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.
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"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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