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“The Dead Past” by Isaac Asimov

“The Dead Past” by Isaac Asimov is story #27 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 Dead Past” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction (April 1956). I can find no ebook or audiobook edition of this story.

Normally, I don’t link to the Internet Archive because I worry it’s going to be taken down. But for “The Dead Past” you can read it here in a scan of the April 1956 Astounding.

Let’s imagine that “The Dead Past” is a robot Isaac Asimov built. This robot has a specific function, to trigger certain ideas and emotions in readers. I believe we can understand this story in terms of the motors and gears Asimov used to design his robot.

  1. The first motor is Arnold Potterley, Ph.D., a Professor of Ancient History. Arnold is obsessed with ancient Carthage. He desperately wants to use a time viewer to prove that specific history about Pre-Roman Carthage is untrue, and were lies created by their enemies the Greeks and Romans.
  2. The second motor is academic control, as viewed through The Department of Chronoscopy, which has the power to view the past using the science of neutrinics, an area of physics created by a man named Sterbinski.
  3. The third motor is Jonas Foster, a new instructor in the physics department.
  4. The first gear system is a dystopian society that rigidly controls all academic research. Asimov used this feature to satirize the real-life academic bureaucracy that he had to deal with. Arnold fights against this bureaucracy to get access to the time viewer to do his research. Jonas becomes intrigued with why the bureaucracy suppresses the time viewer. The two men’s motives mess to work together secretly to build their own time viewer.
  5. The fourth motor is Caroline Potterley, Arnold’s wife. She is obsessed with the death of their child, Laurel, who died twenty years earlier at age 3. She wants the time viewer to see Laurel again.
  6. The second gear system is the mystery of Laurel’s death. Arnold is afraid that if Caroline could see the event he might be blamed. I believe Asimov added this system to his machine because he wanted an emotional component.
  7. The fifth motor is Ralph Nimmo, a popular science writer.
  8. The third gear system links Ralph and Jonas and allows Asimov to express views on science writers, as well as enable the building of a home time viewer.
  9. The sixth motor is Thaddeus Araman, Department Head of the Division of Chronoscopy. He is in charge of suppressing the technology of time viewing for a very specific reason.
  10. The last gear is between Arnold, Caroline, Jonas, and Thaddeus. The first three want to view the past, and the last wants to stop them. The why is the revelation of the story.

“The Dead Past” is one of Asimov’s better stories, even a favorite to some. I liked it quite a lot but found it clunky. The driving force behind Arnold is to prove ancient Carthage didn’t practice child sacrifice, and the driving force behind Caroline is to see her dead child again. Jonas is so intrigued by a possible conspiracy theory that he throws over his budding career in physics. I thought all three of these fictional motives were melodramatic. They do work, adding complexity and emotion to a rather dry final idea, but it’s a shame that Asimov didn’t come up with a more sophisticated emotional linkage.

I think Asimov would have shown more finesse if he had foreshadowed the ending. There is a cross-link between Arnold’s and Caroline’s desire to see the past, but neither predicts the real reason why Thaddeus wants to suppress the time viewer. This might be simplistic on my part, but if Arnold, Caroline, and Jonas each had a reason to use the time viewer, and one of their reasons should have foreshadowed the real reason why Thaddeus thought the time viewer was so dangerous. I believe the story would have been tighter if Jonas has wanted to use the time viewer to uncover the conspiracy, and Caroline wanted to use it to spy on Arnold and Jonas.

I don’t think Asimov was a very mature person. From what I’ve read about him, and from reading his stories, he comes across as a rather clever child prodigy who as an adult had trouble comprehending human relationships. This is often reflected in his stories. His fiction focuses on ideas, and his characters are constructed to present those ideas. In “The Dead Past,” Asimov tries harder than usual to present adult emotions, but they come across as contrived. Still, “The Dead Past” is a good example of Asimov trying to overcome his weakness. I give him credit for that.

Two or three years ago I read or reread all of Asimov’s robot stories. They were all hampered by this problem. I could always see how Asimov added human emotion to his stories. When I was young, that effort worked unseen, but as I got older, the stories succeeded in their ideas but felt clunky in their efforts to deal with genuine humans and relationships. In fact, I was sometimes horrified by some of Asimov’s emotional conclusions – but that’s for another essay.

“The Dead Past” is a nicely worked-out science fiction story. Asimov adds psychological depth to a neatly complex plot. Unfortunately, he uses B-movie creativity for creating the psychological drivers of this story.

Finally, regarding “The Dead Past,” I want to make a protest, or maybe a lament. This is my third reading of the story, and this time I wanted to read “The Dead Past” with my eyes, and then listen to it again from an audiobook. But I could find no audiobook edition. Nor could I find an ebook edition. This annoyed and depressed me. “The Dead Past” is one of Asimov’s best works of short fiction. You can find it in print in The Complete Stories, Volume 1. There are US and UK versions on Amazon, but they don’t have the same number of pages, so I don’t know which to recommend. However, used copies of the US edition are quite common and much cheaper.

I now prefer consuming fiction via ebooks and audiobooks. I hate that Asimov’s short fiction, as well as other science fiction writers’ short fiction, is either not available or is no longer available in these formats. A friend eventually found an epub version for me to read, and that visually easier-to-read format made reading the story far more enjoyable.

I recently noticed that all English language versions of Brian W. Aldiss audiobooks have been pulled from Audible. Classic old science fiction is slowly disappearing. There’s still plenty to buy and read, but it’s disappearing at the edges. I hate that.

James Wallace Harris, 7/6/23

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“The Spiral” by Italo Calvino

“The Spiral” by Italo Calvino is story #26 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 Spiral” first appeared in Le Cosmicomiche, a collection of the author’s stories first published in Italy in 1965. It was later translated and published in English in 1968 as Cosmicomics.

Calvino is growing on me. In fact, after reading “The Spiral” I decided to buy Cosmicomics. I went to Amazon and Audible and listened to the introduction to The Complete Cosmicomics. I was so intrigued that I bought the ebook for $2.99 and the audiobook for an additional $7.49. That volume contains Cosmicomics (12 stories), Time and the Hunter (11 stories), 4 stories from Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories, and 7 newly translated stories, 34 in all.

“The Spiral” continues with the character from “A Sign in Space,” Qfwfq, who reminds me of YHWH. I don’t know if Calvino intended that or not, but these stories feel like another Bible that describes the evolution of matter and life through a coevolving self-awareness. I recently read An Immense World by Ed Yong, a book about umwelt in humans and animals, including mollusks. These two books have great synergy.

Cosmicomics stories are about science. I think it’s especially important to read Martin McLaughlin’s introduction to The Complete Cosmicomics. It’s too long to quote in its entirety, but I believe this should get you interested to maybe spring for the $2.99 Kindle edition.

With “The Spiral” I feel Calvino is trying to write a scientific description of reality using a philosophical conceit. Like McLaughlin said, Calvino thinks realistic fiction was exhausted, so he came up with this new approach.

Qfwfq is like God or Gaia, or one of an infinity of pantheistic gods who is describing the evolution of the universe and life. Although Calvino’s goal is to describe science, it also feels spiritual.

When I was young I couldn’t conceive of God or a beginning. I concluded that reality has always existed. It’s infinite in all directions and dimensions. Nothing can’t exist. Reality is the unfolding of all possible forms of non-existence.

You can listen to “The Spiral” here:

James Wallace Harris, 7/4/23

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“A Sign in Space” by Italo Calvino

“A Sign in Space” by Italo Calvino is story #25 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. “A Sign in Space” first appeared in Le Cosmicomiche, a collection of the author’s stories first published in Italy in 1965. It was later translated and published in English in 1968 as Cosmicomics.

“A Sign in Space” is not science fiction. I won’t go into my rant again about how I dislike science fiction editors poaching literary works and calling them science fiction. I assume they do it to inflate the reputation of our genre, but I don’t want our genre to gain recognition for the wrong reasons. If Italo Calvino was really considered a science fiction author his success and fame would not have happened.

Be that as it may, let’s discuss “A Sign in Space” as a literary story. As soon as I started reading it I heard the voice of Mel Brooks doing his 2000 Year Old Man routine. Is it possible that Calvino could have heard this 1960 record? Great discoveries are often made at similar times around the world.

I did find a couple audio readings of the story, but none of the readers read it like Mel Brooks. I was disappointed. But here’s a nice narration.

This is a creative work that’s reasonably entertaining. It’s meant to be humorous and clever, but that really depends on the reading and delivery. That’s why I ached to hear Mel Brooks do it as a comedy routine. I did think it was too long.

I imagined the narrator being God when he was a youngster, just figuring things out. Did God create all of reality, or just Earth and its vicinity? Imagine being a conscious being that could ride around the Milky Way as it spun like a record. Imagine that being not having a language and needing to develop one. Making a sign could be the very beginning of the process. There are interesting philosophical points in this story.

Another thing I thought about while reading “A Sign in Space” was wondering how an observer could track the rotation of our galaxy? We see the Earth orbiting the sun through the changing background of the constellations throughout the year. The celestial sphere seems fixed to us when we realize we are moving. Would there be a larger sky outside our galaxy that would seem fixed too?

Just because a writer tells a fantastic story about outer space doesn’t mean we can pin a sign on their back that says SCIENCE FICTION WRITER. Marketing fiction as science fiction is a publishing technique to get certain kinds of stories to certain kinds of readers. It’s often bad for writers. And it’s unfair to writers who have developed a reputation outside of our genre. Some science fiction writers have learned that being labeled a science fiction writer has hurt their career potential. But it doesn’t help them or the genre to go around tagging certain famous writers as science fiction writers.

I wish David Hartwell could have found a genuine science-fiction story from Italy.

James Wallace Harris, 7/1/23

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“The Gold at the Starbow’s End” by Frederik Pohl

“The Gold at the Starbow’s End” by Frederik Pohl is story #24 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 Gold at the Starbow’s End” first appeared in Analog (March 1972). It’s currently available in Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories. Right now the Kindle edition is only $3.99. The story is also available as a standalone novella for $2.99 for the Kindle edition, but Kindle Unlimited members can read it for free.

I was surprised to discover that I had never read “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” before, especially since it’s such a great read. I never knew how involved Frederik Pohl was in the history of science fiction until I read his memoir, The Way the Future Was. I haven’t read much of Pohl’s fiction, but whenever the reading group covers one of his stories I’m always impressed. I highly recommend his memoir.

“The Gold at the Starbow’s End” was a finalist for a Hugo and Nebula and came in #1 in the 1973 Locus Poll for best novella. It’s not widely reprinted, probably because it’s so long, but it was included in Wollheinm’s The 1973 World’s Best Annual Best. The World Treasury of Science Fiction from 1989 is the last major anthology that remembers it, which is a shame since the story is so much fun to read.

I’m disappointed there is no audiobook of this story. Before I actually discuss the story, I’d like to talk about that. I love listening to science fiction short stories read by professional narrators. A great reader can make the story come alive in ways my poor internal reading voice can’t. Unfortunately, short stories are the red-headed stepchildren of the literary world. They are lucky if they get reprinted at all.

In the science fiction world, short stories get treated better than other genres — well, it used to be that way. The best stories were often regularly reprinted in retrospective anthologies. Those anthologies don’t get published very often anymore. In times past, there was a huge retrospective anthology about every five years, so over the course of twenty years most of the best science fiction short stories from the past were reprinted. This gave each new generation of readers a chance to read the classics and gain a sense of the evolution of the genre. Unfortunately, those huge retrospective anthologies didn’t stay in print (except for The Science Fiction Hall of Fame volumes 1, 2a, and 2b).

What I would love to see is a ten-volume The Best Science Fiction Short Stories of the 20th Century that would stay in print as printed books, ebooks, and audiobooks. Those volumes should collect these 251 stories. I would buy all ten volumes in all three formats.

Like many classic science fiction stories, “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” is about transcendence, especially the kind readers of Astounding Science-Fiction in the 1940s loved. The story is told through two alternating narratives. First first, are messages sent from the first interstellar mission to Alpha Centauri, crewed by six men and women. The second follows Dieter von Knefhausen, a Dr. Strangelove-like character who advises the president on the mission. Knefhausen designed the mission so the highly intelligent crew wouldn’t have much to do during their ten-year voyage but study. He hoped such isolation and focus would cause them to leap ahead of current scientific knowledge.

While civilization on Earth delines during the ten-year period, civilization on the spaceship Constitution evolves dramatically. “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” reminds me of children in “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” More Than Human, Childhood’s End, and Valentine Michael Smith of Stranger in a Strange Land. Knefhausen not only reminded me of Dr. Strangelove, but Henry Kissinger. The politics in the Washington side of the story devolve so greatly, that it reminded me of “The Marching Morons” by C. M. Kornbluth.

The Earth side narrative is obvious satire, but what about the spaceship side of the story? It represents the hope of SF fans. Knowing Pohl’s other work, I have to assume it’s also satire, even though it plays up to some of the most treasured ideas in science fiction.

I can’t decide if “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” isn’t Pohl preaching the gospel of science fiction or making fun of it. Science fiction fans have always wanted to be slans. It’s surprising how much Campbell and Heinlein wanted transcendence in the 1940s, and Clarke wanted it in the 1950s and 1960s. Was Pohl continuing the dream in this story, or turning on it?

“The Gold at the Starbow’s End” is so cynical that it’s hard to believe it’s aspirational. And am I being cynical when I wonder if certain science fiction writers like Pohl and Bester are secretly making fun of science fiction by pushing the very emotional buttons in their readers that they themselves are sneering at? Pohl and Bester were way smarter than most of us.

“The Gold at the Starbow’s End” is an outstanding piece of writing on Pohl’s part. Working out how to convey Human 2.0 behavior isn’t easy, and Pohl does an impressive job here. The Washington/Knefhausen side of the story is as equally worked out, revealing the egocentric madness of people in power. I wish Stanley Kubrick could have filmed “The Gold at the Starbow’s End.” It would be a combination of Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I have to wonder if Pohl wasn’t using both as inspiration.

James Wallace Harris, 6/29/23

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“Inconstant Moon” by Larry Niven

“Inconstant Moon” by Larry Niven is story #23 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. “Inconstant Moon” first appeared in Niven’s 1971 collection, All the Myriad Ways. Currently, the story is available in N-Space, a retrospective collection of Niven’s work from 1990. If you want an ebook version of the story, it’s included in Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century edited by Orson Scott Card.

Outer Limits dramatized the story – watch it on YouTube.

“Inconstant Moon” is one of those science fiction stories where the main idea sticks with you even if you don’t remember the plot or characters. “Inconstant Moon” won the Hugo for Best Short Story in 1972, and is the kind of classic SF tale I expected to see in an anthology that remembers the best science fiction of the 20th century.

Stan and his girlfriend Leslie realize something epic is happening when the Moon becomes much brighter than normal. “Inconstant Moon” is an astronomical science fiction story like “Nightfall.” I don’t know if I should tell you anymore, I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun.

“Inconstant Moon” is the kind of short story that inspires readers to ask themselves what they would do in a similar situation.

<<<Beyond Here Lie Spoilers>>>

Most science fiction is geared toward young people with romantic minds who want to fantasize about being action heroes, while “Inconstant Moon” is aimed at adults who take more wistful prosaic paths. The protagonists aren’t young or heroic, and their actions are quite ordinary and mundane. The setting is only slightly in the future from 1971, after the Apollo 19 landing. Niven didn’t know that sadly, Apollo landings would end with 17 in 1972. He even has Stan talking about getting to handle a moon rock, which I don’t know if NASA ever allowed either.

Stan goes out on his balcony one night and the Moon is several times brighter than normal. He starts wondering why and eventually concludes the Sun has gone nova. This is my third time reading this story, but I remember when I read it the first time being quite surprised that people would still be alive after such an event. Until I read “Inconstant Moon” the first time, I imagined if the Sun went nova it would instantly vaporize the Earth.

Niven gives us a more thought-out scenario. Earth is 8.5 light-minutes away from the Sun, and Jupiter is 44.2 minutes. Niven imagines the Earth itself being a barrier that protects people on the side away from the Sun, and that a shockwave travel at the speed of sound would circle the Earth. Stan rushes over to see his girlfriend, hoping to have a few good hours before the end of the world. He doesn’t tell Leslie his theory, but eventually, Stan realizes she came up with it on her own too.

I would love to see an episode of PBS’s NOVA analyze the same situation.

Stan and Leslie assume the shock wave is hours away, and it will kill them before California faces the sun. They go out for ice cream and drinks after having sex. I felt “Inconstant Moon” had an adult vibe not because of the sex, but because of the mental processes Stan and Leslie go through. My guess is young characters and readers, would think and act differently. This age-difference reaction can be seen in “The Last Day” by Richard Matheson (Amazing Stories, Apr-May 1953). Read it here.

Ultimately, Stan figures out the Sun didn’t go nova, and that it must have been a very large solar flare. It means they might live, and that changes the course of the evening.

It’s a shame we don’t get more science fiction that makes us think like this story. Some stories inspire arguments like, “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin, but Niven’s story makes readers think about physics and astronomy. Isaac Asimov used to write about how science fiction fans of his generation would tell their parents they were learning science from science fiction. That seldom happens, if ever. But with this story, Niven sets up a scientific situation that makes us think about science rather than science fiction.

Does anyone know what would likely happen to the Earth if the Sun went nova or there was an extremely large flare?

James Wallace Harris, 6/27/23

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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 Phantom of Kansas” by John Varley

“The Phantom of Kansas” by John Varley is story #21 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 Phantom of Kansas” first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction (February 1976). It is currently available in The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction. That collection is available on paper, as an ebook, and as an audiobook (18 stories — 26 hours and 36 minutes).

A science fiction writer is like an artist with a blank canvas, they can paint anything they can see or imagine. When you look at composing science fiction that way, you have to wonder why some authors put more on their canvas and others less, and where the images come from. With, “The Phantom of Kansas” John Varley decided to lay out his canvas with a series of related science-fictional scenes.

The setting is the Moon — after aliens have taken over the Earth and pushed humans out across the solar system — part of Varley’s Eight Worlds series. Now this image is enough to fill a whole canvas but is merely a small object in the background in this painting. Varley wisely chose not to do an elaborate alien invasion mural, those were old and tired even back in 1976. We are told it’s November 342, so I assume humanity restarted the clock when our home world was snatched away from us. This aspect of the painting does intrigue me, and I wish I could see that section of the canvas expanded.

The plot is a murder mystery. The protagonist, a woman named Fox, has just been revived in a clone body and learns she’s been murdered three times before. So she’s actually Fox 4. Because some murderers in this future like to permanently kill people, they must kill the person and destroy the memory cube that backs up their personality. This murderer has failed three times, why? Fox is told she should expect to be murdered again unless the police can find the murderer first. She doesn’t want to become Fox 5. This is a solid subject for a painting and I would have been satisfied if it was the subject of the whole canvas. However, I wouldn’t have been that impressed, not like I am with the additional imagery Varley squeezes in.

For Varley, this unique murder mystery wasn’t enough to dominate his canvas. We see Fox is an artist who engineers weather dramas. This requires quite a bit of world-building on Varley’s part. Humans who live on the Moon mainly live underground, but they crave being out in nature like humans did on Earth. So giant artificial environments are created that replicate various natural settings from old Earth. Varley calls disneylands. Fox is working on a giant storm symphony that spawns several tornadoes for a disneyland that’s a replica of the Kansas prairie.

The Kansas disneyland is a hollowed-out cylinder twenty kilometers beneath Clavius. It’s two-hundred and fifty kilometers in diameter, and five kilometers high. That’s a huge feat of super-science engineering.

Now this is interesting. Those pesky aliens got rid of humans and all our artifacts on Earth so they could enjoy nature. The human refugees in space long for the wonders of Mother Nature. What should we feel about that revealed in the painting? Back in 1976 when I was young I was dying to go into space, but now in 2023 and I’m old, you couldn’t pay me to go there. Mother nature is the place to be.

But Varley isn’t finished with adding subjects with his brush. He paints another character onto his canvas that vividly stands out, the Central Computer. Varley portrays the computer as it, which I like. Gender is a biological trait. And like Mike in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, this computer is a quite charming and appealing image.

And there is one other aspect that reminds me of Heinlein. People can change gender. Fox has been a he in the past. And, at first, I thought this was just another added detail in Varley’s scene, but it turns out to be an essential plot element.

I’ve seen “The Phantom of Kansas” before, decades ago, and it impressed me then, except that it depends on one of my least favorite scenarios in science fiction, brain downloading and uploading. And I like that theme even less this time. However, it’s needed for the plot, so I begrudgingly accepted it.

In my judgment of art, science fiction scenes are somewhat realistic paintings, inspired by what we see in reality, whereas fantasy scenes are modern art, paintings inspired by inner visions. I liked this painting better this time because I viewed the painting as a fantasy. It’s a clever image of a murder mystery derived from an interesting series of what-if mental conjectures.

Ultimately, the painting, “The Phantom of Kansas” is elegantly symmetrical. Like any good mystery, all the clues were there, even if they were highly contrived.

James Wallace Harris, 6/22/23

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“Ghost V” by Robert Sheckley

“Ghost V” by Robert Sheckley is story #20 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. “Ghost V” first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction (October 1954).

Back around 1968, when I was in high school, I had two friends that also read science fiction – Jim Connell and George Kirschner. We’d often sit around and talk about the science fiction we read over our short lifetimes. Mostly, we couldn’t remember titles or authors but always remembered a unique idea within the story. I remember George excitedly telling Connell and me about “Ghost V” back then. I’ve read it since, but probably in the 1970s. I never remembered the story title or details. Just the trick ending.

So when I started reading “Ghost V” again today I remembered nothing about it. As soon as I started reading it I thought, “Hey, this could be that story George had told us about over half a century ago!” And my hunch was right. I remembered the idea that Sheckley used as the punch line of his story. It has always been memorable, and I’ve even told other people about it a few times because it’s a charming little idea with a neat kind of connection to reality.

Now, the question I have is: should I tell the ending here? I never know how much I should say about a story when writing about them. I really want to discuss stories, not review them. To do the same thing that Connell, George, and I did way back when — talk about the most exciting and memorable ideas. I want to just bullshit about the idea or ideas that make a particular story great for me.

“Ghost V” isn’t very long. You could go read it here. It’s part of a series of nine stories Robert Sheckley wrote about the AAA Ace Planet Decontamination Service. “Ghost V” is essentially a joke. It’s about two guys, Richard Gregor, and Frank Arnold who exterminate problem creatures on newly discovered planets. Think Ghostbusters. Gregor and Arnold don’t believe in ghosts or other supernatural beings, but they are hired to get rid of supernatural threats on Ghost V.

Sheckley sets up the story when Mr. Ferngraum comes to visit their office to hire Gregor and Arnold. Ferngraum is a planet flipper, buying planets cheap, and selling them for a profit. He tells Gregor and Arnold how he invested more than his usual amount in a quality planet that he hoped to make a killing with, unfortunately, the first two expeditions to the planet were mysteriously wiped out, killing colonists in the most hideous ways. If they can’t help him he’ll go bankrupt.

By the way, you have to understand the mood of the story. Think of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For me, I recalled Sheckley’s novel, Dimension of Miracles which features a minor character we know of as God, who did a cut-rate contracting job creating Earth. The level of humor is not very sophisticated in “Ghost V,” young people might put it on the level of the current TV show Ghosts.

“Ghost V” is silly and completely unscientific, but unlike some of the stories in The World Treasury of Science Fiction, it’s told in a way that I believe the setup while reading it. That’s the difference between “Ghost V” and the stories in the anthology like “The Chaste Planet” and “Tale of a Computer Who Fought a Dragon,” which I’ve criticized for not using the kind of storytelling techniques I prefer. If those stories had been told the way Sheckley told “Ghost V,” I probably would have liked them.

Sheckley tells his tall tale realistically, with a straight face. His storytelling technique is no different from the way Hemingway writes about real-life bullfighting or deep-sea fishing.

Gregor goes off to Ghost V knowing that colonists in two previous expeditions were slaughtered by some kind of horrible scientifically undetectable monsters. Sheckley aims to scare us too. Arnold stays home to be Gregor’s research consultant.

Gregor lands with no problem and sets up living in the quarters of an earlier expedition, the ones who had been sun worshippers. (I assume we’re to read nudists.) That night, after he turns off the light and goes to bed, he sees his clothes come to life in the shadowy dark and menacingly approach him. He blasts them to pieces. Gregor then turns on the light and radios his partner. Arnold claims to have a theory, but Gregor remains frightened.

The second monster Gregor meets is a Purple Striped Grabber. The Grabber wants to eat Gregory with chocolate sauce. The Grabber also informs Gregor that he can only eat him on the first of the month, which is the following day, and asks Gregor for a favor. The monster wants Gregor to eat apples before he comes back because that will make him taste sweeter. The monster leaves and Gregor calls Arnold again. Arnold says this new report confirms his theory. Ghost V monsters are our childhood fears made real. That there must be something in the environment that messes with our brains.

The next day, when the Grabber returns Gregory remembers a monster like it from his childhood, recalling it could be stopped with a magic word. After frantically dredging up several magic words while the Grabber is trying to eat him, Gregor hits on the right one and is saved. (Hey, Gregor was the name of the character in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.”)

The next monster is the Shadow. Eventually, Gregor kills it with a water pistol.

Arnold arrives and they discuss the situation clarifying the solution, but the next monster that shows up, the Grumbler, seems to be invincible. Gregor and Arnold quickly take off for Earth thinking they’re escaping the Grumbler but once in space realize the Ghost V atmosphere at gotten into their ship. It must contain a hallucinogenic drug, one that will make them kill themselves. Their only hope is to hide from the Grumbler until the ship’s atmosphere is recycled.

When all hope is lost, they remember one solution that could destroy all childhood fears, and it saves them.

That solution is what I remembered from all these decades. I remembered nothing else about the story, so when I retold it, my summary of the story was always made up, except for the solution.

Should I tell you?

Or do you want to guess?

James Wallace Harris, 6/20/23

Posted on by jameswharris · 11 Comments

“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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“Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon” by Stanislaw Lem

“Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon” by Stanislaw Lem is story #18 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. “Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon” has a long complicated publication history that I’ll let y’all read at ISFDB.org. It’s part of a series called Robot Fables. But from what I can tell was first published as “Bajka o maszynie cyfrowej, co ze smokiem walczyła” in Zycie literackie (August 1963). It was first translated into English for Other Worlds, Other Seas: Science-Fiction Stories from Socialist Countries edited by Darko Suvin (1970).

“Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon” is a very short story that comes across like a fable, and feels like it’s supposed by told by an oral storyteller. I’m afraid I dislike stories that sound like fables. Not because Lem’s tale is bad or uninteresting, but because such stories feel like a quick summary of a novel to me. I feel cheated. Such stories tell what happens instead of dramatizing the plot and developing the characters. A real short story is not a condensed novel. For some reason, many of these translated SF stories are told in this fable-like style. I wonder if that style isn’t normal in other countries because they never had pulp fiction? And thus, never developed the style of short story writing I like?

Basically, “Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon” is about a king who computerizes everything and then is threatened by an all-powerful computer. The solution to the king’s problem is silly and childish, much like some of the solutions Captain Kirk used against cybernetic foes in Star Trek. (It also reminds me of a solution Heinlein used against one foe in Glory Road, a fantasy novel.)

Stanislaw Lem has a great reputation, and his stories are widely reprinted. But I’ve yet to read one of his stories which makes me want to read more of them. I believe I read Solaris decades ago, and think I admired it. Need to give it another read.

This brings up an interesting problem. What if storytelling techniques are different from country to country? Are they reflected in the translation? Or, is the fable-feeling structure something that comes out of translation?

I guess it might reveal one of my biases or limitations. Other members of the short story club like these types of stories. They do sound clever, but cleverness can often draw attention away from the story. If you read “Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon” how do you visualize it? I visualize it as a Wizard of Id drawing.

Lem wrote a lot of these short satires. I assume, he liked cranking out ideas, but not novels. There’s enough plot content in “Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon” to structure a whole novel.

“Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon” is obviously a satire, attacking both computerizing everything, but also attacking leaders who feel the need to exert power to inflate their egos. That might have been politically subversive in 1963 in the USSR. It might also explain the childlike fable quality — a politically safer to write.

I wonder what Russians might dare to write about Putin today? Read “Tale of the Computer That Fought a Dragon” and substitute Putin every time you see the word king. It kind of works.

James Wallace Harris, 6/14/23