(Weird Tales, Pt. 2) W. S. Merwin and Weird Tales; an unlikely combination

Here is the story I selected for the second Weird Tales science fiction story.

It is quite short, six pages, has almost no action and only one character. It is the kind of future history that I enjoy. Explorers visiting a uninhabited planet and trying to piece together what happened to the civilization from the ruins. For a very different take you might look at my post for "Omnilingual" by H. Beam Piper here,

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2017/05/omnilingual-by-h-beam-piper.html

"The Red God Laughed" appeared in Weird Tales, for April 1939. The story in brief, concerns the visit to Earth by Thvall the Seeker, a kind of squishy, soft bodied alien who is visiting 21st Century Nu Yok. But while the incredible city, with four thousand foot high towers still stands, it seems Asia (the yellow races, yes we are back to the "yellow peril"), you can see my post, Weird Tales, Pt 1 for more on this topic, and America have unleashed poison gas rockets, (of course they started it), and destroyed almost all life on earth, except deep sea fishes, worms and plants. So Thvall, who is looking for a world with water for his dying planet wiggles around casting aspersions on the likelihood of a race with rigid skeletons developing intelligence. Until that is he fiddles with an unexploded canister and well, Merwin's poem sort of sums it up.

"Merwin’s great single-line poem—not the greatest short poem, but perhaps the shortest great poem, ever written—is about the converse problem, that of outliving. This is the poem in its entirety:"

"Who would I show it to"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-final-prophecy-of-w-s-merwin

And with Thvall's death, his people will never learn of the planet that could save their race. Earth itself will be forgotten with no one to appreciate it's accomplishments or take warning from it's stupidity. I have always been fascinated by ruins, Darwinism, evolutionary theory and tales about the end of the world or even the universe. Science fiction in the pulps has lots of these stories that appeal to me. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has a lovely essay here;

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/end_of_the_world

Another thing I find interesting is the period in which a story is written or read. I can rarely prove that any particular event influenced a writer. Also editors often held stories for years before publishing them which further confuses the issue. But one can make some statements about what the original reader would have been experiencing when they read the story. In this case the story concerns the outcome of a future war between Asia and America and 1939 the year it was published was a significant date. The Sino-Japanese War had been raging since 1937. In Sept 1938, Neville Chamberlain declared we would have "Peace in Our Time and five months after this story appeared Germany would invade Poland and the Second World War would begin. So the reader would perhaps have been reading or hearing many discussions about the possibility of war during this period. 

A lot of people today like to read science fiction through the lenses of the present, which is fine. I prefer to try to understand how writers and readers embraced the themes of science fiction, within the context of their world and their daily lives. So it makes me wonder what they thought when they read "The Red God Laughed".

Stories that make you go Wow. Morning Child by Gardner Dozois

Early Tuesday morning, during a spell of insomnia, I was reading James Davis Nicoll's article on Tor.com about the Science Fiction Book Club, Six Bulky Classics Delivered by the Science Fiction Book Club, 

https://www.tor.com/2019/03/21/six-bulky-classics-delivered-by-the-science-fiction-book-club/

 when I encountered a link for the Gardner Dozois story "Morning Child" in the comments. Thank you from me as well, Sophie Jane.

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/morning-child/

Sometimes you start reading and you just know this is going to be sad, this is going to be poignant, this is going to be powerful. Your going to remember this for a long time. This story was all those things within a couple of paragraphs. 

"The old house had been hit by something sometime during the war and mashed nearly flat. The front was caved in as though crushed by a giant fist: wood pulped and splintered, beams protruding at odd angles like broken fingers, the second floor collapsed onto the remnants of the first. The rubble of a chimney covered everything with a red mortar blanket. On the right, a gaping hole cross-sectioned the ruins, laying bare all the strata of fused stone and plaster and charred wood—everything curling back on itself like the lips of a gangrenous wound. Weeds had swarmed up the low hillside from the road and swept over the house, wrapping the ruins in wildflowers and grapevines, softening the edges of destruction with green."

Williams brings the boy John here (the house they once lived in before it was destroyed) almost every day. He gathers plants for food while John plays.

'John erupted out of the tall weeds and ran laughing to where Williams stood with the foraging bags. “I been fighting dinosaurs!” John said. “Great big ones!” Williams smiled crookedly and said, “That’s good.” He reached down and rumpled John’s hair. They stood there for a second, John panting like a dog from all the running he’d been doing, his eyes bright,'

Then gathering done they proceed to their camp by the river to cut wood and pull in the fish nets. Their walk is uneventful, Willams limping a bit from the load. In their whole long journey to return to this area they have never encountered another person.  

 “Can I help you carry the bags?” John said eagerly. “Can I? I’m big enough!” Williams smiled at him and shook his head. “Not yet, John,” he said. “A little bit later, maybe.”

It is clear by the time night falls all is not well with John, or the with the world "Somewhere on the invisible horizon, perhaps a hundred miles away, a pillar of fire leapt up from the edge of the world."

The story first appeared in Onmi and is available free on Lightspeed. Don't read about it, read it and let me know what you think. I loved this story, I need to do a list of my favourites and put this high on it.

My take:

Dozois has written a fairly compact story, the action takes place within a single day. Details about the characters or events are minimal. The story relies on mood, atmosphere and the evidence of the affection between the Williams and John to convey the story and provide the emotional weight for the resolution. If I had to compare "Morning Child" to other works, I would suggest the stories of Ray Bradbury or the moody black and white episodes of The Outer Limits, where bittersweet joy, horror and nostalgia bleed through into our world and tinge our futures. Dozois leaves many questions unanswered in this story, but after I thought about it for some time I realized the only important question was, how long?

I know there is a copy of Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois around here somewhere and I need to dig it out. 

Cover image from ISFDB: Omni, January 1984 by Tim White (variant of Ring Around the Sun 1979)