Who Goes There?

Despite having lived an incredibly long life (she was born in 1925 and died in 2019), Katherine MacLean wasn’t the most prolific of writers. She only wrote five novels, only two of which are solo efforts, and one of those is a fix-up. On the short fiction front she didn’t write a whole lot more, although she did have a streak in the ’50s; about half her short fiction was published that decade. MacLean was one of the few lady writers to appear regularly in Astounding (she even debuted there), but like a lot of other writers she hopped on the Galaxy bandwagon, appearing in that magazine’s first issue. “Pictures Don’t Lie” is a prototypical Galaxy-type story, and not unlike another early Galaxy story I reviewed recently, Philip K. Dick’s “The Defenders,” it’s founded on a Big Twist™. Unlike Dick’s story, however, MacLean’s remains effective even when taking the twist into account. Also like the Dick it was adapted for radio as an X Minus One episode, and has even been adapted elsewhere, including an EC Comics adaptation. It’s one of her most reprinted stories for a good reason.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It was reprinted in Invaders of Earth (ed. Groff Conklin), The Great SF Stories #13 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), The Prentice Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy (ed. Garyn G. Roberts), as well as the MacLean collection The Diploids. It’s also fallen out of copyright, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Joseph R. Nathen is a radio decoder for the American military, which during the Cold War would mean having a job that could potentially involve the difference between a frozen conflict and a hot one. But Nathen has found something a lot more incredible than signals from the other side of the Iron Curtain: he’s found signals of non-human intelligent life. “Squawking,” as he calls it, which needs to be slowed down, but the squawking is certainly not human, yet at the same time can be understood. Radio gives way to TV and it didn’t take long for Nathen to get a TV signal of the alien ship. He wanted pictures. “Pictures are understandable in any language,” he says. Nathen ends up being right about this—but also tragically wrong. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There are only three real characters in this story: Nathen, a journalist named Jacob Luke who’s mostly referred to as the Times man (which Times?), and Nathen’s correspondent on the alien ship, nicknamed Bud. There are a few other characters, mostly journalists who are only called by the outlets they work for (the Herald, the News, and so on), and the dialogue is almost entirely expositional; good thing Nathen is fluent in Expositionese. If this story has a flaw that would turn some readers off it’s that it seems in love with its own attempts at explaining its premise—so dense in exposition as to be hard to digest.

(The X Minus One adaptation does a pretty good job of streamlining the narrative, by giving us a solid viewpoint character [with the Times man] but also massively dialing back the scientific explanation for how the humans and aliens are able to communicate.)

Nathen had used the TV line to send the aliens the Rite of Spring segment of Fantasia, which the aliens not only received in a couple weeks but apparently enjoyed. At first this sounds like a match made in heaven with regards to first contacts: the aliens are not only able to respond back but can communicate, and according to Nathen their planet is “Earth-like.” The aliens seem to be humanoid, and the Earth team is able to receive TV images of the aliens on the ship. The question then remains: What could go wrong? There are a few warning signs, but the humans are unable to make heads or tails of what these abnormalities could mean. For one, the aliens move at a deliriously fast speed. “Something about the way they move…” As Nathen explains, while the images themselves are clear, the speed at which these images are relayed is hard to gauge. “When I turn the tape faster, they’re all rushing, and you begin to wonder why their clothes don’t stream behind them, why the doors close so quickly and yet you can’t hear them slam, why things fall so fast. If I turn it slower, they all seem to be swimming.” Something isn’t right. But still, the aliens intend to land on Earth, right outside the military base where the story’s happening—and soon.

The twist of this story is telegraphed pretty hard, but only with hindsight. I had the good fortune of not knowing the twist beforehand, so I was left with the genuine question of what the catch is—because there has to be a catch with a story like this. MacLean is clever here in that she turns the screw at just the right pace so that if you’re fast enough you can anticipate the twist, but there’s a good chance you won’t; but then you might reread the story and give yourself a pat on the back for taking note of what now reads as obvious foreshadowing. The title is ironic. It borders on postmodern—not in literary technique, obviously, but in how it shows that objective reality, or rather our notion of it, can be untrustworthy. Our perception of reality is based on our senses. The humans and aliens have differently calibrated perceptions and as such they don’t perceive the same space in the same way. When the alien ship comes to Earth the humans don’t see any sign of it by the landing pad, and Bud says the ship can’t see the humans anywhere despite surely having landed on Earth. The atmosphere, Bud says, is too thick—much thicker and soupier than Nathen said. The humans posit that the aliens might’ve landed on Venus by accident (this was when Venus was thought of as a gaseous swamp and not a hellworld), but this can’t be the case. Something has gone wrong, but they don’t know what.

There Be Spoilers Here

The aliens are on Earth alright, and they’re even somewhere near the landing zone—but the humans can’t see the aliens. Bud says that the ship has come under attack and that the humans have to find the ship fast if there’s hope of saving them. It’s there that Nathen and the Times man realize the missing piece of the puzzle—and at the same time realize it’s probably too late to save the ship. It’s one of those great “we’re fucked” moments in old-timey SF, a real sense of having passed the point of no return, like locking your doors after your house has already been robbed, or realizing that one girl you liked had a crush on you as well and you only realize this years after the fact. MacLean gives us a real zinger of a final line, which encapsulates the bizarre tragedy of the situation, for why the humans can’t see the ship—at least not with the naked eye: “We’ll need a magnifying glass for that.” The aliens move at such an odd speed and the atmosphere around them is so thick because they are, in fact, microscopic. The pictures didn’t lie, but they didn’t tell the whole story either. The humans thought they had made contact with likeminded aliens when in fact they were giants who had made contact with beings even smaller than ants, and neither side could figure this out until it was too late. This is how you do a twist ending.

A Step Farther Out

“Pictures Don’t Lie” is basically a tragedy, not caused by technology but aided by it. Even by the early ’50s there’ve been a ton of first contact narratives, such that it would take a bit of ingenuity to write a story of this type that’s truly memorable. MacLean was still very young, and early in her career at this point, but she did have that touch of ingenuity. More impressively it’s a story that raises questions about the utility of the brand-spanking-new technology called television, about how such technology might contribute to first contact with aliens—and how even with this new tech something could go wrong. It’s also a question of size and perspective. We always imagine aliens like how they appear in Star Trek, humanoids that happen to be the same size as humans. MacLean posits we might find life on another planet—or possibly in a grain of sand.

See you next time.