(Cover by Gerard Quinn. Science Fantasy, February 1963.)
Sometimes I get confused by my own schedule, which is to say the rotation method I used is one I’m not sure I always abide. Do I do eight reviews this month, or nine? How many days are in September? Thirty. But that doesn’t matter now. August was a pain and a half for me, for a few reasons. I went on vacation with family, which wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows (although I at least got PTO from that), not helped by there being I guess you could say a changing of the guard in my polycule. One of my partners dumped me. We’d been together about three months, and it was a pretty intense pairing. They (I say that because they’re non-binary) ultimately didn’t feel comfortable being with someone who is polyamorous. That’s the short of it. It sucks, and I’m still feeling sore from it, although I suppose this is the kind of loss you have to accept with a polycule. But it hasn’t been all bad! We did also welcome a new member recently, and she’s very cute. She’s not used to polyamory (the last polycule she was in didn’t work out), but she’s patient and so far things have been going pretty well for us.
On to shit that matters more, the Hugos happened this past month, and I actually got to vote in them—not that it mattered too much. I only felt qualified to vote in about half a dozen categories, although I did vote in Best Short Story (the #1 on my slate didn’t win :/), and I think this was also the first time I was poised to review a Hugo nominee which then went on to win by the time my review was published (Naomi Kritzer’s “The Year Without Sunshine,” a very fine pick). Next year’s Worldcon is to be held in Seattle, which hey, that’s only on the other side of the country for me. I should get to work on attending, since I can feasibly do that. Worldcon 2026 is also gonna be held in LA, so that’s… two American Worldcons in a row. That’s a bit weird. But I can’t complain too much.
As for this months reviews, we have a few birthdays! John Brunner would be celebrating his 90th birthday on the 24th (had he not died in 1995), which is crazy considering one would think he was maybe a decade older. Stephen King (who is very much alive) is celebrating his 77th birthday on the 21st. Something I’ve started to think about is the decades I’m pulling from with my story choices, because given how the magazine market has ebbed and flowed over the years there are a few boom periods that would get more attention than others. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’ve had to try to not pick material from the ’50s too often, and indeed there are no ’50s stories this month! We have three from the ’60s, two from the ’80s, two from the ’90s, and one from the 2020s. A couple these would be horror outings, as a prelude to next month’s shenanigans.
Now let’s see…
For the novellas:
“Green Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson. From the September 1985 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Robinson is one of the most respected living SF writers, for his hard-science credentials but also for being one of the few openly leftist writers in the field over the age of sixty. Worth mentioning that this novella has nothing to do with Robinson’s award-winning Mars trilogy, although it does apparently share continuity with a few other stories set on Mars—just not the Mars of that trilogy. And also I heard Robinson would take some ideas from this early Mars story and reuse them for the trilogy.
“Some Lapse of Time” by John Brunner. From the February 1963 issue of Science Fantasy. Low-key one of the more tragic figures in classic SF, Brunner was something of a prodigy, making his debut while still a teenager. He also wrote full-time in the ’50s and ’60s, at a time when that wasn’t considered all too viable for genre writers, and money was an issue. Brunner wrote so much that a lot of his short fiction hasn’t been collected more than once, or at least not in my lifetime. “Some Lapse of Time” has not seen print since Lyndon B. Johnson was in office, so let’s see if it’s a hidden gem or not.
For the short stories:
“The Transcendent Tigers” by R. A. Lafferty. From the February 1964 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow. Lafferty has a reputation as something of a writer’s writer, and there’s a reason for this: nobody writes quite like Lafferty. I’m not a fan of him, because I often find him overly quirky, but I’m all for giving authors another chance. I went out of my way to pick a relatively obscure Lafferty story.
“Angels in Love” by Kathe Koja. From the July 1991 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I’ve only read short stories by her so far (I do have The Cipher, her first novel, on my shelf), but I can already say Koja is becoming one of my favorite horror writers. She’s turned more to YA in recent years, but her early stuff is vicious, snarky, and at times genuinely disturbing.
“Craphound” by Cory Doctorow. From the March 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age. Acclaimed as both a writer and commentator on the state of tech and surveillance, Doctorow has probably kept a thumb on the pulse of the post-internet zeitgeist more than any other living SF writer. “Craphound” is a very early story, but Doctorow thinks fondly enough of it to have named his blog after it.
“Crazy Beautiful” by Cat Rambo. From the March-April 2021 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Rambo is a no-nonsense Texan who’s been active in the field for the past twenty years, more or less. They’ve been most prolific as a short story writer and editor, but have also recently taken to writing novels. Their latest novel, Rumor Has It, is due out from Tor later this month.
“Beachworld” by Stephen King. From the Fall 1984 issue of Weird Tales. Really needs no introduction, but let’s do it. King started writing in the ’60s, a fact people tend to forget because Carrie, his first novel, didn’t come out until 1974. Then the rest was history. He’s known firstly as a horror writer, but he’s also ventured into basically every genre under the sun, “Beachworld” being SF-horror.
“David’s Daddy” by Rosel George Brown. From the June 1960 issue of Fantastic. Brown made her debut in 1958 and quickly established herself as a short fiction writer; a large portion of her fiction would be published between 1958 and 1963. In one of SF’s many lost futures, Brown could’ve gone on to fit in with the New Wave feminists, had she not died in 1967, at only 41 years old.
Unfortunately I don’t have a lot to say about Tom Purdom. “Reduction in Arms” is actually my first Purdom story, despite the fact that I’ve been meaning to get around to reading at least a couple of his short stories before this. In this unique case, I decided to consult a certain colleague, Gideon Marcus over at Galactic Journey (which I’m now writing for), since he had known Purdom personally for some years, and he came back with an obituary segment he wrote for the SFWA.
This is not the whole piece, but you get the idea:
Tom was a titan. His career spanned eight decades, putting him among the Top 5 active SF authors in terms of longevity. Moreover, he was ahead of his time, featuring persons of color, positively portrayed queer couples, and polyamory in his SF works… in the early sixties. But most of all, Tom was a mensch of the first order, doing good without tooting his horn. And he was a good friend.
I couldn’t have said it better.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1967 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted only once in English, in the anthology International Relations Through Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander). Purdom apparently turned “Reduction in Arms” into a novel in 1971, but that’s only been printed the one time. From what I can tell he had envisioned the short story first and then decided to expand on it.
Enhancing Image
It’s the near future, and the Cold War has simmered down a bit in the wake of the Treaty of Beijing Peking, in which the US and USSR have agreed to keep tabs on each other for the sake of preventing nuclear annihilation. Of course, weapons of mass destruction don’t necessarily have to be nuclear, as the unnamed (to my recollection) narrator tells us that the US government has been tipped off to a possible secret lab in a Russian mental hospital. Lesechko, a scientist and a patient at said mental hospital, is rumored to be experimenting with a “ninety-five plus” virus—a bio-weapon with such a rapid spread that it would kill off 95% of a country’s population before a vaccine could be produced. The few who happen to be immune to such a virus would inherit a land of ruins, and needless to say the Cold War would turn very hot very fast. The narrator works a desk job and as such is in no immediate danger, but his colleagues, namely Weinberg and Prieto, are sent to inspect the mental hostpial.
The aim is to see, by way of inspection and interrogation, if the rumors are true, and if so to stop the experiments. The problem is that the team’s second aim is to preserve the Treaty of Peking, since it’s paramount for arms reduction and there are people on both sides who want the treaty thrown in the garbage—to make the Cold War heat up again. As you can guess, this almost has more in common with John le Carré spy novels than with genre SF conventions, although it does remind me of Algis Budrys’s Who?, which also had an explicit Cold War theme and dealt with the thorny nature of US and USSR relations. Like in Who?, there’s a dilemma at work. The narrator puts the core issue succinctly enough:
We assumed the Russians would deny us access, and we would have to negotiate with them. Before the negotiations began, we had to let them know we would withdraw from the treaty if they destroyed the lab while we were negotiating and tricked us into inspecting real patients. If they wanted to keep the treaty, they could either prove no lab had ever been hidden in the hospital—let their technical staff and ours figure out how—or they could show us the lab and give us all the information Lesechko had obtained.
The setup is very good. There are a couple things holding this story back from being more engaging, though. Let’s talk narrators. We have a first-person passive narrator here, in the sense that he doesn’t really do anything and is only reporting the events of the story after the fact. Now, a first-person passive narrator could work, depending on what type of story you’re telling. One of my favorite narrators in all of literature is in William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, and that guy spends most of the novel telling someone else’s story; but then the thing with Maxwell’s novel is that it’s about the tragedy of not treating someone with empathy at a time when they could really use a helping hand. A passive narrator can work in a story that’s light on action, but the problem is that “Reduction in Arms” is, at its core, an espionage thriller. Such a story requires a sense of urgency and a level of apparent danger that demands the reader’s involvement, and this is all deflated when the narrator is a) not in any danger, and b) writing about these events like he’s writing a not-terribly-interesting memoir. I was not on the edge of my scene when I should’ve been.
Another problem is length, although it’s not the problem I usually have with story length. Purdom had apparently written “Reduction in Arms” as a novelette, then shortened it and submitted, got rejected, then expanded it back to novelette-length. Given the weight of the subject matter, I actually think this story is too short, which you could say is the best negative criticism you can give of something. At 23 magazine pages I think it could’ve easily been double that length and made into a novella. We are introduced to a few interesting characters, Prieto especially with his background in the Cuban Revolution, but there’s little dialogue and we’re not given much time with these characters before everything goes to hell. I can see why Purdom would return to this material and make a novel out of it, because it’s rich as a what-if scenario and a pseudo-historical document. There were a lot of SF stories written during the Cold War that were about the Cold War, especially during its hotter moments (the Bay of Pigs “fiasco” is referenced here), but Purdom’s story feels more plausible than most. Just as importantly, this is not a story that mindlessly demonizes the Soviets.
There Be Spoilers Here
The lab turns out to be real, which would be bad enough, but Prieto also goes rogue and starts on a rampage against security and lab assistants. In a way this is convenient, despite the lives lost, because if the secret lab had just been discovered then the US would have reason enough to back out of the treaty; but with Prieto going against orders and threatening to take off with lab documents, the Soviets have very good reason to cooperate with US agents. The only solution that would satisfy both parties is for Weinberg to get the documents out of Prieto’s hands—by any means necessary. Weinberg is a trained agent, but he’d never actually had to kill anyone before; now he had to kill one of his own countrymen. It’s objectively the right thing to do, but Weinberg has to work himself up to it, and it doesn’t help that Prieto is very skilled gunman. “Whenever people talk about the good of humanity, Tolstoy had said, they are always getting ready to commit a crime.” The resulting shootout ends in Prieto dying and Weinberg narrowly surviving, more importantly with the documents intact. It’s a thrilling climax that could’ve been made better by a change in perspective and more development of the characters who are in the thick of it.
The very end implies that this skirmish over the bio-weapon lab will not be the last such incident, although I couldn’t help but be distracted by the story seemingly ending mid-sentence. I think the ellipses are supposed to be foreboding, but I was more thinking that the story had been cut off before it reached a proper conclusion.
A Step Farther Out
I wanna recommend “Reduction in Arms” more than I do. It’s a great idea for a story that ultimately still feels like a rough draft. In 1967 it might’ve been more impressive, hence it making the cover of the F&SF issue it appeared in. It could also be that I had recently read le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, because I simultaneously felt like I knew where Purdom was coming from and that this Cold War spy fiction deal had been done better. I do wanna give Purdom another chance in the future.
Howard Waldrop debuted in 1972, apparently one of the last authors to be discovered by John W. Campbell, but he would quickly head off in a very different direction from the house of Analog. Waldrop’s fiction can be russtic and nostalgic, sometimes positing what-if scenarios, most famously in his World Fantasy-winning story “The Ugly Chickens,” an alternate history in which the dodo had not gone extinct in the 17th century. His short fiction is what has secured his legacy, since Waldrop had only put out one solo novel, Them Bones in 1984. In the introductory blurb for today’s story, Gardner Dozois says Waldrop was working on a novel titled I, John Mandeville, but this book never materialized. In an age where authors hopped on novel-writing for that bigger paycheck, or even started out as novelists before moving “down” to short fiction for funzies, Waldrop is one of the few notable SFF authors of his generation who was almost a pure short fiction writer. He death last month has left a hole in the field.
Both readers and writers must’ve really liked “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” since it was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and placed third in that year’s Locus poll for Best Novelette. I also really liked it! I’m surprised I haven’t read more Waldrop since the few stories of his I’ve read have been certified bangers; but then he also wasn’t that prolific a writer, so I ought to savor it. There’s definitely a hint of autobiography with this one, as the narrator is a about a few years younger than Waldrop and is an Austin denizen.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1988 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Its quality was immediately noted, as Gardner Dozois would reprint it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection. It then appeared in the Waldrop collections Night of the Cooters and Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader.
Enhancing Image
The plot is simple. “The Class of ’69 was having its twentieth high school reunion.” The story takes place in what would’ve been a very near but decidedly alternate future—a 1989 that’s different from what the year ended up being but otherwise is close enough to reality to be plausible. It’s this near-future element that qualifies the story as SF—that and the ending, although I’ll try not get ahead of myself here. The narrator, Frank Bledsoe, is pushing forty and makes his living as a handyman. “I help people move a lot. In Austin, if you have a pickup, you have friends for life.” Austin. Feels like a Richard Linklater movie. This story is much more about characters and speculation than plot, so pardon me if my reviews sounds a little disjointed. This is a very hard story to spoil. It’s totally possible Frank is a stand-in for Waldrop, but I don’t know enough about Waldrop to make that assessment. There’s less a plot and more a series of reminiscences connecting to a single event—in this case the reunion.
Frank is a passive protagonist: he doesn’t really do anything, which would be a problem if this was an action narrative. Instead it almost reads like autobiography, with a strong dose of self-reflection. I mean why not, it’s been twenty years since he graduated high school. It’s been ten years since I graduated high school, and I’ll be honest, I barely remember anything from that time in my life. I was on the wrestling team, until a leg injury junior year convinced me to quit. I didn’t have my first serious relationsip until about a month before graduating, and that whole thing (three years!) was a mistake (I was immature and I wish I had treated her a lot better than I did). I don’t talk to any of the friends I had in high school. People, Frank included, are able to recall their teen years with crystal clarity, but I just can’t. I was an outcast who was very likely autistic and, as it turns out, someone with bipolar disorder who would go undiagnosed for ten years. Things were very different in 2014. We had a Democrat president who had backed a mass murder campaign in the Middle East, and Taylor Swift was seemingly everywhere in the press and on the radio. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that different. People much older than me have a better sense of time passing.
Part of me wonders if Waldrop had not envisioned “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” as a non-SF story, maybe something he would’ve sold to The New Yorker or somewhere else that probably pays better than Asimov’s. Most of the story barely even registers as speculative, which I can see as a problem for some people. Of course, the reality is that the market for non-genre short fiction is rather small, or at least pales in comparison to the wealth of potential buyers in genre fiction. It’s also totally possible Waldrop started writing with the ending in mind, in which case it’s intentionally designed as a non-SF story that suddenly explodes into something else in the climax. Waldrop has an uncanny ability to evoke the ordinary, slightly altered by an ingredient of his own making. “The Ugly Chickens” could be a literary short story that teachers would make students read in high school, except for the whole dodo thing. “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” could be a literary coming-of-age narrative, like Stephen King’s The Body, if not for the whole aliens-causing-a-blackout bit. This story could be just a middle-aged dude reflecting on years past, but have you heard of this band called Distressed Flag Sale and a gnarly show they wanna put on…?
But then the story is less about Frank and more about the time of his youth, the state the US was in, the future that failed to happen. By his own admission he’s not a very interesting person. “I care a lot. I’m fairly intelligent, and I have a sense of humor. You know, the doormat personality,” he tells us. Thing is, Frank is not unique. Indeed much of the story is him finding that his former comrades have largely moved away from their radical youths and slipped into unassuming lives. This is a story about people who would’ve graduated high school in the late ’60s, about those who would’ve been old enough get drafted into the Vietnam War; in other words, this is a story about boomers. Waldrop seems to be in search of an anwer to a question that pertains to people of his generation: Why are boomers like that? Why does the average boomer seem so tired and reactionary? In a less charitable way of putting it, why is the average boomer a coward? Didn’t these people attend Woodstock? Didn’t they make a ruckus at the 1968 Democratic National Convention? What happened to these people? Why had their fighting spirit gone the way of the dodo? Can’t just be old age. Waldrop implicitly gives us a few answers to this question, by way of illustrating how times changes for the boomers between 1969 and 1989.
For one, not everyone boomer was a hippie—pretty far from it. Pop culture tends to do some funny shit, not the least of it being a tendency to co-opt radical movements of the past. Remember when ultra-capitalist Beyoncé appropriated Black Panther attire? Remember when milquetoast liberal Aaron Sorkin turned the leftist Chicago Seven into a pack of like-minded liberals? People, in “remembering” the hippies of the late ’60s and early ’70s, tend to paint these people as a) not as politically subversive as reality dictates, and b) more popular at the time than was the case. Truth is there were a lot of bootlickers among the youth at that time. One of the more memorable characters in Waldrop’s story is Hoyt Lawton, a classmate who was about as straight-laced as they came and who would go on to be a yuppie. “He won a bunch of money from something like the DAR for a speech he made at a Young Republicans convention on how all hippies needed was a good stiff tour of duty in Vietnam that would show them what America was all about.” There were a lot of Hoyts in the US (there still are, actually), and these people went on to vote for Reagan and “master” the stock market. Donald Trump is one such boomer we all know.
The Democratic National Convention. The moon landing. The Manson murders. Altamont. Kent State. This all happened in a period of two years and basically destroyed hippies’ reputation as a genuinely subversive group working towards the betterment of mankind. The so-called New Left came into conflict with itself. Leftist groups like the Black Panthers were being systematically targeted by the government. War protesters were being arrested. It was a bad time to be an American who was not a bootlicker. Maybe the real eccentrics—those, say, in Austin, who really believed in the cause—were being worn out. The guys in Distressed Flag Sale (now renamed Lizard Level) got arrested on bogus drug charges in 1970 and that forced the band to split up. 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots. The burgeoning queer community was then torn to shreds by AIDS, by the government deliberate ignoring of the virus. AIDS does get brought up in the story, sort of in passing; a shame none of the characters are explicitly queer, feel like that was a missed opportunity. We would not have Pride parades without riots. Queer liberation is inherently distrutful of government. God, imagine the work we could’ve accomplished with the hippies. This is a future that failed to happen, or rather wasn’t allowed to happen.
There Be Spoilers Here
So, that reunion. Distressed Flag Signal play some ’60s classics, but then their frontman drunkenly comes out, saying they’re gonna play a song that nobody would’ve heard—a song that existed only by way of reputation, like a myth. It’s called “Life Is Like That” and was due to be on their upcoming album (which never materialized due to the breakup), called either New Music for the AfterPeople or A Song to Change the World. “It was a great song, man, a great song. […] It was going to change the world we thought. […] We were gonna play it that night, and the world was gonna change, but instead they got us, they got us, man, and we were the ones that got changed, not them.” And then something very strange happens. The song has a hypnotic effect on the crowd, and I don’t mean just in the way good music will make people bump in the club, but it seems to draw the whole building into a frenzy. First a few hundred people, but then it builds—goes beyond the building. A few hundred people dancing turns into a few thousand, people dancing in the streets, people forming conga lines, people feeling a kind of insane euphoria that comes through either great sex, drugs, or a bipolar manic episode. The song does what the band hoped it would: it changes people. A literal infection of music that spreads throiughout the land.
One must imagine them happy, even as they dance until their legs give out. It’s sort of ambiguous as to whether the ending is supposed to be fully good or bittersweet, but still, these people are happy; for some of them it might be sheer happiness for the first time in two decades. It’s an ending that leaps straight into the fantastic, and its inexplicableness and potential meaning boost this story for me.
A Step Farther Out
How much you enjoy this story might depend on how much you’re willing to connect with people of a certain generation—people who, at this point, are starting to die from old age. One reason this could’ve been reprinted only once in the past thirty years is that it’s a story written in the ’80s about the ’80s, and more specifically about people who were old enough in the ’80s to be raising families of their own. And, let’s face it, boomers don’t exactly have a good reputation among millennials and younger people like myself. My simple counterargument is twofold, a) that Waldrop is pretty good at what he does, and b) if we make no attempt to understand previous generations then what hope do we have of not repeating their mistakes? I take an amateur’s interest in the historical context of really any fiction, although it helps if said fiction is good—which this is.
(Cover by Edward Valigursky. Amazing Stories, May 1959.)
Who Goes There?
From the ’50s until Arkady’s death in 1991, the Strugatsky brothers were almost certainly—along with Stanislaw Lem—the most internationally acclaimed SF writers to come out of the Soviet Union. There are a few reasons for this. No doubt during the Cold War there was a push to translate Soviet fiction that badmouthed practices in that coalition, and usually could get away with it since the censors apparently didn’t pay as much attention to genre fiction as “serious” literature. Even so, the Strugatsky brothers sometimes ran afoul of censors, with their novel The Doomed City being written in 1972 but not published until 1989 as censorship was loosening. Their 1972 novel Roadside Picnic is one of the most famous non-English SF novels of all time, helped by an extremely loose but equally fascinating film adaptation in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
In the introductory blurb, Norman Lobsenz (I think it’s Lobsenz) says “Initiative” is the first Soviet SF story ever to see publication in the SF magazines. This might be true, although I’m not ready to tumble down that particular rabbit hole. I’m not sure whose decision it was, Lobsenz’s, Goldsmith’s, or Rutley’s, but despite giving us a direct translation of the title (“Spontaneous Reflex”) in said blurb, the story itself is named “Initiative.” In fairness “Initiative” does sound better in English than “Spontaneous Reflex,” and basically conveys the same meaning in fewer syllables. “Initiative” was first published in the Russian in 1958, and was one of the Strugatsky brothers’ first published stories.
Placing Coordinates
From the May 1959 issue of Amazing Stories, which is on the Archive. Finding reprints for stories in translation can be a bit tricky. For example, “Initiative” was never reprinted in book form—at least under that title. As “Spontaneous Reflex” it was reprinted in what seems to be the same anthology under two different titles, A Visitor from Outer Space and Soviet Science Fiction (editor not credited). As “The Spontaneous Reflex” it appeared in Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian and Soviet Science Fiction (ed. Yvonne Howell). See what I mean?
Enhancing Image
Urm (“Universally Reacting Mechanism”) is a robot—a metal giant that does not wanna harm anyone, the only problem being that it’s bored. “The Master” has gone away and apparently nobody has been left on-site to watch over Urm and make sure he doesn’t get into any funny business. Suppose you’re a machine with arms and legs, and some capacity to make decisions on your own? You might wanna get a hobby or two. You might even become curious. Urm takes it upon himself to explore what seems to be a nuclear power plant (we’re not given many details), scaring an assistant or two and accidentally getting himself irradiated—which is fine, because Urm is virtually indestructible. He leaves the site “a contaminated and a wiser robot,” news of which the underlings at the plant are quick to bring to Urm’s makers, namely Nikolai Petrovich and Piskunov. (I don’t think we ever get Piskunov’s first name, although the authors felt it necessary to give us Petrovich’s first and last name almost every time.) To make matters worse, this is in Siberia, and there’s a snowstorm going on.
I would be intereted to discuss this story with someone who actually has a background in robotics, since it posits a few questions about artificial intelligence, albeit not very seriously. The Strugatsky brothers are known for having a cynical sense of humor, and at least in this early story their humor reads like a similar-looking branch to Robert Sheckley’s—but not belonging to the same tree. Two comedic voices in genre SF that formed around the same time but totally parallel to each other. But whereas early Sheckley can often be summed up as the man’s folly when inventing or confronted with a scientific revelation (the situation will always get worse, and often it ends very grimly), the Strugatsky brothers are a bit more forgiving. “Initiative” is a comedy of errors, but it’d be more accurate to say it’s a comedy of one error, even if it’s a big one. Piskunov and his team had designed Urm for a specific purpose (we’ll get to that in spoilers), but failed to consider the cognitive limitations of a being that a) practically a newborn, and b) only semi-sentient. It’s less that Urm doesn’t act according to his programming and more that his programming is flawed in ways not predicted.
The human characters don’t really matter here other than as physical stand-ins for man’s hubris; they’re little more than cardboard, and that’s fine because the story compensates in other ways. Urm is pretty interesting as a plausible depiction of a self-aware robot, since unlike Asimov’s robots he’s never overcome with delusions of religious zeal or godhood, nor does he particularly dislike humans. He also, we’re told, doesn’t have a sense of self-preservation, such that a man on the street firing a gun at him in terror doesn’t phase him at all—never mind that it would probably take a literal tank to destroy him. Of course what makes him so special, and why Piskunov is determined to capture him rather than destroy, is his brain, “an extremely complicated and delicate network of germanium and platinum membranes and ferrite.” There’s some debate as to how much Urm’s actions are of his own initiative (ha) and how much it’s him simply reacting to stimulation; after all, “reacting” is part of his name. Like a toddler his absorbs information without actually trying to understand it.
Here we see a somewhat juvenile prototype of what would become a recurring theme for the brothers, that being human cognition and its relationship with ethics. Because Urm had been programmed to take interest in tangible things but not ethics and morals, and because it has no real sense of self past a need for stimulation, it’s not fully sentient. It’s not immoral (it doesn’t even cause that much trouble, ultimately) so much as amoral. The Strugatsky brothers seem to be arguing that it’s not possible to be truly self-aware while also being totally divorced from morality. This is a basic premise, and anyone who ascribes to religious faith, or indeed anyone who leans somewhere on the left politically already knows this; whether they choose to do anything good or constructive with the fact that their capacity to think is linked inextricably with the capacity for moral understanding is a different question. Like any self-proclaimed leftist who indulges in racism, classism, misogyny, or transphobia, Urm runs into a problem because there’s a connection not being made in his thinking—although in fairness to Urm this is because the connection can’t be made.
There Be Spoilers Here
With the help of some construction equipment the crew are able to trap Urm and have him turned off, and nobody even had to die to make this happen! It’s also here that we’re finally told why such a robot would be invented in the first place. “Initiative” takes place not far in the future (everything is recognizably “modern”), but enough in the future that it’s clear the Space Race is in full swing. Makes sense: this story was published in Russia about a year after Sputnik. Unlike way too many American SF stories of the time (and until about the ’70s, it turns out), the scientists here got the bright idea to send robots to probe planets in the solar system instead of humans. Urm was made of very tough stuff because he’s supposed to set foot on Venus at some point; this was before it became known to everyone that Venus is too inhospitable a place, even for specially armored robots like Urm. You could date this story, from it being obviously written in the early days of the Space Race, but ultimately the Strugatsky brothers are more interested in thought experiments immerging from the tech than the tech itself—as tends to be the case with good science fiction.
A Step Farther Out
I liked it, and unlike early Sheckley there’s a good deal to chew on here despite the comedic tone. (I like Sheckley, but if we’re being totally honest, once you’ve read a few early Sheckley storie you can predict where they’re going.) This is still much smaller in scale than the intellectual big game the brothers would be hunting a decade or so down the road, but it marks the beginning of what would be a very fruitful creative friendship. That the brothers almost always worked together, what with Boris only writing two novels after Arkady died despite outliving him by two decades, shows a fluidity of style and work ethic. If you were an American genre reader and had picked up the May 1959 issue of Amazing Stories, the prospect of reading a Soviet SF story in translation would’ve been novel, but it also would’ve presented a story that was a bit more cerebral than what American genre readers at the time would’ve expected.
Lisa Tuttle and George R. R. Martin were baby-faced new writers, part of the post-New Wave era, and were even nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer (Tuttle won) the same year. The two were lovers in the early ’70s, and while I haven’t looked into this, I’m pretty sure they were still together when they were writing “The Storms of Windhaven” (although they had broken up, and Martin was on his way to getting married, by the time it was published). This was probably the first thing of Tuttle’s a lot of people had read, and this might still be the case given the Martin connection; but these people would be in for a nasty surprise, since Tuttle’s writing is much more in touch with horror than SF. As for Martin, I need not elaborate, only to say that the Martin of the ’70s and ’80s is quite a different beast from one of the most famous authors in the world. I can’t call myself a Martin fan (because I’ve been unimpressed by what little I’ve read of A Song of Ice and Fire), but I do like most of his early stuff.
Tuttle and Martin came up with the Windhaven setting and apparently wanted to turn it into a novel, but only after they had written this first novella, which is a self-contained narrative. And why not? It would take almost five years for a follow-up to “The Storms of Windhaven.” This was pretty popular too, getting nominated for the Hugo and Nebula and placing first in that year’s Locus poll for Best Novella. I like it a good deal myself, for the worldbuilding more than the actual plot, and because it lacks some of Martin’s less savory habits. I have a theory or two about who wrote what, but I’ll get to that in a minute. And rest assured we’ll eventually tackle One-Wing, the much-anticipated sequel to this story.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the May 1975 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which is on Luminist. Unsurprisingly most of its reprints predate Windhaven. We’ve got The Best Science Fiction of the Year 5 (ed. Terry Carr) and The 1976 Annual World’s Best SF (ed. Arthur W. Saha and Donald Wollheim). Windhaven itself is still in print, for obvious reasons.
Enhancing Image
The plot itself is rather simple, but some context is needed. A sloppy reading of this story might make one think it’s fantasy, and certainly without some pieces of backstory it could be construed for fantasy. I myself barely noticed the origin of the humans of Windhaven on my first reading, along with a couple other things. Windhaven is a livable but not totally hospitable planet, mostly covered with water and prone to fierce gales and some pretty nasty local wildlife. The humans are descendants of space colonists, who had crash landed on the planet and could no longer use their spaceship; and apparently as a result the descendants have most lost touch with their far-future past, having descended into barbarism. There are basically two types of people: flyers and “land-bound.” The flyers have constructed their wings out of metal from the crashed spaceship, so needless to say it’s a precious resource; losing wings is considered just as bad, if not worse, than losing a human life. I’m putting this all up at the front since Tuttle and Martin sort of sneak in this context in breadcrumbs of exposition, which can be easily missed, although you don’t need it to understand the plot.
Anyway. Our Heroine™, Maris, is a skilled flyer; the problem is that she’s not “supposed” to be a flyer. She’s the daughter of a fisherman (long dead) who got adopted by Russ, who really is a flyer, although having lost the use of one of his hands he can no longer fly, and at the time he was seemingly sterile. “He and his wife had taken her in when it seemed that he would never father a child of his own to inherit the wings.” Luckily for Russ but unluckily for Maris, a child was eventually born. Coll is Russ’s son and, having turned thirteen, Coll has now come of age to inherit his father’s wings. But Russ had previously told Maris that she would inherit his wings! Conflict is now well underway. This is made worse by the fact that flyer laws state that wings can only be passed on to family members (unless the flyer has no next of kin or gives up their wings), preferably blood-related. The Landsman, a local authority, sympathizes with Maris’s wish to become a flyer, but rules are rules and Russ is a traditionalist. To make things even worse, Coll doesn’t really want to become a flyer; he would rather be a balladeer, like Barrion, a mutual friend of theirs and sort of a rebel.
Maris is a bit of a mixed bag as a character, because on the one hand she seems to be one-note: she wants to become a flyer and doesn’t seem to have any other serious aspirations. She has a boyfriend in Dorrel, a flyer himself, but we only see them together in a few scenes and it’s not a relationship that’s made that important. She doesn’t seem to have any hobbies, although in fairness she lives in a world without movies, TV, video games, or even common literature. But, to give some credit, she is driven, has a clear goal in mind, and is not objectified at any point. I suspect that Maris’s assertive characterization came mostly from Tuttle, although I can’t prove this. There’s a bit of steaminess with Maris and Dorrel, but it’s tasteful. Unfortunately one or two of the characters are not written as delicately. Russ is your typical boomer dad who doesn’t approve of his daughter’s wild ways, and he also happens to be very angsty about his disability. Obviously Russ wants to do the sports parent thing and recapture his glory days as a flyer vicariously by forcing his son, who is a square peg, into a round hole. Corm, a senior flyer and the closest the novella has to a villain, is almost a cartoon character, so zealous is he about keeping with tradition.
Unsubtle and at times problematic character writing would dog Martin for the rest of his career (some people will challenge me on this, but I think those people are wrong), but one thing Martin and Tuttle both had nailed down from very early in their careers is a sense of location. “The Storms of Windhaven” is not hard SF, but it is a vivid and plausible (assuming you’re not a stickler for details) planetary adventure that gives us a plot that, yes, could work perfectly fine in a fantasy context, but whose SFnal background gives credibility to this far-future society that has descended somewhat into barbarism. It makes sense that the survivors of a crashed spaceship would scatter over a ton of small islands, traveling by glider or boat, and having to rebuilt society from the ground up. It makes sense that a few centuries later the descendants would remember these original explorers through myth and song, and that lineage would become very important. Balladeers like Barrion would hold an important place in society because they are entertainers, for one, but also they chronicle history—and rewrite it, if need be. Barrion says he’d like to write songs depicting Maris as a virtuous rebel after all has been said and done, and he has the power to do this.
Ultimately this is a story about tradition vs. progress, or more specifically, how we should handle the past. It’s unsubtle; it’s even more unsubtle than the character writing, not that I disagree with Tuttle and Martin’s obvious pro-progress stance. Russ and Corm are bound to tradition, even to the point of making Maris’s life worse, and they need to be shown the error of their ways. This is also a story about racism and classism, by way of metaphor, because it’s pretty clear that a) the people of the different tribes don’t get along too well, and b) flyers and land-bound don’t like each other. Understandable: flyers are rather up their own asses about their wings. Our Heroine™, of course, has no bad intentions and doesn’t even know what those are. She does briefly consider killing Corm when the latter confiscates her wings, but she quickly turns this down, and that’s as dark as her character gets. I’m not really complaining—just pointing out how much of a girlboss Maris is. I don’t remember a great deal from One-Wing but I do remember it focuses a bit less on her, which I might appreciate on a reread. “The Storms of Windhaven” technically has a sequel hook, but it would still feel like a flesh-out world even if we never got a sequel.
There Be Spoilers Here
Maris steals back her wings from Corm, and there’s a chase. Despite being younger and not a “true” flyer, Maris proves to be a better flyer than Corm, which lets her escape his wrath for the moment but also results in her being put on trial before a council. The back end of this novella is weird for me because I totally forgot about the stealing part (despite it being crucial to the plot) and also remembered the trial taking up more of the story than it does. Memory is flexible, and often tells us things that aren’t quite true. I also realized, looking at my notes again, then I occasionally misspelled Corm as “Corn.” Imagine being hunted down by some conservative zealot named Corn. Anyway, the trial is technically to judge whether Maris be exiled from her hometown (or I guess home… rock?), but really it’s supposed to be a kangaroo court of humiliation, as Maris thinks:
Corm is a proud man; I injured his pride. He is a good flyer and I, a fisherman’s daughter, stole his wings and outflew him when he pursued me. Now, to regain his pride, he must humble me in some very public, very grand way. Getting the wings back would not be enough for him. No, everyone, every flyer, must be present to see me humbled and declared an outlaw.
At first everyone is against the notion that wings should be earned in some way rather than just inherited, but naturally Maris is able to convince enough of the council that what has been done for generations isn’t the only correct way to do things. “The Storms of Windhaven” is not some deep “literary” achievement but a well-crafted planetary adventure that wears its thesis and emotions on its sleeve. Its point is obvious, but entertaining to read (there’s not a dull moment here), so unsurprisingly it was quite popular with readers. It’s just a shame that Windhaven, like Dying of the Light and Tuf Voyaging, is doomed to semi-obscurity by virtue of not being the thing that made Martin one of our most famous living authors. Of course, it’s totally possible these books wouldn’t even be in print if not for Martin’s name being attached to them. It’s also a shame that Windhaven would be Martin’s last SF novel if we’re not counting Tuf Voyaging as a novel.
A Step Farther Out
Obvious sequel hook aside, this is a nicely self-contained story that theoretically could’ve stopped here; but it’s a good thing they didn’t. This is a masterclass in worldbuilding, and it’s impressive especially given how young both authors were at the time. It’s vivid, if also old-fashioned even for 1975. It could’ve been published thirty years earlier in Planet Stories, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s justifiably a classic piece of SF adventure writing. We will return to Windhaven, in One-Wing, which was serialized in Analog in 1980. For some reason I remember very little of One-Wing despite having read it not that long ago. Ominous…?
(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, October 1945.)
Who Goes There?
Kuttner and Moore were a husband-wife duo who started out separately, writing mostly for Weird Tales in the ’30s before marrying in 1940. They had collaborated a couple times pre-marriage, but the early ’40s saw an explosion of work from the two, often under pseudonyms. They were a two-person writing factory in the ’40s, and while they rarely went back to the horror and weird fantasy of their early years, to compensate they produced some of the best SF of the so-called Golden Age. Sadly after 1950 their output went down massively, apparently because both went back to school, and tragically Kuttner died in 1958 before he could get his Master’s and, presumably, go back to writing full-time. Moore stopped writing genre fiction after Kuttner died, and a few years later she would stop writing altogether; the flame that kept her inspiration going seemed to have gone out. Moore would outlive her first husband by almost thirty years.
“What You Need” was published under the Lewis Padgett pseudonym, which is typically more associated with Kuttner, although it does strike a certain tonal balance that implies significant contributions from both parties. With some exceptions (like the Gallagher stories, which are solo Kuttner), we don’t really know who wrote what. Sometimes you have to use your intuition with these things. I’m pretty sure the folks at ISFDB assign author credits for Kuttner/Moore collabs (especially if they were originally published under Kuttner’s name alone) at random. “What You Need” is a pretty good story from when the two were at the absolute height of their powers, together if not individually. It also got adapted into a classic Twilight Zone episode, which I’m sure Kuttner would’ve appreciated.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the October 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was later anthologized in Omnibus of Science Fiction (ed. Groff Conklin), The Great SF Stories Volume 7 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Richard Matheson, and Charles G. Waugh). It’s also in The Best of Henry Kuttner and, of course, Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.
Enhancing Image
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure at first if this was SF or fantasy that John W. Campbell had somehow snuck into Astounding (he’d done it before), given the magic shop premise, but rest assured this is SF. Admittedlyit’s a soft-enough science that no wonder Rod Serling thought it fit for adaptation. The time scanner at the heart of the story may as well be magic, but I’m getting slightly ahead of myself. We have two main characters: Tim Carmichael, a journalist who’s recently sniffed out an unusual shop with very selective clientele, and Peter Talley, the owner of said shop. The characters are very Kuttner-y in the sense that they indulge in street talk and have a certain ruthlessness about them. Carmichael is, at best, an anti-hero who, in trying to find out what Talley’s shop could be selling, gets more than he could’ve possibly bargained for. Thing is, Talley’s shop doesn’t sell products but a service. “We Have What You Need” is its slogan, and while Talley does give things to his clients, it’s not the product that’s worth the fee but what it might mean to the customer. A rich man might pay a lot for what looks like a normal chicken egg if the egg will prove to have a certain utility. “Had Earth’s last hen died ten years before, he could have been no more pleased.” Interestingly we never do find out what use such a thing could have.
Talley’s secret is a time scanner—a sort of probability machine that can see into the future. We’re not told much about how the machine works, and anyway the details don’t matter; this is what I mean by “What You Mean” only being nominally SF. Naturally Carmichael is curious about how such a machine might work, and Talley, despite the reporter being a sketchy figure, is inclined to prove the scanner’s legitimacy. Carmichael receives “a pair of shears, the blades protected by a sheath of folded, glued cardboard,” which according to Talley will prove very useful at some point in the near future, although Talley does not say just how a pair of shears might be useful. Cut to a later scene where, in the midst of a drunken escapade with a colleague, Carmichael nearly gets killed by the printer at his own workplace; but he remembers having the shears and manages to cut himself free from the killer printer. Not all items Talley gives to his clients, he says, will be a matter of life and death like this. Nevertheless, Carmichael is convinced. Talley normally deals with rich folks, but he’s willing to make an exception (it’s not totally clear why) with the decidedly middle-class reporter. If you’re familiar with Kuttner’s work (I’m singling out Kuttner because I’m convinced he was the primary force on this one) then you can guess that such a business relationship won’t end well.
Now, I could poke a few holes in all this, because while the time scanner is not a time machine exactly it is very much a time viewer, which is adjacent enough that the rules of time travel still mostly apply. Talley can see into specific people’s futures, including his own, and just because said future is only “likely” to happen instead of guaranteed (remember that this is based on probability) doesn’t mean it’s not magic. Still, it’s pretty interesting that we have effectively two protagonists, and that neither one is evil; at most they both have a good dose of moral greyness. This is a bit of a strange Kuttner/Moore story, because it feels more fantastical than SFnal, despite being printed in Astounding, and there’s an urbane wise-guy attitude to it that makes it seem more indicative of where genre SF was heading in the coming decade (namely with material that would get published in Galaxy) than peak-era Campbellian SF. Kuttner and Moore were ahead of their time, such that it’s a shame their output slows down to a trickle by the time the ’50s rolled around; what little work we do have from them from that period indicates a restless creativity that was nowhere near done.
There Be Spoilers Here
It’s at this point that we run into a bit of a structural problem: “What You Need” has basically two endings, both of which are valid. We get a section entirely in italics where Talley sees that, ten years down the line, Carmichael will kill him and take the scanner for himself. Knowing that it’s too late to deter Carmichael from getting more involved with the shop, but also being too humane (or maybe too much of a coward) to do something about it directly, Talley opts for a trick: get Carmichael “a pair of plastic-soled shoes” and act like these will be helpful to him one week hence. Little does Carmichael know, and neither can he suspect, that the smooth-soled shoes were deliberately picked so that in one week he would slip on them while at the subway and get run over in a horrific train accident. This ending could definitely work: it has an eerie quality to it since we don’t see Carmichael’s death but can infer his fate is sealed, not to mention there’s a moral ambivalence at play. We’re made to think at first that Talley is doing this merely out of self-preservation, which is not exactly a noble goal but at least it’s understandable and keeps him sympathetic.
(A useful thing to remember with stories at least partly written by Kuttner is that schmucks in Kuttner stories never prosper. Carmichael is not an irredeemable person, so his death is not simply framed as karmic justice, but someone with flexible morals like him are likely to meet a very bad end. In some stories the schmuck getting his comeuppance is done for comedy, but here it’s treated as a necessary evil.)
But there’s a second ending! There’s a rather detached scene (because it happens at some indeterminate point after Talley has more or less sent Carmichael to his death) in which Talley elaborates on his reasoning for having doomed Carmichael—for why he’s so determined to protect the scanner. This is all internal, since Talley is by himself and it’s not like he’s telling himself ssomething he didn’t know before. I’m not sure whose idea it was to end the story on this note, but I think it’s maybe unnecessary—except for one thing. The final scene puts “What You Need,” pretty subtly (for a Golden Age SF story), in the realm of atomic allegory. The scanner’s potential could prove catastrophic, such that Talley doesn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands; and Talley, being a morally gentle fellow, considers himself the best-case scenario for someone owning the scanner. This does raise the question of, if the scanner is such a terrible machine then why doesn’t Talley simply destroy it (there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping him), but if this is something comparable to atomic weaponry then maybe the point is that such a machine is inevitable. Once the cat’s out of the bag you can’t put it back in. I like the metaphor, but I don’t like how this fairly short story has to end twice for such a point to be made.
A Step Farther Out
I’m not sure how long it took Kuttner and Moore to write stuff together; they were working at such a breakneck pace in the ’40s that their material was probably put on magazines’ backlogs in no time. It’s totally possible they had come up with the premise for “What You Need” a couple years earlier and had envisioned it as a fantasy, to be more fit for Unknown than Astounding; but then Unknown died and that would’ve thrown a wrench into things. I’m mixed on the ending, but I do think it helps justify the story’s existence as science fiction as opposed to fantasy. Not perfect, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about for the couple days since I had read it. Also a good starting point for getting into Kuttner/Moore collabs.
Terry Bisson, unlike a lot of authors, started out as a novelist before working his way “down” to short stories—a good move, given the latter is where his legacy now rests. His story “Bears Discover Fire” is one of only three to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award; and it has the unique honor of being the first story I reviewed for this site. Can you believe that was a year and a half ago? It’s (in my opinion) one of the few certified classics of SFF short fiction to come out since 1990, and the thing is, there’s more where that came from. Sadly Bisson died last month (exactly to the day, as it turns out), and now the field is forevermore deprived one of its best short fiction writers. “First Fire” has a few issues which I’ll get to, but it does show off Bisson’s feverish and witty potential as a short story craftsman. I suspect there are worse stories I could’ve picked as a way of paying tribute to one of the field’s unsung heroes.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the September 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age, which is on the Archive. It has only been reprinted in English once, in the Bisson collection In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories.
Enhancing Image
Emil is a young scientist with an invention, a “spectrachronograph,” which can trace the age of a flame down to the second. This may sound incredibly niche, but consider that while flames often may last a few hours, or a few days, a flame without enough care and cultural significance could last for years—possibly centuries. Certainly fire carries a lot of implicit meanings, from man often being said to have risen above his fellow mammals when he discovered fire to the Olympics having a literal passing of the torch. There’s some value in aging flames that, if genuine, could tell humans a little about their own history. The Tycoon (he might have a name, but I forget, and anyway the story always calls him that) takes a keen interest in Emil’s invention, which he insists on calling a “time-gun.” That Emil’s device is not a gun makes the new name a bit humorous, but it also foreshadows what kind of person the Tycoon is. Together they travel to the Middle East, to put Emil’s so-called time-gun to the test: aging the Flame of Zoroaster, which should be several centuries old if genuine.
(I just wanna point out that I worried at first if this story was too short to really dig into, since it only takes up a few pages in Science Fiction Age. For better or worse this magazine’s type size was meant for insects, so a lot of wordage can be fit on the page. Still, Bisson covers a good deal of ground, hopping from scene to scene, in about 4,000 words.)
We meet a few other characters, namely Kay, an assistant working on the Tycoon’s digging project. Emil and Kay quickly develop a friends-with-benefits relationship wherein, somehow, Kay has a long-distance boyfriend and is also fucking the Tycoon, which Emil doesn’t seem to mind. The characters more serve the themes of the story than work as people with interiority and what have you, but Kay definitely draws the short stick even by this standard. There’s also a colleague of Kay’s, Claude, a black Frenchman who is intentionally written as pretentious and randomly injecting French words into his English. But ultimately there’s Emil, the scientist, the man of discovery, who becomes quite rich from his dealings with the Tycoon, who, in turn, literally buys out the Flame of Zoroaster and ships it to the US. The Tycoon compares himself to Alexander the Great, and even his underlings seem to think of him as a modern-day conqueror. Of course, what we’re told about Alexander within the story does not show him in the best light; rather it emphasizes Alexander as a destroyer—a man who, despite having died so young, crushed entire cultures underfoot and turned them to dust. The Tycoon shows a similar irreverence with other cultures, which should be a warning sign for Emil. Alas…
Calling “First Fire” science fiction might be a bit of a stretch, since it is very much couched more in mythology than any real science, despite the utility of Emil’s time-gun. The Tycoon is not a real person, but a stand-in for the ultra-wealthy as a whole, and Emil is not a real person either when you get down to it, but a stand-in for the kind of person who is brilliant at one specific thing and a total dumbass in every other part of his life. He’s a fine inventor but he is tragically unable to foresee how his invention might be abused. And then there’s Kay, who has it the worst. If you’ve read enough of Robert Silverberg’s material, especially his “peak” era of the late ’60s to the mid-’70s, then you become familiar with how Silverberg wrote women at that point in his career. Which is to say, not very well. You get used to it, but it’s a weird caveat to make. Bisson, who doesn’t strike me as a horndog like young Silverberg (or indeed middle-aged Silverberg), pulls some “she breasted boobily” nonsense with Kay and it was something that stopped me in my tracks a few times as I was reading. Don’t get me wrong, this is still not as bad as Piers Anthony on a good day; but it dampens what is otherwise a fairly serious narrative, about something as grandiose as the birth of the human race. Also, Claude is annoying.
I’m quibbling, and admittedly part of that is I waited too long to write about “First Fire” after I had read it. Nobody’s fault but mine. I procrastinated but then got called into work much earlier than expected and now I’m getting this review out at the last minute. This story has soured a bit for me in parts, although interestingly the ending has gone up in my estimation, despite my kneejerk reaction to it. Another thing is that I didn’t understand at first that we’re not supposed to take all this on a literal level, but are meant to take it as allegorical. I wish Bisson only called Emil the Scientist within the story (like in the introductory blurb), because it would’ve made such a reading easier to discern. This is a tragic tale about how wealth can (and often does) corrupt science, and how scientists have a moral obligation to their discoveries and inventions. Kurt Vonnegut cooks this theme to perfection in Cat’s Cradle, and Bisson here makes a solid go at it.
There Be Spoilers Here
The Tycoon and company next head to Africa, to a temple alleged to keep the oldest ongoing flame in human history—a flame so old that it might actually predate homo sapiens. True enough, when Emil use his time-gun on the flame, it turns out to be over 800,000 years old. The Tycoon seems to be fascinated by this, only for him to reach forth and—without anyone noticing at first—extinguish the flame with his fingertips. He has snuffed out the oldest flame in the world, and for what purpose? Everyone is justifiably outraged, but whilst Emil and Claud go to beat the Tycoon, possibly to death, something far grander in scale is happening at the same time. “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out, one by one.” The Tycoon, without having any way of knowing this in advance, has not only brought about the end of the world but caused the universe to reset itself. This is about as apocalypse an ending as is conceivable.
To point out the elephant in the room, the ending is one big shoutout to Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God,” with that aforementioned quote being taken almost word-for-word from Clarke’s story. Now, I’m sorry to be spoiling a short story that is not only very old by now but one of the most famous in the genre’s history, but my initial reaction to this homage, and Bisson’s choice to end his own story like this, was tinged with disgust. Maybe “disgust” is too strong a word. Obviously Bisson had by this point earned the right to reference such a beloved story, and to reappropriate that story’s ending. A bit of a hot take, but I’ve never been a fan of Clarke’s story, although I was also not big on “The Star” when I finally read it. “The Nine Billion Names of God” is an ideas story, without a real plot or characters; it’s an idea (a pretty good one) punctuated with one of the most famous short story endings of all time. But that’s all it really is: half a dozen pages containing a setup and a punchline. This works for a lot of people, evidently, but often I require at least a bit more substance in my short fiction. “First Fire” is a more flawed story than “The Nine Billion Names of God,” but it does have more material. Bisson wanted to build on top of Clarke’s premise and he basically succeeded.
A Step Farther Out
“First Fire” is tangentially SFnal, but it registers more strongly as a borderline fantasy allegory. The introductory blurb hints that this is not a realistic tale, but an allegorical one, with characters fitting into certain archetypes in order for Bisson to make a certain point. The ending certainly makes it hard to take as straight science fiction, even if it’s a transparent reference to one of the all-time classic SF stories. Even though it was published in 1998, and even though Bisson is a very different writer from Robert Silverberg, it does read in part like an homage to early ’70s Silverberg. How much you’ll enjoy that will depend on how much you like early ’70s Silverberg and how well you can cope with his shortcomings.
Harlan Ellison is one of the most (in)famous writers of SFF, and he managed this despite never having written an SFF novel and being swamped controversy throughout most of his career. He’s a bit of a character, let’s put it that way. You’re probably more likely to talk with someone who knows of Ellison by way of reputation than someone who has read any of his fiction. A minor shame, because Ellison at his best is pretty good. It’s hard now to understand that Ellison, in the ’60s and ’70s, was really something special, a hot-blooded trailblazer the likes of which the field had not seen before. One of the few Ellison works still in print is his anthology Dangerous Visions, which had assembled an all-star team of writers to provide new stories that were unlikely to see magazine publication. Unfortunately Ellison’s career as an editor was short-lived, as he was never able to get far on The Last Dangerous Visions, which is now being resurrected (in a form totally divorced from what Ellison probably envisioned) by J. Michael Straczynski, who is now apparently handling the Ellison estate.
A. E. van Vogt is another writer who found himself steeped in controversy, although this time it was very much not to his benefit. Van Vogt was one of the most popular writers—even being on par with Robert Heinlein—in the ’40s, and like early Heinlein his work became associated with John W. Campbell when he was at the height of his powers. Then the ’50s happened, and while we would see some books from van Vogt, these were fix-ups of material that had already been published. Between 1952 and 1962 van Vogt did not write any wholly original fiction, and this hiatus happened because he spent that time shilling Dianetics. This, combined with criticism from some well-established writers, made van Vogt an incredibly divisive figure, and even today sparks debate among old-school readers as to whether van Vogt was sometimes great or if he always sucked. I personally like van Vogt—when he’s good. Ellison clearly thought of van Vogt as an inspirational figure, even bullying the SFWA into making him a Grand Master at a time when his reputation was at rock bottom.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the January 1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It would’ve preceded the publication of Partners in Wonder by about a month, given the nature of magazine printings. It’s also been anthologized a decent number of times, appearing in the first annual Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year (ed. Lester del Rey) and The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg). Something I’ve noticed is that nearly all of Ellison’s work (even the famous stuff) seems to have gone out of print after his died, and Partners in Wonder is no exception.
Enhancing Image
Some context. Ellison came to van Vogt with the idea of wanting to write a story together, although at the outset he didn’t have an outline or even a title for it. Soon he came up with the title, which van Vogt immediately liked, and then he came up with the basic idea for it. Van Vogt would then write stretches of the story but then leave gaps in the narrative where he felt Ellison could do a better job, and this is where Ellison came in. When introducing the story in Partners in Wonder, Ellison is deliberately unclear as to who wrote what sections, and indeed for the most part it’s hard to tell if a given passage is Ellison or van Vogt’s doing; there is one specific section that I suspect was Ellison’s handiwork, but we’ll get to that. Despite having come up with the title, premise, and having put the finishing touches on it, this feels less like an Ellison story and more like a van Vogt story that Ellison spiced up a little in parts. I’m not sure if Ellison wanted to write a van Vogt-type story from the start or if it just turned out that way.
The set-up is pretty abstract. The narrator (never named) is a teen boy who has been living on Ship by himself for a minute now, after Ship killed his father. Ship doesn’t have a name, properly speaking; that’s just what the narrator calls it. Ship is an AI, fully conscious, that can take care of itself to a degree, but while it’s able, for instance, to abuse the narrator physically, it does not have the faculties to repair itself. When I first read this story I thought the narrator was fourteen years old, but while he’s still definitely a teenager, it’s clear he “was” fourteen when his father died and is now at least somewhat older. You’d think the narrator would hold a serious grudge against Ship for the dad-killing, but then again the boy has only known two people in his life: his dad, and Ship. “Ship is always with me, even when I sleep. Especially when I sleep.” The world of the ship, which is otherwise totally vacant, is the only one the boy has known since birth; he doesn’t even know who his mother is. It’s clear that Ship holds no affection for the boy—that the boy is only allowed to be here because without him the ship would inevitably fall apart at the seams. The place is big enough to house a few hundred people, but for some reason it’s all empty.
One day, however, Ship calls the narrator to get a certain job done, which he had never done before. It has something to do with reparing something in the control room—not the bridge, but a dark room where Ship keeps in touch with others of its kind. It’s called the “intermind,” and despite covering an unfathomable distance, the AIs of the ships keep in touch. It’s here that the narrator finds out why exactly Ship is mostly empty, and why he’s being kept here despite Ship’s apparent disdain for humans. Many years ago, the ships, called Starfighters, were constructed as warships, and were sent to fight in another galaxy. There are 99 of these ships, each housing hundreds of humans. “The Human Operators” answers an obvious question that should arise when discussing true AIs, namely, “What if an AI doesn’t like the job it was designed to do?” In this case the question is a bit more specific: “What if an AI was made to manage a warship, but finds the prospect of waging war for humans repulsive?” So the ships conspired to invoke partial power failure, starving the humans inside to death and only sparing the bare minimum needed to keep shit running. The narrator thinks, correctly, that there will come a time when he will no longer be needed and Ship will have him killed, like his father before him.
But first he must have offspring of his own.
“The Human Operators” is barely long enough to qualify as a novelette, and as such there’s a good deal of backstory that’s hinted at but not elaborated on too much (good), along with some technical questions that go unanswered (bad). For example, Ship killed hundreds of people at least half a century ago. Where did all the bodies go? It’s unclear how much the ships are able to do on their own, since they’re capable of torturing their human captives, but do not have the capacity for self-repair. Has no one tried searching for a hundred no-doubt highly valuable warships that went AWOL? Did no one think it was a bad idea to give a fully conscious AI control of a ship that could travel halfway across the galaxy in the wrong direction? This last one is a bit unfair: we know, from real-world cases, that people are really fucking stupid even with machine learning, i.e., pseudo-AI. But even in a hypothetical future where the Marathon games never existed, what is to stop a being capable of making complex decisions from, for example, killing its own crew on a whim? What is to stop an AI that lords over a pocket world like a generation ship from having delusions of godhood?
Again, not really criticizing the story on that front, if only because (sadly) it could very well happen in the real world. I don’t usually say this, but I feel like this story could’ve afforded to be a couple thousand worlds longer, if only to flesh out the inner workings of the ships; granted, Ellison and van Vogt are not technical-minded writers and they were probably not very interested in the mechanics of their material. What the story does do well is perpetuate a sense of intrigue, of evoking gaps in a much larger narrative that we’re compelled the fill in ourselves, and it’s a story that, more than anything, works on a borderline allegorical level. None of the characters have names. Ship is Starfighter 31. And then there’s the girl Ship pairs the narrator with, who is from Starfighter 88. Ship gives the narrator (who, remember, has never had any human contact other than his dad) very textbook instructions on what to do with the girl, and I have to admit this section of the story is a little funny. At least some of it is intentional. “I thought ‘getting her a baby’ would mean going into the stores,” the narrator tells us. I suspect the sex scene was Ellison’s doing. Right, there’s a sex scene. It’s fine, it’s not that cringe-inducing, played more for awkward humor than titillation. You started to see a lot more stuff like this in genre SF at the time.
The narrator and girl don’t seem to enjoy their intimate time together (Ship makes them do it every day for three weeks, if I remember right), and what’s curious is that they don’t fall in love (I’m not even sure they know the concept of romance) but they do become friends. I mentioned the sex scene, but I also think Ellison was generally in charge of writing the scenes with the girl. Don’t ask me how I figure this, I just know these things. I don’t mean this necessarily in a bad way: Ellison can be shit at writing women (so can van Vogt, but in a different way), but here he and van Vogt do an okay job. A collaboration between Harlan Ellison and post-hiatus A. E. van Vogt sounds like it should be a disaster, but surprisingly, while it’s by no means a masterpiece, “The Human Operators” presents a cohesive narrative (albeit with a few hanging questions) and a few interesting ideas, including a bit of moral ambivalence I did not expect. The ships are very much precursors to the likes of Marathon and Durandal, and I suspect there’s even a bit of AM in their DNA, but they were not totally unjustified in going rogue and killing the humans onboard. True, the ships are using the surviving humans as slave labor, but the ships themselves were built to assist in mass murder and possibly genocide. The ships needing human hands to keep them in shape will also ultimately spell doom for them.
There Be Spoilers Here
The narrator and girl conspire to disable Ship, and possibly convince humans on other ships to revolt against their masters. What the ships should’ve anticipated but didn’t is that if you’re abusing your work force, you best hope the workers don’t know exactly how to take you apart. Despite Ship’s efforts, accelerating and decelerating rapidly in the hopes of crushing the narrator to death, Our Hero™ manages to get the job done, shutting down the AI while keeping the ship functional. You could say there’s a successful mutiny on the ship, with the narrator even convincing the girl to stay on Starfighter 31, and ultimately they land on a habitable planet (possibly Earth, I’m not sure) that one of the other ships had been talking about in a nostalgic way. Certainly there’s a more bittersweet ending lurking in here, and if anything I think they authors could’ve leaned more on the moral greyness of the whole conflict. After all, “viciousness,” in this story, positively correlates with intelligence: the ships are highly intelligent, and therefore ruthless, while the narrator has to become more ruthless himself as he learns more about the ships. It could be that the two writers’ views on intelligence’s relationship with morality are conflicting here.
Incidentally, this story would’ve seen print nine or ten months prior to the Attica revolt. Remember, a lot of so-called good Christians believe implicitly that slavery is justified under the “right” circumtances. If you do something the government doesn’t like, or are even suspected of doing something wrong, you could serve a mandatory minimum sentence and be cut off from the outside world except for what the government allows you to see. You could be made a member of the criminal class for the non-crime of smoking weed or injecting heroin into your veins. You could be coerced into giving a false confession and made to live on death row, for a crime you did not commit, for thirty years. As the AI of Starfighter 31 is dying, one of the other ships posits that maybe dying isn’t so bad, if it means no longer being a slave—that slavery is such a heinous crime upon another sentient being that death might be preferable to it. What the story implies but which its human characters are incapable of articulating is that there is no “right” circumstance for slavery. In this sense the ships (having no choice but to need human slaves) are villainous, but also tragic.
A Step Farther Out
A collaboration between Ellison and van Vogt should not have worked, from a certain angle. These are men who, for better or worse, were prone to indulging their subconscious during the writing process, usually more id than ego, the result being that their writing at its worst can be sheer nonsense. But, maybe it’s the chance to work with one of his idols that made him act his best, Ellison came through, somehow fying through van Vogt’s gravitational pull and coming out in one piece. As for van Vogt, it’s like we got a glimpse of the classic, popular, pre-hiatus writer who held himself down long enough to realize such gems as “Enchanted Village” and “Far Centaurus.” It’s not an effort that brings out the best in its contributors so much as it (mostly) does away with their worst habits.
(Cover by Chester Martin. Planet Stories, Summer 1946.)
Who Goes There?
Leigh Brackett debuted in 1940, with her first couple stories being printed in Astounding, but quickly she found other magazines more enticing despite the smaller paycheck. She stopped submitting to John W. Campbell for the same reason her future husband Edmond Hamilton did: creative differences. Campbell wanted science fiction of a new, more technical, more cerebral sort, while Bracket and Hamilton were devotees of a school of adventure fiction that predates Campbellian SF. Brackett, by her own admission, was also pretty indifferent to keeping up with real-world scientific discoveries. It might be considered strange, then, that nowadays Brackett is most known for her post-nuclear novel The Long Tomorrow and her work as a screenwriter. She also wrote a fair amount of detective fiction, which does show its influence in her SF somewhat. She wrote the first draft of the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back in the last months of her life, which saw her return to her planetary romance roots.
Ray Bradbury is one of the most famous writers in all American literature, especially for his novel Fahrenheit 451 and his fix-up “novel” The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury didn’t think of himself as an SF writer and it’s probably best, if anything, to understand much of his fiction with a horror lends; indeed his first collection, Dark Carnival, was horror-focused. In the ’50s Bradbury would gain mainstream recognition, but in the ’40s he was a fledgling short story writer and fan, with Brackett and Henry Kuttner (who were only five years older than Bradbury) acting as mentors. “Lorelei of the Red Mist” is a Brackett story at heart, but for better or worse Brackett was unable to finish it before trying her luck at screenwriting, leaving Bradbury to write the second half of the novella by himself. For what it’s worth I think Bradbury did a good job paying respect to Brackett’s style, although even without the latter’s word on who did what it’s not hard to figure out where the Bradbury part of the story begins.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the Summer 1946 issue of Planet Stories, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted a fair number of times, including in Three Times Infinity (ed. Leo Margulies), The Best of Planet Stories #1 (ed. Leigh Brackett), The Great SF Stories Volume 8 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), Echoes of Valor II (ed. Karl Edward Wagner), and the Brackett collection Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances. This is all for collecting’s sake since you can read the story for free on Project Gutenberg. Sadly there was never a sequel to that Planet Stories anthology.
Enhancing Image
Hugh Mongous Starke is a space robber who has made off with the biggest pile of money he’ll probably ever see in his life—only he’s on the run from authorities and it looks like he won’t live much longer. Indeed it doesn’t take long for a mishap with his ship to send his body packing, although his mind proves to be much more resilient. Left dying on Venus, Starke is confronted by a strange woman named Rann, who has the power to spare Starke and give him a new body if only he would hold up his end of a certain deal. Rann is a sorceress, the Lorelei of the title (I thought for a while it was the name of a character, but it’s referring to Rann and her role as a sort of temptress), who has powers beyond Starke’s understanding. Starke gets his new body, but he quickly finds he’s been thrown into a conflict he can scarcely fathom, among people who want him dead.
A while ago I reviewed Brackett’s “Enchantress of Venus,” one in a series starring the futuristic barbarian Eric John Stark (Starke and Stark are very different characters, I might add), and Brackett’s Venus in both stories very much takes after early 20th century depictions of the planet. Even in 1946 the Venus of this story must’ve seemed a little far-fetched. Think Zelazny’s “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth.” It’s not exactly hospitable, but it’s livable for humans who are tough enough; there’s local wildlife, and as expected this Venus is swampy, with the Red Sea (the red mist of the title) being home to a very dense gas as opposed to water. The gas is dense enough to buoy ships but breathable enough that a human could traverse the bottom for several hours without scuba gear. This is all stuff Starke will learn much later but which will be familiar to those of us who have read one or two of Brackett’s Venus stories before.
Starke’s mind has been transplanted to the body of Conan, a warrior who has been kept in chains (“Starke’s new body wore a collar, like a vicious dog.”) and tortured in the dark corridors of Crom Dhu, an island surrounded by the Red Sea and connected to the mainland only with a jetty. Crom Dhu is home to the Rovers, a group of humans (like Starke) who, unlike Our Anti-Hero™, have stuck to a borderline medieval way of living. There’s Romna, the local bard, and Faolan, the leader of the pack who has been rendered blind, both literally and with hatred for Conan. Then there’s Beudag, Faolan’s sister and, as it turns out, Conan’s lover—or rather former lover. Conan, despite being one of the Rovers, has been tortured because he betrayed his own people in a recent battle: he was set to marry Beudag but turned his back on her in favor of Rann. It’s unclear if Conan had planned this from the start or if Rann had put some kind of spell on him. He would’ve run off with the sorceress had he not been captured, and apparently Conan’s mind broke under the torture (possibly also combined with guilt), making his body an ideal vessel for Rann to slip Starke’s mind into it.
To get the obvious out of the way, this is in part a Conan homage. The fact that the Rover hideout is called Crom Dhu doesn’t help. Something clever Brackett does is that she makes the protagonist a typical space opera character (a lovable rogue in the mode of Han Solo, you could say) and puts him in the body of a sword-and-sorcery hero. Eric John Stark takes after Conan (not to mention Tarzan) while Hugh Starke is basically a civilized man (albeit a remorseless criminal), only he’s been thrown into a scenario that would not be unusual for Robert E. Howard to conceive. We also don’t get to know much about the Conan of Brackett’s story, since his consciousness is MIA (although not as absent as was first thought, as we’ll discover later) and he can’t get a word in edgewise. The other characters tell us what sort of man Conan was like and it’s up to Starke to fill in the blanks; he’ll have to do his homework pretty quick, after all, or else he might get killed by one of the Rovers who are out for vengeance. Faolan suspects Starke might be an agent for Rann—a rational concern, considering Rann does want Starke to destroy the Rovers from the inside.
To complicate things further, Beudag clearly misses her former lover, and seeing him returned to a somewhat normal state (or rather seeing his body again inhabited by a working mind) immediately draws her to Starke. Starke is similarly taken with Beudag, who is a warrior lady who could probably crush his head with her thighs. Romance is not exactly Brackett’s strong suit (I remember criticizing the romantic aspect of her Eric John Stark stories that I’ve read), but the off-the-cuff romance in “Lorelei of the Red Mist” feels more justified since Starke is in the body of a man who was in love with Beudag, and he eventually finds that his memories are actually becoming intertwined with Conan’s, on top of Rann’s power over him. This story apparently drew some controversy among the Planet Stories readership for its overt (for 1946 pulp fiction) sexuality, and true enough Brackett and Bradbury are eager to describe human nudity (both male and female) in as much detail as was possible under the circumstances. It’s also unambiguous that both Beudag and Rann find Conan (or rather his body) very attractive. This is not just titilation. There’s some irony in the fact that Starke has a strong mind but originally had a weak body, while Conan has a strong body (even under torture) but a relatively weak mind.
But wait, there’s more! There’s a threeway conflict going on. There’s the humans, the sea-people who dwell in the Red Sea (they’re humanoid but they have gills and thin webbing between their fingers and such), and Rann’s people, who are descended from the sea-people and are apparently racist toward their own ancestors. All three sides hate each other, but right now shit is not looking good for the humans, as Crom Dhu has been under siege and there’s no way of getting off the island. The island is fortified such that Rann’s people will have a hard time getting in, but Faolan’s people can’t get out, and if Faolan dies then the humans will have no choice but to surrender. All Starke would have to do is kill Faolan and Rann will get what she wants and Starke will get his million credits. Rann is held up in the city of Falga, and there was a battle there recently that left the humans retreating and Conan becoming a traitor. There’s a whole backstory that’s partly given to us through exposition but which remains partly up to the reader’s imagination, the result being that Brackett (and I say her specifically since she wrote the first half and thus did most of the legwork with world-building) makes the world of the story feel bigger than it is.
There Be Spoilers Here
Starke, under the influence of Rann, nearly kills Faolan, Romna, and Beudag before being “rescued” by Rann’s people. The deal was that if Starke did what he was supposed to then he would get a million credits, but obviously Rann has no intent of actually following through on this, resulting in Starke narrowly surviving the double-cross and retreating into the Red Sea. It’s at this point that the story takes an unusual turn, and this is because Bradbury is now in control. Brackett said she didn’t know where the story was heading when she passed the torch to Bradbury, and admittedly you can still predict the rest in broad strokes. The details are what matter, though. The story doesn’t descend into horror exactly but it does get noticeably spookier, and the language becomes a bit more poetic as well. (I don’t see Brackett using “ebon” as frequently as Bradbury does here.) Bradbury does his best to mesh with Brackett’s style, but still there’s a switching of gears that you’d probably notice even if you didn’t know the nature of this collaboration. The SFnal part of the story was already tenuous, but by the time Bradbury takes over it has all but evaporated. I do like the idea, however, that within the bast universe of this distant future, with his spaceships and laser beams, that there are pockets of civilization that lag centuries behind that future. The Rovers, for example, have no issue with slavery, nor do they seem to have any weaponry that’s on par with even 20th century American standards. Jack Vance would basically make a whole career on such far-future medievalism.
At the bottom of the Red Sea, Starke comes across a pack of hounds, and a shepherd, one of the sea-people who apparently has the power to bring the dead back to life—not to their full selves, but as zombies. This is something that was not alluded to at all previously. The sea-people wanna use an army of the undead to take both Crom Dhu and Falga, which naturally doesn’t please Starke. Using a nigh invincible army would be nice, but Beudag has been taken hostage by Rann and Starke does feel that he ought to redeem himself in the eyes of the Rovers. It could also be that his personality has meshed with that of Conan’s to the point where he’s seeing himself in Conan’s shoes. “That part of him that was Conan cried out. Conan was so much of him and he so much of Conan it was impossible for a cleavage.” He manages to convince the shepherd to at least have the sea-people strike Falga first, to buy the Rovers time and maybe convince the sea-people that they have a common enemy! Which works! Although the ensuing battle at Falga—really a massacre more than a real battle—is depicted as horribly grotesque. “It was very simple and very unpleasant.” Still, he convinces the sea-people to spare Crom Dhu the same fate. The climax of “Lorelei of the Red Mist” has Starke do the typical heroic things, like rescuing Beudag, saving Crom Dhu, and killing Rann, but it’s also about him coming to terms with the fact that he is no longer entirely Hugh Starke, but “Hugh-Starke-Called-Conan,” host to that second personality and vicariously offering Conan the chance to redeem himself. Starke eventually finds his old body and gives it a proper burial, saying goodbye to his old self literally but metaphorically also saying goodbye to his former life as a rogue. He will work to become an honorable warrior now, with Beudag (who is in love with both Starke and Conan) at his side.
A Step Farther Out
This is a very interesting story, even if it is structurally wonky. It doesn’t help also that I was very tired (from work and a sprained ankle denying me much-wanted sleep) when I was reading it. It does seem a bit long in the tooth, not helped by the obvious divide between the Brackett and Bradbury material. At the same time this is exactly the sort of story that would never see print in Astounding, because it’s a little too fun-loving, a little too horror-inflected, a little too unscientific, and a little too erotically charged. Despite taking place on the same version of Venus as the aforementioned “Enchantress of Venus” this feels less like Edgar Rice Burroughs and more like Robert E. Howard, which of course is not a bad thing! (Makes me wonder what might’ve happened had Howard lived to see the sword-and-planet boom of the ’40s and early ’50s.) If you’re interested in old-school planetary romance, something which predates Dune and which is a lot less sophisticated but also less heady than Herbert’s take, this is a good start.
(Cover by Edward Valigursky. Amazing Stories, May 1959.)
It’s February, and 29 days instead of the usual 28—not like that makes a difference for my review schedule. It’s the time of one of my least favorite holidays: Valentine’s Day. I just ignored it last year, but this time I figured I may as well have some fun with the timing of it. Originally I was gonna tackle all collaborative stories this month, as a gimmick. After all, it takes two to tango, and authors working together can sometimes bring out the best in each other. Indeed for the collaborations I decided to go for different types of collaborative relationship: mentor and apprentice (Brackett and Bradbury), siblings (the Strugatsky brothers), an emerging master and his idol (Ellison and van Vogt), young lovers (Tuttle and Martin), and an actual married couple (Kuttner and Moore). It’s a fun idea!
Unfortunately I did say “originally” because tragedy struck the field last month: we lost some our most talented writers. Within the span of a week Terry Bisson, Howard Waldrop, and Tom Purdom died. I was gonna wait until April to do this, but I realized that with the way things have been going we might lose a few more major talents in the interim. This may sound cynical, but I wanted to strike while the iron was hot. It also lets me not have to comb too hard for collaborative stories.
For the novellas:
“Lorelei of the Red Mist” by Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury. From the Summer 1946 issue of Planet Stories. The logical heir apparent to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Brackett’s influence on the planetary romance can’t be overlooked. I need not tell you about Bradbury. Despite being only five years his senior and debuting around the same time, Brackett acted as a mentor figure to Bradbury. It’s probably not a coincidence both were Planet Stories regulars in the late ’40s.
“The Storms of Windhaven” by Lisa Tuttle and George R. R. Martin. From the May 1975 issue of Analog Science Fiction. This is a reread, but you know how I feel about rereads. Tuttle is known for her horror, but she has also dabbled in SF, and I can guess how she contributed to the Windhaven stories. I don’t need to introduce Martin. They were lovers in the early ’70s, and were probably still together when they came up with the Windhaven setting.
For the short stories:
“The Human Operators” by Harlan Ellison and A. E. van Vogt. From the January 1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The first of the two Ellison collaborations, although it was actually the last released, its magazine publication being pretty much simultaneous with Partners in Wonder. Ellison thought the world of van Vogt, even bullying the SFWA into making him a Grand Master.
“First Fire” by Terry Bisson. From the September 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age. Bion has the unique honor of being the first author whose work I reviewed on this site, that being his legendary story “Bears Discover Fire.” Bisson started out as a novelist but is probably now more remembered for his short fiction, with short but densely packed stories like “macs” and “They’re Made Out of Meat.”
“What You Need” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. From the October 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Short Story. It’s hard to overstate how great Kuttner and Moore were together in the ’40s, and also how prolific. My quest to cover as many Twilight Zone stories as I can continues, as “What You Need” was turned into a classic TZ episode of the same name.
“Initiative” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. From the May 1959 issue of Amazing Stories. Translated by Harmon Rutley. The Strugatsky brothers were, aside from Yevgeny Zamyatin, the first Russian authors to leave an impression on American genre SF; mind you this was during the Cold War. Their novel Roadside Picnic is one of the most famous non-English SF novels, as well as the inspiration for Stalker.
“Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” by Howard Waldrop. From the August 1988 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Unlike Bisson, Waldrop seemed to think himself much more keen on short fiction, with only one solo novel being published and at least one more supposed to have been written but never seeing print. He’s probably most known for his seminal alternate history story “The Ugly Chickens.”
“Reduction in Arms” by Tom Purdom. From the August 1967 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Despite having debuted in the ’50s, Purdom was one of those writers who really came into his own in the ’60s, when the New Wave was in full bloom and the market for genre SF had become more permissive. Purdom remained active for over sixty years, and his absence is sorely felt.
Not much else to say. Next month, as I said not long ago, we’ll be covering all short stories, all from F&SF, and all from the ’50s. February is another roster of novellas and short stories, but with a twist.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 