Robert Heinlein - Podkayne of Mars (1963)

I disliked Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein's alleged classic, probably more than anything else I read that year, and it's taken me about a decade to get over my subsequent aversion to the man's work - which I appreciate is ridiculous given the undeniable quality of at least a few of his books. Stranger didn't really have a story as I recall, being mainly the rambling account of a displaced Martian accepted into the circle of Jubal Harshaw, a massive bore who spends the entire novel expounding on his theories of this, that, and the other. Harshaw is a vehicle for Heinlein's own views on polygamy, incest and other sixties fixations - a pompous libertarian windbag as Rudy Rucker described him - who takes near infinite delight in the brilliance of his own testimony. I skimmed the last two-hundred pages and vowed to never do that to myself again, to which end I adopted the formula that anything written after Stranger should probably be given a wide berth.

After fifty pages of Podkayne with no actual story forming in support to a first person narrative taking suspiciously familiar delight in its own testimony, I realised that, despite all of the above, I hadn't bothered to make any mental note of the year Stranger in a Strange Land was published and had been ill-equipped to veto anything else I happened across in the used book store.

To be fair, it could have been worse in many respects, not least being that the central character and narrator is a fifteen-year old girl who somehow doesn't find herself sexually attracted to a much older man who writes science-fiction novels and who is probably named Bob or something like that; and her testimony is mostly witty and generally less annoying than that of Jubal Harshaw. The story here is that Podkayne and her younger brother travel to Venus with their uncle, and some stuff happens at a pace and in terms suggesting that Heinlein was having a stab at a literary novel rather than another ripping adventure, which sort of works as a travelogue with all the interesting stuff being the background detail of future civilisation, the rigours of space travel and so on. The slambang adventure described by Theodore Sturgeon on the back cover presumably refers to the espionage subplot which eventually develops - something to do with a bomb on the spaceship which I found difficult to follow over the noise of Podkayne jabbering on about life, the universe, and everything, and also because I was bored.

It isn't terrible, and I've a feeling I may simply have picked the wrong day to read it, but it will probably be a while before I give it another shot.

August Derleth (editor) - Worlds of Tomorrow (1953)

It feels like it's been a long time since I read one of these collections and I warmed to this one quite quickly, enjoying the spirit of the enterprise even where a couple of the stories were underwhelming for one reason or another. The spirit of the enterprise was, in this instance, visions of tomorrow, I suppose - which was doomed to failure given science-fiction's somewhat shaky predictive track record; but at the heart of that spirit was the notion of there being a future as something exciting or at least vastly different to the present. I feel we've lost sight of this, so it's nice to be reminded.

Anyway, aside from a few clunkers reliant on twist endings which have since become massive clichés - and may even have been clichés in 1953 for all I know - the collection is mostly great, and actively astonishing in a couple of cases. Jogging straight past the first Earthman on Mars ending up in a Martian zoo, Frank Belknap Long's The Great Cold reminds us of the genre's roots in - or at least its passage through - weird fiction, taking us to a far future where super-evolved barnacles rule the Earth, which the author somehow manages to write as genuinely weird and upsetting rather than just plain screwy, additionally using his beautifully vivid prose to say something beyond weird innit! Somehow, there's a lesson for us even in this world of super-evolved barnacles.

It was an utterly malicious dream, evoked by enforced idleness, the product of immense power seeking to sate itself in trivial cruelties.

The Fires Within by Arthur C. Clarke is similarly fantastic, with weird physics performing the heavy lifting for what is essentially a conversation between a couple of eggheads at a research centre. Fritz Leiber, Mack Reynolds, and Simak collaborator, Carl Jacobi all turn in respectable pieces, but the finest are possibly the last two. The Martian and the Moron may be the best thing I've read by Theodore Sturgeon, and it could be significant that it contains no traditional elements of science-fiction, or at least, the detail upon which the story spins remains ambiguous, leaving us with a radio ham who may or may not have picked up an alien transmission, and his son's relationship with a person I won't describe here because, despite having read the story, I still can't work out what or who she's supposed to be. The Martian and the Moron puts the reader to work, but it feels worth the effort. Finally, William Tenn's Null-P serves up an unfortunately familiar future history of the United States with lashings of sardonic wit. Despite what I wrote in the first paragraph, this is one case of a prediction having been fired in the right direction even if he doesn't quite hit the bullseye. Tenn's future America is founded on a fear of book learnin' with stupidity reclassified as a mark of character. Tenn fails because, as an optimist, he didn't account for basic greed as a motivating factor, with lies and telling people what they want to hear as a means to this end; but it's a wonderful piece of writing, alternately chilling and funny without resorting to slapstick.

Starshine

Theodore Sturgeon Starshine (1966)
This collection of six short stories is possibly the first Sturgeon I've read since having noticed that Kurt Vonnegut's recurring Kilgore Trout character was based on Sturgeon. Given that Vonnegut tended to write Trout as cranky at best, and otherwise something of a loser, I've found it hard to avoid this notion tainting my impression of Sturgeon's fiction, although in this case, the parallels seem to exist independent of my imagination. However, it should probably be remembered that Vonnegut and Sturgeon were friends, and that the genesis of Trout was as much to do with Kurt being amused by the idea of someone having a fish for a surname. I really don't think Kilgore Trout was intended as a criticism of Sturgeon, even though it's difficult to get away from the possibility.

Kilgore Trout was more or less invented by a friend of mine, Knox Burger, who was my editor in the early days. He did not suggest that I do this, but he said, you know, the problem with science-fiction? It's much more fun to hear someone tell the story of the book than to read the story itself. And it's true: If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it's over in a minute or so. It's a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarizing, and I suppose I've now summarized fifty novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them.

While I recall Sturgeon's More Than Human as astonishing, nothing since has done much to sustain that impression. Apparently I thought The Synthetic Man was great too, and yet I don't even remember reading it.

Anyway, the six stories collected as Starshine mostly represent sparky, original ideas, and Sturgeon's prose is jazzy and engaging, or should be engaging, bespeckled as it is with unexpected and often startling images; and yet I kept finding myself thinking that Vonnegut had a point, even though Vonnegut's point was never anything to do with the quality of what his friend wrote. The energetic style isn't really a problem and never quite becomes as irritating or yappy as Kornbluth could occasionally be after a major Sunny D jag, but the ideas at the heart of these tales somehow feel convoluted and unlikely for the sake of convoluted and unlikely, as though Sturgeon wrote to see whether he could pull it off, imposing what might at least seem like internal logic on this stuff; and I found it hard to care. For all that Sturgeon wrote well, I was left without any idea as to why he wrote these.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination July 1966

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination July 1966 (1966)
Here we are with another one of these, and mostly reprints this time for some reason, excepting Chad Oliver's Just Like a Man, which is relatively readable and set on a planet so indistinguishable from Earth as to actually have lions. The point is anthropological, focusing on the absolutely fascinating means by which Oliver's alien lemurs failed to evolve into anything resembling humanity. My use of the term absolutely fascinating in the previous sentence may contain trace elements of sarcasm.

David V. Reed first enquired as to Where is Roger Davis? back in 1938, the answer apparently revealing that those swastika toting hordes about to sweep across Europe may have been aided by Martians. It's one of those first person account tales impersonating  private correspondence which opens with I know you're not going to believe this, but the other night as I charged my trusty meerschaum with a goodly plug of tobacco… To be fair, that sentence doesn't appear in the story because I just made it up, but somehow it feels as though it did. Also, the Martian invasion force comprises just three of them, which is probably understandable when you're trying to make a kid's show on the cheap, but—oh never mind.

Simak's The Trouble with Ants is one of those short stories which was eventually included in City, which is approximately a novel; and I know it won a million awards and that it's Simak and I generally love Simak without exception or reservation, but I've always found City a little overrated with its cast of talking dog and their robot pals just a little too silly to work. This one is about how the talking dogs and their robot pals realise that you have to be careful with ants, otherwise they develop technology. I sort of wonder if Cliff was experiencing trouble with his heating that month, because City suggests the influence of certain powerful fumes. I'm told it can get a bit nippy at times up there in Wisconsin.

Almost Human by Tarleton Fiske, who was actually Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, tells of an innocent robot corrupted by the kind of toughs commonly portrayed by James Cagney and who end each statement with a quasi-interrogatory see, see. It's readable, if nothing life-changing, see.

Theodore Sturgeon's The Way Home is short and pleasant but didn't make much sense - or maybe I mean didn't seem to have a point - but never mind because the last two pretty much justify the entrance fee. Henry Kuttner's Satan Sends Flowers is one of those tales where someone has an actual conversation with the devil and is very satisfying; leaving just Isaac Asimov's Satisfaction Guaranteed, which apparently I've read before although I don't remember it. It's one of his Susan Calvin things, but herself is thankfully only a secondary character. Being written by Asimov in 1951, we probably shouldn't be too surprised to meet a housewife who just wants to keep her home clean and her man happy, which I'm sure will have gone down a storm with the usual Goodreads wankers. I sometimes find this sort of thing a bit painful, and true enough, when Asimov falls on his arse, he falls hard; but here the focus on the actual thrust of the story - yet more robot stuff - is of such elegant precision that blaming Asimov for a) the fifties and b) having been born as someone other than Andrea Dworkin seems both unfair and a bit of a waste of time, tantamount to whining about Silas Marner seeming dated.

I'm still not sure why Fantastic went tits up. I guess maybe there were just too many of these things and not enough readers coughing up to a monthly timetable.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1965

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1965 (1965)
This one is dated to the month of my birth, beyond which I don't have anything interesting to add regarding these unrelated facts aside from makes you think, dunnit?

Fritz Leiber's Stardock is one of his Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser tales, a series I've given a wide berth up until now because I didn't like the sound of it. Leiber writes like a dream when he's writing something interesting - expressive and arguably unique in the history of this sort of literature; but Stardock is unfortunately more or less what I expected it to be, namely the adventures of bearded men who point at distant objects and exclaim behold! The bearded men in this case are engaged in mountain climbing in search of the inevitable treasure, and they both get to knob sexy faerie ladies, and it's sixty looong pages which I read in a single sitting because I knew I'd end up skipping the rest if I took a break. It's probably great if you like that sort of thing and I don't, but it's nice to know my instincts regarding whether I'm going to like something or not seem reasonably on point.

Thankfully, it's mostly uphill for the rest of the trip. Simak's You'll Never Go Home Again is characteristically nourishing; and Sally is one of those tales in which Asimov did something other than invite us to figure out the puzzle, so that's jolly nice; and this issue's vintage reprint was David H. Keller's The Worm from 1929 - then much younger than this magazine is now - which isn't anything mind blowing but does a job.

Frank R. Paul's cover illustrates The Man from Mars, his one page speculative essay on Martian biology. It's preposterous but charming and, dating from 1939, somewhat refutes the claim - which I read somewhere or other and have probably repeated - of Simak being the first writer to depict alien intelligence as something other than inevitably hostile.

The finest of the selection is Theodore Sturgeon's The Dark Room featuring a cast of mostly vodka-Martini guzzling fifties men and which is as such absurdly dated but works in spite of itself, and because Sturgeon's prose has a uniquely jazzy energy which crackles off the page.

3 in 1

 

Leo Margulies (editor) 3 in 1 (1963)
The idea was to collect novella length stories from the digests which weren't long enough to reprint as novels in their own right, and yet which weren't sufficiently breezy as to justify inclusion in a short story anthology. I'm not sure what the highest available page count would have been for a paperback produced in the early sixties, but I'm guessing not much more than a couple of hundred, hence this volume. I'm also guessing the potential page count may have risen somewhat soon after this was published, which is why we haven't seen a load of these things all washed up in second hand book stores.

Anyway, this one seemed like an essential purchase given the presence of both Simak and Leinster. Theodore Sturgeon's There is No Defense sags a bit towards the end, although is worth reading just for the first half which pretty much beats James S.A. Corey to everything which made The Expanse interesting - at least on the box - but did it all back in 1948. Simak's Galactic Chest is characteristically wonderful, and is actually hard to read without one's inner film director giving the lead role to James Stewart. Finally, there's Murray Leinster's West Wind which isn't one of his best, but is nevertheless worth reading at least once because it's Leinster and as such goes everywhere but the places you might expect it to go. Truthfully, the only points deducted are for how much it reminds me of one of Algis Budrys' slightly twitchy cold war fables, and there are probably worse things to be reminded of.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Theodore Sturgeon Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)
I wouldn't ordinarily have bothered but for this novelisation having been written by Theodore Sturgeon. I think I saw the movie as a kid, but I'm not absolutely certain, and I recall being underwhelmed by what I saw of the subsequent TV series which, given my unconditional juvenile love of anything starring a vaguely futuristic vehicle, doesn't seem to speak well of the enterprise. Momentarily ignoring what Sturgeon did here so as to examine his source material, Voyage is essentially a variation on Gerry Anderson's formula with characters and situations packed in around the edges of the technological lead role - typically a fast car which shoots house bricks or something; which is in turn an essentially Gernsbackian misreading of Jules Verne; and so Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is Twenty Thousand Leagues reimagined by a dunce, a man who dared to ask what anyone ever saw in Nemo, suggesting the story would be a lot more fun and exciting if we were to reinvent him as a guy one could respect such as a police officer or a solid military man, someone who knows doctors and dentists. As with Star Trek and others of its general type, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is adventure with safety features, framed in a tidily modular setting with regular guys and associated squares at the controls, none of that weird beatnik stuff to confuse you or keep you awake at night.

Against all odds, Theodore Sturgeon managed to squeeze something pretty damn readable out of this near terminally beige commission. Charles Bennett, co-author of the original script, seems to have had an otherwise reasonably impressive track record, so I assume his role was to elevate Allen's basic ideas above grade school level. I don't know how much Sturgeon kept of what Bennett wrote, but it's fairly easy to forget this was ever a movie, which is probably a good thing. Sturgeon's prose is intense and jazzy, twisting and turning in such a way as to blur the focus of what we're actually reading, but throwing out such wild images and ideas that it doesn't really seem to matter that it's founded on what may as well have been an unusually dull episode of Stingray. Additionally, he makes an effort with the science, or at least more of an effort than whoever came up with the original plot, so even if Asimov's title remains unchallenged, the reader can squint a bit and just about get past this being a story in which the sky catches fire.

Assuming the novel inherited these details from the script, it's interesting - even amusing - that the good guys, the progressive, radical thinkers should be conservative uniformed Americans who know when to say sir, while the dangerous, backwards-looking bureaucrats are sceptical European types; but Sturgeon manages this aspect without either hint of an agenda or diluting the occasional ecological digression. Following the maxim of how lousy books can make for decent movies, it's pleasing to find that the equation can work both ways.

Peculiar Lives

Philip Purser-Hallard Peculiar Lives (2003)
At the risk of repeating myself, I sometimes find it quite difficult to maintain warm, fuzzy thoughts about Doctor Who fandom, which is awkward because I used to quite enjoy Doctor Who and would like to be able to continue to do so on some level without inadvertently finding myself reminded of the toxic idiocy practised by about 85% of the shitehawks who will inevitably turn up to pitch in at the faintest whisper of its name. When I say Doctor Who, I really mean the novels, and mostly - although not exclusively - the novels published after the show was cancelled but predating its resuscitation as an advertising franchise in 2005. As with Who itself, there was something progressive about those books, an exploration of relatively new territory, an expansion of horizons, and I vaguely recall someone suggesting that the New Adventures were intended to bring new science-fiction authors to the fore. The New Adventures ceased in 1997, but their momentum was sufficient to spawn entire series of related novels with the serial numbers filed off: the Bernice Summerfield books, Time Hunter, and of course Faction Paradox. This seemed like a positive development to me because I was quite keen to read more by the people who had brought us Christmas on a Rational Planet, The Death of Art, and others; but it seems that I've been out of step, and the thing Who fans really want is more Doctor Who, or anything which we can pretend is Doctor Who - cosy adventures in time and space reminding us of teatime all those years ago, an endless string of quirky time-travelling eccentrics having scrapes and solving crimes and occasionally cracking a joke which we'll all recognise as a cheeky reference to something which happened in episode three of The Dalek Masterplan.

Tee hee.

Did anyone here buy the adventures of the time-travelling police station? Me neither. It was like Dixon of Dock Green from when we were kids, and the building itself jumped backwards and forwards in time, and it was populated by these really barmy characters, yeah?

I have nothing specific against pulp adventures, or cliches, or corporate entertainment, or even things which - God help us - aspire to corporate entertainment, and it doesn't all have to be Crime and Punishment - which is handy because I find Dostoyevsky unreadable; but I despair at how few of those surfing this tsunami of increasingly repetitive time travel thrills and spills aspire to anything greater, and how the few who do tend to get lost amongst the many who just want to see what would happen if something a bit like the Daleks encountered something a bit like the Ice Warriors.

Time Hunter was born from a Doctor Who novella called The Cabinet of Light, written by Daniel O'Mahony and published by Telos Books. When the BBC reeled in all of its most lucrative licences, Telos elected to continue their series of novellas with the lead transferred to that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as Honoré Lechasseur. I've read both The Cabinet of Light and now this one, and I still don't really understand what the deal is, why the title identifies him as a Time Hunter, or why I should care; but it doesn't matter because Telos always seemed to favour authors with some genuine ability to write, as opposed to simply publishing anything by anyone who liked Doctor Who a very, very lot.

Nothing if not ambitious, Philip Purser-Hallard's second novel takes on the eugenic elephant in the historical room of twentieth century science-fiction, daring - where many have preferred to mumble something about people being of their time before wandering off to see whether Neil Gaiman is still signing stuff - to draw attention to certain themes common to all those futuristic Gernsbackian supermen, and the Third Reich; and in a display of prowess bordering on the ostentatious, he writes it as a sort of sequel to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, and writes it in a pitch perfect homage to Stapledon's style, and the bad guy is George Bernard Shaw in a false beard. So there's a lot which could have gone horribly wrong, particularly given the subject, and yet the narrative is all nuance, not one slogan or generalisation, and a beautifully rendered and atmospheric period piece.

Practically speaking, the story falls somewhere between Wyndham's Chrysalids and Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human and, as befits both the subject and the genre, is mostly a discussion of morality, transcendence - a theme which runs through much of the author's other works - and how these relate to evolution and the mythology of the same. For the purposes of the reader who just really, really, really, really needs someone to have an adventure in time and space just like on the telly, this kind of leaves Honoré Lechasseur without anything much to do, arguably sidelined in his own novel, but with this being due to the novel's great success at doing what it sets out to do, no-one with a brain could reasonably object.

Even now, with Purser-Hallard's Devices trilogy on shelves in actual high street book stores, he seemingly remains a best kept secret, but one day the reading public will surely catch up, and they'll go back to this one - if they can find a copy - and realise that it was obvious all along.

The Shape of Things

Damon Knight (editor) The Shape of Things (1965)
I still find it hard to leave one of these on the shelf, which is partially nostalgia for anthologies such as this more or less having been my introduction to science-fiction which wasn't based on a TV show or else written by Philip K. Dick. Also, there's the exciting promise of getting something you didn't expect, of not really knowing quite what the fuck will happen once you get between the covers. I really don't know how anyone can resist.

Of course, these days there's also the appeal of revisiting what have become old favourites, but it's the surprises which keep me coming back, and not least because there are still surprises to be had. In this case one big one turns out to be The New Reality by Charles L. Harness. I don't recall having heard of the guy and I know nothing about him, but The New Reality is absolutely top shelf material, notable as a version of reality as construct within the eye of the beholder of some vintage, predating all those recent revisitations of the theme, and even predating the likes of Dick's Eye in the Sky. I'm sure Harness himself was only riffing on some previous telling of the story, one I've probably read and forgotten, but nevertheless he makes the convention his own.

As with any anthology, there are a couple which don't quite make the grade, but with this one the good stuff is of such quality as to render the duds forgiveable; and the good stuff from Henry Kuttner, Murray Leinster, Theodore Sturgeon, and Ray Bradbury are all very good indeed. Also, it's nice to read Knight's introduction to van Vogt's Dormant and to find that he did, on occasion, have a good word for the guy after all; so, very satisfying, all round.

Selections from The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology

John W. Campbell (editor)
Selections from The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology (1956)
Isaac Asimov said of John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, that the man was the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely. By agency of his magazine, Campbell was first to publish many of the greats - Asimov himself, Heinlein, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, and of course the mighty A.E. van Vogt. It's therefore probably inevitable that the stock of his name has lost some of its currency in recent years, just as has that of Hugo Gernsback, arguably Campbell's spiritual forebear in the field. Campbell popularised a very specific strain of science-fiction - two-fisted, deeply conservative men having space adventures whilst reeling off lists of scientific statistics, the sort of thing which led to Star Wars, Alien, and the rest. I can't be arsed to dig out my copy of Brian Aldiss's Trillion Year Spree, but I expect he will have said something along those lines; and assuming he did, he will have had a point.

Campbell was unfortunately of his time in the sense of Oswald Mosley and senator Joseph McCarthy being of their time, with all kinds of unsavoury views regarding race, socialism, and the institution of slavery, as Michael Moorcock reported in an editorial piece entitled Starship Stormtroopers, essentially a brief history of authoritarian currents in science-fiction literature:

He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were 'natural' slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery, that the moujiks when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest and that the blacks were 'against' emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in 'leaderless' riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

The more I know about Campbell, the less I like, and yet I'd nevertheless rather not see him chucked down the same oubliette as Gernsback. Whilst I agree that his talent and reputation may be historically overplayed, and that as a person he sounds absolutely ghastly - as I'm sure Sir Kenneth Clark would agree - for better or worse, his influence upon the genre is undeniable, and his legacy is not entirely lacking in redeeming qualities. Just like Gernsback, Campbell's vision was arse, but it was populist, bestselling arse, and providing you keep in mind that it was arse, there's nevertheless some pleasure to be gained.

The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology came out in 1952 as a mammoth hardback assemblage of twenty-two short stories by what were then the biggest names. I gather it was one of the first anthologies of its kind, and as such left an indelible stamp on the genre as a whole. This collection is one of several paperbacks reprinting just eight of those stories, because paperback technology of the time was supposedly not quite up to reprinting the whole thing; and I picked it up, still buzzing from reading a Murray Leinster collection and hoping to keep the magic going.

Leinster's fiction very much ticked all of the Campbell boxes, but as with A.E. van Vogt, I nevertheless find the atmosphere and peculiar narrative twists compelling and often so odd as to actively undermine the square-jawed subtext; which isn't to say that they're anything deep, just immensely enjoyable. That said, I've noticed a peculiar quality of Leinster's view of the alien entirely in keeping with what Moorcock regards as the authoritarian tendencies of Campbell's lads. First Contact is a variation on The Aliens from the collection of the same name, in which humans encounter extraterrestrials in deep space. Whilst the encounters are not overtly fraught with hostility, they seem informed by the paranoid cold war politics of the time, and bizarrely so. Both tales spin upon the supposed inevitability of alien species who really want to be able to trust each other but somehow know this to be impossible, and so they must destroy each other.

Well duh.

It makes for odd reading in 2016, but it helps that Leinster reaches an amicable conclusion, in part revealing the folly of xenophobia; which makes a pleasant change from the alien as foul bug-eyed Communist and, I suppose, might even get its message to those needing it with greater efficacy than would a more overtly liberal tale. Although that said, The Aliens seems particularly weird for having an out and out declared xenophobe on the crew of its ship, and one stated as having been chosen specifically so as to provide a variant perspective to that of the ship's more reasonable captain - all seeming very pertinent right now, of course...

Ugh... yeah - getting back to this book, the first story is Asimov's Nightfall which I read in 2008 and thought was amazing. Almost everyone I know who has read Asimov, read and enjoyed his work as teenagers then later came to regard his writing as big on ideas but otherwise piss poor and very much overrated. I didn't actually read anything by him until 2008, by which point I would have been in my forties, and I thought he was fucking terrible, particularly those Susan Calvin stories; until someone pointed me in the general direction of the good stuff, or what seemed to be the good stuff, and thus was my opinion revised, or at least modified. Yet reading Nightfall now, it too seems horribly clunky - an admittedly nice big idea somewhat lost beneath thirty pages of dreary conversation amounting to a couple of one-dimensional characters describing the story to us.

Protons, you say? So what kind of properties might one of those have?

Anyway, I picked this from the shelf thinking I could hardly go wrong given the names on the cover, but ultimately, aside from a half decent Leinster, an averagely pleasant - and conspicuously well written Simak - and A.E. van Vogt's eye-wateringly peculiar Vault of the Beast, it's all a little underwhelming. Possibly excepting the slog of Nightfall, there's nothing terrible here, but it fails to live up to the promise of Paul Lehr's wonderful cover painting, and dammit - this collection really should have been better.

The Synthetic Man

Theodore  Sturgeon The Synthetic Man (1950)
This being the second novel I've read by Sturgeon, I must conclude that biology, mutation, and outsiders were common preoccupations of his writing as this one also features a group of freaks trying to make their way in the world. It's been a while since I read More Than Human, and I can't actually recall much of it beyond this distinguishing feature and the fact of it being extremely well written, but the freaks of The Synthetic Man - the earlier novel for what it may be worth - have banded together for safety as part of a travelling side show. The pseudo-gothic freak show has become something of a cliché, and without really caring enough to look anything up, I suspect it's probably been trotted out by Clive Barker, Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman and others with some frequency - although I personally thought Lawrence Miles used it very well in Interference - but Sturgeon writes with such lively confidence that it feels like a new idea, which is pretty good going for something published over half a century ago.

Kiddo, as he is known, turns out to be something much stranger than the robot implied by the title - at least to me - as Sturgeon asks us to consider the possibility of there being another form of life here on Earth unlike anything with which we are familiar, thus far undetected because it has no effect on us, nor we on it. Further to this we get Kiddo growing up as female in order to elude the wrath of its misanthropic sideshow owner - not simply the bold use of a transgendered main character at a time when this would have appeared quite shocking to at least a few of the readers, but a main character who is transgendered for reasons of narrative and theme rather than as a simple example of the freakish.

Sturgeon writes well with the warmth and authority of someone who weaves tales, as opposed to simply filling pages and making a living from the pulps. For want of a better description it's van Vogtian surrealism communicated with the simple clarity of Ray Bradbury, and The Synthetic Man has been a real find. I really need to keep an eye open for more by this guy.