Who Goes There?

Lloyd Biggle, Jr. was born in 1923, and was of that generation of American men to see action in World War II, serving in the army. He suffered a leg wound during the war that would leave him disabled for the rest of his life. He studied musicology at the University of Michigan, even earning a PhD there, and his studying of music figures into some of his SF. Compared to some other authors of his generation he came to writing SF relatively late, his debut story not appearing until 1955, and he didn’t start writing full-time until 1963; but then again, for others writing genre fiction always remains a side hustle. Aside from being active as a professional writer for a few decades (his output slowed down after the ’70s), Biggle also contributed significantly to fandom, even founding the Science Fiction Oral Association, an organization dedicated to preserving audio recordings of speeches and interviews of professionals in the field. Those of us who like to dig deep into the history of genre SF, however much of it we’re able to know, can thank Biggle’s efforts in a major way.

I’ve only read a few of Biggle’s stories in passing over the years, and none of his novels yet, but “First Love” is a surprisingly good coming-of-age story whose obscurity is hard to justify. Surely it’s not the first “modern” SF story to deal with mermaids, and the revelation in the story’s climax is not strictly a unique observation on Biggle’s part. What makes it work is the execution, such that it doesn’t even really read as pulpy, despite being printed in the ’50s and in a magazine that didn’t pay very well. On the contrary, Biggle’s handling of youth, love, loneliness, and sexual awakening (along with sexual trauma) now reads as quite modern.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1959 issue of Amazing Stories. It’s been reprinted in Encounters (Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh) and the Biggle collection A Galaxy of Strangers.

Enhancing Image

Firstly I recommend tracking down a reprint of this story, since the magazine version has an introductory blurb that not only gives away a big twist, but it also comes off as misleading.

Walter Rogers is a 16-year-old farm boy whose family make much of their income by leasing land to the Zenglers. The Zenglers, incidentally, live by a quarry with a lot of water in it, about fifty feet deep, so that it’s like a pond. To becomes relevant to Walter when one night a huge explosion goes off near the Rogers property, cause unknown, but blowing out all the windows in the house. Aside from Walter’s hand getting cut, nobody’s hurt. The explosion, however, came from the direction of the quarry. Now, Walter’s naturally an adventurous boy, taken to swimming and fishing; but he also has an artistic side, in that more specifically he likes to paint. After the explosion, which got a headline in the local newspaper but nothing else worth mentioning, Walter journeys to the quarry with the idea of going for a little swim. He strips down to his birthday suit, and it’s during this awkward moment that he’s met with the strangest of surprises: there’s a girl in the pond. Not a dead girl, thankfully, but also evidently not human, although she does seem to be humanoid. She’s also naked, like Walter, but unlike him she’s perfectly suited to the water, being a mermaid of sorts. Walter, who at this point in his life hasn’t yet gone out with any girls, sees a beautiful girl (never mind that she’s an alien) up close and is star-struck, his mind gravitating toward her “small breasts” and “shapely legs” as she floats beneath the surface. This is a lot to take in, but Walter is a quick thinker, and it takes him practically no time to figure the girl needs his help.

The sexuality of all this is more blunt than one would expect, given the vintage. This is not merely for titilating the reader, either, but also serves a major purpose for Walter’s character; indeed the Meet Cute™ happening when both parties are nude and in vulnerable position, with the girl even being submerged in a body of water (think bodily fluids), sets the tone for the rest of the story. “First Love” is about a peculiar moment in a boy’s life, during that period when he has started thinking about girls in “that” way but before he has really become a man. Any honest depiction of a person’s life during adolescence should, metaphorically at the very least, involve sex in some way, and Biggle is more honest about this than many other writers appearing in the genre magazines at the time. Walter’s pressing need to help the girl, first in feeding her (finding her fish to eat, which he infers is a safe bet), is driven partly by lust. There’s also the mad frenzy that happens, the way one’s brain becomes all foggy, when in love for the first time. For better or worse, you never forget your first love, whether its reciprocated or not. Now you may be thinking, this all sounds a bit like the movie Splash (if you don’t remember that movie—don’t worry, you’re not missing out on that much), or maybe it sounds like a gender-flipped take on The Shape of Water, which I’m sure more people in [current year] know about. Guy meets monster girl. Guy falls in love with monster girl. Nowadays it feels to me like we don’t get enough of that dynamic; more often it’s a human girl and a monster guy, which can get boring.

Being an aspiring monster-fucker aside, Walter becomes more outgoing in his efforts to help the mermaid, not least getting the help of a neighbor, Old Ed, to net up loads of fish for her.

Walt swore him to eternal secrecy, and confided that he wanted to try to stock the quarry. Old Ed allowed that he didn’t think it would work, that the fish would lack their natural food and the water might be queer for them. But then—there might be some way to feed them, and if Walt wanted to try, why, he enjoyed catching fish, and he’d never rightly caught all he wanted to catch because he hated to waste them. Walt saved out enough fish for the Rogers’ table and triumphantly dumped the rest into the quarry with the shadowy face watching silently from the depths.

I like the last part of that passage especially. For much of the story Biggle is deliberately murky about describing the girl, since the girl keeps herself underwater and partly out of Walter’s view. We only get bits and pieces of her at a time, and in the water where she’s at home she’s as angelic as a swan. It’s the idealized image you tend to have of someone when you fall head over heels for them, although here that idealization is rendered in a literal fashion. Normally the Zenglers wanting to dynamite the quarry would mean nothing, and indeed it wouldn’t to most people, but Walter steps in like this is a matter of life and death for him. He’s pushing himself to the limit for a girl who doesn’t even understand his language and who probably won’t even be able to communicate with him.

Ahh, the follies of young love.

There’s another character, Roy Zengler, around Walter’s age, who acts as a foil to him, being a very extroverted and rascally fellow who apparently changes girlfriends like how you’d change a pair of socks. He’s also framed as being totally selfish, wanting to dynamite the quarry for the fun of it, whereas Walter really does have the mermaid’s wellbeing in mind. It’s also Roy’s threatening to blow up the quarry and unwittingly kill the mermaid (it’s not like he’d believe Walter if told about it) that pushes Walter to do something drastic and decidedly illegal. No, I’m not talking about murder, but he’ll do something reckless to save the girl.

There Be Spoilers Here

There’s a whacky scheme to steal a truck with a tanker attached and to carry the girl off to the nearest lake—some fifty miles one way. Mind you that Walter is barely even old enough to know how to drive a car. This scheme shockingly works out, even if Walter nearly gets both him and the girl killed thanks to a state trooper seeing him trespass. While he’s able to get the girl to the lake, though, the girl is not all that thankful for his efforts; and even worse, for the first and only time we get to see what she looks like when out of the water. It’s not a pretty sight. Actually it’s the most haunting passage in the whole story, undermined a good deal because this very scene is given away in the introductory blurb:

Her face was a gruesome, rubbery mask, her eyes large and sunken. She had no nose. Needlelike fangs protruded from her gaping, gasping mouth. Her hair, her lovely, flowing hair, was short tufts of fur that covered her back from the crown of her head to the base of her spine. The glimmering dark green fabric that she wore was her flesh, spongy and slimy to the touch.

The experience is horrifying, even if nobody physically got hurt. The justaposition between how the girl looks underwater and how she looks and acts on land is an effective one. And, of course, Walter doesn’t get the girl and will probably never see her again, even if he does save her life. It’s a moment he might never forget, and even if he does on a conscious level it’s liable to haunt his dreams in the future.

A Step Farther Out

In a way “First Love” comes off as like a Clifford Simak story if Simak wasn’t so averse to describing human sexuality. We have a rather bittersweet coming-of-age narrative in a rustic setting, during summer when school is out, with a yearning for that period in one’s past when there was an inherent degree of personal freedom. The world seemed so much larger then. Sadly such freedom is wasted on the young. This story appeared in the September issue of Amazing, which means it would’ve been on newsstands in August, when school would’ve still been out—a bit of serendipity, given the story’s tone and subject matter. It’s a good summer read. Not sure why practically nobody has picked this one up.

See you next time.