Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  “I went on until it must have been noon, though my watch had stopped. Occasionally I passed metal trees that had fallen from above, and once, the metallic body of a bear that had slipped off a path above, some time in past ages. And there were metal birds without number. They must have been accumulating through geological ages. All along up to this, the cliff had risen perpendicularly to the limit of my vision, but now I saw a wide ledge, with a sloping wall beyond it, dimly visible above. But the sheer wall rose a full hundred feet to the shelf, and I cursed at my inability to surmount it. For a time I stood there, devising impractical means for climbing it, driven almost to tears by my impotence. I was ravenously hungry, and thirsty as well.

  “At last I went on.

  “In an hour I came upon it. A slender cylinder of black metal, that towered a hundred feet into the greenish mist, and carried at the top, a great mushroom-shaped orange flame. It was a strange thing. The fire was as big as a balloon, bright and steady. It looked much like a great jet of combustible gas, burning as it streamed from the cylinder. I stood petrified in amazement, wondering vaguely at the what and why of the thing.

  “And then I saw more of them back of it, dimly—scores of them— a whole forest of flames.

  “I crouched back against the cliff, while I considered. Here I supposed, was the city of the lights. They were sleeping now, but still I had not the courage to enter. According to my calculations I had gone about fifteen miles. Then I must be, I thought, almost diametrically opposite the place where the crimson river flowed under the wall, with half of the rim unexplored. If I wished to continue my journey, I must go around the city, if I may call it that.

  “So I left the wall. Soon it was lost to view. I tried to keep in view of the orange flames, but abruptly they were gone in the mist. I walked more to the left, but I came upon nothing but the wastes of red sand, with the green murk above. On and on I wandered. Then the sand and the air grew slowly brighter and I knew that night had fallen. The lights were soon passing to and fro. I had seen lights the night before, but they traveled high and fast. These, on the other hand, sailed low, and I felt that they were searching.

  “I knew that they were hunting for me. I lay down in a little hollow in the sand. Vague, mist-veiled points of light came near and passed. And then one stopped directly overhead. It descended and the circle of radiance grew about it. I knew that it was useless to run, and I could not have done so, for my terror. Down and down it came.

  “And then I saw its form. The thing was of a glittering, blazing crystal. A great-six-sided, upright prism of red, a dozen feet in length, it was, with a six-pointed structure like a snowflake about the center, deep blue, with pointed blue flanges running from the points of the star to angles of the prism! Soft scarlet fire flowed from the points. And on each face of the prisrn, above and below the star, was a purple cone that must have been an eye. Strange pulsating lights flickered in the crystal. It was alive with light.

  “It fell straight toward me!

  “It was a terribly, utterly alien form of life. It was not human, not animal—not even life as we know it at all. And yet it had intelligence. But it was strange and foreign and devoid of feeling. It is curious to say that even then, as I lay beneath it, the thought came to me, that the thing and its fellows must have crystallized when the waters of the ancient sea dried out of the crater. Crystallizing salts take intricate forms.

  “I drew my automatic and fired three times, but the bullets ricocheted harmlessly off the polished facets.

  “It dropped until the gleaming lower point of the prism was not a yard above me. Then the scarlet fire reached out caressingly—flowed over my body. My weight grew less. I was lifted, held against the point. You may see its mark upon my chest. The thing floated into the air, carrying me. Soon others were drifting about. I was overcome with nausea. The scene grew black and I knew no more.

  “I awoke floating free in a brilliant orange light. I touched no solid object. I writhed, kicked about—at nothingness. I could not move or turn over, because I could get a hold on nothing. My memory of the last two days seemed a nightmare. My clothing was still upon me. My canteen still hung, or rather floated, by my shoulder. And my automatic was in my pocket. I had the sensation that a great space of time had passed. There was a curious stiffness in rny side. I examined it and found a red scar. I believe those crystal things had cut into me. And I found, with a horror you cannot understand, the mark upon my chest. Presently it dawned upon me that I was floating, devoid of gravity and free as an object in space, in the orange flame at the top of one of the black cylinders. The crystals knew the secret of gravity. It was vital to them. And peering about, I discerned, with infinite repulsion, a great flashing body, a few yards away. But its inner lights were dead, so I knew that it was day, and that the strange beings were sleeping.

  “If I was ever to escape, this was the opportunity. I kicked, clawed desperately at the air, all in vain. I did not move an inch. If they had chained me, I could not have been more secure. I drew my automatic, resolved on a desperate measure. They would not find me again, alive. And as I had it in my hand, an idea came into my mind. I pointed the gun to the side, and fired six rapid shots. And the recoil of each explosion sent me drifting faster, rocket-wise, toward the edge.

  “I shot out into the green. Had my gravity been suddenly restored, I might have been killed by the fall, but I descended slowly, and felt a curious lightness for several minutes. And to my surprise, when I struck the ground, the airplane was right before me! They had drawn it up by the base of the tower. It seemed to be intact. I started the engine with nervous haste, and sprang into the cockpit. As I started, another black tower loomed up abruptly before me, but I veered around it, and took off in safety.

  “In a few moments I was above the green. I half expected the gravitational wave to be turned on me again, but higher and higher I rose unhindered until the accursed black walls were about me no longer. The sun blazed high in the heavens. Soon I had landed again at Vaca Morena.

  “I had had enough of radium hunting. On the beach, where I landed, I sold the plane to a rancher at his own price, and told him to reserve a place for me on the next steamer, which was due in three days. Then I went to the town’s single inn, ate, and went to bed. At noon the next day, when I got up, I found that my shoes and the pockets of my clothes contained a good bit of the red sand from the crater that had been collected as I crawled about in flight from the crystal lights. I saved some of it for curiosity alone, but when I analyzed it I found it a radium compound so rich that the little handful was worth millions of dollars.

  “But the fortune was of little value, for, despite frequent doses of the fluid from my canteen, and the best medical aid, I have suffered continually, and now that my canteen is empty, I am doomed.

  Your friend, Thomas Kelvin”

  * * * *

  Thus the manuscript ends. If the reader doubts the truth of the letter, he may see the Metal Man in the Tyburn Museum.

  THE FIREFLY TREE, by Jack Williamson

  First published in Science Fiction Age, May 1997

  They had come back to live on the old farm where his grandfather was born. His father loved it, but he felt lonely for his friends in the city. Cattle sometimes grazed through the barren sandhills beyond the barbed wire fences, but there were no neighbors. He found no friends except the firefly tree.

  It grew in the old fruit orchard his grandfather had planted below the house. His mouth watered for the ripe apples and peaches and pears he expected, but when he saw the trees they were all dead or dying. They bore no fruit.

  With no friends at all, he stayed with his father on the farm when his mother drove away every morning to work at the peanut mill. His father was always busy in the garden he made among the bare trees in the orchard. The old windmill had lost its wheel, but there was an electric pump for water. Cantaloupe and squash vines grew along the edge of the garden, with rows of tomatoes and beans, and then the corn that grew
tall enough to hide the money trees.

  He found the firefly tree one day while his father was chopping weeds and moving the pipes that sprayed water on his money trees. It was still tiny then, not as tall as his knee. The leaves were odd: thin arrowheads of glossy black velvet, striped with silver. A single lovely flower had three wide sky-colored petals and a bright yellow star at the center. He sat on the ground by it, breathing its strange sweetness, till his father came by with the hoe.

  “Don’t hurt it!” he begged. “Please!”

  “That stinking weed?” his father grunted. “Get out of the way.”

  Something made him reach to catch the hoe.

  “Okay.” His father grinned and let it stay. “If you care that much.”

  He called it his tree, and watched it grow. When it wilted in a week with no rain, he found a bucket and carried water from the well. It grew taller than he was, with a dozen of the great blue flowers and then a hundred. The odor of them filled the garden.

  Since there was no school, his mother tried to teach him at home. She found a red-backed reader for him, and a workbook with pages for him to fill out while she was away at work. He seldom got the lessons done.

  “He’s always mooning over that damn weed,” his father muttered when she scolded him. “High as a kite on the stink of it.”

  The odor was strange and strong, but no stink at all. Not to him. He loved it and loved the tree. He carried more water and used the hoe to till the soil around it. Often he stood just looking at the huge blue blooms, wondering what the fruit would be.

  One night he dreamed that the tree was swarming with fireflies. They were so real that he got out of bed and slipped out into the dark. The stars blazed brighter here than they had ever been in the city. They lit his way to the orchard, and he heard the fireflies before he came to the tree.

  Their buzz rose and fell like the sound of the surf the time they went to visit his aunt who lived by the sea. Twinkling brighter than the stars, they filled the branches. One of them came to meet him. It hovered in front of his face and lit on the tip of his trembling finger, smiling at him with eyes as blue and bright as the flowers.

  He had never seen a firefly close up. It was as big as a bumblebee. It had tiny hands that gripped his fingernail, and one blue eye squinted a little to study his face. The light came from a round topknot on its head. It flickered like something electric, from red to green, red to yellow to blue, maybe red again. The flashes were sometimes slower than his breath, sometimes so fast they blurred. He thought the flicker was meant to tell him something, but he had no way to understand.

  Barefoot and finally shivering with cold, he stood there till it stopped. The firefly shook its crystal wings and flew away. The stars were fading into the dawn, and the tree was dark and silent when he looked. He was back in bed before he heard his mother rattling dishes in the kitchen, making breakfast.

  The next night he dreamed that he was back under the tree with the firefly perched again on his finger. Its tiny face seemed almost human in the dream, and he understood its winking voice It told him how the tree had grown from a sharp-pointed acorn that came from the stars and planted itself when it struck the ground.

  It told him about the firefly planet, far off in the sky. The fireflies belonged to a great republic spread across the stars. Thousands of different peoples lived in peace on thousands of different worlds The acorn ship had come to invite the people of Earth to join their republic. They were ready to teach the Earth-people how to walk across space and travel to visit the stars. The dream seemed so wonderful that he tried to tell about it at breakfast.

  “What did I tell you?” His father turned red and shouted at his mother. His brains been addled by the stink of that poison weed I ought to cut it down and burn it.”

  “Don’t!” He was frightened and screaming. “I love it. I’ll die if you kill it.

  “I’m afraid he would.” His mother looked worried. “Leave the plant where it is, and I’ll take him to Dr. Wong.”

  “Okay.” His father nodded at him sternly. “If you’ll promise to do your chores and stay out of the garden.”

  Trying to keep the promise, he washed the dishes after his mother was gone to work. He made the beds and swept the floors. He tried to do his lessons, though the stories in the reader seemed stupid to him now.

  He did stay out of the garden, but the fireflies came again in his dreams. They carried him to see the shining forests on their own wonderful world. They took him to visit the planets of other peoples people who lived under their seas, people who lived high in their skies, people as small as ants, people larger than the elephants he had seen in a circus parade. He saw ships that could fly faster than light from star to star, and huge machines he never understood and cities more magical than fairyland.

  He said no more about the dreams till the day his mother came home from work to take him to Dr. Wong. The nurse put a thermometer under his tongue and squeezed his arm with a rubber gadget and left him to wait with his mother for Dr. Wong. Dr. Wong was a friendly man who listened to his chest and looked at the nurse’s chart and asked him about the fireflies.

  “They’re wonderful!” He thought the doctor would believe. “You must come at night to see them, sir. They love us. They came to show us the way to the stars.”

  “Listen to him!” His mother had never been out when the fireflies were shining. “That ugly weed has driven him out of his head!”

  “An interesting case.” The doctor smiled and patted his shoulder in a friendly way and turned to look at his mother. “One for the books. The boy should see a psychiatrist.”

  His mother had no money for that.

  “I’ll just take him home,” she said, “and hope he gets better.”

  A police car was parked in front of the house when they got there. His father sat in the back, behind a metal grill. His head was bent. He wouldn’t look up, not even when his mother called through a half-open window.

  The police had more cars parked around the garden. They had chopped down all the money trees and thrown them into a pile. The firefly tree lay on top. Its fragrance was lost in a reek of kerosene. The policemen made everybody move upwind and set the fire with a hissing blowtorch.

  It spread slowly at first, then blazed so high they had to move farther away. Feeling sick at his stomach, he saw the branches of the tree twist and beat against the flames. He heard a long sharp scream. A cat caught in the fire, the policemen said, but he knew it wasn’t a cat. Fireflies swarmed out of the thrashing branches and exploded like tiny bombs when the flames caught them.

  His father was crying when the police took him away, along with a bundle of the money trees for evidence. His mother moved him back to the city. In school again, he tried to tell his new teachers about the fireflies and how they had come to invite the Earth into their great confederation of stars. The teachers sent him to the school psychologist, who called his mother to come for a conference.

  They wanted him to forget the fireflies and find his old friends again, but he wanted no friends except the fireflies. He grieved for them and grieved for his father and grieved for all that might have been.

  * * * *

  “The Metal Man” Copyright © 1928 by Experimenter Publications, Inc.

  “The Firefly Tree” Copyright © 1997 by Jack Williamson.

  PART 4: The Mass Market Era

  (1945–1960)

  After the end of the Depession and the Second World War, people found themselves with more disposable income and more entertainment options, in the form of movies, radio, and increasingly, television (which at the time meant three national networks plus perhaps a handful of independent stations, depending on where you lived and the sensitivity of your antenna). But they found themselves with more reading options as well, due to better distribution of magazines and inexpensive paperback books.

  Books, magazines, and comics were for the most part distributed not through bookstores, but through spinner racks locate
d in drugstores, grocers, and other retailers. The book and magazine selection would change regularly (usually every week), and genre readers could buy that week’s science fiction (or whatever their favorite genre) on a weekly trip to the drugstore or tobacconist.

  While far fewer genre books were published than today, sales of each book were much higher, with midlist authors routinely selling over 100,000 copies of a new paperback. Those paperbacks were generally shorter than contemporary books, averaging about 50,000 words—roughly half the length of a typical novel today. Many SF novels were “fix-ups,” assembled from pieces that had previously been published in magazines as stories.

  The quality of writing and storytelling continued to improve, with more demand for good writing and more science fiction writers able to make a living from their work. Organized groups of science fiction fans had begun throwing small conventions in the 1930s (and had met and corresponded since the 1920s), but with the increased prosperity of the postwar period, the mobility brought about by air travel and the new Interstate Highway System, and the worldliness of readers who were often military veterans, those conventions and interconnections among fandom grew. In 1953, the Hugo Awards were given out for the first time. It was still possible for fans to read all the science fiction that was being published (since there was a lot less of it than today), which meant that when fans did meet at conventions, there was a sense of a shared canon that all had read and could talk about.

  Science fiction was still a niche market, but a big enough market to attract films (granted, usually B-grade films) and develop its own literary critics, like Damon Knight, Anthony Boucher, and James Blish. It was generally dismissed by mainstream voices as not being serious or literary, but increasingly that relative invisibility enabled science fiction writers to express views on politics, race, and gender that were impossible for more mainstream voices in the 1950s.