SF Book Reviews

Book Review: The Killer Thing, Kate Wilhelm (1967)

/ Joachim Boaz / 27 Comments
  • Paul Lehr’s cover for the 1969 edition

4/5 (Good)

On the last page of the March 1968 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, readers encountered an anti-Vietnam War petition, signed by science fiction authors, and organized by Kate Wilhelm and Judith Merril [1]. Both organizers incorrectly assumed that 95 percent of the field would sign due to the “global and anti-racist view” they believed guided SF [2]. Yet, on page 44 of the same issue, a pro-war petition organized by Robert Heinlein and Jack Williamson appeared with slightly less signatories. The June 1968 issue of Galaxy placed both lists next to each other for added effect.

Much ink has been spilt on the division lines between New Wave and Old Guard demonstrated by the two opposing advertisements [3] and in analysis of the canonical anti-Vietnam War science fiction novels, such as Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1975), partially compiled from stories that appeared as early as 1973, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1972), written in 1968. Far less attention has been given to the Vietnam-inspired fiction of Kate Wilhelm, one of the organizers of the petition. Only her short story “The Village” (1973) receives occasional mention–it transposes a My Lai-esque massacre to the US. Little attention has been given to her third novel The Killer Thing (1967), written at a far earlier stage of the conflict [4].

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Short Story Reviews: Michael Bishop’s “The Windows in Dante’s Hell” (1973), Barrington J. Bayley’s “Exit from City 5” (1971), and A. J. Deutsch’s “A Subway Named Mobius” (1950)

/ Joachim Boaz / 38 Comments

My first review of 2024!

To quote a much younger me: “I’ve always been fascinated by imaginary and historical cities: the utopian (Tommaso Campanella’s 1602 work The City of the Sun), the allegorical (Calvino’s Invisible Cities), the multi-layered (Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Rome), the planned (Palmanova), the [fantastically] decaying (Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris), the multi-tiered (Tolkein’s Minas Tirith)…”

The science-fictional examples–from the urban gestalt of San Francisco in John Shirley’s  City Come A-Walkin’ (1980) to the arcologies of an overpopulated world in Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside (1971)–hold special appeal. As manifestations of societal decadence and vice or vibrant communities of interaction and discovery, they often become characters—changing and evolving over the course of the narrative.

To inaugurate my brand new short story review series on The Urban Landscape in Science Fiction, I’ve selected one of my favorite SF short stories: Michael Bishop’s “The Windows in Dante’s Hell” (1973). Bishop adeptly renders a human drama in a future Atlanta, replete with soaring dome and nine subterranean levels. I’ve paired it with two stories entirely new to me: Barrington J. Bayley’s “Exit from City 5” (1971) and A. J. Deutsch’s “A Subway Named Mobius” (1953). Bayley depicts a city as generation ship. A. J. Deutsch imagines a mathematical mystery within a rapidly expanding metro system underneath a future Boston.

Let me know if you have any favorite city-centric short stories that I haven’t covered on the site published pre-1985 that I could include in this series.

Up Next: Robert Abernathy’s “Single Combat” (1955).

  • Paul Lehr’s cover for the 1974 edition

5/5 (Masterpiece)

Michael Bishop’s “The Windows in Dante’s Hell” first appeared in Orbit 12, ed. Damon Knight (1973). If you have an Internet Archive account, you can read it online here.

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Short Fiction Reviews: Russell Bates’ “Hello, Walls and Fences” (1973), “Rite of Encounter” (1973), and “Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined…:” (1977)

/ Joachim Boaz / 15 Comments

"There is a world of experience and culture that is exclusively Amerindian that has never been told. That I have set out to try to relate what I can of this world is audacious, perhaps. But there was simply no way I could have done otherwise, even if I had consciously tried" -- Russell Bates' intro to "Rite of Encounter" (May 1973)

With this post I complete my micro-series covering the short fiction of Kiowa author Russell Bates (1941-2018), one of a handful of Native American science fiction authors active in the 1970s. In Part I, I provided a short biography and what I could find about his writing career including contributing to Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974), and reviewed his first three short stories.

In this post, I’ll cover his three remaining published non-franchise science fiction stories. He also wrote “The Patient Parasites” anthologized in Star Trek: The New Voyages 2, ed. Myrna Culbreath and Sondra Marshak (1978) that I won’t feature. Unfortunately, his submission–“Search Cycle: Beginning and Ending 1. The Last Quest; 2. Fifth and Last Horseman”–to Harlan Ellison’s infamous Last Dangerous Visions, slated for 1973, still has not seen the light of day.

“Hello, Walls and Fences” (1973) and “Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined…:” (1977) also serve as the 32nd and 33rd story in my media landscapes of the future series.

Previously: Edmond Hamilton’s “Requiem” (1962) and John Anthony West’s “George” (1961)

Up Next: George H. Smith’s “In the Imagicon” (1966)

  • Ron Walotsky’s cover for the 1st edition

3.75/5 (Good)

“Hello, Walls and Fences” first appeared in Infinity Five, ed. Robert Hoskins (1973). You can read it online here.

A bleak allegory of the societal forces that compel the creative to sell their souls, “Hello, Walls and Fences” follows a nameless narrator attempting to find work from a mysterious tycoon named Thornton, who spends his days on a technologically advanced estate playing wickets and eating cheese. The work itself isn’t entirely clear: it might concern computer programing for massive one-time military “hologrammers” that Thornton places across his oasis (70).

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Short Fiction Reviews: Edmond Hamilton’s “Requiem” (1962) and John Anthony West’s “George” (1961)

/ Joachim Boaz / 4 Comments

Today I’ve reviewed the 30th and 31st story in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future. In Edmond Hamilton’s “Requiem” (1962), the newsmen and women of the far future descend en masse to witness Earth’s death. And in John Anthony West’s snarky satire “George” (1961), the titular character’s body slowly atrophies while ensconced in the living room watching TV.

Previously:  Sydney J. Van Scyoc’s “Shatter the Wall” (1962).

Up Next: Russell Bates’ “Hello, Walls and Fences” (1973) and “Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined…:” (1977)

  • Lloyd Birmingham’s cover for Amazing Stories, ed. Cele Goldsmith (April 1962)

3.5/5 (Good)

Edmond Hamilton’s “Requiem” first appeared in Amazing Stories, ed. Cele Goldsmith (April 1962). You can read it online here.

In 2020, I read Hamilton’s brilliant “What’s It Like Out There?” (1952) which obliterated my ignorant view of his fiction. I asked some of my readers for other ruminative Hamilton works (i.e. not the pulp cosmos-exploding adventures he’s best known for) and “Friend of the Site” Brian Collins mentioned “Requiem.” And onto the queue, it went as it fit this series. Thank you!

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Book Review: The Sound of His Horn, Sarban (1952)

/ Joachim Boaz / 6 Comments
  • Richard Powers’ cover for the 1960 edition

4.25/5 (Very Good)

Sarban, the pen name of British diplomat and author John William Wall (1910-1989), spins a hypnotic horror in which a soldier, escaping from a Nazi prison camp, awakes in a dystopia a hundred years after Hitler’s victory in WWII [1].

Drawing on a rich English tradition of pastoral novels, The Sound of His Horn (1952) [2], despite its brief length, weaves a disquieting vision of the mechanisms of power and control [3] It’s unusual. It’s terrifying. It’s possessed by a gorgeous turn of phrase. And, in its most ruminative moments, an incisive exploration of the nature of desensitization and the fear that underpins all actions.

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Short Story Reviews: Chan Davis’ “The Nightmare” (1946), “To Still the Drums” (1946), and “The Aristocrat” (1949)

/ Joachim Boaz / 15 Comments

Chan Davis (1926-2022) was a fascinating figure. He was a communist activist, fanzine editor, mathematician, and political prisoner. He was fired from the University of Michigan in 1954 and imprisoned for six months in 1960 on charges of contempt of Congress leveled by HUAC. The Hugo Book Club recently posted a fantastic interview, from which I derived the bibliographic blurb above, with Steve Batterson, the author of The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis: McCarthyism, Communism, and the Myth of Academic Freedom (2023) that I plan on purchasing soon.

Today I have selected three of Chan Davis’ thirteen published SF short stories. The connecting theme? 1940s speculations on nuclear war in the immediate post-Hiroshima world. All three appeared in Astounding Science Fiction under the tutelage of John W. Campbell, Jr.

  • William Timmins’ cover for Astounding Science Fiction, ed. John W. Campbell, Jr. (May 1946)

3/5 (Average)

“The Nightmare” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, ed. John W. Campbell, Jr. (May 1946). You can read it online here.

A few months before the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima (August 6th, 1945), a group of scientists at the University of Chicago published The Franck Report (June 11th, 1945). James Franck and his colleagues argued that “within ten years other countries may have nuclear bombs, each of which, weighing less than a ton, could destroy an urban area of more than ten square miles.” They point out the great disadvantage of the United States with its “agglomeration of population and industry in comparatively few metropolitan districts” in comparison to countries with a population and “industry […] scattered over large areas.” In the months after Hiroshima, Chan Davis published his first SF story “The Nightmare” with The Franck Report warning firmly in mind [1].

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Short Story Reviews: Robert Silverberg’s “Road to Nightfall” (1958) and Edgar Pangborn’s “The Music Master of Babylon” (1954)

/ Joachim Boaz / 17 Comments

I can’t escape the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Like a voyeuristic shadow, I follow the denizens of the charred surface as they plod their slow movements toward the end. I observe how they push away the looming violent redness that blots out the sky, and, when everything else seems lost, they turn interior. A final movement that lays bare tattered dreams and ephemeral memories…

  • Ed Emshwiller’s cover for Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (November 1954)

5/5 (Masterpiece)

Edgar Pangborn’s “The Music Master of Babylon” first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (November 1954). You can read it online here.

Fresh of Edgar Pangborn’s masterpiece Davy (1964), I decided to cover some of his short fiction on the site. He’s shaping up to be my author of the year. “The Music Master of Babylon” (1954), which I suggest should be included as part of his Tales of a Darkening World sequence due to multiple references to events and people present in the world of Davy, contains many of the embryonic concerns that crop up in the later novel. Pangborn is the master of interweaving narrative and personal memory and the ways art–in this instance music–lays bare the topography of self.

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Short Book Reviews: Octavia E. Butler’s Mind of My Mind (1977) and Susan Cooper’s Mandrake (1964)

/ Joachim Boaz / 16 Comments

Note: My read but “waiting to be reviewed pile” is growing. Short rumination/tangents are a way to get through the stack before my memory and will fades. My website partially serves as a record of what I have read and a memory apparatus for future projects. Stay tuned for more detailed and analytical reviews.

1. Mind of My Mind, Octavia E. Butler (1977)

  • John Jude Palencar’s cover for the 1994 edition

4/5 (Good)

Octavia E. Butler’s Mind of My Mind (1977) is the second-published and second chronological installment of her Patternist series of novels (1976-1984), that chart the dystopic and hyper-violent development (and destruction) of a telepathic society. The series also contains her disowned (and hard-to-afford without selling a child) novel Survivor (1978). I wish I had read Wild Seed (1980) first!

The immortal Doro, able to hone into those with telepathic talent and shift his essence into new human bodies at will, oversees a generations-old telepathic breeding project. The harrowing story follows one his many daughters, Mary, a rare active telepath (vs. latent), as she comes of age and begins to understand the role that she is designed to play. Doro preys on the downtrodden and abandons the majority of latent telepaths to live miserable lives, unable to filter out the emotions they sponge up. Doro pairs Mary with another active telepath named Karl in order to guide her through her transition. But something new appears in her mind, she seems to have created a pattern that compulsively draws in actives from across the country. And Doro begins to feel threatened by his own creation.

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Book Review: The Gold at the Starbow’s End, Frederik Pohl (1972)

/ Joachim Boaz / 48 Comments
  • Peter Jones’ cover for the 1975 edition

3.75/5 (Collated rating: Good)

After Frederik Pohl (1919-2013) left his editorial position at Galaxy and If in 1969, he set his pen towards a productive vein of form in the 70s that would culminate in his Hugo and Nebula-winning Gateway (1977). The Gold at the Starbow’s End contains five short stories–including the first of his Heechee sequence–from this period. Two of the best stories, the titular “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” (1972) and “The Merchant of Venus” (1972), demonstrate Pohl’s characteristic blend of hyperbolic satire and delirious energy. There are no duds in this collection.

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