Pop that champagne because IT’S THE NEW YEAR, BABY! WOOOO! 2023 LET’S FUCKING GO! Not that I expect this to be a better year than last (mind you that 2022 was mostly pretty good for me), but there’s always something a little exciting and yet anxiety-inducing about turning over to a new year. It implies change, which is often scary. Last month I spent the whole time reviewing fiction by Fritz Leiber, one of the best to ever do it, and while it was nice to pay such a tribute, it also became exhausting. I missed the sheer variety of discovering new voices and returning to some old favorites. We actually don’t have any such favorites this month, although we do have a couple authors I’ve grown fond of in the past year or two.
Most importantly, this is the time for me to correct some mistake. For example, I’ve never read even a single word of N. K. Jemisin’s fiction, despite her impressively high status. I know, I suck for that. The thing is that Jemisin is one of those authors who likes to focus on series, and I have commitment issues; she also hasn’t appeared in the magazines too often, but I did manage to snag an early story of hers that caught my attention. We also have a short story by Hao Jingfang that I technically must’ve read, due to its inclusion in a certain anthology, but which I literally have no recollection of. Speaking of rereads and stories I don’t remember reading even though I must have, we have what is perhaps Timothy Zahn’s most famous short work—not saying much considering how his contributions to Star Wars have utterly dwarfed the rest of his output.
And of course, any reason to read more Ken Liu is a good reason.
For the serials:
The Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg. Published in Galaxy Science Fiction, April to June 1970. Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Novel. I don’t know why they got rid of the definite article for the book version. With Silverberg you could basically throw a dart as his stuff published between 1967 and 1972 and land on a classic, and I’d be surprised if The Tower of Glass isn’t one of those. Incidentally Silverberg turns 88 this month, and unless he pulls a Betty White we’ll be celebrating his birthday, for a man who’s been in the game seven goddamn decades.
The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard. Published in Weird Tales, September to November 1934. Howard, unlike Silverberg, sadly did not live so long; in fact he killed himself when he was only a few years older than me. But Howard wrote a truly frightening amount in his short time, and The People of the Black Circle is one of the longest “official” entries in the Conan series. That’s right, we’ll be reading some Conan the Cimmerian! Not the first hero of sword and sorcery, or even the first created by Howard, but Conan is the great codifier.
For the novellas:
“Hardfought” by Greg Bear. Published in the February 1983 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Yeah, I know, the timing of it. Never mind that Bear sadly passed away back in November, I’d actually been meaning to read his Nebula-winning novella “Hardfought” for a minute. I’ll even be reviewing another Bear story next month, just not on my own; that’ll be his Hugo- and Nebula-winning short story “Blood Music” (from the same year!) as part of Young People Read Old SFF.
“Cascade Point” by Timothy Zahn. Published in the December 1983 issue of Analog Science Fiction. So this won the Hugo for Best Novella of 1983 while Bear’s “Hardfought” won the Nebula, and the two have even been bundled together as a Tor double. Why not? I’ve also been meaning to return to this one since I admit when I read “Cascade Point” I didn’t retain much from it, which could mean the story is mid or it could mean I didn’t give it the proper amount of attention. We’ll see…
For the short stories:
“The Perfect Match” by Ken Liu. Published in the December 2012 issue of Lightspeed. Liu’s fiction is so humane, his prose is so elegant, and while he doesn’t write short stories as often as he used to (he went from being insanely prolific to be “only” moderately prolific), he’s now a bestselling and beloved novelist. His short story “Good Hunting” got adapted for one of the best Love, Death & Robots episodes and his fiction has served as the basis for the series Pantheon.
“Non-Zero Probabilities” by N. K. Jemisin. Published in the September 2009 issue of Clarkesworld. Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Short Story. Jemisin has the unique honor of being the only author thus far to win the Hugo for Best Novel three years in a row with her Broken Earth trilogy. Her standing has only escalated in the past decade and she rivals Ken Liu as a generation-defining author. I’ve never read any Jemisin past some of her blog. Heresy, I know, but we’re about to fix that!
“Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang. Published in the January-February 2015 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Hugo winner for Best Novelette. I know I must’ve read this before, as part of Invisible Planets (courtsey of Ken Liu), but I literally remember nothing about it. Let’s see if the forgetfulness was warranted. Also has the honor of being the first reprint to be covered on my blog, on account of it first being published in Chinese, but we’ll be looking at its first English publication.
I’m not in favor of quotas, generally speaking; they make me feel bad. I feel like I shouldn’t be obligated to cover this much material by these demographics in a year, but at the same time the name of the game is to discover potential gold, both old and new, from many different walks of life. So I’m not including Liu, Jemisin, and Jingfang for the sake of imaginary brownie points—I’m doing it because I feel I owe it to myself to broaden my horizons and not only explore works by someone I already like (Liu) but to discover a new potential favorite (Jemisin). SFF, being speculative by its nature, should be about venturing out to new territories and sailing through uncharted waters. You can’t hang on to the past forever.
We have a diverse set of authors here, though. We have some sword and sorcery with Howard, some New Wave SF with Silverberg, some classic hard SF with Bear and Zahn, and voices from the current generation with the short stories. I’m looking forward to it.
Nowadays we’re used to genre authors hopping across the border, so to speak, or even just mixing several genres together in a stew; you have “SF” authors writing fantasy with ease and vice versa. But 70 years ago there was not much cross-pollination, mostly due to there not being much of a market for fantasy then. Fritz Leiber started as one of the best fantasists of his generation, contributing regularly to Weird Tales and Unknown in the late ’30s and ’40s, but the SF magazine market started bubbling and by 1950 it became prudent to turn to writing SF. Some authors did not make the transition, but Leiber was one of those who became a good science-fictionist due to market forces; he had written some SF prior to 1950, but his material from this second phase of his career was decidedly stronger than what came before. It seemed only natural that he would be made Guest of Honor at the 1951 Worldcon, given his almost rebirth as one of the best SF short story writers of the period, and this rebirth was in no small part due to the premiere of what was, at least for a time, the best SF magazine on the market.
Galaxy Science Fiction, for at least most of the ’50s, was the gold standard for magazine SF—not just short SF, but even novels which ran as serials. While not always appealing to the hard SF crowd which continued to devour Astounding and while not as strictly “literary” as F&SF, Galaxy presented a new breed of SF which was socially conscious, which commented on what were then current conditions for real people, and which was more willing to discuss topics like gender roles, the growing suburban populace, and a wave of new technology which overwhelmed people’s minds in the years following World War II. Leiber, who was always a little more cosmopolitan than his fellows, spent 1950 to 1953 delivering a string of classic short stories in the pages of Galaxy, of which “The Moon Is Green” is one.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the April 1952 issue of Galaxy, which is on the Archive. Oddly it has not been reprinted that often, but there are options. There’s The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1953, edited by Everett F. Bleller and T. E. Dikty, which has a couple alternate titles, such as The Best Science Fiction Stories: Fourth Series. We also have The Great SF Stories #14, covering fiction published in 1952, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. If you’re looking for more of a collector’s item then there’s The Leiber chronicles: Fifty Years of Fritz Leiber from Dark Harvest, although I’m not sure how pricey it would be to get online.
Most curiously this is the first story I’ve covered for my blog which got adapted for the legendary radio program X Minus One, which in the ’50s was probably the best introduction to short SF of the period. That episode is available on both the Archive and YouTube, although I recommend only listening to it after reading the story, since… well, it doesn’t entirely do justice to Leiber’s writing. It’s a bit less poetic and a bit more overblown is what I’m saying, along with the performances being uneven.
Enhancing Image
Effie and her husband Hank live in an apartment, which is normal; what’s not so normal is that this apartment is one of the few constructed on the surface. Most of what is left of humanity lives underground, but Effie and Hank live a privileged existence by virtue of Hank’s connections with the Central Committee—what is left of the government—while Effie is supposed to be fertile, although she and Hank have been unable to have a child all these years. The obvious implication is that Hank is impotent, but it must also be said that the world had gone to SHIT a good deal prior to the story’s beginning. The years following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saw a nigh-endless wave of SF about the dangers of nuclear weapons, and “The Moon Is Green” is not even Leiber’s first go at the subject.
What makes “The Moon Is Green” different from a lot of other nuclear catastrophe stories of the period, especially ones prior to the coming of Galaxy, is that it’s more a domestic drama than an outright nuclear catastrophe story. Another thing that was unusual (for the time, anyway) is that we get a heroine in Effie, and unlike most female characters from this period in SF she’s not fickle or overly reliant on the men in her life, but someone with thoughts and dreams of her own. I know, totally radical. Mind you that by 1952 we had started to see an influx of women in the field, and for the first time it could be said that SF had a place for women among its many voices—though the ratio of men to women was still very much lopsided. Still, authors like Leiber dabbling earnestly in writing female protagonists was a sign of some profound changes.
Anyway, despite the fact that objectively life is pretty good for her (or at least it could be a whole lot worse), Effie is not satisfied with her life as essentially a first-generation Morlock. “A mole’s existence, without beauty or tenderness, but with fear and guilt as constant companions. Never to see the Sun, to walk among the trees—or even know if there were still trees.” She pines for pastoralism, for the simple pleasures of taking a stroll through the forest and gazing up at a full brightly lit moon during a clear night. Both Effie and the narration specifically describe her hunger as a hunger for beauty, which takes on almost a religious zeal; that she hopes to transcend her semi-buried existence will lead to tragedy. The problem is that she can’t go outside because the outside world is shrouded in radioactive dust, which will kill most things and what it doesn’t kill it would presumably make stranger.
So what to do? She’s unhappy but she can’t go anywhere, and at this point she doesn’t even like staying with her husband, whom she clearly sees as having become overly controlling and bureaucratic. Hank is not exactly a villain, but he’s pretty far from what we would call a model husband; he almost cares more about his relationship with the Central Committee than with his wife, and while his fears about death by radiation are not unjustified (what stops him from being a villain), he has become one of those no-fun-allowed people who has to do everything by the book. What separates the two, and what allows the real drama of the story to happen, is that Hank demands that Effie go with him to a Committe meeting, where he hopes to get his foot in the door as a small-time bureaucrat, but Effie refuses on the grounds that she has Covid she’s too sick to go. Relauctantly Hank leaves her behind, on the condition that she not do any funny business like touching the lead shutters of their apartment, which can carry radiation.
I wonder how long she’ll behave herself?
A more important question that will become more pronounced when we get to spoilers is: What is more important to life, its longevity or its quality? Because the two are not always the same. The main conceit of Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To…, maybe the thorniest of all ’70s SF novels, is that life can only mean so much when there’s minimal pleasure to be taken from it. What’s the point of continuing to live after the bombs have gone off if you’re to become a burrower for the rest of your years? If the best you can hope for is that your children’s children will be able to enjoy what you could not (assuming there’s anything left) once there’s been enough radiation decay. You might have a long-term plan, but what do you do in the short term? Even the act of love-making might lose its luster.
In post-nuclear stories there’s a variety of possible obstacles for the characters, and you’d know this regardless of whether you’re a connoisseur of the subgenre or if you just play a lot of Fallout. In A Canticle for Leibowitz the biggest threat is the death of human knowledge; in The Road the biggest threat is the total loss of human empathy, never mind that the race is ultimately fucked in that novel and there’s no going back; in “The Moon Is Green” the biggest threat is the fact that regardless of who’s left, life underground or just barely above ground is quite shitty. There’s government, there’s a semblance of order, and some human culture remains, but at least in Effie’s mind there is no beauty left—only the machinery of human endeavor. Which is what makes what happens next tragic and yet vaguely hopeful.
There Be Spoilers Here
While Hank is out, Effie gets a visitor—from outside. How? Surely everyone who didn’t go underground died or turned rabid; but Patrick is not like most people. (He also sounds like a damn leprechaun in the X Minus One adaptation for some reason.) Somehow he and his cat have been able to survive in the outdoors this whole time, with Patrick himself seemingly bereft of mutations. Tempted by the prospect of life outside of her burrow, and the fact that Patrick is a charming enough fellow, Effie not only touches the shutters but opens her apartment window to meet Patrick face to face, exposing herself to the radioactive dust of the outside world. Why would she do this? Consider that it seems to be standard practice for the underground people to have Geiger Counters on them, to test for radiation easily, so paranoid are they about what’s left of civilization succumbing to its own failings. Yet Patrick claims that actually the radiation has decayed much faster than expected, and that actually it’s all fucking sunshine and rainbows outside civilization’s metal coffin.
Now, a few question. Why do these buildings on the surface have windows? Why are they comprised of materials which could transmit radiation? How come Effie and Hank didn’t divorce after failing to produce a child after several years? The last question is sort of answered by Hank eventually coming back and accusing of Effie having an affair with a colleague of his (Effie claims at one point to be pregnant, but from how I read it I took her as lying about it). I’m also not sure what Patrick would’ve lived off of all this time, given how much animal and even plant life would’ve died off in the interim, although given what he reveals later some radioactive sunflower seeds would probably not hurt him. Doesn’t quite explain the cat, but in typical ’50s post-nuclear fashion we just take mutated animals for granted. You’d think with how well-documented the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were that there would be more stories from this period about the actual effects of radiation on organic matter.
When Hank returned unexpectedly, however, the truth about Patrick comes out via a waving of the Geiger Counter. Contrary to what Patrick had said, the outside world was still smothered in radioactive dust that would be fatal to most living things, and in fact Patrick HIMSELF makes the Geiger Counter go off the damn charts. Appartently Patrick puts on an act in order to get some action with women who have locked themselves off from the outside, which is… actually even more horrifying than it sounds at first. Like how many times has he done this? How many people have died because of his need for companionship? Not that he makes a secret of being a harbinger of death once he’s outed, being “Rappacini’s [sic] child, brought up to date,” in reference to the famous Nathaniel Hawthorne short story. Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is one of the great 19th century SF stories (worthy of a future blog entry, I’d say), about a mad scientist’s daughter who, in being experimented on and living alongside poisonous plants, has become immune to the poison at the cost of now being poisonous herself.
The twist here is that while Patrick thinks himself a modern incarnation of that tragic woman, it is really Effie who takes after Rappaccini’s daughter, being the victim of her own circumstances, torn and ultinately brought down by the two most important men in her life. Leiber takes what was already potentially a feminist narrative (Hawthorne’s sympathies for the women of his time being prescient, all things considered) and alters the perspective to make that feminist angle more explicit. Leiber would explore the “woman’s angle” in later works such as The Big Time, albeit much quirkier in that case, but “The Moon Is Green” is a quite serious and quite effective early attempt at writing a woman’s perspective in a science-fictional context.
Having lost hope in the man who’s been with her and having been betrayed by the man who had teased her with a new way of living, Effie runs off on her own into the wasteland, for good or ill. In a lot of love triangles you would get rid of the hypotenuse by way of, say, death, or having the third wheel find someone else, but what makes “The Moon Is Green” subversive for its time is that Effie turns her back on both of the men in her life. Patrick leaves, knowing he won’t be able to bring Effie back, while Hank locks himself up again and tests himself with his Geiger Counter, his own immediate future hanging in the balance. Whether Effie dies or adapts to the wasteland is unknown, but even if she doesn’t adapt to the radiation she might think it best to die on her feet and with her lungs taking in the unclean air. All for just a slice of beauty, and a taste of freedom.
A Step Farther Out
Leiber’s short fiction from this period tends to be pretty damn solid, and “The Moon Is Green” is no exception. It could be that I’ve been reading a good number of his works in quick succession, but I’ve been noticing how many of Leiber’s stories read like plays. “The Moon Is Green” could very easily work as a one-act play: you’ve got one location, a total of three on-screen characters (four if you count the cat), and it’s not like you need fancy effects work to realize the setting or what happens in the climax. It’s very simple like that, but it also works. When I picked this one for review I knew basically nothing about it, not even it being a post-nuclear fable not entirely dissimilar to “Coming Attraction”; but whereas you could argue that that more famous story is tinged with misogyny, “The Moon Is Green” is one of Leiber’s more actively feminist efforts.
Effie is an active chaeacter with a sense of interiority, and she doesn’t want anything stereotypical like wanting to have a ton of kids or to be a good wife, but to escape from the cage of her daily life for something more freer and more beautiful. Her fate is left open, but Leiber supposes that, regardless of whether she lives or dies in the wasteland, it might be best for Effie to leave the men in her life and chase after her dream. Best of luck to her.
By 1969, Fritz Leiber had been in the game for thirty years (a long time, mind you), and yet unlike most of his contemporaries he had not started to rest on his laurels, or, even worse, embarrass himself in front of his peers. Isaac Asimov became known as a pop scientist, releasing the occasional short story but mostly spending his time on articles and science books. Robert Heinlein went silent after The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and when he returned he seemed to have lost his magic touch (imagine waiting four years for a new Heinlein novel and you get I Will Fear No Evil). Theodore Sturgeon was mostly not writing at this point, although he was gaining himself some major Trek cred and he would soon return to the magazines with fresh material. Clifford Simak was pumping out about one novel a year, but the late ’60s were not exactly peak years for him. Yet Leiber not only remained productive but played nicely with the New Wave kids, fitting in with authors a generation younger than him; even at this relatively late stage of his career he remained restless.
“Ship of Shadows” was written specially for Leiber’s F&SF tribute issue, and as should probably be expected of a special author tribute story it goes just a bit farther than the average Leiber yarn. Whereas Leiber tends to jump between SF, fantasy, and horror with his fiction, “Ship of Shadows” dabbles in all three genres, though it can ultimately be considered science fiction for reasons I’ll get to much later. On the one hand this is a perfect recipe for disaster, or at least a muddled story, but the hodgepodge of genres paid off, as it won the Hugo for Best Novella. It’s also a reread for me, but it’s been a couple years, and as it turns out I remembered even less of “Ship of Shadows” than I thought I did—which is not necessarily a mark against it!
Placing Coordinates
First published in the July 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Incidentally this is one of those old F&SF issues I actually have a physical copy of, which is cool. Being a Hugo winner, “Ship of Shadows” has been reprinted quite a few times over the years, first in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1970 (confusingly covering fiction from 1969), edited by Terry Carr and Donald Wollheim. Naturally it would also appear in The Hugo Winners, Volume Three; it was supposed to appear in the previous volume, but Isaac Asimov, by his own admission, had somehow forgotten to include it. We also have the Leiber collection Ship of Shadows, very creatively named no doubt. If you’re an avid collector then there’s Masters of Science Fiction: Fritz Leiber from Centipede Press, although I do wanna warn you that a copy of this pristine hardcover will run you in the hundreds of dollars. Sadly it looks like there aren’t any reprints in paperback or hardcover that are currently available new, but on the bright side you have a lot of second-hand options.
Enhancing Image
Spar is an elderly (or at the very least decrepit) member of Windrush, some kind of ship that may or may not be the world entire. It’s amazing that Spar is able to accomplish anything given that a) he’s half-blind, and b) he’s a raging alcoholic. Indeed we start with Spar nursing himself through a hangover, which compounds his already poor eyesight, but quickly things “improve” when he comes across a talking cat—yeah, a talking cat, and it’s not a hallucination. The cat, to be named Kim, is clearly intelligent, and while there are “witches” on the ship who have cats as their familiars, Kim seems to be acting on his own. The two bond and start a sort of business relationship, with Spar providing Kim with a home and Kim providing him a service as rat catcher. Meanwhile Spar works at the Bat Rack (I sense a Halloween theme going on here) as a bartender’s assistant; said bartender is Keeper (get it? like barkeep? but also his brother’s keeper…?), who gives Spar something to do while also trying to not have him waste away on booze.
Know how you shouldn’t get high on your own supply? Same goes for drink, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure Spar is an addict.
A few things to note about the Bat Rack and the people who frequent it. Much of the novella’s action happens in or around this bar, which gives the story a vaguely theatrical tingue, what with there being only a few locations of note. The characters also have tangled personal and professional relationships, and it might be easiest to understand them as if in the context of a film noir, and why not, the setting and the character archetypes fit the bill well enough. Spar is our nominal hero who, much like the typical film noir protagonist, is knee-deep in his vices, with Keeper as the straight man. Suzy is a barfly who has a bit of a maybe-maybe-not going on with Spar, being much less the femme fatale than the film noir protagonist single obligatory lady friend, if he even has one. There’s Kim, the humorous and callous sidekick who arguably functions as the id to Spar’s ego. Then there’s the Big Bad™ of the story (not a spoiler, trust me), Crown, who is all but said to be the local pimp, as well as a big deal at the Bat Rack.
Oh, and then there’s Doc—the sage.
Regardless of where we actually are, we’re almost certainly not on Earth; for one thing, the method of timekeeping in Windrush is different. “Workday, Loafday, Playday, Sleepday. Ten days make a terranth, twelve terranths make a sunth, twelve sunths make a starth, and so on, to the end of time,” so says Spar. There’s a four-day cycle, ten days in the equivalent of a week, and so on, although this doesn’t help with understanding the setting so much as it helps give the impression that the setting itself is not totally understandable. Not much is explained in at least the first half of “Ship of Shadows,” partly because Spar, being our POV character, doesn’t know a whole lot himself, but also partly because his ability to comprehend his surroundings is hampered by his blindness. While everything being described as a “blur” got repretitive for me, I get that there are only so many words you can use to convey the fuzziness and lack of depth of poor eyesight.
Windrush is a curious setting for what swerves between fantasy, horror, and SF, as the descriptions of the ship’s interior very much imply that the story, on the whole, falls into that last genre. What complicates matters is that aside from the “normal” people aboard Windrush, there are also apparently witches, vampires, and even zombies, although tellingly these creatures of the night are not confronted directly (unless I’m missing something); for example we hear a good deal about witches, but we never see a witch or see witchcraft performed. The closest we get to witchcraft is actually medical science, plain and simple, and nobody aside from Doc understands how modern (or I guess it’d be considered futuristic) medicine works. Doc, whom Spar comes to with hopes of restoring his eyesight and even giving him a new pair of teeth, is the real hero of the story if anything, but since he’s a supporting character we’re not always sure what he’s up to.
Doc, who is maybe not the oldest (although he would be up there) but certainly the wisest of the cast, is also seemingly the only one aware that there was life prior to the current dynamic in Windrush. More than anything he represents the standards of our civilization, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence either that Doc, being the only truly civilized man on a ship full of barbarians, has a little black bag that amounts to the story’s MacGuffin. Little black bag? A doctor’s bag that can do anything? Does this sound a little but like the equally sought-after MacGuffin of C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag”? Similarly there’s a tinge of pessimism about humanity’s future, and how Doc’s equipment is the ony thing keeping what’s left of humanity from teetering off a cliff. Take Doc’s response to Spar’s request for new eyes and teeth, which is as bitter as it is solemn:
After what seemed a long while, Doc said in a dreamy, sorrowful voice, “In the Old Days, that would have been easy. They’d perfected eye transplants. They could regenerate cranial nerves, and sometimes restore scanning power to an injured cerebrum. While transplanting tooth buds from a stillborn was intern’s play. But now… Oh, I might be able to do what you ask in an uncomfortable, antique, inorganic fashion, but…” He broke off on a note that spoke of the misery of life and the uselessness of all effort.
Leiber was not only aware of Kornbluth but was close contemporaries with him, although the two have starkly different worldviews. Doc’s little black bag, and generally the narrative of how it will take a select few “smart” people to prevent humanity from blowing itself up, are definitely in keeping with Kornbluth’s writing, but let’s not kid ourselves; this is merely paying homage to a fellow great writer, rather than pastiche. For the most part “Ship of Shadows” reads like Leiber—not exactly classic Leiber, as it is grimier and bloodier than his early ’50s standouts, but it has the theatrics, the inventiveness, and the sense of wit one can expect from him. Had Kornbluth not already been dead for a whole decade he may have written a New Wave piece not too dissimilar from “Ship of Shadows.” Just beware that this is Leiber in an unusually dark vein (though not without a snarky sense of humor) by his standards.
F&SF used to (I guess they still do it, but we’ve only gotten one of these since 2002) dedicate special issues to authors deemed important in the field, especially authors who have contributed immensely to F&SF, with Leiber of course being one of the authors to receive this treatment. The tribute story, written specially for the issue, tends to be a novella, though not always, and typically you can expect the author indulge in as many of their fetishes (in the non-sexual meaning of the word) as possible while also, ideally, delivering a fine read. Eventually I’ll review Poul Anderson’s “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” which also won a Hugo, and that novella is, for good or ill depending on your biases, very Anderson-y; similarly “Ship of Shadows” is up there with the most Leiber-y of works, and as a result of that it’s a bit muddled but also highly entertaining. It also has the advantage of being, like much of Leiber’s best work, pretty compact all things considered; it’s a novella, sure, but only maybe 20,000 words in length, and Leiber gets a lot of mileage by the gallon with this one.
There Be Spoilers Here
The big twist of “Ship of Shadows” is that it’s a generation ship story. Now, that may sound rather niche, but the generation ship story was, at least for a time, a pretty crowded subgenre (if it can even be called a subgenre) of SF. If you’ve read, say, Heinlein’s “Universe” or Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop then you know there are certain tropes to expect here. The thing about generation ships is that they sound cool on paper but realistically would run into a number of problems that are likely to jeopardize the whole operation, of which I would say the big three are: 1. the passengers or the crew commit mutiny and overthrow the ones in charge, 2. enough time passes that, depending on the sophistication of the ship’s design, the passengers might even forget that they’re on a spaceship, and 3. some illness or virus breaks out that, once it spreads, nobody on the ship is able to stop it, so we’d be looking at death or something not quite as bad. “Ship of Shadows” manages to tick all three boxes, because Leiber is going one step beyond with this one.
Whatever crew seems to be left on Windrush is clearly in charge of shit anymore, I suspect because they’ve tried to isolate themselves from the mostly ill passengers. Speaking of which, the passengers have almost entirely succumbed to the Lethean rickettsia, known colloquially as Styx ricks, with Doc the only person onboard who has the equipment and the know-how to treat symptoms; why then Doc and Keeper, who are demonstrably more rational, should give the reigns to Spar at the end is beyond me, but apparently it’s due to Spar’s position as the closest the drama has to an innocent soul. Awkward and unearned sex scene (well, implied sex scene) with Suzy aside, of course.
The novella’s climax is pretty over the top, almost reaching the levels of Titus Andronicus with how gruesome it is, although it must be said it lacks the camp factor of that infamous play. Not only are Crown and Ensign Drake disposed of in bloody fashion, but Suzy, who up to this point has been the only sympathetic female character of any substance, gets it maybe the bloodiest of all; there’s being fridged, and then there’s being fed unceremoniously into a meat grinder. Given Leiber’s history of quasi-pacifism, and how violence is often treated in his fiction (i.e., as something to be avoided), the brutality of “Ship of Shadows” further reinforces this notion that Leiber is pulling out all the stops—for both good and bad. Mostly good, but I was reminded rather uncomfortably that “Ship of Shadows” is one of those Leiber stories where he unintentionally comes off as much more of a woman hater than he really was.
Qualms aside, the ending is still one of those classic eureka moments, typical yes but often satisfying in a generation ship story where the characters realize that the universe is unfathomably bigger than their metal coffin. No wonder then that the twist is what I remembered more than anything (aside from Kim and the generally ghoulish atmosphere) from my first reading. Leiber loves his Halloween shit and he knows how to do the monster mash. That the ghoulish apperitions seemingly haunting Windrush are human drug addicts is maybe a little anticlimactic, but as another entry in Leiber’s continuing interest in the nature of addiction (especially alcoholism, which the man himself was prone to) it makes sense allegorically.
A Step Farther Out
I have to admit I’m a sucker for stories set on ships. Not a fan of actually being on ships, but stories about ships? Aw hell yeah. No wonder I like Melville and Conrad. A ship is the perfect setting to invoke paranoia, loneliness, nightmarish visions, a sense of isolation, all this negative shit that would be bad for the characters but good for us as readers. “Ship of Shadows” starts out as murky, intentionally so what with Spar’s eyesight, almost masquerading as fantasy before revealing itself to be SF in the second half, unfortunately sort of petering out at the very end. What makes “Ship of Shadows” so memorable is that while it would not be surprising if someone in their thirties wrote it, it’s a good deal more surprising that Leiber was pushing sixty at the time. There’s a bit of New Wave, a bit of satirical fantasy in the Unknown tradition, and a bit of that trademark Leiber quirkiness; the only thing it’s seriously missing is his thing for chess. It’s also a contender for Leiber’s most violent story, although your mileage may vary with regards to his treatment of his female characters (admittedly more brutal than the norm for him). In 1969, thirty years into his career (almost to the month), he was still searching for new avenues.
Our favorite authors don’t always come to us at such a young age; it happens a lot, but not all the time. No doubt I still would’ve fallen head over heels for Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut had I discovered them in college instead of high school. But some discoveries take longer than one would think. Given how they are such kindred spirits, it’s startling to know that H. P. Lovecraft did not start reading William Hope Hodgson until fairly late in life. Despite his connection (for both better and worse) with Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp did not start reading the tales of Conan until long after he had started writing fantasy of his own. And similarly, I had not read so much as a word of Fritz Leiber until I was in my early twenties; mind you I had only turned 27 this month. All this despite Leiber, regardless of the genre he tackles, quickly becoming one of my favorites.
It’s hard for me to remember now what my first Leiber story was: it had to be either “Gonna Roll the Bones,” by virtue of its appearance in Dangerous Visions (ed. Harlan Ellison), or it was his 1950 story “Coming Attraction,” which appeared in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One (ed. Robert Silverberg). The former is a somewhat nightmarish fantasy, an allegory for addiction which explicitly tackles gambling but more implicitly alcoholism (there’s a good deal of overlap between gambling and heavy drinking) while the latter is a grimy post-nuclear fable that would become emblematic of material published in Galaxy Science Fiction. Indeed “Coming Attraction” saw print in one of the very first issues of Galaxy, and for the next few years Leiber and that newfangled magazine would have quite the fruitful relationship—see his equally classic post-apocalypse story “A Pail of Air.” It was during that productive period of 1950 to 1953 that Leiber really showed himself to be a top-tier science-fictionist, although labeling him as just that would be doing him a disservice.
Fritz Leiber was born on Christmas Eve, 1910, in Chicago, which for decades was his home turf, though he would adopt San Fransisco in the third act of his life. In the first years of his career as a writer he often went by the byline of Fritz Leiber, Jr., to differentiate himself from his old man, who was then known as a Shakespearean actor. Fritz, the son, started out as an actor like his father, both on the stage and even nabbing some small roles on the big screen, but he realized that acting was not in his future, despite his physical stature and his voice which carried enough weight for two men. Listen to his speech, “Monsters and Monster Lovers” (which was also printed in Fantastic), delivered at Pacificon II, and you can easily detect an alternate timeline where Leiber starred in Universal horror movies, like an American Boris Karloff. His background as a thespian would even inspire some of his fiction; his Hugo-winning novel The Big Time reads like it was meant for the stage.
Leiber would not debut officially in the field until 1939, at the age of 28, but he was already prepping his pen for a few years at that point. His first genre story, “Two Sought Adventure,” published in the August 1939 issue of Unknown, introduced not only Leiber to the SFF magazine world but also his most lasting creation, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It’s worth noting, though, that while “Two Sought Adventure” was the first story published to feature everyone’s favorite barbarian-thief duo, it was not the first written. Leiber had apparently written “Adept’s Gambit” in 1936 (as far as I can tell the novella was more or less in its final form here), but it would not be published until the collection Night’s Black Agents came out in 1947—a whole decade later. Leiber’s struggle to get his work (more specifically his fantasy) published was a speed bump that would appear several times throughout his career, less aimed at Leiber in particular and more indicative of fantasy’s precarious place in the mid-20th century.
(Night’s Black Agents. Cover by Ronald Clyne. Arkham House, 1947.)
One of the few sympathetic voices to fantasy in the ’40s and ’50s was Arkham House, founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei with the mission statement of preserving the works of Lovecraft via book publication, though certain contemporary authors were also picked up. It’s no coincidence that Leiber got his early horror and fantasy collected alongside the likes of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Ray Bradbury; not only was he was a practitioner of weird fiction, but he was even correspondents with Lovecraft toward the end of the latter’s life. No doubt Lovecraft had a profound impact on Leiber, but what’s curious is that you probably wouldn’t guess this from reading the fiction collected in Night’s Black Agents. Early horror outings like “The Automatic Pistol,” “Smoke Ghost,” and “The Hound” (the last of which I reviewed recently) don’t have a cosmic flavor so much as an urban one. These stories are not about bookish introverts who stumble upon eldritch terrors, but average city slickers who confront classic supernatural forces as transplanted to 20th century cityscapes.
In “The Automatic Pistol” we have a weapon which on the surface looks like any other gun (say, a Colt 1911), but which turns out to maybe have a mind of its own; in “Smoke Ghost” we have a classic ghost narrative, but the specter itself seems to represent something which can only be possible in a world shaken by the industrial revolution; in “The Hound” we have one of the most classic of monsters—the werewolf—but as a stand-in for the oppressiveness of skyscrapers and apartment complexes. This trend would continue with Leiber’s debut novel, Conjure Wife, published as a complete novel in Unknown in 1943, this time taking witchcraft and applying a few twists to it, first by replacing the typical Puritan settlement with a 20th century college campus and second by giving witches a different kind of role in society. The result is darkly comedic, if also problematic given our current understanding of gender roles (mind you that it would be a fatal error to take Conjure Wife too seriously or too literally). Being a landmark in fantasy literature, not to mention being a pretty enjoyable read to this day, Conjure Wife justifiably won Leiber a Retro Hugo for Best Novel, beating out his second novel and his first science fiction novel.
Leiber’s second and third novels, Gather, Darkness! and Destiny Times Three, are SF, with the latter capping off the first phase of his career. From the outset, Leiber wasn’t really a science-fictionist, but far more convincingly a fantasist; his best work from that first phase is mostly not his science fiction, which he didn’t write a lot of anyway. Whereas Leiber’s fantasy and horror felt basically fully formed (although obviously it would mature) from the beginning, the same cannot be said of his SF. Destiny Times Three, for instance, reads very much like A. E. van Vogt pastiche; it lacks the trademarks (namely his sense of humor) that so often define Leiber’s fantasy, especially his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. Leiber would do a much better job at writing convincing (not to mention compelling) SF when he started contributing to the magazines frequently again in 1950—a level of crafstmanship he would retain, albeit somewhat sporadically (he would either write prolifically or nothing at all), for the rest of his career.
It could be during the aforementioned period of 1950 to 1953 that Leiber became a master of SF more out of necessity than anything; he had a strong incentive to take on the role of science-fictionist, as while the SF magazine market was booming during these years, things were not looking so good for fantasy and horror. Unknown went under in ’43, Weird Tales (or rather its first incarnation) was on its last legs, and there wasn’t much new blood to go around for magazine fantasy or horror. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser themselves were basically put on ice, not appearing at all between “The Seven Black Priests” in 1953 and “Lean Times in Lankhmar” in 1959. On the bright side, it was during this period that we got some of Leiber’s most famous and most anthologized short SF, including “Coming Attraction,” “A Pail of Air,” “The Moon Is Green,” and “A Bad Day for Sales.” Leiber becoming Guest of Honor at the 1951 Worldcon (it was Nolacon I) was very much earned, and his formidable level of quality in the early ’50s must’ve almost made him seem like a new man to the SFF readership.
When Leiber returned, after a short hiatus, in the late ’50s, he not only revived Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser but devised a new SF series: the Change War cycle of stories. It’s this point, from 1957 to about 1970, that could be considered Leiber’s finest era. Aside from winning a slew of awards, perhaps the most passionate (certainly the most unique) acknowledgement of Leiber’s talent and importance would have to be the November 1959 issue of Fantastic, which not only printed “Lean Times in Lankhmar” but had all of its fiction pieces be by Leiber himself, as a tribute to the man. Fantastic had debuted in 1952, but it was only under the new editorship of Cele Goldsmith in 1958 that it became arguably the best fantasy-leaning magazine on the market; more importantly in Leiber’s case, it became a safe haven for fiction of his which he could not have reasonably submitted elsewhere. At least one Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story a year would see print in Fantastic, until Goldsmith stepped down in the 1965, whereafter the series would be put on another (albeit briefer) hiatus.
(Cover by Morris Scott Dollens. Fantastic, November 1959.)
The ’60s were a pretty good time to be Fritz Leiber; after all, he had, seemingly for the first time in his career, options. If he wanted to write a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story or some miscellaneous adventure fantasy then he could send it to Fantastic; if he wanted to write more “high-brow” fantasy, something more urban or literary, then he could send it to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; if he wanted to write SF there were several magazines waiting in the wings, including Galaxy, Worlds of If, and Amazing Stories. “How come Analog didn’t get brought up?” I’m not exactly sure when this happened, but it looks like Leiber abandoned what was then Astounding Science Fiction after 1950, presumably because he found editor John W. Campbell’s pushing of Dianetics, along with his increasing conservatism, alienating. Minus that, the field was open! It was also the most prolific Leiber was as a novelist since the ’40s, with five novels published in the ’60s, though it must be said that Leiber was never much of a novelist; he was more impressive as a practitioner of the short story.
With “Ship of Shadows” (written specially for an F&SF tribute issue) and “Ill Met in Lankhmar” in 1969 and 1970 respectively, Leiber became the first author to win the Hugo for Best Novella twice in a row.
You may have noticed that Leiber has been in the game for a long time at this point. 1939 saw the debuts of Leiber, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. van Vogt, and by 1970 Leiber was (with the possible exception of Sturgeon) the only writer from that class to still be producing work strong enough that the word “legacy” need not be applied to him. While the New Wave was rocking the scene and plenty of writers in their twenties and thirties were pushing the field forward, Leiber continued to play impeccably with writers a generation younger than him. He won two more Hugos in the ’70s, as well as winning the newfangled World Fantasy Award three times that decade—all for stories which, while maybe not the very best he ever wrote, demonstrated a persistence of vision. Whereas Asimov and Heinlein, two of the most important voices in the history of American SFF, were resting on their laurels at this point, Leiber took the ’70s as an opportunity to return to and refine what he had started out with: urban fantasy and horror.
His final novel, Our Lady of Darkness, was published in 1977, and it was his first major venture into urban fantasy since his 1950 novel You’re All Alone (review forthcoming) while also acting as a sort of bookend to Conjure Wife. Leiber did not retire at this point, as he continued to write short fiction, albeit not as prolifically, for several more years; but it did represent the last hurrah for what had been a remarkably consistent and yet adventurous career, despite the setbacks. He was given the Gandalf Grand Master Award in 1975 (the second person to receive it—Tolkien was the first, naturally) and the following year he was given the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, both acknowledging his enormous contributions as a fantasist. In 1981 he was made an SFWA Grand Master. Even with all this recognition, however, Leiber continued to elude mainstream notice, not becoming a pop scientist like Asimov or getting mainstream book deals like Heinlein; he was a star in SFF fandom, but outside of it he remained obscure.
It could be that Leiber never gained mainstream popularity because he didn’t seem to have a “brand” about him. The closest to a constant Leiber had throughout the half-century of his career would be Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, but they never picked up traction like Howard’s Conan did; of course, Conan is now more treated as an icon than a character, and thus he is often misunderstood, never mind that Howard didn’t live to reap the benefits. Whereas Howard and Lovecraft are treated as “types,” as writers who are bound by their obsessions, Leiber is not so easy to categorize, his restlessness and spontaneity being used against him. It could be that Leiber’s lack of drive as a novelist (as novels sell more than short story collections) relegated him to being “merely” an exceptional writer at short lengths. Many writers who excel at the short form tried and often failed to jump to novel-writing when it became clear what the market favored, and while Leiber never sold himself out in this manner, he also, as a result, became (and remains so) hard to find outside of used bookstores.
Given that he was a better writer, line for line, than most if not all of his contemporaries (he and Sturgeon might be the only “Golden Age” authors whose works remain a joy to read simply as literature), and given that he possessed a vision which only aged, rather than withered or shattered, with the years, Fritz Leiber’s continued lack of appreciation among genre readers (especially younger readers) is nothing short of scandalous. His prime lasted not a few years, but a few decades.
(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, April 1945.)
Who Goes There?
The first phase of Fritz Leiber’s career can said to have lasted from 1939 to 1945, incidentally overlapping with World War II. While Leiber would write the occasional short story from 1946 to 1949, there would be a five-year gap between novels, those being Destiny Times Three and You’re All Alone. It was also during this gap that Leiber more or less vanished from the magazines, with said occasional work getting published first in book form, perhaps most famously his modern vampire story “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” and the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser novella “Adept’s Gambit.” But the war years saw Leiber as a regular contributor to Weird Tales, Unknown, and even Astounding Science Fiction, despite (at least at this early point in his career) being much more of a fantasist than a science-fictionist. Case in point, Destiny Times Three, which feels almost more like fantasy than SF, with its multiverse madness and dubious science-fictional elements. Even so, Leiber’s third novel (though it is quite short) would get a Retro Hugo nomination.
Placing Coordinates
Part 2 was published in the April 1945 issue of Astounding, which is on the Archive. Because Destiny Times Three is so short, and yet too long to be considered a typical novella, it has not been reprinted often. It was first brought into book form as part of an anthology, Five Science Fiction Novels, in 1952, edited by Martin Greenberg, and it wasn’t published solo until 1957—more than a decade after its serialization. You could also get it cheap enough as part of Binary Star, No. 1, the other half of that being Norman Spinrad’s “Riding the Torch.” As far as I can tell it’s not possible to get a book publication of Destiny Times Three that’s in print currently.
Enhancing Image
We have two psychologists and best buddies, Thorn and Clawly, who live in the Dawn Civilization, not our world but a utopian world in which a benevolent world government (like the UN is it actually did its job) keeps everything in check—except for something peculiar that has been going on lately. People have been reporting more nightmares than usual, and there have been these amnesiac episodes where people don’t recognize themselves or the people in their lives. Turns out these episodes are due to the exchanging of minds, people being swapped with their counterparts from a world that is mostly the same and yet quite different from the Dawn Civilization. Thorn not only unwittingly takes a talisman which is connected with these parallel worlds, but his finds his mind spontaneously swapped with that of his counterpart.
There are three worlds, all of which share a point of divergence about thirty years prior to the events of the present day, and all have to due with the accessibility of an invention known as subtronic power, which is apparently the best thing since sliced bread. In the Dawn Civilziation, subtronic power is open for public use; in World II, which seems to be launching an invasion of the first world, subtronic power is only kept in the hands of what is in that world a totalitarian government; in World III, subtronic power is suppressed entirely. To further complicate things, these parallel worlds exist because of an even greater invention: the Probability Engine. Watched over by eight experimenters, the Probability Engine has the capacity to create and destroy worlds based on points of divergence, and the talisman Thorn took is needed to work the Probability Engine. Oktav, one of the experimenters, tries to warn Clawly of the impending invasion from World II without giving away the Probability Engine’s existence, though this has mixed results.
In World I Thorn is a psychologist, but in World II he’s a rebel, Public Enemy #1 against the totalitarian government, which Thorn finds quickly to be a huge change in circumstances; and whereas Thorn II is still a good guy, the same cannot be said for Clawly II, who is a fascist collaborator. At the end of Part 1 we saw Thorn, now in the body of Thorn II, be taken into custody and presented to the government of World II, who, sensing (correctly) that Thorn had swapped minds with his counterpart, think it better to kill Thorn on the spot, despite him being in Thorn II’s body. It’s at this point that Thorn spontaneously mind-jumps once again, he assumes because of the fight-or-flight response. Part 2 thus starts with Thorn in what he thinks to be his own body again, although we gradually find that this is not the case.
I said in my review of the previous installment that I suspected we would get to World III at some point, since that only made sense, although it was highly unlikely that someone from World III would jump into World I, given the former’s presumed lack of technology. Which turned out to be right. If you thought World II with its Orwellian nightmare was a tough piece of work then World III will utterly dismay you, unless of course you happen to be a Ted Kaczynski type. The world has basically gone to shit—not just from a political standpoint but from a basic physical one; it’s a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the people who are left live like mountain men and animals rule the landscape once more. Leiber being Leiber, his descriptions of this new desolate landscape are excellent; as weary as I am about the post-apocalypse subgenre, it pains me a little that we never got the Fritz Leiber equivalent of A Canticle for Leibowitz or I Am Legend.
A ruined world, from which the last rays of a setting sun, piercing for a moment the smoky ruins, struck dismal yellow highlights.
But recognition could only be held at bay for a few minutes. His guess about the ravine had been correct. That snow-shrouded, milelong mound ahead of him was the grave of the Opal Cross. That dark monolith far to the left was the stump of the Gray H. Those two lopped towers, crazily buckled and leaning toward each other as if for support, were the Gray Twins. That split and jagged mass the other side of the ravine, black against the encroaching ice, upthrust like the hand of a buried man, was the Rusty T.
It could hardly be World I, no matter after what catastrophe or lapse of years. For there was no sign, not even a suggestive hump, of the Blue Lorraine, the Mauve Z, or the Myrtle Y. Nor World II, for the Black Star’s ruins would have bulked monstrously on the immediate left.
So Our Heroes™, Thorn and Clawly, are split up, and Clawly has to contend not only with an invasion but with a “benevolent” world government that refuses to take him seriously. Admittedly I too would struggle to be taken seriously if I concocted a massive hoax about a Martian invasion because the actual invasion would be too crazy to believe. In Part 1 I was unsure about the credentials of the “utopian” society of World I, but thankfully I was convinced in Part 2 that, no, we’re actually not supposed to view this “utopia” as usfficient for human happiness and freedom. Partly what allows the invasion to happen is the complacency of the so-called benevolent world government, not to mention that while there is literally a world of difference between the governments of World I and II, they’re shown to not be all that different when the chips are down.
Part 2 is shorter than the first installment, so I feel I don’t have as much to say here, but I will say that the structure of this novel is a bit odd—sort of like a lopsided hourglass. We start out lost and confused, like we’re a kid who’s too small to be in the ball pit, before the sky clear and the scope of the narrative contracts rather than expands. At the beginning of Part 2 we’re still in the middle of that contraction, and we spend most of this installment torn between two relatively small subplots before, all of a sudden, the scope expands again, resulting almost more in an explosion than an expansion. If you’re expecting an epic threeway battle a la Lord of the Rings then you’ll be disappointed, but I would argue something even more astounding happens in the last few pages of this novel.
My criticisms of Part 1 are mostly still relevant, and at least one criticis has only gotten more severe, that being the lack of female voices among the cast; not only that, but the cast has seemingly only gotten smaller as we approach the climax. Destiny Times Three is a short novel, true, but the best novellas and short novels don’t need expansion to make themselves feel more whole, whereas this novel feels deprived of more characters, more character depth, more worldbuilding, generally more material that isn’t just action. I chock it up to the time in which it was written and where it was published, since (with exceptions, obviously) the SF of the ’40s very much leans more on the plot end of the plot vs. character spectrum. The bright side is that on top of fast-moving plots, the best SF of this period is rich in ideas, and Leiber has a pretty good one to throw at us right at the end.
There Be Spoilers Here
The Probability Engine is maintained by the experimenters, but it wasn’t invented by them—something that Oktav points out in an argument with his colleagues (mind you it was his talisman that Thorn took). The actual people who built the Probability Engine turn out to maybe not be a “people” at all, but something that even Leiber doesn’t have a word for. Easily the cleverest part of Destiny Times Three is that unbeknownst to us, what has been assumed to be a third-person narrative is actually first-person. One could argue that the narrative only becomes first-person once Thorn unlocks his talisman and gets in touch with his two counterparts, thereby getting into contact with the inventors, but I like to think everything we’ve up to this point is from the inventors’ perspective, who are, after all, revealed to be practically all-seeing. Thorn, who is reconciled with his alternate selves, gets the best ending of the characters, whereas the experimenters are rightly punished for their callousness and their treatment of the alternate worlds.
The ending of Destiny Times Three borders on transcendental, although it doesn’t quite get there, though it’s hard for me to articulate why. Transcendence within the boundaries of SF is a tricky thing simply because what makes science-fictional transcendence special is its marrying of the secular and the religious, or oftentimes finding the religion in the secular. The ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey might be the most famous example of transcendence—of conceptual breakthrough—in all of SF, but it’s not religious at all, at least not overtly. Similarly the reveal of the inventors could be compared to a meeting with the divine, but Leiber doesn’t decorate the moment with any religious symbolism; it’s a perfectly secular revelation. And yet despite Leiber’s talent as a wordsmith, its execution leaves me wanting somehow. I suppose Destiny Times Three has the same problem a lot of other early Leiber I’ve read has, in that while it has its high points, it feels half-baked compared to the formal elegance of his work from about 1950 onward, compounded by it being a longer work.
A Step Farther Out
Destiny Times Three feels like just the sort of short novel which could’ve benefited from expansion, though unfortunately it never was. Leiber’s vision is simultaneously grand and claustrophobic, featuring only a few characters who really matter in the drama while also doubling or tripling that factor when you combine those characters’ alternate selves. The action is fast-moving, and there’s a good dose of political intrigue, although we don’t get to know any of the three worlds too deeply, and thinking back on it the action might be there to take our minds off the fact that the characters themselves are not some of Leiber’s finest creations. Mind-blowing on paper, somewhat less so in execution, this is an early work which hints at more ambitious and more finely tuned outings which play with similar concepts, namely the Change War series. Still, on a sentence-by-sentence level it’s hard to fault Leiber, as even this early he shows himself to be more poetric than most (if not all) of his fellow Astounding writers. The biggest criticism I have of Destiny Times Three is that I wish there was more of it.
(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, March 1945.)
Who Goes There?
Fritz Leiber spent the first phase of his career, from about 1939 to 1945, mostly published in Weird Tales and Unknown, and more precariously in Astounding Science Fiction. I say “more precariously” because Leiber, at least early in his career, was not too keen on science-fictional writing; he would write some stone-cold SF classics like “Coming Attraction” and “A Pail of Air,” but that was later. Destiny Times Three was Leiber’s third novel, and it basically closed out the first phase of his career, in that while he continued to write in the latter half of the ’40s, his output was more sporadic, and evidently he struggled to find outlets for his material. Serialized in two parts, this is very much a short novel, but as we’ll see it packs quite a punch. It was nominated for a Retro Hugo for Best Novel.
Placing Coordinates
Part 1 was published in the March 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Time has not been very good to this novel in terms of publication. It did not see print in book form until the anthology Five Science Fiction Novels in 1952, from Gnome Press, edited by Martin Greenberg (not to be confused with Martin H. Greenberg, not that I would ever make such a mistake). Five years later and it finally got a solo book release, as part of the Galaxy Science Fiction Novel series. Things went dark for a while and in 1978 it reappeared as one half of Binary Star No. 1, the other half being Norman Spinrad’s “Riding the Torch.” Apparently there are hardcover and paperback editions of the novel by itself from Wildside Press, but I’m not sure where you would find these. Destiny Times Three has the misfortune of being too short a novel (it’s arguably a novella) to easily justify printing on its own, but it’s also too long to be anthologized, especially in the current market. Your best bet might just be the serial version.
Enhancing Image
We start with Thorn, a psychologist, accidentally stealing an object which he struggles to describe and whose possession he finds inexplicable. “It was about two inches in diameter and of a bafflingly gray texture, neither a gem, nor a metal, nor a stone, nor an egg, though faintly suggestive of all four.” If it sounds like I’m just tossing you into the middle of things without explaining who Thorn is, or what it is he stole, or from whom he was taking it, that’s because Leiber does the same thing. Admittedly Destiny Times Three does not start on the best foot; indeed I’d say it starts out pretty confusing and gets gradually more understandable as it goes on, which I suspect was by design, but it also means quite a few readers are gonna bounce off the opening chapters. We’re given no context at the outset what kind of world Thorn lives in, which is important because it’s clearly not our world. As such I’ll have to tackle this synopsis shindig a bit differently from the usual.
The plot centers around Thorn and Clawly, lifelong friends and colleagues who study people’s dreams, as you do. Something they’ve noticed lately is that people seem to be having far more nightmares than to be expected, and what’s far weirder is that these people have amnesiac episodes in which they don’t remember or recognize the people in their lives. The amnesiac episodes are temporary, but still, there are too many of these cases to be ignored. It looks like there be trouble in paradise. Thorn and Clawly live in what could be called a better alternative to our world, being a world apparently free from mass starvation and war, along with top-down tyranny, despite the presence of what is called the World Executive Committee. The World Executive Committee is basically like if the UN actually did its job, and curiously this novel was serialized mere months prior to the UN’s founding.
I would say Leiber’s expectations of a world government were too optimistic, but this was also the same period when Robert Heinlein, during his flaming liberal phase, would have more or less agreed with such optimism.
This utopia is called the Dawn Civilization, but for reasons to be given later I’ll refer to it from now on as World I (mind the Roman numeral). What makes it such a smashing civilization is apparently the wide availability of what Leiber calls subtronic power, which is supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread and whose accessibility has allowed for a technological and political Good Future™. I don’t know what subtronic power is exactly, because Leiber doesn’t really bother to explain it, but it’s obviously supposed to be analogous with atomic power. So-called Golden Age SF can be broken into two groups: pre-Hiroshima and post-Hiroshima. A good deal of pre-Hiroshima SF was about the potential greatness of atomic power, whereas post-Hiroshima SF was concerned about its potential as a weapon, though there are exceptions; you can guess which group Destiny Times Three falls into. I have to wonder if Leiber would’ve made a thinly veiled substitute for atomic power the great tech of the novel had he written it even one year later.
So, Thorn has a mysterious object which naturally unbeknownst to him has more power than he is aware of, and Clawly is driven to desperation after failing to convince the World Executive Commitee that these bizarre psychological episodes have any tangible importance. Clawly goes to see Oktav, an oracle, about what to do about what he suspects to be attempts by some outside force to invade the Dawn Civilziation, though Oktav knows a lot more than what he tells the poor psychologist. You see, Clawly theorizes that when people have these memory lapses that they’re not actually losing their memories, but that their minds are being displaced—put elsewhere and replaced by something. It sounds outlandish and you can see why the higher-ups scoff at him, but if you’ve read the script like Clawly did then you would reach similar conclusions.
So he tells the World Executive Committee:
“It is my contention—I might as well put it in plain words—that alien minds are displacing the minds of our citizens, that they are infiltering Earth, seeking to gain a foothold here. As to what minds they are, where they come from—I can’t answer that, except to remind you that Thorn’s studies of dream landscapes hint at a world strangely like our own, though strangely distorted. But the secrecy of the invaders implies that their purpose is hostile—at best, suspect. And I need not remind you that, in this age of subtronic power, the presence of even a tiny hostile group could become a threat to Earth’s very existence.”
Meanwhile, Thorn experiences what can only be called a waking nightmare—a surreal passage that stands out as one of Part 1’s highlights, and a typically excellent bit of prose for Leiber. Of course it’s not just a nightmare: something is happening to Thorn, though he doesn’t realize it right away. Soon he finds himself in a place he doesn’t recognize, in a body which is still his but which at the same time he feels to be alien somehow, and that’s only the start of his troubles. Could it have something to do with the object he stole without remembering why he did that? Does it have to do with a possible mental invasion that Clawly has been talking about? Yes to both, but how exactly is left up to spoilers.
I’ll say here that I went into Destiny Times Three thinking it would be a time travel narrative, which it isn’t really; it involves multiple timelines but they’re more like alternate realities. That’s right, we’re dealing with a multiverse story, and from 1945! Despite it’s brevity, this baby is dense, not just with action but also with ideas, and while details do clear up as we understand more about the workings of World I, the significance of the object Thorn took (it’s actually called a talisman) and so forth, you might have to reread a few passages to get what’s going on. Leiber would venture into equally if not even more high-concept territory later in his career, such as his Change War series, but Destiny Times Three might be his most ambitious work up to this point, though I have to admit I’ve not read his earlier SF novel Gather, Darkness! Safe to say Leiber is pushing himself into new territory here.
A few criticisms at the end of this section…
If you’re expecting women to play any significant roles in this novel, too bad, at least for Part 1. There’s a very minor female character (I don’t think she even has a name) who shows up once and is never seen again, and all the characters who matter are manly men of action. I’m trying to remember where exactly this was, but I recall Leiber years later saying he regretted not giving women a bigger role in the narrative for this specific novel. If you’re looking for a character-focused work then you’ll also be disappointed, as Destiny Times Three is driven by action and ideas; it’s a wild ride that only gets wilder as it goes on, but it’s not psychologically complicated. I would say, however, that Leiber is chasing after a vision that is quite astounding (haha, I know) given how short the novel is, and if he was pressured to keep it brief for magazine publication then oh well, that’s how life is.
There Be Spoilers Here
Thorn has swapped minds with someone who both is and is not himself. Whereas Thorn is a law-abiding psychologist, Thorn II (the man whose body he now occupies) is a rebel, and he needs to be a rebel because the Bad Future™of World II is run by a tyrannical world government (as opposed to the good world government). Clawly II himself is a member of said big bad government, which complicates things when Thorn crosses paths with this alternate version of his best friend.
How did we get here? Not just the swapping of minds but the fact that there’s more than one reality. Going back to subtronic power, there are apparently three timelines which diverge depending on what the leaders of the world do with this new discovery that could shape the future of mankind. In World I, deemed “the best” timeline, subtronic power was made accessible to the public; in World II, it’s held hostage by what is now a fascist world government; in World III, the discovery of subtronic power is totally suppressed. We don’t meet anyone from World III—at least not yet; but World II is basically the antagonist of the novel, as we find out its government is plotting an invasion of World I. Yet there is an even greater discover than subtronic power, one which makes such an invasion even possible: the Probability Engine. Placed outside space and time, the Probability Engine is maintained by a council of experimenters, of which Oktav is a member, and it was Oktav’s talisman which Thorn had taken.
The Probability Engine was probably invented by a third party (let’s face it, it’s either aliens or far-future humans), and it has the power to create (and, conversely, destroy) alternate timelines; at least that’s how I understand it. For the purposes of the novel there are three timelines, though at least for now only two are important. Rather than jump across timelines via portals or a time machine, one’s mind is swapped with his/her counterpart’s, which kinda… reminds me of a certain movie. To be fair, I’m pretty sure the Daniels have never even heard of Destiny Times Three, but it just goes to show that these “nifty sci-fi ideas” are usually really fucking old and that nothing is original. And also Santa Claus isn’t real.
A gripe I often have with multiverse stories is that when we see someone’s alternate selves they’re too closely related, despite the fact that you’d probably turn out a different person if your parents conceived on this day instead the other day, never mind all these other factors. I even criticized Sarah Pinsker’s otherwise pretty enjoyable novella “And Then There Were (N-One)” for having dozens of different versions of herself (it’s that kind of story) that are not that different. Even Everything Everywhere All At Once, great a movie as it is, does not go far enough with presenting just how radically different multiple versions of yourself would be; we never, for instance, see a male version of Michelle Yeoh’s character, even though that seems highly likely to occur. Leiber dodges this gripe by having the big change occur after Thorn, Clawly, and the other major characters were already born, so they have the same physiologies, names, and even some of the same childhood experiences.
The question is, how do you fight an invasion of minds? How do you fight against an army when it’s an army of body snatchers? How do you protect your mind from being swapped with that of your counterpart’s? You’ll just have to wait a bit.
A Step Farther Out
Part of me feels that Leiber originally conceived Destiny Times Three as a fantasy, since it almost leans closer to that than SF. The council of experimenters are like sorcerers. Subtronic power may as well be magic. Yet given the lack of a viable market for fantasy, especially of this length, in 1945, I wouldn’t be surprised if Leiber tinkered with it enough to make it SF. Not much of a criticism, really. At the risk of sounding immature, Destiny Times Three works because it is so COOL. The notion of an invasion not happening through some portal or gateway or a time machine, but through our minds, is COOL. The notion that all it takes is one invention to change not just society at large but people’s individual personalities is COOL. So far we’ve only seen World I and II, but the possibility of encountering that third world (which does not sound like a picnic) and having all three intersect is COOL. It’s a cool novel, and I hope it only ramps up in Part 2.
I also have to wonder if Leiber had been reading any A. E. van Vogt and what he thought of it, because Destiny Times Three strikes me as conspicuously van Vogt-esque, for both good and ill. This is Leiber at his least lucid (now doesn’t that phrase roll off the tongue), and I certainly wish he could explain himself better here, something he normally does with elegance. But also like van Vogt, the vision is so grand, so close to the transcendent, that it almost feels religious despite being undeniably secular. It’s like a cosmic epic in miniature, and I’m here for it.
It’s that special time of year, and I’m not just saying that because it’s Christmastime. Truth be told, I’m not crazy about Christmas; I certainly don’t go nuts over it like I do with Halloween—which is why my review roster for this month is not Christmas-themed. My birthday is also this month (it’s the 9th, if you’d like to know), but that’s not why I’m here. Some months thing will be totally normal, but then there are times like this. Oh, we still have the usual rotation, albeit with a little twist (in fact it’s a new department), which I’ll get to in a minute. The real twist is that this will be a single-author lineup, and the guest of honor is Fritz Leiber.
Fritz Leiber was born on Christmas Eve, 1910, and when he made his professional genre debut in 1939, he was about to mark a new era in fantasy writing—although people were not aware of this at the time. His most lasting achievement is the grand episodic narrative of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, one of fantasy’s most daring duos and a landmark in what is now called Sword and Sorcery (the same subgenre which contains Robert E. Howard’s Conan, among other things). Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are by no means his only contribution to the genre, and indeed his turf goes far beyond just fantasy. You know, I really like Leiber, but even with most of my favorite authors I would not dedicate a whole month to reviewing works of theirs; what makes Leiber different from most is his ability to dabble in basically everything, from fantasy to horror to science fiction. Across the half-century of his career, Leiber shfited from genre to genre, mood to mood, not being as easy to pin down as most of his contemporaries.
Since this is a bit of an unusual month for reviews, I decided to go an extra step and introduce another new department—albeit an irregular one. There aren’t too many of them, but there are in fact “complete” novels in the magazines, especially in the ’40s and ’50s. Or rather were, because magazines running novels was basically an attempt to keep paperbacks (which were gaining traction) from biting their heels, an attempt which ultimately and inevitably proved a failure. A lot of “complete” novels being run in magazineare also just novellas, but there are exceptions! Leiber’s 1950 novel You’re All Alone is one such exception, and while it is technically an abridged version of The Sinful Ones (long story), at 40,000 words it’s a bit too long to be comfortably called a novella, at least for my blog. I’ll explain how this new thing will work at the end.
So, we get two serials, two novellas, two short stories, and a complete novel in honoring this bastard. Not the last time I’ll be doing this single-author month deal, but obviously it’s something I’ll only do maybe once a year. But enough! It’s time to reveal what we’ll be reading.
The serials:
Destiny Times Three, first published in the March to April 1945 issues of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novel. Not one of Leiber’s more famous works, if the number of times it’s been reprinted says anything, but then it is quite a short novel—probably too short to sell on its own but also too long to be anthologized easily. One of Leiber’s earliest attempts at depicting alternate timelines, a premise that he would return to fruitfully much later.
Rime Isle, first published in the May to July 1977 issues of Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy. Never heard of Cosmos? Don’t worry, it only lasted four issues. Rime Isle is part of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, being a later entry, as well as one of Leiber’s final appearances in the magazines; thereafter he stuck to original anthologies. Whereas some other Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories are often cited, this is not one of them. I know basically nothing about it.
The novellas:
“Scylla’s Daughter,” from the May 1961 issue of Fantastic. The late ’50s saw a major revival for the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, which was not coincidental considering Fantastic‘s new editor, Cele Goldsmith, clearly sympathized with Leiber and wanted to buy what he was selling, with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser getting at least one story a year in that magazine until Goldsmith left. “Scylla’s Daughter” would later be expanded into The Swords of Lankhmar.
“Ship of Shadows,” from the July 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This is a special issue of F&SF, being one of its author tribute issues, with “Ship of Shadows” as the lead novella. Technically a reread, but it’s been long enough that I could use a refresher, and hell, I remember liking it quite a bit. Leiber stories tend to fall into SF, fantasy, or horror, but “Ship of Shadows” ticks all three boxes, and it won a Hugo while it was at it!
The short stories:
“The Hound,” from the November 1942 issue of Weird Tales. The first several years of Leiber’s career saw him dwell primarily in Weird Tales and Unknown, the top fantasy-horror magazines of the early ’40s. Not being the most comfortable with SF, Leiber distinguished himself at first as a young master of terror and the supernatural. “The Hound” is one such early horror effort from Leiber, and hey, it’s apparently a werewolf story, and I love me some werewolves.
“The Moon Is Green,” from the April 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. After being relatively inative in the late ’40s, Leiber came back strong early the next decade, and his return to the field coincided with those explosive first years of Galaxy, the new SF magazine on the market. Leiber became one of Galaxy‘s leading writers in the early ’50s, and “The Moon Is Green” is one of those Galaxy-Leiber tales to get adapted for the legendary X Minus One.
Now, finally, the complete novel:
You’re All Alone, from the July 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures. Apparently the magazine version is an earlier draft that Leiber had tried but failed to get published, since the fantasy market in the latter half of the ’40s was in the dumps, but luckily Fantastic Adventures, previously a second-rate pulp outlet, was under new management. Leiber would then “expand” the novel for book publication under the title The Sinful Ones, but from what I’ve heard the magazine version is better.
About how these complete novel reviews will work. My review schedule is on a rotation basis, switching between short stories, novellas, and serials; depending on how many days there are in a month I would cram in a third novella or short story. The way I have it figured is, if a month has 31 days, and if I’m set to review a novella on the 31st day, I’ll switch that would-be novella out for a complete novel. After all, I wanna save the biggest single review project for last, and I wanna give myself enough time to really digest the extra long material. The resulting review will itself of course be longer than average. Now, how do I separate a complete novel from a novella? How does one tell the difference, especially since magazines, while usually two-columned, have different type sizes and therefore some can pack more wordage into each page? Sometimes magazines give rough word counts, but much of this, admittedly, will come down to my own discretion.
Not making promises, but complete novel reviews will probably be the last department I add to my blog. This is a one-man show, ya know, and I do have a day job to contend with. Still, I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t out of passive, and you also know that I’m a compulsive reader. The more the merrier! Just hope I can do someone as great as Leiber justice with this.
Poul Anderson is a semi-obscure name in the field nowadays, which is weird because there was a time when, evidently, he was considered a big fucking deal. From his genre debut in 1947 to his death in 2001, Anderson was one of the real vanguards of 20th century American SF, though unlike contemporaries like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein he showed himself to be about as proficient writing fantasy as SF. He was also alarmingly prolific, writing non-stop for a good half-century, and as such he doesn’t already hit it out of the park, as it were; the good news is that if you don’t like one Anderson story, there’s at least another that will appeal to you. One possible (read: probable) reason why Anderson’s stature has faded somewhat since his death is that not only did he write a lot, but he also wrote several vast continuities, none of which seemed to be published in internal chronological order. A seemingly standalone short story can turn out to be part of an overarching cycle that Anderson worked on for decades, and the result is that to this day it’s hard to organize his work.
Anderson won seven Hugos and three Nebulas, and he was made an SFWA Grand Master in 1998. His fantasy novels The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions are intriguing and often thrilling examples of “modern” fantasy which were written parallel to The Lord of the Rings. Despite their politics being very much different, Michael Moorcock was apparently inspired by Anderson’s fantasy. The subject of today’s review, We Have Fed Our Sea, however, is decidedly hard SF, and was the first work of Anderson’s to garner a Hugo nomination.
Placing Coordinates
Part 2 was published in the September 1958 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Despite the Hugo nomination and despite being well-liked by Anderson fans, time has not been very kind to We Have Fed Our Sea—by that I mean that this shit has not been in paperback since the ’80s. Oh sure, you could snag a copy, under its book title The Enemy Stars, as an ebook, but 1) it’s an ebook, and 2) it’s published by Open Road Media, the coal in the stockings of naughty children on Christmas morning. Unlike some other Anderson titles, The Enemy Stars doesn’t even have paperback edition from Open Road Media, which may well be for the best, since their paperbacks tend to be depressingly mediocre. Still, I imagine it’s not hard at all to find used copies of The Enemy Stars on eBay for such low prices that the shipping might cost more than the book itself.
Enhancing Image
At the beginning of Part 2, our four crewmen of the Southern Cross have found themselves in quite the pickle. For one, the ship’s ion drive is damaged such that they won’t be able to get into a stable orbit around the black star, and another is that the mattercaster’s web is also damaged enough to be unusable; the second problem is the big one, because if they can’t mattercast then there’s no way of getting back to civilization. The nearest human outpost is tens of lightyears away and the Southern Cross can only travel at a fraction of the speed of light. No FTL ships here! I said this jokingly in my review of Part 1, but I do have to wonder if mattercasting influenced how teleportation works in Star Trek. We even get the “Do we die when we’re teleported?” meme. In the case of We Have Fed Our Sea the answer is actually YES, believe it or not: the main characters are technically clones—not that being clones matters much to them.
The ion drive can be repaired with onboard tools, but the mattercaster will be a tougher nut to crack. The mattercaster web requires a specific metal, germanium, which is not on the ship, but the good news is that the Southern Cross has basic mining equipment and the crew will be able to extract enough germanium from a nearby smoldered planet (a dead planet near a dead sun) to repair the web; the bad news is that they would have to land on said planet, and the Southern Cross was not built to land directly on anything. Some improvisation will be required. Chang Sverdlov, would-be revolutionary and the ship’s engineer, will have to head out into the vacuum of space and see what the deal is, and Seiichi Nakamura, the pilot, will have to maneuver around the black star and find some way to land on a planet containing the germanium they need.
I like how Sverdlov’s rebellious attitude toward the Protectorate comes to nothing, both because of the existential situation the men find themselves in and also because of what happens to Sverdlov.
What starts as a four-man group becomes a dwindling party, and Sverdlov is the first to bite the big bazooka; this happens early enough in Part 2 that I don’t consider it much of a spoiler, at least if you’ve made it this far. Sverdlov suffers a freak accident during his inspection of the ship and dies in the vacuum of space, alone, with only the voices of his fellows as his last connection to humanity. “He stood with ten thousand bitter suns around him; but none were Sol or Tau Ceti. O Polaris, death’s lodestar, are we as little as all that?” The bright side is that Sverdlov’s death is not meaningless, since it’s through his efforts that the other crewmen are able to correct the ship’s trajectory. Sverdlov has the misfortune of being the least developed of the four crewmen, but the arc of his development and his fate are fine encapsulations of the book’s main theme: the insignificance of man when compared to the vast indifference of space.
So, that leaves three men. And it does not take merely a day or two to find the planet for the job, but weeks. Without an endless supply of provisions and without backup. Fortunately for Our Heroes™, water can be recycled on the ship, but unfortunnately food cannot; it’s pointed out, rather morbidly, that at the rate it’s taking to find the planet to mine the geranium, everyone would’ve starved to death had Sverdlov not died first. In this context the individual’s life means next to nothing, and even the collective is overwhelmed by an endless natural world which does give a single shit about human endeavor.
Something you have to understand about Anderson is that, as a rule of thumb, he’s more interested in things that aren’t human than things that are; We Have Fed Our Sea is a human drama, but it would not exist if not for everything surrounding the humans. None of the four crewmen is developed that much outside of the role he plays in relation to The Big Picture™, that being the grand conflict between mankind and space. Take Terangi Maclaren, for instance, who takes on a more active role in Part 2: last we checked he had started to turn toward the solemn and self-loathing, and by now he has become thoroughly emo. But why? What do we know about Maclaren? Mostly that he is, by his own admission, a playboy astrophysicist who has up to this point not taken life very seriously, and now that he’s in a life-or-death situation he’s not taking shit very well. We know very little about Maclaren’s personal relationships, or his philosophy on life, but we do see how his ego crumbles at the prospect of dying next to a black star and lightyears from home.
If you’re into hard SF then you’ve probably been here before, and you’re also very much into this sort of thing. The ’50s was arguably the first big decade for hard SF, with Anderson as one of its biggest practicioners, but since this is a facts-and-figures kind of story and since it’s from that period, there are a couple things to consider: the first is that there is ONE female character worth anything, and we’ll get to her in a minute. Another thing is that I have to be honest here and admit that after reading the whole serial, I did read the synopsis on Wikipedia to make sure I got the details sort out, because there’s stuff that I just did not understand on an initial read. It probably doesn’t help also that the science is dated, though it’s not that obvious. Apparently Anderson went back and revised the text slightly for later book versions since the serial and the initial book publication came out prior to the “discovery” of tachyon particles, which given the nature of mattercasting is definitely something you’d be justified in including.
What I’m saying is that I may be too stupid to get everything that Anderson is talking about here, although something that did not escape my notice is the social and political aspects of the story, which surprisingly are very much there, despite the fight for suvival at the core of it. While Anderson was almost certainly turning conservative at this point in his career, he does some things with We Have Fed Our Sea that have aged better than one would expect, and he also gives us an ending that, while it does threaten to venture beyond the realm of plausibility, I think is thematically appropriate and even a little unexpected in a good way.
There Be Spoilers Here
After Sverdlov’s death we suddenly jump to a very different scene. Remember that David Ryerson was recently married? His wife Tamara is stuck with Magnus, David’s old man, now her father-in-law, with Magnus being convinced that David is dead (it’s been months at this point since anyone has heard from the crew) while Tamara is still hoping. Oh, and she’s pregnant with David’s kid, naturally. Normally I don’t like it when anything, let alone hard SF, veers toward melodrama, but I actually think this novel could’ve used some flesh-and-blood conflict even if it was somewhat cliched and overwrought. Anyway, Tamara is the only female character here who matters at all, and while she is a satellite character (she does not exist outside of her relationships with the men in her life), she’s at least given more attitude than the average Anderson woman.
It’s also during this scene that I realized Anderson’s playing with race was very much intentional. Three of the four crewmen are at least implied to be POC, and even David, the resident white boy, is part of an interracial marriage. Tamara is said to be Malay, and apparently learning English is akin to learning Latin, or some other language that would now only be used in rituals. Magnus is a proud white man, maybe not a racist but certainly a bit of a jingoist—one who, perhaps unsurprisingly, is into Rudyard Kipling. The novel’s magazine title is taken from a Kipling poem titled “The Song of the Dead” (not the last time Anderson gets on his Kipling shit), and not only does it sound better than the book title (even if The Enemy Stars is more direct), but it feeds more into the conflict between the unstoppable force of humanity and the immovable object that is space. Magnus even quotes part of the poem at the end of the novel, which I’ll also quote here:
“We have fed our sea for a thousand years And she calls us, still unfed, Though there’s never a wave of all her waves But marks our English dead: We have strawed our best to the weed’s unrest, To the shark and the sheering gull, If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord God, we ha’ paid it in full!—”
Magnus is shown to be stuck in his ways, but at least he has the decency to like Kipling, and at least it’s implied he will treat Tamara better after the story’s end.
And indeed death becomes a bigger element as the novel reaches its climax. Nakamura, who in Part 1 was my favorite character, gets killed midway through Part 2 in trying to land the Southern Cross on the planet where the survivors can get their germanium; it was almost more of a crash than a real landing. Nakamura’s death is perhaps the most tragic of the bunch, but I have a mild qualm with how it’s written—specifically that it’s not told from Nakamura’s perspective in his final moments, but Maclaren recounting what happened after the fact. Nakamura’s sado-masochistic obsession with space reaches its conclusion here, and it’s a shame we don’t get a line to his thoughts about it in his final moments. Maclaren speculates that Nakamura had intentionally sacrificed himself since rations were running low and, hell, the Southern Cross no longer needed to be airborne, since there was no way to return it to civilization. “Or perhaps, simply, he found his dark bride.” We never find out, but that doesn’t matter anymore; the only goal now is stay alive long enough to fix the mattercaster.
At this point I’m not sure what I ought to say about the final twist—not Ryerson and Maclaren repairing the mattercaster, that’s not a twist. No, I’m talking about what happens when they find a resonance (i.e., somewhere they can teleport to) and they have no clue where it is or what could be on the other side. I’ve read a couple reviews of this novel and nobody that I’ve read has brought up the final twist, even when discussing spoilers, which is a little… conspicuous. Because the twist is really something, for better or worse; I’m not totally sure if it’s plausible, but it does reinforce the notion that space is fucking massive, and that we have not touched even 99.5% of it. I’ll also say that it’s not a deus ex machina—at least not entirely. You’ll have to read and form your own take on it, because I guess I’ll just continue the pseudo-tradition and refrain from talking about the final twist specifically.
A Step Farther Out
We Have Fed Our Sea is a bit unusual among the Anderson works I’ve read, in how simultaneously claustrophobic and epic it is; the epicness is rather characteristic of Anderson—the claustrophobia is not. Instead of exploring an alien culture, or in the case of his fantasy stories returning to Nordic mythology, we have a character-focused drama which especially leans into the “drama” part in its latter half. Not that the characters are the most nuanced ever, but they do play their roles well, and ultimately they feed into a much larger drama about the human race and its place among the stars. It’s not as romantic about space travel as what you’d see with a lot of hard SF—hell, it’s not as romantic as some of Anderson’s own later takes on the subject. Yet it’s a cautiously optimistic story, and while there were some parts that confused me (due to technobabble and not any “literary” difficulty), I feel like this is just the kind of novel to grow fonder in my memory. As of right now I’d say it’s B-tier Anderson: not his best but it’s pretty far from his worst.
I’m not totally sure what keeps bringing me back to Anderson. Rarely do I love his work, but I often find him compulsively readable. Hell, I had just finished rereading Brain Wave a couple weeks ago, right before starting We Have Fed Our Sea, and normally I don’t read two novels by the same author in such quick succession. Maybe it’s because at his best Anderson excels at certain things other SF authors don’t, namely his talent for world-building (both literally and in terms of writing lore), and also, like Kipling, he’s a conservative writer whose faults and virtues, the very things that make him tick, make him a chronicler of empire—only with Anderson it’s the American empire. And of course, I have to admit, Anderson can write a pretty entertaining yarn when he chooses.
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most lauded SFF writers of the 20th century, by far; it’s not even close. She made her genre debut in 1962, already in her thirties, and while she was a bit slow to start she managed to kick off both of her most famous series by the end of that decade: Earthsea and the Hainish cycle. (I remember some people in middle school reading A Wizard of Earthsea, but I didn’t read it myself until years later.) From the ’60s until her death in 2018, Le Guin was not only crowned as one of the field’s great storytellers but as one of its very few sagely figures; there’s a Twitter bot that posts nuggets of Le Guin’s wisdom daily. Of course, it can be a bit stifling to have to contend with someone who apparently never said or did anything wrong—who is treated by many as a saint. The result is someone who is most fascinating (in my opinion) when she is dealing with human faults and the inherent conflict of sentient existence; she is not, as it were, something to packed inside a fortune cookie or an automated Twitter account.
What’s really impressive about Le Guin is her versatility. Aside from being equally comfortable with SF and fantasy writing, there are also few authors (anywhere, not just in the field) who wear as many hats as Le Guin does. There’s Le Guin the sociologist, Le Guin the feminist, Le Guin the Taoist, Le Guin the anarchist, Le Guin the pacifist, Le Guin the teller of tall tales, and often these hats are not mutually exclusive. Much as I love guys like Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein, they very much have formulas (or in Heinlein’s case fetishes), whereas Le Guin is harder to pin down, and even when she was in the fourth decade of her career she was still, as Joseph Conrad would put it, “striking out for a new destiny.” Today’s short story, “Mountain Ways,” is part of the Hainish cycle, a grand continuity Le Guin had abandoned midway into the ’70s but then returned to in the ’90s. It’s late Le Guin, but that’s not a mark against it!
Now, a brief rant…
“Mountain Ways” won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, which is now called the Otherwise Award. The James Tiptree, Jr. Award is bestowed upon SFF which explores gender; it’s a reference to the fact that Tiptree was a pseudonym for a woman, Alice Sheldon, but it also makes sense since much of “Tiptree’s” writing is concerned with gender relations and women’s precarious status in a world where men almost without exception hold the most power. Recently the award’s name was changed, on account of the contentious circumstances surrounding Sheldon’s death. This was really fucking stupid. This is not the same as, say, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer being renamed the Astounding Award; I don’t entirely agree with the rationale behind that award being renamed, but I can at least sympathize with the people calling for that change. The story behind Tiptree is too complicated for me to recount here (I’ll cover her more in-depth later, don’t worry), but I just think that, regardless of how well-intentioned the change was, erasing Tiptree’s achievements like this was monstrously stupid, even in bad taste. It should be corrected as soon as possible.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1996 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. If that’s not good enough then just know it was reprinted online FOR FREE in the March 2014 issue of Clarkesworld, so you have no excuse! We have a few book reprints of interest, including the Le Guin collection The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, along with the Library of America box set containing the entire Hainish cycle. Le Guin is one of the few SFF authors to get LOA editions, although weirdly they have not collected the Earthsea series. There’s also the anthology The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane, which might still be in print? I’m not sure. With this story the reprints are a matter of quality over quantity; it’s hard to go wrong with the options.
Enhancing Image
We get an author’s note from Le Guin at the very beginning, detailing the most unusual aspect of human culture on the planet O: its version of polygamy. I say “version of” because while polygamy is the norm on O, its setup is both convoluted and conservative. You have four people, two mena dn two women, who each come from different clans; you have a Morning man and a Morning woman, as well as an Evening man and an Evening woman. The Morning man is allowed, within the marriage, to have sex with the Evening man and the Evening woman (homosexuality is not taboo here, but as we’ll see there are other problems), BUT he is prohibited from having sex with the Morning woman. While it does involve four people, the plural marriage typical of O is effectively four pairings mingled together with certain arbitrary restrictions.
The main characters of “Mountain Ways” are a Morning woman and an Evening woman, named Shahes and Akal respectively. Shahes is the daughter of a marriage that sadly is now half-empty, since the Evening partners died in an accident, leaving the Morning partners “widowed” despite the fact that they still have each other. The setting, in broad strokes, will strike some readers as familiar, since it is mountainous farmland, not unlike rural Switzerland or the landscape of Alberta, Canada. Also not unlike the rural Swiss, the people of these mountains are a conservative lot, with their strict adherence to their version of polygamy being a fine example of Le Guin subverting our expectations at the outset. In the real world, the traditionalists are always the ones crying for strict monogamy, with even groups with histories of polygamy like the Mormons now being staunch monogamists (just reminding myself to chew out Orson Scott Card when I inevitably review something of his), but here it’s quite the opposite.
The people up there in the mountains are civilized but not very civilized. Like most ki’O they pride themselves on doing things the way they’ve always been done, but in fact they are a willful, stubborn lot who change the rules to suit themselves and then say the people “down there” don’t know the rules, don’t honor the old ways, the true ki’O ways, the mountain ways.
Akal, who goes at first by the religous name of Enno, comes to Shahes’s place as a farm hand, and a pretty able one; she’s taller than the average woman, and while her occupation has been as a religious scholar, she has not exactly lived a pampered life. It takes all of about five minutes for Shahes and Akal to fall in love—and by that I mean they start fucking at the first opportunity. Their love affair is a fast and furious one, and it doesn’t take long for them to pledge their whole selves to each other and all that, except there’s one problem that faces them: they can’t get married. Sure, as Morning and Evening women they could love each other to their hearts’ content within a group marriage, but that would require two extra people. In the area there is one viable (by that we mean desirable) Morning man, named Otorra, but even if he were to say yes that still left the problem of an Evening man.
Unless…?
Shahes suggests that Akal go away for some months and returns disguised as an Evening man; she thinks it’s positive because Akal, who already has a masculine physique, could pass off as a man, and also because people in the area know Akal by her religious name, not her true name. What would happen then if that Shahes would ask Temly, a woman she likes enough and with whom she’s had intimate relations before, to become the Evening woman in the marriage while Akal becomes the Evening “man.”
Akal stared through the dark at Shahes, speechless. Finally she said, “What you’re proposing is that I go away now and come back after half a year dressed as a man. And marry you and Temly and a man I never met. And live here the rest of my life pretending to be a man. And nobody is going to guess who I am or see through it or object to it. Least of all my husband.”
“He doesn’t matter.”
“Yes he does,” said Akal. “It’s wicked and unfair. It would desecrate the marriage sacrament. And anyway it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t fool everybody! Certainly not for the rest of my life!”
“What other way have we to marry?”
“Find an Evening husband—somewhere—”
“But I want you! I want you for my husband and my wife. I don’t want any man, ever. I want you, only you till the end of life, and nobody between us, and nobody to part us. Akal, think, think about it, maybe it’s against religion, but who does it hurt? Why is it unfair? Temly likes men, and she’ll have Otorra. He’ll have her, and Danro. And Danro will have their children. And I will have you, I’ll have you forever and ever, my soul, my life and soul.”
Aside from the fact that there’s no fucking way this plan would work, it’s still an effective subversion of the typical “marriage plot” narriage; you have two people who basically want to be monogamous with each other but can’t due to the staunch polygamy of their culture. Rather than a couple of cheaters plotting to cut out a third wheel so they can be together, Shahes and Akal plot to recruit a couple people. But like I said, this plot is doomed to fail. For one thing (and mind you, Akal is aware of this), you would not be able to fool somebody like this for decades on end; you probably couldn’t even away with it for a month. We’re also not given much detail as to how Akal intends to pass as a man, but if dressing up different really is all she does, then the whole thing is doomed, no question.
There is one thing that popped into my head, and I’m not sure if this was by design or if it was simply an oversight on Le Guin’s part: What if Akal was transgender? Or rather, what if Akal passed as a trans man? How does this culture deal with genderqueer people? It’d be safe to bet that given their conservatism they’d want nothing to do with genderqueer people, but also remember that homosexuality is a non-issue for the people of O. My assumption is that Le Guin didn’t consider this, not that it’s her fault really, but still the conflict would remain if Akal were to fake her gender in this way; if anything it’d be more plausible if she said she was a trans man and fooled Otorra and Temly, but still faced internal conflict because she felt guilty over not being true to herself. The biggest argument against such an alteration to the narrative is that it could possibly come off as transphobic (you know, person lies about their gender to fool others), but you could already make that argument with the story as is.
The words “straight,” “gay,” “lesbian,” and “bisexual” never get used in “Mountain Ways,” which I actually like since jargon changes over time and refraining from using such terminology helps the story feel a bit more timeless. On O, biseuxality is presumed to be the norm, but part of the conflict comes from the fact that Shahes is strongly drawn to Akal (to the point of irresponsibility) and Akal is all but said to be a lesbian, although her terrible experience with a former male partner is implied to factor into that. This is by means the first time Le Guin has played with gender (see perhaps her most famous novel, The Left Hand of Darkness), but she’s clearly still playing with tools she had not touched before, combining the conundrum of gender with rigid societal norms. O is not a dystopia, but its culture is shown here to not be very inclusive.
Of course it’s not just a conservative culture that fans the plot: things probably wouldn’t be too bad if Shahes and Akal kept their libidos in their pants long enough to agree that maybe it’d be better if they kept their relationship on the down-low. It wouldn’t be ideal, but it’d be a lot better than to trick a couple people into a joining a marriage, and Akal knows this, being a scholar and considerably more morally upright than Shahes. Like I said, the central internal conflict is Akal feeling bad that she has to lie to herself and other people like this, and correctly she thinks it would be wrong to their other partners to treat them this way. Not immediately apparent, but Shahes is at best a decent person who lets her passion compel her to do some shitty things, and more likely is a manipulative person who all but coerces Akal into going along with what she sees as the only “correct” option. Shahes is not evil (rarely does Le Guin write “evil” characters), but her insistence on doing wrong in the name of true love naturally leads to tragedy.
There Be Spoilers Here
The biggest problem with the scheme is that since Akal is now the Evening “man” and Otorra is the Morning man, they’re expected to have sexual relations, which means Akal will be outed. Conveniently, it turns out that Otorra is straight! Like Akal he also had a bad experience with a male partner in the past, although it’s not clear if he had already thought of himself as straight or if the bad experience put him off of same-sex relations. It’s also not clear if the scene where Otorra confesses his orientation is also the point where he gathers that Akal is actually a woman, but a later conversation implies this is the case. Both Otorra and Temly, at different points, figure out Akal’s true nature, although curiously they don’t make a scene about it and they don’t tell Shahes anything. Indeed Shahes is the last person to be informed that the scheme had failed, which leads to the climax and the story’s most dramatic scene—and also its weakest.
If I had one major qualm with “Mountain Ways” it would be the ending, or rather the fact that there isn’t one. There just isn’t an ending. Like yeah it technically exists, the story does come to a close, but it’s so abrupt and inconclusive that I actually thought there had been a misprint and the story was cut off prematurely. Unfortunately no. The implication I think we’re supposed to get is that Shahes plots to kill… Otorra? Temly? Akal? All of them somehow? But literally nothing comes of it; the story ends without resolution. It’s also weird because up to this point the narration has been third-person, yes, but it’s also been more or less anchored in Akal’s perspective. Suddenly the perspective changes to Shahes’s in the very last page and her growing jealousy and insecurity have apparently reached a boiling point, overhearing the others laughing at Akal being found out.
I can’t believe the plan that was obviously never going to work unraveled in a matter of weeks. I’m not even sure how Otorra and Temly feel about Akal being a woman; they say they had figured out what she was, but we get nothing as to what they intend to do about the fact that the Evening man is an Evening woman. Partly this has to do with Otorra and Temply (especially Temly, she gets next to nothing to do here) being underdeveloped, but I also see this as a case where ambiguity doesn’t actually add anything.
You could probably come up with a defense for the ending, but I have to admit I can’t add it up on either an emotional or intellectual level. It’s unsatisfying on a gut level but it also feels like Le Guin legitimately couldn’t come up with a reaction worth anything for when Akal is inevitably found out. Not that I want to see Shahes stick a knife in one of her partners; quite the contrary, I was hoping Le Guin would refrain from such a option altogether. It’s just so cliched for a love triangle (or in this case a love square) to end in violence, and it’s especially beneath “Mountain Ways” since so much thought was put into O’s customs and norms.
I guess it’s also frustrating that this all wasn’t told from Shahes’s perspective, since her journey from heroine to anti-heroine to villainess (it’s very hard to sympathize with her by the end) feels choppy and somewhat implausible as is. This perspective issue, combined with the lack of a real ending, leads me to think “Mountain Ways” could’ve used one more rewrite, so that maybe it could be ranked among the best of Le Guin’s short fiction.
A Step Farther Out
“Mountain Ways” sees Le Guin in full-on sociologist mode, but it’s also justified in its Tiptree Award win as an examination of gender in the midst of a culture that’s too stuck in its ways to handle such a topic properly. The people of O are strict polygamists, and their adherence to plural marriage is clearly meant to parallel real-life heteronormative crusaders who die on the hill of “traditional marriage.” It’s not perfect. It could’ve been longer, not only to give us a proper conclusion but also to flesh out the charactrs, half of whom existence as little more than plot devices. Is it anti-polygamy? Of course not, and it’s not transphobic either. Le Guin, as she often does, argues that tradition for its own sake is a bad thing, and that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all relationship model. Shahes and Akal would be happy together if they were allowed to just marry each other, but they weren’t and the outcome was a tragic one. How tragic, and in what way exactly? You’ll just have to read it for yourself.
(Cover by H. R. Van Dongen. Astounding, August 1958.)
Who Goes There?
A big deal within the field from the ’50s until his death in 2001, Poul Anderson was a giant whose star power has lessened somewhat in recent years. You can easily find Anderson books (a seemingly endless supply of them) in used bookstores, but much of his work is currently out of print. This is all a little mystifying. Anderson has his quirks, but his range and productivity are impeccable, being one of those authors who, while he did write a lot more science fiction than fantasy, was comfortable with both. There is an Anderson book or series for every season; if you don’t like, say, the Nicholas van Rijin stories, then you might like the Time Patrol series. If you told me that Brain Wave and The Broken Sword, novels which came out the same year, were written by THE SAME GUY, I would shit myself. Curiosly, while he wrote many novels, many of which are acclaimed (I really like The High Crusade and Tau Zero myself), all of Anderson’s seven Hugos and three Nebulas belong to his short fiction.
We Have Fed Our Sea will strike a few people as familiar under its book title, The Enemy Stars. I picked this up for review because a) I’d been meaning to read it, and b) from what I could tell it sounded like a fitting counterpart to our previous serial, Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To…, both literarily and philosophically. Not only is Anderson a generation older than Russ, but he’s also… well, a lot more conservative. Whereas Russ’s novel has an implicit but persistent layer of feminism in its thematic makeup, Anderson’s novel is much more typical of the hard-headed facts-and-figures SF that would’ve made the rounds in Astounding and later Analog.
Placing Coordinates
Part 1 was published in the August 1958 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Anderson’s estate has been stingy about looking the other way for online reprints, so when seeing if an Anderson story has been archived it’s a real flip of the coin. I have to assume that something nefarious is going on since Anderson wrote a lot and a lot of it is out of print, and his estate isn’t keen on letting people actually discover his work without bending over backwards. Anyway, it looks like The Enemy Stars has not been in paperback since the ’80s; it has an ebook edition from Open Road Media, but Open Road Media is dogshit and I wouldn’t recommend giving them money unless you really have to. A reprint of particular interest would have to be The Best of Astounding: Classic Short Novels from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, edited by James E. Gunn (not to be confused with the other James Gunn), which collects The Enemy Stars along with a few other novels and novellas.
Enhancing Image
The opening passage of We Have Fed Our Sea is also perhaps the most memorable in Part 1, which is really unfair, because Anderson sets a standard for himself that he proceeds to not meet again; to be fair to him, that standard is pretty high. The launching and flight of the Southern Cross, the farthest traveling spaceship in human history, is described in almost Biblical terms, and Anderson wants us to know two things right away: that the universe is unfathonably big, and that the Southern Cross is nothing short of ancient. With this ship we’re not talking years but centuries, and while my gut reaction is to think that a spaceship would become outdated long before then, rendering the Southern Cross a metal coffin, this is a ship that seems specifically designed to be able to go the distance. Even so, its placement as a sort of generation ship where many people have died and even been killed gives the Southern Cross a slight haunted house vibe.
The effect is grand, yet ominous. Or maybe the other way around.
Get this:
After ten generations, the Southern Cross was not quite halfway to her own goal, though she was the farthest from Earth of any human work. She was showing a little wear, here a scratch, there a patch, and not all the graffiti of bored and lonely men rubbed out by their successors. But those fields and particles which served her for eye, brain, nerve still swept heaven; each man at the end of his watch took a box of microplates with him as he made the hundred light-year stride to Earth’s Moon. Much of this was lost, or gathered dust, in the century when Earthmen were busy surviving. But there came a time when a patient electrically seeing machine ran through many such plates from many ships. And so it condemned certain people to death.
The Southern Cross is on a voyage to rendezvous with a black star, what Part 1’s blurb calls a “burned-out supernova,” a thing blacker than space itself and which is possibly as old as the universe. The black star is the novel’s Big Dumb Object, although unlike most Big Dumb Objects it’s not an alien construction (as far as we know) but something completely natural. It’s just that the black hole is massive and, like the ship studying it, so old as to be practically ageless. Anderson is hunting big game with regards to visuals and a sense of wonder with this one, and he puts his best foot forward here. If the spectacle is spoiled by anything it’s the inevitability of human characters.
Speaking of which…
Before I started reading We Have Fed Our Sea I suspected that we would basically start on the ship with our principal characters already gathered together, and if not then there would be minimum setup. To my surprise, though, a good chunk of Part 1 is dedicated to seeing our main characters in their natural habitat before they get teleported aboard the ghost ship. I say “teleport” because teleporting is a central factor in the novel’s world; it’s called mattercasting, and it very well anticipates beaming individuals as seen in Star Trek. With modern technology teleporting Our Heroes™ onto the Southern Cross, despite it being light-years away from the closest human colony, is not a big deal, but teleporting off the ship may prove a problem.
Now for the players: We have Terangi Maclaren, a brilliant but lazy playboy scientist who signs up for the expedition as a way to prove his continuing worth in his field; David Ryerson, a dilligent and recently married young man who joins to appease his Christmongering father who happens to hold a death grip on his allowance; Seiichi Nakamura, a melancholy martial artist and devout Buddhist who joins because he wants to get away from the suffocating colony planet where he lives; and Chang Sverdlov, a would-be revolutionary who’s not very good at hiding the fact that he hates Earthlings and wants colonial independence.
Be aware that while Anderson’s novel is big on wonder, it’s not so big on women. There are two women in Part 1, one of whom I don’t even think is named, with both being satellites to two of our main characters. Ryerson’s wife exists to see him off and hope he comes back in one piece. At least the women are simply guided offstage quietly and aren’t stuffed in a fridge. Sexism is a bit of a problem with Anderson; he fairs a good deal better with regards to race. Unless I’m mistaken, Ryerson is the only white man in the crew, with the others being at least implied to be POC. There is a bit of a caviat with Nakamura, since he is, let’s face it, somewhat stereotyped: as said before, he’s into martial arts, he’s fixated on honorable behavior, and he’s the most timid of the crewmen. Yet Nakamura’s speech is not caricatured, he’s allowed to talk and act like a normal person, and as I’ll explain in the spoilers section, he’s arguably the most human of the bunch.
This is not to say that these introductory scenes with each of the characters gives us Henry James levels of psychological depth; the men are meant to fill roles, rather than act as individuals with inner lives. With maybe an exception or two every inner monologue anyone has has to do with either the plot or the worldbuilding, which is not necessarily a bad thing since worldbuilding is where We Have Fed Our Sea excels the most—not just the literal worldbuilding of the black star but a galaxy-spanning mankind. Since the days when Southern Cross flew into the depths of space, mankind has conquered quite a few colony worlds, united under the Protectorate (totally not the Federation from Star Trek), with Earth at the center. At it turns out, though, not everyone is happy to be living in a hostile environment, all while being farmed for resources by the heart of the Protectorate, hence the existence of rebels like Sverdlov.
Just going off of what has happened in the novel, I’m not sure where Anderson stands on the relationship Earth has with the colonies, which he depicts as being at least somewhat parasitic, while at the same time painting people like Sverdlov in a villainous light—not that this novel has (at least so far) an outright human villain. Anderson’s worldview changed considerably during the ’50s; he went from being a liberal who staunchly supported the UN to a hawkish Goldwater-era libertarian type. Actually, if anything, the reference to Rudyard Kipling with its magazine title (which, in my opinion, is easily superior to the oddly pulpier book title) suggests that by this point Anderson had become a Kiplingesque conservative. I wouldn’t be surprised, then, if he turns out to sympathize with the colonists while also thinking the Protectorate to be a necessary evil, if not benign.
There are a few questions Anderson doesn’t answer, such as: Where are all the robots? What about androids? If you have teleportation then surely you would have androids equal to if not better than humans. Why send such a small crew to the Southern Cross? What about backup? I suspect, however, that the government would see it as more costly to risk sending highly advanced robots on what almost amounts to a suicide mission than a bunch of ultimately expendable meat sacks. This is also very much an old-fashioned space adventure in the sense that there’s a surprising lack of computer technology onboard, what with stuff like the microchip not having been invented in the real world yet; but then this is also justifable given how fucking old the ship is. A few scratches and patches will prove to be the least of the crew’s problems.
There Be Spoilers Here
Like I said, Nakamura strikes me as the most human of the crew, which does lead to me feeling conflicted about him. On the one hand, making Nakamura Japanese was very much deliberate; it’s not like Anderson picked his race out of a hat. Nakamura’s backstory is a pretty tragic one: his family was killed in a natural dissaster, and this was after he had already been transplanted as a child, having moved from Japan to a colony world. Undoubtedly there’s meant to be an evocation of Japanese wartime trauma, reminding me specifically of the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945, though Anderson was probably thinking of Hiroshima. Of the four cremen, Nakamura’s backstory is easily the most death-haunted, and his fascination with space is made more peculiar by his fear of it.
I have to admit that Anderson’s novel subverted a few of my exepectations. Aside from the racially diverse cast I was surprised by the stance it took on space exploration, which is nowhere near as blindingly optimistic as I had assumed, especially given other Anderson works I’ve read. Joanna Russ’s novel We Who Are About To… is obviously a deconstruction of narratives in which mankind should and does seek out the corners of space, overcoming every obstacle, but Anderson’s novel is actually not too far removed from that viewpoint. While not as pessimistic as Russ’s novel, We Have Fed Our Sea, regardless of its title, alludes to the vastness and grand indifference of space which in practice comes off as malevolence; these are not the friendly stars, or the neutral stars, but the enemy stars. The cold dead star around which the Southern Cross orbits is an almost Lovecraftian presence, like Moby Dick, a great titan of nature which rejects human understanding. Yet like Moby Dick, there is a godlike magnetism with the dark star, and the same thing applies to space itself. In Moby Dick, Ishmael tells us he joins a ship and heads out to sea whenever a particular terrible bout of melancholy hits him, and Nakamura’s situation is not so different.
Metaphysical elements are not unknown to Anderson; he strikes me as a Christian, albeit a highly pragnatic one. Indeed the religiosity of his fantasy novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, which is topped with the protagonist even converting to Catholicism at the end (it’s not as preachy as it sounds), suggests a recurring conflict for any great religious writer: the conflict between science and God. Not science and organized religion, mind you, but science and the idea of a grand designer—an otherworldly force whose intentions are mysterious. As the crewmen find themselves in a precarious position at the end of Part 1, between technical issues and wanting to tear each other to pieces despite needing each other, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say their conflict is both physical and metaphysical.
A Step Farther Out
I suppose I was expecting a metaphysical angle, but I was not also expecting the political angle. It’s hard to tell with Anderson because depending on when a given story was written he can be pretty subtle or pretty cane-waving about it. The Protectorate and the colonies are not on the best of terms, and I’m not sure which side Anderson sympathizes with more, though I can chock that up to the characters all being sympathetic enough, or rather none of them is totally evil. Maclaren is a bit of an asshole, and Sverdlov is treacherous, but their viewpoints are not inexplicable; from the colonists’ view the “Earthlings” are callous and exploitative, while from the Earthlings’ view the colonists are ungrateful and reckless when it comes to the sheer vastness of the universe. Even with ‘casting, the universe is unfathomably huge, and my mind keeps going back to that introductory section with the Southern Cross and how it instantly conveys a foreboding sense of scale. The technobabble can be a bit much (I don’t understand half of it, and I suspect Anderson does it partly to distract less discerning readers), but this is looking to be enjoyable hard SF yarn.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 