The Empires We Choose Not to See

I'm going to start with a statement: empires are bad.

This isn't something I would have expected to be controversial five years ago because I would have expected people to know, in the same way that pain hurts and fire burns, that empires are bad. There are plenty of people who are well aware of how bad empires are, of course, but they tend to be the victims of empire. The primary beneficiaries of empire -- for those of you keeping score, that's white people in the Western world -- tend to be ignorantly innocent about it at best, and willing participants at worst. It's true that the last five hundred years is in many respects a history of empires, because when you have these organizations exerting their will across oceans and continents, impoverishing some to enrich others, they're going to leave a mark in the historical record. The modern legacy of empire is like the iridium concentration at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary; a global reminder of devastation and destruction.

But you wouldn't really get that impression from reading science fiction. Space empires have been a fixture of science fiction for practically as long as there has been science fiction, and while they were often meant as enemies -- take the Eddorians in the Lensman series -- science fiction's origins in imperialist states meant that the influence of empire would always be there. The venerable RPG Traveller is anchored around empire, whether it's plucky Terrans fighting against and replacing the aging Vilani Empire or the star-spanning Third Imperium; literary settings like Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium fills the future with a hegemonizing empire that seeks to incorporate all human worlds into its authority, with no exceptions; and the play-by-mail games of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The May/June 1983 issue of The Space Gamer reviews three of them -- Galactic Conflict, Starlord, and Star Venture -- and imperialism is in their bones. Take Starlord, where the players' goal is "to capture the Throne Star and become the Emperor, after which you get to play for free." For everyone else, it cost $2.50 to submit a Starlord turn ($6.11 in 2016 US dollars), which may make Starlord one of the few games where the player had a real monetary incentive for imperialism.

"Yeah," you might say, "but those are just games." I'd argue that games can shape the way we think and view the world just as much as anything else, and that these play-by-mail games were the precursors of modern 4X games, a genre designation which itself seems pretty innocuous until you think about it.

Explore, expand, exploit, exterminate.

The standard playbook of the Earth-based empire, and there it is, copy and pasted into interstellar space, giving you opportunity after opportunity to commit atrocities in the name of winning the game. Practically encouraging you to do it, at times -- take, for example, the Stellar Converter in Master of Orion II. By the time you've researched this late-game weapon, you don't need it, but it lets you follow the example of the one science fiction empire everyone knows: it lets you destroy planets. Using it rewarded you with this video and nothing else. No political slaps on the wrist, no anger from the galactic community, just a fresh asteroid belt. I can't count the number of times I did it, because it was easy and quick and I didn't need that planet anyway. But that's the thing about empire: it compromises you. It whispers in your ears. Like Brian Aldiss said in his introduction to the 1973 Galactic Empires anthology, "morality is all very well, but give me luxury every time."

Which brings me to Stellaris. Stellaris is the most recent of the 4X games, released by Paradox Entertainment just last year, and may well be the most dense and complex computerized 4X game. As a game it has a lot going for it, but like everything, it has its own unspoken political assumptions. One of those is empire. Not in that the game allows you to build an aggressive, galaxy-spanning empire should you so choose -- but in that it uses "empire" as the default. No matter whether you're fanatic egalitarians running a space United Nations, materialist xenophiles advocating for the light of Science, or a pacifist spiritualist nation seeking to commune with the secrets of the mental realm, the game refers to you as an empire just as it does the xenophobic authoritarians who dream of galactic conquest. It's baked into the tutorial tips and even into the news updates that appear in Steam before you boot up the game itself.

Funny, I'd have thought an empire was scary enough on its own.

The concept of empire is further rooted in the way the game works, too. The best government building you can build, which you can have only one of, is called the Empire Capital-Complex. There's an Imperial form of government authority, but in structure -- life terms and hereditary rulership -- it's just a monarchy. Just because a state is democratic doesn't mean it can't also be imperial, but the way they're set up as orthogonal here echoes an idea that's been made to percolate in the Western consciousness for a long time now. Hell, even if you're a fanatically xenophilic democracy that has embraced interstellar immigration for decades, the game still requires you to research a specific technology to get leaders who aren't of your founding species.

It's not so much that this is outright nostalgia for empire, I think, so much as it is divorced from the actual nature of empire. Unlike hyperdrives and psionic realms, empires are real things, and yet Stellaris treats it as if it's as neutral as using "lift" instead of "elevator." But there's a lot of hidden nostalgia here, the sort that Aldiss meant when he wrote about luxury. Up until recently, the general public tended to remember empires more easily because empires were the ones who wrote the histories. When they did, they remembered the accoutrements, the displays of wealth and power, and didn't stop to think about where that wealth came from and what that power was used for. (For those of you keeping score at home, the wealth was plundered from other people using that power.)

What gets me about Stellaris is that to me, there's a fairly evident disconnect between what was put there consciously and what slipped through unconsciously. One event, for example, has your scout ship discover a planet in the grip of an ice age but with industrial ruins, with the event text commenting on how nobody could understand how a species could be so foolish as to alter their own environment to uninhabitability. Another is how the humans are presented: the default United Nations of Earth, the "hero" humans, begin with a Black woman as leader, and the default Human species portrait is of a woman when in every other game I can think of, it's been a man.

Fun fact: originally Humans had "Quick Learners" as a trait. They were only switched in a later patch to being Wasteful.

But you have to look beyond that to get to the unconscious choices, like the use of "empire" as something that's value-neutral. Take the in-game blockers; these are meant as stumbling blocks to your developmental aspirations, where mountain ranges, dense jungles, toxic kelp, or noxious swamps need to be cleared away with advanced technology for you to make use of the resources on the tile they occupy. You're trained for this by the inclusion of unique blockers on your homeworld. There are two kinds. One is industrial ruins, left over from "a past age of progress." This is the other one.

Yeah, nothing political in that choice of description, am I right?

You have to look at stuff like this to get a sense of the unconscious choices. You have to look at how Martin "Wiz" Anward, one of the people who built Stellaris, apparently saw nothing wrong with wearing a red "MAKE SPACE GREAT AGAIN" hat during the pre-release streams in early 2016, when the Orange One had already told us everything we needed to know about him. You have to look at the things that are, as far as the person who created them are concerned, are so obvious that they don't need any special attention drawn to them.

You have to look at the people who believe, uncritically, that empire is a good thing.

Star Trek: The Orville Quest

This past Sunday night I hunkered down and watched the premiere of The Orville, Seth MacFarlane's new sci-fi series, because I hate myself and believe I deserve to suffer. None of the trailers or previews led me to expect greatness, and it certainly wasn't great. I tweeted many of my impressions at the time, and if you're really interested you can do an archive dive, but I feel my first impression is the most critical - it's aggressively mediocre. Still, it's been nibbling at the corners of my brain since I turned off the TV, and it's at least worth talking about.

The Orville is a unique show in that it is so transparently a Star Trek parody/homage/ripoff. This isn't unique across media, with 1999's Galaxy Quest being the first thing that came to mind when I heard of it, but it's different here. First, Galaxy Quest was a one-off; this is a series, though at least it being live-action means it can't stretch across decades the way Family Guy has. Second, Galaxy Quest knew what it was doing. The Orville doesn't. The fundamental problem with the series is that it's too Galaxy Quest to be Star Trek and too Star Trek to be Galaxy Quest. Galaxy Quest is that it gleefully deconstructed trope after Trek trope, from the captain's penchant for losing his shirt to casual interstellar exploration to things that only exist to put the heroes in danger.

The Orville, on the other hand, is one of the purest examples of the second artist effect I've yet encountered. If you haven't run up against it before, it's a phenomenon described by Charles Stross: the first artist goes outside, beholds the landscape, and paints it, but the second artist goes to the gallery, beholds the first artist's painting, and paints that. It's the artistic equivalent of clone degeneration, and The Orville is shot through with it. Why does the Orville have a navigator and a helmsman? Because the Enterprise did. Why is the Orville's bridge at the top of its primary hull with a big honking skylight in the roof? Because that's how the Enterprise was. Why does half of the bridge crew go down on away missions? Because that's how things were done on the Enterprise.

The Orville isn't a parody of Star Trek, even though it has so many opportunities to be. The episode's climax has the Orville under attack from a totally-not-Klingon ship, and the daredevil helmsman flies the ship on a death-defying series of attack runs that look like the video half of a motion simulator ride, weaving around the enemy ship, blasting all the way. It's a lot like a scene that was the climax of a Deep Space Nine episode, where the Defiant makes a death-defying series of attack runs, weaving around the enemy ship, blasting all the way. It was ridiculous then, it's ridiculous now, and yet both series play it completely straight. But even DS9 knew enough to keep that bit down to twenty-five seconds. In The Orville, it went on for so long I'm surprised Seth MacFarlane didn't cut away to five minutes of Conway Twitty.

The Orville isn't a homage to Star Trek, either; from the look and feel of the sets to  the fades-to-black before commercial breaks to the same streaming-stars effect in quantum drive, it hews far too close to its source material to be called that. It doesn't poke at the structure it's built around the way Galaxy Quest did, and it wastes its advantage of being made in the future.

The future is of particular importance here. One thing I've seen again and again, both in official commentaries and in some reactions to it, was on the need for optimistic science fiction in this hellscape of a decade. But The Orville doesn't feel like the future because it isn't; it's the future of the 1960s. Sure, the chassis may be smooth and modern-looking, but under the hood there is absolutely nothing that 1967 would be surprised by. Hell, considering how much of the first episode consisted of Captain Ed Mercer, Seth MacFarlane's character, complaining about his ex-wife and his divorce to anyone who would listen, it sometimes feel like it is more honest to 1967 than to 2017.

For all its attempts at being not your father's Star Trek, with a navigator who cares a lot about being able to drink pop on the bridge and a helmsman who casually throws the word "bitch" around, the fact is that this is your father's Star Trek with its hat turned backward, earnestly willing to rap with you all in a most tubular manner. This attitude was made clear in the premiere's first scene, a place-setting shot of New York City in 2417. It's the standard sci-fi city, with monuments like the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge contrasted with supertall skyscrapers, flying cars, and so on.

What weren't there were the seawalls. You see, for the past while, my usual encounters with future New York have been through The Expanse, which is everything The Orville isn't. In that series, Manhattan is surrounded by seawalls the size of small apartment buildings. It's a stark image, but given what we know, it's a reasonable extrapolation of what New York might look like in 2350. The Expanse looks ahead with eyes open and unblinking and sees some pretty ugly stuff. The Orville covers its eyes, plugs its ears, and builds its optimistic future with fifty-year-old blueprints.

The thing about The Orville is that there are so many ways MacFarlane could have done it without being what it is. Something that took inspiration from, say, The Irresponsible Captain Tylor would play to his strengths, but The Orville is far too wedded to being Star Trek without being Star Trek that it couldn't go too far without falling apart. It's like the holodeck: one shows up in the episode, and it requires no explanation where Star Trek: The Next Generation took five minutes explaining it, because MacFarlane can rely on audience knowledge. It's also like the holodeck in that beyond the door, the photons and force fields that give illusions substance dissolve into nothing.

In the end, that's all The Orville is, really - thoron fields and duranium shadows.

Tailings of the Golden Age: The Goddess of World 21

"The Goddess of World 21," by Henry Slesar
Appeared in Fantastic Science Fiction, March 1957

She was a beauty, all right, by anybody's standards. They stood gaping at her, awed by both the superb contours of her body and by her incredible size. The sun etched her figure sharply against the morning sky. She was something unreal, something out of an alien dream, yet something as real and desirable as a man could know...

"She's coming for us!" It was a shriek from the first engineer.

Nothing like this actually happens in the story.

If there's one overriding statement underlying the vast majority of 1950s cultural artifacts, it's this: "uphold the status quo." Understandable, really. In 1956, the largest and most devastating conflict in history was only twelve years past and the Cold War was already warm to the touch. Throughout the West, marginalized people were fighting for basic rights. It's no surprise that 1950s cultural products aimed at the comfortable white majority, like Leave It to Beaver, depicted uncomplicated, anodyne worlds only faintly related to the one outside the target audience's window. In the 1950s world of cultural repression, political repression, and sexual repression, the unstated drive to maintain the status quo left its stamp everywhere, including the pages of science fiction magazines.

Fantastic was one of the more successful of the post-war magazines, running from 1952 to 1980, and had a reasonable circulation for its day -- more than 30,000 in 1962 and 1963, which beats out Analog's 2016 numbers. It also ran covers like this, in case there was any doubt as to its target audience. From 1958 it would be edited by Cele Goldsmith, one of the first woman sf magazine editors, but in 1957 it was run by men and it shows, especially in stories like this one.

One thing I've noticed in doing these reviews is the way short science fiction tends to predict concepts that show up shortly thereafter in far more visible ways. Take Tom Ligon's "Funnel Hawk," which is pretty much Twister with a high-performance airplane except made six years before Twister, or Robert Silverberg's 1995 story "Hot Times in Magma City," which did "a volcano erupts in Los Angeles" much, much better than Volcano would two years later. The 1950s was receptive to stories about huge things. With the theme established by the giant ants in 1954's Them!, giant women appeared in 1958's Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and 1959's The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock. With the March 1957 Fantastic showing a copyright date of 1956, "The Goddess of World 21" was well ahead of the huge-human curve -- even more so by not including nuclear mutation. That's right: compared to its contemporaries, this story is actually sophisticated!

Just think about that for a second.

So, the story. As it's a 1950s story written by a man, it shouldn't be particularly surprising that the protagonist of "The Goddess of World 21" is a man himself -- Stu Champion, syndicated feature columnist for the Universal Press Syndicate, resident of a retrofuture where photon-drive starships share space with typewriters, and where the interstellar media is dominated by newspapers. After writing a column about the spacer myth of Gulliver, a planet "eight times the size of Jupiter" and populated by giants, he meets a "space bum" who claims to have crashed on an uncharted world, only for a "sky-high dame" to literally bend his rocket back into shape. Intrigued, Stu's investigation takes him first to Damon Scully's Space Circus, where the sleazy Scully tries to hire him to find Gulliver so he can turn it into a circus exhibition, and then to Dr. Alvin Domino, pioneer of a revolutionary cellular regeneration technology.

I feel it's worth pointing out here that across this thirty-eight page novella, there are precisely two women with names, and one of them is Stu's secretary Claire, who exists mainly to be called "sweetie." I was honestly surprised the author even bothered to give her a name at all.

It turns out that the space bum's helpful giantess is actually Victoria Bray, the first human subject of the regeneration technique. At first it worked great, regrowing three fingers and a thumb lost in an accident, but then she started growing taller and taller, with no end in sight. To prevent "bad publicity" for the regeneration technology -- seriously, that's the argument, that and how "the Earth could only reject a creature such as Victoria had become" -- Domino loads the now 85-foot-tall Victoria onto an interstellar transport and dumps her off on World 21, an isolated planet where "she lives in dreadful loneliness... a forgotten martyr to science."

In what may be the most science-fictional aspect of this story, Stu -- who, remember, is a syndicated newspaper columnist -- hires a starship on the company tab to take him to World 21, where he meets Victoria herself. Her now-immense stature scares off the starship crew, but Stu chooses to stay. Their blossoming friendship is interrupted by the return of the starship and the discovery that Scully's Space Circus plans to make Victoria the centrepiece of its latest exhibition.

Where do I begin unpacking this story?

The first step is the obvious one -- its rampant sexism! Sure, there only being two female characters in a story focused around a woman is pretty bad, but it gets worse, and it's not just the garden-variety stuff that was more common than air in the 1950s. Take this line, for example: "Stu located him behind a beautiful receptionist, a beautiful secretary, and finally, a beautiful mahogany desk." They're certainly meant to be women, considering the "unexamined 1950s social assumptions IN SPACE," and not only do they represent fully half of the women in the story,  they are treated with less attention and respect than a desk. Compared to that, Victoria constantly being called a "girl" is water off a duck's back. As far as the magazine's cover copy goes, it's hard for someone to be "Hated By Women--Preyed On By Men" when there are no women of agency present.

This includes Victoria, too. For all that the story is centred on her, she doesn't do anything in it. If she had become, say, a telepathic statue instead of a giantess, the narrative would not need to change at all until the very end, and even then that's only because of the people around her. Throughout the story Victoria is acted on by others, and the only times any characters are ever reacting to her they are just reacting to her existence. When, at the climax, the protagonist Stu becomes a giant himself to defend Victoria against Scully's predatory space circus, she is firmly sidelined by the narrative and reduced to the distressed damsel archetype that filled '50s B-movies. I'm reminded in particular of the 1957 film Beginning of the End, which started out focusing on a woman photojournalist only for her to be shoved aside as soon as the top-billed man entered the narrative. 

The narrative is never kind to Victoria at all, especially considering how often she's referred to as "a creature" or "a freak," and you can practically see it build immense justifications for its twisted viewpoints as you watch. For example, when Dr. Domino marooned her on an uncharted world, he built her a small but reasonably comfortable house, a greenhouse, and a power plant. Stu's reaction to this, when Victoria gives him a tour, is that he "found his admiration for Dr. Domino increasing with every step." Admiration, for a man who exiled a woman because her presence would be inconvenient! It's like men who think they deserve a round of applause for meeting basic standards of human decency.

So much of the story is built around the concept of Victoria's desirability, too, if only because the narrative is so closely tied to its protagonist -- and even that is something that makes it stand out from its contemporaries. In Arthur C. Clarke's 1958 story "Cosmic Casanova," an astronaut is repulsed to discover that the woman he's been long-distance romancing is actually a giantess, and in "At Last My Eyes Have Opened" from Charlton Comics' Out of This World #8 in 1958, a man stayed in stasis for a 300-year eugenics experiment to improve upon his girlfriend, only to find... hell, I'll just show you, it's public domain.

The lesson here, presumably, is that men cannot be attracted to people who make them feel small. Baarrff. Also, you have to love how much deadline was obviously involved in naming a valley populated by tall people "Tall Valley."

There's more to it than this surface stuff, though, and I didn't realize it until after my second read-through. Strip the story down to its basics, remove the jerks and bastards and the "suicidal despair" that Victoria experienced, quite understandably, after having been abandoned to die alone -- an interesting thing emerges.

In the context of the story, Victoria is quite literally a self-sufficient woman. All of her material needs are met, she has books and music to exercise her mind, and she learned how to mix local clays to make paint and produces wonderful landscapes. She is a woman that does not need a man, and as soon as I made that connection, everything about this story made sense. My impression of 1950s culture is that it ranked "independent women" as only slightly less threatening than the atom bomb. That's why the story is about taking away her self-sufficiency and her independence. It's why it's about taking a woman who lived in primeval freedom and giving her two choices that both result in her subordination to a man.

"The Goddess of World 21" is, at its core, about the demolition of an independent woman. This is only reinforced by the climax, when a standoff between Stu and Damon Scully, who despite being a circus owner managed to obtain atomic artillery, is interrupted by a deus ex machina in the form of two giant alien astronauts appearing from "mythical" Gulliver. They're both male, of course. Their world is described as a peaceful utopia, sure, but look between the lines and you'll find a reassurance to the readers that it doesn't matter how big or powerful a woman appears to be; sooner or later some man will come around to put her in her place.

Would I recommend you read it now? Hell no; there's plenty of good work being done today that isn't focused on upholding the kyriarchy. If you feel you simply must, though, it's available as a double-novel with The Last Days of Thronas on Amazon.


Previous Tailings
#5 - "The Trouble With Telstar" (June 1963)
#4 - "Industrial Revolution" (September 1963)
#3 - "Next Door, Next World" (April 1961)
#2 - "In the Imagicon" (February 1966)
#1 - "Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)

Things You Should Totally Read #1

Recently I realized that I was only reviewing things so that I could criticize them. Not only is that unhelpful, seeing as how a lot of these things are works of short science fiction older than I am, it's unhealthy - constantly seeking out things you don't like only has negative effects, psychologically and physiologically. So in the spirit of being more helpful and more healthy, I've been inspired to start out this irregular series looking at current bits of fiction that I think are good and worth your time.

My own bits will be brief, because I'd rather you spend your time with the authors.

Onward!

"Of Peach Trees and Coral-Red Roses" by Mina Li

I'm not too familiar with Li's work. In fact, this was the first thing of hers I'd read, but when she brings skill like this to the page, I'm certain it won't be the last. This is a fantasy story that I felt did a thought-provoking job at not only inverting the typical fairy-tale-princess setup but weaving deeper meanings into it. I don't know if they were intended by Li or it's just a result of me bringing myself to the table, but good stories aren't inert; they start internal conversations. "Of Peach Trees and Coral-Red Roses" had my brain chugging for a while afterward, so it's successful in that regard. Plus, I know things I didn't know before, like the notions of good fortune associated with peach trees and bamboo. It's a worthwhile story that broadens your horizons, and this is one of them.

It's free to read at Kaleidotrope, so I suggest you do it!

"The Last," by Premee Mohamed

When I was in high school in Central Ontario they made us read CanLit. So much CanLit. Stories about people in the cold north woods, in the windswept prairies, in the frozen Arctic, people alone and struggling with the angry environment at every turn. If I'd had stories to read like Premee Mohamed's "The Last," I would have enjoyed it a lot more. This story is so very Canadian - drippingly, meltingly so. I mean, it is a story about cowboys that wrangle sentient icebergs. I read this on my smartphone browser and couldn't put it down. It has a fine, polished edge and a cold heart - much like an iceberg, in fact! This will definitely be on my Aurora nomination list for next year, because it is that good. Mohamed is another author I expect to go far in the years ahead.

"Runtime," by S.B. Divya

Finally, people are realizing that novellas can stand on their own. "Runtime" is one of the first standalone novellas to come out of Tor.com Publishing, and in the low-word-count constraints of the form S.B. Divya has created a future that feels real, alternatively gleaming and grimy, hopeful and hopeless. It pivots around Marmeg, an eighteen-year-old cyborg who upgrades herself with rebuilt parts rescued from behind dumpsters and can write fresh code in minutes, and her struggle to win a punishing rough-country footrace. It's rich with the technical crunchiness that you might expect from an Analog story, coupled with a good human core. The characters were well-built, and the world felt like a logical extension of the present day, rather than a logical extension of, say, 1977.

I read this one as a physical, printed copy, and I suspect that heightened my like of it even more, but read it however you want to! This one is definitely in the running for a Hugo, and it'll be on my nominating list next year.

Short SF Review #24: Perspectives

"Perspectives," by W.R. Thompson
Originally published in Analog, November 1983

"You realize how dangerously tense things are up here, don't you?"
Bob looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that this is the most stress-filled environment in which humans have ever attempted to live."

The 1980s were interesting times for science fiction. The gosh-wow-isn't-this-gadget-rad-as-heck stories and odes to pocket-protected engineers solving technical problems that had once dominated it were an increasingly smaller part of a larger galaxy. The Space Shuttle had begun to fly, and proved the 1970s dreams of two-week turnarounds and $10-per-pound orbital launch costs to be just that--dreams. The world was becoming more like science fiction every day, but to some science fiction writers, the world was always trying to take it away.

A lot of those writers ended up placing stories in Analog, and as a result, many Analog stories in the '80s are built around space boosterism and reflect the anxieties of authors that, just as it had been possible to reach for space, their hands were being slapped away by "budgets" and "physics" and "U.S. Senator William Proxmire (D-WI)," about whom they complained mightily. Stories that come out of this zeitgeist often look rather... warped to modern eyes.

W.R. Thompson's "Perceptions" is one of them. Set in the near future of 1983, so probably ten or fifteen years ago, the United States has set up a lunar colony as the core of a space mining operation. Buffetted and battered by its dependence on Earth and its politicians, a deep vein of uncertainty and stress is piled on to the ordinary concerns of space life--you know, that unless everything keeps working, everyone will die. Into this comes Charles Augustine Hacker, a psychologist sent up to study the effects of stress in the colonial environment. Makes sense, really; a lunar colony runs in completely different circumstances from anything on Earth, and you'd want to have an outside opinion on mission-critical things like psychological stability, for the same reason you'd want air traffic controllers or nuclear reactor technicians to be in good mental health.

But he isn't 100% on board with the idea of space colonization, so in the world of a 1980s Analog story, he is of course the villain.

Hacker has an argument behind him -- the colonists act weird to his eyes, beyond their general-but-understandable unwillingness to dwell on the hostility of their environment; they're as sober as a temperance convention, they're careful to a fault, they use jargon-filled slang that implies they'd rather think of themselves as machines. He also has a solution: for the colonists to return to Earth, before their society snaps. The colonial leaders, being the colonial leaders, don't think much of this solution, and when they discover where Hacker's coming from, they immediately make plans to resolve the situation to their benefit.

#

I'll admit that the execution of "Perceptions" may suffer from being, as best as I can tell, Thompson's first professional sale. I know that my first sale to Analog, back in 2012, doesn't match up to things I'm creating now. Still, readers can only engage it by how it was executed, and honestly, I still can't decide if the author *intended* the reader to look askance at the story or to take it at its word. When I first read it on the subway, I reached a point where I said to myself "oh, I see what's going on, all these expectations that're being set up are going to get toppled," right until I reached the last line and the tower of expectations stayed defiantly upright.

The story is built around the colonists' realization that Hacker has an ideological axe to grind: specifically, that technological advancement had made civilization more and more stressful, that "technology has destabilized the foundations of life" and "form[s] dangers to life and limb which are beyond human comprehension." The leaders decide he lacks intellectual honesty because he filters things through his viewpoint rather than theirs, and come to the conclusion that abandoning the colony would end up dooming all of humanity to a new Dark Age. So, being calm, rational individuals who are in no way suffering from severe psychological pressure, they decide to give Hacker a nervous breakdown.

Yeah.

That's pretty much how it ends. The colony's director wonders how long it'll be until he can sleep soundly again, even though he's convinced himself that he's saved the colony -- and there's a lot of convincing going on in this story. The colonists convince themselves that they're totally okay, that Hacker is full of shit solely because he has a particular viewpoint, and that all of their actions are worthwhile and justifiable.

The key thing that the story appears to gloss over, though? Hacker isn't wrong. The moon is far more hostile than any environment on Earth. Stress can be a real problem, and it can sneak up on you. "I don't feel any tension," says Bob Dubois, the colonial director, as if that settles things. But tension is funny like that, and it's something I can speak to. I've been working the same job for nine years now, but it's only fairly recently that the tension migraines started to appear, and even more recently that I discovered they were tension migraines. You can think you're calm, collected, and in control and be totally unaware that the dam holding back everything has started to buckle.

I thought that this story would end by, in part, vindicating Hacker. Much of the story's middle is a dialogue between two characters justifying the colony's customs to each other, which I read as the characters trying to convince themselves that they were right, that nothing was wrong with them. There's never any self-awareness, never any doubt; the colonists know they are the Good Guys Here. It's like they're terrified to interrogate their own beliefs, in case they discover something they'd rather leave hidden.

In their own way, the colonial leaders are no better than their villain -- but you could make an argument that they're worse. They barely bother seeing if Hacker can be swayed, with the doctor justifying the induced breakdown by saying that he can't be reasoned with. What's left unsaid is that, to all appearances, neither can they.

"Perspectives," to me, is greater than the sum of its parts. It's not many stories that leave me thinking for days after I read it, wondering whether the author was pointing to this thing or that one.

what do you mean i haven't used this category for FOUR YEARS woooooow

Previous Short SF Reviews:

• #23: "Ministry of Space" (Warren Ellis, et al)
• #22: "When Planets Collide" (Gold Key Comics)
• #21: "You Source of Tears" (Andrew Barton)
• #20: "The Helix" (Gerard Rejskind)
• #19: "The Thirst Quenchers" (Rick Raphael)
• #18: "Hackers" (Rick Cook)
• #17: "Attached to the Land" (Donald J. Bingle)
• #16: "The Great Gizmo Machine!" (Pierce Rand and John Forte)
• #15: "Alien Psychologist" (Erik Fennel)
• #14: "The Frontliners" (Verge Foray)
• #13: "Second Chance" (Walter Kubilius and Fletcher Pratt)
• #12: "Hades" (Charles F. Ksanda)
• #11: "Revolt of the Ants" (Milton Kaletsky)
• #10: "Blessed Are the Meekbots" (Daniel F. Galouye)
• #9: "To Make a New Neanderthal" (W. Macfarlane)
• #8: "Funnel Hawk" (Tom Ligon)
• #7: Testing... One, Two, Three, Four" (Steve Chapman)
• #6: "Bite" (Lawrence A. Perkins)
• #5: "No Shoulder to Cry On" (Hank Davis)
• #4: "Crazy Oil" (Brenda Pearce)
• #3: "The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)
• #2: "Job Inaction" (Timothy Zahn)
• #1: "Roachstompers" (S.M. Stirling)

Hugo Rockets, Reaction Mass

It's been nearly a week since news of the Hugo nominees dropped, and there have been approximately seventy billion reaction posts and tweets from everyone even tangentially related to the whole mess--so at this point, I figure, my neck is aching and everyone else has said something about it, so why not me? I'm not going to go into deep details; if you're unfamiliar with the situation, suffice it to say that this year's Hugo Award nominations were dominated by a particular voting slate that has, among other things, marked itself as a reaction to the tides in which science fiction's most storied award has been following recently. It's divided between the Sad Puppies, headed by writers Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen, and the Rabid Puppies, led by racist, sexist, friend to gators, and all-around loathsome person Theodore Beale, who (surprise, surprise) snaffled multiple nominations for himself under his pseudonym Vox Day.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't wade into this morass at all--I have enough stressors in my life as it is, and my social privilege is such that "just ignore it" is a valid option for me. But I will anyway, because as I discovered for the first time last Saturday, I have a personal connection to the Sad Puppies' slate. Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine is up for Best Semiprozine, and this affects me because I have been a slush reader for ASIM for the last seven years--which means that if you sent a story to ASIM at any time since 2008 and got rejected, I may well have been one of the people that said "no" to it.

Working with ASIM was my first entry into the world of science fiction, before I'd placed a single story anywhere, well before I'd ever been paid for my words. As I write this there's a new piece of slush in my inbox waiting for my review. I'm happy to be able to be a part of something that people can enjoy, to help make it be as good as it can be.

Which is why, when I saw that ASIM had made its first-ever Hugo ballot thanks to the Sad Puppies' efforts, the thing that echoed in my mind was this: your approval fills me with shame.

Why?

Because, as far as I can see it, the Sad Puppies appear to spring out of the same suspicious, conspiratarian view that characterizes so much of modern American culture, and as such is yet another example of Americans ruining everything the rest of us. (When it comes to science fiction fandom, see also the DC in 2017 Worldcon bid Kool-Aid-Manning into a field that was until then divided between Japan, Montreal, and Helsinki, because god forbid the Americans let the rest of us have one fucking year to ourselves.)

Do a search for "Sad Puppies slate" and the first thing you'll find at the top of Google News is a National Review article headlined "Social-Justice Warriors Aren't So Tough When Even Sad Puppies Can Beat Them."

Go exploring for comments from the people involved and you'll see things like Larry Correia's belief that the Hugos have been "politically biased," or that there's "an ongoing culture war between artistic free expression and puritanical bullies," and his statements from last year that "a chunk of the Hugo voters are biased toward the left, and put the author’s politics far ahead of the quality of the work."

Search for "Sad Puppies" in general and you'll find a lot of stuff framing this not as a gesture to get overlooked works on the ballot, but as a way to stick it to social justice warriors.

It doesn't exactly inspire me with confidence as regards the purity of their motives.

Not that I think that they're bad people, necessarily; I can't speak for everyone, but going by what I've seen and heard, I believe that at least Torgersen really is interested in highlighting works that he sees as not falling into the "Hugo Standard"--but I also believe that he's gone about it in an exceptionally ham-fisted manner.

I believe that he's a modern-day Sorcerer's Apprentice, and he's unleashed something that he was never able to control.

But.

I don't care if the SPs think they're striking a blow for overlooked works. What I care about is that for me, their actions have tainted the entire process. That any award resulting from this would always ask the niggling question "is it really that good, or was it just politically acceptable to a bunch of people gaming the system?" It's true that the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies are, this year, distinct--but this is the first year this is true, after the Sad Puppies got one of VD's works onto last year's ballot, and which finished sixth behind No Award--but I will also point out that the SP state still includes three nominees from Castalia House, a brand-new publisher established by, and heavily printing, Beale.

But I'll tell you what I'm going to do when I get my voters' ballot. I will take that Best Semiprozine category, and I will not rank ASIM--but I will rank "No Award."

Why?

Because being tied, even tangentially, to those who think that people like Theodore Beale and John C. Wright represent the best of science fiction makes me feel dirty.

Because I don't want your goddamn charity.

Tailings of the Golden Age #4: Industrial Revolution

"Industrial Revolution," by "Winston P. Sanders" (aka Poul Anderson)
Appeared in Analog, September 1963

He was still gladder when the suits were off. Lieutenant Ziska in dress uniform was stunning, but Ellen in civvies, a fluffy low-cut blouse and close-fitting slacks, was a hydrogen blast. He wanted to roll over and pant, but settled for saying, "Welcome back" and holding her hand rather longer than necessary.

Science fiction of the 1960s, ladeez and germs--when we're talking about science fiction that John W. Campbell bought for Analog, at that time a titan, it could practically be its own subgenre. I've often remarked that the lion's share can be summed up as "white male engineers solving technical problems," and "Industrial Revolution" is a typical specimen--but for all that, it could have been written yesterday, which goes to show how much things don't change in half a century. This is a story about square-jawed, right-thinking, competent men who probably vote Republican versus a starship full of literal Social Justice warriors.

Also, as the representative quote above suggests, it's pretty distractingly sexist.

Dateline: the future, somewhere in the asteroid belt. The Sword is one of the first profitable independent concerns out there, an asteroid converted into an industrial outpost, processing gas scooped from Jupiter's atmosphere and turning it into stuff. It's a private enterprise, as we're reminded again and again throughout the story, because this is Campbellian science fiction where government is bad and capitalism is rad. When it comes to its inhabitants, the testosterone is palpable--there's a ten-to-one ratio of men to women on this asteroid because 1960s, and only two of the women are single. Just acknowledging that bit actually makes me feel more emotion than most anything else in the story; imagine how they would feel, millions of kilometers away from anything else, surrounded by men who are no doubt all trying to out-Nice Guy™ each other.

The Sword's workaday existence is interrupted by the arrival of NASS Altair, a North American warship (yeah, because us up here are falling over ourselves to be Americans--pfft), and the initial action of the story follows Mike Blades, one of the asteroid's VIPs, showing the military bigwigs around and answering their oddly specific questions about radiation shielding and so on. In the meantime, he takes an interest in Lieutenant Ellen Ziska, a "she-Canadian" (???) Altair officer and does his utmost to get into her pants by the tried-and-true juxtaposition of long walks in arboretums and political arguments.

See, the problem here is that the last election in North America has brought the Social Justice Party to power, with more and more people on Earth getting angry about investing so much money into starting up Belt industries, only to see much of the Belt's profits reinvested into building itself up rather than shipping its raw materials back down the well. So it's pretty much the tired old American Revolution transposed into space, because god forbid you be even slightly creative. Things go sour when the Altair conveniently "loses" a nuclear missile, and it's up to Mike Blades to figure out a way to use his technical savvy to defend the unarmed asteroid from the looters and moochers trying to take it away.

For what it is, "Industrial Revolution" isn't terrible. It was good enough for John W. Campbell to buy, sure, but just check out Galactic Journey to get a better idea of what Campbell thought "good enough" meant. The best I can think to say about it is "innocuous"--if not for the fact that "Winston P. Sanders" is really Poul Anderson, it would've been long forgotten. ISFDB tells me that it was the second of multiple stories that make up the "Flying Mountains" series, but really... it's average. At best. The motivations of the antagonists are the standard-issue "Earth needs more tax money to pay for welfare" that you see over and over again in science fiction, and the protagonists essentially have no character at all.

Incidentally, I wish there were more stories from this era that approached things from the other side of the political spectrum--I'd love to eviscerate them, but the shadow of the Soviet Union was long in the '60s, I imagine. Even Star Trek didn't get properly communist until the '80s.

"Industrial Revolution" is available for free download via Project Gutenberg.

Previous Tailings
#3 - "Next Door, Next World" (April 1961)
#2 - "In the Imagicon" (February 1966)
#1 - "Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)

Everyone Is Posting Ad Astra Schedules So I Guess I Should Too

("My Ad Astra Schedule" would probably have been a more compact title, but a lot of people are probably doing variations of that, too.)

If you're one of the maybe two people who actually pays attention to this weblog anymore, you may have noticed that I'm going to be putting in an appearance at Ad Astra, Toronto's own Richmond Hill-based science fiction convention, early next month. The panel schedules have at last come down from on high, and here's what I'll be up to if you feel like tracking me down for some unfathomable reason.

Saturday

A Trillion Is a Statistic
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Room: Markham B
Panellists: Ian Keeling, Karl Schroeder
It happens so often in science fiction there's a name for it: "earth-shattering kaboom." From Lensmen to Ender's Game and beyond, sf has been solving problems with genocide for decades. Is this just authorial laziness, motivating heroes with a big enough bang, or is reflective of something dark in the genre's soul?

The Wisdom of Ages Past: Relevance of Older Science Fiction
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Room: Oakridge
Panellists: David Lamb, Hayden Trenholm, Nina Munteanu
The golden age of science fiction still has a solid grip on the minds and dreams of even the youngest readers today. What can we still learn from the greats, and what of their ideas or methods are so outmoded that they can only be appreciated as a history lesson of how the industry used to be?

Sunday

Readings: Andrew Barton & Mike Rimar
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Room: Aurora

I willn't tell you what'll be happening at the reading on Sunday. It's SOOPER SEKRIT so you'll just have to come.

HD 28185: An Elite Odyssey

The first time I went to Los Angeles, what struck me was how this place I'd never been to in all my life could be so damn familiar. We see things on our screens and we read them on our pages, and while it's no substitute for experiencing a place with your own senses unmediated by anything, sometimes it's the only way we can make these journeys. As a science fiction writer, that's particularly the case for me--it's unlikely I'll ever leave Earth, and telling stories of far-off places is the best we can hope for. Even knowing these places are real can be staggering enough sometimes: last year I had the opportunity to view Saturn through a telescope, and my first thought on seeing those rings was "my god, it really does look like that."

One place I've visited twice now in print is the HD 28185 system, 138 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus; fourteen years ago we detected a gas giant orbiting in its habitable zone, and it's around that gas giant I've placed Esperanza, setting of the stories "The Paragon of Animals" in the March 2013 issue of Analog and "The Badges of Her Grief" in its March 2015 issue, which is available now--and you should totally go out and get it! It's a place that feels familiar now, though it's also a place I could never visit.

At least, I couldn't until Elite: Dangerous came out. This space flying-trading-pirating-exploring sim, the latest expression of a thirty-year franchise that goes back to vector graphics on the BBC Micro, is set in a one-to-one reproduction of the Milky Way and its four hundred billion stars. For now, it's also likely to be the closest I'll get to exploring the galaxy. With that in mind, given the occasion of "The Badges of Her Grief" seeing print, I went on a "short" pilgrimage to HD 28185--or as it's known in-game, HIP 20723, as E:D seems to have a serious love for the Hipparcos catalogue.

Well, as short as anything measured in light-years can be.

It wasn't THAT much of an odyssey, though. From my home base at Big Harry's Monkey Hangout* in the Jotunheim system, it was a trip of 158 light-years, with a brief stopover in the Ongkuma system to investigate the short-lived slave rebellion there. Seeing as how ships in E:D are capable of flying faster-than-light in normal space due to the magical frameshift drive--a technical necessity for a multiplayer game that, nonetheless, makes me feel dirty--and my Adder can cross 15 light-year gulfs in as many seconds, it was the work of an evening. I didn't even have to leave human space; to my regret, I discovered that HD 28185 is part of the Empire, the requisite society of neo-Roman assbutts that maintains slavery in the 34th century to remind us that they're a bunch of jerks.

It's not even a particularly interesting system. I was hoping to find things that would fire my imagination--perhaps even an Earthlike planet! What I found would be nothing to write home about if this was any other system--an asteroid belt close to the star and a rocky, ringed world with sulphur dioxide air, a 182 degree surface temperature, and a lonely orbital mining platform above, and at the edge of the system that I could detect, the gas giant HD 28185 b. Only in the stories I write is it called Corazon.

Not much, is it? Not even so much as a moon. I mean, I was hoping that it would at least have rings. Nevertheless--it had a feeling of reality to it. It's a world we know is out there. It's a place we can speculate about, and in this small way, I can see its face.

I'll be back there again, for future stories. For now, I like knowing that it's out there to be found.

* Which, incidentally, sounds like the sort of name the Culture would give to a space station. So far, it is only rivalled in-game by Norman-Mavis's Bingo Palace and Lucy Young's Orbital Happy Home.

Tailings of the Golden Age #3: Next Door, Next World

"Next Door, Next World," by Robert Donald Locke
Appeared in Analog Science Fact & Fiction, April 1961

"Lance," said Carolyn.
"Yes?"
"You feel it too, don't you?"
"Feel what?"
"That there is danger involved. That something dreadfully, dreadfully wrong can happen to you while you're out there. No matter what the eggheads say about it." A paroxysm of sobs suddenly racked the girl's slender body. "Oh, darling, don't go!"

Fun fact: the above theme of the protagonist being entirely oblivious to everything around him and needing everything to be explained to him will continue throughout this story!

There are certain--tics, perhaps--in Golden Age-era science fiction. Epithets like "Space!" and "Unity!" because god forbid anyone encounter the word "fuck" in print, the rah-rah belief that the United States of the 1950s is the social model that will one day be projected over vast swaths of the galaxy, and at least in John W. Campbell's Analog, a focus on square-jawed white male engineers solving technical problems. Robert Donald Locke's "Next Door, Next World feels like a story that was written in the 1940s and features one of the thick-headedest protagonists I've ever tagged along with, and had I not been cooling my heels in a hospital waiting room I doubt I'd have bothered.

Major Smoke Manmuscle Roll Fizzlebeef Lance Cooper is a "big man with space-tanned features"--and I have to wonder if "space-tanned" is not in fact a euphemism for "chronic radiation poisoning"--set to fly the latest hyperspace rocket out to Groombridge 34. As we learn in a hackneyed groundside scene where his fiancée Carolyn acts the Standard '50s Female routine, full of sobs and requiring a Strong Man's Arms and talking about how women are saner than men because they don't go exploring, hyperspace is something of a dangerous place: one or two flights out of every ten don't come back at all, and sometimes the pilot returns a bit off. But the fears of "this frail, clinging, lovely piece of femininity he wanted so dearly" are nothing next to the Glorious Conquest of Interstellar Space, so away he flies!

He experiences Weird Shit in hyperspace, of course, because what would hyperspace _be_ without that? He feels himself split apart, sees duplicates of his ship outside where there should be nothing at all, but returns to normal space feeling none the worse for wear and after a quick sightseeing expedition, makes the return hop back to Earth where his fiancée Carolyn is waiting for him--except, shock! When he lands, no one recognizes her name, not even her dad, his boss Colonel "Hard-Head" Sagen! Lance immediately jumps to the logical conclusion: everyone is pulling a complicated prank on him. After his experience is declared classified and he's put in a cell, he manages to escape--because of course it's easy as hell to steal a military guard's sidearm and effect escape with it--and goes to his girl's place, looking for answers from her mother.

Because of course the best place to go looking for answers after you've broken out of military custody is *the home of the military superior who placed you in custody*! Seeing as how Mrs. Sagen is, you know, intelligent, she alerts the military to Lance's presence--and while he escapes again, he does so fuming about her "double-cross," while I start to wonder if hyperspace pilots are chosen specifically for their expendability.

He returns to the base--because of course they won't look there--and finds that his friends don't recognize him, he remembers things that are no longer the case, and comes to the conclusion that everyone is lying to him. Finally, he's brought before a military psychiatrist and finds out the truth that was pretty apparent from the first word: he's slipped into a parallel universe, where his girlfriend was never born. Apparently this happens a lot.

It was at this point that I seriously began to doubt Cooper's bonafides--it's as if someone shaved the stupidest Watson and stuffed him into a starship. Despite being presented with a litany of examples of pilots who came back "off"--wearing the wrong uniform, a man with a mustache he couldn't possibly have grown so fast--and by his own admission being aware of the parallel worlds theory, he does not consider that he might actually be in a parallel world until he's practically being told his name is Homer Thompson. Nevertheless, driven only by a desire to see his girlfriend again, he takes the Colonel at gunpoint and finagles his way back into his hyperspace ship, and blasts off in the hopes of reaching his own world. Does he make it?

Well, kinda.

Cooper's thickheadedness over his predicament is, I think, another one of those artifacts of older science fiction. Science fiction is built around the projection of current trends into the future, but at the time this story was written, science fiction was still culturally marginal, and so a lot of Golden Age sf feels like they're set in worlds which do not themselves include a cultural legacy of science fiction. I mean, if I got shot through hyperspace and came back to find people I knew were gone and the world was just subtly askew, the notion of parallel universes would be on my theory plate thanks to things like Sliders or the Mirror Universe from Star Trek or actual scientific investigations toward whether a multiverse exists. Lance Cooper, being the resident of a '50s future, doesn't have that cultural background and so looks stupid for never even entertaining the notion.

As for the story itself, it's written in the stilted manner that's common for a lot of sf writing from that era. I mean, things like "Dad opined he'd have walloped the daylights out of me" - who the hell uses words like "opined" in casual conversation? It's no surprise Robert Donald Locke didn't leave a mark on the field--he's got only eleven credits on ISFDB, and this was in fact his last story.

If you're interested, Next Door, Next World is available for download on Project Gutenberg.

Previous Tailings
#2 - "In the Imagicon" (February 1966)
#1 - "Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)

Tailings of the Golden Age #2: In the Imagicon

"In the Imagicon," by George Henry Smith
Appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1966

Then Cecily made him feel even sillier by leaning over and kissing his right foot with passionate red lips. "Oh, Dandor! Dandor, I love you so much," she murmured.

Dandor resisted the temptation to use one of his newly pampered feet to give her a healthy kick on her round little bottom. He resisted it because even at times like this, when his life with these women began to seem unreal, he tried to be as kind as possible to them. Even when their worship and adoration threatened to bore him to death, he tried to be kind.

So instead of kicking Cecily, he yawned.

I'm gonna let that quote up there just sink in for a minute.

For a genre that spent so much time yapping on about the future, Golden Age science fiction--in this case, one of the last shoots springing up in the mid-1960s, when the old fields were beginning to wilt beneath the New Wave--spent a hell of a lot of its time rooted in the past. Yeah, I know, science fiction is fundamentally about the time it's written in, and "In the Imagicon" by George Henry Smith--who previously brought us such towering works of literature as 1963's Sexodus!--could not be more of a product of the 1960s if it tried. This is the sort of stuff that proto-nerds who aspired to become Don Draper would read. I feel like it's quintessentially of its time, to the degree that it reads almost like a parody of it.

Leaping into the story, we are introduced to the foppish, indolent Dandor, who is in the process of being fed grapes, getting a pedicure, and being generally worshipped by women--a blonde, a voluptuous brunette, and cuddly twin redheads, and yes those are how they're described and essentially the limits of their characterization, and god damn, man, am I really meant to take this at all seriously? Is this supposed to be a laff-out-loud comedy piece? I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE, SOMEONE HOLD ME

Ahem. Moving on. Dandor's problem is that he's getting awfully bored by being waited on and worshipped in his "palatial palace," because screw you guys, it's 1966, you don't need more descriptive adjectives when you're probably half-drunk by now anyway. So he leaves, back out through the imagicon of the title, and we see Dandor as he really is: a pioneer on the frozen colony world of Nestrond, home of punishing storms and snows and ice wolves, and which really begs the question of why you'd cross light-years to colonize a place that makes Antarctica look appealing. What really makes it intolerable, though, is Nona, his shrew of a wife! Am I right, fellas? The narrative lovingly details her faults--"a big, raw-boned woman with stringy black hair, a broad flat face with thin lips and uneven, yellowish teeth. God but she's ugly, he thought as he stared at her." Now that he's back in the real world, Dandor's got work to do, and he hates it! So he digs up ice moss for the fire, fixes the cattleshed roof to keep the icewolves from attacking their space cows, digs a cesspool, and so on.

Nestrond, for all intents and purposes, was settled by people who not only made it to the end of the Oregon Trail without dying of dysentery, but found a starship there waiting for them.

Disaster strikes in the night when ice wolves attack--six-legged, because alien critters gotta have six legs, otherwise how're you to know they're alien? Dandor manages to see them off thanks to his trusty laser rifle, but not before one of them takes a good chunk out of him; good enough, in fact, to demand that his entire leg be amputated. Because, sure, they have enough technological infrastructure to support stuff like laser rifles and imagicons, but not indoor plumbing or twentieth-century medicine. Presumably Nestrond's colonists are, in fact, survivors of a failed expedition. Maybe they were the advance team and the main ship blew up in orbit--they are in dire straits, with the last of the morphine gone and no anaesthetic more sophisticated than whiskey. Nobody's to say.

Dandor is aghast over the loss of his leg, of course--not because of the pain, not because of how much harder it'll make it to scratch out a life, but because now there'll be no imagicon; he'll belong only to Nona. How, he asks himself, could she treat him this way? Yeah! How could she ever stay by his side in his condition and make him face the world? One has to ask why she even bothers, on a world where there are twenty men for every woman. I mean, she obviously sees something in this guy, or she'd have just walked out while he was on one of his imagicon trips, right? Wouldn't you want to have someone standing by you at a low point like that?

Not our Dandor! He knows just what to do--escape from the dreaded barbs of reality! Half-mad with pain and bleeding out from his as-yet-uncauterized stump, he drags himself until he seals himself up into the imagicon, "more dead than alive," and slowly fades away while the soft voices of his adoring palace women brush against his ears--

Except, in a plot twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan--who would not be born for another four years, so at least he's not responsible for this one--Dandor wakes up, good as new, in the real world. In the palace. Because, you see, Dandor's palatial palace is reality, and it's Nestrond that's the product of the imagicon! On Earth in the year 22300, Dandor is on top thanks to a plague which killed all but a handful of men--many of whom "had not been able to stand the strain... too many years of having everything and every woman they wanted." Dandor created Nestrond as a place he could find "a taste of hell," without which "how could a man appreciate heaven?"

How could a man appreciate heaven.

Because this story is really all about the mens.

As I chip away at it, I feel like there's a pool of anti-woman sentiment bubbling underneath. Look at the difference between Earth of 22300, where men are powerful through their rarity and which is depicted as a warm, peaceful, beautiful place, and Nestrond, where women are powerful through their rarity and is explicitly described as a hell on multiple occasions. On Earth, Dandor is "sweetheart" and on Nestrond, he's "idiot." On Earth, he is fed grapes; on Nestrond, he's grudgingly served thin soup, stale bread, and rancid pork.

It almost reads like it's a parody of certain attitudes now. Nestrond reads like the sort of place any given MRA would come up with to describe a feminist world, and I'm confident that what MRAs yearn for is a world where they can all be Dandors. I have to wonder what the women might say if you asked them to describe their world. Are they happy feeding this guy, rubbing his feet, servicing him, when he descends into unreality as soon as they start to bore him? From where I'm sitting, this "heaven" seems pretty damn one-sided.

As I put this together, I had a realization: unlike Nona, who is given a rather detailed description to cement the hellishness of Nestrond, we're never actually given a description of Dandor. But I have a pretty good idea.

You want to hear the real punchline, though?

This story made the first ballot for the 1967 Nebula Award.

Sheesh.

Previous Tailings
#1 - "Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)