Who Goes There?

It’s May 3, 2024, and I’m being forced to live in interesting times. College students are protesting an ongoing genocide in a country that the federal government and American military contractors support, and the antediluvian head of state is calling for protests—not real protests, but more like when a bunch of people sit in a circle and chat like it’s a fucking book club or AA meeting. Conservatives want protesters’ skulls crushed, liberals also want protesters’ skulls crushed but are usually much more “polite” about wishing violence upon people who were born literally this century and who are committing the “crime” of being disgusted with American complicity in atrocities. And worst of all, it’s an election year. Is this 2024 or 1968? You may be thinking, “Brian, you’re being awfully political right now, and also you’re dating your review.” You’re right on both counts. In fact I dated it at the very start. Of course people might not know about this blog in five years, or even know what America is—or was.

Not that the above is strictly irrelevant either, since today’s story is also about the folly and immorality of empire, although its conclusion is much more optimistic than what I’ve been able to consider for the current real-world situation. I haven’t said anything about April Smith yet because unfortunately I can’t say anything about April Smith, although I can say a good deal about the fact that I have nothing to say about her. Smith has two stories to her name, with “Birthright” being her only solo work, and in neither case do we get any biographical information in the introductory blurb. We don’t know when she was born or when she (probably) died, where she grew up, what non-genre work she might’ve done, or even if “April Smith” is her real name. She is, like too many lady authors who were active in ’50s genre SF, a ghost of that era.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1955 issue of If, which is on the Archive. It would not be reprinted in any form for over sixty years; for better or worse Smith let it fall out of copyright, so the full story is on Project Gutenberg. It would finally be reprinted in book form in Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957), editor unknown.

Enhancing Image

Cyril Kirk is an ambitious young man, top of his class, and while some dudes might want a fancy car or a high-powered gaming laptop, Kirk wants a planet that he sees as worthy of patronage. And theoretically at least he has options: the Galactic Union contains dozens of worlds, mostly for the purposes of colonization and resource mining. Unfortunately Ross, Kirk’s superior, makes him a planetary advisor on one of the most obscure and least valuable worlds in the Union: Nemar. Even someone as well-read as Kirk can’t remember this planet off the top of his head, and further research doesn’t help much. “The documents on Nemar, all the information he could dig up, confirmed Ross’s statement that the planet held nothing of commercial value.” So he’s been assigned a planet that, at least as far as the Union is concerned, is basically worthless. It won’t be a short assignment either: five mandatory years, plus five optional, although Kirk suspects he won’t be using those extra years. He won’t be the only Terran on Nemar, but that won’t help him much either, since we soon learn the people he’ll be working with are as enthusiastic about making the natives useful as he is.

Once we land on Nemar, a few things become clear: the natives have no interest in contributing to the Union, and perhaps more importantly, they seem like they have no need to. I have to stop for a second here to say that “Birthright” is overtly a narrative about colonialism, about a member of the empire trying (and spoilers, failing) to “enlighten” the indigenous population. Overall it’s a pretty progressive-minded story, actually far more left-leaning for the ’50s than I had expected, but it does also play into Orientalist fantasies, what with the natives of Nemar being perpetually semi-nude (although they consider it to be normal attire), conventionally attractive yet exotic, and they’re described several times as “naive” and “childlike.” Nemar is clearly supposed to be like a paradise, like vacationing on one of the Hawai’ian island. Incidentally it’s noted at the beginning that the natives are basically homo sapiens, just with a unique skin complexion, and that Nemar itself is very similar to the tropics on Earth. If you were to adapt “Birthright” for film or TV (and you could do that without the headache of securing rights, since it’s public domain), you would probably shoot in Hawai’i, or maybe Samoa if you’re feeling a little more adventurous. My biggest gripe with the story, aside from its lack of a solid ending (will get to that), is that while it’s a cutting criticism of colonial arrogance, this criticism is also undermined by now-outdated racial politics.

While reading I was reminded most of Joseph Conrad, and also the movie Fitzcarraldo. Both Apocalypse Now and Fitzcarraldo are movies about arrogant white men in exotic locales, with the explicit and implicit comments on colonialism; and there’s also the fact that both are infamous “I will kill everyone on this set and then myself for the bit” movies. “Birthright” is nowhere near as daunting; if anything it comes close to being a fish-out-of-water comedy. Kirk has a native woman, Nanae, who looks after the house he’s been given, and he practically trips over his own cock trying not to ask for this woman’s hand in marriage upon first seeing her. He cannot come to terms with the fact that he is super-horny over Nanae and it embarrasses him, not least because fellow Terrans in the village (including Jeannette, an actual Earth woman) see his plight for what it is immediately. Indeed everyone seems to see right through Kirk except for Nanae, although it’s possible she knows and is too polite to say anything. The lax attitude of the other Terrans, who at this point are more expats than workers of the Union, also troubles Our Hero™, as if something in the air has changed them, made them forget their purpose here. “Somehow, the planet had infected them.” There must be some secret “weapon” the natives use to pacify the PAs, and Kirk’s gonna find out what it is.

Not to get nostalgic over an era I was not even close to being alive for, but I admire that at this time in SF history you could have stories with meaty ideas that were still only short stories or novellas. Nowadays it seems like if you wanna draw any attention in the field you have to write, bare minimum, a long novella (say close to 40,000 words) that would be too lengthy for magazine publication but just the right length for an overpriced Tor chapbook. “Birthright” just barely meets the SFWA criterion for novella length and, truth be told, it could’ve been a few thousand words longer; not saying this as a negative criticism. Smith’s style is breezy and on the side of minimalist. The story can be thought of less as a “story” and more like a series of Socratic dialogues, although these dialogues individually tend to be brief and there was never a point where I wondered if or when Smith would “get on with it.” This is not an action narrative; it’s about a man’s slow but sure transformation from an agent of the empire to someone who’s wondering if his bootlicking has been worth the effort—or even if it’s been well-intentioned. Nemar is basically a socialist utopia in the mode of what Ursula K. Le Guin might’ve envisioned (which has its own problems, but we’re not getting into that today), a society where there’s no fixed hierarchy, where parents respect their children, where money seems to be a non-issue, and where’s almost no industry to speak of.

There Be Spoilers Here

This leads to Kirk figuring out the planet’s “secret,” which is really that there is no secret. The natives have cultivated a society that’s founded on compassion, as opposed to most Union societies (and by extension our society) which are founded on protection of property. When Kirk tries to convince the village council on voting in favor of mining operations on the planet, the council votes no. The council’s rationale for this denial of industry is pretty hard to argue with, for both Kirk and the reader. An unnamed member of the council goes on by far the longest monologue in the story, and I may as well quote “all” of it here. I say “all” because the paragraph the monologue is a part of is even longer, if you can believe it:

“As you said, the mining is very hard, disagreeable work. We feel that when you begin to do disagreeable things for an end that is not valuable in itself, you are beginning to tread a dangerous path. There is no telling where it will end. One such situation leads to another. We might end up cooped up in a room all day, shut away from the sun and air, turning bolts on an assembly line to make machines, as we have heard often happens on Terra. […] Being surrounded by technical conveniences isn’t worth that. […] On Terra and on most of the other planets we have had word of, people seem to spend their time making all kinds of things that have no value in themselves, because they can be sold or traded. Other people spend their time trying to persuade people to buy these useless things. Still other people spend all day making records of how many of these things have been sold. No! This path is not for us. […] We don’t know how it came about that all these people spend their time at these unpleasant, useless things. They can’t have wanted it that way. No human being could want to spend his time doing silly, pointless things. How could you believe in yourself? How could you walk proudly? How could you explain it to your children? We must be careful not to make the mistake of taking the first step in that direction.”

So capitalism does not flourish on the planet, at least for now. Kirk is, at least professionally speaking, a failure; but at the same time he comes to realize he may have won on a personal and moral level—that by “giving in” to the ways of these people he seems on his way to redeeming himself. He accepts that he has become like a child again. He even ponders, at the very end, the possibility of earning Nanae’s affections and returning to Earth with her. This ending sentiment is fine, but also the story doesn’t so much “end” as it comes to a stop, which bothered me initially.

A Step Farther Out

I’m sort of dismayed it took seven decades for “Birthright” to appear in book form; surely this has nothing to do with the sexism of anthology editors in the ’50s until at least the ’80s. There are some pretty rotten stories from this era that have been reprinted multiple times, but not a genuinely interesting yarn like this one. It’s flawed in a couple ways, and I wish April Smith had continued trying her hand at genre writing (this was her second story and it would be her last, at least under the April Smith name), but it shows a level of ambition not too often found in ’50s genre writing. I get pretty sentimental about the ’50s in the context of genre SF because it really was like the Klondike gold rush for pulp writers, each author looking to make some kind of living off writing what was often perceived as childish at the time, looking to get lucky and even publish a bestseller. Most of the attempts would be failures, of course, but there are so many hidden gems from this period that I’m convinced that despite being so often mined for anthologies, we have not even come close to drying this particular well.

See you next time.