Classics of Science Fiction

Group Read 27: The Big Book of Science Fiction

Story #74 of 107: “Passing as a Flower in the City of the Dead” by S. N. Dyer

“Passing as a Flower in the City of the Dead” by S. N. Dyer first appeared in Terry Carr’s Universe 14. Dyer’s real name is Sharon N. Farber and she has written a number of science fiction stories, but little else is known about her.

“Passing as a Flower in the City of the Dead” is a story about using an O’Neill space colony for patients with immune-compromised diseases and conditions. To complicate the plot, Dyer has her society resent people who voluntarily undergo the rigorous preparation to live in the colony just to be with an ailing loved one. They call these faithful partners Fidos. They hate them because they could return to Earth when all the truly afflicted know they can’t ever leave the colony. Madeline is a Fido, hiding her marriage to Henri, by pretending to have Lupus with complications just so she can stay with her husband.

I’d rate this story 3-stars and give it a plus (***+) because it’s a solid piece of science fiction I enjoyed. I liked how Dyer worked up a story setting and then developed a plot to fit it. However, even though it’s a good story, it doesn’t transcend. It was a good idea story, but I never felt emotion for Madeline or Henri.

For me, there’s a definite barrier between 3-star and 4-star stories. Of course, it’s subjective, and it’s relative. Each reader resonates with stories differently, but I think we all have buttons when pushed, will kick the story up to the next level. For me, it’s the immediate awareness that I’ll want to reread the story someday. Yet, that’s a rather vague way of explaining what I mean. What makes me want to reread a story?

A totally useless way to say it is to say stories that spark magic. Boy does that sound dumbass. It sounds like I’m Marie Kondo holding up a possession, to decide to keep or throw out. Yet, it’s about as definitive as I can get. Some stories just spark joy.

This story didn’t. It’s sparked, “That’s pretty cool.” And that’s often good enough. Most stories will never be ones we put in our “To Keep” piles. The mathematics behind that is realistic. I’ve read thousands of short stories, but it’s only practical to keep so many in my memory and heart. I often wonder about that number. Right now, it’s between 100 and 200, but I feel as I get older, it will fall below 100, and then 50, then 25, and finally, and if I’m lucky, I might remember a handful of favorites during my last days.

James Wallace Harris, 1/15/22

Group Read 27: The Big Book of Science Fiction

Story #73 of 107: “Variation on a Man” by Pat Cadigan

“Variation on a Man” by Pat Cadigan first appeared in the January 1984 issue of Omni Magazine. The Big Book of Science Fiction seems to be the first time it’s been anthologized. And it doesn’t seem to be included in any of Cadigan’s three collections. Does that imply it wasn’t liked? I enjoyed it, though.

“Variation on a Man” is another take on cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction that was popular back in the 1980s and 1990s. At the time there was a lot of excitement over cyberpunk, but it seems to have faded away into the mainstream of science fiction. William Gibson’s cyberpunk started with his famous novel Neuromancer was noirish. Cadigan’s story does away with cybercrime and deals with mindplayers, people who make mind-to-mind contact for various creative reasons. Deadpan Allie (Alexandra Victoria Haas) is a pathosfinder hired to help Rand Gladney become a composer again after his mind was stolen and his personality is being rebuilt.

Most of the science fiction in this story is based on downloading/uploading of minds, which has become a very popular meme in our genre. It’s a concept I don’t believe in but is kind of fun for storytelling. However, there are many people working and hoping to someday make this fantasy real. In this story world, people have artificial eyes that are easily removable, giving access to the optic nerves that can be used for computer interfaces. Allie goes into Rand’s mind this way. Sort of ghoulish, but kind of neat too.

Cyberpunk often worked at creating a hip attitude, with lots of cool jargon and nicknames. But Deadpan Allie and her boss Nelson Nelson (Duran Duran?) sound like something Damon Runyon would have created back in the 1920s, although Deadpan might have been a tip of the hat to Tin Pan Alley since the story is about music. And deadpan also means with no emotion, and Allie isn’t supposed to convey any in her work while inside people’s minds. But for me, I found these names jarring and hurt the story somewhat.

“Variation on a Man” was a pageturner for me. Even though I didn’t like the idea or the cutesy names, I wanted to know what would happen. The idea of rebuilding a personality from scratch in a grown body is interesting. Plus, the idea that all the previous personality was erased made the mystery of wanting to become a composer again another story mystery.

The tale concluded well enough but fizzled out towards the end. I never bought the psycho-mumbo-jumbo as to why Rand Gladney would or could recreate a ghost of his stolen personality. Where did it come from? His doctors claimed the new personality was kept away from any knowledge of his old personality.

I might like to read some of Cadigan’s novels, Mindplayers, Synners, or Fools. I’m not sure old cyberpunk holds up, but I kind of miss the excitement it once produced. “Variation on a Man” reminds me I need to reread The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny which I read back in the 1960s. It’s another story about mucking around in someone else’s mind.

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James Wallace Harris, 1/11/22

Group Read 27: The Big Book of Science Fiction

Story #72 of 107: “Bloodchild” by Octavia E. Butler

I’ve been waiting months for us to get to “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler. It’s the #1 story on our Classics of Short Science Fiction list. It has 18 citations that remember it over the last 35+ years. I’ve read “Bloodchild” three times now, and it is a great story. But I keep asking, “Why is it great?” What ingredients did Butler use to cook up such a tale?

The first time I read “Bloodchild” I assumed it was about slavery. I partly assumed that because Butler is African-American, but Butler herself assures us it’s not in her afterward to the story in her collection Bloodchild and Other Stories.

IT AMAZES ME THAT some people have seen “Bloodchild” as a story of slavery. It isn’t. It’s a number of other things, though. On one level, it’s a love story between two very different beings. On another, it’s a coming-of-age story in which a boy must absorb disturbing information and use it to make a decision that will affect the rest of his life. 

On a third level, “Bloodchild” is my pregnant man story. I’ve always wanted to explore what it might be like for a man to be put into that most unlikely of all positions. Could I write a story in which a man chose to become pregnant not through some sort of misplaced competitiveness to prove that a man could do anything a woman could do, not because he was forced to, not even out of curiosity? I wanted to see whether I could write a dramatic story of a man becoming pregnant as an act of love—choosing pregnancy in spite of as well as because of surrounding difficulties. 

Also, “Bloodchild” was my effort to ease an old fear of mine. I was going to travel to the Peruvian Amazon to do research for my Xenogenesis books (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago), and I worried about my possible reactions to some of the insect life of the area. In particular, I worried about the botfly—an insect with, what seemed to me then, horror-movie habits. There was no shortage of botflies in the part of Peru that I intended to visit.

Butler, Octavia E.. Bloodchild: And Other Stories (p. 30). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition. 

This morning, as I reread the story, I tried to observe myself reading it. First of all, it succeeds because it’s compelling. “Bloodchild” draws us in immediately. It has page-turning power. Partly, that’s the vivid writing, but partly it’s the horrifying details. We’re watching a trainwreck we can’t turn away from. I’ve commented quite often how the VanderMeers keep picking science fiction horror stories, and this is another one. How many readers find the horrific a stimulus to keep reading?

I don’t like horror as a genre, but I have to admit that many of the stories I love involve elements of the gross, the ugly, the terrifying, the depressing, etc. Reading “Bloodchild” again makes me ask myself: “What makes me love science fiction?” Always before, the quick answer was science fiction was about things I wanted from the future. There is no path in “Bloodchild” I’d want to follow. Then, why do I admire it so much?

The setting of the story is another world, and I love stories about humans colonizing alien planets. I also love stories about aliens. However, these aliens are pretty damn strange. They are three meters long and insect-like. They lay their eggs in host animals, but at the time the humans arrive at their planet, their eggs, are beginning to fail in the local host animals. Humans then develop a symbiotic relationship with the Tlic, becoming the new hosts. The Tlic prefer human males, thus allowing human females to focus on producing more humans.

Gan, a teen boy, is our point-of-view character, and as the story progresses, we learn about his future as a host, and what it means to become a host. This is why when I first read the story I thought it was symbolic of slavery, but it’s not. It’s about a new kind of relationship, a new kind of love, a new kind of obligation.

Men have always wondered how women could choose to become mothers knowing all the pain they will suffer. Like Butler says, this is her pregnant man story. She is giving us a story that answers the question, “Why would you give birth knowing the pain involve?” The story is even more complicated than that. On a science-fictional level, it asks, “What would you do to survive on another planet?” and “How far would you go to develop a relationship with another intelligent alien species?”

As a kid growing up I read science fiction because I wanted to become a Mars colonist. In 1964 I didn’t expect that to be much of a sacrifice. But in 2022, I know living on Mars would involve a tremendous price in suffering. Maybe “Bloodchild” is a symbolic lesson in the cost of our SF dreams? Or maybe, it’s merely Butler imagining a very exotic situation.

One of the most important aspects of a great work of science fiction is imagining something very strange and different. That involves creating a lot of details to paint such a picture. “Bloodchild” is dense with such details.

This leaves me wondering. Are my favorite stories about characters living lives I envy, or just living fascinating lives? As a teen in the 1960s, I loved Heinlein’s juveniles because I wanted to trade my mundane existence with his characters leading exciting science-fictional lives. Can I say I’d never want to exchange places with Gan? The only story I can remember from those we’ve read in The Big Book of Science Fiction that I think I’d like to jump into is “The Martian Odyssey.”

The novel I’m listening to when I’m not reading these stories is Bewilderment by Richard Powers. It’s about a father struggling with an emotionally disturbed nine-year-old son. The boy keeps having meltdowns because he worries about all the doom and gloom in our future. One technique the father uses to calm his son is to tell stories from his collection of 2,000 paperback science fiction books.

You know what’s scarier than “Bloodchild?” Our future. At what point in our timeline will kids consider “Bloodchild” a positive escape? Is that why we read science fiction now? Is any world better than this one? Even Gan’s world?

Update: 1/10/22

My comment to the group:

Whenever I read this story I'm horrified by what Gan and the other males have to go through. It's pretty awful. But then I've been thinking, is it any worse than what women have to go through when having a baby? I've been thinking about that ever since I read that Butler called this her pregnant man story. When I first read "Bloodchild" years ago I tried to interpret it in terms of slavery. But Butler said it's not about that. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if Butler isn't just giving us a metaphor for women and birth. Then do the Tlic represent men?

James Wallace Harris, 1/9/22

Group Read 27: The Big Book of Science Fiction

Story #70 of 107: “Mondocane” by Jacques Barbéri

“Mondocane” by Jacques Barbéri is another one of those entries that felt like a fictional essay rather than a story. All I can say is this story reminded me of a wordy version of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” I just don’t consider this kind of work science fiction. Sure parts of it can sound science-fictional, but my quibble is it sounds like an art form from an alternate reality where science fiction’s intent was strangely different.

The hives of homunculi were born out of necessity. The occupants of the nuclear bunkers were found, for the most part, buried under hundreds of meters of sand. Initially, the women, crushed by a powerful lethargy, saw their volume increase considerably; their limbs atrophied, and only their head remained, at the tip of a gigantic flaccid body. Inversely, the men decreased in volume and started to live in the folds of flesh of the female bodies. 

But it was a matter of becoming animal only in appearance, cerebral functions diminishing not at all. Except the social instinct, of collective life, was intensified. The first eggs were tended in doubt and fear. Then the first larvae made their appearance. And, supplied with burrowing snouts, they set about fighting their way towards the surface. The desert is now a gigantic network of tunnels and reproduction chambers. The hives presently stage the form of life that is the most evolved, most adapted, of the planet. All things considered, the homunculi would prefer to remain underground, and come out only very rarely, mainly to hunt.
 

I felt this story descends from Poe rather than Verne or Wells.

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James Wallace Harris, 1/7/22

Group Read 27: The Big Book of Science Fiction

Story #69 of 107: “Swarm” by Bruce Sterling

Well, I can’t complain about not getting good old fashion science fiction with “Swarm” by Bruce Sterling? It has a proper pedigree, being first published in the April 1982 issue of F&SF, my favorite SF magazine, and then reprinted by my two favorite best-of-the-year anthologists at the time (Carr and Wollheim). And it’s part of a well-imagined science fiction series, the Shaper/Mechanist universe.

What makes “Swarm” good old fashion science fiction? First, it thinks big. Really big. It imagines humanity dividing into two species, the Shapers, who use genetics to become posthuman, and the Mechanists, who use cybernetics as their path to evolving. Making “Swarm” even more exciting is meeting aliens who have chosen a third way, of symbiosis with multiple organisms.

“Swarm” takes place in an alien hive world fashioned out of an asteroid. Two humans, Simon Afriel and Galina Mirny survive there naked, coexisting in the hive ecology of many symbiotic species. Their clothes were consumed right off their bodies by various unintelligent alien critters who serve the hive organism. They eat what the symbiotes regurgitate.

Visually, this reminds me of The Forgotten Planet, by Murray Leinster, Hothouse by Brian Aldiss, and “Surface Tension” by James Blish. It also makes me think of the film Fantastic Voyage but imagining Raquel Welch and Stephen Boyd without suits floating in the inner space of the human body. Simon and Galina float in weightlessness instead of fluids.

“Swarm” would make a fascinating film because of its tremendously alien setting, however, it needs a plot and an ending that doesn’t spring out of a hidey-hole at the last minute. How the story wraps up is rather impressive, but there was no buildup to it at all. We’re told Galina and Simon each have their assignments from the Shapers, but those tasks don’t drive the story. “Swarm” is full of dazzling ideas, but they all feel tacked on like Christmas tree decorations.

“Swarm” got 11 citations, making it on our Classics of Science Fiction Short Story list. That’s impressive, revealing a lot of people loved this story when it came out, and it’s well remembered by two fan polls.

I’m afraid it’s only an average good story for me because I never felt anything for Simon or Galina. “Swarm” tied for 7th place with nine stories. “Fire Watch” beat “Swarm” for both the Hugo and Nebula awards that year. I liked all of the other stories below much more but felt if “Swarm” had been more emotional I would have liked it much more than the others. If we had felt a sense of posthuman difference in Simon and Galina, if the ending had been built up to so we felt the tragedies of both characters, then this story would have been at the top of the group with me. It thought big but moved little.

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James Wallace Harris, 1/5/22

Group Read 27: The Big Book of Science Fiction

Story #67 of 107: “The Snake Who Had Read Chomsky” by Josephine Saxton

The VanderMeers present yet another horror science fiction story, although the horror in “The Snake Who Had Read Chomsky” is very different from the recent stories we’ve been reading. The story I read did not feel like the story they promised in the introduction:

Roz Kaveney, editor of Saxton’s The Power of Time, described Saxton’s work as “a combination of surrealism, occultism, feminism and a sort of bloody-minded Midlands Englishness, and quite wonderful.” John Crowley was inspired by Saxton’s work to write a love story (“Exogamy”) with speculative elements—influenced in particular by The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith. 

“The Snake Who Had Read Chomsky” (1981) is classic Saxton: a take-no-prisoners examination of biotech experimentation and the follies of capitalist societies in the grips of decadent extremes. It is sharp, incisive, darkly inventive, and an excellent example of the capabilities of this brilliant but underrated writer.

“The Snake Who Had Read Chomsky” didn’t deal with feminism. The woman protagonist, Marvene, is evil and deranged, but then so are the other two main characters. Nor did I feel it was an attack on capitalistic societies in the grips of decadence. It might have been a bit surreal, but not really, and there was no occultism that I noticed, but that comment could have applied to other stories in the collection.

The story was dark. The setting is a future dystopia ruled by elites, that use scientists to control the unwanted population. The story is about three scientists, Selly, the lead researcher, and two assistants, Marvene and Janos. Those two schemes to dethrone Selly in his lab. This group invents ways to control the mass of humanity that is no longer needed by the elites. These three scientists hope their inventions will make them famous and wealthy. However, if you can imagine the inventions Donald Trump would come up with in this situation, then you’ve got the feel of this story. Their most brilliant gadget makes people act like animals, which they turn on each other. Selly becomes a cat, Janos a mouse, and Marvene, our main point-of-view character, a snake.

At first, I rooted for Marvene. I like a character I can root for, but before long she became so disgusting that I rooted for her demise instead. Not to spoil the ending, but I get my wish. Saxton does a good job developing these bad characters and does a satisfying job of storytelling, but “The Snake Who Had Read Chomsky” just left a nasty feeling in my head. I’m getting over Covid, and I associate how I feel physically with how the story made me feel emotionally. Why would someone write such a story?

I have to assume Saxton disliked 1981 England and America, although neither are mentioned. She also disliked science and scientists. And she disliked academic politics and competition. Young readers today love dystopian tales because their protagonists take a stand against the status quo. We love those characters because of their blows against the empire. In this story, Marvene basically wants to be the Joseph Mengele of her society, and become rich and famous for her cruel inventions.

By the way, I never got the Chomsky reference. I assume it’s just a 1981 version of clickbait.

James Wallace Harris, 1/1/22