“The Listening Child” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (December 1950) by Margaret St. Clair using the pseudonym Idris Seabright. You can read it online here. It is short story #1 of 25 that our Facebook group will be discussing as Group Read 92. (See the reading schedule at the end of this review.) Group Read 92 consists of 25 stories picked by five group members that we haven’t read before. That was a challenge since we’ve been discussing a short story daily for years. The group is public.

In the 1950s, extrasensory perception (ESP) was a popular theme in science fiction and fantasy magazines. It was often speculated that people with physical or mental abnormalities might have additional senses to compensate for the loss of one of their primary senses. I assume the assumption came from blind people who had keener hearing.

After Hiroshima, science fiction and comic book writers often used radiation as a cause of ESP. However, in the 1930s and 1940s, John W. Campbell was impressed by the Rhine experiments, and science fiction writers often supposed that advanced aliens had psychic powers. Arthur C. Clarke, who was normally a hard SF writer, proposed that the evolution of human development led to ESP in two of his most famous novels, Childhood’s End and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Soft science and fantasy writers leaned towards psi-powers in physically and mentally damaged humans, like Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human.

Margaret St. Clair imagines a deaf mute having a rather unique ESP talent. Timmy can “hear” when death is near. Many famous stories personify death, so this isn’t too out there, but it’s not as believable as other ESP talents, even though it is well proven that ESP does not exist. Still, hearing death makes for a nice story idea.

St. Clair’s setup for her story is rather quaint. Edwin Hoppler is 63 and suffers from a weak heart. He lives in a boarding house. Boarding houses have disappeared, but were common in old movies and science fiction short stories before the 1960s. Quite a few episodes of The Twilight Zone were set in boarding houses. It’s a shame they don’t still exist. Living with several other individuals who ate communal meals fixed by a nice old lady sounds pleasant.

Timmy is the landlady’s grandson, and Edwin feels sorry for him. Edwin befriends Timmy when he realizes that the other kids don’t play with Timmy. Edwin notices that Timmy “listens” intently at times, and eventually notices that these listening moments precede a person or animal dying. Edwin decides to use Timmy as the canary in a coal mine to detect his own impending heart episodes.

“The Listening Child” is a pleasant little story, but rather slight. Timmy and Edwin are only developed enough as characters to present the idea for the story. There’s little conflict or tension. The story also lacks color or voice. The idea is slight, but writers can flesh out simple ideas into complex characterization and plots. For example, compare it to “Jeffty is Five” by Harlan Ellison. Jeffty is a boy who is perpetually five, and always lives in the year he was five, with the popular culture never changing. Or read “Baby is Three” by Theodore Sturgeon; it’s tremendously dramatic for a boy with psychic powers talking to a psychiatrist.

I don’t want to tell you the ending, but I expected St. Clair thought her readers would find it emotional and poignant. It was presented too casually for me to be moved, but I’m curious if other members from our short story reading group will be moved. I wanted the ending to be like in Platoon when we see Elias still alive, and the emotional impact we felt watching him die.

I’m working on a project to find my all-time favorite science fiction stories I’ve read over the past sixty years. Identifying such stories means learning what makes a story work. Most published stories succeed at a basic three-star level, which is how I’d rate “The Listening Child.”

For this story to reach the four-star level, Timmy and Edwin would need to become vivid characters. To make it to a five-star story would require elevating the story gimmick of hearing death into something metaphorical and philosophical that I would want to contemplate over several readings.

James Wallace Harris, 4/21/25

Group Read 92 Schedule

  • 01 (04/22/25) – The Listening Child, by Margaret St. Clair (ss) F&SF, December 1950 (DH)
  • 02 (04/24/25) – Brightness Falls from the Air, by Margaret St. Clair (ss) F&SF, April 1951 (FP)
  • 03 (04/26/25) – The Rose, by Charles L. Harness (na), Authentic Science Fiction, 15 March 1953 (PF)
  • 04 (04/29/25) – The Last Day, by Richard Matheson (ss), Amazing, April/May 1953 (FP)
  • 05 (05/01/25) – Watershed, by James Blish (ss), If, May 1955 (RH)
  • 06 (05/03/25) – The Certificate, by Avram Davidson (ss), F&SF, March 1959 (FP)
  • 07 (05/06/25) – To See the Invisible Man, by Robert Silverberg (ss), Worlds of Tomorrow, April 1963 (FP)
  • 08 (05/08/25) – A Two-Timer, by David I. Masson (nv), New Worlds 159, February 1966 (PF)
  • 09 (05/10/25) – The Adventuress, by Joanna Russ (nv), Orbit 2, ed. Damon Knight (Putnam, 1967) (RH)
  • 10 (05/13/25) – No War, or Battle’s Sound, by Harry Harrison (nv), If, October 1968 (FP)
  • 11 (05/15/25) – The Milk of Paradise, by James Tiptree, Jr. (ss), Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison (Doubleday, 1972) (RH)
  • 12 (05/17/25) – Pale Roses, by Michael Moorcock (nv), New Worlds 7, ed. Hilary Bailey & Charles Platt (Sphere, 1974) (PF)
  • 13 (05/20/25) – Concepts, by Thomas M. Disch (nv), F&SF, December 1978 (PF)
  • 14 (05/22/25) – Gate of Faces, by Ray Aldridge (nv), F&SF, April 1991 (PF)
  • 15 (05/24/25) – On Sequoia Time, by Daniel Keys Moran (ss), Asimov’s, September 1996 (PN)
  • 16 (05/27/25) – Journey into the Kingdom, by M. Rickert (nv), F&SF, May 2006 (PN)
  • 17 (05/29/25) – Roxie, by Robert Reed (ss), Asimov’s, July 2007 (PN)
  • 18 (05/31/25) – 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss, by Kij Johnson (ss), Asimov’s, July 2008 (DH)
  • 19 (06/03/25) – Passage of Earth, by Michael Swanwick (ss), Clarkesworld 91, April 2014 (PN)
  • 20 (06/05/25) – Cimmeria, by Theodora Goss (ss), Lightspeed 50, July 2014 (RH)
  • 21 (06/07/25) – Sadness, by Timons Esaias (ss), Analog, July/August 2014 (RH)
  • 22 (06/10/25) – Ten Poems for the Mossums, One for the Man, by Suzanne Palmer (nv), Asimov’s, July 2016 (PN)
  • 23 (06/12/25) – The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington, by P. Djèlí Clark (ss), Fireside Magazine, February 2018 (DH)
  • 24 (06/14/25) – The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations, by Minsoo Kang (nv), New Suns, ed. Nisi Shawl (Solaris, 2019) (DH)
  • 25 (06/17/25) – One Time, a Reluctant Traveler, by A. T. Greenblatt (ss), Clarkesworld 166, July 2020 (DH)