Short Story Reviews: Russell Bates’ “Legion” (1971), “Get With the Program” (1972), and “A Modest Proposal” (1973)

/ Joachim Boaz / 3 Comments

Welcome fellow vintage science fiction fans!

This is Part I of II in a series covering the short fiction of Russell Bates (1941-2018), one of a handful of Native American science fiction authors active in the 1970s [1]. I first came across his name while investigating all the authors featured in Craig Strete’s Native American fanzine Red Planet Earth (6 issues in 1974) [2]. I’ve managed to piece together the following information about his SF career.

Born in Lawton, Oklahoma (I’ve also seen Anadarko, OK implied as a birthplace), Bates was an enrolled member of the Kiowa tribe. After he finished high school, he entered the U.S. Air Force. While injured after an explosion at a missile assembly building, he was encouraged to take up a hobby. He began writing science fiction stories–including Star Trek fanfiction (discussed in more detail below) [4].

Interested in honing his craft, Bates attended the famous Clarion workshop in 1969, and his first story, “Legion” (1971), hit print two years later [4]. He published six science fiction short stories between 1971-1977. A seventh–“Search Cycle: Beginning and Ending 1. The Last Quest; 2. Fifth and Last Horseman”–was scheduled to appear in Harlan Ellison’s infamous Last Dangerous Visions, originally slated for 1973. It hasn’t been published elsewhere.

Bates decided to try his luck in Hollywood. He joined a Writer’s Guild program for minorities with the assistance of D. C. Fontana. Initially unsuccessful, his rejected Star Trek story attempt later appeared in The New Voyages 2 (1978). He kept the American Indian crew member Walking Bear that later appeared in his only co-written Star Trek credit ST: The Animated Series’ “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth” (1974). It is for this episode that Bates is probably best known as it is the only episode of the two original Star Trek series that won an Emmy Award. Unfortunately, despite quite a few sales to the motion picture industry, few of his stories saw the screen after his early Star Trek credit [5].

Without further tangents, lets turn to his first three science fiction short stories–each a rumination on violence and trauma–to hit print.

  • Jim Steranko’s cover for Infinity Two, ed. Robert Hoskins (1971)
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Short Story Reviews: Kate Wilhelm’s “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis” (1976) and Langdon Jones’ “The Empathy Machine” (1965)

/ Joachim Boaz / 17 Comments

Today I’ve reviewed the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh story in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future. In Kate Wilhelm’s masterpiece of blue-collar drama “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis” (1976), reality TV serves both as domestic irritant and therapy. Langdon Jones, in “The Empathy Machine” (1965), also speculates on the therapeutic aspects of “viewing” the crisis of another in a media-drenched future.

As always, if you know of other stories connected to this series that I haven’t reviewed, then let me know in the comments!

Previously: Richard Matheson’s “Through Channels” (1951) and Robert F. Young’s “Audience Reaction” (1954)

Up Next: Henry Kuttner’s “Year Day” (1953)

  • 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)

5/5 (Masterpiece)

Kate Wilhelm’s “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis” first appeared in Orbit 18, ed. Damon Knight (1976). You can read it online here if you have an Internet Archive account. I read it in her collection Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions (1979).

Lottie comes home from the factory Friday afternoon with “frozen dinners, bread, sandwich meats, beer” to prepare for the weekend watching reality TV with her husband Butcher (121). As predicted, Butcher comes home mad, “mad at his boss because the warehouse didn’t close down early, mad at traffic, mad at everything” (123). He pulls up his recliner–they’ll sleep in front of the softly flickering screens–Lottie microwaves the dinners and brings her husband beer. The ritual commences.

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Updates: Recent Science Fiction Purchases No. CCCXX (Michael Moorcock, Dean Ing, Vonda N. McIntyre, John Hersey)

/ Joachim Boaz / 26 Comments

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

1. Pulling Through, Dean Ing (1983)

  • Uncredited cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “DOOMSDAY. ARE YOU READY?

HARE RACKHAM, bounty hunter, race-car driver. His best friend is a hunting cheetah. Harve has turned his California home into a survival shelter. He intends to pull through.

SHAR MCKAY, Harve’s little sister. Shar’s latest fad is nuclear survival. She intends for her husband and kids to all pull through.

ERNEST MCKAY, engineer. He has the knowledge and skills to save his family. With his help they’ll all pull through.

KATE GALLOW, runaway, forger, a tough street survival. She’s trouble–but when real troubles come down, Kate will always pull through.

Dean Ing has thought a lot about survival, and he wants as many of you as possible to pull through inevitable disaster of nuclear war. That’s why he’s written this more-than-a-novel. Dean Ing lays all the cards on the table in this one. The story tells why. The articles and blue-prints tell how. PULLING THROUGH won’t save your hide all by itself, but it sure will give you a head start on pulling through by yourself.”

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Short Book Reviews: John M. Ford’s The Princes of the Air (1982), Keith Roberts’ The Furies (1966), and John D. MacDonald’s Wine Of the Dreamers (1951)

/ Joachim Boaz / 18 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 any larger project I might conduct in the future. I rather have a short review than none at all! Stay tuned for more detailed and analytical reviews.

1. The Princes of the Air, John M. Ford (1982)

  • Uncredited–looks like Jim Burns to me–cover for the 1991 edition

3.5/5 (Good)

John M. Ford (1957-2006) is one of those authors I’ve read a lot about but never sat down and read. As if often my strategy, I decided to explore around the edges a bit before reading his best-known novels Web of Angels (1980) and The Dragon Waiting (1983). I settled on his second novel The Princes of the Air (1982)….

The first layer of The Princes of the Air reads as a traditional space opera. Three young men from rough poverty-filled pasts–Orden Obeck, David Kondor/Koleman, and Theodor Thorn/Norne–aspire to serve the Queen of Humankind. On the dusty planet Riyah Zain, the three friends scam the unwary and while away their days in the Asterion Arcade playing military games in which they imagine how they will serve the queen—Obeck will be the Ambassador-Global, Kondor the Admiral of the Fleet, and Theodor Norn the best Pilot and writer of the book on piloting. Obeck, indentured to the state as he voluntarily went on the government dole, trains to be a diplomat. He brushes up against the classist views of the students, who look down on Obeck’s achievements as an indentured man. Soon his accomplishments mean that he, and his friends, can leave the planet. Eventually, they find themselves embroiled in the machinations of the state and the powers that bind everything together.

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Short Story Reviews: Philip K. Dick’s “The Infinites” (1953) and James Causey’s “Competition” (1955)

/ Joachim Boaz / 16 Comments

The following reviews are the 23rd and 24th installments 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. Many are far from the best. And that is okay. I relish the act of literary archaeology.

I’ve paired two 1950s stories, by Philip K. Dick and the far lesser-known James Causey, that explore the inability to understand the universe outside our Earth. Explorers find themselves at each others throats caught up in paranoid delusions of grandeur.

Previously: George R. R. Martin’s “The Second Kind of Loneliness” (1972) and Tom Godwin’s “The Nothing Equation” (1957)

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

  • Allen Andersons’ cover for Planet Stories, ed. Jack O’Sullivan (May 1953)

3.5/5 (Good)

Philip K. Dick’s “The Infinites” first appeared in Planet Stories, ed. Jack O’Sullivan (May 1953). You can read it online here.

A preliminary note: I dislike writing about Philip K. Dick. As I mentioned in my 2021 review of “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” (1974) for this series, “I find it far more enjoyable and liberating to write about lesser-known authors.” Or at least those whose works and lives are less encyclopedically covered by fans and academics alike. There are and will be far superior takes on this story. I don’t have the will or focus. And that’s okay. I rather focus my obsessive eye on others. To be clear, I love Philip K. Dick. Along with C. J. Cherryh, Frank Herbert, and Stanislaw Lem, he was one of the authors of my early twenties–right before I started this website.

A few observations on “The Infinites” (1953)….

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Book Review: Fireflood and Other Stories, Vonda N. McIntyre (1979)

/ Joachim Boaz / 16 Comments
  • Charles Shields’ cover for the 1st edition

4.25/5 (Collated Rating: Very Good)

After Vonda N. McIntyre’s passing in 2019, I made a promise to finally tackle her spectacular array of 70s fictions, including her Hugo and Nebula-winning Dreamsnake (1978). Her stories appeal to so many of my sensibilities. Her perceptive eye resides in interior spaces, the moody psychological landscapes of society’s pariahs and traumatized. Her work reflects the best of the New Wave. The prose rarely flashes with excessive experimental exuberance but relies on the poetic moment hinting at internal sadness, decay, and the inability to truly escape.

Despite her often depressed narrators, the stories are not all without hope. In “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” (1973), horrific misunderstanding reinforces a healer’s calling. In “Wings” (1973) and “The Mountains of Sunset, the Mountains of Dawn” (1974), the transformed find meaning in interpersonal connection as the unknown spins closer.

There’s a running theme in the collection of technology prematurely and cruelly unleashed. In “Spectra” (1972), a girl is enslaved to a machine that causes others pleasure. In “Aztecs” (1977), the choice–the physical reworking of the body–to become a Pilot servers all possibilities of love. And in “The Genius Freaks” (1973), the mental workings of genetically modified are harvested by cruel overlords unable to confront the lives they have ruined.

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Updates: Recent Science Fiction Purchases No. CCCXIX (Kim Stanley Robinson, Pamela Sargent, Greg Bear, and René Barjavel)

/ Joachim Boaz / 42 Comments

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

1. The Wild Shore, Kim Stanley Robinson (1984)

  • Andrea Baruffi’s cover for the 1st edition

From the back cover: “Seventeen-year-old Henry wanted to help make America great again, like it had been sixty years ago, before all the bombs went off. But for the people of Onofre Valley, just surviving was challenge enough. Then one day the world came to Henry, in the shape of two men who said they represented the American Resistance…”

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Book Review: Dimension Thirteen, Robert Silverberg (1969)

/ Joachim Boaz / 8 Comments
  • Ron Walotsky’s cover for the 1st edition

3.25/5 (Collated rating: Above Average)

Robert Silverberg (1935-) was one of the authors of the first decade of my site. I’ve reviewed twelve of his novels and thirty-two of his short stories. I also consumed with relish Tower of Glass (1970) and A Time of Changes (1971) as audiobooks and thus couldn’t review them. While an occasional story crops up here and there in an anthology, it’s about time I return to a Silverberg-specific volume. Dimension Thirteen (1969) collects six 50s stories and five from the 60s. The collection charts the moment when Silverberg’s career profoundly shifted from workman adventure to exemplary texts of the New Wave. They range from humorous commentaries on peccadillos and lusts to sinister ruminations on egotism and power.

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Short Fiction Reviews: George R. R. Martin’s “The Second Kind of Loneliness” (1972) and Tom Godwin’s “The Nothing Equation” (1957)

/ Joachim Boaz / 8 Comments

The following reviews are the 21st and 22nd installments 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. Many are far from the best. And that is okay. I relish the act of literary archaeology.

I’ve paired a take by Tom Godwin (1915-1980) and George R. R. Martin (1948-) on the psychiatric impact of isolation in the bleak emptiness of space. Both explore the interior landscape of the mind alone with itself and all its memories, and delusions, and terrors. There are no heroes in these pages.

Previously: Harlan Ellison’s “Psycho at Mid-Point” (1956) and “The Discarded” (variant title: “The Abnormals”) (1959)

Up Next: Philip K. Dick’s “The Infinites” (1953) and James Causey’s “Competition” (1955)

  • Kelly Freas’ cover for Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, ed. Ben Bova (December 1972)

4/5 (Good)

George R. R. Martin’s “The Second Kind of Loneliness” first appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, ed. Ben Bova (December 1972). You can read it online here.

At the Edge of the Vortex We Tell So Many Lies

The location: the Cerberus Star Ring, six million miles beyond Pluto (10). The manmade station, “a circle whose diameter is more than a hundred miles” (12), surrounds a nullspace vortex (think wormhole) to an unknown location across the universe. Humanity sends ships through the brightly colored swirling eddies of the portal to establish colonies somewhere beyond. A single man operates the machinery on the ring from a featureless white control room via a holograph helmet (11). The story follows the journal entries of an unreliable narrator ostensibly counting down the days until his relief arrives from Earth: “It will be at least three months before he gets here, of course. But he’s on his way” (10). It’s a mantra he tells himself. Relief is on its way. Relief is on its way. But does he want relief?

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