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“All the World’s Tears” by Brian W. Aldiss

“All the World’s Tears” by Brian W. Aldiss was first published in Nebula Science Fiction 21 in 1957. It has been rarely anthologized, but frequently reprinted in collections of stories by Aldiss. Older American science fiction fans might remember reading it in Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (1960). However, that collection has been republished many times with varying numbers of stories. I don’t recommend the current Kindle edition because it leaves off the story titles, uses the theme titles instead, and runs the intros into the beginnings of the stories. It’s readable but annoying.

You can read “All the World’s Tears” in Nebula Science Fiction 21. You can read a review of Galaxies Like Grains of Sand at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

Galaxies Like Grains of Sand is a fixup novel with a mosaic story composed of eight or nine unrelated short stories glued together by imaginative introductions. Sort of like Simak’s City. It feels like a cross between Last and First Men and The Dying Earth.

“All the World’s Tears,” is the second story, under the theme “The Sterile Millennia.” For being such a short short story is dense with ideas, atmosphere, and imagery. The opening sequence, tells us the ending but we won’t know that until we get to the last page and read it. Aldiss has painted a future Earth of stark contrasts. The setting is the far future, the last day of summer of the 44th century. Earth no longer supports billions of humans, just hundreds remain, living in a high-tech society under the control of robots. No one is poor, but civilization is in decay.

Robots control every intent of peapods, bees, birds, and ants. The agricultural land is impoverished, yet wild mother nature is encroaching everywhere. I have to wonder if this is the mid-way point between the mid-20th century and the future of the Hothouse stories Aldiss would soon write.

Strangely, the robots do everything, yet are rather dumb. They monitor all activity, yet talk between each other in clumsy English and can be easily fooled. At one point, a man evades security robots by holding tree branches and telling the robots he’s a rose bush.

Aldiss’ prose suggests vivid scenes for paintings and films. Aldiss is quite imaginative. Both Hothouse and Galaxies Like Grains of Sand could be the basis for wonderful animated films for adults.

“All the World’s Tears” feature four human characters and several robots. The main character of focus of Ployploy. She is a young woman who is considered mentally deficient for being kind and barred from having children. However, Ployplay is well-loved by her father Charles Gunpat. She is judged a hereditary throwback because she is white and can’t express herself with hate and aggression. I can’t but wonder if Aldiss isn’t being racist here by suggesting non-white people are the genetic aggressors. Although he could also be suggesting that whiteness disappeared as the world’s population homogenized, and aggression was another trait that emerged after thousands of years of endless wars.

Observing Ployploy is a visitor, J. Smithloa, who is hired to visit Gunpat’s estate. He is a professional insulter, hired to fire up people’s aggression so they will mate and work to keep civilization going. The fourth character is a wild man sneaking onto Gunpat’s estate. He lives outside the control of the cyber-controlled state and wants Ployploy to run off with him.

Aldiss envisions the future as being extremely regulated, and high-tech, yet, falling into decay, near the end of mankind’s reign on Earth. Wild nature will soon overrun what is left of our civilization. Not only is Aldiss’ picture of our future bleak, but the couple we want to escape this horrible society die tragically.

Why did Aldiss write this story? Why is he so pessimistic? Over the past couple of years, I’ve become a fan of Brian W. Aldiss. Sometimes his works seem more adult, more mature than American science fiction. I assume in the 1950s, Aldiss extrapolated human aggression constantly evolving through natural selection into what he projects in “All the World’s Tears.” I have not read all the stories in Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, but the ones I have contain the same Darwinian cynicism about the future. In these stories, it’s a red tooth and claw existence.

I read this story years ago, and then yesterday, and again today. Each time I found more little nuggets of speculation. The story is both slight and deep. Aldiss included in his collection Man in His Times: The Best Science Fiction of Brian W. Aldiss, a collection I’m group reading on Facebook.

James Wallace Harris, 7/9/23

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“The Lens” by Annemarie van Ewyck

“The Lens” by Annemarie van Ewyck is story #28 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Lens” first appeared in Dutch in De beste sf-verhalen van de King Kong award 1977, deel 1 (Dec. 1977/Jan. 1978). In 1986 it was reprinted in English in The Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Sam J. Lundwall.

Annemarie van Ewyck was Annemarie Pauline van Ewijck (1943-2017). She only has three short stories listed in ISFDB and was mainly an editor and columnist. The periodical above where the story first appeared looks like a fanzine to me.

Once again, I find it interesting that my take on a story is different from Hartwell’s. More and more, I’m realizing that The World Treasury of Science Fiction (1989) seems like a precursor to The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016) and that I’m out of touch with both editors. I might just be out of touch with the genre in general. However, with “The Lens” I believe it’s a perfect story for this anthology, and it’s my kind of science fiction.

Here’s Hartwell’s intro:

I thought “The Lens” was quite a nice story, especially effective for being so short, but I didn’t think “The Lens” reflected the mood, tone, or concerns of 1950s science fiction. I don’t know if that era can be generalized, and I wonder if there really is a general style to post-Anglo-American post-New Wave works. “The Lens” doesn’t feel like Bradbury, Zelazny, or Sturgeon to me at all but it does remind me of James Tiptree, Jr., but also Ursula K. Le Guin.

In other words, “The Lens” reminds me of 1970s science fiction written by women, which it is, but can we generalize on that? Is there a common denominator? I don’t think so, other than a female character in an alien society feeling the shock of otherness after undergoing an alien rite. But isn’t that theme also explored by Jack Vance in “The Moon Moth” or Downward To the Earth by Robert Silverberg?

As the years go by, I’m less inclined to believe there was much of a New Wave in science fiction, despite the efforts of Michael Moorcock, Judith Merril, and J. G. Ballard. Yes, there were some experimental efforts, like the kind we saw in New Worlds, England Swings, and Dangerous Visions, but that kind of experimentation had been going on in the literary world for a long time. I believe by the 1960s and 1970s the genre was just getting more diverse writers, and better writers in general, writers who were willing to try different ways to tell a story. By then writing programs were flourishing everywhere.

I also know people get tired of me bellyaching about some stories in these anthologies not being science fiction. That’s not because of how they were written, or by who. I believe science fiction represents a state of mind, and “The Lens” is definitely science fiction, and fits within that state of mind.

The first-person narrator, Dame Ditja, a diplomat, is returning from Earth to Mertcha after visiting their dying mother. We know things are very different when we learn her mother died at age 286. I liked how Dame Ditja described her relationship with their mother and their interaction with the other passengers on the ship. She is returning to the city of Tiel where she is the Head of Cultural Liason.

On Mertcha, the aliens have three arms and three legs, and their architecture and philosophy reflect that difference. Dame Ditja has decided to request a permanent assignment to Mertcha, which she now thinks of as home. She expected to be met at the spaceport by Mik, a local who is her driver and friend, however, a substitute driver meets her instead. That driver thinks she is an ordinary tourist and takes her to a holy place that is a main tourist attraction for people from Earth.

At the Holy Place of Tiel, Dame Ditja has a transcendental experience, one of ecstasy, one that is usually experienced by certain believers in this alien culture. While having this experience, Dame Ditja realizes that radical monks of this faith have trapped some tourists from Earth to hold hostage, and Dame Ditja comes out of her trance and carefully, but forcefully, frees them in a diplomatic coup.

This achievement gets her offered more prestige assignments, and Dame Ditja changes her mind and plans to leave, even though all through the story she wanted to stay.

The ending is strange. Because of the incident at the Holy Place of Thiel, Dame Ditja no longer feels like Mertcha is her home, and thus feels compelled to leave. It appears Dame Ditja wants to die, and she feels she can only die in a place she considers home. I’m not sure why she wants to die or is ready to die, but I wonder if it’s because people live too long in this fictional future?

After reading this story twice I feel it’s closest in style and tone to some stories I’ve read by Brian W. Aldiss. On the first reading, I would have rated this story ***+ but on my second reading, I feel it’s a **** story.

James Wallace Harris, 6/8/23

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Futures Past: 1928

Futures Past – Link to website for ordering softbound, hardbound, and digital copies. Jim Emerson writes and publishes Futures Past. Read Emerson’s About page to find out more about him and his future plans. Jim hopes to eventually publish volumes for the years 1926-1975. Even if Jim cranks out two volumes a year, I don’t know if I can live that long, but I hope I can live long enough to read those for the 1940s and 1950s. A .pdf file of the 1926 volume is available as a free download.

Jim has just published the third volume in his history of science fiction, Futures Past: A Visual History of Science Fiction. This 194 book is a visual delight, full of color photographs of book and magazine covers, as well as old black and white photographs of the people who created them. There’s an extensive history of space opera, including long profiles of the pioneers of the subgenre, E. E. “Doc” Smith, Jack Williamson, and Edmond Hamilton. I’ve been reading about the history of science fiction all my life, but I still found plenty of new information to discover in Futures Past. See my review of the earlier 1926 and 1927 volumes. Here’s the full table of contents to 1928.

1928 will be ancient history to most young science fiction fans, so they will find that year to be full of obscure details. However, the main articles in this volume, cover more than just the year 1928. The piece on space opera mentions books from 1802 to 1998, and the profiles of Smith, Hamilton, and Williamson cover their entire careers. That means pages 15-151 cover a good portion of the history of science fiction, especially the 20th century.

Content that’s exclusively on the year 1928 is on pages 8-14, 152-188. My favorite section in Futures Past is the section devoted to the books of the year. Most of the novels Emerson describes are long out of print and forgotten, yet some of them sound intriguing and make me want to track them down. Futures Past was first a fanzine in the early 1990s, and one mention in the 1926 volume, told about Phoenix by Lady Dorothy Mills. That one paragraph got me on a decades-long search for the novel. In fact, that mention made me become a collector of books by Lady Mills and inspired by to create a website devoted to her.

I’m intrigued by Tom Swift and His Talking Pictures, where Tom invents a large screen color TV and the movie moguls try to put him out of business because they fear TV will ruin their industry. Elsewhere in Futures Past 1928, Emerson mentions that May 10, 1928, was the first broadcast of a regularly scheduled TV program from W2XB, a General Electrics station in Schenectady, New York. I had no idea that television began so early. That makes me want to read more about it. I wish Emerson could have published their TV schedule. I did find out that W2XB broadcast the first drama, The Queen’s Messenger on September 11, 1928. This is leading me down a rabbit hole of researching early TV.

I expect readers of Futures Past will do the same thing, find an intriguing bit of history, and go follow it. I always thought The Skylark of Space was the first science fiction novel that features interstellar travel. That’s not true. Emerson says Les Posthumes by Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, a French novelist, is considered the first space opera and was published in 1802. But I’m intrigued by his mention of The Struggle for Empire: A Story of the Year 2236 by Robert William Cole published in the year 1900.

I’m curious how many people will buy Futures Past. It means they are interested in the history of science fiction. And more than likely, readers of old science fiction. I expect Baby Boomers who discovered science fiction in the 1950s and 1960s will be the most ardent fans of this publication, mainly for nostalgic reasons.

One fact that Emerson notes is Amazing Stories started publishing the full names and addresses of readers who wrote letters to the letter column. This allowed early science fiction fans to contact one another and led to the creation of fandom and fanzines. I expect his yearly volumes to start chronicling the rise of fandom in the 1930s.

As each year progresses, I believe there will be more and more content specific to that year. I’m looking forward to that. It will be a tremendous amount of work to gather such information. Maybe Emerson could use some help or ideas.

What I would like to see is a month-by-month chronicle of the best content published in magazines and fanzines. Most of the magazines and many of the fanzines from the 1930s are online. Knowing what’s worthy of reading is the key to using those libraries. Emerson has a start of that for Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. However, I’d want more details. Sort of like A Requiem for Astounding by Alva Rogers, which mentions the best stories and illustrations from each issue.

I’m less concerned with the table of contents from each issue shown on the right than what Emerson comments on the left. ISFDB lists the contents of magazines, but I never know what’s worth reading. What would be worth knowing is the outstanding stories from each prozine and the commentary about them from the fanzines.

What I use Futures Past for is finding old forgotten science fiction that I think might be worth tracking down and reading. The trouble is the amount of content coming out each year grows larger and larger, making Emerson’s job harder and harder. By 1953-1954, a 200-page book could be published on what went on each month in science fiction. That was when a science fiction boom happened when almost 40 SF magazines were coming out.

James Wallace Harris, 7/7/23

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“The Dead Past” by Isaac Asimov

“The Dead Past” by Isaac Asimov is story #27 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Dead Past” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction (April 1956). I can find no ebook or audiobook edition of this story.

Normally, I don’t link to the Internet Archive because I worry it’s going to be taken down. But for “The Dead Past” you can read it here in a scan of the April 1956 Astounding.

Let’s imagine that “The Dead Past” is a robot Isaac Asimov built. This robot has a specific function, to trigger certain ideas and emotions in readers. I believe we can understand this story in terms of the motors and gears Asimov used to design his robot.

  1. The first motor is Arnold Potterley, Ph.D., a Professor of Ancient History. Arnold is obsessed with ancient Carthage. He desperately wants to use a time viewer to prove that specific history about Pre-Roman Carthage is untrue, and were lies created by their enemies the Greeks and Romans.
  2. The second motor is academic control, as viewed through The Department of Chronoscopy, which has the power to view the past using the science of neutrinics, an area of physics created by a man named Sterbinski.
  3. The third motor is Jonas Foster, a new instructor in the physics department.
  4. The first gear system is a dystopian society that rigidly controls all academic research. Asimov used this feature to satirize the real-life academic bureaucracy that he had to deal with. Arnold fights against this bureaucracy to get access to the time viewer to do his research. Jonas becomes intrigued with why the bureaucracy suppresses the time viewer. The two men’s motives mess to work together secretly to build their own time viewer.
  5. The fourth motor is Caroline Potterley, Arnold’s wife. She is obsessed with the death of their child, Laurel, who died twenty years earlier at age 3. She wants the time viewer to see Laurel again.
  6. The second gear system is the mystery of Laurel’s death. Arnold is afraid that if Caroline could see the event he might be blamed. I believe Asimov added this system to his machine because he wanted an emotional component.
  7. The fifth motor is Ralph Nimmo, a popular science writer.
  8. The third gear system links Ralph and Jonas and allows Asimov to express views on science writers, as well as enable the building of a home time viewer.
  9. The sixth motor is Thaddeus Araman, Department Head of the Division of Chronoscopy. He is in charge of suppressing the technology of time viewing for a very specific reason.
  10. The last gear is between Arnold, Caroline, Jonas, and Thaddeus. The first three want to view the past, and the last wants to stop them. The why is the revelation of the story.

“The Dead Past” is one of Asimov’s better stories, even a favorite to some. I liked it quite a lot but found it clunky. The driving force behind Arnold is to prove ancient Carthage didn’t practice child sacrifice, and the driving force behind Caroline is to see her dead child again. Jonas is so intrigued by a possible conspiracy theory that he throws over his budding career in physics. I thought all three of these fictional motives were melodramatic. They do work, adding complexity and emotion to a rather dry final idea, but it’s a shame that Asimov didn’t come up with a more sophisticated emotional linkage.

I think Asimov would have shown more finesse if he had foreshadowed the ending. There is a cross-link between Arnold’s and Caroline’s desire to see the past, but neither predicts the real reason why Thaddeus wants to suppress the time viewer. This might be simplistic on my part, but if Arnold, Caroline, and Jonas each had a reason to use the time viewer, and one of their reasons should have foreshadowed the real reason why Thaddeus thought the time viewer was so dangerous. I believe the story would have been tighter if Jonas has wanted to use the time viewer to uncover the conspiracy, and Caroline wanted to use it to spy on Arnold and Jonas.

I don’t think Asimov was a very mature person. From what I’ve read about him, and from reading his stories, he comes across as a rather clever child prodigy who as an adult had trouble comprehending human relationships. This is often reflected in his stories. His fiction focuses on ideas, and his characters are constructed to present those ideas. In “The Dead Past,” Asimov tries harder than usual to present adult emotions, but they come across as contrived. Still, “The Dead Past” is a good example of Asimov trying to overcome his weakness. I give him credit for that.

Two or three years ago I read or reread all of Asimov’s robot stories. They were all hampered by this problem. I could always see how Asimov added human emotion to his stories. When I was young, that effort worked unseen, but as I got older, the stories succeeded in their ideas but felt clunky in their efforts to deal with genuine humans and relationships. In fact, I was sometimes horrified by some of Asimov’s emotional conclusions – but that’s for another essay.

“The Dead Past” is a nicely worked-out science fiction story. Asimov adds psychological depth to a neatly complex plot. Unfortunately, he uses B-movie creativity for creating the psychological drivers of this story.

Finally, regarding “The Dead Past,” I want to make a protest, or maybe a lament. This is my third reading of the story, and this time I wanted to read “The Dead Past” with my eyes, and then listen to it again from an audiobook. But I could find no audiobook edition. Nor could I find an ebook edition. This annoyed and depressed me. “The Dead Past” is one of Asimov’s best works of short fiction. You can find it in print in The Complete Stories, Volume 1. There are US and UK versions on Amazon, but they don’t have the same number of pages, so I don’t know which to recommend. However, used copies of the US edition are quite common and much cheaper.

I now prefer consuming fiction via ebooks and audiobooks. I hate that Asimov’s short fiction, as well as other science fiction writers’ short fiction, is either not available or is no longer available in these formats. A friend eventually found an epub version for me to read, and that visually easier-to-read format made reading the story far more enjoyable.

I recently noticed that all English language versions of Brian W. Aldiss audiobooks have been pulled from Audible. Classic old science fiction is slowly disappearing. There’s still plenty to buy and read, but it’s disappearing at the edges. I hate that.

James Wallace Harris, 7/6/23

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“The Spiral” by Italo Calvino

“The Spiral” by Italo Calvino is story #26 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Spiral” first appeared in Le Cosmicomiche, a collection of the author’s stories first published in Italy in 1965. It was later translated and published in English in 1968 as Cosmicomics.

Calvino is growing on me. In fact, after reading “The Spiral” I decided to buy Cosmicomics. I went to Amazon and Audible and listened to the introduction to The Complete Cosmicomics. I was so intrigued that I bought the ebook for $2.99 and the audiobook for an additional $7.49. That volume contains Cosmicomics (12 stories), Time and the Hunter (11 stories), 4 stories from Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories, and 7 newly translated stories, 34 in all.

“The Spiral” continues with the character from “A Sign in Space,” Qfwfq, who reminds me of YHWH. I don’t know if Calvino intended that or not, but these stories feel like another Bible that describes the evolution of matter and life through a coevolving self-awareness. I recently read An Immense World by Ed Yong, a book about umwelt in humans and animals, including mollusks. These two books have great synergy.

Cosmicomics stories are about science. I think it’s especially important to read Martin McLaughlin’s introduction to The Complete Cosmicomics. It’s too long to quote in its entirety, but I believe this should get you interested to maybe spring for the $2.99 Kindle edition.

With “The Spiral” I feel Calvino is trying to write a scientific description of reality using a philosophical conceit. Like McLaughlin said, Calvino thinks realistic fiction was exhausted, so he came up with this new approach.

Qfwfq is like God or Gaia, or one of an infinity of pantheistic gods who is describing the evolution of the universe and life. Although Calvino’s goal is to describe science, it also feels spiritual.

When I was young I couldn’t conceive of God or a beginning. I concluded that reality has always existed. It’s infinite in all directions and dimensions. Nothing can’t exist. Reality is the unfolding of all possible forms of non-existence.

You can listen to “The Spiral” here:

James Wallace Harris, 7/4/23

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“A Sign in Space” by Italo Calvino

“A Sign in Space” by Italo Calvino is story #25 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “A Sign in Space” first appeared in Le Cosmicomiche, a collection of the author’s stories first published in Italy in 1965. It was later translated and published in English in 1968 as Cosmicomics.

“A Sign in Space” is not science fiction. I won’t go into my rant again about how I dislike science fiction editors poaching literary works and calling them science fiction. I assume they do it to inflate the reputation of our genre, but I don’t want our genre to gain recognition for the wrong reasons. If Italo Calvino was really considered a science fiction author his success and fame would not have happened.

Be that as it may, let’s discuss “A Sign in Space” as a literary story. As soon as I started reading it I heard the voice of Mel Brooks doing his 2000 Year Old Man routine. Is it possible that Calvino could have heard this 1960 record? Great discoveries are often made at similar times around the world.

I did find a couple audio readings of the story, but none of the readers read it like Mel Brooks. I was disappointed. But here’s a nice narration.

This is a creative work that’s reasonably entertaining. It’s meant to be humorous and clever, but that really depends on the reading and delivery. That’s why I ached to hear Mel Brooks do it as a comedy routine. I did think it was too long.

I imagined the narrator being God when he was a youngster, just figuring things out. Did God create all of reality, or just Earth and its vicinity? Imagine being a conscious being that could ride around the Milky Way as it spun like a record. Imagine that being not having a language and needing to develop one. Making a sign could be the very beginning of the process. There are interesting philosophical points in this story.

Another thing I thought about while reading “A Sign in Space” was wondering how an observer could track the rotation of our galaxy? We see the Earth orbiting the sun through the changing background of the constellations throughout the year. The celestial sphere seems fixed to us when we realize we are moving. Would there be a larger sky outside our galaxy that would seem fixed too?

Just because a writer tells a fantastic story about outer space doesn’t mean we can pin a sign on their back that says SCIENCE FICTION WRITER. Marketing fiction as science fiction is a publishing technique to get certain kinds of stories to certain kinds of readers. It’s often bad for writers. And it’s unfair to writers who have developed a reputation outside of our genre. Some science fiction writers have learned that being labeled a science fiction writer has hurt their career potential. But it doesn’t help them or the genre to go around tagging certain famous writers as science fiction writers.

I wish David Hartwell could have found a genuine science-fiction story from Italy.

James Wallace Harris, 7/1/23