One of these Four Sci-Fi Books Struck Me Dumb With Admiration

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Welcome back to the punishment prairie.

[00:00:02]I am being punished indeed. It is extraordinarily cold. Um, talking about four books, most of which I mostly recommend.

[00:00:13]Does not go for the first one. Northwest Smith. Yes, I recommend it. Do I recommend most of it? No, I don't. You should read probably exactly four of the stories collected here. CL Moore was an underssung weird fiction writer, a contemporary of Lovecraft, uh, and Clark Ashton Smith and them boys. I'll take her over Lovecraft. I won't take her over Smith, but Smith, Northwest is at the very minimum an interesting exercise in pulp writing that um is named after the protagonist character Northwest Smith, who is allegedly the archetype upon whom upon which Han Solo is based. He's a cool leather jacketw wearing cigarette blast and legendary gun for hire who haunts the uh backwater spaceports of different places around the galaxy principally Venus and Mars which are home to two different um I think subspecies of human or humanoid alien. Mars looks just like Barum. Earth does not appear until the final story and Venus is uh this decadent I think uh coded as Chinese specifically civilization. The first story sets the template. It's shamblow which is a really famous u short story from war about um a fem fatal wearing red which is part of the formula has striking eyes as does northwestmith.

[00:01:46]He has gray eyes and a scarred up face.

[00:01:50]Seemingly every story is introduced by focusing on his his beautiful eyes. He saves this mystery woman from a marauding band of uh seeming bandits, invites her back to his quarters where she stays and uh there is a dark seduction. Great piece of body horror.

[00:02:10]Reminded me quite a bit of Croninberg.

[00:02:12]John Carpenter feels slightly out of time as it was written in the 1930s was effective. Creeped me out. And this is the first example of a motif that runs throughout these stories which is science fiction tellings of ancient Greek myth. The rest of the stories pretty much follow this same formula.

[00:02:31]Northwest Smith meets a uh an exotic seductress and succumbs to their womanly ws and is drawn to the kind of incoit primal evil of female sexuality which is a part of the stories that's that seems to be the point to characterize female sexuality as something that's basically destabilizing and sinister or something to be used cynically to be wielded against men of power such as Northwest Smith. And it wasn't actually until the last couple of stories that I even had ambivalence about it. It seemed settled as I was reading it. It seemed like that was just unambiguously kind of the point of the stories. I thought that she was pandering to a teen boy reader base for uh weird tales. But the last two stories are I think by far the most interesting.

[00:03:19]Avala is the penultimate story and it was published contiguously with the other ones spanning from sorry I'm not threatening you I'm not threatening to crush you necessarily. Uh my hand is cold. Northwest Smith and his sidekick Venujian sidekick are hired by representatives of um the main corrupt political establishment on Venus or like a crime family or something. It's been a while since I read these. um they're hired as sex traffickers and in this story uh his characterization is very different. Song in a minor key, the final story was published 20 years later, 21 years later in 1957 as a kod to the Northwest Smith stories. It's very brief and it colors in his backstory and furnishes a possible motivation or a narrative that explains maybe his unconscious drives. I think that this portraiture of Northwest Smith is definitely interesting, but I think it's a pretty flimsy skeleton and it's something that is only paid out after you've already committed a lot of attention to reading through these stories that for the most part are very redundant, formulaic, and boring. The writing I also found occasionally quite poor. I think that her writing in her cosmic horror mode uh I just didn't really like. I don't have much of a taste for that stuff anyway anymore.

[00:04:45]There's only so many times you can read about a hapless protagonist succumbing to the waves of overpowering ancient cosmic evil. You know, this isn't necessarily her fault because she was writing at the time when this stuff was still relatively fresh, but it's not fresh to me. I've read it too many times. and uh her her pros especially here can be really purple. I will also recommend Scarlet Dream uh as the exception to that as an exercise in cosmic horror. Allah, Clark Ashton Smith that I just thought visually like the imagery was really good. Those are the four stories I recommend. Shambbleow, Scarlet Dream of Alla, and Song in a Minor Key. Uh I recall the rest of them being skippable. And this is one of those books that I wish that I liked more because more because I think that CL is such an interesting historical figure and is still sort of underappreciated in the readership and not given her her due co-wrote almost all of the stuff that is credited just as Henry Cutner and likewise Cutner co-wrote some of the stuff credited as more. This is uh not my favorite pulp writing and it's also not my favorite cosmic horror, but I don't not recommend it. The book that I do recommend if you read one book from this whole video, Make It Sabella by Tanith Lee. This is now my favorite Tanith Lee book. I think very possibly and plausibly. I don't know if I'm stealing Valor here. I don't know if this is a take that I heard somewhere that I I just digested and it's reemerged as my own insight. It probably isn't. Uh, but it seems to be a treatment of the Northwest Smith stories, a retreatment of it because thematically it's so close and it concerns the same kind of uh male female sexual dynamics. Lee is such a good writer in this and in a few of her books that it almost feels like she was cheating. It feels like a build your own character in a a video game where you just max out all the talent skill bars.

[00:06:43]I almost don't even know how to pitch it. I I this is one of those books where I almost just want to end the review at like you just go find it. You go find it. You go read it. Where's my wand?

[00:06:51]Here. Let me menace you with this. If you don't track down a copy of Sabella by Tanith Lee and read it within the next two months, I will find you and I will jab you. This is also actually accidentally what it feels like to read this book. This is Lee at her absolute most intense, most confrontational, darkest. It's the closest I've ever read her to writing like Joanna Russ, which is an extremely high compliment. Russ is probably the most intense confrontational science fiction writer that I've come across. And this is Lee somehow both writing like Russ with that degree of like absolute conviction in what she's saying and conviction in her own talent and her grander creative vision but with the softer touch of a Lee Brackett or a CL Moore or a Jack Vance writing uh what feels like a planetary romance. It almost feels like Barum Pastiche I think on purpose. It takes place on a planet called Novo Mars that um looks like Barum, the Edgar Brosian Mars, but it's pink instead of red. Follows titular character Sabella, who is a vampire who lives in a little house on the prairie of Novo Mars with only packs of wolves for company. uh recalling her life after the death of her aunt. Uh which opens up interesting new uh opportunities for her. Thinking back on her adolescence and her emergent vampirism as probable metaphor for the sudden emergence of uh the necessity of reckoning with male sexual attention. And I have a smile on my face because it is such a good book, but it's also very heavy and really dark. It's a serious work that's written with such absolute technical flare and mastery, not only of the form of like horror writing andor planetary romance writing. It involves so many other genres like noir crime fiction. There's cyberpunk elements. It reads like just a straight romance at times, especially uh in the end. It has a strong southern gothic flavor that reminded me quite a bit of Reefs of Earth by Laferdy, which is my favorite Laferdy book. It also is, I think, a direct commentary upon the Northwest Smith archetype. Again, this strong like overpowering male archetype wears all of these hats stacked one on top of the other. Does all of these things simultaneously somehow. And it does not feel like homage. It doesn't feel like this patchwork quilt. I don't think anybody else can do this. I've never seen anybody else do this this well. She eats everybody's lunch. She takes lunch money from all of my favorite authors. It rules. It rules. It rules. The ending loses a lot of people.

[00:09:44]I think it it kind of lost me too. It's about like dominance and submission, but other than that, I think that this is um I will say at the very least the equal of Electric Forest, Kill the Dead, and Nights Master. This is almost like the one ring. This is the one vintage science fiction paperback to rule them all. This is the thing that just like does everything that I like in science fiction and fantasy writing, in genre writing, and it does it all in one book.

[00:10:14]I'm not saying that this is the best science fiction book that I've ever read. I'd have to think about that and plan to think about that more because this is almost certainly going to wind up on the next top 15 video whenever I uh get serious about making another one of those. Please go find it. Please go read it. No, no, no. Not please do it. Sibella is a book where the reading experience will be enriched. If you have read a lot of other science fiction books, especially like science fiction, horror, planetary romance, maybe Philip K. Dick, it feels dickian.

[00:10:49]And my audio receiver died, so I apologize if there are audio issues.

[00:10:54]This might be a case where you must have read other science fiction uh of a particular kind to unlock this as a book that makes sense because Maulsberg's writing style, if you've heard me talk about him before, is really difficult and sometimes impenetrable and it's not obvious exactly what even is happening.

[00:11:15]It's written typically in this loop toloop style with shifting first and third person narration where the characters experience depersonalization as they become increasingly insane. Um, and that describes a lot of Maulsburg's work. And it describes this, and this also is satire of a particular kind of uh like pulp science fiction, golden age science fiction about the square jawed uber mench uh white bred American conquering astronaut hero. And it's also a satire I think of stuff like Star Trek or even like uh the heish novels by Leguin or just generally a satire of the kind of technological optimism that was endemic to golden age science fiction writing. Maulsburg was a great devote of that material and of science fiction generally. But his work is characterized by a fairly extreme form of pessimism that could even be characterized as litism or litesque.

[00:12:10]I guess one of his driving themes is that technology is a fundamentally destructive uh force in human psychology and human culture and uh human subjectivity that just can't ever be controlled. That's a kind of pessimism that he shares with a lot of writers that I really like.

[00:12:29]people like David R. Bunch and this like Beyond Apollo is a satire of that like Superman archetype in science fiction, but also much more so that that vision of uh like a space fairing humanity being a liberalizing colonial force for good in the universe of being able to spread our like philosophies and ideas and technologies to uh alien cultures who we deem deserving of it. And this is an example of um four such colonists going on this mission sent by uh what is referred to only as the bureau with a capital B. Heavy Kofka influence in a lot of uh Maulsburg. Another thing that I love about Maulsburg. The Bureau is the governing apparatus of what is simply called the Empire with a capital E. and they're sent on this mission to make contact with aliens to prepare them to receive the gift of human technology that will accelerate their development into a a space fairing uplifted species themselves. Uh the mission goes ary as the uh captain's programming and mind breakdown. He's a heavily um I guess brainwashed you can say or like psychologically conditioned individual who's a true believer in the cause of the empire and the mission of the bureau. And this optimism, this faith in his own purpose and in his own identity is eroded over time as he uh loses power. He is stripped of his symbolic power as leader of this expedition as he ceases to have any real responsibilities once they make planet fall. uh and kind of lingers on as this ghost at the banquet of the captain and name only. He can't cope with that demotion psychologically. It drives him insane and it drives him to increasing uh levels of of violent psychosis. And um another book where I have a smile on my face, but it's incredibly dark. It is a satire. It's a very very very black comedy. It suffers, I will say, from Maulsberg's tendency to uh write too much graphic sex. And uh Maulsberg had a a second or supplemental career as a writer of pornography, a writer of um erotica, and sometimes it just bleeds through too much. It is sort of an intrusion into the the science fiction stories from time to time, and that's the case here, especially because it gets pretty brutal. But the ending is one of my favorites ever. Really amazing, really bleak ending. I think sort of on par with the ending of Blindside by Watts. That sort of twist of the knife right at the very end of just leaving you no cause for hope whatsoever. I would say this probably is not a great first Maulsberg to read if uh you have not yet read Maulsberg, probably Beyond Apollo. But if you're already in the club, then um this is definitely recommended. This is not one of his better-known books. None of his books are better known books, but even among the unknown works, this is a pretty obscure one, I think, but it is recommended. And then finally, The Dream Millennium by James White. Uh, I had pretty high hopes for. James White is most famous for being the creator of the Sector General series, but he also wrote stuff that was not medical SF. And I don't think it's really read all that much anymore, uh, but does enjoy a reputation of being above average on the front of hard SF writing or this sort of vanilla like space adventure adventure.

[00:16:02]I don't know. It's like Fred Pole. Fred Pole. Frederick Pole. I associate him with Frederick Paul as someone who's a sort of generic, I guess, is a really shitty porative way to frame it, but I think you know what I'm saying. Like a kind of generic science fiction writer, but who was also popular for a reason.

[00:16:18]I'm not a huge Pole fan, but I recognize him as a competent writer. White I think I like more than P. He gives me a similar feeling, but I like him a little bit more. This is about a man who is on this multiund year voyage to different stars. Allah actually freeze frame revolution by Watts who I'll mention again uh and follows a similar plot trajectory where he's occasionally awoken by the ship's computer tasked with different responsibilities made to confront different crises that arise over the course of the voyage and the AI the onboard AI does not necessarily always operate with the best interests in mind uh or you know by by merit of the consequences of its decision is not always acting in the best interests of the crew who remain in cryo sleep but are periodically awoken to do like mental exercises to keep themselves fresh and to deal with problems on the ship. And the reason they're on this voyage is that they are escaping a dystopian Earth to try to seed human populations on an M-class planet somewhere out there in the cosmos. There are 11 candidates that they've mapped out and u as the ship gets further and further along uh the ship progressively begins to break down. These are not super novel conceits in a science fiction book. The novel conceit is as they are cryosleeping they experience dreams that ascend through the eras of life on earth experiencing the subjectivity of different animals beginning with trilobytes and then moving up through dinosaurs into primitive uh apes and homminids and then experiencing the life experience objectively of different historical figures uh until they get up to the time that is contemporary with when they left earth that looks like a somewhat benol uh predictable science fiction dystopia from the 1970s. Oh my god, Earth is beyond its carrying capacity, overpopulation, blah blah.

[00:18:21]This was like the main shoe toy of dystopian science fiction writers of this time. I find the lame, unconvincing. Um, and I think that there's a sort of troubling philosophical underbelly to that stuff that is very rarely part of the, you know, ethical calculus of of these kinds of uh stories. Anyway, it's an occasionally powerful book that also is occasionally quite boring, quite predictable, and overexpository. I don't think that there's enough here to say this is a true forgotten gem. But there are a few interesting ideas. The dream uh conceit I think works really well.

[00:19:00]Some of those dream sequences that are written as their own little short stories nestled into the bigger plot of the you know the the human crew on the ship are really good. Uh also there's especially one premise that shows up towards the end of the book about the afterlife that I think is really cool.

[00:19:18]But else-wise, I think this is sort of a downthe-middle, slightly above average, but not like super special or all that fascinating of a book. But I would definitely read White again. I think I should probably read one of the Sector General novels. Maybe the first one. How about that? Maybe Sector General number one. I think it's called Hospital Station. White himself is an interesting character, too. He's from Northern Ireland. Dedicated pacifist his whole life. Seemed to be a good guy. Um, and uh, I would definitely read more from him, but uh, I was not ultimately as thrilled by this as I had hoped to be, and certainly, as you can tell, not as thrilled as I was by the other books. If you want my full thoughts about them, I reviewed all of them right after I read them and put up standalone videos on my Patreon where I review each book that I read. And I review um, for typically like 15 to 30 minutes per book. I do extras. I've been reviewing Ballsburg essays, critical essays about science fiction history from Engines of the Night. I do movie reviews periodically.

[00:20:18]I throw in supplemental stuff. I do little garden tour videos occasionally.

[00:20:24]I'm a very amateur gardener. If that's interesting to you, it probably isn't, but if it is, then it's five bucks per month. Uh, and I upload there quite frequently. There will be a link to that below. I feel that it's worth it.

[00:20:35]There's way over 200 videos up there now that you get access to for a mere $5. A mere $5. If not, no worries. You'll see me again soon. probably be in the apartment. What is it? I I should name the apartment the agony apartment. It has been lately. We'll see. All right.

[00:20:53]Thank you. It's not the agony apartment.

[00:21:10]Hey, hey, hey.