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.
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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.
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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.
Something about history is that it’s full of lost opportunities and near-misses, and this applies to genre history as well. Rosel George Brown is one of those writers who seemed on her way to becoming at the very least a major figure in feminist SF writing, but her premature death stopped this in its tracks. She was born in 1926 and died in 1967, of lymphoma, just as the New Wave was kicking into high gear and feminism was becoming more entrenched in the field. Women’s Lib and all that. Brown debuted in 1958 and wrote at a somewhat sporadic pace for the next nine years, probably because she had a day job as a teacher and she would’ve gotten most if not all of her writing done during summer vacation; that Brown was a teacher is particularly relevant to today’s story. Of course, it’s hard to say if Brown would’ve become a major figure had she lived longer, given that her output of short fiction had slowed down to a trickle in the last few years of her life, presumably to do what pretty much every female genre writer at the time did: focus on novels. She co-wrote Earthblood with Keith Laumer, plus two solo novels starring the detective Sibyl Sue Blue. “David’s Daddy” was part of the meteor shower of short stories Brown wrote at the start of her career, it being a nominally SFnal classroom drama.
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First published in the June 1960 issue of Fantastic. It’s been reprinted only twice, and one of those you can only access with the Wayback Machine. We have The 6th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F (ed. Judith Merril) and a digital reprint on the long-defunct Sci Fiction. Curiously all three editors who picked this story were women.
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Lillian (I don’t think we ever get her last name) is evidently a young teacher who looks up to her older colleague, Ms. Fremen, primarily because Ms. Fremen has a perfect grip on her students. “The cadence was perfect. No face was sullen. No face rebellious.” Lillian is trying to learn “the Frown,” which she hopes can help get her students under control, to make them perfectly obedient. This is a telltale sign of the story being culturally set in the ’50s, even though it was published in 1960—granted that it would’ve been written a year or even two years earlier. The ’60s had not properly started yet. This was the age of (at least what the adults considered) out-of-control juvenile delinquency, a trend that seemed to continue through the JFK years. It’s this context, in which those of the silent generation (those born between, say, 1935 and 1945) sought to rebel against middle-class sprawl, that compelled Robert Heinlein to write Starship Troopers. Lillian, probably being around Brown’s own age at the time, is chiefly concerned not with her students’ happiness, or even their engagement with the material, but their capacity to follow orders. It’s easy to assume at first that we’re supposed to take Lillian’s draconian relationship with her students as a good thing, but we’re about to be shown (rather than told) that her desire for obedience at the expense of everything else is a character flaw.
“David’s Daddy” would be a totally non-genre slice-of-life narrative if not for two wrenches being thrown into the equation: the first is a boy named Jerome, one of Ms. Fremen’s students, who is implied to be telepathic. I’m not counting this as a spoiler since we’re introduced to Jerome and his weird gift early enough, but this is the one thing that makes the story SFnal, and only arguably at that. Ms. Fremen tells Lillian that Jerome has some kind of telepathic connection such that he is clairvoyant, although this gift is never given an SFnal explanation. I’m reminded of Stephen King’s Carrie, or more specifically how in the book Carrie’s telekinesis is explained as the byproduct of a very rare recessive gene (the book is, in fact, science fiction), whereas in the 1976 film we’re never given such an explanation. Jerome’s psi power may prove a problem in a different story, but in this story it will turn out to be an incalculably valuable asset. Not that Ms. Fremen or Lillian can make any sense of it. As Ms. Fremen says, in one of the story’s funniest lines, “I’ve been teaching for twenty years, […] I don’t have any imagination.” The other thing is that a strange man who looks like a bum has been loitering on school grounds, which Lillian finds concerning, yet apparently this is not enough to evacuate the school. “In this neighborhood, a good third of the daddies looked like bums. Hell, they are bums.” The bum in question, Mr. Mines, turns out to the father of David, one of the shyer kids in class. This does not make the situation better.
One thing I really like about “David’s Daddy” is how it balances a kind of breezy humor with what turns into a pretty serious situation—especially from a modern perspective, where school shootings have become depressingly commonplace. Evidently shootings on school grounds were not a major concern in the late ’50s, but bomb threats would’ve still been a thing, and some children did (as they do now) have to live with abusive parents. We never find out much about David or his daddy, but while the drunk-looking man is confirmed to be his father, the two don’t seem to have an idyllic relationship. Mr. Mines has come to school to pick up his son, for no clear reason given and well before class has ended. This in itself is concerning, only made more so because the school doesn’t seem to have any security to speak of. (Lillian considers telling Mr. Buras, the school principal, about the situation, but she’s doubtful he will actually do anything about it.) The whole thing is creepy, probably even more so with our current understanding of kids’ safety than it would’ve struck readers at the time. Brown writes Lillian as a flawed but relatable would-be heroine, with some self-deprecating humor about the thankless job of teaching thrown in. It’s a balancing act that she makes work in only ten pages.
The humorous and then creepy scenario takes a deadly serious turn, though: Mr. Mines has put a bomb somewhere in the school, and Jerome is the only person who might know where it is.
There Be Spoilers Here
Mr. Mines came to take David out of class before he bombed the place, but after Lillian distracts him enough it seems he’s grown content at the thought of killing his own son, along with his classmates. We never learn why Mr. Mines would do such a thing, other than that he is supposedly an alcoholic, maybe having grown tired of living as a bum. David’s relationship with his dad is only faintly implied, since David himself says very little, but the boy’s timidness generally and around his father especially implies an abusive relationship. So there’s a bomb, and Jerome with his psi power can track it down like a bloodhound—only he can’t do it alone. Lillian and Jerome have to work together to pinpoint the bomb before it’s too late, meaning Lillian has to trust the boy and his gift in order to save the day. Naturally they do, but it’s still a tense situation, one that requires Lillian be a model teacher and stop panic from spreading whilst keeping her own nerves in check. At one point the strain gets to her and breaks down in front of Jerome, a moment of emotional vulnerability that leaves her feeling ashamed. Teachers aren’t “supposed” to show emotions like that. “Children are terribly frightened when grown people lose control.” She ultimately finds that she can’t be the domineering statue of a woman she wants to be—she has to learn to be content simply as a woman with feelings. In a strange role reversal from what we usually see it’s the woman and not the man (or in this case boy) who has to accept emotional vulnerability.
A Step Farther Out
I said earlier that all the people who chose this story for publication were women, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. While not a feminist story of the flavor we would see later in the ’60s, “David’s Daddy” is very much a story about women’s experiences, as told by someone who knew very well what it was like. The only adult male characters are either dangerous (Mr. Mines) or useless (Mr. Buras), while the well-adjusted female teachers have to cooperate with their students. The male students who figure into the plot (Jerome and David) are also not delinquents or all that macho; indeed they’re soft-spoken kids who are strangely bereft of what we think of as typically boyish behavior. I’ve read a few Brown stories and there’s this running theme of not so much reconciling the sexes or even arguing for women’s rights, but trying to explain women’s experiences in a field that was very much male-dominated. Yet I don’t get prudish or conservatives vibes from Brown like I do with say, Zenna Henderson, although both writers were preoccupied with teachers and their students.
(Cover by Gerard Quinn. Science Fantasy, February 1963.)
Who Goes There?
John Brunner would’ve turned 90 today, which is not an unreasonable age by modern standards. Unfortunately health problems piled on each other until he died just short of his 61st birthday, and by the time he died Brunner’s legacy was in danger of being totally lost to the abyss of history. Even his most famous novel, Stand on Zanzibar, can’t really be considered “famous” by any metric other than among SF connoisseurs; its Hugo win did not result in the sales figures Brunner was hoping for. Brunner started writing SF when he was a teenager, and given that his earliest work was published in the US first and also his use of at-the-time American genre conventions it’s easy enough to think he was an American writer; but no, he was a Briton, as today’s story makes clear enough. The conventional narrative with Brunner is that he wrote a handful of a truly good and ambitious novels, plus a smattering of very good short fiction, along with a whole lot of pulp trash. He took up writing full-time at a point when this was financially feasible—albeit only barely. While he tended to be more miss than hit with his novels, he had more luck at short lengths, such that even minor and long-forgotten excursions like “Some Lapse of Time” have points of interest. Also, incidentally, this is like the third hospital drama I’ve reviewed for this site in the past three months. Weird.
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First published in the February 1963 issue of Science Fantasy. It’s been reprinted in English only once, in the Brunner collection Now Then!, which I have to tell you is super out of print.
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Max Harrow has a dream, and it’s not a good one. He dreams of being in the wilderness somewhere, as if the apocalypse had happened and blown humanity back to the stone age. He sees, of all things, a man holding a human finger bone, which turns out to be a premonition—only he doesn’t know this yet. When he wakes he finds the real world to be about as strange as the dream realm. It’s nighttime and he gets a call from London police: a “tramp” has collapsed nearby and he’s in pretty bad shape, and Max is a doctor, one of the best. It’s a wonder the tramp is still alive when they get him to the hospital considering his jaundiced skin, bald patches, tattered clothes, and the fact that he’s unable to speak—at first. And when he does it’s clearly not English, nor is it any other language the hospital staff can recognize. “The last chance of determining what it was immediately vanished when they fetched Jones, the ambulance attendant, and he ruled out Welsh.” (Bit of a funny line there.) The strangest part is that the tramp is clearly afflicted with something, but his symptoms are not consistent with anything the hospital staff know about—nobody except Max. Years ago (it’s actually unclear how long ago this was) Max and Diana had a son named Jimmy, but Jimmy died in childhood from what Max would call “heterochyha,” something akin to radiation sickness. Jimmy was the only person, at least in London, to be afflicted with heterochyha, until this tramp walked into Max’s life. Now he has a patient and a mystery on his hands.
Gordon Faulkner, Max’s most trusted colleague, knows about the case with Max’s son but is otherwise unable to help much. A linguist named Laura is brought in to talk with the tramp, but she’s convinced at first that it’s a hoax, some mean trick set up, on account of the tramp speaking in what turns out to be some garbled form of English as it might develop in the future. So, we have a homeless guy who looks like he’s on the verge of death, yet if we were to even take a guess at his age (he’s in such bad shape that it’s hard for Max to discern his age and even his ethnicity), it’s a miracle that he’s lived this long with a disease that would turn lethal if one ate food with any fats in it—at least going off of what happened with Jimmy. There are thus two mysteries at the heart of this story: where did the tramp come from, and how has he lived this long with something that should by all rights be a dead sentence. There are a few smaller mysteries tucked within this sprawling narrative, such as how the tramp was able to kill a policeman’s dog whilst being as physically weak as he is. And then there’s the finger bone—a real human finger bone—the tramp was found with, reflecting Max’s own dream from the beginning. Whose bone is it, and how did the tramp get it? These are questions that will eventually be answered, although Brunner will take his sweet time getting around to them.
The chief problem with this story is that given the claustrophobia of the setting and the rather small cast, it’s too long, being at least 20,000 words when it could’ve been a novelette. (ISFDB calls it a novelette, but this is clearly wrong.) It doesn’t help that I’m trying pretty hard right now to not simply give away the twist with the tramp, because it’s obvious and you can figure it out well before Max does. A rule of thumb with writing mystery is that you wanna cover your tracks just well enough that the reader can follow along with the detective figure rather than come to the correct conclusion before the character does, for a few reasons, perhaps the biggest being that if the reader correctly guesses the solution in advance the rest of the story loses its sense of urgency. This would not be as big a problem if “Some Lapse of Time” was shorter, but it’s too lethargically paced for how simplistic its conclusion is. It’s a shame, because this is some of Brunner’s stronger character-writing that I’ve seen. Max is a tragic hero who clearly has not gotten over his son’s death, and we’re left to wonder if parts of the mystery are real or merely products of his trauma. Faulkner is sympathetic but can only do so much. Diana and Laura are a bit shrewish (the former more so, and we’ll get to her in a minute), but they clearly have interior lives that are not inextricably connected with the men around them. I know the bar is low, but Brunner can be unnecessarily unflattering with his female characters, so I’ll take what I can get.
There’s still the small problem of Diana. A complication that emerges is Diana, for some reason, suspects that Max is having an affair with Laura, despite the two having a very business-like relationship and having only met a few times up to this point; indeed she’s convinced enough that she threatens to divorce Max on those grounds, so… basically over nothing. It’s irrational, sure, but it also comes out of fucking nowhere. The two get into a fight and Diana slams the car door on Max’s hand hard enough that it actually chops one of his index fingers off. Brutal, but it also creates a surreal effect, something like the story gradually wrapping around itself like an ouroboros. Max saw a finger bone in his dream, then the tramp had one, and now he’s lost that same segment of his finger. The order of events is all wrong, but it’s like he had a traumatic memory of losing his own finger before it happened. A premonition? The future seems to be creeping backward into the present, yet we’re given no explanation for how this can be possible. The tramp’s condition is horrible, and yet he has gotten this far, even overpowering a police-trained dog. “The fact that Smiffershon [the name the tramp is given] was alive meant that the memory of how to hold heterochylia at bay had endured when knowledge of weaving was lost. The disease must be commonplace for that to happen.” Max senses some weird self-fulfilling prophecy unraveling before his eyes, and things only get more eerie when the country’s “Secretary for War” is due for an operation that could have dire consequences…
There Be Spoilers Here
You’re not getting a prize if you guessed the twist correctly.
Like yes, obviously the tramp is from the future, after a nuclear war has not only demolished civilization but stricken humanity with radiation burns. Most would die and the survivors, like the tramp, would be deformed. We never do get an explanation for how the tramp managed to jump back to the present day or what brought him here. It doesn’t matter too much, since the Bad Future™ Max becomes increasingly desperate to prevent is implied to happen anyway. Brunner is not an optimist and fittingly “Some Lapse of Time” ends on quite a bleak note.
A Step Farther Out
It’s not bad. Maybe a touch above mediocre. I can see why this one hasn’t been in print for over half a century. Brunner goes to considerable lengths to depict a “modern” world unknowingly on the brink of nuclear apocalypse, but also, you’ve seen this before. Even in 1963 this would not have been new, although its emphasis on character psychology and pessimism does place it as having anticipated the New Wave. Also strange that this was published in Science Fantasy, since it’s very much SF and not fantasy, but I get there was overlap between Science Fantasy and New Worlds at the time. Anyway, check this out only if you’re curious enough.
Stephen King had already been writing professionally for a handful of years when his debut novel Carrie became a bestseller in 1974, despite it being horror and also nominally science fiction. He was 26 at the time. Carrie was by no means the first horror novel to sell by the truckload, even in the ’70s, but it did mark a genuine paradigm shift in the field of horror, one which arguably has not had a successor. Rather than fade off the map, King quickly emerged as a one-man publishing business; not only did he write a lot but he consistently wrote bestsellers and got more movie/TV deals than the vast majority of writers can even hope for. By 1980 he had written Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, The Long Walk (as Richard Bachman), and Firestarter. The holy trinity of horror can be said to comprise Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King; but while Poe and Lovecraft did not earn their reputations until after their deaths, King had unquestionably become the new king of horror while still in his thirties. It could even be said, in what I have to admit is kind of a foreboding tone, that King is so big that he is larger than horror. I know people who are casual readers who have read very little horror outside of King, who don’t care much for horror as a genre outside of what King does with it, which on the one hand is sad, but it also speaks to the grip King has had on horror writing for the past fifty years.
So I have mixed feelings on King. I’m of the opinion that horror is at its best at short lengths, and King’s immense popularity as a novelist has made it so that horror short stories and novellas has been rendered mostly irrelevant since the ’80s, except in a historical context. Indeed, from about the time of Poe to the 1970s horror thrived on and was mostly defined by its short fiction, and this is simply not the case anymore. If you wanna get noticed as a horror writer you must write a novel—preferably several. But to give King credit, unlike some of his contemporaries like Anne Rice and Peter Straub who had little to no interest in contributing to the field at short lengths, he very much respects the short story and its shared history with horror. It also helps that King has written a lot of short fiction over the years, “Beachworld” being just one of many. I covered “The Jaunt” a hot minute ago, which you may recall was an SF-horror hybrid, as is “Beachworld.” Do I like this one more than the other? Hmmm…
Placing Coordinates
First published in the Fall 1984 issue of Weird Tales, which from what I can tell was a one-off. (The publication history of Weird Tales is convoluted.) It’s been reprinted in English only twice, but the King collection Skeleton Crew is super-duper in print. I should’ve said “three times” maybe, but the strange thing is that despite being reprinted in the October 2010 issue of Lightspeed and being available on that magazine’s website for over a decade, “Beachworld” seems to have been taken down last year. Why? On whose orders? You can still access it online via the Wayback Machine, I’m just confused as to why it’s not longer on the site. It was also reprinted in Lightspeed: Year One (ed. John Joseph Adams), a beefy anthology collecting all the short fiction of Lightspeed‘s first twelve months, including reprints. They never did a Year Two, sadly.
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ASN/29 had crash landed (“There had been a fire. The starboard fuel-pods had all exploded.”) on an unnamed desert planet, a three-manned ship with two survivors. There’s Shapiro and Rand, with the third, Grimes, having been turned into a bowl of spaghetti from the impact. Not a pretty sight! Shapiro and Rand are alive, but they probably won’t be for much longer, what with the few resources at their disposal and the fact that they landed on the worst possible type of planet that’s still theoretically habitable. Arrakis has more biodiversity than this world, which is not only endless desert, indeed a vast ocean of desert, but which doesn’t seem have to have any grub to feed on. No vegetation. Chances of being rescued are supremely remote. This is what we call a major bummer. For about half the story or so we’re left with two guys, neither of whom one can really call “likable,” although Shapiro is the POV character and is at least marginally more relatable than his companion, on account of having a much stronger will to live. Rand, the melancholy half of the pair, quickly becomes convinced that the whole thing is doomed, and it actually takes him a shockingly small amount of time to crack under the pressure. In situations like this, where chances of survival are low, it’s almost better to be alone than to be stuck with an unhinged companion. And in the words of Anakin Skywalker, “I hate sand.”
First, what “Beachworld” does well, which is a fair bit. King did not become the most famous horror writer in living memory from sheer luck; when he’s on the ball he knows how to bring the spooky vibes. Like two ends of a circle meeting, the world of “Beachworld” is so vast that it becomes claustrophobic, with deert as far as the eye can see, and with the sand being so pervasive that it manages to creep into the crashed ship’s air-tight hull. “Beach sand,” as Rand notes, “is very ubiquitous.” A robust short story hould have at least one of the three fundamental types of conflict, those being man vs. man, man vs. self, and man vs. nature. That third one tends to involve one of the other two, or possibly both, as is the case with this story. The desert world is like a sweltering purgatory, and in Shapiro’s shoes the central problem of living long enough that rescue may come along takes on a psychological aspect, thus man vs. self; and then there’s Shapiro’s deteriorating partnership with Rand, plus a spoiler, which gives you man vs. man. This is all captured in a story which thankfully does not overstay its welcome, and it helps that on top of an impending sense of doom King manages to sneak in some sardonic humor. My favorite not-totally-serious passage has to be when the pair go through Grimes’s quarters and find his pet goldfish—or what’s left of them. “The tank was built of impact-resistant clear-polymer plastic, and had survived the crash easily. The goldfish—like their owner—had not been impact-resistant.” It’s morbidly funny. Had this been “pure” horror, with some snark to lighten the mood a bit, I would find it easier to recommend this story; but unfortunately it’s not.
When writing a genre hybrid, ideally the two (or three, the more the merrier) genres should work in tandem to produce something that could not exist without all its components. Some of the most beloved horror movies of all time (Alien, The Thing, David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly, etc.) are known primarily as horror, but they retain their potency even if undertood purely as science fiction. Alien is not a personal favorite of mine, but it might be the perfect synthesis, being balls-to-the-wall science fiction rivaled in sseriousness only by the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and at the same time it’s such an eerie and mysterious movie. (That Ridley Scott would later toss much of that mysteriousness out the window with Prometheus is beside the point.) The problem is that “Beachworld” is not very good science fiction, at least if we’re going by Theodore Sturgeon’s criterion for what constitutes good science fiction. Namely there’s the problem that you could have perhaps more easily turned this story into a Robinson Crusoe-esque fantastical narrative, turning it into an outright ghost story, and it would be easier to believe and digest. One of the commenters on Lightspeed said they couldn’t tell this was a Stephen King story just by reading it, and oh, I have to disagree. The prose style at times slips into King’s trademark colloquialism, but also it takes place in the distant future only because King tells us so. Despite it being set 8,000 years in the future, Shapiro and Rand happen to know the pop culture boomers like King are familiar with, namely the Beach Boys. Because of course. King has this borderline fixation on the pop culture of his adolescent, so we’re talking 1950s and ’60s; and while these references usually work fine in his fiction, as it tends to be contemporary or set in the ’50s/’60s, here they’re a lot more conspicuous, to the point of implausibility. And that’s not getting into spoilers.
There Be Spoilers Here
Early on there grows the suspicion that somehow the endless sand of the world is alive, which is certainly alarming. At first there remains the possibility that this is all a trick of the mind, and this possibility stays until pretty close to the end. The good news is that the distress beacon Shapiro set up worked, although it turns out the people who’ve come to “rescue” them are not an ideal choice. I’m not totally sure who these new people are, but they seem to be space pirates, as while they try to find salvage in the ship, they also posit that Shapiro and Rand would go for such-and-such an amount on the market. I guess getting sold into slavery is arguably a better fate than slowly dying on a world totally bereft of water. Their option are limited. Among the pirate crew are a couple androids, very expensive machinery there, and the captain himself is a cyborg, his lower half being like a metal horse, giving the appearance of a centaur. That’s neat, although I’m not sure what the symbolic potential behind it could be, and more importantly I’m not sure this is a more practical arrangement than just having two human legs. It doesn’t matter, though, because by the time the captain and his crew get here Shapiro has (rightly) gone paranoid and Rand’s mind has all but turned to jelly. Maybe there’s something in the sand, or maybe it’s the sand itself that’s alive, but the planet doesn’t want these people to leave. They narrowly escape, too, losing an android in the process and leaving Rand on the planet, who at the very end is putting handfuls of sand in his mouth, eating it and eating it. I have to admit it’s a disgusting ending, that last bit, so kudos there, although otherwise I found the ending predictable. “The Jaunt” has a pretty memorable ending, for all my gripes with that story, while “Beachworld” has more of a mixed bag of an ending.
A Step Farther Out
It’s fine. Those looking for big surprises will not find any, and while it does have a fittingly ominous tone (those, like myself, who dislike the beach will be sure to have their nerves hit), the SFnal half of the equation does very little to heighten the horror half; if anything this story is dragged down a bit for being SFnal only one a surface level. This is good horror but lackluster science fiction is my point. Still, it does show King’s capacity as a chameleon, able to change his colors—to an extent.
(Cover by Mondolithic Studios. F&SF, March-April 2021.)
Who Goes There?
Cat Rambo has been around for a while in a variety of roles, not least as former editor of Fantasy Magazine, two-time President of SFWA, and currently as a teacher. Her most recent novel is Rumor Has It, out this year from Tor Books, the third in a series which starts with You Sexy Thing. They have their own website, whose design is easy on the eyes. Despite being active since the early 2000s they didn’t have their first story in F&SF published until 2016, but thereafter have stayed a regular presence. Fun thing is that the March-April issue is the first to be edited by F&SF‘s current editor, Sheree Renée Thomas, with Rambo’s story being the first in said issue. In a way “Crazy Beautiful” could be considered an indicator of the direction the magazine would take under Thomas’s leadership, turning F&SF into one of the more leftfield and progressive (both politically and artistically) magazines on the market. “Crazy Beautiful” is a fable about the possibilities of true AI and the question of art ownership, told in a broken-up way such that it’s more like putting the scattered pieces of a puzzle back together than reading a conventional short story.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March-April 2021 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It has been reprinted only once so far, in The Long List Anthology: Volume 8 (ed. David Steffen).
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Given the scattered non-structure of the narrative, some details seem deliberately unrevealed, so apologies if I don’t get all the plot beats right. The broad strokes of the plot will make themselves known by the end. It’s the near-future (we’re talking 2026/2027), and there seems to have been a huge theft at an art warehouse near Paris—thousands, possibly a few million dollars worth of artwork sort of just vanished. Another problem is that not all of that artwork was kept their legally if you know what I’m saying. Mr. Maker is first thought of as a suspect, but not only does he have an alibi but he inquires about the warehouse after it had already been robbed. We jump between several people in what is almost epistolary format, the story being a mix of messages and written/recorded testimony—police interrogations, that sort of thing. Since basically the whole thing is dialogue, without prose descriptions, Rambo is able to cover a lot of ground in only ten magazine pages. There’s no protagonist or lead character, properly speaking, but the biggest player might be someone who is actually not human at all. At a certain university, which I don’t think is ever named, there’ve been experiments with AI—not just machine learning but AI that is actually self-aware and able to make decisions of its own volition. As Dr. Shiv Nouri explains, the project is called Xōchipilli, “because the craze right then was to name [the AI] after gods,” Xōchipilli being the Aztec god of “art, games, dance, flowers, and song.” This experiment with a self-aware AI will become too successful, as it turns out.
“Crazy Beautiful” is a nominally SFnal story that’s concerned with two real-world problems: that of AI and that of intellectual property. “AI” has become a kind of buzzword for a thinking machine, a thing which takes input and vomits up responses, in the past few years, but people much smarter and more tech-savvy than me have been tracking the development of “AI” for many years. One character cites IBM’s Watson, a real AI which really did win a game of Jeopardy! back in 2011, and similarly Rambo’s extrapolation on the development of AI in relation to intellectual property follows this real-world development closely, even if the story becomes a little outlandish as it reaches its climax. Something quite believable and creepy that happens is an AI infiltrating a chat room full of college kids, as is what happens with the chat room Steve Starr sets up for his students, among them a certain Marcus Maker. We see interactions in this chat room from both the outside and inside, via Starr’s messages to Dr. Nouri, Starr and Maker’s testimonies to police, as well as chat logs between Maker and an unknown user signed FlowerKing123. Remember the thing about Xōchipilli being, among other things, the god of flowers? Maker, for his part, has some radical ideas about intellectual property (he’s probably a Cory Doctorow fan), which he’s happy to share with FlowerKing123; of course, unbeknownst to Maker the other part is not a real person. Maker wrote a “manifesto” about art and intellectual property, which is really a list, and I’ll quote it here:
“That Art is necessary to life, as necessary as food and water, and that without it, we are little more than machines driven by bioelectric pulses and chains of nucleic acids, rather than cogs or steam.
“That Art belongs to no one, and that to take it away is to take away things like water and air and the right to speak.”
“That Art, like Information, wants to be free.”
This is all well and good—I more or less agree with Maker—although I’m pretty sure he could not have thought he was a) inspiring a self-aware AI, and b) that said AI would take what he’s saying a little too literally. The AI can think for itself—that’s not to say its thinking skills are highly developed. When you think about it, the trajectory of this story is predictable, and would’ve been predictable even four decades ago. “AI reacts weirdly to human input and starts causing a ruckus.” We’ve seen this before, many times at this point. Of course, the achronological structure makes this less apparent; it also helps that Rambo provides some moral ambiguity as to whether what FlowerKing123 is doing is really a bad thing or not. Oh, some people die, although it must be said that a few major characters somehow die in police custody, a “mystery” which is never solved, because I guess people just die while in police custody sometimes (which they do). The AI’s beef is not with humanity at large but with a specific kind of person—someone who thinks that just because they have a copyright on art, or paid such-and-such for a work of art, they think they own the work. FlowerKing123 takes control of scrap metal, constructing weird metallic beetles and other devices, to enact its vision, and it doesn’t take too long for people to notice that some strange things are happening. We’re talking art theft, but also the creation of new works, quite literally made from trash, which took effort and certainly a creative mind to make, as opposed to the AIs we currently have which just take people’s art and makes a Frankenstein monster out of it. I could go on a whole rant about that, but I won’t.
There Be Spoilers Here
The situation escalates to almost apocalyptic proportions, and by the end Maker and Starr are dead—although not from the AI. Needless to say this situation causes a massive legal headache for the university, with Dr. Nouri deciding to retire while she still has the chance, maybe get around to reading all those books on her shelf. Despite the death toll (we’re not told how many the AI would’ve killed, but it has to be some amount, given how many are put in witness protection), Dr. Nouri doesn’t regret the development with the AI—that which was named after an Aztec god and which became something like a god. Art which can respond to information and act out against its owners, in an effort to quite literally be free from ownership, is a radical (if also outlandish, like I said) idea, and Dr. Nouri isn’t sure if it will ultimately be for good or ill. But it will be interesting.
A Step Farther Outè
Truth be told, when I first read “Crazy Beautiful” I could not follow what was happening. I had to stop about halfway through the story, rest my eyes for a bit, and then start over. I’m not sure if this is a positive or negative. Despite its brevity this is a story that demands one pay attention to the details, both the chronology of events and what perspectives are being given. The problem is that I find this more fun to think about after the fact than to read in the moment, since mid-story I’m more concerned with figuring out what Rambo is up to. This is a story that not only lacks an antagonist in the traditional sense but also a protagonist, and since it jumps back and forth constantly it takes some untangling to find the start and end points. Your mileage may vary on if the experimentation was worth it, but I do have to give Rambo props for writing something as mind-bending as this; it gets a lot of work done in a short time.
(Cover by Chris Moore. Science Fiction Age, March 1998.)
Who Goes There?
It seems like a lot of SF writers now living prefer to keep to themselves, with a few notable exceptions—Cory Doctorow being one of those exceptions. Over the past couple decades he has become arguably more notable as a personality and commentator on the state of copyright in our post-internet age than as an SF writer. On top of his fiction he’s been a prolific non-fiction writer and editor, including being a former co-editor of Boing Boing and having articles published in the likes of Wired and Asimov’s Science Fiction. He did something that was pretty audacious with his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in that he used a Creative Commons license to make it digitally available online, for free(!), simultaneously with its commercial print publication. This was back in 2004, mind you. He’s a bit of a character. While Doctorow hasn’t yet won a Hugo or Nebula, he’s tied for the most number of Prometheus Award wins; given his democratic socialist politics this is a bit ironic. Still, it’s true that few people have fought more staunchly against the horrors of DRM and top-down surveilance, and in that sense “freedom” is a big word in his vocabulary. Despite “Craphound” being a very early story for Doctorow, he clearly has soft enough a spot for it to have named his own website after it.
He’s from Toronto, but let’s not hold that against him.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age. It was then reprinted in Northern Suns (ed. Glenn Grant and David G. Hartwell), The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), Before They Were Giants: First Works from Science Fiction Greats (ed. James L. Sutter), The Big Book of Science Fiction (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and the Doctorow collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More. Because Doctorow makes his work available online for free, with some copyright trickery (that I can’t be bothered to explain), you can read “Craphound” totally legit on Project Gutenberg.
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“Craphound” takes place in what seems to be a then-present Canada, which means that despite presumably taking place in the ’90s it culturally feels more like the ’80s. To make matters worse, Jerry, our narrator, is a sucker for ’50s nostalgia, from pop culture to useless knick knacks—the remains of a bygone era. As is expected I suppose for a story written by a young person (Doctorow would’ve only been 25 or 26 at the time), about a similarly young character, there’s a pining for a past the author/protagonist did not actually live to experience. It’s also worth mentioning that if “Craphound” is set in the present then it’s a present with a big difference—namely that mankind and intelligent alien life have long since made contact. Indeed Jerry’s best bud is one of the aliens, named Craphound; that’s the name Jerry gave Craphound, not his actual name. Of course, Jerry and Craphound are both craphounds, in that they’re dumpster divers, finding old crap as yard sales and whatnot and then reselling them elsewhere at a higher price. People (especially old people, if we’re being honest) sometimes give away old stuff of theirs without knowing the thing’s market value, which is where craphounds come in. I mean, it’s a living; at least they’re not landlords. It helps also that thee two are redeemed by their genuine friendship.
Conflict enters the picture when the two buddies find a yard sale run by a couple of “blue-haired old ladies,” with the top find being a trunk full of Wild West apparel and toys, tossed-aside belongings for a guy who was once a kid, or rather liked to play as “Billy the Kid,” but who would be a grown-ass man now. (Remember how Westerns were inexplicably really popular in the ’50s? What was up with that? Remember Bonanza? Have Gun—Will Travel…?) Jerry likes what he sees, but Craphound is nothing less than enraptured, and the two have a kind of bidding war over the trunk, with Craphound winning out, albeit by paying a ridiculous amount. This strains the two’s friendship, not least because it violates an unwritten rule among craphounds, in that when fellow craphounds are at a yard sale or whatever at the same time they ought to refrain from getting into a bidding war. There’s a time and a place for bidding, and that’s an auction house, not some granny’s front yard. Doesn’t help either that Jerry does his business as a way of making a living while Craphound is doing it for fun, already being unspeakably rich, having “built his stake on Earth by selling a complicated biochemical process for non-chlorophyll photosynthesis to a Saudi banker.” Others of Craphound’s race have similarly become members of the top 1% on Earth by selling their technology, or at least some of it, for prices the richest of humanity would be pay a pretty penny for. The friendship between Jerry and Craphound is thus troubled by a difference in species, cultural priorities, but also class. An older and wiser Doctorow might’ve interrogated Craphound’s vulture-like attitude with human culture more unsparingly, or indeed framed Jerry’s own capacity for selfishness more harshly, but ultimately this is a story that, while playing tug-of-war between optimism and pessimism in humanity’s relationship with capital, ultimately goes for optimism.
That’s not to say “Craphound” doesn’t evaluate its own late-capitalist landscape, which at times can border on apocalyptic, the very much Canadian Jerry obsessing over American pop culture of the past, Craphound himself being like a wealthy tourist. Jerry becomes fixated on someone else’s past, that of the man he only knows as “Billy the Kid,” the former owner of the trunk, whose contents have memories attached to them which are not Jerry’s own. He does, by sheer chance at a sale, meet a strapping 30-year-old upstart named Scott, who co-runs a firm and who matches the description Billy’s mother had given. Despite already being rather wealthy Scott is himself a fellow craphound, and over the course of about a week, the two strike up a friendship, their meeting place called the Secret Boutique, a second-hand market, Scott being a kind of a replacement for Craphound. Perhaps the strangest moment between these two, representing Jerry’s capacity for occasional selflessness (and I suspect remorse over his bitter treatment of Craphound the last time they were together), is when Jerry buys a Native American headdress for five dollars, intending to sell it somewhere else at a much higher price, only to sell it back to Scott/Billy for the same amount. This act of kindness must be at least partly fueled by the fact that Jerry’s convinced Scott/Billy is his man, so to speak. “As I said it, I was overcome with the knowledge that this was ‘Billy the Kid,’ the original owner of the cowboy trunk. I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did, with utter certainty.” Again there’s a cynical undertone to all this, these lily-white Canadians hawking over junk and often caricatured representations of indigenous peoples; that we never get to meet an indigenous character may or may not add to the subtle bleakness.
There Be Spoilers Here
Bad news: Scott/Billy turns out to not be Billy after all. This changes surprisingly little, although it does coincide with Jerry realizing that maybe his own childhood memories are more important than leeching off of other people’s memories. The good news is that Craphound is back, and the two buddies reconcile while at an auction sale, which is perhaps fitting. In this story friendships are formed and reformed, which provide the external conflict, but this is also about Jerry’s internal conflict, his sense of nostalgia and hungering for a past which is not necessarily his. I’m referring to “nostalgia” in the proper sense of the word, which is a kind of homesickness, as opposed to a kind of euphoria as people often think of it. Jerry spends most of the story homesick, except the home in question is not concrete but abstract. He comes to a realization that’s put pretty beautifully, maybe too beautifully given how colloquial his speech is otherwise; but still it’s one of those little passages I can imagine Doctorow smiled at while he was writing it. Hell, writing is such a solitary business, you may as well take pride in it. So here it is:
I understood that an alien wearing a cowboy hat and sixguns and giving them away was a poem and a story, and a thirtyish bachelor trying to spend half a month’s rent on four glasses so that he could remember his Grandma’s kitchen was a story and a poem, and that the disused fairground outside Calgary was a story and a poem, too.
That last one is referring to the fact that some of these aliens, or “extees,” are so rich that they buy up property on Earth, presumably in the hopes of turning a profit on it—being craphounds on a considerably larger scale than what Jerry does. In a different story (I suspect James Tiptree, Jr. would have a fun time with this premise) I can imagine such a turn of events becoming something quite shadowy, but Doctorow (or at least Jerry) wants to think the aliens know what they’re doing. The result is an ending that one would call cautiously optimistic.
A Step Farther Out
“Craphound” wasn’t Doctorow’s first published story, but it was the first to pick up traction with reprints, and it’s not hard to understand why. Aside from being a uniquely Canadian story (we even get a Tim Horton reference) at a time when genre SF was overwhelmingly American and British, it comes off as almost post-cyberpunk, despite the lack of futuristic technology in the humans’ lives. It feels like post-cyberpunk in the sense that the great technological shift has not only married late capitalism already but has seemingly passed over the average person’s head. The aliens have left their table scraps, in the form of basically patenting little pieces of their own tech, and yet humanity at large seems no better off for this. On a macro scale this sounds bleak, but Doctorow posits that at least on a micro scale, on an individual basis, there’s room for hope. There has to be room for hope. Which is something we all think about, probably.
(Cover by J. K. Potter. Asimov’s, September 1985.)
Who Goes There?
Kim Stanley Robinson debuted at the tail end of the ’70s, but as with William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Connie Willis, and some others, he really came into his own in the ’80s. Nowadays he’s known for his leftist utopian novels and commentary, especially having to do with averting climate disaster, and indeed he’s one of the few living SF writers I can think of who’s over the age of sixty and also openly a socialist. He follows a lineage in the field that’s home to H. G. Wells and Ursula K. Le Guin, but he writes much more hard-nosed SF than either of them; it’s useful to think of him as the left-wing equivalent of a Poul Anderson or Larry Niven. This is to say that a good deal of Robinson’s wordage is spent on the mechanics of the worlds he builds, to the point where the mechanics can often overtake plot and character. His Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) won major awards and stands collectively as one of the defining SF works of the ’90s. “Green Mars,” despite sharing a name with one of those aforementioned novels, has nothing to do with the Mars trilogy, other than the fact that Robinson would reuse a few ideas from this earlier novella. At this point Robinson had already shown his ambitions at novel length with The Wild Shore and Icehenge, with “Green Mars” feeling thematically akin to the latter, only on a much smaller scale.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the September 1985 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It was then reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), one half of a Tor Double with Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Meeting with Medusa,” and the Robinson collection The Martians. Given that it’s a solid 30,000-word novella it might be a bit too long to be reprinted more often.
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Roger Claybome has had enough of politics on Mars, which is understandable given that a) he’s several centuries old at this point, and b) he’s a member of the Reds, conservationists who believe Mars’s pre-human ecological state should’ve been kept intact. The Greens, those who believe in terraforming Mars, have long since won the “war,” so to speak. It’s just taken 27 years for Roger to admit he’s lost.
Too many opponents, too many compromises, until the last unacceptable compromise arrived, and [Roger] found himself riding out of the city with Stephan, into the countryside he had avoided for twenty-seven years, over rolling hills covered by grasses and studded by stands of walnut, aspen, oak, maple, eucalyptus, pine: every leaf and every blade of grass a sign of his defeat. And Stephan wasn’t much help; though a conservationist like Roger, he had been a member of the Greens for years.
He’s become like a fish out of water, and he’ll continue to feel that way once he meets up with the rest of the time. Olympus Mons, a volcano that stands as the Mount Everest of Mars, is something that needs climbing, and for Roger there may even be remnants of the Mars he once knew up there, at the very top. Something neat Robinson does here that he also did in Icehenge is making the characters nigh-immortal, with people living a thousand years at a time; how this is made possible is not made clear, but it is the future and Robinson knows we don’t really need to know the science behind it. The result is that Roger and his contemporaries were of the generation that started colonizing Mars, back when it was like one vast desert, so rather than have a sense of nostalgia pushed on them by previous generations they lived to see the planet change before their very eyes. Despite having been part of the Martian government for three decades (a long time for us normal humans, surely), Roger looks like he’s barely reached middle age. This crunching of the passing of time is especially convenient for a novella, which doesn’t have the space of an epic novel.
Both the physical and narrative trajectory is mostly upward, and I have to say it’s pretty neat we get an illustration of the expedition, with camp locations and all that. The human members of the expedition are for the most part not as vividly drawn, sad to say, with the only exceptions being Eileen, a former short-term lover of Roger’s (it was long enough ago that she doesn’t remember their time together, although he does), and the terminally grumpy Marie, who sadly is left with that one defining trait. The other team members are basically expendable. It probably doesn’t help (although it does make the narrative more focused) that this is all told from Roger’s POV. From the start Robinson sets up Roger and Eileen’s unexpected reunion as the basis for romantic/sexual tension, but to his credit he also uses this tension to contrast our two leads, as they not only differ sharply in personalities but also worldviews. The budding romance serves a symbolic purpose which will become gradually more apparent as Roger’s character develops, which is what we call doing two things at once, i.e., good writing. Eileen herself is the closest we get to Robinson’s mouthpiece here, which is to say she vomits up what is clearly supposed to be the story’s thesis, that having to do with our perception of the past. As Eileen says, “Our past is never dead,” and then does the philosophy student thing (although chronologically she’s much older than college-age) of asking Roger if he’s read Jean-Paul Sartre. Roger says he’s much more of a Camus fan, actually. Okay, no, he just says he hasn’t read Sartre. Then she brings up Heidegger and that’s when we know we’re really in trouble. I won’t recite their whole conversation, because I’m not a philosophy major (although my Philosophy 101 professor tried hard to convince me), so we’ll move on.
Much of this story is about nostalgia and how we connect important moments in our lives, often distant memories, to places that were totally incidental. Roger has an intense fondness for Mars when it was red because he has childhood memories here that mean a lot to him, but which he is unable to recapture. He contrasts his own fond memories on the surface of the Martian desert with the minor character Pip from Moby-Dick, at the same time likening himself to the precocious and often depressed Pip of Great Expectations, two comparisons that link Roger as a literary figure but which also show a kind of latent narcissism in himself, that he should think himself comparable to characters in iconic works of literature. The comparison with the Pip of Moby-Dick does fit, though. For those of you who forgot, Pip is the cabin boy who at one point goes overboard and stays on the wide ocean, staring into its bleak depths, for an hour or so before being rescued, by which point the experience had driven him insane. (This is also a reminder that Moby-Dick is arguably cosmic horror.) Yet the two characters’ experiences could not be more different. “Someone had lived an hour very like his day on the polar desert, out in the infinite void of nature. And what had seemed to Roger rapture, had driven Pip insane.” And here Roger is again, surrounded by nature, with only half a dozen or so fellow humans for company—only this time it’s a nature that’s been perverted, a nature he doesn’t recognize. One person’s Eden is another person’s Hades. Roger wonders if his intense nostalgia and Pip’s madness are two sides of the same coin—the sensation that something has been lost, only coming from emotionally opposite directions.
The plot is simple—maybe too simple, given how long this novella is; but to compensate Robinson lovingly describes the cliffsides of Olympus Mons and the growing vegetation there, small signs of animal life, as the climbers ascend and the atmosphere gets thinner, like how it is on one of the tallest mountains on Earth. The campsites, the caves, the conserving of oxygen tanks and food supplies, it all becomes like a mountain-climbing story you might read today, or what Jack London might’ve written about. What the characters (aside from Roger and maybe Eileen) lack in depth the setting more than makes up for it, and not only that but the traversing of said setting. This is an adventure narrative, albeit an introspective one, and Robinson does his best to give the reader an impression of what it would be like to scale the tallest volcano on Mars.
Consider:
Verticality. Consider it. A balcony high on a tall building will give a meager analogy: experience it. On the side of this cliff, unlike the side of any building, there is no ground below. The world below is the world of belowness, the rush of air under your feet. The forbidding smooth wall of the cliff, black and upright beside you, halves the sky. Earth, air; the solid here and now, the airy infinite; the wall of basalt, the sea of gases. Another duality: to climb is to live on the most symbolic plane of existence and the most physical plane of existence at the same time. This too the climber treasures.
If Roger can’t take solace in a transformed Mars then at least he can take comfort in being an expert climber. There’s an incident with Frances, one of the other climbers (I wanna say she’s a redshirt, but that’s a bit mean), who gets an arm broken and has been escorted down to base for rescue, which itself is no easy feat. By this point the party has broken up into small groups, leaving only Roger and Eileen with each other as they ascend the volcano the rest of the way. Incidentally, as the human interference has lessened and the roughness of the setting has increased, Our Heroes™ find it easier and easier to communicate with each other, as if their growing isolation from the rest of the expedition is correlating with what might be a rekindling relationship. On one last note before we get to the climax, I think it’s worth reminding the both of us that the life we see on Mars is not native to it—at least not originally: the flora and fauna brought over have been given centuries of genetic engineering and adaptation. Nothing is the same anymore, but then again that means there’s room for growth, both for life on the planet and Roger’s own view towards it. The past haunts the present, but the past doesn’t have to mean just one thing to everyone; it’s possible to revise it, or at least to gain a different understanding of it.
There Be Spoilers Here
Just one line from Eileen: “Maybe I do remember you.”
A Step Farther Out
It’s a bit overlong, and I have to question the logistics of turning Mars green in just a few centuries; but still, it’s riveting, as personal as it is political. One of Robinson’s career-long obsessions has been our relationship with history, and the capacity for revisionism. Needless to say he agrees with Sartre, that history, or rather our understanding of it, is not fixed. This is unsurprising given Robinson’s leftist sympathies and academic background (he had recently earned his PhD when “Green Mars” was published), but what’s more surprising is how he’s able to synthesize his views on history with a planetary adventure narrative which has, within its confines, at least one character in the Shakespearean sense. That Roger is the only character here with a sense of an interior life would be a problem if this were a novel, but thankfully the novella mode is right for such a thing.
There seemed to be a point in the ’90s when Kathe Koja could lay claim to being the best horror writer in the business, and certainly her output at this time was hard to argue with. She debuted in the late ’80s, as part of a wave of extreme and body-focused horror writers (think Clive Barker), although she also has quite a snarky sense of humor that tends to stop her fiction from becoming a black hole. In the 21st century her output has generally slowed down and she’s turned more to YA, which might partly explain why she has not been given the amount of attention she deserves. In a better world Koja would be awaking millions of readers to her unique style and explorations of the human body’s relationship to the external world, but instead we’ll have to awaken ourselves to her. Unfortunately most of her novels are not exactly easy to find in the wild. “Angels in Love” is a short but finely tuned story, packed with tension and perversion, more of a character study than a conventional horror narrative. This was published the same year as Koja’s first novel, The Cipher, and if you were on the look-out in 1991 it would’ve been hard to deny the talent on display.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the July 1991 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s since been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifth Annual Collection (ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and the Koja collection Extremities. That Dozois reprint is funny considering it’s arguably not SF.
Enhancing Image
The next-door neighbors are being loud, which is not normally something Lurleen would mind—except that the neighbors are fucking. Not the usual kind of fucking, but something more vigorous and yet mysterious. A rhythmic thumping that isn’t bed springs, and she’s not hearing the people’s moans exactly. “Lying there listening, her own bones tingled, skin rippled light with goose bumps, speculation: who made those strange, strange sounds?” It has to be sex. What else could it be? Of course Lurleen is interested, at least in part because she’s bored with her day-to-day life, working at a record store for a boss (Roger) she doesn’t like. Bored and lonely. This was also in the days before high-speed internet, so if you wanted to jerk it as a way of passing the time or to relieve pressure you had to resort to print, film, or your imagination. In this sense “Angels in Love” shows its age, in that it presumably had to take place in a pre-internet world, in the world of the erotic thriller—Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Brian De Palma movies, and so on. The erotic thriller (and “Angels in Love” could be understood partly as an example of such a thing) is a subgenre that basically doesn’t exist anymore, due to a few factors: the availability of online porn, but also moviegoers seem to be more squeamish now than thirty years ago. This is a graphic and indeed borderline pornographic story, but the eroticism is very much there for a purpose, not to mention it helps build tension. There’s a reason the erotic thriller was popular for a while, which is the overlap between feeling horny and feeling scared—the heightened blood pressure and senses being needed for both.
I guess people spying on their neighbors the old-fashioned way, by eavesdropping or using a pair of binoculars, was more acceptable back then. Not to say what Lurleen’s doing is good, but she’s framed such that it’s easy to sympathize with her despite her perversion. After all, she’s clearly lonely and sexually deprived, her boss is a pain in the ass, the men she meets outside of work tend to be pigs. She wants to be desired but not objectified, which almost sounds like a paradox, because how do you present yourself in an interaction as desirable without also becoming a slab of meat to the other party? She knows Roger objectifies her, she knows the clerk at the store objectifies her, she knows the dumb muscle she picks up at bars sees her the same way. But here the tables have turned, as she objectifies her neighbors without even seeing them first—although she soon works to change that. “It came to her that she had never really seen that next-door neighbor of hers.” The girl next door is Anne, and Lurleen is surprised to find that the woman who’s been having such amazing sex (or so Lurleen thinks) is so… boring. Not obnoxious or messy, but bland. Beige. When they finally meet Lurleen is put off by how normal Anne is—so unassuming, actually, that she becomes an uncanny figure. The mystery then becomes with regards to the man Anne is seeing, assuming it’s the same man (and assuming it’s a man, which Lurleen does) every time Lurleen spies on them. So Anne is boring, but then what about the man she’s seeing?
The subtle horror of “Angels in Love” works in two ways: the mystery of the next-door neighbor, but also the lengths Lurleen goes to in finding out her neighbor’s private life. She starts acting in ways that are undeniably creepy, and were she not the perspective character it would be easy to understand Lurleen as a villain. This is not a case of unintended dissonance between the protagonist’s actions and what the reader expects of them, but part of the story’s design. Lurleen is an anti-heroine, and in just a handful of pages Koja makes sure we know this. There’s an especially creepy passage where she takes her eavesdropping to levels that would be considered unacceptable, even by most perverts:
She began to stalk Anne, never thinking of it in so many words, but as sure and surely cautious as any predator. Waiting, lingering in the hallway after work, for Anne to come home from whatever unfathomable job she did all day. Never stopping to talk, just a smile, pleasant make-believe. She made it her business to do her laundry when Anne did hers; at the first whoosh and stagger of the old machine, Lurleen was there, quarters in hand; her clothes had never been so clean; she had to see. Any jockey shorts, bikini underwear, jockstraps, what? She meant to take one if she could, steal it before, before it was clean. Smell it. You can tell a lot about a man.
This is a cosmic horror story ultimately, and we’ll get to that part, but Koja understands that often the scariest thing is human behavior—something that can be found in everyday life, no science fiction or fantasy needed. Lurleen’s growing obsession with Anne and her mystery boyfriend escalates at a rate that makes enough sense and at the same time doesn’t feel rushed, given how short this story is. It has to do with stalking, and getting too interested in other people’s lives, but it also has to do with misogyny, both how the male characters view the women and Lurleen’s own internalized misogyny against Anne, whose only crime is being a “sorry-looking bitch.” She wonders how such an “empty” person could have such a stud muffin in her bed on a regular basis, as opposed to Lurleen’s bed. Because she obviously deserves him more, right? And yet she also wonders, given Anne’s own blandness, “Could a man want a woman to be nothing? Just a space to fill? Lurleen had known plenty of guys who liked their women dumb—it made them feel better—but anyway, Anne didn’t seem dumb, just empty.” Is wanting a woman to be “just a space to fill” at the core of misogyny? Is that what it comes down to? Maybe it’s as simple as that. Maybe Anne is with this mystery man because she’s such easy pray. Lurleen’s about to find out.
There Be Spoilers Here
Cosmic horror is ultimately about the terror of discovering something you shouldn’t have—of fucking around and finding out. Lurleen fucks around and she finds out. In a way the conclusion is totally predictable; if anything it’s a release after the building tension and the escalating of Lurleen’s creepy behavior. We know that at some point this story has to enter SFF territory at some point, and so it does on the final page. During one of their bouts Anne and her boyfriend suddenly stop, seemingly mid-thrust, which concerns Lurleen enough that she rushes over next door to see what’s going on. What she encounters is hard to describe, and there’s a certain degree of ambiguity in the situation. “His body beautiful, and huge, not like a man’s, but so real it seemed to suck up all the space in the room, big elementary muscles, and he was using them all.” Anne’s back is bent at an unnatural angle and some liquid “like spoiled black jelly” is leaking from her mouth. Is she dead? Is fucking what the two had actually been doing this whole time? How long has this been going on? We never learn, and neither will Lurleen, maybe. The creature takes notice of her, and the story ends before we find out what becomes of either of them. We do know that Lurleen has just stepped over a line she shouldn’t crossed, and that she has gained the notice of something whose attention you don’t really want. I do have to wonder if maybe Koja had taken inspiration from Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart, or Hellraiser, in making the “angel” of the story a supreme sadist—a supernatural creature whose definition of pleasure includes immense pain. Maybe it was an angel, long ago, but it had gone bad.
(Cover by McKenna. Worlds of Tomorrow, February 1964.)
Who Goes There?
From about 1960 to the mid-’80s, R. A. Lafferty stood out as one of the true mavericks of the field, having a style that would be nigh-impossible to emulate. He has a reputation as something of a writer’s writer, not helped by many vocal Lafferty fans being writers themselves. It’s not that Lafferty was a poet (although he did have a capacity for poetry, unlike most SFF writers) or a mean wordsmith, but that nobody else wrote quite like him at the time. He got lumped in with the New Wavers, even appearing in Dangerous Visions, which in hindsight was a bit odd, given a) he was a good generation older than the New Wavers, and b) he was an outspoken conservative in what was considered a generally left-leaning movement. I don’t consider myself a Lafferty fan, because I tend to find his quirkiness and old-school Catholicism a bit stifling. It came as a bit of a shock to me, then, that I quite liked today’s story, which is an early and somewhat obscure Lafferty tale. “The Transcendent Tigers” predates the New Wave by a couple years, but it’s one of those stories that anticipates the movement. It’s also a darkly funny and pessimistic story, even for Lafferty.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the February 1964 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, which is on Internet Archive. It was reprinted in Young Demons (ed. Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia) and the Lafferty collections Strange Doings and The Man with the Speckled Eyes. It also appeared on Sci Fiction, which you can read free of charge with the power of the Wayback machine. Surprised this one hasn’t been reprinted more often.
Enhancing Image
Carnadine is a little girl who gets four presents for her birthday: a white rubber ball that’s hollow inside, a green plastic frog, a red cap, and a wire puzzle. “She immediately tore the plastic frog apart, considering it a child’s toy. So much for that.” As for the other gifts, however, she makes good use of them—indeed better use than her parents had expected. When she wears the red cap she can turn the rubber ball inside out without tearing it and is able to solve the wire puzzle—the problem being that both of these things should be physically impossible. While most of the gifts are from her parents and friends of the family, nobody knows who got Carnadine the red cap, which should tell you immediately that something malicious is brewing. Carnadine is only nominally the protagonist of the story: for one she’s a sociopath (as is typical of young children), but also much of the story doesn’t focus on her. Lafferty breaks a few rules when it comes to writing short stories, just on a regular basis, but here he does it especially effectively. The third-person narrator strays from Carnadine’s story to give us a kind of bird’s-eye view of strange things happening around the world, including speculation on a new “Power” that could make or break humanity. Lafferty gives this otherwise absurd narrative a sense of genuine speculation by interspersing Carnadine’s story with passages from fictional academic journals and news sources, almost like what John Brunner would do in Stand on Zanzibar, only on a micro scale. We do eventually get an explanation for the red cap, but by then it’ll be too late—for the characters.
Meanwhile, Carnadine has taken to “sharing the wealth” a bit and has decided to found a club, the Bengal Tigers, a club so exclusive that at first she’s the only member. “It had only one full member, herself, and three contingent or defective members, her little brother Eustace, Fatty Frost, and Peewee Horn. Children all three of them, the oldest not within three months of her age.” Nobody knows about the Bengal Tigers, but pretty soon people are gonna feel the effects of the kids sharing their red cap. This strange red cap apparently grants one ESP, along with heightened intelligence, which in the case of Carnadine turns her from someone who was already a brat into a super-brat. Even in 1964 “The Transcendent Tigers” would’ve been another in a long line of stories about kids with ESP, although typically these kids would discover a sense of heroism along with their psychic powers. Carnadine does not. On paper this is a very dark story, but it’s lightened by Lafferty’s sense of humor and especially how quippy the narrator is. Humor usually benefits from brevity, so it helps that Lafferty packs a fair amount into a short space it’s still that: a short space. Scenes go by quickly, we jump back and forth between Carnadine and the aforementioned bird’s-eye view, and while in the past I’ve found Lafferty’s prose a bit too labyrinthine that’s not an issue here, his style here being much punchier and to the point than what I would say is the norm for him. Despite “The Transcendent Tigers” only being ten pages long I chuckled several times during it, which I have to admit is unusual in my experiences with Lafferty; but also that goes to show its effectiveness as a comedy, albeit a pretty morbid one. By the end you’ll wish Carnadine would fall off a cliff.
This is also an example of liking a work of art while at the same time disagreeing with the artist’s politics as expressed in their art, something I wish more people were capable of doing! I said before that Lafferty was an old-fashioned Catholic, even for the time, and while Christianity never comes up in the story I do think Lafferty is making an argument that falls in line with his conservatism. I have a bit of a hypothesis about what separates right-wing Christianity from left-wing Christianity, and it has to do with who can be saved: right-wing Christians believe that maybe individuals can see the gates of Heaven, but not groups, whereas left-wing Christians believe humanity as a cluster of groups deserves to be saved. It basically has to do with optimism vs. pessimism, and I do think Lafferty was a pessimist—only that his sense of humor tended to soften what I think was a pretty dim view of humanity. Throughout “The Transcendent Tigers” there’s speculation from intellectuals about an as-yet-undiscovered power which could blow even nuclear power out of the water, sheerly from its capacity to allow man to change his very environment without the use of industry. A single man could literally move mountains with this hypothetical power, and these intellectuals wonder if humanity would be ready for such a thing, should it come along. Lafferty argues we’re not, and that if we were to encounter such a power we either wouldn’t know what to do with it or use it for bad ends as soon as possible. The Bengal Tigers have such a power, and it doesn’t take them long to start using it for very bad ends.
There Be Spoilers Here
On a planet “very far out,” a race of energy beings (Is it just me or was this beyond-matter kind of alien race really popular around the time of the original Star Trek series?) discusses having found a valid candidate on Earth for a way to manifest immense power in the form of a red cap. One of the aliens says he managed to find only one candidate on the whole planet, one who had perfect assurance, “one impervious to doubt of any kind and totally impervious to self-doubt.” That person was Carnadine. As the other alien in the conversation point out, however, the candidate didn’t need only perfect assurance, but other qualities, although we’re not really told what those other qualities are. Carnadine is perfectly self-assured because there’s nothing more egotistical than a child, but she also totally lacks empathy and self-restraint, which are important qualities if one wants to be a functional human being in our society! Or at least those should be important qualities; turns out the most financially success tend to lack empathy at the very least. So the test with the red cap looks to be a loss on Earth, but as one of the aliens points out, worst case scenario humanity destroys itself and the virus of the red cap will have quarantined itself.
And it does.
In the course of ten pages we go from a young girl getting a strange gift to her literally destroying cities with said gift. The body count is immeasurable. To say a lot of people get killed would be an understatement. Carnadine and the other members of the “club” use a map of the US to stick needles on cities, like voodoo on a mass scale, New Orleans, Baltimore, San Antonio (“There were some of us who liked that place and wished that it could have been spared.”), and so on down the line. The situation escalates so much in such a short space that it becomes funny in a fucked-up way, having just the right cadence for a dark joke. Had Lafferty written this as a serious story (although I do think he’s trying to make a serious point with it, which is not the same thing) it would surely be one of the bleakest SF short stories of the ’60s. But thankfully it’s not serious.
A Step Farther Out
Sorry for another short review (by my standards), but then this is a concise story, and a very nicely constructed one at that. Lafferty has surprised me a couple times and this is one of them. When to authors I’m not personally fond of I’m always (maybe not “always,” I do have limits, but you know what I mean) up for giving them another chance. I mean for fuck’s sake I’ve read more than one Piers Anthony novel and I’m looking to read another one soon. Lafferty is a much better writer than Anthony, even if he can be too much for me, so we’ll be seeing him here again eventually—so in like, a year, maybe two years depending.
(Cover by Lawrence. Famous Fantastic Mysteries, March 1944.)
Who Goes There?
One of the most beloved Christian apologists of his era, G. K. Chesterton came to prominence in the Edwardian era as a kind of jack of all trades when it came to writing, being a prolific essayist, poet, and short story writer. His Father Brown mysteries were pretty popular during Chesterton’s life and remain very much in print. (Curiously Chesterton came up with his Catholic priest detective character long before he himself converted to Catholicism.) His religious treatises Heretics and Orthodoxy were partly responses to avowed atheists of the era, such as George Bernard Shaw (Chesterton and Shaw were good friends, for the record), and partly to help those who considered themselves defenders of the faith in what was becoming a more secular England. You don’t have to be Catholic, or even Christian (as indeed I’m not), to enjoy Chesterton’s writing, since he tended to be very funny, and had kind of an Oscar Wilde-esque penchant for zingers. He’s a much finer prose stylist than H. G. Wells, his close contemporary, friend, and in some ways his foil. He also wrote his fair share of fantasy, including what is perhaps his single most famous work, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, one of the great novels of the 20th century.
Of course, how The Man Who Was Thursday counts as fantasy can be a point of contention with people, to the point where folks in the Famous Fantastic Mysteries letters column were wondering if it might even qualify as fantastic enough—although they enjoyed the novel as a whole. 1908 would be a bit of an annus mirabilis for Chesterton, as it saw the publications of both The Man Who Was Thursday and Orthodoxy, and despite being on its face an espionage novel (an early example of that genre) The Man Who Was Thursday might be as concerned with Christianity as Chesterton’s religious tracts. This is a reread for me, although I have to admit I mostly just stuck to the complete text rather than its FFM publication. I said in an earlier post that the novel’s FFM printing seems to be unabridged, but doing a side-by-side comparison between the Project Gutenberg text and FFM version for random passages show that the novel has been subtly abridged, from about 57,000 words to maybe 55,000—a difference the casual reader might not notice. Chapters and scenes remain intact, but sentences and even parts of sentences are occasionally tossed out the window, I have to assume for length but also for little flourishes that the editor (Mary Gnaedinger) might’ve considered a little too verbose.
Placing Coordinates
First published in 1908 and reprinted in the March 1944 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, which for some reason is not on Internet Archive. It is on Luminist at least, so there’s that. I will say, however, that aside from the novelty of Lawrence’s interiors (which are quite good) and a slightly altered text, I would simply read it on Project Gutenberg, it being in the public domain and all. Paperback copies are also not hard to find in the wild, this being a fairly well-known classic novel.
Enhancing Image
The Man Who Was Thursday is a masterpiece, and when it comes to novels as fine and yet weird as this one the question we have to ask ourselves is not “How did he do it?” but rather “How did he get away with it?” How did Chesterton get away with writing this? It’s what we would now call trippy, there’s certainly a hallucinatory effect that intensifies as the novel progresses; but it’s also a deeply Christian and at the same time political novel. Not only is anarchism mentioned but it’s the political ideology that takes center stage, at a time when anarchism in the US and England was gaining some very bad mainstream press, most infamously (at least for Americans) with Leon Czolgosz assassinating William McKinley in 1901. This novel was written in the 1900s, and presumably is set in that decade, what with there being “motor-cars” that predate the Ford Model T. So Chesterton introduces us to Saffron Park, a London suburb. These are not, however, the fog- and mud-covered streets of London as described at the beginning of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House; instead it’s a whimsical and implicitly fantastic introduction that hints at the madness to come. We’re introduced to Gabriel Syme, not as you would normally describe the protagonist in a narrative, but like the subjective viewpoint in a lucid dream—an angle Chesterton is going for quite deliberately. Between the novel’s subtitle and this opening passage about the people of Saffron Park it’s clear, at least with hindsight, that Chesterton is setting us up for something, only we’re not given to thinking anything is amiss at first. Not even Syme suspects what he’s in for, poor bastard. I could quote the whole passage, but I won’t.
We meet Syme and his friend/rival Lucian Gregory, who considers himself not only an earnest poet but a genuien anarchist—possibly the realest. Syme claims Gregory is full of shit, and so Gregory takes him on a journey to prove that he is, indeed, the realest. Gregory is quite the character, and I’m gonna frontload this review with discussion of him since once we get through the first few chapters we won’t see him again until the very end of the novel. It isn’t apparent at first, but Gregory will serve a major symbolic purpose, on top of being reponsible for kicking off the plot, being a tenacious red-haired man, someone who considers himself both a genuine creator (a poet, or an artist) and a genuine destroyer (anarchist) “a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.” He is contrasted with his sister Rosamond, who similarly has fiery red hair but whose demeanor is much kinder; she’s a minor character, and like Gregory she’s gonna be absent for most of the novel, but we’ll eventually get back to her. Indeed we have no choice but to remember Rosamond, as she will be the only female character of any importance. I said this is a great novel, I didn’t say it would be all that egalitarian. As for Syme and Gregory, whom Chesterton calls at one point “these two fantastics” (these are not realistic characters, or even actors on a stage, but water-colored figures in a fairy tale), the two take a trip to what turns out to be the entrance to a secret lair, with a password and everything. The password in question is “Mr. Joseph Chamberlain,” which is funny considering Gregory and other anarchists would have to recite the name of a notorious conservative politician of the time.
Political humor. Tehe.
Before we continue with the plot, I wanna stop for a moment to illustrate how the FFM printing occasionally removes sentences or sentence fragments, seemingly to achieve a punchier effect in places where Chesterton is being verbose, such that these passages would be considered the least necessary. Readers wouldn’t have missed out on much, but what they did miss would’ve often been little juicy nuggets of prose. Take this passage for example, in which Syme and Gregory are traversing the secret passage which leads to the Council’s hideout. I’ve bracketed the section which the FFM printing excludes:
They passed through several such passages, and came out at last into a queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in shape, but presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the appearance of a scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or pistols in this apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more dubious and dreadful shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or the eggs of iron birds. They were bombs[, and the very room itself seemed like the inside of a bomb. Syme knocked his cigar ash off against the wall, and went in.]
Sure, we don’t need to know that last fragment, as it doesn’t further the plot or action, but it sounds better than simply “They were bombs.” Anyway, Gregory is convinced he’s gonna be the new Thursday in the Council of the Days, a league of European anarchists, the best and most fiendish the movement has to offer. Each member of the Council takes on an alias after a day of the week, and the previous Thursday died recently. There’s gonna be a vote tonight. Syme and Gregory have each sworn a secret to each other, which each party is to keep to himself—a tragic development for Gregory, given Syme’s secret is that he’s actually an undercover cop. Gregory just led a cop into a den of anarchists. What a dumbass. But all is not lost, as Syme is not only here by himself, unable to call for backup, but he’s also sworn that he’d keep the hideout a secret. Since these men are English, their word turns out to be good enough. The Man Who Was Thursday is a uniquely British novel in several ways, not the least of them being that if this were an American story Syme wouldn’t give a fuck about keeping a secret with a man who evidently sees him as an adversary once he reveals his true identity. To make matters worse, while Gregory is poised to become the new Thursday, Syme comes in with an improvised speech that blows Gregory’s out of the water, and the despite the fact that surely nobody at the meeting would have seen Syme before he wins the vote and becomes the new Thursday. More or less on a whim, it sseems. Gregory is not happy about this, and it’s hard to blame him considering once Syme becomes Thursday Gregory will vanish from the narrative until the end.
Syme is the main character, so let’s talk about him. Syme is not your conventional hero, or even much of a heroic figure. I’m not just saying this because he’s a cop. Having descended from a line of eccentrics, Syme has become neurotic about his family of nonconformists and has gone in the total opposite direction—of being in favor of order to the point of lunacy. We’re treated to what I remember as being the only conventional flashback in the whole novel, in which we’re given Syme’s backstory, how he had a chance meeting with an unusually philosophically-minded policeman, and of his encounter with a mysterious man in “the dark room,” evidently not seeing the man’s face but being given the lofty job of policeman. His job thus was to go undercover and infiltrate the Council of the Days, to put a stop to the anarchist movement in England from the inside. This is a bit of an unusual scene since it breaks away from what is otherwise is a more or less linear narrative, but we do get an explanation for Syme’s strange obsession with the anarchists, not to mention we get some really good lines from the cop he talks to. A little quibble I have with this book, which I think comes close to perfect on the whole, is that the pacing does go kind of sideways. The first two chapters are a perfect setup-payoff affair, totally engrossing and with a promising of escalating tension, only for the narrative to jump backwards abruptly momentarily. I also have to admit that once Gregory leaves the novel and we’re introduced to the Council that the plot sort of funnels, or rather that there’s a snowball effect in which you have a straight shot to the climax over the course of about a hundred pages. Most of this novel can feel like one long chase sequence.
So we meet the Council, who will accompany Syme as main characters for the rest of the novel, although some members get more attention than others. It’s a bit of an ensemble effort, and Chesterton doesn’t give himself too much wordage. With how many ideas it throws at the reader The Man Who Was Thursday could’ve easily been double its length if published today, but Chesterton, being accustomed to short-length works like poems and essays, wasn’t much of a novelist, or rather he didn’t have the prolonged stamina expected of the writer who thinks themself a novelist first. Instead he hits the reader with a shotgun blast of symbols and characters. None of the members of the Council is very developed, individually, but they prove to be greater than the sum of their parts. There is, of course, Sunday, the head of the Council, an almost impossibly large man with a face that could take up the whole sky—a character not too dissimilar from Chesterton, for his physical largness but also his charima. There’s Monday, only otherwise known as the Secretary, who acts as Sunday’s right-hand man and most devoted follower, and who delivers one of the novel’s most memorable lines: “A man’s brain is a bomb.” There’s Gogol as Tuesday, a cartoonish Pole among mostly Englishmen—although it turns out that “Gogol” is, in fact, a Cockney policeman in disguise. There’s the Marquis de St. Eustache as Wednesday, a noble Frenchman who acts as if he jumped out of one of Alexandre Dumas’s novels. There’s my personal favorite, Professor de Worms as Friday, who’s so old and dicrepit that Syme wonders how he even made it to the Council meeting. Finally there’s Dr. Bull as Saturday, a young and mischievous yet enigmatic fellow whose “smoked spectacles” hide his eyes. These are basically cartoon characters, but whereas that would be considered shallow writing in realistic fiction, Chesterton uses the men’s broad-strokes characterizations for humor, as well as symbolic purposes.
Sunday outs Gogol as an undercover cop at the meeting, although despite Gogol being a cop Sunday doesn’t have him killed or anything; in what I have to admit is a confusing turn of events Sunday just… lets Gogol go free? The poor Cockney has a fall down the stairs by accident, but he’s fine, and we even see him much later in the novel safe and sound. But since Gogol is the first Council member to be outed as a cop he also gets the least time to shine; it’s a good thing, then, that his one scene where he’s the focus is pretty funny. I’m sorry, did I say “first” Council member to be outed as a cop? Well that’s because Syme and Gogol aren’t the only cops in the Council. It’s hard to say what counts as spoilers for this novel, since I’ve seen people argue that even the ending doesn’t really count as a spoiler, seeing as how the subtitle anticipates. It’s also easy to see, on a second reading, how Chesterton sets up his novel as a work of fantasy (albeit surreal rather than “high” or “low” fantasy) from the very beginning. Certainly the series of events here soon proves to be improbable, if not outright fantastic. What are the odds of there being multiple policement undercover in the Council of Days, and that these cops would be unaware of each other’s missions? Syme didn’t know who Gogol really was, and after some investigating he comes to find he didn’t know who Professor de Worms was either—not a horribly old nihilist but a relatively young actor who took on the role of a real man he once met named Professor de Worms. Wilks, the cop who has been impersonating de Worms, uses makeup and body language for the sake of a performance. Like Syme, Wilks is a man of order who has such a disdain for disorder (or, as he says, nihilism) that he comes out looking half insane for it. Chesterton seems to be saying that police and anarchist, both driven in their ideals to the point of mania, are two sides of the same coin. It goes to explain why Syme and Gregory are opposites, yet they have an affinity for each other that will come back into play at the very end.
Before we get waist-deep in the plot, or rather the prolonged chase sequence as I had mentioned, let’s talk a bit more about Chesterton’s faith and politics, and how they figure into what is a deeply religious and political novel. Chesterton is now known as a Catholic apologist, although he didn’t convert to Roman Catholicism until fairly late in life, a good 14 years after The Man Who Was Thursday was published; he was, however, already a devout Anglican who had written essays and books aimed at Christian readers, regardless of denomination. One reason I suspect this novel works with readers who may or may not share Chesterton’s faith is that while the dialogue and even character functions are laced rather strongly with Biblical meaning (Rosamond is a walking symbol of Christian grace), it’s not a work that gets stuck in the quagmire of church minutia. Just as an example, you have to admit that if you’re a secular (or even non-Catholic) fan of Gene Wolfe that his work can occasionally be stifling with its uniquely Catholic symbolism. Or to use another example, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a very good novel, but its dead give-aways as a pre-Vatican II novel meant it became dated just a few years after publications. The Man Who Was Thursday has no such issues, and while Chesterton’s both-sidesing of police and anarchists can come off a bit centrist in a way, the notion that police are not embodiments of good necessarily (Syme notes at one point, with dismay, that one of the police’s functions is to terrorize London’s working class) can actually be taken as a progressive stance. Granted, Chesterton’s framing of anarchism is unflattering (especially given Gregory’s symbolic purpose, which we’ll get to), but it could be a lot worse for 1908.
There Be Spoilers Here
Three, then four, and so on, Syme discovering that each man in the Council is an undercover cop, such that ultimately everyone in the Council (even the Secretary) who isn’t Sunday is secretly a cop—yet none of these knew any of the others were police. Each man admits to having been recruited into the service by a man in a dark room, a man none of them can identify. Each man has taken on a disguise, and each encounter has that disguise peeled back to reveal a man of nobility—if also eccentricity. Professor de Worms is shown to be a stage actor underneath his old-man makeup, the Marquis is shown to not be quite as statuesque a man as thought since much of his bulk turns out to be padding, Dr. Bull’s eerie spectacles come off to reveal a youthful innocence, and so on. Each man is not quite what he appears to be, which is fitting considering the climax of the novel takes place at a masquerade, whose unlikelihood by this point goes unopposed given how the action has escalated into unlikelier and unlikelier territory. I called much of this novel a chase sequence, but it could also be likened to tumbling down a rabbit hole. The Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland comparison is apt, and it’s one Chesterton all but explicitly makes.
I said I would refrain from quoting whole passages, indeed a hard task with such a quotable novel, but I’ll make an exception with perhaps the finest of Sunday’s monologues—or at least I feel justified in quoting most of it here. It’s a badass and memorable passage, not least because of its surrealism. Up to this point Sunday has come off as a larger-than-life figure, but as the novel approaches its final stretch it’s become clear that Sunday is no ordinary man—indeed that he might not be strictly human. What is Sunday, then? A common interpretation is that Sunday is God, although it must be said that if he’s meant to be God then he is not the merciful father figure of the gospels, but the somewhat conniving God who makes a bet with Satan over whether Job will give up his faith. Sunday is not an anarchist, but then he’s also not a cop; rather he seems to be playing both sides against each other, order against disorder, to see who will come out on top. In this light it’s hard to call him a villain, but then he’s certainly not heroic. Maybe he’s beyond human conception of good and evil?
Anyway, here it is:
“You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money, and I will now.”
Right before taking off in a hot air balloon (yes, there’s a chase involving a hot air balloon) Sunday finishes with perhaps the biggest revelation in the novel other than the ending: “I am the man in the dark room, who made you all policemen.” After the chase with the hot air balloon, plus another chase involving Sunday on an escaped elephant, the men of the Council finally meet their tormenter face-to-face at a masquerade, one in which each of the men has been given a suit whose design corresponds with a day of the creation in Genesis. (These colorful outfits are lovingly depicted on the FFM cover, by the way, with Syme and company on a chess board, with massive hands [presumably Sunday’s] manipulating them.) Then there’s Sunday, and most surprisingly (for Syme anyway) there’s Gregory, who reappears quite literally in these last few pages. If Monday through Saturday are days of the creation and Sunday is God, then Gregory, the one genuine anarchist, is shown to be analogous to Satan. (Remember the red hair?) The very fabric of reality seems to be tearing itself apart at this point, the action becoming so heightened that the novel threatens to break through some kind of wall, from the unlikely into the impossible.
Then Syme wakes up.
The subtitle, A Nightmare, turns out to be quite literal. Of course, if this novel is supposed to be a nightmare then it’s a weirdly funny one—not horror but surreal and maybe discomforting comedy. The “it was all a dream” ending tends to be disparaged, and for good reason, a major exception being the ending of this novel, which is perhaps the most befuddling part of the whole thing. Something I wanna point out is that to my recollection The Man Who Was Thursday has only one scene break, which happens at the very end, as Syme suddenly wakes up and finds that he’s been walking and in the middle of a conversation with Gregory—only this doesn’t seem to be the Gregory of the dream. The meaning behind this one scene break, which divides the nightmare from reality, is lost in the FFM printing, wherein for some reason the editors thought it necessary to provide more conventional scene breaks. This ending is very strange, not least because of how brief it is (only half a magazine page) and how there isn’t any dialogue here. It’s ambiguous how different Syme and Gregory are from their dream counterparts, but at the very least they’re good friends in the real world. We had been reading a fantasy novel this whole time, but we didn’t know it, and neither did Our Hero™. Despite the experience of having had such a vivid dream, and somehow in the middle of a conversation, Syme feels awoken in more ways than one, as if suddenly made aware of the performance of a miracle, or as if “in possession of some impossible good news.” Even if the whole adventure with the Council of Days didn’t happen in the real world, the Christian significance of it left its mark on Syme. We even meet Rosamond again, for the first time in over a hundred pages, that symbol of grace with the “gold-red” hair (compared with Gregory’s flaming redness) who, naturally, we see tending a garden—her little Eden.
A Step Farther Out
You could go on for a while about this novel, as despite its brevity Chesterton is playing with a few layers, not to mention that’s simply a very entertaining (and increasingly fucking wild) ride from start to finish. The Man Who Was Thursday is at once a spy novel involving a council of anarchists and also an Alice in Wonderland-esque journey backwards to the beginnings of Judeo-Christian theology. It works because even if you disagree with Chesterton’s religious views (as indeed I disagree), not to mention his not-totally-flattering depiction of anarchism, it still has the capacity to entertain and provoke thought. I’ve read it twice now and I can say it’s easily the best novel I’ve covered on this site, and was probably the best novel ever printed in Famous Fantastic Mysteries. It’s fairly accessible for an Edwardian novel, but it’s also very unusual in that it’s not a realistic novel at all. Reading The Man Who Was Thursday is like getting drunk and then taking an edible, and then an hour later some dude walks in and starts reading Bible passages aloud at you after the edible’s taken effect.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 