95 years ago, there was the publication of a horror anthology. The book was titled Creeps by Night, and the editor was none other than Dashiell Hammett. Now, Hammet was not a horror writer; rather he was arguably the finest crime writer of his generation, and maybe even when compared to the generation that followed. Hammett did, however, have an eye for good fiction, and moreover he respected what was then the burdgeoning pulp market, seeing as how his short stories and even a couple of his novels (most famously The Maltese Falcon) first saw print in those same pulp magazines. By and large the stories chosen for Creeps by Night were recent, published between 1910 and 1930, and by and large these stories were originally published in the pulps. Hammett is less concerned with the exact literary merit of the stories and more with their effectiveness as weird fiction. As he says so well in the introduction:
The effectiveness of [weird fiction] depends on the reader’s believing that certain things cannot happen and on the writer’s making him feel—if not actually believe—that they can but should not happen. If the reader does not feel that these things have happened, or does not care whether they have happened, then the author has been, in the first case, unconvincing, and in the second, uninteresting, literary faults by no means confined to our present field, and so of no especial interest to us here.
The “present field” in question is horror, and more specifically short horror as appearing in often cheap periodicals. Hammett, himself an accomplished author, recognized that there was a truckload of garbage when it comes to these periodicals, but he also recognized the merits of what was at the time a not very respected field of writing. The pulp horror story, or the weird tale in the vein of H. P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries, was not like the more mannered and openly appreciated supernatural horror by the likes of M. R. James, Henry James, Arthur Machen, etc. Weird Tales and its rivals patronized a small but passionate group of writers and readers, who in turn huddled around lurid and often violent weird stories like moths around a lantern. In a way this new breed of horror story took after the precedent set by the Jameses and their ilk, but they also pointed the way for a new and uniquely American kind of horror.
Creeps by Night was published right in the middle of that boom of pulp horror, and in the 95 years since there has been, if anything, more freedom afforded to writers who would prefer to specialize in the short story over the novel, even if the novel utterly dwarfs the short story in popularity. Short-form horror literature has also become a lot more sophisticated on average since the 1930s. For all the changes that have happened, though, the central conceit of the weird tale has remained steadfast, namely that a good weird tale ought to make the reader feel that something can but should not happen. There is also the emphasis on how the reader feels rather than thinks, which may be the key difference between weird fiction and, say, dystopian SF—not that the two are mutually exclusive. Whereas dystopian SF is meant to light a flame under one’s intellect, horror leans more towards the irrational. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in ghosts (as I don’t—at least not literal ones), a good ghost story should make you feel, if only temporarily, that such things can be. That’s the magic of it.
Obviously since October is here, we have all weird and strange stories for this month’s review forecast, spanning nearly a century in content but hopefully showing something of a continuity in the short-form horror tradition. Of course, it helps that I always get into this exact mood when October comes around, even though autumn seems to start a bit later with each passing year as the climate becomes more erratic.
Well, it can’t be helped.
We have one story from the 1930s, one from the 1940s, one from the 1970s, three from the 1980s, one from the 1990s, and one from the 2020s. I didn’t go in intending for there to be a focus on horror from the ’80s, it sort of just turned out that way.
Now, for the stories in question:
“The Opener of the Way” by Robert Bloch. From the October 1936 issue of Weird Tales. Bloch was born in 1917, and would’ve been all of 18 when he wrote this story—yet by this point he was already an established author in the pages of Weird Tales. He evntually became famous for writing Psycho, but he started out as one of Lovecraft’s many correspondents and imitators.
“In the Arcade” by Lisa Tuttle. From the May 1978 issue of Amazing Stories. Like Bloch, Tuttle was something of a prodigy, writing her first professional story when she was in her teens. She collaborated with George R. R. Martin on the SF novel Windhaven, but Tuttle’s true calling always seemed to be horror. While she’s written several novels, she’s far more prolific with short stories.
“Greenface” by James H. Schmitz. From the August 1943 issue of Unknown. Schmitz would forge a respectible career as an SF writer about a decade down the line, with maybe the most notable recurring feature of his stories being his sympathy for his female characters. “Greenface” is an unusual debut for him, being horror and printed in Unknown, and being his only story for six years.
“The Medusa” by Thomas Ligotti. From the Winter 1991 issue of Fantasy Tales. While he has not written a great deal over the past four decades or so, even seemingly having gone into hibernation as of late, Ligotti stands as one of the undisputed living masters of horror. He takes some cues from Lovecraft, no doubt, but the cadance of Ligotti’s prose style is very much his own.
“Family” by Joyce Carol Oates. From the December 1989 issue of Omni. Over her very long career, Oates has won multiple literary awards and is typically considered a literary author (and tweeter), but her fascination with horror goes back to pretty much the beginning. Most of Oates’s horror output has been through short stories and collections, and even then she’s been startlingly prolific.
“The Night of White Bhairab” by Lucius Shepard. From the October 1984 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Shepard only started writing as an adult when he was pushing forty, so in that way he was a late bloomer; but when he did debut in 1983, he emerged in the field more or less fully formed. A lot of Shepard’s work blurs genre lines, and this is probably no exception.
“She Sheds Her Skin” by Raven Jakubowski. From the November 2023 issue of Nightmare Magazine. “A tailor by trade and writer by vocation,” Jakubowski is an NYC denizen who technically made her debut back in 2014, but she only started writing consistently again (after a false start) around 2021. According to an interveiew, “She Sheds Her Skin” was inspired by COVID lockdowns.
“Remembering Melody” by George R. R. Martin. From the April 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. Martin is one of our most famous living writers, although he’s far more known for his fantasy than his SF and horror. Despite this, Martin has remarked on more than one occasion that he considers himself instinctively a horror writer more than anything, and honestly it shows.
Now let’s get in the mood and read some spooky stories.
(The Platt family finds something has changed about their neighborhood.)
(I’ll be discussing some minor spoilers for The End of Oak Street, but rest assured I will not be going into the film’s controversial ending or anything in detail about the third act.)
There’s a pretty well-known J. G. Ballard quote, taken from his final novel, Kingdom Come, and it goes like this: “The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.” This is a sentiment that can be found in a lot of Ballard’s work, and it’s this same sentiment that David Robert Mitchell, writer and director of The End of Oak Street, has latched onto with his latest movie. That much is obvious. The whole thing is “obvious,” really, if you’ve seen any of the trailers for it. A little slice of Reagan’s America getting jettisoned into the past and overrun by prehistoric creatures is such a blunt metaphor that I’m surprised it has never been done before, at least in film. It seems like an idea that Mitchell has had tumbling around in his mind since he was in his teens, and I do mean that as a point of praise. Maybe he saw Jurassic Park in theaters 33 years ago and thought of something, or rather seeing Jurassic Park sparked something in him, as it still does with a lot of people. Despite having people running away from dinosaurs as a commonality, though, Mitchell’s latest is quite a different ordeal. The result is a movie that reads in places like Jurassic Park, but also those ’80s movies Steven Spielberg produced but didn’t direct, like Gremlins and The Goonies.
The End of Oak Street is Mitchell’s first movie in eight years, since he directed the career-killing spectacle that was Under the Silver Lake in 2018. Mitchell had originally gained a good deal of traction with It Follows in 2014, a sort of ’80s throwback (complete with Richard Vreeland’s synth-driven score) which stood out as one of the most acclaimed horror movies of its year. But Under the Silver Lake, which is not a horror movie, although it does come off as like a hallucinatory voyage gone sour, got mixed reception at Cannes, with A24 basically dumping it in the woods like some horrifically deformed infant in medieval times when it came time for a theatrical release. It made no sense and made no money, as the saying goes. Now, nearly a decade later and thanks in part to J. J. Abrams as a producer, Mitchell has made his one-for-them theatrical comeback with The End of Oak Street. Reviews have been pretty positive, actually, but the box office numbers have been so-so. It has made back its $85 million production budget, but is unlikely to make up for the marketing costs (rule of thumb is that a theatrical film’s marketing budget is about the same amount as its production budget). What we have here is probably a cult classic in the making, in that it may find its “real” audience a decade or two down the line.
Mitchell’s past three movie’s show a love-hate relationship with America’s past, namely in regards to American pop culture and the ways in which the younger generation have been screwed over by those in power. It Follows puts a twist on the sexually reactionary and anti-feminist/homophobic bent of a lot of ’80s horror movies, especially those of the slasher variety, while Under the Silver Lake is about Hollywood’s (both the film industry and greater Los Angeles) ouroboros-like cannibalizing of its own past. The End of Oak Street returns to the same ’80s well It Follows had gotten water from, but it goes about things in a very different way. For one, we’re now literally thrown back to the ’80s (It Follows intentionally muddies the waters as to when it takes place), more specifically a Michigan suburb in 1982. Also different is the music: gone is Richard Vreeland, which is a bit of a shame. One of my gripes with this movie is that while Michael Giacchino replacing Vreeland makes sense for the film’s ’80s Spielberg vibes, this is not one of Giacchino’s more memorable scores. There’s also the rating, as this is Mitchell’s first movie to not be rated R; but don’t let that fool you, as The End of Oak Street is the most violent PG-13 movie you’re likely to see in theaters all year. Hell, I’m pretty sure it has more on-screen blood than The Odyssey, which was rated R mostly for the (not very bloody) violence.
So, what is the idea here? It’s a premise so simple and juvenile that (and again, I do mean this affectionately) it seems to have emerged from a teenage boy’s imagination, albeit filtered through a mature person’s point of view. The Platts are ostensibly a happy white middle-class family. Denis and Greg have two kids, a fenced-in backyard, and even a dog named Starbuck. The son, Brian (Christian Convery [I have to stop in my tracks for a split second every time, being as we have the same name]), has a bow (complete with a quiver of arrows), a group of friends he hangs out with, and oh yes, the neighborhood bully who’s looking to make mince meat out of his ass over some grievance. There’s the daughter, Audrey (Maisy Stella), who’s sort of tomboyish and, in a way unusually subtle for this movie, is implied to be a burgeoning lesbian. Both are in their teens, although Audrey is a bit older and a good deal more capable in tough situations than Brian. Speaking of characters who are implied to be some flavor of queer, there’s Denise (Anne Hathaway), the mom, who’s been secretly working on a semi-autobiographical novel, as a way to vent about her disappointment with her domestic life. Greg (Ewan McGregor), Denise’s husband, has been recently been laid off from his well-paying job, although his hasn’t told Denise about this, instead secretly (except Brian knows about it) working as a pizza delivery driver so as to scrounge some money together.
Now you may think this all sounds implausible, cliched, and kinda dumb—and you’d be right. There’s also the issue of the fact that The End of Oak Street is at least half a decade late to the party, that being the rampant fetishization of ’80s pop culture we saw in the 2010s (think Stranger Things, Ready Player One, etc.) whose sloppy seconds we’re still dealing with in the 2020s. For better or worse, much like an HPV-induced lip sore, ’80s nostalgia has a weird way of going away, only to pop up again periodically. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Mitchell had indulged in said nostalgia a decade ago and now he’s back at it again; and yet somehow, against all odds, The End of Oak Street finds new ways of tackling well-worn material. On paper I should not give a single fuck about Denise’s put-upon-housewife routine, and yet her dilemma is elevated by Anne Hathaway giving a career-best performance—even better, dare I say, than her likely-to-be-Oscar-nominated performance in The Odyssey. Hathaway gives Denise a depth that’s not necessarily in the script almost sheerly through her physicality. Rarely do I see an actor use her whole body, especially her face, to convey emotions in a mainstream movie like this. There are some moments in this movie that would be difficult to pull off seriously, but Hathaway somehow does it. There’s a palpable sense of loneliness and alienation with her character, in how she really does feel disconnected from the rest of her family, that makes Denise one of the best movie heroines I’ve seen recently.
I could talk more about the human performances, but I know why you’re here, and I’m sure you know why I went to see The End of Oak Street in the first place, aside from being one of those cultish defenders of Under the Silver Lake who waited patiently for what Mitchell might cook up next. We’re here for the dinosaurs, and also some other prehistoric reptiles who decided to join in on the fun. Most heavily marketed of the bunch might be the somewhat fluffy (all the dinosaurs have at least some fur on them) allosaurus, which I’ve seen some folks erroniously call a T. rex despite the very wrong head shape and the fact that it has more than two claws on each hand. A couple (by no means all, since I’d rather not give away everything) other hightlights include a spinosaurus with what might be the ugliest mug of any big-budget movie dinosaur (I have to think the spinosaurus looking so scuffed has to be a joke about how it’s the mascot for what used to be the most widely derided Jurassic movie), as well as some kind of sauropod, two of which treat us to what might be the (at least intentionally) funniest sex scene of 2026. Yet strangely, the most memorable animal of them all is not a dinosaur, nor even a pterosaur (although we do get those as well), but a giant fucking snake that’s first seen emerging out of someone’s backyard swimming pool early in the film. Unlike every other prehistoric beast, even of the most carnivorous of which are simply doing as Nature commanded them, there’s something oddly malicious about this phallic-looking thing with teeth the size of bone saws, as if it had come less out of the past and more out of someone’s nightmares.
(A somewhat fluffy allosaurus is on the hunt.)
As you can guess, the animals (and I insist on calling them animals as opposed to monsters) are made possible with the use of CGI, the fidelity of which is good but not exactly exceptional, except for the fact that the production budget was less than half that of the latest Jurassic World movie. The special effects, despite the sheer number of them, are surprisingly not the film’s biggest selling point; at no time did I stop mentally during my watch to consider the mechanics of a certain action sequence, or the detail of a certain dinosaur’s computerized skin (or, well, scale) texture. Even when watching Jurassic Park, which I may add is my favorite movie of all time and which I must’ve watched nearly a hundred times over the course of my thirty years, I can’t help but think about the incredible work that went into blending practical on-set effects with CGI. Unfortunately, we now live in a cinematic landscape where so much of that cloud of unknowing behind the process (and the process, as I had read somewhere, is ultimately part of the end product) has been demystified. We know too much now. The power of CGI has gone to answer questions that should’ve remained open. It’s a good thing, then, that much of the visual splender of The End of Oak Street comes not from the effects themselves, but from Mitchell’s direction and Mike Gioulakis’s cinematography (Gioulakis had worked as DP on It Follows and Under the Silver Lake as well). I’ve seen people complain about the use of split diopter shots here, especially one scene in particular that’s almost nothing but split diopter shots, but those people are too weak to survive the coming winter. But that’s just my opinion.
More so than the visuals themselves, what makes the creatures in this big ol’ creature feature captivating, if also a little too unorthodox to take for some viewers, is how they act. Not since the original Jurassic Park has a dinosaur movie committed this hard to depicting said dinosaurs as animals first, monsters second. The End of Oak Street is on the short side by modern blockbuster standards, at only an hour and forty minutes, but in that time we see a wide variety of behavior from different prehistoric species. We see big and small carnivores go after the Platt family, sure, but these same carnivores are quick to give up on the hunt if the humans prove to be too much of a hassle; that most of the humans we come across prove easy prey is beside the point. We see dinosaurs eating, grazing, messing around with human stuff like trash cans, sleeping, shitting, and of course, mating. Aside from the aforementioned sex scene with the sauropods (this got by far the most laughs out of the [admittedly small] audience I saw the movie with), it’s telling that before we’ve even seen our first dinosaur in the flesh, the first sign that something big and prehistoric has started lurking abaout is a giant pile of shit (it’s basically a recreation of that one scene from Jurassic Park, you know the one) in the next-door neighbor’s backyard. Mel Jacobs (P. J. Byrne), the neighbor in question, immediately blames the Platts, as he has a vendetta against them because of Starbuck leaving little accidents on his lawn—but of course, we know better.
The behavior of the dinosaurs and their cousins strikes a balance between what was the common scientific and cultural assumption about dinosaurs for decades, that being that dinosaurs were dumb brutes who could barely find their way to a watering hole, and the more recent tendency in fiction to depict dinosaurs as (equally implausibly, I might add) freakishly intelligent and determined serial killers in lizard form. There’s a well-done action sequence set at night in which the spinosaurus is chasing a couple of the Platt members, but once it’s become clear these pesky humans are more trouble than they’re worth, Big Spino gives up and opts to find some water to drink for the time being. This scene works as a cute nod to the fact that Big Spino was an aquatic predator who would’ve preferred large fish and reptiles over some scrawny mammals, but it also works to demystify dinosaurs, in a media landscape where too often dinosaurs are shown to be more like movie monsters than animals that really lived on this planet millions of years ago. What makes the dinosaurs in The End of Oak Street scary, if anything, is the reality that humans are small, slow, and squishy, with little in the way of natural defenses. We have not had any natural predators since at least the last ice age because of our ingenuity and our use of tools; and even then, a cowboy-style lever action rifle doesn’t do much against the thick scaley coat of an allosaurus. Even Mel, who apparently has a six-shooter on standby, isn’t able to do much against a flock of hungry pterosaurs. There’s a lot of death and carnage in this PG-13 movie.
An unspoken rule with dinosaur movies, especially the Jurassic movies (even the original film [but not the novel] abides this), is that certain types of people are not to be eaten by dinosaurs. Children, of course, are off-limits, as are the very old, and of course nobody who is too sympathetic is to be taken as a snack. The original Jurassic Park, to its credit, does mess with this formula a bit by sacrificing Robert Muldoon, one of its coolest characters; but otherwise when you watch a Jurassic movie you can rest assured that certain characters will be wearing plot armor. This is not so much the case with The End of Oak Street. Our first on-screen death is a nice old lady who seemed to be one of Denise’s few friends in the neighborhood, and we even see that she’s had some of her throat torn out by some small carnivore (again, this movie clings to its PG-13 rating for dear life). We see dead bodies of nearly all ages on the streets and in houses, and in at least one case it looks as if some poor woman had opted to commit suicide in her car, following the dinosaur outbreak. It’s even implied that small children, that most heavily armored of demographics when it comes to these movies, are not safe from the jaws of hungry carnivores. Perhaps most alarmingly, and a point which doesn’t exactly get spelled out, is the fact that the neighborhood never comes together at any point; it really is a case of every man for himself, as people shut themselves up in their houses and families try to escape the suburbs—only to find that there is no escape. Without electricity or even running water, this little pocket of human civilization is trapped in the past forever, and there’s really nothing to be done.
The End of Oak Street is by no means a perfect movie—if anything you could argue it’s a technically sound movie that purposefully tries to be “bad.” We have a schlocky B-movie premise, possibly inspired by The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, with a cliche-ridden family drama at the center. Aside from Hathaway, who really should (but will not) get an Oscar nomination for her turn here, the performances range from good to sort of stilted, as if Mitchell was making some of the actors think they were performing in a different kind of movie altogether. The ending has already proven divisive, even among people like myself who generally go to back for this movie, although I personally think it throws a few wrinkles into what could’ve been all too straightforward. But what makes The End of Oak Street special, and indeed worthy of what will probably be cult classic status some ways down the line, is that it manages to be fun as all heck while being just strange and sinister enough that you wouldn’t confuse it with other ’80s throwback projects, which we’ve gotten too many of over the past decade or so. Instead of being coy about its indebtedness to Jurassic Park and other Spielberg movies, it makes its homages quite deliberate while throwing in a twist of its own. This was supposed to mark Mitchell’s return to mainstream filmmaking, but its true audience is of the sort that’s more receptive to cult classics like Carnival of Souls and Roger Corman movies.
(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1947.)
Who Goes There?
Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he also studied to practice medicine. Ultimately Doyle didn’t pursue a career as a doctor, but his medical knowledge would come to be very useful for his actual career as a writer. He started quite young, which his earliest short fiction being published when he was just barely out of his teens; but it was with his 1887 novel, A Study in Scarlet, that Doyle created the two characters who would secure his legacy, to the point where he at times resented their popularity. Taken on its own, A Study in Scarlet is not very impressive, being a detective novel where nearly half the wordage is spent on a flashback sequence that does not involve the two main characters at all. It’s unevenly paced, and there’s the sense that while Doyle may have done good work at short lengths, he was (at least for now) uncomfortable as a novelist. The two main characters in question are Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, as you probably already know. This marked the beginning of one of the most famous literary franchises in history, although Doyle didn’t start sending Holmes and Watson on adventures in earnest until 1890’s The Sign of the Four. Over the next few years we saw 24 Sherlock short stories, before Doyle “killed off” the world-famous detective, having grown tired of him. However, there came a point where rent was due, or in any case Doyle’s creative batteries had time to recharge.
Of course, Doyle wrote much more than Sherlock, although the titanic success of his prized character overshadows his other work. He was not the first writer of detective fiction (he credited that to Edgar Allan Poe), but he did more to popularize the genre than any other author, setting a standard that would be bent and stretched but not tossed away for decades after. Agatha Christie has sold more books, but then Christie was primarily a novelist, whereas Doyle tended to show his best self when it came to short stories. On top of detective fiction, he also wrote a good deal of historical fiction, as well as horror and SF (even if even “science fiction” had not been coined yet when Doyle was in his prime). His most famous SF story is the 1912 novel The Lost World, but most of his SF was relegated to short lengths, including today’s story. “The Horror of the Heights” reads as predictable now, but it was surely one of the first notable stories to be written about the airplane, following its invention.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the November 1913 issue of The Strand Magazine. It later appeared in the December 1947 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. There’s no shortage of reprints, including The Seventh Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories (ed. Mary Danby), The Best of British SF 1 (ed. Mike Ashley), Strange Tales from the Strand (ed. William Patrick), The British Way (ed. James E. Gunn), and frankly too many Doyle collections to count, including Danger! and Other Stories, Tales of Terror and Mystery, and Gothic Tales. It’s also in the public domain, so there’s that.
Enhancing Image
The bulk of the story is the “Joyce-Armstrong Fragment,” a mostly intact notebook recovered after the disappearance of Joyce-Armstrong, a renowned pilot who was looking to break the height record. Unfortunately the last page of the notebook seems to have been torn out, but otherwise we have an in-depth account of the last flight the pilot ever took. Now, truth be told my favorite part of “The Horror of the Heights” is the introductory section, in which the narrator (presumably a fictionalized Doyle) recounts the discovery of the notebook and the context for Joyce-Armstrong’s flight. This account seems to be written in what was then the near-future, maybe the 1920s, since there’s a reference to airplanes having been around for “more than twenty years,” but obviously this would not have been true in 1913 (it would’ve been more like ten). However, aviation had come along enough since the Wright brothers’ experiments that the Royal Aero Club had been founded in the UK a few years prior to this story’s publication, and the narrator also references a flight school on Salisbury Plain that was founded around the same time. It’s clear that Doyle wrote this story as sort of an ode to the first generation of aviators, some of whom would see their skills come to very good use in World War I soon enough. If this is an ode to a group of brave men and women, however, it’s also meant to be taken as a cautionary tale, of the sort that borders on cosmic horror.
A day laborer had found the notebook just outside Withyham, which incidentally is where Joyce-Armstrong lives (or lived). There have been too many odd deaths and disappearances with pilots as of late, and one of these hotspots for strange shit also just so happens to be the upper atmosphere above Withyham and its environs—areas of sky that seem to be home to “jungles of the upper air,” as Joyce-Armstrong calls them. Well, he’s decided to take his fewfangled monoplane and see if he can climb to above 30,000 feet, maybe even 40,000 feet, to see what he can find. Despite flying solo, he’s come more than reasonably prepared, taking a shotgun as a sidearm and with a handy notebook to record the prelude to the flight. As he says, in a bit of a funny moment (Doyle is good at these), “If I don’t [survive] this note-book may explain what I am trying to do, and how I lost my life in doing it. But no drivel about accidents or mysteries, if you please.” Much of the story is not even so much about the flight itself as Joyce-Armstrong’s preparation for it, as well Doyle describing the mechanics of climbing in a propeller plane up a higher and higher altitude. This must’ve been thrilling to read at the time, before commercial flying had become a thing and indeed when a very small number of people were qualified to even board a plane, let alone fly one. I don’t wanna say “The Horror of the Heights” has aged poorly, because that would be misleading, but it has simply lost the capacity to thrill the modern-day reader like it would have a century ago, through no fault of Doyle’s own. Sure, some people will always have a phobia of flying, but this story would not be classified as SF if published today; instead it would most likely appear in an outlet for weird fiction.
When giving background on Joyce-Armstrong, the narrator describes the esteemed pilot as something of a poet and a dreamer; that second part is true enough, but I wouldn’t call Joyce-Armstrong a poet. Neither is Doyle, for that matter. Doyle’s gift is for storytelling, humor, and crafting some pretty memorable characters. Joyce-Armstrong is a no-nonsense adventurer type of the sort that can be found in both genre and non-genre pulp fiction from early in the 20th century. Doyle is more literate and self-aware than, say, Edgar Rice Burroughs, but no doubt he was getting paid by the word. If anything about “The Horror of the Heights” should try the reader’s patience, it’s the sheer length, relatively little of which can be attributed to action or plot revelations. In my copy of Gothic Tales, it comes to fourteen rather dense pages with small type, but it could easily have been a few pages shorter. This less has to do with Doyle’s flaws as a writer necessarily (although he does have those) and more to do with (as I said) the fact that what would’ve fascinated readers in 1913 might now read as obvious. You could say the story is a victim of its own success, because it does a very good job of giving a plausible and detailed account of one man’s journey into an “air-jungle,” a place that does not actually exist; and yet Doyle handles his material with a kind of journalistic integrity. It works well, if not entirely, because Doyle takes his own story quite seriously.
There Be Spoilers Here
This is a hard one to spoil, since the ending is all but given flatly away at the beginning, so I won’t go into it.
A Step Farther Out
Did Doyle believe there are creatures lurking in the mists of our upper atmosphere? Probably not. He did come to believe in some screwy shit after the end of WWI, most infamously an obvious hoax about fairies. Doyle’s turn to supersition can be explained by the trauma of losing his son Kingsley in the war, but it should also be noted that Doyle (along with damn near every British public figure at the time) steadfastly supported the UK entering said war. Family tragedy can sometimes renew one’s artistic energy, as happened with Doyle’s close contemporary Rudyard Kipling, who wrote some of his finest and most deeply felt short stories and poetry following his own son’s death in the same war. “The Horror of the Heights” was one of Doyle’s last stories he wrote before the war period, and as such it was one of the last to come out before what is often regarded as Doyle’s artistic decline, even putting aside the fairy stuff. The story itself works best as a snapshot of aviation in its early years, when you had your first flight schools and masters of flying but before these incredible machines were to be used as weapons of death in WWI. It’s hard to believe Doyle would have written the same story even a couple years later.
Anyway…
I’ll see you in about a month, aside from a couple editorial posts. That’s right, I’m taking a “vacation” from this blog. Not the first time I’ve done this. I’m a slow reader and a temperamental writer. Even so, I’ve averaged about 200,000 words a year for this blog for the past four years, because unfortunately, like Doyle, I tend to not be very concise. I do, however, wanna write two or maybe even three Observatory posts during my “vacation,” so you can expect to see one of those every week to ten days. When I come back swinging in October, we’ll be doing a marathon of horror stories, with one coming from the pages of Amazing Stories. Amazing is not a horror-centric magazine, and at the same time I always get into the mood for spooky stuff when October comes around.
(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1947.)
I was thinking of taking a break from this blog for this month, but maybe I’ll save the vacation for September. Funnily enough it was easier to come up with a review forecast, with stuff I’m interested in checking out, than it was to announce a month-long break. This is what happens when you’re a compulsive reader.
Anyway, we’re back to our usually programming, although we have a serial novel in a whopping four installments (although Space Viking is not as long as the installment number would have you think), as well as a reprinted SF-horror yarn by one of the most famous British authors of all time. Of course, with the exception of Arthur Conan Doyle, these are all authors I’ve covered before. I figured that if I’m gonna keep myself busy, even going against my own expectations, I may as well keep things “safe” for the time being. At least with Bruce Sterling this is earned, considering I was set to write about another short story of his many moons ago, only to not get around to it. Consider this a second attempt.
I’m keeping this post short and sweet. Not much to report on my end, aside from recently acquiring a second cat. (Cats are easy to adopt, like they just kinda let you pick them up, get them their shots, sign a paper, badda-bing badda-boom.) I also have maybe one too many books on my plate at the moment (incidentally none of them are genre fiction), so I hope to whittle that down, make things more manageable.
As for the stories, we have one from the 1910s, one from the 1960s, one from the 1970s, and two from the 1980s.
For the serial:
Space Viking by H. Beam Piper. Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, November 1962 to February 1963. Piper was born in 1904, but didn’t start writing SF until he was in his forties, making his debut in 1947. The next decade or so was productive enough for him, including the non-SF mystery novel Murder in the Gun Room. Said novel, while not SF, does pay tribute to fandom in the years following World War II. Space Viking was one of several novels Piper had written in quick succession in the last few years of his life, along with The Cosmic Computer, Little Fuzzy (and its sequel), and Lord Kalvin of Otherwhen. Sadly, after a failed marriage and with the belief that his writing career was floundering, Piper took his own life in 1964.
For the novellas:
“The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” by James Tiptree, Jr. From the May 1988 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Tiptree is one of the most acclaimed authors of her generation, although despite being typically considered part of the New Wave she was actually a decade or two older than most of her peers. Her life story is a dramatic one, worthy of a Hollywood biopic, and the circumstances of her death remain controversial to this day.
“The Araqnid Window” by Charles L. Harness. From the December 1974 issue of Amazing Stories. Harness’s career as a writer spanned six decades, although it came in fits and starts. He stepped away from writing in the ’50s to focus on his job and raising his family, only returning after a decade. “The Araqnid Window” itself is one of only two Harness stories published in the ’70s. His job as a patent attorney goes to explain his low output.
For the short stories:
“Sunken Gardens” by Bruce Sterling. From the June 1984 issue of Omni. Sterling was born in Brownsville, Texas, but later became an Austin denizen. Unusually he made his fiction debut with a novel, Involution Ocean, published when he was very young. His first ambitious project, though, was the Shaper/Mechanist universe, comprising the novel Schismatrix and some short stories.
“The Horror of the Heights” by Arthur Conan Doyle. From the December 1947 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. First published in 1913. While Doyle did not invent the detective story (he rightly credits Edgar Allan Poe with that), he did codify the genre and became quite rich and famous off of it it. Doyle also wrote in other genres, though, including horror and science fiction.
(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Amazing Stories, July 1964.)
Who Goes There?
Philip K. Dick was born in 1928, one half of a pair of twin siblings, but his sister died in infancy while Dick survived—a loss that would crop up here and there in his work throughout his life. Dick wrote some juvenelia when he was a teenager, but he landed his first professional sale in 1951, although it would take another year for said story to appear in print. Having flunked out of college (actually he got kicked out of UC Berkeley for failing what at the time was mandatory ROTC) and no longer wanting to work at a record store, Dick decided to try writing full-time. It was grouling work, and while he wrote at a mile a minute (with the help of amphetamines), poverty would plague him for much of his adult life. He tried breaking into the mainstream with a few non-genre novels, but only one of them, the pretty solid Confessions of a Crap Artist, even saw publication in his lifetime. In spite of all this, along with the fact that he died at the age of just 53, he came to have one of the most distinctive and important ouevres of any genre SF author. For years after his death he acted as sort of a go-to example for “intellectual” stimulation in SF, with themes and such. Dick has been such a favorite with academic types for so many years that it seems like recently we’re finally able to take a step back and better appreciate his work.
Even with his faults, of which there are several (his penchant for misogyny, his at-times sloppy phrasing, that like every prolific writer he fell back on a set of themes and character types), taken into account, Dick is arguably the best American SF writer of the ’50s and ’60s. Keep in mind also that a lot of Dick’s best work lies in his short stories, which he didn’t write as frequently after the ’50s; indeed he transitioned from being one of the best short-story writers of the ’50s to one of the best novelists of the following decade. “A Game of Unchance” came out during an especially busy year for Dick, which saw the publications of The Penultimate Truth, Clans of the Alphane Moon, The Simulacra, and the book version of Martian Time-Slip. This SF-horror yarn reads like a companion piece to a much earlier Dick story, “Colony,” although the situation here is different.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the July 1964 issue of Amazing Stories. Took a surprisingly long time for “A Game of Unchance” to appear in book form, being reprinted in the 1980 Dick collection The Golden Man. Other Dick collections with this story include We Can Remember It for You Wholesale and Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick.
Enhancing Image
At some point in the future, Mars has been colonized, or at least is in the process of being colonized. The habitable but not exactly friendly planet (the depiction of Mars here, as with Martian Time-Slip the same year, would’ve been anachronistic even for 1964) is the new home for a bunch of human settlers, whose rough-and-tumble lifestyle echoes that of the sharecroppers from earlier in the 20th century. One day an alien carnival ship lands outside of town, promising games, magic shows, freaks, and “WOMEN,” that last part practically in all caps. Falling Star Entertainment Enterprises. Bob Turk remembers what happened when a similar ship landed round the same time the previous year: the results were not good. “Last time a carnival had come to their area they had been robbed of most of their crops—accepted by the pitchmen in barter—and had wound up with nothing more than an armload of useless plaster figurines.” Well, not gonna happen this time. Fred Costner, Tony’s son, is “sort of half-witted” but who also possesses genuine psi powers, so he can act as a spy for the settlers and help them win the big prizes at the carnival. What they win, however, ends up being far more troublesome than it could’ve possibly been worth.
The most valuable prizes at the carnival seem to be a bunch of plastic figurines, like toy soldiers but bigger and more complicated-looking. The carnies are protecting these and reserving them for only the biggest winners, although why is a mystery to Fred. “He could not for the life of him fathom the carny’s reasons for protecting these; surely they were worthless.” Still, the logic goes that the tougher the challenge, the sweeter the prize. Of course, Bob and company are cheating here, what with Fred’s help, although the carnies apparently have a psi person of their own trying to rig games. The whole thing is rigged, is the point. The prize in question, a bunch of “microrobs,” are not actually micro in size at all, but they could be confused for toys. Only thing is they’re very much not toys. One of them damn near blinds Hoagland Rae, a village leader, and another one later fatally wounds a Martian gopher. These little bastards, who don’t seem to be sentient but who at the same time quickly prove to be unruly, come upon the townsfolk almost like a plague of locusts. Bob and the others, being unprepared for such a thing, have to call in military guys from the UN. (The most unrealistic part about this story, aside from Mars itself, is the notion that the UN is good for anything.) Even then, the carnies show no interest in helping with the infestation; on the contrary they’re all too happy to leave the settlers with the mess they’d made for themselves.
Given that the themes that recur in Dick’s fiction have been picked apart by people more well-read than me, one pet theme of Dick’s that flies somewhat under the radar is his ambivalence toward capitalism. Dick was not a leftist himself, although he was open about having quite a few leftist friends; but since very early in his career his writing expressed a disdain for both corporate shenanigans and government authoritarianism. There’s a memorable scene early in Ubik where Joe Chip, the protagonist, has to haggle with his robotic apartment door. There’s some not-too-subtle commentary on class hierarchy in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? “A Game of Unchance” takes a critical if also sympathetic view of the settlers by calling out their foolishness for giving up their livelihoods for some carnival games, but also pointing out that life in the colony is horribly dreary. The colonists do not see themselves as a people with values or even “culture” so much as they see themselves as a bunch of individuals trying to fight off boredom and poverty. The ship makes bank off the colonists, takes advantage of their need for entertainment, and at the same time leaves them with some killer robots. One of the UN men theorizes that they were in fact not supposed to win those microrobs, but this is never confirmed, and anyway the ending casts doubt on this theory.
There Be Spoilers Here
The central tragedy, indeed the horror, of “A Game of Unchance” is that the villagers are doomed to make the same mistakes, despite their best efforts. As such the story has a cyclical structure, with the opening and ending scenes being similar. This is rendered literally when another carnival ship arrives, although evidently not the same people as from earlier in the story. Of course there were freaks and scantily clad women, and “the games of chance had been placed—conveniently—ahead of even the girly shows and the freaks.” Maybe things will be different this time. We’re introduced to another valuable prize in the form of “homeostatic traps,” which are like automated robots made to combat pests like the microrobs—indeed they seem to have been made with the microrobs in mind. The villagers, desperate for a solution to their immediate problem, give up all they can to win these traps. Once again the carnies have a psi person on their team, but once again Fred is able to cheat into winning the most valued prize. “It was almost as if they had worked it that way on purpose.” We’re all but told in plain words that the cycle of those who con and those who get conned will continue, as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow.
A Step Farther Out
“A Game of Unchance” lies on the border between major and minor Dick, as it’s a bit too long and winding for what it is, and there’s this sense that we’ve seen this premise done before—maybe even by Dick himself. For the most part, though, the execution is quite good. It’s the kind of story where thinking about it after the fact is maybe as rewarding as the experience of reading it. There’s a creeping pessimism that hangs over most of Dick’s work, but it’s especially pronounced here, with the ending line being a haunting moment. The anti-capitalist commentary here unfortunately has not aged in the 62 years since its publication. While it’s not as outright horrifying or bleak as “Colony” (without spoiling anything about that story, I seriously recommend it), it posits the sentiment that we will keep falling into the same traps in the hopes of getting out.
(Cover by Alex Schomburg. Amazing Stories, December 1962.)
Who Goes There?
Raymond F. Jones was born in 1915 and spent much of his life in Utah. He seemed to be the first practicing Mormon (Zenna Henderson grew up Mormon but later strayed from the Church) to have written genre SF, so in that sense he was patient zero for what has since become a somewhat common trend in the field. (Indeed there has spawned a whole industry of young Mormon genre writers who learn their craft at BYU and other Christmonger factories.) Jones made his debut in 1941 and from the beginning had a pretty steady relationship with Astounding, although at his most prolific he appeared in other magazines as well. His debut novel, Renaissance, is one of the longer and larger-in-scale novels to emerge from SF magazines in the ’40s, but it’s his 1952 novel This Island Earth which might ring a bell for some people—if only because of the film adaptation being associated with Mystery Science Theater 3000. His 1945 novelette “Correspondence Course” eventually earned a Retro Hugo nomination, deservedly as it’s one of the finer stories to be printed in Astounding during its prime and still reads fairly well.
“Stay Off the Moon!” is an outlier for Jones in a few ways, not the least being that it arrives late in his career. Jones died in 1994, but he only wrote sporadically after the ’50s. Secondly, it was published in Amazing Stories, which was not one of Jones’s regular haunts. Finally, and most strikingly, this is very much an SF-horror hybrid that could’ve reasonably appeared in Weird Tales, had that magazine not closed its doors a decade earlier. Its odd blend of speculative fiction and cosmic horror might explain why it’s basically never been reprinted, despite being considered major enough at the time to be made the cover story. I think it works rather well myself, in spite of the outlandish premise, so that it reads better in execution than it sounds on paper, if that makes any sense. (It’s worth mentioning here that Jones took an interest in Dianetics in the ’50s, something that happened depressingly often with SF writers at the time.)
Placing Coordinates
First published in the December 1962 issue of Amazing Stories. It has never been collected or anthologized, and is neglected enough that Jones let it fall out of copyright. As such you can read it on Project Gutenberg. I can think of worse stories that have been reprinted.
Enhancing Image
It’s difficult to talk about this story without bringing up The Big Twist™, but I’m gonna try for as long as I can.
At some unspecified point in the near future, the space program has gone far enough the NASA is now sending a remote-controlled “mobile laboratory,” called the Prospector, to the moon via Saturn rocket. The Prospector’s job is to collect samples on the moon’s surface, and the controller and by extention Mission Control are able to see in fine detail what’s going on out there. This is all in preparation for a manned mission to the moon. Jim Cochran is a technician whose interest in the moon borders on mania, although he also had some skin in the game since Allan, his brother-in-law, is one of those astronauts set to make the voyage and those legendary first steps. Even as the moon floats within mankind’s grasp, however, there’s still a tangable sense of mystery about it that Jim is unable to shake off, maybe because for centuries the moon has been almost more an object of mythology and folklore than a real celestial body that exists in the universe. There’s something romantic about the moon, but also something a bit eerie. In the 19th and early 20th centuries there was much SF and even earnest speculation written about the possibility of life on the moon.
Both the best and worst thing that could happen is if there is absolutely nothing on the moon—just rocks and dust. A profound and insatiable emptiness. This doesn’t sit well with Jim—the likely possibility that the Prospector will find nothing of interest.
The baying of dogs on a wintery, moonlit night.
The madness called lunacy.
Seeds must be planted just so, in relation to the moon, or the crop will fail.
Men had always felt strange things about the moon. Would a Saturn missile and a mechanical monster in its nose be able to destroy all that?
There’s a gear shift that happens midway through the story, but Jones foreshadows the shift well in advance. He invokes werewolves, lunacy, and even calls the Prospector “a mechanical monster.” The vibes are sort of bad from the outset, but it’s hard to articulate why they’re bad, which in my book makes for effective horror. Things get considerably creepier once Jim starts analyzing material collected by the Prospector and finds that there’s something peculiar about the moondust, down to even the atomic level. Now, we know that the moon is an offshoot of Earth, having been formed at the time of Earth’s creation and becoming caught in Earth’s orbit. The moon is made of the same basic ingredients as Earth—or at least this should be the case. But Jim finds, to his horror, that is it not. Not only did the moon not come from Earth’s leftovers, but the moon seems to have originated from somewhere outside the known universe. It is a foreign body that has attached itself to Earth, having come a long way from outside out solar system. The short-term problem is that the very moondust that covers the surface might be lethal to humans, even through spacesuits, but there’s a deeper problem that only gradually rears its head.
There’s something off about the moon, but there’s also a far less esoteric kind of horror here: bureaucracy. What began as Cochran’s Theory soon became a paper which Jim sent to a respected astronomy publication, and thereafter all hell broke loose. NASA and the ghouls in DC are less concerned about the safety of the astronauts and more at the prospect of all this money and manpower having gone to waste. There’s the sunk-cost fallacy to consider: the Americans are too deep into investing in landing men on the moon to back out at this point. Too much has already gone into the space program. It’s too late to back out now, although Jim does have some allies, including Allan and his friend Sam. But it’s not enough.
Scientific judgement was being held in abeyance until actual moon samples were available on earth. For the present, at least one of Jim’s predictions had come true. The hypothesis was becoming known as Cochran’s Theory. That it was also called Cochran’s Idiocy by a few didn’t matter.
We haven’t even gotten to the big reveal yet, but this is still on its own a compelling depiction of how the space race in the ’60s could’ve gone very differently, and indeed much worse, than it did in real life. A lot of classic horror is essnetially conservative in temperament, if not necessarily in politics (although a disproportionate number of the great horror authors over the past couple centuries have been some flavor of right-wing), and “Stay Off the Moon!” continues this streak by saying that maybe it’d be best for all of us if we stopped being obseesed with going to space and landing on the damn moon. As someone who has become increasingly ambivalent about space travel over the years (but for woke reasons), I have to say I get behind this sentiment. It is, to take the title from one of M. R. James’s most beloved stories, a warning to the curious.
There Be Spoilers Here
The Prospector continues its probing and digs deeper, until one day it doesn’t, on account of having been swallowed up by a fissure in the ground that wasn’t there before. Not only have they lost the Prospector, “a billion-dollar experiment” gone up in smoke, and not only does Jim loses his job, but he has made a discovery that will change everything: the moon is alive. There are live hydrocarbons beneath the surface, and something has been lurking inside the moon for God knows how long. Now, in the decades since this story it’s become not uncommon to find horror related to possible life on the moon, or even the moon itself being a living (and also nefarious) thing as seen here, to the point where the premise has sort of become creepypasta material. Jones handles said material with delicacy, though, so that while the actual science is pretty dubious, the reveal of the moon’s true nature is done in very good taste. It helps that while we’re told that whatever cosmic entity lurking in the moon is evil, it’s also more or less unseen. There’s also the added layer of dread from the fact that Jim’s report on the moon terror gets suppressed and he winds up out of a job. There is literally nothing he can do to help people—not even his brother-in-law. Allan loses his life during the Appollo mission, although (and I think this is a pretty wise choice on Jones’s part), we’re not told how he dies.
There would be astronaut deaths with the Apollo missions, namely the Apollo 1 disaster that happened some five years after “Stay Off the Moon!” was published, so there’s an added sense of eeriness here that Jones obviously could not have intended. The tragedy with the moon landing here does nothing to halt the space program, as also happened in real life. We will set foot on the moon—whether it wants us to or not. The ending is bleak as shit, which goes to explain why maybe this did not appear in Analog despite that being Jones’s most frequent outlet.
A Step Farther Out
This is a weird one, and I don’t just mean in the sense that it borders on counting as weird fiction. Rarely do I see a short story shift gears as dramatically as “Stay Off the Moon!” does, which alone would make it at least a curiosity; but at the same time it expresses an ambivalence towards NASA and the space race that was rare at the time, and which would only gradually pick up steam as it became more appearent that something really “useful” would come out of it. That the twist is a hard one to stomach, and of course one which does not align with our scientific understanding of Earth’s moon at all, is something that some readers will be unable to get past. I thought it was more effective than it had any right to be, though, to the point where I found the ending genuinely unnerving.
(Cover by Allen Anderson. Planet Stories, January 1951.)
A change is coming to this site, and unfortunately it’s not for the better. I was supposed to review Leigh Brackett’s The Big Jump last month, but while I had finished reading the novel on time, I could not bring myself to write anything all that substantive about it. It’s fine, basically. It’s a short novel that is sort of spacefaring but decidedly unlike the swashbuckling planetary romances Brackett had made her bread and butter. Novels, for the most part, were also not really her strong suit, which makes her 1955 novel The Long Tomorrow all the more an outlier. I wanted to write about Brackett still, though, so this month we’ll be downsizing and looking at a short story of hers from earlier in her career, “The Halfling,” which got a Retro Hugo nomination. It’s also not a planetary romance, though; instead Poul Anderson, who for a time early in his career wrote some Brackett-esque science-fantasy, will take up that mantel. Incidentally I was supposed to write about an Anderson novella sometime last year, but never got around to it, so I’ll be making up for lost time.
The increasing habit I’ve made of missing out on pieces I had set out to cover has made me think this site could use some downsizing of its own. Thankfully not much will change except, sad to say, I will no longer be covering “complete” novels, i.e., stories 40,000 words or longer that are printed whole in magazine issues. This was a niche department to begin with, which I would only make use of a few times each year, but it seems with my life circumstances in mind that such a department is no longer viable. Of course, I’ll still be covering novels in serial form (indeed we have one such novel for this month), but the Complete Novels section you see at the top of the page of now dead. Those reviews will be kept up, because why not, but I will no longer be updating that department for the foreseeable future. Instead I will simply not post anything on the 31st of the month going forward, which gives me a bit of extra time to relax as well as the previous post more time to marinate at the top of the page. Really I think this is the best move for everyone, and I also think the price for no longer reviewing such stories is a rather small one.
July will see all short stories from Amazing Stories, but for this month it’s pretty much just more of the same. Nothing unusual here. Aside from Brackett and Anderson, authors I’d meant to cover earlier but couldn’t, we have the serial version of Gordon R. Dickson’s first major novel, as well as a novella from Katherine MacLean and an out-of-left-field SF-horror yarn from the now-obscure Raymond F. Jones. I had temporarily forgotten about my thing of reviewing as least one piece from Amazing Stories this month and almost replaced Jones with a Bruce Sterling Omni story. But Sterling is gonna have to way a bit, probably a few months.
We’re leaning vintage this month, with one story from the 1940s, three from the 1950s, and one from the 1960s.
For the serial:
Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, May to July 1959. Born and raised up to a point in Canada, but moving with his family to the US when he was 13, Dickson can now strike one as oddly mild-mannered and sympathetic for being a major forerunner of what we now call military SF. The Childe Cycle, which contains the Dorsai stories, would encompass his life’s work, although he never lived to give it a proper ending. Dorsai! was not the first story in the cycle, but apparently the second, as well as the first novel. The magazine version was nominated for a Hugo.
For the novellas:
“The Diploids” by Katherine MacLean. From the April 1953 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. MacLean was one of the last major discoveries John W. Campbell had made, and indeed she would appear regularly in Astounding/Analog over the course of many years. Despite living an exceedingly long time (she died in 2019), she mostly stopped writing after the 1970s. She trained in psychology and had apparently taken in interest in Dianetics at one point.
“Witch of the Demon Seas” by Poul Anderson. From the January 1951 issue of Planet Stories. Anderson was another Astounding/Analog regular, although he also appeared basically everywhere else. Born American but raised by Danish immigrants, there’s a strong sense of the “Nordic twilight” in Anderson’s writing, especially but not exclusively his later work. Early in his career he followed in the footsteps of Leigh Brackett and wrote some planetary romances.
For the short stories:
“The Halfling” by Leigh Brackett. From the February 1943 issue of Astonishing Stories. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novelette. Instead of reviewing a novel I guess we’ll settle for something more small-scale. Brackett had made her debut in 1940, in Astounding, but she quickly turned to other magazines despite the lesser pay. She would eventually find much success as a screenwriter.
“Stay Off the Moon!” by Raymond F. Jones. From the December 1962 issue of Amazing Stories. Born and raised in Utah, Jones seems to have been the first Mormon SF writer of note, so in that sense he was ahead of his time. He was active through much of the ’40s and ’50s. Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 may recognize him for having written This Island Earth (the novel, not the movie).
We are now knee-deep in spring, which means last month I narrowly survived a fit of allergies. (I’m not really exaggerating, I got hit with what the doctor called postnasal drip, and for some days it was difficult to even breathe, let alone sleep at night.) In terms of weather this might be my least favorite time of year, because of said allergies. In better news, it’s also time for applying for memberships at the yearly Worldcon, if you’re interested. This one is happening in LA, which is unfortunate because it’s the other side of the country for me and I don’t have any connections who live close enough to where the action’s happening. I have a few friends in California, but as you know, California is a big state. (That’s not even getting into people from outside the US who want to attend in person. It’s rough.) I did end up getting a WSFS membership, I think for the third year in a row. I mainly do this for all the free stuff you get, a very good I would say given it’s only $50. You get ebooks of novels and short fiction, and you even get files for the movies up for Best Dramatic Presentation.
As for what we’ll be reading this month, for the first time in a long while we have a complete novel, which I have to get around to this time. (Unlike last time.) We also have a novel in serialized form, by someone whom I’m sure will not raise any eyebrows. Incidentally, two of the stories here are related to World War II, although one was written on the eve of the war in Europe while the other is an early example of a “Hitler wins” alternate history. Such a scenario is pretty tired today, but it was not so when C. M. Kornbluth came up with it back in the ’50s. Another funny connection is that both Kornbluth and L. Ron Hubbard served in WWII, the former in the army and the latter in the navy. Hubbard’s time in the navy was respectable, and I’m sure nothing untoward or embarrassing happened when he was at sea. Unfortunately for Kornbluth, his time in the army caused a weakness in his heart that would later see him die quite young.
Anyway…
We have one story from the 1940s, two from the 1950s, one from the 1980s, one from the 2000s, and one from the 2020s.
For the serial:
Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, April to June 1940. Where do we even start with Hubbard? One of the most controversial figures in not just SF but also modern religion and pseudo-science. Hubbard had Dianetics published in 1950, and in 1952 he founded the Church of Scientology, one of the most successful (if only because of the disproportionate number of rich people in its ranks) cults in recorded history. Before all that, he was a fairly respected genre writer, with the late ’30s and early ’40s marking his peak for both quality and quantity. Final Blackout is probably the most well-received of Hubbard’s SF novels, after the much more famous but also more controversial Battlefield Earth.
For the novellas:
“The Giants of the Violet Sea” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. From the September-October 2021 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Born and raised in Greece, and indeed currently living there, Triantafyllou writes her fiction in English. Her personal website says she has “a flair for dark things.” She made her debut in 2017, and so far has only written short fiction. This here novella is the longest work of Triantafyllou’s to have been published up to that point.
“Two Dooms” by C. M. Kornbluth. From the July 1958 issue of Venture Science Fiction. Kornbluth is maybe one of my favorite SF writers to have really flourished during the ’50s magazine boom-and-bust, although he had made his debut long before that. He was a prodigy whose earliest work was published when he was a literal teenager. Unfortunately he also died very young, at just 34, from a weak heart, robbing the field of one of its most incisive writers.
For the short stories:
“The Persecutor’s Tale” by John M. Ford. From the November 1982 issue of Amazing Stories. Speaking of very good writers gone too soon, Ford also made his debut when only in his teens, but he picked up on the trade pretty quickly. A writer’s writer, the best way to read a Ford novel is the read it twice. Sadly he died in 2006, at just 49, having not quite completed his final novel.
“Always” by Karen Joy Fowler. From the April-May 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Nebula winner for Best Short Story. Believe it or not, there’s an L. Ron Hubbard connection here. Fowler is maybe the most high-profile author to have made her debut in the annual (and Scientology-backed) Writers of the Future anthology series, although Fowler herself is not a Scientologist.
For the complete novel:
The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett. From the February 1953 issue of Space Stories. While Brackett’s first few stories were published in Astounding, she soon moved to other magazines that were more open to her brand of space adventure SF. By the end of World War II she’d come to be associated most with Planet Stories, in a mutually beneficial relationship. Indeed, after Edgar Rice Burroughs, Brackett can be considered the leading writer of planetary romance. She married fellow writer Edmond Hamilton in 1946, but they almost never collaborated. Nowadays she’s best known as a successful screenwriter, and for her grounded SF novel The Long Tomorrow, which is quite different from what she most often wrote. The Big Jump is a short novel, apparently published in magazine form unabridged, and later as one half of an Ace Double along with Philip K. Dick’s Solar Lottery.
(Cover by Philippe Halsman. The 28 June, 1952 issue of Collier’s, where Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” first appeared.)
When Robert Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth” appeared in the 8 February, 1947 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, there was cause for celebration. Heinlein had just returned from a four-year hiatus, having spent much of that time helping with the war effort, and when he got back to writing it was as if he had never left. In the years immediately following the war, in which the US immerged as a superpower, there was a burgeoning suburban middle class, and therefore a burgeoning suburban middle-class readership. The Saturday Evening Post was, for much of its existence, a weekly tabloid-format magazine that had already been around for over a century; but by the immediate post-war years it had reached the absolute height of its popularity. By 1948 something like 10% of American adults were reading the Post, which was and still is a ridiculous circulation. The Post was a “slick” magazine, although it didn’t use slick paper; rather it was slick in the sense that it paid well for articles and stories, and the lucky author would enjoy a wide readership. It was a mainstream magazine that occasionally printed genre fiction. When several of Heinlein’s stories appeared in the Post in the late ’40s, corresponding with a book deal he had made with Scribner’s, he knew he had hit the big time.
Heinlein’s experience with gaining mainstream traction was not totally unique to him. There were some other writers of his generation, and even more of the following generation, who started out writing pulp fiction before moving to the slicks. Ray Bradbury, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, Harlan Ellison, and even Stephen King had their first stories published in pulp magazines. King, in the introduction to his story collection Night Shift, thanks (among others) Robert W. Lowndes, who was editor of the cheap and now-forgotten magazines Magazine of Horror and Startling Mystery Stories. Lowndes had also bought King’s first two stories, when the latter was barely out of his teens. Evidently the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree.
Science fiction has infested practically every facet of modern life, so it can be hard to appreciate the fact that it used to be quite a niche interest. We’re constantly being flooded with bestselling novels that are SF, and a disproportionate number of the highest grossing movies ever are SF. For better or worse (it’s easily for the worse) we’re at the mercy of technocrats who grew up reading SF. But going back to the 1940s and ’50s, SF was mostly constrained to magazines with ultimately low circulations, not to mention all the B-movies. Even before that, SF was steeped in the pulp tradition, which is to say being published in pulp magazines. While science fiction as a codified genre became a thing in 1926, with the launch of Amazing Stories, the pulps went back to the tail end of the 19th century, and some fiction from these older pulp magazines even found their way as reprints in Hugo Gernsback’s newfangled “scientifiction” magazine. The pulps started proliferating in the 1900s thanks to a few big publishers, maybe the most famous of them among old SF fans being Street & Smith, who would later print Astounding Stories. By the time Amazing Stories launched, you already had popular pulp magazines that sometimes printed science fiction and fantasy, including Argosy, Adventure, and Blue Book. Most famously there was Weird Tales, which while focused on horror and fantasy also regularly printed SF.
The “pulp” label is easy enough to understand, although it’s not totally consistent. As a rule of thumb, a pulp magazine in the early 20th century had such-and-such dimensions, but more importantly it had to do with the quality of the paper, which was rough and brittle. Sometimes the edges were untrimmed. These magazines were cheaper to buy than their slick counterparts, but correspondingly they also paid less by the word. Also, in terms of class politics and age demographics, it must be said that while the likes of The Saturday Evening Post and Harper’s Weekly appealed to bourgeois readers, adults who while part of the workforce weren’t exactly getting their hands dirty, the pulps appealed more to working-class adults and adolescents. Granted that it’s unwise to generalize a whole era of popular fiction like this, the stories in these magazines tended to be heavy on action and plotting, and with at least a tinge of wish fulfillment. As I said, these stories did not pay well on a word-by-word basis, but if one could crack the code of what a magazine’s editor is looking for, and how to write a reliably solid adventure story, there was some money in it. The luckiest of these pulpsters was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who had taken on writing relatively late in life, already being deep in his thirties and with some odd jobs behind him. In 1912 alone Burroughs cracked the code with such gusto that he basically changed the face of American pulp fiction, with the one-two punch of A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, both appearing in the pulp magazine The All-Story (which later merged with Argosy, it’s confusing). Burrough’s literary reputation is up for contention, but the cultural impact he continues to have is hard to deny.
Most of the authors who appeared in these pulps are now totally forgotten, and in fact got tossed into the dust bin of history decades ago. At the same time, some of the most important American writers of the 20th century got their start writing for the pulps, be they SFF magazines or other genres. Black Mask, founded in 1920, was a crime-oriented pulp magazine that would publish works by such future giants of crime fiction as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The best of these authors eventually moved on from the pulps in favor of better-paying markets, such as getting into novel-writing, but the strictness of magazine protocol encouraged discipline over raw imagination. In the introduction for his collection Trouble Is My Business, Chandler recounts his experiences with writing stories for Black Mask and other pulps in the ’30s as follows:
If the formula had been a little less rigid, more of the writing of that time might have survived. Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of the formula, but we usually got caught and sent back. To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack.
Chandler describes a push-and-pull effect with writing for the pulps that’s by no means unique to crime fiction—in fact it applies to every other genre of magazine fiction, including what appears in the slicks. Editors have their biases, no matter how benign they appear, and there were restrictions regarding censorship in those days that made it so that the language could never be too salty or the sex appeal all that explicit. (The sexiest a fiction magazine could get was Weird Tales, which you have to admit had some pretty erotically charged covers in the ’30s, but even that came with some legal trouble. Pick a random issue of Weird Tales from the year 1935 and juxtapose it with a random issue from 1939 or 1940: you’ll see the difference.) These restrictions encouraged writers to develop formulae that could get their work accepted with more ease, depending on the market. The work itself might not be masterful, but these markets did serve as training grounds for promising writers.
The years between the world wars saw the height of the pulps, but America’s involvement in World War II demanded everyone tighten their figurative belts, including a need for paper. The paper shortage during the war saw the deaths of several pulp magazines, maybe the most lamented of them being Unknown, Astounding‘s fantasy-oriented sister magazine. Astounding itself barely survived the paper shortage, being the only one of Street & Smith’s genre magazines to have made it. Even the ones that did survive, including Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, fell on hard times during and immediately after the war, with the former eventually closing its doors (not for the last time) in 1954. This is not to say good fiction wasn’t being published in these magazines, especially in the case of Weird Tales which continued strong more or less until the end, but these were struggling magazines with small (if also devoted) readerships. By the early ’50s the pulp format was on its way out, with former pulps switching over to digest. It didn’t help that there were newfangled magazines at this time, including Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which were printed in digest format from the beginning. These magazines were not quite slick, as they were still aimed at the small world of genre readers; but they had decent quality paper, they paid well enough, and they (namely F&SF) even sometimes reprinted material from the slicks.
(Cover by Clinton Pettee. The All-Story, October 1928. This issue ran Tarzan of the Apes in its entirety.)
Of course, pulp writing, along with the format associated with it, is dead, and in fact has been dead since before my parents were even born. Analog Science Fiction, formerly Astounding, is now the only genre magazine still standing which had begun its life as a pulp magazine. What little remains of the pulp years has long since found its way into book form, as novels, story collections, anthologies, what have you. The 1950s saw the extinction of the pulp magazine, with the last of these to have stuck with the format, Science Fiction Quarterly, ending with its February 1958 issue. The digest format, a sort of happy medium between the unsophisticated pulps and the decidedly bourgeois slicks, continued. Now, while the pulps were gone, they were by no means forgotten. If you love Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Tarzan, or a good film noir, just know that these things have their roots in the pulps. Hell, H. P. Lovecraft had much of his fiction published in Weird Tales, and indeed that lurid magazine was often the only market that would take his work. Given that the rates were poor, the paper was brittle, and the readership either very young or not too thoroughly educated, pulp fiction left quite a legacy. And within a couple decades there would be a book counterpart to the digest magazines—that is to say, popular fiction in book form that’s sort of pulpy but also sort of slick. There soon came a mode of writing that would embody the best (and worst) qualities of both its parents, and in part is has to do with paperbacks outselling magazines.
The market for genre magazines has evolved radically over the decades, so that the most successful ones running today are online, subsisting on either Patreon subscriptions or simply donations. There’s no debate, however, that the book, and more specifically the paperback, enjoys a far wider readership than any magazine you can name in [the current year]. Go to any bookstore, be it a Barnes & Noble or that indie place you frequent just around the corner, and you will find rows upon rows of paperbacks and hardcovers; meanwhile there may be a couple stalls for magazines, if any, and only a fraction of those will be magazines focusing on fiction. Now, it’s not exactly cheap to buy a paperback novel, unless you have a publisher’s line of paperbacks, like Oxford World’s Classics or Barnes & Noble Classics, that focus on printing “classic literature” at very reasonable prices. But most paperbacks will cost you something. My paperback copy of R. F. Kuang’s Babel (to use an example of a recent novel that a lot of people have read and liked) ran me $20, which feels almost as if Kuang herself (or rather her publisher in this case, HarperCollins) had beaten me over the head with a stick and called me ugly. Kuang is independently wealthy, even if she weren’t a popular writer; surely she (or rather HarperCollins) didn’t need my $20. Still, she writes for a broad audience, as in she writes popular fiction, and evidently she’s doing something right.
You know who else writes popular fiction? George R. R. Martin. One of our most famous living writers, regardless of genre. I’ve covered a few of his short works on this very site, and will do so again eventually. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is very popular, both in how many people read these books as well as the demographic Martin writes (or wrote) with in mind. But was that always the case? Did you know that the Daenarys chapters of A Game of Thrones first appeared as a novella in an issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, just a few months before A Game of Thrones found its way to bookstore shelves? If you were one of the relatively few people to have been subscribed to Asimov’s in 1996, you would’ve gotten a sneak peek at what has since become one of the most famous and controversial series in all of fantasy. Asimov’s is a digest magazine with, as I said, a healthy but ultimately modest readership. It’s not pulpy, but you also wouldn’t call it slick or popular. It’s sophisticated, but not that sophisticated. Martin himself has made no secret of being influenced by pulp fiction from the days of yore, namely SF published in Astounding before it became Analog. Indeed Martin’s biggest aspiration as a writer at the outset of his career was to get published in Analog, which he succeeded at. Nowadays people tend to overlook Martin’s pre-ASoIaF SFF, maybe because said fiction was not aimed at a general readership for the most part. I do suggest doing some digging and, for instance, reading the short fiction collected in Martin’s Dreamsongs.
Popular genre fiction takes the broad demographic and image of respectability from the slicks and combines that with the juvenile adventurousness of the pulps. The problem we’re now facing is that with the pulps long gone and the slick magazines not much more relevant, the options you have for reading some good SFF have narrowed. This is made worse by the phasing-out of the mass market paperback, which for a few decades served as like a book equivalent to a pulp magazine issue, in terms of paper quality, garishness, and affordability. The mass market paperback is smaller and cheaper than the trade paperback, but the latter has has finer and more flexible paper, not to mention an air of respectability. You can still find Martin’s old books as mass market paperbacks, but the same can’t be said for Kuang, or indeed other SFF authors of her age or even a generation older. Publishers used to get by on selling mass market paperbacks at $9 a pop, or magazine issues at the same price; but now they want your $20 for a trade paperback edition novel you might already have. Pulp and slick writing have merged, or maybe fallen together into a boiling pot, to create popular fiction, but this Frankenstein monster is itself a victim of capitalist greed. Clearly there’s a big audience for fancy trade paperbacks and even fancier hardcovers, but the problem (and I’m sort of paraphrasing Oscar Wilde here) is that audiences tend to be stupid.
Both Wikipedia and the SF Encyclopedia have little to say about Amelia Reynolds Long. She apparently lived a long but quiet life, born and died in Pennsylvania. She lived her whole adult life in Harrisburg, specifically. She got both her BA and MA from U Penn, and incidentally she earned her MA the same year “Omega” was published. Long was part of that first generation of women to write for the genre magazines, and along with Clare Winger Harris she had her work published under her full name. She wrote short SF somewhat prolifically from the late 1920s through much of the ’30s, but by the ’40s she turned away from SF to focus on writing mystery fiction. ISFDB is very useful for tracking authors’ writings, for the most part, but the folks in charge tend to neglect listing non-genre works, even with there being a non-genre section. Long stopped writing mystery fiction in the early ’50s to focus on writing poetry and editing textbooks. “Omega” is a pulpy but somewhat prescient SF-horror tale, seemingly written in homage to Edgar Allan Poe but with that touch of 1930s super-science that dominated the field until the tail end of the decade. Long challenged herself by telling a story of the last days of mankind without using time travel.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the July 1932 issue of Amazing Stories. It’s been reprinted in Avon Fantasy Reader No. 10 (ed. Donald Wollheim), Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The Wonder Years 1926-1935 (ed. Martin H. Greenberg), and Beyond Time: Classic Tales of Time Unwound (ed. Mike Ashley). Sorry, it doesn’t seem to be public domain yet.
Enhancing Image
Professor Michael Claybridge is giving us a testimony of a pretty unusual event, that being an experiment in which a man, under hypnotic suggestion, took on the persona of the last man to live on Earth—tens of thousands of years in the future. This was an experiment conducted by a friend and colleague of Claybridge’s, Professor Mortimer, and the subject was a man named Williams. From hereon I’ll be summarizing the plot in the present tense, but we can gather from Claybridge’s tone and choice of words in the beginning that this experiment was successful—maybe too successful. The session is a way to test what Mortimer calls “mental time,” his theory that there are two ways in which we understand time: materially and mentally. More importantly, he argues that the latter is just as legitimate and has as much bearing on human perception as material time. Mortimer had already tested this on a willing subject who claimed to have experienced life in the time of Napoleon, but Claybridge is understandably skeptical about this. It’s one thing to claim to have lived, for a moment in your mind’s eye, in a different country a century ago, but what about the future? What about the end of the world as we know it?
People who know their classic horror should immediately think of Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which on top of being horror is also arguably an example of proto-SF. Hugo Gernsback certainly thought so, even printing it in the inaugural issue of Amazing Stories. Both “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and “Omega” are examples of SF having to do with hypnotism, or mesmerism as it’s also called, a topic that doesn’t come up so much nowadays but which can be considered a soft science. Hypnotism tends to be written off these days as pseudo-science rather than soft science, not helped because its most prominent influence on the real world in living memory is its connection with Dianetics and the Church of Scientology. Indeed, what Mortimer’s been testing with “mental time” sounds like a more inoccuous precursor to what L. Ron Hubbard and his followers would be doing just a few decades later. Going back to Poe’s story, that one has to do with the titular Valdemar, an old man, who is put under hypnosis while on his deathbed, with the results being disconcerting, to say the least. Williams, a man who is on the run from the law on account of murder, but who is unable to kill himself despite a guilty conscience since his religion “forbids suicide,” signs up for Mortimer’s experiment.
Mortimer (rightly) suspects the experiment, like in Poe’s story, will go sideways somehow, so he has Williams sign a waver and with a hefty cash reward of $5,000. Where Mortimer got the money from, I’m not sure, especially this supposed to be in 1926 (when the story is set) dollars. You may also be wondering how Claybridge contributes to this experiment: he doesn’t really. Well, on a metatextual level Claybridge is there so that we have a “grounded” and journalistic viewpoint on what sounds like a bunch of quackery. In-story the justification is that despite his better instincts he’s become morbidly curious about what Williams might say while under hypnosis. The scene of the action is a room that’s been cleared out for this purpose, described as follows:
It was windowless, with only a skylight in the ceiling to admit light and air. Aside from the chair in which Williams sat, there was no furniture save an instrument resembling an immense telephone transmitter that a crane arm held about two inches from the hypnotized man’s mouth, and a set of ear phones, such as a telephone operator wears, which were attached to his ears. But strangest of all, the walls, floors, and ceiling of the room were lined with a whitish metal.
Basically we have a white metallic cube with only a skylight for air and light, said skylight figuring into the story’s ending. While under hypnosis Williams is made to recount the last six days (in “Biblical time,” as in Genesis) of life on Earth, from the perspective of man—not any specific man, but sort of the inverse of ancestral memory. In a voice that isn’t his own, Williams gives us the story of the last days of mankind, and a planet that has gone very hot and very wet, before finally the seas dry up and the last lifeforms on Earth wither. For the record, as someone who’s read Genesis a couple days, I’m not really sure what Mortimer means by this way of keeping time. There’s material time and mental time, but then there’s Biblical time. If you’ve read even a few books from the Old Testaments, the unknown authors of these books had some pretty funny ideas about how time works. Anyway, we’re given a tour of life, more than 40,000 years into the future. It’s here that Claybridge as both narrator and character evaporates, to say nothing of Mortimer and Williams, as the story turns away from plot and even character to focus on what I have to think is honest speculation.
There was some dying earth SF prior to “Omega,” albeit not a lot of it. Pretty memorably the hero of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine travels millions of years into the future in the climax of that novella, to find an Earth that’s become all but inhospitable. There was also William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, from 1912, which itself would prove quite influential on science fiction and fantasy about Earth in its twilight years, not least of them being Jack Vance’s own The Dying Earth. Long’s way of getting around having to send her characters forward in time in order to give us a glimpse of Earth in such a state also anticipates John W. Campbell’s “Twilight,” which has been reprinted far more often and is in some ways the less dated story. Campbell’s technique is more fluid and “mature” than Long’s, although it must be said Long’s story doesn’t have the unfortunate bits of anti-black racism that crop up in “Twilight.” This is a nice way of saying “Omega” now reads as stilted and rather basic, although it would not been taken as such in 1932. The dialogue especially can be hard to stomach now, but that part mostly goes out the window once Williams tells his story.
There Be Spoilers Here
Not only does Williams feel psychological agony from the hell of Earth’s distant future, but Mortimer isn’t even able to pull him fully out of his hypnotic state. Much like how poor Valdemar is able to keep talking even after death (sorry for spoilering a story that came out 180 years ago), Williams is unable to break out of this “last man” persona. Things go from bad to worse when on “the sixth day” something totally unexplainable happens: as Williams’s persona dies, the man himself seems to get atomized, with only his charred clothes remaining. The skylight from above killed Williams like how sunlight typically kills a vampire. Well, at least those $5,000 would presumably go to his sister.
A Step Farther Out
By the time “Omega” was published, Amazing Stories was no longer the top dog in the small world of magazine SF. Hell, Astounding was a couple years away still from holding that title. Keeping in mind that we’re reading a story from a magazine that had gone from being a pioneer to second-rate in just a handful of years, “Omega” ain’t half bad. It’s simple, and ultimately isn’t trying to say anything all that meaningful about the future of mankind, but its simplicity and egalitarian attitude are to its credit. I said before that Campbell’s “Twilight” takes a similar premise and executes it perhaps more memorably (readers certainly thought that was the case), but “Omega” doesn’t have that certain awkwardness of Campbell’s story which makes it hard to recommend these days.
