Short Story Review: Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021)

November 15, 2025November 19, 2025 / Joachim Boaz / 15 Comments

Today I’m joined again by Rachel S. Cordasco, the creator of the indispensable website and resource Speculative Fiction in Translation, for the sixth installment of our series exploring non-English language SF worlds. Last time we covered Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s ruminative “Wanderers and Travellers” in International Science Fiction, ed. Frederik Pohl (November 1967).

Please note that Rachel and I are interested in learning about a large range of authors and works vs. only tracking down the best. That means we’ll encounter some stinkers. Thankfully, not this time! We got a powerful one.

Unfortunately, Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021) does not exist online. A large range of her SF stories were translated and published in two volumes by Verso books with various translators. You can acquire Terminal Boredom (2021) and Hit Parade of Tears (2023) at relatively inexpensive prices online. Despite my substantial qualms with the editions (see my review below), I recommend acquiring them.

“Terminal Boredom” (1984) does double duty as the 35th installment of my review series on media landscapes of the future.

Previously: George H. Smith’s “In the Imagicon” (1966).

Up Next: TBD

Enjoy!

Rachel S. Cordasco’s Review

In an article on the “iconoclast” Japanese sf writer Izumi Suzuki, Andrew Ridker distills her stories down to three words: “Ambivalence, disappointment, resignation: Suzuki’s stories speak so eloquently to our burnt-out moment that it’s easy to forget the importance of her cultural context” (LitHub, 5/7/21). We are indeed burnt out, more burnt out even than when Ridker was writing just four years ago. It’s now 2025 and time to face the fact that Facebook and YouTube have been around for over twenty years. The iPhone has been around for nearly that long, and for an entire year, the world was turned upside down during a pandemic, during which time we were even more closely connected to our devices. We’re burnt out by phones, by the rapidly-developing world of AI, by the streaming services that offer us so many choices that it’s nearly impossible to pick something to watch.

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Short Fiction Reviews: George H. Smith’s “The Last Days of L.A.” (1959) and “In the Imagicon” (1966)

October 4, 2025November 15, 2025 / Joachim Boaz / 9 Comments

Paul Orban’s interior art for George H. Smith’s “The Last Days of L.A.” in If, ed. Damon Knight (February 1959)

Back in 2021, I reviewed and adored George H. Smith’s “The Last Crusade” (1955), a scathing take-down of modern war (replete with confused soldiers in mech suits). While a good portion of Smith’s science fictional output was comedic smut with titles like Those Sexy Saucer People (1967) and Flames of Desire (1963), he clearly could craft an effective short fiction in the best genre magazines of the day.

I appeared recently on a podcast about Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece “Foster, You’re Dead” (1955) and felt the urge to track down story about nuclear terror. Smith’s drunk whirlwind of a story “The Last Days of L. A.” (1959) fits the bill. In addition, I selected “In the Imagicon” (1966), an intriguing take on a personal virtual reality machine, as the 34th story in my series on media landscapes of the future.

Previously in my future media series: Russell Bates’ “Hello, Walls and Fences” (1973) and “Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined…:” (1977)

Up Next: Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984)

Let’s get to the stories!

Frank Kelly Freas’ cover for in If, ed. Damon Knight (February 1959)

4/5 (Good)

“The Last Days of L. A.” first appeared in If, ed. Damon Knight (February 1959). You can read it online here.

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

August 30, 2025 / Joachim Boaz / 54 Comments

A selection of read volumes from my shelves

What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading or planning to read next month? Here’s the July installment of this column.

One of my favorite forms of SF scholarship is careful identification of a intellectual genealogy–tracing what an author read and engaged in dialogue with. Authors are readers. They also can’t escape references and textual traces of what they’ve consumed (or, of course, engagement with the world in which they lived).

I’ve read two interesting examples recently. The first, Carol McGuirk’s “J. G. Ballard and American Science Fiction” in Science Fiction Studies, vol. 49 (2022), is the perfect example of this type of scholarship. She traces Ballard’s engagement with SF, his earliest stories, and the various parallels an interactions between his work and American SF that he read (Galaxy Magazine, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Robert Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth, Ray Bradbury, Judith Merril, Federic Brown, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, etc.). She argues that Ballard engaged in “retelling with a twist” (476). She writes that “early Ballard stories rework prior sf in moods ranging from measured homage to barbed repose to parodic photo-bomb” (483).

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Exploration Log 10: Interview with Jaroslav Olša, Jr., author of Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction (2025)

June 23, 2025June 24, 2025 / Joachim Boaz / 7 Comments

Graphic created by my father

Over the last few years, I have incorporated a smattering of the vast range of spectacular scholarship on science fiction into my reviews and highlighted works with my Exploration Log series that intrigue me.¹ Today I have an interview with Jaroslav Olša, Jr. about his brand-new book, Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miles (Miroslav) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction (2025). In the book, he covers the life and career of Miles (Miroslav) J. Breuer (1889-1945), the first SF author to regularly write original stories for Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing. Breuer’s career also provides a fascinating window into the literary and cultural world of immigrants in late 19th and early 20th century America.

You can buy an inexpensive physical copy ($15.80 at last look) directly from Space Cowboy Books here (preferred) and on Amazon.

Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. First, can you introduce yourself and your interests in science fiction?

Since childhood, I have loved reading science fiction, but — except for a short time — I have not been professionally attached to it. After studying Asian and African Studies and social sciences in Prague, Tunis and Amsterdam, I joined the Czech diplomatic three decades ago, and have served in various positions including Director of the African Dept. and the Head of the Policy Planning Dept. at the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I also served as a Czech Ambassador three times: to Zimbabwe for six years, to South Korea for another six years, and to the Philippines for four years. Since December 2020, I have served as Czech Consul General in Los Angeles in charge of the US West.

In the early 1980s, I became a part of a small but very active fandom when—in the then communist Czechoslovakia—the first science fiction club emerged. I started the SF fanzine Ikarie XB, which in 1990 turned into the first Czech-language professional SF magazine Ikarie, with monthly editions until 2024.

I have also translated many short stories and edited numerous SF anthologies, but never wrote fiction. But since the very beginning, the center of my interest in SF was to write about science fiction. I co-edited and authored entries in the only Czech SF encyclopedia, published in 1995. Thus my book about Miles (aka Miloslav) J. Breuer is somewhat of a culmination of my work on science fiction.

What drew you to the science fiction of Miles (Miloslav) J. Breuer (1889-1945)?

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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)

May 19, 2025May 19, 2025 / 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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Exploration Log 9: Three More Interviews with Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988)

April 27, 2025April 28, 2025 / Joachim Boaz / 10 Comments

Graphic created by my father

Back in July 2024, I posted six interviews with Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988). Since then I’ve tracked down three more. As in that post, I’ll provide a rundown of each interview and provide quotes of interesting passages. In the interviews, Simak comes across as an author deeply suspicious of rigorous generic distinctions, passionate about all life, and open to science fiction as an ever-changing and evolving entity.

As readers of the site know, I have a substantial interest in Simak’s SF that culminated last year in my September article “‘We Must Start Over Again and Find Some Other Way of Life’: The Role of Organized Labor in the 1940s and ’50s Science Fiction of Clifford D. Simak” (2024) in Journey Planet #84. Since then I’ve posted an Exploration Log on his 1971 Worldcon speech, reviewed Best Science Fiction Stories of Clifford D. Simak (1957), and contributed to a podcast on “The Huddling Place” (1944) (the second City story).

Enjoy! And if you know of more interviews (or are able to update the Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry as it only includes five of the nine interviews I’ve covered) let me know.

THE INTERVIEWS

Jim Odbert’s cover for Rune # 43 (May 1975)

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

March 26, 2025June 6, 2025 / 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

March 17, 2025March 17, 2025 / 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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Short Fiction Reviews: Leigh Kennedy’s “Salamander” (1977), “Whale Song” (1978), “Detailed Silence” (1980), and “Speaking10 to Others2; Speaking3 to Others20” (1981)

November 17, 2024November 17, 2024 / Joachim Boaz / 24 Comments

Today I’ve selected the first four stories by an author I’ve only recently started to read–Leigh Kennedy (1951-). I’d previously reviewed “Helen, Whose Face Launched Twenty-Eight Conestoga Hovercraft” (1982) and placed her on the list for this series. According to SF Encyclopedia, Kennedy’s “writing is succinct, polished, lucent, and her stories are emotionally penetrating; it is unfortunate that she has fallen from the world of novel publishing, though continuing to work as a professional indexer.” And I can’t agree more! Her first four stories show great promise and moments of refined vision. I can’t help but think the backlash to her Nebula-nominated (and best-known work) “Her Furry Face” (1983) might have had some effect on her trajectory.

So far I’ve featured 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-). 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.