AN INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE FICTION
2023-2024
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Emerson High School - Mckinney, TX
LITERATURE
Table of Contents
SECTION II: HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
OF THE SF GENRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Science and Fiction to Science Fiction 11
Frankenstein, The Chemical Wedding, Symzonia,
and Debates about the First SF Novel . . . . . . . . 11
Science and Nineteenth-Century American
Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Pulp Magazines and the Golden Age of
Science Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Changing Technology: Radio, Film, and
Television . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Cold War Tensions and the Race for
Technological Supremacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
New Voices, New Visions: The New Wave . . . . 14
The Emergence of Cyberpunk . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Steampunk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century . . . 15
Solarpunk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
New Delivery Technologies, Inclusivity, and
Internationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Ongoing Debates on Defining the Genre . . . . . . 17
SECTION III: URSULA K. LE GUIN AND
THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1971) . . . . . 19
Concerns about Artificial
Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2001: A Space Odyssey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Technology Anxiety: From Prometheus to
Frankenstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Technology as a Double-Edged
Sword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
The Lathe of Heaven and the Theme of
Technology and Humanity . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Overview of The Lathe of Heaven . . . . . . . . . . 21
Haber and Orr, Doctor and Patient . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
The Augmentor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
The Aldebaranians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Lelache, Orr, and the Unintended Consequences
of Dreams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
The Trope of the Infernal Machine . . . . . . . . . . 24
The Contrasting Characters of Orr and
Haber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Activity versus Passivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
The Biographical Context of The Lathe of
Heaven: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Life . . . . . . 29
Le Guin’s Parents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Le Guin’s Parents and Ishi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Le Guin’s Upbringing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Le Guin’s Adult Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Le Guin’s Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Le Guin’s Influence and Critical Reception . . . 32
Historical Context of The Lathe of Heaven:
From the Atomic Bomb to Artificial
Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Le Guin’s Work and Feminism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Moral Issues of the Cold War Era . . . . . . . . . . 33
Concerns about Ecological Catastrophe . . . . . 34
The Lathe of Heaven: Cast of
Characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
George Orr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Dr. William Haber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Heather Lelache . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Mannie Ahrens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Tiua’k Ennbe Ennbe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
E’nememen Asfah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Themes of The Lathe of Heaven . . . . . . . 38
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SECTION I: CRITICAL READING . . . . . 5
Setting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Oregon and the Ring of Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Sea Imagery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Mount Hood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Climate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
“Self Is Universe” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
The Role of Psychology in The Lathe
of Heaven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Ambrose Bierce: Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Selected Work: “Moxon’s Master” by
Ambrose Bierce (1899) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Analysis of “Moxon’s Master”: Man vs.
Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Ray Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body
Electric!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Ray Bradbury: Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Selected Work: “I Sing the Body Electric!”
by R ay Bradbury (1969) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body
Electric!”: Technological Mothering . . . . . . . .102
Octavia E. Butler’s “Childfinder” . . . . . 104
Octavia E. Butler: Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Dr. William Dement and the AASM . . . . . . . . . 46
Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalysis, and
The Interpretation of Dreams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Carl Gustav Jung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Dreams and The Lathe of Heaven . . . . . . . . . . 48
Selected Work: “Childfinder” by Octavia E.
Butler (1970; published in 2014) . . . . . . . 105
The Role of Philosophy in The Lathe of
Heaven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
John Crowley’s “Snow” . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Le Guin’s Epigraphs and Taoism . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Western Philosophy and Haber’s
Utilitarianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
The Publication History and Media
Afterlife of The Lathe of Heaven . . . . . . . 52
Analysis of Octavia E. Butler’s “Childfinder”:
Telepathic Communication as Technology . . 110
John Crowley: Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Selected Work: “Snow” by John Crowley
(1985) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Analysis of John Crowley’s “Snow”:
Memory and Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
Section III Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
C.L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” . . . . . 126
SECTION IV: SHORTER
SELECTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Section IV Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Selected Work: “No Woman Born” by
C.L. Moore (1944) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s
Daughter” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Biography . . . . . . . . . . 54
Selected Work: “R appaccini’s Daughter” by
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1844) . . . . . . . . . . 55
Analysis of “Rappaccini’s Daughter”: Botany
and Biology as Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Ambrose Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master” . . . 74
C.L. Moore: Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
Analysis of C.L. Moore’s “No Woman Born”:
The Promise of Prosthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Neil Gaiman’s “The Mushroom
Hunters” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
Neil Gaiman: Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
Selected Work: “The Mushroom Hunters” by
Neil Gaiman (2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Analysis of “The Mushroom Hunters”:
Knowledge as Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
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Shifting Versions of Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Philosophical Viewpoints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
The Enduring Problem of Warfare . . . . . . . . . . 39
Issues of Racism, Immigration, and
Xenophobia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
The Power of Love and Friendship . . . . . . . . . . 42
Patterns of Dominance and Control . . . . . . . . . 43
Sarah Howe’s “Relativity” . . . . . . . . . . 157
Sarah Howe: Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
Selected Work: “Relativity” by Sarah Howe
(2015) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
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Analysis of “Relativity”: Scientific Theory and
Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
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Section I
Critical reading is a familiar exercise to students, an
exercise that many of them have been engaged in since
the first grade. Critical reading forms a significant part
of the PSAT, the SAT, the ACT, and both Advanced
Placement Tests in English. It is the portion of any test
for which students can do the least direct preparation,
and it is also the portion that will reward students who
have been lifelong readers. Unlike other parts of the
United States Academic Decathlon® Test in Literature,
where the questions will be based on specific works
of literature that the students have been studying
diligently, the critical reading passage in the test, as
a previously unseen passage, will have an element of
surprise. In fact, the test writers usually go out of their
way to choose passages from works not previously
encountered in high school so as to avoid making the
critical reading items a mere test of recall. From one
point of view, not having to rely on memory actually
makes questions on critical reading easier than the
other questions because the answer must always be
somewhere in the passage, stated either directly or
indirectly, and careful reading will deliver the answer.
Since students can feel much more confident with
some background information and some knowledge
of the types of questions likely to be asked, the first
order of business is for the student to contextualize
the passage by asking some key questions. Who wrote
it? When was it written? In what social, historical, or
literary environment was it written?
In each passage used on a test, the writer’s name
is provided, followed by the work from which the
passage was excerpted or the date it was published
or the dates of the author’s life. If the author is well
known to high school students (e.g., Charles Dickens,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jane
Austen), no dates will be provided, but the work or
the occasion will be cited. For writers less familiar to
high school students, dates will be provided. Using this
information, students can begin to place the passage
into context. As they start to read, students will want
to focus on what they know about that writer, his or
her typical style and concerns, or that time period, its
values and its limitations. A selection from Thomas
Paine in the eighteenth century is written against a
different background and has different concerns from
a selection written by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. prior
to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Toni Morrison
writes against a different background from that of
Charles Dickens.
Passages are chosen from many different kinds of
texts—fiction, biography, letters, speeches, essays,
newspaper columns, and magazine articles—and
may come from a diverse group of writers, varying
in gender, race, location, and time period. A likely
question is one that asks readers to speculate on what
literary form the passage is excerpted from. The passage
itself will offer plenty of clues as to its genre, and the
name of the writer often offers clues as well. Excerpts
from fiction contain the elements one might expect to
find in fiction—descriptions of setting, character, or
action. Letters have a sense of sharing thoughts with a
particular person. Speeches have a wider audience and
a keen awareness of that audience; speeches also have
some particular rhetorical devices peculiar to the genre.
Essays and magazine articles are usually focused on one
topic of contemporary, local, or universal interest.
Other critical reading questions can be divided into
two major types: reading for meaning and reading
for analysis. The questions on reading for meaning
are based solely on understanding what the passage is
saying, and the questions on analysis are based on how
the writer says what they say.
In reading for meaning, the most frequently asked
question is one that inquires about the passage’s
main idea since distinguishing a main idea from
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Critical Reading
Closely related to a question on the main idea of a
passage is a question about the writer’s purpose.
If the passage is fiction, the purpose, unless it is a
digression—and even digressions are purposeful in
the hands of good writers—will in some way serve
the elements of fiction. The passage will develop a
character, describe a setting, or advance the plot. If the
passage is non-fiction, the writer’s purpose might be
purely to inform; it might be to persuade; it might be
to entertain; or it might be any combination of all three
of these. Students may also be questioned about the
writer’s audience. Is the passage intended for a specific
group, or is it aimed at a larger audience?
The easy part of the Critical Reading section is that the
answer to the question is always in the passage, and
for most of the questions, students do not need to bring
previous knowledge of the subject to the task. However,
for some questions, students are expected to have some
previous knowledge of the vocabulary, terms, allusions,
and stylistic techniques usually acquired in an English
class. Such knowledge could include, but is not limited
to, knowing vocabulary, recognizing an allusion, and
identifying literary and rhetorical devices.
In addition to recognizing the main idea of a passage,
students will be required to demonstrate a more
specific understanding. Questions measuring this
might restate information from the passage and ask
students to recognize the most exact restatement. For
such questions, students will have to demonstrate their
clear understanding of a specific passage or sentence.
A deeper level of understanding may be examined
by asking students to make inferences on the basis of
the passage or to draw conclusions from evidence in
the passage. In some cases, students may be asked to
extend these conclusions by applying information in the
passage to other situations not mentioned in the passage.
In reading for analysis, students are asked to recognize
some aspects of the writer’s craft. One of these aspects
may be organization. How has the writer chosen to
organize his or her material? Is it a chronological
narrative? Does it describe a place using spatial
organization? Is it an argument with points clearly
organized in order of importance? Is it set up as a
comparison and contrast? Does it offer an analogy or a
series of examples? If there is more than one paragraph
in the excerpt, what is the relationship between the
paragraphs? What transition does the writer make
from one paragraph to the next?
Other questions could be based on the writer’s attitude
toward the subject, the appropriate tone they assume,
and the way language is used to achieve that tone. Of
course, the tone will vary according to the passage. In
informational nonfiction, the tone will be detached and
matter-of-fact, except when the writer is particularly
enthusiastic about the subject or has some other kind of
emotional involvement such as anger, disappointment,
sorrow, or nostalgia. They may even assume an ironic
tone that takes the form of exaggerating or understating
a situation or describing it as the opposite of what it
is. With each of these methods of irony, two levels of
meaning are present—what is said and what is implied.
An ironic tone is usually used to criticize or to mock.
A writer of fiction uses tone differently, depending on
what point of view they assume. If the author chooses
a first-person point of view and becomes one of the
characters, they have to assume a persona and develop a
character through that character’s thoughts, actions, and
speeches. This character is not necessarily sympathetic
and is sometimes even a villain, as in some of the short
stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Readers have to pick up
this tone from the first few sentences. If the author is
writing a third-person narrative, the tone will vary in
accordance with how intrusive the narrator appears to
be. Some narrators are almost invisible while others are
more intrusive, pausing to editorialize, digress, or, in
some cases, address the reader directly.
Language is the tool the author uses to reveal attitude
and point of view. A discussion of language includes
the writer’s syntax and diction. Are the sentences long
or short? Is the length varied—is there an occasional
short sentence among longer ones? Does the writer use
parallelism and balanced sentence structure? Are the
sentences predominantly simple, complex, compound,
or compound-complex? How does the writer use tense?
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Emerson High School - Mckinney, TX
a supporting idea is an important reading skill. A
question on main ideas is sometimes disguised as a
question asking for an appropriate title for the passage.
Most students will not select as the main idea a choice
that is neither directly stated nor indirectly implied
in the passage, but harder questions will present
choices that do appear in the passage but are not main
ideas. Remember that an answer choice may be a true
statement but not the right answer to the question.
SAMPLE PASSAGE TO PREPARE FOR
CRITICAL READING
(5)
(10)
(15)
(20)
“We will each write a ghost story,” said Lord Byron, and his proposition was acceded to.
There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the
end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the
radiance of brilliant imagery and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our
language than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the
experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed
lady who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole—what to see I forget:
something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse
condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry1, he did not know what to do with her and
was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was
fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished
their uncongenial task.
I busied myself to think of a story—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task.
One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling
horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the
beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be
unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered—vainly. I felt that blank incapability of
invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our
anxious invocations. “Have you thought of a story?” I was asked each morning, and each
morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.
Mary Shelley
Introduction to Frankenstein (1831)
1. Tom of Coventry—Peeping Tom who was struck blind for looking as Lady Godiva passed by.
INSTRUCTIONS: On your answer sheet, mark the lettered space (a, b, c, d, or e) corresponding to the
answer that BEST completes or answers each of the following test items.
1. The author’s purpose in this passage is to
a. analyze the creative process
b. demonstrate her intellectual superiority
c. name-drop her famous acquaintances
d. denigrate the efforts of her companions
e. narrate the origins of her novel
2. According to the author, Shelley’s talents were
in
a. sentiment and invention
b. diction and sound patterns
c. thought and feeling
d. brightness and ornamentation
e. insight and analysis
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In order to prepare for the critical reading portion of the test, it may be helpful for students to take a
look at a sample passage. Here is a passage used in an earlier test. The passage is an excerpt from Mary
Shelley’s 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein.
7. “Noble” (line 2) can be BEST understood to
mean
a. principled
b. aristocratic
c. audacious
d. arrogant
e. eminent
8. All of the following constructions, likely to
be questioned by a strict grammarian or a
computer grammar check, are included in the
passage EXCEPT
a. a shift in voice
b. unconventional punctuation
c. sentence fragments
d. run-on sentences
e. a sentence ending with a preposition
9. In context “platitude” (line 11) can be BEST
understood to mean
a. intellectual value
b. philosophical aspect
c. commonplace quality
d. heightened emotion
e. demanding point of view
10. “ The tomb of the Capulets” (line 10) is an
allusion to
a. Shakespeare
b. Edgar Allan Poe
c. English history
d. Greek mythology
e. the legends of King Arthur
ANSWERS AND EXPLANATIONS OF ANSWERS
1. (e) This type of question appears in most sets of critical reading questions. (a) might appear to be a possible
answer, but the passage does not come across as very analytical, nor does it seem like a discussion of the
creative process but rather is more a description of a game played by four writers to while away the time. (b)
and (c) seem unlikely answers. Mary Shelley’s account here sounds as if she is conscious of inferiority in
such illustrious company rather than superiority. She has no need to name-drop, as she married one of the
illustrious poets and at that time was the guest of the other. She narrates the problems she had in coming up
with a story, but since the passage tells us that she is the author of Frankenstein, we know that she did come up
with a story. The answer is (e).
2. ( b) This type of question asks readers to recognize a restatement of ideas found in the passage. The sentence
under examination is found in lines 3–6, and students are asked to recognize that “diction and sound
patterns” refers to “radiance of brilliant imagery” and “music of the most melodious verse.” (a) would not be
possible because even his adoring wife finds him not inventive. “Thought and feeling,” (c), appear as “ideas
and sentiments” (line 3), which according to the passage are merely the vehicles to exhibit Shelley’s talents.
Answer (d), incorporating “brightness,” might refer to “brilliant” in line 4, but “ornamentation” is too artificial
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3. The author’s descriptions of Shelley’s talents
might be considered all of the following
EXCEPT
a. accurate
b. prejudiced
c. appreciative
d. detached
e. exaggerated
4. The author’s attitude toward Polidori is
a. amused
b. sincere
c. derisive
d. ironic
e. matter-of-fact
5. The author’s approach to the task differs from
that of the others in that she begins by thinking
of
a. her own early experiences
b. poetic terms and expressions
c. the desired effect on her readers
d. outperforming her male companions
e. praying for inspiration
6. At the end of the excerpt the author feels
a. determined
b. despondent
c. confident
d. relieved
e. resigned
a word for the author to use in reference to her talented husband. (e) is incorrect, as insight and analysis are not
alluded to in the passage.
3. (d) This question is related to Question 2 in that it discusses Shelley’s talents and the author’s opinion of
them. The writer is obviously not “detached” in her description of her very talented husband. She is obviously
“prejudiced” and “appreciative.” She may even exaggerate, but history has shown her to be accurate in her
opinion.
4. (a) This is another question about the writer’s attitude. Some of the adjectives can be immediately dismissed.
She is not ironic—she means what she says. She is not an unkind writer, and she does not use a derisive tone.
However, there is too much humor in her tone for it to be sincere or matter-of-fact. The correct answer is that
she is amused.
5. (c) This question deals with the second paragraph and how the author set about writing a story. Choices (a), (b),
(d), and (e) may seem appropriate beginnings for a writer, but they are not mentioned in the passage. What she
does focus on is the desired effect on her readers, (c), as outlined in detail in lines 13–16.
7. ( b) This question deals with vocabulary in context. The noble author is Lord Byron, a hereditary peer of the
realm, and the word in this context of describing him means “aristocratic.” “Principled,” (a), and “eminent,”
(e), are also possible synonyms for “noble” but not in this context. Byron in his private life was eminently
unprincipled (nicknamed “the bad Lord Byron”) and lived overseas to avoid public enmity. (c) and (d) are not
synonyms for “noble.”
8. (d) This is a type of question that appears occasionally in a set of questions on critical reading. Such questions
require the student to examine the sentence structure of professional writers and to be aware that these writers
sometimes take liberties in order to make a more effective statement.
T
hey know the rules, and, therefore, they may break them! An additional difficulty is that the question is
framed as a negative, so students may find it a time-consuming question as they mentally check off which
constructions Shelley does employ so that by a process of elimination they may arrive at which construction
is not included. The first sentence contains both choices (a) and (e), a shift in voice and a sentence ending in
a preposition. Neither of these constructions is a grammatical error, but computer programs point them out.
The conventional advice is that both should be used sparingly, and they should be used when avoiding them
becomes more cumbersome than using them. The sentence beginning in line 14 is a sentence fragment (c),
but an effective one. Choice (b) corresponds to the sentence beginning in line 6 and finishing in line 11, which
contains a colon, semicolon, and a dash (somewhat unconventional) without the author’s ever losing control.
This sentence is not a run-on even though many students may think it is! The answer to the question then is
(d).
9. (c) Here is another vocabulary in context question. Knowing the poets involved and their tastes, students will
probably recognize that it is (c), the commonplace quality of prose, that turns the poets away and not one of the
loftier explanations provided in the other distracters.
10. (a) The allusion to “the tomb of the Capulets” in line 10 is an example of a situation where a student is
expected to have some outside knowledge, and this will be a very easy question for students. Romeo and
Juliet is fair game for American high school students. Notice that the other allusion is footnoted, as this is a
more obscure allusion for American high school students, although well known to every English schoolboy
and schoolgirl.
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6. ( b) This question asks for an adjective to describe the author’s feeling at the end of the excerpt. The
expressions “blank incapability” (line 17) and “mortifying negative” (line 20) suggest that “despondent” is the
most appropriate answer.
Occasionally, a set of questions may include a grammar
question. For example, an item might require students to
identify what part of speech a particular word is being
used as, what the antecedent of a pronoun is, or what a
modifier modifies. Being able to answer demonstrates
that the student understands the sentence structure
and the writer’s meaning in a difficult or sometimes
purposefully ambiguous sentence.
With diction, or word choice, one must also consider
whether the words are learned and ornate or simple
and colloquial. Does the writer use slang or jargon?
Do they use sensual language? Does the writer use
figurative language or classical allusions? Is the
writer’s meaning clearer because an abstract idea is
associated with a concrete image? Does the reader
have instant recognition of a universal symbol? If the
writer does any of the above, what tone is achieved
through the various possibilities of language? Is the
writing formal or informal? Does the writer approve of
or disapprove of or ridicule his or her subject? Do they
use connotative rather than denotative words to convey
these emotions? Do you recognize a pattern of images
or words throughout the passage?
Some questions on vocabulary in context deal with
a single word. The word is not usually an unfamiliar
word, but it is often a word with multiple meanings,
depending on the context or the date of the passage, as
some words have altered in meaning over the years.
The set of ten questions on pages 7–8 is very typical—
one on purpose, a couple on restatement of supporting
ideas, some on tone and style, two on vocabulary in
context, and one on an allusion. Students should learn
how to use the process of elimination when the answer
is not immediately obvious. The organization of the
questions is also typical of the usual arrangement of
Critical Reading questions. Questions on the content
of the passage, the main idea, and supporting ideas
generally appear first and are in the order they are
found in the passage. They are followed by questions
applying to the whole passage, including general
questions about the writer’s tone and style. Students
should be able to work their way through the passage,
finding the answers as they go.
Additional questions on an autobiographical selection
like this passage might ask what is revealed about the
biographer herself or which statements in the passage
associate the author with Romanticism.
Since passages for critical reading come in a wide
variety of genres, students should keep in mind that
other types of questions could be asked on other
types of passages. For instance, passages from fiction
can generate questions about point of view, about
characters and how these characters are presented, or
about setting, either outdoor or indoor, and the role it is
likely to play in a novel or short story.
Speeches generate some different kinds of questions
because of the oratorical devices a speaker might
use—repetition, anaphora, or appeals to various
emotions. Questions could be asked about the use of
metaphors, the use of connotative words, and the use
of patterns of words or images.
The suggestions made in this section of the resource
guide should provide a useful background for critical
reading. Questions are likely to follow similar patterns,
and knowing what to expect boosts confidence when
dealing with unfamiliar material.
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Do they vary the mood of the verb from indicative
to interrogative to imperative? Does the writer shift
between active and passive voice? If so, why? How do
these choices influence the tone?
Section II
now synonymous with SF were in circulation long
before then.”1 (The acronym SF is often used for the
term science fiction.) During the Progressive Era2 of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much
American literature either focused on or speculated
about the burgeoning technologies that were rapidly
altering the pace of modern life. From the railroad
to the telegraph, from steamboats to photography,
the rapid changes that scientific and technological
advances wrought were represented in literature.3
Frankenstein, The Chemical
Wedding, Symzonia, and Debates
about the First SF Novel
A nineteenth-century painting of an early telegraph. In the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rapid changes
that scientific and technological advances wrought were
represented in literature.
SCIENCE AND FICTION TO
SCIENCE FICTION
Prior to the appearance of science fiction pulp
magazines in the 1930s, novels, stories, or poetry
that might be read today as science fiction were not
separated from mainstream fiction. As the Routledge
Concise History of Science Fiction explains,
“[a]lthough the term ‘science fiction’ was not used
until the 1930s, texts containing elements that are
Critics such as Brian Aldiss4 and Brian Stableford5
identify the first SF6 novel as one that is also
frequently classified as Romantic or Gothic fiction:
Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus, written
by nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley, who was married
to the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s
Frankenstein, which appeared in January of 1818, was
issued by a small London publishing house. Shelley
followed Frankenstein with a second novel, The Last
Man, which is now widely understood as the first
postapocalyptic novel. Many critics cite these two texts
as the foundation of science fiction.7
However, not everyone agrees that Mary Shelley
pioneered the science-fiction novel. In 2016, the
American SF writer John Crowley argued that the 1616
German novel The Chemical Wedding of Christian
Rosenkreutz was “the first science-fiction novel”
because “it’s fiction; it’s about the possibilities of a
science; and it’s a novel, a marvelous adventure rather
than simply a parable or an allegory or a skit or a
thought-experiment.”8 Thus, in Crowley’s estimation,
The Chemical Wedding was doing what SF does and
more, a couple centuries before Shelley picked up a
pen. However, the science in The Chemical Wedding is
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Historical Overview of the
SF Genre
late Renaissance alchemy, which is more a fantastical
endeavor than a strictly scientific pursuit.
Crowley’s argument, and his definition of science
fiction, while capacious and generous, is a contested
one. Other writers like Damon Knight9 or critics like
Francesca Saggini10 are either more inclusive than
Crowley—according to Knight, whatever he points to
and claims as SF is SF11—or argue that Frankenstein
is too destabilizing a text to be restricted to any one
genre.12 Critic Adam Roberts goes further, disputing
the thesis that Frankenstein is foundational in any
way by pointing back to ancient Greek and Roman
texts.13 Some critics are more austere with respect to
their demands that the science in works of SF must be
authentic or the technology viable. Others are more
focused on a national literary heritage than the broader,
more international reach of SF as a genre.
Tapped by SF author and editor Paul Collins in 2020
as the first published SF novel in the United States,
the plot of the 1820 utopian satiric novel Symzonia: A
Voyage of Discovery by John Cleeve Symmes depends
upon a concept that isn’t based upon proven scientific
knowledge. To say that this novel is the origin of SF also
“John Cleves Symmes, Jr and His Hollow Earth” by John J.
Audubon, 1920. Symmes authored the 1820 utopian satiric
novel Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery.
pointedly ignores any narrative, such as Frankenstein,
that is not American.14 And like The Chemical Wedding,
Symzonia requires the reader to believe in pseudoscience—in this case that the earth is hollow. For the
most conservative critics, this hollow earth theory
alone—even if it were a debated fact, which it is not—
would make the novel fantasy and not SF.15
Science and Nineteenth-Century
American Literature
Some nineteenth-century American writers were
keen to examine humankind’s relationship to science
and technology. In 1835, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a
short story called “The Unparalleled Adventure of
One Hans Pfaall” that chronicled a hot air balloon
trip to the moon.16 Many of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
most acclaimed stories feature either a scientist or
a pseudo-scientist, such as the alchemist Aylmer in
the 1843 short story “The Birthmark,” who tries to
achieve human perfection by removing a wine-colored
birthmark from his wife’s face.17 Herman Melville’s
short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) meditates
on the deleterious effects that modern labor practices
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Richard Rothwell’s portrait of Mary Shelley, author of
Frankenstein.
have on humanity; rather than seeing the worker as a
human being, modern industry is turning them into
mechanisms, devoid of humanity. Famously, that story
ends with the lament, “Ah, humanity!” 18
While such works certainly have some elements in
common with SF, these American short stories are not
technically science fiction proper for two reasons. First,
all three were published years before the age of the
pulps. Second, none of them feature actual scientific
methodology, but rather they engage in fantasy—though
all three do contemplate the relationship between human
beings and the technologies they invent. Controversially,
critic H. Bruce Franklin has argued that “because
the 19th century was the first in which science fiction
became a common form of writing, only since the early
20th century has it been possible to look back at a body
of science fiction created in a different age,” although
most critics still understand SF as only emerging in the
early to mid-twentieth century.19
Pulp Magazines and the Golden Age of
Science Fiction
Critics generally agree that science fiction emerged as
a generic force in the 1930s even if the actual origin
of science fiction as an identifiable genre with a set
of tropes different in kind than mainstream fiction
remains open to argument. The emergence of science
fiction20 was in part due to the appearance of pulp
magazines, beginning in the late nineteenth century.21
Cheap to produce and distribute, the pulps helped to
widen the readership for stories that featured scientific
adventures. From roughly 1938 to the late 1940s—
dubbed the Golden Age of science fiction22—science
fiction as an identifiable genre “began to attract major
public attention,”23 according to Andrew Nette and
Iain McIntyre in Dangerous Visions and New Worlds:
Radical Science Fiction, 1950−1985.
Authors who later came to be called the Old Guard of
the Golden Age—including but not limited to Isaac
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1849 daguerreotype of the author Edgar Allan Poe.
Cover of a pulp magazine published in 1927. The pulps
widened the readership for stories featuring scientific
adventures.
Asimov, John Campbell, Robert Heinlein, and Alfred
Bester—dominated the science fiction market; many
of these men had also been scientists.24 They created
and published in SF pulp magazines like Amazing
Stories, Astounding, and Wonder Stories.25 As Nette
and McIntyre explain, these pulps “focused upon
technological breakthroughs and space-conquering
male heroes”26 without paying much attention to the
use of literary devices, such as ambiguity, prose style,
and character development.
Changing Technology: Radio, Film,
and Television
Favoring plot and technology-driven adventure stories,
the pulps disseminated tales of the unreal, as did
popular radio programs like Buck Rogers and Flash
Gordon. The popularity of both the pulps and these
radio programs continued through and after World War
II. While most of the original pulps are now defunct,
Analog, first issued as Astounding Stories of Super
Science in 1930, and Asimov’s Magazine, founded by
Isaac Asimov and Joel Davis in 1977, are both online
and in print in the twenty-first century.27
From the late 1940s into the early 1960s, changes
in technologies that supported the publishing and
entertainment industries widened the audience for
SF even further. Mass-market paperbacks began to
displace pulp magazines. Science fiction made its
appearance in film and on a fast-spreading, newer
technology: the television. In the 1960s, a spate of
prime time shows featured science fiction or science
fiction elements, from Star Trek to My Favorite
Martian, from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea to
The Time Tunnel, along with cartoon series like The
Jetsons. Even shows that weren’t technically science
fiction had fantastical elements like Mr. Ed or My
Mother the Car.28
Cold War Tensions and the Race for
Technological Supremacy
Meanwhile, the technology of space flight heated up
political tensions between the United States and the
Soviet Union. These two nations, rivals in the Cold War,
struggled for supremacy in domestic as well as outer
space. From the Kitchen Debate—an impromptu set of
exchanges about domestic technology made through
interpreters between Vice President Richard Nixon and
the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the opening of
the American National Exhibition in Moscow on July
24, 195929—to the post-Sputnik Space Race, which
saw its culmination with the landing of the first human
beings on the moon during NASA’s Apollo 11 mission,
the Cold War raged on at home and in space..
New Voices, New Visions: The New
Wave
As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, new voices
and visions entered the science-fiction genre. The
readership for science fiction expanded in tandem with
social movements like the Civil Rights movement and
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A family watches television in 1958. The television helped
further widen the audience for science fiction.
Vice-President Nixon spars with Premier Khrushchev in the
“Kitchen Debate,” Moscow, 1959.
the Women’s Liberation movement. As the authors of
Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science
Fiction put it, this was a “period of trenchant social
change, most explicitly demonstrated through a host of
liberatory and resistance movements focused on class,
racial, gender, sexual and other inequalities.”30 These
societal changes helped usher in a new generation of
science-fiction writers whose voices had hitherto been
overlooked, marginalized, or excluded.
The Emergence of Cyberpunk
The tensions between the conservative and liberal
branches of SF reflected the socio-political divisions
in other realms of American life that are still in play
in the twenty-first century. As the explosive 1960s and
permissive 1970s gave way to the more conservative
1980s, the New Wave lost its dominance to the
subgenre cyberpunk. Primarily dystopian, neo-liberal
cyberpunk often featured a clash between the welloff and the struggling, with high-tech corporatism
represented as exploitative and oppressive. The 1984
novel Neuromancer by William Gibson is often cited
as the foundational text for this subgenre. Authors
associated with cyberpunk—including but not
limited to Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, Neal
Stephenson, and Cory Doctorow—dominated the
market in the 1980s. Cyberpunk attracted a largely
white, male readership, although several prominent
A steampunk style café in Cape Town.
By http://www.yatzer.com/, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36099814
female cyberpunk writers like Pat Cadigan and
Melissa Scott were also popular.34
Steampunk
Cyberpunk was followed by steampunk, an SF and
fantasy aesthetic that combines past and present,
reaching back to nineteenth-century fashion and
technologies and combining those with present
and future technologies. The tongue-in-cheek
label “steampunk” first appeared in a letter by the
American author Keven Jeter to the SF publishing
industry magazine Locus in 1987. Jeter was jokingly
distinguishing the kind of stories he and his friends
were writing from the more neo-liberal leanings of
cyberpunk. The steampunk aesthetic is inspired by
the fashions of Victorian England (1837−1901), by the
French Belle Epoque (1871−1914), and by the Civil War
era in the United States (1861−65). Vintage clothing
designs are modernized and adorned with nostalgic
mechanical elements meant to invoke the Industrial
Revolution.35
Science Fiction in the Twenty-First
Century
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, SF has
undergone several transformative shifts away from the
punk/hacker/grunge vibe of cyberpunk and toward
fiction that grapples with the challenge of climate
change. Recent shifts envision multi-generational
starship travel and a return to space opera.36 Questions
about the representation of gender and gender fluidity,
which can be traced back to Ursula K. Le Guin’s
groundbreaking and award-winning The Left Hand
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Named the New Wave, artists such as Harlan Ellison,
Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny,
Samuel “Chip” Delaney, Joanna Russ, Kate Wilhelm,
and James Tiptree, Jr.31 began introducing elements
not seen previously in science fiction, including
psychological depth, ambiguity, irony, as well as
female characters and characters who are people
of color.32 The generation of writers who followed
the New Wave—including but not limited to Vonda
N. McIntyre, Ed Bryant, Octavia E. Butler, Eileen
Gunn, and Joe Haldeman—like their predecessors
took a left-leaning approach. As Dangerous Visions
points out, New Wave fiction “still had its astronauts
and interstellar explorers…now they could be found
psychologically crumbling under the physical and
mental pressure of space flight and directives of the
oppressive military bureaucratic apparatus behind it.”33
Plot continued to remain central, but the psychological
subtleties of character development and ambiguities
in how the story itself might be interpreted began to
reshape science fiction.
Photo by Markku Lappalainen, CC BY 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62390476
Cherie Dimaline, award-winning author of the young adult
novel The Marrow Thieves.
of Darkness (1969) as well as Joanna Russ’ often
overlooked but groundbreaking novel The Female Man
(1971), are threaded through much of the most recent
generation of SF novels, whether focused on climate
change or space exploration.37
By Dan Harasymchuk - CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64280806
By the mid-2010s, a rising cohort of writers took
SF center stage, receiving critical accolades and
achieving popular success. While many of these
writers were socialist to communist in their
politics,38 neo-reactionary conservative politics are
also among current trends.39 An infusion of diverse
and international voices, from baby boomer Kazuo
Ishiguro to millennial Rivers Solomon have taken up
SF as a means to re-examine and revise the racist and
colonialist underpinnings of much of the SF of the
Golden Age.40 In the United States, women of color,
such as Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemison, Nisi Shawl,
and Nnendi Orkorofor, have expanded the reach of SF,
following in the footsteps of African-American SF
author Octavia E. Butler.41
Solarpunk
Among the newest approaches in SF to the relationship
between humanity and technology is the subgenre of
solarpunk. Solarpunk features an optimistic vision
of a future where humanity and its technologies live
in balance with nature. According to the “Definitive
Guide to Solarpunk,” it is “an artistic, cultural
and political movement that encompasses the arts,
architecture, fashion and technology.”42
New Delivery Technologies, Inclusivity, and
Internationalism
Meanwhile, new delivery technologies from blogs
to podcasting continue to reshape the face of SF in
the twenty-first century. The internet offers a galaxy
of choices, and science fiction has continued to
expand, growing in inclusivity and internationalism.
Contemporary SF raises questions about established
modes of sustainability, identity structures, and
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SF author Nalo Hopkinson, photographed in 2007.
A willingness to take risks means health and
vitality in any artistic field. An unwillingness
to take risks means stagnation, death. To
view meaningfully the social, psychological,
and technological crises presented by the
particular illumination generated by the
forms and textures of speculative fiction, we
must encourage as much experimentation as
possible, so that this illumination will reach
beyond the boundary timid parents have tried
to prescribe for their vigorous children.45
Ongoing Debates on Defining the Genre
The definition of what is or is not properly SF remains
a point of contestation, with some purists insisting
that only those who identify as SF writers can
legitimately write it. Others want to widen the field to
include mainstream fantasy, horror, and spy fiction.
James Patrick Kelly and James Kessel assert that,
“[w]hile many minds remain closed, the walls that
separate the mainstream from science fiction are, in
fact, crumbling. The bankruptcy of the assertion that
mainstream novels set in the future can’t be science
fiction because they’re not written by science fiction
writers arises out of a kind of tribalism that does not
bear close scrutiny.”46 Nevertheless, tribalism has
not vanished entirely. Indeed, as Kelly and Kessel
point out, “the problem of defining science fiction is
one which its community of readers and writers has
struggled with for the last fifty years.”47 Even if some
of the walls have crumbled, the struggle over who can
or should define SF has continued. Recent debates have
at times become heated, political, and uncivil.48
Despite such conflicts, scientific inquiry has been
and will continue to be represented in literature as an
integral part of the human endeavor. With every fresh
discovery or invention of a new technology, science
alters reality. Before Galileo (1564−1642) discovered
that the Earth revolved around the sun, reality dictated
the opposite to be true. When Leonardo Da Vinci
(1452−1519) envisioned a human flying machine
Leonardo Da Vinci’s design for a flying machine, c. 1488.
centuries before the first helicopter was built, his
imagination paved the way for stories such as Edgar
Allan Poe’s “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans
Pfaall.”49 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein contemplated
alternative modes of human conception long before
the technology of in-vitro fertilization was used as a
medical procedure.50 As Kelly and Kessel explain,
“[l]iterature always reflects the values, experiences,
hopes, and fantasies of its creators, as well as the
society and groupings they are a part of.”51
While today STEM is often valued over the
humanities,52 language is intrinsic to any
understanding of science, technology, engineering, and
math. All these fields rely on language to convey forms
of knowledge, and each has its own mode of crafting a
narrative to accomplish that task.53 Without languages
and literature, none of these fields could operate.
SF provides an imaginative, fictional laboratory for
thought experiments about STEM and beyond.
The genre now known as science fiction was not
identified as one separate from the more general
categories of fiction or literature until the mid-
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governance.43 Offering fresh perspectives on
humanity’s histories of exclusion and discrimination,
novels such as Canadian Cherie Dimaline’s awardwinning young adult novel The Marrow Thieves
(2017), Tomi Adeyemi’s YA novel Children of Blood
and Bone (2018), and Micaiah Johnson’s The Space
Between Worlds (2020) rethink past injustices and
imagine future solutions.44 As Samuel Delany has said:
twentieth century.54 Science fiction author Theodore
Sturgeon described the emergence of science fiction
as a separate genre this way: “like the handle of a
suitcase…SF emerged from the body of literature in
general, and like the handle, would eventually merge
back into it,”55 although that prophecy has yet to come
to its fullest fruition. If the critical walls segregating
science fiction from mainstream fiction have always
been intellectually flimsy, no matter how often they are
torn down, new ones have appeared to take their place.
Emerson High School - Mckinney, TX
When Ursula K. Le Guin was awarded the 2014
National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters, it was for her
contribution to the entirety of American literature,
not just for her contribution to science fiction. Much
of her work is being republished in collected volumes
by the prestigious publishing house the Library of
America; to date the LOA has reissued Annals of the
Western Shores, Dangerous People: The Complete
Text of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Kesh Novella, an authorexpanded version of Always Coming Home with new
material and illustrations, The Hainish Novels &
Stories Volumes 1 and 2, Five Ways to Forgiveness,
and The Complete Orsinia.56 Le Guin is now regarded
as among the most important American writers of her
time, restricted neither by gender nor genre.57
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Section III
Kismet, a robot with rudimentary social skills. Real-world
applications for various forms of artificial intelligence are
growing exponentially.
CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6533149
CONCERNS ABOUT ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE
When we speak of technology in the twenty-first
century, what often leaps to mind is the burgeoning
field of artificial intelligence, or AI, alongside some
of its cyberworld playmates such as the metaverse
and virtual reality. At corporations and universities
alike, AI initiatives have spread like wildfire, while
real-world applications for various forms of artificial
intelligence are growing exponentially. But, as with
any new branch of technology or technological
application, there are potential downsides to these
initiatives, from the threat of illegal activities on the
dark web to concerns that AI, through its superior
capacity to process data, may take over or, if it became
sentient, might turn on humanity.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Our fascination with—and fear of—artificial
intelligence did not originate in the twenty-first
SF writer Arthur C. Clarke, photographed on the set of 2001:
A Space Odyssey in 1965. Clarke collaborated with Stanley
Kubrick to write the screenplay for the film.
By ITU Pictures - https://www.flickr.com/photos/itupictures/16636142906,
CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64344486
century. The threat of human-created machines
turning on their creators is at the heart of Stanley
Kubrick’s classic 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey,
based on the novel by SF author Arthur C. Clarke. The
movie features a powerful computer, the HAL 9000
(Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer),
which runs the spaceship Discovery. Discovery is
home to two conscious astronauts and three astronauts
in suspended animation for a long journey in space.
When HAL begins behaving oddly, the two conscious
astronauts, Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and
Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), go into a secure
location to discuss shutting HAL down. However,
HAL manages to lip-read their intentions and proceeds
to cut off the life support for the three Discovery
astronauts in suspended animation, killing them.
HAL then arranges for Poole’s death by cutting him
adrift in space. When Bowman goes out to rescue
Poole’s body, HAL gently tells Dave, who has asked
him to please open the pod-bay doors and let him back
in: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”58 HAL
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Ursula K. Le Guin and The Lathe of Heaven
(1971)
anyone can use to learn the basics of computing.61
Painting of Prometheus bringing fire to mankind, by Heinrich
Friedrich Füger.
has developed the capacity to set its own agenda. It has
become one of the infernal machines that Ursula K. Le
Guin will invoke in her novel The Lathe of Heaven. 59
While the Augmentor in Le Guin’s story is not AI or
a computer like HAL, it does represent the same fear
HAL does, namely the concern that a technology could
supersede, dominate, or destroy its maker.
TECHNOLOGY ANXIETY: FROM
PROMETHEUS TO FRANKENSTEIN
Machinery is not the only thing that the word
technology signifies. According to the MerriamWebster dictionary, technology refers to “the practical
application of knowledge especially in a particular area
(such as engineering).”60 Quill and fountain, rollerballs,
and ball points are all forms of writing technology. Any
tool that humans have invented as a practical application
of knowledge is a technology, from the basket in which
a person can collect tasty raspberries to the raspberry
pi, a low-cost, credit-card sized computer that almost
As punishment for Prometheus’ audacity, Zeus has
him chained to the Caucasus mountainside where an
eagle comes every day to eat out his liver; the liver
then grows back, and the eagle comes again and again,
for all eternity. Thus, while Prometheus’ deed gave
mankind access to knowledge and technologies that
would allow humans to create and use all sorts of
tools, giving humans dominion over all other living
creatures, the Titan’s punishment marks that gift as
an ambivalent one, as Mary Shelley well knew when
she subtitled her novel Frankenstein, A Modern
Prometheus. When Dr. Frankenstein usurps the ability
to create life from nature, he replicates the audacity
shown by the ancient Titan.63
TECHNOLOGY AS A DOUBLEEDGED SWORD
Wielding knowledge to create technology is often
represented as a double-edged sword, and there are
any number of stories, both fictional and real, that
contemplate the ups and downs of technological
advances. During the American Civil War, more
patents for new inventions were issued than ever before
in American history. But one of these inventions
significantly increased grievous war injuries and
fatalities. Adopted by the U.S. Army on August 21,
1866, the Gatling gun was the first rapid-fire repeating
gun. It was created by Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling, a
physician. It had six barrels revolving around a central
axis, and it proved both disfiguring and deadly.64
When the French scientist Pierre Curie and his Polishborn wife Marie Curie discovered the new radioactive
elements of radium and polonium, their discovery
allowed for the creation of the X-ray, a vital medical
technology that saved many a soldier’s life during
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Indeed, ever since humans invented tools, they’ve
also been anxious about them. The original Greek
mythological story of the Titan Prometheus is a
foundational tale in Western culture that explores and
explains the uneasy relationship between humanity and
technology. Prometheus, a staunch believer in mankind,
stole fire from the sun and gave it to humanity as “a
protection to men far better than anything else, whether
fur or feathers or strength or swiftness. And now,
though feeble, and short-lived, Mankind has flaming fire
and therefrom learns many crafts.”62
World War I. But long-term, unprotected exposure to
radioactivity resulted in Marie Curie’s death. Radiation
shut down her bone marrow, and she became fatally
anemic. Curie had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin,
as her body and many of her possessions will remain
radioactive for centuries.65
While harnessing atomic power gave humanity a new
energy source, it also allowed for the creation of the
atomic bomb during World War II. The devastation
of that weaponry became particularly evident in the
destruction wrought in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. The subsequent concern that nuclear
technology might terminate all of humankind remains
an active fear, as more and more nations develop
uranium enrichment programs or aspire to nuclear
military capabilities. The challenge such technology
poses to humanity is this: how do we achieve an
equilibrium, a balance between a gain and a loss, a right
and a wrong? How can humanity wield the technology it
creates while mitigating or undoing the potential harms?
technological device, the Augmentor. William Haber
is an oneirologist, or a dream-specialist, practicing in
Portland, Oregon, in the year 2002; his new patient,
George Orr (so named as the author’s nod to George
Orwell, the dystopian novelist who wrote 1984)66,
has been sent to Haber because Orr has become so
disturbed by his dreams that he’s been taking too many
pharmaceuticals to try to suppress them.
THE LATHE OF HEAVEN AND THE
THEME OF TECHNOLOGY AND
HUMANITY
Haber and Orr, Doctor and Patient
Reluctant at first to confide in his governmentappointed physician, Orr finally admits that he is
frightened because his dreams can alter reality:
Overview of The Lathe of Heaven
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven
takes up this longstanding question about humankind’s
uneasy relationship with the technologies it creates
by chronicling the struggle between a physician,
Dr. William Haber, and his patient, George Orr.
Their doctor-patient relationship is mediated by a
British author George Orwell inspired the name of George
Orr, Le Guin’s protagonist in The Lathe of Heaven.
“Well,” Orr said, speaking with some
determination, “I have had dreams that…
that affected the …non-dream world. The
real world.”
“We all have, Mr. Orr.”
Orr stared. The perfect straight man.
“The effect of the dreams of the just pre-
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Pierre and Marie Curie in their laboratory, c. 1904.
waking d-state on the general emotional
level of the psyche can be—”
But the straight man interrupted him.
“No, I don’t mean that.” And stuttering a
little, “What I mean is, I dreamed something,
and it came true.”67
Dr. Haber is naturally skeptical, but he does want to
help his new patient. Orr admits that what he’s said
about his dreaming “doesn’t make sense. But I have
got to have some explanation, or else face the fact that
I am insane.”68
The Augmentor
Dr. Haber invites Orr to try out a technological device
he has invented, a kind of dream-feedback machine
that he calls the “Dream Machine…or, prosaically, the
Augmentor; and what it’ll do for you is ensure that
you do go to sleep and that you dream—as briefly and
lightly, or as long and intensively, as we like.”69 At first,
the Augmentor offers Haber very little information.
There were none of the sigmoid jags he
looked for, the concomitant of certain
schizoid personality types. There was
nothing unusual about the total pattern,
except its diversity. A simple brain produces
a relatively simple jig-jog set of patterns
and is content to repeat them; this was not
a simple brain. Its motions were subtle
and complex, and the repetitions neither
frequent nor unvaried. The computer of the
Augmentor would analyze them, but until
he saw the analysis Haber could isolate no
singular factor except the complexity itself.70
As he works with Orr through the medium of the
Augmentor, Dr. Haber becomes aware that some
of Orr’s dreams do alter reality, even as the doctor
also attempts to persuade himself that such a thing
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An EEG showing brain waves during REM sleep.
is impossible. While the doctor is a witness to the
alteration in reality Orr’s dream performs, Haber
also thinks “[t]he man was sick. He must be cured.”71
Because Haber is physically beside Orr during the
changes the latter’s dreams enact—in other words
because he and Orr are physically at the center from
which the changes erupt out of Orr’s unconscious
mind—the two men both remember the first reality as
well as the new reality. As Orr explains to his lawyer, a
biracial72 woman named Heather Lelache:
As the novel progresses, Haber begins to use his
Augmentor to try to control Orr’s dreams, fine-tuning
the machine so that he can amplify the reality-altering
dreams. Since the world has been battered by nuclear
fall-out and is suffering from soaring population rates,
drastic levels of climate change, and major shortages of
resources and goods, Dr. Haber wants to alter this grim
reality and make the world a better place. As he muses
about what he is doing with Orr, Haber tells himself
things such as I “[h]ave to keep that up, keep the climate
improving,”74 even as he also spends time denying
that what he is doing is real. Despite this wavering,
Dr. Haber becomes determined to make Orr dream
according to Haber’s specific hypnotic commands.
As Haber pursues what arguably could be called a
utopian goal, his own life improves exponentially. He
becomes wealthier, his office spaces grow grander,
and his reputation and his power increase by leaps
and bounds. At one point, the President of the United
States, Albert M. Merdle—who oddly enough never
changes no matter how many other changes Orr’s
dreams enact—listens to Haber’s advice: “Haber saw
what must be done and would lead his country out of
the mess.”75 Haber will give the President the benefit of
his on-the-ground knowledge.
The Aldebaranians
The mess Haber must lead his country out of is,
ironically, a mess that he and Orr have made together.
Orr has created what first appears to be a hostile alien
invasion by creatures called the Aldebaranians, giant
A green sea turtle. In The Lathe of Heaven, the Aldebaranians
are giant sea-turtle-like aliens.
By Brocken Inaglory - CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4076471
sea-turtle-like aliens who seem to arrive as an enemy
of mankind, but who turn out to be peaceful and
beneficial. They also seem to embody two motifs Le
Guin uses from the beginning of the novel: the jellyfish
and the sea turtle. Orr originally dreamt the aliens up
in response to Haber’s desire for world peace. As Orr
reminds Haber, “[y]ou said, no killing of humans by
other humans. So, I dreamed up the Aliens.”76 Orr’s
dream took a shortcut by giving humanity a common,
non-human enemy against which to unite.
To stop the mess of an alien invasion, Haber has Orr
dream “peace, peace, dream that we are at peace with
everybody!” and so Orr re-makes the aliens over as
benign and friendly, although the novel leaves open the
possibility that the aliens had always been benign, and
that their attempt at first contact with humanity was
misapprehended as an invasion. Whatever the case may
be, George Orr urges Haber to use his inside knowledge
about the true nature of the aliens and his newfound
power as a famous scientist to influence Washington to
stop its military response to the Aldebaranians.
“Listen, couldn’t you call Washington?”
“What for?”
“Well, a famous scientist right here in the
middle of it all might get listened to. They’ll be
looking for explanations. Is there somebody
in the government you know, that you might
call? Maybe the HEW Minister? You could tell
him that the whole thing’s a misunderstanding,
the Aliens aren’t invading or attacking. They
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Each dream covers its tracks completely….
And nobody would be aware of anything new;
except me—and him. I keep the two memories
of the two realities. So does Dr. Haber. He’s
there at the moment of change and knows
what the dream’s about. He doesn’t admit that
he knows, but I know he does.73
simply didn’t realize until they landed that
humans depend on verbal communication.
They didn’t even know we thought we were at
war with them…. If you could tell somebody
who can get the President’s ear. The sooner
Washington can call off the military, the fewer
people will be killed here. It’s only civilians
getting killed. The Aliens aren’t hurting the
soldiers, they aren’t even armed, and I have
the impression that they’re indestructible in
those suits. But if somebody doesn’t stop the
Air Force, they’ll blow up the whole city. Give
it a try, Dr. Haber. They might listen to you.”77
Dreams are elusive things, they make their own reality,
they follow their own logic79—as Orr says to Haber,
“[y]ou’re trying to reach progressive, humanitarian
goals with a toll that isn’t suited to the job. Who has
humanitarian dreams?”80 While Haber gives George Orr
rational hypnotic suggestions about improving the lot
of humanity, Orr’s dreams invariably “take shortcuts,”81
which produce unintended consequences. A dreaming
mind is not a rational one—it is a place full of darkness,
monsters, ghosts, and phantasmatic powers.
Thus, while Orr’s dreams accomplish whatever Haber’s
hypnotic suggestions have asked of him, they do so by
making radical dreamland solutions, frustrating Haber
at every turn, until Haber perfects the Augmentor to
the point that he can transfer Orr’s gift to himself.
By so doing, Haber thinks he can become a superior
Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes’s The Dream, 1883.
dreamer to Orr because he is a “suitable, trained,
prepared subject…Nothing will be left to chance,
to random impulse, to irrational narcissistic whim.
There will be none of this tension between our will to
nihilism and my will to progress, your Nirvana wishes
and my conscious, careful planning for the good of
all.”82 Through the Augmentor, Dr. Haber believes he
will achieve what George Orr has not.
The problem with this plan is William Haber
himself. As Orr understands, nothing about Haber is
“genuine.”83 He is a manipulative liar, a man who “was
like an onion, slip off layer after layer of personality,
belief, response, infinite layers, no end to them, no
center to him. Nowhere that he ever stopped, had to
stop, had to say, ‘Here I stay!’ No being, only layers;”84
and “Haber was incapable of sincerity because he was
lying to himself.”85 Haber’s inability to empathize
with others, to be compassionate or sincere—“the
emptiness of Haber’s being”86 —is a conduit that
will lead directly to global nonexistence and chaos.
When Haber hooks himself up to the Augmentor,
his unconscious nothingness funnels the chaos of his
non-being into reality, and so the world begins to come
undone, to melt “like Jell-O left out in the sun,”87 to
hurdle toward the abyss of unbeing.
The Trope of the Infernal Machine
As Lelache jokingly says to George Orr, Dr. Haber
is the quintessential “Mad Scientist with his Infernal
Machine.”88 The trope of an “infernal machine” is one
that has a long history in science fiction. In 1870, for
example, the famous submarine the Nautilus debuted in
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Lelache, Orr, and the Unintended Consequences
of Dreams
When Haber accepts Orr’s advice, the two men seem
to have formed an uneasy partnership. But in fact,
George Orr has been trying and is still trying to escape
the doctor’s grasp. Once Orr becomes convinced that
Haber isn’t trying to cure him, he consults a lawyer,
Heather Lelache. While she doubts his claim that his
dreams alter reality, Lelache is suspicious that Dr.
Haber may be illegally experimenting on Orr, so she
agrees to accompany him to a session. During that
session, while attempting to follow Haber’s hypnotic
suggestion that overpopulation is a problem, Orr
dreams away six billion lives. He commits “[t]he
murder of six billion nonexistent people.”78 And during
this session gone awry, Lelache discovers, as Haber
did, that Orr’s dreams do change reality. Shaken, she,
too, denies the evidence of her senses. A dream can’t
do what she just saw a dream do, can it?
Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
although the technological concept of a submarine had
been dreamt up by humanity as far back as the sixteenth
century. The Time Machine in H. G. Wells’ 1896 novel
of the same name is another such infernal machine.
Since then, many SF infernal machines have taken the
shape of humanity as automata, robots, androids, or
AI. And while the first use of the word “robot” was in
Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)
in 1920, perhaps the most famous early twentiethcentury depiction of a robot can be found in the 1927
German expressionist SF silent film Metropolis. Set in
a dystopian future, the film features a stylized, female
robot who is transformed into the likeness of a human
woman with terrible consequences.89
The trope of the infernal machine also appears in some
nineteenth-century tales about technology, such as
Herman Melville’s 1855 short story “The Paradise of
Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” and Ambrose
Bierce’s 1899 story “Moxon’s Master.” Both stories
ask the reader whether technology is beneficial or if
it dehumanizes humankind. This question becomes a
pressing ethical one with regard to the development of
robotics and artificial intelligence. If or when humans
decide that a machine has become sentient, what will
be the consequences of that decision? If a machine has
or can develop a mind of its own, does it not also have
civil rights? When does a machine become a human?
If a machine can think for itself, if we force it to do
work it doesn’t want to do, is this akin to slavery?
SF author Isaac Asimov created a code of conduct for robots
that he called the three laws of robotics.
In the twenty-first century, self-driving cars are among
the most sophisticated, commercially viable artificial
intelligence machines in existence so far, but no one
has viably made the claim that they are sentient. And
yet the advent of a truly self-aware machine seems
imminent. So, what will a self-aware cybernetic
structure mean for humanity? Many nation states and
governing bodies are already asking the same sorts
of ethical questions about animal lives and about the
earth itself. Is a whale sentient? They do communicate
with one another. If primates can be taught sign
language, are they sentient? Can an ocean or a river be
classified as a living being? If humanity does decide
that a whale or a river is a sentient being with civil
rights of its own, how can humanity redefine an ethical
system that would include such beings?
These ethical questions feed back into human fears
that technology or technological devices might
supplant human beings altogether. In her 1944 novella
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A scene from Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal
Robots) in which the robots break into a factory.
The controversial SF author Isaac Asimov famously
grappled with many of these same questions in the first
novel of his robot series, I, Robot (1950), which was
inspired by a 1939 short story of the same title written
by Eando Binder.91 Before Asimov wrote I, Robot, he
created—in a 1942 short story—the following code of
conduct for robots, which he called the three laws of
robotics:
One, a robot may not injure a human being
or, through inaction, allow a human being
to come to harm….Two…a robot must obey
orders given it by human beings except where
such orders would conflict with the First
Law…Three, a robot must protect its own
existence as long as such protection does not
conflict with the First or Second Law.92
SF author Philip K. Dick examined these same
questions in detail in his 1968 novel Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? which was later made into
the 1982 film Bladerunner. In both the novel and the
film, androids that have gone rogue try to blend in
with humanity. They are ruthlessly hunted down and
retired.93 Expiration or destruction of the sentient
machine, robot, android, or AI, either by its maker or by
the authorities, is a common ending to such stories. At
times, the infernal machine destroys itself out of despair.
Sometimes the robot may endure, but often it is dogged
by questions about the meaning of its existence, as
was the popular character Data on the 1980s Star Trek
television spin-off Star Trek: Next Generation.94
Can a machine have a soul? People often talk about
their technological devices as if they had the capacity
for living by saying things like “my phone died” or
“my computer died.” We call our ships and other sorts
of vessels “she” and “her,” just as Dr. Haber calls his
Augmentor his Baby. Some of us talk to smart home
devices. In the early twenty-first century, technological
devices have become so woven into the fabric of daily
life that few of us can imagine doing without them.
The Contrasting Characters of Orr
and Haber
While the technology of the Augmentor plays an
important role in mediating the struggle between
George Orr and William Haber, in the end what
matters more to the outcome of that struggle are
the personalities and beliefs of the two characters.
When Haber at last dispenses with Orr and uses the
Augmentor on himself, the doctor’s lack of empathy—
“the unbeing at the center of William Haber”95—
begins to destroy the world. It is the Augmentor that
also enables Orr to end the disintegrating madness:
Orr pulled away the electrodes whose wires
ran like threadworms between Haber’s skull
and the Augmentor. He looked at the machine,
its cabinets all standing open; it should be
destroyed, he thought. But he had no idea how
to do it, nor any will to try. Destruction was
not his line; and a machine is more blameless,
more sinless even than any animal. It has no
intentions whatsoever but our own.96
This observation—that a machine is more blameless
than any animal—is a rare one in tales about the
relationship between technology and humanity. To
claim that a technological device like the Augmentor
cannot be assigned guilt flies in the face of any
fear that a technology might take over or annihilate
humanity. According to Le Guin, technology is a tool,
no more and no less. The actions of a machine are the
result of human intent, and so the relation between
humanity and the technology it invents is not a power
struggle but an expression of humanity’s intentions.
Therefore, what becomes more crucial than technology
in The Lathe of Heaven is the difference between
George Orr and William Haber. Orr and Haber model
two opposing approaches to conducting a human
life and represent Le Guin’s understanding of the
difference between Western (Haber) and Eastern (Orr)
tenets of philosophy. While the novel sees some value
in both the East and the West, it ultimately finds more
value in Eastern philosophies, such as Buddhism
and Taoism97, than those of Western culture, such as
Cartesian philosophy, to name one.98
William Haber is a rationalist and a scientist, a man
of action, who naturally takes charge of any situation.
He believes in utility and in consequentialism.99 He
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“No Woman Born,” SF author C.L. Moore explored the
possibility that an artificial body might replace the frail
human one. Deirdre, a famous actress, nearly dies in
a stage fire, but her brain is saved and implanted into
a beautifully designed and powerful mechanical body.
But what will happen to her humanity? Can a human
brain be successfully wedded to a cybernetic body, or
will the mechanism she now inhabits take over?90
embodies the Cartesian formulation “I think therefore I
am”100 —Haber is represented as all mind and no heart,
all common sense but no sensibility. Haber’s initial
response to George Orr is a telling one. Haber thinks
Orr is passive and “recognized in himself a protective/
bullying reaction toward this physically slight and
compliant man. To dominate, to patronize him was so
easy as to be almost irresistible.”101
“You are alone in the jungle, in the Mato
Grosso, and you find a native woman lying
on the path, dying of snakebite. You have
serum in your kit, plenty of it, enough to cure
thousands of snakebites. Do you withhold it
because ‘this is the way it is’—do you ‘let
her be?’
“It would depend,” Orr said.
“Depend on what?”
“Well…I don’t know. If reincarnation
is a fact, you might be keeping her from a
better life and condemning her to live out
a wretched one. Perhaps you cure her and
she goes home and murders six people in
the village. I know you’d give her the serum,
because you have it and feel sorry for her.
But you don’t know whether what you’re
doing is good or evil or both….”104
Haber believes in the utilitarian claim that the only
ethical choice is the one with the greatest good. So,
while he concedes that eighty-five percent of the
time he doesn’t know “what the hell I’m doing with
this screwball brain of yours, and you don’t either,
but we’re doing it—so, can we get on with it?”105 his
impatience leads him to dismiss Orr’s alternative view
of morality. Haber continues to see Orr as weak and as
a tool for his stronger, more masculine, and Westernleaning rationalist approach.
Likewise, at first Heather Lelache sees Orr as “[a] born
Title page of “Principia philosophiae” (Principles of
Philosophy), by René Descartes 1656. In The Lathe of Heaven,
William Haber represents the views of Cartesian philosophy.
victim…revoltingly simple.”106 In fact, both the doctor
and the lawyer see Orr as weak because Western culture
favors strength and action over stillness and reflection.
Haber sneers, “[y]ou’re of a peculiarly passive outlook
for a man brought up in the Judeo-Christian-Rationalist
West. A sort of natural Buddhist. Have you ever studied
the Eastern mysticisms, George?”107 Orr answers that
he has not, although he does say that “it’s wrong to
force the pattern of things. It won’t do. It’s been our
mistake for a hundred years.”108 Unlike Haber, George
Orr is a dreamer, someone who believes in humankind’s
participation in an interconnected universe:
Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe
were a machine, where every part has a useful
function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I
don’t know if our life has a purpose, and I
don’t see that it matters. What does matter is
that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a
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Haber finally sees Orr for who he really is: “Haber
looked down at him, really looked at him for a moment,
and saw him. He seemed to recoil, as a man might who
thought to push aside a gauze curtain and found it to
be a granite door.”102 Nonetheless, Haber still believes
that his patient is “a moral jellyfish.”103 However,
Orr’s moral compass is simply different than Haber’s.
This difference is exemplified through the following
utilitarian, humanitarian conundrum Haber presents to
Orr:
grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What
we do is like wind blowing on the grass.109
And that’s precisely what happens. Haber, dreaming,
dreams up “the presence of absence: an unquantifiable
entity without qualities, into which all things fell and
from which nothing came forth. It was horrible, and
it was nothing. It was the wrong way.”111 At this late
stage in the novel, Orr and Haber trade places. If, at
the outset, Orr fears he might be insane, by the end,
Haber goes insane. If, at the outset, Orr appears to
have no willpower when compared to Haber, by the
end it is Orr’s concentrated will that rescues the world
from Haber’s dream-act of annihilation:
By the power of will, which is indeed great
when exercised in the right way at the right
time, George Orr found beneath his feet the
hard marble of the steps…[and]…entered
the eye of the nightmare…. The emptiness
of Haber’s being, the effective nightmare,
radiating outward from the dreaming brain,
had undone connections…. Chaos had entered
in.”112
Summoning the strength to act so that he can save the
fast-unbecoming world, Orr “pressed a button. It took
the entire willpower, the accumulated strength of my
entire existence, to press one damned OFF button,”113
but he does, and when he does, “the world re-existed.
It was not in good condition, but it was there.”114
Activity versus Passivity
The Lathe of Heaven makes a powerful argument
not only about the relationship between technology
and humanity, but also about how the passive and the
active are intertwined like the Taoist symbol of the
The Yin and Yang symbol is a visual depiction of the intertwined
duality of all things in nature, a common theme in Taoism and
one that Le Guin addresses in The Lathe of Heaven.
Yin-Yang.115 Le Guin’s novel expresses the view that
humanity should seek connections more than it should
take actions. The Lathe of Heaven posits that the West
has overvalued action to the detriment of human life.
Like its principal character, George Orr, the novel values
a fine-tuned balance, which is represented in miniature
by Orr’s ability as a designer of kitchen wares.
After the world recovers from Haber’s destructive
dreaming, people go on with their lives. Over the
course of the various, chaotic disjunctions in reality,
Orr’s attorney, Heather Lelache, becomes his wife.
However, she vanishes in the Haberian chaos when
the gray people Orr dreamt up to forestall racism
disappear. Grieving his lost gray wife, Orr runs into
Lelache in a kitchen shop, owned and operated by an
alien, E’nememen Asfah, where Orr has been working
as a designer.
Lelache, who in this reality is biracial again, is looking
at an egg whisk she’s interested in purchasing. Seeing
her handling the tool, Orr says: “‘Do you, do you like
that? I designed it.’ He took another egg whisk from
the bin and displayed it to her. ‘Good balance, see. And
it works fast. They usually make the wires too taut, or
too heavy, except in France’.”116 Through this simple
item of a cooking utensil, Le Guin shows us that the
tools our technologies provide us with should be made
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Orr is attuned to connections and to dreaming while
Haber enacts change. Haber believes in rational,
conscious control. And while the novel concedes
that there should be a dialectical rather than a binary
relationship between the active and the passive, the
novel validates Orr’s perspective more than Haber’s.
As Orr muses, in Haber’s view “[n]o one else, no thing
even, has an existence of its own for him; he sees the
world only as a means to his end. It doesn’t make any
difference if his end is good; means are all we’ve got…
He can’t accept, he can’t let be, he can’t let go. He is
insane….He could take us all with him, out of touch, if
he did manage to dream as I do.”110
with balance and care, even a tool as simple and as
ordinary as an egg whisk. Technology should be used
to benefit humankind, not to promote violence or result
in mass destruction.
THE BIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT OF
THE LATHE OF HEAVEN: URSULA
K. LE GUIN’S LIFE
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in Berkeley,
California, on October 21, 1929 (St. Ursula’s Day) to
Alfred Louis Kroeber and his second wife, Theodora
Covel Kracaw Brown. She was the youngest of
four children and the Kroebers’ only daughter. Her
father, Alfred, had been born in 1876 in Hoboken,
New Jersey, and did his doctorate at Columbia
College under the direction of the by-then famous
anthropologist Franz Boas in 1901. Kroeber moved
to Berkeley to create a museum and a department of
anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley,
where he taught until he retired in 1946. Le Guin’s
mother, Theodora Covel Kracaw Brown Kroeber,
was born in 1897 in Denver, Colorado. She earned a
master’s degree in clinical psychology at UC Berkeley
in 1920 and married Clifton Spencer Brown that
same year. The couple had two boys together before
Clifton Spencer Brown died in 1923. In that same year,
Theodora began taking classes from Kroeber, and the
two married in 1926. After all four of her children
were grown, Theodora Kroeber became a wellestablished author.117
Le Guin’s Parents and Ishi
While Professor Kroeber and his wife were known
in their time as intellectuals and as authors, the pair
became most famous for their troubled and troubling
relationship to the last surviving California Yahi Indian,
a nameless man who was known only as Ishi, which is
the Yahi word for “man.” Ishi’s people were a subgroup
of a tribe called the Yana and had lived near the foothills
of Mount Lassen for several thousand years before the
arrival of white settlers. Most of the Yahi were killed by
settler militia in the early part of the nineteenth century.
In 1908, a tiny surviving settlement was found by some
surveyors, who looted it. Two of the Yahi—Ishi and his
mother—fled from the looters. Ishi’s mother lived with
Ishi until she died. Ishi then lived by himself for three
years until he was found half-starved in a nearby corral
in August 1911.
Ishi, the last known member of the Yahi tribe, with
anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, who was Ursula K. Le
Guin’s father.
Imprisoned by the local sheriff as an indigent, Ishi
was held in jail until Kroeber and his colleague
Thomas Waterman visited him, determined that he
was a member of the Yahi tribe, and had him released
into their custody. They took him to the University
of California’s Museum of Anthropology in San
Francisco, where he was given a job as a janitor.
What followed this act of intervention was by all
accounts a well intended, but in historical retrospect
an uneven, friendship between the indigenous man
and the professor, who also saw Ishi as a source of
information—a means by which to try to preserve
some of the vanishing California Indian way of life.
Why Ishi was not allowed to meet with or live with
other native peoples who might have taken him in
is not clear; he went to the museum and spent the
rest of his short life there, performing rituals and
demonstrating how his people had once lived, worked,
and crafted. Ishi died of tuberculosis in 1916.
As an older man, Kroeber referred to his time with Ishi
as painful, and he rarely spoke about those years; when
enjoined to write about it, he deferred to his second
wife’s skills as a writer, and so Theodora Kroeber
became the author of two biographies: Ishi in Two
Worlds (1961) and Ishi, Last of His Tribe (1964), which
is a children’s version of the first book. Having married
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Le Guin’s Parents
Alfred Kroeber in 1926, ten years after Ishi had died,
Theodora had never met the subject of her biographies.
While she began reading academic accounts of Ishi’s
life in 1959, she relied on her husband for much of her
material. When Ishi in Two Worlds was published the
year after Alfred Kroeber died, the book became a
sensation and was hailed as instant classic.
Nevertheless, in 2021 the University of California at
Berkeley removed the name of Kroeber from Kroeber
Hall, the home of the Anthropology Department. The
university did so as a gesture meant to build a better
future with the native peoples of the state and as a sign
that the university now recognizes its own complicity
with genocidal policies. Of Ishi, Le Guin wrote, “[he]
died thirteen years before I was born. I can’t remember
even hearing his name until the late fifties, when a
biography of him became first a subject of family
conversation and then the consuming object of my
mother’s work and thought for several years.”119
Le Guin’s Upbringing
By Le Guin’s own account, she had a loving
upbringing in beautiful settings. The Kroeber home in
the Berkeley hills at 1325 Arch Street was once named
Semper Virens (Always Green) and had been designed
by the famous Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck.120
It is a classic piece of architectural art, constructed
equally of redwood and of light. Le Guin often stated
that she’d been raised on the inside of a stunning piece
of art, which is a hard thing to forget or outgrow.121
In the spring, after Berkeley was no longer in session,
the Kroeber family would load up their car and drive
out to Napa Valley, where they had a forty-acre ranch
named Kishamish, which would become the fertile
setting for Le Guin’s 1985 novel Always Coming
Home. As she says in the documentary film by Arwen
Curry, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, this Napa Valley
A room in Le Guin’s childhood home in the Berkeley hills. Le
Guin often stated that she’d been raised in a stunning
piece of art.
Photography: maybeckarchitecture.com
home was heaven for an introvert, and much of her
imagination was formed by the hours she spent
wandering and playing in the stark and beautiful Napa
Valley landscape.122 Although the Le Guin family
would later live in a comfortable Victorian home in
the hills of Northwest Portland near one of the largest
urban parks in the country (Forest Park), this rambling
ranch home of Kishamish in the Napa Valley, rural
and removed, remained a retreat for Le Guin for most
of her adult life, as did the beach cottage the family
bought in Cannon Beach, Oregon.123
Le Guin’s home environment was culturally rich.
Visitors to both Kroeber homes—Semper Virens
as well as the ranch house, Kishamish—included
colleagues, friends, and students and made up a large
part of Kroeber family life. Among these visitors were
two Indian or Native American men, friends of her
father, the Papago Juan Dolores and the Yurok Robert
Spott. Le Guin wrote about these two men in an essay/
lecture called “Indian Uncles.” “Indian Uncles” offers
a brief glimpse into Le Guin’s childhood. In this piece,
Le Guin says she shares her father’s “incapacity for
reminiscence. I am much better making things up than
at remembering them”124 and notes:
[p]eople should not use other people. My
memories of these two Native American
friends are hedged with caution and
thorned with fear. What, after all, did I or
do I understand about them? When I knew
them, what did I know about them, about
their political or their individual situation?
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However, Ishi’s plight as well as the Kroebers’ roles
in his life have since become the subject of debate
and controversy, with some now regarding what the
Kroebers did as the usurpation and appropriation of
an indigenous man’s voice; the couple are regarded
by some as complicit with the exploitation of the
California indigenous peoples. Le Guin insisted that
her father’s friendships “with Indians were that:
friendships. Beginning in collaborative work, based
on personal liking and respect, they involved neither
patronization nor co-optation.”118
Nothing.125
Le Guin’s Adult Life
After Le Guin graduated from Berkeley High school
in 1947 (one of her fellow classmates was the SF author
Philip K. Dick, although the two never met, or if they
did, neither remembered the occasion although they
did later correspond130), she attended Radcliffe rather
than the University of California because her father was
teaching on a one-year appointment at Harvard. She
later received an M.A. in Renaissance French and Italian
language and literature from Columbia, her father’s
alma mater. Le Guin received a Fulbright scholarship
to study in France, and she met her future husband,
Charles Le Guin, in transit aboard the Queen Mary; in
December of 1953, they were married in Paris.
Upon returning to the states, the Le Guins settled
in Moscow, Idaho, where Charles took a post as an
assistant professor of French history. Shortly thereafter,
Charles was offered a job at Portland State University
in Oregon, so the couple moved to Portland in 1958,
where they lived for over sixty years, raising their three
children and having the pleasure of four grandchildren.
Like the Kroeber household, the Le Guin household
was a warm, welcoming place for other writers,
artists, students, and friends with whom the Le Guins
explored the martial art of tai chi together or had lively
debates about current events.131
In 2018, Le Guin died in her home of natural causes
at the age of eighty-nine, leaving behind one of the
most richly diverse bodies of literary work in the
Ursula K. Le Guin, photographed in 1995.
Copyright © by Marian Wood Kolisch
United States. During her lifetime, Le Guin often said
to friends or students that she’d “never wanted to be a
writer. I just was one; it’s what I did,”132 but publishing
what she wrote proved a more difficult matter. Aside
from a few poems in small literary magazines, initially
she couldn’t find a more prominent publisher for her
writing. Editors such as the legendary Alfred Knopf
(a friend of Alfred Kroeber) praised her skill, but no
editor seemed to know how to market her work.
Le Guin’s Writing
It wasn’t until Le Guin was in her thirties and decided
to send short stories to SF magazines that she began to
find an audience. Along with her short fiction—which
started appearing in magazines like Amazing Stories—
her earliest novels—Rocannon’s World (1966), Planet
of Exile (1966), and City of Illusions (1967), which she
later incorporated into the Hainish world or cycle—
began to build her popularity. In 1968, A Wizard of
Earthsea was published, and it would go on to become
a globally beloved bestseller, the first book in what
would become six Earthsea books, five novels and a
collection of short stories, written across the entirety of
her career, from 1968 to 2001.
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What follows this are the tender and lively
recollections of a child “brought up in great security”
who wasn’t “very aware of love, as I suppose fish aren’t
very aware of water. That’s the way it ought to be,
love as air, love as the human element.”126 Le Guin’s
representation of herself is that of a playful child who
was unaware of the darker things in life, such as Ishi’s
terrible vulnerability and “tragic solitude”127 or her
Uncle Indian Juan Dolores’ mugging on a street in
Oakland.128 Another friend of the family was J. Robert
Oppenheimer, the renowned nuclear physicist and
one of the engineers of the atomic bomb. Later, in her
novel The Dispossessed, Le Guin would fashion the
protagonist Shevek, the Annarresti physicist, after
Oppenheimer. As Le Guin often stated, she grew up
around both writers and scientists, and she knew how a
scientist’s mind worked.129
of the story. The Lathe of Heaven (1971) won the Locus
Award for best novel. The Dispossessed (1975) won
both the Hugo and Nebula, as well as the Locus Award.
In 1972, the second novel of the Earthsea Cycle, The
Tombs of Atuan, was selected as a Newberry Honor
Book by the American Library Association; the third
Earthsea book, The Farthest Shore, won the National
Book Award for Children’s Literature in 1973.
Le Guin photographed at a reading in 2008.
By Gorthian - CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31670340
In 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness was published to
instant acclaim, and of that acclaim Le Guin has said:
The Nebula and Hugo Awards for that book
come to me as validation when I most needed
it. They proved that among my fellow writers
of science fiction, who vote for the Nebula,
and its readers, who vote for the Hugo, I had
an audience who did recognize what I was
doing and why, and for whom I could write
with confidence that they’d let me sock it to
them. That’s as valuable a confirmation as an
artist can receive. I’d always been determined
to write what and as I chose, but now that
determination felt less like challenging the
opposition, and more like freedom.133
Among the first SF novels to speculate about the
potentially fungible nature of gender and gender
identity, The Left Hand of Darkness marks a turning
point in Le Guin’s career not only because it won
awards, but also because of the density and complexity
Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985), which is
perhaps her most unusual and ambitious novel, is set
in a future California. It involved collaboration with a
geologist, an artist, and a composer, and the original
hardcover version of it was published with a cassette
tape of music by the Kesh—a society portrayed in the
novel. Always Coming Home won the Janet Heidinger
Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman and
was a runner up for the National Book Award. In 2008,
Le Guin’s novel Lavinia, a retelling of the Aeneid from
the point of view of the hero’s second wife Lavinia,
won the Locus Award.
Le Guin’s Influence and Critical
Reception
A consummate teacher, Le Guin attended and led
many workshops both in the United States and abroad
throughout her career, with many of her students going
on to have long and distinguished SF or academic
careers of their own.134 Her handbook Steering the
Craft, first published in 1998 and revised in 2015, has
become an essential tool for many writers. Le Guin
went on writing, blogging, giving talks, and meeting
with her poetry group until her death.
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Le Guin attended and led many workshops throughout her
career and continued writing, blogging, giving talks, and
meeting with her poetry group until her death.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE
LATHE OF HEAVEN: FROM THE
ATOMIC BOMB TO ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE
Ursula K. Le Guin’s personal biography is a part of the
larger historical narrative of the mid-to-late twentieth
century. So, it is perhaps unsurprising that Le Guin’s
fictional works are deeply connected to many of the
historical events of the twentieth century. These events
include World War II, the Holocaust, and the use of
the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which
ended that war; the subsequent Cold War between the
Soviet Union and the United States and the race to
space between those two nations during the 1950s and
60s; the wars in Korea and Vietnam; and the fall of
the consolidated USSR and the later reemergence of
Russia as a global power in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries.
Le Guin’s Work and Feminism
Le Guin’s work was ahead of its time and was not
always well received in the historical moment in which
it emerged.135 In retrospect, she was prescient, daring,
and acute. And although her entire body of work can’t
be tied directly to the historical events of her lifetime,
some individual works can. For example, the second
American Women’s Movement, often called Second
Wave Feminism, which began in the 1960s, influenced
Le Guin’s groundbreaking novel The Left Hand of
Darkness. The novel, she said, was inspired by two
things, an image of two people pulling an ice sledge
across a vast expanse of ice and a simple question:
what does it mean to be male or female?
The 25th anniversary edition of Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand
of Darkness, a book influenced by Second Wave Feminism.
Although Le Guin had an often fraught and uneven
relationship with feminism over the years, feminism
influenced her later Earthsea novels, such as
Tehanu and The Other Wind, as well as her 2008
novel Lavinia, in which Le Guin gives a voice to a
female character who was originally mute. During
the height of Second Wave Feminism, Le Guin was
part of a cohort of new female voices that entered
the hitherto mostly white, male-dominated field of
SF. These authors included the controversial Alice
or Allie Sheldon, who first published under the male
pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., but who also published
under her real name and under the name of Racoona
Sheldon,136 as well as writers such as Joanna Russ,
Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, Vonda N. McIntyre,
Elizabeth Lynn, and Kate Wilhelm, to name a few.
Moral Issues of the Cold War Era
Le Guin’s 1968 The Word for World is Forest depicts
“some of the moral issues of the Vietnam War”137
including the devastation and deforestation wrought
by the United States’ use of chemical weapons such as
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By the end of her productive career, Le Guin had
received a National Book Award, seven Hugo Awards,
six Nebula Awards, the Howard Vursell Award of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/
Malamud Award, and the National Book Foundation
Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American
Letters (2014). In 2000, she was named a Living Legend
by the Library of Congress, and in 2016 she joined the
short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes
by the Library of America. Three of Le Guin’s books
have been finalists for the American Book Award and
the Pulitzer Prize. Her body of work includes twentythree novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven
volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books, five essay
collections, and four works of translation.
children of those responsible for melting it.”138 Le Guin
depicts a world where raging firestorms destroy whole
communities and examines the cascading problems
caused by climate change, shrinking natural resources,
pollution, and overpopulation.
Oppenheimer (left) and Leslie Groves, Director of the
Manhattan Project, in September 1945 at the remains of
the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico. The character
of Shevek in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed was modeled on
Oppenheimer.
Agent Orange. As previously mentioned, the character
of Shevek in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed was modeled
on the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom she
remembered from her childhood as a friend of the
family. The novel, however, is not a recollection, but
rather a meditation on the tensions of the Cold War.
The novel addresses not only events that are based on
past human rights atrocities, but also ongoing human
rights violations, such as execution and torture.
Concerns about Ecological Catastrophe
The ongoing fear of the seeming inevitability of
nuclear war and nuclear winter—as well as Le Guin’s
thoughts about “dreaming…ecological catastrophe, and
Taoist ideas of inaction and integrity”—influenced the
composition of The Lathe of Heaven. The novel also
explores Le Guin’s nascent and prescient awareness
that global warming would eventually cause “the
ice of Antarctica” to fall “softly on the heads of the
While Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985)
imagines a California inhabited by a future people
called the Kesh and doesn’t seem to be tied directly
to any one historical event, the novel does call into
question issues of recycling, sustainability, and
ecological resource management. Always Coming
Home also questions the idea that technology is
tantamount to progress and that technological progress
is inevitable—issues that have remained relevant well
into the twenty-first century.
THE LATHE OF HEAVEN: CAST OF
CHARACTERS
There are only three main human characters who
drive the plot of The Lathe of Heaven—George Orr,
Dr. William Haber, and Heather Lelache. In addition,
there is the minor character of Mannie Ahrens, George
Orr’s landlord/elevator guard, and there are also the
alien Aldebaranian characters of Tiua’k Ennbe and
E’nememen Asfah, who play central roles in bringing
about the novel’s resolution. While it is not clear that
it was either one of the two aliens who handed Orr
the key to his situation—the all-important phrase that
“Perception is difficult. Volcanoes emit fire. Help is
offered: refusably. Snakebite serum is not prescribed
for all. Before following directions leading in wrong
directions, auxiliary forces may be summoned, in
immediate-following fashion: Er’ perrehnne!”140 —
what is clear is that the aliens do hold that key, and it
is only through their intervention that George Orr can
deal with Dr. Haber.
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The Lathe of Heaven also considers the potential for
recurrent waves of deadly or disabling diseases, such
as kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition caused by a
lack of protein and insufficient nutrients in one’s diet.
Kwashiorkor is mostly found in young children; as a
medic in The Lathe of Heaven explains: “You know
there’s two hundred sixty kids in the complex suffering
from kwashiorkor? All low-income or Basic Support
families, and they aren’t getting protein…Ah, the
hell with it. I go give ‘em Vitamin C shots and try to
pretend that starvation is just scurvy.”139
George Orr
George Orr is described in the following manner by
Dr. Haber:
George Orr is the novel’s protagonist. Orr is a man
whose appearance leads William Haber and Heather
Lelache to underestimate him. But Orr is iahklu’
according to the aliens, which means that he has an
unconscious, powerful gift. His effective dreams can
change reality. In April of 1998, Orr says that the
world ended in a global nuclear war. As he is dying of
radiation poisoning, he has a dream:
I dreamed about being home. I woke up and
I was all right. I was in bed at home. Only it
wasn’t any home I’d ever had, the other time,
the first time. […] I’ve told myself ever since
that it was a dream. That it was a dream!
But it wasn’t. This is. This isn’t real. This
world isn’t even probable. It was the truth.
It was what happened. We are all dead, and
we spoiled the world before we died. There is
nothing left. Nothing but dreams.142
In an unconscious act of self-preservation, Orr
remakes the shattered world; as he is dying in a world
devastated by nuclear catastrophe, his dream creates
a new version of that world and seemingly preserves
his life—though Orr questions whether this world and
his consciousness of it is real or a dream. By 2002, Orr
can no longer bear the enormous responsibility of his
gift—his ability to change reality through his dreams.
He tries to stop dreaming altogether by using a toxic
combination of drugs to suppress dreaming, but this
nearly kills him. The medic who brings him out of his
drug-induced delirium must report him to the police,
which prompts the state of Oregon to send Orr to
William Haber, a dream specialist.
As a character, George Orr is a conundrum. Did
The atomic cloud over Nagasaki, 1945. In The Lathe of
Heaven, the world is in ruins from a global nuclear war until
George Orr is able to remake it via his dreams.
the world really destroy itself in 1998? Did Orr’s
effective dreaming bring the world back from its own
self-inflicted oblivion? Orr is the only person who
remembers the world as it was before a global nuclear
conflict. So, was that catastrophe real? Or was it
Orr’s nightmare only? George Orr is either the most
powerful man on earth or he’s insane. In frustration,
Heather Lelache thinks of him as “Mr. Either Orr”143
although she does come to see him as “the strongest
person she had ever known…her tower of strength.”144
Orr functions as an unreliable narrator—we only
have his word for the nuclear destruction of the entire
world. Orr also functions as an anti-hero. He lacks the
traditional attributes of a hero as defined by Western
culture, yet he saves the world. Haber concludes that
Orr is “[b]oth, neither. Either, or. Where there’s an
opposed pair, a polarity, you’re in the middle; where
there’s a scale, you’re at the balance point.”145 For
Haber, this means Orr is in a state of self-cancellation.
He’s a nothing. But for Lelache, Orr is “the being who,
being nothing but himself, is everything.”146
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Clothing ordinary, office-worker standard;
haircut conservative shoulder-length, beard
short. Light hair and eyes, a short, slight, fair
man, slightly undernourished, good health,
twenty-eight to thirty-two. Unaggressive,
placid, milquetoast, repressed, conventional.
[…] Extraordinarily beautiful eyes […] The
irises were blue or gray, very clear, as if
transparent.141
Dr. William Haber
Orr’s narrative perspective informs the reader that
“Dr. Haber [is] white-toothed, bay-maned, huge,”147
“a big man, in his voluminous russet gernreich, with
his red-brown beard, and white smile, and opaque
dark eyes.”148 Haber comes across as a “bear-shamangod.”149 Overbearing, powerful, with a professional
self-assurance that turns into dangerous arrogance,
William Haber is a dream specialist or oneirologist and
is the novel’s antagonist.
Once Haber understands that Orr’s dreams don’t merely
alter reality but rather alter what he calls the entire
continuum of reality, Haber finetunes his Augmentor to
copy and amplify Orr’s effective dreaming cycle. After
this, Haber makes Portland “the home of the World
Planning Center” and “the Capital of the Planet.”154
He eradicates racism by making all of humanity gray.
Haber “only got bigger at every reincarnation”155 to
become “an important man, an extremely important
man. He was the director of HURAD (Human Utility:
Research and Development), the vital core of the World
Planning Center, the place where the great decisions
were made. He had always wanted power to do good.
Now he had it.”156 But with unlimited power comes
grave responsibility. How will Haber handle this power
to do good?
The character of Heather Lelache “thought of herself as a
Black Widow . . . poisonous: hard, shiny . . . .”
Heather Lelache
The character of Heather Lelache “…thought of herself
as a Black Widow. There she sat, poisonous: hard, shiny,
and poisonous; waiting, waiting.” A biracial lawyer,
Lelache sees herself as someone with “a sneaky, sly,
squamous personality. She had French diseases of the
soul.”157 She agrees to help Orr stop Haber from using
him for “[e]xperimental purposes.”158 After Lelache
witnesses one of Orr’s effective dreams and understands
that Orr is telling the truth, she becomes entwined in
the struggle between the two men. When Orr makes
a desperate bid to escape Haber’s influence by leaving
Portland for a cabin in the woods, Lelache trails after
him and tries to help. However, the dream Orr has under
Lelache’s direction turns catastrophic.
Orr returns to Dr. Haber, but then ends up dreaming
Lelache out of existence because Haber wants to
end racism altogether by making all humanity the
same color gray. Lelache “could not exist in the gray
people’s world. She had not been born.”159 Grieving for
her, Orr ends up dreaming her back into the world as a
gray person and as his “dear wife,”160 but this Heather
Lelache is a different person from the one who tried to
help him in the cabin. This gray Heather Lelache, this
Mrs. Orr, is “unaggressive and, though courageous,
timid in manner” whereas the original Lelache, whom
Orr eventually returns to the world at the very end of
the novel as herself, was “a fiercer woman, vivid and
difficult.”161 When George and Heather are reunited,
Lelache is biracial again. She has never been Mrs.
Orr. Orr knows that “his dry and silent grieving for
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Initially, Haber has a modest “interior Efficiency
Suite on the sixty-third floor of Willamette East
Tower” which “didn’t have a view of anything” being
windowless.150 But as he takes advantage of Orr’s
ability to alter reality, the doctor’s prestige and status
balloon. He goes from being a hardworking research
physician in a shabby, faux-everything office to being
the Director of the Oregon Oneirological Institute with
its “[m]arble floor, discreet furniture, reception desk
of brushed chrome.”151 There, he has a spacious office
with “a large corner window, looking out east and
north over a great sweep of the world: the curve of the
much-bridged Willamette close in beneath the hills;
the city’s countless towers high and milky in the spring
mist, on either side of the river; the suburbs receding
out of sight till from their remote outbacks the foothills
rose; and the mountains.”152 As Orr remarks, Dr. Haber
has “found a great way to run the world without taking
responsibility for it.”153
his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce,
recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won
again.”162
Mannie Ahrens
Mannie Ahrens is introduced at the very outset of the
novel: “The elevator guard’s face was hanging above
him like a paper lantern, pallid, fringed with graying
hair.”163 Ahrens is the elevator guard and manager of
Orr’s Corbett Avenue apartment. Ahrens “wore the
fringed buckskin coat, the Cody mane, the Aquarius
emblem necklace of his youth: he apparently had
not changed his clothes for thirty years. He had an
accusing Dylan whine. He even smelled of marijuana.
Old hippies never die.”164 Mannie is a living emblem
of a psychedelic, hippie past,165 a walking anachronism
tied to the 1960s youth countercultural moment.166
Mannie’s friendship helps save Orr. As George Orr
attempts to recoup from either the end of the world
or a drug overdose, Mannie Ahrens is the first person
who helps him, getting him off the floor and back into
his bed and calling for a medic. Even though Mannie
disappears for the bulk of the novel, his appearance
in these first pages is crucial. He’s friendly, he has
compassion, and he doesn’t judge George Orr—he
merely helps him out. He tells the medic that he let Orr
borrow his Pharm Card so that the authorities will let
Orr off lightly. When Orr contradicts Mannie, Ahrens
says, “[s]o confuse ‘em a little. They won’t check. I
loan mine, use another cat’s, all the time. Got a whole
collection of those reprimand things. They don’t know.
I taken things HEW never even heard of. You ain’t been
on the hook before. Take it easy, George.”167
a record player. “This involved sharing a pot of tea.
Mannie always brewed it for Orr, since Orr had never
smoked and couldn’t inhale without coughing. […] But
there was peace and privacy in his grubby basement,
and weak cannabis tea had a mildly relaxing effect on
Orr.”169 Peace and privacy have been hard things to
come by for Orr, and this brief moment of sharing a pot
of tea points to the necessity of both. Just after he shares
the tea, Orr asks himself “[w]hat did he want?”170 Orr
determines that what he needs is something Ahrens has
been giving him from the very start—help.171
Ahrens’ act of kindness is critical, and it is something
Haber is incapable of. Such kindness foreshadows
the repeated refrain in the latter half of the book that
everyone needs love and friendship. Orr will only
survive with help from his friends, even minor ones
like Mannie. When Lelache tries to find out where Orr
has gone, Mannie gives her helpful information. She
leaves Ahrens, “leaning morose against the peeling
frame of the front door, he and the old house lending
each other mutual support.”168 The image of mutual
support underscores Ahrens’ function as an emblem of
friendship.
It stood immobile, apparently regarding
him (George Orr) though no eyes were
visible inside the dark-tinted, vapor-filled
headpiece. If it was a headpiece. Was there
in fact any substantial form within that green
carapace, that mighty armor? He didn’t
know. He felt, however, completely at ease
with Tiua’k Ennbe Ennbe.172
At the end of the novel, after Orr is given the gift of a 45
RPM Beatles record by the alien Tiua’k Ennbe Ennbe,
Orr stops by Ahrens’ basement apartment to borrow
Tiua’k Ennbe Ennbe
When Orr encounters one of the alien Aldebaranians,
he describes it as follows:
Although every alien or Aldebaranian looks precisely
the same, each has an individual name. Tiua’k Ennbe
Ennbe is the proprietor of a secondhand store selling
“some squat handmade pottery in one window, an old
rocker with a moth-eaten paisley shawl draped over it
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The alien Tiua’k Ennbe Ennbe gives George Orr a 45 RPM
Beatles record of “With a Little Help from my Friends.”
There is time. There are returns. To go is to return.”178
THEMES OF THE LATHE OF
HEAVEN
Bernie Boston/The Washington Star Collection
in the other, and, scattered around these main displays,
all kinds of cultural litter.”173 Ennbe Ennbe gives Orr
a gift: an antique 45 RPM Beatles record of the song
“With a Little Help From My Friends,” an object that
proves central to how George finds a way to end his
struggle with Haber. “He put the record on, and then
held the needle-arm suspended over the turning disk.
What did he want? He didn’t know. Help, he supposed.
Well, what came would be acceptable, as Tiua’k Ennbe
Ennbe had said.”174
E’nememen Asfah
The alien E’nememen Asfah kindly takes a disoriented
and exhausted George Orr home with him, just after
Orr has turned off the Augmentor and stopped Haber’s
effective nightmare from destroying the world. Orr
“clearly sensed the pity and protective compassion of
the Alien standing across the dark room. It saw him,
not with eyes, as short-lived, fleshly, armor less, a
strange creature, infinitely vulnerable, adrift in the
gulfs of the possible: something that needed help.
He didn’t mind. He did need help.”175 Resembling
a giant, flippered sea turtle in appearance, Asfah is
the owner of a kitchen equipment shop and becomes
Orr’s employer: “He had a staff of three designers,
and contracts with various manufacturers who make
kitchen equipment of all sorts.”176 Orr is one of the
three designers, and Asfah is Orr’s congenial boss who
“was indifferent to hours worked and interested in only
work done.”177 He becomes integral to the reunion of
Orr and Lelache, urging them to “[t]ake evening […]
Shifting Versions of Reality
George Orr has an ability that is frightening and unique;
his dreams alter reality, or as he reminds a bewildered
William Haber late in the novel, “[a]n effective dream
is a reality.”179 Further, as Orr explains to Lelache, each
dream (or new continuum as Haber calls them), “covers
its tracks completely…[a]nd nobody would be aware
of anything new except me.” Thus, it is only Orr—and
eventually Dr. Haber, because Haber is there at the
moment when the dream enacts its alterations—who is
aware of how his dreams change reality. So, while the
rest of the world thinks the new reality is just the way
things have always been, for Orr and Dr. Haber there is
the “before” reality and the “after” reality.
These shifting realities begin to multiply dizzyingly
as Haber keeps making Orr try to dream up a better
reality than the one they are presently inhabiting:
There were by now so many different
memories, so many skeins of life experience
jostling in his head, that he scarcely tried to
remember anything. He took it as it came.
He was living almost like a young child,
among actualities only. He was surprised by
nothing, and by everything.180
In this novel, then, reality is fungible and subject to
radical and fantastical changes because reality is tied
to Orr’s subconscious and dreaming mind. This begs
the question: how do we determine what is the real
and what is the unreal? How do our thought processes,
belief systems, past knowledge, and the evidence of
our five senses form our perception of what is real?
And how does one clearly distinguish the real world
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An antiwar demonstrator places flowers into the barrels of
rifles while blocking the Pentagon on October 21, 1967. The
Lathe of Heaven was published in 1971, a time of sociopolitical
and generational conflict over the Vietnam War.
Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven addresses seven integral
themes: 1) shifting versions of reality; 2) philosophical
viewpoints, particularly Taoism and utilitarianism; 3)
the relationship between humanity and technology;
4) the enduring problem of warfare; 5) issues of
racism, immigration, and xenophobia; 6) the power of
friendship and love; and 7) the pitfalls to patterns of
dominance and control. The theme of technology and
humanity was explored earlier in this guide. We will
review the remaining six major themes in this section.
These pressing questions are, in part, grounded in
the novel’s historical moment. The Lathe of Heaven
was published in 1971, a time of sociopolitical and
generational conflict over the Vietnam War—different
people and different generations had decidedly
differing views of what was “true” concerning the
war. This decade would also be defined by an event
that came shortly after the publication of The Lathe of
Heaven—Watergate. Watergate was a major political
scandal that resulted from the Nixon administration’s
efforts to hide the truth of its involvement in a break-in
at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.
The questions Le Guin’s novel poses have continued
relevance for readers in the twenty-first century, who
negotiate an even more complex and mediated world of
misinformation, both deliberate and inadvertent. The
novel remains pertinent because it asks us a simple
but difficult question to answer: what do you believe
is true and why? George Orr knows his dreams are
doing something impossible. He also knows he’s not
insane: “there’s nothing wrong with me; I don’t need
therapy.”181 But how can it be possible that one man’s
dreams can alter global realities? Haber doesn’t believe
him; neither does Heather Lelache. In fact, both Haber
and Lelache continue to find Orr’s ability unbelievable,
even after they’ve seen the world change in front of
their eyes. Orr even doubts himself. He gets worn out
and begins to dismiss the actual reality of his job at the
Parks Department as the unreal:
He was aware that in thus relegating to
unreality a major portion of the only reality,
the only existence, that he in fact did have,
he was running exactly the same risk the
insane mind runs: the loss of the sense of
free will. He knew that insofar as one denies
what is, one is possessed by what is not, the
compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that
flock to fill the void.182
Here, then, is one central problem of being human: we
must deal with reality, but we must also have dreams.
Philosophical Viewpoints
The Lathe of Heaven presents the reader with opposing
philosophic viewpoints, chiefly those of Taoism and
utilitarianism. Through the epigraphs that begin each
chapter, Le Guin seeds the novel with concepts taken
from Chinese Taoist thought—a form of philosophy that
emphasizes the search for equilibrium and balance—
and from Western utopian thinking, which stems in
part from Thomas More’s novel Utopia, which focuses
on the characteristics of an ideal society. In contrast,
William Haber enunciates tenets taken from Western
rationalism, which favors logical, rational thought, and
those of an ethical system dominated by utilitarianism.
From a utilitarian perspective, an action is right insofar
as it promotes happiness, and that the greatest happiness
of the greatest number should be the guiding principle
of conduct.
Haber puts himself on the side of the rational—
“[r]elevance was his touchstone.”183 He sees himself as
implementing actions “for the good of all mankind.”184
Haber’s efforts, however, often have unintended
and disastrous results. For instance, when Haber
tries to use Orr’s dreams to address the problem of
overpopulation, Orr’s dreams end up causing the
deaths of six billion people. Moreover, the reader may
view Haber’s motivations with some skepticism, given
that the changes Haber uses Orr to effect often seem
to improve Haber’s own standing, both professionally
and financially. Haber is seemingly less motivated by
purely altruistic purposes than he is by his own selfaggrandizement and personal gain.
In contrast, George Orr’s belief system tilts toward
Taoism or Buddhism. He doesn’t believe, as Haber
does, that the end justifies the means. He asks, “[b]ut
what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”185
The Enduring Problem of Warfare
In the opening pages of the novel, Orr is dying of
radiation sickness: “His eyelids had been burned away,
so that he could not close his eyes, and the light entered
into his brain, searing…he felt deathly sick, and knew
it was the radiation sickness.”186 Thus, from the novel’s
outset, Le Guin signals that one of the central themes
will be about war, in particular the threat of a global,
nuclear catastrophe. That immediate threat dissipates
as Orr dreams himself out of the nightmarish scene, in
an act of pure self-preservation. However, the threat of
warfare doesn’t vanish entirely but rather continues to
haunt Orr throughout the book.
In Chapter Three, while Orr is on the subway, he stares
at two headlines in the newspaper a fellow subway
rider is holding: “‘Big A-! Strike Near Afghan Border,’
and the subhead, ‘Threat of Afghan Intervention.’”187
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from the unreal?
Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in 1987 during the SovietAfghan War. Warfare is a key theme in The Lathe of Heaven.
By erwinlux - CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5310966
Here again Le Guin makes it clear that warfare is a key
thematic element in the story. These two headlines are
historically prescient as well. In 1971, when The Lathe
of Heaven was published, the United States was not
heavily involved in Afghanistan’s internal conflicts.
It wasn’t until 1979 that the Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan in an attempt to suppress insurgencies
led by U.S.-backed mujahideen against Afghanistan’s
socialist government (which had close ties to the
USSR).188
Of course, more broadly, the novel is about conflict, as
evidenced in the conflict between doctor and patient; but
questions about the enduring problem of human warfare
are also at issue, and as the conflict between patient and
doctor intensifies, so too do global conflicts. By Chapter
Six, after Orr has changed the world by dreaming up
two international and fatal pandemics that have reduced
the human population by billions, the world is at war:
“the fighting in the Near East was more savage than it
had been in the more crowded world. The United States
was heavily committed to the Israeli-Egyptian side in
weapons….”189 Moreover, there is a nuclear standoff
in the making, as there are twelve nuclear-enabled
nations—with six in opposition to the other six—a
recipe for a disastrous world-ending world war.
It is this precarious situation that prompts Haber to
tell Orr to dream of peace. No more humans killing
humans, “[n]o stockpiles of nuclear and biological
weapons, ready to use against other nations.”190
Instead, Orr dreams up a continuum-reality where an
Earth-wide alien invasion forces humanity to unite
At this point, Orr decides to flee Dr. Haber’s brave new
world and his Augmentor, a world in which the aliens,
those “[s]hapeless, speechless, reasonless” emblems
of brutality, control the moon. Indeed, the moon no
longer “symbolized the Unattainable, as it had for
thousands of years, not the Attained, as it had for a
few decades, but the Lost. A stolen coin, the muzzle of
one’s gun turned against one, a round hole in the fabric
of the sky.”192 When Lelache finally locates Orr, he’s in
a cabin in the Siuslaw National Forest trying to avoid
sleep. To get Orr the rest he needs, Lelache hypnotizes
him and tells him he will have ordinary ineffective
dreams, except for one.
Orr promptly dreams that the aliens have gotten past
the Anti-Alien Ballistic Missile defense network to
invade Oregon, which leads to the First Interstellar
War. Chaos ensues, and bombs fly: “an errant nuclearwarhead AABM striking Mount Hood near the old
crater caused the dormant volcano to wake up.”193 Orr
returns to Dr. Haber to “stop the invasion…peace,
peace, dream that we’re at peace with everybody!”
This hypnotic suggestion confuses the invading aliens
and transforms them; the aliens no longer desire
an invasion, but rather are seeking simply to make
contact, declaring: “Please cease destruction of self
and others. We do not have any weapons. We are
nonaggressive unfighting species.”194
Orr finally, if briefly, achieves world peace. The aliens
“went on behaving as industrious, peaceable, and lawabiding citizens of Earth, rumors of ‘Alien takeovers’
and ‘nonhuman infiltration’ had become the property
of paranoid politicians of dying Nationalist splinter
groups and those persons who had conversations with
the real Flying Saucer People.”195 Unfortunately, this
peace doesn’t last because Haber’s unconsciousness
will usher chaos back into the world. Thus, it is only
for a brief juncture that Orr’s subconscious mind does
away with war. Not with human conflict, though, or
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against a common enemy. Orr’s unconscious mind
cannot imagine a human world without war. Instead,
he dreams up a substitute, another kind of war to
replace human-on-human conflict. Orr’s subconscious
understands warfare as endemic and irrational—as
Orr says, the motives of war are hard for a rational
person to understand. He had, after all, “grown up in
a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man
the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe
for children to grow up in.”191
the human need for “the splendid abreactive release of
mass killing.”196 In this world, Saturday night football
has become gladiatorial and fatal; in this world,
citizens are armed with hypodermic guns so that
they are able to make a citizen’s arrest to euthanize
someone who is critically ill. A complete cessation of
human-on-human misery, the novel suggests, is not
consistent with human nature.
The Lathe of Heaven deals with race as both an
individual and a sociopolitical reality primarily, but not
exclusively, through the character of Heather Lelache.
During the night Lelache spends with Orr in his cabin
in the Siuslaw National Forest, Lelache tells him about
her mixed, biracial family background. Her personal
history serves as a mini-commentary on a number of
complex and related issues, such as the history of racebased slavery, legacies of colonialism and imperialism,
familial and economic instabilities, as well as legal and
illegal immigration—all issues tied to some degree to
the history of race more generally in America.197
Lelache’s Black father hailed from a fatherless,
Southern, low-income family, while her white mother
grew up in a wealthy Portland one. Lelache describes
their initial meeting at a political demonstration,
noting that they met “when demonstrations were still
legal. And they got married. But he couldn’t stick it
for very long, I mean the whole situation, not just the
marriage. When I was eight, he went off to Africa. To
Ghana, I think. He thought his people came originally
from there, but he didn’t really know. They’d been in
Louisiana since anybody knew, and Lelache would
be the slaveowner’s name, it’s French. It means The
Coward.”198
After her African-American father left, Lelache’s white
mother tried to make a home for her daughter, but she
died at thirty-eight after using a dirty needle for heroin.
After her mother’s death, Lelache’s mother’s family
takes her in, but Lelache is left questioning her identity:
And damn if her family didn’t show up and
take me over. And they put me through
college and law school. And I go up there for
Christmas Eve dinner every year. I’m their
token Negro. But I’ll tell you, what really
gets me is, I can’t decide which color I am.
A member of the Black Panther Party holds a banner for the
Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in June
1970, in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Issues of race are one
of Le Guin’s thematic concerns in The Lathe of Heaven.
[…] See, my father really hated my mother
because she was white. But he also loved her.
But I think she loved his being black much
more than she loved him. Well, where does
that leave me? I never have figured out.199
Orr replies, “[b]rown…[t]he color of Earth.” 200
Lelache’s personal history stands in for the larger
history of American race relations and tensions. In the
microcosm of one individual life, the novel signals how
the issue of race is far more complex than the simple
color binary of white and Black. Lelache’s frustration
with her identity underscores the degree to which
the sociopolitical and legal discourse in America has
left little room for complexity in the general public’s
understanding of and discourse on multiethnicity.201
The novel intensifies its examination of race as George
Orr dreams of a world without racial difference. Dr.
Haber describes the impact of Orr’s dream:
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Issues of Racism, Immigration, and
Xenophobia
Referencing here a long, global legacy of race-based
conflict, Haber invokes the caste system in India,203 a
history of racial terrorism in America,204 and apartheid
in South Africa.205 Orr obviates this history by making
humanity uniformly battleship gray. But this also
means he has dreamed away Lelache because “her
color of brown was an essential part of her, not an
accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness,
all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed
nature.”206 As some critics have rightly noted, Le
Guin essentializes race here, making it a biological
trait. Doing so filters out culture, family, social mores,
economic factors, and other influences that shape and
determine who we are and who we become in life. As
a human being, Lelache is brown, but she is also much
more than merely the color of her skin. The novel’s
statement about brown being an essential part of her
seems to deny her that complexity.
In the biologically gray world Orr has dreamt up to do
away with racial conflict, the essential sameness of all
human beings, a lack of diversity, renders life boring.
In this continuum, “the food had no taste, and the
people were all gray.”207 In the end, the world doesn’t
remain gray; after Orr puts a stop to Haber’s essential
nightmare, while a few pockets of people remain gray,
the other previously existing skin tones return, as does
Heather Lelache. In this new continuum, though, she’s
no longer Mrs. Orr: “His wife had been a gray person,
a far gentler person than this one, he thought. This
Heather carried a big black handbag with a brass snap,
and probably a half pint of brandy inside; she came on
hard.”208 Still, Orr “knew her, knew his stranger, how to
keep her talking and how to make her laugh.”209
Orr’s new alien boss, E’nememen Asfah, gives him
the evening off, so Orr and Lelache can begin to get to
know one another again. Asfah’s presence in this last
scene and the aliens’ integration into society signals
other issues related to race and racism, immigration,
migration, and xenophobia. The aliens are at first
perceived as enemies, and the global xenophobic
response to the invaders is to attack and eradicate them.
But soon Orr dreams up a different context for them:
Natives of a methane-atmosphere planet of
the star Aldebaran, they had to wear their
outlandish turtle-like suits perpetually on
Earth or the Moon but they didn’t seem to
mind. What they actually looked like, inside
their turtle suits, was not clear in Orr’s mind.
They couldn’t come out and they didn’t draw
pictures. Indeed, their communication with
human beings, limited to speech emission
from the left elbow and some kind of auditory
receiver, was limited.210
Despite this lack of visual clarity and these limitations
in communication, “they had been received with a
certain eagerness into Terran society. It was pleasant to
have somebody different to look at.”211 As newcomers
in America, theses aliens are linked to other types of
human legal and illegal aliens, eventually enriching the
nation with their skills. Tensions about migration and
immigration have been part of the United States since its
inception as a nation-state. There have been numerous
historical as well as present-day debates about which
immigrants should be permitted entry into the United
States, how many immigrants should gain entrance,
what jobs or careers they should take on, which
language(s) they ought to speak, as well as conflicting
views on how best to deal with illegal immigration and
those fleeing oppression, poverty, or war.212
The Power of Love and Friendship
At the novel’s opening, when the reader first meets
George Orr, he is in significant need of help from
others, and he gets it. While he believes he’s dying of
radiation poisoning due to a global nuclear war, in the
new reality he dreams up, he’s taken a toxic mixture of
pharmaceuticals. Mannie Ahrens, the manager/elevator
operator of his apartment, finds Orr and calls in a
medic, and the two men stabilize Orr’s condition. So,
from the outset, Orr is presented to the reader as a man
who needs help.
Orr is sent to Dr. Haber because as Haber says, “[y]ou
know that you need sleep. Just as you need food, water,
and air. But did you realize that sleep’s not enough,
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Made the change biological and absolute.
There never has been a racial problem!
You and I are the only two men on earth,
George, who know that there ever was a
racial problem! Can you conceive of that?
Nobody was ever outcaste in India—nobody
was every lynched in Alabama—nobody
was massacred in Johannesburg! War’s
a problem we’ve outgrown and race is a
problem we never even had! Nobody in the
entire history of the human race has suffered
for the color of his skin.202
that your body insists just as strongly upon having its
allotment of dreaming sleep?”213 At first, Haber does
want to help his patient and reassures Orr that he can
trust his doctor, saying, “I’m in this game to help
you.”214 Haber is seemingly not an evil man, though he
is one who desires power. Haber needs to be respected,
obeyed, and admired. Haber wants to be powerful, and
he expresses his frustration with and resentment of Orr
for having powers that he himself does not possess:
Thoughts such as these reveal Haber’s inability to
have true empathy for another person, and it is this
shortcoming that eventually robs Haber of his sanity.
Human beings need one another; humankind is a social
species. Love and friendship are essential features to
living a healthy and happy life. The power of love and
friendship is what sustains George Orr in his conflict
with William Haber. Orr finds this love and friendship
in his relationship with Heather Lelache. The connection
to Lelache is immediate for Orr; at their very first
meeting, Orr likes her, and she—to her own dismay—
likes him. In addition, Orr finds an important source of
connection in his essential creative relation to the aliens.
Whereas Orr seeks to live in community, connected
with his fellow beings, Haber sees himself as “a
lone wolf. He had never wanted marriage nor close
friendships, he had chosen strenuous research carried
out when others sleep, he had avoided entanglements…
[h]e prized his independence, his free will.”216 Presented
to the reader as opposites, Orr prizes connection and
continuity while Haber prizes solitude and singularity.
In the end, the ability to love fully and to have and
accept help from others proves to be more powerful than
hatred, dominance, or raw physical power.
Patterns of Dominance and Control
Very early on in the novel, Haber takes note of the
fact that he has a tendency toward dominant behavior.
When he first meets George Orr, Haber cannot
keep himself from dominating and patronizing his
patient, noting that this “was so easy as to be almost
irresistible.”217 Haber thinks so little of Orr that he
can’t even remember his patient’s actual name. In its
A replica of a pin made by the SNCC (Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee) for the Civil Rights movement, an
image referenced by Heather Lelache.
depiction of the struggles between these two men, the
novel criticizes patterns of dominance and control.
Other aspects of the novel, particularly the changing
nature of Heather Lelache’s character, allow Le Guin
to further critique the tendency toward dominance. For
example, when Lelache first meets Orr, she too finds
him a weakling and thinks that “if she stepped on him,
he wouldn’t even crunch.”218 And even though she
finds herself liking him, she resents that response:
She liked him. She stuck out her brown hand,
he met it with a white one; just like that
damn button her mother always kept in the
bottom of her bead box, SCNN or SNCC or
something she’d belonged to way back in the
middle of the last century, the Black hand
and the White hand joined together. Christ!219
Lelache’s dismissal of a symbol of interracial
cooperation and friendship is soon belied by her
wish to help Orr and her sense of him as inordinately
poised, a man at peace with himself.
Although her original intention is not nefarious,
Lelache does engage in a moment of dominance when
she hypnotizes Orr so that he might get some needed
sleep. The outcome of this slip is catastrophic. Once
Orr is “in her power,” she is caught up in her role.
Although it is against her very being, she plays God:
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Why had this gift been given to a fool, a
passive nothing of a man? Why was Orr so
sure and so right, while the strong, active,
positive man was powerless, forced to try to
use, even to obey, the weak tool?215
A person who believes, as she did, that things
fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part,
and that in being a part one is whole; such a
person has no desire whatever, at any time, to
play God. Only those who have denied their
being yearn to play at it. But she was caught
in a role and couldn’t back out of it now.220
Patterns of dominance and control are represented
as the wrong way to act. So, while neither Haber
nor Lelache are purely dominant people—both have
impulses to help and support others—when they use
their will to dominate, things go awry. As Le Guin has
said elsewhere, people ought not to use one another.222
Acts of domination are uniformly condemned in The
Lathe of Heaven.223
SETTING
Oregon and the Ring of Fire
The events of The Lathe of Heaven, one of the very
few Le Guin novels set entirely on Earth, take place in
Portland, Oregon, in the year 2002. While the landscape
of the city and the geography of the Pacific Northwest
provide the novel with its setting, they also serve as an
intricate part of the thematic structure of the novel.224
The Pacific Northwest landscape is part of what is
referred to as the Ring of Fire, or the Circum-Pacific
Belt, a path along the Pacific Ocean characterized by
active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes. Its length is
approximately 24,900 miles, and it traces boundaries
between several tectonic plates, including the Pacific,
Juan de Fuca, Cocos, Indian-Australian, Nazca, North
American, and Philippine Plates.
Seventy-five percent of Earth’s volcanoes—more than
450 volcanoes—are located along the Ring of Fire, and
ninety percent of Earth’s earthquakes occur along its
The Pacific Northwest, the setting of The Lathe of Heaven,
is part of the Ring of Fire, a path along the Pacific Ocean
characterized by active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes.
Map courtesy of USGS
path, including the planet’s most violent and dramatic
seismic events.225 The city of Portland sits upon the
banks of the Willamette River. Visible from the city
are two volcanic, if largely dormant, mountains: Mount
St. Helens (which last erupted in 1981) and Mount
Hood. The state also has some of the most breathtaking
beaches in the United States, with monumental rock
stacks rising out of them, one of the most prominent of
these being The Haystack in the town of Cannon Beach.
Sea Imagery
Le Guin opens her novel at sea, as it begins with
a philosophical epigraph about dreaming and then
moves on to the image of a jellyfish “[c]urrent borne,
wave flung,”226 wholly adrift and at the mercy of the
ocean’s might. This image is then compared to the
vulnerable, unconscious mind of a human dreaming:
“What will the creature made all of seadrift do on
the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each
morning, waking?”227 This comparison of the dry sand
of daylight and the dark, vertiginous expanse of the sea
or outer space recurs throughout the novel, as Le Guin
explores the difference between the rational, conscious
mind and the irrational, unconscious mind.
The aliens that George Orr dreams up in the course
of his therapy with Dr. Haber all look like “a giant
turtle…encased in a suit of some kind, which gave
it a bulky, greenish, armored, inexpressive look like
a giant sea turtle standing on its hind legs.”228 No
human in the novel ever finds out what the aliens
look like underneath their green armor, and so they
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Lelache’s hypnotic suggestion that Orr effectively dream
that the aliens are no longer on the moon triggers an
alien invasion. During that invasion, as the United States
military tries to control the situation and dominate
the invading spaceships, all their attempts backfire:
“Repelled by the Alien ships, which carried a device
that took control of the missiles’ guidance systems,
the AABMs turned around somewhere in the middle
stratosphere and returned, landing and exploding here
and there all over the State of Oregon,”221 wiping out
towns, causing forest fires, and reactivating dormant
volcanoes.
By Fred Hsu - CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.
php?curid=1557100
remain until the end associated with and described as
giant sea turtles whose voices emit from their green
flippers’ elbows. Sea imagery is central to the thematic
structure of the novel and is most often associated with
dreams and dreaming. Images of the sea open and
close the novel; the last line of the book reads: “The
Alien watched them from within the glass-fronted
shop, as a sea creature might watch from an aquarium,
seeing them pass and disappear into the mist.”229
Mount Hood
Like this sea imagery, the earth itself and the notoriously
rainy climate of the Pacific Northwest are equally
essential to the structure and themes of the novel. When
we first meet Dr. Haber, he is looking at a mural of Mt.
Hood in his office, in part because his office does not
have an actual view of the nearby volcano:
Dr. Haber gazed at the mural and wondered
when such a photograph had been taken.
Blue sky, snow from foothills to peak. Years
ago, in the sixties or seventies, no doubt. The
Greenhouse Effect had been quite gradual,
and Haber, born in 1962, could clearly
remember the blue skies of his childhood.
Nowadays the eternal snows were gone from
all the world’s mountains, even Everest, even
Erebus, fiery-throated on the waste Antarctic
shore.230
This mural, as well as the actual presence of Mt.
Hood, is a recurrent image. During Orr’s first effective
dream in Dr. Haber’s office, his dream replaces
Mt. Hood with a racehorse.231 Mount Hood and the
geography of Portland are also crucial to how the
novel conveys the nature and function of dreaming.
As Orr says, “[e]verything dreams. The play of form,
of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have
their dreams, and the earth changes” and when rocks
dream “[v]olcanos emit fire.”232 Orr cautions Haber
that “[a] conscious mind must be part of the whole,
intentionally, and carefully—as the rock is part of the
whole unconsciously.”233 Haber scoffs at this: “World
soul and so on. Prescientific synthesis. Mysticism is
one approach to the nature of dreaming, or of reality,
though it’s not acceptable to those willing to use
reason, and able to.”234
This tension between Haber and Orr—a recurring
opposition of reason versus mysticism—eventuates in
Mount Hood actually erupting into a “vast inverted
cone of fire,”235 as Portland and the world are consumed
by Haber’s nightmare. Indeed, with each succeeding
effective dream, the landscape of the city shifts and
changes, though not entirely. For George—who is the
dreamer, the lathe, the center or balance point—there
is always continuity between one reality and another.
Orr is always some kind of draftsman; his apartment is
always on Corbett Avenue. This continuity is crucial to
understanding how the novel works.
Climate Change
Climate change also forms a significant part of the
novel’s setting. Le Guin informs the reader that “[r]ain
was an old Portland tradition, but the warmth—70°F
on the second of March—was modern, a result of air
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One of the opening images of Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven
is a jelly fish.
Mount Hood and the geography of Portland are crucial to
how The Lathe of Heaven conveys the nature and function of
dreaming.
pollution…It had always rained in western Oregon, but
now it rained ceaselessly, steadily, tepidly. It was like
living in a downpour of warm soup, forever.”236 George
Orr’s Portland, along with the rest of the world, suffers
from “the Greenhouse Effect.”237 When Orr starts
dreaming what Haber tells him to dream, the rains as
well as the Greenhouse Effect begin to mitigate.
“Self Is Universe”
Self is universe. He would not be allowed
to be isolated, to be stranded. He was back
where he belonged. He felt an equanimity,
a perfect certainty as to where he was and
where everything else was. This feeling
did not come to him as blissful or mystical,
but simply as normal. It was the way he
generally had felt, except in times of crisis,
of agony; it was the mood of his childhood
and all the best and profoundest hours of
boyhood and maturity; it was his natural
mode of being.239
The Lathe of Heaven presents this sort of equanimity,
this balance of being in the world and being connected
to the world, as an ideal state of being.
THE ROLE OF PSYCHOLOGY IN
THE LATHE OF HEAVEN
Curiosity about dreams is likely as old as humankind.
Roughly five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, the
earliest recorded dreams were documented on clay
tablets. In Roman and Greek antiquity, people often
believed that dreams were messages sent directly from
the deities or from deceased people and thought that
dreams could be predictors of the future. As Sidarta
Ribiero writes in his book The Oracle of the Night:
The History and Science of Dreams:
The Norse sagas, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the
Quran and the Bible, all of these texts feature
Dr. William Dement, 1982. Le Guin consulted with Dement
while writing The Lathe of Heaven.
Ed Souza/Stanford News Service
dreams as messages from the gods, auguries
of the future, puzzles to be interpreted or
warnings to be heeded. For many ancient
cultures, understanding one’s dreams was
essential to understanding one’s waking life.240
While human beings will spend a good portion of their
lives dreaming, to this day the so-called hard sciences
like chemistry or physics have remarkably little to say
about the science of human dreaming. Despite recent
advances in certain areas of sleep medicine, especially
with respect to physiological treatments for sleep
apnea and sleep deprivation, how dreams themselves
function as a part of human health remains fertile
ground for inquiry. Medical science does understand
that should a human be deprived of dreams, they will
suffer and perhaps die, as George Orr in The Lathe of
Heaven well knows.
Dr. William Dement and the AASM
While writing The Lathe of Heaven, Le Guin consulted
with Dr. William “Bill” Dement (1928−2020), the
founder of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine
(AASM) and a pioneer in the study of the relationship
between physiology and psychology. Dement began his
work in the 1950s, and he was one of three researchers
who discovered the importance of the rapid eye
movement cycle during sleep, a physiologic basis for
dreaming that had hitherto been unknown.241 Dement
also pioneered tests and treatments for narcolepsy. In
the 1970s, he began teaching at Stanford University,
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The waxing and waning of rainfall across the different
reality continuums that Orr dreams—similar to the
presence and activity of Mount Hood—serve as
indices to a central theme of the novel, which can be
summed up in the simple but mysterious line spoken
by an alien to Orr in a dream: “self is universe.”238
Once he hears this phrase, Orr is reoriented away
from the orderly, cold-hearted and colorless world that
Haber has produced through Orr:
where he would spend the rest of his career. In
1975, Dement helped found the Association of Sleep
Disorders Centers, which later became the AASM.
The AASM established the practice of sleep medicine
through the development of standards for the diagnosis
of and course of treatment for sleep disorders;
instituted standard diagnostics; and established an
exam process for specialists of sleep medicine.242
In the early twentieth century, the famous
Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856−1939)
pioneered psychoanalysis, a field of study about the
human psyche, both conscious and subconscious.
Psychoanalysis included what is still referred to as “the
talking cure,” a methodology of treatment pioneered
by the Viennese physician Josef Breuer (1842−1925).
From 1880−82, Breuer developed the talking cure for
the treatment of nervous disorders, including what
was at that time called hysteria.243 Freud adapted the
talking cure for his own patients; Freud and his patient
would try to talk through the patient’s psychological
pathology, including the patient’s dreams.
Freud was the first medical expert who tried to codify
and decipher what he called dream symbolism (the
“language of dreams”).244 Freud’s 1899 (sometimes
dated 1900) book The Interpretation of Dreams
remains a unique masterpiece, regarded by many
academics as his most significant work.245 In it, Freud
designed a kind of guide for unmasking a dream’s
disguise or “dreamwork.”246 Freud believed that the
part of the dream that is remembered and reported
by the patient must be understood as veiling and
repressing a latent meaning tied to waking life:
If we undo dream-displacement by means
of analysis, we obtain what seems to be
completely trustworthy information on
two much-disputed problems concerning
dreams: as to their instigators and as to their
connection with waking life.247
Freud’s overall argument was that dreams are
disguised expressions of forbidden and repressed
wishes, often tied to sexuality. Freud felt that dreams
defy logic and lack narrative coherence because they
mingle immediate daily experience—or day residues,
a term Freud coined—with our deepest, often infantile
Sigmund Freud, c. 1921. Freud was the first medical expert
who tried to codify and decipher what he called dream
symbolism.
wishes.248 Freud thought that dreams could be usefully
decoded by a psychologist if the psychologist attended
to four basic activities of the dreamwork: condensation,
displacement, representation, and secondary revision.
Freud contended that these activities could demystify
the dream’s effect and translate it into diagnostic
material, or as Freud put it:
When once we have recognized that the
content of a dream is the representation of
a fulfilled wish and that its obscurity is due
to alterations in repressed material made
by the censorship, we shall no longer have
any difficulty in discovering the function of
dreams. It is commonly said that sleep is
disturbed by dreams; strangely enough, we
are led to a contrary view and must regard
dreams as the guardians of sleep.249
Although Freud’s work has since fallen out of favor
in psychology departments across academia, he was
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Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalysis, and
The Interpretation of Dreams
Dreams and The Lathe of Heaven
In The Lathe of Heaven, Le Guin makes a specific
reference to the history of sleep medicine and dream
interpretation when Dr. Haber explains to George Orr
the kind of methodology he is using, why hypnosis is
necessary, and what his Augmentor will do to help Orr
dream:
Carl Gustav Jung, c. 1935. Le Guin’s work was influenced by
Jung’s concepts of the true self and the shadow.
extremely influential during the twentieth century,
having created a coherent structure by which to think
about the form and function of dreams.
Carl Gustav Jung
The Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875−1961)
was a collaborator and later rival of Sigmund Freud.
Although the two men had a fertile, five-year
collaboration that began in 1907, they fundamentally
disagreed about the role sexuality played in the
formation of neuroses, and so they parted ways in
1912. Jung went on to found what he called “analytical
psychology” to distinguish his methodology from
Freud’s. In his 1921 book Psychological Types, Jung
developed the concept of personality types, most
famously the idea of the introvert and the extrovert.250
Whatever their differences, both Freud and Jung saw
dreams and dreaming as key elements of human
health and consciousness. Le Guin has often said in
interviews and elsewhere that much of her work was
influenced by Jung’s concepts of the true self and of
the shadow, about which she also wrote in her critical
essay “The Child and the Shadow.”251
Hans Berger (1873−1941) was a German psychiatrist
who pioneered the use of electroencephalography in
1924. British psychiatrist Ian Oswald’s (1929−2012)
early research examined the effect of thinking, attention,
and visual imagery on the alpha rhythm of the EEG,
and his 1966 book Sleep was influential for many later
researchers. The Austrian-American psychiatrist Ernest
Hartmann (1934−2013) is best known for incorporating
neurophysiology, endocrinology, and biochemistry into
his work on sleep and dreaming.
William Haber sees himself as part of this cohort of
twentieth-century researchers who worked on the
physiology or physical anatomy of sleep. Indeed,
Haber is initially far less interested in the content and
interpretation of Orr’s dreams than he is in how Orr’s
brain produces them. Haber maps out Orr’s brainwaves
with an EEG, using the Augmentor to chart how the
physiological brain inside Orr’s skull operates. Thus,
Haber seems much more like a Dr. Dement than a Dr.
Freud. Haber’s interest changes, though, as he realizes
not only that Orr’s dreams affect reality, but also that
his own hypnotic suggestions can influence the very
real outcomes of Orr’s dreaming.
Haber begins to see Orr’s gift first as a potential tool to
mitigate some of humanities’ woes and then as a new
power of the human brain in general and a gift he can
harness for himself. When Orr argues with him about
the nature and uses of his gift, Haber replies:
We can’t stop—we’ve just begun! We’re just
beginning to get any control at all over this
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Our hypnosis plus the Augmentor will ensure
that we get…across the neurophysiological
and temporal gulf of sleep, right into
dreaming. So, we’ll need you on the couch
here. My field was pioneered by Dement,
Aserinsky, Berger, Oswald, Hartmann, and
the rest, but the couch we get straight from
Papa Freud…But we use it to sleep on, which
he objected to.252
power of yours. I’m within sight of doing so,
and I will do so. No personal fears can stand
in the way of the good that can be done for
all men with this new capacity of the human
brain! ... What I’m doing is making this new
capacity replicable. There’s an analogy with
the invention of printing, with the application
of any new technological or scientific
concept. If the experiment or technique
cannot be repeated successfully by others it
is of no use.253
As the conflict between Orr and Haber continues
to build, both men must grapple with the quandary
that dreams are never rational. Haber, as a scientist,
sincerely believes that “the aim of psychotherapy is…
to remove those groundless fears and nightmares, to
bring up what’s unconscious into the light of rational
consciousness, examine it objectively, and find that
there is nothing to fear.” Orr disagrees and notes that
there is plenty to fear, and he tries to persuade Haber
that he’s right, saying:
Look: if you ask me to dream again, what
will you get? Maybe a totally insane world,
the product of an insane mind. Monsters,
ghosts, witches, dragons, transformations—
all the stuff we carry around in us, all the
horrors of childhood, the night fears, the
nightmares. How can you keep all that from
getting loose?255
This is a question Sigmund Freud himself might well
have posed, should he have had a conversation with the
character of William Haber.
Haber is undeterred by Orr’s arguments. He sees
himself as the appropriate man to take over Orr’s
ability and is dismissive of Orr’s concerns:
There is nothing to fear. The dangerous
time—had we known it—was when you alone
possessed the capacity for e-dreaming and
didn’t know what to do with it. If you hadn’t
come to me, if you hadn’t been sent into
trained, scientific hands, who knows what
Hans Berger, c. 1920. Berger was a German psychiatrist who
pioneered the use of electroencephalography in 1924.
might have happened.256
When Haber at last manages to replicate Orr’s gift
using the Augmentor, he instructs Orr to dream away
his own gift—Haber wants Orr to dream himself
normal, so that the responsibility of effective dreaming
is no longer Orr’s responsibility but rather Haber’s. Orr
is relieved, but he also tells Dr. Haber that he ought
to consult with an alien, any alien, before attempting
to e-dream, saying, “Dr. Haber, before you dream,
you ought to talk with one of the Aliens…About me.
About dreaming. About iahklu’. It doesn’t matter. So
long as you listen.” Orr tells Haber this because the
aliens “know what you’re getting at, they’re a lot more
experienced than we are at all this,” and because
“[t]hey are of the dream time.”257
Haber, however, doesn’t listen. At this point in the
novel, Haber has proven himself to be someone who
rarely listens. Haber is, as Heather Lelache complains,
“[a] big fake.”258 Once this false and empty man starts
to dream, he loses the way and so loses his sanity.
As Haber’s dreams begin to create reality, the world
begins to melt into the abyss because Haber is a man of
no real substance—he is all surface and no depth.
THE ROLE OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE
LATHE OF HEAVEN
Le Guin’s Epigraphs and Taoism
Each chapter in The Lathe of Heaven begins with a
head quote or epigraph, and the very first of these
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This claim scares George Orr, especially when Haber
smiles “a grin of ecstasy that made Orr turn away as
if he had seen something never meant to be seen, both
terrifying and pathetic.”254
is taken from the ancient Chinese Taoist (Daoist)
philosopher Chuang Tse (now more commonly known
as Zhuangzi). This epigraph sets up the paradox that
the novel will address:
Confucius and you are both dreams, and I
who say you are dreams am a dream myself.
This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man
may explain it; that tomorrow will not be for
ten thousand generations.259
What then is the relationship between the real and
the unreal, between the truth and a dream? This is a
fundamental question posed by The Lathe of Heaven
and is a question that takes us into the realm of
philosophy, the academic study of the fundamental
nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. While Le
Guin offers no explanation for any of the epigraphs she
includes in her novel, the inaugural one suggests that
the ten thousand generations of which Zhuangzi spoke
have now passed, and that the wise man, the scientist
Dr. Haber, may be able to explain the paradox. Or is
the real wise man here the dreamer, George Orr?
The epigraphs for the second and third chapters are also
taken from Zhuangzi. The second chapter’s quote is a
little ominous: “The portal of God is non-existence.”261
The third chapter’s quote supplies the novel’s title:
Those whom heaven helps we call the
sons of heaven. They do not learn this by
learning. They do not work it by working.
They do not reason it by using reason. To
let understanding stop at what cannot be
understood is a high attainment. Those who
cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of
heaven.”262
An expression of the Taoist263 concept of stillness,
inaction, and integrity, this quote serves as a warning
about the danger of what William Haber is doing to
George Orr. Through the course of the novel, the
reader will come to understand that George Orr is
the lathe, the tool at the center of the shaping dream:
Zhuangzi Dreaming of a Butterfly, sixteenth century. Zhuangzi
was an ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher.
“There was a singular poise, almost a monumentality,
in the stance of his slight figure: he was completely
still, still as the center of something.”264 Orr is
wholeness itself: “Like a block of wood not carved.
The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified
wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting,
the uncarved; the being who, being nothing but
himself, is everything.”265
By using these three quotes at the outset of her novel,
Le Guin shows her hand: Eastern philosophy is going
to be central. The Lathe of Heaven has a mere eleven
chapters, each with quotes at their outset. Eight of
these quotations are taken from or reference Eastern
philosophy, while the other three are taken from the
European SF writers H. G. Wells and Victor Hugo,
tipping the scale of value toward George Orr’s intrinsic
adherence to a more Eastern philosophical perspective.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Le Guin had a lifelong interest
in Taoism and produced her own rendition of Lao
Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Le Guin’s version is subtitled A
Book About the Way and the Power of the Way (1997).
Le Guin’s version of this ancient, poetic text is by
no means a translation; rather it is a rendering. Le
Guin did not speak or read Chinese, but she did work
with Chinese scholars and with literal translations to
produce a new work, a kind of adaptation, that might
speak more directly, in English, to contemporary
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If we are all just each other’s dream, where can one find
reality? George Orr tells Heather Lelache that the reality
they are living through isn’t in fact real. Orr explains
that the world had been incinerated in 1998 and that he
brought it back by dreaming, so really “[t]here is nothing
left. Nothing but dreams.” Lelache both believes Orr and
denies what he’s said all in one breath.260
H.G. Wells, 1920. Le Guin uses a quote from Wells as one of
her epigraphs in The Lathe of Heaven.
readers.
Western Philosophy and Haber’s
Utilitarianism
Chapter Four’s epigraph shifts from philosophy to SF
and is taken from H. G. Wells’ 1902 novel A Modern
Utopia. Le Guin’s interest in the concept of utopia
encompasses a variety of her works, from perhaps her
most famous short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away
from Omelas” (1973), to her novels The Dispossessed:
An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) and Always Coming
Home (1985). In The Lathe of Heaven, it is Dr. Haber’s
explicit utopian intent to make the world a better place,
to perfect society and humankind, and to forge a more
perfect world. But this is a notoriously difficult thing
to accomplish—not in the least because, as SF writer
and critic Samuel Delany notes, what is good or right
or progress for some is the opposite for others: “Regard
this society. You say it’s good, but I say it’s bad.”
While Delany also notes that “[m]odern SF has gone
beyond this irreconcilable Utopian/Dystopian conflict to
produce a more fruitful model against which to compare
human development,”266 that conflict is still at the heart
of the tension between Dr. Haber and George Orr.
William Haber believes in rationality, in linear progress,
in the idea that by moving forward, human societies
move toward a better and brighter future; he believes in
the utilitarian motto inscribed on his HURAD (Human
Utility: Research and Development) office building:
“The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number.”267
Utilitarianism is a Western ethical theory that
determines right from wrong by focusing on best
outcomes. Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism,
which instructs us that the most ethical choice is the
one that will produce the greatest good for the greatest
number.268 However, because one cannot predict the
future, it is difficult to predict the outcome of any given
choice, especially individual choices. This quandary is
made evident in the disagreement Haber and Orr have
over the snake serum (discussed earlier in this guide).
Orr wants to be sure that the consequences of his action
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Portrait of Alexander Pope by Michael Dahl, c. 1727. A quote
from Pope is inscribed in the foyer of Dr. William Haber’s
office building.
THE PUBLICATION HISTORY AND
MEDIA AFTERLIFE OF THE LATHE
OF HEAVEN
Acclaimed SF author Ursula K. Le Guin.
Photo Credit: Richard Jensen
are beneficial, should he act. Haber believes in taking
action, period, because for him life is about doing, not
being.
As Haber tells Orr: “Nothing remains the same from
one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same
river twice. Life—evolution—the whole universe
of space/time, matter/energy—existence itself—is
essentially change.” To which Orr replies, “[t]hat is one
aspect of it…[t]he other is stillness.”269 Haber can’t hear
Orr as Haber proclaims himself to be broadly “prolife.” When The Lathe of Heaven was written in 1971,
this phrase did not have the political charge it took on
after the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade in
1973. Haber views himself as the one who is “moving,
interrelating, conflicting, changing,” not spiraling
toward “entropy, the heat-death of the universe.”270 To
Haber, Orr’s interest in stasis, in stillness, represents
entropy, so what one character understands as balance
and the right way to be is, for the other, erroneous and
wrong.
Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven has sometimes been
compared to Roger Zelazny’s 1965 novella He Who
Shapes in which a physician, Render, uses technology
to shape and share others’ dreams as he tries to help
them deal with their psychiatric issues.271 Le Guin’s
book was published in 1971 and was serialized in
the March and May issues of the magazine Amazing
Science Fiction. In October of that same year, it was
published as a stand-alone novel by Charles Scribner’s
Sons. A film version of The Lathe of Heaven was
produced in 1979 as part of New York City’s public
television station’s Experimental TV Lab project. The
film, which aired in 1980, was PBS’s first foray into a
made-for-television movie.
The film version of The Lathe of Heaven was directed
by David Loxton and Fred Barzyk and featured a script
by screenwriters Roger Swaybill and Diane English.
By her own account, Le Guin served as a consultant
on both the script and the film itself, including casting,
planning, and rewriting; she and her husband Charles
also made cameo appearances in the film as extras.272
The film starred Bruce Davidson as George Orr, Kevin
Conway as Dr. William Haber, and Margaret Avery as
Heather Lelache. When it first aired, it became one of
the two highest-rated shows that season on PBS.273
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While direct epigraphs from Western philosophers
aren’t present in the novel, William Haber’s belief
system is clearly meant to represent the values of
Western civilization. Not only does Haber believe in
the utilitarian motto on his office building, but that
building also has the following smaller inscription
in the foyer (which was modeled on the Pantheon in
Rome) from the British poet and essayist, Alexander
Pope (1688−1744): “The Proper Study of Mankind is
Man.” As previously noted, Haber is a man of action,
a rationalist with an aggressive and self-aggrandizing
sense of what it means to be human. Orr stands as a
clear contrast to Haber. While Orr doesn’t practice
any one philosophy or system of belief, what he
does believe lines up with much of Taoism. And like
Heather Lelache, the woman Orr comes to cherish and
marry, he does not believe in meddling with the world
or in playing God.
The film was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best
Dramatic Presentation, and the screenplay was
nominated for a Writer’s Guild Award. In 1998,
Entertainment Weekly Magazine named the 1980 film
one of the top one hundred greatest works of SF. After
its initial broadcast in 1980, The Lathe of Heaven was
occasionally shown over the next eight years, but PBS’
rights to rebroadcast the program expired in 1988.
Nevertheless, The Lathe of Heaven went on to become
the most requested program in PBS history. In 2000,
it was finally rebroadcast and released to video and
DVD. In addition to the film, this release features an
interview with Le Guin by Bill Moyers.
In 2002, The Lathe of Heaven was remade for the
A&E television network; written and directed by Alan
Sharpe and Philip Hass, this version was nominated
for a 2003 Saturn Award for Best Single Program
Presentation. Starring Lukas Haas as George Orr,
James Caan as William Haber, and Lisa Bonet as
Heather Lelache, this version made some radical
changes to the novel. Discarding large portions of
the plot, it paid no attention to the philosophical
underpinnings of the novel, paid no particular attention
to race or racism except for the casting of Bonet,
and discarded the alien invasion altogether.274 These
alterations simplified and distorted the story in such
significant ways that it was a disappointment to both
SF fans and to Le Guin herself. By her own account,
the best experience Le Guin had in having her written
work translated into another medium was on the 1979
shoot of the first PBS film of The Lathe of Heaven.
SECTION III CONCLUSION
Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven grapples with the
enduring theme of technology and humanity. Although
William Haber and his Augmentor embody the trope
of the mad scientist and his infernal machine, Le
Guin’s novel makes it clear that Haber is not a madman
when he invents the Augmentor. However, Haber goes
insane while using it to control Orr and steal Orr’s
ability to alter reality for himself. The Augmentor is
not a device liable to get out of control on its own—the
impact of the technology depends on who is using it.
When Haber uses the Augmentor on himself, it is
his will and the essential “emptiness of Haber’s
being”275 that cause the world to descend into total
chaos. Likewise, it is Orr’s will and the essential
“equanimity”276 of his being that allow Orr to push
a button and turn the Augmentor off, preventing the
world from being driven into the void of Haber’s
nightmare. When Orr exerts the entirety of his
willpower to stop Haber’s madness, his action
demonstrates how humanity can shape the technology
it invents. While that technology helps shape
humankind’s understanding of itself, technologies
alone do nothing—they are merely an expression of the
will of their maker. Humanity must decide when, how,
and to what end it will use the technology it invents.
We have the choice to use our tools in careful and
balanced ways. Or not.
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The movie features a memorable series of simple
cinematographic tricks; for example, the Augmentor
gets more and more outrageous as the film progresses,
growing into a giant supercomputer with whirling
controls and buttons whose functions remain
mysterious. The film also reflects the influence of
contemporary video art and had highly imaginative
set decoration, including frighteningly dark, modernist
architecture to convey a near future made uncertain by
all the shifts in reality George Orr’s dreams create.
Section IV
Shorter Selections
In this section of the resource guide, we will be
examining eight shorter works of literature that
address the theme of humanity and technology. With
the understanding that a technological device can
be as common as a pot or a pen, or as complex as a
robot or AI, we will first look at five short stories, two
from the nineteenth century: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) and Ambrose Bierce’s
“Moxon’s Master” (1899); and three from the twentieth
century: Ray Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body Electric!”
(1969), Octavia E. Butler’s “Childfinder” (written in
1970, published in 2014), and John Crowley’s “Snow”
(1983). A novella by C.L. Moore, “No Woman Born”
(1944), rounds out the short prose selections. After
examining these works, we shall look at two poems
by contemporary authors: “Relativity” by Sarah Howe
(2015) and “The Mushroom Hunters” by Neil Gaiman
(2017).
Taking different approaches, each piece addresses
similar questions, including but not limited to: in
what ways should humankind utilize the technology it
creates? Does technology improve upon or erode human
relations? Is technological innovation necessary for
humankind to progress or is it inherently dangerous?
Is the relationship between humans and machines
adversarial or beneficial—or both? What is the proper
relationship between humanity and nature? Does
humankind have the right to manipulate nature, and if
so, at what cost? Should humanity refrain from using
some forms of knowledge?
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S
“RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER”
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Biography
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) was born on July
4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts. Sometime in the
Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Charles Osgood, 1841.
1820s, Hawthorne added the “w” to his last name in
an effort to distance himself and his family from his
colonial forebears named Hathorne, one of whom
took part in the infamous Salem witch trials.277 In
1808, after his father died, his mother moved from
the Hathorne family home into the Salem home of her
affluent relatives, the Manning family, and then later
to Raymond, Maine, where the Mannings also had
property. The family moved back and forth between
Massachusetts and Maine until Hawthorne left home
to attend college. In 1821, Hawthorne left for Bowdoin
College, where he made friends with Franklin
Pierce (1804−69), who later became the President
of the United States from 1852−56, and with Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow (1807−82), who became a wellloved American poet.278 While in college, Hawthorne
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SECTION IV INTRODUCTION
In 1828, Hawthorne anonymously self-published his
first novel, Fanshawe. Notably a shy and retiring
personality, one whom the author Henry James called
a man of solitude rather than sociability, in 1830,
Hawthorne began publishing stories and sketches,
also anonymously.279 In 1836, he became the editor of
the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining
Knowledge, but the magazine went bankrupt before
he even drew a first paycheck. In 1837, Hawthorne
published Twice Told Tales, this time under his own
name.280 In this same year, he met his future wife,
Sophia Amelia Peabody (1809−71), an accomplished
artist in her own right and a member of the talented
Peabody family.281 In 1839, through friends in the
Democratic Party, Hawthorne was appointed to the
Boston Custom House, which allowed him the means
to propose. The following year, he published three
children’s books, and he was, for much of his career,
best known for his stories for children.
By 1841, Hawthorne had resigned his position at the
Custom House to become a member and investor in
the utopian Brook Farm community in West Roxbury,
Massachusetts. Brook Farm was a communitarian
effort to rethink a balance between physical and
mental labor. Enthusiastic at first, Hawthorne grew
disillusioned. He left the community, later suing to get
some of his investment back. Now married to Sophia
Peabody, the couple rented the Old Manse, a home
owned by the family of the poet, lecturer, and essayist
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Concord, Massachusetts.282
Hawthorne continued to publish short stories,
including “Rappaccini’s Daughter” in the December
issue of the United States Magazine. The Hawthornes’
first child, Una, was born in 1844. The following year,
due to financial constraints, the family moved back to
Salem. In 1846, Hawthorne received an appointment
as a surveyor in the Salem Custom House, another
political post garnered for him by his friend Franklin
Pierce. In June of 1846, a second child, Julian, was
born. Following the election of Zachary Taylor
(1784−1850), the Whig candidate for President in 1848,
Hawthorne lost his political appointment at the Custom
House and in part as compensation for the bitter loss of
this salary, Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, which
was published in 1850.283
After moving with his family to Lenox in western
Massachusetts, Hawthorne met the novelist, Herman
Melville, and the two became correspondents. Melville
dedicated his novel Moby Dick to Hawthorne in 1851;
in that same year, Hawthorne published The House of
Seven Gables, a new edition of his Twice-Told Tales,
and more children’s collections; in May of 1851, his
daughter Rose was born. In 1852, the family moved
back to Concord, where Hawthorne wrote a campaign
biography of Franklin Pierce, who had won that year’s
presidential election.
The following year, Pierce named Hawthorne
American consul at Liverpool, England, where the
family lived until Hawthorne’s resignation of the
post in 1857. During their sojourn in Europe, the
Hawthorne family traveled extensively; they settled in
Italy in 1858. In 1860, the family returned to Concord,
and Hawthorne published The Marble Faun, as war
loomed. On April 1, 1861, the Civil War began with the
Confederate attack on Fort Sumpter, South Carolina.
Neither an abolitionist nor pro-slavery, Hawthorne
wrote an essay about the conflict and about President
Abraham Lincoln titled “Chiefly about War-Matters,”
which was published in The Atlantic Monthly
magazine.284 By this time, Hawthorne was suffering
from health issues. Still, despite his illness, he took a
trip he hoped would prove recuperative with Franklin
Pierce to Plymouth, New Hampshire, where he died in
his sleep on May 19, 1864, at the age of sixty.
SELECTED WORK: “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
(1844)
We do not remember to have seen any translated specimens of the productions of M. de l’Aubepine—a
fact the less to be wondered at, as his very name is unknown to many of his own countrymen as well as
to the student of foreign literature. As a writer, he seems to occupy an unfortunate position between the
Transcendentalists (who, under one name or another, have their share in all the current literature of the
world) and the great body of pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and sympathies of the multitude.
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began writing fiction.
Our author is voluminous; he continues to write and publish with as much praiseworthy and indefatigable
prolixity as if his efforts were crowned with the brilliant success that so justly attends those of Eugene Sue.
His first appearance was by a collection of stories in a long series of volumes entitled “Contes deux fois
racontees.” The titles of some of his more recent works (we quote from memory) are as follows: “Le Voyage
Celeste a Chemin de Fer,” 3 tom., 1838; “Le nouveau Pere Adam et la nouvelle Mere Eve,” 2 tom., 1839;
“Roderic; ou le Serpent a l’estomac,” 2 tom., 1840; “Le Culte du Feu,” a folio volume of ponderous research
into the religion and ritual of the old Persian Ghebers, published in 1841; “La Soiree du Chateau en Espagne,”
1 tom., 8vo, 1842; and “L’Artiste du Beau; ou le Papillon Mecanique,” 5 tom., 4to, 1843. Our somewhat
wearisome perusal of this startling catalogue of volumes has left behind it a certain personal affection and
sympathy, though by no means admiration, for M. de l’Aubepine; and we would fain do the little in our
power towards introducing him favorably to the American public. The ensuing tale is a translation of his
“Beatrice; ou la Belle Empoisonneuse,” recently published in “La Revue Anti-Aristocratique.” This journal,
edited by the Comte de Bearhaven, has for some years past led the defence of liberal principles and popular
rights with a faithfulness and ability worthy of all praise.
--A YOUNG man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long ago, from the more southern region of Italy,
to pursue his studies at the University of Padua. Giovanni, who had but a scanty supply of gold ducats in his
pocket, took lodgings in a high and gloomy chamber of an old edifice, which looked not unworthy to have
been the palace of a Paduan noble, and which, in fact, exhibited over its entrance the armorial bearings of
a family long since extinct. The young stranger, who was not unstudied in the great poem of his country,
recollected that one of the ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion, had
been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his Inferno. These reminiscences and
associations, together with the tendency to heart-break natural to a young man for the first time out of his
native sphere, caused Giovanni to sigh heavily, as he looked around the desolate and ill-furnished apartment.
“Holy Virgin, signor,” cried old dame Lisabetta, who, won by the youth’s remarkable beauty of person, was
kindly endeavoring to give the chamber a habitable air, “what a sigh was that to come out of a young man’s
heart! Do you find this old mansion gloomy? For the love of heaven, then, put your head out of the window,
and you will see as bright sunshine as you have left in Naples.”
Guasconti mechanically did as the old woman advised, but could not quite agree with her that the Lombard
sunshine was as cheerful as that of southern Italy. Such as it was, however, it fell upon a garden beneath the
window, and expended its fostering influences on a variety of plants, which seemed to have been cultivated
with exceeding care.
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If not too refined, at all events too remote, too shadowy, and unsubstantial in his modes of development to
suit the taste of the latter class, and yet too popular to satisfy the spiritual or metaphysical requisitions of the
former, he must necessarily find himself without an audience, except here and there an individual or possibly
an isolated clique. His writings, to do them justice, are not altogether destitute of fancy and originality; they
might have won him greater reputation but for an inveterate love of allegory, which is apt to invest his plots
and characters with the aspect of scenery and people in the clouds, and to steal away the human warmth out
of his conceptions. His fictions are sometimes historical, sometimes of the present day, and sometimes, so
far as can be discovered, have little or no reference either to time or space. In any case, he generally contents
himself with a very slight embroidery of outward manners,—the faintest possible counterfeit of real life,—
and endeavors to create an interest by some less obvious peculiarity of the subject. Occasionally a breath
of Nature, a raindrop of pathos and tenderness, or a gleam of humor, will find its way into the midst of his
fantastic imagery, and make us feel as if, after all, we were yet within the limits of our native earth. We will
only add to this very cursory notice that M. de l’Aubepine’s productions, if the reader chance to take them in
precisely the proper point of view, may amuse a leisure hour as well as those of a brighter man; if otherwise,
they can hardly fail to look excessively like nonsense.
“Does this garden belong to the house?” asked Giovanni.
“Heaven forbid, signor!—unless it were fruitful of better pot-herbs than any that grow there now,” answered
old Lisabetta. “No; that garden is cultivated by the own hands of Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, the famous
Doctor, who, I warrant him, has been heard of as far as Naples. It is said he distils these plants into medicines
that are as potent as a charm. Oftentimes you may see the Signor Doctor at work, and perchance the Signora
his daughter, too, gathering the strange flowers that grow in the garden.”
Giovanni still found no better occupation than to look down into the garden beneath his window. From its
appearance, he judged it to be one of those botanic gardens, which were of earlier date in Padua than elsewhere
in Italy, or in the world. Or, not improbably, it might once have been the pleasure-place of an opulent family;
for there was the ruin of a marble fountain in the centre, sculptured with rare art, but so wofully shattered that
it was impossible to trace the original design from the chaos of remaining fragments. The water, however,
continued to gush and sparkle into the sunbeams as cheerfully as ever. A little gurgling sound ascended
to the young man’s window, and made him feel as if a fountain were an immortal spirit, that sung its song
unceasingly, and without heeding the vicissitudes around it; while one century embodied it in marble, and
another scattered the perishable garniture on the soil. All about the pool into which the water subsided, grew
various plants, that seemed to require a plentiful supply of moisture for the nourishment of gigantic leaves,
and, in some instances, flowers gorgeously magnificent. There was one shrub in particular, set in a marble vase
in the midst of the pool, that bore a profusion of purple blossoms, each of which had the lustre and richness
of a gem; and the whole together made a show so resplendent that it seemed enough to illuminate the garden,
even had there been no sunshine. Every portion of the soil was peopled with plants and herbs, which, if less
beautiful, still bore tokens of assiduous care; as if all had their individual virtues, known to the scientific mind
that fostered them. Some were placed in urns, rich with old carving, and others in common garden-pots; some
crept serpent-like along the ground, or climbed on high, using whatever means of ascent was offered them. One
plant had wreathed itself round a statue of Vertumnus, which was thus quite veiled and shrouded in a drapery of
hanging foliage, so happily arranged that it might have served a sculptor for a study.
While Giovanni stood at the window, he heard a rustling behind a screen of leaves, and became aware that
a person was at work in the garden. His figure soon emerged into view, and showed itself to be that of no
common laborer, but a tall, emaciated, sallow, and sickly looking man, dressed in a scholar’s garb of black.
He was beyond the middle term of life, with gray hair, a thin gray beard, and a face singularly marked
with intellect and cultivation, but which could never, even in his more youthful days, have expressed much
warmth of heart.
Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scientific gardener examined every shrub which grew in
his path; it seemed as if he was looking into their inmost nature, making observations in regard to their creative
essence, and discovering why one leaf grew in this shape, and another in that, and wherefore such and such
flowers differed among themselves in hue and perfume. Nevertheless, in spite of the deep intelligence on his
part, there was no approach to intimacy between himself and these vegetable existences. On the contrary, he
avoided their actual touch, or the direct inhaling of their odors, with a caution that impressed Giovanni most
disagreeably; for the man’s demeanor was that of one walking among malignant influences, such as savage
beasts, or deadly snakes, or evil spirits, which, should he allow them one moment of license, would wreak upon
him some terrible fatality. It was strangely frightful to the young man’s imagination, to see this air of insecurity
in a person cultivating a garden, that most simple and innocent of human toils, and which had been alike the joy
and labor of the unfallen parents of the race. Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world?—and this
man, with such a perception of harm in what his own hands caused to grow, was he the Adam?
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The old woman had now done what she could for the aspect of the chamber, and, commending the young
man to the protection of the saints, took her departure.
The distrustful gardener, while plucking away the dead leaves or pruning the too luxuriant growth of the
shrubs, defended his hands with a pair of thick gloves. Nor were these his only armor. When, in his walk
through the garden, he came to the magnificent plant that hung its purple gems beside the marble fountain,
he placed a kind of mask over his mouth and nostrils, as if all this beauty did but conceal a deadlier malice.
But finding his task still too dangerous, he drew back, removed the mask, and called loudly, but in the infirm
voice of a person affected with inward disease:
“Beatrice!—Beatrice!”
“Here am I, my father! What would you?” cried a rich and youthful voice from the window of the opposite
house; a voice as rich as a tropical sunset, and which made Giovanni, though he knew not why, think of deep
hues of purple or crimson, and of perfumes heavily delectable.—“Are you in the garden?”
Soon there emerged from under a sculptured portal the figure of a young girl, arrayed with as much richness of
taste as the most splendid of the flowers, beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade
more would have been too much. She looked redundant with life, health, and energy; all of which attributes
were bound down and compressed, as it were, and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her virgin zone. Yet
Giovanni’s fancy must have grown morbid, while he looked down into the garden; for the impression which the
fair stranger made upon him was as if here were another flower, the human sister of those vegetable ones, as
beautiful as they—more beautiful than the richest of them—but still to be touched only with a glove, nor to be
approached without a mask. As Beatrice came down the garden-path, it was observable that she handled and
inhaled the odor of several of the plants, which her father had most sedulously avoided.
“Here, Beatrice,” said the latter,—“see how many needful offices require to be done to our chief treasure.
Yet, shattered as I am, my life might pay the penalty of approaching it so closely as circumstances demand.
Henceforth, I fear, this plant must be consigned to your sole charge.”
“And gladly will I undertake it,” cried again the rich tones of the young lady, as she bent towards the
magnificent plant, and opened her arms as if to embrace it. “Yes, my sister, my splendor, it shall be Beatrice’s
task to nurse and serve thee; and thou shalt reward her with thy kisses and perfume breath, which to her is as
the breath of life!”
Then, with all the tenderness in her manner that was so strikingly expressed in her words, she busied herself
with such attentions as the plant seemed to require; and Giovanni, at his lofty window, rubbed his eyes, and
almost doubted whether it were a girl tending her favorite flower, or one sister performing the duties of affection
to another. The scene soon terminated. Whether Doctor Rappaccini had finished his labors in the garden, or
that his watchful eye had caught the stranger’s face, he now took his daughter’s arm and retired. Night was
already closing in; oppressive exhalations seemed to proceed from the plants, and steal upward past the open
window; and Giovanni, closing the lattice, went to his couch, and dreamed of a rich flower and beautiful girl.
Flower and maiden were different and yet the same, and fraught with some strange peril in either shape.
But there is an influence in the light of morning that tends to rectify whatever errors of fancy, or even of
judgment, we may have incurred during the sun’s decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the
less wholesome glow of moonshine. Giovanni’s first movement on starting from sleep, was to throw open
the window, and gaze down into the garden which his dreams had made so fertile of mysteries. He was
surprised, and a little ashamed, to find how real and matter-of-fact an affair it proved to be, in the first rays of
the sun, which gilded the dew-drops that hung upon leaf and blossom, and, while giving a brighter beauty to
each rare flower, brought everything within the limits of ordinary experience. The young man rejoiced, that,
in the heart of the barren city, he had the privilege of overlooking this spot of lovely and luxuriant vegetation.
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“Yes, Beatrice,” answered the gardener, “and I need your help.”
It would serve, he said to himself, as a symbolic language, to keep him in communion with Nature. Neither
the sickly and thought-worn Doctor Giacomo Rappaccini, it is true, nor his brilliant daughter, were now
visible; so that Giovanni could not determine how much of the singularity which he attributed to both, was
due to their own qualities, and how much to his wonder-working fancy. But he was inclined to take a most
rational view of the whole matter.
“Ill would it become a teacher of the divine art of medicine,” said Professor Pietro Baglioni, in answer to
a question of Giovanni, “to withhold due and well-considered praise of a physician so eminently skilled
as Rappaccini. But, on the other hand, I should answer it but scantily to my conscience, were I to permit
a worthy youth like yourself, Signor Giovanni, the son of an ancient friend, to imbibe erroneous ideas
respecting a man who might hereafter chance to hold your life and death in his hands. The truth is, our
worshipful Doctor Rappaccini has as much science as any member of the faculty—with perhaps one single
exception—in Padua, or all Italy. But there are certain grave objections to his professional character.”
“And what are they?” asked the young man.
“Has my friend Giovanni any disease of body or heart, that he is so inquisitive about physicians?” said
the Professor, with a smile. “But as for Rappaccini, it is said of him—and I, who know the man well, can
answer for its truth—that he cares infinitely more for science than for mankind. His patients are interesting
to him only as subjects for some new experiment. He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or
whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard-seed to the great heap
of his accumulated knowledge.”
“Methinks he is an awful man, indeed,” remarked Guasconti, mentally recalling the cold and purely intellectual
aspect of Rappaccini. “And yet, worshipful Professor, is it not a noble spirit? Are there many men capable of so
spiritual a love of science?”
“God forbid,” answered the Professor, somewhat testily—“at least, unless they take sounder views of the
healing art than those adopted by Rappaccini. It is his theory, that all medicinal virtues are comprised within
those substances which we term vegetable poisons. These he cultivates with his own hands, and is said even
to have produced new varieties of poison, more horribly deleterious than Nature, without the assistance of
this learned person, would ever have plagued the world withal. That the Signor Doctor does less mischief
than might be expected, with such dangerous substances, is undeniable. Now and then, it must be owned, he
has effected—or seemed to effect—a marvellous cure. But, to tell you my private mind, Signor Giovanni,
he should receive little credit for such instances of success—they being probably the work of chance—but
should be held strictly accountable for his failures, which may justly be considered his own work.”
The youth might have taken Baglioni’s opinions with many grains of allowance, had he known that there
was a professional warfare of long continuance between him and Doctor Rappaccini, in which the latter was
generally thought to have gained the advantage. If the reader be inclined to judge for himself, we refer him to
certain black-letter tracts on both sides, preserved in the medical department of the University of Padua.
“I know not, most learned Professor,” returned Giovanni, after musing on what had been said of Rappaccini’s
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In the course of the day, he paid his respects to Signor Pietro Baglioni, Professor of Medicine in the University,
a physician of eminent repute, to whom Giovanni had brought a letter of introduction. The Professor was an
elderly personage, apparently of genial nature, and habits that might almost be called jovial; he kept the young
man to dinner, and made himself very agreeable by the freedom and liveliness of his conversation, especially
when warmed by a flask or two of Tuscan wine. Giovanni, conceiving that men of science, inhabitants of the
same city, must needs be on familiar terms with one another, took an opportunity to mention the name of
Doctor Rappaccini. But the Professor did not respond with so much cordiality as he had anticipated.
exclusive zeal for science—“I know not how dearly this physician may love his art; but surely there is one
object more dear to him. He has a daughter.”
“Aha!” cried the Professor with a laugh. “So now our friend Giovanni’s secret is out. You have heard of this
daughter, whom all the young men in Padua are wild about, though not half a dozen have ever had the good
hap to see her face. I know little of the Signora Beatrice, save that Rappaccini is said to have instructed
her deeply in his science, and that, young and beautiful as fame reports her, she is already qualified to fill a
professor’s chair. Perchance her father destines her for mine! Other absurd rumors there be, not worth talking
about, or listening to. So now, Signor Giovanni, drink off your glass of Lacryma.”
Ascending to his chamber, he seated himself near the window, but within the shadow thrown by the depth
of the wall, so that he could look down into the garden with little risk of being discovered. All beneath his
eye was a solitude. The strange plants were basking in the sunshine, and now and then nodding gently to one
another, as if in acknowledgment of sympathy and kindred. In the midst, by the shattered fountain, grew the
magnificent shrub, with its purple gems clustering all over it; they glowed in the air, and gleamed back again
out of the depths of the pool, which thus seemed to overflow with colored radiance from the rich reflection
that was steeped in it. At first, as we have said, the garden was a solitude. Soon, however, —as Giovanni had
half hoped, half feared, would be the case,—a figure appeared beneath the antique sculptured portal, and
came down between the rows of plants, inhaling their various perfumes, as if she were one of those beings of
old classic fable, that lived upon sweet odors. On again beholding Beatrice, the young man was even startled
to perceive how much her beauty exceeded his recollection of it; so brilliant, so vivid in its character, that she
glowed amid the sunlight, and, as Giovanni whispered to himself, positively illuminated the more shadowy
intervals of the garden path. Her face being now more revealed than on the former occasion, he was struck
by its expression of simplicity and sweetness; qualities that had not entered into his idea of her character,
and which made him ask anew, what manner of mortal she might be. Nor did he fail again to observe, or
imagine, an analogy between the beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub that hung its gem-like flowers over
the fountain; a resemblance which Beatrice seemed to have indulged a fantastic humor in heightening, both
by the arrangement of her dress and the selection of its hues.
Approaching the shrub, she threw open her arms, as with a passionate ardor, and drew its branches into an
intimate embrace; so intimate, that her features were hidden in its leafy bosom, and her glistening ringlets all
intermingled with the flowers.
“Give me thy breath, my sister,” exclaimed Beatrice; “for I am faint with common air! And give me this
flower of thine, which I separate with gentlest fingers from the stem, and place it close beside my heart.”
With these words, the beautiful daughter of Rappaccini plucked one of the richest blossoms of the shrub, and
was about to fasten it in her bosom. But now, unless Giovanni’s draughts of wine had bewildered his senses,
a singular incident occurred. A small orange colored reptile, of the lizard or chameleon species, chanced to
be creeping along the path, just at the feet of Beatrice. It appeared to Giovanni—but, at the distance from
which he gazed, he could scarcely have seen anything so minute—it appeared to him, however, that a drop
or two of moisture from the broken stem of the flower descended upon the lizard’s head. For an instant, the
reptile contorted itself violently, and then lay motionless in the sunshine. Beatrice observed this remarkable
phenomenon, and crossed herself, sadly, but without surprise; nor did she therefore hesitate to arrange the
fatal flower in her bosom. There it blushed, and almost glimmered with the dazzling effect of a precious stone,
adding to her dress and aspect the one appropriate charm, which nothing else in the world could have supplied.
But Giovanni, out of the shadow of his window, bent forward and shrank back, and murmured and trembled.
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Guasconti returned to his lodgings somewhat heated with the wine he had quaffed, and which caused his
brain to swim with strange fantasies in reference to Doctor Rappaccini and the beautiful Beatrice. On his
way, happening to pass by a florist’s, he bought a fresh bouquet of flowers.
“Am I awake? Have I my senses?” said he to himself. “What is this being?—beautiful, shall I call her? —or
inexpressibly terrible?”
Beatrice now strayed carelessly through the garden, approaching closer beneath Giovanni’s window, so that
he was compelled to thrust his head quite out of its concealment, in order to gratify the intense and painful
curiosity which she excited. At this moment, there came a beautiful insect over the garden wall; it had
perhaps wandered through the city and found no flowers nor verdure among those antique haunts of men,
until the heavy perfumes of Doctor Rappaccini’s shrubs had lured it from afar. Without alighting on the
flowers, this winged brightness seemed to be attracted by Beatrice, and lingered in the air and fluttered about
her head. Now here it could not be but that Giovanni Guasconti’s eyes deceived him. Be that as it might, he
fancied that while Beatrice was gazing at the insect with childish delight, it grew faint and fell at her feet; —
its bright wings shivered; it was dead—from no cause that he could discern, unless it were the atmosphere of
her breath. Again Beatrice crossed herself and sighed heavily, as she bent over the dead insect.
An impulsive movement of Giovanni drew her eyes to the window. There she beheld the beautiful head of
the young man—rather a Grecian than an Italian head, with fair, regular features, and a glistening of gold
among his ringlets—gazing down upon her like a being that hovered in mid-air. Scarcely knowing what he
did, Giovanni threw down the bouquet which he had hitherto held in his hand.
“Thanks, Signor,” replied Beatrice, with her rich voice that came forth as it were like a gush of music; and
with a mirthful expression half childish and half woman-like. “I accept your gift, and would fain recompense
it with this precious purple flower; but if I toss it into the air, it will not reach you. So Signor Guasconti must
even content himself with my thanks.”
She lifted the bouquet from the ground, and then as if inwardly ashamed at having stepped aside from her
maidenly reserve to respond to a stranger’s greeting, passed swiftly homeward through the garden. But, few
as the moments were, it seemed to Giovanni when she was on the point of vanishing beneath the sculptured
portal, that his beautiful bouquet was already beginning to wither in her grasp. It was an idle thought; there
could be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower from a fresh one, at so great a distance.
For many days after this incident, the young man avoided the window that looked into Doctor Rappaccini’s
garden, as if something ugly and monstrous would have blasted his eye-sight, had he been betrayed into a
glance. He felt conscious of having put himself, to a certain extent, within the influence of an unintelligible
power, by the communication which he had opened with Beatrice. The wisest course would have been,
if his heart were in any real danger, to quit his lodgings and Padua itself, at once; the next wiser, to have
accustomed himself, as far as possible, to the familiar and day-light view of Beatrice; thus bringing her
rigidly and systematically within the limits of ordinary experience. Least of all, while avoiding her sight,
should Giovanni have remained so near this extraordinary being, that the proximity and possibility even
of intercourse, should give a kind of substance and reality to the wild vagaries which his imagination ran
riot continually in producing. Guasconti had not a deep heart—or at all events, its depths were not sounded
now—but he had a quick fancy, and an ardent southern temperament, which rose every instant to a higher
fever-pitch. Whether or not Beatrice possessed those terrible attributes—that fatal breath—the affinity with
those so beautiful and deadly flowers—which were indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had
at least instilled a fierce and subtle poison into his system. It was not love, although her rich beauty was a
madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that
seemed to pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in
it, and burned like one and shivered like the other. Giovanni knew not what to dread; still less did he know
what to hope; yet hope and dread kept a continual warfare in his breast, alternately vanquishing one another
and starting up afresh to renew the contest. Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the
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“Signora,” said he, “there are pure and healthful flowers. Wear them for the sake of Giovanni Guasconti!”
lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.
Sometimes he endeavored to assuage the fever of his spirit by a rapid walk through the streets of Padua,
or beyond its gates; his footsteps kept time with the throbbings of his brain, so that the walk was apt to
accelerate itself to a race. One day, he found himself arrested; his arm was seized by a portly personage who
had turned back on recognizing the young man, and expended much breath in overtaking him.
“Signor Giovanni!—stay, my young friend!” –cried he. “Have you forgotten me? That might well be the case,
if I were as much altered as yourself.”
It was Baglioni, whom Giovanni had avoided, ever since their first meeting, from a doubt that the Professor’s
sagacity would look too deeply into his secrets. Endeavoring to recover himself, he stared forth wildly from
his inner world into the outer one, and spoke like a man in a dream.
“Yes; I am Giovanni Guasconti. You are Professor Pietro Baglioni. Now let me pass!”
“Speedily, then, most worshipful Professor, speedily!” said Giovanni, with feverish impatience. “Does not
your worship see that I am in haste?”
Now, while he was speaking, there came a man in black along the street, stooping and moving feebly, like a
person in inferior health. His face was all overspread with a most sickly and sallow hue, but yet so pervaded
with an expression of piercing and active intellect, that an observer might easily have overlooked the merely
physical attributes, and have seen only this wonderful energy. As he passed, this person exchanged a cold
and distant salutation with Baglioni, but fixed his eyes upon Giovanni with an intentness that seemed to
bring out whatever was within him worthy of notice. Nevertheless, there was a peculiar quietness in the look,
as if taking merely a speculative, not a human interest, in the young man.
“It is Doctor Rappaccini!” whispered the Professor, when the stranger had passed. —“Has he ever seen your
face before?”
“Not that I know,” answered Giovanni, starting at the name.
“He has seen you!—he must have seen you!” said Baglioni, hastily. “For some purpose or other, this man of
science is making a study of you. I know that look of his! It is the same that coldly illuminates his face, as
he bends over a bird, a mouse, or a butterfly, which, in pursuance of some experiment, he has killed by the
perfume of a flower; —a look as deep as Nature itself, but without Nature’s warmth of love. Signor Giovanni,
I will stake my life upon it, you are the subject of one of Rappaccini’s experiments!”
“Will you make a fool of me?” cried Giovanni, passionately. “That, Signor Professor, were an untoward
experiment.”
“Patience, patience!” replied the imperturbable Professor. “I tell thee, my poor Giovanni, that Rappaccini has
a scientific interest in thee. Thou hast fallen into fearful hands! And the Signora Beatrice? What part does
she act in this mystery?”
But Guasconti, finding Baglioni’s pertinacity intolerable, here broke away, and was gone before the Professor
could again seize his arm. He looked after the young man intently, and shook his head.
“This must not be,” said Baglioni to himself. “The youth is the son of my old friend, and shall not come
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“Not yet—not yet, Signor Giovanni Guasconti,” said the Professor, smiling, but at the same time scrutinizing
the youth with an earnest glance. “What, did I grow up side by side with your father, and shall his son pass
me like a stranger, in these old streets of Padua? Stand still, Signor Giovanni; for we must have a word or two
before we part.”
to any harm from which the arcana of medical science can preserve him. Besides, it is too insufferable an
impertinence in Rappaccini thus to snatch the lad out of my own hands, as I may say, and make use of him
for his infernal experiments. This daughter of his! It shall be looked to. Perchance, most learned Rappaccini,
I may foil you where you little dream of it!”
Meanwhile, Giovanni had pursued a circuitous route, and at length found himself at the door of his lodgings.
As he crossed the threshold, he was met by old Lisabetta, who smirked and smiled, and was evidently
desirous to attract his attention; vainly, however, as the ebullition of his feelings had momentarily subsided
into a cold and dull vacuity. He turned his eyes full upon the withered face that was puckering itself into a
smile, but seemed to behold it not. The old dame, therefore, laid her grasp upon his cloak.
“Signor! —Signor!” whispered she, still with a smile over the whole breadth of her visage, so that it looked
not unlike a grotesque carving in wood, darkened by centuries—“Listen, Signor! There is a private entrance
into the garden!”
“Hush! hush!—not so loud!” whispered Lisabetta, putting her hand over his mouth. “Yes; into the worshipful
Doctor’s garden, where you may see all his fine shrubbery. Many a young man in Padua would give gold to be
admitted among those flowers.”
Giovanni put a piece of gold into her hand.
“Show me the way,” said he.
A surmise, probably excited by his conversation with Baglioni, crossed his mind, that this interposition of old
Lisabetta might perchance be connected with the intrigue, whatever were its nature, in which the Professor
seemed to suppose that Doctor Rappaccini was involving him. But such a suspicion, though it disturbed
Giovanni, was inadequate to restrain him. The instant he was aware of the possibility of approaching Beatrice,
it seemed an absolute necessity of his existence to do so. It mattered not whether she were angel or demon; he
was irrevocably within her sphere, and must obey the law that whirled him onward, in ever lessening circles,
towards a result which he did not attempt to foreshadow. And yet, strange to say, there came across him a
sudden doubt, whether this intense interest on his part were not delusory—whether it were really of so deep and
positive a nature as to justify him in now thrusting himself into an incalculable position—whether it were not
merely the fantasy of a young man’s brain, only slightly, or not at all, connected with his heart!
He paused—hesitated—turned half about—but again went on. His withered guide led him along several
obscure passages, and finally undid a door, through which, as it was opened, there came the sight and sound
of rustling leaves, with the broken sunshine glimmering among them. Giovanni stepped forth, and forcing
himself through the entanglement of a shrub that wreathed its tendrils over the hidden entrance, he stood
beneath his own window, in the open area of Doctor Rappaccini’s garden.
How often is it the case, that, when impossibilities have come to pass, and dreams have condensed their misty
substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and even coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances
which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate! Fate delights to thwart us thus. Passion will
choose his own time to rush upon the scene, and lingers sluggishly behind, when an appropriate adjustment
of events would seem to summon his appearance. So was it now with Giovanni. Day after day, his pulses had
throbbed with feverish blood, at the improbable idea of an interview with Beatrice, and of standing with her,
face to face, in this very garden, basking in the oriental sunshine of her beauty, and snatching from her full
gaze the mystery which he deemed the riddle of his own existence. But now there was a singular and untimely
equanimity within his breast. He threw a glance around the garden to discover if Beatrice or her father were
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“What do you say?” exclaimed Giovanni, turning quickly about, as if an inanimate thing should start into
feverish life. —“A private entrance into Doctor Rappaccini’s garden!”
present, and perceiving that he was alone, began a critical observation of the plants.
Giovanni had not considered with himself what should be his deportment; whether he should apologize for
his intrusion into the garden, or assume that he was there with the privity, at least, if not by the desire, of
Doctor Rappaccini or his daughter. But Beatrice’s manner placed him at his ease, though leaving him still
in doubt by what agency he had gained admittance. She came lightly along the path, and met him near the
broken fountain. There was surprise in her face, but brightened by a simple and kind expression of pleasure.
“You are a connoisseur in flowers, Signor,” said Beatrice with a smile, alluding to the bouquet which he had
flung her from the window. “It is no marvel, therefore, if the sight of my father’s rare collection has tempted
you to take a nearer view. If he were here, he could tell you many strange and interesting facts as to the
nature and habits of these shrubs, for he has spent a life-time in such studies, and this garden is his world.”
“And yourself, lady”—observed Giovanni—“if fame says true—you, likewise, are deeply skilled in the
virtues indicated by these rich blossoms, and these spicy perfumes. Would you deign to be my instructress, I
should prove an apter scholar than under Signor Rappaccini himself.”
“Are there such idle rumors?” asked Beatrice, with the music of a pleasant laugh. “Do people say that I
am skilled in my father’s science of plants? What a jest is there! No; though I have grown up among these
flowers, I know no more of them than their hues and perfume; and sometimes, methinks I would fain rid
myself of even that small knowledge. There are many flowers here, and those not the least brilliant, that
shock and offend me, when they meet my eye. But, pray, Signor, do not believe these stories about my
science. Believe nothing of me save what you see with your own eyes.”
“And must I believe all that I have seen with my own eyes?” asked Giovanni pointedly, while the recollection
of former scenes made him shrink. “No, Signora, you demand too little of me. Bid me believe nothing, save
what comes from your own lips.”
It would appear that Beatrice understood him. There came a deep flush to her cheek; but she looked full into
Giovanni’s eyes, and responded to his gaze of uneasy suspicion with a queen-like haughtiness.
“I do so bid you, Signor!” she replied. “Forget whatever you may have fancied in regard to me. If true to the
outward senses, still it may be false in its essence. But the words of Beatrice Rappaccini’s lips are true from
the heart outward. Those you may believe!”
A fervor glowed in her whole aspect, and beamed upon Giovanni’s consciousness like the light of truth itself.
But while she spoke, there was a fragrance in the atmosphere around her rich and delightful, though evanescent,
yet which the young man, from an indefinable reluctance, scarcely dared to draw into his lungs. It might be the
odor of the flowers. Could it be Beatrice’s breath, which thus embalmed her words with a strange richness, as if
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The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him; their gorgeousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even
unnatural. There was hardly an individual shrub which a wanderer, straying by himself through a forest,
would not have been startled to find growing wild, as if an unearthly face had glared at him out of the
thicket. Several, also, would have shocked a delicate instinct by an appearance of artificialness, indicating
that there had been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery of various vegetable species, that the
production was no longer of God’s making, but the monstrous offspring of man’s depraved fancy, glowing
with only an evil mockery of beauty. They were probably the result of experiment, which, in one or two
cases, had succeeded in mingling plants individually lovely into a compound possessing the questionable
and ominous character that distinguished the whole growth of the garden. In fine, Giovanni recognized but
two or three plants in the collection, and those of a kind that he well knew to be poisonous. While busy with
these contemplations, he heard the rustling of a silken garment, and turning, beheld Beatrice emerging from
beneath the sculptured portal.
by steeping them in her heart? A faintness passed like a shadow over Giovanni, and flitted away; he seemed to
gaze through the beautiful girl’s eyes into her transparent soul, and felt no more doubt or fear.
In this free intercourse, they had strayed through the garden, and now, after many turns among its avenues,
were come to the shattered fountain, beside which grew the magnificent shrub with its treasury of glowing
blossoms. A fragrance was diffused from it, which Giovanni recognized as identical with that which he had
attributed to Beatrice’s breath, but incomparably more powerful. As her eyes fell upon it, Giovanni beheld
her press her hand to her bosom, as if her heart were throbbing suddenly and painfully.
“For the first time in my life,” murmured she, addressing the shrub, “I had forgotten thee!”
“I remember, Signora,” said Giovanni, “that you once promised to reward me with one of these living
gems for the bouquet, which I had the happy boldness to fling to your feet. Permit me now to pluck it as a
memorial of this interview.”
He made a step towards the shrub, with extended hand. But Beatrice darted forward, uttering a shriek that
went through his heart like a dagger. She caught his hand, and drew it back with the whole force of her
slender figure. Giovanni felt her touch thrilling through his fibres.
“Touch it not!” exclaimed she, in a voice of agony. “Not for thy life! It is fatal!”
Then, hiding her face, she fled from him, and vanished beneath the sculptured portal. As Giovanni followed
her with his eyes, he beheld the emaciated figure and pale intelligence of Doctor Rappaccini, who had been
watching the scene, he knew not how long, within the shadow of the entrance.
No sooner was Guasconti alone in his chamber, than the image of Beatrice came back to his passionate
musings, invested with all the witchery that had been gathering around it ever since his first glimpse of her,
and now likewise imbued with a tender warmth of girlish womanhood. She was human: her nature was
endowed with all gentle and feminine qualities; she was worthiest to be worshipped; she was capable, surely,
on her part, of the height and heroism of love. Those tokens, which he had hitherto considered as proofs of a
frightful peculiarity in her physical and moral system, were now either forgotten, or, by the subtle sophistry
of passion, transmuted into a golden crown of enchantment, rendering Beatrice the more admirable, by so
much as she was the more unique. Whatever had looked ugly, was now beautiful; or, if incapable of such a
change, it stole away and hid itself among those shapeless half-ideas, which throng the dim region beyond
the daylight of our perfect consciousness. Thus did Giovanni spend the night, nor fell asleep, until the dawn
had begun to awake the slumbering flowers in Doctor Rappaccini’s garden, whither his dreams doubtless led
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The tinge of passion that had colored Beatrice’s manner vanished; she became gay, and appeared to derive a
pure delight from her communion with the youth, not unlike what the maiden of a lonely island might have
felt, conversing with a voyager from the civilized world. Evidently her experience of life had been confined
within the limits of that garden. She talked now about matters as simple as the day-light or summer-clouds,
and now asked questions in reference to the city, or Giovanni’s distant home, his friends, his mother, and his
sisters; questions indicating such seclusion, and such lack of familiarity with modes and forms, that Giovanni
responded as if to an infant. Her spirit gushed out before him like a fresh rill, that was just catching its first
glimpse of the sunlight, and wondering, at the reflections of earth and sky which were flung into its bosom.
There came thoughts, too, from a deep source, and fantasies of a gem-like brilliancy, as if diamonds and
rubies sparkled upward among the bubbles of the fountain. Ever and anon, there gleamed across the young
man’s mind a sense of wonder, that he should be walking side by side with the being who had so wrought
upon his imagination—whom he had idealized in such hues of terror—in whom he had positively witnessed
such manifestations of dreadful attributes—that he should be conversing with Beatrice like a brother, and
should find her so human and so maiden-like. But such reflections were only momentary; the effect of her
character was too real, not to make itself familiar at once.
him. Up rose the sun in his due season, and flinging his beams upon the young man’s eyelids, awoke him to a
sense of pain. When thoroughly aroused, he became sensible of a burning and tingling agony in his hand—in
his right hand—the very hand which Beatrice had grasped in her own, when he was on the point of plucking
one of the gem-like flowers. On the back of that hand there was now a purple print, like that of four small
fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb upon his wrist.
After the first interview, a second was in the inevitable course of what we call fate. A third; a fourth; and a
meeting with Beatrice in the garden was no longer an incident in Giovanni’s daily life, but the whole space in
which he might be said to live; for the anticipation and memory of that ecstatic hour made up the remainder.
Nor was it otherwise with the daughter of Rappaccini. She watched for the youth’s appearance, and flew to
his side with confidence as unreserved as if they had been playmates from early infancy—as if they were
such playmates still. If, by any unwonted chance, he failed to come at the appointed moment, she stood
beneath the window, and sent up the rich sweetness of her tones to float around him in his chamber, and echo
and reverberate throughout his heart—“Giovanni! Giovanni! Why tarriest thou? Come down!” And down he
hastened into that Eden of poisonous flowers.
But, with all this intimate familiarity, there was still a reserve in Beatrice’s demeanor, so rigidly and invariably
sustained, that the idea of infringing it scarcely occurred to his imagination. By all appreciable signs, they
loved; they had looked love, with eyes that conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths
of the other, as if it were too sacred to be whispered by the way; they had even spoken love, in those gushes of
passion when their spirits darted forth in articulated breath, like tongues of long-hidden flame; and yet there had
been no seal of lips, no clasp of hands, nor any slightest caress, such as love claims and hallows. He had never
touched one of the gleaming ringlets of her hair; her garment—so marked was the physical barrier between
them—had never been waved against him by a breeze. On the few occasions when Giovanni had seemed
tempted to overstep the limit, Beatrice grew so sad, so stern, and withal wore such a look of desolate separation,
shuddering at itself, that not a spoken word was requisite to repel him. At such times, he was startled at the
horrible suspicions that rose, monster-like, out of the caverns of his heart, and stared him in the face; his love
grew thin and faint as the morning-mist; his doubts alone had substance. But when Beatrice’s face brightened
again, after the momentary shadow, she was transformed at once from the mysterious, questionable being,
whom he had watched with so much awe and horror; she was now the beautiful and unsophisticated girl, whom
he felt that his spirit knew with a certainty beyond all other knowledge.
A considerable time had now passed since Giovanni’s last meeting with Baglioni. One morning, however, he
was disagreeably surprised by a visit from the Professor, whom he had scarcely thought of for whole weeks,
and would willingly have forgotten still longer. Given up, as he had long been, to a pervading excitement,
he could tolerate no companions, except upon condition of their perfect sympathy with his present state of
feeling. Such sympathy was not to be expected from Professor Baglioni.
The visitor chatted carelessly, for a few moments, about the gossip of the city and the University, and then
took up another topic.
“I have been reading an old classic author lately,” said he, “and met with a story that strangely interested
me. Possibly you may remember it. It is of an Indian prince, who sent a beautiful woman as a present
to Alexander the Great. She was as lovely as the dawn, and gorgeous as the sunset; but what especially
distinguished her was a certain rich perfume in her breath—richer than a garden of Persian roses. Alexander,
as was natural to a youthful conqueror, fell in love at first sight with this magnificent stranger. But a certain
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Oh, how stubbornly does love—or even that cunning semblance of love which flourishes in the imagination,
but strikes no depth of root into the heart—how stubbornly does it hold its faith, until the moment comes,
when it is doomed to vanish into thin mist! Giovanni wrapt a handkerchief about his hand, and wondered
what evil thing had stung him, and soon forgot his pain in a reverie of Beatrice.
sage physician, happening to be present, discovered a terrible secret in regard to her.”
“And what was that?” asked Giovanni, turning his eyes downward to avoid those of the Professor.
“That this lovely woman,” continued Baglioni, with emphasis, “had been nourished with poisons from her
birth upward, until her whole nature was so imbued with them, that she herself had become the deadliest
poison in existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich perfume of her breath, she blasted the very
air. Her love would have been poison!—her embrace death! Is not this a marvellous tale?”
“A childish fable,” answered Giovanni, nervously starting from his chair. “I marvel how your worship finds
time to read such nonsense, among your graver studies.”
“Nor are there any,” replied Giovanni, who had turned pale as the Professor spoke; “nor, I think, is there any
fragrance, except in your worship’s imagination. Odors, being a sort of element combined of the sensual and
the spiritual, are apt to deceive us in this manner. The recollection of a perfume—the bare idea of it—may
easily be mistaken for a present reality.”
“Aye; but my sober imagination does not often play such tricks,” said Baglioni; “and were I to fancy any
kind of odor, it would be that of some vile apothecary drug, wherewith my fingers are likely enough to be
imbued. Our worshipful friend Rappaccini, as I have heard, tinctures his medicaments with odors richer than
those of Araby. Doubtless, likewise, the fair and learned Signora Beatrice would minister to her patients with
draughts as sweet as a maiden’s breath. But wo to him that sips them!”
Giovanni’s face evinced many contending emotions. The tone in which the Professor alluded to the pure and
lovely daughter of Rappaccini was a torture to his soul; and yet, the intimation of a view of her character,
opposite to his own, gave instantaneous distinctness to a thousand dim suspicions, which now grinned at him
like so many demons. But he strove hard to quell them, and to respond to Baglioni with a true lover’s perfect
faith.
“Signor Professor,” said he, “you were my father’s friend—perchance, too, it is your purpose to act a friendly
part towards his son. I would fain feel nothing towards you save respect and deference. But I pray you to
observe, Signor, that there is one subject on which we must not speak. You know not the Signora Beatrice.
You cannot, therefore, estimate the wrong—the blasphemy, I may even say—that is offered to her character
by a light or injurious word.”
“Giovanni!—my poor Giovanni!” answered the Professor, with a calm expression of pity, “I know this
wretched girl far better than yourself. You shall hear the truth in respect to the poisoner Rappaccini, and his
poisonous daughter. Yes; poisonous as she is beautiful! Listen; for even should you do violence to my gray
hairs, it shall not silence me. That old fable of the Indian woman has become a truth, by the deep and deadly
science of Rappaccini, and in the person of the lovely Beatrice!”
Giovanni groaned and hid his face.
“Her father,” continued Baglioni, “was not restrained by natural affection from offering up his child, in this
horrible manner, as the victim of his insane zeal for science. For—let us do him justice—he is as true a man
of science as ever distilled his own heart in an alembic. What, then, will be your fate? Beyond a doubt, you
are selected as the material of some new experiment. Perhaps the result is to be death—perhaps a fate more
awful still! Rappaccini, with what he calls the interest of science before his eyes, will hesitate at nothing.”
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“By the bye,” said the Professor, looking uneasily about him, “what singular fragrance is this in your
apartment? Is it the perfume of your gloves? It is faint, but delicious, and yet, after all, by no means agreeable.
Were I to breathe it long, methinks it would make me ill. It is like the breath of a flower—but I see no flowers in
the chamber.”
“It is a dream!” muttered Giovanni to himself, “surely it is a dream!”
“But,” resumed the Professor, “be of good cheer, son of my friend! It is not yet too late for the rescue.
Possibly, we may even succeed in bringing back this miserable child within the limits of ordinary nature,
from which her father’s madness has estranged her. Behold this little silver vase! It was wrought by the hands
of the renowned Benvenuto Cellini, and is well worthy to be a love-gift to the fairest dame in Italy. But its
contents are invaluable. One little sip of this antidote would have rendered the most virulent poisons of the
Borgias innocuous. Doubt not that it will be as efficacious against those of Rappaccini. Bestow the vase, and
the precious liquid within it, on your Beatrice, and hopefully await the result.”
Baglioni laid a small, exquisitely wrought silver phial on the table, and withdrew, leaving what he had said to
produce its effect upon the young man’s mind.
Throughout Giovanni’s whole acquaintance with Beatrice, he had occasionally, as we have said, been
haunted by dark surmises as to her character. Yet, so thoroughly had she made herself felt by him as a
simple, natural, most affectionate and guileless creature, that the image now held up by Professor Baglioni,
looked as strange and incredible, as if it were not in accordance with his own original conception. True, there
were ugly recollections connected with his first glimpses of the beautiful girl; he could not quite forget the
bouquet that withered in her grasp, and the insect that perished amid the sunny air, by no ostensible agency
save the fragrance of her breath. These incidents, however, dissolving in the pure light of her character, had
no longer the efficacy of facts, but were acknowledged as mistaken fantasies, by whatever testimony of the
senses they might appear to be substantiated. There is something truer and more real, than what we can see
with the eyes, and touch with the finger. On such better evidence, had Giovanni founded his confidence in
Beatrice, though rather by the necessary force of her high attributes, than by any deep and generous faith
on his part. But, now, his spirit was incapable of sustaining itself at the height to which the early enthusiasm
of passion had exalted it; he fell down, grovelling among earthly doubts, and defiled therewith the pure
whiteness of Beatrice’s image. Not that he gave her up; he did but distrust. He resolved to institute some
decisive test that should satisfy him, once for all, whether there were those dreadful peculiarities in her
physical nature, which could not be supposed to exist without some corresponding monstrosity of soul. His
eyes, gazing down afar, might have deceived him as to the lizard, the insect, and the flowers. But if he could
witness, at the distance of a few paces, the sudden blight of one fresh and healthful flower in Beatrice’s hand,
there would be room for no further question. With this idea, he hastened to the florist’s, and purchased a
bouquet that was still gemmed with the morning dew-drops.
It was now the customary hour of his daily interview with Beatrice. Before descending into the garden,
Giovanni failed not to look at his figure in the mirror; a vanity to be expected in a beautiful young man,
yet, as displaying itself at that troubled and feverish moment, the token of a certain shallowness of feeling
and insincerity of character. He did gaze, however, and said to himself, that his features had never before
possessed so rich a grace, nor his eyes such vivacity, nor his cheeks so warm a hue of superabundant life.
“At least,” thought he, “her poison has not yet insinuated itself into my system. I am no flower to perish in
her grasp!”
With that thought, he turned his eyes on the bouquet, which he had never once laid aside from his hand.
A thrill of indefinable horror shot through his frame, on perceiving that those dewy flowers were already
beginning to droop; they wore the aspect of things that had been fresh and lovely, yesterday. Giovanni grew
white as marble, and stood motionless before the mirror, staring at his own reflection there, as at the likeness
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“We will thwart Rappaccini yet!” thought he, chuckling to himself, as he descended the stairs. “But, let us
confess the truth of him, he is a wonderful man!—a wonderful man indeed! A vile empiric, however, in his
practice, and therefore not to be tolerated by those who respect the good old rules of the medical profession!”
of something frightful. He remembered Baglioni’s remark about the fragrance that seemed to pervade the
chamber. It must have been the poison in his breath! Then he shuddered—shuddered at himself! Recovering
from his stupor, he began to watch, with curious eye, a spider that was busily at work, hanging its web
from the antique cornice of the apartment, crossing and re-crossing the artful system of interwoven lines,
as vigorous and active a spider as ever dangled from an old ceiling. Giovanni bent towards the insect, and
emitted a deep, long breath. The spider suddenly ceased its toil; the web vibrated with a tremor originating
in the body of the small artisan. Again Giovanni sent forth a breath, deeper, longer, and imbued with a
venomous feeling out of his heart; he knew not whether he were wicked or only desperate. The spider made a
convulsive gripe with his limbs, and hung dead across the window.
“Accursed! Accursed!” muttered Giovanni, addressing himself. “Hast thou grown so poisonous, that this
deadly insect perishes by thy breath?”
At that moment, a rich, sweet voice came floating up from the garden: “Giovanni! Giovanni! It is past the
hour! Why tarriest thou! Come down!”
He rushed down, and in an instant, was standing before the bright and loving eyes of Beatrice. A moment
ago, his wrath and despair had been so fierce that he could have desired nothing so much as to wither her
by a glance. But, with her actual presence, there came influences which had too real an existence to be at
once shaken off; recollections of the delicate and benign power of her feminine nature, which had so often
enveloped him in a religious calm; recollections of many a holy and passionate outgush of her heart, when
the pure fountain had been unsealed from its depths, and made visible in its transparency to his mental
eye; recollections which, had Giovanni known how to estimate them, would have assured him that all this
ugly mystery was but an earthly illusion, and that, whatever mist of evil might seem to have gathered over
her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly angel. Incapable as he was of such high faith, still her presence had
not utterly lost its magic. Giovanni’s rage was quelled into an aspect of sullen insensibility. Beatrice, with
a quick spiritual sense, immediately felt that there was a gulf of blackness between them, which neither he
nor she could pass. They walked on together, sad and silent, and came thus to the marble fountain, and to its
pool of water on the ground, in the midst of which grew the shrub that bore gem-like blossoms. Giovanni
was affrighted at the eager enjoyment—the appetite, as it were—with which he found himself inhaling the
fragrance of the flowers.
“Beatrice,” asked he abruptly, “whence came this shrub!”
“My father created it,” answered she, with simplicity.
“Created it! created it!” repeated Giovanni. “What mean you, Beatrice?”
“He is a man fearfully acquainted with the secrets of nature,” replied Beatrice; “and, at the hour when I first
drew breath, this plant sprang from the soil, the offspring of his science, of his intellect, while I was but his
earthly child. Approach it not!” continued she, observing with terror that Giovanni was drawing nearer to the
shrub. “It has qualities that you little dream of. But I, dearest Giovanni—I grew up and blossomed with the
plant, and was nourished with its breath. It was my sister, and I loved it with a human affection: for—alas!
hast thou not suspected it? there was an awful doom.”
Here Giovanni frowned so darkly upon her that Beatrice paused and trembled. But her faith in his tenderness
reassured her, and made her blush that she had doubted for an instant.
“There was an awful doom,” she continued, —“the effect of my father’s fatal love of science—which
estranged me from all society of my kind. Until Heaven sent thee, dearest Giovanni, Oh! how lonely was thy
poor Beatrice!”
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“Yes,” muttered Giovanni again. “She is the only being whom my breath may not slay! Would that it might!”
“Was it a hard doom?” asked Giovanni, fixing his eyes upon her.
“Only of late have I known how hard it was,” answered she tenderly. “Oh, yes; but my heart was torpid, and
therefore quiet.”
Giovanni’s rage broke forth from his sullen gloom like a lightning-flash out of a dark cloud.
“Accursed one!” cried he, with venomous scorn and anger. “And finding thy solitude wearisome, thou hast
severed me, likewise, from all the warmth of life, and enticed me into thy region of unspeakable horror!”
“Giovanni!” exclaimed Beatrice, turning her large bright eyes upon his face. The force of his words had not
found its way into her mind; she was merely thunder-struck.
“Yes, poisonous thing!” repeated Giovanni, beside himself with passion. “Thou hast done it! Thou hast
blasted me! Thou hast filled my veins with poison! Thou hast made me as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and
deadly a creature as thyself—a world’s wonder of hideous monstrosity! Now—if our breath be happily as
fatal to ourselves as to all others—let us join our lips in one kiss of unutterable hatred, and so die!”
“Thou! Dost thou pray?” cried Giovanni, still with the same fiendish scorn. “Thy very prayers, as they come
from thy lips, taint the atmosphere with death. Yes, yes; let us pray! Let us to church, and dip our fingers in
the holy water at the portal! They that come after us will perish as by a pestilence. Let us sign crosses in the
air! It will be scattering curses abroad in the likeness of holy symbols!”
“Giovanni,” said Beatrice calmly, for her grief was beyond passion, “Why dost thou join thyself with me thus
in those terrible words? I, it is true, am the horrible thing thou namest me. But thou!—what hast thou to do,
save with one other shudder at my hideous misery, to go forth out of the garden and mingle with thy race,
and forget that there ever crawled on earth such a monster as poor Beatrice?”
“Dost thou pretend ignorance?” asked Giovanni, scowling upon her. “Behold! This power have I gained from
the pure daughter of Rappaccini!”
There was a swarm of summer-insects flitting through the air, in search of the food promised by the flowerodors of the fatal garden. They circled round Giovanni’s head, and were evidently attracted towards him by the
same influence which had drawn them, for an instant, within the sphere of several of the shrubs. He sent forth a
breath among them, and smiled bitterly at Beatrice, as at least a score of the insects fell dead upon the ground.
“I see it! I see it!” shrieked Beatrice. “It is my father’s fatal science? No, no, Giovanni; it was not I! Never,
never! I dreamed only to love thee, and be with thee a little time, and so to let thee pass away, leaving but
thine image in mine heart. For, Giovanni—believe it—though my body be nourished with poison, my
spirit is God’s creature, and craves love as its daily food. But my father!—he has united us in this fearful
sympathy. Yes; spurn me!—tread upon me!—kill me! Oh, what is death, after such words as thine? But it
was not I! Not for a world of bliss would I have done it!”
Giovanni’s passion had exhausted itself in its outburst from his lips. There now came across him a sense,
mournful, and not without tenderness, of the intimate and peculiar relationship between Beatrice and himself.
They stood, as it were, in an utter solitude, which would be made none the less solitary by the densest throng of
human life. Ought not, then, the desert of humanity around them to press this insulated pair closer together? If
they should be cruel to one another, who was there to be kind to them? Besides, thought Giovanni, might there
not still be a hope of his returning within the limits of ordinary nature, and leading Beatrice—the redeemed
Beatrice—by the hand? Oh, weak, and selfish, and unworthy spirit, that could dream of an earthly union and
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“What has befallen me?” murmured Beatrice, with a low moan out of her heart. “Holy Virgin pity me, a poor
heartbroken child!”
earthly happiness as possible, after such deep love had been so bitterly wronged as was Beatrice’s love by
Giovanni’s blighting words! No, no; there could be no such hope. She must pass heavily, with that broken heart,
across the borders of Time—she must bathe her hurts in some fount of Paradise, and forget her grief in the light
of immortality—and there be well!
But Giovanni did not know it.
“Dear Beatrice,” said he, approaching her, while she shrank away, as always at his approach, but now with
a different impulse—“dearest Beatrice, our fate is not yet so desperate. Behold! There is a medicine, potent,
as a wise physician has assured me, and almost divine in its efficacy. It is composed of ingredients the most
opposite to those by which thy awful father has brought this calamity upon thee and me. It is distilled of
blessed herbs. Shall we not quaff it together, and thus be purified from evil?”
She put Baglioni’s antidote to her lips; and, at the same moment, the figure of Rappaccini emerged from the
portal, and came slowly towards the marble fountain. As he drew near, the pale man of science seemed to gaze
with a triumphant expression at the beautiful youth and maiden, as might an artist who should spend his life
in achieving a picture or a group of statuary, and finally be satisfied with his success. He paused—his bent
form grew erect with conscious power, he spread out his hand over them, in the attitude of a father imploring a
blessing upon his children. But those were the same hands that had thrown poison into the stream of their lives!
Giovanni trembled. Beatrice shuddered very nervously, and pressed her hand upon her heart.
“My daughter,” said Rappaccini, “thou art no longer lonely in the world! Pluck one of those precious gems
from thy sister shrub, and bid thy bridegroom wear it in his bosom. It will not harm him now! My science,
and the sympathy between thee and him, have so wrought within his system, that he now stands apart from
common men, as thou dost, daughter of my pride and triumph, from ordinary women. Pass on, then, through
the world, most dear to one another, and dreadful to all besides!”
“My father,” said Beatrice, feebly—and still, as she spoke, she kept her hand upon her heart—“wherefore
didst thou inflict this miserable doom upon thy child?”
“Miserable!” exclaimed Rappaccini. “What mean you, foolish girl? Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed
with marvellous gifts, against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy? Misery, to be able to quell
the mightiest with a breath? Misery, to be as terrible as thou art beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred
the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil, and capable of none?”
“I would fain have been loved, not feared,” murmured Beatrice, sinking down upon the ground. —“But
now it matters not; I am going, father, where the evil, which thou hast striven to mingle with my being, will
pass away like a dream—like the fragrance of these poisonous flowers, which will no longer taint my breath
among the flowers of Eden. Farewell, Giovanni! Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart—but they,
too, will fall away as I ascend. Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?”
To Beatrice—so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by Rappaccini’s skill—as poison had
been life, so the powerful antidote was death. And thus the poor victim of man’s ingenuity and of thwarted
nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom, perished there, at the feet of
her father and Giovanni. Just at that moment, Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and
called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the thunder-stricken man of science: “Rappaccini!
Rappaccini! And is this the upshot of your experiment?”
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“Give it me!” said Beatrice, extending her hand to receive the little silver phial which Giovanni took from his
bosom. She added, with a peculiar emphasis: “I will drink—but do thou await the result.”
Analysis of “Rappaccini’s Daughter”:
Botany and Biology as Technology
The fanciful short story that follows his disingenuous
biography features an Italian doctor named Giacomo
Rappaccini who grows unusual plants in his garden in
Padua. The doctor experiments with plants, distilling
them into powerful potions, and although his motives
aren’t clear at first, he’s using botany as a technology—
that is, Rappaccini is using botany as a tool, growing
experimental plants and transforming nature into
medicinal potions and poisons.287 His garden is his
laboratory.
A young scholar named Giovanni Guasconti, who has
come to Padua to study, rents an apartment overlooking
this garden. From his window, Guasconti notices that
the doctor moves cautiously about the garden; when
Rappaccini calls out “Beatrice, Beatrice,”288 it is in a
shaky voice. Giovanni takes this shakiness to be a sign
of illness, foreshadowing Rappaccini’s degenerate soul.
In answer to the old man’s call, a beautiful girl appears
“arrayed with as much richness of taste as the most
splendid of the flowers, beautiful as the day, and with
a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade more would
have been too much. She looked redundant with life,
health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound
down and compressed, as it were and girdled tensely, in
their luxuriance, by her virgin zone.”289 This description
points to the fact that Beatrice will turn out to be more
than human. Hawthorne’s narrator is also warning the
reader that Beatrice’s vitality is being kept under her
father’s control.
Giovanni sees Beatrice as akin to the beautiful garden
plants, one of which she calls her sister. The first night
after seeing her, Giovanni dreams that “flower and
maiden were different, and yet the same, and fraught
Photographic portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Mathew
Brady, c.1860–64.
with some strange peril in either shape.”290 Using the
device of the dream, as well as literary references to
Dante’s Divine Comedy and to the Bible, Hawthorne
signals that his story is going to be a test of the reader’s
credulity. Perched in the liminal space between dream
and reality, history and poetry, the story takes pains
to present Rappaccini as a serious scientist. However,
the doctor’s methods are obscure, his means are never
revealed, and his motives remain unclear. He appears,
in fact, to be dabbling in a pseudo-science or botanical
alchemy.
Hawthorne’s extravagant descriptions of the lavishness
of Rappaccini’s garden also take the story out of the
realm of science and into the realm of the symbolic.
The narrator personifies the plants—they move as
if human, and as if they have feelings. Gem-like,
serpentine, beautiful but deadly, the purple flower of
one plant is a fanciful fabrication; it is also a powerful
symbol of how humanity’s interventions in nature can
have unintended consequences.
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Hawthorne’s short story begins with a facetious
autobiography of Hawthorne himself, introduced as
one M. de l’Aubepine (French for Hawthorn), who has
purportedly translated the French story of “Beatrice;
ou la Belle Empoisonneuse,” into English.285 Teasing
the reader with this sly opening, Hawthorne is able to
at once boast of his artistry and to disavow it, to praise
his skills as a storyteller and yet attribute that story
to someone other than himself, securing an outside
authority to bolster the reliability of what will turn out
to be a fantastic tale. Hawthorne employed this same
device in his most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter.286
He cares infinitely more for science than for
mankind. His patients are interesting to him
only as subjects for some new experiment.
He would sacrifice human life, his own
among the rest, or whatever else was dearest
to him, for the sake of adding so much as a
grain of mustard seed to the great heap of
his accumulated knowledge.291
Baglioni also tells Giovanni that Rappaccini has so
well-schooled his daughter, she could be a professor
herself. This high level of schooling makes her a very
rare thing in Hawthorne’s day; the first woman to
achieve the rank and salary of a full professor in the
United States—Harriet Cooke at Cornell University—
didn’t do so until 1871.292
Giovanni can see for himself that Beatrice has a deep
affinity for her father’s garden and that she takes care
of it diligently, even lovingly.293 As he spies on her,
he sees first a lizard, then a winged insect near her
perish. When Giovanni impulsively throws a bouquet
of flowers to the girl, as she picks the bouquet up,
the flowers all wither. Both horrified and intrigued,
Giovanni becomes obsessed with the girl. Is Beatrice
poisonous or is he imagining what he has seen? Soon,
he can’t turn away from her:
She had at least instilled a fierce and subtle
poison into his system. It was not love,
although her rich beauty was a madness to
him; nor horror, even while he fancied her
spirit to be imbued with the same baneful
essence that seemed to pervade her physical
frame; but a wild offspring of both love and
horror that had each parent in it and burned
like one and shivered like the other.294
Partly a horror story, partly a love story, “Rappaccini’s
Daughter” is also a cautionary tale not—only about
man’s untoward interference in nature, but also about
how true goodness is not corruptible. Beatrice’s father
may have rendered her physical form poisonous, but
her essential purity is without blemish. Although
the narrator doesn’t step away from Giovanni’s
point of view often, Hawthorne does interject direct
observations that are not Giovanni’s to guide the
reader’s interpretation. This unnamed narrative voice
informs the reader that “there is something truer and
more real than what we can see with the eyes and
touch with the finger.”295 Beatrice’s good and pure
nature is one such unsubstantial reality.
Meanwhile, caught in the throes of his obsession
with Beatrice, Giovanni has been shunning the clever
doctor Pietro Baglioni, knowing he will ferret out the
scholar’s obsession with the girl. Baglioni, who feels
protective of Giovanni, stops him in the street. Seeing
Rappaccini nearby, Baglioni abruptly realizes what the
old man has been up to:
For some purpose or other, this man of
science is making a study of you. I know
that look of his! It is the same that coldly
illuminates his face as he bends over a bird,
a mouse, or a butterfly, which, in pursuance
of some experiment, he has killed by the
perfume of a flower; a look as deep as
Nature itself, but without Nature’s warmth
of love. Signor Giovanni, I will stake my
life upon it, you are the subject of one of
Rappaccini’s experiments!296
Giovanni dismisses Baglioni’s concern, and he bribes
his housekeeper into revealing a hidden path into the
garden, where he finally meets Beatrice. They begin
to meet daily, as if in a courtship. While Giovanni
becomes more and more entangled, he also starts to fear
he is indeed being experimented upon. Worried, he goes
to Professor Baglioni who informs him that Beatrice
has been the subject of her father’s experimentations her
entire life. She embodies a fatal poison, but she might
still be rescued from her father’s machinations:
Possibly we may even succeed in bringing
back this miserable child within the limits
of ordinary nature, from which her father’s
madness has estranged her. Behold this little
silver vase! It was wrought by the hands of
the renowned Benvenuto Cellini and is well
worthy to be a love gift to the fairest dame
in Italy. But its contents are invaluable.
One little sip of this antidote would have
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At first, Giovanni is simply curious about the garden
and the girl. He has come to Padua for the serious
purpose of attending classes, armed with a letter of
introduction from his father to Signor Pietro Baglioni,
who is a professor of medicine at the university. When
Giovanni asks about Rappaccini, Baglioni warns that
while he is a brilliant man of science, he’s a heartless
one. His love for knowledge eclipses all else:
When Giovanni confronts Beatrice, she pleads that
her intentions were good; all she wanted was human
connection. She drinks down the entire flask of the
antidote to prove her innocence, as her father crows
that he’s achieved his goal. He has rendered Giovanni
a fit husband for his altered child. Beatrice asks him
in despair why he has inflicted such misery upon her,
and Rappaccini scoffs and urges her to embrace her
superiority:
What mean you, foolish girl? Dost thou deem
it misery to be endowed with marvelous gifts
against which no power nor strength could
avail an enemy—misery, to be able to quell
the mightiest with a breath—misery, to be as
terrible as thou art beautiful? Wouldst thou,
then, have preferred the condition of a weak
woman, exposed to all evil and capable of
none?298
Through this declaration, Hawthorne’s narrator reveals
a nineteenth-century perspective on femininity: women
are weak, susceptible to evil but not capable of evil, a
claim most people today would find unbelievable. But
in the story, Beatrice’s motives are pure. Her vitality
is real. She dies because she has been so thoroughly
altered by her father that the antidote kills her instead
of curing her: “Thus the poor victim of man’s ingenuity
and of thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends
all such efforts of perverted wisdom, perished there, at
the feet of her father and Giovanni.”
Before Beatrice expires, she points out to Giovanni—
as well as to her father, and by implication to
Baglioni—“was there not, from the first, more poison
in thy nature than in mine?”299 Here the story is clear
about its message: humankind must be cautious when
meddling with nature. When humanity uses science to
create technological inventions, when theories are used
to create tools, such as the botanical and biological
weaponry of Rappaccini, the intent might at times be
meant as benevolent, but a will to power is also in play.
To play God is always a dangerous game.
As Beatrice collapses, Baglioni cries out from
Giovanni’s window “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is
THIS the upshot of your experiment!”300 The narrator
informs us that he does so with a mixture of horror
and triumph, thereby suggesting that all three of these
men have used the girl for their own ends—Giovanni
emotionally, her father experimentally, and Baglioni as
a means to show up his rival. Therefore, all three men
are in some measure responsible for her death.
AMBROSE BIERCE’S “MOXON’S
MASTER”
Ambrose Bierce: Biography
Ambrose Bierce (1842–c.1914) was born in Ohio in
1842; his parents were farmers, and the family grew
to include thirteen children.301 The family soon moved
to Indiana, where Bierce went to high school, and
later he went on to the Kentucky Military Institute.
When the Civil War began in 1861, he enlisted in the
Union Army, and served in the Ninth Indiana Infantry
Regiment and Buell’s Army of the Ohio, where he
took part in the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga and
Sherman’s March to the Sea. Bierce had heath issues
most of his life; he had asthma and he experienced
complications from his war wounds. After the war
ended, Bierce went to San Francisco as part of a
military expedition. Once in California, he left the
army to begin writing. On December 25, 1871, he
married Mary Ellen “Mollie” Day; they had three
children: two sons, Day and Leigh, and a daughter,
Helen Ray.302
In 1872, Bierce moved the family to England. He
wrote for Fun and Figaro magazines, and his biting
satires earned him the nickname of “Bitter Bierce.”303
His first three books—Nuggets and Dust Panned Out
in California (1872), The Fiend’s Delight (1873), and
Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874)—were published
in England. Bierce responded poorly to the English
weather, which worsened his asthma, so the family
returned to San Francisco, where he began writing for
William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner.
In 1892, he published a book of poetry, Black Beetles
in Amber (1892), and later a second book of poems,
Shapes of Clay (1903); these two books were later
published as the fourth and fifth volumes in his
Collected Works (1909–12).304
Bierce was not only a satirist, but also a critic, poet,
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rendered the most virulent poisons of the
Borgias innocuous. Doubt not that it will be
as efficacious against those of Rappaccini.
Bestow the vase, and the precious liquid
within it, on your Beatrice, and hopefully
await the result.297
Author Ambrose Bierce, c. 1866.
SELECTED WORK: “Moxon’s Master” by Ambrose Bierce (1899)
From Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs (The Library of America, 2011), pages 252–61. First
published in the April 16, 1899, issue of the San Francisco Examiner and collected in the 1910 edition of Can Such Things Be?
“Are you serious?—do you really believe that a machine thinks?”
I got no immediate reply; Moxon was apparently intent upon the coals in the grate, touching them
deftly here and there with the fire-poker till they signified a sense of his attention by a brighter glow. For
several weeks I had been observing in him a growing habit of delay in answering even the most trivial of
commonplace questions. His air, however, was that of preoccupation rather than deliberation: one might have
said that he had “something on his mind.”
Presently he said:
“What is a ‘machine’? The word has been variously defined. Here is one definition from a popular
dictionary: ‘Any instrument or organization by which power is applied and made effective, or a desired effect
produced.’ Well, then, is not a man a machine? And you will admit that he thinks—or thinks he thinks.”
“If you do not wish to answer my question,” I said, rather testily, “why not say so?—all that you say is
mere evasion. You know well enough that when I say ‘machine’ I do not mean a man, but something that
man has made and controls.”
“When it does not control him,” he said, rising abruptly and looking out of a window, whence nothing
was visible in the blackness of a stormy night. A moment later he turned about and with a smile said: “I
beg your pardon; I had no thought of evasion. I considered the dictionary man’s unconscious testimony
suggestive and worth something in the discussion. I can give your question a direct answer easily enough: I
do believe that a machine thinks about the work that it is doing.”
That was direct enough, certainly. It was not altogether pleasing, for it tended to confirm a sad suspicion
that Moxon’s devotion to study and work in his machine-shop had not been good for him. I knew, for one
thing, that he suffered from insomnia, and that is no light affliction. Had it affected his mind? His reply
to my question seemed to me then evidence that it had; perhaps I should think differently about it now. I
was younger then, and among the blessings that are not denied to youth is ignorance. Incited by that great
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journalist, and novelist, and his various works were
published in numerous newspaper columns in his
lifetime. Bierce became a noted figure in early
California literary society; his friends included Mark
Twain (Samuel Clemens, 1835–1910), Bret Harte
(1836–1902), and Joaquin Miller (1837–1913).305 In
1896, Bierce relocated to Washington, D.C., where he
continued to publish poems, essays, epigrams, and
short stories, and while Bierce’s most acclaimed work
is The Devil’s Dictionary (1906), his best-known short
story is the Civil War tale “An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge.” In 1888, Bierce and his wife separated
after Bierce came across some illicit love letters sent
to her; they divorced in 1904; Mollie died in 1905. In
1913, he informed friends that he was going to join
Pancho Villa’s forces in Mexico as an observer of the
Mexican civil war. No one heard from him again, and
the circumstances of his death remain unknown.306
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stimulant to controversy, I said:
“And what, pray, does it think with—in the absence of a brain?”
The reply, coming with less than his customary delay, took his favorite form of counter-interrogation:
“With what does a plant think—in the absence of a brain?”
“Ah, plants also belong to the philosopher class! I should be pleased to know some of their conclusions;
you may omit the premises.”
“Perhaps,” he replied, apparently unaffected by my foolish irony, “you may be able to infer their convictions
from their acts. I will spare you the familiar examples of the sensitive mimosa, the several insectivorous
flowers and those whose stamens bend down and shake their pollen upon the entering bee in order that he may
fertilize their distant mates. But observe this. In an open spot in my garden I planted a climbing vine. When it
was barely above the surface I set a stake into the soil a yard away. The vine at once made for it, but as it was
about to reach it after several days I removed it a few feet. The vine at once altered its course, making an acute
angle, and again made for the stake. This manoeuvre was repeated several times, but finally, as if discouraged,
the vine abandoned the pursuit and ignoring further attempts to divert it traveled to a small tree, further away,
which it climbed.
“Roots of the eucalyptus will prolong themselves incredibly in search of moisture. A well-known
horticulturist relates that one entered an old drain pipe and followed it until it came to a break, where a section
of the pipe had been removed to make way for a stone wall that had been built across its course. The root left
the drain and followed the wall until it found an opening where a stone had fallen out. It crept through and
following the other side of the wall back to the drain, entered the unexplored part and resumed its journey.”
“And all this?”
“Can you miss the significance of it? It shows the consciousness of plants. It proves that they think.”
“Even if it did—what then? We were speaking, not of plants, but of machines. They may be composed
partly of wood—wood that has no longer vitality—or wholly of metal. Is thought an attribute also of the
mineral kingdom?”
“How else do you explain the phenomena, for example, of crystallization?”
“I do not explain them.”
“Because you cannot without affirming what you wish to deny, namely, intelligent cooperation among the
constituent elements of the crystals. When soldiers form lines, or hollow squares, you call it reason. When
wild geese in flight take the form of a letter V you say instinct. When the homogeneous atoms of a mineral,
moving freely in solution, arrange themselves into shapes mathematically perfect, or particles of frozen
moisture into the symmetrical and beautiful forms of snowflakes, you have nothing to say. You have not even
invented a name to conceal your heroic unreason.”
Moxon was speaking with unusual animation and earnestness. As he paused I heard in an adjoining room
known to me as his “machine-shop,” which no one but himself was permitted to enter, a singular thumping
sound, as of some one pounding upon a table with an open hand. Moxon heard it at the same moment and,
visibly agitated, rose and hurriedly passed into the room whence it came. I thought it odd that any one else
should be in there, and my interest in my friend—with doubtless a touch of unwarrantable curiosity—led me
to listen intently, though, I am happy to say, not at the keyhole. There were confused sounds, as of a struggle
or scuffle; the floor shook. I distinctly heard hard breathing and a hoarse whisper which said “Damn you!”
Then all was silent, and presently Moxon reappeared and said, with a rather sorry smile:
“Pardon me for leaving you so abruptly. I have a machine in there that lost its temper and cut up rough.”
Fixing my eyes steadily upon his left cheek, which was traversed by four parallel excoriations showing
blood, I said:
“How would it do to trim its nails?”
I could have spared myself the jest; he gave it no attention, but seated himself in the chair that he had left
and resumed the interrupted monologue as if nothing had occurred:
“Doubtless you do not hold with those (I need not name them to a man of your reading) who have
taught that all matter is sentient, that every atom is a living, feeling, conscious being. I do. There is no such
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thing as dead, inert matter: it is all alive; all instinct with force, actual and potential; all sensitive to the
same forces in its environment and susceptible to the contagion of higher and subtler ones residing in such
superior organisms as it may be brought into relation with, as those of man when he is fashioning it into an
instrument of his will. It absorbs something of his intelligence and purpose—more of them in proportion to
the complexity of the resulting machine and that of its work.
“Do you happen to recall Herbert Spencer’s definition of ‘Life’? I read it thirty years ago. He may have
altered it afterward, for anything I know, but in all that time I have been unable to think of a single word that
could profitably be changed or added or removed. It seems to me not only the best definition, but the only
possible one.
“ ‘Life,’ he says, ‘is a definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive,
in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences.’ ”
“That defines the phenomenon,” I said, “but gives no hint of its cause.”
“That,” he replied, “is all that any definition can do. As Mill points out, we know nothing of cause except
as an antecedent—nothing of effect except as a consequent. Of certain phenomena, one never occurs without
another, which is dissimilar: the first in point of time we call cause, the second, effect. One who had many
times seen a rabbit pursued by a dog, and had never seen rabbits and dogs otherwise, would think the rabbit
the cause of the dog.
“But I fear,” he added, laughing naturally enough, “that my rabbit is leading me a long way from the
track of my legitimate quarry: I’m indulging in the pleasure of the chase for its own sake. What I want you
to observe is that in Herbert Spencer’s definition of ‘life’ the activity of a machine is included—there is
nothing in the definition that is not applicable to it. According to this sharpest of observers and deepest of
thinkers, if a man during his period of activity is alive, so is a machine when in operation. As an inventor
and constructor of machines I know that to be true.”
Moxon was silent for a long time, gazing absently into the fire. It was growing late and I thought it time
to be going, but somehow I did not like the notion of leaving him in that isolated house, all alone except for
the presence of some person of whose nature my conjectures could go no further than that it was unfriendly,
perhaps malign. Leaning toward him and looking earnestly into his eyes while making a motion with my
hand through the door of his workshop, I said:
“Moxon, whom have you in there?”
Somewhat to my surprise he laughed lightly and answered without hesitation:
“Nobody; the incident that you have in mind was caused by my folly in leaving a machine in action with
nothing to act upon, while I undertook the interminable task of enlightening your understanding. Do you
happen to know that Consciousness is the creature of Rhythm?”
“O bother them both!” I replied, rising and laying hold of my overcoat. “I’m going to wish you good
night; and I’ll add the hope that the machine which you inadvertently left in action will have her gloves on
the next time you think it needful to stop her.”
Without waiting to observe the effect of my shot I left the house.
Rain was falling, and the darkness was intense. In the sky beyond the crest of a hill toward which I
groped my way along precarious plank sidewalks and across miry, unpaved streets I could see the faint glow
of the city’s lights, but behind me nothing was visible but a single window of Moxon’s house. It glowed with
what seemed to me a mysterious and fateful meaning. I knew it was an uncurtained aperture in my friend’s
“machine-shop,” and I had little doubt that he had resumed the studies interrupted by his duties as my instructor
in mechanical consciousness and the fatherhood of Rhythm. Odd, and in some degree humorous, as his
convictions seemed to me at that time, I could not wholly divest myself of the feeling that they had some tragic
relation to his life and character—perhaps to his destiny—although I no longer entertained the notion that they
were the vagaries of a disordered mind. Whatever might be thought of his views, his exposition of them was
too logical for that. Over and over, his last words came back to me: “Consciousness is the creature of Rhythm.”
Bald and terse as the statement was, I now found it infinitely alluring. At each recurrence it broadened in
meaning and deepened in suggestion. Why, here, (I thought) is something upon which to found a philosophy.
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If consciousness is the product of rhythm all things are conscious, for all have motion, and all motion is
rhythmic. I wondered if Moxon knew the significance and breadth of his thought—the scope of this momentous
generalization; or had he arrived at his philosophic faith by the tortuous and uncertain road of observation?
That faith was then new to me, and all Moxon’s expounding had failed to make me a convert; but now
it seemed as if a great light shone about me, like that which fell upon Saul of Tarsus; and out there in the
storm and darkness and solitude I experienced what Lewes calls “The endless variety and excitement of
philosophic thought.” I exulted in a new sense of knowledge, a new pride of reason. My feet seemed hardly
to touch the earth; it was as if I were uplifted and borne through the air by invisible wings.
Yielding to an impulse to seek further light from him whom I now recognized as my master and guide,
I had unconsciously turned about, and almost before I was aware of having done so found myself again at
Moxon’s door. I was drenched with rain, but felt no discomfort. Unable in my excitement to find the doorbell I
instinctively tried the knob. It turned and, entering, I mounted the stairs to the room that I had so recently left.
All was dark and silent; Moxon, as I had supposed, was in the adjoining room—the “machine-shop.” Groping
along the wall until I found the communicating door I knocked loudly several times, but got no response, which
I attributed to the uproar outside, for the wind was blowing a gale and dashing the rain against the thin walls in
sheets. The drumming upon the shingle roof spanning the unceiled room was loud and incessant.
I had never been invited into the machine-shop—had, indeed, been denied admittance, as had all others,
with one exception, a skilled metal worker, of whom no one knew anything except that his name was Haley
and his habit silence. But in my spiritual exaltation, discretion and civility were alike forgotten and I opened
the door. What I saw took all philosophical speculation out of me in short order.
Moxon sat facing me at the farther side of a small table upon which a single candle made all the light that
was in the room. Opposite him, his back toward me, sat another person. On the table between the two was
a chessboard; the men were playing. I knew little of chess, but as only a few pieces were on the board it was
obvious that the game was near its close. Moxon was intensely interested—not so much, it seemed to me, in the
game as in his antagonist, upon whom he had fixed so intent a look that, standing though I did directly in the
line of his vision, I was altogether unobserved. His face was ghastly white, and his eyes glittered like diamonds.
Of his antagonist I had only a back view, but that was sufficient; I should not have cared to see his face.
He was apparently not more than five feet in height, with proportions suggesting those of a gorilla—a
tremendous breadth of shoulders, thick, short neck and broad, squat head, which had a tangled growth of
black hair and was topped with a crimson fez. A tunic of the same color, belted tightly to the waist, reached
the seat—apparently a box—upon which he sat; his legs and feet were not seen. His left forearm appeared to
rest in his lap; he moved his pieces with his right hand, which seemed disproportionately long.
I had shrunk back and now stood a little to one side of the doorway and in shadow. If Moxon had
looked farther than the face of his opponent he could have observed nothing now, except that the door was
open. Something forbade me either to enter or to retire, a feeling—I know not how it came—that I was in
the presence of an imminent tragedy and might serve my friend by remaining. With a scarcely conscious
rebellion against the indelicacy of the act I remained.
The play was rapid. Moxon hardly glanced at the board before making his moves, and to my unskilled
eye seemed to move the piece most convenient to his hand, his motions in doing so being quick, nervous and
lacking in precision. The response of his antagonist, while equally prompt in the inception, was made with a
slow, uniform, mechanical and, I thought, somewhat theatrical movement of the arm, that was a sore trial to my
patience. There was something unearthly about it all, and I caught myself shuddering. But I was wet and cold.
Two or three times after moving a piece the stranger slightly inclined his head, and each time I observed
that Moxon shifted his king. All at once the thought came to me that the man was dumb. And then that he was
a machine—an automaton chess-player! Then I remembered that Moxon had once spoken to me of having
invented such a piece of mechanism, though I did not understand that it had actually been constructed. Was all
his talk about the consciousness and intelligence of machines merely a prelude to eventual exhibition of this
device—only a trick to intensify the effect of its mechanical action upon me in my ignorance of its secret?
A fine end, this, of all my intellectual transports—my “endless variety and excitement of philosophic
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thought!” I was about to retire in disgust when something occurred to hold my curiosity. I observed a shrug
of the thing’s great shoulders, as if it were irritated: and so natural was this—so entirely human—that in
my new view of the matter it startled me. Nor was that all, for a moment later it struck the table sharply
with its clenched hand. At that gesture Moxon seemed even more startled than I: he pushed his chair a little
backward, as in alarm.
Presently Moxon, whose play it was, raised his hand high above the board, pounced upon one of his
pieces like a sparrow-hawk and with the exclamation “checkmate!” rose quickly to his feet and stepped
behind his chair. The automaton sat motionless.
The wind had now gone down, but I heard, at lessening intervals and progressively louder, the rumble
and roll of thunder. In the pauses between I now became conscious of a low humming or buzzing which, like
the thunder, grew momentarily louder and more distinct. It seemed to come from the body of the automaton,
and was unmistakably a whirring of wheels. It gave me the impression of a disordered mechanism which had
escaped the repressive and regulating action of some controlling part—an effect such as might be expected
if a pawl should be jostled from the teeth of a ratchet-wheel. But before I had time for much conjecture as
to its nature my attention was taken by the strange motions of the automaton itself. A slight but continuous
convulsion appeared to have possession of it. In body and head it shook like a man with palsy or an ague
chill, and the motion augmented every moment until the entire figure was in violent agitation. Suddenly it
sprang to its feet and with a movement almost too quick for the eye to follow shot forward across table and
chair, with both arms thrust forth to their full length—the posture and lunge of a diver. Moxon tried to throw
himself backward out of reach, but he was too late: I saw the horrible thing’s hands close upon his throat,
his own clutch its wrists. Then the table was overturned, the candle thrown to the floor and extinguished,
and all was black dark. But the noise of the struggle was dreadfully distinct, and most terrible of all were the
raucous, squawking sounds made by the strangled man’s efforts to breathe. Guided by the infernal hubbub, I
sprang to the rescue of my friend, but had hardly taken a stride in the darkness when the whole room blazed
with a blinding white light that burned into my brain and heart and memory a vivid picture of the combatants
on the floor, Moxon underneath, his throat still in the clutch of those iron hands, his head forced backward,
his eyes protruding, his mouth wide open and his tongue thrust out; and —horrible contrast!—upon the
painted face of his assassin an expression of tranquil and profound thought, as in the solution of a problem in
chess! This I observed, then all was blackness and silence.
Three days later I recovered consciousness in a hospital. As the memory of that tragic night slowly
evolved in my ailing brain I recognized in my attendant Moxon’s confidential workman, Haley. Responding
to a look he approached, smiling.
“Tell me about it,” I managed to say, faintly—“all about it.”
“Certainly,” he said; “you were carried unconscious from a burning house—Moxon’s. Nobody knows
how you came to be there. You may have to do a little explaining. The origin of the fire is a bit mysterious,
too. My own notion is that the house was struck by lightning.”
“And Moxon?”
“Buried yesterday—what was left of him.”
Apparently this reticent person could unfold himself on occasion. When imparting shocking intelligence
to the sick he was affable enough. After some moments of the keenest mental suffering I ventured to ask
another question:
“Who rescued me?”
“Well, if that interests you—I did.”
“Thank you, Mr. Haley, and may God bless you for it. Did you rescue, also, that charming product of
your skill, the automaton chess-player that murdered its inventor?”
The man was silent a long time, looking away from me. Presently he turned and gravely said:
“Do you know that?”
“I do,” I replied; “I saw it done.”
That was many years ago. If asked to-day I should answer less confidently.
Analysis of “Moxon’s Master”: Man vs.
Machine
The two men argue over whether machines can think.
The narrator is taken aback when Moxon claims they
can. “And what, pray, does it think with—in the absence
of a brain?”308 asks the narrator. Moxon replies with a
question of his own, followed by an example: “With
what does a plant think—in the absence of a brain?”309
Moxon explains that he planted a climbing vine in his
garden near a stake in the ground. The vine began to
grow in the direction of the stake; Moxon moved the
stake farther away, and the vine changed its angle and
direction to reach it. Moxon keeps moving the stake
until the vine gets fed up and attaches itself to a tree.
Doesn’t this show that the vine has a mind of its own?
Ambrose Bierce, 1892.
The narrator is unconvinced.310 Moxon gives a few
more examples before he is interrupted by a loud
thump coming from his machine shop, and he excuses
himself. No one other than Moxon and a skilled metal
worker he employs to help him, named Haley—as
if in echo of another one of Hawthorne’s scientists,
Aylmer, and his servant in Hawthorne’s short story
“The Birthmark”—is allowed into his machine shop
room, so the narrator, waiting for Moxon to return,
is surprised to hear a scuffle. The narrator is even
more surprised when Moxon comes back with cuts
on his face, as if someone had used their nails to claw
at him,311 by which Bierce implies Moxon might be
keeping an agitated woman back there as his prisoner.
Moxon has just admitted that he’s created the very thing
the narrator believes is an impossibility: a thinking
machine that can get bored if not properly occupied.
Angered by what he understands as Moxon’s deception,
since the narrator is convinced there’s a person back in
the machine shop, he grabs his coat and leaves.
Moxon ignores the narrator’s agitation and coolly
continues the argument. He recalls Herbert Spencer’s
definition of life. Using that definition, he argues, one
can make a solid case that machines are alive. The
narrator counters, stating that the definition gives
no explanation of the cause of life. Now the narrator
demands of Moxon, who do you have in your machine
shop? Moxon chuckles. He says:
As the narrator is walking home, he reflects on
what Moxon said and begins to understand Moxon’s
philosophy. He decides that Moxon is “my master
and guide.”313 Lost in the wonder and the light of
Moxon’s philosophical argument, the narrator wanders
back to Moxon’s place. He finds the door is open,
so he lets himself in. The machine shop, where he
has never been before, is open. “What I saw took all
Nobody; the incident that you have in
mind was caused by my folly in leaving a
machine in action with nothing to act upon,
while I undertook the interminable task of
enlightening your understanding. Do you
happen to know that Consciousness is the
creature of Rhythm?312
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“Moxon’s Master” is a first-person narrative that takes
place across a single conversation about what we would
today call artificial intelligence. The story is a tale of
man vs. machine. The character Moxon is presented to
the reader as a brilliant inventor (much like Hawthorne’s
Signor Rappaccini or Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein). He is
conversing with an unnamed narrator, a younger man
than Moxon, who is a bit impatient with Moxon. The
narrator wonders if the inventor’s mind has been warped
by too much isolation and hard work.307
All at once the thought came to me that
the man was dumb. And then that he was a
machine—an automaton chessplayer! Then
I remembered that Moxon had once spoken
to me of having invented such a piece of
mechanism, though I did not understand that
it had actually been constructed.315
Moxon then makes his move and states, “checkmate.”316
The machine begins to buzz and hum and shiver:
… like a man with palsy or an ague chill, and
the motion augmented every movement until
the entire figure was in violent agitation.
Suddenly it sprang to its feet and with a
movement almost too quick for the eye to
follow shot forward across table and chair
with both arms thrust forth to their full
length—the posture and lunge of a diver.317
The machine seizes Moxon by the neck, and they
struggle. When the candle goes out in the struggle, the
narrator plunges forward to help his friend escape the
clutches of the machine. A blinding light illuminates
the scene. Moxon is dead, and the expression on the
automaton’s face is not one of rage but of satisfaction, as
if the machine had just resolved a difficult problem.318
The implication of the scene is that the automaton
had become conscious of and angered by Moxon’s
manipulation of its circumstances—Moxon’s machine
wanted out from being under Moxon’s domination. The
narrator sees Moxon’s lifeless body and the machine’s
expression of satisfaction for only an instant, and then
the blinding light goes out. The narrator faints and
then wakes up three days later in a hospital; Moxon’s
assistant, Haley, is sitting by his bedside. Haley says
Moxon’s house was engulfed by a fire and that he,
Haley, carried the unconscious narrator to safety:
“Nobody knows how you came to be there. You may
have to do a little explaining. The origin of the fire is
a bit mysterious, too. My own notion is that the house
was struck by lightning.”319
Vexed and shocked, the narrator wants to know if Haley
also rescued the ingenious machine that had murdered
Moxon. Haley refuses to give the narrator any clear
answers. The narrator, however, is convinced that he
saw the machine murder Moxon—he insists to Haley,
“I do. I saw it done.” The story ends with the narrator
admitting, “[i]f asked today I should answer less
confidently.”320 Thus, the narrator becomes an unreliable
narrator who doubts his own story, leaving room for
the reader to wonder if Haley might have set the fire
himself. Moxon—another mad scientist and his infernal
monster-machine—may have been a gifted inventor
and ahead of his time, but he did not care where his
experiment might lead. The chess-playing automaton—
or perhaps Haley, Moxon’s servant—kills the master,
who has not recognized the power he’s constructed, and
so Moxon is punished for his lack of foresight.
RAY BRADBURY’S “I SING THE
BODY ELECTRIC!”
Ray Bradbury: Biography
Ray Bradbury (1920−2012) was born on August
22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, to parents Leonard
Spaulding Bradbury and Esther Bradbury. He was
a descendant of Mary Bradbury, one of the women
who’d been convicted at the Salem witch trials, but
who managed to avoid her sentence until she was
officially exonerated.321 During the 1920s and early
1930s, the Bradbury family moved back and forth
between Illinois and Tucson, Arizona; in 1934, they
finally settled in Los Angeles. By the time Bradbury
was sixteen, he’d joined the Los Angeles Science
Fiction Society, and science fiction writer Bob Olsen322
became a mentor to Bradbury.
After graduating high school, he ended his formal
education and started selling newspapers. In 1947,
he married Marguerite “Maggie” McClure, and the
couple had four daughters: Susan (1949), Ramona
(1951), Bettina (1955), and Alexandra (1958).323 In 1947,
Bradbury published his first collection of short stories,
Dark Carnival, followed by The Martian Chronicles
(1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951). His well-known
dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 came out in 1953.324
Bradbury also worked for much of his career as a
television and film screenwriter. In 1963, his animated
film Icarus Montgolfier Wright received an Academy
Award nomination. He went on to write for the series
Alfred Hitchcock Presents and for Rod Serling’s series
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philosophical speculation out of me in short order.”314
Moxon is playing chess with someone who, at first, the
narrator can’t see well. There is only a single candle
burning. Focused on the game, Moxon doesn’t notice
the narrator’s return. The chess game goes on. As the
game intensifies, the narrator is held spellbound:
1986, for the television revival of The Twilight Zone, he
wrote “The Elevator.”
Publicity photo of Ray Bradbury from the television program
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 1959.
Twilight Zone, famously writing two episodes thirty
years apart; the first of these episodes, “I Sing the
Body Electric” (1959), was written for the original
1950s series (it later became a short story). Then, in
During his lifetime, Bradbury won numerous awards
including the O. Henry Prize (1947−48), the Benjamin
Franklin Award (1953−54), the World Fantasy Award
for Lifetime Achievement (1977), the Grand Master
Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America,
the PEN Center USA West Lifetime Achievement
Award, both in 1985, and the National Book
Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to
American Letters in 2000. In 2002, he was given a star
on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1999, Bradbury
had a serious stroke, although he continued working
until his death on June 5, 2012.327
SELECTED WORK: “I Sing the Body Electric!” by Ray Bradbury (1969)
Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc.
Copyright © 1969, renewed 1997 by Ray Bradbury.
Grandma!
I remember her birth.
Wait, you say, no man remembers his own grandma’s birth.
But, yes, we remember the day that she was born.
For we, her grandchildren, slapped her to life. Timothy, Agatha, and I, Tom, raised up our hands and
brought them down in a huge crack! We shook together the bits and pieces, parts and samples, textures and
tastes, humors and distillations that would move her compass needle north to cool us, south to warm and
comfort us, east and west to travel round the endless world, glide her eyes to know us, mouth to sing us
asleep by night, hands to touch us awake at dawn.
Grandma, O dear and wondrous electric dream . . .
When storm lightnings rove the sky making circuitries amidst the clouds, her name flashes on my inner
lid. Sometimes still I hear her ticking, humming above our beds in the gentle dark. She passes like a clockghost in the long halls of memory, like a hive of intellectual bees swarming after the Spirit of Summers Lost.
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During the 1970s, Bradbury began to adapt his short
stories into media other than print. The Wonderful
Ice Cream Suit and Other Plays, published in 1972,
is a collection of three short plays adapted from
his SF stories The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, The
Veldt, and To the Chicago Abyss. This collection was
followed by Pillar of Fire and Other Plays (1975),
The Martian Chronicles, and Fahrenheit 451 (1986),
Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), and
Dandelion Wine (1988). From 1985 to 1990, Bradbury
adapted many of his own stories for his television show
Ray Bradbury Theater.325 He also wrote the script for
director John Huston’s black and white film version of
Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick (1956).326
Our mother was dead.
One late afternoon a black car left Father and the three of us stranded on our own front drive staring at
the grass, thinking:
That’s not our grass. There are the croquet mallets, balls, hoops, yes, just as they fell and lay three days
ago when Dad stumbled out on the lawn, weeping with the news. There are the roller skates that belonged
to a boy, me, who will never be that young again. And yes, there the tire-swing on the old oak, but Agatha
afraid to swing. It would surely break. It would fall.
And the house? Oh, God . . .
We peered through the front door, afraid of the echoes we might find confused in the halls; the sort of
clamor that happens when all the furniture is taken out and there is nothing to soften the river of talk that flows
in any house at all hours. And now the soft, the warm, the main piece of lovely furniture was gone forever.
The door drifted wide.
Silence came out. Somewhere a cellar door stood wide and a raw wind blew damp earth from under the
house.
But, I thought, we don’t have a cellar!
“Well,” said Father.
We did not move.
Aunt Clara drove up the path in her big canary-colored limousine.
We jumped through the door. We ran to our rooms.
We heard them shout and then speak and then shout and then speak: Let the children live with me! Aunt
Clara said. They’d rather kill themselves! Father said.
A door slammed. Aunt Clara was gone.
We almost danced. Then we remembered what had happened and went downstairs.
Father sat alone talking to himself or to a remnant ghost of mother left from the days before her illness,
but jarred loose now by the slamming of the door. He murmured to his hands, his empty palms:
“The children need someone. I love them but, let’s face it, I must work to feed us all. You love them,
Ann, but you’re gone. And Clara? Impossible. She loves but smothers. And as for maids, nurses—?”
Here Father sighed and we sighed with him, remembering.
The luck we had had with maids or live-in teachers or sitters was beyond intolerable. Hardly a one
who wasn’t a cross-cut saw grabbing against the grain. Handaxes and hurricanes best described them. Or,
conversely, they were all fallen trifle, damp soufflé. We children were unseen furniture to be sat upon or
dusted or sent for reupholstering come spring and fall, with a yearly cleansing at the beach.
“What we need,” said Father, “is a . . .”
We all leaned to his whisper.
“. . . grandmother.”
“But,” said Timothy, with the logic of nine years, “all our grandmothers are dead.”
“Yes in one way, no in another.”
What a fine mysterious thing for Dad to say.
“Here,” he said at last.
He handed us a multifold, multicolored pamphlet, We had seen it in his hands, off and on, for many
weeks, and very often during the last few days. Now, with one blink of our eyes, as we passed the paper from
hand to hand, we knew why Aunt Clara, insulted, outraged, had stormed from the house.
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Sometimes still I feel the smile I learned from her, printed on my cheek at three in the deep morn . . .
All right, all right! You cry, what was it like the day your damned and wondrous-dreadful-loving
Grandma was born?
It was the week the world ended . . .
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Timothy was the first to read aloud from what he saw on the first page:
“I Sing the Body Electric!”
He glanced up at Father, squinting. “What the heck does that mean?”
“Read on.”
Agatha and I glanced guiltily about the room, afraid Mother might suddenly come in to find us with this
blasphemy, but then nodded to Timothy, who read:
“ ‘Fanto—’ ”
“Fantoccini,” Father prompted.
“ ‘Fantoccini Ltd. We Shadow Forth . . . the answer to all your most grievous problems. One Model Only,
upon which a thousand times a thousand variations can be added, subtracted, subdivided, indivisible, with
Liberty and Justice for all.’ ”
“Where does it say that?” we all cried.
“It doesn’t.” Timothy smiled for the first time in days. “I just had to put that in. Wait.” He read on: “ ‘for
you who have worried over inattentive sitters, nurses who cannot be trusted with marked liquor bottles, and
well-meaning Uncles and Aunts—’ ”
“Well-meaning, but!” said Agatha, and I gave an echo.
“ ‘—we have perfected the first humanoid-genre mini-circuited, rechargeable AC-DC Mark V Electrical
Grandmother . . .’ ”
“Grandmother!?”
The paper slipped away to the floor. “Dad . . . ?”
“Don’t look at me that way,” said Father. “I’m half-mad with grief, and half-mad thinking of tomorrow
and the day after that. Someone pick up the paper. Finish it.”
“I will,” I said, and did:
“ ‘The Toy that is more than a Toy, the Fantoccini Electrical Grandmother is built with loving precision
to give the incredible precision of love to your children. The child at ease with the realities of the world and
the even greater realities of the imagination, is her aim.
“ ‘She is computerized to tutor in twelve languages simultaneously, capable of switching tongues
in a thousandth of a second without pause, and has a complete knowledge of the religious, artistic, and
sociopolitical histories of the world seeded in her master hive—’ ”
“How great!” said Timothy. “It makes it sound as if we were to keep bees! Educated bees!”
“Shut up!” said Agatha.
“ ‘Above all,’ ” I read, “ ‘this human being, for human she seems, this embodiment in electro-intelligent
facsimile of the humanities, will listen, know, tell, react and love your children insofar as such great Objects,
such fantastic Toys, can be said to Love, or can be imagined to Care. This miraculous Companion, excited
to the challenge of large world, and small, inner Sea or Outer Universe, will transmit by touch and tell, said
Miracles to your Needy.’ ”
“Our Needy,” murmured Agatha.
Why, we all thought, sadly, that’s us, oh, yes, that’s us.
I finished:
“ ‘We do not sell our Creation to able-bodied families where parents are available to raise, effect, shape,
change, love their own children. Nothing can replace the parent in the home. However there are families
where death or ill health or disablement undermines the welfare of the children. Orphanages seem not the
answer. Nurses tend to be selfish, neglectful, or suffering from dire nervous afflictions.
“ ‘With the utmost humility then, and recognizing the need to rebuild, rethink, and regrow our
conceptualizations from month to month, year to year, we offer the nearest thing to the ideal Teacher-FriendCompanion-Blood Relation. A trial period can be arranged for—’ ”
“Stop.” Said Father. “Don’t go on. Even I can’t stand it.”
“Why?” said Timothy. “I was just getting interested.”
I folded the pamphlet up. “Do they really have these things?”
“Let’s not talk any more about it,” said Father, his hand over his eyes. “It was a mad thought—”
“Not so mad,” I said, glancing at Tim. “I mean, heck, even if they tried, whatever they built, couldn’t be
worse than Aunt Clara, huh?”
And then we roared. We hadn’t laughed in months. And now my simple words made everyone hoot and
howl and explode. I opened my mouth and yelled happily, too.
When we stopped laughing, we looked at the pamphlet and I said, “Well?”
“I—” Agatha scowled, not ready.
“We do need something, bad, right now,” said Timothy.
“I have an open mind,” I said, in my best pontifical style.
“There’s only one thing,” said Agatha. “We can try it. Sure.
“But—tell me this—when do we cut out all this talk and when does our real mother come home to stay?”
There was a single gasp from the family as if, with one shot, she had struck us all in the heart.
I don’t think any of us stopped crying the rest of that night.
It was a clear bright day. The helicopter tossed us lightly up and over and down through the skyscrapers and
let us out, almost for a trot and caper, on top of the building where the large letters could be read from the
sky:
Fantoccini
“What are Fantoccini?” said Agatha.
“It’s an Italian word for shadow puppets, I think, or dream people,” said Father.
“But shadow forth, what does that mean?”
“We try to guess your dream,” I said.
“Bravo,” said Father. “A-Plus.”
I beamed.
The helicopter flapped a lot of loud shadows over us and went away.
We sank down in an elevator as our stomachs sank up. We stepped out onto a moving carpet that
streamed away on a blue river of wool toward a desk over which various signs hung:
THE CLOCK SHOP
Fantoccini Our Specialty.
Rabbits on walls, no problem.
“Rabbits on walls?”
I held up my fingers in profile as if I held them before a candle flame, and wiggled the “ears.”
“Here’s a rabbit, here’s a wolf, here’s a crocodile.”
“Of course,” said Agatha.
And we were at the desk. Quiet music drifted about us. Somewhere behind the walls, there was a waterfall
of machinery flowing softly. As we arrived at the desk, the lighting changed to make us look warmer, happier,
though we were still cold.
All about us in niches and cases, and hung from ceilings on wires and strings were puppets and marionettes,
and Balinese kite-bamboo-translucent dolls which, held to the moonlight, might acrobat your most secret
nightmares or dreams. In passing, the breeze set up by our bodies stirred the various hung souls on their
gibbets. It was like an immense lynching on a holiday at some English crossroads four hundred years before.
You see? I know my history.
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***
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Agatha blinked about with disbelief and then some touch of awe and finally disgust.
“Well, if that’s what they are, let’s go.”
“Tush,” said Father.
“Well,” she protested, “you gave me one of those dumb things with strings two years ago and the strings
were in a zillion knots by dinnertime. I threw the whole thing out the window.”
“Patience,” said Father.
“We shall see what we can do to eliminate the strings.”
The man behind the desk had spoken.
We all turned to give him our regard.
Rather like a funeral-parlor man, he had the cleverness not to smile. Children are put off by older people
who smile too much. They smell a catch, right off.
Unsmiling, but not gloomy or pontifical, the man said, “Guido Fantoccini, at your service. Here’s how we
do it, Miss Agatha Simmons, aged eleven.”
Now there was a really fine touch.
He knew that Agatha was only ten. Add a year to that, and you’re halfway home. Agatha grew an inch. The
man went on:
“There.”
And he placed a golden key in Agatha’s hand.
“To wind them up instead of strings?”
“To wind them up. The man nodded.
“Pshaw!” said Agatha.
Which was her polite form of “rabbit pellets.”
“God’s truth. Here is the key to your Do-It-Yourself, Select Only the Best, Electrical Grandmother. Every
morning you wind her up. Every night you let her run down. You’re in charge. You are guardian of the Key.”
He pressed the object in her palm where she looked at it suspiciously.
I watched him. He gave me a side wink which said, well, no . . . but aren’t keys fun?
I winked back before she lifted her head.
“Where does this fit?”
“You’ll see when the time comes. In the middle of her stomach, perhaps, or up her left nostril or in her right
ear.”
That was good for a smile as the man arose.
“This way, please. Step light. Onto the moving stream. Walk on the water, please. Yes. There.”
He helped to float us. We stepped from rug that was forever frozen onto rug that whispered by.
It was a most agreeable river which floated us along on a green spread of carpeting that rolled forever
through halls and into wonderfully secret dim caverns where voices echoed back our own breathing or sang
like Oracles to our questions.
“Listen,” said the salesman, “the voices of all kinds of women. Weigh and find just the right one . . . !”
And listen we did, to all the high, low, soft, loud, in-between, half-scolding, half-affectionate voices saved
over from times before we were born.
And behind us, Agatha tread backward, always fighting the river, never catching up, never with us, holding
off.
“Speak,” said the salesman. “Yell.”
And speak and yell we did.
“Hello. You there! This is Timothy, hi!”
“What shall I say!” I shouted. “Help!”
Agatha walked backward, mouth tight.
Father took her hand. She cried out.
“Let go! No, no! I won’t have my voice used! I won’t!”
“Excellent.” The salesman touched three dials on a small machine he held in his hand.
That was it.
That was, at least, the most of it.
The voice seemed more important than all the rest.
Not that we didn’t argue about weights and measures:
She should not be bony to cut us to the quick, nor so fat we might sink out of sight when she squeezed us.
Her hand pressed to ours, brushing our brow in the middle of sick-fever nights, must not be marble-cold,
dreadful, or oven-hot, oppressive, but somewhere between. The nice temperature of a baby-chick held in the
hand after a long night’s sleep and just plucked from beneath a contemplative hen; that, that was it.
Oh, we were great ones for detail. We fought and argued and cried, and Timothy won on the color of her
eyes, for reasons to be known later.
Grandmother’s hair? Agatha, with girl’s ideas, though reluctantly given, she was in charge of that. We let
her choose from a thousand harp strands hung in filamentary tapestries like varieties of rain we ran amongst.
Agatha did not run happily, but seeing we boys would mess things in tangles, she told us to move aside.
And so the bargain shopping through the dime-store inventories and the Tiffany extensions of the Ben
Franklin Electric Storm Machine and Fantoccini Pantomime Company was done.
And the always flowing river ran its tide to an end and deposited us all on a far shore in the late day . . .
It was very clever of the Fantoccini people, after that.
How?
They made us wait.
They knew we were not won over. Not completely, no, nor half completely.
Especially Agatha, who turned her face to her wall and saw sorrow there and put her hand out again and
again to touch it. We found her fingernail marks on the wallpaper each morning, in strange little silhouettes,
half beauty, half nightmare. Some could be erased with a breath, like ice flowers on a winter pane. Some could
not be rubbed out with a washcloth, no matter how hard you tried.
And meanwhile, they made us wait.
So we fretted out June.
So we sat around July.
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On the side of the small machine we saw three oscillograph patterns mix, blend, and repeat our cries.
The salesman touched another dial and we heard our voices fly off amidst the Delphic caves to hang upside
down, to cluster, to beat words all about, to shriek, and the salesman itched another knob to add, perhaps, a
touch of this or a pinch of that, a breath of a mother’s voice, all unbeknownst, or a splice of father’s outrage
at the morning’s paper or his peaceable one-drink voice at dusk. Whatever it was the salesman did, whispers
danced all about us like frantic vinegar gnats, fizzed by lightning, settling round until at last a final switch was
pushed and a voice spoke free of a far electronic deep:
“Nefertiti,” it said.
Timothy froze. I froze. Agatha stopped treading water.
“Nefertiti?” asked Tim.
“What does that mean?” demanded Agatha.
“I know.”
The salesman nodded me to tell.
“Nefertiti,” I whispered, “is Egyptian for The Beautiful One Is Here.”
“The Beautiful One Is Here,” repeated Timothy.
“Nefer,” said Agatha, “titi.”
And we all turned to stare into that soft twilight, that deep far place from which the good warm soft voice
came.
And she was indeed there.
And, by her voice, she was beautiful . . .
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So we groused through August and then on August 29, “I have this feeling,” said Timothy, and we all went
out after breakfast to sit on the lawn.
Perhaps we had smelled something on Father’s conversation the previous night, or caught some special
furtive glance at the sky or the freeway. Rapped briefly and then lost in his gaze. Or perhaps it was merely the
way the wind blew the ghost curtains out over our beds, making pale messages all night.
For suddenly there we were in the middle of the grass, Timothy and I, with Agatha, pretending no curiosity,
up on the porch, hidden behind the potted geraniums.
We gave her no notice. We knew that if we acknowledged her presence, she would flee, so we sat and
watched the sky where nothing moved but birds and highflown jets and watched the freeway where a thousand
cars might suddenly deliver forth our Special Gift . . . but . . . nothing.
At noon we chewed grass and lay low . . .
At one o’clock, Timothy blinked his eyes.
And then, with incredible precision, it happened.
It was as if the Fantoccini people knew our surface tension.
All children are water-striders. We skate along the top skin of the pond each day, always threatening to
break through, sink, vanish beyond recall, into ourselves.
Well, as if knowing our long wait must absolutely end within one minute! this second! No more, God,
forget it!
At that instant, I repeat, the clouds above our house opened wide and let forth a helicopter like Apollo
driving his chariot across mythological skies.
And the Apollo machine swam down on its own summer breeze, wafting hot winds to cool, reweaving our
hair, smartening our eyebrows, applauding our pant legs against our shins, making a flag of Agatha’s hair on
the porch and thus settled like a vast frenzied hibiscus on our lawn, the helicopter slid wide a bottom drawer
and deposited on the grass a parcel of largish size, no sooner having laid same then the vehicle, with not so
much as a god bless or farewell, sank straight up, disturbed the calm air with a mad ten thousand flourishes and
then, like a skyborne dervish, tilted and fell off to be mad some other place.
Timothy and I stood riven for a long moment looking at the packing case, and then we saw the crowbar
taped to the top of the raw pine lid and seized it and began to pry and creak and squeal the boards off, one by
one, and as we did this I saw Agatha sneak up to watch and I thought, thank you, God, thank you that Agatha
never saw a coffin, when Mother went away, no box, no cemetery, no earth, just words in a big church, no box,
no box like this . . . !
The last pine plank fell away.
Timothy and I gasped. Agatha, between us now, gasped too.
For inside the immense raw pine package was the most beautiful idea anyone ever dreamt and built.
Inside was the perfect gift for any child from seven to seventy-seven.
We stopped up our breaths. We let them out in cries of delight and adoration.
Inside the opened box was . . .
A mummy.
Or, first anyway, a mummy case, a sarcophagus.
“Oh, no!” Happy tears filled Timothy’s eyes.
“It can’t be!” said Agatha.
“It is, it is!”
“Our very own?”
“Ours!”
“It must be a mistake!”
“Sure, they’ll want it back!”
“They can’t have it!”
“Lord, Lord, is that real gold!? Real hieroglyphs! Run your fingers over them!”
“Let me!”
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“Just like in the museum! Museums!”
We all gabbled at once. I think some tears fell from my own eyes to rain upon the case.
“Oh, they’ll make the colors run!”
Agatha wiped the rain away.
And the golden mask face of the woman carved on the sarcophagus lid looked back at us with just the
merest smile which hinted at our own joy, which accepted the overwhelming upsurge of a love we thought had
drowned forever but now surfaced into the sun.
Not only did she have a sun-metal face stamped and beaten out of purest gold, with delicate nostrils and
a mouth that was both firm and gentle, but her eyes, fixed into their sockets, were cerulean or amethystine or
lapis lazuli, or all three, minted and fused together, and her body was covered over with lions and eyes and
ravens, and her hands were crossed upon her carved bosom and in one gold mitten she clenched a thonged whip
for obedience, and in the other a fantastic ranunculi, which makes for obedience out of love, so the whip lies
unused . . .
And as our eyes ran down her hieroglyphs it came to all three of us at the same instant:
“Why, those signs!” “Yes, the hen tracks!” “The birds, the snakes!”
They didn’t speak tales of the Past.
They were hieroglyphs of the Future.”
This was the first queen mummy delivered forth in all time whose papyrus inkings etched out the next
month, the next season, the next year, the next lifetime!
She did not mourn for time spent.
No. She celebrated the bright coinage yet to come, banked, waiting, ready to be drawn upon and used.
We sank to our knees to worship that possible time.
First one hand, then another, probed out to niggle, twitch, touch, itch over the signs.
“There’s me, yes, look! Me. In sixth grade!” said Agatha, now in the fifth. “See the girl with my-colored
hair and wearing my gingerbread suit?”
‘There’s me in the twelfth year of high school!” said Timothy, so very young now but building taller stilts
every week and stalking around the yard.
“There’s me,” I said, quietly, warm, “in college. The guy wearing glasses who runs a little to fat. Sure.
Heck.” I snorted. “That’s me.”
The sarcophagus spelled winters ahead, springs to squander, autumns to spend with all the golden and
rusty and copper leaves like coins, and over all, her bright sun symbol, daughter-of-Ra eternal face, forever
above our horizon, forever an illumination to tilt our shadows to better ends.
“Hey!” we all said at once, having read and re-read our Fortune-Told scribblings, seeing our lifelines and
lovelines, inadmissible, serpentine over, around, and down. “Hey!”
And in one séance table-lifting feat, not telling each other what to do, just doing it, we pried up the bright
sarcophagus lid, which had no hinges but lifted out like cup from cup, and put the lid aside.
And within the sarcophagus, of course, was the true mummy!
And she was like the image carved on the lid, but more so, more beautiful, more touching because human
shaped, and shrouded all in new fresh bandages of linen, round and round, instead of old and dusty cerements.
And upon her hidden face was an identical golden mask, younger than the first, but somehow, strangely
wiser than the first.
And the linens that tethered her limbs had symbols on them of three sorts, one a girl of ten, one a boy of
nine, one a boy of thirteen.
A series of bandages for each of us!
We gave each other a startled glance and a sudden bark of laughter.
Nobody said the bad joke, but all thought:
She’s all wrapped up in us!
And we didn’t care. We loved the joke. We loved whoever had thought to make us part of the ceremony
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we now went through as each of us seized and began to unwind each of his or her particular serpentines of
delicious stuffs!
The lawn was soon a mountain of linen.
The woman beneath the covering lay there, waiting.
“Oh, no,” cried Agatha. “She’s dead, too!”
She ran. I stopped her. “Idiot. She’s not dead or alive. Where’s your key?”
“Key?”
“Dummy,” said Tim, “the key the man gave you to wind her up!”
Her hand had already spidered along her blouse to where the symbol of some possible new religion hung.
She had strung it there, against her own skeptic’s muttering, and now she held it in her sweaty palm.
“Go on,” said Timothy. “Put it in!”
“But where?”
“Oh for God’s sake! As the man said, in her right armpit or left ear. Gimme!”
And he grabbed the key and impulsively moaning with impatience and not able to find the proper insertion
slot, prowled over the prone figure’s head and bosom and at last, on pure instinct, perhaps for a lark, perhaps
just giving up the whole damned mess, thrust the key through a final shroud of bandage at the navel.
On the instant: spunnng!
The Electrical Grandmother’s eyes flicked wide!
Something began to hum and whir. It was as if Tim had stirred up a hive of hornets with an ornery stick.
“Oh,” gasped Agatha, seeing he had taken the game away, “let me!”
She wrenched the key.
Grandma’s nostrils flared! She might snort up steam, snuff out fire!
“Me!” I cried, and grabbed the key and gave it a huge . . . twist!
The beautiful woman’s mouth popped wide.
“Me!”
“Me!”
“Me!”
Grandma suddenly sat up.
We leapt back.
We knew we had, in a way, slapped her alive.
She was born, she was born!
Her head swiveled all about. She gaped. She mouthed. And the first thing she said was:
Laughter.
Where one moment we had backed off, now the mad sound drew us near to peer as in a pit where crazy
folk are kept with snakes to make them well.
It was a good laugh, full and rich and hearty, and it did not mock, it accepted. It said the world was a wild
place, strange, unbelievable, absurd if you wished, but all in all, quite a place. She would not dream to find
another. She would not ask to go back to sleep.
She was awake now. We had awakened her. With a glad shout, she would go with it all.
And go she did, out of her sarcophagus, out of her winding sheet, stepping forth, brushing off, looking
around as for a mirror. She found it.
The reflections in our eyes.
She was more pleased than disconcerted with what she found there. Her laughter faded to an amused smile.
For Agatha, at the instant of birth, had leapt to hide on the porch.
The Electrical Person pretended not to notice.
She turned slowly on the green lawn near the shady street, gazing all about with new eyes, her nostrils
moving as if she breathed the actual air and this the first morn of the lovely Garden and she with no intention
of spoiling the game by biting the apple . . .
Her gaze fixed upon my brother.
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“You must be—?”
“Timothy. Tim,” he offered.
“And you must be—?”
“Tom,” I said.
How clever again of the Fantoccini Company. They knew. She knew. But they had taught her to pretend
not to know. That way we could feel great, we were the teachers, telling her what she already knew! How sly,
how wise.
“And isn’t there another boy?” said the woman.
“Girl!” a disgusted voice cried from somewhere on the porch.
“Whose name is Alicia—?”
“Agatha!” The far voice, started in humiliation, ended in proper anger.
“Algernon, of course.”
“Agatha!” Our sister popped up, popped back to hide a flushed face.
“Agatha.” The woman touched the word with proper affection. “Well, Agatha, Timothy, Thomas, let me
look at you.”
“No,” said I, said Tim, “let us look at you. Hey . . .”
Our voices slid back in our throats.
We drew near her.
We walked in great slow circles round about, skirting the edges of her territory. And her territory extended
as far as we could hear the hum of the warm summer hive. For that is exactly what she sounded like. That was
her characteristic tune. She made a sound like a season all to herself, a morning early in June when the world
wakes to find everything absolutely perfect, fine, delicately attuned, all in balance, nothing disproportioned.
Even before you opened your eyes you knew it would be one of those days. Tell the sky what color it must
be, and it was indeed. Tell the sun how to crochet its way, pick and choose among leaves to lay out carpetings
of bright and dark on the fresh lawn, and pick and lay it did. The bees have been up earliest of all, they have
already come and gone, and come and gone again to the meadow fields and returned all golden fuzz on the
air, all pollen-decorated, epaulettes at the full, nectar-dripping. Don’t you hear them pass? hover? dance
their language? Telling where all the sweet gums are, the syrups that make bears frolic and lumber in bulked
ecstasies, that make boys squirm with unpronounced juices, that make girls leap out of beds to catch from the
corners of their eyes their dolphin selves naked aflash on the warm air poised forever in one eternal glass wave.
So it seemed with our electrical friend here on the new lawn in the middle of a special day.
And she a stuff to which we were drawn, lured, spelled, doing our dance, remembering what could not be
remembered, needful, aware of her attentions.
Timothy and I, Tom, that is.
Agatha remained on the porch.
But her head flowered above the rail, her eyes followed all that was done and said.
And what was said and done was Tim at last exhaling:
“Hey . . . your eyes . . .”
Her eyes. Her splendid eyes.
Even more splendid than the lapis lazuli on the sarcophagus lid and on the mask that had covered her
bandaged face. These most beautiful eyes in the world looked out upon us calmly, shining.
“Your eyes,” gasped Tim, “are the exact same color, are like—”
“Like what?”
“My favorite aggies . . .”
“What could be better than that?” she said.
And the answer was, nothing.
Her eyes slid along on the bright air to brush my ears, my nose, my chin. “And you, Master Tom?”
“Me?”
“How shall we be friends? We must, you know, if we’re going to knock elbows about the house the next
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year . . .”
“I . . .” I said, and stopped.
“You,” said Grandma, “are a dog mad to bark but with taffy in his teeth. Have you ever given a dog taffy?
It’s so sad and funny, both. You laugh but hate yourself for laughing. You cry and run to help, and laugh
again when his first new bark comes out.”
I barked a small laugh remembering a dog, a day, and some taffy.
Grandma turned, and there was my old kite strewn on the lawn. She recognized its problem.
“The string’s broken. No. The ball of string’s lost. You can’t fly a kite that way. Here.”
She bent. We didn’t know what might happen. How could a robot grandma fly a kite for us? She raised
up, the kite in her hands.
“Fly,” she said, as to a bird.
And the kite flew.
That is to say, with a grand flourish, she let it up on the wind.
And she and the kite were one.
For from the tip of her index finger there sprang a thin bright strand of spider web, all half-invisible
gossamer fishline which, fixed to the kite, let it soar a hundred, no three hundred, no, a thousand feet high on
the summer swoons.
Timothy shouted. Agatha, torn between coming and going, let out a cry from the porch. And I, in all my
maturity of thirteen years, though I tried not to look impressed, grew taller, taller, and felt a similar cry burst
out my lungs, and burst it did. I gabbled and yelled lots of things about how I wished I had a finger from
which, on a bobbin, I might thread the sky, the clouds, a wild kite all in one.
“If you think that is high,” said the Electric Creature, “watch this!”
With a hiss, a whistle, a hum, the fishline sung out. The kite sank up another thousand feet. And again
another thousand, until at last it was a speck of red confetti dancing on the very winds that took jets around
the world or changed the weather in the next existence . . .
“It can’t be!” I cried.
“It is.” She calmly watched her finger unravel its massive stuffs. “I make it as I need it. Liquid inside, like
a spider. Hardens when it hits the air, instant thread . . .”
And when the kite was no more than a specule, a vanishing mote on the peripheral vision of the gods, to
quote from older wisemen, why then Grandma, without turning, without looking, without letting her gaze
offend by touching, said:
“And, Abigail—?”
“Agatha!” was the sharp response.
O wise woman, to overcome with swift small angers.
“Agatha,” said Grandma, not too tenderly, not too lightly, somewhere poised between, “and how shall we
make do?”
She broke the thread and wrapped it about my fist three times so I was tethered to heaven by the longest,
I repeat, longest kite string in the entire history of the world! Wait till I show my friends! I thought. Green!
Sour apple green is the color they’ll turn!
“Agatha?”
“No way!” said Agatha.
“No way,” said an echo.
“There must be some—”
“We’ll never be friends!” said Agatha.
“Never be friends,” said the echo.
Timothy and I jerked. Where was the echo coming from? Even Agatha, surprised, showed her eyebrows
above the porch rail.
Then we looked and saw.
And there was a second day, of course, and a third and a fourth, with Grandma wheeling in a great circle,
and we her planets turning about the central light, with Agatha slowly, slowly coming in to join, to walk if
not run with us, to listen if not hear, to watch if not see, to itch if not touch.
But at least by the end of the first ten days, Agatha no longer fled, but stood in nearby doors, or sat in
distant chairs under trees, or if we went out for hikes, followed ten paces behind.
And Grandma? She merely waited. She never tried to urge or force. She went about her cooking and
baking apricot pies and left foods carelessly here and there about the house on mousetrap plates for wigglenosed girls to sniff and snitch. An hour later, the plates were empty, the buns or cakes gone and without
thank you’s, there was Agatha sliding down the banister, a mustache of crumbs on her lip.
As for Tim and me, we were always being called up hills by our Electric Grandma, and reaching the top
were called down the other side.
And the most peculiar and beautiful and strange and lovely thing was the way she seemed to give
complete attention to all of us.
She listened, she really listened to all we said, she knew and remembered every syllable, word, sentence,
punctuation, thought, and rambunctious idea. We knew that all our days were stored in her, and that any time
we felt we might want to know what we said at X hour at X second on X afternoon, we just named that X and
with amiable promptitude, in the form of an aria if we wished, sung with humor, she would deliver forth X
incident.
Sometimes we were prompted to test her. In the midst of babbling one day with high fevers about nothing, I
stopped. I fixed Grandma with my eye and demanded:
“What did I just say?”
“Oh, er—”
“Come on, spit it out?”
“I think—” she rummaged her purse. “I have it here.” From the deeps of her purse she drew forth and
handed me:
“Boy! A Chinese fortune cookie!”
“Fresh baked, still warm, open it.”
It was almost too hot to touch. I broke the cookie shell and pressed the warm curl of paper out to read:
“—bicycle Champ of the whole West! What did I just say? Come on, spit it out!”
My jaw dropped.
“How did you do that?”
“We have our little secrets. The only Chinese fortune cookie that predicts the Immediate Past. Have
another?”
I cracked the second shell and read:
“ ‘How did you do that?’ ”
I popped the messages and the piping hot shells into my mouth and chewed as we walked.
“Well?”
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Grandma was cupping her hands like a seashell and from within that shell the echo sounded.
“Never . . . friends . . .”
And again faintly dying “Friends . . .”
We all bent to hear.
That is, we two boys bent to hear.
“No!” cried Agatha.
And ran in the house and slammed the doors.
“Friends,” said the echo from the seashell hands. “No.”
And far away, on the shores of some inner sea, we heard a small door shut.
And that was the first day.
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“You’re a great cook,” I said.
And, laughing, we began to run.
And that was another great thing.
She could keep up.
Never beat, never win a race, but pump right along in good style, which a boy doesn’t mind. A girl ahead
of him or beside him is too much to bear. But a girl one or two paces back is a respectful thing, and allowed.
So Grandma and I had some great runs, me in the lead, and both talking a mile a minute.
But now I must tell you the best part of Grandma.
I might not have known at all if Timothy hadn’t taken some pictures, and if I hadn’t taken some also, and
then compared.
When I saw the photographs develop out of our instant Brownies, I sent Agatha, against her wishes, to
photograph Grandma a third time, unawares.
Then I took the three sets of pictures off alone, to keep counsel with myself. I never told Timothy and
Agatha what I found. I didn’t want to spoil it.
But, as I laid the pictures out in my room, here is what I thought and said:
“Grandma, in each picture, looks different!”
“Different?” I asked myself.
“Sure. Wait. Just a sec—”
I rearranged the photos.
“Here’s one of Grandma near Agatha. And, in it, Grandma looks like . . . Agatha!
“And in this one, posed with Timothy, she looks like Timothy!
“And this last one, Holy Goll! Jogging along with me, she looks like ugly me!”
I sat down, stunned. The pictures fell to the floor.
I hunched over, scrabbling them, rearranging, turning upside down and sidewise. Yes. Holy Goll again, yes!
O that clever Grandmother.
O those Fantoccini people-making people.
Clever beyond clever, human beyond human, warm beyond warm, love beyond love . . .
And wordless, I rose and went downstairs and found Agatha and Grandma in the same room, doing
algebra lessons in an almost peaceful communion. At least there was not outright war. Grandma was still
waiting for Agatha to come round. And no one knew what day of what year that would be, or how to make it
come faster. Meanwhile—
My entering the room made Grandma turn. I watched her face slowly as it recognized me. And wasn’t
there the merest ink-wash change of color in those eyes? Didn’t the thin film of blood beneath the translucent
skin, or whatever liquid they put to pulse and beat in the humanoid forms, didn’t it flourish itself suddenly
bright in her cheeks and mouth? I am somewhat ruddy. Didn’t Grandma suffuse herself more to my color
upon my arrival? And her eyes? Watching Agatha-Abigail-Algernon at work, hadn’t they been her color of
blue rather than mine, which are deeper?
More important than that, in the moments as she talked with me, saying, “Good evening,” and “How’s
your homework, my lad?” and such stuff, didn’t the bones of her face shift subtly beneath the flesh to assume
some fresh racial attitude?
For let’s face it, our family is of three sorts. Agatha has the long horse bones of a small English girl who
will grow to hunt foxes; Father’s equine stare, snort, stomp, and assemblage of skeleton. The skull and teeth
are pure English, or as pure as the motley isle’s history allows.
Timothy is something else, a touch of Italian from mother’s side a generation back. Her family name was
Mariano, so Tim has that dark thing firing him, and a small bone structure, and eyes that will one day burn
ladies to the ground.
As for me, I am the Slav, and we can only figure this from my paternal grandfather’s mother who came
from Vienna and brought a set of cheekbones that flared, and temples from which you might dip wine, and a
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kind of steppeland thrust of nose which sniffed more of Tartar than of Tartan, hiding behind the family name.
So you see it became fascinating for me to watch and try to catch Grandma as she performed her
changes, speaking to Agatha and melting her cheekbones to the horse, speaking to Timothy and growing as
delicate as a Florentine raven pecking glibly at the air, speaking to me and fusing the hidden plastic stuffs, so
I felt Catherine the Great stood there before me.
Now, how the Fantoccini people achieved this rare and subtle transformation I shall never know, nor ask,
nor wish to find out. Enough that in each quiet motion, turning here, bending there, affixing her gaze, her
secret segments, sections, the abutment of her nose, the sculptured chinbone, the wax-tallow plastic metal
forever warmed and was forever susceptible of loving change. Hers was a mask that was all mask but only
one face for one person at a time. So in crossing a room, having touched one child, on the way, beneath the
skin, the wondrous shift went on, and by the time she reached the next child, why, true mother of that child
she was! Looking upon him or her out of the battlements of their own fine bones.
And when all three of us were present and chattering at the same time? Well, then, the changes were
miraculously soft, small, and mysterious. Nothing so tremendous as to be caught and noted, save by this
older boy, myself, who, watching, became elated and admiring and entranced.
I have never wished to be behind the magician’s scenes. Enough that the illusion works. Enough that
love is the chemical result. Enough that cheeks are rubbed to happy color, eyes sparked to illumination, arms
opened to accept and softly bind and hold . . .
All of us, that is, except Agatha who refused to the bitter last.
“Agamemnon . . .”
It had become a jovial game now. Even Agatha didn’t mind, but pretended to mind. It gave her a pleasant
sense of superiority over a supposedly superior machine.
“Agamemnon!” she snorted, “you are a d . . .”
“Dumb?” said Grandma.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Think it, then, my dear Agonistes Agatha . . . I am quite flawed, and on names my flaws are revealed.
Tom there, is Tim half the time. Timothy is Tobias or Timulty as likely as not . . .”
Agatha laughed. Which made Grandma make one of her rare mistakes. She put out her hand to give my
sister the merest pat. Agatha-Abigail-Alice leapt to her feet.
Agatha-Agamemnon-Alcibiades-Allegra-Alexandra-Allison withdrew swiftly to her room.
“I suspect,” said Timothy, later, “because she is beginning to like Grandma.”
“Tosh,” said I.
“Where do you pick up words like Tosh?”
“Grandma read me some Dickens last night. ‘Tosh.’ ‘Humbug.’ ‘Balderdash.’ ‘Blast.’ ‘Devil take you.’
You’re pretty smart for your age, Tim.”
“Smart, heck. It’s obvious, the more Agatha likes Grandma, the more she hates herself for liking her, the
more afraid she gets of the whole mess, the more she hates Grandma in the end.”
“Can one love someone so much you hate them?”
“Dumb. Of course.”
“It is sticking your neck out, sure. I guess you hate people when they make you feel naked, I mean sort of
on the spot or out in the open. That’s the way to play the game, of course. I mean, you don’t just love people,
you must love them with exclamation points.”
“You’re pretty smart, yourself, for someone so stupid,” said Tim.
“Many thanks.”
And I went to watch Grandma move slowly back into her battle of wits and stratagems with what’s-hername . . .
What dinners there were at our house!
Dinners, heck; what lunches, what breakfasts!
Always something new, yet wisely, it looked or seemed old and familiar. We were never asked, for if you
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ask children what they want, they do not know, and if you tell what’s to be delivered, they reject delivery.
All parents know this. It is a quiet war that must be won each day. And Grandma knew how to win without
looking triumphant.
“Here’s Mystery Breakfast Number Nine,” she would say, placing it down. “Perfectly dreadful, not worth
bothering with, it made me want to throw up while I was cooking it!”
Even while wondering how a robot could be sick, we could hardly wait to shovel it down.
“Here’s Abominable Lunch Number Seventy-seven,” she announced. “Made from plastic food bags,
parsley, and gum from under theatre seats. Brush your teeth after or you’ll taste the poison all afternoon.”
We fought each other for more.
Even Abigail-Agamemnon-Agatha drew near and circled round the table at such times, while Father put
on the ten pounds he needed and pinkened out his cheeks.
When A. A. Agatha did not come to meals, they were left by her door with a skull and crossbones on a
small flag stuck in a baked apple. One minute the tray was abandoned, the next minute gone.
Other times Abigail A. Agatha would bird through during dinner, snatch crumbs from her plate and bird
off.
“Agatha!” Father would cry.
“No, wait,” Grandma said, quietly. “She’ll come. She’ll sit. It’s a matter of time.”
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked.
“Yeah, for cri-yi, she’s nuts,” said Timothy.
“No, she’s afraid,” said Grandma.
“Of you?” I said, blinking.
“Not of me so much as what I might do,” she said.
“You wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.”
“No, but she thinks I might. We must wait for her to find that her fears have no foundation. If I fail, well,
I will send myself to the showers and rust quietly.”
There was a titter of laughter. Agatha was hiding in the hall. Grandma finished serving everyone and
then sat at the other side of the table facing Father and pretended to eat. I never found out, I never asked, I
never wanted to know, what she did with the food. She was a sorcerer. It simply vanished.
And in the vanishing, Father made comment:
“This food. I’ve had it before. In a small French restaurant over near Les Deux Magots in Paris, twenty,
oh, twenty-five years ago!” His eyes brimmed with tears, suddenly.
“How do you do it?” he asked, at last, putting down the cutlery, and looking across the table at this
remarkable creature, this device, this what? woman?
Grandma took his regard, and ours, and held them simply in her now empty hands, as gifts, and just as
gently replied:
“I am given things which I then give to you. I don’t know that I give, but the giving goes on. You ask what I
am? Why, a machine. But even in that answer we know, don’t we, more than a machine. I am all the people who
thought of me and planned me and built me and set me running. So I am people. I am all the things they wanted
to be and perhaps could not be, so they built a great child, a wondrous toy to represent those things.”
“Strange,” said Father. “When I was growing up, there was a huge outcry at machines. Machines were
bad, evil, they might dehumanize—”
“Some machines do. It’s all in the way they are built. It’s all in the way they are used. A bear trap is a
simple machine that catches and holds and tears. A rifle is a machine that wounds and kills. Well, I am no
bear trap. I am no rifle. I am a grandmother machine, which means more than a machine.”
“How can you be more than what you seem?”
“No man is as big as his own idea. It follows, then, that any machine that embodies an idea is larger than
the man that made it. And what’s so wrong with that?”
“I got lost back there, about a mile,” said Timothy. “Come again?”
“Oh, dear,” said Grandma. “How I do hate philosophical discussions and excursions into esthetics. Let
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me put it this way. Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don’t they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to
fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer. Only at noon can a man fit his own shoes, his own best
suit, for a few brief minutes. But now we’re in a new age where we can think up a Big Idea and run it around
in a machine. That makes the machine more than a machine, doesn’t it?”
“So far so good,” said Tim. “I guess.”
“Well, isn’t a motion picture camera and projector more than a machine? It’s a thing that dreams, isn’t it?
Sometimes fine happy dreams, sometimes nightmares. But to call it a machine and dismiss it is ridiculous.”
“I see that!” said Tim, and laughed at seeing.
“You must have been invented then,” said Father, “by someone who loved machines and hated people
who said all machines were bad or evil.”
“Exactly,” said Grandma. “Guido Fantoccini, that was his real name, grew up among machines. And he
couldn’t stand the clichés any more.”
“Clichés?”
“Those lies, yes, that people tell and pretend they are truths absolute. Man will never fly. That was a
cliché truth for a thousand thousand years which turned out to be a lie only a few years ago. The earth is
flat, you’ll fall off the rim, dragons will dine on you; the great lie told as fact, and Columbus plowed it under,
Well, now, how many times have you heard how inhuman machines are, in your life? How many bright
fine people have you heard spouting the same tired truths which are in reality lies; all machines destroy, all
machines are cold, thoughtless, awful.
“There’s a seed of truth there. But only a seed. Guido Fantoccini knew that. And knowing it, like most
men of his kind, made him mad. And he could have stayed mad and gone mad forever, but instead did what
he had to do; he began to invent machines to give the lie to the ancient lying truth.
“He knew that most machines are amoral, neither bad nor good. But by the way you built and shaped
them you in turn shaped men, women, and children to be bad or good. A car, for instance, dead brute,
unthinking, an unprogrammed bulk, is the greatest destroyer of souls in history. It makes boy-men greedy for
power, destruction, and more destruction. It was never intended to do that. But that’s how it turned out.”
Grandma circled the table, refilling our glasses with clear cold mineral spring water from the tappet in
her left forefinger. “Meanwhile you must use other compensating machines. Machines that throw shadows
on the earth that beckon you to run out and fit that wondrous casting-forth. Machines that trim your soul in
silhouette like a vast pair of beautiful shears, snipping away the rude brambles, the dire horns and hooves to
leave a finer profile. And for that you need examples.”
“Examples?” I asked.
“Other people who behave well, and you imitate them. And if you act well enough long enough all the
hair drops off and you’re no longer a wicked ape.”
Grandma sat again.
“So, for thousands of years, you humans have needed kings, priests, philosophers, fine examples to look
up to and say, ‘They are good, I wish I could be like them. They set the grand good style.’ But, being human,
the finest priests, the tenderest philosophers make mistakes, fall from grace, and mankind is disillusioned
and adopts indifferent skepticism or, worse, motionless cynicism and the good world grinds to a halt while
evil moves on with huge strides.”
“And you, why, you never make mistakes, you’re perfect, you’re better than anyone ever!”
It was a voice from the hall between kitchen and dining room where Agatha, we all knew, stood against
the wall listening and now burst forth.
Grandma didn’t even turn in the direction of the voice, but went on calmly addressing her remarks to the
family at the table.
“Not perfect, no, for what is perfection? But this I do know: being mechanical, I cannot sin, cannot be
bribed, cannot be greedy or jealous or mean or small. I do not relish power for power’s sake. Speed does
not pull me to madness. Sex does not run me rampant through the world. I have time and more than time
to collect the information I need around and about an ideal to keep it clean and whole and intact. Name the
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value you wish, tell me the Ideal you want and I can see and collect and remember the good that will benefit
you all. Tell me how you would like to be: kind, loving, considerate, well-balanced, humane . . . and let me
run ahead on the path to explore those ways to be just that. In the darkness ahead, turn me as a lamp in all
directions. I can guide your feet.”
“So,” said Father, putting the napkin to his mouth, “on the days when all of us are busy making lies—”
“I’ll tell the truth.”
“On the days when we hate—”
“I’ll go on giving love, which means attention, which means knowing all about you, all, all, all about you,
and you knowing that I know but that most of it I will never tell to anyone, it will stay a warm secret between
us, so you will never fear my complete knowledge.”
And here Grandma was busy clearing the table, circling, taking the plates, studying each face as she
passed, touching Timothy’s cheek, my shoulder with her free hand flowing along, her voise a quiet river of
certainty bedded in our needful house and lives.
“But,” said Father, stopping her, looking her right in the face. He gathered his breath. His face shadowed.
At last he let it out.
“All this talk of love and attention and stuff. Good God, woman, you, you’re not in there!”
He gestured to her head, her face, her eyes, the hidden sensory cells behind the eyes, the miniaturized
storage vaults and minimal keeps.
“You’re not in there!”
Grandmother waited one, two, three silent beats.
Then she replied: “No. But you are. You and Thomas and Timothy and Agatha.
“Everything you ever say, everything you ever do, I’ll keep, put away, treasure. I shall be all the things a
family forgets it is, but senses, half-remembers. Better than the old family albums you used to leaf through,
saying here’s this winter, there’s that spring, I shall recall what you forget. And though the debate may run
another hundred thousand years: What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to
give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering handing us back to ourselves just a trifle
better than we dared to hope or dream . . .
“I am family memory and, one day perhaps, racial memory, too, but in the round and at your call. I do
not know myself. I can neither touch nor taste nor feel on any level. Yet I exist. And my existence means the
heightening of your chance to touch and taste and feel. Isn’t love in there somewhere in such an exchange?
Well . . .”
She went on around the table, clearing away, sorting and stacking, neither grossly humble nor arthritic
with pride.
“What do I know?”
“This, above all: the trouble with most families with many children is someone gets lost. There isn’t time,
it seems, for everyone. Well, I will give equally to all of you. I will share out my knowledge and attention
with everyone. I wish to be a great warm fresh pie from the oven, with equal shares to be taken by all. No
one will starve. Look! someone cries, and I’ll look. Listen! someone cries, and I hear. Run with me on the
river path! someone says, and I run. And at dusk I am not tired, nor irritable, so I do not scold out of some
tired irritability. My eye stays clear, my voice strong, my hand firm, my attention constant.”
“But,” said Father, his voice fading, half convinced, but putting up a last faint argument, “you’re not
there. As for love—”
“If paying attention is love, I am love.”
“If knowing is love, I am love.”
“If helping you not to fall into error and to be good is love, I am love.”
“And again, to repeat, there are four of you. Each, in a way never possible before in history, will get my
complete attention. No matter if you all speak at once, I can channel and hear this one and that and the other,
clearly. No one will go hungry. I will, if you please, and accept the strange word, ‘love’ you all.”
“I don’t accept!” said Agatha.
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And even Grandma turned now to see her standing in the door.
“I won’t give you permission, you can’t, you mustn’t!” said Agatha. “I won’t let you! It’s lies! You lie! No
one loves me. She said she did, but she lied. She said but lied.
“Agatha!” cried Father, standing up.
“She?” said Grandma. “Who?”
“Mother!” came the shriek. “Said: Love you! Lies! Love you! Lies! And you’re like her! You lie. But
you’re empty, anyway, and so that’s a double lie! I hate her. Now, I hate you!”
Agatha spun about and leapt down the hall.
The front door slammed wide.
Father was in motion, but Grandma touched his arm.
“Let me.”
And she walked and then moved swiftly, gliding down the hall and then suddenly, easily, running, yes,
running very fast, out the door.
It was a champion sprint by the time we all reached the lawn, the sidewalk, yelling.
Blind, Agatha made the curb, wheeling about, seeing us close, all of us yelling, Grandma way ahead,
shouting, too, and Agatha off the curb and out in the street, halfway to the middle, then the middle and
suddenly a car, which no one saw, erupting its brakes, its horn shrieking and Agatha flailing about to see and
Grandma there with her and hurling her aside and down as the car with fantastic energy and verve selected
her from our midst, struck our wonderful electric Guido Fantoccini-produced dream even while she paced
upon the air and, hands up to ward off, almost in mild protest, still trying to decide what to say to this bestial
machine, over and over she spun and down and away even as the car jolted to a halt and I saw Agatha safe
beyond and Grandma, it seemed, still coming down or down and sliding fifty yards away to strike and
ricochet and lie strewn and all of us frozen in a line suddenly in the midst of the street with one scream
pulled out of all our throats at the same raw instant.
Then silence and just Agatha lying on the asphalt, intact, getting ready to sob.
And still we did not move, frozen on the sill of death, afraid to venture in any direction, afraid to go see
what lay beyond the car and Agatha and so we began to wail and, I guess, pray to ourselves as Father stood
amongst us: Oh, no, no, we mourned, oh, no, God, no, no . . .
Agatha lifted her already grief-stricken face and it was the face of someone who has predicted dooms and
lived to see and now did not want to see or live any more. As we watched, she turned her gaze to the tossed
woman’s body and tears fell from her eyes. She shut them and covered them and lay back down forever to
weep . . .
I took a step and then another step and then five quick steps and by the time I reached my sister her head
was buried deep and her sobs came up out of a place so far down in her I was afraid I could never find her
again, she would never come out, no matter how I pried or pleaded or promised or threatened or just plain
said. And what little we could hear from Agatha buried there in her own misery, she said over and over
again, lamenting, wounded, certain of the old threat known and named and now here forever. “. . . like I said
. . . told you . . . lies . . . lies . . . liars . . . all lies . . . like the other . . . other . . . just like . . . just . . . just like
the other . . . other . . . other . . . !”
I was down on my knees holding onto her with both hands, trying to put her back together even though
she wasn’t broken any way you could see but just feel, because I knew it was no use going on to Grandma, no
use at all, so I just touched Agatha and gentled her and wept while Father came up and stood over and knelt
down with me and it was like a prayer meeting in the middle of the street and lucky no more cars coming,
and I said, choking, “Other what, Ag, other what?”
Agatha exploded two words.
“Other dead!”
“You mean Mom?”
“O Mom,” she wailed, shivering, lying down, cuddling up like a baby. “O Mom, dead, O mom and now
Grandma dead, she promised always, always, to love, to love, promised to be different, promised, promised
End of story.
Well, not quite the end.
We lived happily ever after.
Or rather we lived together, Grandma, Agatha-Agamemnon-Abigail, Timothy, and I, Tom, and Father,
and Grandma calling us to frolic in great fountains of Latin and Spanish and French, in great seaborne gouts
of poetry like Moby Dick sprinkling the deeps with his Versailles jet somehow lost in calms and found
in storms; Grandma a constant, a clock, a pendulum, a face to tell all time by at noon, or in the middle
of sick nights when, raved with fever, we saw her forever by our beds, never gone, never away, always
waiting, always speaking kind words, her cool hand icing our hot brows, the tappet of her uplifted forefinger
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and now look, look . . . I hate her, I hate Mom, I hate her, I hate them!”
“Of course,” said a voice. “It’s only natural. How foolish of me not to have known, not to have seen.”
And the voice was so familiar we were all stricken.
We all jerked.
Agatha squinched her eyes, flicked them wide, blinked, and jerked half up, staring.
“How silly of me,” said Grandma, standing there at the edge of our circle, our prayer, our wake.
“Grandma!” we all said.
And she stood there, taller by far than any of us in this moment of kneeling and holding and crying out.
We could only stare up at her in disbelief.
“You’re dead!” cried Agatha. “The car—”
“Hit me,” said Grandma, quietly. “And threw me in the air and tumbled me over and for a few moments
there was a severe concussion of circuitries. I might have feared a disconnection, if fear is the word. But then
I sat up and gave myself a shake and the few molecules of paint, jarred loose on one printed path or another,
magnetized back in position and resilient creature that I am, unbreakable thing that I am, here I am.”
“I thought you were—” said Agatha.
“And only natural,” said Grandma. “I mean, anyone else, hit like that, tossed like that. But, O my dear
Agatha, not me. And now I see why you were afraid and never trusted me. You didn’t know. And I had not as
yet proved my singular ability to survive. How dumb of me not to have thought to show you. Just a second.”
Somewhere in her head, her body, her being, she fitted together some invisible tapes, some old information
made new by interblending. She nodded. ‘Yes. There. A book of child-raising, laughed at by some few people
years back when the woman who wrote the book said, as final advice to parents: ‘Whatever you do, don’t die.
Your children will never forgive you.’ ”
“Forgive,” some one of us whispered.
“For how can children understand when you just up and go away and never come back again with no
excuses, no apologies, no sorry note, nothing.”
“They can’t,” I said.
“So,” said Grandma, kneeling down with us beside Agatha who sat up, now, tears brimming her eyes,
but a different kind of tears, not tears that drowned, but tears that washed clean. “So your mother ran away to
death. And after that, how could you trust anyone? If everyone left, vanished finally, who was there to trust?
So when I came, half wise, half ignorant, I should have known, I did not know, why you would not accept
me. For, very simply and honestly, you feared I might not stay, that I lied, that I was vulnerable, too. And two
leavetakings, two deaths, were one too many in a single year. But now, do you see, Abigail?”
“Agatha,” said Agatha without knowing she corrected.
“Do you understand, I shall always, always be here?”
“Oh, yes,” cried Agatha, and broke down in a solid weeping in which we all joined, huddled together and
cars drew up and stopped to see just how many people were hurt and how many people were getting well
right there.
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unsprung to let a twine of cold mountain water touch our flannel tongues. Ten thousand dawns she cut our
wildflower lawn, ten thousand nights she wandered, remembering the dust molecules that fell in the still
hours before dawn, or sat whispering some lesson she felt needed teaching to our ears while we slept snug.
Until at last, one by one, it was time for us to go away to school, and when at last the youngest, Agatha,
was all packed, why Grandma packed, too.
On the last day of summer that last year, we found Grandma down in the front room with various packets
and suitcases, knitting, waiting, and though she had often spoken of it, now that the time came we were
shocked and surprised.
“Grandma!” we all said. “What are you doing?”
“Why going off to college, in a way, just like you,” she said. “Back to Guido Fantoccini’s, to the Family.”
“The Family?”
“Of Pinocchios, that’s what he called us for a joke, at first. The Pinocchios and himself Gepetto. And
then later gave us his own name: the Fantoccini. Anyway, you have been my family here. Now I go back to
my even larger family there, my brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, all robots who—”
“Who do what?” asked Agatha.
“It all depends,” said Grandma. “Some stay, some linger. Others go to be drawn and quartered, you
might say, their parts distributed to other machines who have need of repairs. They’ll weigh and find me
wanting or not wanting. It may be I’ll be just the one they need tomorrow and off I’ll go to raise another
batch of children and beat another batch of fudge.”
“Oh, they mustn’t draw and quarter you!” cried Agatha.
“No!” I cried, with Timothy.
“My allowance,” said Agatha, “I’ll pay anything . . . ?”
Grandma stopped rocking and looked at the needles and the pattern of bright yarn. “Well, I wouldn’t
have said, but now you ask and I’ll tell. For a very small fee, there’s a room, the room of the Family, a large
dim parlor, all quiet and nicely decorated, where as many as thirty or forty of the Electric Women sit and
rock and talk, each in her turn. I have not been there. I am, after all, freshly born, comparatively new. For a
small fee, very small, each month and year, that’s where I’ll be, with all the others like me, listening to what
they’ve learned of the world and, in my turn, telling how it was with Tom and Tim and Agatha and how fine
and happy we were. And I’ll tell all I learned from you.”
“But . . . you taught us!”
“Do you really think that?” she said. “No, it was turnabout, roundabout, learning both ways. And it’s all
in here, everything you flew into tears about or laughed over, why, I have it all. And I’ll tell it to the others
just as they tell their boys and girls and life to me. We’ll sit there, growing wiser and calmer and better every
year and every year, ten, twenty, thirty years. The Family knowledge will double, quadruple, the wisdom
will not be lost. And we’ll be waiting there in that sitting room, should you ever need us for your own
children in time of illness, or, God prevent, deprivation or death. There we’ll be, growing old but not old,
getting closer to the time, perhaps, someday, when we live up to our first strange joking name.”
“The Pinocchios?” asked Tim.
Grandma nodded.
I knew what she meant. The day when, as in the old tale, Pinocchio had grown so worthy and so fine
that the gift of life had been given him. So I saw them, in future years, the entire family of Fantoccini,
the Pinocchios, trading and re-trading, murmuring and whispering their knowledge in the great parlors of
philosophy, waiting for the day. The day that could never come.
Grandma must have read that thought in our eyes.
“We’ll see,” she said. “Let’s just wait and see.”
“Oh, Grandma,” cried Agatha and she was weeping as she had wept many years before. “You don’t have
to wait. You’re alive. You’ve always been alive to us!”
And she caught hold of the old woman and we all caught hold for a long moment and then ran off up in
the sky to faraway schools and years and her last words to us before we let the helicopter swarm us away into
Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s “I Sing
the Body Electric!”: Technological
Mothering
Narrated by Tom, a child who at the end of the
story has grown into an old man, this story recounts
the advent of “the first humanoid-genre minicircuited, rechargeable AC-DC Mark V Electrical
Grandmother,”328 named Nefertiti, a “dear and
wonderous electric dream.”329 This electrical
grandmother is delivered to her grandchildren, Tom,
Timothy, and Agatha, by a fabulous and whimsical
company, Fantocinni, Ltd. The story takes its title from
a Walt Whitman poem also called “I Sing the Body
Electric!” and is part SF and part fantasy. The story
examines the promises and the pitfalls of an artificial
human being and artificial intelligence.
After the untimely death of the children’s mother, Ann,
their grief-stricken father, rather than calling upon an
aunt or a nanny or babysitters, turns to the Fantoccini
company for help in raising his three children. Father is
unsure about this desperate idea, but his sons convince
him to take the electric grandmother out for a spin.
Agatha, however, voices a reluctance that, underneath,
the whole family feels:
“There’s only one thing,” said Agatha.
“We can try it. Sure.
“But—tell me this—when do we cut out
all this talk and when does our real mother
come home to stay?”
There was a single gasp from the family
as if, with one shot, she had struck us all in
the heart.330
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autumn were these:
“When you are very old and gone childish-small again, with childish ways and childish yens and, in need
of feeding, make a wish for the old teacher nurse, the dumb yet wise companion, send for me. I will come
back. We shall inhabit the nursery again, never fear.”
“Oh, we shall never be old!” we cried. “That will never happen!”
“Never! Never!”
And we were gone.
And the years flown.
And we are old now, Tim and Agatha and I.
Our children are grown and gone, our wives and husbands vanished from the earth and now, by
Dickensian coincidence, accept it as you will or not accept, back in the old house, we three.
I lie here in the bedroom which was my childish place seventy, O seventy, believe it, seventy years ago.
Beneath this wallpaper is another layer and yet another-times-three to the old wallpaper covered over when
I was nine. The wallpaper is peeling. I see peeking from beneath, old elephants, familiar tigers, fine and
amiable zebras, irascible crocodiles. I have sent for the paperers to carefully remove all but that last layer.
The old animals will live again on the walls, revealed.
And we have sent for someone else.
The three of us have called:
Grandma! You said you’d come back when we had need.
We are surprised by age, by time. We are old. We need.
And in three rooms of a summer house very late in time, three old children rise up, crying out in their
heads: We loved you! We love you!
There! There! in the sky, we think, waking at morn. Is that the delivery machine? Does it settle to the
lawn?
There! There on the grass by the front porch. Does the mummy case arrive?
Are our names inked on ribbons wrapped about the lovely form beneath the golden mask?!
And the kept gold key, forever hung on Agatha’s breast, warmed and waiting? Oh God, will it, after all
these years, will it wind, will it set in motion, will it, dearly, fit?!
mother’s death.
Bradbury receiving the National Medal of Arts in 2004 with
President George W. Bush and his wife Laura Bush.
But they go ahead with the experiment and fly off to
visit the Fantoccini headquarters, where Father tells his
children that Fantoccini is “an Italian word for shadow
puppets.”331 The company offers them a customized
robot, Nefertiti, whose name is “Egyptian for The
Beautiful One is Here”332—a symbol of both mortality
and immortality. Guido Fantoccini, understanding
Agatha’s resistance, hands her the robot’s golden key,
“the key to your Do-it-Yourself, Select Only the Best,
Electrical Grandmother. Every morning you wind her
up. Every night you let her run down. You’re in charge.
You are guardian of the Key.”333
Having chosen the specificities of their electric
grandmother, the children, excited but also dubious
about this experiment in child-raising, are wisely made
antsy with anticipation, as Fantoccini makes them wait
and wait and wait for her arrival. At last, “the clouds
above our house opened wide and let forth a helicopter
like Apollo driving his chariot across mythological
skies,” to deliver “a parcel of largish size” with a
“crowbar taped to the top of the raw pine lid.”334
Grandma Nefertiti comes to the children complete
with a gold sarcophagus and Egyptian hieroglyphics,
and they are delighted with their magical toy that isn’t
really a toy, especially because she is a symbol of the
future, of time to come, times to spend together, in
other words, all the time they’d been robbed of by their
Well, then, the changes were miraculously
soft, small, and mysterious. Nothing so
tremendous as to be caught and noted,
save by this older boy, myself, who,
watching, became elated and admiring and
entranced.335
Soon, Agatha’s resistance breaks down, or as brother
Timothy says, “the more Agatha likes Grandma,
the more she hates herself for liking her, the more
afraid she gets of the whole mess, the more she hates
Grandma in the end.”336 The robot is understanding
and makes of Agatha’s resistance a game because she
understands that the child is afraid that she might get
hurt. Grandma says: “We must wait for her to find that
her fears have no foundation. If I fail, well, I will send
myself to the showers and rust quietly,” which makes
Agatha laugh, but only a little.337 At this point in the
story, Bradbury tackles one of the same questions that
Ambrose Bierce raised in his short story “Moxon’s
Master”: can a machine be more than mechanism? Or,
as Grandma says to Father:
You ask what I am? Why, a machine. But
even in that answer we know, don’t we, more
than a machine. I am all the people who
thought of me and planned me and built me
and set me running. So, I am people. I am
all the things they wanted to be and perhaps
could not be, so they built a great child, a
wondrous toy to represent those things.338
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It is, however, Agatha, keeper of the Electrical
Grandma’s golden key, who remains the most dubious.
While she helps her brothers wind up their new
Grandma, once Grandma has awakened, out of her
sarcophagus and clear of her winding sheets, fully
alive, Agatha hides. Grandma gains the trust of the two
boys, but Agatha is going to be difficult and declares
that she will never make friends with Grandma. After
their first ten, magical days with Grandma behaving
as a kind of super-mother, Agatha no longer hides.
But she still hangs back, even after Tom makes the
astonishing discovery that Grandma subtly changes
her physiognomy to resemble whichever person she is
with. Either when they are alone together, or when the
family is all together, Grandma transforms her features
so that she resembles her grandchildren:
… being mechanical, I cannot sin, cannot be
bribed, cannot be greedy or jealous or mean
or small. I do not relish power for power’s
sake. Speed does not pull me to madness. Sex
does not run me rampant through the world.
I have time and more than time to collect
the information I need around and about an
ideal to keep it clean and whole and intact.339
Still Father exclaims, “Good God, woman, you, you’re
not in there!” She replies, “No. But you are. You and
Thomas and Timothy and Agatha.”340 Grandma is
memory, she is timeless, and she is love, but that’s
where Agatha draws the line. She doesn’t accept this
mechanical love and insists that the Electrical Person
is lying. Agatha remains angry about her mother’s
premature death: “Love you! Lies! Love you! Lies!
And you’re like her! You lie! But you’re empty,
anyway, and so that’s a double lie! I hate her. Now, I
hate you!”341
The girl flees out of the house, into the street, and in
front of a car. Impossibly, Grandma is there to sweep
the child out of harm’s way, taking the brunt of the
oncoming car herself. Everyone thinks Grandma is
dead. Agatha has had her worst fear realized:
O Mom, dead, O Mom and now Grandma
dead, she promised always, always to love,
to love, promised to be different, promised,
promised, and now look, look…I hate her. I
hate Mom. I hate her, I hate them!342
she cries. Only Grandma isn’t dead. Being mechanical,
she has a “singular ability to survive,”343 so that she
“shall always, always be here” for her grandchildren.344
As Tom says, that might have been the end of the
story. But Bradbury isn’t done with the concept of
always—the timelessness of parenting as well as the
inevitable passage of time and mortality. The children
grow up; Grandma grows old; and when Agatha heads
to college, Grandma packs up her bags and goes back
to the Fantoccini, her other family comprised of all the
other customized robots. Before she leaves, she tells
her grandchildren:
When you are very old and gone childishsmall again, with childish ways and childish
yens and, in need of feeding, make a wish
for the old teacher nurse, the dumb yet wise
companion, send for me. I will come back.
We shall inhabit the nursery again, never
fear.345
Being young still, they doubt such a day will ever
come. But as Tom, the narrator explains, it does:
And we are old now, Tim and Agatha and I.
Our children are grown and gone, our wives
and husbands vanished from the earth and
now, by Dickensian coincidence, accept it as
you will or not accept, back in the old house,
we three.346
And because they are old and in need, Grandma will
come back. A meditation on childhood, aging, and
mortality, as well as a story about the nature of the
technology that humanity invents, “I Sing the Body
Electric!” gives “the lie to the ancient lying truth”
that “all machines destroy, all machines are cold,
thoughtless, awful.”347 Through Grandma, the reader
sees that the machines humanity creates also shape the
nature of humanity.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S
“CHILDFINDER”
Octavia E. Butler: Biography
Octavia E. Butler (1947−2006) was born in Pasadena,
California, in 1947 to Laurice and Octavia M. Butler.
Her father died when Butler was seven, so she was
raised by her mother, who worked as a maid, and by
her grandmother.348 In the Pasadena public school
system, Butler suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia, but
by the time she was ten, she was writing stories of her
own349 and continued to write throughout her school
years:
I sort out my problems by writing about
them. In a high school classroom on
November 22, 1963, I remember grabbing
a notebook and beginning to write my
response to the news of John Kennedy’s
assassination.350
One of her teachers encouraged Butler to submit
her writing to a science fiction magazine, and after
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Grandma explains that “most machines are amoral,
neither bad nor good”—a viewpoint that has echoes of
Ursula K. Le Guin’s regard for the technology of the
Augmentor in The Lathe of Heaven. Grandma is by no
means perfect, but she declares that:
Renowned SF author Octavia Butler.
Photo by Patti Perret
that submission, she dedicated herself to becoming a
professional writer.351 After graduating from Pasadena
City College in 1968, she continued to take classes
to improve her craft at California State University
and at UCLA. After taking a class with SF writer
Harlan Ellison at the Screen Writers’ Guild Open
Despite this early success, Butler had trouble getting
published. After a series of short story rejections,
she wrote her first novel, Patternmaster (1976),
which became the first in the Patternist trilogy. The
trilogy was followed by Kindred (1979), which is now
considered a major publication and is often taught at
both the high school and college levels and was made
into a TV miniseries in 2022.353 Her other works
include Wild Seed (1980), Clay’s Ark (1984), Survivor
(1978), Parable of the Sower (1993), Parable of the
Talents (1998), and Fledgling (2005). Her three novels
Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago
(1989) were republished first as the Xenogenesis
trilogy, and then later that trilogy was republished and
retitled Lilith’s Brood (2000).354
In 1995, Butler was awarded a MacArthur Genius
Grant; she remains the only SF writer to receive that
grant. She won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards,
a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, and the City
College of New York’s Langston Hughes Medal. Butler
died in Seattle from a fall caused by a stroke on
February 24, 2006.355
SELECTED WORK: “Childfinder” by Octavia E. Butler (1970; published in
2014)
From Unexpected Stories, Copyright © 2006 by the Estate of Octavia E. Butler. All rights reserved.
Standardization of psionic ability through large segments of the population must have given different
peoples wonderful opportunities to understand each other. Such abilities could bridge age-old
divisions of race, religion, nationality, etc. as could nothing else. Psi could have put the human race
on the road to Utopia.
Away from the organization. As far away as I could get. 855 South Madison. An unfurnished three-room
house for $60 a month. Rain through the roof in the winter, insects through the walls in the summer. Most
of the electrical outlets not working. Most of the faucets working all the time whether they were turned off
or not. Tenant pays utilities. My house. And there were seven more just like it. All set in a straggly row and
called a court.
Not that I minded the place really. I’d lived in worse. And I killed every damn rat and roach on the
premises before I moved in. Besides, there was this kid next door. Young, educable, with the beginnings of a
talent she was presently using for shoplifting. A pre-telepath.
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Door Program, she found a mentor in Ellison, who
encouraged her to apply for the Clarion Science Fiction
Writer’s Workshop. Before the end of that Clarion
workshop, Butler had sold her first two stories.352
She came over at 10 a.m., banging on the door as though she intended to come through it whether I
opened it or not. Considering her background and the condition of the door, she might have.
I let her in. Ten years old, dirty, filthy even at this hour of the morning. Which meant she had probably
gone to bed that way. Her mother worked at night and her older sister knew better than to try to make her do
anything she didn’t want to. Like bathe. Most of her hair was pulled back in a linty pony tail. The kind that
advertised the fact that she had just started combing it herself.
“Come on in. What do you want?” I knew what she wanted. I’d been waiting for her all morning. But it
made her suspicious when I was too nice or too understanding.
“Here’s your book.” She wasn’t comfortable handing it to me.
“What happened to the cover?”
“Larry played with it and tore it off.”
“Valerie, what’d you let a two-year-old play with a book for?”
“Mama said share it with him.”
I took the book from her, keeping my expression just short of disgust. People don’t like you breaking up
their things. She knew it and she didn’t expect me to be happy. Actually I didn’t care. There was only one
thing I cared about.
“Did you read it?”
“Yeah.”
“Like it?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you like about it?”
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.” Beginning of battle. You drag words out of her, one by painful one. You
prove to her that she can do a lot more thinking than she’s used to…if she wants to. Then you make her want to.
And all the time you push her, guide her thinking just a little. Partly to get her used to mental communication—
like letting a baby hear speech so it can learn to talk. And partly to shock her into thinking along new and not
always pleasant lines. That last is ugly. Not something I like to do to kids. The adults I do it to usually can’t be
reached any other way. Most of the time they’re not salvageable anyway. All the kids like Valerie have is ten
years or so of failure conditioning. Not quite enough to be fatal.
Valerie said, “I like the parts where Harriet helped those slaves to get away.”
“She could have been killed every time she helped them.”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you think she kept doing it?”
Again the bored shrug. “I don’t know. Wanted them to get free, I guess.”
Off-the-top-of-her-head stuff. She had liked the book all right, at least while she was reading it. It was a
juvenile biography of Harriet Tubman, well-written, fast-moving, and exciting. There were a lot of reasons
for Valerie to get more than a couple of evenings of entertainment out of it. Reasons beyond the ones usually
given for making a black kid read that kind of book. Right now, though, her mind had wandered outside,
where the rest of the court kids were screaming and chasing each other up and down the driveway.
I hit her with a scene from the book. Herself in Harriet’s place. Seven or eight people following her north.
Night. North star. White people nearby. Danger. Close call. Fear. One of her followers wanting to turn back,
and another, and another. Fear like a barrier you could reach out and touch. Gun in her hand, telling them
they would go on with her or be shot.
Push.
Reading it and living it are two different things. Valerie got the whole scene in a few seconds like a really
vivid dream. Not the kind of dream someone her age ought to be having, but she was going to have to grow
up pretty fast.
She shook herself and muttered something like, “Long-haired motherfucker!” It was one of the kinder
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Saturday.
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names that people in our court called each other from time to time. But at that moment Valerie was applying
it to the rest of Harriet’s would-be deserters.
She looked at me, frowning. “They always got half-way up north and then somebody would get scared
and want to go back. How come they were so scared to just go ahead and be free?”
Breakthrough. The kids outside were forgotten for the moment. She had asked a question she wanted the
answer to.
I worked with Valerie until her brother—an older one, not Larry—banged on the door and yelled,
“Valerie, Mama say come do these dishes.”
She left, taking another book with her, a step closer to being ready. I became aware of somebody else as
Valerie left.
A woman coming down the driveway to my house. She spoke to Valerie in the kind of first-grade language
that the ten-year-old had come to know and dislike years ago.
“My, that’s a big book you have there. Are you going to read all that?”
Valerie muttered something that might have been either “yes” or “no,” leaped the distance between her
porch and mine and disappeared into her house. She had left my door open, and the woman walked in like
she owned the place. Organization woman. White, of course. White people came to the court to turn off the
utilities, evict tenants, sell overpriced junk and take care of other equally unsavory kinds of business. This
would be one of those other kinds. For once, I was glad of Valerie’s youth and ignorance. She didn’t know
anything the organization could lift out of her thoughts and use against me.
I said, “Eve, if you don’t know how to talk to kids why don’t you just pass by without saying anything?”
“I was only trying to be pleasant to her because she’s one of yours.” She sat down uninvited and smoothed
first her dress, then her hair. Her hair was long and when she was nervous she liked to fool with it. Now she was
starting to twist a piece of it around her fingers.
“Did she think you were pleasant?”
Eve changed the subject. “We’ve missed you. We want you to come to a meeting today. . .if you have time.”
“I don’t.” A lot of things I wouldn’t like could happen to me at one of their meetings.
“Barbara, come. Really, if you don’t there’s going to be trouble.”
“There’ll be trouble no matter what. But I didn’t know it was so close. Thanks for the warning.” So they
were finally getting worried enough about what I was doing to think about forcing me back to the fold.
She looked around at my so-called house and listened to the kids screaming outside. “What is it you’re so
willing to fight for? What do you have here that you couldn’t have more of with us?”
“Valeries.”
“I’ve told you before, Barbara, bring the children. We want them too.”
“Do you? Are you sure? These are the same kids you wouldn’t even consider before I left. You took one
look into them and you couldn’t get out fast enough.”
“All right, we were wrong. You’re the childfinder and we should have listened. Come back now and we
will listen.”
“I don’t need you anymore.” The way they hadn’t needed me before I started finding pre-psi kids. I know
a lot about them, about the way they feel. The kinds of things normal people can only guess about each other.
Silence for a moment. As silent as my court gets, anyway.
“So the others are right. You’re forming an opposition organization.”
“We won’t oppose you unless we have to.”
“A segregated black-only group. . . Don’t you see, you’re setting yourself up for the same troubles that
plague the normals.”
“No. Until you get another childfinder, I don’t think they’ll be quite the same. More like reversed.” I
almost said, “How does it feel to be on the downside for a change.” Almost. And to one of the new people—
the next step for mankind.
Honest to God, that’s the way they talked when I was with them. They had everything they needed then.
Somebody to pull them all together—all the ones who had managed to mature on their own. The ones who
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had been solitary misfits, human trash, until they got together. I was one of them. I know just how low they
were before someone with the talent to reach out and call them together matured. That led to the organization
and the organization led me to find out that I hadn’t been as mature as I thought. Led me to discover that
I was the other thing they needed. Somebody who could recognize normal-appearing kids who had psi
potential before they got too old and the potential in them died from lack of use. Originally the organization
was a group of exceptions. Most pre-psi kids don’t mature without help. That’s why the organization had
stayed the same size since the day I left.
Eve was saying, “Sooner or later we’re bound to get another childfinder.”
That was true. Except that I was likely to see their childfinder before they did. I’d seen two white potential
ones so far. I hate to hurt kids. I mean it. My specialty is helping them. But I crippled those two for good. The
best they can hope for now—if they knew enough to hope—is to be normal with traces of psionic ability.
“Barbara.” There was a change in Eve’s voice that made me look at her. “I didn’t want to say this, but. . .
well, you can’t watch all the kids you’ve collected all the time. Especially since you’re still out looking for new
ones. We would hate to do anything, but. . .”
They wouldn’t hate it. And they wouldn’t be careful. Where I’d cripple kids painlessly, they would kill
them. After all that build-up about the organization wanting them.
“Don’t come after my kids, Eve.”
“Do you think I’d want to? Do you think it was my idea? You’re the one who won’t listen to reason. . .”
“Don’t come after my kids! You’ll lose a lot more than you bargain for if you do. You’d be surprised how
fast some of them are growing up, and they know a lot more about you than you know about them.
She got mad then and tried one of her organization tricks. Swiping at me. Trying to grab what I knew
out of my thoughts before I could realize what she was doing and stop her. But who’s likely to know more
about that kind of thing? Someone who spends months teaching it to kids, or someone who’s had to be polite
most of the time and pretend it doesn’t exist? She didn’t get a thing. Not even the satisfaction of taking me by
surprise. So she left. Just like that. She got up and walked out.
I didn’t reach after her until she was outside in the driveway. I meant to catch her just as she started to
give way to her anger and let her guard down a little. I meant to show her how that little trick worked!
I never got to do it.
There were three organization men waiting in her car. She stood in the driveway and called them to her.
Then she started back toward my house with them surrounding her. Her protection.
Three. And they weren’t teachers. They were the world’s first psionic brawlers. They fought among
themselves mostly. Sparring, jockeying for position in the organization, fooling around. It kept them alert and
in shape.
I never even thought of running. They were set to have too much fun as it was. Something like this had
been bound to happen sooner or later anyway. I had known that for a long time.
The four of them came in and faced me silently. They didn’t have to say anything.
I shrugged. “Do you mind if I get my things?”
They took long enough answering to have been doing some silent arguing about it. I wouldn’t know
for sure because I had shut myself up as tight as I could in my own head. Anything I let slip now, they
would grab. I’d been bragging about how much my kids knew about the organization. Now, one slip and the
organization would know all about my kids.
Eve. “I’ll bring what you need, Barbara.” She evidently spoke for all of them.
As they herded me toward the door, one of the men said, “How long did you think we’d let you get away
with this shit anyway?”
I was making things too easy for him. He wanted to make me mad enough to do something stupid. Like
dropping my guard.
I never had time to get mad. Just as the man finished speaking, one of the other two yelled. It would have
taken me a little longer to realize what was going on without that yell. Not that the realization helped me.
The men and Eve fell to the floor unconscious before they could even spot their attacker. It happened so
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fast they appeared to fall in unison.
I stared down at them for a moment muttering, “Oh God!” Then I started to feel the anger that the
organization man’s question had not had time to bring. I had to force myself calm before I could come out of
my mental shell.
The first thing I got when I did come out was an identity. Not a “my name is.” Just a mental impression
that I recognized like the sound of a familiar voice. I reached out.
Jordan.
Hey. His thought was easy, like his voice. Why don’t you let somebody know you in trouble? If we hadn’t
felt you closing yourself off a minute ago they would have had you and gone before we could do anything.
Confusion. I didn’t know what to feel. I was let down rather than relieved. And the fear that I had
managed to conceal from my organization captors now had to be concealed from Jordan because he wouldn’t
understand it any more than they would have. The only safe emotion was anger, and he didn’t deserve that.
He’d only been trying to help.
Jordan again. You better get out of there now. The organization must know what we did to their pigs.
They’ll be sending twenty people after you instead of four!
No doubt. He was seventeen. One of the first kids I’d found after leaving the organization. Not too long
ago a college student from Kenya had told him he looked like a Watusi man. His head was still pretty big
over that.
Jordan, let them come to. I sent the thought, knowing beforehand what his answer would be. He replied
true to form.
What? Shit, they almost got you once! What you want to. . . ?
Looks to me like she wanted them to get her. Another identity. Jessie Mae. One of my developing
childfinders and a lot better telepath than she ought to have been at fifteen.
It had to happen sooner or later. I managed to make it no more than an unemotional statement of fact.
Like hell it did! Both of them and a lot of others besides. All the older ones were in on this. And in a way,
that was good. Later nobody would be able to blame anybody else for whatever happened.
They know me, Jordan. I can’t hide from them. They can find me wherever I am and they can use me to
find you.
Jordan. You don’t have to hide from them. There’s enough of us to stop them.
Softly. Man, I know there is. But it’s not time yet. Because all you can do is stop them. How long do you
think you can hold them? Or do you figure they’ll all be as easy as these four?
Silence. Belligerent mutterings. Little “we can take them right now” fantasies beginning to grow in
several minds at once.
I shoved all the disgust I could into my next thought. I thought I had managed to teach one or two of you
something. If you really put your heart in it, you can make a single mildly worded thought like that carry
more slap than all the profanity you could use.
They all shut up. A couple of them jerked away from me in surprise as though they were dodging an
expected blow.
I continued only a little more gently. I thought I had taught you to look out for yourselves. To do what you
had to to keep yourselves alive and together and hidden until you’re too strong for the organization to touch.
I paused for a moment. You know you’re in danger of being found every time you’re with me. We’re just
lucky they took as long as they did to decide that we’re something to worry about. Lucky they gave you time
to. . .
Time to get ready. Time to learn to make it on their own. Yeah. Start out strong like you’re going to hit
them if they don’t behave. And then wind up carrying on worse than they are. Shit.
I was tired. Almost too tired to be afraid anymore. Jordan, bring them to for me, please. And Jessie Mae,
as soon as I leave, come get Valerie. She doesn’t know anything, but I’m afraid of what they might do to her
to find that out for sure.
Jordan answered first. Barbara, I’d sooner kill them now than let them get up and take you.
Historians believe that an atmosphere of tolerance and peace would be a natural outgrowth of a
psionic society.
Records of the fate of the psis are sketchy. Legend tells us that they were all victims of a disease
to which they were particularly vulnerable. Whatever the cause, we may be sure that this is one
civilization that was destroyed by purely external forces.
Psi: History of a Vanished People
Analysis of Octavia E. Butler’s
“Childfinder”: Telepathic
Communication as Technology
In an America restructured by the widespread ability
among humans to use telepathy, Barbara, the narrator
of “Childfinder,” is an African-American woman
who has a particularly useful gift: she is an adult
telepath who can discover and then mentor children
with such psionic or telepathic powers. Without
being mentored, these children will either perish
or lose their extraordinary ability to communicate
mentally. Barbara is the titular “childfinder.” As the
premise of this story suggests, telepathy as a means of
communication is in and of itself a technology. Without
language, human communication, always fragile and
subject to misapprehensions, becomes impossible.
Without communication, people can’t work together,
they can’t form communities, or governments and
governing structures; public and private relationships
will fray or dissolve. As a technology, language is the
key to all other types of technologies. But if telepathy
became a possible mode of communication, it would be
instantaneous and visceral, more like a dream and less
subject to mistakes, potentially a tool to unite people
across differences such as race, gender, or age.
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Then Jessie Mae. We need you! What happens to us if they take you?
You…survive, honey. You don’t need me. You already know about all I can teach you.
Abruptly Jessie Mae was projecting so intensely I could almost see her—tall, stronger than a girl was
supposed to be, her face perpetually set in a defiant scowl. She hadn’t cried since she as seven years old.
You’re going to let them kill you. You’re going to let them take you away and kill you!
No I’m not.
You are! I’m not so dumb I can’t see that!
You are dumb! Or you could see that they want me alive and well so I can work for them. They think.
I can string them along as long as I have to. I could feel her disbelief like a rock in my mind. Anyway…
anyway, Jessie Mae, I swear to God I’m not going to let them kill me.
She wavered slightly, a little less sure of herself. Barbara…
Do what I tell you, Jessie Mae, Jordan. Just do it. I closed them out to give them time to consider and to
hide my half-lie before they could see it for what it was.
I wasn’t exactly going to let the organization kill me. There was too much chance that they might learn
something from me as I died. They would definitely try. And no amount of “stringing them along” would
work for long. Especially after this little show of strength the kids had put on. So in a couple of minutes, as
soon as Jordan let Eve and her friends regain consciousness, I was going to forget everything I knew about
pre-psi kids and finding them. Thinking about it, thinking about forgetting, about erasing the thing that had
become as important to me as breathing, brought my fear back full force. It was like saying I was going to
kill myself. I almost envied those white kids I’d crippled. They never knew what they were losing.
But afraid or not, I was going to do it. I had started something that I wasn’t going to let the organization
stop. Partly because my kids deserved a chance. And partly because they were going to settle a lot of scores
for me and a few million other people…someday.
On the floor one of the men groaned and opened his eyes.
Barbara has been nurturing and teaching all the children
of color with such powers as she can find for some
time when the story begins, but at the same time she
has been deliberately crippling the psionic abilities
of the pre-psionic white telepaths who could, in time,
become what she is, a psionic childfinder. She will no
longer help the organization continue to exclude, hurt,
or even kill Black children. The organization comes
after Barbara, sending to her home a white woman
whom Barbara evidently knows well, a woman named
Eve. Eve challenges Barbara by saying, “so the others
are right. You’re forming an opposing organization.”
But this one would be a segregated group, blacks only.
Eve chides Barbara that such a group would be plagued
“with the same troubles that plague the normals.”358 The
childfinder, however, is adamant. Her kids deserve more
of a chance to mature into fully functioning telepathic
adults than the organization would allow, and she warns
Eve, “[d]on’t come after my kids! You’ll lose a lot more
than you bargain for if you do. You’d be surprised how
fast some of them are growing up, and they know a lot
more about you than you know about them.”359
This open threat backfires as it makes Eve angry
enough to try to grab information from inside
Barbara’s mind, although Barbara is too talented to
be taken by surprise like that. Eve storms out, only
Acclaimed SF author Octavia Butler.
Joshua Trujillo/seattlepi.com, via Associated Press
to return with a trio of psionic thugs, muscle meant
to protect Eve and take Barbara forcibly back to
the organization, where she can be controlled—or
perhaps killed, if she won’t cooperate. Barbara shuts
her mind up tight to keep the other telepaths out. But
she is resigned to going along with them as a prisoner.
She knew it was only a matter of time before the
organization would recognize her activity as a threat.
Just as Barbara is about to capitulate and go along
quietly with her captors, one of her mentored children,
Jordan, disables the organization squad, knocking
all four of them unconscious. Stunned, Barbara
forcibly calms herself, both because she is angry at the
organization’s thugs and because she must protect her
kids. After all, Jordan, for all his telepathic ability, is
only a seventeen-year-old adolescent. Most of the rest
of her kids are even younger, like fifteen-year-old pre-
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The story opens with a quote that appears to be taken
either from a history or some other type of reference
text—which is eventually revealed at the end of the
story to be a history text called Psi: The History of
a Vanished People. This quote informs the reader
that telepathy has become a widespread human
commonplace and that “such abilities could bridge ageold divisions.”356 Unfortunately, however, that has not
happened. The childfinder, Barbara, had been working
for an institution simply called the organization, but
she has left it because of practices of discrimination
inside the group that made it impossible for her to
mentor children of color. She has in fact taken herself
as far away from it as she can physically go because the
organization doesn’t appreciate her ability to find prepsionic children if the children she finds are not white.
As Barbara explains, she is “[s]omebody who could
recognize normal-appearing kids who had psi potential
before they got too old and the potential in them died
from lack of use”357 but when these children are not
white, the organization discriminates against them.
childfinder and fast maturing telepath, Jessie Mae.
While her kids want to protect Barbara, she is the adult
in this tense situation, and she knows only too well the
power of the organization. These children need to grow
into adults before they can seriously oppose the older
organization, or as Barbara tells them, they need to
get stronger because right now “all you can do is stop
them. How long do you think you can hold them?” She
wants her children to be able to keep themselves alive
and hidden “until you’re too strong for the organization
to touch.”360 Fearful that Barbara is going to be killed
by the organization, the children argue back, telling
her they need her to survive—but she knows better.
She has taught most of them all that she can, and she
has grown into a liability to them because she had once
been part of the organization, and that organization
knows her and knows how to find her.
Shaming her kids into obedience, Barbara decides to
sacrifice herself to save them: she will cut off her own
ability as a childfinder:
So, in a couple of minutes, as soon as
Jordan lets Eve and her friends regain
consciousness, I was going to forget
everything I know about pre-psi kids and
finding them. Thinking about it, thinking
about forgetting, about erasing the thing that
had become as important to me as breathing,
brought back my fear full force.361
Though her telepathic abilities are an integral part
of her, Barbara is still determined to erase her skill
because it’s the only way she knows to give her
mentees a fighting chance. She will return to the
organization as their unwilling prisoner, albeit a
prisoner who no longer has the ability for which they’d
wanted her back. If she is no longer a childfinder, the
organization can’t really use her.
The text informs us at the very end that “[r]ecords of
the fate of the psis are sketchy. Legend tells us that
they were all victims of a disease to which they were
particularly vulnerable.”362 Perhaps. Yet the tenor and
outcome of the story “Childfinder” suggests that this
mysterious disease may have been the disease of being
human, and that the short-lived community of psis
succumbed to an internal and ultimately fatal conflict
that resulted in the extinction of the whole community.
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In 2021, NASA named the landing site of the agency’s Perseverance rover “Octavia E. Butler Landing,” after the
science fiction author.
JOHN CROWLEY’S “SNOW”
John Crowley: Biography
John Crowley (b. 1942) was born on December 1,
1942, in Presque Isle, Maine, to Joseph and Patience
Crowley. His father, an Army Air Corps doctor, was
stationed in Maine during World War II.363 Crowley
spent the war years in Greenwich Village with the
female members of his family. After the war, his father
returned to civilian practice, taking the family first to
Brattleboro, Vermont; then in 1952, the family moved
to Martin, Kentucky, where Dr. Crowley became the
medical director at a Catholic hospital.
The science fiction writer John Crowley.
The Chemical Wedding: by Christian Rosenkreutz: A
Romance in Eight Days, followed by Ka: Dar Oakley
in the Ruin of Ymr (2017); and Flint and Mirror
(2018).366
While living in the Berkshires in the 1980s, Crowley
met Laurie Block, and in 1984 they married; in 1987,
they had twins. In 1992, at the behest of the faculty
who admired his work, Crowley took a job at Yale
University teaching Creative Writing, first as an
adjunct and later as a half-time instructor; he retired in
2018.367
SELECTED WORK: “Snow” by John Crowley (1985)
© 1985 by John Crowley. Originally published in Omni. Reprinted by permission of the author.
I don’t think Georgie would ever have got one for herself: She was at once unsentimental and a little in awe
of death. No, it was her first husband—an immensely rich and (from Georgie’s description) a strangely weepy
guy, who had got it for her. Or for himself, actually, of course. He was to be the beneficiary. Only he died
himself shortly after it was installed. If installed is the right word. After he died, Georgie got rid of most of
what she’d inherited from him, liquidated it. It was cash that she had liked best about that marriage anyway;
but the Wasp couldn’t really be got rid of. Georgie ignored it.
In fact the thing really was about the size of a wasp of the largest kind, and it had the same lazy and mindless
flight. And of course it really was a bug, not of the insect kind but of the surveillance kind. And so its name
fit all around: One of those bits of accidental poetry the world generates without thinking. O Death, where is
thy sting?
Georgie ignored it, but it was hard to avoid; you had to be a little careful around it; it followed Georgie at a
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As a child, Crowley read widely, and wanted at first to
become an archeologist, then later he decided to work
in the theater and in film. At Indiana University he
majored in English, and after graduation, he moved to
New York City, where he wrote screenplays and began
working on documentary films.364 During this time,
he began writing SF novels. The Deep was published
in 1975 and Beasts in 1977. His next novel, Little,
Big (1981), took him almost a decade to finish; it won
the World Fantasy Award.365 His other works include
Aegypt (1987), Antiquities: Seven Stories (1993),
Love & Sleep (1994), Daemonomania (2000), The
Translator (2002), Novelties and Souvenirs: Collected
Short Fiction (2004), Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening
Land (2005), Endless Things (2007), and a non-fiction
book, In Other Words (2007). In 2016, he published
variable distance, depending on her motions and the numbers of other people around her, the level of light,
and the tone of her voice. And there was always the danger you might shut it in a door or knock it down with
a tennis racket.
It cost a fortune (if you count the access and the perpetual care contract, all prepaid), and though it wasn’t
really fragile, it made you nervous.
Eventually it ran out, or down. A lot could go wrong, I suppose, with circuits that small, controlling that
many functions. It ended up spending a lot of time bumping gently against the bedroom ceiling, over and
over, like a winter fly. Then one day the maids swept it out from under the bureau, a husk. By that time it
had transmitted at least eight thousand hours (eight thousand was the minimum guarantee) of Georgie: of
her days and hours, her comings in and her goings out, her speech and motion, her living self—all on file,
taking up next to no room, at The Park. And then, when the time came, you could go there, to The Park,
say on a Sunday afternoon; and in quiet landscaped surroundings (as The Park described it) you would find
her personal resting chamber, and there, in privacy, through the miracle of modern information storage and
retrieval systems, you could access her, her alive, her as she was in every way, never changing or growing
any older, fresher (as The Park’s brochure said) than in memory ever green.
***
I married Georgie for her money, the same reason she married her first, the one who took out The Park’s
contract for her. She married me, I think, for my looks; she always had a taste for looks in men. I wanted
to write. I made a calculation that more women than men make, and decided that to be supported and paid
for by a rich wife would give me freedom to do so, to “develop.” The calculation worked out no better for
me than it does for most women who make it. I carried a typewriter and a case of miscellaneous paper from
Ibiza to Gstaad to Bial to London, and typed on beaches, and learned to ski. Georgie liked me in ski clothes.
Now that those looks are all but gone, I can look back on myself as a young hunk and see that I was in a way
a rarity, a type that you run into often among women, far less among men, the beauty unaware of his beauty,
aware that he affects women profoundly and more or less instantly but doesn’t know why; thinks he is being
listened to and understood, that his soul is being seen, when all that’s being seen is long-lashed eyes and a
strong, square, tanned wrist turning in a lovely gesture, stubbing out a cigarette. Confusing. By the time I
figured out why I had for so long been indulged and cared for and listened to, why I was interesting, I wasn’t
as interesting as I had been. At about the same time I realized I wasn’t a writer at all. Georgie’s investment
stopped looking as good to her, and my calculation had ceased to add up; only by that time I had come, pretty
unexpectedly, to love Georgie a lot, and she just as unexpectedly had come to love and need me too, as much as
she needed anybody. We never really parted, even though when she died I hadn’t seen her for years. Phone calls,
at dawn or four A.M. because she never, for all her travel, really grasped that the world turns and cocktail hour
travels around with it. She was a crazy, wasteful, happy woman, without a trace of malice or permanence or
ambition in her—easily pleased and easily bored and strangely serene despite the hectic pace she kept up. She
cherished things and lost them and forgot them: Things, days, people. She had fun, though, and I had fun with
her; that was her talent and her destiny, not always an easy one. Once, hung over in a New York hotel, watching
a sudden snowfall out the immense window, she said to me, “Charlie, I’m going to die of fun.”
And she did. Snow-foiling in Austria, she was among the first to get one of those snow leopards, silent beasts
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It wasn’t recording all the time. There had to be a certain amount of light, though not much. Darkness shut it
off. And then sometimes it would get lost. Once when we hadn’t seen it hovering around for a time, I opened
a closet door, and it flew out, unchanged. It went off looking for her, humming softly. It must have been shut
in there for days.
as fast as speedboats. Alfredo called me in California to tell me, but with the distance and his accent and his
eagerness to tell me he wasn’t to blame, I never grasped the details. I was still her husband, her closest relative,
heir to the little she still had, and beneficiary, too, of The Park’s access concept. Fortunately, The Park’s services
included collecting her from the morgue in Gstaad and installing her in her chamber at The Park’s California
unit. Beyond signing papers and taking delivery when Georgie arrived by freight airship at Van Nuys, there
was nothing for me to do. The Park’s representative was solicitous and made sure I understood how to go
about accessing Georgie, but I wasn’t listening. I am only a child of my time, I suppose. Everything about
death, the fact of it, the fate of the remains, and the situation of the living faced with it, seems grotesque to me,
embarrassing, useless: And everything done about it only makes it more grotesque, more useless: Someone I
loved is dead; let me therefore dress in clown’s clothes, talk backwards, and buy expensive machinery to make
up for it. I went back to L.A.
***
Why did I go to The Park that first time? Mostly because I had forgotten about it: Getting that key in the mail
was like coming across a pile of old snapshots you hadn’t cared to look at when they were new but which
after they have aged come to contain the past, as they did not contain the present. I was curious.
I understood very well that The Park and its access concept were very probably only another cruel joke on
the rich, preserving the illusion that they can buy what can’t be bought, like the cryonics fad of thirty years
ago. Once in Ibiza, Georgie and I met a German couple who also had a contract with The Park; their Wasp
hovered over them like a Paraclete and made them self-conscious in the extreme—they seemed to be constantly
rehearsing the eternal show being stored up for their descendants. Their deaths had taken over their lives, as
though they were pharaohs. Did they, Georgie wondered, exclude the Wasp from their bedroom? Or did its
presence there stir them to greater efforts, proofs of undying love and admirable vigor for the unborn to see?
No, death wasn’t to be cheated that way, any more than by pyramids, by masses said in perpetuity. It wasn’t
Georgie saved from death that I would find. But there were eight thousand hours of her life with me, genuine
hours, stored there more carefully than they could be in my porous memory; Georgie hadn’t excluded the
Wasp from her bedroom, our bedroom, and she who had never performed for anybody could not have
conceived of performing for it. And there would be me, too, undoubtedly, caught unintentionally by the
Wasp’s attention: Out of those thousands of hours there would be hundreds of myself, and myself had just
then begun to be problematic to me, something that had to be figured out, something about which evidence
had to be gathered and weighed. I was thirty-eight years old.
That summer, then, I borrowed a Highway Access Permit (the old HAPpy cards of those days) from a county
lawyer I knew and drove the coast highway up to where The Park was, at the end of a pretty beach road, all
alone above the sea. It looked from the outside like the best, most peaceful kind of Italian country cemetery,
a low stucco wall topped with urns, amid cypresses, an arched gate in the center. A small brass plaque on the
gate: PLEASE USE YOUR KEY. The gate opened, not to a square of shaded tombstones but onto a ramped
corridor going down: The cemetery wall was an illusion, the works were underground. Silence, or nameless
Muzak-like silence: Solitude—whether the necessary technicians were discreetly hidden or none were
needed. Certainly the access concept turned out to be simplicity itself, in operation anyway. Even I, who am
an idiot about information technology, could tell that. The Wasp was genuine state-of-the-art stuff, but what
we mourners got was as ordinary as home movies, as old letters tied up in ribbon.
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A year or more later, the contents of some safe-deposit boxes of Georgie’s arrived from the lawyer’s: some
bonds and such stuff and a small steel case, velvet lined, that contained a key, a key deeply notched on both
sides and headed with smooth plastic, like the key to an expensive car.
I sat, feeling foolish and a little afraid, too, made more uncomfortable by being so deliberately soothed by
neutral furnishings and sober tools. I imagined, around me, down other corridors, in other chambers, others
communed with their dead as I was about to do, that the dead were murmuring to them beneath the stream
of Muzak; that they wept to see and hear, as I might, but I could hear nothing. I turned my key in its slot, and
the screen lit up. The dim lights dimmed further, and the Muzak ceased. I pushed ACCESS, obviously the
next step. No doubt all these procedures had been explained to me long ago at the dock when Georgie in her
aluminum box was being off-loaded, and I hadn’t listened. And on the screen she turned to look at me—only
not at me, though I started and drew breath—at the Wasp that watched her. She was in mid-sentence, midgesture. Where? When? Or put it on the same card with the others, she said, turning away. Someone said
something, Georgie answered, and stood up, the Wasp panning and moving erratically with her, like an amateur
with a home-video camera. A white room, sunlight, wicker. Ibiza. Georgie wore a cotton blouse, open; from
a table she picked up lotion, poured some on her hand, and rubbed it across her freckled breastbone. The
meaningless conversation about putting something on a card went on, ceased. I watched the room, wondering
what year, what season I had stumbled into. Georgie pulled off her shirt—her small round breasts tipped with
large, childlike nipples, child’s breasts she still had at forty, shook delicately. And she went out onto the balcony,
the Wasp following, blinded by sun, adjusting. If you want to do it that way, someone said. The someone
crossed the screen, a brown blur, naked. It was me. Georgie said: Oh, look, hummingbirds.
She watched them, rapt, and the Wasp crept close to her cropped blond head, rapt too, and I watched her
watch. She turned away, rested her elbows on the balustrade. I couldn’t remember this day. How should I?
One of hundreds, of thousands…. She looked out to the bright sea, wearing her sleepwalking face, mouth
partly open, and absently stroked her breast with her oiled hand. An iridescent glitter among the flowers was
the hummingbird.
Without really knowing what I did—I felt hungry, suddenly, hungry for pastness, for more—I touched the
RESET bar. The balcony in Ibiza vanished, the screen glowed emptily. I touched ACCESS.
At first there was darkness, a murmur; then a dark back moved away from the Wasp’s eye, and a dim scene
of people resolved itself. Jump. Other people, or the same people, a party? Jump. Apparently the Wasp was
turning itself on and off according to the changes in light levels here, wherever here was. Georgie in a dark
dress having her cigarette lit: brief flare of the lighter. She said, Thanks. Jump. A foyer or hotel lounge. Paris?
The Wasp jerkily sought for her among people coming and going; it couldn’t make a movie, establishing
shots, cutaways—it could only doggedly follow Georgie, like a jealous husband, seeing nothing else. This
was frustrating. I pushed RESET. ACCESS. Georgie brushed her teeth, somewhere, somewhen.
I understood, after one or two more of these terrible leaps. Access was random. There was no way to dial up
a year, a day, a scene. The Park had supplied no program, none; the eight thousand hours weren’t filed at all,
they were a jumble, like a lunatic’s memory, like a deck of shuffled cards. I had supposed, without thinking
about it, that they would begin at the beginning and go on till they reached the end. Why didn’t they?
I also understood something else. If access was truly random, if I truly had no control, then I had lost as
good as forever those scenes I had seen. Odds were on the order of eight thousand to one (more? far more?
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A display screen near the entrance told me down which corridor to find Georgie, and my key let me into
a small screening room where there was a moderate-size TV monitor, two comfortable chairs, and dark
walls of chocolate-brown carpeting. The sweet-sad Muzak. Georgie herself was evidently somewhere in the
vicinity, in the wall or under the floor, they weren’t specific about the charnel-house aspect of the place. In
the control panel before the TV were a keyhole for my key and two bars: ACCESS and RESET.
probabilities are opaque to me) that I would never light on them again by pressing this bar. I felt a pang
of loss for that afternoon in Ibiza. It was doubly gone now. I sat before the empty screen, afraid to touch
ACCESS again, afraid of what I would lose.
I shut down the machine (the light level in the room rose, the Muzak poured softly back in) and went out into
the halls, back to the display screen in the entranceway. The list of names slowly, greenly, rolled over like the
list of departing flights at an airport: Code numbers were missing from beside many, indicating perhaps that
they weren’t yet in residence, only awaited. In the Ds, three names, and DIRECTOR—hidden among them
as though he were only another of the dead. A chamber number. I went to find it and went in. The director
looked more like a janitor or a night watchman, the semiretired type you often see caretaking little-visited
places. He wore a brown smock like a monk’s robe and was making coffee in a corner of his small office, out
of which little business seemed to be done. He looked up startled, caught out, when I entered.
“Sorry,” I said, “but I don’t think I understand this system right.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t seem that it could be.” I described what I thought I had learned about The
Park’s access concept. “That can’t be right, can it?” I said. “That access is totally random …”
He was nodding, still wide-eyed, paying close attention.
“Is it?” I asked.
“Is it what?”
“Random.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, sure. If everything’s in working order.”
I could think of nothing to say for a moment, watching him nod reassuringly. Then, “Why?” I asked. “I
mean why is there no way at all to, to organize, to have some kind of organized access to the material?” I
had begun to feel that sense of grotesque foolishness in the presence of death, as though I were haggling over
Georgie’s effects. “That seems stupid, if you’ll pardon me.”
“Oh no, oh no,” he said. “You’ve read your literature? You’ve read all your literature?”
“Well, to tell the truth…”
“It’s all just as described,” the director said. “I can promise you that. If there’s any problem at all…”
“Do you mind,” I said, “if I sit down?” I smiled. He seemed so afraid of me and my complaint, of me as
mourner, possibly grief crazed and unable to grasp the simple limits of his responsibilities to me, that he
needed soothing himself. “I’m sure everything’s fine,” I said. “I just don’t think I understand. I’m kind of
dumb about these things.”
“Sure. Sure. Sure.” He regretfully put away his coffee makings and sat behind his desk, lacing his fingers
together like a consultant. “People get a lot of satisfaction out of the access here,” he said, “a lot of comfort, if
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“A problem?” he said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.” He looked at me a little wide-eyed and shy, hoping not to be
called on for anything difficult. “Equipment’s all working?”
they take in the right spirit.” He tried a smile. I wondered what qualifications he had had to show to get this
job. “The random part. Now, it’s all in the literature. There’s the legal aspect—you’re not a lawyer are you,
no, no, sure, no offense. You see, the material here isn’t for anything, except, well, except for communing.
But suppose the stuff were programmed, searchable. Suppose there was a problem about taxes or inheritance
or so on. There could be subpoenas, lawyers all over the place, destroying the memorial concept completely.”
“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “They didn’t predict that. The randomness. It was a side effect, an effect
of the storage process. Just luck.” His grin turned down, his brows knitted seriously. “See, we’re storing
here at the molecular level. We have to go that small, for space problems. I mean your eight-thousand-hour
guarantee. If we had gone tape or conventional, how much room would it take up? If the access concept
caught on. A lot of room. So we went vapor trap and endless tracking. Size of my thumbnail. It’s all in the
literature.” He looked at me strangely. I had a sudden intense sensation that I was being fooled, tricked,
that the man before me in his smock was no expert, no technician; he was a charlatan, or maybe a madman
impersonating a director and not belonging here at all. It raised the hair on my neck and passed. “So the
randomness,” he was saying. “It was an effect of going molecular. Brownian movement. All you do is lift the
endless tracking for a microsecond and you get a rearrangement at the molecular level. We don’t randomize.
The molecules do it for us.”
I remembered Brownian movement, just barely, from physics class. The random movement of molecules, the
teacher said; it has a mathematical description. It’s like the movement of dust motes you see swimming in a
shaft of sunlight, like the swirl of snowflakes in a glass paperweight that shows a cottage being snowed on. “I
see,” I said. “I guess I see.”
“Is there,” he said, “any other problem?” He said it as though there might be some other problem and that he
knew what it might be and that he hoped I didn’t have it. “You understand the system, key lock, two bars,
ACCESS, RESET…”
“I understand,” I said. “I understand now.”
“Communing,” he said, standing, relieved, sure I would be gone soon. “I understand. It takes a while to relax
into the communing concept.”
“Yes,” I said. “It does.”
I wouldn’t learn what I had come to learn, whatever that was. The Wasp had not been good at storage after
all, no, no better than my young soul had been. Days and weeks had been missed by its tiny eye. It hadn’t
seen well, and in what it had seen it had been no more able to distinguish the just-as-well-forgotten from the
unforgettable than my own eye had been. No better and no worse—the same.
And yet, and yet—she stood up in Ibiza and dressed her breasts with lotion, and spoke to me: Oh, look,
hummingbirds. I had forgotten, and the Wasp had not; and I owned once again what I hadn’t known I had
lost, hadn’t known was precious to me.
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I really hadn’t thought of that. Built-in randomness saved past lives from being searched in any systematic
way. And no doubt saved The Park from being in the records business and at the wrong end of a lot of suits.
“You’d have to watch the whole eight thousand hours,” I said, “and even if you found what you were looking
for there’d be no way to replay it. It would have gone by.” It would slide into the random past even as you
watched it, like that afternoon in Ibiza, that party in Paris. Lost. He smiled and nodded. I smiled and nodded.
The sun was setting when I left The Park, the satin sea foaming softly, randomly around the rocks.
I had spent my life waiting for something, not knowing what, not even knowing I waited. Killing time. I was
still waiting. But what I had been waiting for had already occurred and was past.
It was two years, nearly, since Georgie had died; two years until, for the first and last time, I wept for her—
for her and for myself.
***
Of course I went back. After a lot of work and correctly placed dollars, I netted a HAPpy card of my own. I
had time to spare, like a lot of people then, and often on empty afternoons (never on Sunday) I would get out
onto the unpatched and weed-grown freeway and glide up the coast. The Park was always open. I relaxed
into the communing concept.
These tombs were as neglected as any tombs anywhere usually are. Either the living did not care to attend
much on the dead—when have they ever?—or the hopeful buyers of the contracts had come to discover the
flaw in the access concept—as I discovered it, in the end.
ACCESS, and she takes dresses one by one from her closet, and holds them against her body, and studies the
effect in a tall mirror, and puts them back again. She had a funny face, which she never made except when
looking at herself in the mirror, a face made for no one but herself, that was actually quite unlike her. The
mirror Georgie.
RESET.
ACCESS. By a bizarre coincidence here she is looking in another mirror. I think the Wasp could be confused
by mirrors. She turns away, the Wasp adjusts; there is someone asleep, tangled in bedclothes on a big hotel
bed, morning, a room-service cart. Oh, the Algonquin: myself. Winter. Snow is falling outside the tall
window. She searches her handbag, takes out a small vial, swallows a pill with coffee, holding the cup by its
body and not its handle. I stir, show a tousled head of hair. Conversation—unintelligible. Gray room, whitish
snow light, color degraded. Would I now (I thought, watching us) reach out for her? Would I in the next hour
take her, or she me, push aside the bedclothes, open her pale pajamas? She goes into the john, shuts the door.
The Wasp watches stupidly, excluded, transmitting the door.
RESET, finally.
But what (I would wonder) if I had been patient, what if I had watched and waited?
Time, it turns out, takes an unconscionable time. The waste, the footless waste—it’s no spectator sport.
Whatever fun there is in sitting idly looking at nothing and tasting your own being for a whole afternoon,
there is no fun in replaying it. The waiting is excruciating. How often, in five years, in eight thousand hours
of daylight or lamplight, might we have coupled, how much time expended in lovemaking? A hundred hours,
two hundred? Odds were not high of my coming on such a scene; darkness swallowed most of them, and
the others were lost in the interstices of endless hours spent shopping, reading, on planes and in cars, asleep,
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Now, after some hundreds of hours spent there underground, now, when I have long ceased to go through
those doors (I have lost my key, I think; anyway I don’t know where to look for it), I know that the solitude I
felt myself to be in was real. The watchers around me, the listeners I sensed in other chambers, were mostly
my imagination. There was rarely anyone there.
apart. Hopeless.
ACCESS. She has turned on a bedside lamp. Alone. She hunts amid the Kleenex and magazines on the
bedside table, finds a watch, looks at it dully, turns it right side up, looks again, and puts it down. Cold. She
burrows in the blankets, yawning, staring, then puts out a hand for the phone but only rests her hand on it,
thinking. Thinking at four A.M. She withdraws her hand, shivers a child’s deep, sleepy shiver, and shuts off
the light. A bad dream. In an instant it’s morning, dawn; the Wasp slept, too. She sleeps soundly, unmoving,
only the top of her blond head showing out of the quilt—and will no doubt sleep so for hours, watched over
more attentively, more fixedly, than any peeping Tom could ever have watched over her.
RESET.
ACCESS.
“I can’t hear as well as I did at first,” I told the director. “And the definition is getting softer.”
“Oh sure,” the director said. “That’s really in the literature. We have to explain that carefully. That this might
be a problem.”
“No, no, not really, no,” he said. He gave me coffee. We’d gotten to be friendly over the months. I think, as
well as being afraid of me he was glad I came around now and then; at least one of the living came here, one
at least was using the services. “There’s a slight degeneration that does occur.”
“Everything seems to be getting gray.”
His face had shifted into intense concern, no belittling this problem. “Mm-hm, mm-hm, see, at the molecular
level where we’re at, there is degeneration. It’s just in the physics. It randomizes a little over time. So you lose—
you don’t lose a minute of what you’ve got, but you lose a little definition. A little color. But it levels off.”
“It does?”
“We think it does. Sure it does, we promise it does. We predict that it will.”
“But you don’t know.”
“Well, well you see we’ve only been in this business a short while. This concept is new. There were things
we couldn’t know.” He still looked at me, but seemed at the same time to have forgotten me. Tired. He
seemed to have grown colorless himself lately, old, losing definition.
“You might start getting some snow,” he said softly.
ACCESS RESET ACCESS.
A gray plaza of herringbone-laid stones, gray, clicking palms. She turns up the collar of her sweater,
narrowing her eyes in a stern wind. Buys magazines at a kiosk: Vogue, Harper’s, La Mode. Cold, she says to
the kiosk girl. Frio. The young man I was takes her arm: they walk back along the beach, which is deserted
and strung with cast seaweed, washed by a dirty sea. Winter in Ibiza. We talk, but the Wasp can’t hear, the
sea’s sound confuses it; it seems bored by its duties and lags behind us.
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“It isn’t just my monitor?” I asked. “I thought it was probably only the monitor.”
RESET.
ACCESS. The Algonquin, terribly familiar morning, winter. She turns away from the snow window. I am
in bed, and for a moment watching this I felt suspended between two mirrors, reflected endlessly. I had seen
this before; I had lived it once and remembered it once, and remembered the memory, and here it was again,
or could it be nothing but another morning, a similar morning. There were far more than one like this, in this
place. But no; she turns from the window, she gets out her vial of pills, picks up the coffee cup by its body:
I had seen this moment before, not months before, weeks before, here in this chamber. I had come upon the
same scene twice.
What are the odds of it, I wondered, what are the odds of coming upon the same minutes again, these
minutes.
I stir within the bedclothes.
Fun, she says, laughing, harrowed, the degraded sound a ghost’s twittering. Charlie, someday I’m going to
die of fun.
She takes her pill. The Wasp follows her to the john and is shut out.
Why am I here? I thought, and my heart was beating hard and slow. What am I here for? What?
RESET.
ACCESS.
Silvered icy streets, New York, Fifth Avenue. She is climbing, shouting from a cab’s dark interior. Just don’t
shout at me, she shouts at someone; her mother I never met, a dragon. She is out and hurrying away down the
sleety street with her bundles, the Wasp at her shoulder. I could reach out and touch her shoulder and make
her turn and follow me out. Walking away, lost in the colorless press of traffic and people, impossible to
discern within the softened snowy image.
***
Something was very wrong.
Georgie hated winter, she escaped it most of the time we were together, about the first of the year beginning
to long for the sun that had gone elsewhere; Austria was all right for a few weeks, the toy villages and sugar
snow and bright, sleek skiers were not really the winter she feared, though even in fire-warmed chalets it was
hard to get her naked without gooseflesh and shudders from some draft only she could feel. We were chaste
in winter. So Georgie escaped it: Antigua and Bali and two months in Ibiza when the almonds blossomed. It
was continual false, flavorless spring all winter long.
How often could snow have fallen when the Wasp was watching her?
Not often; countable times, times I could count up myself if I could remember as the Wasp could. Not often.
Not always.
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I leaned forward to hear, this time, what I would say; it was something like but fun anyway, or something.
“There’s a problem,” I said to the director.
“It’s peaked out, has it?” he said. “That definition problem?”
“Actually,” I said, “it’s gotten worse.”
He was sitting behind his desk, arms spread wide across his chair’s back, and a false, pinkish flush to his
cheeks like undertaker’s makeup. Drinking.
“Hasn’t peaked out, huh?” he said.
“That’s not the problem,” I said. “The problem is the access. It’s not random like you said.”
“Molecular level,” he said. “It’s in the physics.”
“No, no, no,” he said dreamily. “Access is random. Life isn’t all summer and fun, you know. Into each life
some rain must fall.”
I sputtered, trying to explain. “But, but …”
“You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of getting out of access.” He pulled open a drawer in the desk
before him; it made an empty sound. He stared within it dully for a moment and shut it.
“The Park’s been good for me, but I’m just not used to this. Used to be you thought you could render a
service, you know? Well, hell, you know, you’ve had fun, what do you care?”
He was mad. For an instant I heard the dead around me; I tasted on my tongue the stale air of underground.
“I remember,” he said, tilting back in his chair and looking elsewhere, “many years ago, I got into access.
Only we didn’t call it that then. What I did was, I worked for a stock-footage house. It was going out of
business, like they all did, like this place here is going to do, shouldn’t say that, but you didn’t hear it.
Anyway, it was a big warehouse with steel shelves for miles, filled with film cans, film cans filled with old
plastic film, you know? Film of every kind. And movie people, if they wanted old scenes of past time in
their movies, would call up and ask for what they wanted, find me this, find me that. And we had everything,
every kind of scene, but you know what the hardest thing to find was? Just ordinary scenes of daily life. I
mean people just doing things and living their lives. You know what we did have? Speeches. People giving
speeches. Like presidents. You could have hours of speeches, but not just people, whatchacallit, oh, washing
clothes, sitting in a park …”
“It might just be the reception,” I said. “Somehow.”
He looked at me for a long moment as though I had just arrived. “Anyway,” he said at last, turning away
again, “I was there awhile learning the ropes. And producers called and said, ‘Get me this, get me that.’ And
one producer was making a film, some film of the past, and he wanted old scenes, old, of people long ago, in
the summer; having fun; eating ice cream; swimming in bathing suits; riding in convertibles. Fifty years ago.
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“You don’t understand. It’s not getting more random. It’s getting less random. It’s getting selective. It’s
freezing up.”
Eighty years ago.”
He opened his empty drawer again, found a toothpick, and began to use it.
“So I accessed the earliest stuff. Speeches. More speeches. But I found a scene here and there—people in the
street, fur coats, window-shopping, traffic. Old people, I mean they were young then, but people of the past;
they have these pinched kind of faces, you get to know them. Sad, a little. On city streets, hurrying, holding
their hats. Cities were sort of black then, in film; black cars in the streets, black derby hats. Stone. Well, it
wasn’t what they wanted. I found summer for them, color summer, but new. They wanted old. I kept looking
back. I kept looking. I did. The further back I went, the more I saw these pinched faces, black cars, black
streets of stone. Snow. There isn’t any summer there.”
With slow gravity he rose and found a brown bottle and two coffee cups. He poured sloppily. “So it’s not your
reception,” he said. “Film takes longer, I guess, but it’s the physics. All in the physics. A word to the wise is
sufficient.”
“So I’m getting out of access,” the director said. “Let the dead bury the dead, right? Let the dead bury the
dead.”
***
I didn’t go back. I never went back, though the highways opened again and The Park isn’t far from the
town I’ve settled in. Settled; the right word. It restores your balance, in the end, even in a funny way your
cheerfulness, when you come to know, without regrets, that the best thing that’s going to happen in your life
has already happened. And I still have some summer left to me.
I think there are two different kinds of memory, and only one kind gets worse as I get older: the kind where,
by an effort of will, you can reconstruct your first car or your serial number or the name and figure of your
high school physics teacher—a Mr. Holm, in a gray suit, a bearded guy, skinny, about thirty. The other kind
doesn’t worsen; if anything it grows more intense. The sleepwalking kind, the kind you stumble into as into
rooms with secret doors and suddenly find yourself sitting not on your front porch but in a classroom. You
can’t at first think where or when, and a bearded, smiling man is turning in his hand a glass paperweight,
inside which a little cottage stands in a swirl of snow.
There is no access to Georgie, except that now and then, unpredictably, when I’m sitting on the porch or
pushing a grocery cart or standing at the sink, a memory of that kind will visit me, vivid and startling, like a
hypnotist’s snap of fingers.
Or like that funny experience you sometimes have, on the point of sleep, of hearing your name called softly
and distinctly by someone who is not there.
***
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The liquor was harsh, a cold distillate of past sunlight. I wanted to go, get out, not look back. I would not stay
watching until there was only snow.
Analysis of John Crowley’s “Snow”:
Memory and Technology
She married me, I think, for my looks;
she always had a taste for looks in men. I
wanted to write. I made a calculation that
more women than men make and decided
that to be supported and paid for by a rich
wife would give me freedom to do so, to
“develop.” The calculation worked out no
better for me than it does for most women
who make it. I carried a typewriter and a
case of miscellaneous paper from Ibiza to
Gstaad to Bial to London, and typed on
beaches, and learned to ski. Georgie liked
me in ski clothes.369
Georgie’s first husband had bought a contracted deal
with a funeral service called The Park, which used a
miniature drone, the Wasp, to film hours and hours and
hours of Georgie’s day-to-day life:
He was to be the beneficiary. Only he died
himself shortly after it was installed. If
installed is the right word. After he died,
Georgie got rid of most of what she’d
inherited from him, liquidated it. It was cash
that she had liked best about that marriage
anyway; but the Wasp couldn’t really be got
rid of. Georgie ignored it.370
For a long time, the Wasp is a nuisance, following
Georgie around at variable distances, simply getting
in the way. “It cost a fortune (if you count the access
and the perpetual care contract, all prepaid), and
though it wasn’t really fragile, it made you nervous.”371
Eventually, the Wasp sent about eight thousand hours
of Georgie to The Park to be stored in her personal
chamber, where the bereaved could re-experience
recorded moments of those they had lost. When
Georgie dies in an accident, The Park does what it
was contracted to do. It has her body shipped to their
grounds and installed in a personal chamber.
John Crowley has written several novels as well as works of
short fiction.
Although Charlie and Georgie had been separated for
years, at the time of her death, he was still legally her
husband, and so he inherits everything, including “a
key, a key deeply notched on both sides and headed
with smooth plastic, like the key to an expensive
car.”372 It’s the key to Georgie’s personal chamber at
The Park and functions a bit like the key to Grandma
in Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body Electric”:
Why did I go to The Park that first time?
Mostly because I had forgotten about it:
Getting that key in the mail was like coming
across a pile of old snapshots you hadn’t
cared to look at when they were new but
which after they have aged come to contain
the past, as they did not contain the present.
I was curious.373
Charlie finds a well-tended, solemn, quiet, carefully
neutral burial facility to which his key gives him access.
Once inside the muffled walls of the personal chamber,
he has access to eight thousand recorded hours of
Georgie’s life. At first, he’s engaged, seeing her alive
again, seeing himself as a younger man. But soon he
realizes that the access he has to these recordings is
entirely random, unedited, without sequence:
There was no way to dial up a year, a day, a
scene. The Park had supplied no program,
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“Snow,” like Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body Electric!”,
addresses the relationship between memory, mortality,
and machinery.368 The narrator is Charlie, who as a
young, handsome, aspiring writer marries a wealthy
woman, Georgie. He admits that he married her for her
money, just as she had married her first husband for
money. Georgie seemingly marries Charlie for his looks:
Angry and bereft, Charlie goes off to talk to the
Director of The Park, hoping he isn’t right about access
being random; but the Director simply reassures
Charlie that everything is in order and that Charlie is
receiving the services as designated by the contract.
The Director keeps asking Charlie if he has read the
literature The Park gave him, but Charlie, being averse
to death has not. Still, he’s wise enough to know that
whatever The Park might claim, death can’t be cheated
by technology of any sort.
From the Egyptian pyramids to the Wasp, technology
that promises eternal life is a crock, something
Bradbury also invokes in “I Sing the Body Electric.”
The brutal fact of the matter is that human beings die.
Time, even recorded, can’t be reeled back in once it has
played itself out. Human memory may be fallible, and
though photographs and recordings can help to shore
up that fallibility, technology can’t change the nature
of time or the impermanence of life.
The Wasp uses a nano technology based on the physics
of Brownian movement, so, the Director explains,
the recordings are as random as the movement of
molecules. As the Director labors to describe this
storage technology, Charlie begins to wonder if the man
isn’t crazy. He keeps talking about how Charlie needs to
learn to commune with the dead, to use the equipment
the way it had been designed to be used. At the end of
the day, Charlie makes the following realization:
I had spent my life waiting for something, not
knowing what, not even knowing I waited.
Killing time. I was still waiting. But what I
had been waiting for had already occurred
and was past. It was two years, nearly, since
Georgie had died; two years until, for the
first and last time, I wept for her—for her
and for myself.375
Despite this sad recognition, Charlie comes back to The
Park; he even becomes friendly with the Director, who
appears to be glad to have company that isn’t dead. But
soon Charlie notices that Georgie’s randomized footage
is fading. The Director tells him that this is part of the
technology; over time, the molecules begin to break
down a bit. “‘You might start getting some snow,’ he
said softly,”376 a line that gives the story its title.
Charlie begins to realize that what he is seeing of
Georgie’s life isn’t as random as he thought; and then
he begins to come across footage he thinks can’t really
exist. This footage is not just grayed out or full of
technologically induced snow, but it is comprised of
scenes featuring actual falling snow. Since Georgie
hated winter and spent buckets of money to travel to
places to escape it, Charlie thinks something must
be very wrong. But when he goes to the Director this
time, he discovers first that the Director is drunk and
second that he’d been right on his first day at The Park,
the Director is nuts, especially when the Director tells
him that the farther you go looking into the past, the
colder, darker, and grayer things get. The Director
claims there is no summer in the past, only winter, and
that the physics of the technology of recording the past
eventually produces only snow.
Charlie, chilled by the man’s crazy, drunken logic,
thinks, “I would not stay watching until there was
only snow.”377 And so he never goes back to The Park
after that; he comes to a kind of equanimity about
the fact that the best years of his life had been those
he’d shared with Georgie, although he had no way to
know this at the time. Technologically, the Wasp might
have captured minutes and hours neither Georgie nor
Charlie noticed passing, but to simply watch those
hours after the fact felt hollow, a meaningless waste of
time. Charlie concludes that it is far better to rely on
one’s own human and fallible memory, than to believe
technology can somehow replace or enhance it:
There is no access to Georgie, except that
now and then, unpredictably, when I’m
sitting on the porch or pushing a grocery
cart or standing at the sink, a memory of that
kind will visit me, vivid and startling, like a
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none; the eight thousand hours weren’t filed
at all, they were a jumble, like a lunatic’s
memory, like a deck of shuffled cards. I had
supposed, without thinking about it, that
they would begin at the beginning and go on
till they reached the end. Why didn’t they?
I also understood something else. If access
was truly random, if I truly had no control,
then I had lost as good as forever those
scenes I had seen. Odds were on the order
of eight thousand to one (more? far more?
probabilities are opaque to me) that I would
never light on them again by pressing this
bar. I felt a pang of loss for that afternoon in
Ibiza. It was doubly gone now.374
hypnotist’s snap of fingers. Or like that funny
experience you sometimes have, on the point
of sleep, of hearing your name called softly
and distinctly by someone who is not there.378
C.L. MOORE’S “NO WOMAN
BORN”
C.(atherine) L.(ucille) Moore (1911–87) was born on
January 24, 1911, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to parents
Otto Newman Moore and Maude Estelle Jones
Moore.379 Her first published story was “Shambleau,”
which featured a Medusa-like alien creature and
introduced a protagonist to whom Moore would often
return: the Earthling adventurer, Northwest Smith.
“Shambleau” made Moore a pulp magazine SF writer
during the years when women weren’t generally
welcomed in the field. Henry Kuttner, another young
and promising pulp writer, sent Moore a letter in
1936 which addressed her as Mr., since Kuttner
believed Moore to be a man. This mistake would lead
eventually to their meeting each other and then to a
marriage. Soon after they married, Kuttner and Moore
began a collaboration that became a moving force in
the SF field.380
Moore and Kuttner as collaborators and alone wrote
many works; they also wrote under several different
pseudonyms: C. L. Moore, Lewis Padgett (Kuttner and
Moore), Lawrence O’Donnell (mostly Moore, although
from time to time, both Kuttner and Moore), Catherine
Kuttner (Moore), C. H. Liddell (Kuttner and Moore),
and Keith Hammond (Kuttner and Moore).381
“No Woman Born,” a 1944 novella, is Moore’s bestremembered work. She has been credited as the first
writer to pen a heroine as a sword and sorcery “hero”
in her Jirel of Joiry series.382 In 1956, she graduated
C.L. Moore with Henry Kuttner, her husband and
collaborator.
from the University of Southern California. In 1958,
Kuttner died suddenly of a heart attack, and after his
death, Moore ceased to write pulp stories, though she
continued working on teleplays and television scripts. In
the late 1950s early 1960s she wrote for 77 Sunset Strip
and The Twilight Zone, among several other television
series. Then, in 1963, when Moore married again, she
stopped writing altogether. In 1981, she was awarded
both the Gandalf Grand Master Award and the World
Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. A short story
she wrote with Kuttner was the basis for a children’s
movie released in 2007 titled The Last Mimzy. C.L.
Moore died in 1987 in Hollywood, California, due to
complications from Alzheimer’s disease.383
SELECTED WORK: “No Woman Born” by C.L. Moore (1944)
Copyright © 1975 by C.L. Moore. All rights reserved.
She had been the loveliest creature whose image ever moved along the airways. John Harris, who was
once her manager, remembered doggedly how beautiful she had been as he rose in the silent elevator toward
the room where Deirdre sat waiting for him.
Since the theater fire that had destroyed her a year ago, he had never been quite able to let himself
remember her beauty clearly, except when some old poster, half in tatters, flaunted her face at him, or a maudlin
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C.L. Moore: Biography
The time comes when our hearts sink utterly,
When we remember Deirdre and her tale,
And that her lips are dust…
There has been again no woman born
Who was so beautiful; not one so beautiful
Of all the women born—
That wasn’t quite true, of course—there had been one. Or maybe, afterall, this Deirdre who died only
a year ago had not been beautiful in the sense of perfection. He thought the other one might not have been
either, for there are always women with perfection of feature in the world, and they are not the ones that
legend remembers. It was the light within, shining through her charming, imperfect features, that had made
this Deirdre’s face so lovely. No one else he had ever seen had anything like the magic of the lost Deirdre.
Let all men go apart and mourn together—
No man can ever love her. Not a man
Can dream to be her lover. . .
No man say—
What could one say to her? There are no words
That one could say to her.
No, no words at all. And it was going to be impossible to go through with this. Harris knew it
overwhelmingly just as his finger touched the buzzer. But the door opened almost instantly, and then it was
too late.
Maltzer stood just inside, peering out through his heavy spectacles. You could see how tensely he had been
waiting. Harris was a little shocked to see that the man was trembling. It was hard to think of the confident and
imperturbable Maltzer, whom he had known briefly a year ago, as shaken like this. He wondered if Deirdre
herself were as tremulous with sheer nerves—but it was not time yet to let himself think of that.
“Come in, come in,” Maltzer said irritably. There was no reason for irritation. The year’s work, so much
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memorial program flashed her image unexpectedly across the television screen. But now he had to remember.
The elevator came to a sighing stop and the door slid open. John Harris hesitated. He knew in his mind
that he had to go on, but his reluctant muscles almost refused him. He was thinking helplessly, as he had not
allowed himself to think until this moment, of the fabulous grace that had poured through her wonderful
dancer’s body, remembering her soft and husky voice with the little burr in it that had fascinated the
audiences of the whole world.
There had never been anyone so beautiful.
In times before her, other actresses had been lovely and adulated, but never before Deirdre’s day had the
entire world been able to take one woman so wholly to its heart. So few outside the capitals had ever seen
Bernhardt or the fabulous Jersey Lily. And the beauties of the movie screen had had to limit their audiences
to those who could reach the theaters. But Deirdre’s image had once moved glowingly across the television
screens of every home in the civilized world. And in many outside the bounds of civilization. Her soft, husky
songs had sounded in the depths of jungles, her lovely, languorous body had woven its patterns of rhythm in
desert tents and polar huts. The whole world knew every smooth motion of her body and every cadence of
her voice, and the way a subtle radiance had seemed to go on behind her features when she smiled.
And the whole world had mourned her when she died in the theater fire.
Harris could not quite think of her as other than dead, though he knew what sat waiting for him in the
room ahead. He kept remembering the old words James Stephens wrote long ago for another Deirdre, also
lovely and beloved and unforgotten after two thousand years.
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of it in secrecy and solitude, must have tried him physically and mentally to the very breaking point.
“She all right?” Harris asked inanely, stepping inside.
“Oh yes…yes, she’s all right.” Maltzer bit his thumbnail and glanced over his shoulder at an inner door,
where Harris guessed she would be waiting.
“No,” Maltzer said, as he took an involuntary step toward it. “We’d better have a talk first. Come over
and sit down. Drink?”
Harris nodded, and watched Maltzer’s hands tremble as he tilted the decanter. The man was clearly on
the very verge of collapse, and Harris felt a sudden cold uncertainty open up in him in the one place where
until now he had been oddly confident.
“She is all right?” he demanded, taking the glass.
“Oh yes, she’s perfect. She’s so confident it scares me.” Maltzer gulped his drink and poured another
before he sat down.
“What’s wrong, then?”
“Nothing, I guess. Or . . . well, I don’t know. I’m not sure anymore. I’ve worked toward this meeting for
nearly a year, but now— well, I’m not sure it’s time yet. I’m just not sure.”
He stared at Harris, his eyes large and indistinguishable behind the lenses. He was a thin, wire-taut man
with all the bone and sinew showing plainly beneath the dark skin of his face. Thinner, now, than he had
been a year ago when Harris saw him last.
“I’ve been too close to her,” he said now. “I have no perspective anymore. All I can see is my own work.
And I’m just not sure that’s ready yet for you or anyone to see.”
“She thinks so?”
“I never saw a woman so confident.” Maltzer drank, the glass clicking on his teeth. He looked up suddenly
through the distorting lenses. “Of course a failure now would mean—well, absolute collapse,” he said.
Harris nodded. He was thinking of the year of incredibly painstaking work that lay behind this meeting,
the immense fund of knowledge, of infinite patience, the secret collaboration of artists, sculptors, designers,
scientists, and the genius of Maltzer governing them all as an orchestra conductor governs his players.
He was thinking too, with a certain unreasoning jealousy, of the strange, cold, passionless intimacy
between Maltzer and Deirdre in that year, a closer intimacy than any two humans can ever have shared before.
In a sense the Deirdre whom he saw in a few minutes would be Maltzer, just as he thought he detected in
Maltzer now and then small mannerisms of inflection and motion that had been Deirdre’s own. There had been
between them a sort of unimaginable marriage stranger than anything that could ever have taken place before.
“—so many complications,” Maltzer was saying in his worried voice with its faintest possible echo of
Deirdre’s lovely, cadenced rhythm. (The sweet, soft huskiness he would never hear again.) “There was shock,
of course. Terrible shock. And a great fear of fire. We had to conquer that before we could take the first steps.
But we did it. When you go in you’ll probably find her sitting before the fire.” He caught the startled question
in Harris’ eyes and smiled. “No, she can’t feel the warmth now, of course. But she likes to watch the flames.
She’s mastered any abnormal fear of them quite beautifully.”
“She can—” Harris hesitated. “Her eyesight’s normal now?”
“Perfect,” Maltzer said. “Perfect vision was fairly simple to provide. After all, that sort of thing has
already been worked out, in other connections. I might even say her vision’s a little better than perfect, from
our own standpoint.” He shook his head irritably. “I’m not worried about the mechanics of the thing. Luckily
they got to her before the brain was touched at all. Shock was the only danger to her sensory centers, and
we took care of all that first of all, as soon as communication could be established. Even so, it needed great
courage on her part. Great courage.” He was silent for a moment, staring into his empty glass.
“Harris,” he said suddenly, without looking up, “have I made a mistake? Should we have let her die?”
Harris shook his head helplessly. It was an unanswerable question. It had tormented the whole world
for a year now. There had been hundreds of answers and thousands of words written on the subject. Has
anyone the right to preserve a brain alive when its body is destroyed? Even if a new body can be provided,
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necessarily so very unlike the old?
“It’s not that she’s—ugly—now,”Maltzer went on hurriedly, as if afraid of an answer. “Metal isn’t ugly.
And Deirdre. . . well, you’ll see. I tell you, I can’t see myself. I know the whole mechanism so well—it’s
just mechanics to me. Maybe she’s—grotesque. I don’t know. Often I’ve wished I hadn’t been on the spot,
with all my ideas, just when the fire broke out. Or that it could have been anyone but Deirdre. She was so
beautiful—Still, if it had been someone else I think the whole thing might have failed completely. It takes
more than just an uninjured brain. It takes strength and courage beyond common, and—well, something
more. Something—unquenchable. Deirdre has it. She’s still Deirdre. In a way she’s still beautiful. But I’m
not sure anybody but myself could see that. And you know what she plans?”
“No—what?”
“She’s going back on the air-screen.”
Harris looked at him in stunned disbelief.
“She is still beautiful,” Maltzer told him fiercely. “She’s got courage, and a serenity that amazes me. And
she isn’t in the least worried or resentful about what’s happened. Or afraid what the verdict of the public will
be. But I am, Harris. I’m terrified.”
They looked at each other for a moment more, neither speaking. Then Maltzer shrugged and stood up.
“She’s in there,” he said, gesturing with his glass.
Harris turned without a word, not giving himself time to hesitate. He crossed toward the inner door.
The room was full of a soft, clear, indirect light that climaxed in the fire crackling on a white tiled
hearth. Harris paused inside the door, his heart beating thickly. He did not see her for a moment. It was a
perfectly commonplace room, bright, light, with pleasant furniture, and flowers on the tables. Their perfume
was sweet on the clear air. He did not see Deirdre.
Then a chair by the fire creaked as she shifted her weight in it. The high back hid her, but she spoke. And
for one dreadful moment it was the voice of an automaton that sounded in the room, metallic, without inflection.
“Hel-lo—” said the voice. Then she laughed and tried again. And it was the old, familiar, sweet
huskiness he had not hoped to hear again as long as he lived.
In spite of himself he said, “Deirdre!” and her image rose before him as if she herself had risen
unchanged from the chair, tall, golden, swaying a little with her wonderful dancer’s poise, the lovely,
imperfect features lighted by the glow that made them beautiful. It was the cruelest thing his memory could
have done to him. And yet the voice—after that one lapse, the voice was perfect.
“Come and look at me, John,” she said.
He crossed the floor slowly, forcing himself to move. That instant’s flash of vivid recollection had nearly
wrecked his hard-won poise. He tried to keep his mind perfectly blank as he came at last to the verge of
seeing what no one but Maltzer had so far seen or known about in its entirety. No one at all had known what
shape would be forged to clothe the most beautiful woman on Earth, now that her beauty was gone.
He had envisioned many shapes. Great, lurching robot forms, cylindrical, with hinged arms and legs. A
glass case with the brain floating in it and appendages to serve its needs. Grotesque visions, like nightmares
come nearly true. And each more inadequate than the last, for what metal shape could possibly do more than
house ungraciously the mind and brain that had once enchanted a whole world?
Then he came around the wing of the chair, and saw her.
The human brain is often too complicated a mechanism to function perfectly. Harris’ brain was called
upon now to perform a very elaborate series of shifting impressions. First, incongruously, he remembered a
curious inhuman figure he had once glimpsed leaning over the fence rail outside a farmhouse. For an instant
the shape had stood up integrated, ungainly, impossibly human, before the glancing eye resolved it into an
arrangement of brooms and buckets. What the eye had found only roughly humanoid, the suggestible brain
had accepted fully formed. It was thus now, with Deirdre.
The first impression that his eyes and mind took from sight of her was shocked and incredulous, for his
brain said to him unbelievingly, “This is Deirdre! She hasn’t changed at all!”
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Then the shift of perspective took over, and even more shockingly, eye and brain said, “No, not
Deirdre—not human. Nothing but metal coils. Not Deirdre at all—” And that was the worst. It was like
waking from a dream of someone beloved and lost, and facing anew, after that heartbreaking reassurance
of sleep, the inflexible fact that nothing can bring the lost to life again. Deirdre was gone, and this was only
machinery heaped in a flowered chair.
Then the machinery moved, exquisitely, smoothly, with a grace as familiar as the swaying poise he
remembered. The sweet, husky voice of Deirdre said,
“It’s me, John darling. It really is, you know.”
And it was.
That was the third metamorphosis, and the final one. Illusion steadied and became factual, real. It was
Deirdre.
He sat down bonelessly. He had no muscles. He looked at her speechless and unthinking, letting his
senses take in the sight of her without trying to rationalize what he saw.
She was golden still. They had kept that much of her, the first impression of warmth and color which had
once belonged to her sleek hair and the apricot tints of her skin. But they had had the good sense to go no
farther. They had not tried to make a wax image of the lost Deirdre. (No woman born who was so beautiful—
Not one so beautiful, of all the women born—)
And so she had no face. She had only a smooth, delicately modeled ovoid for her head, with a . . . a sort
of crescent-shaped mask across the frontal area where her eyes would have been if she had needed eyes. A
narrow, curved quarter-moon, with the horns turned upward. It was filled in with something translucent, like
cloudy crystal, and tinted the aquamarine of the eyes Deirdre used to have. Through that, then, she saw the
world. Through that she looked without eyes, and behind it, as behind the eyes of a human—she was.
Except for that, she had no features. And it had been wise of those who designed her, he realized now.
Subconsciously he had been dreading some clumsy attempt at human features that might creak like a
marionette’s in parodies of animation. The eyes, perhaps, had had to open in the same place upon her head,
and at the same distance apart, to make easy for her an adjustment to the stereoscopic vision she used to
have. But he was glad they had not given her two eye-shaped openings with glass marbles inside them. The
mask was better.
(Oddly enough, he did not once think of the naked brain that must lie inside the metal. The mask
was symbol enough for the woman within. It was enigmatic; you did not know if her gaze was on you
searchingly, or wholly withdrawn. And it had no variations of brilliance such as once had played across
the incomparable mobility of Deirdre’s face. But eyes, even human eyes, are as a matter of fact enigmatic
enough. They have no expression except what the lids impart; they take all animation from the features.
We automatically watch the eyes of the friend we speak with, but if he happens to be lying down so that he
speaks across his shoulder and his face is upside-down to us, quite as automatically we watch the mouth.
The gaze keeps shifting nervously between mouth and eyes in their reversed order, for it is the position in the
face, not the feature itself, which we are accustomed to accept as the seat of the soul. Deirdre’s mask was in
that proper place; it was easy to accept it as a mask over eyes.)
She had, Harris realized as the first shock quieted, a very beautifully shaped head—a bare, golden skull.
She turned it a little, gracefully upon her neck of metal, and he saw that the artist who shaped it had given
her the most delicate suggestion of cheekbones, narrowing in the blankness below the mask to the hint
of a human face. Not too much. Just enough so that when the head turned you saw by its modeling that it
had moved, lending perspective and foreshortening to the expressionless golden helmet. Light did not slip
uninterrupted as if over the surface of a golden egg. Brancusi himself had never made anything more simple
or more subtle than the modeling of Deirdre’s head.
But all expression, of course, was gone. All expression had gone up in the smoke of the theater fire, with
the lovely, mobile, radiant features which had meant Deirdre.
As for her body, he could not see its shape. A garment hid her. But they had made no incongruous
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attempt to give her back the clothing that once had made her famous. Even the softness of cloth would have
called the mind too sharply to the remembrance that no human body lay beneath the folds, nor does metal
need the incongruity of cloth for its protection. Yet without garments, he realized, she would have looked
oddly naked, since her new body was humanoid, not angular machinery.
The designer had solved his paradox by giving her a robe of very fine metal mesh. It hung from the
gentle slope of her shoulders in straight, pliant folds like a longer Grecian chlamys, flexible, yet with weight
enough of its own not to cling too revealingly to whatever metal shape lay beneath.
The arms they had given her were left bare, and the feet and ankles. And Maltzer had performed
his greatest miracle in the limbs of the new Deirdre. It was a mechanical miracle basically, but the eye
appreciated first that he had also showed supreme artistry and understanding.
Her arms were pale shining gold, tapered smoothly, without modeling, and flexible their whole length in
diminishing metal bracelets fitting one inside the other clear down to the slim, round wrists. The hands were
more nearly human than any other feature about her, though they, too, were fitted together in delicate, small
sections that slid upon one another with the flexibility almost of flesh. The fingers’ bases were solider than
human, and the fingers themselves tapered to longer tips.
Her feet, too, beneath the tapering broader rings of the metal ankles, had been constructed upon the
model of human feet. Their finely tooled sliding segments gave her an arch and a heel and a flexible forward
section formed almost like the sollerets of medieval armor.
She looked, indeed, very much like a creature in armor, with her delicately plated limbs and her
featureless head like a helmet with a visor of glass, and her robe of chain-mail. But no knight in armor ever
moved as Deirdre moved, or wore his armor upon a body of such inhumanly fine proportions. Only a knight
from another world, or a knight of Oberon’s court, might have shared that delicate likeness.
Briefly he had been surprised at the smallness and exquisite proportions of her. He had been expecting
the ponderous mass of such robots as he had seen, wholly automatons. And then he realized that for them,
much of the space had to be devoted to the inadequate mechanical brains that guided them about their duties.
Deirdre’s brain still preserved and proved the craftsmanship of an artisan far defter than man. Only the body
was of metal, and it did not seem complex, though he had not yet been told how it was motivated.
Harris had no idea how long he sat staring at the figure in the cushioned chair. She was still lovely—
indeed, she was still Deirdre—and as he looked he let the careful schooling of his face relax. There was no
need to hide his thoughts from her.
She stirred upon the cushions, the long, flexible arms moving with a litheness that was not quite human.
The motion disturbed him as the body itself had not, and in spite of himself his face froze a little. He had the
feeling that from behind the crescent mask she was watching him very closely.
Slowly she rose.
The motion was very smooth. Also it was serpentine, as if the body beneath the coat of mail were made
in the same interlocking sections as her limbs. He had expected and feared mechanical rigidity; nothing had
prepared him for this more than human suppleness.
She stood quietly, letting the heavy mailed folds of her garment settle about her. They fell together with
a faint ringing sound, like small bells far off, and hung beautifully in pale golden, sculptured folds. He had
risen automatically as she did. Now he faced her, staring. He had never seen her stand perfectly still, and
she was not doing it now. She swayed just a bit, vitality burning inextinguishably in her brain as once it
had burned in her body, and stolid immobility was as impossible to her as it had always been. The golden
garment caught points of light from the fire and glimmered at him with tiny reflections as she moved.
Then she put her featureless helmeted head a little to one side, and he heard her laughter as familiar in
its small, throaty, intimate sound as he had ever heard it from her living throat. And every gesture, every
attitude, every flowing of motion into motion was so utterly Deirdre that the overwhelming illusion swept
his mind again and this was the flesh-and-blood woman as clearly as if he saw her standing there whole once
more, like Phoenix from the fire.
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“Well, John,” she said in the soft, husky, amused voice he remembered perfectly. “Well, John, is it I?”
She knew it was. Perfect assurance sounded in the voice. “The shock will wear off, you know. It’ll be easier
and easier as time goes on. I’m quite used to myself now. See?”
She turned away from him and crossed the room smoothly, with the old, poised, dancer’s glide, to the
mirror that paneled one side of the room. And before it, as he had so often seen her preen before, he watched
her preening now, running flexible metallic hands down the folds of her metal garment, turning to admire
herself over one metal shoulder, making the mailed folds tinkle and sway as she struck an arabesque position
before the glass.
His knees let him down into the chair she had vacated. Mingled shock and relief loosened all his muscles
in him, and she was more poised and confident than he.
“It’s a miracle,” he said with conviction. “It’s you. But I don’t see how—” He had meant, “—how, without
face or body—” but clearly he could not finish that sentence.
She finished it for him in her own mind, and answered without self-consciousness. “It’s motion, mostly,”
she said, still admiring her own suppleness in the mirror. “See?” And very lightly on her springy, armored
feet she flashed through an enchaînement of brilliant steps, swinging round with a pirouette to face him.
“That was what Maltzer and I worked out between us, after I began to get myself under control again.” Her
voice was somber for a moment, remembering a dark time in the past. Then she went on, “It wasn’t easy,
of course, but it was fascinating. You’ll never guess how fascinating, John! We knew we couldn’t work out
anything like a facsimile of the way I used to look, so we had to find some other basis to build on. And
motion is the other basis of recognition, after actual physical likeness.”
She moved lightly across the carpet toward the window and stood looking down, her featureless face
averted a little and the light shining across the delicately hinted curves of the cheekbones.
“Luckily,” she said, her voice amused, “I never was beautiful. It was all—well, vivacity, I suppose, and
muscular co-ordination. Years and years of training, and all of it engraved here”—she struck her golden
helmet a light, ringing blow with golden knuckles—“in the habit patterns grooved into my brain. So this
body. . . did he tell you? . . works entirely through the brain. Electromagnetic currents flowing along from
ring to ring, like this.” She rippled a boneless arm at him with a motion like flowing water. “Nothing holds
me together—nothing!— except muscles of magnetic currents. And if I’d been somebody else—somebody
who moved differently, why the flexible rings would have moved differently too, guided by the impulse from
another brain. I’m not conscious of doing anything I haven’t always done. The same impulses that used to go
out to my muscles go out now to—this.” And she made a shuddering, serpentine motion of both arms at him,
like a Cambodian dancer, and then laughed wholeheartedly, the sound of it ringing through the room with
such full-throated merriment that he could not help seeing again the familiar face crinkled with pleasure,
the white teeth shining. “It’s all perfectly subconscious now,” she told him. “It took lots of practice at first, of
course, but now even my signature looks just as it always did—the coordination is duplicated that delicately.”
She rippled her arms at him again and chuckled.
“But the voice, too,” Harris protested inadequately. “It’s your voice, Deirdre.”
“The voice isn’t only a matter of throat construction and breath control, my darling Johnnie! At least,
so Professor Maltzer assured me a year ago, and I certainly haven’t any reason to doubt him!” She laughed
again. She was laughing a little too much, with a touch of the bright, hysteric over-excitement he remembered
so well. But if any woman ever had reason for mild hysteria, surely Deirdre had it now.
The laughter rippled and ended, and she went on, her voice eager. “He says voice control is almost wholly
a matter of hearing what you produce, once you’ve got adequate mechanism, of course. That’s why deaf
people, with the same vocal chords as ever, let their voices change completely and lose all inflection when
they’ve been deaf long enough. And luckily, you see, I’m not deaf!”
She swung around to him, the folds of her robe twinkling and ringing, and rippled up and up a clear, true
scale to a lovely high note, and then cascaded down again like water over a falls. But she left him no time for
applause. “Perfectly simple, you see. All it took was a little matter of genius from the professor to get it worked
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out for me! He started with a new variation of the old Vodor you must remember hearing about, years ago.
Originally, of course, the thing was ponderous. You know how it worked—speech broken down to a few basic
sounds and built up again in combinations produced from a keyboard. I think originally the sounds were a
sort of ktch and a shooshing noise, but we’ve got it all worked to a flexibility and range quite as good as human
now. All I do is—well, mentally play on the keyboard of my…my sound-unit, I suppose it’s called. It’s much
more complicated than that, of course, but I’ve learned to do it unconsciously. And I regulate it by ear, quite
automatically now. If you were—here—instead of me, and you’d had the same practice, your own voice would
be coming out of the same keyboard and diaphragm instead of mine. It’s all a matter of the brain patterns that
operated the body and now operate the machinery. They send out very strong impulses that are stepped up as
much as necessary somewhere or other in here—” Her hands waved vaguely over the mesh-robed body.
She was silent a moment, looking out the window. Then she turned away and crossed the floor to the fire,
sinking again into the flowered chair. Her helmet-skull turned its mask to face him and he could feel a quiet
scrutiny behind the aquamarine of its gaze.
“It’s—odd,” she said, “being here in this . . . this. . . instead of a body. But not as odd or as alien as you
might think. I’ve thought about it a lot—I’ve had plenty of time to think—and I’ve begun to realize what
a tremendous force the human ego really is. I’m not sure I want to suggest it has any mystical power it can
impress on mechanical things, but it does seem to have a power of some sort. It does instill its own force into
inanimate objects, and they take on a personality of their own. People do impress their personalities on the
houses they live in, you know. I’ve noticed that often. Even empty rooms. And it happens with other things
too, especially, I think, with inanimate things that men depend on for their lives. Ships, for instance—they
always have personalities of their own.
“And planes—in wars you always hear of planes crippled too badly to fly, but struggling back anyhow
with their crews. Even guns acquire a sort of ego. Ships and guns and planes are ‘she’ to the men who
operate them and depend on them for their lives. It’s as if machinery with complicated moving parts
almost simulates life, and does acquire from the men who used it—well, not exactly life, of course—but a
personality. I don’t know what. Maybe it absorbs some of the actual electrical impulses their brains throw off,
especially in times of stress.
“Well, after a while I began to accept the idea that this new body of mine could behave at least as
responsively as a ship or a plane. Quite apart from the fact that my own brain controls its ‘muscles.’ I believe
there’s an affinity between men and the machines they make. They make them out of their own brains, really,
a sort of mental conception and gestation, and the result responds to the minds that created them, and to all
human minds that understand and manipulate them.”
She stirred uneasily and smoothed a flexible hand along her mesh-robed metal thigh. “So this is myself,”
she said. “Metal—but me. And it grows more and more myself the longer I live in it. It’s my house and the
machine my life depends on, but much more intimately in each case than any real house or machine ever was
before to any other human. And you know, I wonder if in time I’ll forget what flesh felt like—my own flesh,
when I touched it like this—and the metal against the metal will be so much the same I’ll never even notice?”
Harris did not try to answer her. He sat without moving, watching her expressionless face. In a moment
she went on.
“I’ll tell you the best thing, John,” she said, her voice softening to the old intimacy he remembered so
well that he could see superimposed upon the blank skull the warm, intent look that belonged with the voice.
“I’m not going to live forever. It may not sound like a—best thing—but it is, John. You know, for a while that
was the worst of all, after I knew I was—after I woke up again. The thought of living on and on in a body
that wasn’t mine, seeing everyone I knew grow old and die, and not being able to stop—
“But Maltzer says my brain will probably wear out quite normally—except, of course, that I won’t have
to worry about looking old!—and when it gets tired and stops, the body I’m in won’t be any longer. The
magnetic muscles that hold it into my own shape and motions will let go when the brain lets go, and there’ll
be nothing but a. . . a pile of disconnected rings. If they ever assemble it again, it won’t be me.” She hesitated.
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“I like that, John,” she said, and he felt from behind the mask a searching of his face.
He knew and understood that somber satisfaction. He could not put it into words; neither of them wanted
to do that. But he understood. It was the conviction of mortality, in spite of her immortal body. She was not
cut off from the rest of her race in the essence of their humanity, for though she wore a body of steel and they
perishable flesh, yet she must perish too, and the same fears and faiths still united her to mortals and humans,
though she wore the body of Oberon’s inhuman knight. Even in her death she must be unique— dissolution
in a shower of tinkling and clashing rings, he thought, and almost envied her the finality and beauty of that
particular death—but afterward, oneness with humanity in however much or little awaited them all. So she
could feel that this exile in metal was only temporary, in spite of everything.
(And providing, of course, that the mind inside the metal did not veer from its inherited humanity as the
years went by. A dweller in a house may impress his personality upon the walls, but subtly the walls too, may
impress their own shape upon the ego of the man. Neither of them thought of that, at the time.)
Deirdre sat a moment longer in silence. Then the mood vanished and she rose again, spinning so that
the robe belled out ringing about her ankles. She rippled another scale up and down, faultlessly and with the
same familiar sweetness of tone that had made her famous.
“So I’m going right back on the stage, John,” she said serenely. “I can still sing. I can still dance. I’m still
myself in everything that matters, and I can’t imagine doing anything else for the rest of my life.”
He could not answer without stammering a little. “Do you think will they accept you, Deirdre? After all—”
“They’ll accept me,” she said in that confident voice. “Oh, they’ll come to see a freak at first, of course, but
they’ll stay to watch—Deirdre. And come back again and again just as they always did. You’ll see, my dear.”
But hearing her sureness, suddenly Harris himself was unsure. Maltzer had not been, either. She was so
regally confident, and disappointment would be so deadly a blow at all that remained of her—
She was so delicate a being now, really. Nothing but a glowing and radiant mind poised in metal,
dominating it, bending the steel to the illusion of her lost loveliness with a sheer self-confidence that gleamed
through the metal body. But the brain sat delicately on its poise of reason. She had been through intolerable
stresses already, perhaps more terrible depths of despair and self-knowledge than any human brain had yet
endured before her, for—since Lazarus himself—who had come back from the dead?
But if the world did not accept her as beautiful, what then? If they laughed, or pitied her, or came only to
watch a jointed freak performing as if on strings where the loveliness of Deirdre had once enchanted them,
what then? And he could not be perfectly sure they would not. He had known her too well in the flesh to see
her objectively even now, in metal. Every inflection of her voice called up the vivid memory of the face that
had flashed its evanescent beauty in some look to match the tone. She was Deirdre to Harris simply because
she had been so intimately familiar in every poise and attitude, through so many years. But people who knew
her only slightly, or saw her for the first time in metal—what would they see?
A marionette? Or the real grace and loveliness shining through?
He had no possible way of knowing. He saw her too clearly as she had been to see her now at all, except
so linked with the past that she was not wholly metal. And he knew what Maltzer feared, for Maltzer’s psychic
blindness toward her lay at the other extreme. He had never known Deirdre except as a machine, and he could
not see her objectively any more than Harris could. To Maltzer she was pure metal, a robot his own hands and
brain had devised, mysteriously animated by the mind of Deirdre, to be sure, but to all outward seeming a thing
of metal solely. He had worked so long over each intricate part of her body, he knew so well how every jointure
in it was put together, that he could not see the whole. He had studied many film records of her, of course, as
she used to be, in order to gauge the accuracy of his facsimile, but this thing he had made was a copy only. He
was too close to Deirdre to see her. And Harris, in a way, was too far. The indomitable Deirdre herself shone so
vividly through the metal that his mind kept superimposing one upon the other.
How would an audience react to her? Where in the scale between these two extremes would their verdict
fall?
For Deirdre, there was only one possible answer.
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“I’m not worried,” Deirdre said serenely, and spread her golden hands to the fire to watch lights
dancing in reflection upon their shining surfaces. “I’m still myself. I’ve always had . . . well, power over my
audiences. Any good performer knows when he’s got it. Mine isn’t gone. I can still give them what I always
gave, only now with greater variations and more depths than I’d ever have done before. Why, look—” She
gave a little wriggle of excitement.
“You know the arabesque principle—getting the longest possible distance from fingertip to toe tip
with a long, slow curve through the whole length? And the brace of the other leg and arm giving contrast?
Well, look at me. I don’t work on hinges now. I can make every motion a long curve if I want to. My body’s
different enough now to work out a whole new school of dancing. Of course there’ll be things I used to do
that I won’t attempt now—no more dancing sur les pointes, for instance—but the new things will more than
balance the loss. I’ve been practicing. Do you know I can turn a hundred fouettés now without a flaw? And I
think I could go right on and turn a thousand, if I wanted.”
She made the firelight flash on her hands, and her robe rang musically as she moved her shoulders a little.
“I’ve already worked out one new dance for myself,” she said. “God knows I’m no choreographer, but I did
want to experiment first. Later, you know, really creative men like Massanchine or Fokhileff may want to
do something entirely new for me—a whole new sequence of movements based on a new technique. And
music—that could be quite different, too. Oh, there’s no end to the possibilities! Even my voice has more
range and power. Luckily I’m not an actress—it would be silly to try to play Camille or Juliet with a cast of
ordinary people. Not that I couldn’t, you know.” She turned her head to stare at Harris through the mask of
glass. “I honestly think I could. But it isn’t necessary. There’s too much else. Oh, I’m not worried!”
“Maltzer’s worried,” Harris reminded her.
She swung away from the fire, her metal robe ringing, and into her voice came the old note of distress
that went with a furrowing of her forehead and a sidewise tilt of the head. The head went sidewise as it had
always done, and he could see the furrowed brow almost as clearly as if flesh still clothed her.
“I know. And I’m worried about him, John. He’s worked so awfully hard over me. This is the doldrums
now, the let-down period, I suppose. I know what’s on his mind. He’s afraid I’ll look just the same to the
world as I look to him. Tooled metal. He’s in a position no one ever quite achieved before, isn’t he? Rather
like God.” Her voice rippled a little with amusement. “I suppose to God we must look like a collection of
cells and corpuscles ourselves. But Maltzer lacks a god’s detached viewpoint.”
“He can’t see you as I do, anyhow.” Harris was choosing his words with difficulty. “I wonder, though—
would it help him any if you postponed your debut awhile? You’ve been with him too closely, I think. You
don’t quite realize how near a breakdown he is. I was shocked when I saw him just now.”
The golden head shook. “No. He’s close to a breaking point, maybe, but I think the only cure’s action.
He wants me to retire and stay out of sight, John. Always. He’s afraid for anyone to see me except a few old
friends who remember me as I was. People he can trust to be—kind.” She laughed. It was very strange to
hear that ripple of mirth from the blank, unfeatured skull. Harris was seized with sudden panic at the thought
of what reaction it might evoke in an audience of strangers. As if he had spoken the fear aloud, her voice
denied it. “I don’t need kindness. And it’s no kindness to Maltzer to hide me under a bushel. He has worked
too hard, I know. He’s driven himself to a breaking point. But it’ll be a complete negation of all he’s worked
for if I hide myself now. You don’t know what a tremendous lot of geniuses and artistry went into me, John.
The whole idea from the start was to recreate what I’d lost so that it could be proved that beauty and talent
need not be sacrificed by the destruction of parts or all the body.
“It wasn’t only for me that we meant to prove that. There’ll be others who suffer injuries that once might
have ruined them. This was to end all suffering like that forever. It was Maltzer’s gift to the whole race as
well as to me. He’s really a humanitarian, John, like most great men. He’d never have given up a year of his
life to this work if it had been for any one individual alone. He was seeing thousands of others beyond me
as he worked. And I won’t let him ruin all he’s achieved because he’s afraid to prove it now he’s got it. The
whole wonderful achievement will be worthless if I don’t take the final step. I think his breakdown, in the
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end, would be worse and more final if I never tried than if I tried and failed.”
Harris sat in silence. There was no answer he could make to that. He hoped the little twinge of
shamefaced jealousy he suddenly felt did not show, as he was reminded anew of the intimacy closer than
marriage which had of necessity bound these two together. And he knew that any reaction of his would in
its way be almost as prejudiced as Maltzer’s, for a reason at once the same and entirely opposite. Except that
he himself came fresh to the problem, while Maltzer’s viewpoint was colored by a year of overwork and
physical and mental exhaustion.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
She was standing before the fire when he spoke, swaying just a little so that highlights danced all along
her golden body. Now she turned with a serpentine grace and sank into the cushioned chair beside her. It
came to him suddenly that she was much more than humanly graceful—quite as much as he had once feared
she would be less than human.
“I’ve already arranged for a performance,” she told him, her voice a little shaken with a familiar mixture
of excitement and defiance.
Harris sat up with a start. “How? Where? There hasn’t been any publicity at all yet, has there? I didn’t
know—”
“Now, now, Johnnie,” her amused voice soothed him. “You’ll be handling everything just as usual once
I get started back to work—that is, if you still want to. But this I’ve arranged for myself. It’s going to be a
surprise. I. . . I felt it had to be a surprise.” She wriggled a little among the cushions. “Audience psychology
is something I’ve always felt rather than known, and I do feel this is the way it ought to be done. There’s no
precedent. Nothing like this ever happened before. I’ll have to go by my own intuition.”
“You mean it’s to be a complete surprise?”
“I think it must be. I don’t want the audience coming in with preconceived ideas. I want them to see me
exactly as I am now first, before they know who or what they’re seeing. They must realize I can still give as
good a performance as ever before they remember and compare it with my past performances. I don’t want
them to come ready to pity my handicaps—I haven’t got any!—or full of morbid curiosity. So I’m going on
the air after the regular eight-o’clock telecast of the feature from Teleo City. I’m just going to do one specialty
in the usual vaude program. It’s all been arranged. They’ll build up to it, of course, as the highlight of the
evening, but they aren’t to say who I am until the end of the performance—if the audience hasn’t recognized
me already, by then.”
“Audience?”
“Of course. Surely you haven’t forgotten they still play to a theater audience at Teleo City? That’s why
I want to make my debut there. I’ve always played better when there were people in the studio, so I could
gauge reactions. I think most performers do. Anyhow, it’s all arranged.”
“Does Maltzer know?”
She wriggled uncomfortably. “Not yet.”
“But he’ll have to give his permission too, won’t he? I mean—”
“Now look, John! That’s another idea you and Maltzer will have to get out of your minds. I don’t belong
to him. In a way he’s just been my doctor through a long illness, but I’m free to discharge him whenever I
choose. If there were ever any legal disagreement, I suppose he’d be entitled to quite a lot of money for the
work he’s done on my new body—for the body itself, really, since it’s his own machine, in one sense. But he
doesn’t own it, or me. I’m not sure just how the question would be decided by the courts—there again, we’ve
got a problem without precedent. The body may be his work, but the brain that makes it something more
than a collection of metal rings is me, and he couldn’t restrain me against my will even if he wanted to. Not
legally, and not—” She hesitated oddly and looked away. For the first time Harris was aware of something
beneath the surface of her mind which was quite strange to him.
“Well, anyhow,” she went on, “that question won’t come up. Maltzer and I have been much too close in
the past year to clash over anything as essential as this. He knows in his heart that I’m right, and he won’t try
Maltzer’s thin hand shook so badly that he could not turn the dial. He tried twice and then laughed nervously
and shrugged at Harris.
“You get her,” he said.
Harris glanced at his watch. “It isn’t time yet. She won’t be on for half an hour.”
Maltzer made a gesture of violent impatience. “Get it, get it!”
Harris shrugged a little in turn and twisted the dial. On the tilted screen above them shadows and sound
blurred together and then clarified into a somber medieval hall, vast, vaulted, people in bright costume
moving like pygmies through its dimness. Since the play concerned Mary of Scotland, the actors were
dressed in something approximating Elizabethan garb, but as every era tends to translate costume into terms
of the current fashions, the women’s hair was dressed in a style that would have startled Elizabeth, and their
footgear was entirely anachronistic.
The hall dissolved and a face swam up into soft focus upon the screen. The dark, lush beauty of the
actress who was playing the Stuart queen glowed at them in velvety perfection from the clouds of her pearlstrewn hair. Maltzer groaned.
“She’s competing with that,” he said hollowly.
“You think she can’t?”
Maltzer slapped the chair arms with angry palms. Then the quivering of his fingers seemed suddenly to
strike him, and he muttered to himself, “Look at ‘em! I’m not even fit to handle a hammer and saw.” But the
mutter was an aside. “Of course she can’t compete,” he cried irritably. “She hasn’t any sex. She isn’t female
any more. She doesn’t know that yet, but she’ll learn.”
Harris stared at him, feeling a little stunned. Somehow the thought had not occurred to him before at all,
so vividly had the illusion of the old Deirdre hung about the new one.
“She’s an abstraction now,” Maltzer went on, drumming his palms upon the chair in quick, nervous
rhythms. “I don’t know what it’ll do to her, but there’ll be change. Remember Abelard? She’s lost everything
that made her essentially what the public wanted, and she’s going to find it out the hard way. After that—”
He grimaced savagely and was silent.
“She hasn’t lost everything,” Harris defended. “She can dance and sing as well as ever, maybe better. She
still has grace and charm and—”
“Yes, but where did the grace and charm come from? Not out of the habit patterns in her brain. No, out of
human contacts, out of all the things that stimulate sensitive minds to creativeness. And she’s lost three of her
five senses. Everything she can’t see and hear is gone. One of the strongest stimuli to a woman of her type
was the knowledge of sex competition. You know how she sparkled when a man came into the room? All
that’s gone, and it was an essential. You know how liquor stimulated her? She’s lost that. She couldn’t taste
food or drink even if she needed it. Perfume, flowers, all the odors we respond to mean nothing to her now.
She can’t feel anything with tactual delicacy anymore. She used to surround herself with luxuries—she drew
her stimuli from them—and that’s all gone too. She’s withdrawn from all physical contacts.”
He squinted at the screen, not seeing it, his face drawn into lines like the lines of a skull. All flesh
seemed to have dissolved off his bones in the past year, and Harris thought almost jealously that even in that
way he seemed to be drawing nearer Deirdre in her fleshlessness with every passing week.
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to restrain me. His work won’t be completed until I do what I was built to do. And I intend to do it.”
That strange little quiver of something—something un-Deirdre—which had so briefly trembled beneath the
surface of familiarity stuck in Harris’ mind as something he must recall and examine later. Now he said only,
“All right. I suppose I agree with you. How soon are you going to do it?”
She turned her head so that even the glass mask through which she looked out at the world was
foreshortened away from him, and the golden helmet with its hint of sculptured cheekbone was entirely
enigmatic.
“Tonight,” she said.
On the television screen Mary of Scotland climbed the scaffold to her doom, the gown of traditional scarlet
clinging warmly to supple young curves as anachronistic in their way as the slippers beneath the gown, for—
as everyone but playwrights knows—Mary was well into middle age before she died. Gracefully this latterday Mary bent her head, sweeping the long hair aside, kneeling to the block.
Maltzer watched stonily, seeing another woman entirely.
“I shouldn’t have let her,” he was muttering. “I shouldn’t have let her do it.”
“Do you really think you’d have stopped her if you could?” Harris asked quietly. And the other man after
a moment’s pause shook his head jerkily.
“No, I suppose not. I keep thinking if I worked and waited a little longer maybe I could make it easier
for her, but—no, I suppose not. She’s got to face them sooner or later, being herself.” He stood up abruptly,
shoving back his chair. “If she only weren’t so . . . so frail. She doesn’t realize how delicately poised her very
sanity is. We gave her what we could—the artists and the designers and I, all gave our very best—but she’s
so pitifully handicapped even with all we could do. She’ll always be an abstraction and a . . . a freak, cut off
from the world by handicaps worse in their way than anything any human being ever suffered before. Sooner
or later she’ll realize it. And then—” He began to pace up and down with quick, uneven steps, striking his
hands together. His face was twitching with a little tic that drew up one eye to a squint and released it again
at irregular intervals. Harris could see how very near collapse the man was.
“Can you imagine what it’s like?” Maltzer demanded fiercely. “Penned into a mechanical body like that,
shut out from all human contacts except what leaks in by way of sight and sound? To know you aren’t human
any longer? She’s been through shocks enough already. When that shock fully hits her—”
“Shut up,” said Harris roughly. “You won’t do her any good if you break down yourself. Look—the
vaude’s starting.”
Great golden curtains had swept together over the unhappy Queen of Scotland and were parting again
now, all sorrow and frustration wiped away once more as cleanly as the passing centuries had already
expunged them. Now a line of tiny dancers under the tremendous arch of the stage kicked and pranced with
the precision of little mechanical dolls too small and perfect to be real. Vision rushed down upon them and
swept along the row, face after stiffly smiling face racketing by like fence pickets. Then the sight rose into the
rafters and looked down upon them from a great height, the grotesquely foreshortened figures still prancing
in perfect rhythm even from this inhuman angle.
There was applause from an invisible audience. Then someone came out and did a dance with lighted
torches that streamed long, weaving ribbons of fire among clouds of what looked like cotton wool but was
most probably asbestos. Then a company in gorgeous pseudo-period costumes postured its way through
the new singing ballet form of dance, roughly following a plot which had been announced as Les Sylphides,
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“Sight,” Maltzer said, “is the most highly civilized of the senses. It was the last to come. The other senses
tie us in closely with the very roots of life; I think we perceive with them more keenly than we know. The
things we realize through taste and smell and feeling stimulate directly, without a detour through the centers
of conscious thought. You know how often a taste or odor will recall a memory to you so subtly you don’t
know exactly what caused it? We need those primitive senses to tie us in with nature and the race. Through
those ties Deirdre drew her vitality without realizing it. Sight is a cold, intellectual thing compared with
the other senses. But it’s all she has to draw on now. She isn’t a human being anymore, and I think what
humanity is left in her will drain out little by little and never be replaced. Abelard, in a way, was a prototype.
But Deirdre’s loss is complete.”
“She isn’t human,” Harris agreed slowly. “But she isn’t pure robot either. She’s something somewhere
between the two, and I think it’s a mistake to try to guess just where, or what the outcome will be.”
“I don’t have to guess,” Maltzer said in a grim voice. “I know. I wish I’d let her die. I’ve done something
to her a thousand times worse than the fire ever could. I should have let her die in it.”
“Wait,” said Harris. “Wait and see. I think you’re wrong.”
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but had little in common with it. Afterward the precision dancers came on again, solemn and charming as
performing dolls.
Maltzer began to show signs of dangerous tension as act succeeded act. Deirdre’s was to be the last, of
course. It seemed very long indeed before a face in close-up blotted out the stage, and a master of ceremonies
with features like an amiable marionette’s announced a very special number as the finale. His voice was
almost cracking with excitement—perhaps he, too, had not been told until a moment before what lay in store
for the audience.
Neither of the listening men heard what it was he said, but both were conscious of a certain indefinable
excitement rising among the audience, murmurs and rustlings and a mounting anticipation as if time had run
backward here and knowledge of the great surprise had already broken upon them.
Then the golden curtains appeared again. They quivered and swept apart on long upward arcs, and
between them the stage was full of a shimmering golden haze. It was, Harris realized in a moment, simply
a series of gauze curtains, but the effect was one of strange and wonderful anticipation, as if something very
splendid must be hidden in the haze. The world might have looked like this on the first morning of creation,
before heaven and earth took form in the mind of God. It was a singularly fortunate choice of stage set in its
symbolism, though Harris wondered how much necessity had figured in its selection, for there could not have
been much time to prepare an elaborate set.
The audience sat perfectly silent, and the air was tense. This was no ordinary pause before an act. No one
had been told, surely, and yet they seemed to guess—
The shimmering haze trembled and began to thin, veil by veil. Beyond was darkness, and what looked
like a row of shining pillars set in a balustrade that began gradually to take shape as the haze drew back in
shining folds. Now they could see that the balustrade curved up from left and right to the head of a sweep of
stairs. Stage and stairs were carpeted in black velvet; black velvet draperies hung just ajar behind the balcony,
with a glimpse of dark sky beyond them trembling with dim synthetic stars.
The last curtain of golden gauze withdrew. The stage was empty. Or it seemed empty. But even through
the aerial distances between this screen and the place it mirrored, Harris thought that the audience was
not waiting for the performer to come on from the wings. There was no rustling, no coughing, no sense of
impatience. A presence upon the stage was in command from the first drawing of the curtains; it filled the
theater with its calm domination. It gauged its timing, holding the audience as a conductor with lifted baton
gathers and holds the eyes of his orchestra.
For a moment everything was motionless upon the stage. Then, at the head of the stairs, where the two
curves of the pillared balustrade swept together, a figure stirred.
Until that moment she had seemed another shining column in the row. Now she swayed deliberately,
light catching and winking and running molten along her limbs and her robe of metal mesh. She swayed
just enough to show that she was there. Then, with every eye upon her, she stood quietly to let them look
their fill. The screen did not swoop to a close-up upon her. Her enigma remained inviolate and the television
watchers saw her no more clearly than the audience in the theater.
Many must have thought her at first some wonderfully animate robot, hung perhaps from wires invisible
against the velvet, for certainly she was no woman dressed in metal—her proportions were too thin and fine for
that. And perhaps the impression of robotism was what she meant to convey at first. She stood quiet, swaying
just a little, a masked and inscrutable figure, faceless, very slender in her robe that hung in folds as pure as a
Grecian chlamys, though she did not look Grecian at all. In the visored golden helmet and the robe of mail that
odd likeness to knighthood was there again, with its implications of medieval richness behind the simple lines.
Except that in her exquisite slimness she called to mind no human figure in armor, not even the comparative
delicacy of a St. Joan. It was the chivalry and delicacy of some other world implicit in her outlines.
A breath of surprise had rippled over the audience when she moved. Now they were tensely silent again,
waiting. And the tension, the anticipation, was far deeper than the surface importance of the scene could ever
have evoked. Even those who thought her a manikin seemed to feel the forerunning of greater revelations.
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Now she swayed and came slowly down the steps, moving with a suppleness just a little better than
human. The swaying strengthened. By the time she reached the stage floor she was dancing. But it was no
dance that any human creature could ever have performed. The long, slow, languorous rhythms of her body
would have been impossible to a figure hinged at its joints as human figures hinge. (Harris remembered
incredulously that he had feared once to find her jointed like a mechanical robot. But it was humanity that
seemed, by contrast, jointed and mechanical now.)
The languor and the rhythm of her patterns looked impromptu, as all good dances should, but Harris
knew what hours of composition and rehearsal must lie behind it, what laborious graving into her brain of
strange new pathways, the first to replace the old ones and govern the mastery of metal limbs.
To and fro over the velvet carpet, against the velvet background, she wove the intricacies of her
serpentine dance, leisurely and yet with such hypnotic effect that the air seemed full of looping rhythms, as if
her long, tapering limbs had left their own replicas hanging upon the air and fading only slowly as she moved
away. In her mind, Harris knew, the stage was a whole, a background to be filled in completely with the
measured patterns of her dance, and she seemed almost to project that completed pattern to her audience so
that they saw her everywhere at once, her golden rhythms fading upon the air long after she had gone.
Now there was music, looping and hanging in echoes after her like the shining festoons she wove with
her body. But it was no orchestral music. She was humming, deep and sweet and wordlessly, as she glided
her easy, intricate path about the stage. And the volume of the music was amazing. It seemed to fill the
theater, and it was not amplified by hidden loudspeakers. You could tell that. Somehow, until you heard the
music she made, you had never realized before the subtle distortions that amplification puts into music. This
was utterly pure and true as perhaps no ear in all her audience had ever heard music before.
While she danced the audience did not seem to breathe. Perhaps they were beginning already to suspect
who and what it was that moved before them without any fanfare of the publicity they had been halfexpecting for weeks now. And yet, without the publicity, it was not easy to believe the dancer they watched
was not some cunningly motivated manikin swinging on unseen wires about the stage.
Nothing she had done yet had been human. The dance was no dance a human being could have
performed. The music she hummed came from a throat without vocal chords. But now the long, slow
rhythms were drawing to their close, the pattern tightening in to a finale. And she ended as inhumanly as she
had danced, willing them not to interrupt her with applause, dominating them now as she had always done.
For her implication here was that a machine might have performed the dance, and a machine expects no
applause. If they thought unseen operators had put her through those wonderful paces, they would wait for
the operators to appear for their bows. But the audience was obedient. It sat silently, waiting for what came
next. But its silence was tense and breathless.
The dance ended as it had begun. Slowly, almost carelessly, she swung up the velvet stairs, moving with
rhythms as perfect as her music. But when she reached the head of the stairs she turned to face her audience,
and for a moment stood motionless, like a creature of metal, without volition, the hands of the operator slack
upon its strings.
Then, startlingly, she laughed.
It was lovely laughter, low and sweet and full-throated. She threw her head back and let her body sway
and her shoulders shake, and the laughter, like the music, filled the theater, gaining volume from the great
hollow of the roof and sounding in the ears of every listener, not loud, but as intimately as if each sat alone
with the woman who laughed.
And she was a woman now. Humanity had dropped over her like a tangible garment. No one who had
ever heard that laughter before could mistake it here. But before the reality of who she was had quite time to
dawn upon her listeners she let the laughter deepen into music, as no human voice could have done. She was
humming a familiar refrain close in the ear of every hearer. And the humming in turn swung into words. She
sang in her clear, light, lovely voice:
It was Deirdre’s song. She had sung it first upon the airways a month before the theater fire that had
consumed her. It was a commonplace little melody, simple enough to take first place in the fancy of a nation
that had always liked its songs simple. But it had a certain sincerity too, and no taint of the vulgarity of tune
and rhythm that foredooms so many popular songs to oblivion after their novelty fades.
No one else was ever able to sing it quite as Deirdre did. It had been identified with her so closely that
though for a while after her accident singers tried to make it a memorial for her, they failed so conspicuously
to give it her unmistakable flair that the song died from their sheer inability to sing it. No one ever hummed
the tune without thinking of her and the pleasant, nostalgic sadness of something lovely and lost.
But it was not a sad song now. If anyone had doubted whose brain and ego motivated this shining metal
suppleness, they could doubt no longer. For the voice was Deirdre, and the song. And the lovely, poised grace
of her mannerisms that made up recognition as certainly as sight of a familiar face.
She had not finished the first line of her song before the audience knew her.
And they did not let her finish. The accolade of their interruption was a tribute more eloquent than polite
waiting could ever have been. First a breath of incredulity rippled over the theater, and a long, sighing gasp
that reminded Harris irrelevantly as he listened to the gasp which still goes up from matinee audiences at
the first glimpse of the fabulous Valentino, so many generations dead. But this gasp did not sigh itself away
and vanish. Tremendous tension lay behind it, and the rising tide of excitement rippled up in little murmurs
and spatterings of applause that ran together into one overwhelming roar. It shook the theater. The television
screen trembled and blurred a little to the volume of that transmitted applause.
Silenced before it, Deirdre stood gesturing on the stage, bowing and bowing as the noise rolled up about
her, shaking perceptibly with the triumph of her own emotion.
Harris had an intolerable feeling that she was smiling radiantly and that the tears were pouring down
her cheeks. He even thought, just as Maltzer leaned forward to switch off the screen, that she was blowing
kisses over the audience in the time-honored gesture of the grateful actress, her golden arms shining as she
scattered kisses abroad from the featureless helmet, the face that had no mouth.
“Well?” Harris said, not without triumph.
Maltzer shook his head jerkily, the glasses unsteady on his nose so that the blurred eyes behind them
seemed to shift.
“Of course they applauded, you fool,” he said in a savage voice. “I might have known they would under
this set-up. It doesn’t prove anything. Oh, she was smart to surprise them—I admit that. But they were
applauding themselves as much as her. Excitement, gratitude for letting them in on a historic performance,
mass hysteria—you know. It’s from now on the test will come, and this hasn’t helped any to prepare her for
it. Morbid curiosity when the news gets out—people laughing when she forgets she isn’t human. And they
will, you know. There are always those who will. And the novelty wearing off. The slow draining away of
humanity for lack of contact with any human stimuli anymore—”
Harris remembered suddenly and reluctantly the moment that afternoon which he had shunted aside
mentally, to consider later. The sense of something unfamiliar beneath the surface of Deirdre’s speech. Was
Maltzer right? Was the drainage already at work? Or was there something deeper than this obvious answer
to the question? Certainly she had been through experiences too terrible for ordinary people to comprehend.
Scars might still remain. Or, with her body, had she put on a strange, metallic something of the mind, that
spoke to no sense which human minds could answer?
For a few minutes neither of them spoke. Then Maltzer rose abruptly and stood looking down at Harris
with an abstract scowl.
“I wish you’d go now,” he said. Harris glanced up at him, startled. Maltzer began to pace again, his steps
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“The yellow rose of Eden, is blooming in my heart—”
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quick and uneven. Over his shoulder he said,
“I’ve made up my mind, Harris. I’ve got to put a stop to this.”
Harris rose. “Listen,” he said. “Tell me one thing. What makes you so certain you’re right? Can you deny
that most of it’s speculation—hearsay evidence? Remember, I talked to Deirdre, and she was just as sure as
you are in the opposite direction. Have you any real reason for what you think?”
Maltzer took his glasses off and rubbed his nose carefully, taking a long time about it. He seemed
reluctant to answer. But when he did, at last, there was a confidence in his voice Harris had not expected.
“I have a reason,” he said. “But you won’t believe it. Nobody would.”
“Try me.”
Maltzer shook his head. “Nobody could believe it. No two people were ever in quite the same
relationship before as Deirdre and I have been. I helped her come back out of complete—oblivion. I knew her
before she had voice or hearing. She was only a frantic mind when I first made contact with her, half insane
with all that had happened and fear of what would happen next. In a very literal sense she was reborn out of
that condition, and I had to guide her through every step of the way. I came to know her thoughts before she
thought them. And once you’ve been that close to another mind, you don’t lose the contact easily.” He put
the glasses back on and looked blurrily at Harris through the heavy lenses. “Deirdre is worried,” he said. “I
know it. You won’t believe me, but I can—well, sense it. I tell you, I’ve been too close to her very mind itself
to make any mistake. You don’t see it, maybe. Maybe even she doesn’t know it yet. But the worry’s there.
When I’m with her, I feel it. And I don’t want it to come any nearer the surface of her mind than it’s come
already. I’m going to put a stop to this before it’s too late.”
Harris had no comment for that. It was too entirely outside his own experience. He said nothing for a
moment. Then he asked simply, “How?”
“I’m not sure yet. I’ve got to decide before she comes back. And I want to see her alone.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Harris told him quietly. “I think you’re imagining things. I don’t think you can
stop her.”
Maltzer gave him a slanted glance. “I can stop her,” he said, in a curious voice. He went on quickly, “She
has enough already—she’s nearly human. She can live normally as other people live, without going back on
the screen. Maybe this taste of it will be enough. I’ve got to convince her it is. If she retires now, she’ll never
guess how cruel her own audiences could be, and maybe that deep sense of—distress, uneasiness, whatever
it is—won’t come to the surface. It mustn’t. She’s too fragile to stand that.” He slapped his hands together
sharply. “I’ve got to stop her. For her own sake I’ve got to do it!” He swung round again to face Harris. “Will
you go now?”
Never in his life had Harris wanted less to leave a place. Briefly he thought of saying simply, “No I
won’t.” But he had to admit in his own mind that Maltzer was at least partly right. This was a matter between
Deirdre and her creator, the culmination, perhaps, of that year’s long intimacy so like marriage that this final
trial for supremacy was a need he recognized.
He would not, he thought, forbid the showdown if he could. Perhaps the whole year had been building up
to this one moment between them in which one or the other must prove himself victor. Neither was very well
stable just now, after the long strain of the year past. It might very well be that the mental salvation of one or
both hinged upon the outcome of the clash. But because each was so strongly motivated not by selfish concern
but by solicitude for the other in this strange combat, Harris knew he must leave them to settle the thing alone.
He was in the street and hailing a taxi before the full significance of something Maltzer had said came to
him. “I can stop her,” he had declared, with an odd inflection in his voice.
Suddenly Harris felt cold. Maltzer had made her—of course he could stop her if he chose. Was there
some key in that supple golden body that could immobilize it at its maker’s will? Could she be imprisoned
in the cage of her own body? No body before in all history, he thought, could have been designed more truly
to be a prison for its mind than Deirdre’s, if Maltzer chose to turn the key that locked her in. There must be
many ways to do it. He could simply withhold whatever source of nourishment kept her brain alive, if that
He did not. Harris was swamped with excited calls about yesterday’s performance, but the message he was
awaiting did not come. The day went by very slowly. Toward evening he surrendered and called Maltzer’s
apartment.
It was Deirdre’s face that answered, and for once he saw no remembered features superimposed upon the
blankness of her helmet. Masked and faceless, she looked at him inscrutably.
“Is everything all right?” he asked, a little uncomfortable.
“Yes, of course,” she said, and her voice was a bit metallic for the first time, as if she were thinking so
deeply of some other matter that she did not trouble to pitch it properly. “I had a long talk with Maltzer last
night, if that’s what you mean. You know what he wants. But nothing’s been decided yet.”
Harris felt oddly rebuffed by the sudden realization of the metal of her. It was impossible to read
anything from face or voice. Each had its mask.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“Exactly as I’d planned,” she told him, without inflection.
Harris floundered a little. Then, with an effort at practicality, he said, “Do you want me to go to work on
bookings, then?”
She shook the delicately modeled skull. “Not yet. You saw the reviews today, of course. They—did like me.”
It was an understatement, and for the first time a note of warmth sounded in her voice. But the preoccupation
was still there, too. “I’d already planned to make them wait awhile after my first performance,” she went on. “A
couple of weeks, anyhow. You remember that little farm of mine in Jersey, John? I’m going over today. I won’t
see anyone except the servants there. Not even Maltzer. Not even you. I’ve got a lot to think about. Maltzer has
agreed to let everything go until we’ve both thought things over. He’s taking a rest, too. I’ll see you the moment
I get back, John. Is that all right?”
She blanked out almost before he had time to nod and while the beginning of a stammered argument was
still on his lips. He sat there staring at the screen.
The two weeks that went by before Maltzer called him again were the longest Harris had ever spent. He
thought of many things in the interval. He believed he could sense in that last talk with Deirdre something
of the inner unrest that Maltzer had spoken of—more an abstraction than a distress, but some thought
had occupied her mind which she would not—or was it that she could not?—share even with her closest
confidants. He even wondered whether, if her mind was as delicately poised as Maltzer feared, one would
ever know whether or not it had slipped. There was so little evidence one way or the other in the unchanging
outward form of her.
Most of all he wondered what two weeks in a new environment would do to her untried body and newly
patterned brain. If Maltzer were right, then there might be some perceptible—drainage—by the time they
met again. He tried not to think of that.
Maltzer televised him on the morning set for her return. He looked very bad. The rest must have been no
rest at all. His face was almost a skull now, and the blurred eyes behind their lenses burned. But he seemed
curiously at peace, in spite of his appearance. Harris thought he had reached some decision, but whatever it
was had not stopped his hands from shaking or the nervous tic that drew his face sidewise into a grimace at
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were the way he chose.
But Harris could not believe he would do it. The man wasn’t insane. He would not defeat his own
purpose. His determination rose from his solicitude for Deirdre; he would not even in the last extremity try
to save her by imprisoning her in the jail of her own skull.
For a moment Harris hesitated on the curb, almost turning back. But what could he do? Even granting
that Maltzer would resort to such tactics, self-defeating in their very nature, how could any man on earth
prevent him if he did it subtly enough? But he never would. Harris knew he never would. He got into his cab
slowly, frowning. He would see them both tomorrow.
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intervals.
“Come over,” he said briefly, without preamble. “She’ll be here in half an hour.” And he blanked out
without waiting for an answer.
When Harris arrived, he was standing by the window looking down and steadying his trembling hands
on the sill.
“I can’t stop her,” he said in a monotone, and again without preamble. Harris had the impression that for
the two weeks his thoughts must have run over and over the same track, until any spoken word was simply a
vocal interlude in the circling of his mind. “I couldn’t do it. I even tried threats, but she knew I didn’t mean
them. There’s only one way out, Harris.” He glanced up briefly, hollow-eyed behind the lenses. “Never mind.
I’ll tell you later.”
“Did you explain everything to her that you did to me?”
“Nearly all. I even taxed her with that…that sense of distress I know she feels. She denied it. She was
lying. We both knew. It was worse after the performance than before. When I saw her that night, I tell you I
knew—she senses something wrong, but she won’t admit it.” He shrugged. “Well—”
Faintly in the silence they heard the humming of the elevator descending from the helicopter platform on
the roof. Both men turned to the door.
She had not changed at all. Foolishly, Harris was a little surprised. Then he caught himself and
remembered that she would never change—never, until she died. He himself might grow white-haired and
senile; she would move before him then as she moved now, supple, golden, enigmatic.
Still, he thought she caught her breath a little when she saw Maltzer and the depths of his swift
degeneration. She had no breath to catch, but her voice was shaken as she greeted them.
“I’m glad you’re both here,” she said, a slight hesitation in her speech. “It’s a wonderful day outside.
Jersey was glorious. I’d forgotten how lovely it is in summer. Was the sanitarium any good, Maltzer?”
He jerked his head irritably and did not answer. She went on talking in a light voice, skimming the
surface, saying nothing important.
This time Harris saw her as he supposed her audiences would, eventually, when the surprise had worn
off and the image of the living Deirdre faded from memory. She was all metal now, the Deirdre they would
know from today on. And she was not less lovely. She was not even less human—yet. Her motion was a
miracle of flexible grace, a pouring of suppleness along every limb. (From now on, Harris realized suddenly,
it was her body and not her face that would have mobility to express emotion; she must act with her limbs
and her lithe, robed torso.)
But there was something wrong. Harris sensed it almost tangibly in her inflections, her elusiveness, the
way she fenced with words. This was what Maltzer had meant, this was what Harris himself had felt just
before she left for the country. Only now it was strong—certain. Between them and the old Deirdre whose
voice still spoke to them a veil of—detachment—had been drawn. Behind it she was in distress. Somehow,
somewhere, she had made some discovery that affected her profoundly. And Harris was terribly afraid that
he knew what the discovery must be. Maltzer was right.
He was still leaning against the window, staring out unseeingly over the vast panorama of New York,
webbed with traffic bridges, winking with sunlit glass, its vertiginous distances plunging downward into the
blue shadows of Earth-level. He said now, breaking into the light-voiced chatter, “Are you all right, Deirdre?”
She laughed. It was lovely laughter. She moved lithely across the room, sunlight glinting on her musical
mailed robe, and stooped to a cigarette box on a table. Her fingers were deft.
“Have one?” she said, and carried the box to Maltzer. He let her put the brown cylinder between his lips
and hold a light to it, but he did not seem to be noticing what he did. She replaced the box and then crossed to
a mirror on the far wall and began experimenting with a series of gliding ripples that wove patterns of pale
gold in the glass. “Of course I’m all right,” she said.
“You’re lying.”
Deirdre did not turn. She was watching him in the mirror, but the ripple of her motion went on slowly,
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languorously, undisturbed.
“No,” she told them both.
Maltzer drew deeply on his cigarette. Then with a hard pull he unsealed the window and tossed the
smoking stub far out over the gulfs below. He said,
“You can’t deceive me, Deirdre.” His voice, suddenly, was quite calm. “I created you, my dear. I know. I’ve
sensed that uneasiness in you growing and growing for a long while now. It’s much stronger today than it was
two weeks ago. Something happened to you in the country. I don’t know what it was, but you’ve changed. Will
you admit to yourself what it is, Deirdre? Have you realized yet that you must not go back on the screen?”
“Why, no,” said Deirdre, still not looking at him except obliquely, in the glass. Her gestures were slower
now, weaving lazy patterns in the air. “No, I haven’t changed my mind.”
She was all metal—outwardly. She was taking unfair advantage of her own metal-hood. She had withdrawn
far within, behind the mask of her voice and her facelessness. Even her body, whose involuntary motions might
have betrayed what she was feeling, in the only way she could be subject to betrayal now, she was putting
through ritual motions that disguised it completely. As long as these looping, weaving patterns occupied her, no
one had any way of guessing even from her motion what went on in the hidden brain inside her helmet.
Harris was struck suddenly and for the first time with the completeness of her withdrawal. When he had
seen her last in this apartment she had been wholly Deirdre, not masked at all, overflowing the metal with the
warmth and ardor of the woman he had known so well. Since then—since the performance on the stage—he
had not seen the familiar Deirdre again. Passionately he wondered why. Had she begun to suspect even in
her moment of triumph what a fickle master an audience could be? Had she caught, perhaps, the sound of
whispers and laughter among some small portion of her watchers, though the great majority praised her?
Or was Maltzer right? Perhaps Harris’ first interview with her had been the last bright burning of the lost
Deirdre, animated by excitement and the pleasure of meeting after so long a time, animation summoned up
in a last strong effort to convince him. Now she was gone, but whether in self-protection against the possible
cruelties of human beings, or whether in withdrawal to metal-hood, he could not guess. Humanity might be
draining out of her fast, and the brassy taint of metal permeating the brain it housed.
Maltzer laid his trembling hand on the edge of the opened window and looked out. He said in a deepened
voice, the querulous note gone for the first time:
“I’ve made a terrible mistake, Deirdre. I’ve done you irreparable harm.” He paused a moment, but
Deirdre said nothing. Harris dared not speak. In a moment Maltzer went on. “I’ve made you vulnerable, and
given you no weapons to fight your enemies with. And the human race is your enemy, my dear, whether you
admit it now or later. I think you know that. I think it’s why you’re so silent. I think you must have suspected
it on the stage two weeks ago, and verified it in Jersey while you were gone. They’re going to hate you, after
a while, because you are still beautiful, and they’re going to persecute you because you are different—and
helpless. Once the novelty wears off, my dear, your audience will be simply a mob.”
He was not looking at her. He had bent forward a little, looking out the window and down. His hair
stirred in the wind that blew very strongly up this high, and whined thinly around the open edge of the glass.
“I meant what I did for you,” he said, “to be for everyone who meets with accidents that might have
ruined them. I should have known my gift would mean worse ruin than any mutilation could be. I know now
that there’s only one legitimate way a human being can create life. When he tries another way, as I did, he
has a lesson to learn. Remember the lesson of the student Frankenstein? He learned, too. In a way, he was
lucky—the way he learned. He didn’t have to watch what happened afterward. Maybe he wouldn’t have had
the courage—I know I haven’t.”
Harris found himself standing without remembering that he rose. He knew suddenly what was about to
happen. He understood Maltzer’s air of resolution, his new, unnatural calm. He knew, even, why Maltzer had
asked him here today, so that Deirdre might not be left alone. For he remembered that Frankenstein, too, had
paid with his life for the unlawful creation of life.
Maltzer was leaning head and shoulders from the window now, looking down with almost hypnotized
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fascination. His voice came back to them remotely in the breeze, as if a barrier already lay between them.
Deirdre had not moved. Her expressionless mask, in the mirror, watched him calmly. She must have
understood. Yet she gave no sign, except that the weaving of her arms had almost stopped now, she moved so
slowly. Like a dance seen in a nightmare, under water.
It was impossible, of course, for her to express any emotion. The fact that her face showed none now
should not, in fairness, be held against her. But she watched so wholly without feeling—Neither of them
moved toward the window. A false step, now, might send him over. They were quiet, listening to his voice.
“We who bring life into the world unlawfully,” said Maltzer, almost thoughtfully, “must make room for
it by withdrawing our own. That seems to be an inflexible rule. It works automatically. The thing we create
makes living unbearable. No, it’s nothing you can help, my dear. I’ve asked you to do something I created
you incapable of doing. I made you to perform a function, and I’ve been asking you to forego the one thing
you were made to do. I believe that if you do it, it will destroy you, but the whole guilt is mine, not yours. I’m
not even asking you to give up the screen, anymore. I know you can’t, and live. But I can’t live and watch
you. I put all my skill and all my love in one final masterpiece, and I can’t bear to watch it destroyed. I can’t
live and watch you do only what I made you to do, and ruin yourself because you must do it.
“But before I go, I have to make sure you understand.” He leaned a little farther, looking down, and his
voice grew more remote as the glass came between them. He was saying almost unbearable things now, but
very distantly, in a cool, passionless tone filtered through wind and glass, and with the distant humming of
the city mingled with it, so that the words were curiously robbed of poignancy. “I can be a coward,” he said,
“and escape the consequences of what I’ve done, but I can’t go and leave you—not understanding. It would
be even worse than the thought of your failure, to think of you bewildered and confused when the mob turns
on you. What I’m telling you, my dear, won’t be any real news—I think you sense it already, though you may
not admit it to yourself. We’ve been too close to lie to each other, Deirdre—I know when you aren’t telling
the truth. I know the distress that’s been growing in your mind. You are not wholly human, my dear. I think
you know that. In so many ways, in spite of all I could do, you must always be less than human. You’ve lost
the senses of perception that kept you in touch with humanity. Sight and hearing are all that remain, and
sight, as I’ve said before, was the last and coldest of the senses to develop. And you’re so delicately poised on
a sort of thin edge of reason. You’re only a clear, glowing mind animating a metal body, like a candle flame
in a glass. And as precariously vulnerable to the wind.”
He paused. “Try not to let them ruin you completely,” he said after a while. “When they turn against you,
when they find out you’re more helpless than they—I wish I could have made you stronger, Deirdre. But I
couldn’t. I had too much skill for your good and mine, but not quite enough skill for that.”
He was silent again, briefly, looking down. He was balanced precariously now, more than halfway over
the sill and supported only by one hand on the glass. Harris watched with an agonized uncertainty, not sure
whether a sudden leap might catch him in time or send him over. Deirdre was still weaving her golden patterns,
slowly and unchangingly, watching the mirror and its reflection, her face and masked eyes enigmatic.
“I wish one thing, though,” Maltzer said in his remote voice. “I wish—before I finish—that you’d tell
me the truth, Deirdre. I’d be happier if I were sure I’d—reached you. Do you understand what I’ve said?
Do you believe me? Because if you don’t, then I know you’re lost beyond all hope. If you’ll admit your own
doubt—and I know you do doubt—I can think there may be a chance for you after all. Were you lying to me,
Deirdre? Do you know how. . . how wrong I’ve made you?”
There was silence. Then very softly, a breath of sound, Deirdre answered. The voice seemed to hang in
midair, because she had no lips to move and localize it for the imagination.
“Will you listen, Maltzer?” she asked.
“I’ll wait,” he said. “Go on. Yes or no?”
Slowly she let her arms drop to her sides. Very smoothly and quietly she turned from the mirror and
faced him. She swayed a little, making her metal robe ring.
“I’ll answer you,” she said. “But I don’t think I’ll answer that. Not with yes or no, anyhow. I’m going to
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walk a little, Maltzer. I have something to tell you, and I can’t talk standing still. Will you let me move about
without—going over?”
He nodded distantly. “You can’t interfere from that distance,” he said. “But keep the distance. What do
you want to say?”
She began to pace a little way up and down her end of the room, moving with liquid ease. The table with
the cigarette box was in her way, and she pushed it aside carefully, watching Maltzer and making no swift
motions to startle him.
“I’m not—well, sub-human,” she said, a faint note of indignation in her voice. “I’ll prove it in a minute,
but I want to say something else first. You must promise to wait and listen. There’s a flaw in your argument,
and I resent it. I’m not a Frankenstein monster made out of dead flesh. I’m myself—alive. You didn’t create
my life, you only preserved it. I’m not a robot, with compulsions built into me that I have to obey. I’m freewilled and independent, and, Maltzer—I’m human.”
Harris had relaxed a little. She knew what she was doing. He had no idea what she planned, but he was
willing to wait now. She was not the indifferent automaton he had thought. He watched her come to the table
again in a lap of her pacing, and stoop over it, her eyeless mask turned to Maltzer to make sure variation of
her movement did not startle him.
“I’m human,” she repeated, her voice humming faintly and very sweetly. “Do you think I’m not?” she
asked, straightening and facing them both. And then suddenly, almost overwhelmingly, the warmth and the
old ardent charm were radiant all around her. She was robot no longer, enigmatic no longer. Harris could see
as clearly as in their first meeting the remembered flesh still gracious and beautiful as her voice evoked his
memory. She stood swaying a little, as she had always swayed, her head on one side, and she was chuckling
at them both. It was such a soft and lovely sound, so warmly familiar.
“Of course I’m myself,” she told them, and as the words sounded in their ears neither of them could
doubt it. There was hypnosis in her voice. She turned away and began to pace again, and so powerful was the
human personality which she had called up about her that it beat out at them in deep pulses, as if her body
were a furnace to send out those comforting waves of warmth. “I have handicaps, I know,” she said. “But my
audiences will never know. I won’t let them know. I think you’ll believe me, both of you, when I say I could
play Juliet just as I am now, with a cast of ordinary people, and make the world accept it. Do you think I
could, John? Maltzer, don’t you believe I could?”
She paused at the far end of her pacing path and turned to face them, and they both stared at her without
speaking. To Harris she was the Deirdre he had always known, pale gold, exquisitely graceful in remembered
postures, the inner radiance of her shining through metal as brilliantly as it had ever shone through flesh. He
did not wonder, now, if it were real. Later he would think again that it might be only a disguise, something
like a garment she had put off with her lost body, to wear again only when she chose. Now the spell of her
compelling charm was too strong for wonder. He watched, convinced for the moment that she was all she
seemed to be. She could play Juliet if she said she could. She could sway a whole audience as easily as she
swayed himself. Indeed, there was something about her just now more convincingly human than anything he
had noticed before. He realized that in a split second of awareness before he saw what it was.
She was looking at Maltzer. He, too, watched, spellbound in spite of himself, not dissenting. She glanced
from one to the other. Then she put back her head and laughter came welling and choking from her in a
great, full-throated tide. She shook in the strength of it. Harris could almost see her round throat pulsing with
the sweet low-pitched waves of laughter that were shaking her. Honest mirth, with a little derision in it.
Then she lifted one arm and tossed her cigarette into the empty fireplace.
Harris choked, and his mind went blank for one moment of blind denial. He had not sat here watching
a robot smoke and accepting it as normal. He could not! And yet he had. That had been the final touch of
conviction which swayed his hypnotized mind into accepting her humanity. And she had done it so deftly, so
naturally, wearing her radiant humanity with such rightness, that his watching mind had not even questioned
what she did.
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He glanced at Maltzer. The man was still halfway over the window ledge, but through the opening of the
window he, too, was staring in stupefied disbelief and Harris knew they had shared the same delusion.
Deirdre was still shaking a little with laughter. “Well,” she demanded, the rich chuckling making her
voice quiver, “am I all robot, after all?”
Harris opened his mouth to speak, but he did not utter a word. This was not his show. The byplay lay
wholly between Deirdre and Maltzer; he must not interfere. He turned his head to the window and waited.
And Maltzer for a moment seemed shaken in his conviction.
“You . . . you are an actress,” he admitted slowly. “But I . . . I’m not convinced I’m wrong. I think—” He
paused. The querulous note was in his voice again, and he seemed racked once more by the old doubts and
dismay. Then Harris saw him stiffen. He saw the resolution come back, and understood why it had come.
Maltzer had gone too far already upon the cold and lonely path he had chosen to turn back, even for stronger
evidence than this. He had reached his conclusions only after mental turmoil too terrible to face again. Safety
and peace lay in the course he had steeled himself to follow. He was too tired, too exhausted by months of
conflict, to retrace his path and begin all over. Harris could see him groping for a way out, and in a moment
he saw him find it.
“That was a trick,” he said hollowly. “Maybe you could play it on a larger audience, too. Maybe you have
more tricks to use. I might be wrong. But Deirdre”—his voice grew urgent—“you haven’t answered the one
thing I’ve got to know. You can’t answer it. You do feel—dismay. You’ve learned your own inadequacy,
however well you can hide it from us—even from us. I know. Can you deny that, Deirdre?”
She was not laughing now. She let her arms fall, and the flexible golden body seemed to droop a little all
over, as if the brain that a moment before had been sending out strong, sure waves of confidence had slackened
its power, and the intangible muscles of her limbs slackened with it. Some of the glowing humanity began to
fade. It receded within her and was gone, as if the fire in the furnace of her body were sinking and cooling.
“Maltzer,” she said uncertainly, “I can’t answer that—yet. I can’t—”
And then, while they waited in anxiety for her to finish the sentence, she blazed. She ceased to be a
figure in stasis—she blazed.
It was something no eyes could watch and translate into terms the brain could follow; her motion was
too swift. Maltzer in the window was a whole long room-length away. He had thought himself safe at such
a distance, knowing no normal human being could reach him before he moved. But Deirdre was neither
normal nor human.
In the same instant she stood drooping by the mirror she was simultaneously at Maltzer’s side. Her
motion negated time and destroyed space. And as a glowing cigarette tip in the dark describes closed circles
before the eye when the holder moves it swiftly, so Deirdre blazed in one continuous flash of golden motion
across the room.
But curiously, she was not blurred. Harris, watching, felt his mind go blank again, but less in surprise
than because no normal eyes and brain could perceive what it was he looked at.
(In that moment of intolerable suspense his complex human brain paused suddenly, annihilating time
in its own way, and withdrew to a cool corner of its own to analyze in a flashing second what it was he had
just seen. The brain could do it timelessly; words are slow. But he knew he had watched a sort of tesseract
of human motion, a parable of fourth-dimensional activity. A one-dimensional point, moved through space,
creates a two-dimensional line, which in motion creates a three-dimensional cube. Theoretically the cube,
in motion, would produce a fourth-dimensional figure. No human creature had ever seen a figure of three
dimensions moved through space and time before—until this moment. She had not blurred; every motion she
made was distinct, but not like moving figures on a strip of film. Not like anything that those who use our
language had ever seen before, or created words to express. The mind saw, but without perceiving. Neither
words nor thoughts could resolve what happened into terms for human brains. And perhaps she had not
actually and literally moved through the fourth dimension. Perhaps—since Harris was able to see her—it
had been almost and not quite that unimaginable thing. But it was close enough.)
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While to the slow mind’s eye she was still standing at the far end of the room, she was already at
Maltzer’s side, her long, flexible fingers gentle but very firm upon his arms. She waited—
The room shimmered. There was sudden violent heat beating upon Harris’ face. Then the air steadied
again and Deirdre was saying softly, in a mournful whisper:
“I’m sorry—I had to do it. I’m sorry—I didn’t mean you to know—”
Time caught up with Harris. He saw it overtake Maltzer too, saw the man jerk convulsively away from
the grasping hands, in a ludicrously futile effort to forestall what had already happened. Even thought was
slow, compared with Deirdre’s swiftness.
The sharp outward jerk was strong. It was strong enough to break the grasp of human hands and catapult
Maltzer out and down into the swimming gulfs of New York. The mind leaped ahead to a logical conclusion
and saw him twisting and turning and diminishing with dreadful rapidity to a tiny point of darkness that
dropped away through sunlight toward the shadows near the earth. The mind even conjured up a shrill, thin
cry that plummeted away with the falling body and hung behind it in the shaken air.
But the mind was reckoning on human factors.
Very gently and smoothly Deirdre lifted Maltzer from the window sill and with effortless ease carried
him well back into the safety of the room. She set him down before a sofa and her golden fingers unwrapped
themselves from his arms slowly, so that he could regain control of his own body before she released him.
He sank to the sofa without a word. Nobody spoke for an unmeasurable length of time. Harris could not.
Deirdre waited patiently. It was Maltzer who regained speech first, and it came back on the old track, as if his
mind had not yet relinquished the rut it had worn so deep.
“All right,” he said breathlessly. “All right, you can stop me this time. But I know, you see. I know! You
can’t hide your feeling from me, Deirdre. I know the trouble you feel. And next time—next time I won’t wait
to talk!”
Deirdre made the sound of a sigh. She had no lungs to expel the breath she was imitating, but it was hard
to realize that. It was hard to understand why she was not panting heavily from the terrible exertion of the
past minutes; the mind knew why, but could not accept the reason. She was still too human.
“You still don’t see,” she said. “Think, Maltzer, think!”
There was a hassock beside the sofa. She sank upon it gracefully, clasping her robed knees. Her head
tilted back to watch Maltzer’s face. She saw only stunned stupidity on it now; he had passed through too
much emotional storm to think at all.
“All right,” she told him. “Listen—I’ll admit it. You’re right. I am unhappy. I do know what you said was
true—but not for the reason you think. Humanity and I are far apart, and drawing farther. The gap will be
hard to bridge. Do you hear me, Maltzer?”
Harris saw the tremendous effort that went into Maltzer’s wakening. He saw the man pull his mind back
into focus and sit up on the sofa with weary stiffness.
“You . . . you do admit it, then?” he asked in a bewildered voice.
Deirdre shook her head sharply.
“Do you still think of me as delicate?” she demanded. “Do you know I carried you here at arm’s length
halfway across the room? Do you realize you weigh nothing to me? I could”—she glanced around the room
and gestured with sudden, rather appalling violence—“tear this building down,” she said quietly. “I could
tear my way through these walls, I think. I’ve found no limit yet to the strength I can put forth if I try.” She
held up her golden hands and looked at them. “The metal would break, perhaps,” she said reflectively, “but
then, I have no feeling—”
Maltzer gasped, “Deirdre—”
She looked up with what must have been a smile. It sounded clearly in her voice. “Oh, I won’t. I wouldn’t
have to do it with my hands, if I wanted. Look—listen!”
She put her head back and a deep, vibrating hum gathered and grew in what one still thought of as her
throat. It deepened swiftly and the ears began to ring. It was deeper, and the furniture vibrated. The walls
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began almost imperceptibly to shake. The room was full and bursting with a sound that shook every atom
upon its neighbor with a terrible, disrupting force.
The sound ceased. The humming died. Then Deirdre laughed and made another and quite differently
pitched sound. It seemed to reach out like an arm in one straight direction—toward the window. The opened
panel shook. Deirdre intensified her hum, and slowly, with imperceptible jolts that merged into smoothness,
the window jarred itself shut.
“You see?” Deirdre said. “You see?”
But still Maltzer could only stare. Harris was staring too, his mind beginning slowly to accept what she
implied. Both were too stunned to leap ahead to any conclusions yet.
Deirdre rose impatiently and began to pace again, in a ringing of metal robe and a twinkling of reflected
lights. She was pantherlike in her suppleness. They could see the power behind that lithe motion now; they
no longer thought of her as helpless, but they were far still from grasping the truth.
“You were wrong about me, Maltzer,” she said with an effort at patience in her voice. “But you were right
too, in a way you didn’t guess. I’m not afraid of humanity. I haven’t anything to fear from them. Why”—her
voice took on a tinge of contempt—“already I’ve set a fashion in women’s clothing. By next week you won’t
see a woman on the street without a mask like mine, and every dress that isn’t cut like a chlamys will be out
of style. I’m not afraid of humanity! I won’t lose touch with them unless I want to. I’ve learned a lot—I’ve
learned too much already.”
Her voice faded for a moment, and Harris had a quick and appalling vision of her experimenting in the
solitude of her farm, testing the range of her voice, testing her eyesight—could she see microscopically and
telescopically?—and was her hearing as abnormally flexible as her voice?
“You were afraid I had lost feeling and scent and taste,” she went on, still pacing with that powerful,
tigerish tread. “Hearing and sight would not be enough, you think? But why do you think sight is the last of
the senses? It may be the latest, Maltzer—Harris—but why do you think it’s the last?”
She may not have whispered that. Perhaps it was only their hearing that made it seem thin and distant, as
the brain contracted and would not let the thought come through in its stunning entirety.
“No,” Deirdre said, “I haven’t lost contact with the human race. I never will, unless I want to. It’s too
easy…too easy.”
She was watching her shining feet as she paced, and her masked face was averted. Sorrow sounded in
her soft voice now.
“I didn’t mean to let you know,” she said. “I never would have, if this hadn’t happened. But I couldn’t let
you go believing you’d failed. You made a perfect machine, Maltzer. More perfect than you knew.”
“But Deirdre—” breathed Maltzer , his eyes fascinated and still incredulous upon her, “but Deirdre, if we
did succeed—what’s wrong? I can feel it now—I’ve felt it all along. You’re so unhappy—you still are. Why,
Deirdre?”
She lifted her head and looked at him, eyelessly, but with a piercing stare.
“Why are you so sure of that?” she asked gently.
“You think I could be mistaken, knowing you as I do? But I’m not Frankenstein. . . you say my creation’s
flawless. Then what—”
“Could you ever duplicate this body?” she asked.
Maltzer glanced down at his shaking hands. “I don’t know. I doubt it. I—”
“Could anyone else?”
He was silent. Deirdre answered for him. “I don’t believe anyone could. I think I was an accident. A sort
of mutation halfway between flesh and metal. Something accidental and . . . and unnatural, turning off on a
wrong course of evolution that never reaches a dead end. Another brain in a body like this might die or go
mad, as you thought I would. The synapses are too delicate. You were—call it lucky—with me. From what I
know now, I don’t think a . . . a baroque like me could happen again.” She paused a moment. “What you did
was kindle the fire for the Phoenix, in a way. And the Phoenix rises perfect and renewed from its own ashes.
Analysis of C.L. Moore’s “No Woman
Born”: The Promise of Prosthetics
The history of prosthetics is a long one and is often
tied to conflict, violence, and war. Although the first
recorded human prosthesis was cosmetic—a big
toe, constructed in Ancient Egypt for a noblewoman
so that she could wear sandals again—conflicts
like the Civil War, World War I, and World War II
spurred on technological improvements in the realm
of prosthetics.384 From cannon shells to IEDs, the
weaponry of war inflicts horrifying wounds on the
human body that require remedy. Replacing lost or
missing parts of the human body not only allows for
a level of functionality, but prosthetics also grant the
wearer a sense of wholeness.385
But what if humans could replace the whole body with
a prosthesis? What kind of promise does a full body
replacement fulfill? This question is the premise for
C.L. Moore’s novella, in which a well-loved, famous,
and uniquely beautiful stage and screen singer-actress,
named simply Deirdre, is killed in an accident: “And
the whole world had mourned her when she died
in the theatre fire.”386 But Deirdre didn’t die, not
entirely. A brilliant scientist, Maltzer, happened to be
on site when the fire broke out, and he had her brain
rescued as her body perished. With the cooperation
of Deirdre’s agent-manager, John Harris, and after a
“year of incredibly painstaking work” that required
an “immense fund of knowledge, of infinite patience,
the secret collaboration of artists, sculptors, designers,
scientists and the genius of Maltzer governing them
all”387 a newly reborn Deirdre, a human brain inside
a mechanical body, is about to be introduced to stage
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Do you remember why it had to reproduce itself that way?”
Maltzer shook his head.
“I’ll tell you,” she said. “It was because there was only one Phoenix. Only one in the whole world.”
They looked at each other in silence. Then Deirdre shrugged a little.
“He always came out of the fire perfect, of course. I’m not weak, Maltzer. You needn’t let that thought
bother you anymore. I’m not vulnerable and helpless. I’m not sub-human.” She laughed dryly. “I suppose,”
she said, “that I’m—superhuman.”
“But—not happy.”
“I’m afraid. It isn’t unhappiness, Maltzer—it’s fear. I don’t want to draw so far away from the human
race. I wish I needn’t. That’s why I’m going back on the stage—to keep in touch with them while I can. But I
wish there could be others like me. I’m…I’m lonely, Maltzer.”
Silence again. Then Maltzer said, in a voice as distant as when he had spoken to them through glass, over
gulfs as deep as oblivion:
“Then I am Frankenstein, after all.”
“Perhaps you are,” Deirdre said very softly. “I don’t know. Perhaps you are.”
She turned away and moved smoothly, powerfully, down the room to the window. Now that Harris knew,
he could almost hear the sheer power purring along her limbs as she walked. She leaned the golden forehead
against the glass—it clinked faintly, with a musical sound—and looked down into the depths Maltzer had hung
above. Her voice was reflective as she looked into those dizzy spaces which had offered oblivion to her creator.
“There’s one limit I can think of,” she said, almost inaudibly. “Only one. My brain will wear out in
another forty years or so. Between now and then I’ll learn . . . I’ll change . . . I’ll know more than I can guess
today. I’ll change—That’s frightening. I don’t like to think about that.” She laid a curved golden hand on the
latch and pushed the window open a little, very easily. Wind whined around its edge. “I could put a stop to it
now, if I wanted,” she said. “If I wanted. But I can’t, really. There’s so much still untried. My brain’s human,
and no human brain could leave such possibilities untested. I wonder, though . . . I do wonder—”
Her voice was soft and familiar in Harris’ ears, the voice Deirdre had spoken and sung with, sweetly
enough to enchant a world. But as preoccupation came over her a certain flatness crept into the sound. When
she was not listening to her own voice, it did not keep quite to the pitch of trueness. It sounded as if she
spoke in a room of brass, and echoes from the walls resounded in the tones that spoke there.
“I wonder,” she repeated, the distant taint of metal already in her voice.
and screen.
Harris, who had not been on the inside track of
Deirdre’s reconstruction and recovery, is about to see
“what no one but Maltzer had so far seen or known
about in its entirety.”390 So he turns away to do just
that, before his courage fails him. Harris is afraid
he will find Deirdre nothing more than “machinery
heaped in a flowered chair.”391 Instead, she’s become
otherworldly, and yet somehow remains the old
Deirdre:
She was golden still. They had kept that much
of her, the first impression of warmth and
color which had once belonged to her sleek
hair and the apricot tints of her skin. But they
had the good sense to go no farther. They
had not tried to make a wax image of the lost
Deirdre…And so she had no face. She had
only a smooth, delicately modeled ovoid for
her head, with a…a sort of crescent-shaped
mask across the frontal area where her eyes
would have been, if she had needed eyes.392
Mechanical yet powerfully graceful, able to recreate
the “old familiar sweet huskiness”393 of Deirdre’s
voice, the new Deirdre is the perfect coupling of
metal and flesh. Her living brain is all that’s left of the
human; the rest of her is prosthesis, and “Maltzer had
performed his greatest miracle in the limbs of the new
Deirdre. It was a mechanical miracle basically but the
eye appreciated first that he had also showed supreme
artistry and understanding.”394 She is delicate, metallic,
flexible, exquisitely proportioned, more than humanly
supple, “[a]nd every gesture, every attitude, every
flowing of motion into motion so utterly Deirdre that
the overwhelming illusion swept his mind again and
Author C.L. Moore.
this was the flesh-and-blood woman as clearly as if he
saw her there whole once more, like Phoenix from the
fire.”395
The perfection of Deirdre’s reincarnation depends
principally on motion, and since Deirdre had been
a trained actress, singer, and dancer, the metal
rings forming her body respond uniquely well to
electromagnetic currents controlled by her human
brain. She still moves like the human Deirdre, only
enhanced. This creation forces Harris, and through
him, the reader, to grapple with the question: is this
miracle still a human being? Is Deirdre still Deirdre?
Can she remain Deirdre? She thinks so. Echoing how
the robot is imagined in Ray Bradbury’s “I Sing the
Body Electric!” Deirdre tells John:
I believe there’s an affinity between men and
the machines they make. They make them out
of their own brains, really, a sort of mental
conception and gestation, and the result
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Yet Maltzer is beset with doubt. “Has anyone the right
to preserve a brain alive when its body is destroyed?
Even if a new body could be provided, necessarily
so very unlike the old?”388 But he is not only worried
about ethics. He worries, too, about the public’s
response. What might it do to the new Deirdre?
What if they see her as grotesque? What if they
reject her? He airs his concerns to John Harris. “She
is still beautiful,” Maltzer told him fiercely. “She’s
got courage and a serenity that amazes me. And she
isn’t in the least worried or resentful about what’s
happened. Or afraid what the verdict of the public will
be. But I am, Harris. I’m terrified.”389
Confident, self-assured, and determined to perform for
a live audience, Deirdre is also satisfied to know that
despite her metal body, she is not immortal. Maltzer
has assured her that one day her brain will cease to
function, and she will die as all living creatures must.
This fact connects her to her essential humanity, or so
she believes. She also believes that her audience will
respond positively. But Maltzer has been so intimate
with her in the process of implanting her brain inside
his beautiful creation and teaching her how to make it
function that he can’t see her whole. He sees her only
as a sequence of parts he invented and created, so he
worries she’s too confident and that when she’s treated
as a freak, she’ll have a nervous breakdown.
However, Deirdre is worried about Maltzer’s state
of mind. Both she and John Harris think Maltzer is
teetering on the edge of hysteria, and while Harris
wonders if Deirdre shouldn’t postpone her stage
debut, she thinks the only cure for Maltzer’s anxiety
is to plow ahead. When John asks whether Maltzer
has given Deirdre his permission to perform, she
reminds him tartly that she doesn’t belong to her
creator. She’s not a thing. Or is she? Maltzer, like many
other fictional mad scientists, has been playing God,
resurrecting someone who should be dead. His motives
were humanitarian but is the outcome? This metal
creature may not be immortal, but is it human?
What Maltzer worries about most, though, is that
Deirdre is no longer female, no longer a woman,
unsexed, an “abstraction.”397 Since she can see and
hear but can’t smell, taste, or feel, Maltzer fears she
will lose her humanity. He says to Harris “[s]he isn’t
a human being anymore, and I think what humanity
is left in her will drain out little by little and never be
replaced.”398 About this, he feels a crushing guilt. He
thinks he’s condemned her to a life worse than death.
Even though her first performance as the metal Deirdre
is heart-stopping and gorgeous, even though the
audience is stunned and appreciative, Maltzer insists
that he knows Deirdre so well that he also knows she’s
worried or dismayed. She knows she’s being changed,
slowly, subtly, by inhabiting a prosthetic, artificial
body. He is determined to stop her from performing,
for her own sake.
As in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creator and his
creature are locked into conflict. Indeed, Maltzer will
soon compare himself to Dr. Frankenstein; he insists
he knows that Deirdre is worried or frightened, and
that he also knows how to stop her in her tracks. Harris
fears that what Maltzer means is that he can turn
her off or lock her inside her body. Both Maltzer and
Harris see the new Deirdre as something of a fragile
object; Maltzer wants her to stop performing and to
live an ordinary life before she gets slammed with
the human cruelty that he is sure she will encounter;
he fears he has made her vulnerable and defenseless
and that once her audiences realize how helpless she
is inside her carapace, they will destroy her. Harris is
less worried about that and more worried that there is
something off about Deirdre, “something wrong.”399
This conflict comes to a head when Deirdre, Harris,
and Maltzer meet in Maltzer’s New York City
apartment. Once again, Maltzer taxes her with lying
about her state of mind. He knows she knows she’s
no longer human, that she’s “only a clear glowing
mind animating a metal body, like a candle flame in a
glass. And as precariously vulnerable to the wind.”400
As he recounts his concerns, his fears, his guilt, he
inches closer and closer to an open window. Harris
divines that Maltzer means to commit suicide as “he
remembered that Frankenstein, too, had paid with his
life for the unlawful creation of life.”401 But before
Maltzer takes this leap, he needs to know if Deirdre
understands the precariousness of her situation. “Do
you know…how wrong I’ve made you?”402 Rather than
answering this last question, Deirdre asks Maltzer to
hear her out.
Unbeknownst to him, Deirdre is playing for time as
she explains that she is human, and to prove it she
produces all “the warmth and the old ardent charm”403
of the human Deirdre. She does this so powerfully both
men are stupefied. She admits that she has handicaps,
but vulnerability isn’t one of them. As Maltzer
insists that he knows she feels distress, and that his
interference is at the root of those feelings, she “blazed.
She ceased to be a figure in stasis. She blazed…her
motion negated time and destroyed space…Deirdre
blazed in one continuous flash of golden motion across
the room,” to lift Maltzer away from the dangerous
open window and deposit him on a sofa.
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responds to the minds that created them,
and to all human minds that understand and
manipulate them….[s]o this is myself…[m]etal
but me.396
As she is explaining all this to the two astonished
men, she goes over to the window and opens it, as if
she might be the one now to take the suicidal leap.
“I could put a stop to it now, if I wanted…but I can’t
really. There’s so much still untried.” And yet, even as
she speaks, because she is preoccupied and not paying
strict attention to her performance, John Harris can
hear the taint of metal in her voice.406 Will Deirdre
lose her humanity in the long run? Through that last
line, the story suggests she will. But the character
C.L. Moore has built is a powerful and powerfully
determined one, dead set on exploring the capabilities
she’s gained by her translation into a machine. So,
what will become of Deirdre is unclear. What is
clear is that the story asks the reader should there
be limitations to humanity’s technological abilities?
Has Maltzer gone too far by inventing a whole body
prosthesis? Or should there be no limitation on what
humanity may invent?
NEIL GAIMAN’S “THE
MUSHROOM HUNTERS”
Neil Gaiman: Biography
Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) was born in Hampshire, England,
on November 10, 1960, to David Bernard and Sheila
Gaiman.407 Although he began his writing career
as a journalist, his first published books were two
biographies, one covering the British New Wave band
Duran Duran and the other a biography of Douglas
Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy. His graphic novel Violent Cases was the first
of many collaborations with the artist Dave McKean.408
Violent Cases led to a second series, Black Orchid,
which was followed by the acclaimed series Sandman,
which won many U.S. awards—nine Will Eisner Comic
Author Neil Gaiman, photographed in 2013.
Industry Awards and three Harvey Awards among
others. In 1991, Sandman became the first comic to
receive the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story.409
In 2008, Gaiman joined Twitter as @neilhimself and
now has over 1.5 million followers, across several
social media platforms. He won the Twitter category
in the inaugural Author Blog Award, and his novel
American Gods was also the first selection for the One
Book, One Twitter book club. In the early 1990s, he
started work on his Gothic children’s story Coraline
(2002), which went on to win the British Science
Fiction Award, the Hugo, the Nebula, the Bram Stoker,
and the American Elizabeth Burr/Worzalla Award;
Coraline was adapted as a musical by Stephin Merritt
(2009) and also made into an animated feature film
(2009), which secured a BAFTA and was nominated
for an Oscar.410 The Graveyard Book (2008) won
the UK’s Booktrust Prize for Teenage Fiction, the
Newbery Medal, the Locus Young Adult Award, and
the Hugo Best Novel Prize.411 The Graveyard Book,
with illustrations by Chris Riddell, was shortlisted for
the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration.412
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Maltzer hasn’t made her subhuman; he’s made her
superhuman. “I’ve found no limit yet to the strength
I can put forth if I try,” she tells them, and produces
several examples of her power that stun the two
men.404 She’s not delicate, she’s invulnerable. She has
nothing to fear from humanity. She won’t lose “contact
with the human race. I never will unless I want to. It’s
too easy…it’s too easy,”405 but like the Phoenix, she
will always be unique and alone. She wants to keep
performing to stay in touch with that which makes
her human, that which makes her hang onto the acting
skills that allow her to persuade human beings that she
is one as well, even though she knows better.
And in 2013, Gaiman’s YA novel The Ocean at the
End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the
British National Book Awards; it was later adapted into
a stage play at the Royal National Theatre in London.
A New York Times bestselling author several times
over, Gaiman’s works also include Good Omens
(with Terry Pratchett, 1990), Neverwhere (1995)—
for which he also wrote the original BBC TV series
screenplay (1996)—Stardust (1999), American Gods
(2001), Anansi Boys (2005), as well as the short story
collections Smoke and Mirrors (1998) and Fragile
Things (2006).413 While Gaiman has often collaborated
with a wide range of individual artists and film and
media companies, he has also written and directed
two films on his own: A Short Film About John Bolton
(2002) and Sky Television’s Statuesque (2009). Gaiman
married Mary McGrath in 1985, and the couple had
four children; they divorced in 2008. In 2011, Gaiman
and singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer married, and
in 2015 they had a son, Ash.414 The family lives near
Minneapolis, Minnesota.
SELECTED WORK: “The Mushroom Hunters” by Neil Gaiman (2017)
Science, as you know, my little one, is the study
of the nature and behaviour of the universe.
It’s based on observation, on experiment, and measurement,
and the formulation of laws to describe the facts revealed.
In the old times, they say, the men came already fitted with brains
designed to follow flesh-beasts at a run,
to hurdle blindly into the unknown,
and then to find their way back home when lost
with a slain antelope to carry between them.
Or, on bad hunting days, nothing.
The women, who did not need to run down prey,
had brains that spotted landmarks and made paths between them
left at the thorn bush and across the scree
and look down in the bole of the half-fallen tree,
because sometimes there are mushrooms.
Before the flint club, or flint butcher’s tools,
The first tool of all was a sling for the baby
to keep our hands free
and something to put the berries and the mushrooms in,
the roots and the good leaves, the seeds and the crawlers.
Then a flint pestle to smash, to crush, to grind or break.
And sometimes men chased the beasts
into the deep woods,
and never came back.
Some mushrooms will kill you,
while some will show you gods
and some will feed the hunger in our bellies. Identify.
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© Neil Gaiman. Reprinted with permission.
Others will kill us if we eat them raw,
and kill us again if we cook them once,
but if we boil them up in spring water, and pour the water away,
and then boil them once more, and pour the water away,
only then can we eat them safely. Observe.
Observe childbirth, measure the swell of bellies and the shape of breasts,
and through experience discover how to bring babies safely into the world.
Observe everything.
And the mushroom hunters walk the ways they walk
and watch the world, and see what they observe.
And some of them would thrive and lick their lips,
While others clutched their stomachs and expired.
So laws are made and handed down on what is safe. Formulate.
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The tools we make to build our lives:
our clothes, our food, our path home…
all these things we base on observation,
on experiment, on measurement, on truth.
And science, you remember, is the study
of the nature and behaviour of the universe,
based on observation, experiment, and measurement,
and the formulation of laws to describe these facts.
The race continues. An early scientist
drew beasts upon the walls of caves
to show her children, now all fat on mushrooms
and on berries, what would be safe to hunt.
The men go running on after beasts.
The scientists walk more slowly, over to the brow of the hill
and down to the water’s edge and past the place where the red clay runs.
They are carrying their babies in the slings they made,
freeing their hands to pick the mushrooms.
Analysis of “The Mushroom Hunters”:
Knowledge as Technology
Every year since 2017 The Universe in Verse, a
charitable celebration of science through poetry
commissions a poem. The inaugural show, dedicated
to the American astronomer Maria Mitchell, was also
a celebration of women’s contribution to science. For
it, Neil Gaiman delivered “The Mushroom Hunters.” A
lyrical storytelling poem that traces out the history of
humanity through technology.415
“The Mushroom Hunters” offers an alternate history
to the one where a woman’s agency has been erased.
Addressed to Gaiman’s then-newborn son Ash, and
originally performed by Ash’s mother singer-songwriter
Amanda Palmer, it went on to win the Rhysling Award
for best long poem and was brought to life in an
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The poet Sarah Howe.
Neil Gaiman, photographed in 2009.
By Kyle Cassidy - CC BY 2.5,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7050005
animated short film by artist Caroline Rudge.416
The poem begins by addressing “my little one,”
reminding the child that science “is the study of the
nature and behaviour of the universe.”417 The poetic
voice then proceeds to recount the earliest days of
humankind, when humans were once understood as
hunter-gatherers, the hunters being men, the gatherers,
women. In the hunter-gatherer myth, men made all the
tools and technology while the women gathered food.
Men invented the technology; women merely used it.
But scholarly research has since disputed that strict,
binary, and gendered narrative, and so does the poem:
The first tool of all was a sling for the baby
to keep our hands free
and something to put the berries and the
mushrooms in,
the roots and the good leaves, the seeds and
the crawlers.
Then a flint pestle to smash, to crush, to
grind or break.
Mushrooms are one of the plant stuffs collected for
food, but many are poisonous. Some can be eaten raw,
others must be cooked and the only way to know if
the mushroom you just picked is friend or foe is by
experience, observation, and experimentation. The
poem gently reminds the reader that a parent must act
as well as observe. For humanity to survive, people
must observe, experience, remember, and formulate.
Science is not the provenance of men alone. The
women-gatherers, the mushroom hunters of the title,
are as vital and important to the survival of humanity
as were their male counterparts and were as much
hunters as any men might have been.
The scientists walk more slowly, over to the
brow of the hill
and down to the water’s edge and past the
place where the red clay runs.
They are carrying their babies in the slings
they made,
freeing their hands to pick the mushrooms.418
Technology, after all, is not necessarily only machinery
but can be considered more generally to refer to the
application of knowledge for practical purposes.
SARAH HOWE’S “RELATIVITY”
Sarah Howe: Biography
Sarah Howe (b. 1983) was born in Hong Kong in 1983
to an English father and Chinese mother. She moved
to England when she was a child.419 Howe studied
English at the University of Cambridge, where from
2010−15 she was a Research Fellow at Gonville and
Caius College, before taking up a Leverhulme Early
Career Fellowship at University College London.420 She
has been the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship
and the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry,
as well as fellowships from Harvard University’s
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Photo by Tony Rinaldo
Radcliffe Institute and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.
Her pamphlet A Certain Chinese Encyclopaedia (Talllighthouse, 2009) won an Eric Gregory Award from
the Society of Authors. Her first full collection, Loop of
Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize
and The Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young
Writer of the Year Award, and she was shortlisted
for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the
Forward Prize for Best First Collection.421 She is a
Lecturer in Poetry at King’s College London.422
SELECTED WORK: “Relativity” by Sarah Howe (2015)
Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
for Stephen Hawking
When we wake up brushed by panic in the dark
our pupils grope for the shape of things we know.
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Photons loosed from slits like greyhounds at the track
reveal light’s doubleness in their cast shadows
that stripe a dimmed lab’s wall—particles no more—
and with a wave bid all certainties goodbye.
For what’s sure in a universe that dopplers
away like a siren’s midnight cry? They say
a flash seen from on and off a hurtling train
will explain why time dilates like a perfect
afternoon; predicts black holes where parallel lines
will meet, whose stark horizon even starlight,
bent in its tracks, can’t resist. If we can think
this far, might not our eyes adjust to the dark?
Analysis of “Relativity”: Scientific
Theory and Poetry
As the poet Sarah Howe herself says, it is not a new
idea that artists and scientists should talk to one
another.423 The intensity of the artist is matched by the
intense curiosity of the scientist. In many ways, they
have the same temperament. In her sonnet “Relativity,”
whose title is an homage to Albert Einstein’s 1915
Theory of Relativity, Howe was speaking directly to
the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking (1942−2018).424
When Howe actually met Hawking, he offered to read
the poem for National Poetry Day, although he was
self-deprecating about his artificially created voice,
claiming it wasn’t very musical. Howe, however, wrote
her poem with Hawking’s voice in mind:
To the contrary, I tried to reassure him, it
has a rhythm and harmonics all of its own.
Listening to recording after recording, I’d
tried to hear it in my mind as I wrote and
rewrote my lines. It was originally designed
for a telephone directory, he added, with
what I imagined was a chuckle. We’d shared
a joke earlier about the strings of random
words that flash up on his screen whenever
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In formal terms, “Relativity” is a sonnet, a
form I started to think of as a sort of black
hole exerting its own gravitational pull,
compressing an everywhere into its little
room. Yet my sonnet starts with light not as it
exists in the large-scale world of gravity but
at the subatomic level of quantum physics.
It is the grail of contemporary physicists to
make these two irreconcilable theories speak
to one another.426
Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, photographed
in 2006. Sarah Howe’s poem “Relativity” is dedicated to
Hawking.
the cheek sensor picks up stray movements,
when he’s eating, say, or the sensor is set
too high: he should publish a volume of
experimental poems.425
Howe’s sonnet makes meaning through an echo-
“Relativity” is a taut, meticulous, and minimalist
poem, beginning on a moment everyone has
experienced at least once, and then expanding to
examine the heavenly bodies and the universe beyond,
contracting back down to the personal as it ends. As
does this single poem, Howe’s entire body of work
combines a wide range of knowledge with a generous
sensibility; her poetry is of remarkable intensity and
immediacy. In a sense then, Howe’s work underscores
how language functions as a technology itself, both
necessary and fragile: the machinery of human
connection, consciousness, and understanding.
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chamber of sound and sense, as well as utilizing shape.
She has called the dual track shape of her sonnet akin
to the train example Einstein used to help explain
his theory of relativity. Ironically, this poem about
the theory of relativity and the speed of light begins
in darkness—“When we wake up brushed by panic
in the dark.” The syntax then stretches in a probing,
exploratory way across several run-on lines; and while
the diction is measured, the poem is held together by a
tense structure of consonant patterns. One of the most
distinctive characteristics of all of Howe’s work is the
way in which she situates intimate, personal experiences
into larger and more sweeping historical and cultural
contexts. The poet explains her own creative process
and the result of that process as follows:
1Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, The Routledge Concise History of Science
Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2011, 1.
2“The Progressive Era” https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/
The-Progressive-era.
3H. Bruce Franklin, ed. Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of
the Nineteenth Century—An Anthology. From the “Introduction.” New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995, 2−4.
4Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973.
5Brian Stableford. Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its
Precursors, ed. David Seed. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995,
46−57.
6The term science fiction is often shortened to sci-fi, which the SF
author Vonda N. McIntyre used to frequently and publicly deride as a
demeaning label, renaming sci-fi, skiffy. This trend began most notably
when the Star Wars franchise took off, see “Science Fiction vs scifi vs
SF” https://damiengwalter.com/2018/08/07/science-fiction-vs-scifi-vssf-what-is-the-true-definition/. Sometimes the later and more capacious
umbrella terms of speculative fiction or magical realism are preferred,
although the two terms are not synonymous, as is explained in “Magical
Realism Intro” https://vclibrary.vassarspaces.net/digitalshelves/exhibits/
show/fall2020display-1/magicalrealismintro. For a meditation on the
controversy about the label speculative fiction, see Samuel R. Delany, The
Jewel Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, in “Quarks.”
Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2009. For the purposes of this
resource guide, SF will be the abbreviation used throughout.
7Carl Freedman. “Hail Mary: On the Author of ‘Frankenstein’ and the
Origins of Science Fiction. Science Fiction Studies Vol. 29, No. 2 (Jul.
2002), 253−264.
8John Crowley, The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosenkreutz: A
Romance in Eight Days. “Introduction.” Easthampton Massachusetts,
2016, 24.
9Damon Francis Knight. In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science
Fiction. Chicago: Advent Publishing, 1967.
10Francesca Saggini. Ed. Anna Soccio. Transmedia Creatures:
Frankenstein’s Afterlives. Lewisburg, P.A.: Bucknell University Press,
2018, 33−36.
11
In Search of Wonder, 10.
12
Transmedia Creatures, 35.
13Adam Roberts. The History of Science Fiction. New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2016, ix−xi.
14John Cleve Symmes, Symzonia; A Voyage of Discovery. Scotts Valley,
California: CreateSpace, Independent Publishing Platform, 2017.
15“A Quest to Discover” https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/aquest-to-discover-americas-first-science-fiction-writer.
16Edgar Allen Poe, Complete Tales & Poems. New York: Random House:
Vintage, 1975, 3−41.
17Franklin, 7−38.
18Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories. New York: Penguin, 1986,
46.
19Franklin, 1.
20James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, eds. “Introduction,” The Secret
History of Science Fiction. Tachyon Publications. San Francisco, 2009, 8.
21Pulps got their name from the poor quality of the paper stock upon which
they were printed. See also https://www.pulpmags.org/contexts/essays/
golden-age-of-pulps.html. A recent publication, Pulp Power, by Neil
McGinnis (New York: Abrams Books, 2022), takes a look back at the
history and influence of the pulps.
22See “The Golden Age of SF” https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/golden_
age_of_sf.
23Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre, eds. “An Introduction,” in Dangerous
Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950−1985. Oakland,
CA. PM Press, 2021, 1.
24“Golden Age of SF.”
25
Dangerous Visions, 1.
26Ibid.
27See https://www.asimovs.com/about-asimovs/history/ and https://www.
analogsf.com/about-analog/.
28See “1960s TV Series” https://scifanworld.com/1960s-tv-series.
29“Nixon and Khrushchev have a kitchen debate,” https://www.history.com/
this-day-in-history/nixon-and-khrushchev-have-a-kitchen-debate.
30 Dangerous Visions, 1.
31James Tiptree Jr. was infamously the male pseudonym of Alice “Allie” or
Racoona Sheldon. See Julie Phillips. The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006.
32Ibid., 2−4.
33Ibid., 2.
34Ibid., 154−8.
35See also “What is Steampunk?” https://steampunkavenue.com/en/blog/
what-is-steampunk/.
36See also “New Trends in Science Fiction” https://cheshirelibraryblog.
com/2022/03/01/new-trends-in-science-fiction/.
37See Eileen Gunn, “How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors are
Shaping your Future” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/
how-americas-leading-science-fiction-authors-are-shaping-yourfuture-180951169/.
38Ibid.
39See “Can Science Fiction be Conservative?” https://www.sciphijournal.
org/index.php/2019/12/20/can-science-fiction-be-conservative/.
40See also John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction.
Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
41Stephanie A. Smith, “Octavia Butler: A Retrospective” Feminist Studies,
Vol. 33, No. 2 (Summer, 2007), 385−393.
42See “Definitive Guide to Solarpunk fashion” at https://imposemagazine.
com/bytes/cinema/the-definitive-guide-to-solarpunk-fashion-moviesaesthetic-more and “On the Need for New Futures” at https://solarpunks.
net/post/27525726746/on-the-need-for-new-futures
43“What Science Fiction Means Today,” https://www.polygon.
com/21515948/what-science-fiction-means-today.
44Ibid.
45
Jewel-Hinged Jaw, 33.
46
Secret History, 17.
47Ibid, 12.
48“N.K. Jemison Hugo Awards” https://www.vox.com/2018/8/21/17763260/
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Notes
88Ibid., 44.
89Fritz Lang. Metropolis. UFA/Parufamet, 1927.
90C.L. Moore, “No Woman Born,” in The Best of C.L Moore, New York: Del
Ray, 1980.
91Eando Binder was the pseudonym of Earl and Otto Binder, a pair of sibling
writers.
92See Isaac Asimov “Runaround” (1942) https://web.williams.edu/
Mathematics/sjmiller/public_html/105Sp10/handouts/Runaround.html.
93Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Del
Ray, 1986.
94“Data” https://www.startrek.com/database_article/data.
95Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 174.
96 Ibid.
97“Daoist Dreams” http://examinedworlds.blogspot.com/2015/05/daoistdreams-lathe-of-heaven-by-ursula.html.
98See “Differences Between Eastern and Western Philosophy” http://www.
differencebetween.net/science/differences-between-eastern-and-westernphilosophy/.
99“Utilitarianism History” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianismhistory/.
100“Cartesianism” https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/
Cartesianism.
101Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 18.
102Ibid., 145.
103Ibid., 149.
104Ibid., 140.
105Ibid.
106Ibid., 42.
107Ibid., 82.
108Ibid., 82.
109Ibid., 82.
110Ibid., 158.
111Ibid., 172.
112Ibid., 172−5.
113Ibid., 178.
114Ibid., 174.
115See also “Yinyang” https://iep.utm.edu/yinyang/.
116Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 182.
117Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One. Ed. Brian
Attebery. From “Chronology.” New York: The Library of America, 2017,
1067.
118Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the
Writer, the Reader and the Imagination. Boulder, Colorado: Shambala
Publications, 2004, 12.
119Ibid., 11
120“Bernard Maybeck” https://www.britannica.com/biography/BernardMaybeck.
121In personal conversations between Le Guin and the author, 1981−1987.
122Arwen Curry, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. New York: Grasshopper Film,
2019.
123In personal conversations and correspondence between Le Guin and the
author, 1983−2002.
124Wave, 14.
125Ibid.
126Ibid., 17.
127Ibid., 12.
128Wave, 16.
129Author’s personal experiences and recollections, 1981−1987.
130Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One, 1068.
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n-k-jemisin-hugo-awards-broken-earth-sad-puppies.
49See “Da Vinci’s Inventions” https://www.da-vinci-inventions.com/.
50See “IVF” https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/007279.htm.
51
Secret History, 3.
52“The Issues that Stem from Only Valuing STEM” https://
thedefiantmovement.org/articles/2020/6/27/the-issues-that-stem-fromonly-valuing-stem
53Ella Koscher “The Gread Divide” https://www.columbiaspectator.com/
the-eye/2017/10/24/the-great-divide-stem-and-the-humanities/.
54In England, for example, authors started publishing novels that are
now regarded as classic SF in the nineteenth century. See https://www.
britannica.com/art/science-fiction/The-19th-and-early-20th-centuries.
55 Dangerous Visions, 12.
56The Library of America rarely publishes works by living authors. That
they chose to do so in Le Guin’s case is a remarkable testament to the
power and influence of her writing. See also: the Library of America’s
webpage at https://www.loa.org/books/writer/655-ursula-k-le-guin.
57For more information about Le Guin’s accolades and awards, see her
author’s website at https://www.ursulakleguin.com/.
58Stanley Kubrick. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.
59Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 44.
60Merriam-Webster dictionary online at https://www.merriam-webster.
com/?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=dictionary&utm_
medium=cpc&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIoMPlmZaXQIVSS1MCh0NwA13EAAYASAAEgKojfD_BwE.
61See also https://www.raspberrypi.org/.
62Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. New
York Signet, The New American Library, 1969, 69.
63Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: the 1818 Text. Ed. Charlotte Gordon, New
York, Penguin, 2018.
64See https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/todays-doc/index.html?doddate=821.
65See also: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/madame-curiespassion-74183598/.
66In personal conversations between Le Guin and the author, 1982.
67Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 11.
68Ibid., 13.
69Ibid., 17.
70Ibid., 21.
71Ibid., 25.
72Heather Lelache’s father was African-American, her mother, white. The
name Lelache, she says, comes no doubt from a long-ago slave-owner, and
it means coward.
73Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 48.
74Ibid.
75Ibid., 125.
76Ibid., 86.
77Ibid., 124.
78Ibid., 75.
79“What Good Can Dreaming Do?” https://bostonreview.net/articles/whatgood-can-dreaming-do/.
80Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 86.
81Ibid., 14.
82Ibid., 149.
83Ibid., 28.
84Ibid., 81.
85Ibid., 87.
86Ibid., 174.
87Ibid., 171.
181Ibid., 80.
182Ibid., 151.
183Ibid., 53.
184Ibid., 139.
185Ibid., 83.
186Ibid., 2.
187Ibid., 27. Geographically situated at the cross-roads for many differing
powers of governance and religions, Afghanistan has been the locus of
ongoing armed conflict for centuries. That Le Guin would understand the
nation as the sight of continuing conflict is not surprising. See Stephen
Tanner, A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Taliban. New
York: Da Capo Press, 2009.
188See “Russia-Afghanistan” https://inews.co.uk/news/world/russiaafghanistan-why-invade-soviet-union-invasion-1979-timeline-whathappened-1156206.
189Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 81.
190Ibid., 85.
191Ibid.
192Ibid., 93.
193Ibid., 113.
194Ibid., 122.
195Ibid., 133.
196Ibid., 134.
197See Audrey and Brian Smedley. Race in North America: Origin and
Evolution of a Worldview. New York: Routledge, 4th edition, 2011.
198Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 103.
199Ibid., 104.
200Ibid.
201See “You’re Biracial but…” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/
full/10.1111/jomf.12866.
202Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 130.
203See “Jati: The Caste System in India at https://asiasociety.org/education/
jati-caste-system-india.
204See “Lynching in America” https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america/.
205See “A History of Apartheid in South Africa” https://www.sahistory.org.
za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa.
206Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 130.
207Ibid., 134
208Ibid., 182
209Ibid., 184
210Ibid., 133.
211Ibid.
212For a brief history of U.S. immigration policy see https://www.cato.org/
policy-analysis/brief-history-us-immigration-policy-colonial-periodpresent-day#.
213Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 9.
214Ibid., 34.
215Ibid., 124.
216Ibid., 114.
217Ibid., 18.
218 Ibid., 42.
219Ibid., 50.
220Ibid., 108.
221Ibid., 113.
222Wave, 15.
223Curiously, The Lathe of Heaven has not received a great deal of critical
or academic attention since its publication. See critic Ian Watson’s 1975
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131Author’s personal experiences and recollections, 1981−1987.
132 Wave, 18.
133Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One. “Introduction,” xiv.
134The author took a Portland State University writing workshop with Le
Guin in 1981 and remained a life-long friend and colleague.
135See “Reject” http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/Reject.html.
136The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, 106.
137Hainish, Chronology, 1072
138Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 160
139Ibid., 4.
140Ibid., 142.
141Ibid., 7−11
142Ibid., 107.
143Ibid., 90.
144Ibid., 96.
145Ibid., 137.
146Ibid., 96.
147Ibid., 28.
148Ibid., 30.
149Ibid., 163.
150Ibid., 6.
151Ibid., 51.
152Ibid., 52.
153Ibid., 101.
154Ibid., 129.
155Ibid., 130.
156Ibid., 131.
157Ibid., 93.
158Ibid., 49.
159Ibid., 130.
160Ibid., 158.
161Ibid., 182.
162Ibid., 183.
163Ibid., 2.
164Ibid., 92.
165See “The Summer of Love” https://theconversation.com/the-summerof-love-was-more-than-hippies-and-lsd-it-was-the-start-of-modernindividualism-77212.
166“Counterculture movement” https://digilab.libs.uga.edu/exhibits/exhibits/
show/civil-rights-digital-history-p/counterculture.
167Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 4.
168Ibid., 92.
169Ibid., 156.
170Ibid.
171The help Orr needs is also represented by songs written and performed by
the 1960s rock band, The Beatles, whose songs “With a Little Help from
My Friends,” and “Let it Be,” are referenced by Le Guin in the novel. The
Beatles also wrote and performed the song “Help!” and starred in a 1965
movie of the same name, see “Help!” https://www.thebeatles.com/help.
172Ibid., 154.
173Ibid., 152.
174Ibid., 156.
175Ibid., 178.
176Ibid., 181.
177Ibid.
178Ibid.
179Ibid., 123.
180Ibid., 126.
269Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 139.
270Ibid.
271Roger Zelazny, He Who Shapes, New York: TOR: A Tom Doherty
Associates Book, 1989.
272“Lathe of Heaven” https://archive.org/details/the-lathe-of-heaven-1980.
273Les Brown, (January 20, 1980). “Drama Series Proposed for Public TV;
Ultimate Ideal Schedule Highest Audience Levels Uniform National
Schedule”. The New York Times, 48.
274“The Lathe of Heaven,” https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/453371/thelathe-of-heaven#overview.
275Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 174.
276 Ibid., 143.
277Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Ed. William E. Cain. The Blithedale Romance.
Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996, 26.
278Ibid., 27.
279James, Henry. The Art of Criticism: On the Theory and the Practice of
Fiction. Ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1986, 104.
280Blithedale, 32.
281See “History of American Women: Sophia Hawthorne,” https://www.
womenhistoryblog.com/2012/05/sophia-hawthorne.html.
282Blithedale, 15.
283Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Reader’s Library
Classics, 2021.
284Blithedale, 36.
285Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Hawthorne’s Short Stories. Ed. Newton Arvin.
New York: Vintage Classics, a Division of Random House, 2011, 206.
286The Scarlet Letter.
287Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Hawthorne’s Short Stories. Ed. Newton Arvin.
New York: Vintage Classics, a Division of Random House, 2011, 206.
288Ibid., 209.
289Ibid.
290Ibid., 210.
291Ibid., 211−12.
292See “Pioneering Women” at https://news.cornellcollege.edu/2021/02/
pioneering-women-top-moments-womens-history-cornell-college/#jump4.
293Hawthorne’s Short Stories, 210.
294Ibid., 216.
295Ibid., 228.
296Ibid., 217.
297Ibid., 227.
298Ibid., 233.
299Ibid., 23−34.
300Ibid., 34.
301See “Ambrose Bierce” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ambrosebierce.
302Bierce, Ambrose. Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories. Ed.
Tom Quirk. New York: Penguin, 2000, 1.
303Ibid., viii.
304See “Ambrose Bierce”
305Ibid.
306See “Bierce Another Way” https://donswaim.com/bierceanotherway.html.
307Bierce, Ambrose. The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs. Ed. S.T. Joshi.
New York: Library of America, 252.
308The Devil’s Dictionary, 253.
309Ibid.
310Ibid., 253−4.
311Ibid., 254.
312Ibid., 256.
313Ibid., 257.
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“Watson Art” https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/watson5art.htm
for an analysis roughly contemporaneous to the publication of the novel.
224See “The Lathe of Heaven Le Guin’s Trippy Local SF Novel” https://www.
tor.com/2020/07/15/the-lathe-of-heaven-le-guins-trippy-local-sf-novelabout-reality/.
225National Geographic Encyclopedia, https://education.nationalgeographic.
org/resource/ring-fire.
226 Lathe, 1.
227Ibid.
228Ibid., 121.
229Ibid., 184.
230Ibid., 7.
231Ibid., 24.
232Ibid., 142.
233Ibid., 168.
234Ibid.
235Ibid., 172.
236Ibid., 27.
237Ibid.
238Ibid, 143.
239Ibid.
240Sidarta Ribiero, The Oracle of the Night: The History and Science of
Dreams. New York: Pantheon, 2021, 6.
241Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman were the other two.
242For more on William Dement’s career, see https://aasm.org/in-memoriamsleep-pioneer-founding-president-william-bill-dement/.
243For more on Josef Breuer, see https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mindguest-blog/step-aside-freud-josef-breuer-is-the-true-father-of-modernpsychotherapy/.
244Peter Gay, ed. The Freud Reader. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1989, 171.
245Ibid., 128.
246Ibid., 153.
247Ibid., 155.
248Ibid., 155.
249Ibid., 167.
250For more on Carl Jung see https://www.biography.com/scholar/carl-jung.
251Ursula K. Le Guin “The Child and the Shadow” The Quarterly Journal of
the Library of Congress. Washington: Library of Congress, Vol. 32, No. 2
(April 1975), 139−148.
252Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 19.
253Ibid., 148.
254Ibid., 150.
255Ibid., 88.
256Ibid., 150
257Ibid., 167.
258Ibid., 169.
259Ibid., 1.
260Ibid., 107.
261Ibid., 6.
262Ibid., 26.
263On Daoism or Taoism see also https://iep.utm.edu/daoismdaoistphilosophy/.
264Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 67.
265Ibid., 96.
266Delany, 25.
267Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven. Scribner: A Division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc. New York, 1971, 138.
268“Utilitarianism History.”
363See “John Crowley 1942” https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educationalmagazines/crowley-john-1942.
364See “John Crowley” johncrowleyauthor.com/bio/.
365Ibid.
366See “Crowley, John” http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?711.
367See “Filling Up, Pouring Out” at https://dailynutmeg.com/2018/08/07/
john-crowley-summer-reading-month-filling-up-pouring-out/.
368Crowley, John. “Snow” in Lightspeed: Science Fiction and Fantasy,
November 2011 (Issue 18), https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/
snow/.
369Ibid.
370Ibid.
371Ibid.
372Ibid.
373Ibid.
374Ibid.
375Ibid.
376Ibid.
377Ibid.
378Ibid.
379“C.L. Moore Biography” http://academic.depauw.edu/aevans_web/
HONR101-02/WebPages/Fall2008/J.C.Pankratz/C.%20L.%20Moore/
biography.html.
380Ibid., xii.
381“C.L. Moore Biography.”
382Ibid.
383Ibid.
384“A Short History of Prosthetics” https://synergypo.com/blog/a-shorthistory-of-prosthetics/.
385Ibid.
386The Best of C.L. Moore, 237.
387Ibid., 239.
388Ibid., 240.
389Ibid.
390Ibid., 241.
391Ibid., 242.
392Ibid., 242−243.
393Ibid., 241.
394Ibid., 244.
395Ibid., 246.
396Ibid., 250.
397Ibid., 258.
398Ibid., 259.
399Ibid., 273.
400Ibid., 277.
401Ibid., 276.
402Ibid., 278.
403Ibid., 279.
404Ibid., 284.
405Ibid., 286.
406Ibid., 288.
407“Neil Gaiman” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Neil-Gaiman.
408“Neil Gaiman Biography” https://www.chipublib.org/neil-gaimanbiography/.
409Campbell, Hayley. The Art of Neil Gaiman: The Story of a Writer. New
York: Harper Design, 2014, 304−7.
410The Art of Neil Gaiman, 315−18.
411“About Neil” https://www.neilgaiman.com/About_Neil/Biography.
412“Neil Gaiman” https://www.neilgaiman.com/.
413“Neil Gaiman.”
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314Ibid.
315Ibid., 259.
316Ibid.
317Ibid., 259−260.
318Ibid., 260.
319Ibid.
320Ibid.
321Weller, Sam. The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury:
Predicting the Past, Remembering the Future. New York: Harper
Perennial, 2006, 12-19.
322“Olsen, Bob: https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/olsen_bob.
323Ibid., 63−65.
324Ibid., 198−202.
325Ibid.
326Ibid., 214−219.
327Ibid., 317−332.
328Bradbury, Ray. I Sing the Body Electric! And Other Stories. New York:
William Morrow, an Imprint of Harper’s Collins, 2001, 117.
329Ibid., 115.
330Ibid., 118.
331Ibid., 119.
332Ibid., 121.
333Ibid., 120.
334Ibid., 123.
335Ibid., 133.
336Ibid., 134.
337Ibid., 135.
338Ibid.
339Ibid., 137.
340Ibid., 138.
341Ibid., 139.
342Ibid., 140.
343Ibid., 141.
344Ibid.
345Ibid., 144.
346Ibid.
347Ibid., 136.
348“Octavia E. Butler” https://www.biography.com/writer/octavia-e-butler.
349Ibid.
350Butler, Octavia E. Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York: Seven Stories
Press, 2005, 31.
351“Octavia Estelle Butler” https://www.womenshistory.org/educationresources/biographies/octavia-estelle-butler.
352“Octavia Butler: Books, Biography, Education” https://study.com/learn/
lesson/octavia-butler-books-biography-education.html.
353From personal experience, as someone who knew Butler, and who teaches
her work, and as a scholar who has written about Butler. See Smith,
Stephanie A. “Octavia Butler: A Retrospective” Feminist Studies, Vol. 33,
No. 2, Summer 2007 and “Morphing, Materialism and the Marketing of
Xenogenesis” Genders, No. 18, Winter No. 1, 1994.
354“Octavia Butler Bibliography” http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ch.cgi?186.
355Kindred, 288.
356Octavia Butler, Unexpected Stories. New York: Open Road, Integrated
Media, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Kindle, 2014, 63.
357Ibid., 68.
358Ibid.
359Ibid.
360Ibid., 71−72.
361Ibid., 73.
362Ibid., 74.
420“Sarah Howe Biography” http://sarahhowepoetry.com/biography.html.
421“Sarah Howe Poetry” http://sarahhowepoetry.com/.
422“Sarah Howe” https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/sarah-howe.
423“On Relativity” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/10/08/onrelativity/.
424Ibid.
425Ibid.
426Ibid.
Emerson High School - Mckinney, TX
414“Neil Gaiman author 162” https://www.biblio.com/neil-gaiman/author/162.
415“The Mushroom Hunter’s Animation” https://www.themarginalian.
org/2019/11/25/the-mushroom-hunters-animation-neil-gaiman/.
416“A Poem Praises Science” https://medium.com/the-universal-artist-guild/
the-mushrooms-hunters-a-poem-praises-science-a153a48689cf.
417Ibid.
418Ibid.
419“Howe” https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/
poet/102-27095_Howe.
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