Here are some thoughts about three old sf stories. (These thoughts include spoilers.) The stories aren\u2019t particularly connected to each other except by appearing in the same anthology.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
The two male human protagonists, who are the only characters in the story, constantly say each other\u2019s names when speaking to each other, roughly once every other paragraph.<\/p>\r\n
Like, when the two of them step onto a platform that rises into the air: \u201cWade\u2014we stepped into some kind of elevating force.\u201d Or: \u201cObjects, Jon\u2014The room was full of them.\u201d Or: \u201cI wonder, Wade\u2026\u201d Or: \u201cThe beginning, Jon.\u201d Or: \u201cThose pictures, Wade\u2014\u201d followed immediately by \u201cYes, Jon, the pictures.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
It\u2019s like they have to keep reminding each other (and the reader) what their names are.<\/p>\r\n
I have a vague idea that I\u2019ve seen other old stories where characters call each other by name more often than I would expect, but I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever before seen it done quite this often.<\/p>\r\n
At one point, I thought maybe the author was doing something clever: Over the course of the story, the two protagonists are transformed, and I thought maybe they would stop calling each other by name as they became less human. But nope, they don\u2019t.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
The apparent protagonists are scientists who have encountered a mysterious phenomenon in their lab. (It\u2019s a hole in space that somehow looks like a hypercube, whatever that means.) People who try to investigate the phenomenon die of fear, because it\u2019s too alien for human minds to deal with, so the scientists need someone who\u2019s incredibly adaptable \u2026 and it turns out the super-adaptable person who gets recommended to them is a 19-year-old woman! (That\u2019s in the middle of the story; this isn\u2019t a surprise twist ending.)<\/p>\r\n
I had been expecting that the adaptable person they would find would be a hard-drinking straight-shooting grizzled male adventurer, so I was surprised and pleased for a moment\u2014That\u2019s great, a male writer in the 1950s making a prominent tough character female!<\/cite><\/p>\r\n But then my suspicious-reader self kicked in. Don\u2019t you know by now, Jed, that when a 1950s white male sf author includes a character who isn\u2019t a white man, it\u2019s for plot reasons?<\/cite><\/p>\r\n And sure enough: the adaptable woman survives her trip into the weird world of the hypercube, but in the end, she figures out that what\u2019s really needed is a baby who can be raised partly in the ordinary world and partly in the weird world.<\/p>\r\n To Nourse\u2019s credit, the woman doesn\u2019t explicitly state that she\u2019s going to have to bear and raise the baby herself, nor that the father will be the lead scientist on the project. But I assume that that\u2019s what Nourse had in mind. (Given that she\u2019s the only adult human who can survive in the weird environment.)<\/p>\r\n Still, I do like what little we see of her character\u2014no-nonsense, and refreshingly aware of her own worth (and not afraid to say so).<\/p>\r\n\r\n A Space Navy ship crewed by three human men arrives on a planet that has had only one previous contact with a human (named Samuel Fraser), 300 years previously. The narration notes, in passing: \u201cTime brings many wide and sometimes unexpected changes.\u201d<\/p>\r\n The inhabitants turn out to be humanoids; unlike most aliens, they look just like humans. The narration says: \u201cNo especial difference fron the ship\u2019s crew except that they were a little smaller, a little lighter in build, and had skins of a deep, rich copper color. Yes, that was the greatest contrast: the dark glow of copper skins and gleam of jet black eyes.\u201d<\/p>\r\n So I rolled my eyes and thought Yet another story where whiteness is so much the default that the aliens are marked as alien by having a non-white skin color.<\/cite><\/p>\r\n Later in the story, it turns out that Fraser (the human who had previously contacted these aliens) had told the aliens that (a) the longer it was before other humans showed up, the better; and (b) when humans did eventually show up, if they said two particular words, they should be killed. Otherwise, they could be welcomed in peace.<\/p>\r\n The protagonists pass the test\u2014they visit the shrine to Fraser and they don\u2019t say the two words. Relieved to have passed the test, they ask the locals what the two words were. The locals tell them the words (the narration tells the reader that the two words have two syllables each, but the words aren\u2019t written out in the story), but the protagonists are confused\u2014the words are not words they\u2019ve ever encountered before, and they have no idea what those words mean. The locals also don\u2019t know what the words mean.<\/p>\r\n And then in the third-to-last paragraph of the story, \u201cthe three men looked up [again] at [\u2026] the life-sized painting of the gray-haired, black-skinned Space Scout Samuel Fraser.\u201d And they repeat that the words are gibberish to them, and that\u2019s the end of the story.<\/p>\r\n So, presumably, the two words are some intensifying swear word followed by the N-word, and the point of the story is that by the time of the story, humans are no longer racist.<\/p>\r\n Which I imagine was a particularly progressive and utopian idea in 1951. But even though Russell was presumably trying to set up thematic stuff by having the aliens be \u201ccopper-skinned,\u201d I feel like he undermines his own point by having their skin color be the noticeable difference between them and the humans. All of the human Space Navy officers in the story apparently have non-copper skin, non-black eyes, and 20th-century-American-sounding names (Joe Hibbert, Steve Randle, and Harry Benton), which to me suggests that the Space Navy isn\u2019t particularly diverse, and thus that maybe the human culture hasn\u2019t gotten as far beyond racism as Russell wants us to believe.<\/p>\r\n \u2026That said, my reaction in that direction was stronger before I figured out that there are only three humans on the ship. With just three of them, it seems possible that Russell meant their skin and eye colors to be coincidental, with the rest of the Space Navy being much more diverse. And for that matter, it seems possible that they themselves aren\u2019t white\u2014all we know about their skin color is that it\u2019s not \u201ccopper.\u201d The story doesn\u2019t explicitly say that they\u2019re white; I just assumed that.<\/p>\r\n And my willingness to give Russell the benefit of the doubt on this issue is greatly bolstered by his publishing history, starting ten years earlier. Because Wikipedia reminds me that \u201cRussell\u2019s short story \u2018Jay Score\u2019 (1941) is unusual amongst the pulp fiction of its time in presenting a [Black] character, the ship\u2019s doctor, without any racial stereotyping. Indeed, this story and its sequels [\u2026] may be considered an early example of the science fiction subgenre in which a spaceship is crewed by a multi-ethnic, mixed human\/non-human, complement (cf. the much later Star Trek<\/cite>).\u201d<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,95,28,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender","category-race-ethnicity","category-short-stories","category-speculative-fiction"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20918"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20923,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20918\/revisions\/20923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Story 3: \u201cTest Piece,\u201d by Eric Frank Russell (1951)<\/h3>\r\n