Hallowe'en Countdown: Entry Three
Oct. 15th, 2012 05:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustWhen I was about eight--the same age Cal is now--my Dad went back to Australia. He's an interesting man with whom I've had an interesting relationship, occasionally combative but currently workable, mainly because of Cal forming a sort of bridge between us. One way or the other, he and I have been separated by a gulf of genre since fairly early on; his poison/drug of choice is science fiction, while mine, well...do I really have to say?;)
Nevertheless, as I've said, one of the books he left behind had a distinctive influence on my understanding of how stylistic choices can vary startlingly from writer to writer, dictating the sort of story you get--the tone, the philosophy, the impact--even when the tropes, concepts or language remain similar. That book was Science Fiction Hall of Fame: The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time...again, pretty brave words, considering it was only 1970.
Among the stories included were straightforward adventure tales full of humorous ethnic stereotypes like Stanley G. Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey", moral parables like Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon", or trope-coiners like Fredric Brown's "Arena" (the model for the Gorn episode of Star Trek: The Original Series). But then again, there were grotesque Twilight Zone-meets-E.C. Comics stories like C.M. Kornbluth's "Little Black Bag", Richard Matheson's "Born of Man and Woman" (If they try to beat me again Ill hurt them. I will.) and Judith Merrill's "That Only a Mother", along with actual Twilight Zone fodder like Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life".
The weirdest ones, for me--I probably started reading this book when I was ten--were the "hip" ones, the slang-y, deliberately "in" stuff like Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain" or Fritz Leiber's "Coming Attraction", Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Eccleisiastes", Anthony Boucher's "The Quest for Saint Aquin" or Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit". Ray Bradbury's "Mars is Heaven!" was beautifully written and horrifying on a sunshine/apple pie/baseball turned inside out sort of level, but the worlds in these stories were perverse from start to finish, adult in ways just as alien as any of their landscapes or inhabitants.
Speaking of horror, meanwhile:
“The Country of the Kind” by Damon Knight
Written in 1955, this may well be the proto-Dexter: In a denuded, verdant landscape, a lone, nameless man wanders from place to place, taking and wrecking whatever he wants. Genetic modification has rendered him a pariah, his presence announced by a horrible smell; he is a throwback to earlier, more violent times, a person whose first impulse is always to murder and rape, but in a stringently anti-violent society, the only fitting punishment for him is lifelong shunning. So he searches in vain for any other person who might share his sensibilities, someone with the "willpower" to choose a similar exile, leaving sculpture wielding knives each place he goes, always with the same message attached: To you who can see, I offer you a world...
“Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov
Rightly acknowledged as a classic, this takes place on a world near the galactic core, a place so surrounded with suns that it has literally almost never known night. However, archaeological evidence points to a cyclical catastrophe, a moment when all the suns are eclipsed at once, bringing two unfathomable mysteries in its wake--the Darkness, and the Stars that inhabit it. Our protagonists, two scientists and a journalist sent to interview them, don't necessarily believe in it, even though one of them maintains it's possible that every time this has happened before the cities have burnt, people have gone insane en masse and no one has survived the resultant chaos but children and the blind, rebuilding the world from the bottom up. But as twilight begins to grow and the sky dims, their reasonable calm starts to change to mounting panic...
“The Cold Equations” by Tom Goodwin
This story is one of those world-rockers and deal-breakers, especially when you're young enough to not think about death very often, and want to believe events have a certain this-for-that logic. Which they do here, but--it's the unforgiving logic of mathematics, not my favourite subject at the best of times, and rotates around the simple observation that when physics are involved, intent is indeed really not magic; your impulsive decision to stow away on a cargo rocket to see your brother faster than that passenger ship was going means nothing, when literally weighed against mass and velocity vs. fuel consumption, no matter what a nice, pretty young girl you may be.
“Mimsy Were the Borogroves” by Lewis Padgett
And finally, there's this: A very odd story indeed, lately made into a really crappy film (Robert Shaye's The Last Mimsy, 2007). In the afr future, a scientist tests his time-travel device by throwing a box of old children's educative toys into it, and accidentally spreads them across a hundred-year historical window. Which is okay when the toys in question arrive only one or two at a time (the sections talking about those "drops" are fascinating, in an early Peter Weir sort of way), but ruinous for the 1943-era family who gets the bulk of them. As the parents watch in bafflement, their children develop abilities they can't begin to grasp, let alone match, eventually non-Euclidean geometry-izing themselves away through some sort of inter-dimensional portal made from junk and odd objects. God, would that be something to see adapted correctly! NIgel Kneale would've creamed his pants.
Okay, there we go. Today's been a bad day, overall; I disappointed some of my best friends in the world over the weekend, and that sucks. But at least I got this done.
Nevertheless, as I've said, one of the books he left behind had a distinctive influence on my understanding of how stylistic choices can vary startlingly from writer to writer, dictating the sort of story you get--the tone, the philosophy, the impact--even when the tropes, concepts or language remain similar. That book was Science Fiction Hall of Fame: The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time...again, pretty brave words, considering it was only 1970.
Among the stories included were straightforward adventure tales full of humorous ethnic stereotypes like Stanley G. Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey", moral parables like Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon", or trope-coiners like Fredric Brown's "Arena" (the model for the Gorn episode of Star Trek: The Original Series). But then again, there were grotesque Twilight Zone-meets-E.C. Comics stories like C.M. Kornbluth's "Little Black Bag", Richard Matheson's "Born of Man and Woman" (If they try to beat me again Ill hurt them. I will.) and Judith Merrill's "That Only a Mother", along with actual Twilight Zone fodder like Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life".
The weirdest ones, for me--I probably started reading this book when I was ten--were the "hip" ones, the slang-y, deliberately "in" stuff like Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain" or Fritz Leiber's "Coming Attraction", Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Eccleisiastes", Anthony Boucher's "The Quest for Saint Aquin" or Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit". Ray Bradbury's "Mars is Heaven!" was beautifully written and horrifying on a sunshine/apple pie/baseball turned inside out sort of level, but the worlds in these stories were perverse from start to finish, adult in ways just as alien as any of their landscapes or inhabitants.
Speaking of horror, meanwhile:
“The Country of the Kind” by Damon Knight
Written in 1955, this may well be the proto-Dexter: In a denuded, verdant landscape, a lone, nameless man wanders from place to place, taking and wrecking whatever he wants. Genetic modification has rendered him a pariah, his presence announced by a horrible smell; he is a throwback to earlier, more violent times, a person whose first impulse is always to murder and rape, but in a stringently anti-violent society, the only fitting punishment for him is lifelong shunning. So he searches in vain for any other person who might share his sensibilities, someone with the "willpower" to choose a similar exile, leaving sculpture wielding knives each place he goes, always with the same message attached: To you who can see, I offer you a world...
“Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov
Rightly acknowledged as a classic, this takes place on a world near the galactic core, a place so surrounded with suns that it has literally almost never known night. However, archaeological evidence points to a cyclical catastrophe, a moment when all the suns are eclipsed at once, bringing two unfathomable mysteries in its wake--the Darkness, and the Stars that inhabit it. Our protagonists, two scientists and a journalist sent to interview them, don't necessarily believe in it, even though one of them maintains it's possible that every time this has happened before the cities have burnt, people have gone insane en masse and no one has survived the resultant chaos but children and the blind, rebuilding the world from the bottom up. But as twilight begins to grow and the sky dims, their reasonable calm starts to change to mounting panic...
“The Cold Equations” by Tom Goodwin
This story is one of those world-rockers and deal-breakers, especially when you're young enough to not think about death very often, and want to believe events have a certain this-for-that logic. Which they do here, but--it's the unforgiving logic of mathematics, not my favourite subject at the best of times, and rotates around the simple observation that when physics are involved, intent is indeed really not magic; your impulsive decision to stow away on a cargo rocket to see your brother faster than that passenger ship was going means nothing, when literally weighed against mass and velocity vs. fuel consumption, no matter what a nice, pretty young girl you may be.
“Mimsy Were the Borogroves” by Lewis Padgett
And finally, there's this: A very odd story indeed, lately made into a really crappy film (Robert Shaye's The Last Mimsy, 2007). In the afr future, a scientist tests his time-travel device by throwing a box of old children's educative toys into it, and accidentally spreads them across a hundred-year historical window. Which is okay when the toys in question arrive only one or two at a time (the sections talking about those "drops" are fascinating, in an early Peter Weir sort of way), but ruinous for the 1943-era family who gets the bulk of them. As the parents watch in bafflement, their children develop abilities they can't begin to grasp, let alone match, eventually non-Euclidean geometry-izing themselves away through some sort of inter-dimensional portal made from junk and odd objects. God, would that be something to see adapted correctly! NIgel Kneale would've creamed his pants.
Okay, there we go. Today's been a bad day, overall; I disappointed some of my best friends in the world over the weekend, and that sucks. But at least I got this done.
