Author: Paul Fraser

It by Theodore Sturgeon

Posted on by Paul Fraser

It by Theodore Sturgeon (Unknown, August 1940) starts with a creature that was “never born” coming into existence in the forest:

It crawled out of the darkness and hot damp mold into the cool of the morning. It was huge. It was lumped and crusted with its own hateful substances, and pieces of it dropped off as it went its way, dropped off and lay writhing, and stilled, and sank putrescent into the forest loam.
It had no mercy, no laughter, no beauty. It had strength and great intelligence. And—perhaps it could not be destroyed. It crawled out of its mound in the wood and lay pulsing in the sunlight for a long moment. Patches of it shone wetly in the golden glow, parts of it were nubbled and flaked. And whose dead bones had given it the form of a man?  p. 144

Later the beast encounters a dog called Kimbo, which it fights and kills. Then, when the dog does not return to its owner, we are introduced to two farmers, Alton and his brother Casey. When Alton goes off to look for the dog the brothers fall out about the chores that have to been done on the farm, an argument that is continued later between Cory and his wife Clissa. Later on that night, after Cory has given up on the outstanding chores, he goes out into the wood to find his brother, and they end up having an even more serious argument. During this, Cory unknowingly stands on part of the creature, which is lying quiescent in the dark.
Matters become more complicated the next day when Cory hears multiple gunshots in the forest. He gets his shotgun and manages to pellet a stranger in the wood, who binds up his hand and leaves the area while thinking about a man he is looking for called Roger Pike. At the same time that this is happening, Cory’s young daughter Babe (who we have been introduced to earlier) also goes into the forest looking for her uncle Alton.
This fast paced and tightly plotted story eventually comes to a head (spoiler) with Cory finding Alton’s body, which has been torn apart, and Babe in a cave with the briefcase and papers the stranger dropped (the man he was looking for carries a substantial reward). Then the creature approaches the mouth of the cave . . . .
In the climactic scene, Babe rushes through the thing’s legs and, when it pursues her, she throws a stone and hits the creature. It trips, and topples over into the stream . . . to be washed away by the flowing water. The skeleton that remains is that of the missing man, Roger Pike, and the family get the reward.
This is a very good piece—it’s tightly plotted, has a number of well-drawn characters, and has a neat, if ultimately bittersweet, ending. I’d also add that Sturgeon’s prose style is much clearer and easier to read than other writers from this period (as was Heinlein’s and de Camp’s) and the well done multiple point of view technique (which includes that of the young girl Babe) is probably original for the time as well.
**** (Very Good). 9,950 words.

The Man Who Never Grew Young by Fritz Leiber

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The Man Who Never Grew Young by Fritz Leiber (Night’s Black Agents, 1947) has a narrator who stays the same age as time flows backwards around him. Various events are described, and the most striking of these is a passage where a grieving widow waits for her husband to be disinterred and come back to life:

There were two old women named Flora and Helen. It could not have been more than a few years since their own disinterments, but those I cannot remember. I think I was some sort of nephew, but I cannot be sure.
They began to visit an old grave in the cemetery a half mile outside town. I remember the little bouquets of flowers they would bring back with them. Their prim, placid faces became troubled. I could see that grief was entering their lives.
The years passed. Their visits to the cemetery became more frequent. Accompanying them once, I noted that the worn inscription on the headstone was growing clearer and sharper, just as was happening to their own features. “John, loving husband of Flora. . . .”
Often Flora would sob through half the night, and Helen went about with a set look on her face. Relatives came and spoke comforting words, but these seemed only to intensify their grief.
Finally the headstone grew brand-new and the grass became tender green shoots which disappeared into the raw brown earth. As if these were the signs their obscure instincts had been awaiting, Flora and Helen mastered their grief and visited the minister and the mortician and the doctor and made certain arrangements.
On a cold autumn day, when the brown curled leaves were whirling up into the trees, the procession set out—the empty hearse, the dark silent automobiles. At the cemetery we found a couple of men with shovels turning away unobtrusively from the newly opened grave. Then, while Flora and Helen wept bitterly, and the minister spoke solemn words, a long narrow box was lifted from the grave and carried to the hearse.
At home the lid of the box was unscrewed and slid back, and we saw John, a waxen old man with a long life before him.
Next day, in obedience to what seemed an age-old ritual, they took him from the box, and the mortician undressed him and drew a pungent liquid from his veins and injected the red blood. Then they took him and laid him in bed. After a few hours of stony-eyed waiting, the blood began to work. He stirred and his first breath rattled in his throat. Flora sat down on the bed and strained him to her in a fearful embrace.
But he was very sick and in need of rest, so the doctor waved her from the room. I remember the look on her face as she closed the door. I should have been happy too, but I seem to recall that I felt there was something unwholesome about the whole episode.  pp. 233-235 (The Dark Side, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

There is then reference to the reversal of world events, starting with what may be a nuclear holocaust (which may have caused time to start flowing backwards in the first place), before the narrator describes the unwinding of time back to the Egyptian era. The story concludes with the narrator and his wife setting out with their flock, as he reflects on what lies ahead:

Maot is afire with youth. She is very loving.
It will be strange in the desert. All too soon we will exchange our last and sweetest kiss and she will prattle to me childishly and I will look after her until we find her mother.
Or perhaps some day I will abandon her in the desert, and her mother will find her.
And I will go on.  p. 241 Ibid.

This brief piece has some striking passages, but I’m not sure it’s much more than a very well written notion.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 2,650 words.

Casey Agonistes by Richard McKenna

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Casey Agonistes by Richard McKenna (F&SF, September 1958) has a narrator who has just arrived in a Tuberculosis ward for terminal patients and, from the very beginning, he tells his story in a strange, nihilistic and anti-authoritarian voice:

You can’t just plain die. You got to do it by the book.
That’s how come I’m here in this TB ward with nine other recruits. Basic training to die. You do it by stages. First a big ward, you walk around and go out and they call you mister. Then, if you got what it takes, a promotion to this isolation ward and they call you charles. You can’t go nowhere, you meet the masks, and you get the feel of being dead.  p. 182 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

I found out they called the head doc Uncle Death. The fat nurse was Mama Death. The blond intern was Pink Waldo, the dark one Curly Waldo, and Mary was Mary. Knowing things like that is a kind of password.
They said Curly Waldo was sweet on Mary, but he was a poor Italian. Pink Waldo come of good family and was trying to beat him out. They were pulling for Curly Waldo.  p. 184, Ibid.

We got mucho sack time, training for the long sleep.  p. 185, Ibid.

On the ward the narrator meets a former shipmate called Slop Chute (a sailor who could have come out of the writer’s later mainstream novel The Sand Pebbles), and next to him is Roby who, later on, “doesn’t make it,” i.e. he recovers enough to go back into the main ward in the hospital.
The other significant character in the story is Carnahan, who tells the narrator that he can see an ape:

“He’s there,” Carnahan would say. “Sag your eyes, look out the corners. He won’t be plain at first.
“Just expect him, he’ll come. Don’t want him to do anything. You just feel. He’ll do what’s natural,” he kept telling me.
I got where I could see the ape—Casey, Carnahan called him—in flashes. Then one day Mama Death was chewing out Mary and I saw him plain. He come up behind Mama and—I busted right out laughing.
He looked like a bowlegged man in an ape suit covered with red-brown hair. He grinned and made faces with a mouth full of big yellow teeth and he was furnished like John Keeno himself. I roared.
“Put on your phones so you’ll have an excuse for laughing,” Carnahan whispered. “Only you and me can see him, you know.  p. 186, Ibid.

Eventually all the men in the ward are sharing what appears to be a consensual hallucination and laughing at Casey’s antics, mostly when the medical staff appear on their rounds. Later, however, the ape seems to take on some sort of reality, something that becomes apparent when arrangements are made to move one of the men to a quiet side room to die. At this point Casey appears and apparently causes the head doctor to stagger. Then, when Slop Chute’s condition worsens and the staff try to move him, the ape’s intervention prevents this from happening.
Over the next few days Slop Chute deteriorates and has a series of haemorrhages, which the men clean up to hide from the staff. Finally (spoiler), in the climactic scene, the narrator sees “a deeper shadow high in the dark” start to descend on Slop Chute. Casey fights the darkness and initially manages to push it back up to the ceiling, but it eventually envelops both him and Slop Chute. Slop Chute passes away, and Casey disappears—but reappears on the ward a couple of days later wearing Slop Chute’s grin.
This is an interesting piece—it has a distinctive narrative voice, and the subject matter is very different from the other SF of the time—but I’m not sure that the story ultimately amounts to much. Still, a noteworthy piece for its anti-authoritarian characters and bleak, inverted view of death (which I suspect would have been quite transgressive at the time).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,200 words.

Nellthu by Anthony Boucher

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Nellthu by Anthony Boucher (F&SF, August 1955) is a page and a half long squib that sees a man meet a woman from his schooldays. Although she was originally homely and untalented, she now has it all: wealth, beauty, talent, etc. When a servant brings the man coffee he realises it is a demon, and quizzes the creature on how she managed to get so much from three wishes. It turns out (spoiler) she did it with one—she made the demon fall “permanently and unselfishly” in love with her. A notion, not a story.
* (Mediocre). 450 words.

The Golem by Avram Davidson

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The Golem by Avram Davidson (F&SF, March 1955) opens with an android arriving at the porch of an elderly Jewish couple and sitting down on one of their chairs. As he tries to deliver his apocalyptic warnings the pair variously kvetch, interrupt and ignore him:

The stranger spoke. His voice was harsh and monotonous.
“When you learn who—or, rather, what—I am, the flesh will melt from your bones in terror.” He bared porcelain teeth.
“Never mind about my bones!” the old woman cried. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking about my bones!”
“You will quake with fear,” said the stranger. Old Mrs. Gumbeiner said that she hoped he would live so long. She turned to her husband once again.
“Gumbeiner, when are you going to mow the lawn?”
“All mankind—” the stranger began.
“Shah! I’m talking to my husband. . . . He talks eppis kind of funny, Gumbeiner, no?”
“Probably a foreigner,” Mr. Gumbeiner said, complacently.
“You think so?” Mrs. Gumbeiner glanced fleetingly at the stranger. “He’s got a very bad color in his face, nebbich, I suppose he came to California for his health.”
“Disease, pain, sorrow, love, grief—all are nought to—”
Mr. Gumbeiner cut in on the stranger’s statement.
“Gall bladder,” the old man said. “Guinzburg down at the shule looked exactly the same before his operation. Two professors they had in for him, and a private nurse day and night.”
“I am not a human being!” the stranger said loudly.
“Three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars it cost his son, Guinzburg told me. ‘For you, Poppa, nothing is too expensive—only get well,’ the son told him.”
“I am not a human being!”
“Ai, is that a son for you!” the old woman said, rocking her head. “A heart of gold, pure gold.” She looked at the stranger. “All right, all right, I heard you the first time.  pp. 113-114 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

Later the android says something rude to the wife and the man slaps it across the face and breaks it. Then the couple talk about golems, and the man sorts the internal wiring exposed when he hit the creature. The golem is more submissive when it is repaired, and the man tells it to mow the grass.
This is quite amusing to start with but it tails off at the end.
*** (Good). 1,800 words.

The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham by H. G. Wells

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The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham by H. G. Wells (The Idler, May 1896) opens with an old man called Elvesham offering a young medical student called Eden the chance to become his heir. After several medical examinations demanded by Elvesham, and (unusual) discussions about Eden assuming Elvesham’s identity after the latter dies, there is a celebratory dinner one evening. During this, the old man sprinkles a pinkish powder on their after dinner liqueurs.
When Eden later walks home he feels quite odd, and experiences phantom memories when he looks at the shops that line the street. That evening he takes another powder given to him by Elvesham before retiring. Later he awakes from a strange dream and feels even more disoriented, eventually realising that, not only is he in a strange room, but (spoiler) he is in Elvesham’s body!
The rest of the story limns Eden’s horror at this turn of events and his subsequent attempts to extricate himself from his predicament. This involves, among other things, a search of the rooms and desks at the property in the hope that he can find a way to contact Elvesham (via his solicitor, etc.). Eden doesn’t find anything of use, although he does find volumes of notes about the psychology of memory along with pages of ciphers and symbols. Then, after he flies into a rage and is put under permanent restraint by Elvesham’s staff and doctors, he finds a bottle of poison. After writing an account of what has happened to him, Eden takes his own life.
There is a final postscript which describes the finding of “Elvesham’s” manuscript, and the fact that “Eden” never survived to inherit Elvesham’s fortune (he is knocked down by a cab, presumably to comply with Victorian morality).
This is an okay if dated piece, and it briefly comes alive in the section where the young man is trapped in the old man’s body (a piece of body horror that will resonate with many older readers who think this is what has happened to them):

I tottered to the glass and saw—Elvesham’s face! It was none the less horrible because I had already dimly feared as much. He had already seemed physically weak and pitiful to me, but seen now, dressed only in a coarse flannel nightdress that fell apart and showed the stringy neck, seen now as my own body, I cannot describe its desolate decrepitude. The hollow cheeks, the straggling tail of dirty grey hair, the rheumy bleared eyes, the quivering, shrivelled lips, the lower displaying a gleam of the pink interior lining, and those horrible dark gums showing. You who are mind and body together at your natural years, cannot imagine what this fiendish imprisonment meant to me. To be young, and full of the desire and energy of youth, and to be caught, and presently to be crushed in this tottering ruin of a body. . . .  p. 136-137 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

**+ (Average to Good). 6,850 words.

Luminous by Greg Egan

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Luminous by Greg Egan (Asimov’s SF, September 1995) gets off to a pretty good start with the story’s narrator waking to find himself handcuffed, and with a woman slicing into his biceps to get a data storage device. He tells her it is a “necrotrap,” and that the data will be destroyed if it is removed from his body—so she pauses and gets on the phone to order medical equipment which will fool the device. During this, he manages to spray her with his poisoned blood and, after she starts vomiting uncontrollably, eventually agrees to free him to get the antidote. As he departs he tells her there isn’t one, but that she’ll recover in twelve hours or so.
The next part of the story is something of a gear change, a flashback to a conversation between the narrator and a female student called Allison during a philosophy of mathematics course years earlier. This introduces the story’s gimmick, which is, if I’m not oversimplifying (note to self, write up Egan’s stories more promptly), that arithmetic may have different rules in other parts of the universe and this will fundamentally affect the nature of reality there.
The story then skips forward to the present, and we find the narrator is in China to meet Allison, who has arranged for them to have time on a supercomputer called Luminous to investigate this alternative arithmetic. We also get more math theory, and learn that (a) the other arithmetic system can theoretically be extended into our reality and (b) that this can be used for commercial advantage (there is a company called Industrial Algebra who are pursuing the pair to obtain their discovery so they can use it for financial gain—IA were behind the earlier biohacking attempt on the narrator).
The main part of the story occurs after they meet a Chinese professor and are taken to his laboratory:

Luminous was, literally, a computer made of light. It came into existence when a vacuum chamber, a cube five meters wide, was filled with an elaborate standing wave created by three vast arrays of high-powered lasers. A coherent electron beam was fed into the chamber—and just as a finely machined grating built of solid matter could diffract a beam of light, a sufficiently ordered (and sufficiently intense) configuration of light could diffract a beam of matter.
The electrons were redirected from layer to layer of the light cube, recombining and interfering at each stage, every change in their phase and intensity performing an appropriate computation—and the whole system could be reconfigured, nanosecond by nanosecond, into complex new “hardware” optimized for the calculations at hand. The auxiliary supercomputers controlling the laser arrays could design, and then instantly build, the perfect machine of light to carry out each particular stage of any program.

They then use their allotted half-hour to get the computer to map the extent of the “far side” and then discuss whether to contain it (so it can never be extended into out reality) or destroy it. Time constraints mean they chose the latter but (spoiler) the alternative mathematical reality begins to fight back . . .
There are several pages of back and forth in the struggle that ensues between the Luminous program and the alternative math, but they can’t contain the latter and eventually a spike of its reality reaches the lab they are in:

It hit me with a jolt of clarity more intense than anything I’d felt since childhood. It was like reliving the moment when the whole concept of numbers had finally snapped into place—but with an adult’s understanding of everything it opened up, everything it implied. It was a lightning-bolt revelation—but there was no taint of mystical confusion: no opiate haze of euphoria, no pseudo-sexual rush. In the clean-lined logic of the simplest concepts, I saw and understood exactly how the world worked—
—except that it was all wrong, it was all false, it was all impossible.
Quicksand.
Assailed by vertigo, I swept my gaze around the room—counting frantically: Six work stations. Two people. Six chairs. I grouped the work stations: three sets of two, two sets of three. One and five, two and four; four and two, five and one.
I weaved a dozen cross-checks for consistency—for sanity . . . but everything added up. They hadn’t stolen the old arithmetic; they’d merely blasted the new one into my head, on top of it.
Whoever had resisted our assault with Luminous had reached down with the spike and rewritten our neural metamathematics—the arithmetic that underlay our own reasoning about arithmetic—enough to let us glimpse what we’d been trying to destroy.

After this the narrator and Allison stop their attack, and the spike retreats. Then Allison realises that they can execute a program that will stop anyone using this other reality but which will not affect it. All ends well.
This is all a bit of a mixed bag—the good parts are very good (the opening, the computer battle with the alt maths, etc.) but unfortunately is stitched together with pages of dry math lectures and wild hand-wavium.
*** (Good). 13,000 words.

Trouble with Water by Horace L. Gold

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Trouble with Water by Horace L. Gold (Unknown, March 1939) opens with a hen-pecked husband (his wife is constantly nagging him about their unattractive daughter’s dowry) fishing on a lake when he makes an unusual catch:

He pulled in a long, pointed, brimless green hat.
For a moment he glared at it. His mouth hardened. Then, viciously, he yanked the hat off the hook, threw it on the floor and trampled on it. He rubbed his hands together in anguish.
“All day I fish,” he wailed, “two dollars for train fare, a dollar for a boat, a quarter for bait, a new rod I got to buy—and a five-dollar-mortgage charity has got on me. For what? For you, you hat, you!”
Out in the water an extremely civil voice asked politely: “May I have my hat, please?”
Greenberg glowered up. He saw a little man come swimming vigorously through the water toward him; small arms crossed with enormous dignity, vast ears on a pointed face propelling him quite rapidly and efficiently. With serious determination he drove through the water, and, at the starboard rail, his amazing ears kept him stationary while he looked gravely at Greenberg.  pp. 68-69 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

The little man explains, when Greenberg makes fun of his ears, that he is a water gnome and uses them to swim. There is further back and forth between the two (mostly about the gnome’s fish-keeping, rainfall, and other water related responsibilities) before Greenberg loses his temper and tears the gnome’s hat to pieces. The gnome retaliates by telling Greenberg that, given his poor attitude, “water and those who live in it will keep away from you.”
The rest of the story flows from this curse, and later sees Greenberg flood his bathroom when he jumps in a bath and the water jumps out, embarrass himself in front of a potential future son-in-law (he can’t shave for the occasion, and chases his soup out of the bowl onto the table), and have to drink beer instead of water.
After further domestic complications the story resolves when Greenberg talks to a (presumably Irish) cop called Mike, who thinks he may have solution. The final scene (spoiler) has the pair on the lake dropping huge rocks into the water (to get the gnome’s attention) and then presenting him with a sugar cube wrapped in cellophane in exchange for the removal of the curse.
This is a pleasant and logically worked out fantasy story, but it doesn’t feel like the classic it is supposed to be (part of that may be because of the character’s attitude and the piece’s dated domestic circumstances, and the fact that it feels a little padded).
*** (Good). 7,850 words.

c/o Mr. Makepeace by Peter Phillips

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c/o Mr. Makepeace by Peter Phillips (F&SF, February 1954) opens with a Captain Makepeace receiving a letter addressed to an E. Grabcheek, Esq. at his address—but no one of that name lives there. When Makepeace tries to return the letter the postman refuses, and says he has delivered other such letters previously.
Makepeace later attempts to send the letters back to the Post Office, and then the Postmaster General, only to have them returned. Eventually he decides to open one of two letters delivered and finds a sheet of blank paper inside. After he angrily tears it up he goes to get the other letter, only to find it has disappeared. Then, when he goes back to dispose of the one he has torn up, he finds that has gone too.
Up until this point the story has an intriguing fantasy set-up, but it slowly turns into more of a psychological piece. This begins when we see a worried Makepeace at a nearby public house, where his mind starts wandering, and we pick up hints of an altercation with his father years before. Then we learn of Makepeace’s mental problems after a shell burst near him during the war, and of his eventual medical pension.
This psychological darkness becomes considerably more pronounced when he waits for the postman one morning and rushes out into the garden when he sees him:

He waited until the postman was about to open his front garden gate, then hurried to meet him.

E. Grabcheek, Esq.,
c/o Tristram Makepeace,
36, Acacia Avenue.

Makepeace was aware of the cold morning air, the gravel underfoot, a blackbird singing from the laurel bushes, milk bottles clinking together somewhere nearby, the postman’s stupid unshaven face; and, faintly, from a neighboring house, “This is the B.B.C. Home Service. Here is the eight o’clock news. . . .”
“Found out who he is yet?” asked the postman.
“No.”
Tristram Makepeace turned back along the path towards his house. It was waiting for him. The door into the everdusty hallway was open. It was the mouth of the house, and it was open.
The eyes of the house, asymmetrical windows, were blazing, yellow and hungry in the early sun.
He wanted to run after the postman and talk with him; or go up the road to the milkman and ask him about his wife and children, talking and talking to reassert this life and his living of it.
But they would think he was mad; and he was not mad. The cold began to strike through his thin slippers and dressing gown, so he walked slowly back up the gravel pathway into the mouth of the house, and closed the door behind him.
He opened the envelope, took out the blank sheet, tore it through. The equal halves fluttered to the floor. He tried to keep his brain as blank as the sheet of paper. It would be nice, came the sudden thought, if he could take his brain out and wash it blank and white and clean under clear running water.
A dark, itching foulness compounded of a million uninvited pictures was trying to force its way into his mind . . . strike your god, your father, see him stand surprised with the red marks of your fingers on his cheek . . . and your lovely virgin mother. . . .  pp. 105-106 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)

The steady stream of letters (spoiler) eventually leads to Makepeace’s breakdown and his admission to an asylum, where he is diagnosed as schizophrenic. He spends his time writing to Grabcheek and eventually, one day, receives a letter to Grabcheek c/o him at the asylum. The doctors can’t work out how Makepeace managed to post the letter to himself, but one doctor posits that his dissociated personality has an “objective existence”. Later on, however, when no-one is around, the letter floats into mid-air and disappears. Someone laughs.
This is an interesting character piece—the account of Makepeace’s psychological breakdown and his troubled past are pretty well done—but it’s not a particularly satisfactory fantasy story (even given the hints that the dead father may be revenging himself on the son). Phillips only wrote another three stories after this one—I wonder if he was beginning to find SF or fantasy too limiting.
** (Average). 3,650 words.

The Lincoln Train by Maureen F. McHugh

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The Lincoln Train by Maureen F. McHugh (F&SF, April 1995) opens with the young female narrator and her mother on a train station platform waiting to be transported to Oklahoma in the mid-1800s. As the narrative unfolds we learn that, in this alternate world, Lincoln didn’t die but was seriously injured and incapacitated. Subsequently, his deputy Seward ordered that “recalcitrant Southerners” be deported (although it seems that the narrator and mother’s offence was to allow their slaves to remain living with them after emancipation).
When the train arrives there is a crush during which the narrator’s mother dies, but she is told by a soldier to leave the body behind and get on the train. On board she is befriended by a young woman who, when they arrive at their destination (spoiler), secrets her away through a door, but only after a madwoman runs down the platform screaming that the deportees are being starved on the reservations.
The narrator subsequently learns she has been saved by Quakers, who are running a version of the Underground Railroad for deported Southerners. They tell her they will help her get to her sister.
The final paragraphs of the story have her offer to help their organisation, but she is refused as she is a “slaver” and thus “evil”. I wasn’t entirely convinced that the Quakers would have been so explicitly judgemental about her.
This is a predominantly descriptive, slow-paced story, and feels a little like an extract from a longer work. It’s fairly good, I guess, but I’m mystified as to how it won a Hugo Award.
*** (Good). 5,500 words.