A Wilderness of Stars presents ten stories; today let's check out four of them, each one by an author we already know we like: Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, or Walter M. Miller, Jr. (Miller has two pieces in the book.) We also know we like Arthur C. Clarke, but I've already read his contribution to A Wilderness of Stars, "Sunjammer," which I can recommend with some enthusiasm--back in 2017 when I blogged about it I called "Sunjammer" "a great example of a hard sf story."
"I, Mars" by Ray Bradbury (1949)
According to isfdb, "I, Mars" has never appeared in a Bradbury collection, and has only appeared in three anthologies, A Wilderness of Stars and two British anthologies, one of them R. Chetwynd-Hayes's Tales of Terror from Outer Space. This is practically a "rare" Bradbury story! Exciting, right? "I, Mars"'s first publication was in the same issue of Super Science Stories as A. E. van Vogt's "The Earth Killers," a story (that I didn't think was particularly effective when I read it in 2014) about racists who nuke America from their base on the moon."I, Mars" is a clever story, sort of a variation on themes found in "The Silent Towns," one of the tales included in the famous The Martian Chronicles; maybe "I, Mars" has been neglected for this very reason, that it might be considered redundant by readers of that iconic collection.
Mars was colonized by Earthlings like 65 or 70 years ago, but shortly after humans had covered the Martian surface with small towns constructed in the style of America's Middle West, the colonists all rushed back to Earth when a world war erupted. One young man stayed behind on Mars: Emil Barton. We are with the aged Barton on his eightieth birthday when a telephone rings--who can be calling? Barton answers, and is reminded that for years, to assuage his loneliness, he pursued various insane projects, like building an army of robots to populate deserted Mars. (He eventually ordered the robots to march into a canal to their destruction.) Another of these projects was to record his voice saying thousands of different things, and then program computers to use these phrases to have conversations over the telephone. He set up the computers to telephone himself on his eightieth birthday and torment him! Most of this story's text relates how 80-year old Barton responds to the harassment of his younger self.
I like it. Pungent and to the point, "I, Mars" is worth the time of Bradbury fans who haven't yet read it.
"Ghetto" by Poul Anderson (1954)
"Ghetto" had its debut in the same issue of F&SF as the first installment of the serialized version of Robert Heinlein's Star Beast, which appeared in the magazine under the title Star Lummox. (Star Beast is fun and memorable--I can still recall the experience of reading it as a kid, where I was and so forth.) According to isfdb, "Ghetto" is the first story in the four-story Kith series, and reappeared in the 1982 Anderson collection Mauri and Kith."Ghetto" is one of those SF stories about Einsteinian time dialtion or whatever we are supposed to call it. You know the drill: your spaceship travels near the speed of light for what feels like a few months or a year, but when you get back to Earth decades or centuries have passed, and cultural norms and political systems have changed radically and all the people you knew are old or dead, so you are a stranger in your own country. The Kith are what the civilization in this story calls these spacefarers who witness thousands of years of Terran history, empires rising and falling, cities being built and then abandoned and then built again, even though their own lives are only the usual 80 or 90 years. Between space flights, Kith live in an Earth ghetto that to normal Earthers looks like an historical artifact, a town that hasn't changed for thousands of years. In the period of history in which this story takes place, Earth is run by an aristocracy who lord it over a middle class of cossetted slaves and a lower class of wretched freemen who live hand to mouth; people in this classbound society owe their position to genetic engineering, with the expendable lower classes ugly and with low IQs and the upper classes beautiful and blessed with high intelligence. (The Kith, initially selected from tough men with high IQs and now having been genetically separate from the rest of humanity for thousands of years, are also ethnically distinct and generally superior.) The aristos, most of them decadent hedonists who do little work and rely on the Kith to bring much-needed resources to Earth from outer space, have a contempt for the Kith, but also enjoy slumming in the "quaint" anachronistic Kith ghetto, while the plebians and proles have what amounts to a racist or bigoted attitude towards the space travellers, a bitterness that is their sublimated resentment of their aristocratic masters.
Presumably Anderson wants the Kith to remind you of Jewish merchants living in Christian Europe, an ethnically and culturally distinct group resented for their economic success but also relied upon for valuable goods and services. More explicitly, he indicates that the decadence of the aristocracy and the rising disaffection of the lower orders are signs that this political system is on the verge of collapse.
The plot of "Ghetto" concerns a Kith man who, out in space, meets an aristo woman who was so fascinated by what she read about outer space that she decided to see alien worlds for herself; these two fall in love and the Kith considers abandoning his people and his space career to live out his life on Earth with the woman among the aristocracy. Of course, Anderson's work often has a tragic tone, and it is no surprise that the Kith man finds himself unable and unwilling to fit in to the decadent and bigoted aristocracy and drops his relationship with the aristocratic woman and decides to marry a Kith woman and continue his life among the stars and in the Kith ghetto.
I can't point to anything wrong with "Ghetto," but it just feels pedestrian, like a bunch of stuff (cross-class love, relativistic time shenanigans, an oppressed minority, an empire on the brink of collapse because its ruling class has become jaded and degenerate) we've seen before. Reading it right after reading "I, Mars," I couldn't help but compare Anderson and Bradbury. Anderson perhaps knows a bunch more history and science than Bradbury, but Bradbury is simply a better writer, able to affect the reader's emotions--"Ghetto" is full of long paragraphs explaining the universe the Kith inhabit, while "I, Mars" is mostly short sentences and short paragraphs that, bang bang bang, present a small number of powerful images and, more importantly, immerse you immediately in the mental world, the psychological universe, of the character. Anderson's story is about a civilization and its history, but Bradbury's is about a person and his feelings.
Acceptable.
"Death of a Spaceman" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1954)
Miller's "Crucifixius Etiam" was all about how conquering space is hell but still worth it, and addressed issues of class and religion, and "Death of a Spaceman" is of the same ilk. Donegal is an old man, a lifelong spacer who served in the space force during the war against the Soviet Union and then spent a long career working in the cramped and uncomfortable engine rooms of rockets flying to and from the Moon. Now he is dying at home in his little apartment with his wife at his side. He is disappointed that his son is not going to become a spaceman himself, and he blames his daughter--her husband was a spacer, and was killed in an accident, and her resulting bad attitude (Donegal thinks) turned his son off from participating in the adventure of conquering space.
Donegal's family lives in a neighborhood that was once posh but is now in decline; alongside the old mansions are now blocks of humble flats. Next door to Donegal's apartment building is one of the mansions that is still inhabited by rich people--in fact, it is home to the owner of the company that builds the sort of rockets Donegal used to fly in! While Donegal lies dying those rich people and their cronies are holding a noisy party to celebrate their son's graduation from the space academy and the start of his career as a spaceman! Donegal's daughter has a case of class envy and his wife resents the noise from the party, but Donegal identifies with the rich family--the company owner and his son are, like Donegal, committed to Man's grand quest of mastering the universe beyond Earth's atmosphere. Donegal's fellow feeling for the wealthy people next door is reciprocated when the party goers are told an old spaceman is dying next door--a musician plays "Taps" and the party lapses into silence in deference to Donegal's last wish, that he be able to hear the launch of a rocket to the Moon from a nearby base.
(There's also a visit from a priest and plenty of talk about Donegal's soul--as you know, religion is a major theme of Miller's body of work and plays a prominent role in this piece as well.)
"Death of a Spaceman" is a sentimental story, and also full of the ambiguity we expect to see in serious literature: is going to space really worth it, as Donegal contends and his family doubts? Are the ordinary spacemen exploited by business interests, or are the wealthy and the working class spacers partners in an heroic enterprise? Is religion a goofy scam or does it really bring comfort to Donegal and his family, help them make sense of their lives, and serve as a bridge and a strengthening bond between different strata of society?
Thumbs up.
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| "Death of a Spaceman" has appeared in all of these anthologies |
"The Lineman" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1957)
"The Lineman" is another of Miller's stories about how conquering space is costly and dangerous and might seem pointless; the story has religious overtones and also opines on sexual relationships. It is a sort of slice-of-life story, not very plot heavy and lacking a strong conclusion.
The human race is in the early stages of colonizing the Moon, and the lunar surface is sprinkled with work gangs in vacuum suits and moon buggies setting up dome cities, digging mines, and laying cable to carry electricity and communications. This work is incredibly hazardous! Over the course of the longish story, which is almost 70 pages here in A Wilderness of Stars, many men are killed by bad luck or through negligence as tiny meteors penetrate their space suits or they forget the many rules one must follow to survive in a low-gravity zero-oxygen environment. One character, near the end of the story, wonders how there could possibly be a God in a universe that is so dangerous, so cruel.
Besides the dangers presented by the natural world of physics and chemistry, there are social and political problems. Years ago it was discovered that children cannot be raised in low gravity--their young bodies grow out of control and they suffer terrible deaths. In response to this tragedy, Earth's world government passed the Schneider-Volkov Act, that, more or less, forbids co-ed operations on the Moon. In effect, this means there are no women on the moon, and so the men setting up the mines and bases on Luna go for months or years without seeing any women, which causes all sort of psychological stress.
A dissident political party, apparently modeled by Miller on underground communist parties (it is made up of independent "cells" and its members act with absolute ruthlessness) has risen up to fight for the repeal of the Schneider-Volkov Act through such actions as an illegal general strike. In the beginning of the story the main character, Bill Relke, the lineman of the title (he lays those aforementioned cables) and a man scarred by the fact that his wife back on Earth has taken up with another man, is being threatened by Party thugs--he considered joining the Party and was allowed to participate in a few meetings, but then declined to join, and the thugs are now pressuring him to change his mind as well as trying to keep him from exposing their plans to the higher ups. These plans--to strike--threaten the safety of many in one of the new lunar cities, because if Relke's gang fails to complete a particular job on time the oxygen system at the city might fail. Later in the story the thugs torture Relke, and then more conservative elements of the work gang in turn torture the thugs in an effort to achieve revenge and maintain order so the critical project is completed on schedule. Miller does not provide us readers with exciting fight scenes or cathartic images of justice being served or romantic gush about right overcoming wrong--the violence in "The Lineman" consists of vicious beatings of essentially helpless people, and Relke reflects that in the absence of the stabilizing force of the heterosexual family, men resort, inevitably, to the brutal ethics of a street gang.
In the middle of this Hobbesian milieu a rocket arrives, landing in an unusual spot, leading to speculation that it is a damaged Earth vessel making an emergency landing or perhaps even aliens. In fact it is a French ship full of prostitutes whose owners exploit some legal loopholes and engage in financial shenanigans in order to operate this interplanetary whore house. The arrival of the brothel gives Miller an opportunity to show how monstrous the Party members are and how unfulfilling can be sexual relationships unmoored from any sort of commitment. The flying brothel also serves as an oblique impetus to the resolution of the short term plot (finishing the critical job on time) and the long term plot (recreating healthy family life on the Moon.)
This story is pretty good, though its valorization of the heterosexual nuclear family and dismissal of homosexuality may offend today's sensibilities. Its portrayal of space colonization as hellishly dangerous and perhaps quixotic reminds us of the career of Barry Malzberg and of Edmond Hamilton's 1952 story "What's It Like Out There?"
"The Lineman" has appeared in Miller collections and was selected for David G. Hartwell's The World Treasury of Science Fiction.
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Four worthwhile stories that suggest that leaving Earth is no picnic. Hold those travel plans, folks!
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