Retro Reviews: A Preliminary Post-Mortem

In keeping with the post-mortem theme, I will be illustrating this post with pulp covers featuring skulls, skeletons and corpses

On Friday, March 13, nominations closed for the 2020 Hugo and 1945 Retro Hugo Awards. It will be a few weeks until we know who the finalists are, so it's time for a preliminary post-mortem of the Retro Science Fiction Reviews project. 
 

As I wrote in my introductory post, the aim of Retro Science Fiction Reviews and the 1945 Retro Hugo Recommendation Spreadsheet was to aid nominators for the 1945 Retro Hugo Awards, to crowdsource recommendations and offer reviews to allow nominators to make more informed decisions rather than defaulting to the most famous names.

Did the project succeed? Well, we won't know for sure until the finalists are announced. But the Retro Hugo Recommendation Spreadsheet quickly filled up with recommendations I hadn't entered.

As for Retro Science Fiction Reviews, all in all I posted twenty-nine reviews of works eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos on this blog in two and a half months. Twenty-six of those were my own reviews, three were guest reviews by Don Briago. Steve J.Wright also jumped in and reviewed a whole lot of eligible works on his blog. Many thanks to Steve and Don, by the way. You're both awesome.

Did we manage to cover everything? Of course not. And considering the sheer amount of material that was published in the American science fiction magazines and beyond in 1944, that would have been impossible. 

So let's take a look at what we covered at Retro Science Fiction Reviews:

Including the guest reviews, we covered three novels, two novellas, eight novelettes and sixteen short stories.

Regarding magazines, Astounding Science Fiction and Weird Tales tie for the top spot with eight stories reviewed each. Planet Stories follows with six stories reviewed, then Amazing Stories with three and finally Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories with one story each. Two of the three novels reviewed were not published in a magazine. I did not get around to reviewing any stories published in Captain Future, Fantastic Adventures, Doc Savage, G-8 and His Battle Aces, The Shadow or the Canadian edition of Super Science Stories nor in the general interest pulps such as Argosy. Meanwhile, Famous Fantastic Mysteries only published reprints in 1944, so they were out anyway.

So let's take a look at the authors: Ten of the works reviewed were written by women, seventeen by men, one was a collaboration between a male and a female author. So a little over a third of the stories reviewed Retro Science Fiction Reviews were written by women, which is quite high for the golden age. 

Breaking it down by author, Ray Bradbury leads with five stories reviewed, followed by Leigh Brackett with four. Isaac Asimov is in third place with three stories reviewed. For Leigh Brackett and Isaac Asimov, I reviewed their entire SFF output in 1944. C.L. Moore, Allison V. Harding, Frederik Pohl and Clifford D. Simak had two stories reviewed each. Edmond Hamilton, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Manly Wade Wellman, Henry Kuttner, Olaf Stapledon, Dorothy Quick, Dorothy B. Hughes, Alice-Mary Schnirring and Stanton A. Coblentz had one story reviewed each. 

So what did I learn from the Retro Reviews project? For starters, that there were a lot of really good stories published in 1944 and not just the enduring classics either. No, a lot of little to unknown stories that have rarely to never been reprinted turned out to be very good as well. Even the weaker stories were entertaining at the very least. However, I have to admit that I abandoned some stories that failed to grip me after a few pages, because I have only so much time and didn't want to waste it on a story that bored me. That said, I only abandoned two or three stories. 

Meanwhile, guest reviewer Don Briago got unlucky with the near future thriller The Delicate Ape byacclaimed crime and noir author Dorothy B. Hughes, a novel neither he (nor anybody else, it seems) likes. However, they can't all be winners. 

According to received wisdom, Astounding Science Fiction was the best of the golden age science fiction magazines due to the high number of classic stories John W. Campbell published. Weird Tales is held in high regard, while Farnsworth Wright was editor, but is less well regarded after Dorothy McIllwraith took over in 1940. Meanwhile, magazines like Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories or Startling Stories are usually considered lesser venues, the contents as lurid as the covers with the occasional good story. 

As so often with received wisdom about past periods of science fiction, this does not match what you find when you actually read the magazines in question. True, Astounding Science Fiction published a lot of classic stories during 1944 and the entire golden age. They also published a lot of not so great stories, only that those have been largely forgotten. 

However, I also noticed that while the good Astounding stories, such as "No Woman Born" by C.L. Moore or the City cycle by Clifford D. Simak or the Foundation stories by Isaac Asimov (though the two 1944 Foundation stories were lesser entries in the series), were very good indeed, the gap between the good and the not-so-good stories was larger in Astounding than in the other magazines. Because the lesser stories in Weird Tales or Planet Stories or Amazing Stories (and Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, I assume, even though the sample size is too small) were always at the very least entertaining. And some little known stories from those magazines turned out to be very good indeed, such as "Morgue Ship" by RayBradbury or "Iron Mask" by Robert Bloch. Meanwhile, the lesser known Astounding stories were inevitably little known for a very good reason, namely because they had aged badly or just weren't very good to begin with. It's probably telling that all of the stories I abandoned were from Astounding.

I suspect the reason for this discrepancy is Astounding's focus on idea stories and hard science fiction. Because idea stories and hard science fiction tend to age badly, once the ideas and the science are obsolete. For quite often, the central idea is all those stories have. Without the idea, there really is no story. And the stories that endure either have a central idea that still appeals (this applies to the Foundation and City stories and also to "No Woman Born") or have something going for them beside the central idea ("Catch That Rabbit"by Isaac Asimov). 

Meanwhile, the various adventure stories set in what I've called the pulp science fiction shared universe are still entertaining as spy thrillers or crime stories or adventure stories, even if you know that science is nonsense and that the solar system doesn't actually look like that. And Weird Tales doesn't give a damn about scientific accuracy anyway, even though they did publish science fiction on occasion. But the focus of the magazine is on entertaining horror and fantasy stories and Weird Tales was very good indeed at what it did. In fact, I prefer Weird Tales under Dorothy McIllwraith to Weird Tales under Farnsworth Wright, for even though Wright published many classic stories, I can only tolerate the often overblown purple prose of Weird Tales in the 1930s in small doses. 

It's not exactly news that genre distinctions were more fluid during the pulp era. And the reason I haven't done a genre or subgenre breakdown of the stories reviewed is because it's impossible. In some cases it's obvious, e.g. "Desertion" by Clifford D. Simak or "Catch That Rabbit" by Isaac Asimov are unambiguously science fiction, while "Hoofs" by Manly Wade Wellman or "The Dear Departed" by Alice-Mary Schnirring are unambiguously fantasy. With horror, it gets more difficult, because a lot of the stories I reviewed were also horror and not just the ones published in Weird Tales either. 

However, what makes "Killdozer!" by Theodore Sturgeon, a story about a possessed and murderous bulldozer, science fiction and "Ride the El to Doom" by Allison V. Harding, a story about a possessed and murderous elevated train, fantasy? The fact that "Killdozer!" was published in Astounding and "Ride the El to Doom" in Weird Tales? That fact that Sturgeon offers a pseudoscientific explanation why bulldozer Daisy starts killing people, while Harding doesn't offer one? And then you have stories like "The Veil of Astellar" by Leigh Brackett about a guilt-ridden space vampire or "Iron Mask" by Robert Bloch about a rabidly francophobic medieval robot attempting to influence the outcome of WWII, which are nigh impossible to classify.

However, the stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project also draw on influences from beyond the three speculative sister genres science fiction, fantasy and horror. And so a lot of those stories also contained elements from other genres. Oddly enough, the western was not one of them, in spite of all the complaints about science fiction stories that were just westerns in space during the 1940s and 1950s. But while I don't doubt that stories like those about Bat Durston whose adventures would never be found in Galaxy were published somewhere in 1944, not one of the twenty-nine stories reviewed for the Retro Reviews project matches that description.

Instead, the biggest influence comes from the crime, mystery and thriller meta-genre and its many subgenres. And so there were a lot of stories that were also spy thrillers, mysteries or noir tales. War fiction, whether directly about WWII or indirectly about some other war in the far future, was also a big influence as well, but then military science fiction was a thing long before Robert A. Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers. But I also came across elements borrowed from gothic romance or contemporary literary fiction. The pulps were one huge genre mash-up petri dish and this extended also beyond the pages of the magazines, as e.g. The Delicate Ape by Dorothy B. Hughes, a WWII influenced near future spy thriller shows.

Last year, I wrote a series of blogposts inspired by the finalists for the 1944 Retro Hugos, in which I noted that a lot of the common assumptions about the golden age of science fiction simply aren't true or apply only to a minority of stories. Let's have a quote:

Now we all have an idea of Golden Age science fiction in our heads. Hard science fiction with fairly rigorous science, at least by the standards of the time, the unquestioning belief in science and progress, the unquestioning acceptance of colonialism and imperialism, future histories dominated by great men (and of course, they’re always men), square-jawed space heroes and brilliant scientists, competent characters – white, male and American, of course – using their brains and occasionally, their rayguns, too, to solve problems, women – if present at all – as damsels in distress to be groped by bug-eyed monsters and rescued by the competent man, people of colour and LGBT people absent altogether, aliens as the other to be either fought and destroyed or at best patronised, humanity inevitably triumphant.

For starters, hard science fiction stories, while certainly present, were actually a minority among the stories I reviewed. And even the supposedly hard science fiction stories contain a lot of handwavium or meaningless technobabble. Psychohistory and positronic brains are just scientific sounding terms Isaac Asimov made up. The descriptions of the surface of Jupiter in Clifford D. Simak's "Desertion" may be as accurate as possible by the standards of the day, but the machine that transforms humans (and dogs) into Jovian lifeforms is pure magic science.  

As for the competent man who triumph due to their superior brains, characters like Limmar Ponyets or Hober Mallow (who is neither white nor straight) from Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories certainly match that description, as do Rake Allan from Edmond Hamilton's "The Free-Lance of Space" or Click Hathaway and Sam Burnett from Ray Bradbury's "The Monster Maker" and "Morgue Ship" respectively. But while robot troubleshooters Mike Donovan and Gregory Powell from Isaac Asimov's "Catch That Rabbit" do solve the problem at hand, I wouldn't call them competent – instead, they're very much idiots who get lucky. Jerome Webster from Clifford D. Simak's "TheHuddling Place" may be a brilliant xenobiologist and doctor, but he is also afflicted by crippling agoraphobia. Maltzer, the scientist from "No Woman Born" by C.L. Moore, is a depressed wreck and the only competent person (in the loosest sense of the word) in the story is Deirdre, the brain in a robot body. Meanwhile, Rick Urquart, the drifter turned unlikely saviour of Mars in Leigh Brackett's Shadow Over Mars is mainly competent at getting himself into trouble and Ciaran, wandering balladeer and petty criminal from Leigh Brackett's "The Jewel of Bas", is no one's idea of a competent hero either. And let's not forget Svan, the Venusian terrorist so incompetent that he blew up himself and his resistance cell, because he was too stupid to turn over a piece of paper in Frederik Pohl's "Double-Cross". So in short, competent men (and women) exist in golden age science fiction, but are far from universal.

As for the gender distribution, six of the twenty-nine stories reviewed, including one written by a female author, contained no female characters at all. Four more stories only feature female characters as walk-ons. Often, the women don't even get a name. Only four stories have female protagonists, while only three pass the Bechdel test. That's rather depressing, especially considering that a third of the stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project were written or co-written by women. And at least according to the letter columns in magazines, many of the readers were women as well. Of course, there were also stories with memorable female characters such as Deirdre from "No Woman Born", Mayo McCall from Shadow Over Mars, Mouse from "The Jewel of Bas" or Sharon Countess Monteseco from "Hoofs". Nonetheless, there is room for improvement on the gender front.

On the other hand, the Retro Reviews project has also proven once again that while the science fiction of the golden age was very straight and white, it was not nearly as straight and white as received wisdom would have you believe. Six stories featured characters of colour, in five of those six the character of colour was a main character. Oddly enough, one character I had always assumed was a person of colour, Gregory Powell from Isaac Asimov's "Catch That Rabbit" and the other Powell and Donovan stories, never has his skin colour mentioned anywhere. The only description of him that we get is that he wears a moustache. I suspect I pictured him as black, because there was a popular actor at the time I first read the story who was named Gregory, had a moustache and was black, so the name and the scant description brought to mind that actor.

With LGBTQ characters, the pickings are even slimmer. For starters, there are no openly LGBTQ characters in those stories at all. However, there are two stories, Isaac Asimov's"The Big and the Little" and Ray Bradbury's "The Monster Maker", where it is implied that the main character is not straight. If I'd gotten around to reviewing "The Devil's Book Keeper", the 1944 entry in Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin occult detective series, we would probably have had three instances, because several people have remarked on the homoerotic vibes between de Grandin and his mystery-solving partner Dr. Trowbridge. In the case of Asimov' Hober Mallow (who is also one of the six characters of colour mentioned above, since his skin is explicitly described as brown), the homoerotic implications are also pretty blatant, because Mallow spends his free time hanging out nude in the solarium of his new home with his friend/sounding board Ankor Twael, talking politics, while Twael puts a cigar in Mallow's mouth. And yes, I know that sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, but come on.

So in short, yes, golden age speculative fiction was pretty straight, white and male, but there were exceptions in all the magazines and sometimes, a writer even managed to sneak in a character of colour who is implied to be gay right underneath John W. Campbell's nose. 

 

So what about the unquestioning belief in science and progress and the unquestioning acceptance of colonialism and imperialism? Again, such stories exist, but they're far from universal. The Foundation stories are probably the worst culprits, because the Foundation uses their superior knowledge to bully and steamroller everybody else into submission. But that's okay, because they're the good guys, they're really smart and they're trying to stave off the Dark Ages. It also helps that the "collapse of galactic civilisation" bits in the Foundation stories are fairly dark and depressing, so you never even question the Foundation's goals, because the alternative looks so much worse. And indeed, this may be why the Foundation stories have been such a strong influence on so many intelligent kids, some of whom went on to draw all the wrong conclusions from those stories and also never revisited them as adults able to realise, "Uhm, actually the Foundation are arseholes, even if they may be right." And there is really no reason to believe that Hari Seldon or rather his hologram is right about anything except that Asimov tells us that Seldon is right.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Clifford D. Simak's City cycle, where humanity manages to isolate itself into eventual extinction, as dogs and ants take over. Or "No Woman Born", where a scientist is in such despair over having engaged in Frankensteinian research that he tries to kill himself (and fails, because his creation saves him). Or the dying worlds and weary immortals of Leigh Brackett's stories, who also gave us those champions of truth in advertising, the Terran Exploitations Company, who are trying to bleed dry what's left of a dying Mars. So no, golden age science fiction was not always optimistic about science and progress either. 

Nor did golden age science fiction accept colonialism and imperialism without questions. Particularly Leigh Brackett's protagonists often side with oppressed natives against the expansionism and colonialism of Terran empire. Frederik Pohl also addressed the subject in "Double-Cross", though in Pohl is more cynical and portrays the rebelling natives and the Terran colonisers as equally bad. Considering the two Frederik Pohl stories I reviewed for this project, it's notable that in both stories, the interplanetary rebels are not the good guys. For someone like me who grew up on Star Wars, that was a huge surprise, because I automatically equal rebels in science fiction with the good guys. I also can't help but wonder whether Pohl's disenchantment with the Communist groups of which he was a member contributed to his rather cynical view of would-be rebels and revolutionaries.

Not a skeleton or skull, but a prime example of the bug-eyed monster menacing a young lady.

As for the infamous bug-eyed monsters, several 1944 magazine covers feature monsters, bug-eyed or otherwise, menacing scantily clad heroines. However, of the twenty-nine stories reviewed for this project, not a single one featured a bug-eyed monster. Even if there was a bug-eyed monster on the cover, there often wasn't one in the story itself. The closest any of the reviewed stories came to a bug-eyed monster was the apelike anthropoids from Leigh Brackett's Shadow Over Mars and those are far more interested in able-bodied men to enslave than in damsels in distress to grope. There is also the alien femme fatale creature in Brackett's"Terror Out of Space", but that creature is never seen in its original form, nor is she remotely interested in females of any species. In fact, I suspect that the bug-eyed monster is more of a cover art cliché than something that actually appeared in any golden age science fiction stories.

So what happens next? I will definitely keep Retro Science Fiction Reviews open. For starters, the 1945 Retro Hugo finalists will be announced soon. And since I doubt that I caught all of the finalists, I will review the ones I missed. Furthermore, there will also be future years of Retro Hugos to cover. Finally, I can also review older SFF works independent of the Retro Hugos.

I'm also always happy about guest reviews. So if there's a vintage speculative fiction work you always wanted to review, let me know.  

Guest Review: "The Delicate Ape" by Dorothy B. Hughes, reviewed by Don Briago

Today, I'm happy to bring you another guest review. This time around, the subject is a potential left-field finalist, the near future novel The Delicate Ape by Dorothy B. Hughes. So I hand over to Don Briago to share his thoughts on The Delicate Ape.

***

If the Retro Reviews have taught us one thing, it's that the pulp pioneers of the Forties didn't give a hoot about what we now call "genre boundaries." They promiscuously jumbled mad scientists, wizards, hard-boiled detectives, robots, vampires, astronauts and cowboys, and stirred them all together into one glorious pop-culture stew. So when a celebrated crime writer like Dorothy B.Hughes decides to add her fiction to the melting pot, the SFF community should welcome her, not denounce her as an interloper. However, we still need to ask, is The Delicate Ape science fiction?

It is a novel published in 1944 that is set in 1957 (or thereabouts - Hughes never tells us the date, only that the story takes place twelve years after the end of the war. By 1944, after the Battle of Stalingrad, most Americans felt that the Nazis were toast but feared that the war with Japan would drag on for years. Presumably Hughes didn't want to jinx the outcome by naming a specific day of surrender.) Technically it's about "the future", but otherwise it's a purely mainstream, naturalistic thriller with none of the pulp trappings of vintage SF. Hughes has no interest in delving into possible technological  or sociological changes. There are no jet packs. (Seriously, where are our jet packs? It's 2020!) There are no other futuristic gadgets (such as TV sets, which were already a reality) or any dystopian tropes. 

So is it SF or not? My head says "Yes" because Ape is set in an imaginary future. My heart says "No" because Ape doesn't feel like SF... And my head wins, because it enjoys writing posts for Retro Reviews. Case closed. 

Having delivered that totally disinterested and non-arbitrary verdict, we can now ask if Ape is any good. It won’t be easy, but I’m going to resist the temptation to point out the many ways Ape’s 1957 differs from our consensus-reality 1957, and laugh at all the things Hughes got wrong. A work of fiction can never be "wrong." As I decreed, Ape is inarguably SF, so I’ll treat it as if it were an example of the alternative history subgenre. 

In this alternate 1957, there is no Cold War. The Soviets aren't even mentioned, and the defeated Germany is not split into Communist East and Capitalist West. Instead it's occupied by a benign if implausible new branch of the American government called the Peace Department. For twelve years since the German surrender the Peace Department has monitored the Germans to prevent them from stockpiling arms and developing an air force as they did between the world wars. Since the Germans have been behaving themselves lately, why don't the occupiers withdraw and let the Germans self-rule?

No way, says Secretary of Peace Samuel Anstruther, the Germans cannot be trusted yet. He compiles a dossier on German crimes and writes a short speech of such stunning, superhuman eloquence that any diplomat who listens to it will instantly be converted to the anti-German crusade. (When we finally hear it in the last chapter, it's an unintentionally hilarious dud.) Unfortunately Anstruther is bumped off on an airplane (too bad he didn't have a jet pack) before he can deliver the papers at the Peace Conclave in New York City, Hughes's forerunner to the UN. Piers Hunt, his deputy and the hero of the novel, keeps Anstruther’s death secret while planning to foil those uppity Germans. 

Hughes is clearly in her element when Piers walks the New York streets, and Hughes evokes the urban atmosphere. The rest of the novel comes across as a laborious effort by the author to make a Grand Statement while stretching herself and failing miserably. It's dull and predictable, from the routine double-crosses, to the three cartoon German villains (Brecklein, Schern, and von Eyna), to the obseqious portrait of the U.S. President. I just can't bring myself to summarize the rest of the idiotic plot and forgettable characters. 

I never expected such earnest, lifeless propaganda from Hughes. It's not just that she writes as if she's never met a diplomat or a German, it's as if she's never met a human being. Whenever the story builds up a little momentum, Piers interrupts to remind us how preferable peace is to war, and how noble the American cause is. The lurid prose often set my teeth on edge, and the scenes with the femme fatale Morgen are cheesy beyond belief. In a nutshell, Ape is a dumb political thriller that's transformed into a total slog by windy rhetoric about War and Peace and Brotherhood. 

Hughes received a fair amount of acclaim during her lifetime, and some now regard her crime novels as among the best ever written. I haven't read enough crime fiction to judge. Sarah Weinman, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, has named Hughes her favorite crime writer. Yet even Weinman doesn't care for Ape, which she considers a disappointing regression from the qualityof Hughes's previous novels. As with many artists at the time, the war made Hughes temporarily lose her mind, along with her talent. 

I'd love to disagree with Weinman and say that Ape is an overlooked science-fictional gem, but it's only a mildly interesting curiosity about the near future by someone who was understandably anxious about the brave new world being formed during a global cataclysm. It was probably something that Hughes had to get out of her system before she could roll up her sleeves and get to work on masterpieces like In a Lonely Place and Dread Journey. Ape is too overtly didactic to be convincing or entertaining as fiction. History buffs could perhaps use The Delicate Ape as a springboard for a discussion about contemporary attitudes towards post-war politics. That's something, but it’s not enough to deserve a Retro Hugo.

***

Thank you, Don, for this great review of The Delicate Ape, even if the novel itself was diappointing.

Retro Review: "The Huddling Place" by Clifford D. Simak

Is it me or were some of the 1944 Astounding covers really ugly?

"The Huddling Place" is a science fiction short story by Clifford D. Simak, which was first published in the July 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found online here. "The Huddling Place" is part of Simak's City cycle and has been widely reprinted.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

"The Huddling Place" starts off with the funeral of one Nelson F. Webster. It might be a scene in any contemporary set story, if not for the fact that the pallbearers are robots and that Nelson F. Webster died in 2117, aged eighty-three.

Our narrator is Jerome A. Webster, son of the late Nelson F. Webster, and one of only three Websters still left alive. The other two are Jerome's son Thomas, who will soon be leaving for Mars, and Jerome's mother, who never gets a name. In the course of the funeral, We also get a brief rundown of the Websters (and a Webster father-in-law, William "Gramp" Stevens who is an important character in the first "City" story published earlier the same year)  interred in the family crypt on the Webster estate. Again, only one woman is mentioned, Mary Webster, Jerome's late wife.

For four generations now, the Websters have lived on a spacious estate with whispering pine trees, meadows, a rocky ridge and a stream full of trouts, ever since John J. Webster, great-great-grandfather of Jerome, moved there after humans abandoned cities in the twentieth century in favour of what the characters consider gracious living on huge lots of land, served by a small army of robots.
The story follows Jerome through his day, as he retreats into his study to mourn his father, not even bothering to say good-bye to the priest who conducted the funeral service. Instead, Jerome leaves the Websters' faithful robot butler Jenkins to deal with the priest, just as he leaves him to deal with everything else.

We learn that Jerome never leaves his house, even though he spent several years as a doctor on Mars in his younger days. Nowadays, however, Jerome doesn't see any need to leave his house. After all, modern technology allows him to speak to anybody, virtually visit any place, attend a concert or play, browse a library and conduct any business he might want to conduct, all from the comfort of his home. This short paragraph is probably the most prescient thing published in Astounding in the entire year of 1944, because the Internet allows us to do all of that from the comfort of our own home as well. Though I hope that most of us react to those possibilities a little differently than Jerome.

Jerome's contemplations are interrupted by a virtual visit from an old friend, the Martian philosopher Juwain whom Jerome met during his time as a doctor on Mars. Juwain has come to pay his respects to the late Nelson F. Webster and also to ask why Jerome never physically returned to Mars for a visit, even though the Martians owe him a great debt, because Jerome wrote the book on Martian medicine. For we learn that the Martians never really had doctors before the humans arrived. Instead, they simply accepted illnesses as fatal. Meanwhile, Martians have come up with orderly and logical philosophy that may be applied as a practical tool, rather than the fumbling human attempts at philosophy. And Juwain is about to make a further breakthrough in philosophy, a breakthrough that will help both humans and Martians. A. Williams' interior art depicts Juwain as a being with flimsy tentacle-like limbs and a huge domed head, which certainly suggests a species of philosophers.

This is not the first time in Astounding in the 1940s that different races and species are given different specialisations they are inherently suited for. Something similar can be found in the Jay Score stories by Eric Frank Russell, one of which – "Symbiotica" – was a finalist for the 1944 Retro Hugo. Though it's certainly interesting that the superior Martian philosophy is orderly, logical and practically applicable, i.e. it is a type of philosophy that would have appealed to John W. Campbell. Meanwhile, humanity still gets to be superior, if only because medicine is a much more vital field than philosophy for the survival of any species.

The story picks up again at a spaceport, where Jerome sees his son Thomas off to Mars. Jerome can barely keep himself from begging Thomas to stay on Earth. Once the spaceship carrying Thomas to Mars has lifted off, Jerome suffers the mother of all panic attacks. He barely makes it across the open stretch of concrete back to the terminal building, where he huddles on a chair near the wall, terrified of the noise and the strangers all around him.

Jerome is desperate to return home at once, so he can feel safe again. However, the faithful robot butler Jenkins informs him that they can't leave just yet, because the Websters' private helicopter is in need of repair. Jerome freaks out even more. "I understand, sir," Jenkins says, "Your father had it, too."

Now Jenkins reveals that crippling agoraphobia apparently runs in the Webster family and usually sets in at around fifty. That's the true reason why Jerome as well as all the Websters before him never leave their estate. Because they cannot.

Being a doctor, Jerome conducts an experiment and invites some two-hundred and fifty men (Simak's word choice, not mine) to visit him. Only three of those invited actually show up, which suggests to Jerome that more and more of humanity (well, the male half) is succumbing to the same crippling agoraphobia that has affected him. This is, Jerome assumes, the result of humanity's lifestyle living far away from each other on huge tracts of land, where they feel so comfortable that they simply cannot bear to leave the familiar surroundings, unless they absolutely have to. And maybe not even then.

Jerome's theory is tested when he gets a call from a man called Clayborne, an old acquaintance from Mars. Clayborne works for the Martian Medical Commission and has contacted Jerome with an urgent request. After all, Jerome is the leading expert on the Martian brain and Clayborne has a patient who urgently needs a brain operation, an operation only Jerome can carry out. And that patient is none other than Jerome's good friend Juwain who has been asking for Jerome.

"You'll bring him here?" Jerome asks, only to be informed that Juwain cannot be moved. Jerome will have to go to Mars to operate him, otherwise Juwain will die.

"But I cannot come," Jerome tells the increasingly (and understandably) irritated Clayborne. Surely he isn't really needed, surely someone else can carry out the operation. Clayborne, however, won't have none of that. He's sending a spaceship straight to the Webster estate.

Soon thereafter, Jerome receives another call, this time from one Henderson, president of the World Committee, which appears to be the global government in Simak's future. Henderson also insists that Jerome must go to Mars to save Juwain. Because if Juwain dies, the philosophical breakthrough he was about to achieve, a breakthrough which will advance humanity and Martians by a hundred thousand years, dies with him.

To be fair, Jerome is determined to at last try to go to Mars, even though he is utterly terrified. He also realises that even though humanity may have left the cities behind, they have still psychologically chained themselves to their homes. Finally, he realises that he has to break those chains and leave his comfortable home behind, just as humans left the cities behind some two hundred years before. So Jerome forces himself to pack a bag and promptly suffers yet another panic attack.

His panic attack is interrupted by Jenkins who arrives to tell him about a most extraordinary occurrence. A ship landed at the estate and wanted to take Jerome to Mars.

"They are here?" Jerome asks, "Why didn't you call me?"

Jenkins declares that he did not want to bother Jerome, because the whole thing was just too preposterous. So Jenkins personally told the men to leave and when they refused, he threw out by force.

Poor Juwain is doomed and humanity will never learn the philosophical revelations he had in store for them. And all because of an overzealous robot butler.

I enjoyed "Desertion", the other Clifford D. Simak story I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project, a whole lot and it's definitely going on my Retro Hugo ballot. I did not like "The Huddling Place" nearly as much. What is more, the story reminded me of what always irritated me about Simak's stories, when I first read them as a teenager, namely the anti-urbanism.

Now I'm very much a city person and I was even more of a city person, when I was younger. My teenaged self wanted to live in some major international metropolis – London, New York or Paris were my top choices – and literally could not understand that there were people who actually enjoyed living in the countryside or in suburbs or small towns. I always assumed they were forced to live there due to jobs, money issues or families who had the idiotic idea that children should grow up in the countryside. Realising at age fifteen that American suburbs like the ones you always see in horror films were a real thing where real people lived utterly baffled me, because who would choose to live in a horror movie setting?

When I read about city world of Trantor, capital of the Galactic Empire from Isaac Asimov's stories, I thought Trantor was the coolest place ever and immediately would have moved there, if that had been at all possible. And when I first encountered the City cycle by Clifford D. Simak at around the same time, I thought it was a horrible dystopia where human had abandoned the cities to live on country estates where nothing ever happens and no one ever goes anywhere, because there is nowhere to go. Worse, I strongly suspected that Simak was not aware that he was writing about what to me was a horrible dystopia.

My adult self has a more differentiated view of the City stories. Yes, Clifford D. Simak was clearly not a city person and obviously preferred the countryside. Just as he was obviously a dog person. Indeed, I was stunned that there is no dog anywhere in sight in "The Huddling Place", because dogs are so prominent in Simak's fiction, including the City stories.

However, even as early as "The Huddling Place" it is very clear that Simak does not view the cityless world he has created as an unalloyed good (and civilisation does eventually break down in the City cycle and humans die out, while dogs and ants take over the world). After all, Jerome A. Webster is a pitiful person, chained to his home and unable to leave even to save the life of his friend. Furthermore, Jerome is utterly dependent on Jenkins and the other robots. It isn't Jerome himself who makes the fatal final decision, Jenkins makes it for him.

I vaguely remembered that the way the humans treated their robots as slaves to run their oversized estates was one of the things that annoyed me about the City cycle. However, upon rereading the story, I realised that it's not so much the humans who are enslaving the robots. Instead, it's the humans who are slaves to their robots. Furthermore, I also remembered Jenkins as wholly positive figure fully in the "robot as pathos" range, to quote Asimov's classification of science fictional robots. But upon rereading, I found Jenkins an almost sinister figure. Does he truly have the best interests of Jerome and the other Websters at heart or is he slyly making Jerome even more reliant on him? After all, if not for Jenkins, it's quite possible that Jerome might have managed to overcome his fears and gone to Mars after all.

Agoraphobia is another theme that keeps popping up during the golden age, particularly among writers in the orbit of John W. Campbell and Astounding Science Fiction. Isaac Asimov, who suffered from agoraphobia himself, addressed the issue several times, most notably in the Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw novels. Asimov's 1953 science fiction murder mystery The Caves of Steel is set on a future Earth that is pretty much the opposite of the world from Simak's City stories. Here, humanity has retreated to huge domed cities and is terrified of any open space. The 1956 sequel The Naked Sun, meanwhile, is set on a world of suburban sprawl that is even more extreme than that of "The Huddling Place". Here, too, humans live on huge estates tended by robots. But in The Naked Sun, the Solarians not only refuse to leave their palatial homes, they also cannot bear to be in the physical presence of other humans, even members of their own families. Indeed, the similarities between "The Huddling Place" and The Naked Sun are so pronounced that I wonder whether both stories aren't the result of one of John W. Campbell's infamous writing prompts.

It's also interesting to view both "The Huddling Place" and The Naked Sun in the light of the trend towards suburbification after World War II. Because in the 1950s and 1960s, people all over the western world really did turn their back on cities in favour of suburbs built on what had been fields and meadows only a decade before. Of course, those people were far more likely to end up in a Levittown shoebox or a "garden city" housing estate than on a huge multigenerational estate like the Webster home. On the other hand, the McMansions that were popular in the US from the 1980s into the early 2000s do seem to show a trend towards a scaled down version of the Webster home. And while humans post WWII did not actually succumb crippling agoraphobia, people did stop going to cinemas, theatres, restaurants, bars, etc… for a while, preferring to stay at home and watch TV and have dinner parties in the privacy of their own homes. Suburbification is mainly associated with the postwar era, but now I wonder whether those trends were already noticeable in the 1930s and early 1940s and whether stories like "The Huddling Place" and The Naked Sun were a type of "If this goes on…" speculation.

In the real world, the trend towards suburbification and people retreating into the privacy of their homes eventually reversed, as younger people moved back into the cities, once derelict city neighbourhoods became extremely desirable places to live, while some suburbs withered and became places for old people, families and those who can't afford to live in the city. Just as people started going out again and cinemas, theatres, restaurants, etc… rebounded. Furthermore, the postwar trend towards suburbification was a purely western phenomenon anyway. Beyond the western world, people continue to flock to the cities, because that's where the jobs, the opportunities and the facilities are.

Indeed, the world Simak describes in "The Huddling Place" and the other City stories is pretty much unsustainable. It's simply not possible for people to take up so much space, unless the world population has been drastically reduced. And in fact, I always assumed that only a minority of people, mainly in the US, lived like the Websters, while life and cities go on as normal in the rest of the world. And considering how very few women there are in the City stories, I also wonder whether women didn't continue as normal, maybe even happy that the men had walled themselves in.

In many ways, "The Huddling Place" is a very American story. Now many of the stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project feel very American, but "The Huddling Place" is an extreme example, since the story's idea of gracious country living is very American phenomenon. "The Huddling Place" is an early example of what Joanna Russ would eventually call galactic suburbia science fiction and one of the comparatively few that was written by a male author.

Since "The Huddling Place" is a Clifford D. Simak story, it is beautifully written. The nature descriptions do their best to make the reader understand just why Jerome loves his plot of land so much. The panic attack scenes are visceral and will bring back unpleasant memories to anybody who ever suffered a panic attack.

In fact, "The Huddling Place" feels more like a work of mid-century literary fiction than like the sort of hard science fiction normally found in the pages of Astounding. Maybe that is why John W. Campbell felt the need to add a blurb announcing that this story is an important extrapolation of social trends. In fact, if Jenkins and the other robots had been replaced by human servants, the spaceport with an airport or train station and if the dying Juwain had resided in a different country rather than on Mars, "The Huddling Place" wouldn't have felt out of place in a 1940s issue of the Saturday Evening Post or the New Yorker.

A tale about crippling agoraphobia and the dangers of suburbification with rather sinister undertones for such a quiet story.