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

March 22, 2024March 24, 2024 / 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

March 16, 2024March 16, 2024 / 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)

March 9, 2024March 9, 2024 / 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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What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. IX

February 17, 2024February 17, 2024 / 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)

February 10, 2024February 8, 2025 / 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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What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. VIII

January 20, 2024January 20, 2024 / Joachim Boaz / 96 Comments

A selection of science fiction novels from my shelves

I hope you’ve gotten off to a great reading start to 2024! What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading this month?

If you’re new and curious about my rationale for the perimeters of my site, check out this recent interview and podcast. And follow me on Mastodon if you don’t already as I no longer post on my Twitter account. Also make sure to check out the previous installment of this monthly column

And, most importantly, let me know what pre-1985 SF you’ve been reading!

The Photograph (with links to reviews and brief thoughts)

Adrian Mitchell’s The Bodyguard (1970) might be one of the oddest dystopias ever written.
Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976) is a fascinating peek into her vast oeuvre of disquieting visions. While I read it before I started my site, a friend reviewed it for my guest post series on Wilhelm’s fiction. As I recently covered Wilhelm’s far lesser known anti-Vietnam War novel The Killing Thing (1967), her work was on my mind.
M. John Harrison is rightly famous for his Viriconium Nights sequence: The Pastel City (1971), A Storm of Wings (1980), and In Viriconium (1982). If you enjoyed them, I highly recommend tracking down his first novel — The Committed Men (1971). From my review: “Possessed by destructive melancholy, the inhabitants of a post-apocalyptical UK–where political powers have sunk into oblivion–attempt to recreate a semblance of normalcy. Clement St John Wendover, teeth long since rotted, still administers to the skin diseases and ailments of his one-time patients although he cannot cure them. […] Gathering together a troop of “committed men” (and a woman!), Wendover sets off across the corroded landscape with a newborn mutant child: a new species for an altered Earth or an accidental abnormality….”
I recently covered a Barrington J. Bayley short story in my cities of the future series and it reminded me of his most extreme moments of off-the-wall invention — The Garments of Caean (1976) immediately came to mind.

What am I writing about?

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Updates: Holiday Purchases! No. CCCXXIX (George Alec Effinger, Margot Bennett, anthology on Nuclear War, and Michael Conner)

January 13, 2024January 13, 2024 / Joachim Boaz / 40 Comments

Time for more holiday finds!

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

1. When Gravity Fails, George Alec Effinger (1986)

Jim Burns’ cover for the 1988 edition

From the back cover: “In a decadent world of cheap pleasures and easy death, Marîd Audran has kept his independence and his identity the hard way. Still, like everything else in the Budayeen, he is available …for a price.

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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)

January 7, 2024June 2, 2024 / 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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My 2023 in Review (Best SF Novels, Best SF Short Fiction, and Bonus Categories)

January 1, 2024January 2, 2025 / Joachim Boaz / 31 Comments

Here’s to a happy 2024! I hope you had a successful reading year. Maybe you pulled down some dusty tome that you’ve wanted to dive into for a decade. I’d like to imagine you finally picked up a book I raved about in years past that you acquired with great anticipation but never opened. Whether you are a lurker, occasional visitor, or a regular commenter, thank you for your continued support and wonderful conversation.

What were your favorite vintage SF reads–published pre-1985–of 2023? Let me know in the comments.

Continuing a trend, I read only a handful of novels this year. Instead, my obsessions focused on my science short story review initiatives (listed below), collections, and histories of the science fiction genre. Without further ado, here are my favorite novels and short stories I read in 2023 with bonus categories. I made sure to link my longer reviews where applicable if you want a deeper dive into the rich seam of science fictional gems.

Check out last year’s rundown if you haven’t already for more spectacular reads. I have archived all my annual rundowns on my article index page if you wanted to peruse earlier years.

My Top 5 Science Fiction Novels of 2023