In one of these stories we lose speech and, in another, we gain the stars but, in both, we remain human. In the other story, that day’s science fiction really was the next day’s science fact.
Octavia E. Butler (1947-06-22/2006-02-24)
“Speech Sounds” (IAsfm, Mid-December 1983)
Rye is riding the bus when trouble erupts. Two guys start fighting which results in the bus driver slamming on the brakes which results in additional fights. Many try to leave the bus at that point and, when a man wearing the uniform of a cop arrives and tosses in a gas cannister, the rest get off. Eventually, the man persuades Rye to accept a ride from him and, by this time, we understand that Rye is in world that’s been struck by a plague, or something like it, which has deprived almost everyone of the power of speech and/or reading and/or the comprehension of these things, as well as impairing some people’s minds generally. The bus is a rare and isolated thing and there is no police force as civilization has collapsed. Rye was trying to make the long journey from LA to Pasadena to see if she could connect with a suriving brother rather than kill herself. Her quick relationship with the “cop,” Obsidian, and the following multiple rapid reversals result in a change of plans.
This is a master class in science fictional exposition as a simple bus ride seems momentarily normal except for strange little dissonances which grow more persistent and troubling as the world is gradually revealed. The depiction of loss and the efforts to persist anyway rings true as does the desperation, randomness, and violence. A note at the end may ring slightly less true but is the sort of thing we sometimes need to tell ourselves. This is an effective contemplation of communication and the ties that bind.
Cleve Cartmill (1908-06-21/1964-02-11)
“Deadline” (Astounding, March 1944)
I just wanted to acknowledge the author and his famous story which brought US intelligence agents down on him and John W. Campbell, demanding to know who was leaking top secret information about the atomic bomb. Turns out, no one was, but Cleve Cartmill was a very clever user of previously published information who described, with some detail, essential aspects of the bomb. Unfortunately, as a story, it’s not that great, as it simply translates WWII into “SF” by putting it on a world not named Earth and by spelling the Allies and the Axis backwards, not to mention having a woman go far beyond being a justifiably paranoid resistance fighter into being basically insane and/or stupid. Still, while many people wrongly assume SF is supposed to be predictive, it can be, and this is one of the more remarkably prescient tales of SF.
Charles Sheffield (1935-06-25/2002-11-02)
“A Braver Thing” (IAsfm, February 1990)
On the eve of his Nobel laureate speech, a physicist who has made a breakthrough in interstellar flight reflects on his road to Stockholm. It’s not what you might expect, involving a lost satchel of books which leads to a teenaged infatuation with the mother of the boy who lost the books, as well as a strange friendship with that boy, which produces parallel lives, culminating in a sort of double-Jekyll-and-Hyde situation of dark obessesions, suicide, and more.
In a way this is a hard SF story and, in a way, it’s not science fiction at all. In a way it is “literary” and, in a way, it isn’t. To make that clearer, the author says in his afterword that it’s not science fiction but “fiction about science” and that’s partly true: the science fiction is that it does have a future Nobel winner with a future physical science breakthrough but that science fictional part is not the point, which is its focus on the scientific endeavor along with the good and bad within individuals and humanity as a whole. But with that focus on science and the complete absence of fantasy (allowing the elliptical “given us the stars”) it’s in a way the hardest of hard SF. And it treads perilously near to being overwritten in places but manages to be “literary” (styled and character-centric) without being enfeebled by it. There are many things to choose from in this excellent story but I think the strongest thing about it for me may be its interlocking, resonant plot structure. But if you’re more interested in style, characters, theme, or several other things, it’s here.
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Yeah, the Sheffield is a really good story.
I mostly drifted away from reading SF between about 1978 and 1984 — it seemed like the brains dribbled out of it for a few years when STAR WARS came out and publishers started pushing a preponderance of similarly mindless trope-y stuff — and only got back into it around 1984 when writers like W. Gibson, B. Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Lucius Shepard showed up, mostly in the early Dozois YEAR’S BESTS and in ASIMOVS.
Sheffield was a mainstay in that latter. While not burning as bright as any of those names, he was reliably good, usually by rethinking some SF or pulp notion in the light of what he knew about science — and he knew a lot about a lot of different kinds of science.
He’d also been around the block both in terms of working in government and business situations, and in terms of human relationships. And so every so often he’d write something like this story, which is one of his very best. He died relatively young, of cancer. I miss him.
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Nice assessment and I miss him, too. We’d likely be without him now anyway, I guess (I think he was born in 1935) but we sure missed many stories he should have written as well. I’ve read far from everything of his but what I have includes two of my very favorites in Between the Strokes of Night and The Compleat McAndrew.
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