Tag: gordon r. dickson

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

March 31st, 2025

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

Who Goes There?

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

Placing Coordinates

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

Enhancing Image

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

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

(Interior art by Wallace Wood.)

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

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

There Be Spoilers Here

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

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

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

A Step Farther Out

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

See you next time.
Things Beyond: March 2025

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

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

A revolution, of a sort, was happening.

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

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

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

Tag: gordon r. dickson

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

Things Beyond: March 2025