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Has Science Fiction Changed?

I often encounter the opinion that science fiction has changed. Is it true? Over my lifetime novels have gotten longer, trilogies and series have become more common, there are more female authors, and the genre has been heavily influenced by fantasy. Before Star Trek in 1966, the world of science fiction seemed tiny, and that TV show brought in millions of new SF fans. Then Star Wars in 1977 brought in tens of millions of new SF fans. (But I’m not sure how much the population of science fiction readers grew.)

But these are all externals. I’m wondering if the essence of science fiction itself has changed. Yes, the writing has gotten better, and the literary world has become more accepting, but do modern readers get something different out of reading science fiction than what I found in the 1960s? Why do I prefer older science fiction? Is it more than just because I imprinted on it when I was young? I’m not the only one who feels this way. Many aging Baby Boomers say they prefer older science fiction too, but so do some young book reviewers.

Over the last forty days I’ve read five novels by Philip K. Dick written between 1959-1963, plus Ammonite by Nicola Griffith and The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. These aren’t new novels, but newer than what I’m talking about, and they feel different. Over the last year I’ve read such new SFF books as Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill, Babel by R. F. Kuang, and The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. I know this is a small sample, but I’ve also read hundreds of science fiction short stories, both old and new, over the last couple of years.

All I can say is science fiction from the first half of my life (1951-1987) feels much different than the second half (1988-2024). The change started around the time of Star Wars in 1977. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg might be the main factors changing the genre. I confess that I’ve long thought that science fiction ran out of original ideas at some point, and the genre has been living on recycling ever since. But women writers, literary standards, and fantasy radically changed the flavor of science fiction since the 1970s too.

But what if the change in science fiction is due to other factors? Yesterday I watched a video by Bookborn, “Do SFF authors think we are stupid now” that offered two innovative ideas. Bookborn suggests that current science fiction lacks subtlety. She also suggests that newer science fiction requires less critical thinking because newer authors tell their readers what to think rather than letting the readers draw their own conclusions. Bookborn also felt authors wrote about topical problems too obviously. Even with books she likes, presenting viewpoints she agrees with, she felt they were too explicit, lacking subtly. She admits this problem is not measurable and highly subjective.

Bookborn then cites an essay, “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes. The essay in long, so I suggest reading Wikipedia’s summary instead, but to give you a quick idea, here’s a quote from the first paragraph at Wikipedia:

"The Death of the Author" (French: La mort de l'auteur) is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980). Barthes's essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight.

Bookborn is quite articulate at explaining her position, and her position is more complex than what I’m conveying here, so I recommend clicking on the link above to watch her video. Bookborn goes on to say that current authors hide from their readers because of social media. They fear attacks on what they say so they are overly careful about what they put forth. I had an additional insight. Because modern science fiction is often about elaborate world building, modern authors struggle to be precise so readers will see clearly what they have worked so hard to invent.

In Ammonite by Nicola Griffith and The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, I was disappointed by the blandness of the author’s voice. And I never felt the presence of Griffith or Banks in their stories. Yes, in both cases their world building is beautifully detailed, but both authors left no mysteries about their stories or their personal views for me to ponder. I have theories to explain this too.

Modern writers prefer a close personal third point of view, or first person, to the older omniscient point of view which is better suited for conveying the author’s voice. I also find that the novels I admire most are ones written by authors I love reading about. Maybe what I love about older science fiction is my connection to the author.

Any science fictional world that’s set far from Earth becomes a fantasy world, and thus far less complex than our reality. Such fictional worlds are far from the infinite complexity of contemporary controversies. Writers can avoid personal philosophy by using allegory. Reading such fantasies means passively consuming what the book describes. Such stories don’t lend themselves to ambiguity and complexity, which makes the reader think. Our reality is infinitely full of shades of gray. Made up fictional worlds tend to be consistently designed because authors want them to be understandable to readers unless you’re Gene Wolfe writing The Book of the New Sun.

The five Philip K. Dick novels were far more compelling and thought provoking than the books by Griffith and Banks. I often try newer science fiction, but they usually come across as merely fun stories. Overall, newer science fiction stories are like going to Disneyland. They dazzle but when the ride is over, are quickly forgotten. I’m still thinking about those Philip K. Dick novels. When nothing else thrills, switching to a Philip K. Dick story will get my mind excited. Why is that? I believe it’s because his Dick’s books are closer to real life, and that makes them ambiguous and mysterious. They offer endless room for speculation. I’m reading another biography of Philip K. Dick, my sixth, I think, because Dick’s novels make me crave understanding.

Dick’s novels were compelling, Ammonite and The Player of Games were not. They aren’t bad, in fact, they’re exceptionally good stories, just not compelling. Dick was obsessed with deciphering reality. He doubted that what we perceive is real. He was horrified by other people, often thinking they were machines, disguised supernatural beings, or illusions of the mind. Paranoia fueled his narratives. Our reality was too complex for Philip K. Dick, and it drove him into insane states of mind trying to figure it out. Every Philip K. Dick novel is another exciting speculative assumption about reality.

Interestingly, Dick doesn’t fit the theory about the author being dead. Yes, his stories are wonderful without knowing anything about Philip K. Dick, but their complexity increases the more you do know about him. I want stories where the authors aren’t dead by Barthes criteria.

By coincidence, both The Player of Games and Time Out of Joint are about game playing. However, the first novel feels contrived. It’s hard to believe. But the second, which is far more fantastic, yet feels very real and believable. Why is that?

I believe the reason I love older science fiction is because it speculates about reality. Whereas newer science fiction is focused on telling a delightful story. Lucas and Spielberg overly inspired newer writers to focus on entertaining the masses.

I loved the Heinlein novels of the 1950s because they speculated about future space travel. That was before NASA showed us what real space travel would be like in the 1960s. Heinlein’s stories honestly tried to speculate about traveling to the Moon or Mars. Space travel in Star Trek, Star Wars, or the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks are really fantasies. Space travel in Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson is somewhat speculative.
Most science fiction isn’t very speculative, even the old stuff. However, novels like Flowers for Algernon or Earth Abides feel far closer to reality. And I’m sure many people will point out that stories by Philip K. Dick are extremely fantastic, yet their characters feel like ordinary real people, and that grounds them.

For all his insanity, Philip K. Dick struggled to understand reality. And I think the reason I admire many older science fiction writers is because they were commenting on reality. I do love entertaining stories, but pure storytelling seldom offers much to think about.

I’m not sure I understand “The Death of the Author” in the same way as Bookborn. It seems to me that classics were written by authors whose personality dominated their fiction. Think about Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Conner, Jack Kerouac, or the science Fiction writers like H. G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Zenna Henderson, Samuel R. Delany, John Brunner, etc. If you want to write a great science fiction novel, I think it must connect with reality. Just think how silly and fantastic Slaughterhouse-Five is, yet Vonnegut points to reality, and that makes it a great novel.

James Wallace Harris, 2/4/24

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“The Sharing of Flesh” by Poul Anderson

“The Sharing of Flesh” by Poul Anderson first appeared in the December 1968 issue of Galaxy Magazine. It won a Hugo award for best novelette in 1969 and was also nominated for a Nebula award. As soon as I started reading it in The Hugo Winners Volumes I and II edited by Isaac Asimov I knew I had read it before. The trouble is I can’t remember when and how I read it before, and that annoys me. I do remember getting that issue of Galaxy back in 1968, but if I only read it then, it wouldn’t have been so fresh in my memory. With this reading, it felt like I must have read it just weeks ago. Everything portion of the story as I read it came back to me.

“The Sharing of Flesh” is about humans discovering a planet that was previously colonized by humans but forgotten. This is the third story in the past couple of weeks I read using this theme. The other was Anderson’s own “The Longest Voyage” and Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite. “The Sharing of Flesh” is a murder mystery with a sociological/biological twist. It’s the kind of story I don’t want to spoil by summarizing it. I would link to Archive.org so you could read it online, but that issue of Galaxy has the story removed, meaning the Anderson estate requested the cut. It is available in Call Me Joe: Volume One of the Short Fiction of Poul Anderson from NESFA Press. (I did find it online later.)

I checked ISFDB.org to see where “The Sharing of Flesh” has been reprinted, and I don’t own any of those anthologies or collections except The Hugo Winners Volume I and II. I suppose I could have read “The Sharing of Flesh” there, but I don’t think so.

I know you’re probably thinking I’m overly obsessed with memory, but recalling when, where, and how I read a story is important for two reasons. First, I’m getting old, and I’m slowly losing my ability to recall. Working to remember is good exercise for my mind. But second, and more importantly, the memorability of a story is a measure of its quality. If words etch into your mind and they stay there for years, there’s a good reason.

Despite all the millions of short stories published, and the thousands that I have read, the memorable ones only number in the low hundreds, and the ones worth cherishing over a lifetime, add up to just a handful of tens.

“The Sharing of Flesh” is memorable because it’s about something grotesque and horrifying, yet its resolution is about forgiveness. The story is about transcending upbringing and culture. It’s incredibly positive. Yet, I don’t know if I’d put “The Sharing of Flesh” into the all-time classic category. I might need to read it a couple more times before I decide. Still, it makes me think I need to read more Poul Anderson.

Even the illustrations from Galaxy are so familiar to me. I must wonder if I read it back in 1968. If I did, I don’t think I’m remembering that time. I wish I had kept a journal from the time I first started reading. I probably read “The Sharing of Flesh” recently because some blogger mentioned it, and I went and read it. If you remember, let me know.

That’s another thing I’d like to remember. I’d like to remember other people by the stories they love. I wish I had started worrying about memories when I was a child. Who knew they’d be so important to me now?

I’m beginning to realize that stories I love are like my genes, they define who I am.

James Wallace Harris, 2/1/24

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Ammonite by Nicola Griffith

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith is one of the books from the Classics of Science Fiction list I hadn’t read. It’s on that list because of these citations:

Otherwise Award
2001200 Significant Science Fiction Books by Women, 1984-2001 by David G. Hartwell
2003The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
2004Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy by Cynthia Ward
2005ISFDB Top 100 Books (Balanced List)
2012Science Fiction the 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 by Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo
2014Mistressworks by Ian Sales
2016SF Masterworks
2016Sci Femme: The Reading List edited by Shannon Turlington
2016Goodreads Science Fiction Books by Female Authors
2016Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction: A Basic Science Fiction Library
2019The Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time – Penguin Random House
2019100 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time – Reedsydiscovery
2021Worlds Without End: Award Winning Books by Women Authors
2022The 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time – Esquire Magazine

Ammonite won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Science Fiction and Fantasy in 1993. Nicola Griffith has won the award three times and been nominated six times. Ammonite also won the Otherwise Award (originally, the James Tiptree Jr. Award) in 1993. It’s a well-respected novel, critically and academically acclaimed.

Interestingly, I didn’t think of Ammonite as a lesbian novel even though all the characters are women, and some of them are in relationships. I listened to the Audible edition, and Griffith makes a statement about the novel in an afterward where she says she didn’t want Ammonite to be a women’s utopia, or an Amazon adventure tale. She wanted her characters to be normal ordinary people, and that’s how it worked out. Sex wasn’t emphasized in the story, and I didn’t really think about gender roles while reading it.

I thought Ammonite was a straight-ahead science fiction problem story. Human explorers discover Grenchstom’s Planet, nicknamed Jeep, where all the males and many of the females die from a virus. They discover that the planet had been previously colonized by humans, with various tribes of women now living on the planet apparently not remembering they how they got there.

Marghe Taishan, an anthropologist volunteers to test a vaccine against the Jeep virus, so she can go down to the planet and visit the various tribes. Each tribe has a different culture depending on the geography and weather of their location. I pictured it pretty much like North America before Columbus, or early civilizations in the Himalayas.

There is a parallel story about a military unit, again all women survivors, which has a base on the planet. They hope to return to Earth if the vaccine proves successful. Marghe has reason to believe that the Durallium Company that commissioned the explorers will destroy all the humans no matter what happens with the vaccine because they fear the Jeep virus will spread across the galaxy. (I thought of the film Aliens, and the phrase, “nuke them from orbit.”)

I had problems with the novel. Problems unique to me. If you read about the novel at Wikipedia, you’ll see it’s highly regarded. I’d compare it to The Left Hand of Darkness and A Woman of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason. And the science fictional setup reminds me of “The Longest Voyage” by Poul Anderson from 1960 which won a Hugo award in 1961. For most readers, Ammonite should be an excellent tale.

Ammonite has a great setup for a science fiction story. But here’s my problem. That’s about all the science fiction we get. Most of the story is about Marghe struggling to survive among various native societies of the original colonists. It’s fictional Margaret Mead. I’m sure this kind of extended worldbuilding is what modern science fiction readers love, but I’m discovering I prefer shorter novels with a higher concentration of science fiction.

The extra length gives Griffith a chance to describe female only cultures and deal with cultural differences. This didn’t feel like science fiction, but fictionalized substitutes of our own world’s tribal customs.

Griffith doesn’t pontificate like a lot of bad science fiction writers, so we don’t have to wade through long speculating info dumps. Griffith works by throwing Marghe into various situations where she must quickly learn to survive. The story reminds me of the movies Little Big Man or Dances with Wolves. Both of those films were about plains Indians, but on Griffith’s cold world, I pictured cultures like the Innuit in North America, or nomadic people from historical Tibet or Mongolia.

Reading both “The Longest Voyage” by Poul Anderson and Ammonite in the same week is what inspired me to write this review. In both stories, a planet was colonized by humans in the distant past and then forgotten. Then these planets are rediscovered by a new civilization of star-faring humans. They discover the old humans have forgotten they ever traveled in space. In Anderson’s story, the forgotten colonists evolved their civilization to about the time of our 1500s. But in Griffth’s world, the colonists have evolved into tribal societies like we saw in Canada, Siberia, Mongolia, and Tibet before the voyages of Columbus.

Like I said, the story is compelling, but feels long, especially after several years of mostly reading science fiction short stories. When I got into science fiction in the mid-1960s, most science fiction novels were 200-250 pages and often less. Ammonite is 416 pages. By comparison, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) runs around 280 pages in most editions. Science fiction novels have only gotten longer on average since 1992.

Science fiction used to be fast paced, with lots of far out ideas. The evolution of the science fiction novel has been towards extending its length by evolving the complexity of plot and character. I assume this chunkiness is what younger readers prefer. They love dwelling in elaborate world buildings efforts to older science fiction’s thrill rides. I just don’t enjoy these longer novels, but if you do, this shouldn’t be a problem with Ammonite. But I also wonder if the aim of science fiction has changed, and it’s not really about the number of pages. Have I lived long enough that the appeal of science fiction has mutated?

Griffith increases her action midway through her novel, but then switches back to slow pace with Marghe learning about a second society. It’s at this point that Griffith gets into the psychological development of Marghe’s character. In the four Philip K. Dick novels I read before Ammonite, Dick went through dozens of plot twists and characters in less than half the number of pages for each of those novels. Dick’s approach is to throw out a science fictional idea every few paragraphs, while Griffith gave us all her science fiction at the beginning and then coasts for hundreds of pages with character interactions. And like I said, Griffith’s science fiction framework is an old idea. The story is really about Marghe becoming more evolved spiritually.

About two thirds of the way into Ammonite, the plot quickens again as the military base becomes threatened on two fronts, but again switches back to Marghe’s story which is much slower. However, this is where we learn how the female only society makes babies.

Most of the book is less about science fiction and more about imagined tribal cultures and New Age spiritualism and healing practices. There are a couple of women characters who like killing both people and animals. I wondered if Griffith was saying even women can have male traits, or that male traits aren’t exclusively male. I’ve always thought if there were only women, there would be no war or vicious kinds of hunting.

I’m not picking on Nicola Griffith for writing a longer novel. Most modern science fiction is getting longer and longer. New writers recycle an old science fictional concept, adding long complex plots. They spend their time developing an interesting cast of characters. It’s more about story and storytelling than science fiction. There’s nothing wrong with this. And modern science fiction is often better written than older science fiction. The trouble for me is I got hooked on the amphetamine type of science fiction.

I don’t know if I can fairly review modern science fiction. I wonder if my taste in science fiction suffers from arrested development. I wonder if I’m stuck in 1950-1979 science fiction, music, movies, and other pop culture.

Ammonite was a pleasant read. It was a somewhat compelling story. But it didn’t excite me. And I have no urge to reread it, which is my main indicator of a great novel.

James Wallace Harris, 1/27/24

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Heinlein’s Juveniles I Read in the 1960s vs. Philip K. Dick’s 1960s Novels I’m Reading in My 70s

I’ve been gorging on Philip K. Dick books this month. It occurred to me, that I’m consuming vast quantities of PKD in my old age like I did Heinlein books in my youth. Why was Heinlein my #1 science fiction writer in the 1960s when I was a teen? Is it for the same reasons that Philip K. Dick is my #1 sci-fi writer in my seventies in the 2020s?

The short answer is Heinlein’s juveniles were great reads and perfect escapism for a young person growing up in a problem family hoping to find a bright future. While PKD’s books are great escapes for an old guy living through troubled times when the future looks quite bleak. Both offer escapism from troubled times, but their imagined futures were distinctly different. Heinlein’s was best for the young, while Dick might be better for old age.

For some reason I resonate with Heinlein and PKD. I’ve written about that before, read “The Ghosts That Haunt Me.” There are certain writers I can’t stop reading their books, and biographies about them. I’m now curious why Philip K. Dick appeals so much to me late in life.

I discovered Heinlein in the Fall of 1964, just months before the first manned Project Gemini missions in March 1965. This was after Project Mercury was over. I had followed every manned space mission in the 1960s starting with Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight in May of 1961. I grew up as a final frontier true believer, and Heinlein’s twelve juvenile novels shaped my hopes for the future. This was before the psychedelic 1960s hit.

I don’t remember when I changed, but like many teenagers growing up in the 1960s, I radicalized. I tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. I was still living at home, and I was still going to high school, but I wasn’t in either place.

I can’t say I contracted the weirdness of Philip K. Dick back then, but science fiction was getting weird. My favorite writers shifted from Heinlein/Clarke/Asimov to Samuel R. Delany, Jack Kerouac, and Mark Twain as the 1960s ended. My ideas about the final frontier and the future were changing, especially after reading Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner in 1969.

I didn’t discover Philip K. Dick until 1968 when I checked out Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from the 7-day bookshelf at the Coconut Grove Library in Miami. What a strange ride that was. Before the decade was over, I also read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and a couple of others, but I can only dredge up specific memories of those two titles right now. I didn’t seriously get into PKD until after the Paul Williams article ran about Dick in The Rolling Stone magazine in November of 1975, then I started reading PKD for real. Back in the 1980s I told my friend Mike about Philip K. Dick, and we started collecting his books and both of us became big fans. We’ve been discussing PKD ever since. In 1991 I even went to Ft. Morgan to visit Dick’s grave.

This past month, I’ve been binge reading PKD again. I do that from time to time. And something struck me. I discovered Heinlein when I was twelve, just before I turned thirteen at the end of 1964. I read nearly all of Heinlein’s back catalog in the following two years, ending my Heinlein binge by reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The Past Through Tomorrow in 1967 as they came out.

But it was the twelve Heinlein juveniles published from 1947-1958 that made me a science fiction fan. At the end of 1967, with my first paycheck from working at the Kwik Check in Coconut Grove, I ordered all twelve of those books in hardback from Scribners because I loved them so much. I still have them. Those books define my love of science fiction. So, it’s weird that I’m ending up in PKD’s landscape. Heinlein and Dick saw the future vastly different. But then, the future I envisioned for myself in the 1960s is nothing like the future I’m living in the 2020s.

What’s interesting, that I realized this week, is Philip K. Dick’s 1960s science fiction are shaping how I think about science fiction in my old age. And there’s quite a contrast between how Heinlein and Dick wrote science fiction. I just finished five books Dick hammered out in 1963:

Heinlein’s fiction from the 1950s had a consistency to them, with each juvenile novel going step-by-step further from Earth. Heinlein was always adamant that his philosophy was represented in the three novels Starship Troopers (1959), Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). But those books represent his third philosophical stage. Heinlein’s first stage was his Future History stories of the 1940s, but what I cared about most was his Space Exploration stage of the 1950s. Both Heinlein and Dick wrote many books that shared a common vision of the future. Heinlein’s vision of tomorrow in his 1950s books are quite consistent. But then, so is Dick’s science fiction from the 1960s.

I’m sensing that Philip K. Dick went through different philosophical stages too. In the 1950s he was cranking out science fiction to make a living, but Dick really wanted to become a respected mainstream writer. Then from The Man in the High Castle (1961) through Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1969) he wrote twenty-one very strange science fiction novels that all have consistent themes and elements. In the 1970s, he shifted to more serious writing, some of which was based on firsthand experiences.

Many readers accused Dick of being a 1960s sci-fi writer on drugs, suffering from mental illness, and producing psychedelic science fiction. I don’t think that’s accurate. I think his 1959 novel, Confessions of a Crap Artist (published 1975) is a key to PKD’s 1960s fiction. Dick learned a lot about writing from producing all those unsold mainstream novels in the 1950s. Yes, he grew up reading science fiction and falling in love with the genre, but he was well acquainted with the real world and real literature. He had to accept that he could only make money selling science fiction, but he compromised by putting reasonable realistic characters into bizarre science fictional fantasies.

When I was growing up and embracing the Heinlein juveniles, I didn’t understand how unrealistic they were. I wanted space travel as Heinlein described it to be possible, but it would be decades before I realized how unrealistic those expectations were. Philip K. Dick was 23 years older than I was, and he obviously knew how crazy science fiction was back in the 1950s. I imagine he told himself, if science fiction sells, I’ll write science fiction but with the weirdness knob turned to eleven.

Dick’s science fiction in the 1960s got very psychedelic before the 1960s got psychedelic. He lived in California, and that helped put him at the forefront of the counterculture. As I grew up with the counterculture, but slightly delayed in Miami, I was still rereading the Heinlein juveniles. They were fantasies that kept me sane, but they were delusional. It’s a shame I didn’t discover PKD sooner, or even first. Dick knew science fiction was delusional. At least, I think he did. I believe with his VALIS experience, he started wondering if the universe wasn’t far stranger than what even science fiction writers imagined. I want to believe that Dick knew he was a crap artist for most of his career before he started believing in the crap. Evidently, you can’t toy with crap ideas all your life and not get infected.

What’s weird on another level was Heinlein turned strange in the 1960s too. It’s my theory that he too realized that 1950s science fiction wasn’t going anywhere, and thus he needed to go in another direction to stay at the top. My guess is he read Atlas Shrugged and decided he wanted to be a writer like Ayn Rand. One whose political ideas were taken seriously. In some ways, Stranger in a Strange Land is just as weird as PKD’s work in the 1960s.

Heinlein’s lost his mojo in the 1970s, and I quit reading him. Over the years, I’ve become disenchanted with Heinlein’s work after 1960 too. Philip K. Dick took a new direction in the 1970s and found a higher calling. Science fiction, as a genre, also cchanged in many ways in the 1970s. Since then, science fiction books have gotten better written, and more creative, but have mostly retreated into itself, into fantastic feats of world building. I still love 1950s science fiction. I think that’s when the genre peaked in terms of exploring science fictional ideas. Movies and novels are better constructed now, but most of the ideas are retreads.

I guess I haven’t progressed much in life. I started in the 1960s with 1950s science fiction, and now in the 2020s I’m focused on 1960s science fiction. Maybe before I die, I’ll get around to digesting 1970s science fiction. But before I do that, I need to use up PKD’s books from the 1960s. I need to figure them out.

I only reread Heinlein juveniles now for nostalgic reasons. I think I’m reading Dick’s 1960s novels for a reason, but I’m not sure what it is. PKD seemed to be writing about something, and I’m trying to figure out what that was. But I could be wrong. He could have just been cranking out a bunch of crazy sci-fi books to pay the bills. However, I’m not the only one trying to figure out PKD. Lots of people are writing monographs and dissertations on him.

In the 1950s and 1960s Heinlein was king of the genre hill. At the time, I thought he would be seen by people in the 21st century as the Charles Dickens of science fiction. That hasn’t happened. Philip K. Dick is the top dog when remembering 20th century science fiction. I would not have predicted that back in the 1960s. Nor would I have imagined that as an old man I would be so hung up on Philip K. Dick.

James Wallace Harris, 1/21/23

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“Consider Her Ways” by John Wyndham

“Consider Her Ways” was first published in the original anthology, Sometime, Never. It is story #22 of 22 for The Best SF Stories of 1956 group read. Unfortunately, I can’t link to a copy of the story to read online, but you might already own one of the many anthologies where it’s been reprinted. I read “Consider Her Ways” in A Science Fiction Argosy edited by Damon Knight. But I also own it in The Science Fiction Century edited by David G. Hartwell. The story was also included in two of Wyndham’s collections:

I strongly urge you to read the story before reading what I have to say. It’s an exceptional yarn, a classic, and I don’t want to spoil your reading fun. “Consider Her Ways” begins with a woman waking up in a hospital and having no memory of who she is or how she got there. That mystery continues for many pages, and I never guessed the cause.

Let me say, “Consider Her Ways” is a feminist utopian tale that most will consider a dystopia. But what defines a better society? If you’ve read and enjoyed Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, you might want to read “Consider Her Ways.”

“Consider Her Ways” is a very old-fashioned science fiction, reminding me of Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein. John Wyndham uses his story to speculate about a future society while commenting on our present society. Referring to these books should give you enough of a clue to the plot of “Consider Her Ways.”

Especially in the 19th century, and to a degree in the 20th century, writers who wanted to write about traveling to the future but without resorting to a time machine, had their present-day characters going into a deep sleep and waking up in the future. John Wyndam invents a drug, chuinjuntin, from South American jungles, which causes a young 20th century woman to project her soul into the body of a woman in the future. Wyndam, solved the problem of return travel by using the same drug again. Mostly sleepers into the future are stuck there unless the story is only a dream. Heinlein had Dan Davis travel to the future via cold sleep in The Door into Summer, but then used a time machine to get him back to 1970.

I won’t go into the society Wyndham creates, other than to say its without men. Jane Waterleigh, our time traveler, does not like the feminist utopia she’s visited and tries to prevent it when she returns to her own time. I’ll call this future, the pink future, since its decor is often painted pink. The pink future Wyndham imagines for women is obviously horrifying from our perspective, but Laura and the other women of the future were completely satisfied with it, even proud of their society. I wasn’t sure I wanted Jane to destroy it. I think each reader will have a different take on Wyndham’s imagined future. Utopia is so hard to define. I don’t think a perfect utopia is possible, but the pink future in “Consider Her Ways” has no violence, lack, ugliness, or apparent unhappiness. However, it has an ant-like social structure. Jane finds herself in a huge body of a woman, a class called mothers. They produced broods of babies, four at a time, and are treated very well.

Wyndham’s missed one point. Jane claims the pink future has no love and romance, and thus a depressing dystopia. What about lesbian love, romance, and sex? Wyndham assumes without men; women wouldn’t have romantic relationships. Even in 1956, that should have been obviously wrong.

We all read stories differently, using fictional clues to customize our versions of the story, based on different assumptions, reactions, wants, and conclusions. Here’s what my friend Mike wrote to me about “Consider Her Ways.”

Ever since I first read The Day of the Triffids back in the sixties, I've been taken with John Wyndham's work. His beautiful prose describes deeply unsettling situations and events.

In "Consider Her Ways," a woman "...who had no idea who I was, or where I was..." is confronted with this vision: "In front of me stood an outrageous travesty, an elephantine female form, looking more huge for its pink swathings."

Only Wyndham could conjure up this disturbing description:

"And this delicate face, this little Fragonard, was set upon that monstrous body: no less outrageously might a blossom of freesia sprout from a turnip."

What transpires is an elaborate hallucination or the future (or one of a number of alternate futures). Jane is confronted with a civilization devoid of men. Her long conversation with the historian Laura could be considered an info dump, but is fascinating and adds considerable depth and nuance to the story. Even after more than sixty-five years it resonates with the reader.

Wyndham never allows us to feel comfortable. Are we dealing with a woman's bad drug trip? Have we had a glimpse of the future? And what do we think about that future? We're left with a jumble of emotions all wrapped up inside of Wyndham's masterful writing.

Mike is open-minded, leaving several possibilities available. I took a different reading route. I accepted Jane’s tale as an actual time travel story. Mike left open the possibility it was all a hallucination, and Jane murdered innocent Dr. Perrigan in an insane delusional state. But Wyndham makes it more complicated. In the end, Dr. Hellyer, Jane’s colleague who gave her the psychoactive drug to test, and Jane’s lawyer, discuss getting Jane off from the murder charge based on insanity. But they wonder if her story is true. Then the lawyer points out that Dr. Perrigan had a son who was also a Ph.D. researcher in the same area as his father. What if Jane’s story is true, but she killed the wrong person?

The story could be a hallucination. The time travel story could be true, but it can take two forms. One, Jane changes, the future, but two, she doesn’t. All the possibilities make “Consider Her Ways” a compelling story. It allows Wyndham to play with several time travel tropes in one tale. Such bendiness makes for great writing.

James Wallace Harris, 1/16/23

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The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick

How do literary scholars of Philip K. Dick’s fiction determine which of his novels are masterpieces and which are his hackwork? They all seem equally bizarre, and even confusing. Library of America selected four novels for their first volume in 2007 devoted to PKD. The years given are when they were (written, published).

  • The Man in the High Castle (1961,1962)
  • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964,1965)
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1966, 1968)
  • Ubik (1966, 1969)

The second volume came out in 2008 recognized:

  • The Martian Time-Slip (1962, 1964)
  • Dr. Bloodmoney (1963, 1965)
  • Now Wait for Last Year (1963, 1966)
  • Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1970, 1974)
  • A Scanner Darkly (1973, 1977)

The third volume in 2009 highlighted:

  • A Maze of Death (1968, 1970)
  • VALIS (1978, 1981)
  • The Divine Invasion (1980, 1981)
  • The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1981, 1982)

Are we to assume these are Dick’s best novels? My personal favorite, Confessions of a Crap Artist wasn’t included. Neither was The Simulacra which I just read and found fascinating and fun. I think some of the Library of America selections are better than The Simulacra, such as The Man in the High Castle, The Martian Time-Slip, and VALIS, but I’d also claim The Simulacra is not a lesser novel to the others. However, using our citation database system, it gets only one citation. Twelve of the twenty-seven PKD novels in our database only got one citation. The novels in the first LOA volume received 9 to 32 citations, which supports the LOA editors.

The only reason The Simulacra received one citation is because it was part of the SF Masterworks series. All the science fiction magazine reviewers ignored it when it came out. As far as I can tell, none of the reprint editions got reviewed either. The Simulacra just isn’t well-known. It’s often disliked when I see it mentioned.

I liked it. And I want to make a case that it’s worth reading. However, it will be hard to even describe. I’m afraid most readers will be turned off by The Simulacra because it has multiple plot lines with over a dozen main characters. And I can imagine many readers calling it stupid too — but that could be true for a lot of readers coming to PKD work. However, if two of the five novels Dick wrote in 1963 made it into the Library of America, why shouldn’t the other three? What divides them? What makes one novel “good” and another “bad?”

The Simulacra‘s complexity might keep readers from liking it, but that complexity might hide many novelistic virtues. Just because I admired this novel, doesn’t mean others will. I’m writing this essay hoping people will read The Simulacra and give me their opinion. I’m curious if I’m a total outlier. I got a big kick out of the story.

According to Samuel Johnson, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Dick complained in several 1963 letters found in The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: Volume One: 1938-1971, that his wife Anne constantly hounded him to make more money. On the other hand, Dick wrote eleven literary (non-genre) novels from 1952-1960 hoping to become a recognized mainstream writer. All were rejected. He then wrote The Man in the High Castle in 1961 which bridges the literary and science fiction world and won a Hugo award for best novel. Dick then wrote twenty-one science fiction novels from 1962 to 1969, five of them in 1963 alone. He obviously needed money and had to crank out the manuscripts.

After 1970, Dick only published six more novels before he died in 1982. Five of which are included in the Library of America editions. That suggests that the novels he took more time writing fared better with the critics. So, the five novels written in 1963 were among the fastest he wrote, suggesting they shouldn’t be as good. Yet, two were selected for the Library of America.

As much as I like The Simulacra, I do see that it’s flawed. It doesn’t have a main character which most readers prefer. Nor does it jump back and forth between two main characters, which can be quite successful with some readers. And it’s not even one of those experimental stories where we follow several unrelated characters that all come together in the end. Readers find that structure confusing but forgive it if the ending brings everyone together in a satisfying way. I’m not sure The Simulacra wraps up nicely.

We might call the plotting of The Simulacra an example of characters doing parallel play. Dick might have aimed for creating a collage of future American scenes. My guess is Dick banged away on his typewriter, vomiting up The Simulacra onto typing paper. The results are fascinating because the novel is one big pile of imagery from PKD unconscious mind — and what a mind! It begs to be psychoanalyzed. And I’m sure, it parallels his personal life, especially regarding insanity, psychoanalysis, and troubling wives and women.

The Simulacra is not satire even though it often feels like the film Dr. Strangelove, nor is it a fantasy even though everything is unbelievable. And I wouldn’t call it surreal or dreamlike, or avant-garde even though it was written in 1963 when trendy artists were creating pop art and post-modern fiction. It’s straight science fiction, meant to be taken as realistic, even though it’s bonkers. The Simulacra has the existential absurd horror of The Tin Drum or The Painted Bird. I don’t even think Dick was making fun of science fiction with its comic book level wild ideas. Dick had crazy ideas, and he saw the world being just as crazy.

The Simulacra pictures future America where psychic abilities are accepted as real, that time travel has been perfected, where people and animals can be artificially created and the results indistinguishable from real people and animals, that colonies exist on Mars and the Moon, and alien lifeforms can be commercialized. In other words, all the crap ideas that science fiction fans and fans of the occult believed in the 1950s. Everything they thought possible, became possible.

The hardest part of this essay is describing what happens in The Simulacra. I wrote about that trouble already for my Auxiliary Memory blog, where I explained I had to read the book and listen to the audiobook to get the most out of The Simulacra. In fact, I’m still picking up the book, or putting on the audiobook, and enjoying random parts of the novel. I can’t seem to leave this story. I’m still finding new insights into whatever scene I stumble upon. I’ve decided the best way to describe the story is by mind mapping the characters. The number given is the number of times the character is mentioned in the story.

I’m trying not to give away too much of the plot. Each of the first level characters involves a subplot. For example, Dr. Egon Superb is the last legally practicing psychiatrist after the pharmaceutical industry pushed through the McPhearson Act that made drug therapy the only legal form of treatment for mental illness. One of his patients is Richard Kongrosian, a psychic pianist who uses telekinesis to play the piano instead of using his hands. Nat Flieger is a sound engineer who wants to record Kongrosian, but he and his crew of Molly Dondoldo and Jim Planck can never track down the man. Ian Duncan and his old friend Al Miller want to perform classical music as a jug band at the White House for Nicole Thibodeaux. Nicole Thibodeaux, the First Lady, but maybe the true ruler of The United States of Europe and America (USEA) wants to negotiate with Hermann Goering via a time machine to get the Nazis to not kill the Jews. Vince and Chic get involve with making the next president, an android, which will replace Nicole’s current husband. Wilder Pembroke, Anton Karp, and Bertold Goltz all vie for power behind the scenes.

If the novel has a main character, it could be Nicole Thibodeaux. Dick’s original draft was called The First Lady of Earth. Since this book was written in the summer of 1963, I assume Dick was inspired by Jackie Kennedy because Nicole spends most of her time charming people, decorating the White House and gardens, and putting on nightly cultural events. Everyone loves Nicole. Yet, out of the public eye, Nicole is also ruthless enough to have people summarily executed. Evidently, she wields unlimited power because of her access to time travel.

The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic future, decades after China attacked the U.S. with missiles with atomic warheads. This gave rise to a population of mutants, similar in appearance to Neanderthals. People ride in self-driving cars. Ads are living creatures that can invade your home and car and must be killed. Richard Kongrosian believes he has a terrible body odor because a deodorant ad infected him with a jingle. The Sons of Job are a neo-fascist political party. People live in giant communal apartment complexes and are required to take civics tests to stay in them. Many people want to escape this totalitarian society by immigrating to Mars. People buy android nuclear families just to have normal friends.

I could go on. There are several layers of political and corporate intrigue in The Simulacra. Dick evidently thought there were conspiracies everywhere. Later in life, Dick would get into Gnostic religion, which is a very paranoid belief system. This novel has many traits of Gnosticism. The Simulacra was written after The Man in the High Castle, We Can Build You, Dr. Bloodmoney, and The Martian Time-Slip, and before The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? There are many similar themes and obsessive ideas that run through all of them. I wish I had the time and energy to study all those novels and plot all the connections. Why did PKD fixate on certain ideas repeatedly? Was it a lack of imagination to explore unfamiliar territory, or were they ideas PKD just could let go of?

James Wallace Harris, 1/5/24

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“Compounded Interest” by Mack Reynolds

“Compounded Interest” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1956. You can read it on Archive.org. It is story #15 of 22 for The Best SF Stories of 1956 group read. “Compounded Interest” was a selection in both the Merril and Asimov/Greenberg anthologies devoted to the best SF of1956, but the story hasn’t been widely anthologized otherwise. I considered “Compounded Interest” an entertaining enough story for a magazine issue but considered it disappointing to read it in a best-of-the-year anthology. It’s a time travel story, yet it’s never been anthologized in any time travel themed anthology, and there have been many. That might tell us something.

The story is rather simple, a time traveler arrives back in the early days of Venice and deposits ten gold coins in a bank with special instructions. He returns every century with new instructions. If you wish to know what happens, read the story. The whole story is merely a fun little idea, with a somewhat punchy ending, so I won’t spoil it. However, the story does have a big “which came first, the chicken or the egg” problem.

“Compounded Interest” is so slight I almost didn’t write about it. Mack Reynolds was a rather prolific science fiction writer. Sadly, I’ve never read much of his work. I have a vague memory of reading a couple of his stories, and reading about Reynolds in Wikipedia, which I just did again. He sounds like an interesting guy, and I’d like to read more of his science fiction. It’s just that his work isn’t remembered. Like I said, I have a rather vague memory of reading one of his stories and sort of liking it, but just can’t remember what it was.

I’d want to think there were dozens of science fiction stories better than “Compounded Interest” published in 1956 yet to be discovered. I just don’t have the time to go read over a hundred issues of SF magazines to find them. And so far, no one else in our reading group has found any forgotten gems either. I’m tempted to go read the five other SF stories Reynolds published in 1956 just to test the waters:

  • “After Some Tomorrow” – If (June)
  • “The Triangulated Izaak Walton” – Fantastic (June)
  • “Case Rests” – Science Fiction Quarterly (August)
  • “Fair Exchange” – Fantastic (August)
  • “Dog Star” – Science Fiction Quarterly (November)

Maybe Reynolds didn’t hit his stride until the 1960s. I remember seeing him a lot in Campbell’s Analog during that decade. Even when I was subscriber back then, I passed over his stories. Reynolds never hooked me, but like I said, reading about him in Wikipedia shows he had a fascinating life and should have written at least a few interesting stories.

“Compounded Interest” is the kind of story that’s just okay. Evident Judith Merril and Asimov and Greenberg, but not T. E. Dikty found it just interesting enough to reprint in their best of 1956 anthologies. But is it padding? My guess, few years produce enough stories to fill an anthology with exceptional stories.

By the way, Mr. Mike wasn’t too kind to this story either, but he was less verbose than I in saying it:

Compounded Interest is a tissue paper thin story with a repetitive plot and uninteresting characters. 

As soon as Professor Alan Shirey is introduced toward the end of the story we realize that he must be the mysterious Mister Smith.

It's a nonsensical and tedious story.

James Wallace Harris, 12/31/23 – Happy New Year

UPDATE:

I just read “After Some Tomorrow” in the June If. Now, this is the Mack Reynolds story that Merril, Asimov/Greenberg, and Dikty should have collected as one of the best of 1956. Follow the link to read it online. It’s about gender role reversals after the apocalypse. And the plot has some nice twists. Plus, it’s quite gritty for a magazine aimed at young readers. Rating: ****+

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“The Dead Past” by Isaac Asimov

“The Dead Past” was first published in Astounding Science Fiction, April 1956. You can read it on Archive.org. It is story #11 of 22 for The Best SF Stories of 1956 group read. Even though this is one of Isaac Asimov’s better stories, it was not up for the Hugo award, nor was it selected for a best-of-the-year anthology. Of course, it was competing with “The Last Question” which many, including Asimov, considered one of his absolute best stories.

This is the fourth time I’ve read “The Dead Past,” the second time the group has discussed this story in 2023, and I previously reviewed it here. I like what I said in my previous review, so I’ll let it stand. For this essay, I want to talk about multiple readings of a story and reading reactions from different people. If you read a story only once, you’ll have only one perception of it. Reading a story again often produces a different perception. And reading what other people think of a story often produces perspectives different from our own experiences.

For example, my friend Mike is reading these stories along with the group, and here’s his reaction:

In "The Dead Past," Asimov presents the idea of chronoscopy or "time viewing." It's a method of viewing past events. In most stories, chronoscopy is simply a deus ex machina that allows the story's plot to unwind, but Asimov confounds our expectations by making chronoscopy the main "character" in the story. 

Arnold Potterly wants to use chronoscopy to view ancient Carthage. 

Potterly's wife, Caroline, wants to use it to view her deceased daughter, pleading that "I want my child." 

For Jonas Foster, the development of the chronoscope becomes "...a matter of important principle." 

Thaddeus Araman is distraught because if the chronoscope becomes widely available then "There will be no such thing as privacy."

Asimov whipsaws us through conflicting emotions about the chronoscope. Would it be good to allow Potterly to peer into the everyday events of Carthage? Would allowing Caroline to view her long dead daughter bring her happiness or detach her from reality and result in madness? What about government control of chronoscopy? Araman laments the death of privacy, ignoring the fact that the government already uses chronoscopy to spy. Isn't privacy already dead?

Chronoscopy takes center stage and Asimov skillfully allows us to view its many facets. We are left to decipher our own feelings about how it should be used.

Araman's final words are stark and signal the impending dystopian future: "You have created a new world among the three of you, I congratulate you. Happy goldfish bowl to you, to me, to everyone, may each of you fry in hell forever. Arrest rescinded."

Even after reading the story four times myself, I feel Mike saw “The Dead Past” in ways I didn’t. Mike sums up the story nicely, somewhat like I did in my previous review, but leaving me feeling he liked the story more than I did and saw it with a different spin. But what’s interesting when I started rereading the story this time, was how I noticed things that weren’t in my last review, or memory, or in Mike’s comments, or in the comments on the Facebook group.

Even short stories are full of hundreds of details, details smaller than the plot. We might think of them as brushstrokes that paint the story. With each sentence Asimov gave us, we get something to think about, and each impression could take our vision of what’s going on in the story in a different direction. Just look at the first paragraph:

Arnold Potterley, Ph.D. was a Professor of Ancient History. That in itself, was not dangerous. What changed the world beyond all dreams was the fact that he looked like a Professor of Ancient History.

Knowing the rest of the story makes me wonder why did Asimov started the story this way? The word “looked” is italicized for emphasis. Even though I’ve read this story three times before I cannot recall anything in the plot that significantly deals with Potterley’s appearance. And the next paragraph is even more enigmatic.

Thaddeus Araman, Department Head of the Division of Chronoscopy, might have taken proper action if Dr. Potterley had been owner of a large, square chin, flashing eyes, aquiline nose and broad shoulders.

WTF! Did I miss something entirely in my first three readings? What is Asimov doing here? Is he just throwing out Araman’s prejudices to color the story’s opening? Did Asimov feel he personally wasn’t taken seriously because of his own looks, and just added this in as a story insight?

The story drops appearance and switches to the topic of chronoscopy and Carthage. In my previous readings I wondered about Carthage, and why Asimov was using it in this story. Asimov wrote many books on history, so I wondered if it was a pet topic of his. During previous reading I meant to research Carthage to see if what Asimov said about Carthage was true. Did it need defending and promoting?

The story then goes into Potterley’s academic frustration of being ignored and his desperation to use the time viewer. Now and in previous readings I wondered if in 1956 if Asimov had had similar academic tiffs with his superiors? Why is so much of the plot dealing with academic rejection? I especially ask this because I know the ending of the story takes us in a completely different direction to where the story had been taking us all along. In the end, we learn that the chronoscope (time viewer) can’t go back further than a century, so there was never a chance of seeing Carthage. And we learn there’s a reason the government keeps people from using the time viewer, and it abruptly changes the tone of the story.

I’ve often heard that there are two types of writers: pantsers and plotters. Pantsers are writers who sit down and start writing whatever comes to them through inspiration. They have no idea where the story is going but feel that their muse will guide them. Plotters are writers who carefully outline their stories ahead of time and know where they are going when they sit down to write each day. They believe everything must be consciously decided, structured, and interrelated.

I get the feeling Asimov was a pantser when writing “The Dead Past,” and with my every rereading of the story only confirms that impression.

If you only read a story once, you consume it like a pantser reader. But if you read it multiple times, you consume it like a plotter reader.

I assume Asimov’s original inspiration was an idea about a professor wanting to see the past with a time viewer. Asimov quickly decided Potterley wouldn’t get to see Carthage because he would have to turn the story into historical fiction and evidently Asimov didn’t want to go in that direction. He shifted the focus to frustration over not getting the funding to do research. Had that been happening to Asimov? I think Asimov saw this focus wouldn’t get him far, so he created the subplot of getting of the accomplice to add intrigue to the story. But even then, the story didn’t have much, so Asimov added the subplot with the wife. At some point he realized the story needed an ending and an insight and decided that examining the past was a bad idea after all. He then abruptly tied up the plots and subplots.

Even though Rich Horton picked this story as one of his all-time favorites, and “The Dead Past” got voted in on a Locus Poll of all-time favorite short stories, I’m not sure if “The Dead Past” is a good story. It was only in Volume Two of Asimov’s The Complete Stories, and not in any of Asimov’s other best of collections. I assume even Asimov later recognized it was clunky.

Multiple readings have revealed more problems with writing this short story. If Asimov knew when he started writing that time viewing was limited to the past one hundred years, would he have ever written about a professor wanting to view Carthage? My guess is Asimov added the subplot of the wife’s desire to see how her child died when he realized that the final insight showed time viewing dangerous to society because of privacy. I don’t know if he knew this on day one of writing, or several days later. Asimov was known to be a furiously fast writer. He was also famous for publishing hundreds of books. I doubt he spent a lot of time rewriting. I believe Asimov just doctored the story with the wife’s subplot.

If the time viewer had limitations and the government didn’t want to use it because it would cause privacy nightmares, there’s no reason this wouldn’t be made public knowledge. I can understand the government keeping a time viewer secret. But if the public knew time viewers existed, I don’t think there would be any need to keep its limits secret, or the fact that its invasion of privacy could shatter society.

Rereading the story reveals that Asimov liked to throw in interesting tidbits along the way. I won’t chronicle any more examples other than those I’ve given, but if you read the story again, look out for them. I’m fairly sure Asimov was a pantser, and things would come to him, and he’d throw little impressions and insights into his stories as he wrote them even if they don’t work consistently with the whole story. “The Dead Past” is like a snowball rolling downhill gathering more snow and other objects, and then it splatters apart when it hits a boulder. With one reading, following along with Asimov’s inspiration kind of works. But multiple readings make me see that “The Dead Past” was thrown together.

JWH

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“Legwork” by Eric Frank Russell

“Legwork” was first published in Astounding Science Fiction, April 1956. You can read it on Archive.org. It is story #10 of 22 for The Best SF Stories of 1956 group read. “Legwork” was a finalist for the 1956 Hugo Award for novelette, but it was not collected into any of the best of the year anthologies even though I think it’s a four-star-plus story. It did get an honorable mention by Judith Merril.

“Legwork” was rarely anthologized, but Mike Ashley reprinted in Future Crimes in 2021 as part of his British Library Science Fiction Classics series. Here’s Ashley’s introduction for “Legwork.” It makes me want to read more Eric Frank Russell, but then I say that every time I review one of his stories. I need to do what I say.

Eric Frank Russell (1905–1978) was one of Britain’s leading sf writers in the 1950s, alongside Arthur C. Clarke and John Wyndham, but his reputation has faded since he more-or-less stopped writing in 1965. He honed his craft on reading American pulps in the 1930s and could muster a passable American idiom. He enjoyed pulp crime fiction. When he finalized his first novel, Sinister Barrier, which involves the investigation by a special government agent into a series of unusual and unexplained deaths, Russell modelled it on the American pulp G-Men. It clearly worked. John W. Campbell, Jr., bought it for the first issue of Unknown, and the novel, about aliens controlling humans, became instantly popular. Russell enjoyed creating strange mysteries investigated by the police in such early stories as “Shadow-Man” (1938) where the police try and find an invisible criminal, or “Seat of Oblivion” (1941) with the police trying to find a criminal who can possess other people. One of his last books, With a Strange Device (1964), issued in America as The Mindwarpers, was an expansion of a novella which first appeared in a detective pulp in 1956 and many critics argued it was not science fiction at all, but a Cold War thriller about the manipulation of scientists’ minds. I have no doubt Russell would have made a good crime-fiction writer had he put his mind to it. The following story, written and set in 1955, pits human ingenuity against alien ability.

Future Crimes: Mysteries and Detection Through Time and Space. British Library Publishing. Kindle Edition.

“Legwork” introduces us to Harasha Vanash, an invader from Andromeda, who can control minds for a radius of one mile. This allows him to pass as anything his victims can imagine. For all intents and purposes, Vanash is a shapeshifter. “Legwork” begins with Vanash landing his spaceship out in the middle of nowhere, sending the spaceship back up into a parking orbit, hiding the ship’s remote controller in a hollow stump, and heading out to invade Earth alone. Vanash has invaded fifty worlds and is quite confident he will quickly take over our planet. Vanash makes himself seen as a human to the people who see him, hitches a ride to a nearby city, gets a room in a boarding house, and starts studying our ways. Here’s how Russell’s prose sounds:

Once settled and observing that money is essential to our way of life, Vanash sets out to get a steady supply. The story then cuts to Edward G. Rider, a genuine human who works at the United States Treasury. Rider is a big guy, weighing two hundred and fifty pounds. He’s recently married and is quite annoyed by his boss assigning him to an out-of-town job investigating a rather strange bank robbery.

Wikipedia has a fascinating article about the long history of shapeshifting in myth and fiction. It’s a theme that comes up in science fiction often. In myth and fantasy, magic causes shapeshifting, but in science fiction, the writer must come up with a good explanation for it.

“Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr. is a famous 1938 science fiction shapeshifting story that might have inspired Russell. I especially wonder that after reading Ashley’s introduction. Campbell asks us to believe in “Who Goes There?” that an alien organism can restructure its body instantly, and the mystery is how to detect such an organism. In “Legwork” the shapeshifting is all illusion, and the humans don’t even know there is a shapeshifter. A good portion of the story is working out how mysterious bank robberies are taking place and coming up with a theory about a shapeshifting crook.

Eric Frank Russell’s “Legwork” could have been a great 1950s film noir movie because it’s about gritty routine detective work. Orson Welles was about the right size in 1956 to play Eddie Rider if you think about his 1958 film Touch of Evil. Russell does an excellent job of producing a police procedural in “Legwork.” In fact, it’s exactly the kind of police procedurals people saw in black and white movies of the 1950s. Imagine seeing The Asphalt Jungle, Odds Against Tomorrow and The Thing from Another World mixed into a slick film noir. I would love to see it. That’s how I imagined “Legwork” when I read it.

And thinking about shapeshifting science fiction and 1950s black and white films, I’m also reminded of Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956. It was a metaphorical take on shapeshifting, designed to make us think about communism. “Legwork” isn’t metaphorical, it’s straight-ahead science fictional alien invasion story. What’s weird is our short story reading group just read “Counterfeit” by Alan E. Nourse, another shapeshifting themed story, but not as good as “Legwork” because Nourse’s prose showed bad pulp fiction writing habits while Russell’s did a slick writing job with “Legwork.”

Russell has a light touch in this story, it’s not humorous like his two most famous SF stories, “Allamagoosa” and “… And Then There Were None,” but “Legwork” has just enough subtle sarcasm and faintly absurd situations that we know that Russell is making fun of Vanash’s overconfidence in conquering us humans. Russell also throws in some nice touches along the way. A teen who is an amateur astronomer with a home built 8″ reflector telescope discovers Vanash’s spaceship in orbit. Me and my buddies tried to grind an 8″ inch telescope mirror and failed when I was a teenager. There are two places where dogs start yelping and run off. That lets us know dogs that see what Vanash really looks like and it must be pretty damn scary.

“Exploration Team” by Murray Leinster won the novelette Hugo in 1956. I thought it a pretty good story, but until now in our group read 67, I thought “Brightside Crossing” by Alan E. Nourse should have gotten that Hugo. Now I’m thinking “Legwork” deserved the trophy. I wonder how many times I will change my mind when we read the next twelve stories?

My friend Mike also liked “Legwork” and sent me these comments:

“Legwork” is an interesting humans vs. aliens story, a well-worn science fiction trope that is skillfully manipulated by Eric Frank Russell.


Russell immediately introduces us to Harasha Vanash, an Andromedan thought-form whose “…natural power had been tested on fifty hostile worlds and found invincible.” Vanash is a menace to Earth when “…he’d discovered an especially juicy plum, a world deserving of eventual confiscation by the Andromedon horde.”


Russell’s genius is that he sets the stage for the impending confrontation by contrasting the Andromedon and human problem solving abilities.


The Andromedons depend upon “…flashes of inspiration that come spontaneously, of their own accord. They cannot be created to order no matter how great the need.”


Humans depend on hard work: “Variously it was called making the grade, slogging along, doing it the hard way, or just plain lousy legwork. Whoever heard of such a thing?”


As the story progresses, the humans work tirelessly to solve the problem of the mysterious bank robberies perpetrated by Vanash. Eddie Rider, a special investigator with the feel of a Sydney Greenstreet character, leads the investigation with aplomb.


The humans ultimately triumph and the alien is vanquished. Mankind is preserved. An entertaining and worthwhile story.

James Wallace Harris, 12/18/23

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“A Gun for Dinosaur” by L. Sprague de Camp

“A Gun for Dinosaur” was first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1956. You can read it on Archive.org. It is story #9 of 22 for The Best SF Stories of 1956 group read. “A Gun for Dinosaur” was a finalist for the 1956 Hugo Award for best novelette, and has been reprinted often. Read the Wikipedia entry for more details about the history of this story.

The first time I read “A Gun for Dinosaur” I thought it just another ho-hum story of big game hunters time traveling to the past to kill big dinosaurs. It lacked the surprise punch of “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury, nor did it have the fun sneering satire of “Poor Little Warrior” by Brian Aldiss. This time around I liked “A Gun for Dinosaur” a lot more, mainly because I paid closer attention to the details L. Sprague de Camp used to paint his story.

It’s interesting that the three stories about time travel and dinosaurs involve big game hunting. Even in de Camp’s 1956 story, he thinks big game hunting has become less popular and must justify the sport in the story. Also, I’m sure de Camp wrote “A Gun for Dinosaur” in a kind of reply to Bradbury’s 1952 “A Sound of Thunder.” By the time Aldiss got around to writing about hunting dinosaurs in 1958, his “Poor Little Warrior” demolishes the theme with biting words. But if you read below, I found eight anthologies devoted to science fiction and dinosaurs. I can’t imagine how the theme could be covered uniquely every time.

“A Gun for Dinosaur” is told within a frame. Time-travel safari guide, Reginald Rivers starts the story by telling a Mr. Seligman why he can’t take him hunting for late-Mesozoic dinosaur. He explains to Seligman that he doesn’t weigh enough to handle a gun powerful enough to kill a dinosaur. First, Rivers goes into describing the kinds of guns needed and why Mr. Seligman is too small and light to use them. To further justify rejecting Mr. Seligman, Rivers tells the story about taking two men, Courtney James, and August Holtzinger, back to the past, and how Holtzinger’s failure to handle a large bore rifle cost him his life, and nearly ruined Rivers’ safari business.

Most of “A Gun for Dinosaur” is Rivers’ account of hunting with James and Holtzinger. It reminds me a bit of Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” The story is about human personalities, rather than dinosaurs. De Camp could have written the same essential story set in Africa hunting elephants. I think that’s why I was somewhat bored with the story the first time I read it. Then I glazed over all the dinosaur information to follow the plot. This time I marveled more about the setting and was impressed with the details de Camp had to know to write the story. De Camp later revised the story for his collection Rivers of Time to update the science.

While reading “A Gun for Dinosaur” I kept thinking that I’ve read many science fiction stories about time travel back to the age of dinosaurs, but except for Dinosaur Beach by Keith Laumer and the Bradbury and Aldiss short stories, I couldn’t recall the names of any of the others. With the help of ISFDB.org I found eight anthologies devoted to dinosaurs in science fiction. Although, I don’t know if all of them involve time travel.

Click the links to see the table of contents:

Also, while poking around ISFDB.org I saw that “A Gun for Dinosaur” was first anthologized in The World That Couldn’t Be and 8 Other Novelets from Galaxy edited by H. L. Gold. It reprints nine stories from 1954-1959, three of which I’ve read, and two of which I especially love, “Brightside Crossing” by Alan E. Nourse and “The Music Master of Babylon” by Edgar Pangborn. Since I’ve been reviewing stories from this period, I decided I needed to track down a copy. Checking my Goodreads revealed I already own the paperback — cool!

My buddy Mike, who is reading these stories with me, didn’t really like “A Gun for Dinosaur.”

"A Gun for Dinosaur" is an insubstantial time travel story that reminds me of the Winston book Danger: Dinosaurs! by Richard Marsten (Evan Hunter), which was published a few years before.
Lots of action and dinosaurs and stock characters. It aims low and hits the target.

That could have been my reaction the first time I read “A Gun for Dinosaur.” And Mike is right, the story is full of action with stock characters. However, this time I thought more about how de Camp wrote the story. I believe the story is well told but its quality is not literary, but quality pulp fiction. I like how de Camp mixed African and Indian safari terms into the story. I know L. Sprague de Camp was a world traveler and was quite a scholar. I believe he wrote as much nonfiction as science fiction, and “A Gun for Dinosaur” reflects that. De Camp includes lots of facts without sounding like he’s info-dumping.

I figure I’ll reread “A Gun for Dinosaur” in the future. In the last third of my life, I’ve discovered that fiction, either printed or on screen, gets better on rereading and rewatching. I wonder what Mike would think if he reread “A Gun for Dinosaur” in ten years. I might like it even more in ten years — if I’m around. Come back in a decade and I’ll let you know.

James Wallace Harris, 12/15/23