Tag Archives: Throwback Thursday

Stay Sane Inside Insanity – more of why I love sf/f

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Frank, Riff -Raff, Magenta and Columbia from the original Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Frank, Riff -Raff, Magenta and Columbia from the original Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I was 17 or 18 years old when two friends took me on a drive down to Portland, Oregon to see a “funny movie” that I might like. It wasn’t the first time that Jim and Bob had taken me to Portland to shop for comics and then catch a movie, but it was the first time that we left so late in the evening. The movie was only shown at midnight, they said.

I confess I was a bit freaked out once we got there. It was a neighborhood we hadn’t been to before, and they hadn’t warned me that almost everyone waiting in line for the show would be in costumes. Many of them oddly sexual costumes. They also hadn’t warned me that it was an R-rated show. It was only after we had sat down, and the lights dimmed that Jim handed me a newspaper and told me to hang onto it, “you’ll need it later.” So they also didn’t warn me about the audience participation that was about to go down.

The original Rocky Horror Picture Show was released on film in 1975. The show had started as a musical stage play written by London actor Richard O’Brien, who poured all of his love for schlocky 40s and 50s muscle-man movies, horror and sci fi films ranging from the 30s through 70s, and rock and roll into the show. It played first in a small 60-seat theatre, but well enough to quickly move to bigger venues, and then the play’s director, Jay Sharman, secured funding to make a movie.

O’Brien’s original script focused on the unintentional humor of the older sci fi and horror film, with only a sprinkling of references to the homoeroticism found in films such as Hercules Unchained and Duel of the Titans. But as they developed the play, and the actors (particularly a young Tim Curry) figured out how they wanted to play the characters, the pansexual and transsexual elements become much more important.

The film didn’t do very well, at all. Mainstream audiences just didn’t understand it. But a studio executive, noting that the movies Pink Flamingos and Reefer Madness were making money in midnight showings, had the idea to get some theaters to show it at midnight (the first showing on April Fool’s Day 1976). And then the show quickly gained a cult following, with people showing up in costume, and then fully costumed local casts re-enacting the show just in front of the screen as it was playing.

I was totally unprepared. People in the audience started chanting “Lips! Lips!” before the movie started. People were singing along and shouting things that I couldn’t quite understand. And then the cast started mimicking what was happening. The one time I asked my friends what was happening they just shushed me and said, “it’ll make sense eventually!”

I was very uncomfortable and confused and a little bit angry at my friends. I couldn’t always understand what was happening on screen because of the shouting from the audience.

Tim Curry during the Sweet Transvestite show-stopper.
Tim Curry during the Sweet Transvestite show-stopper.
And then, with a big build up of rising music (and the audience clapping in time with the bass beat), suddenly Tim Curry was there, in the corset and fishnets belting out, “How’d’ya do I, see you’ve met my, faithful.. HANDY-man…”

It was like a punch right in my chest. And a rush of adrenaline (and other hormones) as he prowled and pranced while belting out “Sweet Transvestite.”

I was completely closeted. This was at least seven years before the first moment I would say aloud (very anxiously) the words “I think I might be gay.” I was still living in a small town attending a conservative evangelical church. I sang in an evangelical touring choir! At least 99% of the people I could categorize as friends were members of either the choir or very similar churches. I lived in a state of constant fear of someone not just calling me a fag (which happened all the time at school), but of deciding that it was actually true. I was constantly monitoring myself, trying to stop myself from saying things that didn’t conform to people’s expectations, trying to stop myself from doing things that didn’t conform, from admitting to liking things that people didn’t think a normal guy should like, and so forth.

And there, on the screen (not to mention sitting all around me) were people flaunting and reveling in nonconformity. Specifically sexual nonconformity!

It blew my mind.

Dr. Frank N. Furter made a man explicitly to be his sexual plaything.
Dr. Frank N. Furter made a man explicitly to be his sexual plaything.
I was pulled into the movie. All the audience participation, the local cast, and everything that wasn’t happening on the screen just vanished for the rest of the movie. It didn’t matter. I just wanted to know what would happen next on screen.

I tried to talk about the plot of the movie with my friends during the drive home after. They were immensely amused that I actually followed the show for the plot. They insisted the movie was just an excuse for the audience to yell and leer. “It doesn’t really have a plot!”

I didn’t see it again for several years. But by then I could sing along to most of the songs, because I’d gotten hold of the soundtrack and listened to it about a million times. The audience participation bits had changed in those years. And when I saw it in a theatre one more time a few years later, they had changed further. I am a huge Rocky Horror fan who doesn’t know most of the audience participation stuff.

The movie is meant to be a parody of all those schlocky sci fi and horror films particularly of the 50s and 60s. The story isn’t meant to be literature. But the film isn’t, really about the story. It’s about taking what was subtext everywhere else—coded homosexual relationships, homoerotic tension (whether intentional or not), sexual relationships of all kinds—and making it manifest. Frank N Furter builds a man for the express purpose of being his sexual plaything, for goodness sake! Several of the characters are casually bisexual or pansexual, but the fact that traditional romances also involve sex (which films and stories before that virtually never acknowledged) is also shoved front and center.

The film doesn’t just poke fun at convention and conformity of all kinds, it dresses convention up in fishnet stockings and makes it sing and dance about why noncomfority is great.

Over the years I’ve watched the film many, many times at home, thanks to availability on VHS back in the day and later DVD. I’ve also attended a couple of live performances of the stage version, as well as really, really enjoying last year’s Rocky Horror Show LIVE by the BBC. I was thus really hopeful about the Fox remake of the film starring trans actress Laverne Cox… and I was sorely disappointed. They were both too timid and too slavishly committed to imitating the 1975 film. There were good moment. I’m happy to see that Tim Curry is able to work, despite the severe stroke he suffered a few years ago. And Adam Lambert rocked the Eddie role, but many of the other casting and design choices were… well, not good.

The BBC version of the live performance (with rotating actors playing the Criminologist–Anthony Stewart Head among them) is available in its entirely on YouTube. I quite enjoyed streaming it to my TV via the YouTube app on my Apple TV last week after watching the Fox version. And the original is available in many formats.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a parody of many sci fi and horror movies, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t sci fi itself. Particularly if you define speculative fiction the way that my new favorite author, Nisi Shawl sometimes does: fiction that de-privileges the status quo. Rocky Horror does that, in spades, while celebrating the outsider, the misfits, and the freaks (and showing that there’s at least a little bit of a freak inside everyone). I wasn’t ready to come out after watching it the first time, but it was another step down the path of realizing that this queer sci fi geek was not alone in the world, and that it isn’t enough to just dream it, you have to let yourself be it.

Longing, Loathing, and Locution — how you love in sf/f isn’t the only way

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Cora Buhlert argued very convincingly this week that there are Three Fractions of Speculative Fiction. She identifies them as the Traditionalists, the Anti-Nostalgics, and the Character Driven1.

Traditionalist fans want sci fi that is heavy on the engineering and explosions and light on the characterization. Rightwing politics in space is all right, but they’d prefer the stories not focus on issues that matter to women, people of colour, or LGBT people. Literary fiction is right out.

Anti-Nostalgic fans want speculative fiction that is sophisticated, literary, and eschews old paradigms. They vehemently reject anything nostalgic. They think the only worthwhile stories are the ones which break new ground and redefine the genre. Many of them give lip service to wanting diversity, but they heap condescension on all non-white, non-male, non-straight writers except one or two favored tokens.

Character Driven fans want sf/f that is heavy on characterization. They aren’t opposed to Big Ideas, but emotional arcs, moral dilemmas, and the effects of technology on human lives should drive the plot, to the point that sci fi tropes can exist as mere set dressing. They are especially fond of protagonists and settings which have previously been neglected in classic sf (women, characters of color, LGBT characters, disabled characters, non-western european settings, non-Anglo cultures).

I think these are fairly good definitions of three of the big categories of science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. Though there will be some overlap, and of course no classification system is going to neatly encompass everyone. For instance, I have emphatically argued that Babylon Five (which I loved) is not science fiction at all, but rather techno-fantasy. It is an epic fantasy which wraps itself in all of the trappings of space opera, but gets some extremely basic science that is fundamental to its main plot laughably and embarrassingly wrong. When I was in the heat of such an argument, I’m sure that I looked to all outside observers like a pure Traditionalist there. Whereas anyone who has read my fiction would likely place me in the Character Driven group.

I also agree with Buhlert that the struggle between the Traditionalist and Anti-Nostalgics has been raging in various incarnations since at least the 1930s. Her examples are: the Campbellian SF versus Pulp Adventure SF, the exclusion of the Futurians from the ’39 WorldCon, the New Wave versus the Campbellians (which had become the old guard by then), the rise of and resistance to Cyberpunk. With each wave, elements that had been new and different and championed by the Anti-Nostalgics were co-opted by the Traditionalist (along with some of their fans), until some other upstarts came along.

There are at least two other fan wars that were primarily Traditionalist vs Anti-Nostalgics that I’d like to throw into the mix. In the early 70s fans who had subscribed to (and later contributed to) magazines for years looked with disdain on fans who never read the monthly ‘zines, and only read novels and anthologies (which were reprints of selected works from the ‘zines). In the later 70s, when comic book fans started coming to sci fi conventions, there was another backlash against these newbies and their “picture books.”2

But not all of the upstarts have been Anti-Nostalgics. When Star Trek fandom blossomed spontaneously, rather than from within existing sf/f fandom, there was a strong backlash, with elements of both the Traditionalist and Anti-Nostalgics looking down on these Trekkies, who weren’t just newbies unfamiliar with classic sf and traditional fandom, but were far more likely to be women! Trek was just the first of many waves of Media Fans (new fans brought into the fold primarily by movies and television)—Doctor Who, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica3, anime, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight—that have each faced resistance and rejection from established fandom when they first arrived.

A lot of these Media Fans fall into the Character Driven category. And just like the Anti-Nostalgic waves before them, most of them have, after being resisted by Traditionalists, su sequently been at least partially assimilated—to the point that the stereotypical attacker of a Fake Geek Girl is a guy who speaks Klingon, has a collection of Star Wars figurines, and will attempt to exclude the girl by asking super obscure comic book questions.

But even more than that, each new wave of the Media Fans tends to have more women, particularly young women and girls, more people of color, more queers, and other marginalized groups than the existing fandom as a whole. I believe the reasons for that is that movies, television, and hit young adult books4 are readily available to more demographic segments of society, and find enthusiasts from all of those walks of life. Established fandom isn’t very welcoming of the newbies, especially non-male, non-white, non-straight newbies. The subsets of the previous waves that have assimilated into existing fandom winds up skewing male, straight, and white. Which perpetuates the problem.

The queers, women, and people of color continue to be fans of sf/f, but more and more they find welcoming communities on the web and outside the established fandom, some times creating their own conventions and meet-ups.

And it’s not just because the existing fandom is all actively racist, misogynist, and homophobic. It’s a combination of lots of subtle things. When the vast majority of the staff of a convention is white, and you’re not, you don’t feel welcome. When the vast majority of existing fans keep telling you that you must read certain classics, which are full of straight white male protagonists, with plots that are full of misogynist and colonial subtext, you don’t feel that this fandom is for you. Heck, when the existing fans won’t talk about anything published less than thirty years ago, and you’re younger than the books they keep talking about, you don’t feel invited7.

The most recent fannish dust-up, the Affair of the Melancholy Canines, is mostly a subset of the Traditionalist reacting to the kind of fiction the Character Driven fans like getting more than token representation in certain awards short lists, as well as the inclusion of non-white, non-male, non-straight writers and editors on those lists in more than small token numbers. The Melancholy Canines also claim that they’re pushing back against the sort of literary fiction the Anti-Nostalgics want, but the funny thing is that the Anti-Nostalgics hate all the same books and authors as the Canines. And if you read some of the posts that Buhlert links to, you’ll notice that they heap rather a lot of condescension on the writers who happen to be women or people of color.

I’m hopeful that this time, maybe, the section of fandom that welcomes (and is eager to both create and consume) sf/f that’s inclusive of all genders, gender identities, races, abilities, et cetera continues to grow and make inroads throughout fandom. It isn’t guaranteed. Previous waves haven’t been successful in changing the complexion of established fandom, after all.

But I’m not giving up. This queer fan is staying right here. I’m going to keep writing the kinds of characters and stories I like. I’m going to keep reading the good stuff I can find. I’m going to try to do a better job of promoting all of the interesting newer stuff I’m reading, as well.

“I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.”
― Philip K. Dick

Footnotes:

1. I am attempting to paraphrase Buhlert here, but my own perceptions may be skewing her point. If you don’t like anything I say here, blame me.

2. The current incarnation of the Anti-Nostalgics is very snobbish and literary, whereas the primary argument against both the non-magazine subscribers and the comic book fans were that they weren’t perceived as reading as broadly nor as seriously as the Traditional fans. Both sides have been snobbish in various ways. The comic fans argued that graphic stories (even though comics had been around for decades) were a new and more experimental art form than the unillustrated word on paper, for instance.

3. Original series. By the time the reboot series had happened, enough fans of the old series had been incorporated into the fandom community that the new series was embraced by most, and their fans tolerated by the rest.

4. It seems to me that Young Adult series have become the new gateway books. Back in the 50s and even still in the 60s5, the Heinlein juveniles were the introduction to sf for many. Though certain older fogies6 still insist on panels at conventions that Heinlein’s works are great gateways, the truth is most of his work (the juveniles in particular) have not aged well.

5. Which is when I was a child finding Heinlein books in school libraries.

6. By which I mean, older than me.

7. I’ve published on this blog a series of “why I love sf/f” posts that focus on books, short stories, shows, writers, and magazines I read as a kid and teen-ager and how they influenced me as a fan (and a writer). So I’m not saying that nothing printed more then a decade ago is worth anyone’s time. I haven’t written about everything I read back then, because not all of it was good. Even for the works I really loved, sometimes had problems I didn’t recognize back then, which I’ve commented on (the children’s book that had two antisemitic scenes which flew right over my head as a child, and shocked the heck out of me when I rediscovered the book in my thirties, for instance). The issue is that when established members of the community tell you (explicitly or not) that only people who love those particular books can be part of the community, well, when the young fan finds themselves cringing at the blatant homophobia, the racism, the misogyny (or at least total lack of any portrayal of many types of people who live in the real world), the message seems clear that we aren’t welcome in the community.

Metallic Rodents and Secret Agencies: more of why I love sf/f

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The 1961 paperback edition of The Stainless Steel Rat, cover art by John Schoenherr
The 1961 paperback edition of The Stainless Steel Rat, cover art by John Schoenherr (click to embiggen)
I was in middle school when I found a copy of Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat in a pile of cheap used books for sale. It was missing the front cover, which I didn’t know at the time probably meant it had been stripped. When a bookstore decides that a book has been sitting on the shelf too long and isn’t going to sell, their distribution contract usually allows them to destroy the book without selling it and get a refund from the publisher. To prove that they’ve destroyed the unsold copies, the store is required to send back the covers from each book destroyed. Shipping back just the cover was cheaper than shipping entire books. This is why many books carry a warning on one of the opening pages that if the book is sold without a cover, it is considered stolen property. (Hardbacks usually are not destroyed, as they will be remaindered, specifically sold at super cheap prices at certain chain stores.)

I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew that whenever damaged books showed up at the used book store, they were sold for a lot cheaper than the others.

If my first copy of The Stainless Steel Rat was a stripped copy, it is highly appropriate, because the star of the book (and its many sequel), was Slippery Jim DiGriz, the slickest conman and thief of the 346th Century.

DiGriz lived in an interstellar society with very high technology that made it nearly impossible for petty criminals to escape prison and “psycho surgery” for long. It took a special kind of criminal to thrive in that society. As the blurb on most of the paperback versions said:

“We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment.”

The book’s written from first person narrative, beginning while Jim is in the middle of yet another insanely daring robbery. Things start going wrong, of course, and it isn’t too many pages in before Jim realizes that the dreaded Special Corps is onto him. The Special Corps is a shadowy agency that was responsible for catching one of the greats, a thief DiGriz admired from affair, Inskipp the Uncatchable… so, of course, when Special Corps hauls DiGriz in to be interrogated by the head of operations, it turns out it’s Inskipp himself. And he has a deal for DiGriz, the same deal Inskipp was offered years ago when he was captured: join the Corps and help catch dangerous criminals, or have his brain altered…

DiGriz was chosen, just as Inskipp was, because DiGriz always planned his heists to very carefully avoid causing and physical harm to any people involved. A few of his previous operations he had even abandoned the heist when it became clear that complications had put people in danger. DiGiz’s first assignment (and the rest of the book) is to try to catch a serial killer.

But this isn’t like a gritty modern bloody serial killer story. The book is written as a light caper, with comedic bits. So the book was a romping adventure story, and far more concerned with the puzzle aspects. The character arcs and interaction are the focus, along with some humor.

It wasn’t just humor. The story explored issues of identity, free will, and what does it mean to be a member of a social species. Jim had always been careful not just to avoid hurting people, but he also always picked targets that were fully insured. He rationalized his existence as providing entertainment or spectacle. He kept security people and police on their toes and in practice. At least that’s what he told himself. Buried in that, along with his eventual confrontation with the killer, were also serious questions about privacy vs security, and control vs freedom.

So it made me think about many things. At different times in the narrative, I found myself agreeing with Jim more than I thought I would. And as I read the book again and again (because it was yet another one that I re-read many times), I found my sympathies seesawing back and forth as I considered the questions. The Special Corps protecting people from sometimes quite serious threats, but they operated in almost complete secrecy, and apparently answered only to themselves.

On the other hand, they had a number of agents like Slippery Jim, who broke ranks from time to time, and demonstrated a willingness to take down the agency if it went too far. Was that enough of to balance things out? In a real world, probably not. And it’s the kind of question still very relevant today.

In my later teens I found the sequels, and after I enthused about them to friends, someone bought me a shiny new copy of the first book for my birthday. The first few sequels cover the next several years in the life of Special Corps (occasionally rogue) Agent DiGriz… and his wife, and their eventual children. Then in 80s Harrison wrote some prequels, showing us events in the life of young Slippery Jim, how he learned his craft and became a legendary thief.

Harrison returned to the older DiGriz for the rest of the series, writing 12 Stainless Steel Rat books total before his death (the last one published posthumously). The Stainless Steel Rat wasn’t the only multibook series the Harrison wrote, but Slippery Jim was the first of his books that I remember reading, and the likable, extremely smart, and capably rogue is a character type that I became very fond of.

The book gave me another way to wrestle with the idea of my own identity. Harrison argued colorfully but persuasively for the idea that the law and customs aren’t always right. Morality and ethics have to come from a sense of empathy and a willingness to do right by people. And those were notions that gave me some more hope, as a closeted queer kid growing up among fundamentalists.

Skillful Men of the Medical and Chirurgical Profession – more of why I love sf/f

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Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter in 1850.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter in 1850.
Occasionally I find myself in the position of having to defend labeling some books or movies or television shows as being part of the science fiction/fantasy genre. For instance, a few years ago, during the early seasons of Person of Interest, someone said I shouldn’t call it sf because it was just an action adventure with a computer. But the Machine (which is the only name they ever give it) isn’t a computer, it is an artificial intelligent program that runs on many machines and is able to correlation data from many feeds and accurately predict people who are going to be victims or perpetrators of serious crime. That’s science fiction. Particularly when it is discovered the Machine has found ways to bypass some limits imposed on it by it’s designers, and even arranges to have a new cluster of computers set up in a new location and transmits itself there, and then has its old location dismantled so that people who know about it can’t destroy it—well that’s exhibiting freewill and more! (Things get really interesting in later seasons when a second, less benevolent AI is introduced)

Similarly, I’ve seen people argue that The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages isn’t really science fiction because it’s a historical novel set in 1943 telling a coming-of-age story of an 11-year-old girl growing up in Los Alamos where her father works on the secret project to build an atomic bomb. Whereas I think the nerdiness of a girl in the 1940s who is building her own radio from parts salvaged at the junk yard, combined with the way the novel explores how the government’s pursuit of this new technological advantage uproots children and disrupts their lives (exploring how new technologies impact society and people in nonmaterial ways has long been a significant part of sf), more than qualifies it.

But the granddaddy of all sf/f novels that people don’t realize is science fiction has got to be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

I can hear you protesting, “But the Scarlet Letter is a Gothic morality tale about Puritan scandal and consequences and forgiveness set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony that they made us read in school. It can’t possibly be science fiction!” That just means you aren’t looking at it from the perspective on 1850, when it was written. Your argument that it isn’t sci fi is similar to someone saying, “Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea isn’t sci fi because supermarines are real!” Submarines didn’t exist when Verne wrote his story of Captain Nemo and his fantastic undersea ship powered by a mysterious electric force.

Similarly, in the Scarlet Letter the character of Chillingsworth (who is secretly the long lost husband of poor Hester Prynne who is saddled with the shame of having had a baby born too long after the presumed death of her husband to be legitimate) is a great example of a science fictional mad scientist. His methods of subtle torture as he secretly experiments on Reverent Dimmesdale (while pretending to be trying to cure his illness) was very science fictional. There are no herbs known that will “corrupt the soul” as the text colorfully describes it. Certainly nothing that would force a man’s greatest fears and secrets to manifest as physical scars that spell out his greatest sins on his flesh!

When described that way, people think of Chillingsworth’s “dark medicine” as some kind of magic, like B-movie depictions of voodoo or the like (complete with colonial cultural misappropriation, but I’ll get to that). But when Hawthorne wrote it, he meant it as what we would today call science fiction. He and many other educated people at the time believed that the sorts of effects he described could be accomplished by the proper application of chemistry and biology, we just didn’t know how, yet!

Just as many scholars refer to Mary Shelley as the either the mother or grandmother of science fiction (never forget: the author of Frankenstein was a teen-age girl who wrote a story which invented sci fi on a dare in 1818), they also sometimes refer to Hawthorne as the grandfather of sci fi. Hawthorne’s more obviously sci fi type stories, such as “Rappacinni’s Daughter,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” or “Dr Heidegger’s Experiment” usually featured a mad scientist type character, rushing in to the dark corners of the universe where angels and sensible people hesitate to tread. But his more famous bits of gothic tragedy also have these elements. The House of Seven Gables has a hypnotist and posits a notion of inherited sin—that committing particularly heinous acts will warp you in ways that will somehow be passed on to your children. If science had known of the mechanism of DNA at the time when Hawthorne wrote, he surely would have had some learnéd person in the narrative talk about the theory of corrupted chromosomes, for instance.

Which brings us back to The Scarlet Letter, and the medical experiments that Chillingsworth secretly subjects Dimmesdale to as part of a plan to exact revenge on the man.

The Scarlet Letter was unusual in Hawthorne’s time for feature a female protagonist. And even more, for portraying the fallen woman as a sympathetic character, more worthy of the reader’s love and respect than any of those who stand judgment over her (and her child). Especially more worthy that her long missing husband, who instead of proclaiming his identity upon returning, forgiving his wife Hester for doing what she had to do to survive while he was off studying herbs and potions with vaguely described Native Americans, and raising Pearl as his own child, embarked on a truly mad plan to exact revenge on the father of Hester’s child.

I saw movie adaptations of The Scarlet Letter before I read the book. A copy of the book was part of a set of classics that a relative had given me for a Christmas present, but I didn’t try to read it until after watching one of the movies on TV. When I did, I found a lot of the contents had been glossed over in the movie. The movie made Chillingsworth’s actions seem more like just some slow acting poison, whereas the book made it clear Chillingsworth was doing something far more subtle and medically revolutionary.

Meanwhile, Hester refused to give in to the public shaming, but to sew her own scarlet letter A on her clothing and support herself by sewing. She also tends to the sick and destitute in the community, so much so that many begin to say that the A she wears doesn’t stand for Adulterer, but Angel and Able. That was a revolutionary idea: that a woman could take her destiny in her own hands and assert her independence. It was radical in 1850 when Hawthorne wrote it, and it would have been even more revolutionary in the mid-seventeenth century when the action of the novel is set.

The Scarlet Letter painted a portrait of how someone shunned and ostracized by their community–even someone condemned by the religious leaders–could be a noble and good person, contributing to society and ultimately rising above the false morality of that community. That was an important lesson for this queer kid growing up among Baptists and rednecks.

Lost Friends in the Dreamlands – more of why I love sf/f

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My Boat by Joanna Russ was published in Fantasy And Science Fiction Magazine, January 1976, cover by David Hardy.
“My Boat” by Joanna Russ was published in Fantasy And Science Fiction Magazine, January 1976, cover by David Hardy. (click to embiggen)
By January of 1976, I was midway through my freshman year in high school, living in a tiny town in northwestern Colorado. My parents had been separated for a few months and their divorce was underway. My physically and verbally abusive father wasn’t living with us any more, which was a plus, but everything from our finances to our daily routines were far less certain and predictable. I had had a big break-up of my own that no one knew about—because we were both extremely closeted boys in a very redneck town so of course we had been keeping it a secret. And another boy who had been one of my most consistent bullies throughout middle-school had recently coerced me into an even more covert non-consensual relationship. So to say my life at the time was a bit of a nightmare would not be inaccurate.

I still had a subscription to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, thanks to my grandparents, and each time a new issue arrived in the mail, I would retreat to my room with it and stay up way past my bedtime devouring every page. These were the circumstances under which I first read the short story, “My Boat” by Joanna Russ… Continue reading Lost Friends in the Dreamlands – more of why I love sf/f →

Asymptotic identities and contradictory infinities – more of why I love sf/f

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New World Ten, published August 1976. Cover artist not credited and no signature visible.
New World Ten, published August 1976. Cover artist not credited and no signature visible.
I first read “The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor” by Barrington J. Bayley in a used paperback copy of the The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald Wolheim that I bought in either late ’77 or early ’78, though it was originally published in New Worlds (sometimes titled New Worlds Quarterly, though they never managed to published more than twice a year), a magazine founded in 1964 by Michael Moorcock, borrowing a name from a sci fi zine that had originally been published in Britain from 1936 through 1963. Moorcock meant the magazine to focus more on experimental writing. It became the birthplace of the New Wave of sf.

None of which I knew when I read Bayley’s story. I was an American high school student whose exposure to sci fi had been dictated by what was available in libraries of various small towns and the pages of U.S. magazines such as Galaxy or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

“The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor” is a novella about a man living in a future where many technologies we would think of as impossible are commonplace. He is flying a personal craft at the velocity of c raised to the 186th power while fiddling with an invention of his own which he hopes will lead to the solution to a problem his society hasn’t yet tackled. He is accompanied by a sort of hitchhiker named Watson-Smythe who is trying to find an artist named Corngold.

Naylor’s invention is a thespitron: a device that constructs stories from all of the possible elements of fiction. Not just stories, it creates virtual worlds inhabited by beings that may be independently intelligent. The problem Naylor is hoping to solve with his experiments is navigation. In Naylor’s time it has been discovered that reality is far bigger than believed in the 20th century: the width of what we think of as the entire universe is simply a unit of measure for this reality. With those distances, the speeds at which advanced civilizations can move, and the fact that reality itself is expanding and changing while they’re zipping around at these impossible speeds means that no form of navigation is reliable. The very fabric of space changes between one’s origin and destination, so from time to time ships become lost.

Naylor has a theory that reality isn’t defined by matter, but by abstract concepts and relationships. He’s convinced if he can truly understand the nature of identity, how objects and beings relate to each other, such as in the structure of stories, that he can create a formula or algorithm to reliable rediscover any unique object one has observed before.

Which is all very cerebral and surreal compared to Watson-Smythe’s quest to find the artist. They do find the artist, his ship seemingly stranded on the edge of a vast stretch of unreality they call a matterless lake. At which point it’s revealed that Watson-Smythe is a government agent out to arrest Corngold, and that Corngold’s model is actually a victim of rape and kidnapping.

What happens next is in some ways far too predictable. When I first read it as a teen-ager I was rather angry that I saw what was going to go horribly wrong before it did, and couldn’t believe an interstellar spy would be stupid enough to fall for it. Even the dippy overly philosophical inventor, Naylor, should have seen it coming, I felt. I was also confused as to why the model/kidnap victim/rape victim seemed completely passive and apparently too afraid, even when essentially a cop arrives ready to rescue her, to do anything against her captor.

Re-reading it more recently, I was even more irritated when I realize that the author gives literally zero lines of dialog to the only woman in the story. Even while she is being abused in front of the officer who supposedly is there to arrest her assailant, the author tells us what she does, but doesn’t let her speak. It’s not that the author says she’s mute. No, the author says that she “responds noncommitally.”

Despite being frustrated with the story, I found a lot of it fascinating. The far future technology, which includes the ability to synthesize any matter one can name from a sort of quantum blob and back again when no longer needed, reminded me a lot of the Culture series by Iain Banks. So when I was reading up on Barrington J. Bayley, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Banks was one of the younger authors who listed Bayley as an influence on his work.

I was also not terribly surprised to find Bayley’s work described as gloomy and downbeat, which this story certainly was. While looking through the list of novels and short stories Bayley had published during his life, I was a bit surprised at how few titles I recognized. I think that this story is the only one of his that I’ve ever read.

While it isn’t a very satisfying read, I can’t say that it’s a bad story. It kept my attention and made me keep turning pages wondering how it would end. Admittedly, part of that was trying to figure out how the author would pull an interesting ending out of this mix of weird characterization and convoluted philosophy and mess of a plot. The story made me want answers, and it made me think about what clues I might have missed.

Is Bayley intentionally making the characters do stupid, and predictable things, to make a point about the reality of Naylor’s world and the unreality of his invention’s constructed worlds? I’m not sure. The intentions of the New Wave writers were to experiment by breaking the established rules of writing and try to find a new way to tell and experience stories. I do have to agree with Donald Wolheim’s comment in the introduction of this story in the anthology: this story crams more science fiction concepts and ideas into it’s novella length than many whole series of novels contain.

And maybe that piling up of ideas without a clear cut answer to any of the questions the central character raises is the point. Sci fi is supposed to be the genre of ideas, after all. And this tales serves up a whole lot!

Advanced Civilizations and Clever Monkeys – more of why I love sf/f

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Amazing Science Fiction, June 1976 issue, their 50th Anniversary issue. Cover art by Stephen E. Fabian.
Amazing Science Fiction, June 1976 issue, their 50th Anniversary issue. Cover art by Stephen E. Fabian. (click to embiggen)
I don’t believe I’ve ever actually read a copy of the magazine, Amazing Science Fiction which is a shame, seeing as apparently it was in business for more than fifty years. So I’m fairly certain that I first read Lester Del Rey’s short story, “Natural Advantage” when I bought the paperback of Donald Wolheim’s anothology, The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF in a used bookstore in 1978.

In the very first sentence Del Rey establishes that we are on a starship and that the viewpoint character, the captain, is not human—since he is looking through a set of trinoculars toward a small blue planet. The ship was on a cargo run to a colony world when they encountered a cloud of antimatter moving through deep space. In the course of mapping the cloud, the discovered radio signals coming for a star system they thought uninhabited.

It’s obvious that they are approaching Earth, which has an inhabited space station in orbit around it, so the story was meant to be set a short distance in our future. They establish contact with the strange two-eyed beings who call this world home, and in a few days the two species have managed to figure out how to communicate.

Del Rey gives some explanations for why this is so. The aliens have much larger and more complicated brains than humans. Because they evolved a way to delay signals from the third eye, they perceive time differently than we do. Their language expert is amazed to realize that humans only have a language of few tens of thousand words, since the most uneducated of the aliens has a vocabulary of several million.

All of this learning is just window dressing for the main problem of the tale. That cloud of anti-matter is moving toward the solar system, and when it arrives bad things will happen. Live on Earth will likely be wiped out by the gamma radiation caused by the light smattering that will his the Earth’s atmosphere, but then things will be much worse when the bulk of the antimatter cloud hits the sun.

The aliens came to warn them, but can’t really offer any help. Their ship is too small to carry more than a handful of humans, and it took them many years to get to Earth as it was, no other ships will be able to reach them before disaster hits.

The captain agrees to leave the humans all of the science books he can, even though he explains that his civilization’s technology couldn’t possibly be used to evacuate billions of people. Then the aliens goes on their way.

Fifteen years later, the captain and the cargo ship return to their home world, and are shocked when a high ranking government official is sent up to greet them. And with the government official is a human, the first person they met, the woman who was the Administrator of the space station.

The revelation at the end of the story is that humans figured out that the alien’s natural way of perceiving variable time had limited their ability to understand all of the implications of their warp drive technology. Thus in a few years, the humans had built engines and ships much more powerful than anything the aliens have, and have managed to save themselves.

This particular story didn’t wow me. Maybe it’s because I’ve read too many stories where the twist is that the obviously inferior humans turn out to be more clever than the superior aliens. Legendary editor John W. Campbell, Jr, used to insist that no story published in his ‘zine could ever show humans to be inferior. They always had to be better than the aliens one way or another.

The difference between this one and a typical Campbell-approved tale is that the aliens aren’t malevolent. The aliens want to save the humans, they just don’t believe it is possible to do more than warn them.

Besides the predictability (which might be more my fault because of the types of sci fi I had read during the years before), the other problem is there isn’t really any conflict in the story. Because it is from the point of view of the aliens who don’t believe they can do anything and who go about their business after the warning, all of the drama of a human population finding out impending doom, scientists and engineers struggling to master another race’s physics and engineering, et cetera, happens off screen. It’s all, “Poor monkeys. They seem nice enough, but they’re doomed because they aren’t advanced enough to have already colonized the stars.” Followed by, “Surprise! We’re more clever than you thought!”

That sort of “twist!” story is entertaining the first few times you encounter it, but after you’ve seen a dozen or more, the story needs to do a bit more to really stand out. The most interesting aspect of the story, as it is, is the notion that have a third eye would change the way a species perceives and understand time and temporal relationships. One of the almost throw away lines in the early part of the tale involves the language expert being flabbergasted that human languages only have a few tenses, and even then only the verbs!

That made me stop for a few minutes to think about how adjectives and nouns could work differently in English if we had different versions of the words for past, present, future, and so forth.

As I said a couple of weeks ago, not every story has to be a masterpiece. And even if the story is merely not bad, but it makes you think, that’s a good thing.

Antique Books and Incongruous Pages, more of why I love sf/f

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Cover of the October, 1976 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, cover by Chesley Bonestell.
Cover of the October, 1976 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, cover art by Chesley Bonestell. (click to embiggen)
There are some science fiction stories that you read, enjoy, but when you encounter them again months or years later, you don’t remember them until you have nearly completed re-reading them. Richard Cowper’s “The Hertford Manuscript” is one of those tales for me.

I think that I read it for the first time in the fall of 1976, shortly after my mother, oldest sister, and I had moved to southwest Washington some months after my parents’ divorce was finalized. My subscription to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had lapsed not long before we moved, but I had been happy to discover that the public library in our new home town subscribed to the magazine. A couple times a month I spent a couple hours at the library reading the magazine, and I am fairly certain I read the October issue, which contained “The Hertford Manuscript” on one of those visits.

I definitely read the story a subsequent time when I bought the paperback of Donald Wolheim’s anothology, The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF a couple years later at the used bookstore. And since I re-read stories in that collection off and on over the next seven or eight years, I probably read it again several times.

Each time I’ve read the story, I began to suspect that the story was going to be a Lovecraftian tale, even with the hints in a completely different direction. And then each time there’s a point where I say to my self, “Oh! I think I remember this story…” Including when I re-read it this week.

The tale starts slow. Our narrator, Francis Decressie, tells of us of his eccentric Great Aunt Victoria, whose husband died in World War I, leaving her to run a rare books business, which she excelled at for many years. She occasionally told slightly scandalous stories of her youth when she was acquainted with H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley. When his Great Aunt dies, her will bequeaths on him a 17th Century Registry—specifically a list of the admissions, discharges, and deaths of patients at a Franciscan Charity Hostel/Hospital in London.

In addition to the ordinary 17th century pages covered with small columns of very compact writing, are a number of pages that don’t match the others. The paper is just as old, but it is clearly manufactured using more modern methods, and the handwriting is very different than the rest of the register. And it appears to be a journal.

The narrator then reproduces the journal, and we find ourselves following Dr Robert Pensley, an acquaintance of H.G. Wells, as he recounts how, having completed his journey into the far future, meeting the Eloi and escaping the Morlocks to return to his own time and recount his findings to some friends, had undertaken a journey into the distant past. Except one of the quartz crystals in the mechanism of the machine breaks (he attributes this to damage inflicted by the Morlocks), trapping Pensley in 1665 England—right when the Plague is ravaging the land.

Pensley must find a jeweler or lens maker to create a replacement crystal, and has to deal with all of the problems of a nation in panic over an illness they do not understand. There are increasingly amusing attempts by Pensley to convince various authorities that the illness is spread by fleas on the rats. The lens-maker has difficulty tracking down a large enough piece of quartz, and various other things go wrong over the course of the tale.

The story ends with a few pages of the narrator explaining how he tried to prove that the pages were a hoax, but experts all agree the book has not be taken apart and restitched since the late 1600s, and he does find various bits and pieces of obscure historical evidence to back up some of the minor details the journal recounts.

And that’s it. The story ends with a philosophical observation about tragedy by the narrator.

The tale told in the enclosed journal was very engaging. The descriptions of the time traveler’s experiences in the mid-1600s pull you right into the tale. Cowper’s attention to historical detail is something that is seen in many of his other works, and serves him quite well here. The framing story is written in the style of a 19th century novel, evoking Dickens and Anthony Trollope and even a bit of Bram Stoker. Which is a little out of place given that the narrator is living in the late 20th Century, but is a nice homage to Wells.

As a kind of sequel to The Time Machine the story works well enough. The framing sequence is not quite as good as the time traveler’s journal. Especially the ending, which I found a little flat. I wanted more. I’m not sure how, exactly, but rather than leaving me wondering what happened next, it felt like he left out something.

So it was enjoyable, but not a mind-boggling revelation. Still, each time I read it, I recognize certain minor details that stuck with me, and have resonated with some of the ideas I’ve tried my hand at in my own stories. Every story we read doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Sometimes merely good is good enough.

Nostalgia for a Time that Never Was – more of why I love sf/f

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The cover of Futurs No 3, an anthology of translated science fiction published in Paris, September, 1978.
The cover of Futurs No 3, an anthology of translated science fiction published in Paris, September, 1978. (Click to embiggen)
One day, back when I was in high school, I found a paperback copy of The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald Wolheim in the used bookstore I frequented. I already owned several of Wolheim’s earlier annual anthologies, so I knew they usually the contained a lot of good stories. The table of contents of this issue featured several authors I loved, including at least a couple of titles that I remembered reading elsewhere and liking. So, of course, I picked it up.

The third story in that anthology, “Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel” by Michael G. Coney did not wow me on the first reading. Honestly, the thing that I found most interesting in the first paragraph was the revelation that it was apparently set in Western Washington state. The story is told by a first person narrator, who is taking a ferry to go to a port to meet a shipment of some sort of alien creature. We never learn much about them, other than that he raises them for their pelts, which he can sell for a profit. Though the way he describes his farm, he is mostly just getting by in this endeavor.

Most of the first two pages of the stories consists of the character describing his ferry trip in such a way that we learn that Earth is part of some kind of Galactic society, that only recently have they replaced rockets with antigrav for vessels that move from ground to orbit, and so on. The hook of the first paragraph is him noticing on his “newspocket” that all the old shuttles at the abandoned Pacific Northwest spaceport are to be scrapped, finally.

He arrives at his destination early, finding himself with five or six hours to kill, and decides to drive up to the old space port. During the drive he rambles some more, dropping hints about what his life was life before, and telling us more about how things have changed since then. It isn’t until halfway through the fifth page that he gets to what appears to be the meat of the story, as he flashes back to junior high school, when he and his best friend used to sneak onto the grounds of the spaceport to watch shuttles land and take off.

The narrator, as a young man, loved everything about the shuttles: the roar of the engines, the sleek shapes of the ships themselves, et cetera. His friends was obsessed with identifying and checking off the shuttles from a book he had of every registers craft that ever landed on Earth. There are a few anecdotes about the mild misadventures the narrator, his friend, and a few other people who liked to sneak onto the grounds of the space port had watching the shuttles land and take off.

Then everything is ruined when his friend gets a crush on a girl. Who just happens to be the same girl that the narrator once got into an altercation with in grade school and of course they hate each other. To say the friendship is strained is an understatement. Then there is a disaster involving the girl’s pet, with is a cat-like animal imported from across the galaxy, which happens to be telepathic, but only with members of its own species.

After the disaster, we flash back to the present, and then the narrator—who has lamented about five dozen times so far in the story how much he misses his old friend, and how astonished his middle-school-aged self would be to know that he doesn’t even know where the friend lives any longer—sees said old friend. The friend, it turns out, owns the wrecking company that is going to tear down the spaceport. But the narrator, of course, doesn’t say hello. He skulks away.

There are a lot of things not to like about this tale. The rambling expository lumps. The lack of characterization. The clichéd use of flashback to tell most of the story. The extremely dated boy vs girl dynamic of the tale. The ludicrous ways that chauvinism pops up and is even defended at one point.

Then in the category of merely cringeworthy, there is the fact that the only female characters who appear in the story all dress and act as if they are characters out of the 1950s. Remember, this was written in 1975—women’s lib had been a thing for many years by then! Even in 1978, when I read this story, that section seemed terribly dated!

I read the story one more time, when I found it in another anthology years later. I didn’t recognize the title, or I might not have read it. The second time I didn’t remember the story until fairly late into it, just about the time of the disaster near the end of the tale. I read it to the end, hoping to have a bit more insight, but still wasn’t impressed.

When I re-read it again last week, I was having the same reaction as before all the way until the end. And then I finally had an epiphany about what the author may have been trying to do. It had never occurred to me during my earlier readings that the narrator was unreliable. The section early on where he defends men’s only clubs and no girls allowed spaces as not being sexist at all should have tipped me off. It was too over the top. And there were several other hints throughout the story where our narrator is being very defensive in describing the events.

That’s when I realized that the ending, where he decides he doesn’t have anything in common with the old friend anymore is supposed to be tragic or ironic (depending). The narrator drives many hours out of his way and spends the entire tale wallowing in a nostalgic lament for the good old days. He goes into inordinate details on fairly minor stuff, is very defensive of himself and goes to pains to describe every other character in the narrative as betraying him or at least not treating him right. He had these great dreams and aspirations, which have all come to naught because the world is just not fair to nice guys like him.

Meanwhile his old friend is now a successful businessman, and is literally in the business of tearing down the obsolete relics of the past so that something new can be built.

Now, finally, the story makes sense when I think of it as a critique of nostalgia and clinging so hard to the past that you can’t move forward. And those expository ramblings sound an awful lot like an old bad way that some sci fi stories in the 30s, 40s, and 50s would do their world building: by having two characters say such unnatural things (while riding a subway or something), “Thank goodness for modern convenience! Can you believe that our ancestors used to have to connect their appliances to receptacles in ways with physical cables to draw power! What a primitive nightmare!”

As an indictment of nostalgia, “Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel” isn’t quite so bad. I’m not sure I agree with Wolheim that it was one of the best story published that year, but it did make me think, even before my epiphany. Struggling with a story is good mental exercise.

And I have to admit that the descriptions of the shuttles taking off and landing and the sense of wonder the narrator had as a child was pretty good.

Very Big Questions and Very Small Epiphanies – more of why I love sf/f

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A cover of a later paperback reprint of the 1977 Annual World's Best SF anthology edited by Donald A. Wolheim.
A cover of a later paperback reprint of the 1977 Annual World’s Best SF anthology edited by Donald A. Wolheim. (Click to embiggen)

Some opening lines are better than others. “Something very large, something very small: a galactic museum, a dead love affair. They came together under my gaze.” Those are the opening sentences of Brian W. Aldiss’ short story, “Appearance of Life” and they’re one of the better examples. The opening tells you, thematically, where the story is going, without giving anything away.

“Appearance of Life” by Brian W. Aldiss is another story that I first encountered in the pages of the 1977 Annual World’s Best SF anthology edited by Donald A. Wolheim. So I was a junior in high school, 17 or 18 years old, when I discovered it. The story is narrated in first person by a character who is on their way to a museum. The character never gives us their name, identifying them self only as a Seeker, which is either a job title or avocation.

The Seeker tells us first about a long lost alien race, the Korlevalulaw. We don’t know what they looked like and virtually nothing about their culture. Because they had vanished by the time humans reached the worlds they once colonized. And the aliens left behind only empty buildings. But they are vast empty buildings. Our narrator is traveling to one such building, which is a single structure that completely encircles a planet exactly on its equator. The building it over 1600 kilometers long, and at different parts of the equator, it is between 15 and 22 kilometers tall. It is called a museum because humans have decided to start filling the empty space with artifacts they have gathered from around the galaxy. Not artifacts left behind by the Korlevalulaw, but artifacts left behind by previous human civilizations.

The story slowly reveals that by the Seeker’s time humans have changed a lot. The Seeker makes references to both the First Galactic Era and Second Galactic Era as distinct long periods of interstellar civilization. He or she makes references to how much smaller humans were at the time, and to other limitations of human bodies. But the Seeker never describes what humans look like, now. The gender of the Seeker is never given… the narrator does refer to every android they interact with as she. And there is a point when a reference computer points out that current human engineered breeding produces a ratio of ten women to every man, which is why “modern humans” don’t understand the importance more primitive humans placed on being husbands and wives.

The Seeker has been commissioned by several academic institutions to explore the museum and look for evidence to shed light on various questions these academics have. The Seeker spends several days exploring the museum.

The Seeker finds a holocube in one of the exhibits which contains a recording of the personality of a long dead human woman. When activated, she informs him that she is only for use by her husband, and to please put her back on the shelf rightside up. A while later the Seeker finds more holocubes, and one of them contains a male memory recording that says he is only for his ex-wife.

The Seeker notices that the names are similar, and so tries an experiment. Placing the cubes next to each other, the Seeker activates them and observes as the two holograms have a discussion. During the exchange of messages, the Seeker has an epiphany about the place of humans in the galaxy, and what the ancient disappearance of the Korlevalulaw means about the fate of human society.

The Seeker is so disturbed by the epiphany, that they abandon their mission, flee the museum, and find a mostly uninhabited world to hide out on, lest they accidentally reveal the epiphany to others and hasten the end of current civilization.

I was a little bit disappointed in the ending. The epiphany as described by the Seeker didn’t seem that alarming or profound, to me. I had been enjoying the story up to that point. It was very interesting to recognize how my image of the narrator and the situation kept changing as certain details were casually revealed. In the beginning, I was imagining a person much like myself. By the end, my imaginary version of the Seeker was only vaguely humanoid, and neither male nor female. Similarly, at the beginning of the story I assumed the human civilization was a kind of standard space opera interstellar empire, or multiple competing federations, something like that. But by the end I was trying to imagine a civilization that barely understood the idea of nations and political systems and even the concept of ownership.

I don’t know if Aldiss meant for the reader to think the Seeker’s epiphany only made sense because we didn’t, still, fully understand the Seeker’s frame of reference, or something else. I thought the way Aldiss built up the idea of this very alien culture, and how they didn’t really understand us, and therefore how we likely don’t understand previous generations, either, was really well executed. I didn’t realize that’s what was happening until I reached the end and was trying to figure out if I misunderstood the ending.

The story is very cerebral, with the conflict being something that the narrator doesn’t even realize is happening until the end. The Seeker wants the answers to particular questions, and doesn’t realize that he/she lacks the frame of reference to understand most of the evidence being examined. So you could describe the plot as Man vs His Own Ignorance. And the resolution is that the Seeker gains just enough insight to realize that none of the answers are pleasant ones.

And though I have been reminded of this story from time to time while reading other sci fi tale, I never realized until I was writing this post that it has more in common with a classic Lovecraft horror story than a science fiction tale. The Seeker gets a glimpse of a much bigger truth about their place in the universe, and that glimpse destroys their sense of self. It’s just a bit less melodramatic than a typical Lovecraft tale would have been. I don’t know if Aldiss was doing that on purpose, but it’s an interesting question.

The story left me pondering and debating with myself how I might have tried to tell the story better. Except I think the best part of it isn’t the traditional form of a story. The best part of the tale is how the writer made me slowly deconstruct my own assumptions about who the narrator was and what his/her world was like and the way the story made me uncomfortable to give the narrator a gendered pronoun.

It didn’t translate as a big epiphany for me. But it did change the way I viewed many stories afterward. It affirmed my suspicions that much of what we thought we knew about our own history, and about ourselves, was way off. And reminded me that we should never be satisfied with the easy answers.