This collection of Nebula Award winners is for stories published in 1984. It includes three novellas, two novelettes, six short stories, two essays about this collection and the current state of science fiction, an essay on the science fiction films of the year, and some science fiction themed poems (the first time I can remember poems in one of these books).
One of the essays talks about how science fiction and fantasy have kind of come together by this time to make one broader genre. (The essay notes that if you want a rough way of distinguishing them, science fiction typically includes futuristic, speculative scientific and technological developments and devices, whereas fantasy has magic rather than science serve that purpose.) These collections have always had the occasional story that would fit more in the fantasy category, but I think the idea is that there will now be more such stories. By this time some science fiction organizations, publications, etc. had started including “fantasy” in their name; indeed, these awards themselves are now labeled the “Best Science Fiction & Fantasy” stories.
Which is a mildly negative development from my standpoint. I’m a modest to moderate fan of science fiction (and of horror, another genre that overlaps with science fiction), but have never been able to get into fantasy. In my experience it’s typically stories in outer space with oddball Medieval and fairy tale elements like dragons, wizards, swords, princesses, etc. for some reason. Which is just dumb.
Anyway, the first story in the book is Bloodchild, the winner in the Novelette category. I give this one a clear thumbs up. It’s one of those stories that doesn’t clearly spell out the context at the start, but requires you to put it together gradually from each little tidbit mentioned along the way, until in the end you have a reasonably clear picture of the puzzle as a whole from the pieces you have managed to place.
And in the end it’s the context—this futuristic science fiction world where the story takes place—that is particularly interesting, more so than the storyline itself.
Evidently, it takes place on another planet. Humans came to the planet at some point in the past, fleeing Earth for whatever reason. We don’t know if they only came here, if they scattered to multiple destinations, if there are any humans left on Earth, etc., but apparently either these are the only people left, or at least they are in an isolated state where they have no contact, no communication, with any humans elsewhere.
Not surprisingly there are various species on this planet that would not have been familiar to people used to only Earth species. The most formidable of them is an intelligent species of giant wormlike creatures with a large number of tentacles.
Late in the story we learn that these species—the humans and the giant wormlike things—clashed when the humans arrived, that the humans sought to wipe out the loathsome creatures, but that ultimately the worms won and subdued the humans.
Since then, they have developed a symbiotic relationship. It has to do with how these worm creatures reproduce.
The worms produce eggs. Many of them can only produce sterile eggs, which are actually highly nutritious in addition to having medicinal powers (for the worms, for humans, for anyone who consumes them). The others can produce eggs that have the potential of becoming living offspring, but there’s a problem there.
The eggs cannot develop, cannot produce young, unless they are placed into the bodies of animals of species other than the worms themselves. Up until the eggs hatch and the young grublike things start consuming the host animal from the inside, these must be living bodies. After that, they can either stay in those bodies and eat them (and gruesomely kill them) or they can be surgically removed and immediately placed into dead animal bodies to eat those instead.
But the planet apparently had become hard pressed for suitable living hosts before the arrival of the humans. Whatever such species hadn’t gone extinct entirely had dwindled greatly in number, and other species didn’t serve the purpose either as well or at all. As a result, the worm civilization was in steady decline as it produced fewer and sicklier young.
As it happens, though, humans are really good hosts for the worm eggs. So even though the giant worms were inclined when they prevailed over the humans to wipe them out for good, after a debate over the matter they opted to disarm them and allow them to establish and maintain a small colony on the planet, a prison colony in effect.
Now, as needed, they take a human, and inject their worm eggs into him or her. If the “pregnancy” or “surrogacy” or whatever you want to call it, goes well, the young are later expertly extracted with a modest amount of pain and discomfort (and a greater amount of trauma from the realization that one has had a bunch of alien worm things inside one), and the person can resume living their normal life, while the newly hatched grubs are quickly transferred to the body of some dead animal. There are cases, though, where things don’t go so smoothly, and the person is injured or killed by emergency surgery, or by being consumed from the inside.
Some of the worm creatures view the humans who serve this purpose as basically livestock or some kind of inferior species that can be exploited without any particular regard for them. The more enlightened of them, however, prefer to treat them more like family members, to establish long term relationships with them that are more equal, or at least as equal as they can be under these peculiar circumstances. They seek to make the egg-injection process less traumatic and more like a neutral or better sexual experience, they see that the hosts receive proper medical care, they do all they can to make the extraction process as safe as possible for the hosts, etc.
I suppose it’s vaguely analogous to the American South during slavery days. There are masters who blatantly rape and in some cases impregnate their slave women, and don’t care a hoot about them or their offspring. There are other masters who develop genuine fondness for certain slave women and have long term relationships with them, sometimes including sex and procreation, that are as close to consensual as they can be under the circumstances.
In the case of the central characters in the story, for instance, the worm creature has been a friend of the family since before the eventual host’s birth. She (I’m saying “she” because it lays eggs, but I don’t know that they’re really gendered) visits them regularly, helps them out, keeps them safe from other worms who might be less favorably inclined toward them, etc. And they mostly view her favorably, sort of like a kindly aunt.
Next is another novelette, The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule. I suppose this is one of the ones that would count as more fantasy than science fiction (Dragon being the giveaway).
It supposedly takes place in the 1800s, but it’s no version of the 1800s that I recognize. It feels more like a timeless fairy tale.
There are indeed dragons afoot, but they are highly unconventional dragons. First of all, they, or some of them anyway, are enormous. I don’t mean double the size of some dragon you might picture from a movie or whatever, but more like fifty or a hundred times that size.
But what’s more odd is they seem to be sort of absorbed into the local terrain, sedentary to the point of being catatonic. The way the main dragon in the story is described, it’s like the bulk of his body is embedded in the side of a hill or mountain, his wings, his ears, his tail, etc. are surrounded, concealed, camouflaged, by trees and other vegetation, rock formations, and so on. Or actually in some sense made up of those things rather than intertwined with them or hidden by them. Characters climb on him and the like, but it’s indistinguishable from working one’s way up a mountainside.
I mean, maybe that’s an indication that the dragon isn’t real, that the dragon parts are actually various elements of nature, that it’s just some fanciful misinterpretation or symbolism by primitive people, like some mythological nature deity. I don’t know.
The dragon seemingly doesn’t “do” much of anything, yet he has, or is believed to have, a detrimental effect on the community around him. Evidently through some kind of magic or telepathy he spreads malice and ill fortune. Enough that there’s a strong desire to be rid of him.
That proves highly difficult, however. Many hero types have reportedly attempted to slay the dragon, but have always failed and paid the price for failing.
Then a “thinking outside the box” type fellow comes to the local leaders with a new plan. He wants—and it’ll take a great deal of manpower and resources to pull it off, which makes the leaders understandably reluctant—to paint the dragon, to in effect create a massive mural on the side of the dragon, a project that will take years. The dragon, so the theory goes, will not resist because it will not see this as a hostile act, but perhaps as some quirky human artistic or ritualistic thing.
But paint, at least the kind of paint they’ll be using, is toxic if painted in great enough quantities on one’s skin. So while the dragon sits still for this lengthy project, and during its aftermath, the poison from the paint will gradually seep into its system and slowly kill it. This may take years or even decades, but eventually that’ll be the end of the dragon.
Eventually they agree, and the project commences. It becomes an even lengthier, more unwieldy project than anyone imagined, going on and on and on for decades, becoming a regularized, major part of the community’s activities. It has so much taken on a life of its own, for the artist and for the community, that it’s almost like they have forgotten that the only purpose of it was supposed to be to kill the dragon; painting this massive dragon (or mountainside or whatever the heck they’re painting) is just part of how they live their lives.
Eventually the dragon does die, or at least appears to. But then there’s an indication that the whole story was imaginary, just some kind of idle speculation from some art students of how they could potentially hoax some superstitious gullible city fathers, speculation that they never acted on.
Or something. Honestly, I’m not sure what the ending of the story is supposed to tell us.
This wasn’t a story that ever particularly connected with me.
PRESS ENTER was the year’s winner in the Novella category. I’d say this was one of the more engaging stories in the collection.
It is told in first person from the perspective of a 50ish man who has lived a semi-reclusive life after the trauma he experienced as a prisoner of war during the Korean War. He discovers the body of his neighbor, a man he barely knew, shot through the head. The police arrive and initiate an investigation as to whether it was a murder or suicide.
It turns out the dead man was some kind of master computer hacker. Besides helping himself to massive sums of money through his hacking, and surveilling everyone in the neighborhood through their electronic devices (he found out that they all, except the narrator, had at least one major scandalous thing—an extramarital affair, tax evasion, crime of some other kind, etc.—that he could use against them if he chose), he also wiped out virtually all evidence of his own existence. He used aliases for everything he did, even his own house and the lot it stood on no longer existed according to any city or county records, etc.
To help track down this mystery man and what led to his mystery death, the cops bring in a computer expert, a Vietnamese woman. She and the narrator promptly fall for each other.
The story continues through this off-putting cyber world, where you never can quite get your footing, never know what’s real and what’s not, especially if you’re like the narrator and have minimal understanding of computer stuff to begin with.
There are hints, speculations, that perhaps the hacker pissed off the wrong entity, maybe some mysterious ruthless government agency—e.g., the CIA, the NSA—and was taken out in response. Or, even more ominously, maybe some computer or computer network or even some kind of bizarre hive mind of all computerized devices in the world was somehow able to retaliate against his activities wherein he had seen things he wasn’t supposed to have seen and done things he wasn’t supposed to have done.
Then more folks connected to the investigation start showing up dead, also in purported suicides that look suspiciously like possible murders.
The narrator is freaked out by all this that is happening so close to him. In the end he turns much more reclusive, in an extreme survivalist, “off-the-grid,” kind of way, seeking to put as much distance as possible between himself and whatever it is that is arranging these computer-related killings. Not only does he destroy every computer in his house, but any device (e.g., a microwave oven, an alarm clock) that might have any kind of mini computer in it enabling it to function. He not only discards his phone and all electronic devices, but has every inch of wiring ripped out of the walls.
I think it’s key to the story’s effectiveness that it’s told from his perspective, and that we have enough information about him to know that it’s plausible that he has some degree of mental illness.
Because if you take everything he describes at face value, then arguably his extreme defensive response is not unjustified. He’s seemingly up against forces that are willing and able to get away with murder, that evidently are connected in some way to these extraordinarily complex computer-related events that he’s now caught up in, and so he’s driven to do whatever he can think of that even might be an appropriate countermove to save his life.
But that’s just it: Can we take everything he describes at face value? A paranoid conspiracy theorist’s worldview can have a certain internal consistency to it, while also just being flat out wrong and crazy. His reactions make at least some sense relative to what he thinks has happened, but it’s entirely possible that a traumatized, mentally ill person such as himself has imagined or skewed much of what he thinks he has seen or been told. It’s possible he’s just been a loon all along.
I mean, by the end he has done everything but put on a tinfoil hat. If it doesn’t immediately jump out at us that he has gone off the deep end, it’s only because we’ve spent so much time in his head, seeing things from his perspective in the way that makes sense to him.
The short story New Rose Hotel I think would fit into the subgenre of “cyberpunk,” which I’m finding as I explore science fiction is not all that appealing to me. It is set in a highly technologized future, where dashing manly young hipster computer expert dudes travel the world having dangerous adventures and pursuing doomed romances as they maneuver their way in a world dominated by their massive multinational corporation adversaries.
I just never cared much about these people, never much liked these people, never was all that motivated to figure out what they were up to (which is always described highly obscurely with invented futuristic jargon), and never developed much inclination to root for or against them.
In the end they evidently get double crossed by the story’s femme fatale, and must flee for their lives.
Next up is one of the runners-up in the Novella category, The Greening of Bed-Stuy.
The story isn’t all that science fictiony in the sense of adventures in the farthest reaches of space centuries or millennia from now. Instead, it is set in the near future, in a ghetto in New York, in a world that differs only modestly from our own, where things have perhaps drifted a bit in a dystopian direction.
So, certainly there are circumstantial details that differ, but there’s probably 80%-85% overlap with a standard contemporary fiction short story about coming of age in an urban ghetto, dealing with all the crime, the violence, the political corruption, and the myriad of pathologies in general.
I mostly liked it. It has a sad feeling to it, appropriately, because that kind of ghetto world where people routinely victimize each other is so sad. It’s a no worse than average adventure story of organized crime, drugs, prison breaks, etc.
The Lucky Strike was one of the finalists in the Novelette category. It’s one of those alternative history stories that examines one way that history might have played out differently if some event—major or minor—had been different. This one’s interesting because it’s not some chance event that’s different, but a conscious human decision. So, it’s a “What difference can one person make?” story.
The protagonist is a crew member on the airplane that is to drop the first atom bomb on Hiroshima. All along, as the crew is gradually told more about the nature of their mission and this new weapon, he has misgivings, which only intensify.
He thinks about whether he should get out of the mission and how (admit it’s a decision of conscience? come up with some other excuse?) so that at least he himself is not involved. But then he thinks that maybe the Japanese deserve it, due to their starting the war in the first place, due to Pearl Harbor, due to their consistent war crimes. And what’s the alternative? Wouldn’t an invasion of Japan come at the cost of even greater death and destruction? Or perhaps the bomb should be dropped in some uninhabited area as a terrifying demonstration, to entice the Japanese to surrender. Maybe rather than getting out of the mission, he needs to sabotage it from within to make sure the bomb isn’t dropped, at least not on a city. But how to do that? Persuade his crewmates of the moral grounds for not cooperating? Trick them with some lie about his having gotten secret orders to treat this as a test run and return to base? Pull out his gun and kill or threaten to kill his crewmates? Plus, there’s the issue of whether any of this should be up to him in the first place, whether his duty instead isn’t simply to follow orders and keep his mouth shut.
The story of the mission, and of the protagonist’s internal moral struggle, I thought was handled well enough to make this an above average story, for my tastes. But then I bumped it up a notch due to the ending, which briefly sketches out what happened—how history was significantly different—as a result of what he ultimately decided to do. It’s an interesting contemplation of just how big a deal one decision of conscience can be.
The protagonist even remembers that he used to play a sort of game with himself in his daydreams as a child, imagining that every decision he made would somehow have a major effect on the world. You can criticize him for having such a grandiose view of his own importance in history, but in its way I actually find this way of looking at things appealing. You never know what effect even the most minor of your actions will have—in a “butterfly effect” kind of way—so it always matters to do the right thing, no matter how little appears immediately at stake. You know, if you send some tiny amount of positive energy into the world—do something kind, something constructive—versus sending some tiny amount of negative energy into the world—do something unkind, something destructive—you can’t guarantee any specific consequences, but it’s a way of playing the odds, of doing what is more likely to alter the future, in direct and indirect ways, in a positive direction.
The short story Morning Child is set in a post-apocalyptic future. The main characters, really the only characters, are Williams and John. The sense you get early is that perhaps John is Williams’s child.
The story is told largely from Williams’s standpoint, who by now is a fairly elderly man. We learn that war has wiped out much of the population. He infers there are still people alive besides the two of them, but none that he knows of anywhere near where they are (though he carries a gun and knife just in case). They live in a makeshift camp, not far from their former house, which, like just about everything, has been destroyed.
As the story progresses (and as always, I’m not avoiding spoilers), you realize that something more is going on with John, that he’s not simply a small child. Perhaps, it is hinted, he is a grown man with the mental capacity of a small child. Evidently, he was a soldier in the war, and came back severely damaged.
But it’s weirder than that. Williams speculates that John may have been the victim of some crazy new chemical or biological weapon, or perhaps was subjected to some kind of bizarre testing. Because as the story comes to an end and we get a little more description of what’s going on with these two, it appears what happened to John is so extreme as to sound more supernatural. As best I can make out, he wakes up each morning a small boy, and then he gradually ages throughout the day until he is an old man at the end, though his mental abilities and memories seem never to develop beyond a very rudimentary childlike level. And then the next day the cycle recurs. All this time, as John goes through all ages each day, Williams ages in the normal way, to where now he’s approaching the point that he’ll no longer be able to take care of John.
This is a creepy, effective story.
The mood shifts substantially with the next short story, The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything.
Not that it doesn’t have its ominous or disturbing elements, but mostly it’s a humorous, whimsical tale, and effective as such. I mean, there is much here that is genuinely funny to contemplate.
It’s told from the standpoint of the U.S. President, who has just been informed that representatives from a race of humanoid aliens have landed and are here at the White House to meet with him.
The aliens hint around that they are a highly advanced race, in certain respects at least, and are fully willing and able to solve humanity’s greatest problems, though they’re quite vague about how they intend to do that.
Over time, more and more of the aliens arrive, as they have decided that Earth is a very nice place to spend some time, or even to live permanently. When they finally get around to bestowing their promised benefits, the first thing they do is embark upon a major project to make the Namib Desert in Africa fertile. Triumphantly they present the results to the President and the Earth’s population, showing how the desert is now covered from end to end with hollyhock flowers.
That’s nice, and impressive in its way, is the response, but couldn’t we instead cultivate something more practical there, like food?
Oh no, no. Hollyhocks are better. They are the most beautiful of flowers. You’ll love this, believe me.
It turns out that the aliens’ scientific and technological knowledge and skills are somewhat different but not necessarily superior to those of humans. Their clunky spaceships, for instance, run on the equivalent of those vacuum tubes that used to be inside television sets in the early years, whereas in other ways (for instance, making a desert bloom) they’re well in advance of us. It’s kind of hit or miss.
Where they truly excel, in their minds at least, is on matters of taste or opinion, which to them are not matters of taste or opinion at all but simply cold, hard, objective facts.
Their confidence about such matters is quite comical. And I like how they will with equal certainty defend the high brow, the low brow, the popular, the unpopular, and everything in between. Besides their knowledge that hollyhocks are the greatest of flowers, they have determined that the finest piece of music of all time is the theme to the movie Ben Hur, that the greatest of U.S. presidents is James K. Polk, that powder blue is the best of all colors, etc.
They’re not just know-it-alls when it comes to general knowledge like that, but also everything related to individuals. Soon there are enough of the aliens on Earth that pretty much everyone has aliens informing him what he should wear, how he should decorate his house, what career moves he should make, whom he should marry, etc.
Basically everyone has the equivalent of the mother-in-law from Everybody Loves Raymond living across the street from them, insinuating herself into their lives.
Not surprisingly, many people find this terribly irritating. It’s hard to really get mad at the aliens and respond to them with any kind of hostility or violence, though, because they’re just so unfailingly nice about it all, insistent—and evidently completely sincere in doing so—that they just want to help.
As I mentioned, they’re ahead of us technologically in some respects and behind us in others. One way they are ahead of us is that they have chanced upon some way to travel basically unlimited distances in almost no time, using some sort of space warps or something that they themselves admit they don’t understand. But they’re more than happy to share this knowledge, like everything else, with humans.
The people who take them up on it find that they can easily travel to any far flung destination in the galaxy they like, and that there are endless worlds all over populated by humanoid races that they can readily communicate with (and that have themselves been visited by the know-it-all aliens, with all the pros and cons that go with that).
In time, there is a massive migration of humans from Earth to various other worlds. Basically all the people who find the aliens too insufferable simply leave. Those who are better able to tolerate the busybodies remain behind.
For those who stay on Earth, life becomes decidedly better in that the drastically reduced population eliminates or reduces problems like resource depletion, pollution, lack of jobs, etc. In effect the aliens, indirectly, have delivered on their promise to solve the world’s problems.
Meanwhile, in space, humans find not only that they can get along with each other better than they ever did on Earth, but that they consistently get along well with the various aliens they end up living amongst, because they are all united by a common distaste for the busybody aliens, a shared gratitude that they no longer have to deal with those folks forcing their opinions on them.
It’s a fun, imaginative story.
Next up is the short story A Cabin on the Coast.
This one is maybe a little obscure for my tastes. I didn’t come away from it confident of what all it was intending to convey.
On the surface of it, it goes something like this: A boyfriend and girlfriend are enjoying a romantic rendezvous at an isolated area at the beach. She disappears one day, with the most plausible explanation being that she went for a swim alone, got too far out, and drowned. The distraught boyfriend swims out to the area where she is most likely to have gone, where he confronts a mysterious ship. On board, he meets a creepy dude who pretty clearly had some involvement in or knowledge of the girlfriend’s disappearance. It turns out, as he explains, that he is of a race of beings that different folklore at different times has given different names and interpreted different ways—fairies, leprechauns, demons, or, today, malevolent space aliens—they’re really all the same. Evidently their methodology is to cause mischief in the world by recruiting human helpers—slaves, in effect, who owe them obedience—to carry out their nefarious projects. He offers to give the guy back his girlfriend, with the price being that he become one of their minions. (So it’s basically a “sell your soul to the Devil” thing.) The boyfriend agrees.
So I get that much of it, I think, but there’s a lot more going on, a lot more we’re told over the course of the story, that presumably is included for a reason, but that’s what was obscure to me.
The guy is the son of a Senator. His being with this girl would for some reason be disapproved of by the Senator and/or cause some kind of scandal—though it’s indicated that this problem would be alleviated or lessened if they got married—so they’re kind of sneaking around. The boyfriend was the last of a large number of kids, but he was the one designated a junior. His mother died in childbirth with him. Late in the story there’s an implication that the Senator too was recruited by and is working for these evil imps. At the end he arrives at the cabin on the beach where the girlfriend is present safe and sound, and neither seems particularly surprised nor upset to see the other.
So there’s something weird going on, like the girlfriend is the reincarnation of the mother who died in childbirth, or the boyfriend is the reincarnation of the Senator, or it was always the Senator having this potentially scandalous rendezvous with this girl and he has somehow been imagining that he’s someone else and hallucinating that an encounter he had with the imps that he remembers from decades ago is instead happening now. Don’t ask me.
I don’t know if I’m reduced to guessing because the author genuinely never does provide enough information to do anything more than that, or if in fact the truth is readily discoverable and I’m just missing it.
I’m also not going to pretend to understand the short story Dogs’ Lives. Evidently the narrator is mentally ill, or is intentionally communicating in a very disjointed, unclear manner because he’s a writer.
He is, so he says at least, a writer and a professor of English. The story is a series of anecdotes he tells, out of chronological order, varying from memories of experiences that could plausibly have really happened, to tales that are fanciful to varying degrees and are almost certainly not to be taken literally.
They generally involve dogs in one way or another, though rarely if ever a truly positive experience he had with a dog, or a memory of a particularly close, rewarding relationship with a dog. There’s generally some kind of conflict, suffering, etc. There’s a dog in heat that an irresponsible dog owner neighbor woman keeps chained outside 24 hours a day, and that is attacked and mounted by various male dogs in the area. There’s a newborn puppy he picks up when he was a child, but what he remembers of the experience is things like that it smelled like shit and that the mother was none too happy about someone picking up one of her puppies and had to be restrained. There’s a family pet who is injured when he tumbles over a waterfall. And so on.
There is also some kind of Great Dane ghost dog or something, that he encounters periodically, such as when it walks into his classroom one day. It is a consistently ominous presence.
Ultimately, he becomes some sort of superhumanly intelligent cyborg (half man/half machine) who is sent off on space missions with crews consisting of human cyborgs and dog cyborgs (half dog/half machine). Appropriately enough, he travels to a planet that orbits Sirius (the Dog Star), which turns out to be populated by alien dogs who are thrilled to be visited by Earth humans and dogs.
He mentions matter-of-factly that he can, or could for a while, read dogs’ minds, perceive the world as they perceive it, search through their memories, and even perceive their past lives. (Reincarnation is true, in other words, and includes dogs.)
Again, I don’t get the point of any of it; I don’t know what we’re supposed to make of his random dog-related reminiscences and fantasies. That he had some traumatic experience(s) with dogs as a child and it drove him insane?
The final story in the book is The Eichmann Variations, the second story in this collection that imagines an alternative track that history might have taken had World War II played out differently.
However, The Eichmann Variations isn’t otherwise similar at all to The Lucky Strike.
In The Lucky Strike, history changes because of the specific behavior of one specific individual, the protagonist of the story. In The Eichmann Variations, the changes are not attributed to anything specific like that; we’re told what happened differently, but not what caused it to happen differently.
The Lucky Strike attempts to be fully realistic, once you accept its premise. There’s nothing impossible or all that implausible about things playing out as the story describes (unless, I suppose, you want to argue that it’s unrealistically optimistic about human nature and our willingness to collectively choose a better path when confronted with the dismal prospects of remaining on our current path). The Eichmann Variations evidently has other priorities (symbolic, metaphorical, whatever) than crafting a realistic story, so it fudges with some developments that are more magic or supernatural than something that could plausibly happen.
The style of The Lucky Strike is pretty straightforward narrative. The Eichmann Variations is a bit more unconventional, jumps around a bit more, though not to an incomprehensible, postmodern extent.
The story is told from the standpoint of Eichmann himself, having been kidnapped by Israeli agents from where he was living in secret in Argentina and brought to Israel. That much is the same as real life, but the history from the war through his capture is quite a bit different from real life.
A group of Jewish scientists created the atom bomb for the Allies in order to take revenge on Nazi Germany. (In reality, I suppose the proportion of Jews amongst the most distinguished physicists of the time who had some direct or indirect role in the making of the bomb was higher than the proportion in the general population, but it was hardly some sort of organized Jewish cabal that invented the bomb to pursue some specifically Jewish objectives.) Multiple major German cities were flattened by atom bombs, causing Germany to surrender. Japan quickly followed suit so as to avoid the same fate. Israel was founded in the Middle East after the war. It quickly became exceedingly successful and popular amongst its neighbors, as Jews used their near-supernatural powers of intellect and innovation to do such things as invent a technique to make the deserts of the area fertile, which they freely shared with the other nations of the region, leading to an endless bounty for all.
They also invented some kind of cloning methodology. Rather than put Eichmann on trial and execute him, they hold him in custody indefinitely while they recreate him over and over and over. They continually execute these Eichmann clones, while letting him live.
But it’s not like real cloning, in that the duplicates aren’t just physically, biologically, the same, like identical twins, but also have the identical memories and are identical mentally to Eichmann.
Though I wouldn’t say they’re presented unsympathetically, the fact that the Jews are so different from any other people, so all-powerful, and so willing to systematically exercise their godlike powers of life and death over those under their control (and the godlike power to create life, for that matter) gives them, to me, the feel of cartoon villains, of an arch-nemesis with super powers. And like I say, it’s completely unrealistic, unless we theorize that none of this is happening outside of Eichmann’s imagination, that perhaps he has gone mad and this is how he now perceives his antagonists.
Why are the Jews making all these Eichmanns, by the way? I wasn’t completely clear on that, but evidently in part it’s a way to be able to study him for as long as they want, to try to understand better what makes him tick, how such a person can exist, and to see if he (any of the “he”s) ever manifests any remorse.
Further it’s a way of trying to punish him proportionately. That is, based on an “eye for an eye” calculation, it’s insufficient in a sense to take someone’s life if they murdered more than one victim. The Jews have invented a way to kill someone multiple times to make up for that discrepancy. That’s why they say that they’ve put a ceiling of six million on the number of executed Eichmann clones, that they’ll cut off this process of study, this process of hunting for remorse, etc., if they ever get to six million Eichmanns.
In a way it doesn’t make much sense. I mean, it’s not like the real Eichmann is suffering much in the way of punishment by having all these clones executed. Perhaps that’s a weakness of the story, or another way to look at it is that it is highlighting precisely the futility of responding appropriately and proportionately to Eichmann-style evil, that even if you imaginatively hypothesized superpowers for the aggrieved people, there’s not much they could do to understand and suitably punish someone like Eichmann.
Not that I know that the author had anything remotely like that in mind. I’m probably just missing the message(s) of the story. I admit I’m enough of a simpleton about fiction and its interpretation that a more straightforward, less obscure, less unrealistic, version of an “alternative history” story like The Lucky Strike fits me better than this one.
On the whole, this is a decent anthology, but not one of the strongest of these Nebula books that I’ve read so far. I’d put it somewhere around the middle.
Among the stories that connected well with me, Bloodchild is imaginative and decidedly creepy, PRESS ENTER held my interest as a mystery and as a study of possible mental illness from the inside, The Lucky Strike is thought-provoking in its treatment of a decision of conscience, Morning Child is an effective, ominous, post-apocalyptic tale, and The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything, is certainly entertainingly quirky and comical.
Honestly, the one that seems to have reached me on the deepest level, the one that has stuck with me the most that I find myself thinking about the most as I look back on this collection, is Bloodchild.
Philo on Books 