Tag: mel hunter

Short Story Review: “The Big Trip Up Yonder” by Kurt Vonnegut

March 14th, 2025

(Cover by Mel Hunter. Galaxy, January 1954.)

Who Goes There?

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most important authors in American history, despite having origins which might lead one to believe he would’ve ended up like most SF writers: forgotten, if sometimes admired. He served in World War II and famously wound up as a POW in Dresden, being there when the Allies bombed that city. His wartime experiences and subsequent PTSD would be dramatized in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. But long before that novel, which cemented Vonnegut as America’s satirist of most distinction in the years following World War II, he made his SF debut in 1952 with his novel Player Piano, a much more conventional bit of ’50s satirical SF, which on its own did not indicate the lustrous future its author was to have. Vonnegut was ambivalent about being called a “sci-fi” writer, and indeed some of his novels, like Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, are not SF at all; but still, at least half his novels are certainly SF, as are some of his most reprinted short stories. “The Big Trip Up Yonder” is not one of Vonnegut’s more well-known stories, it must be said not without good reason (it’s fine, but it’s nowhere near the man at the height of his powers), but it does showcase Vonnegut’s savage wit and his keenness of perception when it comes to post-war American culture.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s since been reprinted in Assignment in Tomorrow (ed. Frederik Pohl) and the Vonnegut collection Welcome to the Monkey House. I guess he didn’t renew the copyright, because it’s on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

The Fords have gathered round the patriarch of the rather large family, Gramps, who’s on his death bed—not from old age, but because Gramps has decided he’ll be taking “the Big Trip Up Yonder” soon, which is to say he is choosing to die. In the year 2185, nobody dies of old age anymore, at least in the US, thanks to a miraculous invention called anti-gerasone, which, if taken regularly as instructed, would make it so that one could live virtually forever, and look young doing it. This has led to a quasi-dystopian future in which overpopulation has run rampant, since far fewer people die now, to the point where whole families are crammed together in apartment buildings, with basically no privacy to speak of. Gramps’s bedroom would be totally normal in our world if not for the fact that he has the luxury of keeping his own bedroom, whereas everyone else in his family must huddle together like rats. As a certain Goodreads reviewer pointed out with this story, one has to wonder how, what with the lack of privacy, anyone has sex or jerks off in this world. There are many questions raised implicitly from what few detailed Vonnegut gives about this future society, and for better or worse he doesn’t really answer any of them. Anyway, it’s time for Gramps to read out and revise his will—again. He’s done this many times before. Lou, Gramps’s grandson, was due to become the new patriarch of the family, but this time he gets cut out of the will, “causes for which were disrespectfulness and quibbling.” This is not an exaggeration. Gramps cuts people out of his will and puts them back in depending on how he’s feeling at the moment, which you could say makes him a tyrant. It’s hard to feel bad for him when we discover that Mortimer, Gramps’s great-grandnephew, is conspiring to send the old man off the grave a bit prematurely by diluting his anti-gerasone. Lou sees this scheme, but is conflicted as to what to do about it, since he’s not exactly fond of the old man either.

Thus we have our conflict.

Much of “The Big Trip Up Yonder” is concerned with Lou and his wife Emerald. Lou looks to be a man of about thirty, but is 103; his father Willy looks only slightly older, but is 142. Gramps himself is close to 200 years old, but looks to be in his seventies—not young like the rest of his family, on account of already being old when anti-gerasone was invented. Apparently anti-gerasone is like the polio vaccine in that if you already have polio, oh well, what’s done is done. It stops aging, but doesn’t reverse it. For reasons I’ve not much bothered to look into, overpopulation became a major “concern” for a lot of ~~white middle-to-upper-class people~~ people in the post-war years, such that there seemed to be a Malthusian bug going around. While nowadays overpopulation is typically treated as a right-wing concern, much like with eugenics this was more or less a bipartisan things back in the day. (The number of left-wing intellectuals who supported eugenics in the early 20th century is, let’s say disconcerting.) Vonnegut was a leftist, of a sort, being a socialist and also a philosophical pessimist; but this didn’t stop him from having worries about there being (supposedly) too many damn people on this planet. In fairness to Vonnegut, the problem of overpopulation in “The Big Trip Up Yonder” has not to do with race or class, but simply man’s fear of dying from old age. Vonnegut himself would’ve only been about thirty when he wrote this story, but even at that time he seemed to be thinking quite hard about the prospect of aging, and the inherent feebleness that comes with old age. Gramps certainly comes off as antagonistic, but to be fair to him, he is surrounded by his much younger-looking family, day in and day out, in a world that seems to be only getting more cramped each day. It’s a story that is perhaps half-baked, in that it doesn’t follow through on all the ideas it presents, nor does it do much to develop its characters (not that Vonnegut usually cared to make his characters all that human), but it does hint at a fierce intellect and future greatness.

There Be Spoilers Here

Unexpectedly, Gramps has left his bedroom—indeed he’s gone off the reservation, so to speak. He left a note behind, with the final revision of will, and with the implication that he’s gone off to commit suicide, having gotten fed up with his family. His will says that there will be no new patriarch, but that the Fords will instead “share and share alike,” which confuses and worries members of the family. What the hell could this mean? Soon a fight breaks out, which then turns into a literal riot in the streets. The Fords are arrested, but really they shouldn’t feel too bad, since jail, at least in some ways, turns out to be better than the outside world. After all, each person gets their own bed, in their own cell, which would come off as a luxury after what they’ve had to deal with. Turns out Gramps also faked his death, since he returns to the apartment, after the arrests, with a gentle and oddly youthful smile on his face. A new version of anti-gerasone is about to hit the market: at just a bit of a higher cost, someone can now reverse their aging! You could say it’s a happy ending, since everyone involved gets more or less what they wanted: the Fords each get to have spaces of their own, at least for a time, and Gramps gets to take a break from his pesky family. Mind you that Vonnegut’s sentiments when it comes to family are, I suppose in keeping with his other views, pretty pessimistic. There’s a story of his, might’ve been “The Big Space Fuck,” in which children can actually sue their parents for having allegedly ruined their lives—not through actual abuse, but just lousy parenting. For someone who raised quite a few children (both biological and adopted), Vonnegut didn’t think much of the nuclear family model—a pessimism towards post-war (sub)urban life that would’ve fit right in with Galaxy in the ’50s.

A Step Farther Out

It was hard for me to be objective with this one, since I do have a nostalgic attachment to Vonnegut. I remember reading Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time when I was 13; it was one of the first “serious” novels I’d ever read of my own volition. However, I’ve not actively read Vonnegut since college, for reasons that can be hard to parse. It could be that I’ve moved on from Vonnegut’s cartoonishly misanthropic view of humanity (I’ve instead moved on to an even darker sort of pessimism, somehow), or that I find his less savory qualities, like his tendency towards misogyny, more grating now. It could also be that Vonnegut intentionally wrote in a beige style, with short, punchy paragraphs, and vocabulary that a 5th grader could understand. He’s both simply and complex as a writer, in a way that would endear him to a mainstream literary audience. My relationship with him is more mixed now, which is reflected in my mild ambivalence towards “The Big Trip Up Yonder.” I probably would’ve loved it years ago, when I was less mature and also less familiar with ’50s SF.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Smell of Death” by Dennis Etchison

October 6th, 2024

(Cover by Mel Hunter. F&SF, October 1971.)

Who Goes There?

I’ve only read a few stories by Dennis Etchison, but it’s clear to me that a) he was a genuine student of the horror game, and b) he was part of that generation of writers who could not have imagined much success pre-1970, but who in the ’70s found a reasonable niche. Etchison never found mainstream success like Stephen King or Anne Rice, or even brushed with it like Peter Straub, in no small part because he wasn’t much of a novelist. Totally random, but he did write some film novelizations in the ’80s, including, of all things, a novel adaptation of Videodrome. (His first original novel didn’t come out until 1986, with Darkside.) But Etchison was clearly much more about the short story (as any horror fan should be), evidenced by both his sizable short fiction output and the fact that he was a pretty respected anthologist of other people’s work, winning the World Fantasy Award more than once as an editor. Etchison’s fiction encapsulates a kind of desolate Americana, in some parts exploitation cinema and other parts a byproduct of beatnik culture, as today’s story tells us. “The Smell of Death” is a slice of eerie Americana, a creeping horror story with a touch of science fiction, written during a time when the space race had already reached its climax and public interest was waning.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in English only once, in the Etchison collection Red Dreams.

Enhancing Image

A family is at a gas station, in the middle of nowhere, with a daughter in the back seat. The young girl is dying, as it becomes clear to the man the parents consult, “the man from the diner,” although the man doesn’t say this out loud. Why the parents ask for this man’s help and why they trust him to take care of their daughter is unclear, but we’re also told there’s no hospital for dozens of miles. The man, whom we learn is called Raven (this is certainly not to be taken as his real name), looks over the girl, who seems unaware of what is happening, her eyes forced shut by the sickness. Then something strange happens, in the it’s not clear, from how it’s phrased, if Raven is smelling the girl’s infection or is exhaling an infection of his own when he’s close to her. It doesn’t matter. He deliberately displaces a nerve in the girl’s neck and she dies, seemingly peacefully, as the parents don’t notice what has happened; as far as they know the man has been a help. “He hoped it would be a long time before they checked the back seat.” Etchison intentionally omits some context for this opening scene, and it doesn’t help that it doesn’t tie in directly with the rest of the plot; but it does succeed at introducing a creepy idea, that there’s a killer lurking on the highway, maybe California or maybe Nevada, but somewhere in the desert. Of course, Raven turns out to be not quite who we think he is.

What this story lacks in complexity, or even human character, it makes up for with character of a different sort: a kind of desolate beauty that would later be realized in Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the movie Paris, Texas, and the works of the late Denis Johnson. Also some of Stephen King’s work. In the years following World War II and the rapidly growing suburban sprawl of the ’50s there seemed to be a much increased interest in highways, and places between towns and cities. Liminal spaces. Diners and gas stations on the side of the road, every which way distant from civilization. Incidentally Raven works at a diner and gas station; how he does this, what hours he works, where he lives, I’m not sure. I’m not sure Etchison thought this situation through entirely, and it only raises more questions the more we find out about “Raven” and his strange ability. Etchison would’ve been only 26 or 27 when he wrote this, and while he had been published several times before (“The Smell of Death” wasn’t even his first appearance in F&SF), I sense a lack of care for internal logic, the how and why of things, that normally would indicate a young writer who’s still growing into their shoes. Oh well, this is more about the vibes anyway. Fun fact, I actually read this story in its entirety twice before writing my review—not because I thought it was that good (it’s fine), but because I was convinced I had not picked up on enough things the first time worth talking about. I thought maybe I had missed something, when really I was just soaking in the flavor of the thing more the second time around, when I wasn’t take notes.

After the incident with the girl, Raven meets up with an unnamed reporter, a young guy who claims his car broke down a pretty long walk from here, and he needs a lift. Raven, understandably, is suspicious about this. The reporter is supposed to be looking for a guy named McCabe, an astronaut who was involved in a very weird and tragic incident some fifteen years ago and who has since seemingly vanished off the map. There was a test run for a squad of astronauts, for what would be a manned-satellite program, and Houston intentionally cut off communications with the team for 36 hours—the problem being that when those 36 hours were up, three of the four members were dead. A nerve in the neck had been dislocated. “Nerves, pressure points, all that stuff was part of the hand-to-hand training for the men who served in Special Forces in the war in Asia then, which includes McCabe, of course,” the reporter says. So, McCabe was suspected of murder, but before Houston command could do anything he took on a disguise and skipped town. Now, it soon becomes apparent (and also obvious to the reader), that Raven and McCabe are the same person, and that the reporter meeting Raven/McCabe on the road was no coincidence. This raises a few questions, like how McCabe has been able to live on his own for the past fifteen years, and also how nobody has recognized him despite him presumably not changing much physically from how he would’ve looked in what was surely a widely publicized event. Or maybe the government kept it under wraps to an extent. There’s some what I would think is important information Etchison refrains from giving us, which I do think is to the story’s detriment. It’s ten pages and could’ve been fleshed out more.

There Be Spoilers Here

After saving him from a possibly venomous snake McCabe decides to not kill the reporter after revealing his identity—at least not directly. He does try sabotaging the reporter’s car, under the guise of helping him (“It was the first time that he had had to do this, to leave a man to die to insure his own safety.), but this backfires. Why McCabe feels the need to go through this whole process is another unanswered question, since he could’ve just done the nerve trick on the reporter while he had him to himself and without any witnesses. Anyway, while working on the car, McCabe thinks back on what had killed his fellow crewmembers, and what’s curious is that while he had indeed killed them, they were already dying, due to what McCabe suspects was an airborne virus that had found its way into the cabin and to which McCabe was miraculously immune. The very end, however, as McCabe lies dying with his arm trapped under the lopsided car, implies that he was in fact the one carrying the virus—that he had at some point become contaminated and is immune to it because he’s the one spreading it. Or the whole “smell of death” thing could just be metaphorical. It could be that McCabe merely put his team members out of their misery, as they were dying of something he was not responsible for, and that he’s not been exactly a murderer but someone who “eases” people through their final moments. His one conscious decision to kill, this being the case with the reporter, leaves him at best with a severed arm at the end.

A Step Farther Out

Like I said, it’s fine. I’ve read better Etchison, although I can see how it has the right mix of horror and SF to fit in F&SF‘s pages. There’s a bit of violence but not much; it’s a lot more a character study, about a man who survived war, then a freak accident as an astronaut, and who seems cut off from the rest of society. It’s about as tragic as it is creepy, but it has the rough edges of a talented author’s early work.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Longtooth” by Edgar Pangborn

October 3rd, 2024

(Cover by Mel Hunter. F&SF, January 1970.)

Who Goes There?

Edgar Pangborn’s career spanned about 25 years, encompassing more or less the third quarter of the 20th century. He took part in the market boom of the ’50s and then remained uniquely himself through the New Wave and post-New Wave periods, although his work got noticeably darker in hue, as is the case with today’s story. He was a New Yorker, although he did spend a few years farming in rural Maine before he entered the world of genre fiction, which more than likely inspired “Longtooth” as well. There’s not too much we know about Pangborn, not helped by the fact that he was never that prolific a writer and he didn’t exactly write bestsellers in his time. He did win the International Fantasy Award for his 1954 novel A Mirror for Observers, and was eventually given the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award as a token of his overlooked talent. He was a lifelong bachelor, never had children, and he was probably gay, although there’s only some circumstantial evidence to suggest this. Nevertheless, Pangborn’s writing often has a stark loneliness about it (at times romanticizing said loneliness a little too much), and a gentleness that for the rather non-humanistic 1950s made him a bit of an outlier. “Longtooth” is a very rare venture into horror for Pangborn, but it still feels characteristic of him.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1970 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s since been reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Nineteenth Series (ed. Edward L. Ferman), A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (ed. Terry Carr and Martin H. Greenberg), The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (ed. Edward L. Ferman and Anne Jordan), Foundations of Fear (ed. David G. Hartwell), Strange Dreams (ed. Stephen R. Donaldson), and the Pangborn collection Good Neighbors and Other Strangers.

Enhancing Image

Ben and Harp are two New England hicks in their fifties, so a little past middle age. Ben is a widower and his son died tragically young, while Harp married Leda, the “problem” being that Leda is 28 while Harp is 56. The other problem is that Leda doesn’t wanna live in the country, but Harp is dead set on staying in the cabin his ancestors had built—never mind the harsh weather, or the lack of local prospects for someone of Leda’s age and disposition, or the fact that someone (or something) has been killing the chickens. Ben is narrating and he tells us that his “word is good,” which should immediately raise alarm bells for the reader. I’m starting to resent the term “unreliable narrator” partly because, as Gene Wolfe (or maybe it was Nabokov) had said, every narrator is unreliable, even if it’s an “omniscient” third-person narrator. There’s always information the reader is not given, which you could say is an inherent limitation of literature, but more often this openness of detail can be an asset. Ben is fairly old, and as we find out he also survived a heart attack and a stroke, although how that happened won’t be revealed until much later. The idea is that Ben is not so much a liar as the equally viable reason for a narrator being unreliable, in that his memory might be faulty. Pangborn is informing us upfront that we probably shouldn’t take the narrative at face value.

“Longtooth” is ostensibly a horror story, but it could also be considered a domestic drama, albeit one where the conflict between the domestic partners is more implied than shown. Harp and Leda don’t exactly have a happy marriage, not that Ben is quick to say anything about it. “You walked on eggs, with Harp,” as he says. The two had married seven years ago, and there’s a room decorated with things meant for a baby, including a crib; yet there’s no baby. Apparently the two tried to have kids, but it didn’t work out. The only thing they have that isn’t a farm animal is a fat old dacshund mix named Droopy. It doesn’t help that Leda had a reputation as the town bicycle before getting hitched with Harp, and even as a married woman she still gets gossiped about. (By the way, Darkfield is such a fucking spooky name for a town, in that rural New England fashion, that I have to wonder if Stephen King copped it at some point. He has almost certainly read “Longtooth.”) Leda also wants to get a job, but Harp won’t let her, or at least he’s not keen on the idea. And then there’s the age gap. Leda was 21 when they married, which, as someone who was 21 at one point, is mighty young, although there’s nothing illegal about the arrangement. The stranger part is that Harp (like Pangborn) was a bachelor deep into his forties, who had never married before or seemingly even had a long-term relationship, when he met Leda. One has to wonder why the two hit it off in the first place; it wasn’t for the money or status, Harp being a poor farmer, and Leda herself being of ill repute. “I suppose [Leda] had the usual 20th-Century mishmash of television dreams until some impulse or maybe false signs of pregnancy tricked her into marrying a man out of the 19th.”

But that’s just one mystery.

The other is that Harp confides in Ben that he’s seen the thing (for he struggles to call it a person) that’s been terrorizing his farm: a humanoid, unnaturally tall, more or less covered head to toe in fur, and with teeth big enough to tear a person’s head off with ease. Ben takes to calling this creature Longtooth. Of course Ben has never seen Longtooth himself, so he can only take Harp’s word on the matter; but Harp, for all his faults, is not a liar. So we’re told. At the very least Harp is convinced it’s not a bear, given he’s hunted those and knows damn well what they look like. But it would also be hard to believe that a man could live in the forests of Darkfield by himself, in which the area gets quite literally several feet of snow in the winter, as happens to be the case now. It becomes even harder to believe when, while Ben and Harp are outdoors, Longtooth breaks into the cabin through the window on the second floor, kills Droopy, and kidnaps Leda. What a Yeti-like creature could want with a human woman makes the two friends shudder, and they figure that even if they do find her she’ll most likely be dead. To their credit, though, and despite the fact that the story Harp would have to give is absurd on its face, they do call the local authorities. Ben and Harp (especially Harp) are not book-smart, but I do like it when even rustic characters like these try to make smart decisions. “Longtooth” is a meaty 15,000-word novelette, and while the plot is by no means complicated if taken literally, there’s a lot of setting detail and psychology, less about action and more about characters thinking about what actions to take. As expected with Pangborn, it has layers.

The authorities suspect Harp killed Leda and hid her body in the wilderness somewhere, and that Ben is in cahoots with Harp, but as Our Heroes™ are quick to point out, this would be a very hard task for two slightly-past-middle-age men, not least the window which had been broken from the outside. But then the idea of a Yeti kidnapping Leda is also ridiculous. It’s the improbable versus the impossible, and the only witnesses claim the latter is, in fact, possible. It’s possible that Harp and Ben have made the whole thing up and that some ordinary man kidnapped Leda, or that maybe Leda hadn’t been kidnapped at all, but as we’re told multiple times, neither of these men is given to making things up; they might have faulty memory, or only see part of the reality, but they don’t lie. Then again, the average person may consider it easy to believe an unusually tall and brawn man caused all this trouble rather than a Yeti with abnormally large teeth, yet Harp is convinced he saw such a creature. Maybe he wants to believe he’s seen such a creature? As Dr. Malcolm (not that Dr. Malcolm), a biologist and friend of Ben’s, points out, “Men can’t stand it not to have closed doors and a chance to push at them.” Harp, in his grief, may be mistaking something improbable for something utterly fantastical—or he may be trying to cover his own tracks. We’re stuck in Ben’s head the whole time, and even his motives are sort of up in the air; meanwhile Harp remains such a mystery to us, despite spending a lot of time with him and after some backstory. We’re not sure if we can trust this man who may have killed his wife.

There Be Spoilers Here

Of course, when Ben and Harp finally do find Leda, who is still alive, albeit deranged, something very strange happens. Upon finding her in the cave Longtooth had taken her to, Harp kills his wife, shooting her “between the eyes,” without any words spoken between them. Harp never gives a reason for why he does this and, just as strangely, Ben never questions it. Is this an honor killing? Did Harp think his young wife had been violated by the creature? Did he think she had utterly lost her mind and sought to put her out of her misery? Was it… somehow out of jealousy? We never get an answer, because soon Harp and Longtooth have a showdown and kill each other, Longtooth strangling Harp while Harp shoves his hunting knife in the creature’s side. Afterward the authorities fail to find the creature’s body, yet surely something or someone must’ve killed Harp. Ben, in the wake of all this, has a heart attack and a stroke, and miraculously survives both despite being on his own, in the freezing wilderness. Yet this might be only slightly less miraculous than a long-tooth Yeti in Maine. Ben has been in the hospital this whole time, and can barely move his body, but he’s mobile enough to write this memoir of sorts, or account—maybe to absolve himself of a crime, if there really was no Longtooth. The creepiness of the story comes partly from the creature’s inexplicable and uncanny existence, but Pangborn also uses ambiguity to unease the reader, raising questions and giving surprisingly few answers, in effect leaving a door open. It’s not viscerally scary, but its openness makes it discomforting.

A Step Farther Out

It took me a few hours to get through this one, which I know is quite slow for a short story, but mind you that a) I was taking notes, and b) I was reading a scanned copy of the F&SF issue, which is simply a more laborious process than reading a physical book. This is certainly a story that demands some notes, though, and also time to think about it. It feels both unusual for Pangborn and something that would’ve been in his wheelhouse, especially late in his career when he seemed to have become more weary of humanity. It’s creepy, but it’s also sad and in parts ambiguous. The whole strange ordeal might’ve really happened, or maybe not.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Subcommittee” by Zenna Henderson

July 10th, 2024

(Cover by Mel Hunter. F&SF, July 1962.)

Who Goes There?

In the ’50s and early ’60s there was a group of writers, who really aside from their gender had little in common, whom James Blish called pejoratively the “housewives” of F&SF. Judith Merril, Margaret St. Clair, Kit Reed, Carol Emshwiller, Rosel George Brown, and not the least of these, Zenna Henderson. She did appear elsewhere, but nearly all of her fiction appeared in the pages of F&SF, and unlike some of her contemporaries she didn’t turn to writing novels once market forces demanded it. I’ve read a few Henderson stories before, but until now I’ve not given much thought as to what goes into her writing. You could say time has been somewhat uncharitable to Henderson’s work; aside from her work being out of print, her output went down after the early ’70s, possibly because the field had changed so radically that there was no place for someone of her disposition. It’s hard to say. ISFDB lists only two interviews with Henderson, both from the ’70s, and the interviewer is the same fucking guy (Paul Walker, but not that one) in both cases. “Subcommittee” is a somewhat feminist story that probably would not have been impressive ten years after publication. Here we have a first contact story that’s unquestionably Henderson, for both good and ill: it’s a subversion of militaristic alien encounter narratives of the era, even if it still comes off as implicitly conservative. You’ll see what I mean.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was reprinted in The 8th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F (ed. Judith Merril), Gentle Invaders (ed. Hans Stefan Santesson), Young Extraterrestrials (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), New Eves: Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow (ed. Forrest J. Ackerman, Janrae Frank, and Jean Marie Stine), as well as the Henderson collections The Anything Box and Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson.

Enhancing Image

A human (read: American) fleet has come into contact with a fleet of alien ships, or rather the alien ships have brought the party to the humans. The Linjeni are a somewhat humanoid race, albeit covered in fur, like a race of Sasquatches. Serena is a wife and mother, whose husband Thorn is one of the generals aboard the human fleet, and so far things are not looking too good. The problem is that nobody has any idea what the other side is trying to communicate, and while the civilians on both sides are kept safe on a nearby beach, the civilians of both sides are separated by a fence. Officially Serena is not allowed to communicate with the civilians on the other side, and vice versa. The Linjeni are here for a reason—maybe for innocuous reasons, maybe to pick a fight with the humans. Serena already has her work cut out for her, but she soon discovers her son Splinter (get it? Thorn? Splinter?) has dug a hole under the fence so he can hang out with Doovie, a child of the alien race, in secret. On the one hand it’s hard to blame Splinter for wanting such attention, since as Serena points out he’s the only human child in the human party; but still, making direct contact with the Linjeni could have very bad consequences; this being a Henderson story, however, we can guess in advance that the consequences can’t be too bad. Personally I’d be more concerned about contracting or spreading disease when interacting with an alien race, but who am I to judge?

Despite being published in the ’60s “Subcommittee” very much feels like a leftover from the ’50s, and while I do love me some ’50s genre SF I can’t say I was taken with this one. Despite featuring a few main characters there’s only one character in the Shakespearean sense, in that she has some kind of inner life, which would be Serena. We actually get some insight into what Serena is thinking, although it isn’t much. Splinter is a gosh-wow caricature, a pretty common sort that would’ve been the standard for writing children characters in the field then, while the aliens lack individual personalities. Even “Mrs. Pink” (nicknamed for her pink fur), Serena’s counterpart, is a character who sort of exists simply for the sake of the plot. Now, as for the adult male characters, there are only two: Thorn, and another general of the fleet whose name is unimportant. The men, when we do see them, are irrational, panicky creatures whose whole thought processes are hijacked by fears of all-out war with the aliens. These too are caricatures, although I do think Henderson intended for us to take them as such anyway, as opposed to as real characters. The men have to be warmongers so that Serena can not only come out looking all the better but devise a solution, with a little help from her son of course. This is a problem story with two basic questions: “How can we start to understand the aliens’ language?” and “What do these aliens want?” These questions are naturally conjoined at the hip: once you answer the first you can then answer the second.

Once they brought up knitting I knew it was over. Serena becomes an accomplice to Splinter and starts making friends with Mrs. Pink and the other female aliens. At first they aren’t able to communicate with even the most basic words, but thankfully actions will usually do the trick where words fail, and so it doesn’t take long for the humans and aliens to find a common ground. This is all done, of course, in secret, behind Thorn’s back, since he wouldn’t understand things women do together when they’re bored, and anyway, an ill-timed revealing of the connection between the races could prove catastrophic. Still one thing is certain: the Linjeni are not the enemy. I’m about to go on a rant about this story’s politics, but before I do that I wanna give credit where credit is due, in that this is very much an anti-xenophobia narrative. Hostility towards the aliens is consistently framed as misguided at best. When I say Henderson’s brand of “feminism” is actually conservative I don’t mean this in how we modern Americans understand “conservatism,” which is xenophobic and anti-intellectual—a crippling fear of the abnormal. Henderson doesn’t fear the abnormal so much as she embraces the normal, to the point of trying to connect with marginalized groups on the basis of “normalcy.” She worked with interned Japanese-Americans during World War II, which probably contributed to her accepting view of minority groups—assuming we’re supposed to take the Linjeni as a stand-in for minority groups.

There Be Spoilers Here

It turns out the Linjeni are a dying race, and the reason they’ve come to Earth is that our planet is incredibly rich in salt water (indeed it takes up the majority of the planet’s surface), and salt is something the Linjeni need to survive. Their own planet has run dry on the stuff, and the survivors have become a collective of vagabonds. “The Linjeni must have come seeking asylum—or demanding it. Neighbors who were afraid to ask—or hadn’t been given time to ask.” If the human fleet were to strike now they would be committing genocide, unbeknownst to the men aboard. The moral implications of the situation might’ve been more fleshed out in the hands of a different writer (but then, maybe not), but regardless we aren’t given much time to dwell on this before Serena and Splinter swoop in to save the day, managing to reason with the human fleet’s high command and prevent what would’ve been a very costly war. (I should mention at some point that this story moves fairly quickly, which I guess is a positive. It’s classified as a novelette, but if so it barely counts.) The nuclear family is such a sacred model (Henderson supposes) that it can serve as common ground for two sentient races who can barely understand each other through words. Of course it would be astronomically good luck (or bad) for humanity to make contact with a fellow intelligent race in the universe, but to have said race not only be somewhat humanoid but conventionally monogamous? That must be like hitting the jackpot ten times over. Imagine the odds. Of course I’m being a little unfair here, but our emotions are never fair and always in the direction of the wind, and reading the climax of this story I couldn’t help but feels like I’d been cheated in some way.

A Step Farther Out

It’s… cute. So naturally I wasn’t a fan. Sorry. (I will admit I’m one of those few unhappy people who found This Is How You Lose the Time War to be too saccharine for my liking.) It’s easy to poke fun at, but then so is anything that is earnest, and I do think Henderson (between this and her other stories I’ve read) was being earnest if nothing else. It must’ve been really something, in the ’60s, to go from the invention of The Pill™ at the start of the decade to, by the end of it, seeing feminism not only advance rapidly but splinter into some very interesting and intellectually demanding schools of thought. Henderson’s “feminism,” if it can really be called that, is totally lacking in intersectionality, and its cloying admiration of the nuclear family model now reads as like nails on a chalkboard. And yet, I don’t think a male chauvinist, especially of the time, could’ve written “Subcommittee,” which in itself should be worth something.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Oldest Soldier” by Fritz Leiber

July 3rd, 2024

(Cover by Mel Hunter. F&SF, May 1960.)

Who Goes There?

Fritz Leiber has one of the most varied and compelling outputs of any SFF writer, and his influence on future generations is often easy to overlook by virtue of his versatility. There’s also the fact that while he would win two Hugos (actually three if we count the Retro Hugos) for Best Novel, he really was better at the short story, which is a form that usually doesn’t get you big sales and notoriety. Still, despite this as well as some personal-life issues (he had a recurring problem with alcoholism, which at a few points led him to give up writing for a time), Leiber was surely a legend. He’s an old favorite on this site. 1960 marked his 50th birthday, and by this point he had already won a Hugo for his short novel The Big Time, which in turn helped spawn an episodic series—not the first instance of a “time war” in SF, but certainly an early example with the Change War series. “The Oldest Soldier” is an entry in said series, although it can be understood perfectly as a standalone and indeed the term “Change War” isn’t even mentioned. More curiously this is an SF-horror hybrid, a fact I did not know beforehand, which thereby shows Leiber dabbling in the genre he was arguably best at: horror. Not gory horror or erotic horror, but a kind of bleak existential horror that could only come from someone who grew up in the city (in this case Chicago) and who seemed to fear it as much as he loved it.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1960 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was first reprinted in The Mind Spider and Other Stories, as one half of an Ace Double with The Big Time. For a more modern Leiber collection there’s Snakes & Spiders: The Definitive Change War Collection. For anthology appearances there’s Another World (ed. Gardner Dozois), Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (ed. Darrell Schweitzer and George H. Scithers), and Time Troopers (ed. Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio). It’s been reprinted more often than one would expect, given it’s good but definitely minor Leiber.

Enhancing Image

The first stretch of the story might lead you to think what you’re reading will not even be SF. We’re in a bar (Sol’s) in Chicago, and it seems to be sometime in the 1950s—certainly after the Korean War. The protagonist/narrator is Fred, who might well be a stand-in for Leiber. The two have very similar backstories, with Fred explaining his upbringing in Chicago in the early 20th century and having pacifistic sentiments in his youths, although by the time of World War II that gave way to something more pragmatic. Fred and Leiber seem to be of the opinion that when fascism knocks that militarism may well be necessary, although Fred might’ve taken this to a more extreme degree than his creator did. He went from being a pacifist to becoming fixated on soldiering and military “honor,” which of course led to him reading a ton of military-related fiction, even early examples of military SF like “Heinlein’s space cadets and Bullard and other brave rangers of the spaceways.” Leiber does this thing where he acknowledges the existence of his own contemporaries in the worlds he creates (he does this most obnoxiously in The Wanderer), and he’s especially fond of name-dropping Robert Heinlein. It’s worth mentioning that Leiber and Heinlein were direct contemporaries (they even made their genre debuts the same year) and that they both very much admired each other, despite having very different politics. Leiber’s pandering to the genre SF readership can come off as self-serving at times, and I’d be lying if I didn’t also get that impression here; but at least it provides context for Fred’s behavior.

Fred decided to hang out with some war veterans who drink together at Sol’s, like it’s fucking Cheers. There’s even a guy named Woody! Woody, Mike, Pierre, “the Lieutenant,” and of course there’s Max, who is our second main character. Max is the titular oldest soldier—but it’s not because of his physical age. If you know about the Change War series in advance then you can infer right away that Max is a time soldier, someone who jumps back and forth in time, often to alter the past in subtle ways—which side he’s on is left unclear. Anyway, the Spiders and Snakes of the Change War are more or less interchangeable, both of them being morally rather ambivalent; that’s the point. Leiber doesn’t think very highly of war. Max is a curious character and how Fred writes about him shows a bit of a problem that can (and often does) arise from writing in the first person. See, at the beginning Fred calls Max a “screwball,” although he doesn’t really mean it as an insult. He even goes on a monologue about the appeal of screwballs, which I suspect is an opinion Leiber shares. The problem more is that he calls Max a guy “with a dream or gag,” which given that he’s writing with hindsight (he knows something about Max we don’t know yet) is an odd thing to say. Max is a bit weird, sure, but his claims about fighting with Martians in the distant future turn out to be probably true. Of course we as genre readers are basically preconditioned to take Max’s claims at face value, so to hear Fred contradict himself like this is jarring if one thinks about it. It’s a fallacy with first-person past-tense narration that’s so common that even old pros like Leiber fall for it. Anyway, it’s more a quip than anything.

So Fred and Max strike up an odd friendship wherein the former feeds into the latter’s tales of military exploits, the “time-and-space-soldier gag,” since at first Fred didn’t believe Max’s stories. Who would? But on walking to Max’s place one night Fred realizes… they’re being followed. Out of the corner of his eye he can see a black dog with flaming red eyes. The malicious dog is a motif that appears from time to time in Leiber’s horror fiction, and actually this isn’t even the first time on this site that I’ve reviewed such a story. In the case of “The Oldest Soldier” it’s much more unexpected, because, this being SF, we’re led to believe there wouldn’t be anything so mystical or Faustian as a black dog stalking Our Heroes™ on the street. They know they’re being followed, Max perhaps even more aware than Fred of this. Before we know it we’re halfway through the story, and it’s at this point that I have to confess something: this is a bit of a hard story to summarize. Not a great deal happens, but it’s hard to complain in the moment because, as tends to be the case, simply reading Leiber is a pleasure in itself. I have a few reasons for believing Fred is something of an author avatar, one of them being his way with language. Take this passage, for example, after Our Heroes™ have changed course and gone to Fred’s place, where Max is working on something that might get him out of this situation, Fred reflecting on his own unbelief in Max being a time-traveling soldier—an unbelief which in fact hid an intense belief in his friend’s stories:

I realized fully then that my first skeptical thoughts had been the sheerest automatic escapism and that, just as I’d told Max, I believed with my whole mind in the black dog. I believed in the whole business insofar as I could imagine it. I believed that there are undreamed of powers warring in this universe. I believed that Max was a stranded time-traveller [sic] and that in my bedroom he was now frantically operating some unearthly device to signal for help from some unknown headquarters. I believed that the impossible and the deadly was loose in Chicago.

Fred’s language oscillates between a slangy, kind of Beatnik dialect, and a shocking capacity for poetic description that manages to avoid sounding overly flowery. Incidentally I refuse to believe Leiber wasn’t at least slightly influenced by the Beatnik movement in the late ’50s. Indeed the opening stretch of the story reads like it could be not SF but instead a literary type of story, about down-to-earth veterans taking comfort in each other’s company in the years following the Korean War. Max would not be the only eccentric veteran by any means. In this sense it’s a very of-its-time story, technically published in 1960 but culturally indicative of the ’50s, which after all did not actually end in any meaningful sense until maybe 1963. The world of “The Oldest Soldier” is decidedly pre-Vietnam, pre-hippies, pre-Beatles, but is also very much the same world in which Joseph Heller was writing Catch-22. You may notice this has a lot more to do with the atmosphere, heightened via Leiber’s prose, than with the actual plot, which on its own is rather simple, if also ambiguous since Fred is an outsider who’s only able to tell us what he’s able to understand. Which brings us to…

There Be Spoilers Here

Max is able to escape whatever was following him, although Fred has no clue how this could’ve happened—at least at first. Max had given Fred a slip of paper that reveals writing on it only after the fact, through some method Fred can’t figure out (it may as well be magic to him), saying that thankfully Max did manage to vanish—into the past or the future is anyone’s guess. Something interesting about the climax is that while Max is working on his escape, Fred keeps watch and tries to ease his nerves by sitting at his typewriter, just outside Max’s room, and starts typing away—not anything coherent, but just phrases and passages that come to his mind, devoid of context. He’s not physically strong enough to fend off a black dog, but he can write. I have to think Leiber is trying to say something with this, that Fred is able to stall for Max and keep eye on him by doing the thing Leiber did for a living. If nothing else, you should write—even if it’s your suicide note. Someone said that, I forget who now. Fred being a writer is another thing that connects him to Leiber, and taking all this into account I have to think this might be—oddly enough—one of Leiber’s more autobiographical works. You get to know a good deal about Leiber if you read enough of his fiction: his penchant for drinking, his way with the ladies, his fondness for cats and chess, his aforementioned pandering to SF fandom which seems to come from a genuine place. You can find little cookie crumbs of Leiber’s inner life in his fiction—even in a story like this, which is little more than a mood piece, although average Leiber is pretty good by most writers’ standards. I enjoy average Leiber more than most authors.

A Step Farther Out

Like I said at the beginning, “The Oldest Soldier” is an unexpected hybrid, fusing the Change War continuity with a kind of urban terror Leiber had been cooking to perfection for about two decades at this point. We don’t talk about Leiber nearly enough, but we especially don’t talk enough about him as a horror writer. His skill for building a sense of dread is unparalleled when he’s on the ball. Actually I would say that between SF, fantasy, and horror, that he’s most consistent with that third genre. “The Oldest Soldier” is perhaps nominally SF (we don’t see any time machines or blasters), but the latter half is an effective urban thriller.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Omen” by Shirley Jackson

March 27th, 2024

(Cover by Mel Hunter. F&SF, March 1958.)

Who Goes There?

One of the most famous authors in 20th century American literature, Shirley Jackson occupies the same space as Ray Bradbury in the sense that she broke into the mainstream by sticking to slick outlets. In 1948 her short story “The Lottery” was published in The New Yorker and sparked an enormous amount of press and controversy, and “The Lottery” has since been canonized as one of those classic short stories high school English students are subjected to. But Jackson wrote much more than “The Lottery,” even if we’re counting just her short fiction; but she also was the rare successful horror novelist prior to 1970, with classics like The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Unfortunately she didn’t live to see the horror renaissance of the ’70s, as she died in 1965, at 48 years old, after years of what should’ve struck people at the time as concerning levels of drug and alcohol abuse. In a way she was a victim of her own success, since being a famous lady writer who made more money than her husband contributed to the strain in her marriage, which was a miserable ordeal.

It would be fair, I think, to call Jackson a horror writer first and foremost; certainly her horror writing is what made her legacy. She did sometimes not write horror, as is the case with today’s story, “The Omen,” one of Jackson’s few appearances in F&SF—indeed one of maybe a handful of appearances she made in the genre outlets. No doubt F&SF‘s dignified appearance, fast-and-loose philosophy with genre boundaries, plus (I suspect) some charm on Anthony Boucher’s part, had some role in wrangling a thoroughly slick author like Jackson. “The Omen” is pretty obscure, especially for Jackson, and admittedly it’s not a hidden masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination; but it does show another side to Jackson, albeit with some of the venom we come to expect with her.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Eighth Series (ed. Anthony Boucher) and the Jackson collection Just an Ordinary Day, a volume of stories which hitherto had either gone unpublished or uncollected in a previous Jackson collection. It’s possible there’s a reprint that ISFDB doesn’t register, since Jackson is sometimes considered a non-genre author, but I find it believable that “The Omen” has only been reprinted twice.

Enhancing Image

Granny is nice old woman in her eighties, who gets along with her daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids—and on the day of the story she also gets hit with an unexpected but very welcome bit of money. She gets an envelope, inside of which is a check for $13.74, “with a covering letter saying that the sender had owed it to Granny’s husband for nearly fifty years, and so was paying it now to his widow, with interest.” Now, in today’s economy $13.74 is piss, but circa 1957 it would’ve been a good deal of money, especially for an old lady. You could do quite a bit with $13.74. She makes a list of things to get her family members, including a perfume brand named Carnation and a stuffed blue cat—only problem being it takes her all of five minutes to lose the list. Anyway, Granny is not the main character, but a much younger woman named Edith, who is in a long-term relationship with some guy named Jerry but who is hesitant to marry him—not because of Jerry, but Edith’s abusive and domineering (redundant) mother.

The omen of the story’s title is Edith making a mistake and finding Granny’s shopping list instead of taking her own bag. Being destitute and a little supersticious, Edith takes the shopping list to be a sort of guide that’ll help her return home, and even maybe help her make up her mind on the Jerry situation. Let’s talk about genre, and about F&SF‘s policy in the ’50s, especially after J. Francis McComas stepped down. Usually fiction printed in F&SF would be SF, fantasy, or a hybrid, but on occasion Boucher would buy a story that can’t really be called SFF, yet is also maybe too strange to have seen print in the slick outlets. Jackson’s first original story in F&SF, “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,” doesn’t have any discernable fantastic elements, and indeed ISFDB classifies it as non-genre; yet it might’ve been too hard to classify (it isn’t horror, and yet there’s something vaguely sinister in its twist) for higher paying markets. “The Omen” arguably is not fantasy at all, depending on how you interpret the list. Is this a case of something like magical realism, or is it a bunch of coincidences? Are the omens good or bad, and does it matter on a cosmic scale?

I personally am counting “The Omen” as fantasy because ~~I have to~~ I think Jackson’s implying that some cosmic force is pointing Edith in the right direction, even though she can’t be sure of it. She can’t know the context for the “Carnation” on the list, instead taking it to mean finding a literal carnation flower, and so she happens to meet a man on the street with one carnation on his breast who’s on his way to getting married. The soon-to-be-married man is also taking part in a contest involving a certain woman and $100 in groceries, which Edith gets wrapped up in. A comedy of mistaken identity ensues. I think the man with the carnation is a seed planeted in Edith’s mind that will later influence her to be more assertice in her relationship with Jerry, but I might be overthinking it. Jackson could at times be a writer of shocking subtlety, although I don’t think “The Omen” is an example of such; it seems to be Jackson taking herself and her world (New York) less seriously. Edith’s journey is a sort of spoof odyssey wherein Our Heroine™ is someone of modest means and probably average intelligence who maybe tricks herself into thinking she’s stumbled into a fantastical situation. Your mileage may vary.

Reading this, I couldn’t help but think about Jackson’s life, the circumstances of her writing, and a kind of unexpected but perfectly logical contemporary comparison: Flannery O’Connor. The two were in some ways very different: O’Connor was a diehard Catholic while I struggle to believe the woman who wrote We Have Always Lived in the Castle believed in an all-loving deity. But they were also pessimists with a biting sense of humor and an equally biting sense of justice, and even though Jackson often wrote horror at a time when the genre was pulp-adjacent, I do think she was at least almost as morally serious as O’Connor. (Sadly they also both died young.) This is why I’m not sure what to make of “The Omen,” which depicts a downtrodden woman who is, quite possibly, on the cusp of liberating herself from one abuser to falling into the hands of another. The few times we hear from Jerry are not flattering. It could also be that I’m projecting Jackson’s own deeply unhappy marriage onto a character of hers, but I can’t help but get the impression that Edith, while on the surface being presented with a way out with Jerry, may be stuck between a rock and a hard place.

There Be Spoilers Here

Edith soon finds a cafe, Kitty’s Lunch, where the owner herself had, “with odd humor, chosen to adorn the window of Kitty’s Lunch with a large painted blue cat.” The cafe also happens to have a payphone Edith can use, and she just happens to have enough money for a cup of coffee and a phone call. And don’t feel too bad for Granny, who you may recall lost her list and subsequently forgot everything she was supposed to get. But everything works out. I could be wrong, though, but the ending feels phony to me, which I know is an odd way of putting it. I don’t think Jackson believes in her own happy ending. Granny, at the very end, even calls the outcome of events “sentimental,” which is a word that I can’t imagine Jackson would use without puking in her own mouth a tiny bit; Jackson doesn’t do sentimentality. Is this impression of fakeness intentional or just a failure at being sincere? It’s a question Jackson’s not keen on answering.

A Step Farther Out

“The Omen” is a lesser known Jackson story, because of its relatively lighthearted tone but also I don’t think it shows Jackson at her best. We know Shirley Jackson could be a really vicious and subversive writer for her time, but “The Omen” reads as the eternal pessimist indulging in sentimentality. You could even argue it’s non-genre and that not only should it have not been printed in F&SF but that I shouldn’t have covered it for this genre blog of mine, but I’ll be generous and work off the assumption that the hints of supernatural intervention should be taken at face value. It’s a curiosity that shows Jackson’s range, but it’s not something I’d recommend unless you’re a Jackson completionist.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie” by C. M. Kornbluth

March 24th, 2024

(Cover by Mel Hunter. F&SF, July 1957.)

Who Goes There?

The ’50s—especially the first half—were a goldmine for satirical writing in genre SF, with writers like Robert Sheckley, William Tenn, and Philip K. Dick acting as court jesters for the scene; and then there was possibly the most talented of the satirists (or at least he could’ve been, had he lived longer), which was C. M. Kornbluth. Despite having died at the horribly young age of 34, of a weak heart, Kornbluth was prolific and at the time of his death he had been writing fiction for nearly twenty years. He debuted in 1939, about 15 years old, and wrote at a mile a minute (often under pseudonyms) until 1942, when he got pulled into the war effort. He would eventually return to writing circa 1949, just in time for the magazine boom that was about to take place, and he never looked back. He wrote quite a few novels, alone and in collaboration with Frederik Pohl, but his best stuff was short-form, which only got more ambitious as he aged.

“MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie” is arguably not even science fiction, but it is very much about science fiction, and about science fiction writers. It’s a self-reflexive dual narrative that, in only about ten pages, shows Kornbluth hunting intellectual big game. At first I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, since it really is a weird fucking story; but, having sat on it for a few days now, I feel more qualified to talk about it. This is the kind of story that rewards the reader for already being familiar with the author’s work, but while it is fannish, it’s not exactly a flattering depiction of being into genre SF at a time when the genre got no respect.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1957 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Seventh Series (ed. Anthony Boucher), the only book publication of this story Kornbluth lived to see. It appeared in the Kornbluth collections The Marching Morons and Other Science Fiction Stories, Thirteen O’Clock and Other Zero Hours, and His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth.

Enhancing Image

There are two threads, which I’ll call the primary and secondary narrative. The primary is a series of messages hidden inside fortune cookies (hence the title), written by one Cecil Corwin, science fiction writer; and the secondary is asides written by C. M. Kornbluth, whom you may have heard of. Corwin has apparently gone insane and vanished off the face of the earth, with only these secret messages detailing what happened to him, in his own words, while Kornbluth, being a long-time friend and Corwin’s literary executor, gives us some much-needed context. Thus we have the “Corwin Papers”—notes you’d find in place of those platitudes that are normally found inside delicious fortune cookies. It’d be accurate to title the story “MS. Found in Chinese Fortune Cookies,” but I understand that doesn’t quite as good. Still, we have two protagonists: Corwin and Kornbluth.

This is all a bit strange, not least because “Cecil Corwin” is one of the aforementioned pseudonyms Kornbluth used back when he started writing. I’m not sure how many readers in 1957 would’ve known this, but Anthony Boucher almost certainly knew, as did some other folks who knew Kornbluth personally. The implication is that Corwin and Kornbluth are meant to be taken as the same person, or maybe as two sides of the same persona, or maybe as two personalities inhabiting the same body a la A Scanner Darkly. Immediately we’re thrown into the deep end of metafictional hijinks, in a maneuver that probably would’ve made Jorge Luis Borges proud (although Kornbluth had almost no way of knowing about Borges in his lifetime). There are some other characters mentioned, very likely based on real people, whose names have been changed undoubtedly for legal reasons and because Kornbluth doesn’t wanna make too many enemies.

Corwin is a writer who thinks he has found what he calls The Answer—the one secret to life, the universe, and everything, which would end human suffering and initiate the kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Despite being on the brink of monumental success, Corwin suspects he might also be on the precipice of insanity. “Of course The Answer looked logical and unassailable, but so no doubt did poor Charlie McGandress’ project to unite mankind through science fiction fandom, at least to him.” I get the impression Kornbluth (the author) was trying desperately not to bring up L. Ron Hubbard or Scientology by name, but you’d have to be blind as a bat to not notice the allusions to what were then fandom hijinks. And in fairness to Corwin, he’s not wrong when he suspects that trying to write out The Answer will get him into serious trouble. Indeed the conspiracy surrounding The Answer is the closest the story gets to SF territory, which reminds me of the centuries-long feud at the heart of The Crying of Lot 49. I wonder if Thomas Pynchon has read Kornbluth?

I wouldn’t recommend “MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie” to people unfamiliar with Kornbluth for a few reasons: it assumes you know who Kornbluth is, that you have at least a cursory knowledge of SF fandom politics in the ’50s; and also, structurally, this is a tangled mess of a story. We’re given two unreliable narrators for the price of one. Immediately we’re signaled to doubt Corwin because he says, “They say I am mad, but I am not mad”—only to chide himself for opening on such a cliched line. Then there’s Kornbluth (the character), who cuts out parts of Corwin’s writing for a few given reasons, but the result is that the notes are left even more fractured than they would’ve been originally. Kornbluth (the character) will also sometimes cut in to voice his disagreement with something Corwin says, either because he genuinely believes what he’s saying or because he wants to make sure not to get caught in the conspiracy that would drive Corwin to write these messages. Needless to say the plot is hard to spoil, because of its layers but also the fact that the story is inextricably linked with Kornbluth’s career within the history of genre SF.

There is a key to this story, in a way, although it wouldn’t be published until after Kornbluth’s death. For people like myself who are actively interested in “old” science fiction there’s a little volume called The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism (ed. Earl Kemp), published in 1959, which collects four lectures given by as many SFF writers, those being Robert Heinlein, C. M. Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, and Robert Bloch. These lectures were originally given a couple years earlier, which Kornbluth giving his in January 1957 at the University of Chicago. The name of the lecture is damning: “The Failure of the Science Fiction Novel as Social Criticism.” The idea, basically, is that while there have been works of SF that work as social criticism, there are too few such examples in a sea of pure entertainment; and, maybe more damningly, said examples fail to leave a tangible impression on the public consciousness. Aside from some excessive psychoanalyzing of George Orwell, it’s a good read.

At one point Kornbluth talks about Wilson Tucker’s 1952 novel The Long Loud Silence, a novel which he feels is effective as social criticism, but an abject failure in sparking any societal change. Unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which (Kornbluth says) really did change how some people thought and acted (in the case of The Jungle it directly inspired government policy), The Long Loud Silence made no such impression; not only that, but it didn’t become a bestseller and is indeed now an obscure novel—forgotten. In trying to explain how this happened, Kornbluth goes further to explain what it was like being a “science fiction writer” in the ’50s, at a time when the market was more vibrant than ever before but which the mainstream dared not touch:

[The Long Loud Silence] was ignored because publishers think of their books in rigid categories. Tucker’s book fell into the category “science fiction.” Books in the category “science fiction” get no promotion or advertising to speak of, they get misleading jacket blurbs, and a sale of five thousand copies is considered a realistic target. The idea is to sell it to the science fiction readers, clear expenses, make a little money on the paperback reprint, pat the author on the back and tell him to write another book, boy, we love your stuff.

Even 1984, which was a bestseller and which Kornbluth praises immensely, had failed to spark any societal change. One of the most famous novels in the English language, often quoted (and misunderstood), and yet despite its immense popularity 1984 remains a novel of ideas that have never materialized. There has not been (to my knowledge) a libertarian socialist society that exists now past the extreme local level, let alone one that takes direct inspiration from Orwell’s warning. (The point of the novel, of course, was the scare readers away from capitalism and socialistic fascism [or fascistic socialism] and encourage a socialist change wherein people of all skin colors and class backgrounds would be allowed to flourish.) If even the most famous SF novel on the planet cannot do what mainstream literature has done, then why are we here? What is the purpose of writing science fiction other than for the lulz and the funzies? Is SF hopes to stand on the same level as mainstream literature then (Kornbluth says) there has to be a work on part with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in terms of societal impact. (That Uncle Tom’s Cabin is now often held as an “important” but poorly aged protest novel that one doesn’t read for pleasure is beside the point.)

The increasing existential dread for the SF writer is one both Corwin and Kornbluth sense, although unlike Kornbluth (the author), Corwin thinks he has found the answer—even The Answer. In a sense you could say this story is autobiographical, because I do think Corwin’s anxiety about the seeming unimportance of the SF writer mirrors Kornbluth’s own. It’s like what he says about the relationship between the reader and the SF writer (although you could argue this goes for any writer of fiction): “There’s a touch of intellectual sadism in us. We like to dominate the reader as a matador dominates the bull; we like to tease and mystify and at last show what great souls we are by generously flipping up the shade and letting the sunshine in.” Science fiction—the reading and writing of it—is like a game. But Corwin and Kornbluth argue this must not or at least should not be so—that science fiction should serve more purpose than as entertainment.

There Be Spoilers Here

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A Step Farther Out

When Kornbluth died in March 1958 he was on his way to succeeding Anthony Boucher as editor of F&SF, and one can’t help but wonder where the magazine might’ve gone under his direction. Certainly he was becoming increasingly concerned with the bottom-tier position science fiction occupied in the zeitgeist, having at that point been relegated mostly to monster movies and speculation on new technology. The complexity and seriousness (despite its absurd premise) of “MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie” point toward Kornbluth trying to open a door—a door that would prematurely slam shut. I’m reminded of the SF Encyclopedia’s entry on Edgar Allan Poe, who like Kornbluth died young, before he could reach his full potential: “If his career had lasted longer, he might have awoken us more inescapably to his vision; as it stands, we must awaken ourselves to him.” The same can be said of Kornbluth.

See you next time.