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…”
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.
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.
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?
Today I’ve reviewed the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth story in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future. In Richard Matheson’s horror short “Through Channels” (1951), a terrifying entity comes through the TV! Robert F. Young, in “Audience Reaction” (1954), speculates on a new form of virtual reality immersion in which desires become enmeshed in the narrative.
Both stories I cover engage with the newly popular entertainment medium of television. 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). As I’ve discussed TV’s impact on the American and British family, entertainment and free time, and its intersection with brainwashing and fears of Communism at length, I won’t belabor the point here. Check out my reviews of Ray Bradbury’s “The Pedestrian” (1951), Brian W. Aldiss’ “Panel Game” (1955), Ann Warren Griffith’s “Captive Audience” (1953), if you want additional 1950s historical context.
Ed Emshwiller’s cover for the 1st edition of Science Fiction Terror Tales, ed. Groff Conklin (1955)
4/5 (Good)
Richard Matheson’s “Through Channels” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas (April 1951). You can read it online here.
I’ve decided to reframe my series on 50s sex and sexuality to include my entire area of SF interest (1945-1985). Thus, I’ve paired Robert Silverberg’s “The Seed of Earth” (1958), a rumination on colonization and human/alien sex, with Doris Piserchia’s “Pale Hands” (1974), a distressing dissection of a future society designed to fixate all sexual desire on masturbation stalls.
If any short stories published between 1945-1985 on sex and sexuality come to mind that I haven’t reviewed yet, let me know in the comments. I have a substantial list waiting to be covered but it’s far from comprehensive.
Ed Emshwiller’s cover for Super-Science Fiction, ed. W. W. Scott (April 1958)
3.5/5 (Good)
Robert Silverberg’s “The Seed of Earth” (variant title: “Journey’s End”) first appeared in Super-Science Fiction, ed. W. W. Scott (April 1958). You can read it online here. It is also available in his collection Dimension Thirteen (1969) that I plan on reviewing in the near future.
A preliminary note about publication: Silverberg reused the title “The Seed of Earth”–chosen by W. W. Scott over “Journey’s End”–for a later unrelated novella and a novel.
Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?
1. My Name is Legion, Roger Zelazny (1976)
Ralph Brillhart’s cover for the 1981 edition
From the back cover: “HE DID NOT EXIST… OR DID HE? He had destroyed his punch cards and changed his face. There was no credit card, birth record, or passport for him in the International Data Bank.
His names were many… any he chose.
His occupation was taking megarisks in the service of a vast global detective agency.
His interworld assignments were highly lucrative, incalculably vital, and terrifyingly deadly.
And more often than not, his life was a living hell!”
Contents: “The Eve of RUMOKO” (1969),” “‘Kjwalll’kje’k’koothaïlll’kje’k” (1973), “Home Is the Hangman” (1975)
Initial Thoughts: In the early days of my site read I reviewed the first in the Nemo sequence–“The Eve of RUMOKO” (1969). At the time I did not care for it. However, I recently read F. Brett Cox’s monography Roger Zelazny (2021) and retrospectively I’m not sure that I understood the character or what Zelazny was trying to accomplish with the story sequence. Often after I read a monograph, I end up making a few impulsive purchases and this is one of them! I hope, at the very least, it gives me a deeper understanding of Zelazny’s SF project. And “Home Is the Hangman” (1975) is a Hugo and Nebula-winning novella that I have not read.
Today I’ve reviewed the twenty-second and twenty-third story in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future. In “Thing of Beauty” (1958) Damon Knight speculates on something very similar to AI art. And in “You’re Another” (1960) Knight conjures a delirious manifestation of reality TV unlike any other. I’ve gone ahead and included reviews of the rest of the stories in Knight’s collection Far Out (1961).
Covers: L, Josh Kirby, 1963; R, Richard Powers, 1962
3.5/5 (Collated rating: Good)
Damon Knight’s impact on the science fiction field can be felt to this day. He founded the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and co-founded two influential science fiction workshops (Milford and Clarion). Knight also edited the Orbit series of anthologies, notable for their larger-than-average number of female science fiction authors and overall quality–I’ve reviewed Orbit 1 (1966), Orbit 3 (1968), Orbit 4 (1968), and Orbit 8 (1970) so far. I can’t help but notice that his fiction, on the other hand, has faded a bit from popular knowledge. I struggle to identify a masterpiece Knight novel. Did he write one?
I’ve enjoyed his short fiction, notably “Down There” (1973) and “I See You” (1976), immensely. With that in mind, I consumed my first collection of his short stories. I can add “The Enemy” (1958), “You’re Another” (1955), and “Cabin Boy” (1951) to my list of favorite Knight visions.
In Martha Bartter’s article “Nuclear Holocaust as Urban Renewal” (1986), she explores the deep ambivalence within tales of future atomic war. Authors, and their characters, yearn to “build, a new infinitely better world out of the old” (148), and what better way than to destroy all that was. Narratives often betray a sinister destructive urge. She argues that “atomic war has traditionally been presented both as obvious disaster and as secret salvation” (148). I planned on featuring this thought-provoking article in my Exploration Log series but never got around to writing it. Alas! Maybe a comment or two from my readers will inspire me to finally do so.
With Bartter’s argument in mind, I’ve paired two divergent post-nuclear stories. Margaret St. Clair affirms, despite devastation and violence, the possibility of a revitalized future that avoids the pitfalls of the past. Richard Matheson sidesteps the issue entirely and instead explores how survival, even if fleeting, depends on an interior retreat into a world of pulp science fiction (and thus posits a meta-analysis of genre).
Earl Bergey’s cover for Startling Stories, ed. Sam Merwin, Jr. (July 1948)
3/5 (Average)
Margaret St. Clair’s “Quis Custodiet…?” first appeared in Startling Stories, ed. Sam Merwin, Jr. (July 1948). You can read it online here.
Margaret St. Clair (1911-1995) was a mainstay of the major pulp magazines and maintained a prolific career from 1946 to the late 60s (between the 70s and early 80s she produced only one novel and a handful of stories).”Quis Custodiet…?” explores a conflict three hundred odd years after the “big atom bombs fell” (114) between “homo mutatus,” or the “Blown-up” humans who experience the effects of radiation mutation and the “Formers,” those spared the mutations (110).
Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations 