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Worlds Without End Blog

Reading the Pulps 11: Where to Find Them Posted at 12:19 PM by James Wallace Harris

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Few people still read the pulps. There are collectors, like those who gather at PulpFest, that buy, collect, and read the actual magazines from the past. But they are not many anymore. Pulps were printed on cheap paper that wasn’t acid-free, so decades later they’re doing a slow burn into oblivion. Generally, their pages are brown, brittle, and have a distinctive smell. Many of them have become too fragile to read, with pages so dry that fragments snap off.

There is little reason for the average reader to read an original pulp magazine because most of their best stories have been long reprinted in books, audiobooks, and ebooks. Many bookworms don’t even know they’ve been reading pulp fiction their entire life. But if you love a particular genre, and want to explore its roots, I highly recommend reading digital copies of the original pulps. The illustrations, editorials, letters to the editor, non-fiction columns, and ads all take you back to another time. Just look at how space suits were imagined in this 1940 illustration from the June issue of Astonishing Stories.

There are many places on the web to find copies of pulps to read. For example, the issue of Astounding Stories that contained the illustration above can be found at the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is a non-profit library that preserves popular culture digitized for the web. The Internet Archive is also known for its WayBackMachine that archives old websites.

For each issue of a pulp magazine the Internet Archive preserves, it provides a variety of reading formats, including Kindle, ePub, PDF, full-text, Abbyy OCR, and the one I prefer, CBR reader (RAR/CBR/CBZ files). These are single file collections of images that can be viewed with a comic book reader (CBR) program. The advantage of CBR is each page is a high-resolution image.

The Pulp Magazine Archive at the Internet Archive also allows visitors to read the pulps on screen with a web viewer. This is great for casual reading. But if you want to sit in your easy chair and use your iPad to travel back to the first half of the 20th century, then downloading a preferred file-type is better. I just save an issue to Dropbox and open it with Chunky, my iOS CBR reader.

I don’t regularly read pulp magazines. I mainly read specific old issues for research about the history of science fiction. I doubt the Internet Archive will become a major source of free reading. Pulps are fun to sample like finding an old 1938 issue of Life Magazine at a flea market and taking it home for an afternoon of contemplating the past.

There are many places on the web to learn about pulp magazine history. Just search Google for “Pulp Magazines.” Most fans of these old magazines are bookworms in their last third of life who remember what they loved to read from their first third. I expect as they die off, interest in pulps will fade, and these old scanned issues will only be of interest to scholars.

If you would like to buy pulp magazines to see what they were physically like, I suggest using eBay and searching for bargain lots. Individual issues of can run into money because of specific collector value, whereas some sellers will bunch together several odd issues and sell them at a bargain. However, what you really want is one with a beautiful cover in top condition. Some people even frame these as decorative art objects.

Reading the Pulps 10: “In Hiding” by Wilmar H. Shiras Posted at 8:08 AM by James Wallace Harris

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“In Hiding” originally appeared in the November 1948 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. You can find this story in these books, which include:

Warning: This column contains mild spoilers

I just finished listening to the new audiobook edition of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 2B. “In Hiding” turned out to be my favorite story in the collection. I don’t think I’ve read it before, although it feels vaguely familiar. And I had no memory of ever encountering the author, Wilmar H. Shiras, before. It turns out Wilmar was a woman, making her only the third woman writer in the first three volumes of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

“In Hiding” is a quiet story about a boy who is so smart that he has to hide his intelligence from other kids and grown-ups. I thought it a remarkable story, and so did the readers of Astounding Science-Fiction back in November 1948. “In Hiding” scored first place in “The Analytical Laboratory,” with an average score of 1.54, meaning most readers put it at the top of their list. That doesn’t happen often. John W. Campbell, the editor had this to say:

Wilmar H. Shiras sent in her first science fiction story, “In Hiding.” I liked it and bought it at once. Evidently, I was not alone in liking it: it has made an exceptional showing in the Lab here—the sort of showing, in fact, that Bob Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, and Lewis Padgett made with their first yarns. I have reason to believe we’ve found a new front-rank author. Incidentally, there’s a sequel to “In Hiding” coming up in the March issue.

Shiras wrote two more stories for Campbell, “Opening Doors” (March 1949) and “New Foundations” (March 1950). In 1953 Shiras came out with Children of the Atom from Gnome Press by including the three Astounding stories and writing two more to create a collection. Although this book has been reprinted many times over the years, it’s not well-known, and Wilmar H. Shiras only wrote a handful of other stories, including three for Ted White’s Fantastic in the early 1970s. It’s a shame that Campbell was wrong about her, and she didn’t become a major science fiction writer. Wikipedia has damn little about Shiras. She got married at 18, had two boys and three girls. Children of the Atom is the main reason she is remembered, and only by a few old fans.

I found “In Hiding” to be a philosophically insightful science fiction story because of how Shiras dealt with the human mutant theme. There are some who claim (without documentation) that Children of the Atom inspired Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to create X-men comics. After the atomic bomb in 1945, radiation was used for all kinds of miracle mutations in comics, pulps, books, television shows, and movies. Radiation caused insects to grow as big as dinosaurs and for people to develop superpowers. Shiras took a quieter approach. Parents working at an atomic plant conceived mutant children with very high IQs. Normal looking, but very smart. I found that much more appealing than silly stories of oddities with superpowers.

I don’t know why, but science fiction has a long history of imagining Humans 2.0, and they invariably give our replacements telepathy and other psychic powers. I just don’t see that happening. Psi-powers are obviously borrowed from stories of gods, angels, and other magical beings in myths. Isn’t prayer telepathy with God? Don’t angels and demons teleport? Aren’t god-like beings always using telekinesis to act powerfully? I find it psychologically lame that SF writers assume evolution will lead to such talents. Superpowers appeal to the child in us. We want reality to be magical — it’s not.

Shiras takes a different approach, one I feel is more adult. Radiation can cause mutations. Sadly, most would be unwanted physical changes. But, Shiras suggests just a bump in smarts. Not god-like super-knowledge, but children smarter than average. In her stories, it’s implied the orphan children of the atomic plant workers have IQs greater than 150. They are orphans because the plant blows up.

“In Hiding” is about Tim, a boy a school psychologist discovers is a lot smarter than his B average grades imply. Over time the psychologist gains the confidence of the boy and learns Tim pretends to be a normal kid because he discovered at a very early age that other people, young or old, resents intelligence greater than theirs. Tim hides. He is raised by his grandparents who expect him to be well-behaved and quiet, and when he is, allows Tim to have privacy and a workshop in an old barn. By using the mail, and pseudonyms, Tim creates secret personalities that pursue various hobbies, conducts science experiments, breeds cats, completes college correspondence courses, sells stories to magazines, and writes articles for journals.

Science fiction has speculated about Homo superior or superior aliens since the 19th century. Almost always they imagine big heads and ESP. I think evolution is obviously working towards increased intelligence and self-awareness. I believe AI machines will be the next rung on the evolutionary ladder, but I also assume it is possible humans could undergo mutations that will lead to a new and improved biological species. But what is better? Marvel Comics mutants appeal to the child in us. What improvements would rational adults hope for? What new species of humans would have better adaptations for our current reality?

I’d say a species that is smart enough to live in cooperation with nature, one that doesn’t cause endless wars, mass extinctions, and poisons the ecosystem. Science fiction and comic books can’t seem to conceive of that. If Wilmar H. Shiras had continued with her series, she might have. Science fiction shines at imagining dystopias but fails at speculating about utopias. Billions plan to go to heaven, but the most complete description of heaven in The Bible sounds like hell to me.

It’s sadly ironic, but Wilmar H. Shiras has been in hiding all these years.

 

 

Reading the Pulps 9: “Co-Operate—Or Else!” by A. E. van Vogt Posted at 9:13 AM by James Wallace Harris

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“Co-Operate—Or Else!” originally appeared in the April 1942 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. You can find this story in these anthologies, which include:

  • The Great SF Stories 4 (1942) edited by Asimov & Greenberg
  • Futures Past: The Best Short Fiction of A. E. van Vogt
  • The War Against the Rull by A. E. van Vogt (fix-up novel)

Warning: This column contains minor spoilers

 

“Co-Operate—Or Else!” begins with a bang and keeps exploding with action. Readers feel like they’ve been thrown into a climax of an adventure novel as Professor Jamieson hangs from an anti-gravity disc high above a jungle planet. (Think high tech parachute.) We learn later in the story that his spaceship has been destroyed by one violent alien creature, an ezwal, and Jamieson is the sole survivor from a crew of over hundred humans. The ezwal, a giant six-legged creature stands on top of the anti-gravity disc trying to kill Jamieson as they float towards the surface of a deadly planet. Later on another race of aliens, the Rull, try to kill both of them, thus the title. This is a terrific start to a science fiction adventure.

Every time I read a science fiction story about aliens I wonder if the author will present a new view of aliens. I’ve been consuming science fiction for sixty years and it’s been a long time since I encountered anything different. Have SF writers imagined all the possibilities? One of my retirement projects is reading all the great short stories in the science fiction genre. I’m systematically going through the annual best-of-the-year anthologies starting in 1939 as well as reading the outstanding retrospective anthologies that preserve the most distinctive science fiction stories from the last four hundred years.

I’ve been keeping a mental list of alien archetypes. It’s starting to feel like that list will be finite because of the constant reuse of the same old forms. In the next decade, I’ll be reading a couple thousand stories which should give me a good statistical example to see if I’m right.

In counting types of imagined aliens, I’m wondering if it should be a list of discrete examples or a list of spectrums. Should alien invaders be subcategorized into various kinds of invading beings or just a spectrum from ultimate nightmares to ultimate BAFFs? Should we create a database of alien taxonomies or just use a spectrum from completely incomprehensible to just like us? We could divide alien relationships into enemies, allies, traders, friends, rulers, subjects, equals, etc., or give a numerical score of 0 for no communication possible to 10 for aliens with whom we develop a telepathic symbiotic relationship.

Science fiction writers have a hard time portraying aliens without using human attributes. “The Martian Odyssey” was such an astounding story in 1934 because Stanley Weinbaum described aliens by their bizarre behaviors. Concurrent with Weinbaum in the 1930s Olaf Stapledon in Star Maker, presented most kinds of aliens we’d see in science fiction for decades to come.

Science fiction writers work hard to imagine what a first contact will reveal. Have they pre-imagined all the possibilities? I sometimes wonder if they have, but I’m going to assume when we actually encounter aliens they will be everything we never imagined. Of course, they might be a black swan, and we’ll hit our heads like a V-8 commercial and say, “That’s so obvious, why didn’t we ever think of that?”

Everyone knows we have mental receptors for recognizing characteristics of sexual attraction in other humans. What if we also have receptors for archetypes in fiction? And even specific ones for science fiction? And what if those archetypes are finite because of hardwired neural limitations?

I’m going to use “Co-Operate—Ore Else!” because it triggered several archetypes as I read. I’m learning from old science fiction why we psychologically respond to science fiction. I’m sure how we imagine aliens in science fiction is directly related to how we pre-imagined people from other cultures. Science fiction often connects deeply with our xenophobia. The trouble is science fiction writers need to imagine beings that aren’t like us, and that’s very hard to do. Look how long we’ve taken to recognize intelligence in other Earthly animals.

Great science fiction lies between the gosh-wow thrill of a Buck Rogers serial and the hard precise mathematically reality of the latest NASA probe. “Co-Operate–Or Else!” reminds me of so many science fiction stories that came later. Picture Captain Kirk in an Enemy Mine conflict on a Deathworld planet.

Back in the 1940s A. E. van Vogt was a superstar of science fiction pulp writers. Many claim The Golden Age of Science Fiction began in July 1939 with his story “The Black Destroyer.” And anyone who has read that story is reminded of the film Alien because of the monster who sneaks onto the ship. Plus, the captain and crew will remind them of Forbidden Planet and Star Trek. Back in 1966 when Star Trek premiered, I thought it original because I had only been reading science fiction for four years. But in the fifty plus years since, I keep discovering how it riffed off Golden Age science fiction. When I read even older science fiction, I discovered the Golden Age writers weren’t original either.

Science fiction writers keep repeating certain concepts while using the same writing techniques. Both the concepts and the techniques can be considered archetypes that go way back into our collective consciousness. Because science fiction works off our past, it has a very difficult time imagining beings we’ve never encountered.

Fantastic Action Adventure might be the first archetype we’re dealing with in this van Vogt story. I doubt Homer was the first to use it or George Lucas the last, yet elements of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Star Wars have striking similarities. Joseph Campbell has covered that thoroughly. Heroic conflict in strange lands with fantastic creatures can’t be claimed by science fiction but they are part of its evolutionary development.

Also common to all fiction is the Cliffhanger-Escape technique. Van Vogt throws his characters into a series of traps that promise certain death only to have them escape. The new Lost in Space often featured two or three cliffhangers with escapes in each episode. Combining fast action with repeated escapes was the standard plot structure of most pulp fiction stories. So, what archetypes of storytelling are unique to science fiction?

Two that van Vogt uses in this story effectively is the Not Like Us Alien and the Ultimate Threat Alien. The ezwal are an intelligent race of beings that don’t use technology. The unnamed telepathic ezwal in this story wants to kill humans for invading their planet, treating his species like food animals, and not recognizing their form of intelligence. The Rull are a species of intelligent being that use technology and travel from galaxy to galaxy destroying all intelligent species. They also eat humans which makes them our ultimate enemy. Cannibalism has always been the pinnacle of horror for describing human enemies. The ezwal are like us getting to talk to an octopus about why we eat them. Van Vogt creates the Rull by imagining a top-level predator who would eat us.

We learn later in the story that Professor Jamieson was bringing the ezwal to Earth to prove their species were intelligent so the federation of over 4,800 worlds with indigenous intelligent species would change their policy on Carson’s Planet, the homeworld of the ezwal. Just before the story began the ezwal escaped aboard ship and killed every human except Jamieson and destroyed the spaceship. “Co-Operate—Or Else!” is about Jamieson’s struggle to convince the ezwal to change his mind about humans. He also wants to convince the ezwal to combine forces, first to survive the deadly planet, and later to fight the Rull. He tells the ezwall his species must join their federation to war against the Rull or else all the species in our galaxy will be destroyed. The ezwal wants to ally his race with the Rull to destroy the humans, and Jamieson struggles to convince the ezwal the Rull have no allies. How many times have we seen this plot?

Nostalgia is an archetype used by all types of fiction. “Co-Operate—Or Else!” doesn’t use it directly, except that I imagine 1942 SF readers were reminded of Edgar Rice Burroughs planetary adventures, or earlier science fiction classics like “A Martian Odyssey.” It’s funny, but much of modern film/TV science fiction is strongly nostalgia driven. Fans can’t let go of Star Trek, Star Wars, or even Lost in Space. I suppose rebooting classic science fiction TV shows only reinforces my theory that there’s a limited number of science fictional archetypes that appeal to us.

If you analyze all the science fiction books, movies and television shows about alien contact, we could sort them into a set of categories. War of the Worlds is not the first alien invasion story, but probably the one most people think defined the archetype. It also illustrates xenophobic science fiction. Tweel in “The Martian Odyssey” is probably how most older SF  readers remember the E.T. category of a good alien. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers defines the ultimate threat alien to many readers. These are aliens we can kill without ethical consequences. That is until Orson Scott Card refined the category with Ender’s Game/Speaker for the Dead/Xenocide. The ezwal reminds me of the one-with-nature aliens in Avatar.

“Co-Operate—Or Else!” suggests another archetype – nonhuman intelligence. In most science fiction stories aliens are pretty much like us. Few authors work to convey truly alien aliens who perceive reality much differently from humans. The ezwal claims humans use of technology is a crutch. The ezwal are like dolphins, being intelligent without building things. The ezwal tells Jamieson that technology made them blind to their superior mental abilities. The ezwal use telepathy to survive and evolve. Does that make them superior aliens? Quite often in science fiction, we define superior beings by their ability to use psychic powers. But isn’t that the same thing we did with gods and God? We have a very limited ability to imagine beings more advanced than us.

I just finished the new 10-part Lost in Space on Netflix. The aliens in this show are intelligent robots. Are they evil beings out to exterminate humans, or are there reasons their violence against us could be ethical? Because fiction often wants pure enemies to destroy without moral qualms, science fiction often invents Borg, Bezerkers, Bugs, or Buggers to kill without empathy. But isn’t this like video games seeking kill thrills?

Van Vogt covers a lot of ground in “Co-Operate—Or Else!” Jamieson wants humans and ezwal to coexist. But he also claims there will be aliens who want to exterminate all other intelligent beings and they should be made extinct. Is that the true spectrum of how we imagine aliens — from those we should kill, to those we should befriend? In Roadside Picnic, Russian SF writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky imagined aliens we couldn’t comprehend. who were neither a threat nor potential friend, because we were completely inconsequential to them.

“Co-Operate—Or Else!” is a fairly early SF story. As I continue to read through the years of science fiction I expect to find a variety of aliens, yet I worry I won’t find anything I haven’t encountered before. I feel challenged to seek authors who can escape the event horizon of our collective imaginations. But is that possible? I plan to keep a spreadsheet of  SF archetypes, and maybe that will eventually describe the scope of science fiction.

 

 

JWH

Reading the Pulps 8: “Solar Plexus” by James Blish Posted at 8:00 AM by James Wallace Harris

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“Solar Plexus” by James Blish original appeared in the September 1941 issue of Astonishing Stories.

You can find this story in these anthologies, which include:

  • Beyond Human Ken (1952) edited by Judith Merril
  • Men and Machines (1968, 2009) edited by Robert Silverberg. This version can be read online via Google Books.
  • The Great SF Stories 3 1941 (1980) edited by Asimov & Greenberg

Warning: This essay contains spoilers.

“Solar Plexus” by James Blish isn’t a famous story. As far as I can tell, it was never included in any of Blish’s short story collections, and there were over a dozen of them. He must not have liked it much.

I was intrigued by “Solar Plexus” because it was first published in 1941 and contained words that shouldn’t have been used that year. I read “Solar Plexus” in The Great SF Stories 3 1941 edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. Either James Blish had access to secret research, was very good at extrapolation and coining words, or he had access to a time machine. Of course, the easy answer, Blish revised this story when it was reprinted for book publication. I wish he hadn’t.

I also wish I had access to a copy of Astonishing Stories September 1941 so I could read the original. Unfortunately, the cheapest copy I could locate for sale is $35 plus $15 for shipping. I’m not going to spend $50 to solve a minor literary mystery.

The first phrase that set off warning bells was “the UN’s police cruiser.” The United Nations was established in 1945. I supposed Blish could have guessed the phrase United Nations from the United States.

The next word that caught my attention was “computer.” In 1941 people used the word computer to mean humans that worked at mathematical calculations, not machines. But still, he could have imagined the language changing.

After that came “transistor radio.” The transistor was invented in 1947, and the transistor radio was first developed in 1954. I assumed Blish rewrote “Solar Plexus” in 1952 for the Judith Merril anthology. Now I’m wondering if he revised it again for the 1968 Robert Silverberg anthology Men and Machines.

Blish also used the word, “astronaut” which has been around for various uses, but I’m not sure it was used the way Blish used it in 1941 for space-traveler. I think NASA made that popular, and NASA was created in 1958.

Blish is credited with coining the term “gas giant” but I find that very hard to believe. Technovelgy says the term wasn’t used in the 1941 version but was in the 1952 revision of the story. Even Wikipedia gives him credit. So, wow!

In my research for this story, I found out that Blish constantly revised his short stories. I consider that a kind of cheating when considering the SF speculation aspects. I love reading old science fiction to understand how people in the past thought about the future. Science fiction never predicts the future, but it does speculate and extrapolate. That’s the art of science fiction.

I assume the basic plot of “Solar Plexus” was the same in 1941 despite the updating of terminology. In the story, Brant Kittinger is an astronomer living in a space habitat orbiting a newly discovered gas giant in our solar system. His work is interrupted when a spaceship arrives and connects to his airlock. Kittinger is tricked into going into the new ship where he discovers it’s controlled by a sentient computer that was once Murray Bennett.

This is the earliest science fiction story I know that presents a cyborg spaceship. Bennett had his own body destroyed, incorporating his brain into a ship’s control system. Blish talks about nerve-to-circuit surgery which science is working on today. Cyborgs have a long history as a concept, and science fiction has had many stories about sentient spaceships, including the popular The Ship Who Sang (1969) by Anne McCaffrey.

The plot of “Solar Plexus” is rather simple. Bennett wants to use Kittinger’s brain to create other ships. But the computer mind struggles to understand motivation and purpose. Of course, Kittinger doesn’t want his brain recycled for spaceship parts. Luckily for him, Bennett has another captive on board, a Lt. Powell, and the two of them figure out how to outwit the ship.

I was troubled by the ending though. I didn’t want Kittinger and Powell to kill the sentient ship. However, they have no qualms about doing it. From the same collection, The Great SF Stories 3, I read Isaac Asimov’s story “Liar!” where we are introduced to Susan Calvin. Calvin coldly murders a sentient computer too. Evidently, back in 1941, there was no empathy for AI minds.

I would have been more impressed with Blish if he had created a sympathetic cyborg. Fiction is driven by conflict, and the easiest threat to create in writing is one of bodily harm. That’s why intelligent computers are mostly seen as nightmare killers because unimaginative authors can’t invent a better complication for the conflicts of their stories.

James Blish didn’t lack imagination, just read “Surface Tension.” “Solar Plexus” would be a better-remembered story if it hadn’t been about another mad scientist wanting to harvest brains. Of course, Astonishing Stories wasn’t a top-tier pulp, and 1941 was still early in Blish’s career as a writer.

That said, I try to imagine what it might have been like to be a teen reading a copy of Astonishing Stories in the fall of 1941. The concepts of space travel, spaceships, computers, weren’t highly developed in the public’s mind back then. “Solar Plexus” showed a lot of creative imagination.

I wish science fiction writers wouldn’t revise their stories. Or if they do, date them some way. We should have “Solar Plexus,” “Solar Plexus (1952)” and maybe even “Solar Plexus (1968)” listed in ISFDB. I wish Asimov/Greenberg had used the 1941 version in their collection. Of the three volumes I’ve read so far, I think one introduction mentioned using the original rather than the revised story.

JWH

Reading the Pulps 7: “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany Posted at 9:11 AM by James Wallace Harris

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“The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany first appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow February 1967.

You might already own “The Star Pit” in one of these books:

Warning: This column contains spoilers.

“The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany is a complex novella I’ve read several times in the last half-century. It reiterates common themes Delany dwelt on in the 1960s as a young writer. “The Star Pit” explores the emotions we feel when we discover places we can’t go but other people can. The story analyzes how dissatisfaction of not fitting in makes us want to go elsewhere.

I related to this story strongly back in 1967 because of the anguish I felt wanting to be an astronaut and learning I couldn’t. I didn’t have 20-20 vision. I didn’t understand back then why I wanted to leave the Earth. In the decades since I’ve learned that there are countless existential locations I can’t go, that others can. I’ve since learned why I was unhappy wherever I was, making this story more beautiful every time I reread it. Anyone who reads “The Star Pit” will discover analogies with their own dissatisfactions and limitations.

Have I been a life-long science fiction fan because I couldn’t go into space? I’m not part of the Millennium Falcon generation, where science fiction is pure escapist fantasy. My favorite spacecraft has always been the Gemini space capsule, something that was as down-to-Earth as a Volkswagon Beetle. My astronaut ambitions began with reading Have Space Suit – Will Travel and ended with “The Star Pit,” a period that coincided with the duration of Project Gemini in the 1960s. Of course, I didn’t know besides poor vision I completely lacked the right stuff until I encountered Tom Wolfe’s book.

Over the years I’ve read many astronaut memoirs and they’ve all taught me the same thing: I’m an earthling. Reading “The Star Pit” shows us the boundaries of our ecological existence. It reveals the dissatisfaction of not fitting in pushes us to leave, and at some point, we butt into a barrier like a guppy in an aquarium.

I’ve always read science fiction because I thought it prepared us for the future. I believed being a science fiction fan supported colonizing the solar system. Now I have doubts. What if humans can’t spread across moons, planets, and the galaxy? Is “The Star Pit” an analogy for that too?

Like Kip Russell in the Heinlein novel, I fantasized in 1967 I’d find a way into space one way or another. I was desperate to get to Mars. I didn’t really know why then. I probably assumed my religion, science fiction, demanded it. As I got older I discovered all the ways I couldn’t adjust to my environment. Was a lifetime of reading science fiction my Zoloft to ease the anxiety of never fitting in and never escaping? Or was the vicarious thrill of science fiction all I ever really needed, like a drug? Wisdom has taught me I never could have been an astronaut. I now know I would hate living in space. So, why do I still read science fiction? That answer also lies in “The Star Pit.” Delany’s words weave the allure of living on other worlds. “The Star Pit” is also an ecologarium.

Is fiction our substitute for living lives of quiet desperation? Some people want to do things in life so badly that they make it happen. Or, die trying. As a kid, I thought anything was possible, and I’d be one of those people who’d overcome all odds. I wasn’t. I just didn’t know that in 1967.

I have a thought experiment I sometimes use to see my life more clearly. I call it the Amoeba Analogy or The Microscope Perspective. Have you ever studied pond water under the microscope and watched simple multicellular animals go through their interactions? Imagine seeing your own life from above, as through a microscope lens. It’s a great way to visualize the finite limitations of our own ecologarium.

Delany starts his story with a description of an ecologarium, a reoccurring analogy in this story:

Two glass panes with dirt between and little tunnels from cell to cell: when I was a kid I had an ant colony.

But once some of our four-to-six-year-olds built an ecologarium with six-foot plastic panels and grooved aluminum bars to hold corners and top down. They put it out on the sand.

There was a mud puddle against one wall so you could see what was going on underwater. Sometimes segment worms crawling through the reddish earth hit the side so their tunnels were visible for a few inches. In hot weather the inside of the plastic got coated with mist and droplets. The small round leaves on the litmus vines changed from blue to pink, blue to pink as clouds coursed the sky and the pH of the photosensitive soil shifted slightly.

The kids would run out before dawn and belly down naked in the cool sand with their chins on the backs of their hands and stare in the half-dark till the red mill wheel of Sigma lifted over the bloody sea. The sand was maroon then, and the flowers of the crystal plants looked like rubies in the dim light of the giant sun. Up the beach the jungle would begin to whisper while somewhere an ani-wort would start warbling. The kids would giggle and poke each other and crowd closer.

Then Sigma-prime, the second member of the binary, would flare like thermite on the water, and crimson clouds would bleach from coral, through peach, to foam. The kids, half on top of each other now, lay like a pile of copper ingots with sun streaks in their hair—even on little Antoni, my oldest, whose hair was black and curly like bubbling oil (like his mother’s), the down on the small of his two-year-old back was a white haze across the copper if you looked that close to see.

More children came to squat and lean on their knees, or kneel with their noses an inch from the walls, to watch, like young magicians, as things were born, grew, matured, and other things were born. Enchanted at their own construction, they stared at the miracles in their live museum.

A small, red seed lay camouflaged in the silt by the lake/puddle. One evening as white Sigma-prime left the sky violet, it broke open into a brown larva as long and of the same color as the first joint of Antoni’s thumb. It flipped and swirled in the mud a couple of days, then crawled to the first branch of the nearest crystal plant to hang exhausted, head down, from the tip. The brown flesh hardened, thickened, grew black, shiny. Then one morning the children saw the onyx chrysalis crack, and by second dawn there was an emerald-eyed flying lizard buzzing at the plastic panels. “

Oh, look, Da!” they called to me. “It’s trying to get out!”

Samuel Delany was an active organism himself back in the 1960s. He traveled far and wide. “The Star Pit” is a story about people like him who wanted to go further and do more but couldn’t. Before I read this story, I wanted to be like Wally Schirra and fly in the Gemini space capsule. In “The Star Pit” we meet a kid who wants to be Golden and travel to other galaxies.

Delany uses my Amoeba Analogy with his ecologarium, reminding readers we are part of an ecology. The structure of “The Star Pit” is like Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls. Delany loves recursive or circular plots, the most famous of which is used in Empire Star.

Vyme, age 42, is the largest of the nesting dolls, and our protagonist. Vyme is a black man, which was uncommon back then in science fiction. I didn’t know it at the time, but Delany was black and gay. Delany was only in his twenties when he wrote this story, so I imagine he was projecting himself as an older man in Vyme. Vyme is a drunk, and failed father. My own father was an alcoholic and failed dad too, which is another personal reason why I relate to this story. The main events in “The Star Pit” take place years after the beautiful introduction above. The Star Pit is an artificial world where intergalactic travelers come and go at the edge of the galaxy. Vyme owns a garage for spaceships and helps wayward kids get work to atone for abandoning his own children.

In Delany’s fictional universe, most humans go crazy if they get twenty-thousand light years beyond the galaxy’s edge, and die at twenty-five thousand. Only a few humans have the psychological make-up to travel across the void between galaxies. They are called Golden. This is the analogy with the average citizen of the 1960s and astronauts, but for many other things too. This story contains Ptolemaic circles within circles of analogies.

Another nesting doll in this story is Ratlit, a thirteen-year-old precocious kid who has already published a novel. Vyme sees Ratlit in himself, and we also know that Delany was a precocious kid who wrote a novel too. Ratlit hates the Golden because he wants to travel to other galaxies (Delany’s metaphor for racism?). Ratlit is in love with Alegra, a girl born with psychic powers and an addiction to an exotic drug from another galaxy. She’s a couple years older than Ratlit, and he uses her to view the worlds on distant galaxies because she can project imagery from the minds of the Golden.

Between the ages of Ratlit and Vyme is Sandy, another man who fails at marriage. Marriages in “The Star Pit” are complex group affairs, so Vyme and Sandy fail to fit into their societies. They are loners. Sandy also sees Ratlit as a younger version of himself and realizes Ratlit will eventually hurt Vyme and tries to protect him. Vyme and Sandy witness two Golden fight, with one killing the other. The victor gives the dead Golden’s spaceship to Sandy and Vyme. Ratlit wants them to give him the spaceship so he can give it to a Golden that’s come between him and Alegra.

Vyme wants to help Ratlit, and Sandy wants to protect Vyme. Each of them knows they are trapped by limitations, each of them tries to help the other get beyond those limits. Vyme, Sandy, and Ratlit each feel they are the most wisely experienced despite their ages. I assume Delany sees these three characters as himself at different ages. And I’m not sure if all the characters aren’t Delany in some ways, even the mean and dumb Golden.

The last doll in the nesting is An, for Androcles, a Golden. He has another ecologarium, this one a small sphere he wears around his neck, with a tiny microscope built onto it. He lets Vyme look at it:

I looked through the brass eyepiece.

I’d swear there were over a hundred life forms with a five to fifty stages each: spores, zygotes, seeds, eggs, growing and developing through larvae, pupae, buds, reproducing through sex, syzygy, fission. And the whole ecological cycle took about two minutes.

Spongy masses like red lotuses clung to the air bubble. Every few seconds one would expel a cloud of black things like wrinkled bits of carbon paper into the gas where they were attacked by tiny motes I could hardly see even with the lens. Black became silver. It fell back to the liquid like globules of mercury, and coursed toward the jelly that was emitting a froth of bubbles. Something in the froth made the silver beads reverse direction. They reddened, sent out threads and alveoli, until they reached the main bubble again as lotuses.

The reason the lotuses didn’t crowd each other out was because every eight or nine seconds a swarm of green paramecia devoured most of them. I couldn’t tell where they came from; I never saw one of them split or get eaten, but they must have had something to do with the thorn-balls—if only because there were either thorn-balls or paramecia floating in the liquid, but never both at once.

A black spore in the jelly wiggled, then burst the surface as a white worm. Exhausted, it laid a couple of eggs, rested until it developed fins and a tail, then swam to the bubble where it laid more eggs among the lotuses. Its fins grew larger, its tail shriveled, splotches of orange and blue appeared, till it took off like a weird butterfly to sail around the inside of the bubble. The motes that silvered the black offspring of the lotus must have eaten the parti-colored fan because it just grew thinner and frailer till it disappeared. The eggs by the lotus would hatch into bloated fish forms that swam back through the froth to vomit a glob of jelly on the mass at the bottom, then collapse. The first eggs didn’t do much except turn into black spores when they were covered with enough jelly.

All this was going on amidst a kaleidoscope of frail, wilting flowers and blooming jeweled webs, vines and worms, warts and jellyfish, symbiotes and saprophytes, while rainbow herds of algae careened back and forth like glittering confetti. One rough-rinded galoot, so big you could see him without the eyepiece, squatted on the wall, feeding on jelly, batting his eye-spots while the tide surged through quivering tears of gills.

I blinked as I took it from my eye.

“That looks complicated.” I handed it back to him.

“Not really.” He slipped it around his neck. “Took me two weeks with a notebook to get the whole thing figured out. You saw the big fellow?”

“The one who winked?”

“Yes. Its reproductive cycle is about two hours, which trips you up at first. Everything else goes so fast. But once you see him mate with the thing that looks like a spider web with sequiris—same creature, different sex—and watch the offspring aggregate into paramecia, then dissolve again, the whole thing falls into—”

“One creature!” I said. “The whole thing is a single creature!”

In many, if not all of Delany’s stories in the 1960s, he gives us characters who anguish over their limitations and resent people who have already done things they hope to do. His characters often feel their cherished uniqueness challenged when they meet others who mirror their talents. Ultimately, even the Golden have limitations. They discover lifeforms that can travel between universes. The lesson of this tale is no matter how far you can go, there are always others who can go further, and there are always further places to go.

When I read “The Star Pit” in 1967 I suffered because I couldn’t go into space. Delany was a black gay man who couldn’t go places in my white world where I could. The funny thing is, there were endless exotic places on Earth we both could have gone that were just as far out as anything he wrote or I read in science fiction.

Science fiction today is consumed as a kind of virtual reality for enjoying space travel fantasies. I still read hard science fiction stories where SF writers try to imagine how colonizing space is possible, but they are less common. Why do we want to leave Earth? Are we dissatisfied with life here? Or do we need to go further, to places we currently can’t go?

Is a Sci-Fi fan’s desire to live in outer space any different from a Christian’s desire to dwell in heaven? Or any more realistic? Aren’t most of the places we anguish over not being able to reach also not real anyway? Aren’t we all rejecting an acutely real life on Earth? Isn’t the ultimate point of this story to teach us how stay and coexist in our own ecologarium?

JWH

Reading the Pulps 6: “Call Me Joe” by Poul Anderson Posted at 1:30 PM by James Wallace Harris

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Read it now: Astounding Science Fiction April 1957 (from the Luminist League)

You might already own “Call Me Joe” in one of these anthologies:

  • Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels 9th Series edited by T. E. Dikty
  • A Century of Science Fiction edited by Damon Knight
  • The Science Fiction Hall of Fame v. 2A edited by Ben Bova
  • The Great SF Stories #19 (1957) edited by Asimov & Greenberg
  • Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century edited by Orson Scott Card
  • Call Me Joe: The Collected Works of Poul Anderson #1
  • Call Me Joe – 99 cent eBook at Amazon

Warning: This column contains spoilers.

I’ve been struggling for days to write this essay. I torture myself with self-analysis wanting to know why I keep reading these old stories. I work to build a framework for critical judgment of science fiction that keeps collapsing. I keep relearning that few people read these old stories anymore, which makes me keep asking: “Why am I making this effort?” This leads to pages and pages of theories, eventually leading to the realization the answers are too long for a single essay. So, I’ve decided to just let them leak out while I discuss a series of stories over the next few months.

“Call Me Joe” by Poul Anderson was first published in 1957 and was selected by the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) for inclusion in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 2B edited by Ben Bova. Volume One and 2A have been released on audio and volume 2B is due April 10th. Listening to all these classic science fiction tales is a joy for me, but I’m haunted by the question: “Will anyone care about these old stories when old fans like me die off?”

“Call Me Joe” begins:

The wind came whooping out of eastern darkness, driving a lash of ammonia dust before it. In minutes, Edward Anglesey was blinded.

He clawed all four feet into the broken shards which were soil, hunched down and groped for his little smelter. The wind was an idiot bassoon in his skull. Something whipped across his back, drawing blood, a tree yanked up by the roots and spat a hundred miles. Lightning cracked, immensely far overhead where clouds boiled with night.

As if to reply, thunder toned in the ice mountains and a red gout of flame jumped and a hillside came booming down, spilling itself across the valley. The earth shivered.

Sodium explosion, thought Anglesey in the drumbeat noise. The fire and the lightning gave him enough illumination to find his apparatus. He picked up tools in muscular hands, his tail gripped the trough, and he battered his way to the tunnel and thus to his dugout.

It had walls and roof of water, frozen by sun-remoteness and compressed by tons of atmosphere jammed onto every square inch. Ventilated by a tiny smoke hole, a lamp of tree oil burning in hydrogen made a dull light for the single room.

Why does Edward Anglesey have four feet and a tail? And even though we are told the earth shivered, it doesn’t sound like our world at all. It’s not. We’re on Jupiter, and Edward occupies the mind of a genetically engineered animal designed to live on Jupiter. Anglesey is a man in a wheelchair working in a scientific laboratory orbiting Jupiter. With a combination of psychic powers amplified by electronic equipment Anglesey can control the being called Joe on the surface of Jupiter. When Joe is awake Edward lives in Joe’s powerful body, and when Joe sleeps Anglesey bitterly occupies his own crippled body on the space station.

In 1950s science fiction writers were imagining how humans could explore the solar system. For most writers, the gas giants were considered inhospitable to humans. Anderson wanted to find a way to explore them too. Because many science fiction writers, especially at John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction assumed humans had latent psychic abilities, Anderson combined bioengineering and electronic enhanced possession to solve the problem of living on Jupiter. It’s a wonderful bit of science fictional speculation and imagination for 1957.

However, in 2018 we know there is no surface on Jupiter. We also know that humans do not have psychic powers. In 1957 “Call Me Joe” was good science fiction, in 2018 “Call Me Joe” is outdated science fiction. Modern science fiction often speculates how we could live on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but we’ve given up on colonizing the gas giants themselves. Not all SF writers have given up on psi-powers, but no one who understands science considers ESP anything more than gimmicks for stories that appeal to childish minds.

Does this mean we should stop reading “Call Me Joe?” That’s a hard question to answer. It’s still a well-told compelling work of fiction. It’s entertaining. The first goal of writing is to sell to editors. The second goal is to sell to readers. Entertainment sells best. What makes a story last to become art involves other qualities. 99.9% of most stories don’t last. And even then, it might be overly generous to say one out of thousand stories survive the test of time.

I went to a science fiction convention this weekend looking for dealers of old books and magazines and found none. I hoped to find panels that talked about old stories and found none. Very few people read science fiction short stories anymore. For the majority of science fiction fans, they define the term by movies, television shows, games, anime, comics, role-playing, and cosplay. And I’d say most of the active science fiction readers prefer book series now. Short fiction has a declining audience.

Science fiction of 1957 is not the science fiction of 2018. In 1957 science fiction fans pursued beliefs in the future they faithfully hope science would make real. For the most part, science fiction in 2018 is a form of escape from reality. It’s a rejection of growing up. Just another fantasyland. Very little science fiction written today is about making ideas come true.

So how do we judge a dying art form? There are still science fiction writers who pursue speculation about the possible in a reality governed by science. But most fans want Star Wars. Even Star Trek has been morphed into Star Wars.

If we only consider entertainment as a measure of artistic success, popularity and sales figures are good enough yardsticks for judging. And by those measurements, the stories in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame series must have little artistic merit. This is where I’m trying to build my critical framework. Traditional art has all kinds of measures we could apply to the storytelling part of science fiction, such as how they were written, characterization, plot, theme, setting, and what they say about the times in which they were written. But what about the unique qualities of science fiction? How do we judge speculation? What makes science fiction uniquely science fiction and how do we judge it? How can we define science fiction when it becomes a catch-all for all kinds of far-out unscientific story ideas?

If we don’t consider the science in science fiction, then it’s only fiction and should be judged by the standards of all fiction. And if we do consider the science, how do we judge the science in the story, by the science of when it was written or the science of when it was read? Science fiction often speculates about realistic possibilities that eventually become probably impossibilities.

I believe “Call Me Joe” is a wonderful story about 1957 science fiction. It tells us all kinds of things about 1957 that can’t be found in history books or even Best American Short Stories 1958. If I forget that it was written in 1957, it works as a story, but the science is woefully ignorant. However, that might not be a problem for modern science fiction fans since a kind of comic book pseudo-science has taken over popular science fiction.

Science fiction has become another Disneyland. For most writers and readers, it’s always been that too. However, for a few writers and readers, it was about speculating where science had yet to statistically tabulate the odds. In 1957 there were still some long odds for psychic powers, now there’s not. Poul Anderson used those odds in a creative way. The odds haven’t played out. How do we judge his creative effort?

JWH

Reading the Pulps #4: “The Revolt of the Pedestrians” by David H. Keller, M.D. Posted at 1:40 PM by James Wallace Harris

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Read it now: Amazing Stories February 1928 (from the Luminist League)

You might already own “The Revolt of the Pedestrian” in one of these anthologies:

  • The Road to Science Fiction #2: From Wells to Heinlein edited by James Gunn
  • Amazing Stories: 60 Years of the Best Science Fiction edited by Asimov/Greenberg
  • The Twelfth Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack (.99 cent ebook)
  • The Best of Amazing Stories: The 1928 Anthology ($2.99 ebook)

Warning: This column contains spoilers.

If you only read science fiction for entertainment you could find “The Revolt of the Pedestrians” entertaining enough, especially if you get a hoot out of old-fashioned science fiction. A quick reading might suggest it’s a silly story, but I believe under the surface it has a number of nasty streaks. We generally think of science fiction as cheerleading for the final frontier. Reading “The Revolt of the Pedestrians” shows David H. Keller promoting something else.

My purpose in analyzing this tale is to show that science fiction wanted to be more than just entertainment. Science fiction can’t take itself too seriously because the genre is burdened by the prejudice that it’s not. However, some science fiction writers wanted to distinguish themselves by using science fiction to say something serious about society. The gold medal example of this is Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Keller wins no medal though.

It is often assumed science fiction began genre in April of 1926 with the first issue of Amazing Stories edited by Hugo Gernsback. But that first issue was all reprints, with stories from 1845-1923, suggesting that science fiction had already been around at least 83 years. David H. Keller M.D. (1880-1966) was one of Gernsback early writers, and “The Revolt of the Pedestrians” was his first short story for Amazing. Few readers remember Keller or this story today

Hugo Gernsback took science fiction very seriously. “The Revolt of the Pedestrians” is an example of what Gernsback wanted: speculation, and extrapolation. Keller’s story isn’t much of a story as a polemic against mechanization if we are to assume Keller was serious. He could have gotten its idea on a whim, hoping to make a few bucks at a new magazine about the future. On the other hand, I think he was expressing his conservative views.

What I’d love to know is how Americans thought of science fiction in 1928. The term wasn’t in use yet, as Gernsback wanted to call his stories scientifiction – a tongue twister that would never be accepted. Stories involving travel to other planets had been around for a while, but only in journals and books that few people read.

On January 7, 1929, the Buck Rogers comic strip began running in newspapers. That comic strip was read by millions, and with the 1934 Flash Gordon strip, they probably spread science fictional ideas too far more Americans than Amazing Stories ever did. Buck Rogers originally appeared in Amazing Stories as a short story, but I’ve read so few stories from Gernsback Amazing to know if it was typical. Buck Rogers in the comic strip and serial was silly, even campy, which suggests it’s where the prejudice that science fiction wasn’t serious began. People used to call science fiction, “That crazy Buck Rogers stuff.”

“The Revolt of the Pedestrians” is set many centuries in the future after humans divide into two species – the pedestrians and the automobilists. Automobilists have shrunken legs from always using automobiles or powered chairs called autocars. Eventually, the overwhelming majority of society become automobilists and decide pedestrians are anti-progress — a threat to society. They are outlawed, killed and assumed extinct.

Most of Keller’s story is narrative. There is very little drama or action. Keller may have gotten his central idea from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, where humanity splits into two opposing species. I find it especially hard to believe that Keller thought automobiles were bad for humanity, or it would cause humans to devolve their legs. Logically, he should have known we spend far more time not using cars. Nor could a few centuries have caused the changes he suggests.

I believe Keller was writing about a divide in humanity in his own day, between conservatives and liberals. David H. Keller is now remembered as having been an extreme right-wing, anti-feminist, and racist. Cars and voting women were still new in 1928. Within the story, Keller also expresses pro-eugenic and pro-euthanasia ideas that were also common in the 1920s. The society of the automobilists is seen as socialist and scientific, whereas the rebelling pedestrians are advocates of back to nature and rugged individualists. Hating the automobilists they invent a kind of EMP device to switch-off technological society, thus killing billions of automobilists.

This isn’t escapist fun, but a vicious view. In a way, it prefigures Brave New World by Aldous Huxley that came out in 1932. “The Revolt of the Pedestrians” is an early dystopia. Why would Gernsback accept an anti-science, anti-technology story for Amazing Stories?

The story comes down to a battle between two families, and two men, the pedestrian Abraham Miller and the automobilist William Henry Heisler. They were even distant cousins, and an ancestor of Miller was killed by a distant ancestor of Heisler. The son of that slain victim works for generations to revenge the pedestrians.

For me, the story only had two engaging characters. Margaretta Heisler, child of the automobilist, is a biological throwback who has working legs. Because William Henry Heisler is rich he protects his daughter from being destroyed.

After that conversation, Heisler engaged the old man, whose sole duty was to investigate the subject of pedestrian children and find how they played and used their legs. Having investigated this, he was to instruct the little girl.

The entire matter of her exercise was left to him. Thus from that day on a curious spectator from an aeroplane might have seen an old man sitting on the lawn showing a golden-haired child pictures from very old books and talking together about the same pictures. Then the child would do things that no child had done for a hundred years—bounce a ball, skip rope, dance folk dances and jump over a bamboo stick supported by two upright bars. Long hours were spent in reading and always the old man would begin by saying:

“Now this is the way they used to do.”

Occasionally a party would be given for her and other little girls from the neighboring rich would come and spend the day. They were polite—so was Margaretta Heisler—but the parties were not a success. The company could not move except in their autocars, and they looked on their hostess with curiosity and scorn. They had nothing in common with the curious walking child, and these parties always left Margaretta in tears.

“Why can’t I be like other girls?” she demanded of her father. “Is it always going to be this way? Do you know that girls laugh at me because I walk?”

Heisler was a good father. He held to his vow to devote one hour a day to his daughter, and during that time gave of his intelligence as eagerly and earnestly as he did to his business in the other hours. Often he talked to Margaretta as though she were his equal, an adult with full mental development.

“You have your own personality,” he would say to her. “The mere fact that you are different from other people does not of necessity mean that they are right and you are wrong. Perhaps you are both right—at least you are both following out your natural proclivities. You are different in desires and physique from the rest of us, but perhaps you are more normal than we are. The professor shows us pictures of ancient peoples and they all had legs developed like yours. How can I tell whether man has degenerated or improved? At times when I see you run and jump, I envy you. I and all of us are tied down to earth—dependent on a machine for every part of our daily life. You can go where you please. You can do this and all you need is food and sleep. In some ways this is an advantage. On the other hand, the professor tells me that you can only go about four miles an hour while I can go over one hundred.”

“But why should I want to go so fast when I do not want to go anywhere?”

“That is just the astonishing thing. Why don’t you want to go? It seems that not only your body but also your mind, your personality, your desires are old-fashioned, hundreds of years old-fashioned. I try to be here in the house or garden every day—at least an hour—with you, but during the other hours I want to go. You do the strangest things. The professor tells me about it all. There is your bow and arrow, for instance. I bought you the finest firearms and you never use them, but you get a bow and arrow from some museum and finally succeed in killing a duck, and the professor said you built a fire out of wood and roasted it and ate it. You even made him eat some.”

“But it was good, father—much better than the synthetic food. Even the professor said the juice made him feel younger.”

Heisler laughed, “You are a savage—nothing more than a savage.”

“But I can read and write!”

“I admit that. Well, go ahead and enjoy yourself. I only wish I could find another savage for you to play with, but there are no more.”

“Are you sure?”

“As much so as I can be. In fact, for the last five years my agents have been scouring the civilized world for a pedestrian colony. There are a few in Siberia and the Tartar Plateau, but they are impossible. I would rather have you associate with apes.”

“I dream of one, father,” whispered the girl shyly. “He is a nice boy and he can do everything I can. Do dreams ever come true?”

Heisler smiled. “I trust this one will, and now I must hurry back to New York. Can I do anything for you?”

“Yes—find someone who can teach me how to make candles.”

“Candles? Why, what are they?”

She ran and brought an old book and read it to him. It was called, “The Gentle Pirate,” and the hero always read in bed by candle light. “I understand,” he finally said as he closed the book. “I remember now that I once read of their having something like that in the Catholic churches. So you want to make some? See the professor and order what you need. Hum—candles—why, they would be handy at night if the electricity failed, but then it never does.”

“But I don’t want electricity. I want candles and matches to light them with.”

“Matches?”

“Oh, father! In some ways you are ignorant. I know lots of words you don’t, even though you are so rich.”

“I admit it. I will admit anything and we will find how to make your candles. Shall I send you some ducks?”

“Oh, no. It is so much more fun to shoot them.”

“You are a real barbarian!”

“And you are a dear ignoramus.” So it came to pass that Margaretta Heisler reached her seventeenth birthday, tall, strong, agile, brown from constant exposure to wind and sun, able to run, jump, shoot accurately with bow and arrow, an eater of meat, a reader of books by candlelight, a weaver of carpets and a lover of nature. Her associates had been mainly elderly men: only occasionally would she see the ladies of the neighborhood. She tolerated the servants, the maids and housekeeper. The love she gave her father she also gave to the old professor, but he had taught her all she knew and the years had made him senile and sleepy.

The other character I cared for was a pedestrian man who dressed as a woman working as a stenographer so he could spy on automobilist Heisler. This is a short scene, and almost an aside to the main story, so I wondered why Keller included it. I’m sure Keller was expressing his own prejudices here, but what did Amazing Stories readers make of this scene?

But for the first time in his life, he was in a big city. The firm on the floor below employed a stenographer. She was a very efficient worker in more ways than one and there was that about the new stenographer that excited her interest. They met and arranged to meet again. They talked about love, the new love between women. The spy did not understand this, having never heard of such a passion, but he did understand eventually, the caresses and kisses. She proposed that they room together, but he naturally found objections. However, they had spent much of their spare time together. More than once the pedestrian had been on the point of confiding in her, not only the impending calamity, but also his real sex and his true love.

In such cases where a man falls in love with a woman the explanation is hard to find. It is always hard to find. Here there was something twisted, a pathological perversion. It was a monstrous thing that he should fall in love with a legless woman when he might by waiting, have married a woman with columns of ivory and knees of alabaster. Instead, he loved and desired a woman who lived in a machine. It was equally pathological that she should love a woman. Each was sick—soulsick, and each to continue the intimacy deceived the other. Now with the city dying beneath him, the stenographer felt a deep desire to save this legless woman. He felt that a way could be found, somehow, to persuade Abraham Miller to let him marry this stenographer—at least let him save her from the debacle.

So in soft shirt and knee trousers he cast a glance at Miller and Heisler engaged in earnest conversation and then tiptoed out the door and down the inclined plane to the floor below. Here all was confusion. Boldly striding into the room where the stenographer had her desk, he leaned over her and started to talk. He told her that he was a man, a pedestrian. Rapidly came the story of what it all meant, the cries from below, the motionless auto-cars, the useless elevators, the silent telephones. He told her that the world of automobilists would die because of this and that, but that she would live because of his love for her. All he asked was the legal right to care for her, to protect her. They would go somewhere and live, out in the country. He would roll her around the meadows. She could have geese, baby geese that would come to her chair when she cried, “Weete, weete.”

The legless woman listened. What pallor there might be in her cheeks was skillfully covered with rouge. She listened and looked at him, a man, a man with legs, walking. He said he loved her, but the person she had loved was a woman; a woman with dangling, shrunken, beautiful legs like her own, not muscular monstrosities.

She laughed hysterically, said she would marry him; go wherever he wanted her to go, and then she clasped him to her and kissed him full on the mouth, and then kissed his neck over the jugular veins, and he died, bleeding into her mouth, and the blood mingled with rouge made her face a vivid carmine. She died some days later from hunger.

When I first read this story back in the early 1970s it just seemed like a silly spoof on evolutionary possibilities. I didn’t contemplate how the central idea would have been stupid even back in 1928. I didn’t think about how it could be a political statement.

The apparent hero of this story, Abraham Miller, is a mass murderer, destroying a world-wide civilization of billions. As part the story we see a city of millions thrown into chaos as its inhabitants try to crawl out of the city. I wonder if Keller wanted us to associate the name Abraham with Lincoln, or the Abraham of the Bible. I associated Abraham Miller with Adolph Hitler.

“The Revolt of the Pedestrians” has not been reprinted often. Few stories from the early days of Amazing Stories have, but reading “The Revolt of the Pedestrians” make me want to read more of those old stories to see what else Gernsback was philosophically promoting. Maybe there are more reasons than financial why Gernsback lost his magazine.

We generally assume science fiction was propaganda for progress, but this story is really a revolt against modernity. I used to think it amusing back in the 1970s when I took courses in the Modern Novel we mostly read books from the 1920s.  A tremendous amount of change happened in that decade, and I guess Keller wasn’t too thrilled with them. The 1920s was a huge era for the KKK, with many state governors belonging to that racist organization. And like I mentioned above, Keller promotes eugenics within the story, which had been adopted by some states at that time. I guess Amazing Stories readers just assumed Keller’s ideas were part of the status quo.

Contemporary conservatives often seem anti-science today. Maybe they see liberals as a divergent species. I wonder if we’re still in a civil war over modernity. For the most part, I believe science fiction has taken the side of the Enlightenment, but I need to pay more attention when I read these old science fiction stories for their political philosophy.

Science fiction is always about the times in which it was written. Growing up in the 1960s I assumed science fiction reflected my liberal beliefs for my future, but now that I’m rereading these old stories I realize I had ignored obvious conservative hopes for their future. Since we’re living in a Donald Trump timeline, I wonder if some science fiction helped create it.

JWH

Reading the Pulps #3: Astounding Science Fiction Posted at 8:00 AM by James Wallace Harris

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You can read digital scans of old issues of Astounding here:

“Be careful what you wish,” is a wise adage worth heeding. Back in 1971, when I discovered pulp magazines, I wished I owned a complete run of Astounding Science Fiction. I didn’t have the money or space, but for a few years, I bought a few hundred pulp and digest magazines from the 1920s-1960s. Even then they were dry crumbling old magazines that weren’t going to last much longer. I sold them when I needed money in 1975.

I didn’t know I needed to cancel that wish.

A few weeks ago, I began a new reading project. I decided to read my way through the 25 volumes of The Great SF Stories (1939-1963) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. I even started a discussion group for several of us who want to read through v. 1-25 together.

Of course, many of those stories came from the classic pulp magazines Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories, and I wanted to see what my favorite stories looked like with their original illustrations. I’m in a large group on Facebook called Space Opera Pulp where over eleven thousand members share pulp magazine art and illustrations. After posting one of the illustrations a member left a comment that he had bought the entire run of Astounding on discs from eBay.

To make a long story shorter, I ended up buying a 2-volume collection of the complete run of digital scans of Astounding Science Fiction (1930-1960). (Search eBay: “complete astounding science fiction DVD” – and be prepared to learn about CBR/CBZ readers if you buy the set.)

At first, I thought this might be a stupid impulse buy. There’s no way I’m going to read 359 issues of an old magazine. Besides, all those issues are free on the web if you know where to look. However, each issue runs 50-200 megabytes, with the complete set being 35.9 gigabytes. Buying them on discs saved me a lot of time.

I’ve used this archive every day since. Why I use it every day is the point of this essay. Why you’re reading this essay could be because you love science fiction from that era too.

I keep asking myself why am I so drawn to these old science fiction stories? Why mess with these old magazines when all the best stories and novels have been reprinted in book form since the 1950s? I even wrote an essay about why it’s better to collect the essential anthologies of science fiction than to wade through all the original pulps.

I was born in 1951, so why am I fascinated by the twelve years of science fiction published between 1939 and 1950? On the web I’m constantly meeting old science fiction fans like myself, folks from the Baby Boomer generation, who grew up in the 1960s and fell in love with science fiction they found in libraries that were first published in book format in the 1950s. Most of those stories had originally appeared in the pulp magazines during those years 1939-1950.

I think something psychological is going on. I feel like a biblical scholar who wants to know who wrote The Bible. I’ve gotten tired of modern science fiction. It’s just not the science fiction I grew up reading. I believe I keep returning to old science fiction because I imprinted on it when I was young like a duckling to its mother. It became my religion to explain reality. I know that sounds weird, but I think it’s true. I believe I’m now swimming home like a salmon to where it was first spawned.

If you are young you may never have heard the phrase, “The Golden Age of Science Fiction” – specifically when referring to science fiction published between 1939-1950. And even if you have heard it, you might not know it mainly refers to one magazine and editor, Astounding Science-Fiction and John W. Campbell. Astounding still exists as the magazine Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Campbell changed its name in 1960 to make it more modern, and he had already changed its content significantly in the 1950s, which is why most people consider the Golden Age of Science Fiction to be Astounding in the 1940s. (The phrase, “The Golden Age of Science Fiction” was later recast to mean age twelve when it was realized to be a more universal truth.)

When Astounding first appeared in January 1930, the magazine was called Astounding Stories of Super-Science and edited by Harry Bates. Bates wrote the famous story, “Farewell to the Master” that was made in the 1951 movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still. It struggled to find stories, and few were science fiction. Its goal was to present adventure stories that the emerging science fiction fandom would buy. Just looking at the first cover at the top of this essay tells so much about 1930 science fiction.

Orlin Tremaine became editor in 1933 when the previous owner became bankrupted and Street & Smith bought out the magazine. Tremaine built up the magazine, bought better science fiction, and gathered a devoted audience. One of his big successes was getting E. E. “Doc” Smith to come over from Amazing Stories so Astounding would have the latest Skylark novel.

John W. Campbell was hired in 1937 to work under Tremaine. By 1938 Tremaine was let go. For a while, Campbell published stories Tremaine had bought. It wasn’t until late 1938 or 1939 that Campbell’s buying decisions changed the course of science fiction. Many of the famous science fiction writers of the 1950s were discovered and nurtured by Campbell in the 1940s.

The nature of science fiction changes almost by the decade.  With the arrival of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1949 and Galaxy Science Fiction in 1950, Astounding had significant competition for selling great science fiction. The 1950s were still a great decade for Campbell but his emphasis on ESP, crazy inventions, and crackpot religions got a little weird for some, so most fans consider 1950s Astounding different from the 1940s.

Baby boomers in the 1960s grew up reading the older 1940s and 1950s science fiction while the newer 1960s science fiction came out. Most didn’t know that their copy of The Foundation Trilogy they got when they joined the Science Fiction Book Club was written as a series of short stories for Astounding in the 1940s. A good percentage of famous science fiction “novels” they read in the 1960s were really fix-up novels of related short stories published earlier, such as Slan, More than Human, Pavane, The Martian Chronicles, City, A Case of Conscience, The Dying Earth, Voyage of the Space Beagle, and so on. And many of the actual SF novels published in book form first appeared as serials.

Slan More Than Human Pavane The Martian Chronicles

City A Case of Conscience The Dying Earth The Voyage of the Space Beagle

When I study digital scans of old golden age pulp magazines I read the stories the same way readers read them when it first came out. That’s a lot of fun. What’s even more fun is approaching them like a literary professor studying an era of literature. I’m starting to see trends emerge. I’m also seeing ideas that I thought were original in later stories emerge much earlier. Studying science fiction that emerged before NASA existed is quite revealing. Technological events surrounding the A-bomb, H-bomb, Sputnik, Vostok, Mercury, Ranger, Gemini, Mariner, Apollo all impacted the evolving genre.

What fascinates me now is why people in the 1920s and 1930s took to early science fictional concepts. Those concepts were polished in the 1940s science fiction. Then in the 1950s, science fiction bled into the real world when rockets and space travel became real.

A nostalgia for 1940s science fiction began in the 1950s. By the early 1960s, Alva Rogers began writing a fan’s history of Astounding Science Fiction for the fanzine Viper that was published in 1964 as Requiem for Astounding by Advent. Rogers bought his first issue of Astounding at age eleven in 1934 that contained the first part of Skylark of Valeron by E. E. Smith. His book with introductions by the magazine’s first three editors, Harry Bates, F. Orlin Tremaine, and John W. Campbell was a loving history by a first-generation fan.

Another first-generation fan, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, wrote his memoir Astounding Days in 1989 by recalling how he grew up with the magazine.

Also, from 1989, Alexi and Cory Panshin came out with their Hugo and Locus award-winning The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence. This large book covers more than just Astounding Science Fiction but spends a significant portion of its time on John W. Campbell and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. This book is currently in print, but just barely. It goes in and out of print. It really deserves more attention than it gets.

The Panshins wrote about science fiction in the way I’m now wanting to study it. But I’m not the only one fascinated with this era. All over the web, I see people my age writing about their love of this older science fiction. Fans have scanned most of the famous pulps from this era and put them on the internet. They work to find and scan all the lesser know pulps and are working back into the dime novel age.

In 2011, Jamie Todd Rubin ran a series on his blog called “Vacation in the Golden Age of Science Fiction.” Later episodes can be found here. Each episode featured a monthly issue of Astounding. I wish Rubin had stuck with the project, but it appears he stopped after 29 issues. I wonder how long I’ll be able to keep up this project?

There’s also a book devoted to Astounding coming out this August. Alec Nevala-Lee has written, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Alec blogged about writing his book at Nevala-Lee’s blog.

I’m sure there are other books about Astounding, Campbell and the Golden Age, but these are the ones I know. I’d be interested in hearing about the others if you know any.

Now I want to write a book about the evolution of science fiction. I’m deeply appreciative that pulp magazine scanners are devoting great amounts of their time and money to preserve all the magazines from the pulp era. Their work is a kind of volunteer librarianship. Their labor of love to digitize the past is reflected in how they constantly work to make better scans. They master Photoshop to remove stains, rust marks, holes, tears, etc. and make those old brown pages look new again. Their efforts allow writers access to the primary documents of pulp magazine history.

I doubt many of you who read this essay will start reading and collecting old pulp magazines. But I am curious how many fans of Astounding still exist. I write this to describe the obsessed efforts of a very small subculture to remember a tiny sliver of American pop culture. If I did write a book, how many would want to read it?

It’s strange how a 1971 wish finally came true in 2018. I would never have imagined back then that computers would let me “own” a complete run of Astounding Science Fiction someday. Nor did I imagine being able to communicate so easily with other fans from around the world who also love those stories.

The internet is becoming the World-Wide Library.

JWH

Reading the Pulps #2: “Living Fossil” by L. Sprague de Camp Posted at 8:00 AM by James Wallace Harris

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Read it now: Astounding Science-Fiction February 1939 (from the Luminist League)

You might own “Living Fossil” already in one these anthologies:

Warning: This column contains spoilers.

Let’s imagine we’re a science fiction writer back in the late 1930s. We don’t make much money, so we probably live in a cheap tenement house. There’s no air conditioning, so the windows are open, and the street sounds are pouring in. We have no computer or smartphone, no internet or television. We carefully read the morning and afternoon newspapers, listen to the radio and subscribe to Astounding Science Fiction, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Popular Science, and Scientific American. We often walk to the library in the evening. This is our world of information in 1939.

We’re sitting at the typewriter, smoking a cigarette, planning a story we hope to sell to Astounding Science-Fiction. We want an idea that will wow them and get us the cover. We want to produce the thought variant story. We have a solid knowledge of science fiction published in the pulps back to 1926, and we know the classics like Verne and Wells. Plus, we like to think we’re scientific and visionary.

If you’ve read science fiction short stories from this era you know the variety of wild ideas pitched to science fiction editors. Coming up with something different was essential. Science fiction was mostly idea driven until after the New Wave of the 1960s. Science fiction writers were expected to be as original as research scientists testing a new hypothesis.

“Living Fossil” by L. Sprague de Camp has not been reprinted very often, and I find that shocking. Anyone seeing the interior illustration above will exclaim, “Oh my god, that’s Planet of the Apes!” But it’s 1939, not 1963 when Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes first appeared in English. How did de Camp get that idea? Was it astoundingly original in 1939, or are there older versions of the same idea in pulps I haven’t read?

Anyone who has read The Time Machine (1995) by H. G. Wells already knows about possible evolutionary descendants of Homo Sapiens. That novella also gave us the meme that death will one day come to both to our species and the Earth. And if you’ve read the brilliant Last and First Men (1930) by Olaf Stapledon then you’ve already entertained that 17 possible future species of humans could exist after us.

Is it so hard to imagine that L. Sprague de Camp asked himself, “What if humans became extinct, how long before another species would become intelligent?” This is one of my favorite science fiction themes: Who comes after us? Clifford Simak imagined intelligent dogs and robots in his lovely fix-up novel, City. Today we assume AI machines will replace us. But have you read the wonderful The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, or seen the television documentaries that were inspired by it? I wrote about them back in 2012. What if self-aware intelligence doesn’t rise up again?

Who comes after humans? “Living Fossil” speculates they could be capuchin monkeys from South America after 10 million years. The story opens with Nawputta, a zoologist and his guide Chujee riding their agoutis exploring northeast North America near Pittsburgh. Ten million years have made a lot of smaller species much larger in their world, and now the agoutis are as large as mules.

This is a pleasing idea, at least to me. I love to think if humans go extinct life on Earth will go on. De Camp even has his Jmu (the capuchin word equal to human) complain that humans used up all the metals and other resources. As Nawputta and Chujee cross the country looking for new specimens for their museum back home, they speculate about the dead civilization of man. After finding what remains of a large stone with a partial inscription on it, they start speculating:

Notice the part where they wish they could meet a live human? Well, that comes true, but not for a couple days. First, they meet another one of their kind by a campfire, Nguchoy tus Chaw, and he’s none too friendly. This part of the story reminds me of James Fenimore Cooper and his tales about the French and English using the Native Americas. Like Cooper’s stories, there’s all kind of dishonest shenanigans going on by ambitious colonists wanting to exploit the wilderness.

Nguchoy is a timber scout who is doing something shady. Our guys get suspicious of him. After he leaves they head further into the unknown country. Eventually, they find three dead humans, not fossils, with bullet holes in them. They figured Nguchoy shot them. For some reason, the zoologist decides he wants to find and kill a fresh human for a specimen. My friend Mike thought this ruined the story because earlier they had been wishing to find a human to talk to. I assumed they meant city dwelling humans, not humans who had to devolve back to living in caves. Here’s what happens:

This is where de Camp differs from Pierre Boulle. For the rest of the story, which is mainly an adventure narrative about Nawputta and Chujee fleeing for their lives in a territory of hostiles humans who weren’t afraid of their guns. Our sympathy is with the Capuchins. De Camp portrays the humans like Native Americans in old westerns. They are fearless, ferocious, and treacherous. I don’t know if this is ironic or straight. I don’t know if de Camp was being satirical by having monkeys colonize the new world and then treat humans the same way Europeans treated the Native Americans. Or, if the story was to parallel how Cro Magnon killed off the Neanderthal. Or both. In either case, it’s accepted within this story for the monkeys to kill the humans.

In the Planet of the Apes, our perspective is on the side of the humans, and we want them to fight their way back to the top of the evolutionary heap. Boulle plays to our vanity so we want his humans to outwit the evolved apes. In “Living Fossil” de Camp doesn’t take sides but assumes a kind of naturalism where an intellectually advanced species will overcome a less advanced species.

But I have yet another theory. Maybe de Camp wanted to say humans aren’t the divinely chosen, the crown of God’s creation. Science, evolution, and the Enlightenment offer a view of reality where God isn’t needed or wanted. Readers who feel humans are special will object to this story. In fact, the faithful shouldn’t like this story at all, because it says humans aren’t the center of existence, won’t live forever, and are no different from the other animal species. In that sense, I think de Camp is sticking it to our collective egos.

That’s what I love about these old pulp magazine stories. An ordinary writer could have big ideas and get paid a 1/2 cent a word by the top science fiction magazine of the day. Science fiction allows anyone the chance to defy the common belief, the accepted orthodoxy, or even speculate beyond proven scientific knowledge.

Science fiction allowed every writer to become a Darwin, explaining reality in fiction by using their own observations, speculations, and extrapolations. Sure, most science fiction writers came up with craptastic ideas, but so what, some of them were brilliantly imaginative, and often inspired a sense of wonder, at least in adolescent geeky boys of the times.

How would you answer this question today: “Who comes after humans?” Has science fiction already explored all the obvious possibilities? Already, science fiction has suggested endless variations on Superman and mutations. We’ve imagined countless evolved animals and machines taking over. We’ve imagined aliens moving in and kicking us out. But I’m positive, if I keep reading these old pulp magazines, I will find stories that will surprise me.

[I’m surprised “Living Fossil” didn’t get the cover for February 1940.]

JWH

 

Reading the Pulps #1: “Quietus” by Ross Rocklynne Posted at 11:48 AM by James Wallace Harris

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Original Source: Astounding Science-Fiction September 1940 (link to Luminist.org where you can find old issues of Astounding Science Fiction)

In Anthologies you might own:

WARNING: This column contains spoilers

I don’t remember reading any Ross Rocklynne before I started reading The Great SF Stories edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. From the 1940 volume, I read “Into the Darkness,” Rocklynne’s impressive science fiction philosophical fairy tale that felt inspired by the writings of Olaf Stapledon. I probably read “Quietus” before in my youth because I loved the Adventures in Time and Space anthology, but I’ve totally forgotten it.

I’m undergoing a reading renaissance in science fiction in my retirement years that is as exciting as when I first discovered science fiction at age twelve. But it’s for a different reason. This time around, I’m thrilled by the history of science fiction and how its ideas, themes, and concepts evolved. And because many pulp magazines from that era are available online I can study them. I love trying to imagine how readers back then (whatever the date on the magazine) felt about the story with their then current knowledge. Our culture is so filled with science, and our pop culture so filled with science fiction, it’s hard to comprehend when their science fictional ideas were fresh and original.

“Quietus” begins with “The creatures from Alcon saw from the first that Earth, as a planet, was practically dead; dead in the sense that it had given birth to life, and was responsible, indirectly, for its almost complete extinction.”

Tark and Vascar, two intelligent beings evolved from birds on the planet Alcon, are on an exploration trip. Tark is male, Vascar is female. On their way home, they spot Earth. It appears that an asteroid has hit our world and only a small patch of green is left on the globe. This 1940 story grabbed my attention right away, reminding me of an avian version of Star Trek.

The Great Science Fiction Stories Volume 2, 1940The action next cuts to a naked young man on Earth killing and eating a rabbit raw. We quickly learn that Tommy survived the asteroid apocalypse as a child, becoming a feral kid living alone. He is now a young adult and his language skills are limited to that of childhood. Tommy has a crow companion named Blacky that parrots his words, and often saying phrases before Tommy, anticipating his reactions.

Tommy is driven by two kinds of hunger. One he knows for food, but the second he doesn’t understand until he finds the trail of a young woman. At this point, I worried that Rocklynne was going to give us one of those cliché Adam and Eve endings that used to show up in science fiction.

The story switches back to Tark and Vascar who spot Tommy and his quest with their viewer. They argue about what to do. Vascar wants to assume the crow is the intelligent species because it rides on Tommy’s shoulders and speaks commands to him. Tark wants to keep an open mind, assuming either could be the dominant species. There’s some nice speculation about what happened to the Earth, determining its future, and the proper approach to make when contacting the intelligent species of the planet. Tark is like Mr. Spock, analytical. Vascar is more like Kirk, impulsive.

The story jumps back and forth from Tommy’s point of view to those of the Alconians.

Eventually, Tommy gets closer to the elusive female. We start to feel for him and want them to meet and mate. Whenever he gets close, she panics at the sight of the crow and takes off again. At one point, Tommy gets mad at Blacky and starts to throw stones at him, when:

“It’s all your fault, Blacky!” Tommy raged. He picked up a rock the size of his fist. He started to throw it, but did not. A tiny, sharp sound bit through the air. Tommy pitched forward. He did not make the slightest twitching motion to show that he had bridged the gap between life and death.”

WTF!?! This is cold.

Rocklynne just killed our sympathetic character. That shocked me. I had already had two assumptions about where the story might go. First, I thought Tommy and the girl would mate and the Alconians would discover the humans were the intelligent species. Then they would think about how to protect the last pair of humans surviving on Earth. Or, I thought Tark and Vascar might take them away as a breeding pair to their planet. I wasn’t expecting them to do something we’d do.

Tark was furious at Vascar for killing the human. He says, “You have killed their species.” They eventually check out the crow, but it eludes them, and they begin to assume it’s not intelligent. Eventually, they return to their ship and head home to Alcon. For us, this is a story about the end of humanity.

After a bit of contemplation, I decide I really like this ending, even though it shocked me. I admired Rocklynne for having the guts to go against convention. This story is cold like “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin (Astounding Science Fiction, 1954).

Which brings me to concepts and themes. Besides interstellar travel, alien cultures, and space exploration teams, the story combines post-apocalyptic survival with the last men on Earth themes. Two of my favorites. Generally, science fiction offers hope we’ll survive, but occasionally, it writes our ending. Somehow science fiction has claimed stories about the first and last men as its territory. Two stories I recently read from 1939 were about Neanderthals. And “Quietus” is at least the second story I read in the last couple weeks about our end. The other was “Living Fossil” by L. Sprague de Camp.

But there’s another theme here that’s quieter. I’m guessing between 1926-1946 science fiction was ahead of the game when it came to promoting space travel ideas, but I’m not sure. As I read pulp fiction stories I’m paying attention to ideas and trends. I’m pretty sure the concept of spacesuits were developed in science fiction before they were theorized by scientists. But what about the ideas of space navigation, orbiting planets, escape velocity, airlocks, landings, interplanetary and interstellar travel, etc. We’ve grown up knowing all kinds of things about space travel, but I’m guessing those ideas didn’t exist before a certain point in time, and maybe science fiction introduced them to the public before scientists.

At one-point Rocklynne said, “The ship made a slow circuit of Earth” and I wondered when science and science fiction would start saying “going into orbit” or “achieving orbit” or some other common phrase we use today? That got me to thinking. This is 1940, way before Americans heard about V-1s and V-2s, but Robert Goddard had been working with rockets since the 1910s. On 1/12/20 The New York Times ran a front-page story, “Believes Rocket Can Reach Moon” about Goddard’s work. In 1924 Goddard published an article in Popular Science “How My Speed Rocket Can Propel Itself in Vacuum.” Goddard’s rockets didn’t look like rockets then.

Wikipedia says Goddard was often misunderstood and mocked. Goddard didn’t achieve liquid fuel flights until 1926. Lindbergh got interested in Goddard, and then the public started noticing him more in 1929 and 1930. Throughout the 1930s Goddard continued to develop rockets that began to look like modern rockets (cylinder with fins). Goddard’s work was probably well known by this 1940 story.  Here’s a 1924 article about rocketry in Popular Science that mentions Goddard and other rocket pioneers.

It’s hard to comprehend the public’s mindset of the past. Their science fiction came down to us, but not their popular science books. Yesterday I discovered I could read old issues of Popular Science online. These old issues are very revealing. In fact, they can be more fun than reading the old pulps.

My plan for this column is to discuss the stories I read and try to figure out how science fiction and science fictional ideas evolved in the popular conscience of the day.

JWH