SF Book Reviews

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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Future Media Short Story Review: Lino Aldani’s “Good Night, Sophie” (1963, trans. 1973)

/ Joachim Boaz / 30 Comments
  • Uncredited cover art detail for the 1975 New English Library edition of Barry N. Malzberg’s The Destruction of the Temple (1974)

In the history of my website, I’ve reviewed and adored countless fictions that tackled future formations of the media landscape. Spurned in part by the explosion of television ownership in the 50s, pop art’s obsession with filmic iconography, and popular studies on advertising, science fiction compulsively explored futuristic formulations of media performance and manipulation, exploitation and paranoia (SF Encyclopedia). I’ve decided to put together a review series of short fiction that will continue my exploration of the theme.

It is devilishly difficult to organize all that I’ve reviewed so far but here are a few of the highlights that suggest different routes I might traverse. As I do not plan on rereading stories I’ve covered in the past, feel free to track down some of the gems below.

Christopher Priest’s “The Head and the Hand” (1972), John Brunner’s “Nobody Axed You” (1965), Robert Sheckley’s “The Prize of Peril” (1958), D. G. Compton’s The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (variant title: The Unsleeping Eye) (1973), and Robert Silverberg’s “The Pain Peddlers” (1963) explore the intersection of media and the spectacle of suffering. Pain recorded. Deaths televised. Media as death blow.

Kate Wilhelm’s “Baby, You Were Great” (1967), Carol Emshwiller’s “This Thing Called Love” (1955), and James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973) scrutinize the emotional bifurcation between the audience and their love of the starlet or influencer as presented and constructed. And the ways in which the audience controls the construction…. and by extension the performer.

Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s “Well of the Deep Wish” (1961), Keith Roberts’ “Sub-Lim” (1965), and Kit Reed’s “At Central” (1967) speculate on the methods media can be used as social control. Of course, in the both the Biggle and Reed, the real world outside has utterly transformed since the audience has slipped into new worlds.

And, of course, I have to include Barry N. Malzberg’s extensive oeuvre–such as Revelations (1972) and Screen (1968). His work often demonstrates the pernicious addiction and desperation audiences and participants project into the media landscape hoping for truth and real experience. The media landscape is yet another mechanized artifice pandering to our obsession with dark spectacle.

I hope you enjoy this series. Feel free to join in (I include a link to the first story below)!

And we have a doozy to start with!

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

  • Gianni Benvenuti’s cover for the 1978 edition ofView from Another Shore (1973), ed. Franz Rottensteiner

4.75/5 (Near Masterpiece)

Lino Aldani’s short story “Good Night, Sophie” first appeared under the pseudonym N. L. Janda in Futuro, no. 1 (March/April 1963). Futuro, edited by Aldani along with Giulio Raiola and Massimo Lo Jacono, was the first entirely Italian science fiction magazine (it contained some translations of Polish SF) (contents). I read it in Franz Rottensteiner’s anthology of European science fiction in translation View from Another Shore (1973). You can read it online here.

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Book Review: The Siege of Harlem, Warren Miller (1964)

/ Joachim Boaz / 6 Comments
  • Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

2/5 (Bad)

Over the last year, I acquired three near-future SF novels exploring issues of race conflict in New York City written by authors of different racial backgrounds (White, African American, and Chicano): Warren Miller’s The Siege of Harlem (1964); John A. Williams’ Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light: A Novel of Some Probability (1969); and Enrique Hank Lopez’s Afro-6 (1969). I’ve decided to review them in chronological order.

Warren Miller (1921-1966), best known for The Cool World (1959) and Looking for The General (1964), wrote fiction that often dealt with issues of race. The Cool World attempted to “capture the argot of the streets of Harlem in the late 50s” and give a sympathetic look at the realities of black urban life. Considering his output, I was excited to track down a copy of The Siege of Harlem (1964), his final novel before his premature death.

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Short Story Reviews: Lee Killough’s “Caveat Emptor” (1970), “Caravan” (1972), and “Sentience” (1973)

/ Joachim Boaz / 13 Comments

While travelling to visit my family in Texas, I stopped at the original Half Price Books location in Dallas. I procured a giant pile of vintage SF that I’ll feature in the upcoming year in my acquisition posts, including a signed copy (for $3) of Lee Killough’s A Voice Out of Ramah (1979). I realized that I’ve only read Killough’s “Bête et Noir” (1980) and, as is my wont, decided to start with her first three published pieces of short fiction before diving into a novel. As these are her first published works, I suspect she has not found her best form.

  • Jack Gaughan’s cover for Worlds of If (May-June 1972), ed. Ejler Jakobsson

“Caveat Emptor” (1970), 2.5/5 (Bad): First appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, ed. John Campbell, Jr. (May 1970). You can read it online here. Equine Andvarian aliens pilot a trading vessel across the Commonwealth. Soon after first contact, a young human woman named Danae learns their language and customs on board their vessel. Danae sets up a trade meeting with the business conglomerate Galiol, a member of the Federation, whom she represents (109). Killough posits that megacompanies, driven by profit, will drive humanity’s expansion outward. The climax of the story features economic gamesmanship as the head of Galiol attempts to take advantage of the newly contacted alien species. But both get what they want in the end. Business is business for humans and aliens…

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Generation Ship Short Story Review: Vonda N. McIntyre’s “The Mountains of Sunset, The Mountains of Dawn” (1974)

/ Joachim Boaz / 18 Comments
  • Charles Shields’ cover art detail for the 1st edition of Fireflood and Other Stories (1979)

This is the 13th post in my series of vintage generation ship short fiction reviews. Today I have a story that I’ve not seen described as generation ship take yet firmly fits the theme. That standard plot points are transposed to an alien society with captivating effect.

As a reminder for anyone stopping by, all of the stories I’ll review in the series are available online via the link below in the review.

You are welcome to read and discuss along with me as I explore humanity’s visions of generational voyage. And thanks go out to all who have joined already. I also have compiled an extensive index of generation ship SF if you wish to track down my earlier reviews on the topic and any that you might want to read on your own.

Previously: Michael G. Coney’s “The Mind Prison” (1971).

Next Up: Don Wilcox’s “The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years” (1940).

  • Richard Sternbach’s cover for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (February 1974), ed. Edward L. Ferman

Vonda N. McIntyre’s “The Mountains of Sunset, the Mountains of Dawn” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (February 1974), ed. Edward L. Ferman. 4/5 (Good). You can read it online here. I read it in Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Fourth Annual Collection (1974), ed. Lester del Rey.

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