"Hunter Lake" by Gene Wolfe

First appeared in Gordon Van Gelder's F&SF. Reprinted by Stephen Jones. 

Summary:

Mother (Susan) and daughter (Ettie) search for Hunter Lake, which is said to be haunted--whether because Native Americans tortured or were tortured is left unclear (see below). They travel down a scant trail to find their guide. They don't find him, but they do find the lake.

Discussion:

Their guide doesn't appear, but the water begins to rise. They've heard creepy stories about the lake being the hunter (although a hunter was also said to have found the lake), so Ettie runs, losing a loafer. The mother at first thinks it is a tidal phenomenon but catches her daughter's fear and flees behind her, with the lake in pursuit.

Tides can be a little creepy. (See video.) However, they can't chase someone dashing up a hillside. And this is a lake, not an ocean, which has a lot more water. Tides redistribute earth's water due to the gravitational pull of the moon. So water from other parts of the ocean are piling up on the near and far side of where the moon is.

They find a cabin that Susan initially takes as their own, but it is white clapboard, not log. Susan takes stuffing the cracks with clothes while Ettie decides to wake up from her dream.

It turns out Henrietta (Ettie?) has a daughter, Joan, who knows that her grandmother died from fluid in her lungs.

Some of the strangenesses of the tale:

1. It was all a dream: Ettie/Henrietta wakes up. This is supposed to be a big narrative no-no. But it creates a somewhat interesting scenario. Ettie recognizes this is a dream early on. However, most of the logic seems fairly straight-forward except for the lake. That Ettie recognizes this is a dream but Susan does not, seems like it should be important. However, it is hard to say what exactly that means. Does Susan have a flawed personality that Ettie does not? The text doesn't really support a strong case although maybe Ettie has a stronger dose of reality. But isn't it Ettie that creates the fear of the lake in the first place?
2. Dual POV: This allows us to inhabit both consciousnesses--Susan and Ettie. This is possible through the dream. Is it necessary? It does allow us to examine and compare each POV. Clearly, Ettie's is the preferred perspective since she is the survivor. Yet Susan seems to be the cooler and more reasoning head. Somehow she never see this is a dream. Should Ettie have stuck around to convince Susan to wake up? Or maybe it is only Ettie's dream, so that only she can wake up. If the latter, why pick a Dual POV? Maybe it is just for contrivance to create an old-fashioned flavor.
3. Present-day dream leaps into the future: The main body of the story feels contemporary to its writing, discussing internet and rabbit-ear TV being outdated. But what we thought was the present day becomes a dream of a distant past--presumably at least twenty years into the future where Henrietta has a daughter of her own. Henrietta is rather old-fashioned name to begin with. By 1970, it had fallen out of the top 1000. (By 1956, the top 500; its heyday seeming to be from the 1900s through the 1920s.) So even the name juxtaposed against the internet makes the story have a dreamlike or asynchronous reality.
4. Is this supernatural or science fiction?: One might assume this is a tale of horror/fantasy, but it was included in Wolfe's science fiction collection. Was he just toying with us? Or is the lake a reality, an alien visitor? If so, how did Ettie manage to survive? Why did it select to kill Susan and not Ettie?

Gene Wolfe's Mathoms from the Time Closet: Robot's Story, Against the Lafayette Escadrille, Loco Parentis

First appeared in Harlan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions. "Against the Lafayette Escadrille" was up for Nebula award. Reprinted by Algis Budrys, Charles G. Waugh, Martin Harry Greenberg, Ann VanderMeer, Jeff VanderMeer. 

Summary:

"Robot's Story": Robot escapes one fate in order to tell a story that mirrors the predicament he fled.

"Against the Lafayette Escadrille": A man builds as near a replica of the Fokker triplane as he can. When he flies, he spies an unusual hot-air balloon.

"Loco Parentis": Told in dialogue format, the story-play treats parents who aren't sure about the humanity of the children they are rearing.

Discussion:

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, “Anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom." In other words, it would seem that Wolfe did not initially value these pieces. He liked enough that he submitted them but never reprinted the two that weren't award-nominated. Two involve changes of perspective while the centerpiece, the award-nominee, evokes an emotional mood. Yet I suspect it derives some of its power being proximity to the other examinations of time.

"Robot's Story": Syntactically, the story is strange. There are two outsides, it says, but one is more sheltered than the other. This suggests at least two things. 1) One is always on the outside with these people. 2) It is as cold outside as with these people.

In the next paragraph, the sentence constructions open with three sets of "The kids are": 1) "the older ones" (which is multiply strange: A) that the younger ones are generally called kids and B) that we don't know exactly what a "one" is); 2) "the younger ones" (while this makes more sense--we expect the younger ones to be kids--we've already been pushed off balance, and if the older and younger ones are kids, what's left? Moreover, are they older or younger in comparison to what? Each other? the narrator? Robot?); 3) "Robot" which is strange because we expect the plural subject to be linked to singular noun. But not always. Perhaps, if we were to cut the Gordian knot, the construction makes all of them equivalent or the same person or persons. Or maybe everyone is a kid, compared to the narrator. However, the narrative doesn't create certainties.

What is clear is that the narrator considers Robot to be a living, young man or "kid" of nineteen, perhaps of this age. Robot considers himself to be a machine of five years from the future. The narrator likes Robot. He is the most useful (fixes plumbing), the least hostile, and interesting compared to the other kids.  The narrator says that Robot can be depressed, which wouldn't fit most of our ideas of what a robot is. However, this may be explained by Robot's sentence "I don't know how good I was made." This could be bad grammar, indicating poor craftsmanship that allowed poor grammar and possible depression (after all, only the narrator says the kid is depressed). Or maybe he is grammatically correct and means that he doesn't know how much good is inside him. Since he works for the others, we can suspect he was made with a lot of good.

Robot has a fondness for the 13th century B.C. This may allude to the story of the fourteen young men and women who were fed to the Minotaur until Theseus arrived. In other words, he may have a fondness for stories about the sacrifice of young people, which he seems to be a victim as well.

Robot says he is programmed to tell stories and waits to be told that he can, which the narrator seems to accept by saying the magic words that allow Robot to talk about a human man from a single-man scout ship (Robot compares these ships to sperm) who serves a woman who would only accept his company if he did all the work. So the man agrees. She stays young, which he doesn't mind since he gets to look at her. However, she leaves him as soon as another "fool" or scout-ship comes along.

When Robot finishes, the kids make Robot go out and get marijuana for them. The narrator says he thought about giving Robot his coat, but waits too long. They all fall sleep while they wait for Robot's return. Robot, then, is doing exactly what his story said. Perhaps he knows or does not yet know. He says he served "an ugly woman" from the 33rd century, only to serve these "ugly" people from (presumably) the present or near future. The narrator seems to have kindness lurking within him but doesn't act on it.

"Against the Lafayette Escadrille": This story seem fairly simple. A (then) present-day man builds a WWI airplane replica, flies, and falls for a woman from the American Civil War, having seen her in a hot-air balloon made out of dresses. He keeps taking the plane up to find her again but cannot.

Complicating the story is figuring out the story's timeline and the idea of "dope." When is he from? When is she from? Perhaps this would have been easier if read when the story came out. The story says that men from WWI walked around with canes, which people may have seen in the sixties and seventies, so it may have been contemporary. However, the narrator says he tried...

"to convey with my wave that none of the men of my command would ever be allowed to harm her; that we had at first thought that her craft might be a French or Italian observation balloon, but that for the future she need fear no gun in the service of the Kaiser's Flugzeugmeisterei." 

Suddenly, he is convinced his replica is the real thing and that he commands planes in a WWI Germany (despite having been in the U.S. earlier, or at least having ordered parts from around the U.S.). If he is hallucinating (and the title also suggests this--or maybe he hallucinated building a replica although that seems less likely), is she even really from the Civil War? If she were from the Civil War, could she learn all he was trying to say from a wave?

When we compare these two stories, side by side, it is hard not to read into the term dope. Here, the term refers to material used to tighten a plane's covering, making planes air-tight and weatherproof. The previous story ends on marijuana. The narrator here distinguishes between flammable and inflammable types of dope.

Also in both, we have protagonists unmoored from their time. They seem confused about when they belong. As Wolfe writes in the first story, "This... was to prevent his whenabouts... becoming known." Later, that same narrator interjects in the middle of the Robot's tale, "(I wondered if the 'grass' in the story was an unconscious reflection of the kids' obsession with marijuana; or if for Robot as for Whitman it represented the obliterations of time.)"

Apparently, the two ideas are tied together.

Curiously, the story appeared in an anthology called Space Dogfights, although it doesn't take place in space or have a dogfight in it. It also appeared in a major time-traveling anthology although there may or may not be any time-traveling in it.

"Loco Parentis": The final tale twists the idea of who is real, who fake. The parents wonder if the children they are rearing are apes or machines, but it turns out the parents may be the unreal ones. Or maybe both.

The title refers to the legal Latin phrase "In Loco Parentis" which refers to "in the place of a parent" where either an educational institution acts on the kid's behalf (positively or negatively) or a kid is raised by non-biological parents. "Loco" also means crazy, so crazy parents.

The crazy stuff regarding time here is how fast the kids grow. What sounds like a conversation about whom a kid can play with (pre-teen) switches to whom a kid can date (mid to late teens), and the kid strikes out on his own. The kid returns saying they aren't his parents and maybe they are the ones who are apes or machines. However, the story doesn't end there. The parents don't mourn but immediately coo over a new child who is eating a banana, suggesting that maybe all of them are a little crazy, a little animal, a little machine.

Time is distorted for the characters in all of the stories. I have tried to read the group title not as a dismissal of the stories but as blanket for all three stories and haven't yet come up with a satisfactory tool to do so.

What it does seem to capture as a group is the unmooring of a generation, not only from time, but also from who they are as people, from each other, and from previous generations. The stories may not be well served parted from each other.

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Westworld (1973 movie)

Summary:

The Western grew up with the film industry up until the mid 1970s. Some claim Robert Altman's 1971 McCabe & Mrs. Miller killed the Western. The long-running The Virginian did end that year. But the steady diet of Old West movies continued to appear. In 1973, the year Bonanza died (two years before the end of Gunsmoke), Michael Crichton's Westworld appeared.

Westworld opens with an advertisement for the Delos amusement park, Westworld. For a thousand dollars a day, you can visit an amusement park where you can live out various pasts (Old West, Rome, and Medieval Europe). An announcer interviews attendees as they disembark from a plane.

We are presented our protagonists, John Blane [James Brolin] who is a veteran of the park and Peter Martin [Richard Benjamin] who is giddy as a child at the prospect of shooting guns, drinking booze, barroom brawling, and visiting prostitutes.

Meanwhile, behind the computers and monitors, scientists and programmers adjust settings to ensure the vacationers are having a good time. However, glitches are appearing in the system, machines and robots malfunctioning in small ways. One scientist suggests it's like a contagion spreading through the system. (First hint at a computer virus?). John gets bit by a rattlesnake even though that isn't supposed to happen.

Commentary with Spoilers:

After a night of drinking and brawling John and Peter stumble out of the saloon, hungover, to encounter Yul Brenner's robot character, whom Peter has killed twice already. When John tries to kill the robot, he is shot and killed instead, and Peter flees. The robot, with recently heightened senses, pursues. After Peter ducks into the Delos laboratories and the robot follows, he uses acid to blind the robot. The robot apparently still has hearing and infrared sensors, but medieval torches confuse his detection of Peter, which Peter discovers and uses to his advantage.

Crichton spends a great deal of time developing the science behind the piece. Could the story have been developed without introducing the behind-the-scenes looks? Possibly. It is a story of science gone awry, but it is also a story of the triumph of science over its failures. This almost feels like overkill. But a few critical moments do require it: 1) The revelation of the robot virus (and that the robots have left human-operated computer control), 2) the revelation of how to maim the robot and 3) the denouement where Peter destroys the murdering cowboy bot.

According to Brian Tallerico at Vulture, Crichton is said to have thought the tale preached against corporate greed since the scientists choose to keep the simulations running despite evidence that things were falling apart. Maybe that appears, but more of the film develops the idea behind John Blane's comment, "It's authentic, the way it really was." Sort of. It's more of what the movies told us what the Old West was. Crichton himself said that he threw in the cliches--taunts and gun fights, dallies with prostitutes, prison escape, and a barroom fight. The cliches exist without the support of a narrative, which makes them stand out as bald Western cliches.

We have two ways to view these cliches: A) a critique of the Western genre, B) a critique of the idea we can visit the Old West through movies (or vacations to where famous events took place) as it was more dangerous than we imagine. It is hard to lean toward one interpretation or the other. Reinforcing option A is Yul Brenner, who reprises his Magnificent Seven character--at least down to the costume, if not the character. The Western hero from a classic Western becomes the villain in science fictional world. Meanwhile, reinforcing B, the movie ends with an voice-over echo about this being a vacation.

My main problem with the film is that it doesn't develop narratives for the vacationers. This probably keeps the film simple and from growing too long. Also, if it is a critique of the Western genre, the cliches would not stand out as starkly. The ending, too, is not as strong as it might have been. Perhaps this idea could have been supported elsewhere in the story to make it truly potent.

My hypothesis about what killed the popularity of the Old West: its survivors. People who might have been alive during the frontier days were aging and dying off. People probably felt a tangible if vicarious connection to the West through those who had lived it. But they would have been dying off. We have a connection to our parents and grandparents, but after that our interest dwindles.

For some, the Western still hasn't died. They might have known someone from that era, plus it was a childhood staple of their recommended daily allowance. They like the simple and clear morality, a tough land that repays hard work, the breaking and restoration of law and order.

For some, they still live in the West. They ranch, they farm, they hunt, they work the land, they ride horses and drive cattle. They still feel a kinship for America's past.

For others, who believe the Old West only represents exploitation, they've been cheering each death knell. However, the Western does keep rearing its head after each proclamation of its death.

Outerscope I (episodes 5-11)

Welcome to Sani-land, where scrub brushes, mops, sponges, soap, and scissors clean and polish all the time. They conclude the Outerscope kids dirty.

The scene begins promising enough: white stone and a surreal black and white tile path. They are surrounded by cleaning utensils--the scissors presenting the only menace, though--and herded toward the King and Queen of Sani-land. The King and Queen are duds, though. They flatten the estrangement into something banal. But maybe cleanliness is an issue that troubles kids when they feel they are clean. Moreover, there's the racial epithet of being dirty if not one of their kind. It does have resonance. However, they kill whatever ambiance it's built by singing, accompanied by shrill pipes. Edit that out.

When they exit Sani-land they have a brow-beating discussion that the viewer can guess. Cut? They do bring up the idea that space is like a dream, returning to the idea that their journey is not one of reality but of imagination.

Next we enter Technovek, a land of living machines (living?) with a Papavek, Mamavek, and Babyvek. They seem a bit arrogant about their intelligence while the kids seem to have prejudices/preconceptions to overcome. The kids get directions back home, but don't trust them, so they're going to go in the opposite direction. They are rather odd directions, requiring loops--maybe they're celestial slingshots, but if so, you can't simply reverse them.

The repetition was no doubt necessary for the episodic series since there may have been time between viewing episodes when they first appeared, but now it is tedious. There's a smidgen of charm in the "To be continued" and the recaps, but they are too frequent and exhausting to watch in one sitting. Plus, even within an episode there's unnecessary reinforcement of ideas--maybe in an effort to make sure each kid had something to say and pound home the lesson to be learned.

At this point, the show has something to offer, but it is labored perhaps under the limitations of its original format. When viewing individual episodes, they capture some of home-spun wonder that I recalled. But the repetition bogs it down. Can the show be edited into something worthwhile?

One might argue that it's a kid show, but does that mean it can't be done a little more artfully? Education does require repetition, but 1) the educational value is only in its education of cohesive social values among so many varieties of people, and 2) making it watchable will make people want to watch it once and maybe again.

Time to put this show on pause.

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Outerscope I (series continued and reviewed--episodes 2-4)

I have to admit that these need serious editing. One gets the feeling that the writers were either uncertain where the story was headed or they wanted to streeeetch out the moments they thought were wonderful. Still with careful splicing (jettisoning up to half) and perhaps even cheap CGI, this series could be cool.

Cynthia comes up with the bright idea of using yeast, (which raises dough, right? so why not a spaceship?) to lift their scrapyard craft. She questions whether this is imagination or reality they were dealing with. The older kids treat everything matter-of-fact. Still there are moments of steering in space with bicycle handle bars (with what rudder? against what medium?) or getting the ship off earth, for that matter, (ethanol won't cut it as it is 644 times more dense than air) that makes the reality of what they're doing an intriguing question. If it is eventually addressed, then maybe the series has some small heft.

Other intriguing aspects of the series--then and now--include 1) the fragility of their craft, so rickety, cobbled together with scrap boards, hope, and imagination and 2) the nagging desire of going home, if they ever can.

Why CGI? Part of the charm of these is the awful special effects, much as early Doctor Who episodes relied on the audience's willing suspension of disbelief. But staring into space to see white blobby stars is not quite as enthralling as they seem to believe. Maybe it can be done on the cheap. You don't want to lose the obvious green-screen effect here.

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Outerscope

Every now and again, I hunt down this old educational series that piqued my imagination: Outerscope. Kids--er, small puppets with largely frozen expressions juxtaposed against adult human hands that move with human grace--build a clubhouse out of scraps and go flying off to other worlds. The episodes came in tantalizing bits--tasty morsels but you'd never get any closure. Did they ever get to where they were going? Where did they escape? Will they ever get home? Was it as good as my memory said? Why did I like it?

In the past, I haunted Youtube and Amazon for the collected episodes with no success. It came up again, and this time I found the first episode, and yes, I enjoyed it as much as I did as a kid.

Nick Sagan and others have called it creepy. The puppets are somewhat lifelike, somewhat not, so maybe a little creepy, but you just have to use your imagination, suspend disbelief as you did when you were a child. Even then, I didn't believe they could survive in space with what little they had, but that they did anyway stimulated the gray cells.

Finally, here is the first episode, cued up for you:

I'll see if I can hunt others down.

Here are Nick Sagan's comments on the show:

"[M]ost disturbing of all: the "Outerscope" segments. "Outerscope" was a serialized puppet show about a multicultural group of kids who turn their clubhouse (or maybe just a bunch of old junk) into a rocketship and explore the universe with it. They meet aliens, have all kinds of adventures, and along the way they learn lessons about tolerance, friendship, etc. Not a bad premise for a kids' show. Just two problems with the idea. 

"First, the puppet children were incredible creepy. They had a certain "dead mannequin" quality, with weird, oversized hands. "Man hands" some might say. 

"Second problem: These segments are frightening just in their tone. Again, imagine you're six years old. You watch these dead-eyed big-handed (but otherwise likeable) puppet kids fly off into outer space and get lost. They try to get home, but each episode they just get further and further away. Everything goes wrong, one puppet kid sadly looks at the other and says, "I guess we're never going home." End of episode. Sleep tight, kids. 

"Vegetable Soup scared me silly when I saw it, and yet I couldn't turn away. Why did I keep watching it? And why do I remember it fondly today, nightmarishly weird though it was?"