Dynamic Subspace

Author: Jason W. Ellis

  • Gene Wolfe’s “How the Whip Came Back”

    I’ll be honest–I don’t particularly like the short fiction of Gene Wolfe, but I keep finding myself reading it. Go figure.

    I first read his story, “The Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus,” then “Feather Tigers,” and now, “How the Whip Came Back.” Originally published in 1970 in Damon Knight’s collection, Orbit 6, it’s set in a far future nearly devoid of religious faith and it’s about a UN vote to impress prisoners into slavery for the duration of their sentence.

    Wolfe’s prognostication that there would be a quarter of a million Americans in prison in the future is a bit off. Also, it’s interesting that he chose to write the story when he did, but it was a time of criminal offense reform. The United States began to criminalize things that were not once considered felony offensives (particularly in regard to drug related offenses and the introduction of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 during the Nixon administration).

    In 1970, there were 196,429 incarcerated persons in US prisons according to the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online. That year was actually part of a low plateau following a jump over 200,000 inmates in the years 1958-1965. Since that time, the prison population has jumped exponentially in a near constant upward trend. In 1980, there were 315, 974 prison inmates, 739,980 prisoners in 1990, and 1,461,132 prisoners in 2005.

    It’s important to see how these numbers relate to the United States population during those years. Using data from the U.S. PopClock Projection, I arrived at these percentages of prisoners as compared to the total population. In 1970, 0.096% of the population was in prison. In 1980: 0.139%. In 1990: 0.297%. In 2005: 0.493%. This increase is staggering, but the reasons for increased prison populations is a complex issue that goes far beyond the belief that there are merely more criminals today than in the past. Perhaps Wolfe, as others did, recognized that criminalization of previously non-felony offenses would lead to increased prison populations, and therefore, a higher cost to society in maintaining the prison system (however, his estimated costs are infinitesimal in comparison to other budgetary concerns such as defense).

    Besides a cultural commentary on prison and the utility of prisoners, this story also features a gendered power inversion. The protagonist, Miss Bushnan, goes from being an observer of the delegation proceedings to having a vote in the treaty that would create a forced, leased workforce of the world’s prisoners. What makes her character interesting is that she’s an American female, and the proceeding needs her approval to move ahead. Furthermore, she’s threatened by the male “American delegate” to vote in favor of the proposal for her sake, and she’d also be given the choice to lease her husband. Ultimately, she decides to vote in favor of the proposal and the story ends with her fantasizing about the type of manacles she will have built to control her husband. Her new found power over a male figure, i.e., her husband, is only possible by the male hegemony giving her that power. Her new power is precarious and unstable, because it may be withdrawn by the male power structure. However, this isn’t an immediate concern of hers at the conclusion of the story.

    This is an interesting story with a unique inversion of power politics. I read it in The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories.

  • Gene Wolfe’s “Feather Tigers”

    Gene Wolfe employs a far future perspective in his 1973 short story, “Feather Tigers.” In the distant future humanity is dead and aliens that look like blue, baby rabbits visit Earth for biological and anthropological study.

    It reads as an anti-Vietnam story for two reasons. The first comes from an exchange between a flying car with artificial intelligence, a human artifact, telling the alien, Quoquo, about the long war over the Mekong River. Quoquo doesn’t believe anything that the car attempts to explain to him.

    The second reason comes from the Quoquo’s subject of study: The People of the Yellow Leaves. These are a nomadic people who live in Thailand and have a myth/tale about “feather tigers.” They believe that tigers are capable of projecting their spirits beyond the body in order to scout the land. One may observe this spiritual manifestation in the shifting patterns of light passing through the jungle foliage. For Quoquo, this myth has more substantiation than the facts that the technological artifact tries to tell him. This, and the fear that Quoquo exhibits later, destabilizes and undermines the traditionally privileged position of technology, which may represent the advanced technology of war making.

    “Feather Tigers” is a romp-like story that reads more like a ghost tale than a SF story.

  • Neil Gaiman’s “Goliath”

    I’ve been considering writing a paper to submit to the 2007 Short Story Conference at Edge Hill University. This year’s theme is, “‘The Story Shall Be Changed’: Tales and Re-tellings in the Short Story.” I knew that Neil Gaiman had done this sort of thing with some of his novels such as American Gods and Anansi Boys, but I wasn’t sure where to start with his short stories. Luckily, Gaiman provides ‘liner notes’ in the introduction for each story and poem in his collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. One story grabbed my attention in Fragile Things, called “Goliath.”

    He originally wrote it after reading the script to The Matrix for inclusion on the movie’s official website (read it here). The story is set in the machine world future of The Matrix, and it’s about one human being selected to protect Earth from an alien intruder in nearby space. What makes this story special is that Gaiman inverts the David and Goliath story in his retelling of the tale. I’ve only just begun my research on this, but I think it will lead to a promising essay.

    If you haven’t read this cyberpunk story, I recommend you check it out. Even though SF isn’t Gaiman’s modus operandi, it’s a well developed story that evokes the feel and detailed imagery of The Matrix.

    For more information about Gaiman’s “Goliath” story and its genesis, see The Matrix Wiki here.

    Updated link to “Goliath,” 12 Aug. 2023. -JWE

    Added link to The Matrix Wiki, 22 May 2024. -JWE

  • John W. Campbell’s “Night”

    Before he assumed the post of editor of Astounding, John W. Campbell was primarily an SF writer. He began selling stories while he was pursuing a degree in Physics from MIT and Duke University. The manuscript for his first sold story, “Invaders from the Infinite,” was lost by the editor of Amazing Stories, so his first published story was, “When the Atoms Failed,” which appeared in 1930. Malcolm J. Edwards writes in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction that Campbell had two phases to his writing career directly followed by his career as an editor during which time he wrote little SF (187). In the first phase of his writing career, Campbell established himself as E.E. “Doc” Smith’s “chief rival in writing galactic epics of superscience” (Edwards 187). His second writing phase began with the story, “Twilight” in 1934, which is “a tale of the far future written in a moody, ‘poetic’ style, the first of a number of stories, far more literary in tone and varied in mood, published under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart” (Edwards 187). It’s from this phase and following that style that Campbell published “Night” in Astounding Stories in October 1935.

    The story is about a flight test gone awry that results in the aircraft’s destruction, but the pilot mysteriously disappears. The experimental craft employed what was believed to be an anti-gravity generator, but as is illustrated in other SF examples such as the film, Primer, technology often has unintended consequences and uses not originally envisioned by the engineer/designer.

    After the pilot miraculously reappears and is discovered by the farmer guarding the wreckage, he tells his superiors a dream-like tale about the distant future and the eventual death of our solar system. Campbell evokes H.G. Wells in the way that the pilot relates his tale. As Edwards points out, Campbell is employing a poetic voice in describing the future both experientially as well as scientifically.

    In the far future, the pilot discovers a ‘race’ of machines that have subsumed humanity in the the solar system. Earth is lifeless and without atmosphere, and the machines have a vast city on Neptune, where the pilot is taken after finding a signally device. The machine city and the necessity of fusion power and greater efficiencies predates The Matrix. However, unlike The Matrix, the machines drop humanity as so much dead weight, but the machine’s representative tells Bob, the pilot, “You still wonder that we let man die out…It was best. In another brief million years he would have lost his high estate. It was best” (112).

    Other connections with Campbell’s story are Asimov’s Robots. Campbell goes on a lot about resistances and coils, which is also the language that Asimov uses in his early robot stories. Campbell and Asimov had an extensive editor-author relationship, and Campbell helped Asimov develop the “Three Laws of Robotics.” This example further establishes where some of the imagery and terminology in Asimov’s stories may have originated beyond his own imagination.

    “Night” is an interesting story, and I’d be interested to see what connections could be made between it and Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe” (read online here). These are two different stories, but given Campbell’s ideas about SF and the fact that Zoline’s story is very much New Wave and feminist in orientation, I believe that there is some elements of the latter that speak with or in reaction to the former.

    I found Campbell’s story in The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, edited by Tom Shippey.

    Updated 7/19/2024: I changed the link above to a cached version on the Internet Wayback Machine.

  • Julie Phillips’ James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

    After going up to the 36th floor of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, I picked up a copy of Julie Phillip’s James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon from Jay’s Book Stall on Fifth Avenue. Jay’s a nice guy, and we talked about Kurt Vonnegut after I asked him about a picture of him and the author that he had taped to the wall.

    I’ll probably find something useful in Phillip’s biography of Alice B. Sheldon to use in my utopias essay on Tiptree’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” and Gilman’s Herland.  I’ll post a more detailed review of the book when I finish reading it.