jameswharris

Forgotten Science Fiction: All Flesh Is Grass by Clifford D. Simak

I’m not sure how many young science fiction readers know about Clifford Simak. When I was growing up, he wasn’t a top tier SF writer, but a legendary author of City and Way Station. He was loved well enough for the Science Fiction Writers of America to select Simak as their third SFWA Grand Master. If you look at his list of novels, there’s not many famous ones besides City and Way Station. He won a Hugo for Way Station, and Hugos for the novelette “The Big Front Yard” and his short story, “Grotto of the Dancing Deer,” which also won a Nebula. I remember seeing Simak at a science fiction convention when he was pretty old, and was surprised by how little attention he got from the younger fans. I thought he was great.

Clifford Simak wrote a different kind of science fiction. A kinder, gentler science fiction. His characters were adults, ordinary people from the mid-west, and his stories often had the feel of small any town America. City, a fix-up novels of eight short stories written from 1944-1951, was a hauntingly beautiful series of tales told by intelligent dogs and robots about the legends of long gone humans. You just don’t get more sense of wonder than that.

I read several of his “other” novels from the SFBC in the 1960s, but I’ve forgotten those. Then in recent years I’ve read The Visitors (1980) and Cosmic Engineers (1939) for the Classic Science Fiction online book club. I really liked The Visitors for its unique take on an alien invasion. So for this month, we’re reading All Flesh is Grass from 1965. It’s one of Simak’s many novels that don’t even have an entry in Wikipedia.

That’s too bad, because All Flesh is Grass is pretty good, and it has an interesting distinction – it’s about a small town that wakes up to find itself enclosed in a dome—yeah, like the Stephen King novel and TV series, Under The Dome, from 2009. King had started his novel in 1972 and tried again in 1982. I have no idea if King knew about the Simak book, but they have similar themes too—being cut off from the world makes people act different, and of course, there’s the mystery of who put the dome over the town and why?

I’ve always been fascinated by authors who think up similar ideas separately and then to see how they execute them. Often the idea itself dictates much of the story. If you were going to write a story about a group of humans enclosed in a dome, wouldn’t you pick a small town? Wouldn’t you use ordinary people, but involve the local politician, police and doctor? Wouldn’t everyone be wondering why, and be upset because of the disruption in their lives? Wouldn’t there be scenes of outsiders and insiders talking to each other at the wall? I did search the internet to find an essay on dome stories, but didn’t find one. I did find several forums where people mentioned other dome stories. It’s a growing micro-sub-genre.

All Flesh Is Grass is a difficult book to describe. Note the covers. The top one is from the first edition hardback. The second is the 1978 paperback edition I read. But look at the cover from this British edition. They obviously want to promote the book as science fiction, but it’s not your typical SyFy adventure story, so the publishers tacked on a cover that visually translate science fiction to the contemporary mind.

There are no space ships in All Flesh is Grass. It’s about a failed real estate agent, Brad Carter, who lives in a small town, Millville, that gets caught up in a mystery one day when he’s driving out of town and his car hits an invisible barrier. Like The Visitors, All Flesh Is Grass is about a different kind of alien invasion, and if you look at the first two covers you will get hints as to what the invaders are like. But they don’t invade Earth in spaceships. Simak’s story feels more like one Ray Bradbury would have written in the 1950s, with a touch of Philip K. Dick. It’s a kind of science fiction that has disappeared—as far as I know.

When I was growing up and reading science fiction in the 1960s as a teen, certain books had a quaintness to them. Authors like E. E. Smith, Edmond Hamilton, and Ray Cummings wrote stories that seemed very old. They wrote pulp stories from the 1930s. Their style of writing, common phrases, wording, slang, etc. was just old enough to feel out-of-date old fashioned. 1965 Simak reads that way now. Not like 1930s, because the story has a definite 1950s feel. And the ending is painfully hokey. Yet, All Flesh Is Grass was a pleasure to read, at least for me. I’m just curious if anyone born after 1980 would find it fun.

Science fiction seems to change every decade like society. Pop culture is always evolving and mutating. Reading Simak’s science fiction feels so quaint, like looking at an Amish town, or characters out of a 1940s black and white movie. But All Flesh is Grass is still about the awe of making first contact, still about encountering something that’s very alien. Still imagining unimagined possibilities. Simak’s mind goes way beyond little green men in flying saucers.

Ultimately, All Flesh is Grass is slight. A 254 page paperback that was quickly written and quickly read. That’s the problem with most science fiction, even today—it’s churned out. King’s Under the Dome is 1088 pages. Modern science fiction readers want long stories, either big books, or at least trilogies. Today we remember authors by the series they write. The novels I’ve been writing about as Forgotten Science Fiction were stand alone stories, that were short, quickly written for a few bucks. They were consumed and forgotten.

Yet, I remember these old SF books from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and so do a few others, like my blogging friend Joachim Boaz at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations. They are a unique art form. The ones I like, and I think my friends at the book club like too, are the ones that use science fiction as a way to think about certain kinds of ideas. The stories are more like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits than Star Wars or modern science fiction. I have to admit they aren’t great literature, and maybe their appeal is only nostalgic, yet, they wonder about reality in the same way I did growing up.

JWH – 5/14/14

Finding Vivian Maier–The Emily Dickinson of 20th Century Photography

This afternoon I saw a fantastic documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, about a person I’ve never heard of who deserves widespread fame. Her name was Vivian Maier, and she was a nanny most of her life, and it wasn’t until she died that John Maloof, a young writer discovered she was also a photographer when he bought a box of her negatives at auction. Vivian Maier, who was quite secretive about her private life, was not reclusive like Emily Dickinson, but she hide her art away, and the documentary even questions whether or not if Maier would have liked her pictures shown. Maloof estimates he’s eventually accumulated 150,000 thousands of her negatives. The documentary ends up being about many things, including Maloof’s tenacity of tracking down Vivian’s legacy and making it known. He has her photographs on display in galleries around the world, and has published two art books of Maier’s work, with another coming out soon.

Maier died in 2009, and Finding Vivian Maier isn’t even the first documentary about her. There’s another documentary, Vivian Maier: Who Took Nanny’s Pictures, directed by Jill Nicholls for the BBC that was rereleased in the U.S. as The Vivian Maier Mystery. Maier was also the subject of other short films, and many news reports and essays. Her story is so great that it’s impossible not to retell.

I don’t think I can tell her story better than these films I’ve found at YouTube. If you get the chance, see Finding Vivian Maier at the theater, because her photographs are beautiful blown up on the big screen. Maier mostly took street photos in New York City and Chicago, but did take an eight-month round the world trip by herself. The bulk of her photographs were taken in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and she captured a unique view of history. Her photographs are gorgeously composed of daily life on the run. Probably many of her subjects never knew they were being photographed.

I highly recommend watching these YouTube clips full screen. Be sure and set the resolution to 1080p or 720p. Maier also took many 8mm films. These are interesting, but not beautiful like her black and white photos taken with a mid-format Rolleiflex camera. Her Rollei photographs blow up on the big theater screens magnificently. Maier also took color 35mm pictures too, but I like the black and white pictures best. The film also shows huge crowds flocking to her exhibits. I’ve love to go see them. I’m surprised I’m so late discovering her, but then I think most people haven’t yet either.

Just look at the many images here. The number of pictures taken is tremendous, and the variety of subjects is astounding.

Watching Finding Vivian Maier evokes all kinds of philosophical questions about art and life. Why did she take so many photographs and not print or try to get them exhibited? Like one documentary commentator said, for many of her images, the only time she saw them was when she pressed the shutter release, and even then she was probably looking at the scene and not the composing screen.

Maier is like the existential God who created the universe and then walks away from his creation. Despite all the mystery surrounding Maier, it finally comes down to the art standing on its own. Her images are captivating, haunting, riveting, compelling, and all the words you can imagine that say they make you want to look and look and look.

JWH – 5/13/14

The Impact of Atheism on Well-Manicured Lawns

When I think of good Christians I think of close-knit families with spotless houses and beautiful lawns. The most successful people I know, those whose lives are full of love and happiness, are my Christian friends, because I equate big loving families with social success. These same people have great houses and yards. Most of my non-believing friends tend to be childless, and like myself, self-centered, and our homes and yards show a difference. Its odd, but I think our philosophical differences are reflected how our lawns compare. My neighbors with the best lawns seem to be family oriented and Christian, whereas my own lawn is weedy and chaotic. And the lawns of my Christian friends who don’t have children seem to fall in between.

The history of western civilization and Christianity has been one long war with nature. Christians believe they have dominion over the Earth and wish to subdue nature. That’s reflected in their lawns and gardens. A well ordered yard reflects a well ordered mind, or so we thought.

The faithful think atheists are amoral, but most ardent nonbelievers I know tend to be liberal with strong beliefs about improving society, helping the needy and living ethical lives, but sometimes our personal habits reflect disorder. Atheists I would contend, lean towards embracing nature, rather than ruling over it. If I had my druthers I’d let my yard run wild and encourage more wildlife to settle in it. We use to have a fox that lived in my neighborhood that would run through my backyard, but sadly it was killed by a car. I’m not totally crazy—I don’t want nature coming in my house, but as long as fellow creatures don’t attack me, I don’t mind sharing my yard with as many plants, animals and insects as the natural ecology allows.

I want a Darwinian lawn. I also want a lawn that helps the Earth and our species. I want to lawn to helps other species from going extinct. I want to coexist with nature and not dominate it.

I’ve often wondered about landscaping my yard so it would be perfectly adaptable to our changing climate. I’d like the plants and other living things to adapt to the emerging weather patterns so I wouldn’t have to fertilize and water anything. I’m not sure my neighbors and zoning czars would think about that though. However, as soon as the perils of climate change are accepted by good Christians and they realize they must be stewards of the Earth and not conquerors, they might change their minds too.

For all their talk of heaven, Christians embrace life on Earth. Deep down they aren’t the kind of people who commit suicide or pull the plug when the going gets tough. They fight for life to the bitter end—and when it becomes all too obvious that they are committing species-cide they might change their minds. We atheists accept personal extinction, but we hate the thought of humans dying off. One day, both sides of the spiritual divide might agree on a new approach to lawn care.

For every gallon of gas you burn the warmer you make it for your descendants. For every pesticide you add to the environment the more you poison your children, their children, and their children’s children, and so on until the Earth is cleaned up. Denying manmade climate change is denying your own sins against the Earth, and the crimes you are committing today will burden far more than three generations. Easy Christianity has convinced millions to shirk their debts, because isn’t sin incurring debts to others?

Okay, I’m an atheist, so I can’t expect you to speak my language, so let me try to speak yours. One Christian book that impressed me was The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Modern Christianity has made the pardon of sins way too easy. There has to be more to grace than just claiming belief. What humanity has done to planet Earth is one giant cross that we must all bear. You can’t escape your sins by denying they exist anymore than running away from them by believing. We live by our actions, and any grace you seek must be earned by how you live and not how you think.

JWH – 5/12/14

Forgotten Science Fiction: Goslings by J. D. Beresford

Goslings by J. D. Beresford, is a 1913 post-apocalyptic novel about a plague that sweeps across the world and kills mainly men. If you follow the link from the book title you can read a 23-part serialization from HiLobrow Books, which is illustrated with period photographs. HiLobrow also has reprinted the novel as a paperback and ebook as part of their Radium Age Science Fiction Series. I listened to the Dreamscape edition from Audible.com that was elegantly read by Matthew Brenher who did a bang-up job narrating the British dialect – just look at this reproduction of the English edition to see how hard it would be for a modern American to read. The book was called A World of Women when first published in America.

Beresford was an admirer of H. G. Wells, and combined fiction with scientific philosophy in Goslings, that is part satire, part adventure, and part speculative science fiction. I’m a huge fan of post-apocalyptic novels that deal with the collapse of society to where only a few individuals are left to rebuild civilization. My favorite is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, and although Goslings is not as fine as that great novel, it does prefigure many of the ideas that Stewart explored in his book. I was totally absorbed in Goslings, which is just 8 hours and 12 minutes long, and addictively stuck with it two days running to finish because I enjoyed it so much. However, like I said, I’m a fan of this SF sub-genre, and a fan of old science fiction, so I’m not sure how modern readers will react to this somewhat quaint intellectual story.

Goslings is a science fiction novel before we had the label of science fiction. There is a long history to post-apocalyptic plague novels, the earliest I know of is Mary Shelley’s The Last Man from 1826. I wrote extensively about plague novels in my review of Earth Abides, but also in my reviews of the British TV shows Survivors, and the classic SF novel The Day of the Triffids. As a kid I loved stories about people stranded on a deserted island like Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson and The Mysterious Island. As I grew older and discovered post-apocalyptic novels where most humans were killed by various catastrophes, I loved the idea of rebuilding society from scratch.

J. D. Beresford wrote during the age of passionate socialists who wanted to rebuild the world into a new order, of ardent feminist writers who wrote about female only utopias, and gloom and doom end-of-the-world prophecies. Goslings reflects his thoughts about these topics.

I think the key sentence of Beresford’s philosophy is “It is no longer safe to comfort ourselves with the belief—begotten of our vanity—that the world was necessarily made for man.” Western civilization evolved with the idea that Earth was made by God for humans, but during the Victorian Age, Darwin began teaching a new idea, that humans are animals like all the others, and we have no special place on Earth. It was quite common in the history of Earth for species to disappear, so why not humans. Goslings is about a close call. Like most post-apocalyptic novels, their stories warn us. Beresford did imagine a world without humans, and how cities and the artifacts of man would erode by the onslaught of nature. To give his novel an extra twist, and to make a feminist commentary, he has his survivors to consist mainly of women.

Modern readers will see quite a bit of sexism and even a touch of anti-Semitism in the novel, but it’s not enough to warn you away from reading Goslings. Beresford seems to be saying society has made women more helpless than men, but if given the chance, they will meet the challenges. Beresford also deals with sex to a minor degree—but not like modern novels. Some of the male survivors do act like what you’d imagine in a world of one man to hundreds of women. And some women do attempt to get ahead in such a world by using their bodies instead of their minds. H. G. Wells was a proponent of free love, and Beresford touches on this popular concept of his day too.

Beresford actual spends more time on the allure of religion than that of sex. However, this novel is short, and he explores few ideas in depth. For such an early novel of this type, Beresford touches lightly on many topics that later novels would explore in more detail. Earth Abides focused on the reeducation of humanity, that Beresford only hinted at.

I thoroughly enjoyed Goslings, and while trying to find copies of the original editions on ABE Books I discovered there are many reprints, so it’s not an entirely forgotten novel. My guess is there’s quite of few people like myself reading old science fiction, and resurrecting these forgotten classics. That’s a very limited audience, but it might be growing. It does fill in a gap between H. G. Wells and Amazing Stories. I bought an ebook and audiobook of The Last Man by Mary Shelley and hope to read it soon. I will probably read the other books in the Radium Age Science Fiction series. The reprinting of Goslings goes to the heart of the matter of my favorite subject—what makes a novel become a classic. Ultimately, a classic is a book we remember and keep reading after a very long time. For Goslings, it’s been 101 years.

As to whether Goslings is a successful novel outside the context of its science fictional speculation is hard to say. Beresford does not follow his characters, the Goslings, a middle-class family of four, to their complete fictional conclusion. I wished he had added another hundred pages and wrapped up the stories of George and Blanche, but then Beresford seemed more interested in spending his time speculating about the fate of mankind than finishing the personal stories of some of his characters.

My guess is Beresford started out writing about the Goslings, finished his first draft, and then added the story of Jasper Thrale because he decided he needed a man in his story about a world of women to explain things, and ultimately get things done. I would have found Goslings a more satisfying novel if Blanche had evolved into the Eileen character, and we had followed dad George, and daughter Millie on their individual sexual adventures.

In the end, the reading value of Goslings is for its science fictional speculations. For a short novel, Beresford did touch on many ideas, and I was impressed by what his 1913 mind produced. This is worthwhile for two reasons. It adds to the storehouse of speculation on this subject, and it gives us a view of intellectual discourse of the time, because finally, all speculative science fiction about the future is also an examination of the times it which was written.

JWH – 5/10/14

The Eternal Now and Time Travel

This morning while taking a shower I began thinking about now. Here I was, a naked 62 year old male, in a 1950s pink tile room, wondering what was going on concurrently in the rest of reality as I soaped up. My wife would be just getting to work in her office in Birmingham. 1.3 light seconds away, events are happening on the Moon, several light minutes away Mars and the Sun are doing their thing, stuff is also happening around Alpha Centauri, four and half light years away, then 2,538,000 light years away the Andromeda galaxy is speeding towards our galaxy, and who knows how many billions of light years is the edge or the universe, or what’s beyond and how far it extends.

Everywhere there is something happening, as I take my shower. We’re all in an eternal now.

I try to imagine Einstein’s space-time concept and how it might affect things. But to me, it seems logical to think there is a universal now that happens everywhere, even into adjacent universes in the multiverse, or even adjacent multiverses. Could there ever be two nows? Or multiple nows? Isn’t death just losing touch with the now? And didn’t the eternal now exist even before I existed? Isn’t consciousness tuning into the now?

As as science fiction fan I love the concept of time travel, but isn’t time travel the attempt to go to another now? If there is only one eternal now, then that will be impossible. We see artifacts of the past, and anticipate the future, so we assume both places exist – but do they? When we see the Andromeda galaxy in the sky, we’re seeing what it looked like 2,538,000 years ago. It’s actually much closer.

Recently scientists created a computer simulation of the universe. I wonder if it’s how it looks in the eternal now, or how we see through timed artifacts? Everything we perceive about reality is time delayed. We aren’t looking out our eyes, but at reprocessed information, so there’s a slight delay. If I talk to my friend Connell in Miami, a thousand miles away, there’s a slight delay in the phone signals. The eternal now is everywhere, but we experience it inside our heads, and all that input about reality is delayed. The visual field I see in front of me as I type is a tiny fraction of a second late from the eternal now.

The theory of an all powerful, all knowing God is quite interesting to think about regarding the eternal now. If God is not limited by the speed of light, God would see everything at once in the eternal now. But would this deity also see the past and future all at once too? Or does God inhabit the moment like everyone and everything else? It’s hard for me to believe in God knowing how big reality is, especially if the eternal now has always existed, and will always continue to exist. Infinity is such a mind-bashing number.

We often ask when did time start, and when does it end. And we often imagine the beginning of space and matter. But do we ever wonder about the origin of the eternal now? If there was only one Big Bang moment, then that was the beginning of time, space and now, but it’s starting to look like there wasn’t just one Big Bang. No matter how many universes there might be, won’t there only be just one eternal now? Isn’t it the same now here as it is fifty-five universes over from ours?

I think we’re hung up on birth and death, beginnings and endings, because we have one of each, but maybe reality and the eternal now doesn’t. As a kid I wondered who made God like other kids, and why wasn’t there nothing. How could existence start at all. My conclusion? That non-existence nothing can’t exist. That it’s impossible. If it could, it would have, but since it didn’t, it can’t. It hurts our heads to comprehend why non-existence isn’t so. Logic tells us there should have been an origin. Our minds can’t get beyond cause and effect. We know nothing lasts forever, but maybe one thing does, the eternal now.

We spend our lives pursuing religion, philosophy and science trying to understand the origins of existence, but in the end the answer is always beyond our small brains to comprehend. And even if we built an AI Mind the size of Jupiter, would it be large enough to know? Even if God existed, would God know? Would not a being that could comprehend all of reality have to ask: Where did I come from? How did I get here? Doesn’t any being asking the ultimate ontological question end up with “It’s turtles all the way down!”

The Hindu tell us to “Be Here Now” – but where else could we go?

JWH – 5/9/14