
Who Goes There?
Overall we know about as much about Sylvia Jacobs as we know about Jesus of Nazareth. I can’t find any pictures of her, or find out when she was born or when she died; but then we at least have writings from her, so there’s that. I was pointed towards a useful piece by Rich Horton which covers what little we know about Jacobs’s life and what little fiction and non-fiction she had published in the genre magazines. She had studied oceanography, and was married to a professional deep-sea diver. She apparently had done some research for Robert Heinlein (regarding the ocean, of course) for a juvenile novel he had planned but sadly never got to write. She was a California denizen for at least some of her adult life. She wrote about half a dozen SF stories, mostly in the early ’50s, which is unsurprising given that was when the magazine market saw an immense bubble; and, just as unsurprisingly, she mostly went dormant after 1960. This is the basic narrative of a lot of lady SF writers from that period, although by no means all of them. Horton describes “The Pilot and the Bushman” as like a prototype for the light satire Christopher Anvil later wrote nonstop, although I don’t think he gives Jacobs’s story quite enough credit—not to say it’s a hidden gem, really, but there’s a fair bit going on here.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the August 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. This is my third time plundering this issue for gold, and it’s quite possible I will have covered all of this issue’s fiction contents eventually. The copyright must’ve run out at some point, because “The Pilot and the Bushman,” along with a couple other Jacobs stories, is on Project Gutenberg. It’s also been reprinted in Women Wrote the Future: Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy (ed. J. LaRue). Other than that it’s not seen print at all.
Enhancing Image
The first and easily longest scene is a Socratic dialogue between two men, although despite both appearing to be human one of them is, in fact, an alien. The Ambassador from Outer Space (we never get his actual name) is having a behind-closed-doors meeting with Jerry Jergins, a marketing man and predictably a bit of a scoundrel. The two are in the situation because the Ambassador had made what was called a “boner” in the old days, by that I mean he had made a slip at the UN Assembly by saying the aliens have what they call a Matter Repositor. The problem is that the Matter Repositor can replicate anything, and I do mean anything, which is no real issue for a society that does not run on industrial capitalism. (The Ambassador is quick to point out that the aliens’ economic model is NOT some brand of socialism, IT’S NOT SOCIALISM, GUYS.) The Matter Repositor may as well be magic, but the point is that mankind is too “primitive” to have it. The problem is that once you inform someone of something’s existence and then tell them they can’t have that thing, then that someone is no less incentivized to take the whatever-it-is. God told Adam and Eve to not eat fruit from the tree of knowledge, but that did nothing to stop Eve from having a bite. If you tell your kid they can’t have more cookies from the cookie jar than they ought to, what do you think they’re gonna do at some point? The aliens, as you can tell by the comparisons I’ve made, see themselves as being in a parental or patronizing position with regards to the humans. Jerry isn’t happy about the Ambassador’s smarmy attitude, but if he has a plan (and he does), he’s not upfront about what he has in mind.
This is a story about two races from radically different cultures, with one actually immersing itself in the other’s culture for the first time. “The Pilot and the Bushman” is, on its surface, about the immediate aftermath of mankind making first contact with a fellow intelligent race, but it takes no more than a single brain cell to figure out Jacobs is comparing her SFnal situation with the real-life occurrences of one human culture making first contact with another human culture, with one side being far more advanced on a technological level than the other. I have to italicize that one part because, of course, the Spaniards and later the English who set foot in North America were no more inherently intelligent or morally upright than the indigenous peoples of the land. There were things the indigenous peoples were not and could not be prepared for, namely diseases they had no prior contact with or knowledge of, and thus you had whole populations introduced to diseases they had no immunity against. Similarly the Ambassador fears that introducing mankind to the Matter Repositor would have apocalyptic consequences, since virtually every country on Earth has (whether lefties wanna admit it or not) a capitalist economy based on scarcity. The people of the Ambassador’s home world have been born and raised into a post-scarcity environment, which understandably has created a radically different mindset from what humans are acquainted with. The aliens are not necessarily superior but are certainly very different—the huge gap in cultures being the races being the problem.
As the Ambassador says:
To a Micronesian bushman, the pilot who can be trusted with the power and speed of a B-29 seems a veritable god. But the pilot is only an ordinary Joe, very likely no more intelligent than the bushman—he just had a different background. Fighting each other for necessities and luxuries, the process that you people call business competition, has so long been needless to our people that they would no more think of competitive gain than you would do an Indian harvest dance before you signed a contract. They aren’t necessarily more intelligent or more virtuous than your people—they just have a different background.
Of course, the aliens are the pilot and the humans are the bushman. It’s not exactly a hard comparison to make. What’s strange, reading it now, is that Jacobs goes about it with the mindset that the aliens really do mean well despite their smug attitude around humans, or at the very least that they aren’t looking to divide and conquer Earth as hot new real estate, like with their real-life counterparts. It’s a commentary on colonialism and the relationships invasive cultures have historically had with indigenous peoples, but it lacks serious bite because it does not interrogate the myriad ways in which a colonizing force can subjugate a colonized people’s development. The biggest complaint I have with this story, other than it being overly chatty (there is nonstop talking for over half of it, which can dull one’s attention span), is that Jacobs does not treat her own subject matter with enough seriousness. Horton compares it to Christopher Anvil, but I also thought of a less funny and less vicious Robert Sheckley—granted that Jacobs’s story was published about a year before Sheckley made his debut. My point is that it’s easy to overlook the territory “The Pilot and the Bushman” covers because the story itself doesn’t pay said territory that much mind. It’s a social satire, of the sort that appeared quite often in Galaxy, especially in its early years, and for that it’s an adequate example.
But it could’ve been better.
There Be Spoilers Here
Conditions improve, thankfully, when we finally see an end to the dialogue and some action can kick in, although it’s not much. The back end of this story has enough of a sense of humor and also a viciousness that the first half or so was rather lacking; like I would’ve appreciated it if Jacobs had not spent so much time setting things up. The gist is that Jerry agrees to coordinate a huge propaganda campaign to disincentivize people from looking into the Matter Repositor, while at the same time playing up humanity’s quickly growing reputation as “savage” compared to the aliens. The plan works—in fact it works better than the Ambassador would’ve wanted, although Jerry is perfectly happy with the results. Earth becomes a tourist destination for the aliens, who are so unaccustomed to things to like drinking, whoring, theft, and other vices that they see it all as an alluring novelty. They think stealing some doodad from a convenience store and spending a night in jail is fun. They’re totally unprepared for the eccentricates of human culture and are thus unequipped to resist it. This is clearly a satire of how people in the Anglosphere see certain “backwards” countries as lovely tourist spots. Even circa 1950 this would’ve been very the case with how Americans treated Hawaii, which was a US territory but a state yet. The othering of indigenous people and East-Asians in Hawaii has been a thing for decades now, but ya know, nobody likes a tourist.
A Step Farther Out
I have to assume, given how little she wrote, that Jacobs saw writing SF as like a hobby more than anything. In the early ’50s it was possibly to write SF for a living, so long as you wrote at a mile a minute and knew how to sell a story to the right editor. Maybe Jacobs was into it but not that into it; she did, after all, have a respectable day job. “The Pilot and the Bushman” was her second published story, and I’d be interested in reading the rest of her SF, although I don’t expect to find a hidden master of the form. Jacobs’s career as an SF writer is like a ship that passed in the night.
See you next time.
