(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, July 1933.)
Weird Tales, across incarnations, has been arguably the most important outlet for dark fantasy and horror in the American market for the past century now. Yes, it’s been that long. The first issue of Weird Tales is marked March 1923 and would have appeared on newsstands in February (I’m not splitting hairs), and while it wasn’t immediately impressive it would become the quintessential pulp horror magazine within a decade. Given the nature of my site and how important Weird Tales is, I thought it appropriate (not to mention a break away from tackling serials) to do a month-long tribute by reviewing entirely short stories from this magazine’s pages—but make no mistake, this is not an attempt to cover its incredibly wide-spanning history. What I’m doing rather is to cover the most famous period of Weird Tales: from the mid-1920s to the end of the 1930s.
In a way this is not so much a tribute to Weird Tales as to the man who, more than anyone, made it the legend it now is: Farnsworth Wright. Wright hopped on as editor with the November 1924 issue and stayed until failing health forced him to step down after the March 1940 issue; he died only a few months later. But in the decade and a half that Wright was editor there was a profound change in the magazine’s contents, as it went from focusing on unassuming ghost stories to encompassing a wider range of “weird” fiction, including but not limited to sword and sorcery, operatic science fiction, and of course, cosmic horror. Ghost stories remained a firm part of the magazine’s identity, but under Wright we saw several big forerunners to modern horror and fantasy, including H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, and indeed Weird Tales was the birthplace of both Conan the Barbarian and the Cthulhu Mythos.
Weird Tales was not that friendly to novellas unless they were serialized, and anyway I figured it’d be more accurate a representation to review all short stories this month, which also allows for a more diverse set of authors. We’ve got some famous ones here, but also some deep cuts that I’m very much interested in exploring.
Anyway, here are the short stories:
“The Stolen Body” by H. G. Wells. From the November 1925 issue. This is the first true reprint I’ll be reviewing for Remembrance. “The Stolen Body” was first published in the November 1898 issue of The Strand Magazine, but we’re reading it as it appeared in Weird Tales, and apparently Wright (or somebody) deemed it major enough to make it the cover story despite its reprint status. Wells is someone who needs no introduction, and this is a story from his peak era.
“The Canal” by Everil Worrell. From the December 1927 issue. Not much is known about this author, but her vampire story “The Canal” has been reprinted several times over the years, including as a “classic” reprint in Weird Tales itself. Lovecraft was apparently a big admirer of this one, and he also didn’t seem immediately aware that Worrell was a woman. There’s a later revised version with a different ending, but we’re reading its first magazine appearance.
“The Star-Stealers” by Edmond Hamilton. From the February 1929 issue. Hamilton had made his debut in Weird Tales, and he soon proved to be the most prolific contributor of “weird-scientific stories,” or ya know, just science fiction. “The Star-Stealers” is the second entry in the episodic Interstellar Patrol series, which while not often read now was an early exmaple of space opera, which Hamilton helped codify alongside E. E. Smith and Jack Williamson.
“The Black Stone” by Robert E. Howard. From the November 1931 issue. This has to be the fastest I’ve returned to an author for my site, since only last month I finished covering Howard’s Conan serial The People of the Black Circle. “The Black Stone,” however, is not sword and sorcery but cosmic horror, and it’s supposed to be one of the best old-school Lovecraftian narratives, on top of being one of the first examples of someone taking cues from Lovecraft’s work.
“The Dreams in the Witch-House” by H. P. Lovecraft. From the July 1933 issue. Speaking of which, it’d be impossible to do a Weird Tales tribute without covering its most famous contributor, although Lovecraft was certainly not that at the time. Wright and Lovecraft did not get along, with Wright rejecting At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow Out of Time.” Still, this is one of his more famous short stories, and it even got adapted for TV recently.
“The Black God’s Kiss” by C. L. Moore. From the October 1934 issue. The only reread of the bunch, and that’s because I honestly did not give this one the attention I should have when I encountered it a couple years ago. Moore is now more known for collaborating with her husband Henry Kuttner, but she started as one of the more popular authors in Weird Tales. “The Black God’s Kiss” is the first in the Jirel of Jory series, featuring the titular sword-and-sorcery heroine.
“Vulthoom” by Clark Ashton Smith. From the September 1935 issue. The literary sorcerer returns! Smith was, for a brief time, one of the most prolific contributors to Weird Tales, although he mostly retired from writing fiction by the time Wright left. “Vulthoom” is a “late” Smith story, and you can tell because it was one of only a few he put out in 1935. It’s also a comparitibely rare example of Smith doing SF, with the setting being not Earth but a haunted Mars.
“Strange Orchids” by Dorothy Quick. From the March 1937 issue. As with Worrell we don’t know much about Quick, and unlike “The Canal” this has not been reprinted so often. I do remember first seeing Quick’s name in Unknown, the magazine that for a brief time usurped Weird Tales, but she appeared more in the latter; she basically stopped writing fiction once the first incarnation of Weird Tales shut down. Probably the most obscure pick of the bunch.
“Roads” by Seabury Quinn. From the January 1938 issue. Quinn was the most popular author to appear in Weird Tales during the Wright era, and yet his reputation dwindled enough since his death that he later “won” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. The posthumous obscurity could be because a lot of what Quinn wrote was hackwork, but “Roads” is distinct for apparently being one of those pieces that Quinn wrote out of passion, being an earnestly told Christmas story.
I know Halloween was only like five months ago, but truth be told it’s always Halloween in my heart. If I could get away with just reading and reviewing spooky fiction I probably would; nothing warms my bones like a good horror yarn. The greatest hits from Weird Tales are still cited after nearly a century, but I suspect there are also deeper cuts (especially by female authors, as there would’ve been several) that are worth our attention. We have a healthy variety of authors and a good deal of diversity as to this magazine’s contents, ranging from the supernatural to the weird-scientific.
But enough buildup…
It’s time to venture into the eerie, the uncanny, and the WEIRD!
(Cover by Robert Gibson Jones. Universe, March 1954.)
Who Goes There?
Chad Oliver was one of many authors who came about just in time for the bubbling of the SFF magazine market in the first half of the ’50s; he debuted in 1950, and more than half his short fiction was published by 1960. Despite being a mainstay of the ’50s, there were certain oddities about Oliver’s background and character that separated him from his fellows, namely that he was an academic—more specifically he was an anthropologist, first as a student and later as a staff member at the University of Texas. His 1952 thesis “They Builded a Tower” had to be one of the first academic papers about “modern” SF, and his preoccupation with wedding academia with SF in the ’50s coincided with the likes of Jack Williamson and others bringing the genre to the world of higher education. He was also, a little unusually (and admirably) for the time, vocal about his sympathies for indigenous peoples, with his westerns and some of his SF apparently depicting Native Americans as flesh-and-blood people.
Before Ursula K. Le Guin became SF’s leading anthropologist (among other things), there was Chad Oliver. Given his background, it should be less surprising that Oliver’s fiction is less concerned with individuals and more so with cultures. In the case of his SF we’re talking alien cultures, and with today’s story, “Let Me Live in a House,” we’re given quite the taste of what Oliver’s game is. What a great title, by the way. It’s vaguely ominous, is open to several meanings, and while the alternate title “A Friend to Man” is perfectly fine (the irony is what sells it), this is much better.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1954 issue of Universe Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s one of those stories that showed up more than once in the magazines; its first British publication was in the June 1956 issue of Authentic Science Fiction, which you can find here. For old-timey book appearances we have the Groff Conklin anthology Science Fiction Terror Tales and the Oliver collection The Edge of Forever: Classic Anthropological Science Fiction. If you want in-print options then you do have a couple, and one of them is huge—quite literally. First we have the hardcover Oliver collection from NESFA Press, Far from This Earth and Other Stories. Then we have what drew my attention to this story in the first place, The Big Book of Science Fiction (at over 1,100 two-columned pages it lives up to its title), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. I can see why the VancerMeers, as champions of weird fiction, picked this one out…
Enhancing Image
We start with what seems like suburbia, only it’s smaller and more isolated than the norm. We have two cottages next to each other, each adequately but quaintly fitted. Framed in one of these cottages is part of a poem; Oliver doesn’t cite it, but it’s “The House by the Side of the Road” by Sam Walter Foss, and we only get one line from it: “Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.” On its face it’s meant to be optimistic, but the events that follow will put a much darker spin on it.
The two cottages are enclosed in a dome, or as it’s called a bubble. We’re not on Earth, but on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. Two couples live here: Gordon and his wife Helen, and their neighbors Barton and Mary. Gordon is our protagonist, and for some reason he’s the only one of the four who doesn’t act like everything is normal; in a way his lack of contentment with his environment makes him look normal, and the others strange. Unfortunately for Gordon, who already is not that happy a camper, he and the others live on the side of Ganymede that overlaps with the Twilight Zone. No, but in all seriousness I’m surprised this wasn’t adapted for a Twilight Zone episode, or The Outer Limits. Life under the dome starts out uncanny and things only get worse from there. The grass and foliage are artificial. The “weather” is programmed. There are no animals.
If the outsider is uncanny then life inside one of these cottages is little better. There’s no communication with the outside world (well, with Earth), there’s no way to leave the dome, and for entertainment your options are limited and quickly exhausted. There’s a TV—a “tri-di,” which I take to be a 3D set (because 3D was also a fad in the ’50s, history repeating itself)—but it’s all pre-programmed and much like with an iPod Touch circa 2012 you run out of variety quickly. Oh, and there’s board games. Cool.
Even the act of talking becomes minotonous.
They exchanged such small talk as there was. Since they had all been doing precisely the same things for seven months, there wasn’t much in the way of startling information to be passed back and forth. The bulk of the conversation was taken up with Mary’s opinion of the latest tri-di shows, and it developed that she liked them all.
The sheer monotomy of living under a small dome for months seems close to breaking Gordon already when something unforeseen happens. One “night” the four hear a sound—a whistling noise over their heads—that they know for a fact can’t be coming from inside the dome. Hell, it can’t be coming from outside the dome either; that’s not how sound in space works. Gordon and Barton enter a hidden equipment room and check what has to be the ’50s equivalent of convenience store CCTV footage. An arc of light, perhaps a meteor, passed over the dome at “night”—or, perhaps, it could be something else. Gordon tells himself it has to be a meteor, but even at this early point he’s not doing a great job at convincing himself. I’m amazed Gordon made it this far, considering he seems on the verge of cracking at any moment. Then again, his relatively loose grip on reality will prove something of an asset.
I know I’m bringing up the time period in which this story was written a lot, but you have to keep in mind that “Let Me Live in a House” could not have been written any later than 1963 (when John F. Kennedy caught a bullet with his brain), and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Oliver’s decision to model life under the dome after a rather stripped-down parody of middle-class suburbia was very much deliverate. There’s a whole subgenre of ’50s SF stories that take pot shots at the growing middle-class suburban population and this is one of them. This story could not have been written twenty years before or after; in 1934 people were fighting just to get jobs, and in 1974 there was the oil crisis. There’s this satire of complacency as the result of economic prosperity; not to say it’s a comedy, because it really isn’t, but satire can be serious, in its message if not on its face.
Here they were, he thought—four human beings on a moon as big as a planet, three hundred and ninety million miles from the Earth that had sent them there. Four human beings, encased in two little white cottages under an air bubble on the rock and ice that was Ganymede. Here they were—waiting.
Waiting for the ship from home that was not due for five months. Waiting all alone in an abandoned solar system, with only sound effects and visual gimmicks for company. Waiting in an empty universe, sustained by a faith in something that had almost been lost.
Hey, remember this bit? “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…” I’m not sure where this originated. It was used in the Fredric Brown short story “Knock” (which I haven’t read yet), but I don’t think that’s where it comes from. Regardless it’s a great little two-sentence horror yarn. Well, anyway, the only four people on Ganymede are hanging out in a cottage, when there’s a knock on the door…
Someone’s knocking on the door, and right after an unscheduled storm in a dome on Ganymede. Not long after what looked like a meteor passed this-a-way. Hmmm. After much hesitation Gordon lets the stranger in, and—he’s just an old guy, although miraculously he looks just like a portrait hanging in the cottage, of some guy named Grandfather Walters. (I don’t know if he’s related to anyone.) Somehow he got in here. Is he an alien? That’s the first and most likely answer. But if so, what kind of alien? Is he benevolent? How come he looks perfectly human? A lot of aliens in SF (especially TV) look humanoid or just straight-up like people because of either budget constraints or because the writers weren’t being very creative. We do, however, get a pretty good reason for why the alien, who calls himself “John,” looks like a normal person, but I won’t say what it is for now.
See, all this is rather stagey. We have one location, a grand total of five characters (not even supporting characters, this is all we get), and it’s pretty chatty. There’s very little action, and that’s for later. John doesn’t come in looking to subdue the men with giant tentacles and capture the women for his own perverted ends, but rather comes here to talk; he’s a guest at the cottage and he’s staying for the night whether the other people like it or not. In a way he’s more threatening than the average alien because we honestly don’t know what his deal is, and yet his appearance is hard to explain regardless of the rationale. There’s the burning question of how the hell he got into the dome, and maybe just as importantly, where the hell he came from. It’s implied, of course, that he came by via the meteor, but that doesn’t explain much. Again, how did he get inside the dome?
He’s not here to conquer Earth, and he’s not here to cause too much trouble. He’s also upfront about not being human; the appearance is merely a stand-in for—something else. By all rights and indications he’s an alien, which is a problem for Gordon, because if John is an alien, then…
Another thing about John you may notice is that he speaks English perfectly fine. He also, oddly and humorously (in that satirical way, like I said), has a tendency to spew of-the-time jargon and slogans like a computer trying to imitate human speech. Like I said about aliens appearing humanoid, aliens understanding English like it’s a first language is often the result of writers not being very creative, but again (again, again…), there’s a reason why John is able to do this—although the explanation Oliver gives us would not be deemed so plausible nowadays. You see, there used to be a huge thing about ESP back in ’40s and ’50s SF, not least because of John W. Campbell’s obsession with ESP (many casualties because of authors shoehorning in ESP to appeal to Campbell), but also because it just seemed like a popular topic for writers. So John apparently (we’re “told” through a demonstration, in which Gordon suffers a bad trip) has psi powers.
Hey, remember “Who Goes There?,” the novella that inspired The Thing? (Speaking of Campbell.) Do you remember, in the original story, how the alien copied its victims and was even able to mimic their personalities? You probably forgot because the scene where we get that explanation is one where nothing exciting happens. Anyway, the alien is a telepath and it able to look into people’s minds—more specifically it was able to delve into their dreams. Very odd explanation, very on-brand for a Campbell explanation, and Oliver also makes John an alien that can read people’s minds. He’s able to copy people’s behavior and persumably was able to mimic the look of Grandfather Walters because he’s a telepath. Among other things. How much he’s capable of is never fully revealed.
Helen and their neighbors, who reacted like everything was normal when John came along, are sort of overwhelmed by the alien’s presence and the abnormality of the situation makes them catatonic; their conditioning, which evidently worked more on them than on Gordon, works too well. Gordon, being the only abnormal one of the bunch, is not driven over the edge by the rush of visions John gives him, but now he’s left as the only person who can talk with the alien. The second half of the story is largely concerned with the dialogue these two have, and it would all read as too stagey and chatty if not for Oliver’s way of writing conservation. That and, through mostly just dialogue, he’s able to turn the screw, as the saying goes, with a mounting sense of dread that reaches Lovecraftian levels.
There Be Spoilers Here
John comes from a race of aliens that mimics others, and fittingly does not have a home planet; just as fittingly, considering Oliver’s profession, they mimic other people’s cultures. You have an alien which is telepathic and which can absorb the language and even the lingo of other species, and can even take on their appearance. Unlike Campbell’s alien however, which has the straightforward mission of getting the hell off Earth (in Campbell’s story it builds an anti-gravity pack, in The Thing it’s building a spaceship), John’s goal is harder to discern. To Gordon it doesn’t matter too much, though, since if John is an alien (and he is), then, according to Gordon, man’s goal of colonizing the solar system has come to an abrupt end. For Gordon, and apparently for his superiors, the one thing worse than man being alone in the universe is man not being alone in the universe.
Because if mankind is not the only spacefaring race in the universe, then mankind is not at the top of the food chain. Worse yet, mankind is a minor race that, so far, has not been able to transfer any of its native cultures abroad. The dome on Ganymede is an experiment destined to fail because it’s a prototype for a colony that does not meet the minimum requirements for a culture to thrive. Oliver supposes that mankind, if it is to live in space, must either carry on a previous culture (difficult) or form a new culture practically from whole cloth (at least as difficult). The lack of a culture will (so he implies) drive men insane. The TV, the board games, the neighborly small talk the people in the dome engage with are cultural artifacts, but they’re not enough. The dome has more than one person in it, but it’s little more than a hint at a society. This is not enough.
In John’s words:
“In the long run, you see,” John continued, “it is the totality of little things that goes to make up a culture. A man such as yourself does not simply sit in a room; he sits in a room of a familiar type, with pictures on the walls and dust in the corners and lamps on the tables. A man does not just eat; he eats special kinds of food that he has been conditioned to want, served as he has been trained to want them to be served, in containers he is accustomed to, in a social setting that he is familiar with, that he fits into, that he belongs in. All intelligent life is like that, you see.”
Meanwhile John comes from a race whose special quality is the ability to assimilate other people’s cultures; fittingly they also don’t have a home planet of their own, but are perpetually spacefaring. They seem to go after any intelligent race they can find and take on their appearance and culture, for their own selfish ends. No doubt if ants were as intelligent as humans then members of John’s race would take on the likeness of ants. John is a bad actor, but his maliciousness comes down to the fact that he sees these people as little more than game—like hunting a not very impressive buck. Regardless, someone will probably be dead by the end of the night. The only hope Gordon has of retaining his dream of space travel for mankind is to get rid of John, and make sure nobody on Earth founds out. Yet how did David feel when he took on Goliath? How can Gordon deal with this thing he doesn’t (and can’t) entirely understand?
Thus Gordon is confronted with a member of a race that sees mankind as barely sentient—hardly worth thinking about. Mankind is to John’s race what pigs are to men. “Does the hungry man worry about whether or not pigs have dreams?” Yet there must be a way to defeat him, and indeed there is. While John is able to take on the likeness of a given thing, the likeness is merely a mirage; he looks like a man but he does not feel like one. Gordon gets an idea, and a very simple one at that: fight through John’s psi fuckery and touch him. Whatever it may be past that likeness. And much to Oliver’s credit he refrains from going into what John actually looks like. Whereas Lovecraft describes his horror in exhaustive detail, in an effort to give the reader some impression of the unnamable horror of the week, Oliver goes for a lack of detail. Gordon manages to grab hold of John, and well… the results aren’t pretty. For John, but also for Gordon.
The experience is incredibly traumatizing.
Gordon defeats the alien, but at the cost of his sanity. The experiment is a failure. Mankind’s future of colonizing the planets has died, or at the very least has been postponed. The others are given therapy while Gordon is put in what might be a mental hospital. The cruel irony is that when the Earth ship comes to pick them up months later they do not believe the story with the alien at all; they mistake Gordon’s fears for being spooked by the “meteor” passing over the dome. The log in the equipment room gives far from the full picture. “Odd that a meteor could unnerve a man so!” So the ending is mostly a downer, but then again, much better this than a disingenuous happy ending that doesn’t fit the story’s themes. I guarantee you Oliver would not have been able to stick with this ending had he submitted it to Campbell’s Astounding.
A Step Farther Out
This reminds me of another SF story that’s deeply ambivalent about space travel, and it’s one of the all-time greats at that: Edmond Hamilton’s “What’s It Like Out There?” Oliver’s story is about one step below Hamilton’s, which means it’s damn good instead of a masterpiece, but it’s an eerie and multifaceted tale that works remarkably well as both science fiction and Lovecraftian horror. While he would’ve only been about 25 when he wrote it, Oliver demonstrates a keen sense of cultural shifts, cultural priorities, and mankind’s relationship with a universe which is, in fact, much bigger than himself, never mind that he understands Lovecraftian horror more than most. Given our current values with regards to what constitutes “good” and “important” science fiction, it’s hard to understand why Oliver continues to be an obscure figure. Certainly his best work has aged better than that of certain SF authors from the period who are now more famous.
I’m thinking about the one scholarly article I could find on Oliver, and I don’t think I can link it since you have to log into JSTOR (don’t worry, it’s free) to read it, but you’ll find it right away if you Google Chad Oliver, and you’ll see this title, which justifiably praises Oliver from the outset: “Scientifically Valid and Artistically True.”
(Cover by Julie Dillon. Uncanny, January-February 2015.)
Who Goes There?
We don’t know a whole lot about Hao Jingfang, although she’s prominent enough to be one of those native Chinese authors to get circulation in the Anglosphere, and even a Hugo! She’s appeared in both Invisible Planets (which is where I had first read “Folding Beijing,” although I remembered basically nothing about it prior to this reread) and Broken Stars, both edited by Ken Liu, both containing stories from native Chinese authors in translation. Her background in economics certainly gives context to today’s story, which unusually for an SF story (even a “modern” one) gives a good deal of thought to not only the practical conditions of a future civilization but also the economic reality of it. The only other Jingfang story I’ve read is “Invisible Planets,” from the aforementioned anthology of the same name. (No, I don’t remember reading that one either.)
“Folding Beijing” is a sort of reprint but not really. It was first published in the February 2014 issue of the Chinese magazine ZUI Found, but did not appear in English (translated by Ken Liu) until the January-February 2015 issue of Uncanny Magazine, and it’s this English version that won Jingfang the Hugo for Best Novelette. At 16,254 words it’s almost long enough to count as a novella, although I can believe its novelette status; despite its wordage it has plot beats that could be adequately covered in a 10,000-word story. I’m not sure if Jingfang’s style is just verbose or if it looks that way as filtered through Liu’s own poetic-leaning style.
Placing Coordinates
You can read “Folding Beijing” free online here. I really should not have to elaborate on that, but then we do have several print options. It appeared in a couple annual best-of anthologies, including Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 and Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 1. Something I’ve noticed, looking through the last few entries in his own best-of series, is that Gardner Dozois was oddly deaf to stuff coming out of Uncanny Magazine, despite that publication quickly gaining traction for its quality. Speaking of which, if you’re in a collecting mood then there’s The Best of Uncanny: you could get a hardcover for a pretty penny or as an ebook if you wanna save money, but my opinion on this deeply political matter is, what’s the point of getting an ebook copy of something that’s clearly meant to be a collector’s item? Finally, as said before, you can find it in Invisible Planets.
Not hard to find at all. What’s your excuse?
Enhancing Image
The stereotype of Asian parents being obsessed with schooling immediately rears its head, and not only that but it drives the plot. Some things just can’t be escaped. Lao Dao is a waste disposal worker in a future Beijing that looks a little… different from how it is nowadays. Just how different we’ll see later. The crux of the issue is that Lao Dao, a single parent with a shitty job, wants to send his adopted daughter Tangtang to kindergarten, which sounds easy enough to basically all of us, except that apparently in the Beijing of the story kindergarten may as well be college. Right off the bat I find this hard to believe, at least as a pale white kid from New Jersey who spent his time at kindergarten literally taking naps. There is sort of a justification for why schooling works the way it does in-story, but we’re not given that until much later and even then it’s a bit of a tough pill. The words “kindergarten” and “tuition” really should not be next to each other.
Lao Dao makes just enough to pay rent, so how he’s going to get his daughter (who, mind you, is an off-screen plot device and not a real character) may require some extra income if you know what I mean. I’m of two minds about the exposition here, because clearly Jingfang thought out the implications of her partly invented society and did what most any good science-fictionist ought to do: take things to their logical conclusion, even if it sounds extreme. The problem is that, like I said earlier, this story could’ve feasibly been a few thousand words shorter, mainly through streamlining the walls of text Jingfang throws at us. Take, for instance, this early bit where we find out just how dire the kindergarten situation is:
Lao Dao’s research on kindergarten tuition had shocked him. For schools with decent reputations, the parents had to show up with their bedrolls and line up a couple of days before registration. The two parents had to take turns so that while one held their place in the line, the other could go to the bathroom or grab a bite to eat. Even after lining up for forty–plus hours, a place wasn’t guaranteed. Those with enough money had already bought up most of the openings for their offspring, so the poorer parents had to endure the line, hoping to grab one of the few remaining spots. Mind you, this was just for decent schools. The really good schools? Forget about lining up—every opportunity was sold off to those with money. Lao Dao didn’t harbor unrealistic hopes, but Tangtang had loved music since she was an eighteen–month–old. Every time she heard music in the streets, her face lit up and she twisted her little body and waved her arms about in a dance. She looked especially cute during those moments. Lao Dao was dazzled as though surrounded by stage lights. No matter how much it cost, he vowed to send Tangtang to a kindergarten that offered music and dance lessons.
The good exposition is giving us an impression as to the class divide in this city, which as we’ll find out is even more of a gulf than we’re initially led to believe; the bad exposition is at the end, those last few sentences about the daughter which we really don’t need to know about. All that matters is that Lao Dao has someone in his life whom he loves and who he has to care for. That Lao Dao might do something illegal so as to provide for someone he cares about is understandable on its own; we don’t need bits of flavor for a character we won’t be getting attached to anyway.
Moving on, Lao Dao meets up with a knowledgable older neighbor who, reluctantly, gives him advice on how to traverse the city for a risky but lucrative gig. See, Lao Dao is in Third Space, the lowest echelon of Beijing and the rank that has quite literally the least time and space to work with. You see, Beijing is not a place that you can just make a round trip for; it’s always locked away in parts depending on which echelon of the city is allowed to use what. I’ll explain how this works in a second, but for now it’s important to know that Lao Dao has a difficult task as messenger, taking a message he had originally gotten from Second Space and taking it to First Space. Getting caught meant imprisonment, but success meant putting his daughter in school. “And the cash, the cash was very real.” Lao Dao had snuck into Second Space just to get the message, so First Space, while it would be more difficult, would be surely possible.
Now is the time for me to explain how this works. Correct if I’m wrong, because the phrasing for this little bit of exposition is confusing (I blame Ken, sorry), but Beijing operates on a 48-hour cycle. First Space gets 24 hours to do whatever it wants, then gets put into drug-induced sleep for the next 24. Second Space gets to be awake from 6am on that second day, when First Space is asleep, to 10pm. Then Third Space comes up at 10pm that second day and goes to sleep at 6am the following day, and then the cycle begins anew. 24 hours, then 16, then a measely eight for Third Space. “Five million enjoyed the use of twenty-four hours, and seventy-five million enjoyed the next twenty-four hours.” Sounds simple enough to get around; Lao Dao just has to break curfew. Well, there is one more complication, and it’s what gives the story its title.
What happens to Beijing every Change (mind the capital C) is hard to describe with words, which doesn’t stop Jingfang/Liu from trying. Imagine if a city was a piece of origami. The city is always compartmentalized; it’s impossible to see or even comprehend the city with all its parts unfolded. It’s an impressive if also nightmare work of architecture wherein the three echelons are segrigated by time and space, with First Space being allowed the most access. Not only does Lao Dao have to sneak past surveillance (which, come to think of it, would be nigh superhuman on its own) but he also has to navigate a city that has literally changed its shape around him. The scene where Beijing changes for the first time is a money shot and the most evocative part of the story; it kinda just peaks right there, which is weird because we’re only about a third into it.
Getting to Second Space would be easy enough, as was getting the message. Quin Tian is willing to pay a huge sum for a message to be sent to Yi Yan, a woman in First Space he is deeply fond of, and twice as much money if Lao Dao can get a message from Yi Yan back to him. Basically, Lao Dao has to go from Third Space, wait a whole 24 hours for First Space to go through its cycle, then meet at Second Space, then wait through Third Space’s cycle before getting to First Space. (Who’s on First Space? Sorry.) If this sounds a little convoluted, don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.
There’s a weirdly specific genre of storytelling that may as well have (although it probably didn’t) originated in Italian Neo-Realist films. To indulge my film buff side and drop some of my baggage on you, “Folding Beijing” reminds me more than a little of Bicycle Thieves, which has a very similar premise and sequence of events: a put-upon father has to help his child but is forced to venture outside the law when his livelihood is threatened, with tragic results. See also the much more recent Wendy and Lucy, in which a woman (implied to be homeless) has to choose between taking care of her beloved dog on a shoestring budget and putting her in more capable (i.e., slightly less impoverish) hands. In all three stories money is the driving force of the conflict; without it there would be no plot. “The soul of man under capitalism” is fitting for all three.
Needless to say that the Beijing of the story is not the socialist paradise that certain people desperately want China in the real world to be, and which China in the real world is seemingly averse to bringing about.
There Be Spoilers Here
I’m not terribly interested in recounting events in the latter of the story, so I’ll use much of this space to go on a related tangent. “Folding Beijing” is no doubt a dystopian narrative, which makes it just one more entry in a very long (and honestly tired) line of dystopian science fiction. Dystopian SF is, to my mind, the most overexposed and overrated subgenre of SF; it really can be quite tiresome with how much it’s read in schools and how much water it holds in the popular consciousness. 1984 is a more respected (and itself overrated) work of literature than the genre it belongs to. If SF wants to be taken seriously by naysayers and academics it’s all but required to come packaged in a box which reads “DYSTOPIA” instead of “AMAZON.” The Last of Us (both the video game and the TV show) is taken seriously seemingly on the basis that it’s dystopian SF, therefore it’s serious SF. The world presented is dogshit (i.e., worse than ours), therefore we respect it.
Anyway…
Something I’ve realized is that it’s impossible to write dystopian fiction without also writing self-criticism. There’s no such thing as writing a dystopian SF where the society presented has absolutely nothing to do with the society the authors lives in, where the society presented can’t possibly be an “if this goes on” scenario. George Orwell wrote 1984 in reaction to Stalinisn, yes, but he also wrote it because he feared the UK devolving into (more) authoritarian capitalism and becoming akin to that other country he loathed very much. Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in reaction to the creeping ubiquity of technology in people’s lives which (he thought) would choke off intellectualism and freedom of expression. (The prominence of television, then-newfangled tech, in the novel and how it relates to characters losing their capacity to think actively, should tell you where Bradbury is coming from.) Similarly to Fahrenheit 451, “Folding Beijing” is basically an anti-technology narrative.
Now, when we call someone a luddite, we use as shorthand for the “old man shakes fist at cloud” meme, but when I call Jingfang a luddite, I’m using it in the proper sense. There are two sides to the robot debate with regards to human employment: the first side says that automation will free people to do as they please and indulge in creative endeavors they otherwise might not have been able to; the second side raises the question of, “What would happen if you had millions of people only really fit for unskilled labor who one day found that unskilled labor taken over by automation?” Jingfang very much falls on the latter side. Beijing is a city of about 80 million people where a sizable portion of those people don’t have work to do and there’s very little room for upward mobility. A good fraction of the population works in waste disposal because that’s basically the only job they can do; meanwhile a small fraction reaps the benefits.
And even the human-driven waste disposal is in jeopardy of being replaced.
Rather than free people to live the lives they want, automation has helped create an incredibly rigid class system in which the rich use the city as a playground and dump their waste on those who (quite literally) live on the other side. And yet, while Lao Dao’s experience in First Space is traumatizing, there is a ray-of-hope ending, with him not getting thrown in jail and even bringing home some money for his daughter—albeit not the amount he had originally sought. Personally I found the ending unsatisfying, if only because by the time we get to it Jingfang has thrown so much exposition at us that the plot starts feeling like a sideshow. She does a lot telling rather than showing, whether it be someone projectile vomiting exposition at Lao Dao or the reader being subjected to chunky paragraphs of characters telling their life stories—characters who, mind you, appear once and never again. This is a short story and not a novella, sure, but it’s bloated.
A Step Farther Out
“Folding Beijing” winning the Hugo when it did must not have seemed like coincidence, given that Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem in its English translation also won the Hugo the previous year. If SF in the 2010s was defined by anything (aside from, ya know, the Sad Puppies and that whole debacle) it’s the rise of Chinese SF in the Anglosphere. I reckon “Folding Beijing” appealed to voters because it has a robust human interest plot that’s buoyed by an admittedly pretty neat idea, but the important thing is that said pretty neat idea is not just there to look cool in the reader’s mind: it illustrates the story’s central conceit effectively. That it’s also outwardly ambivalent about China’s future (i.e., that China will only become more of a hyper-capitalist shithole under the current regime) probably didn’t hurt. As for myself, I’ve seen this sort of thing done many times before, and more concisely, even if I agree with Jingfang’s conceit.
(Cover by Andreas Rocha. Clarkesworld, September 2009.)
Who Goes There?
Assuming you’re “in the know,” you already know about N. K. Jemisin, by reputation if not by having read several of her many novels. With that said, a bit of an introduction is in order, for me if no one else. Jemisin is so far the only author to have won the Hugo for Best Novel three years in a row, along with the only author to win the Hugo for Best Novel for all three entries in a trilogy. (Vernor Vinge won with three consecutive novels, but said novels were all published several years apart.) The Broken Earth trilogy, a fantasy series with a dying Earth setting, did all this, along with the third entry, The Stone Sky, winning a Nebula. While her career is still very much in progress, Jemisin stands as one of the most acclaimed SFF authors of the past decade, and has achieved that certain status that the vast majority of authors crave: to be a critical darling and a regular bestseller. “Non-Zero Probabilities,” an early short story from Jemisin, was also a Hugo and Nebula finalist.
I’m ashamed to say that prior to doing this review I’ve not read a single word of Jemisin’s fiction. Sure, I’ve checked out her blog, and I follow her on a certain social media platform that has a bird for a logo, but the thing with Jemisin (this is not a criticism, please don’t kill me) is that she sure loves her series. On top of the aforementioned Broken Earth trilogy we also have the Inheritance trilogy, which I actually saw an omnibus edition of at a Barnes & Noble the other day; the thing was fucking HUGE. Most recently we have The World We Make, which came out last year from Orbit, as the sequel to The City We Became. Jemisin has yet to write a novel that’s not part of a series or franchise, so either I wait for her to write a standalone novel or I get over my fear of commitment and give one of these a shot.
Placing Coordinates
“Non-Zero Probabilities” was first published in the September 2009 issue of Clarkesworld, and you can read it for free online here. Check out also the magazine’s podcast reading of the story here. Despite the Hugo and Nebula nominations (along with being a damn fine story), “Non-Zero Probabilities” has not been reprinted much, although you can easily find a print version of it in the Jemisin collection How Long ’til Black Future Month? Jemisin has not written a great deal of short fiction over the years, with How Long ’til Black Future Month? collecting the vast majority of it, and she has not published a short story since 2019. The good news is that several of those stories have appeared in various online magazines, which means we’ll be seeing her on this site again… eventually…
Enhancing Image
Adele (no, not that one) is your standard quirky biracial (half black, half Irish) woman, although her situation as of late has not been standard. New York has been caught in a sort of bubble where statistically unlikely things have been happening with frightening regularity—for both good and ill. One of the first things we see is a shuttle train being derailed and killing bare minimum a couple dozen people—a horrifying accident that normally would be unthinkable but which recently has been inexplicably allowed into existence. “The probability of a train derailment was infinitesimal. That meant it was only a matter of time.” Incredibly unlikely yes, but not impossible. This is by no means an isolated incident; miraculous things have been happening constantly, but only in this finite space.
“It’s only New York, that’s the really crazy thing. Yonkers? Fine. Jersey? Ditto. Long Island? Well, that’s still Long Island. But past East New York everything is fine.”
At least my home state has not been affected!
New York has been transformed, sort of cut off from the rest of the world, in a way that’s not seen so much as experienced. I’m reminded very much of Bellona, that isolated wasteland (or wonderland, depending on how you look at it) of Samuel R. Delany’s mammoth novel Dhalgren. If you’re even remotely familiar with that novel and are worried that “Non-Zero Probabilities” might approach that level of opaqueness, fear not, this is basically a comedy. A rather dark comedy, but a comedy nonetheless. The fact that it’s set in New York, one of the world’s biggest punching bags, and not say, fucking Cleveland, makes the hijinks hit much harder. Granted, there’s a bit of an out-of-pocket comment made about Bangkok being “pedophile heaven,” which is a little… culturally insensitive perhaps; there’s also a joke about Chinese knockoffs, which might’ve been a fresh joke then but just feels tired now. But the insensitivity is all in good fun, and boy does this story have fun with the sheer lunacy of its premise.
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to call “Non-Zero Probabilities” fantasy or SF, given that the scientific “explanation” is only mentioned in passing and is not even confirmed to be the cause of the bubble. People who normally would not be superstitious have started taking good luck charms seriously, and conversely doing away with things meant to represent bad luck. It’s a bad time and place to be a black cat. Hundreds of thousands of people are set to gather together in Yankee Stadium and I guess push the bad vibes out of the city—although that would necessitate pushing out the good vibes as well. Sure, you could get absolutely fucked over in a convoluted series of accidents, but you could also win the lottery twice in a week. By the way, if you’re wondering if the mass prayer at Yankee Stadium will serve as the climax, just don’t think about that.
At 3,350 words this is probably the shortest story I’ve covered for the site, and it’s also a contender for the most plotless. Adele goes about her day, she meets up with a couple people she knows and they talk about the bubble that’s overtaken New York, and Adele herself does not get into any life-threatening situations. The stakes, at least from a certain angle, are low. We don’t get a plot so much as a series of happenings, which are both entertaining and logical extensions of a setting wherein the unlikely has become likely and there is no such thing as impossibility.
Question: Who would want to live in New York?
I’m not talking about the New York of the story, I’m just asking generally.
Anyway, this thing is highly readable and very short; it’s just long enough that you get a taste of what Jemisin’s doing but short enough that it doesn’t tire itself out as a comedy. It’s an episodic narrative where we get these short scenes that illustrate Adele’s character, the ways in which the city has changed, or both, often to comedic effect. The conflict does not involve Adele directly so much as a general question of science vs. superstition; on a micro level it has to do with Adele’s nominal Catholicism (ya know, the Irish in her) being challenged on two fronts, by a scientific anomaly on one and a supernatural force which may not be the Abrahamic God on the other; on a macro level it’s a question of whether “objective” reality is merely determined by numbers or if there’s an invisible hand orchestrating events.
It’s a bit of a thinker, but first and foremost it’s a slice-of-life comedy that’s constructed efficiently and written with remarkable confidence.
There Be Spoilers Here
This is a hard one to spoil, first because, like I said, it’s basically a slice-of-life narrative, but also because it doesn’t really have an “ending.” Now, not every story has to go out with a bang; it’s possible, occasionally even preferable, to leave things open, and “Non-Zero Probabilities” is one of those stories where I actually don’t mind the lack of closure. The question of whether the statistical anomalies are driven by science or superstition goes unanswered, but to answer that question, or rather to give us the answer, would probably be unsatisfying. Jemisin makes the wise choice of plopping us straight into this augmented New York for a few thousand words and then taking us out of it just as quickly, with a helpful dose of humor but also an air of mystery about what the city might become. Much like Dhalgren, like the Bellona of that novel, the mystery behind the anomaly is much more interesting than the possibility of finding a solution.
A Step Farther Out
A pretty good introduction to Jemisin’s fiction, although something tells me this is lightweight by Jemisin standards, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes you want your short story of the day to be like comfort food. I also have to admit that as a fan of comedic fantasies in the Unknown tradition I’m predisposed to find the hijinks of “Non-Zero Probabilities” at least a little involving. Not all of the jokes work, but most of them do in my opinion, which is more than can be said of most comedic SFF. A lot of the humor of course has to do with Jemisin’s snappy narrator’s voice and the fact that she doesn’t waste time on flowery descriptions when she knows that’s not the kind of writing we’re here for. I can see why it’d be deemed a bit too minor to be included in best-of-the-year anthologies, but given its modest goals which it achieves with easy success, I liked it quite a bit.
(Childhood’s End. Cover by Richard Powers. Ballantine Books, 1953.)
Are we halfway through the first month of the year already? Aw geez, that means I gotta write something. I always have a few editorial ideas swimming around, but the question is always: When should I write these? A topic can be timeless, or it could benefit from being discussed at just the right moment. The right person in the right place can make all the difference, and the same goes for articles, even ones I’m not getting paid for. It’s January 15, 2023, which means two things: it’s a Sunday, and it’s also Robert Silverberg’s 88th birthday. Hopefully we can get a dozen more out of him.
I don’t consider myself a big Silverberg fan, at least not yet, but I do see his place as a constant in SF history as indispensable. I can’t think of anyone alive now aside from maybe Samuel R. Delany whom I would like to sit down with and interview for an hour more than Silverberg, for the simple reason that Silverberg has a nigh-endless supply of stories to tell—not stories as in fiction, mind you, but life stories, stories within SF fandom, stories about all the times he got rejected by editors and, naturally, the subsequent acceptances. This is a man who traded words with John W. Campbell, Anthony Boucher, H. L. Gold, Frederik Pohl, Ben Bova, etc., and lived to tell the tale. This man has attended every Hugo ceremony since its inception in 1953, since he was just old enough to be able to attend the Hugos, and that alone would make his memory a precious thing to back up on some hypothetical external hard drive for people’s memories, which are essentially their beings anyway.
And speaking of 1953…
I have a lot of anthologies on my shelves. I’m young and amateur, but still I think I have a good number. One of those is Silverberg’s Science Fiction: 101, which is a curious mixture of fiction anthology, writing advice, and memoir. I don’t think it’s in print anymore, sadly, but I do recommend finding a copy, as, regardless of how one may feel about Silverberg as a person, the fiction selected is of quite a high standard—some certified classics with a few deeper cuts thrown into the equation. Something I couldn’t help but notice, though, even if Silverberg didn’t bring it up himself, is that focus on ’50s SF in the anthology, and more specifically on a certain year. Of the thirteen stories included, five are from 1953, which one might think to be a little much, especially given that there are only two stories from the ’40s (C. L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” and Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain”). Yet 1953 is undoubtedly framed as a Big Year™ for Silverberg, which makes sense; he was just then starting to write SF in earnest, having lurked around long enough as a fan and now readying to make his mark on the field.
Science Fiction: 101 shows off short SF that meant a lot to Silverberg personally, mostly stuff published during a period in his life when he was making the jump from fan to professional. The slant towards 1953, however, only hints at just how prolific and remarkably high in quality that year was for a lot of people active in the field then. On multiple fronts, the field was rolling ahead at full speed, with the growing accessibility of paperbacks meeting halfway with a magazine market which was at the very height of a bubble—a bubble that, mind you, was about to burst, but in the moment it was at a point of critical mass, which meant a diverse market for writers who otherwise might struggle to get published in Astounding or Galaxy. In the US along there were well over a dozen SF magazines active in ’53, including Amazing Stories, Fantastic, Future Science Fiction, Science Fiction Quarterly, Worlds of If, Universe Science Fiction, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Stories, Space Science Fiction, and frankly almost too many more to count. We would not see this saturated an SF magazine market again until, well, now, but I’ll come back to that at the end.
There was something for everyone. If you wanted “literary” thinking man’s SF then Galaxy and F&SF scratched that itch tremendously; if you’re stubborn and like to read macho SF about psi powers then Astounding has your back; if you’re into planetary romance and generally adventure SF then there are a few options; if you like certain authors but wish you could buy even more of what they’re selling, then good news, those authors have probably sold to more magazines than you existed. And of course, if you’re one of those few sad fantasy readers in that weird point in time that’s post-Chronicles of Narnia but pre-Lord of the Rings then you’ll be pleased to know there’s a new fantasy magazine on the market: Beyond Fantasy Fiction, helmed by Galaxy‘s own H. L. Gold. And if that’s not enough, especially if you’re an avid book reader, the paperback market for SF is opening up big time, and that door will only open wider.
1953 was a great year to be Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, and quite a few others. Dick and Sheckley had debuted the previous year, but 1953 saw these one-man writing factories pull out all the stops; you could probably make a top 10 list of your favorite Robert Sheckley stories from 1953 alone. It was also the year that Arthur C. Clarke, who had appeared from time to time in the American market previously, made his first big splash with American readers here, not just with the publication of Childhood’s End but also a slew of short stories that are still highly regarded, the most famous being “The Nine Billion Names of God.” Poul Anderson, who had been active for some years but had not made much impact, invoked F&SF‘s first serial with Three Hearts and Three Lions, forcing editors Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas to backpedal on their “no serials” policy.
When it came time for Hugo voters back in 2004 to partake in the Retro Hugos, all the aforementioned authors got at least one nomination, not to mention others getting in as well. I understand that the Retro Hugos are a controversial topic (Worldcon doesn’t even do them anymore, at least for now), but I find the idea admirable, and at the very least we get some deep cuts that deserve to be rediscovered on top of the usual suspects. The “1954” Retro Hugos, covering the best stuff to come out of 1953, might have, across all its fiction categories, the strongest of any Retro Hugo lineup. You’re probably thinking, “Voters are biased, they always pick either already-famous works or minor works by famous authors,” and that is basically true. For one I’m pretty sure the people who gave Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man” the Retro Hugo for Best Short Story were thinking about the justly famous Twilight Zone adaptation and had not actually read Knight’s story; if they did they would deem it as minor. I’m also pretty sure Ray Bradbury was not the best fan writer of 1938, just call it a hunch.
(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. F&SF, October 1953.)
What makes the 1954 Retro Hugos different, however, is that the shortlists (never mind the winners) for fiction, regardless of category, are all but unimpeachable. Let’s take Best Novel as an example, because this really is a golden set of nominees. We have Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, and the winner with Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. While not my personal favorite, Fahrenheit 451 is one of the most famous novels in all of SF; people continue to read it, it’s still being discussed quite actively, and it’s even taught in schools; it’s a stone-cold classic of the field and its win is deserved. With that said, you could literally pick any of these other novels and you wouldn’t really be wrong to do so. The Caves of Steel is arguably Asimov’s single best novel; Childhood’s End is a career highlight for Clarke, not to mention one of his most influential; More Than Human sees Sturgeon in rare good form as a novelist; and even the most obscure of the bunch, Mission of Gravity (Clement is one of those authors begging to be rediscovered), is a foundational example of hard SF.
All killer, no filler. You can’t say that with the Best Novel shortlist for any other Retro Hugo year, either because of nominees that are justly forgotten or because of nominees that don’t hold up to modern scrutiny. Yet the near-uniform excellence of the nominees here, as the best of 1953, tells me that it was a very good year indeed. A lot of people were active in the field at the time, but just as importantly, a lot of those people were producing damn good work that still holds up. There was filler, and there was retrograde SF that would’ve been considered old-timey in fashion even in 1953, but there was also so much treasure from so many different voices that the sheer level of quantity and quality is hard to ignore. It was even a good time to be a lady author, what with women like C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Margaret St. Clair, Andre Norton, Judith Merril, and others who have been sadly forgotten producing good work; we would not see this many women contributing to SF again until at least the ’70s.
Now, I admit, I have a ’50s bias. When I started reading short SF in earnest some years ago I mostly stuck to the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, with that middle decade especially getting attention. I have a real soft spot for SF from the ’50s, but not because it’s idyllic or puritanical or old-fashioned—it’s because the SF of that period is often not any of those things. The first serial I reviewed for my site was Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, a sleazy novel about cold-blooded murder, prostitution, incest, and generally the dark side of a world where telepaths are the top 1%. A little more intense than what you’d expect for a novel published in 1952, and yet when the inaugural Hugos were held the following year Bester’s novel was honored with the first Hugo for Best Novel. Clearly writers and readers alike (at least enough of them) were daring enough in 1953 to think that a novel about the aforementioned cold-blooded murder, prostitution, incest, etc., was not only welcomed in SF spaces but could be considered a great work of literature. People seventy years ago were not as naïve as we like to pretend.
But that was, after all, seventy years ago, and of course 1953 is not the best year in SF history; there really cannot be a “best year” for a genre lauded for its capacity to change and adapt over time. The best year for SF hopefully has not happened yet. Yet certainly 1953 is emblematic of a specific point in time for the genre’s history, a time when the magazine market was booming, book publishing was on the rise, and we even get a few major “sci-fi” films that would help determine the genre’s cinematic power for the coming decade; more specifically I’m thinking of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The War of the Worlds, by no means perfect movies but ones which set a standard for the genre on the silver screen. The variety of voices writing SF in 1953 would also not be outdone for many years, and if we’re talking about short SF alone, we would not see such diversity again until the current era, what with several online magazines publishing works by people who would not have been heard even in that wonderland of ’53, whether because of their race, sexual orientation, or political leanings.
The future should always look better, and if it doesn’t then we should try to make sure that it does. There’ve been think pieces and discussions recently about the need for utopian SF, and why not? SF writers aren’t supposed to predict the future, but it’s possible to offer a blueprint for how people might be able to make a world wherein future generations will want to live. First, however, you need SF that’s thriving with quality works by quality people, and you can’t have that if the market has narrowed, where only so many outlets can only take so many voices. I shudder to think of a time when short SF has been basically locked out of discussion by virtue of so few short stories being published, which is why it’s such a good thing that the market is doing very well right now, and why such a level of diversity that we now see is to be treasured. If 1953 for SF represents anything it’s the same thing that 2023 for SF ought to represent: the promise of a good future.
Nowadays we’re used to genre authors hopping across the border, so to speak, or even just mixing several genres together in a stew; you have “SF” authors writing fantasy with ease and vice versa. But 70 years ago there was not much cross-pollination, mostly due to there not being much of a market for fantasy then. Fritz Leiber started as one of the best fantasists of his generation, contributing regularly to Weird Tales and Unknown in the late ’30s and ’40s, but the SF magazine market started bubbling and by 1950 it became prudent to turn to writing SF. Some authors did not make the transition, but Leiber was one of those who became a good science-fictionist due to market forces; he had written some SF prior to 1950, but his material from this second phase of his career was decidedly stronger than what came before. It seemed only natural that he would be made Guest of Honor at the 1951 Worldcon, given his almost rebirth as one of the best SF short story writers of the period, and this rebirth was in no small part due to the premiere of what was, at least for a time, the best SF magazine on the market.
Galaxy Science Fiction, for at least most of the ’50s, was the gold standard for magazine SF—not just short SF, but even novels which ran as serials. While not always appealing to the hard SF crowd which continued to devour Astounding and while not as strictly “literary” as F&SF, Galaxy presented a new breed of SF which was socially conscious, which commented on what were then current conditions for real people, and which was more willing to discuss topics like gender roles, the growing suburban populace, and a wave of new technology which overwhelmed people’s minds in the years following World War II. Leiber, who was always a little more cosmopolitan than his fellows, spent 1950 to 1953 delivering a string of classic short stories in the pages of Galaxy, of which “The Moon Is Green” is one.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the April 1952 issue of Galaxy, which is on the Archive. Oddly it has not been reprinted that often, but there are options. There’s The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1953, edited by Everett F. Bleller and T. E. Dikty, which has a couple alternate titles, such as The Best Science Fiction Stories: Fourth Series. We also have The Great SF Stories #14, covering fiction published in 1952, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. If you’re looking for more of a collector’s item then there’s The Leiber chronicles: Fifty Years of Fritz Leiber from Dark Harvest, although I’m not sure how pricey it would be to get online.
Most curiously this is the first story I’ve covered for my blog which got adapted for the legendary radio program X Minus One, which in the ’50s was probably the best introduction to short SF of the period. That episode is available on both the Archive and YouTube, although I recommend only listening to it after reading the story, since… well, it doesn’t entirely do justice to Leiber’s writing. It’s a bit less poetic and a bit more overblown is what I’m saying, along with the performances being uneven.
Enhancing Image
Effie and her husband Hank live in an apartment, which is normal; what’s not so normal is that this apartment is one of the few constructed on the surface. Most of what is left of humanity lives underground, but Effie and Hank live a privileged existence by virtue of Hank’s connections with the Central Committee—what is left of the government—while Effie is supposed to be fertile, although she and Hank have been unable to have a child all these years. The obvious implication is that Hank is impotent, but it must also be said that the world had gone to SHIT a good deal prior to the story’s beginning. The years following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saw a nigh-endless wave of SF about the dangers of nuclear weapons, and “The Moon Is Green” is not even Leiber’s first go at the subject.
What makes “The Moon Is Green” different from a lot of other nuclear catastrophe stories of the period, especially ones prior to the coming of Galaxy, is that it’s more a domestic drama than an outright nuclear catastrophe story. Another thing that was unusual (for the time, anyway) is that we get a heroine in Effie, and unlike most female characters from this period in SF she’s not fickle or overly reliant on the men in her life, but someone with thoughts and dreams of her own. I know, totally radical. Mind you that by 1952 we had started to see an influx of women in the field, and for the first time it could be said that SF had a place for women among its many voices—though the ratio of men to women was still very much lopsided. Still, authors like Leiber dabbling earnestly in writing female protagonists was a sign of some profound changes.
Anyway, despite the fact that objectively life is pretty good for her (or at least it could be a whole lot worse), Effie is not satisfied with her life as essentially a first-generation Morlock. “A mole’s existence, without beauty or tenderness, but with fear and guilt as constant companions. Never to see the Sun, to walk among the trees—or even know if there were still trees.” She pines for pastoralism, for the simple pleasures of taking a stroll through the forest and gazing up at a full brightly lit moon during a clear night. Both Effie and the narration specifically describe her hunger as a hunger for beauty, which takes on almost a religious zeal; that she hopes to transcend her semi-buried existence will lead to tragedy. The problem is that she can’t go outside because the outside world is shrouded in radioactive dust, which will kill most things and what it doesn’t kill it would presumably make stranger.
So what to do? She’s unhappy but she can’t go anywhere, and at this point she doesn’t even like staying with her husband, whom she clearly sees as having become overly controlling and bureaucratic. Hank is not exactly a villain, but he’s pretty far from what we would call a model husband; he almost cares more about his relationship with the Central Committee than with his wife, and while his fears about death by radiation are not unjustified (what stops him from being a villain), he has become one of those no-fun-allowed people who has to do everything by the book. What separates the two, and what allows the real drama of the story to happen, is that Hank demands that Effie go with him to a Committe meeting, where he hopes to get his foot in the door as a small-time bureaucrat, but Effie refuses on the grounds that she has Covid she’s too sick to go. Relauctantly Hank leaves her behind, on the condition that she not do any funny business like touching the lead shutters of their apartment, which can carry radiation.
I wonder how long she’ll behave herself?
A more important question that will become more pronounced when we get to spoilers is: What is more important to life, its longevity or its quality? Because the two are not always the same. The main conceit of Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To…, maybe the thorniest of all ’70s SF novels, is that life can only mean so much when there’s minimal pleasure to be taken from it. What’s the point of continuing to live after the bombs have gone off if you’re to become a burrower for the rest of your years? If the best you can hope for is that your children’s children will be able to enjoy what you could not (assuming there’s anything left) once there’s been enough radiation decay. You might have a long-term plan, but what do you do in the short term? Even the act of love-making might lose its luster.
In post-nuclear stories there’s a variety of possible obstacles for the characters, and you’d know this regardless of whether you’re a connoisseur of the subgenre or if you just play a lot of Fallout. In A Canticle for Leibowitz the biggest threat is the death of human knowledge; in The Road the biggest threat is the total loss of human empathy, never mind that the race is ultimately fucked in that novel and there’s no going back; in “The Moon Is Green” the biggest threat is the fact that regardless of who’s left, life underground or just barely above ground is quite shitty. There’s government, there’s a semblance of order, and some human culture remains, but at least in Effie’s mind there is no beauty left—only the machinery of human endeavor. Which is what makes what happens next tragic and yet vaguely hopeful.
There Be Spoilers Here
While Hank is out, Effie gets a visitor—from outside. How? Surely everyone who didn’t go underground died or turned rabid; but Patrick is not like most people. (He also sounds like a damn leprechaun in the X Minus One adaptation for some reason.) Somehow he and his cat have been able to survive in the outdoors this whole time, with Patrick himself seemingly bereft of mutations. Tempted by the prospect of life outside of her burrow, and the fact that Patrick is a charming enough fellow, Effie not only touches the shutters but opens her apartment window to meet Patrick face to face, exposing herself to the radioactive dust of the outside world. Why would she do this? Consider that it seems to be standard practice for the underground people to have Geiger Counters on them, to test for radiation easily, so paranoid are they about what’s left of civilization succumbing to its own failings. Yet Patrick claims that actually the radiation has decayed much faster than expected, and that actually it’s all fucking sunshine and rainbows outside civilization’s metal coffin.
Now, a few question. Why do these buildings on the surface have windows? Why are they comprised of materials which could transmit radiation? How come Effie and Hank didn’t divorce after failing to produce a child after several years? The last question is sort of answered by Hank eventually coming back and accusing of Effie having an affair with a colleague of his (Effie claims at one point to be pregnant, but from how I read it I took her as lying about it). I’m also not sure what Patrick would’ve lived off of all this time, given how much animal and even plant life would’ve died off in the interim, although given what he reveals later some radioactive sunflower seeds would probably not hurt him. Doesn’t quite explain the cat, but in typical ’50s post-nuclear fashion we just take mutated animals for granted. You’d think with how well-documented the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were that there would be more stories from this period about the actual effects of radiation on organic matter.
When Hank returned unexpectedly, however, the truth about Patrick comes out via a waving of the Geiger Counter. Contrary to what Patrick had said, the outside world was still smothered in radioactive dust that would be fatal to most living things, and in fact Patrick HIMSELF makes the Geiger Counter go off the damn charts. Appartently Patrick puts on an act in order to get some action with women who have locked themselves off from the outside, which is… actually even more horrifying than it sounds at first. Like how many times has he done this? How many people have died because of his need for companionship? Not that he makes a secret of being a harbinger of death once he’s outed, being “Rappacini’s [sic] child, brought up to date,” in reference to the famous Nathaniel Hawthorne short story. Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is one of the great 19th century SF stories (worthy of a future blog entry, I’d say), about a mad scientist’s daughter who, in being experimented on and living alongside poisonous plants, has become immune to the poison at the cost of now being poisonous herself.
The twist here is that while Patrick thinks himself a modern incarnation of that tragic woman, it is really Effie who takes after Rappaccini’s daughter, being the victim of her own circumstances, torn and ultinately brought down by the two most important men in her life. Leiber takes what was already potentially a feminist narrative (Hawthorne’s sympathies for the women of his time being prescient, all things considered) and alters the perspective to make that feminist angle more explicit. Leiber would explore the “woman’s angle” in later works such as The Big Time, albeit much quirkier in that case, but “The Moon Is Green” is a quite serious and quite effective early attempt at writing a woman’s perspective in a science-fictional context.
Having lost hope in the man who’s been with her and having been betrayed by the man who had teased her with a new way of living, Effie runs off on her own into the wasteland, for good or ill. In a lot of love triangles you would get rid of the hypotenuse by way of, say, death, or having the third wheel find someone else, but what makes “The Moon Is Green” subversive for its time is that Effie turns her back on both of the men in her life. Patrick leaves, knowing he won’t be able to bring Effie back, while Hank locks himself up again and tests himself with his Geiger Counter, his own immediate future hanging in the balance. Whether Effie dies or adapts to the wasteland is unknown, but even if she doesn’t adapt to the radiation she might think it best to die on her feet and with her lungs taking in the unclean air. All for just a slice of beauty, and a taste of freedom.
A Step Farther Out
Leiber’s short fiction from this period tends to be pretty damn solid, and “The Moon Is Green” is no exception. It could be that I’ve been reading a good number of his works in quick succession, but I’ve been noticing how many of Leiber’s stories read like plays. “The Moon Is Green” could very easily work as a one-act play: you’ve got one location, a total of three on-screen characters (four if you count the cat), and it’s not like you need fancy effects work to realize the setting or what happens in the climax. It’s very simple like that, but it also works. When I picked this one for review I knew basically nothing about it, not even it being a post-nuclear fable not entirely dissimilar to “Coming Attraction”; but whereas you could argue that that more famous story is tinged with misogyny, “The Moon Is Green” is one of Leiber’s more actively feminist efforts.
Effie is an active chaeacter with a sense of interiority, and she doesn’t want anything stereotypical like wanting to have a ton of kids or to be a good wife, but to escape from the cage of her daily life for something more freer and more beautiful. Her fate is left open, but Leiber supposes that, regardless of whether she lives or dies in the wasteland, it might be best for Effie to leave the men in her life and chase after her dream. Best of luck to her.
(Cover by Richard Bennett. Weird Tales, November 1942.)
Who Goes There?
Fritz Leiber has a curious relationship with the pulp horror scene of the ’30s; he started in earnest in 1939, but he was already prepping for his writing career, and he was in contact with some pretty major figures, including none other than H. P. Lovecraft. Leiber’s correspondence with Lovecraft in the last year or so of the latter’s life had a pretty immense impact on the younger author, and actually I remember Leiber quoting Lovecraft a couple times in the first installment of Destiny Times Three. Unlike though, say, Robert Bloch, whose first stories were straight Lovecraft pastiches, Leiber found his own voice (or at least enough) right away with his first professional genre publication. Still, the legacy of Lovecraft stayed with Leiber, especially in his horror, which sometimes approaches the cosmic but which more often stays rooted in known reality. A key innovation of Leiber’s as a horror writer crossbreeding old terrors with what was then a newfangled modernity, no doubt influencing what we’d now call urban fantasy.
“The Hound” was published about a year after what is arguably Leiber’s most importan horror story, if not his best: “Smoke Ghost.” Genre historian Mike Ashley called “Smoke Ghost” “arguably the first seriously modern ghost story,” in that it’s a ghost story which is unique to the post-industrial urban setting; it’s not something that could’ve been written prior to the industrial revolution. What “Smoke Ghost” did for ghosts “The Hound” sets out to do similarly for werewolves, and indeed the two feel like companion pieces—being Leiber’s first real attempts at modernizing these old chestnuts of horror.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the November 1942 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. It was soon reprinted in the Leiber collection Night’s Black Agents from Argham House, complete with a handsome-ass cover by Ronald Clyne. It’s been anthologized several times over the decades, although I’m not sure how many of them you can get new. While Masters of the Weird: Fritz Leiber looks to be a fetching collector’s item, it’s just that—a collector’s item. And before you ask, unfortunately no, “The Hound” was not included in the Ballantin collection The Best of Fritz Leiber, although given the breadth of his output it’s no surprise if several major short stories did not make the cut. The most viable option, if you don’t wanna prowl through used bookstores, is the collection Horrible Imaginings, although find it at your own risk, as it’s from—you fucking guessed it—Open Road Media. I swear these bastards exist just to give all the authors I like mediocre paperbacks with the intent on further burying their legacies.
Enhancing Image
You won’t be getting much in the way of plot synopsis here, mostly because “The Hound” might be the shortest short story I’ve reviewed thus far, and it’s also not densely told in terms of its plot, although it is dense in its imagery and its ability to invoke eeriness. It’s clear to me that Leiber wanted to capture a certain exquisite vibe more so than he wanted to tell a conventional werewolf story. Good for him!
Our “hero” of the day is David Lashley, although there’s nothing really heroic about him; he’s a put-upon young man with a job he doesn’t seem particularly fond of. At first I thought David was supposed to be younger, since he’s shown at the start to still be living with his parents, but actually it looks like he’s a good thirty years old. David’s parents are elderly now and he has to take care of them, both in physically looking after them and also paying the bills with his job. If this sounds a little like Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” that’s because it might be an homage, although I’m not sure if Leiber had read Kafka at this point; he probably did, considering his involvement with the so-called Lovecraft Circle and all that, and also because “The Hound” as a whole has a remarkable Kafkaesque vibe about it. I’m using “Kafkaesque” in the correct sense of the word here, because the short story touches on themes prevalent in Kafka’s work, such as alienation, both from one’s own family and society at large.
And then there’s the city. David has been having nightmares about a red-eyed monster, like a dog but not quite, stalking him for years now, and he’s reached a breaking point; there has to be something to these nightmares of his. Of course what David is really afraid of is not some werewolf which might gnaw on his bones in the middle of the night, but something much bigger than even the biggest dog: the city—urbanity. I said before that “Smoke Ghost,” that revolutionary story from the pages of Unknown, transplanted the ghost to the modern landscape—quite literaally, with the ghost being a personification of the factories, the garbage in the streets, the put-puttering of automobiles, of modernity. The potential threat of the werewolf unnerves David on its own, but what really gets to him is the werewolf as only the beginning—the first bite—of a vastly larger creature. We’re back to Kafka again, with the city as villain.
Take this early passage, which juxtaposes (and Leiber does it quite subtly here) the threat of the werewolf with David’s position as a “modern” man, a man of the city:
David Lashley clenched his hands in his overcoat pockets and asked himself how it was possible for a grown man to be so suddenly overwhelmed by a fear from childhood. Yet in the same instant he knew with terrible certainty that this was no childhood fear, this thing that had pursued him up the years, growing ever more vast and menacing, until, like the demon wolf Fenris at Ragnorak [sic], its gaping jaws scraped heaven and earth, seeking to open wider. This thing that had dogged his footsteps, sometimes so far behind that he forgot its existence, but now so close that he could almost feel its cold sick breath on his neck. Werewolves? He had read up on such things at the library, fingering dusty books in uneasy fascination, but what he had read made them seem innocuous and without significance—dead superstitions—in comparison with this thing that was part and parcel of the great sprawling cities and chaotic peoples of the twentieth century, so much a part that he, David Lashley, winced at the endlessly varying howls and growls of traffic and industry—sound sat once animal and mechanical; shrank back with a start from the sight of headlights at night—those dazzling, unwinking eyes; trembled uncontrollably if he heard the scuffling of rats in an alley or caught sight in the evenings of the shadowy forms of lean mongrel dogs looking for food in vacant lots.
Think about it, “the endlessly varying howls and growls of traffic and industry.” Can I take a moment to gush about how a good a writer, sentence-by-sentence, Leiber is? At his best he becomes genuinely poetic, and (this is a hot take) I’d say he comes much closer to marrying sheer terror with the beauty of the English language than Lovecraft. The two men were only a generation apart, but Leiber still reads as modern (if occasionally pulpy) while Lovecraft reads like he’s from a totally different era—which he was, I suppose. Much of my joy in reading “The Hound,” even when not much was actually happening on the pages (which is a lot of it), came from the way in which Leiber wrote (almost sculpted, like he was carving a swan out of a giant cube of ice) about the dark world surrounding Our Hero™. That David’s paranoia feels rather unprompted is beside the point, although admittedly it does feel like we’ve been thrown into the middle of a larger narrative; there’s a lot about David we don’t get to know.
Well, we know a few things: we know David resents caring for his parents, we know he likes but is unable to settle down with this one woman he’s good with (Kafka again), and we know he wants to get the fuck out of the city but is unable to articulate this desire himself. He also has a friend, Tom Goodsell (which sounds like symbolism but probably isn’t), who has some rather odd things to say about werewolves and the supernatural in general when asked about them. In-story, Tom’s half-joking proposition about the evolution of the supernatural in relation to civilization probably didn’t help David’s paranoia, but on a meta level he summarizes Leiber’s mission statement pretty well. In short, the haunted castle narratives of the pre-Victorian era are no longer compatible with the “modern” conception of the supernatural, because between 1792 and 1942 we got, among other things, Darwinian evolution. The automobile. The airplane. And pretty soon, nuclear weapons.
Even the psychologically adept ghost stories of Henry James would struggle in the face of modernity, and God knows they would struggle even more in the wake of the atomic bomb. If our understanding of the nature changes then our understanding of the supernatural must also change. You might not agree with that statement; God knows there’s always a market for an old-fashioned vampire novel that barely treads beyond the ground mapped out by Dracula. But Leiber is making a grander statement here, not just about how we write about the supernatural has the evolve, but also that horror writing much evolve as well. The dude respected Lovecraft a great deal, and worked to preserve his legacy, but he also acknowledged that we (anyone who wants to become a practitioner of horror) has to, at some point, move beyong Lovecraft—into uncharted waters.
Consider this, from Tom:
I’ll tell you how it works out, Dave. We begin by denying all the old haunts and superstitions. Why shouldn’t we? They belong to the era of cottage and castle. They can’t take root in the new environment. Science goes materialistic, proving that there isn’t anything in the universe except tiny bundles of energy. As if, for that matter, a tiny bundle of energy mightn’t mean—anything.”
In part it reads like an essay on what a modern horror story should be, and there’s definitely a criticism towards “The Hound” that it reads almost more like what Leiber thinks a good horror story ought to read like than a good horror story on its own; in that sense it doesn’t hold up as well as “Smoke Ghost,” which is considerably more gripping as a narrative by comparison. And yet, Leiber probably figured (correctly) that it would be better to discuss what he thinks horror ought to become by way of demonstration rather than to lecture the read about it straight up. Also because presumably more people would read it as a short story than as an essay, but that’s neither here nor there. Another advantage is that with fiction Leiber is allowing himself to go full blast on describing David’s mindset, the setting around him, the way he doesn’t vividly describe the ghostly werewolf that’s stalking him, all that. It’s hard for this man to write a bad sentence.
There Be Spoilers Here
I’m not a fan of the ending. When David finally confronts the hound, I do appreciate that Leiber refrains from describing the creature much, partly because the scene is so darkly lit (a blackout occurs in the climax) and partly because Leiber at least knows that the unseen is much scarier than the seen. Even so, the ending commits the sin of having David saved by way of deus ex machina, albeit a mundane one in a vacuum: it’s just some guy with a flashlight, whose name and even face are unknown. It’s also, I have to admit, a little corny. When David asks if the rescuer had seen the hound himself, he replies with:
“Wolf? Hound?” The voice from behind the flashlight was hideously shaken. “It was nothing like that. God, I never believed in such things. But now—” Then the voice spoke out with awful certainty and conviction. “It was— It was something from the factories of hell.”
The dialogue up to this point had admirably stayed away from the typical oh-ye-gods Weird Tales brand of horror dialogue, and the omnicient narrator even pokes fun at the melodrama of it early on, but I suppose Leiber couldn’t help himself at the very end.
Now is a good time to explain why I like werewolf stories so much. I suppose it’s the inherent duality of the thing; a werewolf, by definition of its name, might not necessarily turn into a person, but it will always transform into something. There’s always the possibility of transformation with werewolves. A vampire will always be a vampire, whether they want to be or not, but a werewolf implies duality. In the case of “The Hound,” the werewolf and the city are all but said to be two sides of the same coin—that duality right there, the beast and the civilized. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Leiber started the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, about two adventurers who would rather travel abroad than settle down in urbanity, around the same time he wrote “Smoke Ghost” and “The Hound.” He was a bit of a cosmopolitan, but I can’t help but find Leiber’s ambivalence toward urbanity palpable.
A Step Farther Out
Earlier I said that “The Hound” is like a companion to Leiber’s earlier horror story, “Smoke Ghost,” and while I think that’s true I also think “The Hound” got published in what was then the lesser magazine because it’s somewhat less refined than its older brother. While his fears are justified, David’s fear of the wolf feels inexplicable at first, almost like it’s more a product of his psyche (which itself is not in the best shape) than a flesh-and-blood creature. Even with a story this short, Leiber strings together only but the bare bones of a plot, with a few characters thrown in who appear once and then never show up again. The ending is oddly unsatisfying, but then at least it wasn’t quite as predictable as I was anticipating. And yet, something must be said of how eerie and prescient Leiber’s vision is, not to mention how poetic his descriptions can get. He doesn’t tell a narrative or give us insight into our lead character so much as he presents a colorful metaphor for what happens when—to cop E. M. Forster’s sentiment—the machine stops.
Leiber would return to urban horror again, perhaps most famously with his debut novel Conjure Wife, but it didn’t take long for him to move to greener pastures. Or hell, for him to dip his toes in every other subgenre of horror and fantasy.
It’s that special time of year, and I’m not just saying that because it’s Christmastime. Truth be told, I’m not crazy about Christmas; I certainly don’t go nuts over it like I do with Halloween—which is why my review roster for this month is not Christmas-themed. My birthday is also this month (it’s the 9th, if you’d like to know), but that’s not why I’m here. Some months thing will be totally normal, but then there are times like this. Oh, we still have the usual rotation, albeit with a little twist (in fact it’s a new department), which I’ll get to in a minute. The real twist is that this will be a single-author lineup, and the guest of honor is Fritz Leiber.
Fritz Leiber was born on Christmas Eve, 1910, and when he made his professional genre debut in 1939, he was about to mark a new era in fantasy writing—although people were not aware of this at the time. His most lasting achievement is the grand episodic narrative of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, one of fantasy’s most daring duos and a landmark in what is now called Sword and Sorcery (the same subgenre which contains Robert E. Howard’s Conan, among other things). Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are by no means his only contribution to the genre, and indeed his turf goes far beyond just fantasy. You know, I really like Leiber, but even with most of my favorite authors I would not dedicate a whole month to reviewing works of theirs; what makes Leiber different from most is his ability to dabble in basically everything, from fantasy to horror to science fiction. Across the half-century of his career, Leiber shfited from genre to genre, mood to mood, not being as easy to pin down as most of his contemporaries.
Since this is a bit of an unusual month for reviews, I decided to go an extra step and introduce another new department—albeit an irregular one. There aren’t too many of them, but there are in fact “complete” novels in the magazines, especially in the ’40s and ’50s. Or rather were, because magazines running novels was basically an attempt to keep paperbacks (which were gaining traction) from biting their heels, an attempt which ultimately and inevitably proved a failure. A lot of “complete” novels being run in magazineare also just novellas, but there are exceptions! Leiber’s 1950 novel You’re All Alone is one such exception, and while it is technically an abridged version of The Sinful Ones (long story), at 40,000 words it’s a bit too long to be comfortably called a novella, at least for my blog. I’ll explain how this new thing will work at the end.
So, we get two serials, two novellas, two short stories, and a complete novel in honoring this bastard. Not the last time I’ll be doing this single-author month deal, but obviously it’s something I’ll only do maybe once a year. But enough! It’s time to reveal what we’ll be reading.
The serials:
Destiny Times Three, first published in the March to April 1945 issues of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novel. Not one of Leiber’s more famous works, if the number of times it’s been reprinted says anything, but then it is quite a short novel—probably too short to sell on its own but also too long to be anthologized easily. One of Leiber’s earliest attempts at depicting alternate timelines, a premise that he would return to fruitfully much later.
Rime Isle, first published in the May to July 1977 issues of Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy. Never heard of Cosmos? Don’t worry, it only lasted four issues. Rime Isle is part of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, being a later entry, as well as one of Leiber’s final appearances in the magazines; thereafter he stuck to original anthologies. Whereas some other Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories are often cited, this is not one of them. I know basically nothing about it.
The novellas:
“Scylla’s Daughter,” from the May 1961 issue of Fantastic. The late ’50s saw a major revival for the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, which was not coincidental considering Fantastic‘s new editor, Cele Goldsmith, clearly sympathized with Leiber and wanted to buy what he was selling, with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser getting at least one story a year in that magazine until Goldsmith left. “Scylla’s Daughter” would later be expanded into The Swords of Lankhmar.
“Ship of Shadows,” from the July 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This is a special issue of F&SF, being one of its author tribute issues, with “Ship of Shadows” as the lead novella. Technically a reread, but it’s been long enough that I could use a refresher, and hell, I remember liking it quite a bit. Leiber stories tend to fall into SF, fantasy, or horror, but “Ship of Shadows” ticks all three boxes, and it won a Hugo while it was at it!
The short stories:
“The Hound,” from the November 1942 issue of Weird Tales. The first several years of Leiber’s career saw him dwell primarily in Weird Tales and Unknown, the top fantasy-horror magazines of the early ’40s. Not being the most comfortable with SF, Leiber distinguished himself at first as a young master of terror and the supernatural. “The Hound” is one such early horror effort from Leiber, and hey, it’s apparently a werewolf story, and I love me some werewolves.
“The Moon Is Green,” from the April 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. After being relatively inative in the late ’40s, Leiber came back strong early the next decade, and his return to the field coincided with those explosive first years of Galaxy, the new SF magazine on the market. Leiber became one of Galaxy‘s leading writers in the early ’50s, and “The Moon Is Green” is one of those Galaxy-Leiber tales to get adapted for the legendary X Minus One.
Now, finally, the complete novel:
You’re All Alone, from the July 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures. Apparently the magazine version is an earlier draft that Leiber had tried but failed to get published, since the fantasy market in the latter half of the ’40s was in the dumps, but luckily Fantastic Adventures, previously a second-rate pulp outlet, was under new management. Leiber would then “expand” the novel for book publication under the title The Sinful Ones, but from what I’ve heard the magazine version is better.
About how these complete novel reviews will work. My review schedule is on a rotation basis, switching between short stories, novellas, and serials; depending on how many days there are in a month I would cram in a third novella or short story. The way I have it figured is, if a month has 31 days, and if I’m set to review a novella on the 31st day, I’ll switch that would-be novella out for a complete novel. After all, I wanna save the biggest single review project for last, and I wanna give myself enough time to really digest the extra long material. The resulting review will itself of course be longer than average. Now, how do I separate a complete novel from a novella? How does one tell the difference, especially since magazines, while usually two-columned, have different type sizes and therefore some can pack more wordage into each page? Sometimes magazines give rough word counts, but much of this, admittedly, will come down to my own discretion.
Not making promises, but complete novel reviews will probably be the last department I add to my blog. This is a one-man show, ya know, and I do have a day job to contend with. Still, I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t out of passive, and you also know that I’m a compulsive reader. The more the merrier! Just hope I can do someone as great as Leiber justice with this.
(Cover by Earle Bergey. Startling Stories, March 1948.)
Who Goes There?
Henry Kuttner began writing pretty young, being first published in either 1931 or 1936 (ISFDB claims the former, but something tells me they’re wrong), the latter at the very least introducing Kuttner under his own name to the world of SFF with “The Graveyard Rats.” Said story, a pretty solid one-man show about rats and claustrophobia, has been very recently adapted into an episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Kuttner would come to define himself, though, not as a practitioner of horror, but of humor, though the two are not always mutually exclusive. In the late ’30s he wrote prolifically, but not with a whole lot of success; he became known as one of many hack writers for the pulps, but unlike most of them he really did have talent lurking underneath. 1940 was a watershed year for Kuttner, as he married fellow writer C. L. Moore (they both got their start in Weird Tales, and Kuttner started as a big fan of hers), and together they wrote an impressive streak of SFF that remains essential.
While he more or less worked in collaboration with his wife (and vice versa) for the rest of his career, Kuttner would continue to write on his own (essentially if not quite literally) after 1940. Mostly outside of Astounding Science Fiction, Kuttner had stories submitted under his name alone, presumably because magazines like Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories were less reputable, and also because these stories were deemed more Kuttner-y than his more outright collaborations with Moore. After 1950, Kuttner’s productivity dropped to about one story a year (the same happened with Moore, as they both focused on their education), and unfortunately it never recovered; Kuttner died of a failed heart in 1958, only 42 years old. To quote Brian Aldiss (or maybe it’s David Wingrove) from Trillion Year Spree, “Our own minds were extinguished a little in response.”
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1948 issue of Startling Stories, which is on the Archive. “Don’t Look Now” has been reprinted a good number of times, at least one of which, My Best Science Fiction Story, is also on the Archive; actually there are two versions of this anthology, and thankfully the version that’s archived, the abridged version, still has Kuttner’s story. More importantly, we have an introduction by Kuttner himself explaining why it’s his “best” story—and look, I normally don’t look for authors’ comments on their own work, but this is glorious. I won’t quote the whole thing, but it’s so deliciously sarcastic—it alone would be worth the price of admission.
Why I selected Don’t Look Now as my favorite science fiction story is because it has the technical accuracy of Jules Verne; the realism of H. G. Wells, the social implications of Tolstoi (Leo—the Count, I mean), the freedom of Laurence Sterne, and the terseness of the Bible (the King James translation, of course).
These comparisons are BULLSHIT and Kuttner knows it. He takes apart the idea of an artist choosing their own favorite work and by extension the idea of making an anthology out of such a premise. He then finishes with the cherry on top: “Anyway, my wife wrote it.” Almost certainly untrue, by the way; after having read it I can say “Don’t Look Now” feels like a Kuttner story through and through. Kuttner’s really playing with the reader here, a forecasting of what will be an almost (if not equally) just as subversive a story.
Right, other reprints. The Great SF Stories: 1948, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg; by extension we also have The Golden Years of Science Fiction: Fifth Series, being an amalgamation of The Great SF Stories: 1947 and 1948. More curiously perhaps we have The History of the Science Fiction Magazine Part 3: 1946-1955, edited by Mike Ashley, which despite sounding like a non-fiction series is actually an anthology series. The most essential reprint is, of course, Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, which I brought up in my review of Moore’s story “Daemon” and which I recently managed to get my hands on. All seem to be out of print, but given that you have at least two free online resources I don’t think it’s a bad deal at all.
Enhancing Image
This is a barroom story, which is how you know it’s good. A lot of shit goes down in bars, whether it be between strangers or friends. We meet Lyman, our protagonist, who’s a bit of a weirdo an eccentric, making conversation with a man in a brown suit (let’s just call him the brown man, he doesn’t have a name), and things get a little weird right off the bat. Lyman starts talking about Martians, and how Martians live among us, and how everyone has a Martian whose job is to look after them and make sure they stay in line. Lyman’s Martian happens to be on break, how convenient. He also had been tailing the brown man all day, which is totally not creepy. The fact that the brown man doesn’t hightail it out of there simply because of Lyman’s weirdness perhaps says more about the brown man than it does about Lyman.
Not that the brown man is just some guy Lyman found off the street, he’s a journalist, which you’ll notice is a running thing in old-timey SF especially; if something “out there” is afoot then there’s a good chance a journalist will get involved. Lyman himself is supposedly an inventor. An accident involving “supersonic detergents” went awry and resulted in Lyman’s brain getting rewired, altering his senses such that he could now see and hear Martians—to an extent. He still doesn’t know what they really look like; they apparently walk around in human skin suits. That’s right, this story has actual skinwalkers. Reptilians who secretly rule the world. All that good stuff. Now Lyman is the Man Who Knows Better™, and he’s out to spread the word!
Did the movie They Live take after this? Is this plagiarism?
Anyway, given the alien invasion craze of the ’50s (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers), it’s surprising to me that “Don’t Look Now” was published in 1948, since it feels partly like a commentary on all those alien invasion stories. While there is a fine layer of paranoia coating things, there’s also a good deal of humor, as is typical of Kuttner. We get a reference to the famous Orson Welles radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds—you know, the radio drama that allegedly convinced thousands of people that there was an actual alien invasion going on. According to Lyman it was obviously fiction, but the novel the radio drama was adapting? Maybe not so much. “With Orson It was just a gag. H. G. knew—or suspected.” Again I’m surprised this was published in 1948 and not 1958, because it feels like the kind of self-aware takedown that would come about after a fad’s run its course.
Lyman also has the notion that cats were actually the ones who ran the world before the Martians, and they can even detect Martians as well. As someone who has (not owns) two cats, I find this credible enough.
Truth be told, it’s hard to talk too much about “Don’t Look Now,” for a few reasons. It’s probably the shortest short story I’ve reviewed so far, and I actually worried its length would be a problem; it’s only half a dozen magazine pages long, which translates to about a dozen book pages. Okay, that’s too bad. The thing is that it’s also chatty. This shit is like My Dinner with Andre if it was written by Thomas Pynchon, it’s a little gonzo and it almost feels mashed together. And because the vast majority of it is dialogue, with just two characters in one location, you might get the impression that nothing happens, which in a way is true. The stakes aren’t too high. We don’t suddenly break out into an action sequence. The Martians don’t barge in and wreak havoc. I know that’s entering spoiler territory, but I just wanna set the right expectations, because “Don’t Look Now” works almost like a Socratic dialogue—with a twist at the end, of course.
As such, this is my shortest review thus far; I’d be a little embarrassed if it wasn’t. Which is not to say the story is dull, or that it’s bad. Quite the contrary! Kuttner’s economy of style is empeccable; he does not waste any time and he doesn’t try to “elevate” it with flowery descriptions. Kuttner’s strength lies in punchy storytelling, so even though virtually nothing happens in “Don’t Look Now,” you don’t get the sense that Kuttner is just spinning his wheels, though you may be wondering what he’s up to. There’s definitely a point, but it’s saved for the very end, which naturally is where we’d get to spoilers. I’ll just say here that the story’s sense of paranoia lives up to the paranoia implied in its title, even if it is a bit jokey about it.
There Be Spoilers Here
The ending changes everything. Up to this point we’ve been led to believe that there’s a Martian in the bar, and that anyone could be it. Is it the brown man? The barkeep? Someone we were not aware of until now? No, it turns out that the Martian is… Lyman himself.
Lyman sat there. Between two wrinklesi n his forehead there was a stir and a flicker of lashes unfurling. The third eye opened slowly and looked after the brown man.
He was telling the truth about at least one thing: Martians have a third eye that they keep hidden. Most of everything else is probably a lie. The explanation about Martians appearing in infrared pictured has to be a lie. We’re still not sure what the Martians really look like. Lyman, since he is the protagonist and viewpoint character, has been taken for granted with regards to his trustworthiness, but we find out at the very end that the person who supposedly knows about aliens living among us is actually an alien himself. There’s even a subtle misdirect right before the final line where it looks like the barkeep might reveal himself as a Martian, but this is a red herring. Rarely do yoo come across a story where a good 90% of it is a red herring, come to think of it; the final reveal makes us doubt ourselves.
This raises a peculiar question, though: Why in God’s name did Lyman tell the brown man about Martians in the first place? What did he have to gain from it? Why would he rat out his own race like that? Unless, of course, you assume most of what he said was wrong on purpose; that he was giving the brown man just enough cookie crumbs to become paranoid about alien overlords, but then steered him off the patch by giving false information. Now why would someone in power deliberately give out misinformation? Hmmm. Not to mentions it explains Lyman’s erratic behavior before, which is revealed to have been very much calcualted. It would’ve been too easy for Lyman to get caught by a Martian, given he’s not being exactly secretive about his findings, so Kuttner does the smart thing and makes the Martian the last person we would suspect.
In “Don’t Look Now” we don’t see the solving of a mystery but the planting of one. You know how in Inception their normal job is extraction, which is to steal information from people’s dreams, but plnating false info is much harder? Lyman and Kuttner do that, and they do it pretty well.
A Step Farther Out
If “Don’t Look Now” feels somehow minor it’s because it’s set on so small a stage. There are only two principal characters and most of the word count is dedicated to their dialogue. Hell, only one of the characters is given a name. It’s all rather theatrical, like a one-act play. For a while I wondered where it was going, or rather what the point of it was, but I have to say the ending makes up for the lack of immediate point; it’s the kind of twist that makes you look back on the rest of the story and try to rearrange the pieces of the puzzle you’ve been given. Kuttner, more than anything, is clever, and he waits for the perfect moment to pull the rug out from under you. I would consider it his best, but I think it encapsulates what separates a Kuttner story from a Moore story.
In the years following World War II, there was an uptick in paranoid SF, projecting fears about nuclear weapons, the newfangled Cold War, or both. “Don’t Look Now” belongs to a certain subset of SF story from that period, leaning into the anxieties of the era and presenting something like an allegory. I don’t know where Kuttner stands on the issue of the Cold War, about the possibility of Soviety infiltrators in the US, the ending not really clarifying anything on that front, but I think that lack of clear intention only adds to the intrigue. While published in 1948, this is very much indicative of social anxieties prevalent in ’50s American SF. I would check it out, especially if you’re a sucker for that breed of fiction like I am.
Now we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming! Only not quite, but I’ll save that for the end. We’ve come back to our novella and serial reviews, which I’m thankful for; as fitting as it is to focus only on short stories and novelettes for a month of horror, I found it weirdly draining to review all those short stories back to back. With serials and novellas we’ll have more variety, never mind the lack of a horror theme.
I must’ve gone back and forth on this schedule too many times to count, frankly. The thing is that I like having a schedule for my reviews, as I think it allows me to plan some silly stuff in advance, like the fact that I’ll be tackling Joanna Russ and Poul Anderson stories back-to-back (for those of you who don’t know, I recommend looking up a certain exchange those two reportedly had), not to mention stuff like last month’s review slate. But I’m not here to waste your time, let’s get to the meat of the matter!
For the serials:
We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ. Published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January to February 1976. Russ was a divisive figure in the field and We Who Are About To… in particular was not received well. Even so, it has its defenders, perhaps the biggest of them being Samuel R. Delany (who I always trust), and it also received a glowing review from Joachim Boaz over on his site. I have to admit my experiences with Russ have not been great up to this point, having found her Hugo-winning novella “Souls” underwhelming, but this could be a change of pace!
We Have Fed Our Sea by Poul Anderson. Published in Astounding Science Fiction, August to September 1958. It was nominated for the Hugo for Best Novel, and was published in book form as The Enemy Stars. Anderson was apparently a beloved figure when he was alive, but since his death his star power has faded somewhat, perhaps due to the scattered vairety of his fiction. He was a reliable and insanely prolific writer, and I often like (but rarely love) his work. We Have Fed Our Sea was one of THREE Anderson serials running in Astounding in 1958.
For the novellas:
“Another Orphan” by John Kessel. Published in the September 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Kessel can be thought of as adjacent to the cyberpunk movement of the ’80s, though it would be a mistake to consider Kessel himself one of the cyberpunks. Renowned for both his fiction and genre criticism, he’s also edited several anthologies, often in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly. “Another Orphan,” which won the Nebula for Best Novella, is apparently a riff on a classic work of American fiction…
“The Kragen” by Jack Vance. Published in the July 1964 issue of Fantastic. Like with Poul Anderson, Vance is a writer I often like but rarely find myself strongly attached to. Also like with Anderson, Vance represents to some extent SF writing typical of the pre-New Wave ’60s (i.e., relatively conservative), focusing less on literary experimentation and more on The Big Picture™. “The Kragen” may strike some readers as familiar because they had read it in a different form: it would be expanded into the novel The Blue World two years later.
For the short stories:
“Don’t Look Now” by Henry Kuttner. Published in the March 1948 issue of Startling Stories. You didn’t think I’d forget about Kuttner, right? Making his professional debut in 1936, Kuttner was not the instant success like hie future wife, C. L. Moore, was; actually he had a reputation as a hack writer for a while, and to this day his immense talent tends to be undervalued. Alongside Moore Kuttner would write some of the most beloved SFF of the ’40s, but he also remaimed prolific more or less on his own, “Don’t Look Now” being an example.
“Mountain Ways” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Published in the August 1996 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Le Guin is one of those grandmasters of the field who really needs no introduction. She only appeared sporadically in the magazines from the ’60s to the ’80s, but the ’90s saw a major resurgance for Le Guin as a magazine presence, with her Hainish cycle especially getting more attention. “Mountain Ways” is a standalone Hainish story, and it won the James Triptree Jr. (now regrettably called the Otherwise) Award for gender-bending SF.
If you’re reading this post and it’s the first day of November then you’ll notice there are two new departments for my blog: one of them is simply a quality-of-life improvement while the other is more of a “I’m doing this for funzies” thing. Firstly we have an author index now! Reviews are organized by authors’ last names, and while this page may be small now, there will come a point when it will be massive, and since I don’t rate my reviews, this is probably the best way to help readers find what they’re looking for. The second is The Observatory, which like Things Beyond is an editorial department, but whereas Things Beyond is meant for forecasting reviews, The Observatory will be more like a conventional magazine editorial where I’ll spend a thousand words on whatever subject I feel like writing about—although, of course, it will be SFF-related.
Since Things Beyond happens at the beginning of every month, it seems only natural to have an Observatory editorial posted on the 15th of every month, so that it’ll never be skipped and it’ll fall exactly between two of my regular review posts. With these changes I feel like I’m one step closer to making my blog a “professional” (by that I really mean well-rounded) review site for magazine SFF.
