Dynamic Subspace

Category: Review

  • 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.

  • Vonda N. McIntyre’s “The Mountains of Sunset, The Mountains of Dawn”

    Vonda N. McIntyre’s “The Mountains of Sunset, The Mountains of Dawn” is a wonderfully beautiful tale about love across the generations among a space faring winged and taloned species. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1974, it’s about a young male (called grandchild) who falls in love with a much older female (called grandmother). The “grandchild” wants to mate with the “grandmother” in order to effect his metamorphosis into an adult. Grandmother is a subversive influence on the grandchild, because she breaks from the decision of the others to remain in space. Also, she allows grandchild to continue his infatuation with her.

    I like this story, because of the descriptive language that the author uses to describe flying and hunting prey. I felt myself carried over the air currents as these flying beings freely explored the space that we can only do so through the mediation of technology. It’s a story worth reading, and the generational themes and Freudian issues should be further explored. It can be found in The Norton Book of Science Fiction.

  • Avram Davidson’s “The House the Blakeneys Built”

    The first story that I’ve read by Avram Davidson is “The House the Blakeneys Built.” Originally published in 1965, it’s about a family that finds them flung into an unknown part of the universe after their “boat” ran into something on the way to “the Moons of Lor.” The normal human visitors encounter a group of inbred people living in a castle on the nearest planet. After living with these descendants of two polygamist families for a while, they attempt to live on their own outside the confines of the “castle.” Living apart and breaking with the inbreds’ “law,” results in a confrontation leaving the two “alien” men dead and the women and new born child are taken back to the castle in order to, “Teach them better” (124). Davidson creates an interesting inversion of normality and alienness. The normal shipwrecked visitors are strangers and therefore alien to the inbred and decidedly alien looking natives. This story can be found in The Norton Book of Science Fiction.

    Out of curiosity, I looked up Avram Davidson in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls. Clute reports that he’s an orthodox Jew and he served both in the US Navy (1941-1945) and alongside the Israelis in the 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli War (302). I suppose I was curious about his name, because the only other encounter I’ve had with an “Avram” was in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It.

  • James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”

    “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” is another great Tiptree story. The novella was originally published in 1976 in the collection edited by Vonda N, McIntyre and Susan J. Anderson, Aurora: Beyond Equality. It’s about a future Earth space mission sent around the sun that is flung into the far future following an accident with a solar flare. The three male astronauts find themselves in a world only populated by women who also happen to be clones of a common stock.

    I’m currently writing a paper looking at the similarities between “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. Tiptree’s novella is, in many ways, a retelling of Herland in a far future, but far more ambiguously regarding the fate of the three male astronauts as compared with Van, Jeff, and Terry. Also, Tiptree explores the nature of power along two different axes. The first concerns the biological/anthropological concept of dominance and submission among the three male astronauts. She does this by looking at the “beta” male’s past, Lorimer, and his relationship with the two alpha males, Bud and Dave. He is also the narrator of the story. The other is the cultural constructs of male dominance over females as illustrated by Lorimer’s suppressed impulses and thoughts as well as Dave and Bud’s overt actions. I believe that there are significant links between the two stories, and Tiptree may have wrote “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” as a Second Wave Feminist reaction or simply response to Gilman’s much earlier work.

    This is another story that’s a must read! Of all of the stories that I’ve read by Tiptree, this is my favorite. It’s an interesting story that connects to many significant gender and cultural issues. Besides the connection with Herland, the cloned women in the utopic future remind me of the Cylons of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.

  • Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore

    It’s fun to begin reading a book that starts with the line, “It wouldn’t really be grave-robbing.” However, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Locus Award-winning novel, The Wild Shore, isn’t about petty thieves. The story is a written memoir by the narrator, Henry Fletcher. It concerns his transition from a teenage boy to an adult. The Wild Shore is set in 2047 in the area between Orange County and San Diego in California about 60 years after the United States was struck by an orchestrated suitcase nuke/neutron bomb attack. In the years following the attack, the UN quarantined the States and instructed the Japanese to enforce the Western border. In the midst of this, Henry lives in an anarchistic, cooperative village called Onofre, which is near San Clemente.

    The lives of the Onofrians are tough, but their community is clearly a utopia. People work cooperatively and share the spoils of their efforts. Trade and goodwill abound amongst the citizens of the commune. Though, their lives are structured by the necessities of survival. It’s not an artisan’s paradise as in William Morris’ News From Nowhere, but it’s more similar to Anarres in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

    Henry acts as the utopia’s visitor, because he is experiencing an awakening of awareness of the world around him, which is developed by his transition from childhood to adulthood. Therefore, the familiar and common place suddenly takes on new meanings for his broadening consciousness. Tom, who is Henry’s centigenarian (throughout the story he pretends to be much older than his 80 something years) teacher and friend. He guides Henry’s development through stories as well as teaching him how to read and write. Also, Tom represents the champion of the new world order in opposition to those persons who want to revive the States as they once were.

    Following Le Guin, Robinson’s novel should also be given the subtitle, “An Ambiguous Utopia.” Onofre is never explicitly threatened, but it does exist in a precarious position challenged by Scavengers, the militaristic San Diego Mayor Danforth, and the Japanese. their existence is also tied to the land and sea, which places them under the threat of a new and violent Nature present in the post-apocalyptic world.

    Henry’s gradual shift toward adulthood is one of the most interesting things about the story, because it’s subtle and believable. Robinson constructs Henry’s development gradually with enough self-doubt and uncertainty that he acts and feels like a teenage boy. However, he continually has a growing critical awareness that creeps up on the reader to the point that the voice at the end of the novel actually feels older than the one at the beginning. Furthermore, this is accomplished by the author, because Henry never fully understands everything. The community and his futures are uncertain, yet hopeful. Also, philosophical dilemmas are not discarded. Henry works them over for himself, but consciously shelves them if they extend beyond his current capabilities. However, as readers, we see the connections he makes as well as the gap waiting for a connective spark. This allows Henry to become a well developed character that establishes his own framework, outlook, and conceptualization of his life and the way it fits into his larger reality.

    From Henry’s act of writing the story, he’s constructing a past and therefore, paving the way for the future. His father is described as “slow” and is a tailor in a town where no one really needs his services. Henry, as the tailor’s son, he “stitched together words” (351). His words are based on memories–his memory–the memory of the new generation. His intelligence as well as the fact that he’s writing the story, privileges him over the adults that form the community’s current hegemony. Then, he tentatively joins their ranks at the end of Chapter 22 when Tom and John (both considered community leaders–lacking a better term) listen to him and engage his opinion about the future of their community. This is reinforced by the imagery he records ending the chapter:

    I looked out at the horizon, and this is what I saw: three sunbeams standing like thick white pillars, slanting each its own way, measuring the distance between the grey clouds and the grey sea (368).

    The “three sunbeams” are the three men walking back from the sea to the community inland. The light appears as “thick white pillars” supporting the people, but they slant in different ways reflecting each person’s viewpoint. And finally, they “measure the distance” between the sky and the sea where the land is. They attempt to determine their (i.e., a favored North American humanity) place in the world and the boundaries within which they can work and prosper.

    The novel was an enjoyable read. Robinson artfully builds a complex narrative around him as the author writing a novel that is a memoir by the narrator/protagonist and that character/author draws on cultural links (both real and imaginary–real to his world) to reinforce and reflect on his own narrative. The novel’s development of female roles is lacking and in some ways regressive. For example, within the Onofre, some women such as Kathryn have special skills (medicine/doctor), but her primary role is that of a farmer. The men in the community (John, Tom, Doc, and others) appear to have the most voice over community matters, and even the boys (Steve and Henry) plan, join, and invite other young people (girls and boys) to join a group of San Diegoians on a raid against the Japanese and the Scavengers. Also, race isn’t an issue in the novel besides the conflict between the American survivors and the Japanese on patrol boats. The Japanese that Henry does encounter could easily have been replaced by other nationalities. Also, race amongst the survivors isn’t brought up, which is interesting with the power of racial divisions in Southwest California. Perhaps the author reasoned that people dropped those conflicts after the bombs went off. However, the short time following the attack doesn’t seem long enough to heal racially divisive wounds.

    Another element that falters is the nuclear attack. The novel was released during the beginning of Reagan’s second term in office in 1984, at a time when there was a certain tension between the United States and the USSR, though it does predate Mikhail Gorbachev coming to power in 1985. In this context, it can be viewed as a very late Cold War text written possibly as a warning or as a way to envision the author’s own wish fulfillment of a utopia via a return to the pastoral garden in a post-apocalyptic world.

    I do recommend this novel, but it does lack certain extrapolative elements that would seem important to this kind of text. Now, I need to follow up this novel with the other two books of the “Three California Trilogy.”