Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 60

Retro Review: “Iron Mask” by Robert Bloch

[image error]

Margaret Brundage’s cover is a surprisingly accurate depiction of a scene in the story.

“Iron Mask” is a novelette by Robert Bloch, which was first published in the May 1944 issue of Weird Tales and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

“Iron Mask” starts out at the headquarters of the local Resistance movement in the French town of Dubonne. American Eric Drake, an AP correspondent who got stuck in France after the beginning of WWII, confronts Pierre Charmand, the former mayor of Dubonne and now head of the Resistance. Eric is furious because Charmand has sent his girlfriend, Charmand’s daughter Roselle, to the ruined Chateau D’Ivers to retrieve some important papers Charmand has hidden there. For not only is the Chateau supposedly haunted, the local top Nazi Gauleiter Hassman is also heading there with a squad of soldiers, presumably to look for the same papers as Roselle.

Charmand is a lot more sanguine than Eric. He assures Eric that the Chateau is definitely not haunted (famous last words that). As for why he sent Roselle rather than one of the male members of the Resistance, a woman is less likely to arouse suspicion. But when dusk falls and Roselle still hasn’t returned, a determined Eric goes after her, Nazi patrols be damned.

Braving patrols and bats, Eric makes his way to the Chateau. Once inside, he hears Roselle scream. He follows the scream and finds Roselle unconscious on the floor, a sinister cloaked figure bending over her, clutching the papers. As Eric approaches, the figure vanishes.

Once Roselle comes to again, she insists that she was attacked by a thing wearing an iron mask. And this thing was not a ghost, but real. Eric agrees that the attacker was real enough, because ghosts don’t steal important papers and they don’t leave footprints.

Eric tells Roselle to return to her father. Meanwhile, he will go after the attacker and get the papers back. Roselle, on the other hand, doesn’t want Eric to go alone. For Roselle shot her attacker in the head, which didn’t even slow him down. “He’s a monster,” she insists. Eric, on the other hand, points out that Roselle’s bullet must have hit the iron mask, which is why the attacker was not injured or killed.

So Eric follows the footprints of the attacker deeper into the ruined castle. When they lead to seemingly dead end, Eric finds a secret passage through which the attacker escaped outside. He chases the attacker down a hill, only for both of them to run into a squad of Nazi soldiers coming up the hill. Soon, Eric finds himself fighting side by side with the masked stranger against the Nazis. Eric uses his gun, while the masked stranger hurls rocks at the Nazis with superhuman strength.

Once the fight is over, Eric demands that the masked stranger – whose mask is not made from iron but velvet – hand over the papers. Turns out that the stranger is working for the Resistance as well and also planned to procure the papers, before they could fall into the hands of the Nazis. As for why he wears a mask, the stranger tell Eric that he was a French soldier whose face and hands were burned by flamethrowers. The doctors attempted to save his life, but left him disfigured. So the stranger donned a mask and started his solo crusade against the Nazis.

Eric wants to take the stranger to the Resistance meeting (he is rather trusting – after all, the stranger could be anyone, even a Nazi in disguise), but the stranger doesn’t want to come. Eric assures him that his damaged face doesn’t matter. “You don’t understand,” the stranger says, “I have no face.” Then he takes off his velvet mask to reveal an iron mask where his face should be. So Roselle had been right after all.

Eric nonetheless takes the stranger and the papers to Charmand, who also accepts him a lot more readily than I would in his position. Only Roselle remains sceptical. Charmand also tells the stranger that there is an important Resistance meeting taking place at midnight (when else?), where the Resistance will plan their campaign against Gauleiter Hassman’s attempt to conscript French men as forced labourers. However, Charmand is still missing an important report, because two of his men have not returned yet. The masked stranger offers to procure the report, though he won’t say how he plans to do that with only an hour left until midnight. “I have developed a certain – technique – in such matters,” he declares.

Indeed, the stranger returns with the report just in time for the Resistance meeting. But almost as soon as he has handed it over, the Nazis storm the Resistance headquarters, led by Gauleiter Hassman himself. By this point, this reader at least became even more suspicious, because the Nazis’ timing is mightily convenient.

In the ensuing battle, Charmand is killed. Eric escapes with Roselle, the papers and the masked stranger who is seemingly impervious to bullets. Not knowing where else to go, they retreat to the Chateau, where Eric demands to know just how the stranger could survive being hit by at least fifty bullets. Now, the stranger finally admits that he is no flamethrower burned French soldier. Instead, he is the legendary Man in the Iron Mask. Oh yes, and he is immortal, too.

Iron Mask tells his story. He is the grandson of Nostradamus and was supposed to continue the family trade of alchemy and prophecy in Paris, advising the aristocracy. Over time, the future Man in the Iron Mask became extremely influential, until he was the de facto ruler of France. Alas, King Louis XIV suspected him of having an affair with his secret wife Madame de Maintenon and therefore ordered him arrested, imprisoned and locked into an iron mask for the rest of his days. However, neither the King nor the Man in the Iron Mask realised how long this life sentence would last. For just before he embarked for Paris, Iron Mask had been given a potion by his alchemist father that grants eternal life.

After thirty-four years of imprisonment, the Man in the Iron Mask finally managed to escape by passing off the body of a recently deceased prisoner in the Bastille for his own. The entries in the prison records of the Bastille containing his true identity vanished at around the same time. But even though Iron Mask was immortal, his face still aged, so he continued to hide it beneath his mask. Ever since then, he has reappeared to aid France in her hour of need. And so he joined the Resistance.

Alas, the Resistance in Dubonne has been all but wiped out – only Eric, Roselle and the Man in the Iron Mask are left. Their headquarters has been discovered as well. Luckily, Iron Mask knows of an alternative: The sewers under the old townhall, now the Gauleiter’s headquarters and the last place where the Nazis would think to look.

So the three of them retreat to the sewers, where Eric informs the others that he has an important meeting with a representative of the Paris Resistance. He plans to hand over the papers they rescued to this representative and receive his instructions what to do, when the Allies land in France (it’s notable that the Normandy landings did not take place until June 1944, i.e. a month after this story was published). However, the Nazis are on the warpath and have patrols everywhere, so Eric has little chance of reaching the representative. Luckily, he has a plan.

He sends out Roselle to check if the Resistance representative is at the meeting point. Meanwhile, Iron Mask will keep the Nazi patrols busy and draw them away. Since he is immortal, their bullets can’t hurt him. Once Roselle gives the all clear, Eric will head to the meeting. However, as soon as Roselle and Iron Mask have left, Eric opens the cask with the papers, finds one that is of interest and sneaks into the Nazi headquarters instead.

Roselle and Iron Mask return just in time to see Eric returning from his spying expedition, the Nazis hot on his heels. The three escape through the sewers, the Nazis in pursuit. During the ensuing fight, a pipe bursts and drowns the Nazis. Once again, only Eric, Roselle and Iron Mask escape.

Iron Mask demands that Eric turn over the papers to him and he’s not asking nicely. Eric, however, wants to give them to the Resistance representative. He draws his gun and when that doesn’t stop the Man in the Iron Mask – well, he is immortal, after all – Eric fires.

The bullet does not hurt Iron Mask, but it tears a hole into his cloak, revealing metal underneath. The stranger isn’t just wearing an iron mask, his entire body is made from iron. He’s a robot and a rampaging one, too.

Eric and the robot fight. Eric finally gets lucky and hits the robot with the butt of his gun, splitting its iron skull. And that’s the end of Iron Mask.

Eric now reveals that he had his suspicions about Iron Mask from the beginning. If he had really been a burned soldier, there was no way bullets wouldn’t have hurt him, iron mask or not. And while Iron Mask was clearly immortal, he was no saviour and protector of France, but instead her mortal enemy.

Iron Mask was created in the thirteenth century by Roger Bacon, when Bacon was imprisoned in the Bastille. Indeed, Iron Mask was the fortune-telling Brazen Head that legend attributes to Bacon. And because Bacon was furious at the French for imprisoning him, he programmed his immortal robot to take revenge and destroy France, which the robot proceeded to do in the centuries that followed.

Iron Mask was an adviser to kings, true, but he inevitably gave bad advice. He whispered the policies that would eventually lead to the French revolution into the ears of the respective monarchs, he set Napoleon Bonaparte on his way to become a tyrant, he advised Bismarck in the Franco-Prussian War (maybe that is the reason Otto von Bismarck was known as the Iron Chancellor) and he made a deal with Hitler, allowing the Nazis to conquer France. In fact, Gauleiter Hassman was taking orders from the robot, while Iron Mask set about to destroy the Resistance. As for why he was so keen to get his hands on those papers, among the papers were the vanished prison records of the Bastille which would have revealed Iron Mask’s secret, so the robot had to procure and destroy them. Conveniently, those papers also revealed that Bacon had built a weakness into the robot, a weakness Eric exploited to destroy Iron Mask.

[image error]I’m not sure what I had expected when I decided to read and review “Iron Mask”, but it certainly wasn’t a gonzo WWII spy adventure cum Tim Powers-esque secret history starring a malevolent medieval robot with a pathological hatred of French people. Because honestly, there is no way you could expect a story like that. As a matter of fact, “Iron Mask” is an excellent example of how very strange the pulps could be at times. With a few tweaks, this story could be one of the more offbeat adventures of Captain America, Peggy Carter and/or the Howling Commandos.

“Iron Mask” is an action-packed tale and follows the pulp school of plotting with frequent twists, turns and reveals. In fact, I am pretty sure that the major reveals map onto Lester Dent’s pulp fiction master plot, even though “Iron Mask” is a long novelette rather than a six thousand word short story. But unlike with e.g. A.E. Van Vogt, whose random plot twists often don’t make sense, the plot twists and reveals in “Iron Mask” all fit naturally into the story.

“Iron Mask” is very well written. The action scenes – and there are many of them – are  thrilling and visceral. The descriptive moments, whether it’s Eric disturbing some bats in the ruined chateau or a fire fight with Nazi soldiers in the cellar of a disused brewery, are suitably atmospheric. Bloch was only twenty-seven, when “Iron Mask” was published, but then he was something of a prodigy and had been writing professionally for more than ten years at this point. Bloch’s first story “Lilies” appeared in Marvel Tales in 1934.

Nowadays, Robert Bloch is mostly remembered for Psycho and his contributions to the original Star Trek, but his range was much greater. He wrote Cthulhu mythos stories, while still in his teens, he was responsible for the mid-century Jack the Ripper renaissance (via the 1944 Retro Hugo finalist “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”) and also for our modern obsession with serial killers in general. And at least based on “Iron Mask”, I’d also say that Robert Bloch originated the secret history subgenre, eight years before Tim Powers, the SFF author most associated with secret history fiction, was even born.

Because “Iron Mask” is certainly a secret history. Bloch uses historical facts – the legend of the mysterious man in the iron mask, the fact that records regarding the man’s identity went missing from the Bastille (they were eventually recovered in 2015 and didn’t reveal the identity of the man in the iron mask, though they did reveal that his jailer was a greedy jerk), Roger Bacon’s stay in Paris (though he was never incarcerated in the Bastille, because it was built almost a century after Bacon was in Paris), the rumours that Bacon had a metal head which could foretell the future, the various points in French history where things went disastrously wrong – to create a wholly fictional narrative of a villainous robot manipulating French history through the centuries. The secret history subgenre sits on the borderline between SFF and thriller and “Iron Mask” is no exception. There even if a classic MacGuffin in the form of the secret papers that the Nazis, the Resistance and Iron Mask are after. The story certainly is thrilling stuff, even though I find it a little hard to swallow that kings, generals and political leaders all took the (highly questionable) advice of a masked man with a metal head. I mean, I could almost see Hitler making a deal with a malevolent robot, but Bismarck? Sorry, but the old Iron Chancellor strikes me as way too practical for that.

While we’re on the subject of history, I have some minor nitpicks regarding the accuracy of the story. And yes, I know it’s strange to say that about a story starring an immortal francophobic robot collaborating with the Nazis. That said, Gauleiters were a kind of provincial governor during the Nazi era in Germany, Austria, occupied Czechia and occupied Poland, i.e. what the Nazis considered their Reich. However, there were no Gauleiters in occupied France with the exception of Alsace, which was (and still is in part) largely German speaking, was part of Germany from 1871 to 1918 and was still considered part of Germany by the Nazis. From 1940 on, it was part of the Gau Baden-Alsace, ruled over by a particularly nasty piece of work named Robert Wagner. However, Dubonne is clearly not in Alsace, because the naming pattern is wrong for the region (speaking as someone with Alsatian ancestry) and therefore wouldn’t have had a Gauleiter. Furthermore, Gauleiter resided in major cities, not provincial small towns. So Bloch used the wrong title for his Nazi official, but then internal Nazi hierarchy is rather opaque. Also, the various Nazi patrols wouldn’t have been Gestapo men, but regular Wehrmacht soldiers. Not that any of this matters much, because Gauleiter Hassman’s role is mainly “generic evil Nazi” in this story. And I have to applaud Robert Bloch for giving his evil Nazi official the name Hassman, which literally means “hate man” in German. But then, Bloch was the son of German Jewish immigrants, so it’s likely that he spoke at least a little German.

[image error]Compared to the positively lurid villain (Iron Mask, not the mistitled Gauleiter Hassman), protagonist Eric Drake remains a tad bland. He’s your typical two-fisted pulp hero, quick with his gun, his wits and his fists, dedicated and heroic, but with few characteristics that set him apart from a dozen other pulp heroes. Before the war, Eric was a foreign correspondent for Associated Press, making him the third reporter hero I came across in the course of the Retro Reviews project. But then, journalist and reporter was a popular occupation for heroic characters in the first half of the twentieth century. Note how many superheroes work as journalists in their civilian identity and how many superheroes have journalists as their significant other. The heroic journalist, once such a common figure in popular culture, has sadly almost died out and journalist protagonists are thin on the ground in the twenty-first century, reflecting increased distrust of and disenchantment with the news media.

Roselle Charmand, female Resistance fighter, theoretically sounds like an awesome character, but in practice she remains bland as well and is given little to do aside from screaming and running. Though I did like the fact that Bloch casually mentions that many of the Resistance members are female, including seemingly harmless and pious looking housewives.

In spite of the stunningly gothic (and accurate for once) cover art, courtesy of Margaret Brundage (who is eligible for the Retro Hugo for Best Professional Artist again this year and who I really hope will win one day), “Iron Mask” is another contemporary tale, albeit one with gothic trappings. In fact, all of the Weird Tales stories I have reviewed for this project so far were contemporary tales. “Iron Mask” is also one of only two stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project that directly mentions World War II (the other is “Undersea Guardians” by Ray Bradbury), though several other stories address the war indirectly.

“Iron Mask” is also one of several robot stories I have reviewed for this project. Robots were certainly having a pop cultural moment in the 1940s, just as they are having a pop cultural moment now. And as Isaac Asimov said in the introduction to The Complete Robot, robots came in three flavours during the golden age, robot as menace “Iron Mask”, “The Jewel of Bas” by Leigh Brackett), robot as pathos (“No Woman Born” by C.L. Moore, even though Deirdre is theoretically a cyborg, and Jenkins from the “City” stories by Clifford D. Simak) and robot as a machine (“Catch That Rabbit” and pretty much any golden age robot story by Isaac Asimov). Bloch also reminds us that robot-like figures have been appearing in myth, legend and popular culture for centuries, even though the term “robot” only goes back to Karel Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R.

“Iron Mask” is a highly entertaining spy thriller cum secret history that will keep you on the edge of your seat. It’s also a fine example of how strange the pulps could occasionally be and how little they cared about genre boundaries.

Send to Kindle

Retro Review: “No Woman Born” by C.L. Moore

[image error]“No Woman Born” is a novelette by C.L. Moore, which was first published in the December 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

“No Woman Born” opens with a man called John Harris on the way to a vital meeting. Harris was once the manager of an actress named Deirdre, a woman of unparalleled beauty and also a global television star. But then tragedy struck and Deirdre was killed in a theatre fire. But Deirdre isn’t dead – or at least not all of her is. For Deirdre’s brain has survived the fire and was transplanted into a robot body in an experimental procedure. What can possibly go wrong?

Harris is on his way to meet Deirdre in her new robot body, which has been created by a scientist called Maltzer. Maltzer tells Harris that the procedure was a success and that Deirdre is confident, happy and eager to see him. Furthermore, Deirdre even plans to return to television. Maltzer, however, worries how Harris and the public will react, because Deirdre is no longer the woman she was.

The new Deirdre is a slender golden robot. Instead of a face, she has blank features and a crescent shaped mask of blue glass where her eyes would otherwise be. After an initial shock, Harris quickly accepts that the robot is Deirdre, because the voice sounds like Deirdre’s and the robot moves just like Deirdre used to move. Deirdre explains that her brain is controlling her movements and voice and her brain is still the same, even if her body is not. Deirdre also tells him that she is not immortal, even though her robot body theoretically is. But her brain will grow out and eventually die and then her body will just be inanimate metal.

Deirdre is keen to return to the stage and the screen, but Harris is worried. True, to him the robot is Deirdre, because he knew her so very well. And to Maltzer, the robot is Deirdre, because he never knew her before the fire. But how will the public react? Deirdre is confident that they will accept her and even begins to imagine wholly new dance techniques that her new robot body makes possible. Harris is more sceptical.

Deirdre, however, brushes off his doubts. She tells Harris that she has already arranged a performance for that very night, a surprise performance in a variety show. Deirdre wants audiences to see her as she is now without any preconceived notions about her handicaps, because she has none. Deirdre also makes it quite clear that neither Maltzer nor Harris have any say in her decision. For even though Maltzer may have built her new body, Deirdre doesn’t belong to him or Harris. Instead, she is her own person.

Maltzer, meanwhile, is vehemently opposed to Deirdre returning to the screen. She has no sex, no sense of taste, smell and touch, Maltzer declares, and those stimuli played an important role in making Deirdre who was. She is no longer human, Maltzer argues. Sooner or later what humanity Deirdre has left will drain out of her. “I wish I’d let her die,” Maltzer declares.

Deirdre’s first dancing and singing performance after the fire is a huge success and the audience won’t stop applauding once they realise who they’re watching.

Harris is relieved that everything went so well, but Maltzer is more furious than ever. He insists that the audience may have been surprised now, but once the novelty wears off, they will only laugh at Deirdre. Maltzer also declares that he has to come to know Deirdre better than she knows herself in the year he has been working on her body. Therefore, Maltzer can sense that Deirdre is worried, even if Deirdre herself cannot. He has to put a stop to Deidre’s return to TV, Maltzer insists. “I don’t think you can stop her,” Harris counters. Maltzer insists that he can and throws Harris out.

Neither Harris nor the reader are party to what happens between Deirdre and Maltzer. But when Deirdre calls Harris the next morning, she tells him that she will retire to her house in the country for two weeks to let Maltzer cool down and keep the audiences in suspense.

Once the two weeks are up, Harris meets with Maltzer and Deirdre. Maltzer has completely deteriorated in those two weeks. “I can’t stop her,” he tells Harris, “There is only one way out.”

Harris and the reader quickly learns what that way is, when Maltzer starts rambling about Frankenstein and his creature and how those who bring life into the world unlawfully must pay for it by withdrawing their own. At this point, it’s very clear that Maltzer intends to commit suicide by jumping from a window in the highrise where the meeting takes place. But before he goes he begs Deirdre to tell him that she understands him and that she knows that she is not fully human.

Deirdre counters that she knows she has handicaps, but that the audience need never know. She could play Juliet, Deirdre insists, and the audience would accept it. And she’s not Frankenstein’s monster, thank you very much, she’s human. Maltzer did not create Deirdre, he just preserved her life. To prove her point, Deirdre even lights a cigarette and smokes and suddenly seems very human indeed. And then she crosses the room with inhuman speed to rescue Harris from his fatal plunge.

Now Deirdre finally admits that Maltzer does have a point. She is not happy, for she is drifting further and further apart from humanity. But not because Deirdre is less than human, but because she’s more than human. The true reason why Deirdre wants to return to the stage is because she wants to remain in contact with humanity. Because by the time her brain dies, she will have explored so many possibilities of her robot body and will have changed so much that she probably truly will no longer be human. She could probably put a stop to this development now, but her human brain is too curious and simply has to explore all the possibilities. Finally, Deirdre is lonely. She knows that her creation was a fluke, a one in a zillion chance. There will never be another like her.

[image error]“No Woman Born” is an excellent updating of the Frankenstein story and probably the best story published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1944, though “Desertion” by Clifford D. Simak is excellent as well. Interestingly, both stories tackle the same question. What makes a person human and what happens when a human mind resides in a body that is no longer human and more than human?

The title is a reference to Deirdre, a 1923 novel by Irish writer James Stephens, based on an Irish legend about a woman who was so beautiful that men would fight, go to war, die and go into exile for her. In fact, quotes from the novel are scattered throughout the story. The legendary Deirdre was a tragic heroine, by the way, who saw her husband murdered by a king who wants her for himself and then discards her, when she does not respond as he had hoped. She eventually commits suicide. C.L. Moore’s Deirdre makes the opposite choice – she chooses to live and fully explore her more than human life. Though like the Deirdre of Irish legend, Moore’s Deirdre is treated like property by the two men in her life. Deirdre repeatedly expresses what she wants, but neither Maltzer nor Harris are listening.

There are other references to literature and legend peppered throughout the story as well. In addition to James Stephens’ version of Deirdre, there are also references to Frankenstein, Mary Stuart, whose fate was dramatized in a play by Friedrich Schiller and to the medieval tale of Abelard and Heloise, which ends with Abelard being castrated by Heloise’s uncle. Indeed, between “No Woman Born” and the Kuttner/Moore story “The Children’s Hour”, which is also full of literary references, I can’t help but notice that C.L. Moore’s stories (and this seems to have been Moore’s rather than Kuttner’s doing, based on their respective solo stories) assume quite a lot of literary knowledge from their readers.

“No Woman Born” is written in C.L. Moore’s typical richly descriptive style. As a result, a scene such as Deirdre’s television comeback, which would have taken up a few paragraphs with another writer is three pages long. And since this is an Astounding story, there is of course the requisite infodump, a load of gobbledygook about how Deirdre controls her robotic body via electromagnetism and brainwaves. But since this is a C.L. Moore story, the infodump is much better written than usual.

It’s telling that even though Deirdre is the protagonist of the story – which makes “No Woman Born” the fourth story with a female protagonist I have reviewed for the Retro Reviews project* – we only ever see her through the eyes of Harris and to a lesser degree Maltzer. Harris is the sole POV character and throughout the story he oscillates between seeing Deirdre as a human being and the woman he knew and viewing her as a machine and something non-human. Maltzer, meanwhile, makes it very clear that Deirdre is no longer human as far as he is concerned. Deirdre, on the other hand, is not entirely sure if she is still human or not and what she will become in time, but she knows – and repeatedly states – that she is still Deirdre.

The reader, finally, is left to decide for themselves if Deirdre is still human or not and if it even matters. Personally, I quickly found myself siding with Deirdre against the overbearing men Harris and Maltzer who want to make decisions for her and hoped that Deirdre would ditch them and go on to have a splendid career as the world’s first robotic TV star. And I for one wouldn’t have blamed Deirdre, if she had let that jerk Maltzer jump to his death. But Deirdre saves him, which proves that she is not only human, but probably a better person than I would be in her situation.

“No Woman Born” is also a story about disability. For Deirdre is considered disabled by the two men – indeed her lost senses are repeatedly referred to as handicaps and particularly Maltzer only views her in terms of her limitations. Worse, Maltzer fully believes that Deirdre would be better off dead than disabled. Deirdre, on the other hand, does not consider herself disabled. She’s different than she was before, true, but not lesser. She will find ways to compensate for what she lost and may indeed be better than before in some respects. In this, “No Woman Born” also reflects contemporary debates whether disabled athletes have an unfair advantage due to their artificial limbs, when competing against non-disabled athletes. Particularly in its treatment of disability, “No Woman Born” feels remarkably modern and wouldn’t feel out of place in one of Uncanny‘s “Disabled People Destroy SFF” special issues. I could also see it turned into a movie or an episode of Black Mirror with Beyoncé or Janelle Monáe as Deirdre.

In other respects, however, “No Woman Born” is clearly dated. The references to smoking are an obvious example and indeed it is fascinating how completely the SFF authors of the golden age failed to predict that smoking would fall from grace and become viewed as a highly unpleasant and unhealthy habit. Furthermore, the depiction of the entertainment industry in the story is also much closer to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century than to whatever future the story is set in.

For starters, Deirdre loses her original body in a theatre fire. Now theatre fires were to the nineteenth and early twentieth century what nightclub fires are to the second half of the twentieth century, disasters that were both extremely deadly and sadly common, until safety measures improved. The Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago on December 30, 1903, is the best known and still the deadliest building fire in US history, but there were many more deadly theatre and cinema fires throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic. The fires were often caused by stage lights setting flammable decorations and backdrops alight and the victims were often female performers in flammable costumes. Indeed, in the mid nineteenth century so many female ballet dancers died when their gauzy costume caught fire from unprotected gas lights on or behind the stage that contemporary commentators wrote about a “holocaust of ballerinas”. And even though most of those fires happened before C.L. Moore was born, they nonetheless still lingered in the public consciousness, so a theatre fire would have seemed like a likely cause of death or injury for an actress and dancer to readers in 1944.

Even though Deirdre is a television star – and it is interesting that Moore expected that television would produce more global stars than film and theatre, even though television was intensely local until the 1990s and it is only in the past ten years or so that people around the world can actually watch the same show at the same time – her performances are closer to what could be seen in Broadway theatres in the early twentieth century.

The lead-in to Deirdre’s comeback performance is a teleplay version of Mary Queen of Scots, which – given the current boom for Tudor historicals – would not feel out of place on HBO or Netflix. Though it is interesting that C.L. Moore notes that the costumes are far from historical and instead reflect contemporary fashions and that the actresses playing Mary Stuart are inevitably young, even though the historical Mary was middle-aged when she was executed. This description certainly matches the two Mary Stuart movies, which came out a few years before, the 1936 Hollywood movie Mary of Scotland starring the then 29-year-old Katharine Hepburn and the 1940 German movie Das Herz der Königin (The Heart of the Queen) starring the then 33-year-old Zarah Leander. It’s unlikely that C.L. Moore saw the latter film, though the description of the gown worn by the TV actress during the execution scene brings to mind Zarah Leander’s stunning pearl-studded gown in The Heart of a Queen, where the executioner neatly rips off the high collar to reveal a perfect ballgown neckline. Katharine Hepburn, meanwhile, goes to the scaffold in a Walter Plunkett designed gown with a collar so high it will surely mess up the executioner’s aim.

Meanwhile, Deirdre makes her robotic debut in a vaudeville show, even though vaudeville was already in deep decline by the 1940s. However, it would experience a revival of sorts in the form of variety shows on the radio and later television. The description of the dance numbers – both Deirdre’s and those of a troupe of nameless dancers – is pure Busby Berkeley, while Deirdre’s robot body is very Art Deco.

The entertainment world in which Deirdre became a star may have very little to do with what television looks like in the twenty-first century, but the mix of classical plays and variety shows, both performed in front of a live audience, is remarkably close to what early television looked like, even though television would only become widespread a few years after “No Woman Born” was written.

But even if the depictions of the entertainment world are dated, the questions raised by “No Woman Born” about what it means to be human are timeless. Next to “Shambleau” and “Black God’s Kiss”, this is probably C.L. Moore’s most famous and most reprinted story and with good reason, too. “No Woman Born” is a great story and would make a highly deserving Retro Hugo finalist.

 

*The other stories with female protagonists are “Undersea Guardians” by Ray Bradbury, “The Gothic Window” by Dorothy Quick and “Hoofs” by Manly Wade Wellman.

Send to Kindle

Retro Review: “Hoofs” by Manly Wade Wellman

[image error]“Hoofs” is a horror short story in the John Thunstone series by Manly Wade Wellman. It was first published in the March 1944 issue of Weird Tales and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

John Thunstone is an occult detective created by Manly Wade Wellman who appeared in fifteen stories in Weird Tales between 1943 and 1951 as well as one further short story and two novels in the 1980s. Six of the John Thunstone stories appeared in 1944 alone, that’s a third of the entire series excluding the novels, so the character and series were clearly popular. Steve J. Wright reviewed all six of the 1944 John Thunstone stories on his blog.

However, “Hoofs” does not begin with John Thunstone himself, but with his love interest, Sharon Countess Monteseco, a recurring character in the series. In spite of her Italian surname, the Countess is American, a woman named Sharon Hill who married an Italian Count who – so the first paragraph informs us – “was a rank bad man, and the world and the Countess were better off for his death”.

But is the Count truly dead? A plump little man named Hengist who visits the Countess in her hotel suite claims that the Count is not in fact dead, but alive in another body. Hengist also insists that the Count loves his wife, which Sharon vehemently denies. Hengist also drops a name, Rowley Thorne. It’s a name Sharon – and the reader – knows, because Thorne appeared in the very first John Thunstone story “The Third Cry to Legba” in the November 1943 issue of Weird Tales and was a recurring antagonist of Thunstone.

The Countess is not impressed, especially since Hengist not just drops Thorne’s name, but also hits on her. And so she slaps him and throws him out. Hengist, on the other hand, is quite satisfied with the meeting. He calls Thorne and informs him that he carried out his instructions and that the Countess believes.

Sharon indeed believes, if only because being the girlfriend of an occult detective means experiencing a lot of otherwise inexplicable phenomena. And so Sharon has personally witnessed Rowley Thorne raise evil spirits, a description which certainly fits her late husband.

It quickly occurs to Sharon that John Thunstone might be able to help her. But unfortunately, they had a quarrel. Therefore, Sharon blows him off with the old “I have a headache” line, when he calls her to apologise. Barely a second later, she curses herself for not confiding in John Thunstone. But Sharon has bigger problems, for Rowley Thorne comes calling.

The description of Rowley Thorne that Wellman gives us – tall, hawklike, bald, gunmetal eyes – match a familiar occultist of our own world, namely Aleister Crowley, whose nonfiction work The Book of Thoth: A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians is eligible for the 1944 Retro Hugos in the Best Related Work category, by the way. Even the names Rowley and Crowley are similar. Like Crowley, Thorne has a huge ego. “Some day,” he informs the Countess, “the world will know me by a name of own choosing, a name of mastery.” Thorne also assure Sharon that world domination is not what he’s after, because that’s a flat and outworn idea. I’m sure the world and its citizens will be very relieved.

In her first confrontation with Thorne, Sharon certainly holds her own. She tells Thorne that she’s not afraid of him, for “Fear is folly, for people like you to feed on.” She also accuses Thorne of lying about her husband. “If I lie, come and prove it,” Thorne counters and so Sharon goes with him.

Thorne takes Sharon to an apartment where Hengist is already waiting. The apartment is empty except for a table on which there is a single object, a glowing glass horse. Thorne insists that the horse contains the spirit of the late Count. Sharon is understandably sceptical, but when she touches the glass, it feels warm. The glass horse also seems to nod in response to Thorne’s questions. And when Thorne invites Sharon to ask the spirit a question that only the late Count could answer, the horse once more knows the answer.

Thorne’s plan is to transfer the Count’s spirit to Hengist and use the resurrected Count to subdue Sharon to get control of her money and also piss off John Thunstone in the bargain. Of course, Thorne assumes that Sharon will remain true to her marriage vows, even if the spirit of her husband – a husband she clearly despised – now resides in another body. It would certainly make an interesting court case to determine if a marriage is still valid, if one partner’s spirit resides in a different body.

Meanwhile, Hengist – whose name is almost identical to “Hengst”, the German word for “stallion” – isn’t too keen on becoming a vessel for a dead Italian Count. And so he proposes to Sharon to throw away the potion he is supposed to drink and just fake that the transfer was successful. For certainly, a relationship with Hengist is preferable to having the Count back and being a slave to Rowley Thorne, he slimily proposes.

While Hengist is hitting on Sharon, Thorne is preparing his ritual, when he is interrupted by none other than John Thunstone himself. Thunstone had come to visit Sharon to make up with her, when he saw Hengist leaving. Recognising Hengist, Thunstone followed him to the apartment building, let himself in and hid behind the drapes, while Thorne explained his grand plan.

Once Hengist took Sharon away, Thunstone emerges to stop Thorne’s ritual. In the resulting fight, Thorne grabs a swordcane and draws the blade – which is interesting, because a swordcane with a blade of silver inscribed with “Thus perish all your enemies” in Latin is John Thunstone’s signature weapon. Alas, Thunstone did not bring his own swordcane, though he does manage to disarm Thorne. The glass horse also shatters during the fight.

“Do you realise what this means?” Thorne exclaims.

Thunstone calmly informs Thorne that the reincarnation of the late Count has been called off, because there is nowhere else for the trapped spirit to go. Thorne points out that he had already began the ritual and pointed the spirit at Hengist. Whereupon Thunstone replies that if Hengist isn’t prepared, that’s his misfortune and also Thorne’s, because the results will be quite embarrassing.

Meanwhile, Hengist is still oozing slime all over Sharon who keeps insisting that there’s someone or rather something outside the door. Hengist tries to draw her attention back to himself, when cloud of glowing vapour passes through the door, takes the shape of a horse and attacks Hengist. It’s the spirit of the Count, looking for a new body, but finding no entrance, because Hengist hasn’t taken the potion he was supposed to take. Sharon flees and stumbles right into the arms of John Thunstone who takes her home.

Thunstone and Sharon never discuss the incident directly, but the next day at lunch, Thunstone tells Sharon that the papers are reporting that a dead body was found in an empty apartment, seemingly trampled to death by horses, although there were no horses anywhere in the vicinity.

[image error]This was my first encounter with Manly Wade Wellman’s occult detective John Thunstone. Based on this story, I certainly wouldn’t mind learning more about the character. Because “Hoofs” doesn’t give us much of a chance to get to know John Thunstone. The story is short, only seven pages long, and Thunstone himself only appears on the second-to-last page after a brief appearance of a only few paragraphs earlier. Instead, the bulk of the story is given over to Sharon, Countess Monteseco. As a result, we also learn a lot more about Sharon – that she is American, that her marriage was ill-advised and unhappy, that she is brave and used to solving her problems on her own, what she looks like (“compactly, blondely handsome, neither doll nor siren”) – then we ever learn about John Thunstone himself.

Stories with female protagonists were rare during the golden age. So far I have reviewed only two stories with female protagonists for the Retro Reviews project, “Undersea Guardians” by Ray Bradbury and “The Gothic Window” by Dorothy Quick. “Hoofs” is the third story with a female protagonist, even though John Thunstone is nominally the hero of the series.

The shortness of the story also makes it difficult to get an idea of what the relationship between John Thunstone and Sharon is like. We learn that they’ve quarrelled, “a disagreement over trifles which wound up a quarrel”, and that they are both proud and are having a hard time apologising to each other. In a move that’s probably uncommon for the 1940s, John Thunstone takes the first step, though he does begin what he hopes will be their reconciliation with “Aren’t we being childish?”, which does feel condescending, particularly viewed from a 2020 point of view.

The brief phone conversation early in the story is the only time that John and Sharon actually talk, so these two certainly have a communication problem. And indeed, I had hoped for a somewhat more romantic reunion of the pair than just Sharon stumbling into John’s arms during her flight from the ghostly horse and he taking her home in silence. But then the briefness of the story doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for romantic interludes. In fact, if there is one complaint I have about “Hoofs”, it’s that the story is too short.

Rowley Thorne makes a suitably sneerworthy antagonist and his henchman Hengist is sufficiently slimy that I at least did not feel the slightest bit sorry that he got trampled to death by a ghost horse. The supernatural threat du jour in the form of an evil occultist and his slimy henchman, the risen spirit of someone the characters would very much prefer to stay dead and finally a murderous ghost horse is certainly menacing enough.

Manly Wade Wellman was a folklorist and worked on a project to collect local American folklore for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. His knowledge of folklore certainly shines through in his stories, more so in the later Silver John a.k.a. John the Balladeer stories than in the John Thunstone stories

Stories about occult detectives were a popular hybrid genre in the first half of the twentieth century and go back to Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence and William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. In the US, occult detectives quickly found a home in Weird Tales, which published the adventures of Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin (who is eligible for Best Series for the 1945 Retro Hugos), Manly Wade Wellman’s Judge Pursuivant and of course John Thunstone himself. Indeed, there are plenty of hints that the adventures of Jules de Grandin, Judge Pursuivant, John Thunstone and Wellman’s later character Silver John a.k.a. John the Balladeer take place in the same universe and that the characters all know each other. Indeed, Judge Pursuivant is namechecked in “Hoofs”, when Thunstone mentions that he is planning to get on a plane with Judge Pursuivant for some investigation far away, before he cancels his plans, once he realises Thorne is in town.

These characters are the ancestors of today’s urban fantasy heroes. Their literary descendants include John Constantine, Harry Dresden, John Taylor (John is certainly a popular first name for occult detectives), Jack Winter, the Leandros brothers, the Winchester brothers and many others. And while Sharon, Countess Monteseco had to content herself with being the hero’s love interest, today’s occult detectives not just have formidable romantic partners like John Taylor’s girlfriend/bride Suzie Shooter (nomen est omen) – no, there are also plenty of female occult detectives such as Anita Blake, Kate Daniels, Mercy Thompson, Rachel Morgan, Dante Valentine and others.

But while today’s occult detectives usually narrate their adventures in the first person in hardboiled/noir mode, older characters like John Silence, Carnacki, Jules de Grandin or Judge Pursuivant are closer to Sherlock Holmes than to Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. John Thunstone is a bit of a transitional character here. He is a younger and more physically active hero than the likes of Jules de Grandin and Judge Pursuivant, a wealthy playboy with a penchant for fighting evil who is also reminiscent of Richard Wentworth a.k.a. The Spider and Bruce Wayne a.k.a. Batman

However, the character that John Thunstone most reminds me of – at least based on this story – is Lee Falk’s Mandrake the Magician. For Mandrake is also a handsome moustachioed playboy who fights supernatural as well as false supernatural enemies with the help of his plucky aristocratic girlfriend Narda (and best friend Lothar, who has no equivalent in the John Thunstone stories). And indeed, it’s interesting that all of these characters were operating at the same time.

Furthermore, the John Thunstone stories also show how the occult detective genre has changed and developed over the past seventy-five years. Early occult detectives mainly appeared in short fiction – the two John Thunstone novels only appeared in the 1980s, some forty years after the bulk of the series – whereas their modern brethren mainly appear in novels. The adventures of early occult detectives are also more episodic. Characters may reappear, see recurring antagonist Rowley Thorne, but there is little in the way of internal continuity and the stories can often be read in any order. Meanwhile, modern series, whether it’s the Dresden Files, the Nightside series, the Leandros Brothers, Kate Daniels or Mercy Thompson series, have a definite series arc.

Finally, modern series place way more emphasis on the occult detective’s social and romantic life and the occult detective is usually surrounded by a network of friends, family and loved ones, often assembled across several books. Meanwhile, the occult detectives of the golden age tended to be loners with few connections aside from the occasional faithful Watson figure such as Jules de Grandin’s friend/partner (and maybe more, since several folks claim to have detected homoerotic vibes between the two) Dr. Trowbridge. John Thunstone is actually something of an exception here, because he has a friend/mentor in Judge Pursuivant and a recurring love interest in Sharon Countess Monteseco. Nonetheless, their relationship takes a backseat to the supernatural mystery of the month, which is probably why the romance aspects of “Hoofs” feel a little unsatisfying from a modern POV.

That probably sounds more critical than it should, because I enjoyed “Hoofs” quite a bit and would certainly like to read more about John Thunstone’s adventures. And if I had a nice print collection of the Thunstone stories rather than being forced to read them in scanned copies of vintage issues of Weird Tales on archive.org, I might well have ended up reading the whole series, which is what happened last year when I planned to reread just the one Retro Hugo nominated Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story and wound up rereading the entire series.

“Hoofs” is a neat occult detective tale in a series I would certainly like to read more of.

Send to Kindle

Retro Review: “Ride the El to Doom” by Allison V. Harding

[image error]

Cthulhu graces the cover of the issue wherein “Ride the El to Doom” first appeared

“Ride the El to Doom” is a horror novelette by Allison V. Harding, which was first published in the November 1944 issue of Weird Tales and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

“Ride the El to Doom” begins with a ride on an elevated train, the titular El, in what is implied to be New York City (though the names of streets, stops and bridges don’t match any real places), as viewed through the eyes of steelworker Jack Larue. The descriptions are highly atmospheric, from the “dingy squalor” and “three and four-storey uniformity” of what has to be either Brooklyn or Queens via a bridge across muddy water to the shining towers of Manhattan in which Jack feels some ownership, because he cast the steel used to build them. We also learn that the El is rundown, the steel components without lustre and streaked with rust, and half-empty, too. I have never ridden the El, because it was gone long before I was born, but nonetheless I could picture the trip and the vistas only too clearly. Harding, who most likely was a native New Yorker, paints a great word picture here that is matched by Boris Dolgov’s striking interior art.

As the El approaches his stop, Jack gets up and exchanges a few words with the driver, a grumpy old man named Pete Nevers who has been working for the El seemingly forever. Jack idly muses that Pete is so connected to the El that if the city authorities were ever to demolish the El, they would have to take down Pete along with it. But that won’t ever happy, because the city cannot do without the El. Anybody who knows a little bit about the history of public transport in New York City (it’s remarkable what you pick up when researching the Silencer stories) knows that those are famous last words.

And indeed a few weeks later, Jack chances to glimpse an article in a co-worker’s newspaper that the El and the bridge which Jack crosses to get to work will be demolished. The bridge will be rebuilt, but the El won’t. Instead, it will be replaced by busses. Jack is bothered by this, so much that he gets drunk after work. When he talks to Pete on the trip home that night, Pete insists that they’ll never stop the El, that it’s alive and they can’t kill it. Jack counters that Pete is just scared, because he’s nothing without the El.

Later that night, Jack wakes up, feeling hungover, not to mention a little guilty about his confrontation with Pete. After all, the old man has always been good to him, has even lent Jack money on occasion. And so Jack decides to pay Pete a visit to apologise.

It turns out that Pete lives in a barren apartment in a rundown building near the El trainyard. Because Jack feels sorry for old Pete, he offers to find him a job at the steel foundry, perhaps as a watchman. But Pete declines. He can’t just change jobs, he declares. He can never leave the El. Jack tries to persuade him, but Pete won’t hear anything about it. “Thanks lad”, he tells Jack, but he needn’t worry about Pete or the El. He shakes Jack’s hand and Jack can’t help but notice that Pete’s handshake is hard and cold as steel.

But of course Jack worries about Pete anyway and even secures him a job as a watchman at the steel foundry. When he visits Pete again a few days later, the man who opens the door is not Pete, but his roommate, an El conductor named Philpot. Philpot tells Jack that Pete is taking the impending end of the El very hard. He doesn’t eat and spends most of his time after hours in the empty El car.

When Jack tells Philpot about the job offer, Philpot says that Pete won’t take it, because he isn’t leaving the El. However, Philpot is interested. Jack tells Philpot that the job offer is only good for Pete, no one else, whereupon Philpot opens an old trunk in the apartment, revealing a tangle of rusty steel parts. Pete has been swiping parts from the El for years, Philpot tells Jack, and is hardly trustworthy as a watchman. “But why?” Jack wonders, when the door opens and Pete comes in.

Pete is understandably furious and throws Jack and Philpot out. He also tells Jack in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t want or need a new job, because he’s staying with the El. Philpot, on the other hand, would very much like the job, but Jack tells him to find one for himself.

On the final day of the El, Jack boards the train for its last ride, disgusted at all the reporters and local dignitaries, flag-waving school children and an off-key marching band and at the demolition crews who stand by to start their work as soon as the last train has passed by. Jack has a bottle of whiskey in his pocket and empties it on his way to the front of the train. Already drunk, he tries to talk to Pete, but all Pete says is “Get out!” That makes Jack angry and he takes a swing at Pete. But even though his fist feels as if he’d just hit a steel wall, Pete doesn’t even feel the punch. But Jack certainly feels it when Pete throws him across the car.

Jack gets drunk some more, falls asleep on a bench and wakes up sorely hungover. Furious, he decides to confront Pete, but only find Philpot wounded and bleeding on the floor. Philpot claims that Pete attacked him and that he isn’t human. He also warns Jack against going after Pete.

But of course, Jack does after Pete anyway. He enters the darkened El railyard and soon comes across the body of a night watchman, bludgeoned to death. He sees a train starting up, driven undoubtedly by Pete. Jack sprints after train and jumps aboard, realising too late that the demolition crews have already started to take down the tracks. Worse, the train is going very fast, too fast to jump off.

Somehow, Jack makes his way to the front of the train, where Pete is in his compartment. Jack yells at the old man to stop the train, because the tracks on the bridge are already gone, but Pete doesn’t react. So Jack tries to grip the controls and stop the train himself, but he cannot, because Pete is too strong for him. In desperation, he tries to pummel Pete, but once again it is like hitting a steel wall.

Jack realises that the train is going up the ramp to the bridge and that he and Pete have to jump off now or die. But Pete isn’t going to jump. He’ll go down with the El and he has Jack’s wrist in a death grip. At the very last second, Jack manages to yank himself free, tearing off Pete’s arm in the process. He jumps and watches as the train derails and falls into the East River (imaginatively called West River in this story).

Jack staggers home, dumps the severed arm in a corner of his room and covers it with newspapers (like you do). He watches the rescue efforts, watches as the battered cars of the El are brought up again. The official story is that Pete went crazy, murdered Philpot and the night watchman and stole the train to commit suicide. But his body is never found and Jack suspects it never will be.

One night, he takes Pete’s severed arm, still wrapped in newspapers, and takes it down to the riverfront. Now Jack finally removes the newspaper and finds not a severed arm, but a steel throttle lever. He realises that Pete truly hadn’t been human and throws the lever into the river to join the rest of “Pete”.

[image error]

The striking interior art for this story by Boris Dolgov.

“Ride the El to Doom” is an atmospheric and highly effective horror story. Particularly, the two El rides that bookend the story, one a regular daytime ride and the second a feverish nightmare suicide ride, are very atmospheric. Ditto for the El’s last trip, complete with dignitaries, off-key marching band and flag waving school children. Writingwise, this story is considerably better than “Guard in the Dark”, the other Allison V. Harding story I reviewed. Native New Yorker Allison V. Harding was obviously writing what she knew here and it shows.

In fact, the thing I liked most about “Ride the El to Doom” is that it offers a glimpse into a vanished New York City. This is a New York where elevated trains still clatter through the city on stilts, though they are on their way out, where steelworkers and other bluecollar folks can still afford to live in Manhattan, where Brooklyn and Queens are monotonous working class neighbourhoods rather than hipster central. This is the New York City of old movies, the New York City that King Kong trashed and also the New York City of the Silencer. In fact, the city descriptions alone were well worth reading the story.

And yes, the city described is absolutely New York, even if Harding changes the names of places and turns East River into West River and 110th Street station, a suicide hotspot in the days of the El, into 109th Street station. I’m not sure which bridge the fictional West River Bridge is supposed to be, for while bridges in New York City have been demolished, none of them seem to have been demolished in the 1940s.

The historical background of the story is the end of the elevated railway a.k.a. El in New York City. The El had been introduced as a solution to New York City’s rampant traffic problem in 1867 and quickly caught on after a few false starts, because unlike trams and trolleys, the El did not occupy valuable street space, but instead ran one level above. However, the El was also noisy. It cast streets and sidewalks into permanent shadow – already a persistent problem with New York City’s many highrise buildings anyway – and covered the neighbourhood in smoke, soot and dirt. Owners of buildings and shops along the El lines complained and property values fell, even as El access developed previously underdeveloped areas. And once subways and busses could handle the same passenger volume cheaper and faster with less noise and pollution, it spelled the end for the El. The first elevated train line ceased operation in 1938 and others followed throughout the early to mid 1940s, i.e. at the time the story is set, though the last line in the Bronx held on until 1973. For more on the history and end of the New York City El, see here and here. As for why most elevated trainlines came down during the 1940s, at least part of the reason was that the steel used to build them was needed for the war effort. The quick demolition of the tracks in “Ride the El to Doom” alludes to this.

Allison V. Harding is a somewhat mysterious figure, as I explained in my review of “Guard in the Dark”. But all evidence points at her having lived in New York City and therefore witnessing the El tracks come down all over the city around the time that she wrote this story. And because the El was so ubiquitous until it disappeared, Allison V. Harding very likely rode it at least occasionally, even though she was of a different social class than her characters. Is the last ride of the El in the story with its potbellied dignitaries and flag-waving school children and off-key marching band something Harding personally witnessed? The description is so on point that it almost seems as if Harding described a real event. And now I am tempted to search the New York Times archives for reports about the ends of the various El lines to see if something matches Harding’s description.

Another thing that’s notable is that “Ride the El to Doom” features only working class characters. Protagonist Jack Larue is a steelworker with an alcohol problem, Pete Nevers is an El motorman and Philpot is a conductor. These are not the kind of people you often see in science fiction, fantasy or horror stories as anything other than walk-ons or side characters, neither during golden age nor today.

“Ride the El to Doom” is also an early example of  contemporary horror and what we now call urban fantasy. According to received wisdom, horror was found mainly in gothic and historical settings before Rosemary’s Baby and the works of Stephen King dragged it into the present and urban fantasy flat out did not exist before the 1980s. However, all of the Weird Tales stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project have had contemporary/near contemporary settings. Furthermore, Weird Tales was a hotbed of proto-urban fantasy and popular Weird Tales series characters like Seabury’s Quinn’s occult detective Jules de Grandin and Manly Wade Wellman’s occult detective John Thunstone are the direct ancestors of Harry Dresden, Peter Grant, Kate Daniels, Mercy Thompson, October Daye and Anita Blake.

If there’s one thing that has become amply clear to me during my extended sojourn in the golden age it’s that fantasy was a hugely varied genre pre-Lord of the Rings. There was gothic horror, modern horror, sword and sorcery, proto-urban fantasy, weird fiction, children’s fantasy, humorous fantasy, etc… Nor did this variety vanish overnight, when the popularity of Lord of the Rings exploded. Quite the contrary, a lot of pulp era fantasy was reprinted in the wake of the success of Lord of the Rings and sword and sorcery experienced its second boom during the 1960s, though of the protagonists of the first boom in the 1930s/early 1940s, only Fritz Leiber was still alive and active to see it. It was only when horror split off as a separate genre in the 1970s and what remained was overtaken by Tolkien clones and big fat quest fantasy that fantasy contracted for the next twenty to thirty years.

“Ride the El to Doom” is urban fantasy in the most literal sense of the word, because the monster to be slain is not a vampire or werewolf but a crucial feature of the city. If public transport horror were a thing, “Ride the El to Doom” would be one of its founding texts. And indeed, it’s worth remembering that railroad fiction was its own genre during the pulp era and that Railroad Stories was one of the longest running pulp magazines of all time. Railroad Stories began publication as The Railroad Man’s Magazine in 1906 and is still around 114 years later, though they stopped publishing fiction in 1979. So Railroad Stories has been in business longer than Astounding/Analog, Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, the three longest running (with interruptions in the case of Amazing Stories and Weird Tales) SFF magazines.

Possessed or otherwise malicious machines are a common feature of the golden age and beyond. “The Twonky” by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, winner of the 1943 Retro Hugo for Best Short Story, as well as “Etaoin Shrdlu” by Fredric Brown, a Retro Hugo finalist in the same category and year, are two examples, respectively featuring a sentient radio-phonograph console and a sentient linotype machine. The novella “Killdozer!” by Theodore Sturgeon, published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1944 and therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos, featured a possessed bulldozer murdering a construction crew. Isaac Asimov’s 1953 story “Sally” is an early tale about autonomous cars who have minds and personalities of their own and conspire to commit murder. Stephen King’s 1983 horror novel Christine is another take on the same subject, only that the explanation for Christine’s sentience is supernatural rather than technological. “Rise the El to Doom” certainly fits into this pattern, only that the sentient machine has a human face here in the form of Pete Nevers.

Allison V. Harding drops hints regarding the true nature of “Pete” throughout the story. We get comparatively few physical descriptions of the characters – we don’t even know what race they are, though personally I imagine Pete as an old black man. But what few physical descriptions of Pete there are usually compare him to steel, iron, metal or coal, all materials associated with the El.

Considering how good this story is, it’s a shame that it has never been reprinted. Maybe the fact that it is tied to a very particular time and place counted against it. Or maybe it’s yet another case of the women writers of Weird Tales being ignored and dismissed as “useless filler that only takes up pages”, while every single utterance ever made by H.P. Lovecraft is analysed to death. Indeed, one thing I have learned during this project is that Weird Tales was so much more than just Lovecraft and Howard, Cthulhu and Conan, and that a lot of it was very good indeed, even if it has never received even a fraction of the attention that Lovecraft and Howard received.

A great atmospheric tale of urban horror that has been unjustly forgotten. Highly recommended.

Send to Kindle

Star Trek Picard tackles “The Impossible Box”

Welcome to my latest episode by episode review of Star Trek Picard. Previous installments may be found here.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

Instead of the now customary flashback, this episode starts with a dream sequence that may also be a flashback. A young Soji wanders along the corridors of her childhood home, clutching her stuffed toy. She’s looking for her father and wanders into his lab, which is full of orchids. “Soji”, her father – who may or may not be Bruce Maddox (at any rate, what we see looks more like Bruce than Data) – says sharply and Soji wakes up screaming in the arms of Narek. As a concerned boyfriend, Narek of course asks Soji what it was that upset her so about the dream. Soji isn’t quite sure, but tells him that it is a recurrent dream. “Is the dream just something that your unconscious served up or is it based on a real memory?” Narek wants to know. Soji says she isn’t sure, whereupon Narek suggests that she ask her mother about that the next time they talk.

Back in his own quarters, Narek is promptly accosted by his sister Narissa once again and they have a repeat of a conversation they have had several times before so far. Narissa wants to know if Narek has made any progress with regard to Soji. Narek declares that he has made progress, but Narissa is still impatient. She wants to go ahead and just kill Soji now and be done with it. “She dreams”, Narek declares triumphantly. Narissa doesn’t get the point, whereupon Narek declares that it makes no sense to program an android to dream, unless the dreams fulfil some function, such as allowing Soji to integrate her false memories with her growing doubts about her true nature. Narek’s plan is now to nudge those doubts towards a tipping point.

And so the next time he sees Soji, he casually asks her whether she talked to her mother about the dreams. Soji says that she isn’t sure, she did talk to her mother, but fell asleep. “Does that happen to you often?” Narek asks before letting the information drop that every single call Soji has made to her mother lasts exactly seventy seconds.

Narek’s plan works, too, because the next time Soji calls her mother, she tries to force herself to stay awake when she starts drifting off. She drifts off anyway, but not before she notices that the “mother” is starting to glitch. At this point, I wonder what would have happened if Soji had tried to call Dahj? Would she have been faced with another hologram or the equivalent of a “party not available” message? Also, why hasn’t Soji tried to contact Dahj yet, especially since the freakout of deborgified Romulan Ramda a few episodes ago suggests that Dahj might be in danger? Never mind that “I’m sleeping with a hot Romulan spy” should be the sort of thing that sisters would discuss with each other.

Now Soji’s suspicions are aroused, she gathers all of her personal belongings – photos, childhood drawings, diaries, her beloved stuffed toy – and scans them, only to reveal that everything she owns, mementos of her whole life, are only 37 months old. Soji’s life – and Soji herself – has only existed for a little over three years.

With her whole life unravelling in front of her eyes, Soji turns to Narek. Not because she necessarily trusts him – after all, Soji suspects that he’s a Tal Shiar agent – but because there is no one else. And Narek of course has the perfect solution, a Romulan meditation technique that is forbidden to non-Romulans. But the rules don’t apply to Narek and so he takes Soji to a meditation chamber, pulling rank on the Romulan guard who tries to block the way.

The mediation is a variation on the labyrinth walking meditation practice from the medieval era. There is a labyrinth etched on the floor of the chamber, marked by lanterns. As Soji walks along the labyrinth, she explores her recurring dream. But before she embarks on her journey, Narek kisses her and tells her his true name, the one that Romulans only reveal to the person they give their hearts to (unless you’re Elnor, in which case you probably blurt it out to the entire La Sirena crew).

Maybe Soji should have gotten a tad suspicious that Narek is so interested in the view outside the windows of her childhood home, for what does that matter to her dream? Nonetheless, she dutifully reports that she sees thunder, rain, vegetation and two red moons. I do think Narek is a bit over-optimistic that the landscape in Soji’s dreams corresponds to a real place. I’m not an android – at least, I think I’m not – but I have recurring dreams about places that don’t correspond to any place I’ve ever visited in real life – and yes, I’ve asked my parents. So I really hope that Narek and Narissa are now chasing the equivalent to “Arabic looking palace by the sea” or “terrace with music and dancing above the sea” or “the Golden Square” or “the mall near the Golden Square that I can never find and the one time I did, it promptly burned down” from my own dreams. Because they definitely deserve to be chasing smoke.

With Narek’s help, Soji finally makes it into her father’s lab. She realises that her “father” has no face, though the hair suggests Bruce Maddox. She also sees what her “father” is working on in the lab and it’s not orchids (in fact, what did Bruce need the orchids for, if the dream is based on a real memory?). Instead, there is an adult Soji in disassembled doll form lying on the table to true surrealist dream fashion.

Once Narek has what he wants, he tells Narissa who has been watching from somewhere else to find a planet with two red moons and frequent electric storms (Yeah, I really hope you’re chasing smoke, Narissa). “But what does it mean?” a baffled Soji stammers.

“It means you’re not real”, Narek says and we wonder whether he is trying to convince himself or Soji or Narissa, “You never were.” Then Narek finishes opening the puzzle box with which he had been playing earlier in the episode during his confrontation with Narissa, the puzzle box that symbolizes Narek’s patient and methodical approach to problems. Only that this time around, the box does not contain a toy figurine like during his confrontation with Narissa, but a kind of crystal which emits something red, which I took for gas, but which is apparently lethal radiation.

Narek locks Soji in the meditation chamber with the box and the radiation. But the mortal danger activates Soji’s defence mechanisms – which Narek should have forseen, if he didn’t – and she smashes her way through the floor of the meditation chamber, while Narek and the Romulan guard watch outside, unable to stop Soji without exposing themselves to the lethal radiation.

Are Narek’s feeling for Soji genuine, even though he betrays her in the end? After all, Narek knows what Soji is capable of and might have foreseen that she would break out of the chamber. Or has Narek been pretending to be in love with Soji all this time? Did he really tell her his true name or was he lying some more? I don’t know and I suspect that even Narek himself doesn’t. As a tortured romance between two people, one of whom (or rather both) are not what they seem, the Narek and Soji relationship works better than the similar relationship between Michael Burnham and Ash Tyler over in Star Trek Discovery. And yes, I initially did like the Michael and Ash relationship, but only before it was revealed that Ash was a Klingon spy surgically altered to look human and unaware of his own identity. And before Ash started murdering people.

AV Club reviewer Zack Handlen isn’t happy with the romance between Soji and Narek, because he feels that nothing about Soji stands out in particular (beyond the fact that she is am organic android, likely the only one of her kind) and that we don’t know a lot about Narek either. But even if Soji is “nothing special”, why does that mean that Narek couldn’t fall in love with her?  After all, most people in the world fall in love with someone who’s “nothing special” to outside observers. As for our lack of insight into Narek, this is deliberate, because the writers are trying to keep us guesssing what Narek’s feeling for Soji are.

While all this is happening, Picard and the La Sirena crew are on their way to rescue Soji. So I was wrong when I said that I suspected season 1 of Picard would be like season 1 of The Witcher and Picard would only find Soji in the last episode, maybe even the last scene. Because Picard and Soji do meet up in this episode, after they’ve both been through something of an ordeal.

I have already talked about Soji’s ordeal above. Picard’s ordeal, meanwhile, is that he has to beam aboard a Borg Cube – alone. And for obvious reasons, Picard has issues with Borgs and Borg Cubes. “The Borg don’t change, they metastize”, Picard yells angrily at one point. But Picard has to go alone, because the mere presence of the La Sirena in the Neutral Zone (so there still is a Neutral Zone, even though the Romulan Empire imploded?) without authorisation is theoretically an act of war. Not to mention that the dead Borg Cube in Romulan space is heavily guarded, so sneaking aboard unnoticed is impossible.

Luckily, Raffi – though drunk and doped up to her gills, following her painful non-reunion with her son last episode – manages to strongarm a former friend in Starfleet to grant Picard a pass to visit the Borg Cube and speak to the director of the Borg reclamation project, a character we and Picard are only too familiar with, namely Hugh the Ex-Borg. Picard’s face lights up, when he sees Hugh’s face on the screen, which is a stark contrast to how Picard felt about Hugh back in the Next Generation days.

However, the pass is only good for Picard and no one else – not even Elnor who insists on accompanying Picard and apparently was so impressed by Seven of Nine that he assumes all Borg are like her. Therefore Jean-Luc has to beam alone into a seemingly deserted part of the Borg Cube and promptly suffers the mother of all traumatic flashbacks. That scene is very effective, turning up the full body horror aspects of the Borg and finally making them scary again, something they haven’t been for a long time. And the acting by Sir Patrick Stewart is predictably excellent, but then he is the best actor Star Trek ever had in any of its incarnations.

Now I have to admit that I don’t particularly care for “The Best of Both Worlds” two-parter. Yes, that cliffhanger with Picard appearing as Locutus on the Enterprise‘s viewscreen was shocking the first time around, but it’s not an episode I tend to rewatch, even though it frequently shows up in various “Best Star Trek episodes of all time” lists. So my memories of what precisely happened beyond “Picard was kidnapped and assimilated” are somewhat dim. However, I do remember that the scene where two Ex-Borg grab Picard to keep him from falling from a walkway (apparently, railings are irrelevant to Borg) mirrors a scene in “The Best of Both Worlds” where Picard is taken aboard a Borg Cube to be assimilated.

And of course, the Borg do know Picard, though not necessarily as Jean-Luc Picard, the great hero of Starfleet (“His face is probably still on the broshures”, Raffi says at one point), but as Locutus who used to be one of their own. In fact, at one point an Ex-Borg calls out “Locutus?” in wonder, as Picard rushes past. It’s also worth remembering that from the POV of an individual Borg drone, Picard/Locutus was likely incredibly privileged, because he at least got a name of his own rather than a “Number of Number” designation.

Picard’s reunion with Hugh is remarkably warm and both men spontaneously hug when they see each other for the first time in more than twenty years.  It’s certainly a notable scene, especially since Picard isn’t really the hugging type and I wouldn’t have taken Hugh for the hugging type either.

Hugh shows Picard around the Cube and explains what they are doing there. Picard is impressed, for even though he knows that De-Borgification is possible – after all, he, Seven, Hugh and Icheb are all proof that it is – he nonetheless didn’t expect that De-Borgification was possible on such a large scale. “Thank you for showing me this”, he tells Hugh and muses that maybe, the Borg Reclamation Project will make the rest of the galaxy see the Ex-Borg as victims rather than monsters. Mind you, Picard himself had more or less called the Borg a cancer earlier in the episode.

Hugh is also happy to help with the search for Soji. After all, Hugh knows Soji and he also knows that Narek is very likely a spy. But when Hugh and Picard arrive at Soji’s quarters, they find the place in chaos (because a desperate Soji scattered her things, when she realised that her whole life was a lie) and Soji gone. And Hugh cannot detect her signature anywhere aboard the ship.

They do find her signature again shortly thereafter, as Soji breaks out of the meditation chamber and alarms go off all over the ship. “Do you know me?” Soji demands, when she finds herself face to face with Picard. Apparently, Soji has not been programmed with the instinct to trust Picard and seek him out, unlike Dahj. Or she is still too much in fight/flight mode to notice.

Picard tells Soji that he is a friend of her father’s and that he knew her sister and couldn’t help her, but that he wants to help Soji. He also shows Soji Dahj’s necklace, which persuades Soji to trust him – for now. Together, Hugh, Picard and Soji flee, the Romulans hot in pursuit.

But Hugh knows the Borg Cube better than any Romulan and so he takes them to what Hugh and Picard immediately recognise as the Queen’s chamber, though neither of them has ever been inside. The Queen’s chamber contains an emergency transporter with a range of forty thousand lightyears, which – as Hugh explains – the Borg gained through assimilating a species called Sikarians. This is a reference to “Prime Factors”, an early episode of Star Trek Voyager, where Captain Janeay and her crew encounter the Sikarians and briefly find the chance to cut their long journey home short dangling in front of their noses. Maybe if the Sikarians had helped Voyager, they wouldn’t have been assimilated.

Alas, the Sikarian transporter requires some time to start up and the Romulans are still hot in pursuit. Two of them have almost caught our heroes, when Elnor appears out of nowhere to slice and dice them into pieces. “I told you to stay on the ship”, Picard tells Elnor. “I know”, Elnor replies in his customary bluntness, “I didn’t listen.”

This is the place where I once again express my appreciation for Elnor. He’s just a great character, his childlike innocence and wonder coupled with the fact that he is absolutely lethal with a sword. “Please, friends, choose to live”, he tells a bunch of Romulan guards at one point. I really hope we see more of Elnor, because he has been an absolutely delight in every scene he’s been in so far.

Picard and Soji escape through the transporter, not before Picard hails Rios and tells him where to pick them up. Hugh and Elnor stay behind to cover their escape. The trailer for the next episode suggests that Picard decides to pay a visit to Will Riker to lie low for a while and very likely brings bad trouble to Riker and Deanna Troi’s doorstep.

This episode is very focussed on Picard, Soji and Narek, but nonetheless the rest of the La Sirena crew gets something to do as well. Raffi continues to drink herself into a stupour and almost falls down, until Rios grabs her and puts her to bed. We also leanr that even though Rios and Raffi have known each other for ages, Raffi has never told him that she has a son. I suspect that Raffi’s addiction to drugs, alcohol and conspiracy theories was not the only reason she is estranged from her son. Cause it seems that while Raffi was (and continues to be) an excellent Starfleet officer, she just was a crappy mother all around. “You can’t be good at everything”, Rios says to her.

Dr. Agnes Jurati explains away the death of Bruce Maddox, which she actively caused, as the result of his extensive injuries and a weak heart. For now, no one questions her account, but I strongly suspect that her actions will be discovered sooner or later. Especially since Agnes is visibly distraught. Elnor notices and of course asks her about it. So does Rios who offers some comfort, a friendly ear and a shoulder to lean on. Agnes is only too happy to accept that offer and kisses Rios. She takes him by the hand and it is implied that they head to her quarters to have sex. Of course, there had been some sparks flying between Rios and Agnes since they first met, but the kiss and fad to black sex is nonetheless a little sudden. Though I do like the fact that Chris Rios, the dashing rogue space pilot, is also the one who offers emotional support to the rest of the crew, since that is normally a role that would fall to one of the women. However, Agnes is a blabbering mess and Raffi is about as emotionally supportive as a cactus.

Finally, it’s also nice to see Rios playing proper football (“soccer” to Americans) rather than some made up future sport or some American sport like baseball. Because Sisko’s baseball obsession in Deep Space Nine was not just one of the many things that made his character irritating, it also made very little sense. Because playing baseball aboard a space station is difficult to impossible, whereas football can be played everywhere, even on the deck of a spaceship.

“The Impossible Box” – a neat title which alludes both to Narek’s puzzle box and the Borg Cube itself – actually does advance the overall plot, though once again not a whole lot actually happens. And indeed, I am hearing increasing complaints about Star Trek Picard, that it’s too slow, that the character of Picard does not ring true to how he was portrayed in The Next Generation, etc…

Regarding the latter complaint, it’s true that Picard is no longer the same character we saw in The Next Generation, but that is because more than twenty years have passed. Besides, both TV writing and our understanding of trauma has evolved a lot since The Next Generation went off the air. PTSD was already known in the 1980s and early 1990s, but you almost never saw it depicted on TV at the time. Furthermore – and this is something a lot of people seem to have forgotten – Jean-Luc Picard was not particularly consistent in The Next Generation either. Especially the early seasons of The Next Generation were highly inconsistent and Picard could go from moral paragon to jerk with a stick up his arse to skilled diplomat to “Kill all Borg” genocidal rage within the space of a few episodes. So if Zack Handlen (sorry, if I seem to be picking on him) or another reviewer declares that the Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek Picard is not the character they remember, I want to ask which Picard precisely they do want to see, because there were so many different versions. And in fact, I suspect that the Picard of Star Trek Picard is how Sir Patrick Stewart envisions the character and would have played him, if some of the crappier Next Generation episodes didn’t have other ideas.

Star Trek is known to have wobbly first seasons and by those standards, the first season of Picard is absolutely stellar. Have the people who complain about Picard forgotten how godawful, not to mention inconsistent, the first few episodes of Star Trek Discovery were? Have they forgotten the positively painful first two season of The Next Generation? The first season of Deep Space Nine (and I never liked Deep Space Nine in the first place and neither did any of my German Trekkie friends at the time, which is why the praise for it is so baffling) or Voyager? Pretty much all of Enterprise?

I recently started rewatching my DVD boxset of Discovery with a friend who’s a casual Star Trek viewer but hasn’t seen Discovery yet due to lack of Netflix. And I found myself apologising that “the first few episodes are really awful, but you can’t skip them either, otherwise you won’t know what is going on, and it gets better, I promise.” But as we rewatched those first few episodes and got to episode 3 – “Context is for Kings”* – we looked at each other and said, “There probably is a worse Star Trek episode somewhere, e.g. the one where Wesley Crusher almost get executed for trampling a flower bed on the planet of the space hippies or the one where Picard, Starfleet’s moral paragon, hands over a bunch of Irish stereotypes to rape and forced birthing in a Handmaid’s Tale style society, all because the Enterprise crew cannot be bothered to part with their precious genetic material, but right now I can’t remember one that’s quite as godawful as this one.”

And that’s precisely the problem. With a franchise as long-lived and varied as Star Trek, we inevitably view the older series through rose-coloured glasses, remembering the mainly the good episodes (and the occasional really awful one, see above), but not the bad ones, of which there were many. And so any new iteration of Star Trek is inevitably measured against the best of what came before rather than the average, let alone the worst.

Though I would expect that people would at least remember how dreadful some early episodes of Discovery were some two years after they aired. Also, back when Discovery first aired those of us who criticised the show were accused of being overly nostalgic for the unrealistic optimism of The Next Generation and unable to recognise how brilliant Discovery was for grappling with our dark times. And now, some of the very same critics complain that Picard is not sufficiently like The Next Generation they remember and also that dark Starfleet is played out and was done better in Deep Space Nine anyway. Which is an almost 180 degree turn from what they said two years ago.

Now I’m not the biggest fan of “Dark Starfleet” and “Dark Federation” either, but it works better in Picard than in Discovery, if only because it’s easier to imagine the Federation turning into a xenophobic and isolationist nightmare state following a shocking event with loads of death some twenty years after Deep Space Nine and Voyager than it is to imagine that Federation going from the war-mongering and prisoner-exploiting nightmare state of Discovery to the optimistic utopia we saw in The Original Series in only ten to fifteen years.

So why are the same people who were praising the “Dark Starfleet” of Discovery to high heavens now criticising the “Dark Starfleet” of Picard? I suspect what changed is that the last vestiges of grimdark finally gave way to hopepunk in the two years since Discovery premiered, while the geopolitical situation looks a lot worse now than it did in late 2017. And it already looked pretty bad back then – indeed, one of the reasons I had such issues with Discovery (which is not the fault of the show) is that the show premiered on the night of the 2017 general election in Germany, when I was already full of despair anyway and the depression fest of Discovery‘s early episodes was about the last thing I needed.

But while I welcome a turn away from the overwhelming grimdarkness that plagued US media in the 2000s and 2010s, I still don’t understand the folks harping on Picard, because Picard is a lot more hopeful six episodes in than Discovery was at that point.

*BTW, the pilot of the prisoner shuttle in that episode whom Camestros Felapton always worried about is dead. We see her safety line tearing and see her floating off into space. Since the Discovery did not rescue her, she’s dead.

Send to Kindle

First Monday Free Fiction: Bug-Eyed Monsters and the Women Who Love Them

[image error]Welcome to the March 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.

Because of the Retro Science Fiction Reviews project, I have been spending a lot of time in the so-called golden age of science fiction of late. So what could be more fitting for this edition of First Monday Free Fiction then a story from Bug-Eyed Monsters and the Women Who Love Them, a collection parodistic takes on some golden and silver age gender tropes. So put on your brass bikini, grab your ray gun and prepare to learn the whole shocking truth about…

Bug-Eyed Monsters and the Women Who Love Them

Captain Crash Martigan of the rocket scout squad of New Pluto City was on patrol again, defending the domed city and its inhabitants from the bug-eyed monsters.

Of course, bug-eyed monsters wasn’t their real name. No, the primitive species native to New Pluto had a long and official Latinate name that no one could ever remember. So the colonists took to calling them bug-eyed monsters, because — well — that’s what they looked like.

For reasons only known to themselves, the bug-eyed monsters had taken to attacking New Pluto City and its inhabitants, killing the men and kidnapping the women. Of late, the attacks had gotten out of hand, which was where men like Crash, true heroes of the new frontier of space, came in.

The cockpit alarm chimed, telling Crash that a bug-eyed monster was near. So he landed his flyer, popped open the canopy and jumped out, looking very steely and manly in his gleaming silver spacesuit.

He took his electro-binoculars from his utility belt and scanned his surroundings. And indeed he spotted it. A bug-eyed monster — and a particularly ugly one at that with long, sucker-laden tentacles — was in the process of molesting a dame. And not just any old dame either — not that there were old dames in New Pluto City, considering the cut-off age for female colonists was twenty-six. No, this was a particularly fine specimen of a dame with long golden curls, luminous alabaster skin and a fine figure swathed in a clinging gown of red silk. A clinging gown that the bug-eyed monster was in the process of ripping off her shapely body.

Crash immediately activated his jet pack and raced to the rescue. For whenever there was a dame in danger, Crash would be there to save her like the dashing hero that he was.

As he approached the scene of the kidnapping, Crash noticed that the dame had swooned in the tentacled embrace of the monster. Well, Crash could hardly blame her. After all, women were known to be the weaker sex and this particular bug-eyed monster really was damn ugly.

He took a closer look at the scene through his electro-binoculars and realised that he knew the monster’s victim. Her name was Geraldine Carmichael, Miss Geraldine Carmichael, and she had been newly transferred from Earth to New Pluto City to work as a biologist or psychologist or nurse, some womanly profession at any rate.

Miss Geraldine had already caught Crash’s eye back in the domed city, for she was truly a looker. So far, she had studiously ignored Crash and rebuffed his advances, but all that would change once he’d saved her from the slimy embrace of the bug-eyed monster.

Crash landed on a rock outcropping overlooking the spot where the bug-eyed monster had dragged poor Geraldine.

“Let go off her, fiend,” he yelled and drew his atomic blaster.

“Eee-yip?” the bug-eyed monster said, which Crash decided to take as a challenge.

Miss Geraldine, of course, said nothing. She was unconscious, after all.

Crash fired his blaster, hitting the monster’s tentacle.

“Eeee-Yaaah,” the monster screamed and let go off Miss Geraldine, who promptly tumbled to the ground.

For a split-second, Crash feared that Miss Geraldine was a goner, which would truly be a pity, considering she was such a fine dame. But then she stirred and sat up, shaking her golden curls and pressing a slender hand to her fine sloping forehead.

“Uh, what… what’s going on?”

“You were attacked, Miss,” Crash exclaimed, “But have no fear, for Captain Crash Martigan is here to rescue you.”

Behind Geraldine, the bug-eyed monster was stirring again, its slimy tentacles reaching for the hapless girl.

“Eeee-yuuup,” the monster wailed.

Crash raised his blaster and aimed it at the monster. “Begone, blackguard,” he declared. He would have fired, too, if Geraldine hadn’t suddenly stumbled into his line of fire.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, clearly outraged, “Why are you threatening my boyfriend?”

“Your what?”

“My boyfriend,” Geraldine repeated, “This New Plutonian here is my boyfriend.”

As if to prove her point, she reached for the creature’s tentacle and patted it gently with her slender hands.

“Eeooouuh,” the monster moaned, seemingly pleased.

“This… this thing is your boyfriend?” Crash exclaimed.

“Yes, he’s my boyfriend,” Geraldine repeated for the third time, “His name is Eee’chuk-chi’up and he’s not a thing.”

“But…”

Geraldine sighed. “Yes, I know he doesn’t talk much and what little he says I don’t understand. But he’s a rocket in bed, if you know what I mean?”

She winked at Crash, while still stroking the monster’s appendage.

“I mean, can you imagine how much pleasure all those tentacles and suckers can bring a woman?”

Crash couldn’t imagine and he didn’t want to either.

“But I… I thought you were in danger,” he stammered.

“Well, I’m not,” Geraldine said, pouting her pretty lips, “And now be a good boy and scoot. Patrol the perimeter or whatever it is that you guys do. Cause…”

She continued stroking Eee’chuk-chi’up, who moaned in pleasure and began wrapping his tentacles around Geraldine’s shapely body.

“…we’d like to be alone now, if you know what I mean?”

***

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

Send to Kindle

Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for February 2020

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

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

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have epic fantasy, urban fantasy, historical fantasy, gaslamp fantasy, YA fantasy, paranormal mysteries, paranormal thrillers, paranormal romance, fantasy romance, science fantasy, fantasy romance, space opera, military science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, dystopian fiction, Steampunk, vampires, werewolves, demons, dragons, telepaths, hell escapees, immortals, crime-busting witches, murderous chefs, magical assassins, fairy godmothers, intergalactic prospectors, dying worlds, clockwork magicians, paladins and much more.

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

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

And now on to the books without further ado:

The Imposter’s Inheritance by C.J. Archer:

A sordid scandal rocks the Glass household and threatens to ruin Matt’s family unless he can suppress it. But after word gets out, and a rare magical coronet is stolen, he and India find themselves scrambling to recover the heirloom and suppress the gossip before reputations are ruined.

To make matters worse, someone is sending threatening letters to the magicians of London, stirring up trouble between the artless and magicians. Tensions are rising, but India and Matt choose not to investigate – until the author of the letters is assaulted.

As if they don’t have enough on their plate, Willie is jailed. The reason for her arrest is…complicated.

Dinner With a Demon: It’s Valentine’s Day After All by Iokasti Argiriou

Apparently it’s Valentine’s day. A day dedicated to love? What in Aphrodite’s name is happening?

Anath – or Leda to Persa as she always refuses to call her by her demonic name – approaches Persa after all this time and she chooses this specific day. Is it a coinsidence? And then, out of the blue, the strangest thing happens. She asks Persa out on a date. A real date.

Ok, it was Persa’s suggestion, actually, but she never thought that Leda would go along with it. Now Persa cannot bow out and…she really hopes that this Valentine dude knows what he’s doing. Please, don’t let him be a sham!

Bérénice Jacquette, Part 1 by S. Ann Austin:

The Past:

She was taken from a rundown farmhouse and brought to an isolated cabin. The sounds of a little girl crying echoes across the bayou. No one can hear her. No one will rescue her.

The Present:

Twenty-seven-year-old Bérénice Jacquette survived a horrific childhood in the swamplands of Louisiana only to wind up trapped in a bitter, loveless marriage. In spite of a traumatic past still haunting her, she is determined to find her independence. Harboring ambitions to be a successful author, she attempts to pen a work of fiction.

The chef of a popular restaurant in New Orleans, she believes no one suspects her of committing murder through the use of black magic while writing a realistic crime novel.

When a handsome and charismatic homicide detective named Gary Northcutt steps into her life she doesn’t wonder if he knows her secrets. She thinks only about how he can be useful to her.

Half-Born by Ivy Baum:

She never wanted magic. But to survive, she’s going to need it.

Kes Adler had the perfect life—until her father disappeared. Now she’s a pariah at school and strange visions make her question her sanity. Life can’t get any worse, right?

Wrong.

The night she accepts a ride home from the mysterious Sol Kyrion, she learns there’s another world out there. A world of magic—and danger.

Marked for Death…

The good news is that Kes isn’t crazy. She’s descended from an ancient, powerful race…and her magic is finally waking up.

But as a half-blood, Kes is marked for death. Her pureblood relatives know she’s out there, and they’ll stop at nothing to hunt her down.

Now she’s on the run with Sol—a half-blood who’s sarcastic, infuriating, and determined to save her life. But the magical world is changing, and pureblood hunters aren’t the only danger out there.

Soon there will be no place on earth that’s safe for half-bloods…

Better off Dead by Odette C. Bell:

Death comes to all – or at least, that’s the promise.

Eve’s got a problem – a big one. She can’t die. She’s cursed to be resurrected, no matter what happens. You’d think that’d be a blessing. You’d be dead wrong. One of the most powerful – and handsome – generals of Hell has promised to kill her once and for all. He’s left her alone for a decade, but now he’s back.

When Eve is dragged into a shady mission, she doesn’t realize he’s at its heart. It’s going to take her a lot longer – and a lot of blood and tears – to realize he’s always been in her heart, anyway.

Ascendant by Richard Denoncourt:

What if a mind could be a weapon of mass destruction…and it belonged to a teenager?

When Michael Cairne discovers he is telepathic, a single mistake causes a corrupt police force to descend on him. His family murdered in the ensuing battle, he manages to escape by joining a group of rebels who claim to know why his psychic power is so sought after…and so dangerous.

Having reached a safe haven in the post-apocalyptic ruins of what used to be a Colorado mountain town, Michael meets other gifted teens and learns of the top-secret military experiment that created them. But Michael is different—one of a kind. Known as an “Ascendant,” his gift is coveted by a cruel dictator, who intends to win a war by genetically engineering child soldiers that can kill with a single thought.

Surrounded by many who fear and hate him—and hunted by a psychic assassin with a devastating weapon in his arsenal—Michael does what he can to survive and train. But he soon discovers his worst enemy is himself. As his power grows fiercer and more unstable, so does something else: the desire to see the world changed, even if it means tearing it apart at the seams.

Sinister Magic by Lindsay Buroker:

I’m Val Thorvald, and I’m an assassin.

When magical bad guys hurt people, I take care of them. Permanently.

This doesn’t make me popular with the rest of the magical community—as you can tell from the numerous break-ins and assassination attempts I’ve endured over the years. But thanks to my half-elven blood, a powerful sword named Chopper, and a telepathic tiger with an attitude, I’ve always been able to handle my problems with aplomb. Maybe some cursing and swearing, too, but definitely aplomb.

That changes when my boss is afflicted with a mysterious disease, a government agent starts investigating me, and a godforsaken dragon shows up in the middle of my latest job.

I’ve taken down vampires, zombies, and ogres, but dragons are way, way more powerful. And it doesn’t look like this one is going to like me.

Worse than that, he wants to use his magic to compel me to do his bidding, as if I’m some weak-minded minion.

That’s not going to happen. I’d die before being some dragon’s slave.

But if I can’t figure out a way to avoid him, save my boss, and get rid of the government spook, I’m screwed. Or dead. Or screwed and dead. And that’s never comfortable.

Lucidium Run by M.D. Cooper:

Without Lucidium, galactic civilization will fall…

For centuries, the Central Systems have dominated the galaxy, maintaining their rule through control of the essential ore: Lucidium. But after millennia of exploitation, supplies of the mineral are running dangerously low.

Samara, captain of the Heron’s Flight, has joined a group of prospectors who are taking advantage of a government bounty on the discovery of new Ludicium deposits. The reward for success is staggering, but so are the risks.

Cypris is a world on the fringe of Central Systems control, known for its lush natural habitats and simple way of life; a resort world where the people welcome a small trickle of visitors every year.

All that changes when the prospectors arrive and find Lucidium in the Corralas Mountains. The deposits are rich enough to make them wealthy beyond imagining—at the expense of Cyrpis and its people.

Now Samara has a choice. She can risk everything to aid the people of Cypris or to do what she must, honoring her contract and keeping her ship and crew safe. No matter the choice she makes, a world hangs in the balance.

Love Potion Sold Seperately by Nicole DragonBeck:

Maggie Baker can’t think of anyone to ask to wear her corsage at this year’s First Days Celebration. After a visit from her fairy godmother, Maggie concocts her own Prince Charming, but when Charle arrives, things get more complicated than she bargained for.

 

 

 

Dying World by Chris Fox:

Our world is tumbling into the sun

The quakes have leveled cities. Soon the continents themselves will break apart. The ships are gone. There’s no way off. But I’m not giving up. I’m a Relic Hunter…an archeologist with a gun, and I have a plan.

Our people arrived on Kemet thousands of years ago in the wake of a terrible space battle. The Great Ships are still up there, ancient derelict hulks powered by a combination of technology and magic, created by gods we no longer remember or understand.

If I can get one of those ships active, maybe I can save myself. Maybe I can save everyone.

Clockwork Magician by W.R. Gingell:

Peter has lived most of his life in the assurance of two comfortable convictions. One, that he is always the cleverest person in the room; and two, that when it comes to magic, he does not make mistakes.

His ability to make—or keep!—friends has been less successful, and despite the fact that Peter enters the University of Mechanics as the youngest student in all of his classes, the disquieting conclusion that he might not always be the cleverest person in the room slowly begins to creep over him.

When he tries to impress his classmate, Miss Stoneflange, with his latest time-altering device, things go disastrously wrong.

Now, Peter has a new conviction: namely, that whenever Miss Stoneflange is involved, something will inevitably go wrong. Worse, it doesn’t seem possible for him to stop making mistakes around her.

Peter will need to decide who is the biggest threat to the timely continuation of the Two Monarchies: Miss Stoneflange and her ability to set things wrong, or himself and his own rash determination to be always right…

Birth of the Colossus by Nicole Grotepas:

In the absence of the Heart, a new power rises.

Holly Drake knew that her victory would be short-lived. Things never felt right after what happened. It was too little. Too much. A contradiction of all the emotions that the revelations shook up in her.

If things can get worse. They will.

She’s learned that much. Without her crew watching her back, she’d be lost. No. That’s not true. She’s strong and tough. As a new power rises and pecks at the fringes of her peace, she’s got nothing to fear.

Whatever comes, she’ll face it. And take it out.

The 6 Moons crew witnesses the birth of a new monster. A new beast. The threat is more than anything they could have imagined. If they don’t take it out, the colossus that forms from the skeletal remains of what once was will be more brutal and dangerous than even they could have known.

Boot Scootin’ Boogeyman by Lily Harper Hart:

Hannah Hickok didn’t know she was a witch but now that she’s embracing her destiny, she can’t wait to learn about magic. Given the trouble that seems to find Casper Creek on a regular basis, that’s probably a good thing.

Cooper Wyatt is enjoying watching Hannah open up and learn about herself. He’s there to lend a helping hand but also eager for her to strike out on her own … until the unthinkable happens. On their first official date, Cooper and Hannah bear witness to a horrifying scene. A local woman, who had gone missing days before, jumps off a downtown building and kills herself. The question is: Why?

There’s more than one missing woman, magic sparking at every turn, and a monster on the hunt. It’s up to Hannah, Cooper, and the rest of their friends to discover exactly what’s going on … and figure out how to solve the problem. That’s easier said than done, though.

Casper Creek’s magic runs deep and Hannah is going to have to tap into it if she expects to keep her friends safe.

She’s up to the challenge.

At least she hopes she is.

Things are about to get messy as the Wild West gets wickeder and wickeder.

Toskaheart by Alia Hess:

Is happiness worth the risk when your life is the wager?

In the depressing gray landscape of 2170 Moscow, Sasha Roborovskiy is fighting to make something of his life. Alcoholism, government-mandated medication, and a dead-end job create impossible hurdles, pushing Sasha into a daily routine of isolation, fatigue, and confusion. He dreams of a place free from the crushing thumb of Russia—blue skies, open roads, and a clear mind.

When a bizarre website on the darknet offers him a chance at a new life with a research team in America, it seems too good to be true. But no one has set foot in the Americas in over a hundred and fifty years, after a devastating virus wiped out much of the continent. Even if the stories of monsters and roving gangs aren’t real, the risk of contracting the virus is, and the experimental vaccine needed to live there doesn’t always work.

Freedom and a fresh start are just what Sasha needs, because he can’t survive his life of oppression much longer. But taking the trip to uncharted America is permanent—and fatal if the vaccine fails.

Continuum by G.S. Jennsen:

Humanity has seized its destiny among the stars. But space remains vast and untamed, and nothing has prepared us to face the dangers rising from the deep shadows of the void.

Fourteen years after The Displacement flung humanity into a universe teeming with alien life, a tenuous alliance has taken root among humans, Anadens, and numerous other species. The wounds of war and revolution have begun to heal, peace and prosperity are within reach, and the architects of The Displacement, Alex Solovy and Caleb Marano, are enjoying an idyllic existence on the living planet of Akeso.

But growing troubles fester beneath the surface of this alliance. An upstart species offers allegiance with one hand but readies weapons of mass destruction with the other, while the Anadens, leaderless and adrift for years, increasingly refuse to play by humanity’s rules.

As tensions simmer, Nika Kirumase, leader of the Asterions—a splinter group of former Anadens thought aeons dead—arrives bearing a warning of a terrifying enemy advancing across the void. Known as the Rasu, the powerful race of shapeshifting metal has already killed tens of thousands of Asterions in its quest to control all of known space.

Nika’s people have struck a blow against the Rasu, and now they race against time to prepare for the coming reprisal. An alliance with humanity stands to give them a fighting chance against their enemy. But for humanity, such an alliance may cost them everything, pushing the fragile peace they fought so hard to achieve to the breaking point and beyond.

*

In Amaranthe, where exotic alien life, AIs, wormholes, indestructible starships and the promise of immortality rule the day, no feat seems out of reach for humanity. But when the worlds of Aurora Rhapsody and Asterion Noir collide and the Rasu horde descends upon them both, more will be asked of heroes past and future. More will be given and more taken, and when the dust settles the very fabric of Amaranthe will be changed forever.

Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher:

Stephen’s god died on the longest day of the year…

Three years later, Stephen is a broken paladin, living only for the chance to be useful before he dies. But all that changes when he encounters a fugitive named Grace in an alley and witnesses an assassination attempt gone wrong. Now the pair must navigate a web of treachery, beset on all sides by spies and poisoners, while a cryptic killer stalks one step behind…

From the Hugo and Nebula Award winning author of Swordheart and The Twisted Ones comes a saga of murder, magic, and love on the far side of despair.

Freaky Fangs by Amanda M. Lee:

Mystic Caravan Circus is in flux. Things are shifting in the organization, new faces are joining the fray, and manager Poet Parker isn’t certain how to deal with it. Unfortunately for her, she doesn’t have time to figure it out.

Kentucky is on the horizon, and a roadside accident that claims a family has caught Poet’s attention. She’s haunted by what she sees … and dreams that show her nothing but snapping teeth and flowing blood.

They’ve been to the area before – Mammoth Caves is a big draw – but something appears to be amiss. It isn’t long until Poet realizes exactly what that something is … vampires. They’re nesting and taking over the entire town.

Vampires are nothing new when fighting monsters with a paranormal circus. These vampires, however, are different. They’re stronger … and faster … and deadlier. In fact, they’re something older and more ruthless, and Poet has no idea how to take on this new enemy.

When the vampires come for one of Mystic Caravan’s own, the time for debate is over. They live as a family. They’ll die as one, too, if need be.

Poet has fought wars before but this one is going to get bloody. It’s going to take everyone working together to overcome this enemy. Even then nothing is guaranteed.

To Hell and Back by Raquel Lyon:

My name is Conner Lovell: werewolf and Hell escapee.

I wish I could say that meant I had my life back, but it would be a lie. Word got out about my return and the supernatural hierarchy weren’t best pleased.

Now I’m stuck killing demons to pay off a debt I didn’t even know I owed, alongside the one person I’d hoped to forget.

Oh, and to top it all off, turns out I’ve got a serial killer on my tail.

Yeah, my life’s a whole lot like Hell.

Skyborn: Ignite by Hannah Parker:

Ever since her village burned, Alina has been afraid of fire. But when she discovers a mysterious gem inside dying embers, she becomes enthralled by the strange object. Where did it come from? Who left it there? And why, just for a moment, did she forget her fear?

When an army of marauders attacks her new home, intent on finding the stone and destroying all who stand in their way, Alina soon finds herself thrown into a world of danger and uncertainty.

Determined to keep the stone from the army, and with nobody but her friends at her side, she must travel to the Ethereal Realm to uncover the origins of the gem – and with it, the truth about herself.

Forced to face her fears, and the only one who can hope to stop the army’s rampage, will Alina be able to harness the power of the stone? Or will her new life burn just like her village?

A Wing and a Prayer by Christine Pope:

His life has gone to hell. Now his heart is about to go to the dogs.

Beelzebub has the perfect job: manager-in-chief of Hell…until the number of condemned souls nosedives, and God slaps an “Out of Business” sign on the Fiery Gates. Now Beelzebub is just a laid-off demon banished to live out a mortal life in his idea of perdition: Los Angeles. Complete with nosy neighbors and a yappy, pint-sized dog that won’t stay off his lawn.

Jillian Torres is finally free of one hellish relationship and has no interest in going down that road again. So what if her best friend reports that their new neighbor is super-smoking-hot? Jillian’s hands are too full running a Chihuahua rescue to notice or care…until Rufus, one of her escape-artist rescue dogs, makes a beeline for the man’s yard.

Three things hit her immediately when she meets Benjamin Blake. He’s definitely super-hot. His grumpy attitude doesn’t quite hide the sadness in his smoky hazel eyes. And Rufus adores him. Thus begins Jillian’s subversive quest to win Ben’s heart — for Rufus. But along the way, Ben and Jillian find everything they never thought they wanted.

Judgment of Honor by Joyce Reynolds-Ward:

THE STAGE IS SET…LET THE GAMES BEGIN!

After defeating Waykemin’s Witches Council, Katerin Leader and Rekaré Kinslayer face new challenges. Waykemin’s overseas ally, Chatain, Emperor of Daran, has abducted Katerin’s daughter Witmara. A new threat arises from the East which requires Katerin’s attention, so it falls to Rekaré to aid Witmara—which supports Rekaré’s vow for vengeance upon Chatain.

Meanwhile, Chatain’s estranged half-sister Betsona aids Witmara’s escape, and encourages her to overthrow Chatain. When Rekaré arrives in Daran, Betsona helps her. But does Betsona intend to use Rekaré and Witmara to become Empress?

At the same time, the rift between the Seven Crowned Gods splinters beyond recovery. How do the actions of Rekaré, Katerin, and Witmara play into the war between the Gods?

Battles at the Nerean Gate and the Spring Festival in Daran decide the fates of Gods and humans…and things will never be the same.

Auxiliary’s Revenge by Jeff Tanyard:

Jerry Harper is back home, recovering from his injuries. It won’t be for long. He’s a strategic asset now, and the government is eager to send him back into action. They want to protect him better on his next war patrol, so he’s assigned to a new station: the Agrarian Commonwealth’s new battleship. He and the fleet soon jump out and begin their mission.

While in space, horrifying news arrives. The Reliants have invented a doomsday weapon, a virus that targets the Agrarian genetic code. They begin deploying it, and Agrarians are killed by the billions. Jerry is tasked with using his electrokinesis to find the virus’s production facility so that a coordinated attack can be made. It might be the only chance the Commonwealth gets before the galaxy’s Agrarians are exterminated.

Jerry’s health is in rapid decline due to his electrokinesis. He can’t afford to push himself. But a Rifleman does his duty, even if it kills him.

The Quantum Well by James David Victor:

When your enemy has a bigger gun than you do, your only choice is to find new allies. Even if that means going somewhere you didn’t even know existed.

The Eternal Empress has unleashed the full might of her planet-destroying weapon. When Anders, Dalia, and their friends flee the destruction, they find themselves in the furthest reaches of the galaxy, in place known only in legend. Can they escape and find a place thought lost in history? If not, humanity may be doomed.

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

Age of Deception by T.A. White:

War hero and daughter to two Houses, Kira is just beginning to learn how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Agreeing to accompany her father’s people back to their homeworld, Kira Forrest prepares for the fight of her life. She’s agreed to undertake the Trial of the Broken, a rite of passage every member of her father’s House must pass. It offers a path to independence and freedom that is too tempting to deny.

Not everyone welcomes this lost daughter of Roake. There are those who fear what her presence might bring to light. Betrayal stalks the halls of Kira’s birthplace—its roots embedded deep in the events that claimed her parent’s lives and set her on her current path.

Walking the wire’s edge between truth and deception will test the person Kira has become as she separates ally from betrayer. An old enemy has put into motion a plan that could topple the balance of power in the universe. Letting them succeed spells doom—but the price might be more than Kira is willing to pay.

Send to Kindle

Retro Review: “Highwayman of the Void” by Dirk Wylie a.k.a. Frederik Pohl

[image error]“Highwayman of the Void” by Dirk Wylie is a space opera novelette, which appeared in the fall 1944 issue of Planet Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Regarding the author, Dirk Wylie was the name adopted by Joseph Harold “Harry” Dockweiler, a member of the Futurians and frequent collaborator with Frederik Pohl in the 1940s. However, Frederik Pohl subsequently stated that he wrote “Highwayman of the Void” alone and submitted under Wylie’s name. So I will refer only to Pohl as the author from this point.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

“Highwayman of the Void” has an absolute killer of a first paragraph:

Steve Nolan was three years dead, pyro-burned in the black space off Luna when a prison break failed. But Nolan had a job to do. Nolan came back.

After this promising start, we follow the undead Steve Nolan across the icy surface of Pluto towards a domed city called Port Avalon. Gradually, we learn that Nolan was once a reporter for the Interplanetary Telenews Company. Now, he’ s looking for revenge on his sworn enemy Alan Woller, his former boss and the man who framed him for treason for supposedly collaborating with a terrorist group called the Junta. Woller’s lies got Nolan a life sentence on Luna. Nolan managed to escape and nearly died. And because he was presumed dead, he decided not to correct the error. But as a result he can never return to the inner worlds. And now Woller is on Pluto, heading a shipping company. Nolan will make sure that he pays for his crimes.

Nolan still has fifteen miles to trudge across Pluto, when he gets lucky and a skid breaks down right in front of him. Nolan forces his way into the skid and persuades the pilot, a young woman, to give him a lift to Port Avalon. In return, he’ll fix the broken skid. The young woman agrees, not that Nolan gives her much of a choice. After an encounter with some local fauna – a giant crab-like critter – Nolan and the young woman reach the city. The young woman – neither we nor Nolan learn her name at this point, with good reason – is quite taken with Nolan and offers to buy him dinner, which is remarkably progressive by 1940s standards. However, Nolan rebuffs her. He has other things on his mind.

He heads to a disreputable bar (are there any other bars in space opera?) named The Golden Ray, where he meets with an old acquaintance, a gambler named Petersen who rescued Nolan after his nigh-fatal prison break and is the only one who knows Nolan’s true identity. Petersen warns Nolan not to go after Woller, because Woller is even more influential than he used to be. But Nolan is determined. He will see Woller dead.

So Nolan sneaks into Woller’s hotel, into what he believes is Woller’s bedroom, only to get the surprise of his life, when he finds not Woller, but the young woman who’d given him a lift, in the bed. “Where is Woller?” Nolan demands, but the young woman refuses to answer. The encounter ends with Nolan retreating, because he can’t bring himself to shoot an innocent woman, even if she is Woller’s mistress, whereupon the woman raises the alarm and the guards come running.

Nolan braces himself for a shoot-out. But suddenly, alarms go off all over Port Avalon. The dome that protects the city against the harsh environment of Pluto has cracked and is rapidly losing air. Soon, everybody in Port Avalon will be dead.

Nolan knows that he should use the chaos to escape, but instead he goes back into the hotel room and tells the young woman to put on a spacesuit (though Pohl calls them heatsuits). Then he flees, desperate to find a spacesuit for himself. But just outside the hotel, he is intercepted by Petersen, who triggered the dome breach alarm to give Nolan to chance to escape the guards. Petersen also informs Nolan that Woller was called away to Mars in a hurry and that his ship will be leaving in the morning.

Nolan tries to bribe his way aboard Woller’s ship. When that doesn’t work, he just forces his way aboard and hijacks the ship. But when Nolan finally comes face to face with Woller, he doesn’t kill his sworn enemy. Instead, he wants Woller to confess and clear Nolan’s name. But before it come to that, the captain – who is a black man, by the way – and the crew overpower Nolan and lock him up.

When the ship lands, Nolan causes an explosion and escapes in the confusion. He also realises that the ship never travelled to Mars at all. Instead, it just landed in another part of Pluto. Nolan is quickly recaptured – there are a lot of escapes and recaptures in this story. Woller, who was wounded in the explosion Nolan caused, very much wants to kill him. However, first he has other business to attend to and so, in the manner of careless villains everywhere, exposes his grand plan.

Turns out that Woller is the one who is collaborating with the Junta to build a fleet of warships in a secluded part of Pluto. When intrepid reporter Nolan accidentally stumbled upon Woller’s schemes, Woller framed him to get rid of him. Nolan also learns that Woller is not actually the head of the Junta. A man in a mirrored helmet everybody only calls Chief is.

The Chief is not at all pleased to see Nolan and orders one of the others to give him a gun. But once he has it, the Chief aims his gun at his co-conspirators and tells Nolan to disarm them. For the man behind the Chief’s mirrored helmet is not the man the Junta were expecting. But that’s a risk that all villains who hide their identity behind a mask run and in fact I am surprised that it doesn’t happen more often. The fake Chief tells Nolan to put on a spacesuit and blows a hole into the side of Woller’s hideout. The explosion and the loss of air kill many of the conspirators. Nolan and the false Chief flee through the hole and commandeer a skid.

Once aboard the skid, the fake Chief finally takes off his mirrored helmet and reveals none other than Nolan’s good friend Petersen underneath. Petersen finally comes clean and admits that he is no gambler at all, but an agent of the interplanetary police force known as Tri-planet Law. Tri-planet Law knew about Woller’s treachery all along and they also knew that Nolan was being framed. Nolan was never supposed to go to prison, instead he would have been questioned and given a new identity or taken into protective custody. But Nolan messed up that plan with his escape attempt. So Nolan was officially declared dead. Petersen was sent to rescue and befriend him to find out what Nolan knew.

When Nolan couldn’t be deterred from going after Woller, Petersen did his best to protect him, including disguising himself as the Chief to infiltrate the meeting of the Junta leaders.

Nolan insists that since the Junta leaders are all at Woller’s hideout, they must do something about it. Petersen says that’s already being taken care of. Together, he and Nolan watch as Tri-planet Law bombs Woller’s hideout, killing everybody inside and putting an end to the Junta

But there is one more revelation to come. For Petersen also tells Nolan that the young woman he met in Woller’s hotel room is not Woller’s mistress but his stepdaughter Ailse. Ailse found out what her stepfather was up to and was planning to confront him. Before Petersen could intervene, she vanished. Petersen fears she may have been at Woller’s hideout, when it was bombed.

Nolan is devastated, until he remembers a coffin-like box he saw aboard Woller’s ship, a so-called sleep box wherein human beings can be kept in suspended animation. And that same sleep box is now in the cargo hold of the skid Petersen and Nolan commandeered. So Nolan rushes to the hold to kiss Snow White – pardon, Ailse – awake.

[image error]“Highwayman of the Void” is a cracking good, action-packed space adventure, even if the title is misleading, because there is no highwayman anywhere in the story, unless Nolan sort of hijacking Ailse’s skid makes him a highwayman.

Action-packed space adventure is not really something I associate with Frederik Pohl. Nonetheless, his two pseudonymous stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project are just that. And in fact, Pohl’s pseudonymous contributions to Planet Stories feel very much as if Frederik Pohl was trying to channel Leigh Brackett.

The opening scenes of “Highwayman of the Void” with Nolan trecking across the icy wastes of Pluto and later walking the mean streets of Port Avalon sound very much like Brackett in her noir mode. And in fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised if “Highwayman of the Void” had turned out to be a forgotten golden age Leigh Brackett story. Though I suspect that Leigh Brackett would have given Ailse a more active role than spending the bulk of the story as Snow White in a sleep box.

The most notable difference between Leigh Brackett’s and Frederik Pohl’s takes on noir space opera is that in Pohl’s stories, representatives of the authorities are portrayed mostly positively. Petersen, the Tri-planet lawman posing as a gambler, is a good example. Meanwhile, Leigh Brackett has much less faith in the system. In her stories, interplanetary police officers mainly exist as a foil for the outlaw heroes, Lundy from “Terror Out of Space” and Simon Ashton from “Queen of the Martian Catacombs” and the Skaith trilogy being notable exceptions.

And even though Steve Nolan is a convict on the run with revenge on his mind, he is not a typical outlaw protagonist like the ones Leigh Brackett favoured. Instead, Nolan is the heroic journalist, a common character type in popular fiction during the 1930s and 1940s, who took on the wrong corrupt capitalist and was framed for a crime he did not commit. There are several crime movies of the 1930s with this very plot. One example that comes to mind is the 1939 prison drama Each Dawn I Die starring James Cagney. There were others as well. Indeed, it is often forgotten that golden age science fiction drew on influences from beyond the SFF genre spectrum, influences which are more difficult to detect today, because the tropes in question have often vanished.

“Highwayman of the Void” suffers a bit from what I call Van Vogt plotting, i.e. there is a random plot twist every 800 words or so. Though attributed to A.E. van Vogt, the frequent plot twists were a common technique in the pulp era. Lester Dent’s famous pulp fiction master plot, requires a plot twist every 1500 words, though Dent was better at pulp plotting than van Vogt (but then pretty much everybody was) and his plot twists usually make sense.

“Highwayman of the Void” has plenty of plot twists and several of them seem rather random at first glance. Our hero is trapped by the goons of the villain with no way out. Oh look, a handy dome breach alarm, quell coincidence. No wait, there is no dome breach – the hero’s pal has triggered the alarm to give our hero a chance to escape. And then our hero has been captured by the villains – again – and is only seconds from execution, when he is rescued by an unknown saviour wearing the mirrored helmet of the conspirators’ leader. What a coincidence – again. And then the unknown saviour is revealed to be the hero’s best pal – again. Hmm, that guy sure gets around and also knows a whole lot for a guy who gambles for a living in dingy spaceport bars. Oh, he’s really an undercover policeman – that explains a lot.

Pohl is already a skilled enough writer at this point of his career to come up with logical explanations for his seemingly random plot twists, though he isn’t yet skilled enough to avoid the pulp school of plotting with its random plot twists altogether. There also are some loose ends, for example the true identity of the Chief in the mirrored helmet is never revealed. That said, it is notable that Frederik Pohl was a better writer at this point of his career than his friend and near contemporary Isaac Asimov, though not yet as good as his other contemporary Ray Bradbury. Pohl is mostly remembered for his fandom activities during the 1940s, but he was already a good writer and editor at this time. Even if “Highwayman of the Void” and his other stories from this period have been reprinted only once in a collection fittingly entitled The Early Pohl.

Another problem with “Highwayman of the Void” is that there is too much plot for a novelette length story. Usually, golden age science fiction stories are exactly the right length for what the idea and plot will support. Occasionally, they are too long, padded out with technobabble and random plot twists. “Highwayman of the Void” is the rare example of a story from this era that I wish would have been longer. Because a novella or even novel-length story would have given Pohl the chance to flesh out the plot and the characters more.

After reading a lot of golden age science fiction stories in a row, including several from the more lurid end of the market such as Planet Stories, Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, I’ve noticed that many of those stories are set in the same consensus version of the solar system. In this pulp science fiction shared universe, Earth is the dominant force and the tri-planet configuration of Earth, Mars and Venus is the centre of civilisation. Sometimes, Mars and Venus have native humanoid populations, sometimes their populations are the human descendants of early colonists (see “Double-Cross”, also by Frederik Pohl). But whichever is the case, Martians and Venusians are usually considered primitive and not on the same level as Earth people. Mercury is inhabited, but a hell world. The rest of the solar system all the way to Pluto (which was still a planet) is inhabited as well, though anything beyond Mars is the wild frontier. Space cops patrol the space lanes.

Earth’s Moon serves a prison in this universe (and would still be portrayed as a prison world all the way to Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in 1966 and beyond – e.g. the Second Species Trilogy by Jane O’Neill features a prison on the Moon in a 21st century series) from which the protagonists either escape or try to prevent being sent there. I’ve never actually read a golden age story set in the prison on the moon (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress doesn’t count, since it’s a 1960s story), but the place sounds about as cheery as a Soviet gulag of the same period.

Science made this pulp science fiction shared universe obsolete in the 1960s, when space probes reached Mars, Venus, the Moon and later on the other planets of the solar system. But nonetheless, we can still see the influence of this pulp science fiction shared universe in contemporary science fiction. The Expanse is set in an updated version of the pulp science fiction shared universe. Earth and Mars are the human core worlds (and perpetually at loggerheads), though science has taken Venus and Mercury out of the game. Meanwhile, the belt and the moons of Jupiter are the wild frontier, populated by marginalised and exploited people and beset by space pirates, murderous capitalists, local revolutionaries and terrorists, space Mormons and fedora-wearing detectives who walk the mean streets of Ceres.

A far more common approach is just transposing the pulp science fiction shared universe to another solar system with more habitable worlds than our own or just the entire galaxy. How many space opera universes feature core of wealthy, high technology worlds (which we rarely visit, because the protagonists usually can’t show their faces there) and a galactic rim of much more primitive frontier worlds, which are often oppressed by the core worlds? It’s an extremely common set-up in space opera, used by Star Wars and Firefly among others. Even my In Love and War universe features a similar set-up. This trope is so common that we have almost forgotten where it came from.

“Highwayman of the Void” is a good example of a story set in the pulp science fiction shared universe of the golden age.  A fine noir space adventure that deserves more recognition than it got.

Send to Kindle

Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for February 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 speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some January 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, Victorian mysteries, Jazz Age mystries, holiday mysteries, paranormal mysteries, crime thrillers, psychological thrillers, paranormal thrillers, police procedurals, romantic suspense, amateur sleuths, police officers, ex-spies, serial killers, domestic abuse, suspicious suicides, crime-busting witches, crime-busting tour guides, murderous Valentines, crime and murder in London, Paris, New Orleans, Miami, Los Angeles, Indiana, Wisconsin, Warsaw 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:

Death by Baguette: A Valentine’s Day Murder in Paris by Jennifer S. Alderson:

Paris—the city of love, lights … and murder? Join tour guide Lana Hansen as she escorts five couples on an unforgettable Valentine-themed vacation to France! Unfortunately it will be the last trip for one passenger…

Lana Hansen’s future is looking bright. She has money in her bank account, a babysitter for her cat, and even a boyfriend. Regrettably she won’t get to celebrate Valentine’s Day with her new beau, Chad. Instead, she will be leading a lovers-only tour in France. Luckily for Lana, her best friend, Willow, and her partner, Jane, will be joining her.

Things go downhill when Lana’s new boyfriend shows up in Paris for her tour—with his wife. Chad is not the website developer he claimed to be, but a famous restaurant critic whose love of women rivals his passion for food.

After Chad drops dead during a picnic under the Eiffel Tower, a persistent French detective becomes convinced that he was poisoned. And the inspector’s sights are set on several members of the tour—including Lana!

While escorting her group through the cobblestone streets of Montmartre, the grand gardens of Versailles, and the historic Marché des Enfants Rouges market, Lana must figure out who really killed Chad before she has to say bonjour to prison and adieu to her freedom.

Introducing Lana Hansen, tour guide, reluctant amateur sleuth, and star of the Travel Can Be Murder Cozy Mystery Series. Join Lana as she leads tourists and readers to fascinating cities around the globe on intriguing adventures that, unfortunately for Lana, often turn deadly.

The Imposter’s Inheritance by C.J. Archer:

A sordid scandal rocks the Glass household and threatens to ruin Matt’s family unless he can suppress it. But after word gets out, and a rare magical coronet is stolen, he and India find themselves scrambling to recover the heirloom and suppress the gossip before reputations are ruined.

To make matters worse, someone is sending threatening letters to the magicians of London, stirring up trouble between the artless and magicians. Tensions are rising, but India and Matt choose not to investigate – until the author of the letters is assaulted.

As if they don’t have enough on their plate, Willie is jailed. The reason for her arrest is…complicated.

What Lies Beneath by David Archer:

Fresh out of high school and off to college, Cassie thought she had the world by its tail, and then she met Mike. Tall, handsome and a police detective to boot, he swept her off her feet and into a whirlwind relationship that led to an engagement ring.

But things aren’t always as they seem, and Cassie comes to discover that Mike has a dark side. When she learns just how dark it can be, she comes face-to-face with the greatest forward she could imagine, and it leaves her burned and scarred for the rest of her life.

Cassie isn’t one to wallow in misery. She takes her experiences and a degree in psychology and sets out to help other women avoid the kind of thing that happened to her, but then one of her clients comes to her in desperation. Her abusive husband has kidnapped her daughter, and it’s up to Cassie to find the girl before it’s too late.

Of course, then the only trick is how to survive.

Bérénice Jacquette, Part 1 by S. Ann Austin:

The Past:

She was taken from a rundown farmhouse and brought to an isolated cabin. The sounds of a little girl crying echoes across the bayou. No one can hear her. No one will rescue her.

The Present:

Twenty-seven-year-old Bérénice Jacquette survived a horrific childhood in the swamplands of Louisiana only to wind up trapped in a bitter, loveless marriage. In spite of a traumatic past still haunting her, she is determined to find her independence. Harboring ambitions to be a successful author, she attempts to pen a work of fiction.

The chef of a popular restaurant in New Orleans, she believes no one suspects her of committing murder through the use of black magic while writing a realistic crime novel.

When a handsome and charismatic homicide detective named Gary Northcutt steps into her life she doesn’t wonder if he knows her secrets. She thinks only about how he can be useful to her.

Murder by Candlelight by Blythe Baker:

A dramatic death…

When an evening’s entertainment unexpectedly turns into a night of death, Alice Beckingham must discover the motive behind a very public murder. But with hundreds of witnesses, narrowing down her suspects isn’t easy. Worse, her investigation makes Alice a target for a killer who doesn’t want to be caught.

With the always aloof Sherborne Sharp assisting, can Alice stay alive long enough to solve the puzzle? Or will the next curtain rise on yet another murder – her own?

Illusions of Warsaw by David Bradwell:

A suspicious suicide. A vengeful girl. Connecting the dots could send a group of friends to the morgue..…

Warsaw, 1997. Fugitive journalist Clare Woodbrook refuses to ignore a colleague’s questionable death. Teaming up with a fellow reporter, she uncovers a trail of corruption that could expose the killer. But when they get too close to the truth, they’re framed for a series of bloody crimes.

London. Secretive, bright-eyed Louise arrives on Anna Burgin’s doorstep, claiming to be Clare’s long-lost niece. But her true agenda is simple and deadly: revenge for her father’s murder. And her ill-conceived plan to infiltrate a crew of con artists puts both Anna and her in a vicious gangster’s crosshairs.

As Clare discovers shadowy links between Poland and Britain, she races against time to clear her name and reveal the culprit before more body bags fill. But with Louise and Anna caught up in the mess in England, it might be too late to save everyone…

Can the unlikely team catch a sinister mastermind before they’re ruthlessly erased?

Illusions of Warsaw is the sixth book in the twisty Anna Burgin mystery-thriller series. If you like fearless characters, Nineties nostalgia, and pulse-pounding suspense, then you’ll love David Bradwell’s breathless tale.

Mystery on Valentine’s Day by Beth Byers and Lee Strauss:

The worlds of Ginger Gold and Violet Carlyle collide in this fun Valentine Mystery short story by bestselling authors Lee Strauss and Beth Byers.

While both Ginger and Violet had plans for a romantic evening of dinner and dancing to celebrate Valentine’s Day with their husbands, something goes terribly awry. One by one, female patrons discover that they are missing jewelry.

In this closed room mystery filled with a brigade of colorful characters, Violet and Ginger join forces to put their skills of deduction to work. Can they unveil the culprit and solve the mystery in time for dessert?

Don’t miss this delectable bite-sized tale. Pairs perfectly with a box of chocolate and a comfy chair!

No Trivial Pursuit by John Ellsworth:

No Trivial Pursuit. Not When It’s Your Own Daughter Missing.

A front-page murder is assigned to LAPD Detective Harley Ellis and her partner. Hollywood studio head Ira Spielman has been murdered. His widow says he had no enemies. Except one, says Harley, and she must discover who that is and why. She knows he sometimes interviewed actresses alone in his Hollywood office. Harley wonders: did he make a wrong move? It’s not much, but it’s a starting point. She would know: her own daughter had a screen test with Spielman before he was killed.

Robbery-Homicide Division begins an investigation that obtains the name of Harley’s daughter. Is she a suspect? No, but she’s a person of interest. Charges get filed. The LAPD investigation is put beneath the microscope. Will Harley’s investigation of a totally different suspect be vindicated? The amazing conclusion to this thoughtful investigation culminates in a final chapter few will see coming.

Chow Down by Mike Faricy:

Life gets complicated!

Former cop, Dickie Mullins, owns the Emporium of Dance. A sleazy pick-up bar with lousy food and about to go broke.

Rae Nell, Dickie’s ex-wife, is having an affair with NFL washout, Terry Taggert.

Terry is starting a steak business. Delicious, unique steaks.

Rae Nell thinks it would be a good idea if Dickie improved his menu.

Meanwhile, Terry’s principal investor, ‘Dr.’ Craig Cullen wants out, NOW!

Terry has just the plan for the ‘Dr.’ Cullen.

The Heartless Valentine by Kacey Gene:

Roses are red; violets are blue

Is a lover from the dead here to kill you?

Valentine’s Day. 2020. Middlebridge, Wisconsin. When the quick-witted second grade teacher and amateur sleuth, Jennifer Hunter, receives a gift from a secret admirer on Valentine’s Day, she heartily investigates who her cupid could be. When she opens the box, though, she doesn’t find chocolates; she finds a human heart wrapped in red tissue paper.

And that’s not all. Her admirer has written a note confessing their desire to watch Jennifer die. That’s when Jennifer’s best friend and Middlebridge’s Police Lieutenant, Jake Hollow, steps in.

Jake and Jennifer put their dynamic duo focus on finding Jennifer’s deranged valentine, and that leads them to the recently deceased body of David Bird IV. He looks like an average dead guy except for one fact — his heart has been removed. Jennifer must investigate this heartless valencrime; otherwise, she fears she’ll be the next victim. Yet, her attempt to protect her own heart leads her to a set of love letters that tell the story of broken hearts from the past.

Valentine’s Day. 1910. Salem, Massachusetts. Clay Trunkett, a twenty year old hard-working journalist, is scheduled to hang for assaulting a man. His accuser? David Bird II, son of the wealthiest man in Salem. Clay’s true crime? Falling in love with Meghan White, the woman David has his heart set on marrying.

The love triangle of 1910 holds the clues Jennifer needs to find the heart snatcher of 2020, but with her own crazed valentine delivering threatening messages and bits of heart like they’re candy, Jennifer struggles to piece together this crime of passion from 1910.

And, Jennifer’s own passions get in the way when she discovers that her best friend, Jake, has a girlfriend — one that he’s been hiding from Jennifer for months. Betrayal runs high as masquerade parties, craft sales, murder mystery dinners, and a strange encounter at the local diner all distract Jennifer from her one mission: To find out who’s making her Valentine’s Day the most horrifyingly heart-filled in history. The problem is, Jennifer’s discoveries may end her friendship with Jake, and that’s a heartbreak she can’t take.

This clean cozy mystery will keep reader’s hearts pounding as they flip through love letters from the past and the alternating stories of Jennifer Hunter and Clay Trunkett. Jennifer’s down-to-earth and lovable personality plunges into new territory as she must assess her relationship with Jake and the type of love she wants in her life. She goes on crochet benders; she attends parties where she gets to be someone other than herself; and all the time she’s piecing together a crime that makes this Valentine’s Day anything but sweet.

Nest of Vipers by Natalie Hames:

Seeing is deceiving.

A layer of freezing fog hovered on the ground, nipping at Andrea Rossi’s ankles as she ran along the secluded trail in Kensington Gardens. It was no ordinary day. In a few hours time, she would be facing a prolific child killer in a legal battle that would change her career, forever. But Andrea would never see the inside of a courtroom, again. Nor would she reach the end of her favourite trail. A few more paces, and Andrea Rossi would be dead.

DI Dalton and DS Nash embark on an investigation to find the killer. They do not have to look very far before they come across Mark Templeton, a man with a history of violence and the father of a murdered child. He has motive and an insurmountable rage making him highly capable of carrying out the brutal slaying. Grace and Ryan proceed with caution and question him to find he has no sympathy for the young Barrister’s death. But as they gather more information, they unearth more suspects and more motives. Initially obvious theories become increasingly blurred as details of Andrea’s private life gradually unfold. Did Mark Templeton really kill her for defending his son’s killer, or are there far deeper and darker motives at play?

Boot Scootin’ Boogeyman by Lily Harper Hart:

Hannah Hickok didn’t know she was a witch but now that she’s embracing her destiny, she can’t wait to learn about magic. Given the trouble that seems to find Casper Creek on a regular basis, that’s probably a good thing.

Cooper Wyatt is enjoying watching Hannah open up and learn about herself. He’s there to lend a helping hand but also eager for her to strike out on her own … until the unthinkable happens. On their first official date, Cooper and Hannah bear witness to a horrifying scene. A local woman, who had gone missing days before, jumps off a downtown building and kills herself. The question is: Why?

There’s more than one missing woman, magic sparking at every turn, and a monster on the hunt. It’s up to Hannah, Cooper, and the rest of their friends to discover exactly what’s going on … and figure out how to solve the problem. That’s easier said than done, though.

Casper Creek’s magic runs deep and Hannah is going to have to tap into it if she expects to keep her friends safe.

She’s up to the challenge.

At least she hopes she is.

Things are about to get messy as the Wild West gets wickeder and wickeder.

Valentines & Victims by Donna Muse:

After being snowbound for much of the winter, amateur detective duo Geneva Pomolo and Iris Reeves are looking forward to a Valentine’s Day getaway with a few older friends at Bittersweet Lodge, a ski resort in the chilly foothills of southern Indiana. Both women are looking forward to a weekend of dance contests, luaus, roasted pigs, and toboggan scavenger hunts. Tensions mount when one of their friends comes down with a sudden illness. Geneva fears the worst: someone is poisoning the lodge’s guests.

The case takes a deadly swerve when Horace Weatherspoon—millionaire head of a railroad empire—dies in a toboggan accident. The old man had been deathly afraid of toboggans and Geneva knows there is malice at work: one of their fellow guests is a murderer. As Iris and Geneva begin to investigate, they uncover a trail of secrets leading back more than thirty years, and one person will kill again to keep those secrets buried.

Be My Valencrime by Amy M. Reade:

It’s Valentine’s Day in Juniper Junction and love is in the air. Or is that just a dark cloud?

Lilly’s shop assistant, Harry, is about to pop the question to his girlfriend, Alice Davenport. He’s got the ring, he’s planned a romantic dinner, and he’s even thought of a gracious escape if Alice says no.

The only thing missing is…Alice.

Lilly wants to do all she can to help find Alice, even if that means interfering with a police investigation. But as she begins to learn more about Harry’s sweet, unassuming girlfriend, she discovers that Alice is hiding a shocking secret that will complicate everything.

And when Lilly suffers a lapse in judgment, the consequences are swift and painful. Can she pull herself together enough to help her daughter through a tunnel of teenage angst, deal with her mother’s dementia-related wanderings, and still help Harry find his Happily Ever After?

The Girl in the Manor by A.J. Rivers:

The sound of a blood curdling scream echoed through the manor.

Her pleas ignored, her screams unheard. Tomorrow would not come for Everly Zara…

What does the death of a young child, and the sudden death of the girl in the manor have in common?

Was it simply just a coincidence, or is there something far more disturbing than anyone could ever imagine?

Everly Zara, a beautiful young woman, is found dead in the bedroom of the manor. The bedroom which she shares with her new fiancé.

She is naked and hanging. Her ankles are bound. There are words written on her body.

The news is shocking and disturbing to everyone who knows her.

Could Everly no longer bear the sadness and guilt of the little boy’s death, and killed herself to escape it?

But the heartbreaking death of a beautiful young woman accused of a horrible act may not be as straightforward as everyone thought.

The further Emma dives into the case, the more she realizes, everything is not as it seems.

As secrets from Everly’s past rise to the surface and the shocking nature of it discovered.

Emma must unravel the truth before she becomes a victim herself. In the close-knit town of Sherwood, something or someone is coming for Emma Griffin.

With her past constantly haunting her, and the disturbing nature of this mystery. Nothing is what it seems, yet everything feels so familiar. Emma is left to wonder if she is really losing her mind.

How deep down the rabbit hole will Emma go to find out the truth of her past?

How far will she go to find out the truth behind Everly Zara’s death?

One thing’s for certain, Emma’s entire world will be forever changed once the truth is revealed.

Run Girl Run by Willow Rose:

When a mother and her child are pulled out of the harbor in their car, the case seems pretty straightforward for Miami PD and Detective Harry Hunter.

Everything points to a murder-suicide.

They were homeless, living in their car, and the mother decided to end it all for them both by driving into the water.

But the case is not what it looks like, Detective Harry Hunter soon realizes.

Harry’s daughter is carrying devastating knowledge about their deaths, and soon she becomes the killer’s next target.

As Harry races to protect her, he is betrayed by someone he thought he knew, leaving him terrified of trusting anyone in a town filled with liars.

The Paladin by T.L. Schaefer:

Redemption. Love. Betrayal. An ancient evils stirs. Unleashing… The Paladin.

James Goltree put Mariposa in his rearview mirror five years ago, escaping a past and a family he’s desperately ashamed of. But now the Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent must return after the death of his grandfather. The grandfather he helped send to prison.

Emergency room LPN Madison Campbell’s quiet life is turned upside down when her son inherits enough money from James’ grandfather to settle all their financial woes. But there are strings.

James and Madison throw sparks neither has ever felt before. But now isn’t the right time for a man unwilling to commit and woman still crippled by betrayal to fall in love.

Not when a killer has once again come to town, one with an unfathomable, unbelievable agenda.

James and Madison must embrace and overcome their pasts to defeat evil and find a love that transcends time.

Murder on Fleet Street by Lee Strauss:

Murder’s a Deadly Secret!

Mrs. Ginger Reed—the former Lady Gold—thought her past was dead and buried, but when the mysterious death of a British secret service agent threatens to expose her own Great War secrets, she’s faced with an unimaginable dilemma: break her legal vow to the Official Secrets Act or join the agency again, something she’s loathe to do.

Because once they own your soul, there’s no getting it back.

Send to Kindle

Star Trek Picard does the “Stardust City Rag”

Welcome to my latest episode by episode review of Star Trek Picard. Previous installments may be found here.

This review is a bit later than usual, because I was tired and not feeling well and therefore didn’t get to watch “Stardust City Rag”, the latest episode of Star Trek Picard, until Saturday. Though the episode was worth the wait.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

“Stardust City Rag” follows the by now common pattern of Star Trek Picard and opens with a flashback to events 13 years prior. Though this flashback is much gorier than what I at least would expect from Star Trek, since it shows a young man in a Starfleet uniform getting his eyeball gouged out in close-up. The eyeball is attached to some kind of black cable – the young man is an ex-Borg.

The vivisectionists aren’t finished yet. They’re looking for further Borg components, because Borg tech is apparently valuable (also see the Romulans dismantling the dead Borg cube). But before they can finish, Seven of Nine storms in and shoots the vivisectionists. She rushes over to the young ex-Borg and cradles him in her arms. But it’s too late. He’s dying and in pain. So Seven finishes the job. “Good-bye, my child”, she says. Now we realise that the young ex-Borg is a character we’ve seen before, namely Icheb, one of the Borg children whom Voyager rescued towards the end of its run and whom Seven took under her wing.

Now it’s been ages since I watched Voyager and so I only had a vague memory along the lines of “Didn’t they rescue some Borg kids?” A bit of googling revealed that Icheb was the oldest of those Borg kids and the only one who stayed aboard Voyager, when it turned out that his parents had genetically engineered him as Borg bait. Icheb wanted to join Starfleet, which isn’t surprising considering that his entire life consisted of murderous parents on an agrarian world, being a Borg drone and then life aboard Voyager, which was the only time his life was ever remotely good. No wonder he wanted to join Starfleet and eventually did. Icheb is no longer played by the same actor who portrayed him in Star Trek Voyager BTW, because that actor has turned out to be something of a jerk.

As for why Icheb’s death hits Seven so hard – in fact, I think it’s the first time we’ve ever seen Seven cry – she was the primary caregiver for Icheb and the other Borg kids aboard Voyager. Also, it’s implied that Seven cannot have biological children due to her Borg implants, so Icheb was the closest thing to a child she’ll ever have. But the main purpose of the gorey opening scene (a lot gorier than anything in Star Trek and more along the lines of the grimdark new Battlestar Galactica and its ilk) is to show that Seven has changed a lot in the approx. twenty years since we last saw her.

This change is also visible in Seven’s appearance. Gone are the silver catsuit and the severe bun. Instead, she wears her hair open and is clad in jeans, a sweater (and what is it with the deliberately hadmade looking sweaters in Star Trek Picard anyway? Did the replicator finally figure out how to reproduce knitting?) and a really cool leather jacket. It’s also notable that unlike Icheb, Seven did not stay with Starfleet. And considering how xenophobic and isolationist the Federation and Starfleet have become, I wonder how voluntary that decision was. Chakotay, by the way, is nowhere in sight, which suggests that Seven’s relationship with Chakotay did not last. Which is not very surprising, considering how tagged on it always felt.

Instead of Starfleet, Seven is now with an outfit called the Fenris Rangers, a sort of freelance vigilante army who try to keep the peace in the former Neutral Zone, since Starfleet can’t be bothered. Picard disapproves, because even though he disagrees with Starfleet disengaging from everything (What precisely are Starfleet doing these days anyway? Analysing cosmic phenomena which will eat starships? Is there even still an actual Starfleet or is it just a bunch of admirals sitting around in San Francisco?), he also believes that taking the law into your own hands is wrong. Never mind that taking the law into his own hands and doing what Starfleet won’t do is exactly what Picard is doing. But then – much as I like him – Picard has always operated as if there is one set of rules for Jean-Luc Picard and one set of rules for everybody else.

“Stardust City Rag” is the first time Jean-Luc Picard and Seven of Nine meet face to face, at least on screen. They may have met in a tie-in novel or a comic or something along those lines, but if so I don’t knwo about it. Though of course, Picard and Seven know each other by reputation. And they briefly were part of the same Borg collective, back when Picard was Locutus. And indeed, Picard and Seven discuss their experiences as former Borg, when Seven asks Picard if he believes he got his humanity completely back when he was deborgified. Picard says no, but that he keeps hoping to regain more and more of it. Seven clearly feels the same, though it is notable how much more human this version of Seven of Nine seems compared to how she was portrayed in Voyager. And talking of Seven, it’s quite delightful how Rios (Rios Prime, not one of his holograms) fangirls her, just as he fangirled Picard earlier. At time, Rios almost strikes me as a stand-in for all the Star Trek fans in the audience, who can’t quite hide his awe at getting to meet so many legends of Starfleet (and based on the trailers, he’ll get to meet a few more).

After they rescued Seven from her exploding ship, the crew of the La Sirena proceed to a place called Freecloud, where Raffi has located Bruce Maddox. Freecloud is your typical neon-drenched cyberpunk city, a place which is pretty much a science fiction cliché by now, albeit a cool one, but that we’ve hardly ever seen on Star Trek for some reason. Indeed, it is notable that Star Trek Picard delves into a lot of stereotypical science fiction tropes (also see Chris Rios himself) that have appeared everywhere except Star Trek. Not everybody is happy with this, as for example this post by James Wallace Harris shows wherein he bemoans that Star Trek Picard does not contain enough science fictional ideas and too much character focus for his taste.

Unfortunately, Maddox is in dire straits. Not only did the Romulans destroy his lab, no, Maddox also trusted the wrong crimelord – a woman named Bjayzl (played by Necar Zadegan) who looks distractingly like a young and evil Deanna Troi – and finds himself drugged and offered for sale to the Romulans. Bruce Maddox, by the way, has also been recast, though not because the original actor is a known jerk, as with Icheb. According to Keith R.A. DeCandido, the original actor Brian Brophy is now director of a university theatre in California and still proud of his lone Star Trek appearance. Maybe there was a scheduling conflict. At any rate, Bruce Maddox is played by a different actor now who – as Camestros Felapton notes – looks uncannily like Jordan Peterson.

Raffi quickly figures all this out, once the La Sirena reaches Freecloud and everybody on board except for Seven and Elnor is inundated with hilarious targeted holo-ads. “Can’t we just outbid the Tal Shiar?” Captain Rios asks, whereupon Raffi replies that you don’t outbid the Tal Shiar. Seven, however, has an idea. For Bjayzl will sell Bruce Maddox to someone other than the Tal Shiar, provided you offer her something she really wants. Such as a former Borg who still has plenty of Borg hardware in her body. And as we know from the gory opening scene (and from Hugh’s comments two episodes before), there is a market for Borg tech ripped out of its former owners. And no, I have no idea what anybody wants Borg tech for either. That’s a question that Star Trek Picard really needs to answer.

And so the con is on. Rios poses as a so-called “facer”, a broker who brings the parties in deals of questionable legality together. Coincidentally, this destroys the theory that Rios might be a hologram himself, unless he has a mobile emitter like Voyager‘s Doctor. But even then, holograms don’t smell and don’t react to drugs. Seven is the captive/product to be sold. Picard is the seller, Elnor is his bodyguard, which causes some problems because, as we learned last week, Elnor was raised by an order of Romulan warrior nuns who always tell the truth, therefore he cannot lie or pretend to be something he’s not. “Then just be yourself. Be Elnor,” an exasperated Picard says. “Elnor who doesn’t talk,” Seven adds.

The con also involves Rios and Picard dressing up in seriously silly clothes. Rios gets a green sequined jacket, a matching fur coat and an orange hat with a feather, while Picard gets to dress like a pirate, complete with eyepatch and an outrageous French accent. Santiago Cabrera and Sir Patrick Stewart are clearly having a lot of fun hamming it up. The flashy clothes in the Stardust City scenes also hearken back to the very colourful look at the future that Star Trek has traditionally offered, from the original series all the way through Voyager. Star Trek Discovery and Picard both look positively murky by comparison.

Of course, the con doesn’t go nearly as smoothly as hoped. Rios does manage to pass a meeting with Bjayzl’s representative, a member of a reptilian species who can smell lies (as well as whom you had sex with and what you last ate) via getting shot up to his gills with drugs. However, the actual meeting with Bjayzl goes completely and utterly wrong, as soon as someone yanks the hood from Seven’s face. For it turns out that Bjayzl and Seven share a history, a history that’s not good. For apparently, Bjayzl worked with Seven in the Fenris Rangers before turning to crime – or maybe she was a criminal all along posing as a Ranger to get inside info. Of yes, and Seven blames Bjayzl for the death of Icheb and wants revenge.

Gavia Baker-Whitelaw believes that the scene implies that Seven and Bjayzl used to be lovers, which would certainly be cool, though I personally don’t see it. Okay, so Bjayzl calls Seven by her human name Annika, which implies a certain degree of familiarity. But then, Bjayzl is begging for her life in that scene, so appealing to Seven’s human side would be a good plan.

The meeting with Bjayzl and her henchpeople ends in a Mexican standoff type situation with everybody aiming phasers at everybody else. “Are we no longer pretending?” Elnor asks, after everybody has long blown their cover. “No, we’re not”, an exasperated Picard replies, whereupon Elnor proceeds to disarm Bjayzl’s henchpeople. By the way, have I mentioned that I love Elnor? True, he didn’t get much to do in what is only his second episode, but I love the juxtaposition between his childlike naivite and his lethal fighting skills.

Seven fully intends to shoot Bjayzl, but Picard talks her out of it – or so he thinks. Because even though Seven beams back to the La Sirena with the rest of the crew as well as Maddox, she later borrows two phasers from the La Sirena‘s stock – because the Rangers always need phasers, she tells Picard – and beams back down again to Freecloud and shoots Bjayzl as well as her henchpeople anyway. “But you… you promised…” Bjayzl stammers just before she is blasted to smithereens. “Picard is an old man”, Seven replies, “He needs some hope. I’m beyond that.”

And just in case Seven of Nine shooting an admittedly unpleasant villainess (though an attractive one) in cold blod wasn’t shocking enough for you, “Stardust City Rag” serves up yet another shocking death. For Bruce Maddox is badly wounded, when Picard and friends rescue him. He is taken to the sickbay of the La Sirena at once, where he tells Picard that he sent Soji (whom we don’t see in this episode. Ditto for Narek and Narissa) to “the artefact” a.k.a. the dead Borg cube in Romulan space.

Dr. Agnes Jurati – who, as we learned earlier, used to be in a relationship with Maddox, even though he is roughly twice her age – shoos Picard away, because Maddox needs medical attention. Once Agnes is alone with Maddox, he tenderly calls her Aggie and asks her if she met Dahj and if she has seen how wonderful Dahj is. Agnes is crying the whole time, which doesn’t alarm neither Maddox nor anybody else, because Agnes has been a bundle of nerves throughout the episode to the point that she was barely able to operate the transporter. But then, Agnes keeps telling Maddox over and over again how sorry she is, but if he only knew what she knew, as medical alarms go off and the emergency medical hologram is triggered. Agnes switches off the emergency medical hologram, as Maddox finally catches on that something is dreadfully, seriously wrong. But it’s too late, because Agnes kills him.

Of course, it always did seem mightily convenient that Agnes showed up at Chateau Picard just in time to shoot a Zhat Vash agent. And then there was Agnes’ meeting with Commodore Oh, the high-ranking Starfleet officer who is a Romulan Zhat Vash agent pretending to be Vulcan. A meeting which we didn’t see and for which we only have Agnes’ word regarding what occurred. However, Agnes was obviously lying and Commodore Oh seems to have convinced her with her whole “Dahj and Soji are the Destroyer and will bring about the destruction of the whole universe, because an ancient Romulan legend says so” shtick. Which is surprising enough in itself, because Agnes Jurati is a scientist after all and therefore I’d assume that she wouldn’t just accept some shaggy dog story about killer androids destroying the universe without at least questioning the whole thing.

Furthermore, how exactly does Agnes expect to get away with murdering Bruce Maddox? Okay, so Maddox was grieveously wounded, so his death may not be questioned at first. But Rios’ emergency medical hologram must keep logs and sooner or later someone will review those logs. Rios or more likely Raffi. Never mind that Agnes is about as bad at lying as Elnor, so she really doesn’t stand a chance.

Keith R.A. DeCandido believes that Agnes is irredeemable, because she murdered an injured man. I certainly don’t much like her either after this, but I also don’t exactly mourn Bruce Maddox either. For starters, Bruce Maddox is the guy who wanted to disassemble and dissect Data in “Measure of a Man”, which Camestros Felapton just revisited here. Yes, he apparently learned better later on, but how trustworthy was Bruce really? Not to mention that we never really got any sense of who Bruce Maddox was as a person beyond the jerk who wanted to dissect Data. In one of my Star Trek Discovery reviews, I wrote that Captain Christopher Pike used to be the answer to a trivia question, but that season 2 of Star Trek Discovery turned him into a character. Bruce Maddox used to be the answer to a trivia question as well (and one I for one couldn’t have answered without googling), but Star Trek Picard turned him into a plot coupon. All Bruce Maddox gets to do in this episode is drop a hint regarding the next destination and then croak. Maybe that’s why the original actor did not come back, because he didn’t want to be a plot coupon.

As if the episode wasn’t yet packed with enough drama, shock and emotion, Raffi Musiker gets an emotional subplot of her own. After all, Raffi had repeatedly announced that she was only travelling with the La Sirena to Freecloud, where she’d part ways with Picard, Rios and the rest. And once the ship finally reaches Freecloud, we learn just why Raffi wanted to go there. Because on Freecloud, we see a nervous Raffi stepping into what looks like a seriously dodgy fertility clinic. I probably wasn’t the only one who thought, “Uhm, even with 25th century medical technology, aren’t you a little old for that?” But while Raffi is there for a child, she’s not looking to have a baby. Instead, Raffi is looking for her estranged adult son Gabriel, who is less than pleased to see her, because after Starfleet fired her, Raffi apparently drowned her sorrows in drugs and conspiracy theories, neglecting her partner and son. Raffi insists that she has changed, but Gabriel doesn’t believe her and seemingly gets proof, when Raffi snaps at him that “it’s not a conspiracy theory”. As for what Gabriel is doing at a fertility clinic, towards the end of that brief scene we get to meet his pregnant Romulan partner Pel. Did Gabriel enter into a relationship with a Romulan to piss off his mother? It’s possible, though Raffi does not hate ordinary Romulans, e.g. she seems to have no problem with Elnor, just the Tal Shiar and Zhat Vash. And why do Gabriel and Pel need a fertility clinic, when we know that humans and Vulcans can reproduce without any issues, as the existence of Spock attests, and that Romulans are genetically identical to Vulcans?

It’s an emotional scene and gives Michelle Hurd a chance to show off her acting skills, something which the various wife, boss and mother roles in which I’ve previously seen her, didn’t. Though it’s notable that she still gets to play someone’s mother. But apart from giving Raffi something to do, what precisely was the purpose of that scene? To show us that Raffi is a mess? Sorry, but that was pretty obvious already. Though the revelation that Raffi had a husband/partner and a kid does nix my suspicions that she used to have an affair with Picard. Unless she did, which would give Gabriel and Raffi’s unseen husband/partner even more reason to be furious at her.

As always with Star Trek Picard, I thoroughly enjoyed “Stardust City Rag” while I was watching the episode. However, as I struggled to write this review, I realised that this episode is something of a mess that shifts wildly in tone from the goofy caper, complete with silly clothes and accents, to very dark – darker than usual for Star Trek – with the gorey eye-gouging scene, two cold-blooded murders, the deaths of two established Star Trek characters (and while Bruce Maddox may have been the answer to a trivia question, Icheb’s role was more substantial) and a failed family reunion.

Furthermore, I have the sneaking suspicion that “Stardust City Rag” also serves as a backdoor pilot for Star Trek: Fenris Rangers, starring Seven of Nine. Which certainly sounds like a spin-off with a lot of potential and more Seven of Nine is always good. Also, a potential Star Trek: Fenris Rangers would be a much better fit for the “dark Star Trek” series they’re clearly trying to make than either Discovery or Picard. Meanwhile, The Orville is holding up the flag for the more optimistic Star Trek as it used to be, though season 3 seems to be missing in action.

Five episodes in, Star Trek Picard is not nearly as much of an incoherent mess as the first season of Star Trek Discovery was and a lot more fun, too. Though the show does have pacing and tonal issues.

Next episode, it seems as if Picard and the gang will finally find Soji. So it looks as if my prediction that the first season of Picard would be like the first season of The Witcher and that Picard and Soji wouldn’t get to meet until the final episode was off.

Send to Kindle