Tag: Hugo finalist

The Lordly Ones by Keith Roberts

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Lordly Ones by Keith Roberts1,2 (F&SF, March 1980) is not so much a story but an extended character portrait of the narrator, Tom, and it begins with his childhood memories of driving a pedal car in the family’s garden:

Wherever I traveled though, I would always end up in my favorite place of all. I called it Daisy Lane, from the big mauve clumps of Michaelmas daisies that grew close by each year. Here, by careful reversing, I could slide myself right out of sight between tall bushes. Once in position I could not be seen from the house at all, but I could see. I could stare down through the gaps in the hedge at the men working in the field, easing the car backward a little by the pressure of a pedal if one of them paused and seemed to glance my way.  p. 141

Tom’s shyness (or solitariness) is further limned when he is put in a special class at school—although Tom can read and write perfectly well, an inability to answer questions and his physical clumsiness give the impression that he is “slow”.
When Tom later enters the world of work he is first employed, courtesy of his gardener father, at the council nurseries. However, things do not go well (he is always breaking pots and then there is trouble with one of the women that works there) and, after that, Tom works at the town tip and then as a binman. Finally, at the age of 45, he becomes a lavatory attendant at “The Comfort Station”.
Tom describes his job at the lavatory in some detail—we learn how he cleans and repairs the facility until it is spotless and in good order—and we are briefly introduced to a couple of other (fleeting) characters: there is the woman who takes care of the other side of the facility (a distant figure), and Mr Ireland, Tom’s sympathetic and helpful supervisor who takes to visiting him on a semi-regular basis.
For most of the story, however, Tom is at the comfort station on his own (he has taken to living in one of the storerooms), and there are disturbing signs from the start of the story that society has experienced some sort of cataclysm: apart from the fact that no-one has come to the comfort station or its bucolic surroundings in the country for some time (including Tom’s co-worker), he has also seen bodies in the deserted nearby town where he goes to get food and supplies; there are also lights in the distant hills during the hours of darkness.
Later on (spoiler) we get a few hints as to what may have happened (and an insight to some of the social problems of UK society in the late 1970s):

I do not know why the Trouble happened. There was a lot on the telly about the black people fighting the whites and the unions trying to take over, but I could never understand it. I do not know why black people and white people should fight. I knew a black man once when I was on the carts. He was a very quiet person and used to bring small fruit pies to work that his wife had made. He shared them with me sometimes. They were very nice.

Tom starts looking after the other side of the comfort station as well as his own, and later goes into town later to stock up on as many supplies as he can find. Then the sounds of battle draw closer, and the water comes back on for a while. But, despite all this, it appears as if Tom is suspended in time:

I supposed it will sound funny, but I felt at peace. I have been feeling like that a lot since everybody went away. I cannot really find the right words to describe it.
When I wake up in the mornings, the sun makes a patch low down on the wall by my head, always in the same place. Birds are singing in the trees by the stream, and I know if I go to the window the sun will be on the brick wall round the car park, and the hills. As it moves round through the day, all the shadows change until they point the other way. Sometimes, if there is a wind, the dust blows across the car park in little whirls. When I lock the doors last thing at night, the moon is coming up. The moon makes shadows too of course, and they change as well, as it goes across the sky. The moonlight makes the car park look nearly white, but the shadows by the stream are black, like velvet. At night it always seems you can smell the water more clearly. The mist usually comes when it is starting to get light. It makes long streaks that reach as high as the bridge parapet. Nothing else happens. I do not want anything else to happen, ever again.  pp. 152-153

One night, however, he finds signs of blood in the lavatories; then, shortly afterwards, he is surrounded, and guns fire through the windows. Tom is told to come out by unseen characters. As he leaves the comfort station, Tom wishes he was back in his pedal car again:

I have had a silly thought, the silliest of all. I would like my little car back again now. I always felt safe in it; I could pedal it through the door and they would laugh. They would see I was only a little child after all.  p. 156

This penultimate paragraph not only links back to the opening passage, but perhaps distils Tom’s shy and uncomplicated character, outlined over the course of the story, into one line.
When I first read this story in the 1980s I didn’t think much of it—I suspect I was impatient at the amount of description and the lack of a plot—but this time around I enjoyed it a lot more. Some of the description is particularly evocative (there are a number of passages that I would like to have quoted) and the unusual protagonist and setting make for an original piece: there aren’t many End-of-the-World stories that take place away from the main events and feature lavatory attendants.
One that I will reread again at some point.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

1. This story was Keith Roberts’ only Hugo finalist—it placed 4th in 1981 behind The Cloak and the Staff by Gordon R. Dickson, Savage Planet by Barry B. Longyear, and Beatnik Bayou by John Varley, and ahead of The Autopsy by Michael Shea and The Ugly Chickens by Howard Waldrop.
Roberts also wrote a sequel to this story, The Comfort Station, which appeared two months later in the May 1980 issue of F&SF.

2. The story’s title comes from a song that is referenced in the story:

There was a song we had to learn at school, about the Lordly Ones. Miss Chaston, who taught us music, said that meant the fairies. It was a strange song and puzzled me very much at first. It said they lived in the hollow hills but I thought the other children were singing “the Harlow hills” and that all fairies lived at a place called Harlow, wherever that might be. I often used to make mistakes like that.
I did not think about the song again for years. Then, when I was working on the dust carts there was a man called Smudger. I never knew his proper name. He was a big man, much bigger than I, and had a lot of friends. I used to go with him sometimes to a hotel near the town center to have a drink. I would never have dared go to such a place on my own. The public bar was up the yard, and to get to it you had to pass a room lit by candles where all the guests were eating their dinner. The first time I looked in I thought some of the ladies were the most beautiful I had ever seen, and for some reason I remembered the song at once. I knew they were not fairies of course, just very rich people, but afterwards whenever I went there, the song always started in my mind.
Then when I had my flat I used to sit quite a lot looking down over the cathedral wall at the grass and driveways inside, especially if there was a wedding there or some other big function, which often happened. The people who came were very grand. Some of them even wore top hats like in the films. So I thought they must be the Lordly Ones too. So, although I was always getting shouted at for being clumsy or in the way, I thought if I could get the job at the Station, some of them might come there and see the towels all clean and soap in the dispensers, and be pleased. I wonder if Mr. Ireland knew that, and that was why he set me on.  p. 147

Life on the Moon by Tony Daniel

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Life on the Moon by Tony Daniel (Asimov’s SF, April 1995) opens at a party where Henry, a poet, meets Nell, an architect. They start dating:

Those first moments were so abstract, urban and—formed, as Henry later recalled them. Like a dance, personifying the blind calls and pediments of nature. That was what it felt like to be alive in the houses of people you didn’t really know, of living hazy days in parks and coffee shops and the chambers of the university. Nell and he met the next day for espresso like two ballet dancers executing a maneuver. Touch lightly, exchange, touch, pass, pass, pass.
But something sparked then and there, because, of course, he had asked her to drive out to the Ozarks to see the flaming maples, and Nell had accepted. And in the Ozarks, Henry could become himself, his best self.
Nell had found one of his books, and when they stopped to look at a particularly fine farmhouse amidst crimson and vermilion foliage, she quoted, from memory, his poem about growing up in the country.
They kissed with a careful passion.  p. 233

Well, at least they didn’t tell each other, “You complete me.”
They get married, and Nell begins a two year building project, a major construction in Seattle called the Lakebridge Edifice. They are given an apartment on the Alki-Harbour Island Span and, while Nell plays with her cement mixer, Henry writes his nature-based poetry:

In the nucleus of our home, my wife draws buildings
in concentrated silence, measured pace
as daylight dapples through the walls and ceilings
of our semi-permeable high arch living space.
While I, raised young among the cows and maize,
garden the terrace by my hand and hoe
and fax her conceptions out to their next phase,
she makes our living—and your living too.
Near twilight, I osmose from room to room
feeling vague, enzymatic lust for her  p. 234-235

The project is a triumph, and Nell then is offered a commission to build a lunar colony. Nell asks Henry to come with her, but he is concerned about what the lack of nature on the Moon will do to his poetry:

Henry had almost turned to go when the sun broke out from behind the clouds, and shattered the falls, and the surrounding mist, into prismatic hues.
This is as loud as the water, Henry thought. This is what the water is saying. It is talking about the sun. The possibility of sunlight.
The light stayed only for a moment, and then was gone, but Henry had his poem. In an instant, I can have a poem, Henry thought, but I look at the moon, and I think about living there—and nothing comes. Nothing. I need movement and life. I cannot work with only dust. I am a poet of nature, of life. My work will die on the moon. There isn’t any life there.
He must stay.
But Nell.
What would the Earth be like without Nell? Their love had not been born in flames, but it had grown warmer and warmer, like coals finding new wood and slowly bringing it to the flash point. Were they burning yet? Yes. Oh, yes.  p. 241

The agonies of being an artist compel Henry to stay on Earth while Nell goes to the Moon, and he moves to his grandfather’s log cabin to write. He passes up the chance to make a yearly visit, but this is something he agonises about after their regular VR calls. Then, one day (spoiler), he gets a call from her boss saying she has been killed in an accident. He also tells Henry that she left something for him in a crater on the Moon, but that they don’t know what it is. When Henry goes up there he sees it is a sculpture of a garden animated by micro machines (obviously not a very good one if the others couldn’t figure out what it was).
Okay, it’s probably pretty obvious by now that I wasn’t a fan of this: I found it a ponderous and pretentious piece (see above), and one in which the protagonist’s problems are not only self-created, they aren’t that believable (I can just about understand why he didn’t want to go to the Moon for an extended period, but why would you pass up the yearly visit?) What makes the story even more tiresome is that there are screeds of Henry’s really, really bad poetry used as interstitial material (see above for an example) And when we aren’t being exposed to that, we get extracts from Nell’s dry as dust architectural essays (I’ll spare you an extract from those—you’ve suffered enough).
I’m baffled as to how this was both a Hugo finalist and the winner of that year’s Asimov’s poll for Best Short Story.
* (Mediocre). 6,500 words.

The Secret Place by Richard McKenna

Posted on by Paul Fraser 2 Comments on The Secret Place by Richard McKenna

The Secret Place by Richard McKenna (Orbit #1, 1966) has as its narrator a geologist called Duard Campbell, one of a team sent to a small town to search for a vein of uranium:

It began in 1931, when a local boy was found dead in the desert near Barker, Oregon. He had with him a sack of gold ore and one thumb-sized crystal of uranium oxide. The crystal ended as a curiosity in a Salt Lake City assay office until, in 1942, it became of strangely great importance. Army agents traced its probable origin to a hundred-square-mile area near Barker.  p. 31

After the team finds nothing (the whole area is overlaid by Miocene lava flows) Campbell is left behind to maintain a skeleton operation to keep the army happy. He is angry and feels betrayed by his boss, and decides he will find the vein to spite him. Then, one night at dinner, Campbell speaks to Old Dave, one of the townsmen, who tells him about a local myth of a lost mine, and how the deceased boy’s sister, Helen, might know something about its whereabouts.
Campbell then hires Helen (who is described in part as “elfin”) as his secretary, and the main part of the story concerns itself with Campbell’s manipulation of her to obtain the information he wants. Initially this proves unsuccessful, but one day he makes a breakthrough:

I was trying the sympathy gambit. I said it was not so bad, being exiled from friends and family, but what I could not stand was the dreary sameness of that search area. Every spot was like every other spot and there was no single, recognizable place in the whole, expanse. It sparked something in her and she roused up at me. “It’s full of just wonderful places,” she said.
“Come out with me in the jeep and show me one,” I challenged.

During this trip, and subsequent ones, Helen tells him of the “fairyland” that she and her brother used to play in, and talks about “big cats” that chase dogs, “shaggy horses with claws, golden birds, camels, witches, elephants and many other creatures,” “the evil magic of a witch or giant,” “sleeping castles,” “gold or jewels,” and “magic eggs” amongst other things. Throughout this Campbell sketches the topology of Helen’s fantasy land (noting that she is remarkably consistent with her descriptions) and later convinces her to show him the “magic eggs,” which turn out to be quartz pebbles that could never have originated in the basalt desert around Barker.
Throughout all this Helen becomes increasingly unhappy and unstable, and there is a crisis point where she says that her brother Owen stole the “treasure” and later died because of her family’s poverty (when he was found he had lacerations of his back consistent with a cougar attack, although there were no such animals in the area). Old Dave eventually intervenes, tells Campbell about the townfolk’s displeasure about Helen’s condition, and states that she needs to go home.
Before he can arrange this Campbell receives a map of the prevolcanic Miocene landscape of the area, and is stunned when he realises it is a point for point copy of the map he has made of Helen’s fairyland. All of a sudden he realises, “The game was real [. . .] All the time the game had been playing me,” and he rushes out to find Helen, only to come across Dave who says she is missing.
Campbell drives out to the desert in the jeep ahead of the search party and, when he finds her, declares his love:

“Wait for me, little sister!” I screamed after her. “I love you, Helen! Wait for me!”
She stopped and crouched and I almost ran over her. I knelt and put my arms around her and then it was on us.
They say in an earthquake, when the direction of up and down tilts and wobbles, people feel a fear that drives them mad if they can not forget it afterward. This was worse. Up and down and here and there and now and then all rushed together. The wind roared through the rock beneath us and the air thickened crushingly above our heads. I know we clung to each other, and we were there for each other while nothing else was and that is all I know, until we were in the jeep and I was guiding it back toward town as headlong as I had come.
Then the world had shape again under a bright sun.  p. 45

There is a minor confrontation with the townsfolk when they get back, but Helen says she is going away with Campbell to be his wife.
A short postscript takes place sixteen years later, where Campbell tells of his professorship and the son they have had. Campbell also says that they don’t have any books of fairy tales in the house, but goes on to quote a cryptic remark from the son:

“You know, Dad, it isn’t only space that’s expanding. Time’s expanding too, and that’s what makes us keep getting farther away from when we used to be.”  p. 47

When I first finished this story (I skimmed it again later) I found it a bit of a muddle to be honest, and wasn’t sure whether “The Secret Place” was located in a different time or in a different reality, or both.1 Part of this was down to expectation (I’d previously read a review—which I can’t now find—of McKenna’s Fiddler’s Green which states that the characters in the story generate their own reality to escape the current one), and part of it was McKenna’s execution of the story itself, which trowels in so much talk of fantasy and magic that it almost drowns out the evidence suggesting the children (and later Campbell and Helen) are actually playing make-believe games in another time: the gold, the uranium, the quartz pebbles, the topology map, and the comment by the son.
I also thought the sudden declaration of love by Campbell a bit unlikely, and have no idea what is happening in the earthquake scene above (is it really a timequake—“now and then all rushed together”—or is it just an emotional climax to the story?)
It’s a very mixed bag and by no means a worthy Nebula winner. Bob Shaw’s Light of Other Days should have won that year, but was probably pipped by this as McKenna had recently died, and the film of his best-selling book, The Sand Pebbles, was in the cinemas.
** (Average). 6,150 words.

1. It took me a couple of days of scratching my head, Algis Budry’s October 1966 Galaxy review (“a minor story by a major writer,” “about time travel, love and maturation”), and reading the other comments on my Facebook group read thread before I could make sense of the story.