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Reading potential nominations for the shorter fiction categories for the 1943 Retro Hugos is no easy task. Unless you have a vast collection of golden age short story anthologies or access to a collection of the original pulp magazines, you are not going to be able to read much of the relevant material, even if you restrict yourself to looking for stories other people have already recommended. But I did make some efforts to read some of the more readily accessible stories and novelettes, in order to do what justice I could to the nominations. I managed to acquire, through the auspices of my friendly internet faeries, a variety of magazines from 1942 that I’d flagged mostly because they contained at least one piece of short fiction from an author I’m generally a fan of, or a story I’d seen recommended. Couldn’t find everything I would have liked to, but did find enough to keep me busy for a while. Looking in this post at eligible novelettes...
First up, Robert Heinlein’s novelette “Goldfish Bowl,” which is an unsettling story about unexplained phenomena, including fireballs that kill some humans but cause others to vanish, and two huge waterspouts that stretch mikes into the stratosphere. The story follows two men who try to find out what’s at the top of the strange spouts, and who succeed, to their own ruin. The net result is to bring a large dose of humility into the standard American sf narrative of mastery of science, the world and outer space.
Leigh Brackett’s “Out of the Sea,” is a novelette set on contemporary Earth, in California. Recently jilted newspaperman Webb Fallon is drowning his sorrows by the sea when suddenly a wave of giant, mutated sea creatures boils out of the surf onto the land, and some even into the air. Fallon and the blonde he’d been flirting with survive, Fallon with minor wounds. Imperial Japan claims responsibility and demands surrender from the Pacific allies in the war. But Fallon, working from his memories of an interview with an undersea geologist, has other ideas and sets out to find the truth. The story is fast paced and engaging, but what caught my interest in particular was the way it deals with the changes in Fallon’s character and his relationships with women. He starts out being somewhat of an angry and entitled ass, selfish, a very reluctant hero. But under pressure, and stung by the scorn of his new companion Joan, and the scientist Bjarnsson, he makes the heroic choices.
Yet another of Leigh Brackett’s tales published in 1942 is “The Sorcerer of Rhiannon.” Set on a Mars of ancient, lost civilisations and dried out seas, it features adventurer, rxplorer, and tomb robber Max Brandon, who, lost in a deadly sand storm, stumbles across an untouched relic, a Martian ship hundreds of thousands of years old. Within is an ancient consciousness that has survived long past the death of its body, ready to awaken old enmities. Brackett also gives us a competent, interesting woman as Brandon’s partner and love interest - Sylvia Eustace - who saves Brandon and is as instrumental in bringing about the eventual successful conclusion to the story as he is.
E. E. Smith’s novelette “Storm Cloud on Deka” is set in the Lensman universe, part of the “Vortex Blaster” series, and deals with illegal drug manufacturing and production, which was one of Smith’s go-to careers for nasty people. Drug smugglers operating under the cover if being a legitimate business sometimes need to kill people, even their own employees, and they need to do so in a way that no one will investigate. The druglords of Dekanore III have been blaming ‘excess’ deaths on an atomic vortex - but now mathematical genius and vortex buster Neal “Storm” Cloud has sensed something is not quite right with the way this vortex is reportedly behaving, and he moves the rogue vortex to the too of his schedule. Naturally, Cloud figures out what’s going on, saves the day and the Lensmen arrive to finish up. A fairly standard “Doc” Smith adventure.
A. E. Van Vogt’s “Co-operate - Or Else!” is an interesting survival story in which a human and a large, intelligent alien crash land on an extremely dangerous planet with many large and nasty life forms, and must co-operate, despite their differences, in order to reach safety. This is one of Van Vogt’s Rull series, where a multi-species interstellar civilisation including human is fighting an alien species bent on total destruction of all other intelligent life. In this story, not only must out intrepid human convince his alien companion to cooperate in the short term to escape the planet and a patrol of Rull, he must persuade him urge his people to join humanity’s fight against the Rull. Not nearly as overwrought in literary style as some other Van Vogt pieces, and rather fun to read.
One of van Vogt’s best stories, I think, was also published in 1942 - “The Weapon Shop.” Setting aside the underlying pro-gun philosophy, which I don’t agree with, it’s a narrative of collective resistance and support for social justice. When an illegal weapon shop first appears in the village of Glay, Fara Clark, a loyal citizen of the Empire is appalled and leads the fight to get it closed down. But when misfortune strikes, thanks to a vicious son and a grasping corporation, and suicide seems his only option, Fara discovers what the weapon shops are really doing in the Empire, and his entire way of looking at the world around him is changed.
Van Vogt’s “The Ghost” is one of those neatly plotted time paradox attempts to change a predicted future stories, about an old man who has been a ghost for at least five years, but continues to act just as he did in life - including walking through gates, and getting mixed up in time and talking about things that haven’t happened yet. It’s very well crafted, engages the reader, and keeps one guessing about what’s going to happen right to the very end.
C. L. Moore’s “There Shall Be Darkness” is an end of empire narrative, modelled on the end of the Roman Empire. Earth’s troops are being called home, to fight the barbarians at the gates. On Venus, a young and impetuous people - as colonial subjects naturally portrayed as too uncivilised to take up the reins of effective self-government - may be the next home if civilisation, if they have enough time to mature before the barbarians come for them, too. So, yeah, it’s a hot mess of colonialist tropes and the white man’s burden, but it’s also a compelling story about a woman - the Venusian Quanna - who wants out of a patriarchal society and is willing to do it by any means necessary.
Moore, writing with Henry Kuttner under the name Lewis Padgett, also published the deeply ironic “Piggy Bank,” about Bob Ballard, a robber baron type who has built his fortune on the sale of diamonds - artificially created thanks to a secret process known only to his partner in crime, who naturally has set up a deadman scheme to have the secret released if he ever dies. Ballard has another problem - people keep stealing his diamonds. He can always have his partner make more, but the more there are on the market, the less value they have. So he comes up with the perfect solution - he has a robot built that’s specislised to do one thing only - escape from anyone who doesn’t know the password. Ballard takes care of his first problem, too, but his partner had been prepared for that eventuality too, and the story of how his revenge from beyond the grave plays out is actually rather satisfying.
Irony seems to have been one of Kuttner and Moore’s favourite devices. In “Compliments of the Author,” originally credited to Kuttner alone but now considered to be written by both, Tarbell, a corrupt newspaperman tries to blackmail a magician, but ends up killing him instead. He inherits two things - a book that can be used ten times to answer any question that involves danger, threat or great need, and the magician’s familiar, who swears revenge. Tarbell uses several of the book’s uses to escape attempts by the familiar to kill him, and then tries to use the book to get rid of the familiar. He succeeds, but at the end, he learns that sometimes the answer to finding an escape is “No.”
Henry Kuttner’s “The Crystal Circe” is a standard planetary romance, with three human adventurers finding an asteroid with a seductive, fatally beautiful, ancient and very alien being on it. One survives, forever changed by his experiences, to tell the harrowing tale, the others go on to their fate, neither life nor death as we know it. Competently written, as one would expect from Kuttner, and quite engaging, but a fairly ordinary example of its kind.
Theodore Sturgeon’s “Medusa” tells a story about a trip to hell in a ship full of madmen. Eight military spacemen, all but one of whom has had his mind carefully taken apart and put back together with “schizoid” personalities - one paranoic, one manic-depressive - are sent on a mission to discover the source of a mental field emanating from a strange planet, a field that drives men mad if they come too close. The reasoning is that a certain kind of mental illness might actually protect humans against the effects of the field. The final man has been given powerful hypnotic conditioning, to destroy the generator of the field, no matter what it is. It’s a fascinating look at interpersonal dynamics when paranoia goes wild, with a rather ingenious explanation at the end for what caused the killer mental field in the first place.
First up, Robert Heinlein’s novelette “Goldfish Bowl,” which is an unsettling story about unexplained phenomena, including fireballs that kill some humans but cause others to vanish, and two huge waterspouts that stretch mikes into the stratosphere. The story follows two men who try to find out what’s at the top of the strange spouts, and who succeed, to their own ruin. The net result is to bring a large dose of humility into the standard American sf narrative of mastery of science, the world and outer space.
Leigh Brackett’s “Out of the Sea,” is a novelette set on contemporary Earth, in California. Recently jilted newspaperman Webb Fallon is drowning his sorrows by the sea when suddenly a wave of giant, mutated sea creatures boils out of the surf onto the land, and some even into the air. Fallon and the blonde he’d been flirting with survive, Fallon with minor wounds. Imperial Japan claims responsibility and demands surrender from the Pacific allies in the war. But Fallon, working from his memories of an interview with an undersea geologist, has other ideas and sets out to find the truth. The story is fast paced and engaging, but what caught my interest in particular was the way it deals with the changes in Fallon’s character and his relationships with women. He starts out being somewhat of an angry and entitled ass, selfish, a very reluctant hero. But under pressure, and stung by the scorn of his new companion Joan, and the scientist Bjarnsson, he makes the heroic choices.
Yet another of Leigh Brackett’s tales published in 1942 is “The Sorcerer of Rhiannon.” Set on a Mars of ancient, lost civilisations and dried out seas, it features adventurer, rxplorer, and tomb robber Max Brandon, who, lost in a deadly sand storm, stumbles across an untouched relic, a Martian ship hundreds of thousands of years old. Within is an ancient consciousness that has survived long past the death of its body, ready to awaken old enmities. Brackett also gives us a competent, interesting woman as Brandon’s partner and love interest - Sylvia Eustace - who saves Brandon and is as instrumental in bringing about the eventual successful conclusion to the story as he is.
E. E. Smith’s novelette “Storm Cloud on Deka” is set in the Lensman universe, part of the “Vortex Blaster” series, and deals with illegal drug manufacturing and production, which was one of Smith’s go-to careers for nasty people. Drug smugglers operating under the cover if being a legitimate business sometimes need to kill people, even their own employees, and they need to do so in a way that no one will investigate. The druglords of Dekanore III have been blaming ‘excess’ deaths on an atomic vortex - but now mathematical genius and vortex buster Neal “Storm” Cloud has sensed something is not quite right with the way this vortex is reportedly behaving, and he moves the rogue vortex to the too of his schedule. Naturally, Cloud figures out what’s going on, saves the day and the Lensmen arrive to finish up. A fairly standard “Doc” Smith adventure.
A. E. Van Vogt’s “Co-operate - Or Else!” is an interesting survival story in which a human and a large, intelligent alien crash land on an extremely dangerous planet with many large and nasty life forms, and must co-operate, despite their differences, in order to reach safety. This is one of Van Vogt’s Rull series, where a multi-species interstellar civilisation including human is fighting an alien species bent on total destruction of all other intelligent life. In this story, not only must out intrepid human convince his alien companion to cooperate in the short term to escape the planet and a patrol of Rull, he must persuade him urge his people to join humanity’s fight against the Rull. Not nearly as overwrought in literary style as some other Van Vogt pieces, and rather fun to read.
One of van Vogt’s best stories, I think, was also published in 1942 - “The Weapon Shop.” Setting aside the underlying pro-gun philosophy, which I don’t agree with, it’s a narrative of collective resistance and support for social justice. When an illegal weapon shop first appears in the village of Glay, Fara Clark, a loyal citizen of the Empire is appalled and leads the fight to get it closed down. But when misfortune strikes, thanks to a vicious son and a grasping corporation, and suicide seems his only option, Fara discovers what the weapon shops are really doing in the Empire, and his entire way of looking at the world around him is changed.
Van Vogt’s “The Ghost” is one of those neatly plotted time paradox attempts to change a predicted future stories, about an old man who has been a ghost for at least five years, but continues to act just as he did in life - including walking through gates, and getting mixed up in time and talking about things that haven’t happened yet. It’s very well crafted, engages the reader, and keeps one guessing about what’s going to happen right to the very end.
C. L. Moore’s “There Shall Be Darkness” is an end of empire narrative, modelled on the end of the Roman Empire. Earth’s troops are being called home, to fight the barbarians at the gates. On Venus, a young and impetuous people - as colonial subjects naturally portrayed as too uncivilised to take up the reins of effective self-government - may be the next home if civilisation, if they have enough time to mature before the barbarians come for them, too. So, yeah, it’s a hot mess of colonialist tropes and the white man’s burden, but it’s also a compelling story about a woman - the Venusian Quanna - who wants out of a patriarchal society and is willing to do it by any means necessary.
Moore, writing with Henry Kuttner under the name Lewis Padgett, also published the deeply ironic “Piggy Bank,” about Bob Ballard, a robber baron type who has built his fortune on the sale of diamonds - artificially created thanks to a secret process known only to his partner in crime, who naturally has set up a deadman scheme to have the secret released if he ever dies. Ballard has another problem - people keep stealing his diamonds. He can always have his partner make more, but the more there are on the market, the less value they have. So he comes up with the perfect solution - he has a robot built that’s specislised to do one thing only - escape from anyone who doesn’t know the password. Ballard takes care of his first problem, too, but his partner had been prepared for that eventuality too, and the story of how his revenge from beyond the grave plays out is actually rather satisfying.
Irony seems to have been one of Kuttner and Moore’s favourite devices. In “Compliments of the Author,” originally credited to Kuttner alone but now considered to be written by both, Tarbell, a corrupt newspaperman tries to blackmail a magician, but ends up killing him instead. He inherits two things - a book that can be used ten times to answer any question that involves danger, threat or great need, and the magician’s familiar, who swears revenge. Tarbell uses several of the book’s uses to escape attempts by the familiar to kill him, and then tries to use the book to get rid of the familiar. He succeeds, but at the end, he learns that sometimes the answer to finding an escape is “No.”
Henry Kuttner’s “The Crystal Circe” is a standard planetary romance, with three human adventurers finding an asteroid with a seductive, fatally beautiful, ancient and very alien being on it. One survives, forever changed by his experiences, to tell the harrowing tale, the others go on to their fate, neither life nor death as we know it. Competently written, as one would expect from Kuttner, and quite engaging, but a fairly ordinary example of its kind.
Theodore Sturgeon’s “Medusa” tells a story about a trip to hell in a ship full of madmen. Eight military spacemen, all but one of whom has had his mind carefully taken apart and put back together with “schizoid” personalities - one paranoic, one manic-depressive - are sent on a mission to discover the source of a mental field emanating from a strange planet, a field that drives men mad if they come too close. The reasoning is that a certain kind of mental illness might actually protect humans against the effects of the field. The final man has been given powerful hypnotic conditioning, to destroy the generator of the field, no matter what it is. It’s a fascinating look at interpersonal dynamics when paranoia goes wild, with a rather ingenious explanation at the end for what caused the killer mental field in the first place.
