Young People Read Old SFF

Poor Man, Beggar Man

Joanna Russ

Young People Read Old SFF

5 Sep, 2024

The subject of September 2024’s Young People Read Old Nebula Finalists is Joanna Russ’ Poor Man, Beggar Man1. Russ was a respected author and critic, whose works are widely discussed… although not as far as I can remember this story in particular. 

Poor Man was first published in Terry Carr’s 1971Universe 1, which as it happens, I don’t own and have never read. It was subsequently anthologized in 1972’s Nebula Stories 7 (which I also have never seen), and collected in 1983’s The Zanzibar Cat, which I recently purchased but have not read. Because I have not read it, I cannot comment. After 1983, this Nebula finalist appears to have fallen out of print. How odd but certainly not an ominous foreshadowing of reactions to come. Russ was, after all, under-anthologized until recently. 

SFWA members liked Poor Man enough to nominate the story for a Nebula. What will the Young People make of it? Let’s find out! 

1: Poul Anderson’s The Queen of Air and Darkness won its category this year. Poor Man, Beggar Man ranked behind Edgar Pangborn’s Mount Charity (another story I have never seen) but ahead of Gardner Dozois’ A Special Kind of Morning and Kate Wilhelm’s The Encounter.

Kris:

I am usually a fan of Russ’ writing but this one left me cold. It seemed to be overlong and rambling with weird stylistic choices, such as having paragraphs that last entire pages for no apparent reason. The biggest issue I had is that I simply did not understand what the point of it was. I looked at other online reviews to enlighten me but most of them had the same reaction.

Any further insight others have on this point would be appreciated.

Brian:

I get that this is supernatural and also alternate history, but if you have to leave a note at the end alluding to what the point of the story might be you might not have done the job right.

[A note from James: a month passes between the above and the next section. Blame me!]

I read this over a month ago, so my memory was a bit foggy. I was gonna reread it to freshen up on it, the problem being that before I had even gotten to the end of the first page my eyes were starting to glaze over a bit. Bad sign. When it comes to female authors from the New Wave and especially before that time, there’s a solid chance their fiction doesn’t get reprinted as often as their male counterparts because contemporary editors had a misogynistic streak. 

Unfortunately, ​“Poor Man, Beggar Man” has been reprinted so little because it’s not very good. It’s actually uncharacteristic for Russ in how uninteresting it is.

It’s an alternate history ghost story in which Alexander the Great is confronted with the ghost of his dead friend. There’s something about a love triangle, if I remember right. Russ leaves a note at the end saying how this story diverts from real history, although strangely enough this note doesn’t clarify why she felt compelled to write this particular story in the first place. There’s the occasional joke, so it’s not completely dull (it’s closer to a dark comedy than horror), but I’m not sure what the point of it is. This is not to say I expected a message, because Russ doesn’t ask easy questions or give easy answers typically, but everything I’ve read by her has been about something, maybe having to do with Russ’s own life as a woman and, in the early ​’70s, closeted lesbian. But not this story.

On the one hand I feel like I’m missing a piece of the puzzle, but also if a story isn’t compelling enough for me to want to find that missing piece then what good is it? A puzzle is not worth solving if it isn’t fun to solve. It’s sad, because while I don’t always like Russ’s fiction (although I love her criticism) it’s usually more personal and confrontational than this.

Rose:

Russ is the kind of author whose voice fluctuates to fit her story. In a way, I think her voice takes on a tone in this story that really manages to crack into the nihilistic tendencies of the work. There is a clear thread of destiny that Russ has chiseled out of simple characters and a shared history which has been stripped to its barest bones. To me, there have always been three things that really matter in writing: the objective, the achievement, and the methods. As far as methods go, Russ has them locked and loaded. It feels that her narrating voice was made to take the reader on a tour de force: word choice was exquisite, characters had distinct speech patterns, she played a trickster god archetype to its limits and reigned it in with thoughtful grounding and deep ties to tangible revenge. This story, however, came out to be worth less than its means. The objective of the story, and by extension the objective of our author in having written it, is flimsy. It seems like a story made only so it could exist. It stands on a very thin line between gratuitous and inconsequential that just never settles into being genuinely compelling. There were moments when my interest piqued and I found myself settling into a new, but very real, desire to pursue the plot hook or the character flaw or the question posed, but it was always squandered. Moreover, because I found the objective of both author and story so hard to identify with and put a name to, it is difficult for me to say that I felt like anything at all was really achieved in the work. Overall, this was a story that felt like it had a very powerful drive into a great open expanse of nothing. It’s not to say that the story is wasted or terrible or even bad, only to say that it hired the world’s best stone smith to thatch the world’s daintiest roof. Taken as a whole, the work primarily serves as a confusing and occasionally intriguing account of insincere revenge. To her credit, I do believe Russ has a fine mastery of language which is on good display here and which is certainly enough to recommend it be visited by those who like the genre.