Okay, let’s get this out of the way: Something Wicked this Way Comes is not a science fiction novel. It’s dark fantasy, and, in my opinion, a precursor to many famous books in that genre from the likes of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Erin Morgenstern, and others.
However, Ray Bradbury’s books were always sold in the science fiction aisle when I was a kid. And I read all his books thinking they were science fiction. (I didn’t read fantasy back then.) So, I’m shoe-horning him into my classic sci-fi book covers thread.
Having said all that, let me add that this is one of my favorite novels, not to mention Bradbury’s best. It’s the tale of two 13-year-old boys, Will and Jim, who have grown up next door to each other in 1930s Illinois. Will and Jim are almost exactly the same age, with Will being born one minute before midnight on October 30th and Jim being born one minute after midnight on October 31st. Yes, one boy is born a minute before Halloween begins and the other born a minute after. (Guess which one is the “bad” kid?)
It might seem like clunky symbolism, but in Bradbury’s prolix hands, it works. The duality between the introverted, good-natured Will and the adventurous, mischievous Jim—that is, between light and dark sides of our being—is repeated throughout the novel. Both boys are forced to confront their darker impulses when a demonic carnival arrives on the edge of town in the middle of the night. Will and Jim soon discover that the carnival is a vehicle for a bunch of malevolent, vampire-like beings who want nothing more to lure innocent people onto the midway and tempt them into evil.
The only person who believes the boys when they tell what they’ve seen is Will’s father, an older man who doubts his own strength and courage. Together, they challenge the men who run the carnival, Mr. Cougar and Mr. Dark (another light/dark duality) for the soul of the town.
I really like this cover—created by veteran illustrator David Grove—because it captures the nostalgia, magic, and dark wonder that are the great strengths of the novel. Specifically, it refers to a moment in the story when Mr. Dark wanders through the town looking for Will and Jim. He has the images of the boy tattooed on his palms, and he shows them to passersby to see if anyone recognizes them. It’s an extremely creepy scene in an amazing book. (It’s also the first moment when Will’s father shows his courage and guile in besting Mr. Dark.)
My appreciation for the cover is in no way diminished by the fact that it appears to be a poster tie-in with the film adaptation produced by Disney in 1983, depicting the likenesses of some of the actors (most notably, the great Jonathan Pryce, who performance as Mr. Dark is worth the price of admission all by itself).
Also, not long after Mr. Grove passed away, Tor.com published a tribute to him and his career. You can see it here…
As some dedicated readers of this blog might know, my friend Margaret Luongo and I posted a pair of videos discussing George Eliot’s classic novel Middlemarch to our “Read A Classic Novel…Together!” channel on YouTube. Ever since then, I’ve been meaning to take the time to write a post about it, mainly because it had such a big impact on me. I mean, lots of books have achieved the classic moniker and yet don’t hold up to modern scrutiny. But Middlemarch does. In fact, it’s one of those titanic works of literature that you almost can’t get your head around. It has so many sides and so many aspects, such that it attains a kind of sublime quality. Like Shakespeare’s works, Middlemarch is a different experience for everyone who reads it.
When I say titanic, I mean it literally. Middlemarch is a big book–eight hundred pages in most editions–following the lives of six major and at least a dozen minor characters in the fictional, provincial town called Middlemarch. The story is set in the 1830s, but Eliot wrote the book in the 1870s, when the world had already been vastly changed by the industrial revolution in England. And so, the book has a little bit of a “lost world” feel to it. One can sense that Eliot (whose real name was Mary Ann Evans) is writing about the social and economic environment that is already a thing of the past. However, absolutely nothing about the book feels the least bit sentimental or nostalgic. Quite the contrary. Eliot was a great writer whose blazing intelligence seems to illuminate every page of this very long book. And everything she describes feels as true and relevant today as when she wrote it.
Frequent readers of this blog might remember a post a did some years ago called “My Rex Stout Shout-Out,” and will therefore already know of my long and abiding admiration for Rex Stout. Specifically, for his Nero Wolfe novels, the best of which is perhaps The Doorbell Rang.
It’s one of Stout’s later novels, published in 1960, and it was also the most controversial, involving as its central, unseen villain no other than J. Edgar Hoover himself. And, yeah, that’s one reason I like it. Stout’s detestation of the American right-wing’s tendency toward fascist behavior reached a fever-pitch level, which I share. But the main reason I like the book is for its story, which is actually two interlocking plot lines, each of which complements the other in inventive and surprising ways. The central line involves a very rich widow, Rachel Bruner, who suspects that the FBI is tapping her phones and generally harassing her. She wants Wolfe—the most brilliant man in New York City—to figure out a way to stop them. (Fun fact: this is an example of a little-known sub-sub-sub-genre of detective fiction in which the P.I. serves as a kind of fixer for some rich person’s critical problem.)
Through the intervention of NYPD Inspector Cramer (a highly intelligent but belligerent recurring character, who serves as a frequent foil for Wolfe throughout the series), Wolfe learns that FBI agents are suspects in the murder investigation of a journalist. Thus, Wolfe (and Stout) sees an opportunity to connect these two lines of inquiry. That is, by solving the mystery of the murdered journalist, Wolfe might be able to get some leverage on the FBI, and thus stop its harassment of Mrs. Bruner.
It’s a devilishly clever story, and made even more entertaining by the ways in which Wolfe and his loyal “leg-man,” Archie Goodwin (the narrator of all the Wolfe novels), contrive to outwit the dunder-headed FBI agents. This involves hiring actors to copy the dress and mannerisms of both Archie and Wolfe, so that the actors can impersonate both men and lure the agents into a trap.
Every good story is, in my opinion, a kind of whodunit, if only in a psychological or philosophical sense. Every successful novel asks a question, which the reader must keep reading to discover. With actual mystery novels, this question is explicit—who did the murder and how will the P.I. catch them—but that’s the only real difference. What always amazes me about Rex Stout is how good he is at asking this essential question. In fact, in The Doorbell Rang, he essentially poses it in the opening lines of the book…
Since it was the deciding factor, I might as well begin by describing it. It was a pink slip of paper three inches wide and seven inches long, and it told the First National City Bank to pay to the order of Nero Wolfe one hundred thousand and 00/100 dollars. Signed, Rachel Bruner. It was there on Wolfe’s desk, where Mrs. Bruner had put it. After doing so, she had returned to the red leather chair.
Already, the reader is sucked in. We have to find out what’s the deal with that check, which leads us to the crux of the entire mystery.
This passage also illustrates another great strength of the Nero Wolfe novels—and it ain’t Nero Wolfe. Rather, it’s Archie. Archie’s voice. Smart. Sharp. Sardonic. But a bit noble, too. Take this example from a few paragraphs, later:
After she was in the red leather chair I put her coat, which was at least a match for a sable number for which a friend of mine had paid eighteen grand, on the couch, sat at my desk, and took her in. She was a little too short and too much filled out to be rated elegant, even if her tan woolen dress was a Dior, and her face was too round, but there was nothing wrong with the brown-black eyes she aimed at Wolfe as she asked him if she needed to tell him who she was.
I love that bit about Brunner’s eyes. Archie is, of course, an avowed heterosexual, with some kind of romantic exploit in every book. Yet here he finds himself taken with a woman (an older woman, at that) not for her looks but for her obvious intelligence and determination. It’s a great detail, of the sort Stout always delivers.
It’s also a great example of how vividly drawn Stout’s characters are, especially the recurring characters. The snarky and slightly amoral newspaper editor Lon Cohen. The fastidious and unflappable chef, Fritz Brenner. The cool and precise leg-man Saul Panzer. All of them become as familiar to us over the course of the series, like old friends.
Naturally, Wolfe and Archie manage to pull off the caper, trap the FBI agents, and solve the murder, all simultaneously. I won’t spoil it by giving away the climax of the novel, but trust me…it’s a dozy.
Well, the 2025 Edgar Awards Ceremony is over. I didn’t win my category (that honor went to Henry Wise for his excellent novel Holy City, but I still had a blast. I met a lot of cool people, including my new editor at Crooked Lane, Sara Henry, CLB founder Matt Martz, and others. Best of all, I made some new friends in writers Kerri Hakoda, Audree Lee, and Carol Floriani.
And, for a bonus, Cathy and I got to spend some time in the greatest city in the world, Manhattan. (I am writing this post from inside a Starbucks on 7th Ave.) I used to come here pretty often in the early 2000s, when I was working for software consulting company on Prince Street, and I always loved it. I was last here for fun in 2017 with my son Connor, doing the tourist thing. The city hasn’t changed that much as far as I can tell. It’s still a rambling, teeming, kinetic barrage of sights, sounds, and languages. Manhattan is one of the few places on earth where you can step into a crowded elevator and hear Spanish, French, German, Russian, Hausa, and several others being spoken.
It’s also got the best museum in the world, the Met, which Cathy and I visited, of course. We got to see the John Singer Sargent exhibit, with Sargent’s masterpiece Portrait of Madame X on prominent display. I first learned about this amazing picture (and the scandal it caused) from David McCollough’s excellent history The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, in which Sargent is one of the Paris-bound artists discussed. (Sargent painted Madame X in Paris with a well-known socialite as his subject; hence the scandal.)
So, all in all, a damn fine trip so far. I don’t know if I will ever get another Edgar nom, but if I do, you can bet I will be back.
This entry in my on-going Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series is both old and new. That is, it’s a modern touch-up of the cover from the October 1949 edition of Astounding Science Fiction painted by Hubert Rogers. That issue included a work by A.E. van Vogt, but not the one we are interested in here. This modern version is from a 1999 edition of van Vogt’s classic sci-fi novel, The War Against the Rull, which I distinctly remember devouring in two days when I was in eighth-grade.
I like this cover a lot. It’s not just a classic. It’s an archetype. Specifically, the archetype of the heroic (America) scientist, a buff intellectual and polymath whose ilk could be found in countless works of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Roger Zelazny, and on an on. In The War Against the Rull, the man is Dr. Trevor Jamieson, a brilliant scientist who is also a fierce warrior and survival-expert. He’s stranded on an alien planet with a huge, six-legged, intelligent creature called an ezwal who wants to kill him. But when both Jamieson and the ezwal encounter a mutual enemy—a race of aggressive, centipede-like aliens called the Rull—they decide to work together to survive.
It’s a great story, like so many from the sci-fi’s Golden Age. I’ve written before about why sci-fi novels from that era are so much more enjoyable (to me, at least) than most of those written in the last ten years or so. I think it has to do with the gritty humanity of such stories. Yeah, Jamieson is essentially a comic-book character (think Doctor Quest and Race Bannon rolled into one), but van Vogt does a great job of making you believe he’s in real trouble. The ezwal, too—he’s a compelling character in his own right. You get involved in the desperate nature of their situation, and you keep reading to see how they will get out of it.
Anyway, check it out if you can…
Original Cover from AstoundingCover from the 1970 edition that I read as a kid (by artist John Schoenherr)Another version of the Scientist Hero Archetype (by artist James Bama)
Ever since Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, people have been talking about the “two Americas.” Namely, the working class, poorly educated, white, xenophobic America that voted for Trump and the middle- and upper-class, highly educated, “elitist,” multi-cultural America that voted for Hillary Clinton (and, later, Kamala Harris).
This perception of two Americas—and, indeed, of a “cold” Civil War that is currently being waged between them—is warranted and realistic. America is more polarized than it has been since the 1860s, and there is a very real possibility of the country tearing itself apart (not militarily, I think, but politically, in the same way the USSR erased itself in 1990).
However, I’m not sure we are in a battle between two Americas, per se, as in one between two worldviews. In one worldview, America is under threat of racial dilution, socialist revolution, and religious transgression, all of which will create an evil, perverse America, which its adherents would rather be dead than live in. In the other world view, America is under threat of nascent Fascism, corporatism, kleptocracy, and the climate apocalypse that will inevitably result from all these things.
As usual, the Germans have a much better word for this: Weltanschauung, a term that encapsulates the philosophical and cognitive underpinnings that define a social group or generation (or both). As an English major in the 1980s, I was obliged to read Eustace M. Tillyard’s classic The Elizabethan World Picture, which explores the conscious and subconscious belief system of Britons in the time of Shakespeare. More recently, I read Robert O’Niell’s memoir The Operator, which recounts his years as a Navy Seal fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this book, he describes the weltanschauung of the Afghani locals whom he encountered, some of whom—quite literally—believed in dragons.
My privious entry in this continuing “Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers” series was also devoted to Roger Zelazny, so please forgive me for double-dipping into the Zelazny well. But I couldn’t resist talking about one of Zelazny’s other great novels, …And Call Me Conrad—published in 1966 as This Immortal. Most people have never heard of it, but it’s an interesting book for several reasons.
For one, it was Zelazny’s first novel, and it has many of his signature obsessions (e.g, ancient mythology mixed with science fiction; a wise-cracking anti-hero who is also an Übermensch; epic fight scenes; etc.). For another, it actually won a Hugo Award, tying in 1966 with a slightly better-known book…Frank Herbert’s Dune. And finally, it’s just a hell of an entertaining adventure tale.
I chose this cover (by fantasy artist Rowena Morrill) because it really captures the sense of the book’s main character, Conrad Nomikos, a world-weary man-of-mystery who might be immortal. (The text suggests that he is at least a century old, and hints that he might be several thousand years older still.) He works as director of a government agency tasked with protecting and preserving the surviving relics of a destroyed earth. A nuclear war referred to by the characters as “The Three Days” has occurred many decades before, leaving most of the planet uninhabitable. The survivors, which include a wide variety of mutants both human and animal, live mainly on islands like Greece, Conrad’s home.
And that’s not even the main subject this wild, wild little book. Conrad is assigned the duty of escorting a group of VIP tourists—including Cort Myshtigo, an alien from the Vega star system whose race has purchased earth as a kind of vast museum—as they tour the planets once great sites (now ruins). Conrad soon realizes that another of the tourists, an Egyptian assassin named Hassan with whom Conrad has befriended in the past, is secretly on a mission to kill the Vegan. Hassan, it seems, has been hired for this task by an obscure, underground political group who want to reclaim earth for humanity. So, Conrad finds himself not only being a tour-guide but also an unpaid protector of Myshtigo—who he hates.
It’s a crazy book, and the cover conveys this craziness well. Though the edition is from 1980, the cover really feels like a 1970s cover, with its vaguely photorealistic painting of a ruggedly handsome dude with great hair (think Roger Staubach in his prime). I also like how Morrill works in the other tropes of the book—its setting among Greek ruins, as well as the presence of some mythological creatures in the background (which, the reader eventually learns, are actually just animals that have been mutated by radioactive fall-out).
It’s a very dated cover, but still a really cool one. Classic, one might say…
One of the many things I learned from Rod Stewart’s memoir, Rod: The Autobiography, is that the technical process of recording a studio album is very strange. For instance, the lead singer usually records his vocal track in a soundproofed room, by himself, wearing headphones so that he can listen to the band’s instrumental track.
It seems a very sterile and artificial process–not at all what one pictures when imagining a rock singer at work. And so I was impressed to learn that Stewart has always rejected this technique, insisting on recording all tracks directly with his band:
When we were recording, I liked to be in the sound room with the band, walking around with a microphone in hand, so that I could look them in the eye, interact with them, perform with them, basically. I think it slightly startled the engineer, who was more used to having the singer isolated behind screens, or in an entirely separate vocal booth. I remember hearing how Frank Sinatra had once been parked by an engineer behind a screen in a recording studio and he had made them take it down. In order to sing, he needed to feel the sound of the orchestra hit him in the chest. I guess this was my own version of that.
It’s interesting that Stewart draws a comparison between himself and Sinatra. As I learned from James Kaplan’s fine bio of Sinatra, the great crooner himself exerted tremendous effort when preparing for one his recordings. He was known to read the song lyrics aloud to himself, almost like prose. He felt he had to discover the emotional truth of the lyric before he could sing it, and if that truth was not forthcoming, he would nix the song.
It feels a little silly, writing SPOILERS BELOW considering I am discussing a novel that came out 123 years ago. Is it possible that any reader of this blog—or, for that matter, any book nerd over the age of thirty—is not already familiar with the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles? Even those who haven’t read the book have probably seen the movie in one of its many incarnations over the decades. I first saw the Basil Rathbone version from 1939 (which is free on Youtube) when I was about ten years old. This was about the same time my mom gave me a faux-leather bound edition of the complete Sherlock Holmes collection, which I read and re-read many, many times. And the work I re-read the most was The Hound of the Baskervilles (henceforth, HOTB).
Which might lead one to ask: Why would anybody re-read a mystery? After all, the whole point of a mystery is to figure whodunnit, right?
For the average mystery, this is largely true. But the great mysteries—like great books of any kind—operate on many levels and hold different kinds of appeal. For me, the very best mystery novels are character-driven, with a vivid setting and a lot of drama that stands above mere plot mechanics. HOTB is such a novel.
When I was an English major at the University of Florida, one of the best classes I took was a Survey of Science Fiction Literature course. It covered a lot of famous American and British SF, some of which I had already read as a teenager and some of which were new to me.
Looking back on it now, it occurs to me that two of the writers we read in the class were not only totally different from each other, they also presented two completely opposite visions of what we now call artificial intelligence. These writers were Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison.
For Asimov, we read his early, seminal work, I, Robot. This is the short story collection that included his first formulation of the Three Laws of Robotics, which have been alluded to (i.e, ripped off) in countless other science fiction stories, including Star Trek. The book came out before the term AI became common parlance. Yet, in Asimov’s imagined future, the world is rife with robots that are essentially AIs with mechanical bodies. All of them have positronic brains (yeah, Star Trek ripped off this conceit, too) with the Three Laws hard-wired in. The result is that all robots function as humanity’s tireless, benevolent servants. (Some would say, slaves.)
Actually, they are much more than that. They can think, reason, and make choices. In fact, they have to make choices. The moral dilemmas created by the Three Laws as the robots interact with chaotic (and often evil) human beings is the source of drama in most of the stories.
Despite the mystery and drama of the stories, though, Asimov’s vision is a very optimistic, almost Buck-Rogers-esque idea of the future—not quite a utopia but close to it. There is no poverty, no hunger, no war. It’s only upon close reading of the stories in I, Robot that the exact nature of the master/servant relationship between humans and robots appears fraught—probably more so than Asimov consciously intended. This is especially true in a few of the stories, where it’s revealed that future governments are secretly run by the highest order of HAL 9000 style robots, whose plans might be beyond human comprehension.
Later in the Science Fiction class, we read Harlan Ellison’s short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” which is quite possibly the darkest and most disturbing short story I have ever read, sci-fi or otherwise. And, of course, it involves an AI.
The story is mostly set underground, about one hundred years after a nuclear war wiped out all of humanity except for five people. The war was started by a mutinous Pentagon computer (yeah, just like Skynet) called AM that becomes self-aware and decides it hates human beings more than anything. After killing everyone on the planet, it preserves the five people as its playthings, running them through an endless number of elaborate, sadistic games. Unfortunately for them, AM has somehow obtained God-like technological power over physics, able to shape and project matter wherever it wishes, and also to keep the humans alive and immortal in their banged-up, miserable state. So, in effect, the protagonists spend an eternity in a kind of Holodeck-like hellscape, trying to figure out how to either escape or kill themselves.
Yeah, it’s heavy.
This enormous gulf between Asimov’s and Ellison’s visions of the future—an AI paradise versus an almost literal AI hell—is, in part, symptomatic of various generational and cultural shifts between the two men. I, Robot was published in 1950, on the tail-end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the time when the prosperity of America in the post-war years seemed destined to go on forever, fueled by newer and greater technological innovations (AI among them). In contrast, Ellison’s short story was published in 1967, at the height of a counter-cultural revolution that extended into science fiction literature —the New Wave that introduced some of my favorite sci-fi writers of all time, such as Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Ellison himself.
Thus, the difference between Asimov and Ellison’s work is essentially the difference between the lingering triumph of World War II and the horrors of VietNam. Between the optimism of the Atomic Age and the nihilism of the Cold War. In some ways, it’s also the difference between fantasy and realism, and between genre fiction and literary fiction. As dark as Ellison’s short story is, it’s also a much better work of fiction than Asimov’s. More convincing, too, alas. Told from the point-of-view of AM’s youngest victim, Ted, the story is filled with vivid, sharp writing and devastating passages, like this one:
Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because AM amused itself with strange sounds) was hallucinating that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very dubious. “It’s another shuck,” I told them. “Like the goddam frozen elephant AM sold us. Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We’ll hike all that way and it’ll be putrified or some damn thing. I say forget it. Stay here, it’ll have to come up with something pretty soon or we’ll die.”
Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we’d last eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.
You don’t have to be a literary critic to see that Asimov and Ellison are worlds apart, not just on the subject of Artificial Intelligence but on literally everything. Asimov was a scientist, a rationalist, and his optimistic views on the future of humanity were deeply rooted in the legacy of the Enlightenment. Ellison is more of a Gothic Romantic, full of existential angst and cosmic horror. His story is essentially an updated version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the supercomputer in the role of the monster, determined to torment its creator.
Of course, the Frankenstein story is, itself, a reworking of an even older one—the Faustian myth. According to German legend, Faust is an intellectual who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge, and ends up going to hell. If the story seems familiar, it’s probably because the legend has been the psychological basis for countless tales of perverted science for centuries. Scientists, the story goes, want to attain the power of God, and thus end up being destroyed by their own hubris (often in the form of some infernal creation like Frankenstein’s monster or, more recently, SkyNet).
Isaac Asimov
Perhaps the biggest irony here (at least for me, personally) is that while I have great admiration for Ellison’s story, and I believe it is a much greater artistic work that anything ever penned by Asimov, Asimov’s vision is probably more accurate of what we can actually expect from the AI revolution. For all the hype about AIs destroying art and music and literature and taking away our jobs, I think AI will be a net positive for humanity. Perhaps a big net positive. It’s already making contributions in the fields of materials science, medicine, and even fusion energy. Yeah, it’s probably going to take away some people’s jobs, but those were probably crap jobs anyway. (If you train an AI to do it as well as a human, it’s probably not worth doing.)
As for the whole AM/Skynet thing, I don’t worry about it because I don’t believe computers will ever become conscious. In fact, the very idea of a machine becoming conscious seems like a category error, the kind of conceit that will seem laughable a hundred years from now as those old drawings of “men of the future” with feathered wings strapped to their arms.
Harlan Ellison
This doesn’t mean, of course, that we won’t, someday, create an artificial life form that might replace us. But it won’t be a computer. It will be…something else.
Ash Clifton, Writer 