Aliens from Analog: Tellure, Schmidt, Stiegler

In late November we read four stories from the 1983 anthology Aliens from Analog, edited by Stanley Schmidt, physics professor and editor (1978-2013) of and contributor to Analog; the little "about the editor" note at the end of the book says Schmidt was one of the last writers "developed" by John W. Campbell, Jr.  Having read four other stories from the anthology over the years, let's finish it up by reading the three unread stories that remain, all by people I don't think I have read before: Schmidt himself, Alison Tellure, and Marc Stiegler; today's blog post will be one of those in which we tread previously unexplored territory.

"Green-Eyed Lady" by Alison Tellure (1982)

Tellure has five entries at isfdb.  "Green-Eyed Lady, Laughing Lady" was the cover story of the issue of Analog in which it debuted, and our German friends included it in a 1983 anthology of Analog stories, so Schmidt, and perhaps other SF editors, thought pretty highly of it.  Like all of today's stories, I'm reading Tellure's not in the original issue of Analog where it first appeared, but in a scan of Aliens from Analog, where for some reason its title is shortened to "Green-Eyed Lady."  (Is the title a hint this is a joke story?)

"Green-Eyed Lady" is one of those stories that strives to create aliens that are truly alien, not just hippies or communists or Nazis or American Indians in space.  In appearance, the people in the story are kind of like crabs, with six segmented legs and eye stalks and carapaces.  They have three sexes--male, female and "yd"--and a life cycle the transformations of which wreak great changes on their bodies and minds.  The crab people communicate through precise and rapid alterations of the color of individual cells of their bodies, like cuttlefish, I suppose.  Their culture is dominated by religion, and, in classic SF fashion, the story's plot involves our protagonist discovering the truth of her world which this religion reflects and conceals; we also see in "Green-Eyed Lady" the common SF theme of a small elite manipulating society through deception for its own good, and Tellure also and hints at a sense of wonder future in which the crab people conquer the universe.

The first half or so of the story is devoted to introducing us to a young female crab-person and her people's society.  The god worshipped by the crab people is a kaiju-sized crab monster, a yd who is practically immortal and lurks underwater.  The god requests a young person of particular intelligence be selected to serve as High Priestess, to act as an intermediary between the god and her people, and our green-eyed protagonist is the lucky individual tapped by the priesthood for this position.

In the second half of the story we learn the mundane reality behind the crab people's religion and watch as the god and the priesthood manipulate the main character, the general populace, and each other for their own ends.  The god has a rival, a monster tougher than he, and for hundreds of generations has been eugenically breeding the crab-people to be better soldiers and shaping their society--guiding their education policy, for example--so they will be fit to help him fight his enemy one day and, that accomplished, perhaps even develop a galactic civilization.

"Green-Eyed Lady" has little plot.  After learning about the setting and the two main characters we get a few pages on how they become friends despite the priestess' brief temper tantrum over the fact that her  relationship with the god has monopolized her time and energy such that all her other relationships have withered down to nothing.  Then we flash forward to the high priestess' old age and last day; this ending, which I guess is supposed to be an ironic surprise, sad and also funny, reveals that when its high priests get old the god eats them, and our heroine shows no reluctance in offering herself to be eaten by her god.

"Green-Eyed Lady" is pretty boring and I am on the fence on whether to give it a thumbs down or concede that it is barely acceptable.  Tellure's construction of this alien race and milieu is admirable enough, but the story as a whole is cold and unemotional--Tellure doesn't offer much plot or much character development and fails to create any suspense, to get the reader emotionally invested in the characters or what happens to them; I couldn't care less if so and so crab-person is alienated from her people or which monster wins the monster war or whatever.  We've heard the story's arguments--that religion is a scam used by elites to control people, and that elites manipulating people is often for the best--innumerable times from other Astounding-type authors like Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Sturgeon and van Vogt already, and maybe that is why Schmidt likes the story, the fact that it hearkens back to the classic works of those SF titans.  Tellure does tinker with the template, having a female protagonist, for example, and maybe feminists will like that the story has a strong female lead who yells at people and tells them what to do and can also claim to be a victim of the elite.

"...And Comfort to the Enemy" by Stanley Schmidt (1969)

Here's a story by Schmidt published in Analog during the magazine's editorship by Campbell.  "...And Comfort to the Enemy" was an Analog cover story but doesn't seem to have been reprinted anywhere besides Schmidt's own Aliens from Analog.

We get a little italicized prologue at the start of "...And Comfort to the Enemy," a human narrator talking about how he and his wife moved from Earth to an alien planet to take part in colonizing it.  We learn that the intelligent natives, the Reska, have harsh laws which will punish any Reska who offends a human colonist.  Then comes the main story, told in the third person, that reveals the reason the Reska have these laws.

Schmidt's Reska act almost exactly like humans do--they sit around campfires and swap stories, they have space ships and firearms and radios and they travel around the galaxy, exploring and conducting research on alien planets.  Their own home world suffers pollution and overcrowding as a result of modern advances.  Schmidt even has them use English colloquialisms like calling a guy who is hard to convince a "hard-boiled egg."   

The plot of this main part of the story is about how a Reska research team was doing work on an alien planet and got in trouble with the natives who live in harmony with nature.  These natives don't have technology--they use animals and plants and fungi in place of technology--and in fact the Reska initially didn't suspect they had any intelligence at all.   In place of modern medicine they have leeches and similar creatures at their beck and call; there's a bird that can translate their language into the language of the Reska; they have mushrooms that act as a telephone or walkie talkie; hive insects run their agriculture.  If they want to fight--and "...And Comfort to the Enemy" is an action/horror story--they direct various armored beasts, sharp-beaked birds, and infectious germs to attack enemies.  These natives, seeing how the Reska are going to disrupt the delicate ecological balance of the planet, attack, capturing a Reska (most of the story focuses on his adventures) and take a sample from him with which to tailor a disease for use in exterminating the Reska.  

The disease starts killing the Reska expedition and even spreads back to the Reska home world and other Reska outposts and colonies.  The Reska captive convinces the natives to give them the cure for the plague in return for the technology behind interstellar travel, which the natives can't duplicate with an animal or plant.  Reska's space civilization suffers a population loss of 41%, and learns to be accommodating to all alien intelligent races they meet for fear of their unexpected powers.  The twist ending of "...And Comfort to the Enemy" is that the captive Reska has tricked the plague-crafting natives--he is not a scientist but merely the research team's cook and can't explain to them how to build a spaceship.

For what it achieves, this story feels long; the italicized frame story and other explanatory passages feel unnecessary--we'll hear about some event in the boring and bland third-person omniscient narration, and then we'll hear one Reska tell another Reska about it in boring and bland dialogue.  This story is essentially bland; Schmidt didn't get me emotionally involved with the plight of the characters, even though they are living through a horror story--one being held captive by aliens, the others facing extermination of their race as over a third of their population falls to a disease.  Maybe an intelligent civilization which uses genetic engineering of living thing for all its technology was fresh in 1969, but in 2024 it didn't feel fresh to me.  We're judging "...And Comfort to the Enemy" to be barely acceptable filler.

"Petals of Rose" by Marc Steigler (1981)

"Petals of Rose" was the cover story of its issue of Analog; we also see on the cover an ad for the short-lived magazine Science Fiction Digest, which it appears offered excerpts of works by major genre writers (e.g., Robert Heinlein's Friday, Stephen King's Cujo, and Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover) as well as essays on SF (e.g., Vincent Price and his son on what makes a story scary) and film reviews by Charles Platt (including of films I've never even heard of, like Heartbeeps and Modern Problems, both of which sound horrible--Chevy Chase is one of those comedians whose face and voice I find not amusing but annoying) and had as its raison d'etre guiding the fan through the overwhelming volume of SF material available in the early 1980s.  It seems SF fans didn't want such a guide; Science Fiction Digest was fated to fold after only four issues.

In "Petals of Rose" we have a story that dramatizes and perhaps exaggerates the ability of writers, intellectuals, shrinks and eugenicists to figure out problems and solve them, to alter the course of history by knocking over governments and radically reforming societies.  This is also a densely written story, with lots of crazy ideas packed into a relatively small space burdened with very little fat; of today's three stories, "Petals of Rose" is also the one that most succeeds at portraying--and eliciting in the reader--human emotion.  I can moderately recommend this one.

The Rosan people, who are covered in scale-like feathers that look a little like rose petals, of planet Khayyam (named by the furry Lazarine people after the poet) have an even more bizarre lifecycle than those of the crab people in Tellure's story.  A Rosan spends a year or so as an egg, then two years as an armored larva out in the inhospitable desert of the planet surface.  Then he or she crawls back underground to the site of his or her parent's deaths to eat from mom and dad's brains.  After this feast the Rosan transforms into a bipedal person with super intelligence, a photographic memory, and most significantly, the memories of the parents upon whose brains he or she just dined.  An adult Rosan only lives for thirty-six hours or so--these people have to cram their life's work into those little more than a Terran day (fortunately they don't have to waste any time eating or sleeping, as the body fat stored while a larva is enough to power them nonstop for those 36 hours.)  Generally a Rosan continues the work or his or her parents, being fully equipped with pater and mater's memories, after all.  (The memories of more distant ancestors--grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.--are there but increasingly faint and hard to access.)  

Many years before the start of Steigler's story, a human grad student in psychology, Sorrel, read books about the Rosans of planet Khayyam and came up with a theory to make their society more efficient.  In traditional Rosan society, Mom and Dad keel over, and three years later their larval brats eat their brains and continue work on Mom and Dad's projects.  Sorrel in his dissertation suggested that Rosan larva eat not three-year-old brains to which they are genetically tied but the brains of people who died in the last few days, who of course can't possibly be their parents.  In this fashion, there is no three-year gap in the pursuit of those projects.  When the Rosan people learned of this theory about half of them embraced it; these reformers went to war against the conservatives who wanted to preserve the old way of doing things, and overthrew them.  The current society of Khayyam practically worships Sorrel as a god, he being the man who drew up the blueprint for their current way of life.

As the story begins, Sorrel has been summoned by the Lazarine people.  The human race fought a war with these furry characters long ago, the humans the aggressors because they envied the Lazarines--the  humans were also the losers.  Sorrel, like many humans, hates the Lazarines--his wife died in the war.  The Lazarines predict that another war will erupt between human and Lazarine, and wish it wouldn't--they predict it will be a genocidal war, but can't predict (or so they say) which race will survive.  The Lazarines have also come up with a theory that will allow for FTL communication, and have hopes such easy communication will prevent the war.  To put the theory into practice, to build an FTL communications system, will take lots and lots of research and experimentation, and the Lazarines recognize that the Rosans, with their super brains can build this communications system much faster than they can.  But how to convince the Rosans, who each only have adult lives of 36 hours, to devote those 36 hours to building this system?  Well, get the man they see as a god, Sorrel, to ask them nicely and in person!

Sorrel heads to Khayyam, the world he revolutionized but has never been to, as the head of a small party of human engineers.  Sorrel knows jack about engineering, but puts his skills as a shrink to use managing the engineers' culture shock at having to work with teams of natives who die every single day and who are much smarter than humans.  Envy and jealousy are major themes of the story--some humans envy Rosan intelligence, but some Rosans envy human longevity.  A Rosan generation is a single day, so political developments that might take years on Earth take place in days on Khayyam, and an anti-human political party takes over the planet and Sorrel has to figure out how to foil their program of halting the FTL project.  In the fracas most of the brains with FTL knowledge are destroyed, but Sorrel has hidden some brains against this eventuality.  Then Sorrel uses hypnosis to recover the deeply buried memories of the Rosan who first translated the human's paradigm-shifting dissertation into the Rosan language and, sort of, resurrect that translator in the body of one of his descendants--the Rosans treat this as the second coming of their greatest prophet.  (As in Tellure's story, religion is a tool with which the long-lived elite manipulate the development of a short-lived society to their own ends, but also for their own good.)                       

The dramatic ending has Sorrel risking his life in an effort to save the resurrected prophet from an assassination attempt.  The sentimental ending has this prophet taken to the surface of Khayyam to be the first adult Rosan to see a sunrise in many generations.  The twist ending reveals what has been hinted at, that the Lazarines manipulating Sorrel and the human race live for 25,000 years--the Lazarines have exactly the same relationship to us humans that humans have to the Rosans, humans envying Lazarine longevity and Lazarines admiring and taking advantage of human industriousness.

"Petals of Rose" would be reprinted alongside Tellure's "Green-Eyed Lady, Laughing Lady" in that German anthology Analog 6 and also the 1990 Stiegler collection The Gentle Seduction.

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Astounding/Analog is, I believe, the SF magazine most associated with science ideas and least with traditional literary values or popular thrills-and-chills entertainment value, and these three stories certainly have lots of speculative biology ideas and their authors certainly endeavor to extrapolate on what sort of societies these strange biologies might produce.  Unfortunately, only Stiegler produces a good story out of his ideas--Tellure and Schmidt's stories have structural and style problems that render them unengaging, though not terrible; if the ideas are what you really care about, maybe you'll like them more than I did.