Tag: theodore sturgeon

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?