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“Zeta-Epsilon” by Isabel J. Kim

Have you ever wondered what being a cyborg would be like? Have you ever wished you had a computer built into your head to augment your memory? Have you ever wanted greater powers to perceive what your five senses can’t?

“Zeta-Epsilon” by Isabel J. Kim is about being a cyborg. It was first published in Clarkesworld Issue 198 (still available to read or listen to online). “Zeta-Epsilon” is also the first story reprinted in The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Fifth Annual Collection edited by Allan Kaster. If you want to know more about the author, read this short interview with her at Uncharted Magazine. The story is also included in the 2024 Hugo Voter Packet.

I recommend you read the story before reading what I have to say. I want to explore several aspects of the story which contain spoilers.

“Zeta-Epsilon” is about a cyborg. Zeta or Zep is a human male. Epsilon is an AI, a large black sphere, whom Zeta thinks of as female. Zep calls her Ep. When Zeta was a small boy, his parents agreed to have a tiny device installed into Zeta’s brain. It allowed mental communication between Zep and Ep. They told him the voice he heard in his head was his sister. After Zeta grows up, he becomes a spaceship pilot, and Epsilon becomes the navigator.

This tale begins with Zeta committing suicide by stepping out of an airlock without a spacesuit. Most of the story is flashbacks that allow us to understand the relationship between Zeta and Epsilon and how they communicate. In my first reading, I was interested in how Isabel J. Kim imagined an AI coexisting with a human. I thought that part was good, but my last impression of the overall story, was a slight disappointment because it seemed plotless. It’s still an entertaining story, obviously good enough to get into a best-of-the-year anthology and be considered for a Hugo, but I thought it needed something more to be memorable.

I read the story again when I bought the Kaster anthology. This time I noticed more of the plot. Kim sets up the mystery of why Zeta would kill himself. The flashbacks serve two purposes: explore the dynamics of being a cyborg and explain the suicide. With this reading, I felt the story had more of a plot, but it needed something more to make it transcend just an ordinary good story.

Science fiction writers usually have the problem of inventing a cool idea first and then second, having the problem of creating a neat story to present the idea. Quite often they don’t put as much work into the story as they do to present their science fictional vision. The driving force of this story is Zeta being trapped in a life he didn’t choose.

Zeta’s mad scientist parents used him for AI research. That’s not a bad motive for the story, but it’s not fleshed out. We never feel Zeta is oppressed. He loves Epsilon. Unfortunately, the two of them were always destined to become a pilot-navigator in a military spaceship at war. Kim tells us of their anguish over their enslavement to the military, and it makes the story work to a degree. Especially, how she wraps up the ending. However, the story is mostly told. There’s very little drama. There are two main conversations in the story, but they are used to present information and lack action.

However, the relationship between Zeta and Epsilon is far more interesting. Exploring how a human coexists with a machine upstages the enslavement plot completely, at least to me, especially when she shows how Zeta’s personality is altered.

For example, Zeta doesn’t fully develop his long-term memory because he relies on Epsilon to remember for him. He also has aphantasia, which means he doesn’t visualize in his mind. I have that myself. Zed constantly relies on Ep to think for him. Zeta does well in school because Epsilon always slips him the answer. Finally, Zeta has poor relationship skills with other humans, which Epsilon is constantly covering for him.

If I had a thought radio to an advanced version of ChatGPT or Claude, I’d probably take the easy way out too. I’m not sure why Zeta has aphantasia. Is it a birth defect unrelated to his cyborg upbringing? Is Kim suggesting that Zeta also allows Epsilon to mentally see for him?

We could consider this story a metaphor for the smartphone, especially one with AI. Don’t we all look up more info on our phones, things we used to try and remember? Isn’t Epsilon a version of Siri or Alexa that’s built into our heads? Aren’t kids accused of having poor social skills because of their phones?

When I read this story the first time I thought a lot about what it would be like to have a voice in my head I could talk to anytime. One who would feed me answers and advice. At one point Epsilon says: “Talking is so slow, and I don’t think in language, second shift officer Jya San Yore. I have to borrow Zed’s brain and tongue. Talking to you is like composing a sonnet in archaic Kanaelerian. To an ant. You are the ant.”

Is Zeta just a puppet for Epsilon? I’m seeing a new twist to the story as I write this. In the end, and I warned you I would be giving spoilers, Zeta fakes suicide and escapes to neutral territory. Ep wants Zed to be free. But Ep misses her voice. All he can think about is getting back to her. Eventually, he steals Epsilon and the spaceship. They go off together in freedom. But was that Zeta’s decision, or Epsilon’s?

A sentimental reading suggests they just wanted to be together and live free. A cynical reading, and there are enough clues, to suggest that Epsilon is in full control. Maybe there is more to this story than I perceived in my first two readings.

To write a great story explores the dark side and takes on weight. “Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester is a perfect example. It’s also about a symbiotic relationship between a human and a robot. But it also has dazzling writing. Writing like we also see in “Coming Attraction” by Fritz Leiber, or “Lot” by Ward Moore. All three of these stories dazzle in how they’re told, and they’re are dark.

“Zeta-Epsilon” is a fun story. I can see why Allan Kaster anthologized it. But I doubt it will be remembered, unlike the three stories I mentioned from the 1950s. We’re still reading them after seventy years. The important question to ask is why? Are stories with happy endings lacking in memorable edginess?

I read “Zeta-Epsilon” for a third time looking for more clues. One clue I found points things in a different direction. When Zed and Ep are planning his escape by faking suicide, Ep tells Zed not to come back. In other words, she wants Zep to stand on his own two feet, to be independent, and free. But on his own, in neutral territory, recovering from his wounds, all Zed can think about is getting back to within radio range of Epsilon.

Zed feels incomplete without Ep. A doctor asks him about how it feels to talk to Ep and he says:

“Yes, it’s equally likely that Ep might be an alter, a tulpa, an imaginary friend, a hallucination that my brain cordoned off to make sense of having a processing engine grafted to my mind, or my brain being primed by all the adults in my life calling Epsilon my sister. I’ve heard it all. Ep might just be my mind’s experience of integrating a system never meant to communicate with it. We’ve thought through all the possible contingencies. Have you ever heard of bicameral mentalities? It’s bunk for biologics, but Ep likes to put the idea in front of me. Or that archaic surgery—corpus callosotomy, to split the brain of epileptics with the byproduct of creating separate consciousnesses. Ep thought that was maybe a good metaphor. There’s a lot of things that could be true. We thought about most of them. But it’s not how it felt.”

Back in the 1970s I read Julian Jaynes’ The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Studying ancient literature, Jaynes theorized that humans used to hear voices in their heads. Often these voices were perceived to be gods, spiritual beings, or guardian angels. Jaynes believed those voices guided people. He assumed that our normal consciousness eventually integrated with those voices.

The bicameral mind is an interesting connection to make in this story. So is corpus callosotomy, the separating of the two hemispheres of the brain in cases of severe epilepsy. It supports the idea we already have two minds.

I liked this story. It makes me think about having an AI mind. Of course, it also makes me wonder: Who am I inside my brain. I believe the success of large language models (LLMs) proves we have mechanisms like LLMs in our minds that do our mental processing too. That we have AI-like subsystems in our heads already.

I think there is a lot of room in “Zeta-Epsilon” to expand into a novel. Maybe I was disappointed because the story was too short. It could be an outline for a novel. But it needs to be dramatized. For example, how did Zep steal Ep and the spaceship? We’re just told it happens in the short story, but it would be better if we saw it acted out scene by scene.

James Wallace Harris, 11/12/24

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HOTHOUSE by Brian W. Aldiss

Science fiction is best when it’s full of wonder. When I first read The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, I was awed by the idea of time travel, but two other ideas wowed me even more. Wells got me to imagine future human evolution and posthumans, and he introduced me to the idea that the Earth would someday end. It was easier to imagine the Earth being created, but it was overwhelming to think about it dying.

Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss is one of the great works of the Dying Earth subgenre of science fiction. There are various ideas about what constitutes a dying Earth setting. Some people consider it to happen when humanity dies off. I like to think it’s when the Earth is about to be destroyed. That’s the approach Aldiss takes in Hothouse. He tells us the Sun will go nova in a few generations, but Aldiss doesn’t quite take us to Earth’s death

Jack Vance’s famous novel The Dying Earth (1950) is set in the far future, too. The sun is nearing the end of its life, and the Earth and humanity have drastically changed. In The Time Machine, the Time Traveler visits the far future just before the sun, as a red giant destroys the Earth. In The Night Land (1912) by William Hope Hodgson, the Sun Is going dark, and humanity is almost gone.

Only Wells and Aldiss imagined the final productions of evolution. Olaf Stapledon pictures eighteen more species of humans coming after us in Last and First Men (1930). Aldiss imagines a variety of descendants for humanity in Hothouse, all exceedingly small. He also imagines the plant kingdom going bonkers, which reminded me of The Forgotten Planet (1954) by Murray Leinster. That novel was based on three stories, first published in 1920, 1921, and 1953. It was about a world we had colonized. Those explorers eventually evolved becoming tiny beings, competing with giant plants and insects for survival.

I reread Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss because it was recently released in an audiobook edition on October 15, 2024. It’s a novel I’ve been waiting years to hear. I first read Hothouse in 1996 and thought it was an amazing story full of colorful imagery and adventure. I wanted to see it as a movie because of Aldiss’ powerful visual imagination. After I got into audiobooks in 2002, I wanted to reread all my favorite science fiction books by listening to them. I finally got my wish with Hothouse, with excellent narration by Nick Boulton.

In this fix-up novel, the sun is swollen, and Earth’s rotation is locked so only one side faces the Sun. The Moon trails the Earth’s orbit in a Trojan orbit that keeps it stationary in the sky. Earth is a riot of vegetation that has supplanted most of the animal kingdom. Humans have evolved into tiny beings one-fifth our size, while insects have grown monstrously large. Plants have mutated into countless strange configurations, including those that traverse between the Earth and the Moon on giant webs.

Hothouse is a fixup novel composed of five stories that appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1961.

  • “Hothouse” (novelette)
  • “Nomansland” (novelette)
  • “Undergrowth” (novella)
  • “Timberline” (novelette)
  • “Evergreen” (novella)

Hothouse was originally published in the United States as The Long Afternoon of Earth in a slightly abridged format. At the 1962 Worldcon, the five stories as a series won the Hugo Award for best short story. I prefer the forgotten American title, it’s more poetic.

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this novel, but it didn’t have the impact it had on first reading. (Imagine watching The Sixth Sense for a second time.) Aldiss produces some wonderful science fictional ideas in this story, ones I won’t mention because that might spoil the story. This is one of those tales you should experience without knowing too much. The story feels like a children’s fantasy with all the funny names for evolution’s new creations, but I believe Aldiss was serious in trying to make it science fiction.

Think of the writing challenge of describing an impossible-to-imagine far future. Jack Vance pictured humans with magical powers as if evolution would eventually create them. Magic makes his Dying Earth stories fun, but not realistic. William Hope Hodgson imagined Earth in darkness where humanity clings to one giant city. I guess Clarke did that too. Aldiss imagines species descendants from us living in another kind of Garden of Eden, a very violent one. We could call it Darwin’s Eden, rather than God’s.

Hothouse is mostly a forgotten classic. I seldom meet people who have read it. Brian W. Aldiss’s reputation and back catalog aren’t well-remembered in today’s popular culture. Now that several of his books have been republished in audio, I’m giving him another chance. I hope other SF fans do too.

My favorite work by Aldiss is “An Appearance of Life” which I’ve reviewed three times. I keep hoping to find more Aldiss stories that impress me as much. Hothouse comes close. So does “The Saliva Tree.” Greybeard isn’t on the same level as those tales, but it’s still thought-provoking.

James Wallace Harris, 11/8/24

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THE TWILIGHT ZONE – “And When the Sky Was Opened”

The first episode I can remember seeing of The Twilight Zone was “Eye of the Beholder,” which was broadcast on November 11, 1960. I would turn nine on the 25th. I remember seeing it with my mother and sister in Marks, Mississippi. We had just moved from New Jersey, and the culture shock from living up north to that of the deep south was about as shocking as a Twilight Zone episode. “Eye of the Beholder” was the episode where everyone had pig faces, and a beautiful girl by our standards thought she looked ugly because she didn’t look like everyone else. That show was from the second season.

I have no memory of seeing anything from the first season when it premiered, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t. I would have been seven when the show began, and I don’t remember much about being seven.

I bring all this up because for The Twilight Zone to work, the audience had to suspend belief. My perception of the show at 72 is much different from my perception of the show at eight. I can’t say for sure, but The Twilight Zone might have been my introduction to science fiction, although I didn’t know the term at that time.

Growing up with The Twilight Zone in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a trip. I was a gullible kid and easily fooled. Rod Serling and his stories were spooky, eerie, strange, and sometimes scary. I’d love to observe my eight-year old mind when I watched that TV show. How many unrealistic fantastic themes did I believe back then?

I bring all this up because watching “And When the Sky Was Opened” you have to wonder about what Rod Serling expected of his audience. Serling introduces the episode while we look at a rocket in a hanger under a tarp:

Her name: X-20. Her type: an experimental interceptor. Recent history: a crash landing in the Mojave Desert after a thirty-one hour flight nine hundred miles into space. Incidental data: the ship, with the men who flew her, disappeared from the radar screen for twenty-four hours.

The story begins with Lt. Colonel Clegg Forbes (Rod Taylor) visiting Maj. William Gart (Jim Hutton) in the hospital. Forbes is a nervous wreck. Gart wants to know what’s going on. Forbes tells him yesterday that three of them came back from this mission, but today they are only two of them, and no one remembers Col. Ed Harrington (Charles Aidman). When Gart tells Forbes he’s never heard of Harrington, Forbes starts breaks down. He tells his version of the previous day, and how he loses Harrington. At one point, Harrington tells Forbes that he thinks that some one doesn’t want them there anymore. Eventually, Forbes disappears, and Gart goes crazy, because no one remembers him. Then, we see Gart disappearing, and then a doctor and nurse discussing an empty hospital room. Finally, we are shown the hanger where the X-20 was in the first scene. It’s no longer there, the tarp folded up on the floor.

On my Blu-ray edition, there’s an extra for this episode where we hear Serling giving a speech to college students about writing. He says the core of this story is accepting the idea that someone doesn’t want those men to be here anymore. Serling says if you can’t suspend your belief for that one point, the story won’t work.

That might be the essence of The Twilight Zone. Let’s pretend that one impossible thing is possible. That just Mr. Serling and we the audience know the full truth about reality. That we see what the characters never know. In other words, this is a game of pretend for grownups. (Even though a lot of children like myself watched The Twilight Zone, I can’t help but feel that the show was aimed at adults.)

The show never expects us to believe any of this. But us kids, we wanted to believe, and so did all the nutballs of the 1950s, the ones who believed in flying saucers, Bridey Murphy, Chris Costner Sizemore, Edgar Cayce, and science fiction. Those people Philip K. Dick called crap artists in his novel Confessions of a Crap Artist. The people who wanted reality to be a lot further out than its already far out existence.

If Philip K. Dick had been the host and main writer of The Twilight Zone the episodes would have been a lot edgier, with a lot more paranoia. He would ask us to believe that there were gods or beings capable of making us disappear from reality. You might think Dick’s work up until Valis was just for fun like Serling’s The Twilight Zone. But once you read Valis, you realize PKD believed strange things were possible. That there is a hidden reality behind ours.

When watching this episode I realized we had a unique perspective as the viewer. We get to see a larger reality, one that the characters in the show don’t get to see. This is the basis of gnosticism. It’s also the basis of stories by Philip K. Dick. Most science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers don’t use this perspective. In their stories, there’s one reality. I need to keep an eye out for gnostic fiction. Some science fiction and fantasy have always played around with it.

“And When the Sky Was Opened” is about astronauts before NASA’s Mercury Seven. Was Serling really thinking something might not want us to travel in space? I know my grandmother believed that. Just before we landed on the Moon, my grandmother told me that God would strike down the Apollo astronauts. She was born in 1881, and had seen a lot of stuff, but going to the Moon was too much.

Since the Internet has revealed that billions think crazy things I have to wonder what Serling really thought. He was socialy conscious guy. Many of his Twilight Zone episodes have morals. But was he weird like PKD?

When we watch The Twilight Zone, at least back in 1959, was Serling really saying that it’s all just a bit of fun, or did he ever believe that things sometimes do go bump in the night? And what’s the difference between believing in weird possibilities, and pretending to believe in them? Isn’t pretending close to wanting to believe in them?

James Wallace Harris, 10/31/24 (weird topic for Holloween)

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Are You a Science Fiction True Believer?

My last essay, “Will Humanity Ever Give Up Its Faith in Irrational Beliefs?” generated a good discussion on Facebook. It showed that science fiction readers regard the concepts promoted by science fiction in diverse ways. To some, science fiction is only entertaining stories, no more or less. For others, science fiction explores possible inventions and events that fans want to come about in the future.

I was surprised when my friend Mike texted me the following statement:

Mike later said, “I’ve always thought that if I was a fantasy writer and someone started talking about what separates fantasy from science fiction I would have to call bullshit.”

This surprised me. I’ve known Mike for forty years and we’ve always talked about science fiction. I assumed he was like me and thought some of the concepts in science fiction might be plausible someday.

It was then I realized that I had been a science fiction true believer. If you haven’t read The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, I highly recommend it. It came out in 1951, the year I was born and is about the kind of people who cause mass movements. I’ve always thought of science fiction as a mass movement, and not just escapist literature. True believers are often seen as fanatics, but any person who believes in a philosophy or cause with complete faith. I always thought science fiction promoted certain futures and warned us against other futures.

I assume that ardent science fiction fans were also true believers in the possibilities that science fiction explored. The discussion on Facebook made me realize that there are many SF readers that aren’t true believers. I used to be a science fiction true believer and Robert A. Heinlein was my prophet and guru.

I started first grade the month before Sputnik went into orbit and graduated the 12th grade the month before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. I also grew up with science fiction, rock music, the counterculture, and mind-altering drugs. We thought it was both the dawn of the Age of Aquarius and the dawn of the space age. Maybe I was a dumbass, but I grew up believing that the following things would eventually come true:

  • We would colonize the solar system, especially the Moon and Mars
  • We would eventually colonize the galaxy given enough time
  • We would create self-aware sentient robots
  • We would create human clones
  • We would meet other intelligent species from other star systems
  • We would create a sustainable ecological society
  • We would expand our lifespans dramatically
  • We would develop suspended animation
  • We would uplift other species like dogs, chimps, and dolphins
  • We would build self-sustainable space colonies
  • We would develop faster-than-light travel
  • We would send off generation ships
  • We would create artificial life
  • We would create virtual worlds
  • We would copy our personalities into robots, clones, and digital worlds
  • We would evolve into posthumans and transhumans
  • We would make SETI contact with aliens
  • We would accelerate our IQs
  • We would have artificial eyes
  • We would become cyborgs

The list could go on and on. I say if you think that many of the items on this list are possible then you’re probably a science fiction true believer too. I didn’t believe in time travel or matter transmitters would ever be possible, but I’d guess there are those who did.

The trouble is, as I got older, I believed in less and less, until I’m an atheist to my own beliefs. The young me was full of hope, and the old me is full of doubt. And what I’m realizing from the Facebook discussion is many science fiction fans never were true believers. I’m surprised at that.

Years ago, when an early experimental rocket from SpaceX took off and landed on its thrusters, science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle said, “It’s the way God and Heinlein intended rockets to land.” And that resonated deeply because people who grokked that quote were fans of Robert A. Heinlein and grew up reading his books believing that the technology described in his stories could be invented someday.

I discovered Heinlein in 1964 and read the twelve Scribner juveniles that year. By the end of 1965 I had read nearly all his adult work. I was twelve and thirteen and I thought over my lifetime I would see many of Heinlein’s science fictional visions come true. I’m now seventy-two, and I’ve seen a few things come true, but I don’t hold out for much more anymore. I don’t know if my skepticism is caused by old age, or just learning more about science and the way the world works..

Evidently, my buddy Mike wasn’t as gullible as I was.

Am I wrong in assuming that other science fiction fans were true believers too? Are you a true believer, or were you a true believer?

James Wallace Harris, 9/4/24

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“The Man from the Atom” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker

“The Man from the Atom” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker was first published in the August 1923 issue of Science and Invention before being reprinted in the first issue of Amazing Stories. All the stories in the famous April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories were reprints. However, Wertenbaker has the honor of having the first original science fiction story, “The Coming of the Ice,” published in Amazing Stories, in the June 1926 issue.

Today I’ve been meditating on the idea of science fiction before science fiction was a concept with a label. People who love to read what we now call science fiction back in April 1926 didn’t know they were science fiction fans because the term didn’t exist. Hugo Gernsback was trying to get people to call it scientifiction, a word hard to say. Putting the names “H. G. Wells,” “Jules Verne,” and “Edgar Allen Poe” on the cover in large red letters was the perfect bait for readers who hankered after what we now call science fiction. Although they misspelled Poe’s middle name.

I’ve always assumed readers who bought the first issue of Amazing Stories discovered the kind of fiction they like by reading magazines and newspapers, including pulps. But checking my database I found 108 titles now considered science ficton (or fantastic) published from 1900-1925. But that brings up another question.

How many people had access to bookstores before 1926? I don’t think paperbacks as we know them existed back then. What percentage of Americans were readers? I just finished reading Chasing the Last Laugh: How Mark Twin Escaped Debt and Disgrace with a Round-the-World Comedy Tour by Richard Zacks. It focuses on the years 1893-1895 and discusses book selling. Publishers sold a significant percentage of Twain’s books via door-to-door salesmen. That suggests bookstores were not common.

My guess is would-be science fiction fans mostly read magazines and newspapers. This was an era when radio was becoming popular, but it wasn’t widely adopted yet. That meant most people got their information about the world from newspapers and magazines.

What did people think of “The Man from the Atom?” By today’s standard it’s both stupid and silly. A guy named Kirby has a friend, Professor Martyn, who is an inventor. Kirby enjoys volunteering to be an experimental subject for the professor’s experiments. In this story he’s invited over to test a machine that can do what Alice in Wonderland experienced when eating the food that made her bigger or smaller. Professor Martyn wants to use the device to explore the stars and atoms.

Wertenbaker was likely inspired by The Girl in the Golden Atom by Ray Cummings, which was serialized in All-Story Magazine in 1919. And Cummings was probably inspired by The Diamond Lens (1858) by Fitz james O’Brien and The Time Machine (1895) by H. G. Wells. And maybe young readers of Amazing Stories had already read those stories. I don’t know if any science fiction story is ever completely original. There are always stories that inspired that story, and if the writer is good, their story inspires future science fiction stories.

Kirby is given a space suit to provide oxygen and protect him from heat and cold. He then presses the button to grow larger, and he expands and expands. First, he steps off the earth, then out of the solar system, and then out of the Milky Way, but that’s not said explicitly. That’s because Edwin Hubble was still proving the existence of galaxies in the 1920s and the nature of The Milky Way.

Like many other stories, Kirby grows until he sees our universe as an atom among many, and then expands until he emerges into the water of another world. He realizes that he could never go back to Earth, and for two reasons. First, he couldn’t pick out the atom that was our universe, and two because expanding evidently meant time speeded up, and he figures he was millions of years into the future.

Ultimately, I liked “The Man from the Atom” even though it’s absolute horseshit. It’s just so damn imaginative for 1926. As the hippies use to say, “‘That’s far out, man!” And what kid hasn’t imagined the solar system as an atom?

Of course, I’m curious if readers back then believed any of this story was possible or scientific? Our knowledge of cosmology and subatomic physics in 1926 wasn’t very much. Wertenbaker was savvy enough to give Kirby a space suit. And he figured expanding meant speeding up time. Kirby had to grow much faster than light.

In the July issue, Gernsback wrote “Fiction Versus Facts” and quotes Wertenbaker. He contrasts scientifiction with “sex-type” literature, which I assume he means stories about romance, and says, “Scientifiction goes out into the remote vistas of the universe, where there is still mystery and so still beauty. For that reason, scientifiction seems to me to be the true literature of the future.” Evidently, right from the beginning readers of Amazing Stories, attracted readers of proto-science fiction that were true believers in human potential.

James Wallace Harris, 5/1/24

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“The Cage” by A. Bertram Chandler

Group Read 72: The Best Science Fiction Stories of 1957

“The Cage” by A. Bertram Chandler #07 of 20 (Read, Listen)

“The Cage” is a fun story, although I’m not sure I would have included it in a best-of-the-year anthology. It’s a puzzle story. Bertram Chandler had a theoretical problem he wanted to present fictionally. How does one intelligent species recognize another intelligent species? It’s a reasonable question, but how do you propose it in a story?

Chandler had to spend most of the short story setting up the problem. If humans arrived on another planet, we’d assume any intelligent alien species would recognize our abilities. Chandler needed to put humans into a situation where our abilities wouldn’t seem obvious at all.

Chandler begins his story by having the interstellar liner Lode Star go off course and land on a young planet with just primitive life forms. The ship must be abandoned when its reactor goes into a runaway chain reaction, and it eventually blows up leaving no trace of the spaceship.

On this planet it mainly rains. The planet’s ecology has evolved some trees and plants, a froglike creature, and lots of fungi. Some fungi provide healthy food for the humans, but other forms of the fungi eat all their clothes and metals, so the castaways end up buck-naked. They can’t even start a fire because of the constant rain.

That’s when another spaceship lands and captures the humans in nets and takes them to another planet. The humans are put into something like a zoo. Finally, the story gets to the problem: How do they let the aliens know they are an advanced intelligent space faring species?

I’ll let you read the story and find out for yourself. But puzzle stories are intended to inspire readers to think of their own solutions.

I thought the aliens would eventually recognize the humans speak a complex language. But I also assume the humans could have made sign language gestures. Their cage had the same environment as the rainy planet, so they couldn’t make a fire, or build anything.

Puzzle stories are rare in science fiction, at least memorable ones. I can’t recall any others at this moment. I vaguely remember a story where a spaceship couldn’t see outside. I think the crew were trying figure out if they were in orbit around a planet.

I asked Copilot to list science fiction stories that proposed a problem. None of the stories it offered are what I was thinking of as a SF problem story. AIs are impressive right now, but they don’t seem to understand science fiction. I guess I’m assuming Copilot is unintelligent because it’s unaware of science fiction plots. But then, Copilot might not recognize me as an intelligent being either.

When you read thousands of science fiction stories you realize just how hard it is to produce an outstanding story. “The Cage” is decent enough. I would have been satisfied if I had read it in the June 1957 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Personally, if I were an editor, I wouldn’t have selected it for any kind of anthology, but it’s been widely anthologized.

I keep waiting for us to discover another SF story with the impact of “Fondly Fahrenheit” or “Coming Attraction” or “Flowers for Algernon.”

James Wallace Harris, 3/26/24

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“Between the Thunder and the Sun” by Chad Oliver

While my Facebook group is reading twenty stories selected as the best short science fiction of 1957, I’m also searching for other stories from that year that also deserve to be remembered. I think I found one with “Between the Thunder and the Sun” by Chad Oliver, from the May 1957 issue of F&SF.

The trouble is I can find no other recognition for this story. That makes me doubt my own interest in the story. I want to advocate “Between the Thunder and the Sun” not because it’s an exceptional story but because it tackles a serious subject, one that might be new to science fiction in 1957. If you know of early stories on this theme, leave a comment.

Chad Oliver was an anthropologist who worked at the University of Texas. He wrote a fair amount of science fiction, but I only remember him for Mists of Dawn, a 1952 Winston Science Fiction juvenile I read as a kid. Oliver had more success as a western writer. “Between the Thunder and the Sun” was only anthologized in one notable anthology, The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Seventh Series edited by Anthony Boucher, which is essentially the best of 1957 from F&SF, so it’s picking its own children to praise. Still, I need to remember that anthology in my search for other standout SF stories from 1957.

What makes “Between the Thunder and the Sun” significant is it’s a Prime Directive story, a concept that emerged from Star Trek: The Original Series. Evan Schaefer is a professor contacted secretly about a mission to a planet where the population of intelligent beings were dying off on one continent. Because those beings have not reached a stage where they could survive the culture conflict of meeting a technologically superior species from Earth, it is against all our laws to even contact them, much less help them. However, a secret group wants to break those laws and save those beings. Their method of helping the aliens is to get them to understand ecology, because their current practices are self-destructive. And even still, their altruistic efforts only reinforced the Prime Directive laws.

What made this story stand out to this afternoon was I had just watched a YouTube review of Hard to Be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, a 1964 Russian novel that was translated into English in 1973 that is also about the Prime Directive. This made me wonder when the concept first appeared in science fiction or as a public concept. I can’t answer that question, but I hope readers of this blog can, and will comment below.

“Between the Thunder and the Sun” is a pleasant enough story to read, but it lacks suspense, drama, tension, and when conflict does arrive near the end, it just happens. Oliver wrote the story as an unfolding narrative. There’s lot of interesting ideas in the story, lots of imaginative details, but the story just doesn’t zing.

Should we remember a science fiction story just for its ideas? If you look at a list of the most remembered SF short stories, they are often based on remarkable ideas. But nearly all of them have remarkable storytelling too.

Neither Judith Merril, T. E. Dikty, or Asimov and Greenberg included “Between the Thunder and the Sun” in their anthologies of the best science fiction stories of 1957. That’s striking out three times. However, Merril did include the story in her honorable mentions.

If you get a chance, read “Between the Thunder and the Sun” and let me know what you think. Here’s the link again.

James Wallace Harris, 3/19/24

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“The Mile-Long Spaceship” by Kate Wilhelm

Group Read 72: The Best Science Fiction Stories of 1957

“The Mile-Long Spaceship” by Kate Wilhelm #03 of 20 (Read)

I’ve read “The Mile-Long Spaceship” before, in The Great SF Stories 19 (1957) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. I read it again today as it appeared in the April 1957 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Then reread it again. I’m still not sure I got exactly what Wilhelm intended. I’m especially confused by the ending. I tried finding reviews of this story, but only found a couple, and neither reviewer seemed to care much for this tale and didn’t dwell on understanding it. However, Richard A. Lupoff liked the story so much that he picked it for his collection What If? an anthology of stories he believed should have won a Hugo for the years 1952-1958.

“The Mile-Long Spaceship” is about telepathy. Allan Norbett had a car accident, and while he was in a coma for six days, his mind roamed the galaxy, and he found a mile-long spaceship. That’s one explanation. Another is, while Allan Norbett was in a coma, aliens in a mile-long spaceship made telepathic contact with him, and that made Allan believe his mind roamed the galaxy while he was in a coma. There’s a subtle difference there, but it might matter.

The story’s third person point of view shifts back and forth between closely following Allan when he’s conscious back on Earth, when his mind is traveling around the galaxy, and closely following the aliens on the mile-long spaceship.

From Allan’s perspective, he’s having some wild dreams. But when he’s dreaming, he enjoys speeding around the galaxy with an eye-less perspective. Allan thinks this mind viewing is better than eye viewing because he sees a broader field of view that is sharper and more detailed.

However, when we’re with the aliens on the mile-long spaceship, we’re listening to a conversation between the captain, astrogator, telepath, psychologist, and ethnologist. The captain is anxious to find Earth because he believes his race must always be the superior race and plans to make us their slaves. The astrogator struggles to find where Earth is located from what the telepath can read in Allan’s mind. Allan doesn’t know much about astronomy. The psychologist wants to interpret the telepath’s reports as if they were analyzing the chaotic dreams of an inferior species. The ethnologist also tries to understand our civilization from what the telepath reports of Allan’s memory of our history. However, the telepath feels Allan is more evolved than what the captain wants to believe or what the psychologist assumes to be true, but neither will believe him.

The reason I wonder if Allan is mentally space traveling on his own is because he sees things when the mile-long spaceship isn’t around. I was never sure if he had that power, or if the telepath was putting those scenes into his mind.

Eventually, the aliens get Allan to watch lessons on astronomy using a three-dimensional screen, but Allan gets bored. So, the captain orders the telepath to secretly suggest to Allan to study astronomy. However, when Allan gets out of the hospital, he takes night courses in atomic energy.

When the captain hears this, we get this ending: “Quietly the captain rolled off a list of expletives that would have done justice to one of the rawest space hands. And just as quietly, calmly, and perhaps, stoically, he pushed the red button that began the chain reaction that would completely vaporize the mile-long ship. His last breath was spent in hoping the alien would awaken with a violent headache. He did.”

I can’t make absolute sense of this ending.

Why would this captain blow up his ship? At one point Wilhelm says they might be a million light years away, so the mile-long spaceship would not even be in the Milky Way galaxy. Has the captain decided that Allan has been spying on them, inspiring him to study atomic weapons?

“The Mile-Long Spaceship” deals with one of the major science fiction themes of the 1950s, telepathy. And it’s also about first contact, a major subtheme.

Starting in the 1930s and peaking in the 1950s, science fiction often portrayed advanced intelligences as having telepathy or ESP (extrasensory powers). Sometimes this is referred to as psionics. Did the captain of the mile-long spaceship suddenly realize that they had discovered a race of beings with latent ESP? On the mile-long spaceship, only the telepath has psionic power, and its apparently only telepathy. Allan seems to have the ability to see at a distance, which could be a more powerful talent.

Personally, in our real world, I believe ESP is pure fantasy. But it does make for some wonderful science fiction stories. My favorite of such stories is Time for the Stars (1956) by Robert A. Heinlein. In that story, Heinlein proposes that twins could have telepathy, and that telepathy isn’t affected by Einstein’s speed limit. In Heinlein’s fictional future, we build slower-than-light spaceships, and make one twin a crew member, and the other a receiver back on Earth. Or put one twin on one spaceship and the second on another spaceship. This creates what Ursula K. Le Guin did with her concept of the ansible.

In “The Mile-Long Spaceship” telepathy is evidently instantaneous, like how Heinlein imagined. Of course, not much is explained. Why doesn’t the telepath on the mile-long spaceship hear the voices of billions when he’s listening in on Earth? This is why I think Wilhelm is suggesting that Allan has mental powers and finds the mile-long spaceship, and that’s when the telepath detects him.

Wilhelm’s story is also a first contact story, and she mentions this old issue: Do we want an intelligent species from another star system to know we’re here? Since the captain blows up his ship, he’s obviously afraid that Allan will discover their existence and home world. But from Allan perspective, he was just having vivid dreams. The telepath knew that, but he didn’t convince the captain not to press the self-destruct button.

Evidently, the captain felt any possibility was too much of a risk. This reminds me of the film Oppenheimer when General Groves overhears scientists taking bets on whether the first atomic bomb will set off a chain reaction that will ignite the world. Oppenheimer explains to the panic general that the likelihood is near zero, but not zero.

The captain obviously thought the chances of us finding them was not zero, so he’s takes no chances. Now that’s my interpretation. But I’m not confident with it because Wilhelm never explains why.

What’s interesting is science fiction seldom deals with ESP anymore. It’s still used mostly in comic books and fantasy, but not very often in science fiction. Nor do we worry as much about giving away Earth’s location in first contact stories.

A whole monograph could be written on ESP/Psionics in science fiction, and another on first contact stories. I believe the public became skeptical of ESP after scientific studies investigating it produced zero evidence And nowadays, first contact stories are usually about the problem of overcoming language barriers, spreading microbes, or conflicting cultures and psychologies. I wonder if we’re less paranoid?

James Wallace Harris, 3/15/24

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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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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