Who Goes There?

One of the things that made The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction unique in its early years was its mysterious ability to attract authors who normally wouldn’t be caught dead in one of the genre magazines. In the ’50s, if you were a “serious” short story writer (and wanted the big bucks), you would aim for The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, and even Playboy. Still, you had famous mainstream authors like Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson appearing in F&SF without issue. Ann Warren Griffith is another one of these mainstream authors, although she is leagues more obscure (at least now) than Bradbury and Jackson. According to Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas’s intro for “Captive Audience,” Griffith was “an actress, a librarian, a shipfitter, a pilot in the WASPS, a Red Cross ‘overseas-type girl,’ an ‘editorial assistant-type girl’ on trade magazines and, of course, a writer.” Griffith was apparently busy in several outlets, but she only wrote two SFF stories, both of them for F&SF.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1953 issue of F&SF, which is on the Archive. To my surprise “Captive Audience” has been reprinted a few times over the decades, including The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Third Series (ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas), reprinting what the editors felt were the best F&SF stories from 1953. There’s also Tomorrow, Inc.: Science Fiction About Big Business (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander), which sounds like catnip for those who want SF that satirizes American capitalism. For something that’s more recent and in print we look toward Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957), edited by… somebody. I wish I knew who this person was.

Enhancing Image

This is gonna be half a review and half an essay on the nature of dystopian science fiction, because frankly I don’t have a lot to say about “Captive Audience” but I do have a fair bit more to say about how it figures into the hitory of dystopian SF. The subgenre goes back a long way—back to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, and even further back to E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” and Jack London’s The Iron Heel, although the first of these is often cited as the prototypical dystopian SF work. Regardless, these are stories about Bad Futures™, wherein the author makes an “If this goes on—” kind of statement, in some way criticizing some aspect of what was then their current society. Dystopia is typically defined by taking a current issue and taking it to a logical extreme. For example, Ray Bradbury reacted to what he saw as TV enabling anti-intellectualism with book burnings in Fahrenheit 451, and Aldous Huxley reacted to the rampant hedonism of the 1920s by turning it into a cult of pleasure in Brave New World.

In the case of “Captive Audience” the explosive rise in consumer culture in the years following World War II is taken to an admittedly cartoonish extreme by having advertisements that talk to you constantly. It’s the near-future—so near that it more reads like a slightly altered version of the ’50s—and we’re met with Fred and Mavis, a happy well-to-do couple who in most ways embody the “ideal” affluent American family. Fred is the Assistant Vice President of Sales at MV, short for Master Ventriloquism; like most vapid shitheads he’s into marketing. Fred and Mavis make for almost a perfect couple, except Fred has to deal with a certain in-law. “Fred honestly didn’t know if he would have gone ahead and married Mavis if he’d known about her grandmother.” Grandmother has been in jail for the crime of wearing earplugs, after the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional since they obstruct advertising—the freedom of marketing being held higher than freedom of the individual.

I wanna say the Supreme Court would never make so assbackwards a decision, but the past few years have shown us that this is actually the most believable part of the story.

In the America of “Captive Audience,” advertising is not only virtually omnipresent, but quite vocal; even cereal boxes will sing jingles at you, which makes me wonder how these things are profitable, given the tech involved. Going back to Brave New World, advertising has so thoroughly infiltrated the human psyche that people will regurgitate jingles at each other—that they will even think about jingles and slogans as if they’re Bible passages. Both Huxley and Griffith satirize the mindless pleasure-seeking that would’ve been spreading during what were, incidentally, years of huge economic growth in the US especially. Fred and Mavis are total converts of this new pleasure-at-all-costs mindset and are thus totally devoid of humanity; these are not sympathetic characters, although it’d be hard to call them monstrous. The funniest scene hass to be where Mavis has a splitting headache and decides she needs an aspirin, only she can’t pick between the three bottles she has based on their advertising—so she takes one of each. Robert Sheckley would’ve been proud to write this bit.

As for Grandmother, she fits into this weird archetype of the one character in a dystopian narrative who remembers the beforetimes. She is apparently the only person Fred knows who rejects the ad overload of the modern age, and when she gets out of prison her rebellious attitude is liable to ruin Fred’s reputation as an upstanding citizen. Aside from the inherent joke of an old lady being a remorseless “criminal,” I do have to wonder how much time has passed since American society metamorphized into this soulless hellscape that knows not love nor individuality; given the ’50s-isms it’s probable that Griffith didn’t mean the action to take place more than a couple decades into what was then the future. Endless jingles and Muzak pollute the ears of the populace, although strangely I don’t remember television getting more than maybe a few words of attention.

As with a lot of dystopian narratives, the characters are really not the highlight of the story. Grandmother is endearing, but she’s not the protagonist, being little more than a side character who appears so as to act as a reader surrogate; otherwise we would not be able to latch onto goddamn anybody. The closest we have to a real protagonist, the character who’s faced with a problem upon which the story hinges and whose actions matter the most, is Fred, whom as I’ve said is a shell of a man. Remember how John Savage, the “hero” of Brave New World, doesn’t even appear until halfway through the novel? Anyway, while there are a few good jokes here, and while Griffith’s observations are sadly on-point, I didn’t find myself thinking about this one much as I was reading it. “Captive Audience” is socially relevant now, especially since people have become more overtly anti-advertisement and anti-capitalist (again) in recent years. It’s pessimistic in that it assumes the average American is, or will become, incredibly stupid and short-sighted, but it’s sure not boring!

There Be Spoilers Here

Rather than try to change the world or even change her relatives’ minds, Grandmother finds she’s quickly gotten sick of the outside world and opts to return to prison. Again, it’s a little funny, this old lady who’s probably buddies with actual criminals. But the implication is that prison is partly where non-conformists go, those who commit the crime of standing “in the way of progress,” as Fred puts it, although what he means by progress is unclear. The story would be perfectly satisfactory if it were to stop there, but then Fred gets the “bright” idea that Grandmother is a non-conformist because being in prison has not allowed her to adapt to the brave new world. Prisoners aren’t consumers because they’re basically slaves so there’s the question of what to do about this “problem.” Indeed, what to do…

There are several flavors of dystopian ending: there’s the protagonist-gets-their-shit-kicked-in ending, the ray-of-hope ending, the Bolivian army ending, and so on. While Grandmother does not meet a destructive end like John Savage or Winston Smith, it’s implied that she and her kind will at some point be forced to join the crowd—that the skyscraper-high iron of capitalism, a la FLCL, will smooth out the wrinkles, as it were. I say this is a comedy, but it’s a bit of a dark one.

A Step Farther Out

I chuckled a couple times. “Captive Audience” has a grim ending but it’s more or less a comedy, and unfortunately an all-too-believable one. Still I find the problem here to be the same I have when reading Robert Sheckley stories, in that there’s a point being made and I can’t tell if there’s anything beneath that one meaning we’re supposed to take from it. It’s a ten-page story that was clearly meant to be taken a certain way so I can’t fault it much, but it’s just that I tend to like stories that make me think and feel more. The characters being totally superficial was no doubt intentional, but part of me wonders if this would’ve caught my eye more as a satire if it had more of a touch of humanity to it. But hey, it’s funny!

See you next time.