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.

Retro Review: "The Dear Departed" by Alice-Mary Schnirring

"The Dear Departed" is a ghost short story by Alice-Mary Schnirring, which was first published in the May 1944 issue of Weird Tales and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found online here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

"The Dear Departed" opens with a séance in progress. Six people are seated around the table, including the medium Radha Ramavi. During the séance, the voice of a child can be heard calling "Mommie, Mommie". One of the people at the table, a woman named Mrs. Harcourt, recognises the voice as that of her late daughter Dorrie. Clearly upset, she gropes about in the dark and breaks the circle, ending the séance early. When the lights go on again, Mrs. Harcourt is holding a stuffed toy elephant that used to belong to Dorrie, but has been missing since her death.

Radha Ramavi declares that once the circle has been broken, there is no use in going further today. But they can try again tomorrow. Then his assistant, described as a small man in Eastern clothes, sees the guests out, but not before Mrs. Harcourt slips him an envelope containing one hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in the 1940s.

Once the guests are gone, Radha Ramavi and his assistant take off their pseudo-Indian outfits and share a smoke. We learn that Radha Ramavi is really called Joe and that his assistant is called Mark. Neither of them has ever even been to India and Radha a.k.a. Joe cannot really talk to the spirits of the dear departed either. Instead, Joe and Mark are frauds, preying on the despair of the recently bereaved. They acquired the toy elephant from a nurse and used it to fleece Mrs. Harcourt and the others for money.

Joe and Mark head out for dinner and we learn a little more about how their scam works. Mark researches the customers and their dead relatives. He's also a ventriloquist and produces the voices, while Joe plays the medium. Occasionally, Mark also organises the materialisation of a spirit, using props such as an old Air Force uniform. Since the story was written in the middle of WWII, there would have been a great demand for spirits in uniform and as well as a lot of bereaved parents and widows and therefore a great demand for mediums to talk to the dead. However, Joe and Mark decide to lay off the materialisations for now, because they suspect that one of their customers, a man called Henderson, might be an undercover cop.

By now it's pretty clear that Joe and Mark are despicable people. But just in case there was any doubt, Mark decides to use his ventriloquist skills to harass a black truck driver waiting at a traffic light, while he and Joe are crossing. And so Mark produces a disembodied voice that whispers "Black boy, debbil's waitin' fo' you," to the truck driver. As a result, the terrified truck driver slips off the brake, the truck lurches forward and runs over Mark. Poetic justice, I'd say.

Schnirring's decision to make the truck driver black not just shows that New York City, where "The Dear Departed" is set, was a highly diverse place, it also adds racism to the already long list of Mark's sins and proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Mark is or rather was a horrible person. I could have done without a awful accent Schnirring gave the black truck driver, though.

Now that Mark has gotten his comeuppance, Joe is distraught. For starters, he needs Mark or someone with his skills to run his fake medium scam. And besides, Joe was fond of Mark, because Mark worshipped him and would have done everything for him. Like a mongrel who'd do everything for a bone, a pat on the back or a kick. Just in case there was any lingering doubt, Joe comparing his faithful friend (and maybe more?) and business partner to a dog shows that he is a horrible person, too. Not to mention that we wonder why Mark put up with Joe, especially since Mark was the one who did all the work. Joe just pretended to be a fake medium.

However, Joe still has a séance scheduled for the next day and his customers arrive on cue. Joe has no idea what to do now, cause with Mark gone there is no one to do the voices of the spirits and arrange all the other little tricks. But since he can hardly send his customers home again, Joe decides to go through with the séance and just pretend that the spirits are not in the mood to answer that day. And so he sits at the table with the others, eyes closed, and wonders just how long he will have to pretend that he's trying to contact the spirits before he can send everybody home.

Suddenly Joe smells cigar smoke and wonders about that. After all, he told Mark not to smoke in the séance room, because the smell of smoke gets stuck in the draperies. Then Mrs. Harcourt screams and faints. Joe opens his eyes and there is Mark or rather his ghost, his body still mangled from the accident. "You wanted me, Joe, so I came," Mark's ghost says.

"The Dear Departed" is short, only three and a half pages long, but a certainly manages to pack a lot of punch into its short length. In many ways, this story is similar to "The Gothic Window" by Dorothy Quick, which ran in the same issue. For both stories feature a character faking a supernatural occurrence – though for very different reasons – only for the supernatural to really happen and make sure that a loathsome character gets their comeuppance. Though in "The Gothic Window" there is a plausible natural explanation for the supposedly supernatural occurrences. In "The Dear Departed", the ghost of Mark really does appear at the end, witnessed not just by Joe but by Mrs. Harcourt and the rest of the circle as well.

Apart from Mark's sudden death by truck, there are very few surprises in "The Dear Departed" and a savvy reader can quickly tell where the story is going. Nonetheless, the story is well written and highly effective. And while fake mediums are as common in fiction as they probably are in the real world, I nonetheless found the explanations how Joe and Mark conduct their scam fascinating.

Alice-Mary Schnirring is another forgotten woman writer of the golden age, except that she is even more obscure than Allison V. Harding and Dorothy Quick, if that's possible. According to ISFDB, she was born in Brooklyn in 1912 and died in 1978. Her byline is very likely her real name, if only because no one in their right mind would choose a surname like Schnirring, which is almost impossible for Americans to pronounce and spell (and not exactly great for Germans either), as a pen name. And indeed, in my quest to learn more about Alice-Mary Schnirring I found the obituary of her son, William Schnirring who was born in 1938 and died in 2003 and also worked in publishing, though in very different fields than his mother.

Alice-Mary Schnirring was less prolific than Harding or Quick. ISFDB lists only six stories by her, all published in Weird Tales between 1942 and 1944. However, she also seems to have been active in other genres. A 1975 Alfred Hitchcock anthology contained a story by her and crime fiction writer and Edgar Award winner Robert L. Fish dedicated a novel to her. All this points to a writer who left SFF for friendlier and more lucrative pastures (Weird Tales was notoriously slow to pay its writers). Alas, there is no crime and mystery equivalent to ISFDB, therefore it is impossible to tell how active she was in that genre.

Considering that every scrap of paper left behind by H.P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard has been scrutinised to death, it's telling how very little is known about the women who wrote for Weird Tales, even though Weird Tales had more female contributors on all levels (writers, editors, artists) than any other SFF magazine of the pulp era. We clearly need a comprehensive study about the women of Weird Tales.

Screenshot from the Night Gallery adaptation of "The Dear Departed"

With regard to reprints, Schnirring seems to have done a little better than Harding or Quick and several of her stories, including "The Dear Departed" have been reprinted in anthologies over the decades. Furthermore, "The Dear Departed" was also adapted for an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery in 1971, which David Juhl reviews here. The Night Gallery episode sticks to the basic plot of the story, but adds in a love triangle between Joe, Mark and his wife. I suspect that the adultery subplot was added to dispel any suspicions that Joe and Mark are a couple on a personal as well as professional level. Because the story certainly contains hints in that direction.

An effective and genuinely spooky ghost story by yet another underrated woman writer of the golden age.

Retro Review: "Morgue Ship" by Ray Bradbury

"Morgue Ship" by Ray Bradbury is a science fiction short story, which appeared in the summer 1944 issue of Planet Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

Sam Burnett is one of two living humans aboard the Constellation, the titular morgue ship, which picks up the dead of an interplanetary war between Earth and Venus and then returns the bodies to Earth. The ship has room for one hundred bodies and Burnett has just picked up body number ninety-eight of his one hundredth run. It will also be his last, for Burnett is burned out both by the sheer amount of death he's seen and also by the fact that instead of wartime heroics, Burnett and the morgue ship only arrive when the war has already moved on.

Body number ninety-eight turns out to be a Venusian officer named Lethla, the righthand man of the Venusian commander Kriere. Burnett's younger and less jaded partner Rice is excited by this find, for if Lethla is aboard the morgue ship and dead, then Kriere must be close by and perhaps injured or dead as well. Retrieving Kriere might well end the war and make Burnett and Rice heroes. However, Burnett dampens his young partner's enthusiasm. The war has long since moved on and Lethla is just another body to be retrieved and prepared.

There is just one problem. Lethla isn't dead. He suddenly sits up on the morgue slab, draws his gun and points it at Burnett and Rice, both of whom are unarmed. Turns out that that he survived because of a thin glass mask and oxygen capsules (the requirements of surviving in the vacuum of space were not yet well known). Lethla then proceeds to destroy the radio of the Constellation and demands that Rice and Burnett help him rescue his superior Kriere. For the ship carrying Lethla and Kriere was attacked and destroyed. Lethla and Kriere managed to survive in a liferocket (the term "escape pod" wouldn't be coined until much later), but they had neither a radio nor sufficient supplies. The morgue ship is their best chance of getting past the Earth blockades back to Venus.

Rice is something of a hothead and attempts to defy Lethla, but Burnett seemingly goes along with Lethla's orders, while plotting to capture both Lethla and Kriere and thus end the war. When they spot Kriere's floating body, Burnett leaves the controls of the Constellation to Rice and operates the morgue ship's retrieval claw to pull in Kriere – body number ninety-nine.

However, Burnett deliberately lets the retrieval claw grip Kriere too tightly, crushing and killing the Venusian. The death of his commander shocks Lethla long enough that Burnett and Rice can attack him. Together, they manage to disarm and kill Lethla, but not before Burnett is shot.

Burnett dies, knowing that he has ended the war and that there will be no more morgue ship trips necessary. He becomes body number one hundred of the last cargo of the Constellation.

When thinking of Planet Stories – home of space opera adventure and planetary romance – Ray Bradbury is not the first author who comes to mind, even though he wrote a fair number of stories for the magazine, three in 1944 alone. Many of the stories that would eventually make up The Martian Chronicles were also first published in Planet Stories.

"Morgue Ship" manages to be both a typical Planet Stories yarn and a typical Ray Bradbury story. It has all the space action, adventure and suspense one expects to find in Planet Stories and it has the poetic style and introspective melancholia one expects from a Ray Bradbury story.

Few authors of the golden age have the command of language that Ray Bradbury had. Mostly, speculative fiction of the golden age either features the invisible prose found in Astounding or the overly purple prose often associated with Weird Tales under Farnsworth Wright. Not many authors managed to find a golden means between those two extremes, but Bradbury is one of them.

"Morgue Ship" is short, only six pages long (and half a page is taken up by an illustration), but Bradbury perfectly manages to capture the atmosphere aboard the morgue ship with its clinical interior, its shelves full of dead soldiers, the churning blood pumps and whirring machinery, in such a short space. Bradbury also manages to pack the horrors of war in space, the exploding ships and spinning dead bodies among the wreckage, into just a few paragraphs. Finally, Bradbury captures overwhelming weariness of Sam Burnett, weariness with his grisly task, weariness with the war and the feeling that because Burnett is not a combatant, he is not contributing to the war effort.

This last sentiment is something that I have occasionally encountered on the Allied side of World War II, mainly among Americans who were either not fit for active military service or on assignments far from the frontlines and yet yearned for frontline action. On the German side, there also are plenty of accounts of mostly very young boys eager to fight and die for Führer and Fatherland (and by the end of World War II, the Nazis were drafting boys of sixteen and younger, many of whom did not survive), but just as many accounts by mostly somewhat older men, many of whom still remembered World War I and tried to avoid being sent to the frontline by all possible means. In fact, relatively safe posts far from the frontlines were often handed out as rewards for "solid" citizens, while particularly dangerous frontline assignments were viewed as a way of getting rid of malcontents and shutting up problematic people.

"Morgue Ship" was written and published, while World War II was still going on, so the desire of Burnett and Rice to finally get to take part in the action rather than picking up the pieces afterwards is understandable in the context of the time. Furthermore, men of fighting age, who were not in active service, were often treated with contempt or outright hostility on both sides of World War II. "Morgue Ship" is clearly an attempt to show that non-combatants also serve and are vital for the war effort. And since Ray Bradbury was not in the military during World War II (he was rejected for medical reasons), I also wonder whether he did not have first hand experience with the contempt for and hostility towards young male non-combatants at the time.

Though much of the so-called golden age of science fiction coincided with World War II, comparatively few stories of the time reference the war. Of the 1944 Retro Hugo finalists in the fiction categories, the two works that actually reference the war – The Magic Bedknob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons  by Mary Norton and to a lesser degree The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – are both outliers from outside the American science fiction scene. "Morgue Ship" is one of the very few science fiction stories published in the American pulp magazines of the time that address the war at least indirectly.

As I've remarked before, Ray Bradbury's stories are the most timeless of the various Retro Hugo finalists and Retro Hugo eligible stories I have reviewed over the years. Some of the technical details in "Morgue Ship" are dated, but with a few edits the story wouldn't feel out of place in a contemporary issue of Uncanny or Tor.com or Lightspeed or Clarkesworld.

Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury were almost the same age (both born in 1920, though Asimov's exact birthdate is not known) and started publishing around the same time, though Asimov managed to break into the pro magazines before Bradbury did. However, the three Asimov stories I reviewed show that Isaac Asimov was still very much developing as a writer at this point in his career, while Ray Bradbury's writing skills are much further along.

In Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury wrote that the 1944 Retro Hugo winner for Best Short Story "R is for Rocket" as well as "The Lake", which I reviewed here, were his breakthrough stories, where he stopped trying to imitate other writers and also stopped writing what he believed magazine editors wanted and finally found his own voice. "Morgue Ship" dates from the same period and is another example of Bradbury finding his own voice and style. For "Morgue Ship" is very unlike most stories from this period. In fact, the story of which "Morgue Ship" reminded me most is "Aftermaths" by Lois McMaster Bujold (nowadays included in Shards of Honor as a sort of epilogue), which was first published in 1986, more than forty years after "Morgue Ship".

"Morgue Ship" is not nearly as well known as either "The Lake" or "R is for Rocket" and in fact had never been reprinted until the 2010s in the three volume The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition. This is unfair, because "Morgue Ship" is a great story that shows just how good a writer Ray Bradbury already was at the age of barely twenty-four.

In fact, "Morgue Ship" is probably the most pleasant surprise I've had since I started the Retro Science Fiction Reviews project. For I already knew that "The Lake" and the Leigh Brackett stories were good. "Morgue Ship", on the other hand, was completely unknown to me and turned out to be an unjustly forgotten gem.