Tag: hal clement

Novella Review: “Attitude” by Hal Clement

November 4th, 2024

(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, September 1943.)

Who Goes There?

To get the elephant in the room out of the way, sorry this is a day late, but I’ve been in the process of moving shit into my apartment and may have bit off more than I could chew with this one.

As for Hal Clement, the quasi-pseudonym of Harry Clement Stubbs, we’re talking about one of the codifiers of what we call “hard SF,” which is kind of a vague term, less a subgenre and more a way of understanding SF. If SF is the genre of ideas then Clement was one of its most loyal practitioners, and for six decades at that. He made his debut in 1942 with “Proof,” a story he wrote when he was but a sniveling teenager; but even at that early stage Clement’s work didn’t read quite like anyone else’s. Not to say he was a poet, at a time when genre SF writing could be pulpy or beige, because he really wasn’t; if anything his style is even more stripped back than what was then the standard. Rather what makes Clement different is that, for better or worse, his stories read like lectures—not in the sense that he’s wagging his finger at the reader, but more that his stories seek to instruct, while also being entertaining. You could call it edutainment. Despite being one of John W. Campbell’s discoveries, Clement’s work reads as more Gernsbackian than Campbellian, for reasons I’ll get into. “Attitude” is a very early Clement story, and yet, while it has a couple big issues, it also shows a barely-out-of-his-teens Clement doing what he does best.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. It’s only been reprinted twice, in Travelers of Space (ed. Martin Greenberg) and the Clement collection Music of Many Spheres. I guess Clement or his estate let it fall out of copyright, because it’s on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Dr. Little wakes up in an empty chamber that’s six-sided, “like the cells in a bee-hive,” with no memory of how he got here, only figuring the ship he was on, the Gomeisa, must’ve been attacked. He spends a few days by himself in this chamber, staving off hunger and boredom (how he goes to the bathroom is never answered), only subsisting on a tube that feeds him lime juice. Why lime juice? Question to be answered later. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Little, along with the rest of the Gomeisa‘s crew, is being held captive by aliens. The alien ship had been on route to presumably their home world, with the human ship in tow, and before too long Little is reunited with the rest of the crew, nearly forty men all told. (Of course the ship’s crew is unisex, you’d have a hard time finding a spaceship crew in ’40s SF that wasn’t a sausage party.) Turns out they’re not the only ones being held captive, as there are also some Vegans (as opposed to vegans), sentient and rather furry aliens who are on friendly terms with the humans. It’s also a good thing the Vegans are here, too, as they’re able to communicate with the “pentapods” (as the humans take to calling them) up to a point. An unnamed Vegan acts as interpreter for Little and company.

It takes a minute just for us to meet up with the rest of the crew, which was an early indicator of my main issue with “Attitude,” which is to say its length borders on terminal. At 23,000 words it’s a decent-sized novellas, and honestly you could cut this down, say, a 15,000-word novelette without losing the meat of the story. There’s a lot of sitting around and chatting, with characters explaining things to each other (in fairness these are things that should be explained), to a point where it becomes a bit grating. Clement was not a “good” writer in the sense that we nowadays think of as good writing, at least for SF. Dialogue is not his strong suit, so it’s worrying that so much of “Attitude” is talking. This becomes a little ironic considering the pentapods (called that because they have five appendages and resemble starfish) never talk, and indeed the fact that they don’t or can’t talk to the humans is the main driving force behind the plot. If the humans were able to communicate with the pentapods then this would be a much shorter story, although curiously it would be no less violent. The pentapods had apparently taken the humans captive without physically harming any of them, doing this by restraining each man with their appendages. (The pentapods don’t seem to have heads or mouths, which makes one wonder how they eat, or indeed how they know what’s going on. Clement will explain their sensory capabilities to an extent, but some of it remains a mystery.) Little himself finds he had gotten both unlucky and lucky when the ship got taken over, as he should’ve died from sudden decompression, only being saved by a strange gas that puts one in suspended animation.

This will become important later.

Because “Attitude” is a Clement story, the characters (both human and alien) are basically reasonable beings, not prone to act on impulse. Clement’s fiction takes place in some weird alternate universe where people act in favor of their best interests. The downside of this is that because characters tend to not act irrationally, that greatly narrows the range with how you can write character interactions. For example, the Vegan interpreter is basically human, just with a different coat of paint, because the Vegans, while they are able to communicate with the pentapods, don’t seem to have anything culturally or linguistically unique about them. A Vegan thinks just like a person, which in Clement’s world is someone who thinks of everything as problems to be solved. This is like how in Mission of Gravity, the Mesklinites are like huge bugs, but otherwise they think and act like people. Then there are the humans themselves, who differentiate from each other very little. With the exception of the Dennis brothers we don’t even get first names for these people, which admittedly is not something we needed anyway. What’s more bothersome is just the fact that Little (who gets basically no backstory to speak of) spends a lot of time yapping with his fellow crewmen, especially after an escape attempt sends them to a partly underground fort, and a good deal of it could’ve been cut.

As for the positive side, those who assume ’40s SF to be all hard-nosed gun-toting tough guys will be pleased by the lack of machismo in Clement’s writing. Little and company are prisoners on this alien planet, but otherwise things are pretty chill; the pentapods don’t seem to have any intention of harming them, only trying to foil escape through non-lethal means, and the prisoners similarly are not too keen on resorting to violence. It’s telling that when the Gomeisa‘s captain talks about his men trying to defend their ship with brute force their “plan” did not work at all. This is a recurring thing with Clement’s fiction, that solutions are best sought through non-violent means, which is a bit strange considering Clement himself was by no means a pacifist: he was a bomber crewman during World War II and seemed to think back on his wartime service fondly, and he would later support the Vietnam War. But maybe it’s less about pacifism and more about non-aggression; this is, after all, about solving a problem, or a puzzle. If Campbellian SF can be loosely defined as problem-solving SF, then Clement fits the bill; but he’s also very much a continuation of Gernsbackian SF in that he’s trying to teach the reader something, sticking as close to the sciences as he understood—taking a few liberties into account, of course. Makes sense, considering he would later have a day job as a teacher.

There Be Spoilers Here

The Vegans have since figured out that the pentapods don’t have a verbal language, and as such they have an intricate sign language that would render something like radio useless—but television very useful. Mind you that TV really was a newfangled technology in the early ’40s, to the point where it would not have been commercially viable yet. Little suspects these aliens captured the humans and Vegans for the sake of studying their technology, to see if anything might be useful. The aliens ultimately are neither good nor evil, but simply different, and maybe more than a little curious. Of course, “gassing” the aliens (the aforementioned gas that does no physical harm) in the climax must’ve had a different ring to it in the wake of the Holocaust—ironic for a story in which nobody dies.

A Step Farther Out

I may have been in the wrong headspace to read this one, between the business of moving and now being on antidepressants, but while I found it intriguing in parts I also found it to be a bit of a slog overall. It’s overlong considering the conclusion Clement reaches, but I also have to admit I’m impressed that for how early it is in his career it seems like his “voice” was already more or less fully formed at this point. Given how young he was it’s surprising he already had the basics down, both in writing fiction generally and finding his own authorial voice.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: November 2024

November 1st, 2024
(Cover by Hisaki Yasuda. Asimov’s, May 1987.)

How are you doing?

I wish I could say the past month has been better for me, but it has not. A big thing is happening in my life, in that today is actually the move-in date for my first apartment. Wow, imagine, at 28, my first apartment. Been taking care of the practical side of things, with assistance: furniture, stuff for the kitchen and bathroom, and of course signing up with utilities. This has been a long time coming, and truth be told I’ve become immensely tired of living with my parents. And yet I’m not happy. Moving into my own place might prove only marginally better than my previous living situation. I don’t make enough to pay for rent so I’ll be bleeding my savings for the following months. The only reason my application even got accepted is my credit score is good. I’ll be living by myself in this one-bedroom apartment. It’ll be very lonely here, as none of my partners live close enough to move in with me, and anyway, with one exception we don’t know each other that well yet. Surely the lack of my parents breathing down my neck will do me some good, but this will be a solitary existence.

Honestly I’ve been tired all the time as of late. My work schedule as of right now is erratic and I find myself going to sleep at six in the morning and waking up after noon. As you may know I have anxiety and depression, and while the former has not been as bad lately, the latter has been worse, or rather more persistent. I’m tired of everything. I’m tired of my job. I’m tired of my imperfect body, and the fact that I can barely sleep. I’m tired of being tired. The US election is in less than a week and honestly I’m sick of this fucking immoral country, and its authorities who have been spending the past couple centuries murdering socialists, queer people, ethnic minority groups, etc. We’re only a quarter into the 21st century but already I feel like almost everything that could go wrong has already gone wrong. And will get worse. I’m normally a pessimist, so take all this with a grain of salt, but I don’t see conditions improving much.

So, go backward or forward, but don’t stay here. I hate it here. I do this blog for fun, and according to stats have written 186,000 words (or about equivalent to Great Expectations in word count) this year alone; but I also do it as a coping mechanism. I don’t do it for readers, or money, because not enough people read this blog or even know about it, despite my spreading word on a few social media platforms. Maybe when I hit 200 subscribers I’ll start a Patreon. Just know I’ve been going at this for two years now because it gives me some degree of emotional security. If not for all these words I would surely have given up a minute ago.

Now, what do we have for reviewing? We have two stories from the ’40s, three from the ’60s, one from the ’80s, one from the ’90s, and one from the 2010s.

For the novellas:
1. “Attitude” by Hal Clement. From the September 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novella. Feels like it’s been a while since we last talked about Clement, who was one of the first hard SF authors as we now think of the term. Not only was Clement a pioneer, he had a pretty long life and career, remaining active into the beginning of the 21st century. His prose is workmanlike and his human characters tend to be little more than abstractions, but his lectures-as-stories can be enthralling.
2. “Last Summer at Mars Hill” by Elizabeth Hand. From the August 1994 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Nebula and World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novella. Over the past four decades Hand has taken a kind of jack-of-all-trades approach to writing, tackling SF, fantasy, and horror seemingly with equal relish, with even the occasional movie novelization to her credit. (She wrote the novelization of the infamous 2003 Catwoman movie.) “Last Summer at Mars Hill” is one of her most decorated stories.
For the short stories:
1. “Beyond the Threshold” by August Derleth. From the September 1941 issue of Weird Tales. Derleth was correspondents with H. P. Lovecraft and could be argued as the person most responsible for preserving Lovecraft’s legacy, as he co-founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei in 1939 firstly to reprint his mentor’s fiction. He also wrote quite a bit of fiction in his own right.
2. “The Scar” by Ramsey Campbell. From the Summer 1969 issue of Startling Suspense Stories. One of August Derleth’s biggest discoveries as editor was Ramsey Campbell, whose work Derleth had discovered when he was but a teenager. Campbell’s first collection was published when he was only 18, so that he got his start in weird fiction very early. He would later become a prolific horror novelist.
3. “Nomansland” by Brian W. Aldiss. From the April 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Aldiss debuted in the 1950s and would remain active pretty much until his death, which was not too long ago. He would win a Short Fiction Hugo for Hothouse, which is sort of a novel but also a collection of linked stories. We already covered the first story, and now we’re on the second.
4. “Flowers of Edo” by Bruce Sterling. From the May 1987 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Sterling debuted in 1977 when he was barely out of his teens, but he would become one of the defining SF writers of the ’80s. While typically labeled as cyberpunk, Sterling has a surprising versatility, with even early novels like Schismatrix and Islands in the Net being very different from each other.
5. “Soft Clocks” by Yoshio Aramaki. From the January-February 1989 issue of Interzone. First published in 1968. Translated by Kazuko Behrens and Lewis Shiner. Seeing as how the Sterling story takes from Japanese culture, I thought it only right (and perhaps a neat gimmick) to follow up with a story from a Japanese writer. Yoshio Aramaki has been active since the ’60s as an author and critic.
6. “Checkerboard Planet” by Eleanor Arnason. From the December 2016 issue of Clarkesworld. Judging from her rate of output you might think Arnason a more recent author, but in fact she was born in 1942 and made her debut back in 1973. She’s been an activist for left-liberal causes since the ’60s but did not start writing full-time until 2009, hence her recent uptick in productivity.
Won’t you read with me?
Serial Review: Needle by Hal Clement (Part 2/2)

February 27th, 2023

(Cover by Chesley Bonestell. Astounding, June 1949.)

Who Goes There?

While not the first author to write what we’d call hard SF, Hal Clement, more than any other, codified this particular mode of writing. Making his debut in 1942 when he was still in his teens, not to mention an undergraduate, Clement helped introduce a degree of science-fictional hardness that previously was rarely seen, and was not considered part of some greater collective effort to put the science in science fiction. It’s about as hard-headed as you can get, and yet there’s also an undeniable joy in Clement’s writing—more specifically how eager he is to build and explore eccentric planets and alien races. He was not the first planet builder, but he was arguably the best of his generation to do this. Mission of Gravity and other stories set in that continuity alone would’ve cemented his legacy, but Clement kept writing reliably (if not prolifically) until his death in 2003.

Needle was Clement’s debut novel; while he had been active in the field for half a dozen years at this point, he would’ve only been about 26 when he wrote it. It was the first in a series of rapid-fire novels for Clement, being followed in only a few years by Iceworld and his most famous work, Mission of Gravity. A criticism (positive or negative) often made about Clement is that he seems far more invested in making rounded characters out of his aliens than his humans, and this certainly remains the case with Needle. Despite involving a teen boy as his partner in crime-solving, the hero and the character most worthy of our empathy is a four-pound blob that can barely get around on his own.

Placing Coordinates

Part 2 was published in the June 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Did you know that Needle was up for the Retro Hugo for Best Novel of 1950, but was withdrawn on the grounds that it was first published (albeit in abridged form) the previous year? Anyway, your best bet at finding the book version outside of used bookshops is to pick up the omnibus The Essential Hal Clement Volume 1: Trio for Slide Rule and Typewriter, which contains Iceworld and Close to Critical.

Enhancing Image

We had spent the back end of Part 1 off the island and on the mainland, where Bob goes to school, but now we’re back home. Bob’s father had apparently called him to return home early; up to this point we had not gotten a single word out of the father, but now he’s gonna be an actual cjharacter alongside Bob’s mother, though let’s not make a mistake here and act like these are complex characters.

If Part 1 showed Clement in his element, the concluding installment forces him to write about the thing he’s the least interested in: other people. Not that Bob was a Shakespearean figure before this, but it’s when we’re introduced to the father and more of Bob’s friends that we realize that the island setting might be even more isolated than previously thought. While the friendship between Bob and the Hunter feels earned enough, this is the only character relationship in the novel to feel even close to organic—not that there’s much in the way of competition. Much of the interest here comes from the Hunter’s paternalistic relationship with his host, the latter being just old enough to understand the mechanics of the situation but still too immature to probably act responsibly on his own. The Hunter’s role as a parental figure has deepened, made more profound by the fact that Bob’s parents are pretty relaxed folks.

This is especially true when it comes to injuries, and doubly so now that Bob is aware that he has an alien that can heal wounds up to a point onboard. Take the following, for example:

The alien, unlike his host, was able to see one good point in connection with the mishap; it might cure the boy of the unfortunate tendency he had been developing, of leaving the care of his body to the Hunter. The latter said nothing of the sort, of course—it might have been taken amiss, as Bob lay awake that night trying to keep as much of himself as possible out of contact with the sheets. He had not been so careless for years, and was inclined to blame it on his coming home at such an odd time. The Hunter did not dispute the matter. He could not have eliminated the pain without the risk of permanent damage to Bob’s sensory nerves, and probably would not have done so anyway.

Truth be told there’s not much more to say here without getting into spoilers, since this is the installment where we finally find out where the hell the fugitive could be hiding. To Clement’s credit he clearly did his homework and he’s putting a great deal of effort into making the mystery challenging from a scientific angle. There’s no easy fix for the Hunter finding the fugitive and even communicating with Bob proves a challenge, although not to put too find a point on it, but the reveal still comes too easily. Again, I wanna be fair here since crossing SF with mystery was all but unheard of at this point in the former’s history and Clement was sailing waters that basically had not been charted. I don’t blame him either for the very matter-of-fact prose style, which is typical of Clement but also goes a long way to give the proceedings a sense of realisim; if it seems too stoic and inelegant that’s still preferrable over being unnecessarily overblown.

There Be Spoilers Here

After trying and failing to find the culprit among Bob’s friends, the Hunter ends up finding the culprit much closer to home—literally. After some rather odd remarks from Bob’s dad, the Hunter deduces correctly that the father, unbeknownst to himself, has become the host for the fugitive. This makes sense considering it would’ve been easiest for the fugitive to enter someone’s body while they’re unconscious, and the chances of getting the father to be fine with being host for a four-pound alien blob would be low. Is it convenient that the person containing the fugitive happens to live under the same roof as Our Heroes™? Absolutely, but there’s a lot of potential for having a parental figure (unknowingly) assist the villain—potential which sadly, though not unexpectedly, Clement fails to exploit.

Needle is a novel that starts off quite interesting and becomes marginally less so by the climax, and there are a few reasons for this. The first is that Astounding, while being the top SF magazine of the day, also had a puritanical streak, with stories being made squeaky clean for publication on the off chance there profanity in the manuscript. While Clement’s novel is deeply concerned with biology, the sexual side of the equation goes unacknowledged, with the result being that any attempt at a Freudian analysis would hit a road block. Because Bob gets to act like a perfectly rational (i.e., too rational) human being and because he and his dad don’t seem to have a strenuous relationship, there’s potential for drama with the latter being host to villain that goes unrealized.

It’s also totally possible that, had even the censors not kept an eye on him, Clement would’ve still gone the totally pragmatic route and put out a novel concerned with the surface mechanics of its scenario but not the very obvious psycho-sexual material at hand. Had this been written by Philip K. Dick or J. G. Ballard, the basic plot beats remaining the same, we would’ve gotten a radically different novel.

Anyway, Bob and the Hunter naturally find an ingenious solution to getting the fugitive to come out of the father’s body and kill him and all is well at the end, with Bob agreeing to keep Hunter as his symbiote since the latter, by his own admission, can’t leave Earth. Killing the fugitive rather than arresting him sounds a bit cruel, but then arresting is not an option when you’re lightyears from home and thus you can’t bring the criminal to any prison belonging to your race. Something I like about the one scene we get of the fugitive talking is that much is implied in his dialogue with the Hunter but there are gaps in their history that are left deliberately unfilled. We knew already that the fugitive is not to be trusted, but it’s only here that we get it from the horse’s mouth, with the fugitive admitting to having betrayed previous hosts for personal gain.

Clement intelligently hints at a whole alien civilization while only letting us see two of its inhabitants, letting us imagine for ourselves what this society of aliens biologically wholly different from humans (they’re technically viruses, going by the definition Clement gives us) might look like. It’s a shame then that he does not care as much about making the human setting come to life, despite the novelty of a tropical SF story from this era.

A Step Farther Out

I would say I was disappointed, but I did have my expectations in check. I’m tempted to say that the lack of development with the human characters was due to length, but this is par for the course with Clement: his aliens are always more interesting than his humans. Whereas someone like Philip K. Dick would’ve taken this premise in a darker direction, diving more into psychological intrigue, Clement is content to use the reveal simply as a convenient out for Our Hero™, sadly neglecting how thematically ripe the material is. We still get a curious mashup of cold-blooded science fiction and a detective looking for a malevolent blob that doesn’t wanna be found. I haven’t read too many mysteries in my time, but I tend to find the first half—the setup—more gripping than the payoff, which might just be the nature of the genre. Not that the conclusion to a mystery being a letdown is too big a mark against this short novel or any of its ilk; it’s just that the mystery is often so much better than the mystery being solved.

See you next time.
Serial Review: Needle by Hal Clement (Part 1/2)

February 20th, 2023

(Cover by Paul Orban. Astounding, May 1949.)

Who Goes There?

There’s been an ongoing debate over the decades as to hard SF’s place in the context of SF literature, and even the basic question of what hard SF is. Now, I’m just a lay reader; I don’t have a degree in the hard sciences. I took a chemistry course in college that I’ve basically forgotten everything about. I do, however, feel confident in giving a succinct and easily understandable definition for hard SF that will hopefully mellow the conversation: hard SF is Hal Clement. Now remembered as a writer (he also did painting on the side), Clement was a trained astronomer and chemist who seemed eager (to the point of obsession) to convey his love for the wonders of the natural world to the rest of us mortals. Most famously with Mission of Gravity but palpable in so much of his work is this sense of a clockmaker or a sculptor who never tires of the delicate mechanics of his craft. Clement was what we might call a planet builder, and he was one of the best.

Clement’s career is also one of the longest of any SF author, although except for a bright period in the ’50s he was never too prolific. He debuted with the short story “Proof” in 1942, written when he was still a teenager, and his final SF work, the novel Noise, was published in 2003—the year of his death. From beginning to end he kept the faith, demonstrating that it was possible to extract artistry from the intricacies of physics and chemistry. More than any other figure (despite some being more popular), Hal Clement is the grand architect of hard SF. Our understanding of hard SF as fiction which puts roughly equal emphasis on both science and fiction goes back to Clement. To crib a line from James Nicholl, in his Tor.com article on the Ballantine slash Del Rey Best Of series, “Current exoplanet research suggests that we are living in a Hal Clement universe.”

Placing Coordinates

Part 1 was published in the May 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. A word of warning: a scanning error on a specific page ~~it’s page 26~~ renders a handful of words therein illegible, which left me feeling cheated slightly. Apparently this same scan is on Luminist, which means that, as far as I know, there’s no scan of this issue available online that does not have this problem. Anyway, from what I understand the serial version of Needle is arguably novella-length; Clement would expand Needle for book publication, although I can’t imagine he could’ve added that much material. Used paperback editions are not hard to find, although if you want something in print and a little fancy then go with The Essential Hal Clement Volume 1: Trio for Slide Rule & Typewriter, which collects Needle along with Iceworld and Close to Critical.

Enhancing Image

We start with a spaceship chase that quickly becomes earthbound. An alien police officer known only as the Hunter is after a fugitive, a member of his own species, when both ships crash land on Earth—and on a rather specific part of Earth, too. The Hunter is a blob-like semi-liquid alien that’s also, technically, a parasite, albeit a symbiotic one; the Hunter survives the crash but his alien host does not. Upon leaving the ship the Hunter finds himself in our ocean, not too far from shore, which is where we get the inspiration for both the cover and the first interior, involving an unlucky hammerhead shark that mistakes the Hunter for food. The Hunter at first tries taking on the shark as a host, finding a) the shark is a predator who is trying (unsuccessfully) to devour him, and b) the shark is of markedly low intelligence (apparently the symbiotes are used to taking sentient beings as hosts), the Hunter thinks it best and only fair game to leave the shark for dead once he’s able to get it to beach itself.

A few things immediately stood out to me. The narrative is third-person and sort of omniscient, but also totally from the Hunter’s perspective. The decision to make the hero of the story both an alien and non-humanoid must’ve also been a rare decision in those days, especially in the pages of Astounding; but don’t worry, there’s still some human chauvinism thrown in once the Hunter acquires his human host—more on that later. Another is the tropical setting. I don’t think we’re ever told specifically where this is set, but I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be Hawaii, in the late ’40s when Hawaii was a US territory but not a state yet. This would also be taking place presumably a few years after the end of World War II, although the war never gets brought up directly. Finally, as is often noted when people review this novel, this is, if not the first then one of the first attempts to wed science fiction with a good old-fashioned mystery.

A common criticism (or at least it used to be a criticism) of SF-mystery is that the author can pull anything out of their ass in order for the mystery to be solved conveniently, not to mention that in a futuristic setting there would be a wide arsenal of tools the protagonist can use to solve the mystery. At least with for the latter Needle presents no such issue; while the Hunter is an alien, he has to make due with what was then modern Earth technology and the cooperation of a human who, on top of being a teenager, might not be keen on letting an alien slime ball inhabit his body. The Hunter and the fugitive are also on about the same playing field since they’re both symbiotes who both crashed in the same area, and both ideally want a host of high intelligence and mobility, in which case humans would be the only good option. Of course, finding someone who could be inhabiting any given body would be like finding a needle in a haystack (hence the title, very clever), and even with the small island setting the Hunter has potentially dozens if not hundreds of people who could be hosts for the fugitive.

You may be thinking to yourself: “Wait, an alien policeman goes after another alien that has crash landed in Hawaii, a place conveniently surrounded by water, and the latter alien is able to blend in with the local population?” No, this is not Lilo & Stitch, this is something totally different.

Now, about that human host. The Hunter comes upon a bunch of teen boys hanging out on the beach, and one of them, Robert Kinnaird (Bob for short), is taking a nap while the others are distracted. What happens next is… interesting. The Hunter makes it clear both to us and later to Bob that a symbiote much prefers to take another’s body with the host’s knowledge and consent (there are indeed benefits to having a four-pound blob inside you, as we’ll see), but since the Hunter knows nothing of the local language and has enough common sense to figure that the boy would probably not just let him come inside (there should be a better way to phrase this), he takes the sneaky option. I don’t think Clement intended this, but the body horror potential of this whole ordeal is quite big. Take the following passage, in which the Hunter creeps into Bob’s body unbeknownst to the latter:

The boy was sound asleep, and remained so. The alien organism flowed smoothly along the bones and tendons in his foot and ankle; up within the muscle sheaths of calf and thigh; switched to the outer wall of the femoral artery and the tubelets within the structure of the thigh bones; around points, and along still other blood vessels. It filtered through the peritoneum without causing the least damage; and slowly the whole four pounds of matter accumulated in the abdominal cavity, not only without harming the boy in the least but without even disturbing his slumber. And there, for a few minutes, the Hunter rested.

Ech. This was meant for teenagers? Right, Needle is technically a juvenile, although as is often the case with juvenile SF from this period (see also Robert Heinlein’s juveniles) I struggle to believe it was aimed at such a young readership. Not that the prose is hard to get through. Clement’s style is… well, it’s not poetic; actually it’s the opposite of poetic. When people say they have a hard time getting into hard SF, especially the classics, because of the inelegance of the prose, they’re thinking of some variation on what Clement was doing, and to be fair he can be occasionally clunky, but I think far more often it works. The mix of the third-person narration and the Hunter’s running inner monologue reads almost like a script for a nature documentary, albeit one that David Attenborough would be pleased to narrate. Clement writes about the Hunter as if intelligent symbiotes from another planet were as real as hippos and alligators, something that always draws me to his writing even though the human characters, by comparison, feel like little more than abstractions.

Also unusually for a mystery, the Hunter does not immediately take advantage of Bob in order to find his adversary; actually he spends several months simply trying to understand human culture as filtered through Bob’s day-to-day life, along with making sure the boy doesn’t hurt himself too bad. A symbiote can, to some extent, heal the host’s body, but the importan thing for the Hunter is to make sure Bob stays mobile, so that when they finally do reach an understanding they’ll be able to venture out and see what they can do about the fugitive, who no doubt has similar plans. The curious result of the Hunter looking after Bob is that the former almost serves as a parental figure (mind you that we don’t even hear about Bob’s father until towards the end of Part 1), although it’d be more accurate to say he becomes Bob’s guardian angel. If Bob gets a bad cut then the Hunter can speed up the healing process, or at least quarantine the injury. But of course eventually Our Hero™ will have to make himself known to his human partner more directly, which concerns the back end of Part 1.

There Be Spoilers Here

The Hunter can do some things that would give Bob the impression of something being off about himself; he could ~~make Bob trip balls~~ mess with Bob’s vision and make it seem like he’s hallucinating, forming letters in the air in front of him. He could do things with Bob’s body that would certainly be unusual, unless there was a far-out explanation, like say, someone not strictly human being in contact with him. But the Hunter is, ultimately, little more than a lump of jelly who can’t even pick up a pencil without the host’s imput. He at least has used his time in Bob’s body to understand enough English (he becomes oddly fluent in it in five months, but that’s still more plausible than Frankenstein’s monster becoming a Shakespearean actor after eavesdropping on some random people), but not enough to understand the limits of the human physique. There’s only so much he can do.

One night the Hunter sneaks out of Bob (I don’t know if Clement understood the implications of what he was writing) and manages to write a note for him when he wakes up. Up to this point Bob was vaguely aware that something odd has been going on with him, and it’s not puberty—no matter how tempting it is to try to make that connection. While the revelation of Bob being in contact (and rather intimate roommates) with a symbiote can feel abrupt, at least by modern standards (no doubt Needle would be at least 300 pages long if written today), it’s not sudden. We have in fact, for most of Part 1, been building up to this moment—the moment when Our Alien Hero™ and his human partner make contact.

Bob wakes up to find this at his desk:

“Bob,” the note began—the Hunter did not yet fully realize that certain occasions call for more formal means of address—“these words apologize for the disturbance I caused you last night. I must speak to you; the twitching of muscles and catching of your voice were my attempts. I have not space here to tell who and where I am; but I can always hear you speak. If you are willing for me to try again, just say so. I will use the method you request; I can, if you relax, work your muscles as I did last night, or if you will look steadily at some fairly evenly illuminated object I can make shadow pictures in your own eyes. I will do anything else within my power to prove my words to you; but you must make the suggestions for such proofs. This is terribly important to both of us. Please let me try again.”

Bob, despite being a teenager, adjusts quickly enough to the fact that he can communicate with an alien that also happens to be living inside him. A little implausible? Maybe. Clement seems to go out of his way to prevent any chance of getting an allegorical or Freudian reading from the text, although some things seep through despite his best efforts. Bob is a good American high schooler who plays football in the fall while keeping an eye on his grades, and in typical Clement fashion as far as his human characters go Bob is perhaps too rational. No matter. Most of Part 1, and by extension about half the damn novel in its serial form, has been preoccupied with the Hunter getting his bearings straight rather than going after the fugitive, but now that the Hunter and his human have “found” each other, the game is now truly afoot. Still, how will they even hope to find that other symbiote, who after all can be hiding damn near anywhere? Stay tuned…

A Step Farther Out

This is… oddly cozy? There’s a mystery, sure, and a criminal to be captured, but the majority of Part 1 is just the Hunter trying to make sense of his surroundings and adjust accordingly’ in the process we find out a good deal about the biology of these blob-like aliens, and while we don’t find out much about their culture we do get to know how the Hunter and others like him interact (at least ideally) with their hosts. I’m of course thinking of Dax from Deep Space 9, who is also a symbiote, although the Hunter presumably can’t pass along memories between hosts. Bob is not exactly a unique character, being a pretty average teenage boy, but it’s how the Hunter tries to communicate with him (or even make himself known in the first place) that generates interest. I won’t be surprised if Clement ends up taking the easy way out with regards to how the hell the Hunter will be able to find the fugitive, but I’m willing to forgive that if he keeps up this level of intrigue and pseudo-documentary atmosphere. Despite taking place on Earth and evidently being aimed at a younger readership, I’m pretty stoked about this mixture of mystery and hard SF.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: February 2023

February 1st, 2023
(Cover by Joe Tillotson. Fantastic Adventures, October 1951.)

I have to admit I take really niche pleasure in writing these forecast editorials. I suspect reviewers have a to-read list and just tackle shit when they feel like it, but I myself prefer to plan things out. Funny thing is that aside from these forecasts I don’t have a to-read list, anywhere. All this stuff is either in my noggin or it’s not shown up on my radar yet. Hell, I only started keeping a list of things I did read this year. I’m mostly a spontaneous reader, so let me have this one little bit of scheduled activity.

No gimmicks this month. Well, there is one, but you wouldn’t know it at first glance and I’m not even sure it counts. You see, I have a major soft spot for SF-horror; I love SF, and believe it or not I love horror too with almost equal passion, so what happens when you combine the two? This month’s short stories are crossbreeds of horror and science fiction, one by the most famous horror author of all time, the other by someone whose name probably doesn’t ring a bell but who really deserves more recognition.

Anyway…

No more wasting time, let’s see what’ll be on my plate!

For the serials:
1. The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard. Published in Weird Tales, September to November 1934. Started this last month and now we’re gonna finish it. It’s been a fun ride so far. Howard only wrote about Conan the Cimmerian in the last four years of his life, but like with everything else he wrote a lot of it, and this is one of the longer Conan tales. Due to the episodic nature of the series it’s not necessary to have read previous Conan stories to enjoy this one.
2. Needle by Hal Clement. Published in Astounding Science Fiction, May to June 1949. Clement had already been active for several years, but Needle was his debut novel, and it would be published in book form in 1950. Clement is one of the founding fathers of what we’d call hard SF, with Mission of Gravity especially geing a genre-defining novel, but Needle seems to not fall into that mold; rather it’s one of the earliest known attempts at mixing SF with the mystery genre.
For the novellas:
1. “Dancing on Air” by Nancy Kress. From in the July 1993 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Novella (well, Best Novelette for the Hugo, I guess voters were confused). Kress is one of those authors I’ve been meaning to read more of, and I’ve been making progress… slowly. Like all great authors Kress seems very fond of the novella mode, but rather than go for one of her award-winners I’m going for a slightly deeper cut. Just slightly.
2. “Medusa Was a Lady!” by William Tenn. From the October 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures. Tenn is supposedly one of the great comedians in SF from the late ’40s to his semi-retirement from the field in the late ’60s. Unusually for Tenn, “Medusa Was a Lady!” (also reprinted as the lamer-sounding “A Lamp for Medusa”) ventures into fantasy adventure territory. And look, I’m weak for a good cover, and the Joe Tillotson cover shown above convinced me.
For the short stories:
1. “Let Me Live in a House” by Chad Oliver. From the March 1954 issue of Universe Science Fiction. Oliver is one of those forgotten authors who popped up on my radar recently, with this story especially catching my interest. Oliver started young and was one of many authors who rode the wave of ’50s magazine saturation before quieting down circa 1960. While Ursula K. Le Guin is rightly praised for her anthropological SF, Oliver was a major forerunner in that vein.
2. “The Jaunt” by Stephen King. From the June 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. Does King need an introduction? Not really. Anyway, an SF Discord (shoutout to Media Death Cult, by the way) I’m in has “The Jaunt” on a list of short stories the group’s covering this month, and it’s one of the few on the list I had not read before in all honesty. Rather than just read and make a few remarks on it, I do believe I’ll give it the fancy long review treatment…
So it’s a short month. Only two serials, two novellas, and two shorts. I have something special in mind for March, but for now I’ll enjoy this calm before the storm. Nothing too gimmicky this month! Just catching up with some authors I’ve been meaning to do that with, plus some horror thrown into the mix—which may or may not be foreshadowing.

Won’t you read with me?