Why is A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn out of print at Amazon? There is no Kindle or Audible edition either. This 1954 novel won the International Fantasy Award back in 1955. Being out-of-print is especially puzzling when you consider the other winners of that short-lived award: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart (1951), Fancies and Goodnight by John Collier (1952), City by Clifford Simak (1953), More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon (1954), and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1957). A Mirror for Observers has been reprinted several times since 1954, but it’s mostly forgotten.

Two weeks ago, I listed A Mirror for Observers as one of my top ten favorite science fiction novels for a YouTuber survey. I first read the novel back in 2018 and was so impressed with Pangborn that I bought several of his other novels. But that was a first impression. I reread A Mirror for Observers this week and felt it was seriously flawed. Not one I’d still list in my top ten. However, it’s an impressive effort. The main reason I admired the story in 2018 because I was an older reader. I’m not sure younger readers today will care for the novel.

Let’s face it, most science fiction is aimed at our adolescent selves. Science fiction appeals to our fantasies about reality. When I read science fiction at age seventy-three and like a story, it’s generally because that story nostalgically recalls the science fiction I read when I was young, unearthing buried adolescent emotions of hope for the future.

Science fiction readers spend their lives in quiet desperation waiting for their favorite sense of wonders to come true. When you get old and realize you’re never going to trek across Mars or rocket across the galaxy at faster-than-light speeds, you start thinking about reality differently, certain science fiction works take on a new light.

Rereading A Mirror for Observers makes me think it could have been a science fiction novel that Robert M. Pirsig might have written in an alternate reality. In case you’re too young to remember, Pirsig wrote the 1974 bestseller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Edgar Pangborn also used his story to express his philosophical views about society, quoting Greek philosophers, dealing with ethics and aesthetics. Another parallel, both stories involve an older man mentoring a teenage boy.

A Mirror for Observers is a story about two groups of Martians who live among us and have been for thirty thousand years. Mars and Martians, Salvay and Salvayans in their language. The Martians abandoned a dying planet to come to Earth. Think about that word Salvayans. It’s awful close to the world salvation. The two groups of Martians are called the Observers and the Abdicators. The observers watch us hoping to help us without us knowing or interfering with our own development, they are like guardian angels. The Martian renegades, the abdicators, gave up on humanity, deciding we were too stupid to survive the evolutionary challenge, figuring it would be best if we became extinct. The one abdicator we meet, Namir, takes on a role like the devil.

Pangborn throws out a lot of science fictional speculation in the story, but it ultimately feels like a morality tale. Pangborn is spiritual, if not Christian. He’s also very influenced by philosophy and classical music. The story is fun where Pangborn guesses what his near future would be like, now fifty years in our past.

Pangborn was born in 1909, so he was in his forties when he wrote A Mirror for Observers, but the voice of the novel feels much older. Pangborn’s voice comes through as Elmis, the Martian observer who goes by the names Benedict Miles and Will Meisel. Elmis is competing with the abdicator named Namir for the soul of the 12-year-old boy, Angelo Petrovecchio. Elmis also discovers another brilliant child, Sharon, a friend of Angelo who is a few years younger.

As I reread A Mirror for Observers I wanted to love this novel. I wanted it to be great. Unfortunately, this time I discovered too many flaws. The plot has three main disjointed acts. Elmis is sent to the small town, Latimer, Massachusetts to guard Angelo from Namir. We were told that Angelo is very special, an exceptional human that has great potential and needs protection. We do get some hints of that in the conversations between Elmis and Angelo. Martians live for hundreds of years. Elmis is well over three hundred, so he has a great deal of experience with human history, but so has Namir, who is even older.

I do praise Pangborn for imagining Angelo a superior human without giving him superpowers or ESP. Robert Heinlein and John W. Campbell, Jr. often did that to designate a sign of future human evolution. The best part of the story is the Latimer setting, when Angelo and Sharon are young. Sharon is better developed as a character than Angelo, especially with her creative dialog. She even seems more aware than Angelo.

The story eventually jumps a few years, leaving Latimer for New York City, and that’s when the story lost its charm for me. The plot shifts to fighting an emerging fascist organization run by Namir, who wants to take over America, and eventually destroy the world. I thought this section was poorly done, and it reminded me of Heinlein’s early novels about secret societies wanting to overthrow the U.S. Angelo, under a new name, Abraham Brown, does not stand out in this section. He’s rather passive. And the proxy war that Elmis and Namir are fighting is vague and fictionally lame.

The final section of the novel involves a pandemic. (That could elevate the story with readers this decade because of our recent pandemic.) Angelo becomes more active, but he doesn’t do anything exceptional. Strangely, the exceptional human in this story, is Sharon. She has become a musical prodigy through arduous work, practicing up to twelve hours a day. She has always been in love with Angelo and wants to be reunited with him.

I like Elmis and Sharon as characters. Angelo just never gels to what Pangborn promised. We needed him to stand out, like Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon, or Valentine Michael Smith in A Stranger in a Strange Land. He never does. That’s the major fault of this novel.

Pangborn focuses on juvenile delinquency and gangs in the first section of the novel, a worry considered a national threat in the 1950s. Pangborn is also concerned with the cold war, and other elements underming society. You sense that Pangborn is anxious about the world and uses this novel to explore his fears. That’s why I compare it to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The heart of this story is very strong, which is why I wanted to love A Mirror for Observers. I admire it for its intent, but I can see why its flaws make it a forgotten novel.

Pangborn made a huge writing mistake by having the Martians go through three sets of names. Angelo is needlessly renamed Abraham Brown in the second section. This was very confusing. Drastically shifting the plot twice also hurt the story. The subplot with the fascists was just poorly developed, although it resonates with our present, making it feel more relevant than it really is. The pandemic section is well done, and moving, being the emotional peak of the story, but the emotions are melodramtically generated.

We are promised a spirtual novel. The Martian observers see potential in us, but that potential is never revealed. Pangborn gives us more evidence to support Namir’s position that we don’t deserve survival.

A Mirror for Observers reminds me of another novel I picked for my top ten list, The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis. That 1963 novel is about a Martian coming to Earth hoping to find the technology to secretly build a spaceship that could bring 300 surviving Martians to Earth from their dying planet. Tevis also uses his story to comment on the evils of current day society. His Martian, whom we know as Thomas Jerome Newton, is a much better developed character. Like Pangborn, Tevis takes his character through several jarring plot twists, but I remember it working better. I need to reread it too, to know for sure.

At seventy-three I’m going back in time looking for science fiction works originally aimed at mature readers. The trouble is I’m concurrently reading the literary classics of the 20th and 21st century, and the contrast reveals how poorly written science fiction has always been. There are exceptions, but they are few. I just finished Attonement by Ian McEwan, and the character development is light-years beyond Pangborn’s efforts.

Still, I want to like A Mirror for Observers. Jo Walton, in her review says she rereads Mirror every decade. I will probably reread A Mirror for Observers again someday too. Quite often flaws I see in a second reading are overcome in a third or fourth reading.

JWH

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3 thoughts on “A MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS by Edgar Pangborn”

  1. “The trouble is I’m concurrently reading the literary classics of the 20th and 21st century, and the contrast reveals how poorly written science fiction has always been.”

    Great literature is filled with layers of meaning, but layer number one better be “This is more entertaining than staring into space & doing nothing.” or no one will ever care about any of the other, deeper layers.

    Almost ALL literature, when read the first time strictly for its entertainment value, will seem poorly written when re-examined as “literature.” That science fiction suffers more than most when re-examined through time’s microscope is predictable. All other literature relies on a world that either exists or on a wholly created world (fantasy).

    Science fiction alone uses a world that either exists or what, with an additional discovery or two (warp speed a favorite such), could logically exist. and extrapolates from reality in a rigidly logical fashion. While world building within real world restraints that realistically stretch reality, it must tell a story worthy of our time.

    Of all forms of literary story telling, only a sustained ballad is more difficult. Like ballads, Science Fiction is the Rodney Dangerfield of literature — worthy of great respect but (so far) not getting it.

    Anyone of average reading ability can appreciate the brilliance of Agatha Christy’s story telling. It’s takes excessive education to try to minimalize her brilliance with a literary lens. The same thing happens to science fiction, even by those of us who love Sci fi.

    The best science fiction entertains and forces us to ask questions. (Questions, not answers, is the purpose of science.) When you first read A Mirror for Observers, there were many concepts your brain had never fully questioned, but reading the book, you did.

    The question is not, “Does it still feel like literature?” The real question, “Does it still awaken new questions?” And if the answer is “No, it doesn’t.” Is it the story, or the reader that no thoughts are inspired?

    All teenagers naturally question everything. The scientific mind never outgrows being a child. Most literature seeks to reveal a Deep Insight. Great Science fiction seeks to ask new questions. May it never grow up. May there always be new discoveries, places never before visited, and dreams dreamed for the first time.

    It was the Original Star Trek intro “To boldly go…” that still inspires Science Fiction. Let lesser concerns be used to measure easier literature. “Does this story make my thoughts boldly go where no thought has gone before?” is the ultimate Science Fiction Literary test.

    New idea for a sci fi story: the gradual elimination of certain sci fi stories from the internet because someone wants their ideas suppressed.

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  2. Jim, many thanks for your review, as always. I haven’t read this novel, but I was interested in this passage: “Science fiction readers spend their lives in quiet desperation waiting for their favorite sense of wonders to come true.”

    I may be a minority among SF readers, but I don’t necessarily hope that the visions of SF come true in the real world. I’ve always loved SF as a branch of fantastic literature, and for me SF is a wonderful self-contained world of its own. That doesn’t mean it has no relevance or connection to the real world, only that my enjoyment doesn’t depend on its coming true. 

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