Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (221 page)

As for those who embrace SF but turn up their noses at its media iterations, I note that film and print each have their strengths, and the best on screen – movies like
The Day the Earth Stood Still
,
2001
and
Gattaca
—can more then hold their own as exemplars of the genre.

Where science fiction, both print and media, is unique among genres is in having to explain itself. Unless a film is part of a series, like
Star Trek
, a person entering the world of an SF film needs to get his or her bearings. Noted author Isaac Asimov made the case in an essay many years ago where he noted that someone watching a genre film like a western or a prison movie or a historical romance doesn’t necessarily require a lot of explanation. We know a great deal about the conventions of the genre even if they’re not necessarily connected with reality. You know what a saloon is like or a courtroom or a royal ball even if you’ve never encountered them in real life because you’ve seen (and read about) them in so many other stories. However in SF the writer has to set out the ground rules. In
Destination Moon
the characters—and the viewers—get a crash course in rocket science from none other than Woody Woodpecker. In
Gattaca
the details of a society that favors designer gene babies, and which discriminates against those born naturally, needs to be spelled out or the story will make no sense. This information can be cleverly salted throughout the film, or presented in a clever—or awkward—“info dump,” but it means that even if you’ve seen artificially created humans in movies before, you need to find out what the story is behind the replicants of Blade Runner before becoming fully immersed in this particular world. That learning curve puts the critic and film scholar on the same level of everyone else in the audience. For some, that’s mere exposition, and it detracts from the “people” the movie ought to be about, meaning that science fiction becomes a lesser genre by definition. For those who know who play by the rules, such as Christopher Nolan in his masterful Inception, it means the whole complex world created for the movie with people invading dreams and creating dreams within dreams is not at all difficult to follow…so long as you didn’t go out to the concession stand for five minutes and miss a crucial bit of dialogue. Knowing how to convey this information without being heavy-handed about it is simply the challenge of those who would work in this genre, just as someone making a war movie had better get acquainted with the weapons that were used in that particular war.

What seems beyond argument by anyone who has watched the best science fiction films is that science fiction is a vibrant genre where some of the most entertaining and interesting films have been and are continuing to be made. Those who try to deny it or insist that some film they like isn’t “really” science fiction are simply revealing how little they know. Take pity on them. The debate is over.

We won.

* * * *

This essay is adapted from
Daniel M. Kimmel
’s book
Jar Jar Binks Must Die… and other observations about science fiction movies
(Fantastic Books). For 25 years he was the Boston-based film critic for the
Worcester Telegram and Gazette
. His reviews currently appear at NorthShoreMovies.net. He is also the Boston correspondent for
Variety
and teaches film at Suffolk University. He has written about science fiction films for
Clarkesworld
,
Artemis
, the
Internet Review of Science Fiction
, and
Space and Time
.

(1922–2003)

I knew him as Hal Clement, a quiet man who was always at the Boston-area conventions I attended. Many writers and editors are fairly boisterous at conventions, quick with a story and always willing to jump into conversations, but not Hal. He had plenty to say, but only if you asked. And for all his literary credentials, he considered himself a fan first, rather than a writer. Some of my friends outside of the SF community knew him as Harry Stubbs, a really good high school physics teacher, one of the teachers people remembered and told stories about years later.

Whatever the venue, Clement was all about making sure you understood the idea. His writing was never flashy, any more than he was, but his ideas were extraordinary and, like his teaching, it stuck with you.

Clement grew up in greater Boston and became interested in both astronomy and SF after a chance encounter with a Buck Rogers comic. He sold his first story, “Proof,” to
Astounding
in 1942 while earning his BS in astronomy from Harvard. After flying thirty-five combat missions over Europe during World War II, he returned to get masters degrees in education (Boston University) and chemistry (Simmons College). He then spent the next forty years teaching high school chemistry, interrupted only by a recall to active duty during the Korean War and military reserve duty thereafter. (He retired from service as a full colonel.).

Needle
, Clement’s first novel, was serialized in
Astounding
in 1949, but his most famous book was
Mission of Gravity
(1953). Like most of Clement’s writing, it uses characters and story primarily as a means of exploring and solving a science problem, in this case an expedition to recover a stranded probe on a high-gravity world. Clement retired from teaching in 1987, but continued to write methodically, with
Noise
, his last novel, coming out in 2003, the same year he died in his sleep of complications from diabetes.

Married for more than fifty years to Mary Elizabeth Myers, he had two sons and a daughter. The Hal Clement Award for Young Adults for Excellence in Children’s Science Fiction Literature is presented in his memory at Worldcon each year.

First published in
Astounding Science Fiction
, September 1945

“So you’ve left us, Mr. Cunningham!” Malmeson’s voice sounded rougher than usual, even allowing for headphone distortion and the ever-present Denebian static. “Now, that’s too bad. If you’d chosen to stick around, we would have put you off on some world where you could live, at least. Now you can stay here and fry. And I hope you live long enough to watch us take off—without you!”

Laird Cunningham did not bother to reply. The ship’s radio compass should still be in working order, and it was just possible that his erstwhile assistants might start hunting for him, if they were given some idea of the proper direction to begin a search. Cunningham was too satisfied with his present shelter to be very anxious for a change. He was scarcely half a mile from the grounded ship, in a cavern deep enough to afford shelter from Deneb’s rays when it rose, and located in the side of a small hill, so that he could watch the activities of Malmeson and his companion without exposing himself to their view.

In a way, of course, the villain was right. If Cunningham permitted the ship to take off without him, he might as well open his face plate; for, while he had food and oxygen for several days’ normal consumption, a planet scarcely larger than Luna, baked in the rays of one of the fiercest radiating bodies in the galaxy, was most unlikely to provide further supplies when these ran out. He wondered how long it would take the men to discover the damage he had done to the drive units in the few minutes that had elapsed between the crash landing and their breaking through the control room door, which Cunningham had welded shut when he had discovered their intentions. They might not notice at all; he had severed a number of inconspicuous connections at odd points. Perhaps they would not even test the drivers until they had completed repairs to the cracked hull. If they didn’t, so much the better.

Cunningham crawled to the mouth of his cave and looked out across the shallow valley in which the ship lay. It was barely visible in the starlight, and there was no sign of artificial luminosity to suggest that Malmeson might have started repairs at night. Cunningham had not expected that they would, but it was well to be sure. Nothing more had come over his suit radio since the initial outburst, when the men had discovered his departure; he decided that they must be waiting for sunrise, to enable them to take more accurate stock of the damage suffered by the hull.

He spent the next few minutes looking at the stars, trying to arrange them into patterns he could remember. He had no watch, and it would help to have some warning of approaching sunrise on succeeding nights. It would not do to be caught away from his cave, with the flimsy protection his suit could afford from Deneb’s radiation. He wished he could have filched one of the heavier worksuits; but they were kept in a compartment forward of the control room, from which he had barred himself when he had sealed the door of the latter chamber.

He remained at the cave mouth, lying motionless and watching alternately the sky and the ship. Once or twice he may have dozed; but he was awake and alert when the low hills beyond the ship’s hull caught the first rays of the rising sun. For a minute or two they seemed to hang detached in a black void, while the flood of blue-white light crept down their slopes; then one by one, their bases merged with each other and the ground below to form a connected landscape. The silvery hull gleamed brilliantly, the reflection from it lighting the cave behind Cunningham and making his eyes water when he tried to watch for the opening of the air lock.

He was forced to keep his eyes elsewhere most of the time, and look only in brief glimpses at the dazzling metal; and in consequence, he paid more attention to the details of his environment than he might otherwise have done. At the time, this circumstance annoyed him; he has since been heard to bless it fervently and frequently.

Although the planet had much in common with Luna as regarded size, mass, and airlessness, its landscape was extremely different. The daily terrific heatings which it underwent, followed by abrupt and equally intense temperature drops each night, had formed an excellent substitute for weather; and elevations that might at one time have rivaled the Lunar ranges were now mere rounded hillocks like that containing Cunningham’s cave. As on the Earth’s moon, the products of the age-long spalling had taken the form of fine dust, which lay in drifts everywhere. What could have drifted it, on an airless and consequently windless planet, struck Cunningham as a puzzle of the first magnitude; and it bothered him for some time until his attention was taken by certain other objects upon and between the drifts. These he had thought at first to be outcroppings of rock; but he was at last convinced that they were specimens of vegetable life—miserable, lichenous specimens, but nevertheless vegetation. He wondered what liquid they contained, in an environment at a temperature well above the melting point of lead.

The discovery of animal life—medium-sized, crablike things, covered with jet-black integument, that began to dig their way out of the drifts as the sun warmed them—completed the job of dragging Cunningham’s attention from his immediate problems. He was not a zoologist by training, but the subject had fascinated him for years; and he had always had money enough to indulge his hobby. He had spent years wandering the Galaxy in search of bizarre lifeforms—proof, if any were needed, of a lack of scientific training—and terrestrial museums had always been more than glad to accept the collections that resulted from each trip and usually to send scientists of their own in his footsteps. He had been in physical danger often enough, but it had always been from the life he studied or from the forces which make up the interstellar traveler’s regular diet, until he had overheard the conversation which informed him that his two assistants were planning to do away with him and appropriate the ship for unspecified purposes of their own. He liked to think that the promptness of his action following the discovery at least indicated that he was not growing old.

But he did let his attention wander to the Denebian life forms.

Several of the creatures were emerging from the dust mounds within twenty or thirty yards of Cunningham’s hiding place, giving rise to the hope that they would come near enough for a close examination. At that distance, they were more crablike than ever, with round, flat bodies twelve to eighteen inches across, and several pairs of legs. They scuttled rapidly about, stopping at first one of the lichenous plants and then another, apparently taking a few tentative nibbles from each, as though they had delicate tastes which needed pampering. Once or twice there were fights when the same tidbit attracted the attention of more than one claimant; but little apparent damage was done on either side, and the victor spent no more time on the meal he won than on that which came uncontested.

Cunningham became deeply absorbed in watching the antics of the little creatures, and completely forgot for a time his own rather precarious situation. He was recalled to it by the sound of Malmeson’s voice in his headphones.

“Don’t look up, you fool; the shields will save your skin, but not your eyes. Get under the shadow of the hull, and we’ll look over the damage.”

Cunningham instantly transferred his attention to the ship. The air lock on the side toward him—the port—was open, and the bulky figures of his two ex-assistants were visible standing on the ground beneath it. They were clad in the heavy utility suits which Cunningham had regretted leaving, and appeared to be suffering little or no inconvenience from the heat, though they were still standing full in Deneb’s light when he looked. He knew that hard radiation burns would not appear for some time, but he held little hope of Deneb’s more deadly output coming to his assistance; for the suits were supposed to afford protection against this danger as well. Between heat insulation, cooling equipment, radiation shielding, and plain mechanical armor, the garments were so heavy and bulky as to be an almost insufferable burden on any major planet. They were more often used in performing exterior repairs in space.

Cunningham watched and listened carefully as the men stooped under the lower curve of the hull to make an inspection of the damage. It seemed, from their conversation, to consist of a dent about three yards long and half as wide, about which nothing could be done, and a series of radially arranged cracks in the metal around it. These represented a definite threat to the solidity of the ship, and would have to be welded along their full lengths before it would be safe to apply the stresses incident to second-order flight. Malmeson was too good an engineer not to realize this fact, and Cunningham heard him lay plans for bringing power lines outside for the welder and jacking up the hull to permit access to the lower portions of the cracks. The latter operation was carried out immediately, with an efficiency which did not in the least surprise the hidden watcher. After all, he had hired the men.

Every few minutes, to Cunningham’s annoyance, one of the men would carefully examine the landscape; first on the side on which he was working, and then walking around the ship to repeat the performance. Even in the low gravity, Cunningham knew he could not cross the half mile that lay between him and that inviting airlock, between two of those examinations; and even if he could, his leaping figure, clad in the gleaming metal suit, would be sure to catch even an eye not directed at it. It would not do to make the attempt unless success were certain; for his unshielded suit would heat in a minute or two to an unbearable temperature, and the only place in which it was possible either to remove or cool it was on board the ship. He finally decided, to his annoyance, that the watch would not slacken so long as the air lock of the ship remained open. It would be necessary to find some means to distract or—an unpleasant alternative for a civilized man—disable the opposition while Cunningham got aboard, locked the others out, and located a weapon or other factor which would put him in a position to give them orders. At that, he reflected, a weapon would scarcely be necessary; there was a perfectly good medium transmitter on board, if the men had not destroyed or discharged it, and he need merely call for help and keep the men outside until it arrived.

This, of course, presupposed some solution to the problem of getting aboard unaccompanied. He would, he decided, have to examine the ship more closely after sunset. He knew the vessel as well as his own home—he had spent more time on her than in any other home—and knew that there was no means of entry except through the two main locks forward of the control room, and the two smaller, emergency locks near the stern, one of which he had employed on his departure. All these could be dogged shut from within; and offhand he was unable to conceive a plan for forcing any of the normal entrances. The viewports were too small to admit a man in a spacesuit, even if the panes could be broken; and there was literally no other way into the ship so long as the hull remained intact. Malmeson would not have talked so glibly of welding them sufficiently well to stand flight, if any of the cracks incurred on the landing had been big enough to admit a human body—or even that of a respectably healthy garter snake.

Cunningham gave a mental shrug of the shoulders as these thoughts crossed his mind, and reiterated his decision to take a scouting sortie after dark. For the rest of the day he divided his attention between the working men and the equally busy life forms that scuttled here and there in front of his cave; and he would have been the first to admit that he found the latter more interesting.

He still hoped that one would approach the cave closely enough to permit a really good examination, but for a long time he remained unsatisfied. Once, one of the creatures came within a dozen yards and stood “on tiptoe”—rising more than a foot from the ground on its slender legs, while a pair of antennae terminating in knobs the size of human eyeballs extended themselves several inches from the black carapace and waved slowly in all directions. Cunningham thought that the knobs probably did serve as eyes, though from his distance he could see only a featureless black sphere. The antennae eventually waved in his direction, and after a few seconds spent, apparently in assimilating the presence of the cave mouth, the creature settled back to its former low-swung carriage and scuttled away. Cunningham wondered if it had been frightened at his presence; but he felt reasonably sure that no eye adapted to Denebian daylight could see past the darkness of his threshold, and he had remained motionless while the creature was conducting its inspection. More probably it had some reason to fear caves, or merely darkness.

That it had reason to fear something was shown when another creature, also of crustacean aspect but considerably larger than those Cunningham had seen to date appeared from among the dunes and attacked one of the latter. The fight took place too far from the cave for Cunningham to make out many details, but the larger animal quickly overcame its victim. It then apparently dismembered the vanquished, and either devoured the softer flesh inside the black integument or sucked the body fluids from it. Then the carnivore disappeared again, presumably in search of new victims. It had scarcely gone when another being, designed along the lines of a centipede and fully forty feet in length, appeared on the scene with the graceful flowing motion of its terrestrial counterpart.

For a few moments the newcomer nosed around the remains of the carnivore’s feast, and devoured the larger fragments. Then it appeared to look around as though for more, evidently saw the cave, and came rippling toward it, to Cunningham’s pardonable alarm. He was totally unarmed, and while the centipede had just showed itself not to be above eating carrion, it looked quite able to kill its own food if necessary. It stopped, as the other investigator had, a dozen yards from the cave mouth; and like the other, elevated itself as though to get a better look. The baseball-sized black “eyes” seemed for several seconds to stare into Cunningham’s more orthodox optics; then, like its predecessor, and to the man’s intense relief, it doubled back along its own length and glided swiftly out of sight.

Cunningham again wondered whether it had detected his presence, or whether caves or darkness in general spelled danger to these odd life forms.

It suddenly occurred to him that, if the latter were not the case, there might be some traces of previous occupants of the cave; and he set about examining the place more closely, after a last glance which showed him the two men still at work jacking up the hull.