james_davis_nicoll | Mindwebs: The Cage and Rememberance To Come

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The Cage

How odd. The story this is based on got mentioned recently on rec.arts.sf.written. In it a group of humans have to try to convince their alien captors that the humans are as intelligent as their captors. The situation is complicated by the fact that the humans have through misfortune been denied all tools and even clothing; as well, they are not the most imaginative group of humans.

There was a moment early on when I wondered if this story was one of the ones that inspired Joanna Russ' We Who Are About To....

Rememberance To Come

This by Gene Wolfe and it's mostly interesting as a reminder of how terrified of students people were back in the 1960s.

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/3954650.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

While I have not read the story, this "terror" is one of many things about the 60s which were and are exaggerated. Though perhaps Gene Wolfe - who spent some years at Texas A&M at about this time - was exposed to people who really were afraid. When I last worked at A&M, in this century, there were still people who were afraid of hippies. Hell, there were still people afraid of Lincoln.

I've recently been reading Ross MacDonald, and was expecting to enjoy his novels a lot less when they reached the 1960s. I shouldn't have worried. Lew Archer takes it in stride.

William Hyde

From:

austin-dern.livejournal.com

I'm not sure which is the funnier: the ``hippie panic'' episode every sitcom in the late 60s had to do (and its echoes in science fiction, as in here), or the ``Pop Hates The Beatles'' episode every sitcom in the early 60s did (what are the science fiction versions of that little wave?).

Someday I must write the Foundation spoof-fiction where yeah, yeah, the Galactic Empire is dying and all that but what Hari Seldon is really eager to prevent is a resurgence of the Space Hippies, whom everyone in Salvor Hardin's time remembers vaguely as this thing that was big when their grandparents were kids, they guess.

From:

womzilla.livejournal.com

I think the clearest inspiration for We Who Are About To.... is Randall Garrett's execrable "The Queen Bee", which concludes with a woman being lobotomized so that she can serve as a breeding cow for the male crash survivors. (Admittedly, she did murder the other women to try to put herself in charge of the "colony", but that doesn't excuse the author for creating the situation or the abominable "laws" under which the "colony" served.)