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