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Short Fiction Reviews: Cherry Wilder’s “The Ark of James Carlyle” (1974), “The Phobos Transcripts” (1975), and “Way Out West” (1975)

/ Joachim Boaz / 10 Comments

In the past few years, I’ve put together a series on the first three published short fictions by female authors who are completely new to me or whose most famous SF novels fall mostly outside the post-WWII to mid-1980s focus of my reading adventures. To be clear, I do not expect transformative or brilliant things from first stories. Rather, it’s a way to get a sense of subject matter and concerns that first motivated authors to put pen to paper.

Today I’ve selected the first three science fiction short stories by New Zealander author Cherry Wilder (1930-2002). Here’s her bibliography. In the past I’ve picked up her best-known novel Second Nature (1982) and gazed at the evocative Tony Roberts cover! But never managed to get past the first few pages… According to SF Encyclopedia, Wilder’s work is “notable for its narrative skill, evocative style and rounded characterization, should have long since given her a higher reputation.” My general sense from her first three stories is that they’re relatively well-told, traditional, and a bit on the slight side of things. I still look forward to reading Second Nature (1982).

So far I’ve featured Leigh Kennedy (1951-), Alice Eleanor Jones (1916-1981), 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-).

Let’s get to the stories!

  • Tony Roberts’ cover for the 1975 edition of New Writings in SF-24, ed. Kenneth Bulmer (1974)

3.5/5 (Good)

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

/ Joachim Boaz / 65 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 the March installment of this column.

Recently I came across John Boston and Damien Broderick’s three-volume series examining each and every story and non-fiction article in the pre-Michael Moorcock New Worlds and Science Fantasy/SF Impulse magazines in the UK. John Boston is a valued member of my site’s community — frequently stopping by in the comment sections. I thought for this mini-editorial I’d list a handful of active community members with websites, books, and worthwhile SF-related fanzine articles. I, of course, could be missing a few. Community matters more than you might think. I enjoy the discussion. I enjoy reading reviews that others write — even if it’s on science fiction that might not be within my more narrow focus (the historian in me). I always want to learn and share what’s worth reading and/or historically interesting. Thank you one and all.

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Science Fiction in Dialogue with The Great Depression: Frank K. Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” (1934)

/ Joachim Boaz / 7 Comments
  • Graphic created by my father

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) confides in the introduction to his travel memoir Puzzled America (1935) that the Great Depression was inescapable: “I was a writer of tales. It might be that I should have remained just that, but there is difficulty. There are, everywhere in America, these people now out of work. There are women and children hungry and others without enough clothes.”1 Edgar Albion Lyons, in the author’s note to his science fiction novel The Chosen Race: A Novel Based on the Depression and Machine Age (1936), echoes this sentiment: “The following chapters were written during the months of 1932 when the words ‘Depression’ and ‘Unemployment’ were on everyone’s lips.”2 Magazine science fiction, with its eye towards the marvelous technological future, likewise could not escape contemporary economic, political, and societal convulsions.3 Science, “in the form of a hypothesized device or theory,” enabled exciting adventures but also the exploration of “diverse and dire social implications.”4

On May 9th, 1934, a massive two-day dust storm caused by severe drought and human-made factors, removed massive amounts of Great Plains topsoil. The Dust Bowl unleashed its fury. The dust clouds reached Chicago and cities in the east, blotted out the Statue of Liberty and the United States Capitol. Red snow fell in New England.5 In the September 1934 issue of Astounding, a twenty-year-old Frank K. Kelly published “Famine on Mars” (1934) about a desperate attempt to assist Martians dying of thirst and starvation after a drought. In Kelly’s vision, The Combine, Earth’s government, deliberately caused the genocide and refuses to provide assistance.6

  • M. Marchioni’s interior art for “Famine on Mars” (1934)
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What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. XX

/ Joachim Boaz / 53 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 the January installment of this column (sorry I missed a month).

Before John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971) attempted to raise the “standards and thinking in magazine SF,” David Lasser (1902-1996) attempted his own brief (1929-1933) program to improve science fiction as managing editor of Hugo Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories, Wonder Stories, and Wonder Stories Quarterly. According to Mike Ashley’s The Time Machine: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazine from the Beginning to 1950 (2000), Lasser is a “much neglected revolutionary in science fiction” and through his efforts the genre “started to mature” (66).

Ashley highlights Lasser’s letter of instruction mailed to his regular contributors on the 11th of May, 1931, in which he “exhorted them to bring some realism to their fiction” (72). He also outlawed common tropes like the giant insect story and space opera (73). He emphasized the need to focus on characters that “should really be human” — not everything needs to be a “world-sweeping epic” (73). Stories in this vein, according to Ashley, include Clifford D. Simak’s religiously themed “The Voice in the Void” (1932), P. Schuyler Miller and Walter Dennis’ “The Red Spot on Jupiter” (1931) and “The Duel on the Asteroid” (1974), which featured a grim realism and character development (74).

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Book Review: Star Science Fiction Stories No. 3, ed. Frederik Pohl (1955)

/ Joachim Boaz / 35 Comments
  • Richard Powers’ cover for the 1955 edition

3.5/5 (collated rating: Good)

Ballantine Books’ illustrious science fictional program started with a bang–Star Science Fiction Stories. According to Mike Ashley’s Transformations: The Story of Science-Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970 Frederik Pohl’s anthology series of original (mostly) stories was “intended as both a showcase of Ballantine’s authors and a lure to new writers.” Paying better rates than magazines, the Star series foreshadowed the explosion of original anthologies that would provide a sustained challenge to the eminence held in the 50s by the magazine.

I’ve selected the third volume of the six-volume series.1 It contains an illustrative cross-section of 50s science fiction. Philip K. Dick’s “Foster, You’re Dead” (1955), Richard Matheson’s “Dance of the Dead” (1955), and Jack Williamson’s “Guinevere for Everybody” (1955) are not to be missed.

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Adventures in Science Fiction Art: Rodger B. MacGowan’s Approachable New Wave Art, Part I

/ Joachim Boaz / 12 Comments
  • MacGowan’s illustrations for Neil Shapiro’s “Starman of Faraway Station” in Vertex (July 1975)

Rodger B. MacGowan (1948-2025), best known for his wargame art and design, passed away yesterday.1 Most of the memorial posts I’ve seen on social media focus on his later career paths in the board-gaming world. Thus, I thought it would be worthwhile to narrow in on his contribution to science fiction art. After graduating UCLA, where he studied art, motion pictures, and graphic design, MacGowan found work at an advertising agency and an opportunity to create art for one of their accounts, the short-lived Vertex science fiction magazine.2

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Exploration Log 8: Pat M. Kuras and Rob Schmieder’s “When It Changed: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Science Fiction Fandom” (1980)

/ Joachim Boaz / 17 Comments
  • Graphic created by my father

“We also encountered many gay people, feminists and progressives of every stripe. These people were at the convention because present day science fiction has much to offer them. Science fiction is the fiction of ideas, and the ideas coming from the minds of the new writers more and more concern progressive analyses of social issues.”

— Pat M. Kuras and Rob Schmieder (1980)

At the 38th World Science Fiction Convention (29th August–1st September, 1980) held in Boston, MA, organizers scheduled the first Worldcon panel with an openly LGBTQ topic: “The Closed Open Mind: Homophobia in Science Fiction Fantasy Stories” moderated by Jerry Jacks, one of the “early openly gay fans.”1 Around 200 fans attended to hear Elizabeth A. Lynn (SFF author), Samuel R. Delany (SFF author), Frank M. Robinson (SF author and activist), and Norman Spinrad (SFWA President and SF author) (“the token straight”) discuss issues of representation.

  • Pat M. Kuras and Rob Schmieder’s “When It Changed: Lesbians, Gay Men and Science Fiction Fandom” in the September 27th, 1980 issue of Gay Community News
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Short Book Reviews: Margot Bennett’s The Long Way Back (1954) and Mack Reynolds’ The Earth War (1964)

/ Joachim Boaz / 15 Comments

Note: My read but “waiting to be reviewed pile” is growing. Short rumination/tangents/impressions 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 future projects. Stay tuned for more detailed and analytical reviews.

1. Margo Bennett’s The Long Way Back (1954)

  • Uncredited cover for the 1955 edition

3.25/5 (Above Average)

I’m always on the lookout for lesser-known SF works by female authors. And Margot Bennett’s The Long Way Back (1954) certainly fits the bill. Bennett (1912-1980), a Scottish-born screenwriter and author of primarily crime and thriller novels, lead a fascinating life before her writing career. During the Spanish Civil War, she volunteered for Spanish Medical Aid, and was shot in both legs. Afterwards, she continued to participate in various left-wing political causes such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The Long Way Back manifests, with satirical strokes, her critical stance on nuclear war and British colonialism. In a future collectivized Africa ruled by a calculating machine that grades the population, Grame, a “mechanical-repetitive worker” (7), dreams of a career in physics. Instead, the machine shuffles him off on an ill-fated expedition to the ruined remains of Britain post “Big Bang” (nuclear blast). On the way he falls in love with the leader of the expedition, Valya, who serves as a virginal Bride of the State (24). After their sea plane lands, they are beset by a bizarre range of mutations–ferocious dogs, micro-horses, etc. Eventually they discover a tribe of hairless white survivors holed up in primitive caves. Grame teaches the brightest arithmetic. Valya sets about measuring and applying pseudo-scientific theories to understand white society, religion, and conception of the world i.e. parroting all the pseudo-science and racist theories posed by British explorers of Africa. As they attempt to find a lost city, Hep, the third surviving member of the expedition, imagines the potential exploitation and colonization Africa might implement—“Yellow America” is on the rise and resources will be needed. History threatens to re-cycle through the horrors of the past in more ways than one.

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

/ Joachim Boaz / 58 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 the December installment of this column.

Lost texts, and the act of reconstructing the fragments, fascinates. The questions pile up. Would the contents reveal a pattern in an author’s work? Intriguing personal details? A startling modus operandi? At the 11th World Science Fiction Convention (Philcon 2), Philadelphia (September 1953), Philip José Farmer gave a speech titled “SF and the Kinsey Report.” Considering Farmer’s recent publication of “The Lovers” (1952), this is not surprising. Alfred Kinsey, the famous sexologist and founder of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction on Indiana University’s campus, published his controversial Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female appeared in 1953. Like many of Farmer’s earliest speeches, he did not keep copies.

Deeply intrigued by what the speech might have contained, Sanstone and I (on Bluesky) managed to piece together a few general responses from fanzines and magazine con reports.

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