“You Know Willie” by Theodore R. Cogswell #05 of 20 (Read)
I was disappointed that “You Know Willie” is not science fiction. It’s a story about racism that uses fantasy to make a surprise ending. The story isn’t bad. Both Merril and Asimov/Greenberg included it in their anthologies covering 1957. I remember the racism of the 1950s, and it horrified me as a kid, and I’m white. I remember visiting Mississippi in 1960 and being frightened by the violent emotions of the racists. Such people were sadly all too common. So, I can understand why this story was written. In fact, its fantasy depends on a similar thought I had as a kid.
Back then I wondered what racists would do if they woke up one morning looking like the people they hated. At the time I thought it would cure them of their racist beliefs. Later, when I was a bit older, I wondered if that would be true. Back then I felt if a baby from a fundamentalist protestant family was switched at birth with a baby of a fundamentalist Muslim family, they would grow up to be whatever religion their parents believed.
People seldom break free of their upbringing. That’s why it is important to teach Critical Race Theory. I can remember specific lessons I had as a kid that helped me avoid becoming a racist. I’m not sure a story like “You Know Willie” would have helped. I do remember reading books about race in my late teens, ones that would be banned from classrooms today, that did enlighten me.
I’m sure stories like “You Know Willie” would have made good people feel better about themselves when they read it back in the 1950s, but I don’t think it would have altered the thinking of bad people. I’m sure Cogswell was well-intended when he wrote this story, but he should have aimed higher.
Would racists have a come-to-Jesus moment if they suddenly turned the color of the people they hated? We don’t get to find that out in “You Know Willie.” This story goes for the easy win and doesn’t explore anything deeper. Willie experiences a kind inverse Golden Rule — have others do unto you what you have done to others. We saw the surprise ending coming from a long way off.
For this story to be truly memorable, we needed Willie to have lived long enough to see how a change in color would have affected his thinking. For me, the story brings up the ugliness of racism only to play it for a laugh. I didn’t like that.
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.
“Hunting Machine” by Carol Emshwiller #04 of 20 (Read, Listen – @05:40)
“Hunting Machine” by Carol Emshwiller is a rather short, but effective anti-hunting story that was first published in the May 1957 issue of Science Fiction Stories. Ruthie and Joe McAlister are on a three-day hunting trip with a robotic hunting dog rented from the park service. The robot was set by the warden for three birds, two deer and one black bear. However, Joe tinkers with the governor on the robot so he can hunt a 1,500-pound brown bear.
Most of the story is satire about how in the future people bring all kinds of gadgets to make their time in the rugged wilderness as comfortable as staying at home. Because hunting with their automatic rifles and robot is like shooting fish in a barrel, Joe overrides the controls in the robot to make the bear put up a fight. We see some of the story from the robot’s and bear’s perspective, both of which are more in tune with nature. Humans come across as schmucks in this story.
I’ve read “Hunting Machine” before, but it hasn’t stuck in my mind. It’s too slight, too simple, and too obvious. I’m surprised by both T. E. Dikty and Asimov/Greenberg included it in their anthologies that collected the best SF shorts of 1957. That suggests it is liked more than I think it should be. It’s a nice enough little yarn, fine for a magazine, but lacks the punch needed to make it worthy of an anthology in my opinion.
W. M. Irwin felt the story was more than an anti-hunting story, about how sports and outdoor adventures are ruined by automation. I can buy that. I agree with Paul Fraser that the ending was anti-climactic. I wanted the bear to win, to destroy the robot and to kill and eat Ruthie and Joe. And second to that possible ending, I wanted the robot to kill Joe because he was within the new weight limit that Joe had illegally changed. But Carol Emshwiller kept the story lighthearted.
This story should have been published in a hunting magazine in 1957. I’m sure real hunters would have enjoyed the satire even more. I don’t think “Hunting Machine” adds much to our understanding of 1950s science fiction. The definitive 1950s hunting story with a science fiction theme is “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury, first published in Collier’s in 1952. It’s about hunting dinosaurs. Following that is “A Gun for Dinosaur” by L. Sprague de Camp, that first appeared in Galaxy in 1956. It’s another hunting story that plays off Hemingway’s classic Africa stories. Finally, there’s yet another classic dino hunt story, “Poor Litte Warrior!” from F&SF in 1958, where Brian Aldiss satirizes the first two.
I’m sure if I made a concentrated effort, I could track down more titles to define hunting as a sub-theme of science fiction. But my memory can’t dredge up any more from my brain, and I’m worn out on Googling.
“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?
“The Queer Ones” by Leigh Brackett #02 of 20 (Read)
Ever wonder why science fiction imprinted on you as a child? Why does the genre appeal so strongly to some people? What’s its subconscious attraction?
Psychoanalyzing 1950s science fiction reveals a deep-rooted desire to contact aliens. UFOs became a mania in that decade, which spilled over into the 1960s. UFO crazies seemed to have disappeared after that. But they’re back today. I do believe that humanity suffers from cosmic loneliness. Or is it something else?
“The Queer Ones” by Leigh Brackett speaks to both xenophobia and loneliness. I’m not going to give spoilers right away, but I recommend you follow the link above and read the story. It offers bit of a mystery, so I don’t want to spoil your reading fun, but I want to have my say eventually. However, “The Queer Ones” fits the mold so well for this kind of 1950s science fiction story, that it might not be much of a mystery for aficionados.
My first reaction to reading “The Queer Ones” was to feel it was a mirror image of Zenna Henderson’s People stories. But instead of finding gentle aliens out in the backwaters of rural American, we encounter thugs from the stars. I’m reminded of Heinlein’s Have Space Suit-Will Travel. Henderson’s aliens are a version of the Mother Thing, while Brackett’s aliens act like Wormface, but they look human. They even coop human lowlifes.
Leigh Brackett takes on the tone of Clifford Simak in “The Queer Ones,” and it’s hugely different from her planetary romances. She can’t seem to resist herself though because romance does sneak in towards the end.
Hank Temple is the owner/editor of a small town, six-page newspaper. Doc Callender contacts Hank about a curious child, Billy Tate. X-rays and bloodwork show this kid to be strangely different. If fact, the doctor had been called in because Bily had been beaten up by other kids for being different. He looked human, but Billy was slight, redheaded, and a tiny bit odd.
As it turns out, Sally Tate is a young country girl who got put in the family way by a fast-talking stranger. Her child, Billy, grew up to become a kid that Sally’s hill country clan intensely disliked. The Doc calls Hank to see if he wants to drive out into the middle of nowhere to meet this backwoods family. That’s when the mystery starts. Hank and Doc’s first theory was Billy was a mutant.
Mutants are another popular theme of 1950s science fiction. The cause of mutant humans in SF is varied, but two reasons were popular. Radiation from atomic bombs, and the emergence of Homo Superior was the other. This also paralleled our fascination with aliens. Either they were monsters, or advanced beings with godlike powers. Both show up in “The Queer Ones.”
However, the beginning flavor of “The Queer Ones” is much different than the flavor at the end the story. Early on, Brackett taps into the kind of atmosphere we find in Way Station by Clifford Simak. I’d call that theme: Aliens Living Hidden Among Us. Other books like that are A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn, The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis, and as I’ve already mentioned, Pilgrimage: The Book of the People by Zenna Henderson. Superman comics did this too. Henderson essentially steals Superman’s origin story for her People stories. And if you remember, quite a few episodes of The Twilight Zone featured beings from beyond living amongst us.
The plot takes a sinister turn when Doc is killed. Hank realizes their snooping has gotten back to Billy’s father. Then the hospital is burned down with Doc’s evidence. That’s when Hank catches his first alien, a young woman, Vadi, who turns out to be the sister to Billy’s father. That’s when Hank realizes that Billy’s father is not another mutant, but an alien.
Hank is turned on by Vadi. Sally Tate, and all the women of her family had been turned on by Billy’s father, who we eventually learned is an alien called Arnek. Now this is an interesting sub-theme of cosmic loneliness. Leigh Brackett doesn’t go into this, but how can Arnek mate with Sally Tate and produce a child? This has come up in later science fiction stories. A theory to answer that question is panspermia. That theory helps to explain why many of the aliens in Star Trek look human, but it also suggests that God or advanced aliens seeded/populated/colonized the galaxy on purpose. Maybe we weren’t meant to be alone and miss our cousins.
This also suggests that our psychological fear of cosmic aloneness can sometimes overcome our ingrained xenophobia. We want the universe, or at least the galaxy, to be inhabited by beings like us. Even reading stories about aliens gone bad fulfill the need to know were not alone.
Let’s backtrack a minute. Did our hangup of being alone in the universe emerge with UFOs in the late 1940s? I don’t think so. Doesn’t the desire for aliens and angels fulfill the same existential craving? And don’t we have stories of humans and angels falling in love with each other, even having sex. The Bishop’s Wife comes to mind, but then there’s Wings of Desire and City of Angels. Ancient literature is full of aliens if you squint at supernatural beings from a certain angle. Isn’t God a kind of top boss alien? The Bible and other ancient religious work often describe whole species of aliens as part of taxonomy of beings not of this Earth. Sure, the Greek gods weren’t light years away, but they were from on high.
Science fiction doesn’t have that many themes. It tends to explore the same ones over and over, and if you look at them in the right way, those themes have always been around, even before science and science fiction. Just imagine how deep they go when you think about Neanderthals encountering Homo sapiens? We hate the other, but we loath the idea of being by ourselves in reality.
Stories like “The Queer Ones” appealed to me as a kid, and I don’t think I’m alone. Shouldn’t we ask why? For all our eight billion, most of us are lonely. Even if we have plenty of family and friends to keep us company, don’t we feel that something is still missing? Don’t we have a longing for something greater? And isn’t the reason so many people believe in God is because they want a personal relationship with a higher being? Wouldn’t you want a personal relationship with an alien?
In the end, Sally runs off to the stars with Arnek, leaving Billy behind. Hank takes Billy to raise him but wishes he had a wife to help. Hank doubts he will ever marry because after kissing Vadi once, he longs for her too much to settle for a human companion. That’s very strange, don’t you think? Is Brackett suggesting that we’re missing a higher spiritual connection because aliens are our true soul mates?
I doubt we’ll ever meet aliens on Earth, or visit them on other worlds, but we might not stay alone for much longer. Artificial intelligence is progressing so fast that we might have new digital friends soon. R. Daneel Olivaw might arrive before we return to the Moon. Science fiction always promised us robots too. I wonder if we’ll encounter any in the next eighteen stories from 1957.
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“The Queer Ones” first appeared in the March 1957 issue of Venture Science Fiction. Dave Hook became so entranced by its cover that he researched and wrote “Who is Artist ‘Dick Shelton’.” It’s another fascinating stroll down memory lane if you love old SF magazines and their artists who do their covers and interior illustrations.
“The Other Celia” by Theodore Sturgeon #01 of 20 (Read, Listen)
It’s ironic that in the 1960s I grew up reading 1950s science fiction to imagine the future, but now in the 2020s, I’m reading 1950s science fiction to reconstruct the past. We’re now living in yesterday’s future. When we’re young we think science fiction is all about the future, but when we’re old we realize that everything is about the present. My present is figuring out how the past made me at this moment. My brain is like ChatGPT but trained on decades of science fiction. My hallucinogenic output is shaped by that.
How can old science fiction stories reveal anything about the past? And how can that knowledge reveal anything about who I am at this moment? I can offer a comparison that might answer part of that question. My father died when I was eighteen, in 1970, before I got to really know him. Ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out what my father thought from the clues he left behind. It’s not a particularly revealing method because it’s mostly speculation. Reading old science fiction lets us speculate about what science fiction writers and readers were like when the stories were first written, and maybe what we wanted from them, and why.
I vaguely remember 1957. That September I started the first grade. Sputnik, the first satellite, blasted into orbit the following month, but I don’t remember that. I was only five then. I turned six at the end of November, but it made me no wiser or more aware. “The Other Celia” by Theodore Sturgeon had come out in the March issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which means it was on the stands in February. At the beginning of 1957 I was in kindergarten. I had no idea that science fiction existed. My favorite show then was Topper. I believe this was before I was aware of rockets, robots, and even dinosaurs. In 2024 rockets and robots are everywhere, and we know a whole lot more about dinosaurs.
My guess from reading about Theodore Sturgeon, and reading his stories, is he barely made a living by writing. He had to crank out stories to buy food and pay the rent. I feel he must have been an autodidactic who knew something about everything. Sturgeon’s stories suggest he’d lived all over, seen a lot, and tried his hand at doing most things too. I assumed Sturgeon combined personal experience and took an occult idea, popular with weirdo thinkers in 1956, and turned it into a science fiction story. It may or may not have symbolized certain kinds of real people.
I do remember that the world was quite a different place in 1957 than it is in 2024. I remember the cars, the houses, the clothes, the people. The setting of “The Other Celia” is a boarding house. My grandmother managed an old apartment building where elderly people like herself lived. I remember staying with her at various times and visiting the old folks there. I can even remember the smells. One old lady I met had been on the Titanic as a child. I imagine Sturgeon stayed in boarding houses and meeting countless interesting people. All, grist for the mill of writing.
I also remember boarding houses from television shows in the 1950s. The rooms at my grandmother’s apartment building were very much like the rooms described in “The Other Celia.” We lived in Miami, and my grandmother’s building was on Eighth Avenue, which is now part of Little Havana. The Miami of the 1950s was far different than the Miami of today. The rooms were warm and musty, without air conditioning. The hallways and stairs were covered with ancient carpets that deaden sound. And all the inhabitants were old. There were transoms above the doors, and residents cranked their windows open wide to let in the breezes. The occupants had basic furnishings, few clothes, lots of photos and knickknacks, and little else. The rooms were mostly filled with memories and solitary people. Today, our everyday lives are crammed with junk, so I doubt young people can imagine how the boarding house people of “The Other Celia” lived back then with so little.
All those memories came back while I read Sturgeon’s story. I’m not going to talk much about the story because I don’t want to spoil it. I thought for sure Sturgeon had painted himself into a corner that he couldn’t get out of but does. I loved the story for the setting and characterization. They are very real. Sturgeon’s solution is fantastic and unreal, and only amusing because it reminds me of the popularity of such wild beliefs back then.
I can’t help but wonder if people who lived in 1950s boarding houses, or old apartment buildings like the one my grandmother managed, read magazines like Galaxy and F&SF? Or only weird kids like me, who became crap artists. I was in high school before I met another science fiction fan. SF readers were rare. Did normal folks back then think about the future or aliens or the supernatural? As I got a little older, I remember chattering away about science fictional stories and concepts. I’m sure the old folks at my grandmother’s apartment thought I was one strange little man.
“The Other Celia” is not really a science fiction story as I think of science fiction today, yet its two citations in CSFquery were One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (1968) edited by Damon Knight and Modern Classics of Science Fiction (1992) edited by Gardner Dozois. The story has been frequently reprinted, lastly in 2023, in the anthology Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants: When Men’s Adventure Magazines Got Weird. That’s another clue in describing how 1957 was different from today, and how science fiction was different too. Those men’s magazines of the 1950s and 1960s were another strange subculture and model of reality. If you want to get closer to what I’m getting at read Confessions of a Crap Artist by Philip K. Dick. It’s a mainstream novel PKD wrote in 1959, and my favorite of all his novels. To me, it captures the 1950s I remember.
Version 1.0.0
I don’t know why “The Other Celia” was published in Galaxy when it should have been in The Magazines of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Back in the 1950s people were still reading old books and paperbacks by Charles Fort. “The Other Celia” is a Fortean tale. My uncles loved to talk about woo-woo shit like that. The 1950s were when the uneducated found transcendence in UFOs, Edgar Cayce, and Bridey Murphy.
Although, “The Other Celia” isn’t about the future, space travel, robots, it might be about aliens, and it might not. I highly recommend taking the time to read this story. The issue of Galaxy that it’s in, is online, in case you want the whole context.
Theodore Sturgeon does a beautiful job of sucking the reader into a strange mystery by describing the habits of a peculiar character, Slim Walsh. Walsh is a nosy guy, the kind who checks out the medicine cabinet when he uses other people’s bathrooms. He sneaks into other people’s rooms at the rooming house when they are gone. Not to steal, but to just see the secret side of how other people live. The story is about him discovering the very strange lifestyle of Celia Barton.
What’s great about this story is the writing. Sturgeon slowly mesmerizes us with savory details. I would have loved the story even if it didn’t have its fantastic element. “The Other Celia” could have been a literary story, but it didn’t go in that direction. As the story unfolded, I kept wondering where Sturgeon was going to take us. His story was so down to earth that I couldn’t imagine it turning into science fiction or fantasy. Yet, it does, eventually arriving smack dab in Rod Sterling’s territory. “The Other Celia” would have made a classic episode of The Twilight Zone; one Charles Beaumont could have written. Or it could have been a comic strip illustrated by Gahan Wilson or Charles Adams.
“The Other Celia” is a delightful story to begin our group reading of the best science fiction of 1957, not because it’s great science fiction, but because it’s a well-written work by a consummate crap artist. That’s another thing young people today don’t understand. Being a science fiction fan back then made you an outcast, a weirdo, a nerd, a zero. But stories like “The Other Celia” appealed to a certain kind of person, people who loved to watch Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1965) or read EC Comics.
I’m not surprised that Dikty, Merril, nor Asimov and Greenberg left “The Other Celia” out of their anthologies. Yet, it works perfectly for my contention that 1957 was so much different from today. Everyday life in America keeps mutating and transforming. I want the group reading all these 1957 sci-fi stories to help us remember the strange world of science fiction fans back then. But try to reverse the view. Just imagine what the people of 1957 would think about 2024 if we could send a 65″ HDTV to them and let them watch Netflix, Max, Apple TV, and Hulu. We’d scare the bejeezus out of them. They’d think The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch a reasonably normal picture of reality.
We now live in a time when almost everyone is a crap artist, of one kind or another.
Just think of all the speculative theories people of 1957 would produce to understand how America turned into what they see in our 2024 television shows. What I want to do is speculate about what life was like in 1957 from reading twenty science fiction stories from that year. It could explain a lot about how we arrived at this present. It’s stranger than The Twilight Zone.
Starting on March 12th, I’ll be moderating a group discussion of the best science fiction short stories from 1957 on Facebook. We discuss one story every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. I’ll also review those stories here on this blog.
The stories were selected by using any story with at least two citations on CSFquery. I also added two stories because one had been made into a movie, and one into a television show. I then added a few recommendations from our group’s moderators. No stories were awarded a Hugo for 1957, so I used Rich Horton’s picks for 1957 instead.
Here’s the schedule:
Our group has already discussed three famous stories from 1957, “Call Me Joe” by Poul Anderson, “The Menace from Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein, and “Omnilingual” by H. Beam Piper. Those will be discussed on repeat day. I’m really looking forward to reading the twenty stories the group hasn’t read before, many of which I haven’t read either.
When I create the discussion thread for each story I’ll try and find a link to where the story can be read online and put a link to the ISFDB.org entry so people can see if they already own an anthology where the story has been reprinted.
During the Group Read 72 period (March 12 – April 30) we’ll also be open to people recommending stories from 1957 that they feel should be on our list too. Think of it as a kind of scavenger hunt for forgotten classic short science fiction from 1957. Dave Hook, one of our most industrious members, did an extensive study of 1956, and I expect him to do the same for 1957.
Even if you don’t join our discussion group, please recommend any SF story from 1957 that’s not on the list that you think should be in a comment below. I’ll pass your recommendation to the group.
We welcome anyone who loves reading science fiction short stories to join our group. If you do join our Facebook group, be sure and answer the two questions. They are designed to filter out spammers and confirm that we only discuss science fiction short stories, not novels, not movies, not television shows. We delete any message that brings up politics, self-promotes a book, is offensive to others, or that’s off topic.
We read and discuss science fiction stories from anthologies, magazines, award winners, stories up for awards, and by specific year. We also discuss author collections on Sundays. This group reading is our 72nd. Old science fiction stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursday, and Saturdays. New science fiction stories are discussed on Mondays, Wednesday, and Saturdays. We try to promote both print and online science fiction magazines.
“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.
Our Facebook group is reading and discussing all the Hugo award winning short stories and novelettes that we’ve haven’t covered in all our previous years. “Melancholy Elephants” by Spider Robinson is a 1983 Hugo winner that I have no memory of even hearing about before. It first appeared in the June 1982 issue of Analog and came in first in the Analog Readers Poll. But then, that’s the fun thing about Group Read 69, we’re discovering stories that should be remembered, or at least consider why they haven’t.
“Melancholy Elephants” is about extending the copyright lifetime. It’s set in the future, and powerful entities want to pass a bill to make copyright perpetual. Dorothy Martin feels this will be a threat to civilization and it’s vital that the bill be stopped. She goes to see a powerful senator she hopes to convince or bribe into killing the proposal.
Most of the story is infodumping about copyright laws. It talks about how there are limits to creativity and if fiction and music are locked down by copyright, it will destroy them. The story even gives examples, including Harlan Ellison and A. E. van Vogt suing movie companies and winning, and George Harrison unconsciously cribbing “He’s So Fine” to write “My Sweet Lord” by the Chiffons. In the future of this story, there will be powerful computer programs that test for previous use and reject copyright violations. Mrs. Martin’s husband committed suicide when he realized his latest and greatest work was inspired by music he heard in childhood.
I don’t see why this story won the Hugo and Analog Readers Award, but then I don’t remember any of the short stories it competed with either. Also, I disagree with Mrs. Martin’s conclusion. I don’t think long copyright terms keeps artists from innovating, but I do think it keeps some works from being remembered. For example, copyright keeps me from linking to a copy of this story for you to read.
What I found fascinating by “Melancholy Elephants” was how much the story felt like a Heinlein story. Spider Robinson was a huge fan and friend of Heinlein, and this story feels like he stole from Heinlein in the same way Harrison appears to have stolen from The Chiffons.
The story starts out with Dorothy Martin killing a mugger. She justifies it because she couldn’t be late with the meeting with the Senator, ruining her only chance of saving the world from a fate worse than death. “Gulf” by Robert A. Heinlein starts with the protagonist causally killing an attacker and justifying it by his righteous cause. And if memory serves me right, the same thing happened in Heinlein’s novel, Friday. Heinlein like to promote the value of his characters beliefs and causes by casually killing people. He equates the end justifies the means with these quick scenes. I always thought they represented massive egos believing their way of thinking puts them above all others.
“Melancholy Elephants” could have been done without the scene of Mrs. Martin killing someone and hiding the body under the car. It gave the story a repulsive beginning. The story really needed to be an essay, but Spider Robinson sells fiction, so he took the idea and fictionalized it much like Robert A. Heinlein would he wanted to promote his beliefs.
Mrs. Martin visits the Senator, who comes across like Heinlein’s Jubal Harshaw. The way she makes her case and the way the Senator makes his is exceedingly Heinleinesque At one point Mrs. Martin tries to buy off the Senator and he explains he can’t be bought off because he’s already been bought off and it would be unethical to go against the original deal. Heinlein was big on representing government as being corrupt and things got done by big egos battling it out. Heinlein loved to write scenes where his character persuades others on a particular super-vital issue. However, Heinlein’s scenes often come across as character promoting their righteousness, rather than logic.
In the end the Senator sees Mrs. Martin’s side of things and reverses himself, but the way he does it also reminds me of Heinlein characters when they do give in.
It’s ironic that “Melancholy Elephants” is about protecting a creative person’s rights to borrow from the art that inspired them because this story is obviously inspired too much by Heinlein.
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is perfect for generating classroom discussions about philosophy. It’s short, only seventeen minutes on audio, and is told as an allegory. Le Guin presents a tiny utopian country where everything is wonderful except for one detail. Happiness in this land depends on the suffering of one child. Nearly everyone in Omelas accepts they must allow one ten-year-old child to suffer horribly, because that suffering allows everyone else living in Omelas to be happy. Of course, as you can guess from the title, some citizens can’t accept this and walk away.
Is Le Guin’s story questioning Christianity and asking why did Jesus suffer for all of us? I don’t think so. Is Le Guin pointing a finger at Capitalism, where the happiness of many depends on the suffering of the economic losers? Maybe. Do you worry about the losers in your society when you’re one of the winners? Is the story also asking how can we have a perfect society if even one person must pay a price? Isn’t it true that in every society some must suffer? Where can those who walk away from Omelas go?
Most people who read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” focus on the ending, the problem of the suffering child. But in the story’s buildup Le Guin describes what she thinks is a utopian society. Le Guin is challenging her readers to imagine a perfect society too. Le Guin says she doesn’t want clergy or the military, but figures she’ll have to accept orgies and drugs. What would you reject and accept?
I think Le Guin started writing this story wanting to speculate about creating a perfect society, but then realized it couldn’t go anywhere, and then came up with the idea for the suffering child, which led to the idea about those who walk away.
I sense the brilliance of this story wasn’t planned. It’s like my recent discussion of Slaughterhouse-Five. Sometimes a writer accidentally produces a story that works perfectly as a mirror. In my essay, I talked about reading Vonnegut’s classic when I was 18, 55, and 72. With each reading I saw something different about myself. I believe this is also true with “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Le Guin has created a mirror for her readers.
However, I do believe there is a universal psychological theme that deals with the suffering of a few that allows for the benefit of the many. I thought that theme was explored twice in 1956 by Damon Knight with “Stranger Station” and “The Country of the Kind.” I even wondered if Le Guin was inspired to write “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” after reading “The Country of the Kind.”
On my other blog, I produced a theory about ChatGPT, and similar AI programs. I’m wondering if our unconscious minds work in the same way AIs based on large language models. Those AI models are trained on millions of pages of text and images using neural networks. We can query those AI models with a prompt. Imagine all the books Ursula K. Le Guin read in her lifetime before writing “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas.” Now imagine Le Guin asking herself, “How would a functional utopia work?” Isn’t that the same as prompting an AI model? Her unconscious mind then generated “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas.”
Readers add the story to their own mental model and then prompt themselves with a question: “What does this story mean?” Their answers will depend on what they’ve read during their lifetime and how their unconscious mind processed that content.
Instead of asking, “What did Le Guin mean by “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas,” we should ask instead: “Why did I interpret the “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” the way I did?”
I’m guessing great writers don’t intend to mean anything specific but aim to excite our unconscious minds into a kind of creativity. In other words. “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” is a bit of prompt engineering, aimed at readers, knowing they each have a mental model that will generate a unique personalized output.
Classics of Science Fiction 