Santa Clause by Robert F. Young (F&SF, January 1959)1 starts with Ross requesting his own personal Santa Claus from the devil (who he has just summoned). The devil agrees, but says he can’t subdivide “childhood fantasy”.
Ross subsequently gets the Xmas presents he wants, including a pretty blonde wife called Candy, but things starts going awry almost at once: she refuses to have anything to do with him after she has kissed him goodnight and shuts him out of her bedroom; then Jack Frost appears to ice the windows; the Sandman throws sand in his eyes before he sleeps; and a Guardian Angel—a guitar playing cowboy with wings—appears. Later on, Candy becomes pregnant (even though Ross still hasn’t been near her).
Eventually, after a few more months of these childhood fantasies (and the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc.), the Stork comes tapping at the window. Ross decides he has had enough, and once more summons the Devil: Ross tells him he wants out of the deal. The Devil agrees to modify their contract so that he won’t live in a world of childhood fantasy—but again specifies it will be for life, and apply retrospectively.
The final twist of the story (spoiler) has Ross loathing Candy, when he thinks of her, “almost as much as his mother”.
I guess the wife-mother psychosexual tangle made sense to 1950s Freudians, but it seems quite quaint today.
** (Average). 3,600 words.
1. I initially wondered if this story had first appeared in Playboy and, when I learned not, whether it was written with that magazine in mind.
Merry Gravmas by James P. Hogan
Merry Gravmas by James P. Hogan (Minds, Machines and Evolution, 1988) sets up, in its short introduction, a world two thousand years from now, where Christmas Day is used to celebrate the birth of Isaac Newton, “who came to save us all from irrationality”. It is told from the point of view of a Chinese family (Europe is in ruins), and is moderately amusing.
** (Average). 1,100 words.
The Gift by Ray Bradbury
The Gift by Ray Bradbury (Esquire, December 1952) opens with a couple and their son boarding an emigration rocket on Xmas Eve. As they only have a limited baggage allowance, the parents have to leave behind a little Xmas tree with candles, and the present they have for their son.
After they take off the boy asks to go and look out the one porthole on the ship, but his father says no, before adding that it will soon be Xmas: the boy asks if he’ll get his present and his tree, and his father says yes (much to the dismay of the mother). Then the father leaves their cabin on a short errand.
The story closes with the father taking the family up to the porthole. They enter a dark cabin and see the porthole before a number of unseen people start singing carols. Through the porthole the boy can see “the burning of ten billion billion white and lovely candles. . . .”
This is okay, but it’s minor Bradbury. And the idea of non-flickering stars in space resembling candles on a Xmas tree is a bit of a stretch.
** (Average). 780 words.
Holiday by Richard Christian Matheson
Holiday by Richard Christian Matheson (Twilight Zone, February 1982) starts with the narrator on holiday at a Bermudan beach when another tourist, a fat man with white hair and a rosy complexion, starts talking to him. After some chitchat the man says his name is Santa Claus. The narrator humours the man (who he thinks is a nut), and asks why he didn’t get an autographed photo of Joe DiMaggio when he was a kid. Claus mutters an excuse, and they briefly talk about other matters until Claus says he has an early flight to catch, and leaves.
This is okay I guess, but the ending isn’t really a surprise.
** Average. 1950 words.
Gunbelt Highway by Dan Abnett
Gunbelt Highway by Dan Abnett (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) begins with several wiki-like disambiguations, and the first “Gunbelt Highway” passage is a about a specific DRAV (Deep Range Assault Vehicle) and the conflicts that particular vehicle was involved in (Gulf 6 (2052), Orbit 2 (2053), etc.). This is followed by other Gunbelt Highway wikis, which in turn describe a stretch of road, two different songs, a space traffic route, a piece of malware, a TV movie, an account of the Biafran War, and a western adventure novella. As you read through these wikis, there are inconsistencies in the history they describe, something that is developed when the next wiki discusses a sentient meme:
Bentley (and others) also stress that the Gunbelt Highway Effect is far more insidious than the other described phenomena, in several key ways. One, its effect is often scattershot and piecemeal, rather than revolving around a single articulable fact. Two, it not only acts to change or invert verifiable historical details, it often seems to function retroactively, altering, mutating and even cross-pollinating the ‘prior strata’ of axiomatic information upon which any verification of said details depends. As such, the effect seems to possess an acausal property, which Bentley variously calls ‘quantum memetics’ or ‘memetic relativity’, behaving contrary to chronological or linear progression, with meaning and significance shifting depending on the objective position of the observer. Three, it not only affects a modification of collective psychology, but also of hard (usually digital) data. p. 15-16.
Later on in the story this meme is traced back to science fiction in a droll passage:
In “The Primate Pool” (2098), Bell controversially traces the ideas of skeuomophic resonance and quantum memetics back to the pulp fiction mass produced during the 20th century. He suggests that the “heavy lifting” of human cultural development has occurred, not in the deliberate field of philosophy, with its “scrupulous laboratory condition”, but “in the wild”, without oversight or adequate containment, in works of science fiction and speculative fiction. While a significant portion of science fiction has been “purposefully prescient” and has often accurately predicted many aspects of what was deemed ‘the future’, Bell argues that the vast majority of works in the genre have been produced “like wildfire, almost at random, without peer review, and usually with a throw-away or wilfully disposable intent. Words were a base currency, squandered with spendthrift glee, with no thought for the exchange rate, or the infinite variations of idea they could generate”. Bell describes the authors of the genre, often producing frantically on demand to meet publishing deadlines and pay-by-the-word counts, as “toiling like the aphoristic infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, generating incalculable quantities of ideas purely for the purpose of escapist entertainment, without regard for the pernicious durability or half-life of those ideas”.
Bell draws a clear distinction between the small coterie of “responsible speculative authors” who conscientiously pursued the development of prescient scientific and sociopolitical concepts, and the “now largely anonymous legion of hacks and jobbing writers” who wrote “with flagrant abandon” to mass-manufacture prodigious quantities of consumable entertainment, the equivalent of “fast food giants churning out food substitutes that favoured short-term gratification over nourishment, or pre-regulation plastics manufacturers overstuffing cultural and mental landfills”. p. 16
This idea of a changing or tampered-with history is examined once more using the biography of the previously mentioned Biafran War writer but, by the time I finished the story, I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. The central conceit, and the changing events, are also buried under far too many words—the story would benefit from being shorter and more focussed (especially at the beginning, where it takes far too long to get going).
** (Average). 7,600 words. ParSec website.
Stranger Station by Damon Knight
Stranger Station by Damon Knight (F&SF, December 1956) opens with Paul Wesson arriving at a space station built far from Earth for the purpose of interacting with visiting members of an alien species whose proximity causes humans mental distress.
For the first month of Wesson’s six month stay he is alone, apart from an AI/computer network he calls “Aunt Jane”, who he quizzes about various matters while he waits for the alien to arrive—What do the aliens look like? Can he see a picture of them? How did the previous incumbents of the station cope with their tour of duty, etc.? But Aunt Jane won’t answer most of his questions, saying that it isn’t permitted. The computer does, however, read to him an account of the first contact with the aliens on Titan:
We gained access to the alien construction by way of a large, irregular opening . . . The internal temperature was minus seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit; the atmosphere appeared to consist of methane and ammonia . . . Inside the second chamber, an alien creature was waiting for us. We felt the distress which I have tried to describe, to a much greater degree than before, and also the sense of summoning or pleading . . . We observed that the creature was exuding a thick yellowish fluid from certain joints or pores in its surface. Though disgusted, I managed to collect a sample of this exudate, and it this was later forwarded for analysis . . . p. 6
The rest of the month sees Wesson become slightly stir-crazy but then, one day when he is on a spacewalk to the much larger sector two of the station (built to house the alien), he starts to feel fearful, and then there is a booming sound—the alien visitor has arrived. Wesson now feels the same distress as the original contact team:
It was the scent of danger, hanging unseen up there in the dark, waiting, cold and heavy. It was the recurrent nightmare of Wesson’s childhood—the bloated unreal shape, no-color, no-size, that kept on hideously falling toward his face. . . . It was the dead puppy he had pulled out of the creek, that summer in Dakota . . . wet fur, limp head, cold, cold, cold. . . .
With an effort, Wesson rolled over on the couch and lifted himself to one elbow. The pressure was an insistent chill weight on his skull; the room seemed to dip and swing around in slow circles. p. 11
During this part of the story we also learn that the alien’s golden fluid provides humans with increased longevity, and that Wesson’s bosses want him to ask the aliens if they intend continuing their twenty year visits. Then Wesson realises he can sense the position of the alien, and realises that it may be suffering too. Eventually he pressures Aunt Jane into showing him a video image of the alien, which precipitates a realisation (“When two alien cultures meet, the stronger must transform the weaker with love or hate.”). Wesson concludes (spoiler) that, while he and the alien are in close proximity, his mind is being changed so that he (and others like him) will be able to peacefully co-exist with them. When he explains all this to Aunt Jane however, he discovers that he can no longer understand her or speak, read or write English.
The last section sees Wesson decide to resist the emanations coming from the alien, which then causes it such pain that it breaches its sector and wrecks the station. There is a long description of the death throes and, before Wesson dies, his final realisation is that his actions will cause humanity to come into conflict with the aliens.
If the plot of this story sounds like it doesn’t makes much sense, that is because it doesn’t: I think Knight was writing a brooding psychological horror here, and hadn’t really thought through the internal logic. Now, if readers are happy to just immerse themselves in the descriptive writing and atmospherics, they will probably enjoy it—if you have an analytical mind, however, you will be distracted by many questions (Why does Masson have to be unconscious when he arrives at the station? Why does he spend a month there on his own before the alien arrives? How does humanity manage to get enough immortality fluid for everyone if the aliens only visit every twenty years? How did they discover that the fluid could be used for this purpose in the first place? Why do the aliens think they can affect humanity as a whole if they only “convert” one station keeper every twenty years? Why must the two races have a love/hate relationship, can’t they peacefully co-exist or ignore each other? Why does the last sentence have Aunt Jane sounding as if it loves Wesson?) Also on the debit side of the story is the fact that a lot of the writing is long-winded description (whereas the conversation Wesson has with his boss about a possible fluid shortage—and why he doesn’t have a cat on board with him—isn’t even that, it’s just padding). The final nail in the coffin is that a couple of major plot developments come from Wesson having realisations or intuitions about things, always a weak way of advancing a story.
Not one for the left-brained (analytical/methodical).
** (Average). 9,400 words.
Nineteen Eighty-Nine by Ken MacLeod
Nineteen Eighty-Nine by Ken MacLeod (ParSec #1, Autumn 2021) is set in the world of George Orwell’s novel 1984 (now out of copyright), and takes place five years after Winston Smith’s interrogation, torture and indoctrination at the hands of the Thought Police. The story opens with Smith drinking gin in the Chestnut Tree Café, and watching a news program about Number One (the leader of the enemy state Eastasia). Then he recognises a man sitting behind him, and realises it is Syme, who previously worked with Smith in the Research Department until Syme was unpersonned, disappeared. Syme begins talking to Smith, and tells him that he was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp in Shetland but was released early.
During the pair’s subsequent conversation Smith finds out that Syme is going back to his old job (Syme notes his ex-colleagues are still working on the eleventh edition of the Newspeak dictionary), before they are interrupted by events on the screen, which shows Eastasian people protesting against Number One—an unprecedented event. Smith, Syme and the rest of the café’s patrons join in with shouts of “Down with Number One!”, cries similar to those they would normally make during the Two Minute Hate.
After Syme leaves, Smith starts walking home, only to be accosted by the Thought Police and bundled into a car. Sitting in the back is O’Brien, the man who tortured and psychologically broke Smith in Room 101. Smith tells O’Brien to get it over with (Smith expects to be executed, and has done for the last five years) but O’Brien says a worse fate awaits him: Smith subsequently spends several days in a rubber cell withdrawing from his alcohol addiction.
O’Brien then sends for Smith (spoiler):
‘Why have you brought me here?’ Winston asked.
O’Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose, and looked at Winston with the intense, unspoken sympathy of their first exchanged glance, long ago. It was as if the arrest, the torture, the long interrogation and indoctrination, and the room that Winston could—with some effort—avoid thinking about, had never happened.
‘I am engaged,’ said O’Brien, ‘in a conspiracy to overthrow the rule of the Party in Airstrip One, and hopefully in the whole of Oceania. You have a small but important part to play in this conspiracy. Will you join me?’
Winston’s mug rattled as he put it down. A cold sweat broke from his every pore. It was possible that this was a test of his loyalty. It was also possible that O’Brien—the manipulator, the torturer, the inquisitor, the provocateur—was after all an enemy of the Party! In either case, it was best to play along. If he did not, he was unlikely to leave this place alive. He could always gather what information he was able to, and denounce O’Brien to the Thought Police at the first opportunity. p. 22
In the rest of this long section, O’Brien unveils a conspiracy which involves many of the Thought Police, and he also provides Smith with an account of what life was like under Socialism at the end of the WWII. He then reveals that Smith is one of the Windrush generation (a black immigrant from Jamaica). O’Brien finally adds that there are other people who can remember what it was like at the end of the war, and takes Smith to meet some soldiers.
The last part of the story sees O’Brien and Smith go to an underground shelter where members of the military are in the process of mounting a coup. During the visit a black officer called Haynes gives Smith an account of the various flash points and insurrections in Oceania before the pair ask him to be the Minister of Truth in the new provisional government (“political reasons in the Americas [mean] that at least one of the Ministers in the new [Airstrip One] government should be a Negro.”) Then, during this conversation, there is an attack on the bunker by forces that are still loyal to Oceania. After the shoot-out Haynes is dead, and Syme appears from the smoke as the leader of the rebels who have saved Smith and O’Brien from the loyalist attackers. The revolution succeeds, and Smith then becomes Minister of Truth.
The first half or so of this is quite well done, but the later insertion of contemporary political issues (Windrush, racial strife in America) completely derails any suspension of disbelief, and seems like little more than a facile black-washing of Orwell’s novel (racial conflict is mentioned in the story but is not addressed in any meaningful or significant way).
A game of two halves.
** (Average). 9,000 words. ParSec website.
With Clean Hands by John Rackham
With Clean Hands by John Rackham (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) opens on a planet called Malin, where a planetary Governor called Ingersoll is hosting two anthropologists who have been living among the natives. The setting, though, is pretty much like the 1950’s British Empire in space, as can be seen from comments that Ingersoll’s wife’s Martha makes to one of the visitors later on:
“If you’re going to try to talk shop, Robert, take them into your study,” Martha got up. I’ve got work to do, as always. Stay single, my dear,” she shook her head archly at Olga. “Once you marry, well, you can’t really do anything else, afterwards. Children, housework, meals—it’s never ending. . .” and she went to the door to ring a hand-bell for servants. p. 89
After Marta leaves, Ingersoll and his two visitors discuss a native plant called Gleez, the basis for a sought after fabric which also has a special place in Malinese society and religion. Then, when one of the Malinese servants brings in a native version of coffee, Ingersoll learns that the native’s “cough”, a normally untreatable and eventually fatal disease, has been cured by another native he refers to as The Healer. Ingersoll later phones the Chief of Police asks him to investigate.
At dinner that night Ingersoll and his guests discuss the natives’ evensong before Daniels, the policeman, gets back to Ingersoll and tells him that has tracked down the healer. He reports that his preaching “sounds like a cross between Christianity and Socialism”, and adds that his ideas are catching on, something which has led to labour problems in some areas. Daniels also says that he has bugged his accommodation.
We later see Ingersoll’s son develop a cough, initially assumed by the parents to be a normal, human one until Martha comes and shows Ingersoll blood on a handkerchief—when it appears that their son has caught the native disease. Finally, in the middle of all this drama, Olga (one of the anthropologists) visits Ingersoll one evening and sits on his lap! They have a conversation about interdependence before kissing.
The second half of the story sees all these plot elements merge together (spoiler) and, after further unrest on the planet, the native chiefs demand to see Ingersoll. When they are let in, Ingersoll sees that they have brought the healer before him and say they want him crucified (they need Ingersoll’s permission as he has banned public executions). Then, during the meeting, his son bursts in and is cured by the healer.
Ingersoll later questions the healer in private about his activities, and tells him that he can’t continue causing the same level of disruption. Ingersoll adds that he will be left alone to teach if he tones down his message and stops causing trouble for the native chiefs. The healer refuses.
Later, when the pressure to have The Healer crucified becomes overwhelming, Ingersoll once more meets the chiefs, this time asking for a bowl of water and a towel before consciously doing a Pontius Pilate act. After the chiefs take the healer away to his fate Ingersoll tells Daniels to slip the healer something that will help with the pain of crucifixion—and arranges for the native’s body to be spirited away afterwards.
Ingersoll later tells the anthropologists that he has arranged for the removal of the healer’s body from its burial place as he wants to help spread his message on Malin. Later, of course, Daniels finds the body has vanished. The story ends with Ingersoll telling Olga that he is going to send his wife and son back to Earth; Olga says she will stay on the planet with him.
Most of the first half of this story is an amalgam of colonial and social clichés from the 1950s, but the last part is an engagingly weird, if predictable, alien Messiah/crucifixion variant1—with an atypical side helping of adultery and marital breakdown.
** Average. 11,500 words. Archive.org link
1. One of the most famous of these alien crucifixion stories is Harry Harrison’s The Streets of Ashkelon, published in Science Fantasy’s sister magazine New Worlds a year earlier (#122, September 1962). One wonders if Rackham saw Harrison’s story before writing his own.
The Hades Business by Terry Pratchett
The Hades Business by Terry Pratchett (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) opens with its protagonist, Crucible, arriving home and finding smoke in the hallway of his house. When he takes a bucket of water to the source of the fire in the study and charges the stuck door, it opens suddenly and he flies through the air. He ends up unconscious in the fireplace and then, when he comes around, finds the Devil leaning over him.
During their subsequent conversation the Devil tells Crucible that no-one has arrived in the Other Place for almost two thousand years, and that he wants to hire Crucible to head up an advertising campaign. After the Devil leaves, Crucible thinks about the offer and concludes he wants the money—but doesn’t want Lucifer running around. So he visits his local church.
The next part of the story involves Crucible’s journey to a (dilapidated) Hell:
A battered punt was moored by the river. The Devil helped Crucible in and picked up the skulls—pardon me—sculls.
“What happened to what’s-his-name—Charon?”
“We don’t like to talk about it.”
“Oh.”
Silence, except for the creaking of the oars.
“Of course, you’ll have to replace this by a bridge.”
“Oh, yes.”
Crucible looked thoughtful.
“A ha’penny for them.”
“I am thinking,” said Crucible, “about the water that is lapping about my ankles.” p. 70
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees the Devil do a lot of advertising appearances in an effort to promote Hell as a tourist destination, and the Other Place soon resounds to the general bedlam of humanity: the sounds of its many visitors’ jazz and pop music, their motorcycles, the click of slot machines, etc.
After a few weeks of this the Devil has had enough, at which point God appears out of a thunderstorm and asks him if he wants to come back up to Heaven. The Devil accepts the offer.
God then thanks Crucible, who has planned the whole endeavour with this outcome in mind.
This is a cutesy story, but it’s neatly and amusingly done—and it is a particularly impressive debut for a 14 year old. I wonder what became of this writer.1
** (Average). 3,650 words.
1. Yes, joking: Terry Pratchett’s ISFDB page. I got about twenty books into the Discworld series (about half way through) before the increasingly bloated size of some of the volumes started wearing me out (he always seemed to be incapable of efficiently wrapping up the story). Still, I must go back and re-read some of the better ones.
Same Time, Same Place by Mervyn Peake
Same Time, Same Place by Mervyn Peake (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) is one of two stories that appeared in the magazine that year as a result, I believe, of Michael Moorcock’s friendship with the writer (Moorcock brought them to Ted Carnell’s attention, and also provided a short essay on Peake in the same issue in which this piece of fiction appears).
The story itself begins with a description that evokes the grimness of post-war Britain:
That night, I hated father. He smelt of cabbage. There was cigarette ash all over his trousers. His untidy moustache was yellower and viler than ever with nicotine, and he took no notice of me. He simply sat there in his ugly armchair, his eyes half closed, brooding on the Lord knows what. I hated him. I hated his moustache. I even hated the smoke that drifted from his mouth and hung in the stale air above his head.
And when my mother came through the door and asked me whether I had seen her spectacles, I hated her too. I hated the clothes she wore; tasteless and fussy. I hated them deeply. I hated something I had never noticed before; it was the way the heels of her shoes were worn away on their outside edges—not badly, but appreciably. It looked mean to me, slatternly, and horribly human. I hated her for being human—like father. p. 57
When the narrator’s mother starts nagging him he feels suffocated, and leaves the house, getting on a bus to The Corner House restaurant in Piccadilly. There he befriends a woman, and he goes back to meet her on subsequent nights (although he wonders why she is always already there when he arrives, and remains seated when he leaves). Eventually, they arrange to marry.
The final section provides (spoiler) a nightmarish denouement—when his bus arrives late at the registrar’s office he sees, from the upper floor of the vehicle, a group of freakish individuals in the room where he is to be wed:
To the right of the stage (for I had the sensation of being in a theatre) was a table loaded with flowers. Behind the flowers sat a small pin-striped registrar. There were four others in the room, three of whom kept walking to and fro. The fourth, an enormous bearded lady, sat on a chair by the window. As I stared, one of the men bent over to speak to her. He had the longest neck on earth. His starched collar was the length of a walking stick, and his small bony head protruded from its extremity like the skull of a bird. The other two gentlemen who kept crossing and re-crossing were very different. One was bald. His face and cranium were blue with the most intricate tattooing. His teeth were gold and they shone like fire in his mouth. The other was a well-dressed young man, and seemed normal enough until, as he came for a moment closer to the window I saw that instead of a hand, the cloven hoof of a goat protruded from the left sleeve.
And then suddenly it all happened. A door of their room must have opened for all at once all the heads in the room were turned in one direction and a moment later a something in white trotted like a dog across the room.
But it was no dog. It was vertical as it ran. I thought at first that it was a mechanical doll, so close was it to the floor. I could not observe its face, but I was amazed to see the long train of satin that was being dragged along the carpet behind it.
It stopped when it reached the flower-laden table and there was a good deal of smiling and bowing and then the man with the longest neck in the world placed a high stool in front of the table and, with the help of the young man with the goat-foot, lifted the white thing so that it stood upon the high stool. The long satin dress was carefully draped over the stool so that it reached to the floor on every side. It seemed as though a tall dignified woman was standing at the civic altar. p. 63
The narrator stays on the bus and, after riding around for a while, eventually goes home. He now loves his mother and father, and never goes out again.
I wondered if this was an allegory about leaving home, only to see horror in the outside world (he variously refers to members of the group he saw as “malignant” and “evil”), and then wanting to return to an earlier time (Peake was among the first British civilians to witness the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen).
An interesting piece, but perhaps rather too dream-like to be completely satisfying.
** (Average). 3,500 words.
1. Mervyn Peake’s Wikipedia page.