"Green Grew The Lasses" by Ruth Laura Wainwright

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Galaxy, July 1953

"Green Grew the Lasses" gave me remarkably few lines to add to my "hilarious things to retweet or review" file, which is impressive. In fact, it's not a bad little story. It's not mind-bogglingly good, either, but it's quite competent. There are a few minor issues, but on the whole, perhaps worth a read. It's one of only a few old SF stories that I've reviewed that were written by women, and the other that comes to mind was such a mess.

Unfortunately, I can't find out much about who Ruth Laura Wainwright was, and on online databases, this is the only story that shows up.

It's all about gender, which means it's right in my wheelhouse. It also has a take on a world without men that is entertaining because it is also such a rare perspective. In most variations I've seen on this idea (and oddly, the one novel I remember reading it I can't trace and no list of books with this theme seems to include it), the abolition of men has happened with living memory. The women left remember what men were (and virtually always, there's at least one man still around, getting to carry the load of masculinity for a world.)

In this story, the women in a small California town start to turn green, and then to get pregnant without intercourse. It doesn't take the reader long (although it takes the characters much longer) to figure out that the four green women who just moved there are not from around here. In the sense that they're from another planet, and the weed they've planted in this town is behind both the hue and the babies. Venus, apparently, has never had men. It has no concept of men.

So when the Venusian women are confronted by men, they're not hostile, scared, or even lustful. They're just baffled. What are these people and what possible use could they be? And that attitude never changes - they never decide that men are bad. They just don't see the point of them.

When the women of the small town make it clear that they don't want to come back to Venus to help repopulate the feminine utopia (without the need to work, apparently), the Venusian women leave. (See, each has only one daughter via the fainweed, and so I would guess that attrition through accident would slowly deplete their numbers).

That is one quibble I have, though. I'm fine with most women not wanting to go back to Venus, but really? Not one single woman in 1950s suburbia hears the story about a world without work, populated only by women, where they'll have one daughter and spend the rest of their lives doing pleasant things, and says "fuck yes, sign me up"? Really? Not one?

(One woman does go back with them, but that's because she's determined to show them the error of their shiftless, menless, baby-out-of-wedlock ways. Or maybe that's just why she says she's going. Actually, that character is a little inconsistent, veering between small-town petty moralist and New York gal who is too worldly for her California cousins.)

The characters are a little dense, needing to be hit over the head with an anvil before they figure out that these four women (one named Patty Pontiac or something like that, for goodness sake!) aren't from around here. In other words, they're none of them science fiction readers. I don't mind it taking some convincing, but there's taking a while to be convinced and then there's just being obtuse.

Still, there were few hilariously bad lines, and I enjoyed this take on a world without men running into them the first time and being totally uninterested in the concept.

"The Glory of Ippling" by Helen M. Urban

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Galaxy, December 1962

It's so nice to get back to these! The one I'm starting off with has the interesting distinction of being written by a woman, although in the story itself, women don't fare any better  than they often do in these stories, and even a bit worse than some. It makes me sigh. But we'll get back to this.

In this book, the main character has come to Earth to expose it to the glory of Ippling, their obviously amazing civilization of the stars. If only he can get those damned humans to pay attention!

That's actually pretty much the plot. At first, he tries at a wrestling match, then at a strip show, then as a carnival barker/streetcorner preacher. However, as he fundamentally doesn't understand the Earthling mind (I'm not saying human, and there's a reason), it all flops. Urban's last few lines say that the defining feature of Earthlings (although really, all we see is a small section of the United States) is that they don't really "believe in their religions and superstitions." That also seems like a bit of a broad statement, particularly to apply it to the whole planet.

Let's start with the first thing. Urban apparently subscribes to the trend in science fiction where all aliens are humans. There's rarely any discussion, but they're physically identical, and apparently interbreedable. I've decided to call this school of thought Pan-Spermanic.

So Boswellister (the names are absurd, and maybe that's why no one takes him seriously) is here to show the earth the glory of Ippling. At first, it seems like he's a representative of a galactic government, but then it later appears he's the youngest scion of a feudal society, out to make Earth his fiefdom. This story is inconsistent like this quite a lot, and that's too bad.

First, he tries to show off the glory of Ippling at a wrestling match, then at a strip show (the only appearance of a woman, with no dialogue), then on a street corner, trying to emulate a carnival barker. He is ignored, ignored, and then pursued by people who think he's giving away free samples.

(Also, the glory of Ippling seems to be a bright light. No wonder people aren't that impressed.)

How could he have misjudged so badly, he wonders? Well, rather than giving it another try, he gives up and moves on to another planet, where he will misjudge them just as much.

It's funny, but the first thing that struck me was that it was a fine example of Boswellister trying to be "hot" in how he forced people on Earth to notice him, a la Marshall McLuhan, when he should have tried to be 'cool' instead. Freaking out and yelling how awesome you are and how you have all the answers to everything on Earth - not really a great selling point at a wrestling match. Or street corner. Certainly not at a strip club.

The story is weak, and that's a problem. But it's amusing in its lightness. Except for my disappointment that a female author included only one female character, gave her no lines, quickly disappearing clothes, then ushered her off-stage. Literally.

No mentioned non-white characters, either, and the strip show is all we get of sexuality, so it's all very much about the male gaze.

If this story had been more pointed, it would have been better. Instead, it sets up a straw man and then proceeds to demolish it, which leaves the reader going "yeah, but...."

"Faithfully Yours" by Lou Tabakow

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Astounding Science Fiction, December 1955

I sort of love the above illustration, because it so perfectly encapsulates the sole role of the woman in this story. She's there to take care of him (okay, she's a doctor, but a doctor that falls for her patient), and then, the haunted man has to leave her behind because he can't settle down with anyone. She gets to look longingly after him as he continues on his trek. (She might not be a doctor, just a woman on a frontier world who knows as much medicine as anyone does. But I'll give Tabakow the benefit of the doubt, and upgrade it to doctor.)

There's even a hint of cleavage, to make sure we know what he's walking away from.

At any rate, the man above with the haunted eyes is an escaped prisoner from some futuristic space jail. We are never told what his crime is, just that the vastly different laws on different worlds make extradition impossible. So, when he escapes and can't be easily brought back, the administrators on Hades make a decision that haunts them - to unleash some sort of something that will track him down across the galaxy.

If there's a problem with this story, it's that not enough is given to the reader. It's the case where knowing more would create more tension. We know there is something after him, but not what. We see no trace of it until the very last paragraph of the book. We don't know what it's planning on doing to him, again, not until the very last paragraph. We see him evade it for ten years and it really starts to look not that threatening. It's not particularly understandable why he's so scared, always on the run, because we don't know what he knows. And if we did, it would mean more.

Since it's not a twist, why is this information withheld? It would be a much stronger story if we were inside the main character's head. Instead, we merely watch from quite a distance as he lands on frontier world after frontier world, always shaky and trying to find a way to get off and go somewhere else. He smuggles, flies test planes, and disappoints a beautiful woman. At the end, he shows up back at the prison and begs them to take him back, but they say that once the whatever they unleashed is unleashed, it can't be called back. (I really hope that it's never been unleashed accidentally, because some poor guy mashed the wrong button!)

And at the end, it shows up, and apparently it's not going to kill him, just rewrite his brain. Which in many ways is more terrifying, and it would have been nice to know that, and what that meant earlier. It might have helped pass some of the tension he was feeling along to me, the reader. As it was, though, I never really was invested in this guy's trek. Nor did I know how it was tracking him, nor why it was an inexorable fact it would catch up.

I've said my piece about the women, and as far as it is overtly mentioned, a wide-ranging galaxy seems to be entirely white. And all heterosexual. Neither are topics brought up at all in this story, and I wouldn't expect them to be. Just commenting on how it fits fairly precisely into the time period. (Seems a pity at times that all the suppressed homoeroticism seems to have disappeared after the 1930s. It tended to be over the top, but interesting.)

"I Was A Teen-Age Secret Weapon" by Richard Sabia

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Astounding Science Fiction, November 1959

Interestingly enough, this story is not written from the first person perspective, as much as the title makes it sound like we're in for a True Confessions-type of thing. Nope, it's really a fairly straightforward third person story. And as a story, it's not bad. The prose isn't purple, and it's vaguely amusing.

Weirdly, though, I kept thinking that I'd read this story before. And then I remembered that there's an Alfred Bester short story, collected in Star Light, Star Bright, called "Oddy and Id." In that one, a bunch of college professors are trying to harness a student's unconscious luck powers, which is really very similar. A quick google search tells me that the Bester story is the older, published in 1950.

In this story, it's a bit of a reversal - it's not that Wims, the main character, has good luck powers. It's that his defense mechanism is to cause bad luck for anyone thinking even the slightest amount of harm towards him. We first meet him in a research facility, where he never does anything wrong, but catastrophe follows him around. The scientists are nearly apopleptic, and close to murderous.

The main scientist, however, protects him, and even arranges for him to be enlisted. Guess what happens in the army? Of course, lots of mistakes and mishaps, and no one understands when he is given a field promotion and dropped behind enemy lines in China. He's captured by both the Russians and the Chinese, and they try to interrogate him - and in this case, when things start to go wrong, it's a very American perspective on the dangers of the Soviet system - everyone starts to think that everyone else is planning against them, and their military command falls apart into infighting and disarray.

Laughing, the Chinese make off with the prisoner - only to have their own system start to collapse.  Back in the United States, the scientist says smugly that he was the one who figured out what was going on with this bumbling young man, and has single-handedly caused the fall of Communism. The brass don't quite believe him, but there Moscow is in the middle of tearing itself apart.

It's a slight story, amusing, and gives us more insight into Cold War thought about the Soviet Union - in particular, the fault lines that could tear it apart given half a chance. It's a madcap adventure, and entertaining.

The only part that really bothered me is, you guessed it, the female character(s.) It isn't that they're absent - that isn't normally something that bothers me, although I do like to point it out, just to keep thinking about what stories could and couldn't be imagined in earlier ages of science fiction. No, it's more troubling. We don't even get to meet the one female character - she's a secretary at the research lab in the first section of the story.

What's bothersome is that she's literally there as a punchline to a sexual assault joke - the joke being that they thought the orangutan who escaped was female and found out he was male - when he attacked her and chased her around. At this point, absence would be better than having a woman mentioned in the story as part of a funny about an amorous orangutan.

As for the other visibilities I like to keep an eye on - no characters of colour, as far as are mentioned. No one who isn't straight.

Someone was commenting on one of these posts recently, saying that it wasn't fair that I was pointing such absences out, and that that was somehow censorship. I disagree, respectfully. My reviews are, and always have been, very subjective. I think pointing out which stories are told and which ones are not even thought of is perfectly legitimate as a discussion topic. I fail to see how that equals censorship. (But telling me I can't write reviews with that stuff included would be, wouldn't it? I mean, I'm commenting on the stories that are told. You were telling me I couldn't write reviews that pointed out the lack of women.)

At any rate, it's going to continue to be a part of these Throwback Thursday posts.

"Code Three" by Rick Raphael

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Analog, February 1963

When picking a picture from this story for the review, it was pretty much this, or an extremely phallic looking emergency vehicle. Or another of the same thing that looked remarkably like a sperm. At any rate, I'm kind of impressed that the woman in this story rated a picture, and so it is perhaps not surprising that I picked her.

This is a story where the consumer desire for faster and faster automobiles far outpaced any sort of reasonable regulation on speed, leading to jet-fueled cards on superhighways with roving police/ambulance vehicles that roam the road looking for accidents and infractions. Because nothing can slow the people down!

The story follows the three-person team who operate one of the emergency vehicles on one of its two-week tours of duty, coast to coast. I say person deliberately, because miracle of miracles, there's a woman on board! She's the doctor, and she takes a lot of teasing from the younger of the two men, who obviously has a crush on her. She's also part Native American, which also gets teased, but at least in this case its in an affectionate way, rather than an entirely wince-worthy one.  (Doesn't, you know, make it great, but in comparison with some of the stories I've read? It's a definite step up.)

They start out after their month-long vacation, helping out in an accident, stopping joy-riding kids from splattering themselves from here and gone (and delivering lectures on why going easy on the kids will only get them killed). Then there's the man speeding because his wife's in labour, and the cross-country crime spree that leads to a hell of a chase.

The roads are shown as deadly and held together only by the skill of these officers. The effectiveness of cross-country tours makes me wonder how they could possibly always be in the right place at the right time in order to keep the entire road from devolving into chaos. Even if they set out daily - that's still a day apart.

It's a day-in-the-life type story, as they travel the roads. (Which have something in common with Heinlein's slidewalks, with similar ideas of strips for different speeds, except that instead of them being really really fast conveyor belts, there are still individual cars and drivers.) They banter. They save lives. The younger two are obviously attracted to each other. (There are apparently other stories in the series, so I can guess where that goes?) The woman says she's probably not going to get married, as she'd have to leave her job, which is a nice nod to that social convention, and I'm glad to see that the female character ain't just in it till marriage - she actually really likes her job. I sort of expect the long term to end up with her getting married, but I guess we'll see!

As for non-white characters, well, the woman is half Native-American, half Irish, so again, better representation than I've seen in a lot of stories. There are a lot of Hiawatha jokes, but without that particularly nasty tinge. So...it's on the good side of what I'd expect for this time period, without being great. And hey, there's a Canadian character! (I'm always so excited when we show up in stories.)

The story isn't bad. It's not mind-blowing, but it's a solid life in the future for average joes type of science fiction story, and that's interesting. As is the ongoing belief that the need for speed will never be curtailed.

"The Good Neighbors" by Edgar Pangborn

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Galaxy, June 1960

This story was a very pleasant surprise. I'd heard of Edgar Pangborn, but other than that he was a science fiction author, knew very little about him. Now I sort of think I should read more, because this was a very short story that had all the things I like.  It's not, however, a character-heavy story - there's really only one human character, and he's only in it briefly.

But it's witty and snarky and entertaining. A huge creature (imagined above, which seems to have been the accompanying illustration) appears in the sky over the West Coast of the U.S., in distress, and clearly not of terrestrial origin. It flies, crying, lost and lonely, across the country, where they dare not shoot it down lest it crush a good portion of a city.

It doesn't attack anyone, it just cries and flies, and the government sends up airplanes to see what it is and is made of. The descriptions are not too purple. They are evocative without being over the top, and given the general quality of many of the stories I've read, I was impressed.

When it gets near the Atlantic, there are plans to shoot it down over the ocean, but one trigger happy guy (the only named character) lets loose before it's quite past New York. That's not great.

The punchline of the story is that the aliens responsible for having one of their livestock get out and do this leave a note of apology and what they hope is suitable recompense for the damage, before flying off to other parts.

It's not deep, but it's got that short short story knack of being interesting and giving a bit of a twist of the knife at the end. The lack of almost all human characters means I won't pick on the fact that there aren't any female characters in it.

All in all, probably one of my favourite short stories I've read so far from this project.

"The Mating of the Moons" by Kenneth O'Hara

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Orbit, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1953

First off, why is this story called "The Mating of the Moons?" All the action takes place on Mars. It's about Mars. And Martians. Deimos and Phobos don't really make an appearance. (Okay, I guess maybe they appear in conjunction that the internet tells me is totally impossible once.)

Secondly, is it wrong that I spent the entire story wanting to throttle the main character?

Madeleine is rich. Very, very rich. And practically a spinster. Of course, as a rich person, she has rich person problems. Like that the world is very boring. And that she is the only special snowflake with the perception to recognize the world's phoniness, and so therefore she is a cut above everyone else because she cannot tolerate anything at all that does not come up to her high standards for authenticity - which means that she can't tolerate anything.

She is "tortured by the insight that both enables and compels me to see through the sham and pretense." 

"The invisible edges of living had cut her soul to pieces."

Everyone else in the solar system is in "hopeless peonage to the radios and teevee and radar and thundering jets that drown out the song of real life." 

This does not give me sympathy. This makes me want to slap her up the side of the head and tell her to stop being so goddamned in love with her self-image as so much more real than anyone around her. She doesn't even know what she means by real life. Or authenticity. Just that nothing she encounters can ever be it.

Ugh.

So, of course, she's upset at the tourist trap on Mars, that she thought would, just once, satisfy her soul. Or whatever. My eyes were permanently rolled at this point. Luckily it was a short story. On Mars, she bitches about the ruins. Insults the locals. Sees through the commercial sham of the hotel. Almost has sex with the tour guide, but realizes it's not real enough.

And then runs out onto the surface, where she meets a real Martian, a disembodied spirit who appears as an old man, while also realizing that the tour guide is another, younger disembodied Martian, who tries to discourage tourists who are just too good for this tourism shit from going out and getting themselves killed.

Becoming all disembodied, see, would be real. But humans just can't do it. So she dies, halfway between the material world and becoming one of them. She's too old. She can't make the transition as a child could.

But at least she shrivels up and dies on the surface of Mars, in a real death. Almost having found authenticity. Feeling satisfied at last.

Blech.

Hey, it's a female main character, if an utterly useless one. It's funny, I associate this particular kind of being too authentic for the world with men, although that may just be that the specimens I've run into have been male. Plus, I've read Catcher in the Rye.

In the end, there's no sign the author thinks this character is being as ridiculous as I think she's being. Wow.

If you want an old science fiction story that made me want to slap every character in it, you could pick this one. I'm not sure why you would, though.

"General Max Shorter" by Kris Neville

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Galaxy, December 1962

It's been a while since I've done one of these! It may continue to be erratic until my dissertation is finally done and submitted. It's nice to get back to them. And imagine my surprise, when I started this one, ready for purple prose, hilarious similes, and worrisome politics.

Wait, where did that stuff go?

This was not badly written, to my surprise. It's all about the dangers of military think, in terms of the colonization of space, but more generally in terms of a slavish following of rules as an excuse for abdication of thought and compassion.

In this story, the Earth military is mostly in charge of terraforming, and General Shorter is in charge of an expedition to make Miracastle safe for human habitation. Neville moves into things being askew gently, with us seeing General Shorter as a competent, respected leader, and then hearing about the suicide of one of his men (also one of the first science fiction short stories I've read that acknowledges suicide as a problem in the military). Shorter dismisses it as a weak personality, but there are hints that it was because of something the military had done that that soldier had been unable to live with.

Then administrators from earth show up, pissing off General Shorter as it messes with his schedule. There are more hints about how he thinks it would be better to bomb a city than run an expensive evacuation, if it meant he wouldn't be able to track down an enemy.

Turns out, despite a survey that on sampling, showed no evidence of non-human life, there was a small settlement of non-humans. They had evidently not started on this planet, but showed no signs of being able to leave. When the humans started to change the air, they started to suffocate. Shorter was informed that they could reverse it and save them, but refused to let his terraforming get behind schedule. He is shocked at the end of the story, when he is arrested for murder.

It's not just Shorter, though. Neville is careful to show that this is not one man's obsession with utility, but a military-wide problem, through a long-term Sergeant who rails about enlisted men who think too much and question orders. The blame is distributed.

I really enjoyed this story! It's a troubling look at the use of utilitarianism to justify colonialism and at extremes, massacre through inaction. In the recent stories I've been reading from the late 1950s and early 1960s, several seem to have moved from mad scientists to looking at the military applications of technology. Most of them are not that critical, but this one is extremely pointed.

It's too bad that it appears that Neville found that most of his work couldn't be published at the time. I will probably try to seek out more of what he could get published.

However, I should note, that while I enjoyed the politics of this story a lot, Neville's army still didn't include any women, nor, as far as we are told, anyone who wasn't white. It's hard to transcend all barriers, and he's far from alone. Still, it's always a little disappointing when someone is very close to making the next leap, and doesn't.

"The Alternate Plan" by Gerry Maddren

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Amazing Science Fiction Stories, September 1958

This is a strange little story, only barely science fiction. You could change one tiny aspect of it, and it wouldn't be science fiction at all, just a morality tale about suicide. Seriously, with very few changes, I could see this in a religious magazine, preaching about the evils of thinking you can or should take your own life.

So, the main character is a psychologist, but it seems one who has mastered a science fiction version of astral projection. (This is why I say it's barely science fiction at all.) He is undergoing surgery to find out if he has cancer of the larynx. He detaches himself from his body during surgery, with the theory that if he discovers he does has cancer, he's not even going to wake up to get the diagnosis, as obviously having cancer would steal his voice, his wife, and all his joy in life.

Apparently, "In my field I've seen a lot of crazy reactions to loss of basic ability," but he's seen absolutely no good adaptations to traumatic news. So, when he thinks he sees the surgeons frown, he decides (probably correctly) that he does have cancer, and tries to break the line connecting him to his body. From there, he travels to an Entirely-Not-Heaven-But-Totally-Heaven, a lush green place that he can't enter because of a forcefield.

A figure approaches him to more or less tell him that this was an act of weakness, and that alone has disqualified him from entering Totally-Not-Heaven. The psychologist says "oh yeah?" The resulting argument ends with Totally-Not-St.-Peter daring the psychologist to go back to his body to prove his mastery of whatever the science fiction version of astral projection is. Actually, it's reverse psychology. He dares the psychologist to try to reenter his body while Totally-Not-St.-Peter tries to stop him

The psychologist does it, even though he knows that it's a trick to make him accept life, and he succeeds and comes back to life, the end.

No seriously, the end. His heart starts beating, we're done.

So...that's it. There's little science, no real science fiction, and a "suicide is weakness" moral. I suppose it filled a few pages, but there's a part of me that wonders why it got accepted in the first place. Maybe the editor wanted to hammer home that message. I don't know.

Minority Report: The only female character is the wife, there to be stoic and stand by her husband. No people of colour that are referenced. Heterosexuals as far as the eye can see.

"Slingshot" by Irving W. Lande

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Astounding Science Fiction, November 1955

I read this story almost a week ago, and what is perhaps most remarkable is how little of it I remember. Dogfights in space, but that's really about it. One unfortunate turn of phrase. Cold war assumptions. Women only present as pictures in cockpits and voices on the telephone.

Let me try to rack my brain (short pause while I check whether it's rack or wrack), to tell you more. Starting with dog fights in space. In a presumed continuation of the Cold War where both sides want the moon, but neither has the firepower to take and hold it, both sides keep the other from doing so by having dogfights between ships in space. Why this doesn't spark WWIII on Earth is not really gotten into.

Most of the story centers around one dogfight, and the difficulties of effectively fighting ship to ship in space, the extreme unlikelihood that you're going to hit anything. While, by the 1950s, most of the stories had gotten away from the 1930s conviction that scientists are out to doom us all, there's a small tinge of it here. Not that scientists are by definition mad scientists, but the idea that those eggheads never come up with anything useful, it's the men manning the ships who really know best. Because, of course, someone comes up with an idea that just might turn the tide of the war. (Or, you know, work once and then the enemy will adopt it too and nothing will change, but you know. Let's not let that get in the way of military tactics.)

This idea to turn the course of the war is to use nuclear bombs in slingshot-like devices.

The unfortunate phrasing that made me giggle was this line: "thinking the turgid thoughts that always came when action was near." And then the battle starts. Or pretty near. There's nothing turgid about what's described, so using that word in this context made me smirk.

Once the dogfight is over and the Reds have been blown up, the pilots return to earth for some R&R. One guy gets on the blower to his gal right away and gets her to round up a girl for his pilot buddy too. That's pretty much all the screentime the women get.

And that's pretty much it. It's a very simple story, and doesn't add a whole lot in terms of ideas or characters. Disappointing.

"The Untouchable" by Stephen A. Kallis

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Analog, December 1960

This is a fun little story. There's not a whole lot to it, and it's quite short, but as a bit of page-filler, it's quite enjoyable. I can find little about the author, except that as of 2000, he wrote a webpage about secret decoder rings on a website about old-timey radio.

Of course, it centers around the idea that the military really wants a certain new technology, and while everyone in the story seems to agree, I, for one, am quite happy that they can't have it. Of course a new and wonderful technology should be given right to the government for its future wars. Eep.

At any rate, an army general calls in an old scientist friend, wanting him to figure something out for him. The story he tells seems a little like he's gone round the bend - the other night, an insubstantial figure walked through the walls of his office. But far from Marley's ghost, this was a real person, the best friend of another scientist who had recently died. The best friend is a writer who knows nothing about science, but was given the task of delivering the experiment to the military.

It's a miraculous device that makes its wearer intangible, and impervious to harm, as both radiation and force pass right through. There's some science doublespeak about how you can still walk on the floor and not pass right through, but I'm fine with that. My worldview depends on Kitty Pryde being able to walk through solid matter, so I'm not going to push that aspect too hard.

Hilariously, the reason that no one knows how it works or how to duplicate it, without taking the original apart, is that apparently the scientist who invented it had "a childlike fear of putting anything into writing that had not been experimentally verified.”  

I am pretty sure that is not how you science.

Notes, man, they're invaluable. For pretty much every experiment.

So the kicker to this story, where the author brings in his classical allusion about what this is really about is that the writer friend who was delivering it to the general tosses it carelessly onto the desk and the switch flips...and now the desk and the device are intangible, and it'll never run out of power because science.

The General gets to sit there and contemplate his intangible desk and how he'll never have the next great weapon for making intangible soldiers. Which, quite frankly, is how I prefer the military. His friend says he's pretty much fucked, and compares him to Tantalus. And he didn't even kill and cook his own son, unless you're extending the metaphor to the soldiers under his command. Which, hey, would make this even more subversive, but I think the author is referring to the punishment and not the sin.

"The Long Voyage" by Carl Jacobi

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Fantastic Universe, September 1955

There are some plotholes in this story, but other than that, it's a pretty good one. Except that the women characters get shafted. That's not surprising, but what is is how many women are supposed to be on board this ship, and how very little they actually get to do. And, of course, we're given no indication that any of the crew on this "Long Voyage" are anything but white and heterosexual. Which is to say that it's a science fiction story written in the 1950s.

At any rate, Norris, one half of a famed inventor duo, is recruiting young couples, 18 of them to be exact, to undertake a perilous space journey outside the solar system, in search of a new world to colonize. Those fuddy-duddies at the "Space-Time Commission" won't like it, but who cares about those stick-in-the-muds?

He's got weird rules, and this is where the plothole kind of comes in. It's established he doesn't know what will happen when the spaceship travels, and absolutely established that he cannot possibly have tested it before the entire crew gets on board, or he wouldn't have been there to pick them up. But he's got all these weird rules so that they won't do things that he has no way of knowing would be an issue.

So, these young men and women have landed on several successive planets, ostensibly for colonization, they take samples, find there is no animal life on the planet, and Norris insists they move on. One of the young men decides this is silly - even with only the plant life available, they could certainly colonize one of these planets! He foments dissent.

But the dissent doesn't come to much - instead, he discovers that Norris has a dead guy in his bunk. The dead guy is the other half of the famed inventor duo, who had never told Norris how to make the endurable substance that made them rich. Norris is certain that the clue is hidden on his body - and indeed it is, as we discover over the course of the story. What's not clear is what Norris thought this spaceflight was going to do to help solve the problem.

The nice twist here, though, is that it is revealed that they've been travelling not through space but through time, forward in huge jumps to older versions of the planet Earth. That's where the precautions Norris takes to keep the group from realizing it's Earth (namely, being back indoors by dark, so they can't see the constellations) don't make sense - he can't have known it would be a jump forward in time until he'd done it, and since it seems to be one-way, he can't have tested it.

At any rate, it's a good reveal, and I may be spoiling things if I tell you that eventually the other occupants of the ship manage to find how to reveal the secret in the body of the other inventor, and that somehow knowing how to make Indurate lets them travel back in time to where they started.

I'm not all that sure of the logic on that one, but okay. The twist is good enough that I'll be forgiving.

What does get me, though, is that Norris packs a ship full of 36 people, and half of them are effectively useless. All the science, all the anything, seems to be carried out by the men. The women are literally there so that the dissenter's wife can be trapped by a fire, causing him to cut through into Norris' bunk and discover the body. That's the sole purpose - potential victim.

Why this gets me is that not six years later than this was published, Heinlein's Stranger in the Strange Land will come out, meaning it was being written in the years previous. And Heinlein gets it in a way Jacobi doesn't. When you only have a limited number of seats, you can't have half the people be useless. You need everyone to be a specialist of some sort or another, and probably to multi-class at that. In Stranger, the mission to Mars is made up of married couples, but everyone on that ship, women as well as men, is super competent at more than one thing. (I mean, this is part of the small section that happens around the mission to Mars, but it's important.)

Heinlein gets that one gender can't merely be brought along as ballast. Jacobi does not.

So the women here are victims, and maybe get told about the dissent, but that's about it. One woman gets led out coughing from a room on fire. And because within just a few years, someone will get this right where this does not, it bothers me.

So, in the long run, gender politics are wonky, everyone's white, but darn it, that twist is good, even if it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

"Tight Squeeze" by Dean C. Ing

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Astounding Science Fiction, 1955

First of all, the picture that goes along with this is weirdly troubling. Is it just me, or does it look like there's a decapitated astronaut's head bobbing along there in zero gravity? Except for the disembodied head, though, it's a good picture for the story. This is not science fiction with aliens or interplanetary rocket ships.

What it actually is is a very pragmatic story about a manned rocket having trouble as it goes to rendezvous with a space station. A lot of it seemed to me to be prescient shades of Apollo 13. Something goes wrong in space, a small mechanical linkage, and they have to try to fix it.

Because it's 1955, that gives us an interesting look at what 1955 thought the space program would like, and what Ing thought the nitty gritty of problems in space would look like. (Ing is still around, wikipedia tells me writing "technothrillers," but he also an aerospace engineer and a Communications Theory Ph.D.)

This is not going to be a review that is trying to catch him out - I hate that kind of "that science was later proven to be wrong so this is bad science fiction!" dismissal of old SF. (Although I do admit to poking a bit of fun when the answer is always pseudo-mystical "vibrations.")  It's not that. It's how this very practical look at space exploration thought astronauts would operate, and perhaps why. In other words, what things became apparent as they actually built things that could make it out into space that could not have been anticipated before they actually happened.

Most of the engineering stuff sounds very good to this layperson. It's not overly dramatized (in the long run, perhaps a weakness, but fine in a short story), and goes step-by-step. It's interesting that Ing was predicting that they'd be sending mechanics into space instead of fighter pilots, for the most part, given early assumptions about the space program. It's not a bad guess.

One thing jumps out at me, though, in the midst of this very down-to-earth story. (That I actually liked quite a lot - although I should note that I'm not surprised that in 1955, Ing would assume all astronauts would be white men. I'm pretty sure most were making that assumption, so it's not an accusation. Just an observation.)  And that is the idea that one man, one mechanic, could know the entire rocket so well that he could make repairs from memory in the middle of a space flight.

Of the three who went up, the one who is the engineer is entirely in charge of fixing things when they go wrong. Not only does he personally inspect the entire rocket just before he gets suited up to fly, he's practically built the thing. Knowing how much NASA drills its astronauts in every possible occurrence and then still gives them checklists to follow for virtually every procedure, trying to eliminate making one simple mistake in such an unforgiving environment, I was most startled by the end of the story.

Over the course of the story, we find out that the mechanic on the flight has recorded verbal instructions on how to do everything to play back to make sure he won't miss any steps. (Written seems more useful, as it doesn't presume a pace, but fine.) But he finds it so irritating that the story ends by him saying he'll jettison the tapes, as they weren't useful, and just rely on knowing what to do next time.

Again, this isn't that Ing is wrong as that it's indicative of how vastly complex space flight was once they got into it, how little it can be all held in the head of one man, and how much they learned about not relying on human memory alone in the case of emergency.

"The Door Into Infinity" by Edmond Hamilton

 Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Weird Tales, August/September 1936

Just look at this cover. I mean, look at it. All the things I've been talking about, about covers, about gender, about race, and in this case, weird pseudopodinous cities that devour humans. Okay, that last one is new. Other than that, this cover so encapsulates a lot of things about old science fiction.

Also, having read no Lovecraft at all, but having played my fair share of Call of Cthulhu until I realized how upsetting I find that world to be, my first reaction to the story was go to downstairs to my husband, describe the plot, and ask if this Hamilton guy would have been ripping Lovecraft off. Bill explained about the whole group who wrote Mythos stuff. On some surface research, while Hamilton doesn't seem to have been formally part of this group, he was certainly around them, and was one of the main contributors to Weird Tales at the time.

Back to that cover. It's interesting, not so much because it shows a sinister Indian man (spelled "Hindoo" in the story, because of course) sexually assaulting a scared white woman while her clothes are torn. What's more interesting is that that's not how the story goes, at all. Which is not to say this a bastion of progressive fiction - the Hindu man is definitely the evil sinister bad guy, and the pure white woman is definitely the sacrifice the stalwart white male heroes are trying to rescue. What's wrong is the sexual predation. I mean, maybe those pseudopods that come out of the portal have illicit designs on this woman, but the humans don't seem to.

The other part, where gender comes in even more, is that she is actually in a hypnotic trance through the whole story until the last three paragraphs. So there would be no recoiling. Or tearing of clothes. She's a zombie, until she wakes up enough to murmur her husband's name. That is all she gets to do in this story.

But to the plot. A young man comes to the police in England, looking for his missing wife. The police inspector says that a lot of people disappear around this time of year in England, and he knows just the Hindoo who is behind it. (*sigh* Racial profiling always works in fiction that wants to prove that it works, just like torture always gets accurate information on 24.)

They track him down, and chase him on boats, and finally make their way to an underground cavern, where there is a door to another universe, which they open every year and give a whole bunch of humans to a slimy green city with pseudopods on the other side, in return for hidden knowledge. (I swear to god, my first reaction was "Cthulhu is actually the Emerald City?")

Our heroes interrupt the horrifying ceremony, rescue the one guy's wife, abandon the rest of the sacrifices to their doom, pull out a pocket watch that is filled with "the most concentrated high-explosive known," and proceed to blow the living shit out of the cavern, collapsing it beneath the waves forever.

The part that kind of gets me, and I realize this is a weird part to get stuck on, is the part where this evil portal to another dimension is in England, and every year, since the dawn of history, these evil men (mostly non-white) have travelled to England to perform this rite. I mean, how did they discover it? And how did they travel there every year before planes and boats? India's not exactly around the corner. We couldn't have English men be the bad guys, right?

So, there's that. The story is well written, as far as it goes, but chock full of disturbing racism, racial profiling, and women who get delegated to being the victim who needs rescuing. The unconscious victim who needs rescuing. I'm not surprised, I'm just pointing it out.

But hey, slimy green city that eats people!

"Asteroid of Fear" by Raymond Zinke Gallun

 Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From: Planet Stories, March 1951

I had a whee of a time reading this story. I'm nearing the end of my dissertation on temperance and masculinity, you see, and so I've spent years and years reading temperance stories and thinking about what they say about manliness and society. So when I found this story, which is not technically a temperance story, it had enough similarities that I almost rubbed my hands together in glee.

Plus, it had the wonderful epithet "hydroponic pun'kinheads." Which I plan to now use on everyone, ever. You have been warned.

Pretty much the only way in which this isn't a temperance tale is that John, the main character, isn't fatally doomed by his addiction to drink, and can, in the end, save himself by proving himself more manly than the others, rather than having to be saved from his terminal lack of will by a child, or a temperance advocate. (Rarely, if ever, a wife.)

John has gotten himself into trouble while drinking on earth, even spending time locked up in jail. While there, of course, it was too much for his long-suffering but always supportive wife Rose to run the farm by herself, and they lost it. (This trope of wife is always long-suffering but unfailingly loving.) So he's signed up the whole family to farm on an asteroid. They're the first settlers on Vesta since the destruction of the alien civilization there eons ago, although there is a mining camp on the other side of the asteroid.

He's trying to stay off the sauce, and so the miners think he's uppity, which quickly swells into anti-farmer homicidal rage. It's so over the top. One, how do they have the time or energy after a long mining shift to spend their sleeping time traversing to the other side of the asteroid and trying to kill John and his family? And why do they hate farmers? Food is kind of at a premium. Whatever, they're the personified forces of degenerated masculinity, out to kill and destroy, and even threaten rape of John's wife and daughter.

John must defend his homestead all by himself. (It's always strange to me - I'm pretty sure Rose could keep a watch too, and if the man must be the one to have the gun, she could wake him up.) The miners come and try to wreck the supplies he needs to live in the airless vacuum of space. (The suits in this story have, it seems, unlimited air.) He knows they'll be back, until his wife emasculates him by calling the cops.

So John gets to get his first crop in, and takes it to the mining camp to sell. Or at least, he would, if he doesn't decide that he needs a drink before he gets any money. This starts a fight, and the most homicidal of the miners tries to kill him, and he knocks him out and drags him back to his dome, where he proves his superior masculinity by...making him eat a whole bushel of tomatoes? This proves his superior control, and breaks the power of the other guy in the eyes of the other miners, as he's shown to be weak.

This story has it all, if you're looking for masculinity - drink, murder, and manly self-control. Of course, a long-suffering wife to set it off. And those miners. Man. They sure are jerks. But at least they aren't hydroponic pun'kinheads.

"The Mightiest Man" by Patrick Fahy

 Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From Worlds of If, November 1961

I can't find anything out about the author on a very cursory wikipedia-and-google search. Which is too bad, as this is the only story by this author on Project Gutenberg, and it's a doozy! It's short, but packs a hell of a wallop. One of those ones that all circles down to the final lines, and then is entirely chilling.

Because it's so short, there is not a lot of detail, even about the eponymous "Mightiest Man." All we know is that, as a human, he helped alien invaders takes over the earth, and, when they were fought off by "fungoid" defenses (shades of The War of the Worlds and the common cold), they left him with formidable defensive and offensive powers.

We don't know why he betrayed humanity. When he's put on trial, he isn't that helpful, choosing instead to control and kill the people around him, seemingly with his mind. He's more or less invincible, quite homicidal, and if he was quite willing to sell out his entire species to alien invaders, he's now quite happy to kill them all himself as a final action.

It's hard to know what else to say. I certainly don't want to give away the ending, as the prosecuting attorney tries to figure out how to a) stay alive and b) actually punish this guy. What do you do with a truly insane omnipotent being who can kill you with his brain, or just provoke intense agony?

There are no women, and presumably no people of colour, but honestly, that doesn't bother me as much in this story as it has in others, perhaps because this is such a pared down story anyway. No one is explored, even down to the motivations of the traitor.

If you're interested, try going here and check it out for yourself. This is a genuinely chilling little story. It's all an arrow aimed at the last line.

"Blessed Are The Meek" by G.C. Edmondson

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From Astounding, September 1955

Interesting. Looking up this author on Wikipedia, it appears that that the author was born in Mexico and, if his full name is anything to go by, was Hispanic. That's particularly interesting, because this story is all about race, and posits that Asians are not only a different "race," but literally a different race. As in, from another planet. I guess they can interbreed, but that's not really explained.

So, what's this one about? Well, an exploration team lands on a planet that shows ruins that they've been finding all over the galaxy. However, it also has a small population of what appear to be Asian humans. They even speak Chinese. These Asians tell the approaching team (which is actually fairly multiracial, with both Asian and Hispanic members. The Hispanic member passes by with barely a mention) that all Asians everywhere are from their original planet, whose location is lost.

Every thousand years or so, a new set of white barbarians comes along, with their "curly hair, white skin and round eyes," and invades. This race of "dark, straight-haired" people survives by joining with them, going along until the new empire collapses and settling whatever world they end up on. They survive through being "meek," from the title.

It's hard not to be troubled by this, by the idea of Asians as literally a race from another planet who keep getting conquered over and over, and survive by staying in the shadows. The story seems to say they have the greater longevity as a species, but it also makes them passive, and incapable and uninterested in forming their own civilization, or creating, or inventing, or anything. They live, they farm rice, they survive. It's bothersome.

On the other hand, I couldn't help but be a little tickled when the author refers to the Asian crewmember as smiling an "inscrutable East Los Angeles smile."

(It might be an ethnically diverse crew, but there are no women in this story.)

There really isn't a story here. The crew comes, explores, meets with the natives, discovers they speak Chinese, and are told about how these people manage to outlive everyone by being so passive it hurts. That's really it. So dramatically, it's not that satisfying. From a point of view of assumptions about racial personality characteristics, it's troubling.

The scientists aren't evil in this one, unlike many of the first stories I read. Interestingly, those were from the 1930s, and most of the stories I've been reading more recently, from the 1950s, have scientists as the heroes. What a difference twenty years and two atomic bombs makes? Ugh, that's a troubling statement.

"Martians Never Die" by Lucius Daniel

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

From Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1952

I actually like this little story quite a lot. Sure, the gender politics are troubling, but as a story, it holds up better than some I have been reading. I think that's largely because Daniel, whoever he was, (Google is not forthcoming), has focused more on telling a creepy little story than on the nitty-gritty details of the science. So many authors I've read for this series are all about the details, and it tends to be frustrating.


Okay, the plot. A scientist has sent himself out on wavelengths, and there is one day a year when he could return from Mars. It's been four years, and his wife isn't expecting him to come home anymore, and she's taken up with his investment advisor.

This is strongly reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, actually, in which a man turns himself into waves in space, and they intersect with Earth once a year. Vonnegut is out to do more with this idea, and perhaps does it better, but the core is very similar.

It will probably not surprise you at all to hear that he does come back, having spent some time with the intelligent beings on Mars, and, apparently, picking up an equivalent of a Martian dog, although it looks more like a frog (that's him up there in the picture), named Schaughtowl. The wife, Beryl, immediately becomes solicitous, leaving Stern, the investment advisor without either the wife or the money he'd planned on having.

Stern becomes immediately homicidal, deciding to kill off the scientist by overloading his heart - it'll be passed off as due to the difference in gravities. But to do so, he has to get through Schaughtowl. He smashes in the head of the creature and pushes it over a cliff, but not before it stings him. As the story closes, Stern more or less becomes Schaughtowl - not physically, I don't think, but somehow Schaughtowl took over Stern's body with that sting. This is obviously how "Martians Never Die."

As a story, it hangs together well - it's creepy, and Stern is unlikeable enough that is fate is both enjoyable and unsettling. Stern's pretty cynical about women, and that may be just the character, but it's hard to know. When Beryl starts taking care of her recently-returned husband, Stern thinks to himself that it's "the way a woman is when she has a man to impress." Later, he thinks to himself that the changeability of women is "enough to make a man lose faith in the sex."

Certainly, Beryl is there as a plot device to cause Stern's downfall. She's only there to go back to her husband and thus drive Stern to homicide. For all that, she seems fairly capable, both in knowing her husband's science, and in her ability to get things done.

Other than that? As almost always, no race, no class issues come into the story.

What about the scientists? The only one is Dr. Curtis, who went to Mars, and he's mostly abstracted. Not evil, which is refreshing, but far away. Is it just me, or is there a sense that he might be under the control of the Martians?

At any rate, this was not a story that caused me great hilarity. In fact, it was one that made me nod my head and decide that it wasn't bad.

"The Last Evolution" by John W. Campbell

Hey, guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

This one is under John W. Campbell on the Gutenberg SF listing, but the note says it's from a 1932 issue of Amazing Stories.

This is not a good story. It's not the subject matter, or even any of Campbell's well-noted obstreperous politics. It's just not very well written. It's jumpy, which is weird, given his stature as an editor in the field. From paragraph to paragraph, I had trouble following what was going on. The subject kept changing without notice, and things would happen in sentences that in no way actually explained what was going on.

It's also weirdly nihilistic.

Humans have evolved. They have created robots. Then, one day, an intruder comes into the solar system and seems to want to take over the planets there, and the best way to do that, it seems, is by sterilizing them of life. Not getting rid of the dominant species, eradicating all life. That seems to me to be the hard way to do any kind of terraforming, but whatever.

They can't touch robots, though. In fact, they seem to have no concept of robots. So the robots try valiantly to save the humans that they quite readily admit are pretty much obsolete. They manage to save two. I think they're both male, but gender is never mentioned in the story, and the names are no help. (Trest and Roal.) Watching the complete destruction of not only the human race and all the individual humans they've ever known, plus all other life on earth, the two humans' reaction can best be summed up as "Well, it's probably for the best. Men were parasites anyway."

Which begs the question, what about everything else? Is everything a parasite? Everything has to draw energy in some way from some other source, so other than plants (and plants use water), are we all just horrible because we need to get that energy from somewhere? In this particular story, possibly to be a shit-disturber, Campbell answers yes.

It's far worse to be a parasite than something that eradicates all life? I'm a little fuzzy on the morality here. At any rate, the surviving humans are blase about this. (Also, don't robots need to draw power too? What makes them less a parasite?)

And then the robots go on inventing, and invent another robot that uses some magical Ultimate Energy and so is not a parasite? I guess? And he will maybe go hunt down the creatures that destroyed all life in the solar system? Maybe? (The writing here is extremely opaque.)

It's all machines yay, and humans and life, boo, and it's very weird. There are no women (I don't think), and no mention of race, which is probably a good thing, given some of what Campbell was known to have said during his lifetime. Scientists are okay, I guess, but they're humans, and humans are pretty much bad because of how biology works, and this is a weird story.

But mostly, it's badly written. Too bad. I like way out and crazy. I don't like not being able to tell what the fuck is going on.

"Accidental Death" by Peter Baily

Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So, hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?

This is the first one I've looked at that was not a story in a 1930s science fiction magazine! It was presented separately on Project Gutenberg, but the bottom has a note that it appeared as a story in Astounding Science Fiction in 1959.


It's a good story, for the most part. It's the dying recollections of one of the crew of the first interstellar ship, as he lies in the wreckage of a pod back on Earth. It also seems to be a thinly veiled story of first contact - not just first contact with another species, but it is reminiscent of writing about European explorers meeting indigenous peoples for the first time.

This is mostly in the language used to describe the Chingsi, who are supposed to look more like cats than people, although they appear to be bipedal humanoids. The dying crewmember is quick to assert that they're people, though, using the following criteria:

"One, they learned our language in four weeks. When I say they, I mean a ten-man team of them.
"Two, they brew a near-beer that's a lot nearer than the canned stuff we had aboard the Whale.
"Three, they've a great sense of humor. Ran rather to silly practical jokes, but still. Can't say I care for that hot-foot and belly-laugh stuff myself, but tastes differ.
"Four, the ten-man language team also learned chess and table tennis.
"But why go on? People who talk English, drink beer, like jokes and beat me at chess or table-tennis are people for my money, even if they look like tigers in trousers."

However, although the Chingsi are technologically far behind, they may not be the pushovers the crew initially thought. The crew brings at least one Chingsi back with them, (they dub him Charley), and that's when we discover that apparently they can manipulate luck, as the ship starts to have malfunction after malfunction, after a previously flawless trip. Calculations are altered, machinery fails, people mess up.

This results in the crash landing on Earth, in which presumably the Chingsi man dies as well, although there is the detail that he was laughing as the ship went down. The crewman leaves a warning for future potential explorers, about what a whole planet full of these creatures could do. Oh, and he rescinds, their "person" status:

The Chingsi talk and laugh but after all they aren't human. On an alien world a hundred light-years away, why shouldn't alien talents develop?

Beware the hidden talents of the native! seems to be underlying message here. I'm not going to draw this review out into a long consideration of colonialism, but there are hints here. Particularly since the only way race appears in the story is in the Chingsi, who are obviously alien, but alien in the way that is often a metaphor for human experience.


There's not enough here to get into a long discussion of what the author meant, and his point of view on the whole thing. It's interesting, but it's a fairly short story.

There are no women crew on the ship, of course. Or at least, not that are mentioned as such.

This is a pretty good little story, though. The writing is decent, and builds very well towards the end.
The framing device of having it come from the lips of a dying man is effective.

Too bad, I couldn't find anything else about Peter Baily. No other stories on Project Gutenberg, nothing on wikipedia (or anywhere else easily searchable) about the author.