SF Book Reviews

Short Fiction Reviews: Eleanor Arnason’s “A Clear Day in the Motor City” (1973), “Ace 167” (1974), and “The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons” (1974)

/ Joachim Boaz / 24 Comments

In the past few months, I’ve put together an informal series on the first three published short fictions by female authors who are completely new to me or whose most famous SF novels fall mostly outside the post-WWII to mid-1980s focus of my reading adventures. So far I’ve featured Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019), Nancy Kress (1948-), Melisa Michaels (1946-2019), and Lee Killough (1942-). To be clear, I do not expect transformative or brilliant things from first stories. Rather, it’s a way to get a sense of subject matter and concerns that first motivated authors to put pen to paper.

Today I’ve selected an author I’ve never read–Eleanor Arnason (1942-). According to SF Encyclopedia, most of her best-known science fiction appeared from the mid-1980s onward with To the Resurrection Station (1986) (which I own), A Woman of the Iron People (1991), Changing Women (1992), and the Hwarhath sequence (1993-2012). Unfortunately, I did not encounter her work in my late teens and early 20s when I read science fiction more widely.

I’d rank Eleanor Arnason’s first three published short fictions as the most auspicious start of the those I’ve covered so far. Her stories–often self-consciously in dialogue with pulp worlds and plots–demonstrate a fascination with ritualized landscapes and behaviors and feature female narrators attempting to find their place in strange new worlds.

Let me know which Arnason fictions–perhaps from much later in her career–resonate with you.

  • Bruce Pennington’s cover for New Worlds 6, ed. Michael Moorcock and Charles Platt (1973)

4/5 (Good)

“A Clear Day in the Motor City” first appeared in New Worlds 6, ed. Michael Moorcock and Charles Platt (1973). This does not seem to be available online. If you find it, let me know.

Like a cryptic quilt, a strange ritualized landscape drapes across the polluted industrial expanse of Detroit and Windsor. On clear air holidays, when “the Seven Sisters” were visible from the roof of a nearby office building, CEOs adorn “wreaths of plastic oak leaves” and release pigeons to “whoever’s responsible for the weather, to bear our thanks to him, her, it or them” (187).

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Future Media Short Story Review: Ann Warren Griffith’s “Captive Audience” (1953)

/ Joachim Boaz / 23 Comments

Today I’ve reviewed the eleventh story in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future! Ann Warren Griffith spins a nightmarish dystopia where advertisements are illegal to block out.

Previously: Tomorrow’s TV, ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles Waugh (1982). Includes media-themed stories by Isaac Asimov, Jack C. Haldeman II, Ray Bradbury, and Ray Nelson.

Up Next: Pat Cadigan’s “Rock On” (1984).

  • Ed Emswhiller’s cover for the 1960 edition of The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Third Series, ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas (1954)

4/5 (Good)

Ann Warren Griffith’s “Captive Audience” (1953) first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas (August 1953). You can read it online here.

In the 1950s, Americans depicted Communism as denying inherent human freedoms of choice and enslaving the mind. Over the course of the decade, the terror of Communist brainwashing collided with fears of the detrimental effects of consumer culture and advertising. Perhaps the evil Communist was so successful due to a new softness within the American family (Dunne, 123). Anne Warren Griffith’s “Captive Audience” imagines a dystopic future in which the American mind is turned into malleable putty by an entropic (and sonic) inundation of advertisements. According to the story’s relentless logic, the last bastions of independent thought will cease to exist in a capitalist world where the right of every product to receive “its share of the consumer dollar” is the only right that matters (57).

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Future Media Short Story Reviews: Tomorrow’s TV, ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Charles Waugh (1982) (Isaac Asimov, Jack C. Haldeman II, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Ray Nelson)

/ Joachim Boaz / 18 Comments

The seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth stories in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future appear in the anthology Tomorrow’s TV, ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Charles Waugh (1982).

Previously: Two short stories by Fritz Leiber.

“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949) 

“A Bad Day for Sales” (July 1953).

Up Next: Ann Warren Griffith’s “Captive Audience” (August 1953).

  • Greg Hargreaves’ cover for the 1st edition

3.25/5 (collated rating: Above Average)

Tomorrow’s TV (1982) gathers together five short stories published between 1951 and 1979 on future speculations and disturbing manifestations of the tube of the future. The extensive number of TV-related science fiction from these decades (especially the 50s and early 60s) should not come as a surprise. According to Gary R. Edgerton’s magisterial monograph The Columbia History of American Television (2007), no “technology before TV every integrated faster into American life” (xi). Isaac Asimov speculates on the nature of education and the role of the “teacher” if every kid goes to school on their TV. Ray Bradbury imagines a frosty world where everyone turns inward towards the hypnotic glow of their TV sets. Robert Bloch explores the intersection of programming as escape and its collision with the real world. Ray Nelson narrates a hyperviolent expose of the alien entities behind subliminal messaging. And Jack Haldeman II imagines what will happen when the human mind reaches a moment of information overload.

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Short Story Reviews: Nancy Kress’ “The Earth Dwellers” (1976), “A Delicate Shade of Kipney” (1978), and “And Whether Pigs Have Wings” (1979)

/ Joachim Boaz / 20 Comments
  • Bob Venosa’s interior art illustrating Nancy Kress’ “And Whether Pigs Have Wings” (1979) in Omni (January 1979)

Back in December 2019, I read An Alien Light (1987), my first science fiction work by Nancy Kress (1948-). I was so impressed with the novel, a “bleak and powerful rumination on violence” within a “new alien architecture,” that I placed it on my Best Reads of 2019 list. Like my recent rumination on Melisa Michaels’ first three published short stories, I thought I’d do the same with Kress. I relentlessly seek to map another feature in the fascinating territory of 50s-70s SF.

Let me know which Kress fictions–perhaps from much later in her career–resonate with you.

  • Rick Sternbach’s cover for Galaxy, ed. James Baen (December 1976)

3.5/5 (Good)

“The Earth Dwellers” first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. James Baen (December 1976). You can read it online here.

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Future Media Short Story Reviews: Fritz Leiber’s “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949) and “A Bad Day for Sales” (1953)

/ Joachim Boaz / 33 Comments

The fifth and sixth story in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future. Fritz Leiber imagines a sinister conjuration of the Girl behind the advertisement and a robot who wanders a post-nuclear landscape selling soda to the charred victims.

Previously: Brian W. Aldiss’ “Panel Game” (December 1955).

Next Up: Tomorrow’s TV (1982). Stories by Isaac Asimov, Jack C. Haldeman II, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and Ray Nelson.

  • Tony Roberts’ cover for the 1975 edition of The Secret Songs (1968)

4.5/5 (Very Good)

Fritz Leiber’s “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949) first appeared in The Girl with the Hungry Eyes, and Other Stories (1949). I read it in his collection The Secret Songs (1968). You can read it online here.

“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” explores the post-WWII economic boom as television and rapidly growing suburbs expanded the reach and power of advertising. Cold War rhetoric promoted consumerism as a key component of the American Way of Life (source).

A tale of erotic obsession and terror, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” imagines a fantastical conjuration of the archetypal advertising Girl selling every conceivable product. Her face appears on billboards across the urban expanse. Her torso or limb holds the object to be marveled at. And her eyes, “the hungriest eyes in the world” (131), tear into the soul and take something away with their gaze. Fritz Leiber’s terrified narrator, the “poor damned photographer” (129) who unleashed her on the world and fell for her spell, confesses “there are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood” (128).

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Future Media Short Story Review: Brian W. Aldiss’ “Panel Game” (1955)

/ Joachim Boaz / 11 Comments

The fourth story in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future. Aldiss spins a wild satire of a television screen that views you!

Previously: Avram Davidson and Sidney Klein’s “The Teeth of Despair” (May 1961).

Next up: Two Fritz Leiber stories!

“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949) and “A Bad Day for Sales” (July 1953).

  • Gerard Quinn’s cover for the December 1955 issue of New Worlds

3.75/5 (Good)

Brian W. Aldiss’ “Panel Game” first appeared in New Worlds Science Fiction, ed. John Carnell (December 1955). You can read it online here.

At 8:12 pm on September 22nd, 1955 the UK’s first TV advertisement–for Unilever’s Gibb’s S. R. [Sodium ricinoleate] toothpaste–aired on ITV (source). You can watch the commercial here with its toothpaste tube suspended in ice, a model excitedly brushing, and a hilarious graph that does not even pretend to convey data. Just a year earlier, the Television Act of 1954 allowed the formation–to great debate–of ITV, the first commercial television network in the UK.

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Future Media Short Story Review: Avram Davidson and Sidney Klein’s “The Teeth of Despair” (1961)

/ Joachim Boaz / 33 Comments

The third story in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future! In the wreckage of the 1950s Quiz Show scandals, Avram Davidson and Sidney Klein conjure a “secret history” of the real events.

Previously: Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” (August 1951).

Next up: Brian W. Aldiss’ “Panel Game” (December 1955).

  • Jack Gaughan’s cover for the 1st edition of What Strange Stars and Skies (1965)

2/5 (Bad)

Avram Davidson and Sidney Klein’s “The Teeth of Despair” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Robert P. Mills (May 1961). I read it in Science Fiction Oddities, ed. Groff Conklin (1966). You can read it online here.

I suspect most of you have seen Robert Redford’s Quiz Show (1994), a dramatization of the 1950s Quiz Show scandals. In the film, John Turturro, as Herbie Stempel, turns whistleblower after a three-month run on NBC’s Twenty-One where he was compelled to allow his opponent, Ralph Fiennes as Charles Van Doren, to win. In the early weeks of Twenty-One, corporate sponsors of the program grew increasingly frustrated with the poor quality of the contestants. In response, the producers increasingly choreographed the rise and fall of America’s fact-regurgitating heroes.

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Future Media Short Story Review: Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” (1951)

/ Joachim Boaz / 32 Comments

The second story in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future!

Today: Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” (August 1951).

Previously: Lino Aldani’s “Good Night, Sophie” (March/April 1963).

Next up: Avram Davidson and Sidney Klein’s “The Teeth of Despair” (May 1961).

  • Chelsey Bonestall’s cover for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas (February 1952)

4/5 (Good)

You can read “The Pedestrian” in the February 1952 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas here.

Scenes and fragments from Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The Martian Chronicles (1951), Dandelion Wine (1951), The Illustrated Man (1951), and I Sing the Body Electric! (1969) percolate through my memories like embers that refuse to flicker out. The oppressive Venusian rains in “All Summer in a Day” (1954) and the carcasses consumed by lions in “The Veldt” (1951) remain the most distinct. Beacons of cryptic violence and sadness that continue to guide my reading adventures. All were from my first years of reading SF. Some were from cassette audiobooks with my family on long travels into the west. Others read in distant pastures surrounded by the sounds of creeks and roving cows. Until today, he was firmly an author of my youth. Yes, I’d seen (and enjoyed) the 1966 François Truffaut adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 in college but I’d never returned to the texts…

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Short Fiction Review: Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s “The Hoofer” (1955)

/ Joachim Boaz / 34 Comments

The following review is the 15th 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.

I read this story in celebration of Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s birthday (1/23). While best known for his masterful A Canticle for Leibowitz (fixup 1959) novellas, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his other short fictions, including his previous appearance in this series “Death of a Spaceman” (variant title: “Memento Homo”) (1954).

As always, feel free to join the conversation and read along with me on the search for the depressed astronaut.

Previously: Poul Anderson’s “Third Stage” (1962)

Up Next: John D. MacDonald’s “Flaw” (1949)

  • Mel Hunter’s cover for the September 1955 issue of Fantastic Universe

4.5/5 (Very Good)

Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s “The Hoofer” first appeared in the September 1955 issue of Fantastic Universe, ed. Leo Margulies. You can read it online here. I read it in S-F: The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Judith Merril (1956).

“The Hoofer” inhabits a similar future as “Death of a Spaceman” (1954) where space travel is a dangerous blue-collar occupation and coming home from the “Big Bottomless” parallels the traumas of a wartime veteran. With deceptive and powerful simplicity, “The Hoofer” follows Big Hogey Parker, with bottle of gin in hand that aggravates the physical symptoms of space travel–“glare-blindness, gravity-legs, and agoraphobia” (77), on his bus journey home a “week late” (79). He has a secret he fears to share with his wife. And the effects of space travel only explain some of his deep sadness within.

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