Tag: short story

Short Story Review: “Rabbit Test” by Samantha Mills

October 8th, 2025

(Cover by Maxine Vee. Uncanny, Nov-Dec 2022.)

Who Goes There?

Samantha Mills made her debut in 2012, although she didn’t start getting published regularly until 2018. As she says in an interview for (the sadly now-defunct) Fantasy Magazine, which you can read here:

Over the next few years, my attempts at novels improved rapidly, but short stories remained a mystery until 2017. I can’t fully describe what happened, but after a lot of reading it finally clicked, and I produced a few stories that worked, and I finally began submitting again.

By this point Mills had been out of college for about a decade, so if you’re at such-and-such an age and worried it might be too late to try your hand at getting published professionally, it probably isn’t.

I had said in my review forecast at the beginning of the month that Mills had probably written “Rabbit Test” prior to a certain infamous SCOTUS decision getting leaked in May 2022, but this turned out to be wrong. Mills, like any writer, had the idea of the real-life use of female rabbits for human pregnancy tests tumbling around in the back of her mind for years, but it took the catastrophic Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision for her to think of a story to go with it. She wrote “Rabbit Test” in the summer of 2022 and it quickly got picked up by Uncanny Magazine, who published it just a few months later. Turnarounds for story submissions are usually not this quick, but then “Rabbit Test” is, if nothing else, a deeply timely story, and Mills’s gambit paid off. “Rabbit Test” is only the third story ever to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and it placed first in the Locus poll.

I remember when awards season was underway and there was a lot of very good word-of-mouth regarding “Rabbit Test” online, which no doubt contributed to it sweeping. It’s a story that spoke incisively of “the moment” (although “the moment” is now three years behind us) in American politics, that worked to get a reaction out of left-liberal readers, and so it did. But, again, that was three years ago. How does it hold as a story, some time after its own “moment” has passed?

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November-December 2022 issue of Uncanny Magazine, which you can read here. It’s since been reprinted in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (ed. R. F. Kuang) and Nebula Awards Showcase 58 (ed. Stephen Kotowych).

Enhancing Image

The year is 2091, and Grace, a normal girl about to turn 18, has a big problem in the form of an unwanted pregnancy. She had sex with her maybe-boyfriend before he goes away and now her rabbit test (not a test actually involving a rabbit) has come up positive. This would be bad enough on its own, but the America of 2091 is (at least in some ways) even worse off than today, with women’s menstrual cycles being tracked by an app, courtesy of Rabbit Test LMC. Of course, parents can watch over their underage daughters’ cycles like hawks, and this is all in the aftermath of a nationwide ban on abortion. Grace’s only real hope is to go to her friend Sal to mess with the app, causing a “blackout” long enough for Grace to procure some illicit abortion pills from “one of those old ladies who sells pill packs out of their closets, hoarded up from before the ban.” If she can get this thing taken care of without her Jesus-freak mom finding out then all will be well, more or less. Of course, things don’t go that way.

Grace’s story only takes up about half of “Rabbit Test,” with the other half being a mix of real facts, narratives, and fictionalized vignettes that feed into the greater narrative about reproductive rights. To give Mills credit in a couple ways, she evidently spent much of her time (about a month, by her estimates) on the story by doing research, taking a crash course in the history of abortion, forcing miscarriages, pregnancy tests, and so on. That this is all readable while also being crammed into just over 7,000 words is in itself an achievement, although it’s about one step away from simply copy-pasting passages from actual research papers into your SF short story. What makes this all more impressive is that Mills is taking an intersectional feminist approach, plus a somewhat Marx-inspired understanding of historical forces, to make connections you probably wouldn’t make on your own; indeed these sections, kept away from the Grace narrative, are the closest “Rabbit Test” comes to letting the reader think for themself. We get, in a surprisingly short number of words, a brief history of methods for testing pregnancy, going from mice and rabbits to frogs, of women across different cultures and time periods using at-home methods of testing for pregnancy and (if the desire be there) forcing a miscarriage. It becomes clear that the issue of women’s reproductive rights is one that connects race and class conflict, as well as misogyny, perhaps the oldest of mankind’s evils against itself. This sounds like a lot, because it is.

Meanwhile, Grace comes close to getting what she needs through a trans man named Ambrose (“Women aren’t the only people worried about their uteruses, and Ambrose saw the writing on the wall long before the 2084 ban passed.”), but it’s too late. Sal has ratted her out, apparently being unable to keep her mouth shut, and to say Grace’s mom is unhappy about all this would be an understatement. Grace is gonna have the baby, whether she wants to or not. I would feel more about this if we only barely got to know Grace as a person, and if Amelia, Grace’s mom, wasn’t a caricature of the sort you’d find in Stephen King’s writing.

Get this:

Amelia is marching because she fears being outnumbered. She’s marching because she believes it’s her duty to save babies and place them in homes with good Christian values, because the scientific establishment is out of control, a cabal of demons on Earth locking an entire generation out of salvation.

On the one hand yes, there are people like Amelia in America today—at least several million, going by polls. This doesn’t make her any less of a cartoon character. Then again, nobody is allowed much development or interiority in “Rabbit Test,” since this isn’t that kind of story and goddamnit, we only have 7,000 words and change to get through everything. It’s effective shorthand on Mills’s part for letting us know Grace’s mom is a raving lunatic and that we should be worried about Grace’s safety, but it’s just that. Maybe the biggest message take from all this is that so many people, especially queer people (hey, at least Grace is straight and cis, as far as we know), would be better off if they moved out of their parents’ house as soon as possible. I’m being serious here, as someone whose mental health improved exponentially (putting the bouts of depression I still get aside) once I got a place of my own. Unfortunately, Grace don’t got the means.

When I criticize Mills, just know that a part of me does feel bad, for at least two reasons: the first is that I can respect her rather far-left interpretation of history, as it’s one I more or less agree with. Then again, you might say I’m biased for that reason, and for my part I honestly can’t imagine any “pro-life” person reading “Rabbit Chest” and being convinced by Mills’s argument. The second reason is that if I wanted a story with this message to be more to my liking, I would basically be demanding a different kind of story almost altogether, one that leans much more into a show-don’t-tell approach. This is clearly not what Mills had in mind. So, I can take “Rabbit Test” for what it is or I can sit back and think about a quite different story it could’ve been, one which would’ve met my own specific tastes. Which is more fair? But obviously, even if I were to try to be fair all the way, I don’t see myself ever rereading “Rabbit Test” from start to finish. I consider a great short story to be one that the reader can go back to again and again over a span of years, and I’m not sure if Mills intended “Rabbit Test” to be read more than once. Despite the amount of research and talking points, and admittedly some good lines in there, there’s not much reason to go back to it. That’s not what I think of as being a top-tier story.

There Be Spoilers Here

Grace gives birth to a daughter, named Olivia, and eventually the two move out from under Amelia’s scornful gaze and get an apartment of their own. Despite having been desperate to abort her years earlier, Grace has come to love and care for her daughter, despite the two of them living on meager means. Unfortunately, almost as if like clockwork, disaster strikes again. It’s strongly implied that the teenaged Olivia got drugged and raped at a party, and while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does tend to rhyme. So it goes. The two are able to force a miscarriage, but it comes at a terrible price, as Grace is charged with murder and spends a couple decades in prison—for killing what would’ve been almost indistinguishable from a cat fetus. Finally, the year is 2119, and congress is close to reversing the nationwide abortion ban. We’re told that in the intervening years gay marriage had been banned nationwide, only for that decision to later be reversed. Presumably the same thing will happen with the abortion ban. Hopefully.

The idea is that history works in cycles. Rights that were given at one time can just as easily be taken away in another, and also the other way around. For about half a century we in the US had the nationwide right to abortion, thanks to Roe v. Wade, but now we live in a post-Roe v. Wade world. As Mills says at the end, “it is never over.” Patriarchy and the subjugation of women is such an old human evil that it’s in the Bible, predating capitalism by centuries. Mills ultimately argues that women’s liberation is the omni-cause of human rights, and has been for a long time; but like any good intersectional feminist she knows the fight for women’s liberation ties into capitalism, racism, colonialism, and a few other -isms I’m not mentioning at the moment.

A Step Farther Out

I had read this story a couple days ago, and took some time to sit on it. I feel rather conflicted, because Mills succeeded in writing the kind of story she wanted to write; it’s just that I had wished “Rabbit Test” would be something other than what it is, which I understand is unfair. When I heard all these things about “Rabbit Test” I got the hunch it would be a didactic treatise on abortion rights, and it is indeed that. If anything it’s even more in-your-face than I was expecting. I agree with every point Mills makes here, so I feel like I’m at liberty to say this kind of story-as-treatise method doesn’t work for me. I could be wrong, but I don’t think “Rabbit Test” will be read and enjoyed thirty years from now in the way of, say, Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire” or even Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”—the latter also being on the didactic side and seemingly made in a lab to be forced on English students, but still enjoyable. Even Le Guin, when she’s trying to make a point, leaves enough room for the reader to think on it, so that they feel like they’re collaborating with the author.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Woman of the Wood” by A. Merritt

August 25th, 2025

(Cover by C. Barker Petrie, Jr. Weird Tales, August 1926.)

Who Goes There?

A couple years ago I was supposed to review A. Merritt’s novel The Dwellers in the Mirage, although I couldn’t get far into it before admitting defeat. It could be because I was reading it as it appeared in Fantastic Novels, a magazine with a type size intended for ants and other insects, but I was struggling with it. At the time I knew I would have to give Merritt another shot at some point, not least because of his reputation in the field—or, more accurately, his lack of a reputation nowadays. Abraham Merritt only wrote eight novels and small number of short stories, which for someone who wrote pulp fiction is borderline miniscule, but in fact he had such a well-paying day job that he felt not the need to write much fiction. He worked as assistant editor and later editor of The American Weekly, a Sunday newspaper whose top positions paid a pretty good deal. (Making it as a journalist a century ago meant a lot more than it does now, in the sense that you could afford a house without taking on a second job.) Merritt basically quit writing fiction after 1934 to focus on his lucrative career, resulting in a writing career that lasted not quite twenty years. As with close contemporary Edgar Rice Burroughs, Merritt didn’t start writing fiction until he was in his thirties; but once he picked it up, he found a good deal of success with it as well. Merritt cultivated such a devoted following that he’s one of a very small group of people to have a genre magazine named after him, the short-lived A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine.

Yet Merritt’s reputation dwindled in the years following his death in 1943, with naysayers popping up rather early on. In one of his books of criticism, I forget which piece exactly, James Blish calls Merritt a lousy writer. While such an assessment is more often true than not when it comes to once-beloved genre writers from so long ago (E. E. Smith was indeed a pretty bad writer, and his immense influence on the field is thus hard to account for), this judgment of Merritt seems harsh to me. It’s telling that Merritt was one of the first people to be inducted posthumously into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, then was “awarded” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2009. His stuff only seems to be kept in print by small independent presses, and I’m actually unsure if even all his novels are in print. He also wrote few short stories, with “The Woman of the Wood” being his only original appearance in Weird Tales. Merritt’s work was frequently reprinted in the genre magazines of the time, but he was originally published in the general pulps, namely Argosy.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales, and later reprinted in the January 1934 issue. It’s also been reprinted in the first issue of Avon Fantasy Reader, A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (ed. Terry Carr and Martin H. Greenberg), The Fantasy Hall of Fame (ed. Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg), and the Merritt collection The Fox Woman and Other Stories. It’s in the public domain now, which means you can read it however, although it’s not been transcribed for Project Gutenberg in the US as of yet. Very little of Merritt’s public-domain work is there.

Enhancing Image

McKay, an American World War I veteran, has come to the mountains of France in need of some fresh air. A pilot in the war, McKay had apparently joined the French forces and later the Americans, once they entered the war; but while he served honorably, the experience left him shell-shocked. “The war had sapped him, nerve and brain and soul. Through all the years that had passed since then the wound had kept open.” This is, of course, Merritt telling us upfront that we ought to take McKay’s testimony of the strange events to follow with a grain of salt. Indeed, McKay not entirely having his mental screws in place is key to the story working, or else it would sound even more ridiculous than it already does. McKay is quite different from his creator, being a war veteran while Merritt was not, but both men are what we might call eccentrics, and both also have green thumbs. McKay would be perfectly happy as a gardener, such that he seems to get along better with plants than people, and like Bob Ross he has a tendency to bestow human personality on the birch and pine trees of the Vosages. He’s staying at a lodge, owned by an unnamed inn-keeper and his wife, on the edge of a lake, with only one other human habitation at that forested lake—that being the house of Polleau and his two sons.

Polleau and his sons are the descendants of serfs who lived off the land generations ago, but they’ve been feuding with their surroundings such that several members of their family have befallen to bizarre tree-related accidents. Now they are the last of their kind. Given that McKay repeatedly equate the trees with royalty and medieval figures, it’s easy to picture the last of the serfs going up against a legion of nobility (or so Merritt/McKay thinks) from centuries past, in a France which has not had a monarch for many years at this point. When one of the sons tries cutting down a birch (the birch trees are given feminine qualities), McKay witnesses something very strange indeed: the trees seem to fight back. The birch, wounded, lies on a neighboring fir “as though it were a wounded maid stretched on breast, in arms, of knightly lover.” Something I’ll say in Merritt’s favor is that while he’s fond of using certain words over and over, he has a knack for evocative imagery that’s a step above most other people submitting to Weird Tales at the time. The cast is small, and it become apparent pretty soon where Merritt is gonna take the plot, but the setting is well-realized, and there’s an intense earthiness to it that reads like a pulpier and perhaps less scary Algernon Blackwood. I have no doubt that Merritt would’ve read his fair share of Blackwood, considering he was big into reading on the occult and both authors have a shared fondness for rural spaces. “The Woman of the Wood” was by no means the first “Nature fights back” story, probably not even the first to be published in Weird Tales that year, but it’s redeemed by Merritt’s knack for setting and tone.

One of the sons lose an eye in the ordeal, which was a bit more violent than I was expecting, but also it’s unsurprising that a) this conflict between man and tree is a bit more literal than would be deemed realistic, and b) McKay sympathizes a lot more with the trees. Later he is tormented, or maybe just haunted, by a small army of birches come to life as ghostly women, which is how I imagine we got the cover for this magazine issue. The trees tempt McKay to “slay” (they keep using that word specifically for a while, which makes the proceedings just a bit hard to take seriously) the Polleau family for them. Since the closest we have to a human woman in the story is the inn-keeper’s wife, who doesn’t say much, the estrogen quota will have to be met in the form of sly and vaguely slutty tree spirits. The spirits of the forest are not exactly evil, nor are they really good, but simply wanting to retaliate against a small but passionate force of deforestation. It does not seem to occur to anyone, even Polleau himelf, that the old man and his sons should probably make plans to move out of the mountains; but then, considering what we see of them, it wouldn’t be surprising that their pride would make moving out of the question. As is typical of weird fiction, and also pulp writing generally at the time, there’s an appeal more to emotions than the brain. That Merritt can delay the reader in thinking about the logical issues of the setting is to the story’s benefit, not really a negative. That McKay himself is shown to be in a fragile mental state to begin with also makes his extreme actions in the climax easier to understand.

There Be Spoilers Here

The really crazy part, which might be the one thing I wasn’t expecting in terms of the story itself (putting style and pacing aside), is that McKay gets away with murder. Yeah, he shivs one of the sons in the goddamn neck, in a kind of tree-induced rage, actually rips out the guy’s throat with the knife (it should be sliced instead of ripped if it’s with a blade, but putting that aside…), and it’s pretty graphic. It’s about as graphic as you could get away with in a dark fantasy magazine with a lot of naked women on its covers in the 1920s. And what’s more, the trees kill Polleau and the other son off-screen, giving McKay enough leeway to get off scott free. The trees don’t even take vengeance on him when he turns down their offer to join them (I assume by giving up his human body to become a tree spirit, I’m not sure), they just seem a little crestfallen about it. But yeah, aside from being shaken from killing a guy and making contact with a bunch of ghosts, McKay gets out of this in one piece. Didn’t expect that.

A Step Farther Out

Merritt’s known more for his novels (not that he’s known much at all these days), but I’m more of a short story fan myself. Why he didn’t contribute more to Weird Tales, I’m not sure. Maybe the pay rate wasn’t enough. At least with Amazing Stories in the late ’20s, Merritt’s lack of original appearances (although he did give the green light on a few reprints) can be explained by Hugo Gernsback being reluctant to pay anybody much of anything. By the time more rivals to Weird Tales, and indeed more genre alternatives to the general pulps, came about, Merritt stopped writing, and then he died about a decade later. It’s a bit of a shame, because it turns out he wasn’t half bad at writing short fiction. “The Woman of the Wood” is a decent bit of rural weird horror that’s aged better than most from the same period, namely due to Merritt’s style plus the lack of racism.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Storm King” by Joan D. Vinge

August 12th, 2025

(Cover by Alex Schomburg. Asimov’s, April 1980.)

Who Goes There?

Joan D. Vinge was one of the more acclaimed SF writers in the latter half of the ’70s through the ’80s, which makes her retreat from public notice all the more conspicuous. She debuted in 1974 and was one of the post-New Wave crowd, alongside the likes of George R. R. Martin and John Varley. As you can guess, she was also married to Vernor Vinge for much of the ’70s, although they split in 1979, which didn’t stop Joan from ditching Vinge’s last name for her byline going forward. She won a Hugo for the borderline metafictional story “Eyes of Amber,” and she won another Hugo for her second novel, The Snow Queen. After the ’80s her output went down massively, to the point where she disappeared for nearly all of the 2000s. One reason for this is that she suffered a car accident in 2002 that left her unable to write for some years, although that doesn’t explain her relative inactivity in the ’90s as well. She has also, weirdly enough, written about as many novelizations as original novels at this point, including novelizations of (I’m not kidding) Return of the Jedi, Willow, Return to Oz, Cowboys & Aliens, and the ’90s Lost in Space movie. She had written virtually no short fiction since 1990, which makes “The Storm King” one of her later stories, published the same year as The Snow Queen. Unlike most of Vinge’s work, “The Storm King” is fantasy, although it retains Vinge’s propensity for incorporating fairy tale elements.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1980 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Isaac Asimov’s Wonders of the World (ed. Shawna McCarthy and Kathleen Moloney), A Dragon-Lover’s Treasury of the Fantastic (ed. Margaret Weis), and the Vinge collection Phoenix in the Ashes.

Enhancing Image

This will be a short and sweet review, because despite being nearly thirty magazine pages I don’t have much to say about “The Storm King.” I think it’s interesting to point out first that this really is a high fantasy story published in Asimov’s, early in the magazine’s history when such a thing was rare. Granted, Roger Zelazny’s “Unicorn Variation” was published there a year later and was just as much a fantasy story, and even won a Hugo for it. The market for short fantasy fiction, barring a brief period in the 1930s and more so the last decade or so, has never been that good. 1980 saw the death of Fantastic, so that F&SF was the only magazine in town that published a good deal of short fantasy. But Asimov’s, even in its first years, occasionally printed fantasy, and the results tended to be rewarding. I liked “The Storm King” enough, although I didn’t love it.

Lassan-din has a problem—actually he has two problems, but we’ll get to the second one in a minute. He is the heir apparent to the throne in Kwansai, but he’s a prince in exile and he’s willing to do anything to take back what is “rightfully” his, even to go against his homeland’s predominent religion by consulting an old witch. The witch in question and her servant girl, the latter calling herself Nothing, are pagans who work with the elements of Nature. There’s also a dragon who lords over this area called the Storm King, who like your typical Tolkien-esque dragon is an intelligent being who communicates with humans telepathically. Lassan-din wants to tame the Storm King and use its power to retake the throne, but as the witch says, “You don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water.” The witch gives the prince a hint as to how to deal with the dragon and sends Nothing with him, but as she also says, as a kind of warning, “power always has a price.” Nothing will repeat this phrase verbatim much later, which of course means that we’re meant to take it as the story’s thesis. And indeed it is. It becomes clear quite early on that Vinge’s story is a fable about how power corrupts, to the point where it feels a little condescending and wearying; that the plot trajectory goes pretty much exactly the way I expected, going off of the thesis Vinge gives us, also means there’s not much surprising in store for us. Since “The Storm King” doesn’t have any real twists or turns, that forces us to turn to other things in looking for the story’s merits.

In all fairness. while this kind of high fantasy is commonplace now, such that I have precious little interest in modern fantasy writing, it would’ve been more novel in 1980, right after the sword-and-sorcery revival and right before we started getting the super-chunky multi-book sagas that have since dominated the genre. “The Storm King,” for better or worse, would’ve fit right in with short fantasy being published nowadays. There is, of course, also a sexual element, with Nothing being implied to be a prostitute as well as a witch’s apprentice; and while her relationship with Lassan-din never turns romantic exactly, it does get rather steamy. The problem on Lassan-din’s end is that he had suffered some unspecified abuse from his uncle, which has left him impotent, although Vinge is unclear as to what exactly is wrong with him. I thought at first that Lassan-din genitals must’ve gotten damaged, but this turns out not to be the case. There’s an obvious symbolic connection between Lassan-din’s impotence and his having fallen from the throne. Well, the damage can’t be that bad, for Lassan-din and Nothing have sex, and there’s a little something extra thrown into the deal that the former is not made aware of. (You can guess what it is.) The two proceed on their quest, which sees Our Anti-Hero™ finally meet the Storm King himself, and another deal is made. Lassan-din inherits the Storm King’s scales and his control of lightning, but obviously there wouldn’t be much of a story if things ended here.

There Be Spoilers Here

Lassan-din retakes the throne, but he doesn’t become respected so much as feared among his people, not to mention the dragon is still free to terrorize the populace. Lassan-din’s reign becomes so maligned that he too becomes known as the Storm King, by which point he realizes he might’ve made a mistake. He’s unable to reverse the deal he had made with the dragon, being unable to rid himself of those scales; even if the dragon wanted to, he could not undo what has been done. He comes to the conclusion that if he can’t save himself then he can at least save everybody else, so he decides to banish the Storm King from the land. We get what is more or less a happy ending. Hell, there’s even a baby in the mix, with Nothing (now named Fallatha) having a daughter by him. This all reeks a bit of wish fulfillment, at least from a modern perspective. This is a story about how power corrupts, and yet the one whose character is poisoned by power still has enough of a conscience to do the right thing at the end of the day, never mind retaining some of his humanity. Lassan-din is an anti-hero who would be a villain in some other stories, depending on the perspective one writes from, and while this is a nice arc for a character to have, it doesn’t feel real at all. Unfortunately, in real life, someone in Lassan-din’s position is unlikely to have any redeeming qualities of note, nor are they likely to suffer at all from the pain and oppression they bring on other people. “The Storm King” is fantasy due to its setting, but it’s also fantasy because it depicts someone with immense power actually facing consequences for their actions.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry for the delay. Depression and a bit of writer’s block. I was honestly stumped for a bit as to what my thoughts on this story even were, maybe because I tried thinking back on something I had perhaps missed, only to think I really had gotten everything on my initial reading and that I didn’t need to put much thought into it. Maybe not the first Joan D. Vinge story I should’ve written about her first, since in a way it’s an outlier among her short fiction, but it’s also one of her short stories that I’d not read yet that I really wanted to check out. I was mildly disappointed, if only because I expected there to be more to it, but Vinge is not a bad writer. Hell, at this point she was a better writer than her ex-husband. It’s just that “The Storm King” doesn’t show Vinge at her best.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Eeeetz Ch” by H. H. Hollis

July 29th, 2025

(Cover by Dember. Galaxy, November 1968.)

Who Goes There?

This might not be surprising, but H. H. Hollis is a pseudonym for one Ben Neal Ramey, who like a lot of people in the field used a pseudonym to separate his SF work from his well-paying day job. Hollis never wrote a novel, and there has never been a volume collecting what little short fiction he wrote, although it would not be hard to print a one-volume edition containing all of Hollis’s SF. He got two Nebula nominations, actually in the same year, but nothing else as far as awards attention goes. He’s honestly an ideal candidate for the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in the future, since he’s very much a forgotten writer when he probably should not be that obscure. I’ve read a couple Hollis stories and they certainly have their points of interest. “Eeeetz Ch” (what a title, huh) is one of quite a few SF stories about cetaceans that rather conspicuously started popping up in the ’60s. There was Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island. There was Margaret St. Clair’s The Dolphins of Altair. There was Gordon R. Dickson’s “Dolphin’s Way.” There’s even the story I’ll be reviewing in a couple day which also involves cetaceans. Not to say there was zero interest beforehand, but there was clearly a sea change in popular interest in cetaceans that happened in the early ’60s, culminating in what now feel like totally inexplicable crazes like the album Songs of the Humpback Whale.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1968 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It has never been reprinted in English, which I have to say reeks of bullshit considering there are way worse stories than “Eeeetz Ch” that have gotten reprinted multiple times.

Enhancing Image

Ramon Coatle is a senator from Hawaii who has been given I suppose the unenviable task of surveying the Caribbean Research Station, an off-shore American research facility specializing in—you can guess by this point—the intelligence of dolphins. Specifically they’re studying dolphins as a kind of substitute for computers, since dolphins, as it turns out, are highly intelligent, albeit of the calculating variety. A dolphin, even if given the tools, is unlikely to understand the philosophical complexities of, say, Hamlet. As one of the scientists puts it:

“[F]rom a man-centered view of reality all that happens is that, like a computer, they have much faster access to stored information than we do, and much faster manipulation of it. But creative, intuitive use of it? Not in human terms. If that is the measure of true intelligence, then these big, seagoing cats are not very intelligent. They’re just better equipped to handle information.”

The scientists compares the dolphins to cats, but really they’re more like rats, both in their intelligence but also in the tests they’re subjected to at the facility. There are several human characters in “Eeeetz Ch,” but of course the most memorable character is Eeetz ch himself, who is the main dolphin being tested, by virtue of being the first. Eeeetz ch has the intelligence of a well-adjusted human adult, although (as will become a cliche with writing uplifted dolphins in SF) he is rather mischievous. Coatle and the others communicate with the dolphins through a computer translator, since the dolphins are physiologically incapable of human speech; meanwhile Eeeetz ch is hoping his human companions will try to learn his language, his own name as given being an approximation of what it would be in dolphin tongue. There’s a bit of a language barrier, and also the fact that these are two intelligent races who previously had not been able to have a conversation. Dolphins and their close relatives are indeed the closest we have to alien life on Earth, is what Hollis seems to be implying.

In the ’60s, and even for a while after, there seemed to be a reluctance in SF to introduce advanced robotics and unmanned drones, despite the obvious advantages in terms of saving human life and such—or maybe it’s because of these advantages that writers were slow to hop on robot-controlled spaceships and exploration units, until it became too glaring a thing to deny. It would be like denying Darwinian evolution in [the current year], in that normal people would immediately raise their eyebrows with suspicion. As such, in the world of “Eeeetz Ch,” the folks at NASA and elsewhere seem to think investing in uplifted dolphins that can control spaceships remotely would be more feasible than to have artificially intelligent robots do the same damn thing. As mentioned before, the people at the research facility already think of the dolphins there as like lively and quirky computers with fins. This all sounds a bit far-fetched, made more glaring since “Eeeetz Ch” would be published less than a year prior to the moon landing. In-story the prospect of landing on the moon is still treated as theoretically, which is something that would date the story in almost record-time. Another thing that dates the story is the treatment of its sole female character of note, Marguerite, who is one of Eeeetz ch’s human companions, and who honestly comes off as a bit of a shrew; her tendency to be on the emotionally volatile side is certainly conspicuous compared to her male colleagues’ reasonableness, although she does seem to mean well.

(Interior by Dan Adkins.)

The stranger aspects of the research regarding Eeeetz ch, such as prosthetic hands being developed for his fins (this being illustrated uncannily, courtesy of Dan Adkins), now strike me as almost proto-cyberpunk. This is not just because of the topic of cybernetics with how the uplifted dolphins (and conversely the human who swim with their test subjects) are being at least slightly mechanized to better fit their environment, but also (and this is almot certainly a coincidence) the fact that there’s a similarly uplifted dolphin in a certain seminal work of cyberpunk. I’m talking about William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic,” which features a drug-addled hyper-intelligent hacker dolphin that floats in a tank. (It is a weird story, for sure.) Eeeetz ch and his ilk are given prospethic hands that take advantage of the fact that cetaceans’ finsss are basically mammal finger joints that have been webbed together; meanwhile Marguerite and her partner have metal plates in their chests, machines meant to give them a kind of gills surrogate. Coatl is understandably disturbed by this at first, but after several days he gets used to the humans and dolphins meeting each other halfway like this. Actually he might be getting to like the strange dynamics of the facility a little too much, as the ending shows.

There Be Spoilers Here

This is a hard story to spoil, on account of nothing much dramatic happening. I was a bit taken aback by this myself initially, since I was expecting some kind of dramatic climax, only to realize the story just—ends. Not to say it’s that abrupt an ending, or that it just stops in its tracks, since there is at least some change implied at the end. Coatle leaves the facility for home, wondering if he can even express to his colleagues in Washington what he had seen, never mind how he might convince them of the facility’s non-military utility. Not much may have actually changed throughout the story, in that the stakes were never those of life and death, but something has changed (or maybe been revealed or uncovered) in Coatl’s spirit. “His chest itched, and he scratched it gently. Senator Ramon Coatl knew what his chest itched for: he wanted one of those brass adaptor plates set in it, so he could wear gills.” It’s a bittersweet sentiment that doesn’t become overblown or overstay its welcome, which is nice.

A Step Farther Out

Well, this was an oddly cozy read. “Eeeetz Ch” is curious, not least because it feels both of its time and also ahead of its time. The proto-cyberpunk elements and speculation on dolphin intelligence butt heads with what was clearly an America still licking its wounds from the Apollo 1 tragedy. As far as I can tell there isn’t any anthology collecting SF stories revolving around cetaceans, which on the one hand is a bit odd, but also the fascination with cetaceans in pop culture was such a hippie New Age thing (later examples Ecco the Dolphin and David Brin’s Uplift series notwithstanding) that if such an anthology were to be put together then it would’ve happened at least half a century ago. The moment has passed.

Unless, of course, I became an editor myself.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Body Builders” by Keith Laumer

July 25th, 2025

(Cover by Gray Morrow. Galaxy, August 1966.)

Who Goes There?

I know I’ve read at least one Keith Laumer story before, because he appeared in Dangerous Visions, but I could not tell you what “Test to Destruction” is about at all from memory. Laumer is one of those authors who is surprisingly easy to avoid, or rather to miss, considering how prolific he was in the ’60s. He made his debut in 1959, and spent the next decade or so writing at a feverish pace with a few series under his belt, most notably the episodic Retief series. I almost picked a Retief story for today, but it seems like that series was more associated with If in the ’60s; as such as we have a totally standalone story with “The Body Builders.” Laumer suffered a stroke in 1971, which put him off writing for a few years, and when he did return, he was not the same writer he once was, in both quality and quantity. This dip in quality is understandable, since even a minor stroke requires physical therapy to recover from, and for many authors the same incident would’ve outright meant the end of their careers. Laumer was also one of the pioneering voices of military SF, which makes sense given his military background. “The Body Builders” is a very curious story that I wish I liked more, not least because of how prescient it is.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1966 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted a fair number of times, including The Infinite Arena: Seven Science Fiction Stories About Sports (ed. Terry Carr) and the Laumer collections The Best of Keith Laumer and Keith Laumer: The Lighter Side.

Enhancing Image

Barney Ramm is our narrator as well as our guide to this strange new world, where it has become normal to all but give up one’s physical body in exchange for a more physically attractive robotic surrogate—provided one has the money for certain cosmetics. People’s bodies are kept in “the Files,” hooked up to tubes and physically trained unconsciously just enough so that they won’t be totally emaciated bags of bones. Laumer does not leave us to speculate as to how we got to such a future, because Ramm pretty much tells us outright what the deal is:

Our grandparents found out it was a lot safer and easier to sit in front of the TV screen with feely and smelly attachments than to be out bumping heads with a crowd. It wasn’t long after that that they developed the contact screens to fit your eyeballs, and the plug-in audio, so you began to get the real feel of audience participation. Then, with the big improvements in miniaturization and the new tight-channel transmitters, you could have your own private man-on-the-street pickup. It could roam, seeing the sights, while you racked out on the sofa.

One of the cultural landmarks that separated the ’50s from the ’40s was the rise of commercially viable TV, so that you too could have a TV set in the comfort of your living room. If you were rich then you might’ve even been able to buy two TV sets. Wow. Imagine the possibilities. By the end of the ’50s the TV had become a commonplace household item, at least for those with middle-class incomes or better, and by 1965 (about when Laumer would’ve written this story), TV in color was becoming the new norm. A sharper and more vivid image, closer to real life, or rather the real thing. People living vicariously through their TV sets was apparently on Laumer’s shit list, because he doesn’t even try to hide his fist-shaking sentiments at the medium. On the one hand this could’ve been trite and a little too cranky if done improperly, but to Laumer’s credit it’s how he extrapolates on the proliferation of TV that makes “The Body Builders” worth reading. People tend to walk around in lifelike android bodies that seem to be modeled after movie actors, or at least this is the case with some of them. There’s a John Wayne robot, and Lorena, Ramm’s date at the beginning, is also made to look like Marlene Dietrich.

Now you may be thinking to yourself: this sounds a bit like cyberpunk. And it does, about fifteen years in advance. Ramm being a first-person narrator makes the exposition-dumping more awkward than it should’ve been, in that it does hamper the story somewhat, but Ramm being a “light-heavy champ in the armed singles” (he’s basically a boxer, although it turns out to not be boxing quite as recognize it) with a detective’s intuition and an ear for slang lends the narrative voice a noir feel that would later also become a trope associated with cyberpunk. Of course, classic cyberpunk takes a lot of inspiration from old-school crime fiction a la Raymond Chandler, so this is a case of “The Body Builders” and the subgenre it anticipated both drinking from the same well. Cyberpunk became a codified subgenre by the mid-’80s, but there are quite a few examples of SF that predate it, including but not limited to Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction,” Richard Matheson’s “Steel,” Samuel R. Delany’s Nova, and of course Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Speaking of the Matheson story, I have a hunch that Laumer looked to “Steel” as an influence, or perhaps more likely he was thinking of the Twilight Zone adaptation, which would’ve been more recent when he wrote “The Body Builders.”

This all sounds great, but it’s in service of rather clunky storytelling. There’s really no room for environmental or passive worldbuilding here, since Ramm yaps in Expositionese and tells us upfront about every detail of this world that’s relative to the plot. For the most part Laumer chooses to tell rather than show, which hurts one’s attempts at getting immersed in what should be a memorable and somewhat dystopian future. It doesn’t help that the plot is really basic when you get down to it: Ramm gets ambushed into having an impromptu fight when he’s in the wrong robot body for it, with someone clearly having it out for him. He has, I think two girlfriends? There’s the aforementioned Lorena, who’s shown to be vain and high-class, and then there’s Julie, who believes the “Orggies” are an abomination. Can you guess which one he ends up with ultimately? I’m generally not a fan of how snarky and reliant on slang these characters are; if we’re to be invested in Ramm having his revenge then Laumer should’ve tried to conceive a more likable protagonist first. Despite being nearly thirty magazine pages, the tell-don’t-show method combined with the simplistic plot trajectory result in a story that feels undercooked somehow.

There Be Spoilers Here

If you’ve read “Steel” (and I’ve written about it twice now), then you may remember the ending, which is more or less ambiguous in its tone. Are we are supposed to take this as a victory or a defeat? What is to become of Our Hero™ after he has literally broken a few bones in the name of recapturing the glory days? No such ambiguity in “The Body Builders.” After having deliberately sabotages his robot body, Ramm winds up in his real body, in the Files, nearly dying “for real” in the process. I will say, this is a very good scene, when Ramm “wakes up.” It’s like that scene in The Matrix where Neo wakes up from the virtual world to find himself as a scrawny bald dude, with a big tube shoved down his throat and in what almost resembles a bee hive. It’s a great image, and in the case of “The Body Builders” it’s one of the few moments where Laumer’s craftsmanship really shines through. Of course, despite being a scrawny dude who does not resemble the prize fighter he often lives as, Ramm is still able to win the day by virtue of taking advantage of the fact that Orggies are designed to take on other Orggies—that is to say robots, as opposed to humans. This is Laumer’s way of telling you that you should turn the TV off and go for a jog or something. I know, it’s ironic that I’m instead typing this out, sitting in my comfy office chair in my air-conditioned apartment whose rent I can barely afford. To think when this story was written we didn’t have the internet, or even at-home video games. Laumer had a fine imagination, but he really could not have anticipated what the future would bring.

A Step Farther Out

I like thinking about “The Body Builders,” but I wish it was better as a story. Laumer is perhaps a decent writer who in this case punches above his weight class (sorry for the pun). This same premise and even broad plot structure may have worked better in the hands of someone like Philip K. Dick or Robert Sheckley, but in Laumer’s it lacks the sheer momentum as well as narrative fluidity to be compelling from start to finish. I do somewhat recommend checking it out, though, especially if you wanna read more examples of proto-cyberpunk.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Shall We Have a Little Talk?” by Robert Sheckley

July 21st, 2025

(Cover by John Pederson, Jr. Galaxy, October 1965.)

Who Goes There?

When Horace L. Gold launched Galaxy in 1950, the authors who appeared in those first few issues were (with the notable exception of Richard Matheson) from the previous generation of writers. Clifford Simak, Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, Fredric Brown, etc. It took a few years for a whole new crop of writers to make their mark in Gold’s new magazine, but by the end of 1953 the sea change had become apparent. Like Matheson, you had writers born in the latter half of the ’20s who were maybe a bit too young to have seen action in World War II, these including Philip K. Dick, Poul Anderson, Charles Beaumont, Alan E. Nourse, Katherine MacLean, Chad Oliver, and of course, Robert Sheckley. Sheckley actually made his debut in the now-forgotten magazine Imagination, in 1952, but he quickly (by that I mean in about six months) spread his work such that he appeared in seemingly every outlet that could have him. He appeared most often (or so it feels, I’ve not done the numbers myself) in Galaxy, though, which makes sense given that Gold and Sheckley were secular Jewish urbanites with similar temperaments, although Gold was—let’s say the more eccentric of the two. (Gold was agoraphobic, and was not all that sociable. He also had a reputation for being a control freak with his writers.) No matter where he went, but especially in Galaxy, Sheckley acted as a court jester, being humorous but also sour.

By the time Fred Pohl took over Galaxy, Sheckley appeared in it far less, although this was not Pohl’s fault, nor was it unique to Galaxy. Sheckley wrote about as much short fiction between 1952 and 1960 as the next 45 years of his life combined. Why did the torrent of short fiction slow down to little more than a trickle? It seems that Sheckley did what most other authors of the time did, which is to say he mostly switched to writing novels. By 1960 the magazine market had eroded, if not imploded. There remained few avenues for making a living as a short-story writer. But while he took a few breaks from writing short stories, Sheckley never stopped completely; and when it came time for Galaxy‘s 15th anniversary issue, he would be there, with “Shall We Have a Little Talk?”

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1965 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in the Sheckley collections The People Trap, The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley, The Collected Short Fiction of Robert Sheckley: Book Three, and Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley.

Enhancing Image

Jackson (I assume it’s his last name, we never get a first name from him) is a linguist and agent of the Terran empire, and he’s on a mission. The empire has scouted out another planet with intelligent life, which means another planet that could use some colonizing. It’s clear from the outset that Jackson isn’t here merely to understand an alien language, or just to make first contact for the sake of it, but to oil up the locals for exploitation. With this in mind, Jackson is basically a con man, despite working for what is supposed to be a benign government, and calling him an anti-hero would be a touch generous. Indeed, all it would take is a switching of perspectives to depict Jackson as the story’s villain, albeit villainous by virtue of wanting to swindle rather than the fire-and-brimstone treatment. Luckily for Jackson, the aliens are “bipedal monocephaloids,” which is to say humanoid; they have beige skin and are generally dark-haired, looking perfectly human, although they would not be homo sapiens but a conveniently close-resembling cousin species. In old-timey SF aliens being written as humanoid was often done because the writer was being lazy, or in the case of film and TV for budgetary reasons (and also laziness); but with Sheckley this supposed lack of effort into making alien aliens is very much part of the story’s point. The text is aliens, but that text is only a thin smokescreen for the subtext, which is that the aliens are supposed to be (and indeed are) indigenous peoples. This is a story about an indigenous populace meeting with a would-be colonizer, and you’d have to be rather dense to miss it.

“Shall We Have a Little Talk?” is a first-contact narrative that makes a bee line for the heart of what first-contact narratives are all more or less about, which is to say it’s about power dynamics and one group potentially taking control of another in the name of self interest. We also know this is a story about colonialism because Sheckley aims for the jugular and brings up a certain word that threatens to become overused in the current political climate, but which in some cases really is justified, and which tends to be a logical conclusion of colonialism: genocide. The systemic extermination of a people or race. The most scathing and withering passage of this story actually comes along relatively early, and it’s Sheckley at his most acidic, to the point where he does channel Kurt Vonnegut a bit:

No civilized law-abiding race likes to commit genocide. In fact, the folks on Earth consider genocide a very unpleasant matter, and they don’t like to read about it or anything like it in their morning papers. Envoys must be protected, of course, and murder must be punished; everybody knows that. But it still doesn’t feel nice to read about a genocide over your morning coffee. News like that can spoil a man’s entire day. Three or four genocides and a man just might get angry enough to switch his vote.

The Terran empire is a liberal democracy, having moved on from the free-market capitalism of “the ancients,” who are meant to be us. “The ancients” took what they could get and conquered without even the pretext of wanting to help the people they were robbing; but the Terrans of the future are all about soft power, and robbing indigenous populations with a smile on one’s face. Colonialism has changed its attire, but it’s still colonialism. Same shit, different ass. Jackson wanting an in with the aliens, by learning their language and even buying property on their land, is very much shown to be self-serving. He befriends a real estate fellow, one Mr. Erum, but their friendship is extremely shallow and hinges on Jackson getting what he wants out of the well-meaning Erum, which is to say language and property. It’s a business relationship disguised as friendship; there is nothing to stop Jackson from pulling a gun on Erum. It would, of course, be bad news if Erum were to retaliate if such a thing were to happen, because if one of these aliens were to kill Jackson then it would mean the Terrans basically nuking the whole race from orbit. And nobody wants that.

But they’re always prepared to do it.

I do have to wonder what had inspired Sheckley to write this specific story, because he is clearly responding to something. The vast majority of SF is observational fiction, in that is makes observations on current trends and extrapolates on them. There is some predictive SF, as in SF written with the intent of predicting future trends (most notably this is the kind of SF that Hugo Gernsback really liked), but virtually all of predictive SF has since been left in the dust bin of history. What was happening circa 1964 that made Sheckley so ambivalent? It could be that he was commenting on the JFK and LBJ administrations, which were very liberal but also keen on soft power, especially in Asia. There was the creeping question of what to do about Vietnam, and American intervention in the matter was something which at the time middle America would’ve largely either been ignorant or approving of, although Sheckley would’ve known better. It wasn’t exactly a secret that even by the time of JFK’s team the US had an “advisory team” in South Vietnam. This was a sort of colonial power that landed on the softer end of the spectrum, but as we all know, in the years following the publication of “Shall We Have a Little Talk?” that soft power would turn harder until it became an all-out war effort. Curiously, there was one other notable SF story published in 1965 which seemed to allegorize American involvement in Vietnam, albeit from a hawkish right-wing perspective rather than left-wing, that being Poul Anderson’s The Star Fox. What’s funny is that in both cases the stand-in for the JKF/LBJ administration is shown in an unflattering light, but for different reasons.

There Be Spoilers Here

Of course, just when Jackson thinks he has gotten a hold of the aliens’ tongue (because here, language is a key to unlocking an indigenous populace’s potential for exploitation), Erum and the city council throw a fast one on him, albeit unintentionally. For most of the story the alien language comes off as incomprehensible to human ears, but Jackson takes the time to learn its intricacies and nuances; this knowledge is mostly kept out of the reader’s grasp, but we’re not supposed to understand it anyway. Ultimately the aliens still confound the would-be colonizer, because at the end their language seems to have evolved (or maybe devolved) into variations on a single word: mun. In the span of what has to be a few months at the most the language has changed such that Jackson is simply unable to keep up. So he admits defeat. At the very end, when the aliens are left to themselves, their changing to using a bunch of muns seems to be genuine and not done as a prank, with begs the question of how and why the language so quickly changed like this. It’s evident that Sheckley is not a linguist, but I don’t think this is how language works. Even in the remarkably fast transitioning to early modern English in the 16th century, in which you had kids speaking of a brand of English that was nigh unrecognizable from what their grandparents spoke, it took a generation or two for the change to happen. I feel like Sheckley is counting on his readers being about as knowledgable of linguistics as him; which, to be fair, the vast majority of readers would not know better. It’s like how SF writers feel at liberty to bullshit their way through quantum physics, because hell, nobody really understands quantum physics—not even the people who actually study it.

A Step Farther Out

I think more time could’ve been spent on fleshing out the setting, and the twist does strain one’s suspension of disbelief a bit, but this is classic Sheckley in a good way. It’s not his funniest or his darkest, but there’s both a maturity and a raw pessimism here, minus the cheap laughs and gimmickry of his weaker stuff, that a younger Sheckley would not have gone for with such gusto. I really got the sense that Sheckley had a bone to pick with somebody here, although I can’t make heads or tails as to whom. “Shall We Have a Little Talk” is one of the few later Sheckley stories to appear in Store of the Worlds, and there’s a reason for that.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Rules of the Road” by Norman Spinrad

July 18th, 2025

(Cover by McKenna. Galaxy, December 1964.)

Who Goes There?

Norman Spinrad has had a long and winding career over the past sixty-odd years; in fact he’s the only author we’re covering this month who’s still alive, at least last time I checked. Spinrad was born in 1940, in NYC, and he made his debut in 1963, just before the New Wave kicked into high gear. He’s one of the few prominent New Wavers who did not already have a career by the end of the ’50s. He stirred up controversy a few times, most notably with the novel Bug Jack Baron, which was serialized in New Worlds and which the UK parliament took an issue with on grounds of obscenity. They say all publicity is good publicity, but in the case of Bug Jack Baron the controversy actually contributed to New Worlds (already a small operation under Michael Moorcock) downsizing and ultimately evaporating by the early ’70s. There’s also his novel The Iron Dream, a kind of fictional novel as written by Adolf Hitler in an alternate timeline where Hitler became a hack genre writer instead of, ya know. Spinrad’s later outings are less incendiary. Star Trek fans might recognize his name because he wrote one of the better episodes of the original series, “The Doomsday Machine.” 1964 was Spinrad’s first big year as it saw multiple short stories of his in print, with “The Rules of the Road” sadly being minor Spinrad, being competent but otherwise unindicative of the career he would have.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1964 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in First Step Outward (ed. Robert Hoskins) and the Spinrad collection The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde.

Enhancing Image

Sorry that this will be a shorter review than usual. The story itself is quite short and I didn’t have much to say about it. Sometimes a short story can be densely packed with nuance and flavor so that I’d have more to write about, but this is not the case here.

A giant silver dome has appeared in Yucca Flats, which you may recall has a long history of US military involvement of the nuclear variety. (Its name is also associated with a certain infamously bad ’60s sci-fi movie, but putting that aside…) The dome appeared seemingly overnight and is obviously alien in origin, or else how could it be here. The top brass suspect the dome is some kind of ship, or maybe a “giant mousetrap” for human visitors, being perhaps a deadly labyrinth on the inside. Ten men have already been sent into the dome, and none have come out. The military begrudgingly concludes that it’ll take more than just a soldier or a normal civilian for the job, hence we’re introduced to Bert Lindstrom, a mercenary who’s gotten by on being very lucky—or rather Lindstrom has a borderline supernatural capacity to calculate risk. Risk, for Lindstrom, is indeed the name of the game. He’s a daredevil, but he’s an unusually rational kind of daredevil. Measuring risk is what gives Lindstrom’s life a sense of purpose, and pretty quickly we get that he’s a kind of anti-hero; other than that we find out nothing else about him.

“The Rules of the Road” feels both really short and somehow also protracted, because the premise is so simple and because most of it is effectively a one-man show, albeit with a voice from offscreen talking to Lindstrom, like the stage director hollering at the actors from just outside of the audience’s peripheral vision. It’s an adventure narrative, sure, but there’s actually not that much action, with Spinrad spending more time on Lindstrom’s state of mind as he enters the dome and tries to figure out what traps could be hidden inside it. There’s a bit of scenery porn, and also we do get the sense that something is at stake, although exactly what is not made clear at first. Now, if you’ve read your fair share of pre-New Wave ’60s SF then you may be thinking that this sounds a bit like Algis Budrys’s Rogue Moon, albeit without the melodramatic human drama that propels that novel’s plot, which Spinrad absolutely would have read by this point. I’ve seen people complain about Rogue Moon being far more about the people outside of the deadly labyrinth on the moon than about the labyrinth itself, but “The Rules of the Road” is what that same basic plot might look like if you removed the human element. This is to say that Spinrad’s story has the bones of what should be a compelling little adventure story, but lacks the warmth and intellectual stamina of Budrys’s novel. Mind you that Budrys was not the only author whose footsteps Spinrad seemed to follow, but in order to get to that we’ll be talking about the climax…

There Be Spoilers Here

That the dome is an alien construction is obvious, but what’s less obvious is the nature of the aliens who had constructed it. Are they here to put humanity through some kind of rite of passage, or are they here merely to toy with humanity as a kind of plaything? It turns out to be the former. As the alien host, who we hear but do not see, explains, the universe as we see it is actually an illusion, with our three-dimensional perception being a smokescreen for a universe whose “true” nature would turn the average person’s brain to mush. The true universe is “the road” the humanity will have to learn to navigate if it wants to be on par with the aliens, who clearly are supposed to be far more advanced than us. This is a reveal that would not have been out of place in the pages of Astounding a couple decades earlier, to the point where I feel like A. E. van Vogt had written just the same kind of story as this, with more pyrotechnics and a real sense of hallucinogenic wonder at the vastness of the universe. The big problem with Spinrad’s story, aside from its uneven pacing, is that it’s maybe too sober and rational, too casual about the cosmic potential of its premise. It’s “far out” on paper, but Spinrad did not write it as such. When Lindstrom returns from the dome, having apparently been transformed into “something other than human,” we don’t feel much of anything about it.

A Step Farther Out

Reading very early Spinrad you probably wouldn’t get the impression that he would write something decidedly transgressive like Bug Jack Baron a handful of years later, or that he would be one of the more accomplished New Wavers generally. When read the early stuff of, say, R. A. Lafferty or Roger Zelazny, you could see how they would later rub shoulders with the New Wave, but this is not so with Spinrad. “The Rules of the Road” reads like A. E. van Vogt at a discount, albeit if van Vogt also had a firmer grasp of English. It’s clearly magazine filler, which is a shame.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Think Blue, Count Two” by Cordwainer Smith

July 15th, 2025

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Galaxy, February 1963.)

Who Goes There?

Cordwainer Smith was a pseudonym for Paul Linebarger, who wrote SF under as Smith so as to separate that career from his day job as, ya know, working for the US government. Linebarger, as Smith, had one of the most idiosyncratic careers of any writer in the field at the time, this despite his dying relatively young (at just 53) and not having his work pubished regularly until the last half-dozen years of his life. He made his debut, as an adult, with “Scanners Live in Vain” in 1950, after five years of struggling to find a publisher for it, and he would not see print again until 1955 with “The Game of Rat and Dragon.” Smith’s stuff was a little too weird for what was otherwise a highly permissive time in the field’s history; but he had found a couple cheerleaders in the forms of Frederik Pohl and Damon Knight. Pohl and Knight really dug Smith’s material, to the point where Smith appeared in all three issues that Knight had edited for If. “Scanners Live in Vain” would’ve surely wallowed in obscurity longer than it did had Pohl not included it in one of his hardcover anthologies in the early ’50s. From the beginning until his death in 1966, Smith was a “writer’s writer” whose quirks ensured that he would always have a cult following.

When Pohl took over Galaxy and If circa 1961, he made a deal with Smith to have first dibs on Smith’s material going forward, and indeed with a few exceptions all of Smith’s work published from about 1962 until his death saw print in Galaxy or If. “Think Blue, Count Two” is, like nearly all of Smith’s fiction, set in the Instrumentality of Mankind universe, a mind-boggling future history that sadly Smith did not live to finish. You have a far future with comically large spaceships, genetically engineered animal-people, and an interplanetary government that is somehow both omnipresent and whose agents we don’t actually see. This is all conveyed with a style that is rather tell-y and stilted, in a way that either you’ll like or you won’t. Also even by the standards of old-timey writers, Smith was a big fan of cats. Like really. Like he was kind of a proto-furry.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1963 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It was reprinted in Elsewhere and Elsewhen (ed. Groff Conklin) and the Smith collections The Instrumentality of Mankind and The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Fiction of Cordwainer Smith.

Enhancing Image

“Think Blue, Count Two” is set fairly early in the Instrumentality timeline, taking place sometime after “Scanners Live in Vain” but before “The Game of Rat and Dragon.” Unfortunately Smith lost his notebook that had a mapped-out timeline for his future history, so the best we have is guess work. This makes it even harder to find an entry point for the series. Smith’s style of narration is unconventional no matter how you look at it, since despite the action taking place in the far future, the narrator acts as if said action had already happened in the distant past. We have a future history that is self-mythologizing, and also a far-future humanity whose use of English is a bit different from ours. Smith was fluent in multiple language (something like five or six, which is ridiculous and nigh-incomprehensible by today’s standards), and his childhood being partly spent in China in the early years of the 20th century seemed to shape his understanding of language. Not to say he’s a master stylist, a la Fritz Leiber or Ted Sturgeon if we’re talking contemporaries, but rather he has more in common with J. R. R. Tolkien, for both his worldbuilding and his understanding of linguistics. Smith’s future history is weird and densely packed. As for this story we’re actually told the basic plot right at the beginning, before anything actually happens, although it’s easy to overlook this. “A young man, bright of skin and hair, merry at heart, set out for a new world. An older man, his hair touched with gray, went with him. So, too, did thirty thousand others. And also, the most beautiful girl on earth.” But we won’t be introduced to the girl or the men she’ll be accompanying for a minute.

See, space travel in the Instrumentality universe is a big gamble, and at best still takes a lot of work. Most writers of the period depicted space travel as being convenient to the point of straining one’s suspension of disbelief; there’s always some workaround for the speed-of-light problem, not to mention time dilation is usually not factored into things. Not to mention ships would require a truly monstrous amount of energy and propulsion to get through space. Someone like Poul Anderson would make a game out of how spaceships might work. As for Smith, these ships are impossibly large hulking machines, but also space travel is shown to be quite horrible. The whole plot of “Think Blue, Count Two” kicks off because some technicians are prepping a colony ship for a voyage to a distant planet, in a journey that would take centuries of objective time, without repeating the disaster of Old Twenty-two. Basically what happened on Old Twenty-two is that something happened with the sailor (the ship’s human navigator) that required some of the passengers be awoken from cold sleep. “They did not get on well with one another. Or else they got on too horribly well, in the wrong way.” We don’t get specifics, but the gist of it is that all hell broke loose and life aboard Old Twenty-two descended into death and debauchery. For this next trip, the technicians and the “psychological guard” (Smith doesn’t really explain what a psychological guard, but it’s like a psychologist and an engineer rolled into one job) have a safeguard in the form of Veesey, a 15-year-old girl who does not stand out at all aside from her beauty. In fact, Veesey doesn’t have any special skills, except for one thing: she’s to play the daughter role, so that no adult should wanna harm her.

Now, this next part is very weird, so bear with me: Veesey, while she’s in cold sleep, is mind-linked with a laminated mouse brain that is both dead and alive, or rather the mouse is dead but its brain is active—indeed the brain, which is wrapped in plastic, will be active for literally thousands of years assuming it’s never destroyed. Veesey’s telepathic link with the mouse brain (yeah) relies on her unconsciously memorizing a certain TV serial, as well as a nursery rhyme, which goes like this:

Lady if a man
Tries to bother you, you can
Think blue,
Count two,
And look for a red shoe.

If Veesey need ever recite the rhyme, help will come to her aid. How help would come to her aid is not explained, and anyway saying it now would be giving away a big spoiler. You might have noticed that we’re a bit of a ways into the review and, if you’ve read the story already and have it fresh enough in your mind, I’ve barely even tackled the plot. The pacing here is a bit wonky, which truth be told is a problem I often have with Smith, which might have to do with his peculiar style. There is a lot of setup, to the point where we don’t actually get on the ship and are introduced to Veesey’s two male companions until at least a quarter in; but then you might argue we need the setup, or else what follows will not make any damn sense to us. I will say, this really should not be your first Smith or Instrumentality story. I would recommend starting with “Scanners Live in Vain” or “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” or maybe “The Burning of the Brain.” For one, Smith mentions the Scanners offhandedly at the beginning of “Think Blue, Count Two,” and if this is your first Smith story then you would have no clue what a Scanner is, because Smith doesn’t explain it. In fact there is a lot that Smith can’t be bothered to explain, whether it be the jargon or mechanics of his future history. It also doesn’t help that despite psychology figuring very much into the workings of the Instrumentality universe (yeah, you’ve got psi powers and the like), we don’t get much insight into how characters think or how they mentally interact with this strange world around them. As such, there is no singular one-size-fits-all Instrumentality story; but on the plus side, the more of this series you read, the more rewarding it becomes, since these stories piggyback off each other.

Now, Veesey is put in cold sleep and sent aboard, along with 30,000 other passengers. The ship is maintained by the sailor along with a team of robots, but while the robots can do a great deal, a very small number of passengers will have to be awakened if the sailor were to die or become incapacitated. So of course, in seemingly no time at all, the sailor dies; whether it be suicide or an accident is not revealed until later. Veesey thus wakes up, along with two male passengers, the young and handsome Trece and the older and deformed (something had gone wrong with his cryo-chamber) Talatashar. The humans enter and awaken from cold sleep periodically (it would seem like days to them while centuries pass by outside the ship) to help with issues the robots are unable to deal with themselves. That’s the idea. Since this is a story and a story typically requires drama, though, the humans run into problems that are unrelated to the ships—namely that while machinery might be running fine, there’s always the chance for human error and human folly. There’s also the problematic aspect of the equation, which is that every adult (who are bare minimum a decade older than her) wants to get in Veesey’s pants, despite her very young age. I wanna say this sort of thing only happens in this one Smith story, but I’m also thinking of the questionable age-gap relationship at the heart of “On the Storm Planet,” which otherwise is one of Smith’s best. Granted that nothing explicit happens on the page (because this is still magazine SF in the early ’60s), it doesn’t take long for Veesey and Trece to start a sexual relationship.

There Be Spoilers Here

While Veesey and Trece’s relationship progresses, Talatashar becomes kind of an incel, resenting Veesey’s casual pull on his male friend. The result is jealousy that heightens into Talatashar entering a blind rage and going on a rather Elliot Rodger-esque rant about how women are so purely evil that they’re not even aware of their evilness. Yeah, it would be a comical level of misogyny if not for the fact that we now have guys going on shooting sprees basically because they have some awful personalities that they’re unable to get any pussy. Misogyny is the big catalyst for tensions between the three humans escalating, which I’ll be honest, I did not expect considering Smith was a lot of things, but a feminist was not one of them. (Mind you that while he was definitely a right-winger, Smith wasn’t entirely right-wing: for one he seemed to sympathize with the Civil Rights movement, with the Underpeople [the aforementioned genetically engineered animal-people] clearly being an allegory for a oppressed underclass.) Thankfully Veesey is not in any real danger, since all she has to do is think of the nursery rhyme that’s been burned into her brain and the dead-alive mouse brain does its job. A series of holograms comes alive and tell Talatashar to quit being such a bitch baby or else they’ll kick his shit in—a threat that, surprisingly, he ends up taking to heart. The holograms, despite being effectively ghosts, are able to trick the humans’ minds so as to make them think these ghostly doings are for real, to the point where Sh’san, the lead hologram, can apparently fire a “gun” at someone’s head and said head would actually be blown to bits. You have to admit that’s pretty cool.

So, all’s well that ends well. The three humans and their 30,000 fellow passengers reach the planet with the ship in one piece. Of course, Trece dumps Veesey, letting her know that it’s actually not too kosher for a 20-something to be dating a 15-year-old. (He says this after they’ve had sex multiple times, but better late than never, I guess.) Talatashar is much more chill now, having gone over his bout of space-induced insanity, and the technicians waiting for them at the immigration station even repaired his face so he looks reasonably handsome now. This is one of those Smith stories that has a straight-up happy ending, which is not something I would suggest getting used to with Smith.

A Step Farther Out

At some point I’m gonna review a Smith story here that involves the Underpeople, who are quite interesting conceptually, although they don’t actually appear in that many Instrumentality stories. The last Smith story I reviewed, “Drunkboat,” had its points but wasn’t very good, in my opinion, although “Think Blue, Count Two” is better. The appeal of Cordwainer Smith lies in the fact that he’s one of the best and most eccentric old-timey SF writers when it comes to space opera, or more generally space adventure. “Scanners Live in Vain” does not read like any other space adventure story of the time, and similarly “Think Blue, Count Two” takes what is basically a love triangle IN SPAAAAACE and puts a novel spin on it. This is the kind of story you should check out once you’ve become at least a bit acclimated with the Instrumentality series.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” by R. A. Lafferty

July 11th, 2025

(Cover by Dember. Galaxy, December 1962.)

Who Goes There?

I’ve been meaning to dig more into R. A. Lafferty’s early work, which is the stuff that tends to get overlooked when I see people evaluating his legacy. Lafferty is pretty divisive among readers, probably more so today than half a century ago: either you’re a fan of his stuff or you ain’t. I’m not a fan myself, really, but I’ll try anything once (or even twice). In the case of Lafferty it’s mainly because he’s Quirky™ that he has a love-him-or-hate-him reputation, although this same quirkiness also threw him into the midst of the New Wave, despite being politically and socially conservative and also already middle-aged, being about a generation older than most of his fellow New Wavers. He appeared in Dangerous Visions, because of course he did. He was also one of the most frequent contributors to Damon Knight’s Orbit series. Lafferty had made his debut in the late ’50s, but not many people know this. Also, I should mention that this will be a shorter review than usual, both because “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” is very short and also because there’s not much I can say about it.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1961 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in the Lafferty collection Strange Doings, and has fallen out of copyright, so it’s on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

The tragedy of the situation is that Manuel is too thorough at his job, which is not the same thing as being good at one’s job. The state authorities hire Manuel as a census taker, which (the narrator tells us upfront) is a decision that will lead to the deaths of thousands. We’re basically told how the story will end at the beginning, but are not given context. The official who gives Manuel his job tells him to count all the people in the Santa Magdalena (which as far as I can tell is not a real place), a little mountain area on the outskirts of High Plains, Texas. The job should’ve been an easy one, since there aren’t many people in that area—or at least there aren’t many normal people. Unfortunately, Manuel knows something that the official does not. “The official had given a snap judgement, and it led to disaster. It was not his fault. The instructions are not clear. Nowhere in all the verbiage does it say how big they have to be to be counted as people.” So Manuel takes his mule, named Mula, into the desert, and three days later he returns to High Plains, his papers filled with names—thousands of them. Thousands more than there should be. Also, quite strangely, Manuel and his mule seem to have aged by decades, despite not being gone nearly that long. Manuel claims he had aged 35 years while doing the census, and he might be right about that. He also seems to have shrunk in size, to the size of—well, it’s a slur that Lafferty uses, which I will not repeat here.

There’s a large cratr near High Plains, about the size of where a small town might’ve been, and the crater (nobody knows what caused it) had long since been christened as Sodom. Now, Lafferty knew his Bible, and even if you don’t then you should still figure that if there’s a Sodom, there must also be a Gomorrah. These are the twin cities of the plain that God decided to blow to kingdom come, on account of their collective wickedness. The author (or maybe authors) of Genesis did not make it clear just what it was that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were guilty of, but a common historical interpretation is that they indulged a little too much in old-fashioned sodomy—you know that’s where the word comes from. Of course, Lafferty is being ironic, since the people of High Plains and whatever Sodom used to be are not guilty of any crime worthy of a Biblical smackdown; but rather these people fall victim to a classic bureaucratic fuck-up. You could say it was a little misunderstanding. The problem is that Manuel knew about the little people who lived in the Santa Magdalena; by little we mean about the size of action figures, or Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians. Manuel, who we’re told is quite stupid (he is apparently illiterate and can’t read a map), respects the little people, but irks them something fierce when he tries counting them as part of the census. Hilarity ensues.

How much you like Lafferty will depend on your own sense of humor, as well as if you can get behind his callousness as well as his religious ferocity. There’s an immense sadism in a lot of Lafferty’s writing, which is sometimes played for laughs, such as here, as well as the last Lafferty story I reviewed, “The Transcendent Tigers.” “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” is not as good as “The Transcendent Tigers,” for one because it’s not as funny, but also I feel like Lafferty has less of a point to make. The former is so short that we barely have time to understand any of these characters, and Lafferty doesn’t escalate the catastrophe like he does in his best/funniest work. I would describe this story as “cute,” which is to say it has the same energy as a decent joke that makes you exhale from your nostrils but doesn’t actually make you laugh. I do sometimes wonder why Lafferty had such a sadistic streak, but then again virtually every Catholic writer I know has a perverted preoccupation when it comes to death and human suffering. I’ve also seen criticisms of Lafferty for having misogynistic tendencies, but since there aren’t any female characters of note here, there is at least that.

There Be Spoilers Here

Manuel dies, seemingly from a mix of rapid aging and having lost his marbles, which then has the perspective change to that of Marshal, the census chief of High Plains. One night Marshal gets a visitor in the form of one of the little people, although Marshal’s not totally convinced it isn’t a hallucination. The little guy is upset about Manuel’s census list and wants it back, but it’s too late. The truth is that what had caused Sodom was that the people who lived there (this was a few hundred years ago, so says the little dude) had found out about the little people. The whole town had been blown up, from what the little dude reveals to be some kind of explosive “the size of a grain of sand.” Marshal does not take the warning seriously and—well, you already know the rest. The change in perspectives bugged me a bit, being that this is such a short story, and also there’s the fact that the back end suddenly becomes heavy on dialogue compared to the rest of it. The result almost reads like a rough draft.

A Step Farther Out

“Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas” is both early and minor Lafferty, in that it’s good for a chuckle but not much else. I suspect Fred Pohl accepted it because he liked it enough, and because of its lenght he thought it would be a good little piece to fill out an issue. Back in the days before online magazines, it was common practice to accept minor stories for the sake of filler, which is not something online magazine editors have to think about. There’s filler by the usual suspects when it comes to this sort of thing, but then there’s also filler by major writers. Lafferty was not a major writer yet in 1962, but he was on his way there.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Something Bright” by Zenna Henderson

July 4th, 2025

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Galaxy, February 1960.)

Who Goes There?

Our first ’60s Galaxy story for this retrospective is by someone who actually did not appear in Galaxy often. The last time I covered Zenna Henderson it was as part of a retrospective on F&SF, the magazine which seemed to be Henderson’s preferred outlet. Henderson made her debut in 1952, as part of a wave of female writers who would help shape ’50s SF as being a very different ball game from the previous decade—indeed also the decade to come after, since there wouldn’t be as many active female SFF writers in the ’60s. Henderson specialized in short fiction, and one reason she lost traction by the end of the ’60s is that she refused to change her tune with the market; her single “novel,” Pilgrimage: The Book of the People, is a fix-up. Given her day job as a schoolteacher, it makes sense that her fiction tends to focus on relationships between adults (specifically parents and teachers) and children, with children especially getting attention, which for the time was novel. SF at the time was, let’s say averse to understanding the day-to-day lives of children, but Henderson’s fiction was a major exception. Today’s story, “Something Bright,” is a standalone work (Henderson’s fiction can be split into two groups: standalone stories and those about “The People”) that I found a good deal more compelling than “Subcommittee,” the last Henderson story I reviewed. This is a good one, and it’s understandably one of her more reprinted stories.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1960 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It was reprinted in The 6th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F (ed. Judith Merril), The Seventh Galaxy Reader (ed. Frederik Pohl), Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander, and Frederik Pohl), and the Henderson collections The Anything Box and Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson.

Enhancing Image

The exact year is not given, but right away we’re told that “Something Bright” takes place during “the Depression,” so probably anywhere between 1930 and 1935. Anna is an adult now, but she’s telling us about a strange thing that happened to her when she was eleven years old, living in a “court” that her family shared with an older couple, the Klevitys. Mr. Klevity isn’t around (in fact he doesn’t appear until the story’s end), but Mrs. Klevity is, especially whenever Anna’s mom has to go out for errands. Obviously there is something off about the Klevitys, not least because they somehow have fresh eggs every morning, in an economy where even eggs are treated as a delicacy. The SFnal twist is by itself easy to detect in advamce, to the point where it hardly even counts as a twist; but it’s what Henderson does around the twist that makes it a pretty good story. As such I’m gonna work on the assumption that you, the reader, have already figured out that the Klevitys are aliens in disguise, become come on, we’re all adults here, and the fact that Henderson waits until the back end to confirm our suspicions is merely a formality. This is a story about childhood and memory, far more than it is a story about aliens, yet the SFnal element is integral to its makeup. Both in style and substance it would strike the average reader as “literary”—except for the part about the aliens, of course.

The key ingredient that elevates “Something Bright” is the sense that while it is not autobiographical at face value, there is the strong sense that Henderson is writing about personal experiences that she herself probably had first-hand knowledge of. I’m not sure how much Henderson and Anna share in terms of personality, but we do know that they both spent at least some of their formative years during the Depression, and incidentally each is an older child in a family with five kids. When Henderson/Anna asks at the beginning, “Do you remember the Depression?” she’s being at least partly rhetorical: she absolutely does remember. Despite being only about a dozen pages, the setting is vividly set, with Anna lamenting being the eldest of five kids in a home that amounted to two rooms, in which nobody had any privacy, least of all her mother. We’re not told directly what happened with Anna’s dad, that I can recall anyway, but at one point it’s implied he either went off in search of work or abandoned the family outright. Anna’s mom is effectively a single parent, but that’s where Mrs. Klevity comes in. It would have been commonplace, during the Depression, for kids to either be left to fend for themselves much of the time or to be kept under watch by multiple people who were not their biological parents—out of economic necessity more than anything. You may remember in To Kill a Mockingbird that Scout and her brother Jem are left to their own devices for way longer than what would nowadays be considered a good idea, on account of their single dad only being able to do so much.

“Something Bright” must’ve struck a cord at the time, on account of being reprinted multiple times within just a few years, but it also speaks to today’s post-COVID environment. The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is, along with the housing market crash of 2008, the closest we have to a modern-day analog to the Great Depression. These are times in which the machinery of capitalism comes almost to a grinding halt, in which the system “failed” (but, on the other hand, if we’re to take capitalism as a system that works to benefit a rich minority at the expense of the majority, then it more or less kept working as intended), and in which even the nuclear family as a viable model for child care seemed on the brink of becoming a thing of the past. Ironically the nuclear family, which conservatives love to hold up as being traditional and “natural,” has, for practical reasons, been in fact a fairly modern phenomenon. The idea that two parents would take care of their own biological kids was unviable for many during the Depression, during which you’d be lucky if even one of your parents had a steady job, and said job was unlikely to both pay the bills and feed everyone. Thus in this story we’re given a depiction of a nontraditional family setup, in which the father figure is absent and so Anna and her siblings are left with at least one adult figure in their lives who is a constant and yet is not related to them. Mrs. Klevity sticks out in Anna’s memory not just for her strangeness and her conspicuous and yet unexplained ability to provide for both herself and her husband (Anna points out that the Klevitys have three rooms to themselves, compared to Anna’s two), but also the fact that she at least temporarily acted as a surrogate parent.

There Be Spoilers Here

The back end of “Something Bright” takes a turn towards horror, although it doesn’t quite go there, because it turns out Anna is not in any real danger. Her first encounter with Mrs. Klevity without the disguise, which she hears but does not see, is genuinely chilling, not to mention an unexpected bit of restraint of Henderson’s part. We figured in advance that the Klevitys were not strictly speaking human, but how this reveal is made is what makes the twist memorable despite its predictability. That Anna ultimately helps Mrs. Klevity and her husband (who only shows up at the end to find that his wife has flown the coop, so to speak) go back to wherever it is they came from, and gets something material out of it (the Klevitys leave behind their half of the court and bestow it to Anna’s family, in a thank-you note), makes for a pretty upbeat conclusion. Yet despite it being a happy ending, there’s still a strong eeriness about the whole thing, as if Anna, who is telling us this story many years after the fact, is trying to explain some peculiar childhood trauma that had happened to her. I have to wonder what the context could be that Anna is telling this story to us, since this is not the kind of thing you’d tell to just anyone, but this is a quibble. Then again, when you’re looking back on childhood memories, the line between what really happened and one’s own imagination can be hard to separate. I barely remember my own childhood, as an autistic person who also dissociated a lot, to the point where a lot of what I “remember” might not have actually happened. Our own histories become stranger and more disconnected as time passes, to where they no longer seem real to us.

A Step Farther Out

Henderson working with children as part of her day job is very much reflected here, as it captures a genuineness about childhood experience that very few SF stories at the time had even attempted. The twist is obvious, to the point where I don’t even count it as a spoiler really, but the twist is not why we’re here. When I read “Subcommittee” I was ambivalent about its glorifying of the nuclear family, which probably did not read as old-hat in the early ’60s but which now reads as stuffy and too old-fashioned; but “Something Bright” shows us an alternative family dynamic and doesn’t do anything to demonize it. It also helps that Anna is a likable narrator who relates her past experiences such that you get a vivid impression of what her childhood was like, even if you didn’t (and indeed most people in the US don’t now) go through exactly what she did. I recommend it! It’s very good proto-feminist pew-New Wave SF.

See you next time.