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THE TWILIGHT ZONE – “The Lonely” by Rod Serling

My friend Mike told me that he and his wife Betsy were watching The Twilight Zone, one episode each evening. I told him I would do the same. We’ve been texting every morning about the previous night’s episode. Day before yesterday we watched “The Lonely,” from season one, episode seven. I think I’ve seen this episode three times over the last sixty-plus years, but this time I thought more about the story. I think texting with Mike is pushing me to analyze the story in ways that casual watching never did.

The Twilight Zone tended to set its audience up for a surprise ending, often ignoring logic, or even other possibilities for how the story might go. Rod Serling wanted us to get involve and then surprise or shock us – but do it quickly. He treated his stories like a magic trick, and I don’t think he expected us to ask too many questions.

In “The Lonely,” Corry (Jack Warden), convicted of murder, has been sentence to solitary confinement on a deserted asteroid. He is visited four times a year by a supply rocket. The captain of the supply ship, Allenby (John Dehner), has taken pity on Corry and tries to bring him something each time to occupy his mind because he knows Corry is going crazy with loneliness. This time he brings him a large box. Allenby tells Corry not to open until he leaves. It turns out its a robot that looks, acts, and talks just like a beautiful woman. (It’s Jean Marsh who will star in Upstairs, Downstairs in the 1971.)

The robot is named Alicia. At first Corry is offended by thinking his loneliness could be eliminated by the companionship of a machine. But, Alicia is hurt by his rejection, and Corry takes pity on her. They become close.

Then Captain Allenby shows up again and tells Corry he’s been giving a pardon and has twenty minutes to get ready to leave. Corry assumes he can bring Alicia, but Allenby says there’s a weight limit because of limited fuel and he only has room for Corry. Corry can’t believe Allenby could be so cruel as to leave Allicia. To quickly convince Corry he is serious, Allenby shoots Alicia in the face, revealing all her mechanical parts.

This makes “The Lonely” a cold equations story. “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin was a controversial story from 1954. It set up a problem where the only solution was killing a teenage girl. A lot of readers hated “The Cold Equations” and over the decades they have protested that the author should have found a way to save her. They completely missed the point of the story. Godwin set up the story so the girl had to die. And that’s what Serling did in “The Lonely.”

Not only that, but they solved the plot quickly by having Captain Alleby shoot Alicia. I accept all that. That’s the point of the story. But here is where in 2024 I took a different path thinking about the story.

Why didn’t people talk about Corry falling in love with Alicia? In 1959, I wonder if the audience assumed Alicia was just a machine, and that Corry’s loneliness overcame the fact, that his love was a delusion. That when we see the mechanical parts of Alicia that we undertand why Alleby shoots her.

Over the decades, we’ve had a lot of stories that might be called robot liberation stories where many readers believe that a machine that looks and acts like a human is just as human as a biological person. I wonder if the ending shocks modern readers who have come to love robots. If someone shot C-3PO in the face and killed him, wouldn’t we be shocked and mourn his death?

If I remember right, there were a couple of Asimov robot stories where Susan Calvin kills a robot. I was always shocked by that.

In 2024 we don’t want robots murdered. Accepting the logic of the story that Alleby can only take one person back, how could we change it to work with modern audiences?

Rod Serling wrote this episode. He didn’t give the audience or Corry a chance to think about the options. His stories are setup to only work one way. When I was watching the episode I had forgotten the ending, and I wondered how Serling was going to solve the problem. Having Allenby shoot Alicia was a tidy way to end the story. After he shoots Alicia Alleby tells Corry that the only thing he’s leaving behind is his loneliness. Corry says, “I must remember that,” and “I must remember to keep that in mind.”

There’s a problem. We don’t get to decide and neither does Corry. I wish Serling had ended the story differently. I wish Allenby had handed Corry the gun and said, “I can take one person back, the ship leaves in fifteen minutes no matter what,” and then walks off.

The story could end there. We don’t really need to know the ending, because the story has shifted to thinking about all the possibilities. We should accept that the rocket only has fuel for one person. We should also assume there will be no future supply runs so if Corry stays, he will eventually die. We might also assume Alicia runs on radioactive pellets and will live a long time.

But let’s say the TV show had to reveal an ending. The camera in the very last scene could be aimed at the rocket’s hatch from the inside waiting to see who shows up. We could see Corry’s face climb into view, Alicia’s face climb into view, or Allenby say, “Time to go, shut the door.”

Each possible ending would imply so much still.

  • Corry shows up and we think he shot Alicia
  • Corry shows up and we think he didn’t shoot Alicia but left her to be lonely
  • Alicia shows up and we think Corry shot himself
  • Alicia shows up and we think Corry volunteered to die alone
  • Neither show up and we think Corry decided to stay with Alicia
  • Neither show up and we think Corry decided to stay with Alicia but kills her before he dies so she won’t be alone
  • Neither show up and we think Corry decided to stay with Alicia but gives her the gun to make her own decision when he dies

It’s unfair to change an author’s story after the fact. But in this case, I’m suggesting my idea because it illuminates how people might have thought about the story in 1959 would be different from how we like to think about stories in 2024.

James Wallace Harris, 10/27/24

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FUTURES PAST: A Visual History of Science Fiction, Volume 4, 1929: The Gateway to Modern Science Fiction by Jim Emerson

If you love reading about the history of science fiction, you should love reading Jim Emerson’s series Futures Past. I’ve previously reviewed the volumes for 1926 & 1927, and 1928. In the early 1990s Emerson started this project as a fanzine focusing on the history of science fiction, and published four issues: 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1929 before he had to stop. Then a few years ago when he retired Emerson started over with 1926 and expanded each fanzine issue to a softbound book. The latest volume, 1929, is 222 pages. The largest volume yet. Jim says 1929 should be ready to ship in mid-October. You can order pdf, softbound, and hardbound editions here.

Jim writes all the content, and I’m jealous of his knowledge of science fiction’s history. Each volume contains a Year in Review section that covers science fiction books, magazines, plays, and movies of the year, while documenting the people and events related to that year. But more than, that, Emerson includes in each volume a handful of long articles about the history of specific science fictional subjects that lead up to that year.

For example, the 1929 volume has a ninety page overview of women science fiction writers from 1666-1925. I’ve read a lot of SF history and I didn’t know about most of these books or their writers. Our collective culture forgets so much – why did they forget all these women writers?

Other significant articles include the “Evolution of the SF Name” which unearthed far more old examples of the term than I’ve previously known about. In the “Gernsback Bankruptcy” Emerson explains how Hugo Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories and immediated create Science Wonder Stories. Hugo was a wheeler-dealer, and somewhat shady. Besides his magazines he had a radio station, and was an early broadcaster of TV. It blew my mind that Gernsback was paying himself $50,000 a year. That was a tremendous salary in the 1920s when the average worker was proud to make $25 a week.

I’ve always been fascinated by the history of science fiction. We tend to live in an awareness bubble that extends from decade or two before we start reading science fiction to when we lose contact with the genre as we age out. I grew up in the 1950s, starting to read science fiction in 1962, but I was reading stories that were mostly published in the 1950s, and some from the 1940s. I’m in my seventies now, but I’ve mainly lost contact with what’s going on in the genre in the early 2000s. Futures Past portrays the genre in the 1920s, and very early 1930s, and it’s very different. Have you ever thought about what being a science fiction fan in the Roaring Twenties?

One reason I like reading about the history of science fiction is discovering what science fiction fans and writers were like before my bubble of awareness began. The genre has changed several time over the course of my reading lifetime. And reading Futures Past shows how science fiction changed several times before it became the science fiction I knew as science fiction in the 1960s. Reading through the descriptions of the SF books of 1929, or the descriptions of the SF books written by women from 1666 to 1925 reveals that people have always had a fascinating with the fantastic and they’ve always speculated about the possibilities. But how they speculated depended on the common knowledge of the day. In 1929, people still thought there were things and places on Earth still to be discovered, including other intelligent beings.

Well, 1929 was also when the first science fiction clubs and fanzines were formed. Fandom arose concurrently with the early days of rocketry clubs, which were sprouting up around the world, and Emerson has articles covering the histories of both. All of that is fascinating to me. The 1920s and 1930s were when my parents grew up. I wonder if they even knew about science fiction.

For most science fiction fans this history will be too far in the past. So far in the past that it’s an alien landscape. They might be shocked by the weird ideas writers used to create their science fiction, such as lost races, hidden species, about prehistory civilizations like Atlantis and Mu, rejuvenation, utopias, eugenics, future wars, spiritualism, the occult, strange mutations, and so on. They just didn’t have the science we do now. And they believed that all the planets of the solar systems and their moons could harbor intelligent life.

With the aid of the internet, The Internet Archive, and YouTube, you can read the futures past science fiction in old books, magazines, fanzines, and watch the old movies. Emerson summarizes every issue from six SF magazines from 1929: Amazing Stories, Amazing Stories Quarterly, Science Wonder Stories, Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Quarterly, and Weird Tales, and quickly covers several general pulp magazines that featured science fiction. He also reviews the science fiction books that came out that year too. 1929 will go into public domain in January, but most of the magazines are already available online at the Internet Archive. Just search on the magazine’s name plus 1929. Search for book titles on Google and the Internet Archive. Search for the films on YouTube.

By the way, the YouTube channel, Mars Wants Movies, is running a history of science fiction films, and is currently up to the year 1948. It covered the 1920s in six episodes, and devoted a whole episode to 1929. This makes a great supplement to Futures Past with links to those old movies you can watch on YouTube.

Also, you can read the early fanzines at Fanac.org, including The Comet v. 1 n. 1. mentioned in Emerson’s article on the first science fiction clubs.

Here’s Volume 4’s Table of Contents:

I subscribed to Futures Past when it was a fanzine back in the early 1990s. I was disappointed when it stopped publication at 1929. Jim tells me he’s hard at work on 1930 already, and plans to cover many more years in his retirement. I’m really looking forward to the 1930s. I used to think of the 1930s as the early days of science fiction, but Futures Past shows that the origins of science fiction go way back. Emerson’s etomological search for the origins of the phrase science fiction reveals it began way before Amazing Stories.

James Wallace Harris, 10/11/24

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Farewell, Earth’s Bliss by D. G. Compton

Let’s imagine two science fiction writers. The first is a person who wants to avoid a lifetime of working the nine-to-five grind and decides they want to become a science fiction writer. This person studies all the classics and bestselling SF novels and writes what they hope readers will passionately love and make them a million dollars. The second is a person who thinks deeply about life and has what they believe is a brilliant philosophical insight. Their inspiration is to use science fiction to convey their insights into humanity to the rest of us.

Whose book do you want to read?

I read Farewell, Earth’s Bliss by D. G. Compton because my favorite YouTube reviewer, Bookpilled, praised it highly in two videos. He warned the novel was one of the bleakest books he’s ever read. The story is grim indeed. Not as existentially dark as The Road by Cormac McCarthy, or as depressingly dystopian as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or even as bleak as those literary novels that make you want to kill yourself, such as The Painted Bird by Jerzey Kosinski, or The Tin Drum by Günter Grass.

Back in the mid-sixties, science fiction was changing, and it was interesting that in 1966, two science fiction novels came out about shipping convicts into space. The most famous of the two was The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. A forgotten title was Farewell, Earth’s Bliss by D. G. Compton. I find it odd, that right in the middle of the 1960s great space race, when all the excitement and glamor was about how to get to the Moon, and during the thrilling Project Gemini missions two science fiction authors would imagine the Moon and Mars as a Botany Bay prison colony. Instead of sending people with the Right Stuff into space, Heinlein and Compton imagine sending people with the Wrong Stuff. Why? In 1967, Robert Silverberg would publish “Hawksbill Station” about using time travel to exile criminals to the Cambrian period. (I should compare all three someday.)

I believe in the 1950s, Heinlein wanted to be more than the biggest fish in a small pond. He was already the most successful science fiction writer in the world. I can’t prove this, but my guess is he saw the potential of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in 1957 and wanted to swim in the bigger pond Rand created, so he came out with Stranger in a Strange Land in 1961. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was Heinlein’s third book he used as a soapbox to express his philosophical and political ideas. My other guess is D. G. Compton was inspired by New Worlds magazine, and the initial stages of the New Wave and decided to take a piss on science fiction, the space race, and humanity. Heinlein’s view of a penal colony on the Moon wasn’t exactly positive, although he thought it was. He saw his story as recreating the American Revolution. Maybe I need to reread and reanalyze that story. I don’t think Compton had a chance to read Heinlein’s book, so it wasn’t a reaction to it, but it is worthwhile to consider them together as two views SF takes on 1966.

Farewell, Earth’s Bliss is about twenty-four new one-way exiles to Mars. Compton uses several point-of-view characters to project a multifaceted take on humanity. All the people on Mars are convicts, and they shape their own society. Their life is brutal. They’ve found they can eat lichen and one small Martian animal they call a rabbit. Everything else must be recycled from the spaceships bringing the prisoners to Mars twice each Martian year. It’s an extremely hard and bleak existence. This isn’t Star Trek, another science fiction story that came out in 1966.

Compton’s insights deal with racism, feminism, gender, homosexuality, government, brutality, inequality, religion, and other subjects that feel completely contemporary to today. Most of the insights Compton explores didn’t need to be set on Mars. Because they are, it makes us question the desire to explore other worlds.

Ultimately, Farewell, Earth’s Bliss ends in a kind of dark Darwinian optimism. Was Compton trying to be funny? Ironic? Satirical? Existential? Compton uses his novel to show how everyone and all societies are flawed, that life is grim, but there’s a kind of nobleness in surviving, even if you’re killing others to do so.

Like Joachim Boaz at his blog Science Fiction and Other Ruminations, I’ve been into reading science fiction that is critical of the final frontier dream. As a kid, Mars was my Land of Oz, my Big Rock Candy Mountain, my Shangri La. Compton laughs at people like me in Farewell, Earth’s Bliss. Boaz also reviews Farewell, Earth’s Bliss, and rates it 4.5 out of 5. Now that I’m older, I realize the fallacy of my fantasies. Mars would be a horrific place to live.

Over the decades I’ve tried reading D. G. Compton’s work, but I usually give up because his stories were too grim, too adult. But it seems like in the past year that everyone is rediscovering Farewell, Earth’s Bliss and Compton.

What’s the point of exploring the depressing side of reality? Compton makes Mars very unappealing. Years ago, there was this story about people volunteering for a one-way trip to Mars. A lot of people said they would sign up. Mars has always been the Middle Earth for science fiction. No matter how grimly realistic it is portrayed, readers still find it a magical destination to daydream about. I think Compton is asking why people would fantasize about Mars like that.

The leader of the criminals is a ruthless man who is smart enough to manipulate people yet is unaware of his own delusions. He reminds me of Donald Trump. And the laws the criminals choose to live by remind me of what MAGA people want. They embrace religion, even insane religious ideas, reject education because they want to protect their kids from intellectuals, and they want punish rule breakers and people who are different harshly to maintain the orderliness of their community.

I used to think that spreading humanity across the galaxy was the purpose of our species. I haven’t felt that way for years. Reading Farewell, Earth’s Bliss makes me think we shouldn’t infect the rest of the universe with our madness. Compton sees us like cockroaches that are impossible to kill.

Is that the kind of science fiction you’d want to read?

Why?

Amazon currently has Farewell, Earth’s Bliss as a $1.99 Kindle ebook.

James Wallace Harris, 8/12/24

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10 Titles Added to the Classics of Science Fiction List

I added several best science fiction book lists to our database of citations. See the List of Lists to see the kind of lists we use. The new lists were from 2022, 2023, and even a few from 2024. Whenever I do this, some titles reach a total of 12 citations. We call all forms of lists citations. 12 citations is the minimum number for getting on the Classics of Science Fiction List v. 5. Before I started there were 127 titles on the list, now there are 137. With version 5 of the list, an online database, I can add new lists anytime and the totals are recalculated. If any book reaches 12 citations, it automatically gets on the list.

This is how newer books eventually get remembered and recognized. We now have two titles from 2014, the most recently published on the list. That suggests it takes about a decade to be remembered well enough to make it to the Classics of Science Fiction List. Here are the new titles with links to Wikipedia in case you want to know more about them:

If you look at the Classics of Science Fiction List, be sure to click on the citation number to show where the citations come from. Or you can click on “Show Citations” at the top of the list to see the citations for all the books. The CSF list has been in production since 1989. See our About page.

It’s interesting that only one old novel finally made it onto the list, Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss. The YouTube book reviewer Bookpilled put it on his “15 Best Sci-Fi Books I’ve Ever Read” video. That one citation was all Hothouse needed. Bookpilled is my favorite YouTube reviewer. He’s young, but he’s quickly reading all the classics of science fiction and he’s very discerning about what are still credible reads today.

I try to use only lists created by people who are well read in science fiction, or lists made from polls. Younger readers tend to know the most recent books or the most famous science fiction books of all time. So, when I add new lists, the standard classics get more citations, while some newer titles get more recognition. For example, The Left Hand of Darkness now has 52 citations, the most of any title.

Of the ten new titles, I haven’t read Oryx and Crake or Blindsight. That increases my list of books I need to finish reading the entire list. My TBR of CSF now includes the titles below. Their current number of total citations is in brackets.

  1. I Am Legend – Richard Matheson (1954) [15]
  2. Solaris – Stanislaw Lem (1970) [34]
  3. The Gods Themselves – Isaac Asimov (1972) [19]
  4. Roadside Picnic – Arkady & Boris Strugatsky (1972) [16]
  5. The Female Man – Joanna Russ (1975) [28]
  6. Dreamsnake – Vonda N. McIntyre (1978) [12]
  7. Kindred – Octavia Butler (1979) [13]
  8. The Snow Queen – Joan D. Vinge (1980) [15]
  9. The Book of the New Sun – Gene Wolfe (1980-1987) [23]
  10. Downbelow Station – C. J. Cherryh (1981) [16]
  11. Helliconia Spring – Brian W. Aldiss (1982) [12]
  12. Consider Phlebas – Iain M. Banks (1987) [12]
  13. The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks (1988) [15]
  14. Grass – Sheri S. Tepper (1989) (13)
  15. Barrayar – Lois McMaster Bujold (1991) [14]
  16. Synners – Pat Cadigan (1991) [13]
  17. The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson (1995) [18]
  18. A Deepness in the Sky – Vernor Vinge (1999) [14]
  19. Revelation Space – Alastair Reynolds (2000) [12]
  20. Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood (2003) [14]
  21. Blindsight (2006) by Peter Watts [12]
  22. World War Z – Max Brooks (2006) [12]
  23. Anathem – Neal Stephenson (2008) [12]

You can use List Builder to create a custom list. You can control the date ranges, the citation minimum, or even zero in on an individual author.

If you’re curious about titles not listed, here’s the list configured for a minimum of one citation. That lists all the titles in the dataase, 2527 titles.

James Wallace Harris, 1/30/24

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Offline From the Hive Mind

We’ve been without our connection to the internet for ten days now, and it will be many more before we are reconnected. I type this with one finger on my iPhone.

I’ve been sidetracked from my reviewing projects, making me restless. Living without the internet is revealing, reminding me of life back in the 1980s, but it also shows just how much I depend on high-speed internet in my daily living.

I can’t pursue my social media activities, stream TV, music, audio books, or chat with Alexa. I’m cut off from my security cameras, printer, and cloud storage. My tablets are useless. I can write with Word like it’s 1989 but the results just sit on the hard drive.

I can turn on a Wi-Fi hotspot on my phone, but the one bar service only lets Microsoft Edge run in an unusable slow mode. There are so many background processes going on in a modern computer that they need high speed internet to function.

I’m left feeling restless. I would be feeling much worse if I didn’t have my iPhone. This experience has shown me that I’ve built a life around being connected. But it also makes me wonder if I shouldn’t reevaluate how I live.

I grew up addicted to television and now I’m also addicted to computers and the internet. We’re evolving towards a hive mind. The second AT&T repairman who came to the house told me he likes living in the country and getting away from computers and networks. I don’t know if I could do that anymore.

You’d think I’d just read books, but my feelings of Internet withdrawal won’t let me. I wonder how long it will take to get over that. Could I ever go back to living like we did in the 1980s, or 1970s?

I’m trying to imagine a society where the only people you talk to must be in the same room. It boggles my mind.

Just imagine living without smartphones! Or even cellphones. I’ve tried watching over the air TV but it’s abysmal. I’m back to playing CDs and DVDs, but it’s so damn restrictive. I wonder what life would be like if I was limited to vinyl, paperbacks, newspapers, and TV from an antenna. Hell — thing about going back to typewriters!!!

They say you don’t know what you miss until it’s gone. Damn, those old sayings can be painfully true.

James Wallace Harris, 8/8/23

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“Nine Lives” by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Nine Lives” by Ursula K. Le Guin is story #31 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. “Nine Lives” was first published in Playboy (November 1969). This story has been reprinted an amazing number of times, and translated into several languages. And it has 13 citations in the CSFquery database.

“Nine Lives” is about two experienced planetary explorers, Martin and Pugh stationed at the Libra Exploratory Mission Base who are about to be relieved. Before they can, they must help a new crew from the Passerine, and Exploit Team, settle in to start mining the planet. Martin and Pugh are surprised when the mining crew turns out to be a 10-person clone — five men and five women. The clones look very much alike, work and play together as a tight unit, and pretty much ignore the old-timers. Then there is an accident, and 9 of the 10 clones are killed. The story is about the singleton struggling to survive as an individual.

Strangely, Le Guin uses up most characterization development on Martin and Pugh. I was hoping to know more about being a clone, instead, it’s really Martin and Pugh’s story.

“Nine Lives” is well done but it didn’t have the impact for me that “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” or even “The Day Before the Revolution” or “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” did. I’m used to Le Guin making a big social, political, or philosophical statement, and I just didn’t get one from “Nine Lives.”

I guess we’re supposed to contemplate the idea of clones, and in particular, the idea of a clone group. Clones don’t interest me. A DNA replica won’t be a replica of a person. I suppose ten cloned brothers and sisters should be more interesting than the Dionne quintuplets but I didn’t find that so.

I tried to imagine living with nine copies of myself and that produced a very weird sensation. Maybe I need to think about that for a while to really get into the story. In “Nine Lives” the ten clones form a utopian relationship. I’m not sure I’d get along so well with people like me.

There’s another story that explores this idea in a variant way, The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold. It’s about a time traveler who gets together with different versions of himself. In both stories, all the selves get along, but I don’t know if that would be true. I might bring out the worst in myself. I’m pretty sure my wife wouldn’t want ten of me.

However, as a kid, I always wished I had been a twin. I wonder if “Nine Lines” would have had a greater emotional impact on me if there had only been two clones. It’s logical to have ten for a group of workers, but it would have been easier to relate to if the story was only about a pair. And in the story, the clones tended to pair off and work together.

David Hartwell liked “Nine Lives” so much that he included it in another one of his giant retrospective anthologies of science fiction, The Ascent of Wonder.

I think this story is for people who wish they had more friends like themselves.

James Wallace Harris, 7/16/23

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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

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Heinlein’s Super-Collections

Starting in 1950, Heinlein’s short stories were collected into several regular-sized collections as his career progressed. Then in 1967, he published his first super-collection, The Past Through Tomorrow. That single volume assembled nearly all of his Future History stories into one big book. It’s been reprinted a number of times, sometimes as a two-volume paperback. They are all out of print at the moment, and the various hardback and SFBC editions can sometimes be rather expensive to buy used. However, until someone publishes a well-considered Best of Robert A. Heinlein collection, The Past Through Tomorrow is the best single-volume collection of his short stories.

One of the most interesting of The Past Through Tomorrow reprints was from Gateway/Orion because it included the stories “Let There Be Light,” “Universe,” and “Common Sense,” three titles in the Future History series left out of the original hardback. There was even an ebook edition from that publisher, so you were lucky if you snagged it when it was in print. Not only does it seem to be the only complete version of the Future History stories according to ISFDB, but the stories are ordered by how they were set in Heinlein’s imaginary future. I’d love a great audiobook edition of this super-collection.

However, this still out leaves many of Heinlein’s most famous stories. Heinlein’s next super-collection came out in 1980, Expanded Universe: The New Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein. I don’t recommend readers new to Heinlein buying this volume. It’s mostly rarely reprinted stories along with some obscure essays and trunk stories. Perfect for the hardcore Heinlein fan, but it will probably be disappointing to average readers. Nor do I recommend new readers buy Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A. Heinlein and Tributes to the Grand Master which came out in 1992, four years after Heinlein died. It does have some nice rare selections for the devoted Heinlein fan, but nothing that would impress a reader new to Heinlein. It does contain tributes by writers who loved Heinlein.

The next super-collection that contains good to great stories is The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein, which came out in 1999. Again, out of print, but it contains some of Heinlein’s best stories and is the perfect supplement to The Past Through Tomorrow.

The last super-collection is Off the Main Sequence: The Other Science Fiction Stories of Robert A. Heinlein. It was from the Science Fiction Book Club in 2005. The goal of the collection was to collect stories left out of The Past Through Tomorrow and other odds and ends that haven’t been well collected or anthologized. Again, I don’t recommend this volume for new Heinlein readers.

If you like what you read in The Past Through Tomorrow and The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein then I’d recommend tracking down a used copy of Off the Main Sequence. However, it might be easier to buy Heinlein’s original collection Assignment in Eternity that’s still in print to get “Jerry Was a Man,” which is a good story, “Gulf” which is an infamous story that I particularly dislike, and two rather bizarre stories “Elsewhen,” and “Lost Legacy.” But we’re treading into hardcore fan territory here.

Heinlein’s original collections seem to stay in print, in one form or another, and if you buy all of them, along with Methuselah’s Children you can mostly reassemble The Past Through Tomorrow. Here are their original covers:

James Wallace Harris, 10/23/22

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“Let There Be Light” by Robert A. Heinlein

In 1939 Heinlein wrote several stories that were rejected by John W. Campbell. Heinlein wanted to save his name for stories appearing in Astounding and invented pen names for “lesser” publications. I think that was a bad idea. He sold “Let There Be Light” to Frederik Pohl for Super Science Stories and it was run under the Lyle Monroe byline. But if you look at the table of contents below, you’ll see that L. Sprague de Camp and P. Schuyler Miller weren’t protecting their Astounding reputations.

Heinlein should have used his own name for all of his stories. It would have helped out the smaller markets. Frederik Pohl practically begged Heinlein to let him publish it under his real name. Heinlein evidently felt anything Campbell rejected wasn’t first-class and he didn’t want his name associated with such stories. Heinlein obviously wanted to shape his public persona. Doesn’t that reveal a kind of egotism that disassociates flaws from their self-identity? Heinlein is perfect. Who knows who those other guys are?

Even when Campbell published two stories by Heinlein in a single issue he should have put Heinlein’s own name on them. Heinlein would have been an even greater phenomenon than he was, even with his flawed stories. Using all those names split up his reputation and momentum. And Heinlein shouldn’t have assumed Campbell was the arbiter of quality in science fiction.

“Let There Be Light” opens with Dr. Archibald Douglas getting a telegram from Dr. M. L. Martin. Martin informs Douglas “ARRIVING CITY LATE TODAY STOP DESIRE CONFERENCE COLD LIGHT YOUR LABORATORY TEN PM.” Douglas is affronted at the presumption that an unknown character could barge into his lab. Douglas consults Who’s Who in Science, and discovers Martin has a string of degrees and many prestige appointments and papers but is a biologist. Douglas figured a biologist cannot possibly connect to his work in physics.

When Douglas finally meets Martin, M. L. turns out to be Mary Lou, and she’s a beautiful young blonde. This is rather amusing since Heinlein makes all beautiful women redheads after he marries his third wife Virginia. In the 1940 magazine version, Mary Lou is compared to Sally Rand, who Heinlein and his wife Leslyn knew. In the 1950 book version, she’s compared to Marilyn Monroe. I’m surprised he didn’t switch it to a famous redhead. And Mary Lou can’t believe Archie is Dr. Douglas because he looks like a gangster. In the 1940 version, he’s compared to George Raft, but in the book version, no person is mentioned.

Heinlein did some other minor tweaking to the story when it was reprinted in book form. Strangely, the magazine version used the word hell frequently, and I think a damn was in there too, and Heinlein removed them. He also took out some of the gooiest of the sweet talk.

“Let There Be Light” turns into an invention story, but instead of featuring a mad scientist, Heinlein gives us two movie star lookalikes whose dialog sounds like it was written for a 1930s Warner Brothers picture. There’s a fair amount of scientific infodumping which lets the couple invent lighting that sounds like the LED overhead panel in my kitchen, and then solar panels. Of course, this isn’t much of a plot, so Heinlein throws in the conflict of evil corporations keeping innovative inventions off the market to protect the economics of older technology. That’s still not much of a plot.

Heinlein had spent years involved with California politics and was still griping about corruption. Even in the 1960s, I used to hear stories, often from my uncles, about how inventions were kept off the market, such as car engines that could get 200 miles to the gallon. There have always been conspiracy stories. Heinlein expresses other leftist ideas in the story too.

According to William Patterson, “Let There Be Light” was originally titled “Prometheus ‘Carries the Torch'” and it was also rejected by Thrilling Wonder Stories.

“Let There Be Light” isn’t a particularly good story. Its pluses, at least for us today, is it features a positive role for a female character. And it predicts solar power. So why did Campbell reject it? Patterson quotes Campbell’s rejection letter to Heinlein:

So Campbell is afraid of brainy women? That could explain a lot about Astounding/Analog. Heinlein loved brainy women, Leslyn and Virginia proved it. It’s just a shame he couldn’t write better dialogue when it came to men and women. It often seemed like poor dialogue cribbed from B-movie screwball comedies, and in his later novels, flirty dialogue sounded like a twelve-year-old girl trying to write a grownup romance after studying porn films.

Still, I enjoyed the story. It has no lasting value. We can stick a star on it for having a smart woman character, and another for predicting the solar energy industry. But that’s hardly enough to make it a good story for modern readers. Heinlein should have published it with his own name. He should have owned up to it. No one expects a writer to hit one out of the park every time they’re up to bat. And isn’t it odd that he wouldn’t put his name on it in 1940 for a magazine that few people would read, but would admit paternity when it came to a hardback publication in 1950?

Heinlein wasn’t the only contributor showing powerful women, the cover artist paints a fully-clothed woman shooting a BEM.

James Wallace Harris, 10/22/22

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J. G. Ballard’s Double Debut

J. G. Ballard made his science fiction debut in two magazines, New Worlds Science Fiction and Science Fantasy, both dated December 1956. These are the first two stories in The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard which I just began listening to on audio. You can borrow a copy of the scanned hardback from the Internet Archive for one hour here. Amazon has a Kindle edition for just under $15. Or you can read “Prima Belladonna” online here, and listen to “Escapement” here. Links to radio and film versions are here.

New Worlds also profiled Ballard on the inside front cover.

Ballard’s story for New Worlds, “Escapement” was a very early time loop tale. “Prima Belladonna” in Science Fantasy was Ballard’s first Vermillion Sands story. Both stories were well-written and entertaining and both struck me as pure storytelling. No message, no theme, no psychological insights. As far as I could tell, neither had a point other than being an interesting story.

I was completely satisfied with both short stories, but I wondered if I should dismiss them for having no depth? Right after reading those stories, I read “The Cinderella Machine” by Michael G. Coney, first published in F&SF (Aug. 1976). It reminded me of a Vermillion Sands story. I checked and Coney is a British writer from Ballard’s generation. It too was a pure story. I wondered if Coney had been inspired by Ballard, or if writers from that generation just tended to write those kind of stories.

I suppose in each of these stories I could dig around and find something insightful or meaningful about them, but they seemed complete and self-contained, so why bother? I feel little need to describing these stories because the very act of reading them are what they are about. “Prima Belladonna” and “The Cinderella Machine” are set in artist colonies, featuring a striking women character who is not necessarily nice, and both include an exotic science fictional creature. “Escapement” is about a man who can’t understand why his wife doesn’t notice technical difficulties in the television show they are watching.

I could say Ballard and Coney are expressing some science fictional ideas. These ideas aren’t meaningful, or significant, or even insightful. They are just some weird creative shit that both authors thought up.

All the best stories are stories that feature solid storytelling. But it seems to me, all great stories go one step further. A perfect example is Bob Shaw’s “The Light of Other Days.” It’s a solid story. It has a science fiction invention. But it’s deeply moving. You can listen to it here.

Ballard’s and Coney’s stories lack the moving part. Does that mean they can never be 5-star stories? I consider “Escapement” a three-star plus story. I consider “Belladonna” and “The Cinderella Machine” to be just squeaking by four-star stories. By the way, I give stories I believe are well-written and professional three stars. If I like them a lot, I add a plus. Four-star stories are ones I look forward to reading again. Five-star stories are classics that will stand the test of time, and are often ones I’ve read several times over my lifetime.

I really admire pure story stories. I just don’t know if I should recommend them to other people.

I do know one thing though. I’d rather read a good pure story without depth than a poorly told story that tries to be deep.

James Wallace Harris, 10/9/22