“A Child is Crying”
Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1948
Even though he’s best remember as a writer of crime novels and the Travis McGee series of thrillers, John D. MacDonald was also an accomplished author of science fiction. He only wrote three sf novels (The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything; Ballroom of the Skies; Wine of the Dreamers), but the ISFDB lists 70 short stories if I’ve counted correctly. Not all of those are necessarily science fiction, but that’s more than enough for a retrospective collection or two. (Stephen Haffner, are you paying attention?) Some of his science fiction was collected in Other Times, Other Worlds. That little paperback is long out of print, although copies can still be found. I bought one at a secondhand bookstore in Colorado a few weeks ago.
MacDonald was born on this date, July 24, in 1916, and passed away during surgery in 1986. In observance of his birth, I managed to read one of his tales. “A Child is Crying” is one of his best-known sf short stories, and it’s easy to see why.
Billy is a small boy of seven. To say he is a genius would be to vastly understate the situation. He can solve intractable scientific problems in his head. Soon he’s being held captive in an underground bunker meeting once a week with a group of scientists working on atomic weapons.
He doesn’t tell them everything they want to know. Billy can foresee the future. He won’t say anything about what is going to happen other than there is another war coming. To say more would be to affect the future, and he doesn’t want to do the work to figure out how things will change.
John D. MacDonald
At least that’s his story. The truth is a little more nuanced. As the men holding him captive are about to figure too late.
“A Child is Crying” is a powerful and haunting story. Like much of the best science fiction, it also works as a horror story.
MacDonald isn’t the only author with a birthday today. There are two others, plus an artist. I wrote more detailed posts last year and the year before. You can read them here and here. I’ll quickly list them.
First is E. F. Benson (1867-1940). If you like classic English ghost stories, he’s your guy. In my not so humble opinion, he was one of the three greatest writers of the form. (The other two were M. R. James and H. Russell Wakefield, in case you were wondering.)
Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) is probably the most famous and influential fantasy author you’ve never heard of. Of course, that’s not true for regular readers of this blog, who are all smart, erudite, charming, and dashingly handsome (just like Your Intrepid Blogger) and are quite familiar with who he was (just like Your Intrepid Blogger). For those of you getting here late, Dunsany was huge influence on H. P. Lovecraft and casts a long shadow over 20th Century fantasy.
Lastly is Lee Brown Coye (1907-1981). He illustrated some of the later issues of Weird Tales, some anthologies for Arkham House, and Murgunstrumm by Hugh B. Cave and Worse Things Waiting by Manly Wade Wellman, both published by Carcosa in the 1970s. His work inspired Karl Edward Wagner’s classic horror story “Sticks”. Here’s a selection of his work.
