Unready to Wear by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.1 (Galaxy, April 1953) is set in a future where many humans are now “amphibious”, i.e. incorporeal, and when they need a human body they borrow one:
My old body, which [my wife] claims she loved for a third of a century, had black hair, and was short and paunchy, too, there toward the last. I’m human and I couldn’t help being hurt when they scrapped it after I’d left it, instead of putting it in storage. It was a good, homey, comfortable body; nothing fast and flashy, but reliable. But there isn’t much call for that kind of body at the centers, I guess. I never ask for one, at any rate.
Then the narrator later recalls the time he got conned into borrowing Konigwasser’s body (the inventor of the amphibious process) to lead the annual Pioneers’ Day Parade:
Like a plain damn fool, I believed them.
They’ll have a tough time getting me into that thing again—ever. Taking that wreck out certainly made it plain why Konigswasser discovered how people could do without their bodies. That old one of his practically drives you out. Ulcers, headaches, arthritis, fallen arches—a nose like a pruning hook, piggy little eyes and a complexion like a used steamer trunk. He was and still is the sweetest person you’d ever want to know, but, back when he was stuck with that body, nobody got close enough to find out.
We tried to get Konigswasser back into his old body to lead us when we first started having the Pioneers’ Day parades, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with it, so we always have to flatter some poor boob into taking on the job. Konigswasser marches, all right, but as a six-foot cowboy who can bend beer cans double between his thumb and middle finger.
This last passage basically summarises the thrust of the story, which is that most human bodies are unsuitable for the minds that inhabit them—an idea which is examined in a quirky way during the first part of the story (along with the advantages of not having a body, and how Konigwasser discovered the process).
The second part of the story then introduces the “enemy”, the people who have stayed behind in physical form:
Usually, the enemy is talking about old-style reproduction, which is the clumsiest, most comical, most inconvenient thing anyone could imagine, compared with what the amphibians have in that line. If they aren’t talking about that, then they’re talking about food, the gobs of chemicals they have to stuff into their bodies. Or they’ll talk about fear, which we used to call politics— job politics, social politics, government politics.
The enemy manage to trap the narrator and Madge in two bodies that they have taken from the storage centre, and the pair are subsequently tried for desertion. After some witty back and forth between the two sides at the trial, the narrator manages to bluff their way out.
This piece is more quirk and wit than story, but it has an interesting—and sometimes Laffertyesque—perspective on the subject.
*** (Good). 5,400 words. Story link.
1. There was some speculation about the Unready to Wear title when we did the group read of this in one of my Facebook groups: a composite suggestion is that the title is a play on “ready to wear”, and that either humans are either not ready (or willing) to wear bodies, or the bodies themselves are not ready for human use.
The “amphibious” description comes from a reference at the very end of the story about the lack of interest among the young for the bodies available at the storage centres:
So I guess maybe that’ll be the next step in evolution—to break clean like those first amphibians who crawled out of the mud into the sunshine, and who never did go back to the sea.