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“The Mile-Long Spaceship” by Kate Wilhelm

Group Read 72: The Best Science Fiction Stories of 1957

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can’t make absolute sense of this ending.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Wallace Harris, 3/15/24

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“The Queer Ones” by Leigh Brackett

Group Read 72: The Best Science Fiction Stories of 1957

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——

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

James Wallace Harris, 3/13/24

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“The Crystal Spheres” by David Brin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Wallace Harris, 3/8/24

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“Melancholy Elephants” by Spider Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Wallace Harris, 3/5/24

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Deadly Serious Science Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviews of The Deluge:

by James Wallace Harris, 2/29/24

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In Which Postapocalyptic Novel Would You Prefer to Live?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Wallace Harris, 2/16/24

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Has Science Fiction Changed?

I often encounter the opinion that science fiction has changed. Is it true? Over my lifetime novels have gotten longer, trilogies and series have become more common, there are more female authors, and the genre has been heavily influenced by fantasy. Before Star Trek in 1966, the world of science fiction seemed tiny, and that TV show brought in millions of new SF fans. Then Star Wars in 1977 brought in tens of millions of new SF fans. (But I’m not sure how much the population of science fiction readers grew.)

But these are all externals. I’m wondering if the essence of science fiction itself has changed. Yes, the writing has gotten better, and the literary world has become more accepting, but do modern readers get something different out of reading science fiction than what I found in the 1960s? Why do I prefer older science fiction? Is it more than just because I imprinted on it when I was young? I’m not the only one who feels this way. Many aging Baby Boomers say they prefer older science fiction too, but so do some young book reviewers.

Over the last forty days I’ve read five novels by Philip K. Dick written between 1959-1963, plus Ammonite by Nicola Griffith and The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. These aren’t new novels, but newer than what I’m talking about, and they feel different. Over the last year I’ve read such new SFF books as Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill, Babel by R. F. Kuang, and The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. I know this is a small sample, but I’ve also read hundreds of science fiction short stories, both old and new, over the last couple of years.

All I can say is science fiction from the first half of my life (1951-1987) feels much different than the second half (1988-2024). The change started around the time of Star Wars in 1977. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg might be the main factors changing the genre. I confess that I’ve long thought that science fiction ran out of original ideas at some point, and the genre has been living on recycling ever since. But women writers, literary standards, and fantasy radically changed the flavor of science fiction since the 1970s too.

But what if the change in science fiction is due to other factors? Yesterday I watched a video by Bookborn, “Do SFF authors think we are stupid now” that offered two innovative ideas. Bookborn suggests that current science fiction lacks subtlety. She also suggests that newer science fiction requires less critical thinking because newer authors tell their readers what to think rather than letting the readers draw their own conclusions. Bookborn also felt authors wrote about topical problems too obviously. Even with books she likes, presenting viewpoints she agrees with, she felt they were too explicit, lacking subtly. She admits this problem is not measurable and highly subjective.

Bookborn then cites an essay, “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes. The essay in long, so I suggest reading Wikipedia’s summary instead, but to give you a quick idea, here’s a quote from the first paragraph at Wikipedia:

"The Death of the Author" (French: La mort de l'auteur) is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980). Barthes's essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight.

Bookborn is quite articulate at explaining her position, and her position is more complex than what I’m conveying here, so I recommend clicking on the link above to watch her video. Bookborn goes on to say that current authors hide from their readers because of social media. They fear attacks on what they say so they are overly careful about what they put forth. I had an additional insight. Because modern science fiction is often about elaborate world building, modern authors struggle to be precise so readers will see clearly what they have worked so hard to invent.

In Ammonite by Nicola Griffith and The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, I was disappointed by the blandness of the author’s voice. And I never felt the presence of Griffith or Banks in their stories. Yes, in both cases their world building is beautifully detailed, but both authors left no mysteries about their stories or their personal views for me to ponder. I have theories to explain this too.

Modern writers prefer a close personal third point of view, or first person, to the older omniscient point of view which is better suited for conveying the author’s voice. I also find that the novels I admire most are ones written by authors I love reading about. Maybe what I love about older science fiction is my connection to the author.

Any science fictional world that’s set far from Earth becomes a fantasy world, and thus far less complex than our reality. Such fictional worlds are far from the infinite complexity of contemporary controversies. Writers can avoid personal philosophy by using allegory. Reading such fantasies means passively consuming what the book describes. Such stories don’t lend themselves to ambiguity and complexity, which makes the reader think. Our reality is infinitely full of shades of gray. Made up fictional worlds tend to be consistently designed because authors want them to be understandable to readers unless you’re Gene Wolfe writing The Book of the New Sun.

The five Philip K. Dick novels were far more compelling and thought provoking than the books by Griffith and Banks. I often try newer science fiction, but they usually come across as merely fun stories. Overall, newer science fiction stories are like going to Disneyland. They dazzle but when the ride is over, are quickly forgotten. I’m still thinking about those Philip K. Dick novels. When nothing else thrills, switching to a Philip K. Dick story will get my mind excited. Why is that? I believe it’s because his Dick’s books are closer to real life, and that makes them ambiguous and mysterious. They offer endless room for speculation. I’m reading another biography of Philip K. Dick, my sixth, I think, because Dick’s novels make me crave understanding.

Dick’s novels were compelling, Ammonite and The Player of Games were not. They aren’t bad, in fact, they’re exceptionally good stories, just not compelling. Dick was obsessed with deciphering reality. He doubted that what we perceive is real. He was horrified by other people, often thinking they were machines, disguised supernatural beings, or illusions of the mind. Paranoia fueled his narratives. Our reality was too complex for Philip K. Dick, and it drove him into insane states of mind trying to figure it out. Every Philip K. Dick novel is another exciting speculative assumption about reality.

Interestingly, Dick doesn’t fit the theory about the author being dead. Yes, his stories are wonderful without knowing anything about Philip K. Dick, but their complexity increases the more you do know about him. I want stories where the authors aren’t dead by Barthes criteria.

By coincidence, both The Player of Games and Time Out of Joint are about game playing. However, the first novel feels contrived. It’s hard to believe. But the second, which is far more fantastic, yet feels very real and believable. Why is that?

I believe the reason I love older science fiction is because it speculates about reality. Whereas newer science fiction is focused on telling a delightful story. Lucas and Spielberg overly inspired newer writers to focus on entertaining the masses.

I loved the Heinlein novels of the 1950s because they speculated about future space travel. That was before NASA showed us what real space travel would be like in the 1960s. Heinlein’s stories honestly tried to speculate about traveling to the Moon or Mars. Space travel in Star Trek, Star Wars, or the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks are really fantasies. Space travel in Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson is somewhat speculative.
Most science fiction isn’t very speculative, even the old stuff. However, novels like Flowers for Algernon or Earth Abides feel far closer to reality. And I’m sure many people will point out that stories by Philip K. Dick are extremely fantastic, yet their characters feel like ordinary real people, and that grounds them.

For all his insanity, Philip K. Dick struggled to understand reality. And I think the reason I admire many older science fiction writers is because they were commenting on reality. I do love entertaining stories, but pure storytelling seldom offers much to think about.

I’m not sure I understand “The Death of the Author” in the same way as Bookborn. It seems to me that classics were written by authors whose personality dominated their fiction. Think about Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Conner, Jack Kerouac, or the science Fiction writers like H. G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Zenna Henderson, Samuel R. Delany, John Brunner, etc. If you want to write a great science fiction novel, I think it must connect with reality. Just think how silly and fantastic Slaughterhouse-Five is, yet Vonnegut points to reality, and that makes it a great novel.

James Wallace Harris, 2/4/24

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Ammonite by Nicola Griffith

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith is one of the books from the Classics of Science Fiction list I hadn’t read. It’s on that list because of these citations:

Otherwise Award
2001200 Significant Science Fiction Books by Women, 1984-2001 by David G. Hartwell
2003The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
2004Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy by Cynthia Ward
2005ISFDB Top 100 Books (Balanced List)
2012Science Fiction the 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 by Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo
2014Mistressworks by Ian Sales
2016SF Masterworks
2016Sci Femme: The Reading List edited by Shannon Turlington
2016Goodreads Science Fiction Books by Female Authors
2016Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction: A Basic Science Fiction Library
2019The Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time – Penguin Random House
2019100 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time – Reedsydiscovery
2021Worlds Without End: Award Winning Books by Women Authors
2022The 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time – Esquire Magazine

Ammonite won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Science Fiction and Fantasy in 1993. Nicola Griffith has won the award three times and been nominated six times. Ammonite also won the Otherwise Award (originally, the James Tiptree Jr. Award) in 1993. It’s a well-respected novel, critically and academically acclaimed.

Interestingly, I didn’t think of Ammonite as a lesbian novel even though all the characters are women, and some of them are in relationships. I listened to the Audible edition, and Griffith makes a statement about the novel in an afterward where she says she didn’t want Ammonite to be a women’s utopia, or an Amazon adventure tale. She wanted her characters to be normal ordinary people, and that’s how it worked out. Sex wasn’t emphasized in the story, and I didn’t really think about gender roles while reading it.

I thought Ammonite was a straight-ahead science fiction problem story. Human explorers discover Grenchstom’s Planet, nicknamed Jeep, where all the males and many of the females die from a virus. They discover that the planet had been previously colonized by humans, with various tribes of women now living on the planet apparently not remembering they how they got there.

Marghe Taishan, an anthropologist volunteers to test a vaccine against the Jeep virus, so she can go down to the planet and visit the various tribes. Each tribe has a different culture depending on the geography and weather of their location. I pictured it pretty much like North America before Columbus, or early civilizations in the Himalayas.

There is a parallel story about a military unit, again all women survivors, which has a base on the planet. They hope to return to Earth if the vaccine proves successful. Marghe has reason to believe that the Durallium Company that commissioned the explorers will destroy all the humans no matter what happens with the vaccine because they fear the Jeep virus will spread across the galaxy. (I thought of the film Aliens, and the phrase, “nuke them from orbit.”)

I had problems with the novel. Problems unique to me. If you read about the novel at Wikipedia, you’ll see it’s highly regarded. I’d compare it to The Left Hand of Darkness and A Woman of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason. And the science fictional setup reminds me of “The Longest Voyage” by Poul Anderson from 1960 which won a Hugo award in 1961. For most readers, Ammonite should be an excellent tale.

Ammonite has a great setup for a science fiction story. But here’s my problem. That’s about all the science fiction we get. Most of the story is about Marghe struggling to survive among various native societies of the original colonists. It’s fictional Margaret Mead. I’m sure this kind of extended worldbuilding is what modern science fiction readers love, but I’m discovering I prefer shorter novels with a higher concentration of science fiction.

The extra length gives Griffith a chance to describe female only cultures and deal with cultural differences. This didn’t feel like science fiction, but fictionalized substitutes of our own world’s tribal customs.

Griffith doesn’t pontificate like a lot of bad science fiction writers, so we don’t have to wade through long speculating info dumps. Griffith works by throwing Marghe into various situations where she must quickly learn to survive. The story reminds me of the movies Little Big Man or Dances with Wolves. Both of those films were about plains Indians, but on Griffith’s cold world, I pictured cultures like the Innuit in North America, or nomadic people from historical Tibet or Mongolia.

Reading both “The Longest Voyage” by Poul Anderson and Ammonite in the same week is what inspired me to write this review. In both stories, a planet was colonized by humans in the distant past and then forgotten. Then these planets are rediscovered by a new civilization of star-faring humans. They discover the old humans have forgotten they ever traveled in space. In Anderson’s story, the forgotten colonists evolved their civilization to about the time of our 1500s. But in Griffth’s world, the colonists have evolved into tribal societies like we saw in Canada, Siberia, Mongolia, and Tibet before the voyages of Columbus.

Like I said, the story is compelling, but feels long, especially after several years of mostly reading science fiction short stories. When I got into science fiction in the mid-1960s, most science fiction novels were 200-250 pages and often less. Ammonite is 416 pages. By comparison, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) runs around 280 pages in most editions. Science fiction novels have only gotten longer on average since 1992.

Science fiction used to be fast paced, with lots of far out ideas. The evolution of the science fiction novel has been towards extending its length by evolving the complexity of plot and character. I assume this chunkiness is what younger readers prefer. They love dwelling in elaborate world buildings efforts to older science fiction’s thrill rides. I just don’t enjoy these longer novels, but if you do, this shouldn’t be a problem with Ammonite. But I also wonder if the aim of science fiction has changed, and it’s not really about the number of pages. Have I lived long enough that the appeal of science fiction has mutated?

Griffith increases her action midway through her novel, but then switches back to slow pace with Marghe learning about a second society. It’s at this point that Griffith gets into the psychological development of Marghe’s character. In the four Philip K. Dick novels I read before Ammonite, Dick went through dozens of plot twists and characters in less than half the number of pages for each of those novels. Dick’s approach is to throw out a science fictional idea every few paragraphs, while Griffith gave us all her science fiction at the beginning and then coasts for hundreds of pages with character interactions. And like I said, Griffith’s science fiction framework is an old idea. The story is really about Marghe becoming more evolved spiritually.

About two thirds of the way into Ammonite, the plot quickens again as the military base becomes threatened on two fronts, but again switches back to Marghe’s story which is much slower. However, this is where we learn how the female only society makes babies.

Most of the book is less about science fiction and more about imagined tribal cultures and New Age spiritualism and healing practices. There are a couple of women characters who like killing both people and animals. I wondered if Griffith was saying even women can have male traits, or that male traits aren’t exclusively male. I’ve always thought if there were only women, there would be no war or vicious kinds of hunting.

I’m not picking on Nicola Griffith for writing a longer novel. Most modern science fiction is getting longer and longer. New writers recycle an old science fictional concept, adding long complex plots. They spend their time developing an interesting cast of characters. It’s more about story and storytelling than science fiction. There’s nothing wrong with this. And modern science fiction is often better written than older science fiction. The trouble for me is I got hooked on the amphetamine type of science fiction.

I don’t know if I can fairly review modern science fiction. I wonder if my taste in science fiction suffers from arrested development. I wonder if I’m stuck in 1950-1979 science fiction, music, movies, and other pop culture.

Ammonite was a pleasant read. It was a somewhat compelling story. But it didn’t excite me. And I have no urge to reread it, which is my main indicator of a great novel.

James Wallace Harris, 1/27/24

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Heinlein’s Juveniles I Read in the 1960s vs. Philip K. Dick’s 1960s Novels I’m Reading in My 70s

I’ve been gorging on Philip K. Dick books this month. It occurred to me, that I’m consuming vast quantities of PKD in my old age like I did Heinlein books in my youth. Why was Heinlein my #1 science fiction writer in the 1960s when I was a teen? Is it for the same reasons that Philip K. Dick is my #1 sci-fi writer in my seventies in the 2020s?

The short answer is Heinlein’s juveniles were great reads and perfect escapism for a young person growing up in a problem family hoping to find a bright future. While PKD’s books are great escapes for an old guy living through troubled times when the future looks quite bleak. Both offer escapism from troubled times, but their imagined futures were distinctly different. Heinlein’s was best for the young, while Dick might be better for old age.

For some reason I resonate with Heinlein and PKD. I’ve written about that before, read “The Ghosts That Haunt Me.” There are certain writers I can’t stop reading their books, and biographies about them. I’m now curious why Philip K. Dick appeals so much to me late in life.

I discovered Heinlein in the Fall of 1964, just months before the first manned Project Gemini missions in March 1965. This was after Project Mercury was over. I had followed every manned space mission in the 1960s starting with Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight in May of 1961. I grew up as a final frontier true believer, and Heinlein’s twelve juvenile novels shaped my hopes for the future. This was before the psychedelic 1960s hit.

I don’t remember when I changed, but like many teenagers growing up in the 1960s, I radicalized. I tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. I was still living at home, and I was still going to high school, but I wasn’t in either place.

I can’t say I contracted the weirdness of Philip K. Dick back then, but science fiction was getting weird. My favorite writers shifted from Heinlein/Clarke/Asimov to Samuel R. Delany, Jack Kerouac, and Mark Twain as the 1960s ended. My ideas about the final frontier and the future were changing, especially after reading Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner in 1969.

I didn’t discover Philip K. Dick until 1968 when I checked out Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from the 7-day bookshelf at the Coconut Grove Library in Miami. What a strange ride that was. Before the decade was over, I also read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and a couple of others, but I can only dredge up specific memories of those two titles right now. I didn’t seriously get into PKD until after the Paul Williams article ran about Dick in The Rolling Stone magazine in November of 1975, then I started reading PKD for real. Back in the 1980s I told my friend Mike about Philip K. Dick, and we started collecting his books and both of us became big fans. We’ve been discussing PKD ever since. In 1991 I even went to Ft. Morgan to visit Dick’s grave.

This past month, I’ve been binge reading PKD again. I do that from time to time. And something struck me. I discovered Heinlein when I was twelve, just before I turned thirteen at the end of 1964. I read nearly all of Heinlein’s back catalog in the following two years, ending my Heinlein binge by reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The Past Through Tomorrow in 1967 as they came out.

But it was the twelve Heinlein juveniles published from 1947-1958 that made me a science fiction fan. At the end of 1967, with my first paycheck from working at the Kwik Check in Coconut Grove, I ordered all twelve of those books in hardback from Scribners because I loved them so much. I still have them. Those books define my love of science fiction. So, it’s weird that I’m ending up in PKD’s landscape. Heinlein and Dick saw the future vastly different. But then, the future I envisioned for myself in the 1960s is nothing like the future I’m living in the 2020s.

What’s interesting, that I realized this week, is Philip K. Dick’s 1960s science fiction are shaping how I think about science fiction in my old age. And there’s quite a contrast between how Heinlein and Dick wrote science fiction. I just finished five books Dick hammered out in 1963:

Heinlein’s fiction from the 1950s had a consistency to them, with each juvenile novel going step-by-step further from Earth. Heinlein was always adamant that his philosophy was represented in the three novels Starship Troopers (1959), Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). But those books represent his third philosophical stage. Heinlein’s first stage was his Future History stories of the 1940s, but what I cared about most was his Space Exploration stage of the 1950s. Both Heinlein and Dick wrote many books that shared a common vision of the future. Heinlein’s vision of tomorrow in his 1950s books are quite consistent. But then, so is Dick’s science fiction from the 1960s.

I’m sensing that Philip K. Dick went through different philosophical stages too. In the 1950s he was cranking out science fiction to make a living, but Dick really wanted to become a respected mainstream writer. Then from The Man in the High Castle (1961) through Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1969) he wrote twenty-one very strange science fiction novels that all have consistent themes and elements. In the 1970s, he shifted to more serious writing, some of which was based on firsthand experiences.

Many readers accused Dick of being a 1960s sci-fi writer on drugs, suffering from mental illness, and producing psychedelic science fiction. I don’t think that’s accurate. I think his 1959 novel, Confessions of a Crap Artist (published 1975) is a key to PKD’s 1960s fiction. Dick learned a lot about writing from producing all those unsold mainstream novels in the 1950s. Yes, he grew up reading science fiction and falling in love with the genre, but he was well acquainted with the real world and real literature. He had to accept that he could only make money selling science fiction, but he compromised by putting reasonable realistic characters into bizarre science fictional fantasies.

When I was growing up and embracing the Heinlein juveniles, I didn’t understand how unrealistic they were. I wanted space travel as Heinlein described it to be possible, but it would be decades before I realized how unrealistic those expectations were. Philip K. Dick was 23 years older than I was, and he obviously knew how crazy science fiction was back in the 1950s. I imagine he told himself, if science fiction sells, I’ll write science fiction but with the weirdness knob turned to eleven.

Dick’s science fiction in the 1960s got very psychedelic before the 1960s got psychedelic. He lived in California, and that helped put him at the forefront of the counterculture. As I grew up with the counterculture, but slightly delayed in Miami, I was still rereading the Heinlein juveniles. They were fantasies that kept me sane, but they were delusional. It’s a shame I didn’t discover PKD sooner, or even first. Dick knew science fiction was delusional. At least, I think he did. I believe with his VALIS experience, he started wondering if the universe wasn’t far stranger than what even science fiction writers imagined. I want to believe that Dick knew he was a crap artist for most of his career before he started believing in the crap. Evidently, you can’t toy with crap ideas all your life and not get infected.

What’s weird on another level was Heinlein turned strange in the 1960s too. It’s my theory that he too realized that 1950s science fiction wasn’t going anywhere, and thus he needed to go in another direction to stay at the top. My guess is he read Atlas Shrugged and decided he wanted to be a writer like Ayn Rand. One whose political ideas were taken seriously. In some ways, Stranger in a Strange Land is just as weird as PKD’s work in the 1960s.

Heinlein’s lost his mojo in the 1970s, and I quit reading him. Over the years, I’ve become disenchanted with Heinlein’s work after 1960 too. Philip K. Dick took a new direction in the 1970s and found a higher calling. Science fiction, as a genre, also cchanged in many ways in the 1970s. Since then, science fiction books have gotten better written, and more creative, but have mostly retreated into itself, into fantastic feats of world building. I still love 1950s science fiction. I think that’s when the genre peaked in terms of exploring science fictional ideas. Movies and novels are better constructed now, but most of the ideas are retreads.

I guess I haven’t progressed much in life. I started in the 1960s with 1950s science fiction, and now in the 2020s I’m focused on 1960s science fiction. Maybe before I die, I’ll get around to digesting 1970s science fiction. But before I do that, I need to use up PKD’s books from the 1960s. I need to figure them out.

I only reread Heinlein juveniles now for nostalgic reasons. I think I’m reading Dick’s 1960s novels for a reason, but I’m not sure what it is. PKD seemed to be writing about something, and I’m trying to figure out what that was. But I could be wrong. He could have just been cranking out a bunch of crazy sci-fi books to pay the bills. However, I’m not the only one trying to figure out PKD. Lots of people are writing monographs and dissertations on him.

In the 1950s and 1960s Heinlein was king of the genre hill. At the time, I thought he would be seen by people in the 21st century as the Charles Dickens of science fiction. That hasn’t happened. Philip K. Dick is the top dog when remembering 20th century science fiction. I would not have predicted that back in the 1960s. Nor would I have imagined that as an old man I would be so hung up on Philip K. Dick.

James Wallace Harris, 1/21/23

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“Consider Her Ways” by John Wyndham

“Consider Her Ways” was first published in the original anthology, Sometime, Never. It is story #22 of 22 for The Best SF Stories of 1956 group read. Unfortunately, I can’t link to a copy of the story to read online, but you might already own one of the many anthologies where it’s been reprinted. I read “Consider Her Ways” in A Science Fiction Argosy edited by Damon Knight. But I also own it in The Science Fiction Century edited by David G. Hartwell. The story was also included in two of Wyndham’s collections:

I strongly urge you to read the story before reading what I have to say. It’s an exceptional yarn, a classic, and I don’t want to spoil your reading fun. “Consider Her Ways” begins with a woman waking up in a hospital and having no memory of who she is or how she got there. That mystery continues for many pages, and I never guessed the cause.

Let me say, “Consider Her Ways” is a feminist utopian tale that most will consider a dystopia. But what defines a better society? If you’ve read and enjoyed Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, you might want to read “Consider Her Ways.”

“Consider Her Ways” is a very old-fashioned science fiction, reminding me of Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein. John Wyndham uses his story to speculate about a future society while commenting on our present society. Referring to these books should give you enough of a clue to the plot of “Consider Her Ways.”

Especially in the 19th century, and to a degree in the 20th century, writers who wanted to write about traveling to the future but without resorting to a time machine, had their present-day characters going into a deep sleep and waking up in the future. John Wyndam invents a drug, chuinjuntin, from South American jungles, which causes a young 20th century woman to project her soul into the body of a woman in the future. Wyndam, solved the problem of return travel by using the same drug again. Mostly sleepers into the future are stuck there unless the story is only a dream. Heinlein had Dan Davis travel to the future via cold sleep in The Door into Summer, but then used a time machine to get him back to 1970.

I won’t go into the society Wyndham creates, other than to say its without men. Jane Waterleigh, our time traveler, does not like the feminist utopia she’s visited and tries to prevent it when she returns to her own time. I’ll call this future, the pink future, since its decor is often painted pink. The pink future Wyndham imagines for women is obviously horrifying from our perspective, but Laura and the other women of the future were completely satisfied with it, even proud of their society. I wasn’t sure I wanted Jane to destroy it. I think each reader will have a different take on Wyndham’s imagined future. Utopia is so hard to define. I don’t think a perfect utopia is possible, but the pink future in “Consider Her Ways” has no violence, lack, ugliness, or apparent unhappiness. However, it has an ant-like social structure. Jane finds herself in a huge body of a woman, a class called mothers. They produced broods of babies, four at a time, and are treated very well.

Wyndham’s missed one point. Jane claims the pink future has no love and romance, and thus a depressing dystopia. What about lesbian love, romance, and sex? Wyndham assumes without men; women wouldn’t have romantic relationships. Even in 1956, that should have been obviously wrong.

We all read stories differently, using fictional clues to customize our versions of the story, based on different assumptions, reactions, wants, and conclusions. Here’s what my friend Mike wrote to me about “Consider Her Ways.”

Ever since I first read The Day of the Triffids back in the sixties, I've been taken with John Wyndham's work. His beautiful prose describes deeply unsettling situations and events.

In "Consider Her Ways," a woman "...who had no idea who I was, or where I was..." is confronted with this vision: "In front of me stood an outrageous travesty, an elephantine female form, looking more huge for its pink swathings."

Only Wyndham could conjure up this disturbing description:

"And this delicate face, this little Fragonard, was set upon that monstrous body: no less outrageously might a blossom of freesia sprout from a turnip."

What transpires is an elaborate hallucination or the future (or one of a number of alternate futures). Jane is confronted with a civilization devoid of men. Her long conversation with the historian Laura could be considered an info dump, but is fascinating and adds considerable depth and nuance to the story. Even after more than sixty-five years it resonates with the reader.

Wyndham never allows us to feel comfortable. Are we dealing with a woman's bad drug trip? Have we had a glimpse of the future? And what do we think about that future? We're left with a jumble of emotions all wrapped up inside of Wyndham's masterful writing.

Mike is open-minded, leaving several possibilities available. I took a different reading route. I accepted Jane’s tale as an actual time travel story. Mike left open the possibility it was all a hallucination, and Jane murdered innocent Dr. Perrigan in an insane delusional state. But Wyndham makes it more complicated. In the end, Dr. Hellyer, Jane’s colleague who gave her the psychoactive drug to test, and Jane’s lawyer, discuss getting Jane off from the murder charge based on insanity. But they wonder if her story is true. Then the lawyer points out that Dr. Perrigan had a son who was also a Ph.D. researcher in the same area as his father. What if Jane’s story is true, but she killed the wrong person?

The story could be a hallucination. The time travel story could be true, but it can take two forms. One, Jane changes, the future, but two, she doesn’t. All the possibilities make “Consider Her Ways” a compelling story. It allows Wyndham to play with several time travel tropes in one tale. Such bendiness makes for great writing.

James Wallace Harris, 1/16/23