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Review of “Shaft Number 247”
I’m not precisely sure on the setting. When I first read this story in college around 20 years ago or so, I thought it was set in a mining colony in the future. But reading it a second time, I think instead it has more of a dystopian, Logan’s Run feel to it. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a short story after all, and basil is more interested in the characters.
It’s certainly a science fiction story.
Control is never told –could be the government, could be a company, we don’t know. We never find out what happens. Sort of like Abraham Merrit’s “The Moon Pool” from the zero generation we read earlier. Once they go through the pool, the story ends. This story almost reads like the first chapter of a book we’ll never read
When I was in college, I wrote a short story that was intentionally set in the Cthulhu Mythos. But I didn’t include any obvious signs. No creatures, no books, no langue, no names, nothing. But I was trying to evoke the sense of total screw-ment with something happening beyond human ken. It was set in a coal mine back during the Company Town/Company Store era. Anyways, the story was set in the Mythos by intent of the author, and not because of the details that I saw. Does it count?
Basil does that here. You keep expecting for some Mythos element to drop – Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, the Lliogor, the Mi-Go , the Hounds of Tindalos, a place like Innsmouth or the Plateau of Leng. Not Ithaqua. But nope. Nothing. And that desire to keep the story clean of the obvious adoration for those elements makes this a very interesting story.
This is an opaque, dense, place. It’s oppressive, and the story is very, very subtle. And I think that’s really good. Campbell in the prelude says, “one of our tales hints at the ultimate event of the Mythos without ever referring to the traditional names”. Campbell later writes that this was the best story of the written for the novel, which makes it better than Crouch End, Then Curse the Darkness, or Dark Awakening.
I’m giving it four stars.
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