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“The Queer Ones” by Leigh Brackett

Group Read 72: The Best Science Fiction Stories of 1957

“The Queer Ones” by Leigh Brackett #02 of 20 (Read)

Ever wonder why science fiction imprinted on you as a child? Why does the genre appeal so strongly to some people? What’s its subconscious attraction?

Psychoanalyzing 1950s science fiction reveals a deep-rooted desire to contact aliens. UFOs became a mania in that decade, which spilled over into the 1960s. UFO crazies seemed to have disappeared after that. But they’re back today. I do believe that humanity suffers from cosmic loneliness. Or is it something else?

“The Queer Ones” by Leigh Brackett speaks to both xenophobia and loneliness. I’m not going to give spoilers right away, but I recommend you follow the link above and read the story. It offers bit of a mystery, so I don’t want to spoil your reading fun, but I want to have my say eventually. However, “The Queer Ones” fits the mold so well for this kind of 1950s science fiction story, that it might not be much of a mystery for aficionados.

My first reaction to reading “The Queer Ones” was to feel it was a mirror image of Zenna Henderson’s People stories. But instead of finding gentle aliens out in the backwaters of rural American, we encounter thugs from the stars. I’m reminded of Heinlein’s Have Space Suit-Will Travel. Henderson’s aliens are a version of the Mother Thing, while Brackett’s aliens act like Wormface, but they look human. They even coop human lowlifes.

Leigh Brackett takes on the tone of Clifford Simak in “The Queer Ones,” and it’s hugely different from her planetary romances. She can’t seem to resist herself though because romance does sneak in towards the end.

Hank Temple is the owner/editor of a small town, six-page newspaper. Doc Callender contacts Hank about a curious child, Billy Tate. X-rays and bloodwork show this kid to be strangely different. If fact, the doctor had been called in because Bily had been beaten up by other kids for being different. He looked human, but Billy was slight, redheaded, and a tiny bit odd.

As it turns out, Sally Tate is a young country girl who got put in the family way by a fast-talking stranger. Her child, Billy, grew up to become a kid that Sally’s hill country clan intensely disliked. The Doc calls Hank to see if he wants to drive out into the middle of nowhere to meet this backwoods family. That’s when the mystery starts. Hank and Doc’s first theory was Billy was a mutant.

Mutants are another popular theme of 1950s science fiction. The cause of mutant humans in SF is varied, but two reasons were popular. Radiation from atomic bombs, and the emergence of Homo Superior was the other. This also paralleled our fascination with aliens. Either they were monsters, or advanced beings with godlike powers. Both show up in “The Queer Ones.”

However, the beginning flavor of “The Queer Ones” is much different than the flavor at the end the story. Early on, Brackett taps into the kind of atmosphere we find in Way Station by Clifford Simak. I’d call that theme: Aliens Living Hidden Among Us. Other books like that are A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn, The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis, and as I’ve already mentioned, Pilgrimage: The Book of the People by Zenna Henderson. Superman comics did this too. Henderson essentially steals Superman’s origin story for her People stories. And if you remember, quite a few episodes of The Twilight Zone featured beings from beyond living amongst us.

The plot takes a sinister turn when Doc is killed. Hank realizes their snooping has gotten back to Billy’s father. Then the hospital is burned down with Doc’s evidence. That’s when Hank catches his first alien, a young woman, Vadi, who turns out to be the sister to Billy’s father. That’s when Hank realizes that Billy’s father is not another mutant, but an alien.

Hank is turned on by Vadi. Sally Tate, and all the women of her family had been turned on by Billy’s father, who we eventually learned is an alien called Arnek. Now this is an interesting sub-theme of cosmic loneliness. Leigh Brackett doesn’t go into this, but how can Arnek mate with Sally Tate and produce a child? This has come up in later science fiction stories. A theory to answer that question is panspermia. That theory helps to explain why many of the aliens in Star Trek look human, but it also suggests that God or advanced aliens seeded/populated/colonized the galaxy on purpose. Maybe we weren’t meant to be alone and miss our cousins.

This also suggests that our psychological fear of cosmic aloneness can sometimes overcome our ingrained xenophobia. We want the universe, or at least the galaxy, to be inhabited by beings like us. Even reading stories about aliens gone bad fulfill the need to know were not alone.

Let’s backtrack a minute. Did our hangup of being alone in the universe emerge with UFOs in the late 1940s? I don’t think so. Doesn’t the desire for aliens and angels fulfill the same existential craving? And don’t we have stories of humans and angels falling in love with each other, even having sex. The Bishop’s Wife comes to mind, but then there’s Wings of Desire and City of Angels. Ancient literature is full of aliens if you squint at supernatural beings from a certain angle. Isn’t God a kind of top boss alien? The Bible and other ancient religious work often describe whole species of aliens as part of taxonomy of beings not of this Earth. Sure, the Greek gods weren’t light years away, but they were from on high.

Science fiction doesn’t have that many themes. It tends to explore the same ones over and over, and if you look at them in the right way, those themes have always been around, even before science and science fiction. Just imagine how deep they go when you think about Neanderthals encountering Homo sapiens? We hate the other, but we loath the idea of being by ourselves in reality.

Stories like “The Queer Ones” appealed to me as a kid, and I don’t think I’m alone. Shouldn’t we ask why? For all our eight billion, most of us are lonely. Even if we have plenty of family and friends to keep us company, don’t we feel that something is still missing? Don’t we have a longing for something greater? And isn’t the reason so many people believe in God is because they want a personal relationship with a higher being? Wouldn’t you want a personal relationship with an alien?

In the end, Sally runs off to the stars with Arnek, leaving Billy behind. Hank takes Billy to raise him but wishes he had a wife to help. Hank doubts he will ever marry because after kissing Vadi once, he longs for her too much to settle for a human companion. That’s very strange, don’t you think? Is Brackett suggesting that we’re missing a higher spiritual connection because aliens are our true soul mates?

I doubt we’ll ever meet aliens on Earth, or visit them on other worlds, but we might not stay alone for much longer. Artificial intelligence is progressing so fast that we might have new digital friends soon. R. Daneel Olivaw might arrive before we return to the Moon. Science fiction always promised us robots too. I wonder if we’ll encounter any in the next eighteen stories from 1957.

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“The Queer Ones” first appeared in the March 1957 issue of Venture Science Fiction. Dave Hook became so entranced by its cover that he researched and wrote “Who is Artist ‘Dick Shelton’.” It’s another fascinating stroll down memory lane if you love old SF magazines and their artists who do their covers and interior illustrations.

James Wallace Harris, 3/13/24

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“The Other Celia” by Theodore Sturgeon

Group Read 72: The Best Science Fiction Stories of 1957

“The Other Celia” by Theodore Sturgeon #01 of 20 (Read, Listen)

It’s ironic that in the 1960s I grew up reading 1950s science fiction to imagine the future, but now in the 2020s, I’m reading 1950s science fiction to reconstruct the past. We’re now living in yesterday’s future. When we’re young we think science fiction is all about the future, but when we’re old we realize that everything is about the present. My present is figuring out how the past made me at this moment. My brain is like ChatGPT but trained on decades of science fiction. My hallucinogenic output is shaped by that.

How can old science fiction stories reveal anything about the past? And how can that knowledge reveal anything about who I am at this moment? I can offer a comparison that might answer part of that question. My father died when I was eighteen, in 1970, before I got to really know him. Ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out what my father thought from the clues he left behind. It’s not a particularly revealing method because it’s mostly speculation. Reading old science fiction lets us speculate about what science fiction writers and readers were like when the stories were first written, and maybe what we wanted from them, and why.

I vaguely remember 1957. That September I started the first grade. Sputnik, the first satellite, blasted into orbit the following month, but I don’t remember that. I was only five then. I turned six at the end of November, but it made me no wiser or more aware. “The Other Celia” by Theodore Sturgeon had come out in the March issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which means it was on the stands in February. At the beginning of 1957 I was in kindergarten. I had no idea that science fiction existed. My favorite show then was Topper. I believe this was before I was aware of rockets, robots, and even dinosaurs. In 2024 rockets and robots are everywhere, and we know a whole lot more about dinosaurs.

My guess from reading about Theodore Sturgeon, and reading his stories, is he barely made a living by writing. He had to crank out stories to buy food and pay the rent. I feel he must have been an autodidactic who knew something about everything. Sturgeon’s stories suggest he’d lived all over, seen a lot, and tried his hand at doing most things too. I assumed Sturgeon combined personal experience and took an occult idea, popular with weirdo thinkers in 1956, and turned it into a science fiction story. It may or may not have symbolized certain kinds of real people.

I do remember that the world was quite a different place in 1957 than it is in 2024. I remember the cars, the houses, the clothes, the people. The setting of “The Other Celia” is a boarding house. My grandmother managed an old apartment building where elderly people like herself lived. I remember staying with her at various times and visiting the old folks there. I can even remember the smells. One old lady I met had been on the Titanic as a child. I imagine Sturgeon stayed in boarding houses and meeting countless interesting people. All, grist for the mill of writing.

I also remember boarding houses from television shows in the 1950s. The rooms at my grandmother’s apartment building were very much like the rooms described in “The Other Celia.” We lived in Miami, and my grandmother’s building was on Eighth Avenue, which is now part of Little Havana. The Miami of the 1950s was far different than the Miami of today. The rooms were warm and musty, without air conditioning. The hallways and stairs were covered with ancient carpets that deaden sound. And all the inhabitants were old. There were transoms above the doors, and residents cranked their windows open wide to let in the breezes. The occupants had basic furnishings, few clothes, lots of photos and knickknacks, and little else. The rooms were mostly filled with memories and solitary people. Today, our everyday lives are crammed with junk, so I doubt young people can imagine how the boarding house people of “The Other Celia” lived back then with so little.

All those memories came back while I read Sturgeon’s story. I’m not going to talk much about the story because I don’t want to spoil it. I thought for sure Sturgeon had painted himself into a corner that he couldn’t get out of but does. I loved the story for the setting and characterization. They are very real. Sturgeon’s solution is fantastic and unreal, and only amusing because it reminds me of the popularity of such wild beliefs back then.

I can’t help but wonder if people who lived in 1950s boarding houses, or old apartment buildings like the one my grandmother managed, read magazines like Galaxy and F&SF? Or only weird kids like me, who became crap artists. I was in high school before I met another science fiction fan. SF readers were rare. Did normal folks back then think about the future or aliens or the supernatural? As I got a little older, I remember chattering away about science fictional stories and concepts. I’m sure the old folks at my grandmother’s apartment thought I was one strange little man.

“The Other Celia” is not really a science fiction story as I think of science fiction today, yet its two citations in CSFquery were One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (1968) edited by Damon Knight and Modern Classics of Science Fiction (1992) edited by Gardner Dozois. The story has been frequently reprinted, lastly in 2023, in the anthology Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants: When Men’s Adventure Magazines Got Weird. That’s another clue in describing how 1957 was different from today, and how science fiction was different too. Those men’s magazines of the 1950s and 1960s were another strange subculture and model of reality. If you want to get closer to what I’m getting at read Confessions of a Crap Artist by Philip K. Dick. It’s a mainstream novel PKD wrote in 1959, and my favorite of all his novels. To me, it captures the 1950s I remember.

Version 1.0.0

I don’t know why “The Other Celia” was published in Galaxy when it should have been in The Magazines of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Back in the 1950s people were still reading old books and paperbacks by Charles Fort. “The Other Celia” is a Fortean tale. My uncles loved to talk about woo-woo shit like that. The 1950s were when the uneducated found transcendence in UFOs, Edgar Cayce, and Bridey Murphy.

Although, “The Other Celia” isn’t about the future, space travel, robots, it might be about aliens, and it might not. I highly recommend taking the time to read this story. The issue of Galaxy that it’s in, is online, in case you want the whole context.

Theodore Sturgeon does a beautiful job of sucking the reader into a strange mystery by describing the habits of a peculiar character, Slim Walsh. Walsh is a nosy guy, the kind who checks out the medicine cabinet when he uses other people’s bathrooms. He sneaks into other people’s rooms at the rooming house when they are gone. Not to steal, but to just see the secret side of how other people live. The story is about him discovering the very strange lifestyle of Celia Barton.

What’s great about this story is the writing. Sturgeon slowly mesmerizes us with savory details. I would have loved the story even if it didn’t have its fantastic element. “The Other Celia” could have been a literary story, but it didn’t go in that direction. As the story unfolded, I kept wondering where Sturgeon was going to take us. His story was so down to earth that I couldn’t imagine it turning into science fiction or fantasy. Yet, it does, eventually arriving smack dab in Rod Sterling’s territory. “The Other Celia” would have made a classic episode of The Twilight Zone; one Charles Beaumont could have written. Or it could have been a comic strip illustrated by Gahan Wilson or Charles Adams.

“The Other Celia” is a delightful story to begin our group reading of the best science fiction of 1957, not because it’s great science fiction, but because it’s a well-written work by a consummate crap artist. That’s another thing young people today don’t understand. Being a science fiction fan back then made you an outcast, a weirdo, a nerd, a zero. But stories like “The Other Celia” appealed to a certain kind of person, people who loved to watch Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1965) or read EC Comics.

I’m not surprised that Dikty, Merril, nor Asimov and Greenberg left “The Other Celia” out of their anthologies. Yet, it works perfectly for my contention that 1957 was so much different from today. Everyday life in America keeps mutating and transforming. I want the group reading all these 1957 sci-fi stories to help us remember the strange world of science fiction fans back then. But try to reverse the view. Just imagine what the people of 1957 would think about 2024 if we could send a 65″ HDTV to them and let them watch Netflix, Max, Apple TV, and Hulu. We’d scare the bejeezus out of them. They’d think The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch a reasonably normal picture of reality.

We now live in a time when almost everyone is a crap artist, of one kind or another.

Just think of all the speculative theories people of 1957 would produce to understand how America turned into what they see in our 2024 television shows. What I want to do is speculate about what life was like in 1957 from reading twenty science fiction stories from that year. It could explain a lot about how we arrived at this present. It’s stranger than The Twilight Zone.

James Wallace Harris, 3/11/24

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The Best SF Short Stories of 1957

Starting on March 12th, I’ll be moderating a group discussion of the best science fiction short stories from 1957 on Facebook. We discuss one story every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. I’ll also review those stories here on this blog.

The stories were selected by using any story with at least two citations on CSFquery. I also added two stories because one had been made into a movie, and one into a television show. I then added a few recommendations from our group’s moderators. No stories were awarded a Hugo for 1957, so I used Rich Horton’s picks for 1957 instead.

Here’s the schedule:

Our group has already discussed three famous stories from 1957, “Call Me Joe” by Poul Anderson, “The Menace from Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein, and “Omnilingual” by H. Beam Piper. Those will be discussed on repeat day. I’m really looking forward to reading the twenty stories the group hasn’t read before, many of which I haven’t read either.

When I create the discussion thread for each story I’ll try and find a link to where the story can be read online and put a link to the ISFDB.org entry so people can see if they already own an anthology where the story has been reprinted.

During the Group Read 72 period (March 12 – April 30) we’ll also be open to people recommending stories from 1957 that they feel should be on our list too. Think of it as a kind of scavenger hunt for forgotten classic short science fiction from 1957. Dave Hook, one of our most industrious members, did an extensive study of 1956, and I expect him to do the same for 1957.

Even if you don’t join our discussion group, please recommend any SF story from 1957 that’s not on the list that you think should be in a comment below. I’ll pass your recommendation to the group.

We welcome anyone who loves reading science fiction short stories to join our group. If you do join our Facebook group, be sure and answer the two questions. They are designed to filter out spammers and confirm that we only discuss science fiction short stories, not novels, not movies, not television shows. We delete any message that brings up politics, self-promotes a book, is offensive to others, or that’s off topic.

We read and discuss science fiction stories from anthologies, magazines, award winners, stories up for awards, and by specific year. We also discuss author collections on Sundays. This group reading is our 72nd. Old science fiction stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursday, and Saturdays. New science fiction stories are discussed on Mondays, Wednesday, and Saturdays. We try to promote both print and online science fiction magazines.

James Wallace Harris, 3/9/24

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“The Crystal Spheres” by David Brin

“The Crystal Spheres” by David Brin was first published in Analog, January 1984. You can read it at Lightspeed Magazine or can listen to it at StarShipSofa. It won the Hugo award in 1985 and won the Analog reader poll for 1984 short stories.

Literary short stories are generally small in scope, covering brief slices of time, using few characters, placed in limited settings, which make an emotional impact from a personal insight. This is my preferred form for a short story, even for science fiction. However, this doesn’t keep science fiction writers from spanning galaxies over eons featuring multiple intelligence species all in under 7,500 words. I loved these epic sci-fi stories when I was young. They had intellectual emotional impact if that makes any sense. Generally, I prefer small personal short stories in my old age, but I still admire the universe spanning imagination displayed in stories like “The Crystal Spheres.”

But something has changed in me as I’ve gotten older.

“The Crystal Spheres” breaks the cardinal rule of fiction writing classes, show don’t tell, but it proves rules can be broken — sometimes. I must wonder if Brin had used 350,000 words and told this story in a 1,000-page epic called The Crystal Spheres, if the sense of wonder would have been any greater? Could Olaf Stapledon have condensed The Last and First Men and Star Maker down to short stories and had them succeed just as well? David Brin does a lot with this short story.

“The Crystal Spheres” answers the question the Fermi Paradox asks: Where is everyone? It borrows an idea from the ancient Greeks, placing around every star a crystal sphere that keeps visitors out. Brin doesn’t go into whether these protective barriers are natural, or God made, or a product of intelligent design, but the end results is it keeps one intelligent space faring species from colonizing the universe like a plague.

This reminds me of the novels Spin by Robert Charles Wilson and Quarantine by Greg Egan, and to a lesser degree, the novel Out of a Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis, but for an odder reason. I read Spin first, and I marveled at the time that Wilson had produced a unique science fictional idea. But evidently, there is a tiny sub-genre of science fiction stories about barriers around the Earth or the solar system. I need to check into its history and look for other examples.

“The Crystal Spheres” evokes both the theological and the teleological. It reminds me of the Omega Point philosophized by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Brin thrills his reader with vast theories.

Although “The Crystal Spheres” isn’t a very satisfying short story on the personal insight level, its big fun alluding to many science-fictional concepts. Set in the future after humans have developed star travel, cold sleep, and immortality, it describes how humanity has become depressed because we’re alone in the universe. The story begins when a recently reawaked Joshua learns of a new discovery.

But to put that discovery into context Brin needs to set up a backstory. When humans sent out its first interstellar ship it crashed into an invisible sphere that shattered and created centuries of comets raining down on Earth, nearly wiping us out. Bummer. After things settle down, we start sending out starships again, but they keep crashing into spheres around other solar systems. They don’t break the spheres but do destroy themselves. Eventually, we learn how to avoid crashing into spheres and discover a few inhabited planets, mostly by hive-like beings. When we do discover races like us, we can’t communicate with them. We can listen to their broadcasts which can penetrate out the crystal spheres, but we can’t communicate into the spheres to say “Howdy.”

This throws humanity into a deep depression and most people go into hibernation hoping to wake up one day after we find planets we can visit. The story begins with Joshua learning there’s a solar system with a shattered crystal sphere and several possible planets orbiting that star.

It’s in another galaxy. Joshua and friends go there taking hundreds of years, using four diverse types of faster-than-light travel. When they arrive, they discover an abandoned civilization. I love science fiction about abandoned alien civilizations. At first Joshua and friends don’t know if these aliens have died off, committed species suicide, or just left for parts unknown.

Should I tell you everything? I’ve already told you a lot. I never know how much to give away. I want to discuss stories as if you’ve read them too, but I must assume that most of you haven’t read the story so I should keep from spoiling it. But how much should I tell to entice you into reading the story?

Let’s just talk about what I’ve already revealed. The idea of crystal spheres is a neat way to explain the Fermi paradox. Isaac Asimov even suggests this idea came about at Worldcon with writers suggesting ideas for a story, but he doesn’t specifically say David Brin was in that group.

Brin doesn’t give us any hard science speculation why the crystal spheres would be there, or how they work. It states that physical objects can’t penetrate them from the outside. But we know of extrasolar objects visiting the solar system. But was Oumuamua the first one we detected? Maybe when Brin wrote the story in 1984, no such visitor had been discovered. Or maybe only objects with intelligent beings in them can’t penetrate the spheres? And what about random bodies within the system? Why couldn’t some rock leaving the solar system have broken the crystal sphere long before the first spaceship?

See, that’s the fun thing about science fiction, it makes you question the story. Challenging questions. Sense of wonder questions. And in this case, are the crystal spheres naturally made, or from intelligent design? Now that takes us into some fun speculation. In Quarantine Greg Egan came out with a wonderful idea of why humans are locked out from the rest of the galaxy. I won’t give the answer because that would spoil the whole novel.

“The Crystal Spheres” is the kind of science fiction story that makes us think big, gigantically big. I loved that kind of science fiction when I was young. And reading “The Crystal Spheres” conjured that exciting old feeling. But my older wiser self, is more cynical. All those big sci-fi ideas are just childish fantasies. I have serious doubts we’ll ever make it to Mars, and believe interstellar travel is next to impossible. We can’t even save ourselves from self-destruction, so why imagine such exciting futures?

We face real barriers that keep us from colonizing the planets and traveling to the stars. But they are all within us. Our greed, our xenophobia, our petty resentments, our violent nature, our cancerous consumption of natural resources, and the list goes on and on. Our human nature is the crystal sphere that keeps us here.

I should stop reading science fiction, but I have a life-long addiction I can’t throw off. However, the older I get, the more acutely I recognize my childhood hopes about the future are just fantasies. I now crave realistic science fiction that deals with possible futures. Unfortunately, science fiction is written to sell to young people, and realistic science fiction is too depressing for them.

I got a big kick out of reading “The Crystal Spheres” because it encapsulated so many science fiction fantasies that I once loved. It’s still a wonderful story. But now that I’m old, it has a bittersweet twinge to it.

“The Crystal Spheres” reminds me of one last thing, the famous speech Marlon Brando makes in On the Waterfront, where he says, “You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody instead of a bum, which is what I am.” It’s sad that humanity won’t become what Brin and science fiction imagines.

James Wallace Harris, 3/8/24

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“Melancholy Elephants” by Spider Robinson

Our Facebook group is reading and discussing all the Hugo award winning short stories and novelettes that we’ve haven’t covered in all our previous years. “Melancholy Elephants” by Spider Robinson is a 1983 Hugo winner that I have no memory of even hearing about before. It first appeared in the June 1982 issue of Analog and came in first in the Analog Readers Poll. But then, that’s the fun thing about Group Read 69, we’re discovering stories that should be remembered, or at least consider why they haven’t.

“Melancholy Elephants” is about extending the copyright lifetime. It’s set in the future, and powerful entities want to pass a bill to make copyright perpetual. Dorothy Martin feels this will be a threat to civilization and it’s vital that the bill be stopped. She goes to see a powerful senator she hopes to convince or bribe into killing the proposal.

Most of the story is infodumping about copyright laws. It talks about how there are limits to creativity and if fiction and music are locked down by copyright, it will destroy them. The story even gives examples, including Harlan Ellison and A. E. van Vogt suing movie companies and winning, and George Harrison unconsciously cribbing “He’s So Fine” to write “My Sweet Lord” by the Chiffons. In the future of this story, there will be powerful computer programs that test for previous use and reject copyright violations. Mrs. Martin’s husband committed suicide when he realized his latest and greatest work was inspired by music he heard in childhood.

I don’t see why this story won the Hugo and Analog Readers Award, but then I don’t remember any of the short stories it competed with either. Also, I disagree with Mrs. Martin’s conclusion. I don’t think long copyright terms keeps artists from innovating, but I do think it keeps some works from being remembered. For example, copyright keeps me from linking to a copy of this story for you to read.

What I found fascinating by “Melancholy Elephants” was how much the story felt like a Heinlein story. Spider Robinson was a huge fan and friend of Heinlein, and this story feels like he stole from Heinlein in the same way Harrison appears to have stolen from The Chiffons.

The story starts out with Dorothy Martin killing a mugger. She justifies it because she couldn’t be late with the meeting with the Senator, ruining her only chance of saving the world from a fate worse than death. “Gulf” by Robert A. Heinlein starts with the protagonist causally killing an attacker and justifying it by his righteous cause. And if memory serves me right, the same thing happened in Heinlein’s novel, Friday. Heinlein like to promote the value of his characters beliefs and causes by casually killing people. He equates the end justifies the means with these quick scenes. I always thought they represented massive egos believing their way of thinking puts them above all others.

“Melancholy Elephants” could have been done without the scene of Mrs. Martin killing someone and hiding the body under the car. It gave the story a repulsive beginning. The story really needed to be an essay, but Spider Robinson sells fiction, so he took the idea and fictionalized it much like Robert A. Heinlein would he wanted to promote his beliefs.

Mrs. Martin visits the Senator, who comes across like Heinlein’s Jubal Harshaw. The way she makes her case and the way the Senator makes his is exceedingly Heinleinesque At one point Mrs. Martin tries to buy off the Senator and he explains he can’t be bought off because he’s already been bought off and it would be unethical to go against the original deal. Heinlein was big on representing government as being corrupt and things got done by big egos battling it out. Heinlein loved to write scenes where his character persuades others on a particular super-vital issue. However, Heinlein’s scenes often come across as character promoting their righteousness, rather than logic.

In the end the Senator sees Mrs. Martin’s side of things and reverses himself, but the way he does it also reminds me of Heinlein characters when they do give in.

It’s ironic that “Melancholy Elephants” is about protecting a creative person’s rights to borrow from the art that inspired them because this story is obviously inspired too much by Heinlein.

James Wallace Harris, 3/5/24

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Deadly Serious Science Fiction

Out of the thousands of science fiction novels I’ve read, I thought Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner took itself the most seriously. It addressed world problems John Brunner thought threatened humanity in 1968. I read Stand on Zanzibar in 1969 and it made me dread the future he depicted of 2010. It wasn’t the most thrilling SF novel I’ve ever read, nor was it easy to read, but it was most impressive stylistically and made me think about the future more than any other science fiction novel. The Deluge by Stephen Markley now follows in the footsteps of Stand on Zanzibar. Both books describe futures we should want to avoid at all costs. They are deadly serious science fiction.

There aren’t that many serious SF novels that intentionally warn us about the future. Other famous ones are Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, and The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Everyone wants to predict the future, but that’s impossible, so science fiction writers sometimes extrapolate current trends, fictionalizing a possible near future. This is what both Stand on Zanzibar and The Deluge do. We can judge Brunner’s speculation since we’ve now lived past the time he imagined. He got a lot wrong, but he got other stuff right, especially how terrorism would spread across the world. Stephen Markley speculates about the politics of climate change will play out over the next sixteen years and five presidential elections.

Did Brunner and Markley hope we’d change our ways because we read their books? Markley warns his readers what will happen if we don’t act soon regarding climate change. His book asks: What will it take for humanity to give up fossil fuels? Kim Stanley Robinson does the same thing in The Ministry of the Future. Both novels spend a substantial number of words on terrorism. I really hope that isn’t the incentive that pushes us to change. Can we avoid these horrible futures because we read about them today?

My other review of The Deluge, intended for people who don’t read science fiction, I focused on the question: Can we change? For this review I want to focus on the question: Can science fiction influence society at large? If it can’t, why write such SF novels? Both The Deluge and Stand on Zanzibar are huge ambitious works that use a large cast of characters, shifting points of view, interspersed with chapters of pseudo journalism and pop culture, giving a multifaceted view of the near future. The Deluge is almost nine hundred pages in print and runs nearly forty-one hours on audio. It’s big and profoundly serious.

Serious science fiction often warns us we’re heading towards specific scary futures we could avoid if we make the effort. Do we ever heed such warnings? Scientists currently studying free will say it looks like humans are not in conscious control of our lives. I agree with them. If that’s true, can we change the way we act based on things we read? Maybe the authors of serious science fiction never hoped to change the course of history, but only wanted to appeal to certain individuals and influence their thinking. Are such novels part of an extended conversation about the future taking place in the genre of science fiction? Do they expect their readers to change the world, or just for other novelists in the future to reply? Are books about possible futures just an extended conversation that’s taken place in print?

Wasn’t Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four a reply to Huxley’s Brave New World? Wasn’t John Brunner having his turn in the discussion when he wrote Stand on Zanzibar and his Club of Rome Quartet? And didn’t Margaret Atwood jump into the conversation with The Handmaid’s Tale? And aren’t such nonfiction books of futurism like The Limits of Growth and Future Shock also part of the conversation? I believe Robinson’s and Markley’s books are just the latest things said in a never-ending conversation about the future. Sure, many readers consider these books a genre of gloom and doom, but do they have a greater purpose and impact?

It’s interesting that all the books I’ve mentioned so far worry about issues that we continue to face. Is that because we’ll always face those issues? Or do their authors expect us readers to change the way we live and act and eventually solve these problems?

Science fiction writers and futurists know they can’t predict the future, but do they believe readers can divert the present away from possible futures they fear? Isn’t that a kind of free will? A kind of hope for the group mind? The reason scientists don’t believe individuals have free will is because they detect brain activity at the unconscious level before we think we claim to consciously make our decisions. Isn’t the world of intellectual speculation only a kind of unconscious group mind thought process?

People like to think we can become captains of our fate, so is it surprising that writers might hope that society can consciously choose what it will become? But does a meta-conversation about what human society could or should be really represent a kind of free will? I’m sure in their heart of hearts that Orwell, Brunner, Atwood, and Markley wanted to influence society and avoid the horrors they saw coming.

Self-help books are bestsellers because some people do change their habits, so isn’t that evidence that if enough people read serious science fiction it might influence the larger society? Scientists studying free will say no because the desire to change comes from our unconscious minds. But does that matter if science fiction influences us on a conscious or unconscious level? Isn’t the woken social movement mainly due to reading?

I do believe certain books about the future, both fiction and nonfiction, represent an ongoing conversation, but I don’t know if we change our lives because we listened to the conversation. I’m liberal, and have a lot of liberal friends, who claim to be very worried about climate change, but none of us have tried to significantly shrink our carbon footprint.

Back in 1969 when I read Stand on Zanzibar, I was frightened by Brunner’s vision of the future. Over the decades I’ve read and discussed its ideas on overpopulation and the limits of growth with my friends, but we’ve never acted on those fears. I’ve been talking with people about the dangers of climate change for over twenty years now, but we haven’t done anything significant either. That’s why in my other essay about The Deluge I titled it: “Will People Change vs. Can People Change?“

I don’t think we will change. So, why read science fiction that warns us about the future? Likely, we don’t have free will, but we might have an existential awareness of who we are, and I believe books speculating about the future expand that awareness.

Most science fiction is written to entertain. Most science fiction readers seldom read serious science fiction. John Brunner got some critical attention for his Club of Rome Quartet novels, but I’ve read he was depressed because they made no real impact on society. Few writers can achieve George Orwell’s and Margaret Atwood’s social impact.

The Deluge got a fair amount of good mainstream press, but I’m the only person I know who has read it. I doubt Stephen Markley intended it for science fiction readers. He’s a mainstream literary writer. However, because it attempts to do what Brunner did all those decades ago, I believe some science fiction writers will find it interesting.

Reviews of The Deluge:

by James Wallace Harris, 2/29/24

Posted on by jameswharris · 19 Comments

Have You Read Any of These Ten Science Fiction Books from 2023?

I was surprised that I hadn’t heard of any of these ten novels and authors from The Shades of Orange YouTube review “The Top Science Fiction Books Published in 2023.” Is this an indication of how out of touch I am with new science fiction, or do my tastes just run much different from the reviewer? When and why did I stop reading new science fiction?

Here are Shades of Orange’s Top 10 SF novels for 2023. The numbers in parenthesis are from Goodreads. They are (average rating / # of raters / # who left reviews). Those numbers are from Goodreads users who have marked the title read. It would also be interesting to see the number of people who have the book in their library marked “Want to read.” Titles with an asterisk have audiobook editions.

  1. The Deluge by Stephen Markley (4.22 / 3,107 / 738) *
  2. The Infinite by Ada Hoffmann (4.27 / 241 / 55) *
  3. Ethera Grave by Essa Hansen (4.09 / 141 / 29)
  4. Generation Ship by Michael Mammay (3.83 / 805 / 187) *
  5. The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown (3.6 / 3,006 / 808) *
  6. The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon (3.3 / 1,091 / 391) *
  7. Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker (4.11 / 44 / 28) *
  8. The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport Samit Basu (3.67 / 684 / 255)
  9. Bile and Blood by Katherine Franklin (4.50 / 2 / 2)
  10. Rubicon by J. S. Dewes (3.95 / 1,632 / 324) *

I wonder if science fiction fans growing up in the 1930s felt the way I do now when they read best-SF-of-the-year lists in the 1990s? Nearly all my favorite science fiction writers I got to know growing up are dead, and the living ones that became popular during my lifetime evidently aren’t favorites with young readers in 2024 anymore.

If I read these new books, would I find the same kind of excitement I did sixty years ago? Even more interesting to contemplate: Do young readers today find the same kind of excitement that I did in the 1960s and older generations did in the 1930s? Both Doc Smith and Samuel Delany wrote space operas, but were their intent and appeal the same?

If I could somehow get every generation of science fiction readers to write an essay “What I Discovered in Science Fiction” would the revelations be similar?

I am intrigued by the tiles: The Deluge, The Archive Undying, and Generation Ship. Since all three are available as part of my Spotify subscription, I’m going to try them. I keep forgetting that Spotify includes 15 hours of audiobook listening with my music subscription. I think I’ll use that feature to test out new science fiction books since it won’t cost me anything extra.

I’m also impressed with many of the YouTube book reviewers. I assume YouTube is making an enormous impact on what books readers buy today. However, many of my favorite YouTube reviewers only review older science fiction. This is still great because I’ve missed a lot of great science fiction, but it seems to indicate new science fiction gets less attention.

My absolute favorite YouTube reviewer is Bookpilled. He has 36.6 thousand subscribers. I’m absolutely fascinated by which books and authors from the past he still finds significant. Bookpilled doesn’t review new SF.

After Amazon and Audible, I stopped going to new bookstores every week. I think that’s where and why I used to keep up with new releases. Another reason I quit discovering new science fiction at new bookstores is because the science fiction sections grew too large. There was just too much choice, so I gave up.

Shades of Orange has done me a favor by limiting my choices to ten.

by James Wallace Harris, 2/17/24

Posted on by jameswharris · 3 Comments

In Which Postapocalyptic Novel Would You Prefer to Live?

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is a postapocalyptic novel about humanity being assassinated by a mad genetic engineer. Although well-written and thought-provoking it wasn’t a pleasant read. I doubt any science fiction fan would vicariously put themselves into Atwood’s imagined future. Its narrator, a human survivor nicknamed Snowman, is a rather repulsive individual. This novel might be intellectually stimulating, especially for its thoughts on the evilness of humanity, but it’s not a novel that promises hope for rebuilding the future.

As a young reader of science fiction back in the 1960s, I used to fantasize about what I’d do if I lived in the books I read. Even 1950s post-apocalyptic novels about WWIII left room for me to see positive paths to take. Oryx and Crake was as bleak to me as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I admired that novel, but I would never daydream myself into it.

The blurb on the cover above praises Atwood for outdoing Orwell, but not by me. Nineteen Eighty-Four was bleak and depressing, but it was infinitely instructional about avoiding possible futures. Oryx and Crake feels like an oracle of doom. But then I haven’t read Nineteen Eighty-Four in a couple of decades, and at 72 I might find it just as nihilistic as Oryx and Crake.

I’m a connoisseur of after the collapse settings in science fiction. My all-time favorite is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. In that story, almost everyone dies from an illness and the world reverts to a time when humans are few, becoming hunters and gatherers again.

I’m not saying I’d like to live a tribal existence. No, the postapocalyptic world I’d like to live in, is just after the collapse, where the infrastructure of humanity is still intact. I’d want enough leftover supplies to keep me going for the rest of my life, which might not be more than a decade. When I was younger, the idea of rebuilding civilization appealed to me, but I’m too old for that anymore. But if I were in my twenties, would I fantasize about surviving Atwood’s future?

No, old me would want to live in a nicer post-apocalypse to contemplate the end of our species. In Atwood’s book, she has Snowman contemplating his own fucked up life, while he caretakes a genetically engineered new form of humanity. Atwood imagines our replacements as genetically engineered non-violent humanoid beings called Crakers. These post-humans have a reproductive cycle that removes gender conflict and are peaceful herbivores. I can’t imagine these wimpy creatures surviving the highly aggressive genetically modified animals created in the years before humanity was snuffed out.

In Oryx and Crake Homo sapiens are defined by our worse traits. We deserve our fate in Atwood’s story. And I wouldn’t argue with Atwood. But Atwood’s philosophy makes for a bleak depressing read. The novel has two sequels: The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAdam (2013). Even though I was bummed out reading Oryx and Crake, I’m tempted to read the rest of the trilogy just to see if Atwood ever offers her readers hope. I have read that the second volume is about religious people, and that was a frequent theme in 1950s postapocalyptic novels. That tempts me.

Oryx and Crake has got me thinking about the appeal of reading postapocalyptic novels. Why are postapocalyptic settings with zombies so popular with readers today? I’ve never been one to enjoy horror themes. And zombies are so damn yucky. Why would anyone find pleasure putting themselves into such a setting? I must wonder if fans of these stories secretly want to live in a world where they could kill, kill, kill to their heart’s content.

I’m more of a Henry Bemis type myself. I want a nice cozy catastrophe postapocalyptic setting. A peaceful place to meditate on the passing of human existence. When I was younger, I fantasized about playing Tarzan and Jane after the fall of civilization, but now that I’m older, having a faithful dog and robot would be the only companions I’d want. I’d desire a Clifford Simak flavored setting if I were the last man on Earth.

I’m trying not to say end of the world. I dislike that phrase. Humans are so arrogant. They believe when our time is up it’s the end of the world. I think Earth will bop along simply fine without us. Animals and plants would flourish again. The Earth would again teem with life. I can only assume self-aware intelligence was an experiment that failed. Let the robots have the next turn. They might be more compassionate to the animals.

I often write about the difference between old science fiction and new science fiction. In old science fiction we do ourselves in because we’re the stupid violent bastards we are, but there’s not a lot of self-recrimination. In the new science fiction, writers dwell on our evilness. In Atwood’s book, we see two boys, Jimmy (Snowman) and Glenn (Crake), grow up and snuff out humanity. Their formative years were spent watching porn, snuff films, child pornography, playing sick violent video games — just being a couple of gifted brainiacs. They are super intelligent, yet soulless and unlikeable. Jimmy and Glenn use their genius to create and sell ugly products to a world all too anxious to consume them. Sure, that reflects our real world, but does experiencing such in fiction do us any good? Will readers in the future cite Oryx and Crake warnings about genetic engineering? It lacks the symbolism or political resonance of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is about another ugly future, but its ugliness offers us inspiration on how to avoid that future? I assume she intended Oryx and Crake to be positive in the same way, but it isn’t. The Handmaid’s Tale inspires us to fix society. Oryx and Crake only make me want to pull the plug on our species.

In most old science fiction novels about after-the-collapse of civilization, we’re shown ideas for starting over. Sure, some of those novels tell us we’re only going to make the same mistakes again, but there is a will to try again. Some of those stories even suggested it might be possible to take different paths. Reading Oryx and Crake left me feeling it’s time to just let go. Let some other species become the crown of creation.

Maybe Atwood put hope in the sequels, so we’d buy them.

Is my pessimism due to my age? Do younger readers find hope in this novel?

James Wallace Harris, 2/16/24

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Gather Yourselves Together by Philip K. Dick

Only the most ardent fans of Philip K. Dick will want to read Gather Yourselves Together, the ones who want to read everything he wrote. I say that not because the novel is bad, but because I can’t imagine it offering much to any reader who isn’t an ardent fan of Philip K. Dick. I rather enjoyed the story, but then I’m the kind of Philip K. Dick fan who wants to read everything he wrote. Gather Yourselves Together is about sex, but not in a graphic way. It’s about a young man’s first sexual encounter with a woman who was bitter and traumatized by her own first sexual experience.

The character Carl Fitter is obviously a stand-in for the author because Carl shares many personality traits with Dick. Scholars disagree over when Gather Yourselves Together was written. Wikipedia says 1948-1950, but some of his biographers extend the date to 1952. Dick could have been revising it for years, while he was submitting it for publication, because the novel seems more polished than a first effort. Gather Yourselves Together is probably Dick’s first completed novel. I’m guessing most of the first draft was written just before, during, or just after Dick’s first marriage because of the novel’s subject matter.

Dick got married to Jeanette Marlin in 1948 when he was nineteen years old. The marriage only lasted from May 14th to November 30th. Dick appears to have gotten lucky with Marlin even before they were married. Dick married Kleo Apostolides in 1950, and it lasted nine years. Gather Yourselves Together feels like the author wrote it before he got married, or at least conceived the novel before the experience of marriage. Dick’s next novel, Voices from the Street is about being married.

After high school, Dick moved into a warehouse converted into apartments, and most of the other tenants living there were gay. Dick’s mother accused him of being gay, and he also worried about being homosexual. Many of his friends were gay, but they didn’t think Dick was. Dick worked at a record store, Art Music, and one of his fellow clerks got him laid with Marlin, presumably to help Dick with his sexual identity crisis. I recommend reading To the High Castle Philip K. Dick: A Life 1928-1962 by Gregg Rickman. Part Three, chapters 16-22 cover 1945-1950 in much detail, far more than I’ve seen in other biographies. Unfortunately, this book is out of print and the cheapest copy I can find is $75. It’s generally over a hundred, with a few copies going for several hundred. It should be reprinted.

In Gather Yourselves Together, Carl Fitter, about the same age as Dick, with some similar physical and emotional characteristics, meets Barbara Mahler, a slightly older woman of twenty-five, which was true of Marlin. Carl Fitter is afraid of having sex and Barbara Mahler has been psychological damaged by her first experience and is also afraid of getting involved with Carl. Why was Carl so afraid of being seduced by Barbara? He told her because he was afraid of embarrassing himself by not knowing how, but could it be Carl also worried about being homosexual? I don’t think Dick could have put that in a novel in the late 1940s.

The setting and setup for Gather Yourselves Together is both neat and naive. Three people in 1949 are left as caretakers of an American mining operation in China, tasked with handing over the plant to communists after the revolution. Two of those people are Carl and Barbara, the third is Verne Tildon, a guy on the downside of thirty, who had seduced Barbara as a virgin five years earlier by getting her drunk.

It’s obvious that Dick knew little about China, and nothing in the novel suggests a setting of China. A more mature writer would have at least spiced up the story with details specific to China, its culture and geography. It’s a shame that Dick didn’t use his own locale of 1940s Berkley and San Francisco and had the three characters work at a music store like Art Music. Dick knew about the gay, art, music, and bohemian scenes during that time. If he had used his real life for the novel, I bet he would have sold Gather Yourselves Together.

I believe Dick chose the China location for two reasons. Dick’s reading experience was mostly from science fiction, and China was as exotic as outer space. And Dick’s description of China was no more realistic than any of his outer space settings in his science fiction novels. Plus, Rickman mentions that back in the late 1940s, Dick toyed with the idea of moving to Australia. He wanted to get far away from his life after a suicide attempt.

During the novel Barbara wants to convince Verne how much he damaged her, but Verne only wants to seduce her again. Carl, who is a happy puppy dog of a big blond guy, only wants to read his philosophical writings to Barbara.

Gather Yourselves Together reminds me of Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger because of its late forties’ vibes, where everyone is psychologically disturbed, and sex is a major theme without being explicit because of censorship. It also reminds me of early Kerouac, mainly because of its 1940s intellectual topics. Dick was Carl’s age when he wrote this book, just before his first marriage, and maybe just after his co-worker got him laid. I must assume, much of the fiction in Gather Yourselves Together was inspired by Dick’s personal life. It even touches on the Dark-Haired Girls theme that haunted Dick his whole life, and his obsession with classical music, opera, and philosophy. Carl’s Thesis reminds me of Dick’s Exegesis. Carl also talks about his teenage interests and hobbies, as well as his hatred for his mother. Since Dick hated his mother, I assume the hobbies discussed might have been Dick’s too.

Here is the publication history for Gather Yourselves Together at philipdick.com, and its entry at Wikipedia. There’s not much written about this novel. I thought the audiobook was well narrated.

I’m looking forward to rereading Voices from the Street soon. The first time I read it, I knew less of Dick’s biography. But rereading it after reading Rickman’s biography should make it much more interesting.

James Wallace Harris, 2/14/24

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“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin

Today our group, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction, is discussing “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s part of “Group Read 69 – Previously Unread Hugo Winners.” I can’t believe out of all our previous sixty-eight group reads we haven’t read this 5-star story before. I have written about “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” before in the essay “A Philosophical Conversation Between Two Short Stories.”

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is perfect for generating classroom discussions about philosophy. It’s short, only seventeen minutes on audio, and is told as an allegory. Le Guin presents a tiny utopian country where everything is wonderful except for one detail. Happiness in this land depends on the suffering of one child. Nearly everyone in Omelas accepts they must allow one ten-year-old child to suffer horribly, because that suffering allows everyone else living in Omelas to be happy. Of course, as you can guess from the title, some citizens can’t accept this and walk away.

Is Le Guin’s story questioning Christianity and asking why did Jesus suffer for all of us? I don’t think so. Is Le Guin pointing a finger at Capitalism, where the happiness of many depends on the suffering of the economic losers? Maybe. Do you worry about the losers in your society when you’re one of the winners? Is the story also asking how can we have a perfect society if even one person must pay a price? Isn’t it true that in every society some must suffer? Where can those who walk away from Omelas go?

Most people who read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” focus on the ending, the problem of the suffering child. But in the story’s buildup Le Guin describes what she thinks is a utopian society. Le Guin is challenging her readers to imagine a perfect society too. Le Guin says she doesn’t want clergy or the military, but figures she’ll have to accept orgies and drugs. What would you reject and accept?

I think Le Guin started writing this story wanting to speculate about creating a perfect society, but then realized it couldn’t go anywhere, and then came up with the idea for the suffering child, which led to the idea about those who walk away.

I sense the brilliance of this story wasn’t planned. It’s like my recent discussion of Slaughterhouse-Five. Sometimes a writer accidentally produces a story that works perfectly as a mirror. In my essay, I talked about reading Vonnegut’s classic when I was 18, 55, and 72. With each reading I saw something different about myself. I believe this is also true with “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Le Guin has created a mirror for her readers.

However, I do believe there is a universal psychological theme that deals with the suffering of a few that allows for the benefit of the many. I thought that theme was explored twice in 1956 by Damon Knight with “Stranger Station” and “The Country of the Kind.” I even wondered if Le Guin was inspired to write “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” after reading “The Country of the Kind.”

On my other blog, I produced a theory about ChatGPT, and similar AI programs. I’m wondering if our unconscious minds work in the same way AIs based on large language models. Those AI models are trained on millions of pages of text and images using neural networks. We can query those AI models with a prompt. Imagine all the books Ursula K. Le Guin read in her lifetime before writing “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas.” Now imagine Le Guin asking herself, “How would a functional utopia work?” Isn’t that the same as prompting an AI model? Her unconscious mind then generated “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas.”

Readers add the story to their own mental model and then prompt themselves with a question: “What does this story mean?” Their answers will depend on what they’ve read during their lifetime and how their unconscious mind processed that content.

Instead of asking, “What did Le Guin mean by “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas,” we should ask instead: “Why did I interpret the “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” the way I did?”

I’m guessing great writers don’t intend to mean anything specific but aim to excite our unconscious minds into a kind of creativity. In other words. “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” is a bit of prompt engineering, aimed at readers, knowing they each have a mental model that will generate a unique personalized output.

James Wallace Harris, 2/13/24