ATTACK of the CRAB MONSTERS

Attack of the Crab Monsters – 1957 – This movie is an excellent example of the 1950s era B SF/Horror film genre. A team of scientists and its supporting crew venture to a remote oceanic island to learn the fate of a scientist who has gone missing. The scientist characters were depicted as professionals in each of their fields, the lead doctor, a geologist, a botanist, a land and a marine biologist, and a nuclear physicist, but not as men of action. The titular crabs monsters, of which there were two, were the result of mutation caused by radioactive fallout from H-bomb testing in proximity to the island on which the story takes place. The automobile-sized creatures had horribly unrealistic, human-looking eyes, and they gained human sentience, and telepathy, by eating the brains of their victims. I didn’t recognize most of the actors in this movie, but Russell Johnson (Gilligan’s Island’s “Professor”) played a man named Hank. When one of the seamen asked Hank if he was a scientist, he said, “I’m no scientist. I’m a technician and a handyman.” His interaction with the actual scientists was depicted as intelligent but subservient, and, as the movie progressed, his competence, bravery and physicality became evident as the scientists came to depend upon his abilities more and more. The movie meandered, and left some plot threads untied, and most of the action, of which there was little, took the form of swimming and running, unfortunate accidents, narrow escapes, and implicit death scenes at the claws of the crab monster. At the end, it was Hank’s insight and quick, determined action that saved the few scientists who survived.

I would say that, despite its diversion into encephalophagic-induced telepathy, Attack of the Crab Monsters is primo filmage.

I watched it on the Roku TV, through a free streaming service called Retro SciFi & Horror, that has about 70 selections at this time.

Wait! Pamela Duncan was a brunette!

I have devised a rating scale so that I may better convey a film’s quality. I’m calling it the 10TLA10 Scale until I come up with a better name.

The TLA categories, of which there are ten (duh), are:

TMC: Treatment of Major Concept. How well did the film convey its major plot concept (i.e. alien visitation, extraplanetary travel, giant spider invasion)?

STR: Science Technology Realism. Are the science and technology presented realistically? Does it seem like the creators of the film know anything at all about science and technology?

CSE: Competent Special Effects. How was the clay-mation? The superimposed giant lizard? The rubber tentacles and/or claws? The firework rocket-blasts and animated laser fire?

GAQ: General Acting Quality. Were the actors giving 100% to their roles, or phoning it in over here?

LPS: Logical Progression of Story. Beginning, middle, end, are they there? Do they flow, like they should in a movie?

ACE: Apparent Creative Effort. I put a lot of effort into designing this cool rating system. Did the creators of this film put in nearly as much effort making their thing?

RTI: Retention of Trope Integrity. Does the woman running through the woods trip on a root and twist her ankle? Are the space aliens super-advanced and intent upon taking over our planet?

OFE: Overall Film Execution. Okay, taken as a gestalt (oh, look it up!), how was it? Schlock? A good effort? Did they knock it out of the park?

APF: Accuracy Predicting Future. No one knows what tomorrow may bring. How close did this film get to where we are now?

MLA: Menace Level of Antagonist. A giant Gila monster doesn’t rattle a kid who spent his childhood exploring the New Mexico wilderness. A shark, maybe. How did the creators of the film do at presenting the monster, villain, or giant asteroid as a menacing antagonist?

We may, at some point arrange the TLAs in some sort of categorical grouping, possibly representing the broad aspects of the B sci fi / horror genre (Speculative Science, perhaps. Film Artistry, I don’t know. We’re not there yet.) For now, each TLA quality will be measured on a scale from 0 to 10 points, then all points will be added together to get one final score between 0 and 100. Okay?

So, Attack of the Crab Monsters… Go! (For this first film, I’ll provide a little of my thinking behind the rates I choose. It’s all subjective, okay?)

TMC: Treatment of Major Concept. 10

Yes! The idea that man’s mad quest to unlock the power of the atom might have unpredictable and abominable consequences was captured perfectly.

STR: Science Technology Realism. 5

The crab monster mutations were due to radioactive seawater that rained down on the island from nearby H-Bomb testing sites, certainly. Good science. But the effects of the fallout were all over the place. Physicality mutations, size mutations, intellect and ability mutations. Pick a mutation, people! Go with size, and rely on the aggressive voraciousness of the monster to provide the horror and suspense. Also, the crab monsters were impervious to grenades and bullets, but a falling stalactite through the carapace does one in. A little more specialization was needed in the areas of radioactivity and mutations.

CSE: Competent Special Effects. 5

The practical effects were hit and miss. The hideousness of the crab monsters, with their human-like facial features, was sufficiently unnerving, but the giant rubber claws reaching in from off screen, and the near immobility of the creatures in their whole body scenes, was campy.

GAQ: General Acting Quality. 7

The characters delivered their lines and emoted convincingly, for the most part. At times it didn’t appear that they really knew what their motivations were, and the actors didn’t play off of each other very well. Still, there was very little fumbling for lines or flat delivery.

LPS: Logical Progression of Story. 10

The characters are introduced, and their reason for being on the island is provided. They try to determine what happened to the scientists that went missing, discover that the crab monsters exist, learn of the fate of the missing scientists, and subsequently attempt to stay alive and find a way to defeat the creatures. Good and logical progression.

MLA: Menace Level of Antagonist. 9

The crab monsters were lethal and very hard to kill (without employing falling stalactites). They also had the ability to beckon their human prey to their cave lair using telepathic powers gained by eating human brains. They were amoral, calculating, horrific, and one was gravid with what we had to assume were mutant baby crab eggs. My two disappointments were that there were only two of them, and we didn’t get much on-screen physical confrontation between man and monster.

ACE: Apparent Creative Effort. 10

I got the impression that the creators of this film were genuinely trying to create a quality sci fi horror movie. And I think they succeeded in realizing the potential of the story concept, despite the shortcomings of the script, the plot, and special effects.

RTI: Retention of Trope Integrity. 10

Let’s list some tropes! The scientists were scientific. Check! The crew members were hard working sailors. Check! The blue collar technician knew his place and deferred to the scientists. Check! The girl (marine biologist) was sufficiently plucky, but still screamed like a babe in a horror flick and was in need of saving and comforting when the chips were down. Check! The monsters engaged in the relentless pursuit of their prey. Check! Lesser characters were picked off with appropriate regularity. Check! The ending was climactic, and featured a heroic death and the destruction of the last of the creatures. Check! Fade to credits with violin music. Check!

OFE: Overall Film Execution. 8

Maybe 8 is generous, but the film was produced with the filming and special effects technology of its day, so I won’t fault it for special effects, except as noted in the CSE rating. I will say that the off-screen deaths were too numerous, and several opportunities to kill off supporting characters on camera were missed. The characters were fairly one dimensional, and their interaction with each other was lacking.

APF: Accuracy Predicting Future: 0
This movie was then present day, and, although it dealt with atomic radiation and resultant mutation, it made no overt predictions of humanity’s future.

Total rating for Attack of the Crab Monsters: 74! That’s pretty good! And Russell Johnson was in it!

Maybe I’ll rate some other old B sci fi / horror soon! God knows there’s enough of the stuff.

John Racette

August 26, 2021

The Sidewalk

The Sidewalk

By John Racette

Little Jimmy was careful not to step on a crack as he stepped from the crosswalk onto the second to last block before the edge of Plymouth. He was excellent at it—he would say awesome—and could easily look around at his surroundings even while walking at a fast pace. The street was lined with cars, here. The buildings all looked the same, made of brown panels. They were only one story, but they were taller than his school house. Each had a door and a large window, usually with the name of a business stenciled on it. Jimmy thought they might be office buildings, although he didn’t really know what people did in an office, just that they dressed in suits.

“Step on a crack, break your momma’s back!” he sang aloud.

He looked up the street, to the next traffic light and crosswalk. They were both red. Red light for the cars. Red hand for the pedestrians. That meant the cars were whizzing by. Don’t go on red, or you’ll be dead. Beyond the intersection, the sidewalk continued, and Jimmy could see the upper edge of the X’s. He glanced down and adjusted his gait to miss a seam in the concrete.

“It’ll never happen,” he said. “I’m that good.”

Jimmy approached the last intersection, the corner of Main and Omega, and considered the choice he was about to make. He could, at this point in his Thursday afternoon adventure, before his mom would get back from work, turn left and cross Main, and take the long “in-side” of Omega along the curve to the next light, which was at Second Street. From there, he’d take a left on Second and all the way back to Plymouth Community Complex, and home. If he turned right from here, he’d go ’round the block without crossing, and end up getting to Riverside and just having to turn right, because he wasn’t allowed to cross the dam. Then it was another straight shot back to home. He didn’t like that choice. It was boring, and Mom wouldn’t be home for hours.

If you’re gonna go all the way to the crosswalk, you’re gonna push the button.

Across Omega the buildings were behemoth. Giant warehouses of dark metal or stone. The stretch of Main that ran between them was narrower here, and shadowed by the warehouses. Long trucks could only turn around at the end. The X’s were obscured by the tall tankers and delivery trucks that lined the darkened road. The X’s were the thing. I’m gonna cross, he thought. He pressed the bright chrome button and watched the cars whiz past as if they didn’t ever have to stop.

“I press the button, and I own you.” Jimmy announced. After not long he heard the tone, three high-pitched beeps that told the pedestrians that it was their turn to cross. He paused; his father told him not to trust the beeps, but to trust his own eyes. Sometimes the cars on Omega were in too great a hurry to stop for the crosswalk people. You never stepped out unless the cars have actually stopped, even if it’s your turn. Jimmy wondered if the same rule applied to the cars, if a pedestrian was in too much of a hurry. He thought it would be easy to try to find out. Just time it so that the red hand was about to come back, and run out there. Would the cars wait? I mean, they had to. Didn’t they?

The cars had stopped, and Jimmy stepped onto the street and scurried across quickly. He looked back. The lines of cars was already long, and they sounded angry. Omega cars didn’t like being stopped. When the red hand appeared, their electric engines sounded like a swarm of bees and they buzzed away around the curve and out of sight.

He spun on his heel and a darkened sidewalk lay before him. He walked out of the sunlights and felt the coolness of the air at this far end of Main Street. He wondered if darkness was always this cool. The concrete looked darker, the cracks were harder to see. He waited a few seconds for his eyes to adjust, and wondered how they did. He wondered if he could see in pitch black if he waited long enough, if all of the city’s lights went to full out all at the same time, if the suns “went down,” he once heard someone say. And what would happen if they did. Nobody tried to talk about that when there were kids around. The dark was nothing for a boy to be concerned with…

“Step on a crack, break your momma’s back,” he whispered. There were warehouses on both sides of Main at this point. Four on each side. Each one had a giant door in the middle of the front, large enough for any truck to disappear into. They were all closed. There were smaller doors on both sides of the giant doors, and Jimmy thought they shouldn’t be necessary when you had a giant door. But that must have been the way the buildings came, because all of them had them. He crack-hopped past the first building, across a narrow, sunlit alley that curved off to the right between it and the next. He wondered how long the warehouses were. Did they run all the way to Riverside Dam? And what was in them?

At the second alley he peered up the street but couldn’t see the X’s. That’s okay, he thought. He knew they were there. He’d seen them there before, glimpsed them, once, when his father took him around the city, on Omega. It had been almost dark, and they had stopped at the light at Main. He had been looking out his window between the warehouses and saw the X’s. He swore to himself that he’d investigate. So, after lessons, today, when his mother worked the extra hours so she could leave early on Friday, he had hit Main Street at a run, and traversed the thirteen blocks from Schooling Center to the edge of town.

A giant truck rumbled behind him and made him jump and spin. When he’d realized that it was on the street—he was in no danger—he watched it drive past, its left blinker flashing on and off ponderously. Up and across the street, the giant gray door of the fourth warehouse began to open. Jimmy made an instant decision. Run! He could avoid the cracks at any speed, as if he were physically incapable of landing on them, The door was half way up by the time he reached the third alley. The truck was swinging wide to the right, as wide as it could in the narrow roadway, in order to make the turn into the warehouse. It obscured Jimmy’s view of the inside. He turned on the speed and arrived directly across the street from the giant door just as it had opened fully. Jimmy watched the giant truck make the turn. He thought there was no way such a big, long truck could make that turn! But it did, and the door, it seemed, was easily large enough for it to drive through. On either side of the truck as it entered, Jimmy could see light inside the building. And were there people in there, moving about? He thought that’s what he must have seen. The warehouse swallowed the truck, and the giant door began to close. Yes, there were people inside there, and there were lights on. And why shouldn’t there be, Jimmy thought. No mystery there. He hoped the truck turned its blinker off, and he looked down for cracks in the sidewalk and continued on.

At the far end of the fourth warehouse Jimmy emerged into the warm sunlight again. He squinted. There were no more buildings. Before him was a vast span of black tar mac, devoid of trucks, hemmed in by an unbroken loop of sidewalk that, if Jimmy took it, would bring him to the other side of Main Street, and back home. The sidewalk’s curb was bright yellow in the sunlight. Jimmy didn’t know why they painted it that color, since no one ever walked out here to see it.

But the sidewalk’s end wasn’t the attraction. The sidewalk was just a road for pedestrians. Most people never made it to the end of one, they just got on where they were starting from, and off where they wanted to be. No, it was what was beyond the end of the road, past the tar mac and the concrete, out where the sidewalk ends.

The X’s were only visible from a few parts of the city. Jimmy didn’t know how many of the streets made it all the way to them. He didn’t even know how many streets there were in the city! But Main Street, he knew, he had seen. Now, finally, they stood before him, nearly as tall as the warehouses, taller than the tankers and the big box trucks, the titanic X’s, all black and steel. And beyond the X’s…

“Wow.” Jimmy whispered. It was all he could say. His mind had never been prepared for the scene that lay before him. The X’s stood before him, an unbroken line of black sentinels that hummed faintly. Emanating from them was a blue light that illuminated a clearing of gray earth. Jimmy surveyed the expanse, here peering beneath one of the X’s, there through the diamond window where two X’s bumped together. Above the X’s was the washed out black sky that was always illuminated by the Plymouth’s array of white suns. Strewn across the dirt rested the dry bleached bones of monsters, some close, some farther away, all with their teeth bared at the impenetrable barrier. They were the darkness things about which the adults would talk in low tones. They were the horrible things that were living here, on this dark, sunless world, when Plymouth made planet-fall. They had seen humanity’s light, and rushed in to claw us, and kill us, and eat us. But the had all died—all of them—when they entered the light.

Jimmy stood at the apex of the curved sidewalk at the end of Main, and smiled.

“They didn’t stand a chance,” he said aloud.

He glanced at his feet, skipped over the crack between two slabs of concrete, and rounded the loop back home.

Timing

“You lied to me.”

“And a good morning to you, Bob. Sit down and tell me what you’re talking about.”

Professor Reinhart indicated one of the two worn leather chairs before his desk, encouraging the obviously distraught young man to take a seat. He delicately removed his wire-frame glasses, carefully detaching the temples first from one ample ear and then the other. He paused for a moment to look at the lenses, seemed to debate whether they warranted cleaning, then folded the glasses and set them gently on his desk beside his small leather pocket diary. Then he leaned back in his own swivel chair and smiled at his research partner.

For four years, Robert Stillwell had worked with Professor Reinhart, first as a graduate student completing his doctorate in physics, and then as a junior partner in the university research lab Reinhart directed. The partnership had been enormously beneficial for the young scientist. Reinhart was brilliant, widely respected for his theoretical work, and a supportive mentor. More than that, in the past year Reinhart had taken a special interest in the younger man, encouraging him to complete and publish his own work. As a result, at barely thirty, Stillwell already had a reputation as a visionary in the esoteric area of physical theory which he and Reinhart were developing.

“What I’m talking about, Roger, is the TEM tunneling project. You told me it didn’t work, that the theory was bad.”

“And it was, Bob. I explained that to you. Tachyon/electromagnetic tunneling was a beautiful idea, and I thought we had something. But it doesn’t work. You’ve seen the equations: we’d need infinite energy to balance the transfer.”

“No. I think it does work, but you’ve kept the corrected equations to yourself. You did all the theory work on that, and you ran all the numbers. It was when Zach was born, and Melanie and I were busy seeing specialists, getting him taken care of. I was distracted, out of the lab for much of the five months you spent doing the final work.”

The older scientist’s smile didn’t change, but his pale blue eyes seemed to focus more intently on Bob’s face. He seemed to slow, to go from motionless to something even more still. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet, calm, infinitely patient.

“Bob, what has put this thought into your head?”

Without a word, Bob reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a CD jewel-case, and tossed it onto the desk.

“And what is that, Bob?”

“That’s your speech to the American Physical Society, the guest lecture you delivered a year ago.”

“Ah, yes. The one about the state of mathematical physics education in American universities. I remember that. It was an unexceptional speech, as I recall. I didn’t want to do it, but I’ve known Doctor Woodruff for fifty years – he was the best man at my wedding. I couldn’t turn him down.”

“I watched it last night. They’ve asked me to speak this year – not keynote, just a little break-out group presentation – and I wanted to cover new ground, to give them something you hadn’t already said.”

“Commendable. But I’m afraid I don’t understand how this bears on our conversation.”

“It does, Roger. Half way through the speech you tell a joke, the one about wave equations. It gets a pretty good laugh. As the audience quiets down, you’re standing at the podium smiling. And you’re humming to yourself.”

“I do that. Students have commented on it.”

“Yes.” Bob leaned forward in his chair. The angry young man was gone, replaced by the calm, methodical researcher Reinhart had found to be such an asset to his own work. Reinhart listened, but his mind was elsewhere. He was thinking about what a fine young man Robert Stillwell was, what a beautiful family he had, and how much he, Reinhart, would miss working with the junior scientist.

“Bob,” he said, quietly, the smile never wavering. “Whatever you think you’ve discovered is, I’m sure, easily explained. And I’m hungry. Will you join me for lunch? It’s been a long time since we caught up. You can tell me about Melanie and Zach, and what’s going on at home.”

The young man dropped back into his seat, seemingly confused both by the request and by the tone with which it was delivered.

“Roger, you don’t understand. I know. I know what you’ve done with our research. The investments, your advice–”

“Which you’ve taken, am I correct? You purchased NanoMed and DNX, as I told you to?”

“I did. And Quantic, and Vernier Pharmacology. All of your recommendations. And they’ve paid off extraordinarily well, exactly as you said they would. And, honestly, I thank you for that. We’ll never want for money, even if I don’t get tenure. Even if I never work again, frankly.”

“Good. Good. So, how about lunch?”

“No, dammit! Roger, this is serious. That song you were humming a year ago, that’s Emily’s Last Dance by Pyronaut. It’s a huge hit, some kind of quadruple platinum crossover sensation. It’s everywhere; you can’t avoid hearing it.”

“Indeed? Well, perhaps my musical tastes are a little more broad than I care to admit. But I still haven’t a clue what we’re talking about, Bob. And what would you think of Thai, today? There’s a new place on 8th I’d like to try.”

“Roger, I heard a radio interview with Pyronaut just a few days ago, while I was driving. They wrote the song in July – ten months after you were humming it. There’s a whole back-story about it, very sad and moving.”

Now, finally, the older man reacted. The smile remained, but it now had a resigned look about it. Reinhart looked at the younger man, and marveled at his timing.

“I see. And you wonder how I happened to know the latest popular song almost a year before it was written.”

“No. I don’t wonder. I know.”

The two men faced each other across the tidy desk. Neither spoke. Finally, the older man leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and rubbed the bridge of his nose with both hands. When he opened his eyes the smile was gone from his face, replaced with the neutral, vaguely distracted expression it wore when Professor Reinhart was lecturing a class or delivering a speech.

“You’re correct, Robert. Tachyon/EM tunneling works exactly as the theory suggested it would. I did misrepresent the experimental results to you. Not only are the energy requirements not infinite, but they’re in fact negligible: a few million joules for portal formation, and then the tachyon/photon flow balances and the portal is essentially self-sustaining.

“So time travel is not only possible, but it’s practical. Oh, we can’t move a non-trivial mass through the portal – even most molecules are too large. But energy…. Bob, for almost three years now, I’ve been listening to broadcast news from a year in the future. That’s how I’ve picked the investments that have made me, well, wealthier than I’ll admit. And that’s how I’ve arranged to give your family a nice little nest egg, Bob.”

The candid response didn’t placate the young researcher. How could Reinhart have kept such a momentous discovery to himself? Why hadn’t they published; surely they’d share a Nobel for their work. It was unethical, unconscionable, to deprive the world of this knowledge.

They talked for hours, the older man trying to convince his friend and partner that the ability to predict the future was not something mankind should have, not a power man would be able to use responsibly. If he was unsuccessful, his calm and measured argument at least mollified the younger man’s temper.

Finally Professor Reinhart looked at his watch. “Bob, it’s almost five, later than I expected. You should be home with your family. I’ll tell you what. Go home and sleep on it. Try to put it out of your mind, let it percolate in your subconsciousness. Have a wonderful evening with Melanie and Zach. Then, tomorrow morning, come in and tell me what you think we should do. And we’ll do it, exactly as you suggest. You have my word. But no more discussion tonight. Will you do that for me?”

The two men agreed, going so far as to stand and shake hands awkwardly, as if concluding a business agreement. They said goodnight. Robert Stillwell paused at the door, turned as if to speak, and then, with a bemused shake of his head, left the room, closing the door behind himself.

* * * * *

Reinhart sat at his desk until the light faded. At one point he blew his nose loudly on a handkerchief he took from his pocket. His eyes glittered in the dim light, but tears didn’t quite flow: Reinhart was a kind man, but not particularly sentimental.

He’d take tomorrow off, perhaps go for a long walk in the park if it wasn’t too cold. He’d avoid the news, and discard his newspaper without reading it. He knew what tomorrow’s news would be. He’d heard the radio report a year ago:

December 12, 2016 – University of Urbana-Champain researcher Doctor Robert Stillwell was killed today when he lost control of his Toyota Corolla on an icy patch of Interstate 74 near Mahomet. He is survived by his wife Melanie and their son Zachary. Stillwell, a respected theoretical physicist already known for groundbreaking work in the esoteric domain of multidimensional tachyon theory, was 30.

Wrench Monkey (First Installment)

Okay, who doesn’t want to be a writer, right? Not me. I think that the thing I love most about the Golden Age of Science Fiction is the novelty of the genre. It’s a tabula rasa, man. Anything goes! Not really, but most things go, if they’re sciency, and fictiony. So, here goes. I reworked part of Wrench Monkey to make it more like a short story. It’s a vignette, smack in the middle of a thinking guy’s life.

Enjoy.

Wrench Monkey

A guy said you’re midas if you do the things other guys aren’t willing to do. A lot of guys try to do the same as me, twelve on and three off on a Reeler. I’m slinging fiber on the Jupiter Array, and I’m banking gold. There aren’t many that make it, not out here. Too many downs, not enough draw. See, a lot of the other Reddies got families shipped to Blue, and gravity pulls on them. Especially the noobs. They feel the drag of the gravity well and it makes them scratch their heads about priority. Their startup package included a relocate for partners and pups, so they’re stuck at half scratch with the rest going to four walls and formula. I was a Reddie, doing okay in one of the dome metros, working half-year lines keeping lights on, right out of service. They asked me to ride rocks out of the belt, and I jumped at it. Astro-mining? Bro. Strap a thruster on and hit go on someone else’s mark? What’s a little roll, pitch, and yaw, right? No problem unless someone doesn’t carry the one, then it’s straight toward the rock next door with an empty tank. Or you’re in open vac with no tether, hoping for a pickup before your O2 or power cell is dry. That’s a midas line, stone, but I stepped off after my run. Willing, right. I’m not that willing. Give me a blind jump. Anything except mining those grinders! Sure, lots of gold for space-mining iron and nickel, but what you don’t hear is a guy has a half-life of a one-year run in there, and…you’re only midas if…

So I stepped back down to swapping out LED mega-switches on the Olympus Comm Towers, then slung deep fiber sensors into the New Phoenix Wells, then ran repair on the Transarctic Web, across the top of the ice cap. I was set up on Red, consecutive, and they were putting me up, but gravity wasn’t pulling me, and the gold was… thin.

So when J-Array Recruit held a job draw, I put in with every box checked, and bro, they got back to me for the narc and psych screens before I got onto the cross dome lev. Stone, they did. Narc was never a problem. Some guys test out from bufosynth or p-cube, or, what, a hundred other GM organarcs? But their priorities are one-eighty out of phase. You don’t blow the mind that dreams you! Pickleheads. Steambrains, right? Let ’em stew. And I guess psych didn’t tag me out either. They had my public record, so they knew… Orphaned by the Global Flu in Pandemic I. Bussed off Blue and raised in conscription at a Red scatter town. Drawn to Active at fourteen, deployed in the Sino Migration Deterrence on Blue. Back to Red for DefCon Scholarship, because Reddies and Blues don’t mix. Straight to contract. No holes. No social. Maybe my record, with my high tower, deep aqua, and polar shelf stretches, pegged me the right kind of crazy. I don’t know. They won’t show mental on the public worker profile without auth. Maybe space was just the next thing. Whatever. They saw what they needed to, I guess, because they bought my contract, and waved the contingent.

Not a week I got fitted, loaded up with anti-rads, and shipped out. Probably dreamed of Red distancing off, because I sort of remember, but I don’t think I would’ve craned my neck to say goodbye to that ball. My clock wouldn’t start until I drifted through the hatch on the Sleeper, I didn’t know how many months out. Still don’t, and why do I care? It felt like a long nap, though. Some dreams. Some nightmares. Sometimes wide awake in liquid pitch wondering if being a solo was the new stretch.

Now I’m year three into my four, and all ready to box-check if the re-up bonus is midas enough. I’m free-floating. Zero G is my nirvana. Who needs bones, right? J-Array will get back with a number, but it’s a good stretch for me whatever. Someone said JA’s completion’s at three percent, but knowing is above my grade. Best case? One percent per year. That’s job security, bro.

Day in the life? My sleep and eat isn’t a trial. Float never got to me like some. I think no up no down like breathing. I wake up at bell, grab a folger, butterdoughs, crisps and moo, anything, and I’m good for the first six. Some guys regurge in their bunks, and kick and scream through morning chow. Some get shipped to Red, to wait for the next freight to 1G. You pick up the wrong call, I guess. Real stinkers, but not me. I’m head down and keep shoveling. I’m fifo.

Suit up, shield down, battery charged, tanks full, tools clipped. Put in a day drifting on tether, align to black, wait for NOC to confirm link, fine tune to the edge, tighten, drink lunch in the suit, and someone says go. I’m top slinger, so I usually get my twelve up first if no NOC wally bones it up.

Back to the Sleeper, the big chow, visor vids, and the ball rolls around. When I bunk up, I’m brain off. Let someone else think of tomorrow. It’s an old theory out here anyway.

So, there’s a down, right? Sure. The down is that nothing sings in the void. Yeah, one in six of us is a jill, and, no, they’re good as a jack out here on tether, don’t twist my tale. My crew is all jacks, but a pro is a pro, never mind parts. It’s back at base, in our veins, we’re all tweaked by the anti-rad drugs. See, the Sleeper bobs in a nuclear wake. Anti-rads block the, well, rads, duh, but what we don’t know going in is they saltpeter all us guys. The jills are fine; all sorts of four year girl-girls in the crews. But no jack and jill anywhere. So everyone’s a bro, and no one’s a go. Bro.

What else is the world’s a shell! We get a strap cot—not even biomold, so lay still or you wake up on the bulkhead—and a text screen at bunk. A text screen! Primitive, bro! A patch home is a stand-up in the hallway. No skin off my horn, but guys with ties to Blue have to say their goodnight honeys with wallies vid-bombing. And we stream immersion vid at a pale 4k on the GB visors, but it chops when guys get patched to Blue for goodnights. Everybody shares the b-dubs, they say, but a chopped immersion is like being slapped awake from a dream! The rest of the ‘Verse lives the walk-around fantasy. How about some TB for the flesh out, bro! That’s a big down on off days. And shoot. That’s the only real thing besides the line.

Remember I said twelve on three off? Yeah, well, Day Thirteen, right. A lot—most—of the guys hunker in the rec room and marathon the game backlog from Blue. I don’t follow that stream, and rec always stinks of feet. Guys with partners watch the ticker, and cut out of whatever when their patch to Blue comes up. There’s a jill med gets a patch to Red, but she doesn’t take it half of every Thirteen, and drinks it real loud why. She’s girl-girl, full-time, but so? And it’s always love hate like a bipolar, with her, but everybody who slaps her back gets a beer and a peep at the miss you vids. That’s their gig, but what’s a solo like me do after folgers on a Thirteen?

Look, I’m no whining wally. No narcs, I get. A hard vac rote, with narcs in the mix, means death by bone up a hundred ways, mostly O2 jetting, for some reason. Guys say JA drifts you home in the dark if your narc test reads two lines. And there’s no re-up after rehab.

Getting the panoramic, now, I bet. No jack and jill, no total immerse vid package, no biomold. What’s left to sing? We works, eats, falls asleep. Life’s a rote, and it can wear a guy to the edges. But the message on the mirror for me: Finish out my runs. Cache my gold back on Blue. Eight years and I’ll be feet up. Ocean fab Earth housing is my Martian dream. Immerse and live off the fat until I get my bones back. And that sings, bro. Arms back, that sings.

Thanks for reading my stuff. I’ll probably do more.

John Racette

Shirley, You Jest.

My brother and I have discussed the science fiction short story as a genre, and we have observed that the story often takes the form of a vignette, a fragment of what seems to be a larger tale. It also periodically employs a twist, or reveal, or even a punch line, near or at the end, as if the entire story were a mechanism to make a funny or clever remark or observation.

I read two stories in the past couple of days that illustrate the notion. One was a very short, silly bit called The Jovian Jest, by Lilith Lorraine (Amazing Science Fiction, May, 1930). Alien object comes to Earth, lands in a farmer’s field. Townspeople gather to investigate. Tentacles emerge, capture two unsuspecting bystanders. Alien creature probes their minds,  finds one, a common townsfolk, is of meager intellect and affable, the other, a professor, is learned and articulate, but boorish. It possesses one of them in order to communicate with the people of Earth. The message is delivered, and the alien vacates the captured bodies and returns the disembodied consciousnesses to them, and leaves. It is only at the very end of the story, after the extraterrestrial vessel disappears that we learn of the jest: The alien swapped the consciousnesses of the two men.

I don’t want to be hypercritical, but it didn’t work, for me. Ultimately, no one was tricked into making the wrong choice, no one gained anything in the transaction, and no one learned a lesson or got his comeuppance. The two minds were merely forced to trade bodies.

It struck me that the author sought to ridicule the professorial breed, but the justification was absent from the story.

The other story was The Girls From Earth, by Frank M. Robinson (Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1952, about a human future wherein the men of Earth take to the skies to colonize other, rugged, more primitive worlds, and the women, largely disinclined to emigrate, stay behind in the comparatively luxurious comforts of the home world.

Consequently, the colonized worlds are man-heavy, and Earth becomes predominantly female. A sort of cultural schism takes place, along sex lines, and the story addresses the problem that has arisen finding mates.

The premise of the story was silly, but the progression of events was funny, and culminated in a sweet resolution expressing the notion that, however dubious might be the circumstances of their initial encounters, men and women, in the end, are made for each other.

John Racette

The Jovian Jest

The Girls From Earth

Abby Someone. Abby who?

Astounding Science Fiction, August, 1959, we submit, for your consideration, Anne Walker. Who’s Anne Walker? Well I don’t know. Nobody really knows, I don’t think. There is only one title, a short story called A Matter of Proportion, listed under the name Anne Walker in Project Gutenberg.

A Matter of Proportion is a snapshot of a man who, in a time of war, does a heroic thing, to the amazement of one of his comrades. Big idea: Strength of will and dedication to purpose trump seemingly insurmountable obstacles. And, oh, I like that. Give me a David and Goliath story all day!

The story introduces two features that qualify it as science fiction. The first one is the ICEG (inter-cortical encephalograph), a sort of mind-reading, sensation-sharing, buddy system used, in the story, to provide a channel of communication between soldiers in times of war. Through this device, the author allows the narrator, an observer, to experience the thoughts and sensations of his subject, the hero, thus conveying two points of view (the narrator’s panicked incredulity and the hero’s calm determination) simultaneously.

The other feature that tags the story as science fiction takes the form of the big reveal, which–spoiler alert–I will here blurt out verbatim in a quotation from the story:

“I was the first—successful—brain transplant in man.”

So that’s the science fiction of it. Walker’s description of the science of organ transplantation was naive and didn’t convince, but the idea was out there, and she had the guts to run with it, so, more power to her. What’s more? She finished the story and got it published! She lived the dream, Daddy-o!

John Racette

A Matter of Proportion

Thinking about “The Golden Age”

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is generally considered — though opinions differ — to include the three decades of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Writings from the Golden Age are characterized by a charming (to me at least) naivete about  the pace of technological progress: we would soon live in a future of interplanetary rockets and robot servants, of gleaming cities and plentiful atomic power.

With few exceptions, Golden Age writers didn’t anticipate the revolution in microelectronics that would spawn portable computers and universal connectivity. (Nor did they foresee the women’s liberation movement or restrictions on smoking, two often jarringly anachronistic aspects of stories from that era. These authors were, in general, more imaginative than visionary.)

Golden Age writing tended to extrapolate contemporary trends, continuing the pace of rapid industrial and scientific development along existing lines. Making things go faster, making buildings and cities bigger, projecting enormous population growth: these were all obvious to the Golden Age writers. They lived in a world where increasing mechanization and industrial scale defined change, and seemed to promise to bring the stars themselves within our grasp.

In the past decade or two, the revolution in computing and consumer electronics has come to define technology for most of us, and today a single product — the iPhone — stands as the icon of our technological advancement. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that so much of modern science fiction concerns itself with computation, with virtual reality and the artificial augmentation of mind. (Interestingly, in the post-Golden Age science fiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s, that alternate reality and artificially enhanced cognition was achieved through drugs, rather than electronics. For many a lover of Golden Age science fiction, the decade following represents the nadir of the genre.)

Entertaining science fiction need not be prophetic, but it’s interesting to look at the mistakes the Golden Age writers made with their simple extrapolations, and to wonder what similar mistakes we’re making today as we imagine the future. What if virtual reality and the computer-augmented mind isn’t a conspicuous aspect of our technological future? What if something not yet trending, but still not preposterously fanciful, is just over the horizon, waiting to transform our world? What might that be?

Imagine writing a plausible, non-apocalyptic story of the day after tomorrow that didn’t feature connectivity, virtual reality, or artificial intelligence as a significant or necessary plot element. What would that look like?

“Stygian gloom…” Where Did I Leave My Electric Torch?

Today’s indulgence was The Corpse on the Grating, by Hugh B. Cave, from Astounding Stories, Vol I, No. 2. In it, a skeptical medical man named Dale, on a bet with a friend, a more liberal minded scientist, tries to spend the night in an old warehouse where he is led to believe that the watchman had, that very night, been frightened to death. The entire story involved five people, two of whom were dead. It was reminiscent of some of the horror writing of Edgar Allen Poe, told in first person with a tone that suggests that even the teller, after having endured the ordeal, has a hard time believing the tale.

An excerpt: “He was hanging on the grating. Hanging there, with white, twisted hands clutching the rigid bars of iron, straining to force them apart. His whole distorted body was forced against the barrier, like the form of a madman struggling to escape from his cage. His face—the image of it still haunts me whenever I see iron bars in the darkness of a passage—was the face of a man who has died from utter, stark horror. It was frozen in a silent shriek of agony, staring out at me with fiendish maliciousness. Lips twisted apart. White teeth gleaming in the light. Bloody eyes, with a horrible glare of colorless pigment. And—dead.”

The story was only nine pages long, and comprised little more than the fearful thoughts of a man walking alone in a dark, abandoned building after coming across a corpse. This was the pulp science fiction of its day, a fanciful story of scientific experimentation, skepticism, and discovery.

I was happy to learn that I’ll be able to enjoy more of Cave’s writing, because he contributed roughly 800 stories to the science fiction, horror, (et. al.) pulp magazines throughout the 20s and 30s. He also wrote under the pen names John Starr, Geoffery Vace, and Justin Case.

Until next time, dear reader.

John Racette

The Corpse on the Grating

Like A Simile?

“In the plate could be plainly seen the hind quarters of the sheep held in the grasp of such a monster as even the drug-laden brain of an opium smoker never pictured. Judging from the sheep, the monster stood about twenty feet tall, and its frame was surmounted by a head resembling an overgrown frog. Enormous jaws were opened to seize the sheep but, to the amazement of the three observers, the jaws were entirely toothless. Where teeth were to be expected, long parallel ridges of what looked like bare bone, appeared, without even a rudimentary segregation into teeth. The body of the monster was long and snakelike, and was borne on long, heavy legs ending in feet with three long toes, armed with vicious claws. The crowning horror of the creature was its forelegs. There were of enormous length, thin and attenuated looking, and ended in huge misshapen hands, knobby and blotched, which grasped the sheep in the same manner as human hands. The eyes were as large as dinner plates, and they were glaring at the camera with an expression of fiendish malevolence which made Carnes shudder.”

This short descriptive passage from the story The Cave of Horror, by Captain S. P. Meek, is rich with vivid adjectives, and has an economy of words that is reminiscent, to me, of some of the prose of the great heroic fantasy writer (and contemporary of Meek), Robert E. Howard. Just as Howard often did, Meek conjured an entirely fantastic, horrific new life form using comparative terminology (head “resembling an overgrown frog” and body “snakelike”). Such passages make me appreciative of the imaginations of Meek and the other Science Fiction and Fantasy writers of the early pulp magazine age, who could pick and choose features and characteristics of commonplace life forms and combine them to create fanciful abominations. At the same time, though, it makes me wonder: Does the imagery evoked in me by Meek’s words equal, in its vividness, the beast that lurked in the author’s mind?

Alas, I can never know.

John Racette

The Cave of Horror

Utterly Absurd

In 1914, in his novel The World Set Free, H.G. Wells wrote of a future featuring “atomic bombs,” in which “it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.” That was thirty-one years before Trinity — before the detonation of the first atomic weapon in the sands of southern New Mexico.

Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrentheit 451, written in 1953, described ear-buds, those ubiquitous little earphones everyone wears today. He called them “seashells,” but we’d recognize them today — as we would the insular cocoon they created for the perpetually distracted wife of that novel’s protagonist.

Arthur C. Clarke predicted the geostationary orbit, that distance from the Earth — about 22,236 miles — at which a satellite will circle the planet precisely once each day, and so appear fixed in the sky above the same point on the Earth’s equator. He introduced this idea in 1945, more than a decade before the Russians shocked the world by placing the first artificial satellite, the short-lived Sputnik, in a far lower orbit. (In 1960, Clarke would feature the still-nonexistent geosynchronous communication satellite in his short story I Remember Babylon, which presaged, among other things, satellite television and broadband pornography.)

Science fiction writers predict the future. That’s their job. They get it wrong more often than right (a good thing, considering the prominent role of alien invasions and global catastrophes in the genre) but they do sometimes get it right — or get it wrong, but in ways that foreshadow our evolving reality.

H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke are acknowledged giants of science fiction. Not so Albert Teichner, a World War II veteran who most likely passed away in 1989, though biographical information is scarce. But the handful of stories Teichner wrote includes Cerebrum, a fanciful account of Facebook and Snapchat which he penned in 1963.

No, of course it isn’t really about modern social media, nor even the internet. But it does imagine a future in which everyone is networked with everyone else, their instant messaging coordinated by a central switching authority called, prosaically enough, “Central Switching.” It’s a world in which people are constantly connected, are distracted from the world around them by their non-stop mental messaging, and, having instantaneous access to every fact, know less and less, and grow lazier with each passing year.

Most interestingly, it’s a world in which one can be cut off from the great switching center, isolated from the perpetual stream of information and communication, and, so disconnected, become a social outcast and pariah.

That, at least, is nonsense. After all, it’s unimaginable, isn’t it, that the powers behind the internet could ever flex their digital muscles to reward and punish the consumers of their virtual wares?

I mean, Google, for instance. They wouldn’t do something like that.

Or would they?