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).