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.