21. John Christopher - 'The New Wine' (1954)

"There will be no wives for you in the world of 2129."

(Edmund Crispin, ed., Best SF: Science Fiction Stories, Faber, 1955)

This story is the last of a week's offerings drawn from my parents' bookcase; written by John Christopher, aka. Samuel Youd, this was selected as his work sounds interesting - disaster fiction, dystopias, ruined earths. He is perhaps most known for his Tripods trilogy, which was dramatised for television by the BBC in 1984-5. It was from a battered old Faber edition of Science Fiction stories that caught my eye on the bookcase - includes others like Wyndham and Bradbury, both of whom I will get around to eventually in this survey.

One is presented with a portentous scenario, which develops along a fairly predictable course - in line with the sort of themes Christopher is reputed to use on his Wikipedia page. In itself, this is not a terrible story, but its disaster is handled with a much more melodramatic flourish than you would find in the work of that measured, intoxicating surrealist JG Ballard. It is more along the lines of Wells, but given a fairly generic treatment. Things start out as recognisably bland, with a couple about to part; a male and a female scientist musing over their respective inventions; Harl with his tube which entails time travel and Ellen with her telepathic concerns - "Your own Project X?" (p.169). The setting is perhaps apposite in its cardboard, standard nature: 'They were walking up through the trees towards a misty sunset' and the parting is handled with a predictably clipped sentimentality. (p.168)

Admittedly, Christopher goes onto convey a fairly intriguing mysterious scenario of a deserted future earth. The equation is squared, as the vanquishing of humanity has been caused by the meddling of Drewitt and Ellen with the very form of humanity "What we are going to do is to change the human race in one sweep." (p.170) This is a standard genre science-fiction trope of scientific boundaries being pushed too far too quickly, and leading to disaster. There is a nice bit of melodrama in how JC resolves the scenario, but it hardly compels like the best classic theatrical melodrama or cinematic horror.

I am making this sound rather threadbare, but there is some low-key purchase to be found in descriptions of a ravaged, deserted Detroit: 'As they went into the city, there were fewer trees, and grass grew only in patches. For quite large stretches the works of man still held an almost undisputed sway. But the houses were shuttered and empty. They advanced to the city centre, and then turned and back-tracked towards the ship.' (p.177)

The whole is competent, efficient, but not particularly inspiring or challenging; I suppose the comparisons with the force of Priest, Poe or Lovecraft's or the inimitable Ballard are bound to count against this modest, if not wholly unengaging effort.

6/10

4. Isaac Asimov - 'The Segregationist' (1967)

'The surgeon said stolidly, 'To me, it is a matter of the fitness of things.''
(Isaac Asimov, The Complete Robot, 1995, p.158)

There are of course parallels with racial segregation, restricted as it had been by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The distinction, in this science fiction tale, is between the human and the robot. This story was selected as episode 3 of the A Bite of Stars, A Slug of Time series on Resonance FM, the first series of which was focused on science fiction between 1935-65. It concerns a sixty year-old Senator who wishes to take on robotic features through an operation replacing his worn-out heart with a metallic one. Society more broadly is only sketched in; with robots, or 'Metallos', recently having been granted citizenship and thus gaining more cachet in the eyes of humanity. Whether the robot is a class or race metaphor is not necessarily important; Asimov leaves it up to the reader.

The twist in the tale is right at the end - that the surgeon turns out to be a robot himself. In itself, neatly worked up to, and on a second read (or listen, as I read it first myself and then played the ABOS broadcast on MP3) the knowledge allows one to pick up more of Asimov's playfulness with his Laws of Robotics.

There is thus an odd fierceness from this metallo who develops a thesis perceived as logical, that ends almost passionate: that humanity and robots should maintain their own unique identities and not develop as hybrids between the two. The human (?) MedEng (something of a mouthful of a character name!) sees the potential of hybridisation to be positive - the best elements of both could be combined - whereas the surgeon believes that such a creation would be nothing in itself, a fabrication without any of the good points of either.

Asimov's prose and narrative style is straightforward compared to the others I have read so far; it lacks that element of the macabre or absurd conjured at different times in the previous three stories. One is not thrown off-balance in quite the same way; the subtext is made plain in the story's nomenclature, and the twist is intended for gently comic as well as for philosophical effect. As a short-story it is not especially gripping, yet exerts a methodical pull in its empirical way. If Dahl could be characterised as a sardonic anarchist, Barthelme a media-cultural theorist channelling Kafka and HPL as a purveyor of the unutterable, then Asimov is by comparison a staunch rationalist. It is chiefly interesting for the way that Asimov suggest cracks in the facade of his Three Laws of Robotics; the metallic surgeon can be seen to be struggling with the ambiguities implicit in Law One: 'A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.'

7/10