Tag: F&SF

Working With the Little People by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Working With the Little People by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) is an Unknown-type fantasy in which the highly successful author Noah Raymond finds he is unable to write. While Raymond worries about what he is going to do, he wakes up one night to hear his typewriter in action; when he goes through to his office he sees eleven tiny people (we later find out they are gremlins) jumping up and down on the keyboard.
Their foreman explains to Raymond that they are there to write his stories for him (after some back and forth with the other cockney-sounding little people, a short explanation of gremlin history, and the fact they have been watching him ever since he wrote a story about gremlins).
Later on in the story Raymond also learns that human belief is what keeps the gremlins alive (the “a god only exists if they have believers” theme that features in other Ellison stories), and that, over time, they have changed their form to stay in human consciousness.
At the end of the story (nineteen years later) the gremlins tell Raymond (spoiler) that they have run out of stories as they haven’t been writing fiction but recounting their history. They also explain that, not only does human belief keep gremlins in existence, their belief in humans keeps humanity in existence—and that without stories to write for humans, gremlin belief will wane. The tale ends with Raymond writing the history of the human world for the gremlins to read.
This an okay piece of light humour with a final gimmick twist that shouldn’t be examined too closely (it makes for a weak ending). The best of it is some of the publishing related snark at the beginning:

[He] did not know what he would do with the remainder of his life.
He contemplated going the Mark Twain route, cashing in on what he had already written with endless lecture tours. But he wasn’t that good a speaker, and frankly he didn’t like crowds of more than two people. He considered going the John Updike route, snagging himself a teaching sinecure at some tony Eastern college where the incipient junior editors of unsuspecting publishing houses were still in the larval stage as worshipful students. But he was sure he’d end up in a mutually destructive relationship with a sexually liberated English literature major and come to a messy finish. He dandled the prospect of simply going the Salinger route, of retiring to a hidden cottage somewhere in Vermont or perhaps in Dorset, of leaking mysterious clues to a major novel forthcoming some decade soon, but he had heard that Pynchon and Salinger were both mad as a thousand battlefields, and he shivered at the prospect of becoming a hermit.  p. 40

** (Average). 4,250 words

Alive and Well and On a Friendless Voyage by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Alive and Well and On a Friendless Voyage by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) is the second story in a special Harlan Ellison issue of F&SF, and begins with a man called Moth coming out of his cabin on an exotic spaceship and into the lounge. There, he goes from table to table talking to different groups of people (“this ship of strangers”) about various traumatic episodes from his life.
The first of these sees Moth listen to a couple who tell him not to blame himself for letting his child die; then he talks to an abusive and unsympathetic young man about a younger partner who cuckolded him; in his next conversation he tells a woman about how he failed to intervene in a fire in an old folks home; and then he reveals to a fat man how he took a female employee away from her husband and child (and how she later committed suicide).
There are a couple of more confessionals before he tells a woman that:

“I’ve come to realize we’re all alone,” he said.
She did not reply. Merely stared at him.
“No matter how many people love us or care for us or want to ease our burden in this life,” Moth said, “we are all, all of us, always alone. Something Aldous Huxley once said, I’m not sure I know it exactly, I’ve looked and looked and can’t find the quote, but I remember part of it. He said: ‘We are, each of us, an island universe in a sea of space.’ I think that was it.  p. 36

At the end of the voyage all the passengers disembark except Moth, who asks if anyone wants to take his place for the rest of the metaphor voyage. No-one volunteers.
I’m not a fan of existential mopery, but this is probably a reasonably well done example if you like that sort of thing. (At least the navel-gazing here is mostly about traumatic events and not the more usual—for the current SF field— boyfriend, body, parental or petty political concerns.)
** (Average). 4,100 words.

Ransom by Edward Wellen

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Ransom by Edward Wellen (F&SF, July 1977) has a good hook:

First the finger, then the ear, then the nose.
But before them, the tape. The tape came in the mail that caught up with the traveling mansion of Peter Kifeson. The tape showed a trembling Junior Kifeson in a limbo shot—no background visible, no furnishings. A two-shot, with the light on Junior and the masked man holding him at blaserpoint, and darkness all around them. You had the sense, however, that this scene took place in a small room.
Old Peter Kifeson watched, listened, and chuckled. Twenty-five million credits, indeed. But at least and at last Junior was thinking big, showing drive. About time. After all, Junior must be all of sixty.  p. 92

When Kifeson later receives a finger in the post he publicises the fact but refuses to pay the ransom (he still thinks his son is behind the extortion attempt). When an ear and then a nose arrive, Kifeson changes his mind about his son’s involvement but continues to hold out.
The police (spoiler) eventually find the blackmailer and a dead Junior. Kifeson decides to clone his son, and the last couple of paragraphs make an unclear point about parenthood and filial love.
* (Mediocre). 1,500 words.

Jeffty is Five by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Jeffty is Five by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) opens with a short “things aren’t what they used to be” passage about Clark Bars (a period confectionary) before going on to give a nostalgic account of the narrator Donny Horton’s childhood years. During this, Horton talks about a young boy called Jeffty:

When I was that age, five years old, I was sent away to my Aunt Patricia’s home in Buffalo, New York for two years.
[. . .]
When I was seven, I came back home and went to find Jeffty, so we could play together.
I was seven. Jeffty was still five.
I didn’t notice any difference. I didn’t know: I was only seven.
[. . .]
When I was ten, my grandfather died of old age and I was “a troublesome kid,” and they sent me off to military school, so I could be “taken in hand.”
I came back when I was fourteen. Jeffty was still five.
[. . .]
At eighteen, I went to college.
Jeffty was still five. I came back during the summers, to work at my Uncle Joe’s jewelry store. Jeffty hadn’t changed. Now I knew there was something different about him, something wrong, something weird. Jeffty was still five years old, not a day older.
At twenty-two I came home for keeps. To open a Sony television franchise in town, the first one. I saw Jeffty from time to time. He was five.  p. 9-10

After Horton settles back into town he occasionally takes Jeffty out to the movies, etc., and recounts the awkward visits to his house afterwards, where the parents are obviously troubled by their strange son:

“I don’t know what to do any more,” Leona said. She began crying. “There’s no change, not one day of peace.”
Her husband managed to drag himself out of the old easy chair and went to her. He bent and tried to soothe her, but it was clear from the graceless way in which he touched her graying hair that the ability to be compassionate had been stunned in him. “Shhh, Leona, it’s all right. Shhh.” But she continued crying. Her hands scraped gently at the antimacassars on the arms of the chair.
Then she said, “Sometimes I wish he had been stillborn.”
John looked up into the corners of the room. For the nameless shadows that were always watching him? Was it God he was seeking in those spaces? “You don’t mean that,” he said to her, softly, pathetically, urging her with body tension and trembling in his voice to recant before God took notice of the terrible thought. But she meant it; she meant it very much.  p. 15

The story’s major development occurs when Horton finds Jeffty in his den under the porch and sees what looks like a brand new Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Badge (not made since 1956). Jeffty tells Horton that it arrived in the mail that day and, when pressed further, says that he ordered the ring so he could decode the message on the next Captain Midnight radio show (not transmitted after 1950). When Horton asks to listen to the show, Jeffty points out that it isn’t on that night (it is the weekend), so Horton returns a few days later:

He was listening to the American Broadcasting Company, 790 kilocycles, and he was hearing Tennessee Jed, one of my most favorite programs from the Forties, a western adventure I had not heard in twenty years, because it had not existed for twenty years.
I sat down on the top step of the stairs, there in the upstairs hall of the Kinzer home, and I listened to the show. It wasn’t a rerun of an old program, because there were occasional references in the body of the drama to current cultural and technological developments, and phrases that had not existed in common usage in the Forties: aerosol spray cans, laseracing of tattoos, Tanzania, the word “uptight.”
I could not ignore the fact. Jeffty was listening to a new segment of Tennessee Jed. pp. 18-19

When Horton checks his car radio he can’t pick up the program, and realises that Jeffty is not only not aging, but seems to live in a world that is largely like his childhood one (with the minor contemporary changes mentioned above).
Horton spends the next part of the story experiencing life in Jeffty’s world: he hears a number of radio programs from his youth, Terry and the Pirates,1 Superman, Tom Mix, etc.; he goes to the movies to see Humphrey Bogart in Slayground (a movie of a Donald Westlake novel that was never made); he eats and drinks the products of the time (Quaker Puffed Wheat Sparkies); and—perhaps the only part of this world that particularly resonated with me—he sees new issues of pulp SF magazines:

Twice a month we went down to the newsstand and bought the current pulp issues of The Shadow, Doc Savage and Startling Stories. Jeffty and I sat together and I read to him from the magazines. He particularly liked the new short novel by Henry Kuttner, “The Dreams of Achilles,” and the new Stanley G. Weinbaum series of short stories set in the subatomic particle universe of Redurna. In September we enjoyed the first installment of the new Robert E. Howard Conan novel, ISLE OF THE BLACK ONES, in Weird Tales; and in August were only mildly disappointed by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fourth novella in the Jupiter series featuring John Carter of Barsoom—“Corsairs of Jupiter.” But the editor of Argosy All-Story Weekly promised there would be two more stories in the series, and it was such an unexpected revelation for Jeffty and me, that it dimmed our disappointment at the lessened quality of the current story.  p. 21

(Robert E. Howard was already long dead by the 1950s, so I’m not sure how he is still alive in Jeffty’s world—one of the inconsistencies of this piece, along with the anomalous intrusions of the present day.)
Horton (spoiler) experiences the best of both worlds for a while (he still lives in the “normal” world while being able to savour Jeffty’s) but, of course, this charmed existence eventually slips through his hands on the day they go to the cinema to see The Demolished Man. The pair detour via Horton’s Sony store and find it so busy that Horton has to help out, and Jeffty is parked in front of thirty-three TVs showing modern shows. After some time Horton checks on Jeffty and sees that he looks unwell (“I should have known better. I should have understood about the present and the way it kills the past”). Horton gets him away from the TVs by telling Jeffty to go on to the cinema while Horton attends to a final customer. However, while Jeffty is queueing for the movie, he is beaten up by two youths after he borrows a radio and leaves it stuck in his world.
Horton takes the badly injured Jeffty home, and then, in an ending that is not as clear as it could be, Jeffty dies of his injuries.2
This story won that year’s Hugo and Nebula Awards, and I think I can see why: Ellison was, at that point in time, at the top of his game (in my opinion the period from the mid-60s to the mid-70s) and very popular; the story was from a special author issue of F&SF; and, finally, the subject matter would have been hugely appealing to those of a similar generation who were nostalgic for their lost pasts.3
Personally, I liked the story well enough, but I wouldn’t say it is the strongest of his tales for a number of reasons: while the gimmick is a neat one, the ending is weak and somewhat contrived (the TV set route would have been a better way to go); it could do with another draft (it is a little too long, and some of the sentences sound odd, e.g., “the ability to be compassionate had been stunned in him” from the passage above just sounds clumsy);4 the couple’s dislike of their own child is unconvincing (most parents seem to love their children regardless of their infirmities and shortcomings); and, finally, I am not a huge fan of nostalgia (insert your own “it ain’t what it used to be” joke here).5
So, overall, this classic is a good story, but not a great one (although it impressed me more on first reading).
*** (Good). 8,200 words. Story link.

1. You can find old Terry and the Pirates radio programs on the Internet Archive. I wouldn’t bother.

2. According to Wikipedia and other sources the mother drowns Jeffty in the bath at the end of the story—that is not clear from the text (and goes to my comment about the piece needing another draft).

3. The story’s nostalgia for the past comes along with a distinct antipathy for the present:

Today, I turn on my car radio and go from one end of the dial to the other and all I get is 100 strings orchestras, banal housewives and insipid truckers discussing their kinky sex lives with arrogant talk show hosts, country and western drivel and rock music so loud it hurts my ears.  p. 10

Things are better in a lot of ways. People don’t die from some of the old diseases any more. Cars go faster and get you there more quickly on better roads. Shirts are softer and silkier. We have paperback books even though they cost as much as a good hardcover used to. When I’m running short in the bank I can live off credit cards till things even out. But I still think we’ve lost a lot of good stuff. Did you know you can’t buy linoleum any more, only vinyl floor covering? There’s no such thing as oilcloth any more; you’ll never again smell that special, sweet smell from your grandmother’s kitchen. Furniture isn’t made to last thirty years or longer because they took a survey and found that young homemakers like to throw their furniture out and bring in all new color-coded borax every seven years. Records don’t feel right; they’re not thick and solid like the old ones, they’re thin and you can bend them . . . that doesn’t seem right to me. Restaurants don’t serve cream in pitchers any more, just that artificial glop in little plastic tubs, and one is never enough to get coffee the right color. Everywhere you go, all the towns look the same with Burger Kings and MacDonald’s and 7-Elevens and motels and shopping centers.
Things may be better, but why do I keep thinking about the past.

I don’t think the narrator is nostalgic for the past, but for an idealised version of it—cherry picking the things he likes and largely ignoring those that were also of that time: racism, sexual discrimination, possible nuclear oblivion (the list is long).
I’d also note that this reactionary nostalgia is a not uncommon trait in some SF fans. Although they spend a good chunk of their time reading about imagined futures, some have a pronounced dislike of modern technology: I’ve lost count of the number I have come across who actively dislike ebooks, smartphones, etc.; who shun streaming services in favour of DVDs; use chequebooks rather than credit/debit cards or Paypal, and so on.

4. Further to my comments about the story needing another draft, the introduction states that the story arrived “in [. . .] an impressive envelope from something called Federal Express Courier-Pak. It screams RUSH /URGENT from every corner”.
It’s also worth reading Joanna Russ’s F&SF (February 1979) review about the writing in this story.

5. My corrective for those suffering from too much nostalgia—Malcolm Jameson’s Blind Alley.

The Maiden Made of Fire by Jane Yolen

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Maiden Made of Fire by Jane Yolen (F&SF, July 1977) is a short squib (it’s less than three pages long) that tells of a coal burner called Ash who spends a lot of time staring into the flames of his fires. One evening he sees a maiden (glowing “red and gold”) in a fire and pulls her out, burning his hands in the process.
Ash learns she is a fire maiden, calls her Brenna, and builds more fires so she can move around more freely (she can only move over fire and embers).
The story resolves (spoiler) when the village elders turn up and complain that their supply of charcoal has ceased. When Ash points to Brenna the elders cannot see her, and Ash’s sudden doubts about her reality causes her to fade. Ash looks at the villagers and then at Brenna, puts the doubt from his mind, and jumps into the fire to join her.
A pleasant but slight tale, even if there is some personal belief metaphor buried here.
** (Average). 1,200 words.

Achronos by Lee Killough

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Achronos by Lee Killough (F&SF, March 1980) opens with Neil Dorn—an unsuccessful, burnt-out artist—going to a faraway beach to get away from it all. There, after finding a tribolite (an unusual find in that location), he comes upon what he initially thinks is a group of children:

They circled him, looking at him with curious eyes. He stared back. He had been wrong. They were not children, though they were still very young, hardly past adolescence. They were as tall as he and slender as willows, with skin tight and smooth. Clear, lively eyes watched him from unlined faces. And they were completely nude, he discovered with a start. What he had taken to be scraps of bathing suit were only designs painted on their skin.  p. 117

Initially he struggles to understand their speech but, over the course of the next few hours, he discovers they are adults from the future, and learns that the beach they are on is an “achronos”, a timeless place connected to all other times.
The woman who tells him all this, Electra, eventually gets bored discussing the matter and insists that Dorn draws her, and then the others demand the same. After he finishes sketches of them all, Dorn and Electra spend the night together (or what passes for night in this place—the light levels never change).
Later, one of the other women, Hero, gets Dorn to paint an oil portrait of her, and he learns more about the group:

Hero was beginning to emerge from the canvas. She looked different than he intended. Instead of a Parrish subject, she looked more like something created by Toulouse-Lautrec, bright and gay on the surface but hard and sad beneath. He peered at her. To his surprise, he found the painting correct. His eyes had seen and his hands transmitted what his mind did not notice. He remembered her remark about boredom.
“Where would you rather be than here?” he asked.
Her sigh came from her soul. “Just about anywhere. I want to see different faces, experience new weather. I’d like to see the night sky again. I’ve always wanted to go to the stars. I was going to go to Zulac after school, but of course that trip was ruined along with the laser cannon on Pluto.” Her voice grew wistful. “I was just two years late to ever visit the stars. I’m trapped here instead.”  p. 124

Dorn realises that, unlike him (he has previously left the achronos to get his art materials) the group cannot go back to their own time as they left in the last few moments of safety.
The story concludes (spoiler) when Dorn and Hero are interrupted by the news that a dinosaur has stumbled in to the achronos. Dorn and the others watch as Clell baits and fights the creature before the group finally rush in for the kill. Immediately after the dinosaur’s death Electra wants Dorn to paint her with its blood, even though Hero is bleeding to death, untended, beside them. When Dorn refuses, Electra joins in the orgy that has started. Dorn’s unease intensifies and he realises that he may not be safe with these capricious and bored individuals. He retrieves his artwork and drives out of the achronos with a head full of artistic visions.
A fairly good piece about, essentially, jaded immortals.
*** (Good). 5,200 words.

“The Mindano Deep” by Robert F. Young

Posted on by Paul Fraser

“The Mindano Deep” by Robert F. Young (F&SF, March 1980) is one of the later stories in this writer’s Spacewhale series1 and opens with Jonathan on the asteroid-size leviathan Starfinder. He is watching various events from the American War of Independence concerning Nathan Hale, Colonel Prestcott, and Patrick Henry (during these episodes we learn that Starfinder the spacewhale has the ability to travel through space and time). We also learn that a young woman called Ciely Blue, who also lives on Starfinder, appears to be under the guardianship of Jonathan and is currently attending school on Earth.
Once this series housekeeping is dealt with Jonathan decides to use his solo time to “dive to the bottom of the Space-Time Sea” in Starfinder, i.e. go back to the creation of the Universe. At this point we see that Starfinder communicates with Jonathan using mental hieroglyphics:

The rest of the story is a strange account which sees reality dissolve around Jonathan when they get to the bottom of the Space-Time Sea, leaving him standing in a little room with two doors, a fireplace, and a picture window. Later he sees a model of the whale and, when he looks through the portholes, sees a miniature version of himself doing the same; this Mobius-reality effect is then repeated a couple times more, most strikingly when he goes through one of the doors of the room and, while looking over his shoulder, sees himself—and eternity’s worth behind him—doing exactly the same.
These weird events are accompanied by various philosophical observations, the last of which comes from Starfinder, which suggests that Jonathan himself has created this microcosmic reality as there is no macroscopic one at the beginning of Time. After this they climb up off the bottom of the Space-Time sea and return to 1978.
This non-story, its initial series-itis, and the (possibly cod-) philosophical musings may sound like an unpromising mix but I enjoyed it anyway, even though it doesn’t really work.
**+ (Average to Good). 4,900 words.

1. The ISFDB page for Robert F. Young’s ‘Spacewhale’ series. I note that the first story does not seem to be set in the same world as these (it has a Spacewhale, but there are substantial differences—see my review here).

“As a Color, Shade of Purple-Grey” by David Lubkin

Posted on by Paul Fraser

“As a Color, Shade of Purple-Grey” by David Lubkin (F&SF, March 1980) is a groan-worthy half-page Feghoot (pun story) which sees an astronaut return to a colourful welcoming party after a forty year trip to Tau Ceti. The punchline (spoiler) has him fainting because of “fuschia shock”.
** (Average). 120 words.

Before Willows Ever Walked by Tom Godwin

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Before Willows Ever Walked1 by Tom Godwin (F&SF, March 1980) begins with Jake Derken experiencing, not for the first time, the lash of a Joshua tree’s branch as he returns to his house from the mail box. He then goes in to tell the other occupant of the house, Joe Smith, that there isn’t a letter from his granddaughter. We subsequently learn that (a) Smith is the alcoholic, dying house guest of Derken, (b) Derken is attempting to inherit Smith’s estate by isolating him from his grand-daughter, and (c) Derken hates Joshua trees.
After the two men discuss whether plants have feelings, and whether the Joshua tree might have sensed Derken’s antipathy towards them, a letter falls out of the pile of circulars. Smith sees it is from his granddaughter, and quickly opens and reads it.
Derken then has to work fast to preserve his scam: he pretends to phone the daughter but tells Smith line isn’t working and that he’ll go into town to call her. When Derken later goes out he is given a letter and cheque to post to the granddaughter, but he stops in the desert and burns it. Then, as he walks back to the car, he gets hit by a falling Joshua tree branch. Derken rages at the tree and then stamps on a young offspring nearby.
The rest of the story works through various plot developments (spoiler): Smith stops drinking so Derken starts adulterating all Smith’s food and drink with vodka to hasten his demise; several days later, Smith dies (but not before realising what Derken has been doing); Derken then waits for the will to go through probate while avoiding the surrounding Joshau trees, which seem to be getting closer to the house; finally, another letter arrives from the granddaughter saying she has scraped together enough cash to send a PI to find out what has happened to Smith.
The climactic scene sees Derken rush to the bank to get the money and flee but, at the place he stamped on the young Joshua tree, he crashes his car and is trapped in the wreckage. Then the adult tree speaks to Derken “in his mind” while it summons a lightning storm (the fact that Joshua trees can do this has been suggested in an earlier conversation). The lightning then strikes the Joshua tree, which falls on Derken and kills him.
I don’t think that my disbelief was suspended for even a single moment by this story’s silly premise and, even if it had been, the car crash at the end is far too convenient.
* (Mediocre). 7,000 words.

1. The title comes from a superstition which suggests there was once a time when willow trees could walk at night.

Steele Wyoming by Ron Goulart

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Steele Wyoming by Ron Goulart (F&SF, March 1980) opens with a group of “Outside” down-and-outs roasting a dog for dinner (“Tastes pretty good” . . . “It’s the wild oregano gives it zing”). One the group, Otto, claims he invented Steele Wyoming, a revolutionary guardbot, and proceeds to tell his tale of riches to rags.
This account begins with him rescuing a female friend, Bev, the owner of a pest extermination company called Zapbug (a running joke is that her sonic repellents cause Otto continual problems) from a group of Poverty Commandos and Suicide Cadets who are attacking her mansion. When Otto later tries to convince her to give up her career for him, she says he’ll need to amass greater riches first.
This subsequently leads Otto to create Steele Wyoming, which he then demonstrates to Carlos, a contact at NRA (National Robot & Android):

Carlos chuckled. “He’s very impressive, amigo.”
“Designed to scare the crap out of any looter, rapist, housebreaker or other unwanted Outsider.”
“Steele Wyoming, huh? Catchy.”
“A cowboy name.” I’d gotten butsub on my fingers somehow. Wiping them on the plyocloth, I tossed it aside and one of my little servobots came scooting over to gather it up.
Carlos, slowly, circled Steele Wyoming. “I assume he’s lethal as well as frightening?”
“Tell him, Steele.”
“First off, let me say howdy, Mr. Trinidad, sir,” drawled the big android in his rumbling Old West voice. He reached a huge horny hand up to tip his highcrown stetson. “I kin be lethal or I kin merely stun varmints. Depends on how the nice folks who owns me wants the deal to go down.”
Carlos laughed, pleased. “He’s terrific, amigo.”
“What I figured,” I said while Carlos stood gazing up at the seven foot tall cowboy android, “is that to a great many people in America, even in this year of 2020, the cowboy remains a symbol of honesty, dedication, law and order.”
Steele adjusted his hat on his head.
“That is surely true.”  p. 86

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees the homicidal results of Wyoming’s trigger happy attitude1 (starting with a noisy subrock millionaire neighbour, and followed by the three policemen who see Wyoming dumping the body). Further complications result from Bev’s infidelity.
Amusing stuff.
*** (Good). 4,750 words. Story link.

1. One wonders if Wyoming’s lethality was modelled on Clint Eastwood’s movies of the time (the spaghetti Westerns and Dirty Harry series).