Tag Archives: Science Fiction

On Doris Piserchia’s I, Zombie

Books, Speculative Fiction,

1.

The more science fiction and fantasy you read the easier it is to guess where any given premise will go. When a book upends your predictions you feel like you’ve got something special. Doris Piserchia—like Margaret St. Clair, another neglected SF writer—has a talent for dodging the predictable narrative. Take the first Piserchia novel I read, I, Zombie (originally published under the name Curt Selby). A company uses remote-controlled indigent corpses as factory labor; the unnamed first-person narrator is mistaken for dead after nearly drowning in a frozen lake and dropped into the labor force. You can picture this story, right? It’s a near-future dystopia and a left-wing satire. The theme is the dehumanization of labor by management, and the central conflict is the protagonist’s struggle to establish their animate status.

That’s not I, Zombie.

Cover of I, Zombie

Partly that’s because I, Zombie is a space opera set on an icy colony world called Land’s End with indigenous psychic aliens perhaps influenced by Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. Some SFF suffers from “one weird thing” syndrome. You get one novum or fantasy gimmick but everything surrounding that novum defaults to normalcy—Occam’s SFF, careful not to multiply weirdness unnecessarily. Zombie laborers or space opera with psychic aliens. (This is often accompanied by the more serious problem that the story has only one thing going on thematically.) Piserchia is generous with her weirdness; her books have multiple weirdnesses that interact productively.

Most memorable science fiction has a touch of the outsider artist. A stylistic tic, eccentric plotting, unexpected thematic obsessions—some eccentricity flags the work as one writer’s and one writer’s alone because it would never occur to anyone else to write that way. Sometimes the touch of the outside is faint. Piserchia, though professional enough, bursts with it like Philip K. Dick.

They have no obvious common preoccupations, but Piserchia feels tonally like Dick’s close cousin. They both write matter-of-factly about a world they see from a cockeyed and paranoid side view. And both write fast and pulpy and sometimes awkwardly. In an online interview Piserchia admits “I might have done better to spend more time on first drafts but once I began a book, I wrote it at breakneck speed, finishing in 3 or 4 months and then losing interest to the point that I couldn’t push myself to rewrite.” You sometimes see her dropping explanations into the flow of her prose at the moments she realizes they’re needed instead of the moments they naturally fit. Phrasings can be awkward (“people were so busy trying to construct mental highways and tributaries that they lost sight of their premises or the need for same.”) And her first-person narrators recount even the most harrowing trials with an odd insouciance—_I, Zombie_ being a case in point. But it all works.

2.

More weirdness: the narrator isn’t trying to prove she’s alive. She’s relaxed about the whole deal, going with the flow. Before drowning she was institutionalized—she’s awkward, unfashionably tall and muscular, and was assumed to be unintelligent.[1] Being ignored by the factory staff doesn’t feel different from being ignored by doctors, nurses, and caretakers. Mix in some heavy social anxiety—“Never in my life had I been able to speak to a normal person”—and healthy contempt for people who talk about her like she isn’t there, and you get why she doesn’t speak up. It feels like the reason we don’t learn her name is she doesn’t think we ought to need it.

Instead she turns the other zombies, who she can control somewhat through her implants, into imaginary friends, reading the memories slowly decaying in their brain cells and making them talk to each other like a kid playing with action figures.

To the colonists this is invisible. They desperately, even cartoonishly, rationalize away evidence the narrator is alive. When the narrator winks at the lunch lady in the mess hall, she gasps and gapes like the villain in a Tex Avery cartoon who just ran halfway around the world and found Droopy already there. Nobody loves a memento mori: people’s eyes slide away from the walking corpses, or glaze over. One of the managers “ignored us as studiously as an alcoholic ignored hallucinations.”

The narrator does not compute. People’s minds slide frictionlessly off phenomena like a living zombie, or a sophisticated indigenous population, that threatens to complicate or upend the order of their world. Says the narrator of one colonist: “She couldn’t cope in an ordinary way… She did whatever she had to do in order not to blow her cork; she accepted the unacceptable.”

One colonist, juvenilely dubbed Peterkin, commits a murder. The investigation is half-assed; it’s another event the colonists can’t get their heads around. But the narrator has Peterkin figured out. Peterkin registers in turn that she seems more aware of the other zombies, and wants her gone. The other humans ignore and unsee things that bewilder them. Peterkin gets rid of them altogether.

You’d think he’d just whack her. Who’d notice? Instead he sets up indirect Wile E. Coyote traps—accidentally on purpose leaving her out on the ice, fiddling with the other zombies to make them attack her—which she foils by accident or by foresight. Peterkin is an ex-con with an implant preventing violent rages; its designers didn’t notice it wouldn’t stop cold, impersonal murders. On a literal level this explains why he resorts to death traps. But there’s a sense he can’t directly acknowledge the narrator is alive. An overt fight would break the rules of the game.

3.

For the narrator, undeath is play. She has free run of the colony as long as she pretends to follow orders. She happily occupies herself raiding the kitchen and sabotaging her work. At one point she destroys a domed city with an asteroid-sized glob of petroleum, an event she describes with the same distant affectlessness as the time she upends a tub of leftover salad on the guy directing the zombies on garbage duty.

One of the main arguments in David Graeber’s book The Utopia of Rules is about hierarchy and knowledge. Put simply, people at the bottom of a hierarchy understand much more about the people above them than vice versa. The people above have power over the people below, so the people below have to spend time and energy understanding who the uppers are, what they want, and how the system they all live under works; Graeber calls this interpretive labor. Conversely, the uppers have the same power over the lowers whether they understand the lowers or not.

As an assumed zombie, the narrator is so far below everyone else she’s completely illegible to the factory’s hierarchy—but, as the Fantastic Four could tell you, sometimes invisibility is a superpower. The narrator learns everything about the colonists while they learn nothing about her—and she loves it. Not that the asymmetry in interpretive labor doesn’t hurt her in some ways. And the people her fellow zombies were before they died, and the indigenous people of Land’s End. She occasionally takes a moment to snark about it. At one point one of the other zombies—who, remember, are actually the narrator having imaginary conversations—marvels at how he’s worth more to society as a corpse than he ever was alive.

But mostly she’s not thinking about this. She’s watching the colonists with mingled pity and contempt. They’re just as screwed by the information asymmetry—not that they’d ever know it. It’s the reason the narrator sees through Peterkin while the colonists find him irritating but don’t grasp that he’s a mortal danger. Their place in the pyramid of interpretive labor renders the colonists too ignorant even to keep themselves alive.

The narrator befriends the Land’s Enders, who can see perfectly well she’s alive. They don’t speak but can communicate telepathically through her implant. They think she’s different from other humans. She protests she’s just the only person who bothered to find anything out about them. The L.E.’s are aquatic; Land’s End is a water-world stuck in an artificial ice age. An atomic engine in just the right place will start a chain reaction and melt all the ice, turning Land’s End back into a planetary ocean, impossible to colonize.

So the narrator steals one. In another book this would be a major focus, a locus of complications and suspense, even the main plot. Instead, the narrator just grabs the engine from storage and walks out with it. It chugs away in the background for the rest of the book. No one is paying attention. The colonists think it’s peculiar that the ice is getting slushy but never understand what’s happening even after it dawns on them they need to evacuate. The counterintuitive way to handle a plot can be the right way: in a book about un-seeing, keeping the world-changing revolution and climate emergency in the background works thematically. And the way the colonists are slow to notice the planet warming up, even as their base progressively floods, resonates in the 21st century in ways Piserchia can’t have imagined.

4.

Like a lot of SFF from across the political spectrum I, Zombie celebrates rebellion. But the narrator does not openly, noisily protest. She’s not interested in rebellion as an identity. She looks for opportunities to take and exercise power from the place where she finds herself. Her social invisibility allows her to act as omniscient narrator and stage manager, directing the action around her while remaining unseen. She grabs the corporate pyramid from its base and inverts it, and no human ever realizes it. She’ll return to Earth with a new identity but will never be anyone’s hero.

Uniquely, I, Zombie turns social invisibility from an injustice into a wish-fulfillment fantasy for introverts, a celebration of solidarity between those who live in an industrial world but are too weird for industry. It’s a book about alienation in which alienation is pretty good, actually. I don’t think any other novel would take exactly this slant on this material. Piserchia’s point of view is unapologetically hers alone, and that’s as good an argument as any for why she still deserves to be read.

  1. She says she wasn’t intelligent, and says the zombification implants smartened her up like the guy in Flowers For Algernon. But her self-esteem isn’t the greatest and it’s hard to tell how literally we’re supposed to take this; she doesn’t come off as someone who’s spent her life failing to understand things.  ↩

On Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno’s Tone

Books, , , ,

1.

What I mean is, I’m writing on Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno’s book Tone, not their, y’know, tone. Although that’s interesting, too. This is imaginative criticism, not dryly analytical but poetic. Books about art can also be art.

Cover of Tone

Tone, as a literary concept, isn’t as easily defined as plot or character. “Tone” seems to mean less the more you repeat it. (Tone. Tone? Tone tone tone.) Online literary discourse (and it is mostly discourse, in its incarnation as the term for sniping and squabbling on various Twitter methadone sites, rather than discussion or conversation) hinges on plot, character, and visible surface politics, and not much else. Tone mostly comes up in the context of accusations that someone is trying to police it. You start to feel like any consideration of it is cop-brained.

But it does mean something, albeit something elusively complex; Samatar and Zambreno are approaching a definition, not declaring one finalized and laminated for safekeeping. Singular authority is what this book is running from; it’s written in first person plural for a reason.

2.

It’s not voice, for one thing. A book with a consistent tone can contain many voices and one voice can speak in different tones. Readers often have very different feelings about the first three Earthsea books and Tehanu. (I’m lukewarm on the former and loved the latter.) They’re all in Ursula K. Le Guin’s voice but she’s writing in different tones.

Some of the metaphors Samatar and Zambreno use to approach tone:

  • Windows. (Lighted windows, stained glass windows, computer windows.) A window frames what you see through it, maybe colors it. You can be inside looking out or outside looking in. Is this the difference between the writer and the reader? Which is which?

  • Synesthesia. Tone can be a color—some books are grey, some blue. Tone can be an odor or a background noise. Sense-impressions create atmospheres; atmospheres remind us of sense-impressions.

  • Speaking of atmospheres: Ecology. Tone is established through relationships—how the materials of a text relate to each other in a complex web, like the elements of an ecosystem.

Samatar and Zambreno illustrate their arguments with close readings of several novels, and their reading of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn lays out (even for someone like me who has not yet read it) how the ecological metaphor works. Samatar and Zambreno argue The Rings of Saturn has a distant tone, an atmosphere of parts:

  • The Rings of Saturn is structured by a long walk through Sussex—a distance travelled horizontally—after “a long stint of work.”
  • The book repeatedly watches things from heights—from a cliff, a plane, the top of a well.
  • There’s a model of the Temple of Jerusalem, which not only seems distant—we look down on models like we’re looking from a great height—but models something distant in time. The novel ponders the history of the territory the narrator walks (and “the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place”), and also thinks for a while about the 17th century writer Thomas Browne.
  • Sebald’s prose is itself old-fashioned, temporally distanced, originally written in an archaically-tinged German.

Writers arrange images, incidents, and language to resonate against (or with) each other. And then this feedback loop happens: the resonance becomes an organizing principle in itself; readers interpret images, incidents, and language through the tone.

3.

Tone is a general exploration of tone, and also offers readings of several specific books, and at a certain point you realize you’re also reading cultural criticism. Samatar and Zambreno are writing about the tone of the world—the affective atmospheres we breathe without noticing.

The books Tone analyzes, in relation to each other, set a tone—Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, about a Black woman academic; Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, about a writer working a temp job at an Amazon warehouse; Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory, about people working absurd, meaningless jobs; Sebald’s meditations, which take in historical disasters. Samatar and Zambreno investigate tones specific to their own experiences as women in 21st century academia (the atmosphere breathed by a visiting scholar, for instance) and more broadly the tone of the world everyone shares, where capitalism is a sickening and collapsing end in itself instead of a means.

Tone is about the relations between elements in a text, but it’s also about seeing the relations between people in a culture that atomizes us and nudges us into an individualist mindset: we’re the hero, others supporting extras. In the end, Tone concludes, the book has been as much about “making a space where certain things can be said” as about tone itself.

Good criticism, like any other kind of good writing, has got to do more than one thing at a time.

4.

These points where Samatar and Zambreno talk about tone in ecological terms struck me hardest. Another word for an ecosystem is the environment. “Environment” can also mean a social or cultural or architectural environment. In any case it’s an arrangement of materials that relate to each other in particular ways and create particular effects (or affects), and we are among those materials in both senses of the word.

In the Peanuts strip that ran August 11, 1970, Linus is just back from a trip. Everywhere he went he saw the same malls and motels and restaurants they had back home. “Every town looks like every other town… It doesn’t matter where you go… you never left!”

A lot of SFF books—popular fiction in general, really, but SFF is the genre where I keep most up to date—feel like featureless lumps of gray teflon. My attention slides off them. I’ve always found the reasons hard to pin down—nebulous and most likely myriad. But one piece of the puzzle that is my alienation from pop culture is likely a loss of cultural biodiversity. 21st century SFF favors reboots and retellings. It’s marketed as bullet lists of safely familiar “tropes” legoed together into microtargeted subgenres. Every book needs its comp titles; the most marketable use mostly the same materials in mostly the same configurations.

Tone is part of this. High-profile SFF stays within a limited range of marketable tones—straightforwardly invisible, snarky, heartwarming, spunky (this last usually written in first person present tense). SFF paints deep space, fairyland, and contemporary New York in the same tones; they color the speech of medieval Europe, the Paleolithic tundra, and posthuman Pluto. Tonally, these stories are interchangeable geography-of-nowhere theme park suburbs. A literature where, no matter where you are in space or time, you can always get McDonalds.

(It’s easy to see why media execs are comfortable with AI art: AI is inherently remixed, no potentially off-putting tone of its own. A portfolio of proven successes blended into a palatable Soylent shake.)

Samatar and Zambreno quote a speaker at a conference who says Kafka’s style is unlike any other kind of German, like a “meteor” fallen to earth. What with the books’s focus on relationships I don’t feel like it makes sense to talk about this as individuality of tone. Maybe specificity is the right word. Kafka compels because the tone of his work, like the language, is determinedly specific.

Samatar and Zambreno write that the most compelling reason to return to a book is “to breathe that air again.” But first it needs air of its own.

On Stanislaw Lem’s The Chain of Chance

Books, Speculative Fiction, ,

The Chain of Chance is, first, not a direct translation of the title. The book’s Wikipedia entry—not the greatest source, I know—renders it as Catarrh, or Rhinitis. Hay fever. Not a disease, an annoyance.

1.

Cover of The Chain of Chance

What’s most striking about The Chain of Chance is its structure, which is not conventional at all. (As we’ll see, this book’s themes are directly integrated into the structure and the prose. This is something a lot of SFF could learn from!) The first section is a rambling avalanche of frustrations, raindrops building to a storm of aggravation. The narrator, John, is driving to Rome. Severe allergies clog his sinuses. It’s too hot and too humid. Traffic is heavy; the fan blows exhaust fumes in his face. It looks like rain but the storm won’t break, until suddenly it’s a downpour. “My stomach felt like a lump of dough, my head was on fire, and stuck to my heart was a sensor that caught on my suspenders every time I turned the wheel.”

John doesn’t explain what he’s up to. He doesn’t notice he hasn’t explained it. He’s the guy next to you on the plane who spends the flight pouring out his least interesting troubles. We pick out the plot from sporadic details like that sensor: John is posing as a dead man named Adams, using his belongings, monitored by electrodes as he follows Adams’ last journey. How Adams died is a mystery; John imitates his actions precisely, hoping for clues along the way.

Before he took this job John was an astronaut. He didn’t get past orbit, disqualified by allergies. Even his memories of space are annoyances: chasing down floating crumbs and dandruff with a vacuum in zero-G, readjusting to gravity when he came back down.

John stops at a gas station. It’s empty except for a woman who walks in and for some reason faints. What does this mean? Does it mean anything? Just because something seems anomalous, is it important?

An escalator in the station starts when John comes near and stops when he leaves as though, John thinks, it’s announcing the end of a scene.[1] But there’s no intent there, just a sensor. A mechanical process.

2.

Stymied, John flies to Paris, where his journey started. (He still hasn’t gone into details. Who was Adams? Who’s interested in his death, and what’s mysterious about it?) He’s delayed by an airport bombing.

You might assume this is a plot point. It is later, although not in the way you’d expect. For now it’s a thematic bomb. The Chain of Chance was published in 1975 and in the early 1970s terrorism was on everybody’s mind—there was an epidemic of hijackings (over 130 between 1968 and 1972), and Italy was deep in the Years of Lead. In 1975 a bomb would have seemed a logical way to inconvenience the protagonist of a novel in an Italian airport.

Terrorism feels uncanny. The victims are random. The perpetrators are distant, unseen; there’s no direct link. The motive is impersonal—somebody thinks they have to make a point (or that they have a point at all) and to make it they’re going to kill… I dunno, let’s see, maybe you? We don’t know who the somebody is but we know there’s a somebody. When disasters happen in patterns we expect someone is causing them for a reason, an enemy we can fight. As one character observes in an entirely different context, “It’s always convenient to know who’s to blame for everything.”

3.

In the 1960s a programmer named Joseph Weizenbaum created a program called ELIZA. ELIZA was what we’d call a chatbot. It could have followed any number of scripts, but Weizenbaum set it up as what’s known as a Rogerian psychotherapist. (This is the ELIZA we’re all familiar with today, but Weizenbaum called this script DOCTOR.) The technique involves asking open questions and reflecting the patient’s answers back to them, which could be simulated simply by saying things like “That’s quite interesting,” and “Can you elaborate on that?” and occasionally regurgitating whatever the “patient” just typed (“You say the owls are not what they seem?”). What Rogerian psychotherapists thought of all this is not recorded.

In his book Computer Power and Human Reason Weizenbaum described what happened next.[2] When he suggested recording conversations with ELIZA colleagues objected that this “amounted to spying on people’s most intimate thoughts.” Not that Weizenbaum was cool with spying on intimate thoughts, but it hadn’t occurred to him anyone would share intimate thoughts with ELIZA. People were treating ELIZA like a real therapist. Even Weizenbaum’s secretary asked him to leave the room so she could chat privately. Three psychiatrists (including his colleague Kenneth Colby) writing in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease saw a future where “Several hundred patients an hour could be handled by a computer system.” To Weizenbaum this was weird and creepy. Any real therapeutic relationship is based on empathy. How could anyone think this half-assed algorithm was capable of empathy?

Pareidolia is the psychological quirk that makes you see unintended images—often faces—in random or meaningless arrangements of shapes. It’s what’s happening when an electrical outlet looks like a surprised little guy, or when you see a major religious figure in your English muffin. It’s a form of apophenia, the temptation to find meaning in things that aren’t meaningful or even connected. Like, lefty urbanists sometimes insist cities don’t plant fruit trees along the streets due to active collusion between planning departments and supermarket owners, who meet in smoky backrooms nationwide to prevent free food. Nobody thinks of the ordinary and obvious fact—because it’s not an interesting story—that fruit leaves a goddamn mess on the sidewalk. This story takes isolated data points—ornamental trees don’t have fruit, business owners don’t like competition, they’re often tight with local politicians—and perceived a pattern that isn’t there. That’s a form of apophenia.

Humans also tend to anthropomorphize inanimate objects; some small corner in every human mind will see a stuck Roomba banging around under a couch and imagine it’s frightened. Sometimes people see more humanity in objects than humans. The point of all this being that no one who has accidentally sent a text message about ducks thinks the autotext feature on their phone is smart, but put a better version of the algorithm in a different context and you’ll convince a lot of people—educated people, even—they’re talking to Deep Thought. People like to see people and, more than anything else in the world, people want to believe in agency.

4.

Stymied, John visits Dr. Barth, a computer scientist who consults with the Sûreté. We’re halfway through the book and up to now we’ve had to piece the plot together by picking relevant details out of a torrent of grumbles, but here John finally explains what’s going on.

John’s story is the best kind of telling instead of showing, not a dramatization but a report. It’s a long chunk of exposition, but efficient. The Chain of Chance takes advantage of its status as prose and doesn’t draw the explanation out with flashback scenes or extra dialogue. Lem loved crossing fiction and nonfiction; he was a master of storytelling through exposition and his novels include Borgesian volumes of reviews and introductions to nonexistent books.

Adams was one of a series of men—all middle-aged, all single, all balding, all with allergies—who visited a spa famous for its sulfur baths. Each one subsequently developed paranoid delusions—hinting they were on to some mysterious journalistic scoop, or being hounded by terrorists. (Apophenia again.) Finally each man either committed suicide or died through accidents so careless they might as well have been intentional. Adams’ family noticed the similarities and hired John to make sense of this—not that he’s had much luck. Is it a poison? Is someone testing a chemical weapon? Why balding, allergic men, and why single—is that part of the profile, or did they just not have anyone to notice their strange behavior and get help? Just because it’s a point of commonality, is it important? John isn’t sure what details to pick out; he’s been reading the situation the same way we read the first sections of the novel.

5.

Dr. Barth introduces John to a colleague, Dr. Saussure (no relation). Dr. Saussure doesn’t have a solution but he does have a hunch, expressed in metaphor: imagine a table held together with nails, the nail-heads visible on its surface. Imagine a drop of water perfectly positioned on each nail. You’d conclude someone had been by with an eyedropper. But leave the table out in a rainstorm and of course the nails will be wet, no eyedropper required: in a storm some drops will inevitably hit.

Or imagine a fly landing on a firing range. To hit the fly with a single bullet would be impressive marksmanship. But what about a real fusillade, a room packed with bullets? Shoot long enough, and one’s bound to hit. The dead fly would only impress you if you didn’t notice the misses, if your perceptions were somehow limited to that single bullet.

As an astronaut, John had a metaphorical long-distance view of humanity; he could take in the entire world at one glance. On Earth, he’s one of the flies on the firing range.

6.

Here John returns to his catalogue of annoyances. Chief among them is a tabloid suggesting impropriety between John and the young woman who survived the bombing with him; he’s pissed off enough to get careless. In his angrily random roamings he ingests exactly the wrong combination of snacks, allergy medicine, and shampoo—and now he stumbles into the solution to the mystery, nearly adding to the list of victims in the process. The dead men weren’t poisoned by people. What drove them to suicide was an unlikely chemical reaction involving sulfur, allergy medicine, hair tonic, and candied almonds (hey, everybody likes candy).

Lem opens a chapter of his novel Fiasco by insisting “That which mathematically has an extremely low probability also has this characteristic: that it may nevertheless sometimes happen.” Lem keeps coming back to chance and contingency; when he published a book of literary theory he called it The Philosophy of Chance.[3] The Investigation is another mystery where the villain may be an improbable natural process. His Master’s Voice offers this as one possible explanation for an apparently alien signal.

Any wild improbability may be inevitable including, the last line suggests, the writing of The Chain of Chance, a novel that looks at the twentieth century and sees more people alive than at any point in history and a world moving faster every year. This is a human rainstorm: every day enough people take enough weird and random actions to hit every spot on every table and then some.

Surely such a complex repeating pattern must have been planned? But a lot of people die, and a lot of those deaths also have complex backstories, and a lot of those backstories inevitably happen more than once. It’s just that no one picked those specific wet nails out of the many raindrops hitting the table, assumed they’d found a pattern, and deduced intent. John’s investigation is based in the same kind of apophenia the dead men experienced.

Of course, there is an intent behind The Chain of Chance: Lem’s. But we aren’t living in a novel. We can’t read the world like a story. A lot of political discourse is real people fanfiction about the machinations of perceived enemies who are in reality confused and fumbling. Banal contingencies become plots. Anyone who is at all online has seen people confabulate elaborate stories to explain why strangers took actions that were in fact unimportant or random. Think of the people on Nextdoor who see a van driving slowly and warn that burglers are casing the neighborhood when it was just some guy looking for an address.

Purpose and agency are weirdly comforting even when they seem malevolent. Things don’t just happen. Someone is running the game even if it’s rigged against you. Anyone who’s read a detective novel knows mysteries are caused by villains, and at the end of the story the villain will be revealed. You can do things about villains: arrest them, or fight them, or at least call them out. You can’t call out a random combination of chemicals. You can broadcast warnings and pass laws and regulations; but they take a lot of work, and the work doesn’t feel like a fun adventure, and anyway there’s only so much you can do to protect people from their own haplessness. In that sense a villain is, oddly, less frightening. The Chain of Chance is a detective novel where the villains are nature, chance, and apophenia. These are the enemy more often than most of us would care to admit.

  1. Which is is, but only from the reader’s perspective.  ?
  2. I have read just excerpts of this book and would like to read the whole thing… but it’s out of print, used copies are expensive, and the available ebook for some reason consists of page images cut in half and displayed sideways.  ?
  3. As far as I know this has never been translated into English but there’s a summary at that Wikipedia page.  ?

On James Tiptree, Jr.’s Up the Walls of the World

Books, Speculative Fiction,

(Spoilers from the first line this time!)

1.

Cover of Up the Walls of the World

Late in Up the Walls of the World, after the human protagonist Dr. Daniel Dann has transcended his mortal existence, the book throws a good-natured jab at 2001: A Space Odyssey: “I’m not going to be reborn as the embryo of humanity transcendent in the cosmos,” thinks Dann. “I’ll just be me.”

Up the Walls of the World was out of print for years. (It’s back now, as an appallingly typo-strewn ebook.) Tiptree’s novels don’t have a great reputation. They’re not as brilliantly intense as her stories; Tiptree dilutes with length. But Up the Walls of the World is still great (and better than 2001 the novel, which has its moments but mostly survives on the coattails of the superior movie).

UtWotW is structured as two alternating and converging strands with occasional interjections from a standard-issue MYSTERIOUS ALL CAPS ENTITY. Tivonel, a telepathic flying manta from the gaseous planet Tyree,[1] travels to the Wall of the World to hook up with an old lover. Her tryst is interrupted by her world’s impending destruction and certain Tyreeans’ plans to escape via interplanetary mind-swap. Meanwhile, Dr. Dann consults on a military experiment in telepathic communication while managing the drug habit that numbs his overwhelming empathy. His determination to detach from humanity is shaken when he finds himself attracted to the equally distant computer programmer Margaret Omali. (UtWotW could have stumbled here—Margaret is a generation younger than Dann, rather Spock-like in personality, and Black, and Dann initially exoticizes her a little. It would have made for an awkward romance. But where a modern SFF novel might consider romance obligatory, here their relationship settles into a more interesting friendship.) After a series of telepathic contacts and human/alien body swaps everyone ends up as telepathic presences crewing an alien machine built to preserve life from dying worlds—an apparent Destroyer that, in an anomalously eucatastrophic move for Tiptree, turns out to be a Saver.

Up the Walls of the World tells its story in a present-tense third person that sticks close to the point of view characters but allows itself moments of omniscience to let us know what they don’t. (Dann, for instance, doesn’t understand how much better his patients feel after they talk to him, even as he pulls away.)

Tivonel’s voice is all exclamation points and excited questions. She uses the word “how” primarily to marvel at things: How thrilling, how huge, how beautiful, how incredible. (Tivonel thinks less often about how to do things. She just does them.) And there’s something to marvel at everywhere, or in almost everyone. Everything is rich, strong, intense; colors are everywhere.

Dr. Dann’s internal monologue introduces itself by repeating the phrase “as usual.” He’s prone to short sentences and cursory observations, occasionally almost telegraphic. (“Specimen of young deskbound Naval intelligence executive: coarse-minded, clean-cut, a gentleman to the ignorant eye.”) Dann notices what annoys him: asinine projects, substandard door frames, disgusting electrode paste, Naval intelligence executives. The first person he pays detailed attention to is the ironically named Lt. Kirk, who Dann can’t stand. Conversely, he thinks of his patients as their code numbers (“Subject R–95”) to keep them at arm’s length, not because he doesn’t care about them but because in his experience caring hurts. (He warms to them as the book progresses, to his alarm.) Margaret’s POV enters after she leaves her body behind; her chapters are heavy on abstraction and computer metaphors. She sees herself as “ghostly circuitry.”

Tiptree being Tiptree the novel pokes at gender. The Tyreeans swap human gender roles—men carry and raise young and are more emotionally intelligent, women are more action-oriented—but still privilege male activities. Lt. Kirk is everything the Tyreean men aren’t, a symbol of self-destructive male aggression; he’s introduced after kicking a computer and almost castrating himself on the cooling fan. When he’s mind-swapped he ends up as a child—he’s the one with the most to learn from the Tyreeans. But to the extent anyone talks about Up the Walls of the World, gender is the thing they’ve talked about already. I felt more like writing about two points relating back to the quotation at the top of the post.

2.

“I’ll just be me,” thinks Dann, and he will continue to be himself for some time. Visionary or psychedelic SF stories like 2001 often end on a moment of transcendence, where the main character levels up in a cod-evolutionary sense. It’s a metaphorical epiphany, the moment after which everything is different. But we don’t learn how everything is different; the next stage of existence is indescribable. (Or the next world. Closely related are stories that transport the protagonist into the future, or an alien world, but end before we see it because it’s too wonderful to describe.)

It’s the end of the story (2001, Lafferty’s Fourth Mansions, the movies The Black Hole or Repo Man). Or the POV characters watch someone else transcend (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Clarke’s Childhood’s End, the sublimed civilizations haunting the background of Banks’ Culture novels). Or the character de-transcends for the epilogue, returning to ordinary life happier or wiser but not much different. (This risks bathos. Either intentionally, as with the wickedly cynical punchline of Dick’s Galactic Pot-Healer, or unintentionally, as in “Threshold” from Star Trek: Voyager, unrecognized cousin to 2001: For a moment Tom Paris is omniscient, existing everywhere in the universe at once; the writers can’t imagine what comes next and in desperation turn him into a mudskipper.)

What’s the transcendent ending doing? At the simplest level, it’s a literalized metaphor. A novel is supposed to end with the protagonist changed, in a new phase of their life, ideally wiser. Ascending to a new evolutionary phase makes the change more concrete…

…But also more abstract. Growing as a person is good in itself, but in a realist novel we can also appreciate what the protagonist has learned and guess what they’re going to do next—assuming this isn’t a tragedy, where the protagonist won’t be doing anything next—because we know what life looks like. They’ll marry the guy they’d assumed was a jerk; or move back to the midwest and forget about joining the beautiful people; or go on another, hopefully less doomed, whaling voyage. Becoming a space embryo is vaguer. What does an ascended energy being do, besides hassling starship captains? What has it learned that our puny human minds can comprehend? We don’t know what transcendence means; we’re just meant to be impressed these guys transcended. At worst the transcendent SF climax is the idea of wisdom without the specifics, an escapist fantasy for SFF fans who like to congratulate themselves on how much more expanded their minds are than everyone else’s.

So the human and Tyreean cast of Up the Walls of the World ascend to a new existence as pure minds. What’s interesting is that where other stories end there, Tiptree carries on well beyond that point.

“For though he was master of the world,” says 2001, “he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.” Up the Walls of the World says: Okay. So think of something, already. So you evolved. What do you do with that?[2] What’s transcendence for? One of Tiptree’s humans loses himself in a dream world. For a while the Tyreeans live in a virtual recreation of Tyree. But what’s the point of that existence?

Margaret, having taken control of the Saver, knows its crew needs a task. Possibilities flit through Dann’s mind in a rush of em-dashes: its powers can rescue endangered species, turn back and rerun time to save lost civilizations, stop wars. Tivonel, characteristically, wants to try everything. But the important thing is to engage with the world and contribute to the general struggle against entropy instead of retreating into self-absorption. Up the Walls of the World argues growth can be an end in itself but declaring it the end is a failure of imagination. Wisdom isn’t knowing the secrets of the universe; it’s knowing what to do with them.

3.

“I’ll just be me,” thinks Dann, chagrined his cosmic transformation hasn’t granted wisdom: “But what new great necessities have I discovered, beyond the old necessity of kindness?”

On Tyree the Wall of the world is a giant stable windstorm, a mountain of air currents allowing the Tyreeans to climb high into the atmosphere. Only at the top of the Wall can Tyreean telepaths listen to other planets and, if sufficiently morally flexible, swap bodies with aliens.

The arc for these characters is about learning to go over the walls between people. Learning not to fear empathy. Dr. Dann spends the early chapters trying to be colder than he really is because he fears other people’s pain. In one of Tiptree’s more obvious metaphors, as a Tyreean Dann gains an empathic healing ability but has to feel his patients’ pain to heal them. Acknowledging others’ pain can be painful in itself, especially if we’re even indirectly implicated. And comprehending the reality of other people. Some Tyreeans are steal human bodies because to them the humans are supporting characters while they’re the protagonists. But this works the other way around: as an empathic being Dann understands “the reality of a different human world. A world in which he is a passing phenomenon, as she was in mine.” For a Tiptree story this thing is startlingly warm-hearted.

For the first time he has really grasped life’s most eerie lesson: The Other Exists. Cliché, he thinks dazedly. Cliché, like the big ones.

And, yeah, you understand why Dann isn’t that impressed by his own insights. Stated baldly, this is a cliché. Look at it one way and all Up the Walls of the World is saying is that people should be more patient with each other. Tiptree is almost apologizing here for abandoning her usual melancholy, like a goth embarrassed to be caught watching the Lawrence Welk Show. It’s like she’s asking: is this really all I’m saying?

I feel like I need to defend Up the Walls of the World from its own narrative. Stated baldly most moral insights—Dann’s “big ones”—sound like clichés. Any incompetent critic in a bad enough mood can reduce any novel to the bit at the end of the He-Man cartoon where Orko belabors the moral for the less attentive children. And some writing is satisfied with that. The equation of happiness with shallowness is itself a cliché, but it’s a cliché with some basis: the history of SFF is littered with stories written to soothe the reader with reassuring platitudes. (Although the problem isn’t only the stories telling us love conquers all, or the modern variations about how finding a properly affirming friend group solves everything—the hard SF story written to tell its readers how intelligent and tough-minded they are is the same candy, just in a different flavor.)

The real question is whether a story expects the reader to be satisfied with the platitude. And I think Up the Walls of the World passes that test. Whatever doubts the book puts in Dann’s mouth, this happy ending is hard-won; climbing those walls is difficult in ways UtWotW can only express in metaphors, not morals. As the novel ends not everyone’s problems have been solved. Again, the point of the last chapters is that transcendence means ongoing work.

Most stories circle around insights that are both profound and ordinary. Sometimes the difference between bad writing and good is simply that bad writing flattens eternal truths into cheap morals, while good writing finds complexity hidden under clichés.

  1. One of the literary aliens Wayne Douglas Barlowe illustrated for his book Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials.  ↩

  2. To be fair, in 2001 the novel, unlike the movie, the Star Child does do something, usefully vaporizing some weapons satellites.  ↩

Olga Ravn, The Employees

Books, Speculative Fiction

There’s an obvious visual difference between Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Where Kirk’s Enterprise looked like a sterile battleship, Picard’s looks like an office. Soothingly beige, carpeted, with comfy chairs and the occasional potted plant. (Most of the waiting rooms I’ve known in my life have felt very Enterprise D-ish, which is fine by me; who’d want to wait for their dental appointment in a battleship?).

It’s not just an office, of course. The Federation is meant to be a utopia, so the Enterprise is also a home and community. Everybody hangs out in the lounge, attends concerts and amateur drama, gets plenty of free time for hobbies. Everybody on Star Trek: The Next Generation has a great work-life balance.

Cover of The Employees

The Six Thousand Ship, the setting of Olga Ravn’s The Employees, is something else. Among the themes of The Employees is an approach to space travel I haven’t often seen: if a starship is a workplace, its crew has nothing but their workplace, floating in an empty void. It’s implied the Six Thousand Ship’s crew signed up for a one-way journey—it won’t return to Earth in the crew’s lifetimes. Much of the novel is an exploration of the psychological effects, the damage done when there’s literally nothing outside of “productivity.”

Space is the corporate dream: the one place your employees can’t walk off the job. Not if they want to keep breathing.

The Employees is structured as a series of statements to managers holding listening sessions to “gain knowledge of the local workflows.” The statements are anonymous. We rarely hear a name. The protagonist is the whole crew. Given SFF’s emphasis on worldbuilding, it’s weird it doesn’t do fictional mass observation more often. Adventure stories or bildungsromans starring singular heroes are the default, to the point the average SFF fan might think The Employees is more experimental than it really is. SFF tells stories about different worlds, but defaults to focusing on how those differences affect a singular, special, hero as they chase self-actualization. Even SFF novels with multiple POV characters (i.e., A Game of Thrones) often feel less like social novels than like multiple hero stories broken up and braided together. The Employees is instead a portrait of a society.

Toiling alongside the human employees are “humanoids,” artificial workers indistinguishable from humans. (We often don’t know whether a statement is made by a human or a humanoid.) Humanoids were built to work. They don’t know Earth, they have no experience of anything but employment. One is baffled to hear a human colleague say there’s more to a person than their work: “what else could a person be?”

The human employees find themselves nostalgic for everything they had on Earth—family, nature, shopping. They sound surprised. These weren’t feelings they’d expected to have. Some employees keep simulated holographic children as substitute family. Eggs are a recurring image. One employee dreams about tiny spheres like fish eggs breaking out of their skin. In the real world human employees come down with cases of warts, like the dream is trying incompetently to come true. The humans disappear into their roles, becoming interchangeable parts: “As long as you’re in the suit and pass through the corridor to be cleansed, you’re the first officer.” Later there’s a mutiny and the ship’s funeral director doesn’t know how to respond as anything but a funeral director: “I haven’t always felt that my capabilities were being utilized to the full.”

In this environment employees’ full potential as people goes unused and unusable—humans and humanoids both.

As I write this internet junkies have gathered to morbidly gawk at the train wreck that is Elon Musk’s Twitter, which he is running like the world’s drunkest railway signalman. Paid verifications let pranksters pose as his advertisers! People can’t log in because he turned off the two-factor authentication server! He’s getting dangerously close to violating the GDPR!

Most relevantly, as soon as Musk bought Twitter he laid off half the work force, on the theory that anybody left could just work harder. Many have. One proudly posted a photo of herself sleeping at the office, which provoked horror but also some cheering from Musk fans, one declaring “This is how great new things are built.” Which… they’re built badly, but, yeah, this is how a lot of the tech industry works. It’s a standard part of the stereotype: clownish startups filling their headquarters with cereal bars and foosball tables in a vainly half-assed effort to take the edge off long days in the office. Video games are built on “crunch.” Musk demanded his ever-shrinking pool of workers sign a loyalty oath declaring their willingness to be “extremely hardcore” which means working “long hours at high intensity.” The workplace comes first. (Nothing outside of productivity.) In a development that surprised Musk and absolutely no one else, most of the remaining employees took severance instead. That’s where space comes in!

The humanoids suspect something is missing. The humans who identify with their jobs are suffering cognitive dissonance over a bad and irrevocable career choice. Having no past to look back on gives the humanoids time to look at their present, and they’re not sure they want to be tools. At the same time they’re growing their curiosity and optimism as fast as the humans lose it. The company can upload and redownload the humanoids’ minds; they’re likely to survive after the humans are gone. Maybe they’ll someday see Earth. Maybe they can survive on the alien planet the Six Thousand Ship has been studying. “I may have been made,” says one, “but now I’m making myself.”

The statements keep circling back to “the objects,” artifacts from the planet, which hold a strange fascination for the crew. They’re called “the objects” because nobody knows what else they could be. They look like eggs, or tubes, or stones. Sometimes they feel alive. “It’s a dangerous thing for an organization not to be sure which of the objects in its custody may be considered to be living,” says one person. They could be talking about the objects, or the humanoids, or the whole crew.

The objects are the reason The Employees was written in the first place—if you want to get metafictional, you might say they were there at the creation of the crew’s universe. The objects are based on the work of a sculptor named Lea Guldditte Hestelund who asked Olga Ravn to write a text for an exhibition, which became The Employees. The novel mentions the Six Thousand Ship has white walls and orange and gray floors. So does the museum space in the photos at the site I just linked. We’re probably meant to visualize the ship as resembling the real-world museum.

The crew doesn’t understand their own feelings towards the objects; they’re both attracted and disquieted. (A quietly throbbing egg is not as straightforward as a foosball table.) Maybe the objects, in their sheer inscrutability, are envoys from outside the bounds of the crew’s imagination. If these objects are beyond understanding or conception, what other possibilities are they missing? The crew who’ve experienced life outside of work, who know what they’ve lost in moving to a world of pure productivity, are making their imaginations smaller to adjust. It’s that or stop breathing.

“I think you need to imagine a future and then live in it,” says one crew member.

Have I mentioned Elon Musk is the guy who wants to run a Mars colony? I think he’d get takers. Americans are carving away at their imaginations as you read this.

Microworlds and All Systems Red

Books, Speculative Fiction,

Recent Reading 2022–01

Microworlds

Cover of Microworlds

In 1973, the Science Fiction Writers of America gave Stanislaw Lem an honorary membership. In 1976, they found an excuse to take it away. They’d found out what Lem thought of science fiction, and SFF culture is deeply petty. Lem was one of the genre’s harshest critics and Microworlds is 280 pages of what the SFWA was reacting to.

What’s striking about Microworlds is how relevant it feels, though it was published forty years ago and collects essays that are even older. A running theme is Lem’s belief that science fiction’s pulp roots—in his view, its status as a commercial genre—holds it back. One point he keeps coming back to is that science fiction is intensely conformist in the kinds of stories it tells; most defaults to adventure stories or detective stories, and the resulting novels lack the tools to grapple with the bigger themes they gesture towards. And, yeah… this is a phenomenon I’m familiar with even from current SFF.

And Lem calls fans out on that two-step maneuver where they insist science fiction is important literature—maybe the most important literature of all—but when it’s subjected to serious criticism they pull back and insist it’s just entertainment and the critics are being pretentious. SFF fans pull this one out on a regular basis to this day. Fandom likes to congratulate themselves on how much SFF has evolved, but the truth is today’s SFF has a lot of the same problems it had back in the “golden age.”

All Systems Red

Speaking of not grappling with themes…

Cover of All Systems Red

Martha Wells’ Murderbot series has snagged a couple of Hugo awards. In early 2022 I decided I should finally get around to reading the first book, All Systems Red. (Yes, it’s been that long since I took notes for this review.) It’s fine, I guess. It’s entertaining on the same level as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche or one of the better Star Trek novels. I’d have been more impressed if that were what I’d expected going in. SFF grade inflation strikes again.

This is one of the many SFF novels that don’t recognize their own best ideas, or push them far enough. Murderbot is a “SecUnit,” ostensibly a security robot, though in fact it’s (it goes by “it”) a human being with cyborg parts. Murderbot loves television. All it wants to do is watch television and it’s constantly telling us how it spends every spare moment on its shows. But it doesn’t tell us what its favorite shows are like. This is a large and weird narrative hole. First, a chance for fun metafictional commentary on science fiction is left on the table. More importantly, this is a missed opportunity to characterize both the narrator and its world. What stories does Murderbot gravitate to? What kind of stories get told? (Or what kind of propaganda? Because corporations are in charge here and, as in our world, TV is corporate IP.) How are this world’s stories different from our stories, in broad outline or in detail? How does Murderbot’s life differ from the clichés? We don’t find out.

Which means they effectively aren’t different. All Systems Red leans on the reader’s knowledge of what television looks like to fill in the gap. This is admirably baldfaced pandering—Murderbot’s a media fan, just like you! (It reminds me of how so many musicals are about musicals, because the one topic the entire audience is certain to care about is musicals.) But the whole book feels sketched in. We don’t get a sense of what the protagonists’ spaceship or habitat module is like because we’re assumed to already have usable mental models for “spaceship” and “sci-fi base.” We don’t know what Murderbot’s armor looks like because we have a mental model for “space armor.” No good novel catalogs every detail of every environment, but they will offer surprising or thematically relevant details to pull readers away from our mental defaults. Here we’re working with our defaults.

The human characters are an indistinguishable mass. There’s a sympathetic one, a paranoid one, and some other ones. The book could be doing this on purpose to signal Murderbot’s disinterest, but it’s hard to tell.

All Systems Red is one of those books that start in media res with an action scene. These openings make it hard to care what’s happening. We don’t know yet who anyone is, or what world they live in, and can’t put the action in context. It feels like All Systems Red never gives enough context. The narration is a bald and mechanically paced description of events in a generic first person that could easily be converted to third person (a popular default style in contemporary SFF). This happened, then this, then this. Murderbot only narrates what’s happening right now; the structure of the novel doesn’t let it think back or stop to contemplate.

This could be clever, because the book works like a recap of a TV episode where events play out at a steady pace and what isn’t “on screen” isn’t important. But I’m not sure the book is doing this thoughtfully. One important event in Murderbot’s past needed more exploration. This event would have been a traumatic turning point in its life. It would be the first thing to affect how anyone who knew of it thought of Murderbot. But after a brief initial allusion the book mentions this event only a couple of times, briefly, when it comes up in dialogue. The book’s straight-ahead moment-to-moment style doesn’t allow exploration of Murderbot’s past, and doesn’t allow introspection. Murderbot thinks about one of the most significant moments of its life slightly more often than it thinks about rutabagas, and with similar emotional weight.

The end reveals the entire novel was a letter from Murderbot to another character explaining its decision to strike out on its own, rejecting both the security corporation and the second-class citizenship experienced by free cyborgs. But until the reveal the novel doesn’t read like a letter, and at no point does it read like a letter meant to explain anything. Murderbot describes events but rarely has opinions on them beyond mild annoyance at anything that isn’t television. Until the decisive moment all it seems to want is to slide through life with minimal awkwardness or responsibility. The novel never feels like an argument for why Murderbot would make this risky and uncertain decision now, as opposed to any other point in its life. Murderbot has an epiphany just because there’s one scheduled for the end of the novel.

All Systems Red doesn’t explain what it claims to be explaining. It’s more like… well, we can see it’s wrong for SecUnits to be second-class citizens, and we’re meant to identify with Murderbot, so it should be able to see what we do. So we fill in the book’s argument like we filled in the nature of the spaceships and the armor and the planet this all happened on. This book is not about what it wants to be about in any meaningful way.

I’m normally happy when a book hands me implications and asks me to fill in the gaps, but it doesn’t feel like All Systems Red is implying anything. What’s explicit is meant to be enough.

This is not exactly a review of All Systems Red. I mean, it is, but I wouldn’t have bothered to write it if I didn’t have these exact frustrations with so much other science fiction and fantasy. So much popular SFF is so thin. (And by no means am I only talking about current SFF here—but the older thin books are no longer popular.)

It’s not that the All Systems Reds of SFF are bad books. They’re skilled, professional novels. But it feels like that skill and professionalism is focused on streamlining books down to nothing more than a plot and a moral, precision-engineering away any accidental subtext or ambiguity. The resulting novels have skins, and skeletons, but not much of a heart.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Asleep in the Sun

Books, Speculative Fiction,

For the last few months I’ve let my blog lay silent, as happens from time to time. I had covid in December of last year and the time I spent resting put the brakes on my momentum. My attention span also hasn’t been great, so it’s taken me this long to return to blogging.

To get started again I plan to finish a few reviews I took notes towards months ago. This is one of them.

Cover of Asleep in the Sun

Asleep in the Sun is the last Adolfo Bioy Casares book readily available in English I’d yet to read. (There are more, but they’re out of print. Someday I’ll hunt down secondhand copies.) Bioy Casares was a friend and colleague of Jorge Luis Borges, the husband of Silvina Ocampo, and the author of The Invention of Morel, which I’m convinced is one of the most significant yet undervalued science fiction novels of the 1940s. Asleep in the Sun doesn’t reach those heights, but it’s good.

Bioy Casares benefitted from a publishing environment that didn’t categorize books too rigidly. The novel starts as a domestic comedy only to turn into a science fiction story about a mad scientist in what feels like an abrupt swerve. But the SF plot is there from the beginning, unrecognized by the narrator. Bioy Casares has a talent for laying unnoticed threads, then pulling them together into an unexpected plot.

(Spoilers follow. As with Morel, this is a book where you might want your first reading to surprise you.)

Our narrator is Lucio Bordenave. It’s way too easy to talk Lucio into things against his better judgement. He works at a bank but repairs clocks as a side hustle. If the foreman of the Lorenzutti factory wants Lucio to repair the factory clock he may say “I wouldn’t take it for a hundred dollars,” but he’ll wind up working on it.

And when his wife Diana’s friend, a dog trainer, insists she’s unstable and needs a stay in the local mental hospital Lucio senses this is a bad idea, but Diana’s gone before he knows it. And he goes along when her physically identical (but temperamentally different) sister moves in, and when the trainer presents him with a dog coincidentally named Diana. Two Diana-substitutes. Despite their good qualities neither is adequate.

Diana is the one thing Lucio is firm on: he loves her unreservedly, though she treats Lucio with contempt and causes no end of trouble—recently her attempts to “help” Lucio got him fired from his job at the bank. This relationship doesn’t seem good for Lucio, but that’s his call. The thing is, Diana isn’t mentally ill—just touchy and temperamental and unhappy. She is, in short, difficult. That’s what bothers Dr. Samaniego at the institute.

Late in the book, we learn Dr. Samaniego isn’t really a psychiatrist, or at least not a good one—he doesn’t have the empathy to do the job. It’s possible none of his patients are actually ill. Dr. Samaniego doesn’t treat disturbed people. He treats people who disturb everybody else. The patient’s experience and everyone else’s experience of the patient are all the same to him. He wants people to be peaceful, tranquil, like a dog sleeping in the sun. Which turned out to be a good metaphor to have on hand when he discovered the physical location of the human soul, and figured out how to transplant it into other bodies. Like dogs. Dr. Samaniego’s rest cure involves literally “plunging into animality.”

And once you have the soul out of its body that opens up other solutions for “disturbance.” See, people are fungible. Interchangeable parts in a big machine. Dr. Samaniego can take people who doesn’t fit and move them to new bodies and new lives where they’ll fit better. He can’t make people well, but he can make people convenient. He’ll return Diana’s body to Lucio with a different, more compatible soul.

Everyone but Lucio is delighted with the new Diana. He notices she doesn’t remember things she should remember; he catches her going through photos and family trees to get up to speed on her own life. More importantly, she’s not herself. Only Lucio cares enough to notice, which means Lucio is beginning to present Dr. Samaniego with difficulties.

As James Sallis’ introduction to the NYRB Classics edition points out, all this feels like a gently comedic take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And as with Jack Finney’s novel you can read this as a political metaphor. Bioy Casares was an Argentine writer and published Asleep in the Sun in 1973, right before the beginning of the “Dirty War” in which the government disappeared thousands of people. At this point Argentina had been ruled by a military junta since 1966. It’s not hard to imagine why Bioy Casares might have chosen this moment to write a novel setting love for unique and irreplaceable, if troublesome, individuals up against an authority that sees them as machine parts to be swapped out if they throw the gears out of alignment. Or why it’s dangerous to be the person who notices, or cares.

The Venn Diagram of Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: 1973

Books, Speculative Fiction, , , , ,

(I’ve been reading the stories that got both Hugo and Nebula nominations. To see all the posts in the series, check the “Joint SFF Nominations” tag.)

You may have noticed something weird about this series. Apart from the two posts where Anne McCaffery showed up, the author lists have so far been entirely male. It’s not that no women have had Hugo and Nebula nominations, but only McCaffery ever managed to get a story on both lists in any given year. Yes, I’m tired of it, too.

So it’s a relief that this latest post includes three women. That’s out of 11 authors, only 27 per cent, and it should be noted that at this point the voters still thought James Tiptree, Jr. was a man. It will be decades before the shortlists are as likely to be all women as all men. But what the hell, 27 percent is better than zero. We’re finally evening out the Dude Ratio in:

1973

The novels that made both the Hugo and Nebula shortlists in 1973 were Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves, David Gerrold’s When HARLIE Was One, and The Book of Skulls and Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg. The Gods Themselves won both awards, due not so much to quality as to a general feeling that it was great this old guy was still writing. It was a bland year for novels.

On the other hand, it was a strong year for short fiction. The stories that made both shortlists, most of them great, were:

  • Poul Anderson, “Goat Song” (Won the Nebula and Hugo for Best Novelette): A singer descends into a high-tech underworld to plead for the resurrection of his true love, and is told she’ll follow him out, but he’s not supposed to look… have I read this one before?
  • Arthur C. Clarke, “A Meeting with Medusa” (Won the Nebula for Best Novella): Detailed in the last post.
  • Gardner Dozois, “A Kingdom by the Sea”: A slaughterhouse worker forges a connection with an alien intelligence in his dreams.
  • Harlan Ellison, “Basilisk”: A prisoner of war with a strange power returns to a hometown where he’s a scapegoat for his country’s loss.
  • Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Word for World Is Forest” (Won the Hugo for Best Novella): The peaceful Athsheans learn to fight their human colonizers.
  • Frederik Pohl, “The Gold at the Starbow’s End”: A stagnant, collapsing America sends its eight smartest people into space to do some basic research without distractions. The plan goes horribly right.
  • William Rotsler, “Patron of the Arts”: There’s a new art form incorporating holograms and recorded sensations. The narrator commissions a portrait of his wife.
  • Joanna Russ, “When It Changed” (Won the Nebula for Best Short Story): A planet of only women makes their first contact with men in a few centuries, and they’re not enthused.
  • Robert Silverberg, “When We Went to See the End of the World”: A time travel agency offers trips to see the end of the world. It’s briefly fashionable, then people move on to other things.
  • James Tiptree, Jr., “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side”: Humanity is obsessed with aliens, because they’re hot. Like, way too hot.
  • Gene Wolfe, “The Fifth Head of Cerberus”: A boy discovers disconcerting things about his origins.

The first recurring theme for 1973 is long titles. A lot of these titles are very long! I’m going to abbreviate them because I’m lazy.

Less trivially, the key word for 1973 is disillusionment. These are not bright futures. They’re stories of failure, collapse, or pyrrhic victory. They’re often angry; “The Word for World is Forest” is the bluntest thing Ursula K. Le Guin ever wrote, and “Basilisk” is by Harlan Ellison. Now that it’s over we’re finally starting to see stories engage directly with the Vietnam war, and these are our main examples for 1973. (Other stories show oblique influence: ubiquitous political protests are part of the background in “The Gold at the Starbow’s End,” and the far-future colony in “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” is culturally French.) They also exemplify a couple of major themes for 1973, which makes them great stories to start off the next couple of sections.

Live and Don’t Learn

In “Basilisk” Vernon Lestig comes home from his stint as a P.O.W. after breaking under torture and talking. His family has fled their home, his girlfriend married someone else, and a mob shows up to administer a beating. The army cleared Vernon, but he’s guilty of contradicting the stories people tell themselves about the war. American soldiers are heroes, and heroes don’t break. Vernon’s normal, unheroic, human breakdown is an awkward reminder of America’s fallibility.

Luckily for Vernon he’s merged with something alien, a basilisk that kills with a breath or a glance. He confronts the mob in the town square and gives them a brief lesson in pain and terror. Then a woman pulls out a gun and blows his head off while screaming “For Kennyyyy!” and everyone goes home thinking they sure showed him. This feels prescient; in the decades to come the U.S. would repeatedly pick fights—in Grenada, in Panama, in Iraq—to prove to itself it could so win a war, to overwrite Vietnam with the straightforwardly heroic and victorious popular memory of Word War II.

“Basilisk” is a story where nothing is learned, and it’s in good company. Our first major theme for 1973 is stasis. These stories put positive change in the same epistemic category as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Problems aren’t solvable. People can’t break out of patterns; they resist epiphanies.

“Goat Song” and “A Kingdom By the Sea”

Take “Goat Song.” I don’t have much to say about “Goat Song.” You know the story. The hero is Orpheus, a giant computer named SUM is Hades, a woman who serves as SUM’s avatar is Persephone. SUM has Eurydice saved on a hard drive. There are Maenads. Orpheus fails his one big test. As usual. That’s the problem with this overstuffed subgenre of myth and fairy tale retellings; I haven’t just heard this one, I’ve heard it a million times. Right where should be moved to pity I’m just thinking “For crying out loud, not again, Orpheus.” When he strolls off to his futile dismemberment I’m relieved to be rid of him.

Anderson said “Goat Song” was inspired by “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” in that it takes place in a world masterminded by an AI (instead of AM, we have SUM). The comparison doesn’t help it. This is the weakest story in the batch—not bad, but not better than okay. If you’re into SFF you know this theme: Earth is a peaceful, pastoral Garden of Eden managed by SUM for the happiness of all, and it sucks. Struggle is good for you! When the world provides everything for everyone people lose touch with the Human Spirit! Orpheus is a great poet because he the only bastard miserable enough to stay in touch with Higher Things.

It’s interesting to compare Gardner Dozois’ “A Kingdom by the Sea.” The title references “Annabel Lee,” an Edgar Allan Poe poem about a man who is, as is standard for Poe heroes (technical term: “Poetagonists”), pining for his dead lover.

Mason works in a slaughterhouse. He’s the guy who hits cows on the head with a sledgehammer. He lives in a tiny apartment in a gray city, eating frozen pizza that tastes of spaghetti sauce and cardboard. Somehow, without noticing, he’s passed the better part of a decade like this: “He will never hit the road again, he is here to stay. His future has become his past without ever touching the present.”

Someone comes to Mason in his dreams. Like “Basilisk,” this is the story of a worn-down schlub whose life is momentarily improved by something alien. The presence is female, and Mason loves her but also seems to identify with her: “He found her, wrapped in the underbelly of himself like a pearl: a tiny exquisite irritant,” and she “blended [Mason] into herself” and “He merged with her forever.” Every night the presence gets closer, until one day Mason wakes feeling he’s finally going to meet her. He does. He recognizes her in the eyes of the day’s first doomed cow, just as it’s too late to stop himself from bringing down the hammer.

“Kingdom” is barely SFF—it’s a character study, and it’s debatable whether anything truly fantastic is happening here at all. Is Mason a telepath whose soul mate is a cow? Is he lost in his imagination? Your interpretation depends on which genre you expect when you read the story. Which makes it a surprising nominee. But Mason might have been an identification figure for fans, who often use SFF as an escape from an all too mundane reality. The presence is an obvious metaphor for Mason’s intuition that there must be more to life than this, a yearning for something undefined but numinous. This is a common wish-fulfillment fantasy in SFF—discovering magic in the world, or a science fictional phenomenon sparking the proverbial sense of wonder. But Mason’s dreams are brained by the hammer of poverty and routine. He can’t imagine a way out of his predicament.

For a fifty year old story, “Kingdom By the Sea” feels dreadfully contemporary. Right now, an entire economic category of Americans feel ground down in inadequately paid, inadequately respected service jobs. They’re carrying mounds of debt, paying for surgeries with GoFundMes, too tired, sometimes, to dream. “Kingdom” is arguing with “Goat Song:” in a world that cares for no one and provides nothing without a struggle, people lose touch with the Human Spirit. Anderson looks at the modern world from the right and thinks it’s too soft, Dozois examines it from the left—more accurately, I think—and sees a world that’s too hard. These are worlds to stagnate, not flourish, in.

“Patron of the Arts”

Orpheus sends Eurydice back to hell. Mason kills in reality the creature he loved in his dreams. In “And I Awoke,” which I’ll cover later, aliens take a heavy toll on their human lovers. Most of these dysfunctional relationships are specifically failed loves. That’s also the core of “Patron of the Arts.”

Of the stories we’re covering here “Patron” has aged least well. It’s not bad, but it’s very male-gazey, and it’s not surprising it’s the least remembered of the batch. William Rotsler is also the least remembered writer; in the SFF world his claim to fame is having drawn the cartoon that inspired Harlan Ellison to write “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” (Which also makes Rotsler responsible for “Goat Song.” Thanks, I guess?)

“Patron” is a character study of Michael Benton Cilento, an artist working in “Sensatrons,” from the POV of a patron who hired Cilento to make a Sensatron portrait of his wife. Sensatrons are an innovative new medium combining high-definition holographic video with “alpha and beta recorders, the EEG machines, the subtle heartbeat repeaters” modeling the subject’s inner life, and project the artist’s intangible, ineffable interpretation of that subject directly into the viewers’ minds. In practice, they’re used mostly for pictures of naked ladies. It’s worth noting that William Rotsler had a day job in the porn industry. That said, this is very well written. It doesn’t baldly describe a plot; it spends time on conversations with Cilento about how he works and his ideas on the nature of art. It’s this surplus-to-plot-requirements stuff that gives a story thematic depth, something too many SFF writers forget even today.

The narrator’s marriage is more of a business partnership than anything. They get along fine, but his wife is more important to him than he is to her and when Cilento comes along they fall for each other. Cilento has been experimenting with some sort of teleportation technology. The narrator discovers the lovers have disappeared together into a Sensatron depicting an alien landscape. Technically this is a happy ending, for the two lovers. But it’s an offstage happy ending. All we actually see is the narrator’s bemused loneliness.

“When We Went to See the End of the World”

Like “KIngdom by the Sea,” “When We Went to See the End of the World,” feels so much like life feels right now. I find Robert Silverberg’s work inconsistent. Sometimes I don’t understand why he used to be so popular. But sometimes one of his stories just hits me, and “When We Went” is one of those. It’s depressed and anxious and brilliant.

“Nick and Jane were glad that they had gone to see the end of the world,” it begins, “because it gave them something special to talk about at Mike and Ruby’s party.” Nick and Jane’s circle are well off, but probably not in what we’d call the one percent: Mike and Ruby’s house is grand, but sounds like the kind of overdone McMansion owned by people who aren’t as rich as they like to pretend.

Trips to the end of the world are the latest fad. You time travel forwards and watch the literal last moments of life on Earth. Nick and Jane declare how moving it all was. They don’t sound moved, just politely enthusiastic, like they saw a pretty good movie. Nick hopes one friend’s wife will find him interesting enough to agree to meet at a motel. He’s a bit put out to discover he’s not the only one who’s taken the trip. Everybody saw a different apocalypse—it seems these are all potential futures. Nobody’s more than mildly curious about this.

After Nick and Jane tell their story, the hosts’ son comes in to announce the east coast has been told to boil their water because of mutant brain-eating amoebas. His parents tell him to go to bed. Between one-upping each other with their apocalypses the partygoers briefly acknowledge other recent news. An earthquake just sent a big chunk of California into the ocean. Nuclear explosions are a regular occurrence. So many Presidents have been assassinated that the national days of mourning are starting to effect the economy. The story doesn’t make a big deal about any of this because Nick and his friends don’t make any big deal. It’s background noise. In the middle of a paragraph about who’s dancing with who, unremarked upon: “Far away there was the sound of an explosion.” These things are happening to other people, somewhere else.

But are they? As the story progresses we learn one of Nick’s friends has a broken leg from a routine mugging. Another is in financial trouble because terrorists blew up his business (are these people actually rich, or living on credit?). The amoebas have already spread to the Great Lakes. Everyone’s dancing past the graveyard, grasping at any distraction, because looking the apocalypse in the face is scary. But constant apocalypse is also boring. “No one was talking about time trips now. The party had moved beyond that point.”

These days a new disaster comes along every week. A coup attempt in Washington? Old news. Accelerating climate change? The new normal. A worldwide pandemic? Bored now. It’s startling how fast we forget. And I’m not just talking about the Nicks and Janes of the world, here; even the left gets briefly outraged by each crisis but never gets around to taking effective action. An apocalyptic collapse of civilization is both imminent and abstract, something very close which we can’t convince ourselves will ever affect us, because we’re distracting ourselves with—

Well, we’re science fiction fans, aren’t we? We distract ourselves with dystopias. City-levelling superhero fights. Zombie apocalypses. Colorful stories about the end of the world.

“The Fifth Head of Cerberus”

Cover of The Fifth Head of Cerberus

Gene Wolfe’s trademark is the unreliable narrator. Wolfe’s narrators don’t understand the audience they’re writing for; or, at least, their audience isn’t the real people who are actually reading. Often they seem to write only for themselves. Wolfe’s narrator’s don’t know what we don’t know. They don’t know what they don’t know. You have to read for what they aren’t saying as much as what they are; what they don’t notice or don’t think needs explanation. Wolfe is dense. Every paragraph says more than it says on the surface. This is unusual in SFF, which has always favored text over subtext. It’s even more striking now, when more than ever genre fiction is anxious to explain everything, lest it be misunderstood.

The unnamed narrator of “Cerberus” writes to understand himself. At one point he recalls a dream. He’s on a ship captained by his father. It’s not moving. The narrator’s aunt is in the dream, too, and he asks her why. She says, “It doesn’t move because he has fastened it in place until he finds out why it doesn’t move.”

The narrator lives on the twin colony planets of Saint Anne and Saint Croix, which deliberately resemble an 18th or 19th century French colonial society. Like historical European colonies, this is land stolen from a native civilization, a race of shapeshifters who eventually died out. Maybe. Sort of. There are rumors that the natives rebelled against the human invaders and replaced them.

The narrator’s father is a distant man accompanied by an injured monkey. He runs a brothel to fund his scientific investigations. Every so often he calls the narrator to his lab to run odd psychological tests. Otherwise the narrator is raised by a robot named Monsieur Million whose head is a monitor screen with his father’s face.

The narrator starts having memory lapses. (At a certain point Wolfe starts using these like blank lines, as scene breaks.) After one gap the narrator encounters a monkey resembling his father’s pet. No, he’s told, this is one he recently adopted himself. He accepts this without protest.

Outside the narrator’s home is a three-headed statue of Cerberus. He imagines a Cerberus with five heads, representing his family: himself, his father, his brother, and M. Million. But it’s appropriate that the statue has three. The narrator, his father, and M. Million are, in a sense, the same person. It becomes clear, though the story is never so gauche as to infodump it, that the narrator is the latest in a series of clones of the scientist who once uploaded himself into the body of M. Million. All were raised as similarly as possible to ensure they become, as closely as possible, the same person. All eventually kill and replace their “fathers,” just as the native shapeshifters became and replaced their human conquerors. (Maybe the clone family are the only humans on the planet.) M. Million has colonized his own descendants, replicating himself exactly. He’s trying to reach some unfulfilled potential. Instead his descendants can’t break out of the pattern he created.

The heads of Cerberus don’t know how to change. The natives of Saint Anne and Saint Croix did, but they just changed into their colonizers.

How Can They Miss Us When We Won’t Go Away?

“Cerberus” is a good segue to our second major theme: colonialism. “Basilisk” was about the effects of colonialist war on the invaders; “The Word for World is Forest” is about its effects on the people invaded. As in way too many old space operas, what we have here is a mid-twentieth-century male chauvinist, militaristic, colonialist future—but this time done mindfully. Le Guin is reacting to Vietnam in metaphor.

Human colonists have enslaved the natives of Athshe, a forest planet. (Earth needs wood!) Le Guin filters half the story through Captain Davidson, who thinks of women as commodities; and of the Athsheans as lazy, degenerate “Creechies;” and whose favored solution to any problem is to kill a few Creechies pour encourager les autres. Davidson’s personality comes out in the prose. He’s careless, thinking in vague generalities (“trees and stuff”). He keeps thinking that one trait or another is “the way he was made” because for him everything is nature, nothing nurture.

Cover of The Word for World is Forest

This is all very blunt, uncharacteristically for Le Guin; in an introduction she wrote for the novella she ruefully admits “I succumbed, in part, to the lure of the pulpit.” But it’s still amazing writing. The chapters in the point of view of Selver, Davidson’s Athshean opponent, are distinct, calmer and more sensitive to the environment. There are casually brilliant images. Like: “Little paths ran under the branches, around the boles, over the roots; they did not go straight, but yielded to every obstacle, devious as nerves.” Which tells us the Athsheans see the forest is a living entity, with a nervous system; and that in their culture yielding to and routing around obstacles is wise behavior. And devious is an unexpected but perfect adjective for nerves, suggesting both twisting and winding, and intelligence.

For the Athsheans a god is a person who brings a new idea into their culture and “Forest” is the story of how Selver becomes a god. Up to now, the Athsheans were pacifists. They don’t kill people. Selver realizes this will need to change, learns violence from the humans, and goes scorched-earth on Davidson’s settlement. It’s a pyrrhic victory; the Athsheans win, but they win by becoming like their invaders.

Davidson becomes a god, too. Facing death, he instinctively assumes the posture he’s seen Athsheans use to defuse potential fights: he lies down and bares his neck. But he doesn’t really understand what he’s done; he hasn’t learned anything. Davidson, the representative of 1970s America, may be incapable of learning or changing. He can only be quarantined.

“The Gold at the Starbow’s End”

In the United States of “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” both social and technical progress have ground to a halt. The population is in a permanent state of protest. They have a lot to protest about. Humanity has pretty much lost the ability to run a civilization and society is breaking down. By the end of the story the President is a lunkheaded used-car-salesman type and Washington is permanently flooded by human-caused environmental disasters. Again, from a 2021 perspective this feels… weirdly applicable.

Dr. Dieter von Knefhausen figures the problem is that everybody’s stopped doing basic research. People look for tweaks and technological refinements that could lead to short-term profits, but nobody’s coming up with really new ideas, either scientifically or philosophically. So Dr. Knefhausen picks the brightest people on Earth and launches them into space where they’ll have nothing to do but think. His plan goes righter than he could have imagined, in the worst possible way. Messages from the starship get weirder and harder to understand. To Knefhausen’s consternation, the astronauts start experimenting with the I Ching and indecipherable mathematical languages. They’re developing something called Farsight and they’ve figured out how to regrow body parts and one of them is sort of dead but not really. As the story ends “bright, terrible” posthumans descend in golden ships to reenact the lyrics to “Oh, You Pretty Things.”

In the last essay I noted that Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Meeting With Medusa” sees evolution as teleological, and takes it for granted humanity must inevitably be replaced by their posthuman space cyborg descendants, “creatures of metal who must one day supersede them.” Here human society is stuck, static; to change, humanity has to create a powerful outside force to colonize itself. But the colonizers first destroy what’s left of civilization—they’re the ones who caused those environmental disasters. The posthumans will repair the Earth, but it’s anyone’s guess whether we’ll recognize what’s left when they’re done.

“When it Changed” and “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill Side”

SFF appears to be questioning whether any two cultures can meet without one destroying the other. Joanna Russ’ “When it Changed” depicts the moment the planet Whileaway, with a population of entirely women, reestablishes contact with Earth. It’s a brief story with room to sketch Whileaway only in broad strokes, but it’s still vivid. It’s not a utopia, but it’s a good, workable society. But the narrator suspects Whileaway can’t survive contact with men; certainly, the men who’ve arrived on Whileaway are condescending and obtuse. Partly this is an expression of the separatist vein active in second-wave feminism in the seventies; partly it’s a metaphor for how men relate to women with the genders represented as planets. Patriarchal society hasn’t learned anything in hundreds of years. Earth will inevitably fail to see Whileaway as an equal, and Whileaway will be consumed.

Like a lot of James Tiptree’s stories “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill Side” is about what people do for love. It’s also about cultural capital—about what people do to get close to glamor, to power. Earth has joined the wider universe. Humanity is a backwater hick getting its first glimpse of Hollywood, and it’s fascinated by aliens. They’re attractive. They’re richer than us, more powerful and influential, and that makes them attractive. Humans want to get close to glamor even if it hurts, which it does because these guys have totally different reproductive systems and sleeping with them is like trying to interface an accordion with an eggbeater.

“We’re gutting Earth, to begin with,” says the disillusioned maintenance worker being interviewed by the narrator, a journalist on his first trip into space. “Swapping raw resources for junk. Alien status symbols. Tape decks, Coca-Cola, and Mickey Mouse watches.” The humans of “Awoke” are, like the shapeshifters and the Athsheans in “Cerberus” and “Forest,” letting a hegemonic alien culture displace their identities. Like the Americans in “Starbow,” the humans of “Awoke” can’t imagine their own future, instead borrowing the one offered by their golden, shining neighbors.

The maintenance worker tries to explain this to the journalist, but doesn’t get through; the story ends with the narrator chasing after his first real aliens. Again, we have a narrator who fails to learn anything.

It feels like SFF has given up.

On the evidence of the stories they nominated, how was the English-speaking SFF world feeling in 1973? Well, we’d screwed everything up. And the problems we’d created weren’t fixable, or at least we weren’t going to fix them, anyway. The people America kept invading might get somewhere, although more likely they’d just turn into more stupid assholes like us.

When the (mostly American) fans nominated these stories, the U.S. had just finished losing a war they shouldn’t have fought in the first place, and the Nixon administration was imploding amidst the Watergate scandal. They make interesting reading at a time when America is even more nonfunctional, largely due to societal flaws that were obvious by 1973 but that we never bothered to fix after Ronald Reagan came along to assure us everything was fine.

The stories of 1973 are great, but bleak. They’re futures where no one learns, where humanity is doomed to make the same mistakes forever. Where different people can’t come together, on the personal or societal level, without one hurting the other. Right-wing critics sometimes complain 21st century SFF is too downbeat but, people, it’s got nothing on 1973.

Sometimes SFF touches on ideas outside any real-world context, like post-singularity utopias, four-dimensional life forms, and minds so alien we have no frame of reference to understand them. This creates technical problems, because how do you describe the indescribable? A detailed post-singularity future is bound to come off as bathetic, like those old pulp stories where it’s 900 years in the future and a computer is still a warehouse full of vacuum tubes. Writers usually deal with these concepts like low-budget horror movies deal with their monsters—keeping them offstage, describing them as little as possible, letting the readers imagine what is beyond imagining. It’s interesting that the most obvious thing these stories keep offstage is their most traditionally happy ending, the one the lovers in “Patron of the Arts” get. An ordinary happy ending is as indescribable a possibility as utopia.

The Venn Diagram of Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: 1972

Books, Speculative Fiction, , ,

(I’ve been reading the stories that got both Hugo and Nebula nominations. To see all the posts in the series, check the “Joint SFF Nominations” tag.)

For the past few years there’s been a big overlap between the Hugo and Nebula shortlists. Generally we’ve had half a dozen or more stories to cover. For whatever reason, in 1972 fans and writers couldn’t agree.[1] There are only three stories to cover this time—maybe two, or two and a half, depending on how you look at it. (I’ll explain in a moment.) We’re taking a well-deserved break in:

1972

In 1972, the novels nominated for both a Hugo and Nebula were Robert Silverberg’s A Time of Changes and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. A Time of Changes won a Nebula. (The Hugo went to Philip Jose Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go.)

Only three shorter works were double-nominated this year:

Click through to the shortlists and you’ll notice “A Meeting With Medusa” doesn’t appear in the Nebula list. The eligibility windows for Hugo and Nebula nominations haven’t always overlapped perfectly. Sometimes a story’s Hugo nomination will come in one year, and the Nebula nomination in the next. So “A Meeting With Medusa” was nominated for a Hugo this year and a Nebula in 1973. (It won the Nebula.) This will come up again in other years.

My usual approach in this series is to look for shared themes between the stories, but the fewer stories you have the harder that gets. These three don’t have much in common. The good news is that although 1972’s stories aren’t as brilliant as 1971’s they continue to be not actually cringeworthy.

The Queen of Air and Darkness

Cover of a collection containing The Queen of Air and Darkness

Ever since Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes there’s been a bustling trade in knockoffs, the consulting detective equivalent of the merchandise sold on Amazon by manufacturers with names like MOOBEX and FLEZPIP. At first people got around copyright by creating bootleg Holmeses like Solar Pons and Sexton Blake. Or other detective followed the Holmes model without thinking about it: Agatha Christie saddled Poirot with a boring sidekick named Hastings until it finally dawned on her she didn’t need to. Now that he’s in the public domain Holmes has been everything from a cyborg to an angel to, more ridiculously, a high-functioning sociopath.

Poul Anderson’s “The Queen of Air and Darkness” stars a detective named Eric Sherrinford who lounges around his messy apartment smoking a pipe and claims “descent from one of the first private inquiry agents on record, back on Earth before spaceflight.” I did not find this encouraging. I like Sherlock Holmes. I like detectives who are not Sherlock Holmes. I have no interest whatsoever in Sort of Sherlock Holmes, But Not Really. These stories feel like shortcuts for writers running low on ideas. They invariably devolve into exercises in fannish reference-spotting. (“Okay (sigh), that’s from ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles.’ And that’s ‘The Speckled Band.’ I get it, already.”)

This story won me over, though, because Holmes is serving a thematic, metafictional purpose. “The Queen of Air and Darkness” is about archetypes. Humans screwed up when they came to the planet Roland: they’re not supposed to colonize inhabited planets, but this one has natives. Not that anyone realizes that yet. The powerfully telepathic Dwellers have chosen to hide and use the humans’ deeply embedded archetypes against them. “Historical, fictional, and mythical, such figures crystallize basic aspects of the human psyche, and when we meet them in our real experience, our reaction goes deeper than consciousness,” as Sherrinford puts it. The Dwellers hover around the countryside, playing the part of fairies. The old, creepy kind of fairies. They’re creating telepathic illusions, scaring the folksy space rustics, and kidnapping the occasional human child as a changeling. The idea here is that the Dwellers will turn the colonists away from modern society, controlling them through superstitions—reverence and fear of the Old Folk.

Sherrinford is hired to find a kidnapped kid. Which he does because, heck, he’s Sherlock Holmes. And that’s kind of a double-edged sword. Is being Extremely Sherlock Holmes healthy? “We live with our archetypes,” he asks, “but can we live in them?” The Dwellers’ plan is as much a trap for them as for the colonists. They’ve jacked straight into the human subconscious by using an archetype, but in the process they trapped themselves inside that archetype. While they’re fairies, they’re not themselves.

There’s this concept called a “thought-terminating cliché.” It’s something you say to cut off a discussion or line of thought. Keep saying now is not the time to talk about gun control and you never have to talk about gun control. Archetypes can be powerful, but follow them too closely and they work like thought-terminating clichés. That’s what the Dwellers want: don’t think about who might be out in the woods, it’s the Old Folk.

Which brings us back to those store-brand Sherlock Holmes stories I’m so unenthusiastic about. The writer who writes a Solar Pons story taps straight into the audience’s Holmes archetype and their warm and fuzzy memories of the Conan Doyle stories. The writer coasts on the mental association with a fun story about a smart, interesting detective without having to do the work to write a fun story, or create a smart, interesting detective, of their own. (This is also the most common failure mode for fan fiction.) To the extent these stories color within the Holmes lines, they’ve stunted themselves.

A Meeting With Medusa

“A Meeting With Medusa” is nothing like anybody’s idea of a well-structured short story. That’s the best thing about it—it’s refreshingly shambolic. It doesn’t force events into a neatly plotted arc. Arthur C. Clarke is not my favorite writer but I enjoyed this more than I expected; sometimes I want a story that doesn’t feel overtly story-shaped.

Clarke tells the story in three stages, all doing different things. The first part sketches out a decadent post-scarcity future in which people have augmented monkey butlers but are still vulnerable to blimp accidents. The second and longest part concerns Howard Falcon, blimp expert and crash survivor, and his expedition to Jupiter in a space blimp.

(I just like saying “blimp.” It’s an inherently funny word. Blimp.)

This middle stretch is exposition connected by a tissue of events. The prose is journalistic, studded with precise numbers, comparisons, and historical references—it reads like a National Geographic article from the future. The attraction here isn’t suspense. Falcon runs across potential dangers, but nothing feels fraught. It’s only barely about character. The sole point is to imagine what Jupiter might be like if it had life. It’s excited about speculation and exploration in a stereotypically science fictional way; we’re in pure sense-of-wonder territory. This is the kind of thing people imagine when you ask them to imagine “hard science fiction,” but more readable than the description implies.

The epilogue returns to earth and floats off in another direction. We’ve been told that after the accident Falcon was rebuilt like the Six Million Dollar Man, but it’s only now we learn how much: he’s a robot with hydraulic muscles and a human brain, gliding around on wheels. Like other SF around this time (i.e. “Masks,” the novel Man Plus, the Doctor Who serial “The Tenth Planet”) “A Meeting With Medusa” associates cybernetics with alienation, even suggesting enough artificial body parts make you a different form of life entirely. For Falcon humanity is “becoming more remote, the ties of kinship more tenuous.” Clarke takes this a step further. The future of human evolution is a recurring theme in his work, and for Clarke evolution is teleological. 2001 and Childhood’s End are the most obvious examples, but it’s here in “A Meeting With Medusa,” too. Falcon isn’t just different from the bulk of humanity, he’s better—an “ambassador” between “the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them.” The story takes it for granted that humanity must inevitably be replaced by creatures who can fly space blimps.

Blimp!

A Special Kind of Morning

At this point we’re starting to see SFF directly influenced by the Vietnam war from the generation directly affected by it, which to some extent includes Gardner Dozois—as far as I can tell he was never in combat, but he spent a couple of years in the army as a journalist. Here he’s writing about an individualist guerilla war against a bigger and better-equipped collectivist enemy.

But “A Special Kind of Morning” isn’t a straight role-reversal cold war allegory. The individualism-vs.-collectivism conflict is complicated by the hierarchal Combine’s treatment of people as literal human resources. In the Combine your social caste determines even how conscious you get to be. The narrator grew up as barely-sentient living factory machinery—the perfect no-wage employee. Now he’s joined the Quaestors, the guerilla resistance, and he has to dehumanize the enemy in another sense to kill them. The Combine kill at a distance, impersonally, with the high-tech equivalent of bombs and drones. The Quaestors “killed people—not statistics and abstractions.” This is just the story of how the narrator realized he couldn’t do that anymore. Not a complicated plot, but told with a generous helping of symbols and metaphors (and notably better prose than the other stories, both plain and traditionally “transparent”).

Most of those metaphors are about time. The most devastating weapon of the war produces “discontinuities,” ripping the battlefield apart by sending bits forwards and backwards in time. The Quaestors look for old, forgotten ideas, like guerilla warfare, bullets, and personal combat, to fight the Combine. The story itself is a memory, a tale told by an old man about how he lost his leg. The planet where the story is set has an extreme day/night cycle, with different night plants and day plants going dormant and rising each dawn or dusk. A new morning literally changes the landscape.

Reduce it to the theme, and this story could be told about any war: it’s just a guy learning to stop dehumanizing people. Which is not a kind of story all SFF critics are on board with. Galaxy magazine used to run an ad juxtaposing bad western writing with a version search-and-replaced with science fiction jargon, sneering at the stories that were “merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet” and declaring “YOU’LL NEVER FIND IT IN GALAXY!” Good SFF, the theory goes, deals with ideas that could only come up in SFF. So it might be interesting to ask what rhetorical moves this story makes by being science fiction instead of a realist story about, for instance, Vietnam.

First, there’s the distancing effect. Reality is big. It comes with baggage. Anything real—a city, a person, an event—is going to call up a whole host of associations in the readers’ minds. If a writer wants to make a point about, say, the cold war, they may decide they can make that point more sharply if they don’t have to deal with the United States or the Soviet Union, which the readers will view through their own preconceptions.

More importantly, fantasy is a license to exaggerate. Americans saw the effects of real combat on the news every night; an apocalyptic sci-fi weapon is a tool to convey the emotional devastation of war to a desensitized audience. And metaphors can be made literal, and explored at length; the Combine isn’t just dehumanizing, its citizens are replaceable, interchangeable machine parts.

So I’m not bothered by “space westerns.” And, as kind as I was to “A Meeting With Medusa,” serious hard science fiction is not my thing. The point of SFF is that it’s an opportunity to go wild; when SFF tries to be “realistic” it leaves its most powerful tool out of the box.

  1. Some of the better-known short fiction with only one nomination included “Inconstant Moon” by Larry Niven and “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” by Ursula K. Le Guin from the Hugo list; the Nebula list included “Good News from the Vatican” by Robert Silverberg, “The Missing Man” by Katherine MacLean, and, interestingly, “Being There” by Jerzy Kosinski.  ↩

The Venn Diagram of Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: 1971

Books, Speculative Fiction, , , ,

(I’ve been reading the stories that got both Hugo and Nebula nominations. To see all the posts in the series, check the “Joint SFF Nominations” tag.)

Okay. At this point the sixties are over (although the “long 1960s” would drag on for a couple years yet). America is still in Vietnam, Nixon is in the White House, the left has not made a dent on these problems, and everyone’s tired. Stories are asking: what do we do with a broken world? Tear it down? Wait it out? Deep time and patience are recurring themes. SFF is taking the long view in:

1971

The novels that got both Hugo and Nebula nominations in 1971 were Larry Niven’s Ringworld, Robert Silverberg’s Tower of Glass, and Wilson Tucker’s The Year of the Quiet Sun. Ringworld took both awards, although it’s a well-done but lightweight adventure novel rather than anything with ambition.

The stories nominated for both awards were:

  • Harlan Ellison, “The Region Between”: A dead man’s soul is transplanted into a series of alien bodies, and he is not having it.
  • R. A. Lafferty, “Continued on Next Rock”: A team of archaeologists don’t notice an ancient story repeating itself in their midst.
  • Keith Laumer, “In the Queue”: A guy stands in line. It’s a long line, people.
  • Fritz Leiber, “Ill Met in Lankhmar” (Won the Hugo and Nebula for Best Novella): A barbarian and a thief get drunk and attempt a half-assed infiltration of the local thieves’ guild. Meanwhile, a wizard fridges their girlfriends.
  • Clifford D. Simak, “The Thing in the Stone”: A man in rural Wisconsin discovers an alien mind trapped in the landscape.
  • Theodore Sturgeon, “Slow Sculpture” (Won the Nebula for Best Novelette and Hugo for Best Short Story): A woman with cancer meets a man with a cure.

First, I’d like to note that for the first year since 1966 none of the double-nominated stories involve racism or creepy sex. Yay, science fiction! I knew you could do it!

Second, this is a good year. The Ellison, Lafferty, Simak, and Sturgeon stories are legitimately great. The Laumer and Leiber stories are, at worst, average.

And, honestly, my disregard for “Ill Met in Lankhmar” may be a matter of taste. This story stars Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, sword and sorcery[1] heroes whose adventures spanned several volumes and decades. I like a lot of Leiber’s work so I’ve tried to get into this series before, but it bores me. Fafhrd and the Mouser aren’t interesting characters. They’re shallow; nothing they do or think is a surprise. There’s nothing to them beyond their adventuring skills and Vancian speech patterns. Leiber’s prose is as good here as anywhere else, but his subjects feel like a teenager’s Dungeons & Dragons characters.[2]

Leiber wrote “Ill Met in Lankhmar” after decades of stories about Fafhrd and the Mouser. To fans, it must have been an event: this is their origin story, their very first adventure together.[3] What’s interesting is that Leiber doesn’t make them look good. These guys are screwups. Fafhrd and the Mouser meet cute stealing already-stolen gems from fellow thieves. They haul the spoils to the Mouser’s place and introduce their girlfriends to each other. Fafhrd’s other half has a grudge against the Thieves’ Guild and convinces the pair to take action stronger than loot hijacking. They get drunk and attempt a half-assed infiltration of the Guild headquarters, where they watch slack-jawed as a wizard casts a spell. Returning home they discover it was a spell to recover the gems, which incidentally killed their girlfriends. They return to the Guild, kill some people, and run away again. The end.

This story is pointless. It’s not about anything. It’s just… well, a description of some things that happened to the characters, which are assumed to be exciting in themselves in the absence of subtext. Which is a problem if you aren’t interested in these characters and don’t care what happens to them.

I’m getting “Ill Met in Lankhmar” out of the way first because it’s an outlier. It doesn’t share many themes with other stories in this batch, mostly because it has no theme except “look at this gritty adventure.” Unless the theme is “roguish sword and sorcery antiheroes are doofuses, actually,” which is a message I can get behind.

Themes that recur in the other stories include repeating cycles, reincarnation, deep time, geology, and patience. And several stories ask the question: how do you respond to a bad society, and power misused?

There is No Alternative

The simplest is Keith Laumer’s “In the Queue.” People line up to get their documents processed at the world’s only document-processing window. They wait for years—sometimes their whole lives. There’s nothing beyond the line but a wasteland. Hestler is one of the lucky few to reach the window. His business concluded, he walks all the way to the end of the line… and gets in line again. That’s where everyone he knows lives; that’s his world. It’s a bad world, but it’s the world Hestler has; he can’t imagine an alternative.

Cover of Galaxy magazine for The Region Between

Laumer also contributed to Harlan Ellison’s “The Region Between,” which is a lot of fun and miles better than “A Boy and His Dog.” Ellison wrote “The Region Between” for an anthology called Five Fates. The gimmick was that Laumer wrote a prologue in which William Bailey receives a disappointingly impersonal injection at a Euthanasia Center. Laumer, Ellison, Poul “Sharing of Flesh” Anderson, Frank “Dune” Herbert, and Gordon “Call Him Lord” Dickson each wrote a novella starting from there. In this bunch Ellison sticks out like a neon orange thumb: he delivered a drunkenly typeset romp with text scattered sideways, upside down, backwards; spiraling paragraphs and dollops of concrete poetry; and a paragraph where the words of one sentence slip in between the words of another; all framed—in the story’s preferred form—by graphic layouts and illustrations by Jack Gaughan.

A lot of SF predicted something like “Euthanasia Centers” around 1970—see for example Soylent Green,loosely adapted from Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!. Harrison’s novel contains neither euthanasia centers nor cannibalism. That they were added to the movie just four years later may be down to the late sixties’ increasing anxiety about overpopulation. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb popularized the idea (which had been floating around at least a couple decades) that population growth was a major environmental problem. The human population, argued Ehrlich, was on the verge of outstripping the Earth’s resources; he predicted mass starvation by the end of the seventies. Obviously this didn’t happen—Ehrlich didn’t account for the fact that an environment’s carrying capacity can change—but by the end of the sixties imagined futures were often overcrowded. SF writers didn’t have much faith that governments’ response would respect human life.

In “The Region Between,” the Euthanasia Centers were engineered by an alien entity called “the Succubus” to harvest souls, a hot commodity in the wider universe. Some unknown people steal them. The Succubus brokers replacements. Bailey is plugged into a succession of bodies—the story’s collaged layout reflects his fragmented, disjointed new existence. First he’s a soldier sent on a false flag mission designed to extend a war—both sides’ rulers feed off the death. Bailey manages to hold onto his true identity, and almost manages to stop it. In his next couple of bodies he’s more successful at sabotaging a mission of conquest and an alien cockfight. “Did you ever stop to think how many individuals and races like to play God?” asks Bailey. Everyone Bailey inhabits is critical to powerful people who prey on the less powerful, and every time he manages to screw up their plans.

(All the victims’ souls are stolen at exactly the most critical moment. Are the soul thieves revolutionaries?)

(Also: the word Succubus comes from succubare, “to lie beneath.” Does the Succubus underly the powers that be—i.e., is his work the foundation of their power?)

The universe was created by a God who left his fingerprints all over it: “Godness lies dormant yet remembered in every thing, every smallest thing, in every puniest creature.” “God is in everyone” is usually an inspirational bromide, but not here: the God part of us is the part that wants control, sees other people as resources. Bailey, though, has more God than average. When the Succubus takes a closer look at Bailey’s soul God himself emerges from it. And when he sees the world of predators and prey the universe has become, he ends it. Typically for Ellison, this is an angry story. Bailey’s alternative to a sick society is to blow it up, tear everything down. The inevitable result of a universe where everyone wants to play god is that eventually only one god is left. Bailey started out trying to destroy himself; now he’s reduced the universe to nothing but himself.

Time and Stones

“The world gets new rocks all the time. But it’s the same people who keep turning up, and the same minds.”

The theme “Continued on Next Rock” shares with “The Region Between” is repeated returns from death, although not of the same kind. R. A. Lafferty is writing about deep time, living myths, and eternal returns happening in the background of an archaeological trip to a chimney rock leaning on an ancient Native American mound. (A reference in the story compares it to the Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma; Lafferty lived there and his stories are often deeply connected to the landscape.)

Where Ellison is angry Lafferty is strange. His most characteristic stories are celebrations of strangeness. The thing about Lafferty is that he’s… well, completely himself. SFF is mostly market-shaped, crafted to sell to a particular audience or editor. Lafferty tears inscrutable literary contraptions straight out of his heart and brain, and places them before you, and you can take them or leave them. He won’t show up much in this series; rarely is the same Lafferty story nominated for both a Hugo and a Nebula.[4] Lafferty is among the greatest SFF writers of the 20th century, but also among the most esoteric; not everybody can tune in on his wavelength.

Lafferty’s prose has the rhythm of screwball comic patter—you can imagine a Lafferty audiobook read by Groucho Marx—but he can segue into higher registers when needed. He has a complex vocabulary but writes simple prose. Not transparent prose—his stories have narrators, with points of view. Lafferty is a teller of tall tales. A lot of his characters are exaggerated legendary heroes. Like Magdalen, the expedition’s grad student. Magdalen knows things she couldn’t possibly know, like all of what’s in the mound and the chimney. And she’s strong enough to carry a 190 pound deer back to camp on her shoulders. And though she’s the least senior person there, everybody instinctually does as she says: “Magdalen had no right to give orders to anyone, except her born right.”

(Lafferty also has a nice line in comically nasty rogues. But he writes most sympathetically about people on the margins—misfits, if not literally marginalized. Which has a lot to do with why, although Lafferty himself was conservative, his stories often feel progressive. Lafferty is on the side of the oddballs. His dearest wish is that everybody should cultivate their inner weirdness.)

A “rich old poor man” named Anteros Manypenny appears at dinner and offers to dig. He digs perfectly, and knows what he’ll dig up before it’s uncovered. Magdalen’s unimpressed. “He’ll just uncover some of his own things,” she says. Magdalen and Anteros know each other, not that the archaeologists pick up on this. The narrator doesn’t pick up on it, either. Magdalen and Anteros know more than the narrator does. One of Lafferty’s strategies here is to limit the narrator’s understanding of the story, and contrast it with what he wants the reader to understand. “Very often Magdalen said things that made no sense,” says this story, though it’s only her colleagues that Magdalen makes no sense to.

Each day Anteros digs into the chimney rock and uncovers a stone tablet carved with strange love poetry: “You are the freedom of wild pigs in the sour-grass, and the nobility of badgers. You are the brightness of serpents and the soaring of vultures.” The tablets are impossibly recent, written in several Native American languages centuries newer than the undisturbed sediment they’re found in. Gradually the tablets reveal a story about an earthbound being in love with someone repeatedly trying to reach the sky and falling back to earth:

It is the earth that calls you. I am the earth, woolier than wolves and rougher than rocks. I am the bog earth that sucks you in. You cannot give, you cannot like, you cannot love, you think there is something else, you think there is a sky-bridge you may loiter on without crashing down.

And then Magdalen falls from the top of the chimney, and Anteros vanishes, replaced by a statue. And everyone forgets they were ever there.

Magdalen and Anteros have been returning to repeat this story for centuries; possibly thousands of years. (And across multiple civilizations—while they’re in Oklahoma they’re tied to Native American culture, but Anteros is a Greek name and Magdalen is Biblical.) It doesn’t feel like Anteros is stalking her—Magdalen’s capable of dealing with attention she doesn’t want, and her insults to Anteros feel good-humored, like she’s acting out a role. This is a ritual. It’s somehow necessary that Magdalen and Anteros play out this drama of rebirth and sacrifice. Why isn’t clear, but neither are giving up on their work.

Clifford Simak begins “The Thing in the Stone” by contrasting two people. Wallace Daniels moves to rural Wisconsin to recover from a car accident. (Even more than Lafferty’s, Simak’s writing is powerfully tied to his home region and to the landscape, which has a major role in his stories.) “He walked the hills and knew what the hills had seen through geologic time,” says Simak, and the first paragraph continues in that poetic vein; Daniels is sensitive and curious and spends his days exploring his property and tending his chickens and cows. Then we’re told “his next-door neighbor, a most ill-favored man, drove to the county seat, thirty miles away, to tell the sheriff that this reader of the hills, this listener to the stars was a chicken thief.”

This doesn’t come to anything, because the sheriff isn’t stupid. But Ben Adams won’t give up his weird grudge; he thinks Daniels is Up To Something. Daniels wanders his land like he’s searching: for treasure, maybe? What he really sees is deep time. Daniels’ accident left him with powers. He sees through time, seeing the landscape as it was millions of years ago (and sometimes travelling back bodily). If he concentrates on the stars he hears messages sent between alien civilizations. And in one particular cave he hears an alien being trapped beneath the stone.

One cold night, with a dangerous snowstorm coming up, Adams pulls Daniels’ rope away, trapping him in the cave. Desperate, Daniels manages to contact another, incorporeal alien, some loyal follower who watches over the thing in the stone and wants to set it free. Then Daniels manages to shift back a few million years, allowing him to escape the cave (because the prehistoric landscape is different) and incidentally see the thing in the stone arrive. It’s a criminal, and Earth is its prison.

Simak’s prose is deceptively simple. Like Lafferty’s prose it feels like speech, though of a different kind; it’s plainspoken folk storytelling where Lafferty is a vaudeville comedian. It’s carefully crafted without seeming to be, so it’s worth looking at a couple of short paragraphs more closely:

And suddenly in this place of one-sound-only there came a throbbing, faint but clear and presently louder, pressing down against the water, beating at the little island—a sound out of the sky.

Daniels leaped to his feet and looked up and the ship was there, plummeting down toward him. But not a ship of solid form, it seemed—rather a distorted thing, as if many planes of light (if there could be such things as planes of light) had been slapped together in a haphazard sort of way.

Simak’s prose has a calm and measured rhythm. Sometimes he falls into iambs or trochees for a phrase or two before resuming a more naturally irregular stress pattern: “pressing down against the water, beating at the little island.” That’s also parallel phrasing, as is “this reader of the hills, this listener to the stars” from the introduction. Simak uses repetition of phrasing or repetition of words as a speaker might use them for rhythm or emphasis (see also “He walked the hills and knew what the hills had seen through geologic time”—not every writer would have repeated “the hills” there). “Daniels leaped to his feet and looked up and the ship was there” feels like the narrator is talking faster, with the way it stacks “and” conjunctions without commas. And the last phrase “haphazard sort of way” is a phrasing you might use in casual speech—“sort of” is a filler, and also suggests “haphazard” is a word chosen off the top of the narrator’s head, and might not be quite right.

When Daniels returns to the present and meets a search party, he lets Adams know he knows what Adams did. But he also chooses not to give Adams away to the sheriff. He’s giving Adams a chance to be better. (Earlier, of the fox stealing both Adams’ and his own chickens, Daniels said “I figure we are neighbors… Maybe that means I own a piece of him.”) He goes home with his new alien friend. He’s interested in seeing Daniels care for his animals, leading Daniels to a realization. The alien isn’t the thing’s follower, it’s a guardian and minder—as Daniels puts it, a “shepherd.” The aliens deal with evil by keeping it harmlessly contained, but never giving up on the possibility it might be redeemed, even if it takes a few million years.

Patience

“Slow Sculpture” is about a man and a woman whose names we never learn because they don’t ask them of each other until the story ends. The woman has a cancer diagnosis and goes for a walk to clear her head, where she meets the man making scientific observations on a tree. He offers to help; she has nothing to lose, so follows him to his lab. The treatment involves electricity (the man was also measuring electrical current around the tree) and surprisingly seems to work—definite proof will come with time, but she has her own reasons for believing he’s pulled off a miracle. She asks why, if he has this cure, he hasn’t told anyone.

It turns out the man has lived out the urban legend of the inventor whose super-efficient carburetor gets bought and buried by a car company. This is a repeated pattern in his life. He has great ideas, they get shot down because people just aren’t ready for him. He’s too real, man. He knows how it’s going to go if he tries to tell people about his cancer cure: all anyone will see is that he’s not a doctor, and he’ll be branded a quack. His lab is full of inventions that could change the world, and never will. Getting people to listen is hard. He’s stopped trying.

The man likes trees. The centerpiece of his home is a very old bonsai. He’s learned how to care for it, how to make the endless small adjustments that guide it to grow into something beautiful:

A man sees the tree and in his mind makes certain extensions and extrapolations of what he sees, and sets about making them happen. The tree in turn will do only what a tree can do, will resist to the death any attempt to do what it cannot do, or to do it in less time than it needs. The shaping of a bonsai is therefore always a compromise and always a cooperation… It is the slowest sculpture in the world, and there is, at times, doubt as to which is being sculpted, man or tree.

(Sturgeon’s prose is precise but casual, colloquial in a way that might not be clear from this excerpt. This story is dialogue-driven; there’s far more conversation than action or description. It’s a philosophical dialogue.)

Like Ellison’s William Bailey, Sturgeon’s nameless engineer despairs for humanity. Where “The Region Between” is angry (not a complaint—it’s good at being angry), “Slow Sculpture” argues for patience: if you can’t get the world to listen you don’t give up on it, you try a new strategy. As the woman says, “I mean… you already know how to get what you want with the tree, don’t you?”

There’s this ongoing debate in leftist circles over the value of incremental change, or reform, versus revolutionary change. This debate makes no sense to me inasmuch as there’s no reason for reform and revolution to be versus each other. Still, there’s a certain part of the left who, when they can’t get everything they want in one giant leap, give up and go home—think of the voters who sat out the 2010 midterms after getting a public option turned out to be harder than they thought, or the small faction who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden after Bernie Sanders couldn’t convince enough people he was a reliable candidate.

The problem with revolution, though, is that you rarely get the chance to pull one off. The right conditions don’t come along very often. In the meantime you can do nothing, or you can try reform: change what you can. An incremental change is still a change. If it doesn’t help everybody, it may help someone. And enough incremental changes can create the conditions for the big, revolutionary change that’s currently out of reach, like a thousand tiny adjustments shape a bonsai.

“Slow Sculpture” argues that it’s better to think of people as stubborn than stupid. Trees and human society are slow to change, and need constant tending if they’re going to change in the right way; you can’t afford to get frustrated when it proves impossible to force it. It’s not a good world, but it’s better to keep pushing whatever levers you have access to than to give up.

  1. A term reportedly coined by Leiber himself.  ↩

  2. The Fafhrd/Mouser stories were a big influence on Dungeons & Dragons, to the point TSR licensed them for a supplement.  ↩

  3. Another prequel featuring only Fafhrd, “The Snow Women,” also got a Nebula nomination.  ↩

  4. The one time he won a Hugo was for “Eurema’s Dam,” which even Lafferty didn’t think was his best work: in an interview available online, he says “Winning the Hugo Award for ‘Eurema’s Dam’ puzzled me completely, and I’m still puzzled by it.”  ↩