Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man did not fall under the rubric of “that which is called ‘science fiction.’” At that time, “horror” was not a marketing category, and the cover on the first edition called it “the most powerful tale of horror you will ever read.” It looked no less respectable than most of the paperback fiction of that time. (This was when Signet prospered by making William Faulkner books look like Erskine Caldwell books.)
Like so many protagonists in ’50s scary stuff, Scott Carey runs afoul of Evil Radiation, made worse by accidental exposure to insecticide. Unfortunately, he winds up with the size, rather than the abilities, of a spider. In fact, that scary cover shows him battling a spider of approximately equal dimensions, and it would appear to be a very good thing that he is armed with a pin.
It was not published as science fiction, but it thought like science fiction. The spider size is merely a stage in a gradual process of continuing diminishment, and in true sf fashion, Matheson explores the complexities of each new size. We see no end to the decrease, but rather than expecting to disappear, Carey has a science-fictional vision of the wonders of the microcosm he is about to enter.
The Shrinking Man is often discussed as an allegory of the horrors of suburban domesticity. It has been made into a movie twice, in 1957 as The Incredible Shrinking Man, when it was seen as demonstrating the symbolic emasculation of being forced into the domestic role, and in 1981 as The Incredible Shrinking Woman, after we had begun to notice that women have to live like that all the time.
The Shrinking Man first appeared in Gold Medal Books, a paperback original line best known as John D. MacDonald’s publisher. Matheson has always ranged among the genres, with successful science fiction, horror, and supernatural romance, as well as less known mysteries, war novels, and westerns. He has been extremely successful in getting his work into other media. Indeed, I Am Legend, his effort to give a scientific rationale to the vampire legend, beat The Shrinking Man’s record by being filmed three times, and he is also known for the films Somewhere in Time and Hell House and more than a dozen episodes of The Twilight Zone, including most famously “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”
I had remembered Robert A. Heinlein’s Double Star with pleasure. Rereading it for this review, I liked it even more. It is not of course the sort of thing the Library of America was originally intended to enshrine, but it is excellent at what it sets out to do.
Lorenzo Smythe, an actor who is good but not as good as he thinks he is, is the Heinlein protagonist par excellence: witty, competent, opinionated but able to back up his opinions, with a few flaws whose repair will constitute a significant plot element. The tale is set in a Solar System in which other planets have been found to be inhabited, and the book’s main issue is dealing with a Martian race that is biologically and culturally different from the Terrans but unquestionably sentient. (A subtext that occasionally becomes overt is that the barbarous forerunners of the human spacefarers despised one another on the trivial basis of pigmentation.) Required to impersonate a political leader, Smythe grows into his role and learns to serve something bigger than his ego. The plot is cleverly constructed, the characters are well defined, and Smythe is a most enjoyable narrator.
Double Star was published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1956 and reprinted in paperback the next year by Signet. It won Heinlein the first of his four Best Novel Hugo awards. By this time, Heinlein was already referred to as the Dean of Science Fiction and not just by his publisher. He had pioneered the techniques of slipping exposition into description and dialogue that made Astounding a quantum leap above its predecessors. He had designed and executed a major Future History. He was in the midst of the series of “juveniles” (which would now be called YAs) that recruited a generation of readers.
Many consider Double Star the peak of Heinlein’s career; it is probably his most uncontroversially praised work. Thereafter, there was more debate: Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress appealed to widely differing audiences, though the author insisted they represented a single consistent worldview. Later works convinced many that whom the Gods would destroy, they first allow to write what they really want to. Still, Heinlein remains a towering presence in the field.
Alfred Bester begins The Stars My Destination in the way one must never begin a science fiction novel: with a lecture on the book’s main Nifty New Thing, a form of teleportation called jaunting. He gets away with it (as least with me) partly because his unnamed omniscient narrator is as much fun to listen to as Lorenzo Smythe. The whole book is like that: a tightrope walk over many pitfalls with the author simultaneously racing and pirouetting and never completely falling off. Randall Jarrell famously remarked that a novel is a lengthy work of fiction that has something wrong with it, but Bester abuses the privilege.
To wit: It is no secret that substantial elements of the book are lifted from The Count of Monte Cristo. (Defenders might say that Bester owes no more to Alexandre Dumas than Shakespeare did to Raphael Holinshed.) Gully Foyle, the protagonist, is intended to be a monster of revenge, but he goes beyond that. In one confrontation, the reader may infer that a rape has occurred between paragraphs. The world he lives in and many of the people he meets are as nasty as he is, and one plot element is the quest for something beyond ordinary torture. There are scientific botches; Damon Knight cruelly mocked the character who can somehow see all but the visible wavelengths. One could go and on.
And yet there is so much to like along the way. In an early story, Bester had a character recommend a strategy of “dazzlement and enchantment,” and it has become almost mandatory for critics to cite that phrase as a description of Bester’s writing approach. Here he dazzles and enchants over and over again. There is the strange and charming tribe of Scientific People. On a smaller scale, there is a delightful exchange of ritualistic insults when two characters discover that they are descended from rivals in ancient China. (“With all courtesy I shave your ill-formed eyebrows.” “Most respectfully I singe your snaggle teeth.”) There are a few enjoyable pages of typographic tricks invoking synesthesia, but not too many. The wild ride concludes with a giant ambiguity that could be either the greatest empowerment dream ever or the horrific prelude to a tale that can consist only of the words “Everything blew up.”
The Stars My Destination was also serialized in Galaxy, then published in paperback by Signet. Bester had already written The Demolished Man, a comparable work of flawed brilliance. Around that time he also produced a dozen or so remarkable short stories such as “5,217,009” and “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed.” In the ’60s he went off to the greener pastures of mainstream magazines as editor of Holiday. He returned in the ’70s, old, sick, and almost blind, and failed to add much to the luster of his early works.
Just as science fiction is frequently used for thought experiments in science, so imagined alien worlds can offer alternatives that shed light on religious issues. James Blish, though an unbeliever, was fascinated by questions of Catholic theology. In A Case of Conscience, he put a Jesuit on a spaceship to face new evidence on one vexed question: Suppose we encounter a world on which there appears to be no Original Sin. Could that mean the doctrine is false? Could it apply only to Terran humanity but not to others? Could it be . . . Satan?
A Case of Conscience started out as a novella of that name intended as part of one of the first efforts at a shared-world anthology, set on the planet Lithia. When that book failed, he placed the story in If magazine. He added a concluding episode, set on Earth, and the book was published by Ballantine. He later treated the book as part of a “thematic trilogy” on moral issues about the quest for knowledge, along with Doctor Mirabilis, a historical novel about Roger Bacon, and a diptych comprising Black Easter and The Day after Judgment, in which Satan is summoned.
Blish was a complex figure in the field. A Joycean scholar (one plot element in A Case of Conscience deals with Finnegans Wake), he joined Damon Knight to create a body of criti
cism that would treat science fiction as neither above nor beneath the methods by which mimetic fiction can be judged, and he was unsparing in his treatment of works that failed by his standards. Yet he is perhaps best known for his work in the déclassé area of media novelization. In his case, it might be called short-storyization, as he turned the episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series into twelve volumes of stories that were pretty much direct transcriptions of the shows. He also wrote an original Star Trek novel, Spock Must Die!, which is more highly regarded among appreciators of the subsubgenre. Along with A Case of Conscience, he is remembered for the inventive Cities in Flight quartet.
Who? by Algis Budrys, dealt with one of the major issues of the ’50s: the division of the world into American and Soviet blocs. That was a particularly important issue to Budrys, whose father was an official in the Lithuanian government-in-exile. The book has more lasting importance because of the philosophical questions it raises about personal identity.
Lucas Martino, an American scientist, is involved in a horrific accident and falls into Russian hands. They return him, or say they have done so, but what they return is a man in an ovoid metal mask that covers his entire head. There obviously is someone inside, but no one can be sure if it is Martino. The character of Martino and the question of how much of a human being can be replaced were well done, but time has not been kind to the book. There is no Soviet bloc anymore, and Martino’s identity could now be instantly determined from DNA evidence.
Who? was published as a paperback original in 1958 by Pyramid. It was reprinted several times in America and the United Kingdom, and at least twice it had an arresting cover: the man in the mask sitting down, smoking a cigarette, with wisps of smoke drifting out through the interstices in the mask. It could be seen as iconic of all too much science fiction: the gleaming metal future with the stupidity of the present seeping out through the holes.
Budrys also wrote Rogue Moon, an even more fascinating philosophical look at identity, this time via matter transmission, and the underappreciated Michaelmas and Hard Landing. He further contributed to the field with a series of thoughtful reviews in Galaxy and later The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The latter are now being brought back into print by Dave Langford’s Ansible Editions.
Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time was one of the first major looks at the concept of time travel and its use in the creation of alternate worlds. Paradoxically enough, this tale of influencing all times and spaces obeys the classical dramatic unities, taking place in a single room over the course of a few hours. (Some believe that Leiber, who came from a theatrical background, originally conceived the book as a stage play.)
The Spiders and the Snakes, two powerful forces about which we know little besides that they oppose each other, conscript humans from all times and places (thus giving the author a chance to create an elegant variety of voices) for the Change War, and the soldiers meet in The Place (outside ordinary time and space) for Rest & Recreation. (The sexual nature of some of the recreation is more openly hinted at than was common at the time. Cf. Miss Kitty’s house in the contemporaneous Gunsmoke.) They discuss the issues, and then someone sets up a time bomb . . . .
The Big Time was serialized in two parts in Galaxy in 1958, and it won the Hugo for best novel of that year. It was then reprinted as an Ace Double with a small collection of Leiber stories (also set in the Change War) on the flip side. The cover of The Big Time is particularly bizarre even by ’50s paperback sf standards. A curious-looking woman in a two-piece bathing suit with an unsheathed ax swinging from the waist is wielding an apparent Heathkit device that emits visible waves, which in turn cause a satyr and two more traditionally humanoid men to collapse.
Leiber is perhaps best remembered for his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales, landmarks of sword & sorcery, but he also gave us a great variety of graceful and eloquent tales covering such areas as science vs. religion (Gather, Darkness), future publishing (The Silver Eggheads), and academe (Conjure Wife).
A selection of this sort, being finite, inspires arguments about inclusion and exclusion. I could quibble about some of those included, but I see no disasters. Presumably, Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut were left out because they have their own Library of America books. Fahrenheit 451 would be a natural, but I conjecture that Ray Bradbury is likewise about to get his own book. In fact, I’m surprised that he doesn’t have one already. He was considered a credit to his genre in the ’50s, and his work from then is still appreciated. Robert Sheckley had not yet reached his prime as a novelist. (I am pleased to note, however, that his delightful short fiction has gained another form of mainstream acceptance. The book-publishing arm of the other New York Review has issued Store of the Worlds, a collection of 26 of his stories. I recommend it to anyone who does not yet have a Sheckley collection.) The elephant in the room (or not in the room) is Isaac Asimov, and I would recommend The Caves of Steel. It is important for its almost unprecedented successful combination of science fiction and formal mystery; it is still fun to read and I wish they’d found room for it.
If this set were nothing more than the nine novels in clean, well-edited editions on archivally acceptable paper at a reasonable price, it would be a good deal, but there’s more. The Library of America prides itself on its scholarly apparatus. They chose Gary K. Wolfe, who is best known for keeping us all up to date on the new science fiction books in his Locus columns, and is also a regular at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts and the author of Evaporating Genres and other excellent critical works. He has handled the job with thoroughness and aplomb.
For instance: The last time Alfred Bester was revived (by Vintage Books), readers noticed that The Stars My Destination’s famous phrase, “Vorga, I kill you filthy!” was replaced by the plonking “Vorga, I kill you deadly!” Here we learn that a British publisher had made that change, along with others (including an effort to reduce Americanisms) and the phrase was picked up by Vintage. The original text was, of course, restored here, and in general textual emendations are carefully made and noted.
The set also offers biographical essays on the authors and publication history of the novels as well as an extensive Notes section explaining obscure references from Adlai E. Stevenson to Gadzooks! and reprinting supplementary material such as the three chapters Galaxy editor H. L. Gold had Pohl and Kornbluth tack on to the end of The Space Merchants when he had more pages to fill, Blish’s explanation of relevant Catholic dogma and how he expected it to change (his one failed prophecy was that the rite of exorcism would be all but forgotten), and introductions to later editions of the books by Matheson and Leiber.
The Library of America has added further value outside the books. I direct your attention to the web site, which includes a gallery of covers for the books and the magazines from which they came, reprinted essays on the science fiction of the time by Robert Silverberg and Barry Malzberg, and appreciations of each of the books written by such intellectual descendants as Connie Willis, Neil Gaiman, and Kit Reed.
I thoroughly enjoyed this particular example of the Serious Literary World dragging science fiction out of the gutter.
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Arthur D. Hlavaty lives in Yonkers, New York.
Hearts Like Fists, written by Adam Szymkowicz, directed by Kelly O’Donnell
produced by Flux Theatre Ensemble, featuring Becky Byers, Aja Houston, Rachael Hip-Flores, August Schulenburg, Marnie Schulenburg, and Chinaza Uche. The Secret Theatre, Long Island City, New York
reviewed by Jen Gunnels
The human heart is roughly the size of a fist. I learned this years ago when I was a pre-med major. (Yes, frightening, I know. Be thankful I failed calculus.) I was reminded again of this in a scene from Adam Szymkowicz’s Hearts Like Fists at the Secret Theatre in December. This homage to the pulp tradition of costumed vigilantes was a hilarious ensemble piece which combined aspects of Batman with elements from a noir comedy of manners. The end result was humorous, innovative, an
d, at times, beautifully introspective—centered on the opening and closing of both hearts and fists.
The play’s crime fighters did not have super powers and so the fantastic element in some respects was missing, but the effects, which I describe later, do place it within the tradition of vigilante comic heroes as well as recalling the fantastic elements of Hong Kong cinema. In many respects, Szymkowicz grounds the material in the handling of both characters and theme. The female crime fighters are costumed but not overly sexualized—these are women who will mete out pain, not fill out ridiculous, impractical costumes. (They wear very sensible ass-kicking boots. I approve.) But the ridiculousness of the artificial heart and a kitchen surgery definitely gave the material a fantastic and farcical edge.
The action opens on Dr. X (August Schulenburg) as he attempts to evade capture. He delivers a rambling monologue, revealing his insanity through sudden jumps in thoughts and constant remembering and forgetting of his past. He has been rejected by a woman (“her face was like a plate”) who left him. As a result, Dr. X has gone insane, pushed over the edge by thwarted love. Because he cannot have love, no one will, and he’s been killing lovers all over the city by injecting them with a poison that stops the heart.
The Crime Fighters—Sally (Aja Houston), Nina (Becky Byers), and Jazmin (Rachel Hip-Flores)—have been searching for Dr. X to put a stop to his serial killing. Crime fighters when duty calls, the three women work as nurses in the city hospital where they and a fellow Nurse (Susan Louise O’Connor) moon over handsome heart surgeon Peter (Chinaza Uche). The Nurse is especially smitten but lacks the courage to tell Peter of her feelings, and over and over, her attempts to do so are thwarted by circumstance.
During an attempted murder, Dr. X is confronted by another heroine, Lisa (Marnie Schulenburg), who nearly beats him but is herself wounded as he gets away. She goes to the hospital to have her heart checked, and she and Peter have an immediate connection, much to the dismay of the Nurse. Lisa asks Peter out and reveals that she is irresistible to others and eventually breaks their hearts. Peter has the opposite problem and is working on an artificial heart to replace his own weak and broken one. Lisa takes a moment to go to the ladies’ room at the restaurant where she meets the Crime Fighters, who have been tracking her as a sole survivor of one of Dr. X’s attacks. They want her to join them, but Lisa turns them down, thinking that it would hurt her new relationship with Peter. When she returns to their table, Peter has gone, too afraid to have a relationship.
NYRSF January 2013 Issue 293 Page 4