Tag: Internet Wayback Machine

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.

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.

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.