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“Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure” by Josef Nesvadba

“Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure” by Josef Nesvadba is story #22 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. “Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure” first appeared in Nesvadba’s 1960 collection, Einsteinův Mozek. It was translated into English for the 1973 anthology edited by Franz Rottensteiner, View From Another Shore, and it was selected in 1974 for Best SF: 1973 edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss. (Follow the link to the story title to see where it’s been anthologized if you want to find a copy to read. However, The Treasury of World Science Fiction is widely available in used copies and is probably the cheapest way to get this story, along with 51 others.)

David G. Hartwell had so much to say about “Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure” in his introduction that I thought I’d just reprint it here.

I don’t know if I agree with Hartwell when he says “Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure” is a satire on stories from John W. Campbell’s era, or that Nesvadba uses the tropes and conventions of 1940s science fiction. I’m not even sure “Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure” is even an ironic work of criticism. I’m not saying it’s not, but I want to propose an alternate theory.

What if science fiction evolved separately in Czechoslovakia? And what if its evolution sometimes paralleled American pulp science fiction? Evidently, “Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure” was written after Sputnik but before Gargarin’s famous ride. Would Josef Nesvadba have access to old American pulps or even 1950s anthologies that reprinted them?

The prose of “Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure” doesn’t come across like the prose in pulp fiction. Like many of the foreign language science fiction stories we’ve been reading, it’s mostly told and not shown. However, it is longer, and that lets it become a fuller story than the shorter works we’ve read. I wonder if Nesvadba wasn’t inspired by Soviet science fiction or the Polish Stanislaw Lem?

“Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure” is about the super-heroic Leonard Feather and chronicles his feats of always needing to save the day, and eventually the Earth. Yes, we could compare him to Kimball Kinnison and the Lensman series. But Feather could just as easily be compared to Homer’s Ulysses.

I do think Nesvadba was making fun of spacemen, and the kind of macho men who need to always be on an adventure. Feather is a womanizer who makes his wife unhappy, as well as his mistresses, and he can’t understand why his son isn’t like him. Nesvadba is satirizing a certain kind of man that has existed in all genres of literature.

Nesvadba also appears to be attacking the call of the high frontier, robotics, and the never-ending quest to conquer and engineer. When Captain Feather, aka, Captain Nemo meets another intelligent race, he can’t understand what they are after. When he returns to Earth and is forced to stay put, Feather begins to see the need for philosophy and art.

There are parallels to American science fiction in this story. Heinlein, Campbell, Hamilton, and others all wrote stories about meeting super-advanced aliens back in the 1940s. The robots in “Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure” remind me of Jack Williamson’s The Humanoids. This story even reminds me just slightly of Robert Sheckley in the 1950s.

But, Captain Feather and his crew mostly remind me of Space Chantey by R. A. Lafferty, which is a science fiction parody modeled on Homer. My guess is that Nesvadba’s story was really inspired by Lem’s The Star Diaries, which came out in the 1950s?

Still, “Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure” is a good tale. It’s not told dramatically, which disappoints me, but its length allowed it to cover a number of interesting science-fictional topics that were enjoyable to me.

James Wallace Harris, 6/23/23

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“The Green Hills of Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein

“The Green Hills of Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein is story #19 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 Green Hills of Earth” first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, on February 8, 1947.

I don’t know how many times I’ve read “The Green Hills of Earth.” I believe every time before I ignored most of the story, responding and remembering the final part. Heinlein does a great deal of wordy tap dancing before he gets down to a rather simple story. This time I realized that all typewriting soft-shoeing is the real gold in the story, and the final emotional part that I’ve always remembered is pyrite that tricked my eye.

With this reading, I was bowled over by the high concentration of imaginative details in “The Green Hills of Earth.” Heinlein sets up a whole interplanetary space-faring society, alluding to the Harriman’s corporation which is chronicled in later stories. There are politics and laws – the Tri-Planet Treaty and The Space Precautionary Act. There are Venusians and Martians, which aren’t detailed, but I imagined in passing, that is fleshed out in later stories like Red Planet and other juveniles, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Double Star. Heinlein throws in rockets, their makes, and models. And more interestingly, Heinlein alludes to languages that don’t yet exist, and how they relate to our current languages. Plus he talks about pop culture, music, and poetry. He does all this in a faux academic style with hints of satire on how future history and sociology work.

Heinlein also sets up the solar system that’s been explored enough to allow for commercial trade. Heinlein’s spacemen are working-class men who seemed modeled on 1940s commercial shipping and merchant marines and are nothing like NASA’s astronauts. Heinlein had high hopes for the final frontier. Just read through these four paragraphs to see how Heinlein embeds details into his story.

I’d say the first two-thirds of “The Green Hills of Earth” is a kind of prologue that sets up one dramatic scene. Heinlein is experimenting with his writing, going beyond normal pulp fiction. When I think about it, science fiction went through several new waves that caused mutations in SF writing techniques. This story was published in a slick magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, something revolutionary for the genre and Heinlein. The term science fiction wasn’t widely known in 1947. It was just coming into vogue in the general public outside of fandom. Heinlein’s stories for the slicks were breakthroughs, helping the general public move away from thinking of science fiction as Saturday serials “Buck Rogers stuff.”

And we can’t ignore the poetry. This story is full of verse and is about a poet who has become mythic. I’m not big on poetry, so I’ve tended to skim over it in the past. I tried harder this time to read Heinlein’s lines of poetry. I have no idea if Heinlein’s verse is any good, but I did study it enough this reading to realize he put a lot of work into writing it. In “The Green Hills of Earth” Heinlein says about Rhysling, his Blind Singer of the Spaceways, “It mellowed his approach, changed his doggerel to verse, and sometimes to poetry.” I can’t tell verse from poetry, so I don’t know if Heinlein’s verse transcends into poetry.

I did notice Heinlein used some phrasing I thought was bumpy – “calm and couth” – and rhyming dearth with girth. Couth, dearth, and girth seem like archaic words now but might have been fine in the 1940s. Even still, “As they rove around the girth” doesn’t quite seem to work as an image or sound right coupled with “Of our lovely mother planet.” I would have thought, “As we rove around the girth / Of our lovely Earth” would sound better. However, he was saving the word “Earth” for the last line, “Of the cool green hills of Earth.” Of course, this was in a section where Rhysling was working out his song.

Like I said, I’m terrible with poetry, but I like the image Heinlein’s going for here. I’d try to work it as “Let sweet fresh breezes thrill me / As they blow round the Earth / From the planet that calls me / To green hills of my berth.” Can I get away with that pun and double meaning in the end? I know, I’m just as bad as Heinlein. My point here is reading and writing poetry is hard, so I’ve got to give Heinlein a lot of credit for trying.

Heinlein had a habit of killing characters to generate emotion in his readers. In this story, the actual bit of storytelling at the end has Rhysling sacrificing his life to save the ship. That’s rather maudlin and melodramatic, and even cheesy, but I think Heinlein gets away with it because it’s a fitting ending for an old spaceman. Did we want Rhysling to die in a nursing home?

Last year I started a project of reading and reviewing all of Heinlein’s stories in the order they were written. “The Green Hills of Earth” jumps five years ahead of where I left off. I need to get back to that project. But I can say “The Green Hills of Earth” appears to be a quantum leap in Heinlein’s writing skills. I was still writing about his stories written before WWII, and evidently, working for the war effort somehow matured Heinlein’s writing. This story is more sophisticated in its storytelling ambition.

I wish I had the energy and drive to write a comprehensive analysis of “The Green Hills of Earth.” There’s so much going on in this story I could write pages and pages. Looking at the fragment of Rhysling’s poem, “The Grand Canal” makes me wonder if it inspired Roger Zelazny and his story “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” – wasn’t Gallinger writing a madrigal too. Look at Heinlein’s poem. Doesn’t it at least remind you of Ray Bradbury and Planet Stories too?

I could go paragraph by paragraph and find many things to say for each, but that would take too long for a blog post. I imagine each paragraph will remind you of all the science fiction you’ve read too. If you don’t own The Past Through Tomorrow or The Green Hills of Earth, you should be able to find “The Green Hills of Earth” in one of many anthologies.

James Wallace Harris, 6/17/23

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“Two Dooms” by C. M. Kornbluth

“Two Dooms” by C. M. Kornbluth is story #17 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. “Two Dooms” was first published in Venture Science Fiction (July 1958). “Two Dooms” was a posthumously published story since Kornbluth had died earlier that year in March. (By the way, “Two Dooms” is available in The Best of C. M. Kornbluth which is selling today at Amazon for 99 cents for the Kindle edition.)

I finally struck gold. I read these old anthologies hoping to find great science fiction stories I’ve missed, and “Two Dooms” is one such work. I can’t believe I missed it. My memory is faulty, so I could have read it. Decades ago I owned A Mile Beyond the Moon, Kornbluth’s collection that first put the story in book form. I’ve also owned, The Best of C. M. Kornbluth for decades, as well as both the hardback and audiobook of His Share of the Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth, and three anthologies in which “Two Dooms” has been anthologized. Kornbluth is one of those authors I’ve always meant to dive into and read all their stories but never have. “Two Dooms” makes me regret that.

The best way I can describe “Two Dooms” that will make you read it is to say: “Two Dooms” is probably the story that inspired Philip K. Dick to write The Man in the High Castle. I have no way of knowing if PKD read “Two Dooms” but it really feels like it. I’m not saying Dick copied Kornbluth, but like many science fiction stories, many writers read about a juicy idea and want to use it too, but in their own way.

And it’s not just that Dick’s novel and Kornbluth’s novella are alternative histories where Germany and Japan win WWII and occupy the United States — several writers have explored that idea, it’s that each writer chose a mystical philosophy to flavor their story. PKD uses the I Ching and Kornbluth uses Hopi Indians and psychedelic medicine. Both authors gave a low-level view of the occupation. Both authors were concerned with the little people at ground level rather than the big historical perspective. But finally, I think the stories feel similar because both writers were tortured souls.

Kornbluth’s POV character is Dr. Edward Royland, a young physicist working at Los Alamos, New Mexico on the Manhattan Project during WWII. It’s early on, and they aren’t even sure they can build a bomb. Royland isn’t happy with his job, especially working in the miserable heat. One day after work he drives into the desert to meet his friend Charles Miller Nahataspe, a Hopi Indian shaman. This part of the story reminds me tremendously of Carlos Castanada’s books. Kornbluth gives us a fair amount of information about how the Hopi see reality differently from us and even claims the Theory of Relativity is something Hopi understand as children because they have no concept of time like we do. I wonder what books Kornbluth read that inspired him to write this part?

Nahataspe gives Royland some dried, blacken mushrooms. He tells Royland because he doesn’t see reality clearly, they will be safe to experience — that Royland’s cloudy vision of reality will protect him. But Nahataspe was wrong, Royland’s vision isn’t cloudy, and the magic mushrooms take him into the future where the Axis powers rule America.

It’s interesting to compare Kornbluth’s and Dick’s methods of getting their characters into an alternate history. Kornbluth uses the old-fashion literary technique of putting his character to sleep and having them wake up in a new world. Dick begins his story in the alternate history, and one of the amusing aspects of his method, is his characters speculate about our reality.

In olden times, the first-person account was considered the gold standard of believability. That’s why so many old novels have a frame where we learn how the story came about. Modern storytelling has dropped the frame. But with “The Two Dooms” Kornbluth needs Royland to go and come back, and using mystical Native American magic works well as a frame.

Both stories tell what living under Germans and Japanese would be like, and that’s where the two stories differ. While under Japanese rule, Royland spends his time with Chinese peasants, but when he’s on the other side, he spends time with higher-ranking Germans. Kornbluth stereotypes his nationalistic characterizations, but it’s not done in a simple way. I did feel that Kornbluth did quite a lot of research on this story, especially the parts about Los Alamos and the Hopi Native Americans. Since I recently read a nonfiction book about the Manhattan Project, I thought Kornbluth captured some interesting historical details.

I especially like when Kornbluth described a roomful of women as the computer department and Royland wished he had an analog differentiator. All through “Two Dooms” Kornbluth mentions details that entertained me. For example, when Royland leaves his office at the end of the day, Kornbluth says, “Mechanically he locked his desk drawers and his files, turned his window lock, and set out his waster-paper basket in the corridor.” It’s the detail of the waste-paper basket and window that impressed me. Royland’s work is top secret, so it’s logical he would lock his files. But if everything is locked up, how can custodians empty the trash? And it’s 103 degrees at 5:45, so we know the windows are open, and it would be important to lock them too.

Here’s the scene where Royland first enters Nahataspe hut. Notice all the little details Kornbluth sticks in here. Also, notice the humor.

I’ve really got to read more Kornbluth. I’ve been thinking that since I watched Bookpilled’s review of The Best of C. M. Kornbluth. It impressed me that a young guy in his thirties found so much to admire in a mostly forgotten science fiction writer that died over sixty years ago. (Also reviewed are Hothouse, Blood Music, and Nova.)

James Wallace Harris, 6/13/23

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“Pairpuppets” by Manuel van Loggem

“Pairpuppets” by Manuel van Loggem is story #16 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. “Pairpuppets” was first published in Dutch in Morgen #5 (December 1972) and first translated into English for The Best from the Rest of the World: European Science Fiction (1976), edited by Donald A. Wollheim.

“Pairpuppets” is about a young man, Eric, who is getting bored sexually with his current girlfriend, Tina. Eric lives in a future utopia/dystopia where every citizen’s sexual partner is selected by computers with the goal of fulfilling their sexual needs. The plot of this story follows Eric in his search for a new sexually satisfying partner.

Even though the goal of this society is utopian, aiming to make all its citizens happy, humans easily become dissatisfied. So we can also view this society as a dystopia. Basically, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.

I thought “Pairpuppets” was okay as a story, but the storytelling came across as a dry parable. The ending was predictable but realistic. However, I did like the level of detail Loggen used to explain Eric’s plight. Obviously, the author wanted to say a lot about sexual desire and brings up a good many related issues. The story gives us much to think about and would make a great discussion story for a high school literature class (if they allowed discussions of sex (but aren’t we becoming dystopian in that area?)).

I’ve also been thinking about why stories like “Pairpuppets” disappoint me. The biggest problem is I’ve read too much science fiction and I compare every new story I read against the memory of all my favorite science fiction short stories. It’s extremely hard for any new story to compete with my Lifetime Top 100 Science Fiction Short Stories.

Then there is the much smaller problem of pet peeves. “Pairpuppets” is about sexbots, one of my least favorite science fiction themes. Of course, if I had read “Pairpuppets” in 1972 when it first came out (and could read Dutch) it might have been a more entertaining idea. That brings up a third problem with reading SF anthologies — they contain old stories, and thus old ideas.

Now, David Hartwell, had a lifetime of science fiction reading behind him when he selected “Pairpuppets” for this anthology in 1989, so both of my issues weren’t a problem for him. That means, like this story, The World Treasury of Science Fiction is a utopia for Hartwell, but sometimes dystopian for me. The word treasury in the title implies the anthology is where a treasure of science fiction is stored. And like the old saying, “One man’s treasure is another man’s trash.”

“Pairpuppets” is far from trash to me, but it just doesn’t light up my reading soul. Good but no cigar.

Another problem with these translated stories, is they are often on the short side. Shorter short stories often feel condensed, and that hurts their impact, except maybe for intellectuals who love cleverness over other virtues. Cleverness works well at short lengths — just think of Saturday Night Live. (By the way, SNL bores me since I left my twenties.)

I prefer short stories that dramatically reveal the emotional development of a character in a specific situation, ending with an epiphany. If Loggen had written this story with more drama, spending twice as many words, showing us Eric’s development rather than telling us, I might have liked “Pairpuppets” quite a lot more.

I believe “Pairpuppets” would be fine in anthologies that didn’t aim so high, like a theme anthology about sex in science fiction, or an anthology of foreign science fiction that didn’t claim it was the best. I have to assume editors working in English are limited to what foreign stories they can acquire that have been translated into English. And I don’t assume translators always pick the best of the best. My guess is they might pick stories their translation skills can handle. Finally, we don’t know if “Pairpuppets” wasn’t a much better story in its original Dutch.

I haven’t read that many translated stories, and the ones I have, like War and Peace, and Anna Karenina are considered to be among the world’s greatest novels. And when I read those two novels I did study their histories of being translated and tried to find the best translation to read. Also, anyone who reads The Bible knows there are way too many translations to compare, and the problems involved.

Every time I read an anthology or collection of translated science fiction short stories I’ve been disappointed. I don’t know if I’m just hitting a language barrier, or if the stories just aren’t as good as I hope they would be, or maybe they weren’t the best to begin with.

Also, think about this. “Pairpuppets” is how I think of Dutch science fiction now, even though it’s just one story from 1972. Let’s assume it’s a fantastic story in Dutch. But what will people from Holland think of American science fiction if the only story they’ve ever read is “Bears Discover Fire” — even if it has a perfect translation?

James Wallace Harris, 6/10/23

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“The Blind Pilot” by Nathalie-Charles Henneberg

“The Blind Pilot” by Nathalie Henneberg is story #14 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 Blind Pilot,” translated by Damon Knight from the original French, “Au pilote aveugle“ (Fiction #68, July 1959) was first published in English in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (January 1960).

Instead of paraphrasing David Hartwell’s introduction, I’ll just let you read it.

“The Blind Pilot” is real science fiction. Hartwell says it resembles Roger Zelazny’s early work, but it reminded me of a cross between 1950s Alfred Bester and 1960s Samuel R. Delany. Of course, there’s no telling what flavor of writing the original story gave off in the French.

Basically, the story is about an alien who could be from a race of beings that inspired the Siren in Homer’s epic. This idea comes up now and again: fantastic beings in old literature could have been aliens from the stars. To make the story even more exotic, the two humans who encounter the alien are a blind man who used to be a space pilot and his younger brother who is severely crippled. Those two remind me of Delany characters, the alien weirdness reminds me of Bester, and the tie-in to mythology reminds me of Zelazny. But Henneberg couldn’t have known about Delany and Zelazny since the story pre-dates them as writers. That’s why I also say “The Blind Pilot” is real science fiction and not some roped-in foreign literary effort that anthologists want to claim is science fiction.

There were sentences on this page that slightly reminded me of the “Tears in the Rain” scene from Blade Runner.

Even though I consider this story real science fiction and a decent science fiction story, I don’t believe it’s a great SF story. It never takes off, but it does cruise along nicely. A great SF story like “Fondly Fahrenheit,” punches us throughout with unforgettable edginess, while a story like “The Moon Moth” dazzles us constantly with creative imagery. Those stories stay with us. “The Blind Pilot” will fade away quickly.

When you read a lot of science fiction, especially a lot of great science fiction, you realize just how hard it must be to write something spectacular. Our short story club reads anthology after anthology and we often find stories we wonder why they were anthologized at all. Hartwell had certain goals when he aimed to create an anthology that represented science fiction from both the 20th century and stories from around the world. So, far when we’ve read stories from other countries we seldom read ones I think are as great as the best from the English-speaking world. Is that because of translations? Or am I just prejudiced toward my own culture? Maybe, certain SF classics have been burned into my mind, and no new ones, no matter what the language, can compete?

We still have a long way to go in The World Treasury of Science Fiction, so Hartwell still has plenty of opportunity to surprise me. But there’s another problem to consider. I’ve read so many science fiction short stories that I feel that less than 200, maybe even less than 100 stand out from the thousands I’ve read. All too often I feel like I’m comparing all the horses that have won the Kentucky Derby to all the horses that race on any track. And that might not be fair.

But it is what it is. There’s a reason why our method of finding stories for our Classics of Science Fiction Short Story list works so well. When I say a story is only pretty good it’s because I’m comparing them to these stories. The competition is fierce.

James Wallace Harris, 6/6/23

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“The Valley of Echoes” by Gérard Klein

“The Valley of Echoes” by Gérard Klein is story #11 of 52 from the anthology The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989) that my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Valley of Echoes” was originally published in France as “La vallée des échos” in the magazine Satellite in March 1959, and was first translated into English for the anthology View From Another Shore edited by Franz Rottensteiner. It was also reprinted in The Road to Science Fiction, Volume 6: Around the World edited by James Gunn.

Gérard Klein is a French science fiction writer and editor who was born in 1937 and is still alive according to Wikipedia and ISFDB. The most I could find out about him was in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and it wasn’t much. It only shows how language is such a barrier, but looking at the covers from these four translated novels published by DAW I might like to try one, especially after reading, “The Valley of Echoes.”

“The Valley of Echoes” is what I call pre-NASA science fiction. It’s also about Mars, and in 1959, even before Mariner 4 Klein didn’t hold out much hope of finding life on Mars. However, his three astronauts secretly want to drive over the next Martian sand dune and discover an ancient dead Martian city.

I grew up with a Schiaparelli map of Mars poster on my bedroom wall. I held out hope we’d find Martians on Mars until July 1964 when Mariner 4 flew by Mars and took 22 photographs of Mars. Mars looked more like the Moon than Barsoom. I’ve written about this before in “I Miss Martians” and “Science Fiction Before NASA.”

It’s kind of a fascinating coincidence that I read “The Valley of Echoes” today because yesterday I read “High Weir” by Samuel R. Delany, another story about Mars. “High Weir” and “The Valley of Echoes” have an interesting overlap in that they both have a human explorer on Mars that goes crazy. In Delany’s story, his astronauts do find a dead ancient Martian city. Since his story came out in 1968, Delany was holding out hope even after Mariner 4.

I was disappointed in Delany’s story because the focus wasn’t on Martian archeology but on holograms and mental illness. Klein’s story deromanticizes space exploration while showing how we still hoped to find Martians.

Klein does throw us a bone for our romantic hopes by having, his astronauts, Ferrier, LaSalle, and the narrator stumble upon a strange valley that collects echoes of the past. I was never sure if what they heard was real or delusion. My skeptical nature thinks it was the latter, but again Klein plays up to our desires. Ferrier, like Rimky in “High Weir” went insane on Mars.

Klein is being both realistic about what we’ll find on Mars, and realistic about how our hopes influence what we want to find. “The Valley of Echoes” might be a good story for Joachim Boaz’s list of SF stories that challenge the romanticism of space exploration.

No mention of science fiction is found in “The Valley of Echoes” but I can’t help but believe it’s recursive science fiction. Yesterday I watched a short video on YouTube about philosophy and HP Grice’s paper “Logic and Conversation” which deals with the dynamics of communication. There can be more information in a conversation than just the words we say. Klein has written a story intended for science fiction fans. He knows how we think, so the story doesn’t have to say everything because Klein knows it will trigger certain thoughts in us.

“The Valley of Echoes” is about the realism of exploring Mars. His astronauts are bored and tired of driving up and down Martian sand dunes. In their hearts, they want to find what they’ve always dreamed about finding on Mars. Suddenly, they do find something different, and they desperately want it to fulfill their expectations. But does it? He also knows we want that too, and that will affect how we read the story.

James Wallace Harris, 5/30/23

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“The New Prehistory” by René Rebetez-Cortes

“The New Prehistory” by René Rebetez-Cortes is story #9 of 52 from the anthology The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989) that my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The New Prehistory” was evidently first published as a short story in a periodical in 1964 according to the only record I can find. It was collected in La Nueva Prehistoria Y Otros Cuentos in 1967, translated as The New Prehistory and Other Tales by René Rebetez. The site linked above lists 19 short stories, all labeled science fiction.

According to David Hartwell in his introduction to the story, “The New Prehistory” was translated by Damon Knight and was first published in 1972. So the publishing history varies. Hartwell says Rebetez-Cortes was Columbian but the cover of the author collection above suggests something different. Google says he was born in Subachoque, Columbia in 1933 and died on December 30, 1999, in Isla de Providencia, Columbia.

“The New Prehistory” is a very short literary allegory that could be called introverted horror. It’s about a man going to a movie but hates waiting in line. He steps away from the line while watching his friend wait in the queue. Then the line becomes possessed by some unseen force and all the people in the line start acting like they’re part of one giant snake-like organism. People who stood in groups became giant amoeba-like organisms. Individuals stayed individuals. Eventually, the new giant organisms take over the world and hunt the individuals.

Even though a lot of people are calling “The New Prehistory” science fiction I’m not. It’s the kind of fantastic story I heard read in creative writing classes from high school to graduate school. In every writing class there always seemed to be one student who everyone thought was brilliant who would write these kinds of fantastic allegories. They were popular with both the teachers and students because they always seemed so damn clever.

I believe writers, and even oral storytellers, have always used the fantastic in their tales. But that doesn’t mean they are science fiction. Some scholars in science fiction have been trying to claim more territory for the genre for decades. They want to both up the reputation of the genre and claim more types of stories as ours. When I was young, I agreed with this. I wanted the genre to have prestige. But after a lifetime of reading, I realize I’m a consumer of science fiction and I want real science fiction, not ersatz sci-fi.

Science fiction is impossible to define so editors can call anything they want science fiction, but as a consumer, I know what I want, and this kind of story is not it. I remember when I was young back in the 1960s and wondering what science fiction must be like written in other countries in other languages. Then in the early 1970s, we got some Soviet science fiction anthologies and I got my wish. Slowly, the idea of world science fiction has grown, but all too often I believe editors have grabbed anything they could to fill their anthologies. I think that’s a disservice to the genre, and dishonesty to the literary world.

I know that other SF readers will accept these stories as science fiction because their definitions of the genre are different. And that’s cool. The reality is we don’t all think alike. But I would like to think that science fiction was a term with validity and to me, the intent of the genre is more specific, even quite narrow.

Just because a story has elements of the fantastic doesn’t make it science fiction or fantasy. I also believe fantasy as a genre covers definite territory too. As an emerging bookworm back when I was in grade school, I’d go up and down the library shelves looking for certain kinds of stories. Stories about space travel, robots, new technology, and time travel. They were always about the future, or they were set in current times when things changed. “The New History” is set in current times and things changed, but I still don’t consider it science fiction. Why? Because of the tone of the story.

I never believed while reading the story that people could become group organisms. If the author had made some kind of case for that it would have been science fiction. But that wasn’t his intent. He was obviously making a case about the horrors of being in a group. As an introvert, I completely understand that angle. It’s a good story for that purpose. But that’s a completely mundane purpose. Science fiction is not about the mundane. Science fiction is about the far out, but as a real possibility, even in humor. I never thought the people in “The New Prehistory” were becoming group monsters, nor did I think the author wanted us to believe that. I felt the author was giving us an allegory about how he felt about the real world.

For me, science fiction has to be about what the real world could become. The fantasy genre is about make-believe worlds, but believable worlds within their own concepts. I know most science fiction is unbelievable, or has become so. For me to think of it as science fiction, I have to believe it’s possible, or at least think people once thought it possible.

James Wallace Harris, 5/25/23

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“Mockingbird” by Walter Tevis

If you’re an old movie fan, either from being old or just because you love old movies, you might know Walter Tevis from his first novel, The Hustler (1959). It was made into a stunning Paul Newman movie. Jeez, that’s a helluva start for a young novelist. Wait, that happened to Larry McMurtry too. (Note to self, see how many young novelists were made famous by Paul Newman, it might be worth a blog.) Tevis’ last novel, The Color of Money (1984) was also made into a movie starring Paul Newman. I’m sure the first and last thing is unique.

Tevis was forgotten for a while until David Bowie made his second novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963), into a weird quirky flick in 1976. Don’t rush out and watch that movie though, they ruined the book, but do read the novel, it’s quiet and lovely and should resonate with your soul. (You can watch the film afterward to see what Bowie does in the role, and there is another film version and a Showtime TV series to check out too.)

Most young people today will know of Walter Tevis if they read the credits or reviews of Queen’s Gambit (1983), the hit series on Netflix. The TV show is excellent but the book is better. All this media exposure has made Tevis (1928-1984) a minor forgotten writer with some fame.

You might have figured out by now that I’m a fan of Walter Tevis. That’s even more true now that I just finished his 1980 novel Mockingbird. What a strange trip it was. I thought it a perfect novel for the 2020s because it is about artificial intelligence and the decline of the human race and our civilization. Mockingbird is set in the 25th century but I don’t think it will take us that long.

I don’t want to give any spoilers to this novel because it‘s the kind of story that you should just unfold slowly as you read. But I do need to say enough to get you to read Mockingbird. Mockingbird has over two thousand customer ratings on Amazon with a 4.5 average.

For most of the novel Tevis tightrope walks between existentialism and nihilism and has a brush with Christianity. I will tell you the ending made me happy because of how Tevis ties up the story and his philosophical speculations. Tevis doesn’t stick to any one philosophy. He appears to be extrapolating on the decline and corruption of liberal thought but what he projects for conservatives isn’t any better. Walter Tevis was one of those tortured souls that tried mightily to figure out reality in his fiction.

The story opens with Robert Spofforth, a robot who looks like a black man but has an artificial brain. Later in the novel, Spofforth is described as the most beautiful object humans ever created. Bob is a level 9 robot, the most advanced of his kind, but the only unit of this model that hasn’t destroyed himself. He has been programmed so he can’t commit suicide. Currently, he is the Dean of New York University, but he might be the most intelligent and most powerful being left on the planet.

Spofforth hires Paul Bentley to come to New York because he’s the only human being he can find that can read. Bentley’s narrative is the main part of the novel. Paul then meets Mary Lou, an iconoclast living among the sheep, and teaches her to read. But Bob didn’t hire Paul to teach people to read but to translate the intertitles in silent films. Bob doesn’t want humans to learn to read again.

The human population has shrunk from billions to just a few million. Robots care for all their needs, but very poorly because robots are also a declining species. Humans routinely consume drugs, have a lot of casual sex, and pursue inner development.

There are elements in Mockingbird that will remind you of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, with a slight hint of The Road. And if you’ve read The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett, Mockingbird reminded me of it too. And there’s a little bit of Cool Hand Luke in the story. (Another Paul Newman connection).

And if that’s not enough to get you to read Mockingbird there’s a cat named Biff. I’m off to read The Steps of the Sun (1983) but it hasn’t gotten kind reviews. I also bought The King is Dead (2023) which reprints his 1981 collection Far from Home and adds many unpublished works.

James Wallace Harris, 5/20/23

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“Triceratops” by Kono Tensei

“Triceratops” by Kono Tensei is story #5 of 52 from the anthology The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989) that my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “Triceratops” was first published in the August 1982 issue of Omni.

On one level, “Triceratops” isn’t much of a story. Nice enough. Sort of a bland version of Bradbury. A dad and his son are out biking and they see something out of the ordinary. Eventually, they learn it’s a triceratops, and conclude they alone, for some reason that’s not clear, can see into another dimension. Father and son bond over secretly watching a Cretaceous landscape superimposed over their Japanese subdivision.

David Hartwell’s aim is to showcase science fiction from around the world in this anthology, but hopefully, this story isn’t representative of the best SF from Japan or the world. And I’d hate to think Hartwell picked it because he characterizes Japan as a country of big monster fans.

It’s a challenge to find an essay hook for this story. I think I’ll use a video I watched from the Outlaw Bookseller (Steven E. Andrews) this morning on conceptual breakthroughs in science fiction. Andrews begins by talking about the first lines of classic science fiction stories.

The ones we remember have great first lines that announce a paradigm shift. His first example was from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” The second was from Christopher Priest’s The Inverted World, “I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.”

Unfortunately, Tensei begins his story with “The father and son were returning from cycling.” That’s a rather mundane first sentence. Tensei waits for quite a few paragraphs before bringing on his paradigm shift.

Andrews then goes on to say the best SF stories have a conceptual breakthrough that comes near the end that inspires a sense of wonder. “Triceratops” does depend on a conceptual breakthrough, but it’s in the middle. The father and son decide if they think that the Cretaceous can intersect dimensionally with the present then they can see the two together. The logic of “if you believe it to be true it will be true” isn’t much of a conceptual breakthrough, although the film version of The Wizard of Oz pulled it off nicely.

This is the first story I would have left out of this anthology. Unfortunately, it was the first example of world SF. Not a good start.

I recommend watching the whole video, Top 10 Science Fiction Conceptual Breakthrough Stories: The Elements of Science Fiction Part 1. I should use it as a foundation for evaluating the stories in The World Treasury of Science Fiction. However, it might be aiming too high for the average science fiction story — or should every science fiction story aim to hit one out of the park?

James Wallace Harris, 5/15/23

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“Chronopolis” by J. G. Ballard

“Chronopolis” by J. G. Ballard is story #4 of 52 from the anthology The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989) that my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “Chronopolis” was first published in the June 1960 issue of New Worlds.

“Chronopolis” is set in the future where society has outlawed keeping time. Ballard imagined a future where our high-tech global civilization collapsed from the complexity of overpopulation. In this new world, the population is much smaller having giving up the rat race.

The story begins in a holding cell. Conrad Newman is awaiting trial for as of yet unspecified crimes. Newman is obsessed with making his south-facing jail cell window into a sundial so he can accurately keep the time while everyone else is unconcerned about when things will happen. Gradually we learn that this society operates without a schedule, and clocks are illegal. They allow timers, which people use to cook eggs, time a math class, or how long they should sleep, but not clocks that force schedules onto life’s activities.

Ballard has come up with a nifty idea. You don’t know if this new world he described is better or worse for not knowing the time, but Conrad Newman is a renegade who secretly embraces keeping time, allowing him to outcompete other people. Newman’s world is the opposite of Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” Conrad Newman is the polar opposite of Everett C. Marm. It’s funny, but we root for each character in their separate stories.

I got to say, I really liked this story a lot even though when you think about it, there’s not much to it. On the one hand, it’s the old fashion kind of science fiction that’s based on a neat idea. On the other hand, it feels different from the other science fiction of 1960 or before. J. G. Ballard is considered one of the pathfinders of the New Wave movement in science fiction in the mid-1960s. “Chronopolis” isn’t really New Wave yet. Probably why it feels different is it’s British science fiction, and British science fiction always felt more grown-up to me.

I’ve only read a couple novels by Ballard, and maybe a dozen short stories, but they’ve all impressed me as being “heavy” in the old hippie sense of the word. I assume that was another way of saying weighty. I recently read “The Terminal Beach” by Ballard and was equally impressed, and it felt equally heavy. Years ago, I bought The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard on audiobook. It’s 55 hours long. I also have it on the Kindle. Whenever one of his stories comes up on the discussion group I like listening to them. They feel mature and atmospheric. I also like reading them because I’m impressed with Ballard’s prose. Each time I read one of his stories, I tell myself I need to listen to the entire 55-hour audiobook and I really want to get into Ballard’s work.

The other day at the Friends of the Library used bookstore I found Applied Ballardianism by Simon Sellars. I couldn’t tell if it was a novel, memoir, monograph, or what, but I bought it. This is how it’s described at Amazon: 

An existential odyssey weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm.

The mediascapes of late capitalism reconfigure erotic responses and trigger primal aggression; under constant surveillance, we occupy simulations of ourselves, private estates on a hyperconnected globe; fictions reprogram reality, memories are rewritten by the future…

Fleeing the excesses of 1990s cyberculture, a young researcher sets out to systematically analyse the obsessively reiterated themes of a writer who prophesied the disorienting future we now inhabit. The story of his failure is as disturbingly psychotropic as those of his magus—J.G. Ballard, prophet of the post-postmodern, voluptuary of the car crash, surgeon of the pathological virtualities pulsing beneath the surface of reality.

Plagued by obsessive fears, defeated by the tedium of academia, yet still certain that everything connects to Ballard, his academic thesis collapses into a series of delirious travelogues, deranged speculations and tormented meditations on time, memory, and loss. Abandoning literary interpretation and renouncing all scholarly distance, he finally accepts the deep assignment that has run throughout his entire life, and embarks on a rogue fieldwork project: Applied Ballardianism, a new discipline and a new ideal for living. Only the darkest impulses, the most morbid obsessions, and the most apocalyptic paranoia can uncover the technological mutations of inner space.

An existential odyssey inextricably weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm—a world become unmistakably Ballardian.

Some of that description faintly feels like “Chronopolis” but it’s an early story for Ballard, that hints at things to come. Also, by serendipity, I came across this YouTube video by the Outlaw Bookseller on the New Wave. Ballard figures heavily in it. Warning though, this video is one hour and twelve minutes long.

“Chronopolis” is another story that’s pushing me into the world of J. G. Ballard. One of these days, and hopefully soon, I’ll start gorging on Ballard’s books.

James Wallace Harris, 5/12/23