Retro Review: "I, Rocket" by Ray Bradbury

"I, Rocket" by Ray Bradbury is a military science fiction short story, which appeared in the May 1944 issue of Amazing Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

As the title implies, "I, Rocket" is a story written from the POV of a spaceship. This isn't all that unusual in the modern era, see the Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie or "Damage" by David D. Levine. But while the science fiction and fantasy of the golden age are full of sentient machines, often possessed or otherwise malevolent, I don't know any other story of this period which has a machine, in this case a spaceship, as a POV character.

Pronouns are always tricky with non-human characters. And since neither the rocket nor Ray Bradbury have expressed a pronoun preference, I have decided to go with "she", since seagoing ships and spaceships are traditionally referred to by feminine pronouns. Besides, the crew also refers to the rocket as "she".

At the beginning of the story, the rocket is lying ruined on a barren pebbled plateau with twisted jets and bashed fore-plates. It will, the rocket calculates, take a few hundred years for rust and corrosion to break her down. And since the rocket has a lot of time on its hands, she decides to share her story.

The rocket was created as a warship to serve in the war between Earth and Mars. Her first captain was a man called Lamb, a man who is described as wrinkled brown leather with diamond eyes and uneven white teeth. Does this man that Captain Lamb is a man of colour or merely that he wears brown leather? It's not entirely clear at this point, though Captain Lamb's face is described as brown and wrinkled throughout, so I assume that he is indeed a man of colour.

The rocket experiences her first launch and notes that this is the first time she's outside the hangar and the base to see the world. She is surprised to find that it is round. There are more surprises in store for our rocket. Momentum, zero gravity, the gravitational forces of other celestial bodies and the indescribable tides of space.

During the rocket's first trip, we learn more about her crew. We learn that Captain Lamb is in love with a Martian dancer whom he hopes to take back to Earth with him after the war. The cook, meanwhile, is eager for revenge, because his parents died in a Martian attack. Two other crewmen, Conrad and Hillary, are in love with the same woman. The young navigator Ayres is experiencing a religious awakening, something which is apparently common among spaceship crews.

And then there are Anton Larion and Leigh Belloc, two crewmen who are planning to sabotage the rocket. The rocket is aware of their plot, but has no way of warning Captain Lamb and the rest of the crew. However, the rocket is resourceful. She deals with the saboteur Belloc and takes him out via a bursting oil pipe. During the confusion that follows, the second saboteur Larion blurts out a confession and tries to escape in a lifeboat. However, our rocket causes the airlock to malfunction, shooting Larion out into space. She likens this to an immune system reaction.

The rocket experiences her first battle and then many others. She also loses two crewmembers to the war. And when the war is finally over, our rocket is converted into a cargo vessel and given a new captain and crew. She transports freight from Venus and Mars to Earth for five years, until she crashes on a asteroid and her crew is killed.

The rocket lies wrecked on the pebbled plateau for four months, until a one-man patrol ship finds her. And the captain of that ship is none other than Captain Lamb, now patrolman, who misses his old ship just as much as she misses him and therefore set out to search for her when she was lost.

Captain Lamb confesses to the rocket that she was the only thing he ever truly loved. Apparently, things didn't work out with the Martian dancer. It also turns out that Captain Lamb is no happier in peacetime than the rocket. However, the Captain tells the rocket, there is another war brewing, this time with Venus, and good rockets are always needed. And therefore, Captain Lamb will be back with a salvage and repair crew to make the rocket flight ready again and return her to Earth. "I'll be captain of you again," he says.

And so the rocket waits in anticipation for her captain to return.

"I, Rocket" is a beautiful story about the love between a captain and his ship and the difficulties of old soldiers – whether human or metal – to function in peacetime. Ray Bradbury really was on fire in 1944 and I could fill the entire short story category on my Retro Hugo ballot solely with Bradbury stories.

Stories about sentient machinery were a thing during the golden age. "Ride the El to Doom" by Allison V. Harding features a sentient elevated train, "Killdozer!" by Theodore Sturgeon features a murderous bulldozer, "The Twonky" by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner features an overbearing radio-phonograph console. However, of all these stories "I, Rocket" is not just the only story actually narrated from the POV of a sentient machine, it's also the only one where the sentient machine is unambiguously heroic.

Above, I compared "I, Rocket" to modern science fiction stories with spaceship protagonists. However, "I, Rocket" isn't just a spiritual predecessor to the likes of Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie or "Damage" by David D. Levine. It is a direct ancestor, because like "I, Rocket" both later stories very much hinge on the love between ships and their captains. And yes, "I, Rocket" is a love story, albeit a rather unconventional one.

Apart from Captain Lamb, the rest of the rocket's crew are roughly sketched and yet these characters come alive in their brief interactions with the captain and each other, all observed by the rocket. When two of them die, we feel their loss as keenly as the rocket.

Of the conversations aboard the rocket, the one between Captain Lamb and the young pink-faced navigator Ayres, one of the two crewmembers who will die during the war, is interesting, because it suggests that most spacemen board their ships as staunch atheists, but find religion along the way, inspired by the grandeur of the cosmos. Religion is not a theme that frequently shows up in golden age science fiction – in fact, the only other story I reviewed where religion plays a role is "The Veil of Astellar" by Leigh Brackett – and if religion appears at all, it is usually portrayed negatively. Hence, the conversation between Lamb and Ayres and the implication that all spaceship crews are religious is so unusual.

In my review of "Highwayman of the Void" by Dirk Wylie a.k.a. Frederik Pohl, I noted that a lot of golden age science fiction seems to take place in the same consensus version of the solar system. "I, Rocket" is another story that is clearly set in the pulp science fiction shared universe. And so Martian dancers wear silver bells and Venusian spider-silk is a popular export good, just as in Leigh Brackett's stories of the same period. But then, Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett were lifelong friends and critique partners (and even collaborated on one story), so Bradbury probably deliberately inserted those little Easter eggs referring to Brackett's stories.

Ray Bradbury undoubtedly was one of the best stylists of the golden age and "I, Rocket" once again shows off his writing skills. Bradbury attempts to describe what the world and the universe would look like from the POV of a spaceship and likens the rocket's mechanical components and processes going on inside her to the functions of the human body. I particularly liked a passage where the rocket lands on a planet for the first time and likens the mass and the gravity well to the libido and sex drive. But then, rockets are very phallic. Though it is depressing that the most erotic scene in all of the stories I reviewed for this project is that of a rocket landing on Mars.

Of the five Ray Bradbury stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project, one is directly about World War II and three others are stories about war, albeit war in space rather than on Earth. Bradbury never served in the army; he was declared medically unfit due to his bad eyesight. Yet he wrote a lot about wartime experiences, more than most other SFF writers active during World War II. It's also notable that the protagonists of Ray Bradbury's war stories are not soldiers, but a medic retrieving corpses from the battlefield ("Morgue Ship"), a wartime nurse turned murderous mermaid ("Undersea Guardians"), a newsreel photographer ("The Monster Maker") and a war rocket respectively. Bradbury really seems to have wanted to make the point that civilian personnel and other non-combatants (and military vehicles like our rocket) can be as important and heroic as soldiers.

Unlike some of the other 1944 Ray Bradbury stories I reviewed, "I, Rocket" has been reprinted a couple of times. What is more, in 1961 Cele Goldsmith selected it as one of the seven best stories ever published in Amazing for the 35^th anniversary issue alongside such classics as "I, Robot" by Eando Binder  or "Armageddon 2419 A.D." by Philip Francis Nolan, the story which introduced Buck Rogers to the world.

Another winner by Ray Bradbury in what was a very strong year for him.

Guest Review: "Killdozer!" by Theodore Sturgeon, reviewed by Don Briago

Today, I'm happy to bring you another guest review. This time around, the subject is "Killdozer!", a science fiction horror novella by Theodore Sturgeon. So I hand over to Don Briago to share his thoughts on "Killdozer!":

***

“Killdozer!” is a novella by Theodore Sturgeon. It was first published in the November 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found online here.

It has been reprinted many times since. As a kid I came across the story in one of the excellent Spectrum anthologies edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. For this review I read the version that appears in Killdozer!, the third volume of Sturgeon's collected stories, which contains a wonderful general introduction by Robert Silverberg and informative notes on each story by Paul Williams. 

As recounted by Williams, the origin of "Killdozer!" is probably more interesting than "Killdozer!" itself. It was possible - barely - to scrape a living as a pulp writer if you were very prolific, but throughout his career Sturgeon's output was irregular. During the early Forties, he had a pretty good excuse for being distracted, what with a world war breaking out. The army hired him for various gigs, one of which involved operating a bulldozer, a job Sturgeon found not only well-paid but enjoyable. 

The army shipped him here and there. By the time Sturgeon wound up in the Virgin Islands, he hadn't written anything for over four years. (Between lying on the beach or churning out pulp fiction, which would you choose?) Financial desperation - the freelancer’s muse - forced him back to the typewriter, and his creativity erupted. He finished the thirty thousand words of "Killdozer!" in nine days, and mailed the manuscript to John Campbell at Astounding.

The legendary editor loved it. He stopped the presses so he could run "Killdozer!" as Astounding's next cover story. As both Silverberg and Williams note, Campbell paid Sturgeon the princely sum of $542.50, equivalent to ten grand today. Its success led to a (very inferior) bulldozer sequel, a Marvel comic, and a 1974 TV movie that looks so cheesy I'm dying to watch it. It also inspired the formation of a proto-grunge band called Killdozer. Not bad for nine days' work. 

The most successful story Sturgeon wrote was probably also his least characteristic. Sturgeon was widely acclaimed for his casual lyricism and humorous warmth. Neither quality is evident in "Killdozer!" It is pure action, plain and simple. There is no literary innovation here. As Cora recently pointed out, at this time many SFFers were writing stories about malevolent, autonomous machines, though I'm not sure if Sturgeon was aware of the trend during his long fallow period. 

“Killdozer!” starts with a truly awful and unnecessary infodump summarizing the history of a lost civilization that was destroyed in a war against sentient machines. All that's left in its ruins is "neutronium", a field of concentrated energy that could quite possibly wreak havoc. You think, "Oh no, is this going to be a Lovecraft thing where an ancient artifact unleashes eldritch horrors upon the hapless men who disturb its rest?" Yes, it is, but there's no overwrought Lovecraftian atmosphere. Thankfully, the neutronium doesn't really matter, and for the most part Sturgeon retains his light touch.

The hero is a guy named Tom, his foil is a guy named Chub, and there are six other guys who are more or less interchangeable. Their expository dialogue informs the reader that they are a construction crew sent to a deserted Pacific island to pave an airstrip. Which means nobody will be around to rescue them if, for example, they accidentally desecrate an ancient temple housing a nameless evil and it starts disemboweling them. (Campbell no doubtsaw the resemblance to his own seminal story "Who Goes There?" in which a group of isolated men get picked off one by one by a shape-shifting alien.) All of this set-up takes far too long for my taste and suggests Sturgeon's storytelling skills were indeed rusty.

We meet the real star of the show, the bulldozer, and she's a beaut, a D7 model whom the boys on the crew have nicknamed Daisy Etta (a corruption of "De Siete", Spanish for D7.) Then there's a bunch of boring conversation about the crew's past experiences in construction. Sigh. When your readers pick up a story called "Killdozer!" (complete with exclamation mark) they know what's coming once you introduce the bulldozer. You should get on with the anticipated rampage. When I was a kid I thought, "Less talking, more killing!" as I worked my way through the filler, and I felt the same impatience today as a nominal adult. 

When Daisy finally makes her first kill, Tom suspects it's due to a technical malfunction, not because she has been possessed by an eldritch horror, so he sabotages her innards and siphons all the gasoline from her tank. That doesn't stop her, of course, and she kills again. The other crew members suspect Tom of the murders. By the time they accept the fact that Daisy has somehow become a sentient serial killer, half of them are dead.

What follows is the heart of the tale, a cat and mouse game between Daisy and the surviving crew, and it's genuinely gripping. I'll pick three nits, namely the depiction of the crew's Puerto Rican wouldn't fly today, Daisy's intelligence conveniently ranges from shrewd to dumb to fit the vagaries of the plot, and the ending is very, very weak. None of this diminishes the sheer visceral appeal, though. The primal “man versus machine” showdown unquestionably delivers. 

What else is there to say? It's a flawed, fun story. It's hard to imagine mystics founding a religion with "Killdozer!" as a sacred text, or scholars plumbing its depths for semiotic analysis. Sturgeon is simply inviting your inner child into his sandbox to play with his toy tractor. It isn't anything more than that, and it doesn't need to be anything more, not even for $542.50. 

***

Thank you to Don for this great review of "Killdozer!"

Retro Review: "Ride the El to Doom" by Allison V. Harding

"Ride the El to Doom" is a horror novelette by Allison V. Harding, which was first published in the November 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.

"Ride the El to Doom" begins with a ride on an elevated train, the titular El, in what is implied to be New York City (though the names of streets, stops and bridges don't match any real places), as viewed through the eyes of steelworker Jack Larue. The descriptions are highly atmospheric, from the "dingy squalor" and "three and four-storey uniformity" of what has to be either Brooklyn or Queens via a bridge across muddy water to the shining towers of Manhattan in which Jack feels some ownership, because he cast the steel used to build them. We also learn that the El is rundown, the steel components without lustre and streaked with rust, and half-empty, too. I have never ridden the El, because it was gone long before I was born, but nonetheless I could picture the trip and the vistas only too clearly. Harding, who most likely was a native New Yorker, paints a great word picture here that is matched by Boris Dolgov's striking interior art.

As the El approaches his stop, Jack gets up and exchanges a few words with the driver, a grumpy old man named Pete Nevers who has been working for the El seemingly forever. Jack idly muses that Pete is so connected to the El that if the city authorities were ever to demolish the El, they would have to take down Pete along with it. But that won't ever happy, because the city cannot do without the El. Anybody who knows a little bit about the history of public transport in New York City (it's remarkable what you pick up when researching the Silencer stories) knows that those are famous last words.

And indeed a few weeks later, Jack chances to glimpse an article in a co-worker's newspaper that the El and the bridge which Jack crosses to get to work will be demolished. The bridge will be rebuilt, but the El won't. Instead, it will be replaced by busses. Jack is bothered by this, so much that he gets drunk after work. When he talks to Pete on the trip home that night, Pete insists that they'll never stop the El, that it's alive and they can't kill it. Jack counters that Pete is just scared, because he's nothing without the El.

Later that night, Jack wakes up, feeling hungover, not to mention a little guilty about his confrontation with Pete. After all, the old man has always been good to him, has even lent Jack money on occasion. And so Jack decides to pay Pete a visit to apologise.

It turns out that Pete lives in a barren apartment in a rundown building near the El trainyard. Because Jack feels sorry for old Pete, he offers to find him a job at the steel foundry, perhaps as a watchman. But Pete declines. He can't just change jobs, he declares. He can never leave the El. Jack tries to persuade him, but Pete won't hear anything about it. "Thanks lad", he tells Jack, but he needn't worry about Pete or the El. He shakes Jack's hand and Jack can't help but notice that Pete's handshake is hard and cold as steel.

But of course Jack worries about Pete anyway and even secures him a job as a watchman at the steel foundry. When he visits Pete again a few days later, the man who opens the door is not Pete, but his roommate, an El conductor named Philpot. Philpot tells Jack that Pete is taking the impending end of the El very hard. He doesn't eat and spends most of his time after hours in the empty El car.

When Jack tells Philpot about the job offer, Philpot says that Pete won't take it, because he isn't leaving the El. However, Philpot is interested. Jack tells Philpot that the job offer is only good for Pete, no one else, whereupon Philpot opens an old trunk in the apartment, revealing a tangle of rusty steel parts. Pete has been swiping parts from the El for years, Philpot tells Jack, and is hardly trustworthy as a watchman. "But why?" Jack wonders, when the door opens and Pete comes in.

Pete is understandably furious and throws Jack and Philpot out. He also tells Jack in no uncertain terms that he doesn't want or need a new job, because he's staying with the El. Philpot, on the other hand, would very much like the job, but Jack tells him to find one for himself.

On the final day of the El, Jack boards the train for its last ride, disgusted at all the reporters and local dignitaries, flag-waving school children and an off-key marching band and at the demolition crews who stand by to start their work as soon as the last train has passed by. Jack has a bottle of whiskey in his pocket and empties it on his way to the front of the train. Already drunk, he tries to talk to Pete, but all Pete says is "Get out!" That makes Jack angry and he takes a swing at Pete. But even though his fist feels as if he'd just hit a steel wall, Pete doesn't even feel the punch. But Jack certainly feels it when Pete throws him across the car.

Jack gets drunk some more, falls asleep on a bench and wakes up sorely hungover. Furious, he decides to confront Pete, but only find Philpot wounded and bleeding on the floor. Philpot claims that Pete attacked him and that he isn't human. He also warns Jack against going after Pete.

But of course, Jack does after Pete anyway. He enters the darkened El railyard and soon comes across the body of a night watchman, bludgeoned to death. He sees a train starting up, driven undoubtedly by Pete. Jack sprints after train and jumps aboard, realising too late that the demolition crews have already started to take down the tracks. Worse, the train is going very fast, too fast to jump off.

Somehow, Jack makes his way to the front of the train, where Pete is in his compartment. Jack yells at the old man to stop the train, because the tracks on the bridge are already gone, but Pete doesn't react. So Jack tries to grip the controls and stop the train himself, but he cannot, because Pete is too strong for him. In desperation, he tries to pummel Pete, but once again it is like hitting a steel wall.
Jack realises that the train is going up the ramp to the bridge and that he and Pete have to jump off now or die. But Pete isn't going to jump. He'll go down with the El and he has Jack's wrist in a death grip. At the very last second, Jack manages to yank himself free, tearing off Pete's arm in the process. He jumps and watches as the train derails and falls into the East River (imaginatively called West River in this story).

Jack staggers home, dumps the severed arm in a corner of his room and covers it with newspapers (like you do). He watches the rescue efforts, watches as the battered cars of the El are brought up again. The official story is that Pete went crazy, murdered Philpot and the night watchman and stole the train to commit suicide. But his body is never found and Jack suspects it never will be.
One night, he takes Pete's severed arm, still wrapped in newspapers, and takes it down to the riverfront. Now Jack finally removes the newspaper and finds not a severed arm, but a steel throttle lever. He realises that Pete truly hadn't been human and throws the lever into the river to join the rest of "Pete".

"Ride the El to Doom" is an atmospheric and highly effective horror story. Particularly, the two El rides that bookend the story, one a regular daytime ride and the second a feverish nightmare suicide ride, are very atmospheric. Ditto for the El's last trip, complete with dignitaries, off-key marching band and flag waving school children. Writingwise, this story is considerably better than "Guard in the Dark", the other Allison V. Harding story I reviewed. Native New Yorker Allison V. Harding was obviously writing what she knew here and it shows.

In fact, the thing I liked most about "Ride the El to Doom" is that it offers a glimpse into a vanished New York City. This is a New York where elevated trains still clatter through the city on stilts, though they are on their way out, where steelworkers and other bluecollar folks can still afford to live in Manhattan, where Brooklyn and Queens are monotonous working class neighbourhoods rather than hipster central. This is the New York City of old movies, the New York City that King Kong trashed and also the New York City of the Silencer. In fact, the city descriptions alone were well worth reading the story.

And yes, the city described is absolutely New York, even if Harding changes the names of places and turns East River into West River and 110^th Street station, a suicide hotspot in the days of the El, into 109^th Street station. I'm not sure which bridge the fictional West River Bridge is supposed to be, for while bridges in New York City have been demolished, none of them seem to have been demolished in the 1940s.

The historical background of the story is the end of the elevated railway a.k.a. El in New York City. The El had been introduced as a solution to New York City's rampant traffic problem in 1867 and quickly caught on after a few false starts, because unlike trams and trolleys, the El did not occupy valuable street space, but instead ran one level above. However, the El was also noisy. It cast streets and sidewalks into permanent shadow – already a persistent problem with New York City's many highrise buildings anyway - and covered the neighbourhood in smoke, soot and dirt. Owners of buildings and shops along the El lines complained and property values fell, even as El access developed previously underdeveloped areas. And once subways and busses could handle the same passenger volume cheaper and faster with less noise and pollution, it spelled the end for the El. The first elevated train line ceased operation in 1938 and others followed throughout the early to mid 1940s, i.e. at the time the story is set, though the last line in the Bronx held on until 1973. For more on the history and end of the New York City El, see here and here. As for why most elevated trainlines came down during the 1940s, at least part of the reason was that the steel used to build them was needed for the war effort. The quick demolition of the tracks in "Ride the El to Doom" alludes to this.

Allison V. Harding is a somewhat mysterious figure, as I explained in my review of "Guard in the Dark". But all evidence points at her having lived in New York City and therefore witnessing the El tracks come down all over the city around the time that she wrote this story. And because the El was so ubiquitous until it disappeared, Allison V. Harding very likely rode it at least occasionally, even though she was of a different social class than her characters. Is the last ride of the El in the story with its potbellied dignitaries and flag-waving school children and off-key marching band something Harding personally witnessed? The description is so on point that it almost seems as if Harding described a real event. And now I am tempted to search the New York Times archives for reports about the ends of the various El lines to see if something matches Harding's description.

Another thing that's notable is that "Ride the El to Doom" features only working class characters. Protagonist Jack Larue is a steelworker with an alcohol problem, Pete Nevers is an El motorman and Philpot is a conductor. These are not the kind of people you often see in science fiction, fantasy or horror stories as anything other than walk-ons or side characters, neither during golden age nor today.

"Ride the El to Doom" is also an early example of  contemporary horror and what we now call urban fantasy. According to received wisdom, horror was found mainly in gothic and historical settings before Rosemary's Baby and the works of Stephen King dragged it into the present and urban fantasy flat out did not exist before the 1980s. However, all of the Weird Tales stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project have had contemporary/near contemporary settings. Furthermore, Weird Tales was a hotbed of proto-urban fantasy and popular Weird Tales series characters like Seabury's Quinn's occult detective Jules de Grandin and Manly Wade Wellman's occult detective John Thunstone are the direct ancestors of Harry Dresden, Peter Grant, Kate Daniels, Mercy Thompson, October Daye and Anita Blake.

If there's one thing that has become amply clear to me during my extended sojourn in the golden age it's that fantasy was a hugely varied genre pre-Lord of the Rings. There was gothic horror, modern horror, sword and sorcery, proto-urban fantasy, weird fiction, children's fantasy, humorous fantasy, etc… Nor did this variety vanish overnight, when the popularity of Lord of the Rings exploded. Quite the contrary, a lot of pulp era fantasy was reprinted in the wake of the success of Lord of the Rings and sword and sorcery experienced its second boom during the 1960s, though of the protagonists of the first boom in the 1930s/early 1940s, only Fritz Leiber was still alive and active to see it. It was only when horror split off as a separate genre in the 1970s and what remained was overtaken by Tolkien clones and big fat quest fantasy that fantasy contracted for the next twenty to thirty years.

"Ride the El to Doom" is urban fantasy in the most literal sense of the word, because the monster to be slain is not a vampire or werewolf but a crucial feature of the city. If public transport horror were a thing, "Ride the El to Doom" would be one of its founding texts. And indeed, it's worth remembering that railroad fiction was its own genre during the pulp era and that Railroad Stories was one of the longest running pulp magazines of all time. Railroad Stories began publication as The Railroad Man's Magazine in 1906 and is still around 114 years later, though they stopped publishing fiction in 1979. So Railroad Stories has been in business longer than Astounding/Analog, Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, the three longest running (with interruptions in the case of Amazing Stories and Weird Tales) SFF magazines.

Possessed or otherwise malicious machines are a common feature of the golden age and beyond. "The Twonky" by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, winner of the 1943 Retro Hugo for Best Short Story, as well as “Etaoin Shrdlu” by Fredric Brown, a Retro Hugo finalist in the same category and year, are two examples, respectively featuring a sentient radio-phonograph console and a sentient linotype machine. The novella "Killdozer!" by Theodore Sturgeon, published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1944 and therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos, featured a possessed bulldozer murdering a construction crew. Isaac Asimov's 1953 story "Sally" is an early tale about autonomous cars who have minds and personalities of their own and conspire to commit murder. Stephen King's 1983 horror novel Christine is another take on the same subject, only that the explanation for Christine's sentience is supernatural rather than technological. "Rise the El to Doom" certainly fits into this pattern, only that the sentient machine has a human face here in the form of Pete Nevers.

Allison V. Harding drops hints regarding the true nature of "Pete" throughout the story. We get comparatively few physical descriptions of the characters – we don't even know what race they are, though personally I imagine Pete as an old black man. But what few physical descriptions of Pete there are usually compare him to steel, iron, metal or coal, all materials associated with the El.

Considering how good this story is, it's a shame that it has never been reprinted. Maybe the fact that it is tied to a very particular time and place counted against it. Or maybe it's yet another case of the women writers of Weird Tales being ignored and dismissed as "useless filler that only takes up pages", while every single utterance ever made by H.P. Lovecraft is analysed to death. Indeed, one thing I have learned during this project is that Weird Tales was so much more than just Lovecraft and Howard, Cthulhu and Conan, and that a lot of it was very good indeed, even if it has never received even a fraction of the attention that Lovecraft and Howard received.

A great atmospheric tale of urban horror that has been unjustly forgotten. Highly recommended.