"Change the Sky" by Margaret St. Clair
"Change the Sky" is a long tedious story of 12 or 13 pages, but at least it doesn't actually strike me as a hammer blow against the human race and people's pretensions or weaknesses. I would describe "Chaneg the Sky" as the record of a course of the psychotherapy of the interstellar future, neither particularly snobby nor misanthropic, but a total bore.
Much of St. Clair's text is given over to pointless surreal or psychedelic images, descriptions of things the protagonist sees but doesn't really interact with. One reason this story is a drag is that the main character doesn't perform many actions or make many decisions; he just kind of witnesses natural phenomena and elaborate but sterile artifacts, and has emotional reactions to them that are quite subdued.
That bland and flat main character is Pendleton, the son of a rich family of loners. Our guy was born on a space ship and has never had a real home, spent his life as a traveler crisscrossing the galaxy, seeking something, he is not quite sure what, his entire life. His father before him was on a similar quixotic quest, and boy and teen Pendleton accompanied Dad on his useless explorations, learning all the ins and ourts of being a space man along the way. As the story begins, Pendleton, now I guess middle-aged, knows his health is such that he won't be able to participate in space travel any more, so he has come seeking the services of an artist, a man who makes artificial worlds which his clients can visit or even, perhaps, inhabit. These artificial worlds are kind of like hypnosis, I guess--St. Clair doesn't bother to make them logically comprehensible to the reader, so they function in the story like magic or hallucinations or drug dreams.
Pendleton wants the artist to make him an artificial world that will satisfy him, the kind of world he has been seeking, even though he isn't really sure what he wants the world to be like.
"What I’m hunting is a place that’s so beautiful, or so winning, or so right, that I’ll feel, ‘This is the place in the whole universe that I love best. This is home.’ ”
The artist asks Pendleton to describe the most beautiful and most interesting and most etc. planets he has seen, and Pendleton complies; one planet had lots of lightning, another had lots of aromatic flowers, and so forth. The descriptions of these planets are mind-numbingly boring, a list of vapid and vague attributes, an absolute snoozefest.
"Genlis is the most beautiful, by far,” Pendleton answered. “It’s a water world, with deep green, swelling, foam-laden seas, and a sky so intensely blue that it’s almost purple. On the islands — there are a few islands — tall graceful trees like palms lean into the wind, and the perfume of the flowers is so sweet it makes you dizzy. There are flowers everywhere. They say that no matter how far you get from land on Genlis, you can always smell the flowers. The air is soft and yet fresh, and when the wind blows against your face or body, you feel your skin tingle with delight....Nothing could be more beautiful than Genlis."
Most of the story is like this, sterile descriptions of places where nobody does anything or experiences or expresses any deep emotions.
The artist makes the artificial world, and Pendleton enters it, and it is just a series of boring bubbles in which, his brain addled, Pendleton moves from bubble to bubble to bubble until he turns around and travels back through all the bubbles to real life. He complains to the artist, who sends him to a different artist. This second artist creates an artificial world in which Pendleton is a child again, flying around the galaxy with his father, who is teaching his son how to be a space man while searching for evidence to substantiate his absurd theory about a probably fictional alien race. Pendleton seems to forget he is an adult whose parents have died, so it looks like he is going to disappear into this fantasy world for the rest of his life.
I guess the twist ending or point of the story is that the most beautiful things in life are the processes of education and exploration and the place you feel most at home is wherever your attentive family is. Or that the artificial worlds are a trap? Is Pendleton going to survive in this artificial world--can he eat and drink there?
Slow and boring, an aimless narrative punctuated by long lifeless scenes that add nothing to the plot and nothing valuable to the atmosphere, a story with no emotion for a dozen pages and then sappiness on the final page--thumbs down for "Change the Sky." Maybe this story is supposed to be boring, maybe it really is an attack on the human race's pretensions and weaknesses, depicting how bogus psychoanalysis is, how the people who seek psychoanalysis are empty souls who want other people to fill them and how these other people are in fact not real healers but just exploiters.
"Change the Sky" is actually the title story of a 1974 St. Clair collection, so I guess there are those who find it to be an above average story of St. Clair's, or at least one that is representative of her virtues as a writer. A 1968 French anthology included the story, as does a 2022 US anthology of mid-1950s SF by women.
"The Book of Your Life" by James Blish
Petrie Mapes is a publisher who lives with his attractive wife on Long Island. He is obsessed with sex, but has a sad perversion or dysfunction or maybe just a kink, whatever you want to call it: he finds real sex disappointing, and much of his sexual life revolves around pornography and erotica. "The Book of Your Life" is full of literary references, and Blish mentions Henry Miller, Frank Harris, Ben Hecht and Jack Woodford and talks about how Mapes hires writers and artists to craft him unique one-of-a-kind fiction and drawings of an erotic nature.* (Blish also engages in some literary criticism of Ellery Queen, which some may find interesting.)
*This whole story may be inspired by Henry Miller. Miller and his circle, Anais Nin among them, wrote little one-of-a-kind porno stories for money for a perverted guy in the book biz--see the preface to Nin's Delta of Venus--and the theme of "The Book of Your Life," that reading and writing are not life but an escape from life or an obstacle to living life, is a theme of Miller's work--see Sexus, Chapter 1: "No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in."
Mapes comes into Manhattan on business with some frequency and has an odd, tense, relationship with a bookseller there, who may perhaps be the Devil. The plot of "The Book of Your Life" revolves around how this bookseller has a huge book, something the size of an unabridged dictionary, that has magical powers. Over a thousand pages of tiny type, the book is comprehensive, including, for every possible reader, a scene that perfectly manifests the deepest desire or foremost obsessions of that reader, and when you open the book at random for the very first time, the scene tailored to your peculiar overriding interest will be what you find and it will shake you to your core! You can read the entire rest of the book, but never will you be so stirred. The bookseller rents out this colossal sui generis tome to people, and Mapes has possession of it over the course of Blish's story, and we observe as the book has a malign effect on Mapes and those in Mapes' orbit.
A good story that addresses the theme that life is a journey about pursuing goals and if you achieve your goals, if your desires are fulfilled, you life will lose its savor. The idea that pornography is more exciting than actual sex, and consumption of pornography can damage your real-life relationships, feels topical in 2025, when I am writing this, and maybe will continue to feel topical in 2026, when you are reading it. But perhaps the most striking thing about "The Book of Your Life" is its suggestion that reading books (or watching TV or otherwise consuming media) is not really living, but just a substitute for living, and people who devote their time to books are throwing their lives away, that media is consuming them rather than vice versa. Ouch!
It looks like "The Book of Your Life" has not been reprinted beyond a translation in the French edition of F&SF, which is strange, as the story is compelling and very meta, being about genre literature and the people who produce and consume it. An overlooked gem!
"Millennium" by Fredric Brown
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In this one, Satan is sitting in his office, one by one interviewing people who want to sell their souls for a wish, as he does every day. As Satan has feared for so long, one of the soul sellers makes a wish that puts Satan out of business, the wish that ends, or reduces substantially, the amount of evil and unhappiness on Earth. The way the wish is worded is a little oblique and I had to ponder it before I really understood it; maybe this suggests this vinny is more sophisticated than are many others of its ilk? (Or just reminds us how dim I am?) I'll call this vignette "acceptable."
"Millennium" has appeared in several Brown collections in four or five different languages, as well as one of those anthologies that has Isaac Asimov's name on it above those of hard-working anthologists, in this case Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh.
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Brown's story is about a guy who risks his soul to make the universe a better place, but all the other stories we read from this magazine today are absolute downers. A robot who wants to commit suicide? A pervert who risks his soul using a magic book to destroy other people? A guy who feels like he has no home and, in his search for the place where he belongs, loses himself in an artificial world? Happy New Year, everybody!
Oh, no! You read the wrong Ciardi story! The one I suggested to you is "The Hypnoglyph" in the July 1953 F&SF, a story which has been anthologized a few times and translated into various languages. "The Bone That Seeks", which I haven't read, was apparently never reprinted except in the French edition of the magazine.
ReplyDeleteFear not, I'm reading the Ciardi, Derleth & Reynolds, St. Clair, and de Camp and Pratt stories from the July '53 F&SF next time!
DeleteFor all their talk about the progress of man, it strikes me that science fiction is the most pessimistic branch of literature. The stories are always about people experiencing problems. Sometimes they solve them and sometimes they don't but they always have problems.
ReplyDeleteI suppose the counterargument to this is that life is inevitably full of problems, and you can't have drama without some kind of conflict, so almost any work of fiction that is exciting to read is going to be about people grappling with problems.
DeleteJohn W. Campbell, Jr. would disagree with you, say that mainstream literary fiction is always about some kind of tragedy or defeat, but the kind of science fiction he liked was about people solving the mysteries of the universe and profiting thereby. Of course, since his death, perhaps since the New Wave or even since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, lots of science fiction has been pretty pessimistic. But how do you feel about those utopias like Ted Sturgeon's or Chad Oliver's, in which people toss restrictions on sexual activity into the dustbin of history or cast aside modern technology and create a paradise? Or those van Vogt stories in which a guy achieves super power and creates the universe or conquers the universe or whatever? They seem pretty optimistic.
Which branch of literature do you think is more optimistic than science fiction? Maybe women's romance novels or stories that dramatize Christian teachings, but surely not murder mysteries or all those literary things about divorce or sexual abuse or how empty middle-class life is or how hard it is to be in this or that identity category.
I think a lot depends on the way you define the term "science fiction," which has proven to be notoriously difficult to define. I define "science fiction" as follows:
ReplyDeleteScience fiction is defined as that branch of literature in which the central focus of interest is the presentation of a scientific idea or artifact, and whose human characters are then seen in relation to that scientific idea or artifact. The primary focus of the story is on the idea, and the human characters are of secondary interest. The idea of the story is that part of the story which, if it were removed, there would not be any story left. The originator of this method of telling a story seems to me to be Jules Verne. If we examine Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, it is plain to me that, as has been stated elsewhere, the only real hero or person of interest is the Nautilus. In a true science fiction story, you come away from the story stating to yourself that it is at least possible that something of this nature could be done. On the other hand Verne spends virtually none of his time on the human characters: The book in short is about the idea of an advanced submersible and what was known about oceanography in 1870. The rest of the story is about how the human characters react to the Nautilus.
In other words, science fiction is primarily a literature of ideas and only secondarily about characters.
If this is the case, then the question is what types of ideas has science fiction chosen to involve itself with? It appears to me that science fiction emerged from the scientific movement of the 19th century which sought to replace the supernatural God with man as God: Man can master his environment and make a god of himself by the application of the knowledge and artifacts of science.
But it seems to me, and this is the central point, science fiction stories superficially seem to show that we can do that: but the stories generally seem to point to the fact that the attempts are fraught with danger: we either narrowly avert our peril or are destroyed by it. Verne is often thought of as an optimist of science but it does not seem to me he is that at all. The only thing that Nemo actually does with his submarine is to commit acts of terrorism and mass murder. Robur the Conqueror starts by kidnapping people to prove his theories to them and ends with a crazy scheme to conquer the world in Master of the World. I can't think of anything more pessimistic than Wells's The Time Machine, and most of his early scientific romances read the same way. He seems to think that his utopias are visions of earthly heaven, but they seem more like hell to me.
In other words, if science fiction is peculiarly a literature of ideas, then the ideas it has chosen to deal with in regard to the making of the new man are generally ideas of peculiar pessimism. I suppose that there are people who would like to live in a Theodore Sturgeon utopia, but they strike me as being disgusting cesspools (Venus Plus X, anyone)? and I doubt that they would last for very long. If anything, our history, I think, that of all animals man is peculiarly unsuited for life in utopia, and most utopian stories tend to show the dangers or destruction of utopias. What does Van Vogt's Robert Hedrock actually do this supermanship than establish a monarchy with a bunch of weapons fanatics?
In other words, at its most optimistic the best future that science fiction seems to have to offer is to tells us that we will overcome our problems (most of which we have made for ourselves) and will live to fight another day, and that in the end we will all die as Wells Eloi degenerates (unless Cthulhu eats us first).
However, when we move to stories on a finite time line with stories of character, romance and the like, they can be quite optimistic: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. Most other types of stories do not look at the ultimate nature of things, whereas this is virtually unavoidable in a science fiction story, and the ultimate nature of things is filled with foreboding in the long run.
You make a compelling and well-argued case--thanks for sharing it with us! I will mention our exchange on twitter in hopes more SF readers get a chance to see it.
DeletePlease do. Note that your program said my response was too long to publish, and I had to inexpertly chop out sentences from it.
DeletePlease feel free to post addendums or the entire text in multiple parts and to include a link to a fuller text; I didn't think what you wrote was too long.
DeleteI would further note that one of the literary progenitors of science fiction is the Gothic horror novel (Frankenstein, for instance) which is not a genre noted for its jollity.
ReplyDelete