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language: English
country: USA
year: 1926-1933
form: short fiction
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 12.2.23-15.2.23
The Artificial Man and Other Stories is the collected short fiction of Clare Winger Harris, most of which was published in the 1920s, except for “The Ape Cycle” (1930) and “The Vibrometer” (1933).
there are a few recurring themes that run throughout the stories, such that while they’re all standalone they feel related. one is an interest in scale: several of the stories are built around the idea that each atom or molecule may be contain a whole universe, and conversely that the solar system itself may be a single molecule within an incomprehensibly large universe. “The Diabolical Drug” sees the protagonist shrunk down to a molecular universe, and both “A Runaway World” (one of the highlights) and “The Menace of Mars” see the Earth flung through space as part of some enormous cosmic science experiment. this feels a little silly at times, but it’s conceptually interesting, and I did actually quite enjoy “A Runaway World”.
another recurring theme, unfortunately, is — as I observed this afternoon — racial difference. when human characters encounter aliens here, their reactions are typically a deep, instinctive disgust or antipathy: there are worm-aliens on Venus in “[A] Baby on Neptune”, there are giant alien beetles in “The Miracle of the Lily”, there are humanoid but inhuman Martians in “The Fate of the Poseidonia”. this is never treated as — say — a prejudice or reaction that humans might want to move beyond, but rather as natural and inevitable: species-racial difference is inevitably horrifying or disgusting, and perhaps genocide is a natural reaction (as in the case of the rapidly evolving terrestrial insects in “The Miracle of the Lily”). that’s a bad vibe!
the one exception is the inhabitants of Neptune in “[A] Baby on Neptune”, definitely my favorite story in the collection, which — like several other stories — plays with temporality by having the Neptunians move and communicate at a rate orders of magnitude slower than humans (to the tune of one sentence per six weeks). in this case the Neptunians are a kind of gaseous jellyfish, and the human scientists who first observe them perceive them as majestic, even beautiful.
I probably would have given this somewhere around 3.5 stars, but the collection is marred by “The Ape Cycle”, which is deeply racist. the premise is, essentially, “well, obviously human slavery was morally wrong, but humans do deserve to be freed from the obligation to labor, so…What If Black people APES were literally subhuman animals with no souls who could be subject to a concerted eugenics/selective breeding program until they are of human-equivalent intelligence and then enslaved? and then there was a violent slave uprising, but one brave ‘good’ slaveowner is able to blow up the apes’ government and restore humans’ rightful dominion over the earth? this is good btw”. for the first third or so I held out hope that it was going to be a clumsy attempt to critique racism/race science/eugenics (“The Evolutionary Monstrosity” is dubious, to put it mildly, about human-focused eugenics, so it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility), but it…was not.
the other thing that made me go. hm. was “A Certain Soldier”, which posits that Josephus himself was the Roman soldier who set fire to the Second Temple during the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, which has a certain saveur à blaming Jews for their own oppression.
moods: adventurous, tense, wacky