Dynamic Subspace

Author: Jason W. Ellis

  • Cordwainer Smith’s “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”

    Cordwainer Smith, the pseudonym of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, was an influential SF short story writer in the 1950s and 60s. “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” is a story from his “Instrumentality” universe and was first published in 1961. Smith is probably best well known for his story, “Scanners Live in Vain” from 1950.

    “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” is set in a far future that combines H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Shape of Things to Come (and accompanying film, Things to Come) with what I would describe as proto-cyberpunk elements such as re-engineering the body and mapping new memories and experiences onto the human mind. It’s about a couple recreated as French citizens after the safeties of existence are released to allow accident and disease to modulate the population levels of the “real humans.” In the second paragraph, Smith writes, “Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.” The world is populated by homunculi (engineered human-animal hybrids who serve as workers), hominids (humans engineered for enduring the strain of space travel), and real persons (numbered people engineered and maintained by the Instrumentality).

    The main characters, Paul and Virginia are considered “real persons.” They run afoul of a bull homunculi, but are saved by C’mell, a cat woman who figures in some of the other Instrumentality stories.

    There are some interesting images built into the story that relate to the Great Chain of Being (more info here and here). The humuculi occupy the lower levels of the city, the real persons live and play in the middle levels, and the Instrumentality occupies the upper levels in Earthport. Paul and Virginia are troubled when they learn that the cat-woman, C’mell works in Spaceport, because her kind are regarded as lower and therefore not privileged like real people. In fact, C’mell, when asked her name by Paul, replies, “Does it matter?…I’m not a person.” C’mell’s action to save Paul and Virginia, and later Paul at the Abba-dingo, further reinforces the problematizing nature of culturally understood and maintained hierarchies.

    I recommend this story wholeheartedly. I read it in The Norton Book of Science Fiction, but you can also find it in Cordwainer Smith’s complete short fiction collection, The Rediscovery of Man.

  • Sonya Dorman Hess’ “When I Was Miss Dow”

    Sonya Dorman Hess’ 1966 short story, “When I Was Miss Dow,” is another gender bending story that is the same category as Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe.” Thinking about great openings, I like the way Hess begins this story:

    These hungry, mother-haunted people come and find us living in what they like to call crystal palaces, though really we live in glass places, some of them highly ornamented and others plain as paper.

    It’s about humans, the “hungry, mother-haunted people,” exploring a planet inhabited by “Protean” or shape shifting aliens. The narrator describes itself and others like it as “he,” but “he” transforms into a “she” with the directive to obtain money from the predominantly male human explorers in return for “her” services. Unlike the others, the narrator is given the special task of emulating human brains by forming two lobes instead of just one as is customary for his people to do, and in so doing, transforms into Miss Dow, a thirty-something lab assistant. As Miss Dow, the narrator falls in love with the much older scientist she works with and she experiences attraction, dejection, and longing as the story progresses.

    This is a great example of early Second Wave Feminist SF, and I recommend it. You can read it online here, but I read it in The Norton Book of Science Fiction.

    Updated 7/19/2024: I updated the links above to ones cached on the Internet Wayback Machine.

  • Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million”

    Frederik Pohl’s short story, “Day Million,” is a mix between Jeffrey Eugenidies’ Middlesex, Greg Egan’s Diaspora, and the Wachowski Brother’s The Matrix. Actually, you can get a feel for this from the story’s hilarious opening paragraph:

    On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl and a love story.

    Now although I haven’t said much so far, none of it is true. The boy was not what you and I would normally think of as a boy, because he was a hundred and eighty-seven years old. Nor was the girl a girl, for other reasons; and the love story did not entail that sublimation of the urge to rape and concurrent postponement of the instinct to submit which we at present understand in such matters. You won’t care much for this story if you don’t grasp these facts at once. If, however, you will make the effort, you’ll likely enough find it jampacked, chockfull and tiptop-crammed with laughter, tears and poignant sentiment which may, or may not, be worth while. The reason the girl was not a girl was that she was a boy.

    Pohl’s 1966 story is about far future designer sex assignment in utero, recording one’s self digitally, and interaction with virtual identities. It’s a fun, tiny story that I highly recommend for it’s forward thinking ideas that puts not only his imagined future cultural norms on display, but also our own, which is evidenced by the final paragraph:

    Balls, you say, it looks crazy to me. And you–with your after-shave lotion and your little red car, pushing papers across a desk all day and chasing tail all night–tell me, just how the hell do you think you would look to Tiglath-Pileser, say, or Attila the Hun?

    I found Pohl’s story in The Norton Book of Science Fiction.

  • Jamie Barras’ “Winter”

    Jamie Barras’ “Winter” is another story in the 25th Anniversary Issue of Interzone. Barras’ story is a tight, one-two punch, with a nice twist at the end that shares similarities with Iain M. Bank’s Use of Weapons.

    “Winter” is an alternative history following WWII that’s about humanity dealing with a virus of the story’s title, initially assumed to be of extraterrestrial origin, that increases’ one’s mental abilities to “the level of supermen,” (26). These “patients,” including men and women, are known as “Wintermen” and they are a threat to the world wide nation state hegemony. The story follows Christian, one of the scientists involved in creating these supermen to question a captured woman who is an escaped Winterman.

    Interestingly, the work of early enhanced Wintermen is eagerly accepted by society, such as viral memory storage, “electromagnetics,” and longevity (24). However, the hypocrisy of the situation isn’t fully explored, but rather connected to the conflict within Christian and is tied to the twist at the end.

    “Winter” is an enjoyable short story that contains neatly packaged surprises for the reader. You can read it in Interzone #209, April 2007.

  • Angela Carter’s “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter”

    Angela Carter’s 1974 short story, “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter” continues on the “daughter” theme of the previous Alastair Reynolds post, but Carter’s story is significantly different. It was originally published in Fireworks, and I found it in Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction No. 8.

    It’s a story about an ambiguous time and place on Earth. It’s like she’s focusing a telescope down on the story’s small community and watching them from afar, but she can see through walls and see the dirty side of a filthy existence. In fact, there is no dialog in the story. It’s all descriptive, and is primarily about the executioner and his daughter. It’s a gruesome tale that’s about incest by siblings as well as fathers. There’s no mention of mothers in the story, only the coveting of the singularly “beautiful daughter.” It’s a powerfully wicked story that concerns things that families in the past often didn’t or wouldn’t talk about. This story isn’t for everyone, but it reminds me of the importance of organizations such as the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network.

    Another theme in the story has to do with the problem of “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (who guards the guards). The executioner enforces his society’s one law, which is no one is to commit incest. The story begins with the executioner publicly killing his own son for his involvement with his sister. However, he indulges himself on his daughter without concern of punishment.

    Also, it’s reminiscent of Avram Davidson’s “The House the Blakeneys Built,” which is also about an incestuous primitive community that’s on another planet in the far-future.

    A great website with lots of information about Carter and her works can be found here.