“Waterspider,” first published in If (January 1964), is one of Dick’s rare humorous stories, Some it takes place at a contemporary SF convention, wher “Waterspider,” first published in If (January 1964), is one of Dick’s rare humorous stories, Some it takes place at a contemporary SF convention, where 21st century time-traveller Aaron Tozzo goes in order to obtain the help of a science fiction writer. You see, he needs advice on how to shrink a spacecraft, and everybody knows the SF writers of the mid twentieth century were precogs, sages with a clear knowledge of what was to come. While reading one of the pre-cogs’ publications—a scientific journal called If, Tozzo discovers an article by a a pre-cog named “Poul Anderson,” and decides he is the one who must be brought into the future to help with the project.
Like I said, this is a humorous story. It has some serious things to say about conformity, prison camps, secret police, the morality of experimentation upon prisoners, and the possible uses of science fiction in the future. But what remains in the reader’s mind—this reader’s at least—is the wonder of the ‘60’s San Francisco Sci-Fi convention. Oh, how I wish I could have been there, with Anderson, Leinster, Van Vogt, Dick, Azimov, and Vance! What conversations they must have had! ...more
First published in Fantastic (February 1964), the novella “Novelty Act” was more fully developed and published as the full-length novel The Simulacra First published in Fantastic (February 1964), the novella “Novelty Act” was more fully developed and published as the full-length novel The Simulacra later the same year. It tells of a comforting yet disturbing future America in which social and civic life is essentially confined to large individual apartment buildings, and the focus of everybody’s attention is the nightly television show broadcast from the White House, where main attraction Nicole Thibodeaux, the First Lady of the Land, presents the best variety acts in the good ol’ USA.
The story begins in the Abraham Lincoln apartment building, where the building community is preparing for its local talent show, hoping that a White House talent scout may ask one of their acts to travel to Washington to perform on the national stage. Our protagonists are the Duncan brothers, a jug band duo who perform classical music while an artificial papoola (a mechanical replica of an extinct Martian species) that dances for the audience. The Duncan Brothers and the papoola are summoned for a command performance, but once they reach the White House, things go desperately wrong.
The plot is complicated, and the themes are many, but its basic portrait of America—a overtly democratic but increasingly oppressive society soothed by television, organized through planned housing, controlled by a system of occupational testing, and monitored through a mandated program of counseling and confession—is a chilling one.
And there’s nowhere else to go. Except for Mars....more
“If There Were No Benny Cemoli” was first published in Galaxy (December 1963). It’s title echoes a paraphrase of Voltaire (“if there were no God, man “If There Were No Benny Cemoli” was first published in Galaxy (December 1963). It’s title echoes a paraphrase of Voltaire (“if there were no God, man would have to invent him”), and the story itself begins with the arrival of a starship from Alpha Centauri to New York City. Its mission? To rebuild Earth ten years after a devastating nuclear war, and—incidentally of course—wrest control from the local authorities.
One of the mission’s goals is the prosecution of war crimes, and—when the Alpha Centauri commission starts up the old “homeostatic” newspaper, The New York Times—it soon becomes clear that not only is there a revolutionary leader named Benny Cemoli who plans a march on New York calling for social justice, but that this same revolutionary may have been responsible for the war itself.
But soon other evidence is discovered, and the question becomes: is there really a Benny Cemoli? Or is he a fiction designed to distract the commission from Alpha Centauri? As Dick remarked himself in 1076, “I have always believed that at least half the famous people in history never existed. You invent what you need to invent. Perhaps even Karl Marx was invented, the product of some hack writer.”
This is an extraordinarily effective narrative which develops a complex plot with balance and nuance. One of Dick’s best....more
First published in Galaxy (December 1959), “War Game” tells a simple, apparently straight-forward story in which Leon Wiseman and his crew from the Te First published in Galaxy (December 1959), “War Game” tells a simple, apparently straight-forward story in which Leon Wiseman and his crew from the Terran Import Bureau of Standards test three recent creationss that have come from Ganymede, a respected manufacturer of toys. There have been tensions, and rumors of war, between Terra and the moons of Jupiter, and Wiseman wishes to be sure that there is nothing subversive or harmful about the new Ganymedan product line. The three toys to be tested: an elaborate game of “capture-the-fort” involved an a dozen automated soldiers, a cowboy suit made of an unusual material, and a board game that great resembles Monopoly.
The story has two distinct pleasures: first, the painstaking examinations of the workings of the three toys, particularly the citadel with the little robot soldiers, and secondly, the final revelation of where the real danger lies.
Interestingly enough, the original title of this story was “Diversion,” which describes both the strategy of the Ganymedan toymakers and the writer Philip K. Dick very well....more
“Explorers We,” first appearing in Fantasy and Science Fiction (January 1959), begins in typical classic sci-fi fashion. A crew of astronauts, returni “Explorers We,” first appearing in Fantasy and Science Fiction (January 1959), begins in typical classic sci-fi fashion. A crew of astronauts, returning to earth after a dangerous nearly deadly voyage and eager to be back home, lands somewhere in the outskirts of San Francisco.
But things do not go well: little children flee from them, and—when they enter into the city—people routinely scatter at their approach. Something must be seriously wrong with San Francisco. Or is there perhaps something wrong with the explorers themselves? Are they really human beings after all? Or do they just appear to to be?
This tale shares a similar theme with the Dick’s “Human Is” and “Impostor.” Although the plot itself is not as interesting as those of these other two stories, its reflection on the human and alien condition—particular by FBI agent Wilks—is haunting and thoughtful: “… if they—whatever they are—feel human, might they not become human, in time?”...more
This last M.R. James’ short story to be published during his life—printed in the Eton College magazine The Masquerade in 1933—is a step up from the oc This last M.R. James’ short story to be published during his life—printed in the Eton College magazine The Masquerade in 1933—is a step up from the occasional pieces and bagatelles that constitute his last works. The key to its success, I think, is to be found in the title of the story, for James’ here adopts a distinct modern tone, straight out of “The Age of Anxiety” or the early paranoid short stories of Philip K. Dick. He describes a world in which the most common everyday objects may be actively endeavoring to kill us, and the fate of one poor chap to whom this horrible thing occurs:
In the lives of all of us, short or long, there have been days, dreadful days, on which we have had to acknowledge with gloomy resignation that our world has turned against us. I do not mean the human world of our relations and friends: to enlarge on that is the province of nearly every modern novelist. In their books it is called ‘Life’ and an odd enough hash it is as they portray it. No, it is the world of things that do not speak or work or hold congresses and conferences. It includes such beings as the collar stud, the inkstand, the fire, the razor, and, as age increases, the extra step on the staircase which leads you either to expect or not to expect it. By these and such as these (for I have named but the merest fraction of them) the word is passed round, and the day of misery arranged.
Printed in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier (January 14, 1832), this is the first tale Poe published under his own name, and it marks a propitious st Printed in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier (January 14, 1832), this is the first tale Poe published under his own name, and it marks a propitious start to the twenty-three-year-old prose writer’s career. It is no masterpiece, but still, it is a fine exciting tale, filled with Germanic atmosphere, gothic imagery, and romantic rhetoric, continually teetering atop the precipice of parody, but never falling over the edge.
It tells the story of the reckless young Baron Frederick Metzengerstein and his feud with the Berlifitzing family. Soon after Frederick inherits his estate, the Berlifitzing stables catch fire and Wilhelm Von Berlifitzing perishes in the blaze. That evening Frederick’s servants bring him a magnificent stallion discovered in his own stables. The young lord claims the horse as his own—with fateful and tragic consequences.
I like the story both for what it remembers, and what it presages. In its treatment of doomed dynasties and unavoidable curses, it draws on Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, but its imagery—filled with fire and monumental destruction, alternating the brooding and vague with the unsettlingly precise, looks forward to The Fall of the House of Usher to come.
This passage will give some idea of what I mean. Here Baron Frederick, the stables blazing, contemplates a tapestry showing his Metzengerstein ancestor assassinating a Saracen forefather of the Berlifitzings:
But as the Baron listened, or affected to listen, to the gradually increasing uproar in the stables of Berlifitzing- or perhaps pondered upon some more novel, some more decided act of audacity- his eyes became unwittingly rivetted to the figure of an enormous, and unnaturally colored horse, represented in the tapestry as belonging to a Saracen ancestor of the family of his rival. The horse itself, in the foreground of the design, stood motionless and statue-like- while farther back, its discomfited rider perished by the dagger of a Metzengerstein ...
[H]e could by no means account for the overwhelming anxiety which appeared falling like a pall upon his senses. It was with difficulty that he reconciled his dreamy and incoherent feelings with the certainty of being awake. The longer he gazed the more absorbing became the spell- the more impossible did it appear that he could ever withdraw his glance from the fascination of that tapestry. But the tumult without becoming suddenly more violent, with a compulsory exertion he diverted his attention to the glare of ruddy light thrown full by the flaming stables upon the windows of the apartment.
The action, however, was but momentary, his gaze returned mechanically to the wall. To his extreme horror and astonishment, the head of the gigantic steed had, in the meantime, altered its position. The neck of the animal, before arched, as if in compassion, over the prostrate body of its lord, was now extended, at full length, in the direction of the Baron. The eyes, before invisible, now wore an energetic and human expression, while they gleamed with a fiery and unusual red; and the distended lips of the apparently enraged horse left in full view his gigantic and disgusting teeth.
One final note. “Metzengerstein” was one of the stories Poe submitted to a contest held by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, deadline December 1st 1831. Delia Bacon won the contest with her story “Love’s Martyr,” and Poe’s consolation prize was to see his story printed one week after the winner’s. I wonder: how many times did Delia Bacon—who outlived Poe by ten years—tell this story in the decades to come?...more
First published in Science Fiction Stories, “The Unreconstructed M” is a complicated—perhaps overly complicated—detective story involving someone bein First published in Science Fiction Stories, “The Unreconstructed M” is a complicated—perhaps overly complicated—detective story involving someone being framed for a murder he didn’t commit, but—since this is by Philip K. Dick story it is over course a tale involving ingeniously crafted machines—in this case, a small machine that can enter an apartment, deposit all the “evidence” necessary to frame a suspect, and (if it is almost caught in the act) assume the appearance of a small TV set as a disguise.
Of course something like this was bound to happen. In a society which has replaced the real criminal detective with a computer that accumulates a series of irrefutable data points, one may defeat the criminal justice system without fail if we can learn to fake precisely those data points that the computer accepts as conclusive proof.
As Philip K. Dick said about this story: "If my main theme throughout my writing is, "Can we consider the universe real, and if so, in what way?" my secondary theme would be, "Are we all humans?" Here a machine does not imitate a human being, but instead fakes evidence of a human being, a given human being. Fakery is a topic which absolutely fascinates me; I am convinced that anything can be faked, or anyhow evidence pointing to any given thing. Spurious clues can lead us to believe anything they want us to believe. There is really no theoretical upper limit to this. Once you have mentally opened the door to reception of the notion of fake, you are ready to think yourself into another kind of reality entirely. It's a trip from which you never return. And, I think, a healthy trip... unless you take it too seriously."...more
First published in If (July 1959), “Recall Mechanism” is a tale of a post apocalyptic world in which Sharp—who works for War Destruction Salvage—finds First published in If (July 1959), “Recall Mechanism” is a tale of a post apocalyptic world in which Sharp—who works for War Destruction Salvage—finds himself unable to complete his work because of disturbing recurrent hallucination and an increasingly intense fear of falling. He makes an appointment with an analyst called Humphrys who uses a “recall mechanism” to summon up the memories of the past he believes are the source of Sharp’s anxiety.
All this sounds relatively straightforward, right? But then, of course, this is a Philip K. Dick story. And in any Dick story about a post-nuclear war environment, can mutation be far behind?
This is an effective, absorbing little tale, well told. It also has a surprise ending, and—unlike many of Dick’s last minute surprises, this one actually works....more
By the time Hawthornes’s final collection of short fiction, The Snow Image, and Other, and Other Twice Told Tales (1852) was published, the author had By the time Hawthornes’s final collection of short fiction, The Snow Image, and Other, and Other Twice Told Tales (1852) was published, the author had already turned his full attention to novels. (The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables had been published in the two previous years, and Hawthorne had already begun work on The Blithedale Romance.) In fact, only three works included here—”Main-Street,” “The Snow-Image,” and “The Great Stone Face,” “Ethan Brand”—had been written since the publication of Hawthorne’s previous collection, Mosses from the Old Manse (1846), the other twelve being previously uncollected pieces, some written twenty years before. Apparently Hawthorne’s audience had moved on too: The Snow Image was the authors least profitable book.
Still, everything here is worthy a reader’s attention. “Old News” (1835), “Old Ticonderoga” (1836) “A Bell’s Biography” (1837), and “Main Street” (1849) are fact-filled meditations in which Hawthorne uses an old place or artifact existing in the present—a hoard of ancient newspapers, a ruined fort, a local church bell, a diorama of Salem) to summon up the atmosphere of the colonial and revolutionary past. A few others are essentially successful tales slightly marred by their brevity or incompleteness—“The Wives of the Dead” (1832), “The Devil in Manuscript”(1838), “Sylph Etherege” (1838), “John Inglefield’s Thanksgiving” (1840)—but each emanating from the center of Hawthorne’s dark vision. Add to these “Little Daffydowndilly” (1843), a child’s allegorical parable about the nature of work, and “The Canterbury Pilgrims” (1833), a typical Hawthorne piece in which a group of desperate, down-on-their luck people decide whether to take refuge in the celibate Shaker Community of Canterbury, New Hampshire, and you have the core of a diverse and diverting college.
In addition, Hawthorne offers us five masterpieces, three of which are newer works. “The Snow-Image,” a chilling children’s story, demonstrates—like “The Birthmark,” “Rappacini’s Daughter,” and “The Artist of the Beautiful” before it—how a sensible, well-meaning man can destroy an irreplaceable, precious thing, “The Great Stone Face” (1850), a melancholy allegory, present a few images of human greatness, and “Ethan Brand” embodies the classic Hawthorne theme of a passionate man grown cold through a clinical search for perfection. The other two tales, though, are much earlier, and are just as good as the previous three. The Man of Adamant” (1837), as its title indicates, shares a theme with “Ethan Brand,” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832)—written when Hawthorne was in his late twenties—is a tale of youthful disillusionment is as fine as anything Hawthorne has written, right up there with “Young Goodman Brown.”
Short version: not as good as “Twice-Told” or “Manse,” but well worth a look....more
Sometimes genius gives a preview of itself; Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman Major Molineux” is a fine example of this. Published in The Token and Atlantic Sou Sometimes genius gives a preview of itself; Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman Major Molineux” is a fine example of this. Published in The Token and Atlantic Souvenir (1832), when Hawthorne was twenty-eight, it possesses the symbolic resonance, the use of gothic imagery adapted to a vivid colonial atmosphere that characterizes the best of his short fiction to come. Moreover, it expresses a sharp sense of evil and a disillusionment with moral authority that Hawthorne would later bring to perfection—in his mid-forties—in his novel The Scarlet Letter. And yet it is a realistic coming-of age tale too, written by a man young still young enough to empathize with his naive hero and mourn his own loss of innocence, yet mature enough to control a plot and sustain a mood of ludicrous, almost comic menace throughout a narrative of more than seven thousand words, crowded with incident
The naive hero in question is a young man named Robin, who has just arrived by ferry in the city of Boston. He has come from the country to seek his fortune in the great city, and he knows where to start; he was promised employment by an important man: his kinsman, a Major Molineux. He asks those he meets about Molineux’s whereabouts, but is almost universally abused for his pains. A rich old man menaces him with a cane, a tavern-owner accuses him of being an escaped bondservant, and the night watchman threatens him with a night in the stocks for vagrancy. He encounters other people in his journey—including a pretty woman claiming to be Molineux’s housekeeper and a man with a fiery complexion and horn-like protuberances on his brow—but eventually he meets up with Major Molineux. And the laughter that results from this encounter echoes in the readers memory long after the story is done. Is this a rite of passage for Robin. Or a moral failure? Or both.
I’ll end this review with one of my favorite passages, showing young Hawthorne’s gothic impulse combined—as would often be the case—with spiritual meditation. Here Robin, while sitting on the steps of a church and waiting for the coming of Molineux, examines the house directly opposite, wondering if it could belong to the major:
[H]e took a minute survey of an edifice which stood on the opposite side of the street, directly in front of the church-door, where he was stationed. It was a large, square mansion, distinguished from its neighbors by a balcony, which rested on tall pillars, and by an elaborate Gothic window, communicating therewith.
Perhaps this is the very house I have been seeking,” thought Robin.
Then he strove to speed away the time, by listening to a murmur which swept continually along the street, yet was scarcely audible, except to an unaccustomed ear like his; it was a low, dull, dreamy sound, compounded of many noises, each of which was at too great a distance to be separately heard. Robin marvelled at this snore of a sleeping town, and marvelled more whenever its continuity was broken by now and then a distant shout, apparently loud where it originated. But altogether it was a sleep-inspiring sound, and, to shake off its drowsy influence, Robin arose, and climbed a window-frame, that he might view the interior of the church. There the moonbeams came trembling in, and fell down upon the deserted pews, and extended along the quiet aisles. A fainter yet more awful radiance was hovering around the pulpit, and one solitary ray had dared to rest upon the open page of the great Bible. Had nature, in that deep hour, become a worshipper in the house which man had builded? Or was that heavenly light the visible sanctity of the place, — visible because no earthly and impure feet were within the walls? The scene made Robin’s heart shiver with a sensation of loneliness stronger than he had ever felt in the remotest depths of his native woods; so he turned away and sat down again before the door. There were graves around the church, and now an uneasy thought obtruded into Robin’s breast. What if the object of his search, which had been so often and so strangely thwarted, were all the time mouldering in his shroud? What if his kinsman should glide through yonder gate, and nod and smile to him in dimly passing by?
“Oh that any breathing thing were here with me!” said Robin.
First published in College Days (June 28,1924), this little tale set in the celebrated “playing fields of Eton” (the school where James was provost, 1 First published in College Days (June 28,1924), this little tale set in the celebrated “playing fields of Eton” (the school where James was provost, 1918-1936), is a mere bagatelle, not to be taken seriously—not even as a ghost story. Still, it is by one of the masters of the ghostly tale, and—provided he does not expect too much—I think the reader will find it pleasing.
On an evening of marvels—Midsummer’s eve, to be precise—our narrator (unnamed) who is walking across the playing enters into colloquy with a cockney owl who complains of being harassed by fairies. The owl, at first merely angry, grows terrified when the bells toll the Witching Hour:
“Midnight?” cried the owl, evidently much startled, “and me too wet to fly a yard! Here, you pick me up and put me in the tree...Quick now! “ I obeyed. “Which tree do you want?” “Why, my tree, to be sure! Over there!”...The one what ’as like a door in it. Go faster! They’ll be coming in another minute.” “Who? What’s the matter?” I asked as I ran, clutching the wet creature, and much afraid of stumbling and coming over with it in the long grass. “You’ll see fast enough,” said this selfish bird. “You just let me git on the tree, I shall be all right.”
And I suppose it was, for it scrabbled very quickly up the trunk with its wings spread and disappeared in a hollow without a word of thanks.
But our narrator doesn’t “see”--at least not “fast enough.” Instead, he hides himself “one the darker side of the tree” and waits...
He never tells us exactly what he saw that night, but he ends with this general observation:
I find I do not like a crowd after dark — for example at the Fourth of June fireworks. You see — no, you do not, but I see — such curious faces: and the people to whom they belong flit about so oddly, often at your elbow when you least expect it, and looking close into your face, as it they were searching for someone — who may be thankful, I think, if they do not find him. “Where do they come from?” Why, some, I think, out of the Water, and some out of the ground. They look like that. But I am sure it is best to take no notice of them, and not to touch them.
First published in the periodical At Random (1929), “Rats” may well be the last of M.R. James scariest stories. It takes place—as many of his best sto First published in the periodical At Random (1929), “Rats” may well be the last of M.R. James scariest stories. It takes place—as many of his best stories do—in an inn near the coast (this time in Suffolk) where Thomson, currently at Cambridge, has retired for a little quiet reading. While out on his afternoon walk one day, he encounters “a square block of white stone fashioned somewhat like the base of a pillar, with a square hole in the upper surface.” That night, at the inn bar, he inquires of the locals what that thing might be:
‘A old-fashioned thing, that is,’ said the landlord (Mr Betts), ‘we was none of us alive when that was put there.’ ‘That’s right,’ said another. ‘It stands pretty high,’ said Mr Thomson, ‘I dare say a sea-mark was on it some time back.’ ‘Ah! yes,’ Mr Betts agreed, ‘I ’ave ’eard they could see it from the boats; but whatever there was, it’s fell to bits this long time.’ ‘Good job too,’ said a third, ‘‘twarn’t a lucky mark, by what the old men used to say; not lucky for the fishin’, I mean to say.’ ‘Why ever not?’ said Thomson. ‘Well, I never see it myself,’ was the answer, ‘but they ’ad some funny ideas, what I mean, peculiar, them old chaps, and I shouldn’t wonder but what they made away with it theirselves.’
One day, Thomson doesn’t go on an afternoon walk. He checks out the other rooms on his floor instead, and gets more than he bargained for in one of them:
Thomson close the door very quickly and yet quietly behind him and lean against the window-sill in the passage, actually quivering all over. It was this, that under the counterpane someone lay, and not only lay, but stirred. That it was some one and not some thing was certain, because the shape of a head was unmistakable on the bolster; and yet it was all covered, and no one lies with covered head but a dead person; and this was not dead, not truly dead, for it heaved and shivered. If he had seen these things in dusk or by the light of a flickering candle, Thomson could have comforted himself and talked of fancy. On this bright day that was impossible.
Lucky for the reader, things get even worse. But I’ll leave the rest of it up to you....more
