Week 13: Nov. 27—Dec. 3
Vonda N. McIntyre, “Little Faces”
Tony Daniel, “A Quiet, Dry War”

Saturday, Nov. 30: Quiz 3 due  

A Guest
This week we will read 2 stories of the far, far future.

Vonda McIntyre, author of “Little Faces,” has said she will look in on our class [at LACC], so I’ll set up an “Ask Vonda” part of the “Little Faces” forum where you can talk to her. I hope you will! She’s a major SF writer and a winner of many awards for her stories and novels. “Little Faces” was chosen for inclusion in 2 anthologies of the best fiction from 2005. 

[Note:   If you want to participate as a guest,  your participation at the LACC site will count toward weekly discussion points. Scroll down to find English 270 FA 2006.     Login name: guest  Password: guest ]

SF and Time
SF dealing with the nature of time or with time travel itself has been popular since H.G. Wells. SF writers and readers love the paradoxes that can be created by such fictions, the endless loops, the branching off of alternate futures, the travels into the past in order to change the future, the journeys to parallel worlds, the alternate histories. Many commentators have insisted that such fiction is not SF at all but fantasy, since in terms of our known science, time travel and journeys to parallel worlds are not possible. For physicists’ writings about the nature of time you have only to consult publications like The Scientific American to see the range of scientific speculation about the possibilities of time travel and the theories of possible futures. The impossibility of time travel is by no means agreed upon! Today’s impossibility may be tomorrow’s fact.

Physicists are quick to admit that they do not know what time is. They agree that alternate futures and pasts are not impossible. It is only the human observer who fixes reality to one outcome where the possible becomes actual and the future becomes the past. The observer alters the observed.

“Consider Her Ways” by John Wyndham [extra credit]
In this novella one concern is with the alteration of the past in order to prevent a particular future. Here the narrator Jane Waterleigh travels through time, courtesy of a fictional drug, and enters the body of Mother Orchis in a future society bereft of men:

“Bloated, obese ‘mothers’ are dedicated full-time to childbearing — it is in the body of one of these monsters that Jane's personality has lodged itself. The ‘mothers’ are attended by midget, sterile ‘servitors.’ Society's heavy lifting is done by muscular Amazon types, also sterile, and the whole thing is presided over by a wise ‘Doctorate’ of normal-looking women who can give birth if they wish to. The medical specifics are left unclear, but some sort of parthenogenesis seems to be involved.” (John Darbyshire, “It’s a Woman’s World,” National Review Online).

A good part of the story is the debate between Jane, the narrator, and Laura, the historian, over the merits of the two societies. Laura’s main argument is that women are safe from brutal domination by men. (Love between women does exist, but is only cryptically alluded to by the reference to Sappho, the ancient Greek poet whose poems celebrated her love for women. But after all the story was written in the 1950s. It’s interesting that this story, written by a male author, postulates that a society of women would not have war. There have been many stories and novels written by women about societies where men have been killed off by a virus: most of them are not particularly peaceful. And even in The Left Hand of Darkness, it is left unanswered whether the absence of gender will lead to an absence of war.

In answer to Laura’s powerful arguments, Jane can only rhapsodize about her love for her deceased husband and the wonders of romantic love in general, something Laura tells her is a trap for women, forcing them into positions of inferiority to a consumer culture. Much reflects the 1950’s happy housewife stereotype and not the more independent women of today who are, never the less, still preyed upon by media imagery glorifying sexual allure and the myth of a romantic love which will solve all problems and give meaning to life.

Certainly the stratified, ant-like society presented in the story does not seem to us to be a happy alternative. But the inhabitants do not seem unhappy. It’s all a matter of perspective.

But what was the nature of Jane’s experience? She comes to believe that it was not a hallucination, but she is faced with a dilemma:

“If it should be a kind of pre-vision of an inevitable, predestined future, then nothing anyone could do would change it. But that does not seem to me to make sense: it is what has happened, and is happening now, that determines the future. Therefore, there must be a great number of possible futures, each a possible consequence of what is being done now. It seems to me that under chuinjuatin I saw one of those futures .”

She laments the fact that she did not ask Laura for verifiable evidence that she could check, then remembers that she does have one name, Dr. Perrigan, whose “concern was the extermination of rats—particularly the brown rat, which used to do a great deal of expensive damage.” It is ironic that the virus Perrigan develops to exterminate the brown rat mutates into a virus that kills every man on earth, a possible joke by the writer.

Jane's soliciter and doctor remain unconvinced that there was any validity to the experience she described. The doctor is particularly skeptical:

“If Jane, poor girl, has settled one thing, it is that there's no future in this particular fantasy. Perrigan's finished with, and all his work's gone up in smoke and fire."

But the solicitor is troubled by one thing: there was no way Jane could have known of Perrigan, a fact the doctor agrees with. The story ends with the solicitor’s information that Perrigan had a son who is planning to carry on his work.

So Jane’s actions may have brought about the very future she wanted to avoid. Or perhaps it would have come in any case---if not from the son, then from the father if he had survived. The outcome contradicts her theory that she had seen only one version of a possible future. Rather she was right the first time: she has seen “a kind of pre-vision of an inevitable, predestined future” and “nothing anyone could do would change it.”

” Legions in Time” by Michael Swanwick
In this story, both the past and future are up for grabs. Here’s what Swanwick himself says about the story (I added some links for further explanations):

“I wrote the story for the sheer fun of it. But also I wrote it in order to learn. As you're aware, the best of the old pulp stuff had a furious narrative drive to it that contemporary SF can't touch.....

“So I sat down and wrote the snazziest opening line I could think of: ‘Eleanor Voigt had the oddest job of anyone she knew.’ I made the heroine an oldish woman because women of that age tend to be underestimated and because I thought it would be a hoot if one got to conquer the universe. I lifted the situation from A.E. Van Vogt because I loved "Recruiting Station" [a very similar story] and learned a lot of my craft from it. So I thought an homage to the Grand Master might be an appropriate way of acknowledging my debt.

“I determined that the story would start out as slow as I could make it, and then by increments go faster and faster until it was moving as fast as it could possibly go. To acknowledge what I was up to, I scattered references throughout to the original story and I named my protagonist Voigt - which is Vogt with an "I" in it. Because I'm a postmodern writer, I almost reflexively came up with an ending which in its extreme solipsism contains a disturbing hint that the human race might in the end be supplanted by a lone woman. And I had a lot of fun with the speculations of a Depression-era woman about what a girl from the Twenty-First Century might be like and why.

That's it, basically: For the fun, to learn, and in praise of a pulp master. If I'd known it was going to win a Hugo, I would've come up with a loftier purpose. But I didn't.”

In case you missed it, one of the speculations from a Depression-era woman about a Twenty-First Century girl occurs when Ellie and Nadine are piloting the police vehicle and ordered to stop: Nadine pulls Ellie through a hole in the roof of the vehicle telling her, “I can see the black doorway-thingie–the, you know, place!" and “Following, Ellie had to wonder about the educational standards of the year 2004. The young lady didn’t seem to have a very firm grasp on the English language.”

Hexagons by Robert Reed
Alternate History SF is wonderfully eerie “what if” fiction. What if the Japanese and Germans won the Second World War (The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick), what if most Europeans were wiped out by the Black Plague in the 15th century and modern Europe never came into existence (The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson) or what if the American South won the Civil War (Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore), not to mention the many alternate history novels of Harry Turtledove.

“Hexagons” gives us a world that we have to slowly figure out: the first point of estrangement is possibly the mention of the Testudo car in the third paragraph or the Young Legionnaires’ Club just before it. Slowly we realize, with mention of a cheetah named Hadrian, electric vases instead of television, and a city named New Rome that we are in a world in which the Roman Empire did not fall to waves of barbarian invasion in the 5th century CE. This alternate world of 1933 is far different from the historical one we read about: electronics, computer technology, voyages to the moon and Mars. Still, time has passed and Rome no longer rules the known world. The world itself is now known and much larger than the world the Romans knew in the time of their hegemony. China is the more powerful country. What we call America is in this world the New Lands and it is backward by comparison, a small outpost of old Rome, surrounded by other nations such as the Aztec Empire and tribes supported by Asian powers.

The narrator, Samuel Dunlop, an overweight, awkward 12 year old boy, continually the butt of jokes and hence insecure and naïve, is the perfect foil for the Hitler figure who runs for political office, a man with “an intoxicating sense of supreme destiny [who] was involved in a failed attempt to spark a civil war. His hope was to unite the Germanic provinces against Rome, and then conquer the Old Empire, and from there, he would have launched a suicidal assault against the Far East." This is similar to but not exactly like Hitler’s course of action. One similarity is that Hitler was imprisoned after a failed rebellion and this man in prison, after a failed rebellion like the real Hitler “ wrote a small book–a brutal little treatise on hatred and rampant nationalism.” This of course is similar to href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf target=blank> Mein Kampf.

The alternative Hitler offers Samuel a “cure” for his sense of inferiority. He is taken in (as lots of people were in 30’s Germany): "Wouldn’t it be wonderful?....Rome strong again. The Chinese and Indians not telling us what to do. All of our enemies sent packing, the bastards. Then we could build anything we wanted, and spaceships.” He ignores the candidate’s anti-Semitic remarks until his half-Jewish friend Nathan punches him out.

In our world, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped to defeat Hitler. In this world they have their parallels. Nathan’s grandfather “emigrated from Britain, escaping some ill-defined trouble, and now he lived with his son’s family, tucked away in their guest quarters. He was a fat man, a cigar smoker and a determined drinker, who’d sit and talk to me. We had actual conversations about real, adult topics. The man had this massive intelligence and endless opinions, and with a booming voice, he could speak forever about things that I never knew were important.” It is the grandfather who introduces Samuel and later his father to the illegal Chinese game, itself an example of superior technology:

"’In the Old Empire,’ he explained, ‘a toy such as this would be labeled ideologically dangerous. In the New Lands, thankfully, we are a little less obsessed about maintaining the fabled status quo. But still, our government would be within its rights to take this from me, if only to harvest the mechanical mind. This is not a new game, but its circuits are still superior to anything we can build today.’” In this statement is implied that the old Roman Empire struggled to maintain itself by repressing technological development. In the New Lands, there is more freedom and a desire to reach the standard of the rest of the world. Samuel notes: “With a glance, I knew why it was such a secret. All the words were Mandarin. The board looked new and modern, filled with a cold, slick light.”

It is a game about “the world, and war” in which different scenarios and actions bring about different consequences, and never the same result twice. Samuel, ever wishing to be on the winning team, decides to be China, and Nathan’s grandfather is sarcastic: "Naturally. You wish to pick the winner."

But Samuel loses and is told: " ‘ Even if you began again, and even if you made the same initial moves, events would play out in some very different fashion.’ Then he said the word, ‘Chaos,’ with a genuine fondness. ‘Chaos can break the strongest nation, and it can build empires from the weakest tribe.’"

Nathan plays next, choosing to be the Roman Empire. The results are startling at least to us: “This was our year, and nothing was familiar. There were no spaceships, much less cities on the moon. China was mangled and poor, and India belonged to an independent Britain, and again, with a sick surety, war was breaking out in the remnants of the Empire. The Germans were marching into Gaul, and the Slavs were massing their millions, and in the New Lands, a new Roman republic was building armies and fleets, and crude propeller planes were waiting to carry the first uranium bombs.”

Thus, randomly, the game pictures an approximation of our own world somewhere between 1933 and 1945. But it is not exact. More than two different versions of reality are possible. (This self-reference occurs also in The Man in the High Castle, where several of the characters read an alternative history novel in which Germany and Japan lost the war but in which the world depicted is still not ours.)

To Samuel’s father, the grandfather proclaims: " I could run this scenario thousands of times, and to the satisfaction of every bloodless mathematician and chilled intellect, I could prove that certain policies, and certain leaders, would be dangerous to us.” No matter which parallel world we live in, there are certain constants. He has foreseen the danger of the alternate Hitler and is willing to help Samuel’s father ensure that the other candidate will win the election.

Who is this other candidate? Most of what we know comes from his rival, the Hitler figure, who says: "He is an adulterer. He sleeps with his secretary. A man like that isn’t fit for public office, and I think in a few days, the world will find out what kind of man he is."

The alternate Hitler is wrong. There are some things more evil than sleeping with your secretary. In this version of the world of 1933, it is his hate-filled rantings, recorded electronically by Samuel through technology supplied, we assume, by Nathan’s grandfather, which show the world who he is and cost him the election. By the end of the story we see the winning candidate is celebrating not only his victory but the fact that “[h]umans have now walked on Mars." He is an internationalist, calling the achievement a victory for humankind though it was accomplished by the Chinese. And he gives a picture of the world far different not only from our historical 1933 but our own time: "We’re blessed… We’re walking on Mars. People are well-fed, and mostly educated. There are no important wars at the moment. And diseases have been mostly eradicated."

In an ironic reference to the actual Roosevelt, who was crippled by polio, the candidate tells Samuel: "In a different century you would have had to worry. About measles, and polio, and the mumps."

He ends with a promise "I wish everyone could have these advantages. And I think one day–sooner than you could guess–everybody will have them." He tells Samuel that he plans to run for president of the New Lands. In our own world, Roosevelt was elected to office in 1933.