Who Goes There?

Two stories in (today’s pick being the second) and I’m pretty sure I’m a Pauline Ashwell convert. Ashwell debuted in 1958 with two SF stories, one under her own name and the other under the Paul Ash pseudonym (I’m not sure if anyone was bamboozled by this), getting two Hugo nominations the following year—the first for her emaculate novella “Unwillingly to School” and the second for Best New Author (went to No Award, although Brian Aldiss came close). She was one of the first female authors to get Hugo-nominated in any of the fiction categories, but despite this and the quality of her work she remains depressingly obscure; it probably doesn’t help that she wrote exclusively for Astounding and later Analog. Many of Ashwell’s short stories (admittedly there aren’t too many of them) have never been reprinted, and according to a certain insider friend of mine her estate has been basically impossible to get in touch with. Surely an Ashwell rediscovery would be possible if it was easier to reprint her work.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1966 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which is not on the Archive but which can be found on Luminist. It was soon reprinted in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1967 (ed. Terry Carr and Donald Wolheim), and later anthologized in the dinosaur-themed collections Behold the Mighty Dinosaur (ed. David Jablonski) and The Science Fictional Dinosaur (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Robert Silverberg, and Charles G. Waugh). This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but these are all out of print. The messed up part is that “The Wings of a Bat” might be Ashwell’s most reprinted story, given that the competition is not stiff.

Enhancing Image

We’re down for our second dinosaur story this month, although it’d be more accurate to call it dinosaur-adjacent since pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. I was surprised to find that at no point (to my recollection) does the narrator of the story call the Pteranodon at its center a dinosaur, since that would’ve been (and still is) a common mistake to make. Consider, for one, how a dromaeosaur (or raptor) has more in common with a chicken than a pterosaur, the latter being a flying reptile and an evolutionary dead end. We don’t actually see any dinosaurs in the story itself, although they do get mentioned, making this a tenuous piece of dinosaur media. We get a couple mentions of certain prehistoric animals too, but thankfully Ashwell does not go deep into details, lest the story age woefully.

Where are we? More importantly, when are we? It’s the Cretaceous, and we follow a team of colonists in a mining camp—not mining the land but the waters of the island. The narrator (whose name I don’t think we get) is on paper a doctor assigned to the camp but who in practice spends much more of his time working on the camp’s newspaper—with a readership of less than thirty people. Doc (as I’ll call him from now on) is, like everyone else on the island, very short (the tallest person is 5’7″, as company-mandated), and does not have a soft spot for local wildlife. The location? Lake Possible, a sort of Loch Ness where prehistoric life really had taken over, although curiously, like I said, we do not encounter any dinosaurs directly.

Indeed, unlike most dinosaur media involving humans, the campers are not so concerned with being hunted by predators, but instead focus on their work and try to get along with each other. Conflict in introduced when Henry, a very young co-worker of Doc’s, brings in a wounded baby pterosaur, much to Doc’s distress; for one he’s a people doctor and not a veterinarian, but he also holds a grudge against pterosaurs. “I maintain that my attitude was not unreasonable, or even unkind. I knew no more about the treatment of sick pterodactyls than Henry did—if anything, less.” Had Doc been a veterinarian he might’ve written the pterosaur off as a losst cause, but with a combination of hope and ignorance he takes the fledgling in, first getting her (for it’s identifiably a her I suppose) to eat—not very successfully. This is where the pterosaurs-are-just-scaly-birds things comes into play, with truth be told is the only thing that struck me as overtly anachronistic; mind you, I say this ias an enthusiastic layman and not an expert.

We know now that pterosaurs and birds, while they were contemporaneous and to some degree related to dinosaurs (the birds being directly related to theropods), did not have a lot in common. Fiona, as the baby Pteranodon comes to be called, proves to be resourceful, but the thrust of the narrative is essentially one where a human nurses a baby bird back to health; in reality a baby Pteranodon would’ve probably been even more independent, being able to fly and fend for itself at a very young age. As it is much of the story is concerned with Doc and company working out a way to feed Fiona and later getting her to use her wings. There’s a certain saying that it takes a village to raise a child, and that’s basically true with raising Fiona, which turns out to be a multi-person endeavor. Still, Doc got the ball rolling.

You may wonder why, feeling as I did, I allowed myself to get stuck with the brute. The explanation, though complicated, can be given in one word: Morale. It’s a tricky thing in any community. When twenty-nine people make up the total population of the world and will for the next nine years, it’s the most important thing of all.

Of course the unspoken other reason for Doc agreeing to take care of Fiona is that he’s becoming slowly fond of her, but thankfully the narration does not push this to the forefront. I know that I’m describing “The Wings of a Bat” in such a way that one could think of it as a sappy yarn about some grumpy guy who learns that children are cool and yadda yadda, but trust me, this could be so much sappier. It works, I think, primarily because Doc, for all his capacity to do good, is not a sentimental person; like a lot of real doctors he cares about the lives of others but is not what we’d call an empath. Leonard McCoy he is not quite. Despite the lack of sentimentalism, the momentum of the narration is impressive, with Ashwell taking a bit after fellow British author Eric Frank Russell in that she conveys an energy that could be mistaken for American brashness.

“The Wings of a Bat” is billed as a novelette, but it reads as shorter because Ashwell deals out information at an almost perfect pace—I say “almost” because she does faulter slightly in the last quarter or so, when she apparently felt obligated to inject some “action” into the narrative. This is a story that starts stronger than it ends, but it maintains a youthful lust for the wonders of life that border on cinematic. Not that this would ever happen, but I can imagine a live-action movie adaptation (maybe a short film) that uses mainly puppetry and animatronics to bring Fiona to life—or, as an alternative, motion capture wherein a person, mimicking what might’ve been a pterosaur’s movements on land, is CG’d over. Even something on this humble a scale can charge the imagination in such a way.

There Be Spoilers Here

Unfortunately and without warning, Fiona does leave the nest, so to speak. More importantly, there comes the possibility of a storm—even a hurricane—that could put the whole mining expedition in jeopardy. The camp’s meteorologist falls ill, and somebody has to head out and get her weather readings for her. (We can send people back a hundred million years but evidently our weather machinery can only be so advanced.) Why Doc of all people has to be the one do this is a little arbitrary, but then without it we wouldn’t have an “explosive” climax—although we didn’t need one, this being my only real issue with the story. During his expedition Doc comes across a rather nosey Pteranodon, which of course is supposed to be Fiona but which Doc is unsure about. “This creature was about twice as large as she’d been when I loosed her. Would Fiona be full grown now? I hadn’t the slightest idea.” Oh I think you do, Doc! Henry supposes that Fiona, now grown up, either thinks herself as like a human or thinks of her human foster family as like pterosaurs. Ultimately Doc accepts the reunion.

The ending is a bittersweet one. We never see Fiona again, and her fate is left uncertain; but the camp is left mostly intact and Doc himself was apparently shielded by the now-grown Pteranodon during the storm. The newspaper Doc runs changes its name to include pterosaur-watching. Well that’s sweet. It took me two and a half days to read this one, which normally sounds bad, but in the case of “The Wings of a Bat” my schedule was cluttered and the time I had to read the story I wanted to savor. The last quarter of it is the weakest part (though the ending itself is nice), but it’s still well-paced enough that I didn’t feel my time was being wasted. What I liked so much about “Unwillingly to School,” namely its punchiness and eagerness to suck the reader into a place and particular character’s mindset (never mind that said character has a disability and she does not constantly hate herself for it), is shown here as well. Doc himself is implied to live with dwarfism, and he very much strikes me as (in the hypothetical movie adaptation) being played by Peter Dinklage. By story’s end I feel like I got live on Lake Possible and its environs, despite sparce descriptions of the wildlife and most of the campers being unnamed. Ashwell has the magic touch.

A Step Farther Out

Did not age as much as I had expected; granted, this is partly due to the aforementioned lack of details given about life in the Cretaceous. Ashwell’s style is also about as spritely and youthful as I had expected, despite her being deep in her thirties at this point and writing for the most conservative magazine in the field. I think people act disappointed with Analog in the last years of John W. Campbell’s editorship because he was still capable of backing strong material, and “The Wings of a Bat” is one example. I can see how one’s interest would wane a bit in the last section, once the “action” kicks in and the doctor’s relationship with the other campers and Fiona takes sort of a back seat, but it’s still short enough that my attention span was not tested. This is, despite the prospect of a cute baby pterodactyl, not the excercise in sentimentality I might’ve assumed. Hell, I can see this working as a movie. Just remember that pterosaurs are not dinosaurs!

See you next time.