Written Thoughts

Science 101: Story by Story Thoughts

DAMON KNIGHT’S FOUR IN ONE: To be honest, I have never read any of Knight’s material before and though I recognize his contribution to the genre, and in particular his founding of SWFA, this story did nothing to motivate reading more of his material.

Written in 1953, in what Silverberg heralds as the “Golden Age of the Science Fiction Short Story”, Knight is a teller, not a show-er, in this tale of a monster that engulfs the characters who in turn become the monster and use its body to their advantage. Perhaps part of my boredom with this tale arose out of the fact that at least 90% of it was descriptive, with little or no dialogue from the characters. Why should I care about these people being in this dilemma? Knight never gives me reason. Reminiscent of Gunn’s Science of Science Fiction Writing (reviewed last semester), Knight treats the characters as chess pieces, the plot as merely a convenience, and spends most of the story caught up in an almost egotistical demonstrative display of how clever his idea is.

In truth, I found it utterly boring.

Silverberg’s analysis of FOUR IN ONE admits to a lack of character, a shortness of ‘eloquent prose’, and a deficit of ‘philosophical revelation.’ But where Silverberg sees a great concept – monster eats man but man’s mind survives – I see an idea, but no story. This in turn confused me as just pages before, in Silverberg’s opening essay, he shared several rejection letters from editors of his early material where he was told that an idea does not a story make.

A bit of contradiction that would continue to shadow the remainder of the collection and his essays.

ALFRED BESTER’s FONDLY FAHRENHEIT: Written in 1954, I can think of several stories that followed the plot of this tale but none with the poeticism or the ingenious changes in POV. For these reasons, it was easy to suspend my disbelief and ennui because the author kept me engaged. This tale of an android with frequent episodes of violent madness owned by an overtly anxious man pulls the reader in through a surrealistic “I” – first person, who then becomes “He” and in turn, just has you might have it figured out as to who is who, the material switches to “They”. The mystery of identity never gets in the way of the story, however, but in turn drives home its deeper plot – madness is indeed contagious and with it comes a loss of self-identity, especially when in a state of denial of man’s ultimate sin: murder.

Still, Bester’s characters aren’t full blown either, but whereas Knight’s are 1-dimensional, FF’s main character(s) are 2-dimensional. We are allowed an almost perverted insight into the ease of insanity’s journey.

And Bester’s prose is almost musical – which I believe is another reason why the reader accepts the breaking of POV Taboos. There is an almost lyric quality to much of his work which in turn is justified by the haunting song of the Droid as it goes about murdering the innocent.

Bester, like Knight, seemed to fall back on a great deal of telling, however. Because his ‘telling’ was LYRICAL in nature, I was more forgiving. Still, I would have liked to been allowed to ‘see’ more of the story myself, instead of being ‘told’ what happened.

I’m not sure if this was submitted today if an editor would accept it or not, IF the author was an unknown. Bester takes great chances, and in my opinion succeeds brilliantly, but the patience needed to see a story like this to the end is in short supply amongst today’s popular fiction readers. And perhaps, its editors as well.

C.L.MOORE’S NO WOMAN BORN: A feminista side note here, I was grateful to Silverberg for making a strong point in his essay following this story regarding Catherine Lucile Moore’s gender and how this fact was hidden from popular consumption during that good old golden age of Science Fiction Short Stories. I have always been a Moore fan, known her to be a woman, and always found her stories to be some of the deeper pov material around when it came to this particular era of the genre. She was an inspiration for my own efforts.
Silverberg points to her fluid abilities in exposition, a trait of Moore’s (albeit sometimes mixed with Kuttner’s own more clinical presence as they were known for tweaking each other’s work constantly) that I have always admired as well. Moore was always able to artfully place the reader in the situation through her grace of prose mixed with insightful dialogue. Her talents were so unlike Knight who seemed determined to keep the reader at arm’s length. In this story exploring mortality, and its by-product of morality, we are thrust into the compassionate POV of a friend of a woman who has been ‘re-born’ through cybernetic means. In doing so, we are actually closer to the woman’s experiences than if we were inside her own head. By ‘observing’ her body language, ‘hearing’ her dialogue, we (the readers) are allowed to experience her pain, her joy and her self-realization at what it means to be human and where the true seat of a soul lies – in the brain (which has been transplanted in this case into robotic casing) and not the heart which simply pumps blood AT THE BRAIN’S COMMAND.

Another sidebar: I would very much like to strengthen my main characters of Kate, Jon and Burke by the outside POV’s – this may not truly crop up until the next rewrite but it is something I hope to accomplish. I do know that Kate’s perspective of Seutonious and Jon’s perspective of Andra/Boudiga are opportunities to explore this technique and I look forward to the task coming up in accomplishing this.

There are some minor ‘imperfections’ in NO WOMAN BORN as Silverberg calls them – the use of parentheses for some technobabble regarding the heroine’s newfound abilities, some emphasis in the foreshadowing. I actually found one odd error that Silverberg did not point out, a strange scene cut where we go from the friend and the heroine talking alone to suddenly in the next line, with no scene break indicated, the creator of her new body is there, discussing an entirely new subject. I was ‘jarred’ out of the story but was quick to forgive this gaffe as the tale was so intriguing.

At this point in the Silverberg Compendium, I got worried. Were my tastes so out of the norm for what is considered good science fiction? Where were the tales of how humanity is AFFECTED by science? NO WOMAN BORN fit this requirement for my sensibilities in spades, but would the rest of the compilation fall back to the James Gunn model of a good science fiction character is a cardboard character? Or would NO WOMAN BORN be part one of what I consider meatier storytelling, where the character’s story IS the story, the plot a device to bring about exploration and change in the protagonist, and antagonist? Would I, the reader be graced by real characters for the remaining 334 pages or would there be more gelatinous monsters (although, I must admit thatStar Trek’s DEVIL IN THE DARK did a fabulous job of exploring how even a gelatinous monster can be driven to protect their young as much as any human – a poignant tale, IMHO)?

Enough rambling.

HENRY KUTTNER’s HOME IS THE HUNTER, next in the anthology, immediately calmed my concerns. HUNTER provides the reader with a POV so deep that a chasm of pain and passion surrounds the main character, Bellamy, in almost choking proportions. As is proven in its telling, it’s a necessary perspective to get the story’s theme across of how tasteless crowning success can be in the world of hunters who must take their colleagues heads or be taken themselves.

And it’s accomplished in the first person! A technique that I fell in love with in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Lewis Alton books (of the Darkover series) and have recently fallen out of love with in Allen Steele’s KING OF INFINITE SPACE (another contract book that I am hating for its meandering meaningless). Where Kuttner and Bradley, artfully fuse the reader with the writer into a protagonist’s mind that is filled with doubts and struggles, Steele falls for the trap Silverberg warns of in his essay about HUNTER – an overrunning of events, a babbling of sorts. First person is incredibly tricky – I know, I’ve had both good and bad luck with it – and a long-winded narrative, as Silverberg points out, isn’t really a story. It’s a monolog, a telling of events.

Another sidebar: I failed miserably with CRITICAL PAST but my short story, MEMENTO, received strong enough support that I hope to rewrite it this winter and submit it to mags for consideration.

Back to HUNTER, I see no other way to have told this tale of the dark side of ‘Head Hunting’ without being inside the head of Bellamy, the most successful, and therefore the most embittered of the hunters around. It is that bitter taste that drives his passion, and therefore the readers, as he does one last kill, one last Triumph where he then in turn ‘opts out’ – committing ritual suicide in recognition that there is no place to go but down when one has reached the top.

One ‘tool’ I picked up from this story and its accompanying essay – or perhaps not a tool as much as a conscious awareness of a subconscious technique – was Silverberg’s discussion on the ‘All Is Lost” technique. In HUNTER, Bellamy has conquered the unconquerable competitor and taken his head. He prepares for a Triumph, a celebration of sorts much like the Romans did, but is terrified that no one will come. No one will be there because someone else had better success than he. Continuing the technique, Kuttner rewards Bellamy’s fear by having his hall fill with a populace eager to share in his Triumph. And then with one last subtle twist, Bellamy drinks a cup of poison, toasting his unsurpassable Triumph in relief at not having to outdo himself yet again.

After such a heavy story, I was grateful to Silverberg for putting ROBERT SHECKLEY’S MONSTERS next. As writer/director Joss Whedon once said, "I'm very much of the 'make it dark, make it grim, make it tough,' but then, for the love of God, tell a joke." MONSTERS was a breath of laughter after the intensity of HUNTER. A breath of laughter that left the reader thinking about who is the Monster – and who is human. The protagonists, Cordovir and Hum, are not human by the readers’ interpretation yet they have a cultured, highly ordered society in which wife killing is done with as much ritual as changing the sheet’s on one’s bed every week. Too many females populate this ‘human’ world as so they are killed after 28 days of adulthood to make way for the next female in the man’s house.

A side note of imperfection here: Sheckley refers to the killing of wives as a normal, standard thing that male ‘humans’ do. In several cases, however, he has the 'monsters' refer to the act as ‘murder’. Murder is, by definition, unlawful. Yet in this society it is considered legal and in fact, required. In the end, it would appear, even the author could not fully remove himself from the reader’s stet interpretation of what human is.

The dialogue is quick, the wit sharp and the characters simply but humorously designed.

Next up, JAMES BLISH’S COMMON TIME. I should probably preface my comments here by stating that the only Blish I’d read prior to this was his adaptations of the original STAR TREK series into novelizations. As well as his original SPOCK MUST DIE. And just like the TREK books, I found COMMON TIME to be cold, with an almost deliberate intent on the part of the author to keep the reader at arm’s length.

Considering the story’s premise – how a human would react to the ‘perils’ of faster-than-light travel – you’d think I’d have been fascinated by Blish’s approach. Sadly, I wasn’t. Instead, I found the tale to be a rather transparent wrapper for technobabble. The only portion of this story that held my interest at all was when the protagonist meets aliens whose language structures are so different that the reader IS pulled in to provider his/her own interpretation of what the author actually meant.

Silverberg points out several key elements of his ‘writing philosophy’ in the essay following COMMON TIME completely contrary to my own. Firstly, he states “…idea that there are grand archetypes that can be relied on to affect a reader’s response seems untrustworthy”. I respectfully disagree as those archetypes, as demonstrated by the theories of Joseph Campbell’s HERO OF A THOUSAND FACES, John Truby’s 22 STEPS SCRIPT STRUCTURE , Chris Vogler’s WRITER’S JOURNEY, amongst others. I’ll save the whys and wherefores regarding the value of deep symbology in storytelling for my WRITER’S JOURNEY blog in a week or two, but I will say that though archetypes may not affect a reader’s response consciously, I believe that they can work on a much deeper – and perhaps more important level: the subconscious, or better yet – as Mike Arnzen at SHU calls it, the ‘Lizard Brain’: that deep seated part of our selves that calls out for attention. When great writing comes along that calls out to that deep level, it becomes a powerful unbreakable force.

COMMON TIME reaches for wonder in its examination of FTL travel and alien encounters but fails short for me due to Blish’s cold style of writing. Far too much technobabble and too little character are interspersed in what could have been a dynamic exploration of what it means to explore beyond the reaches of our solar system.

CORDWAINER SMITH’S SCANNERS LIVE IN VAIN, on the other hand, was a welcomed full throttle dive into the life of a scanner, a man made machine to protect him from the pains of the up-and-out of space and its painful effects. Martel, like any scanner, has the infrequent opportunity to cranch, to temporarily detox from the coldness of a machine mind to vacation within his humanity where he may enjoy sight, sound, touch. And as the reader of his tale, we experience his cranching as well with Smith’s wonderfully detailed descriptions of rediscovered senses: “He smelt the thousand and one smells that are in anybody’s room: the crisp freshness of the germ-burner, the sour-sweet tang of the humidifier…”

Nor does Smith stop there. Martel’s anger and frustration are equally shared with the reader through intense detail: “the sudden red stinking roar of coming back to his senses” places the reader firmly inside the character’s head. Because Smith pulls us in so quickly, we sit inside Martel’s consciousness for the remainder of the story – sharing his confusion and distrust over the traditions of scanning and his hopes for a better way to live without dehumanization. By the time a way out from the cold detachment of scanning is offered, our identification with Martel is so strong that we too are running towards the answer, our hearts and minds entwined with the hero in hopes of an answer.

Not bad for 1950. From the other examples Silverberg has presented, telling takes a lead over showing…until SCANNERS. 54 years later, I wish I could write half as well as this guy, pulling the reader into such a deep POV that they loose their own identity during the telling, and regain not only who they are but perhaps, with new insight, afterwards.

Next in this behemoth book was BRIAN W. ALDISS’ HOTHOUSE, a pseudo fantasy/science fiction piece that paints contrasting pictures of a pastoral life of far future descendants of humanity with the dangers they experience living in treetops amongst ferocious vegetable and insect-like monsters. Typically, I enjoy this kind of fusion of science fiction and fantasy but HOTHOUSE, originally written in 1960, again keeps the reader at arm’s length and tells its tale with a cinematic lens. Though I understand the need for this technique for opening a sequence in a story, I have never had much patience for its continued use throughout the telling of a tale. If I want a cinematic telling, I’ll watch a movie (or television). As a reader, I want to be engaged fully, my emotions and senses connected deeply to the story. With HOTHOUSE, as with several other stories in this compilation, I never forgot I was sitting in a chair, reading a book. I was never immersed in the tale.

Though I wholeheartedly agree with Silverberg that Aldiss’ world is richly built, I would have preferred a little less expository and descriptive passages of how the creatures live, and instead seen a more clearly defined protagonist. For the 40 some-odd pages the author uses to tell this tale, it could have easily been accomplished. While I recognize that some of this ‘cinematic view’ is Aldiss’ technique, I still believe he should have remembered that his reader(s) is not a bug, but a human. Or at least, most of the time!

JACK VANCE’S THE NEW PRIME, written in 1951, continues along the same line of plot over character with its unrelated vignettes that are eventually revealed as computer generated experiences for testing potential ‘Prime Lords of Two Billion Suns”. Each ‘scene’ takes place on a different world, with a different central character undergoing a completely non-related situation. With just one little extra step, Vance could have developed an underlying theme throughout these different scenarios and thus made THE NEW PRIME a more engaging read. Instead, the last few pages of the tale are where we discover these are merely tests to find an individual of character who can score highest in intelligence, perseverance and other virtues. The clever twist of having the Elders pick a man of compassion and altruism versus one of intelligence is nice, but it’s treated in almost epilogue fashion, giving the reader no satisfaction in the telling of the tale.

COLONY by PHILIP K. DICK, is not his best work but was certainly entertaining. Dick does a good job of capturing the horrors of the colonists when violently threatened by aliens masking as inanimate objects. As pointed out by Silverberg, the intercutting of the horrific attacks with the protagonist Major Hall’s self-doubts of the situation’s reality, give the story an added level of tension. I’ve always enjoyed intercut (I know, a film term but it IS appropriate to storytelling as well!) stories, where different levels of action are forwarding the plot in different ways. Dick does it well – as he always had.

Two quick things I’d like to bring up here:

1) At the end of COLONY, the humans climb on board what they think is a rescue ship. The ship turns out to be a fake and is actually one of the aliens who ‘eats’ them. This ending was very reminiscent of the “Twilight Zone” episode TO SERVE MAN. Wanting to check dates to see which came first, I discovered that TO SERVE MAN was based off the Damon Knight story from 1950 which is 3 years prior to Dick’s writing of COLONY.

2)Silverberg’s essay on COLONY repeatedly bemoans the later writings of Dick, calling stories such as THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE static, without advance of plot or character. It’s been awhile since I’ve read any Dick but I have always enjoyed the deep POV of his characters and the plot/action of his stories immensely. It would seem that Silverberg is looking for something different than I am. Of course this bothers me as he’s a ‘Grand Master’ of the genre and I’m just a little writer hoping to make a dent. Since Dick has done so well, I tend to believe that Silverberg and I are both right, and both wrong. In the end, it’s the endurance of a story or novel that points to its technique being ‘good enough’. And Dick’s body of work certainly has endured.

C.M KORNBLUTH’S THE LITTLE BLACK BAG seems to serve both Silverberg’s and my own requirements for good science fiction. The plot itself is wondrous in its disturbing view of supernormal (hyper-intelligent) people versus subnormals (sub par folks that seem to make up the majority of not only Kornbluth’s world but reality as well – their lack of effort a cause for mediocrity). And the main character, a subnormal looser of a doctor who through discovery of a magic black bag filled with medical tricks, finds redemption in his sudden ability to heal his fellow man.

There is a directness in Kornbluth’s style that I enjoyed immensely. He’s obviously writing to the ‘supernormals’ and never seems to talk down, or slow down for that matter, in painting a complex tale of corruption, redemption and folly. Though the technique is telling in many cases where it could be showing, the story is strong enough that I wasn’t bothered by it. To me a good story can be shown or told as long as its unique, moving forward and the POV is deep.

BOB SHAW’S LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS brings a touch of emotional realism to the realm of the science fiction short story of the 50’s/60’s. Not surprisingly, LIGHT was written in 1966 – a full 10 to 15 years later than most of the stories in this collection. By this point, Star Trek had hit the cool fires of America’s homes (television) and science fiction combined with character exploration would begin to meld (no offense to Spock).

Shaw comes up with a terrifically unique concept in this tale (that apparently he utilized elsewhere as well) with Slow Glass – glass that shows us images from elsewhere or when, thanks to the material’s ability to slow down the light pouring through it. Using this device in allegorical terms, to reflect the protagonist’s marital struggles and the glassmaker’s marital loss, is science fiction at its best, IMHO. The device is unique, as is the plot and the character(s) reactions to both propel LIGHT into a strong story that would stand up in any era of popular fiction, be it the 60’s, now or some future. There are apparently other stories and novels using the Slow Glass device and I’m eager to discover them.

Lastly, (pant, pant) FREDERIK POHL’S DAY MILLION, also written in the post-golden era in 1966. A far flung, imaginative and humorous tale that is told, not shown, but with wit and insight, MILLION still succeeds because of Pohl’s creation of characters. I found a touch of irony in the story where Pohl has momentarily deviated from the experiences of Dora and Don to give us a bit of background about how routine space travel has become. He continues with “But you don’t care about that, either. It is people who make stories, not the circumstances they find themselves in…”

Ha! There may be hope yet for a science fiction writer whose stories are about people, and how they react to the science about them, versus the science itself being front and center.

I can only hope.

posted by No One You Know @ 1:42 PM