Science Fiction: The Short Stuff discussion

September's novelette group read is Never Gut-Shoot a Wampus by Winston K. Marks. I selected this novelette having recently encountered it on the The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast. It's a really good story to listen to. Despite that, I have mixed feelings about this podcast. I've only listened to four or five episodes so far, but every single one is in the realm of soft SF, not hard SF. In fact, the podcaster is choosing only stories that have something to do with heterosexual lust, male on female, and this story is the third or fourth example of that in a row. The SF seems to be a trapping only for the protagonist to get his perv on.

This is the first I have ever heard of this particular author. The one photo I know of that exists of him is featured on our group home page this month. He wrote approximately 60 short stories for the pulps, all but four of these published between 1953 and 1959. The other four were from 1940, 1941, 1967, and 1968. Marks had a career and writing was just something he did on the side, except perhaps for that 1950s period.

I plan to give this story a close read. It first appeared in the February 1955 issue of Imagination and has been made into a Project Gutenberg free (or very low cost) chapbook available for Kindle.