"Chrysalis," "Come into my Cellar," and "The Smile" by Ray Bradbury

Members of that small elite band of masochists who follow my semi-defunct twitter feed know that I recently received a gift certificate usable only at Second Story Books for my birthday.  With this free money burning a hole in my pocket I ended up buying, along with a Barry Malzberg hardcover and a beautiful collection of reprinted Tarzan comics from the early 1930s, a stack of paperbacks I didn't really need, each selected for some whimsical reason.  Among these paperbacks was a British printing of Ray Bradbury's S is for Space.  S is for Space was first printed in hardcover in America in 1966; my UK paperback was printed in 1972 and would have cost English SF fans stopping at the book shop on the way home to a cup of tea after spending the afternoon at the pub where they drank a warm pint and watched footy 25 pence.  I bought this thing for like $1.50 because I liked the cover with its swarm of SST-like spacecraft and the idea that it was once owned by the American Embassy Association, whatever that is.  Let's read three stories from the book that I am choosing based on their provocative titles which promise (I think) human transcendence, a horrible death, and a horrible death at the hands of a smirking killer.   

"Chrysalis" (1946)

As the title suggests, this is a story about man transforming into something greater.  Smith is a twenty-something electronics researcher who spends more time around radiation than maybe the people at OSHA (founded in 1971, so off the hook for this 1946 incident) would advise.  He works pretty closely with a doctor, Hartley.  One day Hartley calls over another medical man, Rockwell; Rockwell's comic relief assistant, a fat beer-loving Irishman, Murphy McGuire, comes along.  Hartley shows them Smith, who has been lying still for days and whose skin has turned green and hard, and whose heart beat and breathing are only barely detectable by stethoscope!

Rockwell observes Smith for weeks and becomes thrilled by the possibility that radiation has triggered something in the man's genetic makeup that is transforming him into a superior being.  In the same way creepy crawly caterpillars aren't meant to live out their lives on the ground or in a bush, but transform into beautiful butterflies that take to the sky, maybe homo sapiens isn't meant to live out his life on this crappy planet with the cows and pigs but to transform into a creature that can fly out into space and explore the galaxy!  

While Rockwell has high hopes that Smith is a harbinger of better times to come, Hartley is scared by Smith and keeps talking about killing him while they still have a chance.  If Smith emerges from his chrysalis with superpowers won't he make himself king or something and enslave all us normies?  You don't want some arrogant human butterfly pushing you around, do you?  But maybe Hartley is just pissed at Smith because he, Hartley, was also exposed to all that radiation and fears something crazy is also going to happen to him!  Can Rockwell and his obese Irish sidekick keep the comatose Smith safe from the mentally unbalanced Hartley?  And what the hell is going to happen if and when Smith comes out of this chrysalis anyway?

A solid story with classic SF elements including a lot of talk about science and a sense-of-wonder the-future-is-going-to-be-more-awesome-than-we-can-imagine ending.  The comic-relief son-of-Erin bit is a little much, and basically superfluous, but otherwise the style and pacing are good, with Bradbury throwing some surprises in there even though just from the title you know what to expect in the long run.  Thumbs up!

"Chrysalis" debuted in Amazing and they knew they had something good and milked it, reprinting it in 1965 and including it in a 1987 anthology that, for some reason, has a black "the future is going to suck!" cover instead of some kind of optimistic "the future is going to rock!" cover.  Did they ask Barry Malzberg to help them select a cover?

"Come into my Cellar" (1962)

This story has appeared in some venues as "Boys!  Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!" and may some day appear as "[Persons!] Raise Giant Mushrooms in [Their] Cellar!" but it made its debut in Galaxy as "Come Into My Cellar" and shows up as "Come into my Cellar" in my British paperback of S is for Space.  That issue of Galaxy also includes Cordwainer Smith's "Ballad of Lost C'Mell," illustrated impressively by Virgil Finlay, and an editorial in which Pohl moans that SF on TV is bad.  All I can do is echo one of my brother's punk rock buttons: "Kill your TV!"  

"Come into my Cellar" feels kind of long and tedious.  Bradbury does a lot of that "the wind moved across the empty lot" and "the wind came in the hallway" and "the sun shone on his arm" poetic stuff, trying to create a mood, but somehow this time it felt like so much superfluity.

Happy suburban people--young couples with clever young sons who read science magazines--begin to feel uneasy, like something just isn't right; they and their neighbors are intuitively sensing impending doom.  We follow as one father pieces together the clues that indicate just what is going on.  One of the problems of the story is that we readers know from page two what is going on, and there are really no surprises.

What is going on is that alien funguses, taking the form of conventional-seeming mushrooms, have been taking over those people who eat them, and now a company down south is mailing clever young boys all over the USA kits so they can grow these mushrooms, eat them and feed them to their parents, turning America into a country of slaves to the alien menace!

This story is merely competent; better than filler, but not much.  Acceptable.  Fred Pohl selected "Come into my Cellar" for The Seventh Galaxy Reader and Groff Conklin and Vic Ghidalia both anthologized it; the boys down in marketing put Ray's name on top of the author list on these books' covers, sure he was the strongest card in their hands. 

"The Smile" (1952)

This one debuted in the very first issue of Fantastic alongside a reprint of a Raymond Chandler story.  

It is the post-apocalyptic future--2061!  America is in ruins!  The survivors blame "civilization" for the war and resulting desolation, and hate everything about the culture and technology of the past, and take a vengeful glee in burning books and smashing automobiles, those products of civilization.  The brief story's plot follows a little boy who attends a ritualistic defiling of a reproduction of the Mona Lisa.  The boy finds the painting beautiful, and when the mob tears it up he salvages a scrap--Gioconda's smile--and treasures it.  It is sort of implied that maybe this kid will grow up to lead a renaissance of civilization.

I'm rolling my bloodshot eyes at this one.  "The Smile" is sappy and sentimental on the one hand, and misanthropic and elitist on the other; it feels like a fable more than an actual story with believable people, and is a sort of direct appeal to the snobbery of SF fans who think themselves smarter than everybody else.  I'm also pretty skeptical of the idea that people who have suffered a devastating attack would blame an abstract concept like "civilization" for the catastrophe and relieve their frustration by destroying useful items--don't people who have been attacked blame the individuals and groups who carried out the attack and then pursue revenge by killing those people, not by wrecking valuable stuff that has survived the attack?   A story in which post-apocalyptic tribes worshipped a reproduction of a Leonardo painting because it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen, or in which warlords fought over a pile of books because they were a source of invaluable wisdom and technical knowledge, would make more sense than what Bradbury tries to sell us here. 

On the plus side the story is short.

Acceptable, I guess.  I'm shrugging it off, but August Derleth thought "The Smile" "science fiction with a difference" and Daniel Roselle thought it could help you "understand world history."  Oh, brother!

**********

S is for Space includes two stories I have already blogged about, "The Man," a story about Christianity, and "Pillar of Fire," which is about time travel (sort of), vampires (kind of) and more importantly utopias, freedom of speech and social engineering.  "Pillar of Fire" is far better than any of the stories we read today.  

Probably I'll read more from S is for Space in the future, but in our next episode we'll look at another of the paperbacks I bought at Second Story Books because I liked its cover.