Who Goes There?

Few authors hit the ground running, making their debut more or less fully formed creatively, but then even fewer authors can be said to have had their creative peak three decades into their careers. Clifford Simak is one such rarity, as he made his genre debut in 1931, only to start putting out really good work consistently by the ’50s. The stories that would make up his 1952 “novel” City were mostly written in the ’40s, but it was in the ’50s that Simak set a high bar both in the quality and quantity of his work. He wrote at a mile a minute at this time, mostly short fiction for the newfangled Galaxy, which he had taken such a quick liking to that his novel Time and Again (serialized as Time Quarry) had its first installment in Galaxy‘s inaugural issue. Rarely do an author and a magazine have such chemistry together, but in the ’50s and early ’60s the two were all but inseparable. Simak was born on August 3rd, 1904, so 120 years ago today. His career spanned from the early ’30s to the early ’80s, right as the cyberpunk movement was kicking into gear. Nowadays he reads as a breath of fresh air compared to the more urban and macho works of his contemporaries, as he was a diehard Midwesterner and pastoralist. “No Life of Their Own” similarly is very Midwestern and very pastoral, and for better or worse (I would say better) it serves as a good entry point for Simak’s unique charm.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1959 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted in Tomorrow’s Children (ed. Isaac Asimov) and the Simak collections All the Traps of Earth and Other Stories and No Life of Their Own and Other Stories.

Enhancing Image

It’s unclear how old Steve the narrator is when he’s recounting this story, but we’re told of one summer vacation during his childhood when life on the farm got mighty strange—as in stranger than normal. Steve and his parents are your average farmers in the American heartland, although lately the family’s luck hasn’t been good. “The tomato crop had failed and two of the cows had died and a bear had robbed the bees and busted up the hives and the tractor had broken down and cost $78.90 to get fixed.” Their neighbors aren’t doing much better for the most part, not least because said neighbors aren’t from around these parts—indeed, they’re not even from this planet. Steve doesn’t have human boys his age to play with, so instead he hangs out with the kids of alien families, who themselves are of different species. We never learn the real names of these other kids, but we get nicknames since Steve finds their real names too hard to pronounce: we have Fancy Pants, Nature Boy, and Butch. Fancy Pants, as you can guess, thinks a little highly of himself and even gets around by levitating, as is the norm for his race. Nature Boy is of a furry but still humanoid race and gets along with the local wildlife. Butch is the son of a well-to-do man who worked as an optometrist on his home planet but who has moved to Earth to try his luck at farming. Thing is, the only farmer in the “neighborhood” who’s been having good luck is the only other human farmer mentioned, Andy Carter, whom nobody likes and who apparently has a foul temper.

The plot is a bit loose, so first I’d like to focus on some of the details, as I think they paint a more vivid portrait than the actual events of the story. This is a concise example of how Simak likes to write aliens, which is to say he likes to write aliens who are basically humanoid and who can be understood by humans on at least some level. The aliens in “No Life of Their Own,” even the more “villainous” ones (which we’ll get to), are especially akin to humans, and it probably doesn’t hurt that here the families of the boys Steve befriends are clearly stand-ins for real-world migrant workers. Mind you that when Simak started writing SF in the ’30s the migrant worker was typically thought of as a white American from the rural Midwest who has traveled to California, or somewhere else along either coast. We’re talking about a sympathetic view of immigrants possibly informed by The Grapes of Wrath and other works that were quite left-leaning and pro-worker—and which in the ’30s were also successful with readers. “No Life of Their Own” was published in 1959 but very much evokes rural life in the ’30s and earlier, which makes sense since Simak grew up in Wisconsin in the early years of the 20th century. Come to think of it, I do wonder if Simak was influenced by John Steinbeck, especially given how Steinbeckian(?) this story feels. It’s a somewhat idealized depiction of farm life, but that’s justified I think given how Simak had actually lived through it and how ultimately this is about one man looking back on an episode of his childhood. This is not a story about racism exactly, although it’s very much an anti-xenophobia narrative in which the humans and several alien races all find common ground—including the “halflings” who kick the plot into gear.

The boys discover that Andy Carter unknowingly has a group of short humanoid aliens (hence them being called halflings) helping him tend the land, the only problem then being that the adults, for some reason, can’t see them. They ask Butch’s dad about it and for better or worse he knows how these halflings work—that they’re kind of a nuisance back where Butch’s dad comes from and that they’re basically a race of mimics, latching onto a “host” and taking after that person’s appearance. Thing is, these halflings always work in groups, or rather in little tribes, and if they latch onto one person than everyone else close in proximity will suffer. “For,” says Butch’s dad, “it is an axiom that fortune for one man is misfortune for the rest.” We then get two problems, a practical and ethical one: What do we do about these halflings? and, Is it right to interfere with the Carter farm like this? Of course Carter doesn’t know he’s getting free help, but he’ll sure as shit notice the difference once the halflings are somehow removed from the picture. This brings up another problem: Can the halflings be reasoned with? Would it be possible to negotiate? Given that this is Simak I don’t think I’d be spoiling things by saying yes, the halflings are ultimately reasonable creatures. (I struggle to think of aliens in Simak’s fiction that can’t be reasoned with in human terms at all.) So the halflings exist on some weird dimensional level that make them transparent, although Butch’s dad is at least able to design a pair of glasses that would allow kids to see them; after all, this is still rooted in science, not magic. Well, maybe a bit of magic. The kids can see the halflings with these special glasses, but adults still can’t see them. As Butch’s dad explains to Steve’s dad, “You and I are too fixed in reality.” So, what to do about the halflings?

Before we get into real spoilers, a few other things to note. While farm life as shown here is written in kind of a rose-tinted fashion, Simak’s evocation of childhood feels genuine, helped by the boys being written such that they come off as actual kids—if not necessarily “alien” in the case of Steve’s friends. The boys like to pull pranks and rough-house, which actually causes the plot to escalate, and they also look up to their dads. This is very much a boy’s world, with the only female character showing up (that I recall) being Steve’s mom, who serves as comfort for him in the back end when Our Heroes™ are at their lowest point. This is also about a time and place when corporal punishment (namely belting) was still very much the norm, and Steve doesn’t think anything of his dad beating him, even with hindsight. Just as curiously, while these are rural folks, futuristic technology is by no means absent, as the boys have a few gadgets to play with, including a “live-it” which seems to be a VR headset (virtual reality here being a reasonable extrapolation on what would’ve been the TV boom in the ’50s), and also a “hopper,” which as far as I can tell is some kind of teleportation device. There’s a weird little episode in the middle involving a cat getting caught in one of these hoppers, which I thought a needless digression, although it does foreshadow a more serious mishap regarding this bit of tech. Generally this is a story more rooted in characters and ideas than the plot, which on the one hand you could argue it could’ve been tightened up to become a novelette, but also my counterpoint is that the vibes are kind of immaculate. Simak’s stories are often quite pleasant, if not always memorable (he does phone it in sometimes), but this is a fairly memorable story of his.

There Be Spoilers Here

Fancy Pants getting payback at Nature Boy for a prank involving a skunk leads to Nature Boy getting teleported to the dimension the halflings are in, rendering him invisible—at least without the glasses. The families panic over this, understandably, but they hatch a plan to rescue Nature Boy—and maybe get their hands on one of the halflings while their at it. The halflings are what cause this whole plot to kick off, but I like the idea that petty antics between kids are what heighten the stakes. Anyway, The plan is (naturally) a success, and they even manage to get a word with one of the halflings, who not only resembles Carter but also talks like him. This is a bit disturbing, but Our Heroes™ quickly learn that the halflings can’t help who they mimic really. What the halflings really want, as it turns out, are those live-it sets, one for each of them. The halflings mimic other people’s actions, because they seem preconditioned for it but also they like watching other people; it’s their main pastime. The live-it is like an immersive and personal TV set, therefore the halflings see it as pretty neat. Simak makes a pretty curious suggestion here about technology and entertainment, as said through Fancy Pants’s dad. It’s not necessarily “correct,” but it’s interesting.

“There was a time when the human race found it necessary to congregate in families and tribes for companionship and entertainment. Then the race got the record player and the radio and TV and there was less need for get-togethers. A man had entertainment of his own in his home. He need not move beyond his living room to be entertained. So the spectator and group sports simply petered out.”

Simak lived through the birth of radio and TV, and while these mediums started as aimed at groups or families, something to play in the kitchen or living room (you would only have on TV set in the whole house then), he postulated (I think at least somewhat correctly) that these modes of “entertainment” would become more personalized, so that everyone would have their own radio or TV set. What used to be a group activity will become more individualistic. The conflict at the heart of “No Life of Their Own” is resolved by the farmers making a deal with the halflings, to give them live-it sets and have them disperse so that they wouldn’t group around a single property. It’s hard to gauge how Simak feels about his own solution for the problem, because it does solve the problem, but also he seems ambivalent about the prospect of people not coming together as often for entertainment, or more generally for shared experiences. There’s a little tinge of bitterness to what is otherwise a happy ending (well, except for Fancy Pants, who gets “grounded”), which I think makes it memorable.

A Step Farther Out

Despite being the title story in one volume of that recent series collecting all of Simak’s short fiction, I do wish “No Life of Their Own” got reprinted more often. This is typical Simak in broad strokes, but it’s the little things (especially when you’ve read enough Simak like me) that pulled me in and kept me thinking about it after I had finished reading it. It’s a short novella that, like “The Big Front Yard,” more or less gives you a crash course in what you can expect from Simak and what makes him different from other genre SF writers of the time. There are some surprisingly incisive statements here about technology and race relations that are lurking beneath a charming and somewhat childlike pastoralism.

See you next time.