Who Goes There?

I’ve occasionally covered authors who had meteoric rises such that they garnered reputations only a couple years after entering the field, but Vernor Vinge falls on the opposite end of the spectrum. Vinge debuted in 1965 with the story I’m talking about today, but he would not start to make an impression on the field until his cyberpunk novella “True Names” in 1981, and would not surpass that until A Fire Upon the Deep in 1992. This is all a little pointless to say now, since Vinge (sadly now retired from writing fiction) has long since made his case for being one of the important SF writers in living memory. His Zones of Thought series has one of the most unique and captivating space opera premises. “True Names” was an eerily prescient glimpse at what virtual reality and cybersecurity might entail. He has won five Hugos and is one of the few people to earn the Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement. I like him.

“Apartness” was Vinge’s first published story; he would’ve been all of 19 when he wrote it. Now, tempting as it is to pick on a literal teenager, I wanna be clear that for all its flaws, this is a pretty ambitious story. Here we have a post-apocalypse story that tackles, rather directly, the ramifications of real-world colonialism. It’s a rare genre SF story from the era that tackles race relations without resorting to metaphor. This is a lot to chew on for a 19-year-old, and it hints at an ambition Vinge would take advantage of much later. I recommend it, despite its roughness.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1965 issue of New Worlds, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1966 (ed. Terry Carr and Donald Wollheim) and Under African Skies (ed. Gardner Dozois and Mike Resnick). Then of course there’s The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, which is supposed to be a complete volume of Vinge’s short fiction but which does not include a few stories that were published afterward. Somebody should update that maybe.

Enhancing Image

Context matters, so I’m frontloading the review with some of that if you don’t mind. Some three centuries into the future, half the world has gone to shit. The “North World War” was a series of calamities that left the entire northern hemisphere devoid of human life, with only South America, South Africa, and Australia and I guess New Zealand too escaping the carnage; and even then, the survivors were by no means unscathed. South America has since been “unified” by a family line of dictators, resulting in one massive police state. We follow Diego Ribera y Rodrigues, an anthropologist on a seafaring expedition near Antarctica, who has to deal with a cynical captain and a group of government-appointed astrologers, who basically take the place of scientists. What these astrologers could be doing or accomplishing is unclear, but it is clear that Ribera’s only allowed to be here because he has good connections, otherwise “el Presidente Imperial” would be happy with just superstitious busybodies.

Vinge gives us a whole lot of backstory upfront for a short novelette, and right away you might guess how this future world might be unusual for genre SF in 1965. The main characters are, at the very least, not white Americans or Europeans; actually you’d be hard-pressed to find another SF story from the era that has a cast of Hispanics. There’s an African character and another part of the backstory Vinge does not reveal until much later, but we’ll get to that. This is also a rare case in SF of a first contact narrative between two groups of humans; because, you see, the people on the ship find that there are also people in Antarctica. Which is weird. Nobody was supposed to be living here. Now if you know your history then you know first contact between an indigenous people and a more “advanced” group of settlers has always ended badly, and the following encounter runs a similar course. Naturally the people living in the Antarctic are not natice to that land, but it becomes clear they have become accustomed to the harshness of the land and have not been in contact with other human civilizations for a very long time. Delgado, the ship captain, is unimpressed.

Vinge, even as a teenager, understood that for our talk of wanting to see exotic alien worlds, there are places on Earth that are already strange enough, just from their geography and weather. Ribera and his fellow South Americans, accustomed to warmer climate, are taken aback by the stark coldness of the Antarctic landscape—the sheer desolation of it. “The only things that seemed even faintly normal were the brilliant blue sky, and the sun which cast long shadows into the drowned valley; a sun that seemed always at the point of setting even though it had barely risen.” There’s not so much a subgenre as a subspecies of SFF, the lost world tory, that was pretty popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, and which was about civilized (read: white) man venturing into some unmapped corner of the globe and finding lost civilizations, ancient creatures, and so on. Of course, as the surface of the globe became more or less entirely charted, the lost world story faded into antiquity—except for when there’s a twist. “Apartness” is a lost world story with a couple twists: firstly, the explorers are not white, and secondly, the “lost world” is a place that had once been known but, as a result of a quasi-apocalypse, had been forgotten.

As for the people in the Antarctic, they’re not dissimilar from what you’d find in an old lost world story, with a race of ape-people who are semi-civilized but who might also want the explorers for lunch. There’s a big language barrier issue; whatever language the ice people speak it has been isolated from the rest of humanity for a couple centuries. Ribera discovers that the ice people are the survivors of what must’ve been a shipwreck, although what exactly happened will not be revealed until after we have left the Antarctic. There’s certain information Vinge, rather coyly, refrains from giving us, which made me scratch my head whilst reading the story a bit. The structure of the thing is a bit odd. There’s some useful context that’s denied us until after the central action of the narrative. If it seems like I’m trying a little too hard to not jump ahead it’s because the conflict, or rather the question, of the story is a bit foggy without that last piece of the puzzle. And it is a mystery, with who these people are and what civilization they could’ve descended from. “Ribera’s mind returned to the puzzle: where were these people from? How had they gotten here?” You could flesh out this scenario into at least a novella, which Vinge probably should’ve.

There Be Spoilers Here

Things go badly between the groups and Ribera takes a harpoon to the abdomen, which honestly he should not have survived (especially because, by his own admission, there wasn’t much medical help on hand), but a little too miraculously he survives. I know why Vinge did this: because Ribera is our POV character and if he dies then the final scene becomes a dialogue between two characters we knew nothing about previously. I guess that would be worse since it would slightly undermine what ends up being a pretty powerful closer; indeed it’s only here at the end that it becomes clear what point Vinge is trying to make. Hitherto there have been little inklings of what “Apartness” is about, but only with the introduction of Lunama and his subsequent infodump do all the pieces fit. Lunama is a government guy, part of the propaganda wing—and a black African, a proud “Zulunder.” It turns out that, among the other atrocities committed during the North World War, an actual race war erupted in South Africa, with black Africans taking to exterminating the white settlers in the region. On the one hand, that’s a spicy meatball; on the other hand, Vinge at least tries to not play into the (presumably) white reader’s fear of a “white genocide.” If anything there’s the implication that whitey might’ve had it coming, as brutal as that sounds. You don’t read about anti-colonial extremism often in old-timey SF often, especially from a non-reactionary viewpoint.

Ya know, it’s an awkward word, like you would never hear someone use it in a conversation, but “apartness” sure does sound similar to “apartheid.” Vinge is playing an association game with us.

But, as Ribera points out, you can’t entirely wipe out a people with as much power and influence as the white South Africans had. Colonialism always leaves its mark. “The Afrikaners had left a lasting mark, obvious to any unbiased observer; the very name Zulunder, which the present Africans cherished fanatically, was in part a corruption of English.” We also learn that the people in Antarctica are the decendants of white South Africans who, desperate to escape the carnage, escaped on two luxury cruisers, housing a total of some 5,000 people. Ribera, now understanding the why of the situation but also understanding this is a couple hundred years post-race war and genocide, speaks up to convince Lunama that the Antarctic barbarians need not be exterminated, but Lunama makes it clear they’re perfectly happy to leave those people basically alone—cut off from the rest of humanity. The “civilized” man, left without a colonized land and people to exploit, has descended into barbarism. (Incidentally, or maybe not, Ribera calls these runaway white South Africans “aborigines” at one point, which is funnily ironic.) Certainly from a modern perspective this is a spicy meatball, and I’ll be honest, I did not expect someone like Vernor Vinge to make such a point: that the “Afrikaners,” in thinking themselves innately superior to the people they’re exploiting, have deservedly been left to rot in their own “apartness”—their separation from mankind. It doesn’t help, of course, that the richest person in the world (depending on the time of day) is a fascistic and socially inept white South African.

A Step Farther Out

Obviously I wouldn’t recommend “Apartness” as one’s first Vinge, although if you know your SF then you’ve probably read at least some Vinge already. It’s an outlier in his oeuvre, but while it would not cover the same territory as more mature Vinge and indeed has a touch of the amateur, it’s a good time provided you’re a fan who’s curious about a great writer’s early days and/or your interest is piqued by the somewhat unique and thorny material Vinge is playing with. Most authors’ first stories are creaky and unassuming, and while “Apartness” certainly is creaky it is not unassuming; rather it’s an ambitious start for someone—I need remind you—who was a literal teenager at the time. I’m able to give works of literature the proper context when understanding them, so I enjoyed it.

See you next time.