Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Of course, it is important to note that for Merril, this alliance between mothers and scientists is at best an only partial solution to the problems posed by the threat of nuclear war. At the end of the novel the family unit is preserved, but its survival is far from guaranteed: Gladys’s son Tom is located but much to her horror has been drafted into the army; her husband Jon returns from New York City but is wracked with radiation burns and gunshot wounds that prevent him from asserting his place as the head of the family; and Levy himself is diagnosed with a potentially fatal strain of radiation poisoning.9 This ambivalence is key to Merril’s project: if she depicts a postholocaust future where scientists can solve all the problems of nuclear war, then there would be no reason to protest that kind of war in the first place. But that is not her project. Instead, by demonstrating how even the natural sympathies of mothers and scientists might not be enough to guarantee survival in the future, she makes a strong case for the necessity of peace activism in the present.

  The civil rights movement and SF’s “encounter with the alien other”

  Although nuclear weapons might have been the most pressing technological issue for women involved in midcentury political activism, it was certainly not the only one that captured their interest. Many turned their attention to what was undoubtedly the most pressing social issue of the day: the struggle for racial integration in America. In contrast to the antiwar movement, which continually had to justify its existence in an era when cold war politics seemed to necessitate the development and stockpiling of nuclear weapons, civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) were able to position themselves as a necessary part of America’s effort to spread democracy and social justice throughout the world (Lynn 108).

  In practice, overturning nearly 300 years of American prejudice was a much more complex task. Civil rights organizations took a two-pronged approach to this task, working to secure integration at the levels of both the state and the neighborhood. The efforts that occurred at the first level are those that have been most thoroughly recorded by history: the struggle to integrate public schools as mandated by the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (which firmly rejected the “separate but equal” doctrine that had governed U.S. policymaking since the 1890s); the year-long Montgomery bus boycott organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in 1955; and, of course, the massive, nonviolent demonstrations initiated by King and other black leaders in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Kaledin 150-155). All these activities were carefully aligned with the liberal humanist ethos of the time as planned efforts to secure the rights of all individuals through the regular channels of participatory and representative democracy.10

  But this is, as feminist historians have pointed out, quite literally only half the story. Efforts to ensure integration in public institutions were accompanied by efforts to do much the same in the realm of private relations as well. As Susan Lynn notes, progressive interracial women’s organizations such as the Young Women’s Christian Organization (YWCA) were certainly instrumental in lobbies for civil rights legislation. What has been less often recognized, however, is they were also central in developing new strategies for integration that “emphasized a female ethic as central to creating social change, particularly by building friendships across racial lines” (112). These strategies included the development of antiracist literature, lecture series, and, most centrally, summer conferences where black and white girls worked and lived together for months at a time. Hundreds of girls attended these conferences, and hundreds left testimonials reporting that the most important part of the conferences for them was the realization that “in hundreds of little ways we felt the same whether our skin was dark or light” (in Lynn 113). It should come as no surprise, then, that many of the girls who attended these conferences in the 1950s grew up to participate in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s, since both emphasized the connections between personal and political relations.

  These connections were further demonstrated by women’s activities on other fronts of the civil rights struggle. Throughout the 1950s women allied with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC, a mixed-sex group originally founded by Quaker activists in 1917) worked closely with local NAACP leaders to ensure that the Brown v. Board of Education decision would be enacted as smoothly as possible. These women enacted the feminine ethos of social change through interpersonal dialogue by facilitating meetings between black and white parents, students, school boards, and community leaders (Lynn 116-17). More than mere auxiliary to the rest of the civil rights movement, then, this new mode of social change became central to the daily implementation of civil rights legislation.11

  Of course, the battle to integrate girls’ associations and public schools was hardly the stuff of midcentury SF—or at least not at any immediately obvious level. However, the clash between two cultures most certainly was. John Clute and Peter Nicholls note that “encounter with the alien other” stories are as old as SF itself. Influenced by Darwinian theory, early science fiction stories ranging from H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) to Edmond Hamilton’s “Thundering Worlds” (1934) depicted alien others as the natural enemies of mankind. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, most SF authors had forsaken such crude depictions for more nuanced investigations of “the problems of establishing fruitful communications with alien races” (16). Women writing SF at that time were no exception to this rule. Authors including Margaret St. Clair, Kay Rogers, and Mildred Clingerman all inflected the new alien encounter narrative with an ethos of social change through interpersonal communication much like that deployed by their counterparts in the civil rights movement. In doing so, they created stories that explored the very real problems of establishing fruitful communications with human races on the American homefront.

  Significantly, midcentury women’s alien encounter narratives tend to focus on communication not between like-minded people working together in the public sphere, but between star-crossed lovers who can only flourish in the private worlds they create for themselves in the face of a hostile society. As such, these stories function much like the nuclear war ones written by Merril, Emshwiller, and Jones: as warnings about the nightmare future America might create for itself given present-day scientific and social arrangements. Midcentury women’s alien encounter narratives also resemble their nuclear war counterparts in that both refuse the apolitical, ahistorical “love conquers all” mentality that dominated so many other forms of midcentury popular culture (and that continue to do so today). Instead, they show how private relations between individuals are always already conditioned by historical and material factors, and how reformation of these relations can only be meaningful if accompanied by a similar reformation of their institutional counterparts.

  Women’s alien encounter narratives from the early 1950s reflect much of the hesitation and pessimism attending the early years of the civil rights struggle. Although President Harry Truman established the first Civil Rights Commission in 1946 and then ordered the desegregation of the American military in 1948, he restrained from enforcing any more specific legislation at the time for fear of alienating white Southern voters (Chafe 91). It is not surprising, then, that stories such as Margaret St. Clair’s “Brightness Falls from the Air” (1951) imagined that even the most wildly successful examples of interracial communication would inevitably fail in the face of an entrenched bureaucracy. St. Clair’s story depicts a far future where humans have ruthlessly taken over every habitable planet they can find, leaving indigenous peoples to starve and die unless they are willing to participate in the deadly “battle sports” that have become the conquering race’s favorite distraction. Kerr is a minor human bureaucrat who acknowledges his people’s wrongdoings but shrugs them off as “a particular instance of the g
eneral cruelty and stupidity” that he believes characterizes all peoples in all times (162). He is forced to revise this opinion when he meets Rhysha, a beautiful bird-woman with whom he promptly falls in love. Rhysha is also intrigued by Kerr and the two exchange life stories. When Kerr learns that the battle sports are a perversion of the dignified leadership rituals that once structured life on Rhysha’s world, Kerr vows to help her people escape extinction by sponsoring their immigration to a new world. But all is for naught: Kerr’s petitions are denied and the young man falls gravely ill from his exertions; when he recovers, it is only to learn that Rhysha has sacrificed herself in the battle sports arena to secure food for her family. Thus the love between individuals from different races is rendered meaningless precisely because the new social perspectives engendered by this love are negated by the intransigency of public institutions.

  A similar pessimism informs Kay Roger’s short story “Experiment” (1952), where humans have been enslaved by the snake-like Venusians, a cold-blooded race with limited emotional capabilities. Intrigued by the human concept of love, one particular Venusian, Cobr, decides to perform an experiment in which he rescues a human woman from the slave pens and installs her in his own household with all the comforts that his people usually accord one another. In return, Cobr asks the woman (a professional performer who remains unnamed throughout the story) to help with his experiment by singing her people’s love songs to him. Inevitably, Cobr becomes enchanted with the singer and is delighted when she learns the forms of courteous expression that pass for affection between members of his race. Before the relationship can progress further, however, the singer dies of a sudden illness and Cobr finds himself in a surprising position: alone and far too heartsick to continue the experiment with another human. Once again, then, love fails to conquer all—indeed, this love, such as it is, cannot even be named by the individual who experiences it.

  Published at the height of the midcentury civil rights movement—three years after Brown v. Board of Education and two years after the Montgomery bus boycott—Mildred Clingerman’s “Mr. Sakrison’s Halt” (1957) treats the problem of racial justice in America in a more direct and complex manner than its predecessors. Here, the encounter with the alien other takes the form of a romantic encounter between the southern belle Mattie Compton and the northern liberal Mr. Sakrison. Although she initially dismisses him as a “Yankee beast” (39), Miss Mattie soon falls in love with the gentle man and his vision for a better world: “I’d never heard anybody speak so sadly about the nigras. . . .He put words to the little sick feelings I’d had at times, and I began to catch his vision” (40). The young couple decide to migrate north and marry, but their plans collapse when their train makes an unexpected stop in an unnamed town where beautifully-dressed people of all races live together in prosperity and harmony. Mr. Sakrison immediately gets off the train and is welcomed by a distinguished-looking black man; Miss Mattie, overcome by a flash of prejudicial anger and fear, hangs back—and promptly looses her chance for happiness when the train starts up and barrels on without her fiancé. As a kind of penance, Miss Mattie spends the next forty years of her life riding the Jim Crow cars of the same train, desperately searching for the mysterious town where her beloved vanished. Much like St. Clair and Rogers, then, Clingerman suggests that interpersonal communication in the guise of romantic love may indeed be the first important step toward the elimination of racial prejudice in America but it is by no means necessarily enough to eliminate prejudice altogether.

  This is not, however, the whole of Clingerman’s story. “Mr. Sakrison’s Halt” is narrated by an anonymous young woman born in Miss Mattie’s hometown but raised in the north. To counteract the hostility she feels as an outsider when visiting her birth-town, the narrator makes friends with the only other person in town who does “too much traveling around”: Miss Mattie (38). In contrast to the other townsfolk, Clingerman’s narrator does not simply dismiss Miss Mattie’s tale as the product of a lovesick mind; accordingly, she is given the privilege of witnessing its final act. During their last train ride together the narrator spots the mysterious stop that Miss Mattie has described so many times before. This time Miss Mattie does not hesitate to get off the train, where she is rewarded with the return of both her youth and Mr. Sakrison. Thus it would seem that with patience and continued communication between sympathetic individuals, there might be a future in which love—between individuals and between races—could prevail.

  Again, however, this is not the entire story. Miss Mattie and her lover are only reunited in a magical, alternative America that the narrator glimpses but can never find for herself again, trapped as she is in a world of “firey crosses” and white supremacist rage (43). The narrator’s closing observation underscores the difference between these two worlds:

  the Katy local was retired years ago. There’s a fine highway now to the city. . . . I hear everything has changed. But I read in my newspaper last week how they’ve locked the doors to the schoolhouse and barred with guns and flaring anger the way to the hill, and I realize how terribly far [my birth-town] still is from Mr. Sakrison’s halt. (43-44)

  More than mere apocalyptic imagination, this final image encapsulates some of the most dreadful newspaper headlines of Clingerman’s day: after all, “Mr. Sakrison’s Halt” appeared in print the very same year that President Dwight Eisenhower sent out the National Guard to ensure the integration of Little Rock Central High School (and Alabama’s governor shut down the entire state school system in retaliation). And much the same thing can be said of Clingerman’s entire story. With all its twists and turns, the narrative structure of “Mr. Sakrison’s Halt” closely mirrors the complex and sometimes contradictory hopes and fears attending the dream of racial justice in America. Although Clingerman’s narrator—and by extension, Clingerman’s readers—might have been able to catch glimpses of the brave new world imagined by civil rights activists and their sympathizers, in the American South of 1957 it might well have felt like that dream was still almost impossibly far away.

  Conclusion: Feminist history and feminist SF studies reconsidered

  As Helen Merrick notes in her essay “‘Fantastic Dialogues’: Critical Stories About Feminism and Science Fiction,” feminist SF has received a certain amount of critical attention from the feminist literary community, but “for the most part, dialogue across the genre-mainstream border has been rare” (52). This kind of dialogue is important to all feminist scholars interested in the recovery of women’s diverse authorial activities throughout the modern era. More specifically, it is important to feminist SF scholars interested in establishing women’s SF as more than a mere appendage to their more serious or canonical literary efforts.

  As feminist SF scholars we are uniquely positioned to enable this kind of dialogue because we have access to literary histories and analytic tools that are neither apparent nor available to our counterparts elsewhere in academia. As I have argued in this overview of women’s political and literary praxis at midcentury, women writing SF in the cold war era may not have endorsed an explicitly feminist agenda, but they did invoke culturally-specific ideas about gender to interrogate the predominantly patriarchal scientific and social arrangements of their day. By invoking these ideas in science fiction narratives, they both made concrete and in many cases directly anticipated the hopes and fears of their activist counterparts. For instance, nuclear war narratives enabled authors like Judith Merril, Carol Emshwiller, and Alice Eleanor Jones to show how cold war America’s national security policies threatened the very same families they were designed to protect. Meanwhile, stories about the problems of communicating with alien races were, as authors like Margaret St. Clair, Kay Rogers, and Mildred Clingerman demonstrate, easily adapted to explorations of the problems attending communication between human races on the American homefront.

  In the beginning of this essay I suggested that midcentury women’s SF has been marginalized by SF scholarship because longstanding assum
ptions about its trivial nature have, until recently, precluded serious study of its relation to the development of science fiction as a whole. If this history has been “lost” to the SF community, we can hardly be surprised that the larger feminist community never even knew it existed in the first place. And this is precisely where we as feminist SF scholars can give something back to the discipline which has inspired so much of our own work. By continuing to recover the history of women’s science fiction in all its diversity, and by continuing to talk about it amongst ourselves and with our colleagues from other fields of inquiry, we can make important strides toward the larger feminist effort to remember those women that history doesn’t see.

  Notes

  1. For one of the most influential discussions of this trend in midcentury political and cultural discourse, see Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.

  2. See Dee Garrison, “‘Our Skirts Gave Them Courage’: The Civil Defense Protest Movement in New York City, 1955-1961”; Harriet Hyman Alonso, “Mayhem and Moderation: Women Peace Activists During the McCarthy Era”; Eugenia Kaledin, Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s; Susan Lynn, Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s; and Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike For Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s.