Great Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century is more than just a pretty face, as I found as I glanced over the table of contents, looking for familiar names among the stories selected for the book by major SF writer Robert Silverberg and indefatigable anthologist Martin H. Greenberg. Of the 38 stories in the book, I have already blogged about five [UPDATE OCTOBER 21, 2019: In fact, six] of them:
"Grandpa" by James H. Schmitz (1955)
"Private Eye" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (1950)
"The Human Operators" by Harlan Ellison and A. E. van Vogt (1971)
"A Galaxy Called Rome" by Barry Malzberg (1975)
"The Shadow of Space" by Philip José Farmer (1967)
...and there are quite a few more I am curious to read. So let's read three included stories by American Grandmasters, those by Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury.
"When You Care, When You Love" by Theodore Sturgeon (1962)
I know that some of you out there think of Ted Sturgeon primarily as the guy who wrote "Killdozer!," the Astounding cover story of a piece of construction equipment that went on a murderous rampage, but Ted's more characteristic work is about the power of human love and sexual relations to make our lives worthwhile, so this title, "When You Care, When You Love," is pure Ted! "When You Care, When You Love" first appeared in a special Sturgeon-centric issue of F&SF and would go on to be included in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: A Special 25th Anniversary Anthology, among other places.
"When You Care, When You Love" is the story of Sylva Wyke, richest woman in the world! And her husband, Guy Gibbon, the ordinary man she met by chance--these two fell in love when she saved his life, he a trespasser who almost drowned in her private lake. As the story begins the couple, only recently married, discover that Guy has an unusual cancer which suddenly inflicts upon him agonizing pain and which will kill him in a matter of weeks!
Much of the story follows the plot of Sylva responding to this disaster in their young lives, which were so full of hope and joy in the brief period after they met. But much of it is flashbacks that give biographies of Sylva, Guy, and Sylva's surrogate father and guardian, Keogh. Biography is one of the themes of "When You Care, When You Love." The Wykes, we learn, made a fortune in the colonial period in that triangular trade of slaves, sugar and booze we talked so much about in high school. The man who founded the Wykes dynasty had a sort of religious conversion experience and decided to strictly follow the Ten Commandments; one aspect of his stringent code was that his wealth should be hidden from others, so they would not be tempted into covetousness. Wyke's heirs have maintained this code, and so for centuries the Wykes have been getting richer and richer, but few ordinary people know how rich they are. The Wykes also have a tradition of spending some years of their youth laboring among the working classes--twelve-year-old Sylva, watched over by Keogh, worked in a cotton mill in the South.
These flashbacks and biographies feel a lot like mainstream fiction about love and family relationships, but without the customary villains and with a minimum of personality clashes. I think we can think of "When You Care, When You Love" as a sort of fantasy of an alternate universe where everybody is nice and good and works hard and helps each other; the focus is on love, and Sturgeon, using poetic devices like detailed descriptions of images and repetition of words and phrases, tries to convey to the reader the feeling of falling in love and being in love. When people do get in trouble it is bad luck related to impersonal forces--a guy gets cancer, a guy almost drowns, Sylva slips off a catwalk. There are no thieves or invaders or whoever to serve as the challenge to the protagonists, their challenges are posed by the universe.
The "present day" plot is where all the SF is. Guy is going to die in six weeks (interestingly, Guy and Sylva got married six weeks after meeting, Sturgeon giving us a little parallelism here.) The spectacularly wealthy Sylva decides that she will use her wealth to finance the first cloning of a human being, so she can have another Guy to love. She gets the best doctors and scientists, has a huge research lab built on her property, etc. Keogh points out that she can thusly handle the nature part of building Guy Gibbon #2, but he won't be the Guy she loves unless she also handles the nurture part. Sylva thus embarks on the monumental project of researching ordinary twenty-something Guy's boring biography, and hiring actors to play the parts of all the people he knew in life when clone baby Guy is born: Guy #2 is going to live the same youth Guy #1 lived, so that Sylva will have an exact duplicate of Guy #1 to love. Sylva quickly finances the invention of cryogenic freezing technology so she can be preserved at her current age so that when she is woken up in twenty years to meet Guy #2 as he trespasses on her property, just like Guy #1 did, she will practically be the same age she was when it happened the first time and can live out the life with Guy #2 that she should have been able to live out with Guy #1.
The sense of wonder ending is Sturgeon suggesting to the reader that his or her own life might be a scripted fake, engineered to develop a specific personality--how would you know?
Sturgeon is a good writer, and he sells these somewhat crazy ideas, and spurs the reader to think about what love is, what components go together to create a personality, how rich people should ideally behave, etc. This story also presents us with also yet another example of classic SF that seems to be advocating the manipulation of ordinary people by the cognitive elite.
We are living in a feminist age, and so it seems that we should ask, is "When You Care, When You Love" a feminist story? On the one hand, Sylva Wyke is good, smart, ambitious, an effective leader, and she pursues her goals relentlessly, not allowing any obstacle to stop her. On the other hand, her goals, to the extent we see them in the story, are to save a man's life and then to recreate that man when he is doomed to die--as far as this story is concerned, her whole life revolves around her love for some guy, and this guy, while a decent and honest sort, is not her equal socially or intellectually.
Pleasant, thought-provoking, and a change of pace from what I usually read (in which people are always trying to destroy each other) "When You Care, When You Love" is getting a solid thumbs up from me. Silverberg and Greenberg made an appropriate choice here.
"'All You Zombies--'" by Robert A. Heinlein (1959)
Here's another story from F&SF, this one from an "All Star Issue." We've dipped into this issue before, reading Algis Budrys's "The Distant Sound of Engines" earlier this year.
"'All You Zombies--'" is a complicated time travel story in which a hermaphrodite manages to be his own mother and father, and to recruit his own younger self into the time police who travel back and forth through time to prevent cataclysms like nuclear wars. It is written in a sort of jaded tough guy noirish style by the veteran time cop who is running a bar in New York where he will meet his younger self and manipulate him into having sex with his still younger self, when he(?) was still living as a woman and was capable of giving birth to the little girl who would eventually grow up into a woman who would have a sex change procedure after giving birth to himself/herself. I found the story challenging to figure out with my own unaided noggin, but luckily there is a diagram and a bulleted list at wikipedia that help make it all clear. The story is clever, with little clues and jokes that foreshadow its revelations that you notice the second time you read it, and as usual Heinlein's style is smooth and enjoyable.
Among the interesting little subplots or side issues of the story is the fact that, when the space program really gets going, the government sets up a professional prostitution corps to service the large numbers of male astronauts who are off in space for months and years at a time. (The narrator, when young, pursues a career with this unit.) This corps has a series of joke acronym names that challenge the reader's ability to suspend disbelief--I think to get the reader to accept a crazy plot (like one in which a guy is both of his own parents) you have to play it straight, and the absurdist humor of the names of the government prostitute cadre undermines the story a little.
Also interesting is that the narrator for a period wrote genre stories for magazines to pay the bills, as of course Heinlein and so many of his fellow SF writers did. The narrator's market was not SF or horror or western or detective magazines, but the "confession magazines," which (I am told--I haven't read any confession magazines) published stories of women who had made some sort of mistake or committed some transgression, I guess mostly related to sex, but then recovered and got their lives back under control. The narrator, having lived as a woman who had a child out of wedlock which was stolen from her, can authentically write in such a woman's voice, being one (or having been one) him/herself.
The title of the story suggests that one of the most important aspects of the piece is how the narrator is totally alienated from rest of the human race--as he is his own mother and father, he has no biological connection to any other human being, and actually seems to doubt our existence. Of course, we have every reason to doubt the existence of the narrator in turn, as he is a being who is part of an isolated circular system without any true beginning. One might see the entire story as a study in alienation--the narrator is a woman who is unattractive, then a prostitute, then the victim of a man who has sex with her and abandons her, then she is given a sex change operation without her consent and has her child stolen, becomes a writer who writes under pseudonyms, and then goes on to be a member of the secret elite who controls (I mean protects!) the world. All the roles the narrator has taken all across her and then his life are somehow marginalized or exploited or at a distance or behind a screen from the rest of humanity, though she/he has made a journey from the bottom (victim) to the top (secret overlord.)
Like Sturgeon's story, this is a story with a female protagonist, though as a woman the protagonist was more victim than actor. Also like "When You Care, When You Love," "'All You Zombies--'" is all about those with superior knowledge and abilities manipulating others. The elitism of classic SF, even from writers who have reputations for being all about love (like Sturgeon) or being libertarian (like Heinlein) is really something to behold. If you love something, Ted, you gotta set it free!
"'All You Zombies--'" has been a hit with editors and appeared in many anthologies; presumably its rigorous construction and lurid and bizarre plot (a guy who was once a woman has sex with himself and becomes his own parents!?) make it a sterling example of the type of SF that works carefully to make impossible ideas seem believable at the same time that it sits firmly in the world of pulp, using all sorts of genre fiction conventions like detectives and fallen women and time travel and the revelation of the elites who are secretly controlling everything from behind the scenes. I can't fault Silverberg and Greenberg for including it here, even if it had already appeared in a bazillion other anthologies.
"Kaleidoscope" by Ray Bradbury (1949)
F&SF, where the Sturgeon and Heinlein stories debuted, is one of the more literary SF magazines, but with Ray Bradbury's "Kaleidoscope" we find ourselves deep in pulp territory--it first appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, in an issue adorned with the image of a scantily clad hot chick on the very brink of death. (Five of Thrilling Wonder's six 1949 issues have cover illustrations of scantily clad women in some kind of dreadful trouble--the sixth depicts a woman holding a man at ray gun point.) This issue includes stories by Bradbury's famous collaborator Leigh Brackett (one I haven't read yet) and one of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's ludicrous joke stories about the Hogben family, "Cold War," which I read four years ago.
"Kaleidoscope" is about men, astronauts, who are facing certain death after an explosion that wrecks their rocket ship spews them out into space between the Earth and Mars, and how they each face their doom. Despite the venue in which it appears, this is primarily a poetic, psychological, philosophical story, rather than a sensationalistic adventure caper, though there is some fearsome violence. One guy reminisces about all the women he's had, another laments that he was too shy to approach women, some of the men continue their stupid feuds or just lash out at each other, and some of them quickly try to repent for their pointless cruelty and envy. Bradbury uses the metaphor of a kaleidoscope in a few different ways. I read "Kaleidoscope" as a kid, probably in the widely available collection The Illustrated Man, and though I forgot the title of the story, I never forgot the story's final image--one of the man becoming a blazing meteor that is spotted by a child in the Mid West as he reenters Earth's atmosphere.
Like the Heinlein tale, "Kaleidoscope" has appeared in many anthologies, with good reason. Another solid choice by Silverberg and Greenberg.
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