Tag: science fiction

Serial Review: The Dream Millennium by James White (Part 1/3)

May 9th, 2025

(Cover by Brian Boyle. Galaxy, October 1973.)

Who Goes There?

In the ’50s and for much of the ’60s the US and UK scenes of science fiction were kept somewhat apart, albeit with some cross-pollination with their authors. Some UK authors appeared in US magazines and vice versa, and one of these authors from the UK to find moderate success in the US was James White. White was one of the few Irish SF writers active at the time, and that perspective ended up being rather novel, even if White himself was only a B-tier writer all said and done. Whereas the standard view at the time was that war was either basically good or bad but “necessary,” White was not so convinced of the virtues of lawful violence. Having been born and raised in Belfast and living through horrific violence between Catholics and Protestants would probably have that effect on a lot of people, but for White especially it had an apparent influence on his writing. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that White’s fiction tends to be more far more about saving lives than ending them. Interest in medicine (White wanted to become a doctor, but this career path was not to be) also plays a big role, most prominently with his Sector General series, maybe not the first but certainly the popularizer of the space hospital in SF. The Dream Millennium is not about a hospital, at least in an official capacity, although it does have elements of a space hospital.

Placing Coordinates

The Dream Millennium was serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, October to December 1973. It got a paperback release from Ballantine the following year, seemingly without any significant changes. Unfortunately it’s been out of print since the ’80s.

Enhancing Image

John Devlin is a passenger aboard a ship that’s on its way to a neighboring star system, in search of a planet suitable for human life. The ship is run by computers and the trip can and probably will take centuries. A lot of authors, especially back then, would find some way to cheat and have their faster-than-light travel, but James White was not one of them. The human crew are kept in cold sleep for the vast majority of the trip, being periodically awakened for brief periods to, as the computer says in all caps, “SPEAK, EXERCISE, REMEMBER.” Devlin and the others have one hour during to stretch their legs, basically, although it’s worth noting these passengers are not awakened at the same time. For all intents and purposes Devlin is alone on the ship, with only the computer for company. The “REMEMBER” part of the instructions has to do with remembering dreams, which itself is like a cognition test. The idea is that since the passengers will be in cold sleep for decades at a time, they’ll be dreaming a lot, and when they wake up for their periodic examinations their ability to recall dreams will be taken as a sign. Now, when you sleep normally, specifically during REM sleep, your dreams can at times seem vivid and at the same time feel like they last only a few minutes, while you’re in the midst of REM sleep for at least a few hours. Time works very differently in dreams. It’s not hard to figure out what the novel’s title is supposed to mean.

Devlin is, let’s say an anti-hero. We’re not sure, at first, what his deal is, but he gives the impression of having a dark and troubled past; he’s also not an astronaut or anyone really interested in space, for that matter, but someone who had a different kind of job back on Earth. Apparently there have been efforts to colonize other worlds because Earth itself is in a sorry state. Even calling it colonization is a bit misleading since that implies a more ambitious effort, like the sort of thing technocrats are obsessed with (ya know, the glory of mankind and all that), but this expedition is being done out of necessity. White is a lot of things, but he’s not much of a romantic. Most of the time there’s no life on the ship to speak of, and when there is it’s regimented and short-lived. The best thing that can be said is at least the ship’s computer really does seem to have the passengers’ best interests in mind. But still, the living situation is bleak. Part 1 of this novel is largely concerned with the first few dream cycles Devlin has that he has to recall, which on the one hand will probably turn out to have symbolic and even plot relevance, but also since these are dreams (or in one case, flashbacks) there’s no sense of urgency, nor is there much actual forward momentum with the plot for the time being. Your enjoyment of this novel will hinge partly on how much you get out of New Wave-influenced surreal imagery, mixed with more pessimism with regards to the human condition than the average. This is not to say White is a misanthrope, but… you’ll see.

The Dream Millennium has to do with the evolution of man, not unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey, although it goes about things very differently from that novel/movie. Both are big in scale despite being set primarily on a cramped spaceship, but The Dream Millennium deals with events out of events, not to mention its timespan is much bigger. The first dream cycle Devlin has sees him as a trilobite in an unspeakably prehistoric period, and the second dream cycle sees him as a brontosaurus (big sauropod) during the Jurassic era. These are out-of-body experiences that don’t further the plot much, but they do provide stimulating experiences for Devlin that at the same time tell us a bit about his character. (I think White was also looking for an excuse to include dinosaurs in his space adventure novel, but that’s fine.) Despite being dreams and therefore harmless by nature, Devlin is not free from experiencing death and disease in these dream realms; it’s also ambiguous if these are just dreams or if they’re actually visions of past lives. A couple later events imply they might’ve been actual lived experiences. The most memorable scene in this first installment is right after Devlin’s second dream cycle, when there’s been a malfunction with one of the other sleep chambers a young woman’s lying in her chamber, dying horribly and not even sure what’s happening to her. Devlin tries comforting her and lies doing so (when someone’s on their deathbed you kinda have to lie to them at least a little bit to make them feel better), but the woman makes the odd confession of having had a dream that she was a dinosaur, similar to Devlin’s. This is despite the woman admitting to not having read up on prehistoric life like the computer told her to. She says she misses her boyfriend, and then she dies. It’s a surprisingly grim scene, but it’s also a tone-setter for the rest of the installment, which delves into matters of human misery.

It’s here about halfway through the first installment that we find out Devlin used to be a doctor on Earth, although it seems he’s no longer in that profession. You can take the man out of the profession but not the profession out of the man, though, because even if he’s not officially the ship’s doctor he still has the attitude of being one. It’s almost like White wanted to become a doctor, and that much of his SF reads like it could be made into a hospital drama with some tinkering. Despite working with similar material to 2001, The Dream Millennium operates on a very different worldview, so that you can tell James White and Arthur C. Clarke are very different people. In a way The Dream Millennium so far feels like an anti-2001, in that it focuses on the cramped and unromantic side of space travel, not to mention its view on the possibility of mankind ascending to gods of the universe is—let’s say more skeptical. There’s also much more of a focus on Devlin’s inner life, or what was called “inner space” at the time, that being juxtaposed with the virtual endlessness of outer space.

There Be Spoilers Here

We then get a lengthy series of flashbacks to a bit earlier in Devlin’s life, when he was a doctor, which oscillates between being genuinely harrowing and a bit too disjointed for my liking. The most memorable and harrowing (this is a rather dark book, it must be said) scene comes when Devlin’s trying to treat a dying boy who’s been brought in with a gunshot wound in his chest—a stray bullet, caught from a totally unrelated quarrel. What do you mean White lived through the Troubles? From what we see of Earth in this lengthy section, it’s a shithole, although it’s not much worse than life as we now know it—maybe a little more dystopian. I mean you can’t get much more dystopian than now, right? Another memorable scene is where Devlin, who describes himself as agnostic, gets into a kind of theological/existential argument with one Brother Howard, whom I’m sure we’ll meet again at some point. In the world of The Dream Millennium the question is not whether humanity can become masters of the universe but whether humanity can even save itself from decay and finally extinction. Have I mentioned that this is bleak? And then BAM, aliens are invading. Devlin’s not sure at first if this is really happening or if it’s some kind of trick, but no, highly advanced aliens are looking to overtake the ship. Now doesn’t this feel random? I wonder how Devlin’s gonna get himself out of this jam.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry this got delayed. I don’t really have an excuse, other than that I’ve just been struggling to write anything. Doing most everything has felt like a chore as of late, including reading stuff for my blog and other places. Then there’s the recent business with Worldcon (which YET AGAIN is getting steeped in controversy) and the fact that I’m voting this year (again), so that’s even more reading material. I’m enjoying The Dream Millennium enough so far that I hope I can get the review for the next installment out in a more timely fashion, but I can’t guarantee it.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” by Kate Wilhelm

May 5th, 2025

(Cover by Richard Wilhelm. F&SF, September 2001.)

Who Goes There?

Like most of the New Wave authors who caused a stir in the latter half of the ’60s, Kate Wilhelm had actually made her debut a decade earlier, in 1956. It wasn’t until the New Wave, though, with the appearances of Dangerous Visions and Damon Knight’s Orbit series, that Wilhelm emerged as a major writer of short fiction especially. She won a Nebula for her story “The Planners,” although I never really understood the praise for this one. She appeared most often in original anthologies and especially in the Orbit series, which shouldn’t be surprising considering she was married to Damon Knight. Together they (along with Robin Scott Wilson) founded the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. In the late ’60s through the ’70s Wilhelm rarely appeared in magazines, but starting in the ’80s she made more magazines appearances; it could be because by the early ’80s the original anthology market had all but imploded, including the death of Orbit, and then there’s the high-paying science magazine Omni, which Wilhelm was a somewhat regular name in. By the time she got a special issue dedicated to her for F&SF she was a living legend in fandom, as both a writer and a teacher. Her son Richard did the cover for this issue, which I feel bad pointing out because said cover is… not very good, to put it one way. “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” is a “realistic” story with a tangentially SFnal element, showcasing a mature talent who’d been around for decades at this point.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 2001 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted only once, in the Wilhelm collection Masters of Science Fiction: Kate Wilhelm, Volume 1.

Enhancing Image

In a way this is a love story, as well as a road trip story. By sheer happenstance Hal Whitcomb, a divorced middle-aged guy, picks up Tilly Dunning off the side of the road. (Do people still hitchhike? I have to wonder.) Hal is 47 while Tilly is about to turn 31, although the latter looks younger than that, to where she can pass off as a college undergrad. Sparks fly between them pretty quickly, although Tilly has what you might call a troubled backstory, which forces the two to get more involved in each other’s lives than was thought possible. As Tilly says, “Last week I lost my job, lost my boyfriend, had my car stolen, and my grandmother died.” All of these things, except maybe the stolen car, tie into one men, or rather two men who knew each other once. Tilly is the granddaughter of the famous physicist Dr. Cherny, who would still be spoken of with reverence today if not for the circumstances of his death: he had apparently died while at a sex worker’s place, in the midst of an affair. He was found dead and naked, from heart failure, inside the woman’s apartment, although she claimed to have never met him before. Tilly’s grandmother suspected foul play, but there was no evidence found of such. Dr. Cherny had died shortly after speaking with one of his students, one Dr. Mandrill, who coincidentally Tilly also worked for, until she got fired. Tilly boyfriend, Peter, also works for Dr. Mandrill, but Mandrill fired Tilly and Peter dumped her. So there’s that. Mandrill fired Tilly for what amounted to insubordination, but Tilly’s suspecting there was more to it than that.

“Yesterday’s Tomorrows” doesn’t have that complicated a plot once you sort out the different perspectives Wilhelm hop between, but it’s given a smokescreen of complication by Wilhelm showing us what end up being two sides of the same corn, between Hal and Tilly. Despite being the first POV character, Hal is actually not that important, nor does he really do much. Tilly is really the focus here, between her backstory but also her conflicts, which are external as well as internal. She’s grieving for her grandmother, whom she was close with, but she’s also at odds over whether her grandmother (who had a paranoid streak, it must be said) was right about Cherny. Is Tilly really the granddaughter of a disgraced scientist, or is there more going on here than meets the eye? Like yeah, obviously there is, but this story has meat on its bones more from being a character study than the mytery behind the Mandrill Institute. Mandrill had studied in physics but switched gears to biology, on Cherny’s recommendation; but the circumstances of this recommendation, for why Cherny saw Mandrill as unfit for pursuing physics, are not made clear until much later. The thing is, this story has little to do with either biology or physics, although it does pay lip service to Quantum Physics 101. The butterfly effect. Schrödinger’s cat. You know how it is. There’s the matter of predestination and alternate futures. The SFnal connection is very faint, to the point where I wonder if at some point during writing Wilhelm panicked and realized she should probably insert a bit more stuff about quantum physics in there if she wanted to sell it to a genre publication. As with other Wilhelm stories I’ve read, “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” is more concerned with character development than it is with being science fiction.

Really this is a story about coincidences, or more specifically serendipity. Tilly just so happens to be the granddaughter of a famous (or infamous at this point) scientist, formerly employed to another famous scientist, and Hal just so happens to be working for some documentary filmmaker named Val (Hal and Val, now won’t that confuse you) who ends up being instrumental in Tilly digging into Mandrill’s past, as well as her own. Mandrill and Tilly’s famous scientist grandfather just so happened to know each other many years ago, when the former was a student, and Tilly’s grandmother’s suspicion that somebody had plotted to ruin Cherny’s reputation just so happens to have been correct. Seeing a pattern here? Wilhelm willingly violates a basic rule of good storytelling, in that “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” is like a ten-car pileup of coincidences; but then this focus on serendipity is also the point. Tilly believess herself to be weirdly unlucky, which given recent events is easy to understand, but she’s also being railroaded toward a certain revelation and a certain conclusion. Speaking of quantum physics, I’m now reminded of the first Half-Life game, which also explores predestination and railroaded sequences of events, albeit in a very different fashion. This is all better to think about after the fact than it is to read in the moment. The one review I could find of this novella that has any depth (it’s the Locus review of this very F&SF issue) described it as having elements of a thriller, but I would say it’s more like a scientific mystery. Wilhelm wants you to take part in putting pieces of the narrative together so that by the end you (hopefully) feel a sensse of accomplishment.

There Be Spoilers Here

When Tilly finally confronts Mandrill about his charlatanism and his past relationship with Dr. Cherny, Mandrill reveals that if anything he had killed the old professor by way of inaction. What happened was that Cherny had called Mandrill a fraud, and the young man didn’t like this very much. On the fateful night of Cherny’s death the man suffered a heart attack while with Mandrill, and Mandrill probably could’ve saved him, or called an ambulance, but instead he conspired to ruin the dying man’s reputation, in a way that admittedly ssounds more far-fetched than the official cause. Mandrill tries drugging Tilly and getting her to kill Peter, so as to kill two birds with one stone: get Peter out of the way so that Mandrill can take all the credit, and also to have Tilly locked away. The plan goes “wrong,” though, as Tilly reveals she had never taken the roofied drink Mandrill had given her. Peter is shot, but lives, and is able to discredit Mandrill’s attempt to frame Tilly. Everyone except for the obvious villain gets a happy ending. This all sounds like a lot for maybe the last ten pages of a sixty-page novella that’s mostly just been talking and ruminating up to this point. In one stroke Tilly gets to clear her grandfather’s name and also take her sweet revenge on Mandrill; she even gets with Hal at the end. Tilly theorizes that her grandmother, despite the shameful circumstances of her husband’s death, had a kind of That’s So Raven moment when Tilly was born, as she foresaw her granddaughter making things right again. Maybe.

A Step Farther Out

This one took longer to gestate than I had hoped. I spent two days getting through the novella itself (I don’t really have an excuse there), and then another two days spent trying to come up with thoughts about it. It’s not that “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” is bad by any means, although I have to admit that after several Wilhelm stories I’ve had to be wowed by any of them, although I’ve enjoyed a few. It could be because Wilhelm, as part of the New Wave, was one of the first in American genre SF to focus more on characters than science or even plot with her fiction, which has since become pretty much the standard for SF writing at short lengths. What was once special might now be commonplace, although there’s still a reason Wilhelm managed to stay in the game as long as she did.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: May 2025

May 1st, 2025
(Cover by John Schoenherr. Analog, June 1975.)

At the beginning of the year I said that I would be covering one short story or novella from Galaxy each month—but I said nothing about serials. The truth is that Galaxy was, alongside Astounding/Analog, the most consistent market for serialized novels and novellas at the time, so it would feel wrong to never acknowledge that part of the magazine’s history. As such we’re getting a novella and a serial from Galaxy this month; that they’re both from authors I admire probably helps.

Last month I covered a horror story by the crime/mystery author Dorothy Salisbury Davis, which gave me the idea of finding more SFF by people who normally write crime/mystery, which while also a genre that has a history in pulp magazines, is “realistic” fiction rather than SFF. One curiosity that struck me ever since I saw it years ago was the fantasy story “The Bronze Door” by Raymond Chandler, which marked one of only two times he appeared in an SFF magazine. Someone who wrote a good deal more SFF than Chandler would be John D. MacDonald, who wrote prolifically for the genre magazines in the late ’40s and early ’50s before shifting to crime fiction and making a killing on that. So for this month’s complete novel we’ve got the early MacDonald novel Wine of the Dreamers. Rounding out the novel-length stuff is a relatively obscure standalone SF novel by Roger Zelazny, who nowadays is more known for his fantasy.

For the women we have two people who are a few generations apart and coming from different continents, but who still, each in her own way, have come to write science fiction. Kate Wilhelm is actually a bit hard to find in magazines after the late ’60s, once she found her voice as a writer, but the September 2001 issue of F&SF was a special issue dedicated to Wilhelm, complete with a new novella. As for the Greek writer Eugenia Triantafyllou, I picked just about the newest story I reasonably could’ve (an unofficial rule of mine is that a story must be at least a year old for me to consider it for review), with “Loneliness Universe” being a finalist in this year’s Hugos. I’m voting in the Hugos, by the way.

That makes one story from the 1930s, two from the 1950s, two from the 1970s, one from the 2000s, and one from the 2020s.

For the serial:
1. The Dream Millennium by James White. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, October to December 1973. I’ve been meaning to read more James White, and thankfully several of his novels first appeared as serials. White first appeared in the UK, in New Worlds, before eventually finding some success in the US as well. Along with Bob Shaw he was one of the few Irish SF writers to appear regularly on both sides of the Atlantic back in those days.
2. Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny. Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, June to August 1975. Zelazny is one of the most influential SFF writers of all time, his mark being apparent on the likes of George R. R. Martin and (God help us) Neil Gaiman; and yet despite a couple generations of writers (especially those of fantasy) owing a debt to Zelazny, much of his work remains obscure or simply out of print, including this standalone novel.
For the novellas:
1. “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” by Kate Wilhelm. From the September 2001 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s easy to forget this, but Wilhelm started in the ’50s, only that she flew under the radar for about a decade. Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, though, Wilhelm seemed to metamorphize almost overnight into one of the most acclaimed SF authors from the late ’60s until her death in 2018. She was married to Damon Knight.
2. “The Other Man” by Theodore Sturgeon. From the September 1956 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Sturgeon is one of my favorite authors, especially of short fiction. Sturgeon had started to write professionally with “mainstream” fiction, although this went nowhere and he quickly pivoted to SFF, much to our benefit. His productivity was peaks and valleys so that he was writing either a lot or nothing at all. He was most consistently productive in the ’50s.
For the short stories:
1. “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. From the May-June 2024 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Novelette. Triantafyllou was born and raised in Greece, and continues to live abroad, but writes her fiction in English. She made her debut back in 2017, and has yet to write her first novel, although maybe she just much prefers writing short fiction.
2. “The Bronze Door” by Raymond Chandler. From the November 1939 issue of Unknown. Possibly the most acclaimed crime writer of the 20th century, seriously only rivaled by Agatha Christie, Chandler’s known for his series of novels starring Philip Marlowe. Chandler famously didn’t start writing crime fiction until he was in his forties, and didn’t write his first novel until he was pushing fifty.
For the complete novel:
1. Wine of the Dreamers by John D. MacDonald. From the May 1950 issue of Startling Stories. Fans of crime fiction would know MacDonald for his prolific (21 novels over a span of as many years) Travis McGee series, as well as the standalone novel Cape Fear (first titled The Executioners, but then retitled after the 1962 film adaptation), but he also wrote a good deal of science fiction in the late ’40s and early ’50s. It’s not unusual for authors to cut their teeth on working with one genre before moving to greener pastures, so that much like how Elmore Leonard started with Westerns before moving to crime fiction, the same happened with MacDonald. Wine of the Dreamers was either MacDonald’s first or second novel, it’s hard to say.
Won’t you read with me?
Novella Review: “Wolves of Darkness” by Jack Williamson

April 19th, 2025

(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, January 1932.)

Who Goes There?

Despite the sheer length of his career and how much of SF history he was involved with, there’s been relatively little retrospective material on Jack Williamson. He made his debut in 1928 and kept writing, albeit with quiet periods in his career, until his death in 2006. By the time First Fandom arose in the late ’30s, Williamson was already considered something of a titan in fandom circles, yet he also outlived most of the young folks in First Fandom who looked up to him. Williamson’s obscurity could be tossed up to him being a B-tier writer who occasionally wrote A-tier material, and also because despite being pretty popular within SF fandom, especially in the ’30s and ’40s, his influence is nowhere near as pronounced as, say, Robert Heinlein’s or even A. E. van Vogt’s. As he more or less admits in his memoir, Wonder’s Child, Williamson didn’t think of himself as a capital-A Artist™, but rather he wrote genre fiction because he enjoyed it. In a way he was the longest-lived and most persistent of the pulpsters, having more in common with the likes of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs than Heinlein. “Wolves of Darkness” itself is a curious if imperfect SF-horror blend that marked one of several turning points for Williamson as a writer. It was, up to that point, his biggest paycheck for a single story, it was made the cover story for the January 1932 issue of the short-lived Strange Tales, and it was also his first attempt at applying an SFnal rationalism to what was then considered purely the ground of fantasy: lycanthropy.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales. It was stranded there for 35 years, until it was reprinted in the November 1967 issue of Magazine of Horror. It’s also been reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Classic Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1930s (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), Rivals of Weird Tales (ed. Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg), Echoes of Valor III (ed. Karl Edward Wagner), and the Williamson collection The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson: Volume Two.

Enhancing Image

Clovis McLaurin is a med student, so somewhere in his twenties, who makes his way to the rural Texas landscape on account of his weird scientist dad needing his assistance for some vague purpose. Dr. McLaurin had inherited a ranch plus some funds from his brother, and has apparently been using the combo of free home and secluded location to conduct experiments. Clovis convinces one the locals, Judsgon, in the town of Hebron, near enough to the ranch, to help him on his way, although traveling by night ends up being a huge mistake for both of them. We’re already told early on that the landscape in these here parts of the state seem to be tormented at night by a pack of wolves, or maybe a werewolf. The introductory blurb for “Wolves of Darkness” tells us that this story will have to do with lycanthropy, which is true enough, although Williamson’s treatment of it pretty unconventional by the standards of pulp fiction. It’s also worth mentioning that one major plus in this story’s favor is its sense of place, which is no doubt inspired by Williamson spending much of his life in rural areas. He was, in fact, born in what is now Arizona, before it had become a state (that’s how old he is), before his family moved to Texas and then New Mexico, literally in a covered wagon in the 1910s. Despite being ostensibly set in what was then modern times, “Wolves of Darkness” is a depiction of the southwest at a time when it was still in the early stages of modernization. It’s set in the 1920s or early ’30s, but could almost just as well takes place circa 1900, as if the past and present were converging. Incidentally Jack Williamson and Robert E. Howard were close contemporaries who were both from the southwest, and thus reading their work from the ’30s you can get an idea of what early modernization for that region was like, albeit from quite different perspectives: Howard had a very love-hate relationship with Texas while Williamson was more forgiving.

Anyway, Clovis ~~it’s such a weird name I’m sorry~~ and Judson are attacked by wolves and a rather skimpily dressed lady with glowing green eyes—in fact the wolves have the same sort of uncannily green eyes, as depicted in the cover. Judson gets killed off-screen, but the woman and her wolf pack take Clovis back to the ranch as a captive. Clovis swears he recognizes the girl from somewhere, and realizes it’s at least the body of Stella Jetton, the daughter of Dr. Jetton, who is (or was) Dr. McLaurin’s colleague. The problem is that Stella doesn’t recognize Clovis, and going by her actions it’s more likely that some outside force has taken control of her body. This turns out to be the case, not just with Stella and the wolves but Dr. McLaurin himself, who is, let’s say not quite himself once Clovis meets him. Both the people and wolves Clovis meets all have green eyes, and all seem to be possessed of some fierce intelligence that while in the bodies of “lower” animals appears to give them extra intelligence, while in the bodies of people they become more animalistic. The big weakness of this outside force becomes apparent early on when Dr. McLaurin (or the thing inhabiting his body) tells Clovis that they really dislike light of any kind, so as to why the interior of the ranch is only shown in a dim red light. The beings who have taken over these bodies are nocturnal, or rather they come from a world that is deprived of light—a notion that seems outlandish, although there are many organisms in the depths of our own planet’s oceans that have never known sunlight. “Wolves of Darkness,” like much if not necessarily all of weird fiction, is basically about someone trespassing beyond the boundaries of the natural order and in so doing fucking around and finding out, as we say. In the case of this story it’s Dr. McLaurin who, prior to the beginning, had tampered with studies in possible alternate dimensions. This is what I mean by the story being SF rather than fantasy, since we’re given an SFnal explanation for why these things are happening.

Even in 1932 the premise of humanity coming into contact with malicious alien life was by no means new, although what’s more novel here is that “Wolves of Darkness” is an early example of aliens of the body-snatching variety. We never see what they look like, although from what I can tell they’re more like energy beings of the sort of that appear regularly in Star Trek; rather we only see them as filtered through the organic Earth bodies they take over. The conflict thus boils down to Clovis being held hostage, to help the aliens make a machine that would basically facilitate an invasion of Earth, or die a horrific death. Of course, he figures he’s gonna die either way, but he’d much rather defeat the aliens and save Stella in the process (he’s not as concerned about saving his dad). I’ve read enough early Williamson that I can tell Clovis very much fits in the mold of what Williamson was doing at the time, which is to say Clovis is a typical early Williamson protagonist: he’s sort of shy and intellectual, but also antsy, and he has a hunger for adventure that puts him in dangerous situations despite his social insecurities. In a way this is wish-fulfillment, a fact which Williamson was not exactly secretive about when it came to his ’30s output. (Some writers intentionally keep the methods behind their madness hidden while others, especially in the age of social media, are a little too eager about sharing with us all the boring fucking processes of their work. Williamson, in Wonder’s Child, takes a pleasant middle ground and only gives us insight into what really mattered to him as both a writer and person. If I ever become a professional writer of fiction, please put a gun to my head if I start oversharing about the miserable and solitary process of writing and getting my stories accepted wherever.) The “romance” between Clovis and Stella (the two barely interact if we discount scenes where the latter is still possessed) is also indicative of pulp fiction, in that it’s totally unconvincing.

What’s more convincing is the thinly veiled sexual angst, which Williamson also points out in his memoir as being rooted in his own failed attempts at romance and sexual intimacy at that time. There’s a memorable scene in which Stella bites Clovis’s leg in retaliation and licks the blood, in a way which is animalistic but also evocative of a merciless dominatrix. Clovis carries that leg wound for the rest of the story, and it gets brought up a few times so as to remind us that Clovis is not in the best physical shape to run from these horrors, but it’s also a connection he has with this woman he is irrationally driven to save. The idea is that he really want to fuck Stella, although this sentiment is never made explicit, or rather it’s shrouded under the guise of “true love.” Their relationship is unconvincing when taken on its face, but is more convincing when read as repressed lust, helped by the fact that Stella is barely clothed for pretty much the whole thing. Another neat thing is that the energy beings are apparently able to inhabit any organic life, even those who are dead, resulting in a small army of green-eyed zombies, including the resurrected Judson. There’s a memorable little passage in which Williamson describes one of the zombies, apparently missing its head, with a pair of gaseous green eyes protruding from its neck stump. This is the kind of gory and unabashedly horrific stuff that would’ve been fine in Weird Tales but would probably not have been fine for Unknown a decade later. “Wolves of Darkness,” aside from just being too long (it’s a novella but has the plot and character depth of a novelette), is a slight challenge to recommend because it has elements of both pulpy weird fiction and more sophisticated SF and fantasy that would appear later.

There Be Spoilers Here

After a lengthy infodump, in which Clovis manages to put Stella under hypnosis and make the energy being recede from controlling her temporarily, and also a failed escape attempt, Our Hero™ knows what he must do. The aliens really hate light, to the point that enough exposure might be able to kill them, or at least make them retreat from the bodies they control. With the help of a few locals, some dynamite, and some matches, he kills the fuck out of some of the zombies and ultimately is able to turn the tables on the aliens. Of course everyone who fell under the possession of the aliens is dead now, including Clovis’s dad, a fact which he doesn’t seem to mind much, leaving Stella as the sole survivor. All’s well that ends well, I guess? It’s a weirdly upbeat ending, considering the death toll and also the strain it put on Clovis’s mental health; meanwhile Stella conveniently doesn’t remember being a meat puppet. Not one of the more convincing endings among Williamson’s fiction.

A Step Farther Out

A few years ago, when I really started to get into magazine fiction, I remember being instantly captivated by H. W. Wesso’s splendid cover for this issue of Strange Tales. I didn’t even know what Strange Tales was at the time; it was actually the horror/fantasy sister magazine to Astounding Stories, back when both were published by Clayton. Astounding almost didn’t make it, but Street & Smith came to the rescue, although Strange Tales was left to rot. Since it was the cover story for this issue, I’d been wanting to read “Wolves of Darkness” for a minute, and I’m glad I finally did. I will say that it does pale a bit in comparison with Williamson’s later attempt at putting an SFnal twist on lycanthropy, “Darker Than You Think,” which I had read a couple years ago, although I may revisit that for the sake of writing about it. “Wolves of Darkness” is a liminal piece in Williamson’s career that I’d recommend for anyone interested enough in the trajectory of the man’s career and/or the history of old-school weird fiction.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Pilot and the Bushman” by Sylvia Jacobs

April 10th, 2025

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, August 1951.)

Who Goes There?

Overall we know about as much about Sylvia Jacobs as we know about Jesus of Nazareth. I can’t find any pictures of her, or find out when she was born or when she died; but then we at least have writings from her, so there’s that. I was pointed towards a useful piece by Rich Horton which covers what little we know about Jacobs’s life and what little fiction and non-fiction she had published in the genre magazines. She had studied oceanography, and was married to a professional deep-sea diver. She apparently had done some research for Robert Heinlein (regarding the ocean, of course) for a juvenile novel he had planned but sadly never got to write. She was a California denizen for at least some of her adult life. She wrote about half a dozen SF stories, mostly in the early ’50s, which is unsurprising given that was when the magazine market saw an immense bubble; and, just as unsurprisingly, she mostly went dormant after 1960. This is the basic narrative of a lot of lady SF writers from that period, although by no means all of them. Horton describes “The Pilot and the Bushman” as like a prototype for the light satire Christopher Anvil later wrote nonstop, although I don’t think he gives Jacobs’s story quite enough credit—not to say it’s a hidden gem, really, but there’s a fair bit going on here.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. This is my third time plundering this issue for gold, and it’s quite possible I will have covered all of this issue’s fiction contents eventually. The copyright must’ve run out at some point, because “The Pilot and the Bushman,” along with a couple other Jacobs stories, is on Project Gutenberg. It’s also been reprinted in Women Wrote the Future: Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy (ed. J. LaRue). Other than that it’s not seen print at all.

Enhancing Image

The first and easily longest scene is a Socratic dialogue between two men, although despite both appearing to be human one of them is, in fact, an alien. The Ambassador from Outer Space (we never get his actual name) is having a behind-closed-doors meeting with Jerry Jergins, a marketing man and predictably a bit of a scoundrel. The two are in the situation because the Ambassador had made what was called a “boner” in the old days, by that I mean he had made a slip at the UN Assembly by saying the aliens have what they call a Matter Repositor. The problem is that the Matter Repositor can replicate anything, and I do mean anything, which is no real issue for a society that does not run on industrial capitalism. (The Ambassador is quick to point out that the aliens’ economic model is NOT some brand of socialism, IT’S NOT SOCIALISM, GUYS.) The Matter Repositor may as well be magic, but the point is that mankind is too “primitive” to have it. The problem is that once you inform someone of something’s existence and then tell them they can’t have that thing, then that someone is no less incentivized to take the whatever-it-is. God told Adam and Eve to not eat fruit from the tree of knowledge, but that did nothing to stop Eve from having a bite. If you tell your kid they can’t have more cookies from the cookie jar than they ought to, what do you think they’re gonna do at some point? The aliens, as you can tell by the comparisons I’ve made, see themselves as being in a parental or patronizing position with regards to the humans. Jerry isn’t happy about the Ambassador’s smarmy attitude, but if he has a plan (and he does), he’s not upfront about what he has in mind.

This is a story about two races from radically different cultures, with one actually immersing itself in the other’s culture for the first time. “The Pilot and the Bushman” is, on its surface, about the immediate aftermath of mankind making first contact with a fellow intelligent race, but it takes no more than a single brain cell to figure out Jacobs is comparing her SFnal situation with the real-life occurrences of one human culture making first contact with another human culture, with one side being far more advanced on a technological level than the other. I have to italicize that one part because, of course, the Spaniards and later the English who set foot in North America were no more inherently intelligent or morally upright than the indigenous peoples of the land. There were things the indigenous peoples were not and could not be prepared for, namely diseases they had no prior contact with or knowledge of, and thus you had whole populations introduced to diseases they had no immunity against. Similarly the Ambassador fears that introducing mankind to the Matter Repositor would have apocalyptic consequences, since virtually every country on Earth has (whether lefties wanna admit it or not) a capitalist economy based on scarcity. The people of the Ambassador’s home world have been born and raised into a post-scarcity environment, which understandably has created a radically different mindset from what humans are acquainted with. The aliens are not necessarily superior but are certainly very different—the huge gap in cultures being the races being the problem.

As the Ambassador says:

To a Micronesian bushman, the pilot who can be trusted with the power and speed of a B-29 seems a veritable god. But the pilot is only an ordinary Joe, very likely no more intelligent than the bushman—he just had a different background. Fighting each other for necessities and luxuries, the process that you people call business competition, has so long been needless to our people that they would no more think of competitive gain than you would do an Indian harvest dance before you signed a contract. They aren’t necessarily more intelligent or more virtuous than your people—they just have a different background.

Of course, the aliens are the pilot and the humans are the bushman. It’s not exactly a hard comparison to make. What’s strange, reading it now, is that Jacobs goes about it with the mindset that the aliens really do mean well despite their smug attitude around humans, or at the very least that they aren’t looking to divide and conquer Earth as hot new real estate, like with their real-life counterparts. It’s a commentary on colonialism and the relationships invasive cultures have historically had with indigenous peoples, but it lacks serious bite because it does not interrogate the myriad ways in which a colonizing force can subjugate a colonized people’s development. The biggest complaint I have with this story, other than it being overly chatty (there is nonstop talking for over half of it, which can dull one’s attention span), is that Jacobs does not treat her own subject matter with enough seriousness. Horton compares it to Christopher Anvil, but I also thought of a less funny and less vicious Robert Sheckley—granted that Jacobs’s story was published about a year before Sheckley made his debut. My point is that it’s easy to overlook the territory “The Pilot and the Bushman” covers because the story itself doesn’t pay said territory that much mind. It’s a social satire, of the sort that appeared quite often in Galaxy, especially in its early years, and for that it’s an adequate example.

But it could’ve been better.

There Be Spoilers Here

Conditions improve, thankfully, when we finally see an end to the dialogue and some action can kick in, although it’s not much. The back end of this story has enough of a sense of humor and also a viciousness that the first half or so was rather lacking; like I would’ve appreciated it if Jacobs had not spent so much time setting things up. The gist is that Jerry agrees to coordinate a huge propaganda campaign to disincentivize people from looking into the Matter Repositor, while at the same time playing up humanity’s quickly growing reputation as “savage” compared to the aliens. The plan works—in fact it works better than the Ambassador would’ve wanted, although Jerry is perfectly happy with the results. Earth becomes a tourist destination for the aliens, who are so unaccustomed to things to like drinking, whoring, theft, and other vices that they see it all as an alluring novelty. They think stealing some doodad from a convenience store and spending a night in jail is fun. They’re totally unprepared for the eccentricates of human culture and are thus unequipped to resist it. This is clearly a satire of how people in the Anglosphere see certain “backwards” countries as lovely tourist spots. Even circa 1950 this would’ve been very the case with how Americans treated Hawaii, which was a US territory but a state yet. The othering of indigenous people and East-Asians in Hawaii has been a thing for decades now, but ya know, nobody likes a tourist.

A Step Farther Out

I have to assume, given how little she wrote, that Jacobs saw writing SF as like a hobby more than anything. In the early ’50s it was possibly to write SF for a living, so long as you wrote at a mile a minute and knew how to sell a story to the right editor. Maybe Jacobs was into it but not that into it; she did, after all, have a respectable day job. “The Pilot and the Bushman” was her second published story, and I’d be interested in reading the rest of her SF, although I don’t expect to find a hidden master of the form. Jacobs’s career as an SF writer is like a ship that passed in the night.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Triplanetary by E. E. Smith (Part 1/4)

April 8th, 2025

(Cover by Leo Morey. Amazing Stories, January 1934.)

Who Goes There?

There were once people who loved reading E. E. Smith, but they’re all dead now. Even at the time of his own death in 1965, Edward E. Smith was something of a dinosaur, albeit one treated with reverence within SF fandom, even if he remained totally unknown outside of it. Smith, as you might know, was perhaps the chief innovator of space opera; when his debut novel, The Skylark of Space, was serialized in 1928, there was nothing else quite like it on the market. The closest for comparison would have been Edmond Hamilton’s Interstellar Patrol series, but there was nothing on the scale of what Smith was doing. Unfortunately, to cop a line from Alexei and Cory Panshin’s review of The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum, time has long since swallowed up what were once Smith’s virtues—an assessment that I think befits Smith a lot more than Weinbaum, for the record. You can still read and enjoy Weinbaum just fine, assuming you’re not of the sort that requires your SF to be dead serious; but with Smith, even if one were to keep an open mind, it can be a real challenge. Smith just wasn’t a good writer, sad to say, really in any sense of the word, except he did have a sixth sense for scale and action, mostly in the depths of space. Even Hamilton, Smith’s closest contemporary, holds up better to modern scrutiny, especially since he did end up evolving with the times, whereas Smith did not. Thus we have someone whose work strikes even the most retro-friendly of modern SF readers as a museum piece.

Why did I pick Triplanetary as my first Smith to cover here, then? The novelty of it was tempting. You see, along with the Skylark series there was the even grander Lensman series, which occupied Smith for much of the ’30s and ’40s. Smith didn’t see any of his novels get published in book form, however, until after the end of World War II, by which point some of these novels had not seen the light of day since they ran as serials more than a decade earlier. When Smith took hold of Triplanetary for book publication he revised and expanded it so as to make it almost unrecognizable from its serial version, to the point that whereas the serial version of Triplanetary is a standalone novel, the book version was retrofitted to be a prequel entry in the Lensman series. The book version is also about 1.5x the length of the serial version. The two are so different that they have separate ISFDB pages. Like I said, it’s the novelty of the thing.

Placing Coordinates

Triplanetary was serialized in Amazing Stories, January to April 1934. Smith had apparently hoped to sell it to Astounding, but that magazine went through a change in both editor and publisher, not to mention it’d gone on hiatus for about six months. The serial version of Triplanetary would remain stranded there for more than seventy years, until it was transcribed for Project Gutenberg in 2007. A few small publishers have since made this version of the novel available in book form, making sure to differentiate it from its book counterpart.

Enhancing Image

The space liner Hyperion is going on its merry way—or maybe not so merry, as the crew is aware that two ships from the Triplanetary League have gone missing in this part of space recently. Not destroyed, but simply vanished without a trace. (The Triplanetary League is a coalition of Earth, Mars, and Venus, from that distant time when Venus was thought to be hostile to human life, sure, but theoretically livable.) Conway Costigan is First Officer of the Hyperion, but also a member of the Triplanetary Secret Service, so he’s like if Spock and Jason Bourne were the same guy. Unfortunately, a pirate must’ve snuck aboard ship and taken on a disguise, as there’s an outbreak of Vee-Two gas, which incapacitates the crew. Costigan only has enough time to save himself and a single passenger, Clio Marsden, getting them into a lifeboat and reviving her. Costigan explains to Clio that Vee-Two is strictly forbidden, something she apparently already knows. (There’s quite a bit of dialogue wherein characters explain things to each other that they already know.) “The penalty for using it or having it is death on sight. Gangsters and pirates use it, since they have nothing to lose, being on the death list already,” says Costigan. Looking into Smith’s works, the death penalty was something he was just really keen on, to the point where he seemed to support its use even for drug dealers—a view that I wanna say has not aged well, but it looks like modern American conservatives are about as enthusiastic about capital punishment. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Costigan heads back into the bowels of the Hyperion to track down the pirate, with a gas mask, space armor, and a nifty weapon on a tripod that’s so powerful that it not only jibs the pirate but turns him into a cloud of mist. This scene, the strongest in the installment, understandably provides the image for Leo Morey’s cover for the issue.

You can accuse Triplanetary of a lot of things, but it is certainly not slow in its pacing, unless you’re talking about the book version. I’ve gathered that the biggest change Smith made was that he wrote six chapters of backstory to pad out the beginning of the book version, working mainly to wedge Triplanetary into the Lensman continuity. I don’t know how anyone is supposed to survive a single chapter of lore written by E. E. Smith, let alone six. The serial version, for all the bad writing on display, wastes the reader’s time as little as possible. In the course of three chapters we’re introduced to the hero, the (probable) love interest, the villain, and what’s at stake. Speaking of which, when it looks like the Hyperion’s troubles are over, the crew is taken hostage by a ship that appears to be invisible, with Costigan, Clio, and Captain Bradley meeting face to face with the owner of an artificial “planetoid” (listen, it’s not the Death Star, got it?), named Roger. Yes, Roger. That’s his name! We know this is about as old-school a space opera as you can get because tractor beams are mentioned. Roger is a mad scientist, although he considers himself not to be mad but perfectly calm and collected; indeed he doesn’t do a Bond villain laugh or anything like that, but rather is calculated in his malice. Even his threat to rape Clio (I suspect it’s implied rather than explicit because of censorship) is stated in so many words, rather than bluntly put. Much of Roger’s workforce is also robotic, rather than flesh-and-blood people, despite what the pirate in the first chapter would make us believe. Thankfully Costigan, being a badass secret agent, has a plan for getting at least himself and the others out of prison. They escape, thanks to some tech that somehow Roger’s goons were unable to detect, but their victory is short-lived as there turns out to be yet another villain, apparently alien, even bigger of a threat than the mad scientist.

Oh, it’s bad.

Putting his ridiculously bland name aside, Roger’s actually not a bad villain. Smith doesn’t bother much with describing his characters physically, but he does give Roger special treatment:

Not only was [Roger] dressed entirely in gray, but his heavy hair was gray, his eyes were gray, and even his tanned skin seemed to give the impression of grayness in disguise. His overwhelming personality radiated an aura of grayness—not the gentle gray of the dove, but the resistless, driving gray of the super-dreadnaught; the hard, inflexible, brittle gray of the fracture of high-carbon steel.

Mind you that this all happens, with Costigan and company getting attacked by pirates and then introduced to Roger, in the first chapter. If the book version of Triplanetary suffers from being too slow, as in frontloaded with exposition, then the serial version might have the opposite problem. And yet, despite having breakneck pacing, Smith still finds room to insert dialogue that is, let’s say redundant. For example Roger spends rather too much time saying, indirectly, that he plans to make a sex toy out of Clio, if only because she’s apparently too slow on the uptake to get his point. A common criticism I’ve seen when reading about Smith is that his characters don’t talk like real people, or even people you’d read about in SF published a decade later, but almost like old-school comic book characters. It’s writing in the old pulp tradition, although even within that context I’d still say Smith is more stilted than, say, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who for all his faults went out of his way to not irritate the reader unless one thought about his racism or dodgy science too deeply. Three chapters in and we have one character who feels like he has real presence, except Roger turns out to not even be the greater-scope villain, if the third chapter’s anything to go by.

There Be Spoilers Here

My eyes started glazing over towards the end, although I’m not sure how much of that was the quality of the novel and how much was the awful mood I’ve been in lately. I’ll let you know.

A Step Farther Out

On the one hand I believe that once I start writing about a serial then I really ought to finish it, as I probably will in this case. I’ll be honest with you, though, it’s been rough going already and we’re only a quarter into it. Maybe I just like Smith as a writer; something about him, aside from his obvious faults, bugs me. I tend to be generous with old-timey SF, even of the pre-Campbell sort, but this might be the threshold for me. But, it’s also possible that this is as bad as it gets.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Proxima Centauri” by Murray Leinster

April 4th, 2025

(Cover by Howard V. Brown. Astounding, March 1935.)

Who Goes There?

When John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding with the October 1937 issue, there was a sort of mass extinction event for genre SF—although not quite. For one, the changing of the guard from F. Orlin Tremaine to Campbell was gradual, with many of the writers who submitted to Tremaine still being around in the early ’40s, but also a few of the pre-Campbell writers did survive well past what should’ve been well past their expiration date. The most remarkable example of one of these authors succeeding against the odds might be Murray Leinster, which was the pseudonym for real-life inventor Will F. Jenkins. Of course, Leinster also occasionally used his real name as a byline, most memorably with one of his forward-thinking stories, “A Logic Named Joe.” Leinster had his first SF story published in 1919, making him so old that he came about before the launch of Amazing Stories. In the ’30s he wrote his first major work, including today’s short novella, but the consensus among genre historians is that the years 1945 to about 1960 are where Leinster really hit his stride. This is impressive for someone who turned sixty in 1956. “Proxima Centauri” is decidedly pre-Campbell in that it’s an example of the pulpy space opera that dominated SF magazines (it even appeared sometimes in Weird Tales) in the late ’20s through much of the ’30s. It’s more Star Trek than something more intellectual like, say, Robert Heinlein’s “Universe,” which is often regarded as having extrapolated on Leinster’s premise; but really, the two stories have little in common past their settings (big spaceship) being similar.

Placing Coordintes

First published in the March 1935 issue of Astounding Stories. It’s been reprinted in Before the Golden Age (ed. Isaac Asimov), From Wells to Heinlein (ed. James E. Gunn), and too many Leinster collections to count, including Sidewise in Time, The Best of Murray Leinster, and First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster.

Enhancing Image

The Adastra is big. Like monstrously big. Indeed “monstrous” is a word Leinster uses to describe maybe one too many times; the vocabulary for pulp writing was not that varied. The Adastra is a spaceship that has been journeying out to Proxima Centauri for the past seven years, with its crew of a few hundred, plus a fair number of children. When someone brings up “Proxima Centauri” it’s as a precursor to the generation ship subgenre of SF, if you can even call it a subgenre. The idea behind the generation ship is that people live, from cradle to grave, on a spaceship, generation after generation. Going by this criteria, however, this is not an example of a generation ship story, since the people aboard the Adastra are supposed to reach Proxima Centauri and then return for Earth. The trip even one-way takes several years, though. At some point, enough people aboard got tired of the day-to-day monotony that a mutiny happened, although it did not succeed. At the beginning of the story there are basically two factions, those who side with the officers and the captain of the ship, and those who side with the “Muts,” short for mutineers. Jack Gary is one of these Muts; he came aboard as a teenager, when he wasn’t even old enough to serve as crewman, but his father died during the trip and Jack took his place. Jack’s in love with Helen Bradley, who (of course) is the captain’s daughter. Doing some basic math tells us that Jack is 23 while Helen is 21. Unfortunately for the both of them, Captain Bradley does not approve of them marrying, on account of Jack being a Mut; meanwhile Alstair, the first mate, approves of them being a couple even less, given he also has eyes on Helen. Helen, for her part (being “the girl” [Leinster’s words, not mine] of the story), doesn’t seem interested in Alstair at all, which is understandable given that he’s an asshole who wants Jack’s head on a pike.

The love triangle between Jack, Helen, and Alstair forms the human drama of the narrative, which… is fine, I guess. You could do worse. Aside from the aforementioned characters there’s nobody else really worth considering; maybe if Leinster had expanded it to a longer novella we would’ve gotten more from the rest of the crew, but alas. The point of the story is really not the borderline generation-ship conditions of life aboard the Adastra, but instead what the crew meet by total accident as they get close to the star. See, this is actually first contact narrative, and the aliens we meet end up being really something. The crew hide in the ship’s depths when the aliens (let’s call them Centaurians) come aboard, although one unlucky redshirt gets killed instantly for his troubles, the Centaurian’s weapon not only killing him but rapidly mummifying his body. One might think this was just a case of misunderstanding, or that maybe the boarding party of Centaurians were too quick with the trigger and realized their mistake; but no, these aliens are very happy to take home some human corpses. After a skirmish in which armed crewmen are able to fight off the boarding party and taken one of the aliens captive, we find out a few things: that the Centaurians are not animals but rather sentient plants; that the Centaurians see animal life as both a food source and the corpses of animals as collectors’ items; and also that the Adastra is woefully ill-equipped to deal with the Centaurian ship. While some people aboard have weapons with which to defend themselves, the Adastra itself does not, and at the same time the ship is too bulky to maneuver out of the way of attack. To make matters worse, Captain Bradley has died offscreen, from… something. Now Alstair is in command, and Alstair is not the right man for the job.

I’d been meaning to review more Leinster since I tackled his SF-horror yarn “Pipeline to Pluto” about 18 months ago, because I wanted to read a Leinster story that’s maybe less bleak, and also because when I reviewed “Pipeline to Pluto” I was in a terrible headspace myself. Turns out that “Proxima Centauri” is only marginally less dark than that other story, although its body count is higher by several orders of magnitude. Death hangs like a shroud over pretty much every page, and the situation Our Heroes™ find themselves in is really hopeless; there is no magical solution in which both sides get to sort out their differences. Leinster’s Centaurians are unambiguously evil, but his human characters are only better by virtue of sometimes being able to make rational decisions. Much of the conflict comes from Jack and Alstair hating each other’s guts and Helen being able to do very little about that. Even when they devise a way to communicate with the captured Centaurian, there’s no way to see eye-to-eye with the alien; the two races are fundamentally opposed to each other’s existences. This is all a curious foil to Leinster’s later and more beloved story, “First Contact,” in which (spoilers) the human and alien space crews are able to resolve their conflict peacefully. In “Proxima Centauri” there is no such option. The crew of the Adastra were already on the brink of killing each other, but for a lot of them being confronted with the pure evil that is the Centaurians proves to be the tipping point. As you can see with the cover for this issue of Astounding, which depicts “Proxima Centauri,” the Centaurians are vaguely humanoid but do not have heads or necks; instead their eyes are rendered as slits in the upper abdomen, and their limbs are rather spongy, which makes sense given that they are walking plants. The Centaurian ship used radio waves to kill non-animal life before boarding the ship, but then of course the Centaurians themselves are non-animal life so that’s what they would think to use.

Assuming you can put aside the insane logistics of the Adastra, a ship whose dimensions and internal workings either cannot or should not exist, it’s internally consistent enough of a story. Most SF writers at this point were not scientists or inventors, despite people like Hugo Gernsback really wanting to push the “credibility” of scientists as writers, but Leinster could actually claim to have in-depth knowledge of some technology. There’s a seriousness with how Leinster imagines the Adastra and its alien foes, even if the tone of the thing is very pulpy.

There Be Spoilers Here

By the time we get to the final chapter the vast majority of the Adastra‘s crew is dead, either killed by the Centaurians or via suicide. There’s a disturbing little passage wherein one of the officers, about to be taken prisoner by the aliens, kills his family and then himself; unfortunately Leinster does not give this sort of grimness the proper sense of weight, either through pacing or his choice of words. The pulp method of writing is ill-equipped for dealing with a story where by the end a few hundred people have died, along with an entire race of intelligent lifeforms. Since that cat is out of the bag, we may as well talk about the ending, which in looking up opinions on “Proxima Centauri” I’ve found surprisingly little material for. It could be that in the context of when it was written the kill-them-all ending is probably far from unique, but I still think it’s worth noting the sense of inevitability in how Alstair, being the last people aboard the Adastra, rigs its engines so that the ship, in exploding, destroys the Centaurians’ home world. Alstair’s decision to sacrifice himself and let Jack and Helen run off together is treated as heroic, but in sacrificing himself he also commits an act of genocide. The extermination of a whole species. It was them or us. A human ship, following the Adastra by a few years, has apparently been on its way to Proxima Centauri, with no way for the Adastra‘s crew to warn them that the Centaurians would be waiting for them. Worse yet, once the Centaurians heard about Earth, they saw a goldmine in the form of a planet, full of animal life that was for the taking.

What’s curious about Leinster’s resigned position that the Centaurians must be exterminates is that it’s not because they’re a warmongering people, but because they’re such resource hogs that they’ve eliminated all animal life from their home planet, as well as others containing life in their solar system. They see non-plant life like how humans see precious metals, and Leinster makes this comparison explicit because he’s not really talking about some hypothetical race of plant people—he’s talking about us. Human greed may become so all-consuming that it threatens life on an existential level. Spoilers for The Day the Earth Stood Still, but after Klaatu, an alien visiting Earth with his cool robot, is resurrected and able to call upon the leaders of as many human governments as could be managed, he warns us that the galactic council he’s a part of might have to take drastic action if the governments of Earth persist in researching nuclear weapons. Powers from another galaxy apparently see the hydrogen bomb, or at least what it can lead to, as enough of a threat to other planets hosting intelligent life that the message is basically: “Sort your shit out, or we will sort your shit out for you.” Surely if the race of people Klaatu belonged to was real, we would all be dead by now. Likewise the Centaurians are so devastating to whatever environment they come upon that something must be done about them. It’s an extremely bloody ending for how hopeful it is.

A Step Farther Out

“Proxima Centauri” is one of the most important pre-Campbell SF stories of the ’30s, although it’s not necessarily one of the best. It’s a story that gives hints of a deceptively bright talent, but is also beholden to pulp-era tropes that not mix well with modern sensibilities. I also recommend not going into it as a precursor to generation-ship narratives since that’s really not the point of the thing, although it might strike some (like it did Asimov, when he first read it as a teenager) as a pleasant surprise. Leinster would adapt with the time, up to a point, so that a decade after “Proxima Centauri” he would emerge as one of the more mature writers in the field. It helps that the story itself is not a slog to get through; it doesn’t overstay its welcome and it mostly go down smooth. Still, this is the kind of thing you read in 2025 for the sake of studying it than enjoying it.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: April 2025

April 1st, 2025
(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, January 1932.)

My schedule is not what it used to be, although I’m not sure if that’s my new living conditions, work slowly growing down on me, the real-world turmoil happening just outside of view, or some combination. I used to run this blog as a way of escaping temporarily from the drudgery of my everyday existence, between my job and living with my parents; but since I moved out four months ago, the scales have shifted in balance quite a bit. Writing for this blog no longer feels like an escape, but just more work that I have to do. I must write every couple days or else… what? What would happen if I took a break for, say, a month? Most likely my skill at writing would wither, if only a bit. Writing is like any other skill in that if you don’t do it for long enough then you sort of forget how to do it in the first place. It’s why I always find it amazing whenever an artist, be they a writer, filmmaker, musician, or whatever, takes a hiatus from the craft, then returns years later, seemingly out of hibernation, as if nothing had happened. Do you think Terrence Malick had to remember what it’s like to direct a movie when he was making The Thin Red Line, or if Robert Fripp, after not playing guitar for a couple years, had to refamiliarize himself with the damn thing when recording for David Bowie’s “Heroes”? Really this mindset can be applied to any skill, even one as worthless and solitary as writing.

I just remembered a depressing thought I had the other night, during one of my shifts, which is that I might be witnessing the death of human creativity in my lifetime. I’m not talking about creativity on an individual level, since I think it’s obvious that so long as humankind exists there will be artists, probably living on the margins, for the same reason there will always be Palestinians and Kurds and Chechens and what have you. I’m talking about a collective resentment towards creativity that has, at least in the US and UK, been building up since the Reagan and Thatcher years, if not earlier. Fascism, be it Christofascism or neo-liberalism of the Reagan-Clinton sort, is at its core a rejection of the human mind’s ability, indeed its incessant urging, to grow and progress. There is a Freudian return-to-the-womb desire inherent in fascism, except on a systemic level. The fascist wants to stop the future from happening—not a good or bad future, but the future as a concept. You can at least give the Chinese credit for envisioning a future, although if we’re being honest it’s a rather bleak one. In a more just world “AI” would be used only to make soul-crushing labor easier to stomach for human workers, but instead the right-wing technocrats who have increasingly gotten a stranglehold on government and commerce think such incredible technology should rather be used for kneecapping the human imagination. It’s possible that in just a decade or two the artist will be treated like how drug addicts and the homeless are treated today, which is to say the artist will be treated in the mainstream as at best a nuisance and more often as a threat to “the status quo.” We are undoubtedly on the path to that conclusion, and really it’s been a long time coming.

So what can I do? I talk a lot about art and artists, because I’m of the firm belief that without art human existence is really not worth it. Evelyn Waugh said that without God human existence is “unintelligible and unendurable.” I mostly agree with that sentiment. I write about art, even bad art, even the pulpy stuff, because I think there must be some value in it, and because God knows there isn’t much value elsewhere. Speaking of which, I decided it’s been too long since I last covered material from the pre-Campbell years that isn’t from the pages of Weird Tales. (I can’t help it that on average Weird Tales aged a lot better than its SF contemporaries.) So, I’m doing something a bit different this month. The serial, along with both novellas, will be from the pre-Campbell ’30s. I’m also finally checking the E. E. Smith box off my list, although not by reading a Skylark or Lensman novel but a standalone that caught my eye if only because of its convoluted publication history. The two short stories are from lady writers, one of whom you might’ve heard of if you’re really into crime fiction, while the other is totally obscure. See, the news is not all bad. Spring is finally here, and while my allergies may be kicking in I’m no longer freezing to death.

I’ve done enough yapping. What will I be reading? We have three stories from the 1930s and two from the 1950s.

For the serial:
1. Triplanetary by E. E. Smith. Serialized in Amazing Stories, January to April 1934. Smith was immensely popular in SF fandom during his lifetime, and yet despite a few attempts to resurrect his reputation he has since then been relegated to something of a sideshow attraction. Along with Edmond Hamilton he was one of the pioneers of space opera, with his novel The Skylark of Space especially laying the groundwork for future entries in that subgenre. The magazine version of Triplanetary was a standalone novel that Smith later retooled so as to make it a prequel in the Lensman series.
For the novellas:
1. “Proxima Centauri” by Murray Leinster. From the March 1935 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. I actually don’t remember if I’ve read this one before, so I’m counting it as a new read. Anyway, Leinster is curious if only because he’s one of the few writers from the Gernsback era to survive the coming of Campbell; not only that, but he actually hit his creative peak in the ’40s and ’50s.
2. “Wolves of Darkness” by Jack Williamson. From the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales. Williamson had one of the longest careers of any writer, inside or outside of SF, debuting in 1928 and remaining active until his death in 2006. “Wolve of Darkness” stands out as, if I remember right, getting Williamson his single biggest paycheck for a story up to that point, as he says in his autobiography.
For the short stories:
1. “The Pilot and the Bushman” by Sylvia Jacobs. From the August 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. This is now the third time I’ve nabbed a story from this issue of Galaxy. I unfortunately have next to nothing to say about Jacobs since we know basically nothing about her, not even when and where she was born. She wrote a handful of SF stories in the ’50s and ’60s and then vanished.
2. “The Muted Horn” by Dorothy Salisbury Davis. From the May 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe. This is a case where looking at an author’s ISFDB page can be deceiving, since going by it one would think Davis wrote very little; but actually she was a prolific crime novelist, and was even President of the Mystery Writers of America when she wrote this story, which is apparently horror.
Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “The Man in the Mailbag” by Gordon R. Dickson

March 31st, 2025

(Cover by Wallace Wood. Galaxy, April 1959.)

Who Goes There?

Who was the first author to win two Hugos for fiction in the same year? George R. R. Martin. Which is wild to think about, because this was in 1980, and nobody outside SF fandom knew who Martin was at this point; nobody knew he would eventually become one of the most famous authors in living memory, and also that he would have possibly the most famous (or infamous) case of writer’s block for all the world to see. So who was the second person to win two Hugos for fiction in the same year? Believe it or not, it happened only one year after GRRM pulled this amazing feat, although nowadays far fewer people know who Gordon R. Dickson is. Dickson was born and raised in Canada (Alberta), but his family moved to the US when he was a teen and he stayed there for the rest of his life. I like Dickson in a similar way to how I like Clifford Simak, which is to say I see their works often as like comfort food. The same can be said for Poul Anderson. Incidentally Dickson and Anderson were besties, to the point where they had a long-running series, about the teddy bear alien race called the Hoka, that they wrote together. Dickson was less of a jingoist than Anderson; actually I’m not even sure if Dickson was of the pro-war sort, since reading some of his Dorsai series and other stories, including today’s story, he didn’t seem keen on warfare. I said at the beginning of the month that “The Man in the Mailbag” was a standalone, but this turned out to be a bit inaccurate, since it’s actually the first entry in a short series involving the Dilbians, a race of aliens that are sort of a cross between gorillas and bears. “The Man in the Mailbag” was much expanded into the short novel Spacial Delivery, which I haven’t read, although I did read Spacepaw, its sequel.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1959 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It could be because Dickson cannibalized it for a novel, but “The Man in the Mailbag” has only been reprinted three times: in The Good Old Stuff and by extension The Good Stuff (ed. Gardner Dozois), and the Dickson collection Steel Brother. These are all out of print.

Enhancing Image

John Tardy (yes, that’s his name) has been tasked with rescuing Ty Lamore, a human sociologist who’s been studying the Dilbians on their home planet and who has apparently been kidnapped by the Streamside Terror, one of said Dilbians. Humans on Dilbia have their own name, but also a Dilbian name, or rather a name the Dilbians give them: Lamore’s is Greasy Face. Tardy will get one of his own, but we’ll get to that in a bit. The Dilbians themselves are a curious race, in their customs but also how they look, being eight-to-ten-foot-all giants covered in fur, being, as I said, somewhere between a gorilla and a bear, albeit one that walks totally upright. There seems to be some disagreement with illustrators as to how gorilla- or bear-like the Dilbians are, since here Wallace Wood’s interiors paint them as akin to Bigfoot, whereas various book covers for Spacial Delivery and Spacepaw (and the omnibus collection The Right to Arm Bears) depict them as anywhere from uncannily human-like gorillas to just grizzly bears that always walk on their hind legs. The introduction for “The Man in the Mailbag” in Steel Brother says that the Dilbians were inspired by Dickson’s non-violent encounter with a bear while growing up in Alberta. Also, The Right to Arm Bears depicts the Dilbians as, well, carrying guns, but having read my fair share of this series by now I can say the Dilbians are not keen on using guns; if they resort to violence, which they do on occasion, they much prefer hand-to-hand—or rather paw-to-paw.

So, despite its length the plot is pretty straightforward, although how Tardy meets with the Terror (he’s usually just called that rather than by his full name) is a different question. Tardy, despite being an Olympian (“decathlon winner in the Olympics four years back”), is still a tiny human in a world whose dominant race is a bunch of hairy giants. The solution is for a friendly Dilbian, named the Hill Bluffer, whom we do meet again in Spacepaw, to carry Tardy in a mailbag, which is apparently big enough to carry an adult human—mind you it’s a Dilbian mailbag, and the Hill Bluffer himself is big enough that he’s able to carry Tardy with ease. Tardy has a wrist-phone (it’s basically a cell phone, although one then has to wonder how he gets cell service on a planet that’s almost entirely rural) that keeps him in touch with Joshua Guy, the human ambassador at HQ. The idea is that Tardy will rescue Lamore without having a physical confrontation with the Terror—for one because such a confrontation would almost surely result in Our Hero™ getting beaten to a pulp. Something I’ve noticed about Dickson is that for someone who gets labeled as vaguely conservative his work often comes off as anti-war, and even sympathetic to pacifism up to a point. In the stories featuring Dilbia, one of the recurring elements is the notion that it’s best for everybody to avoid violence. It’s also best to avoid making rash decisions, since the biggest points of conflict in this story are when characters made decisions that fall outside of “the plan.” There’s a female Dilbian named Boy-Is-She-Built (call me immature, but I think this name is funny) who ends up stealing Tardy’s wrist-phone, which cuts him off from HQ about halfway through the story.

(Interior art by Wallace Wood.)

The plot itself is rather minimal, I suspect so that Dickson gives himself a lot more space for worldbuilding. The Dilbians are about on par with humans and in some ways objectively superior (for one they’re physically stronger than humans on average), but they’re also a culture that’s rooted in honor and one’s own reputation, hence one’s name being assigned by an outside consensus rather than choosing your own name. There’s a Dilbian named Two Answers because he’s known for tending to come up with two answers to a problem. Joshua Guy, the ambassador, got the Dilbian name of Little Bite because of an embarrassing incident involving—well, you can guess. The Dilbians think of humans as cute, in a condescending way, calling them “Shorties,” which can rub the humans the wrong way, but mind you that the humans are here on the Dilbians’ home world and the Dilbians did not invite them. The series, while not all that serious (my big issue with “The Man in the Mailbag” [and by extension Spacial Delivery] and Spacespaw when taken together is that they’re similarly plotted), does deal with a few serious topics, namely colonialism and the clashing of cultures. When I started this story I thought maybe it would’ve fit better in Astounding than Galaxy, given its rather lighthearted and adventure-minded tone; but then it occurred to me that given how Dickson insists humans (white people) ought to treat the Dilbians’ (indigenous people’s) customs with respect, such a notion would’ve probably rubbed John W. Campbell the wrong way. The gender politics are not quite as forward-looking, as the only notable female characters, Ty Lamore and Boy-Is-She-Built, are mostly kept offscreen and are given to flights of fancy when in on the action; but still, they’re shown to be about as capable as their male counterparts.

On the one hand, even for 1959 this feels a bit old-fashioned in the sense that it harks back to an earlier era of planetary adventure SF, which only sometimes appeared in Galaxy under H. L. Gold’s editorship; but also Dickson is a decidedly more humane storyteller than some of his peers, including Poul Anderson and even Hal Clement, which from a modern perspective makes him seem like a breath of fresh air even if he’s not exactly an S-tier writer. I’ve been thinking about the good-but-not-great writer in SF a fair bit, recently, of the likes of Dickson and Simak; maybe I should write an editorial on the subject…

There Be Spoilers Here

Once Tardy finally does meet with the Terror, a court session happens, of a sort, since there’s a bit of a convoluted case of the Terror having stolen one of the “Shorties” but also Tardy having to fight for his right to rescue Lamore. If the humans had only their way then they could’ve left by this point, leaving the Terror with nothing, but that might’ve caused bigger problems by virtue of tarnishing the Terror’s reputation. A Dilbian’s honor is their livelihood. The humans, being outsiders, will have to play by the Dilbians’ rules. Tardy will have to earn his Dilbian name of Half Pint. One of the elders, named One Man, gives a short monologue near the end that proves pertinent to the situation, but it could also apply to any scenario involving a colonizing force and an indigenous population:

You just don’t come in and sit down at a man’s table and expect him to take your word for it that you’re one of the family. As I said to you once before,
who asked you Shorties to come here, anyway, in the first place? And what made you think we had to like you? What if, when you were a lad, some new kid moved into your village? He was half your size, but he had a whole lot of shiny new playthings you didn’t have, and he came up and tapped you on the shoulder and said, ‘C’mon, from now on we’ll play my sort of game!’ How’d you think you’d have felt?”

Of course, Tardy wins his fight with the Terror, through some ingenious means, and despite ostensibly being a battle to the death both men come out of it alive. The truth is that they weren’t supposed to kill each other anyway, as the mission to rescue Lamore was a big test to see if there was a human on the planet who could stand toe-to-toe with the Dilbians. There were a few hiccups, such as Tardy losing his wrist-phone, but he was not supposed to be in that much danger. See? Everybody gets a happy ending. With hindsight it’s easy to see Dickson’s view of colonial relations as being too optimistic, if anything, but he was looking in the right direction, which is more than can be said of a lot of old-timey SF.

A Step Farther Out

I was getting a bit of déjà vu reading “The Man in the Mailbag” since Spacepaw more or less follows the same plot trajectory, which I understand is not this story’s fault, although it is Dickson’s fault for reusing it. He had bills to pay, ya know. I would probably like Spacial Delivery more than its sequel, although I do have to wonder how, even given how short Spacial Delivery is, you’re supposed to make a novel out of a short story that already feels reasonably self-contained. Ah well, this has been a fun crash course in fiction from the pages of ’50s Galaxy; and incidentally the last stop on our tour foreshadows the more adventure-oriented turn the magazine would take once Frederik Pohl becomes its new editor. As to what that’s gonna look like exactly, I’ll find out in July.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Nightmare with Zeppelins” by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

March 28th, 2025

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, December 1958.)

Who Goes There?

As we near this marathon of stories from the first decade of Galaxy, I feel it’s now best to bring up Frederik Pohl, who in just a couple years would take over H. L. Gold’s position as editor in all but name before officially taking the magazine. Pohl is one of the most curious figures from old-timey SF, although he was one of the longest lived, having died in 2013. He worked in practically every stage of development in the world of SF writing, from author to editor to literary agent. I seriously recommend tracking down a copy of Pohl’s The Way the Future Was, which might be the single best memoir about the world of genre SF from the ’40s to the ’60s, from the perspective of someone who had lived through it. He officially became editor of Galaxy and If in 1961/1962 and would win the latter magazine three consecutive Hugos. He’s also pretty good as a writer, especially at short lengths, although his Hugo- and Nebula-winning novel Gateway is also one of the very best SF novels of the ’70s. He was a key member of the Futurians, a mostly left-leaning New York fan group that came about in the late ’30s, and which would serve as an entry point for some of the finest creative minds in the field, including C. M. Kornbluth, who himself was only a teenager when the group started.

Kornbluth was very young when he started writing professionally, but he needed that head start since he would also die tragically young, from a weak heart at the age of only 34. In fact today’s story, “Nightmare with Zeppelins,” would have been one of the last stories Kornbluth completed before his death in March 1958. The conventional narrative is that in the ’50s Kornbluth was the better writer at short lengths, while both authors at this point had their blind spots when writing novels. Pohl and Kornbluth were at their best together when writing novels, though, since they were able to make up for each other’s weaknesses; sadly they wrote only a few short stories together, not counting posthumous efforts wherein Pohl would work off a fragment or outline from the departed Kornbluth. One of these posthumous efforts, 1972’s “The Meeting,” won Kornbluth a Hugo more than a dozen years after his death, so that’s nice.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1958 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Fifth Galaxy Reader (ed. H. L. Gold) and the Pohl-Kornbluth collections The Wonder Effect and Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth.

Enhancing Image

Harry Lewes is a very old gentleman living in London during World War I, apparently having connections with H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, the implication being that like those men, Lewes is or at least was a Fabian—that is to say basically a democratic socialist of the British sort. As far as I can make out, Lewes is a character of Pohl and Kornbluth’s invention, although I do have to wonder if they took inspiration from a certain historical figure. Anyway, Lewes is writing his autobiography, or rather an essay in place of a proper book, to recount something quite traumatic that had happened to him back in 1864, and which makes him worry about the German zeppelins looming overhead and a possibly more destructive war in the future. As a very young man Lewes had taken up an assignment from one Carlotta Cox (who also seems to be fictitious), a do-gooder who wanted Lewes to voyage out to “darkest Africa” and study some of the local peoples, in the name of combatting racism against black Africans. Her intentions are good. It doesn’t help either that, as Lewes notes, the American Civil War was happening at this time, which make no mistake was ultimately about the spreading of chattel slavery to the western territories. (People who say the American Civil War wasn’t about slavery and systemic persecution of black people are at best tragically misinformed.) However, once Lewes gets to the continent he nearly dies and is only saved by Herr Faesch, a “hardy Swiss” with his legion of native workers. While Lewes had by this point nearly died from illness, it wasn’t that near-death experience that haunts him to this day, as we discover in this taut little narrative.

(By the way, I do not suggest looking up this story on ISFDB, since whoever wrote the synopsis thought it was a good idea to give away the entire plot. Since it clocks in at under ten pages, however, and since its ending plays such a crucial role in understanding what Pohl and Kornbluth were going for, it’s hard to discuss without spoiling.)

When it comes to collab stories I often wonder about the process behind it, especially who was the main creative force behind it. Is this more of a Pohl story or a Kornbluth story? Both authors were, at this point, writing some of the most pessimistic genre SF the field has ever seen, and indeed one of the darkest SF stories from this period is Pohl’s own “The Census Takers” (review here). There is, however, a deep-running sense of dramatic irony here that feels very Kornbluth, albeit mixed with a prose style that mimics English writing from the Edwardian and late Victorian eras. “Nightmare with Zeppelins” on the one hand harks back to Wells in his prime (Wells being an important figure in-story, especially thematically, although he never actually appears to take part in the action), but it also is clearly written from a time Wells did not live to see, which was the Cold War at its height. That this is a Cold War-era story is a fact the authors can hardly be bothered to keep on the subtextual level; it becomes pretty obvious that while Lewes himself doesn’t name it, he is clearly looking into the future and seeing a world forever changed by the atomic bomb. Speaking of late Victorian and Edwardian shenanigans, an obvious point of reference for this story is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, what with Herr Faesch being a Kurtz-like figure (albeit more benevolent than Kurtz) with his loyal band of black workers, the physically feeble but still dominant white figure who looms over a colonized Africa. But whereas Charles Marlow, the “hero” of Conrad’s novella, intentionally made his way along the Congo river to meet Kurtz, Lewes runs into Herr Faesch quite by accident. That Herr Faesch is less hateful and consumed by colonizer derangement syndrome than Kurtz, however, does not mean he hasn’t gone mad.

Herr Faesch runs a mine in this little corner of the continent, although it isn’t gold he’s mining but nuggets of Uranium-235, the properties of which he does not and sadly cannot understand fully. U-235, as you know, is the element crucial to the making of the nuclear fission bomb, which would be used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; there’s a whole lot more to it, but that is really the gist of it. Early in the story Lewes talks about what Wells called a “radium bomb,” or a continuously exploding bomb; and it’s no coincidence that Wells around this time would’ve written The World Set Free, an otherwise obscure late novel of his that has gained some notoriety for anticipating something like nuclear weapons—in 1914. Mind you that despite being very much on the left, Wells, like most British intellectuals at the time, supported the UK’s participation in World War I. He reasoning seemed to be that with the right innovations in firepower, war as was understood would be rendered obsolete, feeding into the notion that World War I was “the war to end all wars.” There may be some grim irony in the fact that Wells lived long enough to witness the dropping of the atomic bomb, an event which struck him with profound horror, along with the realization that mankind is more likely to drive itself to extinction with such weaponry than it is to achieve world peace with said weaponry. It also doesn’t take a rocket scientist to get the feeling that Pohl and Kornbluth were hugely pessimistic about the use of nuclear weapons, in that they probably felt the US’s use of atomic bombs against Japan was morally reprehensible.

What’s impressive about “Nightmare with Zeppelins” is that it connects the dots between three very different periods of American-European history, positing that the so-called scramble for Africa in the latter half of the 19th century, the UK’s needless participating in World War I, and the years immediately following the end of World War II share a kinship that paints humanity in a dark light. It draws a direct line from European countries’ colonizing of Africa to the US committing some of the most heinous war crimes of the 20th century against Japanese civilians. The dramatic irony gets to be rather on-the-nose, in that it becomes impossible to ignore what Lewes himself is incapable of noticing, but the point that Pohl and Kornbluth wanted to make still gets across. This is a finely tuned little nugget of pessimistic Cold War-era SF.

There Be Spoilers Here

While he’s recovering in one of the tents, in what turns out to be a safe distance from the mine, Lewes gets the feeling that something horrible is about to happen, although he can’t put his finger on it. Then, one day, the mine explodes, with Herr Faesch and some of his workers inside it, the explosion forming a little mushroom cloud that can be seen from Lewes’s tent, himself only escaping injury because he happened to be covered against the blast at the time. Looking back on this, Lewes is both right and tragically wrong about the future of warfare, hoping in vane that the cursed nuggets of U-235 may never be used to build a new weapon, and that airships in the sky may never be used to drop such a weapon on people’s heads. It leans a bit too much into dramatic irony, but still the final passage is haunting, so I’ll quote it here, as Lewes writes in his essay:

One thing is sure: Count Zeppelin has made it impossible for Herr Faesch’s metal ever to be used for war. Fighting on the ground itself was terrible enough; this new dimension of warfare will end it. Imagine sending dirigibles across the skies to sow such horrors! Imagine what monstrous brains might plan such an assault! Merciful heaven. They wouldn’t dare.

If only he could know how wrong he is.

A Step Farther Out

I’d been curious about reading “Nightmare with Zeppelins” for a few years now, just going by its title, although thankfully I did not look up a synopsis before reading it. I really like Pohl and Kornbluth as writers individually, but together they pulled a Voltron and became one of the most socially keen-eyed SF writers of the ’50s. One has to wonder what might more they could’ve done had Kornbluth not died so young, since Pohl’s digging up his departed friend’s notes really doesn’t do the duo justice. It’s not a masterpiece exactly, but I do recommend it.

See you next time.