Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (250 page)

“Good-bye, teacher.”

“I’m glad you came to me,” I said humbly, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” said Loo Ree.

She was suddenly a tall pillar of light in the dusky room. As natural as breathing, I slid to my knees and bowed my head above my clasped hands. I felt Loo Ree’s hand briefly and warmly on my head and when I looked up, there was nothing in the room but the long, long shadows and me.

* * * *

The next morning, I sat at my desk, feeling so empty and finished inside that it seemed impossible to go on. Loo Ree had been more of my life than I had known. All this time she had been giving more to me than I to her. Now I felt as lost and weak as a convalescent trying to walk alone after months in bed.

The children felt my abstraction and, stimulated by the nearness of the holidays, got away with murder all morning. Just before recess the whole situation erupted. Marsha suddenly threw herself across the aisle at Stacy and Bob who had been teasing her. She hit Stacy over the head with a jigsaw puzzle, then she dumped her brand-new box of thirty-six Crayolas over Bob’s astonished head and jumped up and down on the resultant mess, screaming at the top of her voice.

Awed by the size and scope of the demonstration, the rest of the class sat rigid in their seats. A red Crayola projected from the back of the neck of Bob’s T-shirt and Stacy, too astonished to cry, sat looking down at a lap full of jigsaw pieces.

I gathered up the shrieking, board-stiff Marsha and dismissed the class, apprehensive row by apprehensive row, then I sat down on the little green bench and doubled Marsha forcibly to a sitting position on my lap. I rocked her rebellious head against my sweatered shoulder until her screams became sobs and her nailing feet drooped laxly against my skirt. I pressed her head closer and bent my cheek to her hair.

“There, there, Marsha. There, there.” I rocked back and forth. “What’s the matter, honey-one, what’s the matter?”

Her sobs were hiccoughy gasps now. “Nobody likes me. Everybody’s mean. I hate everybody.” Her voice rose to a wail.

“No, you don’t, Marsha. You don’t hate anybody. Is it about Loo Ree?”

Her sobs cut off abruptly. Then she was writhing in my arms again, her voice rising hysterically.

“Marsha!” I shook her, with no effect, so I turned her over briskly and spatted her good and hard a couple of
times across her thighs just below her brief skirts, then turned her back into my arms.

She burrowed into my shoulder, her two arms hugging one of mine tight.

“Loo Ree’s gone away,” she sobbed.

“I know,” I said, and one of my tears feel on her tumbled hair. “She was my friend, too. I feel bad, too.”

Marsha knuckled her eyes with one hand.

“She was my most special friend, and she went away.”

“She had to go,” I soothed. “She was so special she couldn’t stay.”

“But I didn’t want her to go,” cried Marsha.

“Neither did I,” I patted her back.

“She told me lotsa stories.” Marsha struggled to a sitting position. “She showed me pretty things. She loved me.”

“Yes, she loved us. And just think, we can remember her all our lives. When you grow up, you can tell your children all about her.”

“I’ll tell them all about her,” sighed Marsha, leaning against me and shutting her eyes. “When I grow up.”

“When you grow up,” I whispered, looking past her head and through the schoolroom wall out into the troubled world. “When you grow up.”

I hugged her head to me tight and listened and listened for the creak of a changing balance wondering, with a catch in my heart for all the Marshas and Bobs and their growing up—Which way is it tipping?

* * * *

Copyright © 1953, 1981 by Zenna Henderson; first appeared in T
he Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
; from
Holding Wonder
; reprinted by permission of the author’s Estate and the Estate’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

“We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. (Stanislaw Lem,
Solaris
, 1961, p. 211)

“Reality is what you make it.” (Gene Brewer,
K-PAX
, 1995, p. 79)

In Jane Yolen’s young adult science fiction novel,
The Devil’s Arithmetic
(1988), twelve-year-old Hannah , bored and impatient with the family seder—and with Grandfather’s stories of the camps—suddenly finds herself in 1942 Nazi-occupied Poland. Enduring the concentration camp first hand, Hannah cycles between numbness and pain and hope. Hannah helps herself and others maintain hope and courage by telling her own stories: “‘Let me tell you a story,’ she said quietly, ignoring the fact that they were both weeping…. ‘A story I know you both will love.’ The strength in her voice quieted them and they began to listen even as they walked. ‘It is about a girl. An ordinary sort of girl named Hannah Stern who lives in New Rochelle. Not Old Rochelle. There is no Old Rochelle, you see. Just New Rochelle’ (p. 159). Yolen observes in her epilogue: “Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks” (pp. 169-170). Frank McConnell (1996) sees storytelling itself as integral to our efforts to survive and to act in the face of mortality. He observes: “You will die. We will die. I will die. All storytelling tries to avoid that fact…and all storytelling, in avoiding the fact, only makes it the more inescapable. We want to become stories because stories go on forever and we do not” (p. 223). Grandfather’s storytelling is a way of bearing witness to the past; Hannah’s storytelling is an affirmation of survival into a future that this exists even if today ends in death. Each is engaged in telling “the human tale.”

Yolen and McConnell both speak to the powerful human need to tell stories—and to hear stories. We are thirsty for stories—listening avidly for the echo of our own hearts and minds—our hopes and fears and joys and sorrows. Stories take us into ourselves—and carry us out of ourselves and as they do so, they change us in some way. The change may be almost imperceptible or may be profound enough to take us to new levels of empathy or understanding or even to an outright paradigm shift.

Norman N. Holland offers a neuropsychological explanation for this “power” of literature to transport us. He observes that “when we suspend disbelief in a literary text, 1) we no longer perceive our bodies; 2) we no longer perceive our environment; 3) we no longer judge probability or reality-test; and 4) we respond emotionally to the fiction as though it were real” (2000, p. 397). His explanation is that “two different brain systems are at work. One, the prefrontal cortex’s systems for action, is at rest, because we know…that we are not supposed to act in response to the fiction…or drama.…The other, the cortic limbic projections…enable us to feel emotions and the personal importance to us of what we are sensing” (p. 406).

While any form of literature can allow us to suspend reality for a time, the basic premise of science fiction is that reality itself can—and indeed should—be challenged and re-envisioned. Science fiction seeks fresh perspectives on life (and death) and declines to accept limits as immovable or immutable.1

Fundamentally, science fiction is the fiction of the alien—of alternate realities and ways of seeing, of new ways of understanding and scripting the future, the past,– time itself—of alien landscapes and unfamiliar beings, and the dislocating realization that the self and the familiar world too are also unknowable. We find ourselves estranged and astray in the science fiction world—placing ourselves, whether trustingly or fearfully—in the imaginative hands of the writer and in the rules of a world not of our own making. In fact, science fiction actually provides us with a “safe” experience of “alienation”—calling on us to relinquish the expected, to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty—all while safely anchored in our armchair and our mundane world.

It is no wonder then that science fiction especially appeals when unwelcome realities (significant losses, life-altering diagnoses, catastrophic disasters) prove most intractable and painful in our quotidian lives. The grief that walks with us in each of these life crises—is inherently alien—and alienating. Sandra Gilbert explicitly connects the language of grief with the language of science fiction:

Both, after all, are about alternative lives—past, present, a future.
What if
, cries the griever, just as the sci-fi writer does.
What if
the calamity hadn’t happened, the survivor broods.
What if
the dead one I loved were still alive? What would my life be like today? How would he be living and how would I?…(p. 63).

Writers, thinkers, artists have been explicating grief and love (and the profound connection between them) for millennia but these themes are still potent partly because—despite all our literature and despite all our research—the landscape of loss remains ultimately unmappable. How then do we negotiate this alien terrain? Philosopher Thomas Attig says:

Relearning the world after someone we love has died is not a matter of taking in information or mastering ideas or theories. It is . . . a matter of learning again how to be and act in the world without those we love by our side . . . [as] we relearn our world we move in two directions at once. In part we return to aspects of our lives that are still viable. . . . In part, we transform ourselves as we reshape and redirect our individual, family and community lives. (41, 43)

We do not undertake such journeys—or take on the task of relearning the world—by choice. Every destination in this new landscape seems both unattainable and undesirable. We desperately want to return to where and as we were before—not to go forward at all. This urge to return to “better” times may ultimately account for the perennial popularity of the theme of time traveling in science fiction. Like the quest for immortality, time traveling is also almost always about trying to dispute the inexorability of “reality”. The traveler (whether traveling voluntarily or not) generally is seeking to understand or correct a past that is painful (as in Yolen’s novel) or is trying to find, save, or return to the beloved as in Jack Finney’s
Time and Again
(1970) or Kathleen Ann Goonan’s
The Bones of Time
(1997). Indeed the concept is so attractive that it has permeated the popular imagination and shows up in the language of grievers themselves. Therapists Joseph Currer and Robert Neimeyer (2006) describe a grieving child’s spontaneous use of the concept of time traveling to cope with her grief. “Specifically, she expressed with strong conviction the wish for us to now build a time machine in which the characters could return to the past to save her parents from drinking and using drugs at the hands of the ‘evil dealers.’” (p. 89). The time machine becomes a centerpiece of the therapy sessions with this child over the ensuing months.

Godfrey Justin Holmes (of Roger Zelazny’s “This Moment of the Storm”, 1965) time travels in a different sense by spending long periods in cryostasis. He is trying almost manically to outrun his grief but only finds himself driven to despair: “But a hundred years of travel do not bring a century of forgetfulness—not when you cheat time with the
petite-mort
of the cold sleep. Time’s vengeance is memory… when you awaken your past is still with you” (p. 16).

Sometimes it is the dead who appear to make the journey. Kris Kelvin in Stanislaw Lem’s
Solaris
(1972) projects his guilt and longings for his suicided wife Reya so powerfully that Solaris, a sentient planet (seeking a medium through which to communicate with Kelvin) recreates and sends Reya back to him.

I touched the red spot with my finger. For years now I had dreamt of it, over and over again…as though, in my sleep, I tried to relive what she had gone through; as though I hoped to turn back the clock and ask her forgiveness, or keep her company during those final minutes when she was feeling the effects of the injection and was overcome by terror (p. 56)

Kelvin’s response to Reya’s sudden reappearance is panic and he promptly tries to kill her himself. Still, Reya keeps returning. When Kelvin finally comes to welcome her presence and again tries to hold onto her, she as suddenly departs for good leaving him freshly bereft.

Carl Sagan uses the same device but with a very different feel in
Contact
(1995). Here the “senders”—who have provided the tools for Ellie Arroway and others to travel to a far distant planet—also use the remembered dead as a means of communication. For Ellie this is comforting—not terrifying—offering a kind of reunion with her much missed father. While she clearly recognizes that the figure before her is not really her father, Ellie finds herself surrendering irresistibly to a powerful surge of emotions at his familiarity.

All of it combined to shatter her self-possession. She could feel a massive stone seal being pried open and the first rays of light entering an ancient, almost forgotten tomb.

She swallowed and tried to gain control of herself, but seemingly inexhaustible waves of anguish poured out of her and she would weep again.…More than anything else she had longed to see him again, but she had suppressed the feeling, been impatient with it, because it was so clearly impossible to fulfill. She cried for all the years between herself and him (p. 356).

Grief therapist William Worden (2008) has identified four key tasks of mourning. The blockage or failure to accomplish one of these tasks, Worden contends, can result in prolonged or complicated grieving. The four tasks are to 1) Accept the reality of the loss, 2) Work through the pain of grief, 3) Adjust to an environment in which the deceased is missing and 4) Emotionally relocate the deceased and move on with life. Ellie has dealt effectively with tasks 1 and 3 but has, until this moment, “suppressed” the “pain of grief.” “Anguish” drenches her as the “massive stone seal” breaks. Ellie will return from her trip deeply changed in many ways—but not least because of this long delayed confrontation with her grief over her father.

If Kelvin and Ellie are surprised by the “return” of their dead, Hagan, the glass farmer in Bob Shaw’s “The Light of Other Days” (1966) consciously seeks to hold on to his deceased wife and son through his art. Shaw’s story is built around the science fiction concept of “slow glass” which records for a period (depending on the thickness and quality of the glass) the scene that is before it and then slowly releases that scene over an equivalent period of time. The resulting “scenedows” are highly desired (and expensive) in a world where people often look out on unattractive spaces. Such a device (in a story written before VCRs) could function well at the heart of a hard SF piece, but Shaw instead uses the concept as a metaphorical window into the human heart struggling with traumatic loss. Hagan’s visitors notice him gazing lovingly through the window to his living room where periodically appear his wife and his young child. When the visitors discover that, in fact, the scenes are recorded, not live, Hagan explains sadly: “A hit and run driver got them both, down on the Oban road six years ago. I’m entitled to keep something” (p. 66). Psychologists Klass, Silverman, & Nickman (1996) have helped to challenge the older notion that grief is something we “resolve” or bring to “closure.” Instead their research has found that grievers (especially parental grievers) seek ways to maintain continuing bonds through ongoing attachments, memories, pictures and recordings, linking objects (e.g., a treasured jacket), rituals, conversations and a sense of being watched or protected by the beloved dead. For the couple who encounter Hagan, the power of his simple plea, “I’m entitled to keep something,” strikes at the heart of their own marital conflict and distance from one other over an inconvenient pregnancy. They leave the farmer tightly holding onto one another. We, as readers, are equally moved by Shaw’s quiet depiction of hope, memory, and resilience in the face of grief.

Finding a way to cope with traumatic loss is the focus of Ursula K. LeGuin’s compelling short story, “Nine Lives” (1969). Leguin wrote the story to explore the implications of human cloning, but quickly saw wider ramifications. “I began to see that the duplication of anything complex enough to have personality would involve the whole issue of what personality is—the question of individuality, of identity, of selfhood. Now that question is a hammer that rings the great bells of Love and Death….” (Le Guin, “On 1973,” pp. 204–5).

When a ten-clone (five male and five female individuals cloned simultaneously from the original John Chow) arrive on Libra to take up their work as a mining engineering team, the two explorers already there (Owen Pugh and Alvaro Guillen Martin) struggle to understand the closeness and the intricate relationship of the John Chows. “A clone, [Owen] thought, might indeed be the first truly stable, self-reliant human being.…It would be sufficient to itself physically, sexually, emotionally, intellectually. Whatever he did, any member of it would always receive the support and approval of his peers, his other selves. Nobody else was needed” (LeGuin, 1969, p. 49). The gifts of such a close-knit permanent community—raised together, trained together until they were 21 when each clone specialized in advanced study in a specific discipline for two years, and now working together—are palpable. The costs are not as immediately obvious but are unsettling to the two “singletons” on the planet. The clones have had no need and no experience in relating to any one outside the ten-clone and cannot even “see” the others let alone build real connections with them.

After an accident kills nine of the ten clones, the survivor, Kaph, experiences an almost unimaginable loss—losing all at once his siblings (twins really), his closest friends, his lovers, his classmates, colleagues, his support system, and virtually his self. Indeed he describes himself as “nine-tenths dead. There is not enough of me left alive” (p. 54). Kaph’s grief is so powerful and so complete that it literally fells him physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Even when he begins to again participate in some of the work, he functions mechanically and listlessly. His isolation and silence is so complete that Martin describes him as a “turned off android” (p. 55) and concludes that he hates the two of them. Owen demurs. “I cannot imagine what he feels. But it’s not hatred. He can’t even see us. It’s too dark.…He doesn’t know how to go it alone. He must learn. Give him time” (p. 55). LeGuin, as she always does, brings us with her in her emotional exploration of this terrain of love and loss putting us at once into the feelings of the devastated Kaph and of the empathetic Owen.