Alex Lella's Blog

Night Talk

"Night Talk" is a very short story penned by an obscure fellow named Charles Fritch. William Atheling {James Blish} specualated that Fritch was a pen name for Ray Bradbury. It seems that he was wrong about this. Fritch was a real person, but Wikipedia has very little to say about him.

Anyway, the story is what we might call a short-short and Atheling suggests that it was bought mainly to fill some space in the September 1952 isasue of Startling Stories.

It's actually a sort of Christmas story about a time when Earth has become overcrowded and people have begun immigrating to Mars en masse to the point where there's no room in th hotels. An unnamed traveler meets an unnamed hotel owner. The owner is guilty because he recently turned away a preganant couple and they ended up giving birth in a barn. Can you guess where this is going?

Atheling faulted the story for giving us almost no information about the two characters. I don't know. I think it kind of worked with all the characters being a little bit mysterious. Atheling also suggested that critics would be too kind to the story simply because it's short. He then declares that brevity is not an excuse for being bad. I can sort of see his point, but I can also see the other side. This story is an enjoyable read because it can be quietly aborbed in a few moments' time.

Atheling's next target was the August 1952 issue of Astounding which he states contains a very good piece called "Cold Awakening" and a very bad piece called "The face of the Enemy".Reviews of both are forthcoming.