Tag: william timmins

Short Story Review: “When the Bough Breaks” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

February 11th, 2025

(Cover by William Timmins. Astounding, November 1944.)

Who Goes There?

I know Valentine’s Day is still a few days off, but now is as good a time as any to return to two of my favorite old-timey SFF writers: Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. Kuttner and Moore both made their debuts in Weird Tales in the ’30s, with Moore being a few years older than her future husband and also having entered the field a few years earlier. Moore quickly became one of the most beloved writers on the market, such that Kuttner, himself very young and new to writing, sending her fan letters. The two found that they were both California denizens, and the mutual admiration between the writers soon budded into romance. They married in 1940, and stayed so until Kuttner’s untimely death in 1958, just short of his 43rd birthday. Apart they were very fine writers, each in his or her own way, but together they synthesized such that there’s continued speculation to this day as to who wrote what (or how much) of most of their collaborative fiction. Nearly all of the fiction they wrote together was published either under a few pseudonyms or Kuttner’s name alone. (I have to assume using Kuttner’s name was partly institutional misogyny and also the result of unfortunate timing, since while Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales loved Moore’s work, he also retired from the magazine before dying shortly thereafter in 1940. Other editors of the period were not so egalitarian.) Today’s story, “When the Bough Breaks,” was first published under “Lewis Padgett.”

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, with its iconic Timmins cover and featuring one of Theodore Sturgeon’s most famous stories. “When the Bough Breaks” has been reprinted quite a few times, in Beyond Time and Space (ed. August Derleth), The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology (ed. John W. Campbell), Tomorrow’s Children (ed. Isaac Asimov), Some Things Dark and Dangerous (ed. Joan Kahn), The Great SF Stories Volume 6 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and the Kuttner-Moore collection Two-Handed Engine.

Enhancing Image

Joe Calderon and his wife Myra are normal white middle-class parents, raising their 18-month-old son Alexander—the difference being that Alexander not only has unusual body proportions (namely a bigger head than normal), but also that he’s been exhibiting higher intelligence than the average baby. Things get suddenly much weirder when Joe and Myra are visited by a group of rather short men in weird costumes, who all have similar proportions to Alexander but as adults. The men, who claim to have come from the future, explain that they’ve come here actually on Alexander’s orders—the adult Alexander of the future, that is. The idea is that Alexander is a superman, an “X Free super,” with enormous mental powers, including (of course) ESP. Indeed Alexander is supposedly the first of this forthcoming generation of “homo superior,” which is destined to overtake “homo sap.” But that’s in the distant future. The time-traveling men have come back to give the still-infant Alexander an education, since Alexander of the future apparently laments that he had not been able to tap into his powers when he was very young; so rather than wait, he opted to have his baby self taught ahead of schedule, as it were. Joe and Myra will serve as babysitters for the, well, baby, less teaching him and more making sure he doesn’t accidentally stick a fork in an electrical socket. The time travelers understand that changing the past like this will have a kind of rubber band effect on the future—or so they claim. What actually happens is a lot more unexpected—to the characters, if not the reader.

You can sort of see where this is going, not least because we’re so accustomed to time-travel stories that try every which way to put a twist on the basic premise that we’re conditioned to expect some kind of paradox, and as such this is a difficult story to discuss without talking about the ending, which despite being predictable is pretty memorable. Then again, “When the Bough Breaks” feels more like a Kuttner story than a Moore story, and one of the things Kuttner is very good at is showing characters get their comeuppance, or rather he’s fond of indulging in sadistic cases of cause-and-effect. If you’re even a little shitty as a person you’ll probably not come out unscathed in a Kuttner story, especially if you’re the hero (or rather anti-hero). Luckily for Joe and Myra they are not on the receiving end of Kuttner-Moore’s wrath ultimately, but still unfortunately for them they have to take a beating first. I’ll get to the question lingering in the back of all our minds later, but for now let’s talk about the immediate problem of raising a superbaby: the fact that said superbaby has superhuman powers, but has not yet developed the capacity for morality or empathy. The time travelers teach Alexander how to make use of his powers, but they see no point in teaching him some basic things, such as how to get along with other people or understand them at all, for they see something like that as beneath “homo superior.” If the time travelers and Alexander tell us anything it’s that this future breed of humanity may be objectively more powerful than normal human beings, but they seem to have the emotional maturity of children. What if you gave some tech billionaire who never engaged with the humanities when they were in college ESP? You can probably guess.

“When the Bough Breaks” could be considered a slightly less serious companion to Kuttner and Moore’s more famous story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” which similarly is about children unexpectedly coming into contact with something from the distant future; but whereas the inciting incident in “Mimsy” was a freak accident, in “When the Bough Breaks” it’s quite deliberate. I think it’s also worth mentioning that Kuttner and Moore, especially when writing together, wrote a fair deal about something that rarely went shown or even implied in Campbellian SF: the relationships between parents and their children. There are quite a few Kuttner-Moore stories about raising children, which is a bit ironic given that they were childless (not for lack of trying). But then Yasujirō Ozu, who was also childless and a lifelong bachelor on top of that, was perhaps the greatest of all filmmakers when it came to depicting parent-child relations. (As an aside, one of my pet peeves is parents who act as if raising children blessed them with some innate wisdom or maturity, considering how many fascists [especially Christofascists] I’ve met who call themselves “proud parents.”) “Mimsy” and “When the Bough Breaks” are both somewhat satirical but also somewhat foreboding stories, about normal people in then-contemporary times (the 1940s), who find themselves faced with science that almost comes across as magic. Indeed “When the Bough Breaks” is vaguely fantastic, despite officially being SF, as well as Biblical, what with Joe and Myra sounding a lot like Joseph and Mary—a connection I’m sure Kuttner and Moore had intended. But if Alexander is a Christ figure, which really is how the men from the future treat him, then he’s a Christ without even a hint of ur-socialism, which is to say he has no concern for other people’s wellbeing. As you can guess, this can only end well.

There Be Spoilers Here

Alexander, having become more attuned to his ESP but also more of a monster around the house, has been fiddling with some kind of egg-shaped gadget. Since the third-person narration is thoroughly grounded in Joe and Myra’s perspectives, we know about as much about the gadget as they do, which is to say nothing. The gadget, however, does turn out to do something—although not what Alexander or the time travelers would’ve hoped. There’s a blinding white light and then where Alexander once was he is no more; and while at first the parents think maybe he teleported like before (because he can do that), it seems he just… vanished. Or that he never existed. Kuttner and Moore were both pessimists, which you can figure out once you’ve read even a bit of either of their work. I myself am also a pessimist, so I relate to their dim view of the human condition. One of the basic tenets of philosophical pessimism is that it is perhaps better to not have been born than to live, which should be construed with the notion that it’s better to commit suicide than to live; although of course some pessimists (I’m immediately thinking of Philipp Mainländer) do end up committing suicide. My point is that the “solution,” or at least the resolution, of the story is the time paradox that probably popped into your head much earlier, which is that if Alexander messed with the past via teaching his past self at a point in time earlier than what would’ve compelled Alexander to do this in the first place, then if the past Alexander “succeeds” the Alexander of the future no longer exists. Since the future Alexander no longer exist, neither does the Alexander of the past. Time “corrects” itself: Alexander was never born. From Kuttner-Moore’s viewpoint this is probably for the best. On the one hand, Joe and Myra’s troubles are over, but unfortunately for them they still have memories of their son who once existed but now never did.

A Step Farther Out

I have to admit my enjoyment of this one was marred slightly by the mediocre proofreading for Two-Handed Engine, which seems to be even more so with this story than some others in that collection. Thinking on it, however, it’s hard to deny its effectiveness and memorability as old-timey SF writing. While you can anticipate the ending, it’s still a really bittersweet conclusion that feels perfectly logical, given what Kuttner and Moore had set up for it. Granted, if you’re already a Kuttner-Moore fan then there’s a good chance you’ve already read this one, in which case I need not try to convince you. I am glad that I finally got around to it, though.

See you next time.
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.

Tag: william timmins

Short Story Review: “When the Bough Breaks” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

Novella Review: “Attitude” by Hal Clement