Young People Read Old SFF

With Morning Comes Mistfall

George R. R. Martin

Young People Read Old SFF

3 Nov, 2024

November’s Young People Read Old Nebula Finalists features George R. R. Martin’s ​“With Morning Comes Mistfall”. First published in the May 1973 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, ​“Mistfall” was nominated for the Nebula as well as the Hugo, losing the first to “ Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death”, and the second to Le Guin’s ​“Those Who Walk Away from Omelas”.

I first encountered ​“Mistfall” in Lester del Rey’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Third Annual Collection.



I disagreed strongly with the apparent thesis — that looking for answers to interesting questions is the act of a buzzkill — but enjoyed the story enough start relentlessly hunting down Martin stories. One result is that I own at least three copies of this particular story, in the del Rey anthology, in A Song for Lya and Other Stories1, and in Portraits of His Children. I had the Analog back-issue until a flood ate my 1970s magazine collection. I have a shelf of Martin works and this story is why. 

Of course, there’s no guarantee the Young People will like the same stuff I enjoyed. Let’s find out what they thought. 

1: I can never remember whether A Song for Lya and Other Stories is the collection that was rare even when first released, or it was Songs of Stars and Shadows. I have both. It’s not that I get relentlessly obsessive, I am just a bit of a completist. 

Heck, I have all five published volumes of Martin’s New Voices anthologies, even the one that was only published by Bluejay. 

Kris:

This is a piece that took me a while to read. Not because it is not well written but it is one that constantly required brain recalibration.

Just looking at the beginning:

“I was early to breakfast that morning, the first day after landing.” — Given this is from Analog, likely refers to spaceship landing so on a planet. Probably a first contact story.

“But Sanders was already out on the dining balcony when I got there.” — Okay, this must be a more developed world. Assume something futuristic looking.

“Only a few feet below the balcony level the mists rolled, ghostly breakers against the stones of Sanders’ castle” — Oh so it’s a fantasy tale. Maybe some medieval futurism? Or was the landing actually referring to a boat.

And so it goes on through scenes and concepts, not always the easiest story to pin down.

But that is both part of the joy and part of the point. Between Sanders and Dubowski we have the old question about magic tricks. Do you find it more fascinating to know how the trick is done or dwell in the beauty of the mystery? I am personally more on the side of loving to learn the mechanics of how something is done, but I also do not get enraged if something is left unexplained.

I can’t help but wondering if this is also making a comment on certain readers of science fiction and fantasy. There are those that get annoyed if the rules of the world are not fully laid out and if the mathematics does not precisely conform to our current understanding of the laws of physics. Whist others will get grumpy if there are too many explanations and you lose the sense of wonder.

There is also so much to chew on here. I often say my favourite works of science fiction are ones where you can envision a hundred other stories branching off from them and that is absolutely the case here.

I am not saying I want Kevin J. Anderson’s ​“Heretics of Wraithworld” but I can imagine it being there.

James

NO. DO NOT GIVE KJA IDEAS.

Brian

I reread this, yesterday? The day before that? Reading it for the first time in a couple years, I actually had the opposite experience of Kris. I find this to be a very simple story, which is not a bad thing. It’s so simple, actually, that it shouldn’t work. We’re given one location, Castle Cloud, plus three characters. The narrator, nameless and genderless, is sort of an observer to two opposing worldviews, which are personified for the sake of the narrative. Sanders is an eccentric rich man type who also thinks himself a mystic of sorts, one who feels a personal connection to the land he is technically exploiting. Dubowski is a notorious scientist who wants to uncover Wraithworld’s secrets, in the name of pursuing knowledge. Dubowski is the closest we get to an antagonist, but aside from being a bit haughty he’s basically a decent person. This story does not have a villain, properly speaking, nor does it really have a hero. So there’s a conflict, certainly, but not typically one you would find in a short story.

I think in my old review of ​“With Morning Comes Mistfall” I said that this was the story where George R. R. Martin wanted to figure out a) if he wanted to become a serious artist, and b) what kind of artist he wanted to be. Would he be a balls-to-the-wall science-fictionist or would he be more flexible with how he uses genre? Most of his ​’70s work is SF, but we now know Martin would come to be rather ambidextrous when it comes to genre. This story here is undoubtedly planetary SF, but as Kris pointed out some of the imagery feels more in line with fantasy, and I’d also add the Castle Cloud setting (especially what ultimately becomes of it) has tinges of the gothic. It’s moody, a little abstract, maybe allegorical, and yet in a dozen pages Martin gives Wraithworld enough life (he manages to fit quite a bit of worldbuilding into a small space by alluding to things without elaborating on them) that it feels like a developed locale, despite the fact that it appears in a single short story and we never return to it.

Maybe a hot take, but I think this should’ve won the Nebula over the Tiptree (“Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death”). Le Guin can keep the Hugo, and obviously ​“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is an iconic story that way more people know about. But I like the Martin more, personally.

Rose:

I like a sci-fi that doesn’t want to be wholly tied to science. I love to read a thing that blends genres and does so well. Martin has given an excellent example of the breadth this genre can take on. I think the personification of worldviews in conflict is a hard trope to pull off well, yet, despite this story’s sparse population and tiny geographical footprint, Martin has largely avoided those major pitfalls of the trope that usually set my teeth on edge. I think it is because the story lacks a canonical villain that it is so able to bring fresh air into the tired trope of personified opinions. As a fan of Martin’s work, I must say I prefer this writing style to that of his most famous series. It reminds me of another short story he wrote, ​“The Ice Dragon”, which was far more fantasy than sci-fi but held similar power over its audience by engaging in a practice I like to call ​“big world leaks into this small one”. Martin has a stranglehold on this form of creation whereby he constructs a story in the most minimalist of fashions and then he puts it in a world bathed since birth in riches. This makes the story approachable in a way that some authors never quite master, especially on the short story scale. Because there is only one place to be (in this case Castle Cloud, in others a tiny village, a single open field, or a workshop) and the cast of characters is so small, the learning curve required by the audience to acclimate to the world the story belongs to is quite small. This is not to say, however, that the story is not full of world building but that world building leaks into the audience’s view from the enormity of the big world which contains the little one we can see. Like this, Martin creates a story which can so easily guide us through its pages and create the complex understandings of conflict without needing to scare us off in the first few paragraphs with a lore dump the size of West Texas. Though this story is not my favourite of all time I find myself agreeing with Brian that it should have won the Nebula over Tiptree (though my thoughts on Tiptree, as published on this blog, may bias that opinion substantially). What I will say is this story serves as an excellent demonstration of how authors find their voices over time. Martin has written a story that I have always thought of as being the perfect campfire tale because it is not only a joy to read but its little world inside a big world format gives way to audience participation and discussion at its close. I am fond of this work and the only critique I could offer is that Martin never saw fit to create an anthology of this world.