The first woman to publish in the science fiction
magazines using her own name was Clare Winger Harris, who lived from
1891-1968. Although she had already published a novel when she
broke into the pages of Weird Tales in 1926, the eleven short
stories she published over the next four years formed her contribution
to science fiction. Harris collected all of her short fiction in a
vanity-published book in 1947, which was brought back into print by
Richard Lupoff in 2011.
Harris's debut story, "A Runaway World"
was first published in Weird Tales in 1926 and set a century
later. In the tale, which maintains a feel of small town America
with a few technological gadgets, although televisios are still rare,
the narrator, James Griffin, describes how Mars is suddenly pulled from
its orbit. Not long later, Earth follows suit and the catastrophe
is accompanied by the expected rioting. Although three years pass
with the planet far away from the sun, the Griffins and their colleagues
are able to survive on the food they managed to stockpile and through
the use of their atomic heater. Harris plays around with the idea
that the planets can move between stars, much as high level electrons
can move between nuclei of atoms. There is little tension or
conflict in the story, which is more a description of events, something
which will be repeated throughout Harris's work.
In
December of 1926, Hugo Gernsback ran a contest, asking readers to send
in a short story based on the magazine’s cover, an image of five
nearly nude humanoids watching a floating ocean liner.
Harris submitted the third-place winning “The Fate of the
Poseidonia,” which tells the story of George Gregory, whose instant
dislike for Martell, who lives in the apartment next to him, sabotages
his relationship with Margaret Landon, who he has been wooing.
These relationships serve to drive the narrative while Gregory
also reports on the strange disappearance of water around the world as
the sea level drops due to the emergence of enormous fissures below the
ocean. Naturally, Gregory
finds a link between the disappearance of the water (and a couple of
ocean liners) and his hated neighbor.
As with “A Runaway World,” the narrative is more descriptive
than story, with the protagonist exploring, but not actually influencing
the events.
Harris
also looks at the idea of using science fictional tropes as a means to
conclude the validity of historical events in “A Certain Soldier,”
about two scholars who are determined to discover the identity of the
Roman soldier who started the fire that consumed the Temple in Jerusalem
in AD 70. Harris includes a
form of time travel in her story, but doesn’t provide any sort of
explanation for the temporal change, which weakens the story.
However, her protagonist takes a more active role, both in the
twentieth and first centuries than previous protagonists did.
The
driving force behind “A Dangerous Drug” is Edgar Hamilton’s desire
to marry Ellen Gordon, six year’s his elder, which is the only reason
Ellen spurns his advances.
Hamilton
’s solution is to administer a drug which will retard her aging, and
then an antidote when he becomes older than she is.
Hamilton
’s plans don’t work out as well as he would like and he winds up
quickening his own aging, only to find himself in an alternative
reality. The story doesn’t
quite work and has an almost Twilight Zonish twist to the ending.
After
a war between humans and insect life results in the destruction of
nearly all vegetation on the Earth, humans continue to thrive using
manufactured food. “The Miracle of the Lily” refers to the
possibility that they can reintroduce vegetation to their world
centuries after it was first destroyed and at the same time that humans
are beginning to establish contact with the native inhabitants of Mars
and Venus. The story’s
ending is telegraphed and Harris’s conclusion seems almost as if it is
the set up for a more interesting story to follow when and if the humans
ever meet their interplanetary neighbors.
Six
months after Harris’s first story, “A Runaway World” appeared,
Miles J. Breuer broke into Amazing
Stories with “The Man with the Strange Head.”
Breuer’s career lasted more than a decade longer than
Harris’s and saw him collaborate with Jack Williamson, whose work
began appearing in the December 1928 issue of Amazing
(coincidentally with stories by both Harris and Breuer). Breuer and
Harris collaborated on the story “Baby on
Neptune
.” In some ways, “Baby on
Neptune
” plays with some of the ideas Harris introduced in “A Dangerous
Drug.” The Neptunians operate on a different time scale than humans,
which causes difficulties first in the human attempt to decode their
radio messages and again when the humans visit
Neptune
. At this remove, the story,
which accurately describes space sickness, is perhaps most interesting
for its depiction of
Neptune
, so different from modern understanding.
“The
Artificial Man” features a character named George Gregory, who is not
the same character as the George Gregory who appeared earlier in the
volume in the story “The Fate of the Poseidonia,” although both men
share a similar fate. In
“The Artificial Man,” Gregory is a relatively optimistic man, even
after he loses a leg following an accident on the football field shortly
before his scheduled wedding to Rosalind Nelson.
However, after he loses an arm in an auto accident, again
postponing his wedding, he begins to become bitter and wonders how much
of his physical body could be replaced without damaging his mental
facility and his sense of soul. As
with the other Gregory, his curiosity costs him his fiancé. Harris’s
depiction of a cyborg from 1929 is ahead of its time and Gregory’s
ideas about body and soul working together add a nice dimension to the
character.
“The
Menace of Mars” opens with Harris’s planet-moving concept as
described in “A Runaway World,” but the results are very different.
As all the planets (and the sun) move closer to each other, most
of the Earth becomes inhospitable and the remnants of humanity flee to
two colonies at the poles. Hildeth
finds himself living in Polaria, at the North Pole, while his fiancé,
Vivian Harley takes refuge at
Eden
, on the opposite end of the world. The title refers to a Martian
invasion which has some similarities to the one described by H.G. Wells
in The War of the Worlds, but
in other ways may be unique in the annals of science fiction.
In his Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years,
E. F. Bleiler describes Harris’s writing as “routine,” and The
Menace of Mars is a good demonstration of that description.
However, while the writing may be pedestrian, the ideas Harris
proposed, especially so early in the genre’s history, demonstrate a
keen imagination, allowing her ideas to remain fresh, even after nearly
ninety years..
Harris
explored a wide range of science fictional tropes in her short career,
including time travel, cyborgs, and space travel. In “The Evolutionary
Monstrosity,” she looks at biologists using bacteria to speed up the
evolutionary process, questioning how well evolution of the body without
a changing environment would work and where it would fall apart.
Her scientist, Ted Marston, along with his friend Irwin Staley,
explore the possibilities, while their friend Frank Caldwell maintains
his distance and provides an outside voice of reason to question their
methods and support the idea of their research.
It shows Harris’s imagination that although Marston creates a
horror, she does not write a story in which the moral is that there are
things man was not meant to know, instead showing that science has a
place and can and should probe the unknown, with precautions in place.
As
it happens, the story which brought Harris to my attention, “The Fifth
Dimension,” is the weakest (and shortest) of her works.
Originally appearing in the December 1928 issue of Amazing
Stories, alongside Jack Williamson’s first published story, it is
a tale of clairvoyance and déjà vu, weakened by the ridiculous
dialogue shared by the husband and wife as they ponder how much of their
lives are predetermined and what, if anything, can be changed.
While some of Harris’s story ideas remain fresh
after ninety years, others seem familiar because they have been retold
by other authors. This is
the case with “The Ape Cycle,” her final and longest, story, which
has a strong similarity to the background for Pierre Boulle’s Planet
of the Apes, published more than thirty years later.
In Harris’s story, Daniel Stoddart and his son Ray begin the
process of uplifting apes for use as servants.
The story follows their family for several generations as they
successfully breed the animals, introduce them to society, and society
changes based on the apes’ abilities and usefulness.
Throughout, Harris includes some speculation about whether
animals can have souls and at what point using the uplifted animals
would amount to slavery, although she never quite provides an answer to
either question, eventually turning her attention to an uprising by the
creatures. “The Ape
Cycle” provides a powerful conclusion to the volume, demonstrating
that although Harris was writing at a time when science fiction was
first finding its place, it was still able to examine topics from a
variety of angles.
