Still I Persist in Wondering

Tales of a Darkening World #4

by Edgar Pangborn

The waters rose, and darkness was upon the earth.

For a few decades after the Twenty-Minute War and the Red Plague, there were those who remembered the ways and pleasures of civilization, but soon the harsh realities of life in the flooded seaboard of North America pushed the survivors into a new Dark Age - an age of superstition and brutality, but one of seeking and poetry as well. This is the world of Edgar Pangborn's classic Davy, portrayed here over centuries of its change and growth. Here are heretics, and harpers, crusaders and cowards, magicians and mundane folk, in a stunning cycle of stories that have timeless quality of legend.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Fantasy, Collections, Apocalyptic, Post Apocalyptic

279 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 1978

About the author

Edgar Pangborn was an American mystery, historical, and science fiction author.

He published also under the pen-name of Bruce Harrison

Reviews

[John Cooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edgar Pangborn was a brave and humanistic writer. But it's obvious he had no choice but to write from his heart. The result was several timeless novels and stories, including the masterful Hugo-nominated DAVY (1964) set in a post-apocalyptic world after the Twenty Minute War. The short stories and novellas in STILL I PERSIST IN WONDERING (1978) are set in the same world as DAVY. No zombies here, thank goodness. But it's no less harrowing, to see human beings playing out their same errors and blunders and follies that have always attended the human race. Thankfully, Edgar Pangborn is an optimist, and he chooses to follow characters of good character, putting the baser ones into sharp relief. An optimist, yes, but also a keen observer of human nature. These are cautionary tales, using the sample of post-apocalypse human barbarism and ignorance to help us understand our current lot. Pangborn wrote at a time (during the Cold War) when a Twenty Minute War seemed like far too real a possibility. His main characters in the tales in STILL I PERSIST IN WONDERING are quietly heroic, and exemplars for the rest of us. Several stories have strong gay themes, most notably "Harper Conan and Singer David," "Tiger Boy," and "The Night Wind." That final story in the collection, "The Night Wind," I would consider to be Pangborn's final testament, as it was the last story of his published before his death. It's a tale of a gay youth ostracized from his village after the villagers catch him with another boy -- and although there appears to be no place for him in this world, at the end of the tale he is defiant, brave, and determined to find love and happiness out there, away from the ignorance of his family and home village. It's unfortunately as true a story today as when it was written, and I wish more young gay people from small-minded communities would read this story and take some courage from it. I really applaud Pangborn for writing with the courage of his humanist convictions. He died in 1976, but his words live on. I loved this book just as much as I love DAVY and A MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS.

[Alex Sarll]

One of my regular laments is that there's so little science fiction anything like Clifford Simak's oddly pastoral take on the genre, and at first I thought I'd found another one here. The match wasn't exact – the setting here being the post-apocalyptic Catskills, not Simak's midwest, and there was already a slyness to Pangborn with a little more acid in it than Simak's wryness. But there was still some of that sense of a quieter world recovering from humanity, and humanity recovering from what we'd done to ourselves, and a notion that maybe the end of the world as we know it could as much as anything be a welcome rest. Alas, it doesn't last. Humanity gets up, dusts itself off, and gets right back to what it always does – organised religion, inequality, the persecution of the outsider. A new mediaevalism arises, which like the first one is haunted by a sense of being little men at the end of time, constrained by inquisitions and the like, with the lack of things like decent medical care being made all the more poignant by the relics which survive of an age where so much more could be done – and exacerbated by the mutations and indestructible garbage attendant on the sins of Old-Time civilisation. Decades pass between tales, as the remnants of the old world falter and then get incorporated into the birth of the new; characters from early stories come to be seen as legends in the later ones. Messianic figures are a recurring motif; some of them are strictly local phenomena, others change at least this little corner of the world. A wise and thus increasingly depressing book, not to mention a surprisingly queer one for its time.

[Terence · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know when or why I picked up Edgar Pangborn. I think this collection of short stories was the first works of his I read, and I think that’s largely because – at the time – my gaming buddies and I were heavily “into” post-holocaust RPGs (Gamma World, Aftermath, The Morrow Project, and lesser knowns). Of course, Pangborn’s sensibility is as far removed from the often violent, survival-of-the-fittest ethos of the usual RPG as it’s possible to be. All of the heroes of these stories are people striving to be human in the face of pathological violence and near willful ignorance.

The first story, “The Children’s Crusade,” takes place a short generation after the Twenty-Minute War and the Red Plague, which have brought 20th Century civilization crashing down. Also, presciently, Pangborn recounts how Mankind’s abuse of the environment has caused climate change, drowning much of the East Coast and New England and turning the region into a subtropical zone. But that’s secondary to the story, which tells of the ministry of a new prophet, Abraham, through the eyes of an old, resigned survivor of the war and those of a young, idealistic boy. I don’t want to use the word “cynical” to describe Malachi, the old man, because he isn’t. He’s too old, however, to believe that Abraham’s message of love, peace and brotherhood is going to fundamentally change humans. No more so than that of his immediate predecessor Jesus. But when Abraham’s troupe of followers passes through the village and takes up Jesse, the boy, in its wake, Malachi follows out of love for the youth.

The story ends before the ultimately tragic (and fatal) destiny of Abraham plays out. But the point of the tale is not that humanity needs another savior but that “Human love is greater than divine love…divine love is at worst an illusion, at best a dream for some imaginary future time. Human love is here and now.” (p. 75) And, “The old grim story so many times enacted – for the poor human race has always longed for a Redeemer to take up the burdens that human people themselves alone must carry…. And maybe we learn a little, century by century; or sometimes we forget too much.” (p. 75)

There’s always the chance that fondly remembered childhood reads will prove – well, not all that great when revisited. In this instance, I was happy to rediscover a great writer and one of the formative influences in my life.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of Pangborn's short fiction set in various times in the same world as his most famous novel, Davy. (The entire sequence has been labeled Tales of a Darkening World and includes the novels The Judgement of Eve and The Company of Glory.) Pangborn assembled the book before his death and wrote an introduction, but it was published posthumously. It contains seven (of ten) stories, all of which first appeared in original anthologies edited by Terry Carr, George Zebrowski, or Roger Elwood from 1972-'75. The book was edited by Spider Robinson, who contributed an amazingly moving and interesting introductory essay, as well as a bibliography, which was a rare and valuable addition in those pre-internet days. It's a post-apocalyptic world, though Pangborn never dwelled on the science fiction aspects and concentrated on the humanity of his characters. There are no stories that stand-out particularly over the others (my favorite was probably Tiger Boy), but he builds a complex tapestry of the development of the people in a rich, changing world, and observes that: "And still I persist in wondering...whether folly must always be our nemesis." It's a very good collection and serves as a good introduction to Pangborn's work.

[Ranmaru · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is quite a while ago that I read this short story collection of Edgar Pangborn. As a teenager I found most of the stories rather hard to read, with two exceptions.
Firstly, My Brother Leopold, which deals with the childhood of a new Jesus and that way provokes thoughts of how human Jesus was. For me it made him way more approchable, many people might find it a big blasphemy instead.
The second exception is one of my favorite short stories of all time: The Night Wind. A gay boy flees from a village where people see him as a monster. He meets a woman who is branded as a witch and must learn to overcome his own prejudices in order to find the kindness he has been looking for. Beautiful.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most stories were hard to follow, but still enjoyable.

[Robert Ham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb collection of stories set in his post-apocalypse world. Also recommend The Judgement of Eve, In the Company of Glory, and his masterpiece, Davy.

[Ben Brackett · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I did like how he wrote, I kept finding myself extremely bored and not really caring to finish the stories. Cover art is amazing though.