We seem to be living in a world of shit, or at least it’s easy to think that way. The irony is that the people who think this the most are also probably (being queer and disabled I’m actually not sure how I’m gonna turn out) the ones most likely to come out of all this bullshit unharmed—in body, if not in soul or mind. But, the show continues. I thought I had more to say for this month’s forecast, and at this point I think it’s fair to say my Things Beyond posts have become like actual weather forecasts (I predict, but that doesn’t mean the thing will 100% happen); but still, aside from a couple things I’m sure we all know about already, the past month has been uneventful. I got my purchases for Worldcon at basically the last minute, so I’ll be seeing what I can see of the con virtually if not in person, and with any luck I’ll even be on a couple panels, as one of those inside-a-computer people. I’ve been slowly but surely moving “up” in the world of fandom.
Anyway, for decades we’ve got two stories from the 1920s, one from the 1940s, one from the 1970s, one from the 1990s, and one from the 1890s. As for the stories themselves, we have…
For the serial:
Sunfire by Francis Stevens. Serialized in Weird Tales, July-August to September 1923. Francis Stevens is the androgynous-sounding pseudonym of one Gertrude Bennett, who for just a few years wrote prolifically for the pulp magazines, apparently to help pay the bills. Once her sickly mother died, she stopped writing fiction, with Sunfire being the last story of hers published. It would take more than seventy years for this story to appear in book form.
A Story of the Days to Come by H. G. Wells. Serialized in Amazing Stories, April to May 1928. First published in 1899. Wells is perhaps the most crucial pioneer of science fiction; aside from maybe Edgar Allan Poe he stands as arguably the genre’s nucleus. This is made more remarkable since Wells wrote his most famous work over the span of only about a decade. This story comes from said decade of greatness, but I guess due to its length it remains overlooked.
For the novellas:
“The Glowing Cloud” by Steven Utley. From the January 1992 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Utley was born in Kentucky, at Fort Knox (he was a military brat), before moving to Texas (Austin), and then finally Tennessee. He wrote prolifically in the ’70s, all of it short fiction, as one of the post-New Wave generation. He then fell mostly silent in the ’80s before reemerging in the early ’90s.
“To Fit the Crime” by Joe Haldeman. From the April 1971 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Haldeman, like Utley, came about during the post-New Wave era; he had spent the New Wave years in college, and then in Vietnam, where he got damn near killed. Once his wounds healed enough he got to work writing SF. This story here is the first in a loose series, starring Otto McGavin.
For the short stories:
“When the Bough Breaks” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. From the November 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novelette. I had missed the boat on reviewing Moore solo last month, and I can’t review Kuttner solo next month either; so together here they go. Kuttner and Moore were of course married, and they’re also two of my favorite writers.
“The End of the Party” by Graham Greene. From the December 1950 issue of Worlds Beyond. First published in 1932. Greene was famous in his day as both a serious novelist and a writer of espionage thrillers, although the two were not mutually exclusive. He also occasionally dabbled in supernatural horror, with this story being one of his own personal favorite works despite its age.
(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, July 1935.)
Happy New Year. Blow confetti. Get drunk. Maybe kiss and cuddle a friend or significant other of yours. Although of course you would’ve done that last night. A lot of stores are closed today, because work sucks and the reality is that with a few notable exceptions nobody really wants to work. I hope this message finds you well. There will be a couple changes to this site, which mind you does not mean bad news at all. Frankly those of you who frequent here might not even notice the one “negative” change, that being the fact that given my current life circumstances I can no longer guarantee that a post will be finished on the date I expect it to be. For two years I kept to a pretty strict release schedule with my posts, but after moving into my own place, with all the pros and cons that come with that, I would expect more posts to get delayed by, say, a day, if I were in your position. Occasionally I might not even be able to post a review that I said I would; this happened a few times actually, since November, and I think it’s time to acknowledge that while I try to be prolific, I can only do so much, from a mix of life changes and depression. Also that’s why I’m reviewing a story I was supposed to write about in November, but never got around to even reading it, that being Eleanor Arnason’s “Checkerboard Planet.”
Now, in good news…
The serials department is back, after I had announced at the start of last year that I would only be covering short stories, novellas, and complete novels in 2024. I had thought about what would be the first serial to commemorate the department’s coming back from hiatus, and ultimately I figured it had to be something big. Thus I went with a Robert Heinlein novel I’ve not read before, and truth be told Heinlein’s juveniles are a bit of a blind spot for me in my knowledge of his work; I’ve read a few of them, my favorite probably being Between Planets, but I should certainly read more. It’s also been too long since I last covered Heinlein here.
In other good news, we have another magazine to pay tribute to this year, albeit not on quite the same scale as what I did with F&SF. As you may or may not know, Galaxy Science Fiction launched with the October 1950 issue, making October (or September, depending on how you look at it) of this year its 75th anniversary. Along with F&SF, Galaxy played a pivotal role in reshaping who and what got published in genre SF following Astounding‘s near-stranglehold on the field the previous decade. Especially in the ’50s, a disproportionate number of now-classic stories and novels first saw print in the pages of Galaxy, under the ingenious (if also tyrannical) editorship of H. L. Gold. Unfortunately Galaxy had a bit of a rough history after its first decade, going through a few editors and experiencing declining sales before finally being put out of its misery in 1980. It only lasted thirty years, which admittedly is still better than what most SFF magazines get, but during that time it was arguably the finest magazine of its kind. So, in March, July, and October, as with last year, I’ll be reviewing only short stories, this time from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s respectively, and all from Galaxy. I’ll also be reviewing one short story, novella, or serial from Galaxy every month apart from that. This should be a good deal of fun.
Now what do we have on our plate?
For the serial:
Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, September to December 1957. Heinlein is that rare author who really needs no introduction, but who no doubt deserves one. He made his debut in 1939, at the fine age of 32 but having already entered the field more or less fully formed as a writer; it helps that he had already written a novel, albeit one that had initially gone unpublished, at this point. From the late ’40s to the end of the ’50s he wrote a series of “juveniles,” which helped lay the groundwork for we would now call YA SF. Citizen of the Galaxy was one of the last of these juveniles, and as far as I can tell its serialization occurred more or less simultaneously with its book publication.
For the novellas:
“The Organleggers” by Larry Niven. From the January 1969 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Reprinted thereafter as “Death by Ecstasy.” One of those old-fashioned planet-builders who appeared just as the New Wave was getting started, Niven very much follows in the footsteps of Poul Anderson and Jack Vance. “The Organleggers” is the first in a series of SF-detective stories starring Gil Hamilton.
“In the Problem Pit” by Frederik Pohl. From the September 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Pohl is one of those people who can claim to have taken part in pretty much every aspect of SF publication, from author and editor to literary agent. He edited Galaxy and If in the ’60s, to much acclaim, but in the early ’70s he gave up editing returned to writing fiction regularly.
For the short stories:
“Checkerboard Planet” by Eleanor Arnason. From the December 2016 issue of Clarkesworld. Judging from her rate of output you might think Arnason a more recent author, but in fact she was born in 1942 and made her debut back in 1973. She’s been an activist for left-liberal causes since the ’60s but did not start writing full-time until 2009, hence her recent uptick in productivity.
“Jirel Meets Magic” by C. L. Moore. From the July 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Moore might not be a mainstream figure in genre fiction, but she and her first husband, Henry Kuttner, have a strongly passionate following among older readers. With justification. She’s a favorite of mine. It’s been almost two years since I reviewed the first two Jirel of Joiry stories, which is far too long a wait.
Edward Bryant was born in New York, but raised in Wyoming and even went to college there; and it was the latter’s desolate landscape that very much inspired today’s story. Bryant made his professional debut in 1970, just as the New Wave was hitting its peak before going downhill, such that he would be one of the more acclaimed post-New Wave writers of the ’70s. He never wrote a novel solo, although he did collaborate on a few; but it was the short story that Bryant was really keen on, such that he managed to win back-to-back Nebulas for “Stone” and “giANTS.” Similarly “Strata” also garnered a Nebula nomination. Bryant also has, I suppose you could say the honor of having a hitherto unpublished story appear in The Last Dangerous Visions, although whether the wait was worth it or not is unclear. Bryant died in 2017, and The Last Dangerous Visions came out in 2024. While known for his SF, Bryant also wrote his fair share of horror; he did, after all, appear in the seminal horror anthology Dark Forces. “Strata” is an SF-horror hybrid, albeit leaning more into the latter genre.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was then reprinted in Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Tenth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), A Spadeful of Spacetime (ed. Fred Saberhagen), Fantasy Annual IV (ed. Terry Carr), Dinosaurs! (ed. Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois), Strange Dreams (ed. Stephen R. Donaldson), and the Bryant collections Wyoming Sun and Particle Theory.
Enhancing Image
“Strata” is a novelette, but feels shorter and smaller in scale than it is, which is mostly a good thing. I have to admit that the first few pages made me worry, since I think Bryant gets us started on the wrong foot, namely with the problem that the opening is loaded with exposition, most of which will turn out to be quite unnecessary. We’re introduced to a group of four friends, who in a flashback are celebrating their high school graduation: Steve Mavrakis, Carroll Dale (“It became second nature early on to explain to people first hearing her given name that it had two r’s and two I’s.”), Paul Onoda, and Ginger McClelland. Steve is our POV character, more or less, so it’d be fair to call him the protagonist, although he’s not a hero by any means—not to say he’s an anti-hero, but rather he’s mostly an average dude who’s also heavily implied to be autistic. Paul is the only non-white member of the group, being Japanese-American, and indeed his parents had spent time in an internment camp during World War II. There are implications with how Bryant uses Paul as the token non-white character that I don’t like, or which at least show the story’s age, but I at least understand the symbolic purpose behind using someone who comes from a persecuted racial minority. This is a story about the ugly side of American history, namely racism and colonialism, indeed the side of this country’s history that continues to reverberate in the present. It’s also a story about the baby boomers, of which Bryant and his characters are members, and how this generation, which would have come of age in the ’60s and ’70s, ran into a certain problem.
On the night of their graduation, the four kids ran into something, while hanging out and “necking” right outside Shoshoni, which I found out is a real town in Wyoming (I also recently discovered that human beings do in fact live in Wyoming, albeit not many), although it’s not something any of them can easily describe. While Paul is the token POC of the group, Steve is the token neurodivergant member, which seems to give him supernatural powers not too unlike Stephen King’s shining; his dreams are strange, even by the standards of most dreams, and no doubt they have a prophetic quality to them. Steve is shown to have a keen intelligence, but is reported as being a mediocre student, and he also has trouble interacting with people. How he then grew up to become a journalist I’m not sure. The writing of autistic characters and characters with various mental illnesses has a long and rather bleak history, since the public treatment of people with such conditions has only become to improve relatively recently, and those who have written on such persons are mostly looking from inside a glass house. It’s not unusual for neurodivergant characters in classic literature to be depicted as different in a way that implies the supernatural, one of the most famous (or infamous) examples being Benji Compson in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, who seems to experience the past and present simultaneously. Similarly when Steve has visions of the prehistoric past bleeding into the canyons of present-day Wyoming it’s like a layer of film superimposed on top of another. The most memorable and eerie of these visions, which naturally happens during one of his dreams, is Steve imagining himself as an animal with fins instead of hands. This is strange at first, but it only gets stranger when the four friends reunite fifteen years later.
The canyons of Wyoming are haunted, although by what is unclear at first. “Strata” attempts, through some exposition on Paul’s part, to provide an SFnal explanation for the things the four friends see, but it’s ultimately a ghost story; there are ghosts in the quite literal sense, but there’s also the ghost of the American frontier’s bloody past. I can see why this got a Nebula nomination, less so for the execution, which I find to be a bit clunky, and more for the ideas Bryant plays with; he’s hunting some intellectual big game here, although I think the story could’ve used another draft. Steve and company run afoul of malign spirits, although they’re not the spirits of dead indigenous peoples, but instead animal life that lived in this part of the country (although, as Steve points out, it would’ve been an ocean depending on the time period) over a hundred million years ago. In particular there’s what seems to be unnamed ancient marine reptile, large, carnivorous, and with big fins, which stalks the group. I had heard this was a story that involves dinosaurs, which I can now say is a bit misleading, not least because ancient marine reptiles were not dinosaurs. We also see at one point what looks to be a pterosaur, which mind you is also not a dinosaur. Bryant does something curious in that he clearly wants us to think of these ghostly animals as stand-ins for the wrong indigenous people who still live in that region of the country; meanwhile the actual indigenous people Steve and company come across remain on the margins of the story, barely mentioned, let alone given a chance to connect explicitly with the ghosts. But while textually something is lacking, subtextually what Bryant wants us to think about still worms into our minds.
Bryant and his characters are boomers, in the proper sense that they were born around or following the end of World War II, with Bryant himself being born about a week before Japan surrendered. The boomers are now typically derided by members of younger generations for being exceedingly selfish, short-sighted, and unwilling to take responsibility for how they may have negatively impact the world. Whereas the silent generation grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression, the boomers were born into an America which was rapidly on its way to becoming the world’s leading superpower, and with an economy and expanding middle class to show for it. World War II was a pyrrhic victory for the British empire, which came out of the war more or less in shambles, and having to resort to a kind of soft coddling welfare-socialism in order to rebuild itself. The Soviet Union came out second place, having fought back the Nazis in an impressive show of force, albeit suffering almost inconceivable losses of life in the process, showcasing a very different (and much more brutal) kind of socialism from the British. So the US became, almost overnight, the crowning beacon of capitalism for all the world to see. The boomers, growing up, probably thought this prosperity (for white people, anyway) would last forever—the only problem, at least according to a lot of boomers, being that it didn’t. The dream had, at some point, been pawned, and for what? It’s a problem that lurks in the minds of Bryant and his characters, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “Strata” is about boomers who would not only have come of age but would been in their early-to-mid thirties.
There Be Spoilers Here
It’s ambiguous just how much the ghosts are able to interact with the world of the living. At one point we see a deer that’s been bisected, but we’re not sure what did it; could’ve been a car, or it could’ve been something else. The encounter with the giant marine reptile in the climax is also ambiguously framed, but nevertheless the car goes offroad and crashes, and Paul dies as a result, his neck “all wrong.” Indeed something must have gone wrong a long time ago, for the spirits of the dead in this region to be so vicious. The survivors at the end are left wondering if they’re in some way responsible for the hauntings of the land, or if there’s even still time to turn back. The land has had its vengeance, not for the first time and probably not for the last time either. It’s an ominous ending, somewhat ambiguous, which I think sends off the story on a much stronger note than how it started. Paul dying and leaving the lily-white characters to fend for themselves leaves sort of a bad taste in my mouth, but this might’ve been intentional.
A Step Farther Out
I liked thinking about this one more than I liked reading it, which may or may not be a good thing considering you might spend more time thinking about something than reading it.
(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Magazine of Horror, July 1968.)
Who Goes There?
It’s not every day you get to talk about a Nobel winner for your genre fiction review blog, but here we are. Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865, right at the end of the year, to British parents in India. Kipling was one of the few real prodigies in prose writing; while it’s not too surprising he started writing poetry from a very young age (although he didn’t consider himself much of a poet), he also showed himself pretty much off the bat as a consummate writer of short stories. That he also got a job as a journalist while still a teenager goes to explain his professionalism, but also his (at least when he was young) unadorned style, such that his straightforwardness partly inspired the title of his first big story collection, Plain Tales from the Hills. He would later write The Jungle Books, Just So Stories, and other collections of stories. His 1901 novel Kim was one of the first modern espionage novels, sort of, although it’s much more than just an exotic spy thriller. To this day he’s the youngest to ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature, being just 41 at the time, an age that would be unthinkable for an author nowadays; but like I said, Kipling started early and he ended up writing a lot.
Kipling also wrote a good deal of genre fiction, pretty much of every stripe, including what we now call science fiction. Like seemingly every British writer of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, though, he really had a soft spot for the supernatural horror story—granted that his supernatural stories weren’t always horror. But Kipling came from a generation of Britons who apparently loved telling and writing ghost stories, partly to make a bit of extra money but also for some gather-around-the-fire entertainment. “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” was published on the eve of Kipling’s twentieth birthday; yet despite being a teenager when he wrote it, and despite a bit of roughness, it shows a very promising young writer who has already nailed down the basics to an eerie extent.
Placing Coordinates
First published in 1885, it first appeared in book form in The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Tales in 1888, the same year as Plain Tales from the Hills. On top of the July 1968 issue of Magazine of Horror you can find it in H. P. Lovecraft Selects: Classic Horror Stories (ed. Stefan Dziemianowicz), The Big Book of Ghost Stories (ed. Otto Penzler), and The Body-Snatcher and Other Classic Ghost Stories (ed. Michael Kelahan). By all rights I should recommend the meaty tome Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror and Fantasy, but having gotten a copy for myself, I have to say the proofreading is abysmal, to the point where there seems to be a typo every other page. Fine. You can read “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” on Project Gutenberg.
Enhancing Image
This story technically has two narrators, the first being unnamed and presumably a fictionalized version of Kipling himself. The first narrator serves as a walking framing device, telling of the unfortunate demise of his friend Jack Pansay, who supposedly died of some wasting disease, but who according to his own written testimony (he wrote of his experiences in the last few months of his life), the cause is something quite different. Writing with “a sick man’s command of language,” the now-deceased Pansay tells us, in his own words, of the horror that befell him. A few things to say first, not the least being that even with this short opening section, which gives context to the switching of narrators, Kipling’s ear for dialogue is on-point. We only see him a few times, but the quack doctor Heatherlegh is memorable both for his quirkiness and his seeming incompetence, or rather cluelessness as to what could be ailing Pansay. Pansay himself is indicative of the kind of anti-hero Kipling was fond of writing for his early set-in-India horror yarns: the haughty Englishman who learns a harsh lesson. Some of Kipling’s characters live to put what they learned into practice, but Pansay is not one of them. (Of course, since we already know what has become of the main character, this is a rather hard story to spoil.)
A few years ago, Pansay had an affair with a married woman, one Agnes Wessington, fellow Briton traveling in India, and the two worked out well—for a while. But Pansay grew tired of her, which was not in itself unusual, as he confesses to us he tires of his partners sooner or later, the only problem being Mrs. Wessington did not feel the same way. “Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have wearied of me as I wearied of them; seventy-five of that number would have promptly avenged themselves by active and obtrusive flirtation with other men. Mrs. Wessington was the hundredth.” Since it is surprisingly hard to ghost someone in the 1880s, Pansay struggles to get her off his back before making clear that he is no longer interested in the relationship. Mrs. Wessington doesn’t take the rejection well, although rather than plot revenge or running back to her husband, she simply… withers. Eventually she dies of a wasting disease, similarly to how Pansay goes, but it’s clear that what really killed her was a broken heart. Pansay feels a pang of remorse about this, mixed with a hateful resentment towards the poor woman, even after she has died—but he’ll learn the error of his ways soon enough. When Mrs. Wessington dies it had been a couple years since Pansay dumped her, and since then he’d moved on to another woman, Kitty Mannering. There’s no going back.
Mind you that despite being a ghost story, and despite the setup leading us to expect a certain chain of revenge, this is not a revenge narrative; rather it’s a narrative about guilt and misogyny. Pansay, in trying to rid himself of Mrs. Wessington, comes to loathe her but also pity her, these two very different emotions clashing, and so he mistreats her even as he tries to cement the bad news in her mind. “I was the offender, and I knew it. That knowledge transformed my pity into passive endurance, and, eventually, into blind hate—the same instinct, I suppose, which prompts a man to savagely stamp on the spider he has but half killed.” I was taken back by this a bit, because truth be told, as someone who considers themself a Kipling fan, issues of feminism and womanhood are not his strong suit—at least early on. He would later write some pretty memorable and well-rounded heroines in stories like “Mary Postgate” and “The Gardener,” but a childish sort of misogyny runs through some of his early fiction. Indeed woman-forsaking bachelorhood is treated as something to be aspired to (and conversely, something to be mourned when it is lost) in one of my favorite Kipling stories, “‘The Finest Stories in the World.’” Kipling, like pretty much every great writer, is someone with a few internal contradictions: he was a proud Englishman, but ended up marrying an American woman; he was a lifelong imperialist, with the belief that the British empire really had Indians’ best interests at heart, yet some of his writings come off as deeply ambivalent about government. To paraphrase George Orwell (who, like me, was a socialist and thus not a fan of Kipling’s politics), Kipling’s brand of conservatism doesn’t really exist in the US, UK, and Canada.
Of course, Kipling’s brand of misogyny is in itself sort of alien in today’s Anglosphere, in that he was not actively a woman-hater who believed women were basically property with legs; rather he believed in a softer kind of misogyny that modern-day liberals would probably find agreeable, in that he believed women and men are different on some fundamental level (a level that transphobes have a hard time defining, despite their “best” efforts), with women being fragile in some immaterial way. Granted that this is all told from Pansay’s POV, but Mrs. Wessington and Kitty are both depicted as overly emotional and temperamental, being more beholden to the id than the superego, whereas Pansay’s problem (aside from the titular ghostly ‘rickshaw that haunts him) is that he’s torn apart by having too active a conscience. Another way of looking at it is that Pansay didn’t have enough of a conscience before Mrs. Wessington’s death, but the haunting presence of her ‘rickshaw (a two-wheeled carriage, for those who forgot), with its spectral bearers (or “jhampanies” as they’re called), drives him to realize that he had indirectly killed someone who had meant him no harm. That the story is a bit overlong in getting to this point says that Kipling had not yet gotten down the flow of narrative pacing (a gift he would use with extreme prejudice in just a few years), but he’s getting there. “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” is not a scary story, nor does it try that hard to be scary in the first place, but it’s compelling and psychologically thorny.
There Be Spoilers Here
Something I was thinking about while reading “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” was a fallacy in first-person narrative writing that even hardened professionals make, which is that the narrator, telling a story in the past tense and thus something that has already happened, makes remarks on their story as if they were currently experiencing it, without time to think retrospectively on the events. At least here, though, Kipling averts the fallacy by having there be a time skip in Pansay’s writing; he has, after all, spent a fair amount of time writing about the thing which is now killing him. As the end looks to be nigh, Pansay comes to grips with the notion of dying, and also that he was in a way responsible for Mrs. Wessington’s death, his only concern being what will happen to him after he dies, since he is convinced that there is such a thing as a life after this one—a kind of afterlife which doesn’t look inviting, if it’s true. His final comment, and by extension the story’s final paragraph, is a haunting one, so I’ll just repeat it here: “In justice, too, pity her. For as surely as ever woman was killed by man, I killed Mrs. Wessington. And the last portion of my punishment is ever now upon me.”
A Step Farther Out
I was indulging myself a bit with this one, as an aforesaid Kipling fan, although I had not read “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” before and there was a very real chance it would disappoint. (Truth be told, I’m not the biggest fan of Kim or the first Jungle Book.) But Kipling, even baby-faced Kipling, often delivers the goods, as he does here.
Been a while, hasn’t it? By that I mean, little over a week. For some bloggers this is not unusual, to go a week or even a couple weeks without posting; but for me it’s different, as I like to think one of the things that makes this blog different is its regularity. I would post something every three or four days, or even sometimes twice in as many days, and in hindsight I’m not sure how I did that for two years while only occasionally slipping by, say, posting something a day later than I had intended. The idea was that like a magazine having a monthly or bimonthly release schedule, my posts would come out at regular intervals. As you know, I’ve spent this year covering a lot of stories from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary. Unfortunately there’s been a bitter irony to my decision to go on a mini-hiatus, as F&SF has also been falling behind with its scheduling. Years ago they went from monthly to bimonthly, and this year those at the top announced the magazine would now be quarterly, with the big 75th anniversary issue presumably hitting newsstands in December. This is bad news no matter how you look at it. F&SF seems to be run by maybe five people plus a small army of hamsters on wheels, and they’ve fallen so far behind on publishing and even accepting stories that authors have had to retract their stories months after submitting and with no feedback. This has been a bittersweet year for F&SF.
It’s also been bittersweet for me, although more recently leaning toward the sweet. I’ve been through a few turbulent relationships this year, but I also started going to therapy, got a prescription for antidepressants and a hormone blocker, plus I recently got to spend time with one of my partners. I got my annual raise at my job, although it wasn’t worth much. I moved into my first apartment, living partly off of savings. It’s funny, I probably have more time (and certainly space) to myself than I ever had since college, yet I’ve found it harder to write for this damn thing. Call it a soft case of writer’s block. I talked with my therapist about this last week and she suggested that maybe it’s because I wrote for SFF Remembrance partly to get away from living under the same roof as my parents—mentally if not physically. That’s not to say my home life was objectively miserable before, but one can only be so happy living in a cage, even if it’s well-ornamented. I’m now freer than I’ve ever been—which means I also don’t have as much motivation to write now. It doesn’t come as naturally to me as it did before. There was some kind of tradeoff I was not told about in advance. I could be happier and be less productive, or more miserable but more productive—or at least that’s how I interpret it. And then there’s the fucking election. On a macro scale things are looking bad for a lot of us, on the horizon, but for me personally life has been kind to me as of late.
But, sooner or later, the show must continue.
I said months ago that for the “normal” months I’d be covering two stories from F&SF, a novella and short story, or two of either; but I neglected to mention full novels. In fairness, this is a truly exceptional scenario, as Algis Budrys’s Hard Landing might be the only instance of a novel being printed wholesale in a single issue of F&SF. I could be wrong. I’m making a bit of an exception by covering it, plus two short stories from that magazine. Why not? This is the last chance I’ve given myself to do such a thing, at least for a while. This will also be the last time I’m not covering serials, as I’ll be bringing that department back in January, with a bang. The world may go to shit, but we’ll have fun. And before you ask, the three stories I neglected to cover last month will get their due—eventually.
For the novellas:
“Code Three” by Rick Raphael. From the February 1963 issue of Analog Science Fiction. Raphael would write a small number of short stories and novellas over the next decade, but despite living to a reasonably old age (he died just short of his 75th birthday), he wrote very little fiction overall. His work is in such disarray that some of it has fallen out of copyright, including “Code Three,” which would make up the first part of the fix-up novel of the same name. So of course he “won” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.
“Recovering Apollo 8” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. From the February 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Short Form Alternate History and placed first in the Asimov’s readers’ poll for Best Novella. For this final month of paying tribute to F&SF I figured I should cover another author who was at one point one of its editors. Rusch took over in 1991 and for the next six years gave F&SF a darker, one might say more gothic bent, and it helps that she was also the magazine’s first female editor.
For the short stories:
“The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” by Rudyard Kipling. From the July 1968 issue of Magazine of Horror. First published in 1885. The first and possibly only time we’ll be covering a Nobel winner on this site, Kipling wrote a good deal of SF, fantasy, and horror, on top of more realistic fiction and poetry. He wrote “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” when he was 19, but he was already showing signs of greatness.
“The Christmas Witch” by M. Rickert. From the December 2006 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Mary Rickert is a Wisconsin native who made her debut in 1999, in F&SF, and from then on it would remain her most frequent outlet. She doesn’t seem to have written much if any SF, preferring fantasy and horror. I needed at least one Christmas-themed story, so…
“It Takes a Thief” by Walter M. Miller, Jr. From the May 1952 issue of If. Before the phenomenon that is A Canticle for Leibowitz, Miller wrote prolifically at short lengths, with 1952 being an especially productive year for him. I find myself gradually becoming a Miller fan, helped by his writing candidly about religion, existential crises, and mental illness—things he experienced first-hand.
“A Runaway World” by Clare Winger Harris. From the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales. Harris was supposedly the first woman to write genre SF under her own name, and by the time she entered the field she had written her first and only novel, Persephone of Eleusis. Like too many old-timey female SFF writers she wrote a streak of short stories over the course of a decade, then stopped.
“Skulking Permit” by Robert Sheckley. From the December 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Like Algis Budrys, and indeed Walter M. Miller, Sheckley debuted in the early ’50s and probably could not have found enough markets for his kind of fiction (often urbane satire) any earlier than that. But he contributed prolifically to Galaxy, and the two were practically made for each other.
“Strata” by Edward Bryant. From the August 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Bryant was one of the curious new talents of the post-New Wave era, having debuted in 1970, and wrote almost entirely short fiction. “Strata” is one of several stories inspired by Bryant’s childhood in Wyoming, and I have to admit I also picked it for the reason that it involves dinosaurs.
For the complete novel:
Hard Landing by Algis Budrys. From the October-November 1992 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. While Kristine Kathryn Rusch was at one point F&SF‘s editor, Budrys was a regular columnist for the magazine for about 15 years, until he stepped down from that position, incidentally around the same time Isaac Asimov stopped writing F&SF‘s science articles (on account of dying). But Budrys, who had made his debut in the early ’50s, was very much alive still, and while he no longer did book reviews for F&SF, the early ’90s were a busy time for him, as he hosted the annual (and controversial, because of the Scientology connection) Writers of the Future contest, began editing the semi-pro magazine Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, and wrote Hard Landing, which would be his final novel.
Once more into the breach before the year ends, eh?
(Cover by Richard Schmand. Startling Mystery Stories, Summer 1969)
Who Goes There?
Sorry that this is a day late. I hope this sort of thing doesn’t become regular, but for what it’s worth my review was not delayed because of bad news; on the contrary, things are looking up for me personally, even if it looks like we’re all going to Hell in a handbasket.
Ramsey Campbell was only 23 when “The Scar” was published, but he had already been a published writer for five years at that point. He had been discovered by August Derleth, in what was probably Derleth’s biggest discovery in his later years, and his debut would be a collection released through Arkham House, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants. That Campbell was barely even old enough to vote did little to stop him from entering the fast track to becoming one of horror literature’s more respected authors. Campbell would eventually turn to novels, in prolific fashion, but for the first decade of his career he stuck exclusively to short stories, which especially in the ’60s (there were few markets for horror literature at the time) was not exactly a recipe for mainstream success. As early as his first collection Campbell showed himself to be a devotee of weird fiction and cosmic horror, and he would even an original story published in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I was surprised, then, to find that while “The Scar” very much deals with the uncanny, it’s much more about psychology than cosmic expanse—about inner space as opposed to outer.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the Summer 1969 issue of Startling Mystery Stories. It has actually been reprinted a decent number of times, including The Year’s Best Horror Stories, No. 1 (ed. Richard Davis), Lost Souls: A Collection of English Ghost Stories (ed. Jack Sullivan), and the Campbell collections Dark Feasts: The World of Ramsey Campbell and Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961-1991.
Enhancing Image
Fair warning that this story, while good, is very British.
Things should be going smoothly at the Rossiter house, and yet there’s some tension behind closed doors. Lindsay Rice and his brother-in-law Jack Rossiter are very different men with different temperaments, and who evidently deal with different financial circumstances. Lindsay (from what I can tell) is an office drone while Jack runs a jewelry store, which he takes a lot of pride in. Lindsay isn’t exactly poor, but he clearly is envious of his sister Harriet having married someone petit bourgeois like Jack, that the two own a house with two fine kids while Lindsay hovers around them like a fly on shit, quietly ashamed of his own meager living situation. “But he never had the courage to invite them to his flat; […] he knew it wasn’t good enough for them.” One night Lindsay tries striking up conversation with Jack, and it goes pretty much disastrously, with Lindsay mentioning, among other thingss, that he had recently encountered a dead ringer for Jack while on the bus, the only big difference being that this doppelganger had a scar running from his left temple to his jaw. Of course the thing with doppelgangers is that if you see your own then you will die soon, but as Jack points out, since Lindsay had sseen Jack’s doppelganger then he should be fine. If it’s an attempt at a joke it doesn’t go over well. Lindsay also brings up the jewelry store possibly getting robbed, this being another attempt at humor, and Jack takes it even worse. The two are not getting along, sadly.
(One quibble I have with this story that bothers me and probably no one else is that the characters all call each other by their first names, naturally, but the third-person narrator consistently calls Lindsay by his last name. He’s the only character who gets this treatment, I have to assume because Harriet and Jack have the same last name. I understand English naming conventions can be weird and I’ve been guilty of being inconsistent with calling characters by their first or last name during a review.)
“The Scar” is, among other things, about self-fulfilling prophecies and time folding in on itself. Things that are talked about happen at a later time. The real world seems to be out for lunch as time goes out of order. I said before that this is a story about inner space, in that while the narrator is third-person it’s also anchored to Lindsay’s POV, with us being given a line to his thoughts. To paraphrase and heavily summarize Lovecraft’s take on what makes weird fiction the thing that it is, as opposed to just general horror or dark fantasy, is that weird fiction should involve the otherworldly creeping into normal human existence. This would be a grounded domestic drama if not for the fact that Jack, on route to the pub he and Lindsay frequent, gets assaulted by a man whose face resembles a “black egg” and who cuts up Jack’s face with the edge of a tin can—from his left temple to his jaw. Of course the faceless attacker is Jack’s double, although he doesn’t conider this, and Lindsay doesn’t say anything about having seen this man before—the fact that this man has the same scar he would give Jack. The snake is eating its own tail, somehow. The why of the attack is never given. Jack starts off as a bitter and rather conceited man, whose new injury only makes him more hostile to everyone. Harriet is worried, but doesn’t know what to do. This is a John Cheever-style family-threatening-to-implode narrative, except that the catalyst is someone who should not reasonably exist. If this is a ghost story then the ghost in question merely gives the human characters a little push, on their way to some kind of oblivion.
The thing about horror stories is that there tends to be a dissonance between what the reader/viewer expects and what the characters expect. This is more apparent in bad works of horror, or horror where the characters seem to have taken several hit points to their intelligence. But then if you’re a normal person then you probably don’t believe in, say, ghosts, or doppelgangers who signal one’s impending doom. Most characters in horror stories aren’t aware that they’re in a horror story, although Lindsay borders on such a realization, the tragic part being that he is unable to express this. He doesn’t have the words for what he and Jack are experiencing. “Something was going to happen; he sensed it looming. If he could only warn them, prevent it—but prevent what?” We’re told early on that one of Lindsay’s character flaws is his struggle to communicate with others, despite being a grown-ass man; given also his tendency to go non-verbal it’s not unreasonable to assume he’s what we’d now call autistic. “The Scar” is horror, being an entry in a long history of stories about doppelgangers; but it can also be understood as domestic tragedy. Lindsay and Jack are both undone by their personal shortcomings, combined with an unspoken but clearly thought-about class conflict, between Lindsay’s timidness and Jack’s bourgeois vanity. The result is an eerie but also class-conscious ghost story.
There Be Spoilers Here
If there’s any part of this that feels like it was written by a very young writer (albeit someone who was on his way up), it’s the climax. Not that it’s bad, just that it’s predictable and it sort of takes the easy way out, which is a quibble I often have when reading horror: the author doesn’t quite stick the landing for my taste. In kind of a side note, Lindsay seeing a naked man painted entirely in red reminded me of the climax to Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death, which Campbell probably had seen at this point, although it’s probably also a coincidence.
A Step Farther Out
It’s been a few days since I read this one, and I have to admit the more I’ve thought about it the more I like it. It’s a textbook example of a weird tale in which the mundane urban way of life meets the uncanny, and is then totally turned inside out by this sudden lack of normalcy. It may have found a better market had it been written a decade earlier, or even a few years later, but the ’60s was sadly the nadir for modern horror publishing. In fairness, while he did run cheap magazines, Robert W. Lowndes (the editor of Startling Mystery Stories, and also Magazine of Horror) did have an eye for talent; there’s a reason Stephen King thanks him in his introduction to Night Shift, Lowndes having bought King’s first two stories. Campbell would go on to bigger and better things, but while he had made his debut five years earlier, “The Scar” feels like a big bang moment for his career.
(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, September 1941.)
I was supposed to write my review of “Beyond the Threshold” by August Derleth for today, but I could not find it in myself to do so. For one I have to admit I’ve been feeling horribly drained from the business of moving into my apartment, which I still haven’t totally finished with yet. I’ve barely slept for the past few weeks, hence the lack of a mid-month editorial post in October. Anyway, this isn’t a review. If you want my opinion on the story, it’s middling. Derleth was a pretty good editor but a second-rate writer, from the weird fiction of his that I’ve read, and “Beyond the Threshold” explicitly tips its hat to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos (a name Lovecraft himself did not use) without doing anything meaningfully extra. It has a bit of that rural Wisconsin atmosphere, but mostly does away with it in favor of a typical old-dark-house-has-dark-secrets narrative. If you want a take that’s a bit more in-depth you’ll have to wait a couple weeks, as I am really doing a proper (albeit short) review of this story for Galactic Journey, as part of the chunky anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. I’ll be reviewing more than half the stories in that book, so keep an eye out for that. Hopefully I will have also regained my writing energy by then.
Unfortunately I’m not here to talk about fiction, really. In the morning, today, November 6th, Americans woke up to find that the improbable (not the impossible, because I think we all understood the chance of this happening was very real) had happened. Now, I don’t make my politics a secret on here; after all it’s my blog and nobody else’s. Over the past couple years my views have shifted farther left: back in August 2022, when I posted my first review here, I think I considered myself a fellow traveler, but now I would say I’m a libertarian socialist. I used to be a libertarian of the American sort (we all make mistakes, huh), but now I’m a libertarian in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde. I’m ambivalent about the state’s capacity to help marginalized groups and I’m even more ambivalent about marginalized people’s rights being secured through electoral means. Yesterday we had the chance to prove that we are above electing the king of the yuppies (that he’s also very likely a rapist is pretty significant, but which mainstream news media has treated as almost incidental) back into office, but we failed. The Democratic establishment failed its voter base and its voter base in turn failed the most vulnerable people in this country. Indeed it’s a collective failure of liberalism in the US that we have not seen since—well, the 2016 election. We’ve been told (accurately) that Trumpism is an American blue-collar sort of fascism, yet if this is true then liberalism has failed to stop fascism—again.
To be clear, and I shouldn’t have to say this given what I had just said but I’ll do it anyway, I don’t like Kamala Harris, as both a politician and person. I think she’s a weasel, a centrist with a few progressive sympathies but ultimately someone who tried really hard to cater to “moderate” conservatives, a plan which literally did not work. It was a huge gamble, because calling Dick Cheney brat (how do I even explain to people of the future what “being brat” means) alienated a lot of left-liberal people, understandably. Who the actual fuck voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but then Harris in 2024? Who of that demographic was persuaded? Cuddling up with neo-conservatives while also ignoring (at best it was ignoring) the concerns of Palestinian-Americans and Arab-Americans at large was not a good move! I know, this may seem like a controversial opinion, but as someone who basically was radicalized by Israel’s siege of Gaza, I think the Biden (later Harris) campaign leaving Arab-Americans in the dust was very bad. Islamophobia has been a major problem in this country since at least 9/11, and it has not really gotten better. Sure, we have a few Muslim members of congress, but look at how the Biden administration has defended them against harassment, or rather how the Biden administration has not: it’s disgraceful. I say this as someone who, back when I was a right-libertarian and edgy atheist (I’m much softer on religion nowadays), also had Islamophobic tendencies; so I know very well what it looks like. Large swaths of the population see Muslims as subhuman, and unfortunately those people will be totally without shame about it.
We have failed queer people (so that includes me), we have failed people with disabilities (also includes me), we have failed the working class, we have failed black Americans, we have failed Muslim Americans, we have failed the women of this country, and of course we have failed ourselves. What do we do with this information? How does it relate to this blog, which is after all a genre fiction review fan site? Because I’m not here to write political tracts, I’m generally someone who reads for the pleasure of it. As a leftist I still enjoy right-leaning writers like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and so on. I don’t believe in abstaining from reading fiction by authors with very different political views, or at least I try to hold myself to that belief; obviously there’s a limit for everything. But, I’m queer, and my partners are all queer, and so are quite a few of my friends. I had to talk one of my partners through a panic attack over the phone last night. We live in a country that basically wants us dead, because most of the American population is homophobic and/or transphobic. This has been the case since forever, but it’s impossible to ignore now, with social media and the little slivers of mainstream visibility queer people get. It’s not even about resisting the incoming Trump administration, it’s simply about coping, and finding ways to support marginalized people, even if these are small things like donating to someone’s GoFundMe. God knows I’ve been supporting some of the fellow queer people in my life for a minute now. I’ve said before that I use this blog as a coping mechanism, because I have a history of depression and anxiety, and that hasn’t changed.
Here’s the thing, and this happened after Trump won in 2016 as well: the people who voted him in, who are really fucking stoked about him winning, are not gonna be any happier in the long run. If anything, with the exception of the rich (because the rich will evade basically any kind of retribution, even climate disaster [for now]), these Trumpists are gonna be made more miserable, if for no other reason than that Trump is such a toxic personality that mere exposure to him and his fucking yapping for long enough will do something horrid to one’s psyche, even if that person is pro-Trump. I’ve seen it happen first-hand, it’s a very creepy phenomenon, but Trumpists also don’t wanna admit that their own guy, whom they treat like a demi-god, makes them feel miserable. And we’re not even getting into his “economic plan” to combat inflation, because assuming that actually happens we’re all gonna be feeling that a year from now. In a way I’m morbidly curious about the future, with how bleak and yet how cloudy it is. I talk about the past all the time here because the past is never dead, and like a shambling corpse that has risen from the grave it terrorizes us despite not having a pulse. If the past is a zombie then the future is a horror that has not yet been birthed, and I’m not sure which is worse. The only thing I can say is that I hope to stay alive, despite my own thoughts of suicide.
I wish I could say the past month has been better for me, but it has not. A big thing is happening in my life, in that today is actually the move-in date for my first apartment. Wow, imagine, at 28, my first apartment. Been taking care of the practical side of things, with assistance: furniture, stuff for the kitchen and bathroom, and of course signing up with utilities. This has been a long time coming, and truth be told I’ve become immensely tired of living with my parents. And yet I’m not happy. Moving into my own place might prove only marginally better than my previous living situation. I don’t make enough to pay for rent so I’ll be bleeding my savings for the following months. The only reason my application even got accepted is my credit score is good. I’ll be living by myself in this one-bedroom apartment. It’ll be very lonely here, as none of my partners live close enough to move in with me, and anyway, with one exception we don’t know each other that well yet. Surely the lack of my parents breathing down my neck will do me some good, but this will be a solitary existence.
Honestly I’ve been tired all the time as of late. My work schedule as of right now is erratic and I find myself going to sleep at six in the morning and waking up after noon. As you may know I have anxiety and depression, and while the former has not been as bad lately, the latter has been worse, or rather more persistent. I’m tired of everything. I’m tired of my job. I’m tired of my imperfect body, and the fact that I can barely sleep. I’m tired of being tired. The US election is in less than a week and honestly I’m sick of this fucking immoral country, and its authorities who have been spending the past couple centuries murdering socialists, queer people, ethnic minority groups, etc. We’re only a quarter into the 21st century but already I feel like almost everything that could go wrong has already gone wrong. And will get worse. I’m normally a pessimist, so take all this with a grain of salt, but I don’t see conditions improving much.
So, go backward or forward, but don’t stay here. I hate it here. I do this blog for fun, and according to stats have written 186,000 words (or about equivalent to Great Expectations in word count) this year alone; but I also do it as a coping mechanism. I don’t do it for readers, or money, because not enough people read this blog or even know about it, despite my spreading word on a few social media platforms. Maybe when I hit 200 subscribers I’ll start a Patreon. Just know I’ve been going at this for two years now because it gives me some degree of emotional security. If not for all these words I would surely have given up a minute ago.
Now, what do we have for reviewing? We have two stories from the ’40s, three from the ’60s, one from the ’80s, one from the ’90s, and one from the 2010s.
For the novellas:
“Attitude” by Hal Clement. From the September 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novella. Feels like it’s been a while since we last talked about Clement, who was one of the first hard SF authors as we now think of the term. Not only was Clement a pioneer, he had a pretty long life and career, remaining active into the beginning of the 21st century. His prose is workmanlike and his human characters tend to be little more than abstractions, but his lectures-as-stories can be enthralling.
“Last Summer at Mars Hill” by Elizabeth Hand. From the August 1994 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Nebula and World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novella. Over the past four decades Hand has taken a kind of jack-of-all-trades approach to writing, tackling SF, fantasy, and horror seemingly with equal relish, with even the occasional movie novelization to her credit. (She wrote the novelization of the infamous 2003 Catwoman movie.) “Last Summer at Mars Hill” is one of her most decorated stories.
For the short stories:
“Beyond the Threshold” by August Derleth. From the September 1941 issue of Weird Tales. Derleth was correspondents with H. P. Lovecraft and could be argued as the person most responsible for preserving Lovecraft’s legacy, as he co-founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei in 1939 firstly to reprint his mentor’s fiction. He also wrote quite a bit of fiction in his own right.
“The Scar” by Ramsey Campbell. From the Summer 1969 issue of Startling Suspense Stories. One of August Derleth’s biggest discoveries as editor was Ramsey Campbell, whose work Derleth had discovered when he was but a teenager. Campbell’s first collection was published when he was only 18, so that he got his start in weird fiction very early. He would later become a prolific horror novelist.
“Nomansland” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the April 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Aldiss debuted in the 1950s and would remain active pretty much until his death, which was not too long ago. He would win a Short Fiction Hugo for Hothouse, which is sort of a novel but also a collection of linked stories. We already covered the first story, and now we’re on the second.
“Flowers of Edo” by Bruce Sterling. From the May 1987 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Sterling debuted in 1977 when he was barely out of his teens, but he would become one of the defining SF writers of the ’80s. While typically labeled as cyberpunk, Sterling has a surprising versatility, with even early novels like Schismatrix and Islands in the Net being very different from each other.
“Soft Clocks” by Yoshio Aramaki. From the January-February 1989 issue of Interzone. First published in 1968. Translated by Kazuko Behrens and Lewis Shiner. Seeing as how the Sterling story takes from Japanese culture, I thought it only right (and perhaps a neat gimmick) to follow up with a story from a Japanese writer. Yoshio Aramaki has been active since the ’60s as an author and critic.
“Checkerboard Planet” by Eleanor Arnason. From the December 2016 issue of Clarkesworld. Judging from her rate of output you might think Arnason a more recent author, but in fact she was born in 1942 and made her debut back in 1973. She’s been an activist for left-liberal causes since the ’60s but did not start writing full-time until 2009, hence her recent uptick in productivity.
Every time I’ve encountered Charles L. Grant’s stuff I’ve been indifferent at best, which is a shame because he really did put in the work. From the ’70s until his untimely death (only a few days after his 54th birthday), Grant was a prolific practitioner of dark fantasy, spooky science fiction, and what he called “quiet” horror. Grant’s brand of horror doesn’t seek to gross out or even scare the reader in the conventional sense, but to invoke a certain uneasy atmosphere; this is one way of saying his stories can be very moody, in a way that for some reason does not appeal to me. Not to say he was a bad writer; he clearly exceled in his wheelhouse, just that I find said wheelhouse to be a case of style over substance. It says something that other than his Nebula-winning story “A Crowd of Shadows” I would say today’s story is my favorite from Grant, but I still didn’t care for it. Obviously some people did care, at least at the time: “Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose” got a World Fantasy Award nomination. It’s also set in the perpetually haunted Connecticut town of Oxrun Station, a favorite fictional locale for Grant, although for some reason the folks at ISFDB have not yet added this story as an entry in that series despite it being explicitly set there.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1978 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VII (ed. Gerald W. Page), Horrorstory: Volume Three (ed. Gerald W. Page and Karl Edward Wagner), and the Grant collection A Glow of Candles and Other Stories.
Enhancing Image
Nels Anderson has moved with his family to a farm in Oxrun Station, suppoedly to get some fresh country air but really as a way to distract Nels from business problems. He’s with his wife Kelly, and his three daughters, Grace, Abbey, and Bess; he loves all his daughters, of course, but it becomes apparent that Abbey, the middle child, is his favorite. The thing is that Abbey is no longer a child—none of them are. We’re talking eighteen to twenty. Nels’s daughters are at that age where they have every right to go chasing after boys, although Nels is not ready for this—not that he wants to admit it. The narrative is thus broken up between present-day life on the farm and unattributed conversations between Nels and Kelly, which seem to be flashbacks, in which the two mostly discuss their love life and their relationship with the kids. We learn they were hoping for a son, hence them having three daughters instead of one or two. We learn Rose is Abbey’s middle name, in a bit of obvious symbolism. We also learn Abbey sometimes have nightmares, about dying, which are serious enough that her parents express concern about them. As for life on the farm, Abbey is miserable, although she’s not quick to say so, life on the farm not being what she had hoped for. She wants to appease her dad but there’s only so much she can do. Thus we have a family drama which doesn’t seem to have any horror elements, or anything supernatural going on; since this was published in F&SF we can guess something will happen, but as is typical of his work, Grant is slow to show his hand.
It could be that I’ve seen this kind of story before and that a lot has changed since the ’70s (but also not enough has changed), but I wasn’t terribly interested in Nels’s dilemma with how he should treat Abbey. There is the faintest hint that Nels is possessive of his daughter because he’s in love with her himself, and this incestuous urge is too shameful to be spoken of, but if that was an implication on Grant’s part then there’s no payoff for it. A father who is unwilling to let his 19-year-old daughter live her own life is not in itself an uncommon case, but given the conversations the two have it’s implied that no man would satisfy Nels as Abbey’s daughter because he projects himself onto the boyfriend role. This is all but confirmed when three young men (one man for each daughter) come to the property, drunk, with one saying he’s here to take Grace on a date. Grace herself says that the men had previously harassed her and Bess, and would not take no for an answer. Now, in fairness if I was a parent and three complete strangers came to my home saying they were here for a date with my kids, I would be quite skeptical. Given that the boys are being threatening, and decidedly not sober, Nels has a choice: he can try to either deescalate, or give these boys an ass-kicking. He picks the latter. This choice is framed as not the wisest of things to do, but it’s also totally understandable, and frankly it’s hard to blame Nels for kicking the men off his property. Of course, since this is ostensibly a horror story we know things will only get worse, and that the three men will figure back into the plot somehow.
Maybe this would have been more effective had it not been so short (a dozen magazine pages that go by quickly) and had it seemed like Nels had more of a choice in the course of events. Like what is he supposed to do here? The obvious point Grant wants to make is that Nels obsesses over his daughters too much and Abbey in particular, but if there’s any abuse, we don’t see it. Apparently Abbey declined to go to a high-class college so she could stay close to her family, instead (if the flashback is anything to go by) going to a local community college, which we’re told is a bad thing. Okay. What exactly is wrong with going to community college? Could you maybe illustrate more clearly to us how Abbey’s codependant relationship with her dad has made her life worse? We are told, but not really shown, that Nels is doing the wrong thing. Maybe if he had an incestuous crush on his own daughter and is trying to keep her all to himself like that then there would be a real problem, but while (like I said) there’s the faintest hint of this being the case, Grant doesn’t follow through on it. The other thing is that Nels’s unhealthy relationship with his daughter is set up to have tragic and unforeseen consequences, albeit telegraphed through Abbey’s nightmares about her dying. We all have dreams about dying, but in the context of this story Abbey’s nightmares are taken as premonitions, as if there’s something different and supernatural about them, despite nothing being shown that this is the case. I could go on for a minute, but my point is that the story’s attempt at building dread is unearned.
There Be Spoilers Here
Nels’s harsh treatment of the three men comes back to bite the family, or so it seems. The five of them go on a picnic when, from somewhere distant, a shot rings out. Then another. Kelly is wounded in the shooting and Abbey is killed, perhaps as the latter had predicted she might be. Presumably one of the men had taken to sniping at the family, but nobody sees the shooter and the three men are never arrested, on account of having lullabies. What started as a vacation home becomes a tragic memory. It isn’t until the very end that the story turns supernatural—maybe. Nels refuses to leave the farm, with the rest of the family even leaving him behind. He is unable to go. He talks to a big tree, the one Abbey had clung too as he died, and he hears her voice in his head. “Turnabout, father, is not always fair,” she says. She wanted to leave the farm, but now she’s stuck here, as a spirit tied to the tree. Of course, there’s nothing to prove that this isn’t just Nels talking to himself in his mind. Again I’m left wondering, what was Nels supposed to do here? Have the family leave the farm early? Send Abbey back home? Grant interrogates his protagonist but does not provide an alternate course of action. I don’t get it.
As we approach the climax of this year-long tribute to F&SF, it’s about time we cover an author who was also one-time editor of that magazine. There’ve been a few writers who also picked up the editing torch with F&SF (Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and most recently Sheree Renée Thomas), but Avram Davidson might’ve been the most prepped to become editor, although his tenure would be short. He debuted in F&SF in 1954 with “My Boy Friend’s Name Is Jello” and would remain a quirky presence in that magazine (among others) for many years to come. By the time he became editor in 1962 he was already a Hugo winner, for his 1958 SF-horror story “Or All the Seas with Oysters.” Under Davidson F&SF took on a rather different character from both before and after, making it something of a black sheep era for the magazine. After he stepped down from editing Davidson went back to writing regularly, with a vengeance. Known mostly for standalone stories, Davidson started the episodic Jack Limekiller series in the ’70s, of which today’s story is the second entry. “Manatee Gal Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight” shows its age nowadays, and its big twist is obvious (perhaps by design), but it does have, as Edward L. Ferman says, quite the atmosphere.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the April 1977 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Year’s Finest Fantasy (ed. Terry Carr), Under South American Skies (ed. Gardner Dozois and Mike Resnick), Modern Classics of Fantasy (ed. Gardner Dozois), and the Davidson collections Limekiller! and The Avram Davidson Treasury.
Enhancing Image
The first question is, who is Jack Limekiller? He’s a Canadian expat, apparently from Toronto, which goes to explain a lot. The Limekiller stories have a strong international flavor, being set in “British Hidalgo” (there’s also an independent sister country called Spanish Hidalgo “though it had not been Spain’s for a century and a half”), a fictional South American country that, despite these stories being set very much post-World War II (although not much more specific than that), is still under British guardianship. What does Limekiller do for a living? Not sure. Supposedly he deals in trading, but for the whole course of this story he’s not doing work at all; on the contrary, he spends some of it thinking of ways to avoid his creditors. He has some debt he’s not currently able to pay off. The good news is that despite the inherent exploitation required in maintaining a colony like British Hidalgo, and also the fact (this is not a spoiler really) that “Manatee Gal” will turn into borderline Lovecraftian horror down the road, things are easy-going here. Limekiller’s main creditor will probably catch up with him, but not tonight, or tomorrow either. He’s a bit of a wish-fulfillment character, in that he is too individualistic (and maybe too drunk) to work a 9-to-5 job, but he’s still very cool and sociable, and we know in advance that he’ll come out of whatever weird situation Davidson tosses his way basically unscathed. Everybody around Limekiller, on the other hand…
Something tricky Davidson does in the first few pages is set up the first of a few mysteries, the only thing being we’re unlikely to take it as a mystery that needs solving. Bob Blaine, a notorious trader in these parts, has gone missing. This will not come up again until much later, so put a pin in that one. This is less about the plot and more about the place and characters. British Hidalgo is somewhere in South America but seems as home to Caribbeans and white Europeans, including folks like Limekiller. The most elusive of these characters would have to be John Samuel, a white Creole with one eye, and Captain Cudgel, a mysterious old man who frequents the same bar Limekiller goes to. Cudgel is more of a walking mystery while Samuel is a bit of an eccentric; it’s a shame I can barely understand what the latter is saying. A problem I encountered almost immediately here is that most of the characters have some kind of “accent,” and Davidson writes them out phonetically—maybe a little too much. Davidson traveled around a lot, in fact if I remember right he edited F&SF while living in Mexico, which posed a problem; but that doesn’t automatically give one license to give non-white (or also in this case, as with Samuel, white characters who are not from the US or Canada) goofy accents that are hard to parse. He even does the “t’ing” thing for Caribbean characters, except he applies that logic to seemingly every other word, the result being a meaty novelette that’s rather chatty, and much of that dialogue is hard to read.
“Manatee Gal” has a loose plot, made up more of episodes than a cohesive narrative, so with that said my favorite part is one that is only very loosely related to the overarching mystery, in which Limekiller (seemingly because he has nothing better to do) gets taken on a ride to Shiloh, the remnants of a Confederate colony that had been founded in British Hidalgo over a century, and which still hosts a small group of people who are making a decent living. The colony “had not been wiped out in a year or two, like the Mormon colonies in Mexico—there had been no Revolution here, no gringo-hating Villistas—it had just ebbed away.” But still there’s something left. Colonialism always leaves scars. Of course, Limekiller and Davidson don’t seriously question the ghost-like presence colonialism has on the land, the past haunting the present. The idea seems to be that these expats and settlers will eventually wither away, as with Shiloh, or get killed off (burn out or fade away, your choice), but then, while the dinosaurs did go extinct, they left a certain feathered animal behind as their legacy. British Hidalgo is a scarred land, and clearly haunted, but not just by supernatural creatures. The double-edged sword of Davidson’s setting is that because it’s fictitious it also means Davidson is free to put his thumb on the scales, so to speak. There is no place on Earth quite like British Hidalgo, which does lend a surreal quality to it, perfect for supernatural shenanigans, but also it’s ultimately a white author’s exotic fantasy land.
There Be Spoilers Here
Manatees get brought up from time to time throughout the story. Sea-cows. They’re cute, harmless marine mammals, but Davidson also raises kind of an odd question: There are all kinds of were-animals, not just werewolves, so why not a were-manatee? Someone who is amphibious, who can change between a person on land and a manatee in the water, just off the coast. They do eventually find Bob Blaine—or what’s left of him. Something had killed him. We never see the were-manatee, but the implication is that Samuel is the killer, although he is never seen again. Limekiller connects some dots and comes to the conclusion that such a creature could exist, here, in British Hidalgo. But of course that’s not his problem. Limekiller’s debt problem also clears itself up at the last minute, as a freak accident has led to his trading position (namely his boat) becoming very sought after again. All’s well ends well, more or less. Nothing will fundamentally change. We would see Limekiller again, even I don’t.
A Step Farther Out
I’ve not read a great deal of Avram Davidson for the simple reason I find him to be a little too quirky and at times misogynistic (basically the same reason I don’t often read R. A. Lafferty), and admittedly “Manatee Gal” might be too obtuse for a story with ultimately such a straightforward reveal. I also get the impression that, given Limekiller is wearing a thick coat of plot armor with this series, there’s no real sense of danger. Limekiller comes upon a mystery or two, connects a few dots, goes “Well that’s weird,” and moves on, perhaps taking comfort in the knowledge that said weirdness won’t happen to him. I also struggle to believe the exoticism of the locale would fly as well if published today, but judging by awards attention for this and future Limekiller stories there was clearly an audience for it back in ye olden times. I’m also pretty sure Lucius Shepard read it and got a few ideas, so you could say it’s influential in kind of a niche way.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 