Tag: galaxy science fiction

Short Story Review: “The Snowball Effect” by Katherine MacLean

March 8th, 2025

(Cover by Jack Coggins. Galaxy, September 1952.)

Who Goes There?

Katherine MacLean was born in 1925 and died relatively recently, in 2019, making her one of the longest-lived SF writers. Despite her longevity, though, MacLean wrote little fiction, and much of what she wrote was published in the ’50s, when she was quite young. This could be because the market for short SF saw a bubble that decade the likes of which it wouldn’t really see again until the 2010s. Clearly novels were not her preference, as she only wrote two solo novels, one of which (The Missing Man) is a fix-up. But in the ’50s MacLean was one of the most rigorous writers in the field, indeed one of the codifiers of hard SF, although her early stuff can be less defined by the hard sciences than the soft. She went to grad school for psychology, and today’s story is about sociology. “The Snowball Effect” might strike you as being only nominally SF; certainly it’s not SF of the robots-and-spaceships sort. But it’s definitely speculative fiction, which is not a label I like to use (I tend to see “speculative fiction” as a cop-out term), but this is a rare instance where it’s applicable. MacLean had made her debut in Astounding, but the newfangled Galaxy was a much better fit for her brand of satirical soft SF, so mostly she would stay there.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Reprinted in Second Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction (ed. H. L. Gold), The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (ed. Brian W. Aldiss), The Great SF Stories #14 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF (ed. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer), The Big Book of Science Fiction (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and the MacLean collection The Diploids. The copyright ran out on it, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg with no issue.

Enhancing Image

Halloway is the president and dean of a university—somewhere. It’s unclear where exactly this university is. He’s dealing with a bit of a renegade professor, one Wilton Caswell, the head of the Sociology Department, which risks being gutted on account of a lack of interest from “the big-money men,” i.e., wealthy donors who actually keep the college running. Sociology doesn’t really appeal to them. “To them, sociology sounds like socialism—nothing can sound worse than that,” says Halloway. This is both a funny little bit of social commentary and perhaps some foreshadowing as well. You may recall about a year ago I reviewed MacLean’s “Pictures Don’t Lie,” which I liked quite a bit, especially with how it handled its twist ending. “The Snowball Effect,” which like the aforementioned story got adapted for X Minus One (I do recommend the X Minus One version of “The Snowball Effect,” by the way, it’s pretty faithful and in some ways more vividly depicts what MacLean was going for than what she could accomplish on paper), and both stories feel very much like they could be produced as stage plays, or for radio. Much of our time is spent either with just Halloway and Caswell or Halloway more or less by himself, as he keeps track of Caswell’s project. Caswell has a solution for his department, which comes down to a bet: Caswell can show his theory about the snowball effect for an organization and chart out said organization’s growth and lifespan over a six-month period. Sociology is, after all, the study of societies; but then damn near anything can count as a society—even a women’s sewing circle. By the end of the six months the Watashaw Sewing Circle, run by one Mrs. Searles, should have grown so as to vindicate Caswell’s studies, according to the plans and laws he laid out. “If Caswell’s equations meant anything at all, we had given that sewing circle more growth drives than the Roman Empire.”

Four months later and Halloway checks in on the Sewing Circle, only to find that such an organization does not exist anymore, and indeed has not for a minute; instead it’s been replaced by the Civic Welfare League, also run by Mrs. Searles. At first it seems like Caswell’s project had fallen through horribly, but quite the opposite has happened, with the former Sewing Circle having metamorphized and grown into a formidable charity organization seemingly overnight. The miraculous thing is that the CWL sprouted from the Sewing Circle without actually changing or amending the rules Caswell had laid out for the Sewing Circle, although the implication is that Caswell had designed the Sewing Circle so that it would, out of necessity, become something else so as to grow rapidly in numbers. He knew what he was doing. Halloway is more clueless, not helped by his struggling to get in touch with Mrs. Searles, who despite her importance to the plot remains a marginal figure. One reason I suspect MacLean was one of the few women to appear in Astounding (later Analog) with any regularity is that her style and preoccupation with male characters could be considered masculine. Certainly she stands out as distinctly pre-New Wave, being a generation (literarily, if not physically) apart from the second-wave feminist writers who would most forcefully bring the battle of the sexes to science fiction. Women both do and do not figure strongly into “The Snowball Effect,” because on the one hand the only characters with substantial dialogue, and whose perspectives we have any real insight to, are men; but then also you have the CWL, which at first is an all-women organization, and MacLean seems to be making a point about women’s roles in political activism, as historically women’s contributions to liberation movements and anti-war protests, have been quite profound. And then there’s Caswell, who despite having devised the project in the first place, is content to just watch it play out; you could say he only got the snowball tumbling downhill.

“The Snowball Effect” is a good deal less serious than “Pictures Don’t Lie,” indeed being the kind of social satire that Robert Sheckley would make his bread and butter (Sheckley made he debut the same year MacLean’s story was published); but while Sheckley had a misogynistic streak, MacLean’s story is slyly feminist in a way that male readers of the time probably would not have found too confrontational, while at the same time these readers would be subjected to some big ideas under the guise of a sci-fi comedy. Also by centering her story on men, with women being peripheral but at the same time pervasive, MacLean avoids what would become a bit of a stereotype with lady authors in the field during the pre-New Wave years, that being the centering of women’s roles as caregivers in what was being a middle-class sprawl. James Blish, in one of his books of criticism (I forget which one), makes the misogynistic but incisive comment that these lady authors, who tended to gravitate toward The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction rather than Galaxy, were the “housewives” of the field. They wrote about women who lived day to day as moms and/or wives, their own existences hovering around the men and/or boys closest to them. An SFnal conflict may arise because the female protagonist’s idiot husband wants something, or her bratty son wants something, or maybe she herself wants something that she thinks will impress her husband or son. While women were literally at the center of such stories, their relationships with the male gender also took just as much center stage—mind you that the authors often did this with social commentary in mind, to say something about what it’s like to live as a (presumably) white middle-class woman under patriarchy. But while the dual protagonists of MacLean’s story are men, they end up being observers to a women-driven phenomenon, with the women in question mostly acting apart from their male peers.

There Be Spoilers Here

The CWL proves to be a huge success once the six months are up—if anything it might be too successful. What started as a ladies’ club has blossomed into something like an egalitarian democratic socialist society, a kind of mini-government whose chief concern is welfare. It’s the kind of thing the Fabians would’ve wanted. The CWL has gone well beyond Watashaw and by the end of the story they’ve opened up a branch in New York, open to women and men, be they rich or poor, handsome or ugly, yet still acting on the guidelines Caswell had set up for the Sewing Circle. Halloway’s jaw hits the fucking floor as he charts the rate of growth. “After the next doubling, the curve went almost straight up and off the page.” Caswell calculates that at the rate things are going the CWL will have effectively become a world government in about twelve years. There is a problem, of course, in that the project was set up such that once it stops growing for a long enough period it will dissolve. The implications are not exactly great, as presumably once this future world government reaches as many people as it can possibly recruit it will start crumbling. But by the time that happens it won’t be Caswell or Halloway’s problem anymore. The business will have gotten too big by then. Despite involving only a few characters and feeling like a stage production with how insular it is, the ending is comically large-scale.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry, I was supposed to post this yesterday, but there was an issue with WordPress that seemed to have to do with Google Chrome so I couldn’t fucking log into my account. (Thank you, Google, very cool.) I guess it was the kind of mishap that befits a comedy of this sort, although unlike my real-life experience with writing about “The Snowball Effect” I do certainly recommend the story itself. Being concerned with both social commentary and the soft sciences, it’s just the kind of story H. L. Gold wanted for his magazine, and it’s the kind of story one would have a hard time finding in Astounding, which was Galaxy‘s most direct rival. I should also read more MacLean—not that she wrote a lot.

See you next time.
Short Story: “Self Portrait” by Bernard Wolfe

March 4th, 2025

(Cover artist uncredited. Galaxy, November 1951.)

Who Goes There?

For someone who wrote so little SF, Bernard Wolfe (no relation to Gene Wolfe) is very much someone worth rediscovering, if for no other reason than that he brought a worldview to the table that was quite rare in his lifetime, and which has since become only somewhat less so, even as the field has become more progressive in its collective politics. Wolfe trained as a psychologist, and seemed to be one of the few proper Freudians of his time to have written SF; he had even himself undergone psychoanalysis in 1950, about the same time he would’ve written today’s story. He was also a leftist, specifically a Trotskyist, to the point where as a young man he even acted as a bodyguard for Leon Trotsky for several months, although he had left his post over a year prior to the latter’s assassination. While Wolfe would come to no longer identify as a Trotskyist, no doubt at least in part due to the red scare in the years following World War II, he seemed to remain committed to the causes he thought were worth fighting for. On top of being a psychologist he also made some extra money teaching at university; and while he only wrote one SF novel and a handful of short stories, he did write a decent amount of work that wasn’t SF. ISFDB can be frustrating with not cataloging an author’s non-genre work, since here it gives the impression that Wolfe had vanished from the face of the earth between 1952 and 1960. Most notably he wrote a fictionalized account of Trotsky’s last days titled The Day the Prince Died, or The Death of Trotsky.

Wolfe made his SF debut with “Self Portrait,” whose themes he then expanded upon for his sole SF novel, Limbo, published the following year. “Self Portrait” is densely packed, maybe too much for its own good, but it’s fascinating, there’s a good deal to unpack, and it’s a good example of the kind of socially aware SF that H. L. Gold wanted for Galaxy, his newfangled magazine that was already forever changing the way we understand the genre. You can see why Harlan Ellison, when commissioning stories for Again, Dangerous Visions, was eager to nab a Wolfe story (he ended up getting two of them), despite the latter’s inactivity.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Robot and the Man (ed. Martin Greenberg, not to be confused with Martin H. Greenberg), Second Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction (ed. H. L. Gold), Tomorrow and Tomorrow (ed. Damon Knight), and We, Robots (ed. Simon Ings). It seems to have fallen out of copyright in the US, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Oliver Parks has recently been assigned to Princeton University, to work in its cybernetics department. The story is set over the course of a few months, in the fall of 1959, which was then the near-future. Parks has taken on the hefty task of designing a life-like robotic leg, after his boss was impressed with his “photo-electric-cell” insects, often referred to as bedbugs—little robotic bugs of Parks’s design that look and more importantly act like real bugs, not because of the exterior but what goes on inside. The nerves. Prosthetic limbs are by no means new; in fact, if you think about it, basic prosthetic limbs have been around since at least the golden age of piracy. Wooden pegs for legs and all that. But then there’s the issue of developing a limb that can look and act like its real human counterpart. Perhaps even better than the real thing. Thus we have Parks’s subject, named Kujack, a Korean War veteran who had both of his legs blown off. (It’s worth noting that Wolfe probably wrote “Self Portrait” in the fall of 1950, so that the Korean War had only been going on for maybe a handful of months, making it surely one of the first SF stories to mention that conflict.) There’s also Parks’s assistant, Goldweiser, who despite his position is openly an egomaniac, and I do have to wonder if it’s a coincidence that Goldweiser reminds me of the similarly named H. L. Gold. Gold, for better or worse, worked closely with his writers, and he quickly gained a reputation for being a control freak. I have little doubt that Wolfe would’ve found Gold a pain in the ass to work with.

And then there’s Len Ellsom. Parks and Ellsom go back quite a bit, not least because there’s the implication Ellsom had “stolen” Marilyn, who was Parks’s fiancée. Ellsom also has a habit of calling Parks “Ollie,” which irritates him, although it’s unclear if Ellsom is doing this innocently or not. Ellsom is not a cyberneticist; instead he’s working on a supercomputer that can beat even the best human player in a game of chess—a computer so smart and tactically oriented that it could win a war all by itself. This was written in the days long before the microprocessor, and before the real-world evolution of the computer that was designed to play chess against professional opponents. You might have a fuzzy memory of the supercomputer Deep Blue playing against world champion Garry Kasparov. In case it wasn’t obvious, we’re talking about machine learning, which nowadays tends to be just called AI, although calling it AI isn’t really being accurate. Deep Blue was not able to write poetry or commit suicide (after all, being able to write poetry and commit suicide are the two biggest signs of human-like intelligence), but it was able (indeed designed) to think strategically. There was a problem that needed solving (a game of chess) and Deep Blue could solve it. Parks considers machine learning to be easier than constructing an artificial limb because while Parks has to replicate the human leg, Ellsom is “merely” working with learning machines, which can replicate a certain function of the human brain, but not all of it.

That’s why the robot-brain boys can get such quick and spectacular results, have their pictures in the papers all the time, and become the real glamor boys of the profession. They’re not asked to duplicate the human brain in its entirety—all they have to do is isolate and imitate one particular function of the brain, whether it’s a simple operation in mathematics or a certain type of elementary logic.

There’s some evident jealous in Parks’s tone: it might be the thing Marilyn, but it could also be the fact that Ellsom has the more glamorous job. Things are not as straightforward as they seem, though, not helped by Parks being a bit of an unreliable narrator. “Self Portrait” is told as a series of diary entries from Parks, so that we’re hit with a double whammy of a first-person narrator who’s also bitching about his colleagues in real time. It also goes to explain Wolfe’s rather informal style here, since presumably Parks is writing these entries without the expectation of them getting published, and thus we see a side to him other people would not.

One night Parks and Ellsom have a bit of a night on the town, and Ellsom gets quite drunk; but then of course, he confesses he’s been drinking more than he should. The reason? “I saw a machine beat a man at a game of chess.” Three years ago. Machine learning is apparently a bit farther along in development than Parks had thought, and despite being involved in the development himself Ellsom is rather disturbed by it. He has a friend, Steve Lundy, who lives in Greenwich Village. “He’s a bum, you see, but he’s got a damned good mind and he’s done a lot of reading.” Lundy is pessimistic about the development of a supercomputer that can beat a man in chess, and it becomes hard to not see why. Incidentally Lundy is also a leftist, having fought in the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. It seems to me that of the characters featured in “Self Portrait” that Lundy might resemble Wolfe the most, the irony being that we don’t actually see him until the end. Speaking of Greenwich Village, Ellsom brings up Marilyn again, apparently guilt-ridden, and explains to Parks, in so many words, that he shouldn’t feel too bad about having lost Marilyn, on account of her being a huge slut who had fucked every man in the Village who would have her. In the Village she tried being an artist, like every other bohemian, but apparently gave that up to go back to doing a tech job at IBM. Despite her sluttery, Marilyn is said to be a very intelligent woman, and there’s the hint that Parks still sometimes thinks about her. “You know,” he says, “she helped lay out the circuits for the first robot bedbug I ever built.”

If it seems like a lot is going on without my ever feeling the need to go through the plot beat by beat, that’s because it is. “Self Portrait” is about 9,300 words according to the Gutenberg text, making it a solid novelette, but even so it feels squeezed in, almost like the abridged version of a much longer and deeper narrative. I would have preferred if Wolfe had doubled the length and turned it into a novella, which would’ve given his ideas more room to breathe. If contemporary reviews are anything to go by his novel Limbo, which expands on the ideas presented in “Self Portrait” but not the plot, suffers from the opposite problem: at some 430 pages it’s freakishly long for a ’50s SF novel. Wolfe is a lot more cerebral (not to mention left-leaning) than some other ideas-heavy SF writers of the period like A. E. van Vogt, but he still has the problem of not being a very good storyteller. It strikes me as apparent that “Self Portrait” probably should’ve been narrated by Ellsom, not Parks, although it’s possible that by sticking us in his shoes Wolfe wanted to make a point about the kind of person Parks, which is to say a square. A conformist. Ellsom calls him a Boy Scout, which Parks takes as an insult. Something you realize about Parks is that he’s kind of an asshole, and also prone to lying for the sake of keeping up appearances. Not to get ahead of the plot a bit, but the ending solidifies Parks’s status as anti-hero, in that he is anti-heroic. The only reason he doesn’t come off worse is because Goldweiser is more openly unlikable; and anyway, while Parks is not exactly a good person, Wolfe posits that the likely future, in which the US builds a computer that can conduct a whole war, is leagues worse than one petty cyberneticist. It’s bleak, if you think about it.

There Be Spoilers Here

Parks finds out that Ellsom’s recklessness has gotten to the point where he’s not only hanging out with Kujack, but sharing government secrets with him. This is a development that mostly happens offscreen, which can make the reveal of Ellsom and Kujack both technically traitors a surprise in the sense that the reader simply would not have expected such a development to occur. It feels random. There is, of course, a bit of foreshadowing, about how something is off about Kujack, and there’ve been mentions of Ellsom’s alcoholism; but then both counts can be dismissed, or at least downplayed, on account of us only being told about this through Parks’s rather biased perspective. The implication of the twist and the two men’s subsequent arrests (although in a humorous sequence of events Kujack isn’t arrested until after the team gets to show to the public that Parks’s artificial leg is a success, for the sake of PR) is that Ellsom may have turned to hard drinking out of a crisis of conscience, given that he’s been helping with a project that could potentially lead the US and Soviet Union ending the world. (Less of a Dr. Strangelove and more of a Fail Safe situation, by the way.) Ellsom had also been yapping about the project with Lundy, who in turn has been running an anarchist magazine named after the supercomputer Emsiac. Things end badly for about half the cast (there are too many characters here, really), although not Parks, who comes out unscathed and is even able to reunite with Marilyn at the end. The conformist lives happily ever after; meanwhile the characters who are framed as more sympathetic, indeed those whom Wolfe likes more, are punished.

A Step Farther Out

I would be curious to read Limbo, since it seems like the kind of overly ambitious mess that was sadly rare in ’50s SF. “Self Portrait” is the only Wolfe story to appear in a genre magazine; all the others would be published either in mainstream outlets or anthologies. This story doesn’t count as cyberpunk, mind you, but it does feel like a distant precursor to the movement, by a good thirty years, in that it deals with cybernetics (well, duh), but also its thematic concerns anticipate the anti-capitalist and anti-war stances of most classic cyberpunk writing. In that sense Wolfe was ahead of his time, although he wrote so little SF and from what I can tell he could never quite tap into his own talent to produce a masterpiece.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “To Fit the Crime” by Joe Haldeman

February 18th, 2025

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, April 1971.)

Who Goes There?

For the past fifty-odd years, but especially from the ’70s to about the turn of the millennium, Joe Haldeman has been one of the most acclaimed “war” writers in SF, although war is far from the only topic he’s written about (see today’s story). He was one of those authors who, before he could even start his career as a writer, got drafted and thrown into the Vietnam War, where he saw action as a combat engineer. He got injured, damn near killed apparently, and sent home, and it was as he recovered from his wounds that he took up the pen (or probably typewriter) in earnest. His first story was published in 1969, but it wasn’t until the following year that multiple Haldeman stories saw print, and within a handful of years he made his way to the top of the totem pole. I need not tell you about his Hugo- and Nebula-winning 1974 novel The Forever War, which to this day remains one of the most beloved and widely read SF novels of its type—it might even be the most universally beloved military SF novel of all time. Haldeman would write a lot more novels and short fiction, including the fix-up “novel” All My Sins Remembered, which contains “To Fit the Crime.” This is an SF-detective hybrid with a rather strong trace of noir.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1971 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It has only been reprinted as part of All My Sins Remembered.

Enhancing Image

The stories that comprise All My Sins Remembered (it’s classified as either a novel or a collection, depending on the source) star Otto McGavin, an agent working for the TBII whose gimmick is that he goes under a variety of disguises, which require him to not only get covered in “plasti-flesh” but also adopt someone else’s personality via “hypnotraining.” We can now infer, with the gift of hindsight, that Otto will come out of the case of the week in one piece, although in fairness, readers would not have known this at the time. The case in question has to do with some mysterious deaths out of the indigenous population on Bruuch, a prospecting planet that’s basically run by a single company, and on which the natives are put to work either in the fields or mining in the planet’s depths. Otto is an operator, which is to say he’s a very special agent at the TBII, and two operators have already gone missing (presumed dead) on Bruuch, investigating the same case. No answers as to what’s going on as of yet. The idea, then, is to have Otto go undercover as Dr. Isaac Crowell, a renowned scientist who’s studied the Bruuchians enough to speak their language, to an extent. Crowell has not actually been on Bruuch in many years, though. Otto is 27 years old but playing a man in his sixties, with the biggest strain being the pounds of plasti-flesh and what have you, as well as the difference in gravity on Bruuch. He’s wearing a highly advanced fat suit, is what I’m saying.

There are really three mysteries in “To Fit the Crime,” which have to do with why the Bruuchian miners have been dying more often as of late, what happened to the other two operators, and less urgently but just as importantly, what “stillness” means for the Bruuchians. Mind you that Haldeman doesn’t describe the Bruuchians much, but they’re supposed to be at least humanoid enough, and that culturally they seem to have something in common with ancient Egypt and certain Native American peoples. In terms of alienness they barely count as such, clearly being stand-ins for real-world people of color who’ve had to live under European or American colonialism. Bruuch is a prospector planet, as I said, in that it’s like one of those company towns that’s run arguably more by a monopoly than the local government, or rather government and capital are most intimately in cahoots with each other. Again, because we now can figure that Otto survives and presumably solves the case of the week, spoiling this story borders on impossible. It doesn’t help that even without the foreknowledge of this being the first entry in a series it’s not exactly unpredictable. This is a problem the detective genre tends to run into anyway, but it’s compounded when combined with SF because SF gives you a nigh-infinite number of tools you could use to solve a crime that one can’t have in real life. You have the issue of the reader being able to foresee the solution well before the detective does, but you also have the issue of said detective being able to solve the case and get out of trouble any which way the author chooses. The only reason Otto even gets as far as he does is because he has technology available to him that we (both in the 1970s and now) don’t. Also, aside from Otto the only character who appears in maybe two scenes is Dr. Waldo Norman, who becomes his closest ally while on Bruuch. Conversely the villains (there’s more than one) only appear long enough so that the reader gets a good idea, right away, that these men have been doing something with the miners.

Not that “To Fit the Crime” is bad by any means; it’s a perfect decent detective story. It helps that it’s a rather short novella, maybe 19,000 words, and for that sort of story it doesn’t overstay its welcome. The third mystery I had mentioned is also the most intriguing, for its ambiguity and also it being the most SFnal element. See, as I was reading “To Fit the Crime” I was wondering if I had somehow pissed a passage as to what “stillness” means, because it’s a ritual the Bruuchians perform on their dying and it’s something Dr. Crowell (the real guy, not Otto) had studied before; yet Haldeman doesn’t give us an explanation until very late in the story. This is also an early example of a certain type of detective story, at least in SF, although it does have roots in earlier detective novels and film noirs. I’m thinking of the story wherein a white male detective investigates the murder or disappearance of a person of color. You may be thinking of The Last Wave, or Bad Day at Black Rock, or more recently Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s a progressive-minded narrative that has a hint of the white savior about it, and in the case of “To Fit the Crime” this is not helped by the Bruuchians being more human than alien. But fret not, because while the villains are exactly who you think they are (who can honestly be surprised that the evil money-grubbing white man turns out to be a murderer on top of being greedy), Otto is one of the good white people. It does its job, given the time period (I suspect also there may be subtext with how overt racism played into the then-ongoing Vietnam War, even towards the South Vietnamese, our “allies”), but there’s also a reason Martin Scorsese deconstructed this sort of narrative in Killers of the Flower Moon. Maybe it’s wishful thinking that one good man can save a whole village and punish the guilty in the process.

There Be Spoilers Here

There really isn’t much to give away here, except for what stillness actually is. So, one would think this is something biologically unique to Buuchians, but they can also perform it on humans, including the bad guys. It’s basically a state of half-life in which the person’s body freezes up and they enter a kind of cold sleep, except without the actual freezing. They may as well be dead, but they don’t technically die and they certainly don’t decay. It’s like a perfect embalming. It’s supposed to be a death ritual the Bruuchians typically reserve for members of their own community, although how they’re able to do it and what the evolutionary benefit of such an ability could be are not clearly stated. It’s fine, we don’t need to know.

A Step Farther Out

Mind you that this is very early Haldeman, so it’s fair to say he was still finding his legs as a writer. Still, not bad, if rather standard. I would be curious to see the other Otto McGavin stories in All My Sins Remembered, since that seems to be the only damn way you can read all of them. I also liked Haldeman enough already that no doubt I’ll be covering something much later of his… eventually.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “The Organleggers” by Larry Niven

January 10th, 2025

(Cover by Gray Morrow. Galaxy, January 1969.)

Who Goes There?

In the latter half of the ’60s there were basically two factions among genre SF writers: the New Wavers and the old school. Lines were drawn along literary but also political lines, although it was by no means a clean split, since while the New Wave was considered generally left-wing there were a few notable right-wing New Wavers, including Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty. But the old school was for the most part steadfastly right-wing, including among those who were actually not old enough to have been part of the “old” school. One of the best and brightest of these new recruits to the anti-New Wave side was Larry Niven, who is still very much alive and who had made his debut in 1964, being one of Frederik Pohl’s biggest discoveries. At a time when hard SF ran the risk of becoming irrelevant (Analog was easily the most anti-New Wave magazine, and while its sales numbers were good it was also the least relevant of the big SF magazines in the late ’60s.), Niven emerged and made it seem cool again. Early Niven was snappy, wondrous, had a knack for concocting strange alien beings and cultures, and was not afraid to mix and match different genres. “The Organleggers” is an SF-mystery hybrid, and the first entry in a series starring the ARM detective Gil Hamilton. Niven, who would’ve been barely out of his twenties at the time, gave himself the challenge of writing a compelling SF mystery that would work as both science fiction and a mystery.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1969 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It would be titled “Death by Ecstasy” thereafter. For reprints we have World’s Best Science Fiction: 1970 (ed. Terry Carr and Donald Wollheim), Supermen (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), and several Niven collections, the most pertinent of these being The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton.

Enhancing Image

Gil Hamilton has been called in to investigate an unusual death—not as a detective, but as the deceased’s next of kin. He finds Owen Jennison in his apartment, sitting in his armchair, grinning, and very much dead. Starved to death. Jennison must have been in his apartment by himself for weeks, starving to death and smiling the whole time. Hamilton and Jennison are old friends; they used to be asteroid miners together, which, says Hamilton, would make two men about as close to each other as one can get while still being platonic. In a rather proto-cyberpunk move for the time, Jennison has an implant in his skull, that would explain the uncanny grin: at least in the last weeks of his life he’d become a “current” addict, which is to say the pleasure centers of his brain would’ve been stimulated until he couldn’t think straight, indeed couldn’t really do anything else. Some people get addicted to drugs or drinking (or, shit, you could get addicted to just about anything under the right circumstances), but in the year 2123 there are also those get a “droud,” a cylinder implanted in their skull that gets them addicted to current. The rule of thumb is that current addicts have only themselves to blame since they can’t get a droud installed without being aware of the inevitability of addiction. They become like zombies, that is to say barely functional human beings. But they asked for it. Addiction is what you’re signing up for. At the same time none of this sits right with Hamilton. Why would Jennison choose to end his own life in such a way? It’s strange, and very drawn out, although in fairness it would not have been painful from Jennison’s point of view.

So something fishy is going on, and there we have our mystery. Either Jennison killed himself (Hamilton sees this as unlikely), or someone had gotten him addicted to current and hooked him up such that he could not escape. Unsurprisingly somebody wanted Jennison dead. There are a few factors that make this case a science-fictional one, that both make Hamilton’s job easier and hinder him. Had this been a normal mystery set on the Earth of today it would’ve been half the length, but Niven spends a good deal of time establishing both Hamilton’s backstory and the world in which he works, because this is not the Earth of today. It’s here that I should bring up the issue of organlegging, since it forms the crux of the mystery. For reasons I don’t really understand Niven seemed to have a hyperfixation on organ transplants at this time, since as how he had just written another story about this topic, “The Jigsaw Man,” for Dangerous Visions. The first successful heart transplant happened in December 1967, several months after Dangerous Visions was published, and Niven probably wrote “The Organleggers” around the same time. He seemed to be concerned with the practical issue of where to get these organs, of how much demand there might be and who would be able to meet such a demand. In the world of “The Organleggers” demand has risen to what I have to admit sounds like a ludicrous degree, with people requesting organ transplants even when they don’t need them—often just wanting younger organs for themselves, presumably so they can live longer. The government’s response to this is to make the death penalty a sentence for rather minor offenses, so that you have more criminals whose organs can be harvested. Yet this is still not enough, as there’s also a fruitful black market for illicit organ-harvesting.

There’s quite a bit to unpack with the political implications of the world Niven has set up, not least because Niven himself is a conservative. I suspect he gave up on the Gil Hamilton series by the early ’80s because it must’ve become clear to him that the future he depicted, in which human life is valued based on the condition of one’s organs and that people would be scrambling to get organ transplants, did not and would not come to pass. I mean, that’s good news for real-world people, but I can see how that would knock the wind out of one’s sails as an SF writer. (Of course that doesn’t stop right-wing nutjobs from coming up with conspiracy theories about how Planned Parenthood harvests the body parts of aborted fetuses for some black market, or what have you.) So conditions are a bit dystopian. So what? Our conditions are about as dystopian. The right to own property and capital are held to a higher priority than, say, having breathable air. This is all complicated by Niven probably supporting some form of the death penalty, which is strange to me because, given Niven’s right-libertarian sentiments, the government being able to murder basically whoever it wants strikes me as very not libertarian. But, it’s not all bad. Psi powers have become somewhat commonplace, to the point where Hamlton and Julie, his connection to ARM HQ, have them, Hamilton having a limited but very useful telekensis while Julie is a wide-ranging telepath. Niven is funny about ESP; he seems to think it’s the cat’s meow. One of the small ironies of old-timey SF is that Niven never appeared in Campbell’s Analog, despite at least theoretically the two being perfect for each other. Apparently the reason Niven did not appear in Analog until after Campbell’s death is that the two just didn’t get along on a personal level, which is funny to me. So, ARM is an acronym, and it’s kind of a forced joke on Niven’s part because it also refers to Hamilton’s invisible third arm, which is telekinetic.

Niven gave himself the challenge of writing a murder mystery that could not be done in a realistic setting, and I do think he more or less succeeded, albeit with the caveat that at least with “The Organleggers,” the mystery itself is the least interesting part of the equation. This is a problem SF mysteries have had at least since the time of Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, where similarly the set-up and resolution of the mystery are the weakest links of that novel. Writing a good SF story and writing a good mystery are two different skills, and while there have been authors who were able to do both, they usually did so by writing the two genres totally separately. You may have noticed that up to this point I’ve mostly neglected to get into the actual plot of “The Organleggers,” and that’s partly because there isn’t as much of a plot in the strict sense as you would expect out of a novella, but also I have to confess I’ve been horribly depressed these past few days. I had a respiratory infection for about a week, which would’ve lasted longer had I not been proactive in seeing a doctor and getting prescriptions for it; but then, once I started to emerge from my sickness-and-meds-induced haze, I found that I’ve become even more susceptible to “the humors” than usual, which is saying a lot. I really had to coax myself into writing this review, which I wasn’t even sure I could hand in by the deadline (today) at first. The words simply would not come to me for a while. Even the experience of reading Niven’s story now feels to me like a haze, although that really couldn’t be pinned on the story, since I’ve been reading a lot recently and yet I’ve been getting little to no pleasure out of anything. Barely anything feels good to me at the moment. A dark cloud has been hanging over me.

So I’m sorry that this is not quite the review you were hoping for. In all fairness, even without the depression, I still would’ve focused more on the world-building than the plot, since I believe that’s what Niven gave priority, and anyway he does a pretty good job of it. I can poke fun at his politics, and if I really wanted to I could poke holes in the gender implications of this story (I mentioned Julie earlier, but she’s off-screen the whole time and otherwise it’s a bit of a sausage fest), or how it doesn’t hold up when taken as predictive; but science fiction doesn’t exist to be predictive. What matters most is that Niven, especially early in his career, had a formidable imagination, such that he could make things that are totally implausible when one steps back and thinks about them (his Known Space stories have quite a few goofy ideas, but they’re still “hard SF”) seem likely, or even inevitable. It’s a talent most SF writers don’t have. It helps also that Hamilton, while being a somewhat morally grey agent for the UN (ARM is a UN organization, not part of the US), fits the bill of the smooth-talking noir detective. Had Raymond Chandler lived long enough and tried his luck at writing SF he could’ve conceivably come up with the Gil Hamilton series. It’s a shame Niven has spent much of his career up to this point complaining about liberals and environmentalists.

There Be Spoilers Here

See the above.

A Step Farther Out

I could have gone into this with skewed expectations, for one because I had already read a later entry in the series, “ARM,” which I do think is stronger, namely for its heavier reliance on worldbuilding and its less obvious conclusion. There’s also the aforementioned problem of my depression, which has decided to creep more thoroughly into my life in the past couple days, for seemingly no other reason than to make up for the fact that I’m no longer feeling the worst of my respiratory infection. Physical sickness replaced by mental sickness; in most cases the former is preferable. At the same time it’s a shame Niven only wrote four Gil Hamilton stories; but then he also stopped the series around the same time people agree he jumped the shark (circa 1980), so maybe it was for the best. I’m sorry, I wish I had more to say on the story itself.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Skulking Permit” by Robert Sheckley

December 24th, 2024

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, December 1954.)

Who Goes There?

Happy Christmas Eve, you fucking losers.

Robert Sheckley debuted in 1952, the same year as Philip K. Dick and Algis Budrys, and quickly established himself as one of genre SF’s court jesters, especially in the recently launched Galaxy, which would print a good portion of Sheckley’s work throughout the ’50s. It was practically a match made in heaven: Galaxy was rather liberal and socially conscious, with a lot of fiction about average middle-class working people, and Sheckley was (or at least got pigeonholed as being) quite the urbanite. Galaxy leaned towards social commentary and Sheckley was only too happy to provide some social commentary of his own. He’s also an easy writer to dig into, in that one need not think too hard when writing about a Sheckley story. Once you’ve read a few Sheckley stories you can figure out a pattern of his that he was prone to, at least in his early years. Sheckley’s work at its best is major enough that he’s actually one of the few genre SF writers to have gotten a volume in NYRB Classics. Because he wrote a lot, he sometimes wrote bland or just plain bad stuff, for the sake of a paycheck, although “Skulking Permit” shows Sheckley at perhaps his most fun-loving.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It was reprinted the following year in the Sheckley collection Citizen in Space, and would seemingly be included in every Sheckley collection going forward except for The Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley. It would also be anthologized in Overruled! (ed. Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio). It also has an X Minus One adaptation.

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The planetary colony of New Delaware has been doing pretty well for itself, except for the fact that contact with Earth has been cut for several decades—indeed, the people of New Delaware have had to fend for themselves for the past 200 years. But then one day, miraculously, contact is regained between the settlers and the government of Earth. This is not necessarily great news. Tom Fisher is a perfectly average fisherman and law-abiding citizen (but then there are no laws to break), who suddenly has found himself with a new job to do. See, the problem is that the apparently sole superpower on Earth has, after a couple centuries, become a totalitarian shithole, being overtly against free speech, democracy, and “aliens.” The people of New Delaware don’t even know what an alien is, although the planet does seem to have indigenous (albeit non-sentient) life of its own. Earth is gonna send an inspector, or rather the Inspector, with some armed men, to see that the people of the colony have conformed to Earth standards of living. The problem, then, is that there is no problem: New Delaware, while a small village and rather agrarian, is also something of a socialist utopia. There’s a mayor, simply called the Mayor, so presumably there’s a local government, but there’s no prison, nor are there ~~pigs~~ cops; and there’s no prison and no police because there’s no crime. There’s not been a murder (or at least a recorded one, for all we know) on New Delaware in 200 years. This is indeed the problem, because one of the ways the colony is supposed to conform to Earth standards is that there must be police, which means there must also be crime. But the village doesn’t have a criminal class.

The Mayor designates Tom as the village’s legalized, bona fide criminal, complete with a skulking permit—an authorization from the Mayor, in writing, to commit crimes. Yes, that includes murder. What could possibly go wrong? In the early years, there are basically two types of Sheckley story: humanity encountering a problem and only making the problem worse by trying to solve it, and humanity encountering a paradox in social norms and trying (in vain) to untangle this paradox. “Skulking Permit” very much fits in the latter category, but it’s a lot of fun. Sheckley pokes fun at the idea of a human civilization that is bereft of crime, and much more pointedly he pokes fun at the increasing militarization and paranoia in the US following the end of World War II. The Earth authority of the far future has gone down the rabbit hole of McCarthy-era anti-socialism (in other words, the rabbit hole we still find ourselves facing), to the point where the government of Earth has become actively genocidal and is looking to exterminate any intelligent alien life it can find. “Conformity” is the word of the day. The people of New Delaware must conform if they wish to regain partnership with the Earth authority, but conformity means actively making life in the village worse. In order to help the village meet standards for the Inspector, Tom must steal, cheat, skulk in places “of ill repute,” and yes, even kill (although thankfully sexual assault is not part of the deal), which are all things he has never done before. How do you introduce something as heinous as murder to a place that has never even known the word, among people who have never killed anything intelligent? Sheckley was one of the most persistent social critics among genre SF writers in the ’50s, although, probably intentionally, he never seemed to suggest an alternative to what he clearly saw as a slippery slope of totalitarianism in the US. New Delaware is not a valid alternative because, in true utopian fashion, it is by its nature impossible. The colonists, for some reason, have taught themselves over the course of generations of be as about as harmful to each other as baby birds. It’s more like Eden than a real place.

The convenient thing about Sheckley from a reader’s perspective, but not so from a reviewer’s, is that Sheckley was not what you would call a deep writer. His stories can be read almost like one can eat very good potato chips: they taste nice and provide some nice sodium, depending on your blood sugar, but they’re not terribly complicated. “Skulking Permit” has a loose plot and a cast of basically one-note characters, but this is fine—for one because it’s a comedy, but also the characters, while one step above cardboard, would be pretty colorful cardboard. Tom being an everyman works in service of the plot, since he is a totally unassuming guy who has to do some unsavory things for the sake of his village. Also, I’m not sure why he did this, but Sheckley gave characters last names that are professions; sure, you might think nothing of it at first, with Tom Fisher, but then you see Billy Painter, Ed Weaver, the Carpenter brothers, and so on. It’s a fucking cartoon, but for a quick read (or about as quick as you can be at 25 pages), I have to admit I chuckled quite a few times. The point of a Sheckley story is often to be funny, first and foremost, which I thought this was. It helps that, continuing with the cartoon comparison, some absurd things happen, such as the local tavern becoming more popular once it becomes known as a “place of ill repute,” or that the villagers aren’t even sure what a prison is supposed to look like, or that a group of villagers cheer like they’re at a baseball game when Tom finally steals something, or the fact that Tom “must” kill one of his fellow villagers but lacks a real motive to do so, being too friendly with everyone. It’s morbid, at least on paper, but in practice it’s perfectly upbeat, in typical Sheckley fashion.

There Be Spoilers Here

Of course, Tom can’t do it. He tries killing the Mayor, and actually comes pretty close, but the Mayor has recently gotten kicked upstairs to the position of General (a rank he doesn’t understand as the village doesn’t have a military) and tells Tom that since he’s a military figure now, to kill him would count as mutiny and not murder per se. Sure, whatever you say. Tom can’t even bring himself to kill the Inspector, someone he has never met and who’s basically an ambassador for a fascist hellscape; but even then, he simply doesn’t have that killer instinct—indeed none of the villagers have it. Seeing that the villagers are unable to kill and thus useless as would-be soldiers in an interplanetary war, the Inspector and his goons decide to just leave the planet and its “uncivilized” people in peace. This is an unusually happy ending for Sheckley, although in a bit of irony, since he was unable to prove himself as a killer, Tom sleeps “very badly” that night. New Delaware fails at becoming a “proper” society, but may have succeeded at retaining its innocence. There’s a lot you could unpack with what Sheckley is implying, but I’m sure he wanted us to enjoy it for what it is: a comedy.

A Step Farther Out

It’s a good fun read, that’s all I can really say.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Dusty Zebra” by Clifford D. Simak

August 20th, 2024

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, September 1954.)

Who Goes There?

Clifford Simak had already been around for two decades when Galaxy premiered with the October 1950 issue, and this brave new magazine seemed to give the veteran writer’s career a second wind—or at the very least coincided with it. The ’50s would be a golden age for Simak (like with a lot of fellow genre writers), with the early ’50s alone seeing four novels from him (as opposed to just one in the previous twenty years combined), including his masterpiece City. Simak wrote a truly enormous amount of short fiction this decade, on top of the novels, and his outlet of choice was Galaxy. The reasons as to why Simak preferred Galaxy over the competition aren’t totally clear; it could be (I think I recall this) that he came to find John W. Campbell’s meddling to be too exhausting, although he still occasionally contributed to Astounding/Analog in the ’50s and ’60s. Simak has been sort of pigeonholed as a vaguely conservative writer, mostly due to his focusing on rural settings and peoples (that he’s a pastoralist can’t be denied), but a deeper reading of his fiction and reading the tragically few interviews we have with him show him to be a more complicated person. (We’re talking about someone who claimed to reread The Grapes of Wrath every year.) “Dusty Zebra” sounds at first like it might be a straightforward bartering-saves-the-day narrative, similar to Simak’s own “The Big Front Yard” (reviewed here), but it’s more of a humorous cautionary tale.

Also, I’m sorry that this is being posted later in the day than what would be ideal. My daily life has not been great.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It has been reprinted in Alpha 9 (ed. Robert Silverberg) and the Simak collections The Worlds of Clifford Simak and Dusty Zebra and Other Stories.

Enhancing Image

Joe is a business-minded family man, whose son Bill happens to be even more business-minded (ripping off other schoolkids by trading junk for things with actual value), and one day while looking for stamps in his work desk he finds out something very odd: there’s a tiny dot on the desk, and if an object passes through it it goes—somewhere. Seemingly vanishes into thin air. And yet something takes its place. Joe puts random crap on the dot and gets back neat little gadgets, like a pen that also transforms into a fishing rod, and especially there’s the dust-collector, a kind of vacuum that sucks up dust and makes it disappear. Where does the dust go? Not sure. Joe encourages Bill’s schoolyard trading, so it makes sense that he would be interested in what turns out to be an trans-dimensional portal, the only problem then being that while Joe has business sense he doesn’t have technical sense; so in comes Lewis, the next door neighbor, who can explain the gadgetry and mechanics of the strange little dot. (Something you may notice about Simak is that a lot of the time his protagonists are not scientists at all, but they happen to be friends with someone who is scientifically minded and who can explain the SFnal elements of the story.) Before long Joe and Lewis form a business partnership around the trading, complete with a deliberately convoluted contract, and of course Joe tries to lessen Lewis’s share at every opportunity. Simak protagonists are often well-meaning, but they can also at times fall on the anti-hero end of the spectrum, which Joe very much is; not that he’s evil or anything, but he’s a capitalist at heart, maybe a little less human than the average Simak protagonist.

The recurring trade-off throughout the stories is that for some reason the person (called “the Trader”) on the other side of the portal really likes these cheap zebra bracelets that Joe happened to have, and in return for this seemingly useless trinket the humans get a dust-collector in return. The humans find that they can trade in the useless garbage for some pretty useful items, which can then be turned for a profit. We never do learn where the dot came from, who’s responsible for it, or even what the Trader looks like. This is all rather inexplicable, although there’s just enough scientific mumbo jumbo thrown in to keep this away from being fantasy. A lot of Simak’s stories can be thought of less as hard-nosed SF and more like machine fables, in which technology figures into the setting and moral of the story, but the actual plausibility of the tech is a distant second. The dot-as-portal is ridiculous, and also this seems like a very easy way to send over a deadly weapon, or an object that could carry diseases. If we’re to take the Trader as an alien, though, it makes sense that such a figure would be more or less benign in Simak’s book. I often think of Simak as an anti-Lovecraft figure, in that when Simak characters encounter the unknown it’s very rare for the unknown to pose a serious threat. Simak’s aliens, including the Trader, are often curious creatures who can be reasoned with on some level, such as, for instance, bartering being the common ground between humanity and the aliens in “The Big Front Yard.” I assumed “Dusty Zebra” would be a similarly straightforward first-contact story in which bartering is shown as a force for good; and while the bartering itself turns out to be fine, the get-rich-quick scheme Joe and Lewis concoct will have consequences neither of them would’ve wanted or expected.

So about the zebra bracelets. How do the humans and the Trader, well, trade? How do they understand each other? Short answer is, they don’t—at least not beyond a picture book language that even a toddler can understand; but this rudimentary language turns out to be just enough. Joe and company get the bright idea to use one of Bill’s picture books (one showing items as standing in for letters of the alphabet, so A is for apple, etc.) to show the Trader what they have for inventory, and the Trader sends the book back with the desired item marked. One problem: they forgot (or didn’t notice) that the item on the Z page is a zebra—and the Trader wants one of those. Now you may be thinking, that’s a whole-ass animal. Where you would even get one for sale? But as Joe says, after taking some “advice” from Bill, “[The Trader] doesn’t know a zebra is an animal, or, if he does, how big it is!” This is of course an example of ripping someone in a deal off, but as Joe rationalizes, if the Trader can’t tell the difference then what harm is being done? “If the Trader had any qualms about what was happening, he gave no sign of it. He seemed perfectly happy to send us dust collectors so long as we sent him zebras.” This is a partnership that seems to be working, for now. A certain question does linger, though: Where does all the dust that the dust-collectors pick up go? Conceivably it has to go somewhere, and the Trader doesn’t seem to be getting the dust back…

There Be Spoilers Here

Our Anti-Heroes™ have been making a killing on the gadgets, only the problem is that they can’t figure out how to reverse engineer them so as to manufacture them themselves. To really make a killing on the dust-collectors you would need at least a few thousand, but how would you get them? The Trader apparently wants more zebra bracelet charms in exchange for the dust-collectors, and those charms have since been discontinued. In what is admittedly a far-fetched turn of events Joe (this is after making a great deal of money) is able to make a deal with the charm manufacturer, and soon enough the house gets filled with literally thousands of the damn things. The good news is that they get more dust-collectors! In fact too many of them. So, there seems to be a third party in this, or so Joe suspects: clearly the dust must be going somewhere, and in the last stretch of the story it all comes back—pounds of the stuff across multiple households. Joe’s house alone gets filled with dust that seems to have come from another dimension, but maybe not the Trader’s. Then the dot vanishes. We never do find out why the Trader cuts off communication or what he could be doing with all those zebra charms. Maybe he (or they) realized he had gotten ripped off and decided some payback was needed. Or maybe there’s another dimension all the dust goes to and they didn’t like that very much. Point being that a combination of lawsuits and being unable to replicate the gadgets brings Joe and company pretty much back to square one by the end. I like how there’s some mystery retained with the Trader by the end, so that not only did the humans pay for their profit-seeking but that they’re also left wondering what could be going on in those other dimensions.

A Step Farther Out

In a way this is minor Simak, in that it doesn’t take itself very seriously. It’s also not very SFnal, indeed bordering on fantasy—possibly even cosmic horror. Or rather cosmic humor. It’s a story about some entertaining if also unlikable people who think they can get something with minimal effort and reap the benefits. Had this been a Henry Kuttner or C. M. Kornbluth story the ending would’ve been much more unforgiving towards the humans, but ultimately it was written to be in good fun. Simak is not dead-serious that often, but just because he tends to be on the lighthearted (or at least forgiving) side doesn’t mean he can’t make a solid point. I actually think we still don’t give him enough credit.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “No Life of Their Own” by Clifford D. Simak

August 3rd, 2024

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

Who Goes There?

Few authors hit the ground running, making their debut more or less fully formed creatively, but then even fewer authors can be said to have had their creative peak three decades into their careers. Clifford Simak is one such rarity, as he made his genre debut in 1931, only to start putting out really good work consistently by the ’50s. The stories that would make up his 1952 “novel” City were mostly written in the ’40s, but it was in the ’50s that Simak set a high bar both in the quality and quantity of his work. He wrote at a mile a minute at this time, mostly short fiction for the newfangled Galaxy, which he had taken such a quick liking to that his novel Time and Again (serialized as Time Quarry) had its first installment in Galaxy‘s inaugural issue. Rarely do an author and a magazine have such chemistry together, but in the ’50s and early ’60s the two were all but inseparable. Simak was born on August 3rd, 1904, so 120 years ago today. His career spanned from the early ’30s to the early ’80s, right as the cyberpunk movement was kicking into gear. Nowadays he reads as a breath of fresh air compared to the more urban and macho works of his contemporaries, as he was a diehard Midwesterner and pastoralist. “No Life of Their Own” similarly is very Midwestern and very pastoral, and for better or worse (I would say better) it serves as a good entry point for Simak’s unique charm.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1959 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted in Tomorrow’s Children (ed. Isaac Asimov) and the Simak collections All the Traps of Earth and Other Stories and No Life of Their Own and Other Stories.

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It’s unclear how old Steve the narrator is when he’s recounting this story, but we’re told of one summer vacation during his childhood when life on the farm got mighty strange—as in stranger than normal. Steve and his parents are your average farmers in the American heartland, although lately the family’s luck hasn’t been good. “The tomato crop had failed and two of the cows had died and a bear had robbed the bees and busted up the hives and the tractor had broken down and cost $78.90 to get fixed.” Their neighbors aren’t doing much better for the most part, not least because said neighbors aren’t from around these parts—indeed, they’re not even from this planet. Steve doesn’t have human boys his age to play with, so instead he hangs out with the kids of alien families, who themselves are of different species. We never learn the real names of these other kids, but we get nicknames since Steve finds their real names too hard to pronounce: we have Fancy Pants, Nature Boy, and Butch. Fancy Pants, as you can guess, thinks a little highly of himself and even gets around by levitating, as is the norm for his race. Nature Boy is of a furry but still humanoid race and gets along with the local wildlife. Butch is the son of a well-to-do man who worked as an optometrist on his home planet but who has moved to Earth to try his luck at farming. Thing is, the only farmer in the “neighborhood” who’s been having good luck is the only other human farmer mentioned, Andy Carter, whom nobody likes and who apparently has a foul temper.

The plot is a bit loose, so first I’d like to focus on some of the details, as I think they paint a more vivid portrait than the actual events of the story. This is a concise example of how Simak likes to write aliens, which is to say he likes to write aliens who are basically humanoid and who can be understood by humans on at least some level. The aliens in “No Life of Their Own,” even the more “villainous” ones (which we’ll get to), are especially akin to humans, and it probably doesn’t hurt that here the families of the boys Steve befriends are clearly stand-ins for real-world migrant workers. Mind you that when Simak started writing SF in the ’30s the migrant worker was typically thought of as a white American from the rural Midwest who has traveled to California, or somewhere else along either coast. We’re talking about a sympathetic view of immigrants possibly informed by The Grapes of Wrath and other works that were quite left-leaning and pro-worker—and which in the ’30s were also successful with readers. “No Life of Their Own” was published in 1959 but very much evokes rural life in the ’30s and earlier, which makes sense since Simak grew up in Wisconsin in the early years of the 20th century. Come to think of it, I do wonder if Simak was influenced by John Steinbeck, especially given how Steinbeckian(?) this story feels. It’s a somewhat idealized depiction of farm life, but that’s justified I think given how Simak had actually lived through it and how ultimately this is about one man looking back on an episode of his childhood. This is not a story about racism exactly, although it’s very much an anti-xenophobia narrative in which the humans and several alien races all find common ground—including the “halflings” who kick the plot into gear.

The boys discover that Andy Carter unknowingly has a group of short humanoid aliens (hence them being called halflings) helping him tend the land, the only problem then being that the adults, for some reason, can’t see them. They ask Butch’s dad about it and for better or worse he knows how these halflings work—that they’re kind of a nuisance back where Butch’s dad comes from and that they’re basically a race of mimics, latching onto a “host” and taking after that person’s appearance. Thing is, these halflings always work in groups, or rather in little tribes, and if they latch onto one person than everyone else close in proximity will suffer. “For,” says Butch’s dad, “it is an axiom that fortune for one man is misfortune for the rest.” We then get two problems, a practical and ethical one: What do we do about these halflings? and, Is it right to interfere with the Carter farm like this? Of course Carter doesn’t know he’s getting free help, but he’ll sure as shit notice the difference once the halflings are somehow removed from the picture. This brings up another problem: Can the halflings be reasoned with? Would it be possible to negotiate? Given that this is Simak I don’t think I’d be spoiling things by saying yes, the halflings are ultimately reasonable creatures. (I struggle to think of aliens in Simak’s fiction that can’t be reasoned with in human terms at all.) So the halflings exist on some weird dimensional level that make them transparent, although Butch’s dad is at least able to design a pair of glasses that would allow kids to see them; after all, this is still rooted in science, not magic. Well, maybe a bit of magic. The kids can see the halflings with these special glasses, but adults still can’t see them. As Butch’s dad explains to Steve’s dad, “You and I are too fixed in reality.” So, what to do about the halflings?

Before we get into real spoilers, a few other things to note. While farm life as shown here is written in kind of a rose-tinted fashion, Simak’s evocation of childhood feels genuine, helped by the boys being written such that they come off as actual kids—if not necessarily “alien” in the case of Steve’s friends. The boys like to pull pranks and rough-house, which actually causes the plot to escalate, and they also look up to their dads. This is very much a boy’s world, with the only female character showing up (that I recall) being Steve’s mom, who serves as comfort for him in the back end when Our Heroes™ are at their lowest point. This is also about a time and place when corporal punishment (namely belting) was still very much the norm, and Steve doesn’t think anything of his dad beating him, even with hindsight. Just as curiously, while these are rural folks, futuristic technology is by no means absent, as the boys have a few gadgets to play with, including a “live-it” which seems to be a VR headset (virtual reality here being a reasonable extrapolation on what would’ve been the TV boom in the ’50s), and also a “hopper,” which as far as I can tell is some kind of teleportation device. There’s a weird little episode in the middle involving a cat getting caught in one of these hoppers, which I thought a needless digression, although it does foreshadow a more serious mishap regarding this bit of tech. Generally this is a story more rooted in characters and ideas than the plot, which on the one hand you could argue it could’ve been tightened up to become a novelette, but also my counterpoint is that the vibes are kind of immaculate. Simak’s stories are often quite pleasant, if not always memorable (he does phone it in sometimes), but this is a fairly memorable story of his.

There Be Spoilers Here

Fancy Pants getting payback at Nature Boy for a prank involving a skunk leads to Nature Boy getting teleported to the dimension the halflings are in, rendering him invisible—at least without the glasses. The families panic over this, understandably, but they hatch a plan to rescue Nature Boy—and maybe get their hands on one of the halflings while their at it. The halflings are what cause this whole plot to kick off, but I like the idea that petty antics between kids are what heighten the stakes. Anyway, The plan is (naturally) a success, and they even manage to get a word with one of the halflings, who not only resembles Carter but also talks like him. This is a bit disturbing, but Our Heroes™ quickly learn that the halflings can’t help who they mimic really. What the halflings really want, as it turns out, are those live-it sets, one for each of them. The halflings mimic other people’s actions, because they seem preconditioned for it but also they like watching other people; it’s their main pastime. The live-it is like an immersive and personal TV set, therefore the halflings see it as pretty neat. Simak makes a pretty curious suggestion here about technology and entertainment, as said through Fancy Pants’s dad. It’s not necessarily “correct,” but it’s interesting.

“There was a time when the human race found it necessary to congregate in families and tribes for companionship and entertainment. Then the race got the record player and the radio and TV and there was less need for get-togethers. A man had entertainment of his own in his home. He need not move beyond his living room to be entertained. So the spectator and group sports simply petered out.”

Simak lived through the birth of radio and TV, and while these mediums started as aimed at groups or families, something to play in the kitchen or living room (you would only have on TV set in the whole house then), he postulated (I think at least somewhat correctly) that these modes of “entertainment” would become more personalized, so that everyone would have their own radio or TV set. What used to be a group activity will become more individualistic. The conflict at the heart of “No Life of Their Own” is resolved by the farmers making a deal with the halflings, to give them live-it sets and have them disperse so that they wouldn’t group around a single property. It’s hard to gauge how Simak feels about his own solution for the problem, because it does solve the problem, but also he seems ambivalent about the prospect of people not coming together as often for entertainment, or more generally for shared experiences. There’s a little tinge of bitterness to what is otherwise a happy ending (well, except for Fancy Pants, who gets “grounded”), which I think makes it memorable.

A Step Farther Out

Despite being the title story in one volume of that recent series collecting all of Simak’s short fiction, I do wish “No Life of Their Own” got reprinted more often. This is typical Simak in broad strokes, but it’s the little things (especially when you’ve read enough Simak like me) that pulled me in and kept me thinking about it after I had finished reading it. It’s a short novella that, like “The Big Front Yard,” more or less gives you a crash course in what you can expect from Simak and what makes him different from other genre SF writers of the time. There are some surprisingly incisive statements here about technology and race relations that are lurking beneath a charming and somewhat childlike pastoralism.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Pictures Don’t Lie” by Katherine MacLean

June 17th, 2024

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

Who Goes There?

Despite having lived an incredibly long life (she was born in 1925 and died in 2019), Katherine MacLean wasn’t the most prolific of writers. She only wrote five novels, only two of which are solo efforts, and one of those is a fix-up. On the short fiction front she didn’t write a whole lot more, although she did have a streak in the ’50s; about half her short fiction was published that decade. MacLean was one of the few lady writers to appear regularly in Astounding (she even debuted there), but like a lot of other writers she hopped on the Galaxy bandwagon, appearing in that magazine’s first issue. “Pictures Don’t Lie” is a prototypical Galaxy-type story, and not unlike another early Galaxy story I reviewed recently, Philip K. Dick’s “The Defenders,” it’s founded on a Big Twist™. Unlike Dick’s story, however, MacLean’s remains effective even when taking the twist into account. Also like the Dick it was adapted for radio as an X Minus One episode, and has even been adapted elsewhere, including an EC Comics adaptation. It’s one of her most reprinted stories for a good reason.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It was reprinted in Invaders of Earth (ed. Groff Conklin), The Great SF Stories #13 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy (ed. Garyn G. Roberts), as well as the MacLean collection The Diploids. It’s also fallen out of copyright, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Joseph R. Nathen is a radio decoder for the American military, which during the Cold War would mean having a job that could potentially involve the difference between a frozen conflict and a hot one. But Nathen has found something a lot more incredible than signals from the other side of the Iron Curtain: he’s found signals of non-human intelligent life. “Squawking,” as he calls it, which needs to be slowed down, but the squawking is certainly not human, yet at the same time can be understood. Radio gives way to TV and it didn’t take long for Nathen to get a TV signal of the alien ship. He wanted pictures. “Pictures are understandable in any language,” he says. Nathen ends up being right about this—but also tragically wrong. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There are only three real characters in this story: Nathen, a journalist named Jacob Luke who’s mostly referred to as the Times man (which Times?), and Nathen’s correspondent on the alien ship, nicknamed Bud. There are a few other characters, mostly journalists who are only called by the outlets they work for (the Herald, the News, and so on), and the dialogue is almost entirely expositional; good thing Nathen is fluent in Expositionese. If this story has a flaw that would turn some readers off it’s that it seems in love with its own attempts at explaining its premise—so dense in exposition as to be hard to digest.

(The X Minus One adaptation does a pretty good job of streamlining the narrative, by giving us a solid viewpoint character [with the Times man] but also massively dialing back the scientific explanation for how the humans and aliens are able to communicate.)

Nathen had used the TV line to send the aliens the Rite of Spring segment of Fantasia, which the aliens not only received in a couple weeks but apparently enjoyed. At first this sounds like a match made in heaven with regards to first contacts: the aliens are not only able to respond back but can communicate, and according to Nathen their planet is “Earth-like.” The aliens seem to be humanoid, and the Earth team is able to receive TV images of the aliens on the ship. The question then remains: What could go wrong? There are a few warning signs, but the humans are unable to make heads or tails of what these abnormalities could mean. For one, the aliens move at a deliriously fast speed. “Something about the way they move…” As Nathen explains, while the images themselves are clear, the speed at which these images are relayed is hard to gauge. “When I turn the tape faster, they’re all rushing, and you begin to wonder why their clothes don’t stream behind them, why the doors close so quickly and yet you can’t hear them slam, why things fall so fast. If I turn it slower, they all seem to be swimming.” Something isn’t right. But still, the aliens intend to land on Earth, right outside the military base where the story’s happening—and soon.

The twist of this story is telegraphed pretty hard, but only with hindsight. I had the good fortune of not knowing the twist beforehand, so I was left with the genuine question of what the catch is—because there has to be a catch with a story like this. MacLean is clever here in that she turns the screw at just the right pace so that if you’re fast enough you can anticipate the twist, but there’s a good chance you won’t; but then you might reread the story and give yourself a pat on the back for taking note of what now reads as obvious foreshadowing. The title is ironic. It borders on postmodern—not in literary technique, obviously, but in how it shows that objective reality, or rather our notion of it, can be untrustworthy. Our perception of reality is based on our senses. The humans and aliens have differently calibrated perceptions and as such they don’t perceive the same space in the same way. When the alien ship comes to Earth the humans don’t see any sign of it by the landing pad, and Bud says the ship can’t see the humans anywhere despite surely having landed on Earth. The atmosphere, Bud says, is too thick—much thicker and soupier than Nathen said. The humans posit that the aliens might’ve landed on Venus by accident (this was when Venus was thought of as a gaseous swamp and not a hellworld), but this can’t be the case. Something has gone wrong, but they don’t know what.

There Be Spoilers Here

The aliens are on Earth alright, and they’re even somewhere near the landing zone—but the humans can’t see the aliens. Bud says that the ship has come under attack and that the humans have to find the ship fast if there’s hope of saving them. It’s there that Nathen and the Times man realize the missing piece of the puzzle—and at the same time realize it’s probably too late to save the ship. It’s one of those great “we’re fucked” moments in old-timey SF, a real sense of having passed the point of no return, like locking your doors after your house has already been robbed, or realizing that one girl you liked had a crush on you as well and you only realize this years after the fact. MacLean gives us a real zinger of a final line, which encapsulates the bizarre tragedy of the situation, for why the humans can’t see the ship—at least not with the naked eye: “We’ll need a magnifying glass for that.” The aliens move at such an odd speed and the atmosphere around them is so thick because they are, in fact, microscopic. The pictures didn’t lie, but they didn’t tell the whole story either. The humans thought they had made contact with likeminded aliens when in fact they were giants who had made contact with beings even smaller than ants, and neither side could figure this out until it was too late. This is how you do a twist ending.

A Step Farther Out

“Pictures Don’t Lie” is basically a tragedy, not caused by technology but aided by it. Even by the early ’50s there’ve been a ton of first contact narratives, such that it would take a bit of ingenuity to write a story of this type that’s truly memorable. MacLean was still very young, and early in her career at this point, but she did have that touch of ingenuity. More impressively it’s a story that raises questions about the utility of the brand-spanking-new technology called television, about how such technology might contribute to first contact with aliens—and how even with this new tech something could go wrong. It’s also a question of size and perspective. We always imagine aliens like how they appear in Star Trek, humanoids that happen to be the same size as humans. MacLean posits we might find life on another planet—or possibly in a grain of sand.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Defenders” by Philip K. Dick

May 24th, 2024

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

Who Goes There?

Philip K. Dick is arguably both the funniest and scariest writer to emerge from the early ’50s genre SF boom. He wanted to write full-time for a living, and as a result he wrote at a mile a minute; he would wrote some 120 short stories, about a quarter of which would be published in 1953 alone. “The Defenders” is one of those stories. I’ll say upfront that this is not top-tier Dick, although it is curious for a few reasons and I do have to recommend it. For one, this was the first Dick story to make the cover of a magazine, hence the memorable Ed Emshwiller illustration. It’s also one of only two Dick stories to get adapted for the SF radio series X Minus One, the other being the bone-chilling (and darkly humorous) “Colony.” “The Defenders” and “Colony” were published in Galaxy Science Fiction, which had partnered with X Minus One such that the latter often adapted stories from the former’s pages. Despite being so prolific in the ’50s, Dick only appeared in Galaxy a handful of times while H. L. Gold was editor, apparently because (as often happened with Gold) the two did not get along. Gold had a reputation for meddling with authors’ manuscripts, and indeed there’s a sense of meddling with today’s story. Gold shouldn’t feel too bad, though: Dick would appear in Astounding only a single time.

Another couple things. “The Defenders” reads like a companion piece to “Second Variety,” which I reviewed a minute ago. Both stories cover basically the same topic, and given that they were published five months or so apart it’s safe to say Dick wrote them in close succession; but apart from having similar premises they’re very different stories. More importantly is that Dick would cannibalize the premise and twist of “The Defenders” for the much later novel The Penultimate Truth, and if you know the twist of that novel then you can safely guess the twist of this story. I won’t say what the twist is here, but it’s not hard to figure out.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. “The Defenders” wouldn’t see book publication until Invasion of the Robots (ed. Roger Elwood). Other anthology appearances include There Will Be War (ed. John F. Carr and Jerry Pournelle), Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow: Science Fiction War Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh), and Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (ed. Leigh Ronald Grossman). It’s also in *checks notes* every other Dick collection you can think of. To make things even better, it’s fallen out of copyright, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg here.

Enhancing Image

The Cold War went hot eight years ago, with Americans and Soviets having since burrowed underground, hunkering in shelters while the robots, “leadys,” continue to fight the good fight on the surface. The humans would do the fighting themselves, but nuclear fallout from the war’s beginning has rendered the surface uninhabitable—we know this because of newsreel footage and newspaper photos taken of the surface, the leadys keeping humanity updated on a war that seemingly has no end point. “Nobody wanted to live this way, but it was necessary.” Don Taylor is part of his bunker’s military personnel, although despite being in touch with the top brass the higher-ups don’t have a better idea of what’s going on aboveground than Taylor does. (I should probably take a moment to mention that Taylor’s wife, Mary, is in the classic Dick mold, in that she’s rather shrewish. Do not do a drinking challenge where you take a shot every time Dick writes a miserable couple wherein the husband has to put up with his unpleasant wife or ex-wife. What do you mean Dick was already divorced once at this point?) The higher-ups sometimes interrogate leadys to get a more direct line to what’s going on above, but this only goes so far. Nobody, at least on this side, has been to the surface in eight years.

The leadys are the most curious part of the story that isn’t the twist, being shown in the Emshwiller cover. They’re called “leadys” because their lead shells protect them from the radiation on the surface, although they have to be decontaminated every time one is brought underground. It’s also unclear just how they work in the ethical sense, since they’re programmed to not knowingly harm humans—or at least humans on the right side of the conflict, depending. This raises the question of what exactly the leadys are good for, aside from maybe fighting other leadys. Dick seems to conform to Asimov’s three laws of robotics, but he doesn’t delve deep into the matter. The humans bring down a leady for questioning one day and find, to their surprise, that the leady is not radioactive, nor does its chassis have the intense heat of radiation. Don and his superiors figure something must be up, although they can’t be sure what, since as far as they’ve been torn war continues to wage on the surface. But then why no radiation? It’ll be risky, but it looks like humans will be going to the surface for the first time since the war went hot—in leaded clothing, of course. Taylor, his superiors, and a platoon of men plan to go up, but a team of leadys tries to stop them—a fruitless effort, given that the leadys are programmed to not kill humans and so have no way to keep them from going through the Tube.

It’s hard to discuss “The Defenders” without also discussing the twist, but I do wanna point out a couple other things. As is typical of Dick’s early work (with exceptions), the characters aren’t really characters in the Shakespearian sense so much as they exist because the narrative demands human players. Moss and Franks, Taylor’s superiors, are basically interchangeable. Past their immediate circumstances we get to learn nothing about these people. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Dick would become far more ambitious in psychoanalyzing his characters later on, but even at this very early stage there are a few Dick hallmarks that are comforting for the returning fan, sure, but they also serve a purpose. We know life underground is miserable because despite being in a position of authority, Taylor’s life still kinda sucks. The standard Dick protagonist leads an unfulfilled and claustrophobic existence, and this applies even to characters with power, as if to show the hollowness of wanting to acquire power for the sake of itself. Also, as is typical of Dick, the prose is often beige and economical. “The Defenders” just barely qualifies as a novelette, and it feels even shorter than that. Again, not a bad thing. I would’ve had a worse time with this story, given its setup-twist nature, had it overstayed its welcome. I also wanna say the X Minus One adaptation is perfectly decent, much like the source material; it mostly sticks to the short story, with ultimately inconsequential deviations.

There Be Spoilers Here

In one of his books of genre criticism (I forget which one), James Blish lists “The Defenders” as an example of a story whose very existence hinges on its twist, although he doesn’t elaborate on this particular story. He’s undoubtedly accurate with the call, though. If you read early Galaxy you’ll come across a lot of great short SF—indeed some of the best of its kind, certainly in the context of the early ’50s. There were also a lot of setup-punchline stories, and while these weren’t necessarily bad, they could be tiring. Robert Sheckley made a name for himself at the outset with this type of story, but even then it’s clear that he eventually got tired of the routine. Dick could also fall into this trap, and “The Defenders” might be the most setup-punchline of his story; no wonder it would be printed in Galaxy, with Gold having a fondness (really too fond) for just this type of story. And if you know The Penultimate Truth then you already knew what was coming. It turns out the war had basically been over for almost as long as the humans had been living underground. The leadys had been working on reconstructing the surface world whilst feeding the humans (on both sides) false information. That’s right, fake news was a thing in the ’50s! On the one hand this is very much a Dick idea, one he would even return to later; but the execution and implication tell me that either this twist was half-baked or Dick originally had something else in mind but changed it (or maybe Gold changed it) for the sake of appearing in Galaxy.

To elaborate, if there’s one thing Dick does unconvincingly in my experience it’s a happy ending. I’m thinking of Eye in the Sky, arguably the best of his ’50s novels, which while still being an entertaining and mind-bending read, has a tacked-on happy ending that fails to convince. The leadys destroy the Tube and prevent the team of humans from returning underground, leaving them to cooperate with the Soviets for what will probably be several years. “The working out of daily problems of existence will teach you how to get along in the same world,” the top leady says. This is all swell, but it also assumes the leadys really do have the humans’ best interests at heart, which strikes me as fundamentally uncharacteristic for Dick. Contrast this with “Second Variety,” in which the Cold War goes hot, there’s a nuclear holocaust, but the robots are more sinister there. In “The Defenders” the leadys are like a benevolent dictatorship, or Plato’s philosopher king wrapped in iron. You can see what the problem is. This is really out of step with Dick’s generally ambivalent attitude toward robots and automation at large; it’s like he tried to write an Asimov or Simak robot story. And yet it must be said that the twist on its own is good enough that you could do a lot more with it, so it’s unsurprising that Dick would cannibalize it. Still, I found myself feeling underwhelmed by the reveal.

A Step Farther Out

When Dick started out writing professionally he submitted to seemingly every market in the early ’50s, and with a few exceptions he appeared in nearly every genre magazine that would’ve been active in 1953. Sometimes he phoned it in and sometimes you get the feeling the Philip K. Dick we recognize was still in utero. “The Defenders” is very early Dick and feels less Dick-y than the stories previously covered, and of the three it’s easily my least favorite. I recommend it still, but more as a sign of the time and place in which it was written than as a sign of Dick’s genius; for that I’d point towards “Second Variety,” which as I said earlier starts out very similarly to “The Defenders” but goes in a much darker direction. “The Defenders” is an indicative Cold War SF story that happens to have been written by someone who would move on to bigger and better things—something seasoned Dickheads would not find so impressive.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” by Algis Budrys

January 6th, 2024

(Cover by Dember. Galaxy, December 1961.)

Who Goes There?

A famous and well-worn “takedown” of criticism, usually said by artists who are deeply insecure about their craft, is that critics aren’t artists, or if they’re artists then they don’t have the talent to match the art they’re criticizing. “If you can’t do something yourself then why criticize it?” sounds reasonable until you realize nobody would be able to criticize a bad piece of woodwork unless they’ve worked in carpentry, or nobody would be able to criticize the comfortability of a pair of shoes unless they’re a shoemaker. I’m getting a bit sidetracked. Thing is, Algis Budrys is a notable response to this non-criticism because he is one of the few people in the history of genre SF to ssucceed as a writer, critic, and editor. He started off as a very promising short story writer (debuting the same year as Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley, the early ’50s were insane), before showing as much success with novels, and then mostly moving away from fiction in the ’60s in favor of criticism. Budry’s writing didn’t always live up to his own standards, but one can’t doubt he helped raise literary standards in genre SF.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1961 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted a decent number of times. Where to start? The Tenth Galaxy Reader (ed. Frederik Pohl), Alpha Two (ed. Robert Silverberg), Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander, and Frederik Pohl), and The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg). There’s also the Budrys collection Blood and Burning. This is all well and good, but “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” has apparently fallen out of copyright; you can read it on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Rufus Sollenar is the current head of the Sollenar Corporation and the new owner of EmpaVid, a machine that’s set to push TV to the next level. However, as Ermine, an advisor from the International Association of Broadcasters, informs Our Anti-Hero™, there’s trouble on the horizon. Sollenar’s long-time competitor, Cortwright Burr, has been in talks with the Martians about a machine that might outcompete EmpaVid if put on the market but whose properties Ermine is super-vague about; in fairness to the man he doesn’t really know what Burr is up to. The point is that if Burr’s machine is what Ermine thinks it is then the IAB (who are basically a board of investors) will ditch Sollenar in favor of Burr. Sollenar, being a totally reasonable businessman, decides to take matters into his own hands, i.e., to kill Burr and steal the mystery machine for himself; this will turn out to have tragic and very strange consequences.

If it seems like I’m frontloading this review with more synopsis straight from the tap than usual, it’s because Budrys frontloads his story with exposition—only it’s not as straightforward as that. There’s some context that would be helpful that Budrys, for some reason, refrains from telling us. In the first few pages we’re told that this is set at some point in the future, sometime after 1998, and that the Martians, “a dying race” (when are they not), are trading with human civilization like it’s no big thing. This raises some questions that go unanswered, and while this may be so because these questions are not strictly plot-relevant, the answers would add some background flavor the story is otherwise lacking. We know basically nothing about Sollenar aside from his having inherited a powerful company and that he seems used to always getting his way; again, this is all the plot needs to work, but it is unfortunately lacking in character. We arguably learn more about Ermine, who is deliberately made out to be sort of an enigma, than Our Anti-Hero™, and I don’t think Budrys intended this.

I don’t usually say this with regards to length, but “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” could stand to be a couple thousand words longer. ISFDB says it’s a novelette, and while I haven’t run the Gutenberg text through a word processor I’d wager it just barely reaches the 7,500-word mark. Even taking the exposition into account the pacing on this thing is lightning-quick, and not strictly to its benefit. I’m pretty sure Budrys would get on my case for saying this, but this story reads like a pastiche of Dick’s early work: the pacing, the sense of irony, and most importantly the playing with the line between reality and illusion. Once Sollenar fails to kill Burr (so he thinks) the story descends into borderline horror of the surreal kind, which would almost feel more at home in the pages of Weird Tales than Galaxy—if only Weird Tales were still around in 1960. The science-fictional element could easily be replaced with fantasy anyway, and might even work better in that context. Sure, Budrys wrote a story about the future of TV, but that’s an obstacle that can be easily overcome; and anyway who says a fantasy setting can’t have a bit of electricity. The machine the Martians gave Burr, which is now in Sollenar’s possession, may as well be magic. Unfortunately the only American fantasy outlet when Budrys had at that time was Fantastic, which did not pay so well.

This is not to say it’s a bad story. It reads very well, Budrys has a fluency with English that would not give the impression it’s his second language, the pacing (like I said) is fast as a whip, and there is a weird strangeness that one doesn’t normally see in SF of this vintage. Burr is not really a character so much as a ghost that haunts Sollenar, mute, silently judging, looking “like a corpse. Or worse.” Worse yet, after trying to kill Burr, Sollenar is now on the IAB’s shit list; not only might he lose his business but he might also lose his skin. Ermine plays the role of the strictly rational bystander here—so blocked off from emotion that he had all his nerve endings severed so that he literally can’t feel anything. We thus are dealing with a literal zombie and a man who, while not dead, has all the feeling of a corpse. The enjoyment in reading this story comes from watching a not very good person enter a downward spiral as a result of his actions. We’re told, even from the introductory blurb, that Sollenar is likely to meet a bad end; how he meets that end is the real question. It’s a twisty and rather morbid tale that would arguably have benefited from Budrys giving it more time in the oven.

There Be Spoilers Here

Turns out Burr really did die, but—probably because he knew Sollenar had it out for his—decided to give his competitor one last fuck-you in the form of the machine the Martians had given him. The machine, we learn much later, creates what amounts to a waking dream for the auditor, which can be used on the person with the machine or on someone else. The results of such a machine would be unspeakably disastrous, considering the user can basically induce hallucinations in other people, and I’m not sure why the Martians built such a machine in the first place, let alone are willing to sell it to humans. Burr has in fact been dead for most of the story, but he induced a continuing hallucination in Sollenar such that he torments him from beyond the grave. This indirectly leads to Sollenar’s death at the hands of Ermine, but in what I suppose is a moment of grace he uses the machine to give Ermine the illusion of his senses having returned. Sollenar knows the IAB will have him assassinated no matter what at this point, so why not give his assassin a farewell gift.

That has to count for something.

A Step Farther Out

It could be that for personal reasons I’ve been experiencing some gnarly sleep depravation (we’re talking two or three hours of sleep a day) for the past few days, but I was struggling to come up with things to say about this one. My brain was and still is a-fog. In a way this is appropriate since “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” is a surreal narrative, but unfortunately it does not lead to clear-minded literary analysis. There is, of course, the chance that there isn’t much to say about this story because there simply—well—isn’t much to say about it. This is strange, because it’s not hackwork and Budrys’s good stuff lends itself to discussion, if only to criticize it; but then Budrys’s work tends to be more lucid than this story. It could be in attempting to write a nightmare masquerading as an SF narrative, taking after Philip K. Dick whether he intentionally did so or not, Budrys wrote something that can be experienced fine but not so easily rationalized. I’ve mentioned this before, but had Weird Tales still been around in the early ’60s Budrys could’ve reworked the story into a fantasy; it would not have taken much effort and might’ve actually improved the thing.

See you next time.