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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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Schrödinger’s Hugo Finalist – and Some Birthday Stuff

Hugo finalists are not exactly common in Germany (I think there are only three German Hugo finalists altogether and none of them live in North Germany). And so, I was interviewed/profiled by both local papers in my region last week.

Here is Alexandra Penth’s article from the Weser-Kurier (local paper for Bremen and surroundings) and here is Lara Terrasi’s article from the Kreiszeitung (local paper for the Syke/Bassum/Diepholz region). When I sent out a press release after the Hugo finalists had been announced, I expected maybe a small sidebar article, but not an in-depth feature. So I’m really thrilled about the coverage.

One thing both interviewers asked me was how I felt once I learned that I was nominated for a Hugo and whether it was difficult not to talk about it until the official announcement.

I have to admit that the two weeks from the moment I got the e-mail from CoNZealand informing me about the nomination and the official announcement of the finalists were a really strange period. For while you know that you’re a finalist, almost no one else does. You feel very much like Schrödinger’s Hugo finalist, simultaneously a finalist and not a finalist, until the box is opened/the nominations are officially announced. There is also that little niggling voice in your head that wonders whether that e-mail you got is a hoax or mistake and they’ll e-mail you any moment now to say, “Sorry, we miscounted and you’re not a finalist after all.” From talking to other finalists, particularly first time finalists, I know that I am not unique in this. A lot of first time finalists feel this way.

Only when the nominations were officially announced, it finally felt real. Though during the announcement, I cheered more for other finalists than for myself. Because while I knew I was on the ballot, I didn’t know who else was.

The two newspaper articles took the finalist experience to a new level. I had gotten a lot of congratulations before, mostly from people in the SFF community. But suddenly, I also started getting congratulations from neighbours, family members, colleagues, translation customers, etc… – people who are not part of the SFF community and have probably never heard of the Hugos before, but know me in day to day life. In fact, I had people congratulate me on having articles in both local papers about me rather on being a Hugo finalist. Oh yes, and I have to buy everybody a drink at the next translators meet-up, whenever that can take place.

Meanwhile, I also have acquired a Fancyclopedia entry, which is something else that happens when you’re a Hugo finalist. This is the third edition of Fancyclopedia BTW, which is online. The first edition, published in 1944, is a finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugos. I already had an ISFDB entry, but it was updated without hours of the finalist announcement.

With all the Hugo related excitement, I also forgot to mention that I have a new article out at Galactic Journey, where I talk about exciting new trends in interior design – in 1965.

Furthermore, April 18 is also my birthday. There wasn’t much in the way of celebrations, because inviting friends and extended family members or going out for lunch/dinner or just for an ice cream is quite impossible at the moment. However, there was sailor’s curry and there were presents:

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Wrapped birthday presents

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Unwrapped birthday presents. Lots of books as well as a bottle of red wine, which is not pictured, because it showed up on the doorstep (literally) after I took the photo.

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Birthday lunch was sailor’s curry with basmati rice and the traditional side dishes.

And because the weather was nice, I took a drive in the afternoon to enjoy the springtime nature. The rapeseed fields are currently in full bloom (uncommonly early this year), which is beautiful to look at, though not at all good for my allergies. Luckily, there is antihistamine.

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Rapeseed field in full bloom near Dünsen. Note the communications tower on the horizon.

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Another shot of a rapeseed field in full bloom as well as a farm house and a country road. Also taken near Dünsen.

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Rapeseed field in full bloom with trees on the horizon and by the roadside near Nüstedt.

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An ornamental cherry tree in full bloom.

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Some Thoughts on the Hugo Award Finalists, Part II: The 2020 Hugo Awards

Here is the second of the long awaited Hugo finalist reaction posts. Part 1 about the finalists for the 1945 Retro Hugos, is here BTW. And yes, it took longer than usual to get these posts up, but since I’m a Hugo finalist myself this year, I took some time off to celebrate, congratulate fellow finalists and update everything that needed updating.

So let’s take a look at the finalists for the 2020 Hugo Award and delve right into the categories:

Best Novel:

This is an excellent, if fairly predictable ballot, because all of the nominated novels got a lot of buzz last year. The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders, Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine and The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow were all among the most popular and critically acclaimed novels of the year.

The only finalist in this category that surprised me a little is Middlegame by Seanan McGuire. For while I like Seanan McGuire’s work, Middlegame sort of passed me by. It’s also the only finalist in this category that I haven’t read. Besides, Seanan McGuire is talented, prolific and hugely popular, so upon second thought this nomination isn’t all that surprising after all.

2019 was an extremely strong year for SFF novel in general, so several novels one might have expected to see on the ballot, e.g. The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie, A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker, The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz or even The Testaments by Margaret Atwood or Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James, are nowhere in sight, though I suspect that they will sit just under the top six.

The people who worry that fantasy is taking over the Hugos and crowding out science fiction will be pleased that three of six Best Novel finalists are unambiguous science fiction, one is science fantasy and only two are unambiguous fantasy.

Diversity count: 6 women, 1 international writer.

Cue the complaints that women are taking over the Hugos, which – I’ve been told – are already to be found in the usual places. Instead of responding to those complaints, I’ll simply link to this old post again.

Best Novella:

Once again, the finalists in this category are very good, if predictable. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone got a huge amount of buzz last year, all of it deserved, because it’s a wonderful story.

Becky Chambers is a highly popular writer as well as previous Hugo finalist and winner, so I’m not at all surprised to see To Be Taught, If Fortunate on the ballot. Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series is hugely popular and all previous installments have been Hugo finalists, one a winner, so the nomination for In an Absent Dream is no surprise either.

Rivers Solomon is one of the most exciting new voices in SFF to emerge in recent years and her novella The Deep is an adaptation of the eponymous song by the band clipping, which was a Hugo finalist in 2018.

P. Djèlí Clark is another exciting new voice who has emerged in recent years. He was a double Hugo finalist last year and his 2020 nominated novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is a sequel to his 2016 story “A Dead Djinn in Cairo”.

“Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” is the one finalist in the novella category, where I went “Huh? What on Earth is this?” during the Hugo finalist announcement livestream. Then I saw that the author was Ted Chiang and that the novella is from his recent collection Exhalation, which I haven’t read, because Ted Chiang’s work is very hit and miss for me. However, he has long been popular with Hugo voters.

Those who worry (not entirely without reason) about Tor.com’s dominance in the novella category will be pleased that this year, Tor.conm publishing nabbed only two of six finalist slots. Saga Press nabbed another two, Harper Voyager got one and one story was from a collection published by Alfred A. Knopf. Now that Tor.com Publishing has demonstrated that novellas are a viable, other publishers like Saga Press or Harper Voyager are getting into the act, so we’re seeing more variety, which is a good thing.

Diversity count (including the members of clipping): 6 men, 3 women, 1 non-binary, 5 writers of colour, 1 international writer

Best Novelette:

As I noted in my comments on the 2019 Nebula finalists, my short fiction reading seems to have been out of whack with the genre community last year, because several of the finalists in this and the short story category are stories which never appeared on my radar at all. Some of them were published at a time, when I was otherwise occupied (sick with the flu, doing the July short story challenage, away at Worldcon and Eurocon), so maybe I just missed them. Or maybe my tastes are out of whack with the rest of the Hugo electorate.

“For He Can Creep” by Siobhan Carroll is one novelette I have read and that was also on my ballot.

“The Archronology of Love” by Caroline M. Yoachim, “Away With the Wolves” by Sarah Gailey and “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye” by Sarah Pinsker are all stories from magazines (Uncanny and Lightspeed respectively) that I normally read by popular and well regarded authors. Yet for some reason, I have read neither of them.

I also haven’t read “Omphalos” by Ted Chiang for the reasons explained above. Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin is another story I haven’t read, largely because I assumed the stories of the Forward Collection were audiobooks and I have issues with audiobooks. Emergency Skin is also, as far as I can tell, the first ever Hugo nomination for any of Amazon’s publishing ventures, since Marko Kloos, who is published with the Amazon Imprint 47 North, withdrew in 2015.

Diversity count: 1 man, 5 women, 3 authors of colour

Best Short Story:

Another mix of stories I read and liked and stories that passed me by.

“As the Last I My Know” by S.L. Huang is a great story and was also on my ballot. “Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island” by Nibedita Sen is a fine story that was on my personal longlist, but didn’t make the shortlist in the end. It’s also a Nebula finalist.

“And Now His Lordship Is Laughing” by Shiv Ramdas is another 2019 Nebula finalist that I wasn’t even aware of before the Nebula finalists were announced. It is a fine story, though. Along with Nibedita Sen’s nomination in this category as well as for the Astounding (formerly Campbell) Award, 2019 was a good year for SFF writers from India.

“A Catalog of Storms” by Fran Wilde is yet another 2019 Nebula finalist as well as a story that initially passed me by. I have since read it, though it didn’t do as much for me as it evidently did for many others.

“Blood Is Another Word for Hunger” by Rivers Solomon and “Do Not Look Back, My Lion” by Alix E. Harrow are two stories that passed me by completely, even though I normally follow the venues where they appeared. But Rivers Solomon and Alix E. Harrow are both fine and popular writers whose work also appears elsewhere on the ballot. Alix E. Harrow is also last year’s winner in this category.

Diversity count: 1 man, 4 women, 1 non-binary, 4 writers of colour, 3 international writers

Best Series:

As I said last year, I was initially in favour of the Best Series category, because there are a lot of popular and good long-running series, that are rarely honoured by the Hugos (or Nebulas, for that matter), because the whole is more than the sum of its parts and individual books often don’t stand alone very well.

Examples I’m thinking of are The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, Mercy Thompson and Alpha and Omega by Patricia Briggs, Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, Kate Daniels by Ilona Andrews, In Death by J.D. Robb,  Alliance-Union by C.J. Cherryh, The Liaden Universe by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, the Psy-Changeling and Guild Hunter by Nalini Singh, the 1632 series by Eric Flint, etc… That is, series that are extremely popular and yet overlooked by the Hugos. And yes, I’m aware that several of these series did not have new instalments out in 2019.

However, in practice the Best Series Hugo often still overlooks those long-running popular series in favour of trilogies (who usually have no problems hitting the Best Novel shortlist) and works that happen to be set in the same universe, but are only loosely connected. Quite often, there also is a lot of overlap with authors whose work appears/appeared elsewhere on the ballot and who are clearly popular with Hugo voters. So maybe the majority of Hugo voters just aren’t series readers. The fact that the glory days of the long-running SFF series, particularly urban fantasy and epic fantasy series, ended before the Best Series Hugo existed, doesn’t help either, since a lot of series that should have been finalists have ended or at least have not had new books coming out in a while. Though I suspect that even if there had been a Best Series Hugo in 2008 or 2010, when urban fantasy series ruled the bookstores, we would still have seen a similar pattern.

That said, this year’s Best Series finalists are closer to what I envision the award should recognise than last year’s. There is also less overlap with the other categories and there is only one series that I haven’t read at all. Furthermore, I have always been satisfied with the Best Series Hugo winners so far.

The Expanse by James S.A Corey (a.k.a. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) and InCryptid by Seanan McGuire come closest to my idea of what a Best Series finalist should be, namely a long-running and popular series where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Both are also repeat finalists in this category, which has caused some grumbling, particularly since Seanan McGuire has been nominated with alternating series in this category since its inception in 2017. However, October Daye and InCryptid are both very good series and deserving finalists.

I haven’t read all of Emma Newman’s Planetfall books, but I liked the ones I did read. And while Emma Newman is a previous Hugo winner, she and her husband Peter Newman won for their excellent podcast Tea and Jeopardy and Emma Newman (and Peter Newman, for that matter) have never been nominated for their fiction.

I read the first of the Winternight trilogy by Katherine Arden, when she was first up for the Campbell Award in 2018. It was well written, too, but fairytale retellings aren’t really my thing, so I never read the rest of the series. With the Luna series by Ian McDonald, I also read the first book, but wasn’t interested enough to read further. Ian McDonald is popular with Hugo voters, though, and had several nominations in the past.

I haven’t read the Wormwood trilogy by Tade Thompson at all, though again it is a popular and acclaimed trilogy and Rosewater, the first book, won the Arthur C. Clarke award last year. Also, the fact that Rosewater had a small press publication in 2016 made it ineligible for the 2019 Best Novel Hugo, so this is a good way of honouring the series.

It’s also notable that three of the Best Series finalists are by British authors, so it’s quite possible that the strong contingent of British and Irish Hugo voters who still had nominating rights from last year’s Worldcon, had an influence here.

Diversity count: 4 men, 3 women, since James S.A. Corey is two people, 2 writers of colour, 3 international writers.

Best Related Work:

This is another category, which I like in theory, but where I’m often not all that happy with the actual finalists and winners. In this category, I have a strong preference for well-researched non-fiction books, whether academic or popular. However, in practice Best Related Work has become something of a catch-all category with anything from filk CDs via podcasts and fanfiction archives to single essays/articles getting nominated and occasionally winning.

This year, however, I’m largely happy with the Best Related Work finalists. Joanna Russ by Gwyneth Jones, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O’Meara and The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn are exactly the sort of finalists I want to see in this category. All three were also on my longlist, two of them were on my ballot.

Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski was not on my ballot, but is a highly deserving finalist, since autobiographies of people of genre relevance have always been a part of Best Related Work – see also the recent nominations for Carrie Fisher’s and Zoe Quinn’s respective autobiographies.

I still feel that documentaries belong in Dramatic Presentation rather than in Best Related Work, but a small documentary most likely would be drowned out by Hollywood movies and popular TV shows there. And since documentaries are the filmic equivalents of non-fiction books, they do fit in this category and probably have a higher chance of getting nominated and winning here than in the Dramatic Presentation categories. Besides, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is a highly deserving finalist, which portrays one of the greats of our genre.

Jeannette Ng’s 2019 Campbell Award acceptance speech is the lone finalist in this category I’m not happy with. It’s not the first time that an Hugo/Campbell acceptance speech was nominated for a Hugo the following year. The 2011 acceptance speech for Best Fanzine winner The Drink Tank by James Bacon and Christopher J. Garcia was also nominated the following year in the Best Dramatic Presentation Short category, largely due to Christopher Garcia’s epic outburst. And before anybody complains, I was not happy with that nomination either at the time.

Jeannette Ng’s speech clearly had a big impact – after all, the former Campbell Award is now called the Astounding Award. I also don’t disagree with her points, neither that John W. Campbell was a problematic figure nor regarding the political activists in Hong Kong. Nonetheless, I don’t think that a 90 second acceptance speech (maybe 100 seconds, since I think she slightly overran) that is not quite an A4 page long in written form (the acceptance speech for Galactic Journey last year, which would have been slightly under 90 seconds, came in at half an A4 page in large type) is in any way the equivalent to non-fiction books that are hundreds of pages long each or a 68 minute documentary. Never mind that Alec Nevala-Lee made the same point, namely that John W. Campbell was as problematic as he was influential, last year in the Best Related Work finalist Astounding, which finished dead last, most likely because a lot of Hugo voters never bothered reading it.

Diversity count: 1 man, 5 women, 1 writer of colour, 2 international writers

Best Graphic Story or Comic:

This category is a mix of repeat and new finalists.  The previous volumes of Monstress by Marjorie M. Liu and Sana Takeda have won three years running, so it’s no surprise that volume 4 is nominated as well. Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang is another repeat finalist, though it has never won so far. And Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples is only absent this year, because the series is currently on hiatus.

The Wicked and the Divine by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie feels like a repeat finalist, because the series has been often honoured by various awards. However, it has never actually been a Hugo finalist so far. I also thought that it had been nominated before, but it turns out that I had it confused with the similarly named The Divine, which was a finalist in 2016.

LaGuardia by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford is a new series and a new finalist in this category. It’s also highly enjoyable.

Die, Volume 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans and Mooncakes, by Wendy Xu and Suzanne Walker are two new finalists I’m not familiar with at all. A cursory glance reveals that both are very different works – dark vs. sweet – and that both look interesting.

It’s interesting that Marvel and DC have no finalists this year and that no traditional superhero comic was nominated at all. LaGuardia probably comes closest.

Diversity count: 11 men, 8 women, at least 5 creators of colour, at least 4 international finalists

Best Dramatic Presentation Long:

Avengers: Endgame and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker are both the grand finale and culmination of hugely popular and beloved movie franchises. No matter how you feel about the movies themselves (personally, I enjoyed both, even though they are flawed), it’s absolutely no surprise to see them here.

Captain Marvel was one of the highest grossing movies of 2019 as well as one of the better Marvel movies of recent years. Unlike Avengers: Endgame, it also stands alone. So again it’s no surprise that it got nominated.

Us is a movie that didn’t work for me, in spite of a great and Oscar worthy (worthier than for what she actually got an Oscar) performance by Lupita Nyong’o. It is very much a movie aimed at American sensibilities, such as the charity human chain/mass handholding thing, which was hugely iconic according to the director, but that I’d never heard of. There’s nothing wrong with a movie aimed at American sensibilities and I’m not surprised to see it nominated, since it was very popular. It just isn’t for me.

The remaining two finalists are seasons of streaming video series (I still refuse to call it television when it’s not actually on TV). Good Omens was a lovely adaptation of a beloved book with some excellent acting and is a highly deserving finalist. An episode was also on my ballot in Best Dramatic Presentation Short.

The nomination for Russian Doll surprised me a little, since I had no idea it was that well regarded. I haven’t seen the series, but from the trailer it seems to be Groundhog Day – The Series with the protagonist attempting (and failing) to avoid her death at a party. Not a bad idea, but not exactly original either 27 years after Groundhog Day. Much of the coverage of Russian Doll also seemed to focus on star and co-creator Natasha Lyonne and her rather colourful life.

No diversity count, too many people are involved in making movies and TV series.

Best Dramatic Presentation Short:

The Mandalorian was clearly the breakout streaming video show of 2019, largely due to featuring the cutest co-star ever, so I’m very happy to see it nominated. This is also the only of my Best Dramatic Presentation Short nominees to make the ballot in this category (plus Good Omens in Best Dramatic Presentation Long).

I’m way behind with The Expanse, so I haven’t seen season 4 or the nominated episode “Cibola Burn” yet. It’s a solid and well made science fiction series, though, and usually winds up quite high on my ballot, whenever it’s nominated.

A nomination for the 2019 Doctor Who New Year’s special “Resolution” was probably inevitable, as was a nomination for The Good Place, which I still think is awful and most likely the worst thing ever to win a Hugo (I haven’t read They’d Rather Be Right, though). At least, both shows have only one finalist each this year. And The Good Place ended in February, so they have at most one more year, whereas we’ll be stuck with Doctor Who until the BBC tires of the show. At least the Jodie Whittaker episodes are mostly pretty good.

The HBO adaptation of Watchmen gained two finalist slots this year. I haven’t watched the show yet, because I intensely dislike Watchmen and always have. I know it’s a classic of graphic storytelling, but I have always hated Watchmen to the point that I avoided Alan Moore’s work for years, even though I subsequently liked many other things he has done. Just not Watchmen. Apparently, the TV series departs quite liberally from the original comic, largely because the comic was so much a work of its time that you cannot adapt it in 2019 as anything other than a period piece. And maybe I will like the TV series more than the comic.

No diversity count, too many people are involved in making TV series.

Best Editor Short:

Not a lot of surprises in this category. Neil Clarke, Ellen Datlow, Jonathan Strahan, Lynne M. and Michael Damien Thomas and Sheila Williams have all been nominated in this category before and are all highly deserving finalists. C.C. Finlay, the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, has not been nominated in this category so far, so I’m very happy to see him honoured.

Diversity count: 4 men, 3 women

Best Editor Long:

Sheila E. Gilbert, Diana M. Pho, Devi Pillai, Miriam Weinberg and Navah Wolfe have all been nominated (and sometimes won) in this category before. Brit Hvide is the only new name. All six are highly deserving finalists.

Diversity count: 6 women, 2 editors of colour

Best Professional Artist:

John Picacio, Galen Dara and Yuko Shimizu have all been nominated in this category before. Tommy Arnold has never been a finalist, which is a terrible oversight. Rovina Cai and Alyssa Winans were completely new to me. All six make amazing art and it’s going to be very hard to rank them.

Diversity count: 2 men, 4 women, at least 3 artists of colour, at least 2 international artists.

Best Semiprozine:

Another category with a lot of excellent and worthy finalists who’ve all been nominated before. But then, Best Semiprozine is one of the most static categories, because there are only so many eligible magazines.

No diversity count, it takes too many people to publish a magazine.

Best Fanzine:

I’m really happy to see Galactic Journey nominated for the third year running and not just because I’m a regular contributor. I’m also very happy to see my friends of nerds of a feather and The Book Smugglers on the ballot, because both sites do very good work. Journey Planet is anothe perennial finalist in this category and holds up the flag for the traditional print fanzine. Quick Sip Reviews is a repeat finalist as well and does good work reviewing short fiction. The Rec Center is new to me, though I have long enjoyed Gavia Baker-Whitelaw’s articles and reviews for The Daily Dot.

No diversity count, it takes too many people to publish a magazine.

Best Fancast:

I’m very happy that my friends of The Skiffy and Fanty Show made the ballot once again. Galactic Suburbia and The Coode Street Podcast are frequent finalists in this category. Both are very good, if very different. Be the Serpent and Our Opinions Are Correct were both first time finalists last year (and Our Opinions Are Correct won right out of the gate). I was impressed with both, so I’m glad to see them back. Claire Rousseau’s YouTube channel is a new finalist in this category and highly deserved, too, because Claire has been doing good work for years.

No diversity count, it takes too many people to make a fancast.

Best Fan Writer:

We have a set of excellent finalists in this category this year. I may be biassed, because I’m one of them, but I’m really happy to see James Davis Nicoll, Alasdair Stuart, Adam Whitehead, Bogi Takács and particularly my good friend Paul Weimer nominated. It would be an honour to lose to any of them, though as far as I’m concerned, we’re all winners.

Diversity count: 4 men, 1 woman, 1 non-binary, a whopping 5 international writers

Best Fan Artist:

A good mix of previous and new finalists, which also shows the large scope of what fan art is these days, for we have traditional illustration,  jewellery design, sculpture and even calligraphy represented.

Diversity count: 1 man, 5 women, at least 1 artist of colour, at least 1 international artist.

Lodestar:

I’m not a huge YA reader, but I was quite happy with the first year finalists of the then still unnamed Lodestar, less happy with the second year finalists, which struck me as very similar to each other. Year 3 seems to be a return to form.

I’m a big fan of Naomi Kritzer’s and Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher’s work, so I’m very happy to see Catfishing on CatNet and Minor Mage respectively nominated here. Yoon Ha Lee is another writer I really like, so I’m happy to see Dragon Pearl on the ballot. The Wicked King by Holly Black is the sequel to last year’s finalist The Cruel Prince. I haven’t read Deeplight by Frances Hardinge, but I know that she is a popular and well regarded YA writer. Riverland by Fran Wilde is a book I wasn’t aware of at all, but Fran Wilde is a fine and popular writer.

Diversity count: 1 man, 5 women, 1 writer of colour, 1 international writer

Astounding Award (formerly Campbell Award):

Another fine ballot and one with lots of new names. R.F. Kuang is the only repeat finalist in this category. The Poppy War didn’t really work for me, but she is a promising writer and I look forward to seeing what she’ll write next.

I enjoyed Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri a lot, so I’m happy to see her nominated. And while I haven’t yet read The Ruin of Kings and its sequel by Jenn Lyons, it was probably the biggest debut of last year. Nibedita Sen made a splash with her short fiction and is also a finalist in the short story category. I haven’t read City of Lies and its sequel by Sam Hawke, but people I trust have enjoyed them. Emily Tesh wasn’t really on my radar, though her debut novel Silver in the Wood has gotten good reviews.

Diversity count: 6 women (yes, Sam Hawke is female), 3 writers of colour, 4 international writers

***

That’s it for my analysis of the finalists. So now let’s take a look at some reactions from around the web. Though reactions seem to be somewhat muted this time, probably because many people have other things on their mind. The puppies have also stopped barking, which is something to be grateful for, at least.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve already seen my “Squee, I’m a Hugo finalist” post.

My fellow Best Fan Writer finalist Paul Weimer offers an overview over his work and where to find it.

Another fellow Best Fan Writer finalist Adam Whitehead has a brief post up about his nomination and the 2020 Hugo finalists in general.

The team behind the Best Fanzine finalist Journey Planet says thank you to their contributors and everybody who nominated them. The team behind Best Fanzine finalist nerds of a feather also thank their contributors and nominators.

Camestros Felapton shares his thoughts on the 2020 Hugo finalists. There is also some discussion in the comments. Ditto for File 770, where things get a bit heated.

Lela E. Buis also shares her thoughts on the 2020 Hugo finalists and notes that there is a lot of overlap with the Nebulas this year.

There is quite a bit of discussion about the 2020 Hugo finalists going on in the r/fantasy subreddit. Mostly positive, but there are also some folks who feel that the finalists are too political, that there are too many women and that the Goodreads Choice Awards and/or Dragon Awards (which still haven’t updated their website) are better. In short, the usual.

 

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Some Thoughts on the Hugo Award Finalists, Part I: The 1945 Retro Hugo Awards

Here is the first of the long awaited Hugo finalist reaction posts. Not too long, I hope, but since I’m a Hugo finalist myself this year, I took some time off to celebrate, congratulate fellow finalists and update everything that needed updating.

So let’s start with the 1945 Retro Hugos. As regular readers of this blog probably know, I started the 1945 Retro Hugo Awards Recommendation Spreadsheet and also reviewed eligible works at this blog and over at Retro Science Fiction Reviews to help potential nominators to make more informed choices. And that’s why I was extremely interested to see what, if any, impact the spreadsheet and the Retro Reviews project had.

So let’s take a look at the individual categories:

Best Novel:

Science fiction was a short fiction genre during the golden age and so the best novel category at the Retro Hugos is often fairly weak or full of left-field finalists. 1945 is no exception, though we do have some good finalists. Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord by Olaf Stapledon is probably the most obvious finalist in this category and also a really good novel. Don Briago reviewed it for Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Shadow Over Mars a.k.a. The Nemesis from Terra by Leigh Brackett is another fine novel from one of the greats of the golden age. I reviewed it here.

I didn’t review Land of Terror by Edgar Rice Burroughs, largely because my Pellucidar collection only includes the first three novels. But it’s not an unexpected finalist, though Edgar Rice Burroughs is somewhat hampered by the fact that he wrote his best works before there even was a Worldcon, let alone Hugos, so he has never really been honoured.

I’m not a huge fan of A.E. van Vogt, so I did not cover The Winged Man by van Vogt and his wife E. Mayne Hull, but it’s not an unexpected finalist, since van Vogt is clearly popular with Retro Hugo voters.

The Golden Fleece by Robert Graves is a left-field finalist, but a very deserving work. I didn’t review it, but Steve J. Wright did. The other left-field finalist is The Wind on the Moon by Eric Linklater, a beloved children’s book, which I have not (yet) read, but look forward to trying.

Finalists covered at Retro Reviews: 2 of 6

Diversity count: 5 men, 2 women, 5 international writers

Best Novella:

“Killdozer!” by Theodore Sturgeon is probably the best known finalist in this category and a worthy one, too. Don Briago reviewed it for Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

“The Jewel of Bas” by Leigh Brackett is a great planetary romance novella and probably my favourite of the finalists in this category. I reviewed it here.

“A God Named Kroo” by Henry Kuttner was on my list to review, but I didn’t get around to it in time. I didn’t review “Trog” by Murray Leinster either, though Steve J. Wright did. Since I’m not a van Vogt fan, I didn’t review “The Changeling”, though again Steve J. Wright did.

I’m not at all familiar with “Intruders from the Stars” by Ross Rocklynne, though it is listed on the spreadsheet.

Finalists covered at Retro Reviews: 2 of 6

Diversity count: 5 men, 1 woman, 1 international author

Best Novelette:

C.L. Moore is represented three times in this category, once with her solo story “No Woman Born” and twice together with her husband Henry Kuttner with “The Children’s Hour” and “When the Bough Breaks”. All three are excellent stories. I reviewed “No Woman Born” and “When the Bough Breaks”, but didn’t get around to “The Children’s Hour” yet.

I’m not at all surprised that “The Big and the Little” by Isaac Asimov was nominated, since it’s a Foundation story. And while it has its share of flaws, it certainly is interesting. I reviewed it here.

“City” by Clifford D. Simak is another finalist that’s absolutely no surprise, since it is the title story of a beloved cycle/series and besides, Simak was a very good writer. I reviewed two of the four eligible City stories, but not this one.

“Arena” by Fredric Brown is also no surprise, since it’s a classic story that was even adapted as a Star Trek episode.  It was also on my list of stories to review, but I didn’t get around to it.

I’m a little sad that the two eligible Leigh Brackett novelettes didn’t make it, though Leigh Brackett is well represented elsewhere on this ballot. And while “Iron Mask” by Robert Bloch, “Highwayman of the Void” by Frederik Pohl and “Ride the EL to Doom” by Allison V. Harding were all long shots (and the Retro Hugo administrators might well have killed me, if they had to try to track down Harding’s heirs, considering she is an enigma), I would have been thrilled to see them here.

Finalists covered at Retro Reviews: 3 of 6

Diversity count: 5 men (Henry Kuttner twice) and 3 women, all of whom are C.L. Moore.

Best Short Story:

“Desertion” and “The Huddling Place” by Clifford D. Simak are both City stories, both excellent and utterly unsurprising finalists. I reviewed them here and here.

“The Wedge” by Isaac Asimov is the other Foundation story of 1944. It’s usually considered one of the weaker entries in the series, though I liked it better than “The Big and the Little”. I reviewed it here.

Ray Bradbury had twelve eligible stories in 1944 and none of the ones I read were bad. “I, Rocket” was not the Bradbury story I expected to make the ballot, though it is a good choice. But then, there are no bad choices with Ray Bradbury. I reviewed the story here.

I didn’t review “Far Centaurus” by A.E. van Vogt, because I just don’t care for his work. Though “Far Centaurus” is a famous story and also one of the first generation ship stories.

“And the Gods Laughed” by Fredric Brown is a story that never even appeared on my radar, even though it is listed in the spreadsheet.

Finalists covered at Retro Reviews: 4 of 6

Diversity count: 6 men (Clifford D. Simak twice), 1 international writer

Best Series:

This is one category where I really feel that the Retro Hugo spreadsheet made an impact. Because this is the first time ever that we even have this category at the Retro Hugos. And the reason why we never had it before is because people just didn’t know what the nominate in this category.

The Shadow and Doc Savage are both pulp stalwarts that had been published for more than ten years by 1944. They may not be as well remembered as they once were, but they were hugely influential and their impact is felt to this day. Doc Savage influenced everything from Superman to The A-Team, while The Shadow was one of the influences on Batman. Both are highly deserving of recognition, even if the glory days of both series are somewhat behind them by 1944.

Captain Future, created by Edmond Hamilton, hasn’t really had the same impact on popular culture at large, but it had a huge impact on me, because the 1979 Captain Future anime series was one of my foundational science fiction experiences which made me a fan, so I’m really thrilled to see the good Captain here as well as Otho, Grag, Simon Wright (whose spiritual descendant is helping astronauts aboard the ISS) and Joan Randall.

A collection of the first three Pellucidar books was my first contact with the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and my teenaged self certainly loved it. Also, as I said above, Burroughs has never really been honoured by the Hugos, because he wrote his best works long before there even was a Worldcon.

The Cthulhu Mythos by H.P. Lovecraft and friends, represented in 1944 by two August Derleth stories, is one of the great classics of our genre, no matter how you feel about Lovecraft. It’s also still going strong and getting new additions, including many that would horrify Lovecraft, and therefore a highly deserving finalist.

The occult detective Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinn may be somewhat forgotten these days, but he was a mainstay of Weird Tales for more than twenty year. In their time, the Jules de Grandin stories were more popular than Cthulhu or Conan and single-handedly saved Weird Tales from bankruptcy more than once.

No diversity count, because most of these series were written by more than one person. Those persons were generally male, though.

Best Related Work:

This is the other category where I feel that the Retro Hugo Spreadsheet really made an impact, because this another category we didn’t have at all for the golden age Retro Hugos, because no one knew what to nominate. I also want to thank everybody who helped to hunt down these works, some of which were not easy to find. We also have a nice variety of very different works here.

Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere by Willy Ley and Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom by George Gamow are two good popular science books. The Willy Ley book is apparently so good that the Bremen University library still has several copies (plus two more at the library of the Technical College), even though the book is 75 years old.

42 To ’44: A Contemporary Memoir Upon Human Behavior During the Crisis of the World Revolution by H.G. Wells is a non-fiction book by one of the founding fathers of our genre who has never been recognised by the Hugos either, because like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Wells did his best work well before there were Hugo Awards or even a Worldcon.

Fancyclopedia 1 by Jack Speer is the first attempt to chronicle fandom, while it was still in its very early years and another highly deserving finalist. It’s also a project that still exists 75 years later, now as an online Wiki.

Finally, we have two fine essays: “The Science-Fiction Field” by Leigh Brackett is an article from Writers Digest that is remarkably difficult to locate (and we certainly tried). Supposedly, she talks about her experiences as a woman writing science fiction during the golden age, so I hope someone who has a copy will put it up for Retro Hugo voters to read.

“The Works of H.P. Lovecraft: Suggestions for a Critical Appraisal” by Fritz Leiber, published in the fanzine The Acolyte, does exactly what it says on the tin. I suspect I am at least partly responsible for this nomination, because I stumbled across The Acolyte, when I checked out Fritz Leiber’s 1944 publication credits, found the zine online at Fanac.org, liked what I read and entered the essay as well as the fanzine and Fritz Leiber as a fanwriter into the spreadsheet. Since the essay, The Acolyte and Fritz Leiber as fanwriter  all got nominations, I suspect other Retro Hugo nominators must have agreed.

Diversity count: 5 men, 1 woman, 1 international writer (I’m counting immigrants Willy Ley and George Gamow as Americans here)

Best Graphic Story/Comic:

Flash Gordon is represented twice in this category with “Battle for Tropica” and “Triumph in Tropica”. These are the last Flash Gordon strips drawn and written by Alex Raymond who was about to depart for Rip Kirby, so I really hope that Alex Raymond, who was the best artist drawing for the newspaper strips at the time, will finally get the recognition he deserves.

Buck Rogers is the other newspaper strip on the ballot and was the original science fiction adventure strip, long before Flash Gordon came along. Though I have to admit that I always preferred Flash to Buck.

The Spirit is one of the great classics of the era, even though the nominated story was not drawn by Will Eisner. But it was written by Manly Wade Wellman.

Carl Barks was the most iconic artist ever to draw Donald Duck and pretty much created the world that is known as “Entenhausen” (duckville) in German. His comics are classics and I’m really glad to see him honoured here.

The American superhero comic is represented here by the Superman story “The Mysterious Mr. Mxyztplk” which introduces a classic antagonist.

Good choices all and also a nice look at the variety of comics available during this era from serialised newspaper strips via superheroes to funny animals. Though I’m a bit sad that The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician didn’t make the ballot again.

Diversity count: All men, all Americans

Best Dramatic Presentation Short:

There is no Best Dramatic Presentation Long category at the Retro Hugos this year, so works like The Uninvited, Between Two Worlds, The Halfway House, the stage production of Huis Clos or The Phantom and Captain America serials sadly don’t get a shot at winning a Retro Hugo.

One of the Best Dramatic Presentation Short finalists, The Canterville Ghost, is actually a longform finalist at 95 minutes, though it still falls within the grace range. It’s also a nice adaptation of a fantasy classic.

The Curse of the Cat People is a sequel to the 1943 Retro Hugo finalist Cat People and often considered superior to the original. It Happened Tomorrow is a time paradox movie adapted from a story by Lord Dunsany and a minor classic.

House of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man’s Revenge are the sort of Universal extruded monster product that was typical for the SFF cinema of the era. Both are also the upteenth inferior sequel to a good original. Sorry to be so direct, but everybody involved with these films is dead anyway and it’s unlikely I will insult the ghost of Curt Siodmak or Ford Bebee. The Invisible Man’s Revenge is also the only 1945 Retro Hugo finalist that is not listed in the spreadsheet. For some reason, we completely missed this one, though Retro Hugo nominators did not.

Donovan’s Brain, finally, is an example of an art form that was enormously popular during this period, but that is rarely represented at the Retro Hugos, namely the radio drama. I’m always happy to see a vintage radio drama on the shortlist, because they are often overlooked compared to movies and are also generally better than the extruded monster product that so often dominates the Dramatic Presentation categories at the Retro Hugos.

No diversity count, too many people are involved in making movies or radio dramas.

Best Editor Short:

There are absolutely no surprises in this category. John W. Campbell is the oft nominated and just as often winning editor of Astounding Science Fiction. He will probably not be on top of my ballot, but he definitely deserves to be here.

Dorothy McIllwraith’s tenure at Weird Tales may have been overshadowed by Farnsworth Wright’s, but I have been very impressed by the output of Weird Tales during the 1940s. A highly deserving finalist I would love to see win for once.

W. Scott Peacock was the editor of Planet Stories, while Oscar J. Friend edited Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Captain Future. Their respective magazines may be overlooked compared to Astounding and Weird Tales, but I found the stories I reviewed from Planet Stories, Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories consistently entertaining. In fact, those lesser mags are probably more consistent with regard to quality than Astounding, for while Astounding published a lot of classics, they also published a lot of dross.

Raymond A. Palmer’s time as the editor of Amazing Stories is sadly overshadowed by the Shaver mystery nonsense. But the first Shaver mystery story wasn’t even published until the following year and in 1944, Palmer was doing good work. I reviewed fewer stories from Amazing than from Astounding or Planet Stories or Weird Tales, but the ones I reviewed were all good.

I’m a bit surprised to see Mary Gnaedinger, editor of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, on the ballot. Not because she didn’t do good work, she did. But Famous Fantastic Mysteries published no new fiction in 1944, only reprints.

Diversity count: 4 men, 2 women

Best Professional Artist:

Iconic Weird Tales cover artist Margaret Brundage is a frequent finalist in this category, but so far hasn’t won. I really hope that this will be her year, if only because she’s about to move out of SFF art and we won’t have many more chances to recognise her. Besides, her cover and interior artwork for the May 1944 issue of Weird Tales, illustrating “Iron Mask” by Robert Bloch, is lovely and the woman on the cover is even fully dressed for once. Not that I mind the nudes – few people painted better nudes than Margaret Brundage. But it seems to me as if her work is just a little too sexy for modern sensibilities.

Earle Bergey was responsible for the striking and lurid covers of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories and Captain Future, wherein men are manly, women were brass bikinis and monsters are bug-eyed and menace damsels in distress. His work is great fun and few artists were as good at painting bug-eyed monsters and ladies in brass bikinis as Earle Bergey. Who cares that most of the scenes he illustrated never happened that way in the actual story.

Boris Dolgov provided the interior art for many an issue of Weird Tales. His work is always striking and atmospheric, particularly his two page spread for “Ride the EL to Doom” by Allison V. Harding and I’m really happy to see him recognised.

Matt Fox is responsible for the cover of the November 1944 issue of Weird Tales, which depicts Cthulhu in all his terrible glory. I think this is the only time Cthulhu ever appeared on the cover. For some reason, Weird Tales‘ most famous characters – Conan, Cthulhu, Solomon Kane, Jules de Grandin – hardly ever appeared on the cover of the magazine, probably because Margaret Brundage would rather draw semi-nude women, who also sold better than tentacled monstrosities.

Paul Orban provided the interior art for many an issue of Astounding Science Fiction as well as for The Shadow and Doc Savage. He is not listed in the spreadsheet, so here is another 1945 Retro Hugo finalist we missed.

William Timmins, finally, was the cover artist for Astounding Science Fiction throughout WWII and also provided interior art. I have to admit that prefer the more lurid end of the pulp market, but Timmins did provide some striking covers for Astounding in 1944 such as this one and this one.

Diversity count: 5 men, 1 woman. All American, though Dolgov and Orban are immigrants.

Best Fanzine:

Futurian War Digest, Shangri L’Affaires, Voice of the Imagi-Nation and Le Zombie are all repeat finalists in this category and they all did good work. Diablerie is completely new to me, though it is listed on the spreadsheet.

The Acolyte, finally, is a zine focussed on weird fiction and the works of H.P. Lovecraft that I discovered when I checked out the 1944 publication credits for Fritz Leiber and Anthony Boucher. So I checked it out on Fanac.org and was quite impressed with what I found, so I put it on the spreadhseet. Evidently, other Retro Hugo nominators agreed with me, because it made the ballot.

Diversity count: 8 men, 1 woman
Best Fan Writer:

Once again, we have several repeat finalists in this category. Jack Speer, Bob Tucker and Harry Warner Jr. have all been nominated in this category before, as was Myrtle R. Douglas a.k.a. Morojo, who invented cosplay and proves that women were always part of our genre. Jack Speer deserves particular recognition here, because he wrote and published the first Fancyclopedia in 1944, a project which still exists, though now online.

J. Michael Rosenblum was the editor of Futurian War Digest, a British fanzine I find consistently impressive. But for some reason, he has never been a Retro Hugo finalist himself, so I’m happy that the nominators rectified that oversight.

Fritz Leiber Jr. really needs no introduction, considering that he published countless of excellent novels and stories over his fifty-year career, won six Hugos, one Retro Hugo and countless other awards and co-created two of the most beloved fantasy characters of all time in Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. So what is he doing on the Best Fanwriter ballot?

Well, I suspect I might have something to do with that. I’m a big Fritz Leiber fan, so I checked ISFDB for eligible 1944 works and came across not only a handful fo stories for Astounding (no Fafhrd and Gray Mouser in 1944, sadly, because the demise of Unknown the year before left them temporarily homeless) but also a story, an essay and a poem, all published in the fanzine The Acolyte. As I said above, I checked out The Acolyte, liked what I saw and put it on the spreadsheet. In addtion to his essay with suggestions for a critical appraisal of Lovecraft’s work, which is nominated in the Best Related Work category, Fritz Leiber also contributed a short story entitled “Ervool” and a poem to The Acolyte. The poem, entitled “The Gray Mouser”, will probably be familiar to quite a few readers, because it has been reprinted in the various Fafhrd and Gray Mouser collections over the years. So it isn’t quite correct that Fafhrd and Gray Mouser were taking an extended break during the  late 1940s and early 1950s, because Gray Mouser at least was still active in a poem first published in a fairly obscure fanzine. Coincidentally, this poem also appears to be the first time that the wizard Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, a recurring character in the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, was mentioned in print, since I don’t recall Sheelba appearing in any of the stories published in Unknown. You can find the issue of The Acolyte which contains Fritz Leiber’s fan writing output for 1944, online at Fanac.org BTW.

Diversity count: 5 men, 1 woman, 1 international writer

It seems to me as if all the hard work I (and many others) put into the 1945 Retro Hugo Recommendation spreadsheet and Retro Science Fiction Reviews did make an impact, the spreadsheet probably more so than Retro Science Fiction Reviews. Cause I don’t think that we would have had the Best Series and Best Related Work categories at all without the spreadsheet and the three nominations linked to The Acolyte can probably also be attributed to the spreadsheet.

I will be reviewing the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists that I missed the first time around and I’ll definitely do a recommendation spreadsheet and Retro Reviews for the 1947 Retro Hugos, because the 1946 Retro Hugos were already awarded in 1996.

And that’s it for the first part of the analysis of the 2020 Hugo and 1945 Retro Hugo finalists. Part 2, which takes a look at the 2020 Hugo finalists, is coming probably tomorrow.

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Cora is a Hugo Finalist!

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As you probably know, the finalists for the 2020 Hugo Awards and the 1945 Retro Hugo Awards have just been announced. Both ballots are very good this year and I promise you that the detailed analysis of the finalists, which I know you’re all waiting for, is coming as soon as I can get it written. In the meantime, you can read Camestros Felapton’s comments about the 2020 Hugo finalists. And if you want to get started reading the finalists (never too early), JJ has put together a handy list where to find the finalists for the 2020 Hugo Awards for free at File 770.

But for now, I want to focus on just one category, namely the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Fanwriter. Cause if you take a look at that category, you will find – among most excellent company – my name.

Yes, I’m a Hugo finalist for Best Fanwriter!

I’ve known about this for about two weeks now (for those who don’t know, the Hugo coordinators contact you beforehand to ask if you want to accept the nomination), but I’m still in shock. When I got the e-mail from CoNZealand, I initially didn’t even know what it was. I was waiting for an e-mail from my ISP and for my Disney Plus activation mail, so when I saw a mail from CoNZealand in my inbox instead, I thought it was a newsletter or progress report.

It’s a great honour to be a Hugo finalist and I want to thank everybody who nominated me. I’m also thrilled that my friends of Galactic Journey are finalists again in the Best Fanzine category and that my friend Paul Weimer is a fellow finalist in the fanwriter category.

Unfortunately, with CoNZealand going virtual due to the corona pandemic, there won’t be a traditional Hugo ceremony nor the reception beforehand nor the Hugo Losers’ Party afterwards. But thankfully, I got to experience all that last year in Dublin as the designated accepter for Galactic Journey. And on the plus side, it means that I can follow the Hugo announcements in my pyjamas, which is a lot more comfortable than an evening gown and tiara.

I also have a request. Like all Hugo finalists, I will be asked to put together a selection of writings for the Hugo voters packet. And that’s why I need your help. Which 2019 articles or essays of mine should go into the Hugo Voters packet? There is a full list here, so let me know in the comments which ones you think should go into the packet.

How can you vote for the 2020 Hugos and 1945 Retro Hugos? I guess pretty much everybody here knows how it works, but for those who don’t, it’s quite simple. If you buy a supporting membership for CoNZealand, the 2020 Worldcon, you can vote for the Hugo and Retro Hugo Awards as well as vote to select the location of the 2022 Worldcon. You also receive all of the convention publications and get access to the Hugo Voters’ packet, which contains most of the nominated works either in part or as a whole. If you buy an online attending membership, you can also attend the virtual Worldcon panels and other events online.

As I said above, the detailed analysis of the 2020 Hugo and 1945 Retro Hugo ballot is coming soon, probably tomorrow. But for now, I just want to say thank you for nominating me.

ETA: I also have a media kit now, which may be found here.

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Retro Review: “Citadel of Lost Ships” by Leigh Brackett

[image error]The finalists for the 1945 Retro Hugos will be announced tomorrow. But for now, I’ll continue to take a look at some of the finalists for previous years of Retro Hugos. And today, I’ll continue with a story that was not the best story on the ballot, neither in its respective category nor by the respective author, but that I nonetheless found extremely interesting and that I found myself thinking about a lot more than about many of the other Retro Hugo finalists of that year.

The story in question is “Citadel of Lost Ships”, a space opera novelette by Leigh Brackett that was the cover story of the March 1943 issue of Planet Stories and was a finalist for the 1944 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.

Roy Campbell, the protagonist of “Citadel of Lost Ships”, is a typical example of the outlaw heroes Leigh Brackett was so fond of. He is also explicitly described as dark-skinned, even if cover artist Jerome Rozen portrays the character as white and blonde and a deadringer for Doc Savage as portrayed by Walter Baumhofer.

At the beginning of the story, Roy has narrowly escaped the Spaceguard and found refuge with the Kraylens, a tribe of native Venusians who have taken him in before. But there is trouble brewing in this peaceful Venusian paradise, for the exhausted and injured Roy is woken by war drums in the middle of the night.

Roy finally gets the story of what is going on from his Kraylen foster father. It turns out that oil, coal and other minerals have been discovered in the Venusian swamps near the Kraylens’ home. And now the Terran-Venusian Coalition government is planning to take possession of the Kraylens’ land to drain the swamps, drill for oil and mine the coal and other minerals (we wonder if the appropriately named Terran Exploitations Company is involved). The Kraylens will be resettled into reservations, where tourists can gawk at their primitive lifestyle. Understandably, the Kraylens are not fans of this plan. “We will die first,” Roy’s foster father says.

Roy wants to help the Kraylens. After all, they gave him a home when he needed one and hid him from the authorities several times thereafter. But Roy also sympathises with the Kraylens’ plight in more ways than one, for we learn that he comes from a family of farmers who had been working the same plot of land for more than three hundred years, until they were displaced by a hydroelectric dam, victims of the same idea of progress and expansion that will now claim the Kraylens and their way of life.

Luckily, Roy has an idea. The travelling space station Romany, the titular “Citadel of Lost Ships” since it has been assembled from abandoned spaceships, has been offering refuge to those displaced by the imperialist expansion of the Terran-Venusian Coalition for a long time now. And Romany just happens to be in orbit around Venus, so maybe they can be persuaded to take in the Kraylens. It is worth a try at any rate.

So Roy sets off for Romany, narrowly evading yet another patrol ship on his way there. When he reaches the space station, he isn’t exactly given a warm welcome. The communications officer, a young black man from Mercury called Zard, treats him coolly and his boss, an Earthman called Tredrick, blows him off and tells Roy that Romany cannot help the Kraylens and that he shall leave. However, shortly after Tredrick has broken contact, Roy receives a message from Zard telling him to dock at one of the ships that make up Romany. Because, so the young man tells him, there are some who still consider Romany a refuge.

Roy docks as instructed and is promptly knocked out by a one-armed Martian named Marah, who mistakes him for a spy for Tredrick. Once that misunderstanding has been cleared up, Roy learns from Marah and a human telepath named Stella Moore what is going on aboard Romany.

It turns out that Romany is on the edge of a civil war between those like Stella, Marah and Zard who want to continue living according to their own code and help those in need, even if it pisses off the Coalition government, and a group led by Tredrick and the station council who want to stop interfering with the Coalition’s plans in exchange for better trading rights and constant orbits. Tredrick’s fraction is about to move against the rebels when Roy blunders in.

Stella promises Roy that the rebels will rescue the Kraylens. In exchange, Roy promises that he’ll stick around and help the rebels – for the Kraylens’ sake and because Roy sympathises with the rebels and their cause.

Romany is a fascinating setting, an assembly of spaceships whose interior not only houses members of many different races, but also mimics their natural environment, i.e. the Venusian quarter has swamp vegetation, while the Titanian quarter has ice caves. Sadly, Leigh Brackett never revisited Romany, though it’s spiritual descendants still abound in science fiction, ranging from Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine to Alpha, the City of a Thousand Planets, from the Valérian and Laureline comics and the recent film adaptation by Luc Besson.

The rebels are planning to take a ship and rescue the Kraylens, but before they can get there, they find their way blocked by Tredrick and his men. Tredrick informs everybody that Romany cannot help the Kraylens, not anymore, because the Kraylens have already been imprisoned for harbouring the dangerous criminal Roy Campbell. And even though Roy used a false name, when contacting Romany, Tredrick knows that he is aboard the station and warns everybody who helps him of dire consequences.

The rebels pretend to comply with Tredrick’s orders, while Stella and Marah help Roy escape. Roy manages to make his getaway just before the Spaceguard arrives, which leads to yet another chase, as the Guard ships pursue Roy and his ship. Roy’s ship is fatally damaged in the resulting firefight. Roy himself is badly wounded, but nonetheless he gets into a spacesuit and steps out of the airlock. He hides among the debris of his damaged and dying ship – a manoeuvre that Roy’s spiritual descendant Han Solo would use again some thirty-seven years later in The Empire Strikes Back, the original screenplay of which was also penned by Leigh Brackett – and then uses the jetpack of his spacesuit to descend to Venus. Of course, Roy would have gotten burned up upon entering the atmosphere, but pulp space operas don’t care about such inconvenient scientific facts.

Back on Venus, Roy meets up with Marah, Stella and their motley crew of alien rebels, who took a ship from Romany to rescue the Kraylens. Together, they head for the Venusian city of Lhi, where the Kraylens have been imprisoned.

However, Tredrick pre-empted their move and has put the Kraylens under heavy guard. But one of the rebels, a man from the Jovian moon Callisto, uses his magical harp to put the guards to sleep. But when Roy and his friends free the Kraylens, Tredrick himself shows up with more guards. A firefight erupts and Roy and Stella find themselves face to face with Tredrick himself.

Now we briefly get Tredrick’s motivation for turning on his own people. Tredrick explains that even though he was born on Romany, he was never happy there and didn’t care for the freedom Romany offered, since that freedom also meant poverty. So Tredrick decided to rise through the ranks, take over Romany and make a deal with the Coalition government to ensure prosperity for all. Roy and the Kraylens as well as Stella, Marah and the rebels stand in his way, so Tredrick decided to use the Coalition forces to get rid of them.

Roy launches himself at Tredrick and the two men engage in a furious fight. But Roy is weakened from his injuries and therefore he is losing. Just as Tredrick is about to kill Roy, Stella intervenes and uses her telepathic abilities to kill Tredrick.

Roy tells Stella to lead the others to safety. He will stay behind and take the blame for the death of Tredrick and the escape of the Kraylens. Because, so Roy tells Stella, the Coalition government needs a scapegoat for what happened on Venus. And if they cannot use Roy as a scapegoat, they will go after Romany. And Romany has no chance against the combined might of the Terran-Venusian Coalition. But if Roy sacrifices himself, Romany gets to remain free.

“You’re wonderful,” a tearful Stella tells Roy, “I didn’t realize how wonderful.”

Roy promises Stella that he won’t be in prison for long and that he’ll escape. He also says that he hopes Romany will remember him and maybe erect a statue in his honour, because he will be back. Then he waits to be arrested, while Stella flees with the Kraylens.

[image error]“Citadel of Lost Ships” is exactly the kind of glorious and thrilling pulp space opera that Leigh Brackett excelled at. However, the story also has a strong undercurrent of social criticism. Now a lot of Leigh Brackett’s early stories were critical of imperialism and capitalism and often featured marginalised protagonists. “Citadel of Lost Ships”, however, features Leigh Brackett in full social justice warrior mode.

Stylistically, “Citadel of Lost Ships” is very much a story of its time. It’s set in the pulp science fiction shared solar system and its full of the usual anachronisms such as finned rocket ships, people smoking in space and Roy Campbell surviving re-entry in a spacesuit. On the other hand, “Citadel of Lost Ships” is exactly the opposite of the prevalent stereotype of golden age science fiction. “Citadel of Lost Ships” couldn’t be further from the ideals of Campbellian science fiction (and John W. Campbell did not publish it – Malcom Reiss of Planet Stories did). Furthermore, the themes Leigh Brackett tackles – the impact of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism, the treatment of indigenous people, the sacrificing of people in the name of progress – are all themes that science fiction is still grappling with today.

The humans of the Terran-Venusian Coalition are clearly the bad guys jere and the story is very concerned with the treatment of what Roy Campbell calls “the little people”, many of whom are aliens who – in a genre tradition that would last well into modern times – stand in for various marginalised groups in the real world. The plight of the Kraylen is clearly intended to criticise the treatment of Native Americans – and let’s not forget that the Wounded Knee Massacre took place only twenty-five years before Leigh Brackett was born, while the last conflicts between Native Americans and representatives of the (white) authorities happened within Brackett’s lifetime, i.e. those events were still very much within living memory, when “Citadel of Lost Ships” was published. Romany, the name of the space station, refers to the Romani people and indeed, Stella explains at one point that the station and its inhabitants are welcomed as traders but otherwise “hated, just as gypsies [Brackett’s word choice, not mine] always are.” This is not the only time that the Romani people feature in Leigh Brackett’s stories of the golden age either. “The Jewel of Bas”, published a year later, also features a heroic Romani protagonist.

Roy Campbell’s father losing the family farm to a hydroelectric dam project, an event which psychologically scarred Roy and set him on the path towards crime, also echoes actual events of the time the story was written. Because the 1930s and 1940s were the age of the great hydroelectric dam projects in the US like the Hoover Dam (then still known as the Boulder Dam) or the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933. These hydroelectric dams displaced (and were still displacing when the story was written) farmers, families and sometimes whole towns in the name of progress. It’s very difficult to find critical voices about the Tennessee Valley Authority Act or the Boulder/Hoover Dam even today (the displaced farmers and flooded towns are usually just a footnote), so to find one in 1943 is quite remarkable.

Furthermore, people are still facing displacement due to hydroelectric dams and strip mining operations today, whether it’s the historic Turkish town of Hasankeyf about to be flooded by the waters of the river Tigris due to the Ilisu Dam or the people of the Garzweiler and the Lausitz regions in Germany who have lost or are still about to lose their homes to lignite coal strip mining, even though lignite coal is extremely harmful to the environment and will be phased out in the next ten to twenty years anyway. So the issues addressed by “The Citadel of Lost Ships” are not in the distant past – they’re still current today.

[image error]Roy Campbell is one of my favourite Leigh Brackett characters. In many ways, Roy Campbell feels like a prototype for Eric John Stark, who would come along six years later. Like Stark, Campbell is a man of colour, like Stark he does not fit into regular human society, like Stark he found a home with an indigenous tribe, only to lose it again, when those indigenous people were displaced and slaughtered in the name of progress. But while Eric John Stark is generally a good man, Roy Campbell is probably the noblest character Leigh Brackett ever created, even though Roy sees himself as anything but a hero. I also doubt it’s an accident that this noble outlaw and hero of colour shares a surname with the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, a man who would become infamous for his reactionary views regarding race, gender and politics. Was this Leigh Brackett’s way of giving John W. Campbell the finger?

In many ways, it’s a pity that Brackett never revisited Roy Campbell. Did he manage to escape from the prison mines of Phobos (in the pulp science fiction shared solar system, moons are inevitably prisons)? Did he even go to prison in the first place or did the Coalition authorities just shoot him, because the whole affair was too embarrassing? Did Roy get that statue and did he ever get to see Stella again? We’ll never know.

Roy Campbell also sums up the point of the story on the final page, when he says:

“They’re building, Stella. When they’re finished they’ll have a big, strong, prosperous empire extending all across the System, and the people who belong to that empire will be happy.

“But before you can build you have to grade and level, destroy the things that get in your way. We’re the things – the tree-stumps and the rocks that grew in the way and can’t be changed.

“They’re building; they’re growing. You can’t stop that. In the end it’ll be a good thing, I suppose. But right now, for us…”

So much for the claim that the golden age was unpolitical and all about fun science fiction and/or that the science fiction of the time promoted the unquestioning belief in science and progress and the unquestioning acceptance of colonialism. Cause here we have a story from 1943 that is very much about social justice warriors in the most literal sense of the word fighting against human imperialism.

But don’t let my analysis of the political background of the story scare you off. Because “The Citadel of Lost Ships” is a cracking good pulp space opera, whether you agree with its politics or not.

The novelette category of the 1944 Retro Hugos was uncommonly strong and so “The Citadel of Lost Ships” lost out to the excellent, if very different “Mimsy Were the Borogroves” by Lewis Padgett a.k.a. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. And much as I enjoyed this story, it was not in first place on my ballot either, if only because I love Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser even more and “Thieves’ House” is the best of the early Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories published in Unknown. And indeed, reviewing the early Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories is a project to tackle, once I’ve dealt with the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists I missed.

“The Citadel of Lost Ships” is one of the lesser known Leigh Brackett stories of this era. It has been reprinted a few times, but not nearly as frequently as many of her other stories. This is a pity, because “The Citadel of Lost Ships” is a great story that deserves to be better known.

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First Monday Free Fiction: The Four and a Half Minute Boiled Egg

[image error]Welcome to the April 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.

Next weekend is Easter, so what could be more fitting than a story about an egg. Therefore, I have chosen The Four and a Half Minute Boiled Egg, the first story in my series Alfred and Bertha’s Marvellous Twenty-First Century Life as this month’s free story.

The Alfred and Bertha stories are not really science fiction. They are parodies, mundane short stories about a couple in a troubled marriage written in the over the top infodumpy and technical style of science fiction’s so-called “golden age” of the 1940s and 1950s, where every single bit of technology, no matter how mundane, is explained.

Fans of Alfred and Bertha – I know there are about two of you out there – will be pleased to learn that a new Alfred and Bertha story entitled Canis Familiaris of the Sofa (that’s “dog” to you mundanes) will be coming out very soon.

But for now, follow along as Alfred and Bertha von Bülow get into an argument about the correct time required to boil an egg in

The Four and a Half Minute Boiled Egg
A Not Really SF Short Story

Bertha awoke to the shrill beeping of her alarm clock. She opened her eyes to see the numbers six zero zero edged into the clock face, in truth a display of so-called liquid crystals, that is matter in a state which has properties between those of conventional liquids and solid crystals.

What was more, the alarm clock was so accurate that it would neither gain nor lose a single second in an estimated one hundred and thirty eight million years, for it was controlled via a radio signal received from an atomic clock which measured time using the microwave signals that the electrons in a caesium atom emitted while changing energy levels at near absolute zero temperatures.

Bertha hit the button labelled “Off” on the alarm clock and got out of bed. Beside her, Alfred groaned in his sleep. Being a man and Bertha’s husband, Alfred was entitled to an extra fifteen minutes of sleep, measured to an accuracy of plus minus one second in an estimated one hundred and thirty eight million years by the alarm clock on his own nightstand.

Bertha walked over to the window and pressed the switch that closed an electrical circuit, which in turn activated a small motor, which pulled up to electrically operated window blinds. Outside, the sun was shining and the neighbour drove past in a small red hybrid vehicle, which was powered alternately by an internal gasoline combustion engine and an electric motor supplied via an array of high energy efficiency lithium-ion batteries under the hood. The vehicle emitted a whizzing sound, which told Bertha that the neighbour was currently using the electric motor.

Bertha smiled. Wasn’t it wonderful to live in the twenty-first century?

She went into the bathroom, which was illuminated via electrified glass tubes containing rarified neon. She brushed her teeth with a vibrating battery powered toothbrush and showered with water that was kept at a steady temperature of twenty-five degrees Celsius via an inbuilt thermostat. Finally, she dressed herself in clothing made of synthetic polymer fibres and walked over to the kitchen.

The kitchen was also illuminated via electrified glass tubes containing rarified neon, though Bertha did not switch them on, for it was summer in the Northern hemisphere, which meant that the sun rose early in the morning due to the axial tilt of the planet. However, Bertha switched on the radio, which received a broadcast of the morning news via its aerial, which intercepted radio waves of a particular frequency and transformed them into electric power, which was then amplified into sound.

Next, Bertha began to prepare breakfast, for Alfred would be hungry when he woke up. Besides, such was the duty of a wife.

First, she made the coffee. She opened a cupboard and took out a package of plastic-coated aluminium foil that contained the roasted and ground seeds of the Coffea arabica plant, which was cultivated in large plantations in Southern and Central America, the Caribbean and Africa. With a perfectly calibrated, spoon-shaped measuring instrument, she filled exactly the right amount of ground coffee into a plastic funnel that was covered by a layer of fine pored paper for filtration purposes. She inserted the plastic funnel into the electric coffeemaker and poured an accurately measured volume of tap water into a compartment at the top of the machine.

Some experts warned against using unfiltered tap water, because the high calcium content might damage the delicate innards of the electric coffeemaker. However, Bertha regularly rinsed the machine with a decalcifying agent, which dealt with the problem before it could arise.

Finally, Bertha pressed a switch and activated the machine. The switch glowed red, while a heating coil in the water reservoir heated the water and let it drip at a controlled rate through the ground Coffea arabica seeds in the plastic funnel, until it emerged as a hot bitter-flavoured dark brown liquid into a vessel of heat-resistant borosilicate glass.

Satisfied, Bertha turned to preparing the eggs, while the coffee was being automatically boiled by the machine. She opened the refrigeration unit, which was kept at a steady temperature of plus four degrees Celsius by an inbuilt thermostat. As soon as she opened the door, a switch was triggered which closed an electrical circuit and caused a small lamp inside the refrigeration unit to come on to illuminate the interior. It was truly a small miracle and Bertha recalled with a smile how her late father, who had been an electrical engineer, had explained to her how the lights inside the refrigerator worked, when she had been but six years old.

Bertha withdrew a box made of moulded papier-mâché, a composite material consisting of paper pulp and an adhesive, from the refrigeration unit. She opened the box. Inside, there sat ten perfectly ovoid shapes. These were the eggs of Gallus gallus domesticus and not just the eggs of any old Gallus gallus domesticus either, but the eggs of Gallus gallus domesticus that were not kept in pens, but allowed to roam freely, while fed only the kernels of Zea mayz plants that were raised without the aid of chemical fertilisation agents, herbicides or insecticides. True, these eggs, known as corn-fed organic eggs, were pricier than the regular kind, but Bertha believed in always purchasing the highest quality of foodstuffs.

She removed two of the ovoid shapes from the papier-mâché box and returned the rest into the refrigeration unit. Next, she opened a cupboard and took out a device consisting of a round base of brushed chromium steel with a diameter of approximately twenty centimetres topped by a dome-shaped lid of translucent plastic. This device was an electrical egg cooker.

Bertha set it down on the kitchen counter, which was coated with several layers of sturdy Kraft paper impregnated with melamine thermosetting resin and finally cured with heat to create a hard and durable surface. She inserted the power cord into an electrical socket, which supplied their house with power generated via a mix of massive wind turbines, photovoltaic panels as well as nuclear fission, though that was on its way out due to the risk of a meltdown and the severe health and environmental hazards it posed.

Bertha removed the dome-shaped lid and pricked the bottom of the eggs with the tiny but sharp steel needle embedded into the centre of the chromium steel base of the electrical egg cooker. Then she inserted the eggs into the plastic cradles inside the chromium steel base.

Next, Bertha took the measuring cup of translucent plastic, which was included with her electrical egg cooker, and filled it with water from a gleaming chromium tap. She poured the water from the measuring cup into the egg cooker, replaced the dome-shaped lid and finally set the boiling time at the plastic dial on the base of the egg cooker. She was careful to set the boiling time to exactly four and a half minute, for this was how Alfred liked his eggs, not too hard and not too soft, but boiled for exactly four and a half minutes.

Now the machine took over. A heating coil installed inside the chromium steel base brought the water to a boil, until it gradually evaporated. The resulting steam was trapped by the dome-shaped plastic lid and condensated on its inner surface. And so the heat generated by the boiling water and the steam cooked the eggs to just the right texture and firmness, until finally — once all the water had evaporated — the device emitted a shrill whistle and switched itself off.

While the coffee was brewing and the eggs were boiling, Bertha busied herself with setting the table, which was also coated with several layers of sturdy Kraft paper impregnated with melamine thermosetting resin and finally cured with heat to create a hard and durable surface. First, she covered the table with a piece of cloth woven from the natural fibres of the Linum usitatissimum plant and then dyed a cheery red and white with synthetic azo dyes.

Bertha opened the cupboard and removed two ceramic plates, two large ceramic cups for the coffee and two smaller ovoid shaped cups for the eggs and set them on the table. Next she removed four clear glasses, two for each of them, and set them onto the table as well. Then she opened a drawer and removed two small spoons made from melamine plastic and two knives as well as two small spoons made from inoxidable acid-resistant steel containing eighteen percent chromium and ten percent nickel. The plastic spoons were intended for the eggs, the inoxidable steel spoons for the coffee.

From another cupboard, Bertha took a paper bag containing several small round lumps of baked dough made from finely ground Titicum aestivum seeds. She opened the refrigeration unit and removed two containers made of pressed paper coated with a protective plastic layer. One of these cartons contained the secretions of the mammary glands of Bos taurus taurus, which were rich in calcium, iron and other vital minerals. The other carton contained juice made from the concentrated pulp of the Citrus sinensis fruit, which was rich in Vitamin C.

Finally, she removed a small platter of inoxidable steel with a translucent plastic lid from the refrigeration unit. This platter contained an oblong lump of the fatty acids contained in the mammary secretions of Bos taurus taurus and separated from the liquid components of the milk by churning. Because of its unattractive natural colour, this lump of fatty acids had been dyed a cheerful yellow colour with an organic pigment named beta-Carotene.

The coffee was still brewing, the eggs were still boiling and the sound of water rushing through the copper pipes in the walls of their home told Bertha that Alfred had gotten up and was immersed in his own morning grooming routine, to which she — being a only woman — was not privy.

So Bertha went over to the front door instead. She turned the key, a motion which shifted a cunning arrangement of cylinders and bars, which in turn unlocked the door. Bertha waddled out of the door, nodded to her neighbour, who was just getting into her vehicle, which was powered by an internal gasoline combustion engine. From a tube of dark green plastic she withdrew a bundle of sheets listing the day’s news, printed onto cheap woodpulp paper by a rotation printing press.

She took the rolled up newspaper inside, unrolled and smoothed it and laid it onto the kitchen table. Alfred was always rather peculiar about his morning paper.

When she returned to the kitchen, the automatic coffeemaker had finished its work and the vessel of heat-resistant borosilicate glass was filled with freshly brewed coffee. What was more, the egg cooker was whistling, announcing that the eggs were ready. So Bertha lifted the dome-shaped lid and blinked as the steam rising from the device clouded her vision. She removed the plastic cradle with the boiled eggs and briefly held them under cold water from the chromium tap. Then she placed the eggs into their respective cups.

By now, Alfred had finished his own morning routine and entered the kitchen.

“Good morning, dear,” Bertha exclaimed, “I trust you have slept well.”

“Morning,” Alfred grunted. He was always rather monosyllabic first thing in the morning. Men simply were that way.

Bertha poured the coffee, Alfred picked up the melamine spoon and repeatedly hit the top of his egg, until the thin shell of calcium carbonate crystals stabilised by a protein matrix cracked. Alfred brushed the remnants of the cracked shell away, inserted his spoon into the exposed interior and abruptly stopped.

“Bertha…”

“Yes, dear?”

“The egg is too hard.”

Bertha said nothing, for she was far too busy smearing a thin layer of the fatty acids in the mammary secretions of Bos taurus taurus, separated from the liquid components of the milk by churning, onto a halved lump of baked dough made from finely ground Titicum aestivum seeds.

“Bertha, the egg is too hard,” Alfred repeated.

“I heard you the first time,” Bertha said. She lifted a cup to her mouth and enjoyed bitter flavour of the ground and brewed seeds of Coffea arabica as well as the way the caffeine contained in the brew stimulated her central nervous system.

“How long did you boil the egg?” Alfred wanted to know.

“As you know, Alfred, eating too many eggs is not healthy,” Bertha replied, “After all, a single egg contains up to one hundred eighty six milligrams of cholesterol, which promotes the development of atheroma in arteries and is therefore one of the main causes of cardiovascular disease.”

“Actually, Bertha, science has long since debunked the myth that eggs are unhealthy,” Alfred countered, “Indeed, the effect of egg consumption on blood cholesterol is minimal compared to the effect of trans-unsaturated fatty acids.”

He looked down on the boiled egg that was gradually cooling down on the table in front of him. “Besides, I wanted to know how long you boiled this particular egg.”

“Well, as you know, Alfred, you always want your eggs boiled for exactly four and a half minutes…”

“I know that,” Alfred snapped.

“Well then, why do you ask?”

“Because it is physically impossible that this egg…” Alfred banged his spoon against the egg in frustration, further shattering the thin shell of calcium carbonate crystals. “…was boiled for four and a half minutes.”

“But every morning, I take care to precisely set the timer built into the electrical egg cooker and precisely measure out the required volume of water and boil your egg for precisely four and a half minutes, just as you like it.”

“If your measurements were truly that precise…” Alfred said, “…then why is the egg too hard on some mornings and too soft on others?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Bertha snapped, “After all, I am not a female member of the Gallus gallus domesticus species.”

“As you know, Bertha, Gallus gallus domesticus is a sub-species of Gallus gallus, more commonly known as red junglefowl, which in turn is a sub-species of the Phasianidae family. It was domesticated at least five thousand years ago in Asia and is one of the most common domestic animals with a worldwide population of approximately twenty-five billion…”

“I know what a chicken is,” Bertha said, “Don’t bloody lecture me.”

“Considering your continued inability to boil an egg of said species for the exactly correct time and to the exactly right consistency, I just thought you needed a small refresher course.”

“Well, I don’t,” Bertha snapped.

“Then how do you know when the egg is done?” Alfred asked.

“That’s simple. After exactly four and a half minutes, the buzzer goes off and I remove the eggs from the egg cooker.”

“But we have just established that the egg cannot have been boiled for four and a half minutes, because it is too hard,” Alfred pointed out, “What is more, I couldn’t help but notice that the electrical egg cooker only has setting for three and five minutes, not for four and a half minutes. So how do you determine the precisely correct cooking time?”

Bertha shrugged. “I just know. It’s intuitive.”

Alfred looked genuinely shocked. “But Bertha, you should know that intuition is hardly a scientifically accurate method of determining the proper cooking time for an egg.”

“After twenty years of marriage, I guess I have acquired sufficient knowledge and insight to intuitively know how to set the timer on the bloody egg cooker.”

“Nonetheless, evidence suggests that your intuition is wrong,” Alfred said with an infuriatingly smug smile, “Which is not surprising, considering that what is commonly referred to as intuition is a right-brain activity and therefore associated with emotions and irrationality…”

“And of course, women are so emotional and irrational, that’s what you meant to say, isn’t it?”

“There is some statistic evidence that female members of the Homo sapiens sapiens species are more governed by irrational phenomena such as emotions and intuition, whereas male members of the same species are more analytical…”

Bertha seriously contemplated pouring her one third empty cup of cooling Coffea arabica brew over her husband’s head.

“…which is evidenced by the fact that you use intuition to determine the time required to boil an egg to the desired consistence. And as a result, the consistence of the egg is only correct by sheer accident.”

“What does it matter if the egg is boiled for four and a half minutes by sheer accident, as long as it is boiled for four and a half minutes?” Bertha wanted to know.

“Because I’d like an egg with the exact right consistence and not just with an accidentally right consistence,” Alfred said, “I don’t care for how long you boil it, as long as the consistence of the yolk is right.”

“Oh, so after twenty years of lecturing me about boiling your bloody eggs for exactly four and a half minutes, now you suddenly no longer care about the cooking time?”

“That’s not what I meant. I…”

“Oh, so you suddenly no longer care about all the hard work I do to keep the household running, while you go off to chase the elusive Higgs Boson particle at the Large Hadron Collider…”

“As you know, Bertha, the Large Hardon Collider is the world’s most powerful particle collider and also coincidentally the largest single machine in the entire world….”

“Yes, I know,” Bertha snapped, “Because you won’t bloody shut up about it. You never shut up, you’re always lecturing me, while completely dismissing my contributions to this marriage.”

Alfred sighed theatrically. “All I wanted was a soft egg.”

“Well, I’ll tell you where you can stuff your egg. You can stuff it into your anus and I’m not talking about the seventh planet of our solar system.”

“As you know, Bertha, inserting an egg into the anus of the human being may — though not physically impossible — cause serious injury to the muscles of the anal sphincter…”

Bertha emitted a scream of primal frustration.

“Bertha, dear, you are being irrational again.”

Bertha emitted another scream with a pitch and frequency that were even higher than those of the previous scream. She picked up her own egg and hurled it full force at Alfred.

Alas, Alfred ducked at the last possible split second and the egg hit the kitchen counter instead. The calcium carbonate shell shattered and both egg white and egg yolk ran all over the coating of several layers of sturdy Kraft paper impregnated with melamine thermosetting resin and finally cured with heat to create a hard and durable surface, that thankfully also happened to be easy to clean.

“Now that egg seems to have the exact right consistence,” Alfred declared.

But Bertha was no longer listening. Instead, she stormed from the kitchen, slamming the door, which consisted of several thin layers of wood veneer glued together while rotating the direction of the woodgrain by up to ninety degrees to one another.

“Men…” she declared, “…can be such primitive examples of Homo neanderthalensis.”

Alfred looked down at his too hard egg and contemplated poisoning Bertha with diethyl parathion, a powerful insecticide and acaricide best known under the trade names Folidol and E605, which disrupted the nervous system by inhibiting acetylcholinesterase.

But if he did poison Bertha, then who would boil his breakfast egg?

The End

***

That’s it for this month’s edition of First Monday Free Fiction. Check back next month, when a new story will be posted.

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Retro Review: “Exile” by Edmond Hamilton

[image error]Now that we’re waiting for the finalists for the 1945 Retro Hugos to be announced, let’s take the time to look at some of the finalists for previous years of Retro Hugos. I’ll start off with “Exile”, a science fantasy short story by Edmond Hamilton that was published in the May 1943 issue of Super Science Stories and was a finalist for the 1944 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.

“Exile” begins with four science fiction writers – Madison, Brazell, Carrick and the narrator – sitting around the fireplace, sipping whiskey and talking about hunting, baseball and science fiction. The narrator remarks that all four of them are trying very hard to seem like ordinary, solid citizens, even though they don’t feel at home in this world and never will. They all want something different, something more, that’s why they became science fiction writers in the first place.

Brazell points out that the fact that they get paid for it is a large part of the reason why they all write. The narrator agrees that yes, the money is important, but that they nonetheless all dreamt up stories and new worlds long before they were paid for it, even long before they started to write down their stories, because none of them fit in the real world.

“We’d feel a lot less at home in some of the worlds we write about,” Madison says, whereupon Carrick pipes in, “That happened to me. I once wrote about an imaginary world and then I had to live in it.”

Of course, everybody is eager for the story, so Carrick delivers it. It happened, he says, after he moved out to the edge of the city right next to a new power station, because it was quiet there and he needed the quiet to write. Carrick was about to start writing a new series of stories all set in the same world, so he began to create the world and its inhabitants. He made the inhabitants human, but he also made them and their world less civilized and more superstitious and barbarian than the real world, because that would provide conflict and fiction needs conflict.

Carrick is so engrossed in his worldbuilding that he suddenly experiences a click in his brain, as if the world he created and its people had crystallized into existence in another reality, likely due to the energy generated by the power station next door. Then Carrick wonders what would happen if he imagined himself living in that world and creates a character and history for himself.

There is another click and Carrick suddenly finds himself in his imaginary world, as if he’d been born there and always lived there. Carrick is excited at first, as he goes out and walks the streets of the world he created and looks at the people he dreamt up. But eventually, he becomes unhappy, because the world he created is just too barbarian for him and all the things that had seemed exciting from a distance are repulsive and unpleasant close-up.

So Carrick tries to imagine himself back into his own world, only to find that it doesn’t work. He’s stuck. He considers killing himself, but eventually he adapts. Brazell asks Carrick what he did in the other world. Carrick explains that he didn’t have the skills or the knowledge to do most of the jobs in the other world, so he did the only thing he could do. He wrote stories. He wrote stories about his own world, which seemed like science fiction to the inhabitants of the other world and made him popular.

Madison wants to know how Carrick got back in the end. “I never got home,” Carrick says sadly, “I’m still here.”

[image error]“Exile” is very short, only two and a half pages long in magazine format, but it sure packs a punch. It is an example of the “twist in the tale” stories that were so popular during the golden age, stories which exist only to deliver the final punchline. “Exile” wasn’t even the only “twist in the tale” story on the 1944 Retro Hugo ballot – “Death Sentence” by Isaac Asimov and “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” by Robert Bloch, both finalists in the same category, are “twist in the tale” stories as well.

“Exile” is however an excellent example of a “twist in the tale” story. It is a lot more effective than “Death Sentence” and on par with “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”, which is remarkable, because unlike the Robert Bloch story, “Exile” doesn’t have much of a plot. It’s merely a story about four people sitting around the fireplace, drinking whiskey and telling stories. “The Man Who Wouldn’t Hang” by Stanton A. Coblentz is probably the closest comparison. But “Exile” is much better. In fact, it is remarkable how well this little story works.

I suspect part of the reason why “Exile” works so well is that it perfectly captures the sense of alienation that many writers and fans of speculative fiction feel. Like the unnamed narrator of Hamilton’s story, a lot of us don’t feel at home in the real world, so we dream up imaginary worlds. And while getting paid to write about adventures in imaginary worlds is a nice side-effect, many of us dreamt up stories and worlds long before we were ever paid to do it and would continue to do so, even if we didn’t get paid for it.

But even if we don’t really fit into the real world, would we truly want to live in the worlds we create or could we even survive there? I guess, as with poor lost Carrick, the answer is no.

Even though there is a pseudoscientific explanation for Carrick’s predicament, “Exile” is more portal fantasy than science fiction. It’s not even the only portal fantasy on the 1944 Retro Hugo ballot – “Doorway into Time” by C.L. Moore, which was nominated in the same category, is also a portal fantasy. Furthermore, travel to parallel worlds/other planets by the power of imagination has been a common trope in speculative fiction ever since John Carter wished himself upon Mars in A Princess of Mars back in 1911. Edmond Hamilton himself would also revisit the idea of imaginary space/time travel via pseudoscientific means in his 1947 novel The Star Kings.

[image error]Considering that “Exile” is essentially a story about four science fiction writers sitting around and talking, the question is which real science fiction writers of the golden age, if any, do the four characters represent. When I read the story last year for the Retro Hugos, I assumed that Madison was a stand-in for Edmond Hamilton and that Brazell was a stand-in for his future wife Leigh Brackett due to the vaguely similar names. And indeed, I named the Hamilton and Brackett stand-ins in my Silencer novelette The Heavy Hand of the Editor, in which my fictional 1930s pulp author Richard Blakemore locks horns with John W. Campbell (or rather a Campbell stand-in called Donald Angus Stuart) and interacts with several real authors of the golden age, Ed Madison and Liz Brazell in homage to this story. However, Leo Morey’s interior art for “Exile” shows only white men in suits (and reminds me visually of the Dover reprints of selected pages from old Sears catalogues more than anything), no women anywhere in sight. So is Brazell a stand-in for Ray Bradbury, who was after all friends with Hamilton and Brackett? Or am I completely mistaken and it’s someone else?

What’s even more interesting is who Carrick is supposed to be? Cause I would really like to know which science fiction writer of the golden age dreamt our world into existence. For that matter, I’d also like to know which author of apocalyptic fiction is responsible for our current reality. However, I really cannot come up with any SFF writer of the golden age who’d fit what little we learn about Carrick. Though Carrick does put in a cameo in The Heavy Hand of the Editor, if only because paying homage to obscure golden age science fiction stories is fun.

But even though “Exile” appeared in Super Science Stories, which was one of the lesser science fiction magazines of the early 1940s, it’s not exactly an obscure story. At any rate, it’s less obscure than some of the other stories I have reviewed for the Retro Reviews project. “Exile” has been reprinted several times and was selected for the Best of Edmond Hamilton collection that Leigh Brackett edited as well as for the anthology The Great SF Stories, Vol. 5, 1943, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. And of course, “Exile” was well enough regarded that it won a nomination for the 1944 Retro Hugo Awards, even if it lost out to Ray Bradbury’s excellent “R is for Rocket” a.k.a. “King of the Gray Spaces” in the end.

A fine story about alienation and the power of imagination and also a great example of the “twist in the tale” stories that were so popular during the golden age.

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