#philipkdick — Public Fediverse posts

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Par ici : https://podcast.ausha.co/actusf/playlist/sense-of-wonder

With a Replicant uprising serving as the plot, Blade Runner 2099 will air on Amazon Prime Video. It premieres on November 25, 2026.

Amazon will be releasing all right episodes at once. Hopefully it'll be a binge worthy chapter in the Blade Runner universe.

Source: https://youtu.be/0Dr8I_RyRCg?is=lJuoKuLfI7Ok97ZF

#Movies #Film #Cinema #BladeRunner #BladeRunner2099 #PhilipKDick #RidleyScott #MichelleYeoh #HunterSchafer #Vangelis #Deckard #VoightKampffTest #CyberPunk #CassetteFuturism #NeoNoir

Fantapolemiche del weekend

https://leargenteetesteduovo.com/2026/06/30/fantapolemiche-del-weekend/

My 2025 in Review (Best Science Fiction Novels and Short Fiction, Reading Initiatives, and Bonus Categories)

• Graphic created by my father

Here’s to happy reading in 2026! I hope you had a successful reading year. Whether you are a lurker, occasional visitor, a regular commenter, a follower on Bluesky or Mastodon, thank you for your continued support. As I say year after year, It’s hard to express how important (and encouraging) the discussions that occur in the comments, social media, and via email are to me. I’m so thankful for the lovely and supportive community of readers, writers, and discussion partners that stop by.

What were your favorite vintage SF reads–published pre-1985–of 2025? Let me know in the comments.

Throughout the later part of the year I’ve dropped hints about a research project. Perceptive readers might have parsed together the contours of the research: late 19th/early 20th century, utopian, African American, the American South, radical politics… It’s taking longer than expected. I’ve read a good ten monographs, five dissertations, countless articles. I’ve written twenty pages. I hoped to have it posted by early in this year. Alas. It’s coming together–slowly. Stay tuned.

Without further ado, here are my favorite novels (I only read a few) and short stories (I read a ton of those) I read in 2025 with bonus categories. I made sure to link my longer reviews where applicable if you want a deeper dive.

Check out my 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021 rundowns if you haven’t already. I have archived all my annual rundowns on my article index page if you wanted to peruse earlier years.

My Top 5 Science Fiction Novels of 2025

• Alan Gutierrez’s cover for the 1985 edition

1. Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark is the final published volume of her Patternist sequence (1976-1984). It is the third novel according to the internal chronology of the series. Clay’s Ark is, without doubt, the most horrifyingly bleak science fiction novel I have ever read. It’s stark. It’s sinister. It’s at turns deeply affective before descending into extreme violence and displaced morality. The moral conundrum that underpins the central problem, the spread of an extraterrestrial disease, unfurls with an unnerving alien logic. Butler’s characters are trapped by the demands of the alien microbes, scarred by the pervasive sense that their humanity is slipping away, and consumed by the fear of starting an epidemic. A true confrontation of the moment cannot lead to anything other than suicide or the first steps towards an apocalyptic transformation.

• Mark Weber’s cover for the 1st edition

2. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge, a fix-up from two previously published stories “To Leave a Mark” (1982) and “On the North Pole of Pluto” (1980), tells three interconnected tales that all connect to a mysterious monolith left on Pluto (the titular Icehenge). By design Icehenge instead follows the action after the action: men and women attempting to figure out their own place in a world characterizes by lifespans that stretch hundreds and hundreds of years. And its this brilliant interconnection between self-conception and the operations of history that Robinson succeeds and casts his spell. The story is well-told, polished, and filled with fascinating details (technological and sociological).

• Peter Jones’ cover for the 1978 UK edition

3. Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered (1977), 4/5 (Good). Full review.

The vast Confederación is comprised of radically distinct worlds ruled by the entire spectrum of political systems with both alien and non-alien inhabitants. There are few rules: don’t take advantage of indigenous populations and don’t wage wars on neighboring planets. At 22, the naive Otto McGavin, an Anglo-Buddhist, joins the Confederación as an agent to protect the rights of humans and non-humans. But there’s a twist. Under deep hypnosis a construct of Otto McGavin will be created for each mission. He’ll take on the identity–under a sheath of plasticine flesh–of whatever person he needs to be depending on the task.  The story follows Otto on three missions over many years.  The interlocking segments convey the deep trauma Otto must confront before he’s immersed in another persona and sent on another mission. His idealism clashes with the violence he must perpetuate. His sense of self conflicts with the violent actions of his “constructs.” The looming sense of dread and despair must finally have its reckoning.

• Uncredited cover for the 1983 edition

4. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979), 3.75/5 (Good). Full review.

Zoë Fairbairns charts the struggles of the British women’s liberation movement in a dystopic near future. An anti-feminist fringe political party called FAMILY comes to power, simultaneously proclaiming family values while systematically dismantling the welfare state. Benefits effectively eviscerates governmental doublespeak and champions the need to organize and educate in order to fight against patriarchal forces and messianic movements that promise to solve all our ills.

• Colin Hay’s cover for the 1976 edition

5. Edgar Pangborn’s The Company of Glory (1975), 3.5/5 (Good). Full review.

Edgar Pangborn is an unsung SF hero in my book. At his best, he’s a deeply humanistic writer interested in moments of effective metafictional play on the nature of narrative. The Company of Glory (serialized 1974, 1975) is the third novel in the Tales of Darkening World sequence. It forms a prequel to Pangborn’s masterpiece Davy (1964). As with Davy, The Company of Glory attempts to create multiple interlocking layers of narrative, stories within the stories, quotations from various diaries, and the interjections of the overarching narrator of the entire collection of texts who remains anonymous until the final pages. Unfortunately, The Company of Glory is a deeply flawed novel. Recommended only for Pangborn’s fans. Read Davy first if you’re new to his work.

My Top 20 Science Fiction Short Stories Reads of 2025 (click titles for my full review)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Foster, You’re Dead” (1955), 5/5 (Masterpiece): I featured on a podcast about this story. When the episode is posted, I’ll make sure to link it. Mike Foster spends his school days practicing survival skills–digging, making knives, weaving baskets–in case of a nuclear attack. The kids snicker at him as he walks past. They don’t own a fallout shelter at home. His father refuses to pay into the NATS (National Security fund). If a bomb hit, Mike wouldn’t even be granted access to the school shelter. He’s possessed by a deep, perpetual, encompassing trauma.

2. Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950), 5/5 (Masterpiece): A rare reread! Leiber imagines an America transformed after a limited nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The physical landscape mirrors the psychological scars of New York’s inhabitants. Perverse new forms of TV entertainment, in particular male wrestlers pitted against masked women, transfix all audiences.

3. Jack Dann’s “A Quiet Revolution for Death” (1978), 5/5 (Masterpiece): Roger and his family head out of the city for a picnic in a vast cemetery. Roger dreams that he is an angel of God guiding mankind through the realm. Visiting the cemetery is an act of devotion. While other kids plug themselves into feelies, Bennie is a fanatic disciple of his father’s pseudo-philosophy of embracing the macabre. Sandra, Roger’s wife, plays along. The kids see through her dislike of the cemetery and the burial rituals happening around them.

4. Izumi Suzuki’s“Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021), 4.5/5 (Very Good): A nameless young female main character recounts her interactions her one-time boyfriend. HE wants to reconnect with his mother, who abandoned his family. HE joins a staged show called The Psychoanalysis Room in an attempt to convince his mother to take “pity and come and find” him. She also has a dysfunctional family. Her mother, a TV executive, struggles/refuses to connect to her daughter. Like some manifestation of the modern hikikomori, they often refuse to communicate with others, eat as a group or eat at all for days on end, or leave their dwellings for the sun and vista of the aboveground. Both find solace and escape in the vacuities and artifice of television.

5. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Six astronauts return to earth from a voyage to Mars. But they are not treated as heroes. Instead people flee. I found “Explorers We” a well-crafted existential terror. The story plays with narrative expectation and hints at a cosmic enormity that will, at least in this iteration, remain unknown.

6. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An explorer who feels no pain is hurled mercilessly from planet to plant where is he tortured, experimented upon, and broken again, and again, and again. His sense of time dissipates. Space becomes a hellscape that he cannot escape. And each time he’s lifted back to his scout ship where a mechanical boditech stitches him back together.

7. Jack Dann’s “The Dybbuk Dolls” (1975), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Chaim Lewis works at a sex shop down below in the Undercity, one of many identical spheres, one mile in diameter, buried one thousand feet below the ground.  As Chaim finishes up his shift in the dingy shop, a group of visitors ask about his hook-ins and 21st century pornos. Eventually one of them asks him about his alien sex doll collection. And when he returns to the room with the dolls, he discovers they’ve all been unpacked and they imprint themselves on his mind! Cue a descent into the bizarre…

8.  Jack Williamson’s “Guinevere for Everybody” (1955), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An artificially created Guinevere stands “chained” in a “vending machine” tempting sleepy passengers in an airport with her plaintive calls. I did not know Williamson had this type of vision in him! The surprise of the year!

9. George H. Smith’s “The Last Days of L. A.” (1959), 4/5 (Good): A nameless character (“you”) wakes from a recurring dream: “the dream that has haunted the whole world since that day in 1945.” A dream of apocalyptic annihilation, in infinite variations. A narrative repetition takes form: Nuclear nightmare. The waking moment. The aimless quest for understanding. Communing with other lost souls. The retreat to the bottle. Fragments of the news suggest a world unraveling.

10. Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Stars Are the Styx” (1950), 4/5 (Good): The premise: Humans created Curbstone, an artificial satellite around Earth, to facilitate the ultimate scientific achievement–near instantaneous transportation across the galaxy. How? Individual spaceships, with a solitary crew person or couple, will be hurled out from Curbstone at various points across the space time continuum. The story revolves around the aging (and rotund) Senior Release Officer on Curbstone, who certifies, counsels, and guides the strange collection of humans who gather at the station willing to take such a risk.

11. Richard Matheson’s “Dance of the Dead” (1955), 4/5 (Good): In a drug and alcohol drenched near-future, a group of young adults take a break-neck road drip and stray from the path set out by parents and small town community. Manifesting the SPEED of the car, Matheson’s prose resonates with pulse and hum, snippets of song and signage, slang and youthful lust. It’s frantic. It’s zappy. It’s vibrant. Recommended for fans of the more linguistically experimental (and bleak) of 50s visions.

12. Jack Dann’s “Rags” (1973), 4/5 (Good): Joanna wanders the streets without seeing a single person. Everything she sees—from garbage cans to parked cars–seem in be various states of decay (“dented, rusted, and discolored”). She teaches herself a new way to walk to avoid the “invisible beings” that flit around her (6). She remembers a past sickness. Deaths in the family. She makes new rules of movement and perception as an act of preservation.  And suddenly she sees The Purple Cat.

13. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973), 4/5 (Good): he elderly dwell underground in large domed cities. It’s a commercial and media-inundated world — tiny machines grant “feeling” as you watch commercials. Professor Fleitman, who “could not rationalize having an orgasm over a cigarette advertisement,” presents a new idea to galvanize the elderly to Entertainment Committee. Rather than a feelie or a movie he wants to put on a circus.

14. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966), 4/5 (Good): Stanisław Ivanovich spends his days submerged in lakes and rivers tagging septopods, a new octopus-like species discovered on Earth. His daughter, Marsha, assists from above. When he emerges from a lake, Marsha is deep in conversation with Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky, an astroarchaeologist implied to be on leave from an expedition. The two scientists–IIvanovich, with his eyes on earthly mystery, and Gorbovsky, untangling the traces of potential intelligences across the cosmos–and Marsha engage in a series of discussions about the nature of the universe.

15. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): Somewhere on the Venusian surface the Valley of Dur, with its amalgamation of gasses, traps unsuspecting denizens who wander into its depths. In the city of Takon, Venusians, six-limbed creatures with silvery hair, ogle the strange beasts extricated and caged and exhibited from the Valley. The child, transfixed by the man’s noises and scrawls, pushes his stylus and pad under the bars. And Morgan Gratz, stranded astronaut and self-confessed murderer, draws for the child the respective locations of their planets.

16. Katherine MacLean’s “Contagion” (1950), 3.5/5 (Good) is a contact with an alien planet tale that’s legitimately odd. A hunting party looking for specimens of alien life in order to dissect, sets off from the spaceship Explorer across an alien planet called Minos. Reasonably, the crew is obsessed with a minute medical analysis of flora and fauna. The hunting party encounters a majestically shaped human who spins a crazy tale of adaptation and disease. 

17. Cherry Wilder’s “The Ark of James Carlyle” (1974), 3.5/5 (Good): Carlyle spends his tour of duty in a hut with a wood platform on small landmass surrounded by an “oily purple sea” on an alien planet. A crisis hits — and he suddenly learns the reason for the singular trees that grow in the center of each island.

18. E. C. Tubb’s“Without Bugles” (1952), 3.5/5 (Good): A naive journalist struggles to confront her heroic idealism, regurgitated through the media, in her attempt to save the Mars colony afflicted with a futuristic case of the black lung.

19.  Frank K. Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): President Herbert Hoover infamously proclaimed on the eve of the Great Depression that “given the chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” “Famine on Mars,” published five years into the Great Depression, evokes similar paradigmatic shifts between propagandistic proclamation and harsh reality. Kelly spins a nightmare account of a famine on Mars and a plan to save the starving legions.

20. Gerald Kersh’s “Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?” (1953), 3.5/5 (Good): Kersh imagines a literary version of himself returning to New York City from WWII interacting with a fantastical manifestation of a Wound Man on board the Cunard White Star liner Queen Mary. Corporal Cuckoo, the “Wound Man” in question, regals the narrator (Kersh) with the history of his scarred and mutilated form that mysteriously heals from every injury.

Reading Initiatives

I have continued, resurrected, and created new science fiction short story reading series over the course of the year. Most of the stories I’ve picked for the series are available in some fashion online via links to Internet Archive in each review. I’ve included installments from 2024 in each series below. Feel free to read along with me! And thanks for all the great conversation.

Galaxy Science Fiction Read-through (started 2025)

1. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (October 1950)
2. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (November 1950) 

Organized Labor and Unions in Science Fiction (started in 2024)

1. Mack Reynolds’ The Earth War (1964)
2. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979)

The First Three Published Short Fictions by Female Authors (continued from 2021)

1. Cherry Wilder (1930-2002)

Translated Short Stories in Translation (with Rachel S. Cordasco) (started in 2024)

1. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966)
2.  Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021)

The Media Landscape of the Future (started in 2022)

1. George H. Smith’s “In the Imagicon” (1966)
2. Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984)
3. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973)

The Search for the Depressed Astronaut  (continued from 2020)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959) 
2. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972)
3. E. C. Tubb’s “Without Bugles” (1952)
4. E. C. Tubb’s “Home is the Hero” (1952)
5. E. C. Tubb’s “Pistol Point” (1953)
6. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934)

Generation Ship Short Stories (continued from 2019)

1. George Hay’s Flight of the “Hesper” (1952)

Exploration Logs (continued from 2022)

1. Exploration Log 7: Interview with Jordan S. Carroll, author of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024)
2. Exploration Log 8: Pat M. Kuras and Rob Schmieder’s “When It Changed: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Science Fiction Fandom” (1980)
3. Exploration Log 9: Three More Interviews with Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988)
4. Exploration Log 10: Interview with Jaroslav Olša, Jr., author of Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction (2025)
5. Exploration Log 11: Interview with Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke, author of Nigerian Speculative Fiction: The Evolution (2025)

My Top 4 History Reads of 2025

A large portion of my history reading this year pushed my general interest in labor history and leftist politics backwards into the 19th century. Unusual for me I know! Often I write about what I can write about not what I plan on writing about. A brief caveat worth repeating: I’m a PhD-wielding historian and have a high tolerance for academic texts. That said, I’d classify everything in my list as on the approachable side of things if you know the broad strokes of American history.

1. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp’s Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (2010): This filled a complete hole in my knowledge. While I had encountered history-centric militant abolitionist texts written by black authors, I did not know how they fitted into the larger historiographic project of the era. As my PhD looked at universal histories in the medieval period, I’m a sucker for all kinds of histories of historiography! This is a good one.

2. Deborah Beckel’s Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina (2011): I read this one for my research project on a black utopian author. Beckel’s brilliant monograph looks at the race and politics in North Carolina after the end of Reconstruction–a “fusion” government of Republicans and Populists managed to take power (temporarily) from the white supremacist Democratic status quo in the 1890s. Depressing. Fascinating. I’m waiting for an alt-history that uses the 1898 election in North Carolina as a jonbar hinge — hah!

3. Edward K. Spann’s Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for A Cooperative Society in America (1989): While an older monograph, Spann’s work is a fantastic survey of the fascinating range of radical social idealism-inspired communities that proliferated across America. I’m obsessed by left-wing ideologies that permeate the rural world and movements for working-class utopianism. Spann will inspire you to track down newer monographs on the social movements he surveys.

4. Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2025): Rightly won the Hugo! I interviewed Carroll in January. In the book, he examines the ways the alt-right uses classic science fiction imagery and authors to mainstream fascism and advocate for the overthrow of the state. This is a short monograph designed to encourage thought. Highly recommended.

Goals for 2026

1. Keep reading and writing.

2. Read more reviews by other bloggers.

3. Cover more SF in translation.

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

Around The World In 18 Book Adaptations: The International Bestsellers Coming To Film & TV
#News #DavidSzalay #HouseofSprits #JoNesbo039sDetectiveHole #LookAhead2026 #PhilipKDick

https://deadline.com/2025/12/book-film-tv-adaptations-netflix-amazon-disney-bestsellers-1236653472/

Short Fiction Reviews: Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959) and James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972)

The following reviews are the 31st and 32nd installments of my series searching for “SF short stories that are critical in some capacity of space agencies, astronauts, and the culture which produced them.” Some stories I’ll review in this series might not fit. And that is okay. I relish the act of literary archaeology.

Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959) reframes the triumphant astronaut’s return home as the ultimate horror.

James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972) imagines the hallucinogenic journey of a post-human explorer severed from the experience of physical pain.

As always, feel free to join the conversation.

Previously: Clifford D. Simak’s “Founding Father” (1957)

Up Next: TBD

A brief note before we dive into the greater morass of things: This series grew from my relentless fascination with the science fiction of Barry N. Malzberg (1939-2024), who passed away last month. Malzberg wrote countless incisive visions that reworked America’s cultic obsession with the ultra-masculine astronaut and his adoring crowds. As I am chronically unable to write a topical post in the moment, I direct you towards “Friend of the Site” Rich Horton’s obituary in Black Gate. If you are new to his fiction, I proffer my reviews of Revelations (1972), Beyond Apollo (1972), The Men Inside (1973), and The Gamesman (1975). The former two are relevant to this series.

• Ed Emshwiller’s cover for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Robert P. Mills (January 1959)

4.5/5 (Very Good)

Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Robert P. Mills (January 1959). You can read it online here.

Six astronauts–Parkhurst, Barton, Leon, Merriweather, Captain Stone, Vecchi–return to earth from a voyage to Mars, “that damn red waste. Sun and flies and ruins” (89). But they are not met by adoring crowds as they stumble from their spacecraft. “Silence” screams that something is amiss (90). As they wander across a field towards the town, suburbia empties at their approach. People abandon their meals at diner counters. Workers abandon their jobs. Children dart away on bicycles.

I find the “war veteran returns home” a helpful correlate for stories that explore an astronaut’s return to Earth. In this instance, Dick wants the reader the visualize the standard shape of the narrative, the excitement, the expectation, the sense that normality might return. Like a soldier after campaign, Dick’s astronauts imagine the power of simple pleasures: Parkhurst fantasizes about visiting Coney Island, “I want to see people again. Lots of them. Dumb, sweat, noise. Ice cream and water” (89). Vecchi’s eyes shine as he imagines the touch of a woman: “Long time, six months. […] We’ll sit on the beach and watch the gals” (89). As a group, they understand what each went through–the brotherhood of stress and separation–and await the reception they’ll receive “bight and feverish” (90).

As the astronauts wander from the wreckage of their craft expecting the fanfare of a successful voyage, the narrative carefully shifts. The reader expects a heroic welcome. These are the heroes from Mars! In Dick’s final reveal, a cryptic dread-generating ritual hints at an existential dilemma–an indecipherable attempt to communicate? A mindless matter generating technology? An alien attempt to infiltrate and subvert?. And in its final subversive incision, Dick suggests that humans could solve the mystery but are immobilized by fear: “we have to believe that they are plotting against us, are inhuman, and will never be more than that” (97). Humans are not interested in uncovering the wonders of the cosmos–a more primal terror dictates.

I found “Explorers We” a well-crafted existential terror. The story plays with narrative expectation and hints at a cosmic enormity that will, at least in this iteration, remain unknown. Highly recommended–especially if Dick’s better-known “Imposter” (1953) is your brand of SF.

For other stories about the less than heroic experience of return check out Barry N. Malzberg’s “How I Take Their Measure” (1969), reworked as the last section of Universe Day (1971), and John Sladek’s “The Poets of Millgrove, Iowa” (1966).

• Burt Tanner’s cover illustrating “Painwise” for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Edward L. Ferman (February 1972)

4.5/5 (Very Good)

James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Edward L. Ferman (February 1972). You can read it online here. Nominated for the 1973 Hugo for Best Novelette.

An explorer who feels no pain is hurled mercilessly from planet to plant where is he tortured, experimented upon, and broken again, and again, and again. His sense of time dissipates. Space becomes a hellscape that he cannot escape. And each time he’s lifted back to his scout ship where a mechanical boditech (Amanda), perhaps adopted from a real human brain, stiches him back together: “I am programmed to maintain you on involuntary function” (91). Pumped up on euphorics, he’s send down again. Each time he asks the Amanda if the trip is his last. Will he be heading home? He conjures a disturbing plan of self-harm to force the boditech to reveal a fragment of the truth: “they have forgotten us, Amanda. Something has broken down” (93).

Before he can ascertain the true nature of things, three strange empathic entities free him from the scout ship and Amanda’s ministrations. In the Lovepile, an “interstellar metaprotoplasmic transfer pod” (95), the three aliens, Bushbaby (a small fuzzy mammalian), Ragglebomb (an insect), and Muscle (a snake), engage in various acts of sensory immersion and overload. Tiptree’s prose inundates with fragments of jingles and popular songs, culinary references, sounds, colors… And the explorer, still unable to feel pain, joins in their cosmic quest to collect music, sexual experience, and food in the hope that he’ll find Earth. The smothering companionship of the Lovepile does not cover up other manifestations of pain and loss.

While reading the story, I could not escape the feeling that I was watching a cinematic immersion fantasia that overloads and bewilders the senses–the work of Peter Greenaway, namely The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), and newer cinematic experiments like Peter Strickland’s In Fabric (2018) and Flux Gourmet (2022) came immediately to mind. Tiptree, Jr. (and Greenaway and Strickland) adeptly conjure a perverse blend of eroticism and desire, COLOR, the textures and delights of culinary experience, the grime of human existence, and excruciating pain. It’s a lot to take in.

In Tiptree’s final calculus, our drive to explore will compel us to act in the most inhuman ways possible. Like Simak’s “Conditions of Employment” (1960) and “Founding Father” (1957), humanity’s drive to act, exploit, and expand will always win out leaving human chaff in its wake. This is but a glimpse of the psychological impact of the ideology of cosmic conquest. Not to be missed if you’re of the predisposition to enjoy a kaleidoscopic, hallucinogenic, and surreal shuffle towards the end. Recommended.

I’ve reviewed multiple Tiptree, Jr. stories that fit this series over the years including “A Source of Innocent Merriment” (1980), “A Momentary Taste of Being” (1975), and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976).

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

#1950s #1970s #bookReviews #JamesTiptreeJr #philipKDick #sciFi #scienceFiction

Short Story Reviews: Philip K. Dick’s “Stand-By” (variant title: “Top Stand-By Job”) (1963), Milton Lesser’s “Do It Yourself” (1957), and H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire’s “Hunter Patrol” (1959)

For a large portion of the year, I’ve been collecting evidence on unions in post-WWII to very early 60s American science fiction.1 To be clear, I am not on the hunt for the best by these authors. This project is about stories that reference unions. I will read all the stories I can by American SF authors on the topic during this timeframe for this project in order to understand how authors responded to the historical moment in which they lived. Exciting!

A Bit of Historical Context

During the Great Depression, there was broad consensus among leftist thinkers that the labor movement would lead to radical change. The Second World War and the economic recovery shattered that consensus.2 The unions themselves underwent substantial transformation in this period. American corporate powers and their conservative congressional allies unleashed a “propaganda campaign” against the labor movement.3 This culminated in the contentious passage of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), which weakened the ability of unions to strike. Over the course of the 1950s, automobile manufacturers and their unions pioneered a new relationship—adopted by other industries—in which companies agreed to grant wage increases, health care, and retirement plans in return for union support of long-term contracts. Increasingly, the political and social transformation of capitalism became secondary to preserving their organizations and maintaining a harmonious relationship with industry.4

Before World World II, anti-capitalist intellectuals imagined the labor movement as the American Proletariat which would, at any moment, transform the capitalist system. After WWII, they struggled to grapple with an economic system they had expected to collapse and the lack of interest in socialism within American unions.5 C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) argued labor had been co-opted by state power.6 Those that continued to support elements of the labor movement, such as Sidney Lens (1912-1986), struggled to rationalize labor’s part in the militarization of Cold War America.7 The one-time Trotskyist, Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006), argued that while the labor-movement fell short of representing the “class-based aims of a unified working class” it continued to play a roll in “prohibiting antidemocratic mass movements” by offering workers a role in a “mediating institution.”8 Most involved in the 60s New Left abandoned labor completely as a force for change and grouped unions as part of the liberal establishment, irrelevant in the construction of a new radicalism.9 As in, trade unions “focused on material gains, not fundamental social change.”10

Science fiction written in the post-WWII world likewise reflected outright criticism, deep ambivalence, and confusion over the role of the labor movement. Philip K. Dick’s “Stand-By” (1963) satirizes unions and the media in a post-scarcity world but tentatively suggests conflict between both might lead to the overthrow of a ruling computer and the eventual reemergence of democracy. Milton Lesser’s “Do It Yourself” (1957), one of only a handful unabashedly positive accounts on unions in the 50s, imagines a post-apocalyptic future in which the American individualist ethos reigns supreme. While banned and publicly ridiculed, a union secretly sends out agents to facilitate the rebuilding project. And in H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire’s “Hunter Patrol” (1959), a ragtag group of disaffected, including a union man (an object of jest), attempt to recruit a soldier from earlier in time to overthrow a dictator. More than a few 50s authors, like Robert Silverberg (whom I’ll feature in a later post) and Clifford D. Simak, read and engaged with contemporary writers on the labor movement.11

Let’s get to the stories!

• Lloyd Birmingham’s cover art for Amazing, ed. Cele Goldsmith (October 1963)

2.75/5 (Bad)

Philip K. Dick’s “Stand-By” first appeared in Amazing Stories, ed. Cele Goldsmith (October 1963). You can read it online here.

Unicephalon 40-D, a vast computer, rules humanity. As it calls citizens “comrades,” I assume Dick intends the computer to be read as a manifestation of totalitarian Communism. The computer’s stand-by human president in case it goes offline, Old Gus Schatz, dies. The Government Civil Servants’ Union appoints Max Fischer to take over. Obese with a weak heart, dependent on union funds, glued to his TV set, and without much independent thought, Max attempts to resist the appointment. The union assures him that it’ll be a dull task and an opportunity to take on whatever time-wasting hobby he so desires. Anyway, he doesn’t have a choice. The previous stand-in collected old car magazines (a reference to the glory days of industrial unionism) and the man before him made a massive rubber band ball now housed in the Smithsonian.

Unfortunately for Max there’s an alien invasion that knocks out Unicephalon 40-D. And Max, unelected, must take on the presidency. In predictable fashion, he immediately dismisses his cabinet and advisors, appoints his relatives to positions of power, and acts like a dictator. Only the actions of a news clown (he wears a red wig) named Jim-Jam Briskin, attempts to challenge his authority.

As with Simak’s “Worlds Without End” (1956), “Stand-By” presents unions as a victorious interest group in a larger, dystopian, political game after the fall of democracy. Both works extrapolate from the anti-union sentiment that grew over the course of the 50s. Mainstream news promoted the 1955 merger of the AFL (American Federation of Labor) and CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) as a “danger to the public.”12 Despite labor’s willingness to work within the existing political system in alliance with the Democrats, business leaders and Republican politicians feared the emergence of a monolithic union. During President Eisenhower’s administration, the McClellan Committee, in a series of sensational televised hearings between 1957 and 1960, heightened the public’s concern with corruption and “antidemocratic” practices in organized labor.13 Dick presents Max as the corrupt do-nothing union man who rose from poverty and pretends to have class.

While it’s not entirely clear how the future unfolds in Dick’s vision, it appears the Government Civil Servants’ Union attempted to maintain their influence with a strike after the ascent of Unicephalon 40-D. PKD not only levels a critique at the union man who no longer even needs to work yet collects a check but also the entire system in which everyone seems perfectly okay with a mechanical dictator. The jumbled designators of time-past, “presidency,” “elections,” “car magazines,” etc. all suggest the misguided motives of the labor movement who went along with Unicephalon’s takeover. Dick’s message is clear: unions promote the least worthy individuals and are inherently anti-democratic.

As a story, “Stand-By” is far from Philip K. Dick’s best. It doesn’t have any interesting surreal images, fascinating twists, or memorable turns of phrase. That said, I haven’t read the two sequels–“What’ll We Do with Ragland Park?” (1963) and “Cantata 140” (1963). “Cantata 140” forms the first part of Dick’s The Crack in Space (1964), which I’m almost positive I read before I started my website.

Avoid “Stand-By” unless you’re interested in organized labor in science fiction (me!) or a PKD completist.

• George Schelling’s interior art for Philip K. Dick’s “Stand-By” in Amazing Stories, ed. Cele Goldsmith (October 1963)

• Ed Emshwiller’s cover for Science Fiction Quarterly, ed. Robert W. Lowndes (November 1957)

3.5/5 (Good)

Milton Lesser’s “Do It Yourself” first appeared in Science Fiction Quarterly, ed. Robert W. Lowndes (November 1957). You can read it online here.

In a post-apocalyptical future, Long Island City (across from Manhattan) is a wasteland. In the “dregs of the old industrial society,” scavengers “who hadn’t yet been absorbed by the new rural America” attempt to live a fragment of the pre-bomb life (96). In the wreckage of the old U.N. building, now “the East Manhattan Home Workshop center” (96), a union prints DIY plans and sends out agents to assist those trying to make it on their own. Farther out on Long Island, rural farmers attempt to create a new life. However, behind the facade of DIY projects, workshops, and farmers, they still rely on scavenging. The catch? They can’t let their neighbors know. It must look like everyone is self-sufficient! McPeek is one of the union agents and the story follows his interaction with the Crawford farm. The patriarch of the family proclaims “I’ve got some farm now […] Maybe in the spring I’ll even find the time to plant some crops” (101). While the patriarch makes his plans, McPeek actually gets to work making a latrine, constructing a barn for livestock, making storm windows, fixing tractors, and getting the farm ready for planting. He must avoid vigilantes who raid the countryside attempting to root out anything that might symbolize the old order.

Lesser’s “Do It Yourself” works on multiple levels: 1) the unintended consequences of the Cold War rhetoric of American individualism vs. collective action. 2) A more specific satire of the explosion of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) craze in the 1950s. and 3) A pointed acknowledgement of the value of unions in a moment in which there was growing anti-union sentiment (see the Dick review for more details).

The DIY craze reached a “fever pitch” in the 1950s with traveling road shows and conventions, handyman magazines, and front-cover stories in Time Magazine.14 SF often took this craze to humorous extremes, for example Clifford D. Simak’s robot strike in “How-2” (1954) comes to mind. The implications of Lesser’s take are far more disturbing. Lesser extrapolates that a WWIII leads to a economic depression in which the isolated and depressed attempted to do things for themselves. They interpreted “capital and industry” as artificial contrivances to “keep a man in debt” (102). Thus unions, now banned, secretly attempt to appeal to this individualistic ethos to get people creating new things again (instead of scavenging) on farms instead of factories (102). Unfortunately, the average person is more likely to make grandiose plans than implement them. Lesser argues that America’s fixation on individualism means that even in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, meaningful attempts to assist and mobilize workers will be met with outright violence. The union of idealist handymen, even banned, will continue to fight for tangible benefits for the next generation.

An odd and strangely intriguing post-apocalyptic rumination… This is the first Lesser story I’ve read. Somewhat recommended.

• Ed Valigursky’s cover for Amazing Science Fiction Stories, ed. Cele Goldsmith (May 1959)

2/5 (Bad)

H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire’s “Hunter Patrol” first appeared in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, ed. Cele Goldsmith (May 1959). You can read it online here.

A SF time-travel centric thriller with a few moments of debate over politics, “Hunter Patrol” plunges the reader into the media res. The story follows the soldier Benson on a raid, his last patrol until rotation home, deep into Pan-Soviet territory (the Cold War rages hot). He’s yanked from his time 50 years into the future by a strange group of disaffected plotting to overthrow a dictator. It appears that Cold War exhausted all sides (“the Soviet Bloc was broken up”) and left large portion of the US a nuclear wasteland, and St. Louis, now the location of the U.N., emerges as the World Capitol (25). The Guide rules the U.N. as a dictatorship. Through brainwashing, The Guide prevents his citizens from practicing violence (diabolical eugenics related executions excluded). Thus Benson, free of brainwashing and always up for a fight, is recruited to assassinate The Guide. There’s a catch, previous soldiers yanked from the past have all failed. And the nature of their failure isn’t entirely clear. As the narrative shifts dramatically from time to time a far more bizarre picture of sinister future technology and soda drinks (yes!) emerges.15 You know, time travel makes everything a paradox…. And everyone LOVES soda.

Where are the unions? H. Beam Piper (1904-1964) frequently featured unions in his stories, often with a very negative eye.16 I’ll write a post about his visions in the future. In “Hunter Patrol,” they are a tertiary concern in a wider satire of Cold War interventionalism and American commercialism. The rebels deliberately represent a variety of contemporary political and moral views–collectively they all desire to overthrow The Guide. One, Carl, is a member of a large “Union of all unions. Every working man in North America, Europe, Australia and South Africa belongs to it” (27). There’s a problem, “The Guide has us all hog-tied” and won’t let them strike preventing “closed-shop contracts to stick” and pay raises (27).17 Carl’s view, as with others in the story, is played for laughs as he clearly is not a poor worker. In another instance, Carl appears to adhere to a Marxist interpretation of class-struggle in his depiction of the fragmentation of the Soviet Bloc. His view is dismissed by Anthony, “capitalistic dictatorships he means […], let’s not confuse this with any class-struggle stuff” (25).

Regardless of the ambivalence towards organized labor, Piper and McGuire are overtly critical of big business and the sinister methods (brainwashing, chemicals, et.) it might use to acquire profit. As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, during the early Cold War Americans depicted Communism as denying inherent human freedoms of choice and enslaving the mind. After the Korean War, the terror of Communist brainwashing collided with fears of the detrimental effects of consumer culture and advertising. Perhaps Americans were also susceptible to commercial brainwashing deployed to convince the American family to conform and buy the latest products and models. “Hunter Patrol” is the perfect example of this paranoid lens turning inward.18

I am firmly aware that this is probably one of the worst H. Beam Piper short stories I could have picked up. That’s okay. I’m gathering evidence. If it’s from the 50s or early 60s and talks about unions I’ll read it!

Not recommended unless you’re an H. Beam Piper completist.

Notes

1. I’ve gathered the titles of all the SF stories I’ve identified about unions and organized labor in footnote 1 here. ↩︎
2. Jeffrey W. Coker’s Confronting American Labor: The New Left Dilemma (2002), 51. ↩︎
3. See Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf’s Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 (1994). She describes both a local and a national campaign. ↩︎
4. I adapted this paragraph from my recent article “’We Must Start Over Again and Find Some Other Way of Life’: The Role of Organized Labor in the 1940s and ’50s Science Fiction of Clifford D. Simak.” You can read the entire article here. The summary comes from Ch. 19, “Retrenchment, Cold War, and Consolidation, 1946-1955,” of Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin’s Labor in America: A History, 9th edition (2017), 303-320 ↩︎
5. Coker, 187; See also local level attempts to instill anti-union “American” values in Fones-Wolf’s Selling Free Enterprise; also, Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin describe in Ch. 19 the alliance between the Democratic party and labor and the resulting purge of labor’s radical left wing. ↩︎
6. Coker discusses C. Wright Mills in Ch. 3 and 4 of Confronting American Labor, 65-100. See also Ch. 3 in Daniel Geary’s Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (2009), 74-105 and Ken Mattson’s Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970 (2002), 52-56 for Mills’ evolving views.  ↩︎
7. Coker traces Sidney Lens’ views in Ch. 5 and 6 of Confronting American Labor, 103-139. ↩︎
8. Coker, 51. ↩︎
9. Coker, 58. ↩︎
10. Coker, 186. ↩︎
11. I am confident that Silverberg read articles in The Nation by Harvey Swados (1920-1972) (stay tuned!). I make the argument that Simak either read C. Wright Mills’ The New Men of Power (1948) or a review of it. ↩︎
12. See Dubofsky and McCartin, 314-320. ↩︎
13. Fones-Wolf’s Selling Free Enterprise, 266-270 explores the impact of the McClellan Committee. ↩︎
14. I snagged my information on the craze from this wonderful survey article. It contains a bibliography that I am keen to read; See the August 2nd, 1954 issue. ↩︎
15. A bit of soda-related trivia, Coke Cans first appeared in 1955! Coincidence? Hah. ↩︎
16. In addition to “Hunter Patrol” (1959), I’ve identified the following (I assume there are more): “The Mercenaries” (1950), “Day of the Moron” (1951), “The Null-ABC” (1953), and “The Edge of the Knife” (1957). ↩︎
17. Closed-shops require the hiring of only union members. They were declared illegal under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 yet, while not written into contracts, were still used by employers who depended on unions for hiring: Source. ↩︎
18. See Matthew W. Dunne’s A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society (2013) and Charles R. Acland’s Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence (2012). ↩︎

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And here are the titans of science fiction in this video: #robertheinlein #isaacasimov #octaviabutler #harlanellison #samueldelany #ursulaleguin #raybradbury #hugogernsback #arthurcclarke #judithmerril #julesverne #annemccaffrey #philipkdick #hgwells #maryshelley https://youtu.be/Z6_CfYtn4pA