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“The Public Hating” by Steve Allen”

“The Public Hating” by Steve Allen is story #33 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 Public Hating” was first published in Bluebook (January 1955). It was reprinted in Judith Merril’s first annual anthology, S-F: The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy.

Again, we have a non-SF writer writing an excellent work of science fiction. I was also surprised that “The Public Hating” was so well-written and succinct. I never thought of Steve Allen as a writer. I know he was the creator and first host of The Tonight Show back in 1953. I’ve seen film clips of Steve Allen for years but never really knew who he was. I read his Wikipedia entry and was amazed. Besides all the television shows he created, he composed more than 8,500 songs and published more than 50 books. The guy was a whirlwind of productivity. The Wikipedia piece makes me want to watch his old TV shows. Steve Allen’s shows from the 1950s set up much of what we came to watch later.

The Bluebook intro says “The Public Hating” is Steve Allen’s first short story. Fiction Mag Index lists only a handful of short stories by Allen but does list “The Public Hating” first. Wikipedia shows that most of his books were nonfiction, and fiction writing wasn’t common with Allen.

My guess is because Steve Allen was such a great comedian and a great writer of comic material that he was also a great mimic. “The Public Hating” reads very much like something Ray Bradbury would have written. Allen was well-known for his political views, a famous liberal, and a skeptic, so writing a short story about public hating just after many of the famous HUAC hearings is obvious.

“The Public Hating” is typical science fiction for the 1950s, something that could have been published in Galaxy or F&SF. The structure of the story is dramatic but with a certain amount of infodumping. Like much science fiction of that time, it depends on explaining a made-up scientific concept — that groups of people can project an extrasensory force. People are executed in stadiums by having large crowds think about the exact punishment. Allen imagines in 1955 that in a future set in 1978 that large crowds can focus their hate.

I read “The Public Hating” thinking it was still a story of our times. It strangely resonates with a Carl Sagan quote I read today, from The Demon-Haunted World.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

I believe “The Public Hating” is more than satire. I believe it was a warning. That Allen like Sagan feared the world was reverting backward into the superstitious times of the Inquisition. I believe what the Trump years have taught us is that we’re always been there.

James Wallace Harris, 7/20/23

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Adult Science Fiction

John Brunner was the James Burke (Connections) of science fiction about the near future. Brunner was a polymath who used his diverse sources of knowledge to write four novels (Stand on Zanzibar (1968), The Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972), and The Shockwave Rider (1975)) that extrapolated on everything he knew to envision the early 21st century. No one can predict the future, and Brunner gets all the details wrong in these novels, yet they eerily foretell the problems we face today. They are sometimes called Brunner’s Club of Rome Quartet, inspired by the famous Club of Rome from the 1960s, a think tank devoted to global problems of that day. Its most famous report, The Limits of Growth has been vilified over the decades, but time has proven it wasn’t wrong.

Brunner obviously wanted us to confront those problems before they happened. Of course, we haven’t. Even though some of Brunner’s novels won critical praise when they came out and Stand on Zanzibar won a Hugo, they were never popular. Brunner aimed as high as George Orwell, but his books never reached Nineteen Eighty-Four‘s impact. The Jagged Orbit was nominated for the Nebula and won the BSFA award, The Sheep Look Up was nominated for the Nebula, and The Shockwave Rider came in 2nd for the Locus Award for SF Novel. These four novels were mostly respected by critics, but they never became popular with science fiction readers. And as many brilliant science fiction writers know, science fiction gets no respect outside the genre.

I’ve always considered those Brunner novels to be adult science fiction and most science fiction fans don’t want adult literature. Most science fiction fans read science fiction for fun, for escape, and aren’t looking for serious speculation about present-day life or the near future.

When I use the term adult science fiction, I don’t mean Sci-Fi with X-rated content. Young adult fiction has become very popular and successful, even with adult readers. Young adult fiction usually means protagonists are in their teens. But I think the label should apply to any theme or subject that mostly appeals to young adults. Most science fiction is aimed at adolescent readers, or older readers who prefer not to grow up. And in our society, adolescence has extended into the twenties, and even later for many people. There are some awfully big kids still playing with their Star Wars toys.

To me, adult literature deals with the problems of being an adult in our current reality. That apparently doesn’t leave much territory for adult science fiction since it’s usually not set in our current reality. But let me give you an example of how a novel set in the future can be adult science fiction.

The Shockwave Rider came out in 1975, and its setting is the United States in the early 21st century. In other words, our current reality. Now I don’t mean adult science fiction is only stories set in our current day, the setting can be anytime or place in the universe so long as the reader finds something useful in the story that gives insight into being an adult. The Shockwave Rider was adult science fiction in 1975 and will probably continue to be for years to come. Unfortunately, after decades of knowing about the problems presented in the novel, we ignore them. We don’t want to grow up.

Brunner’s novel is extrapolation. He was inspired by the 1970 nonfiction book, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. Brunner asked: how can humans survive in a world that is growing ever more complex and stressful, living with ever more information, coexisting with computers and automation, dealing with environmental decline, epic natural catastrophes, growing insanity, political corruption, constant surveillance, and ever-changing job requirements. Exactly, what we’re experiencing now. Brunner asks how society and citizens cope?

The plot of The Shockwave Rider deals with Nick Haflinger, who is a computer hacker on the run. He was a prodigy raised by the government to be an elite leader in the future, but he rejects that upbringing, and escapes. The plot is complicated by flashbacks. Part of the narrative deals with Nick being psychoanalyzed after being recaptured. While he is on the run he meets Kate Grierson, a brilliant young woman who gets Nick faster than he gets himself. While they are on the run they live in two different utopian communes that offer alternative lifestyles to what the cyber-controlled government wants.

Throughout the course of the novel, Brunner throws out concepts and gadgets he thinks will be developed by the early 21st century. He was right in imagining we’d have a gadget-oriented future, but for the most part, he pictured us with different kinds of gadgets. However, Brunner almost imagines the smartphone. He pictures a palm size with a flip-up screen. Nick does much of his hacking on such a device. People do have desktop-type computers too in The Shockwave Rider, but Brunner pictures them as smart network terminals. That’s because in the 1960s and early 1970s time sharing computers were all the rage. He doesn’t foresee the laptop.

Even though The Shockwave Rider was hard to read, confusing at times plotwise, and with less than fully developed characters, it is chock full of brilliant speculation. Reading it made me realize just how hard Brunner thought about the future, and how hard we should have been thinking about it too. The tragedy of our times is we knew all this bad stuff was coming and we didn’t do shit about it.

Cli-Fi is becoming more common now, but it’s not always handled in a serious way. Often it’s just a setting for young adult adventure. The best current example, which I would consider an adult science fiction novel is The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

The Shockwave Rider is not the kind of science fiction most science fiction fans want to read. They want adventure, rebellion, thrill rides, etc. Young people love blows against the empire stories. If you’re reading a story about zooming around the galaxy, then you’re reading young adult fiction. If you’re reading about surviving in dystopia, that’s not ours, then you’re reading young adult fiction. If you’re reading about being an old person whose mind is downloaded into a clone body, then you’re reading young adult fiction. Most far-out science fictional ideas are ones that appeal to the young adult in us. And I’m not being critical. I still love that stuff too, and I’m 71.

The Shockwave Rider is hard to read. Not just because it explores surviving in this reality, but because its storytelling structure is convoluted and hard to understand. Today, this novel is mostly unknown, but what little fame it does have, is because it’s credited as a work of proto-cyberpunk fiction. And Brunner gets credit for the term “computer worm.” But it’s much more than that.

Brunner was one of those writers who was way smarter than his readers. He was smarter than most people. Unfortunately, being smart doesn’t bring happiness. From 1968-1975, Brunner wrote a series of novels in which he seriously worried about life in the 21st century. There’s a monograph on Brunner in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series called John Brunner by Jad Smith that I found rewarding. In some ways, Brunner comes across as a tragic figure in this study.

Brunner’s books are full of ideas, and reading about them made me want to read them. Unfortunately, they often fail to entertain. And I think that’s why most adult science fiction fails. It’s hard to pull off a serious book about serious problems and still be entertaining. It can be done. Nineteen Eighty-Four is an excellent example. So is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart.

True adult literature tends to come across as biographical because becoming an adult involves becoming mature. In adult novels, we learn so much about the main character and their growth that we feel we know them. Brunner never could bring this off. His characters are adults, and they struggle with adult problems, but we never feel them growing or even being real. They are puppets Brunner uses to act out situations he wants to intellectually explore.

Science fiction writers have the problem that they are seldom taken seriously by the literary world. They often complain that this lack of recognition keeps them from becoming financially successful. This was true of Brunner too. Despite winning awards and gaining a certain amount of respect and fame within the genre, his writing never provided the kind of money and respect he thought he deserved. I’ve wondered if it’s time to reevaluate Brunner’s work.

I found it very difficult to get into The Shockwave Writer. I had to try several times. I had to push myself to keep reading, but as I went along it became more rewarding. The Shockwave Writer is not a page-turner. But neither are Edith Wharton and Henry James. I don’t think his work will ever appeal to science fiction fans who crave young adult science fiction. And I don’t think there are many fans of adult science fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson writes adult science fiction and gets a certain amount of recognition. But his books just aren’t fun to read like the science fiction books that are popularly discussed on YouTube.

Ultimately, I’m not sure science fiction is the venue for adult literature. Brunner should have written speculative nonfiction. Science fiction works best at delighting our youthful sense of wonder. Aging makes us cynical and realistic.

For now, my favorite example of adult science fiction is Earth Abides. Its main character, Isherwood Williams, grows throughout the novel, and the ending is especially adult. But I’m open for you to leave comments about SF novels you think are adult in the comments.

James Wallace Harris, 7/18/23

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“The Muse” by Antony Burgess

“The Muse” by Ray Anthony Burgess is story #32 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 Muse” was first published in The Hudson Review (Spring 1968), a literary journal. It was reprinted in Best SF: 1969 edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss.

“The Muse” is an honest-to-God science fiction story written by a literary writer. Not only that but Anthony Burgess speculates like a true science fiction writer. Burgess comes up with his own unique form of time travel. It’s a variation of the many-worlds theory, but it’s uniquely his. I was quite impressed.

In David Hartwell’s introduction, he describes Anthony Burgess’s short exploration of science fiction early in his career before giving up on the genre.

A scholar named Paley, we assume from our Earth, travels across space to a system called B303, which orbits another Earth, one very much like ours, except in their evolutionary development, they have only evolved until the time of Shakespeare. Paley is one of those people who really want to know who wrote Shakespeare.

Unfortunately, for Paley, this Earth isn’t quite like ours, and humans have a few extra eyes that give their world a nightmare quality to people from our world.

From reading “The Muse” I could sense that Burgess understood the potential of writing science fiction. And he knew he had to tell his story as if his theoretical world really existed. No pussyfooting around. No smirking and winking at the audience. No, “Look at me MA! I’m being so fucking clever.” No “I’m smarter than you, with a better education from a goddamn Ivy League school.”

Burgess looked at science fiction, saw the rules of the game, and played by those rules. He got down to our level of maturity and babbled in our lingo. I’m impressed.

I was also impressed that he went on to write mostly books that weren’t science fiction. Science fiction is a black hole for most writers. They fall in and can’t get out. Science fiction has tremendous limitations. I believe writers destroy their potential if they only write science fiction.

While you read “The Muse” pay attention to what it does, and what it can’t do. Like in the story, science fiction would be one alternate Earth, but there are an infinite number of alternate Earths where there are other things more interesting than science fiction.

James Wallace Harris, 7/18/23

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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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A Time Before Science Fiction

I believe young people can’t imagine what life was like before the Internet, smartphones, or personal computers. I can’t imagine what my parents’ lives were like living before television, or my grandmother’s life before airplanes, cars, radios, movies, and all the inventions that my parents grew up with. My mother’s mother was born in 1881.

Lately, I’ve been trying to imagine what life was like before science fiction. There have always been stories that had science-fictional elements. Isn’t Noah’s Ark really a post-apocalyptic tale? I’m talking about science fiction as a defined category, a genre.

Life Magazine had to explain science fiction to its readers in its May 21, 1951 issue. It covered books, magazines, movies, and even fandom. Science fiction as a term had been used for the genre for about twenty years before that, but mainly in pulp magazines, and with a very small group of Americans. It’s like how the internet and network computers were used by a small subset of the population for a couple decades before the public was introduced to the World Wide Web with Mosaic in 1993. (See my essay: “When Mainstream America Discovered Science Fiction.”)

I’m theorizing it was the paperback book that got America to discover science fiction. The technology of the mass-market paperback was like when the technology of the Netscape browser got America to discover the World Wide Web.

I consider the science fiction pulp magazines of 1926-1950 to be like the internet before the World Wide Web when few people used it and all the tools were text-based. In the late 1940s and early 1950s science fiction fans created small-press publishing houses to reprint pulp magazine science fiction stories in hardback. Print runs were typically 1,500-3000, and the books were sold mainly to fans, and some libraries. I consider this era to be like the short-lived Gopher technology on the internet. (See my essay: “Remember Fantasy Press, Arkham House, Primes Press, Gnome Press, Shasta Publishers, and Others.”)

My guess is the American public noticed science fiction when science fiction movies came out in the early 1950s and when Ballantine Books, Ace Books, Pocket Books, and others brought out lines of paperback books devoted to science fiction in 1953. Movies were everywhere, and twirling paperback racks were everywhere. By the way, there was a time before mass-market paperbacks. Paperbacks as we know them began appearing in the late 1930s, were widely distributed to soldiers during WWII, and exploded on the scene in the early 1950s. Read Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America by Kenneth Davis for an excellent history of the paperback.

My guess is if you asked the average American what science fiction was before 1950 most would not know, and some might say when you mentioned space travel, “You mean that Buck Rogers stuff?” My parents grew up before science fiction. I was born in 1951, and I didn’t understand the term until 1963 when I was eleven. I had encountered plenty of science fiction on television, but I didn’t think of it as a specialized subject, genre, or art form. I didn’t go to a new bookstore until 1967 when I was 16. My first bookstores were all used bookstores, and I didn’t discover them until 1965.

Even though I was born in 1951, after the time I said was the beginning of the time when the American public started to think of science fiction as a thing, I didn’t learn it myself until 1963, and even then I had to figure it out on my own. It wasn’t until 1964 that I discovered science fiction sections in libraries. Because I had trouble comprehending science fiction as a genre in 1963 at age 11, I imagine many people in the 1950s and 1960s still didn’t comprehend it fully either.

I don’t think it was until the 1970s, when shopping malls became common, and chain bookstores were popping up everywhere, that the public began to see science fiction book sections. The used and new bookstores I shopped at in the 1960s had science fiction sections, but the bookstores were tiny, and the science fiction sections were really just two or three shelves of books. Before March 1967 I had no friends who read science fiction. That’s when I met my lifelong friend Jim Connell. Before that, the only science fiction fan I met was on a Greyhound Bus, when I struck up a conversation with a soldier.

I have to wonder what the average American thought when they saw Destination Moon in 1950 or The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951? Was it mind-blowing? Or just silly kid stuff? I remember talking to my grandmother in 1968 about the space program and the planned Moon landing. She said it wouldn’t happen, that God would stop it.

It’s hard for me to imagine life before I was born in 1951. I think it’s harder for anyone growing up in the 21st century. We get our conception of life before 1950 in old movies, mainly ones in black and white. And think about it — have you ever seen any character in any of those old movies ever mention science fiction, or even talk about a science-fictional subject?

It was a different world back then. A much different world. A world most of us can’t comprehend. But try to imagine people of different ages visiting a drugstore back in 1953 and finding these books on a twirling rack. Especially, people who lived in small towns and suburbs. Imagine young kids, working-class men, and young housewives. What would they think if they picked up one of these books? And what would it do if they bought one, took it home, and read it?

When I read Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein in 1964 when I was twelve, that was when I knew science fiction was my genre. I was a convert. Even by 1964, the percentage of science fiction converts in the American population was very small. And the conceptual umwelt I experienced from reading that 1949 book in 1964 must have been far different from the mind-expanding experiences of twelve-year-olds reading it in 1949, or even what Heinlein felt writing it. When did you discover science fiction as a genre, and what was the book that converted you?

I picked 1953 as the year America discovered science fiction because that’s when Ballantine Books and Ace Books began publishing science fiction, and near the beginning of the general paperback boom. Science fiction paperbacks existed before 1953, but they were much fewer. 1953 was also a boom year for science fiction magazines. (See my essay: The 1953 SF&F Magazine Boom.)

I wrote this essay because I’m learning that the umwelt of every person is different. Not only for how we perceive reality but how our biological sensory inputs lead to comprehending different abstract concepts. We have a tendency to assume everyone sees and knows what we know, and that’s so wrong. What’s amusing me to contemplate is thinking about how we perceive things at different ages and in different generations. Science fiction is just one example. What’s weird to grasp is authors work to code their umwelt into a story but the umwelt the reader decodes isn’t the same. I wish I could have gotten my parents and grandparents to read one of my favorite science fiction books when I was a kid and then ask each of them how they interpreted it.

James Wallace Harris, 7/15/23

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“Zero Hour” by Ray Bradbury

“Zero Hour” by Ray Bradbury is story #30 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. “Zero Hour” was first published in Planet Stories (Fall 1947). The most famous place to read it is in Bradbury’s classic, The Illustrated Man.

I thought as I was reading “Zero Hour” this morning, “Hey, here’s a Bradbury story I haven’t read before!” Yesterday, I bought Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales for $1.99 for the Kindle edition so I’d have his stories on my phone. That worked out well since I decided to read “Zero Hour” at 5:30am this morning while I was still in my sleeping chair. I love having a library that’s always with me.

But when I checked ISFDB.org I realized I’ve read it at least two times before. I read The Illustrated Man in 1969 when the movie version came out. I might have read it again when I bought The Illustrated Man on audio. And I read it when I read The Great SF Stories 9 (1947). Two definite times, maybe a third.

So, why didn’t I remember reading it this morning? It’s a wonderful story. “Zero Hour” has a very similar ending to “The Veldt” which is also in The Illustrated Man, and that’s a story I always remember. Maybe “The Veldt” just hogged those neurons allocated to Bradbury.

“Zero Hour” is about a little girl, Mink, under 10, who her mother thinks has an imaginary friend — a Martian. The story is told from the point of view of the mother, Mrs. Morris, watching Mink and her friends play outside. Mrs. Morris interviews Mink about the game when Mink comes in for lunch. It’s called “Invasion.” Mrs. Morris learns from Mink that only kids under 10 can play because older kids are too critical. Bradbury has often written about the enchanting time of childhood when believing was real.

I don’t want to say any more, because I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment of reading this wonderful little story.

I’ve always admired Ray Bradbury, especially when I was young. However, I never considered him a regular science fiction writer. He was always a horse of a different color. Bradbury’s sense of science is on the magic side of the spectrum. Ray Bradbury is closer to L. Frank Baum than Robert A. Heinlein. Bradbury seemed old even when he was young.

Ray Bradbury was born nostalgic. Mentally, he seemed to live in the 1930s or earlier. Even though he became famous for writing about rockets and space travel, it was from a nostalgic perspective, and not from being futuristic.

“Zero Hour” is a beautiful story about childhood and motherhood. It may have Martians invading Earth, it may have children who kill their parents, and it may have futuristic gadgets, but it’s really a view of Norman Rockwell’s America in the 1930s. Buck Rogers shaped his future, not Heinlein. Sure, “Zero Hour” has the twisted humorous horror of Charles Adams and Gahan Wilson, but essentially it’s a story about being a child of wonder.

My guess is I didn’t remember “Zero Hour” because Bradbury was prolific and many of his stories were similar in theme, so they blur together. However, after reading “Zero Hour” I wanted to read the other 99 Bradbury stories in that collection.

James Wallace Harris, 7/13/23

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Which Writers Would Be Included In A Group Biography/History of 1950s Science Fiction?

The World Beyond the Hill by Alexei and Cory Panshin and Astounding Alec Nevala-Lee were two huge histories of science fiction in the 1940s. Both books focused on the magazine Astounding Science-Fiction, where John W. Cambell was a genre-shaping editor. The Panshins concentrated on three writers: Heinlein, Asimov, and van Vogt, while Nevala-Lee dwelt on Heinlein, Asimov, and L. Ron Hubbard. The Panshins volumes were more about the stories, with some biographical details. Nevala-Lee spent more words on the biographies of the four men, with less prose about their stories. Combined, the two volumes make a great overview of Astounding Science-Fiction in the 1940s.

What if a similar group biography/history was written about science fiction in the 1950s? I already own a bookcase full of books about science fiction but they aren’t the kind I want. The book I ache to read is a biography/history on the impact of science fiction in the 1950s that’s as impressive as biographies/histories written by Walter Isaacson, Robert A. Caro, or Doris Kerns Goodwin. I want to read a biography/history that would make the subject interesting to the general reader. I just finished Tune In by Mark Lewisohn, a giant history of The Beatles that only covered their career until 1962. That’s the kind of high-quality biography/history of 1950s science fiction I want to read.

Alec Nevela-Lee’s biographies approach that league. He could write the book I want, but I don’t think he would because he probably knows the market for such a volume isn’t very big. And I wonder if science fiction fans would want a history of science fiction in the 1950s by him. His books Astounding and Inventor of the Future were hard on his subjects. I thought them honest appraisals, but he may have done in John W. Campbell’s reputation, and he didn’t help Heinlein’s or Asimov’s. I ended up feeling Buckminister Fuller was brilliant but not very successful, and a bit of a nut or crank after reading Inventor of the Future. However, any honest biography of the influential science fiction writers of the 1950s is going to unearth some worms.

The whole phenomenon of science fiction in the 1950s could be fascinating to the general reader if it was written in the right way. Look how pervasive science fiction has become. Science fiction as a subculture actually had a far more lasting cultural impact than The Beats in the 1950s and The Hippies in the 1960s, yet those movements are more studied and written about. Organized science fiction fandom has since inspired many other forms of organized fandoms. There are connections between science fiction and the space program and computers, both of which also started in the 1950s. And as a pop culture art, science fiction might be bigger than rock. Rock music is fading, while science fiction is still big business.

So, who were the movers, shakers, and creators of 1950s science fiction? I don’t think the major players are as obvious as they were in the 1940s.

As a science fiction fan back in the 1960s I was commonly told that Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke were the Big Three Authors of science fiction. Looking at our CSFquery database, which uses various forms of citations to remember short stories and novels, I’m not sure it backs up that common knowledge. Look at the results. I’ve set the citation level at 3 or more citations. (Short stories are within double quotes, and novels are italicized. Clicking on the number of citations will show you the individual citations.)

The three writers with the most citations were Heinlein with eleven, and Bradbury and Asimov with eight each. However, some of those cited stories first appeared in the 1940s. After that, three authors have six titles on the list: Alfred Bester, C. M. Kornbluth, and Fritz Leiber.

Before looking at this data, I would have said Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, John Wyndham, and Walter M. Miller, Jr. were the breakout science fiction authors of the 1950s. Another indication of their popularity is how many photographs I can find of these men, especially ones taken in the 1950s. I’m guessing since photographs are hard to find, then details about their lives will be just as hard to find. That suggests any history of science fiction that focuses on anyone other than Heinlein, Bradbury, and Asimov will be covering events in the shadows of history.

If we alter the search to allow any work with two or more citations we see other authors standing out, but I’m not sure if it would change the overall apparent rankings. Thirteen women writers are on this list, but none have very many stories listed. I’m afraid the 1950s was still a male-dominated decade for science fiction.

And what about editors? Many histories of science fiction claim that John W. Campbell wasn’t as influential in the 1950s. But who was then? H. L. Gold at Galaxy is often mentioned. Anthony Boucher, and maybe J. Francis McComas at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There were dozens of science fiction magazines published during the 1950s, and I’m not sure if any other editor stood out. But then I haven’t researched it. However, I would say the 1950s were still a magazine-driven era for science fiction.

The Panshins and Nevala-Lee had Astounding Science-Fiction to anchor their history/biographies of the 1940s. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy, and Astounding Science Fiction dominated the 1950s, but there were many other magazines that published significant science fiction and influenced the genre. I don’t know if a history of science fiction of the 1950s could be as focused as The World Beyond the Hill and Astounding. The genre just exploded in too many different directions.

The small press or fan press science fiction publishers of the 1950s are legendary, especially to collectors, but I don’t know if any of their editors had that much influence. I would think the editors at Doubleday and the Science Fiction Book Club could be a consideration if I knew who they were. Another consideration is Donald A. Wollheim. His work at Ace Books was both influential and widespread.

If a single volume could be written about science fiction in the 1950s it might need to be divided into twelve chapters, one for each year, or into 120 chapters, based on the months. A linear progression through the decade might be the best way to capture the history of science fiction in the 1950s. And the book would have to be big, maybe a thousand pages.

There is one significant book about science fiction history in the 1950s that I know about, Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines – From 1950 to 1970 by Mike Ashley. I have quite a few other books that cover that era in science fiction, but none are of the scope I’m talking about. I wish Ashley’s books were available in cheap Kindle editions so more people would read them.

And should we also add the impact of the movies and television? Should we consider George Pal and Rod Serling as movers and shakers of 1950s science fiction, for this book I want to read? An Astounding-like biography/history of science fiction in the 1960s would include Gene Roddenberry and one for the 1970s would have to include George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

I wish I had the skill and stamina to write a history of science fiction in the 1950s. I’m in awe of the work done by the Panshins and Nevala-Lee. I would love to read a book about 1950s science fiction like I’ve described, so if you’re a writer looking for a topic, here’s one. I don’t know how many copies it would sell. Sadly, the audience for such a history is getting old and dying. I wrote this essay to gauge interest in such a book, but I’m not finding much so far. However, a good biographer can make any person or topic into a page-turner.

James Wallace Harris, 7/11/23

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“The Hurkle is a Happy Beast” by Theodore Sturgeon

“The Hurkle is a Happy Beast” by Theodore Sturgeon is story #29 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 Hurkle is a Happy Beast” appeared in the very first issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Fall 1949) when it had the title The Magazine of Fantasy.

“The Hurkle is a Happy Beast” is a cute story about a creature from another dimension thrown onto Earth. The Hurkle is blue, has six legs, and is kitten-like. It follows a theme of things discovered by humans in the present that come from other times and dimensions, however, it’s not up to the classics of this theme like “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” “The Twonky,” or “The Little Black Bag.”

Even though “The Hurkle is a Happy Beast” is a slight effort by Sturgeon, it has been often reprinted. However, our discussion group wondered why Hartwell selected a second story by Sturgeon for The World Treasury of Science Fiction. It definitely wasn’t one of Sturgeon’s better efforts.

This listing from CSFQuery shows Sturgeon’s most recognized short stories. If Sturgeon deserved two stories in this monumental anthology, I would have picked “Thunder and Roses” or “A Saucer of Loneliness” because their lengths were close to “The Hurkle is a Happy Beast.” But why give Sturgeon two stories. Wasn’t there a better option from 1949?

Well, not exactly. However, my guess is Hartwell wanted to lighten things up by using Hurkle. To me, the obvious substitute for a cute science fiction story with an animal would be “Bears Discover Fire” by Terry Bisson, unfortunately, it came out the year after Hartwell’s anthology. Another possibility is “The Ugly Chickens” by Howard Waldrop, it came out in 1980, so it was available. Or maybe “The Star Mouse” by Fredric Brown?

“The Hurkle is a Happy Beast” is not a bad story. It’s cute enough, but it’s lightweight. This got me thinking about being a science fiction writer in 1949 and having to crank out short stories to make a living. Imagine sitting at a typewriter and knowing your survival depends on your writing a story that will impress editors and readers. I doubt Theodore Sturgeon was thinking he needed to hit one out of the park for future editors of retrospective anthologies. He just needed to sell a story to earn a penny or two a word. There were damn few science fiction writers who lived solely off selling fiction. Sturgeon may have been one since he was so prolific.

In 1949 Sturgeon sold ten short stories according to ISFDB:

  • “Farewell to Eden” – Invasion From Mars edited by Orson Welles (anthology)
  • “Messenger” – Thrilling Wonder Stories (February 1949)
  • “The Martian and the Moron” – Weird Tales (March 1949)
  • “Prodigy” – Astounding Science Fiction (April 1949)
  • “Die, Maestro, Die!” – Dime Detective (May 1949)
  • “Scars” – Zane Grey’s Western Magazine (May 1949)
  • “Minority Report” – Astounding Science Fiction (June 1949)
  • “One Foot and the Grave” – Weird Tales (September 1949)
  • “The Hurkle is a Happy Beast” – The Magazine of Fantasy (Fall 1949)
  • “What Dead Men Tell” – Astounding Science Fiction (November 1949)

Is it really fair to judge “The Hurkle is a Happy Beast” at all? We think because a story is in Hartwell’s anthology it must be one of the best SF short stories from around the world from the 20th century. But should we think that?

After our reading group has plowed through many of these gigantic SF anthologies I’m starting to wonder about their value and their goals. The Big Book of Science Fiction turns out to be a very accurate title, and by that consideration, an honest one. My problem, and for my fellow group members, I believe, is the phrase “World Treasury” gives us great expectations.

“The Hurkle is a Happy Beast” is a pleasant enough story. I would have been fine reading it in any magazine in 1949. Even though Bleiler & Dikty and later Asimov & Greenberg picked it for their annual best-of-the-year anthologies, which I’ve both read, I don’t think Sturgeon’s story was even at that level. If I had read it in a theme anthology about cute alien creatures it might have been acceptable. It was in two of those, The Science Fiction Bestiary edited by Robert Silverberg, and Zoo 2000 edited by Jane Yolen.

If you follow the links to those two anthologies you’ll find lists of not-so-famous stories. Evidently, this theme isn’t a gold mine for classic SF stories. My favorite alien pet is Willis from Heinlein’s Red Planet. Heinlein and Norton often added cute aliens to their young adult books.

Just for grins, here are some of the covers for Sturgeon’s 1949 publications.

James Wallace Harris, 7/11/23

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“All the World’s Tears” by Brian W. Aldiss

“All the World’s Tears” by Brian W. Aldiss was first published in Nebula Science Fiction 21 in 1957. It has been rarely anthologized, but frequently reprinted in collections of stories by Aldiss. Older American science fiction fans might remember reading it in Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (1960). However, that collection has been republished many times with varying numbers of stories. I don’t recommend the current Kindle edition because it leaves off the story titles, uses the theme titles instead, and runs the intros into the beginnings of the stories. It’s readable but annoying.

You can read “All the World’s Tears” in Nebula Science Fiction 21. You can read a review of Galaxies Like Grains of Sand at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

Galaxies Like Grains of Sand is a fixup novel with a mosaic story composed of eight or nine unrelated short stories glued together by imaginative introductions. Sort of like Simak’s City. It feels like a cross between Last and First Men and The Dying Earth.

“All the World’s Tears,” is the second story, under the theme “The Sterile Millennia.” For being such a short short story is dense with ideas, atmosphere, and imagery. The opening sequence, tells us the ending but we won’t know that until we get to the last page and read it. Aldiss has painted a future Earth of stark contrasts. The setting is the far future, the last day of summer of the 44th century. Earth no longer supports billions of humans, just hundreds remain, living in a high-tech society under the control of robots. No one is poor, but civilization is in decay.

Robots control every intent of peapods, bees, birds, and ants. The agricultural land is impoverished, yet wild mother nature is encroaching everywhere. I have to wonder if this is the mid-way point between the mid-20th century and the future of the Hothouse stories Aldiss would soon write.

Strangely, the robots do everything, yet are rather dumb. They monitor all activity, yet talk between each other in clumsy English and can be easily fooled. At one point, a man evades security robots by holding tree branches and telling the robots he’s a rose bush.

Aldiss’ prose suggests vivid scenes for paintings and films. Aldiss is quite imaginative. Both Hothouse and Galaxies Like Grains of Sand could be the basis for wonderful animated films for adults.

“All the World’s Tears” feature four human characters and several robots. The main character of focus of Ployploy. She is a young woman who is considered mentally deficient for being kind and barred from having children. However, Ployplay is well-loved by her father Charles Gunpat. She is judged a hereditary throwback because she is white and can’t express herself with hate and aggression. I can’t but wonder if Aldiss isn’t being racist here by suggesting non-white people are the genetic aggressors. Although he could also be suggesting that whiteness disappeared as the world’s population homogenized, and aggression was another trait that emerged after thousands of years of endless wars.

Observing Ployploy is a visitor, J. Smithloa, who is hired to visit Gunpat’s estate. He is a professional insulter, hired to fire up people’s aggression so they will mate and work to keep civilization going. The fourth character is a wild man sneaking onto Gunpat’s estate. He lives outside the control of the cyber-controlled state and wants Ployploy to run off with him.

Aldiss envisions the future as being extremely regulated, and high-tech, yet, falling into decay, near the end of mankind’s reign on Earth. Wild nature will soon overrun what is left of our civilization. Not only is Aldiss’ picture of our future bleak, but the couple we want to escape this horrible society die tragically.

Why did Aldiss write this story? Why is he so pessimistic? Over the past couple of years, I’ve become a fan of Brian W. Aldiss. Sometimes his works seem more adult, more mature than American science fiction. I assume in the 1950s, Aldiss extrapolated human aggression constantly evolving through natural selection into what he projects in “All the World’s Tears.” I have not read all the stories in Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, but the ones I have contain the same Darwinian cynicism about the future. In these stories, it’s a red tooth and claw existence.

I read this story years ago, and then yesterday, and again today. Each time I found more little nuggets of speculation. The story is both slight and deep. Aldiss included in his collection Man in His Times: The Best Science Fiction of Brian W. Aldiss, a collection I’m group reading on Facebook.

James Wallace Harris, 7/9/23

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“The Lens” by Annemarie van Ewyck

“The Lens” by Annemarie van Ewyck is story #28 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 Lens” first appeared in Dutch in De beste sf-verhalen van de King Kong award 1977, deel 1 (Dec. 1977/Jan. 1978). In 1986 it was reprinted in English in The Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Sam J. Lundwall.

Annemarie van Ewyck was Annemarie Pauline van Ewijck (1943-2017). She only has three short stories listed in ISFDB and was mainly an editor and columnist. The periodical above where the story first appeared looks like a fanzine to me.

Once again, I find it interesting that my take on a story is different from Hartwell’s. More and more, I’m realizing that The World Treasury of Science Fiction (1989) seems like a precursor to The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016) and that I’m out of touch with both editors. I might just be out of touch with the genre in general. However, with “The Lens” I believe it’s a perfect story for this anthology, and it’s my kind of science fiction.

Here’s Hartwell’s intro:

I thought “The Lens” was quite a nice story, especially effective for being so short, but I didn’t think “The Lens” reflected the mood, tone, or concerns of 1950s science fiction. I don’t know if that era can be generalized, and I wonder if there really is a general style to post-Anglo-American post-New Wave works. “The Lens” doesn’t feel like Bradbury, Zelazny, or Sturgeon to me at all but it does remind me of James Tiptree, Jr., but also Ursula K. Le Guin.

In other words, “The Lens” reminds me of 1970s science fiction written by women, which it is, but can we generalize on that? Is there a common denominator? I don’t think so, other than a female character in an alien society feeling the shock of otherness after undergoing an alien rite. But isn’t that theme also explored by Jack Vance in “The Moon Moth” or Downward To the Earth by Robert Silverberg?

As the years go by, I’m less inclined to believe there was much of a New Wave in science fiction, despite the efforts of Michael Moorcock, Judith Merril, and J. G. Ballard. Yes, there were some experimental efforts, like the kind we saw in New Worlds, England Swings, and Dangerous Visions, but that kind of experimentation had been going on in the literary world for a long time. I believe by the 1960s and 1970s the genre was just getting more diverse writers, and better writers in general, writers who were willing to try different ways to tell a story. By then writing programs were flourishing everywhere.

I also know people get tired of me bellyaching about some stories in these anthologies not being science fiction. That’s not because of how they were written, or by who. I believe science fiction represents a state of mind, and “The Lens” is definitely science fiction, and fits within that state of mind.

The first-person narrator, Dame Ditja, a diplomat, is returning from Earth to Mertcha after visiting their dying mother. We know things are very different when we learn her mother died at age 286. I liked how Dame Ditja described her relationship with their mother and their interaction with the other passengers on the ship. She is returning to the city of Tiel where she is the Head of Cultural Liason.

On Mertcha, the aliens have three arms and three legs, and their architecture and philosophy reflect that difference. Dame Ditja has decided to request a permanent assignment to Mertcha, which she now thinks of as home. She expected to be met at the spaceport by Mik, a local who is her driver and friend, however, a substitute driver meets her instead. That driver thinks she is an ordinary tourist and takes her to a holy place that is a main tourist attraction for people from Earth.

At the Holy Place of Tiel, Dame Ditja has a transcendental experience, one of ecstasy, one that is usually experienced by certain believers in this alien culture. While having this experience, Dame Ditja realizes that radical monks of this faith have trapped some tourists from Earth to hold hostage, and Dame Ditja comes out of her trance and carefully, but forcefully, frees them in a diplomatic coup.

This achievement gets her offered more prestige assignments, and Dame Ditja changes her mind and plans to leave, even though all through the story she wanted to stay.

The ending is strange. Because of the incident at the Holy Place of Thiel, Dame Ditja no longer feels like Mertcha is her home, and thus feels compelled to leave. It appears Dame Ditja wants to die, and she feels she can only die in a place she considers home. I’m not sure why she wants to die or is ready to die, but I wonder if it’s because people live too long in this fictional future?

After reading this story twice I feel it’s closest in style and tone to some stories I’ve read by Brian W. Aldiss. On the first reading, I would have rated this story ***+ but on my second reading, I feel it’s a **** story.

James Wallace Harris, 6/8/23