My Internet went out again and is now back again. I feel like the man in the movie who notices little things here and there, things that aren't quite right but also don't add up just yet. After a while he realizes: these things are indications of something greater--something more ominous and sinister--afoot in the world. But what is it? What exactly is happening? The post office refuses your mail. Your phone and Internet go out. The lobbies at fast food restaurants are closed because there aren't enough workers to keep them open. Even when you go into the lobby, no one is there to take your order. You hear of shortages of school bus drivers in the United States, fuel truck drivers in the United Kingdom. Shortages of electrical power in China. Shortages of natural gas in Europe forecast for this winter. Forget global warming. How many people will die this winter because of the cold? On the opposite end of serious situations, there are shortages of comic book bags and backer boards. If it's cold and dark, at least you can light a candle and wrap a blanket around yourself. But comic books must be protected. How do we save civilization if we don't save all of the elements of civilization? Anyway, these are the situations our elites have created for us. More bad things are on their way. We can all be sure of that. Those same elites would have us believe that they know what they're doing, that they know better than we do--or Nature does, or Reality does--about how the world should run. Pride goeth before the fall.
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I have been reading a lot lately. I still have my series on summer reading to complete. First this break, which follows a break.
One of the books I found this year at Half Price Books is Abyss by Kate Wilhelm (Bantam, 1973), a collection of two novellas, "The Plastic Abyss" and "Stranger in the House." First, I should say again what a good writer Kate Wilhelm was. Her prose is full of colors, moods, feelings--full of emotion, sensitivity, and introspection--relationships, too, especially mother-to-child relationships. (She had two children of her own.) In these things, she was a worthy successor to C.L. Moore (except that Catherine died childless). Some people consider C.L. Moore to have been a feminist or at least a proto-feminist author. I'm not so sure about that. But I think feminists will find something of interest in Abyss, especially in the title story, "The Plastic Abyss," which ends in a kind of transcendence of the lead character, a writer named Dorothy.
"The Plastic Abyss" is a work of real sophistication in science fiction. Originally published in 1971, it followed on the heels of a decade of sophisticated works in that genre, a good example of which is "A Bit of the Dark World" by Fritz Leiber, Jr. (1962). Like Leiber's story, "The Plastic Abyss" is almost phantasmagoric or psychedelic in places, though not to the same extent. There are some genuinely weird and eerie events in Kate's story. She handled these things to perfection. I wonder if she could have been influenced by A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920).
"The Plastic Abyss" is in some ways a weird tale. As in other weird tales, there are sensitive characters and there are hard-edged materialists. Dorothy is a sensitive and perceptive person. She is open to possibilities. Being young and not fully formed, her stepdaughter Jo is also open and sensitive. Their friend Tony, a young, visionary painter, completes their trio. Dorothy's husband, Gary, is her opposite. There is friction between them for different reasons, one of which is his lack of sensitivity and openness. Like materialists elsewhere in genre fiction, he is unable to cope in his confrontation with the non-material or supernormal. His wife--significantly, I think, a woman--seems to reach a transcendent state--to make a leap into a new state of consciousness or existence or power. He--significantly a man--is left behind. It would seem, then, that Kate Wilhelm was a non-materialist, for that is where her sympathies so clearly lie in these two stories. But was she also a believer? We still don't know.
(One more thing about "The Plastic Abyss": it seems to have forecast the arrival of a new kind of stealth technology in which an object might be hidden by projecting images not of itself. It's a story of surfaces versus layers or depths.)
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I have asked the question before: Is there or can there be a gothic science fiction? If Frankenstein was science fiction, the answer is obviously yes, for it is also a gothic work. Fritz Leiber attempted to treat the problem of gothicism in the twentieth century. William Gibson is a more recent practitioner of gothic science fiction. In "Stranger in the House," Kate Wilhelm had a go at that mix of seemingly opposite genres. Fans of weird fiction will find in it another story that they might well enjoy.
As I was reading, I thought that "The Plastic Abyss" has a TV-movie quality to it. "Stranger in the House" is actually structured and reads like a teleplay. I could easily imagine it as an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery. That made me wonder about the differences in generations of science fiction writers. Some were born in and grew up in the years before there were movies. Their storytelling often reflects that. Others saw movies but not television during their formative years. That influence shows, too. Still others were young enough to have been influenced by the first generations of television shows from the 1950s and '60s. I wonder if Kate Wilhelm--who was born in 1928--was among that younger generation of writers. (Today, writers seem to be influenced by nothing but television and movies, or worse, video games and computer games. It's this kind of stepping-down in culture that leads so easily to decline and decay and dissolution.)
"Stranger in the House" begins like a typical gothic romance, as a married couple moves into an old house with a secret history. The woman, Mandy, begins experiencing strange and seemingly malign things. Her husband, Robert, another materialist, is skeptical that these experiences indicate anything out of the ordinary. He believes his wife is mentally ill. (Where do all of these numbskull materialists come from, not just in fiction but in the real world as well?) The house, though, is not haunted by a ghost or a demon or a crazy woman locked in the attic. The haunter--the stranger--is actually an alien. (I'm not giving anything away by telling you that. You'll find out soon enough as you read the story.) The alien lives under the cellar. He is called the Groth. Take away the "r" and of course you get . . .
Two young people quickly figure out that an alien is responsible for all of the strange things going on. How I'm not sure. It speaks to the period that no one considers a cryptozoological creature as a possible culprit. Anyway, there is a kind of SETI scene that takes place in the cellar, an interesting development for this blog considering that I have written so recently about The Listeners by James E. Gunn. "Stranger in the House" also shares some elements with the movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). I liked "The Plastic Abyss" more than "Stranger in the House." It's a tighter and more pointed work, I think. But both are good and if you have a chance you might delve into Abyss.
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Now that I have read Abyss, I would like to read more of Kate Wilhelm's writing but also more science fiction from the 1960s and early 1970s. I send best wishes to all of you in your own reading adventures.
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| Abyss by Kate Wilhelm (Bantam, 1973) with cover art by Lou Feck (1925-1981). The title of this collection goes to its first story, the almost typical gothic romance cover illustration to its second. |
Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley
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