Who Goes There?

In the ’50s and early ’60s there was a group of writers, who really aside from their gender had little in common, whom James Blish called pejoratively the “housewives” of F&SF. Judith Merril, Margaret St. Clair, Kit Reed, Carol Emshwiller, Rosel George Brown, and not the least of these, Zenna Henderson. She did appear elsewhere, but nearly all of her fiction appeared in the pages of F&SF, and unlike some of her contemporaries she didn’t turn to writing novels once market forces demanded it. I’ve read a few Henderson stories before, but until now I’ve not given much thought as to what goes into her writing. You could say time has been somewhat uncharitable to Henderson’s work; aside from her work being out of print, her output went down after the early ’70s, possibly because the field had changed so radically that there was no place for someone of her disposition. It’s hard to say. ISFDB lists only two interviews with Henderson, both from the ’70s, and the interviewer is the same fucking guy (Paul Walker, but not that one) in both cases. “Subcommittee” is a somewhat feminist story that probably would not have been impressive ten years after publication. Here we have a first contact story that’s unquestionably Henderson, for both good and ill: it’s a subversion of militaristic alien encounter narratives of the era, even if it still comes off as implicitly conservative. You’ll see what I mean.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was reprinted in The 8th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F (ed. Judith Merril), Gentle Invaders (ed. Hans Stefan Santesson), Young Extraterrestrials (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), New Eves: Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow (ed. Forrest J. Ackerman, Janrae Frank, and Jean Marie Stine), as well as the Henderson collections The Anything Box and Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson.

Enhancing Image

A human (read: American) fleet has come into contact with a fleet of alien ships, or rather the alien ships have brought the party to the humans. The Linjeni are a somewhat humanoid race, albeit covered in fur, like a race of Sasquatches. Serena is a wife and mother, whose husband Thorn is one of the generals aboard the human fleet, and so far things are not looking too good. The problem is that nobody has any idea what the other side is trying to communicate, and while the civilians on both sides are kept safe on a nearby beach, the civilians of both sides are separated by a fence. Officially Serena is not allowed to communicate with the civilians on the other side, and vice versa. The Linjeni are here for a reason—maybe for innocuous reasons, maybe to pick a fight with the humans. Serena already has her work cut out for her, but she soon discovers her son Splinter (get it? Thorn? Splinter?) has dug a hole under the fence so he can hang out with Doovie, a child of the alien race, in secret. On the one hand it’s hard to blame Splinter for wanting such attention, since as Serena points out he’s the only human child in the human party; but still, making direct contact with the Linjeni could have very bad consequences; this being a Henderson story, however, we can guess in advance that the consequences can’t be too bad. Personally I’d be more concerned about contracting or spreading disease when interacting with an alien race, but who am I to judge?

Despite being published in the ’60s “Subcommittee” very much feels like a leftover from the ’50s, and while I do love me some ’50s genre SF I can’t say I was taken with this one. Despite featuring a few main characters there’s only one character in the Shakespearean sense, in that she has some kind of inner life, which would be Serena. We actually get some insight into what Serena is thinking, although it isn’t much. Splinter is a gosh-wow caricature, a pretty common sort that would’ve been the standard for writing children characters in the field then, while the aliens lack individual personalities. Even “Mrs. Pink” (nicknamed for her pink fur), Serena’s counterpart, is a character who sort of exists simply for the sake of the plot. Now, as for the adult male characters, there are only two: Thorn, and another general of the fleet whose name is unimportant. The men, when we do see them, are irrational, panicky creatures whose whole thought processes are hijacked by fears of all-out war with the aliens. These too are caricatures, although I do think Henderson intended for us to take them as such anyway, as opposed to as real characters. The men have to be warmongers so that Serena can not only come out looking all the better but devise a solution, with a little help from her son of course. This is a problem story with two basic questions: “How can we start to understand the aliens’ language?” and “What do these aliens want?” These questions are naturally conjoined at the hip: once you answer the first you can then answer the second.

Once they brought up knitting I knew it was over. Serena becomes an accomplice to Splinter and starts making friends with Mrs. Pink and the other female aliens. At first they aren’t able to communicate with even the most basic words, but thankfully actions will usually do the trick where words fail, and so it doesn’t take long for the humans and aliens to find a common ground. This is all done, of course, in secret, behind Thorn’s back, since he wouldn’t understand things women do together when they’re bored, and anyway, an ill-timed revealing of the connection between the races could prove catastrophic. Still one thing is certain: the Linjeni are not the enemy. I’m about to go on a rant about this story’s politics, but before I do that I wanna give credit where credit is due, in that this is very much an anti-xenophobia narrative. Hostility towards the aliens is consistently framed as misguided at best. When I say Henderson’s brand of “feminism” is actually conservative I don’t mean this in how we modern Americans understand “conservatism,” which is xenophobic and anti-intellectual—a crippling fear of the abnormal. Henderson doesn’t fear the abnormal so much as she embraces the normal, to the point of trying to connect with marginalized groups on the basis of “normalcy.” She worked with interned Japanese-Americans during World War II, which probably contributed to her accepting view of minority groups—assuming we’re supposed to take the Linjeni as a stand-in for minority groups.

There Be Spoilers Here

It turns out the Linjeni are a dying race, and the reason they’ve come to Earth is that our planet is incredibly rich in salt water (indeed it takes up the majority of the planet’s surface), and salt is something the Linjeni need to survive. Their own planet has run dry on the stuff, and the survivors have become a collective of vagabonds. “The Linjeni must have come seeking asylum—or demanding it. Neighbors who were afraid to ask—or hadn’t been given time to ask.” If the human fleet were to strike now they would be committing genocide, unbeknownst to the men aboard. The moral implications of the situation might’ve been more fleshed out in the hands of a different writer (but then, maybe not), but regardless we aren’t given much time to dwell on this before Serena and Splinter swoop in to save the day, managing to reason with the human fleet’s high command and prevent what would’ve been a very costly war. (I should mention at some point that this story moves fairly quickly, which I guess is a positive. It’s classified as a novelette, but if so it barely counts.) The nuclear family is such a sacred model (Henderson supposes) that it can serve as common ground for two sentient races who can barely understand each other through words. Of course it would be astronomically good luck (or bad) for humanity to make contact with a fellow intelligent race in the universe, but to have said race not only be somewhat humanoid but conventionally monogamous? That must be like hitting the jackpot ten times over. Imagine the odds. Of course I’m being a little unfair here, but our emotions are never fair and always in the direction of the wind, and reading the climax of this story I couldn’t help but feels like I’d been cheated in some way.

A Step Farther Out

It’s… cute. So naturally I wasn’t a fan. Sorry. (I will admit I’m one of those few unhappy people who found This Is How You Lose the Time War to be too saccharine for my liking.) It’s easy to poke fun at, but then so is anything that is earnest, and I do think Henderson (between this and her other stories I’ve read) was being earnest if nothing else. It must’ve been really something, in the ’60s, to go from the invention of The Pill™ at the start of the decade to, by the end of it, seeing feminism not only advance rapidly but splinter into some very interesting and intellectually demanding schools of thought. Henderson’s “feminism,” if it can really be called that, is totally lacking in intersectionality, and its cloying admiration of the nuclear family model now reads as like nails on a chalkboard. And yet, I don’t think a male chauvinist, especially of the time, could’ve written “Subcommittee,” which in itself should be worth something.

See you next time.