The View from the Cheap Seats
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“The New Accelerator”—A remarkably joyful story of super speed and mischief. A playful story—for once in a Wells tale the Accelerator is neither lost nor destroyed, nor does it result in madness and death. Instead we end in possibility.
“The Truth About Pyecraft”—In the main, the narrator is indistinguishable from Wells. This is not true of the narrator of “Pyecraft,” who is a thin man, of Indian descent. Pyecraft himself, who thinks he wants to lose weight but actually wants not to be fat, is a real character, in a Bunterish sort of way, a marvelous and memorable “great, fat self-indulgent man.” It’s a genuinely funny fantasy story which leaves us—almost—where it began.
“The Country of the Blind”—For me, one of the most interesting of Wells’s stories, partly because of his need to rewrite the story decades later, or rather, his need to give it a new ending. It’s an unusual story in many ways: in its easy reversal of the common saw that in the Country of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king; in the inability of the protagonist to communicate; in the way that entire concepts become meaningless when the sensory information they carry becomes redundant.
The first iteration of the story (1904, given here) follows the classic Wells short-story pattern of an encounter with the impossible, and an unsatisfactory resolution, the story convincing us by its own awkwardness.
The later version (1939, missing the last three hundred words and with an additional two thousand words) is both more and less satisfactory—the convincing anecdote now becomes a real short story. The pattern is more familiar. Now the sighted man does more than simply escape—his vision gives him the power to return and warn the villagers, Cassandra-like, of their impending doom; the ending contains real love between a man and a woman, and the thrust of the story has changed from reportage to art. Each version of the story is perfectly satisfying, but the immediacy and conviction of the first ending is exchanged for something that demonstrates that, had Wells had the spirit for it, he might in later life have produced some remarkably moving short stories of the fantastic. (It was not that he was not asked, nor that he did not have a market. More that the fecundity of ideas went away, and that his mind and attention went elsewhere. As Wells explained, in apology, “I find it a little difficult to disentangle the causes that have restricted the flow of these inventions. It has happened, I remark, to others as well as to myself, and in spite of the kindliest encouragement to continue from editors and readers. There was a time when life bubbled with short stories; they were always coming to the surface of my mind, and it is no deliberate change of will that has thus restricted my production.”)
“Empire of the Ants”—A story of eco-disaster. An idea that would be seen now as a bouncing-off point, here is the whole story. Which makes sense, of course: the idea was original, and Wells is a remarkable tale-teller. The story ends with the worrying suggestion by the narrator, Wells, that the second act of this disaster story will occur in Europe in 1950 or 1960.
“The Door in the Wall”—One of my favorite stories, by anyone. Haunting, magical and sad, and none the less satisfying for being so perfectly predictable. Like a silent comedy, the delight is not in what happens, but in how each event in the chain happens at the perfect moment for it to happen.
“The Wild Asses of the Devil”—A little brimstone, a little political commentary. What more could anyone wish for?
THERE ARE FEW enough writers in any field whose short stories will be read a hundred years after they were written. Science fiction in particular has a short enough sell-by date, one that only the finest writers surpass. Ray Bradbury’s Martian short stories transcend our knowledge that there are no canals on Mars and no atmosphere; too many near-future tales from too many fine authors were overtaken by events or by breakthroughs in scientific knowledge and became, simply, redundant. H. G. Wells’s stories are, as this collection demonstrates, still astonishingly readable, and, ultimately, the joy of a volume like this is that the stories can and will be read, not as curiosities from the past, but as living things. Wells himself said of his short stories, “I make no claims for them and no apology; they will be read as long as people read them. Things written either live or die . . .” And of all the things one can say about these stories, to my mind unquestionably the best is this: long after they were written, they live.
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This was my introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Country of the Blind and Other Stories by H. G. Wells, 2007. All Wells quotations are from his introduction to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories, 1911.
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Business as Usual, During Alterations: Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, by Cory Doctorow
George shook his head slowly. “You’re wrong, John. Not back to where we were. This morning, we had an economy of scarcity. Tonight, we have an economy of abundance. This morning, we had a money economy—it was a money economy, even if credit was important. Tonight, it’s a credit economy, one hundred per cent. This morning, you and the lieutenant were selling standardization. Tonight, it’s diversity.
“The whole framework of our society is flipped upside down.” He frowned uncertainly.
“And yet, you’re right too, it doesn’t seem to make much difference, it is still the same old rat race. I don’t understand it.”
—“Business as Usual, During Alterations” by Ralph Williams (Astounding Science Fiction, 1958)
I bought a box of SF pulps when I was in my late teens from one of my father’s friends, who kept them in the garage. English editions of Astounding Science Fiction, for the most part. Stories written by authors whose names I barely recognized, despite being a science fiction reader from about as soon as I could read.
I paid more than I could afford for them.
I suspect that one story paid for all of them, though.
It’s a thought experiment. I’d forgotten the opening of the story (aliens decide to Mess with Us) but remembered what happened after that.
We’re in a department store. And someone drops off two matter duplicators. They have pans. You put something in pan one, press a button, its exact duplicate appears in pan two.
We spend a day in the department store as they sell everything they have as cheaply as possible, duplicating things with the matter duplicator, making what they can on each sale, and using checks and credit cards, not cash (you can now perfectly duplicate cash—which obviously is no longer legal tender). Towards the end they stop and take stock of the new world waiting for them and realize that all the rules have changed, but craftsmen and engineers are more necessary than ever. That companies won’t be manufacturing millions of identical things, but they’ll need to make hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slightly different things, that their stores will be showrooms for things, that stockrooms will be history. That there will now be fundamental changes including, in 1950s-style retailing, in a phrase that turned up well after 1958, a long tail.
Being Astounding Science Fiction, the story contains the moral of 95 percent of Astounding Science Fiction stories, which could perhaps be reduced to: People are smart. We’ll cope.
When my friends who were musicians first started complaining sadly about people stealing their music on Napster, back in the 1990s, I told them about the story of the duplicator machines. (I could not remember the name of the story or the author. It was not until I agreed to write this introduction I asked a friend, via e-mail, and found myself, a Google later, rereading it for the first time in decades.)
It seemed to me that copying music was not stealing. It was something else. It was the duplicator machine story: you were pressing a button and an object appeared in the pan. Which meant, I suspected, that music-as-object (CD, vinyl, cassette tape) was going to lose value, and that other things—mostly things that could not be reproduced, things like live shows and personal contact—would increase in value.
I remembered what Charles Dickens did, a hundred and fifty years before, when copyright laws meant that his copyrights were w
orth nothing in the US: he was widely read, but he was not making any money from it. So he took the piracy as advertising, and toured the US in theaters, reading from his books. He made money, and he saw America.
So I started doing Evenings with Neil Gaiman as fund-raisers for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and learning how to do that; to make an evening interesting for an audience, with just me and a stage and things I’d written, partly because it seemed to me that one day it might not be as easy to make money from selling stories in the traditional way, but that business might still continue more or less as usual, during the alterations, if there were other things I could do.
And as the nature of music-selling changed utterly and fundamentally, I just stood and watched and nodded. Now the nature of book publishing is changing, and the only people who claim to know what the landscape of publishing will look like a decade from now are fools or deluding themselves. Some people think the sky is falling, and I do not entirely blame them.
I never worried that the world was ending, because as a teen I’d read a thought experiment in an SF pulp published two years before I was born. It stretched my head.
I know that the view is going to be very different in the future, that authors are going to get their money from different places. I am certain that not all authors can be Charles Dickens, and many of us became authors in order to avoid getting up on stages in the first place, and that it’s not a solution for everybody or even for most of us.
Fortunately, Cory Doctorow has written this book. It’s filled with wisdom and with thought experiments and with things that will mess with your mind. Cory once came up with an analogy while we argued that explained the world that we were heading into in terms of mammals versus dandelions to me, and I’ve never seen anything quite the same way since.
Mammals, he said, and I paraphrase here and do not put it as well as Cory did, invest a great deal of time and energy in their young, in the pregnancy, in raising them. Dandelions just let their seeds go to the wind, and do not mourn the seeds that do not make it. Until recently, creating intellectual content for payment has been a mammalian idea. Now it’s time for creators to accept that we are becoming dandelions.
The world is not ending. Not if, as Astounding Science Fiction used to suggest, humans are bright enough to think our way out of the problems we think ourselves into.
I suspect that the next generation to come along will puzzle over our agonies, much as I puzzled over the death of the Victorian music halls as a child, and much as I felt sorry for the performers who had only needed thirteen minutes of material in their whole life, and who did their thirteen minutes in town after town until the day that television came along and killed it all.
In the meanwhile, it’s business as usual, during alterations.
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This is one of two introductions to Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age, 2014.
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The Mystery of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown
It is not that the Father Brown stories lack color. Chesterton was, after all, an artist, and begins almost every story by painting in light. “The evening daylight in the streets was large and luminous, opalescent and empty” (“The Man in the Passage”); “It was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in the early winter, when the daylight is silver rather than gold, and pewter rather than silver” (“The God of the Gongs”); “The sky was as Prussian a blue as Potsdam could require, but it was yet more like that lavish and glowing use of the color which a child extracts from a shilling paint box” (“The Fairy Tale of Father Brown”)—three examples picked at random from The Wisdom of Father Brown, each occurring in the first paragraph.
We first meet him in “The Blue Cross,” a bumbling Essex curate, laden down with brown paper parcels and an umbrella. Chesterton borrowed the parcels, the umbrella, and perhaps the central character from his friend Father John O’Connor—once he had discovered, with surprise, that a priest (whom society assumes to be unworldly) must by profession be on close terms with the World and its sins. “The Blue Cross” illustrates this principle: Flambeau, the master thief, is out-thought every step of the way by the little priest, because the priest understands theft.
He had black clerical garb and a flat hat, sandy hair, and gray eyes as “empty as the North Sea.” He was Father Brown (possible initial J, possible first name Paul), one of the greatest colorless figures of detective fiction, who continued through another sixty-odd short stories; less concerned with hounding down criminals, relentlessly bringing them to justice, or with solving crimes, than with offering the offender a chance at forgiveness, or merely being the commonsense vehicle that illuminates a Chestertonian paradox. Other great fictional detectives receive biographies, as aficionados backfill details of their lives and exploits (where was Watson’s wound?); but Father Brown defies attempts to round out the details of his life outside of the canon. He had no home life, no early years, no last bow. He lacked color.
It was Chesterton himself who pointed out that his subtitle to the novel The Man Who Was Thursday, A Nightmare, tended to be overlooked. Perhaps that explains something else about the Father Brown stories: their logic is dream logic. The characters from a Father Brown story have little existence before the story starts, none after it has finished: each cast of innocents and malefactors is assembled to make the story work, and for no other reason. The tales are not exercises in deduction, for rarely is the reader presented with a set of clues and logical problems to work through. Instead they are the inspired magic tricks of a master showman, or tromp l’oeil paintings in which the application of a little brown suddenly turns an Eastern swami into a private secretary, or a suicide into a murder and back again.
The Father Brown stories are a game of masks—it is rare that an unmasking of some kind does not occur. The denouement tends less to be a summation of misdirected clues, than a revelation of who, in the story one has read, was really whom.
It has been said that Chesterton was not proud of Father Brown; it is true that he wrote the stories, especially in the latter days, to fund GK’s Weekly, the mouthpiece for his theories of Distributionism (a sort of bucolic socialism, in which every right-thinking Englishman would own his own cow, and a plot of land to graze it on). It is also true that many of the Father Brown stories are repetitive; there are only so many masks, so many times a man can disguise himself as himself. But even the worst of the stories contains something magical and rare: a sunset, perhaps, or a fabulous last line.
Chesterton himself was colorful, larger than life: one would imagine that in the creation of a detective he would have opted for the flamboyant—his hero would be a Flambeau, or a Sunday. Father Brown, on the other hand, seems created less as a detective than as a reaction to detectives, in a milieu in which, as GKC complained, “the front of the cover shows somebody shot / And the back of the cover will tell you the plot” (“Commercial Candour”).
You cannot celebrate Father Brown, for he doesn’t exist. In the Chestertonian game of masks, the detective is the McGuffin, significant by his very insignificance. A plain little goblin of a man, less disorganized and flustered the more the tales go on, but still colorless to the extreme as he walks among the mirrors and the ever-changing lights.
“One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals is this,” said Chesterton, discussing his fondness for drawing with chalks on brown paper, “that white is also a colour.” And it is also a wise and awful truth that the most colorless of all detectives was employed to reveal the most colorful of all detective stories.
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An essay from 100 Great Detectives, 1991.
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Concerning Dreams and Nightmares: The Dream Stories of H. P. Lovecraft
If literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are twin cities, divided by a river of black water. The Horror place is a rather more dangerous place, or it should be: you can walk around Fantasy alone.
That’s H. P. Lovecraft, the phenomenon. H. P. Lovecraft, the man, died at the age of forty-seven, over fifty years ago.
THE MAN: THIN, ascetic, an anachronism in his own time.
There’s a World Fantasy Award sitting on my stairs; I pat its head as I walk past: a Gahan Wilson sculpture of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937). It’s a portrait of a thin-lipped man, with a high forehead, a long chin, and wide eyes. He looks vaguely uncomfortable, vaguely alien, an Easter Island statue of a man.
He was a solitary individual, an inhabitant of Providence, Rhode Island. He communicated with the outside world through letters, some of them the length of short novels.
He wrote for the pulps: fiction for disposable publications like Weird Tales, its covers showing vaguely arty lesbian bondage scenes. He ghostwrote a Houdini story, rewrote the work of aspiring writers; he sold two tales—“At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow Out of Time”—to Astounding Stories.
He was a believer in unpleasant doctrines of racial superiority, and an Anglophile. He was a student of horror. There is an abundance of conjectures as to the circumstances of his life and death, the roots of his fiction, but they remain theories.
In his lifetime, he wasn’t a major writer. He wasn’t even a minor writer. He was a minor pulp writer, as forgettable as any of his time (quick! can you name five other writers for Weird Tales in the twenties and thirties?). But there was something there which, like Lovecraft’s own Cthulhu, did not die.