Sturgeonblogging: Alaya Dawn Johnson's "They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass"

No one reading this, I hope, wants or needs a white guy to explain why it's nice to see a science fiction story narrated by a middle-aged black woman and treating the lives of black women as being of the utmost importance. And no one, I hope, wants or needs a white guy to explain that there are certain resonances in a story about a pair of black women, sisters, struggling to wrest control of reproduction, of their bodies, from an incomprehensibly alien occupying force and, to a lesser extent, from religious and social pressures that originate from within the women's own community but tend to support the occupying force. So I'll do us all a favor and leave it at saying: these things are going on in "They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass" (PDF link), and they are very good; they form the context for everything else that I'll be talking about in this post, whether I say so explicitly or not.

The "glassmen," as the characters in the story call the occupying force, arrived (all over the world? certainly as far as the characters can see) several decades ago, when Libby, the narrator, was a little girl. Their origin, alien or human, is unknown, as are their motives:

No one knows what they really look like. They only interact with us through their remote-controlled robots. Maybe they're made of glass themselves — they give us pregnancy kits, but won't bother with burn dressings. Dad says the glassmen are alien scientists studying our behavior, like a human would smash an anthill to see how they scatter. Reverend Beale always points to the pipeline a hundred miles west of us. They're just men stealing our resources, he says, like the white man stole the Africans', though even he can't say what those resources might be. It's a pipeline from nowhere, to nothing, as far as any of us know.

"Who was to say what the glassmen were doing?" Libby asks herself at one point, and answers: "Killing us, that's all we knew." Later, "No one knows why the glassmen bomb us. No one really knows the reason for the whole damn mess, their reapers and their drones and their arcane rules you're shot for not following."

Those arcane rules, though we don't hear many of them, are the key to the anxious, sort of Kafkaesque (though not Kafka-like) feeling that the story sets up. For the glassmen aren't only an incomprehensible destructive force; aside from their cluster bombs (the "seeds of glass" of the title), the primary way in which occupier interacts with occupied is much in the manner of representatives of a managing bureaucracy. Libby and her pregnant sister Tris, taken prisoner by a glassman on their way to a rumored abortion doctor (abortion being emphatically forbidden by the glassmen, who prefer that pregnant women go to glassmen-operated hospitals from which neither women nor babies return), look for words to describe him and come up with "eager" and "young," and indeed he reminds one of nothing so much as an eager young lawyer or businessman, excited to join the firm, totally committed to its ideology and goals. Many of his sentences end in exclamation points, and even many of those that don't seem to imply them. "Good news," he says to his captives at one point. "I have been authorized to escort you both to a safe hospital facility." Though it is clear that he would not allow the sisters to escape from his custody, he does not treat them as prisoners — "I think our glassman is under the impression he's doing us a favor," as Libby puts it. This attitude of bureaucratic "helpfulness" leads to some bizarre exchanges:

       "It is my job to assess mission parameter achievables. Would you mind if I asked you questions?" ...
       We spend the next few hours subjected to a tireless onslaught of questions. Things like, "How would you rate our society-building efforts in the Tidewater Region?" and "What issue would you most like to see addressed in the upcoming Societal Health Meeting?" and "Are you mostly satisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with the cleanliness of the estuary?"
       "The fish are toxic," I say to this last question. My first honest answer. It seems to startle him. At least that's how I interpret the way he clicks his front two legs together. ...
       "Well," says the glassman. "That is potentially true. We have been monitoring the unusually high levels of radiation and heavy metal toxicity. But you can rest assured that we are addressing the problem and its potential harmful side-effects on Beneficial Societal Development."
       "Like dying of mercury poisoning?" ...
       "I do not recommend it for the pregnant one! I have been serving you both nutritious foods well within the regulatory limits."

Though the bureaucratisms elicit, from time to time, a sort of rueful smile of recognition, they don't strike me here as playing the same kind of primarily comic function that they seek to play in the work of, say, a George Saunders. They form a part of the terrifyingly uncontrollable fabric of the characters' lives, as unpredictable as the cluster bombs, and as potentially deadly. The stakes are real, and they are high — and the story makes it difficult to laugh at that.

None of this so far is unprecedented; indeed much of it is well-explored territory. But Johnson plays it very well, for the most part, and at any rate the point, despite all the talk of "exhaustion" and "revitalizing genre tropes" and so forth that is always abroad in the field, is not to do something "new" for the sake of novelty, but to allow something that needs to, happen. For me, the "They Shall Salt the Earth" experience centers around the feeling I feel as the story moves to its conclusion, in many ways similar to the sort of rising awe that comes with imminent revelation in many a good sf story, but ultimately very different — because here, one knows all the while that one is feeling it that it is inappropriate, and one senses from very early on that there can be little in the way of revelation here.

The feeling I'm trying to describe is tied up in the glassmen's utter mysteriousness; their presence, in the world of the story and in the story itself as fiction, poses a question that both cries out for an answer and denies the possibility of answers. Central to this is the "pipeline from nowhere, to nothing," previously described, which Libby and Tris see close up during their captivity.

The pipeline is a perfect clear tube about sixteen feet high. It looks empty to me, a giant hollow tube that distorts the landscape on the other side like warped glass. It doesn't run near the bay, and no one from home knows enough to plot it on a map. Maybe this is the reason the glassmen are here. I wonder what could be so valuable in that hollow tube that Tris has to give birth in a cage, that little Georgia has to die, that a cluster bomb has to destroy half our wheat crop. What's so valuable that looks like nothing at all?

Looked at one way, a pipeline seeming to carry nothing from nowhere to nowhere could be seen merely as a metaphor for whatever the reader has decided the story Is About: rampant environmental destruction, racism, misogyny, the interface of any of these with the capitalism they power and are powered by, what have you — any of these could be the metaphorical answer to Libby's question here. And to be sure these notions do resonate powerfully. But, decades of clueless academic intervention notwithstanding, neither metaphor nor allegory on their own are fruitful ways to read (or to write) science fiction. However allusive, elliptical, or "poetic" — not to mention political! — it may choose to be at any given moment, sf plants its flag firmly in the literal, where lie its most basic strengths and weaknesses alike. And so while we can find whatever metaphors we like, and be affected by them as powerfully as the story's abilities and our own allow, we cannot stop there — we must confront the pipeline's literal presence in the story — which confrontation must necessarily take place in the context of all of these metaphors and social and political significances.

So what is the pipeline? In many ways it is what the SF Encyclopedia calls a Big Dumb Object,* but the meanings of the first two words in that term are different here than when they are applied to the "classic" BDOs — and this difference defines to a large extent the ways in which "They Shall Salt the Earth" is an experience unique to itself. Rather than having, as Larry Niven's Ringworld famously does, a surface area greater than all of the planets of Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire combined, it merely (merely!) "doesn't run near the bay, and no one from home knows enough to plot it on a map." And unlike, say, Arthur C. Clarke's Rama, the pipeline's "dumbness" consists not in disinterested — and passive — silence but in active obfuscation.

*I'm not linking to the online entry because they have alas pulled back from the term's use, preferring the much less descriptive, and more blandly respectable, "macrostructure". In the entry in my 1995 print edition, Peter Nicholls credits Roz Kaveney as the possible originator of the term. I'm choosing, incidentally, to interpret the word "dumb" as meaning "mute" rather than "stupid", as this is to me both the more relevant and the more interesting option.

Only those who have the power to define what knowledge is — and this is a structural power, based on countless violences — can simply assume that the search for knowledge will always be possible, and can always be fulfilled. When the world you are made to live in has never been perfectly explicable in your terms, at your leisure, when you have no expectation that things exist in order for you to grasp them (literally and figuratively), "no one from home knows enough to plot it on a map" is big enough to be Big — and what masquerades as helpfulness is worse than silence, worse than disinterestedness.

So. When this Big Enough Worse Than Dumb Object, practically by structural dint of its presence in the story alone, creates that aforementioned feeling of rising awe — the prelude to sensawunda, if you will — it creates with it a contradiction at the heart of this story, which seems almost like it should have no room for awe. It is disconcerting to feel that some wondrous revelation is imminent when one knows that it is not, or that if it is, it will be only a sign of the writer's betrayal of her own vision — and there is no such betrayal here. The closest we come to an explanation of the pipeline is in the passage where another prisoner, taking advantage of a moment when the glassman is temporarily deactivated (that is, the person controlling it, wherever he is, seems to be occupied elsewhere), proposes the theory that it is a wormhole.

       "A passage through space, that's what I heard."
       "That is incorrect!"
       The three of us snap our heads around, startled to see the glassman so close. His eyes whirr with excitement. "The Designated Area Project is not what you refer to as a wormhole, which are in fact impractical as transportation devices." ...
       "Then what is it?" she asks, so plainly that Simon's mouth opens, just a little.
       Our glassman stutters forward on his delicate metallic legs. "I am not authorized to tell you," he says, clipped.
       "Why not? It's the whole goddamned reason all your glassman reapers and drones and robots are swarming all over the place, isn't it? We don't even get to know what the hell it's all for?"
       "Societal redevelopment is one of our highest mission priorities," he says, a little desperately.

Any reader remotely similar to me is fascinated here. A wormhole? In a pipeline? Intriguing! Does the urgency with which the glassman denies it mean that it's true? Does the "what you refer to as" and the (accidentally?) dropped information that wormholes are "in fact impractical" imply that the glassmen are aliens? There are three pages left in the story — what might they contain? But at the same time, the reader knows that in this story there is no guarantee that questions like this can be answered. In this story there is no privileged right to know everything — attempts towards knowledge can simply be cut off at a whim, or by an anonymous official's sudden "I am not authorized to tell you" followed by some bureaucratic platitude as firm as it is empty. At any rate, surely those last three pages will have to be more concerned with simple survival than anything else (even the conversation about the wormhole is as much a cover for an escape attempt as it is a search for information). And indeed the last three pages are filled with survival. And so the reader is left trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, to try to grasp the immense in a world so restricted as to have no room for it.

In case anyone (still) reading this post (hello!) is maybe unfamiliar with the positive use of words like "contradiction", "irreconcilable" and "disconcerting", let me say straight out: this has all been praise. Where the story is irreconcilable, it lives.

Like "The Weight of the Sunrise," "They Shall Salt the Earth" is shortlisted not just for the Sturgeon but for the Nebula as well. That this double honor should be shared by two stories with such, shall we say, different merits led to me to wonder — why? And I suspect that it has much to do with those elements of this story that I do not think deserve praise, those aspects of it that threaten to overcome what is important about it. For the one thing that both stories (and "Bloom", for that matter) have in common is that they are very writerly — by which I mean, they very much desire to be "beautifully written". But is such a desire appropriate?

There is a thing people do over and over again, that other people praise over and over again, where stories of deep rupture are told as though there were no rupture, as though the stories we've been telling ourselves all along can just continue on unaffected no matter what's going on. As though skill and competence and mastery were not only of the utmost importance and appropriateness now (a doubtful proposition) but surely would remain so, unchanged, on the other side of a rupture. As though a story so much concerned with the lack of control should be tightly controlled. I've talked about this before, and while this story is not nearly so compromised by these problems as the one I discussed there (which also was going for a very different kind of mastery), it is compromised.

Or at least I think it is. But people insist upon writing stories this way, and other people seem to find great power in it. Why? What is the power of, for example, sentences like these, taken from two different parts of the story?

I lean back in the boat, the canvas of our food sack rough and comforting on my slick skin, like Mom's gloves when she first taught me to plant seeds.

I have lots of time to wonder about those marks; hour after slow hour with a rattling truck bruising my tailbone and regrets settling into my joints like dried tears.

What is the power of sentences such as these — sentences that seem to me so woefully inadequate to their task — that people return to them, as readers and writers, over and over again?* As a reader, I feel like I'm being asked — and not only, or even primarily, by Johnson — to nod approvingly and say, "Oh, good job, lovely." But what room is there in this story for "good job"? What room is there for "lovely"?

*Please don't come at me with an explanation of the similes. Though the one in the second sentence seems pretty much like a misfire to me, my problem does not lie in a failure to grasp what these sentences seek to mean.

On the second page of the story, we read: "We have a nice smile, Tris and I." Fine. Given the unhappy circumstances of the story, and the childhood reminiscences that surround this sentence, there's a certain melancholy weight to the observation. Not a big deal of a sentence, I have no complaints, no reason to particularly notice it either way. The story goes on, the experience is had, and then it ends with this final, short paragraph:

We have the same smile, my sister and I. It's a nice smile, even when it's scared and a little sad.

And....OK? Again, I understand the meaning this is seeking to convey. But to convey it this way? To me it just seems, once more, inappropriate: a pat conclusion, attaching neatly to something at the beginning of the story, a nice bow to complete the package — in a story that, admirably, has no conclusions to offer, refuses to be neat, and, though it contains beauty, does not deal in prettiness. Once or twice, the story seems to acknowledge the problems with trying to conduct itself this way, as when Libby tells us early on that "Wishful thinking is a powerful curse, almost as bad as storytelling." This reminds me a bit of Lorrie Moore's one good story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" (which I have touched on in the past), in the way that it seems Libby is saying: I know that what I'm doing is unacceptable, but it's all I know how to do. But here, these one or two isolated instances have nothing to attach to, and so they fall flat — and the problem remains. As with Bossert's "Bloom", the good outweighs the bad, and I am pleased that this story has received some well-deserved recognition. But I confess that I am bemused, and troubled, by the persistence of this kind of problem, even in cases such as these where it can be, mostly, overlooked.

Sturgeonblogging: Vylar Kaftan's "The Weight of the Sunrise"

IMPORTANT NOTE
On the off-chance that you've come here via that one white-straight-cis-male supremacist whose unhinged, novel-length screed links to this post, pretending that it supports his points: I would like to state for the record that I repudiate both his misuse of my work and his view of the world, which is as deeply ignorant as it is repellent. His total misrepresentation of the points I raise in this post can only arise from willful — and unethical — distortion, unfathomable stupidity, or both. (I suspect at least the former, considering his careful cherry-picking of individual sentences and stringing them together as though they were consecutive, which is not the case, not to mention that I guess he skipped over the part where I say that the post came out of what I've learned from, among others, black women revolutionaries and communists.) This post is among other things a critique of whiteness, albeit necessarily from within and therefore inevitably compromised. And for anyone who may have forgotten, I would like to remind them that criticism of liberals and liberalism can in fact come from directions other than the right.

[Considering the subject of this essay, I think it is important to place these pieces of information: I am a white American man. To the best of my knowledge, Vylar Kaftan is a white American woman (if she's not white, my problems with the story as it is written and as it seems to me to engage with whiteness remain, though I acknowledge that her right to state an opinion on most of these issues would trump mine). My take on the issues at stake here is in part my attempt to reflect what I have learned from the works of radical thinkers, activists, and revolutionaries of color such as Angela Y. Davis, Assata Shakur, Malcolm X, Paula Gunn Allen, and W.E.B. Du Bois, and many more whose accounts of their knowledge and experience I have been able to get a glimpse of through twitter and other online forums, most particularly Lauren Chief Elk and @prisonculture (do follow through to their websites as well). I mention these names (which should not be considered a comprehensive list) not in an attempt to give myself authority, of which I have none, but so as not to claim that I generated the knowledges that have informed my opinions here myself. If and where I am right, it is because of them; if and where I am wrong, it is because of me.]

With its very first sentence "The Weight of the Sunrise" (PDF link) establishes itself as a tale told by a grandfather to his grandson, a piece of family history passed down orally to explain to the grandson who he is and where he came from as he reaches the age of manhood. But though there are some desultory returns to this framing scattered throughout, the fact is that the story simply does not commit to its chosen form; reading, one gets no sense that Kaftan is even aware of what such a commitment would require. Stories told out loud, passed down from one generation to another, are radically different in purpose and in form from stories written down in solitude and published impersonally in wide-circulation magazines. When one of the latter pretends to be the former, it needs to keep awareness of this difference, either by making the pretense plain — making it the substance of the story itself — or by truly behaving as an oral story, embracing fully the strangeness of the conversion of spoken words into the silent words on the page. Kaftan does neither. Instead, she gives us a totally ordinary written narrative, moving along inexorably from its start to its finish, engaging in all of the behavior characteristic of the American short story form as it has ossified since the middle decades of the 20th century. I could quote passages at you to show you what I mean, but it would be pointless and arbitrary. Take any passage from the story, any at all, except perhaps (perhaps) for those few sections in which the narrator is speaking explicitly to his grandson, and imagine them read out loud. Where are you, who are you? You can only be in the audience at a reading, listening to and appreciating (or not) the work of an artist for its aesthetic merits; you cannot be a member of a community, hearing another member turn his own experience into the life and truth of that community.

This formal failure is just one facet of a much larger problem. Throughout, though she gestures at it from time to time, Kaftan shows very little awareness that different places, times, and peoples carry with them different ways of looking at, knowing, and talking about the world and the things and events in it. And this is a major problem, because although the story she has written is set two hundred years ago, in an alternate world in which the Inca empire survived both smallpox and the Spanish, and is narrated by an Inca man, its worldview is not noticeably different from that of the typical contemporary Western white liberal.

The story deals with the arrival in the empire of an American diplomat, Loddington. He is a planter and revolutionary from Virginia, seeking the independence of the colonies from the British for much the same reason that the wealthy colonial landowners did in our own world's American Revolution, though a few decades later here. He has come to the Inca empire — which was able to survive smallpox by slowing its spread through the use of quarantine, developed by its own scientists, but has been unable to stop the disease — hoping to sell them a newly-developed vaccine in exchange for enough gold to fund the revolution. The Incas, to whom gold is not currency but a sacred substance, are reluctant to pay, but given the necessity of stopping smallpox are nevertheless considering, as the narrator puts it, "selling our gods for the people's health." The narrator, Lanchi, had been an ordinary peasant farmer, but because members of his family contracted and survived smallpox they have been elevated to a sort of honorary noble status, which has become the tradition in the centuries since the arrival of the disease with the Europeans. He becomes involved with Loddington and the events his arrival sets off because, given his elevation and his vague familiarity with English (his grandfather was an English trader who assimilated into Inca society), he is the only man of suitably high rank who can serve as a translator between Loddington and the Inca royalty.

Lanchi is at every turn indistinguishable from that aforementioned typical liberal. He is a Family Man, living with and taking care of his contemporary-American-structured nuclear family.* As with every modern pater familias living out the intersection of patriarchy and ideological capitalist individualism (despite the story giving us no reason to think that his society possesses the latter, and plenty of reason to believe it shouldn't), he behaves as if his family were nothing more or less than an extension of himself, and as such he is far more concerned with their individual well-being than with the near collapse of his people's entire social, political, and religious structure and way of life that occurs within the story, which elicits hardly more than a "meh" from him. At the same time, he displays the good liberal behavior of fretting about the suffering only of those whose suffering is shown to him for political purposes, and desiring the freedom only of those his people's enemies have enslaved.** The story's inability to imagine what anyone significantly different would actually be like extends so far as to include a scene of Lanchi — who grew up both a farmer, working the land, and a member of a sacramental society in which animal sacrifice is commonplace — exhibiting a prim distaste at the sight of animal slaughter, much as contemporary cosmopolitans prefer that the animals we eat be killed elsewhere.

*The story treats this as typical. I will confess that I am no expert on Inca family structures, but I think it is safe to say that they were not this similar in both their material and emotional bonds to those that arose in response to the specific pressures of post-WWII American capitalism. (At roughly the same time and for many of the same reasons as the development of the particular short story form Kaftan is limited to, in fact.)
**That is to say, good instincts distorted for ideological purposes, pointing only in useful directions.

This inability of the story to inhabit its own milieu is perhaps most damning in one of its major subplots, in which in order to make up for the gods-displeasing loss of so much gold the Inca High Priest plans to sacrifice twelve hundred children — and because Lanchi has now come so much to the attention of the nobility, he is certain that his own daughter will be one of them. I do not mean to suggest that it is inappropriate for him to be upset about this, but the way in which he is upset about it rings utterly false. Or rather, perhaps, it is the way that Kaftan makes use of his feelings in the face of this possibility that bothers me. For one thing, it is clearly a stakes-raising device, Kaftan trying to use her contemporary audience's presumed values to make them care more about what's going on. Worse, it is a way for her to distance Lanchi in the reader's eyes from his culture's sacrificial tradition — without which distancing he could not easily be "likeable" to readers from a culture that rejects human sacrifice (or more accurately, prefers its human sacrifice, like its animal slaughter, to be performed elsewhere). Even at a point when the proposed deal with Loddington has led to a rupture between the High Priest and the Sapa Inca (the religious and political leaders, respectively, both considered gods), a rupture that has become public as the High Priest performs a ceremony to determine "whether the bargain offered is satisfactory" — that is, even at a point where the stakes are so high as, basically, civil war on earth and in heaven, Lanchi is unimpressed:

       "I hope the omens are good," I said.
       "So do we all," he said. "Some are troubled, including myself. It is unwise that the High Priest should openily question the Sapa Inca's will. It's one thing to speak from his chair sometimes, but another entirely to consult the gods about another god's decision." ...
       I decided he must be nervous, and perhaps even looking to someone as unimportant as myself for guidance. ... I said, "Maybe the gods will confirm the Sapa Inca's decision."
       "I hope so," he said distractedly, and left for another room. Meanwhile, I hoped with all my heart that the entrails would say otherwise, that I might not worry about my daughter's fate, entangled with the fates of other children in the Four Quarters.

This is astonishing, but again Kaftan seems to think nothing of it. Mixed feelings I could understand; a conflict between public and private obligations, an inability to decide between them, sure. But for Lanchi to "hope with all his heart," to actively desire that the entire material and spiritual foundation of his society be torn apart in order that he not have to "worry" about his daughter is nothing less than the projection of modern, rationalized, non-sacramental, individualistic subjectivity onto someone who should possess an entirely different kind of subjectivity. It is nothing less than intellectual imperialism.

It is not only that contemporary liberal values are imposed on Lanchi; it is that they are imposed on everything. The story implicitly believes in capital-p Progress: that it is axiomatically A Good Thing, that it is inevitable, and that there is only one direction — namely, towards those same contemporary liberal values — in which it can move. This can perhaps best be seen in the fact that, in the story, the Incas survive — and immediately start reforming away from everything that the liberal of today wouldn't like about them. Sacrifice has been abolished by the time Lanchi tells his tale, and Lanchi himself has ushered in an age of universal (implied, standardized) education. I'm not saying that these and other similar changes are or are not plausible, are or are not desirable — only that Kaftan clearly assumes that they are both, and furthermore has no sense that these are enormous and fundamental transformations with incalculable ramifications on every element of Inca life. Instead, she treats them as though they were nothing more than, say, a minor change in campaign finance law to feel victorious about at the next Netroots conference.

Far, far worse, with all of this she all but says: the Incas needed to be overthrown, it's true, but wouldn't it have been nicer if they could have overthrown themselves through reform, in the name of tolerance and diversity, rather than having to be slaughtered?

All of this, I think, is wrapped up in a view of the world that treats the past in a way both teleological and instrumental: progress is unidirectional and inevitable (though always with embarrassing hiccups like genocide and slavery, which like all problems exist in order to be solved — because if there were no problems to be solved, how could there be progress?), and the purpose of the past is to lead to the better present. Past ways of being are to be respected and valued not on their own terms but only insofar as they were precursors to — sometimes "primitive" versions of — our current way of being. I doubt that, if asked, Kaftan would say that she felt this way, probably she neither means to nor thinks she does,* but I see no other worldview that could have produced a story such as this. And considering such a worldview, it is no surprise that the story treats everything — from history (real and imagined) to culture to its own sequence of events — as little more than resources to be made use of as it plods on to its conclusion. Nothing simply is; everything that happens does so in order that something else can happen. In one of its fictional aspects this instrumental worldview is often praised as "tight plotting." I'm not so sure it should be praised — certainly, at least, not when it's like this.

*And I hope it's clear that I'm not, like, imputing active deliberate evil to her or anything. Part of the reason I feel I recognize these dynamics is that I used to/still do participate in them myself.

Perhaps the most horrific example of this is when it is revealed that Loddington has been transporting the vaccine — which is nothing more than the pus from cowpox boils — in the bodies of very young slave children, chained to their beds, where they lie in agony, in their own filth. It is admittedly difficult to write about such a subject without either recoiling in horror or descending into maudlin performances of empty sorrow — but it is the responsibility of the writer confronting it to avoid both. Kaftan does, all right — but she does so by using the revelation primarily as negotiating leverage for Lanchi, and storytelling leverage for herself. This taken care of, the story moves on — gotta get to that conclusion!

Every once in a while, the story is able to break out of these limitations. There is a nice moment when Lanchi learns of the method of vaccination and is able immediately to incorporate it into Inca ways of knowing, rather than European. And at the climax of the story, the use of lying and theft to get the vaccine to the people who need it, rather than "honest" monetary exchange with Loddington, is treated as heroic — where what you'd expect from the typical liberal in response to such methods would be some variation on "I approve of your goals but I can't condone your actions," followed perhaps by some muttering about "the rule of law."

Both moments, and one or two others, are to Kaftan's credit, but it is too little, too late. And not only because of all of the specific issues I have discussed thus far, but because of the fundamental distastefulness of the story's concept. What it really boils down to is, "Wouldn't it be nice if that people we wiped out had survived long enough to (symbolically at least) free that other people we enslaved?" My first reaction was that this is downright obscene. In an email responding to my description of this aspect of the story, a friend suggested the more charitable interpretation that perhaps the story is suggesting that white people as a group are too much a lost cause to be trusted to solve the problems we created, that it would be best if we were just taken out of things altogether (a proposition it's hard to argue against). And it's true that the one real white character in the story is presented very negatively, while the major black character and several Inca characters are presented very positively. But the problem is — how are positive and negative being defined? Who is claiming the right to define them? To what end, to whose benefit?

The territory this story treads upon is so fraught that it seems to me that white people should just stay out of it, at least in the way this story deals with it.* With respect to racism, the responsibility of white writers is to explore our own experiences of whiteness, not to ventriloquize people of color. A white person should be telling this story, if at all, from Loddington's point of view — should be examining what, in her whiteness, she has in common with him, rather than distancing herself from him as an obvious villain. But this kind of examination is too dangerous for the liberal mind, whose self-definition is based upon a fundamental assumption of righteousness. On a more prosaic (but intimately related) level, telling the story from Loddington's point of view would have given less of an opportunity for the kind of feel-good conclusion the entire story points itself towards, the vaguely warm-and-fuzzy ending in which everything turns out for the best.

*Again, I am writing under the impression that Kaftan is white. As I said before, if she is not, the story as written still strikes me as problematic in all of these ways, but obviously some of this would not apply, and at any rate I do not make it my business to tell people of color how to talk about race.

It is frankly embarrassing that "The Weight of the Sunrise" has now been nominated for both the Nebula and the Sturgeon, two awards with pretentions towards seriousness — embarrassing, but not surprising. It is exactly the kind of self-congratulatory story whose flattery the white liberal ego easily confuses with greatness (I speak from some experience, alas), making one overlook its overwhelming clumsiness and dullness, and my sense is that the majority of the Nebula voters, and certainly of the Sturgeon jury, are precisely that kind of white liberal. It is embarrassing, but not surprising — and too it is perhaps appropriate that even now a story like this can be nominated for two serious science fiction awards: for its imperial instrumentalization of the "Other" and of times other than the present is a central, I almost want to say fundamental, aspect of science fiction — one that the field has long rewarded. I wish it would stop.

Sturgeonblogging: Gregory Norman Bossert's "Bloom"

[Niall Harrison ordered me to write about the Sturgeon Award shortlist and so, faithful servant that I am, here we are. I have no idea how much I'll be able to stick to this, but my plan is to write about each of the ten stories on the shortlist, hopefully two a week (probably Monday and Thursday if I can keep it up), which would get us through the whole list, maybe even with time for a summation post if I feel both the need and the ambition, before the award is given in mid-June. Oh, and if it need be said: these posts will contain spoilers, so be warned, etc.]

The titular "Bloom" here, native to the plains of an exoplanet, is a ground-covering colony lifeform. Compared at times to an ant colony and to an algal bloom (it also calls to my mind a coral reef in its mix of different organisms), it is only roughly analogous to any of these. Blooms are slow-moving as a rule, but when one detects an organism in its midst it can dismantle and consume it in a matter of seconds. (Of a human victim, whose death happened to be filmed, one character says "He just . . . blew apart." Another corrects her, saying it was only his own blood pressure that made it look like he blew up, when really he was "stripped down," that the Bloom kills by "reduc[ing] the subject down as efficiently as possible without losing elements outside the colony.") Little is known about their sensory capabilities and limitations (or their sentience; they exhibit behavior, learning, perhaps even personality, though they are presumed not to be conscious), but we are told that movement, moisture, and salt, among other things, can "trigger" them to attack. As the tale begins three people, out at night on the surface of the planet, find themselves accidentally standing in a momentarily dormant Bloom; given the situation, they have little option (though they discuss many) other than to remain utterly still in the pitch-dark night and hope that someone at their base (which they have all, for different reasons, left without signing out) notices that they are gone and comes looking for them. As the tale ends, they have not been found, the rising sun threatens to rouse the Bloom, and in varying types of desperation all three leap, some toward the edge and some toward the center of the Bloom, not knowing what will happen to them.

Though it includes a great deal of tension (not to mention some very disquieting gore, reported secondhand), this is fundamentally a story of stasis, the kind I once wished Kim Stanley Robinson would let himself linger in more often. Here the stasis is quite literal; aside from an occasional shudder or eye rub, and some careful squatting very early on, the three human characters make no physical movements whatsoever until the last four sentences. They cannot move, they cannot see; all they can do is talk — and talk they do. In one strand of conversation we discover that two of the characters, Ben and Andrea, had gone outside for sex — though her primary interest was simply in going out, seeing the stars from the surface of an alien planet for the first time. In another, we learn that the third, our viewpoint character Ki, just over three and a half years ago was the survivor of a rare aborted Bloom attack, an attack that has left her with not only disfiguring scars but also "little pockets of alien DNA" scattered throughout her body, where the surgeons were unable to remove the pieces of Bloom that had embedded themselves in her body. Literally and figuratively alienated from human society — an alienation which, perhaps, began even before the attack — she spends most nights out on the surface, yelling at the Blooms to finish what they started.

All this talk, and Ki's thoughts prompted by the talk and the situation, take the writing through a number of different modes, many of them nakedly expository. My regular reader [sic] will know that to me this is one of the most important aspects of sf, and here, though at times there is a bit too much of the smoothing I have complained about before in other works, for the most part it is very strong. Perhaps best are the moments when a more standard "storytelling" mode gives way suddenly to the language of scientific discourse, forcing the reader to come to terms with the meanings generated by the juxtaposition. A bit before midway through, Ben is antagonizing Ki (in a way we are given to understand is common among the men of the base); Andrea tells him to shut up. A moment passes and then:

       "The hell with shutting up," Ben said, and shouted, "Hey! Help!"
       The sound ripped through Ki like a shockwave, tore her from herself; it was as if she was collapsing inward and reeling away at the same time. One part of her swirled down into a grinding, buzzing dimness threaded by low angry voices. The other part tried to fly in all directions at once and avoided falling only because it could not remember which way was down.
       Ki could not tell if either part was here and now or three years seven months four days ago.

So far this is, as I said before, fairly standard storytelling, on its own perhaps a bit too much "fine writing" for my liking, its metaphors ("collapsing inward and reeling away at the same time") perhaps a bit too on the nose considering the manner in which the Bloom kills. But immediately following:

       After a measureless moment, the shock rippled out through her fingers and toes. Epinephrine and norepinephrine, she thought — fight-or-flight and neither one is a damn option — and with that thought she was whole and here and now.

It's a small thing — and not an unusual gesture for sf — and very brief, but for me the collision of the "storytelling" and scientific discourses calls both into question; specifically, the scientistic reductionism Ki engages in here (and throughout such scientism is calming, centering for her) in this fraught context both insists upon its validity and performs its own critique of itself (both with "neither one is a damn option" and with "whole and here and now"). This doubleness is not only appropriate but necessary in a tale that, Lem-like, deals heavily in the failure of human understanding in the face of the alien, but finds within itself more optimism, or at least more respect for human striving, than Lem ever did. (In this what it perhaps puts me in mind of more than Lem is Genevieve Valentine's recent essay at Strange Horizons on cinematic representations of the dangers and wonders of space exploration.)

I said before that all the characters can do is talk. This is not strictly true; they can also not talk. Though so far I have discussed only what they talk about (and what Ki thinks about), there is one other major component to "Bloom": the silence into which they repeatedly lapse, these lapses being the primary structuring element here. The "story" occurs only in brief snippets of dialogue and narration placed between

       silence

just like that, the one word, uncapitalized, italicized, without punctuation, on a line by itself, surrounded by white space. There are thirty-one of these silences over the course of thirteen magazine pages, separated at the most by about one page, at the least by one six-word sentence.

I find myself torn between admiration that Bossert has explicitly included the silence in his tale and irritation that he includes it merely as a gesture. On the one hand, isolating these silences and letting them structure the telling of what happens in between makes them much more difficult to ignore or miss than they would be if he had used one of the typical dodges (e.g., a section break followed by "Fifteen minutes later...") that writers use to reassure themselves and us that there is no silence, no dark, no emptiness. But on the other, it is all too easy for the "solution" to become a mere tic, a stylistic extravagance purposelessly taking the place of a stylistic commonplace. The question, I suppose, is whether pointing at absence is more or less of a betrayal of absence than is trying to fill it. On balance, I think I see Bossert's silence as an invitation into the work of that which no work can ever contain, of all stories' ultimate failure, and that I truly admire.

I felt a similar ambivalence in the face of the unresolved ending, which at first I found frustrating — though not because I demand "resolution" from fiction; quite the contrary! But in this case, stopping things mid-leap, with neither the characters nor the reader knowing whether any of them survive, felt like the wrong kind of irresolution. Surely, I thought, everything depends upon whether these characters live or die, for everything we have read up until now is about what they do in the face of life and death, and not only the story but the fundamental reason for its being told depends on which they were facing. On reflection, though, I found myself thinking differently. For if they live, they simply live, and life goes on; but should they die it is no different — the event we have watched unfold remains unchanged. As Maurice Blanchot wrote,

One never dies now, one always dies later, in the future — in a future which is never an actuality, which cannot come except when everything will be over and done. And when everything is over, there will be no more present: the future will again be past. This leap by which the past catches up with the future, overstepping the present, is the sense of human death, death permeated with humanity.

And in this sense "Bloom" is not about death, at least not in the sense I was originally thinking; it is not about death as an event but rather as a presence in the mind, a presence in the body.* Which is to say that it is about life, living, and though it is full of drama the unfolding event that is "Bloom" is finally nothing more or less than that of three people living their lives one night.

*Since I've brought Blanchot into it, I might as well mention my amusement that Bossert finishes with a literal "leap", considering the way Blanchot (or Ann Smock, whose translation of The Space of Literature I am quoting) uses the word here and elsewhere to describe the movement of both death and the work of art. What is at stake in both leaps, Bossert's and Blanchot's, strikes me as surprisingly similar.

And yet because this is science fiction, this simple event is placed in a particular way that similar events are not in other kinds of fiction. Early on, in explaining the predicament they're in, Ki says:

"A Bloom event, well, if you consider the colony a single creature, it wakes up, eats, moves, and goes back to sleep. But for the individual organisms that make up the colony, it's an entire lifecycle; whole generations feed, reproduce, and die."

To have this colony be the threat in a story of humans living their lives one night while playing roles in humanity's ravenous expansion into space — well, it's suggestive, to say the least. And (another of sf's characteristic gestures) Bossert gives us enough similarity between the Bloom and humanity as a whole to suggest this parallel while elsewhere giving us so many differences as to destroy it. Identification falters in the face of its own violence. We see ourselves in the alien, but in so doing we deny the alien, fail to comprehend it; to the extent that we recognize this, we cease to see ourselves. (Bossert complicates this even further by suggesting a literal incorporation of the alien into the human, Ki, and vice versa — for the Bloom that attacked her, we are told, has been acting different ever since.)

All this being said, I find myself still with some strong reservations. I said before that the writing is too much concerned with being "fine," and this is true. A work dealing so heavily with the failure of the mind when facing things it cannot contain should not be so concerned with being told "masterfully," especially not with that particular sameness that marks so much of the "best-written" contemporary sf. But though it's bothersome, I can mostly overlook this. Far more troubling, though I suspect arising from the same place (as we shall see in a moment), are the story's frequent efforts to be just that — a story. By revolving around three people with different needs, different histories, different feelings, it strongly resists, becoming instead what I have described it as before, the unfolding of an event. But especially in Ki's internal monologue, her struggles with her past and her present nature, it threatens to become just another story of rising action leading to climax and epiphany, taking its form not from life as it is lived but from the many layers of obfuscation wrapped around life by the conditions of modernity and the forms of storytelling those conditions have encouraged — and by taking this form, it threatens in its turn to further that obfuscation. Everything I have written about up until now militates against this, and for this the story is to be praised — to read it is to experience something occurring, not simply to be granted a moment's cheap and false emotion — but here is a story that wants to be better than it is, without even seeming to realize that it does want this, that there is a problem with what it is.

In this regard, the blurb that introduces the story is telling — and strengthens my conviction that writing workshops are bad news. We are told that Bossert wrote the first draft at the Clarion Writers' Workshop, and that he "would like to gratefully acknowledge the help from his Clarion colleagues in finding the human story in a strange and alien landscape." What is easy to overlook in the thrill of workshopping, of "improving" a story based on "feedback" from the group, is that not every enterprise calls for the same things. I suspect that much of the fine writing I've complained about now three times comes from the workshop mentality, thinking that it is at the resolution of the sentence that greatness is to be found; and the presence at all of that wholly inappropriate thing, a "human story" in an "alien landscape," is most certainly a product of this mentality, whether or not Bossert would have sought to include one without specifically workshoppy feedback (I suspect he would have either way, more's the pity).

An event unfolds: the human reaction to the alien, culminating in an unfinished leap, beyond which is either death or, equally unknowable, life. This is human, yes, but it is not "a human story," not in the sense those words are commonly understood to have. "Bloom" deserves recognition precisely to the extent that it resists the human story that Bossert's workshop friends "helped" him find, and falters precisely to the extent that it is willing to be merely another story.

reading Russ: The early poetry (1954-1957)

reading Russ table of contents

I am not, perhaps, the best person to discuss Joanna Russ's early poems. My knowledge of and ability to write about poetry are limited at best, and certainly I am not competent to talk about these works in the context of their time and place, as I have next to no idea of what that context was. What poetry were people writing and reading in America's mid-1950s? I know there were the beats; I think Black Mountain and Denise Levertov's move to the United States were about this time; but that's about it, and at any rate would the teenage Russ have been familiar with this work? I don't really know. But context or no, I've read these poems, out of a general interest in Russ-the-writer, and I'd like to talk about them.

When I speak of the "early poems," I'm referring to a body of work consisting, to the best of my knowledge, only of fifteen short poems published between 1954 and 1957 (when Russ was between the ages of 17 and 20) — twelve in the student-run Cornell Writer and three in Cornell's more official literary journal Epoch.* I have these poems, thanks to the intrepid ILL efforts of a certain lezbrarian without whom I shudder to think, on a number of photocopied sheets stapled together. Some of these pages — all from The Cornell Writer — include other poems from some of Russ's classmates, none of whose names are familiar to me (no surprise Thomas Pynchon juvenilia, say, though he did work on the journal for part of the time Russ was at Cornell and might well have some work elsewhere in it), and judging from these her poetry was largely of a piece with that of her cohort. It's mainly free verse tending to the formally conservative, with self-consciously elevated and historical (if not pretentious) vocabulary and imagery; in all one gets much more of a sense of "I want to be a poet" than of poetry actually occurring in these pages. Which is, of course, fine; I hate to think what anyone might make of anything I wrote between 17 and 20, and I can hardly claim to have reached the level Russ would attain even just a few years later!

*I know there are a few other poems from this period theoretically available, but I have limited myself to published works for this read-through (not that I wouldn't be interested in reading unpublished works! — but travel to archives is not, alas, always feasible). Several of her later works could also be considered poems — "It's Important to Believe" and "A Short and Happy Life" come to mind — but these are so far as I know the last of her readily recognizable verse poems.

Brit Mandelo, in the only study of these poems that I know to exist, points out that "[t]heir significance as poetry is tied inextricably to their significance as early works of a major writer." This is true, but I must say that at least at this early stage of my familiarity with these poems I do not see the bulk of them as being particularly significant even in these terms. Stilted poems like 1954's "Autumn" — as uninspired a bit of seasonal description as any wannabe poet ever wrote — are perhaps mildly interesting in the sense that it can be heartening to see that even the best writers have also written awkward trivialities, but for me, at least so far, they provide essentially no insight into those of Russ's works that matter.

However! I agree with Mandelo that a small handful of these poems show the young Russ to be a writer with something going on; indeed there are some moments here that I think rise above specialist-only interest. Surprisingly, one of these is the first — to my knowledge the very first work Russ ever published anywhere: 1954's "Some Day Again." After a somewhat embarrassing excited-to-be-at-college opening ("this ivied corner"), the first stanza deals nicely with an imagined reappearance of Saint Francis in the modern world. He, "Perhaps some day again,"

Trembling with wings and bright eyes,
Will walk into the sunlight and the gray stone
Bearing silently the silent wound of hard beaks on calloused hands,
Bearing corn in his saint's hands, corn and a slower time.

The language here interests me, particularly the "Bearing silently the silent wound," with its interplay of different but overlapping silences (which then feeds into the further interplay created by the repetition in slightly different contexts of the words "bearing" and "hands"). And the portrayal of Francis as sort of uncomfortable and frightening — wounded by his birds, his being surrounded by them not idyllic but strange, "trembling" — is intriguing. I admit I don't actually know enough about the saint to judge whether he's being deployed to any meaningful advantage here, but the difference between the sort of vaguely soft and nice received image of him I usually have and the much more worrisome picture called up here reminds me, perhaps idiosyncratically, of Buffy Sainte-Marie's astonishing "Mary," in which the listener is made by both word and sound to consider not the joy or the tranquility but the terror that also comes with knowing that one must become the mother of God.

The second stanza shifts to a consideration of what Mandelo describes as "the dangers of the well-lit empty rooms of a home," while the third and last stanza, which even visually is startlingly brief in comparison with the first two, shifts again to speak of the seasonal changes implicit even in a tree dormant in winter. The connection between the stanzas at first seems tenuous at best. Mandelo criticizes the disjunction, but for me it is useful to focus on the last word of the first stanza, "time," to see what, I believe, Russ is going for here. For the entire poem is concerned with time, and not just time as a singular thing but the different kinds of time, and different motions within them. The first stanza begins by bringing the past (Francis) into the present, or more particularly into a hypothetical future ("some day"), and closes with the invocation of "a slower time"; indeed it is the figure of the past that comes "bearing" this slower time, along with corn — which, as I read, suggests that the "slower time" is that cyclical time in which there is not onrushing linear progress but return ("some day again"), the seasonal time in which crops like corn are sown, grown, harvested, and sown again. But then the opening of the second stanza brings into play a second meaning of the phrase "a slower time" — that is, the commonly-held notion of a past time in which life was slower, a time we have lost in exchange for Progress (a time, of course, in which people's lives were more bound up in the other sense I have ascribed to "a slower time"). That stanza in its entirety, coming immediately after the phrase ("bearing...a slower time") that I have singled out as the poem's hinge:

Oh we are wiser now, or know at least
Not to look for witches in the outside wind
Or in the massy midnight under trees
But in a lit and empty room, unshadowed,
Knowing well the heart-land where the Black Sabbath lies.

We are wiser now, perhaps; but what has progress gained us? We may know better where to look for them, but there are still witches (on which more in a moment) — the techno-scientific eradication of shadows has not eradicated the "Black Sabbath" of the heart. But perhaps even progress is not so all-consuming as that ambiguously lamenting "Oh" might suggest — for just as some day again Francis might return, so will the spring:

Still reaches (not quite to the sky
Not quite past a quiet wall)
Willow yellow willow in January,
A premonition of flowers.

Much is going on here, from the way the parenthesis interferes with the completion of the thought begun with "Still reaches" (so that grammatically the willow ends up reaching neither "to" nor "past" anything, but simply reaches; of course as we read all three of these overlap) to the way the word "premonition" casts us back over the entire poem, nearly every line of which resonates with it in one way or another. I am fond too of the way the "not quite"s of the parenthesis seem to be echoed by the poem's (I think deliberate) refusal to conclude with anything, well, conclusive.

To be sure, Russ does not yet seem to know quite what to do with all of this play with time, with the cycle of the seasons and with linear progression — but that she knows, this early on, that it is important to summon these things up is remarkable.

One thing I must remark on, that I so far have obscured by speaking only in the terms set up by the poem itself, is the figure of the witch. Here that figure seems to stand simply for evil, especially in opposition to the Christian goodness of Saint Francis (though of course, just as that goodness is shown in a complex and uncomfortable way, so too is the evil). To begin with, this heavily Christian-moralistic figural system is somewhat surprising coming from a writer with so secular-Jewish a background as Russ's (which makes me suspect that, as good as the poem is in many ways, it comes not so much from a place of artistic need as of received notions of what a poem can be about). More than that, though, it is a reminder that we are here reading work that predates Russ's awareness of and engagement with a feminism capable of reclaiming the witches, interpreting them not as evils (real or imaginary) but as a lineage of wise women whose knowledge and power had to be destroyed to make way for the further entrenchment of patriarchal power that came with the advent of capitalism. Those witches we are too clever to look for in the dark of nature knew things that the young Russ could have benefited from knowing, had there not been such a wholesale destruction of that knowledge.

Interestingly, though Russ did not yet know about the erasure of these traditions and knowledges, she nevertheless seems to feel the lack, as we see in 1955's "To R.L.". (Full disclosure: I don't know who "R.L." is, and I also don't know if I'm supposed to or not.) It begins with what I have not been able to resolve into anything other than a muddle, a sort of canned-"exotic" midcentury colonialist fantasy ("You were a captive prince, an African"), but then, a little before the halfway point, there is a startling moment where either Russ or the poem's speaker identifies herself with an ancient, forgotten (indeed forcibly erased) "evil", and it is in this moment that the poem really begins for me:

I felt like an ice-born saint, not one of heaven's.
One of the devil's, maybe, I never knew.
I have no soul; I never was a Christian.
I had a God once, but they broke off both his horns
And shut him in a tapestry. So he died.

The death of the speaker's god is an interruption in the transmission of the tradition, the ways of knowing that would have enabled the speaker to know her own nature ("I have tried to raise an image of myself/In vain out of the cloudy, northern sky.") — and yet, in the face of impossibility, the speaker nevertheless declares herself to be something, even if only "something": "I am something left from a much earlier time./I am one of earth's saints."

But even if we don't stop to wonder if the earth can have saints at all and what this might mean, this declaration is not so solid as it may seem — for at the word "earth" the poem immediately pivots again, mid-line: "I am one of earth's saints. The earth is running down/But it never ends; the universe unreels/Forever...". The speaker had a past, but that past died in the permanence of a tapestry; she thought to forge an identity out of the earth, but the earth, though it never ends, has no permanence and so no future: these are the two sides of a tragic paradox. As with "Some Day Again," there is a sense of the poem pulling past and future around itself in the present, but this time the history is not one of life but of death, the premonitions not of flowers but of ice — a sort of romantic stand-in for the heat death, prefiguring the more ironically bathetic-but-sublime deployment of similar images at the climax of the soon-to-come "Nor Custom Stale," the story that marks the real beginning of the Russ we know. The poem ends:

Each flake will be a century of time
And time will slide beneath our feet like snow
And still we ride and still the snow comes down
And still we never reach the line of trees,
The pine-tree woods where nothing living stirs.
Now is left us only what there was
And the world is running down. The snowflakes fall
Slower and slower in frozen time. So we.

And speaking of prefiguring Russ's entry into sf proper, the last of the poems that I find merits serious consideration on its own terms (though it again suffers from the immaturity of its writer), 1957's "The Queen at Ur," wouldn't be at all out of place in a current edition of, say, Strange Horizons, or any of the other poetry-oriented sf magazines. For better or worse, I should add — because when I say it would not be out of place, I mean that it really would fit right in; for me, in my admittedly limited exposure to it, there is a great deal of sameness to contemporary sf poetry, and "The Queen at Ur" feels just like it in everything from its sometimes dime-a-dozen lyrical loveliness-and-melancholy to its body-as-universe images. I don't mean to be entirely negative. I am interested in this poem — I largely agree with what Mandelo writes about it toward the end of her study, and have little to add to that, except to say that I find the poem much less extraordinary than she evidently does.

But at any rate this is full-fledged sf ("I feel with fleshless hands the rigid pattern/Of stars, order, law"), and in its unexpectedly sharp (or blunt?) last lines even seems to point to some of the uses the mature Russ would find for sf.

She speaks:
Daughter, train your soul for the gracious amenities
That come finally with death. Emulate my corpse.

-------------------------------------------

The rest of the poetry is, or at least thus far strikes me as, fairly trivial,* though there are intermittent moments of interest. The poem beginning "Beautiful naked bodies walk across", after its, ahem, unconvincing adolescent-fantasy eroticizing of the men of ancient poetry (much more believable when Pier Paolo Pasolini does it early on in his "The Religion of My Time") moves quickly to a genuinely disquieting finish — all the more disquieting because it is so inconclusive — with a distinctly unappealing Pan (or satyr?), "half in rut," nervously crying "Madam!...Madam!" in his "rusty squeak." "Death and the Gentleman," one of Mandelo's favorites but not one of mine, is at times quite effectively funny in its way ("When I am dust — /More's the pity — /The worms that eat me/Will all turn witty."). "The School Teacher's Daughter Speaks", with its closing scene of (what on the surface reads as) explicitly homoerotic male beauty (much more convincing here!), is reminiscent-in-advance (preminiscent?) of Russ's much later non-fiction writing on a similar subject, in her classic essay on K/S. And the last two poems, "Family Snapshot — Botanical Gardens" and "A la mode" (published together in a 1957 Epoch) are a major departure from the other poems, freer and more formally odd, if still not too unusual; they strike me as semi-successful attempts at the kind of dark levity now associated with Sylvia Plath, pointing at the horror in the quotidian with fractured humor (they're either that or they just completely miss me).

*I always feel the need to make this sort of disclaimer when writing about those of Russ's works I don't care for, as she like no other sf writer I know resists the reader's easy grasp. Are these poems trivial or do I just not know how to read them? In this specific case the first possibility seems the more likely, but better perhaps to play it safe.

These flashes aside, though, the rest of the early poetry for the most part is a collection of awkward juvenilia, hardly even illuminating when considered as the early work of a great writer. Even the three poems I have singled out as worth more consideration, despite what I would insist are their intrinsic strengths and interest, are far from major works. As I mentioned before, this is not at all unexpected; there are not many people whose teenage writings would stand much scrutiny — not everyone can be a Rimbaud, and I doubt we'd want it that way. What is startling, though, is to realize that only two years (and no published writings) separate the publication of the last of these poems and the first of Russ's main body of work, the aforementioned "Nor Custom Stale," which is a fully-realized, mature work. To be sure, there are three short prose works I have yet to read that were published during the same period as the poetry (also in The Cornell Writer), and perhaps I'll find a clearer preparation there for the leap into "Nor Custom Stale," but it is nevertheless remarkable to read these tentative, bumbling efforts, and know that it is not long at all before something entirely different will emerge.

Chronologically reading Joanna Russ

I'm planning on doing it! Based on the bibliography I made! And hopefully I will periodically be writing about it. I'll be tagging these posts "reading Russ," and this post here, which I will link back to in each post, will also serve as a table of contents. BEHOLD:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The early poetry (1954-1957)
2. "Innocence" (1955)
3. "The Wise Man" and "Martyr" (1955, 1957)
4. "Nor Custom Stale" (1959)
5. "Come Closer" (1965)

Adventures in Time and Space: Robert A. Heinlein's "Requiem"

Adventures in Time and Space post series introduction and table of contents

This definitive (or maybe better: defining) collection of "golden age" science fiction stories begins with one by Robert A. Heinlein and contains two more by him (only two other writers are represented three times: A.E. van Vogt and "Lewis Padgett"). In the introduction to my edition the superlative-crazed philistines Healy and McComas call him "possibly the greatest of the giants of those days" — those days being "that best of all possible times in science fiction." Heinlein, we can safely say, was important in the 1940s, and Healy and McComas were determined that he stay that way.

His importance to sf is still contentious, as witness the recent, utterly stupid, "you're not a fan if you haven't read him" kerfuffle.* Before that, more personally, Jonathan McCalmont's response to a pathetic attempt at canon-ossification by Gary Westfahl (today's heir to the superlative-crazed philistine throne) was the impetus behind the post that really got this blog going for me (though at this point I half want to repudiate that post, half want to extend it). But salutary as I find polemics like McCalmont's, and though I would never stand in their way, I can't really agree. Heinlein is central to this thing we call science fiction even today; from where I stand to insist otherwise, though it may be useful or even essential to an attempt to take sf in a different direction and therefore quite justified, is nevertheless simply counterfactual.

*About which I am considering writing a post being cranky at "both" sides, but we'll see. There's only so much thinking about Heinlein and the minds of sf people that I can take.

Funnily enough, I tend to see the ghost of Heinlein most strongly in those areas of sf that would most seek to evade him. The writers who find sf's tendencies toward didacticism distasteful or embarrassing, who wish to bring sf stylistically more in line with "the mainstream", and who (erroneously) think they can do this by valuing "incluing" (as I identified it in that above-linked early post, stealing the term from Jo Walton) over infodumping are using techniques that Heinlein played a (maybe the) major role in developing — this despite Heinlein's well-earned reputation for didacticism. Sf poetry's major award, the Rhysling, is named after a Heinlein character (without whom I wonder if the young Samuel R. Delany would have had the courage to write his early poet protagonists). And those writers who find the term "science fiction" inadequate, inaccurate, or too laden with negative connotations to describe what they do and so call themselves writers of "speculative fiction" — these writers being by and large as far from the pro-Heinlein camp as can be imagined — are, whether they know it or not, quoting Heinlein (who coined the term for these precise reasons) almost verbatim.

For me Heinlein's importance is unquestionable — but my god, how I hate him. I put off starting Adventures in Time and Space, which I am otherwise eager to read and write about, for months simply because the first story in it is by him. Of all the writers that I for whatever reason feel a need to read, he is by far the one I dread reading the most. As such, despite everything that I've said about his importance, I have actually read very little of his work. I pushed my way through his collection The Past Through Tomorrow last year, though I more sort of held it pinched between two fingers at arm's length and stared at it in nose-wrinkled distaste than actually "read" it; I yawned my way through Farmer in the Sky when I was about eleven (when almost any sf excited me); I have started and quickly stopped reading any number of his other stories and novels; and I think that's it for me and the man Delany names as one of his favorite novelists.

I've been trying for a long time to figure out why I dislike him so strongly. There are a number of obvious possibilities, but for me they all seem insufficient. It could be his politics, which are repellent; but then again I can read and find great beauty and illumination in countless other writers, both in and out of sf (e.g., Lovecraft, Heidegger), whose politics I find just as or even more unpalatable (indeed if vile politics were on their own enough to put me off a work or a writer I wouldn't be able to find the value in any "golden age" sf that I do). It could be the "traveling-salesman banter" (as James Blish incredibly accurately described it) that passes for dialogue in his stories, but no, I'm able to pass lightly over similar problems in writers like Asimov or McCaffrey to get at what's important. It could be the bizarre quotidianness of his imagination, where he so often seems to be spanning galaxies and millennia and introducing us to wondrous worlds and aliens and technologies merely to say "but nothing has changed, everything is just everyday, everything is boring", which often is a problem in other writers — but no, this is one of the things that, for me, Heinlein actually, occasionally, pulls off well and makes intriguing.* And it can't be the didacticism, since that's a big part of why I am drawn to sf in the first place! Reading "Requiem", though, I think I finally figured it out, or at least came upon the beginnings of understanding it. Let's take it slow.

*In this connection I'm reminded indirectly of Stanisław Lem's comment on the Strugatskys' Roadside Picnic, that though "earth is incapable of coming to grips with the consequences" of alien intrusion, "at the same time, the little world of humanity continues as before." There is also something of a connection here to what I find so endlessly fascinating about the stories of Cordwainer Smith, though the methods and the feeling there are utterly different.

The events of the story are as follows: an old man, Delos D. Harriman, who has devoted most of his life and his (conveniently) considerable fortune to making the dream of space travel come true, but has never gone himself, wants nothing more than to go to the moon; but because of his age and infirmity he is legally barred from doing so (there is much nonsense about how the very rich are oppressed because others seek to tell them how to spend their money). He finds some sympathetic pilots with their own ship and no class analysis who agree to take him. They go and he experiences the reality of space flight for the first time; they land on the moon and he steps onto its surface. After taking it in for a moment he dies, his body worn out by the strain of the trip, and one of the pilots buries him.

These events are simple, but structurally the story is quite complex. Delany compared the rhetorical variety of Heinlein's first story, "Life-Line" — which "embeds...a collection of newspaper headlines, telegrams, and court transcripts within its narrative in order to tell its tale" — to Dos Passos*, and "Requiem" behaves similarly. It begins with a poem (by Robert Louis Stevenson; if Heinlein is to be believed, it appears on Stevenson's gravestone in Samoa; me, I don't know these things) given not as an epigraph but just barely within the story proper; later on there is a sign advertising a fair attraction and a portion of a newspaper article, not to mention an extended series of flashbacks. The temporal structure, the play with time both within and without the story, is also complex and potentially interesting: Heinlein writes in "the present" about a man in "the future" who has accomplished x, y, and z in "the past" (from the character's point of view), but wants to do a, b, and c in "the future" (the future of the future, that is, which by the story's end is the present), and as he seeks to achieve this goal his mind plays over various other incidents in "the past", which is of course our future. In part this is merely the seldom-examined play of time created by sf's routine gesture of setting stories in "the future," but Heinlein seems to me anyway to be particularly interested in heightening the complexity.

*Yet another nail in the coffin, incidentally, of the many silly narratives told and re-told about the so-called "new wave", which is when most people say such techniques from the non-sf "avant garde" entered sf. John Brunner may have done it better, but if we're supposed to care who did it first — well, he didn't. The evaluation of the use of such techniques in sf as automatically good or automatically bad, well, that's a whole nother silly story.

As he does so, it quickly becomes apparent that he is also interested in making a metatextual commentary on sf itself. Harriman, a man living in an sfnal future, feels that he played an important role in causing this future to be sfnal, but nevertheless has been denied access to the sfnal aspect of this future. He looks back nostalgically at his life, dedicated to ushering in this sfnal future, as he plots his entrance into it — which he gains, and then dies. It does not take much to see Harriman as a (thinly-veiled) stand-in for the figure of the sf writer in the heroic Heinleinian mode, working tirelessly to bring about a techno-future he knows he will not live to see realized, looking back over his career and cursing a death that will come too soon. And here is where the problems come in, for me. Because Heinlein/Harriman always knows he's right. Others might think that dreams of space travel are silly or misguided, but he knows better. Others might try to convince him to devote what he no doubt thinks of as his capital to more prosaic pursuits, but he knows better.

Delany again, this time discussing the much later novel Farnham's Freehold:

Suffice it to say that what distresses one about the Heinlein argument in general, when it is presented in narrative form, is that it so frequently takes the form of the gentlemanly assertion: "Just suppose the situation around X (war, race, what-have-you) were P, Q, and R; now under those conditions, wouldn't behavior Y be logical and justified?" — where behavior Y just happens to be an extreme version of the most conservative, if not fascistic, program. Our argument is never with the truth value of Heinlein's syllogism: Yes, if P, Q, and R were the case, then behavior Y would be pragmatically justifiable. Our argument is rather with the premises: Since P, Q, and R are not the situation of the real world, why continually pick fictional situations, bolstered by science-fictional distortions, to justify behavior that is patently inappropriate for the real world? And Heinlein's unerring ability to see precisely how the real world would have to be changed to make such conservative behavior appropriate begins to suggest that his repeated use of science fiction to this end represents what existentialist critics used to call "bad faith."

Delany's concerns here are explicitly and specifically in the realm we call "political," and from what I understand about Farnham's Freehold the political stakes in that particular case are extremely high. But the general Heinleinian pattern he identifies* holds even when the stakes are significantly lower — even when they are not (so explicitly, so directly) political.

*Which, incidentally, is probably Heinlein's single most damaging literary legacy; whole schools of sf have built up around reproducing it.

So it is in "Requiem" that Heinlein has set up an elaborate structure on which to hang a contemplation of the nature and role of the sf writer (because, again, though Harriman is not literally an sf writer, he is so very plainly a stand-in for one), and he uses it only to brag about how heroic it is to be one. If it were the case that one had spent one's life advocating for a particular kind of future, and if it were the case that because of one's advocacy that future came to pass, and if it were the case that that future turned out to be every bit as great as one said it would be, and if it were the case that various small-minded fools tried to prevent one from...but no doubt you get the idea.

And the bad faith extends even further. For me it reaches its height at the moment when Harriman finally makes it to space — not yet to the moon, but en route, and he looks out the viewport for the first time. Indeed this was the moment when all of this crystallized for me:

There it was, all as he had imagined it so many times. The Moon swung majestically past the viewport, twice as wide as he had ever seen it before, all of her familiar features cameo-clear. She gave way to the Earth as the ship continued its slow swing, the Earth itself, as he had envisioned her, appearing like a noble moon....

And so on. "All as he had imagined it." "As he had envisioned her." Even "her familiar features," though factually more justified, is just the wrong tone. Harriman knew what it would be like to be in space all along. This is nothing other than Heinlein asserting that he is incontrovertibly and transcendently right about his projection of an experience he has never had — indeed at the time he is writing an experience that no one has ever had. "Science fiction was right — look, it says so in this science fiction story!" It is this blandly confident triumphalism that I dislike — no, more than than that; it is this triumphalism, this self-congratulatory certainty, that I find a fundamental betrayal of the science fictional (or, to give Heinlein his own word, the speculative) enterprise itself. From the perspective of 1940, the defining characteristic of space travel is that, though it is possible to make some technical statements about it with a fair degree of certainty and a number of other reasonable but less certain speculations, nevertheless no one has ever done it, and no one knows what, experientially, it will really be like. But for Heinlein, there is no "no one knows." Someone always knows, and that someone is always Heinlein.

All this considered, can it be any surprise that the supposedly hard-headed Heinlein here runs so counter to his reputation (but not, I suspect, his actual nature) and creates one of the most shmoopily sentimental stories I have ever read? From the moment we begin with some heinously colonialist and straight-up bad poetry (how embarrassing for Stevenson if it really is on his grave) to the moment we meet Harriman's "shrewish" wife*, from the lawyer's rousing speech arguing for the rich man's right to spend his money to the ending that all but unfurls the Delos D. Harriman flag on the surface of the moon to the accompaniment of the Delos D. Harriman National Anthem, the deck is comprehensively stacked. Oscar Wilde said that sentimentality is "the luxury of an emotion without paying for it," and we all know how capitalists hate to pay for their luxuries. For me the greatest of these unpaid-for emotions by far is what I earlier described as "cursing a death that will come too soon." Here we see the most basic of all of sf's bad faith, its original sin even, laid bare: the desire to know, with certainty, a world beyond the death of the — one's own — body.

* "I feel a headache coming on. Please try to be a little quiet when you come to bed," she says when he presents his having put all of their money into the development of space travel as a fait accompli and refuses to budge. Women! Can't make heads nor tails of 'em!

Perhaps it is for the best after all that Adventures in Time and Space starts with this story. I still insist that there is much beauty in sf's "golden age," and that it still speaks to us, but for such a, again, defining and definitive volume to begin with a story that declares so openly all of the bad faith, all of the lapses, all of the self-importance to which this era of sf was so prone — indeed that it built itself upon — and that at the time and still to this date threaten to submerge entirely what was good about this writing...well, it's only honest. With this fair warning, I, we, can be on the lookout. We know what dangers lie ahead.

Finally, he lifted his ship and went away

One of the several anthologies I'm currently reading slowly, a story here and there, is Pamela Sargent's Women of Wonder, the landmark collection of sf short stories "by women about women," the concept of which was so radical in 1974 that even most of the participants in the Khatru symposium on women in science fiction were palpably uncomfortable with its even existing (similar projects today are not much less radical, but at least sf's feminist vanguard has come to terms with them). Yesterday afternoon I picked it up, turned to Marion Zimmer Bradley's 1958 "The Wind People" — my first Bradley — and began reading.

The story is immediately enjoyable; right away it establishes for itself that particular atmosphere common to many 1950s sf stories about odd things happening to the crews of spaceships exploring far from Earth.* But the first paragraph could have been written by any midcentury sf writer, even an asshole like Heinlein in one of his rare charming moments. It even seems at first like it's going to be sort of gently swaggering, with its "Captain Merrihew" encountering a "unique problem." But once we learn what this problem is — one of his crew members has given birth to a baby while the crew was on planetary leave, and babies cannot live through the "shift into hyperspace drive" — it quickly becomes obvious that we won't be spending very much time with the Captain, that this will instead be the story of Helen, who will be staying alone on the planet with her baby, Robin, in order to save his life and to raise him.** Whether this would have been felt as a jarring shift to readers of If in 1958, I cannot say; for me, it was not particularly. The story I was constructing in my mind in response to the words on the page adjusted itself and carried on smoothly.

*Always a common theme in sf, of course, but there is something in the feel of the ones written in the 1950s, something I don't think I could put my finger on, that I particularly love. Incidentally, speaking of the 50s and since I won't have a chance to mention it later on: this story, with its assertively competent woman protagonist who is not ruined by (socially normative) casual sex even when it results in pregnancy, seems like it must have been downright scandalous when it first appeared, and also further puts the lie to the concept that "the" "new wave" introduced sex into sf.
**For those who have not read the story and will no doubt be wondering: yes, there is a hint of sexist maternal instinct protective mother bear nonsense in these opening pages, but it is amply counteracted later on in the story. From Robin's conception to his birth, to their remaining on the planet and her methods of raising him, Helen makes a series of choices, each of which pain her; though she does not necessarily understand her reasons for making these choices any better than any of us do our own, neither is she beholden to instinct.

But then, four pages into the story, we do leave the planet with Merrihew and crew, with this isolated gruesome fragment:

        Ten days after the Starholm took off, young Colin Reynolds, technician, committed suicide by the messy procedure of slicing his jugular vein, which — in zero gravity — distributed several quarts of blood in big round globules all over his cabin. He left an incoherent note.
        Merrihew put the note in the disposal and [ship's doctor] Chao Lin put the blood in the ship's blood bank for surgery, and they hushed it up as an accident; but Merrihew had the unpleasant feeling that the layover on the green and windy planet was going to become a legend, spread in whispers by the crew. And it did, but that is another story.

And then there's a section break (the story's first), after which we rejoin Helen and Robin on the green and windy planet, where we will stay until (almost) the very end. This "that is another story" is a small thing, perhaps, and not even all that out of the ordinary, but for whatever reason — perhaps it was the preparation behind it, first the slight realignment we must make from Merrihew's story to Helen's and then the larger oddness of the momentary glimpse of the rest of the crew's journey; perhaps it was just the mood I was in yesterday — as I say for whatever reason it hit me just right. It opened the story up to contingency, indeed to openness; it did what we're always meant to believe, for some ungodly reason I've never been able to decipher, is the worst thing a work of fiction can do: it took me out of the story. Quite literally in fact, for Bradley is quite right: the whispered legends, the death of Colin Reynolds: this is another story, one — more than one — that she has chosen not to tell but obviously feels a need to stray into long enough to remind us could be told, that the space in which these untold stories can be imagined has been opened up by the story she has chosen to tell.

And this is not the only way in which I was taken out of the story. The feeling I felt on reading those words required me to look away from the page and reflect, and as I did I was shaken out of the story (all of these stories) and, for a moment, into real life. I had gotten home from work about an hour earlier, and my legs, though not tired per se, could still feel the effort of having biked eight miles — which I'm just getting back to now that the snow has melted, after a few months of taking the bus and losing some of the leg muscle and stamina I'd built up last season. I was not in the far future of the story's setting, nor in the late 50s in which it was written, but in the (then) present moment of a Thursday afternoon early in April of 2014; neither was I in space or on an idyllic alien planet, but on Earth, in Rhode Island, in a moderately uncomfortable chair in my apartment. I was sitting by the window and as I looked up I looked out; it was sunny, there were squirrels digging in the ground outside and birds in the bare trees; beyond them were the neighbors' house and the suburban street. None of this was unexpected, it was all utterly quotidian (though pleasant and refreshing; spring has been a long time coming), but it was transformed somehow by the experience I had just had reading Bradley's story.

This transformation by its very nature cannot be described — for it is experience, which is precisely not description. Peter Handke touches on it in the moment when Andreas Loser, narrator of Across, looks up from the Georgics of Virgil as "a car from somewhere turned onto the canal bridge and, thanks to Virgil's verses, gleamed a special blue." This is the power literature can have. But for Handke's Andreas what lies behind the special blue is a bit different from what, for me, is at play with science fiction stories like "The Wind People". For him, what "I really care about" is to be gleaned from Virgil's

enthusiasm (never uncontrolled) for the things that still matter: the sun, the earth, rivers, woods, trees and shrubs, domestic animals, fruits (along with jars and baskets), utensils and tools. In these objects, justice, before vanishing from the world, left its trace; thus, far from the weapons that divide man from man (the usual word for "weapon" stands here for peaceable implements), every single thing in the poem, removed once and for all from history, distanced from other things and at the same time held in free association with them, gives me access to a very different story — usually invoked with an epithet...that does justice to the thing.... And since poetry should above all be congruent with things, these verses never cease to revive for me, the reader, the existence of the things they sing of.

A breathtaking passage; perhaps I am being selfish when, coming across elements in it I find troubling, I remind myself that Andreas Loser, however sensitive a thinker, is also a murderer. At any rate, though, if poetry should above all be congruent with things, what are we to make of science fiction, where such congruency is in almost every case a failure of artistic integrity, where the interest of the work lies precisely in the things of the story that are incongruent with the things of this world? The fascination Virgil exerts upon Andreas has to do in part with the contrast between the antiquity — extreme to the point of alienness — of the work and its continued relevance, its dealing with "the things that still matter." But Bradley's story, and good science fiction in general, for me? I suppose that it is all about difference, about encountering the attempt to convey the nonexistent, or the existent twisted into unreal form, and then returning to the world to find it, in my perception, changed — and when things go really well, not just changed but laid bare and renewed.

All of this happened yesterday afternoon. But it did not last forever; I am a reader, and I returned to the story I had been taken out of. And when I did, I found a marvelously strange story that resists being returned to even as its functional and straightforward prose pulls the reader through it. Indeed there is much more to be said about even the part I had read already. This Colin Reynolds — we are not, here or anywhere else in the story, given enough information to know whether he kills himself because of the events with Helen; though we are told that she slept with him at about the right time and that she (mostly) believes that he is the father, which makes it likely that he believes so as well, we don't even know for certain if he does. But the presence in the story at all of the information that he did kill himself — which neither Helen nor Robin will ever know — suggests the idea strongly; and it is only ever a suggestion, it never becomes the subject of any story (it is another story), there is no suggestion of what specifically — guilt? grief? over Helen or Robin or both? — prompted his action even if he is the father, and indeed for all we know it could be completely unrelated (or does he know something that Helen does not believe until the end?); by contemplating this, the reader is forced to contemplate the ways in which story, form, all on its own, generates meaning. Later on, halfway through the story, Helen tells the now-adolescent Robin about his origins, skipping over her doubts to tell him that Colin Reynolds is his father.

        He asked at last, "Why didn't my father stay with you?"
        "I don't suppose it entered his head," Helen said. "He was needed on the ship. Losing me was bad enough."
        Robin said passionately, "I'd have stayed!"
        The woman found herself laughing. "Well — you did stay, Robin."
        He asked, "Am I like my father?"
        Helen looked gravely at her son, trying to see the half-forgotten features of young Reynolds in the boy's face. No, Robin did not look like Colin Reynolds, nor like Helen herself.

Maybe it's just me, but "I don't suppose it entered his head" carries just enough slightly-off resonance with the manner of Reynolds's death to come across as a grisly, dramatic-ironic pun; our awareness of his death too puts an interesting spin on "He was needed on the ship", since we know the ship does well enough without him. The gendered implications of all of this are probably obvious. What interests me on top of this though is that, primed by the openness of the story preceding, I at least in reading this passage can't help but notice all the alternate stories spinning off of practically every sentence. "Why didn't my father stay with you?" Robin asks, and an unwritten story in which he did is conjured up; "I don't suppose it entered his head," and a story in which it didn't — which is probably not this one, though Helen's story would be the same regardless — appears. Then too Helen and Robin are both telling each other, and themselves, different stories, though neither of them are aware of the other's, or to a certain extent their own, at this point. Some of these stories (the verging-on-Freud incestuous romance, say) only appear clearly to the reader on a re-read, but some are immediately plain: for Robin, this previously unheard-of person who apparently played a role in his creation has a newly central importance, but for Helen he can only be someone whose life briefly and superficially entangled with hers fourteen years ago ("Am I like my father"/"the half-forgotten features"); "I'd have stayed," Robin says, casting himself as the hero in some fantasy narrative (and a rather patriarchal one at that — where did he learn that from?), to which Helen, rationalist on an irrational world, can only reply with a narrative of biographical fact.

There are many such moments in this story in which it opens up into the possibility of other stories. Some of these stories remain untold because they are "not what happened" — early on, it is suggested that Helen and Robin easily could have died many times over in their first year on the planet, before she figured out what was necessary for survival and dealt, to the extent that is possible, with the immediate shock of isolation; but though a story could be told about these deaths (one, perhaps, not too unlike Joanna Russ's We Who Are About To), they did not occur in the story we are reading — and some remain untold because Bradley has chosen not to look at them (the hardships of that first year, even if Helen and Robin both survived, could easily fill a very different kind of story). Each of these moments is a powerful dual reminder of the nature of story (in which everything is selected by someone who could just as well have selected otherwise) and of life (in which everything depends on contingency, and through which we simply make our way as best as we can, lacking the external perspective that both the writer and the reader of a story possess). Think about Helen as a character in a story, Bradley seems to be saying, and remember that I could have chosen to have her die early had that been the story I wanted to tell; think about real life projected through my portrait of Helen and remember that a woman speaking to her teenage son is only alive to do so because she did not die when he was a baby.

All of this is going on in the telling of a story that is fundamentally ambiguous, open to interpretation. Are there aliens on the planet that the human eye can't quite detect, or are Helen and Robin in their isolation succumbing to a sort of folie à deux? If there are aliens, what, if anything, do they want? Is Robin quite human, is Reynolds his father? (For that matter, is Helen his mother in a genetic sense?) What happens to either of them in the end? The story does not supply any external information sufficient for us to know "what really happened." At the end of the story, after Robin vanishes into what Helen interprets as the society of these aliens, and after she chases after him, going, probably, to her death, we get one last section break and a final paragraph in which, "many years later", a now-old Captain Merrihew manages to return to the planet where he had left Helen so many years before and search it from orbit.

The old buildings [constructed by the crew during its time on the planet] had fallen into rotted timbers, and Merrihew quartered the little world for two months from pole to pole but found nothing. Nothing but shadows and whispers and the unending voices of the wind. Finally, he lifted his ship and went away.

It is easy to read this as confirming that, with Helen's death, Robin has become one of the undetectable aliens (an odd sort of twisting of Freudian theories, that, as are many other elements of the story, in many different ways); to a reader with a different sense of "what happened," it could be equally easy to read it as suggesting that Helen and Robin, both fully human, both died by mishap that night. But I can't help but find it suggestive that Merrihew only searches from orbit (though even this is ambiguous, as the sensory description in the penultimate sentence and the word "lifted" in the last seem vaguely to suggest that he was on the surface), that he searches an entire planet for only two months, and that we have no idea what methods he uses to search or how thorough they could be. Bradley has not told us what kind of relevant technology this future has, and we are left unable even to determine whether or not Merrihew's search is inconclusive! As for me, I found myself much like Merrihew, at the end: after orbiting the story once, then twice, not ever really entering it no matter how hard I searched for something concrete, I lifted my eyes and went away changed — however slightly —, and returned to a world that now looked different. And all of this happened through the elements in the story that pointed out, not in. (And maybe someday I'll figure out how to do something with all this other than turn it into more written words.)