Short Fiction Month: Pelt - Carol Emshwiller

Ever since encountering a story by Carol Emshwiller in John Joseph Adams' anthology Wastelands I have felt I ought to read more of her short work. In the years since, I have somehow managed to read two of her novels but to avoid any collections. Quite an achievement when you consider most of Emshwiller's output is in the short form. She has had a remarkably long career. She was born in 1921 and her first stories started appearing in the 1950s, her publications continue until quite recently. Pelt is one of the older ones. It first appeared in 1958 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and has been reprinted several times. Most recently in The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

A faithful hunting dog is running ahead of his master in search of prey. The world is new to them, full of strange, exciting smells of creatures that would make excellent additions to his master's collection of trophies. Then he hears a voice that asks him: "Little slave, what have you done that is free today? Remember this world, Do something free today. Do, do."

The plot of this story is not overly complicated. At the end of it the message is loud and clear: hunting for trophies is wrong. What makes it interesting is how Emshwiller uses perspective to tell her tale. She is acutely aware of what each character knows and what it tells the reader. The story is written from the point of view of the dog. His view on matters is very limited. He can hear the locals but not really communicate with them. He also doesn't quite understand the question or why it is important.

The, one would assume, more intelligent master on the other hand, does not hear the locals and has to figure out what they mean and want solely from their actions. Together, the reader has a fuller understanding of what is going on. The master for instance, is left with fear bordering on panic which, when taken into account what we know from the dog's point of view, is understandable but not necessary.

The slave/master dynamic - or predator/prey dynamic, Emshwiller seems to consider them much the same thing - reminded me of her novel The Mount (2002). This novel has the human as slave instead of the master though. It is a subject she clearly has a lot to say on.

Science fiction from the 1950s is usually not my taste. Emshwiller approaches the genre from an angle that made her stand out though. Not in the sense that won her much recognition from the fans of hard science fiction or space opera that dominated the scene at that time, but from a wider audience that appreciated the more literary qualities of her work. She may well be one of science fiction's best kept secrets. An author more people ought to read. One of these days I will really get that collection I have been promising myself for almost a decade.

Story Details
Title: Pelt
Author: Carol Emshwiller
Language: English
Originally published: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1958
Read in: The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (2016)
Story length: Short Story
Awards: None
Available online: Not that I'm aware of.

The Mount - Carol Emshwiller

I read Carol Emshwiller's The Secret City last year as part of a reading challenge. It's an interesting little novel and one of the better ones I've read in 2013. After reading it I wondered what Emshwiller could do in the short format, as her style seems more suited to that. I was planning on reading a collection by her this year but somehow ended up with a copy of her novel The Mount instead. It was published in 2002 and won the Philip K. Dick Award that year, beating, among others, China Miéville's impressive Bas-Lag novel The Scar. The Mount is quite a different story than the one told in The Secret City but both are fascinating reads.

The Mount is the story of Charley, a boy nearing adolescence who is bred and brought up as a mount for a race of aliens. The Hoots, as they are referred to are intellectually superior to humans but, although endowed with formidably strong hands, are incapable of walking any significant distance. Instead they rely on their mounts to get around, which they control with their hands. Humans are ideal for the task. Smart enough to be trained, just the right size, endowed with strong legs and capable of understanding the threat posed by the hands of their riders around their necks. Charley doesn't need to be threatened though. He wants to be a good mount. Until, that is, wild humans raid his settlement and he comes into contact with his father and a different way of life.

Emshwiller does a number of very interesting things in this novel. She has stated that she was originally inspired by a class she'd taken in the psychology of pray animals versus predators. The Mount turns these rolls around with the prey eventually enslaving the predator. There are lots of little signs of the origins of the Hoot as prey. Most notably their tendency to seek out small enclosed spaces to hide for shelter. I'm not entirely sure how much sense this makes biologically speaking but in the story it makes Hoots and their response to danger quite unique. Their control often seems tenuous at best, although Charley doesn't seem to think so, and is mostly based on the image of benevolence and superiority. When it comes to physical violence they are only dangerous in very specific situations.

We see almost the entire story through Charley's eyes and over the course of the novel his view of the world changes drastically. In the early stages of the novel he just wants to be a good mount and has a close relationship with his master. He wants to please and he wants his master to take good care of him. In fact the devotion he shows to his master gave me the creeps in the opening chapters of the novel. It would have been easy to have him radically change his mind when he is exposed to freedom for the first time but Emshwiller takes her characters down a different path. His conditioning doesn't break easily and his relationship with his master remains strong. Charley is torn between wanting to make his own choices and being protected by his master. Eventually the slave/master relationship shifts into something harder to define.

Many readers will be so used to their freedom that they'll find it hard to imagine how Charley might not be all that interested. The wild humans he is first exposed to are to be pitied in his opinion. Their lives are misery, devoid of even the smallest of comforts. Charley wonders why they would want to live this way when they can have the Hoots take care of them. It's a naive view from a young boy who hasn't seen the full extent of the treatment humans get from the Hoots. It clashes so violently with the freedom western society takes for granted that many readers will have a hard time swallowing it. I thought it was a brilliant bit of writing however. Emshwiller shows us Charley's level of maturity and challenges the reader to think of oppression and the psychology of the oppressed in one move.

Like The Secret City the story is told in fairly straightforward language but it makes the reader work to get the full picture nevertheless. Charley's views are often childish but portrayed in such a way that the reader can get more meaning out of it than Charley does himself. His Hoot master, although in a similar state of development himself, is usually a few steps ahead of him but puts things into an alien framework. Another important character in the novel, Charley's father, has problems expressing himself in clear language. His body language and the way he vents his frustration are an important part of how he communicates with Charley and the reader. All these very limited views combined can be interpreted in a number of ways, making the book deceptively challenging. It's one of those books that rewards the reader for looking beyond the superficial and diving into the characters.

The Mount is clearly a science fiction novel but the focus is very much on psychology. The alien invasion is not the center of the story, there are no epic space battles or explorations of strange alien cultures. Readers looking for that type of science fiction will be disappointed. The novel is something of an allegory for slavery or oppression and can be interpreted or applied to many different situations. Some reviewers have suggested it comments on the way we treat animals ourselves for instance and, although I don't think that was Emshwiller's intent, it fits well enough. It's a very effective text really, I'm impressed with how much Emshwiller has packed into such a short novel. It is challenging the reader's convictions about freedom and oppression and invites them to pick the characters brains to understand their motivations. I'm pretty sure I haven't gotten all out of this novel yet after one reading. I'm going to have to revisit it in a few years.

Book Details
Title: The Mount
Author: Carol Emshwiller
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Pages: 232
Year: 2002
Language: English
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 1-931520-03-8
First published: 2002

The Secret City - Carol Emshwiller

Looking for interesting novels to read for the WWend Women of Genre Fiction reading challenge I came across Carol Emshwiller's wprk. She is well into her nineties now and still writing. A lot of her output is short fiction but over a career that spans more than six decades she produced a number of novels as well. The Secret City (2007) is her most recent novel. It grew out of a short story called World of No Return, first published in Asimov's in the December 2005 issue. Emshwiller is not an author that receives a lot of attention but certainly a steady voice in science fiction. She strikes me as an author you have to at read at least something of and thus a good choice for the reading challenge. It turned out to be one of my better picks in the reading challenge.

A group of alien tourists is stranded on Earth. They are equipped with homing beacons so they expect to be rescued soon enough. Trying not to attract attention to themselves, keep away from human society as best they can but as the years go by, rescuers fail to appear and their money runs out, closer contact with humans is inevitable. A new generation grows up not knowing their home planet. The aliens prepare their children as best they can for a return, but having been born on Earth, not all of them are sure they want to go back.

The Secret City is short novel, written in a very to the point style. The prose is sparse, supplying just the bare bones of what is going on in the world around the main characters. Emshwiller lays out her story in just over 200 pages. I finished it in a single day, which is something I haven't done in quite a while. Another interesting feature of the story is that it is written is the first person and the present tense, which always takes me a few pages to get into. I thought it was a highly readable style but some readers might prefer a bit more detail.

Emshwiller follows the story of two main characters. Lorpas, the male protagonist, is the more worldly of the two. He has had extensive contact with the outside world and has integrated to the point of loosing most of his native language. He is basically a good man but not above a little stealing to make his way. Very few other ways to make a living are open to him. One of the most interesting things about him is how he is at the same time not quite human and yet able to fit in almost seamlessly. His point of view clearly shows how ignorant the aliens are of Earth and if you read between the lines, he doesn't think much of his parents' attitude.

The female protagonist Allush has a different view on the world. She grows up in the hidden city somewhere in the mountains of the western United States, much more focused on what her parents' generation has been able to salvage of their alien civilization. They have tried to minimize contact with the outside world but because of a steady drain of people leaving the city and the death of the older generation, the city is slowly emptying. While desperately trying to hold on to their idea of civilization they have regressed to a barely self sustaining hunting and gathering community. The city as their last refuge, symbol of their ignorance pride and foolishness.

Lorpas sees the city as a goal, a place where he might find others of his kind. Something he longs for after years of wandering the world alone. Allush on the other hand realizes she will have to leave it, either for the home world or human society. There is something intensely tragic about both these stories. It might have been a tragedy but somehow, as soon as Emshwiller brings the two together, the story takes another direction. For me, that was one of the most appealing aspects of the story.

The Secret City is a wonderfully understated meditation of being different, of not fitting in. The otherness of the mail characters is constantly present in the narrative and, usually between the lines, they are permanently struggling with it. It is perhaps not the most ambitious science fiction novel ever but the minimalist style and clear language appealed to me. I may have to dig up some of her short fiction. I suspect Emshwiller's writing is even more effective in the short form. This book is definitely the most pleasant surprise in the reading challenge thus far.

Book Details
Title: The Secret City
Author: Carol Emschwiller
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Pages: 209
Year: 2007
Language: English
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 1-892391-44-9
First published: 2007