“The Golden Age of science fiction is twelve.” – Peter Graham
Happens I was twelve when I came upon “Worlds of If” on the
magazine stand at Nieman’s Confectionary.
I was fresh from reading “The Early Asimov”
and I
thought, wow, a pulp magazine!
It wasn’t
a pulp magazine by 1973 – none of the sf magazines had been “pulp” for decades
– but the thrill of discovery overcame that dim awareness.
The June issue was the first I bought but it
was in the August issue that a story indelibly marked the soft wax of my twelve
year old imagination.
Although it was not the first science fiction I read, I think
“The Invaders” by Stephen Tall was the first story told from the viewpoint of
an alien that I read. The clues that an
experienced reader would assemble as a matter of course came as revelations:
Oh, Red Spine was a crab-like creature living on a desert world, but ten
feet wide whose spines could glow – a “sand-dollar” creature – and it
belonged to a telepathic race. The
cylinder from the sky is a space ship, of course, and the small creatures with
the shiny single eye – that must be humans in space suits!
It has been, geez, forty six years?! Since I read it. I’ve read a few other stories by Stephen Tall
but none ever made an impression equal to “The Invaders.”
So when two of my sons took me to the well-stocked, crazy,
labyrinthine Last Book Store in downtown LA during a recent California visit
and I chanced upon “The Stardust Voyages” by Stephen Tall, I bought it out of nostalgia and as a lens into my past.
What could I learn about myself and about science fiction by rereading it now?
To summarize: Red Spine and its fellows (no male or female
indication is given for any of the creatures) are telepathic, large crustaceans
living among sand and mountains. They
seem largely contemplative when not cultivating a rock-borne fungus on which
they feed – and when not bearing food to the Eater. The Eater seems to be a mutant of their kind
that is large and largely immobile. A
rock-slide crushes a number of Red Spine’s fellows and they feed the carcasses
to the Eater. It gorges itself, molts
and proves more ravenous than before.
Red Spine realizes that the Eater’s appetite now exceeds their resources
and takes the radical and lone decision to stop feeding it. Meanwhile a cylinder lands from out of the
sky and human explorers enter the picture.
Red Spine and the humans mutually study each other but direct
communication eludes them. The Eater
gets a taste for flesh in a series of accidents that result in the humans
destroying it in self-defense. Red Spine
and its fellows are grateful for the restoration of ecological balance. The humans excuse themselves to themselves
for violating their no-interference policy and both sides flash the “peace sign”
as the ship departs.
While it isn’t the role of literature to teach, I
think that it does model behaviors.
“The Invaders” modeled some behaviors and outlooks that I’m sure were already
latent in my younger self, but the story quickened them by means of a kind of
feedback loop of the imagination:
•
The pleasures of inversion.
•
The Courageous Independent Thinker v. Tradition.
•
A mild dose of ecological/systems thinking.
•
There is always a reason to violate the Prime
Directive: creative or at least rationalized disobedience.
Gulliver landing among the Lilliputians, the Borrowers being
little English people living among giants, apes caging and studying humans in
“The Planet of the Apes,” all these and more are what I call “inversions” –
turning the world upside down and looking at it from a new angle. Like seeing human explorers from an alien
viewpoint. As old as imaginative
literature but pretty new to my twelve year old self. It was fun but I didn’t realize that I was
being introduced to the ability to detach myself from my own viewpoint and to
see people or a situation or a problem from other angles. Not that this one story zapped me into a
different mental space. It has been a lifetime’s
formation – but this story feels like a discernible moment in that development.
It is apt that several years after I read this story I played
in a high school production of “Fiddler on the Roof” so I can cry “Tradition!”
with the best of the shtetl’s peasants.
“Without our traditions, we would be like a fiddler on the roof!” And being in high school I would have been
all for regarding traditions as the dead hand of the past. Helped along by the science fiction I was
reading.
I count this as a bad result of reading science fiction
although I don’t blame it all on “The Invaders.” The idea of the courageous, independent
thinker opposing rigid tradition is itself as much of a thought cliché as the
stereotypical “But that’s the way we’ve always done it” response. Once a science fiction author – or activist
or I, myself – declares a character to be a courageous, independent thinker
opposing rigid tradition… well, you can just stop thinking right there. We know who is right and who is wrong now, don’t
we? Unfortunately, “courageous,
independent thinkers” often prove shallow and short-sighted and tradition is
sometimes buttressed by more wisdom and culture than we assume.
On the other hand, getting a tincture of ecological systems
thinking – in such a small dose I didn’t recognize it until this rereading –
may have helped nudge me on the Systems Analyst path (broadly understood) that
has been my life’s occupation.
Or – with
this rereading I may be reading too much into that original reading.
But “ecology” was huge in the Seventies
although rarely heard of under the word “ecology” these days
.
Whether I implicitly learned it from “The
Invaders,” science fiction was good for pointing out that what you do
here
can have an effect
there.
An
alien race consuming its food supply faster than it grows, stepping on a
butterfly while hunting dinosaurs
, the ideas
are an invitation to broadmindedness, to seeing connections in a bigger
picture.
There is always a reason to violate the Prime Directive:
creative or at least rationalized disobedience.
The term “Prime Directive” is from Star Trek. In “The Invaders” it is simply “No
Interference” as in “No interference in the lives or activities of an aware
species.” Right. I had seen some episodes of Star Trek in their original broadcast and then, in
reading “The Invaders” even at twelve, I recognized that the Prime Directive
was just a plot device. Why don’t the heroes
solve the problem right now? Can’t
interfere, remember the Prime Directive!
Except when circumstances worsen, of course. Then it can’t be helped.
I think an entire study could be made of the emergence of
this concept in science fiction.
Cultural non-interference is emphatically not an American
trait. Did this come from a growing
awareness of anti-colonialism of the mid-Twentieth century? From a belated and dim recognition of
American mistreatment of indigenous peoples?
Or did it emerge from the scientific world that had realized an observer
can alter observed effects by his presence?
But that is just an aside.
My twelve year old self would have had no patience for such
considerations. What I am sure of is
that “The Invaders” added a small encouragement to my growing understanding at
that age that some big rules could be broken sometimes. But this story was not decisive. The idea of creative disobedience is very
American. Whether it be war stories
(historical or fictional) police stories (historical or fictional) politics,
business, technology, etc., and science fiction, Americans celebrate individual
initiative that defies regulations but achieves a dramatic rescue or a great
breakthrough.
I was already steeped in this can-do, get-it-done attitude at
twelve years old and surely thought nothing of it. Yet with each mental rehearsal a behavior is
etched more deeply in one’s mind. That’s
why I think that in its small way this story was formative.
There were two disobediences in “The Invaders.” One was the destruction of the Eater by the
human explorers. This is a violation of
their No Interference policy but they lightly rationalize it by the threat the Eater
posed to their own lives.
The other disobedience is Red Spine’s refusal to feed the
Eater. This is the result of
deliberation not an emergency reflex such as the humans killing the Eater. This is also a development in the theme of an Independent-Mind Challenges
Tradition. Red Spine and his kind had
“always” fed the Eater. The Eater’s
origins are in the distant past but the humans speculate that it is a mutant of
Red Spine’s species whose telepathic, simplistic cries of “Food! Food!” have been complied with for
generations as it gradually grew and grew more ravenous. Red Spine says “That’s enough.” And he meets opposition. He has to have courage to go with his
reason. He has to be willing to scuttle
alone for his conviction. This was a
good lesson to learn, that there is a cost for standing against the crowd. Again, twelve year old Tony would not have
recognized a lesson in this, but there was one.
I must have read dozens of science fiction stories when I was
twelve and hundreds in my teens and only a few are memorable over four
decades. A lot of the stories I remember
would make me cringe today. So,
mediocre, popular literature as it is, I was glad to read it again over the
shoulder of my twelve year old self.
