Review of Brett Petersen’s The Parasite from Proto Space & Other Stories: The 2020 Anthology from Before the Golden Age

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Brett Petersen’s The Parasite from Proto Space & Other Stories has been compared to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, and Charles Bukowski, among others. Suppose I told you that I not only agreed, but added Frank Herbert, Sam Delany, and Olaf Stapledon to that lustrous list, and added them after reading just the first two stories in Petersen’s anthology. In the words of Ringo, would you stand up and walk out on me? If you did, that would be your loss.

Because Peterson’s stream-of-consciousness, metaphor-of-metaphor prose hits all of that at times, and sometimes more. The 2020 anthology feels like it was written sometime in the 1930s to the early 1950s, that is, before the height of the Golden Age of Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke, even though its stories were written just a few years ago. The parasite in the title story is what used to be called, before and during the Golden Age, a bug-eyed-monster, except this BEM offers observations such as, “He turned the doorknob, which felt like one of Frosty the Snowman’s testicles.” Ok, there’s no way that could have been published in the 1930s. But that’s what makes The Parasite so strikingly original. It feels as if was written almost a hundred years ago, when Hugo Gernsback was riding high, but its attitudes and language smack your ... face with today.

Other stories feature worms from another dimension that eat our memories (not computer worms eating computer memories); a sentient goat, eppes (my word, Yiddish, tough to translate), that also gets hijacked to another dimension, apparently connected in some way to the one with the memory-eating worms; and— well, I’m not going capsule-summarize every story in this gonzo book.

Nor do I love every tale in this anthology. There’s a dark neo-pre-cyberpunk ambience coursing through the stories, sometimes too dark for my usually sunny taste. A father tells his son, “it won’t always be like this” (so good), and that proves true with an ugly vengeance. I prefer a little more hope. Another story features a murderous building, but its inherent black humor—the tenants “yank their window shades down like a skirt blown up by an undercurrent from a sewer grate”—is overwhelmed by the grim. The truth is that there is just one story with an unambiguously happy ending in this anthology, a space-faring tale in which an unlikely hero stops an extra-terrestrial construction from shattering “every preconceived notion we had about the universe” and then humanity. And perhaps one more with an uplifting ending, if an afterlife story can really be happy. I would have preferred more than one and a half of these happy-ish endings.

But be that as It may, Petersen’s way with words is superb, his dark imagination boundless, his eye for detail and logic in fleshing out these paranoid visions keen and impressive. If this sounds like your cup of dark tea, pick it up.