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THE CRYSTAL WORLD by J. G. Ballard

At a minimum, The Crystal World by J. G. Ballard was an entertaining cozy catastrophe that I was always anxious to get back to reading. What compels me to write this review is figuring out why. The prose is vivid, propelled by a moderately interesting mystery. However, its characters are rather bland but then so are ordinary people. In the end, the story faintly alludes to something, but what?

What elevates this novel is trying to understand how it works. Its Heart of Darkness vibe feels biblical, spiritual, or at least existential. Reading The Crystal World makes me ask why we read fiction. Why are humans addicted to fiction and how does that addiction affect our brains? I do this because I’m also reading Stephen Greenblatt’s The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, a nonfiction work that says a great deal about fiction.

Any hardcore bookworm will recognize The Book of Genesis as a genius work of fiction. I also think it’s a brilliant work of speculative fiction. Its author felt challenged to imagine how Earth and life on Earth began. Genesis was written well before the concepts of history or science. The author obviously knew of humans living in cities, and those that farmed and herded animals, the author could even have heard that there were places where humans were hunters and gatherers. And from that knowledge speculated that there was a time when humans lived like animals. The author of Genesis even realized there might be a time when humans didn’t have a language. The author pictured Eden where humans lived in harmony with nature before we became different. The obvious question became: What made us change? The obvious answer was, whatever made everything else. Then the question becomes how. Doesn’t eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil make a lovely allegorical explanation?

Do you see why I consider The Book of Genesis an early example of speculative fiction? And isn’t the story of Noah and the Flood, an early apocalyptic tale? Stephen Greenblatt makes a good case that the author of The Book of Genesis cribbed his ideas from much older Babylonian tales. We’ve always had storytellers and writers who tried to explain reality. However, this makes me wonder about modern writers and storytellers. What are they trying to explain?

Billions of humans have believed in the literal story of Genesis. That story says a lot about fiction and its impact on us. The early fathers of the Christian Church tortured the Book of Genesis for centuries producing endless interpretations. That’s a great example of literary criticism gone wrong.

I bring up Greenblatt’s book because we must ask certain questions about the fiction we read. The first question is: Does it have anything to say? In most modern works of fiction, the answer is no, but not always. If the answer is yes, is the fiction allegorical, satirical, literal, comical, historical, romantic, academic, philosophical, speculative, etc. Of course, the last question: Shouldn’t we abandon fiction for nonfiction if we have something to say? Even when fiction is about saying something, it’s often indecipherable.

I’m getting old, and I worry I’ve wasted too much of my life on fiction. I fear that fiction has no value other than as an entertaining way of killing time, and since time is running out, that’s bad.

Reading The Crystal World made me wonder if J. G. Ballard had something to say, or was his novel was just meant to be entertaining? To complicate the answer, The Crystal World is an early work of New Wave science fiction, published before the term was coined.

As evidence, I reprint below Judith Merril’s “Books” column from the August 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Merril recognizes that science fiction is changing in 1966, and has something to say, and that J. G. Ballard might be leading the way.

The older I get the harder it gets to find science fiction to read. I roam up and down the decades looking for worthy books I’ve missed. With each book that still succeeds on any level, I ask why? Such revelations help me squeeze every last drop of wonder I can out of the genre.

I sometimes wonder if reading fiction hasn’t been a wasted diversion. On the other hand, I wonder if processing fiction hasn’t been my life’s work.

Reading The Crystal World made me think about the power of fiction to temporarily suggest that a made-up story could be true. This isn’t true of all fiction. Some writers can use narrative techniques that convey a sense “that this really happened”
more than others. I’m not claiming that The Crystal World is a brilliant work of realism, but it does use such techniques. And I thought they were the same techniques H. G. Wells used with The War of the Worlds.

The primary technique is using an eyewitness POV. The second technique is telling the story in linear time. The third technique is avoiding fancy prose or embellishments. If the prose feels like reporting events the story will feel real.

The Crystal World is about a science-fictional infection that alters plants and animals. This infection has hit the Earth in several places, much like how the Martian canisters land around the globe in The War of the Worlds. But our narrator, Dr. Edward Sanders doesn’t know this. He learns about one site slowly, by word-of-mouth, as people did before being connected to the internet.

Dr. Sanders lands at Port Matarre on a riverboat steamer from Libreville, in the Cameroon Republic of Central Africa. Dr. Sanders wants to visit two friends, Max and Suzanne Clair, who run a leprosy clinic further upriver. Dr. Saunders works at a leper hospital in Fort Isabelle and is in love with Suzanne Clair.

The story feels like Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. At Port Matarre, Dr. Sanders finds it difficult to go any further. The police and army have put up a blockade around the infected area but don’t explain why. At first, Dr. Sanders has no idea of what’s happening, but something mysterious is occurring in the jungle.

I’ve only read Ballard’s novel The Dround World and Vermillion Sands, a collection, and less than a dozen short stories from anthologies. Ballard is great at creating an atmosphere. The Crystal World suggests a plague infecting reality spreading across the galaxy, even the universe, which affects time and consciousness. It’s not much of an idea, as science-fictional ideas go, but it is different.

However, what if The Crystal World was the only text found from our times, thousands of years from now like The Book of Genesis is to us. Would future humans imagine it as an allegory for something that happened to us? Would some think it described a literal event? Would the author of Genesis ever imagine billions of future humans believing their speculation was absolutely literal?

Fiction is like dreams, they both feel like they’re about something. Dreams are supposed to serve some kind of biological/psychological function. Is that true of fiction too? The authors of The Bible intended it to mean something. But millions of books and sermons have been created to explain The Bible and we’ve never agreed on any of them. The Crystal World is entertaining because it triggers that mechanism in our brain that fools us into believing we’re making sense of reality, the same mechanism that processes religious works, political news, or even gossip.

If I were a Zen Master or an intelligent robot, I’d discipline myself to ignore that delusion. The ancient Church fathers decided that eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, was the origin of sin, and the downfall of mankind. I believe the allegory could also explain our addiction to fiction, and I include religion as a genre of fiction. Both drive us crazy. The faithful use scripture to explain reality, while we heathens use novels.

In Eden, we wouldn’t have needed novels or scriptures.

James Wallace Harris, 12/25/24

“Books” by Judith Merril (F&SF August 1966):

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HOLY FIRE by Bruce Sterling

Science fiction writers can’t predict the future but some aim to speculate on times to come by extrapolating current trends. One of the most famous SF novels to do this was Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, his 1968 novel that anticipated the world of 2010. Bruce Sterling’s 1996 novel Holy Fire tries to imagine life in 2096 via speculation and extrapolation. Do I recommend it? That’s hard to say, even at the current Kindle price of $1.99.

How self-aware are you regarding the selection of the science fiction you read? Does your mind crave a tightly plotted story? If so, Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling might not be for you. Or do you love reading novels with characters you care about, even identify with, and want to vicariously live their fictional adventures? Again, Holy Fire might not be your cup of tea. If you are the kind of science fiction reader who resonates with dense science fiction speculation, reading Holy Fire should definitely be for you.

We judge such speculative fiction in two ways. Does it jive with our own efforts to imagine the future, and now that the novel is almost thirty years old, how well has it done so far? Evidently, back in 1996, Sterling saw that medical technology, changing trends in family size, and population demographics would lead to a world where there were far more old people than young people. The exact opposite of the Baby Boom generation I grew up with. All the current 2024 demographics point to such a future.

Sterling solved the overpopulation problem that many science fiction writers before him saw by having a great pandemic in the 2020s. And he imagined that networks, artificial reality, and artificial intelligence would reshape society. Instead of predicting gloom and doom like so many science fiction novels from the late 20th century, Sterling imagines a near-liberal utopia and a post-scarcity society. The problems faced by the characters in this novel divide between the old and young. The old strive to find purpose with an ever-lengthening lifespan, while the young feel crushed under the weight of a gerontocracy that advises the youth to learn from their experience and live longer.

Because humans have been trying out medical life-extension procedures for decades, a growing percentage of the population is old. These elders have the wealth and power and dominate politics with their gerontocracy. Mia Ziemann, Holy Fire’s protagonist, is 94 at the start. Because she has led such a cautious life and is in such good shape, the medical establishment offers her the latest life extension treatment, one that goes way beyond any previous effort. The procedure is so arduous, that it can be fatal. Mia comes through the process and now looks 20, although some of her memories are gone.

Mia’s doctors consider her an expensive experiment and legally bind her to them for years of research. Mia runs away to Europe and hides as an illegal alien, living among a youthful bohemian crowd of revolutionaries. She changes her name to Maya. On nearly every page of Holy Fire, Sterling speculates about the future evolution of society, technology, and politics. Strangely, climate change is never brought up. But then, Holy Fire came out a decade before An Inconvenient Truth.

Sterling doesn’t focus on space flight, but it happened. The focus of the story is finding meaning in everyday living on Earth. Dogs and other animals have been uplifted, and talk with computer-aided voices. Governments take care of the needy. People use public transportation. People engineer their minds with designer hormones and neural transmitters. And the net and virtual reality is everywhere. Holy Fire makes me think that Bruce Sterling had abundant optimism for the future in the 1990s. I used to have such liberal optimism but it was crushed in 2016.

Sterling’s future is not quite a utopia, because segments of the population are discontented, especially the young who are too brilliant for their own good. That’s the crowd Mia/Maya, embraces. They want the freedom to fail.

Sterling calls Mia/Maya and others in this book posthumans, and that’s where this story shines. His posthumans aren’t silly comic-book superheroes like in many 21st-century SF books. Virtual reality is toned down too from 21st-century SF stories of people downloading themselves into virtual realities. Sterling tries to stay reasonably realistic and scientific. Holy Fire reminds me of the dense speculation in John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. Sterling doesn’t take it to narrative gonzo extremes like Brunner.

Holy Fire is a somewhat picaresque novel, with one reviewer comparing it to Candide. Of course, Candide is considered a broad satire, and I’m not sure that’s true of Holy Fire. I didn’t read it that way, but I could see how a filmmaker could present Holy Fire as a satire. The novel attempts to be transcendental, you might have guessed that from the title. The youth rebellion in Sterling’s 2090s is like the 1960s involving art, music, drugs, and mind-expansion — adding networking, AI, and AR.

The problem with picaresque novels is they are episodic. The hero is exposed to a series of people and subcultures, and that’s what happens to Mia/Maya. There are so many different characters it’s hard to keep up with them or even care about them. Most of the story is about how they impact Mia/Maya, whereas I believe a novel about a 94-year-old woman becoming 20 again should be about her inner transformations.

Mia is an uptight old lady who protects herself by hiding from life, and Maya is a free-spirit young woman giving everything a try and throwing all caution to the wind. We are told that Mia lost some of her memories, but would she lose all wisdom from living to 94?

Response to Holy Fire is all over the place. Hundreds at Goodreads gave it five stars, a few more hundred gave it four stars, but plenty of folks just didn’t care for the story.

Reviews were also mixed. Tom Easton in “The Reference Library” for the March 1997 issue of Analog has this to say:

Norman Spinrad’s “On Books” from the August 1997 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction also compares Holy Fire to William Gibson’s Idoru but comes to a different conclusion. Both novels are later cyberpunk works from the two leading founders of the cyberpunk movement, so it was logical to review them together. Spinrad is the more insightful of the two reviewers.

Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo in Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 had this to say about Holy Fire.

That Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo would recommend Holy Fire as one of the best SF novels from 1985-2010 is high praise. But why don’t I hear more about this novel after all these years? My assumption, is most science fiction readers don’t particularly care for serious speculation about the future and would prefer to read stories that compel you to turn the pages because of tight plots and characters they care about.

This is my second reading of Holy Fire. I first read it when it came out from the Science Fiction Book Club. I bought it then because its plot sounded similar to a 1926 novel I was trying to find, Phoenix by Lady Dorothy Mills. That book was also about an old woman undergoing a rejuvenation process and then running off to Europe to join a bohemian crowd. I finally found Phoenix several years ago and it’s more of a love story than science fiction. I need to reread it and compare the two.

For my second reading, I listened to it on audio. I’ve started rereading it again with my eyes. I never developed an emotional bond with Holy Fire like I have with the novels I consider my favorites. However, I admire it intellectually. It could have had the emotional impact of Flowers for Algernon because Mia/Maya goes through a similar arc of intellectual development. We just don’t see her experiences as tragic.

I think Sterling tried though. Throughout the novel, Mia/Maya experiences epiphanies that should have had a deep emotional impact. To me, they were just intellectually interesting. The ending should have been profoundly spiritual, like something from Hermann Hesse. Instead, it just seemed like a logical way to end the story. The choices Mia/Maya and her former husband, Daniel made in the end are vivid, even dramatic in concept. That just didn’t make an emotional impact on me. I assume Bruce Sterling wanted the ending to be an emotional epiphany. The ending does say a lot about how a posthuman would react to becoming posthuman.

Please leave a comment if you’ve read Holy Fire. I’m curious if you had an emotional response to the story. I found it intellectually exciting. I would recommend it on that level. However, it didn’t touch me, so I’m hesitant to say it’s good. I gave it four stars on Goodreads.

James Wallace Harris, 12/18/24

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SciFiScavenger’s 2024 SF Survey

The YouTube channel SciFiScavenger recently conducted a poll of their viewers’ favorite science fiction novels. Viewers were asked to submit their Top 10 SF novels in order. SciFiScavenger received around two hundred submissions. They assigned point values, with ten points for #1, nine points for #2 down to one point for #10 to determine the final ranking of the Top 75 books. Watch the video to see the results and hear comments on each book.

I thought this was a good survey and added it as a citation list to the Classics of Science Fiction database. We like to regularly add new polls, lists, and awards to the database because our two lists are generated on the fly listing the most popular novels and short stories. Keeping up with the times reflects the changes in readers’ tastes. Each list, poll, award, scholarly recommendation, etc. is considered a citation. To get on the Classics of Science Fiction v. 5 requires receiving at least 12 citations. Currently, the book with the most citations is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin with 53 citations. As of today, we have 138 books with 12 or more citations.

SciFiScavenger’s results overlap well with our list. Of the 75 books ranked, 56 were already on our list. One title, Parable of the Sowers was pushed onto the list because of this poll. The novel only had 11 citations before the poll, so with SciFiScavenger’s citation, it now had the minimum 12 to be on v. 5 of the list.

We do have one ongoing problem with our system. Some famous series books get on lists by the name of the series, and sometimes by the name of individual titles. For example, Foundation by Isaac Asimov was voted onto SciFiScavenger’s list. We put the vote with The Foundation Trilogy since most people think of the trilogy as one work, and its sometimes even published in one volume. We put The Shadow of the Torturer with The Book of the New Sun.

By continually adding more citation lists we reveal the most popular books over time. We don’t think of our system as recognizing the absolute best books but recognizing the most remembered books and short stories. You can read about the history of the project here. If v. 5 of the list gets too long, we’ll up the minimum citations. This way books that are being forgotten over time drop off. We like to keep the list in the 100-150 range. For v. 6 we’ll probably make the cutoff 14 citations. If you look at the v. 5 list, you’ll see books with 12 and 13 citations will get knock off unless they get additional citations. If you click on the citation number in the v. 5 list, you will see which citations put it on the list.

Here is a list of all our current book citations. If you scroll down to the bottom, you will see SciFiScavenger’s 2024 Poll. Click here to see it. You will see the 75 books on the survey. Each book in bold is on our v. 5 list. Because there is so much overlap, it suggests that SciFiScavenger’s survey correlates well with the aggragation of all the other citation lists.

You can use our List Builder feature to set your own requirements.

James Wallace Harris, 12/1/24

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A MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS by Edgar Pangborn

Why is A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn out of print at Amazon? There is no Kindle or Audible edition either. This 1954 novel won the International Fantasy Award back in 1955. Being out-of-print is especially puzzling when you consider the other winners of that short-lived award: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart (1951), Fancies and Goodnight by John Collier (1952), City by Clifford Simak (1953), More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon (1954), and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1957). A Mirror for Observers has been reprinted several times since 1954, but it’s mostly forgotten.

Two weeks ago, I listed A Mirror for Observers as one of my top ten favorite science fiction novels for a YouTuber survey. I first read the novel back in 2018 and was so impressed with Pangborn that I bought several of his other novels. But that was a first impression. I reread A Mirror for Observers this week and felt it was seriously flawed. Not one I’d still list in my top ten. However, it’s an impressive effort. The main reason I admired the story in 2018 because I was an older reader. I’m not sure younger readers today will care for the novel.

Let’s face it, most science fiction is aimed at our adolescent selves. Science fiction appeals to our fantasies about reality. When I read science fiction at age seventy-three and like a story, it’s generally because that story nostalgically recalls the science fiction I read when I was young, unearthing buried adolescent emotions of hope for the future.

Science fiction readers spend their lives in quiet desperation waiting for their favorite sense of wonders to come true. When you get old and realize you’re never going to trek across Mars or rocket across the galaxy at faster-than-light speeds, you start thinking about reality differently, certain science fiction works take on a new light.

Rereading A Mirror for Observers makes me think it could have been a science fiction novel that Robert M. Pirsig might have written in an alternate reality. In case you’re too young to remember, Pirsig wrote the 1974 bestseller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Edgar Pangborn also used his story to express his philosophical views about society, quoting Greek philosophers, dealing with ethics and aesthetics. Another parallel, both stories involve an older man mentoring a teenage boy.

A Mirror for Observers is a story about two groups of Martians who live among us and have been for thirty thousand years. Mars and Martians, Salvay and Salvayans in their language. The Martians abandoned a dying planet to come to Earth. Think about that word Salvayans. It’s awful close to the world salvation. The two groups of Martians are called the Observers and the Abdicators. The observers watch us hoping to help us without us knowing or interfering with our own development, they are like guardian angels. The Martian renegades, the abdicators, gave up on humanity, deciding we were too stupid to survive the evolutionary challenge, figuring it would be best if we became extinct. The one abdicator we meet, Namir, takes on a role like the devil.

Pangborn throws out a lot of science fictional speculation in the story, but it ultimately feels like a morality tale. Pangborn is spiritual, if not Christian. He’s also very influenced by philosophy and classical music. The story is fun where Pangborn guesses what his near future would be like, now fifty years in our past.

Pangborn was born in 1909, so he was in his forties when he wrote A Mirror for Observers, but the voice of the novel feels much older. Pangborn’s voice comes through as Elmis, the Martian observer who goes by the names Benedict Miles and Will Meisel. Elmis is competing with the abdicator named Namir for the soul of the 12-year-old boy, Angelo Petrovecchio. Elmis also discovers another brilliant child, Sharon, a friend of Angelo who is a few years younger.

As I reread A Mirror for Observers I wanted to love this novel. I wanted it to be great. Unfortunately, this time I discovered too many flaws. The plot has three main disjointed acts. Elmis is sent to the small town, Latimer, Massachusetts to guard Angelo from Namir. We were told that Angelo is very special, an exceptional human that has great potential and needs protection. We do get some hints of that in the conversations between Elmis and Angelo. Martians live for hundreds of years. Elmis is well over three hundred, so he has a great deal of experience with human history, but so has Namir, who is even older.

I do praise Pangborn for imagining Angelo a superior human without giving him superpowers or ESP. Robert Heinlein and John W. Campbell, Jr. often did that to designate a sign of future human evolution. The best part of the story is the Latimer setting, when Angelo and Sharon are young. Sharon is better developed as a character than Angelo, especially with her creative dialog. She even seems more aware than Angelo.

The story eventually jumps a few years, leaving Latimer for New York City, and that’s when the story lost its charm for me. The plot shifts to fighting an emerging fascist organization run by Namir, who wants to take over America, and eventually destroy the world. I thought this section was poorly done, and it reminded me of Heinlein’s early novels about secret societies wanting to overthrow the U.S. Angelo, under a new name, Abraham Brown, does not stand out in this section. He’s rather passive. And the proxy war that Elmis and Namir are fighting is vague and fictionally lame.

The final section of the novel involves a pandemic. (That could elevate the story with readers this decade because of our recent pandemic.) Angelo becomes more active, but he doesn’t do anything exceptional. Strangely, the exceptional human in this story, is Sharon. She has become a musical prodigy through arduous work, practicing up to twelve hours a day. She has always been in love with Angelo and wants to be reunited with him.

I like Elmis and Sharon as characters. Angelo just never gels to what Pangborn promised. We needed him to stand out, like Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon, or Valentine Michael Smith in A Stranger in a Strange Land. He never does. That’s the major fault of this novel.

Pangborn focuses on juvenile delinquency and gangs in the first section of the novel, a worry considered a national threat in the 1950s. Pangborn is also concerned with the cold war, and other elements underming society. You sense that Pangborn is anxious about the world and uses this novel to explore his fears. That’s why I compare it to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The heart of this story is very strong, which is why I wanted to love A Mirror for Observers. I admire it for its intent, but I can see why its flaws make it a forgotten novel.

Pangborn made a huge writing mistake by having the Martians go through three sets of names. Angelo is needlessly renamed Abraham Brown in the second section. This was very confusing. Drastically shifting the plot twice also hurt the story. The subplot with the fascists was just poorly developed, although it resonates with our present, making it feel more relevant than it really is. The pandemic section is well done, and moving, being the emotional peak of the story, but the emotions are melodramtically generated.

We are promised a spirtual novel. The Martian observers see potential in us, but that potential is never revealed. Pangborn gives us more evidence to support Namir’s position that we don’t deserve survival.

A Mirror for Observers reminds me of another novel I picked for my top ten list, The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis. That 1963 novel is about a Martian coming to Earth hoping to find the technology to secretly build a spaceship that could bring 300 surviving Martians to Earth from their dying planet. Tevis also uses his story to comment on the evils of current day society. His Martian, whom we know as Thomas Jerome Newton, is a much better developed character. Like Pangborn, Tevis takes his character through several jarring plot twists, but I remember it working better. I need to reread it too, to know for sure.

At seventy-three I’m going back in time looking for science fiction works originally aimed at mature readers. The trouble is I’m concurrently reading the literary classics of the 20th and 21st century, and the contrast reveals how poorly written science fiction has always been. There are exceptions, but they are few. I just finished Attonement by Ian McEwan, and the character development is light-years beyond Pangborn’s efforts.

Still, I want to like A Mirror for Observers. Jo Walton, in her review says she rereads Mirror every decade. I will probably reread A Mirror for Observers again someday too. Quite often flaws I see in a second reading are overcome in a third or fourth reading.

JWH

Other Reviews:

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“Zeta-Epsilon” by Isabel J. Kim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Wallace Harris, 11/12/24

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The State of the Science Fiction Short Story in 2024

For thirty-five years (1984-2018) I depended on Gardner Dozois to tell me about the state of short science fiction in his annual The Year’s Best Science Fiction. After he died, there were still many best-of-the-year anthologies to consult, but none had the extensive wrap-up of the year in science fiction that Dozois produced. By 2024 some of those anthologies have died off, making me wonder if the science fiction short story is dying off too.

Print magazines have lost subscribers for decades, and influential online publishers continually complain about a lack of funding. Today I read an article in Business Insider about how the plurality of companies selling online makes it hard to know what to buy. My theory is there are too many publishers for science fiction short stories. It’s great for new writers wanting to get published, but it’s bad for us readers because we’re reading stories that would have remained in the slush pile decades ago.

Before the internet, fans of short science fiction bought The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Asimov’s, and an occasional original anthology like Orbit. There were semi-pro magazines, but few read them. Because there were fewer slots where a story could appear the competition to get into one was greater.

John Joseph Adams in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 gives a fair overview of science fiction short story publishers. His anthology publishes twenty stories each year. Ten science fiction and ten fantasy. As the series editor, he picks 80 stories to give to the guest editor, who picks the 20 that are published. Here are the publications he used, with the number of stories included in the 80 in parentheses.

  • Lightspeed (7)
  • Clarkesworld (5)
  • Uncanny (5)
  • Beneath Ceaseless Skies (4)
  • The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (4)
  • Reactor (formally Tor.com) (4)
  • Asimov’s Science Fiction (3)
  • The Sunday Morning Transport (3)
  • Fantasy Magazine (2)
  • McSweeney’s (2)
  • Bourbon Penn (1)
  • Cast of Wonders (1)
  • Escape Pod (1)
  • FIYAH (1)
  • Nightmare (1)
  • PseudoPod (1)
  • The Dark (1)

Since this is only 46 stories, the other 34 must have come from author collections and original anthologies. Adams said he also read these periodicals:

  • Analog
  • Apex Magazine
  • Apparition Lit
  • Baffling Magazine
  • The Kenyon Review
  • khōréō
  • Vastarien
  • Weird Horror

This doesn’t cover all the publishers of short science fiction. By the way, some of these periodicals are for fantasy and horror. I only care about science fiction, so I’m disappointed with every other story in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024. You can read Adams’s introduction by reading the sample at Amazon. It’s mostly about his selection process but it gives a good insight into what’s being published.

Because so many science fiction short stories are being published I’ve given up trying to follow the genre during the year by reading the periodicals. I just wait for the annual best-of-the-year anthologies. I occasionally buy F&SF, Analog, or Asimov’s, but F&SF has too little SF, Analog has too many minor stories, and Asimov’s has become rather hit-and-miss. I can’t but wonder if they’d get better stories if the online markets didn’t exist.

Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 8 is more to my taste, but it’s over a year behind. Volume 8 covering 2022 stories, came out in September 2024.

Clarke reports finding a huge number of print magazines:

  • Analog
  • Asimov’s
  • Bourbon Penn
  • Clarkesworld
  • Cossmass
  • Infinities
  • Dark Matter
  • The Dread Machine
  • Dreamforge
  • Fusion
  • Fragment
  • Galaxy’s Edge
  • Infinite Worlds
  • Lady Churchhill’s Rosebud Wristlet
  • Luna Station Quarterly
  • The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF)
  • Interzone
  • Metaphorosis
  • On Spec
  • Planet Scumm
  • Pulphouse
  • Pulp Literature
  • Reckoning
  • Shoreline of Infinity
  • Space and Time
  • Underland Arcana
  • Weird Tales
  • Wyldblood

That blows my mind. I never see most of those titles. Clarke’s State of the Union of SF short stories is comprehensive. I guess he’s the new Gardner Dozois. Even if you don’t buy Clarke’s anthology, you can read his introduction in the sample at Amazon. I won’t summarize what he says, it covers what my title above claims but only hints at. Go read his overview.

Allan Kaster publishes two best-of-the-year anthologies. They showcase SF stories about hard science fiction and AI/robots. Kaster comes closest to what I want to read. I think Kaster succeeds because he defines his science fiction narrowly and only publishes twelve to fifteen stories. Before Gardner Dozois blew up the size of annual best-of-the-year SF anthologies, editors like Donald Wollheim, David Hartwell, and Terry Carr just picked ten to fifteen stories each year too. Check out his two series: The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories and The Year’s Top AI and Robot Stories.

There is an overwhelming number of science fiction short stories to read coming out. In that regard, the industry is doing great. Remember the lament in Business Insider, there are too many sellers. It makes selecting difficult and lowers overall quality. Back in 1953, there was an SF magazine boom, with over forty titles published. That boom crashed because the genre couldn’t support that many titles. I wonder if that will be true today? Or does the Internet allow for countless tiny markets supported by a handful of faithful fans? If that’s true, it might be better to ignore the larger genre, and just find a comfortable niche.

James Wallace Harris, 11/10/24

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HOTHOUSE by Brian W. Aldiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Wallace Harris, 11/8/24

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Do Your Top 10 Favorite Science Fiction Books Change Often?

Bookpilled recently posted on YouTube “Ranking All the Books from Every Top 15 Sci-Fi List” where he reevaluated several years of his All-Time Top 15 SF Books videos. Interestingly, books that had been near the top on earlier lists were thrown off by books from later lists. He also reread some of his favorites, which didn’t hold up. In other words, he discovered better books and found that his first impressions didn’t always hold up. This has been my experience too.

People list their favorite books they discovered early in life. Few people reread books. Quite often, the books you read early in life, make a greater impact, than the books you read later in life.

There is no absolute way to measure the quality of a book. Our Classics of Science Fiction list, we use popularity over many lists to rank books. But the top books on the Classics lists aren’t my all-time favorite SF books.

SciFiScavenger, another YouTuber, is currently collecting votes for favorite SF novels. He asks everyone to list their top ten and will create a list and video of the most popular. You can post your top ten to his poll here. Here’s my Top 10.

  1. Have Space Suit-Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein
  2. Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein
  3. Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein
  4. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
  5. Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
  6. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
  7. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
  8. A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn
  9. The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis
  10. Replay by Ken Grimwood

I’ve read eight of these books at least twice, most three times, and the top three I’ve read more than six times each. I’ve only read the Pangborn and Tevis once each, but they’ve left an impression. If I had spent more time on the list I might have substituted different books for those two. Hyperion comes to mind. I read it three times, and it had a tremendous first impact. However, the older me felt A Mirror for Observers and The Man Who Fell to Earth were deeper books for me at this time in my life.

I also felt The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds are the two most original science fiction books ever written, and should be on a Top Ten list. I really do like them too. I’ve read each several times. I wanted to include a Philip K. Dick novel because he’s my second favorite science fiction author after Heinlein, but I just couldn’t settle on one book – PKD has written too many good SF books to pick a favorite.

I could have made the entire list of ten by Heinlein. And could have made the whole list of ten by Dick. Heinlein made a life-long impact on me during my formative years from 13-18 (1964-1969). I developed problems with Heinlein as I got older, but I still regularly reread his books published before 1960. They are sentimental favorites, my go-to feel-good books. PKD is who I read when I’m feeling weird or I don’t feel like reading anything else. His books are endlessly fascinating, but I’m uncertain if they’re important to me on a psychological level.

I love Replay. I consider time loop stories to be science fiction. I chose it over a PKD because its philosophical explorations resonate with me more than Dick’s philosophical explorations.

I read #1-7 before 1970, when I was an adolescent. All except A Mirror for Observers is on audio, a format that has more impact on me. I wish Audible would publish more Pangborn. They only have his obscure mystery novel, The Trial of Callista Blake. I wished they would publish A Mirror for Observers, Davy, and a collection of his shorter work.

Notice, no books by Asimov and Clarke on my list, even though I’ve read many of their books and enjoyed them. Notice, Dune is not on the list even though I’ve read it twice and plan to read it for a third time soon. Dune is a better work of art than most of the books on my list. Its science-fictional content just doesn’t resonate well with me. I see it as more of an epic fantasy.

What are your favorite SF books? How have they changed over your lifetime? Have newer books supplanted your older favorites? I’ve read a lot of 21st-century science fiction, much of which I admired, but those books just haven’t stuck in my mind as all-time favorites. Is it because new SF is different from old SF, or is it because the books we read when young just stick with us?

I saw another YouTube video that I want to reference here. Rick Beato talks about how most artistic people do their best work before they turn 30. He uses The Beatles as an example. The Fab Four made all their records together while in their twenties. And all their solo efforts after their twenties.

I wonder if the art we admire most is that we encounter before turning 30, or even 20. Is there a relationship between being creative and admiring creativity? A lot of people give up actively listening to music as they get older, and many of the people who still listen to music as they get older, only listen to music they discovered before they were 30. Is that true with books too?

James Wallace Harris, 11/3/24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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THE TWILIGHT ZONE – “Judgment Night”

“What was the first time-loop story?” my friend Mike asked me after watching “Judgment Night.”

“The first one I remember was Replay by Ken Grimwood.” But his question got me thinking.

Time looping became famous with the film Groundhog Day. Later, I learned that there were earlier examples and the theme has become somewhat popular.

“Judgment Night” is about a ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean in 1942, when Nazi submarines were hunting them. I can see how Mike could think this show is an early example of a time loop story but I didn’t think it was one exactly. However, “Judgment Night” suggests how the time loop story evolved.

If you haven’t seen “Judgment Night” you might want to stop reading here and go watch it. Several streaming sources offer The Twilight Zone. Try PlutoTV or freevee on Amazon Prime if you don’t mind commercials for free viewing. (Amazon has the complete series on DVD for under $30.)

“Judgment Night” opens with Nehemiah Persoff on the deck of a cargo ship on a foggy night. He looks scared. As he meets the other passengers and crew he acts very strange. They wonder if he has amnesia since he can only recall his name, Carl Lanser. When he eventually recalls that he was born in Frankfurt the others get worried that he might be a Nazi, especially since he also seems to know all about U-boat wolfpacks. Eventually, the ship is attacked, and we’re then shown a scene from a submarine. The captain is Carl Lanser. His first officer is Lt. Mueller (James Franciscus) tells him he feels remorse for sinking a ship with civilians, especially since they gave no warning. Captain Lanser shows no remorse, and Mueller suggests they will be condemned by God. Then we’re shown Nehemiah Persoff back on the ship again, and Rod Serling says:

The SS Queen of Glasgow, heading for New York, and the time is 1942. For one man it is always 1942—and this man will ride the ghost ship every night for eternity. This is what is meant by paying the fiddler. This is the comeuppance awaiting every man when the ledger of his life is opened and examined, the tally made, and then the reward or the penalty paid. And in the case of Carl Lanser, former Kapitan Lieutenant, Navy of the Third Reich, this is the penalty. This is the justice meted out. This is judgment night in the Twilight Zone.

I can see why Mike asked about time loops. Wikipedia reveals that the concept has been around for a while. I think “Judgment Night” is proto time loop for one reason, because Captain Lanser doesn’t know he’s in a time loop, and doesn’t discover it. It’s just his version of hell, a punishment like not unlike Sisyphus having to roll a rock up a hill forever.

Reoccurring dreams might be the inspiration for time loop stories. Also the wish to have a do over in life is common enough to inspire writers. However, I think the essence of a time loop story is a character discovering they are looping and then trying to get out of the loop.

My first encounter with the idea of a time loop was when I read Replay by Ken Grimwood in 1986. I saw a review in Time Magazine and went immediately to the bookstore and bought it new in hardback. The idea of living my life over totally intrigued me, and it’s a great novel. My next encounter with the theme was in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Cause and Effect” from 1992. Of course, Groundhog Day from 1993 was dazzling. I’ve seen many movies, TV shows, and read plenty of books and short stories that use the theme since. So far, none have been as philosophically effective as Replay.

It’s a shame that Rod Serling, who wrote “Judgment Night” didn’t have Carl Lanser know he was in a time loop. Wouldn’t that have made the punishment more enlightening to Lanser? And more hellish? The episode was good, but not great.

Lanser only suffers eternally, and maybe that’s all Serling thought he deserved. The theme of time looping offers redemption, and even resurrection.

Maybe it wasn’t practical to tell such a tale in a 25 minute show. We have to learn the character is repeating, and that involves showing us the character going through the loop more than once. But if Serling could have pulled that off, I think “Judgment Night” would have been one of the great Twilight Zone episodes.

Time looping is very philosophical, even spiritual. It’s easy to see why it’s a punishment used by gods, but in Replay and Groundhog Day, we can see that it’s a tool for enlightenment. Time looping has a certain Zen quality to it.

Unfortunately, Serling just used part of the concept to allow his audience to hate Nazis. And to be an anti-war story. The Twilight Zone featured a number of those.

James Wallace Harris, 10/30/24