Tag: frederik pohl

Short Story Review: “Nightmare with Zeppelins” by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

March 28th, 2025

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, December 1958.)

Who Goes There?

As we near this marathon of stories from the first decade of Galaxy, I feel it’s now best to bring up Frederik Pohl, who in just a couple years would take over H. L. Gold’s position as editor in all but name before officially taking the magazine. Pohl is one of the most curious figures from old-timey SF, although he was one of the longest lived, having died in 2013. He worked in practically every stage of development in the world of SF writing, from author to editor to literary agent. I seriously recommend tracking down a copy of Pohl’s The Way the Future Was, which might be the single best memoir about the world of genre SF from the ’40s to the ’60s, from the perspective of someone who had lived through it. He officially became editor of Galaxy and If in 1961/1962 and would win the latter magazine three consecutive Hugos. He’s also pretty good as a writer, especially at short lengths, although his Hugo- and Nebula-winning novel Gateway is also one of the very best SF novels of the ’70s. He was a key member of the Futurians, a mostly left-leaning New York fan group that came about in the late ’30s, and which would serve as an entry point for some of the finest creative minds in the field, including C. M. Kornbluth, who himself was only a teenager when the group started.

Kornbluth was very young when he started writing professionally, but he needed that head start since he would also die tragically young, from a weak heart at the age of only 34. In fact today’s story, “Nightmare with Zeppelins,” would have been one of the last stories Kornbluth completed before his death in March 1958. The conventional narrative is that in the ’50s Kornbluth was the better writer at short lengths, while both authors at this point had their blind spots when writing novels. Pohl and Kornbluth were at their best together when writing novels, though, since they were able to make up for each other’s weaknesses; sadly they wrote only a few short stories together, not counting posthumous efforts wherein Pohl would work off a fragment or outline from the departed Kornbluth. One of these posthumous efforts, 1972’s “The Meeting,” won Kornbluth a Hugo more than a dozen years after his death, so that’s nice.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1958 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Fifth Galaxy Reader (ed. H. L. Gold) and the Pohl-Kornbluth collections The Wonder Effect and Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth.

Enhancing Image

Harry Lewes is a very old gentleman living in London during World War I, apparently having connections with H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, the implication being that like those men, Lewes is or at least was a Fabian—that is to say basically a democratic socialist of the British sort. As far as I can make out, Lewes is a character of Pohl and Kornbluth’s invention, although I do have to wonder if they took inspiration from a certain historical figure. Anyway, Lewes is writing his autobiography, or rather an essay in place of a proper book, to recount something quite traumatic that had happened to him back in 1864, and which makes him worry about the German zeppelins looming overhead and a possibly more destructive war in the future. As a very young man Lewes had taken up an assignment from one Carlotta Cox (who also seems to be fictitious), a do-gooder who wanted Lewes to voyage out to “darkest Africa” and study some of the local peoples, in the name of combatting racism against black Africans. Her intentions are good. It doesn’t help either that, as Lewes notes, the American Civil War was happening at this time, which make no mistake was ultimately about the spreading of chattel slavery to the western territories. (People who say the American Civil War wasn’t about slavery and systemic persecution of black people are at best tragically misinformed.) However, once Lewes gets to the continent he nearly dies and is only saved by Herr Faesch, a “hardy Swiss” with his legion of native workers. While Lewes had by this point nearly died from illness, it wasn’t that near-death experience that haunts him to this day, as we discover in this taut little narrative.

(By the way, I do not suggest looking up this story on ISFDB, since whoever wrote the synopsis thought it was a good idea to give away the entire plot. Since it clocks in at under ten pages, however, and since its ending plays such a crucial role in understanding what Pohl and Kornbluth were going for, it’s hard to discuss without spoiling.)

When it comes to collab stories I often wonder about the process behind it, especially who was the main creative force behind it. Is this more of a Pohl story or a Kornbluth story? Both authors were, at this point, writing some of the most pessimistic genre SF the field has ever seen, and indeed one of the darkest SF stories from this period is Pohl’s own “The Census Takers” (review here). There is, however, a deep-running sense of dramatic irony here that feels very Kornbluth, albeit mixed with a prose style that mimics English writing from the Edwardian and late Victorian eras. “Nightmare with Zeppelins” on the one hand harks back to Wells in his prime (Wells being an important figure in-story, especially thematically, although he never actually appears to take part in the action), but it also is clearly written from a time Wells did not live to see, which was the Cold War at its height. That this is a Cold War-era story is a fact the authors can hardly be bothered to keep on the subtextual level; it becomes pretty obvious that while Lewes himself doesn’t name it, he is clearly looking into the future and seeing a world forever changed by the atomic bomb. Speaking of late Victorian and Edwardian shenanigans, an obvious point of reference for this story is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, what with Herr Faesch being a Kurtz-like figure (albeit more benevolent than Kurtz) with his loyal band of black workers, the physically feeble but still dominant white figure who looms over a colonized Africa. But whereas Charles Marlow, the “hero” of Conrad’s novella, intentionally made his way along the Congo river to meet Kurtz, Lewes runs into Herr Faesch quite by accident. That Herr Faesch is less hateful and consumed by colonizer derangement syndrome than Kurtz, however, does not mean he hasn’t gone mad.

Herr Faesch runs a mine in this little corner of the continent, although it isn’t gold he’s mining but nuggets of Uranium-235, the properties of which he does not and sadly cannot understand fully. U-235, as you know, is the element crucial to the making of the nuclear fission bomb, which would be used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; there’s a whole lot more to it, but that is really the gist of it. Early in the story Lewes talks about what Wells called a “radium bomb,” or a continuously exploding bomb; and it’s no coincidence that Wells around this time would’ve written The World Set Free, an otherwise obscure late novel of his that has gained some notoriety for anticipating something like nuclear weapons—in 1914. Mind you that despite being very much on the left, Wells, like most British intellectuals at the time, supported the UK’s participation in World War I. He reasoning seemed to be that with the right innovations in firepower, war as was understood would be rendered obsolete, feeding into the notion that World War I was “the war to end all wars.” There may be some grim irony in the fact that Wells lived long enough to witness the dropping of the atomic bomb, an event which struck him with profound horror, along with the realization that mankind is more likely to drive itself to extinction with such weaponry than it is to achieve world peace with said weaponry. It also doesn’t take a rocket scientist to get the feeling that Pohl and Kornbluth were hugely pessimistic about the use of nuclear weapons, in that they probably felt the US’s use of atomic bombs against Japan was morally reprehensible.

What’s impressive about “Nightmare with Zeppelins” is that it connects the dots between three very different periods of American-European history, positing that the so-called scramble for Africa in the latter half of the 19th century, the UK’s needless participating in World War I, and the years immediately following the end of World War II share a kinship that paints humanity in a dark light. It draws a direct line from European countries’ colonizing of Africa to the US committing some of the most heinous war crimes of the 20th century against Japanese civilians. The dramatic irony gets to be rather on-the-nose, in that it becomes impossible to ignore what Lewes himself is incapable of noticing, but the point that Pohl and Kornbluth wanted to make still gets across. This is a finely tuned little nugget of pessimistic Cold War-era SF.

There Be Spoilers Here

While he’s recovering in one of the tents, in what turns out to be a safe distance from the mine, Lewes gets the feeling that something horrible is about to happen, although he can’t put his finger on it. Then, one day, the mine explodes, with Herr Faesch and some of his workers inside it, the explosion forming a little mushroom cloud that can be seen from Lewes’s tent, himself only escaping injury because he happened to be covered against the blast at the time. Looking back on this, Lewes is both right and tragically wrong about the future of warfare, hoping in vane that the cursed nuggets of U-235 may never be used to build a new weapon, and that airships in the sky may never be used to drop such a weapon on people’s heads. It leans a bit too much into dramatic irony, but still the final passage is haunting, so I’ll quote it here, as Lewes writes in his essay:

One thing is sure: Count Zeppelin has made it impossible for Herr Faesch’s metal ever to be used for war. Fighting on the ground itself was terrible enough; this new dimension of warfare will end it. Imagine sending dirigibles across the skies to sow such horrors! Imagine what monstrous brains might plan such an assault! Merciful heaven. They wouldn’t dare.

If only he could know how wrong he is.

A Step Farther Out

I’d been curious about reading “Nightmare with Zeppelins” for a few years now, just going by its title, although thankfully I did not look up a synopsis before reading it. I really like Pohl and Kornbluth as writers individually, but together they pulled a Voltron and became one of the most socially keen-eyed SF writers of the ’50s. One has to wonder what might more they could’ve done had Kornbluth not died so young, since Pohl’s digging up his departed friend’s notes really doesn’t do the duo justice. It’s not a masterpiece exactly, but I do recommend it.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: March 2025

March 1st, 2025
(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, March 1956.)

Let’s talk about where genre SF was at in 1950, because this year, perhaps more than any other year in the field’s history barring maybe 1926 (the launch of Amazing Stories) and 1953 (the year the magazine market reached critical mass). Changes in the field tend to come gradually; it’s not like, for example, one day you have a market that’s 95% WASPs and then the next it’s much more racially diverse. These things happen in movements, like the rest of history, or indeed like the waxing and waning of the tide. There really was a profound difference between how genre SF looked at the beginning of 1950 and how it looked by the end of the year. There were multiple changes happening at once, and not all of them were good. The less said about Dianetics the better. But you also had the publications of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, two “novels” (they’re really short story collections) that not only garnered acclaim from the usual suspects but even managed to break into the mainstream. This was practically unheard of at the time, to have science fiction that “normal” readers admitted to caring about. 1950 also saw the publication of other major SF books, like Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky, Theodore Sturgeon’s The Dreaming Jewels, A. E. van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle, Asimov’s Pebble in the Sky, and the book version of Hal Clement’s Needle. Notice that with the exception of the van Vogt book, all the ones I just mentioned were aimed at younger readers—as in teenagers, those who might grow up to be SF enthusiasts.

A revolution, of a sort, was happening.

In the world of the genre magazines, things were shaking up at least much, even putting Dianetics aside. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which had launched in the fall of 1949, was finding its footing. There were signs of the coming deluge of new magazines, on top of the current rivals to Astounding, and the biggest of these new arrivals, by far, was Galaxy Science Fiction. Galaxy first hit newsstands with its October 1950 issue, which means it would’ve been available in September. Under the editorship of H. L. Gold, who had already proved himself a capable writer, this was a magazine that would do what Astounding could not, namely be socially conscious, with a focus on science fiction that was rather urbane and literate, while still being very much focused on science. But whereas Astounding was all about the hard sciences, Galaxy would focus just as much on the soft sciences, such as psychology and sociology. Being more socially conscious, there would also thus be much more of a focus on social satire, and one stereotype that would come to haunt Galaxy in the ’50s is that too many of its story would be misanthropic hehe-haha comedy pieces, aimed at the middle-class urbanites it was satirizing. As with The New Yorker around the same time (and indeed The New Yorker now), Galaxy ran the risk of coming off as incessantly liberal and middle-brow. This is a legitimate criticism, but it was also a risk one had to accept when changing the field this radically. To this day a lot of SF being published seemingly either takes after Galaxy under Gold’s editorship or Asimov’s Science Fiction under Gardner Dozois’s. There’s a third, more conservative (because Galaxy was kinda “woke” for its day) brand of SF writing that wants desperately to turn back the clock to a pre-Galaxy world, to a time before white people cared about things like social justice, but you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

I had to think really hard about what stories and authors to cover this month, because the truth is that Galaxy at its peak had individual issues whose sheer quality and star power would put whole novels to shame. Nearly every story in a given issue would be a banger, or at least a fine read. There are people who wrote for Galaxy during its first decade that I had to leave behind, at least for the moment, including Theodore Sturgeon, Margaret St. Clair, Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Clifford Simak, Cordwainer Smith, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, and many others. But still we have a mix of usual suspects, as in those who regularly contributed to the magazine during this time, as well as a few lesser known authors. Of course I couldn’t have it all be now-famous selections.

Anyway, for the stories:
1. “Self Portrait” by Bernard Wolfe. From the November 1951 issue. If Wolfe is little known in the field, it could be because he wrote very little SF, putting out only one SF novel and a handful of short stories. Wolfe was a trained psychologist who also was a committed leftist, specifically a Trotskyist; he even knew the man himself personally, in the years right before Trotsky’s assassination.
2. “The Snowball Effect” by Katherine MacLean. From the September 1952 issue. I’ve covered MacLean before, actually not too long ago, but seeing as how her most prolific era was when she wrote for Galaxy in the ’50s, why not? She lived a very long time, although she didn’t write that much, making her debut in Astounding in 1949 before (for the most part) switching over to Galaxy.
3. “A Bad Day for Sales” by Fritz Leiber. From the July 1953 issue. Leiber is one of my favorite writers of old-timey SF, although he was also quite skilled (maybe even more so) in fantasy and horror. He debuted in 1939, and thus was one of the old guard, but he adapted to changes in the market with a chameleon’s touch. I picked this story specifically on a friend’s strong recommendation.
4. “The Big Trip Up Yonder” by Kurt Vonnegut. From the January 1954 issue. Vonnegut is one of those few authors who needs no introduction, but here it goes. He broke onto the scene in 1952 with his novel Player Piano, which was SF, as would be about half of his other novels. Despite not wanting to be pigeonholed as a “sci-fi” writer, he also occasionally appeared in the genre magazines.
5. “The Princess and the Physicist” by Evelyn E. Smith. From the June 1955 issue. We don’t know a lot about Smith, which unfortunately is not unusual for women in pre-New Wave SF, and incidentally she had mostly stepped away from the field by the time the New Wave and second-wave feminism kicked in. In the ’50s she wrote by far the most prolifically for Gold’s magazines.
6. “A Gun for Dinosaur” by L. Sprague de Camp. From the March 1956 issue. As with Leiber, de Camp was perhaps more adept at writing fantasy than SF, but then in the ’50s there wasn’t much of a demand for the former. He too was of the old guard, and was able to adapt to the changing times. He also lived an extremely long time, indeed having one of the longest careers in the field.
7. “Prime Difference” by Alan E. Nourse. From the June 1957 issue. Nourse is one of the lesser known of the original “hard” SF writers, and indeed the vast majority of his short fiction appeared in the ’50s when he was a very young man. He mostly stopped writing SF probably because he got a very well-paying job as a trained physician, but his work remains to be rediscovered.
8. “Nightmare with Zeppelins” by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth. From the December 1958 issue. Pohl and Kornbluth were good friends for many years, but in the ’50s they collaborated on several novels and short stories, the most famous being The Space Merchants. Sadly Kornbluth died in early 1958, making “Nightmare with Zeppelins” one of the last stories he would’ve finished.
9. “The Man in the Mailbag” by Gordon R. Dickson. From the April 1959 issue. Dickson was born and raised in Canada (he’s from Alberta), but moved with his family to the US when he was a teenager. He’s most known for his regular collaborations with Poul Anderson, as well as his long-running and ambitious Childe cycle. He was one of the pioneers of what we now call military SF.
Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “The Census Takers” by Frederik Pohl

January 25th, 2025

(Cover by Chesley Bonestell. F&SF, February 1956.)

Who Goes There?

I’m not sure if anyone can claim to have a more varied career than Frederik Pohl, who across a career of seven decades took part in the field as a writer, editor, critic, and literary agent, such that he understood basically every step of the writing and publication process. He made his debut in the late ’30s, and early on he was most active as a fan and editor, being in charge of a couple low-budget genre magazines which nevertheless acted as a training ground for some very important writers, such as Isaac Asimov and C. M. Kornbluth. Whereas some great authors specialize in one or two things, going off the rails when they deviate from their specialties, Pohl was much more of a jack of all trades. He’s one of the few people who’s won Hugos for both writing and editing. His memoir, The Way the Future Was, is a surprisingly vulnerable and self-critical account of his early days in SF fandom and making it as a professional. He was already a magazine and anthology editor of renown when he took over If and Galaxy Science Fiction in the ’60s, having already assisted H. L. Gold for some years at that point. His Hugo-winning novel Gateway is still one of the best of its kind, being a deep character study, a gripping space adventure/mystery, as well as a vicious and black-hearted critique of capitalism. Pohl died in 2013, at the age of 93, making him one of the last of the old guard to leave this realm.

Now, you may recall I was set to review a different Pohl story; actually it was a novella, called “In the Problem Pit.” Due to outside circumstances not having to do with the story itself I could barely even begin to read it, let along write a review about it. I may yet read it and write about it in the future, eventually, but that day is not today. Still, I did not want a repeat of what happened when I read C. L. Moore’s “Jirel Meets Magic” earlier this month, so I was determined to read and review a Pohl story, even if it wasn’t a novella. I dug up “The Census Takers,” which comes from a quite different period in Pohl’s career, and it was Anthony Boucher’s introductory blurb for it in F&SF that caught my attention. Boucher calls it “one of the most extraordinary jobs of effective conciseness in all of science fiction,” and I have to say I do think that praise is pretty much warranted. “The Census Takers” is brief, but it’s a dense and mean little bastard of a story, one I would consider something of a hidden gem.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1956 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; incidentally this was also Pohl’s first appearance in F&SF. It was then reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sixth Series (ed. Anthony Boucher), Nightmare Age (ed. Frederik Pohl), No Room for Man: Population and the Future Through Science Fiction (ed. Ralph S. Clem, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander), and the Pohl collections The Case Against Tomorrow and The Best of Frederik Pohl.

Enhancing Image

The narrator is Area Boss of a team of some 150 Enumerators, who over the course of six weeks are supposed to take the yearly census of a given area, called a Census Area. The story takes place somewhere in the US, although Pohl is vogue as to where (Denver gets mentioned at one point, so maybe it’s Colorado), and he’s also vague as to when this is taking place. It’s definitely the future, but there are basically no references to technology, such that the story doesn’t easily date itself. The narrator is also unnamed (sort of, we’ll get to that later), but for the short time we’re stuck with him it doesn’t take long to figure out the kind of person he is: a real no-nonsense asshole type. Manager material. The story is concerned with an incident that happened with one of the narrator’s Enumerators not too long ago, Witeck, who’s also a good friend of the narrator. “We were Enumerators together, and he was as good a man as you ever saw, absolutely nerveless when it came to processing the Overs.” Of course, one day he cracked. Supposedly. The problem is that whereas in our world a census taker’s purpose is simply to help estimate a certain area’s population, the census takers of this story have to verify if a CA is Over or Under—and if there’s even one Over in a CA then it’s a problem. A CA’s population can’t be Over or Under according to Regional Control, and if someone if Over it’s implied they get executed (an Enumerator’s “processor” is actually a gun, although this is not revealed to us right away). So two problems arise, the first being that Witeck claims to have picked up a guy without an ID or blue card who in turns claims to be some ambassador—from the interior of the planet. On the narrator’s end, he has to deal with a father and his wife and five kids, who have attempted to “Jump,” i.e., move out of the CA before the Enumerators come in.

In case you couldn’t tell, the future America of Pohl’s story is some kind of Malthusian nightmare in which the government keeps the population strictly controlled on an area-by-area basis. A CA’s population should not be Under but it especially should not be Over. Having children has apparently become seen as a necessary evil, as people on the census team are not allowed to have children and the narrator, with rather open disdain, calls parents “breeders,” regardless of whether they have one child or five. (As I was reading it I kept thinking of how some queer folks, back in the day, would call people in heterosexual relationships “breeders” as a derogatory thing, although I’m not sure if this was a thing in urban queer spaces in the ’50s, complicated further because Pohl absolutely would’ve been aware of such spaces.) Malthusianism, named after 18th century economist Thomas Malthus, is basically the belief that resources cannot keep up with population growth, i.e., there ain’t enough room in this world for all of us and at some point the bottom will fall out. In the ’50s and ’60s the belief that population growth was some big fucking problem was pretty popular among intellectuals, even left-leaning ones, resulting most famously in SF novels such as Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! and John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. Aldous Huxley, in the last decade or so of his life, became pretty vocally concerned about overpopulation and people took this seriously. I’ve read enough of Pohl’s non-fiction to get the impression he didn’t agree with such a worldview, but even if I hadn’t done the homework in advance, one gets the feeling just from reading “The Census Takers” that he had a bone to pick with Malthusianism. The census takers in-story are basically border patrol, or ICE, which is to say they’re inhuman monsters who, at best, split a family apart if something is out of order; so they’re border fascists, or rather population fascists. For such a short story, this is quite bleak…

Speaking of bleakness, in most stories the narrator would probably be the villain, but here Pohl puts us in his shoes and makes us walk around in them for a bit. This dude is a prick, not that he claims to be a beacon of kindness and selflessness. His treatment of Witeck is understanding, at first, but he quickly loses patience and tells the man to do his job, regardless of the possibility of his claims being true or even if he really is having a mental breakdown like the narrator thinks. Then there’s Carias, the narrator’s “right-hand man,” who doesn’t do much better, especially once he starts backing up Witeck’s claims. The narrator has no patience for such things and he’s already trying not to “process” the father who tried Jumping with his family where he stands. The narrator and Witeck have, by this point, killed or at least deported hundreds, if not thousands of people over the years of census-taking, and it seems today might be the day everything breaks. Mind you that Pohl was always to some degree on the left, certainly more progressive than the average liberal of the time—ironic, considering he would later cry out against the New Wave. Both politically and literarily Pohl gets a lot of work done with so few words, implying more often than stating things outright while also establishing the world of the story. Some points are left ambiguous, intentionally, but we get what Pohl is going for, which is to show the inherent inhumanity of playing border patrol, or playing population control. Of course, the most ambituous (indeed, the closest to mirror the world of “The Census Takers”) Malthusian project in the real world would be China’s one-child policy. One need only extrapolate a bit further beyond that accursed policy to see where Pohl is taking us. In the ’50s, the SF market was broad enough that a dark little nugget like “The Census Takers” could see print, and thank goodness for that.

There Be Spoilers Here

The situation with the “ambassador” gets to the point where Witeck feels the need to call the narrator by his first name: Jerry. “It was the first time in ten years, since I’d been promoted above him, that Witeck had dared call me by my first name.” This convinces Jerry that Witeck really has lost it, relieving him of his post and processing the so-called ambassador, who in turn, as if putting a hex on Jerry, says that the people on the surface of the globe will be wiped off the face of it. The people living at the Earth’s core will have their day. This is implied to be the case (or it could just be a few coincidences) when a series of natural disasters, from a tsunami to a volcanic eruption to geysers in Yellowstone Park, delay Jerry going on vacation. Witeck dies soon after being let go, supposedly a suicide, although as Carias points out he didn’t use his gun on himself. Strange. There are one or two loose ends, or rather dark corners that Pohl intentionally refrains from shining a light on. The effect is a little nightmarish.

A Step Farther Out

When I found this story I knew nothing about it, not least because it hasn’t been in print since the ’90s and thus remains sort of a hidden gem. I didn’t think it would read as timely as it did. Of course, it’s true that since the 19th century, even before the tightening of the US’s immigration policy in the 1920s, immigrants and migrant workers have had a tough lot in this country. The ruling class, serving patriarchy and white supremacy (what counts as “white” has expanded quite a bit over the past century), sees migrants as cheap and easily exploitable labor; and if there’s an issue, if someone were to raise a fuss, then that can be easily dealt with. Pohl was one of the great social commentators of ’50s SF, in a decade that seemed to be blessed with almost a surplus of great social commentators. “The Census Takers” is, as told from the oppressor’s (the capitalist’s, the white supremacist’s, the Zionist’s) point of view, a shot out of hell, a cry of impending vengeance on the part of the migrants and other dispossessed peoples; because at some point, sooner or later, such people will have no choice but to have their revenge or die under the oppressor’s boot. It’s only a matter of time before we too, in our world, see those we treat as subhuman, be they “south of the border” or halfway around the world, have their day of justice.

See you next time. And remember, fuck ICE!
Things Beyond: January 2025

January 1st, 2025
(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, July 1935.)

Happy New Year. Blow confetti. Get drunk. Maybe kiss and cuddle a friend or significant other of yours. Although of course you would’ve done that last night. A lot of stores are closed today, because work sucks and the reality is that with a few notable exceptions nobody really wants to work. I hope this message finds you well. There will be a couple changes to this site, which mind you does not mean bad news at all. Frankly those of you who frequent here might not even notice the one “negative” change, that being the fact that given my current life circumstances I can no longer guarantee that a post will be finished on the date I expect it to be. For two years I kept to a pretty strict release schedule with my posts, but after moving into my own place, with all the pros and cons that come with that, I would expect more posts to get delayed by, say, a day, if I were in your position. Occasionally I might not even be able to post a review that I said I would; this happened a few times actually, since November, and I think it’s time to acknowledge that while I try to be prolific, I can only do so much, from a mix of life changes and depression. Also that’s why I’m reviewing a story I was supposed to write about in November, but never got around to even reading it, that being Eleanor Arnason’s “Checkerboard Planet.”

Now, in good news…

The serials department is back, after I had announced at the start of last year that I would only be covering short stories, novellas, and complete novels in 2024. I had thought about what would be the first serial to commemorate the department’s coming back from hiatus, and ultimately I figured it had to be something big. Thus I went with a Robert Heinlein novel I’ve not read before, and truth be told Heinlein’s juveniles are a bit of a blind spot for me in my knowledge of his work; I’ve read a few of them, my favorite probably being Between Planets, but I should certainly read more. It’s also been too long since I last covered Heinlein here.

In other good news, we have another magazine to pay tribute to this year, albeit not on quite the same scale as what I did with F&SF. As you may or may not know, Galaxy Science Fiction launched with the October 1950 issue, making October (or September, depending on how you look at it) of this year its 75th anniversary. Along with F&SF, Galaxy played a pivotal role in reshaping who and what got published in genre SF following Astounding‘s near-stranglehold on the field the previous decade. Especially in the ’50s, a disproportionate number of now-classic stories and novels first saw print in the pages of Galaxy, under the ingenious (if also tyrannical) editorship of H. L. Gold. Unfortunately Galaxy had a bit of a rough history after its first decade, going through a few editors and experiencing declining sales before finally being put out of its misery in 1980. It only lasted thirty years, which admittedly is still better than what most SFF magazines get, but during that time it was arguably the finest magazine of its kind. So, in March, July, and October, as with last year, I’ll be reviewing only short stories, this time from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s respectively, and all from Galaxy. I’ll also be reviewing one short story, novella, or serial from Galaxy every month apart from that. This should be a good deal of fun.

Now what do we have on our plate?

For the serial:
1. Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, September to December 1957. Heinlein is that rare author who really needs no introduction, but who no doubt deserves one. He made his debut in 1939, at the fine age of 32 but having already entered the field more or less fully formed as a writer; it helps that he had already written a novel, albeit one that had initially gone unpublished, at this point. From the late ’40s to the end of the ’50s he wrote a series of “juveniles,” which helped lay the groundwork for we would now call YA SF. Citizen of the Galaxy was one of the last of these juveniles, and as far as I can tell its serialization occurred more or less simultaneously with its book publication.
For the novellas:
1. “The Organleggers” by Larry Niven. From the January 1969 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Reprinted thereafter as “Death by Ecstasy.” One of those old-fashioned planet-builders who appeared just as the New Wave was getting started, Niven very much follows in the footsteps of Poul Anderson and Jack Vance. “The Organleggers” is the first in a series of SF-detective stories starring Gil Hamilton.
2. “In the Problem Pit” by Frederik Pohl. From the September 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Pohl is one of those people who can claim to have taken part in pretty much every aspect of SF publication, from author and editor to literary agent. He edited Galaxy and If in the ’60s, to much acclaim, but in the early ’70s he gave up editing returned to writing fiction regularly.
For the short stories:
1. “Checkerboard Planet” by Eleanor Arnason. From the December 2016 issue of Clarkesworld. Judging from her rate of output you might think Arnason a more recent author, but in fact she was born in 1942 and made her debut back in 1973. She’s been an activist for left-liberal causes since the ’60s but did not start writing full-time until 2009, hence her recent uptick in productivity.
2. “Jirel Meets Magic” by C. L. Moore. From the July 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Moore might not be a mainstream figure in genre fiction, but she and her first husband, Henry Kuttner, have a strongly passionate following among older readers. With justification. She’s a favorite of mine. It’s been almost two years since I reviewed the first two Jirel of Joiry stories, which is far too long a wait.
Won’t you read with me? Or try to.

Tag: frederik pohl

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