Short Story Sunday 27: Johanna Sinisalo and H. G. Wells

There was a fair amount of hubbub in 2016 around the release of The Big Book of Science Fiction edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. I knew of their reputation even though wasn’t very familiar with their work. Still, a new collection of science fiction stories by dozens of authors spanning roughly 100 years of publishing history carefully curated by two knowledgeable editors and anthologist in the field does call for some attention. That and its very reasonable price point and easy availability led me to purchase a copy. The goal was to read each story and write about it here on the blog. Five years lately, I’m finally starting.

I’ll be taking a specific approach to these reviews. For starters, the VanderMeers wrote wonderfully detailed introduction to each story. Part biography, part career overview, sometimes structured like a miniature essay about an author’s work, these text pieces are as much a draw of the book as the written contents. They also have a great and lengthy introduction to the whole collection in which they write about the difference phases of science fiction writing in the English language while also making mention of non-English authors and their work. They present their criteria in compiling the collection and it makes for a compelling read as well as an excellent contextualization for the reader to sample all of these stories.

Not wanting to go through the whole book one story at a time in the order they’re presented, in part to keep things fresh and in part to allow for greater comparison between different eras of writing, I’ve decided to approach my reading in a back-to-front-to-back approach. The VanderMeers present the stories in chronological order. I’ll start with the newest story, jump to the oldest story, and then jump back to the second newest and so on. Let’s begin with a translated work by a Norwegian author I’ve never heard of before.

“Baby Doll” by Johanna Sinisalo

Translated by David Hackston
Read in The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection (2016), translated by David Hackston and edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Originally published in the Finnish anthology Intohimosta rikokseen (2002)

 

What starts as a familiar coming of age story with an eight year old girl as its main focus, quickly takes a disturbing turn when we learn how Annette is trying to become accepted by the popular kids at school. She’s living in a world where there is one social currency: sexual attractiveness. Young girls and boys are obsessed with gaining and maintaining acceptance in their lives by keeping up with the hottest and sexiest trends. Pre-teen girl getting breast augmentation surgery, young pre-pubescent girls being sex symbols and making a living by appearing on magazine covers and billboards half-naked, teen musical acts whose gimmick is performing topless, etc.

Annette is a familiar type of protagonist, the middle child trying to be seen by the world, wanting to step out of their older and more successful sibling’s shadow. She tries to play the game by following the established rules of society which has only one thing on the brain. She follows along until she witnesses the unwanted consequences having all of your self-worth directly tied to your sexual attractiveness to others has on her older sister. Unaware of her little sister’s involvement, Annette helps her only to have the story end with our protagonist falling back into the familiar pattern of the maxim on which this future society is built upon: sex sells.

Rating: 5 stars

This is a wonderful example of good science fiction because it forces you to confront an issue about our society today by showing you a believable extrapolation of what our tomorrow could be if we continue down the same path. It’s a form of cautionary tale. Sinisalo is confronting the reader with our problematic habits of sex as a commodity and judging our worth by an individual’s sex appeal. The consequences are not unforeseen to people today, they’re quite evident and her story deals with that in effective ways. She plays with our desires and disgusts by smashing the two together. It’s quite skilful how she makes the story relatable, but also repulsive by having the main objects of sexual desire in the story young children, mostly young girls. Thankfully the story never becomes what it is criticizing.

The story doesn’t exist to titillate, rather it’s there to shock and to confront. It’s there to argue a point and to make you think about it. My main issue is that there isn’t much of a plot. What’s there is pretty common place, children can be cruel and growing up in a status-oriented social setting can be challenging. It’s something you’ve seen a lot, but the point of the story isn’t the plot. Sinisalo takes a familiar mode of story, sends it forward to a possible future, and injects it with gripping commentary about how the future was born in our present. It’s really effective. “Baby Doll” stuck with me for a few days after reading it.

“The Star” by H. G. Wells

Read in The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection (2016), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Originally published in the Christmas number of The Graphic (1897), edited by The Editors of The Graphic

A planetoid from outside our solar system crashed into Neptune. The resulting comet approaches toward Earth. Wells takes this cosmological event and uses it to show us how the citizens of Earth react to it. He gives us a wide swath of perspectives, painting in large strokes but offering convincingly real details about individuals’ reaction and our planet’s reaction to the increasingly large star in the sky. Some individual perspectives includes that of newspaper writers, the homeless, a recently widowed wife, young schoolboys, a master mathematician completing complicated calculations, astronomers, a recently married couple, and another couple in the midst of lovemaking. You get the idea. All are different beings and all have a different reaction to what is happening in the sky above.

The planet itself is reacting. The temperature is steadily rising. Ice at the poles is melting. Earthquakes are increasing in frequency and strength. Tidal waves are occurring. Volcanoes are erupting. There are landslides and more. Nothing has yet truly happened, the comet is still traveling in space, but there’s plenty enough happening on Earth despite it all.

Wells’s approach to his story is to tell us all of this with a good dose of realism and matter-of-factness that invites the reader to experience the events being recounted. Are we rushing towards a disaster unequalled in human history or will we have the honour of being witnesses to the chaotic dance of celestial bodies that takes place in the empty spaces of our galaxy? The whole story is an exercise in building tension between those two extreme possibilities while also saying that maybe both are undesirable in some way.

Rating: 4 stars

Wells, along with Mary Shelley and Jules Verne, is cited by the VanderMeers as being part of the triumvirate of early science fiction writers. I’m most familiar with Jules Verne’s written work. Wells I know mostly through adaptations in other mediums and cultural osmosis. I think the only work of his I’ve read is an abridged version of The Invisible Man. As for Shelley, I know of the importance of her most famous work (Frankenstein) but I’ve never read any of it. Of the three, only Wells is represented in this book and I think that’s due to Shelley and Verne mostly being known for their novels whereas Wells is known for both novels and short stories.

The VanderMeers mention that this story created a sub-genre of science fiction (something Wells did a lot); the “impact” sub-genre where an object from space collides with Earth. According to them, most of these stories deal with the mystery surrounding the object or the consequences of the impact. What’s interesting about “The Star” is that most of the story is about how the world reacts prior to the impact. The story is mostly about the build-up, even questioning whether or not the star will hit at all. In this, Wells succeeds admirably and it makes for an enjoyable read.

Unfortunately, the very end is a little disappointing. He provides a button on the story about Martian astronomers and it undercuts a lot of the realism that the story worked so hard to establish up to that point. The narrator makes a bit of a joke about how insignificant events can be when seen from far away, but he doesn’t do this in a way that acknowledges the magnitude of what happened on Earth. Just the opposite, he seems to undercut his own story. I’m not sure if his is a comment that makes more sense in the context of 1897 where people tended to ignore problems that occurred in faraway countries because globalization wasn’t a ting yet and Wells is trying to tell us that those events still matter even if they do not personally matter to us, but I’m guessing and don’t actually know. Either way, it’s a weak ending for what is a rather enjoyable story.

Both stories deal with social and political elements despite having been written nearly a century apart. I think it illustrates the strength, flexibility, and importance of science fiction as a genre. It deals with ideas. Both stories deal with a hypothetical, a “what if” element, and explore it in different ways. Wells’s use of the macro view on the incoming comet contrasts nicely with Sinisalo’s very personal view of her what if (what if we continue down this path of selling sex without end and without limit) specifically through the eyes of a single character, eight year old Annette. Both of these problems exist on a sliding scale. At what point does a celestial body travelling through space become a question of survival for humanity? At what point does our commodification of sexual desire become an issue for specific individuals, a group of people, or society as a whole? At what point does anything because a problem. Both Sinisalo and Wells, in their respective times, ask the reader to think and that, to me and others, is what makes great science fiction.