The Cold Solution by Don Sakers (Analog, July 1991) is a direct response to an earlier story from the magazine’s history, The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin (Astounding, August 1954). If you have never heard of this latter story it involves a spaceship pilot discovering a stowaway on his ship during a trip to take vital medicines to a colony planet. If the (female) stowaway remains on board (extra mass) the pilot won’t make it as he doesn’t have enough fuel. So the choice is: (a) she goes out the airlock or (b) they both die in space, and the colonists die too. The story (spoiler) confounds reader expectation of the time by having the pilot put the stowaway out the airlock rather than finding an engineering solution.1
Reader reactions to the story often miss the Trolley Problem2 at its heart (which of these two awful choices do you choose?) and generally fall into one of two categories: (a) there are engineering or security or physical problems that can or should have been addressed, or (b) the piece is an intentional piece of misogyny because a woman is brutally killed (this latter ignores her sympathetic prior treatment in the story, the likely feelings of the readers—who were from a “woman and children first” generation—and the fact that if it was a man no-one would care. That said, the pilot could have shot her first, which would have been a quicker and less painful death.)3 As we shall see, the piece under consideration falls into the first category.
Saker’s story begins in a similar manner to Godwin’s original with a female spaceship pilot finding a young boy who has smuggled on board her ship. The next few pages are a clunky setup of the problem outlined above (along with in-jokes and references to the original—the boy had spoken to a “Technician Godwin,” and the pilot remembers an old story that she read at the Academy, etc.). Eventually, the ship gets closer and closer to the decision point (there are options that give her a little more fuel but not enough) and, just before they get there, she tells the boy she’d give anything to prevent his death—just before dialling up her laser knife to maximum.
The story (spoiler) then cuts to a hospital where both of them are having their limbs regenerated, and we find out that the pilot amputated various of their limbs with the laser knife, before putting them out the airlock to get down to the required mass (I think the amputations include her legs, and one of his arms and both of his legs, but I can’t remember).
This is a silly end to a story that either (a) misses the conundrum at the heart of the original story or (b) decides to dodge it. Or maybe thinks that there is no philosophical problem so large that it can’t be sorted with a big enough spanner.
Worth reading for the unintentionally hilarious ending.
* (Mediocre). 4,100 words.
1. For a longer review of Tom Godwin’s story see The Cold Equations at sfmagazines.com.
2. The Wikipedia page on The Trolley Problem, or the more entertaining The Good Life take on the matter.
3. For a story that responds to Godwin’s story as a misogynistic piece see my review of Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly at sfmagazines.com.
The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories by Gene Wolfe
The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories by Gene Wolfe1 (Orbit #7, 1970) is one of his ‘Archipelago’ series and opens with its child protagonist, Tackman Babcock, going to the store with Jason, a man who appears to be his ill mother’s boyfriend. When they get there Tackman sees a book he wants but Jason refuses to buy it. However, when they get back to the car, Jason takes the book out from under his jacket and presents it to the boy. Tackman is delighted, and flicks through the pages while Jason makes unsettling comments about his mother (he is told not to come into her room that evening, and that she is so soft that, when Jason climbs on her, “it’s just like being on a big pillow.”) This begins a thread of domestic unease that runs throughout the story.
The next section of the story is an extract from the book that Tackman has been given, which involves a Captain Philip Ransom floating alone on a raft in the middle of the sea. When he sees land in the distance he starts paddling towards the shore.
Then, when Tackman goes outside the next morning:
A life raft. You run to the beach, jump up and down and wave your cap. “Over here. Over here.”
The man from the raft has no shirt but the cold doesn’t seem to bother him. He holds out his hand and says, “Captain Ransom,” and you take it and are suddenly taller and older; not as tall as he is or as old as he is, but taller and older than yourself. “Tackman Babcock, Captain.”
“Pleased to meet you. You were a friend in need there a minute ago.”
“I guess I didn’t do anything but welcome you ashore.”
“The sound of your voice gave me something to steer for while my eyes were too busy watching that surf. Now you can tell me where I’ve landed and who you are.”
You are walking back up to the house now, and you explain to Ransom about you and Mother, and how she doesn’t want to enroll you in the school here because she is trying to get you into the private school your father went to once. And after a time there is nothing more to say, and you show Ransom one of the empty rooms on the third floor where he can rest and do whatever he wants. Then you go back to your own room to read. p. 200-201
The rest of the book mixes three layers of reality: the first is Tackman’s real world (we learn that his mother is separated from his father but she is shortly to be remarried to a Dr Black); the second is the book’s pulp story (Ransom is caught and held captive by Dr Death, a scientist who is undertaking Moreau-like2 experiments); and the third involves scenes where both the real and book worlds merge, such as the one where Tackman talks to Dr Death on a restaurant balcony when he goes out for a meal with his mother, two aunts, and Dr Black.
The rest of the piece sees the appearance (in the story thread) of, among others, Talar of the Long Eyes (a female love interest for Ransom) and Bruno (an uplifted dog), the latter of which later visits Tackman in his bedroom. The climax of the real world thread (spoiler) eventually sees Tackman finding his mother overdosed at a party in the house and calling the police. The culpability (or otherwise) of Jason and Dr Black in her drug use remains ambiguous.
The final paragraphs show that Tackman is probably a character in a story too:
[The police] go away and you pick up the book and riffle the pages, but you do not read. At your elbow Dr. Death says “What’s the matter, Tackie?” He smells of scorched cloth and there is a streak of blood across his forehead, but he smiles and lights one of his cigarettes.
You hold up the book. “I don’t want it to end. You’ll be killed at the end.”
“And you don’t want to lose me? That’s touching.”
“You will, won’t you? You’ll burn up in the fire and Captain Ransom will go away and leave Talar.”
Dr. Death smiles. “But if you start the book again we’ll all be back. Even Golo and the bull-man.”
“Honest?”
“Certainly.” He stands up and tousles your hair. “It’s the same with you, Tackie. You’re too young to realize it yet, but it’s the same with you.” p. 214
The last line arguably introduces a fourth level of reality into the narrative, that of the reader who is finishing Wolfe’s story.
I really liked this piece when I first read it but this time it struck me as a slighter effort—Tackman’s “real” life isn’t a particularly well-developed arc as much of the piece relates to what happens in the book and to Tackman’s interactions with the characters. That said, the story merges the various realities of the story in a highly accomplished (and for the time novel) manner, and I was attracted to the story’s evocation of the complete immersion of youthful reading—what a pity that seems to disappear with age.
***+ (Good to Very good). 6,050 words. Story link.
1. Gene Wolfe was on the Nebula Award final ballot with this story and was initially announced as the winner—until the master of ceremonies, Isaac Asimov, was told that it had placed second to No Award. Gardner Dozois picks up the story in Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards (Tor, 2018):
I was there, sitting at Gene Wolfe’s table, in fact. He’d actually stood up, and was starting to walk toward the podium, when Isaac was told about his mistake. Gene shrugged and sat down quietly, like the gentleman he is, while Isaac stammered an explanation of what had happened. It was the one time I ever saw Isaac totally flustered, and, in fact, he felt guilty about the incident to the end of his days. It’s bullshit that this was the result of confusing ballot instructions. This was the height of the War of the New Wave, and passions between the New Wave camp and the conservative Old Guard camp were running high. (The same year, Michael Moorcock said in a review that the only way SFWA could have found a worse thing than Ringworld to give the Nebula to was to give it to a comic book.) The fact that the short story ballot was almost completely made up of stuff from Orbit [Damon Knight’s anthology series] had outraged the Old Guard, particularly James Sallis’s surreal “The Creation of Bennie Good,” and they block-voted for No Award as a protest against “nonfunctional word patterns” making the ballot. Judy-Lynn del Rey told me as much immediately after the banquet, when she was exuberantly gloating about how they’d “put Orbit in its place” with the voting results, and actually said, “We won!”
2. The book appears to reference H. G. Well’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Richard Shaver’s ‘Lemuria’ stories, but I have no idea where Tala of the Long Eyes comes from.
What Now, Little Man? by Mark Clifton
What Now, Little Man? by Mark Clifton (F&SF, December 1959) is set on the frontier planet of Libo, and opens with a conversation between Jim MacPherson, the narrator, and a friend called Paul Tyler about an indigenous lifeform called the Goonie (after Albatrosses on Earth, who similarly do not flee when predated by man). During this data dump, we learn that the goonies are kept to supply meat for the colony, domesticated to do simple tasks, and are physically beautiful:
[I] marveled, oh, for maybe the thousandth time, at the impossibility of communicating the goonie to anyone who hadn’t seen them. The ancient Greek sculptors didn’t mind combining human and animal form, and somebody once said the goonie began where those sculptors left off. No human muscle cultist ever managed quite the perfect symmetry natural to the goonie—grace without calculation, beauty without artifice. Their pelts varied in color from the silver blond of this pair to a coal black, and their huge eyes from the palest topaz to an emerald green, and from emerald green to deep-hued amethyst. The tightly curled mane spread down the nape and flared out over the shoulders like a cape to blend with the short, fine pelt covering the body. Their faces were like Greek sculpture, too, yet not human. No, not human. Not even humanoid, because—well, because, that was a comparison never made on Libo. That comparison was one thing we couldn’t tolerate. Definitely, then, neither human nor humanoid. pp. 276-277 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)
There is more data-dumping in the next section, where we learn that MacPherson started his career by planting a plantation of pal trees to attract the goonies and, while he names his domesticated “pet” animals—some of whom MacPherson has recently taught to read and write—the others are treated as livestock. We also get an angst-laden account about space travel making humans sterile and therefore unable to reproduce on Libo. This setup is further complicated with the arrival of a woman called Miriam Wellman from the Mass Psychology unit, who starts holding meetings where she induces therapeutic “frenzies” among the rapidly increasing male population.
The story eventually gets going when Tyler hires a goonie from MacPherson to do his reports for Hest, a recently arrived and troublesome official—who is later ridiculed by Tyler when he reveals that a goonie wrote them. Tyler also adds that that the alien is better at the job than Hest and, by saying this, he breaks a local taboo in comparing humans adversely to the goonies. He is subsequently cold-shouldered by the town folks.
After this exchange, MacPherson talks to Tyler in an effort to supress his revelation, but a businessman subsequently arrives at MacPherson’s farm wanting to buy one of the goonies who can read and write; MacPherson refuses, but the business man later tricks McPherson’s wife into giving him one for cash.
After MacPherson discovers what has happened he goes looking for his goonie, but ends up in Wellman’s cottage:
“My work here is about finished,” she said, as she came over to her chair and sat down again. “It will do no harm to tell you why. You’re not a Company man, and your reputation is one of discretion. . . . The point is, in mass hiring for jobs in such places as Libo, we make mistakes in Personnel. Our tests are not perfect.”
“We?” I asked.
“I’m a trouble-shooter for Company Personnel,” she said.
“All this mumbo-jumbo,” I said. “Getting out there and whipping these boys up into frenzies . . .”
“You know about medical inoculation, vaccination,” she said. “Under proper controls, it can be psychologically applied. A little virus, a little fever, and from there on, most people are immune. Some aren’t. With some, it goes into a full-stage disease. We don’t know which is which without test. We have to test. Those who can’t pass the test, Mr. MacPherson, are shipped back to Earth. This way we find out quickly, instead of letting some Typhoid Marys gradually infect a whole colony.”
“Hest,” I said.
“Hest is valuable,” she said. “He thinks he is transferred often because we need him to set up procedures and routines. Actually it’s because he is a natural focal point for the wrong ones to gather round. Birds of a feather. Sending him out a couple months in advance of a trouble-shooter saves us a lot of time. We already know where to look when we get there.”
“He doesn’t catch on?” I asked.
“People get blinded by their own self-importance,” she said. “He can’t see beyond himself. And,” she added, “we vary our techniques. p. 299 ibid.
The story finally climaxes on Carson’s Hill, where a lynch mob intends to kill the goonie. MacPherson climbs the hill intending to save the creature but soon sees he is outnumbered. As he considers what to do, Wellman arrives and treats the group of men like errant children. The crowd begins to dissipate:
“Oh, no, you don’t, Peter Blackburn!” Miss Wellman snapped at him, as if he were four years old. “You come right back here and untie this poor goonie. Shame on you. You, too, Carl Hest. The very idea!”
One by one she called them by name, whipped them with phrases used on small children—but never on grown men.
She was a professional, she knew what she was doing. And she had been right in what she had told me—if I’d butted in, there might have been incalculable damage done.
Force would not have stopped them. It would have egged them on, increased the passion. They would have gloried in resisting it. It would have given meaning to a meaningless thing. The resistance would have been a part, a needed part, and given them the triumph of rape instead of the frustration of encountering motionless, indifferent acceptance.
But she had shocked them out of it, by not recognizing their grown maleness, their lustful dangerousness. She saw them as no more than naughty children—and they became that, in their own eyes. pp. 305-306 ibid.
There is a philosophical postscript where MacPherson thinks about the goonies’ intelligence and, after reflecting on their behaviour when hunted, concludes “What is the point of survival if there is no purpose beyond survival.”
In conclusion, I found this an exceptionally clunky story full of unconvincing ideas and scenes (see the passage above) that don’t really fit together. Apart from the sketchy ecosystem (the goonies and the pal trees seem to be all there is on the planet), the idea that humans would treat an intelligent alien animal as a meat source is hard to get your head around nowadays, and I’m not entirely sure it would have that convincing in the late 1950s. Setting that aside, the seemingly endless amount of supposed psychology and cod philosophy stuffed into the story would, in any event, make for a dull piece. (I’d add that it seems like another thinly disguised Analog lecture dressed up as a story—imagine my surprise when I found it was first printed in F&SF! Is this a Campbell reject?)
After writing this review, it feels like this story should probably be rated as “mediocre,” but I see my notes say “average.” Only just, I suspect.
** (Average). 13,650 words. Story link.
The Man Who Lost the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon
The Man Who Lost the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon (F&SF, October 1959) opens with a boy annoying a man who is half-buried in sand with explanations about how his helicopter works:
He doesn’t want to think about flying, about helicopters, or about you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away.
The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a combination time-piece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, “Don’t move, boy. You’ve got the bends. Don’t even try to move.” He had tried anyway. It hurt. So now, this time, he lies in the sand without moving, without trying. p. 259 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)
After this we learn that the man isn’t, for an unspecified reason, able to think straight, and his inchoate thoughts wander from a childhood concussion in a gym class to observations of his local environment—these include what he thinks is the sea in front of him—before moving on to an attempt to calculate the period of an overhead satellite. During these various thought processes (spoiler) it seems he may be somewhere other than Earth.
The next long section is a formative episode from the man’s youth, when he got into difficulties in the sea while snorkelling and almost drowned—all because he panicked but was reluctant to call for help. He then thinks about the kid with the helicopter, which makes him recall another model, one of a spacecraft that had several stages. Then he notices that the satellite is just about to disappear, and his final calculation of its period confirms where he is.
In the last section of the story he recalls the spacecraft again, but the real thing this time and not the model, and how the final two stages, Gamma and Delta, crashed onto the surface, ejecting a man to lie among radioactive graphite from the destroyed engine. Then the sun rises, and he realises that there isn’t a sea in front of him:
The sun is high now, high enough to show the sea is not a sea, but brown plain with the frost burned off it, as now it burns away from the hills, diffusing in air and blurring the edges of the sun’s disk, so that in a very few minutes there is no sun at all, but only a glare in the east. Then the valley below loses its shadows, and like an arrangement in a diorama, reveals the form and nature of the wreckage below: no tent-city this, no installation, but the true real ruin of Gamma and the eviscerated hulk of Delta. (Alpha was the muscle, Beta the brain; Gamma was a bird, but Delta, Delta was the way home.) p. 269 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)
He realises that this is his spaceship, and it crashed on Mars. He also realises that he is dying but, in his last moments, he rejoices that “we made it.”
This story may appear to have a slight narrative arc but a plot synopsis isn’t much use in an appreciation: what we really have here are a number of well-written and intensely evocative memories and scenes that are slowly brought into focus to reveal what has happened to the man. It’s an accomplished piece and, in terms of technique, atypical for the period.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,950 words. Story link.
What the Left Hand Was Doing by Randall Garrett
What the Left Hand Was Doing by Randall Garrett (Astounding, February 1960) begins with the protagonist, Spencer Candron, arriving at The Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research, Inc., a front for a group of psi (mind-power) capable individuals. Once we eventually get beyond the over-padded beginning (which includes a description of the building, of Candron, and of the secretary and her role in keeping away the crazies) he finally receives a leisurely briefing about the Red Chinese abduction of a famous US physicist called Ch’ien at an international conference in their country (his abductors have attempted to cover this up by murdering a double). Candron is told to rescue Ch’ien before the Chinese uncover his interstellar drive secrets.
The story picks up pace when Candron flies over Chinese territory and arranges to have an aircraft door to fall off during the flight. He then jumps out:
Without a parachute, he had flung himself from the plane toward the earth below, and his only thought was his loathing, his repugnance, for that too, too solid ground beneath.
He didn’t hate it. That would be deadly, for hate implies as much attraction as love—the attraction of destruction. Fear, too, was out of the question; there must be no such relationship as that between the threatened and the threatener. Only loathing could save him. The earth beneath was utterly repulsive to him.
And he slowed.
His mind would not accept contact with the ground, and his body was forced to follow suit. He slowed.
Minutes later, he was drifting fifty feet above the surface, his altitude held steady by the emotional force of his mind. Not until then did he release the big suitcase he had been holding. He heard it thump as it hit, breaking open and scattering clothing around it.
In the distance, he could hear the faint moan of a siren. The Chinese radar had picked up two falling objects. And they would find two: one door and one suitcase, both of which could be accounted for by the “accident.” They would know that no parachute had opened; hence, if they found no body, they would be certain that no human being could have dropped from the plane. p. 183 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)
Not bad, and the next part of the story—where he establishes himself in a hotel room in the city—is interesting too. However, the piece falters when Candron later goes to the Security HQ in the middle of the city and makes full use of his psi powers: he holds onto the underside of a car with his fingertips as it goes through the checkpoint; levitates up an elevator shaft; impersonates a Chinese general in a phone call to the cell guards to organise his visit; and then goes down to see Ch’ien. This is all too easily done, as is his rescue of the physicist, which (spoiler) sees him knock the scientist unconscious with an uppercut, set off a smoke bomb, and then teleport them both back to his room in the city. There, he carries Ch’ien to the roof of the hotel, and levitates himself and the physicist out to sea where they eventually meet a submarine (this latter event happens when he’s getting a bit tired, something we find out after a two page lecture about the limits of the human mind and psionic abilities).
The last couple of pages of the story have a Senator and a couple of other men debrief Candron at the institute, and one of the questions they ask him is why he kept knocking the physicist unconscious throughout the flight to the sub. Candron replies with some typical Campbellian blather about psionics:
“It would ruin him,” Candron broke in, before the senator could speak. “If he saw, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that levitation and teleportation were possible, he would have accepted his own senses as usable data on definite phenomena. But, limited as he is by his scientific outlook, he would have tried to evolve a scientific theory to explain what he saw. What else could a scientist do?”
Senator Kerotski nodded, and his nod said, “I see. He would have diverted his attention from the field of the interstellar drive to the field of psionics. And he would have wasted years trying to explain an inherently nonlogical area of knowledge by logical means.”
“That’s right,” Candron said. “We would have set him off on a wild goose chase, trying to solve the problems of psionics by the scientific, the logical method. We would have presented him with an unsolvable problem.”
Taggert patted his knees. “We would have given him a problem that he could not solve with the methodology at hand. It would be as though we had proved to an ancient Greek philosopher that the cube could be doubled, and then allowed him to waste his life trying to do it with a straightedge and compass.”
“We know Ch’ien’s psychological pattern,” Candron continued. “He’s not capable of admitting that there is any other thought pattern than the logical. He would try to solve the problems of psionics by logical methods, and would waste the rest of his life trying to do the impossible.” pp. 202-203 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)
I think this sort of thing is what was meant by “pushing Campbell’s buttons” (i.e. pandering to the editor of Astounding magazine, John W. Campbell, and his sometimes whacky ideas).
I eventually lost patience with this story as I’m not a fan of work that (a) uses lazy SF ideas and terminology (“psi”) or (b) is obviously padded with word-rate generating material (e.g. endless description and lectures). But most of all I don’t like (c) stories (and movies—I’m looking at you Wonder Woman) where the superhero protagonists can seemingly do anything they want and are never in any sort of jeopardy.
If none of this applies to you, this may be an entertaining enough piece as it’s readable enough.
* (Mediocre). 10,900 words. Story link.
Make a Prison by Lawrence Block
Make a Prison by Lawrence Block (Science Fiction Stories, January 1959) gets off to a pretty good start with two Alteans discussing a prisoner—the murderer of three of their kind, the first such crime in thirty generations—who is about to be imprisoned in a tall tower. They talk about the security precautions (the curved, unclimbable walls, the pneumatic delivery tubes, etc.) and then watch as the shackled prisoner is sent up to the accommodation at the top.
Several minutes later the prisoner throws his shackles down (the key was at the top of the tower), and then (spoiler) he climbs the rail and flies away.
This latter event broke the story for me as there is no build up to this surprising event—it just happens. I presume the twist might work for those who were assuming that the prisoner is a human.
* (Mediocre). 1,000 words. Story link.
Plenitude by Will Mohler
Plenitude by Will Mohler (F&SF, November 1959, as by Will Worthington) starts with a four-year-old boy called Mike asking his narrator father various questions while they garden. As a result of these—why don’t they live in the “Old House in the Valley” anymore, are the “funny men” broken (explained by the narrator as a reference to derelict robots in the city), etc.—the story soon establishes itself as a post-collapse one.1
Then, when the narrator and son Mike return to their house for supper, he learns from his wife that his other son, a twelve-year-old called Chris, has gone hunting. It later becomes apparent that there has been a falling out between the two (and possibly an estrangement with a neighbouring family) as a result of a trip to the city where the narrator killed someone.
The rest of the story then flashbacks to a previous day of gardening, but this time with the elder son Chris, who is also questioning the father about why they live as they do and how society ended up in its present state. The narrator tries to answer these more involved and challenging questions but eventually becomes exasperated with his son and says he will take him into the city so he can see things for himself.
The climactic section (spoiler) sees the pair moving through a mostly derelict urban landscape until they come to a fence surrounding a group of large fluid-filled bubbles. Inside these people float seemingly unaware, connected up to various leads and hoses. The narrator cuts the perimeter fence and the pair go inside for a closer look:
I do not know the purpose of all the tubes and wires myself. I do know that some are connected with veins in their arms and legs, others are nutrient enemata and for collection of body wastes, still others are only mechanical tentacles which support and endlessly fondle and caress. I know that the wires leading to the metal caps on their heads are part of an invention more voracious and terrible than the ancient television—direct stimulation of certain areas of the brain, a constant running up and down the diapason of pleasurable sensation, controlled by a sort of electronic kaleidoscope.
My imagination stops about here. It would be the ultimate artificiality, with nothing of reality about it save endless variation. Of senselessness I will not think. I do not know if they see constantly shifting masses or motes of color, or smell exotic perfumes, or hear unending and constantly swelling music. I think not. I doubt that they even experience anything so immediate and yet so amorphous as the surge and recession of orgasm or the gratification of thirst being quenched. It would be stimulation without real stimulus; ultimate removal from reality. I decide not to speak of this to Chris. He has had enough. He has seen the wires and the tubes. pp. 253-254 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)
Then one of the occupants opens his eyes and sees the pair, and a guard robot quickly arrives. The narrator destroys it and then, in his rage, goes on to slash open the bubbles:
The corn-knife was not very sharp, but the skin of the sphere parted with disgusting ease. I heard Chris scream, “No! Dad! No!” . . . but I kept hacking. We were nearly engulfed in the pinkish, albuminous nutritive which gushed from the ruptured sac. I can still smell it.
The creatures inside were more terrible to see in the open air than they had been behind their protective layers of plastic material. They were dead white and they looked to be soft, although they must have had normal human skeletons. Their struggles were blind, pointless and feeble, like those of some kind of larvae found under dead wood, and the largest made a barely audible mewing sound as it groped about in search of what I cannot imagine.
I heard Chris retching violently, but could not tear my attention away from the spectacle. The sphere now looked like some huge coelenterate which had been halved for study in the laboratory, and the hoselike tentacles still moved like groping cilia.
The agony of the creatures in the “grape” (I cannot think of them as People) when they were first exposed to unfiltered, unprocessed air and sunlight, when the wires and tubes were torn from them, and especially when the metal caps on their heads fell off in their panicky struggles and the whole universe of chilly external reality rushed in upon them at once, is beyond my imagining; and perhaps this is merciful. This, and the fact that they lay in the stillness of death after only a very few minutes in the open air.
Memory is merciful too in its imperfection. All I remember of our homeward journey is the silence of it. pp. 255-256 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)
The remainder of the story returns to the present day, and sees a returned Mike and a neighouring family joining the narrator, wife and youngest son for supper. Mike appears reconciled, even unconcerned, about what happened.
This isn’t a perfect piece by any means (the conflict set up between the father and son fades away rather than being resolved in any meaningful or cathartic way) but it has some superior qualities. Not only is the story well written, with some good characterisation and vivid description, but the narrator’s reflective commentary also puts the reader right inside his head. This rich mixture transcends the slightness of the plot.
I’ll be tracking down more of Mohler’s work.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 5,100 words. Story link.
1. This story reminded me a little, in places, of the novel Earth Abides by George Stewart.
The Sound Sweep by J. G. Ballard
The Sound Sweep by J. G. Ballard (Science Fantasy #39, February 1960) opens with Madame Gioconda, an ageing and out of work opera diva, suffering a headache which is worsened by the sounds of flyover traffic and then, later, by the phantom applause that comes from the auditorium around her apartment on the sound stage of a disused radio station—applause that later turns into boos and catcalls. At midnight a man called Magnon, a mute who can “hear” sound residues, arrives with his “sonovac”:
Understanding her, he first concentrated on sweeping the walls and ceiling clean, draining away the heavy depressing underlayer of traffic noises. Carefully he ran the long snout of the sonovac over the ancient scenic flats (relics of her previous roles at the Metropolitan Opera House) which screened-in Madame Gioconda’s makeshift home—the great collapsing Byzantine bed (Othello) mounted against the microphone turret; the huge framed mirrors with their peeling silverscreen (Orpheus) stacked in one corner by the bandstand; the stove (Trovatore) set up on the program director’s podium; the gilt-trimmed dressing table and wardrobe (Figaro) stuffed with newspaper and magazine cuttings. He swept them methodically, moving the sonovac’s nozzle in long strokes, drawing out the dead residues of sound that had accumulated during the day.
By the time he finished the air was clear again, the atmosphere lightened, its overtones of fatigue and irritation dissipated. Gradually Madame Gioconda recovered. Sitting up weakly, she smiled wanly at Mangon. Mangon grinned back encouragingly, slipped the kettle onto the stove for Russian tea, sweetened by the usual phenobarbitone chaser, switched off the sonovac and indicated to her that he was going outside to empty it. p. 205 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)
When Magnon empties the sonovac there is only the usual sound detritus, and it becomes obvious that the audience that Madame Gioconda claims to hear is only imaginary. But Magnon is an admirer of the singer and hopes to win her favour—he visits every day to clean the apartment of sound residues, serve her tea, and listen to her tales of a comeback and revenge—so he keeps this information to himself.
In the next part of the story we learn more about her obsolescence (normal music was replaced by ultrasonic music which can’t be heard by humans but has an emotional effect) and her plans to stage a comeback by blackmailing a wealthy producer called LeGrande who is going into politics (she drunkenly relates she has intimate photographs of them together as well as a “no holes barred” memoir).
The rest of the story follows quite an involved plot, which adds another character, Ray Alto, a client and friend of Magnon’s who is an ultrasonic composer, and Madame Gioconda’s discovery of the fact that Magnon can not only hear sound residue but can distinguish snatches of conversation. This latter ability eventually sees Magnon and Madame Gioconda go the “sound stockades”—a dumping ground for all the city’s sonic waste—and sieve through the detritus for fragments of conversation which will let them blackmail Le Grande. During this search Magnon recovers his powers of speech.
All of this eventually rolls towards a climax where (spoiler) Madame LeGrande is scheduled—after her blackmail attempt is successful—to sing alongside a debut performance of Alto’s ultrasonic Opus Zero, much to the composer’s fury. Alto then plots with Magnon (who has subsequently been brutally snubbed by Gioconda after she got what she wanted) to hide a sonovac at the performance to hoover up her voice before it gets to the mike (a voice which sounds like, according to Alto, a “cat being strangled” because “what time alone hasn’t done to her, cocaine and self-pity have.”) But, of course, during the performance Magnon (who has by now lost his voice again) decides to revenge himself by letting the world hear her:
Mangon listened to her numbly, hands gripping the barrell of the sonovac. The voice exploded in his brain, flooding every nexus of cells with its violence. It was grotesque, an insane parody of a classical soprano. Harmony, purity, cadence had gone. Rough and cracked, it jerked sharply from one high note to a lower, its breath intervals uncontrolled, sudden precipices of gasping silence which plunged through the volcanic torrent, dividing it into a loosely connected sequence of bravura passages.
He barely recognized what she was singing: the Toreador song from Carmen. Why she had picked this he could not imagine. Unable to reach its higher notes she fell back on the swinging rhythm of the refrain, hammering out the rolling phrases with tosses of her head. After a dozen bars her pace slackened, she slipped into an extempore humming, then broke out of this into a final climactic assault. Appalled, Mangon watched as two or three members of the orchestra stood up and disappeared into the wings. The others had stopped playing, were switching off their instruments and conferring with each other. The audience was obviously restive; Mangon could hear individual voices in the intervals when Madame Gioconda refilled her lungs.
[. . .]
Satisfied, he dropped the sonovac to the floor, listened for a moment to the caterwauling above, which was now being drowned by the mounting vocal opposition of the audience, then unlatched the door. pp. 242-243 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)
This is an original piece and a pretty good one too. I note, however, that it feels like early Ballard: not only does the sonovac and ultrasonic music subject matter feel more like something you would find in Barrington Bayley’s later work, but the story also has a conventional plot. That said, it does have Ballard’s distinctive style.
If the final scene had been clearer, and the miraculous speech recovery in the middle of the story less awkwardly placed, I would have probably rated this higher. That said, these are minor criticisms, and it is well worth a read.
I note in passing that there are a significant number of drug references for the time.
***+ (Good to very good). 14,500 words. Story link.
Dream Atlas by Michael Swanwick
Dream Atlas by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2021) has a scientist studying dreams meet her future self while having one. She is subsequently told that the dream continuum stretches through space and time and can be used to see the past and future. Future scientist then tells her the eighteen principles she needs to complete her work and earn a Nobel Prize, much wealth, and fame. However, (spoiler) before future scientist can finish her spiel, far-future beings1 interrupt the process and tell the present day scientist it would be too hazardous for the people of her time to have that knowledge.
This is an entertaining enough squib but it is slight, and doesn’t really make any sense if you think about it too much: how would the future scientist come into existence if the far-future beings intervene?
** (Average). 2,100 words.
1. The far-future beings sound like the same kind of deal as The Unchanging in his story Scherzo with Tyrannosaur (Asimov’s SF, July 1999), reviewed here recently.
Day at the Beach by Carol Emshwiller
Day at the Beach by Carol Emshwiller (F&SF, August 1959) begins with two (hairless) parents discussing, over their oatmeal, the dangers in commuting to the city to get food. Thereafter we get other hints that this is a post-holocaust or post-Collapse future when a discussion about a possible trip to the beach has mention of the boardwalk having been used for firewood and, when the couple’s three-year old comes in from outside, he is described as having down growing along his backbone (the woman wonders “if that was the way the three year olds had been before”). The child also bites a small chunk out of his mother’s shoulder when she chastises him for knocking over his oatmeal.
After this setup the couple decide—partly because they think it’s Saturday, partly because it’s a nice day—to go to the beach: they fill the car with only enough petrol to get there, and take a can’s worth for the return trip (which they plan to hide while they are on the beach). They also take weapons: a wrench for her, and a hammer for him.
On the drive there they see only a solitary cyclist and then, when they get to the beach, no-one at all. Later on, however, three men appear and threaten them, saying they want the couple’s gasoline. There is then an altercation during which the husband kills the leader with his hammer and the other two run off. Then the couple realise that the child has disappeared.
The remainder of the story sees the couple searching for the kid, and the husband eventually bringing him back. At this point the wife notes that they have time for one last swim (this with the attacker’s body still lying nearby). Then, on the way home:
He fell asleep in her lap on the way home, lying forward against her with his head at her neck the way she liked. The sunset was deep, with reds and purples.
She leaned against Ben. “The beach always makes you tired,” she said. “I remember that from before too. I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”
They drove silently along the wide empty parkway. The car had no lights, but that didn’t matter.
“We did have a good day after all,” she said. “I feel renewed.”
“Good,” he said.
[. . .]
“We had a good day,” she said again. “And Littleboy saw the sea.” She put her hand on the sleeping boy’s hair, gently so as not to disturb him and then she yawned. “I wonder if it really was Saturday.” p. 174 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)
This is an effectively dystopian piece, but its impact will probably be blunted for most readers by the many similar tales that have appeared since. I suspect, however, this story was notably grim for the time, and it foreshadows later new wave stories.
*** (Good). 4,100 words. Story link.