(Cover by Allen Anderson. Planet Stories, January 1951.)
A change is coming to this site, and unfortunately it’s not for the better. I was supposed to review Leigh Brackett’s The Big Jump last month, but while I had finished reading the novel on time, I could not bring myself to write anything all that substantive about it. It’s fine, basically. It’s a short novel that is sort of spacefaring but decidedly unlike the swashbuckling planetary romances Brackett had made her bread and butter. Novels, for the most part, were also not really her strong suit, which makes her 1955 novel The Long Tomorrow all the more an outlier. I wanted to write about Brackett still, though, so this month we’ll be downsizing and looking at a short story of hers from earlier in her career, “The Halfling,” which got a Retro Hugo nomination. It’s also not a planetary romance, though; instead Poul Anderson, who for a time early in his career wrote some Brackett-esque science-fantasy, will take up that mantel. Incidentally I was supposed to write about an Anderson novella sometime last year, but never got around to it, so I’ll be making up for lost time.
The increasing habit I’ve made of missing out on pieces I had set out to cover has made me think this site could use some downsizing of its own. Thankfully not much will change except, sad to say, I will no longer be covering “complete” novels, i.e., stories 40,000 words or longer that are printed whole in magazine issues. This was a niche department to begin with, which I would only make use of a few times each year, but it seems with my life circumstances in mind that such a department is no longer viable. Of course, I’ll still be covering novels in serial form (indeed we have one such novel for this month), but the Complete Novels section you see at the top of the page of now dead. Those reviews will be kept up, because why not, but I will no longer be updating that department for the foreseeable future. Instead I will simply not post anything on the 31st of the month going forward, which gives me a bit of extra time to relax as well as the previous post more time to marinate at the top of the page. Really I think this is the best move for everyone, and I also think the price for no longer reviewing such stories is a rather small one.
July will see all short stories from Amazing Stories, but for this month it’s pretty much just more of the same. Nothing unusual here. Aside from Brackett and Anderson, authors I’d meant to cover earlier but couldn’t, we have the serial version of Gordon R. Dickson’s first major novel, as well as a novella from Katherine MacLean and an out-of-left-field SF-horror yarn from the now-obscure Raymond F. Jones. I had temporarily forgotten about my thing of reviewing as least one piece from Amazing Stories this month and almost replaced Jones with a Bruce Sterling Omni story. But Sterling is gonna have to way a bit, probably a few months.
We’re leaning vintage this month, with one story from the 1940s, three from the 1950s, and one from the 1960s.
For the serial:
Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, May to July 1959. Born and raised up to a point in Canada, but moving with his family to the US when he was 13, Dickson can now strike one as oddly mild-mannered and sympathetic for being a major forerunner of what we now call military SF. The Childe Cycle, which contains the Dorsai stories, would encompass his life’s work, although he never lived to give it a proper ending. Dorsai! was not the first story in the cycle, but apparently the second, as well as the first novel. The magazine version was nominated for a Hugo.
For the novellas:
“The Diploids” by Katherine MacLean. From the April 1953 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. MacLean was one of the last major discoveries John W. Campbell had made, and indeed she would appear regularly in Astounding/Analog over the course of many years. Despite living an exceedingly long time (she died in 2019), she mostly stopped writing after the 1970s. She trained in psychology and had apparently taken in interest in Dianetics at one point.
“Witch of the Demon Seas” by Poul Anderson. From the January 1951 issue of Planet Stories. Anderson was another Astounding/Analog regular, although he also appeared basically everywhere else. Born American but raised by Danish immigrants, there’s a strong sense of the “Nordic twilight” in Anderson’s writing, especially but not exclusively his later work. Early in his career he followed in the footsteps of Leigh Brackett and wrote some planetary romances.
For the short stories:
“The Halfling” by Leigh Brackett. From the February 1943 issue of Astonishing Stories. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novelette. Instead of reviewing a novel I guess we’ll settle for something more small-scale. Brackett had made her debut in 1940, in Astounding, but she quickly turned to other magazines despite the lesser pay. She would eventually find much success as a screenwriter.
“Stay Off the Moon!” by Raymond F. Jones. From the December 1962 issue of Amazing Stories. Born and raised in Utah, Jones seems to have been the first Mormon SF writer of note, so in that sense he was ahead of his time. He was active through much of the ’40s and ’50s. Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 may recognize him for having written This Island Earth (the novel, not the movie).
(Cover by H. R. Van Dongen. Astounding, November 1955.)
So I had read Anne McCaffrey’s “The Weather on Welladays,” and I didn’t like it. I’ve read Dragonflight and The Ship Who Sang, plus one other novel and a few short stories now, and I’m still not really sure what McCaffrey’s appeal is (I say this as someone who jumps to defend A. E. van Vogt’s early work). “The Weather on Welladay” isn’t bad, but it’s seriously hampered by being a novelette where the perspective shifts several times so that we have a few protagonists, when ideally we should have only one. I also just don’t think McCaffrey is that good a writer when compared with some of her peers, who were (and still are) not as popular. It’s nice that McCaffrey was the first woman to win both a Hugo and Nebula for fiction, but I wish those honors had gone to better writers. That’s the gist of how I felt about it, in case you’re wondering where my review post for it is.
The funny thing is that I had too good a time during the couple of days I normally would’ve spent on reading and writing for this site, which is ironic. I struggle to write here either when my personal life is at a peak or when it’s deep in a valley. I have to admit to you, the five of you who actually read these posts, that I sometimes resent writing—well, really anything, but especially for SFF Remembrance. Sometimes I just don’t feel like writing anything, but the problem is that if you stop writing then it can be a real challenge to start again. Writing (if you’re “a writer”) is like brushing your teeth, in that ideally it should be a daily activity. But I also don’t like writing that much; yet at the same time I can barely do anything else that would be considered “productive.” I work a service job. I pay my bills and my rent and my taxes like a “good American,” but I feel like I don’t create anything. I have this urge, or maybe this sense of obligation, to create something that is of any value, but I can’t do it. I hate myself and this country I am forced to live in. The environment is hostile, for creativity but also just for human decency. It’s like that Godspeed You! Black Emperor song: “We are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.” I hate being here, and yet I’m not sure where I could be that’s better. I hate that this is a culture that worships money and productivity. We must have infinite growth, even if the destination is oblivion.
Putting aside that I’m forced to live in this body, and in this third-rate backwater country called America, things are going well for me! Maybe that’s the problem: on a personal I’m doing well, for the most part, but I get the sense that this contentedness will not last, because the world around me is dying. My surroundings are transient. There will surely come a point where the workers of the world will have their revenge and the last politician is strangled with the entrails of the last capitalist; but I’m convinced that I will not live to see any of this happen. Not even the beginning of it. I will have made my way for the exit before this play called The Downfall of Capitalism will have even gotten to its prelude. The curtains will not have risen and we will not see the stage, let alone the actors. There is a future on the way, but something tells me I won’t take part in it.
…
This is getting to be a bit much.
What’s the holdup? After all, it’s a packed month, as far as my review schedule goes, and I’ve really been meaning to get to some of these works for a hot minute. I’m also taking advantage of the loophole I had made for myself and so I have a serial from Galaxy, on top of a novella. We’ve got one story from the 1920s, one from the 1940s, one from the 1950s, one from the 1960s, one from the 1970s, one from the 1980s, and one from the 2010s. This might be my most diverse roster yet, in terms of when the works were published. Well, let’s get to it.
For the serials:
A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, March to May-June 1971. Nebula winner for Best Novel. When Galaxy changed editors in 1969, readers at the time as well as historians are prone to say the change was a downgrade. One major plus, however, of Ejler Jakobsson taking over was that we got several Silverberg novels in the magazine as serials in rather quick succession. Despite the acclaim he was earning, A Time of Changes was the only Silverberg novel from this period to win a major award.
Under Pressure by Frank Herbert. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, November 1955 to January 1956. Also titled The Dragon in the Sea, this was Herbert’s first novel, after he had been in the field for a few years already with now-forgotten short fiction. Herbert’s legacy pretty much solely rests on his Dune series, to the point where it might surprise the reader to find any Herbert that isn’t Dune-related in the wild. I’ve heard from a friend or two that this is actually supposed to be one of Herbert’s best, but we’ll see about that.
For the novellas:
“The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky. From the Summer 2010 issue of Subterranean Online. Nebula winner for Best Novella. More controversially Swirsky also won a Nebula for her story “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” She was also the founding editor of PodCastle, which is crazy to me because she was like, 26? She’s written a good deal of short fiction and poetry over the years, plus one novel so far.
“A Tragedy of Errors” by Poul Anderson. From the February 1968 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been a minute since we last covered Anderson, made more conspicuous because he wrote a truly staggering amount of fiction. Of Anderson’s several series the most ambitious might be his Technic History, a centuries-spanning saga tracing the rise and fall of a galactic empire. “A Tragedy of Errors” takes place toward the end of this future history’s timeline.
For the short stories:
“The Storm King” by Joan D. Vinge. From the April 1980 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Not quite as well-known as her late ex-husband, Vernor, partly on account of the fact that she hasn’t written much over the past four decades, but Joan D. Vinge was one of the most promising new writers of the post-New Wave era. She’s more known for her SF, but “The Storm King” is fantasy.
“The Woman of the Wood” by A. Merritt. From the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales. In the ’20s and ’30s Merritt was one of the most popular pulp writers, even getting a magazine named after him. I was set to review one of Merritt’s novels a couple years ago, but I could not get far into it. Well, now it’s time to correct things a bit. Curiously Merritt didn’t write much short fiction.
For the complete novel:
The Sorcerer’s Ship by Hannes Bok. From the December 1942 issue of Unknown. Bok was known far more for his artwork than his fiction, which is understandable given that he was one of the most gifted and recognizable SFF artists of the ’40s and ’50s. You kinda know a certain magazine or book cover is a Bok work just from looking at it. That Bok died relatively young and in poverty, after having all but retired from illustrating, is tragic. Of course, we might not even know about Bok in the first place if not for Ray Bradbury acting as cheerleader for his early material. Bok was really one of the few mavericks of SFF from that era, being a semi-closeted gay man with some niche hobbies, who was also a perfectionist when it came to his art. The Sorcerer’s Ship was Bok’s debut novel and was published complete in Unknown, but would not see book publication until after his death.
Holger Carlsen is a Danish immigrant of unknown parentage studying engineering in America when World War II breaks out. Returning to his homeland, Holger joins the resistance movement and one night is trapped on a beach facing certain death from the Nazis when an explosion from somewhere sends him into a totally different land. He quickly comes across a horse saddled with equipment fit for a knight, including a shield with three hearts and three lions emblazoned on it. After an encounter with a conniving witch we are introduced to our other members of the party: Hugi, a jolly if brutish dwarf; and Alianora, a maiden who can turn into a swan at will. Holger has two main goals: to find a way to return home and to figure out who he is supposed to be, since clearly he is inhabiting someone else’s body. While his mindset is initially self-centered, Holger soon realizes he has been catapulted into a conflict much larger than himself, between the forces of Law and Chaos, between order and entropy.
Being an agnostic both in faith and in his allegiances at the outset, Holger is tempted by the forces of Chaos who see him as potentially useful—first by the whores of Duke Alfric and then by the sorceress Morgan le Fay, who claims she has the key to Holger’s past. To make matters more complicated, the line between Holger’s own memories and those of his alter ego start to blur. He remembers little bits and pieces of this other self, including a fluency in Latin and something about a sword named Cortana. He suspects that he has entered a parallel world where the mythical exploits of Charlemagne were real, yet there is another piece to the puzzle he has to acquire. If he can uncover his past then maybe he can help defeat the forces of Chaos—but doing so will take the help of a wizard.
Enhancing Image
Some notes:
While the romance between Holger and Alianora is still rather limp (Anderson was never the best at writing women), it does work on a thematic level since Alianora is supposed to be Morgan le Fay’s mirror image, or rather the other way around. You could choose between the chaste and dull but well-meaning girl or you could go with the bad bitch who will probably kill you if you turn her down. Personally I would have to sit down and think about it.
Speaking of which, I was reminded of Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time, which is in part about resisting fascism even as it takes on the form of a beautiful and feisty woman. The reality that a lot of liberals don’t wanna acknowledge is that fascism can sound tempting. How else can you explain millions of people falling for such a patently destructive ideology? Holger could rule the world with Morgan at his side or he could fight and possibly die on the side of good. Not quite as clean-cut as one would hope, but then this is a story about ultimately rejecting the dark side of human nature.
Harping on the women just a bit more, much is made of the fact that Holger, who while not ugly or a wimp was not a lady’s man back home, now has to dodge female affection like it’s bullets in The Matrix. Multiple women either fall for him or just wanna jump his bones over the course of the story. Obviously this is part of the power fantasy, but Anderson tries rationalizing it by saying that while Holger doessn’t know the man whose body he’s currently in, other people sure as hell recognize him, and this knight of the three hearts and three lions is undoubtedly a big deal in this world.
Aside from the contrivance of Holger suddenly becoming a chick magnet, much of the plot is driven by educated guesses that turn out to be correct. Holger theorizes that the world he’s been thrown into is an alternate Earth where magic is real and the legends of Charlemagne were true, and this theory turns out to be correct. The wizard Martinus later theorizes that Morgan had spirited Holger away to our Earth as an infant, and this also proves correct. What are the odds? Granted, these contrivances are not unusual for old-school high fantasy writing. At least Anderson tries to justify what he’s doing.
This is an early example of an RPG-style party in fantasy writing—not the first, because even The Hobbit precedes it by nearly two decades, but for American fantasy it was certainly prescient. Fantasy heroes before then were typically lone wolves, or in the case of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser a dynamic duo, but by the time we reach the back end of this story we have Holger, Hugi, Alianora, and the Muslim knight Carahue. Each member fills a certain niche in what should be a well-rounded party. Alianora would no doubt be a white mage.
Carahue himself is a pretty good depiction of a Muslim character, given the circumstances. Holger is suspicious of him at first, not because of his race or religion but because other characters had warned him that such a knight had been looking for the man whom Holger is posing as—for good or ill, nobody could say. Turns out Carahue is buddies with the guy Holger is acting as. We’re told, once Holger regains his memories as Holger Danske, a paladin who fought for Charlemagne, that Holger and Carahue had met in battle and gained each other’s respect. There’s a religious tolerance here that historically has been sorely lacking in the US, and even today there are far too many Christian/Jewish Americans who treat Muslims—at best—like children.
Those reading this story expecting some grand faceoff with Morgan and her army will be disappointed. The climactic battle is with a bunch of “cannibals” and “savages,” as part of the Wild Hunt. Hugi gets mortally wounded in the battle, sadly. What’s strange is that in most narratives this would serve as the end-of-second-act lowest point for our heroes before they get put to the test one last time; but no, this is the final action scene, at least in the serial version. Once Holger finds Cortana all his memories of his former life come back to him and next thing we know we’re in the epilogue. There is an epic final battle between Law and Chaos, but we don’t get to see it.
I remembered Holger converting to Catholicism once he gets returned home in the epilogue, but I did not remember a rather strange remark the narrator makes. The idea is that Holger is a Danish paladin who fought to bring balance to the world, and the narrator says something vague about real-world conflict. “It may be that we shall need Holger Danske again.” This is the late ’40s, mind you; the Cold War was just getting started. I have to assume Anderson is referring to the Cold War here, but I’m more wondering what role Holger could play in this conflict. Anderson was a liberal when he wrote the serial version, but by the time he expanded it into a novel he had turned conservative. That the last sentence is the same in both makes me wonder what Anderson could’ve meant at either time.
A Step Farther Out
Three Hearts and Three Lions was an outlier when it was first serialized in F&SF, and even for Anderson’s body of work it stands out from other fantasy stories of his I’ve read. I had read the novel version first, then went back to the serial, and while both have issues with pacing, I do think the serial version is more tightly woven. Anderson didn’t change shit around for the novel so much as he added stuff on, much of it not strictly necessary. There’s more of a sense of scale with the novel (we get something like an epic final battle, whereas the Wild Hunt is the serial’s climax), but there’s almost a more personal touch to the serial. Here it’s not so much about war between good and evil as it is about one man’s spiritual conflict, between redicovering his true self as a Christian warrior and giving into the temptations of Chaos. I would say it’s a Christian allegory, but the conflict is more text than subtext; it must’ve been strange but also captivating for a largely irreligious audience, though it no doubt appealed to the Catholic (if liberal-minded) Anthony Boucher. Religion being wedded to fantasy was not strictly new even in 1953, as C. S. Lewis had already started his Chronicles of Narnia, but Lewis also hated rationalism, whereas Anderson did not.
With a career spanning over half a century, and with his productivity almost always insanely high, tracking Poul Anderson’s career is sort of like tracking American genre SF in the latter half of the 20th century. Anderson could repeat himself, and not everything he wrote was good, but he was a remarkably versatile writer, being one of the few American writers of the mid-20th century to be about as comfortable writing both science fiction and fantasy, although he wrote sadly too little of the latter. His novels Brain Wave and The Broken Sword were published the same year and you’d probably not think they were written by the same hand. His popularity has waned since his death, as happens with most writers, partly I suspect because publishers (Baen Books and Open Road Media being the main culprits) do not give his best work the treatment they deserve. You’re unlikely to find Anderson in the wild outside of used bookshops.
Aside from The Broken Sword Anderson’s most well-known fantasy is Three Hearts and Three Lions, which was published as a book in 1961 but which ran first as a short serial in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas explicitly wanted to forego serials for F&SF, but as they explain in the introductory blurb for this serial, they could not fit all of Anderson’s story into one issue—probably more due to problems with scheduling than the raw length of the story. The serial version probably runs about 35,000 words and is thus a novella, hence the magazine version would get a Retro Hugo nomination in that category. The novel version is probably about 50,000 words and, having read both the serial and book versions before, I don’t remember anything revelatory being added. As far as I can tell the serial version has never been reprinted.
Placing Coordinates
It was serialized in the September and October 1953 issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The novel version has been printed many times over the years, and currently has ebook and paperback editions from Open Road Media—at least the latter of which I would avoid. Thankfully it’s not hard to find used copies of older editions at reasonable prices, including paperbacks from Baen (hmmm), Ace, and Berkley Medallion.
Enhancing Image
The narrator (who has a name I think but it doesn’t matter) reminisces about a college friend of his who was of a weird sort and to whom a very weird thing had happened. Holger Carlsen is an engineering student and a Dane, with an accent to boot. We’re told that Holger, if not for his foreignness, would be a stereotypical upstanding American boy; he studies hard, doesn’t mess around with girls, and is built like a brick shithouse (he’s an athlete on top of being a good student, how swell). There is one other odd thing about him aside from him being a Dane: he has no clue who his parents are. He had apparently been left on a doorstep in the town of Elsinore, “Hamlet’s old home, you know,” and adopted by the Carlsens. He’s been studying in the US, but once World War II starts and the Nazis occupy Denmark, Holger feels compelled to return to his homeland, foregoing military service and instead joining the Danish resistance movement. That’s right, we have an Antifa hero and we’re only a few pages in, very good start.
An operation goes amiss, however, and one fateful night Holger is trapped on a beach within spitting range of the enemy; but just when he’s about to face certain death he gets taken somewhere else—indeed somewhere completely different from anywhere he could recognize. He’s in clothes he doesn’t remember ever wearing and soon he finds a horse which looks like he had been riding it, with equipment to boot. The most striking of these new items is a shield with three hearts and three lions on it. “The shield was of the conventional heraldic form, about four feet long, and obviously new.” At first glance he thinks he has been transplanted into the past, maybe medieval Britain; certainly he’s no longer in Denmark. His meeting with a strange old woman at her cottage, Mother Gerd, confirms that like Dorothy and her dog he is no longer home. This is clearly not the past of Holger’s Earth because Gerd is able to conjure a demon (to tell Holger what the fuck he ought to do), only the first of many supernatural happenings.
I’m gonna be focusing more on characters and ideas Anderson puts forth since the plot is rather loosey-goosey, and anyway it’s the least interesting (for my money) aspect of the whole thing. Where to start? For one this might be the only time I’ve ever seen in literature (and I’ve read a fair amount) where a character is introduced with an accent, only for them to lose it. This was not done out of carelessness but for a reason I at first couldn’t figure out, and even then Anderson doesn’t explain why Holger loses his accent. The reason might actually be twofold: one is that there are a few characters we’ll meet who have thick accents, and having to deal with a protagonist having an accent on top of that might prove to be too much; and the second is that people talk differently in this new world, opting for pseudo-Elizabethan English. I have my own issues with this. Anderson can be stilted when it comes to dialogue on the best of days, and to his credit he puts more effort here into giving the impression of an alternate medieval world than one would expect from such a young writer, but that also means I sometimes have to reread lines of dialogue.
Speaking of nigh impenetrable accents, we’re soon introduced to Hugi, a jolly and often drunken dwarf who is to serve as Holger’s guide/sidekick in this brave new world. I would probably like Hugi more if not for the fact that his dialogue comes off like trying to read someone’s chicken scratch through beer goggles. And to complete the trifecta of Our Heroes™ we’re met with the obligatory love interest, Alianora, a “swan-may” who can transform between human and swan form at will and is a fetching girl of all of about eighteen years (Holger is ssomewhere in his early 20s so it’s fine). As far as classic high fantasy tropes go we’re ticking off some boxes: we’ve got the muscular hero, the affable dwarf sidekick, the old witch who talks in Expositionese, the boring good girl whom the muscular hero is to win in record time, and so on. Of course these were not tired tropes in 1953, and indeed this was a year before The Lord of the Rings. Robert E. Howard was long dead, Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series was sort of in limbo, Weird Tales was about to shut down (not for the last time), and while there were a few fantasy magazines active then, none of them were keen on printing heroic fantasy, which makes the publication of Three Hearts and Three Lions in F&SF all the more remarkable.
If people reading Three Hearts and Three Lions nowadays were to find it vanilla and even a bit preachy (this is an overtly Christian narrative, as I’ll explain), it’s partly because of circumstances outside the story’s control. Take for example the fact that the sides in the battle here is not exactly between good and evil, but Law and Chaos. As far as I can tell this is the first example in fantasy writing of such a dynamic and it’ll sound weirdly familiar to fans of Dungeons & Dragons—indeed even people who do not play TTRPGs. What was a novel concept then is now pretty standard. Take, for instance, this explanation of the battle between Law and Chaos:
Humans, except for occasional witches and such-like, were, consciously or unconsciously, on the side of Law; the Middle World, which seemed to include such realms as Faerie, Trollheim, and the Giants, was with Chaos—was, indeed, a creation thereof. Wars among men, like that now being waged between the Saracens and the Holy Empire, were due to Chaos; under Law, all men would live in peace and order, but this was so alien to the Middle Worlders that they were forever working and scheming to prevent it and to extend their own shadowy dominion.
There is one wrench thrown into all this which will throw off most modern readers, and it’s that those on the side of Law believe in the Abrahamic God. Christianity is placed front and center here, but we’re also told practicing Muslims fight on the side of Law, which is… inclusive? Certainly it’s a bit of a head-scratcher for a secular reader like myself. Anderson’s religion (I’m pretty sure he’s a Christian) doesn’t usually pop up in his writing, and indeed many of his characters are professed non-believers; in that sense he’s pretty open-minded for someone of his time and place, in that he thinks non-believers are just as capable of heroism and introspection as their Christian brethren—a mindset I find to be too rare still. Holger himself says he’s an agnostic, which turns out to matter as he does not exactly start off on the side of Law… but I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Another thing that modern readers and fans of anime (the weeaboo scum) will find familiar is the idea of normal Earth person getting spirited away to a secondary fantasy realm. In the wretched and uncultured anime world we call this plot an “isekai,” meaning “another world.” This was actually not a new idea even when Anderson was writing it, but had gone out of fashion by the time of Three Hearts and Three Lions, having not seen serious use since the days of Unknown. Speaking of which, Anderson very deliberately wrote his story such that it could’ve been printed in Unknown had it survived into the ’50s, and more specifically he seems to be taking after L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s Harold Shea stories. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. What’s impressive about Anderson’s story is that he is trying to combine “rationalist” fantasy (like the Harold Shea stories) with a Christian-inflected heroic fantasy narrative. Boucher and McComas call this story “science-fantasy” in their introduction, but in my opinion it’s straight fantasy—albeit with a scientist’s need for reasoning. What Anderson is doing here is pretty ambitious: he’s attempting to marry reasoning with faith, two things that most would say are mutually exclusive.
Does Anderson succeed? I would say basically yes, but at the very least it’s a neat experiment, if also tempered (or anchored, depending on how you look at it) by a straightrfoward fantasy adventure plot. We can talk about the scientific basis for the new world Holger finds himself in, or the Christian symbolism of his being caught in the conflict between Law and Chaos, but this is ultimately still about action and a certain “wow” factor. It works because Anderson, for all his faults with writing characters (including some passive misogyny, as for example all the women in this story being either Madonnas, whores, or too decrepit to be desirable), takes great joy in realizing settings and coming up with ways to put these settings to use. This is, after all, still the guy who wrote the hard-as-nails SF thriller We Have Fed Our Sea (aka The Enemy Stars). And despite its God-fearing demeanor and adherence to the rulebook of genre narrative, this is a youthful and spritely tale, full of what we in the biz call a sense of wonder. Anderson would take a more sprawling and melancholy direction with The Broken Sword, but here he has different goals in mind.
There Be Spoilers Here
I’m gonna hold my tongue and wait to discuss this more in my review of the second installment. All I’ll say right now is that if given the choice between Alianora and Morgan le Fey, I would turn evil and choose the latter in an instant, fate of the world be damned. Imagine turning down a bad bitch like that. Not sure why writers always give the villainess more personality than the “good girl” we’re supposed to side with.
A Step Farther Out
Anderson, who mind you would’ve been all of 25 when he wrote Three Hearts and Three Lions, had ambitions for his short novel that were twofold: he wanted to write a heroic fantasy narrative at a time when that subspecies of fantasy writing had gone nigh extinct (at least in the US), and he wanted to write a “rational” fantasy in the Unknown mode. There is, of course, a third goal here, which was to write fantasy inspired by his Danish heritage. He must’ve been in a certain mood circa 1953, because he wrote his two major fantasies—this and The Broken Sword—in close succession, with the latter being decidedly more melancholy. Maybe it was a kind of homesickness. Anderson was born in the US but was the son of Danish immigrants, and he did live in Denmark for a short time in his childhood. Three Hearts and Three Lions is more of a straight power fantasy and given to old-school heroic fantasy tropes than The Broken Sword (although the power fantasy aspect is tempered by the ending, more on that when we get to it), but it’s still a rip-roaring good time with quite a few novel ideas.
(Cover by Michael Carroll. Asimov’s, December 2007.)
Christmas is coming up, and my birthday before that. Not incidentally we have a birthday among the authors covered, namely Connie Willis, whose birthday is the 31st. Willis is also very fond of Christmas stories so there’s that. Last December we did a month-long tribute to Fritz Leiber, who sadly will not be featured this time. (Don’t feel too bad, he’s already one of our most frequent “visitors.”) Since we’re closing out the first full year of this site, I figure it’s time to introduce one more major change (not permanent, don’t worry), not for this month but for January. December will be the last month probably until 2025 that I’ll be doing serial reviews; for 2024 I’ll be taking a break from serials and focusing on short stories and novellas, although I’ll still squeeze a few complete novels into the schedule.
The way it’ll work is, the days I would be reviewing sserial installments will instead be relegated to short stories, but otherwise the alternating slot method will not change, only starting in January you can expect to see two short stories for every novella. The space given to complete novels will remain the same: if a novella slot were to fall on the 31st of the month then I’ll at least try to tackle a complete novel. Why no serials for a year? For a few reasons. For one, I’m tired, and also I’ve come to find that my serial reviews are the least popular of my reviews, or rather they get the least feedback. Also, I’m a devotee of the short story at heart, and the reality is that there are way more short stories in the magazine market than serials, by at least a factor of ten; so for one year I think short stories deserve more of the glory. We do, of course, get two short serials to tackle before the hiatus, both of which are actually rereads for me.
There is one other thing I have in mind, a rather special thing, but you’ll have to wait until January to hear about it. It’s a secret. :3
For the serial:
Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson. Serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September to October 1953. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novella. This is the first serial I’ll be covering where I’ve not only read the book version but also the serial version, so this is sort of my third go-around with it. It’s worth it, though; this is one of the more influential works in the history of American fantasy, having partly inspired Dungeons & Dragons. It also makes me wish Anderson wrote more fantasy.
Beyond the Black River by Robert E. Howard. Serialized in Weird Tales, May to June 1935. Despite committing suicide at the age of thirty, Howard wrote a truly staggering amount of fiction and created several series in the process, with his most famous creation being Conan the Cimmerian. Howard did not invent sword-and-sorcery fantasy but he had unquestionably the most influence on proceeding American fantasists. This right here was one of the first Conan stories I had read, and it still reads as one of the more unusual.
For the novellas:
“Pursuit” by Lester del Rey. From the May 1952 issue of Space Science Fiction. Del Rey started out as a sentimentalist at a time when genre SF was markedly unsentimental, filling a niche that had gone untapped such that early stories like “Helen O’Loy” and “The Day Is Done” were very popular. He would move away from that style, and in the ’50s he even edited several (very short-lived) SFF magazines, Space Science Fiction being one. Thus the first story in the first issue of this magazine is by del Rey’s favorite writer: himself.
“All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis. From the December 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Hugo winner for Best Novella. In the ’90s and 2000s Connie Willis could lay claim to being the most popular writer to appear regularly in Asimov’s, and that’s on top of her novels, a few of which are certified classics. Her novel Doomsday Book especially is excellent, although it does not indicate her penchant for humor. She holds the record for most Hugo wins for Best Novella, with “All Seated on the Ground” being her fourth.
For the short stories:
“The Keys to December” by Roger Zelazny. From the August 1966 issue of New Worlds. Zelazny looks like he might see a much deserved renaissance soon, with a TV adaptation of his Amber serie being in the works. This is good news, because for a couple decades Zelazny has been threatened with the dark cloud of obscurity, despite being one of the most acclaimed SFF writers to come out of the ’60s. I picked “The Keys to December” because, well, look at the title.
“Genesis” by H. Beam Piper. From the September 1951 issue of Future Science Fiction. Piper is surely one of the most tragic figures in old-timey SF, having started his writing career very late (he was in his forties) and committing suicide at the age of sixty, believing himself to be a failure, such that despite not dying young his career was short-lived. It’s a shame, because Piper was in some ways an unusual writer for the time; he was a bit of a character, one could say.
For the complete novel:
Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp. From the December 1939 issue of Unknown. From 1937 to 1942 (he took a break to support the war effort), de Camp was one of the designated court jesters in John W. Campbell’s Astounding, and perhaps more importantly in Unknown. It was here that de Camp got to show off his range as a fantasist (most famously in his collaborations with Fletcher Pratt), although ironically his two longest solo efforts in Unknown in its first year, Divide and Rule and Lest Darkness Fall, are science fiction, not fantasy. Lest Darkness Fall was de Camp’s solo debut novel, an early example of a modern person being sent back to an ancient time period, and according to a lot of people it’s also his best. It was expanded (although I can’t imagine by much, since the magazine version looks to be a solid 50,000 words) for book publication in 1941.
You may think it a weak move for me to have my last two serial reviews before the hiatus be of ones I’ve already read, but as I’ve said before and always hope to make clear, rereading is arguably more important than reading in the first place. So it goes.
Poul Anderson is a semi-obscure name in the field nowadays, which is weird because there was a time when, evidently, he was considered a big fucking deal. From his genre debut in 1947 to his death in 2001, Anderson was one of the real vanguards of 20th century American SF, though unlike contemporaries like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein he showed himself to be about as proficient writing fantasy as SF. He was also alarmingly prolific, writing non-stop for a good half-century, and as such he doesn’t already hit it out of the park, as it were; the good news is that if you don’t like one Anderson story, there’s at least another that will appeal to you. One possible (read: probable) reason why Anderson’s stature has faded somewhat since his death is that not only did he write a lot, but he also wrote several vast continuities, none of which seemed to be published in internal chronological order. A seemingly standalone short story can turn out to be part of an overarching cycle that Anderson worked on for decades, and the result is that to this day it’s hard to organize his work.
Anderson won seven Hugos and three Nebulas, and he was made an SFWA Grand Master in 1998. His fantasy novels The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions are intriguing and often thrilling examples of “modern” fantasy which were written parallel to The Lord of the Rings. Despite their politics being very much different, Michael Moorcock was apparently inspired by Anderson’s fantasy. The subject of today’s review, We Have Fed Our Sea, however, is decidedly hard SF, and was the first work of Anderson’s to garner a Hugo nomination.
Placing Coordinates
Part 2 was published in the September 1958 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Despite the Hugo nomination and despite being well-liked by Anderson fans, time has not been very kind to We Have Fed Our Sea—by that I mean that this shit has not been in paperback since the ’80s. Oh sure, you could snag a copy, under its book title The Enemy Stars, as an ebook, but 1) it’s an ebook, and 2) it’s published by Open Road Media, the coal in the stockings of naughty children on Christmas morning. Unlike some other Anderson titles, The Enemy Stars doesn’t even have paperback edition from Open Road Media, which may well be for the best, since their paperbacks tend to be depressingly mediocre. Still, I imagine it’s not hard at all to find used copies of The Enemy Stars on eBay for such low prices that the shipping might cost more than the book itself.
Enhancing Image
At the beginning of Part 2, our four crewmen of the Southern Cross have found themselves in quite the pickle. For one, the ship’s ion drive is damaged such that they won’t be able to get into a stable orbit around the black star, and another is that the mattercaster’s web is also damaged enough to be unusable; the second problem is the big one, because if they can’t mattercast then there’s no way of getting back to civilization. The nearest human outpost is tens of lightyears away and the Southern Cross can only travel at a fraction of the speed of light. No FTL ships here! I said this jokingly in my review of Part 1, but I do have to wonder if mattercasting influenced how teleportation works in Star Trek. We even get the “Do we die when we’re teleported?” meme. In the case of We Have Fed Our Sea the answer is actually YES, believe it or not: the main characters are technically clones—not that being clones matters much to them.
The ion drive can be repaired with onboard tools, but the mattercaster will be a tougher nut to crack. The mattercaster web requires a specific metal, germanium, which is not on the ship, but the good news is that the Southern Cross has basic mining equipment and the crew will be able to extract enough germanium from a nearby smoldered planet (a dead planet near a dead sun) to repair the web; the bad news is that they would have to land on said planet, and the Southern Cross was not built to land directly on anything. Some improvisation will be required. Chang Sverdlov, would-be revolutionary and the ship’s engineer, will have to head out into the vacuum of space and see what the deal is, and Seiichi Nakamura, the pilot, will have to maneuver around the black star and find some way to land on a planet containing the germanium they need.
I like how Sverdlov’s rebellious attitude toward the Protectorate comes to nothing, both because of the existential situation the men find themselves in and also because of what happens to Sverdlov.
What starts as a four-man group becomes a dwindling party, and Sverdlov is the first to bite the big bazooka; this happens early enough in Part 2 that I don’t consider it much of a spoiler, at least if you’ve made it this far. Sverdlov suffers a freak accident during his inspection of the ship and dies in the vacuum of space, alone, with only the voices of his fellows as his last connection to humanity. “He stood with ten thousand bitter suns around him; but none were Sol or Tau Ceti. O Polaris, death’s lodestar, are we as little as all that?” The bright side is that Sverdlov’s death is not meaningless, since it’s through his efforts that the other crewmen are able to correct the ship’s trajectory. Sverdlov has the misfortune of being the least developed of the four crewmen, but the arc of his development and his fate are fine encapsulations of the book’s main theme: the insignificance of man when compared to the vast indifference of space.
So, that leaves three men. And it does not take merely a day or two to find the planet for the job, but weeks. Without an endless supply of provisions and without backup. Fortunately for Our Heroes™, water can be recycled on the ship, but unfortunnately food cannot; it’s pointed out, rather morbidly, that at the rate it’s taking to find the planet to mine the geranium, everyone would’ve starved to death had Sverdlov not died first. In this context the individual’s life means next to nothing, and even the collective is overwhelmed by an endless natural world which does give a single shit about human endeavor.
Something you have to understand about Anderson is that, as a rule of thumb, he’s more interested in things that aren’t human than things that are; We Have Fed Our Sea is a human drama, but it would not exist if not for everything surrounding the humans. None of the four crewmen is developed that much outside of the role he plays in relation to The Big Picture™, that being the grand conflict between mankind and space. Take Terangi Maclaren, for instance, who takes on a more active role in Part 2: last we checked he had started to turn toward the solemn and self-loathing, and by now he has become thoroughly emo. But why? What do we know about Maclaren? Mostly that he is, by his own admission, a playboy astrophysicist who has up to this point not taken life very seriously, and now that he’s in a life-or-death situation he’s not taking shit very well. We know very little about Maclaren’s personal relationships, or his philosophy on life, but we do see how his ego crumbles at the prospect of dying next to a black star and lightyears from home.
If you’re into hard SF then you’ve probably been here before, and you’re also very much into this sort of thing. The ’50s was arguably the first big decade for hard SF, with Anderson as one of its biggest practicioners, but since this is a facts-and-figures kind of story and since it’s from that period, there are a couple things to consider: the first is that there is ONE female character worth anything, and we’ll get to her in a minute. Another thing is that I have to be honest here and admit that after reading the whole serial, I did read the synopsis on Wikipedia to make sure I got the details sort out, because there’s stuff that I just did not understand on an initial read. It probably doesn’t help also that the science is dated, though it’s not that obvious. Apparently Anderson went back and revised the text slightly for later book versions since the serial and the initial book publication came out prior to the “discovery” of tachyon particles, which given the nature of mattercasting is definitely something you’d be justified in including.
What I’m saying is that I may be too stupid to get everything that Anderson is talking about here, although something that did not escape my notice is the social and political aspects of the story, which surprisingly are very much there, despite the fight for suvival at the core of it. While Anderson was almost certainly turning conservative at this point in his career, he does some things with We Have Fed Our Sea that have aged better than one would expect, and he also gives us an ending that, while it does threaten to venture beyond the realm of plausibility, I think is thematically appropriate and even a little unexpected in a good way.
There Be Spoilers Here
After Sverdlov’s death we suddenly jump to a very different scene. Remember that David Ryerson was recently married? His wife Tamara is stuck with Magnus, David’s old man, now her father-in-law, with Magnus being convinced that David is dead (it’s been months at this point since anyone has heard from the crew) while Tamara is still hoping. Oh, and she’s pregnant with David’s kid, naturally. Normally I don’t like it when anything, let alone hard SF, veers toward melodrama, but I actually think this novel could’ve used some flesh-and-blood conflict even if it was somewhat cliched and overwrought. Anyway, Tamara is the only female character here who matters at all, and while she is a satellite character (she does not exist outside of her relationships with the men in her life), she’s at least given more attitude than the average Anderson woman.
It’s also during this scene that I realized Anderson’s playing with race was very much intentional. Three of the four crewmen are at least implied to be POC, and even David, the resident white boy, is part of an interracial marriage. Tamara is said to be Malay, and apparently learning English is akin to learning Latin, or some other language that would now only be used in rituals. Magnus is a proud white man, maybe not a racist but certainly a bit of a jingoist—one who, perhaps unsurprisingly, is into Rudyard Kipling. The novel’s magazine title is taken from a Kipling poem titled “The Song of the Dead” (not the last time Anderson gets on his Kipling shit), and not only does it sound better than the book title (even if The Enemy Stars is more direct), but it feeds more into the conflict between the unstoppable force of humanity and the immovable object that is space. Magnus even quotes part of the poem at the end of the novel, which I’ll also quote here:
“We have fed our sea for a thousand years And she calls us, still unfed, Though there’s never a wave of all her waves But marks our English dead: We have strawed our best to the weed’s unrest, To the shark and the sheering gull, If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord God, we ha’ paid it in full!—”
Magnus is shown to be stuck in his ways, but at least he has the decency to like Kipling, and at least it’s implied he will treat Tamara better after the story’s end.
And indeed death becomes a bigger element as the novel reaches its climax. Nakamura, who in Part 1 was my favorite character, gets killed midway through Part 2 in trying to land the Southern Cross on the planet where the survivors can get their germanium; it was almost more of a crash than a real landing. Nakamura’s death is perhaps the most tragic of the bunch, but I have a mild qualm with how it’s written—specifically that it’s not told from Nakamura’s perspective in his final moments, but Maclaren recounting what happened after the fact. Nakamura’s sado-masochistic obsession with space reaches its conclusion here, and it’s a shame we don’t get a line to his thoughts about it in his final moments. Maclaren speculates that Nakamura had intentionally sacrificed himself since rations were running low and, hell, the Southern Cross no longer needed to be airborne, since there was no way to return it to civilization. “Or perhaps, simply, he found his dark bride.” We never find out, but that doesn’t matter anymore; the only goal now is stay alive long enough to fix the mattercaster.
At this point I’m not sure what I ought to say about the final twist—not Ryerson and Maclaren repairing the mattercaster, that’s not a twist. No, I’m talking about what happens when they find a resonance (i.e., somewhere they can teleport to) and they have no clue where it is or what could be on the other side. I’ve read a couple reviews of this novel and nobody that I’ve read has brought up the final twist, even when discussing spoilers, which is a little… conspicuous. Because the twist is really something, for better or worse; I’m not totally sure if it’s plausible, but it does reinforce the notion that space is fucking massive, and that we have not touched even 99.5% of it. I’ll also say that it’s not a deus ex machina—at least not entirely. You’ll have to read and form your own take on it, because I guess I’ll just continue the pseudo-tradition and refrain from talking about the final twist specifically.
A Step Farther Out
We Have Fed Our Sea is a bit unusual among the Anderson works I’ve read, in how simultaneously claustrophobic and epic it is; the epicness is rather characteristic of Anderson—the claustrophobia is not. Instead of exploring an alien culture, or in the case of his fantasy stories returning to Nordic mythology, we have a character-focused drama which especially leans into the “drama” part in its latter half. Not that the characters are the most nuanced ever, but they do play their roles well, and ultimately they feed into a much larger drama about the human race and its place among the stars. It’s not as romantic about space travel as what you’d see with a lot of hard SF—hell, it’s not as romantic as some of Anderson’s own later takes on the subject. Yet it’s a cautiously optimistic story, and while there were some parts that confused me (due to technobabble and not any “literary” difficulty), I feel like this is just the kind of novel to grow fonder in my memory. As of right now I’d say it’s B-tier Anderson: not his best but it’s pretty far from his worst.
I’m not totally sure what keeps bringing me back to Anderson. Rarely do I love his work, but I often find him compulsively readable. Hell, I had just finished rereading Brain Wave a couple weeks ago, right before starting We Have Fed Our Sea, and normally I don’t read two novels by the same author in such quick succession. Maybe it’s because at his best Anderson excels at certain things other SF authors don’t, namely his talent for world-building (both literally and in terms of writing lore), and also, like Kipling, he’s a conservative writer whose faults and virtues, the very things that make him tick, make him a chronicler of empire—only with Anderson it’s the American empire. And of course, I have to admit, Anderson can write a pretty entertaining yarn when he chooses.
(Cover by H. R. Van Dongen. Astounding, August 1958.)
Who Goes There?
A big deal within the field from the ’50s until his death in 2001, Poul Anderson was a giant whose star power has lessened somewhat in recent years. You can easily find Anderson books (a seemingly endless supply of them) in used bookstores, but much of his work is currently out of print. This is all a little mystifying. Anderson has his quirks, but his range and productivity are impeccable, being one of those authors who, while he did write a lot more science fiction than fantasy, was comfortable with both. There is an Anderson book or series for every season; if you don’t like, say, the Nicholas van Rijin stories, then you might like the Time Patrol series. If you told me that Brain Wave and The Broken Sword, novels which came out the same year, were written by THE SAME GUY, I would shit myself. Curiosly, while he wrote many novels, many of which are acclaimed (I really like The High Crusade and Tau Zero myself), all of Anderson’s seven Hugos and three Nebulas belong to his short fiction.
We Have Fed Our Sea will strike a few people as familiar under its book title, The Enemy Stars. I picked this up for review because a) I’d been meaning to read it, and b) from what I could tell it sounded like a fitting counterpart to our previous serial, Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To…, both literarily and philosophically. Not only is Anderson a generation older than Russ, but he’s also… well, a lot more conservative. Whereas Russ’s novel has an implicit but persistent layer of feminism in its thematic makeup, Anderson’s novel is much more typical of the hard-headed facts-and-figures SF that would’ve made the rounds in Astounding and later Analog.
Placing Coordinates
Part 1 was published in the August 1958 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Anderson’s estate has been stingy about looking the other way for online reprints, so when seeing if an Anderson story has been archived it’s a real flip of the coin. I have to assume that something nefarious is going on since Anderson wrote a lot and a lot of it is out of print, and his estate isn’t keen on letting people actually discover his work without bending over backwards. Anyway, it looks like The Enemy Stars has not been in paperback since the ’80s; it has an ebook edition from Open Road Media, but Open Road Media is dogshit and I wouldn’t recommend giving them money unless you really have to. A reprint of particular interest would have to be The Best of Astounding: Classic Short Novels from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, edited by James E. Gunn (not to be confused with the other James Gunn), which collects The Enemy Stars along with a few other novels and novellas.
Enhancing Image
The opening passage of We Have Fed Our Sea is also perhaps the most memorable in Part 1, which is really unfair, because Anderson sets a standard for himself that he proceeds to not meet again; to be fair to him, that standard is pretty high. The launching and flight of the Southern Cross, the farthest traveling spaceship in human history, is described in almost Biblical terms, and Anderson wants us to know two things right away: that the universe is unfathonably big, and that the Southern Cross is nothing short of ancient. With this ship we’re not talking years but centuries, and while my gut reaction is to think that a spaceship would become outdated long before then, rendering the Southern Cross a metal coffin, this is a ship that seems specifically designed to be able to go the distance. Even so, its placement as a sort of generation ship where many people have died and even been killed gives the Southern Cross a slight haunted house vibe.
The effect is grand, yet ominous. Or maybe the other way around.
Get this:
After ten generations, the Southern Cross was not quite halfway to her own goal, though she was the farthest from Earth of any human work. She was showing a little wear, here a scratch, there a patch, and not all the graffiti of bored and lonely men rubbed out by their successors. But those fields and particles which served her for eye, brain, nerve still swept heaven; each man at the end of his watch took a box of microplates with him as he made the hundred light-year stride to Earth’s Moon. Much of this was lost, or gathered dust, in the century when Earthmen were busy surviving. But there came a time when a patient electrically seeing machine ran through many such plates from many ships. And so it condemned certain people to death.
The Southern Cross is on a voyage to rendezvous with a black star, what Part 1’s blurb calls a “burned-out supernova,” a thing blacker than space itself and which is possibly as old as the universe. The black star is the novel’s Big Dumb Object, although unlike most Big Dumb Objects it’s not an alien construction (as far as we know) but something completely natural. It’s just that the black hole is massive and, like the ship studying it, so old as to be practically ageless. Anderson is hunting big game with regards to visuals and a sense of wonder with this one, and he puts his best foot forward here. If the spectacle is spoiled by anything it’s the inevitability of human characters.
Speaking of which…
Before I started reading We Have Fed Our Sea I suspected that we would basically start on the ship with our principal characters already gathered together, and if not then there would be minimum setup. To my surprise, though, a good chunk of Part 1 is dedicated to seeing our main characters in their natural habitat before they get teleported aboard the ghost ship. I say “teleport” because teleporting is a central factor in the novel’s world; it’s called mattercasting, and it very well anticipates beaming individuals as seen in Star Trek. With modern technology teleporting Our Heroes™ onto the Southern Cross, despite it being light-years away from the closest human colony, is not a big deal, but teleporting off the ship may prove a problem.
Now for the players: We have Terangi Maclaren, a brilliant but lazy playboy scientist who signs up for the expedition as a way to prove his continuing worth in his field; David Ryerson, a dilligent and recently married young man who joins to appease his Christmongering father who happens to hold a death grip on his allowance; Seiichi Nakamura, a melancholy martial artist and devout Buddhist who joins because he wants to get away from the suffocating colony planet where he lives; and Chang Sverdlov, a would-be revolutionary who’s not very good at hiding the fact that he hates Earthlings and wants colonial independence.
Be aware that while Anderson’s novel is big on wonder, it’s not so big on women. There are two women in Part 1, one of whom I don’t even think is named, with both being satellites to two of our main characters. Ryerson’s wife exists to see him off and hope he comes back in one piece. At least the women are simply guided offstage quietly and aren’t stuffed in a fridge. Sexism is a bit of a problem with Anderson; he fairs a good deal better with regards to race. Unless I’m mistaken, Ryerson is the only white man in the crew, with the others being at least implied to be POC. There is a bit of a caviat with Nakamura, since he is, let’s face it, somewhat stereotyped: as said before, he’s into martial arts, he’s fixated on honorable behavior, and he’s the most timid of the crewmen. Yet Nakamura’s speech is not caricatured, he’s allowed to talk and act like a normal person, and as I’ll explain in the spoilers section, he’s arguably the most human of the bunch.
This is not to say that these introductory scenes with each of the characters gives us Henry James levels of psychological depth; the men are meant to fill roles, rather than act as individuals with inner lives. With maybe an exception or two every inner monologue anyone has has to do with either the plot or the worldbuilding, which is not necessarily a bad thing since worldbuilding is where We Have Fed Our Sea excels the most—not just the literal worldbuilding of the black star but a galaxy-spanning mankind. Since the days when Southern Cross flew into the depths of space, mankind has conquered quite a few colony worlds, united under the Protectorate (totally not the Federation from Star Trek), with Earth at the center. At it turns out, though, not everyone is happy to be living in a hostile environment, all while being farmed for resources by the heart of the Protectorate, hence the existence of rebels like Sverdlov.
Just going off of what has happened in the novel, I’m not sure where Anderson stands on the relationship Earth has with the colonies, which he depicts as being at least somewhat parasitic, while at the same time painting people like Sverdlov in a villainous light—not that this novel has (at least so far) an outright human villain. Anderson’s worldview changed considerably during the ’50s; he went from being a liberal who staunchly supported the UN to a hawkish Goldwater-era libertarian type. Actually, if anything, the reference to Rudyard Kipling with its magazine title (which, in my opinion, is easily superior to the oddly pulpier book title) suggests that by this point Anderson had become a Kiplingesque conservative. I wouldn’t be surprised, then, if he turns out to sympathize with the colonists while also thinking the Protectorate to be a necessary evil, if not benign.
There are a few questions Anderson doesn’t answer, such as: Where are all the robots? What about androids? If you have teleportation then surely you would have androids equal to if not better than humans. Why send such a small crew to the Southern Cross? What about backup? I suspect, however, that the government would see it as more costly to risk sending highly advanced robots on what almost amounts to a suicide mission than a bunch of ultimately expendable meat sacks. This is also very much an old-fashioned space adventure in the sense that there’s a surprising lack of computer technology onboard, what with stuff like the microchip not having been invented in the real world yet; but then this is also justifable given how fucking old the ship is. A few scratches and patches will prove to be the least of the crew’s problems.
There Be Spoilers Here
Like I said, Nakamura strikes me as the most human of the crew, which does lead to me feeling conflicted about him. On the one hand, making Nakamura Japanese was very much deliberate; it’s not like Anderson picked his race out of a hat. Nakamura’s backstory is a pretty tragic one: his family was killed in a natural dissaster, and this was after he had already been transplanted as a child, having moved from Japan to a colony world. Undoubtedly there’s meant to be an evocation of Japanese wartime trauma, reminding me specifically of the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945, though Anderson was probably thinking of Hiroshima. Of the four cremen, Nakamura’s backstory is easily the most death-haunted, and his fascination with space is made more peculiar by his fear of it.
I have to admit that Anderson’s novel subverted a few of my exepectations. Aside from the racially diverse cast I was surprised by the stance it took on space exploration, which is nowhere near as blindingly optimistic as I had assumed, especially given other Anderson works I’ve read. Joanna Russ’s novel We Who Are About To… is obviously a deconstruction of narratives in which mankind should and does seek out the corners of space, overcoming every obstacle, but Anderson’s novel is actually not too far removed from that viewpoint. While not as pessimistic as Russ’s novel, We Have Fed Our Sea, regardless of its title, alludes to the vastness and grand indifference of space which in practice comes off as malevolence; these are not the friendly stars, or the neutral stars, but the enemy stars. The cold dead star around which the Southern Cross orbits is an almost Lovecraftian presence, like Moby Dick, a great titan of nature which rejects human understanding. Yet like Moby Dick, there is a godlike magnetism with the dark star, and the same thing applies to space itself. In Moby Dick, Ishmael tells us he joins a ship and heads out to sea whenever a particular terrible bout of melancholy hits him, and Nakamura’s situation is not so different.
Metaphysical elements are not unknown to Anderson; he strikes me as a Christian, albeit a highly pragnatic one. Indeed the religiosity of his fantasy novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, which is topped with the protagonist even converting to Catholicism at the end (it’s not as preachy as it sounds), suggests a recurring conflict for any great religious writer: the conflict between science and God. Not science and organized religion, mind you, but science and the idea of a grand designer—an otherworldly force whose intentions are mysterious. As the crewmen find themselves in a precarious position at the end of Part 1, between technical issues and wanting to tear each other to pieces despite needing each other, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say their conflict is both physical and metaphysical.
A Step Farther Out
I suppose I was expecting a metaphysical angle, but I was not also expecting the political angle. It’s hard to tell with Anderson because depending on when a given story was written he can be pretty subtle or pretty cane-waving about it. The Protectorate and the colonies are not on the best of terms, and I’m not sure which side Anderson sympathizes with more, though I can chock that up to the characters all being sympathetic enough, or rather none of them is totally evil. Maclaren is a bit of an asshole, and Sverdlov is treacherous, but their viewpoints are not inexplicable; from the colonists’ view the “Earthlings” are callous and exploitative, while from the Earthlings’ view the colonists are ungrateful and reckless when it comes to the sheer vastness of the universe. Even with ‘casting, the universe is unfathomably huge, and my mind keeps going back to that introductory section with the Southern Cross and how it instantly conveys a foreboding sense of scale. The technobabble can be a bit much (I don’t understand half of it, and I suspect Anderson does it partly to distract less discerning readers), but this is looking to be enjoyable hard SF yarn.
Now we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming! Only not quite, but I’ll save that for the end. We’ve come back to our novella and serial reviews, which I’m thankful for; as fitting as it is to focus only on short stories and novelettes for a month of horror, I found it weirdly draining to review all those short stories back to back. With serials and novellas we’ll have more variety, never mind the lack of a horror theme.
I must’ve gone back and forth on this schedule too many times to count, frankly. The thing is that I like having a schedule for my reviews, as I think it allows me to plan some silly stuff in advance, like the fact that I’ll be tackling Joanna Russ and Poul Anderson stories back-to-back (for those of you who don’t know, I recommend looking up a certain exchange those two reportedly had), not to mention stuff like last month’s review slate. But I’m not here to waste your time, let’s get to the meat of the matter!
For the serials:
We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ. Published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January to February 1976. Russ was a divisive figure in the field and We Who Are About To… in particular was not received well. Even so, it has its defenders, perhaps the biggest of them being Samuel R. Delany (who I always trust), and it also received a glowing review from Joachim Boaz over on his site. I have to admit my experiences with Russ have not been great up to this point, having found her Hugo-winning novella “Souls” underwhelming, but this could be a change of pace!
We Have Fed Our Sea by Poul Anderson. Published in Astounding Science Fiction, August to September 1958. It was nominated for the Hugo for Best Novel, and was published in book form as The Enemy Stars. Anderson was apparently a beloved figure when he was alive, but since his death his star power has faded somewhat, perhaps due to the scattered vairety of his fiction. He was a reliable and insanely prolific writer, and I often like (but rarely love) his work. We Have Fed Our Sea was one of THREE Anderson serials running in Astounding in 1958.
For the novellas:
“Another Orphan” by John Kessel. Published in the September 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Kessel can be thought of as adjacent to the cyberpunk movement of the ’80s, though it would be a mistake to consider Kessel himself one of the cyberpunks. Renowned for both his fiction and genre criticism, he’s also edited several anthologies, often in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly. “Another Orphan,” which won the Nebula for Best Novella, is apparently a riff on a classic work of American fiction…
“The Kragen” by Jack Vance. Published in the July 1964 issue of Fantastic. Like with Poul Anderson, Vance is a writer I often like but rarely find myself strongly attached to. Also like with Anderson, Vance represents to some extent SF writing typical of the pre-New Wave ’60s (i.e., relatively conservative), focusing less on literary experimentation and more on The Big Picture™. “The Kragen” may strike some readers as familiar because they had read it in a different form: it would be expanded into the novel The Blue World two years later.
For the short stories:
“Don’t Look Now” by Henry Kuttner. Published in the March 1948 issue of Startling Stories. You didn’t think I’d forget about Kuttner, right? Making his professional debut in 1936, Kuttner was not the instant success like hie future wife, C. L. Moore, was; actually he had a reputation as a hack writer for a while, and to this day his immense talent tends to be undervalued. Alongside Moore Kuttner would write some of the most beloved SFF of the ’40s, but he also remaimed prolific more or less on his own, “Don’t Look Now” being an example.
“Mountain Ways” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Published in the August 1996 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Le Guin is one of those grandmasters of the field who really needs no introduction. She only appeared sporadically in the magazines from the ’60s to the ’80s, but the ’90s saw a major resurgance for Le Guin as a magazine presence, with her Hainish cycle especially getting more attention. “Mountain Ways” is a standalone Hainish story, and it won the James Triptree Jr. (now regrettably called the Otherwise) Award for gender-bending SF.
If you’re reading this post and it’s the first day of November then you’ll notice there are two new departments for my blog: one of them is simply a quality-of-life improvement while the other is more of a “I’m doing this for funzies” thing. Firstly we have an author index now! Reviews are organized by authors’ last names, and while this page may be small now, there will come a point when it will be massive, and since I don’t rate my reviews, this is probably the best way to help readers find what they’re looking for. The second is The Observatory, which like Things Beyond is an editorial department, but whereas Things Beyond is meant for forecasting reviews, The Observatory will be more like a conventional magazine editorial where I’ll spend a thousand words on whatever subject I feel like writing about—although, of course, it will be SFF-related.
Since Things Beyond happens at the beginning of every month, it seems only natural to have an Observatory editorial posted on the 15th of every month, so that it’ll never be skipped and it’ll fall exactly between two of my regular review posts. With these changes I feel like I’m one step closer to making my blog a “professional” (by that I really mean well-rounded) review site for magazine SFF.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 