Who Goes There?

Stephen King had already been writing professionally for a handful of years when his debut novel Carrie became a bestseller in 1974, despite it being horror and also nominally science fiction. He was 26 at the time. Carrie was by no means the first horror novel to sell by the truckload, even in the ’70s, but it did mark a genuine paradigm shift in the field of horror, one which arguably has not had a successor. Rather than fade off the map, King quickly emerged as a one-man publishing business; not only did he write a lot but he consistently wrote bestsellers and got more movie/TV deals than the vast majority of writers can even hope for. By 1980 he had written Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, The Long Walk (as Richard Bachman), and Firestarter. The holy trinity of horror can be said to comprise Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King; but while Poe and Lovecraft did not earn their reputations until after their deaths, King had unquestionably become the new king of horror while still in his thirties. It could even be said, in what I have to admit is kind of a foreboding tone, that King is so big that he is larger than horror. I know people who are casual readers who have read very little horror outside of King, who don’t care much for horror as a genre outside of what King does with it, which on the one hand is sad, but it also speaks to the grip King has had on horror writing for the past fifty years.

So I have mixed feelings on King. I’m of the opinion that horror is at its best at short lengths, and King’s immense popularity as a novelist has made it so that horror short stories and novellas has been rendered mostly irrelevant since the ’80s, except in a historical context. Indeed, from about the time of Poe to the 1970s horror thrived on and was mostly defined by its short fiction, and this is simply not the case anymore. If you wanna get noticed as a horror writer you must write a novel—preferably several. But to give King credit, unlike some of his contemporaries like Anne Rice and Peter Straub who had little to no interest in contributing to the field at short lengths, he very much respects the short story and its shared history with horror. It also helps that King has written a lot of short fiction over the years, “Beachworld” being just one of many. I covered “The Jaunt” a hot minute ago, which you may recall was an SF-horror hybrid, as is “Beachworld.” Do I like this one more than the other? Hmmm…

Placing Coordinates

First published in the Fall 1984 issue of Weird Tales, which from what I can tell was a one-off. (The publication history of Weird Tales is convoluted.) It’s been reprinted in English only twice, but the King collection Skeleton Crew is super-duper in print. I should’ve said “three times” maybe, but the strange thing is that despite being reprinted in the October 2010 issue of Lightspeed and being available on that magazine’s website for over a decade, “Beachworld” seems to have been taken down last year. Why? On whose orders? You can still access it online via the Wayback Machine, I’m just confused as to why it’s not longer on the site. It was also reprinted in Lightspeed: Year One (ed. John Joseph Adams), a beefy anthology collecting all the short fiction of Lightspeed‘s first twelve months, including reprints. They never did a Year Two, sadly.

Enhancing Image

ASN/29 had crash landed (“There had been a fire. The starboard fuel-pods had all exploded.”) on an unnamed desert planet, a three-manned ship with two survivors. There’s Shapiro and Rand, with the third, Grimes, having been turned into a bowl of spaghetti from the impact. Not a pretty sight! Shapiro and Rand are alive, but they probably won’t be for much longer, what with the few resources at their disposal and the fact that they landed on the worst possible type of planet that’s still theoretically habitable. Arrakis has more biodiversity than this world, which is not only endless desert, indeed a vast ocean of desert, but which doesn’t seem have to have any grub to feed on. No vegetation. Chances of being rescued are supremely remote. This is what we call a major bummer. For about half the story or so we’re left with two guys, neither of whom one can really call “likable,” although Shapiro is the POV character and is at least marginally more relatable than his companion, on account of having a much stronger will to live. Rand, the melancholy half of the pair, quickly becomes convinced that the whole thing is doomed, and it actually takes him a shockingly small amount of time to crack under the pressure. In situations like this, where chances of survival are low, it’s almost better to be alone than to be stuck with an unhinged companion. And in the words of Anakin Skywalker, “I hate sand.”

First, what “Beachworld” does well, which is a fair bit. King did not become the most famous horror writer in living memory from sheer luck; when he’s on the ball he knows how to bring the spooky vibes. Like two ends of a circle meeting, the world of “Beachworld” is so vast that it becomes claustrophobic, with deert as far as the eye can see, and with the sand being so pervasive that it manages to creep into the crashed ship’s air-tight hull. “Beach sand,” as Rand notes, “is very ubiquitous.” A robust short story hould have at least one of the three fundamental types of conflict, those being man vs. man, man vs. self, and man vs. nature. That third one tends to involve one of the other two, or possibly both, as is the case with this story. The desert world is like a sweltering purgatory, and in Shapiro’s shoes the central problem of living long enough that rescue may come along takes on a psychological aspect, thus man vs. self; and then there’s Shapiro’s deteriorating partnership with Rand, plus a spoiler, which gives you man vs. man. This is all captured in a story which thankfully does not overstay its welcome, and it helps that on top of an impending sense of doom King manages to sneak in some sardonic humor. My favorite not-totally-serious passage has to be when the pair go through Grimes’s quarters and find his pet goldfish—or what’s left of them. “The tank was built of impact-resistant clear-polymer plastic, and had survived the crash easily. The goldfish—like their owner—had not been impact-resistant.” It’s morbidly funny. Had this been “pure” horror, with some snark to lighten the mood a bit, I would find it easier to recommend this story; but unfortunately it’s not.

When writing a genre hybrid, ideally the two (or three, the more the merrier) genres should work in tandem to produce something that could not exist without all its components. Some of the most beloved horror movies of all time (Alien, The Thing, David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly, etc.) are known primarily as horror, but they retain their potency even if undertood purely as science fiction. Alien is not a personal favorite of mine, but it might be the perfect synthesis, being balls-to-the-wall science fiction rivaled in sseriousness only by the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and at the same time it’s such an eerie and mysterious movie. (That Ridley Scott would later toss much of that mysteriousness out the window with Prometheus is beside the point.) The problem is that “Beachworld” is not very good science fiction, at least if we’re going by Theodore Sturgeon’s criterion for what constitutes good science fiction. Namely there’s the problem that you could have perhaps more easily turned this story into a Robinson Crusoe-esque fantastical narrative, turning it into an outright ghost story, and it would be easier to believe and digest. One of the commenters on Lightspeed said they couldn’t tell this was a Stephen King story just by reading it, and oh, I have to disagree. The prose style at times slips into King’s trademark colloquialism, but also it takes place in the distant future only because King tells us so. Despite it being set 8,000 years in the future, Shapiro and Rand happen to know the pop culture boomers like King are familiar with, namely the Beach Boys. Because of course. King has this borderline fixation on the pop culture of his adolescent, so we’re talking 1950s and ’60s; and while these references usually work fine in his fiction, as it tends to be contemporary or set in the ’50s/’60s, here they’re a lot more conspicuous, to the point of implausibility. And that’s not getting into spoilers.

There Be Spoilers Here

Early on there grows the suspicion that somehow the endless sand of the world is alive, which is certainly alarming. At first there remains the possibility that this is all a trick of the mind, and this possibility stays until pretty close to the end. The good news is that the distress beacon Shapiro set up worked, although it turns out the people who’ve come to “rescue” them are not an ideal choice. I’m not totally sure who these new people are, but they seem to be space pirates, as while they try to find salvage in the ship, they also posit that Shapiro and Rand would go for such-and-such an amount on the market. I guess getting sold into slavery is arguably a better fate than slowly dying on a world totally bereft of water. Their option are limited. Among the pirate crew are a couple androids, very expensive machinery there, and the captain himself is a cyborg, his lower half being like a metal horse, giving the appearance of a centaur. That’s neat, although I’m not sure what the symbolic potential behind it could be, and more importantly I’m not sure this is a more practical arrangement than just having two human legs. It doesn’t matter, though, because by the time the captain and his crew get here Shapiro has (rightly) gone paranoid and Rand’s mind has all but turned to jelly. Maybe there’s something in the sand, or maybe it’s the sand itself that’s alive, but the planet doesn’t want these people to leave. They narrowly escape, too, losing an android in the process and leaving Rand on the planet, who at the very end is putting handfuls of sand in his mouth, eating it and eating it. I have to admit it’s a disgusting ending, that last bit, so kudos there, although otherwise I found the ending predictable. “The Jaunt” has a pretty memorable ending, for all my gripes with that story, while “Beachworld” has more of a mixed bag of an ending.

A Step Farther Out

It’s fine. Those looking for big surprises will not find any, and while it does have a fittingly ominous tone (those, like myself, who dislike the beach will be sure to have their nerves hit), the SFnal half of the equation does very little to heighten the horror half; if anything this story is dragged down a bit for being SFnal only one a surface level. This is good horror but lackluster science fiction is my point. Still, it does show King’s capacity as a chameleon, able to change his colors—to an extent.

See you next time.