Cracks in the Foundation

I've finished my reread of Isaac Asimov's Foundation, and the verdict is: it's deeply, deeply flawed, and I don't love it like I used to, but it's not terrible.

As I noted in a recent post, the Foundation series was one of the first examples of adult-level science fiction that I read as a teen, and for much of those early years, I counted it as my favourite work of sf. But it's been more than 20 years since I last picked it up, and when Asimov's Robot novels failed the reread test a few years ago, I was afraid that revisiting Foundation would ruin the memory of it.

So over the past week or so, I've finally confronted it and given each section a lot of thought. It's often been hard — sometimes cringeworthy — encountering the weaknesses, blunders, and missed opportunities in this collection of stories that's been stitched together and had a "novel" label slapped on it. Fans back in the days when these novellas (Novelettes?  Whatever.) must have been truly desperate for content as much as they were blown away by the ideas in the Foundation stories to have read them and wanted more — never mind the editors who published them. And yet we can't dismiss out of hand the idea that people can be blown away by the ideas within a story (or collection of stories), even if it is deeply flawed. You like what you like.

And yet we do have to be honest about the cracks in the Foundation.

For starters, the writing isn't that good. Asimov's approach to characters is clumsy, with both his protagonists and villains unnecessarily exploding at each other in just about every other conversation, as he attempts (and always fails) to ramp-up tension in scenes that really have none because the stories are all talk and no action (as the author confesses in his forward to the book). Beyond their forced bursts of aggression, their dialogue is hackneyed. There are the cheesy attempts at futuristic expressions like "Space!" or "Galaxy!". Imperial officials and borderworld warlords speak in an overwrought fashion that comes off as pretentious, and while it may have been Asimov's intention to use this mode of speech to try to show that the apparently (though often ultimately not) powerful antagonists themselves were pretentious (or products of a pretentious culture), it just comes off as pretentious writing. Similarly, the protagonists of the Foundation have a forced, rapid plainspokenness that feels like Asimov is trying to mimic what he thinks Humphrey Bogart might say in a movie (the stereotypical "fast-talkin' high pants" speech that probably wasn't as pervasive as old black and white films would have us believe), but doesn't quite pull it off.

Beyond their dialogue, the characters themselves are one-dimensional. The outer rim of Asimov's galaxy is populated by warlords of antagonistic kingdoms next door to Terminus who could each buy-out entire stores in Portland of their supplies of moustache wax as they scheme and utter threats, stopping just short of laughing maniacally and tying damsels to railroad tracks for kicks (nuclear railroad tracks, that is, because everything in the Foundation stories — up to and including kitchen knives — is nuclear, in keeping with the technological darling of the 1940s and 50s). Taken with the overwrought dialogue, their descriptions and actions are supposed to evoke Kasper Gutman, or Ming the Merciless, or any other well-spoken, aristocratic (or pseudo-aristocratic) bad guy of the era, but instead they fall flat and unintentionally become caricatures of characters who are themselves intentionally, to varying degrees, caricatures. The protagonists are also caricatures, chomping on their cigars in back rooms as they tell everyone around them how much more clever they are than anyone else, and especially smarter than the current government of  Terminus/the Foundation. Hober Mallow, the merchant prince of the final sequence, is an absurd, futuristic Yankee trader or robber baron, who, in spite of the story, is impossible to take seriously because he's just so over the top, painted as a giant with a booming voice who's seemingly the best at everything. Asimov misses the opportunity to create a three dimensional character in Mallow by failing to give the Trader captain any kind of internal examination of what it means to be an outsider within the Foundation power structure. He's frequently reminded that he's from one of the worlds the Foundation has conquered, and thus a kind of second class citizen, but Mallow never addresses it internally, and I don't recall him addressing it externally in any substantial way either. It's just brushed aside. A better writer could have opened the character up with this issue to let us get to know his motivations better, and to give him an opportunity to evolve. Instead, Mallow, like every other character in Foundation remains static.

There are other problems with the writing: Chapter 1 of "The Mayors" is essentially a long "as you know" piece, making it dull. That's a fatal way to start a story (or, at least, it should have been) when we consider this would have been published as a piece in an sf magazine.

Then there are the rare holographic appearances by Hari Seldon, the legendary psychohistorian who founded the Foundation: they serve no purpose. It's a logical hole in the story big enough to fly an Imperial battle cruiser through. Seldon's photonic ghost provides no guidance at all — he just checks-in once in a while to say "Well, I calculate that you probably made it through some crisis that I didn't warn you about, even though I knew it was coming, and I'm not going to spell it out now even though we may actually be thinking about two entirely different incidents if your experience varies from my predictions, but hopefully you're sitting here listening to me, even though I'm still not going to tell you anything! Basically, you're here just to look at my picture. Am I dead sexy or what?" The leaders and academics of the Foundation don't even have a schedule of when he's going to appear! They really don't know! They just have to assume that things have been shitty enough recently to constitute a Seldon Crisis, and that the old man is going to materialize in his cube any minute, look up from the book on his lap, and, yet again, tell them nothing of substance. I mean, this is the future, so you'd think there would be an electronic warning in city hall a little while prior to the airing of the latest episode of The Hari Show, but Asimov doesn't mention anything along these lines, so it could just be the case that the mayor of Terminus has a line item in his budget to pay some kid to stand around outside the Seldon vault and shout "Hey, you guys!" whenever the machinery starts to hum. Or, knowing large organizations the way we do now, it's probably an unpaid internship position.

Asimov has made some other strange decisions when it comes to the Foundation colony: only one psychologist was sent with the initial population of settlers, and there have been no others since. That's a truly astounding amount of faith in the mental health of a group of people who have to build a society, run a major project, and, you know, survive in the face of hostile neighbours (and eventually a hostile Empire) while isolated out on the rim of the galaxy, never mind your standard run-of-the-mill psychological, emotional and relationship issues, and developmental challenges, that come up during everyday life. The explanation given is that Seldon didn't want the Foundation to have psychologists who could relearn and use his predictive science of psychohistory to try to guide their society and thus skew his plan. But Asimov seems to have confused the disciplines of psychology and sociology, and besides, his fictional psychohistory seems to rely heavily on some kind of higher level mathematics, which is sufficiently different from psychology (read sociology in this case) that there's little danger of a mental health professional who does marriage counselling or developmental assessments or personal therapy, and maybe still has 5 minutes left in his/her day after dealing with this case load and making time for a life outside of work, stumbling into calculations that will allow him/her to predict and steer the future of entire civilizations.

There's also what feels like a bit of retconning going on between the introductory section, "The Psychohistorians" (which was added on later when the first Foundation stories were compiled into a novel) and the other sections over the question of the secrecy of Seldon's plan. The intro section tells us that Seldon and his team have been working on preparations for the Foundation project for two-and-a-half years prior to his trial, preparations that are so well-known that, because of his dire predictions, he's earned the nickname of "Raven Seldon". So lots of people know his take on the state of affairs (at least generally) and that he's getting ready to do something about it. And yet, by the time we get into the originally-written stories in the second section, "The Encyclopedists", nobody out on Terminus has any idea that they're there to do anything other than compile an encyclopedia, even though they're only 50 years out from the settling of their colony. It's completely unbelievable that they're ignorant of the Foundation's true purpose. After the first crisis, Seldon's recorded holograph tells them they were kept in the dark about their purpose (never mind his predictions about what's coming) to prevent them from going off the course he'd charted for them. Never mind that I've heard scientists of varying disciplines say on several occasions that scientists don't like to keep secrets, it's just not believable that with all of the extensive preparations going on before the launch of the original colony ships, and with all of the publicity about Seldon's predictions, that none of the settlers would have known or guessed what their purpose was. There's also no value in keeping them in the dark. Asimov, through the character of Seldon, saying that the Foundation's people can't know what's coming so they don't corrupt the timeline and the plan is basically so much weak handwaving. The fall of the Empire and the bid to have the two Foundations survive with all the old knowledge and rebuild society over a thousand years into a Second Empire is disaster planning on a galactic scale, and any emergency management expert will tell you that people have a better chance of making it through disasters if they plan ahead and know what to challenges to expect in different situations and how to deal with them. It's just not believable that the best way for the Foundation to succeed would be to keep its people ignorant. There may be an argument for keeping the science of psychohistory out of their hands so that the Foundation doesn't, with the best of intentions, wander too far out into left field, but using Seldon's electronic spectre to give them advanced warnings ahead of the crises would make sense and probably help them succeed.

As if all of that wasn't enough, the book is a total sausage fest. The only female character with a speaking role (and, unless I'm forgetting, the only female character in the book at all!) is the Commdora in the final section, and she doesn't occupy any place of value in the plot. A princess of the Empire who's married to a warlord out on the border, the Commdora only makes a couple of appearances to play the role of a spoiled shrew of a wife who nags her husband to prove he isn't a loser by getting off his ass and conquering some planets. Oh, and she likes pretty jewellery. This is probably Asimov's attempt to inject a little humour into a dry story, making his barbarian conqueror a hen-pecked hubby, but it isn't necessary and doesn't accomplish anything in terms of story or character development. It isn't even funny. And while we can look at the absence of women on the Foundation's council or among its Traders as an artifact of the time the stories were written (and possibly of the editorial choices of the magazine where they were published, and the writer and editor's assessment of their target audience), to have no women mentioned at all elsewhere in the stories is a major oversight, and to make the only female character a shallow harpy is bad writing. Whether cast in the role of a protagonist or antagonist, Asimov could have given the Commdora more to do, such that she actually has an effect on the plot.

It's also strange that Asimov, an immigrant born to parents who grew up in Tsarist Russia who fled with him to America to escape the Communist regime, seems to have little use for democracy in the story. It begins in an empire (which was chosen because Asimov took inspiration from the fall of the Roman empire, and probably because empires are, to our modern eyes, inherently dramatic), and starts with a colony that has a democracy in the form of the mayor and council of the planet Terminus, but one that has no teeth because it's subservient to the non-democratic council of academics running the Foundation project. The mayor, Salvor Hardin (who, at age 34, seems unbelievable in the role of media mogul and colony leader) then stages a coup and overthrows the council, but this isn't a victory for democracy as Hardin leads more-or-less as a dictator. From there, the Foundation (though still a democracy for its own citizens on Terminus) manufactures a religion to control the people and governments of neighbouring kingdoms, and this theocracy is left in place for decades, rather than installing democratic governments in their new subjects/confederates. Eventually, the territorial theocracy is replaced by Mallow's plutocracy, which more-or-less squats on top of the democracy of the Foundation itself: there's still an elected mayor, but Mallow has used his money to buy the election, and it's the richest Traders who (like the merchant families in Renaissance Italian city states, or the Hanseatic League) decide what happens in the Foundation for the next period in its history, with Mallow, as the richest, ruling as de facto dictator, tossing political opponents in jail. Putting aside the other changes to the Foundation's government throughout the rest of the series, Hari Seldon's goal, ultimately, is for a Second Empire — a monarchy — to be established, leaving no room for democracy.

But, for all its faults, I can't find it in myself to dislike Foundation. Is it just nostalgia that's holding me back, preventing me from hating this book? Or, taking into consideration the time when it was written and the nature of other sf that was being published, balancing the writer's ideas and enthusiasm against lack of ability, and its impact on me as a reader and on the genre as a whole, does Foundation have merit?

Overall, I liked the larger plot of a colony established to minimize a period of cultural darkness following the collapse of a large civilization, and, more than that, to build something greater. I like the notion of intelligent people, rather than interstellar bullies, being the ones who rebuild civilization — the nerds win! Even if I don't agree with all of his assessments or outcomes, I'm intrigued by the possibility that Foundation is Asimov's attempt to do what Plato did in the Republic and examine types of government. And I love the vastness of Asimov's future, of time so deep that humanity has forgotten its origins — that even in an age of electronics and super science, this forgetting implies thousands of years of exploration, colonization, exploitation, experimentation with different approaches to creating and running cultures and civilizations that compete with, overthrow, destroy, amalgamate and outgrow others and their predecessors; that technologies for and philosophies of record keeping and storytelling have changed; that there have been wars, epidemics, isolation, Renaissances, building and rebuilding, soul-searching, and reinterpretation of and throwing away and reinventing history; that people have created and repurposed and discarded and edited cultural myths, and repeatedly invented a new sense of self both personally and culturally. It's truly breathtaking worldbuilding contained in a few throwaway lines about historians arguing in books over centuries about humanity's origin.

Maybe there's also something to the thought that Asimov might have been a better short story writer than novelist, being better suited to a platform that could showcase his big ideas while being tight enough to let him skate over his professional weaknesses.

I think, taking all of those things into consideration, Foundation does still deserve a place in the sf canon (and whether the genre should have a canon or not is something that's been debated by many others previously and will continue to be argued about into the foreseeable future), and, personally, I think I can be comfortable in defending my enjoyment of it. If nothing else, Foundation and Asimov opened the door for me to adult sf, a lot of big ideas, and a universe of other (and often more talented) writers. For that reason alone, it deserves a place of honour on my bookshelf, and a fond bookmark in my memory.

Digging Away at the Foundation

It's time to confront my fears.

It's been a long time since I've reread Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. More than 20 years. It used to be my favourite science fiction series; one that I held up as an example of the best in the genre, even when it had been years since I'd read it. But over the past decade or so, an ugly suspicion has started to creep into my brain that maybe it wasn't as good as I remembered. Maybe it wasn't any good at all. What if I'd been wrong in my assessment? What if I went back, as a more mature reader who's experienced a much wider variety of what sf has to offer, and reread it again, only to find out that I didn't like it? How much of an emotional blow would that be?

I read Foundation for the first time when I was 11 or 12. As I've mentioned elsewhere on the blog, I'd always been a fan of science fiction and fantasy, but up until that that point, I'd only been reading kid-oriented stuff: Wollheim's The Secret of books and the other old Winston hardbacks from the 1950s (at least the five or six that were in my school library), Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, all kinds of big, flashy, pictoral adaptations of movies available from the Scholastic order system, Choose Your Own Adventure books, Allan Rune Pettersson's Frankenstein's Aunt, and whatever else I could get my hands on at the school and community libraries. And all of that was a good start — I still look back on some of those kids' books with fondness, and reread a couple once every few years and still enjoy them. But I hadn't stepped over to the adult section of the public library yet to explore it's cache of sf. My uncle Malcolm, who was the lone science fiction fan of his generation in the family, decided it was time for me to graduate to the more mature stuff. For Christmas of '85 or '86, he and my aunt Janine gave me a copy of Foundation, and it

Blew.

My.

Mind.

The idea of a small group of scientists with a plan spanning a whole galaxy and a thousand years. The concept of using science to predict the future. The decidedly non-adventurous notion that a gigantic catastrophe can't necessarily be averted, no matter how plucky the group that recognizes the problem when no-one else will, but that the consequences can be minimized — that sometimes victory isn't measured in overcoming disaster as it's unleashed, but recovering from it well. And that recovery itself is often slow, step by step, over a long period of time — beyond a hero's lifetime. And heroes can be people who sit behind desks and talk and research and calculate and think, rather than grabbing a gun and blasting off in a dreadnought for the nearest space battle. It was all so amazing! And so validating for a young nerd who wasn't into barrelling down a sportsball field and knocking other kids over just for kicks.

And so, when I'd finished, I immediately ran to my little local indie bookstore and bought Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation and Foundation's Edge (and, when it came out in '87, Foundation and Earth) and devoured them. And then turned my attention to everything else Asimov wrote that I could get my hands on, which, fortunately, at that time included the historical anthology series he assembled with Martin H Greenberg: Isaac Asimov Presents: The Great SF Stories (I started at #15), which introduced me to dozens of other authors, educated me in the history of the genre, entertained (and occasionally challenged me) with great stories, and prompted me to seek out the work of others like Clarke and Bradbury.

Through my teens and early twenties, I'd come back and reread the Foundation series every few years, and I still enjoyed it with each reread. Going through it in university, I channeled my minor in Philosophy and started to suspect that more than just being a tale of the recovery of galactic civilization after a Roman Empire-like fall, maybe Asimov was also using it as a platform for his own version of Plato's Republic, examining the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of government.

Time passed, and the collection sat in a spot of honour on my shelf and was largely ignored as I read other stuff. In fact, for many years, I didn't read any Asimov at all, except maybe for the odd short story in a best-of or historical anthology, and even then I often skipped over those because I'd already read them in my youth.

And then I got kicked in the literary nards by that old cliche that says you can't really ever go home. It happened with Frank Herbert's Dune (another Christmas present from Uncle Malcolm and Aunt Janine, given the year after they'd presented me with Foundation). I'd loved the Dune series in my teens (well, the first three books anyway — I soldiered through the others but they each got progressively worse), but when I reread it about 11 or 12 years ago in my thirties, it was terrible. I had to wonder, were they always this bad, or was it merely the case that my tastes had just changed that much?

This worried me. What about the other favourites of my youth? Would they suck too?

Bradbury wasn't a problem. He'd kept writing, steadily putting out new collections of short stories every year or two right up until his death in 2012 (most of which were pretty damn good), and I'd read all of them, so I knew I was all right there. Clarke didn't last quite as long (2008), and for the last several years of his life, most of his stuff was co-written with other authors, but once in a while I'd reread 2010: Odyssey Two or one of his other novels or short story collections, and they'd always stood up. But what about Asimov?

I loved his stories so much that I was afraid to reread them, lest he get knocked off his pedestal like Herbert. So I decided to put it to a test: instead of diving right back in to my beloved Foundation, I'd do an exploratory return to his writing through the Robots series (the four Elijah Bailey and R Daneel Olivaw books, not the I, Robot collection). It was awful. While some of Asimov's science fictional ideas were cool, and the worldbuilding was excellent, the quality of his writing was terrible: clumsy and dumb, predictable (yes, even with the understanding that I already knew the stories, having read them before) and boring, with characters that weren't believable. They didn't work very well as science fiction. They didn't work very well as detective mysteries. They didn't really work very well as anything. Asimov was a great ideas guy, but not a very good writer.

In the intervening years, I've reread a couple of his short stories here and there, and they seemed okay for the most part. Maybe Asimov was passible as a short story writer, where he could just stick to saying "Hey! Here's a really cool idea I just had!" rather than longer forms which demand an ability with story and character (not that short stories don't need these things — the medium is just a little more forgiving if a story isn't as strong in those respects because it's short) that he just didn't have.

But the Foundation question still bugged me. Yes, the first three books really weren't novels at all, but rather collections of short stories or novellas that had originally been published separately in magazines, so, as a better short story writer than novelist, I wondered if maybe they were okay. Passable, at least. And yet, taken collectively (especially with the fourth and fifth books, which were written as single novels, rather than assemblages of shorter materials), they represented a long slog, and I wondered if Asimov's long-form weaknesses would show and ruin the experience and the memory for me.

There's only one way to tell though. Suck it up and give it another try. Yeah, I've got a ton of new books in my to-be-read pile (and a bunch that aren't so new!), but sometimes you have to make time to reread some of your old favourites. To remind yourself of why they're your favourites. Or to show yourself how much you've changed over the years, and how some stories and authors — even the ones that you built your appreciation for the genre on — don't age well.

Is it wise to go digging around an old foundation? I'm about to find out.

Salvaged from the Signal: Recollections of Memorable Short Stories

Another piece from the archives of the dearly departed SF Signal: part of a Mind Meld.

The Mind Melds were a popular feature on the site where a question on an sf-related topic would be put to a panel of participants, with their written responses collected into a post. These would usually prompt lively discussions among other community members in the comments section, sometimes with further thoughts from the original panelists.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to contribute to a Mind Meld on memorable short stories. While I haven't included the notes from the other panelists (there were so many participants that it had to be broken up into two separate posts), here's my two bits:

MIND MELD: Memorable Short Stories to Add to Your Reading List (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on July 22, 2009 by John DeNardo in Mind Meld // 5 Comments

This week’s question is a simple one, but yielded lots of responses. We asked this week’s panelists:

Q: What are some of your favorite short stories in sf/f/h and what makes them so memorable?

Robin Shantz

Robin Shantz writes about all things SF on his site: bloginhood. He’s also a member of the editing team of the Internet Review of Science Fiction and is the author of “Passage” – the third place winner of the On Spec postcard fiction contest. When not babbling about science fiction, fantasy, etc, he works in communications for the non-profit sector in Vancouver, BC.

It’s a funny thing that my favourite short stories aren’t necessarily the ones I remember best, and those that jump immediately to mind when someone says “SF short stories” aren’t always the ones that mean the most to me. Sometimes a story will lock itself in my brain simply because of its visceral impact, or maybe because I really didn’t like it. Some just kind of hang around like old friends at a college or high school reunion – I like them well enough, even if they aren’t my favourites. As for the favourites, while some are beacons for the genre, others may just become one more tree in the forest as memories of other enjoyable reads spring up. In any case, for the purposes of this Mind Meld, here’s a selection of stories that for one reason or another were all memorable:

There’s no question that Ray Bradbury is the master of writing short stories that really hit home. There are a lot of his works that stick out in my mind, but the two that stand head and shoulders above the others are “There Will Come Soft Rains“ and “Last Rites”. TWCSR is probably one of the best-known installments in The Martian Chronicles and is memorable for being completely emotionally devastating. The Earth is in wreckage, a family’s dog drags itself home to die alone (a scene guaranteed to bring a tear to the eye of just about anyone, especially pet owners), and after disposing of the corpse, the house itself malfunctions and is destroyed. The end of this story has literally scoured the Earth of any legacy, physical or emotional, of mankind. It makes you not only think, but feel what the ultimate price of mankind’s folly could be. Meanwhile, in his collection Quicker Than The Eye, Bradbury gives us a story full of deaths with a far different tone. “Last Rites” is a time machine story, but a very different kind of time machine story than we’re used to. The protagonist isn’t interested in launching himself forward or backward in time on a voyage of discovery; he isn’t off on a dinosaur hunt; he isn’t stacking the deck to grow his own personal fortune or create temporal commerce; he’s not even in it to alter the course of history. Rather, it’s a touching story about human connections, about a man who visits some of the greatest authors in the English language on their deathbeds to comfort them by showing them proof that their books continue to be printed and read and loved far into the future, thereby assuring them that their lives and their works have meaning. Admittedly, I may blank on the title of this story from time to time, but this gentle, good story itself is forever locked in my mind.

Arthur C. Clarke is another giant who has a lot of memorable short stories. Two of my favourites are “The Star” and “Superiority”. “The Star” stands out for being not only the story of a man struggling with his faith, but the idea perhaps a god may not be worthy of worship. It also paints a moving picture of a people making a heroic effort to be remembered, even as they face their extinction. When I first watched The Fountain a few years ago (and I was reminded of this when recently reading Pete Tzinski’s review of the movie here on SF Signal), the special effects shots of the nebula as Hugh Jackman’s character flies through it matched the image I had in my mind as I read Clarke’s description of the ship flying towards the star and the time capsule planet. “Superiority”, on the other hand, with its recounting of alien military R&D disasters amidst a war with Earth, is memorable for Clarke’s unexpected and funny finish.

Theodore Sturgeon’s “When You Care, When You Love”, about a young woman who uses her inexhaustible wealth to find any way possible to save her dying husband, is another one that really sticks out. On the surface it’s certainly love story with some charm, and yet I think it’s always stuck with me because there’s something a little unsettling about the idea of rules (in this case, even the rules of life and death) not applying to the ultra-wealthy. Sure, we see a little of this in real life: in communities where you might encounter spoiled rich kids growing up in lives free of consequence, or in the financial sector with corporate raiders and morally bankrupt execs despoiling businesses, annihilating the savings of the little guy, crippling the economy and leaving thousands without jobs, then walking away with fat bonuses and pensions. But science fiction has a way of showing us just how far this mentality could go. Sturgeon’s Sylva Wycke, though loving and benevolent, is none-the-less the literary ancestor of Asimov’s Solarians (in his Elijah Bailey Robot novels) or the Tessier-Ashpools in the Villa Straylight space station in William Gibson’s Neuromancer who are so rich and so far above the rules and challenges of the rest of humanity that they have in effect become alien. I’m no class warrior, but there’s something a little frightening about that, and it’s haunted me since the first time I read WYCWYL.

Speaking of stories that haunt, Philip K. Dick’s “The Father Thing“ isn’t what I would call a favourite, but it’s always stood out for being very creepy. The story is about a boy who has to enlist the help of some other neighbourhood kids when he finds out that his father has been eaten and replaced by an alien android and that there are other dopplegangers being grown in the grove behind the house. In many ways, it’s the ultimate example of Dickian paranoia distilled into just over 10 pages – the question of what’s real, are people actually who they say they are or is it all a sham and are they actually out to get you? Certainly, having been published in 1954, it can be seen metaphorically as a product of its time: a typical Cold War we’re-gonna-be-subverted-and-replaced-by-reds scary tale. Looking at the kids, you can see them as an idealized America in miniature: the white kids (each from different ethnic backgrounds) working with the black kid; one representing emotion while one is brawn and one is the brains – ultimately, a coalition of different individuals contributing their unique talents to take down the enemy. You could also say that it’s a story of growing up; that as a child ages, he changes and his sense of who his parents are changes as well. He has to deal with crises himself, and, in a somewhat Oedipal kind of way (because he has to take out the Father thing, not a Mother thing), he has to overthrow the father figure. But what really works with this story is that it grabs you with the sense of deadliness and betrayal being associated with the most familiar settings and people that are supposed to be safe. The garage is where the killing is done, the stone walkway hides an alien, the grove behind the house (a bamboo grove no less, which one would think is a pretty alien thing in a typical US suburb of the 50’s and in fact harkens back to the battlefields of the Pacific in WWII and of the Korean War) isn’t a place to play because it’s full of garbage and rot and is where the dopplegangers are grown. Even the house itself isn’t safe, as the Father Thing chases the boy up to his room under the guise of going to have “a talk” with him. The fact that the aliens have replaced the father is particularly terrifying, because if you can’t trust your family, who can you trust? This taps into the primal fear all kids have of their parents being taken away from them, and the greater horror that some unfortunate children have of living with abusive parents who, to others, may appear normal on the outside, but within the home are monsters. Because it scares on so many levels, TFT is a story I won’t forget.

Another story that’s deeply unsettling, but for different reasons, is Spider Robinson’s “User Friendly”. The notion that a person can be, without warning, taken control of by alien minds who want to experience life on Earth through human senses but who have no concern at all for the human they’re occupying and no knowledge or care of how a human being can safely experience life on this world is obviously scary. What’s even worse is the thought of having to be a person watching their spouse go through this, being powerless to stop it, and being left in a position of worrying each time whether their loved one will come back alive, and if so how physically and emotionally damaged they will be.

“Outport”, by Garfield Reeves-Stevens, is a story that sticks with me both for the starkness of its landscape (or seascape, as the case may be) and the mindset of the people who are forced to survive in it by any means necessary.

Cory Doctorow’s cynical and funny “The Super Man and the Bugout“ comes to mind anytime I watch a superhero movie or spend any time browsing in a comic book store. It’s portrayal of what a real Superman (or, in this case, Super Man) would have to go through in terms of navigating government bureaucracy and political opportunism, staying relevant if aliens eliminated crime and war, putting up with greedy landlords, and answering to a loving, if pushy old mother, and is in many ways the answer to the simplistic portrayal of costumed vigilante life served up by comics.

I’ll end on a light note with Dennis L. McKiernan’s “The Halfling House”, about a hobbit hole that travels TARDIS-like between fantasy universes, acting as a getaway resort for halflings, leprechauns, faeries and other wee folk. No deep metaphors or incisive views of humanity here, this story is just memorable for being really funny.