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.”
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.
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.
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).
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.
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].
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.
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
Boris Vallejo’s cover for the 1976 edition
1. Edgar Pangborn’s Davy(1964), 5/5 (Masterpiece): Nominated for the 1965 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Full review.
Happy holidays. I hope you’ve been able to squeeze in a bit of science fiction reading.
Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?
1. Those Who Watch, Robert Silverberg (1967)
Gene Szafran’s cover for the 1971 edition
From the back cover: “CRASH LANDING FROM THE STARS.
Only three humans would ever know that the blinding flash in the sky on that night in 1982 was an exploding flying saucer. Only they would learn the truth about THOSE WHO WATCH–about the alien beings who came into this world in a crash landing from the stars. THOSE WHO WATCH is the strange, seductive novel of three accidental colonists from outer space whose chance encounter with Earth triggers interplanetary conflict. It is also the most unusual love story ever written.”
Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations 