Tag: james white

Serial Review: The Dream Millennium by James White (Part 3/3)

May 23rd, 2025

(Cover by Brian Boyle. Galaxy, December 1973.)

The Story So Far

John Devlin used to be a doctor on Earth, but now he’s a passenger aboard a ship in search of a planet fit for human colonization; the voyage is expected to take centuries, probably a thousand years or so. The people aboard this ship spend 99% of their time in cold sleep, experiencing surprisingly vivid dreams that leave them feeling both disturbed and weary when they awake. The ship’s computer handles almost everything, but occasionally it awakes a passenger to do some exercise, recall their dreams, and also handle ship malfunctions if needed. There’s a scare towards the end of the first installment in which some intelligent aliens try to destroy the ship, but Devlin, on being awakened, is able to take control and outmaneuver the aliens, whom we’ll not see again—for now. There’s another malfunction in which one of the other passengers, in trying to see her boyfriend who’s also onboard, doesn’t get back into her chamber correctly and so dies slowly, although thankfully she’s unaware of what’s happening to her. This sad scene shows us Devlin’s past as a medical professional and that he knows a bit more than he lets on, although not enough to know exactly why these vivid dreams are happening. Through lengthy flashbacks we’re introduced to Patricia Morley, who’s a fellow passenger and also Devlin’s love interest. We’re also introduced to Brother Howard, a religious fanatic who only appears in flashbacks but who ends up being kind of a mouthpiece for White’s opinions on human nature, not to mention he has quite a bit to do with Devlin and Patricia’s voyage.

The Earth that Devlin and Patricia came from has gone to shit, which is to say it’s only marginally worse than Earth as it is now. The question driving the whole novel comes down to this: “Is humanity worth saving?” Both Devlin and White have a tug-of-war between genuine pessimism and hope that humanity might be able to move on from its dark past. Over the course of the novel Devlin has dreams of being people and even non-humans from the past, from a sauropod in the Jurassic to a medieval warrior king, to memories of his own life. Every dream somehow involves violence and death, sometimes simply due to circumstance, sometimes because of human malice. To paraphrase Marx, history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Brother Howard was once an astronaut of sorts, and in flashbacks he tries to prepare Devlin and Patricia for the horrors that await them. One can easily go insane in space. A fellow passenger had at some point gamed the system so that he could walk about outside of his chamber, only to commit suicide, with his eyes taped open.

Enhancing Image

I was worried White would fumble the last installment, or make it so that the more tedious moments of previous installments would be in vain, but thankfully he sticks the landing. I’m not sure how White went about writing The Dream Millennium; it’s possible that aside from a basic outline he wrote by the seat of his pants, which would’ve been far from unusual at the time. I suspect, although I have nothing to back this up with, that White had a beginning and ending in mind, but improvised with the middle portion, hence why there are some stretches here that come off as flabby and perhaps unnecessary. The medieval sequence, which takes up a chunk of the second installment, has some thematic significance, but is too drawn out and without anything to make us invested in the action. There’s a sequence early in the last installment where Devlin dreams that he’s a pilot whose airplane has been taken over by a team of hijackers that’s both more involving, more memorable, and also having more directly to do with the novel’s ideas about humanity’s capacity for violence. White’s fascination with violence, or rather his profound distaste for it, comes up again and again, both in his work generally and also in The Dream Millennium where Devlin and Patricia are constantly haunted by it.

The ship had been future-proofed up to a point, but after centuries (quite literally a millennium by the end of the novel) the cracks in the armor are beginning to show, so to speak. Devlin at one point finds, to a mix of horror and wonderment, just how old and dilapidated the ship has become, despite only maybe a few weeks of subjective time passing for him. In old-timey SF space technology will be new and shiny seemingly forever, but this is not the case in White’s fiction. Also, a few of the human crew have died already and a malfunction with the others’ chambers leaves only Devlin and Patricia awake at the end, in charge of a bunch of people stuck in deep sleep who will no longer be able to sit back while centuries pass by around them. They have to find a habitable planet real soon, more out of necessity than anything; it’s either that or death for all of them. You may also recall that at the end of the first installment Devlin narrowly avoids trouble with some intelligent aliens, who are rather quickly forgotten about; the good news is that this scene was not for nothing after all, since this same alien race, several centuries later in their time, figure back into the plot. It’s a bit of a deus ex machina, with how both the humans and aliens get a happy ending, but White makes it work by virtue of having used time dilation to his advantage. Indeed the ending reminded me a bit of A. E. van Vogt’s “Far Centaurus,” which uses time dilation for similar effect.

Even the flashbacks featuring Brother Howard, which probably take as much time on the page as the A-plot aboard the ship, if not more, lead to a pretty satisfying conclusion. Brother Howard used to be insane (as opposed to how he is now, which is just a bit cooky), on account of PTSD from being an astronaut, but through years of therapy he was able to return somewhat to normalcy. (In the days before manned spaceflight, and even during the height of the Space Race, there was a lot of speculation that astronauts would experience PTSD [although it wasn’t called that at the time] much like how soldiers did. The image of the astronaut-as-soldier was a powerful one, although it’s gone out of fashion in recent decades.) Brother Howard has been testing Devlin and Patricia so that he might recruit them for this extraordinary space voyage—a trip that would take more mental fortitude than most things; of course he finds Devlin and Patricia fit for the job. I’m not sure if it was necessary for Devlin and Patricia to be a romantic item, since the latter basically exists so that Devlin has a flesh-and-blood person to talk to on the ship, but it’s not like she’s a one-dimensional character. Aside from his aversion to violence it seems like White also avoids really bad misogynistic tendencies that some of his contemporaries were guilty of (looking at you, Silverberg). Overall this is a read that I would describe as refreshing, if also B-tier in quality.

A Step Farther Out

I think The Dream Millennium would’ve worked better as a novella, but given that I had read it sporadically over the span of a couple weeks, with digital scans of the magazine issues, it’s possible I won’t feel the same if I had a physical copy of the book version in my hands. White is kind of a unique and yet obscure talent in the context of when he wrote, especially in the ’50s through the ’70s, when casual violence still permeated genre SF and there was much undue optimism about mankind conquering the stars. White’s pacificism speaks to the latest generation of SF writers, even if his style is still on the workmanlike side.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Dream Millennium by James White (Part 2/3)

May 15th, 2025

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, November 1973.)

The Story So Far

John Devlin is one passenger out of many aboard a spaceship, which at the beginning of the novel is already nearly a century into its voyage in search of a planet suitable for human colonization. The trip is expected to take several centuries, possibly even a millennium or more of objective time; as such, the human crew spend about 99% of their time in cold sleep, only to be woken up periodically to be tested by the ship’s computer, or to take care of some malfunction that the computer can’t handle itself. During these periods of cold sleep, in which almost no time at all passes for Devlin while decades slip by outside, he has some pretty vivid dreams, including dreams of deep-sea prehistoric life, being a sauropod in the Jurassic era, and flashbacks to his own life before he got recruited for the voyage. During one of these times where he gets woken up to handle a malfunction, a fellow passenger named Yvonne Caldwell, barely old enough to even be on the ship, is dying in her chamber, having not gotten into its properly before cold sleep took over. Caldwell wanted to see her boyfriend, who’s also on the ship somewhere, and for better or worse she’s unaware that she’s dying pretty horribly. Devlin does his best to comfort her in her last moments before she passes, and this is our first big hint that Devlin was a doctor before he left that life behind and became a passenger here.

We get a rather extensive flashback to Devlin’s life on Earth not too long ago, and apparently life on Earth has gone to shit (well, it’s only marginally worse than what we’re dealing with now). Someone I did not bring up in my review of the first installment, because her subplot did not reel me in enough at the time, was Patricia Morley, whom Devlin got to know in this flashback and who actually is also a passenger on the spaceship. Despite being standoffish in personality and also having a bit of a fucked-up face (from self-harm), Morley is Devlin’s assigned love interest for the novel. She ends up being a more significant character than she appears at first, not least because by the end of the second installment she and Devlin have both gone basically rogue on the ship. There’s also the enigmatic Brother Howard, who only appears in flashbacks and who is ostensibly of a religious order, but he seems to know more than he lets on and there’s a good reason for this. It’s also during these sequences that White’s own background as an aspiring doctor who lived in Ireland during one of the most violent periods in the country’s history is brought to the forefront.

Enhancing Image

I think my big problem with The Dream Millennium is that it’s basically two storylines, each rich enough for maybe a novella but not enough to carry a full novel on its own, that are connected enough, but then there are also scenes that have, at least on a surface level, fuck-all to do with either of the main storylines. Here, in the second installment, there’s a whole sequence (it might’ve gotten two chapters, I forget) in which Devlin dreams of being a warrior prince in medieval times who wins against a neighboring kingdom, only to have a horrible marriage in the aftermath. There’s a marked difference between Devlin’s dreams of what seem to be past lives and his dream-memories of his own life, since the former are given very little context or background. The first few dreams, involving prehistoric life, are fine as written, but unless White has something up his sleeve, the medieval sequence could’ve been cut out without diminishing the two main storylines. It’s frustrating, because this is already not a long novel (paperback editions run a bit over 200 pages), but I feel like there’s some filler here. Indeed, while reading this installment, my heart sank as I went through the medieval section, fearing that it would take up the majority of the installment and that almost nothing would actually get done. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, but it’s a black mark on the reading experience, because even if it ends up being significant later, that doesn’t change that while I was reading it I barely understood what was happening and I found it hard to care about what I was able to understand. That sequence is mostly action, and it must be said that action is not White’s strong suit.

Thankfully this installment does eventually pick up. (This is one of those things where I have to wonder if I’d be as harsh on the novel’s weaker moments if I was reading it, ya know, as a novel and not as a serial. Like remember those aliens that showed up at the end of the last installment? Yeah, they left the story about as quickly as they entered. Weird.) We get yet another lengthy flashback to just before Devlin and Morley are recruited for the voyage, but while there’s much less violence than before, the connection these scenes have with Devlin’s current predicament on the ship is much more apparent. The mystery of who the fuck Brother Howard really is is given some much needed clarity, and the budding relationship between Devlin and Morley is developed enough to justify their teaming-up in the current events. Probably the most haunting scene of this installment is during one of Devlin’s waking periods, when he finds a dead passenger named Thomas Purdy, who apparently had tricked the ship’s computer into thinking he was still in his chamber so he could commit suicide outside of it—his eyes taped open so that he could not sleep. It’s become clear by this point that there’s a huge difference between cold sleep and normal sleep, although Devlin and Morley are still trying figure out how the ship’s systems induce those frighteningly vivid cold-sleep dreams. Devlin and Morley feel weirdly fatigued, both mentally and physically, from these cold-sleep dreams, despite their bodies resting for incredibly long periods of time—or at least time outside of cold sleep. For them, subjectively, only a few days have passed, even though it’s been centuries of objective time. This boils down to the question of whether the ship itself is a simulation, and where the dividing line between dreams and reality is.

I wonder if White maybe took some notes from Philip K. Dick, particularly A Maze of Death, which, without giving away that novel’s big twist, feels thematically akin to The Dream Millennium. White and Dick are both pessimistic about the human condition, although otherwise they don’t have much in common, with White’s sensibilities being decidedly more old-school while Dick was adjacent to the New Wave. But still, while The Dream Millennium could’ve been written a decade earlier, there’s a bleakness here (not to mention a lack of problematic elements) that make it feel more modern than some other SF of the time. You’d think it’d be easy for an SF novel from 1973 to not feel horribly dated, but you’d be surprised—or maybe not, depending on your experience.

A Step Farther Out

I’m gonna hold off final judgment until I’ve actually finished the novel, but so far The Dream Millennium has been a mixed bag. Structurally it’s rather nonlinear, but it also feels like a few disparate story ideas tossed together so that White could get a full novel out of it. Other than A Maze of Death it also reminds me of Piers Anthony’s Macroscope, which it must be said is an unusually good novel by Anthony’s standards. White’s a better writer than Anthony, but even for how short it is The Dream Millennium feels a bit cobbled-together. I’m gonna see (and hope) that White manages to stick the landing with the last installment.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Dream Millennium by James White (Part 1/3)

May 9th, 2025

(Cover by Brian Boyle. Galaxy, October 1973.)

Who Goes There?

In the ’50s and for much of the ’60s the US and UK scenes of science fiction were kept somewhat apart, albeit with some cross-pollination with their authors. Some UK authors appeared in US magazines and vice versa, and one of these authors from the UK to find moderate success in the US was James White. White was one of the few Irish SF writers active at the time, and that perspective ended up being rather novel, even if White himself was only a B-tier writer all said and done. Whereas the standard view at the time was that war was either basically good or bad but “necessary,” White was not so convinced of the virtues of lawful violence. Having been born and raised in Belfast and living through horrific violence between Catholics and Protestants would probably have that effect on a lot of people, but for White especially it had an apparent influence on his writing. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that White’s fiction tends to be more far more about saving lives than ending them. Interest in medicine (White wanted to become a doctor, but this career path was not to be) also plays a big role, most prominently with his Sector General series, maybe not the first but certainly the popularizer of the space hospital in SF. The Dream Millennium is not about a hospital, at least in an official capacity, although it does have elements of a space hospital.

Placing Coordinates

The Dream Millennium was serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, October to December 1973. It got a paperback release from Ballantine the following year, seemingly without any significant changes. Unfortunately it’s been out of print since the ’80s.

Enhancing Image

John Devlin is a passenger aboard a ship that’s on its way to a neighboring star system, in search of a planet suitable for human life. The ship is run by computers and the trip can and probably will take centuries. A lot of authors, especially back then, would find some way to cheat and have their faster-than-light travel, but James White was not one of them. The human crew are kept in cold sleep for the vast majority of the trip, being periodically awakened for brief periods to, as the computer says in all caps, “SPEAK, EXERCISE, REMEMBER.” Devlin and the others have one hour during to stretch their legs, basically, although it’s worth noting these passengers are not awakened at the same time. For all intents and purposes Devlin is alone on the ship, with only the computer for company. The “REMEMBER” part of the instructions has to do with remembering dreams, which itself is like a cognition test. The idea is that since the passengers will be in cold sleep for decades at a time, they’ll be dreaming a lot, and when they wake up for their periodic examinations their ability to recall dreams will be taken as a sign. Now, when you sleep normally, specifically during REM sleep, your dreams can at times seem vivid and at the same time feel like they last only a few minutes, while you’re in the midst of REM sleep for at least a few hours. Time works very differently in dreams. It’s not hard to figure out what the novel’s title is supposed to mean.

Devlin is, let’s say an anti-hero. We’re not sure, at first, what his deal is, but he gives the impression of having a dark and troubled past; he’s also not an astronaut or anyone really interested in space, for that matter, but someone who had a different kind of job back on Earth. Apparently there have been efforts to colonize other worlds because Earth itself is in a sorry state. Even calling it colonization is a bit misleading since that implies a more ambitious effort, like the sort of thing technocrats are obsessed with (ya know, the glory of mankind and all that), but this expedition is being done out of necessity. White is a lot of things, but he’s not much of a romantic. Most of the time there’s no life on the ship to speak of, and when there is it’s regimented and short-lived. The best thing that can be said is at least the ship’s computer really does seem to have the passengers’ best interests in mind. But still, the living situation is bleak. Part 1 of this novel is largely concerned with the first few dream cycles Devlin has that he has to recall, which on the one hand will probably turn out to have symbolic and even plot relevance, but also since these are dreams (or in one case, flashbacks) there’s no sense of urgency, nor is there much actual forward momentum with the plot for the time being. Your enjoyment of this novel will hinge partly on how much you get out of New Wave-influenced surreal imagery, mixed with more pessimism with regards to the human condition than the average. This is not to say White is a misanthrope, but… you’ll see.

The Dream Millennium has to do with the evolution of man, not unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey, although it goes about things very differently from that novel/movie. Both are big in scale despite being set primarily on a cramped spaceship, but The Dream Millennium deals with events out of events, not to mention its timespan is much bigger. The first dream cycle Devlin has sees him as a trilobite in an unspeakably prehistoric period, and the second dream cycle sees him as a brontosaurus (big sauropod) during the Jurassic era. These are out-of-body experiences that don’t further the plot much, but they do provide stimulating experiences for Devlin that at the same time tell us a bit about his character. (I think White was also looking for an excuse to include dinosaurs in his space adventure novel, but that’s fine.) Despite being dreams and therefore harmless by nature, Devlin is not free from experiencing death and disease in these dream realms; it’s also ambiguous if these are just dreams or if they’re actually visions of past lives. A couple later events imply they might’ve been actual lived experiences. The most memorable scene in this first installment is right after Devlin’s second dream cycle, when there’s been a malfunction with one of the other sleep chambers a young woman’s lying in her chamber, dying horribly and not even sure what’s happening to her. Devlin tries comforting her and lies doing so (when someone’s on their deathbed you kinda have to lie to them at least a little bit to make them feel better), but the woman makes the odd confession of having had a dream that she was a dinosaur, similar to Devlin’s. This is despite the woman admitting to not having read up on prehistoric life like the computer told her to. She says she misses her boyfriend, and then she dies. It’s a surprisingly grim scene, but it’s also a tone-setter for the rest of the installment, which delves into matters of human misery.

It’s here about halfway through the first installment that we find out Devlin used to be a doctor on Earth, although it seems he’s no longer in that profession. You can take the man out of the profession but not the profession out of the man, though, because even if he’s not officially the ship’s doctor he still has the attitude of being one. It’s almost like White wanted to become a doctor, and that much of his SF reads like it could be made into a hospital drama with some tinkering. Despite working with similar material to 2001, The Dream Millennium operates on a very different worldview, so that you can tell James White and Arthur C. Clarke are very different people. In a way The Dream Millennium so far feels like an anti-2001, in that it focuses on the cramped and unromantic side of space travel, not to mention its view on the possibility of mankind ascending to gods of the universe is—let’s say more skeptical. There’s also much more of a focus on Devlin’s inner life, or what was called “inner space” at the time, that being juxtaposed with the virtual endlessness of outer space.

There Be Spoilers Here

We then get a lengthy series of flashbacks to a bit earlier in Devlin’s life, when he was a doctor, which oscillates between being genuinely harrowing and a bit too disjointed for my liking. The most memorable and harrowing (this is a rather dark book, it must be said) scene comes when Devlin’s trying to treat a dying boy who’s been brought in with a gunshot wound in his chest—a stray bullet, caught from a totally unrelated quarrel. What do you mean White lived through the Troubles? From what we see of Earth in this lengthy section, it’s a shithole, although it’s not much worse than life as we now know it—maybe a little more dystopian. I mean you can’t get much more dystopian than now, right? Another memorable scene is where Devlin, who describes himself as agnostic, gets into a kind of theological/existential argument with one Brother Howard, whom I’m sure we’ll meet again at some point. In the world of The Dream Millennium the question is not whether humanity can become masters of the universe but whether humanity can even save itself from decay and finally extinction. Have I mentioned that this is bleak? And then BAM, aliens are invading. Devlin’s not sure at first if this is really happening or if it’s some kind of trick, but no, highly advanced aliens are looking to overtake the ship. Now doesn’t this feel random? I wonder how Devlin’s gonna get himself out of this jam.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry this got delayed. I don’t really have an excuse, other than that I’ve just been struggling to write anything. Doing most everything has felt like a chore as of late, including reading stuff for my blog and other places. Then there’s the recent business with Worldcon (which YET AGAIN is getting steeped in controversy) and the fact that I’m voting this year (again), so that’s even more reading material. I’m enjoying The Dream Millennium enough so far that I hope I can get the review for the next installment out in a more timely fashion, but I can’t guarantee it.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: May 2025

May 1st, 2025
(Cover by John Schoenherr. Analog, June 1975.)

At the beginning of the year I said that I would be covering one short story or novella from Galaxy each month—but I said nothing about serials. The truth is that Galaxy was, alongside Astounding/Analog, the most consistent market for serialized novels and novellas at the time, so it would feel wrong to never acknowledge that part of the magazine’s history. As such we’re getting a novella and a serial from Galaxy this month; that they’re both from authors I admire probably helps.

Last month I covered a horror story by the crime/mystery author Dorothy Salisbury Davis, which gave me the idea of finding more SFF by people who normally write crime/mystery, which while also a genre that has a history in pulp magazines, is “realistic” fiction rather than SFF. One curiosity that struck me ever since I saw it years ago was the fantasy story “The Bronze Door” by Raymond Chandler, which marked one of only two times he appeared in an SFF magazine. Someone who wrote a good deal more SFF than Chandler would be John D. MacDonald, who wrote prolifically for the genre magazines in the late ’40s and early ’50s before shifting to crime fiction and making a killing on that. So for this month’s complete novel we’ve got the early MacDonald novel Wine of the Dreamers. Rounding out the novel-length stuff is a relatively obscure standalone SF novel by Roger Zelazny, who nowadays is more known for his fantasy.

For the women we have two people who are a few generations apart and coming from different continents, but who still, each in her own way, have come to write science fiction. Kate Wilhelm is actually a bit hard to find in magazines after the late ’60s, once she found her voice as a writer, but the September 2001 issue of F&SF was a special issue dedicated to Wilhelm, complete with a new novella. As for the Greek writer Eugenia Triantafyllou, I picked just about the newest story I reasonably could’ve (an unofficial rule of mine is that a story must be at least a year old for me to consider it for review), with “Loneliness Universe” being a finalist in this year’s Hugos. I’m voting in the Hugos, by the way.

That makes one story from the 1930s, two from the 1950s, two from the 1970s, one from the 2000s, and one from the 2020s.

For the serial:
1. The Dream Millennium by James White. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, October to December 1973. I’ve been meaning to read more James White, and thankfully several of his novels first appeared as serials. White first appeared in the UK, in New Worlds, before eventually finding some success in the US as well. Along with Bob Shaw he was one of the few Irish SF writers to appear regularly on both sides of the Atlantic back in those days.
2. Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny. Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, June to August 1975. Zelazny is one of the most influential SFF writers of all time, his mark being apparent on the likes of George R. R. Martin and (God help us) Neil Gaiman; and yet despite a couple generations of writers (especially those of fantasy) owing a debt to Zelazny, much of his work remains obscure or simply out of print, including this standalone novel.
For the novellas:
1. “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” by Kate Wilhelm. From the September 2001 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s easy to forget this, but Wilhelm started in the ’50s, only that she flew under the radar for about a decade. Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, though, Wilhelm seemed to metamorphize almost overnight into one of the most acclaimed SF authors from the late ’60s until her death in 2018. She was married to Damon Knight.
2. “The Other Man” by Theodore Sturgeon. From the September 1956 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Sturgeon is one of my favorite authors, especially of short fiction. Sturgeon had started to write professionally with “mainstream” fiction, although this went nowhere and he quickly pivoted to SFF, much to our benefit. His productivity was peaks and valleys so that he was writing either a lot or nothing at all. He was most consistently productive in the ’50s.
For the short stories:
1. “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. From the May-June 2024 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Novelette. Triantafyllou was born and raised in Greece, and continues to live abroad, but writes her fiction in English. She made her debut back in 2017, and has yet to write her first novel, although maybe she just much prefers writing short fiction.
2. “The Bronze Door” by Raymond Chandler. From the November 1939 issue of Unknown. Possibly the most acclaimed crime writer of the 20th century, seriously only rivaled by Agatha Christie, Chandler’s known for his series of novels starring Philip Marlowe. Chandler famously didn’t start writing crime fiction until he was in his forties, and didn’t write his first novel until he was pushing fifty.
For the complete novel:
1. Wine of the Dreamers by John D. MacDonald. From the May 1950 issue of Startling Stories. Fans of crime fiction would know MacDonald for his prolific (21 novels over a span of as many years) Travis McGee series, as well as the standalone novel Cape Fear (first titled The Executioners, but then retitled after the 1962 film adaptation), but he also wrote a good deal of science fiction in the late ’40s and early ’50s. It’s not unusual for authors to cut their teeth on working with one genre before moving to greener pastures, so that much like how Elmore Leonard started with Westerns before moving to crime fiction, the same happened with MacDonald. Wine of the Dreamers was either MacDonald’s first or second novel, it’s hard to say.
Won’t you read with me?
Serial Review: All Judgment Fled by James White (Part 3/3)

May 22nd, 2023

(Cover by Vaughn Bodé. If, February 1968.)

Who Goes There?

James White was one of the more successful British SF authors who did not (as far as I can tell) partake in New Wave antics in the ’60s. His loose Sector General series started in the ’50s and remained steadfast as a conventionally written setting for hospital dramas IN SPAAAAAAAACE, and his novel that I’ve reviewed, All Judgment Fled, is, excepting a couple passages (there’s a bit toward the end of Part 3 that references LSD), a pretty vanilla affair—which is not to say it’s boring. On the contrary, White is clearly a writer who considers the logical implications of his narratives, which naturally then snowball into ethical implications; he also has a sarcastic whit which at no point rang as irritating to mine ears. While my feelings on the novel are a bit mixed I do look forward to future adventures with White, especially since he’s one of those prolific magazine contributors and therefore someone (like Poul Anderson and Jack Vance) I fall back on for emergencies.

Placing Coordinates

Part 3 was published in the February 1968 issue of If, which is on the Archive. I’m not usually a fan of If‘s cover art, but the Bodé covers (we got too few of them, sadly) are very well done and eye-catching, including this one. As for book publication we only have a few editions to work with, for a novel that’s over half a century old, but you can find used copies cheap.

Enhancing Image

Before I get into the installment itself, I wanna talk a bit about what the past week has been like for me. If you’re reading this it means it’s May 22nd and by extention this post is two days late. I set deadlines for myself with these but I found out the hard way that there was just no doing this post on-time. I didn’t even finish reading Part 3 until the night of the 21st. Last week round this time I guested on a certain podcast, which went well and which you can expect to see at the beginning of June, probably back-to-back with my review forecast; that was not the hard part. No, the irony is that going on vacation can make it very hard to do things you normally do in your spare time. I had requested time off work and flew to Chicago (from Newark) on Friday, and only got back Monday. I was there to visit a couple friends I very rarely get the chance to hang out with in person; as such, combined with the brief time window I’d given myself, we crunched a week’s worth of fun times into three days. It was a good time, needless to say, but I also got precious little time to work on this site, hence the delay.

Now that I’ve said that, it’s time to finish this damn serial.

Last time we were with the boys, the mission had gone to hell. Morrison got killed by a Type Two, a tentacled creature with a giant horn and without any capacity to reason with the explorers. As violence has broken out on the Ship, a mysterious object orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, the higher-ups at Prometheus Control have been chastising McCullough (the audience surrogate) and company for their lack of professionalism. The Twos are hostile to the point of seeing the humans as food, which results in much of Part 3 being an all-out skirmish between the explorers and a horde of Twos, making for an extended action sequence that admittedly sort of struggled to hold my interest. A weakness of mine as a reader is that my eyes tend to glaze over when it comes to action, whith it being too easy for me to lose track of who’s dealing with what and who’s still alive and who has bitten the big bazooka. The action in Part 3 is especially confusing, partly (I suspect) deliberately and also because White refuses to give us a clear picture of the ship’s interior. The illustrations do a lot of leg work.

The most egregious example of White’s confusing laying out of action happens at the very beginning, wherein we’re told via narration that Drew has died—somehow. I wondered if I had missed something at the end of the previous installment, made worse because the recap section makes no mention of it—but no, Drew is not dead, he’s actually fine. The logic seems to be that in the heat of battle McCullough thinks Drew is dead, but this turns out to be a false alarm; the third-person narration sharing McCullough’s confusion is a hard pill to swallow, however. A similar case happens toward the end when (not getting into specifics here, because spoilers) a character has apparently died and the narration does not tell us this explicitly (unless I missed something, which is possible) until after the fact. Did he die offscreen? What happened? I’m getting ahead of myself.

We’ve discovered by now that the Ship is, or was, operated in all likelihood by a very small crew, and that the Twos wandering about looking for scraps are either non-sentient or driven (by something) to insanity. We never get a clear answer as to the nature of the Twos, but we do know that they’re an active threat to the explorers. Drew’s maddened call for extermination of the Twos (which is supposed to inform us that the explorers have basically reached rock bottom) does not come off as too unreasonable. Regardless, the mission has degenerated to such an extent that Prometheus Control and the explorers are all but no longer on speaking terms—a relationship that is about to get even rockier, if you can believe it.

McCullough sums it up nicely:

He realized suddenly that although he was terribly afraid for his own immediate safety he was furiously angry about the things they had done and were doing on the Ship. From the very beginning they had no control of the situation. It had been a stupid if well-intentioned muddle. And while they had changed their minds several times when new data became available they had not really used their brains. They had been panicked into things. They had not allowed themselves time to think. And when threatened with danger they thought only of survival.

The higher-ups at one point bring in a woman on the speaker to calm the men and reassure them with an incoming supply drop, but this doesn’t work too well. Keep in mind that said woman, whose name we never learn and who is called “Tokyo Rose” at one point (I get the reference, but it’s also a cute bit of symbolism with how the woman’s reassuring voice functions as and is acknowledged as basically propaganda), is the only female character in the novel; and she’s not really a character at that. From here on it’s all a war of nerves, of the explorers fighting off Twos while trying not to have total mental breakdowns. We do get some relief in the form of a new alien species with the Threes, which are like a cross between a snake and a teddy bear; I know that sounds like a weird combination. The Threes appear to be friendly, but are still not the intelligent alien(s) running the Ship that the explorers are looking for. This is the longest installment, so be prepared for a big third-act blowout and the summit of the conflict.

All Judgment Fled is technically a Big Dumb Object™ story, but that’s desceptive given how close-quarters the novel’s scale is. From start to finish we’re stuck with two small ships from the Prometheus Project and the Ship, which while nearly half a mile long is not spacious like the interior of, say, Rama. Comparisons will inevitably be drawn between White’s novel and Arthur C. Clarke’s undying classic, which depending on your worldview may or may not be favorable. If you’re looking for gosh-wow moments that provoke your inner child (what Rendezvous with Rama does in spades) then you’ll have no such luck with White’s novel. The setting is cramped, paranoid, claustrophobic, verging on inner space rather than outer with how much we’re stuck with the flawed humanity of the characters, but this is still a hard-headed old-school SF tale at the end of the day. McCullough, our lead, never becomes fully human in that his conscience never wanders from the physical problem at hand for long, but the novel still deals with the ethical equations of first contact more than some of its ilk.

It’s respectable is what I’m saying, if also cagey.

There Be Spoilers Here

After losing Drew (for real this time) and Berryman we finally get to have a “chat” with the alien that’s really running the Ship, and it looks—interesting. Another thing I gotta give White credit for is that we do not get any humanoid aliens here, with the different types vaguely resembling Earth animals but having nothing that could be mistaken for human. (I bring this up just so we can rest easy that none of the explorers go chasing lustily after some blue-skinned space babe.) The intelligent—and benevolent, wow how lucky—alien running the Ship is itself nightmarish in appearance to our battered explorers, “a great, fat, caterpillar, an LSD nightmare with too many eyes and mouths in all the wrong places.” Still the two species are able to communicate through visuals, since obviously verbal communication will do nothing, and ultimately we get a sort of cultural exchange.

Since half the human crew is dead there’s now few enough people to accommodate the reduced number of space suits, along with one of the P-ships no longer working. Which is all rather… convenient? If also morbid. I don’t totally buy the happy ending here, but then maybe White is not the kind of writer to totally fuck his characters over. J. G. Ballard would fuck shit up with this premise, which makes me wonder what this novel would’ve been like had it been a more ruthless deconstruction of first contact narratives—a premise that’s started here but not completely fulfilled.

A Step Farther Out

I know a couple people who prefer this over Rendezvous with Rama, and I can see the argument for it even though I ultimately have to disagree, because in some ways All Judgment Fled is the anti-Rama. Whereas the explorers in Clarker’s novel are always up against some tangible external problem that can be solved fine with bruce force or swiftness of speed, the conflict in White’s novel comes largely from the fact that the people heading the Prometheus Project failed to consider the possibility of interacting with alien lifeforms, not to mention explorers who might not be the most rational people; yet All Judgment Fled also feels incomplete somehow, whereas Rama is undoubtedly the complete package. This is a short novel, coming in at no more than 55,000 words, and truth be told it could’ve been 5,000 words longer, much of that devoted to scenery and character moments. The characters are not the flattest, but it can be easy to confuse some of them; half of them lack clearly defined roles but also nuance. White also has this thing for not describing places in any great detail, which made the action-heavy back end of the novel read as too abstract for my tastes.

Next post will be on time, trust me.

See you next time.
Serial Review: All Judgment Fled by James White (Part 2/3)

May 13th, 2023

(Cover by John Pederson. If, January 1968.)

Who Goes There?

James White was most popular in his time for the Sector General series, about a giant hospital station in space where conflicts comes not from epic space battles but doctors dealing with bizarre alien biology. White wanted to become a doctor but financial concerns at the time prevented this, although frankly I would’ve just assumed he was a doctor, going by what I’ve read of All Judgment Fled so far. I’m very curious about exploring White more, given his fascination with non-violent causes for conflict, and how violence isn’t treated as a solution but a catalyst for bigger problems.

Placing Coordinates

Part 2 was published in the January 1968 issue of If, which is on the Archive. Bad news is All Judgment Fled has not been given many paperback editions; good news is the few editions we have go for cheap used.

Enhancing Image

Now that we’re on the Ship, it’s time to do some exploring! The men of P-One (Drew, Morrison, and Hollis) and P-Two (McCullough, Walters, and Berryman) are officially stuck together, with the two small ships being now conjoined near the Ship to make moving between the two easy. Last time we hung out with the boys, Walters narrowly survived an encounter with one of the starfish aliens (now called a Type Two), and his suit is now basically unusable. This is a bit of a problem. For the men the suits are like a second layer of skin that, if removed, would greatly increase the risk of death, even though they don’t need the suits in the Prometheus ships; on the Ship it’s a different story. And apparently the aliens are hostile!

On top of all this, the men also have to deal with an increasingly cranky Prometheus Command, the top brass back home who are relaying the men’s actions back to Earth, with millions people (at least a billion, actually) tuning their radios to hear about what happens next. There’s a bit of meta hijinks going on here since McCullough is made all too vividly aware that the men’s sense of privacy has been eroded, that nearly their every move and word is being judged by a vast unseen audience—although unbeknownst to the characters that audience also encompasses readers. We’re given a better idea as to the relationship between the explorers and the rest of mankind, with this lop-sided arrangement that’s probably not good for the explorers’ mental health. Hollis was already on the verge of a breakdown in Part 1, but that turns out to be the least of the men’s problems.

Then there’s the question of the aliens’ intelligence. Frankly there’s no way to be sure. Somebody must’ve been intelligent enough to have built the ship, but the aliens that are actually onboard are unlikely to have been the culprits. The Type Two, for instance, is almost certainly non-sentient, but even then there’s no guarantee about that. Maybe up to now there’s just been failure to communicate. There are also at least two types of alien (as in, aliens that cannot be of the same species) that are on the Ship, and likely there’s a third species waiting for Our Heroes™ down the road. Still, despite the close encounters with aliens, the question as to who built the Ship remains perfectly unanswered—and yet conceivably it has to be something of at least the same intelligence as humans, and more likely of greater intelligence. White understands that in the highly unlikely event of first contact the aliens in question would be akin to angels—or an amoeba.

Their idea was simply that any piece of machinery beyond a certain degree of complexity—from a car or light airplane up to and including spaceships half a mile long—required an enormous amount of prior design work, planning and tooling long before the first simple parts and sub-assemblies became three-dimensional metal on someone’s workbench. The number of general assembly and detail drawings, material specification charts, wiring diagrams and so on for a vessel of this size must have been mind-staggering, and the purpose of all this paperwork was simply to instruct people of average intelligence in the manufacture and fitting together the parts of this gigantic three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

Speaking of first contact, Murray Leinster doesn’t quite get namedropped, but he gets the next best thing: a not very subtle hint directed his way. At one point McCullough, evidently a science fiction fan, thinks about “the old-time author responsible for a story called First Contact.” We also get a reference to another classic Leinster story, “The Ethical Equations,” and both these stories are indeed very much relevant to the current situation. White’s fannish side comes to the surface here, but at the same time it makes sense for the explorers to have been made at least somewhat familiar with classic science fiction, since SF would be the only even remotely useful reference point for their mission. I could fault White for a couple things, but over and over I find his logical outlook admirable; he takes something that with most writers would get pushed under the rug with some handwavium and he guides it along to a logical conclusion. There are no easy answers.

Part 2 does suffer a bit from what we might call Middle Installment Syndrome, in which the middle entry of a trilogy has to contend with not having a beginning or a conclusion, but making do as a big gelatinous second act. Why do people remember The Two Towers less than Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the King? Well, what happens in The Two Towers? We’re introduced to Gollum properly, that’s gotta be worth something; and we get the Battle of Helm’s Deep, often the most cited action set piece in the trilogy—yet going by IMDB and Letterboxd scores people aren’t quite as fond of The Two Towers as its siblings. Middle Installment Syndrome. I’ve come to realize that this also applies to novel serials, although I probably wouldn’t feel the “gelatinous second act” thing as much if I was reading All Judgment Fled as a single unit. Still, it’s short enough to not drag much.

There Be Spoilers Here

Things really go to shit in the second half of Part 2. The explorers kill a Type Two in another encounter, which is more or less accidental but which starts a snowball of paranoia and calls for violence among the men. As I supposed should be expected with White, violence is treated as something to be prevented as much as possible, since it will not solve issues but instead cause a snowball effect of greater violence. Command is not happy with how things are turning out, since at the outset this was supposed to be a mission that would unite mankind, rather than cause people to splinter on, for example, the treatment of alien lifeforms. “But now that the meeting had degenerated into violence, had become literally a blow-by-blow affair, the idea had backfired.” This culminates in the first fatality among the explorers, with Morrison, one of the most experienced men on the team, getting brutally killed by a Type Two. Even though we don’t get to know any of these men (except for McCullough) too much as individuals, Morrison’s death still works as a point of no return for the venture.

For better or worse, the men can only move forward.

After Morrison’s body is tucked away, the men keep searching through the big corridors of the Ship, coming upon rooms of different kinds, although McCullough seems to be the only one keeping his eye on the prize at this point. Most disconcerting is a room that almost resembles something humans would use—like a bedroom or a drawing-room. “A lab animal would not require a furnished room. Which meant that there were intelligent extraterrestrials on the Ship.” Maybe the Type Twos aren’t sentient, but somebody here sure is. And just as it looks like the men are about to hit a big clue as to the aliens’ nature, the Ship has started moving—away from the Prometheus ships. The Ship, which hitherto had been orbiting freely, is now moving on its own again. Well gosh darn it!

A Step Farther Out

It’s enjoyable, but there’s also something missing about it that I can’t put my finger on. It could be that there are too many characters that can be thought of as “nondescript white guy,” with only a couple standing out. That can’t be it, though. The characters in Rendezvous with Rama are made of cardboard, but that doesn’t bother me. I think it may be that White, unlike Clarke, is not concerned with evoking a Sense of Wonder™, which no doubt contributes to Rama remaining popular after half a century. White obviously has different goals from Clarke, which so far he’s been meeting admirably; it’s just that if you’re expecting a first contact narrative that’ll leave you breathless you’ll be disappointed. White does, however, have a special talent for making me think about the situation these characters are in—about logistical problems that would naturally arise from such a situation, but also the deep moral quandary that would come about in the event of first contact with a spacefaring alien race. Looking forward to how White’s gonna end this!

See you next time.
Serial Review: All Judgment Fled by James White (Part 1/3)

May 6th, 2023

(Cover by Douglas Chaffee. If, December 1967.)

Who Goes There?

James White was an Irish SF fan-turned-writer who was one of the many authors to have found his footing in the ’50s, and it was in that decade when he started his Sector General series—about a massive hospital in space that deals with many alien species. Rather than focus on hardboiled adventure narratives, White seemed to prefer to write about issues that naturally arise from psychology and biology; he wanted to practice medicine, but economic troubles apparently led him elsewhere. With this in mind I’m ashamed to say I’ve not read anything by White prior to today’s novel, All Judgment Fled, which is a one-off and which was serialized in If, as opposed to New Worlds, where the Sector General series was published. All Judgment Fled is a Big Dumb Object™ story, published in the midst of several famous BDO stories (notably Ringworld, and, more regrettably, The Wanderer), but White looks to add his own flavor to the basic premise.

Placing Coordinates

Part 1 was published in the December 1967 issue of If, which is on the Archive. (You may notice that this issue has been mislabeled on the Archive as the May 1967 issue. Somebody fucked up.) Also be aware that If and Galaxy under Fred Pohl’s editorship ~~well actually Galaxy also had this issue when H. L. Gold was in charge~~ have some pretty sloppy copy-editing, which may distract from the experience. Sadly there aren’t many paperback editions either; the most recent edition, from Old Earth Books, predates 9/11. The good news is that used copies still go for cheap.

Enhancing Image

In the near future (a future which rather closely resembles the space race in the years following the moon landing), a mysterious vessel is spotted orbiting our sun between Mars and Jupiter, “shaped like a blunt topedo with a pattern of bulges encircling its mid-section and just under half a mile long.” The Ship (with a capital S) is a massive cylindrical object that is no doubt artificial, and which has not responded to any attempts to contact it. Thus we have the Prometheus Project, a first contact mission wherein two small ships, P-One and P-Two, are sent out to rendezvous with the Ship. (If this sounds a bit like Rendezvous with Rama, keep in mind that All Judgment Fled came first.) Six of the sharpest minds in the space program, three to each ship, are set to spend more than five months locked up in tight quarters on their way to the Ship, with McCullough, the doctor on P-Two, as the closest we get to a protagonist. Perhaps not coincidentally, all six of the men chosen are unmarried; survival is not guaranteed.

Aside from McCullough on P-Two we have Berryman and Walters; and on P-One we have Drew, Morrison, and Hollis. McCullough is the only one of the six to have sufficient medical training, and while the ships are always in communication with each other, they’re still a good distance apart as they voyage out to the Ship. Berryman and Walters are trained astronauts while McCullough is the outlier; meanwhile on P-One Hollis is the noobie while Drew and Morrison are the veterans. While it must’ve been tempting for command to hire all veteran spacers for the voyage, a more diverse team (in profession, though it must be said not in skin color or nationality) was probably for the best. Certain skills might be needed…

Instead of six of the world’s acknowledged scientific geniuses there had been chosen four experienced astronauts and two under training who were not even known in scientific circles and were respected only by friends. All that could be said for them was that they had a fairly good chance of surviving the trip.

Something about this novel that struck me is that you can tell that it was written when the space race about the reach its climax. The moon landing was still more than a year off, but Yuri Gagarin had left Earth’s orbit several years prior and it’s quite possible White wrote the novel immediately following the Apollo 1 tragedy. It was widely known by this point that being an astronaut was dangerous—that blood had already been spilled in the name of the US and Soviet Union outdoing each other. As such, despite the peppering of light sarcastic humor throughout (more on this in a bit), there’s still this persistent sense that Our Heroes™ could meet an unfortunate end at pretty much any moment. Of course, space is scary enough; the astronauts also have to deal with each other.

The boys are stuck with each other, in living quarters “which compared unfavorably with the most unenlightened penal institutions,” having to eat paste through tubes, having to wipe themselves down with alcohol periodically since they can’t take water baths, having no idea at all what they’re gonna do exactly when they arrive at their destination. When Hollis comes down with a skin condition and McCullough has to venture out to P-One to take care of him, there’s some worry—not just for Hollis’s body, but his mentality, which doesn’t look good either. McCullough doesn’t have to prod Hollis for long before the latter starts ranting about his co-workers. “A person could say an awful lot about themselves by the way they talked about someone else.” It’s clear to McCullough that Hollis is threatening to have a mental breakdown—that he’s having paranoid delusions about Drew and Morrison, whom he claims have snuck a “Dirty Annie,” a small nuclear weapon, into P-One. Even after Hollis is calmed down, it’s clear that this man’s instability will probably contribute to later problems.

Both the characters and the third-person narrator engage in some banter, which makes sense given the situation; few things deflate tension like humor. Actually while I have my reservations about the characters themselves, I don’t fault White for bordering the narrative with jokes—helped by White’s sense of humor (in my opinion) being often effective and unintrusive. While the BDO story had certainly not been done to death at this point (give it another decade), White’s deconstructing of the premise almost feels like commentary on the basic premise and how in reality, if we were to make contact with some alien vessel in our solar system, things would be much less glamorous than what Hollywood gives us. The lack of imput from the outside world, despite us being told about millions of eyes and ears keeping track of the voyage, only adds to the isolation and claustrophobia.

There Be Spoilers Here

So we finally get to the Ship, and we even meet some aliens, although these are far from little green men. The aliens are obviously intelligent enough to have built the Ship, but whether they’re capable of understanding human speech or even gestures is another question. “We know,” says McCullough at one point, “that they do not have fingers, and may have a two-digit pincer arrangement.” Turns out they have even less than that (or more, depending on how you look at it), with one alien looking like an actual starfish while another resembles a dumbbell. Between Hollis’s paranoia, Walters nearly dying from getting a tear in his spacesuit, and the aliens being totally unintelligible, Our Heroes™ have some work to do.

Stay tuned.

A Step Farther Out

I’m cautiously optimistic about this one. I occasionally find White’s attempts at dry humor chuckle-worthy, but I’m not sure if this is the norm for him or something unique to this novel. We’re also about a third into All Judgment Fled and the action has barely started; this is not the fastest of reads, despite being short overall. At the same time White is focusing on things that are not normally dwelled on in Big Dumb Object™ stories, namely the logistical and psychological cost of coming into contact with a BDO in the first place. McCullough and crew are not the most vividly drawn of characters, but their uneasy dynamic should be fruitful for future conflicts. Given the nature of the aliens this may also prove to be an unorthodox first contact narrative, since we’re not dealing with humanoids or even seemingly aliens capable of verbal speech. I’m already prepping to start Part 2.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: May 2023

May 1st, 2023
(Cover by Allen Anderson. Planet Stories, Fall 1949.)

This will turn out to be a busy month for me. I’m gonna be a guest on one or two podcasts/streams with some people I very much respect, and I’ll also be flying out of my Jersey/Pennsylvania bubble to visit some friends I rarely ever get to hang out with in person. On the one hand this is all more eventful than what I usually deal with, but also I’ll have a bit less time to manage this site—which won’t stop me from putting in as much effort as I usually do. It’s draining sometimes, but that is how passion works.

My personal life is gonna be busy, but also my review lineup is FILLED for May: we’ve got two serials, two novellas, two short stories, and finally a complete novel—our first one in six months. I know, the gap between novel reviews looks to be wide, but mind you that there aren’t too many of these “complete” novels in the magazines.

One more thing: I mentioned in a past editorial that I think very highly of 1953 as a year when SFF flourished, in general and especially in magazine publishing, which was experiencing a bubble we would not see again until… now, basically. Strangely, I haven’t before covered ANYTHING from that year, so to compensate we’ve got two stories from 1953 in the lineup. 1953 was such a banger that I could probably get five years out of just reviewing everything that was published then.

Enough wasting time, though, let’s see what we have.

For the serials:
1. All Judgment Fled by James White. Serialized in Worlds of If, December 1967 to February 1968. White is an author I’ve not read a single word of (or at least I think) up to this point, and given his philosophy with storytelling this feels a little criminal to me. When planning this post I flip-flopped between All Judgment Fled, Second Ending, and The Dream Millennium for my first White, since all three sound appealing, and ultimately went with this because I’ve also been meaning to tackle something—anything—that was published in If.
2. Sos the Rope by Piers Anthony. Serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July to September 1968. Yes, that Piers Anthony. He actually appeared regularly in the genre magazines early in his career, when he was a promising young writer and people did not yet know the horrors he was about to unleash on the world. My only prior Anthony experience was the short story “In the Barn,” and let me tell you… that’s the kind of thing that puts you off an author for years. But maybe Sos the Rope, his second novel, will be good!
For the novellas:
1. “The Rose” by Charles L. Harness. From the March 1953 issue of Authentic Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novella. Harness is one of those recent discoveries of mine that I’ve been meaning to explore further—made easier because Harness was not that prolific a writer; when he wrote he was fairly productive, but then he would vanish for several years. Harness apparently struggled to find a publisher for “The Rose” in the US, having to jump across the Atlantic and submit it to a filthy British magazine.
2. “Enchantress of Venus” by Leigh Brackett. From the Fall 1949 issue of Planet Stories. Brackett is now most known for her part in the messy scripting process for The Empire Strikes Back, for her collaborations with director Howard Hawks, and for the rather unchararcteristic novel The Long Tomorrow. Much of Brackett’s fiction, however, is planetary romance a la Edgar Rice Burroughs, complete with swashbuckling antics. “Enchantress of Venus” is one of several stories starring Eric John Stark, the barbarian hero for the space age.
For the short stories:
1. “Second Variety” by Philip K. Dick. From the May 1953 issue of Space Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novelette. Not that I try to hide my biases anyway, but Philip K. Dick is one of my top five favorite authors—and he ain’t #5 on that list. But before he broke new ground as a novelist, Dick was one of the most talented and prolific SFF writers of the ’50s, with about thirty of his short stories being published in 1953 alone. “Second Variety” is one of Dick’s most famous short stories, and yet somehow I’ve not read it before.
2. “Black God’s Shadow” by C. L. Moore. From the December 1934 issue of Weird Tales. It’s been two months since I reviewed Moore’s “The Black God’s Kiss,” which was a reread, and true enough there was a two-month gap in publication between “The Black God’s Kiss” and its direct sequel. Only a year into her career and Moore had skyrocketed to being one of Weird Tales‘s most popular authors, with the adventures of Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry getting started during this period. Moore is a favorite of mine, naturally.
For the complete novel:
1. Big Planet by Jack Vance. From the September 1952 issue of Startling Stories. Believe it or not, this is a reread—actually one of the first stories I remember reading via magazine scan. As is often the case with me, though, there are surely many things about this novel that I didn’t pick up on a first reading. Vance is not an author I’m strongly attached to, but he does fill a certain niche, being a planet builder par excellence and a crafter of gnarly planetary adventures when he feels like it. Big Planet represents planetary romance shifting away from the Burroughs-Brackett model (which is really science-fantasy), and injecting the subgenre with some semblance of scientific plausibility. But how does this novel hold up on a reread? Let’s find out.
We have a nice mix of science fiction and fantasy, all of it vintage. We’ll get back to some more recent publications next month… maybe. You have to understand that I only cover so much in a given month and that there’s so much history behind the genre magazines. The roster, you may notice, leans toward adventure this month, between the Brackett, Moore, Vance, and probably the Anthony pieces; it just sort of turned out that way. Maybe given that I’ll be traveling soon I thought it appropriate to focus more on tales of high adventure for my site. Regardless, it won’t be a boring lot.

Won’t you read with me?