Who Goes There?

It’s been a long-term goal of mine to review every single one of Walter M. Miller’s short stories and novellas, since all of them were published in the magazines—yes, even the stories that would make up A Canticle for Leibowitz. While he is known now for pretty much just that novel (it is, after all, the only novel he managed to finish in his lifetime), Miller wrote short fiction fairly prolifically, from his debut in 1951 until he began work on the Leibowitz stories. Those first few years, incidentally when the genre magazine market was seeing a huge bubble, were especially productive for him. Miller served as a bomber crewman during World War II, an experience that seemed to give him profound mental health issues as well as compell him to convert to Catholicism, and indeed he falls into one of my favorite kinds of writer: the depressed Catholic. Despite being active in the field for only about a decade, before going into a hybernation from which he would never truly emerge, Miller was honored with two Hugos. He killed himself in 1996, after the death of his wife and having apparently given up on the Church. He left the long-anticipated follow-up to A Canticle for Leibowitz, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, to be finished by Terry Bisson, whom Miller had personally chosen and provided with notes. “It Takes a Thief” is the earliest and easily the weakest of the Miller stories I’ve covered, but it’s still a fine read and has several points of interest.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1952 issue of If. It has, so far as I can tell, never been anthologized in English, but it’s been included in seemingly every Miller collection over the years, including The View from the Stars and Dark Benediction. Miller let some of his stories fall out of copyright, including this one, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Asir is having a bad day, namely that he’s been crucified, spikes through his wrists like Christ, as punishment for being a thief—not a thief of material things, but of specific, secret phrases. “A ritual-thief caused havoc in the community. The owner of a holy phrase, not knowing that it had been stolen, tried to spend it—and eventually counter-claims would come to light, and a general accounting had to be called.” This is not Earth in distant past, and Asir is not the thief who hung dying next to Christ as written in the Gospels, but on Mars, in the future. Humanity has colonized Mars, but seemingly in the process lost its way. Time has been flung backwards as with a slingshot. The crucifixion is not the punishment either, but merely the prelude to the real punishment, either something relatively minor (losing a finger) or death, Asir not knowing which. His “accomplice” (it’s actually ambiguous what their relationship is supposed to be), Mara, is supposed to have gotten word back to him as to his punishment, but it seems she may have betrayed him. This turns out to not be quite the case, but Asir is still very cross with her when he’s finally let down from the crucifix and his arms bandaged. Mara had slept around a bit in order to lighten Asir’s punishment, although the elders say it’s due to his very young age: the punishment is banishment from the village. Asir is to venture out to hills, which doesn’t bother him much given that he was born there. But he has other plans.

“It Takes a Thief” is basically an adventure narrative who conclusion is obvious—maybe not as obvious in 1952, but who’s to say? It has some of the trademarks of a “gritty” ’50s SF adventure, including commentary on the prospect of nuclear destruction, and a hard-as-nails anti-hero who, if we’re being honest, is kind of a shithead. Asir is not secretly a nice person under his grizzled exterior; indeed the only thing that makes him better than the village elders is that he cares about helping humanity at large, even if on a micro level he’s a mean son of a bitch. Why someone who was raised “by a renegade” of a father, in the hills, apart from what civilization is left on Mars, would care so much about restoring humanity to its former glory, is unclear. It’s also unclear why Asir and Mara are together, since the former goes so far as to even threaten to kill the latter. (Asir is clearly an abusive partner, but never sees repercussions for his behavior, nor does Mara seem to mind much ultimately that Asir had threatened her life.) If this story has an Achilles’s heel, it’s the general unlikability of the few characters who take center stage. For what it’s worth, Asir’s slut-shaming of Mara is kept to a minimum, and the latter’s sleeping around is framed as a pragmatic move that “had to be done.” (I’m reminded of Miller’s oddly sympathetic treatment of sex workers in “The Lineman.”) The idea could be that Mars society has devolved into a dog-eat-dog world, such that even the most well-meaning of people have a dark side to them, but there’s also not enough psychology present for me to relate to these people.

Despite its ruggedness and pulpy style, though, this is still at its core a Walter M. Miller story, which means it’s about life and death, and especially man’s capacity to destroy or redeem itself. Indeed the quest Asir and Mara go on to enter the vaults, a forbidden place outside the village, guarded by a mysterious creature named… Big Joe (well that’s a bit silly). The quest to rekindle humanity’s thirst for knowledge and technology strikes me as a half-formed, more juvenile version of what Miller would explore in A Canticle for Leibowitz. I’m pretty sure that “It Takes a Thief” is by no means the only protoype in Miller’s oeuvre, of course, as from what I’ve read his short fiction writing progressed such that he was setting himself up for his big novel. I liked “The Darfsteller” and “The Lineman,” and really liked the much-overlooked “Wolf Pack.” “It Takes a Thief” is not as good as the aforementioned stories, due in part to its roughness of style and characters, its brevity, and the feeling that Miller was still working well within the constraints of pulp SF writing. At the same time it’s easy to see by the time we get to the back end of the story that while he was still quite young (about my age, which does give me a pinch of existential anxiety) and early in his writing career, Miller was on his way to becoming one of the most morally serious SF writers of his generation.

There Be Spoilers Here

A theme that clearly haunted Miller on a personal level, and which would inform a great deal of SF in the ’50s, is the problem of nuclear annihilation. This is especially pertinent for an at-the-time devout Christian like Miller, as it poses a troubling question: If Christ had suffered and died so that humanity may be saved, then why do we now have the ability to destroy ourselves with the push of a button? As Mara quips, once she and Asir have gotten past Big Joe via an elaborate floor puzzle, “The ancients weren’t so great.” They venture into the depths of the vaults and see, on a wall, an engraving of our solar system—only here they see something they do not recognize: a planet between Venus and Mars. Earth. Many years ago man had destroyed Earth and it became an asteroid belt between its neighboring planets. This is the most effective moment in the story, and it’s genuinely haunting, the kind of punch to the gut that Miller can be really good at. It may be obvious, the revelation that Earth got blown to bits, but it’s an image that feeds into the tug-of-war between Miller’s anxiety and depression over humanity’s future—or possible lack of it.

A Step Farther Out

I have to admit I picked this one because it was free to read online, and also I was intrigued by the premise, though it ended up not being as good as I had hoped. Do I regret this? Of course not, I was gonna review this story at some point, as like I said I hope to review all of Miller’s short fiction. This will probably take… a couple decades. Assuming this site still exists in twenty years, or if I still will. The future is foggy, and caked in mud. I personally don’t think I’ll be able to review them all.

See you next time.