Tag: theodore sturgeon

Novella Review: “The Other Man” by Theodore Sturgeon

May 20th, 2025

(Cover by Jack Coggins. Galaxy, September 1956.)

Who Goes There?

Theodore Sturgeon was one of the great writers of SF and fantasy from the early ’40s until about a decade before his death in 1985, especially at short lengths. He’s also responsible for one of the all-time great Star Trek episodes, “Amok Time,” and was instrumental in building up the lore of the Vulcans. Sturgeon’s Law, also called Sturgeon’s Rule, goes like this: “90% of science fiction is crud, but then 90% of everything is crud.” This is more or less true. Sturgeon also had a pretty good criterion for determining what made for good SF, although he didn’t always follow said criterion: a good SF story should introduce a human problem that can only have an SFnal solution. Conversely you could have an SFnal problem with a human solution. This is not to say Sturgeon’s stories were strictly “problem” stories—far from it. His fantasy stories especially play fast and loose with genre conventions, although today’s story, “The Other Man,” is psychological SF in the sense that it deals with psychology, which is a soft science. Maybe the softest and squishiest science of all. SF focusing on psychology seemed to be all the rage in the ’50s, especially in Galaxy, which Sturgeon wrote consistently for at the time. Between his alcoholism, string of odd jobs, and troubled relationships, Sturgeon’s output came in peaks and valleys; he either wrote a lot or nothing at all. But the ’50s saw Sturgeon in his prime, and while “The Other Man” isn’t top-tier material it does show an ambitious writer who worked tirelessly, if also imperfectly.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1956 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in SF: The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume (ed. Judith Merril) and the Sturgeon collections The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon, The Stars Are the Styx, and And Now the News…

Enhancing Image

Fred (I don’t think we ever get his last name) is a combination of physician and therapist, in a future not so different from what was then the present in which psychology has been made just a bit less soft a science thanks to machinery. Unfortunately the machine in question, the psychostat, will only help him somewhat with his latest case. The problem is that Fred and one Hildy Jarrell (her nickname is Osa, so that’s what I’ll call her from now on) used to be lovers, but broke up five years ago. Now Osa’s married to Richard A. Newell, who’s a real nasty piece of work, and Osa wants Frank to help her current partner, as a kind of favor. This is probably the worst thing Osa could’ve done, having her ex work on her husband’s brain, but there’s a certain logic to it, not to mention that if she hadn’t made this weird choice then we wouldn’t have a story. Much of the conflict has to do with Fred’s own internal troubles, but also there’s the fact that Richard himself is not what you’d call a cooperative patient. Finally, to round out the cast, there’s Fred’s assistant, Ms. Thomas, who basically acts as the voice of reason and whose relationship with Fred is ambiguous. Are they just colleagues, or is there something else going on?

Thus we’re off to the races. The setup is simple and for a novella “The Other Man” goes by pretty quickly, but then it’s only maybe 19,000 words. I have a few issues with The Collection Short Fiction of Theodore Sturgeon, of which And Now the News… is a part, namely its mediocre proofreading and the occasional flub on series editor Paul Williams’s part, but Williams’s note on “The Other Man” is quite useful and enlightening. This novella could be considered a collaboration between Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein, in which the latter basically provided the premise for it while Sturgeon did the actual writing. This came about through a series of letters, and it’s interesting to read about if only because Sturgeon and Heinlein are quite different, in their personalities, politics, although not their work ethic, both being imaginative but also having often to be coaxed into getting the writing done. (Also, totally a tangent, but I’m a procrastinator who needs to be under at least a bit of pressure in order to write anything. Partly I blame the clinical depression, but even if I wasn’t often in a depressive episode I would still be prone to waiting until the last minute.) It’s also worth mentioning that for someone who at least publicly had the reputation of deriding psychology (there’s a memorable passage in Time Enough for Love in which Lazarus Long, one of Heinlein’s escapist characters, considers psychology to not be a real science), Heinlein still seemed to read a fair bit on it. Then there’s Sturgeon, who was interested in psychology but also its alternatives, to the point where he was apparently sympathetic to Dianetics in the ’50s (this was unfortunately not unusual among SF writers at the time). So “The Other Man” shows a meeting of the minds—one within the story, but it also shows such a meeting between two of the field’s great writers.

The problem with Richard, aside from being a gaping asshole, is that he has what used to be called multiple personality disorder (MPD), now called dissociative identity disorder (DID). The former was still the clinical term when Sturgeon wrote “The Other Man,” and as such his depiction of this mental disorder is rather out of date, although surprisingly (except for Sturgeon it’s unsurprising) Richard is not demonized for his mental illness. He has issues, is combative with Fred, and his relationship with Osa is on the skids, but this would probably be the case even if he didn’t have a separate identity that occasionally fronted—that separate identity being Anson. (It’s worth mentioning here that Sturgeon named Anson after Heinlein’s middle name, as a kind of tip of the hat.) Anson is “cherubic,” as I think Thomas describes him, but he’s also mentally challenged (that’s not the term Sturgeon uses, just be aware) so that despite being a grown man in personality he’s written as having the temper and vocabulary of a confused child. Fred’s able to make Anson front thanks to the psychostat, the idea being that the machine, using cycles, can break down parts of someone’s personality before putting it back together; in the case of there being more than one personality in a single body this proves to be a bit of a challenge. Fred is thus stuck with a dilemma, since medically he should eradicate Anson and in so doing “cure” Richard, but he’s also tempted to eradicate Richard’s personality and allow Anson to take over. Because this is basically a medical drama there has to be some kind of ethical dilemma.

Sturgeon combines SF technology with treatment of mental illness to explore the mystery of human nature, which both then and now is something that’s hard to parse. We know now that DID tends to be a response to severe trauma, so that a person’s identity has become fractured, but we’re not really sure why Richard is like this. The point that both Sturgeon and Fred are more concerned with is the duality of Richard and Anson as personalities, being like Siamese twins and so conjoined, but literally in the same body as opposed to sharing some skin or organs. The “other man” of the title is at least a double entendre since it could refer to Richard as “the other man” that Osa’s seeing, but also Anson is the “the other man” in Richard’s body. In Sturgeon’s world, people contain multitudes, whether they suffer from mental aberrations or not; his characters are some of the most complex and internally conflicted in old-timey SF. Fred himself is conflicted on what to do, since he’s trying to figure out what’s best for Richard, what’s best for Osa, and then finally what’s best for himself. Modern readers will be quick to notice that Fred is almost laughably unprofessional, to the point where it might strain one’s suspension of disbelief; as for me I have to admit I also found it a bit distracting, but then I also didn’t expect this story to be so insular and on such a small scale. We’re stuck with four (well, five if we count Anson) characters in what may as well be a single room, so that despite being a novella the action feels cramped.

There Be Spoilers Here

Fred and Thompson go through some options as to what might be done about Richard-Anson, with one being to have the two personalities work in shifts. This might not be a coincidence, since I’m 99% sure Sturgeon had read Wyman Guin’s “Beyond Bedlam” when that appeared in Galaxy five years earlier, but that might also just be serendipity. Mind you that aside from tackling 1950s ideas of mental illness, “Beyond Bedlam” and “The Other Man” don’t have much in common, with the former being about what might happen if a certain mental disorder were to become the new norm on a societal level, whereas the latter is far more inward-looking. Sturgeon preceded the New Wave by a couple decades, but “The Other Man” very much anticipates the New Wave’s preoccupation with “inner space,” in that it’s more concerned with human psychology than technology. Anyway, the solution ends up being that with the help of the psychostat Fred is able to merge Richard and Anson into one personality, a kind of mixing of the two so that Richard-Anson becomes a single identity, presumably with each man’s memories intact. It’s really a compromise, because otherwise one of them would have to go. At the end we’re treated to a thank-you letter from Osa, which if I was Fred I wouldn’t know how to feel about, given that she’s my ex and she’s fucking this guy I don’t like. At least it’s implied at the very end that Fred and Thomas’s strictly professional relationship is about to take a friendlier turn, so, all’s well that ends well? It’s a bittersweet ending, although it leans more on the sweetness.

A Step Farther Out

I’m constantly itching to cover more Sturgeon, although there are so many authors to choose from and life is short. This is because, depending on the time period, Sturgeon did write a lot and most of his work appeared in magazines, but also he’s such a multifaceted writer. There is no single Sturgeon story that sums up all his virtues, or which acts as a perfect gateway to his larger body of work. I could write about Sturgeon until I fucking die, and yet as far as I can tell we don’t have a proper book-length biography of him. This is terrible. “The Other Man” is B-tier Sturgeon, which means it’s still better than most SF from the ’50s.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: May 2025

May 1st, 2025
(Cover by John Schoenherr. Analog, June 1975.)

At the beginning of the year I said that I would be covering one short story or novella from Galaxy each month—but I said nothing about serials. The truth is that Galaxy was, alongside Astounding/Analog, the most consistent market for serialized novels and novellas at the time, so it would feel wrong to never acknowledge that part of the magazine’s history. As such we’re getting a novella and a serial from Galaxy this month; that they’re both from authors I admire probably helps.

Last month I covered a horror story by the crime/mystery author Dorothy Salisbury Davis, which gave me the idea of finding more SFF by people who normally write crime/mystery, which while also a genre that has a history in pulp magazines, is “realistic” fiction rather than SFF. One curiosity that struck me ever since I saw it years ago was the fantasy story “The Bronze Door” by Raymond Chandler, which marked one of only two times he appeared in an SFF magazine. Someone who wrote a good deal more SFF than Chandler would be John D. MacDonald, who wrote prolifically for the genre magazines in the late ’40s and early ’50s before shifting to crime fiction and making a killing on that. So for this month’s complete novel we’ve got the early MacDonald novel Wine of the Dreamers. Rounding out the novel-length stuff is a relatively obscure standalone SF novel by Roger Zelazny, who nowadays is more known for his fantasy.

For the women we have two people who are a few generations apart and coming from different continents, but who still, each in her own way, have come to write science fiction. Kate Wilhelm is actually a bit hard to find in magazines after the late ’60s, once she found her voice as a writer, but the September 2001 issue of F&SF was a special issue dedicated to Wilhelm, complete with a new novella. As for the Greek writer Eugenia Triantafyllou, I picked just about the newest story I reasonably could’ve (an unofficial rule of mine is that a story must be at least a year old for me to consider it for review), with “Loneliness Universe” being a finalist in this year’s Hugos. I’m voting in the Hugos, by the way.

That makes one story from the 1930s, two from the 1950s, two from the 1970s, one from the 2000s, and one from the 2020s.

For the serial:
1. The Dream Millennium by James White. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, October to December 1973. I’ve been meaning to read more James White, and thankfully several of his novels first appeared as serials. White first appeared in the UK, in New Worlds, before eventually finding some success in the US as well. Along with Bob Shaw he was one of the few Irish SF writers to appear regularly on both sides of the Atlantic back in those days.
2. Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny. Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, June to August 1975. Zelazny is one of the most influential SFF writers of all time, his mark being apparent on the likes of George R. R. Martin and (God help us) Neil Gaiman; and yet despite a couple generations of writers (especially those of fantasy) owing a debt to Zelazny, much of his work remains obscure or simply out of print, including this standalone novel.
For the novellas:
1. “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” by Kate Wilhelm. From the September 2001 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s easy to forget this, but Wilhelm started in the ’50s, only that she flew under the radar for about a decade. Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, though, Wilhelm seemed to metamorphize almost overnight into one of the most acclaimed SF authors from the late ’60s until her death in 2018. She was married to Damon Knight.
2. “The Other Man” by Theodore Sturgeon. From the September 1956 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Sturgeon is one of my favorite authors, especially of short fiction. Sturgeon had started to write professionally with “mainstream” fiction, although this went nowhere and he quickly pivoted to SFF, much to our benefit. His productivity was peaks and valleys so that he was writing either a lot or nothing at all. He was most consistently productive in the ’50s.
For the short stories:
1. “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. From the May-June 2024 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Novelette. Triantafyllou was born and raised in Greece, and continues to live abroad, but writes her fiction in English. She made her debut back in 2017, and has yet to write her first novel, although maybe she just much prefers writing short fiction.
2. “The Bronze Door” by Raymond Chandler. From the November 1939 issue of Unknown. Possibly the most acclaimed crime writer of the 20th century, seriously only rivaled by Agatha Christie, Chandler’s known for his series of novels starring Philip Marlowe. Chandler famously didn’t start writing crime fiction until he was in his forties, and didn’t write his first novel until he was pushing fifty.
For the complete novel:
1. Wine of the Dreamers by John D. MacDonald. From the May 1950 issue of Startling Stories. Fans of crime fiction would know MacDonald for his prolific (21 novels over a span of as many years) Travis McGee series, as well as the standalone novel Cape Fear (first titled The Executioners, but then retitled after the 1962 film adaptation), but he also wrote a good deal of science fiction in the late ’40s and early ’50s. It’s not unusual for authors to cut their teeth on working with one genre before moving to greener pastures, so that much like how Elmore Leonard started with Westerns before moving to crime fiction, the same happened with MacDonald. Wine of the Dreamers was either MacDonald’s first or second novel, it’s hard to say.
Won’t you read with me?
The Observatory: On Depression, Science Fiction, and the End of World War II

January 17th, 2025

(Cover by Alejandro. Astounding, February 1948.)

Here it is, another Observatory post that’s a couple days late, along with a short story review that’s nowhere to be found. This case is especially painful for me because I respect C. L. Moore a lot, and I irked myself when I read her Jirel of Joiry story “Jirel Meets Magic” and found that I had not read it deeply enough to write a review that’d be worth a damn about it. Unlike the last time this happened, however, it really was because I felt unprepared to deal with Moore’s level of writing, since it must be said she was a better prose stylist than most of her contemporaries, especially in the ’30s. Since I don’t feel qualified to review more Jirel stories, at least for the foreseeable future, I do hope instead to cover a Kuttner-Moore story in February, as a way to return to both of those authors whom I like a great deal. For now, let’s talk about something else. This is a sequel to the Observatory post I wrote last month, “The Origins of Depression in Science Fiction,” which is actually one of my favorite editorials I’ve written thus far, even if it was not what you’d call a “pleasure” to write—rather it was a post I felt I had to write. Turns out that despite the aforementioned post being over 2,000 words long, I still have much more to say on the topic. When I wrote that earlier editorial I did it as a way to talk about my own struggles as a manic-depressive, but I also made an argument which boiled down to this: that the massive uptick in discussing mental illness through genre SF corresponded with, or perhaps was sparked by, the end of World War II, more specifically the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What had previously been only treated as theoretical suddenly became a harsh reality for SF writers, which caused a sea change for the field.

The strange thing about all this, if you think about it, is that while the Allies won World War II, vanquishing a few fascist regimes in the process, such a sense of victory did not show itself in SF writing in the months and years following the war’s end. Why weren’t these people happy? They won! Not only did they succeed in defeating the Nazis, but long-held speculations about the possibility (even the inevitability) of nuclear weapons had been vindicated overnight. It was the closest, at least up to that point, that science fiction had come to actually predicting the future and getting it right. Perhaps the person mostly keenly aware of this change in the moment was John W. Campbell, who famously got into some hot water with some federal agents because of a story he had published in the March 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction: Cleve Cartmill’s “Deadline.” Now, having read “Deadline” for myself, I can say it’s frankly not a very good story; but then it didn’t need to be. Cartmill, who at the time was a new writer, had, much with Campbell’s assistance, written a story that serves as a rather unsubtle allegory about the use of nuclear weapons against the Axis powers. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure that the US government was working on the atomic bomb, or at least some weapon of mass destruction, and that both the Axis powers and even America’s own allies (namely the Soviet Union) were keen on finding out what these scientists were cooking. The March 1944 issue of Astounding would’ve been on newsstands in February, a whole 18 months before the US dropped an actual atomic bomb on actual human beings. Compared to Street & Smith’s other magazines, Astounding did not have a big readership, but it would be their only genre magazine to survive the wartime paper rationing and I suspect Astounding‘s power for prophecy was a big reason why it was spared.

Despite the newfound vindication, however, it seems that a savage gale had swept across the ocean of science fiction with the war’s end, and Astounding, which up to 1945 tended to published some of the most optimistic fiction in the field, took on a darker hue. This change in mood was by no means unique to Campbell’s magazine, of course: every American SF magazine at the time, be it Starling Stories or its more juvenile sister magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories, got at least a bit darker in editors’ speculations and what fiction they were willing to print. During the war years, specifically 1942 to 1945, it was not uncommon to find what you might call a propaganda story in an issue of Astounding, about a character or group of characters going up against either an obvious analog (aha) for the Nazis or just the Nazis outright; and naturally these stories are about how we will or at least should beat Hitler and his goons. Off the top of my head I’m thinking of A. E. van Vogt’s “Secret Unattainable” and J. Francis McComas’s “Flight into Darkness.” Yet following the war’s end there came, over the next handful of years, a bunch of stories in Astounding and elsewhere that could not have been reasonably published (or indeed thought of) during the war, partly because of how bleak these new stories are, including but not limited to C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag” and “The Marching Morons,” T. L. Sherred’s “E for Effort,” A. E. van Vogt’s “Dormant,” Theodore Sturgeon’s “Memorial” and “There Is No Defense,” Jack Williamson’s “With Folded Hands…,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “History Lesson,” too many Ray Bradbury stories from this period to count, and about half of the stories that would comprise Clifford D. Simak’s City. Perhaps the most downbeat of all these post-war stories, in fact one of the darkest stories in the genre’s whole history (which is saying a lot), is Edmond Hamilton’s “What’s It Like Out There?,” which appeared in the December 1952 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. The kicker here is that Hamilton had written an early draft of this story a whole two decades earlier, but could not get it published then; but it found a home, seven years after World War II and in the midst of the Korean War.

(Funny aside about Sturgeon’s “There Is No Defense,” published in the issue of Astounding pictured above: Campbell, in the previous issue’s Of Times to Come section, had to tell readers that the upcoming Sturgeon story “is not about atomic bomb warfare,” despite what the title would naturally make people think. However, the Alejandro cover, which does not illustrate a particular story and which Campbell calls “purely symbolic,” showing an Olympian figure splitting the atom with what seems to be a pair of lightning bolts, tells me that “atomic bomb warfare” must’ve been on somebody’s mind. Given the timing, it’s not hard to see why.)

One could argue the latter half of the ’40s to the early ’50s marked a crucial turning point in the development of genre SF, as a kind of uniquely American form of fiction writing. Oh, there was of course SF written outside the US, before and after World War II; after all, arguably the biggest point of inspiration for Amazing Stories, when it launched in 1926, was H. G. Wells. There was another profoundly influential work of SF from the UK that arrived just in time to coincide with the collective turn toward depression and pessimism that American SF was seeing: George Orwell’s 1984. Rather than celebrate the defeat of Nazism, 1984 warns what was then the western side of the so-called Iron Curtain about totalitarianism—both of the Soviet variety and a more capitalistic American and British fascism. Orwell, in the wake of the war’s end and the start of the Cold War, saw not a new dawn for democracy in the “civilized” world but, to paraphrase him, a man (as in humanity) getting his faced stomped on by an authoritarian’s boot, forever. You know who seemed to agree with Orwell’s post-war pessimism? C. M. Kornbluth, and William Tenn, and Robert Sheckley, and Philip K. Dick, and Henry Kuttner, and so on. These are authors who either only debuted after the war’s end or had gotten lucky during the war years. (Kornbluth is a funny example in that he is both technically a pre-war writer and someone who, after taking a break from writing for several years, returned to a market that had changed drastically so as to better suit his perpetual bitterness.) We still got stories of daring invention and adventure, of man’s destiny as the owner of the universe, but we also got a good helping of stories that Campbell would not have approved. By the early ’50s the market had broadened such that even something as nihilistic as Tenn’s “The Liberation of Earth” got published in a pulpy magazine.

I’ve made it no secret that I find genre SF in the late ’40s through the ’50s very interesting, and not for the reasons people tend to idolize that period of American history. Sure, there was economic prosperity—for some people. The US quickly rose to the occasion as the leader of the Western allies, by virtue of largely of having escaped World War II unscathed compared to the UK and France. But there was racial strife, a revived paranoia that there’s a filthy communist lurking under ever bed, not to mention a forced marriage between Christianity and capitalism. As the Cold War kicked into high gear it was no longer enough to just be a good Christian in America (God forbid you were not a Christian to begin with), you had to also be a good capitalist, the problem being that worship of Christ and worship of the dollar make for uneasy bedfellows. Philosophically the two are like oil and water. Sadly, for almost eighty years at this point we’ve had to live with the suffocating, murderous reality of worshipping the dollar, seeing the rise of neo-liberalism and Christofascism, watching them spread and tangle like weeds in one’s garden. What’s not to be depressed about? The future is looking bleak. As famous as they are, generally optimistic writers like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov are nowadays plagued by controversy, or even simply ambivalence from the modern SF reading crowd. It’s not uncommon to find an earnest SF reader under the age of forty nowadays who thinks Asimov is boring, or that Heinlein is too problematic; but these people would probably connect much more with someone like Kornbluth or Kuttner. Given that we’re constantly at risk of being torn down and obliterated by depression, since it seems clear to at least some of us that we’re living in the last days of industrial capitalism (or so we hope), we might not need a Heinlein or Asimov, but someone… darker.
Short Story Review: “The Silken-Swift” by Theodore Sturgeon

March 10th, 2024

(Cover by Mel Hunter. F&SF, November 1953.)

Who Goes There?

Theodore Sturgeon was, for one or two spans of time, arguably the best American SFF writer in the business. It can be hard to judge Sturgeon’s career as a whole since he had periods of inactivity, and health problems seemed to prevent him from writing much in the last decade or so of his life; but when he was on the ball, he was on it. Unlike most authors in the pulp days, who tended to specialize in SF or fantasy, Sturgeon was great at both, and sometimes his fiction can be hard to categorize. Sadly he never broke into the mainstream like Ray Bradbury, despite some brushes with notoriety, such as his involvement with Star Trek. (His second episode for the original series, “Amok Time,” is one of my favorites.) He is the one who coined Sturgeon’s Law, although it was originally called Sturgeon’s Rule: 90% of science fiction is crud, but then 90% of everything is crud. This rule, however, does not apply to Sturgeon’s own work. He was, for my money, one of the best short story writers of the 20th century.

The ’50s can be thought of as Sturgeon’s heyday, and 1953 especially might’ve shown Sturgeon at the very peak of his powers. We saw his novel More Than Human, often considered his best (though I think the last third is comparatively weak) and which won the International Fantasy Award; and there were such iconic short stories such as “A Saucer of Loneliness” and “The World Well Lost.” “The Silken-Swift” is not as well-known as those stories, likely because it’s fantasy (which has always had an uphill battle when it comes to short fiction) and a more demanding read. It’s totally possible to read “The Silken-Swift” casually and not understand what’s happening at first. This is Sturgeon’s writing at its most controlled and layered, and unsurprisingly he would later regard it as one of his personal favorites. He wrote it as basically a fairy tale for adults, and it was such a success that it’s still one of the best of its kind. This is a Sturgeon who has reached full maturity as both a person and artist.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1953 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. In A Saucer of Loneliness, Paul Williams says this story’s magazine publication happened simultaneously with its inclusion in the Sturgeon collection E Pluribus Unicorn, although ISFDB doesn’t give a publication month for the latter. However, the introduction in F&SF says it precedes the collection by a month, with “The Silken-Swift” being a teaser for E Pluribus Unicorn. Where else has it appeared? Unicorns! (ed. Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois), The Fantasy Hall of Fame (ed. Robert Silverberg), Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment (ed. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer), and The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (ed. Tom Shippey), to name a few.

Enhancing Image

The story incorporates a poem not written by Sturgeon, titled “Unicorn.” It was written by Christine Hamilton and seemed to have been unpublished prior to “The Silken-Swift.” Now who is Christine Hamilton, you may ask? I assumed maybe she was one of Sturgeon’s wives or mistresses, but she was actually Sturgeon’s mother, and she was herself a writer, albeit mostly unpublished. It’s cute that Sturgeon would incorporate his mom’s poetry into a story that is ultimately about womanhood—not that Sturgeon considered himself a feminist, as far as I can tell, but he did sometimes write about women’s struggles under patriarchy. He didn’t write about systemic injustice so much as things like hypocrisy and arbitrary restrictions on how women “ought” to live their lives. He seemed to think highly of “The Silken-Swift” among his own works because its theme was (and sadly will probably always be) prescient. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that out of Sturgeon’s heyday, this story might’ve aged the most gracefully.

So, the plot. I won’t get too deep into it, since it’s a dense narrative and there seems to be some confusion (from reactions I’ve seen) as to what actually happens in “The Silken-Swift.” I also had a concussion a few days ago and am still recovering from that, so sadly I won’t be writing about this as much as I would’ve liked. We have three main characters: Rita, a squire’s daughter who lives in a manor; Barbara, a vegetable saleswoman who lives near said manor; and Del, a brash man “whose corded, cabled body was golden-skinned, and whose hair flung challenges back to the sun.” Rita and Barbara live in the Bogs, right outside town, with a “pool of purest water” by the manor; be sure to remember this last part. At the beginning, Del is sort of lured to the manor while the squire himself and the servants have gone out, leaving just Rita, who takes Del in—although not to do with him what he expects. The two have a good time at first, but before Del can get to second base, Rita plays a rather cruel trick on him (she apparently has been toying with witchcraft) by blinding him. Her reasoning is that no man shall have her—that she will remain a virgin so that one day she can catch a unicorn; this is taking teasing to extreme levels, you have to admit.

After Rita’s catch-and-release routine with Del, she kicks him, still blinded, out of the manor, and it’s here that we meet our other female protagonist. It’s also here that Sturgeon does something very strange for a work of prose fiction, although it does tie into the poem at the story’s center: he repeats himself, a whole paragraph, literally word-for-word. We’re introduced to Barbara twice. I had this feeling of recurrence when reading, so I had to copy-paste these two introductions just to see if my brain (which had just been rattled, mind you) was fucking with me.

The first time:

Deep in the Bogs, which were brackish, there was a pool of purest water,
shaded by willows and wide-wondering aspen, cupped by banks of a moss
most marvelously blue. Here grew mandrake, and there were strange
pipings in midsummer. No one ever heard them but a quiet girl whose
beauty was so very contained that none of it showed. Her name was Barbara.

Then the second time:

Deep in the Bogs, which were brackish, there was a pool of purest water,
shaded by willows and wide-wondering aspens, cupped by banks of a moss
most marvelously blue. Here grew mandrake, and there were strange pipings in midsummer. No one ever heard them but a quiet girl whose beauty was so very contained that none of it showed. Her name was Barbara.

This tactic might not work for some people, and it might seem like padding (this is not exactly a long story in the first place), but it fits with what Sturgeon is going for, which is a sort of narrative prose poem. Sturgeon can at times try too hard with his style, but this might be the single best use of poetry (actual poetry on top of poetic prose) in his writing. The setting is definitely medieval fantasy, but aside from the squire’s manor and the elusive unicorn at the heart of the story this feels detached from any one time frame; it doen’t feel like a stereotypical medieval fantasy setting because there’s basically none of the iconography we’ve come to associate with such a setting. The Bogs are a place that could exist, and the three central characters feel like they could be modeled on real people, despite very much fitting into archetypes appropriate for an allegory. “The Silken-Swift” is ultimately an allegory, if a rather indirect one, with a clear message that floats to the surface despite details of the plot being obscured. Simply put, it’s a story that has not aged, which can’t be said for the vast majority of literature, although fantasy does have a much easier time detaching from the circumstances of its making than science fiction.

As for Barbara’s side of the story, this is where people seem to get confused, and admittedly Sturgeon uses some obtuse language to skirt around a horrific event that, if written today, would probably be described in more visceral terms. Something I realized while reading is that Rita and Barbara are like mirror images of each other, to the point where they could be related. They’re similar enough, or at least sound similar enough, that a blinded Del confuses Barbara for Rita; this will turn out to have very bad consequences for Barbara, since Del, having just been kicked out of the manor and not knowing where he is, is out for revenge. Barbara does her best to care for an injured Del (who, as far as she knows, is just a dude who had something bad happen to him), but Del does something. Is it rape? Probably. It happens so quickly and is so indirectly described that you could miss it on a casual reading, which is one gripe I do have with this story (because nothing is perfect): either out of artfulness, getting around censorship, or likely both, Sturgeon’s language can be a little opaque.

Get this:

Once she cried out.

Once she sobbed.

“Now,” he said, “you’ll catch no unicorns. Get away from me.” He
cuffed her.

“You’re mad. You’re sick.” she cried.

“Get away,” he said ominously.

Terrified, she rose. He took the cloak and hurled it after her. It almost
toppled her as she ran away, crying silently.

You might not even know something had happened if you’re not reading carefully; but credit where credit’s due, Sturgeon implies a great deal in just a few lines. If Barbara was a virgin before then she apparently isn’t one now. Del does something pretty heinous, but it’s also hard to gauge how in control of his own actions he is, given he’s evidently still under the effects of Rita’s witchcraft and is so delirious that he thinks Barbara is Rita; but also the fact that he wanted to rape Rita in retaliation for the witchcraft is inexcusable. Barbara becomes a victim of Del’s abuse and, more indirectly, of Rita’s treachery; but despite all this she retains her sense of virtue, which is important to remember. Unicorns have often been treated in mythology as embodiments of purity, and indeed associated with purity; in the case of “The Silken-Swift” this purity is assumed to mean one’s virginity. Sturgeon, however, asks a simple question: What really counts as “pure?” Rita thinks herself pure, but she’s also a major bitch; meanwhile Barbara is the victim of sexual assault, yet is no less “pure” for it.

I wanna say the message of the story (because like all allegories it does have a clear message, for all its indirectness of style) is the one way you could date it, but unfortunately the message is evergreen. Women’s “purity” is still obsessed over in practically every major society you can think of, regardless of how authoritarian or libertarian the society’s governing system is, and regardless of the majority religion. Misogyny is always here, and might always be here on a systemic level. Among the many ways trans women are dehumanized is to frame them as sex-hungry monsters who prey on “innocent” cisgender women; and of course there’s no such thing as a “pure” trans person, because if you “violate” gender norms then you have already lost that claim to purity. (Never mind that a truly horrifying number of genderqueer people are victims of sexual assault.) Even some liberal-minded people feel threatened somehow if a women has had “too many” sexual partners in the past—if they aren’t reserved enough for their current partner. Sturgeon says this is all bullshit, and while yes the implication of sexual assault is not kid-friendly, this really is, in its subject matter and complexity, a fairy tale “for grown-ups,” as Sturgeon said of it many years later.

There Be Spoilers Here

I don’t even wanna get into spoilers, honestly.

Read it for yourself.

A Step Farther Out

Earlier in my review I said “The Silken-Swift” has not aged, which is not the same thing as saying a work of literature has aged gracefully. Most literature, indeed most great literature, is firmly rooted in the circumstances under which it was written, whether it be the author’s personal baggage or societal norms of the time and place. This in itself is no disgrace. Dhalgren could’ve only been written in the late ’60s through the post-burnout ’70s. The Crying of Lot 49 could’ve only been written during that short period in the ’60s following John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the Beatles landing in America, but before the Vietnam War escalated. Even fantasy, which tends to be more timeless than other genres, is not always excempt. The Once and Future King was clearly written in reaction to the horrors of the Great War and, later, World War II. But “The Silken-Swift,” in both its conception and its message, is timeless; you can’t put a date or place on it. Sturgeon, despite being most known for his SF, was really more comfortable as a fantasist, and I think this is a prime example of such talent.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: March 2024

March 1st, 2024
(Cover by Stanley Meltzoff. F&SF, May 1955.)

Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas wanted to start a fantasy magazine in the mid-’40s, but couldn’t get it greenlit until the decade was about to end. They both were perfectly qualified for such an endeavor, at a time when the SFF magazine boom was still a year or two off: Boucher was an accomplished author and book reviewer while McComas had just co-edited what was, at the time, the definitive SF anthology with Adventures in Time and Space. According to Lawrence E. Spivak’s (F&SF‘s initial publisher) introduction in the inaugural issue, The Magazine of Fantasy would try to encompass the whole breadth of fantasy, “from the thrilling to the chilling, from the comic to the cosmic,” providing a safe haven for what must’ve at the time seemed like the endangered species that was short fantasy fiction. Unlike Weird Tales, which leaned towards horror, and Unknown, which leaned towards the comedic, The Magazine of Fantasy would take a jack-of-all-trades approach with what material was accepted.

Of course, It would only stay “just” a fantasy magazine for the first issue. From the Winter-Spring 1950 issue onward it would be the magazine we now know and love, incorporating SF and fantasy of almost every flavor. But just because the editors caved and hopped on the SF bandwagon doesn’t mean F&SF was any less unique than before; on the contrary, it remained the only SFF magazine of its kind in the ’50s, and even today it stands out as arguably the most progressive outlet in the field thanks to the efforts of current editor Sheree Renée Thomas. Indeed for most of its life F&SF has had a left-leaning mindset, with Boucher and McComas making it clear from day one that they would go out of their way to encourage women who were trying to make it in what was up to that point a thoroughly male-dominated market. When it came time for picking what stories by which authors I should cover this month, it would’ve been easy to have an entirely all-women lineup, given contributors to F&SF in the Boucher/McComas years: Zenna Henderson, Rosel George Brown, Miriam Allen deFord, Mildred Clingerman, Judith Merril, and the list keeps going.

F&SF turns 75 this year; it is the second oldest SFF magazine still active, only behind Analog Science Fiction. Whereas Analog intentionally appeals to an older and more hard-nosed sect of genre readership, however, F&SF is remarkable for its ability to change its colors chameleon-like with the times, and even being ahead of its time on occasion. It would be a fool’s errand to cover fiction from the whole span of F&SF‘s existence, so I decided to devote March, July, and October to the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s respectively. As such, for this month, we’re looking at a small sample of what was published during the Boucher/McComas years, then during Boucher’s solo tenure, and finally the beginning of a short but very fruitful period with Robert P. Mills’s editorship. Something that really made F&SF stand above its contemporaries was its sense of dignity, being a digest with artsy and at times abstract covers that managed to snag authors from outside the genre SFF market. You have Shirley Jackson, who was definitely a genre author but who very rarely went outside the “slick” markets; and you have Robert Graves, who was totally outside the field but who would appear (with reprints) a few times in F&SF. I think I’ve said enough now; let’s get to it.

For the short stories:
1. “The Listening Child” by Margaret St. Clair. From the December 1950 issue. I covered St. Clair not long ago, although if I’m being honest I was in the midst of a horrible time in my life (long story), and thus I think she deserves another go now that I’m (for the moment) in a healthier state of mind. “The Listening Child” was the first published under St. Clair’s “Idris Seabright” pseudonym.
2. “The Shout” by Robert Graves. From the April 1952 issue. First published in 1929. The early years of F&SF were defined in part by its reprints, so I felt obligated to pick one. It helps that I had read I, Claudius and Claudius the God recently and loved them. “The Shout” sees Graves going for supernatural horror, published the same year as his star-making memoir Good-Bye to All That.
3. “The Silken-Swift” by Theodore Sturgeon. From the November 1953 issue. Sturgeon is one of my favorite writers; in terms of the short story I think he rivals Hemingway and Cheever. Nobody in the field at the time had a bigger heart, and impressively he hopped between SF, fantasy, and horror. “The Silken-Swift” is from Sturgeon during his peak era, and is also said to be one of his own favorites.
4. “Mousetrap” by Andre Norton. From the June 1954 issue. Readers of a certain age will tell you they got into SF by reading Heinlein’s juveniles, Norton’s, or both. Norton is one of the most prolific writers in the field’s history, with her Witch World series alone taking up a whole shelf or two. Strange thing is she wrote relatively little short fiction, and even less of it appeared in the magazines.
5. “Free Dirt” by Charles Beaumont. From the May 1955 issue. Beaumont was one of the best horror and fantasy writers of the ’50s and early ’60s, and would’ve kept at it had he not died of a horrific brain disease at 38. He was the third most prolific writer on The Twilight Zone, behind Richard Matheson and, of course, Rod Serling. He also had a movie review column in F&SF around this time.
6. “Steel” by Richard Matheson. From the May 1956 issue. Speaking of which, Matheson is a personal favorite of mine, and unlike Beaumont he did live (indeed a very long time) to see some degree of mainstream recognition. He’ll always be most famous for I Am Legend, but I’ll always think of him first as a short story writer and screenwriter. “Steel” was itself turned into a Twilight Zone episode.
7. “MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie” by C. M. Kornbluth. From the July 1957 issue. Like Beaumont, Kornbluth died way too young, but he also got a lot of work done in the short time he had. He’s most known for The Space Merchants, written with Frederik Pohl, but for my money he was a better short story writer than novelist. This was one of the last stories of his published in his lifetime.
8. “The Omen” by Shirley Jackson. From the March 1958 issue. Jackson is one of those authors who needs no introduction. She’s one of the most famous American horror writers, and one of the few prior to the ’70s to find success with horror novels more specifically. Sadly she didn’t live to take advantage of the ’70s horror boom. “The Omen” is pretty obscure for Jackson, likely because it’s not horror.
9. “Day at the Beach” by Carol Emshwiller. From the August 1959 issue. Wife of artist and filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, Carol is just as talented as her husband, proving early on she had a knack for the short story. She started in the ’50s and kept writing until her death in 2019. In a case of creatives in a relationship supporting each other, Ed sometimes did art for Carol’s stories, as is the case here.
I think I struck enough of a balance between SF and fantasy with this roster. It’s very tempting to focus only on the SF part of F&SF, but fantasy of various flavors (except sword-and-sorcery, which Boucher and McComas were weirdly deaf to) has always played a part in the magazine, especially in those early years. Short stories, as opposed to novellas and serials, defined F&SF at the outset, so it also happens to make sense we’re reading nothing but short stories this month.

Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “Nightmare Island” by Theodore Sturgeon

October 6th, 2023

(Cover artist uncredited. Unknown, June 1941.)

Who Goes There?

I’ve been itching to cover a Theodore Sturgeon story on here for a long time now, pretty much since I started this site over a year ago. Thing is, if we’re talking strictly short fiction, Sturgeon might be in my top five authors—he’s certainly in my top ten short story writers. He’s most known for his novel More Than Human, because novels have always sold more than short fiction and will continue to do so until the end of time, and while that is a very good novel it doesn’t show the full breadth of his talent. Sturgeon is one of the grand masters of the short story, and this would be true just going by a dozen or so of his very best, never mind the many others. From 1939 until his death in 1985 he stood out as one of the more literary and sentimental voices in the field, not too unlike close contemporary Fritz Leiber. Indeed the two men have a few things in common: they were heavy drinkers, had somewhat hectic love lives, had bouts of either writing a lot or nothing at all, and despite being elegant writers (for their time and place) they never really made it into “the slicks,” despite aspirations.

Sturgeon, despite being most associated with SF, wrote a good deal of horror, especially early in his career. I wanted to go with a story I had not read before and bonus points if it’s a deep cut, which brought me to today’s story. “Nightmare Island” was written during Sturgeon’s first productive period, from 1939 to early 1941; he wrote so much in those three years that he sort of got away with the fact that he wrote not a word of fiction between the summer of 1941 and early 1944. Even though he was only 22 when he wrote this one, he had already gone through several odd jobs while trying to make it as a writer, including a stint as a merchant sailor. Sturgeon’s fiction is sometimes inspired by the various jobs he took on, and “Nightmare Island,” set in the tropics, is about one unfortunate sailor.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1941 issue of Unknown, which is on the Archive. Sturgeon was so prolific at this point in his career that he used a pseudonym or two, although he couldn’t be bothered to keep that a secret. The much less obscure story “Yesterday Was Monday” appeared in the same issue under Sturgeon’s own name. “Nightmare Island” has been reprinted in English only twice, and never anthologized—a bit of a shame. It appeared in the Sturgeon collection Beyond as well as Microcosmic God, the second volume of his complete short fiction. Yeah, get the latter.

Enhancing Image

We start with a rather vague framing narrative in which we have an unnamed American, here on business, and “the governor,” an older gentleman of some position on the island. We’re in the tropics, maybe the Caribbean, but Sturgeon doesn’t give any real clues as to where we are (aside from a reference to the Panama canal) and maybe that doesn’t matter. Getting one criticism out of the way, I would’ve asked Sturgeon for one more rewrite so as to make the framing device less conspicuous, since this is mostly a first-person narrative from the governor’s perspective and we don’t really need the short buildup between him and the American; hell, why not have the reader take the place of the American and have the governor talk to us directly. It’s short, this opening scene, but it’s a bit clunky. We do, however, get introduced to Barry, our protagonist, who at this point lives as a beachcomber apparently in the governor’s employ. Barry is a bit fucked up and we’re about to find out why, since the conflict of the story has already happened.

We then flash back to when Barry was—well, “normal” is not the right word. Sturgeon’s protagonists can be pretty dysfunctional (think of the misfits at the heart of More Than Human), but even by those standards Barry is a hot mess. His main vice is drinking, like an insane amount of booze. He needs only the flimsiest pretext to indulge his alcoholism. “When he had a job he’d guzzle to celebrate, and when he lost one he’d guzzle to console himself,” as the governor says. At the beginning of the flashback we see Barry getting laid off again, and having been laid off he sees it fit to enter another bout of hard drinking. At a bar one night he has the misfortune of meeting Zilio, a shady character who seems to take pity on him and offers him a punch. “The name did not refer to the ingredients of the drink but to its effect.” Big mistake. I’m not sure if it used to be considered common courtesy to accept a drink a stranger offers or if at some point there was more public awareness of getting roofied and stuff like that.

Getting shanghaied in first-world countries is probably much rarer now than it would’ve been a century ago. With the internet and more ways to identify a person it’d be harder to knock someone out and make them work on some tin can against their will, as happens with Barry. He’s a real sailor, and a union man, but that doesn’t help him much as he’s stuck working on an oil vessel with mostly non-seaman for almost no pay and seemingly no way of jumping ship that wouldn’t spell death. Just when it seems Barry’s luck couldn’t get worse, it does—arguably; it certainly gets stranger, as Barry manages to topple overboard during the night, and while most people would drown, Barry does not. Nay, by taking hold of a piece of driftwood, he survives and even washed ashore on an uninhabited island.

It’s here that the fantastical part of the story comes in, because you may have noticed we’re a good third or so in and nothing strictly out of the ordinary has happened. I’m actually not sure if “Nightmare Island” would count as fantasy or science fiction, since the creatures Barry meets could very well be understood in science-fictional terms (no ghosts or anything like that), but it’s framed as a waking nightmare, one of Barry’s “horrors” resulting from his alcoholism, and it’s never rationalized. Fuck it, calling it fantasy will do the trick. I’m also not sure if Sturgeon had read any William Hope Hodgson, especially The Boats of the “Glen Carrig,” although I seriously doubt he had read Hodgson at this early point. I’m saying this because the bulk of “Nightmare Island” reads like one of Hodgson’s seafaring stories, although it doesn’t read the sheer cosmic unknowability of Hodgson.

But I’m getting ahead of myself slightly.

For most people, getting stranded on a small deserted island would be very bad; but for Barry it’s more of an inconvenience on account of having to make his own booze somehow. A much bigger problem presents itself as Barry has to share the island with giant worms, who are big and have tentacles—and are apparently sentient. Or at least one of them is; again, we’re not given a scientific explanation as to where these things came from or how they work. Encountering such creatures would drive people to insanity, but Barry is already insane, never mind perpetually drunk. This is not cosmic horror, and indeed I’m not sure if it’s possible to write cosmic horror if the protagonist is already unhinged and so not terribly frightened of unearthly horrors. While it is downbeat, the tone and genre of “Nightmare Island” are a bit hard to pin down, which might explain why it has never been anthologized.

Something that is easier to understand is the style Sturgeon employs here, which is conversational, even reminding me of what he did in “Microcosmic God.” Makes sense, as he likely wrote the two stories in very close succession, and as far as other early short stories of his go there’s this recurring sassiness in the style, like someone with a mean sense of humor is telling us a story while huddled around a campfire. In the case of “Nightmare Island” this very much makes sense since a character within the story is telling us what’s happening. Because the governor is not the most succinct of narrators, the story is perhaps a bit longer than it ought to be, but at the same time it doesn’t feel dragged out and it’s easily readable. A lot of the stories Sturgeon wrote for Unknown have a comedic streak, or are straight-up horror, but this is an attempt at serious narrative that’s also not too dour. I’m not even sure I’d call it a horror story, although it is fairly spooky and Barry certainly counts as what we would call a grotesque; he’s an outsider who, for a brief time, finds shelter in the company of worms.

One such work is Ahniroo, who is able to mimic human speech )although how sentient it is is unclear) and who speaks for the other works, who for some reason can’t talk to Barry. Through a misunderstanding (because English is so new to Ahniroo that he doesn’t even know what it is) the the friendly worm ends up calling himself and his kind “nightmares,” hence the title. Barry manages to cooperate with the giant worms and make something of a living for himself on the island, with the omly adversary being “the Big One,” a hostile and especially large worm that resides in a crater. Well, you know what they say, this town ain’t big enough for the two of us, so a confrontation in time for the story’s climax is inevitable.

There Be Spoilers Here

With the help of Ahniroo and some almighty booze he had grown himself (it’s unclear how long he’s on this island for, but it could be a few months), Barry’s able to defeat the Big One, in what might be the only time in his life where he comes out a winner. Normally this would be the end of the story, but because the governor is narrating after the fact and we know from the outset Barry is now a lunatic, we know we won’t get a happy ending. Having been exhausted from his fight with the Big One, Barry passes out on the shore, and by the time he awakes he finds himself on a government ship, a mile or two away from the island already. 99% of people would see getting rescused off a desert island as a good thing, but unfortunately Barry is part of the 1% who would rather not be rescused.

Because he sees a sort of demented nobility in Barry, and because he feels some remorse for “saving” him from maybe the only place where he could feel at home, the governor now keeps watch over our shattered protagonist. It’s tragic in the sort of way that Sturgeon, even almost from the outset of his career, was really good at. We get this nugget of a pasage from the governor as he ruminates on the rescue team finding Barry:

They found him there, dead drunk on the beach. It was quite a puzzle to the shore party. There he was, with no footprints around him to show where he’d come from; and though they scoured the neighborhood of the beach; they found no shelter of anything that might have belonged to him. And when they got him aboard and sobered him up the island was miles astern. He went stark raving mad when he discovered where he was. He wanted to go back to his worms. And he’s been here ever since. He’s no use to anyone. He drinks when he can beg or steal it. He’ll die from it before long, I suppose, but he’s only happy when he’s plastered. Poor devil. I could send him back to his island, I suppose, but— Well, it’s quite a problem. Can I, as the representative of enlightened humanity in this part of the world, allow a fellow human being to go back to a culture of worms?

Whether you consider the ending bittersweet or a total downer depends on whether you believe Barry’s alcoholism is terminal. As someone who has had a couple family members destroy their bodies through heavy drinking, I think Barry gets off fine enough; but still, you can’t blame him for missing his worms. Makes you feel sorry for the bastard.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve read about half the stories Sturgeon wrote for Unknown at this point, which is a fair amount because Sturgeon clearly preferred writing fantasy over SF at that early point. “Shottle Bop,” “It,” and the aforementioned “Yesterday Was Monday” have been reprinted fairly often while “Nightmare Island” has not, and I’m not sure why. It could be that tonally it doesn’t quite land on one end of the spectrum, having not the whimsy of “Yesterday Was Monday” nor the sheer terror of “It.” It’s also not easily classifiable as SF or fantasy so I have to flip a coin on that one. Sturgeon wasn’t so much a genre writer as a writer who saw genre (he wasn’t terribly picky about which one) as a great conduit for expressing his thoughts and fears—and boy can Sturgeon be a little fucking neurotic and boy can he try a little too hard at times. Fine. He’s a fabulous writer, one of the best, and while this is still a very early piece it and the other best stories Sturgeon wrote at this time (especially for Unknown, although we can never forget “Microcosmic God”) showed the first inklings of a master.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: October 2023

October 1st, 2023
(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, January 1932.)

Let me tell you about monsters.

I love monsters of all sizes, although I have to admit I tend to prefer the giants that stalk whole landscapes. The bigger the better, but then “bigger” doesn’t always mean physical size. I love Frankenstein’s monster, especially Boris Karloff’s mildly talkative and rather emo depiction in Bride of Frankenstein, with his hungering for both love and death. I love Max Schreck’s Count Orlock in Nosferatu, who despite being modeled on Dracula seems to be almost more rat than man. I love the blob, especially in the 1988 version of The Blob—a mindless eating machine that digests people while they’re still alive. I love Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, King Ghidorah, and even Hedorah, the walking turd that might be the strangest of Godzilla’s foes. I love the zombies of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, the shambling corpses who walk the earth in search of something they can’t put a rotted finger on. I think the creature from the black lagoon deserves a break (which he finally gets in The Shape of Water, a Best Picture winner!) and I think werewolves are SEXY.

Fantastical horror always involves monsters, even if they’re the theoretical ghosts of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. As such the stories I pick for review every October (and it will be every October for the foreseeable future) always seem to be monster tales at their core. It’ll be Halloween soon and we’re putting up the decorations. We’ll be seeing vampires, ghosts, zombies, werewolves, witches, black cats, and things from beyond that cannot be easily classified. Because I believe horror, more than any other genre, benefits from brevity, we’ll be doing all shorts again. These are rapid-fire terrors that hopefully will ignite the imagination.

We have the usual suspects: Weird Tales, Twilight Zone Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Certain outlets have served as safe havens for short horror fiction through the decades, and admittedly I would feel weird if I were to not include a selection from something as foundational as Weird Tales. Some traditions ought to be respected.

Here are the stories:
1. “Not Our Brother” by Robert Silverberg. From the July 1982 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. We’re starting with someone who probably doesn’t come to mind when one thinks of horror, although Silverberg’s work can sometimes evoke existential dread. Having made his debut in the early ’50s and still active in fandom, Silverberg has had one of the longest careers of any writer—inside or outside the field. This is a rare example of him doing straight terror.
2. “Nightmare Island” by Theodore Sturgeon. From the June 1941 issue of Unknown. I consider Sturgeon one of the finest short story writers of the 20th century, and a major inspiration. Without Sturgeon and those like him this site probably wouldn’t exist. While most associated with SF, Sturgeon wrote a good deal of horror, including the stories “Bianca’s Hands,” “Bright Segment,” and the novel Some of Your Blood. This one is from very early in Sturgeon’s career.
3. “The Naturalist” by Maureen F. McHugh. From the Spring 2010 issue of Subterranean Online. McHugh won a Hugo for her alternate history story “The Lincoln Train,” and her debut novel China Mountain Zhang is one of the cult classics of ’90s SF; but her range goes well beyond alternate history as she has proven herself to be quite versatile over the last 35 years. “The Naturalist” looks to be a rare horror turn from McHugh, having to do with zombies.
4. “The Ancient Mind at Work” by Suzee McKee Charnas. From the February 1979 issue of Omni. I had a bad first experience with Charnas a couple years ago, but have been meaning to give her another shot since her reputation is solid and her devotion to the weird is unquestioned. “The Ancient Mind at Work” was Charnas’s first short story, although she already had two novels in print. It would then be absorbed into the fix-up novel The Vampire Tapestry.
5. “Pipeline to Pluto” by Murray Leinster. From the August 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Here we have another surprising inclusion, given Leinster isn’t normally associated with horror. He first started writing genre fiction in 1919, predating even Weird Tales. What’s surprising is that not only did he stay relevant several decades into his career, but he peaked in the ’40s and ’50s, holding his ground against writers a generation younger than him.
6. “Brenda” by Margaret St. Clair. From the March 1954 issue of Weird Tales. I covere St. Clair only a few monthss ago, but she’s back already. She wrote a lot in a relatively short span of time (mostly from the late ’40s to the late ’50s), and during that time she was arguably one of the best short story wrriters in the field. Not one to be tied down to any single genre, or even any mode of writing, St. Clair swerved effortlessly between pulpy and more refined prose.
7. “Jedella Ghost” by Tanith Lee. From the September 1998 issue of Interzone. One of two returning authors from last October, because honestly I wanna taste more of what Lee has to offer before forming a real opinion; that and she’s such a prolific and consistently spooky writer that her well never runs dry. I’ve read one or two of her stories since our last encounter (which admittedly did not enthuse me) and I think I’m starting to get what her deal is.
8. “The Door to Saturn” by Clark Ashton Smith. From the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales. The other returning author from last year’s Spooktacular, and this time it’s because I do love me some Clark Ashton Smith. While he can sometimes phone it in, Smith’s writing is often vibrant, poetic, and deeply enchanting—like a wizard casting a spell. Here we have a story set in his Hyperboria universe, a land where sorcerers and dark gods are in charge.
9. “The Last Feast of Harlequin” by Thomas Ligotti. From the April 1990 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. We’re ending with what has to be the longest story of the bunch, but it’s by one of those rare modern masters of horror. Ligotti is not the most popular writer in his field, but those who read him hold him in the highest regard. A devout student of Lovecraft, Ligotti’s fiction can be disturbing by way of implication, as opposed to violence.
Won’t you read with me?