"Industrial Revolution," by "Winston P. Sanders" (aka Poul Anderson)
Appeared in Analog, September 1963
He was still gladder when the suits were off. Lieutenant Ziska in dress uniform was stunning, but Ellen in civvies, a fluffy low-cut blouse and close-fitting slacks, was a hydrogen blast. He wanted to roll over and pant, but settled for saying, "Welcome back" and holding her hand rather longer than necessary.
Science fiction of the 1960s, ladeez and germs--when we're talking about science fiction that John W. Campbell bought for Analog, at that time a titan, it could practically be its own subgenre. I've often remarked that the lion's share can be summed up as "white male engineers solving technical problems," and "Industrial Revolution" is a typical specimen--but for all that, it could have been written yesterday, which goes to show how much things don't change in half a century. This is a story about square-jawed, right-thinking, competent men who probably vote Republican versus a starship full of literal Social Justice warriors.
Also, as the representative quote above suggests, it's pretty distractingly sexist.
Dateline: the future, somewhere in the asteroid belt. The Sword is one of the first profitable independent concerns out there, an asteroid converted into an industrial outpost, processing gas scooped from Jupiter's atmosphere and turning it into stuff. It's a private enterprise, as we're reminded again and again throughout the story, because this is Campbellian science fiction where government is bad and capitalism is rad. When it comes to its inhabitants, the testosterone is palpable--there's a ten-to-one ratio of men to women on this asteroid because 1960s, and only two of the women are single. Just acknowledging that bit actually makes me feel more emotion than most anything else in the story; imagine how they would feel, millions of kilometers away from anything else, surrounded by men who are no doubt all trying to out-Nice Guy™ each other.
The Sword's workaday existence is interrupted by the arrival of NASS Altair, a North American warship (yeah, because us up here are falling over ourselves to be Americans--pfft), and the initial action of the story follows Mike Blades, one of the asteroid's VIPs, showing the military bigwigs around and answering their oddly specific questions about radiation shielding and so on. In the meantime, he takes an interest in Lieutenant Ellen Ziska, a "she-Canadian" (???) Altair officer and does his utmost to get into her pants by the tried-and-true juxtaposition of long walks in arboretums and political arguments.
See, the problem here is that the last election in North America has brought the Social Justice Party to power, with more and more people on Earth getting angry about investing so much money into starting up Belt industries, only to see much of the Belt's profits reinvested into building itself up rather than shipping its raw materials back down the well. So it's pretty much the tired old American Revolution transposed into space, because god forbid you be even slightly creative. Things go sour when the Altair conveniently "loses" a nuclear missile, and it's up to Mike Blades to figure out a way to use his technical savvy to defend the unarmed asteroid from the looters and moochers trying to take it away.
For what it is, "Industrial Revolution" isn't terrible. It was good enough for John W. Campbell to buy, sure, but just check out Galactic Journey to get a better idea of what Campbell thought "good enough" meant. The best I can think to say about it is "innocuous"--if not for the fact that "Winston P. Sanders" is really Poul Anderson, it would've been long forgotten. ISFDB tells me that it was the second of multiple stories that make up the "Flying Mountains" series, but really... it's average. At best. The motivations of the antagonists are the standard-issue "Earth needs more tax money to pay for welfare" that you see over and over again in science fiction, and the protagonists essentially have no character at all.
Incidentally, I wish there were more stories from this era that approached things from the other side of the political spectrum--I'd love to eviscerate them, but the shadow of the Soviet Union was long in the '60s, I imagine. Even Star Trek didn't get properly communist until the '80s.
"Industrial Revolution" is available for free download via Project Gutenberg.
Previous Tailings
#3 - "Next Door, Next World" (April 1961)
#2 - "In the Imagicon" (February 1966)
#1 - "Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)
Showing posts with label 1960s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1960s. Show all posts
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Tailings of the Golden Age #3: Next Door, Next World
"Next Door, Next World," by Robert Donald Locke
Appeared in Analog Science Fact & Fiction, April 1961
"Lance," said Carolyn.
"Yes?"
"You feel it too, don't you?"
"Feel what?"
"That there is danger involved. That something dreadfully, dreadfully wrong can happen to you while you're out there. No matter what the eggheads say about it." A paroxysm of sobs suddenly racked the girl's slender body. "Oh, darling, don't go!"
Fun fact: the above theme of the protagonist being entirely oblivious to everything around him and needing everything to be explained to him will continue throughout this story!
There are certain--tics, perhaps--in Golden Age-era science fiction. Epithets like "Space!" and "Unity!" because god forbid anyone encounter the word "fuck" in print, the rah-rah belief that the United States of the 1950s is the social model that will one day be projected over vast swaths of the galaxy, and at least in John W. Campbell's Analog, a focus on square-jawed white male engineers solving technical problems. Robert Donald Locke's "Next Door, Next World feels like a story that was written in the 1940s and features one of the thick-headedest protagonists I've ever tagged along with, and had I not been cooling my heels in a hospital waiting room I doubt I'd have bothered.
MajorSmoke Manmuscle Roll Fizzlebeef Lance Cooper is a "big man with space-tanned features"--and I have to wonder if "space-tanned" is not in fact a euphemism for "chronic radiation poisoning"--set to fly the latest hyperspace rocket out to Groombridge 34. As we learn in a hackneyed groundside scene where his fiancée Carolyn acts the Standard '50s Female routine, full of sobs and requiring a Strong Man's Arms and talking about how women are saner than men because they don't go exploring, hyperspace is something of a dangerous place: one or two flights out of every ten don't come back at all, and sometimes the pilot returns a bit off. But the fears of "this frail, clinging, lovely piece of femininity he wanted so dearly" are nothing next to the Glorious Conquest of Interstellar Space, so away he flies!
He experiences Weird Shit in hyperspace, of course, because what would hyperspace _be_ without that? He feels himself split apart, sees duplicates of his ship outside where there should be nothing at all, but returns to normal space feeling none the worse for wear and after a quick sightseeing expedition, makes the return hop back to Earth where his fiancée Carolyn is waiting for him--except, shock! When he lands, no one recognizes her name, not even her dad, his boss Colonel "Hard-Head" Sagen! Lance immediately jumps to the logical conclusion: everyone is pulling a complicated prank on him. After his experience is declared classified and he's put in a cell, he manages to escape--because of course it's easy as hell to steal a military guard's sidearm and effect escape with it--and goes to his girl's place, looking for answers from her mother.
Because of course the best place to go looking for answers after you've broken out of military custody is *the home of the military superior who placed you in custody*! Seeing as how Mrs. Sagen is, you know, intelligent, she alerts the military to Lance's presence--and while he escapes again, he does so fuming about her "double-cross," while I start to wonder if hyperspace pilots are chosen specifically for their expendability.
He returns to the base--because of course they won't look there--and finds that his friends don't recognize him, he remembers things that are no longer the case, and comes to the conclusion that everyone is lying to him. Finally, he's brought before a military psychiatrist and finds out the truth that was pretty apparent from the first word: he's slipped into a parallel universe, where his girlfriend was never born. Apparently this happens a lot.
It was at this point that I seriously began to doubt Cooper's bonafides--it's as if someone shaved the stupidest Watson and stuffed him into a starship. Despite being presented with a litany of examples of pilots who came back "off"--wearing the wrong uniform, a man with a mustache he couldn't possibly have grown so fast--and by his own admission being aware of the parallel worlds theory, he does not consider that he might actually be in a parallel world until he's practically being told his name is Homer Thompson. Nevertheless, driven only by a desire to see his girlfriend again, he takes the Colonel at gunpoint and finagles his way back into his hyperspace ship, and blasts off in the hopes of reaching his own world. Does he make it?
Well, kinda.
Cooper's thickheadedness over his predicament is, I think, another one of those artifacts of older science fiction. Science fiction is built around the projection of current trends into the future, but at the time this story was written, science fiction was still culturally marginal, and so a lot of Golden Age sf feels like they're set in worlds which do not themselves include a cultural legacy of science fiction. I mean, if I got shot through hyperspace and came back to find people I knew were gone and the world was just subtly askew, the notion of parallel universes would be on my theory plate thanks to things like Sliders or the Mirror Universe from Star Trek or actual scientific investigations toward whether a multiverse exists. Lance Cooper, being the resident of a '50s future, doesn't have that cultural background and so looks stupid for never even entertaining the notion.
As for the story itself, it's written in the stilted manner that's common for a lot of sf writing from that era. I mean, things like "Dad opined he'd have walloped the daylights out of me" - who the hell uses words like "opined" in casual conversation? It's no surprise Robert Donald Locke didn't leave a mark on the field--he's got only eleven credits on ISFDB, and this was in fact his last story.
If you're interested, Next Door, Next World is available for download on Project Gutenberg.
Previous Tailings
#2 - "In the Imagicon" (February 1966)
#1 - "Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)
Appeared in Analog Science Fact & Fiction, April 1961
"Lance," said Carolyn.
"Yes?"
"You feel it too, don't you?"
"Feel what?"
"That there is danger involved. That something dreadfully, dreadfully wrong can happen to you while you're out there. No matter what the eggheads say about it." A paroxysm of sobs suddenly racked the girl's slender body. "Oh, darling, don't go!"
Fun fact: the above theme of the protagonist being entirely oblivious to everything around him and needing everything to be explained to him will continue throughout this story!
There are certain--tics, perhaps--in Golden Age-era science fiction. Epithets like "Space!" and "Unity!" because god forbid anyone encounter the word "fuck" in print, the rah-rah belief that the United States of the 1950s is the social model that will one day be projected over vast swaths of the galaxy, and at least in John W. Campbell's Analog, a focus on square-jawed white male engineers solving technical problems. Robert Donald Locke's "Next Door, Next World feels like a story that was written in the 1940s and features one of the thick-headedest protagonists I've ever tagged along with, and had I not been cooling my heels in a hospital waiting room I doubt I'd have bothered.
Major
He experiences Weird Shit in hyperspace, of course, because what would hyperspace _be_ without that? He feels himself split apart, sees duplicates of his ship outside where there should be nothing at all, but returns to normal space feeling none the worse for wear and after a quick sightseeing expedition, makes the return hop back to Earth where his fiancée Carolyn is waiting for him--except, shock! When he lands, no one recognizes her name, not even her dad, his boss Colonel "Hard-Head" Sagen! Lance immediately jumps to the logical conclusion: everyone is pulling a complicated prank on him. After his experience is declared classified and he's put in a cell, he manages to escape--because of course it's easy as hell to steal a military guard's sidearm and effect escape with it--and goes to his girl's place, looking for answers from her mother.
Because of course the best place to go looking for answers after you've broken out of military custody is *the home of the military superior who placed you in custody*! Seeing as how Mrs. Sagen is, you know, intelligent, she alerts the military to Lance's presence--and while he escapes again, he does so fuming about her "double-cross," while I start to wonder if hyperspace pilots are chosen specifically for their expendability.
He returns to the base--because of course they won't look there--and finds that his friends don't recognize him, he remembers things that are no longer the case, and comes to the conclusion that everyone is lying to him. Finally, he's brought before a military psychiatrist and finds out the truth that was pretty apparent from the first word: he's slipped into a parallel universe, where his girlfriend was never born. Apparently this happens a lot.
It was at this point that I seriously began to doubt Cooper's bonafides--it's as if someone shaved the stupidest Watson and stuffed him into a starship. Despite being presented with a litany of examples of pilots who came back "off"--wearing the wrong uniform, a man with a mustache he couldn't possibly have grown so fast--and by his own admission being aware of the parallel worlds theory, he does not consider that he might actually be in a parallel world until he's practically being told his name is Homer Thompson. Nevertheless, driven only by a desire to see his girlfriend again, he takes the Colonel at gunpoint and finagles his way back into his hyperspace ship, and blasts off in the hopes of reaching his own world. Does he make it?
Well, kinda.
Cooper's thickheadedness over his predicament is, I think, another one of those artifacts of older science fiction. Science fiction is built around the projection of current trends into the future, but at the time this story was written, science fiction was still culturally marginal, and so a lot of Golden Age sf feels like they're set in worlds which do not themselves include a cultural legacy of science fiction. I mean, if I got shot through hyperspace and came back to find people I knew were gone and the world was just subtly askew, the notion of parallel universes would be on my theory plate thanks to things like Sliders or the Mirror Universe from Star Trek or actual scientific investigations toward whether a multiverse exists. Lance Cooper, being the resident of a '50s future, doesn't have that cultural background and so looks stupid for never even entertaining the notion.
As for the story itself, it's written in the stilted manner that's common for a lot of sf writing from that era. I mean, things like "Dad opined he'd have walloped the daylights out of me" - who the hell uses words like "opined" in casual conversation? It's no surprise Robert Donald Locke didn't leave a mark on the field--he's got only eleven credits on ISFDB, and this was in fact his last story.
If you're interested, Next Door, Next World is available for download on Project Gutenberg.
Previous Tailings
#2 - "In the Imagicon" (February 1966)
#1 - "Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Tailings of the Golden Age #2: In the Imagicon
"In the Imagicon," by George Henry Smith
Appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1966
Then Cecily made him feel even sillier by leaning over and kissing his right foot with passionate red lips. "Oh, Dandor! Dandor, I love you so much," she murmured.
Dandor resisted the temptation to use one of his newly pampered feet to give her a healthy kick on her round little bottom. He resisted it because even at times like this, when his life with these women began to seem unreal, he tried to be as kind as possible to them. Even when their worship and adoration threatened to bore him to death, he tried to be kind.
So instead of kicking Cecily, he yawned.
I'm gonna let that quote up there just sink in for a minute.
For a genre that spent so much time yapping on about the future, Golden Age science fiction--in this case, one of the last shoots springing up in the mid-1960s, when the old fields were beginning to wilt beneath the New Wave--spent a hell of a lot of its time rooted in the past. Yeah, I know, science fiction is fundamentally about the time it's written in, and "In the Imagicon" by George Henry Smith--who previously brought us such towering works of literature as 1963's Sexodus!--could not be more of a product of the 1960s if it tried. This is the sort of stuff that proto-nerds who aspired to become Don Draper would read. I feel like it's quintessentially of its time, to the degree that it reads almost like a parody of it.
Leaping into the story, we are introduced to the foppish, indolent Dandor, who is in the process of being fed grapes, getting a pedicure, and being generally worshipped by women--a blonde, a voluptuous brunette, and cuddly twin redheads, and yes those are how they're described and essentially the limits of their characterization, and god damn, man, am I really meant to take this at all seriously? Is this supposed to be a laff-out-loud comedy piece? I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE, SOMEONE HOLD ME
Ahem. Moving on. Dandor's problem is that he's getting awfully bored by being waited on and worshipped in his "palatial palace," because screw you guys, it's 1966, you don't need more descriptive adjectives when you're probably half-drunk by now anyway. So he leaves, back out through the imagicon of the title, and we see Dandor as he really is: a pioneer on the frozen colony world of Nestrond, home of punishing storms and snows and ice wolves, and which really begs the question of why you'd cross light-years to colonize a place that makes Antarctica look appealing. What really makes it intolerable, though, is Nona, his shrew of a wife! Am I right, fellas? The narrative lovingly details her faults--"a big, raw-boned woman with stringy black hair, a broad flat face with thin lips and uneven, yellowish teeth. God but she's ugly, he thought as he stared at her." Now that he's back in the real world, Dandor's got work to do, and he hates it! So he digs up ice moss for the fire, fixes the cattleshed roof to keep the icewolves from attacking their space cows, digs a cesspool, and so on.
Nestrond, for all intents and purposes, was settled by people who not only made it to the end of the Oregon Trail without dying of dysentery, but found a starship there waiting for them.
Disaster strikes in the night when ice wolves attack--six-legged, because alien critters gotta have six legs, otherwise how're you to know they're alien? Dandor manages to see them off thanks to his trusty laser rifle, but not before one of them takes a good chunk out of him; good enough, in fact, to demand that his entire leg be amputated. Because, sure, they have enough technological infrastructure to support stuff like laser rifles and imagicons, but not indoor plumbing or twentieth-century medicine. Presumably Nestrond's colonists are, in fact, survivors of a failed expedition. Maybe they were the advance team and the main ship blew up in orbit--they are in dire straits, with the last of the morphine gone and no anaesthetic more sophisticated than whiskey. Nobody's to say.
Dandor is aghast over the loss of his leg, of course--not because of the pain, not because of how much harder it'll make it to scratch out a life, but because now there'll be no imagicon; he'll belong only to Nona. How, he asks himself, could she treat him this way? Yeah! How could she ever stay by his side in his condition and make him face the world? One has to ask why she even bothers, on a world where there are twenty men for every woman. I mean, she obviously sees something in this guy, or she'd have just walked out while he was on one of his imagicon trips, right? Wouldn't you want to have someone standing by you at a low point like that?
Not our Dandor! He knows just what to do--escape from the dreaded barbs of reality! Half-mad with pain and bleeding out from his as-yet-uncauterized stump, he drags himself until he seals himself up into the imagicon, "more dead than alive," and slowly fades away while the soft voices of his adoring palace women brush against his ears--
Except, in a plot twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan--who would not be born for another four years, so at least he's not responsible for this one--Dandor wakes up, good as new, in the real world. In the palace. Because, you see, Dandor's palatial palace is reality, and it's Nestrond that's the product of the imagicon! On Earth in the year 22300, Dandor is on top thanks to a plague which killed all but a handful of men--many of whom "had not been able to stand the strain... too many years of having everything and every woman they wanted." Dandor created Nestrond as a place he could find "a taste of hell," without which "how could a man appreciate heaven?"
How could a man appreciate heaven.
Because this story is really all about the mens.
As I chip away at it, I feel like there's a pool of anti-woman sentiment bubbling underneath. Look at the difference between Earth of 22300, where men are powerful through their rarity and which is depicted as a warm, peaceful, beautiful place, and Nestrond, where women are powerful through their rarity and is explicitly described as a hell on multiple occasions. On Earth, Dandor is "sweetheart" and on Nestrond, he's "idiot." On Earth, he is fed grapes; on Nestrond, he's grudgingly served thin soup, stale bread, and rancid pork.
It almost reads like it's a parody of certain attitudes now. Nestrond reads like the sort of place any given MRA would come up with to describe a feminist world, and I'm confident that what MRAs yearn for is a world where they can all be Dandors. I have to wonder what the women might say if you asked them to describe their world. Are they happy feeding this guy, rubbing his feet, servicing him, when he descends into unreality as soon as they start to bore him? From where I'm sitting, this "heaven" seems pretty damn one-sided.
As I put this together, I had a realization: unlike Nona, who is given a rather detailed description to cement the hellishness of Nestrond, we're never actually given a description of Dandor. But I have a pretty good idea.
You want to hear the real punchline, though?
This story made the first ballot for the 1967 Nebula Award.
Sheesh.
Previous Tailings
#1 - "Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)
Appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1966
Then Cecily made him feel even sillier by leaning over and kissing his right foot with passionate red lips. "Oh, Dandor! Dandor, I love you so much," she murmured.
Dandor resisted the temptation to use one of his newly pampered feet to give her a healthy kick on her round little bottom. He resisted it because even at times like this, when his life with these women began to seem unreal, he tried to be as kind as possible to them. Even when their worship and adoration threatened to bore him to death, he tried to be kind.
So instead of kicking Cecily, he yawned.
I'm gonna let that quote up there just sink in for a minute.
Leaping into the story, we are introduced to the foppish, indolent Dandor, who is in the process of being fed grapes, getting a pedicure, and being generally worshipped by women--a blonde, a voluptuous brunette, and cuddly twin redheads, and yes those are how they're described and essentially the limits of their characterization, and god damn, man, am I really meant to take this at all seriously? Is this supposed to be a laff-out-loud comedy piece? I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE, SOMEONE HOLD ME
Ahem. Moving on. Dandor's problem is that he's getting awfully bored by being waited on and worshipped in his "palatial palace," because screw you guys, it's 1966, you don't need more descriptive adjectives when you're probably half-drunk by now anyway. So he leaves, back out through the imagicon of the title, and we see Dandor as he really is: a pioneer on the frozen colony world of Nestrond, home of punishing storms and snows and ice wolves, and which really begs the question of why you'd cross light-years to colonize a place that makes Antarctica look appealing. What really makes it intolerable, though, is Nona, his shrew of a wife! Am I right, fellas? The narrative lovingly details her faults--"a big, raw-boned woman with stringy black hair, a broad flat face with thin lips and uneven, yellowish teeth. God but she's ugly, he thought as he stared at her." Now that he's back in the real world, Dandor's got work to do, and he hates it! So he digs up ice moss for the fire, fixes the cattleshed roof to keep the icewolves from attacking their space cows, digs a cesspool, and so on.
Nestrond, for all intents and purposes, was settled by people who not only made it to the end of the Oregon Trail without dying of dysentery, but found a starship there waiting for them.
Disaster strikes in the night when ice wolves attack--six-legged, because alien critters gotta have six legs, otherwise how're you to know they're alien? Dandor manages to see them off thanks to his trusty laser rifle, but not before one of them takes a good chunk out of him; good enough, in fact, to demand that his entire leg be amputated. Because, sure, they have enough technological infrastructure to support stuff like laser rifles and imagicons, but not indoor plumbing or twentieth-century medicine. Presumably Nestrond's colonists are, in fact, survivors of a failed expedition. Maybe they were the advance team and the main ship blew up in orbit--they are in dire straits, with the last of the morphine gone and no anaesthetic more sophisticated than whiskey. Nobody's to say.
Dandor is aghast over the loss of his leg, of course--not because of the pain, not because of how much harder it'll make it to scratch out a life, but because now there'll be no imagicon; he'll belong only to Nona. How, he asks himself, could she treat him this way? Yeah! How could she ever stay by his side in his condition and make him face the world? One has to ask why she even bothers, on a world where there are twenty men for every woman. I mean, she obviously sees something in this guy, or she'd have just walked out while he was on one of his imagicon trips, right? Wouldn't you want to have someone standing by you at a low point like that?
Not our Dandor! He knows just what to do--escape from the dreaded barbs of reality! Half-mad with pain and bleeding out from his as-yet-uncauterized stump, he drags himself until he seals himself up into the imagicon, "more dead than alive," and slowly fades away while the soft voices of his adoring palace women brush against his ears--
Except, in a plot twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan--who would not be born for another four years, so at least he's not responsible for this one--Dandor wakes up, good as new, in the real world. In the palace. Because, you see, Dandor's palatial palace is reality, and it's Nestrond that's the product of the imagicon! On Earth in the year 22300, Dandor is on top thanks to a plague which killed all but a handful of men--many of whom "had not been able to stand the strain... too many years of having everything and every woman they wanted." Dandor created Nestrond as a place he could find "a taste of hell," without which "how could a man appreciate heaven?"
How could a man appreciate heaven.
Because this story is really all about the mens.
As I chip away at it, I feel like there's a pool of anti-woman sentiment bubbling underneath. Look at the difference between Earth of 22300, where men are powerful through their rarity and which is depicted as a warm, peaceful, beautiful place, and Nestrond, where women are powerful through their rarity and is explicitly described as a hell on multiple occasions. On Earth, Dandor is "sweetheart" and on Nestrond, he's "idiot." On Earth, he is fed grapes; on Nestrond, he's grudgingly served thin soup, stale bread, and rancid pork.
It almost reads like it's a parody of certain attitudes now. Nestrond reads like the sort of place any given MRA would come up with to describe a feminist world, and I'm confident that what MRAs yearn for is a world where they can all be Dandors. I have to wonder what the women might say if you asked them to describe their world. Are they happy feeding this guy, rubbing his feet, servicing him, when he descends into unreality as soon as they start to bore him? From where I'm sitting, this "heaven" seems pretty damn one-sided.
As I put this together, I had a realization: unlike Nona, who is given a rather detailed description to cement the hellishness of Nestrond, we're never actually given a description of Dandor. But I have a pretty good idea.
This story made the first ballot for the 1967 Nebula Award.
Sheesh.
Previous Tailings
#1 - "Blitz Against Japan" (September 1942)
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Reaching Back for Century 21
Traces of that retro-'60s style can still be found here and there, if you know where to look. Seattle Center, home of the Space Needle and site of the Century 21 Exposition, the 1962 World's Fair, is a good place to start. Until October it's the home base of Next Fifty, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Seattle's fair and looking toward the future in much the same way they did in those bright-eyed days just before the Cuban Missile Crisis - an era so innocent that the fair's midway was called the "Gayway."
At least, that's the impression it's easy to pick up from the documentary evidence; the sort of things that don't draw attention to how unpleasant it was to be gay, or a minority, or a woman, or in any way not hewing to the orthodox heterosexual white male norm of 1962. Sometimes that sort of thing comes through unintentionally, like the unbelievably goddamn racist "Chief Screaming Chicken" on the 1960s Batman series. The culture of the early 1960s is not something to be defended. The style, on the other hand, the manner it presented itself and the way it looked at the world - even today, those are infectious. Looking over the anniversary displays on the Space Needle's observation level and in the temporary museum by the fountain, I felt twinges of emotion, of longing. Longing for a piece of the future world that they were so sure was coming, a future world that had dodged its Cold War bullets and, through the power of progress, would become peaceful, grander, richer, wiser... better than the one that had come before.
It's not a regret for scientific advances that didn't come, that the look of our present doesn't accord with their future. That's just semantics. When it comes to forecasting like that, it frequently ends up that things are either realized in forms other than the ones that were expected, or turned out to be too expensive or valueless to expend effort on - the Century 21 Exposition did not, I imagine, see the globally networked, always-on communications of our actual 21st century coming; likewise the sort of problems we face today.
It's exactly those problems which fuels that longing.
The Space Needle is one of the most enduring reminders of that retro '60s style.
In 1962, people wanted to believe that the future was bright and wide-open. The Second World War had, after all, ended only seventeen years before - closer than the end of the Cold War is to us. Fifty years later, well... I don't exactly need shades, you know? The whole "welcome to the future" optimism that accompanied the turning of the millennium was dealt a rather thorough body blow by the collapse of the dot-com economy, the war on terror, and the ongoing global financial crisis. In 2012, no matter where you look it seems like things are getting worse, and the road ahead is pitch black.
Granted, issues like "is the euro going to fail" pale in comparison to "are they going to push the button" - nevertheless... it's easy to know what would happen in the latter case. One of the things that make modern problems difficult to tackle is that we don't know how the dice will fall; not only that, but there are plenty of people who have an interest in making sure they fall a specific way. Not at all like the threat of a nuclear exchange, where actually causing the Third World War would not have been in anyone's best interest.
Besides that, I think one source of this longing could be for a sense of nostalgia for those times - but only in the context of imagining a time when our options hadn't narrowed quite so much. You can see it in the United States, with the Republican Party digging in its heels; in Canada, with Stephen Harper's Conservatives taking actions that would never have been seriously considered twenty years ago - it seems like in the absence of a great external enemy to focus our attentions against, the battle lines have been drawn within our own societies and that we're riding a runaway freight train to the future.
But there's only that road ahead, no matter how narrow it may be.
At least, that's the impression it's easy to pick up from the documentary evidence; the sort of things that don't draw attention to how unpleasant it was to be gay, or a minority, or a woman, or in any way not hewing to the orthodox heterosexual white male norm of 1962. Sometimes that sort of thing comes through unintentionally, like the unbelievably goddamn racist "Chief Screaming Chicken" on the 1960s Batman series. The culture of the early 1960s is not something to be defended. The style, on the other hand, the manner it presented itself and the way it looked at the world - even today, those are infectious. Looking over the anniversary displays on the Space Needle's observation level and in the temporary museum by the fountain, I felt twinges of emotion, of longing. Longing for a piece of the future world that they were so sure was coming, a future world that had dodged its Cold War bullets and, through the power of progress, would become peaceful, grander, richer, wiser... better than the one that had come before.
It's not a regret for scientific advances that didn't come, that the look of our present doesn't accord with their future. That's just semantics. When it comes to forecasting like that, it frequently ends up that things are either realized in forms other than the ones that were expected, or turned out to be too expensive or valueless to expend effort on - the Century 21 Exposition did not, I imagine, see the globally networked, always-on communications of our actual 21st century coming; likewise the sort of problems we face today.
It's exactly those problems which fuels that longing.
The Space Needle is one of the most enduring reminders of that retro '60s style.In 1962, people wanted to believe that the future was bright and wide-open. The Second World War had, after all, ended only seventeen years before - closer than the end of the Cold War is to us. Fifty years later, well... I don't exactly need shades, you know? The whole "welcome to the future" optimism that accompanied the turning of the millennium was dealt a rather thorough body blow by the collapse of the dot-com economy, the war on terror, and the ongoing global financial crisis. In 2012, no matter where you look it seems like things are getting worse, and the road ahead is pitch black.
Granted, issues like "is the euro going to fail" pale in comparison to "are they going to push the button" - nevertheless... it's easy to know what would happen in the latter case. One of the things that make modern problems difficult to tackle is that we don't know how the dice will fall; not only that, but there are plenty of people who have an interest in making sure they fall a specific way. Not at all like the threat of a nuclear exchange, where actually causing the Third World War would not have been in anyone's best interest.
Besides that, I think one source of this longing could be for a sense of nostalgia for those times - but only in the context of imagining a time when our options hadn't narrowed quite so much. You can see it in the United States, with the Republican Party digging in its heels; in Canada, with Stephen Harper's Conservatives taking actions that would never have been seriously considered twenty years ago - it seems like in the absence of a great external enemy to focus our attentions against, the battle lines have been drawn within our own societies and that we're riding a runaway freight train to the future.
But there's only that road ahead, no matter how narrow it may be.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Short SF Review #22: When Planets Collide
"Star Trek: When Planets Collide," author(s) unknown
Appeared in Gold Key's STAR TREK #6, December 1969
"There are our space bogies--and still on collision course! Mr. Spock... what if they should hit...?"
"At their estimated point of contact, the results would be catastrophic, Scotty! The shock waves upon impact alone would pitch many of the Alpho planets out of orbit... to burn in space!"
I know it should be obvious to everyone with even a whiff of familiarity with the subject matter, but it still bears repeating: if you're looking for actual science that makes sense, rather than buzzword particles invented by some writer because the plot needs to be resolved somehow and all that liquor isn't going to drink itself, you're not going to find it in Star Trek. While the franchise did act as a gateway for me and many others into the greater world of science fiction, the facile way in which it portrays scientific and physical phenomena can be stunting; it was only in the last couple of years that I began to understand and appreciate how spaceflight actually works.
Compared to comic books, Star Trek flowed from the pen of Carl Sagan. This is particularly true when the comic books in question are Star Trek comic books. Beginning in the late 1960s, shortly after the cancellation of the original series and tapping into the groundswell of Star Trek fandom that arose with the show's syndication, Gold Key Comics published more than sixty issues of licensed Star Trek comics - and in those pages that hid behind covers made of photo collages that rarely had any relationship to the story within, Star Trek's casual disregard for scientific rigor collided with the completely out-there, ridiculous, anything-goes stuff that comics have been, and continue to be, known for. I mean, I've been told that the Flash's costume is made out of pure speed. Speed isn't even a thing.
Nevertheless - Star Trek comics were made in the 1960s, and in part because they were crazy as hell they were, and remain, entertaining to some degree. Much of the rest of the entertainment value comes from the fact that they're so bad, they're good, in part because of the vast liberties taken by the comic writers and artists from Gene Roddenberry's source material. I mean, these are comics where the Enterprise is regularly depicted as a stereotypical rocketship with flame spewing from the warp nacelles, where Captain Kirk is given to exclamations like "great galloping galaxies" and "howling comets," and where the resolution of the very first story was of the Enterprise scouring a planet of life. Now that's the Starfleet way!
Those meteorites have punctured the bridge, and space air is leaking in! Goggles on, everyone! (Comic page TM & © 2008 CBS Studios. All rights reserved.)
Stardate 23:00.9 - the Enterprise is zooming around in the Alpho Galaxy when its "TV space scanner" picks up two planets on a collision course. I'm not sure what the writer of this particular story meant by "galaxy," whether it was just an issue of people back then tending not to distinguish between "galaxy" and "solar system" - roughly equivalent to not drawing a distinction between the neighborhood you live in and the continent you live on. (Not that it makes much sense either way. "Planets... in the galaxy and orbiting Alpho!" Spock says, incredulously.) For some reason that is not explored whatsoever, the collision of these planets wold be a Pretty Bad Thing and so the Enterprise blasts for the closer planet on full rocket thrust across the thousands of... *sigh* galaxy miles to investigate.
When I say "investigate," of course, I mean "blow up." Because that's how Kirk rolls, you know. Kirk and Spock and Mr. Scott beam down to the planet from a room that bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the transporter room shown in the television show, and are immediately attacked! The planet is inhabited, despite appearances - what a twist! Can Captain Kirk convince his captors that he's come to save them, not destroy them?
Do you really need to ask that? I mean, as I write this I'm not even finished reading the thing, and it's still plenty obvious. This is Captain James T. Kirk we're talking about. Therefore, anticipating the plots of Armageddon and Deep Impact thirty years in advance, Kirk and Spock and a few others who I can't tell who they're supposed to be because only Kirk and Spock bear any resemblance whatsoever to their actors beam down to the second planet and start melting mountains in order to place the atomic charges at just the right places to avert disaster.
But... as Spock says, in perhaps one of his most in-character moments ever, "Great Zounds!" The second planet is also inhabited! I bet you didn't see that one coming. I mean, what's a hamfisted adventure story without a wholly artificial conflict based on convenient coincidences, anyway? Not to worry! Spock knows about a supernova remnant that radiates "a repelling force of the tenth magnitude!" Can the Enterprise use this last chance to save the two inhabited worlds - when it's restricted to a speed of 110,000 miles per second while towing the fragment? Not bloody likely, but come on! These guys obviously know nothing about how space works. So just go with it!
Does it work? Honestly, I wouldn't have been totally surprised if it hadn't. This is, after all, a comic series where the first solution was genocide. Does the comic work? That depends on how you approach it. It barely hews to the source material, it's insulting to the intelligence, and the conflict is purely artificial, engineered to make things as "exciting" as possible and failing miserably. So, it's as good as an average episode of Voyager. Heyoooooo!
ANDREW'S RATING: 0.5/5. In general, these comics are best appreciated the same way that Joel, Mike, and the bots appreciated movies.
Previous Short SF Reviews:
Appeared in Gold Key's STAR TREK #6, December 1969
"There are our space bogies--and still on collision course! Mr. Spock... what if they should hit...?"
"At their estimated point of contact, the results would be catastrophic, Scotty! The shock waves upon impact alone would pitch many of the Alpho planets out of orbit... to burn in space!"
I know it should be obvious to everyone with even a whiff of familiarity with the subject matter, but it still bears repeating: if you're looking for actual science that makes sense, rather than buzzword particles invented by some writer because the plot needs to be resolved somehow and all that liquor isn't going to drink itself, you're not going to find it in Star Trek. While the franchise did act as a gateway for me and many others into the greater world of science fiction, the facile way in which it portrays scientific and physical phenomena can be stunting; it was only in the last couple of years that I began to understand and appreciate how spaceflight actually works.
Compared to comic books, Star Trek flowed from the pen of Carl Sagan. This is particularly true when the comic books in question are Star Trek comic books. Beginning in the late 1960s, shortly after the cancellation of the original series and tapping into the groundswell of Star Trek fandom that arose with the show's syndication, Gold Key Comics published more than sixty issues of licensed Star Trek comics - and in those pages that hid behind covers made of photo collages that rarely had any relationship to the story within, Star Trek's casual disregard for scientific rigor collided with the completely out-there, ridiculous, anything-goes stuff that comics have been, and continue to be, known for. I mean, I've been told that the Flash's costume is made out of pure speed. Speed isn't even a thing.
Nevertheless - Star Trek comics were made in the 1960s, and in part because they were crazy as hell they were, and remain, entertaining to some degree. Much of the rest of the entertainment value comes from the fact that they're so bad, they're good, in part because of the vast liberties taken by the comic writers and artists from Gene Roddenberry's source material. I mean, these are comics where the Enterprise is regularly depicted as a stereotypical rocketship with flame spewing from the warp nacelles, where Captain Kirk is given to exclamations like "great galloping galaxies" and "howling comets," and where the resolution of the very first story was of the Enterprise scouring a planet of life. Now that's the Starfleet way!
Those meteorites have punctured the bridge, and space air is leaking in! Goggles on, everyone! (Comic page TM & © 2008 CBS Studios. All rights reserved.) Stardate 23:00.9 - the Enterprise is zooming around in the Alpho Galaxy when its "TV space scanner" picks up two planets on a collision course. I'm not sure what the writer of this particular story meant by "galaxy," whether it was just an issue of people back then tending not to distinguish between "galaxy" and "solar system" - roughly equivalent to not drawing a distinction between the neighborhood you live in and the continent you live on. (Not that it makes much sense either way. "Planets... in the galaxy and orbiting Alpho!" Spock says, incredulously.) For some reason that is not explored whatsoever, the collision of these planets wold be a Pretty Bad Thing and so the Enterprise blasts for the closer planet on full rocket thrust across the thousands of... *sigh* galaxy miles to investigate.
When I say "investigate," of course, I mean "blow up." Because that's how Kirk rolls, you know. Kirk and Spock and Mr. Scott beam down to the planet from a room that bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the transporter room shown in the television show, and are immediately attacked! The planet is inhabited, despite appearances - what a twist! Can Captain Kirk convince his captors that he's come to save them, not destroy them?
Do you really need to ask that? I mean, as I write this I'm not even finished reading the thing, and it's still plenty obvious. This is Captain James T. Kirk we're talking about. Therefore, anticipating the plots of Armageddon and Deep Impact thirty years in advance, Kirk and Spock and a few others who I can't tell who they're supposed to be because only Kirk and Spock bear any resemblance whatsoever to their actors beam down to the second planet and start melting mountains in order to place the atomic charges at just the right places to avert disaster.
But... as Spock says, in perhaps one of his most in-character moments ever, "Great Zounds!" The second planet is also inhabited! I bet you didn't see that one coming. I mean, what's a hamfisted adventure story without a wholly artificial conflict based on convenient coincidences, anyway? Not to worry! Spock knows about a supernova remnant that radiates "a repelling force of the tenth magnitude!" Can the Enterprise use this last chance to save the two inhabited worlds - when it's restricted to a speed of 110,000 miles per second while towing the fragment? Not bloody likely, but come on! These guys obviously know nothing about how space works. So just go with it!
Does it work? Honestly, I wouldn't have been totally surprised if it hadn't. This is, after all, a comic series where the first solution was genocide. Does the comic work? That depends on how you approach it. It barely hews to the source material, it's insulting to the intelligence, and the conflict is purely artificial, engineered to make things as "exciting" as possible and failing miserably. So, it's as good as an average episode of Voyager. Heyoooooo!
ANDREW'S RATING: 0.5/5. In general, these comics are best appreciated the same way that Joel, Mike, and the bots appreciated movies.
Previous Short SF Reviews:
- #21: "You Source of Tears" (Andrew Barton)
- #20: "The Helix" (Gerard Rejskind)
- #19: "The Thirst Quenchers" (Rick Raphael)
- #18: "Hackers" (Rick Cook)
- #17: "Attached to the Land" (Donald J. Bingle)
- #16: "The Great Gizmo Machine!" (Pierce Rand and John Forte)
- #15: "Alien Psychologist" (Erik Fennel)
- #14: "The Frontliners" (Verge Foray)
- #13: "Second Chance" (Walter Kubilius and Fletcher Pratt)
- #12: "Hades" (Charles F. Ksanda)
- #11: "Revolt of the Ants" (Milton Kaletsky)
- #10: "Blessed Are the Meekbots" (Daniel F. Galouye)
- #9: "To Make a New Neanderthal" (W. Macfarlane)
- #8: "Funnel Hawk" (Tom Ligon)
- #7: Testing... One, Two, Three, Four" (Steve Chapman)
- #6: "Bite" (Lawrence A. Perkins)
- #5: "No Shoulder to Cry On" (Hank Davis)
- #4: "Crazy Oil" (Brenda Pearce)
- #3: "The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)
- #2: "Job Inaction" (Timothy Zahn)
- #1: "Roachstompers" (S.M. Stirling)
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Short SF Review #19: The Thirst Quenchers
The Thirst Quenchers, by Rick Raphael
Appeared in Analog Science Fact - Science Fiction, September 1963
There was water in the highlands, in watersheds and spilling unused down to the sea in many areas. Soon the cities and industries sent out great plastisteel arteries to bring the lifeblood of the land to the vast sponges of the factories and showers in homes and food-processing plants and laundrounits. Water for the machine-precise rows of soy bean plants and for babies' formulas and water for great nuclear power plants and water for a tiny, sixty-fifth floor apartment flower box.
They say that science fiction, no matter what year or world it's set in, is really about the time in which it was written. It's something that becomes increasingly obvious as a work of science fiction ages, and the cultural assumptions underlying it become progressively more out of step with the present day. While this may mean greater speedbumps in the path of a modern reader's suspension of disbelief, it also makes the story into a cultural time capsule of sorts - through it, and through the attitudes, concepts and ideas it incorporates, we can gain fresh insight on the time of its origin.
Over the last few years, the 1960s seem to have picked up a lot of traction in popular culture, starting with the success of Mad Men and going out from there; it's got to the point where I've seen clothing stores advertising new lines that are explicitly derived from period styles. That, really, is the core of it, I think - people today are looking to emulate the style of the 1960s while preserving twenty-first century sensibilities. Sure, it had its cultural dark spots, but there was a profound sense of optimism there too; it was the decade of Civil Rights, of the Prague Spring, of Apollo 11... an optimism that would be more than welcome in these cynical times.
Rick Raphael's "The Thirst Quenchers" is at home in the early 1960s, suffused with the sense of technological optimism that reached its zenith in the 1950s and which today is often zeerusted beyond recognition. The story is set in the mid-21st century and follows Troy Braden and Alec Patterson, snow hydrologists in the employ of the United States Division of Agriculture. This is a more important job than it may seem at first, because "Quenchers" is one of those "if this goes on" stories, where a trend of the present is extrapolated into the future. Unlike other roughly contemporaneous stories, which would look ahead and see overpopulation, the future trend that Raphael follows is the increasing demand on water resources.
It's the manner in which this trend is sketched out, and the way society is depicted as responding to it, that makes "The Thirst Quenchers" a true product of that 1950s sensibility. The story depicts a world where the population has grown to a point where the situation demands active, careful management of the United States' water resources - to a point that, from my 21st century perspective, seems both horrifying in its complexity and stunning in its laxness. It begins from the start; we first meet Braden and Patterson ascending a peak in the Sawtooth Range to replace a snow depth monitoring gauge. Such things are of key importance in a world where the water cycle has, effectively, been completely re-engineered to supply the needs of civilization. In the future of "Quenchers," snow isn't allowed to just melt like it does now; rather, after snowstorms, planes are sent out to spray the white stuff "with clouds of black, monomolecular film" that insulates it from the sun so that its meltwater can be directed where it needs to go, when it needs to be there.
As a project in isolation, it would be one thing... but it's not in isolation, and in fact it's probably the least environmentally impacting measure depicted in the story. No, this is a world where "total conservation of every possible drop of moisture" is seen as utterly necessary to the survival of the United States. Where electricity is generated universally by nuclear power and the hydroelectric dams shut down so that the water of their rivers and reservoirs can be redirected into vast pipelines and massive underground aqueducts. The main conflict of the story, after several pages of Braden and Patterson installing the snow gauge and returning to their home base in the thriving metropolis of Spokane, Washington - with a population of over three million in this story's future - centers around an earthquake cracking one of these underground reservoirs, and the desperate struggle to save as much water as possible for the factories and cities that will never, ever let up in their demands.
It's a world where "conservation" obviously means something completely different than today, since it scarcely even recognizes the environment as a thing that exists. Sure, what we recognize today as the environmental movement hadn't had an opportunity to come together when the September '63 Analog hit the stands, but it's still kind of staggering to get a window into some of the assumptions that were prevalent at the time. It's a world where nuclear power is an unqualified good, where nature is something that exists separately from civilization and will get along fine no matter what we do - I'm sure those spawning salmon from drained rivers will just, y'know, evolve legs or something - honestly, it's a world that's bloody unsettling from a modern perspective. The everyday standard is that every drop of water has to be accounted for, that water rations are so tight that bringing five major industrial units online is a substantial and complicated problem, that there are more and more competitors after less and less water... and yet it never departs from that cheery, starry-eyed, can-do, rather dissonant optimism. It's creepy.
It's a story that, bluntly, could not be written today as it is. The cultural assumptions have changed too much in the intervening fifty years. It would be stronger, I think, if there was some sociological speculation in it as well, a look at how American society changed and adapted to not only this kind of extreme water insecurity, but the political changes that would be necessary to manage it - but there aren't any. There are gadgets, though, and a overwhelming spirit that with the right tools, people can solve any problem. There are mobile nuclear reactors and nuclear-powered drilling lasers and nuclear sump pumps.
Today, though, it seems hollow. At the time, I'm sure it was probably intended for the reader to come away with the idea that there will be challenges in the future, but we'll be equipped to solve those problems if only we're smart and courageous enough to tackle them head-on. Today, what I take from it is a sense that this is a world just before the end - that it's desperate to maintain things as they are no matter the cost, without taking firm action to change the situation to something more stable or sustainable. The world of "The Thirst Quenchers" has the tinge of incipient dystopia to it; like society in that world is running on the top of a wheel, having to constantly struggle lest it be crushed.
But you don't have to take my word for it - draw your own conclusions. If you're interested in reading it yourself, the story is available as an ebook from Project Gutenberg.
ANDREW'S RATING: 3/5
Previous Short SF Reviews:
Appeared in Analog Science Fact - Science Fiction, September 1963
There was water in the highlands, in watersheds and spilling unused down to the sea in many areas. Soon the cities and industries sent out great plastisteel arteries to bring the lifeblood of the land to the vast sponges of the factories and showers in homes and food-processing plants and laundrounits. Water for the machine-precise rows of soy bean plants and for babies' formulas and water for great nuclear power plants and water for a tiny, sixty-fifth floor apartment flower box.
They say that science fiction, no matter what year or world it's set in, is really about the time in which it was written. It's something that becomes increasingly obvious as a work of science fiction ages, and the cultural assumptions underlying it become progressively more out of step with the present day. While this may mean greater speedbumps in the path of a modern reader's suspension of disbelief, it also makes the story into a cultural time capsule of sorts - through it, and through the attitudes, concepts and ideas it incorporates, we can gain fresh insight on the time of its origin.Over the last few years, the 1960s seem to have picked up a lot of traction in popular culture, starting with the success of Mad Men and going out from there; it's got to the point where I've seen clothing stores advertising new lines that are explicitly derived from period styles. That, really, is the core of it, I think - people today are looking to emulate the style of the 1960s while preserving twenty-first century sensibilities. Sure, it had its cultural dark spots, but there was a profound sense of optimism there too; it was the decade of Civil Rights, of the Prague Spring, of Apollo 11... an optimism that would be more than welcome in these cynical times.
Rick Raphael's "The Thirst Quenchers" is at home in the early 1960s, suffused with the sense of technological optimism that reached its zenith in the 1950s and which today is often zeerusted beyond recognition. The story is set in the mid-21st century and follows Troy Braden and Alec Patterson, snow hydrologists in the employ of the United States Division of Agriculture. This is a more important job than it may seem at first, because "Quenchers" is one of those "if this goes on" stories, where a trend of the present is extrapolated into the future. Unlike other roughly contemporaneous stories, which would look ahead and see overpopulation, the future trend that Raphael follows is the increasing demand on water resources.
It's the manner in which this trend is sketched out, and the way society is depicted as responding to it, that makes "The Thirst Quenchers" a true product of that 1950s sensibility. The story depicts a world where the population has grown to a point where the situation demands active, careful management of the United States' water resources - to a point that, from my 21st century perspective, seems both horrifying in its complexity and stunning in its laxness. It begins from the start; we first meet Braden and Patterson ascending a peak in the Sawtooth Range to replace a snow depth monitoring gauge. Such things are of key importance in a world where the water cycle has, effectively, been completely re-engineered to supply the needs of civilization. In the future of "Quenchers," snow isn't allowed to just melt like it does now; rather, after snowstorms, planes are sent out to spray the white stuff "with clouds of black, monomolecular film" that insulates it from the sun so that its meltwater can be directed where it needs to go, when it needs to be there.
As a project in isolation, it would be one thing... but it's not in isolation, and in fact it's probably the least environmentally impacting measure depicted in the story. No, this is a world where "total conservation of every possible drop of moisture" is seen as utterly necessary to the survival of the United States. Where electricity is generated universally by nuclear power and the hydroelectric dams shut down so that the water of their rivers and reservoirs can be redirected into vast pipelines and massive underground aqueducts. The main conflict of the story, after several pages of Braden and Patterson installing the snow gauge and returning to their home base in the thriving metropolis of Spokane, Washington - with a population of over three million in this story's future - centers around an earthquake cracking one of these underground reservoirs, and the desperate struggle to save as much water as possible for the factories and cities that will never, ever let up in their demands.
It's a world where "conservation" obviously means something completely different than today, since it scarcely even recognizes the environment as a thing that exists. Sure, what we recognize today as the environmental movement hadn't had an opportunity to come together when the September '63 Analog hit the stands, but it's still kind of staggering to get a window into some of the assumptions that were prevalent at the time. It's a world where nuclear power is an unqualified good, where nature is something that exists separately from civilization and will get along fine no matter what we do - I'm sure those spawning salmon from drained rivers will just, y'know, evolve legs or something - honestly, it's a world that's bloody unsettling from a modern perspective. The everyday standard is that every drop of water has to be accounted for, that water rations are so tight that bringing five major industrial units online is a substantial and complicated problem, that there are more and more competitors after less and less water... and yet it never departs from that cheery, starry-eyed, can-do, rather dissonant optimism. It's creepy.
It's a story that, bluntly, could not be written today as it is. The cultural assumptions have changed too much in the intervening fifty years. It would be stronger, I think, if there was some sociological speculation in it as well, a look at how American society changed and adapted to not only this kind of extreme water insecurity, but the political changes that would be necessary to manage it - but there aren't any. There are gadgets, though, and a overwhelming spirit that with the right tools, people can solve any problem. There are mobile nuclear reactors and nuclear-powered drilling lasers and nuclear sump pumps.
Today, though, it seems hollow. At the time, I'm sure it was probably intended for the reader to come away with the idea that there will be challenges in the future, but we'll be equipped to solve those problems if only we're smart and courageous enough to tackle them head-on. Today, what I take from it is a sense that this is a world just before the end - that it's desperate to maintain things as they are no matter the cost, without taking firm action to change the situation to something more stable or sustainable. The world of "The Thirst Quenchers" has the tinge of incipient dystopia to it; like society in that world is running on the top of a wheel, having to constantly struggle lest it be crushed.
But you don't have to take my word for it - draw your own conclusions. If you're interested in reading it yourself, the story is available as an ebook from Project Gutenberg.
ANDREW'S RATING: 3/5
Previous Short SF Reviews:
- #18: "Hackers" (Rick Cook)
- #17: "Attached to the Land" (Donald J. Bingle)
- #16: "The Great Gizmo Machine!" (Pierce Rand and John Forte)
- #15: "Alien Psychologist" (Erik Fennel)
- #14: "The Frontliners" (Verge Foray)
- #13: "Second Chance" (Walter Kubilius and Fletcher Pratt)
- #12: "Hades" (Charles F. Ksanda)
- #11: "Revolt of the Ants" (Milton Kaletsky)
- #10: "Blessed Are the Meekbots" (Daniel F. Galouye)
- #9: "To Make a New Neanderthal" (W. Macfarlane)
- #8: "Funnel Hawk" (Tom Ligon)
- #7: Testing... One, Two, Three, Four" (Steve Chapman)
- #6: "Bite" (Lawrence A. Perkins)
- #5: "No Shoulder to Cry On" (Hank Davis)
- #4: "Crazy Oil" (Brenda Pearce)
- #3: "The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)
- #2: "Job Inaction" (Timothy Zahn)
- #1: "Roachstompers" (S.M. Stirling)
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Photo: Wings From the Jet Age
From Mad Men to Pan Am, it seems like the '60s are becoming cool again. I can understand why; even though it was a highly unpleasant time for vast swathes of society, the age also carried with it a transformative, optimistic culture that is dearly, sorely needed in this overcast twenty-first century. Looking back, it's easy to see the Jet Age as a time that was polished, refined, and poised on the edge of everything: a time when everything was possible.
The Boeing 707 was the jet of the Jet Age. It was on such a jet that my grandfather and immediate family first came to Canada in that long, hot summer of 1969. They flew BOAC, the British Overseas Airways Corporation, one of two airlines that was merged to form British Airways in 1974. We still have the original paper ticket from that flight forty-two years ago, so I can say that as of July 15, 1969, a round-trip flight from Manchester to Toronto - with a stopover in Montreal on both legs - cost $340.00; that works out to $2,092.04 in 2011 dollars. Today, the same round-trip ticket costs $1,113; of course, that's without any taxes, and it's also for one person. I guess the Jet Age may have been a bit cheaper after all.
Photographed is a BOAC 707 on the ground at Toronto International Airport on August 18, 1969.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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The Boeing 707 was the jet of the Jet Age. It was on such a jet that my grandfather and immediate family first came to Canada in that long, hot summer of 1969. They flew BOAC, the British Overseas Airways Corporation, one of two airlines that was merged to form British Airways in 1974. We still have the original paper ticket from that flight forty-two years ago, so I can say that as of July 15, 1969, a round-trip flight from Manchester to Toronto - with a stopover in Montreal on both legs - cost $340.00; that works out to $2,092.04 in 2011 dollars. Today, the same round-trip ticket costs $1,113; of course, that's without any taxes, and it's also for one person. I guess the Jet Age may have been a bit cheaper after all.
Photographed is a BOAC 707 on the ground at Toronto International Airport on August 18, 1969.
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Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Tell the Stars Goodbye
If all you ever do is stare at your feet, while you may not trip over anything you're liable to smash right into something fast or sharp or heavy that you never saw until it was right on top of you. The problem is that for a lot of people, it seems like they're comforted by knowing exactly where their feet are, and damn what's ahead. This is true of governments and organizations as well as individuals - attempts to honestly practice foresight tend to fall by the wayside because, hey, screw the future, right?
Sometimes, though, you'll come across a spectacularly bad example of a failure in forecasting - something that makes you wonder if the people in charge of it waited until they were on the way to the office before deciding what they would wear that day. An example such as, say, Project West Ford.
I'd never heard about this before I discovered the reference on Wikipedia - whether or not it's because the people involved have a vested interest in not talking about such a boneheaded project, I can't say. West Ford was a product of the early 1960s drive to start taking advantage of the opportunities presented by space: communications in particular. At the time, the free world relied on undersea cables for intercontinental communications, but these could theoretically have been cut by the Soviets. A more secure method was needed.
Obviously, the most straightforward solution was to create an artificial ionosphere capable of repeating radio transmissions by launching four hundred and eighty million miniature copper dipole antennas into orbit. This was done in May 1963, and the initial ring would have been supplemented by two more if it proved successful - incidentally also cluttering up orbit with more than a billion potential bullets.
Project West Ford didn't work out, something for which we should all be grateful; low Earth orbit is nealy choked with debris as it is. The legacy of Project West Ford is one of big ideas over good sense; of engineers staring at their shoes and insisting they're on the right path. I mean, sure. If there wasn't any alternative for space-based communications on the horizon, it's understandable that West Ford could have been considered "clunky but necessary." The idea of the Kessler syndrome doesn't seem to have occured to anyone at the time, either.
Nevertheless - take a look also at the Telstar project, a pioneering advance in communications satellite technology. Though prototypes, the Telstar 1 and Telstar 2 satellites successfully transmitted pictures, phone calls, and television feeds intercontinentally. Oh, and Telstar 1 was launched nearly a year before Project West Ford's successful needle-spraying; and for that matter, Telstar 2 was launched the same month. It's not as if comsats represented a bolt-from-the-blue technology; Arthur C. Clarke had written about the possibilities of comsats stationed in geosynchronous orbit in 1945, and if anyone was familiar with that, engineers working on a space-based communication systems should have been.
It's not as if it's over, either. Project West Ford, that is. Though some of the needles have been reentering since the 1970s, many of them are still up there in orbit - each one a potential bullet moving at eight kilometers per second. The legacy of a project that never should have been started, that would have jeopardized orbital flight far beyond the advantages it provided had it fulfilled the original plans.
Sometimes the best thing to do is to look up.
Sometimes, though, you'll come across a spectacularly bad example of a failure in forecasting - something that makes you wonder if the people in charge of it waited until they were on the way to the office before deciding what they would wear that day. An example such as, say, Project West Ford.
I'd never heard about this before I discovered the reference on Wikipedia - whether or not it's because the people involved have a vested interest in not talking about such a boneheaded project, I can't say. West Ford was a product of the early 1960s drive to start taking advantage of the opportunities presented by space: communications in particular. At the time, the free world relied on undersea cables for intercontinental communications, but these could theoretically have been cut by the Soviets. A more secure method was needed.
Obviously, the most straightforward solution was to create an artificial ionosphere capable of repeating radio transmissions by launching four hundred and eighty million miniature copper dipole antennas into orbit. This was done in May 1963, and the initial ring would have been supplemented by two more if it proved successful - incidentally also cluttering up orbit with more than a billion potential bullets.
Project West Ford didn't work out, something for which we should all be grateful; low Earth orbit is nealy choked with debris as it is. The legacy of Project West Ford is one of big ideas over good sense; of engineers staring at their shoes and insisting they're on the right path. I mean, sure. If there wasn't any alternative for space-based communications on the horizon, it's understandable that West Ford could have been considered "clunky but necessary." The idea of the Kessler syndrome doesn't seem to have occured to anyone at the time, either.
Nevertheless - take a look also at the Telstar project, a pioneering advance in communications satellite technology. Though prototypes, the Telstar 1 and Telstar 2 satellites successfully transmitted pictures, phone calls, and television feeds intercontinentally. Oh, and Telstar 1 was launched nearly a year before Project West Ford's successful needle-spraying; and for that matter, Telstar 2 was launched the same month. It's not as if comsats represented a bolt-from-the-blue technology; Arthur C. Clarke had written about the possibilities of comsats stationed in geosynchronous orbit in 1945, and if anyone was familiar with that, engineers working on a space-based communication systems should have been.
It's not as if it's over, either. Project West Ford, that is. Though some of the needles have been reentering since the 1970s, many of them are still up there in orbit - each one a potential bullet moving at eight kilometers per second. The legacy of a project that never should have been started, that would have jeopardized orbital flight far beyond the advantages it provided had it fulfilled the original plans.
Sometimes the best thing to do is to look up.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Short SF Review #16: "The Great Gizmo Machine!"
"The Great Gizmo Machine!", by Pierce Rand and John Forte
Appeared in Unknown Worlds #37, February 1964
"Yessir, I've done big things in science. Helped Edison invent the electric light... Eli Whitney took the credit for the cotton gin, but it was really my doing... I was the first to split the atom -- and I followed up by inventing the atomic sub!"
Since I started doing these reviews back in the early days of this weblog, I've confined myself to straightforward short literature: stories from anthologies and magazines devoted to the form. But there's another avenue that the story-starved could explore to sate their hunger, one I never previously considered: the comic book. As I never read them when I was growing up, I must be some kind of sociological freak or something, I guess. So if I make any ignorant mischaracterizations of the comic form in this, please tell me, and please don't get pissed off.
Unknown Worlds, published by American Comics Group, was an anthology comic series that lasted from 1960 to 1967. As I've only ever seen one issue of it, and since in a surprising turn of events Wikipedia has no article on it as of this writing, I can't make any authoritative blanket statements about it. But I can infer, though - its style seems to harken back to the days before the Comics Code, back when the superhero comics that dominated the market for decades afterward shared the newsstands with horror, crime, adventure, science fiction, and fantasy comics, in that it contains independent stories unconnected by any larger universe. While Unknown Worlds #37 claims to offer "mystery thrillers," the contents are supernatural fantasy and science fiction. The third and last story of the issue, coming in just after an advertisement for a Jet "Rocket" Space Ship, was enough to get me to buy the issue with its title alone: "The Great Gizmo Machine!," with story by Pierce Rand and art by John Forte.
Now, the obvious question is this: just what is a Great Gizmo Machine? Is it a machine that makes smaller, even more unfathomable machines? Is this where mogwai really come from -- or is it something even more sinister? I'll tell you what this is - it's true Silver Age crazy.
This story's hero - specifically stated as such - is Joe Binks, a hair-slicked-back, unemployed dude who can never seem to find a job worth his talents - or, more precisely, what he considers his talents to be. Being a janitor at the zoo apparently isn't it. After being chased up a tree by a bear, he quits and strikes out to get a job with Science, because it's "all the rage today" - specifically, the Willis Scientific Foundation. There, he tries to seal the deal with a resumé of claims that make him sound like an escaped mental patient - I mean, it's one thing to call yourself a "nuclear maintenance engineer" because you cleaned the pipes at Pickering, but to take credit for something invented a hundred and seventy years earlier leads me to only two conclusions: either he's is trying to see just how ridiculous a story he can spin while still finding a job, or Joe-Joe Binks is just that stupid.
It comes off, in a way: he does get a job from Professor Willis. As a janitor. This time, though, he stays on the job for long enough to overhear Professor Willis talking to empty air in the Great Gizmo Machine's room - a machine that is being kept a total mystery, beyond the sheer fact of its existence. In an attempt to impress his girlfriend and keep the bow-tied dude who for some inexplicable reason is tagging along on their date - he's described as Joe's rival for his girlfriend's affections - from ending up with her, he sneaks into the Gizmo Machine's room and starts studying how it works.
Which means that, in the truest scientific tradition, he starts fiddlng with knobs and doodads to see what happens. What happens is that the machine starts making noises like "bicka-bicka-bicka" and things start flying around like it's a poltergeist factory. The next day, he witnesses his boss, the Professor, vanish into the machine. Probably due to the absence of a body, he avoids getting slapped with a murder charge and goes to give his girlfriend a present that is, perhaps, the single most prescient reference in this story - a "little gizmo machine" that "makes a lot of noise, runs a mile a minute and doesn't do a thing!" It may have taken fifty years, but we're on our way.
Still, the rival for his girlfriend's affections isn't too happy about Joe claiming to be an Awesome Scientist because he mops the floors in a house of Science, and neither is he impressed by the pre-Star Trek technobabble he resorts to in a desperate attempt to explain something he doesn't understand. The rival, of course, takes the opportunity to futz with the instrumentation and ends up winning over the girlfriend's affections - by default, as Joe gets sucked into the machine and down into a "dark, swirling vortex."
He comes to rest in a circle of light in what looks to me like a graveyard forest, something you'd expect to see as a set backdrop for a Halloween horror comic. He doesn't have much time to ponder his predicament before bodiless voices - speaking English, of course, since the Silver Age also specified that English is the universe's most efficient language, though I can't find the reference at present - start mocking his features and force him to sing love songs. Joe, using the astounding mental prowess that he has demonstrated throughout the story thus far, concludes that they're women - or, at least "real dolls" - and asks for them to show themselves after they cover him with kisses. Fair enough, they turn on their visibility and--
!!!!!
OH GOD BOBBLEHEAD PEOPLE--
Yes, it turns out that what the Great Gizmo Machine is is a dimensional portal to the World of the Bobblehead People, also known as the 432nd Dimension for some unfathomable reason. He's taken before a bobblehead court where he encounters the missing Professor and discovers that the bobbleheads are naturally concerned about the Great Gizmo Machine being a potential invasion path into their world. So what do they do? Fortify in expectation of an invasion? Attack through the machine themselves? Kill the two Earthlings to keep a lid on the knowledge as best they can?
No! They let the Professor return to Earth because he promises to destroy the machine - and they've got to believe him for some reason or another - but they *need* Joe to stay behind! Joe, displaying the intellectual acumen that propelled him to the highest strata of Earthly culture, assumes that the bobbleheads are in desperate need of a leader with a neck that doesn't look like it's as liable to snap as a toothpick with a boulder balanced on the tip. It comes off, in a way - he is needed, as a janitor. The only man of Earth, trapped in an crazy alien dimension full of walking, talking bobbleheads half his size. THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO WE!
Really - this was a simplistic story that might well have been written during the course of a coffee break, possibly when Unknown Worlds realized that the printer's deadline was coming up and it had nine pages to fill. What I do know that it didn't live up to its own hype; how could it have? The "surprise of a lifetime?" If this story had shown up in, say, Analog or Fantasy & Science Fiction, that would've been the surprise of a lifetime. This, is just... filler. That's absolutely what it is. Extruded Entertainment Product, meant for a quick bit of timefilling and later discarding. These stories weren't meant to last - they were meant to get the customer's twelve cents.
And, really, the whole reason I bought Unknown Worlds #37 was because I was fascinated by the idea of what the Great Gizmo Machine could be, and I paid a damn sight more than twelve cents for it - so even fifty years later, it's still doing the work it set out to. That, in itself, is worth recognizing.
Also, I totally want one of those Jet "Rocket" Space Ships now. I mean, only five bucks and it comes with a disintegrator gun and bomb bay, all the better to teach those goddamn aliens to fear the United States Air Force! How can you go wrong?
ANDREW'S RATING: 2/5 - the out-there craziness is just so earnest. It's almost endearing.
Previous Short SF Reviews:
Appeared in Unknown Worlds #37, February 1964
"Yessir, I've done big things in science. Helped Edison invent the electric light... Eli Whitney took the credit for the cotton gin, but it was really my doing... I was the first to split the atom -- and I followed up by inventing the atomic sub!"
Since I started doing these reviews back in the early days of this weblog, I've confined myself to straightforward short literature: stories from anthologies and magazines devoted to the form. But there's another avenue that the story-starved could explore to sate their hunger, one I never previously considered: the comic book. As I never read them when I was growing up, I must be some kind of sociological freak or something, I guess. So if I make any ignorant mischaracterizations of the comic form in this, please tell me, and please don't get pissed off.
Unknown Worlds, published by American Comics Group, was an anthology comic series that lasted from 1960 to 1967. As I've only ever seen one issue of it, and since in a surprising turn of events Wikipedia has no article on it as of this writing, I can't make any authoritative blanket statements about it. But I can infer, though - its style seems to harken back to the days before the Comics Code, back when the superhero comics that dominated the market for decades afterward shared the newsstands with horror, crime, adventure, science fiction, and fantasy comics, in that it contains independent stories unconnected by any larger universe. While Unknown Worlds #37 claims to offer "mystery thrillers," the contents are supernatural fantasy and science fiction. The third and last story of the issue, coming in just after an advertisement for a Jet "Rocket" Space Ship, was enough to get me to buy the issue with its title alone: "The Great Gizmo Machine!," with story by Pierce Rand and art by John Forte.
Now, the obvious question is this: just what is a Great Gizmo Machine? Is it a machine that makes smaller, even more unfathomable machines? Is this where mogwai really come from -- or is it something even more sinister? I'll tell you what this is - it's true Silver Age crazy.This story's hero - specifically stated as such - is Joe Binks, a hair-slicked-back, unemployed dude who can never seem to find a job worth his talents - or, more precisely, what he considers his talents to be. Being a janitor at the zoo apparently isn't it. After being chased up a tree by a bear, he quits and strikes out to get a job with Science, because it's "all the rage today" - specifically, the Willis Scientific Foundation. There, he tries to seal the deal with a resumé of claims that make him sound like an escaped mental patient - I mean, it's one thing to call yourself a "nuclear maintenance engineer" because you cleaned the pipes at Pickering, but to take credit for something invented a hundred and seventy years earlier leads me to only two conclusions: either he's is trying to see just how ridiculous a story he can spin while still finding a job, or Joe-Joe Binks is just that stupid.
It comes off, in a way: he does get a job from Professor Willis. As a janitor. This time, though, he stays on the job for long enough to overhear Professor Willis talking to empty air in the Great Gizmo Machine's room - a machine that is being kept a total mystery, beyond the sheer fact of its existence. In an attempt to impress his girlfriend and keep the bow-tied dude who for some inexplicable reason is tagging along on their date - he's described as Joe's rival for his girlfriend's affections - from ending up with her, he sneaks into the Gizmo Machine's room and starts studying how it works.
Which means that, in the truest scientific tradition, he starts fiddlng with knobs and doodads to see what happens. What happens is that the machine starts making noises like "bicka-bicka-bicka" and things start flying around like it's a poltergeist factory. The next day, he witnesses his boss, the Professor, vanish into the machine. Probably due to the absence of a body, he avoids getting slapped with a murder charge and goes to give his girlfriend a present that is, perhaps, the single most prescient reference in this story - a "little gizmo machine" that "makes a lot of noise, runs a mile a minute and doesn't do a thing!" It may have taken fifty years, but we're on our way.
Still, the rival for his girlfriend's affections isn't too happy about Joe claiming to be an Awesome Scientist because he mops the floors in a house of Science, and neither is he impressed by the pre-Star Trek technobabble he resorts to in a desperate attempt to explain something he doesn't understand. The rival, of course, takes the opportunity to futz with the instrumentation and ends up winning over the girlfriend's affections - by default, as Joe gets sucked into the machine and down into a "dark, swirling vortex."
He comes to rest in a circle of light in what looks to me like a graveyard forest, something you'd expect to see as a set backdrop for a Halloween horror comic. He doesn't have much time to ponder his predicament before bodiless voices - speaking English, of course, since the Silver Age also specified that English is the universe's most efficient language, though I can't find the reference at present - start mocking his features and force him to sing love songs. Joe, using the astounding mental prowess that he has demonstrated throughout the story thus far, concludes that they're women - or, at least "real dolls" - and asks for them to show themselves after they cover him with kisses. Fair enough, they turn on their visibility and--
!!!!!OH GOD BOBBLEHEAD PEOPLE--
Yes, it turns out that what the Great Gizmo Machine is is a dimensional portal to the World of the Bobblehead People, also known as the 432nd Dimension for some unfathomable reason. He's taken before a bobblehead court where he encounters the missing Professor and discovers that the bobbleheads are naturally concerned about the Great Gizmo Machine being a potential invasion path into their world. So what do they do? Fortify in expectation of an invasion? Attack through the machine themselves? Kill the two Earthlings to keep a lid on the knowledge as best they can?
No! They let the Professor return to Earth because he promises to destroy the machine - and they've got to believe him for some reason or another - but they *need* Joe to stay behind! Joe, displaying the intellectual acumen that propelled him to the highest strata of Earthly culture, assumes that the bobbleheads are in desperate need of a leader with a neck that doesn't look like it's as liable to snap as a toothpick with a boulder balanced on the tip. It comes off, in a way - he is needed, as a janitor. The only man of Earth, trapped in an crazy alien dimension full of walking, talking bobbleheads half his size. THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO WE!
Really - this was a simplistic story that might well have been written during the course of a coffee break, possibly when Unknown Worlds realized that the printer's deadline was coming up and it had nine pages to fill. What I do know that it didn't live up to its own hype; how could it have? The "surprise of a lifetime?" If this story had shown up in, say, Analog or Fantasy & Science Fiction, that would've been the surprise of a lifetime. This, is just... filler. That's absolutely what it is. Extruded Entertainment Product, meant for a quick bit of timefilling and later discarding. These stories weren't meant to last - they were meant to get the customer's twelve cents.
And, really, the whole reason I bought Unknown Worlds #37 was because I was fascinated by the idea of what the Great Gizmo Machine could be, and I paid a damn sight more than twelve cents for it - so even fifty years later, it's still doing the work it set out to. That, in itself, is worth recognizing.
Also, I totally want one of those Jet "Rocket" Space Ships now. I mean, only five bucks and it comes with a disintegrator gun and bomb bay, all the better to teach those goddamn aliens to fear the United States Air Force! How can you go wrong?
ANDREW'S RATING: 2/5 - the out-there craziness is just so earnest. It's almost endearing.
Previous Short SF Reviews:
- #15: "Alien Psychologist" (Erik Fennel)
- #14: "The Frontliners" (Verge Foray)
- #13: "Second Chance" (Walter Kubilius and Fletcher Pratt)
- #12: "Hades" (Charles F. Ksanda)
- #11: "Revolt of the Ants" (Milton Kaletsky)
- #10: "Blessed Are the Meekbots" (Daniel F. Galouye)
- #9: "To Make a New Neanderthal" (W. Macfarlane)
- #8: "Funnel Hawk" (Tom Ligon)
- #7: Testing... One, Two, Three, Four" (Steve Chapman)
- #6: "Bite" (Lawrence A. Perkins)
- #5: "No Shoulder to Cry On" (Hank Davis)
- #4: "Crazy Oil" (Brenda Pearce)
- #3: "The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)
- #2: "Job Inaction" (Timothy Zahn)
- #1: "Roachstompers" (S.M. Stirling)
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