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“Two Dooms” by C. M. Kornbluth

“Two Dooms” by C. M. Kornbluth is story #17 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “Two Dooms” was first published in Venture Science Fiction (July 1958). “Two Dooms” was a posthumously published story since Kornbluth had died earlier that year in March. (By the way, “Two Dooms” is available in The Best of C. M. Kornbluth which is selling today at Amazon for 99 cents for the Kindle edition.)

I finally struck gold. I read these old anthologies hoping to find great science fiction stories I’ve missed, and “Two Dooms” is one such work. I can’t believe I missed it. My memory is faulty, so I could have read it. Decades ago I owned A Mile Beyond the Moon, Kornbluth’s collection that first put the story in book form. I’ve also owned, The Best of C. M. Kornbluth for decades, as well as both the hardback and audiobook of His Share of the Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth, and three anthologies in which “Two Dooms” has been anthologized. Kornbluth is one of those authors I’ve always meant to dive into and read all their stories but never have. “Two Dooms” makes me regret that.

The best way I can describe “Two Dooms” that will make you read it is to say: “Two Dooms” is probably the story that inspired Philip K. Dick to write The Man in the High Castle. I have no way of knowing if PKD read “Two Dooms” but it really feels like it. I’m not saying Dick copied Kornbluth, but like many science fiction stories, many writers read about a juicy idea and want to use it too, but in their own way.

And it’s not just that Dick’s novel and Kornbluth’s novella are alternative histories where Germany and Japan win WWII and occupy the United States — several writers have explored that idea, it’s that each writer chose a mystical philosophy to flavor their story. PKD uses the I Ching and Kornbluth uses Hopi Indians and psychedelic medicine. Both authors gave a low-level view of the occupation. Both authors were concerned with the little people at ground level rather than the big historical perspective. But finally, I think the stories feel similar because both writers were tortured souls.

Kornbluth’s POV character is Dr. Edward Royland, a young physicist working at Los Alamos, New Mexico on the Manhattan Project during WWII. It’s early on, and they aren’t even sure they can build a bomb. Royland isn’t happy with his job, especially working in the miserable heat. One day after work he drives into the desert to meet his friend Charles Miller Nahataspe, a Hopi Indian shaman. This part of the story reminds me tremendously of Carlos Castanada’s books. Kornbluth gives us a fair amount of information about how the Hopi see reality differently from us and even claims the Theory of Relativity is something Hopi understand as children because they have no concept of time like we do. I wonder what books Kornbluth read that inspired him to write this part?

Nahataspe gives Royland some dried, blacken mushrooms. He tells Royland because he doesn’t see reality clearly, they will be safe to experience — that Royland’s cloudy vision of reality will protect him. But Nahataspe was wrong, Royland’s vision isn’t cloudy, and the magic mushrooms take him into the future where the Axis powers rule America.

It’s interesting to compare Kornbluth’s and Dick’s methods of getting their characters into an alternate history. Kornbluth uses the old-fashion literary technique of putting his character to sleep and having them wake up in a new world. Dick begins his story in the alternate history, and one of the amusing aspects of his method, is his characters speculate about our reality.

In olden times, the first-person account was considered the gold standard of believability. That’s why so many old novels have a frame where we learn how the story came about. Modern storytelling has dropped the frame. But with “The Two Dooms” Kornbluth needs Royland to go and come back, and using mystical Native American magic works well as a frame.

Both stories tell what living under Germans and Japanese would be like, and that’s where the two stories differ. While under Japanese rule, Royland spends his time with Chinese peasants, but when he’s on the other side, he spends time with higher-ranking Germans. Kornbluth stereotypes his nationalistic characterizations, but it’s not done in a simple way. I did feel that Kornbluth did quite a lot of research on this story, especially the parts about Los Alamos and the Hopi Native Americans. Since I recently read a nonfiction book about the Manhattan Project, I thought Kornbluth captured some interesting historical details.

I especially like when Kornbluth described a roomful of women as the computer department and Royland wished he had an analog differentiator. All through “Two Dooms” Kornbluth mentions details that entertained me. For example, when Royland leaves his office at the end of the day, Kornbluth says, “Mechanically he locked his desk drawers and his files, turned his window lock, and set out his waster-paper basket in the corridor.” It’s the detail of the waste-paper basket and window that impressed me. Royland’s work is top secret, so it’s logical he would lock his files. But if everything is locked up, how can custodians empty the trash? And it’s 103 degrees at 5:45, so we know the windows are open, and it would be important to lock them too.

Here’s the scene where Royland first enters Nahataspe hut. Notice all the little details Kornbluth sticks in here. Also, notice the humor.

I’ve really got to read more Kornbluth. I’ve been thinking that since I watched Bookpilled’s review of The Best of C. M. Kornbluth. It impressed me that a young guy in his thirties found so much to admire in a mostly forgotten science fiction writer that died over sixty years ago. (Also reviewed are Hothouse, Blood Music, and Nova.)

James Wallace Harris, 6/13/23

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“Pairpuppets” by Manuel van Loggem

“Pairpuppets” by Manuel van Loggem is story #16 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “Pairpuppets” was first published in Dutch in Morgen #5 (December 1972) and first translated into English for The Best from the Rest of the World: European Science Fiction (1976), edited by Donald A. Wollheim.

“Pairpuppets” is about a young man, Eric, who is getting bored sexually with his current girlfriend, Tina. Eric lives in a future utopia/dystopia where every citizen’s sexual partner is selected by computers with the goal of fulfilling their sexual needs. The plot of this story follows Eric in his search for a new sexually satisfying partner.

Even though the goal of this society is utopian, aiming to make all its citizens happy, humans easily become dissatisfied. So we can also view this society as a dystopia. Basically, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.

I thought “Pairpuppets” was okay as a story, but the storytelling came across as a dry parable. The ending was predictable but realistic. However, I did like the level of detail Loggen used to explain Eric’s plight. Obviously, the author wanted to say a lot about sexual desire and brings up a good many related issues. The story gives us much to think about and would make a great discussion story for a high school literature class (if they allowed discussions of sex (but aren’t we becoming dystopian in that area?)).

I’ve also been thinking about why stories like “Pairpuppets” disappoint me. The biggest problem is I’ve read too much science fiction and I compare every new story I read against the memory of all my favorite science fiction short stories. It’s extremely hard for any new story to compete with my Lifetime Top 100 Science Fiction Short Stories.

Then there is the much smaller problem of pet peeves. “Pairpuppets” is about sexbots, one of my least favorite science fiction themes. Of course, if I had read “Pairpuppets” in 1972 when it first came out (and could read Dutch) it might have been a more entertaining idea. That brings up a third problem with reading SF anthologies — they contain old stories, and thus old ideas.

Now, David Hartwell, had a lifetime of science fiction reading behind him when he selected “Pairpuppets” for this anthology in 1989, so both of my issues weren’t a problem for him. That means, like this story, The World Treasury of Science Fiction is a utopia for Hartwell, but sometimes dystopian for me. The word treasury in the title implies the anthology is where a treasure of science fiction is stored. And like the old saying, “One man’s treasure is another man’s trash.”

“Pairpuppets” is far from trash to me, but it just doesn’t light up my reading soul. Good but no cigar.

Another problem with these translated stories, is they are often on the short side. Shorter short stories often feel condensed, and that hurts their impact, except maybe for intellectuals who love cleverness over other virtues. Cleverness works well at short lengths — just think of Saturday Night Live. (By the way, SNL bores me since I left my twenties.)

I prefer short stories that dramatically reveal the emotional development of a character in a specific situation, ending with an epiphany. If Loggen had written this story with more drama, spending twice as many words, showing us Eric’s development rather than telling us, I might have liked “Pairpuppets” quite a lot more.

I believe “Pairpuppets” would be fine in anthologies that didn’t aim so high, like a theme anthology about sex in science fiction, or an anthology of foreign science fiction that didn’t claim it was the best. I have to assume editors working in English are limited to what foreign stories they can acquire that have been translated into English. And I don’t assume translators always pick the best of the best. My guess is they might pick stories their translation skills can handle. Finally, we don’t know if “Pairpuppets” wasn’t a much better story in its original Dutch.

I haven’t read that many translated stories, and the ones I have, like War and Peace, and Anna Karenina are considered to be among the world’s greatest novels. And when I read those two novels I did study their histories of being translated and tried to find the best translation to read. Also, anyone who reads The Bible knows there are way too many translations to compare, and the problems involved.

Every time I read an anthology or collection of translated science fiction short stories I’ve been disappointed. I don’t know if I’m just hitting a language barrier, or if the stories just aren’t as good as I hope they would be, or maybe they weren’t the best to begin with.

Also, think about this. “Pairpuppets” is how I think of Dutch science fiction now, even though it’s just one story from 1972. Let’s assume it’s a fantastic story in Dutch. But what will people from Holland think of American science fiction if the only story they’ve ever read is “Bears Discover Fire” — even if it has a perfect translation?

James Wallace Harris, 6/10/23

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“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester

“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester is story #15 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (October 1958).

Alfred Bester is a weird writer. He doesn’t like to just tell a plain story but works out various weird ways to tell stories cleverly. Bester is best known for writing The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, but when the name Alfred Bester comes up, I think of his short story “Fondly Fahrenheit.” That’s Bester’s most famous science fiction short story according to our data. “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” comes in second with the same data. I wish Hartwell had used “Fondly Fahrenheit” instead of “The Man Who Murdered Mohammed” because Bester gave us a real story with “Fondly Fahrenheit,” even though it’s very weird and tricky to read too.

For me, “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” comes across like “5,271,009,” my second favorite Bester short story, in that he’s making fun of science fiction. This might be heretical to the science fiction faithful, but I feel Bester looked down on us science fiction readers. “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” is making fun of time travel stories, while poking the writing of science fiction in the ribs, and giving us a wink-wink. I thought that was also true with “5,271,009” – see my review of that story.

Now, I don’t mind Bester looking down on us. He’s obviously far smarter than me, and our genre does shovel out a lot of silly crap worthy of satire. I’ve taken a graduate course on humor in literature and humor often bites the hand that feeds it.

“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” is an obvious farce. It’s about a wildly brilliant mad scientist, Henry Hassel, professor of Applied Compulsion at Unknown University. Hassel comes home one day and discovers his red-headed wife in the arms of another man. Instead of yelling, “What the fuck is going on here,” Henry dashes to his lab, invents a time machine, and goes back in time to kill one of his wife’s grandfathers. But upon returning to the scene of the tryst, his red-headed spouse is still smooching another. So Henry goes back and kills one of his wife’s grandmothers. That doesn’t work either. Henry decides he must wipe out a significant event in time to affect the present and goes on a killing spree blasting more and more famous people with his .45 — but with no success. Eventually, Henry meets another time traveler who also claims to have murdered Mohammed. Upon reflection, this leads to new theories about the nature of time and travel within.

It’s a rather stupid theory about time travel that Bester assumes will amuse science fiction readers because it’s clever — and unique. “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” and “5,271,000” are outright farces. They are fun enough, but they aren’t engaging stories like “Fondly Fahrenheit.” Now, don’t get me wrong, “Fondly Fahrenheit” is batshit crazy — but it has a compelling plot and characters with decent fictional conflicts to solve. Now, that I think about it, I’m sure Bester wrote “Fondly Fahrenheit” at our expense too – thinking science fiction readers will believe anything. And I did with “Fondly Fahrenheit.”

That’s the difference between “Fondly Fahrenheit” and “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” — while reading “Fondly Fahrenheit” I forget I’m being told a story, I suspended my disbelief, and just get into the story. With “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” I just read along admiring Bester’s cleverness, never forgetting I’m reading a story, especially a story by a man trying to wow us with his ability to be witty.

A lot of humor fiction is absurd. A lot of literary science fiction is intentionally absurd to be clever. I don’t like that. If I’m reading a story and all I notice is cleverness then I never forget myself and drop into the story. Novels like The Confederacy of Dunces, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or Mindswap are over-the-top absurd. But I stop looking for how the magician did their tricks and just let myself be fooled. That’s fun.

I never stopped watching Bester do his tricks in “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed.” Oh, it’s still a good story, but its main virtue is cleverness. Unfortunately, cleverness alone is never enough for me, no matter how clever the story gets.

To make my point, here are the first two pages of the story:

Writing the above about “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” clarifies to myself, the kind of story I want to read. I’ve been starting a lot of novels lately that I give up on quickly. Lately, I’ve been hungry to get into a good novel, but I keep being frustrated by not finding one. Maybe I know a little more about how to spot one I will like.

I’m not saying the tried and true methods of fiction are the only way to tell a story, but for me, I need them. I guess I shouldn’t say Hartwell shouldn’t have included “The Man Who Murdered Mohammed” in The World Treasury of Science Fiction — it’s his anthology, but it does disappoint me. “Fondly Fahrenheit” is Bester’s story to remember. It’s his masterpiece.

James Wallace Harris, 6/7/23

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“The Blind Pilot” by Nathalie-Charles Henneberg

“The Blind Pilot” by Nathalie Henneberg is story #14 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Blind Pilot,” translated by Damon Knight from the original French, “Au pilote aveugle“ (Fiction #68, July 1959) was first published in English in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (January 1960).

Instead of paraphrasing David Hartwell’s introduction, I’ll just let you read it.

“The Blind Pilot” is real science fiction. Hartwell says it resembles Roger Zelazny’s early work, but it reminded me of a cross between 1950s Alfred Bester and 1960s Samuel R. Delany. Of course, there’s no telling what flavor of writing the original story gave off in the French.

Basically, the story is about an alien who could be from a race of beings that inspired the Siren in Homer’s epic. This idea comes up now and again: fantastic beings in old literature could have been aliens from the stars. To make the story even more exotic, the two humans who encounter the alien are a blind man who used to be a space pilot and his younger brother who is severely crippled. Those two remind me of Delany characters, the alien weirdness reminds me of Bester, and the tie-in to mythology reminds me of Zelazny. But Henneberg couldn’t have known about Delany and Zelazny since the story pre-dates them as writers. That’s why I also say “The Blind Pilot” is real science fiction and not some roped-in foreign literary effort that anthologists want to claim is science fiction.

There were sentences on this page that slightly reminded me of the “Tears in the Rain” scene from Blade Runner.

Even though I consider this story real science fiction and a decent science fiction story, I don’t believe it’s a great SF story. It never takes off, but it does cruise along nicely. A great SF story like “Fondly Fahrenheit,” punches us throughout with unforgettable edginess, while a story like “The Moon Moth” dazzles us constantly with creative imagery. Those stories stay with us. “The Blind Pilot” will fade away quickly.

When you read a lot of science fiction, especially a lot of great science fiction, you realize just how hard it must be to write something spectacular. Our short story club reads anthology after anthology and we often find stories we wonder why they were anthologized at all. Hartwell had certain goals when he aimed to create an anthology that represented science fiction from both the 20th century and stories from around the world. So, far when we’ve read stories from other countries we seldom read ones I think are as great as the best from the English-speaking world. Is that because of translations? Or am I just prejudiced toward my own culture? Maybe, certain SF classics have been burned into my mind, and no new ones, no matter what the language, can compete?

We still have a long way to go in The World Treasury of Science Fiction, so Hartwell still has plenty of opportunity to surprise me. But there’s another problem to consider. I’ve read so many science fiction short stories that I feel that less than 200, maybe even less than 100 stand out from the thousands I’ve read. All too often I feel like I’m comparing all the horses that have won the Kentucky Derby to all the horses that race on any track. And that might not be fair.

But it is what it is. There’s a reason why our method of finding stories for our Classics of Science Fiction Short Story list works so well. When I say a story is only pretty good it’s because I’m comparing them to these stories. The competition is fierce.

James Wallace Harris, 6/6/23

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“The Chaste Planet” by John Updike

“The Chaste Planet” by John Updike is story #13 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Chaste Planet” was initially published in The New Yorker (11/10/75).

“The Chaste Planet” isn’t much of a science fiction short story — it’s more of an effort to be a humorous essay that riffs on a decent science-fictional idea but I thought pulled off in a crummy way. What if there were aliens who obsessed over music like humans obsess over sex? John Updike is a literary writer, who has criticized our genre in the past, so I can’t believe he takes his story very seriously. And I’m not talking about the concept, but the execution of the concept as science fiction.

And it’s hard to take this story seriously when it begins, “In 1999, space explorers discovered that within the warm, turbulent, semi-liquid immensity of Jupiter, a perfectly pleasant little planet twirled, with argon skies and sparkling seas of molten beryllium.” I assume he was imagining a planet orbiting inside Jupiter’s atmosphere. But wouldn’t that be another moon? And wouldn’t the atmosphere cause enough friction to quickly de-orbit this world? The planet was called Minerva.

This planet is inhabited by eighteen-inch-tall beings with six toothpick-thin legs. These creatures reveal no sign of sexual reproduction, but it is eventually learned that music is everything to their culture, including forms of kinkiness. At best this story is cute, but even that’s a stretch. It’s the kind of story that people who don’t read science fiction think is science fiction. I find such efforts insulting.

I don’t know why Hartwell included this story in The World Treasury of Science Fiction other than to capitalize on Updike’s name. Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss had “The Chaste Planet” in their annual Best SF: 75, and I assume for the same exact reason. I consider it a pathetic gesture of “See, even famous literary authors write science fiction!”

When I was young back in the 1970s when this kind of thing was popular. Many in the genre wanted academic recognition and respect. I also thought it wonderful our genre was finally being accepted. But there was a writer or critic back then that rejected these efforts at critical recognition. I wish I remembered who it was, but he (maybe she) said something like this: “Throw science fiction back in the gutter where it belongs.”

Now that I’m older, I agree with that. If Robert Sheckley had written “The Chaste Planet” it would have been entertaining in the way I expect science fiction to entertain, and not some literary effort at slumming.

James Wallace Harris, 6/3/23

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“The Fifth Head of Cerberus” by Gene Wolfe

“The Fifth Head of Cerberus” by Gene Wolfe is story #12 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” was initially published in Orbit 10 and edited by Damon Knight in 1972. Wolfe published “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” in his collection by the same name, with two related novellas: “‘A Story,’ by John V. Marsch” and “V.R.T.” (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972). Later editions would treat the collection as a novel.

Gene Wolfe has an immense reputation as a significant writer in the science fiction genre. He was awarded the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) in 2013. He is best known for his novel series, The Book of the New Sun (4 vols. 1980-1983), and follow-up related series. Wolfe dedicated the book version of The Fifth Head of Cerberus to Damon Knight, who was his writing teacher, editor, and mentor. In The Best of Gene Wolfe, Wolfe wrote an afterward to “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” where he explained the importance of this story and Damon Knight:

If the New Wave in science fiction had never been defined, Damon Knight’s original anthology series, Orbit (1966-1980) would have shown that the writing of science fiction was undergoing a significant revolution. Stories like “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” were just different, taking the genre to a whole new level. In his introduction to the story in Modern Classics of Science Fiction, Gardner Dozois wrote about when he first read “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” as a manuscript while attending the Mitford Writers Conference in 1970.

The last time I read “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” I ordered the hardback of the collection because I was so impressed with how the story was written. I haven’t read many Gene Wolfe stories, they are dense and hard to digest, but I’ve been impressed with what I have read. I should read The Book of the New Sun since it’s so widely praised, but I don’t know if I can take such a large concentration of Wolfe’s prose. Many reviewers who gush about The Book of the New Sun say it takes multiple readings to get into the story.

“The Fifth Head of Cerberus” is a mysterious tale to comprehend. The story itself is about several mysteries. In some ways, I felt the setting was the French Quarter in antebellum New Orleans, but it’s actually twenty light years from Earth, on the planet Sainte Croix. Sainte Croix and Sainte Anne are part of a double-planet system that was originally settled by French-speaking people. The plot line takes a long time to develop, and along the way, Wolfe keeps dropping more bits to wonder about. It is hinted that Sainte Croix was originally inhabited by an intelligent species of shape shifters and the current inhabitants, including our narrator Number Five, might be human or aboriginal. I don’t want to tell you too much, if Wolfe wanted to string his readers along, why should I give things out ahead of time?

The story begins with the narrator describing his early years with his brother David in a rather exotic house of prostitution. Slavery exists on Sainte Croix. The boys are raised by a robot named Mister Million who hints at many strange past details during their upbringing. Their father is another source of curiosity. Who and what the narrator might be further clouds this tale. “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” feels like gothic horror rather than science fiction. And even when the story is completed, you never feel you know everything, even after multiple readings.

Ultimately, the story is one of atmosphere, even hallucinogenic and dreamy in many places. It was intentionally meant to be confusing. Whether you like that or not depends.

Like I said, I can only take Wolfe in small doses, but when I do read him I’m impressed.

James Wallace Harris, 6/1/23

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“The Valley of Echoes” by Gérard Klein

“The Valley of Echoes” by Gérard Klein is story #11 of 52 from the anthology The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989) that my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Valley of Echoes” was originally published in France as “La vallée des échos” in the magazine Satellite in March 1959, and was first translated into English for the anthology View From Another Shore edited by Franz Rottensteiner. It was also reprinted in The Road to Science Fiction, Volume 6: Around the World edited by James Gunn.

Gérard Klein is a French science fiction writer and editor who was born in 1937 and is still alive according to Wikipedia and ISFDB. The most I could find out about him was in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and it wasn’t much. It only shows how language is such a barrier, but looking at the covers from these four translated novels published by DAW I might like to try one, especially after reading, “The Valley of Echoes.”

“The Valley of Echoes” is what I call pre-NASA science fiction. It’s also about Mars, and in 1959, even before Mariner 4 Klein didn’t hold out much hope of finding life on Mars. However, his three astronauts secretly want to drive over the next Martian sand dune and discover an ancient dead Martian city.

I grew up with a Schiaparelli map of Mars poster on my bedroom wall. I held out hope we’d find Martians on Mars until July 1964 when Mariner 4 flew by Mars and took 22 photographs of Mars. Mars looked more like the Moon than Barsoom. I’ve written about this before in “I Miss Martians” and “Science Fiction Before NASA.”

It’s kind of a fascinating coincidence that I read “The Valley of Echoes” today because yesterday I read “High Weir” by Samuel R. Delany, another story about Mars. “High Weir” and “The Valley of Echoes” have an interesting overlap in that they both have a human explorer on Mars that goes crazy. In Delany’s story, his astronauts do find a dead ancient Martian city. Since his story came out in 1968, Delany was holding out hope even after Mariner 4.

I was disappointed in Delany’s story because the focus wasn’t on Martian archeology but on holograms and mental illness. Klein’s story deromanticizes space exploration while showing how we still hoped to find Martians.

Klein does throw us a bone for our romantic hopes by having, his astronauts, Ferrier, LaSalle, and the narrator stumble upon a strange valley that collects echoes of the past. I was never sure if what they heard was real or delusion. My skeptical nature thinks it was the latter, but again Klein plays up to our desires. Ferrier, like Rimky in “High Weir” went insane on Mars.

Klein is being both realistic about what we’ll find on Mars, and realistic about how our hopes influence what we want to find. “The Valley of Echoes” might be a good story for Joachim Boaz’s list of SF stories that challenge the romanticism of space exploration.

No mention of science fiction is found in “The Valley of Echoes” but I can’t help but believe it’s recursive science fiction. Yesterday I watched a short video on YouTube about philosophy and HP Grice’s paper “Logic and Conversation” which deals with the dynamics of communication. There can be more information in a conversation than just the words we say. Klein has written a story intended for science fiction fans. He knows how we think, so the story doesn’t have to say everything because Klein knows it will trigger certain thoughts in us.

“The Valley of Echoes” is about the realism of exploring Mars. His astronauts are bored and tired of driving up and down Martian sand dunes. In their hearts, they want to find what they’ve always dreamed about finding on Mars. Suddenly, they do find something different, and they desperately want it to fulfill their expectations. But does it? He also knows we want that too, and that will affect how we read the story.

James Wallace Harris, 5/30/23

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“A Meeting With Medusa” by Arthur C. Clarke

“A Meeting With Medusa” by Arthur C. Clarke is story #10 of 52 from the anthology The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989) that my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “A Meeting With Medusa” first appeared in Playboy, in December 1971.

“A Meeting With Medusa” is among Arthur C. Clarke’s best works of science fiction, including Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The City and The Stars. And I like it better than any of his more famous shorter works including, “The Nine Billion Names of God,” “The Star,” “The Sentinel,” and “Rescue Party.” I believe it’s his best work of hard science fiction, and probably one of the best works of hard science fiction by anybody.

The story is set up with Howard Falcon surviving a dramatic crash of a giant dirigible on Earth. Years later, he is descending into the atmosphere of Jupiter where he mans a monstrous hot-hydrogen balloon. Clarke was never known for writing literary fiction and wasn’t particularly good with characterization and drama, but this story has both.

“A Meeting With Medusa” reminds me of two other classic science fiction stories, “The Martian Odyssey” by Stanley G. Weinbaum and “Call Me Joe” by Poul Anderson. I don’t want to explain why because I don’t want to spoil the reading of “A Meeting With Medusa.” If you know those two stories, you’ll have a couple of hints.

“A Meeting With Medusa” has been reprinted often, and it won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1973. It has also been translated into many languages. This is not a story to miss if you love science fiction. I believe this is the third time our SF short story group has read “A Meeting for Medusa,” and it is well admired.

“A Meeting With Medusa” resonates with our deepest desires for science fiction. We want to explore the universe, and we want to find amazing wonders of nature and lifeforms, and I think most of all, we don’t want to be alone. Most of us will never leave Earth, so science fiction empowers our imaginations to go where we can’t.

I’ve always thought of science fiction as a tool for speculating about the future. History is a tool that lets us know the past, but we can’t know the future like history teaches us about the past. Science fiction can only extrapolate upon endless possibilities. I’d love to know the history of the future, to what will come after I die, but that’s impossible. Science fiction gives me hints, enough to soothe that desire to know the future just a tiny bit.

To me, the best hard science fiction leaves me with the feeling that whatever it imagines might possibly come to be after I die.

James Wallace Harris, 5/27/23

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“The New Prehistory” by René Rebetez-Cortes

“The New Prehistory” by René Rebetez-Cortes is story #9 of 52 from the anthology The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989) that my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The New Prehistory” was evidently first published as a short story in a periodical in 1964 according to the only record I can find. It was collected in La Nueva Prehistoria Y Otros Cuentos in 1967, translated as The New Prehistory and Other Tales by René Rebetez. The site linked above lists 19 short stories, all labeled science fiction.

According to David Hartwell in his introduction to the story, “The New Prehistory” was translated by Damon Knight and was first published in 1972. So the publishing history varies. Hartwell says Rebetez-Cortes was Columbian but the cover of the author collection above suggests something different. Google says he was born in Subachoque, Columbia in 1933 and died on December 30, 1999, in Isla de Providencia, Columbia.

“The New Prehistory” is a very short literary allegory that could be called introverted horror. It’s about a man going to a movie but hates waiting in line. He steps away from the line while watching his friend wait in the queue. Then the line becomes possessed by some unseen force and all the people in the line start acting like they’re part of one giant snake-like organism. People who stood in groups became giant amoeba-like organisms. Individuals stayed individuals. Eventually, the new giant organisms take over the world and hunt the individuals.

Even though a lot of people are calling “The New Prehistory” science fiction I’m not. It’s the kind of fantastic story I heard read in creative writing classes from high school to graduate school. In every writing class there always seemed to be one student who everyone thought was brilliant who would write these kinds of fantastic allegories. They were popular with both the teachers and students because they always seemed so damn clever.

I believe writers, and even oral storytellers, have always used the fantastic in their tales. But that doesn’t mean they are science fiction. Some scholars in science fiction have been trying to claim more territory for the genre for decades. They want to both up the reputation of the genre and claim more types of stories as ours. When I was young, I agreed with this. I wanted the genre to have prestige. But after a lifetime of reading, I realize I’m a consumer of science fiction and I want real science fiction, not ersatz sci-fi.

Science fiction is impossible to define so editors can call anything they want science fiction, but as a consumer, I know what I want, and this kind of story is not it. I remember when I was young back in the 1960s and wondering what science fiction must be like written in other countries in other languages. Then in the early 1970s, we got some Soviet science fiction anthologies and I got my wish. Slowly, the idea of world science fiction has grown, but all too often I believe editors have grabbed anything they could to fill their anthologies. I think that’s a disservice to the genre, and dishonesty to the literary world.

I know that other SF readers will accept these stories as science fiction because their definitions of the genre are different. And that’s cool. The reality is we don’t all think alike. But I would like to think that science fiction was a term with validity and to me, the intent of the genre is more specific, even quite narrow.

Just because a story has elements of the fantastic doesn’t make it science fiction or fantasy. I also believe fantasy as a genre covers definite territory too. As an emerging bookworm back when I was in grade school, I’d go up and down the library shelves looking for certain kinds of stories. Stories about space travel, robots, new technology, and time travel. They were always about the future, or they were set in current times when things changed. “The New History” is set in current times and things changed, but I still don’t consider it science fiction. Why? Because of the tone of the story.

I never believed while reading the story that people could become group organisms. If the author had made some kind of case for that it would have been science fiction. But that wasn’t his intent. He was obviously making a case about the horrors of being in a group. As an introvert, I completely understand that angle. It’s a good story for that purpose. But that’s a completely mundane purpose. Science fiction is not about the mundane. Science fiction is about the far out, but as a real possibility, even in humor. I never thought the people in “The New Prehistory” were becoming group monsters, nor did I think the author wanted us to believe that. I felt the author was giving us an allegory about how he felt about the real world.

For me, science fiction has to be about what the real world could become. The fantasy genre is about make-believe worlds, but believable worlds within their own concepts. I know most science fiction is unbelievable, or has become so. For me to think of it as science fiction, I have to believe it’s possible, or at least think people once thought it possible.

James Wallace Harris, 5/25/23

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“The Golem” by Avram Davidson

“The Golem” by Avram Davidson is story #8 of 52 from the anthology The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989) that my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Golem” was first published in the March 1955 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

You can read or listen to “The Golem” online here.

Avram Davidson (1923-1993) uses his own childhood pop culture references to get us to visualize the setting “The Golem” at the beginning of this 1955 story:

Anyone who attended the movies in the twenties or the early thirties has seen that street a thousand times. Past these bungalows with their half-double roofs, Edmund Lowe walked arm-in-arm with Leatrice Joy, and Harold Lloyd was chased by Chinamen waving hatchets. Under these squamous palm trees Laurel kicked Hardy and Woolsey beat Wheeler upon the head with a codfish. Across these pocket-handkerchief-sized lawns, the juveniles of the Our Gang comedies pursued one another and were pursued by angry fat men in golf knickers. On this same street—or perhaps on some other one of five hundred streets exactly like it. 

And he does the same thing at the end:

Presently the sound of the lawnmower whirred through the quiet air in the street just like the street where Jackie Cooper shed huge tears on Wallace Beery’s shirt and Chester Conklin rolled his eyes at Marie Dressler.

I assume that Davidson was nostalgic for the films he saw as a kid in the 1920s and 1930s but how many readers today will know them? I was familiar with all those names and images, but his story keyed in another era for me, the late 1950s and The Twilight Zone. I visualized Mr. and Mrs. Gumbeiner, an old Jewish couple sitting on their porch with their uninvited Golem guest as one of the comic episodes of that classic TV show.

The tone of the story reminded me of Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, and Richard Matheson, so in 1955, Avram Davidson was ahead of his times — by four years.

Of course, in 2023 we’re starting to get worried about AI and real robots while science fiction readers are still enchanted by stories about friendly androids, cute robots, or sexy sexbots. So I assume modern readers could still be enchanted by this quaint old-fashion story. It’s the kind of Jewish comedy schtick that was once very popular, but I wonder if modern readers concerned with cultural correctness might consider it a stereotype? Essentially, “The Golem” is a time capsule of history, that mixes 1955 science fiction with Jewish folklore while asking us to remember old Hollywood films that kids loved twenty and thirty years earlier.

It’s interesting that David Hartwell included “The Golem” in The World Treasury of Science Fiction. How many stories in that anthology are there because of Hartwell’s own nostalgia? Other editors have loved this story too, just look at the long list of reprints it’s gotten over the last several decades.

However, even though I enjoyed this little blast from the past, I have to wonder if its storytelling hasn’t become too quaint for modern readers. Right after reading it, I started listening to “The Affinity Charm” by Jennifer Egan, the first story in her fix-novel The Candy House. The setting for that story is an apartment where people have gathered after a lecture to discuss what everyone thought. Egan presents a diverse group of intellectuals all arguing from different academic perspectives. To these modern sophisticates, “The Golem” would be an overly simplistic tale they’d quickly dismiss. I wonder if even uneducated young people today would be too sophisticated intellectually to enjoy this story?

I only considered “The Golem” mildly entertaining, mostly for its nostalgia. But then I can remember 1955. How will people born after 1985 or 1995 see it? Hartwell’s anthology came out in 1989, and I’m starting to wonder from its first eight stories if it isn’t already a relic of the past?

James Wallace Harris, 5/22/23