Short Story Review: Kōbō Abe’s “The Flood” (1950, trans. 1989)

/ Joachim Boaz / 18 Comments

Today I’m joined by Rachel S. Cordasco, the creator of the indispensable website and resource Speculative Fiction in Translation, for something a bit different!

We will both offer our reviews of one of Kōbō Abe’s first published speculative short stories, “The Flood” (1950). Over the next few months, we’ll post reviews of speculative fiction in translation from Romania, Chile, Austria, Poland, France, and the Netherlands. Depending on the story and our thoughts, I might also include our responses to each other’s review.

Also if you haven’t checked out Rachel’s website, you must. Not only does she review the global phenomena of speculative fiction but gathers lists of translated fiction by language. Also check out her reference monograph Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium (2021). In 2016, she contributed to my site reviews of three French SF stories in translation.

We read Kōbō Abe’s “The Flood” (1950) in The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories, ed. John L. Apostolou and Martin H. Greenberg (1989). Translated by Lane Dunlop. You can read it online here.

Now let’s get to our reviews!

  • Uncredited cover for the 1997 edition
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What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. X

/ Joachim Boaz / 59 Comments
  • A selection of read volumes from my shelves

What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading or planning to read this month? Here’s February’s installment of this column.

Before we get to books and birthdays and writing plans…

Do you have the inner strength to survive the panic of a nuclear attack? Take a test in the August 21st 1953 issue of Collier’s and find out! Sample question: “HOW DO YOU FEEL WHEN: […] You are alone in an automatic elevator when it stalls between floors?” Possible answers: “I’m not bothered,” “I become tense,” “It jars me badly,” and “I blow up.”

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Short Fiction Reviews: Alice Eleanor Jones’ “Life, Incorporated” (1955), “Miss Quatro” (1955), and “Recruiting Officer” (1955)

/ Joachim Boaz / 25 Comments

I ranked Alice Eleanor Jones’ apocalyptic slice-of-life nightmare “Created He Them” (1955) as my favorite SF short story of 2022. I also found Jones’ “The Happy Clown” (1955) a bleakly effective satire of television and consumerism. Unfortunately, Jones only published five short stories in 1955 before leaving science fiction altogether. It’s a shame she did not continue writing SF. With this post, I’ve covered her entire SF output.

Alice Eleanor Jones (1916-1981) received a PhD in English from University of Pennsylvania in 1944 on the seventeenth-century dramatist Shakerly Marmion. In the first year of her writing career, Jones “published five SF stories and two slick romance narratives.” Despite Anthony Boucher’s prediction that she’d be successful in both fields, Jones never returned to science fiction but continued to publish in the leading women’s magazines of the day and wrote a column for the trade magazine The Writer “well into the 1960s.”1 Lisa Yaszek argues that Jones’ “stories about housewife heroines and other domestic figures” do not reiterate conservative ideologues of the day but rather, through the construction of “offbeat” situations, examine how new scientific and social relations would impact women.2 Her two stories from the male perspective, “The Happy Clown” (1955) and “Life, Incorporated” (1955) are anti-consumerist satires.

This post fits–in conjunction with my earlier “Created He Them” (1955) review—in my series on the first three published short stories by female authors. So far I’ve featured Phyllis Gotlieb (1926-2009), Sydney J. Van Scyoc (1939-2023), Josephine Saxton (1935-), Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019), Wilmar H. Shiras (1908-1990), Nancy Kress (1948-), Melisa Michaels (1946-2019), Lee Killough (1942-), Betsy Curtis (1917-2002), and Eleanor Arnason (1942-).

Now let’s get to the stories!

  • Frank Kelly Freas’ cover for Fantastic Universe, ed. Leo Margulies (April 1955)
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Updates: Recent Science Fiction Purchases No. CCCXXXI (Iain M. Banks, Mike Resnick, Sydney J. Van Scyoc, and David J. Skal)

/ Joachim Boaz / 30 Comments

Which books/covers/authors in the post intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?

1. Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future, Mike Resnick (1986)

  • Michael Whelan’s cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “SEBASTIAN NIGHTINGALE CAIN: County hunter. You can call him Songbird–but only once. He’s after Santiago.

VIRTUE MECKENZIE: Freelance reporter. She never give up. She wants an interview… with Santiago.

THE SWAGMAN: He collects art–at gun point. He wants a few pieces currently in the hands of Santiago.

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Book Review: The Squares of the City, John Brunner (1965)

/ Joachim Boaz / 16 Comments
  • Murray Tinkelman’s cover for the 1978 edition

4/5 (Good)

Nominated for the 1966 Hugo Award for Best Novel

John Brunner’s The Squares of the City (1965) transposes the moves of a 1892 chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz (1836-1900) and Mikhail Chigorin (1850-1905) onto a near future landscape of political intrigue. Inspired by Brazil’s planned capital Brasília (founded in 1960), the action takes place in Ciudad de Vados, the capital city of the imaginary Latin American nation of Aguazul.1 Conjured out of a “barren, rocky stretch of land,” Ciudad de Vados contains all the homogenized trappings of an ultra-modern metropolis (170). It’s sterile. Planned. Mechanized. Quickly the monumental urban regularity fades into the background and the intricate game across its squares takes over.

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What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. IX

/ Joachim Boaz / 84 Comments
  • A selection of read volumes from my shelf

What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading or planning to read this month? Here’s January’s installment of this column.

When I’m not reading science fiction, I’m more often than not devouring history that touches on my decades of focus: 1945-1985. Recently that’s meant lots and lots of monographs on Cold War culture: from fallout shelters, suburbia, to analysis of the drama of morality and terror that characterized nuclear deterrence. And in Guy Oakes’ transfixing The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (1994), I came across a fascinating collision of science fictional thought and public policy.

A few months into Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency, the Public Affairs Office of the Federal Civil Defense Administration released a short pamphlet that analyzed the “relation between national will and nuclear terror” under the ridiculous title “Civil Defense Implications of the Psychological Impact and Morale Effect of Attacks on the People of the United States” (April 1953). In this pamphlet, the authors imagine the effects of nuclear war. They suggest that some survivors would “isolate themselves from the terrifying consequences of nuclear war by effecting a pseudo-escape into an interior psychological reality.” I thought immediately of Richard Matheson’s brilliant “Pattern for Survival” (1955), in which a SF author reenacts the process of writing and publishing a story to escape the reality in which he lives. The pamphleteers further imagine a political reality dominated by “mystical sects and cults, enthralled by the vision of an immeasurably happier future in an inner fantasy life of an extramundane kingdom of bliss that transcended the brutal empirical reality of nuclear destruction” (41). Early Cold War policy makers and consultants as science fiction authors!

50s paranoid future visions aside, let’s turn to the books in the photo and what I’ve been reading and writing about.

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Book Review: Worlds Without End, Clifford D. Simak (1964)

/ Joachim Boaz / 16 Comments
  • Richard Powers’ cover for the 1st edition

3.5/5 (collated rating: Good)

I’m a compulsive list maker. In the past few years I’ve gathered and submitted older science fiction short stories that depict worker unions–from Robert Silverberg’s “Guardian Devil” (1959) to Mari Wolf’s “Robots of the World! Arise!” (1952)–to the Hugo Book Club’s fantastic index. It’s about time I finally get around to reviewing a few of my submissions!1

Clifford D. Simak’s collection Worlds Without End (1964) contains two novellas and one short story that appeared in Robert W. Lowndes’ magazines (second/third tier SF markets in the 50s). Two of three–“Worlds Without End” (1956) and “Full Cycle” (1955)–speculate on evolution of the trade union after the breakdown of the state.

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Updates: Recent Science Fiction Purchases No. CCCXXX (Tim Powers, Octavia E. Butler, George Alec Effinger, and Tom Purdom)

/ Joachim Boaz / 36 Comments

Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?

1. Dinner at Deviant’s Palace, Tim Powers (1985)

  • Ron Walotsky’s cover for the 1985 edition

From the inside flap: “The civilized world had come to an end more than a century earlier, but in California life and society went on… taking strange, often horrifying forms.

Gregorio Rivas was a survivor–a proud, resourceful man who had, most recently, made his way from the corrupt, crumbling city of Venice to carve out a successful career as a musician within the walls of Ellay. He played his pelican with raw energy and flashy style, and people came from all over to hear him. But Greg’s real claim to fame had nothing to do with music. It was a part of his past he wanted to forget. And it had come back to haunt him…

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Short Story Reviews: Howard Waldrop’s “Mary Margaret Road-Grader” (1976), David J. Skal’s “Chains” (1971), and Tom Purdom’s “Courting Time” (1966)

/ Joachim Boaz / 18 Comments

Howard Waldrop (1946-2024), David J. Skal (1952-2024), and Tom Purdom (1936-2024) all passed away since the beginning of the year. As I’ve only read Howard Waldrop’s “God’s Hooks!” (1982), “My Sweet Lady Jo” (1974), and “The Ugly Chickens” (1980) and Tom Purdom’s “Toys” (1967), I impulsively thought I’d stich together a post featuring a tale by each.

Please note that I have not read enough to identify their best work and a negative review is not intended to be a statement about their entire oeuvre and impact on the genre. If you have any fond memories, recommendations for stories, or other tangents related to the three authors, let me know in the comments.

Terry Bisson (1942-2014) also passed away this year but did not publish any short fiction until the 90s. I’ll make sure to review one of his 80s novels—Wyrldmaker (1981) or Talking Man (1986)–this year instead. I’ve also procured novels by Purdom and Skal to feature later this year.

Now let’s get to the stories!

  • David Plourde’s cover art detail for the 1978 edition of Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Sixth Annual Collection, ed. Gardner Dozois (1977)

4.5/5 (Very Good)

Howard Waldrop’s “Mary Margaret Road-Grader” first appeared in Orbit 18, ed. Damon Knight (1976). If you have an Internet Archive account, you can read it online here.

Nominated for the 1977 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Lost to Charles L. Grant’s “A Crowd of Shadows” (1976).

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