My life in books

I read Bitch Planet Volume 1: Extraordinary Machine (which collects issues 1 - 5 of the original graphic series), created by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine De Landro, because Bitch Planet Volume 2 was nominated for a Hugo, and I figured I needed to start from the beginning to get the full impact. Reading Bitch Planet was a very odd experience. As a graphic narrative, it’s really, really good, and it’s also intensely painful. It’s a very dystopic graphic narrative, one that is extremely well-written and drawn, with excellent characters and a very powerful story. It’s also a story that I didn’t really want to engage with, largely because I’ve read too many novels in which the society is blatantly patriarchal and authoritarian (in Bitch Planet, the leaders are called Fathers) and women are reduced to the role of things, commodities, objects to be used for the pleasure, satisfaction or comfort of men, and those who don’t comply, or aren’t pleasing, satisfying, comforting enough, are punished, discarded, or erased.

And that’s the state of things in the universe of Bitch Planet. Women who don’t please men, who are non-compliant, inconvenient, or in some way unsuitable, are seized and sent to a prison planet known officially as the Auxiliary Compliance Outpost - also known as Bitch Planet, because all women who don’t serve men are bitches, right?

There are of course two ways to present this scenario. There are people, mostly men, who would consider this a utopia, a paradise. It’s very clear that the creators of this comic are presenting this as a nightmare, but one with roots in reality - rather like Atwood’s intentions in The Handmaid’s Tale, a classic dystopic nightmare of this particular genre. The creators are also trying to do some educating along with the storytelling, for each issue of the comic contains real world, here-and-now essays about sexism and feminism (unfortunately, these essays are not included in the trade volumes, which is a pity). There’s also some very powerful reflections on the whole American carceral state here that the reader can easily unpack, plus the parodies of the old-style ads younused to find in comic books and pulp magazines are perfect, and perfectly deconstruct the ways that consumerism enforces compliance. It’s an admirable project, just... not one I really wanted to see yet again, when the real thing is happening in the daily newspapers.

So. The narrative is centred on the Bitch Planet prison system, and in particular on Kamau Kogu, a black professional athlete with a strong will and a distinctly revolutionary attitude. She’s being framed for the murder of another inmate in order to pressure her into participating in a brutal sports event known as Megatron that is compulsory viewing for all citizens (bread and circuses, anyone?) - and a money-making scheme to help fund the prison system. Another key character is Penny Rolle, a black woman of considerable size sent to Bitch Planet for, among other things, “... repeated citations for aesthetic offenses, capillary disfigurement and wanton obesity.”

Meiko, another inmate, convinces Kamua to go along with the prison administration and put together a team - with her advice - in order to gain access to a gathering of the fathers in a location that she has intimate knowledge of, because she designed it. Kamua agrees, but as we learn later, she does so in part because she hopes that the process of assembling this team will help her locate her sister, also incarcerated on Bitch Planet.

Meanwhile, in scenes set on earth, we gain a glimpse into the way this society works and the position of the sport Megatron in the culture. We also see, in the background of panels depicting news shows, hints of some kind of women’s movement gathering around the slogan “Eleanor Lives.”

This is not an easy story to read. In today’s world, where perceived non-compliance can get you killed in the blink of an eye if you are racially marginalised person, where refugees, men and women, are imprisoned and separated from their children fir the ‘crime’ of running from a home that’s become a deathtrap - largely because of imperialistic interference and exploitation by ‘developed’ countries - and where the rights if marginalised peoples are being eroded daily, this hits far too close to home.

Seanan McGuire’s InCryptid series has been nominated for a Hugo award, and so, I checked out the first book in the series, Discount Armageddon. So far, the best thing about it is the Aeslin mice, but I’ll get to them a few paragraphs down the line.

So, this is a fairly standard urban fantasy, of the “not all monsters are really monsters” variety. The protagonist, Verity Price, is a member of a family with a mission. Once they were part of the Covenant, a secret society devoted to killing anything that isn’t human, or found within the pages if a standard zoology textbook. Though, being religious zealots of a Christian flavor, they put it as “anything that was not on the Ark.” A couple of centuries back, Verity’s ancestors turned heretic - the Covenant is big on terms like blasphemy and heresy - and instead of killing monsters, which they call cryptids, indiscriminately, they study them, try to protect, or at least stay on good terms with, the ones who are not actively harming people, and try to reason with, relocate, or otherwise neutralise the harmful ones, killing as a last resort.

Verity Price, like the rest of her family, calls herself a cryptozoologist more often than a monster hunter, although it’s true that she’s trained in all sorts of armed and unarmed combat and able to take out a nasty critter aimed on destruction if need be. But what Verity really wants to do is be a professional competitive ballroom dancer. So she moved from the family stronghold in the northwest to New York, where she waits tables at a strip club run by a bogeyman, studies the local cryptid population, patrols for nasties, and tries to get established in the local competitive dance scene under a stage name.

The plot, which given the set-up isn’t all that unexpected, involves Verity and a hot young Covenanter lad, who views her as a heretic to be killed with just as much fervour as he woukd any other blasphemous creature, having to team up to deal with something bigger than both of them. I’m probably not really spoiling anything by saying that sex occurs, and Verity manages to do some deprogramming on said hot Covenanter lad.



Right, now for the mice. Actually, the plot introduces us to a fair number of interesting non-human species, but really, the mice, as it were, take the cake. Aeslin mice are sapient mice-like cryptids, who live in social units called colonies. They are very religious and very enthusiastic about their objects of worship. Verity shares her tiny flat with a branch colony of Aeslin mice, who are part of a larger family of mice who have worshipped the founders of Price family for seven human generations. Verity is their Priestess, and they spend most of their time celebrating one of the endless religious observances in their mousey calendar, such as sixth day of the Month of Do Not Put That in Your Mouth!, and the Festival of Come On, Enid, We’re Getting Out Of Here Before These Bastards Make Us Kill Another Innocent Creature. They also become filled with the holy spirit whenever Verity mutters things to herself, or talks to them, which means that her homelife is filled with mousey choruses of “Hail the buying of new socks” and “Hail the shower!” Most of the novel is pretty standard sardonic somewhat unwilling heroine-centred first-person narrative urban fantasy, with some solid development of legends and speculations about various sorts of imaginary beings from cultures around the world. Fun but not what I’d call spectacularly good. But the Aeslin mice are brilliant.

More Hugo reading. This time, it’s a finalist in the Best Young Adult Novel category (which is, technically, not a Hugo just as the Campbell award is not a Hugo) - Summer in Orcus by T. Kingfisher (who is also known as Ursula Vernon). And it is a charmingly original portal fantasy, a work of whimsical imagination, calling back to earlier, even Victorian-era children’s fantasies with talking animals and curious landscapes. There’s more than a touch of Narnia, and a fair bit of Alice’s Wonderland, here, and it’s all held together by a truly delightful heroine, 11 year-old Summer.

Summer is a human girl, and lives with her mother in a world much like ours. Her mother works hard, but is more than a little defeated by the stresses of single parenthood and an ungenerous working environment. She is far too protective of Summer, who isn’t allowed to do much of anything except go to school and play in her own yard. And in some ways she’s come to rely on Summer for emotional support when the world has gotten too much.

And then one day, when Summer is playing alone in her back yard, Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged hut comes wandering down the alleyway and settles down just behind Summer’s house. Baba Yaga, being in a good mood, offers to give Summer her heart’s desire - but Summer doesn’t know what that is, although she does think becoming a shapeshifter might be fun. Baba Yaga, however, seems to have her own notion of what Summer needs, or knowledge of a place that needs a girl like Summer, and suddenly Summer is in the very strange land of Orcus, with nothing but the clothes she’s wearing, the lock that was on the back gate of her yard, a talking weasel given to her by the crone, and three pieces of advice she’s read in a stained glass window.

Almost immediately, Summer meets three shape-changing women, and a tree whose leaves turn into frogs. But the tree is dying, and the shapechangers tell her that there is a cancer at the heart of this world. Summer doesn’t think of herself as a hero, and she certainly doesn’t think of herself as someone who can save a world, but she does want to try and make things better for just one tree, which has used up all its remaining energy to produce an acorn, which Summer carries with her along with the lock and the weasel as she follows the advice of the shapechangers to find the Waystation, where perhaps she can learn her Way.

As Summer travels through Orcus, looking for something that will save the frog-tree, she encounters many unusual beings, some who help her, some who want to stop her, and some who decide to come with her. There’s Glorious, a wolf who turns into a house when the sun sets, and is being hunted by real estate procurers. There’s Reginald Almondsgrove, a somewhat foppish hoopoe, and his flock of valet birds. And there’s the Imperial Geese Ounk and Anhk, sisters and warriors.

Summer’s adventures are at times whimsical and at times truly frightening, and while she does discover what is wrong at the heart of this world, and makes it a little better for a while, it comes at a cost, and part of that cost is Summer’s innocence. But when Summer finally returns to her own world, one does have the feeling that yes, she has gained her heart’s desire, and it will be with her always.

There are a lot of wonderful things about this book, but one of the best is that, while there is a battle between agents of good and evil, it’s not the climax of book and it doesn’t really solve anything. It’s the skills that Summer brings with her to Orcus, and the steadfast loyalty of her companions, that makes it possible for things to be better.

More Retro Hugo reading - this time, it’s Best Novel finalist The Uninvited, by Irish novelist, playwright, journalist and historian Dorothy MacArdle. MacArdle herself was an Irish nationalist, feminist, labour organiser, and revolutionary colleague of Eamon de Valera.

The novel was originally published in Ireland in 1941 under the title Uneasy Freehold, and was released a year later in the United States as The Uninvited; in 1944 it was made into a Hollywood movie.

The Uninvited is a ghost story somewhat in the Gothic style, but its messages are modern - the silencing of women’s voices, women’s stories, and the ways in which women are turned into symbols to be revered - or despised - while being ignored as real, autonomous beings with both virtues and flaws. There is considerable psychological depth in MacArdle’s telling of the story, and much that delights even as it creates a slow mounting unease.

MacArdle takes her time in introducing her characters, setting the scene, suggesting the outlines of the secrets that must be brought into the open. The immediate action of the story begins with half-Irish siblings, Pamela and Roderick Fitzgerald. Roddy, the older sibling, is an established London journalist focusing on cultural issues, particularly drama. He’s dealing with the end of a difficult relationship, and writing a book on the history of English censorship (it’s worth noting that his career todate revolves around symbolism and silence). Pamela is recovering from the loneliness and isolation of several years spent caring fir their dying father (again, note the situation of a woman trapped in a position of idealised self-sacrifice).

They decide to buy a house in the country, where Pamela can restore her energy and Roddy can have quiet for writing. The place they settle on has been vacant for most of the past 15 years. The owner, Stella, a young woman of 18 living with her grandfather, has not set foot in the house since she was taken from it as a child, shortly after the death of her mother. The grandfather, with whom the Fitzgeralds negotiate, warns them that the house was sold before, to a couple who deserted it due to “disturbances.”

Warned but not concerned, Roddy and Pamela move in, begin renovating and making the house their own. And there are indeed disturbances - starting with lonely sighs in the night and developing slowly into a full haunting. Rooms in which one becomes unaccountably depressed, strange lights, a recurring scent of mimosa, sudden sensations of extreme cold, and eventually apparitions of a pale, blonde woman who resembles Stella’s dead mother.

Pamela convinces Roddy that they must try to discover the secrets of the house and the haunting, convinced that there must be a way to free whatever spirits are trapped there. They begin asking questions of neighbours, people who knew the family before tragedy struck. Slowly, the story emerges, but only in outline. The house was at the end home to three people - Meredith Llewellyn, Stella’s father, an artist, much disliked by most who recalled him; Mary, remembered by sll as a saintly, gentle woman with enormous patience and generosity toward her husband; and Carmel, a Spanish girl brought into the household by Meredith, his model and, most believed, his lover. Mary died in a fall from a cliff on a stormy night, with Carmel near and suspected of possibly causing her death; Carmel died not long after from pneumonia caught on that night, exacerbated by exposure after she fled the house. Pamela and Roddy, hearing these accounts, begin to think there are two spirits in the house, Carmel, filled with hatred, seeking revenge, and Mary, trying to protect her daughter Stella from Carmel’s rage.

Meanwhile, Stella and Roddy have fallen in love, but Stella’s sense of self - already damaged by her grandfather, who idolised his daughter and has tried to mould his granddaughter into her image, is collapsing under the pressure of the haunting. All too soon she seems to be racing toward madness, in a way which only further convinces Pamela and Roddy that the two dead women are somehow battling for Stella’s soul - the doctor treating her describes her condition as bordering on schizophrenia, saying “she has been a stained-glass saint and a crazy little gypsy in turns,” evoking the images that have been forming of Mary and Carmel in their minds, the archetypal contrast between virgin and whore.

In addition to exploring the consequences of this classic idealisation/demonisation trope, MacArdle also looks at, though less markedly, the ways in which race and class intersect with gender, and uses the vehicle of the ghost story as a way of suggesting the intergenerational trauma resulting from the silencing of marginalised voices.

MacArdle tells the tale with great skill, moving slowly at first, giving us a Roshomon-like perspective of the central events that led to the haunting, each observer giving a slightly different tale, each tale carrying its own weight of preconceptions and bias. As the intensity of the ghostly manifestations, and the severity of Stella’s mental anguish, increase, so does the pace of the narrative, and the urgency of the siblings to discover the truth and save Stella, until the final events, and the long-concealed truths, come rushing out. A deeply moving story, well-told.

The Hugo finalists are out, and while quite a few of the short fiction pieces were ones I’d nominated, there are a few I hadn’t read. So, I’ve gotten my hands on those (much thanks to Sarah Pinsker for making a pdf of her novelette available on her website) and corrected those gaps in my reading.

Short Story

“The Martian Obelisk,” Linda Nagata; tor.com, July 19, 2017.
https://www.tor.com/2017/07/19/the-martian-obelisk/

The Earth is dying. Slowly, from ecological breakdown and climate change and loss of infrastructure and antibiotic resistant diseases and natural disasters and sporadic violence and all the things we’ve been fearing in recent years. A series of slow apocalypses. Susannah is an architect, and with the backing of one of the world’s remaining millionaires, she has spent the last 17 years building a soaring monument to the memory of humanity - on Mars, remotely accessing the technology of a Mars colony that was prepped but never settled. And then the unthinkable happens. A message from a survivor of the last functioning Mars colony, previously thought lost, is received. A woman and her children, the only ones left alive on Mars, have battled halfway across Mars and are asking for the resources of the monument to build a place where they can survive just a little longer. Susannah must decide, what will be the final shape of the Martian monument - the obelisk she’s spent years building, or a few more years of life for a doomed family. Powerful story, both in its depiction of the end of the world - not with a bang, but a long slow series of whimpers - and in its examination of the irrational, irrepressible, persistence of hope.


Novelettes

“Wind Will Rove,” Sarah Pinsker
(Originally published in Asimov’s September/October 2017, available for download as pdf on Pinsker’s website: http://sarahpinsker.com/wind_will_rove)

In this novelette, Pinsker explores the tension between preservation of the past and creation of the future through the situation of a generation ship that, through an act of sabotage, has lost its cultural and historical databases. This results in a concerted decision by the passengers to restore and preserve as much of the lost material as possible, not just through the creation of new databases, but through continued repetition and accurate reproduction of the restored material - music, plays, art, and Earth’s history. The narrator, Rosie Clay, is a history teacher and traditional fiddle player, challenged by one of her students who rejects the emphasis on the history and creations of the past, of an Earth that means nothing to them. Forced to look beyond the truism that those who forget history are destined to repeat it - questionable in a world that is entirely different from the Earth where that history took place - Rosie finds herself examining her own assumptions. Quiet but very thought-provoking.


“Children of Thorns, Children of Water,” Aliette de Bodard; Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/children-thorns-children-water/

This novelette is set in the world of de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series, and requires some familiarity with that world to be fully understood. It’s a world where Fallen angels wield magic and rule Houses, life for the houseless is bleak and often violent. The novels are set in an alternate late 19th century Paris and deal largely with relationships, politics and power - within houses, between houses, and in the larger postcolonial society. In this story, Thuan, a dragon in human form and member of the Dragon kingdom based in the waters of the Seine - the dragons, being drawn from Annamese (Vietnamese) tradition, are water beings) seeks to enter one of the Houses, House Hawthorn, as a spy, to gain information on what the tensions between houses might mean for the dragon kingdom. The day of testing, when new house dependents are chosen, is interrupted by a magical assault by creatures made of thorns, manifestations of House Hawthorne itself. Thuan proves useful to the Fallen in charge of the the tests in dealing with the crisis, and thus wins his place in the House. It’s a well-written piece, but I’m not all that fond of this secondary world. I read and enjoyed the first novel in the series and found it interesting - but not compelling enough to have pushed me to read the second volume. Good story, not quite my cup of tea.


Novellas

River of Teeth, Sarah Gailey

In her foreword, Gailey says: “In the early twentieth century, the Congress of our great nation debated a glorious plan to resolve a meat shortage in America. The idea was this: import hippos and raise them in Louisiana’s bayous. The hippos would eat the ruinously invasive water hyacinth; the American people would eat the hippos; everyone would go home happy. Well, except the hippos. They’d go home eaten.” It was this unfulfilled notion that spurred Gailey to imagine the alternate history of this novella, though she places the introduction of hippos into the American ecology and economy some decades earlier. In Gailey’s version of the American South, marshes have been encouraged to allow for the development of hippo farming. Hippos serve instead of horses for cartage and personal transport, and there are canals and pools for the animals to use as rest stops, and instead of stables. Part of the Mississippi has been dammed up, forming a marshy lake area called the Harriet where feral hippos range, interfering with water trade along the river. This lake region is controlled by a shady - and very wealthy - man named Travers, who operated gambling riverboats on the lake, and is known to feed people he dislikes to the feral hippos. The story begins when adventurer Winslow Remington Houndstooth is hired by a government agency to clean out the feral hippos. The general plan is to get them through the barrier at the downstream end of the Harriet by any means necessary, and encourage them to migrate south into the gulf, freeing the river for trade, and not quite incidentally interfering with Travers’ business. In addition to the large payment offered to him and any members if the tram he pits together, Houndstooth has a strong personal motivation for injuring Travers, who burned out his hippo farm sone years ago, leaving him penniless.

The first part of the novella is devoted to assembling the team, which could not be comprised of a more diverse group of characters: Regina “Archie” Archambault, a cross-dressing conwoman; Hero Shackleby, a nonbinary demolitions expert; Cal Hotchkiss, fast gun, card shark, and former employee if Houndstooth who may or may not have betrayed him to Travers; Adelia Reyes, a pregnant lesbian assassin; and Houndstooth himself, a mixed race Immigrant from England whose dream and passion is to rebuild his hippo farm. Gailey also spends time letting us get to know, not only the characters, but their hippos, their personalities and distinguishing traits. It’s clear in this society that people form bonds with their hippos not unlike those with other working or companion animals like dogs, cats or horses. As for the plot - everything goes wrong, of course, and there are double-crosses and hidden motivations and a tangle of cross purposes, and this is not a light-hearted caper, not everyone survives. But it is very entertaining, and I hear there’s a sequel.


Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Seanan McGuire

McGuire uses a delightfully arch and ironic tone in beginning this story - the backstory of Jaqueline and Jillian, Jack and Jill, two of the distinctly different children from the first of the Wayward Children series, Every Heart a Doorway - by introducing Chester and Serena Wolcott, two self-absorbed people who chose to have children to complete the image of their perfect nuclear family. Things go wrong, of course, from the beginning. As soon as they knew they were having twins, they assumed they would have a boy and a girl, thus efficiently creating the ideal family in one swoop. They never considered the possibility of two girls.

Parenthood does not suit the Wolcotts, being too disorderly and entirely too loud and messy. Chester’s mother is almost immediately recruited to actually raise the girls. At least until it becomes inconvenient to have her around, so at age five the twins lose the only person in their lives who saw them as people to be encouraged to grow, rather than accessories to be programmed for the benefit of their parents.

Those who have read Every Heart a Doorway already know a little of what happens to Jack and Jill. One day, they find a doorway where no doorway should have been and it takes them to a strange land where nightmares are real, but at least here they have some choice over which nightmare they will live in, where their parents gave them no choices at all. It is a strange place, a cruel place, and each child is changed in ways that do not bear much thinking about.

This is part of why, while I appreciate McGuire’s skill and invention in writing these stories, I don’t like them. I am not good with reading about abused children who don’t get to really escape their abuse - because we know that while Jack and Jill will someday find their way home, they will be damaged, perhaps permanently, perhaps beyond any hope of being ... normal, happy, able to function in a world of ordinary people. Of course, you can say that of many traumatised children, because the scars of some hurts never heal. So there is a fundamental truth underneath the fantasy here. As it happens, it’s a truth I live with, and reading about it requires accommodations that McGuire doesn’t offer, like the possibility of grace and hope.

More novelettes from 1942 pulp magazines.

Isaac Asimov’s “Runaround” is one of the Mike Donovan Robot stories, in which a robot acts strangely and Donovan has to figure out why, and how to fix the problem. Both error and solution usually involve some bizarre circumstances that impacts on the way the robot resolves the tensions between the famous Three Laws of Robotics, and this story falls perfectly into the pattern. A robot with a deliberately heightened sense of self preservation is given a casually worded order to do something that would endanger him. In this case, the two a mathematically balanced, causing the robot to run in circles around the location he was ordered to, while singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs. Kind of amusing, standard Asimov robot story.

1942 was the year in which Isaac Asimov published the first of the stories that would eventually become his iconic Foundation series. “Foundation” is the origin story, which gives us the basic background to the series, and covers the first “Seldon crisis” - how will Terminus, the remote and relatively isolated home of the First Foundation and the Encyclopedists, hold into its independence as the Empire crumbles? It really was one of the most ambitious concepts of its time, even granting that lots of writers were creating lengthy and complex histories for their fictional universes, from Heinlein to “Doc” Smith. Just one month after “Foundation” appeared in print, the second story dealing with the next Seldon crisis, was published as “Bridle and Saddle.”

1942 also saw the publication of Asimov’s “Friar of the Black Flame,” in which an Earth ruled by the reptilian Llhasinu from Vega are driven from Earth and destroyed by a battle force drawn from all the human worlds. It’s fairly standard milsf, but what makes the story interesting is that it mentions Trantor as one of the human worlds, establishing it as part of the backhistory of the Foundation series.

Alfred Bester’s “The Push of a Finger” is a story of the sort we now associate with the “butterfly effect” - the idea that a butterfly’s wings flapping could a tornado on the other side of the world - though of course it predates that formulation. In a future society where the prime principle is stability, a machine is developed capable of calculating the future - and it predicts the end of the universe in a catastrophic scientific experiment in only a thousand years. The pronosticators use the machine to track back to the one moment that, if changed, can prevent the disaster. There’s a surprise plot twist, of course, which the modern reader will immediately deduce because we’ve seen it too many times, but the story is well told and, I expect, was fairly new and original back in 1942.

Lester del Rey’s novelette “My Name Is Legion” is an example of the “time loop” story, in which the subject is caught in the same sequence of time, looping through the same events. In this story, it’s a defeated Hitler trapped in the loop by a scientist bent on revenge for the deaths if his Jewish wife and children, and it is a particularly nasty loop with an all-too-appropriate end built into it. Quite an effective story.

“Though Poppies Grow,” also by del Rey, is the most powerful of all the war-themed anti-fascism stories I’ve read in the past few weeks, and there have been quite a few of those, what with the US being at war in 1942. In this story, the ghost of the Unknown Soldier from WWI is called forth from his tomb, acting out the promise from the famous poem - “If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.” The writing in this novelette is so evocative, so well-honed, as del Rey follows the young soldier, confused, knowing only that he has a mission, wandering through the streets of Washington, touching people as he passes in various ways. At first he does not know he is dead, a ghost, but slowly as it dawns on him, he is overwhelmed, until at last, he is led to understand his role is to remind these who waver, or are complacent, that there can be no compromise with fascism, with tyranny, with hatred. The story is exquisitely told, the character made so real you can feel his struggle to understand, the message as important today as it was in 1942.

A story in a completely different vein, del Rey’s Lunar Landing s about a mission to the moon, sent in the (faint) hope of rescuing three men from the first lunar voyage. The crew of the Moth - five men and two women - encounter serious problems in landing themselves, and their search for the first ship becomes even more important because they hope to cannibalise it for parts they’ll need to get home themselves. But very little goes as planned in this mission, beginning with the first surprise, plant and animal life adapted for survival on the moon. As I’ve noted elsewhere, del Rey’s style, like Heinlein’s, has aged well. His characters are quite fully and realistically developed, and the two women in the story are intelligent, brave and have lived lives of their own - they have relationships with men, but are not defined solely by them.

Ross Rocklynne’s “Jackdaw” portrays the bewilderment of an alien species on discovering a world where only one living being remains, alone on a planet whose cities, roads and farms have been destroyed by massive bombardment. When the lone survivor dies in a suicide attack on their craft, they are bewildered, but despite their best attempts, the end of the species and the actions of its last member remain incomprehensible to a species that cannot envision war.

“QRM—Interplanetary” by George O. Smith is a cautionary tale of what can happen when you put a businessman whose only focus, and area of expertise, is cost-cutting, in charge of a facility that depends on scientific and engineering excellence to function. QRM, we are told, is the shortwave code for man-made interference in radio transmission. The story takes place in a communications relay station on an asteroid whose orbit is positioned such as to ensure radio transmission between Earth and Mars at all points of both planets’ orbits. The man-made interference is a new Director who knows nothing about either the technical aspects of communication, nor the intricacies of life in an artificially sustained environment. The consequences of his policies, while humorously described, are disastrous. Eventually, the proper order is restored, but not before his decisions come close to killing everyone on the station.

1942 was the date of E. Mayne Hull’s first published work, a haunting novelette called “The Flight That Failed.” Set during the war, it’s the story of a time traveller who tries to avert the destruction of a plane crossing the Atlantic with a secret cargo that will change the course of the history he knows if it gets through.

Fredric Brown’s “The Star Mouse” is a rather poignant tale about a mouse who is shot into space in a small experimental rocket built by your standard eccentric tinkering scientist. Mitkey, as he’s been called by the professor, and his rocket come to the attention of a civilisation of very small people living on an asteroid that happens to be passing near earth. Concerned about potential threats from humans, they explore Mitkey’s memories to find our what they can about human civilisation - but doing this involves giving Mitkey intelligence equal to that of humans. Mitkey goes home again, but alas, the boost in IQ doesn’t last. Still, he survives, is reunited with his mate, and the professor provides him with lots of cheese.

In Jane Rice’ “Pobby” a writer of horror starts a new story - his idea is to tell a gruesome tale of a poor farmer named Pobby who finds a strange seed, plants and waters it, hoping that it might grow into a rare flower that will make him some money, only to be eaten by it once it flowers. As he starts to write his installments for magazine publication, however, someone named Pobby, who looks and talks like the character he’s writing about, appears to various of his friends, saying he needs to find the writer and get him to stop making him grow the flower, because he doesn’t want to die. Finally, Pobby and the writer meet face to face, but the writer persists in following his story - until he finds himself in a writers block just before the final scene. Frustrated, he travels to the lace where he has set Pobby’s farm, finding the town much as he’s written it, with characters he’s mentioned, and Pobby’s farm, where he discovers the cause of his block - Pobby, out of desperation, has written his own ending to the story. An interesting exploration of the conceit that characters can take on a life of their own.

“The Magicians’ Dinner,” also by Jane Rice, is a comic ghost story about a young bride, married to a magician, who tries to handle a dinner for forty in their first home, when she’s never cooked before. Fortunately for her, her family’s long-dead cook decides to return from the other side to save her firmer employers’ daughter’s bacon, so to speak. The tale is told in first person, the narrator is rather self-depreciating and quite engaging and likable, so that the story comes across as light-hearted and sweet. We will pass over the class issues and the trope of the help who care more for the families of their employers than they can for their own, and some if the annoyingly sexist assumptions about how marriages between men and women should work.

In Rice’s “The Elixir,” the narrative voice is again a somewhat unconventional woman, a out-spoken, accident-prone, unmarried writer of mystery novels. In this light-hearted time travel yarn, Amy Parrish’s equally unconventional neighbour, Clare Holloway, throws a Halloween party and Amy decides to attend as a witch. While waiting for the party to get started, Amy mixes up a batch of punch, tossing in liquor, ice cream, and halloween candy, while reciting some off-the-cuff doggerel, and ends up in Salem during the witch hunts. Much strangeness ensues, but all ends well, with Amy back in her own time, wondering if everything happened as she recalls it, or if she was just drunk silly and hallucinating. Having read several of Rice’s stories now, I must say that I am quite delighted with her descriptive style, which is both unique and very apt, and her mastery of tone. It’s a pity that her work is not remembered nearly as well as that of other writers of this era.

A few more novellas from 1942 for consideration for the 1943 Retro Hugos, culled from magazines I was able to download from here and there on the internets.

A. E. Van Vogt’s The Time Masters, first published as Recruiting Station, is the story of two humans from contemporary America who are caught up in a war taking place in the future. One side, the Glorious, have set up recruiting stations across time, and are essentially kidnapping hundreds of thousands of men from their past to become cannon fodder - literally, as each recruit, once conditioned, or ‘depersonalised’ is placed into a war machine and ordered to hurl his machine against the enemy forces, known as the Planetarians, until he is destroyed. Norma Matheson, a bitter and depressed woman, is ‘hired’ to run a recruiting centre by Dr. Lell, one if the Glorious, who overcomes her free will with advanced mental powers and advanced technology. A former lover, Jack Garson, is drawn into the schemes of the Glorious. As they struggle to free themselves, each in different times, that learn more about the thoroughly unpleasant politics of the future, in the hope that somehow they can end the destruction and find each other again. Lots of interesting plot twists and a woman with a fair degree of agency and rekevance to the story as more than some man’s sidekick. In fact, it could be argued that Garson ends up being her sidekick.

Anthony Boucher’s Barrier is another dystopic time travel story, featuring a man who goes forward in tine by 500 years, only to discover that the society he has arrived in, which worships stasis and order above all things, has created a barrier against time travel, preventing his return, and also preventing any travelers from the future from travelling back into his new present. From regularised language to regularised thought, the world he finds himself in is a bland place, ruled by thought police, devoid of freedom and limited in both individuality and creativity. By chance, his earliest encounters are with rebels trying to change the system, and the remainder of the novella follows their attempts to defeat the fascist state and remove the barrier. Assorted time paradoxes, plots, sacrifices, victories and defeats ensue. It’s an open-ended narrative, with no clear victories, but hope, at the end. A complex and entertaining story.

L. Sprague de Camp’s The Undesired Princess is a tongue-in-cheek portal fantasy set in a world of binary logic - things either are something or they are not, there are no transitional states - everything is exactly as it seems, and all fairytale tropes are true. The sun does circle the earth, only primary colours exist, and the princess falls in love with her champion. Engineer Rollin Hobart is unwillingly transported to this world, where he saves the princess from the monster and is then supposed to marry her and rule half the kingdom. The only problem is, Hobart just wants to go home again. But before that can happen, he has to save the king from a behemoth, foil a barbarian invasion, rescue the princess again, and hardest if all, get a handle on how things work in the land of Logaea. De Camp was a seriously funny writer.

In Sprague de Camp’s Solomon’s Stone, a planned prank involving a demon-summoning ritual goes seriously awry when a demon actually appears, and, unhampered by the improperly drawn magical protections, takes possession of the body of one of the participants, sending his soul into the astral plane. There, John Prosper Nash finds himself in an astral body with the identity of a French chevalier, surrounded by people who seem to be living out fantasies in exotic identities - wild west gunmen, knights, Egyptian princesses, samurai, and so on. It’s all very confusing, but Nash has to figure things out quickly, because according to the demon, if he acquires the Stone of Solomon within ten days, the demon will have to return him to his own body. It’s a wild romp, involving kidnappings, duels, lecherous sultans, armies of Amazons, wars between Romans, Leninists, Aryans and other factions, and various and sundry other adventures, some of which involve the fine art of advanced accounting.

Nominating short fiction for the Retro Hugos is difficult. It’s easier with novels, as there were far sff fewer novels published then, and the ones that were, are mostly still in print. But this was in the heyday of the pulps, there was a lot of short fiction published, and most of it is unavailable, unless you collect the classics pulp magazines. While most of the stories that were considered really good have been anthologised, you have to go through a lot of anthologies to read them all, and that’s not easy to do, especially if you’re reading ebooks only.

So, I do what I can. This post contains my thoughts on the eligible novellas I managed to find and read.


In A. E. Van Vogt’s Asylum, a pair of space vampires, aliens who live off both blood and the vital “life force” of their victims, land on an Earth which has developed interplanetary space flight and learned to live without interpersonal violence - rape, murder, even war are considered “social perversions,”

Merla and Jeel are advance scouts for their people, the Dreegh, who violate the laws of Galactic society to raid relatively primitive human planets, harvesting as much blood and life energy as they can before their activities are noticed and thwarted by the Galactic Observers. But this time, Merla and Jeel decide to attack and destroy the system’s Observer before they are noticed, so that the Dreegh can drain Earth of all its life. To do this, they kidnap and interrogate a reporter named William Leigh to help them find the hidden Observer.

The novella is written in a rather florid style, and suffers from too many descriptions of the extreme magnetism and vast intelligence of the nonhuman characters. As well, Van Vogt has some very odd ideas about psychology and how to write internal conflict. I’ve read a fair bit of his work over the years, and I would not rank this among his best, despite the interesting storyline and the foreshadowed but still surprising last minute plot twist. Some pulp sf ages well; this unfortunately did not.


Lester del Ray’s novella Nerves, on the other hand, reads almost like modern fiction, albeit with some quirks in dialogue that mark it as being from an earlier area, and a very bad excuse for a Japanese accent. The novella begins with a team of medical personnel dealing with the aftermath of a serious accident - thirty-odd injured and 17 fatalities - in an industrial facility where an assortment of radioactive products are constructed. The lead physician, Dr. Ferrel, is a former ‘star’ surgeon, who has lost his confidence ever since he had to perform on his dying pregnant wife, and was unable to save her. He has been working in obscurity ever since. His assistant, Dr. Jenkins, a young doctor who once dreamed of being an atomic scientist, is in his own way unsure of his limits, and still longing for the career he could not have.

As the action unfolds, we learn that the plant where everything went drastically wrong was being used to test an experimental process, and that if the still ongoing, but dangerously malfunctioning process isn’t shut down properly, the plabt will explode in a matter of hours, taking the whole facility, and possibly a large region of the populated area nearby, with it. When it turns out that the only man who has the knowledge and experience to safely shut down the process is severely injured and suffering from serious radiation exposure, Drs Ferrel and Jenkins will need every but of their combined experience and background to save the dying atomic engineer. Nerves is a story about damaged people facing an extreme crisis and finding ways to overcome their limitations under pressure. In that sense, it is a very timeless story.


Alfred Bester’s novella Hell is Forever is a rather dull and dreary recapitulation of the rather common idea that hell is of out own making. Of the top of my head, I can think of several plays that have gotten the idea across much better, including Sartre’ No Exit. In Bester’s version, six annoying people accidentally summon something rather like a devil who offers each of them their own reality - which of course turns out to be an eternity of experiencing their own worst nightmares. I really couldn’t get excited about it, it was far too repetitious and once the point is made with the first of the obnoxious protagonists, the fate of the others is of little interest. They are simply not sympathetic enough as characters for us to care about the specifics of each individual hell.


I’ve also reread Heinlein’s novella Waldo. This time around, I feel a strong connection to the title character that is new, and connected to the severe degeneration of my own physical state since my last reading; now, I perceive Waldo as “crip lit” and a fairly sensitive example, for something written by a man who likely perceived himself as able bodied. I was struck by the unifying metaphor of the waldo, the device that allows Waldo to manipulate objects on scales that would be impossible, not just for his crippled self, dealing with severe myasthenia gravis, but in some cases, for any human. This concept is recapitulated in the concept of the Other World which Waldo learns from a traditional hex doctor, the other dimension in which mind resides, and from which mind extends to influence, direct, manipulate the material world through its connections with brain and body.

There are other interesting and very modern ideas in Waldo - including the concern about untested long-term consequences of exposure to new technologies. All in all, a fine example if Heinlein’s early work.


Anthony Boucher’s The Compleat Werewolf is a nicely comedic novella about a university professor named Wolfe Wolf who has fallen in love with one of his former students, the actress Gloria Garton. When she declines his marriage proposal, he goes out drinking, meets a magician who calls himself Ozymandias, and learns that he is a werewolf. But that’s only the beginning of the tale, which also involves satanic temples, a German spy ring, and a taking cat.

The tone is light and just a bit on the frivolous side, the story pure entertainment.


Robert Heinlein’s novella The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag takes a fascinating conceit - the world as a work of art - and turns it into a baffling and rather frightening story of supernatural mystery. (And also, in its description of Hoag’s profession as unpleasant, an in-joke for writers.) Jonathan Hoag is an amnesiac. Not only has he no memory of his live before a time five years ago. He has no idea what he does during the day. Distressed by the sudden realisation that he doesn’t really know who he is, he turns to a private detective to discover the things about himself that he doesn’t know.

Their investigation leads to a series of strange events, terrifying nightmares, unnatural threats, and unbelievable encounters, a sense that either they or the world is gong mad. As it turns out, it’s the world that is subtly wrong, and Hoag’s unknown profession carries with it the potential to make things right.

It’s like one of those secret history stories, in a way. It is so very unbelievable, and yet it could be true, and one would never know. Both the story and the concept stay with the reader after the process of reading is over - surely one of the qualities of good art.

Of the novellas I found and read, I thought both of Heinlein’s pieces, plus the Boucher and del Ray offerings, worth nomination. It will be interesting to see what works others found and decided to nominate.

What with the Hugo nomination period for 1943 Retro Hugo being open, I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone by reading the collections of Heinlein’s shorter fiction that contain anything published in 1942.

I begin my Heinlein Hugo reading with the odd little volume that packages his 1942 sf novella, Waldo, with his slightly earlier contemporary fantasy, Magic, Inc. The edition I have contains an introduction by the self-proclaimed Heinlein expert William H. Patterson, Jr., who tells us that Heinlein did not see why these two novellas were published in one volume: “...he considered these stories so mismatched, he told his agent, that, “[i]t seems to me that they go together about as well as mustard and watermelon.” It was a headache to come up with a title for the book. He ran through several lackluster possibilities and gave up: the book was published in 1950 with just the titles of the two stories joined together.”

Patterson argues that they are in fact thematically linked: “...for what “Magic, Inc.” and “Waldo” have in common is that they are both explorations of cognitive boundaries, of the mental cages we erect for ourselves, whose limits we pace out and self-reinforce.” I think he’s reaching a bit here, not because this isn’t true, but because it is true of most things Heinlein wrote, and indeed most of the best that any writer of speculative fiction has written.

Anyway, on to Waldo. It is, of course, the story that gave remotely operated robotic instruments their nickname, “waldoes,” because it is the story of an isolated and eccentric genius, Waldo F. Jones, with severe myasthenia gravis who invents and relies on such instruments to do the things he cannot. The set-up of the novella: 15 years after the transition to the use of radiant power, and the elimination of all physical means of power transmission, something is going wrong with the system. Unexplained failures, breakdowns in equipment that should not break down, findings that go against all the science that resulted in radiant power being adopted in the first place. No one can explain the problem, let alone solve it. The last option is to seek the help, if it can be obtained, of Waldo, the crippled, misanthropic genius who lives in a self-contained orbital satellite and generally refuses to interact with anyone unless it serves his interests and is on his terms.

The last time I read Waldo, which was many years ago, I did not see myself as disabled. I was overweight, and limited in certain ways, and frustrated that no matter what medical advice I followed, I could not lose weight, but just kept getting heavier. I had some respiratory issues, but the environmental illness that would eventually force me into seclusion had not yet become obvious. I could understand Waldo, the character, intellectually, but I could not feel as he might feel. Now, imprisoned by gravity and my extreme susceptibility to environmental toxins, I identify with Waldo. I long for a Freehold where I could move freely. I want to dance again. So that’s a big part of my response to the novella.

I’m also, as always, delighted by Heinlein’s premise in this story, that there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, and that some of those might in fact involve a basis for some kinds of manipulation of reality, something that looks like magic. This time around, in reading Waldo’s unravelling of the science of the science of the Other World, I was struck by an image of the mind, resident in the Other World, reaching into the continuum of physical reality to make the body function, like an organic simulation of the mechanical waldoes created by the protagonist.

Magic, Inc. is a contemporary fantasy, a forerunner to the modern and burgeoning genre of urban fantasy. It takes place in a world where magic works according to recognised laws and principles, and is fully a part of everyday life. Our protagonists flag down a flying carpet, not a taxi. Restaurants offer “vanishing meals” - you experience all the sensation of eating, but the food magically dematerialises once it reaches the stomach. Most industries run on a combination of technology and magic.

The protagonist, Archie Fraser, runs a building supplies and construction business. He employs licenced, professional magicians on a contract basis, just as he does any other tradespersn or specialist needed to do any given job. But his freedom to hire whom he wishes is being threatened, first by an organisation that purports to be a professional standards body, that wants to regulate contracts and fees, then by a gangster who threatens serious damage to his business unless he only hires magicians they recommend, and pay protection bribes on top of that.

Being a rugged individualist, Fraser refuses, and soon there are consequences. The situation escalates, with curses, hexes, and depredations by gnomes and salamanders on his business properties, and the emergence of a heavily funded lobby that seeks to enact regulation that will put all practising magicians under control of an organisation called Magic, Inc, and compel every business using magic to negotiate only with them. Fortunately, Fraser has a friend, who is a bit of a witch himself, and who knows some very powerful allies who are willing to help Fraser fight this massive attempt to take over the practice of magic.

It’s an engaging story, well-plotted, with some truly memorable characters, including a South African anthropologist who is also a traditional “witch smeller” - a black character portrayed with an uncomfortable mix of respect and racist stereotyping. Heinlein actually manages to show some awareness of the impacts of colonialism on Africa in his handling of the character, and to treat African magical traditions with as much respect as the European ones he draws on - and this is one magical Negro who does not sacrifice himself for anyone.

All in all, it’s a fun romp that shows why Heinlein was a force to be reckoned with in science fiction, right from the very early days of his writing career.

Heinlein only published three short stories in 1942: “Goldfish Bowl,” under his own name, and two others, “Pied Piper” and “My Object All Sublime” under his Lyle Monroe pen name. The Lyle Monroe stories have apparently only been anthologised once, in Off the Main Sequence, and it was never made into an ebook. That makes it difficult to try to read those. “Goldfish Bowl” is in The Menace from Earth, which I have in an omnibus edition with The Green Hills of Earth, so I’m reading both collections.

The Green Hills of Earth, ironically enough, contains a great many stories about working and living in space, or on the Moon. Read in order, these stories - all of them part of the Luna City cycle, which may or may not be part of Heinlein’s Future History - tell, or at least suggest, the ‘history’ of humanity’s movement into space. There’s “Delilah and the Space Rigger” which tells two stories - one about the construction of the space station that makes travel from Earth to the Moon feasible, and one about the psychological shift from space as frontier and space as living environment. “The Space Jockey” continues both themes, the establishment of regular transport to the Moon and the establishment of family life on the Moon. “The Long Watch,” one of Heinlein’s most moving stories, references politics on Earth, but is about the courage of the average man called on to do extraordinary things, and the role of the Moon in making those green hills of Earth safe from war. “Gentlemen Be Seated” is set during the construction of Luna City, and, like three of the following stories, “The Black Pits of Luna,” “It’s Great to Be Back,” and “Ordeal in Space,” highlights what it take, psychologically, to live in space, away from the relative comfort and safety of Earth.

“We Also Walk Dogs” takes place entirely on Earth, but deals peripherally with the preliminary steps toward the establishment of a solar system government that integrates multiple cultures, human and otherwise. It’s in “The Green Hills of Earth” that Heinlein, in another classic and emotional tale, bridges the contradictions between the drive outward, into the far corners of space, and the memory of Earth that the spacemen carry with them - a memory as idealised as all the other things that the blind poet remembers but can not see. “Logic of Empire” ends the collection on a sombre note, an oppositional piece to the optimistic story of human progress to the stats. It is the dark underbelly of the romance of exploration - the tragedy of exploitation - and brings the reader, shockingly, down to earth with the fear that the errors of earth’s past will all be replayed in space’s future.


The stories collected in The Menace from Earth are less thematically linked, and can be divided loosely into two groups. Some of the stories are part of the Luna City cycle, including the story that gives the collection its name. In these stories, one sees the same focus on the spirit of exploration as in the other stories set in this particular timeline and frequently set in, or referencing, Luna City, most of which are collected in The Green Hills of Earth. Some of the stories - “ Columbus Was a Dope,” “The Menace from Earth,” - show Luna City as a well established habitat, with its own full culture, serving as a cradle for further exploration, while “Skylift” focuses on the downsides and the dangers of a space-faring society.

In addition to the Luna City cycle stories, the collection contains several stand-alone stories, including some of Heinlein’s best known short fiction - “The Year of the Jackpot,” “By His Bootstraps,” and “Goldfish Bowl.” These stories, and the two lesser known tales “Water is for Washing” and “Project Nightmare,” interestingly enough, do share a common theme of menace - from the sun, from the waters, from the skies, from the future, from other humans.

Rereading these short stories reminds me of Heinlein’s great versatility, and of how very good a writer he was, and how modern his work still feels today, despite his being in many ways a man of his time. So many sf short stories of the period lack in characterisation, or use language in ways that feel forced, overwrought, or insufficiently nuanced upon rereading. Heinlein ages well in many ways, even when the inevitable casual sexism and racism of the times is too much a part of the story to be set aside - though even then, it is important to note that Heinlein seems to have thought more about the social status and roles of women and people of colour than many other writers of his time, and he does his best to make them fully realised characters, and not just stereotypes, when he includes them in his writing.