But, in a spirit of adventure, today I read two stories by both of these SF icons, confident that no matter how irritating or downright bad they might be, they will contribute something to the haphazard syllabus of my life-long SF education.
"The Enemy" by Damon Knight
I may sometimes say crappy things about Knight and his work, but not this time; "The Enemy" is a very good classic science fiction story with space suits and other futuristic technology, hostile aliens, danger and violence, and sense of wonder elements including an ambiguous ending that leaves you unsure what wonderful or horrible fate awaits mankind. I can enthusiastically endorse this one.
It is the future and the Solar System has been colonized--many people even live their whole lives in space stations, it seems. Our protagonist is a sixteen-year-old girl, a member of what seems to be a marginalized religious or ethnic group who have had to live separate from the rest of humanity, maybe meant to remind you of the Jews or the Roma or Mormons or something. These people have become resourceful in their struggle to survive, and as the story begins the girl is left alone on a planetoid, charged with the task of surveying it and mining it of the metal her people require.
Knight does a great job describing the planetoid and the equipment and techniques the girl uses to accomplish her mission, bringing everything vividly to life with economy so readers can visualize what is going on and share the girl's emotions without having to process or wade through a lot of trivia or unnecessary dialogue and exposition. For example, Knight lets us know in an understated way that the human race has again and again uncovered evidence that the Solar System thousands of years ago was inhabited by intelligent spacefaring beings--Knight doesn't have to tell us how awesome this is or even emphasize that it is mind-blowing because it is essentially awesome, and going on and on about it would only cheapen it.
The girl makes first contact with one of the ancient aliens--or one of their self-motivated life-like artifacts--which has been in hibernation on this planetoid for millennia. The creature gives off an aura of absolute evil, and our heroine feels dutybound to warn the human race about it and to try to prevent its escape from the planetoid. But circumstances arise such that human and ancient monster can only survive if they cooperate! Knight does just a good a job describing the alien and its and the human teen's struggles against each other and against the environment as he did describing the earlier mining and exploring scenes, and keeps the reader in suspense the whole time. Can these two products of radically different civilizations really work together, or will one double cross the other? Who will live and who will die? Is the very future of humanity in peril?
Thumbs up for "The Enemy," a great piece of science fiction. "The Enemy" first appeared in Venture (that is where I read it) and in 1961 was included in the French edition of F&SF (Venture was a sister publication of F&SF) and has been reprinted in the many editions of the Knight collections Far Out and The Best of Damon Knight.
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| Both Fiction #88 and the British 1978 edition of Far Out feature illustrations inspired by "The Enemy" on their covers |
"Idiot Stick" by Damon Knight
This story is mediocre; I guess it is a parable about European imperialism and Cold War foreign policy or something, but long stretches of it are boring and as a whole it is neither particularly interesting nor exciting. Knight doesn't bother to build characters or suspense or offer any other literary or entertainment values, and the most crucial component of the plot happens off screen; "Idiot Stick" is sort of like a bland history article from the near future. Though I guess the message of the story, that it takes guts and self-sacrifice for a society to succeed, is not a bad one.
An alien space ship lands in the greatest state in the union. Its occupants are apparently friendly (and able to neutralize all our weapons) and pay native labor in drugs so addictive that even rich people are soon clamoring to join the aliens' work crews. The aliens issue tools to their drug-addicted workforce that, through inexplicable instrumentalities, move earth or erect walls or whatever; these tools resemble rods or sticks and what feat a given tool performs at any given moment is determined by what tab has been inserted in its butt. By changing tabs, a tool's function can be changed, and while the E.T.s hand out the tools liberally and don't seem to care that many are stolen, they are more discriminating about the tabs.
At the direction of the aliens, who don't like to get their hands dirty, the human labor force constructs a huge building and then assembles from an array of parts a lot of mysterious machinery within it. (Knight describes this construction in some detail, and these passages are sort of tedious; Knight's speculative technology in "The Enemy" is comprehensible and believable, but the point of the advanced technology in "Idiot Stick" is that it is so beyond human experience that it is practically magic, so it is boring.) What is the purpose of this building? One of the aliens gets drunk and the truth slips out--E.T. is here to blow up our home! The aliens have a galaxy-spanning empire, and fear attack from extragalactic aliens. Blowing up the Earth will create a cloud of dust that will serve as a sort of fortification or obstacle to extragalactic attack, forcing potential invaders to fly more slowly through this region of space.
The alien authorities deny the story, and the human race is divided on whether or not they believe it; fewer people show up to work on the aliens' construction site but the aliens just increase their rate of pay and the ranks of the alien-employed swell again.
Some humans want to attack the aliens, who after all are not very numerous, but of course our weapons don't work on them--the aliens' own tools can probably be used as a weapon with the correct tab, but whenever a human scientist has tried to alter a tab and insert it into a tool, the tool has exploded, blowing up an area the size of twenty or thirty city blocks.
You might consider it a plot hole that no human thinks of suicide bombing the alien ship and construction site thusly. Knight comes up with a different way for human guts and a willingness to sacrifice the self for the community to save the day. Thousands of heroic volunteers around the world risk jamming altered tabs into tool butts--and explode--until one of the tabs, at random, turns out to be safe and to turn the tool into a powerful weapon. This sort of tab is duplicated and then a human assault squad attacks the aliens and wipes them out, preventing Earth's demolition.
A story that casts the people of Earth in a role analogous to that of African or Asian natives manipulated as pawns in wars between European powers from the Age of Discovery up through World War II, or between the liberal West and Communist East in the Cold War era, is not a bad idea, and neither is a story about how the human race triumphs over adversity thanks to the self sacrifice of a small group of heroes. (I guess we might see "Idiot Stick" as a sort of leftist wish fulfillment fantasy in which non-Westerners kill off Western interlopers by turning their superior technology against them. Hopefully this story isn't foreshadowing the detonation of an Iranian atomic bomb in Tel Aviv, London or New York.) But this story does not succeed as a piece of entertainment. We'll call "Idiot Stick" barely acceptable filler. The tale has been reprinted in anthologies like Lee Harding's Beyond Tomorrow and Invaders!, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.
"Theory of Rocketry" by C. M. Kornbluth
"Theory of Rocketry" has a satiric setting, depicting a near future United States characterized by conformism, hypocritical religiosity, militarism and television-watching. Our main character is Edel, a high-school English teacher (Kornbluth flings lots of literary references at readers in this story, in particular references to Shakespeare's Henry V) who instructs classes of 70-odd students by reading to them from the Bible and turning on the television for them. The students are all obedient empty-headed dolts, save one student, Foster, a hard-working genius who is determined to get excellent grades and actually understand the material--not just memorize so he can get a pass--so he can fulfill his dream of becoming a space man. He sometimes talks about his father, giving the impression that Dad is a hero, an engineer who just narrowly missed becoming an astronaut himself. When the genius kid is the first student in years to request a special college-level one-on-one course with our protagonist, Edel envisions himself as an Aristotle tutoring an Alexander, suffering the grand delusion that if Foster becomes the first man to conquer the moons of Jupiter it will be in part because he was molded by classic English literature wielded in the expert hands of Edel.
Edel's grandiose dreams of being the teacher who helps mankind conquer outer space are disappointed. For one thing, Foster's paper analyzing Henry V doesn't consider the play as a work of literature but rather as a work of propaganda, a device for maintaining order in Elizabeth's England, and Foster fully approves of this cold practical application of the arts.
For another: "Theory of Rocketry"'s theme of (false, hypocritical) conformity is put across early in the story when one of Edel's fellow teachers loses his job because he fills out his regular psychological survey honestly, exposing his true feelings, instead of checking all the boxes next to the approved, socially-acceptable, answers. Edel has been corresponding with this poor sap, who is now working as an assistant tech at a factory. Foster, to curry favor with the powers that be who can help him get into the space academy, swipes one of these letters, which exposes that Edel himself lies on the psychology surveys, and shows it to the authorities. Edel is thus doomed to lose his job; however, his discovery that Foster's father is no hero engineer but a former bus driver living on disability who drinks and hits his genius son leavens the teacher's bitterness towards his single-minded and treacherous student.
The foundation and decorative facade of this story are sneering contempt for the American people, religious belief and economic life in a market society. But the core of "Theory of Rocketry" is a well-structured and ably-written tale of human ambitions, relationships, and disappointments in which the characters all behave realistically and sympathetically, so I guess I have to admit it is good. If even I think "Theory of Rocketry" is good, Kornbluth's cronies and fellow commies like Judith Merril must love it.
"Theory of Rocketry" has been reprinted in Kornbluth collections and in Laurence M. Janifer's 1966 Masters' Choice, an anthology the contents of which were based on the answers of twenty SF professionals whom Janifer asked to list the five best SF stories of all time. (At the back of the book Janifer lists all the stories that got votes and adds up how many votes each writer got--Heinlein got the most, Sturgeon and Lieber tie for second, and Kuttner and Moore tie for third; this is a pretty cool resource and maybe someday I'll use it the way I have been using these Merril Honorable Mention lists, to guide my reading and inspire me to read a little outside my comfort zone.)
It is the future! In response to overpopulation, millions of people live on huge ships of metal that have no electricity, are driven by huge sails, and get all of their food and oil by capturing ton after ton of brit (swarms of tiny little fish and crustaceans) in huge nets. (The future will be huge!) Our story begins among a convoy of such ships which launched over a century ago, a convoy of seventy-five vessels with a collective population of 1.25 million--yes, each ship has close to 20,000 people aboard. (I said "huge," didn't I?)
The crews of these ships pay obeisance weekly to a brief charter that exhorts them to never set foot on land; most of the crewmembers consider this an inviolable divine command. So the ships have no access to new metal; as a result, women of the ships ceaselessly search for any slight spot of rust or tarnish, and if a ship loses the metal net with which it collects the essential brit, that ship and everybody on it is doomed. (There is absolutely no slack in these ships' economies, so other ships in the convoy can't take on new passengers or sell net components or anything.)
The ship of which our main character is captain loses its net in a storm, apocalyptic news for the 20K people aboard. But an attractive woman who has some book-learnin' offers hope! She's an archivist and a former sex partner of the captain (officers aren't allowed to have wives or children, to prevent nepotism.) She reports that in the oldest records of the ship she has found evidence that the the crew ignored the charter and did in fact send expeditions ashore! This, I guess, gives the people who run the ship psychological permission to break the charter themselves. So the captain, the woman archivist, and four other people who represent their demographics take a boat to Manhattan, which they find apparently deserted. They uncover evidence that a stifling racist and overly religious society lived on the mainland and then collapsed.
Kornbluth abandons his characters and main narrative to deliver a history lesson on what happened to America after the convoy left, indulging in a broad satire that not only tells you ordinary people are stupid and religion is stupid but pointing out a thing you have already heard people point out a million times--popular literature, the cinema and TV are full of depictions of violence but people don't complain about that and instead try to suppress sexual expression.
This digression describes how an anti-sex and anti-natalist activist made money selling BDSM photos (no nudity) via mail and then began publication of DEATH magazine--the magazine was a hit and under this guy's influence America became a sex-hating death cult and almost everybody was murdered or committed suicide, depopulating the continent.
The narrative returns to the present and the six people from the ship are attacked by one of the few surviving bands of land people. These people are fanatically devoted to the anti-sex BDSM death cult, and the archivist scares them off by stripping naked--so anti-sex are they that the sight of an attractive woman's bare body routs them. The captain decides to lead his 20,000 people in an effort to colonize the land. The End.
Kornbluth does an OK job developing a speculative alternate society of people who live at sea with no electricity, their entire economy based on catching tiny aquatic creatures. But otherwise this story is a failure. The plot is not great, just kind of droning on and lacking a climax. The human elements of the story--the characters and their relationships--are weak. The main action scene (the storm) feels long and is boring. The satirical history lesson is lame (parodying LIFE magazine by coming up with DEATH magazine is the kind of joke a child makes.) Kornbluth's points about religion (it is stupid, survival lies in disobeying its tenets, and all religious people are hypocrites) and the media (too violent and too restrictive of sexual content) are banal and one-dimensional. Gotta give "Shark Ship" AKA "Reap the Dark Tide" a thumbs down, but I guess readers angry at religion who hate the American people might enjoy it.
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As followers of my twitter feed are aware, this recent weekend I went to the DC Big Flea in Chantilly, Virginia, a big antiques and collectibles show. At a table of art books I picked up a volume on Alphonse Mucha, and the owner came over to sing the book's virtues in an effort to convince me to buy it. I was already a fan of Mucha and I already liked the book, and so this guy's earnest but hollow and even misleading pitches got on my nerves, actually making me feel worse about buying it than I had before he opened his yap, like I would be a sap if I actually bought the book. (I did actually purchase it, after all.) Similarly, I am an atheist, but the anti-religious arguments, if you can call them that, I find in SF stories are often so lame and mean-spirited that they make me feel more sympathetic to religious people than before I read them, and I am feeling some of that from Kornbluth today.
Still, these stories are better than I expected them to be, so this stretch of our tour of 1958 with Judith Merril as our guide has not been a bad one.
We'll get cracking on the 1958 "L"s soon enough, but I think we'll be visiting the World War II years for a few blog posts before we return to Merril and her Honorable Mentions list.
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