What the hell, a whole month went by and nothing crazy happened that wasn’t work-related. Well, the SFF magazines are being choked out by big daddy Bezos and Twitter is now no longer Twitter, but aside from that, everything has been pretty normal!
I’m being sarcastic.
To keep your mind off the fact that the short story within the context of genre publishing is an endangered species and that readers can hardly be bothered to support the lifeblood of the field, let’s read some stories! We have a curious set this month, focusing more on fantasy, which is not normally my thing; indeed the only science fiction stories covered this month are the novellas. Much like pushing myself just a little bit when trying a new food, fantasy is a genre I treat, paradoxically, with both caution and enthusiasm. Enough wasting time, though…
For the serials:
Skull-Face by Robert E. Howard. Serialized in Weird Tales, October to December 1929. Howard wrote for only twelve years, debuting in 1924 and stopping with his suicide in 1936—at age thirty. Most writers barely get their feet off the ground by the time they’re thirty, but not only was Howard a natural-born storyteller, he wrote at a blistering pace such that he still accumulated a vast body of work. Skull-Face is a standalone fantasy, predating Conan by a few years.
The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson. Serialized in Unknown, March to May 1940. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novel. This was not published in book form until 1964, a 24-year gap that normally would imply the author had died in the interim—only Williamson was not only alive but had another 42 years left in him. Was not Williamson’s first go at fantasy, but it marked his first appearance in Unknown, a new fantasy magazine with more exacting standards.
For the novellas:
“Immigrant” by Clifford D. Simak. From the March 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The review for this will be posted on Simak’s 119th birthday, which is the least we can do for the man. With the wave of “empathetic” and pastoral SF in recent years, especially the works of Becky Chambers, some have looked back to Simak (rightfully) as a direct ancestor. “Immigrant” hopefully will see Golden Age SF’s most compassionate writer in good form.
“Singleton” by Greg Egan. From the February 2002 issue of Interzone. I was gonna tackle “Oceanic” originally, but that seemed too obvious and maybe not characteristic of Egan’s work. I’ve been quasi-binging Egan’s short fiction as of late, because he interests me. Egan’s one of the major voices in transhumanist science fiction, as well as one of the first Aussie writers to leave a mark on the field. He’s also notoriously aloof; there are no pictures of him on the internet.
For the short stories:
“The Dreaming City” by Michael Moorcock. From the June 1961 issue of Science Fantasy. I’ve read a couple Moorcock stories before, but truth be told he’s one of those authors I’ve been slow to get around to because of a bad first impression. Let’s just say I’m not a fan of his essay “Starship Stormtroopers.” But still Moorcock has been an earnest chronicler of fantasy for the past six decades, and to celebrate we’re going back 62 years to the start of his Elric saga.
“Travels with My Cats” by Mike Resnick. From the February 2004 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Hugo winner for Best Short Story. Resnick was one of the most popular and frequent contributors to Asimov’s in the ’90s and 2000s, winning three of his five Hugos there, with his Kirinyaga series being one of the most decorated in genre fiction. I intentionally picked a standalone story because the Kirinyaga stories kinda bug me, and also I like cats. 🙂
For the complete novel:
The Dwellers in the Mirage by A. Merritt. From the April 1941 issue of Fantastic Novels. During his life and in the years immediately following his death, Merritt was one of the most beloved American fantasists, at least among pulp readers; he even got a magazine named after him with A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine. Nowadays Merritt is obscure enough to have “won” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. The Dwellers in the Mirage was first published in 1932, but its printing in Fantastic Novels was the first time Merritt’s preferred ending was incorporated, making it the preferred version.
One last thing I wanna mention is that I’ll be revamping my method for reviewing serials. I’ll be writing about the first installment in the same way as usual, but I’ve come to realize that for subsequent installments there are a couple sections of my review formula that are really unnecessary; for example we don’t need an introductory section where I give context to the author if we’re already in the middle of a work by said author. As such you can expect a more streamlined reading experience when we get to the second installment of Howard’s Skull-Face. Things will look a bit different, but this is less a radical change and more like tweaking. Other than that, my review schedule should be back to normal.
(Cover by Art Sussman. Amazing Stories, Oct-Nov 1953.)
Who Goes There?
This is another case where I have to try to not fanboy out, becaue I respect Richard Matheson a lot and I’ll give anything he writes at least one try. Matheson entered the field in 1950 with a remarkable short-short story titled “Born of Man and Woman,” which instantly made him popular with readers and which remains (impressively for a debut) one of the more reprinted stories in all of genre fiction. Matheson’s subsequent efforts, including “Third from the Sun,” “Dress of White Silk,” “Witch War,” “Through Channels,” and others, were not quite to the level of that first story, but they showed a naturally gifted storyteller who casually wandered across different genres, from science fiction to straight horror. When Matheson turned to novels he proved good at that too, with I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man being two of the most disturbing and thought-provoking SF novels of the ’50s. He would win a Hugo for adapting The Shrinking Man into the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man (the added word is justified, the film is indeed incredible), and Matheson’s new career as a screenwriter was just getting started.
There’s a high chance that if you tracked SFF film and TV in the ’60s that you encountered Matheson in screenwriting mode, including but not limited to the Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within” (really one of the better season 1 episodes) and some Roger Corman productions, including House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death. The thing Mathesone would associate with the most, though, was The Twilight Zone—the ’60s and ’80s runs but especially the former. Along with Charles Beamont, Matheson contributed quite a few scripts to the original series, second in quantity (although not necessarily in quality) only to Rod Serling himself. Today’s story, “Little Girl Lost,” was itself adapted by Matheson for a Twilight Zone episode, though I have to admit my memory of this one is foggy.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the October-November 1953 issue of Amazing Stories, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted as a “classic” in the April 1967 issue, which can be found here. It’s been reprinted several times, although not as many as I would’ve thought. The most relevant of the bunch, at least to my interests, would have to be The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Richard Matheson, and Charles G. Waugh), which, as you can guess, collects the short stories that served as the basis for Twilight Zone episodes. The most recent reprint is Duel: Terror Stories by Richard Matheson, which might still be in print although it’s hard to tell, especially since the quintessential Matheson collection is now Penguin’s The Best of Richard Matheson (which does not include “Little Girl Lost”).
Enhancing Image
Chris and Ruth are a young couple living in a California apartment who one night hear their daughter Tina crying, and like any reasonable man Chris gets up to see what the trouble is. He has to make his way into the living room. “Tina sleeps there because we could only get a one bedroom apartment.” It’s dark, but he can at least hear her. One problem: she’s not on top of the sleeper sofa. Tries reaching under the sofa: she’s not there either. And yet Chris can hear her crying… from somewhere. Tina has to be somewhere in the apartment and yet Chris can’t figure out where she could be. The dog, who’s out on the patio at night, has also started barking like crazy, which doesn’t help. This is a story structured such that it starts off at its most tense and gradually becomes less so, as you’ll see.
Context is important, and we know enough about Matheson to get it. He probably wrote “Little Girl Lost” in early 1953, at which point he was not only a newly married man but father of one (with more to come), and he apparently based the story on struggling to find his daughter one night when she was crying. This is a story about people around my age: a few years out of college, maybe married with their first kid or with one on the way, although Chris and Ruth were not able to buy a house at this point in their lives. I relate to these two, because I also can’t afford a house. Anyway, it doesn’t take long for the young couple to break into hysterics over figuring out where their daughter could’ve gone. She can’t have been abducted, becaue they can hear her, but she’s not in the living room or kitchen, or anywhere else in the apartment they can think of. I heard a criticism somewhere that Ruth is written in the typical “hysterial woman” fashion of the ’50s, but to be fair to her, it would take an iron will to not freak out about this situation, especially if it’s in the middle of the night.
(If you wanna lose some sleep then look up stories about people accidentally locking themselves inside convenience store freezers and being found as corpses in the morning. Have fun with that.)
Chris, instead of calling the police, hits up his friend Bill. “I’d called him because he’s an engineering man, CalTech, top man with Lockheed over in the valley.” Not ideal, but Chris can’t think of a better option in the heat of the moment. Maybe what’s happened to Tina can’t be explained by normal procedure and someone in the sciences ought to be brought in. Because this is a science fiction story and because some of us have seen the Twilight Zone episode beforehand, it’s rather hard to spoil this one. As such, I’ll make a couple more observations before we get into the back end, where there’s not a lot to talk about. This story, after all, is not quite ten pages long and those pages go by at a mile a minute. Matheson’s style is not pulpy but it’s certainly not concerned with fancy language; it goes down smooth, like the average experience of reading a screenplay. I interned as a script reader years ago and the best scripts (or rather the least bad) describe action as economically as possible, with no room given to purple prose antics.
Another thing to consider is that short stories are great for adapting into short films and TV episodes. You may notice that a lot of the shorts comprising Love, Death + Robots are based on short stories, and in those cases the filmmakers can choose to be as faithful to the source material as they want, making the shorts at just the “right” length to cover everything without need for padding. Now, when adapting a ten-page story into a 25-page teleplay, some padding is required. You could easily do the plot of “Little Girl Lost” justice in a short that’s about as long, one page per minute of screentime, but Matheson, when adapting his story for TV, undoubtedly had to make concessions. I don’t remember the Twilight Zone episode too well, but I do remember that structurally it stayed close to the source material; most importantly it retains the climax and tries its best considering it has to work with budget and effects of that era.
There Be Spoilers Here
Eventually the couple let their dog into the apartment, whereupon the dog apparently sniffs out where Tina is and finds what can only be described as a crack in the spacetime fabric that soon sees dog and then Chris fall through it. Chris slips into this other world that’s at once darker than the depths of the ocean and yet filled with blinding lights. “It was black, yes—to me. And yet there seemed to be a million lights. But as soon as I looked at one it disappeared and was gone. I saw them out of the sides of my eyes.” This is undoubtedly the money shot for both short story and TV episode, as we see the mundane apartment replaced with something very different that would strike anyone as alien. The justification for the dimension gap is about as silly as you’d expect, but it at least justifies the story’s escalation into borderline cosmic horror before we earn our happy ending.
The sofa and TV set have now been swapped in the living room so that nobody will be tempted to fall through that crack between dimensions. Call me a zoomer, but I have to look up who Arthur Godfrey is. Actually I’m not ssure if people twenty years older than me know who that is.
A Step Farther Out
It’s short, it’s slight, it’s not exactly deep, but it is evocative and it has imagery in the back end that would translate well to a visual medium. Matheson was a wizard when it came to moving a plot along and while “Little Girl Lost” is simple, it goes down in an even shorter time than its page count would suggest. I was gripped by this extended metaphor for what it’s like to be a young parent and to experience something horrible you’ve probably never thought about before—not until you became responsible for someone’s life. Just remind me to never have kids; a dog sounds better.
Walter M. Miller, Jr. is what a lot of people would call a one-book wonder. A Canticle for Leibowitz capped off what had been an impressive streak in the ’50s, earning Miller a Hugo and to this day remaining a much admired and discussed novel; that secular readers take no issue with the novel’s overtly religious themes speaks of its power. Miller served as a bomber crewman during World War II and his wartime experiences compelled him to turn to Catholicism—a turning point in his life that very much explains today’s story. Make no mistake in thinking Miller was some happy-go-lucky convert, though, as he would suffer from depression for much of his life—an outlook that only grew darker as he aged, eventually resulting in his casting aside the Church and committing suicide, leaving his final novel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, to be finished by Terry Bisson. We’ll never know what more Miller could’ve contributed to the field had he published even a single new word of fiction between 1960 and his death in 1996, but he seemed to have said all he needed to say.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the September-October 1953 issue of Fantastic, which is on the Archive. It was also reprinted as a “classic” in the May 1966 issue of Fantastic, which can be found here. “Wolf Pack” was reprinted in book form only once, in the anthology Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time (ed. Judith Merril), which has been out of print since the ’50s. This story has not seen print anywhere since 1966, which is criminal to me. Miller’s body of short fiction is small enough that you could gather all of it (minus the Leibowitz stories, of course) together in one (admittedly chunky) volume. Why has nobody done this yet?
Enhancing Image
The sun hasn’t quite come up on the horizon yet, but it’s already time for the bombers to get ready for their shift, dressing in coveralls and bomber jackets, “stuffed candy bars and bail-out kits in their knee-pockets, buckled low-slung forty-fives about their waists,” some of whom will not be returning. Mark Kessel is a capable crewman, having flown 46 missions in a B-25 and so close to earning his leave. We’re not flying over Germany or Japan, but Italy, over the the city of Perugia. “Perugia was a bulge in an artery that fed the Wehrmacht fist.” Pretty standard, heading out to bomb supply routes so as to starve the Nazis. Just another flight for Mark.
But there’s a problem. Actually two problems. The first is that Mark has become detached from his girlfriend back home, whom he hasn’t thought about much while in Europe, and the other is that he’s in love with some Italian woman named La. Thing is, La isn’t real—or is she? Mark has never met La (short for La Femme, and doesn’t sound like ammo for allegory) in person, yet he’s seen her and heard her voice with such clarity—more vividly than one would expect in dreams. Strangely, when Mark thinks of La, the latter does not speak English like you’d expect in a fantasy, but in her native tongue. Mark thinks this is just a symptom of being away from home so long. “He had not seen an English-speaking woman in so long that even the image of La spoke Italian.” Even so, he’s unsure if what he’s dealing with is a product of his own imagination or something else.
Regardless, there’s a job to be done.
Taking a step aside here, as the plot is very simple, let’s talk about Miller’s background and how it justifies the existence of “Wolf Pack.” Like Mark, Miller was a bomber crewman during World War II; he flew over fifty missions and took part in the destruction of an Italian religious landmark: a Benedictine Abbey. Mark is also, like his creator, a Catholic, although it’s unclear if Mark is a convert like Miller or was raised in the faith but that part doesn’t really matter. For both character and author, the cost of war doesn’t seem to be just physical but metaphysical—the loss of mankind’s capacity to be in touch with something greater and more virtuous than itself. Even before we take off, in a “scarred and decrepit” ship called the Prince Albert, there’s a strong hint that Mark is on the verge of suffering a mental health crisis, a crisis of faith, or both. There’s a passage early on that gives us a vivid impression of Mark’s eroding mental state.
I am a machine, he thought. Or a part of a machine. A machine with five human parts geared in with the aluminum, glass, and steel. They screw us into our places and we function like pistons, or cogs, or vacuum tubes. We, who were five, become one, and that beats hell out of the Trinity.
Reading this I was genuinely unsure of when the fantastical element was gonna come into play, since this is after all a genre story. Mark has visions of an Italian woman whom he has probably never met, but this can be easily explained as fantasies—a coping mechanism to help Mark live with the fact that he could get shot down on his next flight, a whole ocean dividing him from his homeland. Indeed you can show “Wolf Pack” to someone without the pretense of reading genre fiction and they would be very unlikely to question it. Part of it has to do with the ambiguity of what’s happening to Mark, but we must also give Miller credit for being one of the finest wordsmiths in ’50s SFF. I assume not every short story he wrote was this poetic, but despite being obscure in an already overlooked oeuvre, “Wolf Pack” reads as deeply personal for Miller—something he wanted to get out there, and without half-assing it.
The plot is simple, sure, but the feelings involved are not. Mark seems to be on the verge of a violent religious awakening, yet like Miller he’s also deeply troubled; these are not men who think of belief in Jesus as saving their souls so much as preventing them from walking off a cliff. A Canticle for Leibowitz is beloved by many readers, most of whom are not Catholic, and I think the reason why the religiosity of that and Miller’s other works (for make no mistake, “Wolf Pack” is a profoundly Christian story) doesn’t alienate people is because it doesn’t pretend that such belief will instantly fix everything. This is not some evangelical preachfest that’s trying to convince people (or, more likely, to reinforce certain beliefs), but a work of art wherein the artist tries to make sense of something terrible that happened to him. It’s autobiographical to an extent, which, as I’ll discuss below, does not frame Miller’s mental health as being the healthiest.
There Be Spoilers Here
The V-shaped squad of bombers, the titular wolf pack, turns inland to do its run, narrowly avoiding “death-blossoms” of anti-air gunfire, and unbeknownst to Mark it’s already too late to turn back—not just from the mission but from something else the planes are about to do. There’s that feeling, that specific feeling you can only parse in French, that makes Mark’s nerves uneasy—because he’s been here before. This place is oddly familiar; not just the feeling of being in a cramped airplane with the same guys after a few dozen missions, but being here, over this land and this water specifically. He hears La again, only this time Mark knows this is not a dream—and that she hates him, for what he’s about to do, as part of his job. The implication here is that La is real, that she’s on the ground, and that she knows who Mark is. “He had flown this mission before. He knew about the lake, and it was the same lake. He knew about her language and her mannerisms. He knew down deep—who she was, and where she was, and what she was.” Mark breaks down and tries turning the plane around, only for his fellow crewmen to stop him—which makes sense from their perspective, since as far as they’re concerned Mark is having a mental breakdown.
And maybe he is.
La gets killed in the bombing run, assuming she really existed. We never get any concrete explanation or evidence as to how these two people could’ve come into contact, which might label “Wolf Pack” as an ambiguous fantasy; it’s certainly hard to argue for as science fiction. Still, Mark never hears La’s voice in his head again, and the ending sees him recovering as someone who suffered a case of “combat fatigue,” or what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We could choose to take Mark’s telepathic communication with La at face value, but it’s also easy to read the story as an extended metaphor for PTSD. If what happens in the story and what we know about Miller are to be taken into consideration, it’s easy to read the whole thing as anti-war, stating that war is not only destructive, but ungodly; it drives men to act against God’s will. For Miller, war, no matter how virtuous in its aims, is something that turns men into machines—into mechanized creatures that are no longer capable of spirituality. In a way it reminds me of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, which frames war as being inherently against Nature (which may as well be God for Malick) and thus horrific.
A Step Farther Out
Why “Wolf Pack” has not been picked up in the past half-century I don’t know; maybe because it’s such a downbeat story, even by Miller’s standards, or that it’s honestly hard to classify as fantastical literature. I’m not sure whether to count it as SF or fantasy myself. It could also be that there isn’t much SFF about World War II written after the fact and by actual World War II veterans, such that it stands out. This is a difficult story, far more of a downer and more depressing than what would’ve been the norm in early ’50s SFF—and yet it’s hard to imagine such a story being published at any other point in time. It has to be one of Miller’s most personal narratives, and yet it has been cited basically nowhere when people discuss Miller. I know few people read my blog, but I do know at least a couple editors in the business who read it, and this last message is for them: Find a way to bring “Wolf Pack” back into print, maybe via a themed anthology. It’s not the best story I’ve read all month (although it’s up there), but it’s the story that I feel most deserves to be rediscovered by modern readers.
(Cover by Richard Powers. Beyond Fantasy Fiction, September 1953.)
Who Goes There?
I’ve read a handful of short stories by Margaret St. Clair at this point, which I understand is not much, but every one of these has something memorable about it. St. Clair got started in the late ’40s and for little over a decade was one of the most prolific female writers in the field—until, so it seems, market forces changed. Although she lived a long life, St. Clair wrote little fiction after 1960, focusing more on novels (and not being a prolific novelist at that) while the intervals between short stories stretched into years. It’s a shame, because her formal talent with the short form is almost unmatched among ’50s SFF writers. “The Goddess on the Street Corner” caught my attention just from its title, but its inclusion in Beyond Fantasy Fiction (H. L. Gold’s short-lived fantasy sister magazine to Galaxy) gave me even more hope. Also, as is typical with St. Clair, this is indeed short and… bitter, actually. I struggled to come up with a review for a bit.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the September 1953 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction, which is on the Archive. “The Goddess on the Street Corner” has only been reprinted in English twice, in the St. Clair collection Change the Sky and Other Stories, and in the chunky anthology Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment (ed. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer). Both are very much out of print.
Enhancing Image
We start with an opening paragraph that I swear has a couple words missing due to a printing error (oh yes, the Gold magazines having shitty copy-editing, home sweet home), but once we get past that we’re introduced to Paul, a street bum, and a mysterious woman who clearly has a supernatural aura about her. It takes Paul a surprisingly short time to come to grips with the fact that the woman is the titular goddess—and that she’s a goddess who’s practically on her deathbed. Even so, a dying goddess has an unworldly beauty, and Paul, like any reasonable hetero man, offers to be her servant. If written today this would be the beginning of a beautiful BDSM relationship, but this is the ’50s so no dice. You think I’m joking, but their relationship quickly takes on a master/pet dynamic.
It’s not clearly immediately that Paul is a bum, but we soon discover the extent of his poverty, in that, being jobless, he get his blood drawn (apparently too often for the local nurse’s liking) for a quick buck. Not only is he single, but he doesn’t rwally have any friends aside from presumably his fellow street bums. The goddess does something unusual in that she asks Paul about his day, about his latest romantic outings, as if such information helps her—although the implication is that it does. The two do not form a romantic bond exactly, but it’s sort of like romance by proxy—except something even weirder happens. To satisfy his goddess’s wants, Paul walks around outside doing nothing in particular, only thinking up stories to tell that would satisfy her. At first I thought this was selfish on Paul’s part, but something to keep in mind that the dude is dead broke; he does not have the money to be asking girls out and eating at restaurants, although the goddess doesn’t seem to understand this.
With what I just said you may be expecting a “liar revealed” plot twist to occur, or for the goddess to call out Paul’s dishonesty; but no, she accepts every word he says without question… maybe because she can’t afford to take them for what they are. It’s depressing, and yet Paul is basically framed as doing right by indulging the goddess’s wants in her last days. If you’ve had elderly members of your family go into hospice or retirement homes, and they might not be all there mentally anymore, you or an older family member might make some shit up when talking to their elders so as to make them feel better, and the elders don’t question it. I remember when my paternal grandma was in retirement care and up to the end we acted like my other grandma (my mom’s mom) was still alive, though she had died a couple years prior. The two were friends, of course. What the old lady didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. Shit, that does sound bad.
I was expecting some commentary on how the Abrahamic religions have driven the old pagan faiths into exile, like in American Gods, and because the goddess is clearly of pre-Christian vintage, but it ended up being a steady downward spiral about a stranger trying to help a fellow stranger whose condition is terminal. The fantasy element reads as allegorical here, as the goddess comes of as an old but still beautiful woman whom Paul loves but is unable to satisfy directly, both becaue of a physical gap and because Paul lives in such abject poverty that he has to steal when he can. This is like if a character in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row were to, without even thinking twice about it, fall into an urban fantasy tale, although unlike Steinbeck St. Clair doesn’t seem interested in commenting on poverty so much as using a character’s class for the sake of the allegory.
There Be Spoilers Here
The ending is inevitable, and the “twist” is not much less inevitable. Personally I wouldn’t have saved the revelation that the goddess is Aphrodite until the end, because a) it reads as predictable, b) it’s given to us via the omniscient third-person narrator and not either of the characters, and c) the fact that this is the Greek goddess of love doesn’t matter as much as you would think. Sure, it relates to how the goddess wants to hear about Paul’s fabricated love life, but having the deity who’s dying for lack of followers be a love god strikes me as a bit on-the-nose. Does that make it any less depressing when Aphrodite finally goes and leaves Paul alone, destitute, and now an alcoholic? I have to say no.
A Step Farther Out
I feel a little bad about this one. I had read the story (very easily in one sitting) a couple days ago and then proceeded to not put any words to paper about it until the last minute. A minor case of writer’s block. It’s not that this is a bad story; quite the contrary, I was thinking about the implications of the ending long after reading it. Just that with St. Clair’s writing I feel like the quality of it speaks for itself, in a way that’s unencumbered with fancy language. “The Goddess on the Street Corner” is not even the most downbeat St. Clair story I’ve read, but it has an atmosphere that could easily give one the blues. It’s only ten pages long, but it’s not what I would recommend as a casual read. St. Clair can be merciless.
Philip K. Dick started out as a talented and prolific short story writer, honestly one of the field’s best given how old he was and the competition. Dick sold his first story in 1951 but would not get published until the following year (and with a different story), being broke, in his early twenties, having gotten kicked out of UC Berkley, and now getting the bright idea to try writing full-time. By the time of his death in 1982 he had written something like forty novels and 120 short stories, with about a quarter of those being published in 1953 alone. Dick wrote at a mile a minute, which means some of what he wrote was competent but only done to pay the bills. “Paycheck,” today’s story and one that quite shamefully I had never read until yesterday, is a case of Dick boiling the pot, as it were. Despite its banal title, this really is one of Dick’s best short stories. Not waiting to give my opinion on this; it’s just a lot of fun.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the June 1953 issue of Imagination, which is on the Archive. What’s shocking to me is that “Paycheck” has never been anthologized in English, and also that despite being printed in a long-defunked second-rate magazine it’s not in the public domain; if you wanna read it you’ll have to read a magazine scan or find a Dick collection that has it. The good news is that there are many Dick collections and “Paycheck” is likely to be in any one of them, most notably Ballantine’s The Best of Philip K. Dick and The Philip K. Dick Reader.
Enhancing Image
Jennings is your typical working man, now finishing his two-year contract as a mechanic at Rethrick Construction—only he can’t remember what had happened during those two years. Not a minute of it. Nothing about his job, not even what he did outside of his job in all that time. Turns out Jennings got his memory wiped by the company, standard procedure, nothing to see here. This is troubling in itself, but things only get weirder once Jennings receives his pay, which is supposed to be an envelope with 50,000 credits. (I assume this is supposed to equate to a lot for two years’ labor in 1953 money.) Another weird thing, and just as concerning: the money isn’t there. Apparently Jennings, after starting his contract, chose an alternative over the conventional payment, and rather conveniently Jennings doesn’t remember doing that either. Hmmm.
Inside the envelope are seven items which normally would have little to no value: “A code key. A ticket stub. A parcel receipt. A length of fine wire. Half a poker chip, broken across. A green strip of cloth. A bus token.” Why would Jennings, in the past, have picked these specific things over 50,000 credits that he really could’ve needed? This baffles Jennings post-memory wipe, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He gets caught up on how things have changed in the two years since the start of his contract. The US has become a bit more authoritarian, with the Security Police patrolling city streets and keeping a close eye on the populace. This is also a future where I guess commercial flight never took off and instead we have “inter-city rockets,” which is one of those funny things that shows Dick had several talents but predicting future tech is not one of them.
At least Kelly, the company secretary, is nice.
Jennings leaves his job with his trinkets and hardly a minute passes before he gets picked up by SP goons, who are very curious about what he did for Rethrick Construction. Not being much of a fighter, Jennings would tell the cops what he knows—if only he knew anything. The memory wipe seems to have been a security measure for Rethrick, with even its employees being shut off from secret doings. It’s unclear what the SP are gonna do with Jennings, since they can’t get much info out of him, but the outcome will probably be grim; therefore escape sounds like a good idea. Jennings reaches into his pocket and pulls out the wire—of just the right length and material to pick locks and hightail it out of the SP building. But to go where? The SP probably know where he lives. If he’s to survive he’ll have to become a fugitive, or return to Rethrick.
Ah, but that bus ticket…
Bus to where? Does it matter? Possibly. Two of the items have been used and so far they’ve been shockingly useful. Jennings in the past must’ve requested these items for a specific reason, except that Jennings in the present can only guess as to their purpose. Surely it can’t be a coincidence. Something I wanna point out is that “Paycheck” reads like a compressed novel; it’s 13,000 words, a hearty novelette, but there’s enough suspense here to fuel a whole novel, only Dick comes from a generation of SFF writers that doesn’t believe in wasting the reader’s time. The only reason it took me two days to get through it is because I’ve been working since Thursday, so my time has been limited. If I had a whole day to myself I would’ve blazed through “Paycheck” in one sitting. In less than ten pages we’re introduced to a flamboyant future America, a likeable protagonist who’s not movie star material but still talented, and a plot that, once it kicks into motion, never ceases to intrigue me. And we’re just getting started.
Jennings realizes that the only real choice he has is to return to Rethrick Construction—only he doesn’t even remember where his own workplace was; he had been taken to a separate building, far away from the actual plant, to receive his payment. At the very least if he can find where the plant is he might be able to get hired again and hide from the SP, as while the SP can do many things they cannot interfere with business unless there’s an exception. This is an action narrative, but there are still a few nuggets of commentary from Dick, including a rather incisive moment where Jennings ponders that in the modern world it’s no longer the separation between church and state that divides man, but the separation between state and business. “It was the Government against the corporation, rather than the State against the Church. The new Notre Dame of the world. Where the law could not follow.” This rings true especially in the present day, but keep in mind that in the years following World War II Dick and his contemporaries would’ve seen an intense expansion of commercialism in American life. Capitalism had started to hit the fast-forward button.
Of course, as far as both Jennings and Dick are concerned the government is a bigger threat to human freedom than some company, even if said company memory-wipes its employees so that they don’t snitch to the competition or some third party. The memory-wiping thing would probably be used for more foreboding ends if used in a modern narrative, but here it’s little more than a pretext for Jennings to have a conversation with his past self. I won’t say there’s time travel here, but without getting too much into spoilers just yet there is a reason why Jennings is able to use the items he gave himself just when and where he needs them. Clearly these items were obtained in the past, but there’s no way Jennings could have discerned their usefulness without clairvoyance—or a time machine. This raises another question: What the hell could Rethrick be building, especially since they’re so keen on secrecy? The plot only thickens more when Jennings catches up with Kelly, who may or may not be just a secretary.
One more thing before we barrel into the back end of the story. “Paycheck” was published in the June 1953 issue of Imagination, but it was probably written a full year earlier, during the height of McCarthyism. Some editors in the field were squeamish about publishing material that criticized McCarthy and other anti-communism fanatics, but some stories slipped through the cracks. Jennings and Kelly have a bit of an argument where Kelly says that anyone who’s against the SP must be on the side of good, to which Jennings says, “Really? I’ve heard that kind of logic before. Any one fighting communism was automatically good, a few decades ago.” Dick was not a leftist, but he did have several leftist friends; in some ways he was a fellow traveler, although he did have hangups like his misogyny and anti-abortion stance. “Paycheck” does not indulge in misogyny like some other Dick narratives: Jennings is a bachelor, so minus the shrewish wife (or ex-wife) often found in Dick’s works, and Kelly, while not a three-dimensional character, is by no means a pushover.
There Be Spoilers Here
Using the parcel receipt to find the town where the plant is probably near and the green strip of cloth to disguise himself as a plant worker (well, he was a plant worker, after all, if only in the past tense), Jennings is able to retrace his steps and infiltrate the Rethrick plant, which of course is set in the middle of fucking nowhere—like a nuclear testing site. The narrative, which had hints of espionage up to this point, becomes practically a spy thriller once Jennings gets inside the plant with hopes of acquiring photos of schematics and blueprints. He has a theory about what’s being built here, but he needs to know—which might well spell his doom. Admittedly, and I have say unexpectedly, this section of the story is the least engrossing if I had to pick a weak spot, if only because this section reads like something out of a rather non-SF spy thriller and we already have a lot of those. Dick probably could’ve made more money writing spy thrillers, but he was too creative and thoughtful to be tied down like that.
This may be obvious to some, but Rethrick has in fact been working on a “time scoop,” or a time viewer as I’m gonna call it—a machine that can see into the future. “Like Berkowsky’s theoretical model—only this was real.” There are some questions that might arise when reading “Paycheck” if you stop and think, but the big one, how Jennings was able to predict his own future predicament, gets thoroughly answered. You may also be thinking, “If Rethrick has a time viewer then how come they haven’t been able to track Jennings’s movements?” Also answered: the time viewer had been sabotaged—by Jennings. The mad bastard snuck peeks at the machine and then fiddled with it such that even the company’s other top mechanics have so far been unable to get it working right again. His past self apparently had everything thought out; even the poker chip, broken in half, saves Jennings’s skin as he pretends to be a gambler who’s simply lost his way after curfew. Even the big twist, that Kelly is actually the daughter of Rethrick himself and that she planned to betray Jennings this whole time, gets accounted for. Is there anything this man cannot do…?
Turns out Rethrick is a family-owned business, with the ending implying that Jennings and Kelly will marry and that by extension Jennings will eventually take over the company. Kelly, despite being more loyal to her father than to Jennings, is implied to have had a fondness for Jennings when he worked at the plant; and even if that were not the case, I would be so impressed by Jennings’s gambit that I might just marry him anyway. Dick stories often have endings that are bleak, darkly comical, confusing, or all three at once, but “Paycheck” might have the most triumphant ending of any Dick story. I would gripe about the happy ending, as I did when I read Eye in the Sky and found that novel’s ending unconvincing, but here the victory had been alluded to almost from the beginning; indeed Jennings coming out on top is the point of the story. Dick wanted to write a story about how a man can save his own life, and even change it for the better, using everyday items that would seemingly be of no consequence; that he also wrote a great action narrative is the big cherry on top.
A Step Farther Out
Not sure if this is a hot take, but I think “Paycheck” deserved a Retro Hugo nomination more than “Second Variety.” In terms of Dick-penned action, “Paycheck” is a blockbuster only seriously topped by the second half of Ubik. Even when he’s unsure as to where a plot is going, Dick is supernaturally adept at pushing the reader from one set-piece to another with such swiftness that we can often forgive the inconsistencies—only “Paycheck” has to be one of the most tightly knit of Dick’s short stories. In a way it’s a power fantasy par excellence, pitting an unassuming but quick-witted man against a system that struggles to keep up with his maneuvers; in another way it has commentary that foreshadows Dick’s novels while also just so happening to feature a level of badassery that’ll have you cheering. Can’t wait to see how the Ben Affleck movie fucks it all up.
A favorite returns. I reviewed a bunch of Fritz Leiber works last December in time for his birthday, which was a decision I both do and do not regret. It’s demanding to binge an author’s stuff like I did, but the good thing about Leiber is that he’s versatile enough that you can hop around his career and find him in different modes: Fritz Leiber the science-fictionist, Fritz Leiber the adventure fantasist, Fritz Leiber the master of urban horror, etc. He made his genre debut in 1939 and for the next half-century would prove to be one of the most reliable writers of his generation, rivaled (in my opinion) only by Theodore Sturgeon and Clifford D. Simak; and of the three, Leiber is the one I enjoy most for the sheer beauty of his prose. Sturgeon can be overwrought, but Leiber has a hard time writing a bad sentence just ignore The Wanderer, all while showing humor and social awareness. Nowadays Leiber does not get as much credit as he deserves, with his fantasy series starring Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (incidentally the stars of his debut story) being almost as integral to the formation of American fantasy as Conan—yet so few people bring up these two lovable rogues now.
The early ’50s were an amazing time for science fiction, but not so much for fantasy. There were several attempts to start up hot new fantasy magazines and none of them worked out, folding within a couple years at the most. It’s telling that The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction started out as just The Magazine of Fantasy, but then changed its title after one issue. “The Seven Black Priests” would be the last Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story for four years, and most curiously it saw print in Other Worlds, which was very much an SF magazine. Leiber struggled to get the series published for much of its existence, given that it was a) adventure fantasy, b) rather low fantasy (in that magic doesn’t play much of a part in the world), and c) heavily reliant on short fiction, what with fantasy readers having an irrational fondness for novels that are bloated and meandering.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the May 1953 issue of Other Worlds. “The Seven Black Priests” has never really been anthologized, but it has been collected a couple times and because it’s a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story it’s been available more or less consistently for the past half-century. The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser volume it’s included in, Swords Against Death, is still in print and is available in ebook and paperback from Open Road Media (if you hate yourself and don’t wanna buy an older edition).
Enhancing Image
We start with Our Heroes™ licking their wounds from having lost the loot of a previous adventure; because I haven’t read every Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story I can’t tell if said adventure is from another story or if it’s just something Leiber made up. Anyway, Leiber assumes, given the episodic nature of the series, that we might not’ve run into the best buddies from Lankhmar before, so we’re reintroduced to Fafhrd and the Mouser, the Mouser “clad all in close garments of gray, even to the hood which shadowed his swart features but could not conceal their pug-nosed impudence,” and Fafhrd, “a huge man with wrists thick as a hero’s ankles, yet lithe withal.” Fafhrd is a barbarian, a red-headed giant from a perpetually cold climate, while the Mouser is the short but quick thief. While they fit into RPG character classes, these are individuals who are difficult to confuse with other fantasy characters, especially from that period.
Speaking of cold, the two rogues are now in the Cold Waste, a wintery landscape that’s about as far from Lankhmar and civilization generally as one can get—only, despite appearances, Our Heroes™ are not alone. Within a couple pages we’ve gotten our first action scene, which indeed gets an interior illustration (courtesy of Michael Becker), as the Mouser faces off with a scrawny but feisty man, who goes toe to toe with the well-armed Mouser with just a knife and loincloth. The man is charcoal-black, although the boys suspect at first he might’ve gotten that complexion from the intense coldness of the area. Our Heroes™ send this knive-wielding lunatic tumbling to his death, but there’s an odd glow at the bottom of that dark pit that makes them uneasy; the man might not be dead after all. The boys continue on their way, not wanting to pay the incident too much mind, but “at least one other eye had seen the pulsing glow—an eye as large as a squid’s and bright as the Dog Star.” We may have to worry about more than just the black priests of the story’s title!
The Cold Waste is mostly snow and frozen vegetation, but there’s also a volcano that provides a bit of heat, along with a green hill by the volcano that houses what the black priests are obsessed over. The boys find, on that green hill, a strange idol with words in an ancient and mostly unknown language, along with (most relevant to our treasure hunters) an eye-like gem that is sometimes described as a diamond but which can’t really be one; it would, however, go for a fair price on the market. This whole thing gives off Indiana Jones vibes and personally I would not touch the damn thing, but given that Our Heroes™ are dead broke, the gem will have to do—even minding the priests who are eager to retrieve it. A couple things to note: there’s a long and not-talked-about-enough marriage between colonialism and treasure-hunting, which if you’re a buzzkill who can’t enjoy well-made entertainment would make characters like Indiana Jones and Nathan Drake less sympathatic. Fafhrd and the Mouser steal something which is not theirs, and it doesn’t help that the priests are from Klesh, a jungle-filled country that’s implied to be African-equivalent.
Leiber narrowly avoids turning the adventure into something that might be deemed too problematic, but I’ll say for now that at least the priests are not described in demeaning language that would normally be reserved for stereotyped black characters; they are, however, the butt of a couple jokes about clerics, which is more understandable. I’m not sure if Leiber was an atheist (he probably was), but there’s some playful ribbing of organized religion here that serves as both entertainment and which illustrates Our Heroes™ as anti-establishment. One of my favorite recurring elements of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories (and this applies to Conan as well) is that hierarchical figures are always viewed as, at best, aloof and untrustworthy. Fafhrd and the Mouser are always looking out for themselves and each other, and maybe their girlfriends if they happen to have those, but they don’t serve any particular authority figure.
For shits and giggles, here’s my favorite exchange:
“The seven black priests— ” Fafhrd muttered.
“The six,” the Mouser corrected. “We killed one of them last night.”
“Well, the six then,” Fafhrd conceded. “They seem angry with us.”
“As why shouldn’t they be?” the Mouser demanded. “We stole their idol’s only eye. Such an act annoys priests tremendously.”
It’s a funny.
“The Seven Black Priests” is the shortest Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story I’ve covered for this site thus far, and it’s both the simplest and most abstract. There aren’t any named characters aside from the boys, and indeed the only actors are the boys and the priests—plus a third party I’ve alluded to but whom I will not get deep into until the next section. The Cold Waste is a bit of a unique location because of the juxtaposition of the snowy landscape with the volcano, but the closest we get to shelter are caves. The plot is also pretty simple, with it being a protracted fight over a gem which itself may or may not have plans of its own. Normally I have a hard time following action in writing, but of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories I’ve covered I actually think this one is the easiest to get invested in if you’re not familiar with the series already; it’s a novelette, so it’s not exactly short, but it’s straightforward and because it has a small cast it shows Our Heroes™ doing what they do best without need for prior knowledge.
There Be Spoilers Here
Fafhrd was the one to take the gem, and since then he’s been acting a little weird at night; as if possessed he talks in a way that’s totally out of character for him, which should send the Mouser warning signs but because this story has to go on a bit longer the Mouser decides to not do anything about it for the time being. Given the known presence of supernatural objects in the world of the series I would’ve just assumed the gem that’s supposed to represent some ancient and evil god is haunted as shit, but that’s just me. One by one the priests get killed off, yet that doesn’t remove the problem of what to do with the gem, which as the story progresses compels Fafhrd to do things that strike the Mouser as unusual. It’s implied from the hieroglyphs on the idol that the priests have journeyed to the Cold Waste to pay respects to their god and prevent it from causing unspeakable mayhem, which if you put it that way makes the boys sound like the real villains, although a) the priests attacked first, and b) the boys could not have known initially what powers the gem had. Sometimes treasure is just treasure.
By the climax of the story it’s become clear that the gem plans to use Fafhrd as its puppet and kill the Mouser to complete its ritual, for “it needs the blood of heroes before it can shape itself into the form of man.” The Mouser is ultimately left with a choice: kill Fafhrd and take the gem for himself, or spare Fafhrd but destroy the gem. It’s a pretty easy choice on paper, actually. What makes Fafhrd and the Mouser heroic is not the fact that they do sometimes save people’s skins, but it’s that their love for each other always pulls them through in the end. Aside from its anti-authority stance, I find myself going back to the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories because they present a harsh low fantasy world where friendship redeems. You could even say that, for Our Heroes™, friendship is magic. Leiber rejects the toxic notion that men, in order to prove their “manliness,” must be ruthless and self-serving, instead giving us two undoubtedly masculine men who nevertheless unabashedly love each other. The Mouser destroys the gem and thus kills the mad god who had haunted the Cold Waste for centuries, but more importantly he does it for the sake of his best friend. Unlike most fantasy, male friendship is shown to be a magical power, even for two rogues who are no more wizardly than you and me.
A Step Farther Out
It’s a fun time! Yeah, I don’t have too much to add. This is the shortest and simplest Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story covered thus far and it certainly feels like that. “The Seven Black Priests” must’ve seemed like an odd choice for Other Worlds readers, but it must’ve also been like a puddle in a desert for those who liked heroic fantasy and, in the early ’50s, were getting precious little of it. While it’s not as ambitious as some of the other Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories I’ve read, or even reviewed, Leiber rarely disappoints with this series and he’s a wordsmith the likes of which we rarely see in old-school genre fiction. It’s guys being dudes in an exotic locale and there’s nothing wrong with that.
(Cover by Jack Coggins. Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1953.)
Who Goes There?
I don’t know what to make of Philip José Farmer, but in my defense his peculiar place in SF history is partly what has secured his legacy. It’d be easy to say Farmer is a New Wave author, but he’s a whole generation older than the New Wavers and indeed his roots are distinctly pre-New Wave, despite getting started late as a writer. Farmer was already in his thirties when his debut story “The Lovers” was published in the August 1952 issue of Startling Stories, and apparently readers went nuts over it. There was nothing in terms of content (although not style) that quite matched “The Lovers,” as it was rejected by both Astounding and Galaxy for its graphic (for the time) depiction of romance between a human man and an alien woman who appears human enough. Samuel Mines, editor of Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, knew he had found a special talent, and Farmer’s first few stories (mostly in Mines’s magazines) led him to winning the Hugo (although nowadays it would be the Astounding Award) for Best New Author. In hindsight this can read as a bit odd, considering Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley debuted the same year as Farmer, but the old saying that sex sells was and continues to be true.
The author spotlight for today’s story, “Mother,” labels it as Farmer’s second story, although this would not have been true unless it was the second story Farmer had sold—which is quite possible. Mines singles out “Mother” as being even more transgressive than “The Lovers,” and despite the latter being more famous I think Mines is right; not only does it go into more devious territory than “The Lovers,” it’s also the better story! This is a well-structured and more engrossing tale of first contact, and I’m about to explain why it works in conjunction with Farmer’s Oedipal hijinks.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the April 1953 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. I had first heard about “Mother” through its inclusion in the collection Strange Relations, not to be confused with the omnibus of the same title that also includes The Lovers (the novel version) and Flesh. I’ve read The Lovers and Flesh but not any of the stories in Strange Relations, which seem thematically related. Because “Mother” is a very good story it has been reprinted quite a few times elsewhere, most notably in the Farmer tribute collections The Best of Philip José Farmer and The Philip José Farmer Centennial Collection. If you like chunky anthologies there’s also The Science Fiction Century (ed. David G. Hartwell).
Enhancing Image
Paula Fetts and her son Eddie start out as the only survivors of a crash, and things only get worse from there. Paula is a scientist while Eddie, who must be at least in his twenties despite early descriptions of him (more on this later), is a famous opera singer. As with any mother-son relationship where the former pampers the latter, the son is a little maladjusted. Had Eddie lived in pre-Freudian times he could’ve lived the rest of his life as a shameless mama’s boy, but this is modernity and Farmer knows that such juicy material should not be passed up. Eddie is a bit of a hot mess, but Paula, wanting to stay close to her boy, pulls some strings so that her son can accompany her on this latest expedition to a charted but uncolonized planet, on the basis that Eddie’s expertise in opera could be used to study the form on human colonies. “That the yacht was not visiting any colonized globes seemed to have been missed by the bureaus concerned.” There are sprinkles of humor throughout the story and they’re surprisingly effective. For example, the sheer morbidity of Eddie not liking to clean up the gibbed remains of the crew (quite literally bones and tissue from the impact) because he doesn’t like the sight of blood.
Eddie is, at least symbolically, a child in a man’s body.
The expedition ends before it can even start, with Paula and Eddie being left stranded on the alien planet and with only some portable tech and rations to keep them going. While we’re still at this very early part in the story, before we get to the aliens themselves, I wanna talk about Paula and how interesting she is in terms of her function in the narrative. It was rare for a woman to be the protagonist of an SF story at the time, especially in the adventure mode as with “Mother,” and true enough Paula ends up not filling the protagonist role; she’s undoubtedly smart and competent, but we’re only gonna be in her shoes for a minute before the narrative’s perspective changes profoundly and Paula is, quite intentionally, pushed off-stage. It’s also this opening section that the story is at its most conventional before it goes off the rails (in a good way), with Our Heroes™ using radio to try to find some beacon on the planet; but it’s not too long before they unwittingly get themselves ensnared by the story’s real star.
Eddie and Paula get separated, with the POV now suddenly changing to Eddie’s, with the man-child being trapped in what resembles a huge egg turned on its side, the interior of which feels “soft and yielding—something fleshlike and womanly—almost breastlike in texture and smoothness and warmth, and its hint of gentle curving.” Farmer does not beat around the bush much here. (Also, take a shot every time Farmer uses the word “flesh” and its variants.) At first unsure of his surroundings, Eddie comes to find that he’s inside a very large and very motherly alien, itself unable to move but having tentacles so as to have a good reach both inside and outside. These aliens, which resemble boulders on the outside, hence Our Heroes™ not being aware of their nature at first, are in fact highly intelligent and communicative creatures, with the Mother (with a capital M) Eddie’s inside of even being able to talk to him via Eddie’s radio tech. The Mothers talk in a certain frequency, like they’re FM radio sets, which will prove to bode both good and ill for the humans.
The Mothers are the things on which the story hinges, so let’s talk about them. Often writers struggle (or simply don’t try at all) to create aliens that are not just humanoids with blue skin and funny ears, even though, in terms of probability, we’re far more likely to encounter alien life that’s akin to either starfish or an amoeba. Farmer seemed aware of this from the beginning, as the tragedy of “The Lovers” relies on the alien woman appearing to be more humanoid than she really is; but “Mother” goes a step farther by speculating on how a human might mate with an alien that, while sentient, does not look or behave like a human at all. The Mothers are a single-sex race in that all of the Mothers are female; there are no males of the species—not even disposable things that exist as sperm banks. How do the Mothers reproduce, then? Well, these aliens catch males of other species, only they’re not thought of as males, but as “mobiles.” A mobile, to a Mother, is a male, who will spend time in the egg chamber before getting devoured and released into the environment where the cycle will begin anew. “Mobiles were male. Eddie had been mobile. He was, therefore, a male.” This would intrigue if I found it in a story published in the current year, but for something published seventy years ago it’s kind of astonishing.
Okay, so Eddie and Paula will at some point get eaten by their Mothers, but think also about how I said that the Mothers aren’t exactly discerning about what is male and female. Paula is being kept in a fellow Mother and is apparently acting as that Mother’s mate, but while this can be construed as lesbianism on the Mother’s part, the Mother does not register Paula as being female. It’s almost like gender lines are blurry or something. That Farmer was messing around with this in 1953 should earn him a medal (it did get him a Hugo), but that he did so while showing that in only a matter of months he had matured as a storyteller gets him my respect. “Mother” is a novelette, nearly twenty magazine pages, but it feels shorter somehow, even though there’s little action once Eddie gets trapped inside the Mother. The degree to which Farmer explores the alien mindset of the Mothers while also injecting this with humor is admirable.
There Be Spoilers Here
Eddie has spent enough time in the Mother by now that he’s almost become accustomed to it; he has even given his Mother a name, Polyphema, as a sort of mythology gag. Eddie and Polyphema are able to understand each other somewhat, but there were still the problems of a) contacting Paula, and b) escaping. The first gets solved when Eddie’s able to negotiate with Polyphema and talk with Paula from across the aisle, so to speak. While the humans will eventually be eaten as Nature demands, being “semantic” mobiles (in that they’re able to talk with their Mothers) gives their respective Mothers significant prestige among their peers. (Again, while the Mothers are unable to move, they can communicate across considerable distances, and are thus quite talkative, even catty at times.) Paula has a plan to get out of her own Mother (she has no qualms about killing an intelligent alien being that is simply acting according to its nature) soon enough, but Eddie still has to figure a way to get away from Polyphema.
Unfortunately for everyone a bit of miscommunication comes in to deprive of us a happy (i.e., boring) ending. Without thinking Eddie tells Polyphema that Paula, the mobile in the neighboring Mother, is his mother. The mobile is herself female, which strikes Polyphema as a paradox. “Her world was split into two: mobile and her kind, the immoble. Mobile meant food and mating. Mobile meant—male. The Mothers were—female.” When Paula does come Eddie’s way, Polyphema takes her and devours her almost instantly, in which has to be the story’s most shocking moment—even if I anticipated something like this happening. What shocked me even more was the very dark joke to follow Paula’s death, which actually had me cackling a bit. I’m not gonna say it here because it would feel ruined without the proper buildup, but when you see you might feel compelled to do a double take. Farmer can be a real comedian when he feels like it.
Having lost his real mother, and without any chance of escape, let alone finding civilization again, something strange happens to Eddie: he starts to regress, not just mentally but even physically. The longer Eddie stays with the Sluggos (i.e., the pups, who will one day become Mothers themselves) in Polyphema’s sack the more alien he becomes.
He was, in a sense, their father. Indeed, as they grew to hog-size, it was hard for their female parent to distinguish him from her young. As he seldom walked any more, and was often to be found on hands and knees in their midst, she could not scan him too well. Moreover, something in the heavywet air or in the diet had caused every hair on his body to drop off. He grew very fat. Generally speaking, he was one with the pale, soft, round, and bald offspring. A family likeness.
At the beginning of the story a nearby clock goes backwards in time when the ship crashes—doesn’t stop, but goes back. Farmer brings back this little nugget of symbolism at the end when Eddie, having seemingly met the end of his tether, goes back in time in nearly every way possible—back, even, to being like an infant in his mother’s womb. I knew in advance that “Mother” would end with the human protagonist inside an alien womb, in a Freudian returning-to-the-womb bit, but having actually read it now, the context makes the ending much more effective; it even becomes eerie, although given the alternatives the ending could be worse for Eddie. While having lost his real mother, Eddie is able to leave behind the psychic trauma of human adulthood and will probably now spend the rest of his days in the care of an alien surrogate—one who also happens to be the mother of his children. And they say old SF is unsophisticated.
A Step Farther Out
“Mother” feels like a breath of fresh air especially after the last Farmer story I had read, which was “Don’t Wash the Carats,” a New Wave-era story from one of those goddamn Orbit volumes that I found nigh unreadable hippie garbage. I’m not against hippie-dippy literature and I’m not even against Farmer when he does it necessarily, being one of the few people in the world who likes “Riders of the Purple Wage,” but I just like my literature to read like it was deliberately constructed. Not only is “Mother” deliberately constructed but it shows that Farmer was on to some weird shit at a time when most genre authors were playing by the old rules. Its style is pulpy, yes, but it’s clearly written in the adventure mode so as to more effectively subvert expectations we have about old-school first contact narratives. Tts subject matter also points toward a grand liberalization of the field that had neither a name nor a shape yet… but it was on its way.
(Cover by Virgil Finlay. Weird Tales, March 1953.)
Who Goes There?
When it comes to authors I’ve never read before I always feel a bit nervous when writing this section, because I have to give some context for an artist whose work I have next to no context for. This was not even gonna be my first Mary Elizabeth Counselman story, as I had planned at some point to cover her back in March as part of my Weird Tales tribute, but plans change and now I can’t even remember who I replaced her with. It’s a shame, because while she doesn’t get brought up as nearly as often as H. P. Lovecraft or even C. L. Moore, Counselman was clearly loyal to Weird Tales in its first incarnation, continuing to get published in it up to the bitter end. Doubly a shame because the first Counselman story I ended up reading, todays’ pick, is rather dull, and I don’t have much to say about it—although there are a few points of interest I’ll be sure to write about here. What the hell, I’m not getting paid to do any of this, and this work will not redeem me, nor will it probably turn me into a more understanding person.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. I was surprised to find “Night Court” has been reprinted several times, most notably in Witches’ Brew: Horror and Supernatural Stories by Women (ed. Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini) and Great American Ghost Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Frank D. McSherry, and Charles G. Waugh). It’s definitely a ghost story, but I wouldn’t call it great.
Enhancing Image
We follow Bob: Korean War veteran, 22-year-old husband-to-be, mostly upstanding citizen, and a bit of an asshole. Bob has the very bad habit of reckless driving—not road rage exactly, but an immense carelessness that, we’re told, has gotten him into big trouble a couple times already. If not for a certain family connection in the local legal system Bob would probably be seeing jail time, but thanks to a powerful uncle he just once again got no more than a slap on the wrist for running over an elderly black man (these are not the words used in-story, mind you). Unluckily for Bob, but perhaps for future potentials victims of his behavior on the road, Bob is about to take a detour against his will… into the Twilight Zone.
Jokes aside, this does read like it could be adapted (and perhaps elevated) into a classic Twilight Zone episode, although more because of its structure and moralism than the quality of the thing. Bob is a one-note character, a good-for-nothing who exists in the context of the story to be taught a lesson, but even so there are a couple things about him that struck me. For one, I’ve read a good deal of ’50s SFF at this point, and shockingly little of what I’ve read directly mentions the Korean War; indeed the only SFF author I can think of off the top of my head who’s a Korean War veteran would be Jerry Pournelle. Mind you that the cease fire would not be declared until several months after “Night Court” was published, so this was very much an ongoing conflict when Counselman wrote it. Also, making the villain protagonist of your story a military veteran pre-Vietnam is certainly a choice. Bob talks about how he’s supposedly a hero for “killing fourteen North Koreans” but is labeled a hazard for accidentally killing a couple people on the road. He may have PTSD, but this is sadly not elaborated upon.
After seemingly having run over a little girl whilst rushing to meet up with his fiancée, Bob gets pulled over by a highway patrolman—only this is not a normal man, going by appearances, his thick goggles obscuring his eyes but also giving him an almost skeletal look. “Bob squirmed under the scrutiny of eyes hidden behind the green glass; saw the lips move… and noticed, for the first time, how queerly the traffic officer held his head.” The officer’s neck is craned as if it had been broken or mangled, yet surely the officer still lives. Things only get weirder (although not that weird) when the officer, ignoring the girl under Bob’s car, takes Bob in to be judged at the night court—which is like normal court but sPoOoOoKy. We have, by this point, pretty thoroughly left the confines of everyday reality, hence the Twilight Zone comparison, although once I realized what kind of story this was I have to admit my mind sort of went on autopilot from hereon out.
I knew nothing about “Night Court” going into it other than that it would be a tale of the supernatural, entailing some kind of judgment, and these were not incorrect assumptions! Unfortunately what I got was also a PSA on how you should watch where you’re going on the road, and it’s like… I get it, this was back before we even had seat belt laws; cars were little more than metal death traps. At the same time, I’m legally blind, so I don’t have a driver’s license, let alone a car myself. You may recall in high school how you were taught about the perils of drunk driving and texting on your phone while driving, that sort of thing. As someone who is faaaaaaaar more likely to be the victim of a hit-and-run than a perpetrator, I feel qualified to say that while this is an important lesson to learn when you’re young in the real world, it does not make for compelling storytelling. We learn that the people overseeing Bob’s trial in the night court are all victims of auto accidents, including the old man he had recently killed, and I get that this makes sense—I just don’t find it that interesting or worthy of study.
In 1953 this was probably seen as more necessary to get across in writing, but after decades of TV PSAs I think we’ve moved well past the point where a story like “Night Court” feels worthy of note.
There Be Spoilers Here
I will say, though, that the twist was not one I was expecting. You would expect the girl Bob had run over to appear at the night court as his most recent victim, but actually the girl does not exist—yet. The judge says that the girl will be born years from now, and if Bob doesn’t change his ways then he will kill this girl somewhere down the line. This gets a single golf clap from me. Less interesting is that said girl is implied to be Bob’s future daughter at the very end, which I don’t think is a necessary touch. I was expecting the story to end in a more predictable but tragically ironic way, like Bob promising to better himself only to get killed in an accident by another reckless driver, but the ending we got was anti-climatic by comparison; not as predictable, true, but it also left me feeling a little empty. Maybe Counselman had become weary of conventional twist endings? I would’ve gone for something more gruesome is what I’m saying.
A Step Farther Out
Not that all ghost stories have to be scary, but when I’m reading one I expect to feel something in connection with the supernatural; not always fear, but often an uncertainty, a sense of mystery at the unexplainable. The Turn of the Screw is not what I would call scary, but it is effective and memorable as a psychological study and as an extended metaphor—a metaphor for what we’re not so sure about. For “Night Court” I felt either detached or a little annoyed at the preachiness of it, which strikes me as old-timey even for 1953. It’s not scary or eerie, certainly, but it also reads like Counselman is wagging her finger at the reader and expecting us to take an important life lesson away from it. I usually don’t like moralism in my fiction (which is funny, given I’m a big Twilight Zone fan), but I’m willing to forgive that if the message is given a humane (not to say delicate) touch—only “Night Court” is not in touch with what I would call the pains of the human condition.
The years immediately following World War II saw a profound uptick in humor in science fiction—at least that which was published in the magazines. Almost overnight we went from hard-nosed narratives about scientists solving puzzles to inept military men and Joe the plumber getting more than what they bargained for with whatever the problem of the week was. We saw some very fine court jesters come to prominence in the post-war period, including C. M. Kornbluth, William Tenn, and of course, Robert Sheckley. While he hit the ground running in 1952, submitting to every outlet under the sun, Sheckley quickly became Galaxy‘s comedian of choice, especially during the H. L. Gold years. The two were a perfect match for each other, what with Gold’s desire for more urbane SF and Sheckley being perhaps the most aggressively urbane writer in the field then.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the February 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. As is typical of early Galaxy, this isssue is stacked, with “A Saucer of Loneliness” by Theodore Sturgeon, “Four in One” by Damon Knight, and the last installment of Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak (I’ll review this last one eventually) being other notable picks. “Watchbird” was soon included in Sheckley’s first collection, Untouched by Human Hands, and nowadays you can find it in the collection Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, which has a fancy NYRB edition. Most importantly, for those of you who are too lazy and/or don’t have the cash to spare, “Watchbird” fell out of copyrgith at some point and is available to read perfectly legit on Project Gutenberg, found here.
Enhancing Image
We’re gonna keep this relatively short and snappy, aight?
The central question that kicks off the story is that of murder. Police may be able to catch a suspect in a murder, but they can’t prevent a murder. Solution? Create a machine that can detect acts of aggression from a distance and intercept before a murder can be committed. Gelsen, the closest we have to a protagonist, is a government contractor who helps in the production of “watchbirds,” which are small flying machines that, while not self-aware, are programmed to comprehend a definition of “murder” and to act according to that definition. Of course this is a government initiative, since while the people in the story are not too bright, they’re at least smart enough to know that such a contraption should not be left in the hands of the “free” market. “Like the telephone service, it was in the public’s best interests. You couldn’t have competition in watchbird service.” Thus the US is essentially split into provinces for watchbird manufacturers, all being connected to the federal government but each having a sphere of control.
We’re gonna be following a lot of characters, most of whom are nameless, but Gelsen is the closest to realizing he’s in a Robert Sheckley story; he has a bad feeling that the watchbirds will do more than what was intended, although tragically he’s unable to articulate how this would happen. As I said, the watchbirds are robots, and not terribly intelligent at that; they are, however, able to learn—but not in the way that humans learn things. Because watchbirds are able to communicate with each other over long distances, without input from any human central control, what one watchbird learns will quickly get to others. What happens, then, when a watchbird expands the definition of murder? They all expand the definition of murder—into a shape that the human creators did not anticipate. This is what we might call a comedy of errors, and as is typical with Sheckley, “Watchbird” is very much a comedy, albeit with a lot of death and destruction.
If you’ve read enough Sheckley (and you don’t have to read too much to get the point) then you know he’s a big fan of the “science gone amok” type of narrative, wherein human inventors, apparently lacking common sense, fail to consider the ramifications of their new creation. The purpose of a watchbird is to stun what it perceives as an aggressor before the aggressor can commit murder—but what constitutes aggression? Just as importantly, the watchbird is supposed to help potential human victims, but this turns out to be too narrow a definition for the dumb robots. Watchbirds, while being designed to prevent murder, are also not opposed to killing people by way of omission; they do not consider, for one, that stunning an elderly person or someone with a weak heart might kill them. At first this goes unnoticed. The watchbirds seem to be doing their job, which mind you does not include other types of crime. “Of course, there were still robberies. Petty thievery flourished, and embezzlement, larceny, forgery and a hundred other crimes.” But the murder rate’s gone down! For now…
Gelsen is the closest we have to a protagonist, true, but he doesn’t do much—not that he can do much. The meat of “Watchbird” is the several micro-plots wherein random people are thwarted or ruined by watchbird intereference, including a hitman who’s killed without his would-be victim even being aware of it, a doctor who is forced to watch his patient die because a watchbird mistakes the doctor’s operating for aggression, and other one-off plots that function to show the watchbirds’ evolution—or rather their increased mangling of their prime directive. It’s all morbid and chuckle-worthy, but what’s important in a storytelling context is that Sheckley does not waste time at all here; his prose is on the extreme beige side, with people and places getting basically no description at all. The result is that this is a dialogue-heavy story where the action is conveyed in short bursts. A. E. van Vogt had in mind that a scene should be around 800 words and contain a plot complication; for Sheckley the wordage seems to be boiled down to 300 words a scene. The action escalates quickly, from normalcy to the watchbirds killing almost as many people as they’re saving.
This turns out to be only the beginning.
There Be Spoilers Here
Soon the watchbirds stop trying to prevent the “murder” of just humans. First living animals, then later electrical items like cars and radios—and the watchbirds themselves. The watchbirds come close to achieving sentience but don’t quite get there, which almost feels like a subversion of the classic “robot magically becomes self-aware” trope. These robots fail to understand, for one, that cars are not killed when they’re turned off—that cars are not, in fact, living things. As I said, watchbirds do not comprehend killing via omission (as opposed to commission), thus they don’t realize that by preventing farmers from harvesting crops they’re forcing millions of people to starve. Things escalate to the point where the US’s ecosystem falls into dire jeopardy, with watchbirds preventing predators from killing prey and hunters from killing the hunted. Even killing plant life for the sake of agriculture becomes murder in the eyes of the watchbirds. “No one had told the watchbirds that all life depends on carefully balanced murders.” Again the watchbirds eventually take themselves to be living things, but they lack the intelligence to go against their programming—they can only expand the parameters of their programming and then act on it.
Now, I’m not sure what Sheckley believes in. A gripe I have with the guy is that while he’s a good satirist, it’s hard to get a read on what he’s advocating and even what he’s really against, to the point where it can read as nihilism. I can assume that Sheckley is against the death penalty, but I don’t know that, nor can I really gauge that from reading this story. The watchbirds at first stop a guy from being fried in the electric chair (cool) but later prevent a doctor from saving a patient’s life (not so cool). Aside from a general message about hubris and failing to take into account the consequences of invention I’m not sure if a deeper reading is possible. It doesn’t help that I more or less anticipated the ending, which actually reminded me of an even earlier Sheckley story, “The Leech,” wherein (SPOILERS) the human protagonists find a short-term solution to the problem—only for it to be implied that said solution will cause an even bigger problem in the long run. Sheckley wrote a lot, so naturally he’d resort to a formula.
A Step Farther Out
It’s easy to stereotype early Galaxy as being full of witty satires on post-war American life, and admittedly Sheckley’s work doesn’t help with that; but if you can get past the fact that the humor is of its time, “Watchbird” is a pretty entertaining yarn. Despite being one of Sheckley’s longer early stories, it feels shorter than it is, with the rapid scene changes and punchy paragraphs constantly pushing the reader along until we’ve reached the foreboding climax. The joke does not overstay its welcome. It also helps that we avoid some of Sheckley’s nastier habits, such as his playful misogyny. “Watchbird” is a good introduction to Sheckley’s style but also the kind of SF humor that Gold wanted when Galaxy was at its peak.
At the beginning of Moby Dick you may recall that Ishmael looks for seafaring jobs whenever he gets hit with one of his depressive episodes. “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul…” All that. I normally rotate through short stories, novellas, and serials for my reviews, but there are times when the latter two categories weary me deeply, and I wish to take a break from those more demanding tasks. Back in March I restricted myself to just short stories, and from the pages of Weird Tales more specifically. The timing felt right. I’ve come to realize that to alleviate myself of my review schedule I would do short stories only in March, July, and October of each year. Rest assured that I’ll be reviewing spooky stories for October, just like I did last year and will certainly do next year. But what about July? This is a question that’s been dogging me, because while my review roster for this past March had a theme to it, July proved more challenging.
Some months back I wrote an editorial on the state of SF in 1953, seventy years ago, and how it served as a high-water mark for the field, embodying the very height of the magazine boom—a level of fruitfulness that would not be matched until the 2010s. In the US alone there were over twenty SFF magazines running in 1953, versus less than half that a decade later. You could say the first half of the ’50s was one of the field’s summer periods, when there was this sense that life would never be this large again, nor would the market be this inclusive. It’s an argument I think is worth making, but now I think I’ll argue again—only this time by way of demonstration. We thus have nine short stories, all with 1953 dates, and all from different magazines. I couldn’t even include something from Astounding, which anyway was the least interesting of the Big Three™ at the time. I’m gonna be covering a nice mix of science fiction and fantasy, including a couple authors I’ve not read anything by before—plus a few old favorites.
The short stories are as follows:
“Watchbird” by Robert Sheckley. From the February 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. 1953 was a boom year for Sheckley, who had debuted in 1952 but who would amass a reputation and a large body of short fiction (something like thirty short stories) in his first full year as an author. Sheckley submitted to every outlet under the sun but he was particularly fond of Galaxy, to the point where he seemed to show up in every other issue of that magazine in the ’50s.
“Night Court” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman. From the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales. Yes, Weird Tales was still around at this point, even if it was no longer the leading magazine for short fantasy (then again, who was in the lead?). Counselman had debuted in Weird Tales a couple decades earlier and she was one of those authors who stayed loyal to it to the bitter end. I was ssupposed to read my first Counselman story back in March, but plans change. Now we start in earnest.
“Mother” by Philip José Farmer. From the April 1953 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Farmer came to the field late, already deep in his thirties, but his first story, “The Lovers” (the novella version), made an immediate splash and helped earn Farmer a special Hugo for most promising new writer. “The Lovers” was transgressive as far as ’50s pulp SF goes, and it’s not surprising that Farmer would later fit in with the New Wave writers, what with the sexual weirdness…
“The Seven Black Priests” by Fritz Leiber. From the May 1953 issue of Other Worlds. Leiber’s one of my favorites, and also one of the most consistent SFF writers of the ’50s and ’60s just ignore The Wanderer, having debuted in 1939 but staying strong almost to the end of his life. “The Seven Black Priests” is a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story, a sword-and-sorcery tale that oddly enough saw print in the SF-oriented Other Worlds. The early ’50s were not great for fantasy.
“Paycheck” by Philip K. Dick. From the June 1953 issue of Imagination. I know I covered him only a couple months ago, but what can I say, I’m a Dickhead. Like with Sheckley, Dick had debuted the previous year but really showed what he was made of in ’53, with about thirty short stories published that year and with some of them going on to be classics. As with a good deal of Dick’s work, “Paycheck” would serve as the basis for a (not very good from what I’ve heard) movie.
“Captive Audience” by Ann Warren Griffith. From the August 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. A certain aquaintance (cough cough) had pointed me toward this one. Griffith apparently wrote her fair share of mainstream fiction, but she only wrote two SFF stories, both in the early ’50s and both in the pages of F&SF. Curious how you’d see authors from outside the genre magazine bubble feel comfy with submitting to F&SF.
“The Goddess on the Street Corner” by Margaret St. Clair. From the September 1953 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction. St. Clair is a fairly recent discovery for me, and one who’s quickly becoming a favorite. In the ’50s she was one of the more gifted SFF short story writers—though sadly her sstories are often too short to spend a couple thousand words on. (It gets weird if the review’s length comes close to that of the story it’s covering.) This one does not look so slight.
“Wolf Pack” by Walter M. Miller, Jr. From the September-October 1953 issue of Fantastic. I could theoretically review all of Miller’s short fiction for this site, though that would take about twenty years at the rate I’m going. Miller is known now for A Canticle for Leibowitz, but he also left behind a fruitful body of short fiction (given this all happened in less than a decade). “Wolf Pack” is one of the more obscure stories in an already overlooked oeuvre; it looked appetizing.
“Little Girl Lost” by Richard Matheson. From the Octover-November 1953 issue of Amazing Stories. Matheson is a favorite of mine—and unlike most genre authors of his generation he would make it big as a screenwriter in Hollywood, working in the ’50s onward on a variety of projects from Roger Corman movies to Star Trek. “Little Girl Lost” was one of several Matheson stories adapted (by Matheson himself, in this case) into a classic Twilight Zone episode.
It’s not vacation, because I’ll still be reading and writing as usual, but I’ll be taking time off from novellas and serials. For those who are still in school, summer represents a time for hanging out with friends and going to the beach and whatnot; in other words, doing what you love most with the time you have. The art of the short story is a passion of mine and I wanna take the time to cover more that may be of interest.
Oh, and I changed the site’s name partially. The verbosity of the previous name was getting to me and I hungered for something more straightforward; that and this new one better matches the URL. Anyway…
