Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 57

Justice League or Sometimes There’s No Way to Salvage an Unholy Mess

Last week, the news dropped that Warner Bros is planning to release the so-called “Snyder cut” of Justice League sometime in 2021.

To recap, Zack Snyder, who had already directed Man of Steel and Batman versus Superman: Dawn of Justice shot Justice League and got as far as creating a rough cut without any post-production work in 2017, when tragedy struck and the Snyders’ daughter committed suicide. As a result, Zack Snyder and his wife, producer Deborah Snyder, stepped down to focus on their family. Joss Whedon was brought in to finish the film and created the version of Justice League that premiered in late 2017. Justice League did reasonably well at the box office, but got lukewarm to bad reviews, just as its predecessors Man of Steel and Batman versus Superman: Dawn of Justice. And considering very few people actually liked Man of Steel and Batman versus Superman: Dawn of Justice, the lukewarm reaction to Justice League was pretty predictable. Most critics seemed to agree that it wasn’t good, but at least better than Batman versus Superman: Dawn of Justice.

However, the people who did like Man of Steel and Batman versus Superman: Dawn of Justice, really really liked them and started the petition to release the so-called “Snyder cut”. Never mind that there was no finished “Snyder cut”, just a rough version without any special effects and post-production work. And now, two and a half years after the premiere of the Justice League that is, Warner Bros has agreed to give Zack Snyder another twenty to thirty million US-dollars to create his favoured version of Justice League, which will either be a four-hour movie or a six-part miniseries.

Now I have zero interest in the “Snyder cut”. The Snyder family has my deepest sympathy for the tragic loss they suffered. And Zack Snyder is not responsible for the toxic fans he has attracted. However, I am not a fan of Zack Snyder’s work as a director, going all the way back to 300. The only recent DC movies I liked were Wonder Woman, Aquaman and the very underrated Shazam, neither of whom was directed by Snyder.

However, by coincidence the original 2017 Justice League just happened to be on TV this weekend. And since I had nothing better to do, I decided to watch it, if only to see if it was as bad as its reputation suggests. Besides, even a bad superhero movie would almost certainly be better than the last two episodes of the long-running German crime drama Tatort I tried to watch.

So what’s the verdict? Well, Justice League was better than the last two episodes of Tatort, but it’s still an unholy mess of a movie. It’s the filmic equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, a lumbering, stitched together thing with the seams showing all too clearly.

Now it’s very difficult to imagine two directors more different than Joss Whedon and Zack Snyder. And so it’s easy to tell which parts of Justice League are Snyder’s and which are Whedon’s and you don’t even need to use Henry Cavill’s electronically removed mustache as a guide. In short, any scene with dialogue that’s actually witty or characters appearing to have fun is likely Whedon’s. Anything with ponderous dialogue and the characters being morose is likely Snyder’s as are the action and fight scenes.

That said, it’s easy to see why Warner Bros brought in Joss Whedon to finish the movie. After all, Whedon was available, had experience with superhero movies and the basic plot of Justice League is very similar to Whedon’s own The Avengers. Both The Avengers and Justice League feature a villain with a horned helmet (both created and designed by Jack Kirby even) and his winged henchbeings, who are subordinates of an unseen even bigger baddie, acquiring glowing magical objects all over the world, while a bunch of disparate and often quarrelling superheroes get together to stop him and learn the value of teamwork in the process. Yet, The Avengers is a near perfect movie and one of my go-to feel-good films, while Justice League is an unholy mess.

Part of what made The Avengers so good is the banter and chemistry between the characters. That aspect is almost completely missing from Justice League and what little there is is likely due to Joss Whedon’s reshoots and script tweaks. But compare the scene of the Avengers arguing in the lab, with Tony Stark and Steve Rogers insulting each other, to the scene of the Justice League arguing in the Batcave with Bruce Wayne insulting almost everybody, until Wonder Woman pushes him. It’s basically the same scene, only one is good, because the excellent dialogue fits the characters as they’ve been portrayed until that point, and the other is weighed down by ponderous dialogue and Bruce Wayne being a jerk for no reason at all.

Also, the relationship between Batman and Superman portrayed in the movie is off. In the comics, they’re normally friends. In Batman versus Superman: Dawn of Justice, they hate each other’s guts and in Justice League, Bruce Wayne suddenly behaves as if he has a massive crush on Clark Kent. Now Batman’s sexual orientation has been questioned all the way back to Frederick Wertham in the 1950s and plenty of Batman actors beginning with Adam West in the 1960s have hinted at Batman being interested in men at least on occasion. And there would be absolutely no problem, if Bruce Wayne were indeed revealed to be bisexual or even gay (though likely bisexual, because Bruce Wayne also shows interest in women). And yes, Bruce Wayne can clumsily flirt with both Wonder Woman and Superman. But could they maybe come out and say it already, instead of teasing a bisexual Batman for sixty years?

The problems with Justice League are not the fault of the cast. Gal Gadot and Jason Momoa are great as Wonder Woman and Aquaman respectively. Ezra Miller is pretty good as Flash, though I still prefer Grant Gustin in the role and the Flash costume in Justice League is awful. Ben Affleck isn’t half bad as Bruce Wayne and the moment where he muses that he is getting too old for that sort of thing is nicely done, though I still wonder what whoever designed that Batman suit was thinking. Jeremy Irons makes a good Alfred, but then I’ve never seen a bad Alfred, even though we have had plenty of bad Batmans. Henry Cavill is nice to look at as Superman and The Witcher proved how good he can be, when given good material to work with. But Cavill’s version of Superman is weighed down by the two awful previous movies in which he appeared. I also note that he still pays zero attention to potential collateral damage and civilian deaths. Amy Allen would probably have made a nice Lois Lane, but we see very little of her. Ray Fisher as Cyborg isn’t given much to work with either, though his part is pretty substantial. Cyborg is also a rather dull character in general (but then so is Aquaman) and the movie does nothing to make him interesting, since he spends most of his time staring morosely out of windows (maybe he is trying to beat Batman’s standing morosely on roofs record), not to mention more associated with the Teen Titans than the Justice League. I understand the desire to have another hero of colour on the team, but why not John Stewart as Green Lantern, who actually is an established member of the Justice League? Is it because Green Lantern’s origin story is too complicated? Or is the character still considered toxic, because of the bad Ryan Reynolds movie, even though there are plenty of Green Lanterns available to use who are not Hal Jordan. Though there is a Green Lantern briefly glimpsed in a flashback scene fighting the villain Steppenwolf in prehistoric times.

As for Steppenwolf, Ciaran Hinds does the best with what he’s given, but I still wonder about the decision to use him as the main villain for the first (and likely only) Justice League movie. Loki he’s not. I’ve never particularly cared for the New Gods anyway and Steppenwolf is simply dull. I know they were holding back Darkseid for a later movie (probably for the better, since Darkseid basically is Thanos by another name), but Lex Luthor’s Injustice League idea, which is teased in the post-credits scene, would have been much more interesting than Steppenwolf and his flying monkeys. Steppenwolf’s end – he’s attacked and apparently killed by his own flying monkeys – is also a letdown. Now the Justice League is comprised of heroes who don’t kill – though Superman at least seems to have forgotten that fact in Man of Steel – so having them kill Steppenwolf would have been out of character and locking him up in Arkham Asylum wouldn’t work, since Arkham can’t even hold Batman’s more mundane rogue’s gallery. But just having the heroes stand back, while the flying monkeys do all the work, is still anti-climactic. According to this article on the “Snyder cut”, Snyder was planning to have Aquaman impale Steppenwolf and Wonder Woman behead him, just to make sure, which would have made for a more satisfying climax, but would also have been out of character.

Another problem – and for this one the blame squarely lies with Zack Snyder – was the decision to kill off Superman in Batman versus Superman: Dawn of Justice. First of all, it was always clear that the “death” of Superman would be a fake-out – even clearer than with other superhero deaths – after all, he is Superman and so we always knew he’d be back. However, the inconvenient fact that Superman is dead means that the Justice League have to interrupt the ongoing plot to resurrect him, while Steppenwolf steals the third Infinity Stone – pardon Mother Box. This leads to what is inevitably my least favourite part of every superhero team-up film – the part where the heroes fight each other. Now I have never liked superheroes fighting each other (which is probably why Captain America: Civil War is my least favourite Marvel movie), I’d much rather watch them hanging out, eating shawarma, having parties, playing sports and being friends. Besides, I have never felt the need to see which hero could beat which other hero. Most of the time, it’s obvious anyway.

But while the rest of the Avengers fighting the rampaging Hulk – twice, with a side order of Black Widow fighting the possessed Hawkeye the first time around – at least makes narrative sense, because Hulk is notoriously unstable and difficult to control, everybody fighting Superman makes zero sense, because “notoriously unstable” and Superman have never appeared in the same sentence, at least not until Zack Snyder got hold of him. And while I understand that Superman is not everybody’s piece of cake for being too much of a goody-two-shoes, what Zack Snyder did to the character is unforgiveable. A dark Superman simply does not work, unless it’s some kind of Elseworlds scenario or there is red Kryptonite involved. Also, while the ethics of resurrecting Superman are questionable in general (something the characters do point out), digging him up and resurrecting him without first informing his next of kin is completely unethical. Especially since it becomes clear that Bruce Wayne and Alfred know where to find Lois Lane and Martha Kent, since they bring in Lois to calm down the raging Superman. Luckily, it works, though it could have easily gone wrong and Superman could have tossed Lois aside like a rag doll, just like he tosses Batman aside. Only that unlike Batman, Lois would have had no way of surviving.

And talking of dark, up to now, my take on Zack Snyder’s work has always been, “I don’t like his movies, but the visuals are nice.” And contrary to popular opinion, Sucker Punch is actually my favourite of his films. It’s still deeply flawed, but for once the flaws are less due to Snyder and more due to casting actresses who are more suited to stuff like Highschool Musical than amovie about abuse and mental illness. And whatever else you can say about Sucker Punch, the dream sequences are visually impressive.

Justice League, on the other hand, is not visually impressive. Oh, there are some nice moments such as Superman hurling a giant replica of his own head at the other heroes or Wonder Woman taking down the terrorists early on (But “We are reactionary terrorists”? Really? Even if the lasso compells them to tell the truth, no one thinks of themselves as a reactionary terrorist. He’d probably say something like “We are conservative freedom fighters.”) and Commissioner Gordon (J.K. Simmons, who really seems to be a superhero fan, since he’s also J. Jonah Jameson over at Marvel) firing up the Batsignal, only to get more superheroes than he bargained for. But overall, the action and fight scenes are murky, dark, confusing and not all that well shot. There also are very few iconic shots such as the famous Michael Ballhaus style camera circle around the assembled Avengers in the first Avengers film.

The biggest problem with Justice League, however, is that it is often difficult to follow, bordering on incoherent. Now other superhero movies, including the Avengers movies, jump around between different locations, characters and plotlines as well, but they usually feel much more coherent. Justice League, however, feels choppy. Worse, several times information is missing and important scenes are not shown, but only referred to in dialogue.

This is the one problem with the movie that the “Snyder cut” might actually fix, if only because it is longer – much longer. Four hours long according to rumours. Now I don’t think that any movie needs to be four hours long, but Justice League could have benefitted from another fifteen to twenty minutes runtime.  Besides, both Whedon’s Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron are much longer than Justice League to the point that I was actually surprised that the movie was relatively short. However, according to reports, it was Warner Bros that pushed for a runtime of under two hours. Both Whedon and Snyder would have preferred the movie to be longer.

Will the “Snyder cut” improve on the Justice League that is? Snyder’s fans probably think so. And at any rate, the “Snyder cut” will be a more coherent vision than the badly stitched together mess that we have. Unfortunately, given Snyder’s track record, it will be twice as long, twice as dark and twice as depressing with what little sparkle there is removed. Personally, what I would like to see is not Zack Snyder’s Justice League, but the Justice League Joss Whedon would have made, if he had been in charge of the movie from the beginning.

I understand why Warner Bros has announced the release of the “Snyder cut” now. Due to the corona pandemic, shooting new movies is impossible right now, theatrical releases have been suspended, including Wonder Woman 1984. Releasing the “Snyder cut” is a relatively cheap (and sadly, 20 to 30 million US-dollar is cheap compared to a movie that already cost 300 million US-dollar) way for Warner Bros to get new content as well as subscribers and interest for their streaming service. Plus, it shuts up the “Release the Snyder cut” fanboys.

However, what I cannot understand is why Warner Bros didn’t hit the brakes after Man of Steel came out and demonstrated that Zack Snyder’s vision of Superman was not one that most fans wanted. Why double down with Batman versus Superman: Dawn of Justice (the title alone is a pain to type over and over again) and Justice League? Okay, so Warner Bros had a lot of success with Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (I don’t like those movies, but many people do), but Batman is a very different and darker character than Superman, who justifies a different approach. Not to mention that times, tastes and superhero films have changed a lot since the Dark Knight movies came out. The Dark Knight and the first Iron Man film came out in the same year, one dark and depressing and full of “war on terror” and “we need to make hard choices” rhetoric (which is the reason I can’t stand The Dark Knight, though I liked Batman Begins all right) and the other a lot lighter and more fun and starring a superhero who actually enjoyed his life. Of course, Iron Man had its share of dark moments, too, like all of the Marvel movies, but they were integral to the story, not just darkness for darkness’ sake. And by the time The Dark Knight rises came out in 2012, it was eclipsed by The Avengers. Audience tastes had clearly changed, but Warner Bros doubled down on the dark and gritty for characters that don’t support that approach at all, ironically while having a lot of success with its superhero TV shows, which are very different.

So the big question about Justice League is: How did this mess ever get commissioned in the first place and why did Warner waste 300 million US-dollars and the potential of its biggest characters on a movie they should have known wouldn’t work?

Throwing another 20 to 30 million US-dollars at the problem is not going to make it work.

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In Memoriam Peter Thomas

German film and TV composer Peter Thomas (1925 – 2020) died yesterday aged 94. Unfortunately, there is no English language obituary, though here are some nice German ones from Der Spiegel, Die Zeit and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Together with Martin Böttcher (whom we lost last year) and Klaus Doldinger (who is still alive), Peter Thomas formed the trifecfta of the great West German film composers of the postwar era. All three created iconic works of music, combining jazz, swing, classical and early electronic music. Of these three, Peter Thomas was probably the most experimental.

Peter Thomas was born in 1925 in Breslau, Silesia (nowadays Wroclaw in Poland) and moved to Berlin as a young child. He had music lessons from early childhood on. As with so many others of his generation, his musical career was interrupted by WWII. After the war, Thomas studied music, composition and conducting, while supporting himself as a piano player in the clubs of Berlin that catered to allied soldiers. This is also where he became comfortable with many different styles of music. The Americans loved swing and jazz, the Russians preferred classical music and sentimental tunes. Thomas played them all.

In the 1950s, Peter Thomas first worked for the West Berlin radio station RIAS and then found his true calling composing music for film and TV soundtracks. One of his earliest works is the soundtrack for the 1959 science fiction movie Zurück aus dem Weltall (Moonwolf), starring Ann Savo. The movie is difficult to find, as his Thomas’ soundtrack. However, Peter Thomas and Ann Savo quickly went on to bigger and better things, when they signed on with the West German Edgar Wallace movies of the 1960s. Ann Savo appeared as an actress in several of the movies, most notably as Jean, secretary of Sir John, head of Scotland Yard, while Peter Thomas provided the soundtrack for no less than eighteen of the thirty-eight West German Edgar Wallace movies made between 1959 and 1972, beginning wit Die Seltsame Gräfin (The Strange Countess) in 1961.

As you can hear, the swinging big band dance music for the The Strange Countess is still fairly conventional. This should quickly change, because Peter Thomas was also a musical innovator. Even The Strange Countess already includes electronic music effects, as you can hear in the trailer below. Also enjoy silent movie diva Lil Dagover vamping it up, complete with a Gollumesque “My precious” routine, Klaus Kinski in one of his most delightfully deranged roles (though The Squeaker, also with music by Peter Thomas, is even better) and Brigitte Grothum proving that once upon a time she was an actress with potential and not just the mother from the painful 1980s TV series Drei Damen vom Grill (Three Ladies from the Barbecue) about a three generations of Berlin women running a sausage stand.

Peter Thomas’ music for later Edgar Wallace movies was more innovative. His theme for the 1965 movie Der unheimlich Mönch (The Sinister Monk), in which the titular monk uses a bullwhip to strange the students of an exclusive girls’ boarding school housed in a very gothic mansion, combines organ music with swinging big band tunes.

But Peter Thomas’ masterpiece for the Edgar Wallace series was the main theme for the 1964 film Der Hexer (The Ringer, reviewed at Galactic Journey last year), a squeaky jazz tune, which includes samples of pistol shots, women screaming and moaning, dogs howling, people saying “Der Hexer” over and over again – all in 1964. The result is incredibly danceable – I challenge you not to bop along with the theme – and a great hit at every Halloween party.

The theme for Der Hexer was so good that it reappeared in its original form in George Clooney’s 2002 directorial debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, after Quentin Tarantino referred Clooney to Peter Thomas.

Peter Thomas also provided the music for another great West German series of crime movies from the 1960s, the Jerry Cotton series, starring Hollywood refugee George Nader as pulp hero G-Man Jerry Cotton. The Jerry Cotton movies are highly enjoyable and Peter Thomas swinging Jerry Cotton march is absolutely perfect for the series.

Peter Thomas also worked for television productions and provided the music for a series of hyper-popular TV adaptations of the novels of British mystery writer Francis Durbridge, which were watched by up to 89% of West German TV viewers in the 1960s. Okay, so there only were two channels at the time, but 89% is still an impressive figure. Like Edgar Wallace, Francis Durbridge is another British crime fiction writer of the early 20th century who is largely forgotten in his country of origin, but still fondly remembered in Germany for the (usually very loose) filmic adaptions of his work in 1960s. I have tried to read both Durbridge and Edgar Wallace and find that I don’t particularly care for their novels. The movies, however, are still a treat more than fifty years later. Meanwhile, enjoy Peter Thomas’ theme for the 1966 Francis Durbridge adaptation Melissa.

Also in 1966, Peter Thomas would compose the TV theme that would become one of his most iconic works, the theme for the German science fiction series Raumpatouille Orion (Space Patrol Orion):

The countdown at the beginning is Peter Thomas’ own voice, fed through a vocoder. This is the first use of a vocoder in popular music, by the way, almost ten years before Kraftwerk did it. Together with a friend, Peter Thomas also built his own synthesizer, the “ThoWiePhon”, which can be heard in many of his works and is now in the collection of the Deutsche Museum in Munich, exhibited together with an original Theremin. And of course, Peter Thomas and his ThoWiePhon also provided the music that accompanied Raumpatrouille Orion‘s legendarily bizarre dance sequences:

German film and television drastically changed direction in the late 1970s and early 1970s. Gone were the Edgar Wallace and Jerry Cotton movies, instead we got the New German cinema, crappy softcore porn films masquerading as documentaries and endless adaptations of the sappy, ripped from the headlines novels of Austrian writer Johannes Mario Simmel. It was a dark time for German cinema, but luckily Peter Thomas was there to make even utter crap a little better with his iconic music.

Here is the theme, complete with really sappy lyrics, for the 1972 Johannes Mario Simmel adaptation Der Stoff, aus dem die Träume sind (The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of). Book and movie are a disaster, a slow and sloggy mess about a journalist disillusioned with the fact that the magazine he writes for is focussing more and sex and boobs than on political reporting. He tries to change this by interviewing Czech refugees who came to West Germany after the failure of the Prague spring, falls in love with the Czech refugee Irina and gets embroiled in an espionage affair, too. The summary doesn’t make the film and novel sound too bad and the plot really was ripped from the headlines of the early 1970s. But trust me, it is bad. I have no idea how you can make a spy thriller boring or how a talentd director like Alfred Vohrer can make anything boring, but The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of manages it. So enjoy the only saving grace of the movie. For some reason, “embed” doesn’t work for this video, so it’s just a link.

But the Simmel movies were Oscar-worthy masterpieces compared to the West German softcore porn movies of the early 1970s, which represent the true nadir of German filmmaking. Peter Thomas’ music, however, was as good as ever, even if it now played over some truly dreadful films. Here is a groovy piece for the 1970 movie Die Weibchen (The Girls), a weird erotic thriller about a women’s health clinic that is a front for a cabal of man-killing lesbians (of course). Stars Uschi Glas, who really knows a thing or two about bad movies. And don’t worry, the video is safe for work. The image is just a record sleeve, no man-killing lesbians anywhere in sight. The record is called The Erotic World of Peter Thomas, by the way. Cause only Peter Thomas was famous and bold enough that he could release a compilation of the music he composed for very bad sex films.

With groovy music like that, who wouldn’t want to join a cabal of man-killing lesbians?

Peter Thomas continued to be active well into old age, as a new generation of young musicians rediscovered his classic tunes during the easy listening boom of the 1990s.

One of the obituaries said that Peter Thomas provided the soundtrack for postwar West Germany. That’s absolutely accurate, because any iconic movie or TV show as well as lots of forgettable ones were accompanied by the brilliant music of Peter Thomas – unless it was accompanied by the brilliant music of Martin Böttcher or Klaus Doldinger instead.

So rest in peace, Peter Thomas, and thank you for all the wonderful music.

Finally, here is one last treat, that could also double as recruitment music for the cabal of man-killing lesbians. “Black Power”, a song composed by Peter Thomas for the 1969 TV movie 11 Uhr 20 (Eleven Twenty), performed by a very young Donna Summer, when she was still Donna Gaines and starred in the German stage production of Hair. The movie is apparently a routine adventure thriller and sadly does not feature man-killing lesbians.

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Cora’s Hugo Voter Packet – and Other Miscellaneous Hugo Stuff

[image error]The Hugo Voter Packet is slow to arrive this year, so several finalists in the fan categories have put their Hugo Voter Packets online for everybody to download and peruse. You can find the Hugo Voter Packets of fellow Best Fan Writer finalist Paul Weimer as well as Best Fanzine finalists nerds of a feather, flock together and Quick Sip Reviews here. At File 770, JJ has also compiled a list of where to find the 2020 Hugo finalists (legally) online for free.

And since all the cool kids are doing it, I have decided to put my Hugo Voter Packet online as well. You can download it in your preferred formet below. And in case the cover looks familiar, it’s the same striking artwork by the talented Thai artist Tithi Luadthong that also graces the cover of my novella Evacuation Order, which you can currently get for free as part of Smashwords’ “Authors Give Back” sale.

Because WordPress won’t let me upload mobi and epub files, I had to use StoryOrigin to host the files. However, you don’t have to sign up for my mailing list (which is the original purpose of StoryOrigin), you can download the files directly.

Download Cora’s Hugo Voter Packet here!

If you want to vote for the 2020 Hugos and 1945 Retro Hugos, you have to be a supporting or online attending member of CoNZealand, the 2020 Worldcon in Wellington, New Zealand, which has since gone virtual.

For more Hugo related stuff, next Saturday at 1 PM PDT a.k.a. 10 PM CEST I will be a guest at the Journey Show and talk about the Hugo finalists with fellow Best Fan Writer finalist James David Nicoll and Gideon Marcus, Rosemary Benton and Jason Sacks of the Best Fanzine finalist Galactic Journey. However, since Galactic Journey exists fifty-five years in the past, we will be discussing the Hugo finalists of 1965.

So why don’t you sign up and join us at The Journey Show? It’s a lot of fun and most importantly, it’s free.

I also forgot to mention my latest article at Galactic Journey, which came out May 4. This one is about the latest trends in modern art, the latest trends in 1965, that is.

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Retro Review: “City” by Clifford D. Simak

[image error]“City” is a science fiction novelette by Clifford D. Simak, which was first published in the May 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is a finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugo. The magazine version may be found online here. “City” is part of Simak’s eponymous City cycle and has been widely reprinted. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

“City” opens with an old man known only as Gramp Stevens (in “The Huddling Place”, a later City story, we learn that his full name is William Stevens) sitting in a lawn chair, enjoying the sun and watching as the lawn is mowed. Gramp Stevens grumbles about his grandson Charlie’s taste in music and grumbles even more, when his daughter Betty asks him to move, so the lawn can be properly mowed.

The whole scene feels like a 1950s suburban idyll and reads like something found in an issue of the Saturday Evening Post or Ladies Home Journal, if not for the fact that the lawnmower is a robot. The automatic lawnmower might be the most accurate prediction found in all of Astounding in 1944, by the way, because robotic lawnmowers have become pretty common in recent years. The timing is a bit off, though, because from dates given in this and other stories, we can deduce that “City” is set in 1990.

We gradually get more clues that this is not a piece of contemporary fiction, when Gramp Stevens gets a visitor, Ole Johnson. What makes Johnson’s arrival remarkable is that Ole Johnson still drives a car, an ancient, dilapidated car that would never pass the mandatory biannual technical TÜV inspections in Germany. Johnson is the only person Gramp Stevens knows who still drives a car – everybody else switched to personal helicopters long ago. And since no one is using cars anymore, the streets have long since fallen into disrepair as well, the asphalt cracked and overgrown with weed. Gasoline is no longer available as well – Johnson’s car runs on a mix of kerosene, tractor oil and rubbing alcohol.

Gramp Stevens and Ole Johnson chat for a bit, then Johnson takes off again to try and sell some of his homegrown vegetables at the market. Gramp cautions Johnson that he won’t be able to sell anything. Everybody is only eating hydroponic vegetables now, because hydroponics are more sanitary and the produce supposedly tastes better. I suspect Simak never had the misfortune of trying to eat the watery and tasteless Dutch greenhouse tomatoes that were common until approx. twenty years ago.

Once Ole Johnson has gone and the robot lawnmower has chased Gramp Stevens away by switching to watering the lawn, Gramp gets another visitor, Mark Bailey, one of the few remaining neighbours. However, Bailey only drops by to say good-bye, because his daughter-in-law has finally persuaded his son to move out into the country like everybody else. Gramp confesses that his daughter Betty is pestering her husband to move into the country as well, but that her husband won’t go along with it, because he is the secretary of the chamber of commerce of the unnamed city, so moving away would look bad. Gramp Stevens and Mark Bailey muse about the olden days of the American suburban idyll.

Once Bailey has left, Gramp Stevens goes for a walk and muses some more about the lost suburban idyll and coincidentally also gives us an infodump about why this particular suburban idyll is largely deserted and has fallen into disrepair. Since this is a Clifford D. Simak story, the infodump is also much better written than the usual Astounding infodumps.

In short, the introduction of personal planes and helicopters made cars unnecessary and commuting easier. The introduction of hydroponics meant that traditional farms were no longer necessary. This freed up former farmland, so people flocked out into the country to purchase huge estates. Furthermore, new constructions technologies mean that homes can be quickly and cheaply built and altered at will. Gramp Stevens doesn’t like any of these new developments. He also has another encounter, this time with Henry Adams, the grandson of a former neighbour and old war buddy of Gramp’s. Henry Adams wants to know where his grandfather lived. Gramp shows him the house and also learns that his old war buddy has died.

The scene now switches to John J. Webster, son-in-law of Gramp Stevens and one of Websters who are the red thread that runs through the City stories. Webster is late for a city council meeting, when he meets a ragged man – Simak describes him as a scarecrow – carrying a shotgun. We learn that this ragged man is named Levi Lewis and that he is one of the farmers displaced by the rise of hydroponics and the exodus to the country. As a result, Lewis and his fellow displaced farmers moved into the abandoned city houses to grow their gardens and hunt rabbits. However, these squatters are not wanted in the city either. Police Chief Jim Maxwell considers them criminals and wants to get rid of the abandoned houses as quickly as possible by burning them down. After all, the city owns the houses now because they were seized over unpaid taxes. Other members of the city council disagree and so Webster walks into a heated debate.

One city council member accuses the chamber of commerce of being ineffective and running campaigns and events that cost money, but fail to draw the necessary crowds because the crowds have all moved to the country. When Webster, who is the secretary of the chamber of commerce, is asked to give his opinion, he holds an impassioned monologue and declares that the city is dead and over, that it was dead and over even before personal helicopters and hydroponics were its death knell, that people headed out to the suburbs as soon as they could. Since Webster has just proven himself to be insubordinate and well as something of a jerk, he’s fired on the spot. Webster doesn’t much mind – after all, now he can move to the country, too, and buy himself a huge estate with a running stream. Though he’ll have to find a new job first.

However, finding a new job is easier said than done and so we meet Webster again, when he heads for an office with the slightly sinister name “Bureau of Human Adjustment”, which is apparently an employment agency. The secretary – just referred to as a girl – tells him that he is expected, which surprises Webster, because he didn’t make an appointment and doesn’t need to be adjusted either. All he needs is a job. To his surprise, Taylor – head of the bureau – offers him one. He also tells Webster that they have been expecting him, because Webster’s old boss made sure that he was blackballed and won’t get a job on any city council or chamber of commerce anywhere in the world.

Now it’s Taylor’s turn to infodump. He tells Webster that the Bureau of Human Adjustment is not really an employment agency. Instead, they help people to adjust to the brave new world they find themselves in. The advent of atomic power cost a lot of jobs, so people had to be retrained and learn new skills. The abolition of traditional farming cost even more jobs and caused even more problems, because – so Taylor says – the farmers didn’t really have any skills beyond growing crops and handling animals. I’d say that Taylor (and Simak for that matter) have never met a farmer, but it seems that it’s surprisingly common sentiment that farming is low-skilled work. Michael Bloomberg uttered it just recently during his failed presidential campaign. With that attitude, I’m not at all surprised that his campaign failed.

Furthermore, those dastardly farmers are resisting Taylor’s attempts to adjust them and flat out refuse to learn new skills. Webster agrees and tells Taylor about the squatters living in the abandoned houses and subsisting on what they can grow and hunt. Taylor in turn asks Webster whether he knows Ole Johnson and whether he will help to adjust him. Webster is doubtful that Johnson will let himself be adjusted – after all, there was a brief scene earlier, where Martha Johnson tried and failed to persuade her husband to sell the farm and get a job at the hydroponic farm as well as a personal helicopter and a nice country home with running water and a real bathtub – but he agrees to try.

When Webster leaves the Bureau of Human Adjustment, he once again meets the ex-farmer turned squatter Levi Lewis who tells him that the police are getting ready to burn down the abandoned houses and smoke out the squatters. But the squatters have had enough. They’re not leaving and they’re armed. Oh yes, and Gramp Stevens has joined them and appointed himself as their general, employing his old wartime skills (so much for unskilled farmers). Plus, Gramp has commandeered an ornamental cannon and also found some shells to go with it. Webster is understandably horrified – after all, this will mean a bloodbath. He tells Levi to let Gramp know that he shan’t shoot unless he absolutely has to. Then Webster heads for the city hall to prevent a bloodbath.

Webster storms into mayor’s office, knocking down his (male) secretary first, and gives yet another monologue about how the mayor is clinging to outdated ideas such as rugged individualism and “pulling oneself up by one’s boostraps”. At this point, I was wondering how on Earth Simak ever managed to sell the City stories to Astounding, since Astounding is normally all about rugged individualism and “by one’s bootstraps” ideals. But then, pretty much every Astounding story I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project has been atypical in some way.

Webster ends his monologue by telling the mayor that if the police burns down the abandoned houses, the squatters will shell the city centre, starting with the town hall. And if the city centre is shot to rubble, the mayor will certainly lose his job, because the few remaining city residents won’t re-elect him. That threat is about to work, too, especially since gun fire is heard, followed by a loud explosion. Unfortunately, the chief of police calls the mayor at this point to inform him that the squatters had a really big gun – apparently, the chief of police has never seen a cannon before – but that it exploded.

Webster is understandably worried about Gramp Stevens, who was after all the one person who knew how to operate a cannon, and wants to check on him as soon as possible. The mayor is still intending to burn down the houses, when Gramp Stevens himself comes hobbling into the mayor’s office, Henry Adams in tow. It turns out that Henry Adams used the fortune his family made by getting early into atomic power to pay all the unpaid taxes and buy up all of the abandoned houses. And would the mayor kindly stop burning his property, please.

The mayor orders a very disgruntled chief of police to put out the fires and call in the fire department, if necessary, though I suspect the fire engines will have a hard time even getting to the houses, considering the roads are all overgrown. Henry Adams finally delivery the coupe de grace. He informs the mayor that he will ask the courts for a dissolution of the city charter, since he is now the owner of most of the city grounds. And the courts will comply, because cities are no longer necessary. Oh yes, and the mayor is fired.

The story ends with Webster, Gramp and Henry Adams standing on a hill, overlooking what was once the city or rather its suburbs. Henry Adams announces that he is going to restore the abandoned houses and turn them into a museum, so people can see how their ancestors lived. The squatters can stay – after all, someone needs to restore the houses and gardens. Henry Adams also offers Webster a job as project manager/museum director. Webster is initially reluctant to accept – after all, his wife really wants to move into the country. However – so Henry Adams tells him – Webster doesn’t actually have to stay in the city. He can simply commute every day. And just in case you were wondering what happened to Ole Johnson – inspired by Henry Adams and the city museum, Johnson has decided to turn his farm into a holiday attraction. And so the story ends happily, but those of us who have read the entire City cycle know that this is but the first step that will eventually lead to human extinction, as dogs and ants take over the world.

[image error]When I first read the City stories as a teenager, I mentally filed them in the same “terrible dystopia” category as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. I also didn’t much care for them, less than I liked Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World actually, because those two books at least had the advantage of being some of the few works of assigned school reading I actually enjoyed. City, however, was not assigned reading (and indeed the teacher who assigned Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four had never heard of it, when I asked her if she knew this other dystopian novel I’d read), but an overprized import paperback I’d bought for myself with my pocket money.

In fact, I was surprised how much I enjoyed “Desertion”, when I reread it for the Retro Reviews project, because I remembered not liking the City stories very much. “City” and “The Huddling Place” are both closer to the City stories as I remember them. And while I like the City stories these days and can also tell that they are among the best stories published in Astounding in 1944, I can also easily see why 16-year-old Cora did not care for the City stories at all.

As I said in my review of “The Huddling Place”, I consider myself a city person and my 16-year-old self was even more of a city person. 16-year-old Cora was determined to move to a major international metropolis – London, New York or Paris were my top choices – as soon as possible and literally could not understand that there were people who actually enjoyed living in the countryside or in suburbs or small towns. I always assumed that people were forced to live in such places due to jobs, money issues or the idiotic idea that children should grow up in the countryside.

Now my parents fell for that particular idiotic idea and moved to what was then a very rural area a few years before I was born. So I spent my teens in a village without a cinema or theatre or a bookshop or a shopping mall (or indeed any shops that weren’t food related) or a discotheque (never my thing, but sorely missed by my classmates) or any kind of entertainment option at all. Bremen, which had all of those things and was a city of acceptable size, was only eleven kilometres away. But the only way to get there was by bus and the bus only went five times per day. The last bus went at 8 PM, so forget attending any evening events. Of course, you could always go by bike, but again my parents wouldn’t let me out on my bike after dark.

To the teen girl who was grew up in that place, never really fit in there and hated it, the city world of Trantor, capital of the Galactic Empire from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories, sounded like the coolest place ever and I would have moved there immediately, if it had been remotely possible (Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar was a distant second in my personal ranking of fictional places from SFF where I wanted to live). City, on the other hand, was a horror story about a world, where everybody was forced to live in the countryside, because some arseholes had decided that cities were superfluous. Even if the huge country estates themselves, run by robot labour, are pretty nice places to live, even if it’s not clear where the wealth to run them comes from, as Steve J. Wright points out in his review. Viewed through this lens, it’s obvious why my younger self didn’t much care for the City cycle.

Adult me has a more differentiated view of the City stories. No, the City stories are not horror tales, but neither are they happy stories – after all, humanity eventually dies out, as dogs and ants (and Jenkins, the faithful robot butler) take over the world. And Simak very obviously has an ambiguous view of future he presents – after all, the main POV character in “City” is Gramp Stevens who does not care for all of those newfangled ideas at all. John J. Webster may deliver all the monologues, but it’s very clear that Simak’s sympathy lies with Gramp Stevens and the displaced farmers.

[image error]Adventures Fantastic views “City” as a conflict between collectivists and individualists in his review of the story, but that’s not what “City” is about, in spite of some vague mentions of a world government and John J. Webster’s crack about rugged individualism and that it’s as over as the city. If anything, the people who move out onto huge country estates are the individualists, while the squatters and the city council types try to keep some semblance of human society running. In the end, the City stories are neither utopias nor dystopias, they are is a serious attempt at extrapolation based trends that were already apparent by the time the first stories were written.

We mostly associate the move out of the city centres to the suburbs with the post-WWII era, when identikit suburbs like Levittown sprang up all over the US, made possible by the proliferation of cars. But the desire to leave the cities behind clearly predates the widespread suburbification of the postwar era. Nor was it purely a US phenomenon, though it was most pronounced there. But the urge to move “into the green countryside” was present in the UK and (West) Germany and elsewhere in Europe as well.

Furthermore, the urge to leave the city behind is also at least partly understandable, because in the first half of the twentieth century “city” often meant crime and disease-ridden slums, it meant poverty, it meant lack of space. And in most of Europe, the cities were ruins and rubble anyway. By the time I first read the City stories in the late 1980s, the ruins had been rebuilt (though there were holdouts – hidden behind advertising signs – well into the 1990s), the old slums were gone, poverty had been moved to the public housing estates on the periphery of the big cities and vaccination programs and improved medical treatments had dealt with the diseases. By then, cities were the places where the shops were, the cinemas, the theatres, the museums, the restaurants, the clubs, where the life and the lights were.

In the good old science fiction tradition of “If this goes on…”, Simak tried to extrapolate a trend he saw developing into the future. And as with most science fiction attempts at making predictions, he gets things very wrong, even if he did correctly predict the robotic lawnmower as well as the ending of World War II (Gramp Stevens and Henry Adams’ grandfather started building their respective suburban homes in 1946, after they came back from the war).

[image error]For starters, Simak failed to anticipate that the trend towards surbubification and (white) flight from the cities would not continue indefinitely, but that there would be a reurbification as a counter reaction. In Europe, I’d say that the reurbification has been going on at least since the 1970s. In the US, it started somewhat later, in the 1990s to 2000s. But basically what happened is that once the kids who grew up in the suburbs and experienced all the downsides of being a teenager stuck in a place with little to nothing to do came of age, they moved back into the cities, which had been cleaned up by that point. Similarly, some of those who had moved to the suburbs or even the countryside as newlyweds and young families move back into the city in older age, when driving becomes difficult and living within walking distance to shops, doctors, etc… becomes important.

The world Simak describes is also very much a white American middle class world. People of colour don’t seem to exist in Simak’s stories at all – at any rate, I can’t recall a single person of colour in his oeuvre. Simak normally also isn’t all that great on the gender front either, though “City” at least features two named female characters – Betty Webster, nee Stevens, and Martha Johnson – with speaking parts as well as an unnamed female secretary with lines and another named female character – Mark Bailey’s daughter-in-law Lucinda – without any lines. Alas, Betty and Martha never interact with each other and the only purpose of the various female characters in “City” seems to be to harass their menfolk to move out into the country already. Meanwhile, all of the important people who make the decisions – the city council, the squatters, the Bureau of Human Adjustment – are all white men.

“City” – and that’s probably part of what irritated me as a young reader – is also a very American text. In Europe, downtowns were never abandoned and remained the commercial centres of the respective cities, even as many people moved out into the suburbs. Also, simply letting roads and infrastructure decay and abandoning houses as they are, not even bothering to sell them, is another very American phenomenon. In Germany, roads and other infrastructure that is no longer needed is usually removed, but not left to decay. Germany is also slim picking for urban archaeologists, because houses, shops, malls and being abandoned and left as they are is extremely rare over here. It did happen in former East Germany, largely because no one knew who the legal owner of many buildings was, but is almost unknown in the western part of Germany. The one example I can think of is a clothing shop in the small town of Berne that was abandoned as is and looks like a time warp into the 1970s, because its owner was murdered.

Deliberately destroying homes for fear of squatters is another very American thing. In Centralia, a town in Pennsylvania which has the misfortune of being largely uninhabitable due to being located on top of a mine fire that emits toxic gases, the empty houses were torn down to discourage squatters after the residents were evacuated/forced out, depending on whom you ask. I can’t really imagining this happening in Europe, even if a place is completely uninhabitable.

[image error]Hydroponics may have looked like the future of agriculture in 1944. The Complete Guide to Soilless Gardening by William Frederick Gericke, the seminal book on hydroponics, was published in 1940 and by the 1930s hydroponics were used on several pacific islands with little to no agricultural land to feed airline passengers during stopovers and later US soldiers stationed in the Pacific. So Simak can be forgiven for believing that hydroponics would eventually replace conventional agriculture.

However, while hydroponics are good for lettuce, tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables (and for houseplants), they don’t work for grains, which are the crops that take up the most space. And greenhouses take up a lot of space as well, as everybody who has ever visited the Netherlands knows. Simak also completely fails to anticipate the movement towards more natural and organic food as well as the fact that at least in the early years, greenhouse vegetables simply didn’t taste very good, though the quality has markedly improved in the past twenty years or so.

Talking of hydroponics, do you know those little clay pellets that are used for hydroponic houseplant growing and are often found in potted plants in banks, malls and other public buildings? Do you know what they are made of? They are made from slag from furnaces and kilns. Back when hydroculture for houseplants became popular in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, my Dad was the supervisor of a hazardous waste disposal facility in Moordijk in the Netherlands. The facility burned hazardous waste at very high temperatures in special furnaces either on land or at sea for the particularly toxic substances (the process was later banned, because seals started dying in North Sea – of a virus and not of burn residues – but try telling that to the environmentalists and politicians). And the slag left over in the furnace after the waste had been burned was used to make those little clay pellets. Mind you, the residue had been tested and was completely harmless – the toxic substances had been neutralised by the high temperatures inside the furnace. And besides it was only used to grow houseplants anyway, not vegetables for human consumption. But whenever my Dad tells the story of how they made a lot of money turning slag from toxic waste burning into hydroculture clay pellets, you can see people slowly moving away from the pots with the sad houseplants. Sometimes, I swear he does it on purpose.

Finally, meat production is something Simak does not consider at all. Unless the people of Simak’s have gone vegan, they are going to need land to raise animals. Even factory farming under horribly cramped conditions (and the worst excesses of factory farming have been banned in Europe for a while now due to public pressure) requires space. And there is no way to grow a cow or pig or chicken via hydroponics.

Simak also assumes that farming will not innovate and that farmers will remain stuck in the 19th century in houses without running water and electricity, as becomes clear in the scene between Ole Johnson and his wife Martha. And in 1944, there probably still were a lot of farms that had neither running water nor electricity. However, technical progress not only came to rural areas – no, the much maligned farmers were often innovators. The hydroponic greenhouses that dominate rural areas in the Netherland were set up by farmers, not outside innovators. And in Germany, farmers were at the forefront of the transition towards renewable energy. Whenever you go to a renewable energy presentation or workshop, most of the people you’ll meet there are not stereotypical hippies, but otherwise conservative farmers. I even know one former farmer who now rents out his fields, barns and pig pens to other farmers, because he makes more money selling renewable energy systems.

So in short, “City” is an attempt at serious extrapolation of social trends that has been overtaken and rendered obsolete by reality. This is an issue the City cycle shares with most golden age science fiction. And the fact that the futures presented never came to pass does not matter, as long as the stories are good. So is “City” still a good story?

[image error]

This French cover is probably my favourite of all the covers City has had over the years, because it so perfectly illustrates what the stories are about.

Well, Clifford D. Simak was certainly one of the best writers publishing in Astounding in the 1940s. And like all Simak stories, “City” is well written. Nonetheless, it is a flawed story and IMO the weakest of the four City stories Simak published in 1944.

The main problem with “City” is that it spends much of its time meandering about in search of a plot, as Gramp Stevens reminisces about the good old days. And once it finally finds a plot, namely the conflict between the squatters and the city council, most of the actual action happens off-page. We don’t even see Gramp Stevens siding with the squatters, nor do we see him liberating the cannon. The brief firefight between the squatters and the police is observed at a distance by John J. Webster and the mayor. The action happening off-page was a common issue with Astounding in the 1940s, for example Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories also tend to keep the actual action off stage in favour of having people talk later about what happened. And yes, I know that Astounding was the idea mag, but some action to go with the ideas would have been nice.

The two monologues by John J. Webster also sit like indigestible lumps in the middle of the story. They also seem a lot more clumsy than Simak’s usual writing and I now wonder whether Campbell, who we know was fond of characters monologuing, insisted on them. Paul Fraser also complains about the speechifying and data-dumping in his review of “City”. And yes, I know I just asked for more action, but John J Webster of the mild-mannered and agoraphobic Websters punching out the mayor’s (male) secretary just feels out of character.

I would classify the early City stories under what Joanna Russ called “Galactic Suburbia” science fiction – domestic stories that project the values of mid-century American suburbia into the future. And while “Galactic Suburbia” science fiction is normally associated with the so-called silver age of science fiction – and with women writers, for that matter – I was surprised to find several “Galactic Suburbia” stories during the golden age, quite a few of them written by men.

“Galactic Suburbia” science fiction is often reminiscent of the sort of fiction found in women’s magazines and the so-called slicks – magazines like the Saturday Evening Post – during the 1940s and 1950s. “City” is no exception here and particularly the beginning with Gramp Stevens reminiscing about the good old days feels very much like a literary story of the period with some science fiction trappings thrown in. And while adult me appreciates Simak’s writing skills as well as the melancholy atmosphere of the abandoned streets and houses (yet another melancholic story in a 1944 issue of Astounding), I’m not surprised that my teen self did not much care for City.

“City” is a well-written, if flawed novelette, but it’s not the best novelette of 1944. It’s not even the best City novelette of 1944, since “Census” is better, as are “Desertion” and “The Huddling Place”. I suspect a lot of Retro Hugo nominators went by name recognition here – ditto for “Foundation” winning over the superior “Bridle and Saddle” in the 1943 Retro Hugos. After all, “City” and “Foundation” were the stories that the respective fix-up novel/series was named after. And most of us will have encountered those stories first in fix-up form. Finally, it is also notable that with many fix-ups – definitely the Foundation trilogy and maybe City as well – the whole is greater than its parts. Though with City, the individual parts are usually pretty damn good as well, even if “City” is one of the weaker entries in the cycle.

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First Monday Free Fiction: Kitchen Witch

[image error]Welcome to the May 2020 edition of First Monday Free Fiction. To recap, inspired by Kristine Kathryn Rusch who posts a free short story every week on her blog, I’ll post a free story on every first Monday of the month. It will remain free to read on this blog for one month, then I’ll take it down and post another story.

May is the season for fresh spring green and fresh herbs. It is also the season for wild garlic – or would normally be, because this year, the wild garlic was early and already arrived in late March.

Nonetheless, to celebrate the season I have a mystery for you this month, in which fresh spring herbs in general and wild garlic plays in particular an important part. Kitchen Witch is part of the Helen Shepherd Mysteries series. This time around, Detective Inspector Helen Shepherd and her team have to solve the mysterious death of Eudora Pembroke, a self-styled witch who died after ingesting a poisonous plant. But would an experienced herbalist like Eudora Pembroke really make such a beginner’s mistake? And was her death a tragic accident or foul play? You can find out in…

Kitchen Witch

Rosslyn Grove was exactly what it sounded like, a quiet leafy Hampstead sidestreet lined with Victorian semi-detached houses rendered in red brick.

Once upon a time, these houses would have been middle class homes, occupied by lawyers, doctors, professors, merchants and civil servants, not to mention artists, writers and intellectuals of every stripe. But those days were long gone and nowadays, like all of the nicer neighbourhoods of London and a few of the less nice ones, Rosslyn Grove was the province of millionaires only.

Cause in point, when parking at the curb, Detective Inspector Helen Shepherd of the Metropolitan Police had to squeeze her clunky dark green Rover between a silver gleaming S-class Mercedes and a cute little BMW convertible. Helen suspected the millionaire owners of those luxury cars wouldn’t be too happy about that, but then she didn’t give a damn. They should consider themselves lucky she didn’t have their cars towed for obstructing access to a crime scene.

Rosslyn Grove 22 was something of an exception to the rule of the street, since it was a freestanding single rather than a semi-detached house. It was equally Victorian, equally red brick and surrounded by the same type of wall as the other houses on the street, yet something was different.

For starters, there was no car in the driveway, only an old black bicycle leaning to the wall. And while the garden behind the brick wall was certainly beautiful, it was also a lot less manicured than those of the adjacent homes. All over the garden, chimes and crystal ornaments dangled from the branches of trees and shrubs. Fairy circles sprouted from the grass and in a corner, there was a small altar, covered with stones, sea shells, pieces of wood, candles and little figurines. It was all very enchanting, but certainly not the latest fashion in garden design. What was more, the current tenant of Rosslyn Grove 22 seemed to be fond of growing herbs and vegetables in the front garden, something that millionaires rarely felt the need or urge to do.

The front door was flanked by two mischievous looking stone gargoyles, which seemed to positively snuggle up to the two uniforms guarding the entrance. Dangling from the canopy above the door, there were yet more crystal chimes, a veritable riot of them.

“Good morning, ma’am,” Police Constable Martin Jackson, one of the uniforms guarding the door, greeted Helen, “Quite the fairytale glade, isn’t it?”

“It’s certainly lovely,” Helen agreed, “Though not quite the design sensibility I would expect in this neighbourhood. Camden Town, sure, but here? Too wealthy and too upper class for chimes and vegetable gardens.”

“Well, it is Hampstead,” PC Jackson replied, “And Hampstead always had its share of artsy folk.”

“Though nowadays, the only artsy folk who can afford to live in this neighbourhood are washed-up rockstars and actors with delusions of poshness.” Helen looked around the garden again. “I suspect our victim was neither.”

***

This story was available on this blog for one month only, but you can still read it in Kitchen Witch. And if you click on the First Monday Free Fiction tag, you can read this month’s free story.

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Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for April 2020

It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some March books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have epic fantasy, urban fantasy, historical fantasy, dark fantasy, sword and sorcery, horror, paranormal mysteries, paranormal romance, fantasy romance, science fiction romance, space opera, military science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, YA science fiction, time travel, Steampunk, werewolves, wizards, angels, demons, dragons, pirates of space and of the sea, crime-busting witches, revolutionary witches, rebellious numbers, usurper kings, space marines, supernatural prisons, moon goddesses, teens lost in space and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

The Usurper by James Alderdice:

Introducing the Usurper King…And the Road to the Crown is paved in blood…

The Fates weave a tapestry of life and death for young Gathelaus the Sellsword. Now an unexpected opportunity presents itself for the famed mercenary, he has but to claim the blood red crown…

But once you wear the crown, how long can you hold it until that power is turned against you? Follow Gathelaus on a journey through a life of magic, action and intrigue; battling gods and monsters across a mystic realm …

The Usurper is an action-packed heroic adventure in the vein of classic pulp fiction and heroic fantasy. If you like Conan the Barbarian, The Witcher and Logen Ninefingers along with vengeful sorcery, savage duels, larger-than-life characters, and witty humor, then you’ll love James Alderdice’s barbaric tale.

Ever by Odette C. Bell:

When the future is broken, the present becomes all we have left….

Genevieve wakes in a broken future. Cryogenically frozen in the hopes that one day her illness will be cured, she awakens to find she was never sick. Her disease is a power – one of the greatest in the galaxy. All will fight to control her, and they will bring the Milky Way to the brink of total destruction.

There’s only man who can save her and everyone else – not that he knows it. A transport captain with a rocky past, Scott will have to find the good in his heart before he can rise to the occasion.

Home Front by Lindsay Buroker:

Casmir and his allies have struck a devastating blow to the powerful prince who sent invaders into their star system, but war still rages at home. Worse, the prince has escaped with a lethal bioweapon, and he intends to wipe out all human life on Odin. Casmir could lose his parents, his friends, and everyone he holds dear.

On top of all that, the Kingdom fleet commander Jorg has captured two of Casmir’s friends to ensure his “compliance.” But Jorg wants a bioweapon of his own as well as the deadly crushers that Casmir has made. To side with him would be to side with the devil. But if Casmir doesn’t… he may never see his friends alive again.

Tangled Truths by Lindsay Buroker:

Dealing with dragons is hard. Dealing with a teenage daughter is even harder.

My new mission involves both. Weird things are happening in Northern Idaho, and my boss is sending me to investigate. Unfortunately, my daughter and ex-husband are vacationing in the town that’s at the center of the trouble. Coincidence? Or is someone targeting them to get at me?

I’m a wanted woman right now. Not only by the criminal werewolves, orcs, and trolls that I’m often hired to kill. But by the Dragon Justice Court.

An organization full of arrogant, powerful dragons is exactly as horrible as it sounds. They’re the last beings you’d want after your family. If I can’t get to the bottom of the mystery and convince the dragons I’m not their enemy, I stand to lose far more than my own life.

Boneshaker by Joshua Dalzelle:

Marine First Lieutenant Jacob Brown is bored.

For months he’s been sitting around on an alien planet, waiting for command to recall his scout team so they could rest and be re-outfitted. The team went through hell during their previous mission, losing both their commanding officer and their ship. For now, Jacob was acting CO of Scout Team Obsidian and their ship was a broken down old surplus combat shuttle they’d stolen from narco-smugglers on a planet called Niceen-3.

When command finally does reach out, however, it isn’t to order Obsidian home for some much needed R&R. Instead, they are being reactivated and sent out into the contested space of the recently conquered Eshquarian Empire to track down a single Terran cruiser called the Eagle’s Talon.

The Talon’s captain has gone rogue and is operating within a fleet of ships bent on open rebellion against the quadrant’s only remaining superpower. If that ship is discovered within the rebel fleet, Earth will bear the brunt of the ConFed’s reprisal. Jacob’s team is in a race against time to locate the missing ship and her rogue captain so that a Navy strike force can swoop in and reclaim her… or destroy her.

The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper by A.J. Fitzwater:

Dapper. Lesbian. Capybara. Pirate.

Cinrak the Dapper is a keeper of secrets, a righter of wrongs, the saltiest capybara on the sea and a rider of both falling stars and a great glass whale. Join her, her beloveds, the rat Queen Orvilia and the marmot diva Loquolchi, lead soprano of the Theatre Rat-oyal, her loyal cabin kit, Benj the chinchilla, and Agnes, last of the great krakens, as they hunt for treasures of all kinds and find adventures beyond their wildest dreams. Let Sir Julius Vogel Award-winning storyteller A.J. Fitzwater take you on a glorious journey about finding yourself, discovering true love and found family, and exploring the greatest secrets of the deep. Also, dapperness.

The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper includes seven stories about Cinrak and her crew:

•“Young Cinrak”

•“Perfidy at the Felidae Isles

•“The Wild Ride of the Untamed Stars”

•“Search for the Heart of the Ocean”

•“The Hirsute Pursuit”

•“Cetaceous Secrets of the Jewelled Nadit”

•“Flight of the Hydro Chorus”

Witch Confidential by Lily Harper Hart:

The Big Easy is about to be buried in big trouble.

Again.

For Ofelia Archer, that means she’s knee-deep in an investigation … even though she’s not quite sure how she got there.

Zach Sully thinks he’s in for an easy night at Ofelia’s speakeasy – maybe a little flirting as a lead-up to a date included – when a scream in a neighboring abandoned building draws his attention. Upon further investigation, he finds a young woman dead and a real estate developer traumatized.

The dead girl is a street performer who lived on the edge. That’s bad enough, but when voices from the past cause Ofelia to break open a wall, they find more bodies … and a mystery more than ten years in the making.

The new murder mimics the old deaths, but who are the girls in the wall? Ofelia was a child when stories of street girls going missing were prevalent … and then Hurricane Katrina hit and people forgot their fear in the face of a life-changing storm.

Now, all these years later, Ofelia and Sully are determined to uncover what happened then, tie it to what’s happening today, and find vengeance for all of the victims in the here and now.

That’s easier said than done.

There’s a malevolent force stalking the French Quarter and Ofelia suddenly finds herself in the killer’s path. Someone wants to keep a secret, and he or she is willing to kill to make sure that the past stays buried.

Can Ofelia and Sully evade a killer and uncover the truth? It will be a race to the finish to find out.

Broomstick by A.L. Hawke:

I used to not believe in witches.

Until I enrolled in Dr. Alondra Johansen’s metaphysical history class. Bryce, Alondra’s super cute teaching assistant, told me my element sign is Earth. I am, in fact, a pragmatic sort of girl. My name is Cadence Hawthorne, but you can call me Katie.

Darkness fell over me and my family during my sophomore year. I thought maybe Alondra could help me with my grief and visions of ghosts. But there was this guy working with her, with a goatee and sardonic smile, who looked more like the devil than a professor. He did terrible things to my best friend, threatening my growing love for Bryce.

Do you believe in ghosts? How ‘bout witches? I do. See, it was at Hawthorne University that I learned all about them. Come take a look in my grimoire. I wrote it all down here in Broomstick.

Content warning: Broomstick is a new adult college paranormal romance containing profanity, sexual scenes, adult situations, and, of course, witchcraft.

Velocities: Stories by Kathe Koja:

From the award-winning author of The Cipher and Buddha Boy, comes Velocities, Kathe Koja’s second electrifying collection of short fiction. Thirteen stories, two never before published, all flying at the speed of strange.

 

 

 

 

Fate of Wizardoms by Jeffrey L. Kohanek:

1,000 pages of magic, adventure, & intrigue. Where wizards rule, magic reigns supreme.

Power. The ambitious thirst for it. But when a power-hungry wizard lord seeks to expand his rule, he triggers events unforeseen.

The balance of magic is altered, races of old return, and beasts of legend stalk the land.

A squad of unlikely heroes armed with magical objects are drawn into the conflict:

Jerrell “Jace” – A clever thief whose outrageous exploits force him to hide his identity.

Narine – A wizardess caught between her mad wizard lord father and jealous brother.

Rhoa – A determined acrobat, armed with enchanted blades and a thirst for revenge.

Rawk – Exiled for urges he cannot control, this dwarf possesses unique magic abilities.

Brogan – Once a renowned warrior, he labors beneath the weight of his regrets.

These characters lead a compelling and memorable cast including ruthless wizards who vie for thrones able to grant the power of a god.

How do you defeat a god?

Sinfully Delicious by Amanda M. Lee:

Stormy Morgan left her hometown of Shadow Hills, Michigan, with one goal: to write the great American novel and strike it rich. She sold her novel not long after college, did relatively well, and then fell off a cliff into obscurity. Now, without a book contract, she’s back at her family restaurant in a one-stoplight town … and she’s convinced things couldn’t possibly get worse.

That feeling only lasts until her first shift, when on a trip to the storage building behind the restaurant, she literally trips over a body.

Roy Axe, Shadow Hills most hated “Axehole,” died a hard death only feet from the restaurant (and the second-floor apartment Stormy currently resides in). The detective on the case is none other than Hunter Ryan, Stormy’s high school boyfriend, and the man who occasionally still calls to her in dreams. Hunter only cares about solving a mystery – nothing else – so their reunion is tense.

In an attempt to distract herself from what’s happening, Stormy and her cousin Alice get drunk one night and pull out their great-grandmother’s old Ouija board, and it sets off a strange string of events, most of which seem magical … if you believe in that sort of thing, and Stormy isn’t sure she does.

Stormy has trouble deciding which problem to focus on, so she avoids them all until things start blowing up in her face.

Shadow Hills is a small town but the secrets that plague it run deep. Stormy is a woman – or maybe a witch – lost in a sea of magic and despair … but murder might just lead her out of it. That is if she can survive to solve the case, that is.

Kitra by Gideon Marcus:

Stranded in space: no fuel, no way home…and no one coming to help.Nineteen-year-old Kitra Yilmaz dreams of traveling the galaxy like her Ambassador mother. But soaring in her glider is the closest she can get to touching the stars–until she stakes her inheritance on a salvage Navy spaceship.On its shakedown cruise, Kitra’s ship plunges into hyperspace, stranding Kitra and her crew light years away. Tensions rise between Kitra and her shipmates: the handsome programmer, Fareedh; Marta, biologist and Kitra’s ex-girlfriend; Peter, the panicking engineer, and the oddball alien navigator, Pinky.Now, running low on air and food, it’ll take all of them working together to get back home.

[image error] Ex Nihilo by Nazri Noor:

In the beginning…

Mason Albrecht was a regular kid until the day he turned eighteen, when golden flames seared holy sigils into his skin, when the angels came to exterminate him. The demons came not long after, hungry for a taste of his nephilim flesh.

Fighting off heaven and hell with his bizarre new gifts, Mason speeds towards the only beacon his awakened eyes can see in a world gone mad: a pillar of light emanating from a distant city, where he may yet find sanctuary… or certain doom.

Ex Nihilo is the prequel to the Sins of the Father urban fantasy series, from Nazri Noor, author of the Darkling Mage saga. Experience Mason’s awakening in Ex Nihilo, a humorous, high-impact supernatural suspense story filled with demons, divinity, and plenty of danger.

QUARN by D. Roman:

On August 5th, 2044, humanity will learn that the number of things we take for granted is almost as limitless as the hubris that guides us.

 

 

 

 

A Touch of Darkness by Nita Round:

In the shadows, treachery and betrayal grow unseen.

The state funeral of Princess Olivia at Port Ruth marks the end of the Queen of the Desert’s reign of terror. As Lucinda, Magda and Ascara attend this grand ceremony, all is not as it seems. A storm of secrets and lies emerge from the shadows and the darkness threatens to destroy them all.

No matter where Magda goes, her heritage calls to her. Even when they make their way home, peace and safety are still not theirs. Malice and betrayal, hidden and out of sight, finds the three women and threatens to pull them under the waves of death and pain once more.

For the Trinity of Truth: Raven, Fire and Ice, there can be only one way forward, but at what price?

This is the third in the Towers of the Earth fantasy adventure series.

Beneath Black Sails by Clare Sager:

Sometimes it takes a pirate to catch a pirate.

With weather magic on her side, Lady Vice is the bane of the high seas, but she isn’t captain of her own ship. Yet. If she can persuade her captain to give her a command, she’ll be in charge of her own fate.

To pay off his family’s debts, Knigh Blackwood hunts pirates for the Royal Navy. And he’s damn good at it. When the bounty on Lady Vice increases, he’s determined to make her face justice, even if that means using unorthodox methods.

Forced to work together, neither can deny their mutual attraction. As they face battles at sea and schemes amongst their crew, they discover hints about a long-lost treasure that could be the answer to both their problems.

But treasure isn’t the only thing buried. Secrets best-forgotten lie in wait that could blast them apart. And the closer Vice and Knigh grow, the greater the threat – to her freedom and to his family. Because for one to succeed, the other must fail.

Arrested by Magic by Avery Song:

Homeless at the age of twelve. Misfit among my peers at sixteen. Unemployed by eighteen. I have bad luck, but never thought I’d be in handcuffs by the golden age of twenty.

Some would blame the universe for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I know better. So does the Alpha wolf hidden inside me. Our potential is massive, but we can’t get a bloody break in a world full of crime, corruption, and hate…and someone did this to us on purpose.

Misfits like me often fall into traps made by higher shifters, and this is no exception. Five supernatural beings hold the key to my shackles, intent in the belief that my wolf holds the key to something powerful…something lethal.

They may be right.

Imprisonment is inevitable, but behind bars, a new world is waiting for me. One where captivity can be a blessing in disguise, creating the opportunity for my wounded walls to crumble in total submission.

I’m ready for it all. I’ll be a misfit no more. I will rise, and those responsible for my captivity will receive capital punishment at my paws.

 

Relics of Eternity by Glynn Stewart:

The edge of Imperial expansion

Far from Earth and the other homeworlds

Here lie the secrets of ancient gods

Here…there be dragons

Seeking to escape the shadow of Annette Bond’s success, Captain Morgan Casimir has taken a posting on the far side of the A!Tol Imperium. Here she hopes to begin a legend for herself that stands apart from her stepmother, the Duchess.

A chance encounter introduces her to the xenoarchaeologist Rin Dunst—and to the strange mystery cult that tried to silence him. There are darker secrets in these stars than the A!Tol and their human allies ever guessed…and if they can’t find answers, the Precursors’ mistakes might yet destroy the galaxy.

Again.

Access Point by David Storm:

Ford’s life used to be simple. Travel the post-apocalyptic wasteland, find parts to repair the only working computer in the world, dodge roving marauders, rinse, and repeat. But he is getting a little long in the tooth and life after the end of the world can be hard on the young and old alike. During one journey he comes across a teenage girl named Apinya who enlists him to rescue her captured tribe. He doesn’t want to help but something tells him that this girl, and the USB drive hanging around her neck, may have answers to the questions that have plagued him his entire life. Where did the people who lived here before go? How did their world end? And more importantly, will it happen again?

Time Grab by Al Traversky:

What if you were told you could re-write your past to solve the problems of your present life and save your future?

Farah Wendell is scared. Her life is falling apart. She’s started waking up in increasingly terrifying and dangerous situations with no memory of how she got there and no understanding of why these events are happening.

She’s desperate to find out the cause and to put a stop to it.

And then a mysterious visitor appears to offer Farah hope.

But could you trust a stranger who says that the solution to your problems lies in lucid dreams, time travel and telepathy? Or when they tell you the cause of this new horror in your life is a sadistic psychopathic killer from a dystopian future?

Can Farah channel her inner female heroine to save her family and her own future?

The Witch and the Revolution by Daniel Sugar:

As the Tsar’s subjects turn against him, Lilly Parris races to save Anastasia Romanov and her brother Alexis – the heir to the Russian throne.

The Witch and the Revolution is a fast-paced, brand-new take on the Russian Revolution.

 

 

 

Fallen Earth by James David Victor:

Sometimes you just have to go back to where the problem all started to find a solution

The Earth has been lost to time, but there are those that believe it is the key to the future. When Anders, Dalia, and their team bet the fate of the galaxy, it becomes their only chance at survival. Can humanities ancient home save their future or will mankind fall the same way Earth did so many centuries ago?

Fallen Earth is the eighth book in the Memories of Earth space opera series. If you enjoy stories in fantastic worlds of aliens, space travel, and genetic engineering, the Memories of Earth series will be right up your alley.

Arterial Bloom, edited by Mercedes M. Yardley:

Lush. Brutal.

Beautiful. Visceral.

Crystal Lake Publishing proudly presents Arterial Bloom, an artful juxtaposition of the magnificence and macabre that exist within mankind. Each tale in this collection is resplendent with beauty, teeth, and heart.

Edited by the Bram Stoker Award-winning writer Mercedes M. Yardley, Arterial Bloom is a literary experience featuring 16 stories from some of the most compelling dark authors writing today.

With a foreword by HWA Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient Linda D. Addison, you are invited to step inside and let the grim flowers wind themselves comfortably around your bones.

The line-up includes:

The Stone Door by Jimmy Bernard

Dog (Does Not) Eat Dog by Grant Longstaff

Kudzu Stories by Linda J. Marshall

Dead Letters by Christopher Barzak

The Darker Side of Grief by Naching T. Kassa

Welcome to My Autumn by Daniel Crow

Still Life by Kelli Owen

Three Masks by Armand Rosamilia

Doodlebug by John Boden

Happy Pills by Todd Keisling

What Remained of Her by Jennifer Loring

Blue Was Her Favorite Color by Dino Parenti

In the Loop by Ken Liu

The Making of Mary by Steven Pirie

Mouths Filled with Sea Water by Jonathan Cosgrove

Rotten by Carina Bissett

Send to Kindle

Retro Review: “Far Centaurus” by A.E. van Vogt

[image error]I’m continuing my reviews of the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists with “Far Centaurus”, a science fiction short story by A.E. van Vogt that was published in the January 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is a finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

“Far Centaurus” starts with the first person narrator – we later learn that his name is Bill Endicott – awakening from suspended animation. Over the next page or so, we learn that he is a crewmember aboard a sublight spaceship bound for Alpha Centauri and that he has been asleep for fifty-three years, seven months and two days. Our narrator muses that everybody he knew back on Earth, including his old classmates and the girl he kissed at a party just before take-off, are all old or dead now, while he is unchanged due to a handwavium medication called “the Eternity drug”.

While Bill eats some soup, we learn that the four crewmembers – all men, of course, and all college friends – are woken up approximately every fifty years for brief periods to look after the ship, before taking another dose of the drug and going back to sleep. Altogether, the trip to Alpha Centauri will take five hundred years.

However, the Eternity drug has a certain failure rate, as our narrator finds out to his shock, when he finds one of his fellow crewmembers – Pelham, inventor of the Eternity drug – dead in his quarters. There is a grisly moment, as Bill tries to prepare Pelham’s body for a space burial, only that the body is so badly decayed that pieces keep falling off. Then Bill radios his report to Earth, where it will be received in five months. He also enters Pelham’s death as well as a note for the next crewmember to be woken, engineer Jimmy Renfrew, into the ship’s log. Then he goes back to sleep, this time for one hundred and fifty years.

There is a jump ahead in time and our narrator Bill wakes up again. This time, two hundred and one years have passed since take-off. Bill immediately heads for the log book to see what his fellow crewmembers have written. Jimmy Renfrew, the next to wake, has only logged instrument and made no personal comments at all. His entry reads like a robot’s, Bill muses. Even the death of Pelham, who was a close friend of Renfrew’s, doesn’t seem to bother him. This worries Bill, because Jimmy Renfrew was always a sensitive soul.

Bill is not the only one worried about Renfrew. For the other crewmember, Ned Blake, has left a letter for Bill in the log book, instructing him to tear out and destroy the sheet when he has read it. In this letter, Blake confesses his worries about Renfrew’s mental state. Back on Earth, Renfrew was rich, charming, a brilliant engineer and a ladies man (we learn that he has three ex-wives who are not so ex, at least according to Blake). Both Blake and Bill were already worried about Renfrew’s reaction upon awakening from his drug-induced sleep only to realise that everybody he’d ever loved, including the three ex-wives, was dead. They assumed that Pelham would act as psychological support for Renfrew, only that Pelham is dead, too. Blake closes the letter by urging Bill to think what to do about the unstable Renfrew, since they will have to live with him, once the ship reaches Alpha Centauri.

Bill destroys the letter as instructed, does his routine work and checks on Blake and Renfrew who are asleep and still alive. He still has no idea what to do about Renfrew, but there still is time, so our narrator goes to sleep for the third time.

When Bill wakes for the third time, the ship’s alarm is ringing. Once he makes it to the cockpit, he sees a great ball of fire on the viewscreen, which set off the proximity alarm. Bill initially thinks that the ball of fire is an unknown star, but he eventually realises that it is a giant spaceship on fire. He assumes that the spaceship hails from Alpha or Proxima Centauri, which must have inhabited planets. Thrilled that they won’t be all alone when they reach Alpha Centauri, but that they will encounter an alien civilisation there, Bill goes back to sleep.

The next time Bill wakes up, he is not alone. The ship is about to reach its destination and Ned Blake is already up and walking about with a grim look on his face. He feeds Bill, who’s still dizzy from his long sleep, soup and informs him that Renfrew has gone mad and had to be restrained. Bill is shocked, for while Renfrew was prone to depression, he didn’t expect that the knowledge that everybody he ever knew and loved was dead would drive him to insanity.

“It isn’t only that,” Blake says and tells Bill to prepare for the greatest shock he ever had. For when Blake awoke and saw Bill’s report about the strange spaceship, he checked if he could receive some radio signals from Alpha Centauri. He found hundreds of radio stations, all broadcasting with perfect clarity. Renfrew couldn’t take the news and promptly went mad. Blake also informs Bill that a ship is coming from Alpha Centauri to meet them. Blake still hasn’t told Bill what precisely the problem is, but Bill – and at least this reader – can already guess what’s up.

Spoiler alert: In the five hundred years it took Bill, Blake and Renfrew to get to Alpha Centauri, humans developed lightspeed and got there before them. The Alpha Centauri system is settled and has been for a long time. Though the Centauri were kind enough to name four planets orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B as well as Proxima Centauri after the four brave explorers who were late to arrive.

Not long after this revelation, Bill and Blake are met by a giant spaceship and instructed to land in its onboard hangar. This ship, they learn, can make the trip from Alpha Centauri to Earth – a trip which took Bill, Blake and Renfrew five hundred years – in three hours.

Aboard this ship they are ushered into a luxurious parlour, where they meet a heavily perfumed man called Casellahat, who informs them that he has studied the language and customs of the mid American period since early childhood solely for the purpose of welcoming the visitors from the past. Because not only has technology advanced in five hundred years, language has changed, too. The visitors from the past are honoured guests on Alpha Centauri and will be given a luxurious penthouse and well as five million credits. However, Casellahat keeps wrinkling his nose and finally tells Blake and Bill that they should not interact with the Centauri population directly, because they stink. Which is really mean. After all, Blake and Bill haven’t had a shower in five hundred years, so of course they smell.

The Centauri have been able to restore Renfrew’s mind to sanity. Bill and Blake hug him, overjoyed to see their friend finally well again. In fact, Renfrew is well enough to ask Casellahat science questions, which leads to roughly two pages of the technobabble that John W. Campbell so loved and most others skip (Leigh Brackett said so in 1944). There is something about bachelor suns that don’t tolerate anything in orbit around them and their tenuous connection to the universe. We also get a crash course in the development of the interstellar drive and the history of the settlement of Alpha Centauri. Oh yes, and the burning spaceship that Bill saw upon his third awakening was a tragic accident, but one that advanced spaceship technology a lot, so they shouldn’t feel bad about accidentally having caused the explosion.

Bill and Blake are feeling morose, because they still have a good fifty years or so left to live in a world where other people, including women, find them disgusting and where they cannot even figure out how the simplest machines work. They are torn out of their ruminations by Renfrew who announces that he has purchased a spaceship and that all three of them will go on a trip.

Bill and Blake go along with the plan, but even the wonders of cruising through space cannot shake the melancholy the two of them feel. Only Renfrew is permanently cheerful, but then Renfrew was mentally unstable to begin with.

One day, Renfrew enters Bill’s cabin with a gun in his hand. He ties up Bill and Blake, so they won’t interfere with his plan. Now Bill – and the reader – finally learns that the Centauri psychologists managed to cure Renfrew by telling him that Bill and Blake had gone insane because of the shock. The sense of responsibility for his friends shocked Renfrew back into sanity and now he has found an ingenious solution to their dilemma. He is going to pilot the spaceship into one of the bachelor suns that Renfrew and Casellahat technobabbled about earlier.

Bill and Blake manage to free themselves and try to stop him – after all, Renfrew is  insane and even if they wasted their lives on a futile dream, they don’t want to die just yet. But try as they might, they cannot get the ship into orbit around the bachelor sun, because bachelor suns don’t like anything orbiting them. Meanwhile, Renfrew babbles something about how contact with the bachelor and its tenuous hold upon the universe will throw them all back in time by four hundred and ninety years and seven months.

Bill finally realises just what Renfrew is planning. He’s taking them all back to their own time, one and a half years after they left. “But what about the ship?” he asks. Wouldn’t bringing back a hyper-advanced starship from the future change the course of history?

Renfrew says that won’t be a problem, because no one can understand how the future technology works anyway. They’ll keep the ship for their own use to jaunt around the universe and otherwise let history take its course.

Bill is still unsure, but Renfrew tells him that the girl he kissed at the good-bye party just before the launch, the girl Bill has been pining for every time he woke up again, that girl will be sitting right next to him, when Bill’s first radio message from space finally reaches Earth some fifty years from now.

The story ends with the line, “That’s exactly what happened”

[image error]Now I have to admit that I’m not a huge A.E. van Vogt fan. I know that he was one of the most popular authors of the golden age, but his stories just don’t work for me. And I certainly tried. I tried Slan and The Worlds of Null-A and The Weapon Shop/The Weapon Makers and didn’t care for any of them. As a result, my reaction whenever A.E. van Vogt puts in an appearance on the Retro Hugo ballot is, “Oh no, I have to wade through another one of those.” I have much the same reaction to C.S. Lewis’ appearances on the Retro Hugo ballot, by the way.

Coincidentally, I was stunned that A.E. van Vogt, who would have celebrated his 108th birthday on April 26, lived until 2000, until the ripe old age of 88. For van Vogt is so associated with the 1940s and 1950s that I assumed he died much earlier. According to ISFDB, his publication frequency drops drastically from the mid 1950s on, but he still published stories and novels well into the 1980s.

There are three A.E. van Vogt works on the 1945 Retro Hugo ballot, one of them co-written with his wife E. Mayne Hull. I decided to start with “Far Centaurus”, because it is the shortest. To my surprise, I found that I liked the story. It’s probably the best story by van Vogt I have read so far. True, the story does suffer from van Vogt’s well-known weaknesses such as inconsistent or rather non-existent plotting and random plot twists every eight hundred words or so. But by some miracle, van Vogt’s random plotting technique works this time around and results in a satisfying story.

As Paul Fraser points out in his review, the best part of the story by far is the first half with Bill waking up every couple of decades aboard the starship. Van Vogt’s prose tends towards the purple, but he does manage to convey the sheer scale of the journey that our three explorers are undertaking very well. He also manages to convey the sense of loneliness and isolation that Bill feels as he thinks about the people he’s known who are now old and later dead and of the girl he kissed the night before and fell in love with. This girl is the only female character in the entire story, by the way, and she never even gets a name.

The clock announcing how much time has passed and Alpha Centauri growing brighter and bigger, as our sun grows dimmer in the viewport are nice touches, as are the notes that Bill and Blake leave for each other. The death of Pelham is a genuine shock and for a moment I assumed we were in for a murder mystery in space a la 2018 Hugo finalist Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty, especially since one of our three explorers is supposedly mentally ill. However, Six Wakes is a story that could only happen after stories about century long space journey at sublight speeds had become an old enough hat that a sublight ship could serve as a backdrop for a completely different story.

However, in 1944 a journey through space lasting five hundred years was still a brand-new idea and must have teased that good old sense of wonder hard. After all, golden age science fiction rarely ventured beyond the boundaries of the solar system. With so much excitement and adventure to be found on Venus, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and elsewhere, Alpha Centauri is indeed far out. And indeed, several people who first read the story when they were young report how it blew their minds. I imagine it would have blown mine as well, if I had first read it at fifteen.

Talking of which, I was surprised that it was already known in 1944 that Alpha Centauri is a triple star system consisting of Alpha Centauri A and B as well as Proxima Centauri, since I thought this was a later observation. However, it turns out that the binary nature of Alpha Centauri was discovered as early as 1689 by Jean Richaud. Proxima Centauri was discovered in 1915 by Robert T.A. Innes. So that part of the story was based on known science. Even the fact that the triple star system has habitable planets is not that far out, since a potentially habitable exo-planet was discovered in orbit around Proxima Centauri in 2016.

[image error]Most authors would probably have ended the story with the revelation that later generations of humans had beaten our three brave explorers to Alpha Centauri and that the system had long since been colonised – a revelation that likely was a lot more shocking in 1944 than today.

A.E. van Vogt, however, just keeps on writing and takes a story into a completely new, if not entirely unexpected direction, as our three explorers finally reach their destination and find that they don’t fit into the brave new world of Alpha Centauri at all. Not only does everybody around them think they smell horrible, they also cannot understand the local language, let alone the most basic principles of science. Of course, you cannot blame them for the latter, since the science of bachelor stars and adeledicnander stardrives is complete and utter gobbledegook.

Once the three got on the starship towards the end, I expected the story to go for a downer ending with a triple suicide in the flaming heart of the bachelor star. But maybe I shouldn’t have skimmed over the page of technobabble earlier in the story, because that’s not what happens at all. Instead, Jimmy Renfrew – who clearly is the most brilliant of the three explorers and probably never was mentally ill at all – has found a way to take them all back to a time they understand.

And so the story comes to a neat and surprisingly satisfying ending. Steve J. Wright points out in his review that given van Vogt’s plotting or lack thereof, the fact that the story comes to a satisfying ending is most likely an accident. Nonetheless, it works.

Everybody gets home, Casellahat is probably very relieved to be rid of those smelly ancient humans and Bill gets the girl he’s been pining after for five hundred years. Of course, it’s amazing that the girl waited for him for one and a half years, especially since she thought that Bill was gone forever on a five hundred year trip to Alpha Centauri. Not to mention that she said, “A kiss for the ugly one, too” just before she kissed Bill, which doesn’t exactly sound like the prelude to a great, time- and space-spanning romance. On the other hand, Bill did pine for her for five hundred years and flew straight into a star to get back to her, which should soften even the hardest of hearts. And indeed, Adventures Fantastic notes in his review that the last two paragraphs stuck with him for a long time.

[image error]As so often with science fiction stories of the golden age, particularly those published in Astounding, the characters are largely cyphers. We learn next to nothing about our narrator Bill except that he ended up on the expedition team, because he was friends with the other three explorers in college, and that he pines after a girl he kissed at a party the night before take-off. We don’t even know what he looks like, except that he’s apparently less attractive than his friends. Ned Blake is even more thinly sketched and basically serves only as a sounding board for Bill. Jimmy Renfrew gets a bit more characterisation and we even learn what he looks like. However, we only ever see Jimmy through the eyes of Bill and Ned Blake who to equal parts admire Jimmy and are jealous of him, because he is rich, brilliant, handsome and gets all the girls. It’s not even clear if Jimmy Renfrew truly was mentally ill or whether Bill and Blake just think that he is.

In many ways, the idea of four friends, two of whom just happen to be brilliant scientists, building a spaceship together to explore the cosmos (like you do) is a throwback to the very early days of science fiction, when scientists/explorers like Richard Seaton or Hans Zarkov built spaceships in their backyard to explore the universe. By 1944, it would have been obvious that space travel would not be achieved by enthusiasts tinkering in their garages. Though the trope of brilliant scientists building spaceships and taking their friends for a ride into space without waiting for official authorisation did last well into the era of actual space exploration. After all, this is the origin story of the Fantastic Four in 1960 (and we know that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were heavily drawing on pulp science fiction). In fact, I now imagine Bill looking like Ben Grimm pre-transformation. After all, he is “the ugly one”.

This is probably the most stereotypically Campbellian story on the 1945 Retro Hugo ballot. We have a trio of competent men, even if one them may be mentally ill (and let’s not forget that Campbell was very interested in psychology and hoped to turn it into a more exact science, so the cure narrative would have appealed to him). We have humans triumphing over adversity as well as a positive view of human progress – after all, what our explorers find on Far Centaurus are not aliens, but advanced humans. We have neat central idea, which is grounded in the actual science of the day, and a lot of technobabble, which is not connected to any actual science at all.

On the other hand, the prevailing mood of the story is not one of boundless optimism and marvel at human ingenuity – no, it’s melancholy. Melancholy at having left everybody and everything they knew behind, melancholy at no longer fitting into the world of the far future (compare this e.g. to Buck Rogers who becomes a hero within days of waking up in the future). Come to think of it, melancholy was the prevailing mood in several of the stories from Astounding that I read for the Retro Reviews project (“No Woman Born”, “The Children’s Hour”, “Desertion”, “The Huddling Place”, even the Galactic Empire section of “The Big and the Little”), which is certainly interesting. Finally, the story ends not in the far future on Alpha Centauri, but in the much nearer future with an elderly couple looking up at the stars.

In fact, I have come to suspect by now that our idea of what Campbellian science fiction was like is very much a myth. Because so far, pretty much every story that was published in Astounding Science Fiction that I read for the Retro Reviews project was atypical in some way.

“Far Centaurus” is a surprisingly good story from an author whose work I normally don’t much care for. It has been reprinted several times over the years and Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg also selected it for the 1944 volume of their Great Science Fiction Stories anthology series. “Far Centaurus” certainly a worthy Retro Hugo finalist. Let’s hope that the other two van Vogt stories on the ballot are as good as this one.

 

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Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for April 2020

Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of crime fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some March books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, small town mysteries, hardboiled mysteries, historical mysteries, Jazz Age mystries, 1950s mysteries, paranormal mysteries, crime thrillers, psychological thrillers, domestic thrillers, legal thrillers, spy thrillers, action thrillers, police procedurals, romantic suspense, noir, private investigators, amateur sleuths, police officers, district attorneys, spies, assassins, terrorists, industrial espionage, domestic abuse, little doubts, shocking confessions, crime-busting witches, crime-busting socialites, crime and murder in New Orleans, Michigan, California, Yorkshire, Edinburgh, the Hamptons, the Lake District and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

Murder by Twilight by Blythe Baker:

When Alice Beckingham answers an urgent summons to her sister’s home in Yorkshire, she has no idea what dangers are in store for her. From the moment she crosses the threshold, she is enveloped in the same sinister shadows that seem to lie like a mist over the surrounding moorlands.

Determined to discover who is behind an attempt on her sister’s life, Alice soon finds herself doubting everyone around her, even her most reliable allies. Without her clever cousin Rose or the protective Sherborne Sharp on hand, can Alice put together the pieces of the haunting puzzle in time to save those dearest to her?

A Murder Most Odd by Beth Byers:

June 1926

Violet and Jack are the matron of honor and best man at Rita and Ham’s wedding. Rita’s father is so excited, he’s bought the couple a country house near Vi’s and arranged a several day long celebration culminating in a wedding, wedding breakfast, and wedding ball.

On the first day, there is a large picnic in the ruins near the house. One the second day, there is a snipe hunt and the winner receives a shocking prize. On the third day, the bright young winner falls dead in his soup. Who would kill the lively young man? And why?

Nomad by Mark Cheyenne:

He doesn’t have a name. He doesn’t have any friends or family. He is a man without a past.

His codename is Nomad. And he is an assassin. He works for the Syndicate: a mysterious international organization whose main objective is to hunt down and eliminate warlords, terrorist leaders, crime bosses, and other wicked persons the world could do without.

After Nomad eliminates his last target, a male assassin gets on his tail. He is as skillful and dangerous as Nomad himself.

Who is he? Why is the assassin after Nomad? Who hired him? Who wants him dead? Is it the Syndicate? If the answer is yes, then for what reason has the organization put him on its assassination list?

Nomad has a lot of questions and no answers. But he knows one thing for sure: the mysterious assassin is getting closer and closer.

8 Tales of Noir by J. David Core:

8 Tales of Noir is just what the title would lead you to expect, eight stories about the darker side of the human condition. Six short stories lead in to two novella-length tales.

Two desperate men at a standoff on a residential inner-city street…

A high school prank with unexpected – and deadly – results…

When you grab the wife of a small-time construction company owner for ransom, make sure he’s not from the family…or smarter than you….

A man intent on collecting a debt…

A heist gone wrong…

A prodigal son whose sins follow him home…

A moment of reckless anger puts a sad-sack on the wrong side of the law and leads to an unexpected comradeship with the forlorn bounty hunter sent to bring him in…

Finally, a high school dean, a construction worker, and an off-duty cop head out for a night on the prowl. When each agrees to seek out and introduce another of the trio to his ideal woman, only the annoying fly that keeps buzzing the table is privy to all the behind-the-scenes goings-on in this quirky black comedy.

[image error] Betrayal by Adam Croft:

In Edinburgh, the British Prime Minister prepares to launch a worldwide project to tackle climate change. But there’s a far more sinister motivation behind her plans.

After successfully thwarting a terrorist attack in London a few months earlier, Sam Barker is tasked with investigating a scheme which will turn his life — and the world — upside down.

As he delves deeper into the network of players, Sam uncovers a conspiracy which leads to the one person he loves the most — his son.

But in revealing the facts, Sam risks flushing out a far more sinister, unknown enemy — a rogue agent inside The Firm who will stop at nothing to stop Sam from exposing the truth.

The District Attorney by John Ellsworth:

Have you ever tried to outrun a past that was always ahead of you?

Meet Assistant District Attorney Lettie Portman, a prosecutor whose past tries to run her todays. The sex crimes prosecutor didn’t get into sex crimes by accident: her own past demanded it. When a fourteen-year-old girl is savagely attacked by mother’s live-in boyfriend, Lettie is called to the hospital. There, she meets a sweet young girl whose only goal is to go to school and come home to a safe environment. But mom’s boyfriend makes the girl’s world anything but safe. Soon, the abuse gets worse and Lettie, the prosecutor, goes to the grand jury with the case.

Will Lettie’s own past interfere with her prosecution of San Diego’s Terrible Man of the Year? Will she be able to make peace with her own abuse and move on to become the hard-hitting prosecutor the young girl deserves right now?

Lettie Portman is a woman you won’t ever forget, as you join with her in her march to freedom from her past. A John Ellsworth legal thriller by the master of the genre.

Witch Confidential by Lily Harper Hart:

The Big Easy is about to be buried in big trouble.

Again.

For Ofelia Archer, that means she’s knee-deep in an investigation … even though she’s not quite sure how she got there.

Zach Sully thinks he’s in for an easy night at Ofelia’s speakeasy – maybe a little flirting as a lead-up to a date included – when a scream in a neighboring abandoned building draws his attention. Upon further investigation, he finds a young woman dead and a real estate developer traumatized.

The dead girl is a street performer who lived on the edge. That’s bad enough, but when voices from the past cause Ofelia to break open a wall, they find more bodies … and a mystery more than ten years in the making.

The new murder mimics the old deaths, but who are the girls in the wall? Ofelia was a child when stories of street girls going missing were prevalent … and then Hurricane Katrina hit and people forgot their fear in the face of a life-changing storm.

Now, all these years later, Ofelia and Sully are determined to uncover what happened then, tie it to what’s happening today, and find vengeance for all of the victims in the here and now.

That’s easier said than done.

There’s a malevolent force stalking the French Quarter and Ofelia suddenly finds herself in the killer’s path. Someone wants to keep a secret, and he or she is willing to kill to make sure that the past stays buried.

Can Ofelia and Sully evade a killer and uncover the truth? It will be a race to the finish to find out.

Rich by Janet Elizabeth Henderson:

She has secrets, and he has the training to uncover them.

Rachel Ford-Talbot has nothing to do with her family or their pharmaceutical business. And she likes it that way. As one of four partners who own an internationally renowned security business, Rachel prefers to leave her past, with all its secrets, deeply buried.

But when a series of thefts reveal that the family business is being targeted for industrial espionage, her father begs Rachel to investigate. His illness makes it hard for her to refuse, but Rachel wonders if he truly understands what he’s unleashing on his company. Because she isn’t the same bright-eyed graduate that walked through their doors years earlier. Now, she’s strong, powerful, and somewhat terrifying. A woman who doesn’t suffer fools lightly and who is afraid of nothing.

She also isn’t alone.

This time, she has the might and expertise of Benson Security at her back. And an ex-CIA agent at her side—because Michael “Harvard” Carter has appointed himself her bodyguard for the duration. Even though Rachel doesn’t need, or want, the annoyingly sexy man’s help. But while the world sees a first-class bitch when they look at her, Michael sees only someone who intrigues him. Which makes him the biggest threat of all.

Some Like It Shot by Zara Keane:

“Danger was part of my job description, but none of my contingency plans anticipated an attack by a Maine Coon.”

It’s summer on Whisper Island. Ex-cop-turned-private-investigator Maggie Doyle is looking forward to sun, fun, and romance. Instead, she gets bills, an assault allegation, and a busted wrist. To add insult to injury, there’s a movie being filmed on the island, and Maggie’s diva sister has been cast in it—her debut role. While other residents clamor for parts as extras, Maggie wants nothing to do with the shoot.

But when hotshot director Con Ryder asks Maggie to investigate a series of suspicious accidents on the movie set, she can’t afford to refuse. Maggie and her UFO-obsessed assistant, Lenny, go undercover as extras, with Lenny intent on enjoying every second of the experience, and Maggie determined to solve the mystery and leave as quickly as possible. Maggie’s hopes for a quick-fix solution are shot to pieces when the woman who accused her of assault turns up dead.

How will Maggie get out of this take? Grab a copy and find out today!

Sinfully Delicious by Amanda M. Lee:

Stormy Morgan left her hometown of Shadow Hills, Michigan, with one goal: to write the great American novel and strike it rich. She sold her novel not long after college, did relatively well, and then fell off a cliff into obscurity. Now, without a book contract, she’s back at her family restaurant in a one-stoplight town … and she’s convinced things couldn’t possibly get worse.

That feeling only lasts until her first shift, when on a trip to the storage building behind the restaurant, she literally trips over a body.

Roy Axe, Shadow Hills most hated “Axehole,” died a hard death only feet from the restaurant (and the second-floor apartment Stormy currently resides in). The detective on the case is none other than Hunter Ryan, Stormy’s high school boyfriend, and the man who occasionally still calls to her in dreams. Hunter only cares about solving a mystery – nothing else – so their reunion is tense.

In an attempt to distract herself from what’s happening, Stormy and her cousin Alice get drunk one night and pull out their great-grandmother’s old Ouija board, and it sets off a strange string of events, most of which seem magical … if you believe in that sort of thing, and Stormy isn’t sure she does.

Stormy has trouble deciding which problem to focus on, so she avoids them all until things start blowing up in her face.

Shadow Hills is a small town but the secrets that plague it run deep. Stormy is a woman – or maybe a witch – lost in a sea of magic and despair … but murder might just lead her out of it. That is if she can survive to solve the case, that is.

Little Doubt by Rachel Lynch:

Some places make their own laws…

When Ella Watson, a woman of wealth and status, is brutally stabbed to death in broad daylight it sends a shockwave through the Lake District community. Later that day, Keira Bradley meets the same fate. But whereas Ella’s murder is a tragedy, Keira’s death on the notorious Beacon Estate is just another statistic in a dangerous place.

DI Kelly Porter has the unenviable job of running simultaneous investigations. Her efforts aren’t helped by a boss driven by protecting his reputation and a housing estate where fear rules and no one dare speak out. Kelly knows the answers can only be found by winning the trust of the residents at Beacon Estate. A task so hard it may be impossible.

Kelly puts everything she has into finding justice for both victims. The only thing she hadn’t anticipated was a traitor in the ranks. When the evidence points to someone in her team, Kelly has to put feelings aside and work the case – no matter where it leads. By the time it is over, nothing in her world will ever be the same…

A dark and gripping police procedural

Shocking Confessions by Walter Marks:

A pair of grisly crimes challenges East Hampton Detective Jericho. One involves a body under a bridge. The other is generated by the discovery of a human arm in a shark’s belly.

Kirkus review: “This latest entry in Marks’ (Tumbling Down, 2018, etc.) series featuring Jericho and his cohorts is a taut, fast-paced mystery that skillfully weaves together the investigations of two seemingly unrelated crimes while developing subplots introduced in previous installments. Although Jericho remains the series’ primary protagonist, Officer Vangie Clark becomes an important character in the story as she rises within the department from a 911 dispatcher to detective…”

All Bleeding Stops Eventually by Timothy Sheard:

When two LGBT hospital workers are denied paid parental leave for their newborn children, militant shop steward Lenny Moss takes up the fight for equal rights. Their union contract’s guidelines for paid leave, written before gay/lesbian marriage was legal in Pennsylvania, only requires unpaid leave. As the union mobilizes community support for LGBT rights, Lenny agrees to try and help a nurse who was fired when a patient under her care mysteriously disappeared. Did the patient elope, was she abducted, or was she murdered?

 

Murder on the Boardwalk by Lee Strauss:

Murder’s such a shock!

When Rosa Reed—aka WPC Reed of the Metropolitan Police—and her cousin Gloria decide to spend a fun-filled afternoon in 1956 at the fair on the boardwalk in Santa Bonita, California, they’re in for a shocking surprise. After a ride assistant’s death by electrocution is determined to be murder, Rosa finds herself entangled once again with her high school sweetheart, Detective Miguel Belmonte. Should she catch the next flight to London before she loses her heart again? Or worse, her life?

Deviant Souls by Amanda Wilhelm:

Once I saw her, I had to have her.

Sam McIntyre had it all. Brilliant surgical career. Wealth. The begrudging respect of the best in the profession. Everything except someone to share it with.

Terri Malone is young, beautiful and a bit naïve. So what if Sam is a little possessive, a little pushy? Sam knows more about the world, about life, than Terri does. Of course Sam is going to make most of the decisions.

They look like the kind of couple everybody envies. The big house. The fabulous weekend getaways. The fast track to marriage and a family. As far as anyone knows, everything is perfect. And Sam will do whatever it takes to keep it that way.

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Retro Review: “And the Gods Laughed” by Fredric Brown

[image error]Now that the finalists for the 1945 Retro Hugos have announced, it’s time to get back to Retro Reviews and cover those finalists I missed the first time around. I’ll start off with “And the Gods Laughed”, a science fiction short story by Fredric Brown that was published in the Spring 1944 issue of Planet Stories and is a finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

“And the Gods Laughed” starts off with the line “You know how it is when you’re with a work crew on one of the asteroids.” It’s an opening that pulls you right in. For not only is the reader tempted to reply, “No, actually I don’t”, but they also want to find out exactly what it is like to be part of a work crew on an asteroid. Furthermore, Brown also uses this first line to establish the setting of the story, namely a mining crew on an asteroid.

Over the next page or so, the first person narrator – we later learn that his name is Hank – tells us that asteroid mining mainly means being stuck in a very confined space with four other people and nothing in the way of entertainment. Because space is at a premium both on the mining outpost and aboard the spaceship that takes the crew there, so it’s not possible to take along any books, magazines or other distractions. Nor is there radio reception except for a once-per-day newscast. And since a shift is only four hours long due to the technical limitations of space suits and airlocks as well as due to union regulations, this means that the five man work crews (and they are all men, of course) have a lot of time to fill.

As golden age science fiction goes, “And the Gods Laughed” offers a more realistic image of what space travel is really like than many other stories. Because conditions aboard spacecraft and space stations are often cramped – though the ISS does have a selection of books, DVDs, games, etc… available – and people are stuck together in a confined space for a long time. Interestingly, Brown also mentions at one point that Jupiter has several previously unknown satellites – “almost an asteroid belt”, as Hank explains – which endanger spaceships trying to land on its moons. Voyager 1 and 2 as well as later missions to Jupiter would prove this prediction right. In 1944, when “And the Gods Laughed” was published, Jupiter had eleven known satellites. By 2020, it has 79. It also has rings.

Brown’s asteroid miners spend their copious amounts of free time by spinning yarns and telling stories. Again, this is not entirely unrealistic – there are reports that storytelling is an ability prized in prison. Other activities that might occur between five men trapped together on an asteroid (or in a prison) for months on end are only hinted at.

The narrator Hank makes it very clear in his introduction that most of the stories the miners tell each other are tall tales and must not be taken too seriously. Then we are plunged right into the tail end of such a tall tale, when one of the miners, a man called Charlie Dean, recalls the time he spent fighting a hostile Martian race called the bolies, who look like alligators on stilts. And just in case we don’t get whom the bolies are supposed to represent, the narrator helpfully informs us that the bolies think and fight a lot like Native Americans during the Indian wars of the 19th century. Not that Hank knows much about that – in fact, he muses whether the Native Americans used crossbows or longbows to fight the white settlers.

In his story, Charlie mentions using zircon earrings to impress the bolies (more historical parallels), which causes Hank to launch into a story of his own about the first expedition to Ganymede, where the natives go naked wearing nothing but earrings. Only that, so Hank explains, the natives don’t wear earrings, but the earrings wear them. Now Hank has the others hooked, he launches into his story.

We learn that eight months before, Hank was a crewmen on the first successful mission to Ganymede. The members of the expedition team were Dick Carney, the skipper, Art Willis, a fellow crewman, and three scientists, a biologist and linguist named Lecky, a geologist and mineralogist named Haynes and a botanist named Hilda Race. Yes, there is an actual woman scientist in this story, though she fills the traditional position of botanist (women on mixed gender spaceship crews in older science fiction are almost inevitably biologists, botanists or medical doctors). Hank’s scant remarks about Hilda are also quite sexist – at one point he calls her “a hippopotamus acting kittenish”.

Once the ship lands on Ganymede, the crew quickly encounters the native people and notice that they all wear an earring in one ear only. Biologist/linguist Lecky is sent to make contact with Hank and Art Willis acting as guards. They briefly leave Lecky alone in the native village to survey the surroundings and encounter another alien who is of the same species as the others, but does not wear an earring. He is also a lot more hostile.

When Hank and Art pick up Lecky, they notice that he is wearing one of the native’s earrings. Lecky explains that the earring was a gift and that he gave the Ganymedeans a slide-rule in exchange. Hank and Art wonder why Lecky would give the aliens a slide-rule rather than the usual trinkets reserved for such encounters. Lecky explains that the aliens were fascinated by the slide-rule and quickly figured out how to use it. Lecky also explains that even though the Ganymedeans seem primitive, they have an advanced understanding of mathematics, science and philosophy. Finally, Lecky is curiously protective of the earring, which makes him an honourary member of the Ganymedean tribe, and won’t take it off.

Further trips to the village consist of two scientists and one crewman as a guard. The first team consists of Lecky, Hilda Race and Art Willis. Upon her return to the ship, Hilda is wearing an earring as well and won’t take it off either. The next day, Hank accompanies Lecky and Haynes to the village. Haynes declares that while he wants one of the earrings to analyse, he certainly won’t stoop to wearing it.

While the two scientists are in the village, Hank takes off to explore the surroundings. By now we get the impression that Hank is not very good at his job, considering he leaves the people he is supposed to be guarding alone twice. He hears Haynes scream and comes running, only to find Haynes on the ground with what looks like blood on his shirt. Haynes seems dazed and insists that nothing is wrong, that he simply stumbled and spilled some wine. Oh yes, and he is also wearing an earring, even though he insisted earlier that he wouldn’t.

Hank slips away again and watches two Ganymedeans trying to cross a stream, when one of them is attacked by an unseen creature and has their legs bitten off. Their companion drags them ashore. The Ganymedean is remarkably unbothered by having their legs bitten off. The injured Ganymedean tries to get up and notices that they cannot stand or walk because they no longer have any legs. So the injured Ganymedean nods to his companions, who removes their earring, whereupon the legless Ganymedean collapses – quite dead. Almost as if the earring was animating the alien.

Hank is understandably disturbed by this. He makes an even more disturbing discovery when he returns to the ship with Lecky and Haynes and notices that Haynes’ shirt is not just bloody, it’s also torn and has matching holes in the front and back. Holes that look as if someone had stabbed a spear through Haynes’ chest.

Back at the ship, Hank notices that Lecky, Hilda and Haynes are all acting strangely. Plus, Art Willis is now sporting an earring as well. Furthermore, they seem to forget to talk at times and just stare at each other, before they suddenly resume talking in mid sentence.

Hank bides his time and waits until he can catch Dick Carney alone to share his suspicions. He corners Dick and tells him point blank that the other four are no longer the same people they were at the start of the journey. Whereupon, Dick sighs and says, “Well, it didn’t work. We need more practice then.” Hank realises too late that Dick is wearing an earring as well, though he is wearing it as a bracelet hidden under the sleeve of his uniform.

Dick threatens Hank with a gun and promises to tell him everything, which Lecky – the leader – then proceeds to do. Hank and the reader learn that the earring creatures have no name for either their race or its individual members. Instead, they refer to themselves by numbers. They are telepathic and parasites, which means they can only live when they take over another lifeform. It doesn’t matter if that lifeform is alive or dead – after all, Haynes was killed before the earring creatures took him over.

Hank also learns that the earring creatures – or earring gods, as the Ganymedeans call them, hence the title – come from outside the solar system and arrived on Ganymede with alien visitors a very long time ago. Ever since then, they’ve been stuck there, because the Ganymedeans don’t have space travel and the earring creatures cannot do anything without accessing their hosts’ knowledge and memories. However, now that Earthpeople have landed on Ganymede the earring creatures finally have a way to get off the moon as well as a whole new planet and solar system to conquer.

Hank was the only crewmember not taken over, because the earring creatures wanted to use him as a guinea pig to see if he’d notice anything off. But now that the earring creatures know that they need to be more careful, Hank is no longer of any use and will be taken over as well. And so Lecky hands him an earring and tells him to put it on, otherwise he’ll be shot. The earring creatures prefer to take over undamaged and living bodies, but they’ll also take a dead one, if necessary.

Hank, however, launches himself at Lecky and manages to grab hold of the gun. He shoots his fellow crewmembers, but the shots don’t even slow them down, let alone hurt them. So Hank flees out into the Ganymedean night. The earring creatures don’t even bother to pursue him, cause they know he won’t survive for long out in the cold and with insufficient oxygen.

Hank’s tale stops at this point. Charlie asks what happened next and how he managed to escape, Hank says that he didn’t. He just passed out from lack of oxygen and awoke the next morning aboard the ship.

While he was telling his story, Hank grabbed Chekhov’s Gun (Anton, the Russian playwright, not Pavel, the Enterprise crewmember) from the wall and started to clean it. Conveniently, he finishes cleaning the gun just as he finishes his story. However, Hank’s fellow asteroid miners Charlie Dean and Blake Powers are not as easily tricked as Hank himself. And so Charlie launches himself at Hank, grabs hold of the gun and points it at Hank.

Blake, who is the captain, still half believes that Hank was just spinning some spaceman’s yarn. But just to be on the safe side, he order Charlie to keep the gun and Hank to roll up his sleeves and trouser legs. When this does not reveal any mysterious jewellery, Blake orders Hank to take off his clothes. Only when Hank is buck naked (no, there is nothing odd at all about two guys who haven’t seen a woman in months forcing a third at gunpoint to strip) and there is still no sign of any malevolent jewellery anywhere on his body, Charlie and Blake are satisfied that Hank was really just telling a tall tale. They laugh, while Hank heads for the shower.

So all is well that ends well. Or does it? After all, this is a golden age science fiction story and we all know how much the golden age liked twist endings. And so the story ends with a one paragraph excerpt of a telepathic report from one number 67843 in the asteroid belt to one number 5463 on Earth. Number 67843 reports that the plan to test the credulity of the humans by telling them the truth about what happened on Ganymede was a success. The humans were fully willing to believe the story, but the absence of any visible earrings or bracelets persuaded them that it was just a hoax. Therefore, the process of surgically implanting the earring device into every human taken over must continue to avoid arousing suspicions. Number 67843, otherwise known as Hank, will make sure that the remaining four asteroid miners are all implanted with devices before they return to earth.

[image error]I have to admit that I haven’t read much by Fredric Brown and what I have read was mixed. There is the haunting 1948 flash fiction story “Knock”, which stayed with me for a long time after I first read it, even though I initially had no idea who the author was. On the other hand, Brown’s 1943 Retro Hugo finalist “The Star Mouse” was just too silly for me and his other 1943 Retro Hugo finalist “Etaoin Shrdlu” – another possessed machine story – was okay, but nothing special.

As for “And the Gods Laughed”, I’m not sure what to think about it. On the one hand, it is an effective and well written story. Brown skilfully combines two popular storytelling devices of the era, the “tale within a tale”, a story told around the dinner table, fireplace or aboard an asteroid mining station, and the twist ending. Even Chekhov’s Gun gets an outing – quite literally in this case.

Of course, anybody with any science fiction experience can see the twist ending coming from a mile away. However, the by now well-worn concept of alien parasites who take over humans to invade Earth was still a very new idea in 1944. The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein, probably the most famous early take on the trope, did not come out until 1951, six years after “And the Gods Laughed”. And while A.E. van Vogt’s “Discord in Scarlet” predates “And the Gods Laughed” by five years, the parasitic aliens in van Vogt’s story are closer to the xenomorph from Alien (probably because both were inspired by the same real life creature, the emerald cockroach wasp) than to the parasitic invaders of The Puppet Masters. Furthermore, most alien parasites that take over humans are described as slug-like or starfish-like creatures, so malevolent parasitic jewellery is certainly a different idea as well as a fine example of the wonderful weirdness of the golden age.

Nonetheless, I had issues with the story. One is the fact that “And the Gods Laughed” is narrated in the first person by Hank, which is quite common for “tale within a tale” stories. However, as we learn in the last paragraph, “Hank” is not really Hank, but malevolent parasitic earring number 67843. So why is malevolent parasitic earring number 67843 telling the story as if they were Hank who had a spooky experience and got away? Is malevolent parasitic earring number 67843 trying to fool us just like they fooled Charlie and Blake?

Of course, “the narrator did it” was not a new idea even back in 1944 – after all, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd came out in 1926, eighteen years before. However, revealing that the narrator is the villain without the narrator’s voice hinting at that fact at any point before is not exactly playing fair with the reader. And considering Fredric Brown was also a (very good) mystery writer, he should therefore know a thing or two about mysteries playing fair. Honestly, I feel the story would have worked better, if Charlie or Blake had been the first person narrator (and in most examples of the “tale within a tale” trope, the first person narrator is not the same person as the one who tells the story within a story) instead of “Hank”.

Another issue I had with the story is one that probably wouldn’t have bothered 1940s audiences, but is really glaring today, namely the unquestioning acceptance of colonialism and imperialism. Of course, we know that the races who inhabit the various planets and moons in golden age science fiction are often stand-ins for Native Americans or other indigenous people, but Brown isn’t just content to imply these parallels, no, he flat out has his narrator tell us. And just like European colonisers, the human explorers bribe/trick the various indigenous people with all sorts of worthless trinkets. For example, there is an anecdote about an alien race from the Martian moon Phobos who had never seen elastic before and were willing to trade a bucket full of gemstones for the suspenders of a spaceship crewman. This was probably considered light-hearted back in 1944, but it really hit me the wrong way.

On the other hand, the aliens also use worthless trinkets, the earrings, to trick and take over the human explorers and eventually the Earth. So was Brown interrogating and reversing that hoary old trope by placing the human colonisers on the receiving end of a truly bad deal?

[image error]Another thing that struck me is that a single earring worn in one ear (the right, apparently) used to code a man as gay. And here we have a story where single earrings are used to literally take over the almost all male crew of a spaceship. So is the story a metaphor for gay men supposedly turning heterosexual men gay? Or is this a complete coincidence? Though it is notable that the interior art depicts a man wearing a single earring in his right ear. And let’s not forget that the story also contains a scene where two men force another man at gunpoint to strip naked, so they can examine his body jewellery or lack thereof? And where exactly did Charlie and Blake expect Hank to be wearing the earring that he needs to strip naked? Or am I seeing things here which aren’t there?

Fredric Brown is clearly popular with Retro Hugo nominators, considering he had two nominations for 1943 and also had two for 1945. Nonetheless, I was a bit surprised to see “And the Gods Laughed” on the ballot, because it is not a particularly well known story. It has been reprinted a few times over the years, but it is not nearly as well known as “Arena”, Brown’s other 1945 Retro Hugo finalist. Nor does it show up in Isaac Asimov’s and Martin H. Greenberg’s The Great Science Fiction Stories anthology for 1944. And lesser known stories that make the Retro Hugo ballot can often be found in the Asimov/Greenberg anthologies such as Edmond Hamilton’s “Exile” from last year.

Whatever the reason, quite a few people clearly liked “And the Gods Laughed” enough to nominate it. And to be fair, it is a good story, though it also has its share of flaws. But considering the competition this year, I don’t really see it winning.

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Genre Vacation: Visit the Pulp Science Fiction Shared Solar System

In early April, Shaun Duke started the Blog Challenge Project to encourage participants to blog more and create some conversation across blogs. Shaun describes the project as follows:

What is the Blog Challenge Project? In short, the project aims to create a community of bloggers and booktubers who will encourage one another to create content, support one another in their blogging ventures, and provide a giant list of prompts and ideas for posts that folks can complete on their own time or challenge one another to explore. The idea is to provide some positivity and community in a time of immense stress. You can click the link to read the full info page and see our current list of prompts!

I joined as soon as I heard about the project, because more topics to blog about are always a good thing. But then, stuff happened and so I didn’t get around to writing my first post related to the project until now.

One of the prompts was “genre vacation”, i.e. write a travel guide of sorts to a place from an SFF books or film. The prompt sparked an idea, because during my extended jaunt to the Golden Age for the Retro Science Fiction Reviews project (soon to be resumed to cover the remaining Retro Hugo finalists), I noticed that a lot of Golden Age science fiction, particularly on the pulpier end of the spectrum such as Planet Stories, Startling Stories or Thrilling Wonder Stories, is set in the same version of our solar system, a place I’ve since called the pulp science fiction shared solar system.

Conceived in the 1930s and 1940s long before space probes showed us what the rest of the solar system really looks like, the pulp science fiction shared solar system is a place, where space travel is common and the solar system is teeming with life, both human and non-human. It’s a place of adventure, romance, great riches and even greater friendships, but also a place of danger, where space pirates lurk in every corner, criminals will slit your throat, nonhuman people may worship you or try to kill you, where evil capitalists will frame you and have you thrown in prison or enslave you to work in their mines, where governments are rarely democratic and downtrodden people keep rebelling against them.

Still, it’s the trip of a lifetime – provided you have a fast ship, a good blaster and take a few sensible precautions. So…

Visit the Pulp Science Fiction Shared Solar System

as seen in Planet Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and others

What the grand tour of Europe was to the 18th and 19th century, the grand tour of the solar system is for today’s travellers – a must for the educated inhabitant of the Tri-Planet Terran Empire.

Of course, you have all heard the horror stories. You’ve heard about spaceships vanishing without a trace or found drifting in deep space with all aboard dead or missing. You’ve heard about space pirates, space vampires and space sirens, about hostile natives and planetary revolutions, about ancient cults and murderous criminals.

But have no fear. For the solar system is no longer as wild and dangerous as it once was, now that the heroic men (and they are all men, sorry) of the Tri-Planet space patrol have cleaned up the spaceways and brought the justice of the Tri-Planet government to the furthest corners of space.

But just in case you’re still worried, this travel guide will help you to enjoy your grand tour of the solar system, while staying alive, in excellent health and in possession of all your valuables.

We’ll travel from the sun outwards, starting with:

Mercury

In the pulp science fiction shared solar system, Mercury is tidally locked, divided into a blistering hot light side and a frozen dark side with a thin, habitable twilight belt inbetween. The vistas of rocky Mercury are stunning, as long as you take care to never venture beyond the twilight belt.

Even in the twilight belt, Mercury is mostly rocks. However, some of those rocks contain valuable ore, so there are human mining colonies in Mercury.  There also are natives, furry critters mostly. The natives and the human miners often don’t get along. This usually ends badly for the furry critters. Just ask the infamous outlaw Eric John Stark.

Humans from Mercury are inevitably dark-skinned because of the intense solar radiation. This is also a convenient way for science fiction writers to sneak characters of colour past racist editors. Again, ask Eric John Stark or Jaffa Storm.

As in all rocky places in the pulp science fiction shared universe, there is a prison on the dark side of Mercury. With all the criminals and outlaws the Tri-Planet space patrol has arrested of late, we need to put them somewhere after all.  And convict labour is convenient, considering how hard it is to persuade human miners to willingly move to Mercury.

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Artist’s impression of a prison break on the night side of Mercury.

With Mercury out of the way, we hop back aboard our trusty space rocket and travel onwards to…

Venus

Do you want a tropical vacation, but the beaches and jungles of Earth are too boring for you? Do you want a real adventure? Then Venus is the planet for you. Just forget about getting a tan, because Venus is perpetually shrouded in clouds and fog.

First of the three core planets of the solar system, Venus is a worlds of tropical jungles and treacherous swamps, of glowing mists and mysterious oceans. Some of those oceans are water, some are red glowing mist. All of them harbour carnivorous plant life and mysterious ruins. There also are underwater cities, where humans can enjoy all the luxuries of a modern existence. The cocktail bars are particularly famous.

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Artist’s impression of Venusian underwater cities.

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Artist’s impression of hostile lifeforms on the Venusian ocean floor.

The swamps and jungles of Venus have their share of deadly creatures as well. Many an unwary human tourist has been eaten by a Venusian swamp monster, so never venture into the swamps without a guide. But beware, for while the non-human Venusian natives like the Kraylen or the telepathic kelp people who live in the Venusian ocean are generally friendly folk, the humanoid Venusians are known to be particularly treacherous. Many an unwary visitor has found themselves kidnapped, enslaved, drafted into the warfare between Venusian city states or just vanished without a trace, so never trust a Venusian human. You will recognise them by their pale skin (no sunlight) and equally pale hair.

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Artist’s impression of a beautiful but treacherous Venusian woman and her deadly pet.

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Artist’s impression of an unfortunate Earthman drafted into a war between Venusian vity states.

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Artist’s impression of Venusian war maidens.

If you’re looking for souvenirs, Venus is the home of the famous Venusian spidersilk, a popular material for shirts, gowns and underwear. Of late, oil and coal have also been found in the Venusian swamps and so the Terran-Venusian Mining Corporation (voted second most hated company in the solar system after the Terran Exploitations Company) has moved in.

Once you’ve had your fill of beautiful, fantastic Venus, let’s put in a pit stop at home and visit…

Earth

Headquarters of the Tri-Planet government and clearly the most civilised and most highly developed planet in the entire solar system, Earth does not feature very often in the sort of stories set in the pulp science fiction shared solar system.

A lot of people come from Earth and they sometimes go back there, but very little of the action actually takes place here. Whenever we do visit Earth, it looks remarkably like a 1950s American suburb, only with robots and personal planes/helicopters. Unless, it has huge domed cities, where the agoraphobic population huddles together for protection. Because for reasons unknown, Earthpeople tend to be agoraphobic.

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Artist’s impression of the interior of a domend city on Earth.

So let’s leave Earth behind and venture outwards into the solar system, first making a pit stop on…

The Moon/Luna

Earth’s moon is of little interest to the interplanetary tourist and indeed, hardly anybody goes there voluntarily, because the Moon is a prison, housing the worst criminals in the solar system. Located deep inside the surface of the Moon, escape from the lunar cell blocks is supposed to be impossible. Nonetheless, prison breaks happen with remarkable frequency. But don’t let that worry you, for the heroic officers of the Tri-Planet space patrol will recapture all of those escapees ASAP. (The Tri-Planet police was not available for comment upon the escape of one Steve Nolan, convicted traitor and murderer, who was presumed dead and later reappeared on Pluto, very much alive and also innocent.)

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Artist’s impression of a prison revolt on the Moon. But rest assured that such revolts are quickly squashed.

The Moon is also the home of Curtis Newton, known to the solar system at large as Captain Future, the Man of Tomorrow. Curtis Newton lives in a laboratory complex together with the robot Grag, android Otho and Professor Simon Wright or rather his brain in a box. The Futuremen, as the members of this all-male lunar flatshare call themselves, are remarkably unbothered by sharing the Moon with a bunch of convicts.

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Artist’s impression of Curtis Newton a.k.a. Captain Future and his robotic companions Grag and Otho.

We leave the Moon behind and set course for…

Mars/Barsoom

The third of the three core planets of the solar system, Mars is an ancient world, home to a once great civilisation that rose and fell long before humans ever left Earth.

Legend has it that once upon a time, Mars was as lush as Earth, a world of green hills and deep red oceans. But that time is long gone and nowadays, Mars is a parched and dying desert world, divided into city states and ruled by warlords. Mars has both human and not-so human inhabitants. The human inhabitants are proud warriors, who don’t much care for clothing and are often brown or red-skinned. Women are gorgeous redheads and brunettes who consider clothing strictly optional. Non-human inhabitants include the six-limbed and tusked green martians, the winged people or the ape-like anthropoids.

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Artist’s impression of a Martian warlord in action.

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Artist’s impression of a human fighting a green martian to protect a Martian human damsel.

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Artist’s impression of a heroic human fighting Martian snake-people side by side with a Martian damsel not in distress.

The best way to get around Mars is by flyer, but if you should not have one handy, you can also ride the dragon-like Martian beasts which are a lot friendlier than they look. Just make sure to take enough water and beware of the vicious Martian sandstorms.

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Artist’s impression of Martian riding animal with rider.

Tourists will be tempted to visit Valkis and Jekkara and the other famous towns dotted along the Martian canals, where the last water on Mars can be found. And indeed, the temptations of those ancient cities are many, but nonetheless visitors are strongly advised to be careful. Far too many unwary tourists and spaceship crewmembers on leave have lost all their belongings in the gambling halls, drug dens or brothels of the low canal towns or have been found in a gutter with their throat slit, quite dead.

There are also rumours of human visitors being abducted on Mars to be employed as slave labour in the mines of the Terran Exploitations Company (voted most hated company in the solar system three years in a row), but Jaffa Storm, spokesperson of the Terran Exploitations Company, assures us that is just a malicious rumour without a kernel of truth. The Terran Exploitations Company employs only voluntary labour and knows nothing whatsoever of any disappearances.

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Artist’s impression of enslaved humans forced to work for the Terran Exploitations Company that has no relation whatsoever to reality. Spokesman Jaffa Storm assues us that his security guards are doing their utmost to locate that libelous artist and make sure he gets sent to the mines – only legal prison mines, of course.

Mars is dotted with ancient ruins full of fantastic artefacts. Tourists, however, are warned not to touch anything, for there have been cases of visitors finding themselves possessed by the spirits of ancient Martians, thrown back in time or suddenly finding themselves proclaimed liberator of Mars. Occasionally, such unwary visitors have also wound up marrying beautiful Martian princesses, but such outcomes are rare.

A particular attraction are the polar cities, domed cities located underneath the polar ice caps of Mars. Visitors are advised to be very careful when visiting the polar cities, because anybody who dares venture there either vanishes, goes mad or is eventually found as a frozen corpse.

Visitors interested in Mars should also look into Mythopoeic’s “Every* Mars” cruise! as described by our colleagues Camestros Felapton and Timothy T. Cat.

Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, but they are tiny and used as prisons, because prisons are the only thing moons are good for.

Once we’ve enjoyed our visit to ancient Mars, let’s head onwards through…

The Asteroid Belt

This is where the wild frontier of the solar system truly begins. In the asteroid belt, you’ll find mining outposts, which occasionally double as testing sites for the United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation (which does not appear on the list of the most hated companies in the solar system to everybody’s surprise).

Spaceships crash here and space pirates hide out on isolated asteroids and hold off visitors and members of the Tri-Planet space patrol with fake monsters. There are even rumours of space vampires snatching ships to suck the passengers and crew dry, both those are just rumours, we assure you.

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Artist’s impression of the asteroid belt.

Once you’ve made it safely through the asteroid belt, it’s time to visit…

Jupiter

Jupiter’s moons have humanoid inhabitants such as the cat people of Callisto and harpists, also of Callisto, who can send you to sleep with their telepathic harps. Next door, on Ganymede, you will find beautiful dancing girls. Human pioneers have also set out to settle on Io, Canymede, Callisto and Europa, the four major Jovian moons.

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Artist’s impression of Jupiter viewed from one of its moons.

As a gas giant, Jupiter’s atmosphere is too dense for humans to survive, though robots can. If you must visit the Jovian surface, you can expect stunning vistas of ammonia waterfalls over cliffs of frozen oxygen. But beware, for in order to survive in the toxic atmosphere you have to transfer your mind into a native lifeform called a loper. And so far, no one who has undergone that process has ever returned.

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Artist’s impression of a spaceship crash on Jupiter. However, these things do not happen in reality.

But even though Jupiter is big and impressive, there is not all that much to see here, so let’s head onwards to…

Saturn

It has rings. It has moons. It looks stunning, when viewed from the porthole of a spaceship.

But otherwise, the pulp science fiction shared solar system has little use for Saturn. One of its moons, Titan, has icy cliffs and snowy caves and is home to a race of furry telepathic critters. They did not react well, when the Terran Exploitations Company (still the most hated company in the solar system) built a prison mine there, so they had to be resettled.

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Artist’s impression of Saturn

Since there’s little to see here, let’s head onwards to…

Neptune and Uranus

Neptune and Uranus exist. They are gas giants. They have moons. But hardly anybody ever visits them and when they do, they inevitably find themselves accosted by hostile lifeforms, particularly if they are young and attractive women. Uranus supposedly has some precious minerals and lost cities as well. But the moons are so uninteresting that they haven’t even built any prisons here yet, though the Terran Exploitations Company (yup, them again) is looking into it.

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Artist’s impression of a Neptunian fishman accosting a young Earthwoman

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Artist’s impression of a family exploring a lost city on Uranus.

Since there’s not much to see here, let’s fly onward to…

Pluto

In the pulp science fiction shared solar system, Pluto is still a planet and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

Pluto is where you go, when you have nowhere else in the solar system left to run, which is why Pluto is full of outlaws. Pluto is cold and rocky and has no breathable atmosphere, so its human inhabitants live in domed cities.

Tourists are warned to beware of the local wildlife such as giant crabs, which live in the craters of Pluto.

There are also persistent rumours that because Pluto is so remote, various terrorist groups and revolutionaries are using it as a hideout. However, the Tri-Planet space patrol wishes to assure everybody that they are on the case.

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Artist’s impression of Pluto, as seen from outer space. Giant floating robot heads are not a common sight here at all.

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Artist’s impression of a city on Pluto.

Since there’s not much to see here either, let’s travel…

Beyond Pluto

Is there life beyond Pluto? Why not? After all, there’s life everywhere else. And should you decide to venture beyond the orbit of Pluto you might discover Yuggoth, home of the infamous Mi-Go or the rogue planet Mongo whose impending collision with Earth was thwarted by the heroic efforts of Dr. Hans Zarkov, Flash Gordon and Dale Arden or maybe the unnamed hollow planet inhabited by Bas, the ever youthful sleeping immortal, and the Earthpeople he abducted there.

You can also accompany our good friend Dr. Shaun Duke on his exploration of the forest moon of Endor, which is located neither in the solar system nor does it house a prison.

But wherever you choose to go, excitement and wonder await you.

So what are you waiting for? Book your grand tour of the pulp science fiction shared solar system today!

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