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language: English
country: USA
year: 1962
form: short fiction
genre(s): sci-fi
dates read: 31.1.23-2.2.23
Samuel Delany tweeted (read: his fb is linked and they auto-posted) a bunch of uncaptioned pictures of Katherine MacLean’s books several weeks ago, and I figured that was as good a recommendation as any, so this week I read her short story collection The Diploids, originally published in 1962 but collecting eight stories published between 1949 and 1953. it was an interesting and odd, but engaging, assemblage, but with an unsettling interest in genetics that at times drifted over the line into eugenics.
the title story, the first in the collection, jumps right into this: a man with a bunch of odd physical characteristics ranging from bodily proportions to a third eye concealed under the hair on the back of his head discovers that he’s actually a “diploid”, a laboratory-produced embryo designed to assist in genetic — and particularly eugenic — research. he gets drawn into a conflict between the “supers”, a group of diploids who want world domination, and other diploids who want to help humanity “progress” socially/genetically from behind the scenes. my note to myself on it was: “a wild and troubling story about eugenics and intellectual property law”, although despite the fact that the main character is a patent lawyer it never really deals with the extremely dark implications of DNA being trademarkable intellectual property. this is kind of the theme of the collection: it moves in very dark directions but shies away from them or undercuts itself.
the highlight for me was “Incommunicado”, which I think was almost certainly in Delany’s mind in writing Babel-17 and parts of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. it is, like Babel-17, partly an exploration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it’s a little rushed, but I think its approach is interesting, and the setting seemed promising — I wish there’d been more of it.
“Feedback”, about — essentially — the utterly, violently conformist future the right wing hopes to impose on us today, complete with the (attempted) lynching of a teacher who dares to suggest to his students the possibility of independent thought, hit way too close to home but also, I thought, rather undercut itself by eventually revealing that he had been part of a “seditioner” conspiracy organization the whole time. obviously organized resistance to fascism is good but thematically this felt like a step away from what it had been doing and towards blandness. I also did not love the free-thinking teacher invoking the “it was the Jews who killed Christ, not the Romans” narrative, especially in such close juxtaposition to his discussion of fascism.
most of the rest of the collection was fine — engaging but didn’t especially move me. “The Snowball Effect” was trying to be funny but mainly was just depressing. “Pictures Don’t Lie” was predictable. “Games” and “Defense Mechanism” were. hm. I appreciated the skepticism of patriotism in “Games” and “Feedback” but it was all kind of liberal. “The Pyramid in the Desert” (aka “And Be Merry”) was just…weird, and openly eugenic.
so. interesting, but…weird vibe overall.
moods: dark, lighthearted, tense