Here’s a fun thing, especially for fans of classic SF such as myself. An anthology celebrating a popular theme in science fiction magazines of the 50s and 60s: repopulating a planet.
It’s the kind of story that fell out of fashion by the early 70s, when overpopulation and pollution became hot-button topics, gradually eclipsing colonial and expansionist themes in SF. As a result many of the stories in Go Forth and Multiply have never been reprinted since they originally appeared in magazines like Astounding and New Worlds in the 1950s, including Randall Garrett’s “The Queen Bee,” Rex Jatko’s “On the Care and Breeding of Pigs,” and E. C. Tubb’s “Prime Essential.”
F&SF publisher (and editor emeritus) Gordon Van Gelder has gathered a terrific collection of what Tangent Onlinecalls “twelve great classic science fiction stories,” including Kate Wilhelm’s acclaimed novella “Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang,” Richard Wilson’s Nebula Award-winning “Mother to the World,” and stories by John Brunner, Poul Anderson, Robert Sheckley, Damon Knight, and many others.
“Extinction is the saddest word,” Letta’s mentor tells her on his deathbed. “You don’t understand. In the old days, before the Melting, no one would listen. No one. The politicians just talked and talked. They used words to keep the people in ignorance.”
A dystopian novel, Patricia Forde’s The List takes place in our world after the polar ice caps have disappeared and sea levels have risen. Letta, our seventeen-year-old heroine, is only an apprentice when she abruptly inherits her master’s position as Wordsmith. Now a member of the elite, she’s one of the few people in the town of Ark who’s allowed to use the full scope of language. Everyone else must speak “List,” 500 words that leader John Noa has approved. (Yes. Letta lives in Noa’s Ark.)
The List doesn’t include words like “hope,” “love,” or “dream.” Noa considers these words too dangerous, since they encourage people to think about the future. Most articles are gone, as well as “Hello,” “Thank you,” and “Please.” People are only allowed to use specialized vocabulary if it’s necessary for them to do their jobs. Art and music of all kinds likewise have been forbidden.
As Wordsmith, Letta prepares basic Lists for Ark schoolchildren and specialized Lists for apprentices. She also thinks it’s part of her job to preserve non-List words so that humans can recover language at some future time, when our ancestors have proven they can handle it responsibly. What she doesn’t know is that Noa destroys her note cards, believing humans must be stripped of language completely.
Nat Schachner was born on January 16, 1895 and died on October 2, 1955. Schachner was an attorney who began writing in collaboration with fellow attorney Arthur Zagat. After about a year working together, each man began writing solo, but after publishing science fiction for a decade, Schachner turned his attention towards biographies, focusing on early Americans.
“Ancestral Voices” was a solo effort published by F. Orlin Tremaine in the December 1933 issue of Astounding Stories.It has never been reprinted in English, although a French translation appeared in 1973 and an Italian translation ten years later.
Schachner opens “Ancestral Voices” with a brief look at several people for whom their ancestry helps define who they are in a very basic way, from a Hitlerian dictator of “Mideuropa” (although Hitler is also mentioned) to the crème-de-la-crème of Boston society, to an accountant who is convinced of his superiority over his boss because he is Anglo-Saxon rather than Spanish. Schachner also posits a boxing match between an Aryan champion, Hans Schilling and a Jewish challenger, Max Bernstein, clear stand-ins for Max Schmeling and Max Baer, who fought in the year the story was published.
The main thrust of the story, however, is the arrogant scientist Emmet Pennypacker, who has created a time machine. Denying his assistant any part of the glory, Pennypacker travels backwards in time, without knowing when or where he’ll wind up. To his chagrin, he finds himself in Aquileia during the Hunnic attack of July 18, 452. Unable to return to his own time until the machine is ready to take him there, he winds up rescuing a Roman girl from her Hun rapist.
Although the idea of going back in time and stopping your parent from being born has become cliché, that is the scenario Schachner wrote. However, given the fifteen centuries that separated Pennypacker from his distant forebears, it means he eradicated the common ancestor of about 50,000 people living in the Twentieth Century.
The nominees for the 2018 Philip K. Dick Award, given each year for distinguished science fiction originally published in paperback in the United States, have been announced. They are (links will take you to our previous coverage):
The Book of Etta by Meg Elison (47North) Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty (Orbit) After the Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun (The Unnamed Press) The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt (Angry Robot) Revenger by Alastair Reynolds (Orbit) Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) All Systems Red by Martha Wells (Tor.com)
This is a terrific ballot, with something for every reader. Over at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Joel Cunningham sums things up nicely.
Mel Hunter’s “Flight Over Mercury” is featured on the cover of the January, 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s much more interesting than the actual surface of Mercury, which looks a lot like our moon.
“Natural State” by Damon Knight — The major cities of the United States operate as industrial nations of their own while the rest of the country becomes agricultural. The cities repeatedly try to subjugate those in the country, but the cities’ technology can’t compete against the genetic engineering of those in the country.
Alvah is sent from New York to open trade with the outsiders — the Muckfeet — in hopes of bringing them into a civilized world and to support the needs of the city. When he meets with the Muckfeet, he finds that they consider him backwards – that those in the cities are the uncultured, uncivilized people. It’s up to a young woman named B.J. to reeducate him, if he’ll listen.
Robert Silverberg was born on January 15, 1935. In 1956, he won a Hugo for being the Most Promising New Author, nearly two decades before the John W. Campbell, Jr. Award debuted. He has subsequently won two Hugo Awards for Best Novella and one for Best Novelette. Silverberg has also received two Nebula Awards for Best Short Story, two more for Best Novella, and one for Best Novel.
He has won or been nominated for numerous other awards. Silverberg was a Guest of Honor at Heicon ‘70, the 28th Worldcon, held in Heidelberg, Germany. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999 and named an SFWA Grand Master in 2004. Other lifetime achievement awards include the Big Heart Award, the Forry Award, the Prix Utopia, the Skylark Award, the Milford Award.
“When We Went to See the End of the World” was published in Universe 2 in 1972 by Terry Carr. The story was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Award. Carr reprinted it the following year in The Best Science Fiction of the Year #2, and Isaac Asimov included it in Nebula Award Stories Eight. Lester del Rey also included it in his Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Second Annual Collection. It has since been included in several collections and anthologies and has been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, and Russian.
“When We Went to See the End of the World” is set at a cocktail party which in many ways seems very much of the early seventies when the story was written. Casual sex and marijuana are routine, but the main focus of the story is Nick and Jane telling the rest of the attendees about their recent excursion to see the end of the world.
Such excursions are new, only recently having come down from a price where only millionaires could afford to go, so Nick and Jane gained social status by being the first in their neighborhood to see the end of the world, and Nick sees the opportunity to have an affair with a neighbor’s wife.
Their status, and Nick’s chances for an affair, appear to be ended when a couple of latecomers to the party indicate that they have also taken the journey to the end of the world, although the world they saw was extremely different from what Nick and Jane had experienced. Before either couple can accuse each other of lying about their experiences, another couple announces that they completed the journey and saw someone else when they were there.
The story is a reasonably light-hearted look at a common idea in science fiction and presents a reasonable explanation for the multiple experiences the party-goers who visited the end of the world had. At the same time, since all of the activity takes place in the confines of the cocktail party, it is quite possible to read “When We Went to See the End of the World” is a story about people trying to one up each other, rather than relating their actual experiences.
Dark Imaginings is the first dark fantasy anthology I can remember lusting after in a bookstore. It was published in 1978, when I was 14 years old, at the lordly price of $4.95 — pretty steep in an era when a typical paperback was a buck fifty, even for a big oversized trade paperback.
In those days I would make weekly sojourns to downtown Ottawa every Saturday afternoon to hunt through the used bookstores on Bank Street for science fiction paperbacks, and I would gaze at it longingly on the bookshelf at WHSmith, or take it down and thumb through it. Joel Schick’s beautiful cover, featuring a canopy of dead, grasping trees in a twisted wood, spoke to me of dark tales whispered by strangers on Halloween. Man, I wanted this book.
And who wouldn’t? Dark Imaginings is packed with classic tales of gothic fantasy, including a Kull tale by Robert E. Howard, a Northwest Smith novelette by C. L. Moore, an Averoigne story by Clark Ashton Smith, a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tale by Fritz Leiber, a Cthulhu Mythos story by H. P. Lovecraft, a novel excerpt from Poul Anderson, and ten more stories. Each is illustrated with a sparse b&w pencil sketch by James Cagle. It’s a fine volume to curl up by the window with on a blustery winter evening, as I learned when I finally bought a copy, over a decade later.
Arthur Byron Cover was born on January 14, 1950. He attended the 1971 Clarion Writers Workshop and made his first sale to Harlan Ellison for inclusion in The Last Dangerous Visions. Cover’s novel, Autumn Angels was nominated for the 1976 Nebula Award. Cover was the owner of Dangerous Visions bookstore in Sherman Oaks, California until the store closed in 2002.
His story “A Murder” was published in the August 17, 1991 issue of Pulphouse Weekly Fiction Magazine and was purchased by Dean Wesley Smith. The story has never been reprinted.
Cover’s “A Murder” is a metafictional and psychological exploration of a brutal murder. He tries to get into the head of both the victim, Stephanie, and the murderer, Bill Prisman. Stephanie is an avid reader of horror novels and stories and when she finds herself being attacked, she is very much aware that it was a complete surprise. There was none of the forewarning or sense of foreboding that she would have expected there to have been in the novels and stories she has read. Prisman’s mind is dark. He has just been released from prison and has a sense of entitlement towards women that he can only fulfill by raping and murdering them.
Cover brings the two of them together and then backs away from the horrible crime be invoking the point of view of the omniscient author. Rather than describing Prisman’s attack, he discusses an alternative to the horror he has set up. This tangent is presented in almost clinical terms and serves to show that certain ideas about criminal behavior, notably reformation, are impractical.
Prisman is the poster child for recidivism, something both he and the law enforcement community know, but their hands are tied by a society and culture which believe that people can change when placed in an environment which actually serves to reinforce their worst tendencies. Once this detour is complete, Cover allows his story to continue to its inexorable ending.
Only two print magazines in the first half of the month, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and pulp reprint mag High Adventure. Online zines definitely seem to be where the action is. The first magazines of 2018 feature fiction from Tobias S. Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, S.B. Divya, Tamara Vardomskaya, Sunny Moraine, Terence Faherty, Osahon Ize-iyamu, Erin Roberts, Bo Balder, Bao Shu, Arkady Martine, Marissa Lingen, Sunny Moraine, Vivian Shaw, R.K. Kalaw, and many others. Here’s the complete list of magazines that won my attention in early January (links will bring you to magazine websites).
Beneath Ceaseless Skies — the January 4 issue — #242! — has fiction from Tamara Vardomskaya and Hannah Strom-Martin, plus a reprint by A.B. Treadwell Clarkesworld — new stories from Tobias S. Buckell, Osahon Ize-iyamu, Erin Roberts, Bo Balder, and Bao Shu, plus reprints from James Tiptree Jr. and Michael Swanwick Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine — the January/February double issue follows their winter tradition of seasonal suspense and Sherlockian detection, with a new entry in Terence Faherty’s series from the lost manuscripts of Dr. John Watson, “The Noble Bachelor” Nightmare — original fiction from Lori Selke and Vincent Michael Zito, plus reprints by Halli Villegas and Lynda E. Rucker GrimDark Magazine — Alex Marshall is back with his second Crimson Empire novella *Beasts of the Burnished Chain,* plus a story from Anna Smith-Spark, and interviews with Steven Erikson and Erik Scott de Bie The Dark — brand new dark fantasy and horror from Lindiwe Rooney and Bill Kte’pi, plus reprints from Eric Schaller and Carrie Laben High Adventure — three classic tales of air adventure: “War Game” by George Bruce, “O’leary’s Last Supper” by Arthur Guy Empey, and “The Kansas Comet” by William E. Barrett Uncanny — issue #20 contains all-new short fiction by Elizabeth Bear, S.B. Divya, Arkady Martine, Marissa Lingen, Sunny Moraine, Vivian Shaw, and R.K. Kalaw, plus a reprint by Vandana Singh
Click any of the thumbnail images above for bigger images. Our Late December Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.
In 1940, Edgar Rice Burroughs created his final new adventure setting, the extrasolar planet Poloda. For the first time in a career that had ignited pulp science fiction back in 1912, Burroughs pushed beyond the solar system to the region of pure speculation. But what he discovered four hundred and fifty thousand light-years from Earth wasn’t an E. E. Smith space opera, or even an old-fashioned romp on a weird planet of monsters and savage humanoid tribes. Against the grain of its romanticized title, the incomplete short novel Beyond the Farthest Star isn’t an escapist tale, but a bleak meditation on a world mired in unending warfare. The title makes you anticipate Star Wars. Instead you find just Wars.
This is a stark work. It offers no illusions. There’s a dash of humor and some winking satire, but the overwhelming sensation of Beyond the Farthest Star is resignation to carnage. There are no valiant heroes on Poloda who become beacons for others to follow. There are only stalwart soldiers who fall in line to fight the fight, whatever it may be, and die in numbers tabulated by the hundreds of thousands.
We’re used to Edgar Rice Burroughs as a master of sweeping adventure in worlds where fighting means hope. It’s a shock to see him sitting glumly among the ruins of hope, waiting for the next wave of barbarians. Looking at Poloda from the perspective of the twenty-first century is to see a prophetic futurist emerging in Old Man Burroughs. The story the Old Man tells is not much fun. But it’s enthralling — and there’s nothing else like it in the ERB canon, even among the strange evolutions his work took during his last decade.
As with Savage Pellucidar and its sister books set on Marsand Venus, the Poloda novellas were planned to form a connected sequence for later hardcover publication. Part I, “Beyond the Farthest Star,” was written in October 1940 over twelve days, and Part II, “Tangor Returns,” was finished in December in five days. “Beyond the Farthest Star” appeared in the January 1942 issue of Blue Book, but Burroughs never submitted Part II for publication, probably because he scrapped the series after starting work as a war correspondent. “Tangor Returns” wasn’t discovered until thirteen years after Burroughs’s death. It was published along with “Beyond the Farthest Star” in the 1964 Canaveral Press omnibus Tales from Three Planets. Ace Books later released a paperback of the unfinished Poloda saga as Beyond the Farthest Star, with the first novella retitled “Adventure on Poloda.”
