Who Goes There?

I know Valentine’s Day is still a few days off, but now is as good a time as any to return to two of my favorite old-timey SFF writers: Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. Kuttner and Moore both made their debuts in Weird Tales in the ’30s, with Moore being a few years older than her future husband and also having entered the field a few years earlier. Moore quickly became one of the most beloved writers on the market, such that Kuttner, himself very young and new to writing, sending her fan letters. The two found that they were both California denizens, and the mutual admiration between the writers soon budded into romance. They married in 1940, and stayed so until Kuttner’s untimely death in 1958, just short of his 43rd birthday. Apart they were very fine writers, each in his or her own way, but together they synthesized such that there’s continued speculation to this day as to who wrote what (or how much) of most of their collaborative fiction. Nearly all of the fiction they wrote together was published either under a few pseudonyms or Kuttner’s name alone. (I have to assume using Kuttner’s name was partly institutional misogyny and also the result of unfortunate timing, since while Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales loved Moore’s work, he also retired from the magazine before dying shortly thereafter in 1940. Other editors of the period were not so egalitarian.) Today’s story, “When the Bough Breaks,” was first published under “Lewis Padgett.”

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, with its iconic Timmins cover and featuring one of Theodore Sturgeon’s most famous stories. “When the Bough Breaks” has been reprinted quite a few times, in Beyond Time and Space (ed. August Derleth), The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology (ed. John W. Campbell), Tomorrow’s Children (ed. Isaac Asimov), Some Things Dark and Dangerous (ed. Joan Kahn), The Great SF Stories Volume 6 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and the Kuttner-Moore collection Two-Handed Engine.

Enhancing Image

Joe Calderon and his wife Myra are normal white middle-class parents, raising their 18-month-old son Alexander—the difference being that Alexander not only has unusual body proportions (namely a bigger head than normal), but also that he’s been exhibiting higher intelligence than the average baby. Things get suddenly much weirder when Joe and Myra are visited by a group of rather short men in weird costumes, who all have similar proportions to Alexander but as adults. The men, who claim to have come from the future, explain that they’ve come here actually on Alexander’s orders—the adult Alexander of the future, that is. The idea is that Alexander is a superman, an “X Free super,” with enormous mental powers, including (of course) ESP. Indeed Alexander is supposedly the first of this forthcoming generation of “homo superior,” which is destined to overtake “homo sap.” But that’s in the distant future. The time-traveling men have come back to give the still-infant Alexander an education, since Alexander of the future apparently laments that he had not been able to tap into his powers when he was very young; so rather than wait, he opted to have his baby self taught ahead of schedule, as it were. Joe and Myra will serve as babysitters for the, well, baby, less teaching him and more making sure he doesn’t accidentally stick a fork in an electrical socket. The time travelers understand that changing the past like this will have a kind of rubber band effect on the future—or so they claim. What actually happens is a lot more unexpected—to the characters, if not the reader.

You can sort of see where this is going, not least because we’re so accustomed to time-travel stories that try every which way to put a twist on the basic premise that we’re conditioned to expect some kind of paradox, and as such this is a difficult story to discuss without talking about the ending, which despite being predictable is pretty memorable. Then again, “When the Bough Breaks” feels more like a Kuttner story than a Moore story, and one of the things Kuttner is very good at is showing characters get their comeuppance, or rather he’s fond of indulging in sadistic cases of cause-and-effect. If you’re even a little shitty as a person you’ll probably not come out unscathed in a Kuttner story, especially if you’re the hero (or rather anti-hero). Luckily for Joe and Myra they are not on the receiving end of Kuttner-Moore’s wrath ultimately, but still unfortunately for them they have to take a beating first. I’ll get to the question lingering in the back of all our minds later, but for now let’s talk about the immediate problem of raising a superbaby: the fact that said superbaby has superhuman powers, but has not yet developed the capacity for morality or empathy. The time travelers teach Alexander how to make use of his powers, but they see no point in teaching him some basic things, such as how to get along with other people or understand them at all, for they see something like that as beneath “homo superior.” If the time travelers and Alexander tell us anything it’s that this future breed of humanity may be objectively more powerful than normal human beings, but they seem to have the emotional maturity of children. What if you gave some tech billionaire who never engaged with the humanities when they were in college ESP? You can probably guess.

“When the Bough Breaks” could be considered a slightly less serious companion to Kuttner and Moore’s more famous story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” which similarly is about children unexpectedly coming into contact with something from the distant future; but whereas the inciting incident in “Mimsy” was a freak accident, in “When the Bough Breaks” it’s quite deliberate. I think it’s also worth mentioning that Kuttner and Moore, especially when writing together, wrote a fair deal about something that rarely went shown or even implied in Campbellian SF: the relationships between parents and their children. There are quite a few Kuttner-Moore stories about raising children, which is a bit ironic given that they were childless (not for lack of trying). But then Yasujirō Ozu, who was also childless and a lifelong bachelor on top of that, was perhaps the greatest of all filmmakers when it came to depicting parent-child relations. (As an aside, one of my pet peeves is parents who act as if raising children blessed them with some innate wisdom or maturity, considering how many fascists [especially Christofascists] I’ve met who call themselves “proud parents.”) “Mimsy” and “When the Bough Breaks” are both somewhat satirical but also somewhat foreboding stories, about normal people in then-contemporary times (the 1940s), who find themselves faced with science that almost comes across as magic. Indeed “When the Bough Breaks” is vaguely fantastic, despite officially being SF, as well as Biblical, what with Joe and Myra sounding a lot like Joseph and Mary—a connection I’m sure Kuttner and Moore had intended. But if Alexander is a Christ figure, which really is how the men from the future treat him, then he’s a Christ without even a hint of ur-socialism, which is to say he has no concern for other people’s wellbeing. As you can guess, this can only end well.

There Be Spoilers Here

Alexander, having become more attuned to his ESP but also more of a monster around the house, has been fiddling with some kind of egg-shaped gadget. Since the third-person narration is thoroughly grounded in Joe and Myra’s perspectives, we know about as much about the gadget as they do, which is to say nothing. The gadget, however, does turn out to do something—although not what Alexander or the time travelers would’ve hoped. There’s a blinding white light and then where Alexander once was he is no more; and while at first the parents think maybe he teleported like before (because he can do that), it seems he just… vanished. Or that he never existed. Kuttner and Moore were both pessimists, which you can figure out once you’ve read even a bit of either of their work. I myself am also a pessimist, so I relate to their dim view of the human condition. One of the basic tenets of philosophical pessimism is that it is perhaps better to not have been born than to live, which should be construed with the notion that it’s better to commit suicide than to live; although of course some pessimists (I’m immediately thinking of Philipp Mainländer) do end up committing suicide. My point is that the “solution,” or at least the resolution, of the story is the time paradox that probably popped into your head much earlier, which is that if Alexander messed with the past via teaching his past self at a point in time earlier than what would’ve compelled Alexander to do this in the first place, then if the past Alexander “succeeds” the Alexander of the future no longer exists. Since the future Alexander no longer exist, neither does the Alexander of the past. Time “corrects” itself: Alexander was never born. From Kuttner-Moore’s viewpoint this is probably for the best. On the one hand, Joe and Myra’s troubles are over, but unfortunately for them they still have memories of their son who once existed but now never did.

A Step Farther Out

I have to admit my enjoyment of this one was marred slightly by the mediocre proofreading for Two-Handed Engine, which seems to be even more so with this story than some others in that collection. Thinking on it, however, it’s hard to deny its effectiveness and memorability as old-timey SF writing. While you can anticipate the ending, it’s still a really bittersweet conclusion that feels perfectly logical, given what Kuttner and Moore had set up for it. Granted, if you’re already a Kuttner-Moore fan then there’s a good chance you’ve already read this one, in which case I need not try to convince you. I am glad that I finally got around to it, though.

See you next time.