|
|
|
|
|
|
the Boomer Dukes" and "Survival Kit," two bags of tricks from the future; and in "The Knights of Arthur," a brain in a prosthetic tank. The eerie and disturbing thing about all these stories (and about the dismally illformed "The Middle of Nowhere") is that in spite of all the emphasis on wealth and cupidity, it quickly becomes plain that not one of these characters really gives a damn. (. . .) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The subject of "My Lady Green Sleeves" (in The Case against Tomorrow) is race prejudice, and the story attacks it in a typical display of Galaxy's agonized irony, by substituting "wipes" (common laborers) for Jews, "figgers" (clerks) for Negroes, "greasers" (mechanics) for Mexicans, and, variously, "civil service people'' and "G.I.'s" for white Anglo-Saxons. The point of all this, when we eventually get to it, seems to be that fostering class distinctions based on occupations has canceled out others based on race or religionso that the heroine can ask, in honest ignorance, "What's a Jew?" |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In its own corkscrew fashion, I suppose this is intended as a contribution toward racial egalitarianism. But it seems to me that rubbing the reader's nose repeatedly into racial hate-words in this way is the worst possible way to go about it. The story is such a mishmash of viewpoints that it's impossible to tell where (if anywhere) the author's sympathies lie; reading it as straight satire, it seems to me, you could easily construe it as an expression of bigotry. And on top of everything else, a pure racial stereotype turns up in the story itself, in the description of a man named Hiroko: "Beads of sweat were glistening on his furrowed yellow forehead." (For God's sake, Fred, "yellow man" is an epithetJapanese have brown skins.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Damon Knight, "New Stars," In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science Fiction (1956; rev. ed. Chicago: Advent, 1967), pp. 19394, 196 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In The Space Merchants and Gladiator-at-Law the pattern of the heroic quest is essentially the one familiar to us from romance and romantic comedy: the hero is going to overcome his adversaries, get the girl, and bring fertility. This pattern is worked out, however, in worlds far removed from those of Romance or Comedy. Not quite the horrors we find in Orwell's 1984 or Kafka's Penal Colony, still, the worlds presented in these books do approach what Northrop Frye has called the "demonic," and they have portions of their geography which are explicitly likened to Hell. These works are more optimistic than many satires only insofar as |
|
|
|
|
|