This is the third column in a four-part series by B.D. McClay on speculative fiction. Read the rest here.
There are aliens among us. Don’t panic. They’ve been here a long time. You probably live with a few. Some of them lurk in the dark corners of our homes, unnoticed, but others are much more daring. They’ll come right up to you. They might even sleep in your bed. One is near me as I type these words; he’s about seventeen pounds, with gold-brown fur, wistful brown eyes and a fluffy tail. In the part of Earth in which I dwell, he’s known as a “dog.”
Life as seen through other animal eyes is the closest we really come, and may ever come, to the science-fictional encounters between man and a different form of sentience. As such, to try to depict life as seen through animal eyes has proven irresistible to writers, not only within the world of science fiction but outside of it. Most writers who try their hand at animal consciousness don’t succeed; these stories are usually no more than interesting experiments. Everybody is impressed that Leo Tolstoy tries to “do a dog,” but their observations generally end there. Even Franz Kafka’s genuinely accomplished animal stories, such as “Investigations of a Dog,” owe much to the ways in which their baffled protagonists are not very far from Kafka’s baffled human protagonists. “Investigations of a Dog” is a story about people, because we are not so different from the other animals as to require an extra imaginative leap.
Children’s literature, while full of animal protagonists, is also more often than not really about people dressed up as charming animals, and makes no pretense of being otherwise. (Think Beatrix Potter.) Richard Adams’s Watership Down is a rare exception, managing to create an image of the world in which humans are almost a species of natural disaster. And then there is speculative fiction, which so often involves the introduction of life forms that are on a par with humans, in terms of their intelligence and moral standing, but which are not human: dragons, Martians, vampires, “Old Ones.” Sometimes these others are nevertheless stand-ins for humanity, because what we’re reading might be (for instance) a parable about racism: we fear Others because they’re different, but they’re not so different. Here, again, an interest in the alien is really an interest in the human.
Sometimes, though, speculative-fiction narratives make an attempt to understand a point of view that is truly not human. Here the genre has a real advantage over its mundane cousins; it is already interested not only in the nonhuman but in trying to communicate experiences we do not (and sometimes cannot) have through the power of descriptive language alone. A realistic writer can convey animal experience, but they start from a harder place, and they will write for a readership that may reasonably feel that they turn to a Woolf or a Tolstoy for the subtle distinctions of a human’s experience, not a dog’s.
Eventually, an interest in the alien can lead a writer of science fiction back to the other animals. In a 2002 essay for Oprah, Octavia Butler wrote about a formative childhood encounter with a dog named Baba. When she was three years old, Butler ended up “nose to nose” with Baba, staring into his eyes:
He had dark, clear eyes, a wet nose, a mouth that seemed to smile somehow. I didn’t know what he was, but I knew he was alive, aware and looking back at me. I touched him and stared at him. He bore it patiently. With surprise and bottomless curiosity, I began to understand that he was someone else. He wasn’t like any of the people in the house. He was someone else entirely.
The challenge dogs can present to the would-be interpreter of alien life forms is that, paradoxically, they really are a lot like us: we’ve been going about together for such a long time that it can be hard to remember we do see things differently. In Olaf Stapledon’s bittersweet Sirius, a dog is made to be as smart as a human being without consideration for how lonely that life might be or how ill-suited the dog’s ambitions and dreams might feel to his body. Such thoroughly domesticated animals are still alien, but we understand them, at least a little.
The most widespread and ancient relationship between humans and the other animals, though, is the rejection of identification. The animal is no longer our neighbor in a shared world but a substance: meat to eat, skin to wear—and, more recently, a tool for scientific investigation. We may ask ourselves how the animals feel about it, or try to minimize their suffering, but our knowledge that they aren’t fans and would prefer not to be treated this way doesn’t really affect our decision to continue experimenting on them. It’s not as if we think they’re enjoying themselves. We’re animals too, after all, and we can tell. As the narrator of Craig Strete’s story “Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock” comments: “I care about them going to kill me. Wouldn’t anyone? Ask anybody else in these cages and they’ll all tell you the same thing. Nobody likes to get killed.”
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“Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock” is a short story in the form of a monologue. Its narrator is a lab animal, but also a circus performer. What sort of animal it is we never really learn, but given the details—it can climb, hold things in its arms, be petted, do tricks and dismember an adult man—it’s probably some kind of primate. The title, with its reference to Harry Harlow’s experiments on rhesus monkeys, also points in this direction, so in honor of those unfortunate animals, and for the sake of simplicity, we’ll call it a monkey. What the point of this half-circus, half-laboratory setting could possibly be we also never learn. How could we? Nobody ever bothers explaining it to our narrator, and his viewpoint is the only one we have.
Our monkey has killed a man. It tells us that the death was intentional—“I meant to kill him but I had no idea I could do it so completely”—though later it’ll say it didn’t mean to. It’s in a cell with the bloody straw that death left behind, and it wishes it weren’t. It misses its friends, Flippy and Jumpo. It misses its old lover, Nappi, who was taken away to the lab and came back wrong. It misses its old keeper, Braddock, who is also the person it killed, his body “partly ingested, the stomach torn out like the sawdust stuffings of a wooden doll.” The monkey’s life has been a whole series of missings, ever since it lost its mother:
When I was young, I think I was loved. I don’t remember my mother, they took her away and gave me this cloth thing with a clock inside. It wasn’t the same thing as a mother of course, but it served its purpose. It was better than no mother at all, was the way I looked at it. So soft the cloth was, almost like my mother’s fur, and the clock ticking away in as regular a heartbeat as you could like. Of course, every hour the clock gained a minute, which may be the reason why I turned out so wrong. These things happen, you know.
By this paragraph, we know that we’re reading from the perspective of a nonhuman animal, but why? In science fiction, after all, it’s always possible that a perspective shift can show we assumed wrongly. There are plenty of stories where humans are lab rats or prey or kept in zoos. People can climb trees and hold each other. No matter how many times I read this story, however, I never really entertain this possibility. Whether or not it successfully represents a specific kind of animal’s mind, I become aware very quickly that the voice speaking to me is not a human voice. What does that?
Answer: the monkey is helpless. It doesn’t understand its situation, can’t understand, and doesn’t really try to understand. Its odd attribution of its being “so wrong” to the clock, and not the loss of its mother, or being raised as an experimental animal, is because those things are simply life’s events, the unquestioned background against which things that can be wrong (like clocks) exist. It is capable of violence, but its violence is instinctive. Its killing of Braddock is neither strategic at the time nor part of a strategy afterward. It doesn’t really have a goal: it meant to kill Braddock, but it had no idea he’d actually die. Eventually, even the monkey’s attitude toward its death becomes acceptance. It ceases to care. It might as well die, since its life is barely a life.
The ape in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” begins its journey toward humanity when it grasps and then rejects the thought that, once caged, there is “no way out.” Strete’s monkey, whose story rhymes with Kafka’s (both primates express a dislike of snakes), is instead dragged along (“they … dragged me out of the tree and wrapped me up in the net and no matter how much I screamed, they wouldn’t listen. I wanted to be free and they wouldn’t listen”) and gives up. What is distinctively animal is acceptance of whatever happens. All animals cope, but in this story, only humans sometimes rail against heaven.
The animals in “Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock” are not living lives or dying deaths that make sense. The meaninglessness of what is happening to them would not be solved by an overheard conversation about how this is all to figure out a better drug for cancer. The monkey views the burial of his fellow test subjects as a waste of meat (“perhaps it does not occur to them that we are edible”) because other animals do not torture one another to learn something. As any cat owner knows, they might torture their prey for fun—but they don’t do it for knowledge. To reverse, for a moment, the line of Wittgenstein’s that is often quoted in conversations about animals—that if a lion could speak we would not understand him—in this story, we sense that the lion could simply never understand us. Not because we are so much higher than a lion, so much more rational, but because our motivations have become so detached from our immediate needs.
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Something that links classic children’s fiction and speculative fiction—beyond the old jokes that the ideal age of science fiction is twelve—is a sense that the world cannot be taken for granted. The rabbits of Watership Down may not be like human beings, but they are a bit like children: everything is bigger than they are, they try to use tools that they don’t exactly understand, and they are constantly encountering new information for which they have no context. (The first benevolent human being that they do encounter is, unsurprisingly, a child.) A writer of science fiction might create an alien with different sense organs who perceives our world very differently, or whose world we perceive differently, or whose differing lifespans have created a totally different moral code.
The world is also capricious and tyrannical. Children, living at the mercy of adults, are, like Strete’s monkey, shuffled from one thing to another without necessarily understanding why. Like the monkey, their passive acquiescence may prove to mask a capability for violence that looks like, but is not, an exercise of agency. So it is unsurprising that there would be so many classic books for children in which the central concept is that you are very small, or otherwise vulnerable, and have to live around the already-extant world. One of my favorite places to go play as a child, New Orleans City Park’s “Storyland,” featured a house of crazy proportions. The house was fun because it was not like anything in my life. But the house was also fun, I see, looking back, precisely because it was like so many things in my life.
Depicting the world from the perspective of something that doesn’t understand what’s going on, or which is in some way the wrong size or shape or proportion, is not easy. A story told through the eyes of a child runs the risk of being a story told through the eyes of a stupid adult, and trying to figure out what is going becomes an elaborate exercise in what you think the author thinks children think. One solution is to establish a narrative voice that, while mostly limiting itself to its subject’s perspectives, occasionally breaks through to tell you things. This is how Watership Down operates: rabbits do have their own language to describe the sun and the passage of time, but Adams will sometimes tell us what is what. Stapledon’s Sirius mediates its entire story of a superintelligent dog through a human narrator who can grasp the dog’s situation but also explain it to us.
Strete, setting his story in first-person monkey, cannot avail himself of this trick of translation. Nor does he decide to go the route of elaborately describing things we know in strange ways, something science fiction writers love to do even when animals aren’t involved. Instead, the monkey’s narration is simple and direct, and what Strete plays up is not what is strange but rather what the monkey sees as familiar and also cannot explain. Take the description of the keeper just before the monkey kills him. The man smells like a dying animal. He’s “very clumsy,” at one point falling “like he did not have any bones.” He walks in a strange way, eyes closed, always looking as if “he was going to fall over.” This could be a description of a drunkard or a sleepwalker. It also sounds an awful lot like a classic depiction of the walking dead, which would have already been circulating by the story’s publication in 1975. The man smells sick. His body comes right apart. Was that because of the violence or because it was already rotting? The monkey implies at one point that it has died before, saying of its impending death that “this time, I hope they do it right. I don’t want to go through this again.” Has it? It’s certainly possible, but it could have just been tranquilized, and experienced this as death and rebirth.
Where another author might have put in enough clues for us to figure out the bigger picture, Strete keeps us tightly contained. We know only what the monkey knows, no more—in fact, we probably know less. The creature’s asides and perceptions raise unavoidable questions—what is the lab? do they experiment on people too?—but as they pile up, you realize that the story is providing its own response: there is no explanation supplied to this animal that could possibly matter. The monkey’s passivity, ignorance and misperception create a compressed portrait of a creature who will never really know what has happened or what it was all for and cannot even think to ask.
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No matter how plugged into science fiction you are, it’s likely that you haven’t heard of Craig Strete. Unlike C.L. Moore, Fritz Leiber or Vonda McIntyre, the other authors in this series, Strete never quite became a name. There are reasons for this.
For one, it’s hard to pin down much about Strete himself. He is a Native American writer who seems to have been most active in science fiction during the Seventies. He also wrote children’s books, screenplays and all sorts of other materials—including a book about the Doors’s Jim Morrison which may or may not be nonfiction, depending on who you ask. His books boast introductions from Jorge Luis Borges and Salvador Dalí, the second of which (according to Kristina Baudemann, one of the few scholars to discuss Strete’s fiction) may or may not actually be by Strete. He may or may not be Cherokee and his name may or may not actually be “Craig Strete.”
In the Seventies, Strete ran a zine called Red Planet Earth dedicated to Native American science fiction, but since it was hard to find writers, Strete mostly filled the zine himself, writing under several pseudonyms. Like many zines, Red Planet Earth didn’t last that long (it ran for just a handful of issues), but the passages I’ve seen from it are a winning combination of cocky and deadpan, like this introduction to Strete’s story “Time Deer”: “I will not apologize for having the strongest story in this magazine or for leading off with it first. We are not running a contest to see who can write the best story or be the best human being. The reason we are not doing those things is because I might lose.”
It was Red Planet Earth that brought Strete’s work to the attention of the wider science fiction community. Science fiction éminence grise Theodore Sturgeon dedicated part of his monthly column in the magazine Galaxy to the first volume of Red Planet Earth, quoting from the zine itself at length:
In his gutsy editorial, Strete writes “No other culture has a solider base for writing science fiction than American Indians. We are one of the few races which have actually experienced an alien invasion. They were called pilgrims. They came in strange craft, the like of which we had never seen before… They had a superior technology, a strange language, hideous white skin, multi-colored eyes, and hair of all imaginable colors… They had … alien values and emotions. They spread across the land, eliminating all life-forms not essential to their culture.”
For a period of time, furthering Strete’s career was a personal cause of the science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., who introduced him to feminist writer Joanna Russ. These are the sort of introductions from which big careers are made, and Strete certainly had the talent to have a big career. He did not, partly because of the material reality of his circumstances (introductions, no matter how glittering, can’t put dinner on the table) and partly because he was accused of plagiarism (he was probably innocent).
As with “Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock,” Strete’s stories court multiple levels of estrangement. In “A Sunday Visit with Great-grandfather,” for instance, great-grandson tries to placate his great-grandparents by explaining to them what he’s learned at the white people’s “away school.” They find the lessons he’s learning so outrageous that they decide to keep him at home, even though that will trigger a visit from the police. When a strange vehicle arrives, great-grandson hides and great-grandfather goes to confront the white people, who strike him as “suspiciously blue.” In fact, they are classic space aliens (“six feet tall, covered with blue scaly armor”). The joke of the story initially seems to be that the great-grandparents don’t understand they’re dealing with space aliens, but a cleverly set-up final twist reveals that the great-grandparents themselves are ghosts. The aliens naturally have no conception of what is going on and are terrified to discover that their advanced weaponry has no effect. (One wonders: “Maybe those radio broadcasts we picked up twenty years ago are true? Maybe this guy is Superman?”) In “When They Find You,” a planetary colonist named Gantry does a brisk business killing “stefel dogs” and selling their nerve tissue. He finds them disturbing, as an “alien intelligence that seemed in no way affected by external circumstance, yet was sensitive to things like fear, loneliness and restlessness, but contained no seeming awareness of its own destruction.” Lonely, Gantry takes up with a woman of the indigenous “civilized” species but is never sure if she has feelings the way that he does. Once he finally discovers the answer (yes), it’s too late: more Earth colonists are coming and he would rather put her aside than be degraded by association. The reader senses that the emotional mystery of the stefel dogs and of his lover is perhaps not as deep as Gantry wants it to be: he’s built a life out of extracting resources from both, and to relate to either in another way would cast a light on his past too disturbing to be borne.
These are stories that deserve readers, but an accusation of plagiarism, even if subsequently cast into doubt, is the kind of thing that might prevent a writer whose position was already tenuous from finding a place even in science fiction’s minor canon. (It is still one of the first things you’ll find if you look Craig Strete up.) With so much else to read, why waste time on a writer of a dubious reputation? And while his stories were reviewed positively, these positive reviews can carry a faint but unmistakable whiff of “eat your vegetables”; a positive review in the Washington Post of Dreams That Burn in the Night, the collection that contains “Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock,” ends on the note: “I’m sure The White Plague will sell 20 times as many copies as Dreams That Burn in the Night, which is a shame.” This preemptive lament that the masses will simply be too tasteless to appreciate a book isn’t a great incentive to read it.
But who cares? In the end, with every writer, all we have is the work. If we live in a world in which every single negative statement aimed at Strete is true—that he was a plagiarist, that he fabricated support from bigger names, that he didn’t actually know Jim Morrison—“Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock” would still be a great story. It disturbed me, it upset me, it made me look at my dog a little differently. There are aliens on Earth, but perhaps the aliens are not the dogs after all—perhaps they’re me.
Photo credit: University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives
This is the third column in a four-part series by B.D. McClay on speculative fiction. Read the rest here.
There are aliens among us. Don’t panic. They’ve been here a long time. You probably live with a few. Some of them lurk in the dark corners of our homes, unnoticed, but others are much more daring. They’ll come right up to you. They might even sleep in your bed. One is near me as I type these words; he’s about seventeen pounds, with gold-brown fur, wistful brown eyes and a fluffy tail. In the part of Earth in which I dwell, he’s known as a “dog.”
Life as seen through other animal eyes is the closest we really come, and may ever come, to the science-fictional encounters between man and a different form of sentience. As such, to try to depict life as seen through animal eyes has proven irresistible to writers, not only within the world of science fiction but outside of it. Most writers who try their hand at animal consciousness don’t succeed; these stories are usually no more than interesting experiments. Everybody is impressed that Leo Tolstoy tries to “do a dog,” but their observations generally end there. Even Franz Kafka’s genuinely accomplished animal stories, such as “Investigations of a Dog,” owe much to the ways in which their baffled protagonists are not very far from Kafka’s baffled human protagonists. “Investigations of a Dog” is a story about people, because we are not so different from the other animals as to require an extra imaginative leap.
Children’s literature, while full of animal protagonists, is also more often than not really about people dressed up as charming animals, and makes no pretense of being otherwise. (Think Beatrix Potter.) Richard Adams’s Watership Down is a rare exception, managing to create an image of the world in which humans are almost a species of natural disaster. And then there is speculative fiction, which so often involves the introduction of life forms that are on a par with humans, in terms of their intelligence and moral standing, but which are not human: dragons, Martians, vampires, “Old Ones.” Sometimes these others are nevertheless stand-ins for humanity, because what we’re reading might be (for instance) a parable about racism: we fear Others because they’re different, but they’re not so different. Here, again, an interest in the alien is really an interest in the human.
Sometimes, though, speculative-fiction narratives make an attempt to understand a point of view that is truly not human. Here the genre has a real advantage over its mundane cousins; it is already interested not only in the nonhuman but in trying to communicate experiences we do not (and sometimes cannot) have through the power of descriptive language alone. A realistic writer can convey animal experience, but they start from a harder place, and they will write for a readership that may reasonably feel that they turn to a Woolf or a Tolstoy for the subtle distinctions of a human’s experience, not a dog’s.
Eventually, an interest in the alien can lead a writer of science fiction back to the other animals. In a 2002 essay for Oprah, Octavia Butler wrote about a formative childhood encounter with a dog named Baba. When she was three years old, Butler ended up “nose to nose” with Baba, staring into his eyes:
The challenge dogs can present to the would-be interpreter of alien life forms is that, paradoxically, they really are a lot like us: we’ve been going about together for such a long time that it can be hard to remember we do see things differently. In Olaf Stapledon’s bittersweet Sirius, a dog is made to be as smart as a human being without consideration for how lonely that life might be or how ill-suited the dog’s ambitions and dreams might feel to his body. Such thoroughly domesticated animals are still alien, but we understand them, at least a little.
The most widespread and ancient relationship between humans and the other animals, though, is the rejection of identification. The animal is no longer our neighbor in a shared world but a substance: meat to eat, skin to wear—and, more recently, a tool for scientific investigation. We may ask ourselves how the animals feel about it, or try to minimize their suffering, but our knowledge that they aren’t fans and would prefer not to be treated this way doesn’t really affect our decision to continue experimenting on them. It’s not as if we think they’re enjoying themselves. We’re animals too, after all, and we can tell. As the narrator of Craig Strete’s story “Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock” comments: “I care about them going to kill me. Wouldn’t anyone? Ask anybody else in these cages and they’ll all tell you the same thing. Nobody likes to get killed.”
●
“Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock” is a short story in the form of a monologue. Its narrator is a lab animal, but also a circus performer. What sort of animal it is we never really learn, but given the details—it can climb, hold things in its arms, be petted, do tricks and dismember an adult man—it’s probably some kind of primate. The title, with its reference to Harry Harlow’s experiments on rhesus monkeys, also points in this direction, so in honor of those unfortunate animals, and for the sake of simplicity, we’ll call it a monkey. What the point of this half-circus, half-laboratory setting could possibly be we also never learn. How could we? Nobody ever bothers explaining it to our narrator, and his viewpoint is the only one we have.
Our monkey has killed a man. It tells us that the death was intentional—“I meant to kill him but I had no idea I could do it so completely”—though later it’ll say it didn’t mean to. It’s in a cell with the bloody straw that death left behind, and it wishes it weren’t. It misses its friends, Flippy and Jumpo. It misses its old lover, Nappi, who was taken away to the lab and came back wrong. It misses its old keeper, Braddock, who is also the person it killed, his body “partly ingested, the stomach torn out like the sawdust stuffings of a wooden doll.” The monkey’s life has been a whole series of missings, ever since it lost its mother:
By this paragraph, we know that we’re reading from the perspective of a nonhuman animal, but why? In science fiction, after all, it’s always possible that a perspective shift can show we assumed wrongly. There are plenty of stories where humans are lab rats or prey or kept in zoos. People can climb trees and hold each other. No matter how many times I read this story, however, I never really entertain this possibility. Whether or not it successfully represents a specific kind of animal’s mind, I become aware very quickly that the voice speaking to me is not a human voice. What does that?
Answer: the monkey is helpless. It doesn’t understand its situation, can’t understand, and doesn’t really try to understand. Its odd attribution of its being “so wrong” to the clock, and not the loss of its mother, or being raised as an experimental animal, is because those things are simply life’s events, the unquestioned background against which things that can be wrong (like clocks) exist. It is capable of violence, but its violence is instinctive. Its killing of Braddock is neither strategic at the time nor part of a strategy afterward. It doesn’t really have a goal: it meant to kill Braddock, but it had no idea he’d actually die. Eventually, even the monkey’s attitude toward its death becomes acceptance. It ceases to care. It might as well die, since its life is barely a life.
The ape in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” begins its journey toward humanity when it grasps and then rejects the thought that, once caged, there is “no way out.” Strete’s monkey, whose story rhymes with Kafka’s (both primates express a dislike of snakes), is instead dragged along (“they … dragged me out of the tree and wrapped me up in the net and no matter how much I screamed, they wouldn’t listen. I wanted to be free and they wouldn’t listen”) and gives up. What is distinctively animal is acceptance of whatever happens. All animals cope, but in this story, only humans sometimes rail against heaven.
The animals in “Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock” are not living lives or dying deaths that make sense. The meaninglessness of what is happening to them would not be solved by an overheard conversation about how this is all to figure out a better drug for cancer. The monkey views the burial of his fellow test subjects as a waste of meat (“perhaps it does not occur to them that we are edible”) because other animals do not torture one another to learn something. As any cat owner knows, they might torture their prey for fun—but they don’t do it for knowledge. To reverse, for a moment, the line of Wittgenstein’s that is often quoted in conversations about animals—that if a lion could speak we would not understand him—in this story, we sense that the lion could simply never understand us. Not because we are so much higher than a lion, so much more rational, but because our motivations have become so detached from our immediate needs.
●
Something that links classic children’s fiction and speculative fiction—beyond the old jokes that the ideal age of science fiction is twelve—is a sense that the world cannot be taken for granted. The rabbits of Watership Down may not be like human beings, but they are a bit like children: everything is bigger than they are, they try to use tools that they don’t exactly understand, and they are constantly encountering new information for which they have no context. (The first benevolent human being that they do encounter is, unsurprisingly, a child.) A writer of science fiction might create an alien with different sense organs who perceives our world very differently, or whose world we perceive differently, or whose differing lifespans have created a totally different moral code.
The world is also capricious and tyrannical. Children, living at the mercy of adults, are, like Strete’s monkey, shuffled from one thing to another without necessarily understanding why. Like the monkey, their passive acquiescence may prove to mask a capability for violence that looks like, but is not, an exercise of agency. So it is unsurprising that there would be so many classic books for children in which the central concept is that you are very small, or otherwise vulnerable, and have to live around the already-extant world. One of my favorite places to go play as a child, New Orleans City Park’s “Storyland,” featured a house of crazy proportions. The house was fun because it was not like anything in my life. But the house was also fun, I see, looking back, precisely because it was like so many things in my life.
Depicting the world from the perspective of something that doesn’t understand what’s going on, or which is in some way the wrong size or shape or proportion, is not easy. A story told through the eyes of a child runs the risk of being a story told through the eyes of a stupid adult, and trying to figure out what is going becomes an elaborate exercise in what you think the author thinks children think. One solution is to establish a narrative voice that, while mostly limiting itself to its subject’s perspectives, occasionally breaks through to tell you things. This is how Watership Down operates: rabbits do have their own language to describe the sun and the passage of time, but Adams will sometimes tell us what is what. Stapledon’s Sirius mediates its entire story of a superintelligent dog through a human narrator who can grasp the dog’s situation but also explain it to us.
Strete, setting his story in first-person monkey, cannot avail himself of this trick of translation. Nor does he decide to go the route of elaborately describing things we know in strange ways, something science fiction writers love to do even when animals aren’t involved. Instead, the monkey’s narration is simple and direct, and what Strete plays up is not what is strange but rather what the monkey sees as familiar and also cannot explain. Take the description of the keeper just before the monkey kills him. The man smells like a dying animal. He’s “very clumsy,” at one point falling “like he did not have any bones.” He walks in a strange way, eyes closed, always looking as if “he was going to fall over.” This could be a description of a drunkard or a sleepwalker. It also sounds an awful lot like a classic depiction of the walking dead, which would have already been circulating by the story’s publication in 1975. The man smells sick. His body comes right apart. Was that because of the violence or because it was already rotting? The monkey implies at one point that it has died before, saying of its impending death that “this time, I hope they do it right. I don’t want to go through this again.” Has it? It’s certainly possible, but it could have just been tranquilized, and experienced this as death and rebirth.
Where another author might have put in enough clues for us to figure out the bigger picture, Strete keeps us tightly contained. We know only what the monkey knows, no more—in fact, we probably know less. The creature’s asides and perceptions raise unavoidable questions—what is the lab? do they experiment on people too?—but as they pile up, you realize that the story is providing its own response: there is no explanation supplied to this animal that could possibly matter. The monkey’s passivity, ignorance and misperception create a compressed portrait of a creature who will never really know what has happened or what it was all for and cannot even think to ask.
●
No matter how plugged into science fiction you are, it’s likely that you haven’t heard of Craig Strete. Unlike C.L. Moore, Fritz Leiber or Vonda McIntyre, the other authors in this series, Strete never quite became a name. There are reasons for this.
For one, it’s hard to pin down much about Strete himself. He is a Native American writer who seems to have been most active in science fiction during the Seventies. He also wrote children’s books, screenplays and all sorts of other materials—including a book about the Doors’s Jim Morrison which may or may not be nonfiction, depending on who you ask. His books boast introductions from Jorge Luis Borges and Salvador Dalí, the second of which (according to Kristina Baudemann, one of the few scholars to discuss Strete’s fiction) may or may not actually be by Strete. He may or may not be Cherokee and his name may or may not actually be “Craig Strete.”
In the Seventies, Strete ran a zine called Red Planet Earth dedicated to Native American science fiction, but since it was hard to find writers, Strete mostly filled the zine himself, writing under several pseudonyms. Like many zines, Red Planet Earth didn’t last that long (it ran for just a handful of issues), but the passages I’ve seen from it are a winning combination of cocky and deadpan, like this introduction to Strete’s story “Time Deer”: “I will not apologize for having the strongest story in this magazine or for leading off with it first. We are not running a contest to see who can write the best story or be the best human being. The reason we are not doing those things is because I might lose.”
It was Red Planet Earth that brought Strete’s work to the attention of the wider science fiction community. Science fiction éminence grise Theodore Sturgeon dedicated part of his monthly column in the magazine Galaxy to the first volume of Red Planet Earth, quoting from the zine itself at length:
For a period of time, furthering Strete’s career was a personal cause of the science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., who introduced him to feminist writer Joanna Russ. These are the sort of introductions from which big careers are made, and Strete certainly had the talent to have a big career. He did not, partly because of the material reality of his circumstances (introductions, no matter how glittering, can’t put dinner on the table) and partly because he was accused of plagiarism (he was probably innocent).
As with “Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock,” Strete’s stories court multiple levels of estrangement. In “A Sunday Visit with Great-grandfather,” for instance, great-grandson tries to placate his great-grandparents by explaining to them what he’s learned at the white people’s “away school.” They find the lessons he’s learning so outrageous that they decide to keep him at home, even though that will trigger a visit from the police. When a strange vehicle arrives, great-grandson hides and great-grandfather goes to confront the white people, who strike him as “suspiciously blue.” In fact, they are classic space aliens (“six feet tall, covered with blue scaly armor”). The joke of the story initially seems to be that the great-grandparents don’t understand they’re dealing with space aliens, but a cleverly set-up final twist reveals that the great-grandparents themselves are ghosts. The aliens naturally have no conception of what is going on and are terrified to discover that their advanced weaponry has no effect. (One wonders: “Maybe those radio broadcasts we picked up twenty years ago are true? Maybe this guy is Superman?”) In “When They Find You,” a planetary colonist named Gantry does a brisk business killing “stefel dogs” and selling their nerve tissue. He finds them disturbing, as an “alien intelligence that seemed in no way affected by external circumstance, yet was sensitive to things like fear, loneliness and restlessness, but contained no seeming awareness of its own destruction.” Lonely, Gantry takes up with a woman of the indigenous “civilized” species but is never sure if she has feelings the way that he does. Once he finally discovers the answer (yes), it’s too late: more Earth colonists are coming and he would rather put her aside than be degraded by association. The reader senses that the emotional mystery of the stefel dogs and of his lover is perhaps not as deep as Gantry wants it to be: he’s built a life out of extracting resources from both, and to relate to either in another way would cast a light on his past too disturbing to be borne.
These are stories that deserve readers, but an accusation of plagiarism, even if subsequently cast into doubt, is the kind of thing that might prevent a writer whose position was already tenuous from finding a place even in science fiction’s minor canon. (It is still one of the first things you’ll find if you look Craig Strete up.) With so much else to read, why waste time on a writer of a dubious reputation? And while his stories were reviewed positively, these positive reviews can carry a faint but unmistakable whiff of “eat your vegetables”; a positive review in the Washington Post of Dreams That Burn in the Night, the collection that contains “Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock,” ends on the note: “I’m sure The White Plague will sell 20 times as many copies as Dreams That Burn in the Night, which is a shame.” This preemptive lament that the masses will simply be too tasteless to appreciate a book isn’t a great incentive to read it.
But who cares? In the end, with every writer, all we have is the work. If we live in a world in which every single negative statement aimed at Strete is true—that he was a plagiarist, that he fabricated support from bigger names, that he didn’t actually know Jim Morrison—“Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock” would still be a great story. It disturbed me, it upset me, it made me look at my dog a little differently. There are aliens on Earth, but perhaps the aliens are not the dogs after all—perhaps they’re me.
Photo credit: University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives
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