My Favorite Science Fiction Story: James Wallace Harris

Today’s post is a guest review by James Wallace Harris. James Harris is a preeminent science fiction blogger who is famous for his extremely well thought out and in-depth blog postings and web sites. I recently asked James “What is your favorite science fiction short story and why?” The excellent analysis that follows is typical of Mr. Harris’s style:

James’s Answer:

“The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany

Why does that rare short story grab you when all the others are at best forgettable entertainment or at worse something that clouds your mind with boredom? How many novels and short stories impacted your life enough to reread? And if you have any, how many do you reread regularly. Why?

I believe some stories resonate with readers at a much deeper level than others. Not to sound all new age woo-woo, but sometimes a writer will go after a story to capture something at the core of his being, and if he succeeds, that story will unfold like magic with readers who seek to understand the same mystery in their own souls. If you tune into one of these stories it feels like being a homing pigeon knowing the way home.

For me, that story has always been “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany, which currently can be found in Aye, and Gomorrah: And Other Stories. I was born in 1951 and Delany was born in 1942, so he was blazing a trail in his twenties that I followed in my teens. Delany was a gay black prodigy that attended the famous Bronx High School Science, and exploded onto the science fiction world winning major awards during the New Wave upheaval, and I was a straight white Air Force brat dragged from school to school, always the outsider. I didn’t know Delany’s age, color or sexual orientation when I started reading his stories, but I could identify with his alienation. “The Star Pit” was published early 1967 and I didn’t discover it until late 1967 or early 1968, in the eleventh grade.

I grew up wanting to be an astronaut like many kids who grew up with the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs in the 1960s and who also read science fiction, but by 1968 I knew my ambitions were a fantasy like the fiction I loved. I suffered a terribly sense of angst about the clash between desire and reality. Delany encapsulated it perfectly in “The Star Pit,” a story about people who live at the edge of our galaxy and suffer deep emotional distraught that they can’t travel beyond, especially when it’s discovered that a few humans can. They call them the golden. Strangely, the right stuff in Delany’s world would be the wrong stuff in our world, because the golden are psychological freaks, usually characterized by being either mean or dumb.

I have no idea what Delany’s personal life was like up to writing “The Star Pit,” but I know he was wildly successful and yet he writes about barriers, and the crushing psychological damage of meeting smarter, more successful people, who achieved more and flew higher than he did. No matter how young, brilliant and precocious you are, there’s always someone younger, smarter and more successful who gets to do things you never will.

“The Star Pit” is the story that told me that my science fictional dreams were not going to come true. During the time period, Delany seemed obsessed with cycles, even writing the short novel Empire Star that had a circular plot, and featured many of the same themes as “The Star Pit.” Most science fiction stories have little to do with reality, and even less to do with personal experiences, so the average Sci-Fi reading kid finds few personally meaningful stories in the genre, but this story was different.

Yes, it is real science fiction, with space ships, alien worlds, multiple dimensions, and exotic adventures, but it’s also about raising children, love, marriage, alcoholism, drug addiction, writing, envy, ambition, resentment and growing up. The story is told by ex-alcoholic, Vyme, who couldn’t handle family obligations. My father was a drunk that failed me and my sister. I often wondered if the seed of my father’s alcoholism was the failure of achieving his dreams, to travel to far off exotic Earthly places. He joined the Air Force but didn’t get to fly and ended up anchored to the ground by a demanding wife and kids.

Vyme adopts the prodigy, Ratlit, a young teen, who’s already been everywhere and done everything, and who wants to travel beyond the galaxy but can’t, so he pushes the social fabric in other ways. The mere fact that the golden can go to other galaxies drives Ratlit mad. I felt that longing too as I grew up watching our astronauts go into space. But I also felt that same envy for the kids around me who succeeded with down to earth dreams that I failed at too, like my friend who published in underground newspapers, and another friend who had his poetry and short stories published, or buddies who were in local rock bands, or rich kids who got to travel to other countries, or even the normal kids who got to go to big parties with great drugs and sex. We all envy what we don’t have.

“The Star Pit” is about ecology long before it became a vogue term. Delany uses a succession of ecologariums, think high tech aquariums, to show his characters studying trapped organisms to contrast with their own lives contained by barriers. When we see a goldfish in a bowl we all feel for the creature that has to live in such a limited environment while thinking we have freedom. Delany is saying, no, we have our own glass walls keeping us in, limiting how far we can swim in our lives. Delany tells this story in a plot structure like a matryoshka doll, those Russian dolls that nest inside of each other.

Most kids read science fiction and dream about going to the stars, “The Star Pit” is a science fiction story about kids living out among the stars telling its readers that you ain’t going nowhere kid. It’s a harsh lesson to study. Delany is writing about a different kind of Cold Equations. Forty years later there are still a few golden in our reality that gets to leave Earth, but I never will. Knowing that is not as vicious as being thrown out an air lock but it’s pretty damn cold. Now, don’t get me wrong, the story is much deeper than this. That’s why I keep coming back. When I was young I identified with Ratlit, but now I identify with Vyme.

The point of having a favorite science fiction story, or any kind of story, is to keep coming back to it, to keep exploring it like an archeologist digging for clues. One of my failed ambitions is to write fiction, a desire that lingers like the desire to travel to Mars, and probably just as realistic. However, if I could ever write a story as good as “The Star Pit” I think I would feel like a success, like I finally made it past the galaxy’s edge.

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An audio production from 1967 featuring Delany and others doing a dramatic reading can be found here. There are some very annoying sound effects throughout the story, but they phase out, so stick with the story and don’t let them push you away. I wish Audible.com would produce the complete Aye, and Gomorrah collection. It’s very deep science fiction, that’s exotic and alien, yet real. I think “The Star Pit” would make an excellent movie - it’s both visual and dramatic.

Wikipedia has a nice description of the Aye, and Gomorrah collection and how it compares to the early collection, Driftglass. There are several commercial sites on the web that cater to students doing research for papers that have study guides to “The Star Pit,” implying its literary worth. The Internet Science Fiction Database has a listing of all various anthology collections that reprint “The Star Pit.” The story was also nominated for the 1968 Hugo award for the novella.

I’ve tried to explore my affinity for “The Star Pit” before, in my blog essay, “The Star Pit” - The Limits of Limitations.

James Wallace Harris

Rusty’s Two Cents:

My first online contact with James Wallace Harris came when I was researching science fiction short stories and ran across his “The Classics of Science Fiction” web site. I was quite impressed with his essays on classic scifi novels and short stories. Later I came into contact with his excellent post about free science fiction - it was then that I started following his blog and really began to appreciate his vast knowledge of the science fiction genre as well as his in-depth articles.

Of course he does write about things other than science fiction, and if you want a really fascinating read then check out his “Retirement from Sex” article - rarely do I get a hardy laugh while reading an extremely enlightening and thought-provoking piece such as this.

Anyway, I think the above review gives you a very good taste of what the writings of James Wallace Harris are like. If you are one who desires more depth in this age of YouTube and Twitter then you really should check out his blog: Auxiliary Memory.

Be sure to check out Samuel R. Delany’s book of short stories, Aye, and Gomorrah: And Other Stories, at Amazon.com.

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