Generally, my reading of short stories are unfair to their authors. I read them quickly, like gobbling down chocolate chip cookies, with little thought other than immediate gratification. I want to change that. I want to slow down, read each story twice, and put some contemplation into figuring out what the author’s ambition was when he penned his tale. I’ve written about thirty short stories myself and all but one failed to capture people’s attention in the way I desired. I hope studying successful short stories will improve my ability to convey what I want.
“Appearance of Life” can be found in these anthologies, but it’s not a very famous story. I’m reading it because it’s the opening story from The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald A. Wollheim, a collection we’re reading in the Classic SciFi reading group.
The story opens with two sentences that sum up the story, “Something very large, something very small: a galactic museum, a dead love affair. They came together under my gaze.” The story immediately evokes the awe associated with tales about mysterious missing aliens who leave galactic ghost worlds behind, like the Krell that once lived on Altair IV in the film Forbidden Planet, or the strange civilization that once existed on Bronson Beta, from the novel After Worlds Collide. These were my first encounters with the sense of wonder brought on by discovering long dead alien cultures back in the 1960s, but it’s a very common cliché in science fiction that I see over and over again. It’s odd what Aldiss does with this common idea. His aliens are called the Korlevalulaw, a tongue-twisting name to say or think.
One cool idea in the story is the Korlevalulaw abandoned written writing, which is something our culture is doing now because of the Internet. What will aliens discovering our civilization ever make of keyboards and LCD monitors? Reading this short story also makes me wonder what if anything could be made of my life from the possessions I’ll leave behind. Think about it. Photographs tell more than anything else. How long will this blog endure?
On the planet Norma, humans find a vast building that girdles the planet for sixteen thousand kilometers. Humans have decided to use this alien construct that is impervious to the electro-magnetic spectrum as a museum to house the history of mankind. Androids tirelessly store humanity’s artifacts, supervised by twenty human female staff members. The narrator is a “Seeker” who gets to prowl the collection and develop theories. The entire structure was left empty by the Korlevalulaw, and after ten centuries humans have filled several thousand hectares of space.
Seekers are specially trained people to intuit understanding from scant evidence, perfect for studying the junk left in this vast Smithsonian like attic a thousand light years away from Earth. At the current rate it will take 15,500 years to fill the alien structure. To the Seeker, the human artifacts are almost as alien to him as the Korlevalulaw is to us, because humans have been around for so long that they no longer look like 20th century people. That’s a nice science fiction speculative concept to come up with, to be a far future anthropologist, and it’s not an uncommon idea. H. G. Wells’ Time Traveler spent time in a far future human museum trying to figure out that changes that people experienced over 802 millennia. So far, Aldiss hasn’t presented us with anything new in this story, yet.
The Seeker explores a spaceship from the time when humans were split 50-50 by gender and discovers a wedding ring. In the Seeker’s time, gender population is 10 to 1 in favor of females. We readers don’t know why, but it’s an interesting thing for Aldiss to throw out. Eventually the Seeker discovers two cubes, from different spaceships, that were holographic recording devices. By unbelievable luck, they are from a married couple that recorded messages to each other fifteen years apart, and were design to only respond to the face of their beloved, so the Seeker sets them together and lets the holograms chat out a long dead love affair in an out of sequence conversation of regret and love that is sixty-five thousand years old.
Jean and Chris’ love story takes a couple of pages to play out, but ultimately it seems completely mundane to me, even though they were separated by interstellar war. I’m surprise Aldiss didn’t invent something new to add to marriage and love.
Now we come to the intent of the story, called the “secret of the universe” by the Seeker in his epiphany, “Like the images I had observed, the galactic human race was merely a projection. The Korlevalulaw had created us – not as a genuine creation with free will, but as some sort of a reproduction.” Then the Seeker decides his flash of intuition is nonsense, but we know that isn’t true by his final actions.
In the end the Seeker flees the world Norma to desperately seek out an isolated world to hide away from humanity, fearing that if he communicated his secret it would doom mankind. And this is why I’m writing this review. What is Aldiss really implying? I think he’s saying something philosophical that’s more than making up a spooky SciFi story ending. I feel Aldiss wants his story to be disturbing like those Mark Twain stories written in his collection Letters from the Earth, which featured Philip K. Dick paranoia about existence.
Aldiss doesn’t sell his idea to me. Having humanity be the art of an alien culture is no more real to me than believing man was made in God’s image, although I find it fascinating that billions of humans desperately refashion their lives to fit three thousand year old writings that shaped the long lost twelve tribes of Israel.
The trouble with science fiction writers is they don’t believe their own ideas, they just like to churn out weird concepts to mess with our heads. The best science fiction concepts are the ones we want to accept, like space travel and life extension, so I’m surprised this story has even gotten the attention it has. I’m betting most people liked it for the setup, for the sense of wonder buildup, even though it wasn’t original, and the weird ending didn’t mean much to most readers, but I could be wrong.
JWH – 10/13/9
Auxiliary Memory 
You have badly misunderstood this story. The failed love affair between Jean and Chris, which you rush past, is what it’s all about. The rest is mainly window dressing.
Two people, who loved and died thousands of years ago, brought to life again to re-enact the breakdown of their relationship.
But one is speaking from a time when the hurt is still raw, the other from the maturity of years later and bearing a message of reconciliation that will never be delivered. It’s a dialogue that never took place, that never could take place. A unique perspective on love and loss.
But because these are just recordings, they can’t hear each other. They can’t move on. They’re trapped in their endless loop of petty recrimination and resignation. And that’s where the real poignancy of this story lies. They *perfectly* recreate the kind of failure of communication that ruins real human relationships.
It’s the Human Condition in a nutshell. Or in this case, in two small plastic boxes.
Aldiss goes further: if two simple machines can have such a striking ‘appearance of life’, what does that say about real life? The Seeker’s conclusion is that we might stand in the same relationship to the Korlevalulaw as the boxes stand to us. That humanity is no more than the projection of some unknowable and long-gone beings’ artistry, talking in the dark until the power runs out.
‘Something very large, something very small. They came together under my gaze.’
‘Something very large, something very small. They came together under my gaze.’ – This sentence reads to me like the formula for creativity in Science Fiction, and perhaps elsewhere. The “something very small” of human relations, a love gone wrong, cannot be the all of the good sf story, as if the SF elements were only window dressing. The “something very big” of a big philosophical idea, and a sense of wonder tied to vastness of time and space in the cosmos, cannot really be big unless tied to our lives. We need as well the creative leap of the writer, the “gaze” that combines the two. Perhaps SF can help us to love better, although whether it be more successful is another question, but deeper, yes.