The following review is the 27th and 28th installment of my series searching for “SF short stories that are critical in some capacity of space agencies, astronauts, and the culture which produced them.” Some stories I’ll review in this series might not fit. And that is okay. I relish the act of literary archaeology.

Kate Wilhelm’s “Planet Story” (1975) charts a planetary mystery that seems just out of reach of the cold, factual truth of scientific instruments. And Clark Ashton Smith’s “Master of the Asteroid” (1932) imagines the fragile minds of human explorers unable to grapple with the interplanetary gulf.

As always, feel free to join the conversation.

Previously: Philip K. Dick’s “The Precious Artifact” (1964) and Henry Slesar’s “Mr. Loneliness” (1957)

Up Next: TBD

4/5 (Good)

Clark Ashton Smith’s “Master of the Asteroid” first appeared in Wonder Stories, ed. Hugo Gernsback (October 1932). You can read it online here. I read it in the 1958 edition of Strange Ports of Call, ed. August Derleth (1948).

Cark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) is characterized as “one of the big three of Weird Tales, with Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft.” His fiction was deeply influenced by his psychological afflictions, “including intense agoraphobia,” and nightmares. Due to the Great Depression and the declining health of his parents, Smith wrote more than a hundred short stories between 1929-1934. “Master of the Asteroid” (1932), produced in this productive moment, reads like an unnerving catalog of manias.

The Enigmatic Movements of Dread

In the bleak future (1980) in which “Master of the Asteroid” transpires, tragedies litter the interplanetary gulfs: “vessel after vessel […] disappeared in the infinite–and has not returned” (5). Humanity plunges outward like a lemming, unprepared, unrelenting, unwilling to acknowledge the “inconceivably hostile environment of a cosmos not designed for men” (5). In the wreck of the Selenite, the “first known rocket ship to dare the zone of the asteroids” (5), surrounded by enormous plants that crumble at a touch, explorers discover a skeleton and a diary recounting a cosmic terror. The fate of most of the dead, lost in other desolate realms, remains unknown.

The diary tells the story of schism and insanity. On a small rocket base in Mars’ Syrtis Major, “irrational animosities” divide the well-trained and hardy scientists (6). Three men, Roger Colt, Phil Gershom, and Edmond Beverly–irreparably transformed by the Martian landscape–steal the Selenite and set off propelled by the delusion that “Mars, with its fifteen Earthmen, was entirely too crowded” (6). Edmond Beverly, an unreliable narrator, recounts the gnawing psychiatric state of the other two crewmen. Unnerved by the sensation of ether-travel, Gershom hurls himself from the spacecraft–his dead body bobs outside the viewport. And then Beverly kills Colt, in self-defense. Sinking into the “chaos of vertiginous horror,” Beverly awakes after the Selenite crashes on an asteroid (13). Beverly spends his last days watching mysterious aliens with semaphoric movements conduct rituals that cannot be parsed outside the fused cabin door.

The enigmatic movements of dread infiltrate all layers of Smith’s nightmarish vision. All elements of exploration, the alien landscapes, the method of travel, and the movements and intentions of the indigenous dwellers of the great deep, remain cryptic and cruel. Smith includes an extensive rumination on the devastating effects of the alien nature of the Martian climate. This is not a Mars familiar to most fans of pulp. This is a Mars that creates “profound disturbances of metabolism” that lead to nervous and mental breaks: “Queer, irrational animosities, manias or phobias never classified by alienists, began to develop among the personnel at the rock base” (6). Within a pulp milieu, Smith conjures a sustained rumination of the interior space of a man unable to ascertain the nature of his world and escape a grisly death. If there’s a single quote that represents this series, it’s Beverly’s observation: “The hells of the human mind are vaster than space, darker than the night between the worlds” (10).

Recommended.

Yes, I occasionally step outside of my 1945-1985 area of focus! Despite my minimal interest in pre-1945 American history, I found myself drawn to this one–especially uncovering the threads that crop up in the later stories on this theme I’ve explored. I am eager to explore more of his work.

4.25/5 (Very Good)

Kate Wilhelm’s “Planet Story” first appeared in Epoch, ed. Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg (1975). You can read it online here. I read it in her collection Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions (1978).

Violent Mania in Paradise

A nameless narrator (N) recounts the experience of their deep space survey vessel crew, tasked with charting possible colonies, on a distant planet that appears harmless. Unlike other worlds they’ve charted with clear dangers that bring the crew together, “on this gentle continent, on this benign planet […] there is no menace to mankind in the air, on the ground, beneath the ground, no menace of any kind” (76). Yet, N is still afraid. They are afraid on the surface. Afraid “in sight of my friends and co-workers” on board the orbiting ship (76). A crewman commits suicide, and the fear grows.

The multi-racial crew of experts from all scientific fields work like clockwork–each knows their roles–each knows what will happen if someone dies: “Should Haarlem die, another would operate his core drill, complete his geological survey; should I die, another would don my doctor’s garb and check temperatures, administer to the ill and injured” (76). But the instruments yield no evidence of danger nor an alien presence or a “psychic call from a gloomy wood” (76). And another goes missing.

Clues emerge when N experiences, and records, soul-crushing dread while on the planet’s surface. N awakes, drugged by medical staff, on the survey ship with a theory. But there are other theories far less tied to the few facts N gathered. Some, like Haarlem, ascribe the dread to the uncharted backwaters of the human mind confronting primordial patterns. And Tony goes mad and breaks Francine’s neck in his frenzy (88).

That Which Escapes the Encyclopedic Gaze

Elements of “Planet Story” (1975) reminded me of Christopher Priest’s fantastic short story “Real-Time World” (1971)–and the extended treatment of similar contours of perception in Inverted World (1974). Like Priest, Wilhelm channels the cold, factual, language of science that provides the sheen of truth. And behind the instruments and machines, complex computer calculations, and the linguistic exactitude of the scientific disciplines, the reader and the survivors grasp at radically divergent explanations for the violent manias of paradise. The encyclopedic envelope of the expedition—with its spy satellites, experts, and expeditions–cannot catalog all the crevices of the human mind.

There are intriguing touches throughout. At moments, expected information is withheld from the reader. For example, I read the story three times and could not discern any indication of the gender of the narrator. Wilhelm overtly states the presence of bisexual relationships–N included–on board the ship. In another delicate touch, Wilhelm implies that the deep sleep voyage home will erase all but the impressions of memories. The narrator must decide on which interpretation to latch onto before “the immediacy of the planet” fades and melts into the vague experiences of other celestial bodies (89).

I’ve detected a shift in Wilhelm’s mid-to-late 70s short fiction. As with  “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis” (1976), she turns to a direct (and intense) prose style that differs from her more oblique New Wave experimentation that characterizes “The Planners” (1968). It bites down on the hard truth of it all.

A fascinating study of failure. Recommended.

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