Who Goes There?

When Horace L. Gold launched Galaxy in 1950, the authors who appeared in those first few issues were (with the notable exception of Richard Matheson) from the previous generation of writers. Clifford Simak, Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, Fredric Brown, etc. It took a few years for a whole new crop of writers to make their mark in Gold’s new magazine, but by the end of 1953 the sea change had become apparent. Like Matheson, you had writers born in the latter half of the ’20s who were maybe a bit too young to have seen action in World War II, these including Philip K. Dick, Poul Anderson, Charles Beaumont, Alan E. Nourse, Katherine MacLean, Chad Oliver, and of course, Robert Sheckley. Sheckley actually made his debut in the now-forgotten magazine Imagination, in 1952, but he quickly (by that I mean in about six months) spread his work such that he appeared in seemingly every outlet that could have him. He appeared most often (or so it feels, I’ve not done the numbers myself) in Galaxy, though, which makes sense given that Gold and Sheckley were secular Jewish urbanites with similar temperaments, although Gold was—let’s say the more eccentric of the two. (Gold was agoraphobic, and was not all that sociable. He also had a reputation for being a control freak with his writers.) No matter where he went, but especially in Galaxy, Sheckley acted as a court jester, being humorous but also sour.

By the time Fred Pohl took over Galaxy, Sheckley appeared in it far less, although this was not Pohl’s fault, nor was it unique to Galaxy. Sheckley wrote about as much short fiction between 1952 and 1960 as the next 45 years of his life combined. Why did the torrent of short fiction slow down to little more than a trickle? It seems that Sheckley did what most other authors of the time did, which is to say he mostly switched to writing novels. By 1960 the magazine market had eroded, if not imploded. There remained few avenues for making a living as a short-story writer. But while he took a few breaks from writing short stories, Sheckley never stopped completely; and when it came time for Galaxy‘s 15th anniversary issue, he would be there, with “Shall We Have a Little Talk?”

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1965 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in the Sheckley collections The People Trap, The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley, The Collected Short Fiction of Robert Sheckley: Book Three, and Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley.

Enhancing Image

Jackson (I assume it’s his last name, we never get a first name from him) is a linguist and agent of the Terran empire, and he’s on a mission. The empire has scouted out another planet with intelligent life, which means another planet that could use some colonizing. It’s clear from the outset that Jackson isn’t here merely to understand an alien language, or just to make first contact for the sake of it, but to oil up the locals for exploitation. With this in mind, Jackson is basically a con man, despite working for what is supposed to be a benign government, and calling him an anti-hero would be a touch generous. Indeed, all it would take is a switching of perspectives to depict Jackson as the story’s villain, albeit villainous by virtue of wanting to swindle rather than the fire-and-brimstone treatment. Luckily for Jackson, the aliens are “bipedal monocephaloids,” which is to say humanoid; they have beige skin and are generally dark-haired, looking perfectly human, although they would not be homo sapiens but a conveniently close-resembling cousin species. In old-timey SF aliens being written as humanoid was often done because the writer was being lazy, or in the case of film and TV for budgetary reasons (and also laziness); but with Sheckley this supposed lack of effort into making alien aliens is very much part of the story’s point. The text is aliens, but that text is only a thin smokescreen for the subtext, which is that the aliens are supposed to be (and indeed are) indigenous peoples. This is a story about an indigenous populace meeting with a would-be colonizer, and you’d have to be rather dense to miss it.

“Shall We Have a Little Talk?” is a first-contact narrative that makes a bee line for the heart of what first-contact narratives are all more or less about, which is to say it’s about power dynamics and one group potentially taking control of another in the name of self interest. We also know this is a story about colonialism because Sheckley aims for the jugular and brings up a certain word that threatens to become overused in the current political climate, but which in some cases really is justified, and which tends to be a logical conclusion of colonialism: genocide. The systemic extermination of a people or race. The most scathing and withering passage of this story actually comes along relatively early, and it’s Sheckley at his most acidic, to the point where he does channel Kurt Vonnegut a bit:

No civilized law-abiding race likes to commit genocide. In fact, the folks on Earth consider genocide a very unpleasant matter, and they don’t like to read about it or anything like it in their morning papers. Envoys must be protected, of course, and murder must be punished; everybody knows that. But it still doesn’t feel nice to read about a genocide over your morning coffee. News like that can spoil a man’s entire day. Three or four genocides and a man just might get angry enough to switch his vote.

The Terran empire is a liberal democracy, having moved on from the free-market capitalism of “the ancients,” who are meant to be us. “The ancients” took what they could get and conquered without even the pretext of wanting to help the people they were robbing; but the Terrans of the future are all about soft power, and robbing indigenous populations with a smile on one’s face. Colonialism has changed its attire, but it’s still colonialism. Same shit, different ass. Jackson wanting an in with the aliens, by learning their language and even buying property on their land, is very much shown to be self-serving. He befriends a real estate fellow, one Mr. Erum, but their friendship is extremely shallow and hinges on Jackson getting what he wants out of the well-meaning Erum, which is to say language and property. It’s a business relationship disguised as friendship; there is nothing to stop Jackson from pulling a gun on Erum. It would, of course, be bad news if Erum were to retaliate if such a thing were to happen, because if one of these aliens were to kill Jackson then it would mean the Terrans basically nuking the whole race from orbit. And nobody wants that.

But they’re always prepared to do it.

I do have to wonder what had inspired Sheckley to write this specific story, because he is clearly responding to something. The vast majority of SF is observational fiction, in that is makes observations on current trends and extrapolates on them. There is some predictive SF, as in SF written with the intent of predicting future trends (most notably this is the kind of SF that Hugo Gernsback really liked), but virtually all of predictive SF has since been left in the dust bin of history. What was happening circa 1964 that made Sheckley so ambivalent? It could be that he was commenting on the JFK and LBJ administrations, which were very liberal but also keen on soft power, especially in Asia. There was the creeping question of what to do about Vietnam, and American intervention in the matter was something which at the time middle America would’ve largely either been ignorant or approving of, although Sheckley would’ve known better. It wasn’t exactly a secret that even by the time of JFK’s team the US had an “advisory team” in South Vietnam. This was a sort of colonial power that landed on the softer end of the spectrum, but as we all know, in the years following the publication of “Shall We Have a Little Talk?” that soft power would turn harder until it became an all-out war effort. Curiously, there was one other notable SF story published in 1965 which seemed to allegorize American involvement in Vietnam, albeit from a hawkish right-wing perspective rather than left-wing, that being Poul Anderson’s The Star Fox. What’s funny is that in both cases the stand-in for the JKF/LBJ administration is shown in an unflattering light, but for different reasons.

There Be Spoilers Here

Of course, just when Jackson thinks he has gotten a hold of the aliens’ tongue (because here, language is a key to unlocking an indigenous populace’s potential for exploitation), Erum and the city council throw a fast one on him, albeit unintentionally. For most of the story the alien language comes off as incomprehensible to human ears, but Jackson takes the time to learn its intricacies and nuances; this knowledge is mostly kept out of the reader’s grasp, but we’re not supposed to understand it anyway. Ultimately the aliens still confound the would-be colonizer, because at the end their language seems to have evolved (or maybe devolved) into variations on a single word: mun. In the span of what has to be a few months at the most the language has changed such that Jackson is simply unable to keep up. So he admits defeat. At the very end, when the aliens are left to themselves, their changing to using a bunch of muns seems to be genuine and not done as a prank, with begs the question of how and why the language so quickly changed like this. It’s evident that Sheckley is not a linguist, but I don’t think this is how language works. Even in the remarkably fast transitioning to early modern English in the 16th century, in which you had kids speaking of a brand of English that was nigh unrecognizable from what their grandparents spoke, it took a generation or two for the change to happen. I feel like Sheckley is counting on his readers being about as knowledgable of linguistics as him; which, to be fair, the vast majority of readers would not know better. It’s like how SF writers feel at liberty to bullshit their way through quantum physics, because hell, nobody really understands quantum physics—not even the people who actually study it.

A Step Farther Out

I think more time could’ve been spent on fleshing out the setting, and the twist does strain one’s suspension of disbelief a bit, but this is classic Sheckley in a good way. It’s not his funniest or his darkest, but there’s both a maturity and a raw pessimism here, minus the cheap laughs and gimmickry of his weaker stuff, that a younger Sheckley would not have gone for with such gusto. I really got the sense that Sheckley had a bone to pick with somebody here, although I can’t make heads or tails as to whom. “Shall We Have a Little Talk” is one of the few later Sheckley stories to appear in Store of the Worlds, and there’s a reason for that.

See you next time.