Tag: serials

Things Beyond: August 2026

August 1st, 2026
(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1947.)

I was thinking of taking a break from this blog for this month, but maybe I’ll save the vacation for September. Funnily enough it was easier to come up with a review forecast, with stuff I’m interested in checking out, than it was to announce a month-long break. This is what happens when you’re a compulsive reader.

Anyway, we’re back to our usually programming, although we have a serial novel in a whopping four installments (although Space Viking is not as long as the installment number would have you think), as well as a reprinted SF-horror yarn by one of the most famous British authors of all time. Of course, with the exception of Arthur Conan Doyle, these are all authors I’ve covered before. I figured that if I’m gonna keep myself busy, even going against my own expectations, I may as well keep things “safe” for the time being. At least with Bruce Sterling this is earned, considering I was set to write about another short story of his many moons ago, only to not get around to it. Consider this a second attempt.

I’m keeping this post short and sweet. Not much to report on my end, aside from recently acquiring a second cat. (Cats are easy to adopt, like they just kinda let you pick them up, get them their shots, sign a paper, badda-bing badda-boom.) I also have maybe one too many books on my plate at the moment (incidentally none of them are genre fiction), so I hope to whittle that down, make things more manageable.

As for the stories, we have one from the 1910s, one from the 1960s, one from the 1970s, and two from the 1980s.

For the serial:
- Space Viking by H. Beam Piper. Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, November 1962 to February 1963. Piper was born in 1904, but didn’t start writing SF until he was in his forties, making his debut in 1947. The next decade or so was productive enough for him, including the non-SF mystery novel Murder in the Gun Room. Said novel, while not SF, does pay tribute to fandom in the years following World War II. Space Viking was one of several novels Piper had written in quick succession in the last few years of his life, along with The Cosmic Computer, Little Fuzzy (and its sequel), and Lord Kalvin of Otherwhen. Sadly, after a failed marriage and with the belief that his writing career was floundering, Piper took his own life in 1964.
For the novellas:
1. “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” by James Tiptree, Jr. From the May 1988 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Tiptree is one of the most acclaimed authors of her generation, although despite being typically considered part of the New Wave she was actually a decade or two older than most of her peers. Her life story is a dramatic one, worthy of a Hollywood biopic, and the circumstances of her death remain controversial to this day.
2. “The Araqnid Window” by Charles L. Harness. From the December 1974 issue of Amazing Stories. Harness’s career as a writer spanned six decades, although it came in fits and starts. He stepped away from writing in the ’50s to focus on his job and raising his family, only returning after a decade. “The Araqnid Window” itself is one of only two Harness stories published in the ’70s. His job as a patent attorney goes to explain his low output.
For the short stories:
1. “Sunken Gardens” by Bruce Sterling. From the June 1984 issue of Omni. Sterling was born in Brownsville, Texas, but later became an Austin denizen. Unusually he made his fiction debut with a novel, Involution Ocean, published when he was very young. His first ambitious project, though, was the Shaper/Mechanist universe, comprising the novel Schismatrix and some short stories.
2. “The Horror of the Heights” by Arthur Conan Doyle. From the December 1947 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. First published in 1913. While Doyle did not invent the detective story (he rightly credits Edgar Allan Poe with that), he did codify the genre and became quite rich and famous off of it it. Doyle also wrote in other genres, though, including horror and science fiction.
Now let’s do some reading.
Things Beyond: April 2026

April 1st, 2026
(Cover by Bruce Jensen. Asimov’s, November 1995.)

March was a bit of a marathon here at SFF Remembrance, but truth be told I had more fun writing about that very old and dusty science fiction than in the past few months. I had been suffering from fatigue, along with some real-life stuff that was getting to me and making it hard to sleep at night. Now I feel somewhat rejuvinated. I feel good enough about reviewing stuff here again, in fact, that I’m bringing back the two-short-stories two-novellas deal, although I’m still keeping it to one serial for the month. The serial in question is a three-parter, being the first appearance of one of the most important SF novels ever written—and yet one that has been totally lost to the sands of time. You might find references to The Skylark of Space if you’re a Star Wars fan, as a point of trivia, since it was this novel that in part invented the space opera subgenre. Edmond Hamilton was writing space opera at shorter lengths around the same time Smith made his debut, but there was nothing on the scale of Smith’s novel before it. Smith “revised” it for its eventual book publication, removing co-author Le Hawkins Garby’s contributions, but we’ll be reading it as it appeared in Amazing Stories. This was a long time coming for me.

For the dates of stories, we’re looking at one from the 1920s, two from the 1950s, one from the 1960s, and one from the 1990s. Both of the stories from the ’50s are from the first half of that decade, which was an incredibly productive period for magazine SF.

For the serial:
- The Skylark of Space by E. E. Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby. Serialized in Amazing Stories, August to October 1928. When Smith studied chemistry at the University of Iowa, he didn’t think he would later become one of the pioneering authors of space opera. He didn’t even think he would write fiction, until he talked science fiction with Lee Hawkins Garby and her husband, who were friends from college. This was in 1915, before “science fiction” had even been coined as a label. The Skylark of Space took some years to gestate, but when it appeared in 1928 it made Smith a sensation among the then-niche SF readership. Garby’s contributions were later removed when the novel appeared belatedly in book form.
For the novellas:
1. “Half-Past Eternity” by John D. MacDonald. From the July 1950 issue of Super Science Stories. Fans of classic crime fiction will be familiar with MacDonald, at least by reputation. His Travis McGee series is one of the most prolific and widely read detective series ever. In 1972 he was given the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. He also wrote a good deal of SF from the late ’40s through the early ’50s, along with nearly every other genre.
2. “Death in the Promised Land” by Pat Cadigan. From the November 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It was first published in the March 1995 issue of Omni, but that magazine had gone purely online by that point and the Asimov’s printing marked its first physical appearance. Cadigan is arguably the queen of cyberpunk, going back to the ’80s. She’s not as famous as William Gibson or Bruce Sterling, but she really should be more read than she is.
For the short stories:
1. “Dumb Martian” by John Wyndham. From the July 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s surprising to think that Wyndham had made his SF debut in the early ’30s. His career peak came later than it does with most authors, since he was deep in his forties when The Day of the Triffids was published. The ’50s were a great time to be John Wyndham, between his novels and short stories.
2. “Timberline” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the September 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This is the fourth installment in Aldiss’s Hothouse series, which was then published as a novel. The series of stories, rather than the novel version, won Aldiss a Hugo, which was certainly a confusing move. It’s been almost a year since I reviewed the last Hothouse story, so here we go.
Hopefully you’ll be reading along with me.
Things Beyond: February 2026

February 1st, 2026
(Cover by Robert Fuqua. Amazing Stories, January 1944.)

What a year, huh? And we just started.

Since a lot of us are snowed in, or at least dealing with some pesky snow and ice (and ICE) in the midst of our everyday activities, we may as well pass the time by cozying up with some good reading. Or maybe not so good. Truth be told, I’m not so sure about the quality of what I’ll be tackling this month, with maybe one exception, the short story. Why yes, it’s been a while (a couple years) since I reviewed and quite enjoyed Philip José Farmer’s story “Mother,” which you may remember as being strange and pretty risqué for early 1950s SF. Farmer did write a sequel, “Daughter,” which from what I’ve heard is just as good if not better. As for choosing the obligatory item from Amazing Stories, to celebrate that magazine’s centennial, I decided to pick something from the rather neglected and maligned ’40s period. At the same time, Ross Rocklynne is not just some hack writer, so we’ll see. It had also been, for my money, too long since I’d scavenged the pages of If, namely for a serialized novel or novella, of which many were published in that magazine. For February it’s all sci-fi and all retro.

Now, there is an announcement I’d been wanting to make here, and maybe should have with last month’s review forecast, but now is as good a time. I recently launched a sister blog on Substack, Sketches from a Reader’s Album, which is not focused on genre fiction at all (although genre fiction will inevitably figure into it on occasion), but is like SFF Remembrance a review blog with the occasional editorial. At least that’s the idea. There I’ll be writing about literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, namely books that have won the National Book Award. (The National Book Award is sort of like to the Pulitzer Prize what the Nebula is to the Hugo, if you care for that sort of thing.) With both sites you can expect only so many posts a month, but they’ll be lengthy and hopefully entertaining.

As far as time frames go, we have one story from the 1940s, one from the 1950s, and one from the 1960s. Because I’ll be covering stories published in Amazing Stories in the 1920s and ’30s, we unfortunately will not be getting to more recent stuff until April at the earliest.

For the serial:
- Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown. Serialized in If, April to July 1966. Such a collaboration sounds out of the blue, and honestly I’m not even sure how or why Laumer and Brown came together to work on a novel. But it’s not totally unexpected. Laumer and Brown made their debuts at almost the exact same time, at the tail end of the ’50s, and both were prolific during the pre-New Wave years. They were also very close in age. Sadly Brown died at just 41 years old in 1967, one year after Earthblood was published, while Laumer suffered a stroke in 1971 which left him unable to write for a time. I know little about Earthblood aside from it being an adventure novel, of the sort that was common in If in the ’60s.
For the novella:
- “Intruders from the Stars” by Ross Rocklynne. From the January 1944 issue of Amazing Stories. Retro Hugo finalist for Best Novella. Rocklynne is one of those unexpected survivors from the pre-Campbell years, having made his debut in 1935 when he was just 22, and continuing up to the early ’50s before going on hiatus. (Like too many SF writers of his generation he became interested in Dianetics.) He eventually made a comeback in the late ’60s, and even appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions. Despite the Retro Hugo nomination, “Intruders from the Stars” has almost never been reprinted.
For the short story:
- “Daughter” by Philip José Farmer. From the Winter 1954 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. The SF market in the early ’50s was such that you could get your story published even if it was more daring than average, provided you accepted selling to one of the second-rate magazines. By 1954, Farmer had already become notorious for his novella “The Lovers,” about a sexually explicit (for the time) romance between an Earthman and an alien woman who is more bug-like than she appears. Early Farmer is pulpy in style, but he can be rather big and provocative with his ideas.
Hopefully you’ll read along with me.
Things Beyond: December 2025

December 1st, 2025
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Satellite, December 1956.)

Merry Christmas, happy birthday to me, and all that.

People who keep up with my posts may have noticed that I missed a couple things last month, including what was to be the start of the second serialized novel, Kuttner and Moore’s Fury. Let’s say I’ve been slow about it. Generally I’ve been slower about keeping up with this blog than I was a year ago, and there could be a few reasons for this, but the point is that I’ve come to understand I’m not as on top of my own blog as I once was. I’ve slowed down with the “required” reading, and I’ve been slower about writing, although (not to toot my own horn) I still write here more than some other fan writers I know. Maybe nowadays the load I give myself is just a bit too much, especially since I’ve also been wanting to get into writing professionally, for that bit of extra money, only I’ve not been able to find the time and/or motivation for it. So, I’ll lighten the load a bit. From now on I’ll only be covering one serial a month, regardless of length. Of course, if the serial is four parts or longer this won’t make a difference, but a lot of serials are three-parters, which should give me an extra day to myself. Other than that, it’s gonna be business as usual.

What do we have on our table? All science fiction, which isn’t very diverse, but when these stories were published is certainly more diverse. One story from the 1940s, one from the ’50s, one from the ’60s, one from the ’70s, one from the 2000s, and one from the 2020s.

For the serial:
1. Fury by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, May to July 1947. Kuttner and Moore wrote so much, both together and each solo, that they resorted to a few pseudonyms, one of them being Lawrence O’Donnell. Fury takes place in the same universe as the earlier Kuttner-Moore story “Clash by Night.” Despite Fury historically being credited to Kuttner alone, Moore claimed years later to having been a minor collaborator.
For the novellas:
1. “Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst” by Kage Baker. From the October-November 2003 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Baker had spent much of her adult life working in insurance and with theatre as her primary hobby, before pivoting to writing SF in her forties. No doubt she would still be writing SF today, had she not died all too soon in 2010. Still, for about a dozen years she wrote furiously, with her big series following a team of time-traveling secret agents.
2. “The Dragon Masters” by Jack Vance. From the August 1962 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Winner of the Hugo for Best Short Fiction. This is a reread, although I only have a vague memory of having read it in the first place, and that was without Jack Gaughan’s accompanying artwork. Despite what the title might make you think, “The Dragon Masters” is pure planetary SF, albeit with fantasy-esque coloring that Vance had become known for at this point.
For the short stories:
1. “An Important Failure” by Rebecca Campbell. From the August 2020 issue of Clarkesworld. Winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Born and raised in Canada but now living in the UK, Campbell has written only one novel so far, which in fact was her first SF writing of any sort. Good news is she’s been somewhat prolific in writing short stories and novellas over the past decade.
2. “The Earth Dwellers” by Nancy Kress. From the December 1976 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. This is the third time now that I’ve come to Kress, and why not? Her career now spands nearly half a century, and her stories, if not always entertaining, often provide some food for thought. I know nothing about “The Earth Dwellers,” except it marked Kress’s very first appearance in the field.
For the complete novel:
1. A Glass of Darkness by Philip K. Dick. From the December 1956 issue of Satellite Science Fiction. This book sounds unfamiliar, even for seasoned Dick fans, although it may ring a bell under its book title: The Cosmic Puppets. Dick had burst onto the scene in the early ’50s as one of the most promising short-story writers at the time, in a generation that included such bright newcomers as Robert Sheckley, Algis Budrys, and Katherine MacLean. It only stood to reason, then, that while writing short stories nonstop was all well and good, writing a novel was the logical next step. A Glass of Darkness wasn’t the first novel Dick wrote, but it was the first to be published.
Hopefully you’ll be reading along with me.
Things Beyond: November 2025

November 1st, 2025
(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, March 1970.)

A short and sweet review forecast for this month, partly because I’m running behind on my writing a bit and so am pressed for time, but also because I don’t have a particular theme in mind here. Of course, if you thought I was gonna take a break from reviewing spooky fiction altogether after last month, you’d be mistaken, as both of the short stories due for November are horror pieces. We’re still deep in autumn, after all, and honestly my thirst for spooky shit has not been quenched.

Another thing I just randomly decided to throw in there is that both of the serials are novels written in collaboration, by authors who gained a good deal of acclaim and presumably money from working together. In one case there’s decades-long besties Larry Niven and the late Jerry Pournelle, who shared similar politics and also writing philosophies. There’s also the husband-wife duo of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, perennial favorites on this site, who wrote most of their novels together, although for decades Fury has been erroneously credited to just Kuttner.

We’ve got one story from the 1850s (the oldest I will have reviewed thus far), two from the 1940s, two from the 1970s, and one from the 2000s.

For the serials:
1. Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, August to October 1975. Niven had quickly established himself as one of the major hard SF writers by the end of the ’60s, but Pournelle had a longer road to success, first being active as a fan and then not writing his first stories and articles professionally till he was deep in his thirties. In the ’70s and ’80s Niven and Pournelle wrote several successful novels in collaboration.
2. Fury by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, May to July 1947. Kuttner and Moore wrote so much, both together and each solo, that they resorted to a few pseudonyms, one of them being Lawrence O’Donnell. Fury takes place in the same universe as the earlier Kuttner-Moore story “Clash by Night.” Despite Fury historically being credited to Kuttner alone, Moore claimed years later to having been a minor collaborator.
For the novellas:
1. “Against the Fall of Night” by Arthur C. Clarke. From the November 1948 issue of Startling Stories. Clarke is one of the most famous SF writers ever, to the point that by the ’60s he had become, along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, a media personality. He collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the script for 2001: A Space Odyssey whilst writing the novel version parallel to it.
2. “The Region Between” by Harlan Ellison. From the March 1970 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Ellison is similarly a pretty famous (if more controversial) figure, being just as notorious for his real-life antics and combative nature as for his writing. This novella, one of Ellison’s longest stories, works as a standalone but was commissioned as part of a series which features the same main character.
For the short stories:
1. “The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell. From the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. First published in 1852. Now here’s a name you probably didn’t see coming. For someone who gained notoriety as one of the finest novelists of the mid-Victorian period, as well as being Charlotte Brontë’s first major biographer, Gaskell also wrote a fair amount of supernatural fiction.
2. “I Live with You” by Carol Emshwiller. From the March 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. By this point Carol had outlived her late husband, Ed Emshwiller, by over a decade, but she had long since made a name for herself. The last Emshwiller story I wrote about was from the late ’50s, but nearly half a century later we still find her seemingly in her prime.
Time to get some reading done.
Things Beyond: September 2025

September 1st, 2025

(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Astounding, December 1955.)

It could be that I’ve simply had too much on my plate, or that I’ve been procrastinating with my projects, but I’ve been feeling sluggish and unfulfilled with my writing as of late. Even in writing this forecast post I feel… uninspired. The drive is not currently in me. Actually the drive has not been there for several days now, which hasn’t stopped me from getting a couple things done. There is a difference, however, between writing like you’re in the midst of a fever and writing as a kind of chore, and it’s felt like the latter too often as of late.

So, I figured it was time I take a break from this site for a month, for the most part. I will still be finishing my review of Under Pressure, and will be writing one or two editorials over the course of this month, but otherwise I’ll stepping away from here momentarily. I have too much going on, and I feel as if I’m the verge of utterly burning myself out with how productive I’ve tried to be, even with missing a couple deadlines. (I might still write a review of The Sorcerer’s Ship sometime this month, but needless to say I could not even start my review, let alone have it posted, yesterday.) I continue to write, often without motivation or imagination, because I really feel like I can’t do anything else. Writers, as opposed to people who write, are like actors, in that they do what they do because they feel helpless or impotent when it comes to other talents. I’m a writer. Unfortunately I don’t even make money from writing, as it stands; maybe if I were to train myself to write fiction, to be published in some of the magazines I take material from for this very site, then I could make some money on top of my meager earnings from my day job. Considering how things are going, it could be that in time I might not even have a choice. I might have to branch out into fiction, and take even more time away from this site, because I might have to do it. But who knows, it might be fulfilling in its own right.

Sometimes I feel like a pastor in an empty church, or with only a few congregates, plus the rats and pigeons. Who am I speaking to? I don’t have much of an audience, and some of the people who say they read my stuff are themselves bloggers, also concerned with traffic for their own projects. It’s a problem that SFF fandom has had for a long time, and I don’t see any way of fixing it. Most fans I know don’t engage with this sort of thing. A lot of people who vote in the fan categories, when it comes time for the Hugos each year, are themselves fan writers, artists, etc. We’re voting for each other. I’m speaking to people who know what it’s like, which is both a good and bad thing. I feel so horribly alone, most of the time, and the time and energy I put into this hobby sometimes only worsen the loneliness and anxiety. I had started this site three years ago as a way to cope with some mental health struggles, but it doesn’t always help.

So I’m taking a break this month, for the most part. There will be a few posts, but I aside from Under Pressure and maybe The Sorcerer’s Ship I don’t feel like writing about any magazine fiction until next month. Maybe I deserve a break like this, but mostly I just feel that I need it. I won’t be entirely gone, so don’t miss me too much.
Things Beyond: August 2025

August 1st, 2025
(Cover by H. R. Van Dongen. Astounding, November 1955.)

So I had read Anne McCaffrey’s “The Weather on Welladays,” and I didn’t like it. I’ve read Dragonflight and The Ship Who Sang, plus one other novel and a few short stories now, and I’m still not really sure what McCaffrey’s appeal is (I say this as someone who jumps to defend A. E. van Vogt’s early work). “The Weather on Welladay” isn’t bad, but it’s seriously hampered by being a novelette where the perspective shifts several times so that we have a few protagonists, when ideally we should have only one. I also just don’t think McCaffrey is that good a writer when compared with some of her peers, who were (and still are) not as popular. It’s nice that McCaffrey was the first woman to win both a Hugo and Nebula for fiction, but I wish those honors had gone to better writers. That’s the gist of how I felt about it, in case you’re wondering where my review post for it is.

The funny thing is that I had too good a time during the couple of days I normally would’ve spent on reading and writing for this site, which is ironic. I struggle to write here either when my personal life is at a peak or when it’s deep in a valley. I have to admit to you, the five of you who actually read these posts, that I sometimes resent writing—well, really anything, but especially for SFF Remembrance. Sometimes I just don’t feel like writing anything, but the problem is that if you stop writing then it can be a real challenge to start again. Writing (if you’re “a writer”) is like brushing your teeth, in that ideally it should be a daily activity. But I also don’t like writing that much; yet at the same time I can barely do anything else that would be considered “productive.” I work a service job. I pay my bills and my rent and my taxes like a “good American,” but I feel like I don’t create anything. I have this urge, or maybe this sense of obligation, to create something that is of any value, but I can’t do it. I hate myself and this country I am forced to live in. The environment is hostile, for creativity but also just for human decency. It’s like that Godspeed You! Black Emperor song: “We are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.” I hate being here, and yet I’m not sure where I could be that’s better. I hate that this is a culture that worships money and productivity. We must have infinite growth, even if the destination is oblivion.

Putting aside that I’m forced to live in this body, and in this third-rate backwater country called America, things are going well for me! Maybe that’s the problem: on a personal I’m doing well, for the most part, but I get the sense that this contentedness will not last, because the world around me is dying. My surroundings are transient. There will surely come a point where the workers of the world will have their revenge and the last politician is strangled with the entrails of the last capitalist; but I’m convinced that I will not live to see any of this happen. Not even the beginning of it. I will have made my way for the exit before this play called The Downfall of Capitalism will have even gotten to its prelude. The curtains will not have risen and we will not see the stage, let alone the actors. There is a future on the way, but something tells me I won’t take part in it.

…

This is getting to be a bit much.

What’s the holdup? After all, it’s a packed month, as far as my review schedule goes, and I’ve really been meaning to get to some of these works for a hot minute. I’m also taking advantage of the loophole I had made for myself and so I have a serial from Galaxy, on top of a novella. We’ve got one story from the 1920s, one from the 1940s, one from the 1950s, one from the 1960s, one from the 1970s, one from the 1980s, and one from the 2010s. This might be my most diverse roster yet, in terms of when the works were published. Well, let’s get to it.

For the serials:
1. A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, March to May-June 1971. Nebula winner for Best Novel. When Galaxy changed editors in 1969, readers at the time as well as historians are prone to say the change was a downgrade. One major plus, however, of Ejler Jakobsson taking over was that we got several Silverberg novels in the magazine as serials in rather quick succession. Despite the acclaim he was earning, A Time of Changes was the only Silverberg novel from this period to win a major award.
2. Under Pressure by Frank Herbert. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, November 1955 to January 1956. Also titled The Dragon in the Sea, this was Herbert’s first novel, after he had been in the field for a few years already with now-forgotten short fiction. Herbert’s legacy pretty much solely rests on his Dune series, to the point where it might surprise the reader to find any Herbert that isn’t Dune-related in the wild. I’ve heard from a friend or two that this is actually supposed to be one of Herbert’s best, but we’ll see about that.
For the novellas:
1. “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky. From the Summer 2010 issue of Subterranean Online. Nebula winner for Best Novella. More controversially Swirsky also won a Nebula for her story “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” She was also the founding editor of PodCastle, which is crazy to me because she was like, 26? She’s written a good deal of short fiction and poetry over the years, plus one novel so far.
2. “A Tragedy of Errors” by Poul Anderson. From the February 1968 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been a minute since we last covered Anderson, made more conspicuous because he wrote a truly staggering amount of fiction. Of Anderson’s several series the most ambitious might be his Technic History, a centuries-spanning saga tracing the rise and fall of a galactic empire. “A Tragedy of Errors” takes place toward the end of this future history’s timeline.
For the short stories:
1. “The Storm King” by Joan D. Vinge. From the April 1980 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Not quite as well-known as her late ex-husband, Vernor, partly on account of the fact that she hasn’t written much over the past four decades, but Joan D. Vinge was one of the most promising new writers of the post-New Wave era. She’s more known for her SF, but “The Storm King” is fantasy.
2. “The Woman of the Wood” by A. Merritt. From the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales. In the ’20s and ’30s Merritt was one of the most popular pulp writers, even getting a magazine named after him. I was set to review one of Merritt’s novels a couple years ago, but I could not get far into it. Well, now it’s time to correct things a bit. Curiously Merritt didn’t write much short fiction.
For the complete novel:
1. The Sorcerer’s Ship by Hannes Bok. From the December 1942 issue of Unknown. Bok was known far more for his artwork than his fiction, which is understandable given that he was one of the most gifted and recognizable SFF artists of the ’40s and ’50s. You kinda know a certain magazine or book cover is a Bok work just from looking at it. That Bok died relatively young and in poverty, after having all but retired from illustrating, is tragic. Of course, we might not even know about Bok in the first place if not for Ray Bradbury acting as cheerleader for his early material. Bok was really one of the few mavericks of SFF from that era, being a semi-closeted gay man with some niche hobbies, who was also a perfectionist when it came to his art. The Sorcerer’s Ship was Bok’s debut novel and was published complete in Unknown, but would not see book publication until after his death.
Won’t you read with me?
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?
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?
Things Beyond: February 2025

February 1st, 2025
(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, April 1971.)

We seem to be living in a world of shit, or at least it’s easy to think that way. The irony is that the people who think this the most are also probably (being queer and disabled I’m actually not sure how I’m gonna turn out) the ones most likely to come out of all this bullshit unharmed—in body, if not in soul or mind. But, the show continues. I thought I had more to say for this month’s forecast, and at this point I think it’s fair to say my Things Beyond posts have become like actual weather forecasts (I predict, but that doesn’t mean the thing will 100% happen); but still, aside from a couple things I’m sure we all know about already, the past month has been uneventful. I got my purchases for Worldcon at basically the last minute, so I’ll be seeing what I can see of the con virtually if not in person, and with any luck I’ll even be on a couple panels, as one of those inside-a-computer people. I’ve been slowly but surely moving “up” in the world of fandom.

Anyway, for decades we’ve got two stories from the 1920s, one from the 1940s, one from the 1970s, one from the 1990s, and one from the 1890s. As for the stories themselves, we have…

For the serial:
1. Sunfire by Francis Stevens. Serialized in Weird Tales, July-August to September 1923. Francis Stevens is the androgynous-sounding pseudonym of one Gertrude Bennett, who for just a few years wrote prolifically for the pulp magazines, apparently to help pay the bills. Once her sickly mother died, she stopped writing fiction, with Sunfire being the last story of hers published. It would take more than seventy years for this story to appear in book form.
2. A Story of the Days to Come by H. G. Wells. Serialized in Amazing Stories, April to May 1928. First published in 1899. Wells is perhaps the most crucial pioneer of science fiction; aside from maybe Edgar Allan Poe he stands as arguably the genre’s nucleus. This is made more remarkable since Wells wrote his most famous work over the span of only about a decade. This story comes from said decade of greatness, but I guess due to its length it remains overlooked.
For the novellas:
1. “The Glowing Cloud” by Steven Utley. From the January 1992 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Utley was born in Kentucky, at Fort Knox (he was a military brat), before moving to Texas (Austin), and then finally Tennessee. He wrote prolifically in the ’70s, all of it short fiction, as one of the post-New Wave generation. He then fell mostly silent in the ’80s before reemerging in the early ’90s.
2. “To Fit the Crime” by Joe Haldeman. From the April 1971 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Haldeman, like Utley, came about during the post-New Wave era; he had spent the New Wave years in college, and then in Vietnam, where he got damn near killed. Once his wounds healed enough he got to work writing SF. This story here is the first in a loose series, starring Otto McGavin.
For the short stories:
1. “When the Bough Breaks” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. From the November 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novelette. I had missed the boat on reviewing Moore solo last month, and I can’t review Kuttner solo next month either; so together here they go. Kuttner and Moore were of course married, and they’re also two of my favorite writers.
2. “The End of the Party” by Graham Greene. From the December 1950 issue of Worlds Beyond. First published in 1932. Greene was famous in his day as both a serious novelist and a writer of espionage thrillers, although the two were not mutually exclusive. He also occasionally dabbled in supernatural horror, with this story being one of his own personal favorite works despite its age.
Won’t you read with me?