Category: Science Fiction

Paul J. McAuley’s 1988 short story, “Karl and the Ogre” is a fascinating story about a fairy tale future brought about by our genetically building super smart children who overthrow the adult hegemony. The “superbrights” were even further different than the adults who engineered them. However, the children knew children’s stories and fairy tales, so they transformed the world as they believed it should be.

In this future, Karl and Shem are normal people who were children at the time of the changing. They were allowed to grow up, and they serve the interests of the “changelings” by hunting “ogres,” normal people who escaped the change and hid in the forest.

This story mirrors many Cold War narratives of command and control systems or intelligent systems overthrowing humanity. In this case, our offspring rise up and over throw the adult/parental system, because they can. What child wouldn’t want to have things their his or her way? And, with new found abilities inscribed by the parental system, the children enforce their world view. This goes back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus and continues through films such The Forbin Project (1970) and The Terminator (1984).

It’s interesting to note that the hunters are all male in the story, though we’re told that hunting parties are either all male or all female. Additionally, Karl remarks that the ogre they track down is another female, implying that there were others and this is common. The ogre, who we learn has the name Liza Jane Howard, is a virgin, which is important, because we learn that the unicorn would have speared her with his hor had she not been a virgin. Even though we’re told that boys and girls (i.e., the generic ‘children’) contributed to this magical world, what we see is a world where men are privileged over women (e.g., the water girl changeling transforming into a moth, human to insect, does this represent a loss or a lessening?).

I read this story in The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, but it’s available on archive.org in Interzone #23 (Spring 1988) here. If you’d like to find out more about the author, you can find his official website here, and his blog here.

On April 15, I wrote about Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1984 novel, The Wild Shore. We talked about this and the other two books in his Three Californias Triology: The Gold Coast and Pacific Edge, during our Utopias seminar today. Before class, I collected some notes that I wasn’t initially aware of when I read The Wild Shore.

John Clute’s entry on Robinson in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has a lot of relevant information about the author and this trilogy. The author earned his PhD in English from the University of California in 1982 and his dissertation was published in 1984 as The Novels of Philip K. Dick, which is still an authoritative work on the subject.

Clute goes on to state that The Wild Shore was originally released as an Ace Special, and he says that, “[it] lucidly examines the sentimentalized kind of US SF pastoral typically set after an almost univeral catastrophe” (1015). Also, the three books, “may be read as three versions of the same story, each nesting within the other” (1015). Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to read the other two novels yet. Sunshine and Christian each took one of the other novels to speak about in class.

Another valuable resource is Helen J. Burgess’ “‘Road of Giants’: Nostalgia and the Ruins of the Superhighway in Kim Stanley Robtinson’s Three Californias Triology,” which appears in Science Fiction Studies, #99, Vol. 33, Part 2, July 2006. Burgess writes about the highway infrastructure of the United States and how it came about as a corporate construction of the mythopedic ideal of the open road and American expansion into the West of the future. Car manufacturers utilized nostalgia of American west expansion and they projected that nostalgia into the future to sell more cars and construct new roads. Nostalgia is therefore turned into a created construct when it’s applied to futurity. She draws parallels between this and William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum,” because of the use of nostalgia and the choices we make about the future.

She goes on to makes an argument about the uses of nostalgia in The Wild Shore:

The Wild Shore uses the longings of a group of people in post-apocalypse America to show that nostalgia for the technological ‘progress’ of the past, and the wish to rebuild that past, repeat dubious patterns of nationalism and manifest destiny. The Wild Shore thus attempts to make a distinction between irresponsible uses of nostalgia as a tool in the service of reconstruction (278).

Connected to this is Robinson’s recurring character in the trilogy, Tom Barnard (however, each novel is a separate time line sharing the same space so Barnard in The Wild Shore is not the same Barnard in the other novels):

[He’s] a kind of oracle/conscience/trickster voice, a story teller relating sometimes nostalgic, sometimes critical tales of the past in The Wild Shore. Barnard is a tricky and unreliable narrator, often lying about or concealing true details–for example his age of his location at the time of the holocaust. But he uses the details chiefly didactically, in the service of parables that convey both nostalgia for the past and the recognition that the past was destructive (286).

Through Barnard, Robinson uses parable and stories to reach out to the other characters as well as the reader to instruct and guide as is often the case of the guide in utopias.

Again, I recommend The Wild Shore, and I’m looking forward to reading the J.G. Ballard-like dystopia of The Gold Coast and the utopic vision of Pacific Edge.

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!

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.