Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (508 page)

“I know,” I said.

* * * *

Copyright © 1995 by Dell Magazines.

(1950–)

I’d never met John Kessel before I started working on this book, which didn’t stop him from being generous in his comments and story suggestions. Not only was he extraordinarily well-read on the writers whose work I knew least well, he had a knack for making me want to ignore all my deadlines and read all sorts of interesting things I had never come across until he mentioned them. I suspect his students at NC State are very lucky.

Born in Buffalo, New York, John earned a BA in English and Physics from the University of Rochester before going on to get his MA and PhD from the University of Kansas, where he worked with James Gunn. After several years as an editor for Commodity News Services in Kansas, in 1982 John became a faculty member at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, teaching American literature, science fiction, fantasy, and fiction writing.

All of those subjects intersect in his writing, and the deeper one’s literary knowledge, the more one tends to appreciate John’s work (he primarily writes short fiction and essays). His stories are filled with literary what ifs and exploring roads not taken, like “Pride and Prometheus,” a 2008 Nebula winner that explores the intersection of Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
and Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
. Or “The Pure Product” (1986) which, in a turnabout from all of the stories of time travelers who take advantage of backward people in the past, looks at jaded travelers from the future for whom we are the pitiable playthings. Or the brutal “Invaders” (1990), which uses the motif of the Spanish conquest of the Americas to make a decidedly science fictional point. Or the haunting story below, part science fiction, part meta-science fiction, and part memoir for a past that wasn’t quite, but might have been. Many of his stories have been assembled into three collections, Meeting in Infinity (1992), The Pure Product (1997), and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (2008).

John writes plays and essays as well as stories. He won a Paul Green Playwright’s prize in 1994 for his play “Faustfeathers” (he has acted as well). John’s best-known work of criticism is probably his 2004 essay on Orson Scott Card’s novel
Ender’s Game
, “Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality,” but his criticism has appeared in
Short Form
,
Science Fiction Eye
,
The Los Angeles Times Book Review
,
The New York Review of Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age
,
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Foundation
, and elsewhere. He’s also edited or co-edited some terrific anthologies. John’s won two Nebulas, a Sturgeon Award, a Tiptree Award, a Shirley Jackson Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and many other honors.

First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, January 1991

In April of 1934 H.G. Wells traveled to the United States, where he visited Washington, D.C. and met with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Wells, sixty-eight years old, hoped the New Deal might herald a revolutionary change in the U.S. economy, a step forward in an “Open Conspiracy” of rational thinkers that would culminate in a world socialist state. For forty years he’d subordinated every scrap of his artistic ambition to promoting this vision. But by 1934 Wells’s optimism, along with his energy for saving the world, was waning.

While in Washington he asked to see something of the new social welfare agencies, and Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s Interior Secretary, arranged for Wells to visit a Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Fort Hunt, Virginia.

It happens that at that time my father was a CCC member at that camp. From his boyhood he had been a reader of adventure stories; he was a big fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and of H.G. Wells. This is the story of their encounter, which never took place.

* * * *

In Buffalo it’s cold, but here the trees are in bloom, the mockingbirds sing in the mornings, and the sweat the men work up clearing brush, planting dogwoods and cutting roads is wafted away by warm breeze. Two hundred of them live in the Fort Hunt barracks high on the bluff above the Virginia side of the Potomac. They wear surplus army uniforms. In the morning, after a breakfast of grits, Sgt. Sauter musters them up in the parade yard, they climb onto trucks and are driven by forest service men out to wherever they’re to work that day.

For several weeks Kessel’s squad has been working along the river road, clearing rest stops and turnarounds. The tall pines have shallow root systems, and spring rain has softened the earth to the point where wind is forever knocking trees across the road. While most of the men work on the ground, a couple are sent up to cut off the tops of the pines adjoining the road, so if they do fall, they won’t block it. Most of the men claim to be afraid of heights. Kessel isn’t. A year or two ago back in Michigan he worked in a logging camp. It’s hard work, but he is used to hard work. And at least he’s out of Buffalo.

The truck rumbles and jounces out the river road, that’s going to be the George Washington Memorial Parkway in our time, once the WPA project that will build it gets started. The humid air is cool now, but it will be hot again today, in the 80s. A couple of the guys get into a debate about whether the feds will ever catch Dillinger. Some others talk women. They’re planning to go into Washington on the weekend and check out the dance halls. Kessel likes to dance; he’s a good dancer. The fox trot, the lindy hop. When he gets drunk he likes to sing, and has a ready wit. He talks a lot more, kids the girls.

When they get to the site the foreman sets most of the men to work clearing the roadside for a scenic overlook. Kessel straps on a climbing belt, takes an axe and climbs his first tree. The first twenty feet are limbless, then climbing gets trickier. He looks down only enough to estimate when he’s gotten high enough. He sets himself, cleats biting into the shoulder of a lower limb, and chops away at the road side of the trunk. There’s a trick to cutting the top so that it falls the right way. When he’s got it ready to go he calls down to warn the men below. Then a few quick bites of the axe on the opposite side of the cut, a shove, a crack and the top starts to go. He braces his legs, ducks his head and grips the trunk. The treetop skids off and the bole of the pine waves ponderously back and forth, with Kessel swinging at its end like an ant on a metronome. After the pine stops swinging he shinnies down and climbs the next tree.

He’s good at this work, efficient, careful. He’s not a particularly strong man—slender, not burly—but even in his youth he shows the attention to detail that, as a boy, I remember seeing when he built our house.

The squad works through the morning, then breaks for lunch from the mess truck. The men are always complaining about the food, and how there isn’t enough of it, but until recently a lot of them were living in Hoovervilles—shack cities—and eating nothing at all. As they’re eating a couple of the guys rag Kessel for working too fast. “What do you expect from a yankee?” one of the southern boys says.

“He ain’t a yankee. He’s a polack.”

Kessel tries to ignore them.

“Whyn’t you lay off him, Turkel?” says Cole, one of Kessel’s buddies.

Turkel is a big blond guy from Chicago. Some say he joined the CCCs to duck an armed robbery rap. “He works too hard,” Turkel says. “He makes us look bad.”

“Don’t have to work much to make you look bad, Lou,” Cole says. The others laugh, and Kessel appreciates it. “Give Jack some credit. At least he had enough sense to come down out of Buffalo.” More laughter.

“There’s nothing wrong with Buffalo,” Kessel says.

“Except fifty thousand out-of-work polacks,” Turkel says.

“I guess you got no out-of-work people in Chicago,” Kessel says. “You just joined for the exercise.”

“Except he’s not getting any exercise, if he can help it!” Cole says.

The foreman comes by and tells them to get back to work. Kessel climbs another tree, stung by Turkel’s charge. What kind of man complains if someone else works hard? It only shows how even decent guys have to put up with assholes dragging them down. But it’s nothing new. He’s seen it before, back in Buffalo.

Buffalo, New York, is the symbolic home of this story. In the years preceding the First World War it grew into one of the great industrial metropolises of the United States. Located where Lake Erie flows into the Niagara river, strategically close to cheap electricity from Niagara Falls and cheap transportation by lakeboat from the Midwest, it was a center of steel, automobiles, chemicals, grain milling and brewing. Its major employers—Bethlehem Steel, Ford, Pierce Arrow, Gold Medal Flour, the National Biscuit Company, Ralston Purina, Quaker Oats, National Aniline—drew thousands of immigrants like Kessel’s family. Along Delaware Avenue stood the imperious and stylized mansions of the city’s old money, ersatz-Renaissance homes designed by Stanford White, huge Protestant churches, and a Byzantine synagogue. The city boasted the first modern skyscraper, designed by Louis Sullivan in the 1890s. From its productive factories to its polyglot work force to its class system and its boosterism, Buffalo was a monument to modern industrial capitalism. It is the place Kessel has come from—almost an expression of his personality itself—and the place he, at times, fears he can never escape. A cold, grimy city dominated by church and family, blinkered and cramped, forever playing second fiddle to Chicago, New York and Boston. It offers the immigrant the opportunity to find steady work in some factory or mill, but, though Kessel could not have put it into these words, it also puts a lid on his opportunities. It stands for all disappointed expectations, human limitations, tawdry compromises, for the inevitable choice of the expedient over the beautiful, for an American economic system that turns all things into commodities and measures men by their bank accounts. It is the home of the industrial proletariat.

It’s not unique. It could be Youngstown, Akron, Detroit. It’s the place my father, and I, grew up.

The afternoon turns hot and still; during a work break Kessel strips to the waist. About two o’clock a big black de Soto comes up the road and pulls off onto the shoulder. A couple of men in suits get out of the back, and one of them talks to the Forest Service foreman, who nods deferentially. The foreman calls over to the men.

“Boys, this here’s Mr. Pike from the Interior Department. He’s got a guest here to see how we work, a writer, Mr. H.G. Wells from England.”

Most of the men couldn’t care less, but the name strikes a spark in Kessel. He looks over at the little, pot-bellied man in the dark suit. The man is sweating; he brushes his mustache.

The foreman sends Kessel up to show them how they’re topping the trees. He points out to the visitors where the others with rakes and shovels are leveling the ground for the overlook. Several other men are building a log rail fence from the treetops. From way above, Kessel can hear their voices between the thunks of his axe. H.G. Wells. He remembers reading
The War of the Worlds
in
Amazing Stories
. He’s read
The Outline of History
, too. The stories, the history, are so large, it seems impossible that the man who wrote them could be standing not thirty feet below him. He tries to concentrate on the axe, the tree.

Time for this one to go. He calls down. The men below look up. Wells takes off his hat and shields his eyes with his hand. He’s balding, and looks even smaller from up here. Strange that such big ideas could come from such a small man. It’s kind of disappointing. Wells leans over to Pike and says something. The treetop falls away. The pine sways like a bucking bronco, and Kessel holds on for dear life.

He comes down with the intention of saying something to Wells, telling him how much he admires him, but when he gets down the sight of the two men in suits and his awareness of his own sweaty chest make him timid. He heads down to the next tree. After another ten minutes the men get back in the car, drive away. Kessel curses himself for the opportunity lost.

* * * *

That evening at the New Willard hotel, Wells dines with his old friends Clarence Darrow and Charles Russell. Darrow and Russell are in Washington to testify before a congressional committee on a report they have just submitted to the administration concerning the monopolistic effects of the National Recovery Act. The right wing is trying to eviscerate Roosevelt’s program for large scale industrial management, and the Darrow Report is playing right into their hands. Wells tries, with little success, to convince Darrow of the short-sightedness of his position.

“Roosevelt is willing to sacrifice the small man to the huge corporations,” Darrow insists, his eyes bright.

“The small man? Your small man is a romantic fantasy,” Wells says. “It’s not the New Deal that’s doing him in—it’s the process of industrial progress. It’s the twentieth century. You can’t legislate yourself back into 1870.”

“What about the individual?” Russell asks.

Wells snorts. “Walk out into the street. The individual is out on the street corner selling apples. The only thing that’s going to save him is some co-ordinated effort, by intelligent, selfless men. Not your free market.”

Darrow puffs on his cigar, exhales, smiles. “Don’t get exasperated, H.G. We’re not working for Standard Oil. But if I have to choose between the bureaucrat and the man pumping gas at the filling station, I’ll take the pump jockey.”

Wells sees he’s got no chance against the American mythology of the common man. “Your pump jockey works for Standard Oil. And the last I checked, the free market hasn’t expended much energy looking out for his interests.”

“Have some more wine,” Russell says.

Russell refills their glasses with the excellent bordeaux. It’s been a first rate meal. Wells finds the debate stimulating even when he can’t prevail; at one time that would have been enough, but as the years go on the need to prevail grows stronger in him. The times are out of joint, and when he looks around he sees desperation growing. A new world order is necessary—it’s so clear that even a fool ought to see it—but if he can’t even convince radicals like Darrow, what hope is there of gaining the acquiescence of the shareholders in the utility trusts?

The answer is that the changes will have to be made over their objections. As Roosevelt seems prepared to do. Wells’s dinner with the President has heartened him in a way that this debate cannot negate.

Wells brings up an item he read in the Washington Post. A lecturer for the communist party—a young Negro—was barred from speaking at the University of Virginia. Wells’s question is, was the man barred because he was a communist or because he was Negro?

“Either condition,” Darrow says sardonically, “is fatal in Virginia.”

“But students point out the University has allowed communists to speak on campus before, and has allowed Negroes to perform music there.”

“They can perform, but they can’t speak,” Russell says. “This isn’t unusual. Go down to the Paradise Ballroom, not a mile from here. There’s a Negro orchestra playing there, but no Negroes are allowed inside to listen.”

“You should go to hear them anyway,” Darrow says. “It’s Duke Ellington. Have you heard of him?”

“I don’t get on with the titled nobility,” Wells quips.

“Oh, this Ellington’s a noble fellow, all right, but I don’t think you’ll find him in the peerage,” Russell says.

“He plays jazz, doesn’t he?”

“Not like any jazz you’ve heard,” Darrow says. “It’s something totally new. You should find a place for it in one of your utopias.”

All three of them are for helping the colored peoples. Darrow has defended Negroes accused of capital crimes. Wells, on his first visit to America almost thirty years ago, met with Booker T. Washington and came away impressed, although he still considers the peaceable co-existence of the white and colored races problematical.

“What are you working on now, Wells?” Russell asks. “What new improbability are you preparing to assault us with? Racial equality? Sexual liberation?”

“I’m writing a screen treatment based on
The Shape of Things to Come
,” Wells says.

He tells them about his screenplay, sketching out for them the future he has in his mind. An apocalyptic war, a war of unsurpassed brutality that will begin, in his film, in 1939. In this war, the creations of science will be put to the services of destruction in ways that will make the horrors of the Great War pale in comparison. Whole populations will be exterminated. But then, out of the ruins will arise the new world. The orgy of violence will purge the human race of the last vestiges of tribal thinking. Then will come the organization of the directionless and weak by the intelligent and purposeful. The new man. Cleaner, stronger, more rational. Wells can see it. He talks on, supplely, surely, late into the night. His mind is fertile with invention, still. He can see that Darrow and Russell, despite their Yankee individualism, are caught up by his vision. The future may be threatened, but it is not entirely closed.