Tag: galaxy science fiction

Serial Review: The Dream Millennium by James White (Part 2/3)

May 15th, 2025

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, November 1973.)

The Story So Far

John Devlin is one passenger out of many aboard a spaceship, which at the beginning of the novel is already nearly a century into its voyage in search of a planet suitable for human colonization. The trip is expected to take several centuries, possibly even a millennium or more of objective time; as such, the human crew spend about 99% of their time in cold sleep, only to be woken up periodically to be tested by the ship’s computer, or to take care of some malfunction that the computer can’t handle itself. During these periods of cold sleep, in which almost no time at all passes for Devlin while decades slip by outside, he has some pretty vivid dreams, including dreams of deep-sea prehistoric life, being a sauropod in the Jurassic era, and flashbacks to his own life before he got recruited for the voyage. During one of these times where he gets woken up to handle a malfunction, a fellow passenger named Yvonne Caldwell, barely old enough to even be on the ship, is dying in her chamber, having not gotten into its properly before cold sleep took over. Caldwell wanted to see her boyfriend, who’s also on the ship somewhere, and for better or worse she’s unaware that she’s dying pretty horribly. Devlin does his best to comfort her in her last moments before she passes, and this is our first big hint that Devlin was a doctor before he left that life behind and became a passenger here.

We get a rather extensive flashback to Devlin’s life on Earth not too long ago, and apparently life on Earth has gone to shit (well, it’s only marginally worse than what we’re dealing with now). Someone I did not bring up in my review of the first installment, because her subplot did not reel me in enough at the time, was Patricia Morley, whom Devlin got to know in this flashback and who actually is also a passenger on the spaceship. Despite being standoffish in personality and also having a bit of a fucked-up face (from self-harm), Morley is Devlin’s assigned love interest for the novel. She ends up being a more significant character than she appears at first, not least because by the end of the second installment she and Devlin have both gone basically rogue on the ship. There’s also the enigmatic Brother Howard, who only appears in flashbacks and who is ostensibly of a religious order, but he seems to know more than he lets on and there’s a good reason for this. It’s also during these sequences that White’s own background as an aspiring doctor who lived in Ireland during one of the most violent periods in the country’s history is brought to the forefront.

Enhancing Image

I think my big problem with The Dream Millennium is that it’s basically two storylines, each rich enough for maybe a novella but not enough to carry a full novel on its own, that are connected enough, but then there are also scenes that have, at least on a surface level, fuck-all to do with either of the main storylines. Here, in the second installment, there’s a whole sequence (it might’ve gotten two chapters, I forget) in which Devlin dreams of being a warrior prince in medieval times who wins against a neighboring kingdom, only to have a horrible marriage in the aftermath. There’s a marked difference between Devlin’s dreams of what seem to be past lives and his dream-memories of his own life, since the former are given very little context or background. The first few dreams, involving prehistoric life, are fine as written, but unless White has something up his sleeve, the medieval sequence could’ve been cut out without diminishing the two main storylines. It’s frustrating, because this is already not a long novel (paperback editions run a bit over 200 pages), but I feel like there’s some filler here. Indeed, while reading this installment, my heart sank as I went through the medieval section, fearing that it would take up the majority of the installment and that almost nothing would actually get done. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, but it’s a black mark on the reading experience, because even if it ends up being significant later, that doesn’t change that while I was reading it I barely understood what was happening and I found it hard to care about what I was able to understand. That sequence is mostly action, and it must be said that action is not White’s strong suit.

Thankfully this installment does eventually pick up. (This is one of those things where I have to wonder if I’d be as harsh on the novel’s weaker moments if I was reading it, ya know, as a novel and not as a serial. Like remember those aliens that showed up at the end of the last installment? Yeah, they left the story about as quickly as they entered. Weird.) We get yet another lengthy flashback to just before Devlin and Morley are recruited for the voyage, but while there’s much less violence than before, the connection these scenes have with Devlin’s current predicament on the ship is much more apparent. The mystery of who the fuck Brother Howard really is is given some much needed clarity, and the budding relationship between Devlin and Morley is developed enough to justify their teaming-up in the current events. Probably the most haunting scene of this installment is during one of Devlin’s waking periods, when he finds a dead passenger named Thomas Purdy, who apparently had tricked the ship’s computer into thinking he was still in his chamber so he could commit suicide outside of it—his eyes taped open so that he could not sleep. It’s become clear by this point that there’s a huge difference between cold sleep and normal sleep, although Devlin and Morley are still trying figure out how the ship’s systems induce those frighteningly vivid cold-sleep dreams. Devlin and Morley feel weirdly fatigued, both mentally and physically, from these cold-sleep dreams, despite their bodies resting for incredibly long periods of time—or at least time outside of cold sleep. For them, subjectively, only a few days have passed, even though it’s been centuries of objective time. This boils down to the question of whether the ship itself is a simulation, and where the dividing line between dreams and reality is.

I wonder if White maybe took some notes from Philip K. Dick, particularly A Maze of Death, which, without giving away that novel’s big twist, feels thematically akin to The Dream Millennium. White and Dick are both pessimistic about the human condition, although otherwise they don’t have much in common, with White’s sensibilities being decidedly more old-school while Dick was adjacent to the New Wave. But still, while The Dream Millennium could’ve been written a decade earlier, there’s a bleakness here (not to mention a lack of problematic elements) that make it feel more modern than some other SF of the time. You’d think it’d be easy for an SF novel from 1973 to not feel horribly dated, but you’d be surprised—or maybe not, depending on your experience.

A Step Farther Out

I’m gonna hold off final judgment until I’ve actually finished the novel, but so far The Dream Millennium has been a mixed bag. Structurally it’s rather nonlinear, but it also feels like a few disparate story ideas tossed together so that White could get a full novel out of it. Other than A Maze of Death it also reminds me of Piers Anthony’s Macroscope, which it must be said is an unusually good novel by Anthony’s standards. White’s a better writer than Anthony, but even for how short it is The Dream Millennium feels a bit cobbled-together. I’m gonna see (and hope) that White manages to stick the landing with the last installment.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Dream Millennium by James White (Part 1/3)

May 9th, 2025

(Cover by Brian Boyle. Galaxy, October 1973.)

Who Goes There?

In the ’50s and for much of the ’60s the US and UK scenes of science fiction were kept somewhat apart, albeit with some cross-pollination with their authors. Some UK authors appeared in US magazines and vice versa, and one of these authors from the UK to find moderate success in the US was James White. White was one of the few Irish SF writers active at the time, and that perspective ended up being rather novel, even if White himself was only a B-tier writer all said and done. Whereas the standard view at the time was that war was either basically good or bad but “necessary,” White was not so convinced of the virtues of lawful violence. Having been born and raised in Belfast and living through horrific violence between Catholics and Protestants would probably have that effect on a lot of people, but for White especially it had an apparent influence on his writing. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that White’s fiction tends to be more far more about saving lives than ending them. Interest in medicine (White wanted to become a doctor, but this career path was not to be) also plays a big role, most prominently with his Sector General series, maybe not the first but certainly the popularizer of the space hospital in SF. The Dream Millennium is not about a hospital, at least in an official capacity, although it does have elements of a space hospital.

Placing Coordinates

The Dream Millennium was serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, October to December 1973. It got a paperback release from Ballantine the following year, seemingly without any significant changes. Unfortunately it’s been out of print since the ’80s.

Enhancing Image

John Devlin is a passenger aboard a ship that’s on its way to a neighboring star system, in search of a planet suitable for human life. The ship is run by computers and the trip can and probably will take centuries. A lot of authors, especially back then, would find some way to cheat and have their faster-than-light travel, but James White was not one of them. The human crew are kept in cold sleep for the vast majority of the trip, being periodically awakened for brief periods to, as the computer says in all caps, “SPEAK, EXERCISE, REMEMBER.” Devlin and the others have one hour during to stretch their legs, basically, although it’s worth noting these passengers are not awakened at the same time. For all intents and purposes Devlin is alone on the ship, with only the computer for company. The “REMEMBER” part of the instructions has to do with remembering dreams, which itself is like a cognition test. The idea is that since the passengers will be in cold sleep for decades at a time, they’ll be dreaming a lot, and when they wake up for their periodic examinations their ability to recall dreams will be taken as a sign. Now, when you sleep normally, specifically during REM sleep, your dreams can at times seem vivid and at the same time feel like they last only a few minutes, while you’re in the midst of REM sleep for at least a few hours. Time works very differently in dreams. It’s not hard to figure out what the novel’s title is supposed to mean.

Devlin is, let’s say an anti-hero. We’re not sure, at first, what his deal is, but he gives the impression of having a dark and troubled past; he’s also not an astronaut or anyone really interested in space, for that matter, but someone who had a different kind of job back on Earth. Apparently there have been efforts to colonize other worlds because Earth itself is in a sorry state. Even calling it colonization is a bit misleading since that implies a more ambitious effort, like the sort of thing technocrats are obsessed with (ya know, the glory of mankind and all that), but this expedition is being done out of necessity. White is a lot of things, but he’s not much of a romantic. Most of the time there’s no life on the ship to speak of, and when there is it’s regimented and short-lived. The best thing that can be said is at least the ship’s computer really does seem to have the passengers’ best interests in mind. But still, the living situation is bleak. Part 1 of this novel is largely concerned with the first few dream cycles Devlin has that he has to recall, which on the one hand will probably turn out to have symbolic and even plot relevance, but also since these are dreams (or in one case, flashbacks) there’s no sense of urgency, nor is there much actual forward momentum with the plot for the time being. Your enjoyment of this novel will hinge partly on how much you get out of New Wave-influenced surreal imagery, mixed with more pessimism with regards to the human condition than the average. This is not to say White is a misanthrope, but… you’ll see.

The Dream Millennium has to do with the evolution of man, not unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey, although it goes about things very differently from that novel/movie. Both are big in scale despite being set primarily on a cramped spaceship, but The Dream Millennium deals with events out of events, not to mention its timespan is much bigger. The first dream cycle Devlin has sees him as a trilobite in an unspeakably prehistoric period, and the second dream cycle sees him as a brontosaurus (big sauropod) during the Jurassic era. These are out-of-body experiences that don’t further the plot much, but they do provide stimulating experiences for Devlin that at the same time tell us a bit about his character. (I think White was also looking for an excuse to include dinosaurs in his space adventure novel, but that’s fine.) Despite being dreams and therefore harmless by nature, Devlin is not free from experiencing death and disease in these dream realms; it’s also ambiguous if these are just dreams or if they’re actually visions of past lives. A couple later events imply they might’ve been actual lived experiences. The most memorable scene in this first installment is right after Devlin’s second dream cycle, when there’s been a malfunction with one of the other sleep chambers a young woman’s lying in her chamber, dying horribly and not even sure what’s happening to her. Devlin tries comforting her and lies doing so (when someone’s on their deathbed you kinda have to lie to them at least a little bit to make them feel better), but the woman makes the odd confession of having had a dream that she was a dinosaur, similar to Devlin’s. This is despite the woman admitting to not having read up on prehistoric life like the computer told her to. She says she misses her boyfriend, and then she dies. It’s a surprisingly grim scene, but it’s also a tone-setter for the rest of the installment, which delves into matters of human misery.

It’s here about halfway through the first installment that we find out Devlin used to be a doctor on Earth, although it seems he’s no longer in that profession. You can take the man out of the profession but not the profession out of the man, though, because even if he’s not officially the ship’s doctor he still has the attitude of being one. It’s almost like White wanted to become a doctor, and that much of his SF reads like it could be made into a hospital drama with some tinkering. Despite working with similar material to 2001, The Dream Millennium operates on a very different worldview, so that you can tell James White and Arthur C. Clarke are very different people. In a way The Dream Millennium so far feels like an anti-2001, in that it focuses on the cramped and unromantic side of space travel, not to mention its view on the possibility of mankind ascending to gods of the universe is—let’s say more skeptical. There’s also much more of a focus on Devlin’s inner life, or what was called “inner space” at the time, that being juxtaposed with the virtual endlessness of outer space.

There Be Spoilers Here

We then get a lengthy series of flashbacks to a bit earlier in Devlin’s life, when he was a doctor, which oscillates between being genuinely harrowing and a bit too disjointed for my liking. The most memorable and harrowing (this is a rather dark book, it must be said) scene comes when Devlin’s trying to treat a dying boy who’s been brought in with a gunshot wound in his chest—a stray bullet, caught from a totally unrelated quarrel. What do you mean White lived through the Troubles? From what we see of Earth in this lengthy section, it’s a shithole, although it’s not much worse than life as we now know it—maybe a little more dystopian. I mean you can’t get much more dystopian than now, right? Another memorable scene is where Devlin, who describes himself as agnostic, gets into a kind of theological/existential argument with one Brother Howard, whom I’m sure we’ll meet again at some point. In the world of The Dream Millennium the question is not whether humanity can become masters of the universe but whether humanity can even save itself from decay and finally extinction. Have I mentioned that this is bleak? And then BAM, aliens are invading. Devlin’s not sure at first if this is really happening or if it’s some kind of trick, but no, highly advanced aliens are looking to overtake the ship. Now doesn’t this feel random? I wonder how Devlin’s gonna get himself out of this jam.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry this got delayed. I don’t really have an excuse, other than that I’ve just been struggling to write anything. Doing most everything has felt like a chore as of late, including reading stuff for my blog and other places. Then there’s the recent business with Worldcon (which YET AGAIN is getting steeped in controversy) and the fact that I’m voting this year (again), so that’s even more reading material. I’m enjoying The Dream Millennium enough so far that I hope I can get the review for the next installment out in a more timely fashion, but I can’t guarantee it.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Pilot and the Bushman” by Sylvia Jacobs

April 10th, 2025

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, August 1951.)

Who Goes There?

Overall we know about as much about Sylvia Jacobs as we know about Jesus of Nazareth. I can’t find any pictures of her, or find out when she was born or when she died; but then we at least have writings from her, so there’s that. I was pointed towards a useful piece by Rich Horton which covers what little we know about Jacobs’s life and what little fiction and non-fiction she had published in the genre magazines. She had studied oceanography, and was married to a professional deep-sea diver. She apparently had done some research for Robert Heinlein (regarding the ocean, of course) for a juvenile novel he had planned but sadly never got to write. She was a California denizen for at least some of her adult life. She wrote about half a dozen SF stories, mostly in the early ’50s, which is unsurprising given that was when the magazine market saw an immense bubble; and, just as unsurprisingly, she mostly went dormant after 1960. This is the basic narrative of a lot of lady SF writers from that period, although by no means all of them. Horton describes “The Pilot and the Bushman” as like a prototype for the light satire Christopher Anvil later wrote nonstop, although I don’t think he gives Jacobs’s story quite enough credit—not to say it’s a hidden gem, really, but there’s a fair bit going on here.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. This is my third time plundering this issue for gold, and it’s quite possible I will have covered all of this issue’s fiction contents eventually. The copyright must’ve run out at some point, because “The Pilot and the Bushman,” along with a couple other Jacobs stories, is on Project Gutenberg. It’s also been reprinted in Women Wrote the Future: Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy (ed. J. LaRue). Other than that it’s not seen print at all.

Enhancing Image

The first and easily longest scene is a Socratic dialogue between two men, although despite both appearing to be human one of them is, in fact, an alien. The Ambassador from Outer Space (we never get his actual name) is having a behind-closed-doors meeting with Jerry Jergins, a marketing man and predictably a bit of a scoundrel. The two are in the situation because the Ambassador had made what was called a “boner” in the old days, by that I mean he had made a slip at the UN Assembly by saying the aliens have what they call a Matter Repositor. The problem is that the Matter Repositor can replicate anything, and I do mean anything, which is no real issue for a society that does not run on industrial capitalism. (The Ambassador is quick to point out that the aliens’ economic model is NOT some brand of socialism, IT’S NOT SOCIALISM, GUYS.) The Matter Repositor may as well be magic, but the point is that mankind is too “primitive” to have it. The problem is that once you inform someone of something’s existence and then tell them they can’t have that thing, then that someone is no less incentivized to take the whatever-it-is. God told Adam and Eve to not eat fruit from the tree of knowledge, but that did nothing to stop Eve from having a bite. If you tell your kid they can’t have more cookies from the cookie jar than they ought to, what do you think they’re gonna do at some point? The aliens, as you can tell by the comparisons I’ve made, see themselves as being in a parental or patronizing position with regards to the humans. Jerry isn’t happy about the Ambassador’s smarmy attitude, but if he has a plan (and he does), he’s not upfront about what he has in mind.

This is a story about two races from radically different cultures, with one actually immersing itself in the other’s culture for the first time. “The Pilot and the Bushman” is, on its surface, about the immediate aftermath of mankind making first contact with a fellow intelligent race, but it takes no more than a single brain cell to figure out Jacobs is comparing her SFnal situation with the real-life occurrences of one human culture making first contact with another human culture, with one side being far more advanced on a technological level than the other. I have to italicize that one part because, of course, the Spaniards and later the English who set foot in North America were no more inherently intelligent or morally upright than the indigenous peoples of the land. There were things the indigenous peoples were not and could not be prepared for, namely diseases they had no prior contact with or knowledge of, and thus you had whole populations introduced to diseases they had no immunity against. Similarly the Ambassador fears that introducing mankind to the Matter Repositor would have apocalyptic consequences, since virtually every country on Earth has (whether lefties wanna admit it or not) a capitalist economy based on scarcity. The people of the Ambassador’s home world have been born and raised into a post-scarcity environment, which understandably has created a radically different mindset from what humans are acquainted with. The aliens are not necessarily superior but are certainly very different—the huge gap in cultures being the races being the problem.

As the Ambassador says:

To a Micronesian bushman, the pilot who can be trusted with the power and speed of a B-29 seems a veritable god. But the pilot is only an ordinary Joe, very likely no more intelligent than the bushman—he just had a different background. Fighting each other for necessities and luxuries, the process that you people call business competition, has so long been needless to our people that they would no more think of competitive gain than you would do an Indian harvest dance before you signed a contract. They aren’t necessarily more intelligent or more virtuous than your people—they just have a different background.

Of course, the aliens are the pilot and the humans are the bushman. It’s not exactly a hard comparison to make. What’s strange, reading it now, is that Jacobs goes about it with the mindset that the aliens really do mean well despite their smug attitude around humans, or at the very least that they aren’t looking to divide and conquer Earth as hot new real estate, like with their real-life counterparts. It’s a commentary on colonialism and the relationships invasive cultures have historically had with indigenous peoples, but it lacks serious bite because it does not interrogate the myriad ways in which a colonizing force can subjugate a colonized people’s development. The biggest complaint I have with this story, other than it being overly chatty (there is nonstop talking for over half of it, which can dull one’s attention span), is that Jacobs does not treat her own subject matter with enough seriousness. Horton compares it to Christopher Anvil, but I also thought of a less funny and less vicious Robert Sheckley—granted that Jacobs’s story was published about a year before Sheckley made his debut. My point is that it’s easy to overlook the territory “The Pilot and the Bushman” covers because the story itself doesn’t pay said territory that much mind. It’s a social satire, of the sort that appeared quite often in Galaxy, especially in its early years, and for that it’s an adequate example.

But it could’ve been better.

There Be Spoilers Here

Conditions improve, thankfully, when we finally see an end to the dialogue and some action can kick in, although it’s not much. The back end of this story has enough of a sense of humor and also a viciousness that the first half or so was rather lacking; like I would’ve appreciated it if Jacobs had not spent so much time setting things up. The gist is that Jerry agrees to coordinate a huge propaganda campaign to disincentivize people from looking into the Matter Repositor, while at the same time playing up humanity’s quickly growing reputation as “savage” compared to the aliens. The plan works—in fact it works better than the Ambassador would’ve wanted, although Jerry is perfectly happy with the results. Earth becomes a tourist destination for the aliens, who are so unaccustomed to things to like drinking, whoring, theft, and other vices that they see it all as an alluring novelty. They think stealing some doodad from a convenience store and spending a night in jail is fun. They’re totally unprepared for the eccentricates of human culture and are thus unequipped to resist it. This is clearly a satire of how people in the Anglosphere see certain “backwards” countries as lovely tourist spots. Even circa 1950 this would’ve been very the case with how Americans treated Hawaii, which was a US territory but a state yet. The othering of indigenous people and East-Asians in Hawaii has been a thing for decades now, but ya know, nobody likes a tourist.

A Step Farther Out

I have to assume, given how little she wrote, that Jacobs saw writing SF as like a hobby more than anything. In the early ’50s it was possibly to write SF for a living, so long as you wrote at a mile a minute and knew how to sell a story to the right editor. Maybe Jacobs was into it but not that into it; she did, after all, have a respectable day job. “The Pilot and the Bushman” was her second published story, and I’d be interested in reading the rest of her SF, although I don’t expect to find a hidden master of the form. Jacobs’s career as an SF writer is like a ship that passed in the night.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Man in the Mailbag” by Gordon R. Dickson

March 31st, 2025

(Cover by Wallace Wood. Galaxy, April 1959.)

Who Goes There?

Who was the first author to win two Hugos for fiction in the same year? George R. R. Martin. Which is wild to think about, because this was in 1980, and nobody outside SF fandom knew who Martin was at this point; nobody knew he would eventually become one of the most famous authors in living memory, and also that he would have possibly the most famous (or infamous) case of writer’s block for all the world to see. So who was the second person to win two Hugos for fiction in the same year? Believe it or not, it happened only one year after GRRM pulled this amazing feat, although nowadays far fewer people know who Gordon R. Dickson is. Dickson was born and raised in Canada (Alberta), but his family moved to the US when he was a teen and he stayed there for the rest of his life. I like Dickson in a similar way to how I like Clifford Simak, which is to say I see their works often as like comfort food. The same can be said for Poul Anderson. Incidentally Dickson and Anderson were besties, to the point where they had a long-running series, about the teddy bear alien race called the Hoka, that they wrote together. Dickson was less of a jingoist than Anderson; actually I’m not even sure if Dickson was of the pro-war sort, since reading some of his Dorsai series and other stories, including today’s story, he didn’t seem keen on warfare. I said at the beginning of the month that “The Man in the Mailbag” was a standalone, but this turned out to be a bit inaccurate, since it’s actually the first entry in a short series involving the Dilbians, a race of aliens that are sort of a cross between gorillas and bears. “The Man in the Mailbag” was much expanded into the short novel Spacial Delivery, which I haven’t read, although I did read Spacepaw, its sequel.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1959 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It could be because Dickson cannibalized it for a novel, but “The Man in the Mailbag” has only been reprinted three times: in The Good Old Stuff and by extension The Good Stuff (ed. Gardner Dozois), and the Dickson collection Steel Brother. These are all out of print.

Enhancing Image

John Tardy (yes, that’s his name) has been tasked with rescuing Ty Lamore, a human sociologist who’s been studying the Dilbians on their home planet and who has apparently been kidnapped by the Streamside Terror, one of said Dilbians. Humans on Dilbia have their own name, but also a Dilbian name, or rather a name the Dilbians give them: Lamore’s is Greasy Face. Tardy will get one of his own, but we’ll get to that in a bit. The Dilbians themselves are a curious race, in their customs but also how they look, being eight-to-ten-foot-all giants covered in fur, being, as I said, somewhere between a gorilla and a bear, albeit one that walks totally upright. There seems to be some disagreement with illustrators as to how gorilla- or bear-like the Dilbians are, since here Wallace Wood’s interiors paint them as akin to Bigfoot, whereas various book covers for Spacial Delivery and Spacepaw (and the omnibus collection The Right to Arm Bears) depict them as anywhere from uncannily human-like gorillas to just grizzly bears that always walk on their hind legs. The introduction for “The Man in the Mailbag” in Steel Brother says that the Dilbians were inspired by Dickson’s non-violent encounter with a bear while growing up in Alberta. Also, The Right to Arm Bears depicts the Dilbians as, well, carrying guns, but having read my fair share of this series by now I can say the Dilbians are not keen on using guns; if they resort to violence, which they do on occasion, they much prefer hand-to-hand—or rather paw-to-paw.

So, despite its length the plot is pretty straightforward, although how Tardy meets with the Terror (he’s usually just called that rather than by his full name) is a different question. Tardy, despite being an Olympian (“decathlon winner in the Olympics four years back”), is still a tiny human in a world whose dominant race is a bunch of hairy giants. The solution is for a friendly Dilbian, named the Hill Bluffer, whom we do meet again in Spacepaw, to carry Tardy in a mailbag, which is apparently big enough to carry an adult human—mind you it’s a Dilbian mailbag, and the Hill Bluffer himself is big enough that he’s able to carry Tardy with ease. Tardy has a wrist-phone (it’s basically a cell phone, although one then has to wonder how he gets cell service on a planet that’s almost entirely rural) that keeps him in touch with Joshua Guy, the human ambassador at HQ. The idea is that Tardy will rescue Lamore without having a physical confrontation with the Terror—for one because such a confrontation would almost surely result in Our Hero™ getting beaten to a pulp. Something I’ve noticed about Dickson is that for someone who gets labeled as vaguely conservative his work often comes off as anti-war, and even sympathetic to pacifism up to a point. In the stories featuring Dilbia, one of the recurring elements is the notion that it’s best for everybody to avoid violence. It’s also best to avoid making rash decisions, since the biggest points of conflict in this story are when characters made decisions that fall outside of “the plan.” There’s a female Dilbian named Boy-Is-She-Built (call me immature, but I think this name is funny) who ends up stealing Tardy’s wrist-phone, which cuts him off from HQ about halfway through the story.

(Interior art by Wallace Wood.)

The plot itself is rather minimal, I suspect so that Dickson gives himself a lot more space for worldbuilding. The Dilbians are about on par with humans and in some ways objectively superior (for one they’re physically stronger than humans on average), but they’re also a culture that’s rooted in honor and one’s own reputation, hence one’s name being assigned by an outside consensus rather than choosing your own name. There’s a Dilbian named Two Answers because he’s known for tending to come up with two answers to a problem. Joshua Guy, the ambassador, got the Dilbian name of Little Bite because of an embarrassing incident involving—well, you can guess. The Dilbians think of humans as cute, in a condescending way, calling them “Shorties,” which can rub the humans the wrong way, but mind you that the humans are here on the Dilbians’ home world and the Dilbians did not invite them. The series, while not all that serious (my big issue with “The Man in the Mailbag” [and by extension Spacial Delivery] and Spacespaw when taken together is that they’re similarly plotted), does deal with a few serious topics, namely colonialism and the clashing of cultures. When I started this story I thought maybe it would’ve fit better in Astounding than Galaxy, given its rather lighthearted and adventure-minded tone; but then it occurred to me that given how Dickson insists humans (white people) ought to treat the Dilbians’ (indigenous people’s) customs with respect, such a notion would’ve probably rubbed John W. Campbell the wrong way. The gender politics are not quite as forward-looking, as the only notable female characters, Ty Lamore and Boy-Is-She-Built, are mostly kept offscreen and are given to flights of fancy when in on the action; but still, they’re shown to be about as capable as their male counterparts.

On the one hand, even for 1959 this feels a bit old-fashioned in the sense that it harks back to an earlier era of planetary adventure SF, which only sometimes appeared in Galaxy under H. L. Gold’s editorship; but also Dickson is a decidedly more humane storyteller than some of his peers, including Poul Anderson and even Hal Clement, which from a modern perspective makes him seem like a breath of fresh air even if he’s not exactly an S-tier writer. I’ve been thinking about the good-but-not-great writer in SF a fair bit, recently, of the likes of Dickson and Simak; maybe I should write an editorial on the subject…

There Be Spoilers Here

Once Tardy finally does meet with the Terror, a court session happens, of a sort, since there’s a bit of a convoluted case of the Terror having stolen one of the “Shorties” but also Tardy having to fight for his right to rescue Lamore. If the humans had only their way then they could’ve left by this point, leaving the Terror with nothing, but that might’ve caused bigger problems by virtue of tarnishing the Terror’s reputation. A Dilbian’s honor is their livelihood. The humans, being outsiders, will have to play by the Dilbians’ rules. Tardy will have to earn his Dilbian name of Half Pint. One of the elders, named One Man, gives a short monologue near the end that proves pertinent to the situation, but it could also apply to any scenario involving a colonizing force and an indigenous population:

You just don’t come in and sit down at a man’s table and expect him to take your word for it that you’re one of the family. As I said to you once before,
who asked you Shorties to come here, anyway, in the first place? And what made you think we had to like you? What if, when you were a lad, some new kid moved into your village? He was half your size, but he had a whole lot of shiny new playthings you didn’t have, and he came up and tapped you on the shoulder and said, ‘C’mon, from now on we’ll play my sort of game!’ How’d you think you’d have felt?”

Of course, Tardy wins his fight with the Terror, through some ingenious means, and despite ostensibly being a battle to the death both men come out of it alive. The truth is that they weren’t supposed to kill each other anyway, as the mission to rescue Lamore was a big test to see if there was a human on the planet who could stand toe-to-toe with the Dilbians. There were a few hiccups, such as Tardy losing his wrist-phone, but he was not supposed to be in that much danger. See? Everybody gets a happy ending. With hindsight it’s easy to see Dickson’s view of colonial relations as being too optimistic, if anything, but he was looking in the right direction, which is more than can be said of a lot of old-timey SF.

A Step Farther Out

I was getting a bit of déjà vu reading “The Man in the Mailbag” since Spacepaw more or less follows the same plot trajectory, which I understand is not this story’s fault, although it is Dickson’s fault for reusing it. He had bills to pay, ya know. I would probably like Spacial Delivery more than its sequel, although I do have to wonder how, even given how short Spacial Delivery is, you’re supposed to make a novel out of a short story that already feels reasonably self-contained. Ah well, this has been a fun crash course in fiction from the pages of ’50s Galaxy; and incidentally the last stop on our tour foreshadows the more adventure-oriented turn the magazine would take once Frederik Pohl becomes its new editor. As to what that’s gonna look like exactly, I’ll find out in July.

See you next time.
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.
Short Story Review: “Prime Difference” by Alan E. Nourse

March 24th, 2025

(Cover by Kirberger. Galaxy, June 1957.)

Who Goes There?

I don’t think I’ve read anything by Alan E. Nourse prior to today’s story, which isn’t surprising since his work seems to have fallen massively out of print, to the point where a decent portion of it has also fallen out of copyright. Nourse was one of many SF writers who came about in the early ’50s, some very young people (well, mostly men) who took advantage of the ballooning magazine market. It also helped that for some reason there were a lot of very talented writers, including Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, and Algis Budrys, who were too young to have seen action in World War II but who had entered the field at almost the exact same time. By far the most productive period for Nourse was in the ’50s; once the balloon popped he mostly stopped writing SF, presumably to focus on his respectable day job as a physician. “Prime Difference” is very Galaxy and very 1950s, for both good and ill; it’s not exactly a forgotten gem, although it apparently warranted enough attention to get an X Minus One adaptation. It is on the one hand a deeply of-its-time story when it comes to its gender politics, but also those same gender politics are the point of the whole thing, rather than merely a byproduct of when Nourse wrote it.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1957 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It remained stuck there for six decades before someone transcribed it for Project Gutenberg. I guess the copyright ran out.

Enhancing Image

George and Marge’s marriage is on the skids, but then it’s been that way for almost eight years now. It’s painfully obvious, at least to George, that it would be best for the best of them if they got a divorce, “but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act,” it wouldn’t be financially a good idea. I knew, from the first goddamn sentence, that this was gonna be one of those stories. Reading ’50s SF, there are some things you have to keep in mind if you wanna adapt to the somewhat different literary environment. Misogyny is rampant, although not the same sort of misogyny one would find in New Wave SF a decade later, which was more sexually explicit and in some ways somehow more revolting (to my sensibilities, anyway) than what you’d find in the average ’50s SF story. Marriage sucks, right? If you’re a white middle-class fellow in 1957 then marriage might be your top concern, along with tax season. It was the age of John Cheever, John Updike, and John O’Hara. A lot of Johns. It was the age we started to get the signature Ingmar Bergman drama. Marriage between dreary heterosexuals was the order of the day. What’s strange about the future as depicted in “Prime Difference” is not only that it’s completely the opposite of how gender relations in the ’60s would turn out, but also that it would perceptive in a totally different and unexpected way. See, George says that “the women” getting into politics made it harder for divorce proceedings, which… if anything is the opposite of what women in politics would want. Unless they’re conservative women. Of course this was before the birth control pill and second-wave feminism, and apparently Nourse did not suspect such a thing was gonna happen in just a few years; but at the same time he posited that white conservative women with money would pose a bigger problem than “the feminists.” This is a pretty thorny story, because George is a thorny and rather unlikable character, but it also argues in favor of no-fault divorce.

Then there are the Primes, which are lifelike robots, basically perfect replicas of their human counterparts—and illegal. It makes sense that robots that can pose as normal humans would be outlawed, given the possible repercussions, although how technicians in the black market are able to afford the resources, let alone build these things, is left up in the air. George is desperate to take a siesta from his wife and he finally gets to the point where he orders a Prime—specifically a Super Deluxe model, which is I guess more lifelike than the standard. Looking at George Prime, George can’t even tell the two of them apart. “The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks.” Put a pin in that. Now, I must confess that I found a stretch of “Prime Difference” to be a bit of a chore, in no small part because of how Nourse decided to tell it. George is the protagonist by virtue of being the perspectice character, “Prime Difference” being written in the first person. The problem is that George is a gaping asshole. He is! And not in an endearing or even often an entertaining way. This may well be the point (it probably is), but then why force us to tumble around inside this man’s head? It would’ve been more bearable, and its ending (which I do like) would’ve had more impact, had Nourse written “Prime Difference” in the third person. We also would’ve been able to understand Marge more, who as of now is given minimal personality. The idea is that George Prime will at times serve in the real George’s place for when the latter wants to ~~go around fucking other women~~ take a break from Marge, and Marge will not know the difference. The “problem” is that George Prime is so good at being the real thing that he’s actually superior to the real George in every way. You’ve seen this sort of plot trajectory with stories about androids before.

There Be Spoilers Here

That George Prime has been loving up on Marge, to the real George’s growing concern, is unsurprising; what’s more surprising is that Marge has had her own plan this whole time, albeit off the page. The ending implies that in a sense George and Marge were made for each other, in that they’re both conniving neurotics, but we only see one side of the story. “That Marge always had been a sly one,” George thinks once he realizes what she’s done, having run off with George Prime and replaced herself with Marge Prime, but we never get to see how that even could’ve happened. Of course George is only able to tell it’s a Prime by feeling for the little dent on Marge Prime’s head; that he figures it out pretty much immediately is a consolation. This is one of two possible endings I had anticipated, the other being that Marge finds out about the Prime and proceeds to kick George out of the house. But this way, everyone more or less gets what they want. Their marriage is “saved.” Mind you that Nourse was married for a few years at this point, although being in what I have to assume is a happy marriage doesn’t stop one from being a pessimist about the institution.

A Step Farther Out

Would I recommend it? Not really. It’s a frustrating read, even when compared to other stories about robotics from the period. Nourse wrote so much during the ’50s, though, that it’s quite possible that I caught him on an off day, or that readers thought well of “Prime Difference” at the time but time has not been kind to it.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “A Gun for Dinosaur” by L. Sprague de Camp

March 20th, 2025

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, March 1956.)

Who Goes There?

A recurring thing that I totally did not intend with the author selected for this marathon thus far is that these people lived a long time. Fritz Leiber died at 81, Kurt Vonnegut died at 84, Katherine MacLean died at 94, and so on. About as impressive as MacLean’s longevity, and in some ways even more so, is that of L. Sprague de Camp, who was born in 1907 and died in 2000, being more or less active from 1937 until his death. De Camp technically entered the field before John W. Campbell took over Astounding, but he quickly became one of Campbell’s court jesters, his early fiction often being comedic in tone. He was a forerunner to what we now call hard SF, with a keen eye for historical and scientific accuracy (his first solo novel, Lest Darkness Fall, was a major inspiration for alternate history writers to come), or at least as he saw those things. Unlike most of the rest of Campbell’s stable in the late ’30s through the ’40s, de Camp was just as comfortable if not more so writing fantasy, which made him, along with (God help us) stablemate L. Ron Hubbard, an ideal fit for the short-lived fantasy magazine Unknown. Like a chameleon, de Camp would change his colors as the market demanded it, such that he was able to still thrive as the field changed radically in the ’50s. “A Gun for Dinosaur” is, on the one hand, an adventure story that harks back to the writings of H. Rider Haggard, but it’s also a grim cautionary tale that probably would not have seen print in Astounding. This is a rare case where I had heard the X Minus One adaptation long before reading the source material, which gave the impression, going in, that this would be a more straightforward story than it is.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1956 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The World That Couldn’t Be and 8 Other Novelets from Galaxy (ed. H. L. Gold), Dawn of Time: Prehistory Through Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph Olander, and Robert Silverberg), Dinosaurs! (ed. Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois), Timescapes: Stories of Time Travel (ed. Peter Haining), The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Harry Turtledove), The World Turned Upside Down (ed. Jim Baen, David Drake, and Eric Flint), and the de Camp collections Rivers of Time and The Best of L. Sprague de Camp.

Enhancing Image

As you can guess, “A Gun for Dinosaur” is about using a time machine to hunt dinosaurs, since the big game of our current world has been all but exhausted and rich white dudes with guns have gotten bored with shooting lions, elephants, and black people for sport. The story takes place in presumably what would’ve then been the present day, but our narrator, Reginald Rivers, is a man who seems to be stuck outside of his time and place, having more in common with Allan Quatermain than a modern-day Englishman (for he is very English), being quite burly even in his middle age. De Camp tells the story in technically the second person, since Rivers is talking to one Mr. Seligman, whom we never hear a word from because Seligman is in the place of the reader, the result being that Rivers is narrating to us as if we were a character in the story. We know upfront that Rivers survives the adventure he’s about to tell us about, which even in the 1950s would’ve been thought of as an old-fashioned narrative technique; but it serves a purpose. The tension comes from the fact that while we know Rivers made it out alive, the same does not go for everyone who was around Rivers at the time, hence his telling this story to Seligman so as to why he refuses to take him on a trip hunting big dinosaurs. We’re introduced thus to two men who went on this trip, Courtney James and August Holtzinger, and given Rivers’s tone we can gather that something bad happened with these men, although we’re not told exactly what. We also have the Raja, an Indian hunter who functions as Rivers’s partner and fellow guide. So we have four characters who really matter, and we have our premise.

Since “A Gun for Dinosaur” is not an obscure story I decided to look up what other people have said about it after reading it for myself, and was a bit dismayed to find James Wallace Harris had already done a pretty thorough review of it, even bringing up a few points that I was going to as well. Turns out I’m not unique at all in thinking de Camp had probably written this story in response to Ray Bradbury’s even more famous “A Sound of Thunder,” which had been published a few years earlier. Both stories involve hunting dinosaurs for sport and how this might leads to issues with time travel, not to mention extreme risk for the hunter. For those of you who forgot, “A Sound of Thunder” (oh yeah, spoilers) is about a dumbass with money who goes back in time to hunt a T. rex, although he’s supposed to stay on a set path lest he causes the butterfly effect to kick in. Naturally he goes off the path and kills a butterfly, which somehow has a domino effect on what would be the present day. I’ve always found this to be implausible, since I could never for the life of me make sense of how this one innocuous event could have changed the future so radically; but then you could argue that’s the whole point of the butterfly effect: unintended consequences. I think it’s lazy writing on Bradbury’s part, though, since it feels like he’s asking the reader to do the author’s job for him. De Camp seemed to think the same thing, since he really goes out of his way to explain the mechanics of time travel in “A Gun for Dinosaur.” No butterfly effect here. The rules of the time safari (yes, one story that clearly took notes from de Camp’s is David Drake’s “Time Safari,” which I reviewed a hot minute ago) are pretty clear. The real question, then, is left up to human error.

James and Holtzinger suffer from cases of hubris, but in different ways. Neither of them is an experienced hunter, but whereas James in it for the sake of thrill-saking, Holtzinger did it because he’s a pretty average guy who wants to do something truly risky for once in his life. I feel like there are better ways of averting existential dread that going off hunting dinosaurs, but you do you. But basically Holtzinger means well. James, not so much. Not only is James even more incompetent with handling weaponry and hunting gear than Holtzinger, but he also seems to have a screw loose. (I’ve read enough “time travel dinosaur-hunting” stories to figure that one surefire trope is the affluent white man who has some undiagnosed mental illness.) Rivers, in telling this story to us, goes into quite a bit of detail about what it takes to go on one of these trips, especially the physical brunt of it—that being the main reason why women are not allowed. So yeah, both the story and the private company that hosts these safaris are sausage fests. James tries bribing his way into taking his mistress along for the ride, but Rivers wisely refuses; this ended up being good for both Rivers and the mistress, who very likely would not have survived. As you can see, there’s a bit of racism and sexism on display, although there’s some plausible deniability as to how much of it is Rivers’s and how much de Camp’s, not to mention that it does (unfortunately) make sense, given the rather heavy inspiration taken from Victorian-era adventure fiction.

You may be wondering, then, what makes “A Gun for Dinosaur” worth recommending to this day, since there are quite a few old-timey readers and authors who still swear by it. The key is at least twofold: the foreboding tone, which is established from the very beginning, and also de Camp’s attention to detail. As someone who’s been obsessed with dinosaurs since my earliest childhood, I firstly found interest in “A Gun for Dinosaur” as a snapshot of how we understood the prehistoric world some seven decades ago, long before Jurassic Park caused a profound increase in people becoming paleontologists. Paleontology was still a very niche discipline in 1956, and de Camp, while not a paleontologist himself, gave the field as much respect as he gave any of the other hard sciences, which is to say quite a bit. Granted that the science is laughably outdated, the world of the mid-Cretaceous as depicted in-story is remarkably consistent. The dinosaurs, from the big theropods (there’s a tyrannosaur, although Rivers is quick to point out it is not specifically a T. rex) to the duck-billed parasaurolophus, are thoroughly lizard-like, in both how they move and how they think. The speculation that dinosaurs, especially the theropods, were at least if not more akin to birds than reptiles was still a few decades off. Dinosaurs in this story, including the tyrannosaur, are lumbering brutes with shit for brains, who have to be shot in the heart rather than the head in order to go down. Rivers recommends using the comically large .600-caliber hunting rifle to take down the tyrannosaur, the sheer weight and kickback of the gun being a big reason why people under a certain weight and musculature are prohibited. This is, quite literally, not a game for lightweights.

There Be Spoilers Here

We know a tyrannosaur will show up, and so it does. The hunters’ efforts to take down the tyrannosaur ends up being a disaster, with Hortzinger sacrificing himself to save James’s “worthless life,” getting carried off by the big dinosaur screaming. It’s a rather disturbing sequence, in no small part because Rivers and the Raja try tracking down the wounded tyrannosaur in the hopes of at least recovering Hortzinger’s body; but alas, the trail of blood soon runs cold, with the tyrannosaur and its prey having seemingly vanished into the wilderness. This is the kind of casualty that would probably result in a lawsuit, if not for legal protections that hunting preserves pull in order to relieve themselves of responsibility. In fairness, it was a mix of lack of foresight and sheer stupidity that made them come to this conclusion. Rivers loses his cool with James once they get back to camp, which he now admits was a bad idea with hindsight. James threatens to kill Rivers and the Raja himself, in a moment of apparent insanity, but thankfully the two veteran hunters are able to overpower him. But that’s not where the story ends. Oh no, it would be too easy if Rivers simply brought back James to the present day and had him arrested. The actual ending is much bleaker, and truth be told I don’t recall if the X Minus One episode adapts this part of the story. Needless to say that de Camp takes the grimness of how “A Sound of Thunder” ended and kicks it up a notch, using a time paradox rather than the butterfly effect. It’s this bleaknesss, bordering on nihilism, that Brian Aldiss seemingly took and ran with when he wrote his own take on the “time travel dinosaur-hunting” story with “Poor Little Warrior!” a couple years after “A Gun for Dinosaur” was published.

A Step Farther Out

For decades “A Gun for Dinosaur” was a one-off story, although de Camp would eventually return to Reginald Rivers and his adventures in the early ’90s, possibly influenced by the immense success of Jurassic Park (the book), or maybe it was just serendipity. Despite having several sequels, albeit from a much older de Camp, I suspect there’s a reason why “A Gun for Dinosaur” is the only entry old-timey SF fans talk about. This was a surprisingly vicious, if a little too documentary-like, story about a couple men who got in way over their heads. The attention to detail, given what we knew about dinosaurs in the 1950s (which was not much, mind you), is admirable, and despite being a novelette I didn’t really feel its length. De Camp was at this point considered one of the “old guard,” but he had quite a bit of energy left to both humor the reader and make them think. It seems that when he wrote this story he wanted to write a better time-travel story than “A Sound of Thunder,” and—hot take—I think he did.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Princess and the Physicist” by Evelyn E. Smith

March 18th, 2025

(Cover by Kirberger. Galaxy, June 1955.)

Who Goes There?

What do we know about Evelyn E. Smith? She was born in 1922 and died in 2000, so she lived a pretty long time. She was apparently a lifelong New York denizen. She had a spurt of productivity with writing short stories in the ’50s, but by the mid-’60s had given up short fiction in favor of novels. The last years of her life were spent writing a series of mystery novels, starring Miss Melville. Given that she wrote a couple non-fiction books on witchcraft and spiritualism (under a pseudonym), and that such things figure into some of her short fiction, it’s possible that like her close contemporary Margaret St. Clair she may have converted to neo-paganism. I’m not sure. Her short SF and fantasy has rarely been collected over the years, and seems to be in enough neglect that much of it has fallen out of copyright. This is all a shame, because from what I’ve read of Smith she was one of the funniest SFF writers of the ’50s, having the sharpness of wit and enough silliness that she fell right in with other satirists of the period such as Robert Sheckley and C. M. Kornbluth. It would make sense, then, that more than half of her short stories appeared in Galaxy and its short-lived sister magazine Beyond Fantasy Fiction. Being a New Yorker with an irreverence for post-war societal norms, she was just the kind of writer H. L. Gold wanted. Her work still remains to be given the reevaluation it deserves.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1955 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It would not appear in book form until Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957) (editor not credited), in 2022. I mentioned that many of Smith’s stories have fallen out of copyright, and “The Princess and the Physicist” is one of them. You can read it on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Centuries ago, spacefaring humans came to the secluded planet of Uxen, which had been home to only a single sentient lifeform: Zen. Zen the Terrible, Zen the All-Powerful, Zen the Encyclopedic, etc. Smith tells this story from the perspective of Zen, who is a corporeal and quasi-omniscient being who, despite technically having a body, we get few descriptions of. When the human settlers came, they struck a deal with Zen, such that the lonesome alien would basically do their bidding—a deal he ended up not being too happy about. Since then, the culture on Uxen seems to have evolved into a cross between steampunk (I’m specifically thinking the world of Final Fantasy VI) and medieval, despite the presence of spaceships. There’s a monarchy, complete with a king and the king’s beautiful daughter, Iximi, along with a religious faction. The Uxenach have only a loose connection with Earth, with an Earth ship only coming in on occasion; but still, there are murmurings of wanting independence from Earth, which Iximi is even sympathetic to. Two Earth scientists, Alpheus Kendrick ~~Lamar~~ and his assistant Peter Hammond, are the latest visitors, who are looking to stay for a time with their robot servamt.

Soon we have a battle of wills, between the princess, the scientists, and Zen, who as a third party looks upon the situation and wonders if there might be something for him in all this. The king explains to the scientists that Zen is “Uxen’s own particular, personal and private god,” which is his way of saying Zen is their almighty errand boy. Smith satirizes the relationships societies have with their dominant religious beliefs: she posits that had the God of Abraham been corporeal and able to speak at any time, it’s unlikely that his worshipers would treat him all too well. Tons of people being needy, and complaining about goddamn everything. And yet, it’s not all bad. Society on Uxen has, over the course of almost countless generations, built up a belief system around Zen, who after all is an alien and not really a god. Indeed he’s like one of those energy beings that show up a little too often in Star Trek; there are so many different races in the Star Trek universe that are semi-corporeal, with reality-warping powers, that one sometimes wonders how said universe has not collapsed in on itself. Where Zen came from is, perhaps wisely, never answered; he may well be the only member of his race. Something else that goes unexplained is how the Uxenach practice their religion, since they have their own little quirks and ways of respecting (or paying begrudging homage) their deity, including salutes for different contexts such as “the secular xa” and “the high xa,” which Smith does not describe. It’s a nicely set-up world wherein Smith doesn’t linger on anything not directly related to the plot. I also somehow doubt that someone who believes in an all-merciful and all-loving God would have written a story this ambivalent about religious practices.

“The Princess and the Physicist” is a short novelette, actually shorter than I was expecting, and it does fly by quickly. The plot is simple: the Uxenach sabotage the scientists’ robot so that they have no choice but to take on a local for the role, which they’re justifiably ambivalent about. Thus Iximi will pose as a beautiful local girl in the hopes that the scientists hire her so that she may spy on them. There’s a pretty funny scene in which the scientists are judging the women who’ve applied for the job, and Kendrick points out that someone as prim and proper as Iximi would probably make a poor housekeeper, since her beauty and neatness imply she is not used to doing the unforgiving work of looking after a couple of slobs. Guj, the prime minister of Uxen, tries desperately to convince the scientists to take in Iximi, which eventually works out, although it ends up not being that simple, what with Zen also having conflicting loyalties. On the one hand he admires the scientists for their reverence and lack of neediness with him, but he also figures that if the Uxenach don’t get their way then that’ll become his problem as well. One thing Zen really likes that the Earthmen have brought with them is tobacco, which if smoked provides a nice “incense.” While Zen spends much of his time as like a fly on a wall, he still has needs, ya know. There’ve been notable examinations of man’s relationship with gods and godlike figures via genre fiction, from Star Trek to (God help us) American Gods, but a more accurate title for “The Princess and the Physicist” would’ve been “God Needs Prayer.” The princess and scientists, while important, are still only secondary to the grumpy alien that watches over them. It’s a lot of fun. This is a pessimistic but not too serious satire about a petty god and his equally petty followers.

There Be Spoilers Here

Turns out the assistant, Peter Hammond, had figured out quickly that something was off about the princess, by virtue of—get this—seeing a portrait of her in the kingdom’s hallways prior to the hiring. Iximi admits her cover was a pretty easy one to blow. The good news is that Kendrick, despite his appearance of being smart and learned, is actually quite slow on the uptake. Even better news is that Hammond only mentions this after Iximi infiltrates the scientists’ lodging because he sympathizes with the people’s wish to be rid of Earth influence. In a moment that I have to admit feels implausible, and which I would take bigger issue with if the story wasn’t a comedy, the princess and the physicist admit both their love for each other and their loyalty to cause of independence. This last stretch of the story is pretty abrupt, which does make me wish it were longer, more fleshed out. Just a little bit. Zen also steps in and proposes an ultimatum with the young lovers, so that the independence of Uxen benefits him as well. What we then have is a kind of satirical recreation of bits from the Old Testament, in which God agrees with the Israelites to have six days of work, followed by a day of rest. In the case of Zen and the young lovers the idea is that the people of Uxen will have to work without Zen’s intervention for six days, and then on the seventh (actually it’s a Thursday), Zen will do whatever his followers ask. It seems like a fair deal.

A Step Farther Out

When I reviewed Smith’s “The Agony of the Leaves” last year, I bemoaned the fact that it was the first story of hers I had read, and that I ought to check out more of her stuff. Sadly I’ve not done this very much, in no small part because collections of her work (her stories were never collected in her lifetime, despite how long she had lived() are not exactly easy to find. Incidentally “The Agony of the Leaves” and “The Princess and the Physicist” appear in the same anthology. However, enough of her short fiction is on Project Gutenberg that you could do a crash course if you really wanted. And you probably should. Smith was pretty funny, in a kind of proto-feminist way that her male peers were not.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Big Trip Up Yonder” by Kurt Vonnegut

March 14th, 2025

(Cover by Mel Hunter. Galaxy, January 1954.)

Who Goes There?

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most important authors in American history, despite having origins which might lead one to believe he would’ve ended up like most SF writers: forgotten, if sometimes admired. He served in World War II and famously wound up as a POW in Dresden, being there when the Allies bombed that city. His wartime experiences and subsequent PTSD would be dramatized in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. But long before that novel, which cemented Vonnegut as America’s satirist of most distinction in the years following World War II, he made his SF debut in 1952 with his novel Player Piano, a much more conventional bit of ’50s satirical SF, which on its own did not indicate the lustrous future its author was to have. Vonnegut was ambivalent about being called a “sci-fi” writer, and indeed some of his novels, like Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, are not SF at all; but still, at least half his novels are certainly SF, as are some of his most reprinted short stories. “The Big Trip Up Yonder” is not one of Vonnegut’s more well-known stories, it must be said not without good reason (it’s fine, but it’s nowhere near the man at the height of his powers), but it does showcase Vonnegut’s savage wit and his keenness of perception when it comes to post-war American culture.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s since been reprinted in Assignment in Tomorrow (ed. Frederik Pohl) and the Vonnegut collection Welcome to the Monkey House. I guess he didn’t renew the copyright, because it’s on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

The Fords have gathered round the patriarch of the rather large family, Gramps, who’s on his death bed—not from old age, but because Gramps has decided he’ll be taking “the Big Trip Up Yonder” soon, which is to say he is choosing to die. In the year 2185, nobody dies of old age anymore, at least in the US, thanks to a miraculous invention called anti-gerasone, which, if taken regularly as instructed, would make it so that one could live virtually forever, and look young doing it. This has led to a quasi-dystopian future in which overpopulation has run rampant, since far fewer people die now, to the point where whole families are crammed together in apartment buildings, with basically no privacy to speak of. Gramps’s bedroom would be totally normal in our world if not for the fact that he has the luxury of keeping his own bedroom, whereas everyone else in his family must huddle together like rats. As a certain Goodreads reviewer pointed out with this story, one has to wonder how, what with the lack of privacy, anyone has sex or jerks off in this world. There are many questions raised implicitly from what few detailed Vonnegut gives about this future society, and for better or worse he doesn’t really answer any of them. Anyway, it’s time for Gramps to read out and revise his will—again. He’s done this many times before. Lou, Gramps’s grandson, was due to become the new patriarch of the family, but this time he gets cut out of the will, “causes for which were disrespectfulness and quibbling.” This is not an exaggeration. Gramps cuts people out of his will and puts them back in depending on how he’s feeling at the moment, which you could say makes him a tyrant. It’s hard to feel bad for him when we discover that Mortimer, Gramps’s great-grandnephew, is conspiring to send the old man off the grave a bit prematurely by diluting his anti-gerasone. Lou sees this scheme, but is conflicted as to what to do about it, since he’s not exactly fond of the old man either.

Thus we have our conflict.

Much of “The Big Trip Up Yonder” is concerned with Lou and his wife Emerald. Lou looks to be a man of about thirty, but is 103; his father Willy looks only slightly older, but is 142. Gramps himself is close to 200 years old, but looks to be in his seventies—not young like the rest of his family, on account of already being old when anti-gerasone was invented. Apparently anti-gerasone is like the polio vaccine in that if you already have polio, oh well, what’s done is done. It stops aging, but doesn’t reverse it. For reasons I’ve not much bothered to look into, overpopulation became a major “concern” for a lot of ~~white middle-to-upper-class people~~ people in the post-war years, such that there seemed to be a Malthusian bug going around. While nowadays overpopulation is typically treated as a right-wing concern, much like with eugenics this was more or less a bipartisan things back in the day. (The number of left-wing intellectuals who supported eugenics in the early 20th century is, let’s say disconcerting.) Vonnegut was a leftist, of a sort, being a socialist and also a philosophical pessimist; but this didn’t stop him from having worries about there being (supposedly) too many damn people on this planet. In fairness to Vonnegut, the problem of overpopulation in “The Big Trip Up Yonder” has not to do with race or class, but simply man’s fear of dying from old age. Vonnegut himself would’ve only been about thirty when he wrote this story, but even at that time he seemed to be thinking quite hard about the prospect of aging, and the inherent feebleness that comes with old age. Gramps certainly comes off as antagonistic, but to be fair to him, he is surrounded by his much younger-looking family, day in and day out, in a world that seems to be only getting more cramped each day. It’s a story that is perhaps half-baked, in that it doesn’t follow through on all the ideas it presents, nor does it do much to develop its characters (not that Vonnegut usually cared to make his characters all that human), but it does hint at a fierce intellect and future greatness.

There Be Spoilers Here

Unexpectedly, Gramps has left his bedroom—indeed he’s gone off the reservation, so to speak. He left a note behind, with the final revision of will, and with the implication that he’s gone off to commit suicide, having gotten fed up with his family. His will says that there will be no new patriarch, but that the Fords will instead “share and share alike,” which confuses and worries members of the family. What the hell could this mean? Soon a fight breaks out, which then turns into a literal riot in the streets. The Fords are arrested, but really they shouldn’t feel too bad, since jail, at least in some ways, turns out to be better than the outside world. After all, each person gets their own bed, in their own cell, which would come off as a luxury after what they’ve had to deal with. Turns out Gramps also faked his death, since he returns to the apartment, after the arrests, with a gentle and oddly youthful smile on his face. A new version of anti-gerasone is about to hit the market: at just a bit of a higher cost, someone can now reverse their aging! You could say it’s a happy ending, since everyone involved gets more or less what they wanted: the Fords each get to have spaces of their own, at least for a time, and Gramps gets to take a break from his pesky family. Mind you that Vonnegut’s sentiments when it comes to family are, I suppose in keeping with his other views, pretty pessimistic. There’s a story of his, might’ve been “The Big Space Fuck,” in which children can actually sue their parents for having allegedly ruined their lives—not through actual abuse, but just lousy parenting. For someone who raised quite a few children (both biological and adopted), Vonnegut didn’t think much of the nuclear family model—a pessimism towards post-war (sub)urban life that would’ve fit right in with Galaxy in the ’50s.

A Step Farther Out

It was hard for me to be objective with this one, since I do have a nostalgic attachment to Vonnegut. I remember reading Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time when I was 13; it was one of the first “serious” novels I’d ever read of my own volition. However, I’ve not actively read Vonnegut since college, for reasons that can be hard to parse. It could be that I’ve moved on from Vonnegut’s cartoonishly misanthropic view of humanity (I’ve instead moved on to an even darker sort of pessimism, somehow), or that I find his less savory qualities, like his tendency towards misogyny, more grating now. It could also be that Vonnegut intentionally wrote in a beige style, with short, punchy paragraphs, and vocabulary that a 5th grader could understand. He’s both simply and complex as a writer, in a way that would endear him to a mainstream literary audience. My relationship with him is more mixed now, which is reflected in my mild ambivalence towards “The Big Trip Up Yonder.” I probably would’ve loved it years ago, when I was less mature and also less familiar with ’50s SF.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “A Bad Day for Sales” by Fritz Leiber

March 11th, 2025

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, July 1953.)

Who Goes There?

Fritz Leiber is one of the great chameleons of 20th century genre fiction, being more or less equally talented in writing SF, fantasy, and horror, with Leiber’s use of the genres not being mutually exclusive. That he was also one of the great prose stylists among genre writers in his lifetime is made more impressive by the fact that he was one of the “old guard,” having debuted in the field in 1939. He had a short but intense correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft shortly before the latter’s death, making him one of the last members of the Lovecraft circle to have known the man himself; and indeed Leiber wrote a few Cthulhu Mythos stories. His jack-of-all-trades approach, combined with his prolificity and longevity, make him a favorite on this site. I will never even come close to running out of Leiber stories to talk about. Today’s story, “A Bad Day for Sales,” is brief but potent, being grim but still humorous social commentary of the sort that H. L. Gold, the first editor of Galaxy, loved. Leiber had a streak of productivity in the early ’50s that coincided with Galaxy’s launch and arguably its very best years, even appearing in the first issue. This is quite a short story, only about 2,250 words, so I won’t keep you long today, but I very much recommend it.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Shadow of Tomorrow (ed. Frederik Pohl), Second Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction (ed. H. L. Gold), Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales (ed. Isaac Asimov and Groff Conklin), Nightmare Age (ed. Frederik Pohl), Science Fiction of the Fifties (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander), The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg), Robots Through the Ages (ed. Bryan Thomas Schmidt and Robert Silverberg), and really too many times to count. It’s also out of copyright, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

New York City in the future is different, but not so much; really in some ways it’s more recognizable to us now than it would have been in 1953. In Times Square, advertisements take up the whole sides of buildings—only they’ve gone digital, with people “watching the fifty-foot-tall girl on the clothing billboard get dressed, or reading the latest news about the Hot Truce scrawl itself in yard-high script.” That “Hot Truce” will come into play later, although given the brevity of the story one is unlikely to forget about it. In the first few paragraphs we’re introduced to three major themes in Leiber’s fiction: sex, death, and post-war consumerism. Then there’s the latest advancement in advertising technology, a ~~Roomba~~ robot named Robie, a sentient vending machine with legs—or rather treads. Robie is not humanoid, but rather looks like a tortoise had sex with a tank. “The lower part of Robie’s body was a metal hemisphere hemmed with sponge rubber and not quite touching the sidewalk. The upper was a metal box with black holes in it.” Robie is the first in what may become a line of sales robots like himself, assuming the investors are impressed enough; he doesn’t go around selling cars or property, but small things, including fashion items and even candy for children. A crowd quickly gathers around Robie and this is where the action is set, as if on a stage. Leiber’s background in theatre figures into several of his stories, most notably his Hugo-winning novel The Big Time, but “A Bad Day for Sales” also feels like a one-act play.

(Interior art by Ed Emshwiller.)

Robie offers treads to come kids who come by, a boy and a girl at different times, although in maybe the funniest bit in the story Robie, apparently unsure at first as to the girl’s gender, offers her a nudie magazine. Also a “polly-lop,” which at first I thought was a typo but it’s repeated a few times consistently so I guess not. The girl’s mother is looking for her. Robie’s attempts at appealing to his customers depending on age and gender very much feel like a precursor to what have become “personalized” ads in the internet age. Companies asking to know your age, gender, tracking your location so they know where you are on the map, etc. It’s creepy, no doubt, but also Robie is by no means a malevolent robot; he’s merely doing what he was programmed to do, which is to pull in customers. Certainly he’s not as invasive of people’s privacy as his real-world descendants would become. This portrait of NYC is, on the one hand, very of its time, but it also tracks rather closely with how consumerism will progress (or maybe devolve) in the US, with an increasing reliance on AI and machinery, because I guess for companies it costs less time and money in the long run to do things this way than to hire real people. Leiber’s doing what conventionally a good SF writer ought to do, which is to observe cultural trends in his own time and place, and then extrapolate on them.

It’s hard to talk about this story too much without getting into spoilers, or more specifically the abrupt change in tone it goes through—although tonally it’s not that big of a change. What started as a satirical slice-of-life narrative soon turns into something quite different, which honestly I should have expected but somehow did not. The title clearly has a double meaning, since for one Robie has a hard time selling his junk to people in the crowd, but also his day (or rather the day of everyone around him) is about to get much worse. Leiber’s very clever about all this.

There Be Spoilers Here

Leiber does something he could’ve done in 1953 but probably not 2003 (because he was dead by then, but also because of 9/11): he bombs New York. Specifically the “Hot Truce” mentioned at the beginning apparently fell through, because the enemy (whoever it is) has a nasty surprise for these New Yorkers. Get a load of this:

(But way, way up, where the crowd could not see, the sky was darker still. Purple-dark, with stars showing. And in that purple-dark, a silver-green something, the color of a bud, plunged down at better than three miles a second. The silver-green was a newly developed paint that foiled radar.)

And yes, it is in parentheticals, the only paragraph in the story to be designated at such. I’m not sure if the bomb is a nuke or not, but it does enough damage that Times Square gets turned into rubble seemingly in an instant, with Robie being surrounded by the bodies of the dead and dying. Robie himself is fine, of course, albeit damaged. The little girl mentioned earlier is fine too, thankfully. “A white dress and the once taller bodies around her had shielded her from the brilliance and the blast.” This is… grim. At least she’s reunited with her mom at the end, so it’s not totally bleak. There are a few survivors, a rescue team arrives at the very end, and a little inconvenience like a bomb dropping on Manhattan doesn’t stop Robie from doing what he does best—indeed the only thing he knows how to do. Even with fewer customers, on account of mass murder, the machinery of modern capitalism will keep trudging onward.

A Step Farther Out

The fact that I very rarely see Leiber books in the wild, even in used condition (a lot of his books, from what I can tell, are out of print), is depressing. The conventional narrative is that Leiber wasn’t as good an SF writer as he was with fantasy and horror, but once we take out The Wanderer (it’s quite bad), Leiber was still one of the best SF writers of his time. He had a sense of humor and a keenness of perception, along with a fluidity of style, that put him head and shoulders above most of his peers. (This sharp eye for cultural trends shows through even when he isn’t writing SF, see “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” which is ostensibly horror but reads as kin to his socially conscious SF.) “A Bad Day for Sales” is a very good introduction to what Leiber’s SF—a view of the future that continues to feel bleak, specifically because it feels true.

See you next time.