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.

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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.

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

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.

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.