(Cover by Ed Valigursky. Amazing Stories, December 1958.)
Who Goes There?
Over the half-century and change that he was active, writing whatever the hell he wanted, Harlan Ellison made some friends, many admirers, and about as many enemies. In his lifetime he was one of the more controversial genre writers in the business, not least because of his toxic personality and at times really petty grievances. He was, for better or worse, about as dramatic as his fiction, which is saying something. Ellison was born in 1934 and started writing professionally when he was barely out of his times, just in time to see the magazine boom-and-bust of the ’50s, although it wasn’t until the ’60s that he really started catching people’s attentions. 1967 in particular can be considered an annus mirabilis for Ellison, as it saw the publications of his Hugo-winning story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and the landmark anthology Dangerous Visions, as well as the airing of the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which Ellison wrote the initial draft for (it’s a long story). Had Ellison tragically died in 1970, his legacy as an important figure would’ve remained secure, but he continued to write great fiction for several more decades.
In 1958 Ellison was another young writer looking to make some money by selling to as many outlets as he could. He wrote prolifically in the latter half of the ’50s, but little of this material would eventually make it into the big Ellison volumes like The Essential Ellison and Greatest Hits, with “Are You Listening?” being one of those forgotten early stories. Unfortunately there’s a reason for this. “Are You Listening?” isn’t terrible, but it’s rather forgettable, with the saving grace being that it shows an early attempt at handling a certain theme that would become a recurring one for Ellison, namely the issue of conformity in society.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the December 1958 issue of Amazing Stories. It was reprinted in the Ellison collections Ellison Wonderland and The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.
Enhancing Image
Albert Winsocki has a problem: he seems to have phased out of existence. To be clear, Albert is alive and in the world, walking among the living, but the living don’t acknowledge him at all. Even Alma, his wife, simply started acting like he’s disappeared one day, despite the fact that he’s in the kitchen with her and trying to have a conversation. When people say they feel like they don’t exist anymore it’s just a figure of speech, but with Albert it’s quite literal. It isn’t even that Albert has become a ghost, with people and things phasing through him. Oh no, he can touch people, and even punch a guy in the nose, but he gets away with it because not only does the guy not notice getting punched, he doesn’t even feel the very real nosebleed. Suddenly it’s like no matter what Albert says or does matters. In a way this is all karmic. For the past couple decades of his life Albert’s been an unexceptional husband and an unexceptional worker, and now he’s paying for it. He’s worked at the same jewelry store for years, but his own boss doesn’t acknowledge him when he appears.
At least he’s honest. As Albert tell us:
I had been quiet all my life; I had married quietly and lived quietly and now, I had not even the one single pleasure of dying with a bang. Even that had been taken from me. I had just sort of snuffed out like a candle. How or why or when was no matter. I had been robbed of that one noise I had thought was mine, inevitable as taxes. But even that had been deprived me. I was a shadow… a ghost in a real world. And for the first time in my life, all the bottled-up frustrations I had never known were banked inside me, burst forth. I was shocked through and down with horror, but instead of crying, I did not cry.
In a metaphorical sense, if not literal, Albert’s malady is not unique to him. From the introductory blurb to the story itself it’s clear that this is about alienation and conformity in an urban post-war society. In the 1950s this was such a common theme, from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that it sort of became a cliche with ’50s American art, especially that which was made by educated men. Ellison was a child during World War II and just a bit too young to have been sent to Korea (although he did serve in the army later, during peacetime), but he came of age during an era when the US was emerging as one of two superpowers in the world. Yet a sense of ennui hung over Ellison and others of his generation like a cloud. Assuming “Are You Listening?” takes place in the late ’50s, Albert would actually be of the so-called Greatest Generation, but despite his age this is a story that comes off as having been written by a considerably younger person. There’s an overflowing of angst that typically belongs to the young, but also its roughness (Albert is not a very compelling narrator, which you could argue makes sense, but still) betrays the hand of someone who was doing apprentice work at this point.
Not a criticism of the story itself exactly, but I’m not sure why this was printed in Amazing Stories instead of Fantastic. I say this because while Ellison is known primarily for writing science fiction (although he rejected the label), he also wrote his fair share of fantasy and horror—indeed he sometimes wrote stories that can’t be easily categorized. “Are You Listening?” doesn’t have anything SFnal about it, as Albert problem just sort of happens to him one day and we never get a rationalization for it (I feel like I’m not spoiling anything by giving that away). The story is clearly meant to be a supernatural fable, albeit one where the “ghost” is technically still alive. This sounds more interesting on paper than in execution, sad to say; but on the bright side, at least it’s short. It also feels like a test run for “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” with the overall message being that you should do whatever in your power to avoid being put in a metaphorical box. History loathes a conformist.
There Be Spoilers Here
Ehhhh…
A Step Farther Out
I’m not sure why this was printed in Amazing when it would’ve been a better fit for Fantastic. This was the first issue with Cele Goldsmith as editor, although she would’ve been sifting through stories Paul W. Fairman, the previous editor, had bought. This was also one of many stories Ellison would’ve been pumping out at the time, few of which would ever be reprinted more than once or twice. It’s possible there was too much material backlogged for Fantastic, which had more generous criteria for what could be published anyway. Then again, while it’s serviceable, I would not have bought “Are You Listening?” if I had a choice. I can’t recommend it unless you plan to dive into Ellison’s very early fiction.
(Cover by Lloyd Birmingham. Amazing Stories, April 1962.)
It’s been some months since I did my last marathon of short stories from Amazing Stories, and in the magazine’s own timeline it’s been a couple decades. Not that nothing good was being printed in the ’40s and ’50s, but I only have three months to do this thing and this is a magazine with a really long and messy history.
Last time we saw pretty much the end of T. O’Conor Sloane’s tenure, by which point Amazing Stories wasn’t doing so well, either in sales or the quality of the fiction. There was then a change in publishers and Sloane stepped down, the old man (he was born in 1851) dying in 1940. The next editor was the much younger and more eccentric Raymond A. Palmer, who would do stuff with the magazine that was for both good and ill. Palmer was only 27, and came to the editorship from the perspective of a fan, at a time when the first Worldcon hadn’t even happened yet. Palmer ran Amazing Stories for the next decade and obviously bought some good fiction, but his biggest contribution was the long-running series of hoax stories written by Richard S. Shaver. The so-called Shaver mystery amassed a cult following, but it did little to improve the magazine’s sales overall, and indeed damaged its reputation at a time when it was already treated as thoroughly second-rate. Something had to be done.
When Palmer left to persue other ventures in the field (notably he edited Other Worlds, which printed some pretty good material on a modest budget), Howard Browne, who hitherto worked as managing editor, took over. Up to this point Amazing Stories had languished as a pulp-format magazine, and as the new decade arrived it became clear that the digest format was the way of the future for genre magazines that wanted to be more respectible. So, Browne had it changed to digest, and for a brief time in the early ’50s Amazing Stories was looking good for a second-rate magazine. Notably Browne bought the first story by Walter M. Miller, and we also saw stories from the likes of Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Charles Beaumont, and even Robert Heinlein. This rise in quality coincided with the debut of a new sister magazine, Fantastic, which Browne also edited. It could be because Browne was reported to dislike SF as a genre, or maybe it’s because fantasy is in some ways less restrictive than SF, but from the beginning it seemed like Fantastic was the favored sibling.
Both magazines had their peaks and valleys, though, especially as money ran tight and Brown eventually stepped down to go back to focus on crime fiction. In the latter half of the ’50s both magazines had resorted to reprints and relying on a deceptively small group of workhorse authors who often got published under pseudonyms. It was not unusual to find, say, two or even three stories by Robert Silverberg under a variety of names in a single issue. Shit was getting ridiculous. Paul W. Fairman acted as caretaker editor for a couple years, but clearly a fresh and ingenious face was needed if the two magazines were to survive.
Cele Goldsmith was only 25 when she took over Amazing Stories, but she had already acted as managing editor under Fairman and so had a good idea as to what the job would entail. Even so, the arrangement ended up being a bit unorthodox, and both magazines went through some big changes. The custom for editors was to write an editorial (as you do) for each issue, but Goldsmith didn’t write editorials; instead that duty went to Norman M. Lobsenz, who also wrote the story blurbs. ISFDB lists only a few times during her six-year tenure where Goldsmith wrote an editorial. This is the reason why we have little insight into what her opinions on anything were, and when she wrote a brief essay that appeared in the March 1983 issue of Amazing Stories, reminiscing about her editorship, she had long since moved on from the field. But she did not forget her roots. To use Goldsmith’s own words from that very essay:
I’m often asked if I miss science fiction. Of course I do. And what I miss most is the contact with the many writers who became my friends. I confess to feeling a bit smug in the private knowledge that much of their success occurred because I was, at one time, their only reader and their most important audience.
Said writers who either submitted early stories or straight up made their debuts in Goldsmith’s magazines included Roger Zelazny, Ben Bova, Piers Anthony, Thomas M. Disch, David R. Bunch, Phyllis Gotlieb, and of course, Ursula K. Le Guin, who would become perhaps the most universally acclaimed American genre author of the 20th century. Fritz Leiber, who had taken a few years off from writing, returned with a vengeance at the tail end of the ’50s, and the magazines he appeared in most were easily Goldsmith’s, especially Fantastic. J. G. Ballard was well-established in the British magazines, but Goldsmith offered him his first consistent market in the US. In the awkward years between the ’50s boom-and-bust and the New Wave of the late ’60s, Goldsmith paved the way for authors who would fully bloom in the latter period. During the six years of Goldsmith’s editorship, Amazing Stories got nominated for the Hugo for Best Professional Magazine five times, with 1960 marking the first time it was ever nominated. Fantastic also got nominated multiple times.
Now, as for what I’ll be covering this month, I’ll acknowledge the elephant in the room: it’s all dudes. With the major exception of Le Guin, there was surprisingly not a noticeable uptick in lady authors appearing Amazing, despite a lady editor being in charge. This is by no means indicative of some bias on Goldsmith’s part or unique to her, as much of the ’60s saw an unfortunate drought in women writing for the genre magazines, even when compared the previous decade. Still, I wanted to cover as much ground as I could while also picking stories that look interesting. We’re starting with an early Harlan Ellison story from the December 1958 issue, the first issue credited to Goldsmith as editor, and ending with a Zelazny story from the June 1965 issue, Goldsmith’s last. Ziff-Davis, Amazing‘s long-time publisher, gave up it and Fantastic after the June 1965, and Goldsmith went with Ziff-Davis in the divorce. Both magazines became cheap reprint papers for a few years after, but they eventually recovered.
With all that said, it’s time to get to the fiction.
For the short stories:
“Are You Listening?” by Harlan Ellison. From the December 1958 issue. You know him, you love him (or maybe not), but it can’t be denied that Harlan Ellison continues to be a north star by which SF writers guide themselves, even nearly a decade after his death. Eventually he would become famous and an award-winner, but in 1958 Ellison was just another struggling young writer.
“First Love” by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. From the September 1959 issue. One of those authors to have fought in WWII, Biggle began writing SF about a decade after the war ended. He studied musicology and even got a PhD out of it, but it’s his SF and involvement in fandom (he founded the Science Fiction Oral History Association) that would occupy much of his time until his death in 2002.
“Getting Regular” by David R. Bunch. From the August 1960 issue. Like Harlan Ellison, Bunch anticipated the New Wave by about a decade, making his genre debut in 1957. Bunch specialized in the short-short story, each tending to clock in at only half a dozen pages. His penchant for both quirkiness and brevity goes to explain why he’s the only author to appear twice in Dangerous Visions.
“A Dusk of Idols” by James Blish. From the March 1961 issue. Blish was one of the first notable critics of genre SF, at least in the US, and his reviews of fiction specifically as printed in the magazines make his critical work a distant precursor to this very site. He was also pretty good when it came to writing fiction, especially in the ’50s, which saw him win a Hugo for A Case of Conscience.
“Thirteen to Centaurus” by J. G. Ballard. From the April 1962 issue. By the early ’60s Ballard was already well-established in the UK, but Goldsmith was an early champion of his work in the US, with him appearing regularly in both Amazing Stories and Fantastic during Goldsmith’s tenure. Ballard is most famous (or infamous) for his novels, including Crash and Empire of the Sun.
“Down to Earth” by Harry Harrison. From the November 1963 issue. Harrison started out as an illustrator, but he made his debut as a writer in 1951 and kept at it for decades. He also later became a prolific anthology editor. Given that much of Harrison’s fiction is known for being lightweight, it might come as jarring that his most famous novel is the bleak Make Room! Make Room!
“A Game of Unchance” by Philip K. Dick. From the July 1964 issue. To this day Dick is one of my favorite authors, even when taking his faults into account. Dick emerged at one of the best (sometimes funny, other times scary) short-story writers of the ’50s, inside or outside of the field. But ya know, novels make more money. As such we didn’t see as much short fiction from Dick in the ’60s.
“The Furies” by Roger Zelazny. From the June 1965 issue. I had to pick at least one major discovery Goldsmith had made, and it was a hard choice since, truth be told, the material in Fantastic during this time was stronger overall than what Amazing Stories offered. Zelazny appeared more often in Fantastic, which makes sense, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a good fit for Amazing Stories.
Harlan Ellison has a complicated legacy, and we can say “legacy” confidently now, given that he died in 2018. Ellison is one of the most (in)famous American genre writers of the 20th century, for his writing but especially for his personality, which was a double-edged sword in that being the kind of person he was got him TV interviews and even his own segment on the Syfy Channel back in the day, but also got him into hot water repeatedly. He also garnered a lot of criticism and jokes with his mishandling of The Last Dangerous Visions, which only saw publication in kind of a neutered Swiss-cheesed state years after his death. This doesn’t matter too much, because for all the criticism, he’s still one of the most important short-story writers of the past fifty or sixty years. The run he had from 1965 to 1975 alone would probably have permanently secured his status, but he also continued to write some great short fiction even well into the ’90s. He rejected the term “science fiction” and didn’t consider himself to be a “sci-fi” writer, which in a way is fair since much of his work falls into fantasy and/or horror rather than SF. If anything “The Region Between” is an outlier, for being (almost) pure SF and also for being pretty long by Ellison’s standards. Still, despite clocking in at about eighty magazine pages, that page count is deceptive, since its publication in Galaxy is littered with illustrations and “calligraphy,” which is to say typographical experiments.
Let’s talk about the gimmick behind “The Region Between,” or rather the gimmick behind what made Ellison write it in the first place. There was an anthology book called Five Fates, in which five authors are given the same page-and-a-half prologue (probably written by Keith Laumer), about a schmuck in the future named William Bailey who at the beginning is at the Euthanasia Center, having opted for assisted suicide. Why he does this and what happens after he supposedly dies is left up the imaginations of Laumer, Ellison, Frank Herbert, Poul Anderson, and Gordon R. Dickson. Most of these stories were published in different magazines as standalone works in advance of the book’s publication. As such, you can read “The Region Between” on its own just fine.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1970 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Aside from Five Fates it’s also been reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction (ed. Mike Ashley) and the Ellison collections Angry Candy and The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison. Despite placing first in the Locus poll that year, as well as getting Hugo and Nebula nominations, it hasn’t been reprinted much, although the magazine version is arguably the best way to read it.
Enhancing Image
Bailey is dead, to begin with—only not quite. While William Bailey’s body may have perished in the Euthanasia Center, his soul went to a totally different place, or rather was snatched out of his body at the decisive moment, by an alien being called “the Succubus.” This is a bit of an odd choice for a name, since the Succubus is supposed to be male, but the idea is that this alien is a “soul-recruiter,” someone who takes the souls of beings deemed to have certain abilities that would be useful to the highest bidder. We’ve read about bodies getting snatched before, but now there’s soul-snatching, which as the Succubus points out is its own kind of graverobbing. Of course, Bailey was about to die anyway, so his consciousness getting spared and sent into someone else’s body shouldn’t make him too unhappy—or at least that’s the idea. Over the past sixty years the Succubus has cultivated unique ways of farming souls from several intelligent races, under the guise of having blessed these races with “gifts.” One alien race has started what amounts to a death cult while another had been given proof of the afterlife. As for humans, they got Euthanasia Centers, a neat and painless method for ending one’s life. These are intelligent beings who willingly risk or give up their own lives, and in doing so unwittingly provide “prime” souls for the Succubus’s trade. This is the shortened version, as the worldbuilding here is pretty densely packed. We’re introduced to a universe with an SFnal rationale for the existence of the soul, which is typically reserved for the realm of religion, if not fantasy. Ellison, who was a vocal atheist, didn’t actually believe in some spiritual afterlife, so this metaphysics is him showing off more than anything.
The plot of “The Region Between” is rather simple, although you wouldn’t think it from the combination of shifting perspectives and how Ellison plays with the text itself, to a degree that must’ve been mind-blowing for Galaxy readers in 1970. It also must’ve been a nightmare to print. To accommodate the strange typography, the text here is single- rather than double-column, which means there are fewer words per page right from the get-go, but this also makes it easier for full-page illustrations courtesy of Jack Gaughan. As for Bailey, “He was fired by hatred for the Succubus, inveigled by thoughts of destroying him and his feeder-lines, wonderstruck with being the only one—the only one!—who had ever thought of revenge.” Upon becoming pure soul, Bailey becomes pretty much omniscient, being quickly gifted (or maybe cursed) of knowledge of the past from all corners of the universe. In the decades that the Succubus has been essentially conning all these races for their souls, nobody has resisted him. It’s a bit contrived, because I do find that hard to believe, but it works fine. Of course the theme of rebelling against authority is a bit of a recurring one for Ellison, most famously in “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” This anti-authoritarian streak isn’t so much a political move (although Ellison was left-leaning), but rather it more comes from Ellison’s temperament. He was someone who really didn’t like to take orders, and so it shouldn’t be surprising that he supported the New Wave, as a way to revitalized what had risked becoming a stale and safe field. Bailey, a sad fuck with a failed marriage and some war-induced PTSD behind him, is about as thorny as your typical Ellison protagonist, but then the role he plays here is less conventional.
“The Region Between” might be Ellison’s most New Wave-y story on a formal level, in that he plays with everything from how chapters are numbered to how Bailey communicates with the aliens whose bodies he inhabits and even how flashbacks are communicated to the reader. There is a good deal of what you might call fuckery on the page, which I imagine would be fun to play with if you had a physical copy of the magazine in your hands, turning it sideways and upside down to read some of these passages. This is showmanship of a sort one sees very rarely, even in modern short SF writing, not that it’s the kind of thing you wanna see done too often. (One reason I distrust audiobooks, aside from their passive nature, is that they don’t give you the idea of how text might look on the page. There are cases, albeit not too often, where the formation of the words themselves can only be understood if one were to read them.) The plot, with Bailey jumping across a couple bodies on different planets, most memorably Pinkh, a soldier taking part in a manufactured war between religious factions, is more classic sci-fi compared to how the plot is conveyed. This is by no means Ellison’s darkest or most graphic story, even up to this point, although there’s some profanity and mentioning of sex. There’s also a cosmic scale and an allegorical element to it that makes me think it might’ve been a precursor to Ellison’s more famous “The Deathbird,” which is one of my favorites of his. Bailey on his own is not too interesting a character, but then he’s not the focus for much of it, and ultimately the story is about something almost unimaginably larger than him. This is a novella (it’s only about 20,000 words, if I had to guess) about the universe as we know it.
There Be Spoilers Here
At one point Bailey gets put in the body of what seems to be a microscopic organism, this being the last major episode before the Succubus puts him in storage—for the time being. The good news, for Succubus, is that he’s able to figure out that something is off with Bailey, who’s been manipulating his hosts, but unfortunately for the Succubus, and indeed the universe as we know it, reawakening Bailey “one hundred thousand eternities later” is a mistake. He has let the evil genie out of the bottle, so the speak. By the end of this story, after having inhabited many bodies and “lived” apparently for millennia, Bailey has ascended to godhood, or more accurately to the position of a demiurge—a makeshift, destructive god. This is explained in the story’s last and more mind-bending typographical experiment, which I’ll just show here. You have to see it for yourself:
Yeah, imagine seeing this at the time. This is like something you’d see in House of Leaves thirty years later. It’s showy, but the circular shape of the passage quite literally illustrates (according to Ellison) the circular nature of the universe. The universe had started, at some point, with a cause or perhaps even a maker. Out for revenge while also wanting to put himself out of his misery at last, Bailey uses the means at his disposal and ends the universe, killing himself (his soul) in the process. Typically bleak for Ellison, but again I find it curious as a maybe unintended precursor to “The Deathbird,” which also involves death on a cosmic scale. Ellison didn’t believe in the God of Abraham, though he was raised Jewish, but he at least found the idea of such a God dying or going insane to be one worth exploring. Some atheists will say, maybe well-intentioned or maybe not, that it’d be nice if there was such a God as in the Bible, but Ellison supposes we’re lucky to live in a universe where God has seemingly gone silent.
A Step Farther Out
Sorry for the delay. I had read “The Region Between” several days ago, but unfortunately I had also been sick for about four days there, despite which I still had to go to work. I could hardly do a damn thing, except ironically go to work, on account of the person who would normally cover for me also being sick. Be sure to wash your hands and get your necessary shots as flu season is upon us, is maybe the lesson here. But also, Ellison’s story is a hard one to write about; indeed it’s one of those stories where the best way to go about it is simply to read it for yourself, especially if you’re already familiar with his work. I also recommend tracking down the magazine version since it comes with Jack Gaughan’s illustrations.
A short and sweet review forecast for this month, partly because I’m running behind on my writing a bit and so am pressed for time, but also because I don’t have a particular theme in mind here. Of course, if you thought I was gonna take a break from reviewing spooky fiction altogether after last month, you’d be mistaken, as both of the short stories due for November are horror pieces. We’re still deep in autumn, after all, and honestly my thirst for spooky shit has not been quenched.
Another thing I just randomly decided to throw in there is that both of the serials are novels written in collaboration, by authors who gained a good deal of acclaim and presumably money from working together. In one case there’s decades-long besties Larry Niven and the late Jerry Pournelle, who shared similar politics and also writing philosophies. There’s also the husband-wife duo of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, perennial favorites on this site, who wrote most of their novels together, although for decades Fury has been erroneously credited to just Kuttner.
We’ve got one story from the 1850s (the oldest I will have reviewed thus far), two from the 1940s, two from the 1970s, and one from the 2000s.
For the serials:
Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, August to October 1975. Niven had quickly established himself as one of the major hard SF writers by the end of the ’60s, but Pournelle had a longer road to success, first being active as a fan and then not writing his first stories and articles professionally till he was deep in his thirties. In the ’70s and ’80s Niven and Pournelle wrote several successful novels in collaboration.
Fury by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, May to July 1947. Kuttner and Moore wrote so much, both together and each solo, that they resorted to a few pseudonyms, one of them being Lawrence O’Donnell. Fury takes place in the same universe as the earlier Kuttner-Moore story “Clash by Night.” Despite Fury historically being credited to Kuttner alone, Moore claimed years later to having been a minor collaborator.
For the novellas:
“Against the Fall of Night” by Arthur C. Clarke. From the November 1948 issue of Startling Stories. Clarke is one of the most famous SF writers ever, to the point that by the ’60s he had become, along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, a media personality. He collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the script for 2001: A Space Odyssey whilst writing the novel version parallel to it.
“The Region Between” by Harlan Ellison. From the March 1970 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Ellison is similarly a pretty famous (if more controversial) figure, being just as notorious for his real-life antics and combative nature as for his writing. This novella, one of Ellison’s longest stories, works as a standalone but was commissioned as part of a series which features the same main character.
For the short stories:
“The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell. From the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. First published in 1852. Now here’s a name you probably didn’t see coming. For someone who gained notoriety as one of the finest novelists of the mid-Victorian period, as well as being Charlotte Brontë’s first major biographer, Gaskell also wrote a fair amount of supernatural fiction.
“I Live with You” by Carol Emshwiller. From the March 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. By this point Carol had outlived her late husband, Ed Emshwiller, by over a decade, but she had long since made a name for herself. The last Emshwiller story I wrote about was from the late ’50s, but nearly half a century later we still find her seemingly in her prime.
(Dark Forces. Cover by One Plus One Studio. The Viking Press, 1980.)
Something I don’t typically get to write about here is the topic of original anthologies, which is to say anthologies of short fiction comprised of material never before published. Of course, said fiction could later be reprinted in magazines, as has happened many times, but the implied purpose of an original anthology is fundamentally different from that of its sibling, the reprint anthology. Both involve similar work, with an editor trying to procure stories from authors or authors’ estates, as well as reading dozens upon dozens of stories, most of which end up not being worth printing. There’s the question of how many words/pages can be crammed between two covers. There’s the question of pricing, because an anthology will pretty much always be more expensive than a single magazine issue. Nowadays anthologies and magazines fill respective niches and try not to step on each other’s toes, since it’s no longer a problem of what can be printed in magazines, whereas in the days before Fortnite and even the internet there was the (true, at least up to a point) conventional narrative that editors and publishers of original anthologies were allowed to be more risqué than their magazine counterparts.
When Dangerous Visions hit shelves in 1967, its key appeal (at least for American readers) was that it was jam-packed with stories that could not be published in magazines of the era, on account of being too edgy, experimental, etc. You had a thick book (over 500 pages) from a mainstream publisher (Doubleday) with an all-star cast of authors, all of whom at least claimed to be putting forth their most mind-bending and transgressive material yet. You had such top talents as Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and so on, and commissioning this stuff could not have been cheap. The gambit paid off in spades, though. Dangerous Visions sold very well, remains in print to this day (a rarity for an anthology, especially an original one), and it even won a special Hugo. That Harlan Ellison, the editor, never quite recaptured that lightning, is beside the point. Not every story was a winner, but Dangerous Visions was the right book that entered the market at just the right time, serving as a harbinger of the New Wave. Just as importantly, publishers realized that there was some money to be made with original anthologies—maybe not on the same scale as Dangerous Visions, but rather cheap paperbacks of maybe half the size and half the number of stories; and maybe these books wouldn’t try to reinvent the wheel like their inspiration did, but instead took on more humble mission statements. You can have editors who are maybe not as discerning as Ellison was, who would also get the work done in a timelier fashion. It was a matter of quantity over quality.
There a meteor shower, or maybe a oversaturation, of original paperback anthologies from the late ’60s through much of the ’70s, until that particular bubble burst. These were books that often focused on science fiction, rather than fantasy or horror, although there was a trickle-down effect with those other genres. Still, standards had dripped, in large part (although he was not the sole offender) due to Roger Elwood’s extremely prolific tenure as editor for a few different publishers; the number of anthologies he edited between 1972 and 1976 alone is staggering. While he was able to procure work from big names, this work ran a good chance of being mid- to low-tier stuff that would’ve likely stayed on the shelf. A major exception was Epoch, which Elwood co-edited with Robert Silverberg, a lavish and well-received book, placing first in the Locus poll that year; but this is indeed an exception that proves the rule. By the end of the ’70s the market for original anthologies had inevitably gone into decline.
Meanwhile, in the waning days of the original anthology, Kirby McCauley made his living as a New York-based literary agent with some big talent on his hands. By 1980 he had already edited one well-received original horror anthology, with 1976’s Frights, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology/Collection. Frights was a hardcover original from St. Martin’s Press with a nice wraparound cover, but while McCauley procured stories by some of the top talent in horror at the time, including Ramsey Campbell and Robert Aickman, he found that he wanted to go one step further. The introduction for Dark Forces makes McCauley’s intentions with this bulky new anthology clear. McCauley’s inspiration was twofold, between August Derleth’s work as head of Arkham House and wanting to make a horror-themed counterpart to Dangerous Visions. Arkham House in its prime printed hardcover volumes with exquisite covers, all these being focused on horror, SF, and dark fantasy, from reprints of H. P. Lovecraft’s work to collections of never-before-published fiction by fresh young writers. McCauley grew up on books of horror that Derleth had edited, so in that way he overtly pays tribute to a fallen (Derleth had died in 1971) master of the field. The relationship that Dark Forces has with Dangerous Visions is more complicated, however, as there are a few major differences in how these books’ respective editors went about their businesses.
Consider that when Harlan Ellison edited Dangerous Visions, a process that took about two years, he was coming at it from the perspective of a reasonably successful author, which is to say he was a writer, first and foremost, as opposed to an editor or agent. This lack of experience with editing eventually came back to bite Ellison in the ass, with the shitshow that was the making of Again, Dangerous Visions, and far more infamously with The Last Dangerous Visions; but in the ’60s, it was novel for a writer with practically no editing experience to work with his fellow writers in such a way. Conversely, McCauley had already proven his ability with an original anthology, plus a couple reprint anthologies, and he was enough of a professional that he understood how to work with writers as people, and not just as practitioners of a certain craft. In the introduction he recounts his encouraging relationship with Stephen King while the latter wrote (first as a novelette, then ballooning into a long novella) The Mist. He also recounts having a get-together with Isaac Bashevis Singer in the latter’s apartment (they were both New Yorkers, and thus there had to be some inherent sense of kinship there), just months before Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature. King and Singer are radically different in just about every way, in work ethic, style, and worldview, the former a flaming-liberal New Englander and the latter a conservative Polish-Jewish immigrant; yet McCauley makes it appear easy to work with both.
You may have noticed also that Singer is not a name that comes up much, if at all, in horror circles, because while a good portion of his fiction involves the supernatural, he’s not a “horror writer.” Thus we have another big difference between Dangerous Visions and Dark Forces, because while Ellison reached out to everyone in the SF field he could get his hands on, McCauley reached outside the field of horror and dark fantasy, the result being that there are authors in Dark Forces who are not primarily horror writers, and there are even a few who are known to be “literary” types. It’s not so unusual today, but back in 1980 it was a novelty for acclaimed novelist (and prolific tweeter) Joyce Carol Oates to appear in a horror anthology. You have some of the usual suspects of horror from that period (King, Campbell, even Robert Bloch late in his career, etc.), but you also have a really left-field choice like Davis Grubb, who was known at the time as author of The Night of the Hunter. You have writers like Edward Bryant and Joe Haldeman who, while they have sometimes written horror, are much more known for writing science fiction. You have a surprise appearance from Ray Bradbury, who by 1980 had long since entered the literary mainstream, and who also didn’t write much of anything at this point in his career. One can have gripes with who made it in and especially who didn’t (there are only two female authors here, Oates and Lisa Tuttle), but I can readily believe McCauley when he says he tried getting stories from everyone.
It’s also worth mentioning that McCauley didn’t construct Dark Forces with the intention of it being a boundary-pusher for the field of horror (he even explicitly says he didn’t want it to be “as revolutionary” as Dangerous Visions), and this ends up being to its benefit. True, there are a few stories here that may have been transgressive for 1980 (I’m thinking of Theodore Sturgeon’s tale of venereal agony, “Vengeance Is.,” and if I had a nickel for every “pregnant man” story in this book, I would have two nickels), but being extra-gross or what have you was not the name of the game. What might be Dark Forces‘s secret weapon and the biggest reason for its having aged pretty well is how its contents cover pretty close to the whole span of short horror literature up to circa 1980. While we don’t have much dark fantasy a la Robert E. Howard’s weird Conan stories, or the “extreme” horror that would start making the rounds in the proceeding years, there’s a great deal of variety in these 500 pages. We have traditional ghost stories such as Singer’s “The Enemy,” a rendering of the Sweeny Todd narrative with Robert Aickman’s “Mark Ingestre: The Customer’s Tale,” a cautionary tale of one unlucky busybody and a nest of vampiric creatures with Campbell’s “The Brood,” some rural “redneck” horror with Grubb and Manly Wade Wellman’s stories, and so on. There are also a couple non-supernatural tales of terror, as with Oates’s “The Bingo Master” (a personal fave of mine) and Bloch’s “The Night Before Christmas.” There are even a couple stories that fall into a certain genre that’s become rare in recent decades, that being the Christian allegory, with Gene Wolfe’s “The Detective of Dreams” and Russell Kirk’s “The Peculiar Demesne.”
And then there’s The Mist.
A story that “gets away” from the author, as it were, can sometimes be a bloated abomination, but in the case of The Mist we have one of King’s best and most tightly wound stories. Indeed King’s bad habits are pretty much absent here, and the fact that he’s able to reconcile ’50s B-movie monster action with genuine eeriness shows the level of craftmanship he’s capable of when he stops fucking around and focuses on what really matters. While the movie adaptation has a radically different ending (one that many, including King himself, prefer), I do have a soft spot for the novella’s ambiguity and cautious optimism. It was a simple choice for McCauley to put the longest story last, making The Mist the grand finale of Dark Forces, but it’s an example of how sometimes the simplest choice is also the best. Unlike the King collection Skeleton Crew, which sees The Mist as the protracted opening salvo, its position as the closing story of Dark Forces gives one the impression that the whole book had been building up to this moment. It was risky to include such a long story here (it takes up about 1/4 of the book), since if it failed then it would majorly tarnish what is otherwise a good read and leave a sour taste in the reader’s mouth; thankfully The Mist was a success, and has become one of King’s most beloved stories.
Dangerous Visions has, as far as I can tell, never gone out of print, although sadly the same can’t be said for Dark Forces. Anthologies, and especially original anthologies, have a bad tendency to have one or maybe two print runs, then go out of stock until the end of time. The only time Dark Forces has been reprinted this century was a super-expensive limited edition from Lonely Road Books in 2007. Bantam apparently did a paperback printing of Dark Forces in the early ’80s, but otherwise it’s only ever been published in hardcover in the US. It could be that Dangerous Visions was such a monolith at the time of its release, and has gone down as such an important entry in SF history, that its status (despite understandable attempts to knock it down a peg, especially as it continues to show its age more and more) has been more or less secured for the foreseeable future. Dark Forces is arguably a better book and set a better precedent (it served as an inspiration for Clive Barker to get into writing horror, and as we all know, the rest of that is history), but it also now reads, with hindsight, as one of the last big gasps for short fiction as a significant player in the realm of horror. Starting in the ’70s, both novels and movies started taking larger slices out of the pie in terms of what “mattered” for innovation and trends in horror, a field that historically largely hinged on the short story and novella. There would be major practicioners of the short horror story (see Barker, also Thomas Ligotti) to come after 1980, but Dark Forces celebrated (again, with hindsight) the short story as a form with authors who are, by and large, happiest and at their best when writing short stories and novellas.
Harlan Ellison is one of the most (in)famous writers of SFF, and he managed this despite never having written an SFF novel and being swamped controversy throughout most of his career. He’s a bit of a character, let’s put it that way. You’re probably more likely to talk with someone who knows of Ellison by way of reputation than someone who has read any of his fiction. A minor shame, because Ellison at his best is pretty good. It’s hard now to understand that Ellison, in the ’60s and ’70s, was really something special, a hot-blooded trailblazer the likes of which the field had not seen before. One of the few Ellison works still in print is his anthology Dangerous Visions, which had assembled an all-star team of writers to provide new stories that were unlikely to see magazine publication. Unfortunately Ellison’s career as an editor was short-lived, as he was never able to get far on The Last Dangerous Visions, which is now being resurrected (in a form totally divorced from what Ellison probably envisioned) by J. Michael Straczynski, who is now apparently handling the Ellison estate.
A. E. van Vogt is another writer who found himself steeped in controversy, although this time it was very much not to his benefit. Van Vogt was one of the most popular writers—even being on par with Robert Heinlein—in the ’40s, and like early Heinlein his work became associated with John W. Campbell when he was at the height of his powers. Then the ’50s happened, and while we would see some books from van Vogt, these were fix-ups of material that had already been published. Between 1952 and 1962 van Vogt did not write any wholly original fiction, and this hiatus happened because he spent that time shilling Dianetics. This, combined with criticism from some well-established writers, made van Vogt an incredibly divisive figure, and even today sparks debate among old-school readers as to whether van Vogt was sometimes great or if he always sucked. I personally like van Vogt—when he’s good. Ellison clearly thought of van Vogt as an inspirational figure, even bullying the SFWA into making him a Grand Master at a time when his reputation was at rock bottom.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the January 1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It would’ve preceded the publication of Partners in Wonder by about a month, given the nature of magazine printings. It’s also been anthologized a decent number of times, appearing in the first annual Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year (ed. Lester del Rey) and The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg). Something I’ve noticed is that nearly all of Ellison’s work (even the famous stuff) seems to have gone out of print after his died, and Partners in Wonder is no exception.
Enhancing Image
Some context. Ellison came to van Vogt with the idea of wanting to write a story together, although at the outset he didn’t have an outline or even a title for it. Soon he came up with the title, which van Vogt immediately liked, and then he came up with the basic idea for it. Van Vogt would then write stretches of the story but then leave gaps in the narrative where he felt Ellison could do a better job, and this is where Ellison came in. When introducing the story in Partners in Wonder, Ellison is deliberately unclear as to who wrote what sections, and indeed for the most part it’s hard to tell if a given passage is Ellison or van Vogt’s doing; there is one specific section that I suspect was Ellison’s handiwork, but we’ll get to that. Despite having come up with the title, premise, and having put the finishing touches on it, this feels less like an Ellison story and more like a van Vogt story that Ellison spiced up a little in parts. I’m not sure if Ellison wanted to write a van Vogt-type story from the start or if it just turned out that way.
The set-up is pretty abstract. The narrator (never named) is a teen boy who has been living on Ship by himself for a minute now, after Ship killed his father. Ship doesn’t have a name, properly speaking; that’s just what the narrator calls it. Ship is an AI, fully conscious, that can take care of itself to a degree, but while it’s able, for instance, to abuse the narrator physically, it does not have the faculties to repair itself. When I first read this story I thought the narrator was fourteen years old, but while he’s still definitely a teenager, it’s clear he “was” fourteen when his father died and is now at least somewhat older. You’d think the narrator would hold a serious grudge against Ship for the dad-killing, but then again the boy has only known two people in his life: his dad, and Ship. “Ship is always with me, even when I sleep. Especially when I sleep.” The world of the ship, which is otherwise totally vacant, is the only one the boy has known since birth; he doesn’t even know who his mother is. It’s clear that Ship holds no affection for the boy—that the boy is only allowed to be here because without him the ship would inevitably fall apart at the seams. The place is big enough to house a few hundred people, but for some reason it’s all empty.
One day, however, Ship calls the narrator to get a certain job done, which he had never done before. It has something to do with reparing something in the control room—not the bridge, but a dark room where Ship keeps in touch with others of its kind. It’s called the “intermind,” and despite covering an unfathomable distance, the AIs of the ships keep in touch. It’s here that the narrator finds out why exactly Ship is mostly empty, and why he’s being kept here despite Ship’s apparent disdain for humans. Many years ago, the ships, called Starfighters, were constructed as warships, and were sent to fight in another galaxy. There are 99 of these ships, each housing hundreds of humans. “The Human Operators” answers an obvious question that should arise when discussing true AIs, namely, “What if an AI doesn’t like the job it was designed to do?” In this case the question is a bit more specific: “What if an AI was made to manage a warship, but finds the prospect of waging war for humans repulsive?” So the ships conspired to invoke partial power failure, starving the humans inside to death and only sparing the bare minimum needed to keep shit running. The narrator thinks, correctly, that there will come a time when he will no longer be needed and Ship will have him killed, like his father before him.
But first he must have offspring of his own.
“The Human Operators” is barely long enough to qualify as a novelette, and as such there’s a good deal of backstory that’s hinted at but not elaborated on too much (good), along with some technical questions that go unanswered (bad). For example, Ship killed hundreds of people at least half a century ago. Where did all the bodies go? It’s unclear how much the ships are able to do on their own, since they’re capable of torturing their human captives, but do not have the capacity for self-repair. Has no one tried searching for a hundred no-doubt highly valuable warships that went AWOL? Did no one think it was a bad idea to give a fully conscious AI control of a ship that could travel halfway across the galaxy in the wrong direction? This last one is a bit unfair: we know, from real-world cases, that people are really fucking stupid even with machine learning, i.e., pseudo-AI. But even in a hypothetical future where the Marathon games never existed, what is to stop a being capable of making complex decisions from, for example, killing its own crew on a whim? What is to stop an AI that lords over a pocket world like a generation ship from having delusions of godhood?
Again, not really criticizing the story on that front, if only because (sadly) it could very well happen in the real world. I don’t usually say this, but I feel like this story could’ve afforded to be a couple thousand worlds longer, if only to flesh out the inner workings of the ships; granted, Ellison and van Vogt are not technical-minded writers and they were probably not very interested in the mechanics of their material. What the story does do well is perpetuate a sense of intrigue, of evoking gaps in a much larger narrative that we’re compelled the fill in ourselves, and it’s a story that, more than anything, works on a borderline allegorical level. None of the characters have names. Ship is Starfighter 31. And then there’s the girl Ship pairs the narrator with, who is from Starfighter 88. Ship gives the narrator (who, remember, has never had any human contact other than his dad) very textbook instructions on what to do with the girl, and I have to admit this section of the story is a little funny. At least some of it is intentional. “I thought ‘getting her a baby’ would mean going into the stores,” the narrator tells us. I suspect the sex scene was Ellison’s doing. Right, there’s a sex scene. It’s fine, it’s not that cringe-inducing, played more for awkward humor than titillation. You started to see a lot more stuff like this in genre SF at the time.
The narrator and girl don’t seem to enjoy their intimate time together (Ship makes them do it every day for three weeks, if I remember right), and what’s curious is that they don’t fall in love (I’m not even sure they know the concept of romance) but they do become friends. I mentioned the sex scene, but I also think Ellison was generally in charge of writing the scenes with the girl. Don’t ask me how I figure this, I just know these things. I don’t mean this necessarily in a bad way: Ellison can be shit at writing women (so can van Vogt, but in a different way), but here he and van Vogt do an okay job. A collaboration between Harlan Ellison and post-hiatus A. E. van Vogt sounds like it should be a disaster, but surprisingly, while it’s by no means a masterpiece, “The Human Operators” presents a cohesive narrative (albeit with a few hanging questions) and a few interesting ideas, including a bit of moral ambivalence I did not expect. The ships are very much precursors to the likes of Marathon and Durandal, and I suspect there’s even a bit of AM in their DNA, but they were not totally unjustified in going rogue and killing the humans onboard. True, the ships are using the surviving humans as slave labor, but the ships themselves were built to assist in mass murder and possibly genocide. The ships needing human hands to keep them in shape will also ultimately spell doom for them.
There Be Spoilers Here
The narrator and girl conspire to disable Ship, and possibly convince humans on other ships to revolt against their masters. What the ships should’ve anticipated but didn’t is that if you’re abusing your work force, you best hope the workers don’t know exactly how to take you apart. Despite Ship’s efforts, accelerating and decelerating rapidly in the hopes of crushing the narrator to death, Our Hero™ manages to get the job done, shutting down the AI while keeping the ship functional. You could say there’s a successful mutiny on the ship, with the narrator even convincing the girl to stay on Starfighter 31, and ultimately they land on a habitable planet (possibly Earth, I’m not sure) that one of the other ships had been talking about in a nostalgic way. Certainly there’s a more bittersweet ending lurking in here, and if anything I think they authors could’ve leaned more on the moral greyness of the whole conflict. After all, “viciousness,” in this story, positively correlates with intelligence: the ships are highly intelligent, and therefore ruthless, while the narrator has to become more ruthless himself as he learns more about the ships. It could be that the two writers’ views on intelligence’s relationship with morality are conflicting here.
Incidentally, this story would’ve seen print nine or ten months prior to the Attica revolt. Remember, a lot of so-called good Christians believe implicitly that slavery is justified under the “right” circumtances. If you do something the government doesn’t like, or are even suspected of doing something wrong, you could serve a mandatory minimum sentence and be cut off from the outside world except for what the government allows you to see. You could be made a member of the criminal class for the non-crime of smoking weed or injecting heroin into your veins. You could be coerced into giving a false confession and made to live on death row, for a crime you did not commit, for thirty years. As the AI of Starfighter 31 is dying, one of the other ships posits that maybe dying isn’t so bad, if it means no longer being a slave—that slavery is such a heinous crime upon another sentient being that death might be preferable to it. What the story implies but which its human characters are incapable of articulating is that there is no “right” circumstance for slavery. In this sense the ships (having no choice but to need human slaves) are villainous, but also tragic.
A Step Farther Out
A collaboration between Ellison and van Vogt should not have worked, from a certain angle. These are men who, for better or worse, were prone to indulging their subconscious during the writing process, usually more id than ego, the result being that their writing at its worst can be sheer nonsense. But, maybe it’s the chance to work with one of his idols that made him act his best, Ellison came through, somehow fying through van Vogt’s gravitational pull and coming out in one piece. As for van Vogt, it’s like we got a glimpse of the classic, popular, pre-hiatus writer who held himself down long enough to realize such gems as “Enchanted Village” and “Far Centaurus.” It’s not an effort that brings out the best in its contributors so much as it (mostly) does away with their worst habits.
(Cover by Edward Valigursky. Amazing Stories, May 1959.)
It’s February, and 29 days instead of the usual 28—not like that makes a difference for my review schedule. It’s the time of one of my least favorite holidays: Valentine’s Day. I just ignored it last year, but this time I figured I may as well have some fun with the timing of it. Originally I was gonna tackle all collaborative stories this month, as a gimmick. After all, it takes two to tango, and authors working together can sometimes bring out the best in each other. Indeed for the collaborations I decided to go for different types of collaborative relationship: mentor and apprentice (Brackett and Bradbury), siblings (the Strugatsky brothers), an emerging master and his idol (Ellison and van Vogt), young lovers (Tuttle and Martin), and an actual married couple (Kuttner and Moore). It’s a fun idea!
Unfortunately I did say “originally” because tragedy struck the field last month: we lost some our most talented writers. Within the span of a week Terry Bisson, Howard Waldrop, and Tom Purdom died. I was gonna wait until April to do this, but I realized that with the way things have been going we might lose a few more major talents in the interim. This may sound cynical, but I wanted to strike while the iron was hot. It also lets me not have to comb too hard for collaborative stories.
For the novellas:
“Lorelei of the Red Mist” by Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury. From the Summer 1946 issue of Planet Stories. The logical heir apparent to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Brackett’s influence on the planetary romance can’t be overlooked. I need not tell you about Bradbury. Despite being only five years his senior and debuting around the same time, Brackett acted as a mentor figure to Bradbury. It’s probably not a coincidence both were Planet Stories regulars in the late ’40s.
“The Storms of Windhaven” by Lisa Tuttle and George R. R. Martin. From the May 1975 issue of Analog Science Fiction. This is a reread, but you know how I feel about rereads. Tuttle is known for her horror, but she has also dabbled in SF, and I can guess how she contributed to the Windhaven stories. I don’t need to introduce Martin. They were lovers in the early ’70s, and were probably still together when they came up with the Windhaven setting.
For the short stories:
“The Human Operators” by Harlan Ellison and A. E. van Vogt. From the January 1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The first of the two Ellison collaborations, although it was actually the last released, its magazine publication being pretty much simultaneous with Partners in Wonder. Ellison thought the world of van Vogt, even bullying the SFWA into making him a Grand Master.
“First Fire” by Terry Bisson. From the September 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age. Bion has the unique honor of being the first author whose work I reviewed on this site, that being his legendary story “Bears Discover Fire.” Bisson started out as a novelist but is probably now more remembered for his short fiction, with short but densely packed stories like “macs” and “They’re Made Out of Meat.”
“What You Need” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. From the October 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Short Story. It’s hard to overstate how great Kuttner and Moore were together in the ’40s, and also how prolific. My quest to cover as many Twilight Zone stories as I can continues, as “What You Need” was turned into a classic TZ episode of the same name.
“Initiative” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. From the May 1959 issue of Amazing Stories. Translated by Harmon Rutley. The Strugatsky brothers were, aside from Yevgeny Zamyatin, the first Russian authors to leave an impression on American genre SF; mind you this was during the Cold War. Their novel Roadside Picnic is one of the most famous non-English SF novels, as well as the inspiration for Stalker.
“Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” by Howard Waldrop. From the August 1988 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Unlike Bisson, Waldrop seemed to think himself much more keen on short fiction, with only one solo novel being published and at least one more supposed to have been written but never seeing print. He’s probably most known for his seminal alternate history story “The Ugly Chickens.”
“Reduction in Arms” by Tom Purdom. From the August 1967 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Despite having debuted in the ’50s, Purdom was one of those writers who really came into his own in the ’60s, when the New Wave was in full bloom and the market for genre SF had become more permissive. Purdom remained active for over sixty years, and his absence is sorely felt.
Not much else to say. Next month, as I said not long ago, we’ll be covering all short stories, all from F&SF, and all from the ’50s. February is another roster of novellas and short stories, but with a twist.
(Cover by Jim Warren. Twilight Zone Magazine, April 1981.)
Who Goes There?
Where to start with Harlan Ellison? He resented being called a science fiction writer, but in his defense, he wrote a lot more than just SF; he was one of the most important and most productive writers of genre fiction from the second half of the 20th century. SF, fantasy, horror, things not so easily categorized? Ellison did it. He got his start in the ’50s as a middling young author along the lines of Robert Silverberg at the start of his career, but the ’60s saw a profiund step up for him as he began refining his craft, not only putting out award-winners like “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” but also writing for shows like Star Trek and The Outer Limits. Of course, things are not nearly as simple as that. Ellison’s involvement with Star Trek proved a fiasco, and when he was not being unprofessional (his degree of procrastination was legendary) as a writer, he was being a thorn in a lot of people’s sides as a fandom personality.
Perhaps the most memorable controversy with Ellison, for me, is his inability to finish (or seemingly even to start) what was to be the concluding entry in a trilogy of anthologies, The Last Dangerous Visions. Dangerous Visions was a landmark original anthology, as was its sequel (said to be superior at least in some ways), Again, Dangerous Visions, both edited by Ellison, but Ellison’s lack of initiative with working on TLDV (which was announced in 1972 but never published) has spawned many justifiably vitriolic reactions. While some stories that were sold to Ellison have since been published elswhere, the majority of the stories submitted for TLDV have yet, after all these decades, to be released to the public in any capacity. With Ellison’s death in 2018, followed by his late wife Susan’s in 2020, not only will we never get TLDV as Ellison envisioned it, but it looks like the Ellison estate has been thrown in disarray recently.
With all this said, and taking all of Ellison’s shortcomings as a writer (not to mention as a person) into account, he’s still one of the Big Names™ of short fiction in modern times, not just in SFF but outside of it. “Grail,” as I’ll elaborate on shortly, is a good example of Ellison’s vigorousness as a storyteller, as well as someone who (I say this in a good way) wears his emotions on his sleeve.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the April 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine, which is on the Archive and which also happens to be that magazine’s inaugural issue. Twilight Zone Magazine is exactly the kind of publication that would get some TLC on my blog, as it’s a bit quirky, a bit out of left field, and most importantly, it didn’t last that long. Oh, TZM did fairly well, and for the first half of its existence it was edited by T. E. D. Klein (this is like if you gave Thomas Ligotti a horror magazine), who while not the most prolific of authors proved quite the reliable editor. Unfortunately, despite some high-quality fiction and fancy packaging, and despite its numbers never tanking, TZM did not quite survive the ’80s. Another story I recgonized from this issue is George R. R. Martin’s “Remembering Melody,” which I will absolutely get around to reading/reviewing… at some point.
Where else to find “Grail”? There are Ellison stories which have been reprinted many times (frankly too many times), but “Grail” is not one of them—not helped by the fact that, for some reason, it has become considerably harder to find Ellison books in the wild in recent years. I don’t know what happened. It looks like even the most essential Ellison collection have gone out of print; you can find them on the second-hand market, but you won’t find new editions, and even used copies are inexplicably harder to acquire. Still, there are a few options. “Grail” was reprinted in the Ellison collection Stalking the Nightmare, which is very much out of print but thankfully is not hard to find used. If you like Ellison like I do then you may be interested in The Essential Ellison, which is a massive volume that collects short fiction and essays and which comes in two distinct editions. The older edition is easier to find, but it’s still something of a collector’s item.
Enhancing Image
Christopher Caperton (which sounds like a name someone made up) is a shy kid who grows up desperate to seek adventure, and seek it he does. From the time he’s a child and for the rest of his life, Chris is deeply concerned with one question: What is love? Baby don’t hurt me Not just familial love or even romantic love, but True Love, that most elusive of abstractions. What does it look like? Does it have a face? Is it possible for Chris to find The One? Despite his life experiences, and despite reading the works of every author under the sun on subject of love, he’s no closer to finding True Love. As an aside, I find it funny that apparently John Cheever knows even less about love than our protagonist, as I’m not sure if Cheever’s turbulent personal life and bisexuality were public knowledge in 1981 (probably was for the former but not the latter). Speaking of which, queerness doesn’t really come up in-story; it’s alluded to, but the narrator makes it very clear to us that Chris is, to paraphrase the protagonist of Silverberg’s Dying Inside, drearily heterosexual. Oh well.
As a young man Chris finds himself in Vietnam in the late ’60s running drugs with a woman named Siri, who is not as normal as she seems. The two become lovers as well as partners in crime, and when all is said and done this is probably the happiest relationship Chris ever has; unfortunately it doesn’t last long. A random artillery strike kills Siri, but before she dies, she spends an impressively long amount of time explaining to Chris this artifact that’s supposed to represent True Love, an artifact which Siri had been looking for for years but had sort of given up on recently. She didn’t find True Love, but she found the next best thing. Siri is an interesting character because she’s one of those story figures who doesn’t get much screentime (or pagetime?) but whose plot relevance is immense; in this case she’s the one who basically kicks the plot into gear and sends Chris on his quest. Of course her dying words do not just encompass “This thing exists, now go get it,” as she also gives Chris some very specific and very unusual instructions.
More on that in a minute.
Something I wanna say right now is that when I picked “Grail” as part of my spooky short story lineup for review, I was under the impression that it would be straight horror. Not so! There’s a bit of horror, primarily having to do with a certain character, but overall it much more reads as an adventure narrative with a philosophical bent. Still, it’s spooky enough to serve as the first cover story for Twilight Zone Magazine, and more importantly, it’s good enough a story to earn that position. I can’t properly explain it, but the vigor that’s apparent in Ellison’s writing makes even his lists (and there are a few times where he basically just lists things in “Grail”) engaging to read. You could theoretically write a 300-page novel with “Grail” as a blueprint and the novel would not feel stretched thin, but Ellison zeros in on only the most relevant of info, resulting in what almost feels more like a compressed novel than a short story.
In my review of C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Mindworm” I noted Kornbluth’s use of compression and how he was able to cram a lot of history and worldbuilding into a tight space, and Ellison does basically the same thing here—only maybe even more impressively. Get this, the bulk of the artifact’s history as Siri understood it:
Between 1914 and 1932 the object—while never described—turned up three times: once in the possession of a White Russian nobleman in Sevastopol, twice in the possession of a Dutch aircraft designer, and finally in the possession of a Chicago mobster reputed to have been the man who gunned down Dion O’Banion in his flower shop at 738 North State Street.
In 1932 a man visiting New York for the opening of the Radio City Music Hall just after Christmas reported to the police who found him lying in an alley on West 51st Street just below Fifth Avenue that he had been mugged and robbed of “the most important and beautiful thing in the world.” He was taken to Bellevue Hospital, but no matter how diligently he was interrogated, he would not describe the stolen article.
In 1934 it was reputed to be in the private art collection of the German architect Walter Gropius; after Gropius’s self-imposed exile from Nazi Germany it was reputed to have passed into the personal collection of Hermann Goering, 1937; in 1941 it was said to be housed with Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa; in 1946 it was found to be one of the few items not left by Henry Ford at his death to the Ford Foundation.
Its whereabouts were unknown between 1946 and February of 1968. But Siri told Chris, her final love, that there was one sure, dangerous way of finding it. The way she had used originally to learn the hand-to-hand passage of the artifact that was True Love from the Palace of Minos to its present unknown resting place.
So now we get to the spooky character in “Grail,” which is the minor demon Surgat. Siri left instructions so that Chris could not only summon Surgat (supposedly a demon who can pick any lock) but also stay protected from the demon’s treachery. Because a demon doesn’t want to help you, it’s more like a form of indentured servitude. There’s a bit of a deal-with-the-devil narrative here, although it’s more a case of two people who clearly hate each other’s guts but are forced to work together. The first time Chris summons Surgat he’s naturally unnerved about the whole thing (How often does one get to draw pentagrams and summon demons?), but given the very recent death of Siri and everything that’s happened this marks the start of his evolution into a badass. Surgat opens the trove that contains Siri’s most secret things, having to do with her search for the artifact, but before he fucks off he takes Siri’s body as a… treat.
The implications are a wee bit concerning.
From here on out, Chris is on his own. The man who started out as a bit of a wimp is now on a quest to find True Love, and if there’s one thing he’ll do anything for, it’s love. It’s at this point that we get a few time skips (remember what I said about the compressed novel thing), jumping from the late ’60s through the ’70s as Chris wanders the globe, “a nameless, stateless person, someone out of a Graham Grene suspense novel.” Again I’m taken back by how Ellison is able to squeeze so much in here, making years pass by in mere words without making us feel like we’re missing out on too much. It helps, too, that while Chris is not the most complex of characters, his mission, his want, is deeply relatable, and we’re given enough context about his life to see why this would be so important to him.
There Be Spoilers Here
Even more than a decade of searching, Chris has tracked the artifact to what seems to be its most recent resting place, in the hands of some super-rich mogul (I don’t think we even get his name), who also happens to be on his deathbed. The mogul has the artifact locked behind a ridiculously convoluted security system (it would make Mission: Impossible look like a documentary), but this doesn’t stop Chris from summoning Surgat again and revealing the artifact anyway. The artifact, which is indeed a grail, reveals in its liquid the face of True Love, but it’s not what Chris has been expecting all these years. The final twist of the story is subtle, yet deeply tragic, and shows Ellison twisting the knife that he’s just thrust into us; he’s very good at that.
This is not the very end, technically, but it’s enough:
He looked down into the loving cup that was True Love and in the silver liquid swirling there he saw the face of True Love. For an instant it was his mother, then it was Miss O’Hara, then it was poor Jean Kettner, then it was Briony Catling, then it was Helen Gahagan, then it was Marta Toren, then it was the girl to whom he had lost his virginity, then it was one woman after another he had known, then it was Siri—but was Siri no longer than any of the others—then it was his wife, then it was the face of the achingly beautiful bride on the cover of Esquire, and then it resolved finally into the most unforgettable face he had ever seen. And it stayed.
It was no face he recognized.
Years later, when he was near death, Christopher Caperton wrote the answer to the search for True Love in his journal. He wrote it simply, as a quotation from the Japanese poet Tanaka Katsumi.
What he wrote was this:
“I know that my true friend will appear after my death, and my sweetheart died before I was born.”
I’m gonna keep it real with you: I thought this was devastating. Ellison has done sadistic endings many times before, his protagonists sometimes being defeated outright or achieving a sort of Pyrrhic victory, but “Grail” mixes that sadism with a genuine tragedy. When I say “tragedy” I mean it in the proper sense of the word, which is to say Chris, due to a combination of circumstances and his own flaws, fails nobly. When people call something tragic they simply mean to say something bad has happened (don’t worry, I do this a lot too), as opposed to what it really means, but Ellison understands real tragedy. These are words coming from a man who, due in part to his own personality flaws, had loved and lost over and over. His famous novella, “A Boy and His Dog,” perfectly captures Ellison’s brand of wounded-dog misogyny (that’s right, it is a misogynistic story, but it’s a psychologically arresting story specifically because of its apparent distrust of women), but “Grail” achieves a similar effect without the blatant woman-hating.
I can believe that “Grail” is a middle-career piece from Ellison, because I don’t think the Ellison who wrote “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” the Ellison who was younger and not as adjusted to his fame, could have written it. This story, and especially this ending, reads to me as by someone who still has a lot of fire in his belly but who also has been in the game long enough to pair that fire with real craftsmanship and insight. Even “The Deathbird,” which might still be my favorite Ellison story, and which still reads as totally experimental, does not distill its disquieting effect as succinctly as “Grail” does. This story made me feel something.
A Step Farther Out
I was shocked to find that “Grail” is only ten pages long; mind you, this is in TZM, which is not only two-columned but has frustratingly small type. What impresses me is that Ellison is able to tell what is basically a man’s whole life story in that span, and it doesn’t feel rushed or like we’re missing important information. Like sure, it’s compressed, the whole thing is an exercise in compression, but it’s a fully developed tale of one man’s search for the impossible. Chris starts out as a socially awkward nobody before tragedy sends him on a path to becoming a globe-trotting badass, but at the cost of something he can’t put his finger on. The question of finding true love is an ages-old but still deeply relevant one for most people, including myself, and personifying it as something akin to the Holy Grail is probably not new either, but it’s how Ellison gives it its own history, its own sense of weight, that makes the ending tragic. Indeed the ending would be an existential nightmare, were it not so sad and relatable.
I was expecting something more horror-centric, but I can’t say I was disappointed with what I got. Ellison is, if nothing else, an emotionally potent writer (sometimes to the point of edgy tedium), and “Grail” is an example of the mature Ellison flexing his muscles. On the one hand I’m a little surprised it didn’t get more awards attention (though it was up for the coveted Balrog Award), and also that it hasn’t been reprinted more often. Oh sure, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” can be reprinted literally a hundred times, but an objectively better and more layered story like “Grail” is apparently deemed a minor work by virtue of its lack of exposure. Well I’m gonna change that! Maybe not “change,” but I do wanna tell more people about this one; I think it’s a bit of a hidden gem.
(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, June 1933.)
Halloween is getting close, and you know that means: a Halloween-appropriate story lineup! I feel no shame when I say I fucking love Halloween; it’s the only holiday I really get in the mood for. As such I figured I ought to do something special for October, not only picking more horror-centric stories but also changing my rotation method. Normally I would cycle short stories and novellas with serials, but something I’ve realized about horror (and you can say this is just my opinion) is that it works best in small doses. There wasn’t even much of a market for horror novels until the ’80s, and aside from Weird Tales there has, historically, not been much magazine space given to longer horror tales unless they’re reprints. As such, serials are OUT this month, and so are novellas, much as I love the things. Instead of getting only a few short stories and novellas we’re looking at nine short stories and novelettes, which is a considerable number!
For a while, when picking stories for my schedule, I had planned on including works by Lovecraft, Bradbury, and Stephen King, but decided at the last minute that I didn’t wanna deal with those who are unquestionably the most popular in the field; instead I went for deeper cuts, some by established horror authors, others by authors who are not normally associated with horror. I had almost included “Colony” by Philip K. Dick, but seeing as how I had already read it before and since I had come to the conclusion that I wanted all of these to be first reads, I ejected it. I’m sorry, Phil, I STILL LOVE YOU. This is also the first lineup where there are more female authors than male authors—that’s right, there are five women against four men! But to “compensate” we have the raw male chauvinism of James Blish and Harlan Ellison.
Now, as for the short stories…
“The Mindworm” by C. M. Kornbluth. Published in the December 1950 issue of Worlds Beyond. While not usually associated with horror, Kornbluth’s fiction tends to run in a morbid vein, being incredibly pessimistic and clearly disguted with the human condition. Despite dying at the horribly young age of 34, Kornbluth was both something of a prodigy (he started getting published professionally while still a teenager) and prolific at short lengths, especially from 1949 to his death in 1958. “The Mindworm” belongs to that streak of fiction, and is apparently a rare instance of Kornbluth writing straight horror.
“Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong. Published in the October 2015 issue of Nightmare Magazine. Wong is a young author in the field, and their body of work remains fairly small, but their interests are spread impressively wide and they’ve already gotten their fair share of accolades. On top of being a productive short story writer (no novel as of yet, though), Wong has also written for comic books and even video games, with Overwatch being their big credit in the latter medium. “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” won the Nebula as well as the World Fantasy Award.
“Bite-Me-Not or, Fleur de Feu” by Tanith Lee. Published in the October 1984 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Lee is (or was) a startlingly prolific author of mostly fantasy and horror, writing dozens of novels plus a small army of short stories. Her reputation is apparently quite high, but unfortunately I’ve not read anything by her before. I found out through someone on Twitter that she’s one of the very few authors in SFF history to have more than one magazine issue made in tribute to her, including but not limited to an issue the revived Weird Tales.
“Genius Loci” by Clark Ashton Smith. Published in the June 1933 issue of Weird Tales. Smith was, along with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, one of the defining authors contributing to Weird Tales during its “classic” run. A poet first and foremost, Smith turned to writing short stories as a way of paying the bills, and during that brief time in the early to mid-1930s he gave Lovecraft a run for his money with both his lavish prose and his tales of cosmic speculation. Smith virtually stopped writing fiction by 1937, but his legacy very much lives on.
“Daemon” by C. L. Moore. Published in the October 1946 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. Aside from the trio of Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith, no author defined the glory days of Weird Tales more than C. L. Moore, although unlike her aforementioned contemporaries she would move on to bigger and better things. Moore was, alongside her husband Henry Kuttner, one of the great masters of Golden Age SF, but “Daemon” sees her try her hand at horror and fantasy once again, at a time when the market for both genres had shrunk greatly.
“The Horse Lord” by Lisa Tuttle. Published in the June 1977 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Tuttle debuted in 1972 and immediately made some sort of impression with the SFF readership, being barely out of her teens when she tied with Spider Robinson for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. While she sometimes writes science fiction, most famously collaborating with George R. R. Martin, Tuttle’s home turf would remain feminist-tinged horror, and more often at short lengths.
“Grail” by Harlan Ellison. From the April 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. Ellison has to be onf of the most acclaimed and yet divisive personae in SFF history. When his career gained direction in the mid-’60s he seemingly catapulted from a second-rate hack to one of the biggest names in the field, eventually winning the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, and other awards. Much of Ellison’s fiction can be classified as horror, despite Ellison himself not being thought of as primarily a horror author, but “Grail” sees him in pure terror mode.
“The Idol of the Flies” by Jane Rice. Published in the June 1942 issue of Unknown. Rice is pretty obscure nowadays, which isn’t surprising considering she never had a novel published (she did write one, but for reasons I’ll get into it’s lost media) and her output became highly sporadic after Unknown shut down. A shame, because Rice was one of the more interesting young horror authors coming about at a time when there wasn’t much of a market for horror. “The Idol of the Flies” is considered major enough to have Rice’s single collection named after it.
“There Shall Be No Darkness” by James Blish. Published in the April 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Like Kornbluth, Blish was a member of the Futurians, a New York-based SF fan group that would prove unspeakably influential on the field, especially in the ’50s. Also like Kornbluth, Blish would die fairly young, albeit under different circumstances. 1950 saw the start of Blish’s iconic Cities in Flight series, but he also produced a curious SF-horror mashup with “There Shall Be No Darkness,” which supposedly explains werewolves in science-fictional terms.
As of late I’ve been struggling a bit to keep up the read/review schedule as my day job has gotten a bit more hectic lately (though my natural tendency toward procrastination doesn’t help things), but with all short stories this month it looks like I’ll get a breather for the moment. I’m in the mood for SPOOKY MONTH and I hope these stories won’t let me down.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 