I'll be reading these stories in their original magazine versions, and the title of each section of this post will be a link to a scan of the magazine in which the story first presented itself to the eyes of Eisenhower-era SF fans.
"The Indigestible Invaders" (1956)
It is the 29th century. Following a cataclysmic war some centuries back, the world is split into two Cold War camps, the Whites of the Western Hemisphere and the Reds of the Eastern Hemisphere. These two societies have command economies and forever teeter on the brink of starvation, the governments carefully controlling food production and population levels. For generations, population has been stable thanks to ruthless measures that are now taken for granted as normal; the political situation has also remained stable, as each side has refrained from using weapons of mass destruction or launching potentially decisive military campaigns.
One means of keeping population from growing is raiding--each side regularly sends rocket planes full of commandos and freezers to attack and kill people from the other side. Slain enemies are brought back home to be added to limited food stores--this static future world in which there has not been technological change for centuries relies on cannibalism to (barely) function.
I just told you all this background at the beginning of my plot summary, but Knight doesn't do that, instead springing this stuff on you gradually, as the plot proceeds, you know, to surprise you.
The White civilization is some kind of theocracy--our narrator is the leader or one of a number of leaders, and his title is "patriarch" and council meetings are called "synods." He is out for a walk one day and a thing he initially thinks is a Red missile lands nearby. Aliens, apparently from Venus, emerge from the "missile," now revealed to be a space ship; the patriarch believes this is man's first contact with aliens, as he has been taught that Earth has never launched a manned space ship. The aliens are all killed, and their bodies added to the food supply. Eating the aliens' flesh causes a chemical change in the humans who eat it. (Knight gives us a little science lecture on peptides.) Those who have eaten alien food can no longer digest Earth food. Somehow, the peptides spread to infect everybody in the Western hemisphere as well as the Western hemisphere's crops--I was too bored to follow this development carefully, maybe it is clear but it wasn't clear to me--so the Whites won't starve, at least not immediately. But Reds can no longer safely eat Whites nor Whites eat Reds. The raids must cease, so population begins to grow, putting pressure on food supplies and threatening starvation in the long term.
A year after the arrival of the aliens another space ship arrives, this one manned by human beings. It turns out that humans colonized Venus before the cataclysm, something everybody on Earth has forgotten. The aliens encountered earlier are Venerian natives, now a race of subalterns under the domination of the humans who now rule Venus. The Venus humans somehow learned that Earthers were resorting to cannibalism, and sent the natives as a means of (again, somehow) getting the human race on Terra to stop practicing cannibalism. The Venus humans suggest introducing contraception, but the White Earthers refuse, and instead abandon their taboo against eating fellow Whites and begin eating unmarried women, seeing as in their religion a woman has no soul until she has married. I guess "The Indigestible Invaders" is also a feminist satire of marriage.
Attacks on religion, fear of overpopulation, and feminist sentiments are pretty common in SF, but it seems "The Indigestible Invaders" is so boring that it has never been reprinted, even though SF editors the world over must have been cheering its values between yawns.
When I was a kid, one of the stories I would hear on the theme of "ordinary people are idiots who deserve the contempt of the educated," a sort of companion piece to the allegations that rural hicks went insane with fear upon hearing Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio adaptation, was the story of P. T. Barnum's "this way to the egress" signs. I bring this up because the story that was reprinted many times in Knight collections as "Backward, O Time," including in The Best of Damon Knight, first appeared in Galaxy under the title "This Way to the Regress" and that is the version I am reading today.
"Backward, O Time" AKA "This Way to the Regress" (1956)
Good grief, this is one of those stories in which a guy experiences life backwards. He's born in a deadly car crash as a middle-aged man. He works at an "unprinting plant" where the machines take words off of paper, filling cans with the displaced ink. When it rains he watches water leap from the surface up to the sky. When he smokes he blows smoke out to create a cigar. And on and on with the obvious and stupid visuals. JFC. Haven't I endured this stupid gimmick enough times already? There was that four-hour-long movie with Val Kilmer or Brad Pitt (I always mix those guys up) and that Dan Simmons novel I think is overrated, and I'm sure I suffered through this sort of thing elsewhere, maybe in Weird Tales, with a guy who devolves from a man into a monkey and then a rat or whatever and finally down to an amoeba.
Anyway, the protagonist, as I said, begins life in a car crash and gets steadily younger. His life is pretty ordinary, and Knight fills this story's eight pages with the sorts of lame jokes I've already described, like his razor adding whiskers to his face, money flowing into his bank account from doctors and dentists, another kid curing his black eye with his fist. These shit jokes a child could make are the entire story! Anyway, we see a marriage in reverse, a college career in reverse (even--gag!--a bull session in which a guy wonders what life would be like if cause preceded effect, wow, wouldn't that be crazy!), service in the First World War in reverse, blah blah blah. Horrible.
I repeat, elbirroH! Thumbs down!
Well, thankfully, "An Eye for What?" isn't bad. The style, characters, relationships, and images are all good, and the plot feels pretty original, and it is intriguing and entertaining. The ending left me disappointed, but I am still willing to give "An Eye for What?" a moderate recommendation.
It is the semi-authoritarian space-faring future! Most of our cast of characters consists of astronauts who were subjected to "Pavlov-Morganstern treatments" as children to prevent them committing crimes and who seek solace from a "Church of Marx padre" when under stress. And they are under stress. The men and women in the story have been living in a wheel-like starship orbiting an alien planet for years, and most of them have cabin fever because they haven't been allowed to visit the planet, only admire its beauty through the view ports.
Rounding out the main cast is one alien, a little blob guy they call George, a native of the planet below. The Terran space federation is trying to open up trading relations with the blob people, to get them to join the federation the way Terra has inducted countless other less-advanced civilizations into the federation, a process that can take months or years, and studying George is part of that process.
The plot of "An Eye for What?" concerns the Terran scientists on the station trying to understand the culture of the blob people. You see, George and the humans were getting along just fine for quite a while--in fact, George has been quite submissive and obedient--but then at a banquet the blob stole a human woman's dessert. When asked why, Georgie boy, again tractable and innocuous, says something incomprehensible about its relationship with the woman. When the humans consult the blobs on the planet surface, they say their fellow must be punished, but won't make clear how punishment works among their people. They do darkly hint that if George is not punished, that every human on the ship will deserve to be punished for their negligence in doing their duty of punishing George. Uh oh.
Many punishments are tried, but neither psychological punishments (like isolating the gregarious little guy) or physical punishments (like trying to temporarily deprive it of oxygen or stretching it on an improvised rack) work--George's body and psyche are very resilient and it responds to these punishments as if they are fun games. One of the doctors on the station who s particularly stressed out by life in orbit takes the radical step of using drugs to counteract his Pavlov-Morganstern conditioning so he can break the rules and inflict a risky punishment on George, and in an indirect way this unravels the mystery.
You see, the blobs are single-celled creatures. If they eat too much, they will explode. George seized the human woman's dessert because she is fat and George was worried she would explode if she ate more. There's also a whole bit about how among the blobs the small blobs are revered and have leadership positions because they show self control. Anyway, the means of punishing George is to give it license to eat whatever it wants so it risks exploding. Don't worry--they stop George before everyone's favorite blob actually explodes, but George's weight gain does lead to a loss of status among the natives.
Once the mystery is solved the commander of the base decides to not open trade relations with the blobs after all, even though they have been working to that end for over two years--it would be wrong to expose these people to the vast quantity of mass produced goods the federation could supply them, because it would destroy them-unable to resist over eating, they would all explode. "An Eye for What?" turns out to be a long fat joke and a somewhat oblique attack on our market society, a suggestion that its ability to produce a wide range and high volume of desirable goods has dangerous drawbacks.
Obviously I am not in tune with the message of this story, the kind of argument a commie would make--I think we should have a productive society, and I don't think naked people living in huts in Amazonian rain forests who survive by hunting monkeys with blowpipes or whatever are living better lives than people in North America or Western Europe. But I have more substantive and less ideological criticisms, primarily that the theme or message of "An Eye for What?" comes as a surprise at the end. The clues that indicate that the woman at the banquet is fat are pretty easy to miss, though I suppose if you look at "An Eye for What?" as a mystery story, maybe that is a virtue of the story. The theme that consumption is a terrible danger I didn't pick up on until almost the very end of the story, and I don't think there are really any hints of it through the beginning or middle of the piece. I might also quibble that the way the mystery is solved is almost by happenstance, as a byproduct of something else, rather than through a feat of logic or cogitation or something admirable and attributable to the actions of a detective, but I guess that is true of many mystery stories. The strength of this story is not the theme or even the plot, but the humans and the alien and the relationships among them and the little episodes that illustrate those people's personalities and relationships.
"A Eye for What?" has been reprinted in a multitude of anthologies, but not in The Best of Damon Knight, though it is certainly more commendable and entertaining than "This Way to the Regress." The world is perplexing.
It is a relief that things took a good turn there at the end, but, oof, those first two stories. Did writers whom Knight, as a pioneering critic of SF, had slagged ever throw such stories as "The Indigestible Invaders" and "This Way to the Regress" back in Knight's face, or at least take solace in the knowledge that the same pen that was denigrating them also gave birth to such monstrosities? I hope so!
What you might call a change of pace next time at MPorcius Fiction Log. Stay tuned!
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