StGd SF: SFRA Anthology

Rich Erlich, English 112, A, Fall 1990, 1997

<StGd SFRA Anthology, Sept. 00> 9 Sept. 1999

Study Guide for Selected Stories in Science Fiction:

The Science Fiction Research Association Anthology

GENERAL NOTES:

1. Please tell me about any errors you catch.

2. Whenever you read SF, perform a little thought experiment and pretend that publishing and criticism in the USA are healthier than they actually are and that SF is just another genre of literature, turning up in all sorts of places and not confined (for the most part) to specialized magazines and anthologies, special sections of book stores—and to books inside covers loudly proclaiming the contents to be SF. Were that the case,

would you classify this story as SF?

if it is SF, when in the story were you sure that it's SF?

how does the author make the story familiar enough to be intelligible and yet strange enough that we're sure this isn't "mainstream," or "mundane" (to use Samuel R. Delany's word) fiction?

3. Narrator/Point of View: With any story you read, ask yourself some questions about the voice telling the story. Is the voice "objective," reporting only things observable by a merely human observer? Does the voice belong to someone "omniscient," who can tell what people are thinking? Does the owner of the voice have what's called (paradoxically) "limited omniscience"—the ability to tell what some characters think, but not others? What tense and person are used: past or present, first person ("I"), second ("you"), third ("s/he," "they")?

4. In ch. 14 of his Biographia Literaria (1817), Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells us that he and William Wordsworth divided the work in their Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1802) so that Coleridge would deal with "persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic" and would present them with "a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." Worsdworth was to attempt "to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear nor, and hearts that neither feel nor understand" (see Isaiah 6.9-10). For narrative art in general but SF in particular, note very well (1) our willingness to suspend disbelief—and even some of our beliefs—while experiencing the works, and (2) the process of making the familiar strange summarized in the inelegant but concise term, defamiliarization.

E. M. Forster, "The Machine Stops" (1909)

1. Note very well the opening sentence of this story: "Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee." The room, we soon learn, is underground, inside a world-machine; and at the center of the room "there sits a swaddled lump of flesh—a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus." In a very short space, Forster brings together some of the major motifs of 20th-century SF. He gives us a degenerate future humanity, but more important he places our species underground, inside a machine, and in an environment explicitly likened to a hive. Mechanizing the underworld had been done before, by H. G. Wells in The Time Machine (1895)—and Wells has a sublunar world of rather degenerate Selenites (Moon people) in The First Men in the Moon (1901); still, to put a whole human civilization underground was something new and important. Back to the time of myth-making, the underworld was the realm of "Chaos and Old Night," the womb of the Earthmother. It's no less than the complete reversal of an archetype to mechanize Mamma, and the motif has fascinated a number of artists (cf. such films as Metropolis, THX-1138, A Boy and His Dog; fiction such as Harlan Ellison's "Catman" and Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars).

2. I don't know what "Kuno" means (if anything), but Vashti is a significant name. Vashti was the Queen of Ahasuerus in the biblical Book of Esther who refuses to come when he sends for her. Another significant biblical allusion is in "He [Man] had harnassed Leviathan." In the Book of Job, Leviathan is a very important chaos monster, and God rather sarcastically inquires of Job, "Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, / or . . . put a rope in his nose?" (see Job 41.1-4). In Job's time, anyway, humankind most certainly couldn't capture a sea monster like Leviathan. Are the people of the Machine really so powerful that they've harnassed the forces of Chaos?

3. What is the attitude toward science in this story? Note the early reference to "the attempt to 'defeat the sun'" as "the last common interest that our race experienced about the heavenly bodies, or indeed about anything . . . . [before] science retreated into the ground, to concentrate herself upon problems she was certain of solving." Does science only deal with solvable problems? Did the builders of the Machine turn away from science to mere technology? When we see them, do the people of the Machine retain any science? How does that affect their ability to deal with technology?

Does Kuno rediscover astronomy? Astralogy?

Plato says in the Theatetus (160d) that Protagoras said "Man is the measure of all things," and this crazy saying became the slogan of the humanists. Since Kuno is a future humanist who believes "Man is the measure," should we conclude that in the story such arrogance is presented as necessary for people to do science? That seems paradoxical. If "Man is the measure," maybe we should just ignore "all things" and say with Alexander Pope, "The proper study of mankind is man" ("Essay on Man"). Is Kuno's society more logical (so to speak) than Kuno? Is Foster pushing a paradox?

4. How seriously should we take Vashti's complaint that visiting Kuno has "greatly retarded the development" of her "soul"? How seriously are the normal inhabitants of the Machine really involved with "soul" and "mind" and "ideas"? How precious is their time? Consider the possibility that "The Machine Stops" insists both that human beings won't seriously engage the world without seeing humans as central to the world—and that we won't understand our own humanity if we don't directly engage the world.

5. What is the tone of the Narrator's comment, "Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not?" If "Man is the measure," shouldn't the surroundings be adapted to Man? And isn't that precisely what the builders of the Machine tried to do? If it's society's job to "adapt" people, what, if anything is the role of the Hero?

How easy does Kuno find it to overcome the conditioning of his society—the ways in which he's been "adapted"? Does he need to identify with the past and with "the unborn" he tries to comfort? Does he need to experience a kind of rebirth before he can really affirm "Man is the measure"? Is there a sense in which Kuno's first coming into the air is a (re)birth—or should be? Note the imagery of coming out of the womb of the Earthmother in any ascent from the underground (or out of the guts of Leviathan: see Le Guin's "Nine Lives" and the biblical Book of Jonah, 1.17-2.6). Re-read the first line of the story and consider the significance of Kuno's thinking he should have "torn off every garment I had, and gone out into the outer air unswaddled."

Is Kuno heroic? Is it somehow heroic to rebel against an evil world even if you don't accomplish anything? Is it heroic to rebel against a world like that of the Machine, even if you accomplish nothing and the world isn't particularly evil—and doomed anyway?

In Nineteen Eighty-Four there's the suggestion that "the object was not to stay alive but to stay human" (II.7). Winston Smith doesn't even achieve that; is Kuno more successful?

Is it a victory that Kuno and Vashti ultimately (somehow) "touch"? Have they "recaptured life" just before they die?

6. Do we get a more upbeat ending—in terms of the human species—than we might have had in this story? Do you believe Kuno's dying assertion that "Humanity has learnt its lesson"? Note that "As he spoke, the whole city was broken like a honeycomb" (by an air-ship coming through the vomitory).

The juxtaposition has to undercut his line somewhat, but it needn't undercut it much: the smashing of Kuno is also the smashing of the Machine.

The echo of the opening line of the story in "honeycomb" suggests the destruction of the hive. Still, it's in the nature of bees to build hives, once their numbers get high enough. If the current Homeless become numerous and civilized, will they rebuild the Machine "tomorrow"?

Forster uses "vomitory" consistently to describe the (few) exits to the Machine, and Thom Dunn notes that there are bones about those vomitories. The suggestion here is the Machine as monster, in an underground lair. Can such a monster ever be destroyed finally? This Machine stops, but might others succeed it? (Some time in your life, see Herman Melville's Moby Dick and what it says about the mortality or immortality of Leviathan.)

7. As much as anything, Forster's "meditation" is a dystopian satire, and in any satire subtlety is no virtue. Is Forster guilty of subtlety, at least as far as the MORAL of his story goes?

Note the imagery of "naked man" vs. "garments," completing the motif of "swaddled" and "unswaddled."

Is it correct to see not only advanced technology but culture itself as "a garment and no more"? Is that correct if we see humankind as essentially just the sum of its individual members, who themselves are in essence (Forster's word) divine soul plus divine body?

Is this story a romantic reactionary tale, summarized correctly in Charles Elkin's title, "E. M. Forster's 'The Machine Stops': Liberal-Humanist Hostility to Technology"? (Clockwork Worlds, ed. Erlich and Dunn [1983]).

Ursula K. Le Guin, "Nine Lives" (Playboy, 1969; substantially revised form, World's Best Science Fiction: 1970, ed. Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr—revised form rpt. in SF:F)

From "On Theme," Le Guin's commentary on "Nine Lives" in Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader, ed. Robin Scott Wilson (1973)

* * *

I had been reading The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rattray Taylor, a splendid book for biological ignoramuses, and had been intrigued by his chapter on the cloning process. . . . I did not have to read between the lines; Rattray Taylor did it for me. He pointed out that some biologists have been contemplating these more ambitious possibilities [of cloning organisms more complex than carrots] quite seriously (why don't people ever ask biologists where they get their ideas from?). In thinking about this possibility, I found it alarming. In wondering why I found it alarming, I began to see that the duplication of anything complex enough to have personality would involve the whole issue of what personality is—the question of individuality, of identity, of selfhood. Now that question is a hammer that rings the great bells of Love and Death.

* * *

. . . I don't think sf writers merely play with scientific or other ideas, merely speculate or extrapolate; I think—if they're doing their job—they get very involved with them. They take them personally, which is precisely what scientists must forbid themselves to do. They try to hook them in with the rest of existence. A writer's ability to find a genuine theme (and the great writers' ability to develop profound and complex themes out of very simple materials) seems to be a function of the capacity to see implications, to make connections.

. . . I'm trying to describe a synthetic process [writing] intellectually, which is misleading. It all took place in the dark, in silence, by groping. I didn't say Oh! an idea!—Ah! a theme!— It just began to come together, in odd moments, out of odd corners of my mind.

. . . it "came together," presented itself as a story to be written, rather suddenly: when it found itself expressed in, embodied in, a situation.

. . . A writer must trust the unconscious, even when it produces unexpected Welshmen.

. . . It was to be "a hostile environment." In other words, a nasty place. A place where no human beings or animals or plants lived, or had lived or ought to live. A place where one would feel lonely, threatened—where even a whole group of people would be isolated, and where their need for one another, their interdependence, would always be stressed, and under stress. The dome in which they live only emphasizes their isolation and their enforced closeness. The cave, though, the cave where the mine is—why a cave? I don't know. . . . I know about the accepted symbolisms and implications of large dark caves; but none of them quite seems to fit. The planet is personalized in the very first sentence as "she," and the cave is described, both by me and by Pugh, in clearly physiological terms, as if it were somebody's innards. All the same, I don't see a symbolism either of rape, or of birth and rebirth; or rather I can see it, but it doesn't feel right. The cave may involve inwardness in a nonsexual, totally personal sense—the kind of fearful, compulsive consciousness of one's own body one may have

when ill, a sense of being trapped "inside" something and unable to communicate—a pathological inwardness. Or the cave may be the unconscious. I really don't know.

Given a setting, a character, and a theme, it was now time for the plot to develop itself. For me, this is the chancy part. This is where intellect enters in, where choices must be deliberately made. . . . It's a kind of experimenting [her method of writing], testing. You have to see if your theme holds up, if it works. . . . Sometimes, most often [in creative writing], it's just a loss. But those who trust to the unconscious must expect a good deal of wasted effort. It's only when you write in obedience to external standards, or for a market, that you can turn out reams with never a false start; or when you're a plain genius, on the order of Shakespeare or Mozart.

* * *

And now the reasons for some of Owen's peculiarities became clear. he was the opposite of something. He was peculiar, because the clone were aggressively "normal." He was frail and sloppy because they were healthy, strong, and efficient. He was over thirty because they were young. He was an introvert because they were extraverted. He was Welsh because they were abstractly American—the marginal, defensive culture vs. the dominant, domineering one. Etc. Though conceived as something's opposite, he defined himself and took on substance first because he was a person . . . ; whereas none of the clone-members was an independent person, and the group, the clone itself, was a kind of marvellously effective simulacrum of a human individual.

Martin is also defined by contrast with Owen, but the contrast is more superficial. I wanted the reader to be able to tell him apart from Owen. I wanted the reader to feel the reality of Owen's and Martin's friendship—asserting itself, as friendships do, against disparities and strains and irritations. So he came out dark, sturdy, . . . etc. But on a deeper level, he is simply . . . a restatement of certain qualities which differentiate the individual from the group . . . . * * *All this [on Le Guin's handling of "limited omniscient" point of view] is conventional [for most of the story] . . . . Then Owen goes off in a panic to try and [sic] rescue Martin, and Kaph is left alone in the dome—and instead of following Owen, we stay with Kaph. We don't get inside his mind yet, but in the sentence, "The child's dream ..." we're pretty close to it. Then, in the next to last paragraph, all pretense is dropped and we are in Kaph's mind, seeing with his eyes. This is a bit awkward. It strains the frame. It can be defended only on one ground, that it is stylistically significant. That is, up until the last three pages it was not possible to get inside Kaph's mind, because it was closed to all outsiders—all others but the clone—himself. . . . He is no longer self-sufficient.

Self-sufficient. There the hammer strikes the great bells. What does it mean, to be sufficient to yourself? What is a self? Can a self be sufficient to itself? If not, what is the role of the Other? Is the existence of a foreign self a threat or a necessity, or both? And what is the role of total otherness—of death? Can a being unaware of itself be aware of its own mortality, and conversely, can a being ignorant of its mortality be aware of itself—or of the Other?

* * *

The theme of a story is . . . the coherence of . . . ["descriptive content, intellectual concepts . . . moral assumptions"] to form an aesthetically determined whole.

Joanna Russ, "When It Changed" (1972)

1. If you are familiar with Ursula K. Le Guin's well-received The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), consider the possibility of reading "When It Changed" as a response the LHD.

The main point of view character in LHD is a human male from Terra [= our Earth], who is an envoy from the rest of humanity to a harshly cold world where the people are androgyns with an estrous cycle: except during pregnancy and nursing, and for the few days a month they are in heat and can become male or female, they are neither male nor female but only human. If LHD can be seen as a political work favoring gender integration and humanism through the figure of the androgyne, "When It Changed" might be read as a riposte favoring feminist separatism.

2. Note "continuity and change(s)" in the opening five paragraphs: the elements that make this Whileaway place both familiar and strange.

"Katy drives like a maniac"—sounds familiar, especially if we picture people in a car.

120 km. / hour: We might be surprised by the "kilometers" and that "120 kilometers per hour" would seem maniacal, even on turns, but, still, it's familiar enough: we in the USA are very unusual in not using metric measurements, and it's easy enough to see 120km/hour as dangerous driving on turns on, say, a Canadian or Australian backcountry road.

"My birthplace on Whileaway" sounds a little odd, but it's a grammatical constructions if Whileaway is an island.

The phrase "a five-gear shift" is familiar, as is the rest of the sentence about the area—except that where you might expect something like "rural Queensland" or "northern Manitoba" you get "our district."

The "I" accepts the wife's driving but is bothered that the wife "will not handle guns"—familiar enough, except that a macho guy who's into guns probably would want to drive and not have his wife drive.

Yuriko dreams "twelve-year old dreams of love and war" and the rest of the second paragraph seem OK if we think of "Yuriko" as a European name with a masculine "o" ending and picture a macho culture not far from, perhaps, the Yukon. But Yuriko is a girl—Japanese name ultimately?—and fathers in macho industrialized cultures on contemporary Earth don't accept quite so readily that their teenage daughters might go out bear-hunting or trying to kill cougars with a knife.

The "I" has "fought three duels," has a telegraph in the car, notes that the quiet car engine isn't steam but I.C. (Internal Combustion). For sure this ain't Kansas, and I don't think its even Newfoundland.

Finally—"We've been intellectually prepared for this ever since the Colony was founded, ever since it was abandoned, but this is different. This is awful." And what is awful? "'Men!' Yuki had screamed . . . . 'They've come back! Real Earth men!'"

3. "When It Changed" is a "First Contact" story, in the subgroup of "First Contact in a Long time." I.e., it's like E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Starman and such, but it varies the formula in having the alien creatures humans with whom we've lost contact. With writers in the tradition of comic romance (e.g., Shakespeare or Le Guin in their early writing), this set-up could lead to a work ending with new and better world coalescing around a central, heterosexual couple, whose upcoming marriage would bring fertility to a wasteland and greater wholeness to the main characters. Did you want that happy ending? What's the effect of the ending Russ gives you?

4. Since Yuriko's patronymic/matronymic name is "Janetson," we can infer on about the second page of the story what we only learn directly later: that the name of the "I" is Janet. OK—how does Janet view the men (412)? How do you think Russ wants us to view the men?

Janet puts her hand out for a handshake for "interstellar amity"—does that make you trust her opinion more?

Janet spots Phyllis Helgason Spet, identifying her as someone "whom someday I shall kill"—does that make you trust her opinion any less? (We later learn that the duels Janet fought were to the death [416]; take her threat to Spet quite literally.)

Should we contemn the first man Janet talks with (412-13) and have a rather higher opinion of the second, "the real one" (414)? Is Yuki's opinion important for this question?

5. Note the exposition by Janet (and Lydia) about Whileaway (412, bottom-413).

"Where are all your/the people" (412, 413) is important for the idea of "people" held by the man who's "for show" (414).

Is it "poisoning the well" to assign "people" = "men" to a dense, rather thuggish man? Is it OK to have the women of Whileaway use "son" in the patronymic/matronymic (412) and, apparently, "men" to mean "people, human beings" (413)? Is that OK in Russian? (Real questions for me.)

Patronymic: The "Ivanovich" in "Ivan Ivanovich Rus" or "Alexandra Ivanova Rus"—i.e., "son/daughter of Ivan."

Matronymic: Same thing, from the mother.

If it's not nice to accept with equanimity the plague that allows Whileaway to have an all-women world, what about all those stories in which we saw, though less literally, all-male worlds? Might a somewhat thuggish woman reader ask, "Where are all the people?" in much science fiction, war stories, and other "action/adventure" works?

(I may misremember, but I think in Russ's The Female Man, a Whileaway character named Jael identifies herself and women like her as the "plague." That's an even less nice suggestion, but it should get Russ's readers to wonder what was going on in the heads of a lot of authors who rather blithely ignored women in their works.)

The exposition is brief, but it does suggest a culture requiring a lot of labor—but one that works.

Note that the fantasy of one-sex reproduction is more realistic for woman than for men; currently "parthenogenesis" (virgin birth) for humans may not be "so easy that anyone can practice it," but "the merging of ova" faces mostly technical and ethical barriers (414). Anyway, if women want to fantasize a self-sustaining world without men, they need only have a very large sperm bank with a wide genetic cross-section. Male parthenogenesis fantasies have to get much more complex: cloning and artificial gestation.

6. Note Janet's debate with "the real one" among the men, the real leader, about "parthenogenetic culture" (414-15).

Since any religious arguments would be, it seems, irrelevant to both sides, and it's a bit premature for the men to critique any defects in the life on Whileaway as it's actually lived, the question gets down to whether or not "this kind of society is unnatural" (414).

Who wins the "nature" argument?

Who wins your sympathy?

7. Do you agree that the women "should have burned them [the visiting men] down where there stood" (415)? Would it be in character for Janet?

Picture Janet and the man literally "bristling" at one another "for several seconds (this is absurd but true)"—i.e., the hair-on-end aggressive threat displays in humans and other primate species (415).

Would it have been just for the women to have killed the men?

Should we see the men as spies? Messengers bringing ultamatums? Aliens who should be killed while weak, preferably before they can tell their world the secret location of our home planet—to use the cliché formula.

Given Western Hemisphere history the last 500 years, would it have been wise for the natives of the New World who first encountered Columbus and the other explorers to have killed the Whites and sunk their ships? (The possibility is suggested in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World Is Forest—and before you condemn such bloody-mindedness out of hand, look up brief histories of the Carib Indians and the California Indians.)

8. What are the sexual politics we see within the story—and can infer are inherent to men/women relationships so long as men don't change much? Given the unlikelihood on Earth of a plague that kills only men—what are the implications of "When It Changed" for (sexual) politics here and now?

James Tiptree, Jr. (pseudonym of Alice Sheldon), "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1976)

1. Feminist SF works showing worlds of women raise in very strong ways the question frequently formulated as "Nature vs. Nurture" or "Heredity vs. Environment." I.e., to what extent can we talk of a fixed nature for The Human Being or fixed natures for Man and Woman; to what extent are we defined by our environments, especially our most immediate environment of human culture? Having spent some 23 semester hours around a school of life sciences, I usually find the question silly. I don't believe in The Goose or The Butterfly of even The Methanobacterium; so I don't find it easy to believe in Man or The Human Male or The Human Female or The Human Being or any abstract Human Nature in the mind of a Platonic god. There are geese and butterflies and all sorts of bacteria, and people; about the only thing I can understand in such formulations as "nature" is genotype: the genetic endowment of the organism. I can also understand modal phenotype: all the perceivable ways that the genotype expresses itself, as we're most likely to run into them. And I accept as a law,

Environment

Genotype————————->phenotype

Time

"How would The Organism respond in this stimulus situation?" Hell if I know—is The Oganism a dog or a dogfish or a dogwood tree? "How would the organism develop if there were no environmental interference?" It'd be weird, dude; there's always an environment.

The genetic norm for human beings is 46 chromosomes, two of which directly relate to sex. With only minor exceptions, if the fertilized egg that became you was XX, you're a girl; if XY, you're a boy. About 1/46th of the genetic complement is directly related to your biological gender—which is an important part of the genome, but sitll only a part.

Let's say women tend to have better fine muscle coordination than men (which women probably do). That'd be part of "feminine nature." But any

particular woman might be a klutz; and whether women's having good fine-muscle coordination means that they do most of the needle-point or most of the neurosurgery—that's a matter of culture and politics.

But I also teach courses about periods when properly indoctrinated Europeans believed the Nature = God's Handiwork as expressed in parallel planes, the Cosmic Dance, and, preeminently, The Great Chain of Being. If their theory is correct, then human nature is the human niche in Nature as designed by God. And I am myself a well-indoctrinated Jeffersonian and accept the creation myth in the Declaration of Independence—which includes a view of human nature quite different from both the traditional Greco(Roman)-Christian views and current scientific views.

What's human nature like in "Houston"? Is it unnatural for women to do without male rule (471)? Is it unnatural to produce children by cloning; unnatural to engineer the human genone (462)? Is it "natural to share" (457)? Among humans following our natures, is it the case that "Everybody has aggressive fantasies" or "Nobody does"? Will it be a natural world where ". . . fighting is long over," having ended with men (473)?

Does the women's world in "Houston" deny human nature in being so slow to change? In being unhierarchical? (In The Great Chain Being, there's a place for everyone, and it is a self-evident truth that people are radically unequal.)

Alternatively, if the instigating institution of human civilization was the (military) Army, and the builder of the first great works the thoroughly bureaucratized labor "army," are these undisciplined women uncivilized? Are they denying the essence of civilized humanity in choosing to live comfortably rather than "to boldly go where no man has gone before"—as quickly as possible and inviting a lot of risks?

2. In the background of "Houston" you'll find Aldous Huxley's classic anti-Utopia, Brave New World (made explicit on 462). Huxley presents a peaceful world of what we'd call bio-engineered people, but they're male-dominated and strictly hierarchical, with a class system starting with Alphas and following the Greek alphabet down to Betas, Gammas, and Deltas. To some extent, "Houston" is a reply to Brave New World showing that you can have a good, anarchistic society with at least some cloning (but not growing babies in "bottles"—see Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time for that one handled positively). To what extent, if at all, do the BNW allusions serve to show us limitations in the goodness of "The human race" in "Houston"?

3. In his endnote to the story in The SFRA Anthology, Thomas P. Dunn identifies the protagonist of the story as Doc Lorimer and compares him with Sophocles's Creon in Antigone. I've got some quibbles on Creon, but Dunn is certainly right about who's the central character.

How much should we sympathize with Doctor Orren Lorimer? The story starts with a flashback of little Orren getting tricked or pushed into the girls' washroom at Evanston Junior High and returns momentarily to that scene just before the end (434, 473). Early on there's a long paragraph on the older Lorimer dealing with "all the Buds and Daves and big, indomitable, cheerful, able, disciplined, slow-minded mesomorphs he has cast his life with. Meso-ectos, he corrected himself; astronauts aren't muscle heads," but, Bud and Dave are hardly heroes either. "I'm half-jock, he thinks. A foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier and I'd be just like them. One of them. An alpha. They probably sense it underneath, the beta bile"—and then a few more lines and a short paragraph flashing back to "the painful end part" of the girls' washroom episode: "the grinning faces waiting for him when he

stumbled out. The howls, the dribble down his leg. Being cool, pretending to laugh too. You shitheads, I'll show you. I am not a girl" (436).

If the end of Revenge of the Nerds has things right, and every normal person should occasionally feel nerdy, should we identify with Lorimer's desire to be accepted among the ultimate jocks with "The Right Stuff"? Or, should we condemn him for wanting to be one of the jocks when he alternates his awe of alphas (445) with contempt (436), and suspects the real jocks have no respect for him (453).

If "we" are girls or women, should we condemn him because he identifies nerdish victims with girls?

If "we" are liberal feminists, should we condemn him (gently) for not seeing his self-interest and making common cause with women?

If we identify with the future women, should we sympathize with him but accept his death as just a (more or less unfortunate) necessity, the way the dense little sexist sees women (435)?

4. Mankind, as we see it in "Houston" are one religious fanatic, strongly into the more authoritatian ideas of St. Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, a stage Texan who seems to accept the Gospel According to Hugh (Heffner), in The Playboy Philosophy version, ca. 1969, and a science nerd who wants to be a jock. Is this fair? Fair enough? (E.g., is it about as fair as the view of women in most "action/adventure" movies?)

5. In "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," Ursula K. Le Guin presents a beautiful utopian world with only one flaw: its existence depends upon keeping one child in a room in filth, squalor, and degradation. Thus Le Guin puts to a most rigorous proof the Utilitarian ideal of "The greatest good for the greatest number." Keep that in mind when you consider the climax of the story: "We can hardly turn you loose on Earth, and we simply have no facilities for people with your emotional problems"—and the added line by the earnest Judy Dakar, "Besides, we don't think you'd be very happy" (473). What do you think of these future women who kill Lorimer?

6. If you were to denounce to the authorities the SFRA for purveying dangerous obscenity in reprinting "Houston," which aspects would you stress to really, so to speak, turn on Jesse Helms and the Art Police to the necessity of suppressing the story?

If you were an ACLU attorney defending the story, how would you handle the accusations that the story uses dirty words, denigrates males, shows American astronauts in a negative light, attacks Christian doctrine (471), shows an attempted rape and completed masturbation, and is generally a downer for guys by showing our demise and succession by a world in which, really, "nothing counts" (469)—and one run by feminist anarchists, to boot?

C[atherine]. L[ucille]. Moore, "No Woman Born" (1944)

1. Is it Deirdre? Will Deirdre remain Deirdre insofar as essential to Deirdre is humanity?

2. How should we respond to the last reference to "the distant taint of metal already in her voice" (188, my emphasis)? Is Maltzer a potential Frankenstein insofar as Deirdre is some sort of potential monster? Is Maltzer, perhaps, a disappointed Pygmalion, who's created a Galatea who's a little too good? If a mob electrocuted Deirdre and destroyed the brain, would you accuse them of murder? Or just destruction of a valuable artifact?

Octavia E. Butler, "Bloodchild" (1984)

1. From The Encyclopaedia Britannica (1974), "ichneumon" in Micropaedia: "The females" of the family Ichneumonidae "lay their eggs in or on the larvae or pupae (rarely eggs or adults) of the host. The ichneumon larva feeds on the fats and body fluids of the host until fully grown, then usually spins a silken cocoon. The species that parasitize hosts in open habitats usually develop as internal parasites; those that attack hosts in concealed places . . . usually feed on the host [insect] externally. In most cases a single larva develops in one host; in some cases, however, many larvae develop in a single host" (V.281). Perhaps more to the point for the terror implicit in "Bloodchild" is the folklore about the ichneumon wasp: that the female paralyzes a spider with her sting and lays numerous eggs inside the living, conscious, but paralyzed animal. When the eggs hatch, they eat their way out of the living, conscious, paralyzed spider.

Note the motif of monstrous and deadly pregnancy in the 1986 version of The Fly, Alien, and Aliens.

Note also monstrous impregnation overlapping with fear of rape.

2. As the creators of the Scared Straight program and, more recently (ca. 1988), a poster for Mothers Against Drunk Driving are well aware, rape can be very frightening to men as well as to women. Rape of male humans, however, is relatively rare, and most men and boys not facing a prison sentences can manage to ignore the fear.

3. Does "Bloodchild" work to get men and maybe sophisticated boys to identify with women? With gay males? With oppressed peoples?

4. Insofar as the Terrans have no chance rebelling and do well to accept the protection of the 'Tlic, is "Bloodchild" a little allegory teaching Blacks and other oppressed peoples to accept their condition and not rebel? (If you were Octavia Butler, how would you respond to such a charge—one involving betrayal of your people?)

Harlan Ellison, "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" (1968)

1. In a phone call, Harlan Ellison informed me with some vehemence that (a) he was apalled that critics missed the fact that Ellen is Black (382 + 388) and that (b) the ending of "I Have No Mouth" is upbeat (see 390 n. 2). Since Ellison is a very intelligent man: Huh? Is there a significant racial theme to the story? Aside from the fact that AM isn't completely, utterly, totally victorious in ruining the humans, what is "upbeat"?

2. Given the way computers are getting smaller and the Cold War seems to have given way to more limited warm and hot wars—does the premise of take-over by giant military computers seem likely? Is it very significant one way or the other? I.e., is the story so clearly allegorical or figurative or something other than literal that it doesn't much matter whether or not we accept the premise as realistic? If "I Have No Mouth" is allegorical or figurative or whatever—what is it saying? Are we trapped in some sort of mechanized society that has developed from Cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am"? Are we trapped in a cybernetic universe ruled over by a divine sadist? Is the story written in the hope of preventing a future of a mechanized society out of human control or run by dehumanized humans?

ADDITIONS to Study Guide for SFRA Anthology

6 September 1999

H. G. Wells, "The Country of the Blind" (1904)

This is a "Lost World" story and certainly qualifies as SF that way, and, perhaps also as a kind of eutopia. Still, consider the possibility that "Country of the Blind" might be science fiction and unusual because most of what passes for science fiction has little to do with science.

Opening:

Note third-person ("he"), pretty much omniscient Narrator, switching for a moment to first-person ("I"). We get the story of a man leaving the valley, probably the last person to do so.

We get bits of information that will be important later, such as no precipitation in the valley.

Note faith of the people of the valley, but that they had been "only slightly touched with the Spanish civilisation" and had kept "something of a tradition of the arts of old Peru and of its lost philosophy." The Blind may turn out to be proficient philosophers.

Nuñez enters the valley (I add the tilda [~] for pronunciation):

When Nuñez sees the Blind, we have a kind of First Contact motif.

Note how early Nuñez thinks "In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King." Such Pride usually precedes a fall (at least in literature).

Note Narrator on language. (Would the story seems less plausible to you if the Blind spoke the same Spanish Nuñez speaks? We read "Country" in English, and we might just accept speaking the same language as a convention. [Did you know there was a Universal Translator for Star Trek episodes? Do you believe there can be such a thing as a Universal Translator?])

Nuñez Telling His World / Narrator on Blind Philosophy:

The Blind may lack imagination, in our sense, or "they had made for themselves new imaginations" using their revised sensorium. In any event, they develop a cosmology—a Creation Myth—and attempt explanations for the empirical phenomena of their world.

The Blind may not be as arrogant as Nuñez, but they do have great confidence in their society. Do you perceive them as analogs to the scientists of Wells's day, with their confidence in how much they knew and their confidence in empirical method? Are they also like scientists of our day, or are our scientists more humble?

The Society of the Blind: Note very well the section beginning, "They led a simple, laborious life, these people, with all the elements of virtue and happiness, as these things can be understood by men. They toiled, but not oppressively; they had food and clothing sufficient for their needs [. . .]."

Do you find this society eutopian? In the sense of "a society significantly better that that of the author and the author's audience"?

Do you think it'd be eutopian for Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia and coiner of the word—who based his Good Society on monasteries? Eutopian for American utopists who founded agricultural communes? For the makers and some of the audience of Easy Rider, where a 1960s Hippie commune is handled positively (as is the farm of an extended family of people close to the land)?

The Sensorium of the Blind: Do you believe their sense quite so "marvellously acute" as we are told? Note in through here their "ordered world"; note also the Narrator's direct address to the reader, with the telling cliché, "you see."

Love and Politics ... and Horror:

Nuñez rebels, and his rebellion is put down, and he submits. In the Country of the Blind, the sighted man becomes a servant.

"Love conquers all" the old saying has it (Amor vincit omnia), meaning either "Love conquers everyone (even the gods)" or "Love conquers everything." Does love conquer here?

Note attacks on the eyes as a prime motif in Horror and for horror, from Oedipus Tyrannos to King Lear to Nineteen Eighty-Four to recent slasher flix.

How do you feel about old Yacob's line, "Thank Heaven for science!" and the idea of the blind surgeons that removing "these irritant bodies" with "a simple and easy surgical operation" will cure Nuñez? They're right; removing his eyes will cure him of his delusions of sight.

Ray Bradbury, "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950)

This is a Post-Apocalypse story, set after World War III has destroyed human civilization and, apparently, all human life on Earth.

The tone of the story might be called "elegaic," but in his reading oor an audio tape, Bradbury is very chipper, enthusiastically describing the technology as the House goes through its routines and deals with the unusual challenge of the dying and then dead dog. And then dies, perhaps heroically.

Title: Note the poem for the theme of "There Will Come Soft Rains": "Not one will mind, neither bird nor tree, / If mankind perished utterly [. . .]." Science Fiction, oddly, can sometimes be very oldfashioned in its views: its tendency to take a large view often makes it preHumanist in seeing humankind as just a small part of the universe, and a pretty unimportant small part. Still, as Patrick G. Hogan, Jr., says in the afterword, our going, and the House's going, are "intensely sad."

If you see this story as science fiction, where is the science? Since fiction is usually stories of humans in action, where is the fiction?

Roger Zelazny, "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1963)

You'll need annotations. So here goes, page by page in SF:SFRA Anthology, 1988.

p. 308

Madrigals Macabre: Madrigals are usually happy little songs from the 15th-17th centuries—or short love poems just waiting, so to speak, to be set to music; "macabre" in French and in English means something like "gruesome." Pronounce the title aloud: It's a very arty, 1950s-ish title for a collection of poetry.

Cigarette: along with the "English" measurement of the ash, this is a bit of continuity from the time the story was written. People still smoke tobacco, still think in terms of inches.

¨Let not ambition ...": Thomas Gray (d. 1771), from "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," viii-ix:

Let not ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys and destiny obscure;

Nor grandeiur hear with a disdainful smile,

The short and simple annals of the poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,

And all that beuature, all that wealth e'er gave,

Awaits alike th' inevitable hour,

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Hamlet/Claudius: This begins a motif. The allusion is to William Shakespeare' Hamlet, where Hamlet is a 30-year old prince who returns home from the U. of Wittenberg to find out immediately that upon Hamlet's father's death, his father's brother Claudius has married Hamlet's mother and become king; later Hamlet learns Claudius murdered Hamlet's father and seduced his mother before his father's death. In a very bloody conclusion, Hamlet kills Claudius, and then dies himself.

p. 309

Idyll: usually a short poem, on a pastoral or otherwise pleasant subject.

Saint-Exupéry: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (d. 1944): author of The Little Prince, summarized in Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature: "A pilot crashes in the desert where he meets a childlike figure from another planet who is seeking to return to his home in order to be with his rose, who needs his protection."

Rise and Fall of the Martian Empire: variation on "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire," plus exposition: the Martians were once great, but now aren't. Note in through here and from now on Gallinger's arrogance; if you respect him, call it hybris, the Pride that goes before a tragic fall. In a story from 1963, you might look for a psychological explanation for it, perhaps compensation for ... something.

Like/Village: Like, you know, talk from Greenwich Village, ca. 1955, where it was a cool place for artists to be. (The story assumes humans getting to Mars long before the end of the 20th c.)

Mahabharata: The great, very long, epic of India (which includes as a kind of interlude, no less than The Song of God, a central teaching of mystic thought).

p. 310

Samson in Gaza: heroic strongman, blinded and led helpless (his hair grows back; he regains his strength; and he gets a very bloody revenge).

The Matriarch M'Cwyie: Most Terran societies are patriarchal, ruled by men. Mars is different in being a matriarchy, ruled by women. It is incredibly similar to us in that M'Cwyie is a woman, Homo sapiens sapiens, XX in sex chromosomes.

Schliemann at this Troy: Going against the archeological orthodoxy of his time, Heinrich Schliemann (d. 1890) believed that Troy of The Iliad existed and existed where Homer said it was. He was right and almost on his own discovered Troy.

pp. 311-13

Prakrit/Sanskrit: vernacular, secular Old Indic languages vs. the ancient Hindu holy tongue.

Byzantine brilliance: Like something from the Byzantine Empire: elaborate, ornate, very highly civilized.

Benzedrine and champagne: Benzedrine is the brand name for a powerful upper (meth-amphetamine, more or less); champagne is a sparkling wine. The mixture would both do the job of keeping him up but not hyper and be pretty decadent.

Flashback: Gallinger's father was a preacher of the Calvinist variety and wants Gallinger to read the Bible in its original tongues (Hebrew and Greek) plus enough Latin and Aramaic to read commentary and handle the rare Aramaic passage—plus understand the first language of Jesus.

Note Gallinger's conflation of his father with "Lord" and just "Sir."

Dad thinks Gallinger "born to be a missionary." Recall that line later.

Gallinger's only relationship was his father. How good was that relationship? Dad was "never cruel"—but ....

pp. 314-15

recherches: investigations. About now consider what you think of Gallinger and his vocabulary. Of Zelazny for expecting you to get at least some of these allusions.

Poe into French: The US writer Edgar Allan Poe is popular in French.

Sartre's Other: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialist philosopher very big in the 1940s through 1960s, held that it's almost impossible for an "I" to contact an "Other."

fishers on Mars: Jesus said his ex-fishermen disciples had been catchers of fish, and he'd make them "fishers of men"—bearers of the Word.

Havelock Ellis (d, 1939: English psychologist, most famous for his writings on human sexual behavior.

Braxa: The first we see of her. Note Gallinger's immediate interest.

sari/samisen: Indian garment and Japanese musical instrument. Note that you don't have to know what words mean to understand the sentence.

p. 316

Rama/Vishnu: Major Hindu gods.

Sarasvati, Mary, Laura: Consort of the Hindu god Brahma and goddess of river water; Mother of Jesus/God; beloved in at least one sonnet cycle, and I think a Russian novel. Anyway, Gallinger perceives Braxa as The Lady, divinely inspired.

Rimbaud et al.: poets and writers with serious drug habits.

Job/God: Job and his Comforters go through cycles of argument until Job makes them shut up. Then there's an interpolation; then God answers Job from out of a whirlwind. Gallinger is right, though, in seeing Job's argument throughout with God.

pp. 317-18:

Gallinger isn't now quite as nasty as he usually is. Note Betty's defense of him. She's on to something about Gallinger's psychology, at least his having one.

missionary: Gallinger "needs something to convert people to" indeed.

Swift, Shaw, Petronius Arbiter: three great satirists, the last of whom satirized a very vulgar feast thrown by the newly-rich Timalchio.

Blake's rose, dying: William Blake, early Romantic poet; I couldn't find the rose poem—but you've been reminded again to look for roses.

p. 321: Note the plague that does not kill as a historical fact, as opposed to a vision such as the Apocalypse According to John (last book of Christian Scriptures). Note also joking journal article title, "Tone of Voice: An Insufficient Vehicle for Irony"; it's a good title (the boy has been to grad school).

pp. 322-23: Riddle solved, "Racial sterility, masculine impotence . . ."—just after we learn the Braxa is a very old woman but a human woman.

Shiaparelli/canals: the astronomer Shiaparelli saw canals on Mars, fuelling speculation on a Martian civilization; later astronomers could see no canals.

blind Milton: John Milton, 17th-c. poet and author of Paradise Lost.

ascetics/Dionysiac: ascetics forego pleasure; Dionysius is worshipped most centrally in Dionysian orgia, which gave rise to our word, "orgy."

p. 324: Rilke, Castle Duino, Elegies: Rainer Maria Rilke (d. 1926), whose most famous work is the Elegies, written at Duino.

p. 325: Aspic: a jelly of meat juice, tomato juice and such, and an old word for "asp," the deadly snake.

p. 328: Emory is going to be very nice to Gallinger and do him a favor and let him bring Braxa back, for one possibility of a Happy Ending, possibly prefigured and symbolized by the rose. Is Gallinger's staying on Mars another possibility? So far, does anything preclude it?

p. 330: Note "There is only one prophecy left, and it is mistaken. We will die." We still have hope of a happy ending.

pp. 333-end: Note Gallinger as both the Sacred Scoffer (as M'Cwyie says) and the unworthy bearer of the Word ("a second-rate poet with a bad case of hybris," as Gallinger says). Still,

The Word is borne; the Martians are saved.

Braxa is pregnant, and the child will live.

And Love conquered Gallinger, but stopped there. Would you have liked a happier ending? Would one be appropriate as part of a gift for Koheleth, Ecclesiastes, the Preacher of Emptiness! Emptiness! and futility?

Rich Erlich

SFRA Anthology Adds, F99 (2)

ADDITIONS to Study Guide for SFRA Anthology

7 September 1999

H. G. Wells, "The Star" (1897)

Opening: Wells has Neptune as the outermost planet. (Pluto was hypothesized around the turn of the century, hunted for after 1905, but not finally found until 1930, or so saith my desk encyclopedia.) Note, though, the scientific view presented in the second paragraph: "the huge isolation of the solar system." To what extent is "The Star" a teaching story driving home the lesson of humankind's place in the scheme of things, from a scientific point of view?

Contrast the Judeo-Christian myth of creation in which Earth is central and Man (adam) the Crown of Creation. Contrast perhaps more the Christian view that "God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son."

Development:

Look for proper nouns: names. Who or what gets named? Who or what just gets indicated or typified ("Men writing in offices"; "two Negro lovers"; "The master mathematician"; "The students")?

Note any break in what seems to be a 3rd-person, omniscient but mostly objective point of view, describing (beautifully) great events: "But you must not imagine" (2nd person), "because I have spoken of people praying through the night" (first person), "that the whole world was in terror because of the star" (18).