(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, July 1935.)
Happy New Year. Blow confetti. Get drunk. Maybe kiss and cuddle a friend or significant other of yours. Although of course you would’ve done that last night. A lot of stores are closed today, because work sucks and the reality is that with a few notable exceptions nobody really wants to work. I hope this message finds you well. There will be a couple changes to this site, which mind you does not mean bad news at all. Frankly those of you who frequent here might not even notice the one “negative” change, that being the fact that given my current life circumstances I can no longer guarantee that a post will be finished on the date I expect it to be. For two years I kept to a pretty strict release schedule with my posts, but after moving into my own place, with all the pros and cons that come with that, I would expect more posts to get delayed by, say, a day, if I were in your position. Occasionally I might not even be able to post a review that I said I would; this happened a few times actually, since November, and I think it’s time to acknowledge that while I try to be prolific, I can only do so much, from a mix of life changes and depression. Also that’s why I’m reviewing a story I was supposed to write about in November, but never got around to even reading it, that being Eleanor Arnason’s “Checkerboard Planet.”
Now, in good news…
The serials department is back, after I had announced at the start of last year that I would only be covering short stories, novellas, and complete novels in 2024. I had thought about what would be the first serial to commemorate the department’s coming back from hiatus, and ultimately I figured it had to be something big. Thus I went with a Robert Heinlein novel I’ve not read before, and truth be told Heinlein’s juveniles are a bit of a blind spot for me in my knowledge of his work; I’ve read a few of them, my favorite probably being Between Planets, but I should certainly read more. It’s also been too long since I last covered Heinlein here.
In other good news, we have another magazine to pay tribute to this year, albeit not on quite the same scale as what I did with F&SF. As you may or may not know, Galaxy Science Fiction launched with the October 1950 issue, making October (or September, depending on how you look at it) of this year its 75th anniversary. Along with F&SF, Galaxy played a pivotal role in reshaping who and what got published in genre SF following Astounding‘s near-stranglehold on the field the previous decade. Especially in the ’50s, a disproportionate number of now-classic stories and novels first saw print in the pages of Galaxy, under the ingenious (if also tyrannical) editorship of H. L. Gold. Unfortunately Galaxy had a bit of a rough history after its first decade, going through a few editors and experiencing declining sales before finally being put out of its misery in 1980. It only lasted thirty years, which admittedly is still better than what most SFF magazines get, but during that time it was arguably the finest magazine of its kind. So, in March, July, and October, as with last year, I’ll be reviewing only short stories, this time from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s respectively, and all from Galaxy. I’ll also be reviewing one short story, novella, or serial from Galaxy every month apart from that. This should be a good deal of fun.
Now what do we have on our plate?
For the serial:
Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, September to December 1957. Heinlein is that rare author who really needs no introduction, but who no doubt deserves one. He made his debut in 1939, at the fine age of 32 but having already entered the field more or less fully formed as a writer; it helps that he had already written a novel, albeit one that had initially gone unpublished, at this point. From the late ’40s to the end of the ’50s he wrote a series of “juveniles,” which helped lay the groundwork for we would now call YA SF. Citizen of the Galaxy was one of the last of these juveniles, and as far as I can tell its serialization occurred more or less simultaneously with its book publication.
For the novellas:
“The Organleggers” by Larry Niven. From the January 1969 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Reprinted thereafter as “Death by Ecstasy.” One of those old-fashioned planet-builders who appeared just as the New Wave was getting started, Niven very much follows in the footsteps of Poul Anderson and Jack Vance. “The Organleggers” is the first in a series of SF-detective stories starring Gil Hamilton.
“In the Problem Pit” by Frederik Pohl. From the September 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Pohl is one of those people who can claim to have taken part in pretty much every aspect of SF publication, from author and editor to literary agent. He edited Galaxy and If in the ’60s, to much acclaim, but in the early ’70s he gave up editing returned to writing fiction regularly.
For the short stories:
“Checkerboard Planet” by Eleanor Arnason. From the December 2016 issue of Clarkesworld. Judging from her rate of output you might think Arnason a more recent author, but in fact she was born in 1942 and made her debut back in 1973. She’s been an activist for left-liberal causes since the ’60s but did not start writing full-time until 2009, hence her recent uptick in productivity.
“Jirel Meets Magic” by C. L. Moore. From the July 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Moore might not be a mainstream figure in genre fiction, but she and her first husband, Henry Kuttner, have a strongly passionate following among older readers. With justification. She’s a favorite of mine. It’s been almost two years since I reviewed the first two Jirel of Joiry stories, which is far too long a wait.
(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, June 1935.)
The Story So Far
There’s a frontier war going on the between the Aquilonians and the Picts, the former trying to expand westward and the latter trying to keep their territory by any means necessary. The Aquilonians have better weapons and fortification, but the Picts in the area have a secret weapon in the sorcerer Zogar Sag, who incidentally is out for revenge against Fort Tuscelan. We follow Balthus, a young Aquilonian warrior set to be at Fort Tuscelan, and Conan, a Cimmerian who is currently working as a mercenary for the Aquilonian government. The first believes that expansion is both possible and good for humanity; the latter does not. As far as Conan’s concerned he’s doing it for the paycheck, but that doesn’t stop him from wanting Zogar Sag’s head on a platter—for the sorcerer’s treacherousness if not to defend the fort. Indeed this Pictish sorcerer has been collecting human heads for the purposes of blood sacrifices.
Regrouping at the fort, Conan assembles a crack team of warriors to cross Black River and take out Zogar Sag on the down-low, so as to hopefully prevent an all-out skermish between the Picts and the fort. It goes about as well as you’d expect: all the men get killed off, either right away or in the sorcerer’s hideout, and Balthus only lives because Conan rescues him. They discover, perhaps too late, that the sorcerer is not fucking around, as he’s able to conjure (among other things) a giant snake and a shadowy beast that stalks the woods. Killing Zogar Sag becomes secondary to making it out of Pict territory alive, but also warning the fort.
Enhancing Image
What began now as an assassination attempt has now turned into a losing battle. Conan expressed doubts that the Aquilonians could hold the frontier earlier, and these doubts are proved valid when Zogar Sag’s forces cross Black River in search of the fort, where they will be sure to give no quarter. It’s here that Conan and Balthus split up, and it’s also here that we’re introduced to our last major character: Slasher, a mangy dog who was orphaned when his settler owners got killed. Depending on your politics Howard might be doing too much to humanize the settlers, despite also thinking that their cause is a fatally misguided one, not helped by the Picts being written as mindless brutes. Still, this is more nuance than one would expect from a pulpy sword-and-sorcery tale with lots of delicious gore that was written in the ’30s. One has to wonder what Howard would’ve done had he lived to contribute to the more “socially aware” Unknown a few years hence.
Howard is not known for his delicateness with language (despite writing a fair amount of poetry), and true enough his writing is often at its best with either dialogue or visceral action. He does, however, sometimes plop a bomb in the reader’s lap in the form of a really juicy passage. He crystalizes what makes Conan special, both in the context of his world (as a future barbarian king), and as a seminal figure in heroic fantasy. There was, to my knowledge, not a single character in the annals of heroic fantasy prior to Conan who stood so boldly against everything “polite society” in Howard’s day stood for, nor illustrated so clearly. Observe:
He felt lonely, in spite of his companion. Conan was as much a part of this wilderness as Balthus was alien to it. The Cimmerian might have spent years among the great cities of the world; he might have walked with the rulers of civilization; he might even achieve his wild whim some day and rule as king of a civilized nation; stranger things had happened. But he was no less a barbarian. He was concerned only with the naked fundamentals of life. The warm intimacies of small, kindly things, the sentiments and delicious trivialities that make up so much of civilized men’s lives were meaningless to him. A wolf was no less a wolf because a whim of chance caused him to run with the watchdogs. Bloodshed and violence and savagery were the natural elements of the life Conan knew; he could not, and would never, understand the little things that are so dear to civilized men and women.
One gripe I have with this story is that Zogar Sag is not a character; he doesn’t really have a personality, nor do anything that immediately distinguishes him from other Conan villains. He’s almost unnecessary for the story to even work, but admittedly how Conan disposes of him does offer the one little ray of light in what is otherwise a gloomy ending. Sure, Conan kills the demon Zogar Sag is linked with (the latter dying at the fort from seemingly nothing), and the sorcerer’s death demoralizes the Picts enough to make them retreat, but it’s a pyrrhic victory. All the men who stood to defend the fort have been killed with a single exception. The loss of the fort is so big that the border will be pushed back. Balthus and Slasher die in battle, fighting off Picts just so the women and children have enough time to evacuate, otherwise there would’ve been no survivors. Conan is literally one of only two survivors by story’s end.
A certain colleague of mine said that when she had first read this story many moons ago that Slasher’s death made her cry. It didn’t get that reaction out of me on either reading, but a) it speaks to Howard’s skills as a storyteller that we can feel for an animal that only shows up in the last quarter of the story, and b) on this second read I did feel sort of overwhelmed by the sheer gloominess of this story’s climax. Not that the Conan series is known for being uplifting (Conan himself is a pessimist and characters, be they heroic or villainous, are likely to meet bad ends), but even by those standards Beyond the Black River stands out as probably the gloomiest in the whole series. We’re told at the end that civilization “is a whim of circumstance,” and curiously this final line is not spoken by Conan but by an unnamed woodsman, who nonetheless shares Conan’s worldview. Appeal-to-nature fallacy aside, Howard seems to be saying that civilization, no matter how great, is only temporary; once it inevitably gives way, barbarism will take its seat on the throne, just as it had done previously.
A Step Farther Out
Beyond the Black River is arguably the best Conan story done by Howard’s pen, but I wouldn’t recommend it as one’s first Conan story. Aside from the genre mixing, this is an especially dark tale that lacks some of what had become hallmarks in the series, like Conan saving a scantily clad damsel in distress, and indeed there’s no romance plot nor any named female characters to speak of. This is not necessarily a bad thing. This was not the last Conan story written or even published in Howard’s lifetime, but it feels like a culimination of what Howard was trying to say with the character. This is the most vivid thesis statement on what Conan represents and what Howard was trying to do with the series. As such I would recommend reading it only after getting at least a few prior Conan stories under your belt; it becomes more rewarding the more you put into it.
And that’s it—my last serial review until 2025. 2024 will be focused on short stories, novellas, and the occasional novel. Reviewing serials takes a certain amount of energy out of me, and as I’m looking for a new job (yes, I’m back on the job hunt), I don’t wanna become fatigued on this blog. I love writing about mostly old-timey SFF and it would be a shame if personal issues got in the way of this specific hobby of mine. This is not my last review for 2023 (there’s one more in the oven), but still it marks the beginning of a hiatus I’m taking from reviewing a mode of fiction.
(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, May 1935.)
Who Goes There?
It’s telling of Robert E. Howard’s skill as well as his productivity that despite committing suicide at the age of thirty (most authors barely get their careers started by thirty these days), he stands out as one of the most influential American fantasists. He got his start when he was a teenager and from then on he never stopped writing, with a truly staggering amount of short fiction and poetry under his belt. (He only wrote two novels, however, one of which doesn’t seem to have been finished at the time of his death.) Howard started several series over his career, the most famous of these being Conan the Cimmerian, or Conan the Barbarian as he’s more popularly known. This one character (who admittedly is rarely ever depicted accurately in media by other hands) would lay the groundwork for sword-and-sorcery fantasy as we tend to recognize it, despite Conan not being Howard’s first attempt at such a character but rather a culmination. God only knows what the field would look like had Howard not died so young.
This will be my last serial review until 2025, and we’re capping things off with a reread. “Beyond the Black River” was one of the first Conan stories I had ever read, and it definitely helped ignite my interest in classic heroic fantasy, not to mention Howard’s writing. Conan himself is a bit of a handyman, taking on different odd jobs between stories, and this is reflected in the stories themselves taking on different subgenres, from straight action fantasy to weird horror. In the case of “Beyond the Black River” we see weird horror being wedded to—of all things—the frontier Western (think less A Fistful of Dollars and more The Last of the Mohicans). Howard really loved Westerns and he actually wrote a fair amount of straight examples of that genre, without fantastical elements.
Placing Coordinates
Serialized in the May and June 1935 issues of Weird Tales, which are on the Archive. It’s in more Conan collections than I can count, honestly, but good news is you don’t have to worry about tracking down a hard copy unlesss you really want to, because it’s on Project Gutenberg.
Enhancing Image
We start, not with Conan but a young Aquilonian settler named Balthus, who is on his way to his fort near Black River. He witnesses a fight between a Pict (a barbarian native to the land on which Balthus’s fort borders) and Conan, who really needs no introduction. Well, maybe a little. Conan is one of the most frequently (and inaccurately) depicted fantasy characters in visual media, and this is no doubt helped by Howard giving us some very juicy descriptions of his physique and demeanor in every story. He’s tanned, has raven-black hair, is built like a brick shithouse, moves “with the dangerous ease of a panther,” and is “too fiercely supple to be a product of civilization.” Conan is a Cimmerian, from a long line of Celtic barbarians, and in this sense he’s not dissimilar from the Pict whom he makes short work of. Balthus and Conan are working for the same side, although unlike the former, who believes in westward expansion, Conan is merely doing it for money, acting as muscle for the Aquilonians.
There’s a frontier war going on between the Picts and the Aquilonians, or more accurately a series of skirmishes. The only thing separating Pict land and Fort Tuscelan is Black River (not the black river as the title would suggest), not to mention woodland. The Aquilonians are a “civilized” people who, in the name of settler colonalism, may have bitten off more than they could chew. Balthus and Conan quickly find that there are far more dangerous things in the forest than Picts, for some animal had nearly ripped off the head of some dead merchant named Tiberias. We’re told of a Pictish sorcerer, Zogar Sag, who had been imprisoned in Fort Tuscelan for theft, but escaped and has since sought his revenge. The men who had originally detained the sorcerer were all killed, with their heads torn off. Zogar Sag lurks in Gwawela, a Pictish village on the other side of Black River. Clearly one side or the other must yield, but so far it’s been a stalemate between the Picts and Aquilonians, which is where Conan comes into play.
Beyond the Black River is a very different kind of story from the last Conan outing I reviewed, The People of the Black Circle, and indeed is quite different from other Conan stories I’ve read. Typically, though the narration is third-person, the perspective tends to be from Conan’s, at least when he’s onscreen. It’s pretty clear from the outset here, though, that Balthus is basically the protagonist of this story, not Conan. Of course, Conan is guaranteed to survive any story he’s in, but the same can’t be said of literally anyone else—including the person the story is really about. Another weird thing is that, to my knowledge, this is the only time Howard injects Western elements into the Conan series, although it’s certainly not the only time he mixed weird fiction with the Western. More specifically Beyond the Black River harks to a subgenre of Western that’s even older than the John Wayne variety—in this case James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. Even the title would not be out of place in a Western pulp magazine.
Morality in the Conan series tends to lean towards a dark shade of grey, and Conan himself often only does heroic things by virtue of helping people who are not as bad as the opposition. In this case Our Anti-Hero™ gets caught between the settlers, who are rather misguided to put it one way, and Zogar Sag, who is actively malicious. There’s some debate, from a modern left-leaning perspective, if the settlers are sympathetic at all, given that they also indulge in racism against the Picts, and it’s not entirely clear how Howard himself sees them. Something very curious Howard does is he makes both sides of the conflict white, although the Picts (like Conan) are described as “swarthy” and dark-skinned, “but the border men never spoke of them as such.” It’s easy to make parallels, such as between WASPs and white Jews and in the US, or—more likely what Howard intended—between WASPs and the Irish. It’s unclear at what point the Irish started to not count as “off-white” in the US, but clearly anti-Irish discrimination was something experienced within living memory in Howard’s time.
(Conan himself continues to be one of the most entertaining characters in fantasy, in no small part because he’s a bit of a scoundrel. While he is a great warrior and there’s definitely a noble quality about him, he has no qualms with playing sides against each other, or even working for a faction he used to be enemies with if the pay is right. He admits pretty casually to Balthus that he had fought against the Aquilonians some years prior, despite now being on that government’s payroll as a mercenery.)
Beyond the Black River might be the most overt example of Howard’s thesis on the relationship between man and civilization, and it’s a shame he died when he did because had he lived he probably would’ve been able to refine it. Howard was pretty open-minded for a man of his time and place, but he still had his own prejudices, and there’s definitely something questionable going on in the dynamic between the settlers and Picts. I mentioned Cooper’s frontier Westerns before, and now I’m gonna specify the comparison a bit more, perhaps to an uncomfortable degree. Making the Picts white was a clever move, because it softens the blow—that being that this is clearly running parallel to American westward expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s true that the settlers are not shown in the fondest light (indeed Conan thinks their enterprise foolish), but the Picts—the stand-ins for Native Americans nations—are mindless fiends who probably don’t deserve to keep their land. That Zogar Sag is a ruthless killer who collects human heads and does blood sacrifices arguably plays into certain real-world stereotypes, and not incidentally the settlers call the Picts “savages.”
There Be Spoilers Here
Conan thinks correctly that it’d be better to assassinate Zogar Sag with a small group of warriors than a whole battalion, but it still goes about as well as you’d expect. Also, is it just me or did Howard really have a thing against snakes? Giant snakes show up pretty regularly in his fiction and the halfway point of Beyond the Black River is no exception.
A Step Farther Out
This is not what I would recommend as one’s first Conan story, but for my money it might be the most intriguing of the ones I’ve read; it’s certainly the one that tries hardest to worm its way out of what must’ve already become predictable sword-and-sorcery cliches. In some ways it feels complementary to another Conan story Howard wrote around the same time, “Queen of the Black Coast,” in which Conan takes up piracy and even falls for a pirate queen who’s no less a fearless adventurer than him. There aren’t any notable female characters in Beyond the Black River to my recollection, and actually this is a rare case of Conan not saving a scantily clad damsel—although Balthus fulfills the “damsel” part at the end of this installment. This is more downbeat and not as overtly pulpy as other Conan stories, and its lateness plus its mixing of genres imply that maybe Howard considered branching out with his writing; he was maturing, but unfortunately he would not give himself much more time to do that.
(Cover by Michael Carroll. Asimov’s, December 2007.)
Christmas is coming up, and my birthday before that. Not incidentally we have a birthday among the authors covered, namely Connie Willis, whose birthday is the 31st. Willis is also very fond of Christmas stories so there’s that. Last December we did a month-long tribute to Fritz Leiber, who sadly will not be featured this time. (Don’t feel too bad, he’s already one of our most frequent “visitors.”) Since we’re closing out the first full year of this site, I figure it’s time to introduce one more major change (not permanent, don’t worry), not for this month but for January. December will be the last month probably until 2025 that I’ll be doing serial reviews; for 2024 I’ll be taking a break from serials and focusing on short stories and novellas, although I’ll still squeeze a few complete novels into the schedule.
The way it’ll work is, the days I would be reviewing sserial installments will instead be relegated to short stories, but otherwise the alternating slot method will not change, only starting in January you can expect to see two short stories for every novella. The space given to complete novels will remain the same: if a novella slot were to fall on the 31st of the month then I’ll at least try to tackle a complete novel. Why no serials for a year? For a few reasons. For one, I’m tired, and also I’ve come to find that my serial reviews are the least popular of my reviews, or rather they get the least feedback. Also, I’m a devotee of the short story at heart, and the reality is that there are way more short stories in the magazine market than serials, by at least a factor of ten; so for one year I think short stories deserve more of the glory. We do, of course, get two short serials to tackle before the hiatus, both of which are actually rereads for me.
There is one other thing I have in mind, a rather special thing, but you’ll have to wait until January to hear about it. It’s a secret. :3
For the serial:
Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson. Serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September to October 1953. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novella. This is the first serial I’ll be covering where I’ve not only read the book version but also the serial version, so this is sort of my third go-around with it. It’s worth it, though; this is one of the more influential works in the history of American fantasy, having partly inspired Dungeons & Dragons. It also makes me wish Anderson wrote more fantasy.
Beyond the Black River by Robert E. Howard. Serialized in Weird Tales, May to June 1935. Despite committing suicide at the age of thirty, Howard wrote a truly staggering amount of fiction and created several series in the process, with his most famous creation being Conan the Cimmerian. Howard did not invent sword-and-sorcery fantasy but he had unquestionably the most influence on proceeding American fantasists. This right here was one of the first Conan stories I had read, and it still reads as one of the more unusual.
For the novellas:
“Pursuit” by Lester del Rey. From the May 1952 issue of Space Science Fiction. Del Rey started out as a sentimentalist at a time when genre SF was markedly unsentimental, filling a niche that had gone untapped such that early stories like “Helen O’Loy” and “The Day Is Done” were very popular. He would move away from that style, and in the ’50s he even edited several (very short-lived) SFF magazines, Space Science Fiction being one. Thus the first story in the first issue of this magazine is by del Rey’s favorite writer: himself.
“All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis. From the December 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Hugo winner for Best Novella. In the ’90s and 2000s Connie Willis could lay claim to being the most popular writer to appear regularly in Asimov’s, and that’s on top of her novels, a few of which are certified classics. Her novel Doomsday Book especially is excellent, although it does not indicate her penchant for humor. She holds the record for most Hugo wins for Best Novella, with “All Seated on the Ground” being her fourth.
For the short stories:
“The Keys to December” by Roger Zelazny. From the August 1966 issue of New Worlds. Zelazny looks like he might see a much deserved renaissance soon, with a TV adaptation of his Amber serie being in the works. This is good news, because for a couple decades Zelazny has been threatened with the dark cloud of obscurity, despite being one of the most acclaimed SFF writers to come out of the ’60s. I picked “The Keys to December” because, well, look at the title.
“Genesis” by H. Beam Piper. From the September 1951 issue of Future Science Fiction. Piper is surely one of the most tragic figures in old-timey SF, having started his writing career very late (he was in his forties) and committing suicide at the age of sixty, believing himself to be a failure, such that despite not dying young his career was short-lived. It’s a shame, because Piper was in some ways an unusual writer for the time; he was a bit of a character, one could say.
For the complete novel:
Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp. From the December 1939 issue of Unknown. From 1937 to 1942 (he took a break to support the war effort), de Camp was one of the designated court jesters in John W. Campbell’s Astounding, and perhaps more importantly in Unknown. It was here that de Camp got to show off his range as a fantasist (most famously in his collaborations with Fletcher Pratt), although ironically his two longest solo efforts in Unknown in its first year, Divide and Rule and Lest Darkness Fall, are science fiction, not fantasy. Lest Darkness Fall was de Camp’s solo debut novel, an early example of a modern person being sent back to an ancient time period, and according to a lot of people it’s also his best. It was expanded (although I can’t imagine by much, since the magazine version looks to be a solid 50,000 words) for book publication in 1941.
You may think it a weak move for me to have my last two serial reviews before the hiatus be of ones I’ve already read, but as I’ve said before and always hope to make clear, rereading is arguably more important than reading in the first place. So it goes.
(Cover by Vincent Di Fate. Analog, February 1988.)
The Story So Far
The Cay Habitat was constructed a few decades ago to house a race of special humans—ones that were made to work in zero gravity indefinitely, since such conditions are awkward for normal humans. With a second set of arms for legs, the quaddies are considered the property of GalacTech, who’re also the employers of Leo Graf, Our Hero™. Leo has a problem: How do you teach a group of people about exploitation when said people exist as slave labor? It’s a question that for better or worse will have to go unanswered, because word gets through that an anti-gravity device has not only been invented but deemed ready for market sale, thus rendering the quaddies obsolete. Of course this raises another problem: What do you do with outdated tech when the tech is people? At best GalacTech will have the quaddies sterilized and shipped off to a barracks—at worst have them terminated with extreme prejudice. If the quaddies can’t be allowed to live out their lives peacefully under GalacTech jurisdiction then the only solution is to get out of said jurisdiction—and then comes an idea.
The Habitat is small, when taken in its essentials; it was made to house a thousand quaddies and little more than that. If broken down, the Habitat could be made to piggyback on an interstellar ship as flies through the wormhole near Rodeo. What at first sounds like a moral problem then becomes an engineering problem. The quaddies are very young (the oldest are barely out of their teens), but the best of them, along with some help from sympathetic humans, could make the scheme a success. Sure, the other end of the wormhole falls under a different planet’s jurisdication, but they’ll cross that bridge when they get there.
Enhancing Image
Sorry this is a day late. Forces beyond my control kept me in a bind yesterday such that I couldn’t write this post in time. Oh well.
I’m not sure if I would get this same feeling if I read it all at once, but I’ve become less interested in Falling Free with each successive installment, and the big reason for this is that Bujold gives us a memorable premise and a memorable setting to go with it, but there also has to be a plot here. For the record, there’s a difference between conflict and plot; you could have a character-driven narrative that’s rife with conflict, but very little actually happens. We start with both external and internal conflict here. We have the conflict between Leo and Van Atta, Leo and Dr. Yei, Dr. Yei and the quaddies, Leo and the quaddies, and of course Leo conflicting with his own interests. A great deal is implied about what had led to the quaddies being created. We only learn about Dr. Cay through second-hand sources, since Cay died a year before the story’s beginning, but what we do learn about him is not flattering. Yei, Cay’s successor, is implied to be in conflict with herself, since she was hired basically to make the quaddies docile whilst being well aware of their slave status, but for most of the novel she has a “just doing my job” mentality that eventually gives way to guilt.
Bujold introduces us to some engrossing character conflicts, but they start taking a backseat as the plot starts being funneled into what amounts to a race against the clock. Van Atta was never a layered character (he is, I have to say, disappointingly one-dimensional), but his role gets eroded to the point where he becomes a walking plot device—a threat that Our Heroes™ have to evade, since he can’t be reasoned with. Since we’re never allowed into Dr. Yei’s head our ability to perceive her inner conflict is limited, and her redemption at the end in incapacitating Van Atta long enough to let the Habitat enter the wormhole is boiled down to a single action. The recurring problem with this novel as it progresses is that it starts out as rather chatty, with a lot of room for character depth, but rather than elaborate on that we’re instead forced down a corridor wherein characters, who once were well-defined and intelligent, are boiled down to their actions. Tony, who is the first quaddie we see, all but stops being a character after the first installment; now admittedly part of this is because he gets put on a bus, figuratively speaking, but when we do meet up with him again he is reduced to something Our Heroes™ have to rescue.
What’s frustrating is that, at least going by Theodore Sturgeon’s definition of what makes a good science fiction story, Falling Free is good SF. Paraphrasing Sturgeon here, a good SF story is a human story with a human problem that must be solved in a human way, but which hinges on a scientific aspect. In Falling Free we’re given a premise which (at least with existing technology) can only be made possible in a science-fictional universe; but at the same time sounds logical enough that it could happen. We’re given a problem centered around human rights and this problem is resolved in a human way, albeit with a dose of that old-school hard SF hardheadedness. There comes a point, however, when Bujold’s economy of style turns against her and the novel, which starts out as seemingly open-ended, turns into a series of Things Happening™. I can see what people mean when they say this is minor Bujold, despite the Nebula win. I would be less disappointed if the novel’s opening stretch wasn’t so promising.
Oh, and the romance between Leo and Silver is both unnecessary and unconvincing, never mind that Silver is half Leo’s age.
A Step Farther Out
I’m unsure how to feel about this novel, although having finished it I can say its winning the Nebula is totally baffling. Was there really no better choice that year? C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen won the Hugo that year, and while I haven’t read it I have this hunch it would’ve at least been the more fitting winner; but to make things more baffling Cyteen wasn’t even nominated for the Nebula! What were people on back in the day? It’s shit like this that my borderline zoomer brain struggles to comprehend. I’m also not sure if Bujold wrote Falling Free with serialization in mind or if maybe her agent recommended it, but I don’t think the serial model works great for her. Admittedly there’s a reason serialization has basically become extinct, because a) not many people read magazine anymore, and b) it incentivizes a certain type of writing that puts higher priority on plot than character. Looking at this novel as a whole, I’m mixed. Getting kinda tired of serials.
(Cover by Robert Daniels. Analog, Mid-December 1987.)
The Story So Far
Leo Graf took on an instructing job at the Cay Habitat, an artificial satellite orbiting the planet Rodeo, where the work is hard but the rewards are rich. Leo was to train a group of “quaddies,” test-tube humans born with four arms and no legs, made specially to work in zero gravity. GalacTech, the company behind the quaddies and the ones responsible for Leo’s paychecks, had produced a race of humans to use as slave labor—a reality which does not sit well with Leo at all. Dr. Cay, who came up with the Habitat (itself having been made in secret two decades prior) in the first place, died a year ago, and in his place are Bruce Van Atta, Leo’s supervisor, and Dr. Sondra Yei, who works to socialize the quaddies. Unfortunately tensions are already rising as it becomes clear that the quaddies, despite efforts to isolate them from the human race at large, have already picked up some “bad habits,” like monogamy and a wish to leave the Habitat.
The end of Part 1 saw Tony, his girlfriend Claire, and their infant son Andy sneak off the Habitat and take refuge in a warehouse, still in deep space but at least avoiding a trip to Rodeo which would’ve literally crushed them. Van Atta interrogates Silver but with little result (Van Atta himself had already “corrupted” the quaddies by way of seriously unprofessional behavior, such as having sex with Silver), and to make matters worse Apmad, GalacTech’s VP, has come to the Habitat for an inspection ahead of schedule. So you have a drugged and traumatized quaddie, plus three more who are MIA. Part 1 does what a serial installment should do in that it raises intrigue, builds tension, and then ends on a huge question mark. How will Our Heroes™ get out of this one? You have to stay tuned and find out.
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The good news is that despite being stowaways, Tony and his family come out of the experience alive—but not unharmed. A frenzied security officer wounds Tony when he was supposed to stun him (having replaced his stun gun with an unregistered pistol), and thu Tony spends pretty much all of Part 2 out of the picture. Indeed Claire spends most of the time off-screen, with the only quaddie then being given a fair amount of screentime here being Silver. That there have been issues taming the quaddies turns out to be a problem without a solution, or rather a problem where the solution would not be worth it, because Leo hears a rumor from one of the shuttle pilots that a new anti-gravity device has not only been invented, but has reached the stage where companies are willing to buy it. The quaddies were made because zero gravity presents a problem for normal humans, but with anti-gravity it would be much easier for normal humans to work in deep space. You thus have a race of people, treated by GalacTech as organic technology, “post-fetal experimental tissue cultures,” about to be outmoded by actual technology. The question then is: What will become of them?
Part 2 is shorter than Part 1 and there seem to be fewer scenes; instead we get several lengthy borderline Socratic dialogues in which Leo and the people running the Cay Project have to confront both the ethical and logistical dilemma of the quaddies. This is the stuff that was hinted at in Part 1, but now that the cat’s out of the bag we’re knee-deep in it, and frankly this installment gripped my interest even more tightly than the first. Like this is the kind of shit that I’m here for. Moral conundrums usually get me going and Falling Free provides a meaty one in the form of, “We typically throw away technology once something better comes along, but what if that technology is people?” Leo’s problem with the quaddies escalates from “How do you protect workers from exploitation when said workers are already slaves?” to “How do you prevent the eradication of a people if legally they don’t even count as a people?” Because, technically speaking, the options GalacTech are providing for the quaddies in light of the anti-gravity device boil down to genocide—either via sterilization or extermination outright. This is a lot for a 300-page hard SF novel.
When confronting Van Atta about the anti-gravity device we get a pretty good line from Van Atta, who is an irrideemable monster but who says something that, unfortunately for Leo, rings true: “There’s only so much one human being can do, Leo.” The bastard is right—actually more right than he’s capable of knowing. There’s only so much one person can do in this situation. The mid-section of Part 2 sees Leo at his lowest point, unable to convince anyone on the Cay Project that these people are worth saving, and to make matters even worse, Leo has developed a crush on Silver despite her only being about half his age. (I don’t recall us being told how old Leo is, but given his 18 years of experience he’s probably somewhere in his forties.) The bright side of all this is that since GalacTech has not offered a third option, and since Leo knows what the quaddies are up against, it’s up to him now to find a solution—with a little help from his friends. The “character’s lowest point” part of the narrative has seemingly passed and now we’re looking at an ascent to victory, my one reservation being that unless Bujold has another trick up her sleeve, this might be too early in the novel to be doing such a plot turn, now that we’re about halfway through.
A few things to note here since I don’t really have anywhere else to put them. I said earlier that this novel is about 300 pages in its book version; as far I can tell the serial and book versions are more or less the same. To my novella-pilled brain 300 pages sounds like a good amount, but even by the ’80s we were seeing SF novels become longer on average. Call it an educated guess, but I think this happened because genre publishing was moving away from serializations, such that by the late ’80s the only magazine which regularly did serials was Analog. Serialization has some implicit demands, such that a novel must be structured in a certain way (there must be chapters which end on a high-tension note that sparks intrigue) and must be—or at least ought to be—of a certain length. The lack of such restrictions meant a novel could be of any length so long as it didn’t piss off the editor, but with those restrictions you would have a more concise work. Bujold wastes very little time on describing locations and people in Falling Free, to the point where Part 2 is mostly he-said-she-said dialogue. I’m not bothered by it, because I don’t like to have my time wasted, but modern readers might want something with more meat and flab on its bones.
Since this is a serial but also since Bujold is a very capable writer, every scene serves a purpose with regards to the plot, and the plot is pretty much always moving forward. Modern conventional wisdom says we should be have more “quiet” moments, where we’re treated to character psychology, but the characters here more exist to serve the plot while still being vividly drawn enough. Despite the deep-space setting, this is still a human narrative. I get the impression that Bujold is too much of a humanist to let her characters be mere cogs in a machine (like say, Hal Clement, although Clement’s talent very much lay elsewhere), although that doesn’t stop her from conceiving a borderline cartoonish villain like Van Atta. This is ultimately an “ideas” novel, but it’s by no means heartless or reactionary.
A Step Farther Out
In her rundown of Hugo nominees up to the year 2000 (very addicting series of articles, by the way), Jo Walton calls Falling Free “minor Bujold,” then adds “but minor Bujold would be a major book from most writers.” I do have to think, if this is minor Bujold then what does major Bujold look like? True, it’s rather small in scale, a little short by today’s standards (fantasy readers might even wrongly call it a novella), but it puts forth a novel concept and explores it in a way that is consistently intriguing. I do have to wonder how conflict will be sustained, because we’re about halfway through the novel now and there’s this creeping sense that the rest may turn into a white savior narrative (no doubt problematic), which would disappoint me a bit. The fact that I’m eagerly looking forward to whether I will be disappointed or not, though, speaks to Bujold’s skill and the novel’s readability.
(Cover by Vincent Di Fate. Analog, December 1987.)
Who Goes There?
I only first read Lois McMaster Bujold about a year ago, with the novella “The Mountains of Mourning,” a work that impressed me but didn’t bring me to dive deep into Bujold’s oeuvre so quickly. A lot of this has to do with Bujold’s work largely being connected to some series, or in the case of today’s novel the vast and not-so-chronological Vorkosigan universe. It would take too long to explain the backstory for this series, and anyway I haven’t read enough of it yet to be intimately familiar. Generally speaking it’s a space opera series which in parts follows members of the notorious Vorkosigan family, namely Cordelia and her son Miles. This series has won Bujold five out of her six Hugos (she is tied with Robert Heinlein for most Hugo wins for Best Novel, although Heinlein leads if we count Retro Hugos), and Falling Free, while not as renowned as some other entries, still won the Nebula for Best Novel. I’m enjoying it so far but I have to say this kind of novel winning the Nebula is a bit of an odd choice.
The premise is eye-catching right away, though, and I can already see how it would’ve gotten inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, it being chiefly concerned with the rights of a race of genetically engineered humans. The quaddies, so called, are normal humans in most ways except they’ve been engineered to have four arms and no legs (or rather arms for legs), so as to make them more nimble in zero gravity; in fact they’re so monkey-like in their “natural habitat” that they’re sometimes called “chimps.” Yes, a company breeding a race of people for the sake of specialized labor sounds like a moral black hole, but that’s only the start of it!
Placing Coordinates
The first installment is in the December 1987 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which is NOT on the Archive but which can be found on Luminist. It’s still in print from Baen, both on its own and as part of the omnibus Miles, Mutants, and Microbes, which includes the novella “Labyrinth” and the later novel Diplomatic Immunity. Falling Free takes place a good deal before Miles’s birth but does apparently set up the backstory for “Labyrinth,” in which Miles meets the quaddies.
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Leo Graf is a veteran engineer and inspector who has come to the Cay Habitat (named after its founder), a facility near the planet Rodeo, “the armpit of the universe,” on what amounts to a teaching assignment. Up to now the details had been kept foggy; Leo knows about “the Cay Project” but not what it entails. Dr. Cay himself had died a year ago, and in his place stands Bruce Van Atta, one of Leo’s former students, although it takes time for Leo to remember where they could have met before. What he manages to remember of Van Atta does not fill him with enthusiasm. “Was this sleek go-getter the same idiot he had kicked impatiently upstairs to Administration just to get him out from underfoot on the Morita Station project—ten, twelve years ago now?” And now this yuppie of the future is Leo’s supervisor for the Cay Project. What could go wrong here?
The question, though, remains as to whom Leo will be teaching while on the Habitat—a question that gets answered more suddenly and frightfully than Our Hero™ could’ve anticipated. We soon meet one of the young engineers on the Habitat, Tony, who is smart, spritely, willing to learn, about what you would hope for out of someone both young (only twenty years old) and talented. There is one problem: Tony doesn’t have any legs. Rather, he has an extra pair of arms where his legs would be, which nearly sends Leo into abject panic. Apparently nobody had told him in advance about the quaddies, the unusual denizens of the Habitat, and the people he is supposed to teach about welding in zero gravity. Leo thinks this condition is some kind of deformity, but Van Atta informs him that no, the quaddies (so they’re called) are supposed to be like this; they were genetically engineered by GalacTech, Leo’s company as well as the ones behind the Cay Project, in secret. This new race of people, who were at first created in test tubes but who have now taken to breeding naturally, “self-replicating” as Van Atta puts it, are designed to live and work in deep space.
Indeed Tony, who mind you is barely out of his teens and still one of the oldest of the quaddies, is already a father, raising his infant son Andy with his girlfriend Claire. All three are company property. The quaddies, strictly speaking, are not people, but assets of GalacTech; theoretically the company could have them killed without legal qualms if not for the fact that doing so would be blowing a lot of money. Leo’s viscerally troubled by the physiology of the quaddies but soon he becomes far more troubled by the fact that his own company has invented a new form of slave labor. Actually it’s a wonder that he’s not more disgusted by what’s going on, but then his job also depends on him keeping a cool head—or trying to. Things get thornier when we meet Dr. Sondra Yei, who has been working closely with the quaddies and conditioning them to not indulge in certain lines of thinking. At face value Yei is here to help prepare the quaddies for a life permanently cut off from 99% of humanity, but, although her intent doesn’t seem to be malicious, she seems to be here to reinforce a slave mentality.
Bujold doesn’t strike me as an ironist, but there’s a vicious bit of irony about Leo teaching the quaddies about safety procedures about shady company practices when they are literally the products of exploitation. How do you inform an audience about exploitation when said audience is slave labor and not even considered human by their creators? This sounds like a huge red flag, or rather a sign that maybe Leo should high-tail it out of there, but the conflict here is that yes, the situation is abhorrent, but Leo is also a devoted engineer who has been granted the opportunity to instruct a generation of people who were literally born and raised to be engineers. “The degree of censorship imposed upon the quaddies implied by Yei’s brief description made his skin crawl—and yet, the idea of a text that devoted whole sections to great engineering works made him want to stand up and cheer.” I know a few engineers and they’re all goddamn freaks; they see instruction manuals as a form of entertainment. Incidentally, despite the extreme dubiousness of the Cay Project, a love engineering still shines through, both in Leo’s thoughts and Bujold’s third-person narration. I mean if you put aside the slavery thing it’s really a technical marvel.
Leo being the protagonist is a logical choice since he’s the outsider in the narrative, a newcomer to the Habitat who at first doesn’t exactly side with either the people running the show or the quaddies, although it doesn’t take him long to sympathize far more with the latter. It helps that the quaddies are so innocent, despite the oldest of them already starting families and knowing a thing or two about sex and all that. Silver, a mutual friend of Tony and Claire’s, might be the most interesting of the ones we meet in how there is much more than meets the eye with her, but we’ll get to her more in the spoilers section. The characters—at least the ones we’re introduced to in this first installment—are largely at least understandable (you can understand someone’s motivations while still disagreeing with them), with only Van Atta being basically irredeemable. Of course Van Atta is a stand-in for the moral vacuum that is GalacTech. Actually I’m surprised a novel this ambivalent about corporate leeway was printed in Analog, but then again Bujold is a Baen regular despite apparently being liberal.
Right, so I should probably bring up why this novel blipped on my radar in the first place. True, I’d been meaning to get into Bujold, and a Nebula win is nothing to sneeze at, but I find it amusing that the people over at the Libertarian Futurist Society said, “Yes, this novel about the exploitation of a race of genetically engineered humans is the kind of shit we’re looking for in our mostly right-libertarian fiction.” I mean they have sometimes picked works by liberals and left-libertarians, but Falling Free doesn’t immediately stick out like, say, The Dispossessed, which is overtly a left-libertarian narrative. It’s less that Bujold is clearly arguing for the rights of man, whether that man has two arms or four (which I suspect is why it got picked anyway), and more the dimness with which she frames the creation of the quaddies. Van Atta may well be a Heinlein-esque figure in a different context, but here we see him as power-hungry and uncaring. If the story’s intend is to make us uncomfortable and even complicit in the mistreatment of the quaddies, but so far I think it’s a job well done.
There Be Spoilers Here
One problem with keeping a group of people in perfect isolation is that it’s impossible to do such a thing if there are outside forces; the other problem is that human nature is always at play, even if the humans came from test tubes. Tony and Claire wanna stay together, naturally, both because they love each other and for the sake of their son. The higher-ups don’t see it that way. In one has to be the most upsetting scene in the first installment, Dr. Yei informs the couple that they will soon be separated—not because they’ve done anything wrong but as some kind of “reward.” Claire’s done such a good job as a mother that she’s been granted permission for a second pregnancy ahead of schedule—with someone other than Tony as the father. “There is a Project-wide push to increase productivity. In all areas,” so Dr. Yei says. As for Tony, he will be shipped off and paired with a different quaddie woman for breeding. Dr. Yei justifies this monstrous procedure with the “Well it wasn’t my idea” justification; after all it was Dr. Cay’s idea and Dr. Cay is now dead, so who’s to blame really?
Meanwhile Silver has been getting intimate with normal humans on the sly—implicitly with Van Atta (or, more accurately, it’s implied she tolerates Van Atta’s behavior) and explicitly with Ti Gulik, one of the shuttle pilots who flies between the Habitat and Rodeo. There’s a great scene where Ti gives Silver a few books and a blouse as gifts, but Silver can’t accept the blouse since it would undoubtedly set off alarms that someone from outside the Habitat has been courting her. Sex between normal humans and quaddies is forbidden, or at least that’s an unspoken rule. Something that only just now occurred to me is that Van Atta clearly sees the quaddies as subhuman, even calling them “chimps” as times, but that doesn’t stop him from having an illicit affair with one—like a slave driver back in the old South. This comes back to bite him in a curious way at the end of the first installment. You see, the boss is coming in for a dog-and-pony show and three of the company’s prized assets have gone missing.
Knowing they’re to be forcefully separated, Tony and Claire take Andy with them as they hop on one of the shuttles (Ti’s shuttle, as it turns out) heading out as stowaways, they think heading for an orbiting station but which, due to a mix-up, is heading “Downside”—to Rodeo. The gravity nearly kills them but they manage to survive the trip, except now their problems are only just beginning. We get the deeply uneasy feeling that someone will get killed from all this. Bujold knows how to end an installment, with tensions having reached a fever pitch in all the plot threads; more impressively, I’m genuinely unsure as to where the novel will go from here. Granted, it could also be because I’ve been high-strung as of late, but I’ve found this to be an unusually tense and bleak novel for what is ostensibly hard SF.
A Step Farther Out
Falling Free was Bujold’s fourth novel, written during what must’ve been a white heat as it was her fourth novel in three years. True enough, she’s not trying to reinvent the English language here; this is not a novel you would read as a bit of prose poetry. The Nebula is often stereotyped as the award given to more “artsy” works, being a writer’s award, but there are a lot of populist novels that prove the exception (if there ever was a rule) and Falling Free is one of those accessible Nebula winners. Doesn’t matter, because unless Bujold fumbles the ball later on, I’m sold. I’ve been thinking about this novel for the past couple days and I’ll still be thinking about it when I read the next installment in a couple more.
(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, March 1943.)
How’ve you been? I’ve been not great. Long story short, October was a rough patch for me; there were a couple weeks in there where I didn’t even enjoy working on this blog. It sucks, because one of the reaons I started SFF Remembrance was I thought it would be therapeutic, and it usually is! But it’s not 100% guaranteed to work. Now, despite not having to write about any longer works, October was also a busy month for me, partly because of work but also it was my own fault. For the past several years I’ve done a month-long movie marathon in October and I’ve been continuing that tradition, even with the extra workload of this blog.
I ended up getting a sleep med prescription, since I had a really awful bout of insomnia combined with depression there. Anyway, good news is we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming. Last month was focused on horror and weird fiction, but for November we’re returning to pure uncut science fiction from start to finish. I like to write about short fantasy since it’s a field that my colleagues are not prone to covering, but science fiction is my home turf. We’ve got a mix of names I’ve covered before with a few newcomers, and in one case someone who has only been active for the past decade. I know my tastes skew towards the classics, but I do like to go out of my way to cover new voices in the field at timess.
Let’s see what’s on my plate.
For the serial:
Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold. Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, December 1987 to February 1988. Bujold is tied for the most Hugo wins for Best Novel (although Heinlein has the lead if we count Retro Hugos), and she also won a Nebula for Falling Free. Aside from the award-winning novella “The Mountains of Mourning” I’ve not read any Bujold, which shames me because I can tell she’s not your average writer of space opera and military SF. This novel, a fairly early effort from Bujold, is set in her incredibly vast Vorkosigan universe, which includes the aforementioned novella as well as the Hugo-winning novels The Vor Game, Barrayar, and Mirror Dance.
For the novellas:
“A Man of the People” by Ursula K. Le Guin. From the April 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Possibly the most universally respected of all modern SF writers, Le Guin emerged in the ’60s as a writer of immense depth and humanity. Her crowning achievement, at least when taken collectively, is the Hainish cycle, which includes The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Le Guin put the series on hold in the mid ’70s but made a grand return to it in the ’90s, with “A Man of the People” being set in that universe.
“Clash by Night” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. From the March 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novella. The power couple of old-timey SF, Kuttner and Moore started out alone (both, incidentally, debuting in Weird Tales) before meeting up, marrying, and writing prolifically together. They were so prolific in the ‘40s that they employed a few pseudonyms, with Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O’Donnell being the most popular. With some exceptions it’s up to guessing as to who wrote what.
For the short stories:
“Everquest” by Naomi Kanakia. From the October 2020 issue of Lightspeed. This has the honor of being the most recent story I will have covered for my blog so far. When it comes to literature I prefer to wait at least a couple years for something to ripen, don’t know why. Anyway, Kanakia is a trans Indian-American writer, one of many colorful new talents to have come about in the 2010s. And yes, the title is very much a shoutout to the MMORPG of the same name.
“Angel’s Egg” by Edgar Pangborn. From the June 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. I’ve read a couple of Pangborn’s novels, each showing a unique and warm-hearted writer who would’ve stuck out in the ‘50s. A Mirror for Observers won the International Fantasy Award while Davy was up for the Hugo (losing to Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer, ugh). “Angel’s Egg” was Pangborn’s first short story, which is fitting because it’s also my first time reading him at short length.
I recommend checking out the short stories in advance since it’s pretty easy to do so; they’re both readily available online.
(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, November 1946.)
The Story So Far
Michael Slade is a strapping young businessman who would’ve continued to enjoy a normal and luxurious life if not for a car accident that revealed a third eye lurking in his forehead. Using a dubious method of eye therapy, Slade is able to perceive a plane of existence totally separate from and yet existing in tandem with Earth as we recognize it. He meets a fellow three-eyed person, a mysterious woman named Leear who guides him (rather obtusely) toward a city of this new plane: Naze. A city perpetually under siege and whose denizens have a concerning appetite for human blood, Naze is controlled by a man named Geean, who, so Leear claims, must be killed if the city is to be saved at all. Outside the city lurks a group of people who dwell in caves and who seem to be connected with Leear, having come from a crashed ship and who show themselves to be more civilized than the city-dwellers. This is all well and good, but Slade isn’t sure what his role in all this is, and unfortunately for him he’s in an A. E. van Vogt story.
That’s the gist, but there are so many odd little things that happened in the first installment that the recap section reads like a somewhat inebriated person trying to summarize a Thomas Pynchon novel. Van Vogt crams a lot into those thirty pages, and if you think the next thirty-something pages are gonna be any clearer—I’m sorry.
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I had to take a Tylenol for this.
Like last time I won’t be talking about the plot so much as things taken almost in isolation that stuck out to me, because while I don’t claim to be a master at reading comprehension, I can’t bring myself to understand all of what happens here; more damningly, I can’t bring myself to care enough. The Chronicler is a turkey in a way that bad van Vogt stories specifically tend to be turkeys, which is to say they’re bad in such a way as to be unique to van Vogt’s own failings as a writer. It’s like how latter day Heinlein can be bad in ways that only latter day Heinlein can be bad: the digressions, the lack of plotting, the very odd sexual remarks, and so on. In the case of van Vogt it’s an incoherence of plotting which other writers might only reach if trying to write a van Vogt pastiche. It’s funny because in the anthology Five Science Fiction Novels (ed. Martin Greenberg) I had read and reviewed another inclusion in that book: Fritz Leiber’s Destiny Times Three. I remarked in my review that Leiber almost certainly intended to write a van Vogt pastiche there, and the sad part is that when compared with The Chronicler Leiber beats van Vogt at his own game—not that Destiny Times Three is a masterpiece or anything, just the better narrative.
The first ten pages or so of The Chronicler‘s second installment made me think that maybe things won’t be so bad. Slade, after being saved from the depths of Naze, meets the cave people and this time tries to get to know them. It turns out that these people are not only civilized but have psychic powers beyond even what Slade can do—for now. He falls under the wing of Danbar and Malenkens, who know what Leear is up to but refuse to give Slade more than a little breadcrumb of information, since Leear has plans of her own. The idea is that the eye therapy (which doesn’t work IRL) which allowed Slade to perceive this other plane was only the beginning of what will turn out to be arduous psychic training. As an example, the cave people can turn themselves invisible—or rather mess with other people’s vision so as to make them think they’ve turned invisible. Technology doesn’t much play much of a part in this narrative, as the powers that the characters have are pretty much all psychic—powers that are already dormant, like the third eye, only needing to be awakened via training.
ESP is the flavor of the week, in the case of Astounding/Analog the flavor of, hmmm, some forty years and change. We’re introduced to the niths, one of which we had seen towards the end of the first installment but whose roles are now made more clear: bear-like creatures that are not only sentient but telepathic, opening two-way channels with those they communicate with. Telepathy is not predominant in The Chronicler as some other typical Astounding works, if only because van Vogt turns up the dial so high on ESP generally here that telepathy comes almost as an afterthought. The thing about the predominance of ESP is Astounding/Analog is that most authors used it either as a storytelling tool (nothing inherently wrong with that) or to spice up their piece for Campbell. James Blish tore apart his own serial Get Out of My Sky (under a pseudonym) for cynically incorporating ESP in the back end of that story, which I’m sure will be amusing when we eventually get to that. But van Vogt was one of the few writers in Campbell’s stable who was a true believer—with tragic consequences.
Okay, so. Van Vogt’s writing philosophy was that on average you should scenes of about 800 words and that with each scene there should be at least one plot development. Sounds simple. The result is often that van Vogt’s stories pack a lot of plot into relatively little space, such that even a short-short like “The Great Judge” is just a bit more action-packed and twisty than you would expect. Sometimes this works beautifully; sometimes you get a bunch of shit that fails to cohere. The Chronicler packs a short novel’s worth of plot into a 30,000-word novella and while it could’ve worked if van Vogt was a more elegant writer, elegance is not something he’s known for. People, when taking down van Vogt, say his prose is rather stilted, almost like it was written by someone whose first language is not English. This is true enough, although he can be surprisingly evocative at times, almost in spite of himself, and there are a few scenes in the back half of The Chronicler that work—that are memorable in a good way. There’s a late scene where Slade has a telepathic conversation with a friendly nith that is strongly dreamlike, evoking what Joseph Conrad calls “the dream-sensation,” that struck me as a rare moment here of van Vogt being on the ball.
But holy shit, I’m tired and I could no longer afford to care by the end. It doesn’t help that the climax of this story is extremely confusing, even by the “high” standard it set for itself. We’re given a series of revelatios about Leear and Geean and how they have a shared history, even being part of the same race of immortals (makes sense, given their names are similar). It all has something to do with life-prolonging technology being tossed aside in favor of true immortality achieved with—you guessed it—ESP. There are a couple major twists brought up in, I kid you not, the last couple pages that raise so many needless questions that my head hurt a bit. I wasn’t convinced van Vogt was being 2 smart 4 me so much van Vogt writing something that only made sense to himself. I can see why this hasn’t been printed in English since the ’70s: it’s not very good. It’s the kind of bad that doesn’t offend me but rather deeply weary me; it’s the kind of bad that makes me feel like I’m coming down with a cold, or the flu, and that I ought to take a nap. Sleep is always good, so I suppose you could do much worse.
A Step Farther Out
What’s funny is that I could’ve avoided this—or delayed the inevitable, since given the finite number of serials I would’ve had to cover The Chronicler at some point; but I had read a van Vogt piece a few days before my monthly forecast post with the intention of writing about it, and it was a much stronger piece than this. “Dormant” is a short story I would recommend to anyone curious about post-nuclear SF in the years immediately following World War II, as it’s entertaining, evocative, a little unhinged, and yet coherent for van Vogt. Problem was, too much time had passed between my reading the story and when I was set to write about it. I got cold feet. My metaphorical pen started to run out of ink. There’s much to say about “Dormant,” but I may save it for when I’ll have reread it in a few years, presumably when my thoughts will be more fully formed. Please read that one instead. To quote a letter in the March 1947 issue of Astounding, The Chronicler is “not up to van Vogt’s standards.”
(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, October 1946.)
Who Goes There?
It’s not unusual for authors who’ve made it to see their popularity dwindle within their lifetimes, but A. E. van Vogt’s fall from grace is a little weirder and more complicated than average. In the ’40s he was one of the most popular writerss in magazine SFF, easily rivaling Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov—until, almost overnight, he wasn’t. Van Vogt debuted in 1939 and wrote a mile a minute until 1951, whereupon he gave up writing fiction from whole cloth in favor of taking the many stories he had already written and stitching them into fix-up novels. This change in work ethic happened, at least in part, because van Vogt got really busy shilling a new pseudoscience that you may have heard of: Dianetics. While he didn’t join the Church of Scientology, van Vogt shilled Dianetics for little over a decade, and by the time he gave up that business and got back to writing in earnest he had lost his prestige—although he still had his fans.
On top of the Dianetics business, van Vogt saw some pretty biting criticism during his heyday, most famously from a young Damon Knight who tore apart the serial version of The World of Null-A. When van Vogt returned in the ’60s his work was not up to the standard of prior material, such that it became easy to assume that van Vogt was never good. It’s a shame, because van Vogt’s best stories are pretty special, with nuggets like “Far Centaurus,” “Enchanted Village,” “The Weapon Shop,” “The Rull,” “The Great Judge,” and of course the stories making up The Voyage of the Space Beagle being well worth reading today. The Chronicler, also reprinted as Siege of the Unseen, does not look to be one of van Vogt’s finer moments, although it’s still far too strange an endeavor to be considered dull.
Placing Coordinates
Serialized in the October and November 1946 issues of Astounding Science Fiction, which can be found here and here. The Chronicler has only been reprinted a few times in English and you’re more likely to find it as Siege of the Unseen. It was first reprinted under its original title as part of Five Science Fiction Novels (ed. Martin Greenberg) and then as one half of an Ace Double in 1959—the other half being John Brunner’s The World Swappers. It has not seen print since the ’70s (in English, that is, since apparently the French love van Vogt) and there may be a reason for that.
Enhancing Image
Normally I would try to do a point-by-point synopsis, but the plot for The Chronicler is nigh undiscernible and so for the sake of my own sanity I’ll be instead focusing on scenes and ideas that caught my attention—for better or worse. A common criticism of van Vogt is that his stories make no sense, and while this is sometimes not the case (the aforementioned “Enchanted Village” and “The Great Judge” have straightforward narratives), it is very much true here. This thing makes no sense. There are some pretty memorable scenes and if van Vogt has a major talent it’s for crafting moments like these, but stringing them together is a different story.
So…
Michael Slade is co-head of a brokerage firm who survives a car accident with his wife at the beginning of the story. He gets cut pretty badly on his forehead, but the injury is nothing compared to what lies under the skin: a third eyeball, lidless but otherwise functional, which hitherto had been dormant since it couldn’t see anything. It’s suggested that the third eye has to do with the pineal gland, which if you’ve read some really old-timey SF (for example, Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”) then you might be familiar with it as a trope. We’re literally two pages in and we’re already being introduced to some Cronenberg-esque body horror and pseudoscience that would’ve been old hat even in 1946. Slade always knew his forehead was soft (something that really should’ve concerned him more than it does), but he didn’t know he had a dormant third eye hiding in there.
But wait, there’s more!
Slade, whose vision in his two normal eyes is poor and in his third eye very bad, goes to see an eye doctor who suggests an alternative method for restoring his eyesight. The doctor is a quack, although he’s framed as perfectly legit in-story, and I’m bringing this up being he employs an actual eye correction method that van Vogt may or may not have also bought into: the Bates method. Named after William Horatio Bates, this is a “theory” that proposes that poor eyesight comes not from something wrong with the eye itself, but with how the brain functions. The idea is that someone will basically go through therapy and relax their mental state such that they’re able to see more clearly, foregoing surgery and prescription glasses. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but the Bates method has long since been discredited and it was likely already considered bunk by most eye doctors even when van Vogt was writing this story.
Using a method that doesn’t work, Slade is able to not only to improve his eyesight but see things with his third eye that he normally should not be able to, even being seemingly transported to a different location from where he was a second ago. It’s during one of these sessions that Slade finds himelf by a stream, in a place he’s never been before, and he sees a woman who looks like she’s about go skinny dipping, as “except for a rather ornamental silvery belt around her waist, she had no clothes on.” This is an unexpectedly titillating scene, given it was printed in Astounding, but more importantly, Slade and this woman (let’s call her Leear) have a short interaction. The thing that really catches Slade’s attention, aside from the view, is that Leear also has a third eye. What could this mean?
Before I get into what will be the main setting, let’s talk about pseudoscience, as it’s a word that’s come up a few times now. Pseudoscience, which is really an umbrella term that can cover anything from ESP to UFOs to alternatives to Darwinian evolution, has historically played a major part in the conceiving of science fiction—which creates a problem. For decades SF fans and writers have prided themselves on keeping up to date with the latest scientific findings, but if you check the facts you’ll find this rarely the case; and even then, science goes through far more changes than myth. Some writers intentionally fall back on speculations that held water decades ago but have since then been disproved, writing what we’d call recursive SF to achieve a retrograde effect. Nobody with sense would seriously object to someone writing a story set on a swampy Venus in 2023.
The problem is that outdated science is not quite the same thing as pseudoscience—i.e., as fake science, i.e., once more, as science that, when asked for evidence and consistency, fails the test. ESP is fake science. Dianetics is fake science. The Dean Drive is fake science. The Bates method is fake science. Despite John W. Campbell’s proclaiming that Astounding (and later Analog) would print fiction based in real science (or at least credible speculation), the magazine would oftentimes print fiction that takes advantages of fake science, and it would become such a habit that it would persist even after Campbell’s death. One of the differences between Heinlein and van Vogt is that while Heinlein was masterful at incorporating real (for the time) science, van Vogt was equally masterful at incorporating fake science. The result is that van Vogt’s premises are often patently absurd, as is the case with The Chronicler.
One more thing to bring up before we get to “the other plane,” which is that this story swaps back and forth between in-the-moment third-person narration and a series of recorded interviews with different characters that presumably happen after the story ends; saying “presumably” because Slade has apparently died. According to Slade’s wife (or ex-wife, as she leaves him during the eye therapy ordeal), the quack doctor, and a few other people, Slade ATE SHIT, and yet in the third-person half of the narrative he is very much alive. This is an unusual method of creating intrigue and I have to give van Vogt kudos for trying, but I have to think it would also be more effective if I could understand what was happening.
Upon returning to his old family estate outside the city where he normally lives, Slade follows through on a deal made with Leear—that he is to meet her on this farm at midnight on any given day. It works, and through means which not even the omniscient narrator is able to explain, Slade gets spirited away to “the other plane”—a place not so much on a different planet as in another dimension existing in tandem with Earth, thanks to his third eye. It’s here that we’re moved into the city of Naze, a massive shithole which is perpetually under siege and which is host to thousands of… and this is really the best way I can put it… non-supernatural vampires. People who have a bit of an addiction to human blood, much like how we might have an addiction to cocaine or jerking off. The city is home to savages while Leear and her people are civilized folks who live in caves because their spaceship has been put out of commission. Nice little reversal there, huh? The civilized live like barbarians while the barbarians live in the city.
Slade jumps back and forth a few times between Naze and Earth, but mostly he sticks to Naze, and perhaps too quickly he comes to the conclusion that he’s likely to stay here in spite of everything. Slade’s mindsert makes sense to a degree, since he is a three-eyed freak who’s now getting divorced and whose friends won’t return his calls. Something that keps popping into my head while reading this installment, aside from “WHAT THE FUCK’S GOING ON?,” is the possibility that van Vogt had been rereading the John Carter novels at the time. The Chronicler, in some ways, certainly echoes A Princess of Mars. While John Carter astral projects himself to Barsoom (itself a hard pill to swallow nowadays), Slade has more esoteric ways of shifting between the dimensions. Romance also comes up unusually quickly, although I’m not sure if it’s weirder to crush on a female alien who mostly look human but lays eggs or a three-eyed crackhead vampire.
There Be Spoilers Here
It’s hard to spoil something you barely comprehend.
Let me put it another way. This installment of The Chronicler is pretty short, being only thirty pages. Looking at both installments I would say it comes to maybe about 30,000 words—honestly short enough to have been published in one piece as a novella, except there was probably an issue with scheduling and Campbell needed a serial. Despite being objectively short, and despite not being boring (it has other issues, but not that one), reading it can feel like an endurance test. The worst part is that van Vogt crams so much plot development in here, and so little of it connects, that you’d be tempted to read the recap section of the second installment right away just to see what you might’ve missed. Like I said, while there are scenes that work (I’m thinking of a very odd bit wherein Slade considers hitting on Amor, a city dweller and ally to Leear, only for her to ask him if she could have a little taste of his blood), the dots do not connect.
I have many questions and I suspect only some of them will be answered in the next installment. Van Vogt has this thing for flashbanging the reader with an enigma or unexplained revelation at the last minute, which sometimes works, but not so much here.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 