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[July 6, 1962] Enjoy Being A Girl? (Gender and Possibilities in the 1960s)

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[The rush of modern technologies has created whole new industries, one result of which has been the breaking down of traditional barriers, as Ms. Lucas will illustrate…]


by Victoria Lucas

As a child I learned that there were expectations.  Not so much rules.  I don't remember being taught rules except for rules of grammar or other school subjects, including physical education class.  Those Expectations determined What You Did, Who You Were, and other facets of one's life including Who You Know.

My encounters with Expectations came to a head on two occasions that I remember in my childhood, one when I was somewhere between 6 and 8, and one when I was 12.  When I was 6, maybe 7, I remember sliding out of bed on the way to getting up and, with my head touching the floor but my legs still on the bed, having the epiphany that I was responsible for my own actions–not my parents or anyone else.  Obviously it took me some time to work out the ramifications of this, but I had the basic concept, anyway.

When I was 12, I discovered that I was A Girl. 

This hit me like a heavy blow.  Suddenly lots of things were excluded from my future.  Girls didn't do science or compose music.  Girls were nurses, assistants, secretaries, and so on, but not generally People of Importance unless they were actresses.  Even then they were inferior to Actors, and people didn't really take them seriously.  I had never heard of Hedy Lamarr, and I don't remember knowing anything about Eleanor Roosevelt or any of the women who have been resurrected from European
culture as having had something to do with their own futures.

As a teenager I ran into the Girl thing again when my high-school counselor specifically delimited my career choices: secretary, wife and mother, waitress, teacher, or nurse.  That was it.  I had to choose among those.  Since I had no boy friends, couldn't remember a food order even after I myself had made it, and was squeamish about blood, that left secretary and teacher.  I kind of held onto "teacher" for awhile since there was nothing I could do about it till I finished college.  So I took secretarial courses, sacrificing a third year of my beloved Latin to be sure I could get a Job after high school.  A Career?  Now that was something totally unknown.  Mostly those were Men things.  I haven’t got the hang of those yet.

I was never given the results of the intelligence test I took when I was in school.  I don't think anyone paid any attention to it (possibly the Girl thing, but it never occurred to me it might be a “Spic” thing too, given my name.) I tended to be a Teacher's Pet, but that wasn't an advantage.  Socially it was a bad disadvantage, and it took getting through a few grades to latch onto that concept.  So I accepted my father's preference of a nickname ("Vicki" for "Victoria"), learned to be very vague about answers to any question like "So how'd you do on that test?" and was careful to be ready to expound on anything we had to have read before class. 

This gave me the reputation in high school for being happy to explain anything to anybody in the minutes before class started so they could rush it onto paper and onto the teacher's desk, making homework out of it.  And the further nickname "Encyclopedia."  Classmates would tackle me on the way to class, and I would move slowly to the classroom door followed by people asking me to regurgitate the day’s book report or lesson.  So I was trying to avoid other peoples' Expectations – for instance, being smart made one Stuck Up. 

I tried to go to parties, but my Expectations that these would be rational and enjoyable events were ruined the first time someone drove me to a drunken high school shindig.  I think I went to two parties
during high school and regretted going to both of them, not because anything bad happened, but because I realized I didn't know what Fun was, and I was terrified of the driving my rides exhibited.

My idea of Fun, as it turns out, has a lot to do with foreign movies (including British "Carry On" comedies) and some few American ones, along with reading, writing, research, and intellectual company.  Also with interesting music, and my idea of "interesting music" turns out to be very strange.  Last summer at Stanford I took an Introduction to Music course to round out my summer units. 

Sitting at the back of the practice theater in the basement of Dinkelspiel, I would nod off to the strains of Beethoven or others of the (to me) boring 20th-Century Canon—which was mainly what was being taught.  I should explain, since like as not the “20th-Century Canon” will not be a term with which most people are familiar.  It refers to the works in Western culture that are considered to be worth teaching.  In music it refers to what people call “Classical Music”– the “three Bs,” Bach, Beethoven & Brahms, but also the rest of the “important” male composers who made European music from about 1600.  From the time I began to occupy my own piece of the house (built for my uncle and aunt before they left) I played records, starting with my mother’s 78s and finishing with all the ones in the public library—over and over.  I knew all the stuff in the course.  I just was having it organized and analyzed for me.

But, as the last thing he did in the class, the instructor introduced "tape music" to us by telling us that it was the latest thing, putting a tape recorder on a chair in the middle of the stage, starting it up, and walking off.  Now, I know what a tape recorder is.  Here’s the little portable number I used to do sound for Bob Hammond’s “Solitaire” and “Bon Voyage” and Robinson Jeffers’s “Cretan Woman” at the Playbox Theatre.  It only weighs 25 lb.

My friend and mentor Barney Childs wrote the incidental music for those.  But this …

As I sat listening, the music spilled out of the machine and over the apron, into the orchestra pit.  Since music has no gravity, only levity, it went UP the aisle stairs all the way to me in the back and swirled around my ankles before it receded.

I haven't been the same since.  Neither have my Expectations.  This time, the only thing that being A Girl has to do with it is that I don’t even remember whether the composer was male or female.  It didn’t matter.  Whoever it was spent perhaps hundreds of hours recording, rerecording, treating recorded sounds, whether music or any sound, as material to be distorted, slowed down, twanged and edited with the same little razor-blade kit that I use, then rerecorded onto a final reel of tape that would bear all the machinations of the composer.  This was new. 

It was a hallucinatory hopestorm that drove that music up the aisle.  There is still room for the new, even if it’s female.  Even if it’s me.

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Book

[July 4, 1962] Happy submersion (The Drowned World, by J.G. Ballard)

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by Rosemary Benton

At last, the levity that I so desperately needed has been provided. Prior to reading The Drowned World I was only aware of J. G. Ballard as a name. He was well published, I knew, but ultimately a background figure to my science fiction library. That all changed on June 30th, however, when I went to the town bookstore and purchased The Drowned World. The bookseller said that it would take me no time at all to read. I found this to be true, although the time it took me to process the book was far longer than than I had expected.

J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World is a post-apocalyptic ballad performed by a select cast, and encased in a small slice of Ballard's much larger story of the evolution of Earth. The location of the story takes place in an entirely fictional future vision of Earth. Due to a sun which has become unstable, the Earth is rapidly heating. The remaining 5 million humans have fled to the Antarctic circle where the temperature is a tolerable 85 degrees. The Earth's equator, by comparison, is close to 200 degrees on any given day. Bombarded by solar radiation and spurred on by the intolerable heat, flora and fauna have begun to mutate to prehistoric shapes and sizes. Enormous iguanas, crocodiles and snakes are now a common site in Berlin and London, whose streets and buildings are now submerged by upwards of 50 feet of water. Large bat-sized mosquitoes bash themselves relentlessly against the wire meshes and cages encircling the last human bastions in London, while dog-sized bats feast upon the oversized insects. The evolution of disease has kept pace with the changing environment; malaria becomes the most common affliction hitting the human population.

Much of Europe has been reduced to lagoons nestled between vast expanses of jungle and silt dunes. In one such lagoon, floating over the decaying architecture of London, sits the stage and players of the story. Central to the book are the biologists Dr. Robert Kerans and Dr. Bodkin, the emotionally distant heiress Beatrice Dahl and the villainous looter, Strangman. Surrounding them are the rest of the research team sent to monitor the changing landscape, and Strangman's crew of tribalistic-minded followers.

On a small scale Ballard includes the traditional elements of science fiction and action-adventure. There is a hero, a villain, a love interest who is desired by both the villain and the hero, a climax to the tension between the battle of the hero and the goals of the villain, tied off nicely with a sacrificial confidant and companion to the hero. On a much larger scale The Drowned World offers a character study of a villain and a hero, both of whom are morally ambiguous, as they navigate a truly alien environment with totally different sets of rules for survival.

To best dissect The Drowned World I think it is necessary to take a look at the three major players to Ballard's drama: Ms. Dahl, Strangman and finally Dr. Kerans. Ms. Dahl is perhaps one of the more developed characters of the story, and yet her journey is largely symbolic. A key element of Ballard's world is that not only is the physical world around humanity devolving, but so is the unconscious mind of humanity. Plagued by memories of survival urges now unlocked after centuries of culture and socialization, humans by and large are subjected to nighttime visions of hot, fiery landscapes and looming reptilian danger. Ms. Dahl is one of the first characters who we see suffering from these apparitions.

We read about her trying to deal with them through alcohol and cool detachment. Her acceptance of the end of the human world is made all the more evident by her refusal early on in the book to leave the lagoon for the more tolerable temperature of the northern settlements. Despite the coming rains, the rise of the water, and the abandonment of the post by the well equipped scientific team, she shows little interest in leaving behind her home. Yet in the shifting pools of green, warm water with its surface disturbed by the movement of reptiles swimming in and out of the lower levels of the ruined buildings, she has managed to find an equilibrium in which she can live out her days, even as the prophetic nightmares of flooding rain and dense jungle encroachment press ever closer. She has given up fighting against nature and the universe's larger plans for the planet, and instead finds her small pleasures in dining on the dwindling reserves of fine food, sunbathing, and keeping up a cultured outward physique.

Ms. Dahl's personal journey is taking her along the same path as Dr. Kerans'. She is dreaming of an ancestral life and living it as best she can in the present. When confronted with a challenge to this backwards slide she recoils and withdraws within herself. She longs for the return to the encroachment of the water and reviles in the exposure of the land.  She is unable to deal with change that could draw her on a different path from the envelopment of Earth by the sea, and ultimately it destroys her relationship with her companions Dr. Kerans and Dr. Bodkin.

Enter Strangman on his ridiculous riverboat piled high with looted objet d'art, liquor and jewelry. Like Ms. Dahl, Strangman enters the story as someone who has given in to the changing world, although he has done so in a drastically different fashion. In keeping with salvage laws and the overall objective of land reclamation, Strangman drains the lagoon in order to gain favor with the loosely upheld government. At the same time he is able to continue with his passion of surrounding himself with items of beauty from the old world. Unlike our protagonists, Strangman is not regressing backwards to a state of piteous apathy, nor is he embracing the larger time scale that Ms. Dahl and Dr. Kerans have via their million year old primitive dreams. Even though he is aware of them via conversation with Dr. Kerans, and presumably experiences them himself, he is written as an opportunist. He takes risks in sending his crew, which he provides for and never once abuses, down into the sunken city. He takes chances by draining the lagoon in order to reclaim the land and thereby more easily take its sunken riches. He is progress in a backwards way because ultimately nothing he does will have any lasting impact, but he at least fights against the insignificance of his actions and his existence.

Along this line he is also upholding the pre-drowned world, and while he revels in the finer luxuries it provided, he doesn't do so in the same way as Dr. Kerans or Ms. Dahl. While they are content with living out the lifespan of their delicious foods and luxury accommodations before the sea reclaims them, Strangman wants to make them last as long as possible. Even unnaturally so. He rejects the inevitable in favor of the possible when he drains the lagoon and likely plans to drain others in the area. He is even commended for his actions by Dr. Kerans' team when they return to the area at the end of the book and see what he has accomplished.

At last we must examine Dr. Kerans. This man, who we meet standing on his balcony of the Ritz complete with air conditioning, fine clothes and even finer furnishings, is not shaken by the thought of nearly anything involving his future. Absorbed in the visceral feel of his present environment, Dr. Kerans is a man who lives entirely in the now with little thought to the future or concern for the past. Only later does he even begin to experience the dreams that have led most of the cast to a delayed madness. At the end of the book he even embraces a futile journey south and consequently a slow, painful suicide. Put concisely he is against everything that we, as modern humans and Americans, are taught to embrace as progress – the continuous struggle against nature, the need to suffer for progress, and the need to forge your own fate. In any other story he would be the villain trying to prevent the human race from fighting back against its aggressor. Interestingly, in this story he is the hero. But why is he the hero? Ultimately I believe this can be answered by Ballard's writing style.

J. G. Ballard's writing is like a good red wine. It has body, heft, and layered flavors that reveal themselves based on how you indulge in them. I read The Drowned World over the course of several days, taking my time to sink into the atmospheric environment that Ballard creates. In short sips the book takes the reader a long way. So many descriptive analogies, metaphors and adjectives are crammed into each page that one would think Ballard had gone overboard. Yet despite his verbose world building, nothing felt repetitive and frankly, I couldn't get enough.

I lived for days on how Ballard would express his characters' wonder at the world surrounding them, and how each as an individual would contribute to the progress of the story. It is this individual experience that I believe made Dr. Kerans the hero, Strangman the villain, and Ms. Dahl the figurative totem. When one reads Ballard's dialogue it is abundantly secondary to the individual brazen actions taken by each character. This isolation, when a character acts of their own volition outside of what their companions would want or desire, is what Ballard revels in. The individual, whether walking forward or backwards in human evolution, is a lynchpin. What they see, how the environment congeals around them, and how their actions later influence others is paramount to Ballard's The Drowned World.

Thus, Dr. Kerans was the hero because he was willing to press forward into that isolation of standing behind his scientific team, and in the end, the isolation of the journey south toward the epicenter of the heat. Strangman, on the other hand, was nothing without his crew, his treasures or his need to change the world for the benefit of the many. As such he was the villain. It is an interesting reversal, and one which I believe took a cunning mind to pen. I look forward to exploring more of Ballard's works and retroactively swimming through his vast sea of published works. This book deserves a well-earned five out of five stars. 

—

(P.S. Don't miss the second Galactic Journey Tele-Conference, July 29th at 11 a.m.!  If you can't make it to Worldcon/Chicon III, this is YOUR chance to Vote for the 1962 Hugos!)

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Magazine

[July 2, 1962] Getting to the Point (July 1962 Analog Science Fiction)

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by Gideon Marcus

There are many ways to measure the strength of a story.  Is the plot innovative?  Does it resonate emotionally?  Are the featured characters unusual?  Does it employ clever literary devices?

As a writer, I am always particularly impressed by efficiency: the ability of an author to develop his tale with a minimum of exposition, unfolding a plot teasingly so as to keep the reader turning those pages with increased anticipation, and then delivering a solid conclusion at the end – where it belongs.

The July 1962 Analog Science Fiction delivers a series of object lessons in how (and how not) to write efficiently.  In some cases, the execution can be admired even if the story isn't great shakes.  And vice versa.  Read on!:

Listen! The Stars!, by John Brunner

Brunner is a new British author whose prolific writings have already enchanted one of the Journey's writers.  Now it's my turn.

Listen! takes place a few decades from now, just after the discovery of an esoteric electronic principle that allows one to literally eavesdrop on the stars.  Using a sort of acoustic telescope, the "stardropper," one can tune in to the mental vibrations of extraterrestrials.  This isn't telepathy, and even if it were, who could understand the minds of total aliens? 

Yet, listening to these emanations is compelling in the extreme.  There is the feeling that, if you could just wrap your head around them, the secrets of the universe might be yours.  Stardropper addiction runs rampant…and then the disappearances begin.  Users simply vanish, though very few cases are actually witnessed.  Concerned at the ramifications, the American government dispatches a special agent to investigate the vanishings. 

Listen! is perfectly constructed, fitting its novella length just right.  The plot is also novel, though there are shades of Clarke's Childhood's End.  The characterizations serve the tale rather than being tacked on.  A five star story.

Junior Achievement, by William M. Lee

This tale of a gaggle of precocious kids and their science project is neither engaging nor novel.  I think the idea is that fall-out from an atomic exchange has caused the kids to surpass the adults by leaps and bounds, but otherwise, I couldn't see the point.  Two stars.

The Other Likeness, by James H. Schmitz

Alien agents in human form are inserted into a Terran Federation with the goal to destroy it from within.  A textbook example of how not to write: three quarters of this story is action without explanation, followed by the most expository of endings.  The result is that one wonders why one is reading until the finale and then feels let down for the effort expended.  Two stars.

Brain Waves and Thought Patterns, by John Eric Holmes, M.D.

I normally cringe at the prospect of reading non-fiction in Analog given Editor Campbell's preference for crackpots pushing psychic malarkey, but July's piece genuinely intrigues.  We are finally learning a bit about the black box of the mind that lies between stimulus and response.  The key has been to implant electrodes into the brain and measure the electrical output.  Cats are the subject of choice being the perfect combination of ubiquitous and medium-sized.

The result?  We now know a lot about the brainwaves of cats.  What this means for the future of humanity, brain research, Dr. Rhine, etc. remains to be seen.  Three stars.

Border, Breed Nor Birth (Part 1 of 2), by Mack Reynolds

El Hassan, the mythical would-be uniter of North Africa is back in Reynolds' second tale set in the Mahgreb of the 1980s.  As in the first, it follows Homer Crawford and his band of Westernized Negroes as they promulgate the virtues of democracy and technology under a collective assumed identity. 

I'm a little warmer to the idea that Africa can use the help of its displaced children across the sea, and I do appreciate the attention to detail in the setting and the politics (no surprise – Reynolds spent a good deal of time in Morocco and Algeria).  However, the presentation is still too flip, and I suspect the endeavor is going to prove all too easy.  But perhaps the naive ambitions of Crawford et. al. will be thwarted in Part II.  Three stars so far, but I'm waiting for the thump of shoe #2.

The Rescuer, by Arthur Porges

Last up is the chronicle of the destruction of a machine, perhaps the most powerful and important machine in human history.  The pay-off is as hoary as your grandmother, but the unveiling is rather masterful.  Three stars.

Summed up, this month's Analog is the least good of the Big Five magazines, scoring a still respectable 3.1 stars – and it has the month's best story, in my opinion.  Given that no digest scored under the three stars this month, it has been an unusually fruitful July for science fiction lovers.

***

(P.S. Don't miss the second Galactic Journey Tele-Conference, July 29th at 11 a.m.!  If you can't make it to Worldcon/Chicon III, this is YOUR chance to Vote for the 1962 Hugos!)

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