(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Satellite, December 1956.)
Merry Christmas, happy birthday to me, and all that.
People who keep up with my posts may have noticed that I missed a couple things last month, including what was to be the start of the second serialized novel, Kuttner and Moore’s Fury. Let’s say I’ve been slow about it. Generally I’ve been slower about keeping up with this blog than I was a year ago, and there could be a few reasons for this, but the point is that I’ve come to understand I’m not as on top of my own blog as I once was. I’ve slowed down with the “required” reading, and I’ve been slower about writing, although (not to toot my own horn) I still write here more than some other fan writers I know. Maybe nowadays the load I give myself is just a bit too much, especially since I’ve also been wanting to get into writing professionally, for that bit of extra money, only I’ve not been able to find the time and/or motivation for it. So, I’ll lighten the load a bit. From now on I’ll only be covering one serial a month, regardless of length. Of course, if the serial is four parts or longer this won’t make a difference, but a lot of serials are three-parters, which should give me an extra day to myself. Other than that, it’s gonna be business as usual.
What do we have on our table? All science fiction, which isn’t very diverse, but when these stories were published is certainly more diverse. One story from the 1940s, one from the ’50s, one from the ’60s, one from the ’70s, one from the 2000s, and one from the 2020s.
For the serial:
Fury by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, May to July 1947. Kuttner and Moore wrote so much, both together and each solo, that they resorted to a few pseudonyms, one of them being Lawrence O’Donnell. Fury takes place in the same universe as the earlier Kuttner-Moore story “Clash by Night.” Despite Fury historically being credited to Kuttner alone, Moore claimed years later to having been a minor collaborator.
For the novellas:
“Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst” by Kage Baker. From the October-November 2003 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Baker had spent much of her adult life working in insurance and with theatre as her primary hobby, before pivoting to writing SF in her forties. No doubt she would still be writing SF today, had she not died all too soon in 2010. Still, for about a dozen years she wrote furiously, with her big series following a team of time-traveling secret agents.
“The Dragon Masters” by Jack Vance. From the August 1962 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Winner of the Hugo for Best Short Fiction. This is a reread, although I only have a vague memory of having read it in the first place, and that was without Jack Gaughan’s accompanying artwork. Despite what the title might make you think, “The Dragon Masters” is pure planetary SF, albeit with fantasy-esque coloring that Vance had become known for at this point.
For the short stories:
“An Important Failure” by Rebecca Campbell. From the August 2020 issue of Clarkesworld. Winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Born and raised in Canada but now living in the UK, Campbell has written only one novel so far, which in fact was her first SF writing of any sort. Good news is she’s been somewhat prolific in writing short stories and novellas over the past decade.
“The Earth Dwellers” by Nancy Kress. From the December 1976 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. This is the third time now that I’ve come to Kress, and why not? Her career now spands nearly half a century, and her stories, if not always entertaining, often provide some food for thought. I know nothing about “The Earth Dwellers,” except it marked Kress’s very first appearance in the field.
For the complete novel:
A Glass of Darkness by Philip K. Dick. From the December 1956 issue of Satellite Science Fiction. This book sounds unfamiliar, even for seasoned Dick fans, although it may ring a bell under its book title: The Cosmic Puppets. Dick had burst onto the scene in the early ’50s as one of the most promising short-story writers at the time, in a generation that included such bright newcomers as Robert Sheckley, Algis Budrys, and Katherine MacLean. It only stood to reason, then, that while writing short stories nonstop was all well and good, writing a novel was the logical next step. A Glass of Darkness wasn’t the first novel Dick wrote, but it was the first to be published.
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, December 1955.)
The Story So Far
John Ramsey is a gifted psychologist, part of the Bureau of Psychology, who’s given the unenviable assignment of surveying the crew of the subtug Fenian Ram, and especially its captain. Captain Sparrow is on the one hand the master of his ship, and his performance on the job has been off the charts; but he’s also a Christmonger, and the higher-ups fear he might be a little too unhinged. Meanwhile there’s also the suspicion that there’s a spy aboard the submarine, which is a bit odd considering the crew (minus Ramsey) is a total of three men, all of whom have known each other for months. Still. Ramsey takes a crash course in a submarine’s layout and becomes the fourth crewman, as the new electronics officer. (The last one had lost his mind.) Of course, Ramsey’s job as psychologist is kept secret from the others, as well as the fact that he’s here to sniff out a potential rat. You have Captain Sparrow as well as Bonnett and Garcia, with Bonnett being Sparrow’s right-hand man and Garcia being a practicing but rather pessimistic Catholic. Sparrow is fond of spouting prayers and Bible verses, to the point where if I were in Ramsey’s position I would just assume the man was totally psychotic. But that’s just me. There is indeed a whiff of religious mania in the air, but rather than immediately cause problems this instead constributes to a kind of synergy among the three crewmen. Ramsey is the odd one out; his contributions to the team add a degree of tension presumably not there before, and what’s worse is that at one point Ramsey comes to the realization that he’s afraid of being underwater.
While set in the 21st century, actually around the same time as [current year], Under Pressure takes place in a world where the Cold War has gone a bit hot and East and West and battling under the seas for control of oil. Frank Herbert seems to have a fondness for narratives about factions fighting over a precious resource. The Fenian Ram is a top-performing subtug, and she’ll need to be considering the previous twenty subs that have been on this raid have failed—indeed destroyed. We’re in the depths of the sea, off the coast of Siberia, in enemy territory, where Soviet wolf packs have been picking off American subs and, the top brass suspects, there may be a spy sabotaging these subs. For some reason damn near every SF writer in the business at the time thought the Cold War would go on for a century or more, with the exception of John Brunner and one or two others. Sure, the Cold War lasted a while, but it seems nobody had speculated that the Soviet Union would dissolve as early as it did.
Enhancing Image
Much of the first installment is concerned with setting up the context for this undersea voyage, as well as the crew. Now that we’ve become acclimated it’s time for some sweet submarine-on-submarine action, of the sort you may have seen watching Das Boot. (I’m sorry that I’ve mentioned that movie more than once at this point, but in my defense, it is the gold standard for the niche subgenre that is submarine media.) The second installment is a lot heavier on action, which ironically means there’s a lot less for me to talk about. If you’ve been reading my posts for at least a few months then you know I’m not very good at writing about action, nor am I even good at recapping what happens. When it comes to reading fiction I’m about ideas, characters, dialogue, and individual moments, which is probably why I’ve been a Thomas Pynchon fan since college. (Try not to hold that against me.) Thankfully, while he does have weaknesses as a writer (his tendency to jump from one character’s internal monologue to another without pause can be grating at times, and he was by no means a poet), Herbert has a talent for giving what is at least on paper a simple scenario a layer of complexity. Think about it: we’re stuck in this submarine for most of the novel, and with a small set of characters the whole time, none of whom are all that likable. Like sure, Ramsey is not as suspect as the others, but that’s because a) he’s the protagonist, b) he really does wanna do the right thing, and c) he’s not a Jesus freak. Even while these characters are prone to bickering and having tirades, it’s a setting that perfectly calls for such things. When a close call with some enemy subs leads to Sparrow getting a case of radiation sickness and lying in the infirmary for a time, you get the sense that while it wouldn’t happen at this point, if only for the sake of the plot, it’s very possible that a freak incident can leave this little ship without a captain. Everything can go to hell in a second, and it nearly does.
Things are tense while Sparrow is recovering, and even when he resumes control the situation doesn’t lighten any. It becomes apparent to everyone that one of them is probably out to sabotage the subtug, so that there are always two people awake to keep watch on each other. (It does not occur to them, of course, that there could be two spies.) The first revelation is that Garcia has somehow found out that Ramsey is a psychologist and not really an electronics officer by trade, even calling him a “head thumper.” This sparks an uneasy agreement between them, because it would be inconvenient for Sparrow especially to discover that Ramsey’s been sent here to check his head. The second revelation comes at the very end of the installment when Bonnett, having been roused into zealotry by Sparrow and convinced Ramsey is suspect, misunderstands the situation and almost punches Ramsey’s lights out before the latter can even get a word in. Something I have to say about Under Pressure that I usually don’t get to say about SF of this vintage is that I’m really not sure how this is supposed to play out in the final act. All three men are suspect in some way, and of course Ramsey himself could be secretly working for the other side, although I would be much peeved if that were the case considering we’ve been given insight into his thought processes. At that point I’d feel like Herbert was cheating. This also goes for Sparrow, to a lesser extent, since he’s the other character whose internal monologue we’re let in on throughout the novel. Herbert is rather inconsistent about how much attention each man’s internal monologue gets and at what points we’re allowed to read their thoughts, which is a problem that would haunt Herbert for decades.
A Step Farther Out
I had actually read this installment about a week ago, but didn’t feel motivated to write about it until recently. You’d think giving myself time to focus on other things would mean that at some point I’d be really itching to hop back on the horse that is writing, but this is not so. The problem with writing is that in order to be effective you have to work at it at least somewhat regularly or else you will lose the touch, so in that way it’s like how you ought to hit the gym at least a few days a week. I also seem to have not gained any extra insight into what Herbert’s doing with this novel, which I might add is looking to be a pretty solid debut novel, since I finished this installment. My initial thoughts and feelings didn’t change or expand, which disappointed me. It was just a matter of sitting down for a couple hours and pushing out some words. Don’t worry, I’ll have finished reviewing this serial by the end of the month.
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, December 1955.)
It could be that I’ve simply had too much on my plate, or that I’ve been procrastinating with my projects, but I’ve been feeling sluggish and unfulfilled with my writing as of late. Even in writing this forecast post I feel… uninspired. The drive is not currently in me. Actually the drive has not been there for several days now, which hasn’t stopped me from getting a couple things done. There is a difference, however, between writing like you’re in the midst of a fever and writing as a kind of chore, and it’s felt like the latter too often as of late.
So, I figured it was time I take a break from this site for a month, for the most part. I will still be finishing my review of Under Pressure, and will be writing one or two editorials over the course of this month, but otherwise I’ll stepping away from here momentarily. I have too much going on, and I feel as if I’m the verge of utterly burning myself out with how productive I’ve tried to be, even with missing a couple deadlines. (I might still write a review of The Sorcerer’s Ship sometime this month, but needless to say I could not even start my review, let alone have it posted, yesterday.) I continue to write, often without motivation or imagination, because I really feel like I can’t do anything else. Writers, as opposed to people who write, are like actors, in that they do what they do because they feel helpless or impotent when it comes to other talents. I’m a writer. Unfortunately I don’t even make money from writing, as it stands; maybe if I were to train myself to write fiction, to be published in some of the magazines I take material from for this very site, then I could make some money on top of my meager earnings from my day job. Considering how things are going, it could be that in time I might not even have a choice. I might have to branch out into fiction, and take even more time away from this site, because I might have to do it. But who knows, it might be fulfilling in its own right.
Sometimes I feel like a pastor in an empty church, or with only a few congregates, plus the rats and pigeons. Who am I speaking to? I don’t have much of an audience, and some of the people who say they read my stuff are themselves bloggers, also concerned with traffic for their own projects. It’s a problem that SFF fandom has had for a long time, and I don’t see any way of fixing it. Most fans I know don’t engage with this sort of thing. A lot of people who vote in the fan categories, when it comes time for the Hugos each year, are themselves fan writers, artists, etc. We’re voting for each other. I’m speaking to people who know what it’s like, which is both a good and bad thing. I feel so horribly alone, most of the time, and the time and energy I put into this hobby sometimes only worsen the loneliness and anxiety. I had started this site three years ago as a way to cope with some mental health struggles, but it doesn’t always help.
So I’m taking a break this month, for the most part. There will be a few posts, but I aside from Under Pressure and maybe The Sorcerer’s Ship I don’t feel like writing about any magazine fiction until next month. Maybe I deserve a break like this, but mostly I just feel that I need it. I won’t be entirely gone, so don’t miss me too much.
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, December 1957.)
The Story So Far
Thorby, once a slave a Jubbulpore, a city where slavery is alive and well, then taken in and educated by a “beggar” named Baslim, has since grown up to become a surprisingly intelligent (albeit not wise) young man. He joined the Free Traders for a time, under the foster care of Captain Krausa and the tyrannical matriarch Grandmother, only for the latter to die and Thorby to leave the Free Traders. A philosophical dialogue with Dr. Mader, the only passenger aboard the Free Trader ship Sisu (also probably my favorite scene in the whole novel, it’s at the end of Part 2), convinces Thorby he had left one kind of slavery only to enter another. After some digging on Krausa’s part a few things come to light for both parties: that Baslim was a colonel in the Terran Hegemony’s space navy, who covertly partook in anti-slavery operations, and that Thorby is not descended from the Free Traders but instead is the son of the presumably deceased former owners of Rudbek and Associates. Thorby’s birth name is Thor Bradley Rudbeck (get it? Thor Bradley? Thorby?), and since his parents are missing or dead that makes him the legal heir to the company, with all its money and influence. Small problem: John Weemsby, an in-law to the Rudbeks, has been in charge of the company for years, with his stepdaughter Leda thus being the heir prior to Thorby’s unexpected reappearance.
Enhancing Image
So, Thorby and Leda are cousins, of a sort; they’re not actually blood-related. Given that Leda is supposed to be only a bit older than Thorby, and given the strange chemistry between them, it must’ve taken Heinlein an exceeding amount of willpower to not indulge in some pseudo-incest. Of course this isn’t even the first time in Citizen of the Galaxy that pseudo-incest (I say “pseudo-” because for my money’s worth I say it’s only the real deal if they’re related enough by blood) is a bullet that Thorby dodges, although, as with Mata on the Sisu earlier in the novel, Thorby’s total lack of interest in sex “saves” him. We know that this is not how most teen (or maybe by the end of the novel he’s in his earlier twenties) boys think, but a) Thorby is not like most teen boys, and b) it’s implicitly accepted as part of the deal when reading a Heinlein juvenile. Actually, as far as the Heinlein juveniles that I’ve read so far go, Citizen of the Galaxy might be the least realistic in that it takes the most breaks from reality, but also it’s the least concerned with hard science. Part of the reason for Heinlein writing these novels in the first place was to teach young readers some facts (or what Heinlein considered facts, which is not the same thing) about space and other things. Some of these novels, despite being aimed at teenagers, border on what we now call hard SF. Citizen of the Galaxy is pretty flaccid loose with its science; if you went in worried about having to deal with numbers and calculations, don’t be, because there are basically none to speak of. Spaceships in this novel go however fast they fucking feel like, and time dilation seems to be a non-issue. Space as we understand it is a non-factor in the characters’ problems, which even for 1957 is pretty soft.
Instead this novel is concerned with other things, like the slave trade, and also, strangely enough, the minutia of running a business. Business majors (the few business majors who have any interest in reading real literature) will get a kick out of the last installment of this book. Citizen of the Galaxy switches gears a few times throughout, from far-future thriller to planetary advneture to, finally, a sort of legal drama. Readers in 1957 were probably not expecting this novel to end up where it does, for better or worse. Truth be told I found it to get a bit worse as it goes along, or rather I think it peaks when Thorby is with “the People” and then gets bogged down from there. Whereas the first two installments gave us some intriguing characters, from the enigmatic Baslim (even if he is clearly a stand-in for Heinlein) to the tough-minded but feeble-bodied Grandmother, the cast of the novel’s latter half is more of a mixed bag. Leda is a curiously hard-nosed young woman and one of Heinlein’s more compelling female characters, in a novel that might actually have his strongest roster of girls/women, but Weemsby is a weak villain—if you can even call him that. He’s obviously not a good person, and also is an opportunistic businessman (but then aren’t they all) who profits off the slave trade, but he never does anything particularly bad onscreen, or… on-page. The back end is chiefly concerned with what is basically a battle of wills (or rather a will, sorry for the pun) between Thorby and Weemsby, which is not as compelling (as least to me) as it sounds. Some readers will get more out of it, but a common gripe with this novel is that the ending is weak, as indeed it is, tapering off as soon as Leda hands over the business to Thorby on a silver platter. The implication is that Thorby and Leda may after all engage in some pseudo-incest, but only after the book has ended, so as to spare young readers’ virgin eyeballs.
Let’s talk about the cheery topic of slavery, and how Heinlein clearly opposes it but also tries to reconcile abolitionism with capitalism. This is heavy subject matter for a novel aimed at young readers, but then again Heinlein was not above covering dark subject matter in some of his previous juveniles. The catastrophe that happens in the back end of Farmer in the Sky might be the single bleakest stretch of writing out of Heinlein’s whole career, and again this is a novel written for high schoolers. With Citizen of the Galaxy the strange thing is more that slavery, which in this spacefaring future has made a big comeback, at least in some societies, is presented as a problem that requires a solution, as opposed to what slavery apologists tend to argue, which is either that slavery is really not that big an issue or that sure, slavery is a big issue, but it’ll inevitably get phased out on its own and we really shouldn’t do anything about it. As with most if not all right-wing beliefs, the defense of slavery, as with the defense of racism, or homophobia or transphobia, is founded on a contradiction or series of contradictions. Slavery apologists, both in Heinlein’s time and today, will very rarely argue that slavery, as it existed in the CSA, should still be around, and they may even be “happy” that it is no longer a thing; but then they’ll say that actually it should have been “left up to the states,” or that the Union (which did have a couple slave states on its side, mind you) should not have fought the CSA over slavery (although the CSA had technically fired the first shot), or even (actually this might be the most common argument) that the Civil War was not about slavery at all but about some other bullshit. So “of course” slavery is bad, but according to apologists it’s not bad enough to abolish.
Heinlein was nothing if not a man of contradictions. He started out as a progressive in the ’30s before shifting farther right, especially upon marrying Virginia, his third and last wife. One of the few things that remained consistent throughout Heinlein’s adult life was his fierce individualism, which also happened to conflict with his lifelong adoration of the military—not just the US military but the idea of the military. He served in the US Navy for five years, albeit during peacetime so it’s not like he saw combat, so he certainly had a rose-tinted view (despite the chronic illness) of such things. He also became increasingly a fierce capitalist, although truth be told he always had a quite cheritable view of capitalism, even from his earliest published stories. One of Heinlein’s more memorable characters is D. D. Harriman, the man who sold the moon, a legendary businessman who is responsible for landing the first people on the moon’s surface, despite being unqualified to go there himself. (No doubt Elon Musk sees himself as a Harriman-like figure, and he’s explicitly and repeatedly paid homage to Heinlein, although for what it’s worth I’m not sure Harriman would have been a screaming antisemite and transphobe, not to mention a cuckold.) Citizen of the Galaxy ends with Thorby, having now claimed what is “rightfully” his, vowing to do what he can to disrupt the slave trade, having already made the order to pull Rudbek and Associates out of it. This now reads as a little overly optimistic. It’s also a bit contrived that Thorby just so happens to have descended from what amounts to royalty; it’s like how Rey starts out as a peasant girl in The Force Awakens but then discovers she’s Palpatine’s granddaughter. We feel cheated somehow because we’ve been denied our working-class hero.
A Step Farther Out
Given its reputation I have to say I was a bit disappointed with Citizen of the Galaxy, as it might not even be my second favorite of the Heinlein juveniles I’ve read (I prefer Between Planets and Farmer in the Sky). I would also have to look into if Heinlein had written it with the hope of a serial run, since it does split pretty neatly into four parts; unfortunately those parts are also rather disjointed. Heinlein’s juvenile’s are beloved among older readers to this day in part because they’re some of his least problematic/uncomfortable works, and while Citizen of the Galaxy does walk a fine line with its subject matter, it does handle it better than many SF novels from the same period; indeed, it handles the issue of slavery and individual freedom better than some of Heinlein’s adult novels. As I’ve gotten older and my politics and reading tastes have shifted I’ve become more conflicted on Heinlein—but then so does everyone who isn’t a moronic sycophant.
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, November 1957.)
The Story So Far
Thorby is a teen boy with no last name and of unknown heritage who, in the first installment, got sold off to an old beggar named Baslim—the twist being that Baslim is no beggar, but a wise man with far more resources and connections than he lets on. At the end of Part 1, Thorby was separated from Baslim, who died offscreen, having been cornered by the Sargon’s goons and opting to kill himself rather than be interrogated and then executed. Part 2 saw Thorby on a ship, the Sisu, captained by a man named Krausa but really run by Grandmother, the ship’s matriarch and chief officer. Grandmother is quite old, to the point of being bedridden, but she’s quite a bitch, and much of Part 2 is concerned with Thorby adapting to life on the ship but also being caught in the crossfire between Krausa and Grandmother, in a battle of wills. One side wants to keep Thorby onboard as a useful mathematician, Thorby having been given a crash course in maths (as the Brits say) by Baslim, while the other wants Thorby married off to some girl on the ship as soon as possible so that he becomes a proper member of “the People,” that is to say the Free Traders, a cluster of nomadic peoples who roam the stars in the name of freedom and fair trade. Thorby, as is typical for a Heinlein juvenile protagonist, isn’t very interested in girls despite his age, which doesn’t stop him from befriending a younger girl, Mata. The tragic part is that Mata has a crush on Thorby and Thorby can’t just go with any girl, but rather has to marry someone who, like him, was adopted by the ship; for someone who was “adopted” to marry someone who was born on the ship would be taboo. The higher-ups, fearing Thorby might reciprocate Mata’s feelings, decide to ship the latter out.
Enhancing Image
Before getting into the plot of Part 3, let’s talk about what Citizen of the Galaxy is, aside from being a planetary adventure novel aimed at teen boys in the latter half of the ’50s. I’m not sure if Heinlein wrote this novel with the hope of it getting serialized, on top of getting Scribner’s to publish it in book form, but it does read as if intended to be taken in installments; or maybe I’m just saying this before I’ve not yet read it as a book. The thing about Citizen of the Galaxy, which makes it rather unique among Heinlein’s juveniles but also somewhat to its detriment, is that it’s overtly a picaresque novel. For those of you who forgot, a picaresque novel is a kind of narrative, typically comedic, in which a boy or young man goes out to see the world and gets into a series of adventures (or more often misadventures). It was a popular form in 18th and 19th century English literature, probably in no small part because novels in the UK and France were often first published as serials, and the episodic and amorphous structure of the picaresque novel was built well for serialization, in which readers could catch up with their favorite rascal month after month. By the time Heinlein wrote Citizen of the Galaxy the picaresque form had long since fallen out of fashion, I suspect because of the decline of serialized novels in magazines, and also the lack of seriousness associated with the form (I wouldn’t call it a genre). There were still some notable examples around this time, like Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March and John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, the latter being consciously written as an homage to 18th century picaresque novels like Tom Jones. Citizen of the Galaxy itself pays homage to one of the last of the “classic” picaresque novels, Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel Kim.
So we have a novel about one boy’s education and quest for self-discovery, although it’s worth mentioning that up to this point Thorby has not been very active in shaping events in his life. Three quarters into this novel and my major problem, if I had to say I had one, is that Thorby himself is not a very interesting protagonist; but then who the hell is interesting at 16 or 17? When you were in high school you barely fucking qualified as a sentient mammal, let alone as a person. No, instead it’s the people around Thorby, mostly the adults in his life, who draw our interest. In Part 1 we had the walking enigma that was Baslim, as well as the well-meaning old lady Mother Shaum who briefly looks after Thorby before he hops aboard the Sisu. Since then we’ve been left with Captain Krausa, Grandmother, and Dr. Mader, the last acting as an exposition machine but also a viewpoint that would land closest to the reader’s, so that we have someone relatively normal who can explain to both Thorby and us the ways of the Free Traders. Grandmother and Dr. Mader are unusual for Heinlein and especially unusual for genre SF of the time in that they’re strong-willed women who don’t take shit from anyone while also staying bachelorettes (although in Grandmother’s case that’s more because she’s very old and an invalid). But because this is the third installment and the novel’s trajectory is rather spotty, with Heinlein picking up Thorby from one situation and then putting him down in another, Our Hero™ has to be separated from the adults in his life somehow. First thing is that Grandmother dies. This in itself is not unusual, even for a Heinlein juvenile, since if you read enough of these things you start to realize adult characters who play mentor to the teen protagonist tend to not be long for this world; rather it’s how we’re told of Grandmother’s death that’s a bit shocking. The old bitch dies her sleep while the Sisu has docked on the planet Woolamura, but what’s unusual is that we’re told of her death several pages before the characters find out for themselves. Is this dramatic irony? It’s an odd choice from Heinlein, to tell us of a character’s death before it actually happens, but somehow it works.
Grandmother’s death is also convenient because it means Thorby is no longer in danger of getting married to some girl on the ship (and by extension the Sisu) any time soon. This then leads to another problem, though, that being that Krausa discovers that Thorby is, in fact, not descended from the Free Traders; he’s also found, via messages from Baslim as recited by Thorby (the old beggar having conditioned the boy to repeat these messages in specific circumstances), that he is no longer to be foster father to the boy. The Free Traders are super-capitalists, but they’re also “honorable” in that they follow through on a favor (although they call it a “debt”) to the letter. Thorby’s business with the Sisu is reaching its end. It turns out that Thorby is not one of the People, but the lost heir to a goddamn upper-class family, his “true” name being Thor Bradley Rudbek. Truth be told, I’m not keen on this twist, for one because it turns Thorby from just another kid into suddenly a member of the ruling class, albeit someone who is very much open to exploitation. But there’s also with how Heinlein reveals this, which really shows the novel’s episodic structure to its detriment. We feel, by the end, like we’re reading a different novel than what we started with. It’s also in the back end of Part 3 that we’re introduced what seems to be a human antagonist, in the form of John Weemsby, whichm given that we’re more than halfway through the novel at this point, is a bit odd. Between Part 2 and 3 a couple years have apparently passed and Thorby is now at least old enough to have become a guardsman for the Terran Hegemony, while secretly running for an anti-slavery operation. (I think more so than a lot of Heinlein novels, and especially for something published in Astounding, this book really hates slavery. Wonder what the very racist John W. Campbell thought of that.) I do feel it’s during this stretch where the novel loses me a bit, although it does pick up again by the end of the installment.
A Step Farther Out
Three quarters in and I’m not sure I would call Citizen of the Galaxy my favorite Heinlein juvenile so far. The plot is not as cohesive as, say, Between Planets, nor is the conflict as urgent here as in that novel. Thorby is a bit of a cypher, although I understand that’s probably the point given how he’s been railroaded by higher powers up to this point, and indeed this railroading is part of the conflict. Heinlein was working within the constrains of genre SF writing of the period, although he also helped broaden horizons via his deal with Scribner’s. In the ’40s and ’50s he was, while certainly being open to criticism, at the very least a more ambitious storyteller than nearly all of his contemporaries. Citizen of the Galaxy is flawed, but it’s also (so it seems clear to me) one of the most ambitious of Heinlein’s juveniles—even more than the written-for-adults Double Star.
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Analog, December 1972.)
Who Goes There?
Vernor Vinge died last month, in what turned out to be a battle with Parkinson’s; and it was one of the most crushing losses for the field in a long time, because Vinge was one of the most creative mind of his generation. Despite not being a very prolific writer, and despite his work being all over the place in terms of quality, Vinge at his best was one of those rare talents, like Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison at their best, who genuinely pushed the field in new directions and made readers and fellow writers see new horizons. His novella “True Names” is a seminal work of cyberpunk that came out just before the word “cyberpunk” would be coined, and modern readers will find it holds up to an eerie degree today. His duology The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime might’ve been the first prolonged attempts at speculating on human life right before and after the technological singularity—a term Vinge did not invent, although he did popularize it. His loosely linked novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky both won him Hugos, and more importantly they revolutionized the space opera during what was already a renaissance for the subgenre. Vinge is unwittingly responsible for a generation of Elon Musk fanboys—but let’s not hold that against him.
With the notable exception of “True Names,” Vinge is not known for his short fiction, although that didn’t stop him from winning the Hugo for Best Novella twice. “Original Sin” is pretty obscure, even as far as Vinge’s short fiction goes; so far I’ve seen a total of one solitary person talk about it, albeit positively. It’s early Vinge, and while it was published during Ben Bova’s tenure at Analog it might be a story John W. Campbell had bought right before his death; it reads like a classic Campbellian narrative—with a little twist. It’s flawed, in the way Vinge’s earlier writing tends to be flawed, but while it starts out rough it does have some points of interest.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the December 1972 issue of Analog, which is not on the Internet Archive but which can be found on Luminist. I happen to have a physical copy of this issue. “Original Sin” was then reprinted in the Vinge collections Threats… and Other Promises and The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. Would be nice if we got an updated version of the latter since it doesn’t include the several short stories and novellas Vinge put out afterward.
Enhancing Image
Humanity has not only reached beyond our solar system but encountered intelligent life in the process. It’s been about two centuries since humanity made contact with the Shimans, a sentient bipedal race that’s like a cross between a kangaroo and a shark. The Shimans are a vicious bunch, but also fiercely intelligent—such that within two centuries they went from being pre-agrarian barbarians to having tech and societal structure on par with late-20th century America. Really the only thing keeping the Shimans from progressing even faster is a very short lifespan. “The creatures were really desperate: no Shiman had ever lived longer than twenty-five Earth months.” Enter Professor Kekkonen, a very old (although he doesn’t look it) biologist and both friend and employee of Samuelson Enterprises. Evidently humans have invented a rejuvenating technology that gives people something close to immortality (assuming they don’t get killed), and the Shimans want that same tech. Problem is, “the Empire” (Earth has apparently become united—and imperialistic) doesn’t want Shimans to have said tech; so Kekkonen has been conducting his work on Shiman biology very much illegally, with the help of a bribed “Earthpol” agent. Shit hits the fan, though, when Earthpol gets a whiff of Kekkonen’s scent, with a massive pyramid-like ship hovering over the planet.
Vinge structured the story such that mostly we follow Kekkonen’s first-person narration, which itself I think is a mistake since we can infer right away that the professor gets out of this ordeal alive, and this is supposed to be basically an action narrative. I’m also not big on the voice Vinge gives Kekkonen: it’s too snarky for my taste. This first-person narration is broken up a few times with a third-person perspective that’s all in italics and which is written in a very different style, evoking an old-timey fable or, more accurately, the Bible. The problem here is that Vinge is not a poet; his style at its best can be considered decidedly utilitarian. With the major exception of another early story, “Long Shot,” which is closer to a narrative prose poem than a short story (I think it’s fairly effective as that), Vinge doesn’t capture the imagination with his language so much as his straightforward way of describing things which are in and of themselves mind-bending. We remember the Bobbles, the Tines, the virtual world in “True Names,” and so on, but because of the things themselves and not because of Vinge’s language. The Bible-esque passages regarding the life-death cycle of the Shimans was an earnest attempt, but it doesn’t work for me and this story would’ve been a few pages shorter if I had gotten my grubby hands on it.
I’ve mostly gotten the negatives out of the way, so let me juxtapose that with something I think “Original Sin” does really well, which is the aliens. Despite having two legs, aping human technology, and even being able to replicate human speech (one wonders how they do that given their rows of shark teeth), the Shimans are decidedly not human. The third and final main character, after Kekkonen and Tsumo (the bribed Earthcop), is Sirbat, a Shiman escort is comes out of this story the most interesting of the three in no small part because of his aloof nature. He speaks perfect English and is perfectly willing to cooperate with the humans, considering what’s in for his race, but one also gets the impression he’s constantly holding back a part of himself—probably an urge to eat his own comrades. One reason Earth is very worried at the prospect of Shimans gaining nigh-immortality is that the Shimans are vicious, yes, but they’re also voracious eaters; indeed cannibalism is part of their very biology, since baby Shimans escape the “womb” by devouring their own parent. I say “parent” and not “mother” because the Shimans are single-sex, reproduce asexually, and they seem to all be male, although Vinge is unclear if the Shimans actually identify as male or if male pronouns are simply what the humans use for the sake of convenience. So let’s say the Shimans are males that happen to give birth.
“Original Sin” is basically a problem story, or rather a question story: Is it ethically sound to give an alien civilization technology that could make said aliens an existential threat to other intelligent life in the universe? Is it right for humanity to keep a powerful technology to itself for fear that there may be competition—possibly even a rival for the position of supreme intelligent race? Vinge has always had a keen moral sense, or at least a strong moral curiosity, which you have to admit makes his endorsing of anarcho-capitalism fucking bewildering. (In fairness he seemed to think other forms of anarchism are valid, but felt that anarcho-capitalism, for some reason, was the “correct” option. I’m sorry, I’m getting distracted.) So Kekkonen is in a tough spot: he was hired by a longtime friend to do a job that may or may not result in humanity’s eventual destruction, and at the same time the cop that Samuelson had bribed in the first place is practically begging him to not go through with the experiment. The Shimans of course wanna live a hundred years instead of just two, and wouldn’t Kekkonen feel like an asshole for denying a whole race a longer lifespan? It’s a curious dilemma that acts as good brain food—even if it becomes clear by the end which side Vinge supports.
There Be Spoilers Here
Using this section to talk about Tsumo, who’s a bit of a mixed bag as a character. Vinge ain’t half bad at writing women usually, but he’s on shaky ground with this one. Her backstory is interesting: she had a husband who served as a Christian missionary on Shima, and nobody knows what happened to him—possibly killed and eaten by his own followers. (Should probably also mention Christianity has taken off among the Shimans, despite and possibly because of their ravenous nature.) So Tusmo has a certain vendetta against the Shimans, although she denies this has anything to do with not wanting the little bastards to have extremely long lifespans. At one point towards the end she even seduces Kekkonen and sleeps with him in an effort to stop him from finishing the experiment. Not sure if this was necessary on Vinge’s part. Anyway, it doesn’t work, because Kekkonen reveals that Samuelson wants the Shimans to become competitors with humanity. This all feels like almost an inversion of the Adam-and-Eve myth, hence the title. Adam and Eve give up their immortality for the sake of knowledge, whereas the Shimans are already knowledge-hungry (on top of just being hungry in general) but seek virtual immortality so as to remove the cap for that knowledge-seeking. The “original sin” of the title also refers to the Shimans’ biologically mandated genocide and patricide—the fact that they must eat their own parents and then most of each other.
A Step Farther Out
Do I recommend this story? Hmmm, not unless you’re already familiar with Vinge’s writing and you’re curious about his early work. I would not recommend it as one’s first Vinge story because it’s more apparently flawed than his more mature work, and unlike his first story, “Apartness” (review here), it’s more confused. I actually considered giving up and picking a different Vinge story early on, because this story really does not start on the right foot; but I’m glad I kept with it, because it did get better as it progressed. I could’ve picked a worse story to review in paying tribute to someone I think of as one of the true masters of the field.
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Analog, December 1972.)
As has unfortunately become commonplace, there have been a few deaths in the family. Christopher Priest and Brian Stableford died in February and Vernor Vinge little over a week ago. This last one hit me by far the hardest. Obviously there are some people I’m not mentioning, but unfortunately unless I really wanted to I can’t cover everyone. There’s too much. The past month or so has been rough for me. I had a nasty fall a few weeks ago and I seem to have acquired mild PTSD from it. Half of my face got messed up and I ended up spending some time in the ER. Obviously I’m doing better now. Yet somehow I don’t feel totally “right.”
Hopefully some good (or at least interesting) fiction will help me! We have a nice mix: two SF novellas, plus two SF short stories, two fantasy, and two horror. Or at least these stories seem to fit predominantly into those genres; obviously they’re not mutually exclusive.
For the novellas:
“A Woman’s Liberation” by Ursula K. Le Guin. From the July 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. One of the most universally beloved of all SFF writers, Le Guin started relatively late but would enjoy a very long and acclaimed career. She’s one of the few authors to enjoy about equal reverence for both her SF and fantasy. Her Hainish Cycle, especially The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, might constitute her best and most important work overall. “A Woman’s Liberation” is set in the same universe as those novels, and is a loose sequel to “Forgiveness Day” and “A Man of the People.”
“Palely Loitering” by Christopher Priest. From the January 1979 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. British Science Fiction Award winner for Best Short Fiction. Priest died in February, after a career spanning more than half a century. His 1974 novel Inverted World is something of a cult classic. His 1995 novel The Prestige was turned into a movie by Christopher Nolan. ISFDB classifies “Palely Loitering” as a novelette, but at about forty pages in F&SF I suspect it counts as a novella. It got a Hugo nomination for Best Novelette but placed third in the Locus poll for Best Novella.
For the short stories:
“The Hounds of Tindalos” by Frank Belknap Long. From the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales. Long had a ridiculously long (ha) career, spanning from the 1920s to his death in 1994. He was a close friend of H. P. Lovecraft and the two seemed to take inspiration from each other, with “The Hounds of Tindalos” being one of the first Cthulhu Mythos stories not written by Lovecraft.
“Traps” by F. Paul Wilson. From the Summer 1987 issue of Night Cry. A doctor by day and a bestselling author by night, Wilson is the only person to have earned both the Bram Stoker and Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement. He likes to hop between science fiction and horror, with the two not being mutually exclusive. “Traps” itself was a Stoker nominee for Best Short Story.
“The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” by Ellen Kushner. From the September 1991 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Kushner got started in the ’80s writing Choose Your Own Adventure books before turning to proper fantasy literature and even radio. This story is set in the same universe as her novel Swordspoint but, as far as I can tell, is not a sequel.
“Two Suns Setting” by Karl Edward Wagner. From the May 1976 issue of Fantastic. British Fantasy Award winner for Best Short Story. Wagner was a devotee of both horror and sword-and-sorcery fantasy. His Kane series very much follows in Robert E. Howard’s footsteps, but Wagner at his best was a genuine poet as well. “Two Suns Setting” was his first (and I think only) appearance in Fantastic.
“Original Sin” by Vernor Vinge. From the December 1972 issue of Analog Science Fiction. Despite debuting in 1965 and remaining active until about half a decade ago, Vinge’s output is fairly small; but, given the five Hugo wins, he certainly did something right. “Original Sin” is one of Vinge’s more obscure stories, but I went with it on the recommendation of a certain colleague.
“The Growth of the House of Usher” by Brian Stableford. From the Summer 1988 issue of Interzone. Stableford passed away in February after a very long and winding career. (Incidentally Priest, Vinge, and Stableford all debuted within a few years of each other.) He was a prolific translator of French SF and contributed to the SF Encyclopedia, on top of a massive amount of fiction.
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Analog, January 1990.)
Who Goes There?
Nancy Kress debuted in the ’70s, and became a big deal in the ’80s mostly on the back of some very good short fiction. Her 1991 novella “Beggars in Spain” (then expanded into a novel) is one of the most decorated of its kind in SF history. Her 1985 aliens-on-Earth vignette “Out of All Them Bright Stars” won a Nebula. She, along with Connie Willis, has been one of the most frequent and popular contributors to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and incidentally both women are very fond of writing at novella length. So today we’re looking at a Kress story that’s neither a novella nor published in Asimov’s. “Inertia” might be the best Kress story I’ve read so far; it’s certainly the complete package, containing thought-out speculation and human drama that struck a chord with me. That this story only got away with a Locus poll spot feels more than a little criminal.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the January 1990 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which you cannot find anywhere at the moment. I’m sure it’ll be added to Luminist at some point, but thankfully I had bought a used copy of this issue some months ago. Gardner Dozois tended to overlook Analog stories, but he recognized this one’s quality enough to include in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection. “Inertia” was also reprinted in A Woman’s Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women (ed. Sheila Williams and Connie Willis) and Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (ed. John Joseph Adams). This last one, I’d argue, is a little misleading.
Enhancing Image
A note to put upfront is that “Inertia” discusses the lives of people with disabilities, with mental illness, and more subliminally works as a reaction to what was then the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. This is not light reading; indeed its dark hues stand out in a magazine that’s more known for rigorous but not emotionally intense fiction.
It’s the future (not too distant a future), and the US has mostly gone to shit. Riots have become a frequent occurrence and the country has basically devolved into a police state; but that’s only the case for “Outside.” There are sealed-off internment camps across the country containing those infected with a disease that at first glance sounds like Leprosy; it’s a skin disease in which the infected is scarred with ropy patches of skin, but without getting ahead of myself there’s more to it than that. The disease is communicable and so the infected are walled off in “blocks,” basically left to die since the government is no longer looking for a cure. It’s here that we’re introduced to the elderly narrator, her daughter Mamie, her teen granddaughter Rachel, and her in-law Jennie. “Jennie, the daughter of Mamie’s dead husband’s brother, is Rachel’s cousin, and technically Mamie is her guardian.” We start with two announcements in this little family unit: that Mamie is getting engaged to some guy named Peter, and that Jennie is bringing in someone from Outside—a doctor named Tom McHabe. The latter will turn out to have a profound effect on these characters.
“Inertia” both is and is not a dense read. The plot, if one were to recite to someone, is not complicated. It starts out as a slice-of-life narrative in what is admittedly a dreary setting before someone from Outside comes in and changes everything, and the story picks up inertia. There is, however, a lot of scarily plausible speculation, and these characters are never anything less than human. AIDS had been public knowledge for no quite five years when Kress wrote this story: the Reagan administration had deliberately ignored HIV/AIDS until it became literally impossible to do so, the result being that people were dying of a virus nobody knew anything about, and once it was made public there was a tidal wave of misinformation that would have long-term ramifications. Nowadays conservatives wanna downplay this, but the reality is that the Reagan administration had condemned a swath of the American population to death for the non-crime of homosexuality, and there were many politicians and pundits who came up with some truly monstrous ideas as to what ought to be done with AIDS victims. Putting thousands of people in internment camps is not even the worst thing that could’ve happened. In case you doubt me about the connection, we get a reference to AIDS in-story, although not by name, it being called “that other earlier one” that was sexually transmitted. Of course we know you could contract AIDS via blood transfusion, but in the ’80s it was typically known as something that happened between queer men.
Life in the camps is far from ideal, but it’s surprisingly functional. There are no riots. There’s no huge wealth disparity. There’s no war, naturally. People are able to provide for each other, even if they have to work every day for it. This is not an anarcho-communist paradise, mind you, because these people live in poverty and with an infection that might prove fatal, but as McHabe soon makes it clear, life Outside is often worse. You may recall that “Inertia” was reprinted in an anthology focused on stories about the apocalypse, and honestly I don’t think it qualifies. At the most you could say society in the story is on the brink of total collapse, but that the apocalypse has not happened—at least not yet. Journalists and pundits speculated that the camps would soon descend into total mayhem, but to their disappointment this has not happened. Obviously something is different about the people living in the camps, something that compels them to cooperate rather than start fighting in the streets (Kress does not seem to think people are inherently good), which is why McHabe is here. The government stopped finding a cure years ago, after several people in the camps were tested on and killed as a result (Mamie’s husband had died “of an experimental cure being tested by government doctors”), but that doesn’t stop people from coming in to conduct their own research illegally.
About the characters. I don’t think we ever get the narrator’s first name, but she’s as vividly drawn a protagonist as any you’ll find in the best short fiction, with bonus points for being an SF protagonist who’s both a woman and probably in her sixties. Rachel and Jennie, despite their age, are not the rebellious sort, and this pleasing demeanor will have plot importance. The big outlier among the women in the story is Mamie, who unlike her mother and daughter is far from content. For one, she finds out almost as soon as they’re engaged that Peter is cheating on her, although this doesn’t stop her from soon making up with him—probably more from her fear of being abandoned than anything Peter did to make it up to her. Given her outbursts and her fear of abandonment it’s quite possible Mamie has what we’d now call Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s unclear if she was always like this, whether it was being forced Inside, the death of her husband, or something that has always afflicted her; but then if a revelation later in the story is anything to go by it’s implied that Mamie always lived with mental illness, only that something exasperated her condition. Then there’s McHabe, who in a typical Analog story would be the protagonist, but here he’s a supporting character whose aims are noble but tragic.
Something odd I noticed is that Kress wrote this story in first-person present tense, which is uncommon and honestly hard to justify; you need a rather specific reason to write with this combination, otherwise it reads awkwardly and raises unnecessary questions. I suspect it’s because, given the context, it raises the emotional intensity of the narrative, but it also reinforces the notion that what Kress is talking about is happening in the now—that her future story is firmly rooted in what were then current events. The inhumane treatment of AIDS victims was a part of the background the story was written against, and this would be the case for many more years. It still holds true because homosexuality is still demonized in many pockets of the country, and those who suffer chronic illness are often denied proper accommodations. It’s funny because there is no homosexual activity in the story itself (the characters are drearily straight), but it’s something those who didn’t live under a rock would’ve picked up. Don’t get the wrong idea, though, “Inertia” has aged depressingly little; it actually holds up better than some of the award-winners from this period.
There Be Spoilers Here
The reason McHabe went Inside is to tudy the neurology of those with the infection, because it turns out this infects the brain as well as the skin. The people in the camps have not descended into anarchy because (assuming McHabe is correct) they’re constantly depressed—not clinically depressed, as he puts it, but mildly enough that they’re not quick to take action on anything. The infected are able to maintain a society with minimal resources because the infection messed with their brain chemicals such that by and large they’ve become docile. Curiously, this applies to neurotypical people, and the longer someone has had the infection the more chill they are; but again, this is assuming they would’ve been “balanced” before. Mamie probably had mental illness prior to getting infected, which seems to have thrown her more off-balance, and the consequences of this will prove to be disastrous for our characters. McHabe’s idea is to cure people of the skin disease part of the infection, but to leave the brain alteration as is, such that these people can hopefully rejoin “normal” society and “infect” as many people as possible. He thinks the infection, if rid of its harmful aspect, can be useful. The narrator is doubtful about this.
Mamie, in one of her manic episodes, betrays McHabe to the authorities, resulting in his execution. It speaks to the savagery of government authority at this point that McHabe is killed pretty much on the spot. It’s traumatic, but it’s also the push that compels Rachel and the narrator to escape to Outside, or die trying. There’s a passage at the end that really struck me, as someone who very likely has BPD myself, and it might speak truer than even Kress had intended—to those with mental illness, but also those who feel trapped by their conscience, by the tug-of-war between their thoughts and what they feel they ought to do. “[Rachel] is sixteen years old, and she believes—even growing up Inside, she believes this—that she must do something. Even if it is the wrong thing. To do the wrong thing, she has decided, is better than to do nothing.” It’s a spin on Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and in my opinion it’s at least as emotionally compelling, at least as thought-provoking, in no small part because unlike Le Guin’s story Kress’s has plot and characters. There’s a concreteness that pushes it out of the realm of pure allegory, and emerges arguably stronger for it. This is a deeply bittersweet ending.
A Step Farther Out
Theodore Sturgeon argued that a great SF story should ideally have both compelling human drama and a thoughtful speculative element. The reality is that a lot of good and even great SF stories only have one or the other, and Sturgeon’s own “A Saucer of Loneliness” is an iconic story despite its SFnal element being tangential. “Inertia” meets this ideal, though; it’s a deeply felt and rather angry story that was written in response to one of the American government’s biggest failures in living memory. While you can make an educated guess as to when this story was written, though, it remains relevant and gut-punching because the American government does not value the lives of its own people, especially people who live marginalized lifestyles and those who live with disabilities. This will continue to be true so long as the government only puts stock in people of a certain income, skin complexion, and balance of brain chemicals. Kress repeatedly shows herself to be a friend of the downtrodden, and “Inertia” is one of her most effective and overt studies of the people we leave behind.
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Amazing Stories, May 1983.)
Who Goes There?
William F. Wu is almost certainly one of the first Asian-American authors to contribute to genre SFF with any regularity, although despite this he’s now a pretty obscure figure; it probably doesn’t help that he’s written little fiction since the turn of the millennium. Wu got started in the late ’70s and would come out a decade later with some big awards nominations, including a Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy nomination for “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium.” He got another Hugo nomination for his 1985 vignette “Hong’s Bluff,” which I reviewed for Young People Read Old SFF. Thus this is not my first run-in with Wu, and my little exposure to him tells me we share a fondness for Westerns and the romanticized image of the American frontier. I may have to find Hong on the Range.
This is now the second story I’ve covered to get turned into a Twilight Zone episode—this time for the ’80s series.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the May 1983 issue of Amazing Stories, which is on the Archive. It was first reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 10 (ed. Arthur W. Saha), and collected in the Wu volume Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium and Other Oddities. Since it got adapted for The Twilight Zone it’s only natural that it would appear in New Tales from the Twilight Zone (ed. Martin H. Greenberg). These, sadly, are all out of print, and despite its awards attention this story has not been collected in anything since the ’90s; and mind you, it’s Wu’s most popular story.
Enhancing Image
Wong is a dock worker for a New York Chinatown who also happens to be—let’s call him the substitute overseer of a very strange shop. Of course, Wong didn’t ask for this job and he’s not getting paid for it; the real owners of the shop have gone missing and Wong, for reasons unclear to himself, decided to take their place until they return. If they return. It’s a big place that expands to accommodate its stock seemingly endlessly. “The shop was very big, though crammed with all kinds of objects to the point where every shelf was crowded and overflowing.” There are crates everywhere, even ones hanging from the ceiling, filled with all kinds of junk.
True to what the title would make you think, it’s indeed a lost and found center where people can find lost items—and even belongings of theirs that are far more abstract. The story starts out with Wong helping out a much older woman (she has a name, but it doesn’t matter) look for a lost chance at becoming an artist in her youth—a lost opportunity that has taken the form of a bottle’s contents. The way it works is that if it’s a physical item that has been lost then it can found as a solid or liquid object in one of the many boxes; but if it’s an idea, like a decision not made or a part of one’s personality, then it would take the form of a gas that must be inhaled to take effect. The latter is harder to get a hold of, as once the bottle is opened and the vapors come out, the person has only one chance to capture it. Sadly for the old lady she fumbles her bottle and fails to take in the vapor. This all sounds pretty high-concept, although I have to admit Wu doesn’t do a lot with it in the story itself.
There’s not a lot of plot to go over, as this is little more than a vignette, but let’s talk about the mechanics of the shop since I suspect that’s the reason readers took such a liking to it. Wong has been working and basically living in this shop off and on for the past couple months, living off of food scraps, which would be impossible considering his responsibilities to his real job if not for the fact that time moves differently in the shop. “The dual passages of time in here and outside meant that I had spent over two months here, and I had only spent one week of sick days and vacation days back in New York, on the other side of one of the doors.” Even with that time dissonance, though, he’s just about at the end of his rope, losing his patience with people he helps but also knowing he only has so much time he can spend here. The real problem—the internal conflict, since there’s not much of an external one—is that Wong is a bit of an asshole, despite his “job.”
This comes to a head when Wong gets another “customer” in the form of a nameless young woman (Asian-American, like Wong) who has apparently been hiding out in the shop for some time now, watching Wong and judging (correctly, in all fairness) him unworthy of his position. It’s here that we’re given a reason for why Wong is so callous: growing up a victim of racism made him stone-hearted. On the one hand it now reads as cliched that a person of color gives childhood racism as the reason for their trauma, but it would’ve been novel at the time in magazine SFF to have that background be written by someone who almost certainly experienced the same thing in their own life. This story is a whole forty years old now and having two of the three main characters be non-white was certainly uncommon then, although in that sense it now reads as unexceptional.
One more thing about the shop. You may be asking, “How do you find anything here?” The idea is that there’s a customer and an overseer, and the customer would not be able to find what they’re looking for on their own; but the overseer is guided by a ghostly light which shines on the object of the customer’s desire. In other words, if you wanna find anything, you need a partner. The young woman is looking for something herself—a part of her personality that somehow she had lost, and while she disagrees with Wong’s attitude, she does need his help. The lost part of her personality, as it turns out, is her sense of humor, which makes her a good deal more bubbly—not that that helps Wong much. The back end of the story thus sees a sort of comedic-straight dynamic between Wong and the young woman, or one could think of it as a master-apprentice thing.
There Be Spoilers Here
The roles reverse as, having been helped, the young woman decides to help Wong in return—if only to make him more caring. Wong claims to have lost his sense of compassion, and while he ends up fumbling the bottle for that (mirroring the old lady earlier), he does find two bottles containing other things lost—only he’s not quite sure what’s inside. Had this been a horror narrative it’s at this point that we might be greeted with a horrific part of Wong’s background or personality that had been forgotten, like suddenly remembering a crime he had committed long ago. But this is not horror and what Wong finds is fairly pleasant: the first is a nice memory that he had forgotten, and the other is his integrity. While he didn’t get his compassion back exactly, he did get some of it along with his integrity “in a package deal.” It’s sweet. Wong didn’t think he owned the shop before, but now he feels genuinely responsible for it, even suggesting the young woman should become his assistant. How they intend to make a living off this is anyone’s guess.
Maybe I’m also an asshole, but I couldn’t help but think about how one is supposed to make money with this place. I mean, it’s a lost and found center, but I feel like services this esoteric shouldn’t come free.
A Step Farther Out
Upon reading “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” I wasn’t really sure how to feel about it. It’s cute, but despite the neat premise Wu gives us the ends were more banal than I would’ve hoped. We get the slightest hint of something cosmic lurking around the corner, since while the workings of the shop are explained somewhat there is much that is left a mystery, but this is very much not a horror narrative. Admittedly if it did turn out to be horror then I probably would’ve complained that such a premise leading to horror is trite, so I suppose I’m being unfair with it. The problem may be that while I can’t say it has aged poorly, it would probably not catch people’s attention if published as a new story today without a word changed. Urban fantasy, even from POC perspectives, has really taken off since 1983, so that while it was prescient, it has since been surpassed.
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, March 1954.)
Who Goes There?
Clifford Simak is one of my favorite discoveries of the past few years, in that he’s exactly the kind of author I like to show off to people who think so-called Golden Age SF is just this or that. Simak debuted in 1931, which would make him a bit of an oldster by the time John W. Campbell took over Astounding in late 1937; but whereas some authors merely adapted to the new standard and were lucky to do that, Simak actually got better as time went on. He wrote most of the stories that would comprise City in the ’40s, with 1944 alone seeing four of them in print. These were some of the best and most emotionally fulfilling short stories of the era, even surpassing most literary fiction of the time in my opinion. The ’50s then saw a period of immense productivity for Simak, mostly in the pages of Galaxy, where he played well with authors two decades his junior.
“Immigrant” was one of the few major Simak stories in the ’50s to be published in Astounding, and without giving the game away at the start, I can see why it was published there and not in Galaxy. This is a bit of an unusual Simak story in that it takes place entirely away from Earth, as instead we find ourselves on an alien planet with a race of powerful and condescending aliens. It’s also rather foreboding—for the most part.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was most recently reprinted in The Shipshape Miracle and Other Stories, which seems to only have an ebook edition. Sigh. You gotta go back to the ’90s for a paperback reprint. The most relevant for me has to be Galactic Empires Volume One (ed. Brian Aldiss), which is not an anthology you’d expect to see a Simak story in.
Enhancing Image
Going into this I thought it would be a coming-of-age narrative featuring a juvenile protagonist; well, it is a coming-of-age narrative in a sense, but there are a few twists. Our Hero™ is Selden Bishop, a 29-year-old genius who, through rigorous testing and passing a certain exam, gained the privilege of traveling to Kimon, apparently the most prosperous and alluring planet in the known galaxy. In this distant future, humanity knows it’s far from the only sentient race in the galaxy, and yet Kimon stands out among its neighbors as being where you wanna go if you wanna make it big; only thing is that a tiny fraction of humans (such that they can only be an extreme minority on Kimon) are allowed to enter.
Kimon was a galactic El Dorado, a never-never land, the country at the rainbow’s foot. There were few who did not dream of going there, and there were many who aspired, but those who were chosen were a very small percentage of those who tried to make the grade and failed.
The other thing is that those who are lucky enough to land on Kimon have been awfully cryptic in their letters to Earth for decades. It’s a shame Simak did not anticipate social media, as it would then be much harder to keep the exact relationship between humans and Kimonians a secret. Anyway, Bishop is here because he earned it, but also to do a sort of job for Morley, his Earth contact, which is to figure out what is actually happening on Kimon and what the humans are supposed to be doing there. No, despite the Kimonians being humanoid and very handsome (akin to tall bronze statues), there’s no implication of cross-breeding between humans and Kimonians; this is still a John W. Campbell magazine, after all. What Bishop discovered will be much more aligned with Campbell’s interests, but that’s for later. Much of the first half of “Immigrant” involves Bishop figuring out the basics and how to get a job, since he still needs one of those.
Like other immigrants from Earth, Bishop is sent to stay at a hotel that’s almost quite literally in the middle of nowhere, with “nothing, absolutely nothing, but rolling countryside” outside the hotel. There are no roads on Kimone, nor do there seem to be cities. While Simak does pander to Campbell somewhat in this story, the pastoralism of Kimon is surely Simak’s treat to himself. Actually the decadent ruralism of the Kimonians reminds me of what became of future humanity in Campbell’s own “Forgetfulness,” wherein mankind, in developing psi powers, forgets how to use technology as said technology becomes no longer needed. The Kimonians themselves are natural psi users, being able to communicate with each other across distances without tech via telepathy and teleportation; naturally, and more creepily, they can also read human minds.
As for the Kimonians themselves, they’re kinda… well, they’re like Vulcans: they’re a bunch of assholes. Not in an actively malicious way, but more in that they clearly think of humans as “cute.” Bishop can’t have a real conversation with them. The good news is that while the number of humans on Kimon is incredibly small, the humans have been clustered together such that it doesn’t take long for Bishop to make at least one new friend, namely Maxine, who to her credit does not exist to be Bishop’s love interest. Maxine has been here for a while now and not only understands the Kimonians to a better degree, but is capable of doing a couple things that normal humans ought not to be able to do. Unfortunately Maxine is also a pessimist who assumes the Kimonians just wanna play an epic prank of their human visitors—not that the Kimonians try hard to disprove this.
To make it in this new world, as surely the Irish and Italians had to in 19th century America, Bishop will have to know a whole new rulebook. “You have to adapt,” he thinks at one point. “You’d have to adapt and play the Kimon game, for they were the ones who would set the rules.” Whatever that game is. Eventually he sucks up his pride and goes to ask for a job, which true enough will have a very healthy paycheck by human standards, though it’s far from glamorous. Occupation? Babysitter.
What I like about “Immigrant” is that it’s too packed to work as a short story but too slight to be stretched to a 50,000-word novel; it’s a fine example of what can be done with the novella mode—specifically the short novella where we’re looking at 17,500 to 25,000 words. I suspect Simak wrote this for Astounding because of the paycheck, but also because Astounding usually ran a novella in each issue, with the only rival to both have such a policy and offer such a healthy paycheck being Galaxy. Still, this is not what I would call “major” Simak. It took me four days to read “Immigrant,” partly due to work but also I was not exactly glued to my screen. It’s hard to call boring, but it also meanders enough that I was not sure, while reading, about the point Simak was trying to make until the end. For those of you who are wary of Simak because of his sentimentality, though, you may be pleasantly surprised at how not sentimental “Immigrant” is.
There Be Spoilers Here
The “babysitting” job turns out to be a lot more taxing than Bishop assumed. For one, the Kimonian children he looks after seem totally capable of taking care of themselves, but worse is that they don’t seem to even acknowledge him as an adult figure; indeed, to the Kimonian children, Bishop is, at best, like a fellow child. When being introduced to the children they give him human names—for the sake of his convenience. “They are approximations,” says one. “They are as close […] as he can pronounce them,” says another. These are Kimonian names which Bishop is not equipped to understand; like with most everything else on the planet it’s a door he’s not allowed to open—at least not yet. Sure, the pay is extravagant, but Bishop finds “babysitting” these kids to be profoundly demeaning.
At first Bishop gets the idea that humans are allowed on Kimon to serve as pets, or at best as playmates for their children, since clearly a Kimonian child is treated as a more advanced being than an adult human with a college education. Most authors writing for most other outlets probably would’ve gone with the “humans are pets” option, predictable as that may sound now, but Simak is not like most authors; he believes, usually, that it’s possible for humans and other sentient races to treat each other with respect. I’m convinced at some point that Simak may have envisioned a downer ending wherein Bishop realizes that he and his fellow humans are mere playthings for the Kimonians—except for the fact that the Kimonians are natural psi users. Now, why would a story published in Astounding depict a “superior” alien race with psi powers while humans come off as a bunch of weaklings? Surely there’s a catch to this—and there is!
While overall I enjoy the previous Simak story I’ve covered, “The Big Front Yard,” (review here) more, I do think the solution to “Immigrant” is more justified, even if it still plays to Campbell’s interest. Simak may well have thought of the ending well in advance of writing the rest of the story; it doesn’t read like a last-minute addition. While I did not know how this story would end, I really should’ve made an educated guess from before the story even officially starts, as there’s a major clue. The opening blurb (probably written by Campbell) is clever in that while with hindsight it’s easy to see as spoiling the whole trajectory of the plot, there’s not enough context given to make a certain guess at the start.
After many years of work, the child graduates from grammar school—and is a freshman, in high school. After more years of work—he gets to be a freshman again. And if he is very, very wise, he might even get to be a kindergarten student again…
Bishop thinks back on a few things, such as Maxine’s ability to teleport (a rudimentary ability by her estimate) and other strange things that have happened, and realizes something: these psi powers can be learned. Over time, and with the right mindset, humans can evolve to read minds, move objects, and yes, teleport to other places, just as the Kimonians do. “But before you could even start to absorb the culture, before you could start to learn, before you ever went to school, you’d have to admit that you didn’t know.” In order to learn these abilities (in which it would take years to do so), Bishop has to, in a way, become a child again. This 29-year-old man with a high IQ has to start his life over, with a new mindset, with the expectation that he’ll have to think as the Kimonians think if he wants to get to their level. But it can be done. The very last line of the story confirms Bishop’s theory: that the humans bright enough to go to Kimon are going back to school—this time to learn psi powers.
A Step Farther Out
I’m not quite sure how to feel about “Immigrant.” This is a story that ultimately plays to Campbell’s obsessions, namely his thing for psi powers and humanity evolving to a higher state of consciousness. I don’t think Simak’s view of humanity is so optimistic as depicted here and in “The Big Front Yard,” although he certainly wasn’t a misanthrope. On the other hand, much as I wanna think Simak may have had a different ending in mind in the event he could’ve sold it to Galaxy, I do think the ending was as intended from the start. It’s a bit of an eerie story, not horror but a little uneasy with how Kimon is depicted, until its swings upward at the end, like someone waving a flag in triumph. I may question the sincerity of it, but as is typical with Simak I respect the swerving-away from what might’ve been a horrific conclusion and instead choosing an ending that bodes well for everyone involved. Simak probably doesn’t believe humans can evolve into telepathic superbeings in a matter of months, but he may well believe that with some hard work and humility, mankind can redeem itself.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 