Dynamic Subspace

Category: Review

  • Pamela Sargent’s “Gather Blue Roses”

    Pamela Sargent’s 1972 short story, “Gather Blue Roses” comments on the shared sufferings of a people as made personal through the psionic empathy shared between mother and children as well as siblings. The narrator is Esther Greenbaum, and her brother Simon, growing into their empathic powers to feel and make manifest in their own bodies, the pain and suffering of others. They are the children of Samuel and Anna Greenbaum. Anna is a holocaust survivor with her Nazi supplied identification number tattooed above her breasts. This physical mark is left on her body near the point where she would have given milk to her suckling children. The mark of suffering is imposed on the giving of life to that of her children, and it symbolizes a transference of her gift/curse to her children.

    However, Esther’s lack of empathy for her mother as exemplified by some of her thoughts concerning her mother’s WWII imprisonment is interesting. In a way, she blames her mother for the wrongs done to her that she must imagine, but not openly speak or ask about of her mother. Esther thinks to herself:

    By the time I reached my adolescence, I had heard all the horror stories about the death camps and the ovens…the women used, despite the Reich’s edicts, by the soldiers and the guards. I then regarded my mother with ambivalence, saying to myself, I would have died first, I would have found some way rather than suffering such dishonor, wondering what had happened to her and what secret sins she had on her conscience, and what she had done to survive” (250).

    As a young woman, Esther should realize that had her mother died, “rather than [suffer] such dishonor,” she would not have been born. Her empathic powers that she’s growing into, just as she’s growing into adulthood, reveal the inability of one far removed from the trauma of war to consider life and living in a pragmatic way. In a way, Esther’s ability will enforce a conscientiousness and emotional awareness that is lacking in most people. She will feel things as only the “other” can.

    At the end of the story, Esther’s mother says, “it will be worse with her, I think, than it was for me” (254). This ironic twist of the holocaust survivor saying that her daughter’s life will be worse than her own is striking. Is Sargent saying that those who come after the war will be unable to cope with the horrors of the past, or will we be unable to avoid making similar mistakes unless the emotional and physical impact are carried over and inculcated in the next generation? Also, is it possible to pass on this shared suffering to those who were not actually there?

    I read “Gather Blue Roses” in The Norton Book of Science Fiction, but you may read it online here.

    I would like to note that Sargent is also well known for her anthologies. There are three collections that she edited in the 1970s that I’d like to have a chance to read in the near future: Women of Wonder (1975), More Women of Wonder (1976), and The New Women of Wonder (1978).

    Update 7/19/2024: I changed the link above to one cached in the Internet Wayback Machine.

  • Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”

    During my six hour layover in New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on Sunday, I read Harlan Ellison’s Hugo and Nebula-winning short story, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” It was originally published in the December 1965 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, and it can be readily found today in The Essential Ellison.

    It’s a story about a future ruled by efficiency and time keeping. Whenever you’re late, that time gets docked from your projected lifespan. If you’re late too much, as is the story’s joker-hero, Harlequin, you’re “turned off.” The Master Timekeeper, or as he’s called behind his back, the Ticktockman, is responsible for policing and enforcing the law of punctuality.

    Ellison explicitly relies on Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, particularly in the ending when Harlequin, aka Everett C. Marm is broken. However, he breaks with Orwell by making Harlequin a character that can actually disrupt the system instead of an individual who is a ball of yarn to the state-cat.

    One element that I found lacking in the story is the way in which the lone speaking female character is portrayed. She is put off by Harlequin “annoying people,” and she’s ultimately the one that betrays him. This betrayal is voluntary, unlike Julia’s betrayal of Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It seems like Ellison is painting the woman in a traditional role as betrayer rather than a less stereotypical role.

    That being said, I do like “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” a great deal. It’s a postmodern narrative that features great dialog exchanges that sound strange reading them, but perfectly normal if you say them out loud. Also, I like the way in which he employs jelly beans to create a cascading breakdown in system efficiency–most inventive!

    We need more Harlequins today more than ever!

  • 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