I have great admiration for anyone who can pull off a short story successfully. I can't do it, as anyone reading this on anything resembling a regular basis can sadly attest. Any short stories I've done are frivolous and lightweight affairs, having no real heft, balloons that have sailed away before you've even adjusted your grip. My favorite short story of all time is probably James Joyce's "The Dead" and that's more or less due to the last ten pages. I will never come near anything remotely of that caliber. Even talking about it just depresses me. Let's move on!
It's probably rather obvious but I'll say it anyway: short stories are not novels. Complexity is allowed but the main goal is to get in and get out as soon as you can. I'll say a thing that may be less obvious, even as I'm leading up to it: they're also a bugger to write. What's harder than that? Short stories that rely on some kind of "twist" ending, forcing you to sketch out the rules and yet at the same time hide the crucial shading to the rule so that only the most astute readers will pick up on where the story is going, until perhaps the very end.
But what's even harder than that? Science-fiction short stories with a twist ending. And with Gustavo Bondoni's "Growing Pains in the Womb" that's exactly what we seem to have. See, the problem is that genre short stories that are relying on a kind of twist ending work by finding new interpretations of the rules we thought we knew, arranging situations so that they are full of all the familiar pieces conforming in new ways, in formations that you never see coming but once in place, seem all the more obvious. With SF and fantasy stories you are involved in the task of presenting the reader with new worlds, worlds that are like the one that they know, with several key differences. And the challenge remains, if you're going to do this type of thing, to properly lay out the rules of the new setting so that the twist, when it does come, doesn't seem to violate any of the rules that have already been laid out. This can make the reader feel a bit cheated, all told, since you're on some level forcing them to guess an ending that there was no possible way they couldn't see coming, as they don't have all the cards.
To put it more concretely, imagine the ending of "Gift of the Magi" where aliens show up to take her hair in exchange for the new watchband for her husband (I hope that doesn't spoil the story for anyone). It's not something you'd expect but you'd have no earthly reason to expect aliens to even show up, it's not the type of world where aliens might conceivably exist and to pull them out at the last second in order to force an ending to the story would be, honestly, cheating. Even if you think aliens are really cool.
Yet, you have to walk this fine line in SF and fantasy stories where you have to lay out enough of the cards so that the ending is within striking distance of the reader. Too many, and not only does the direction of the story become obvious but the story risks becoming an information dump, an exercise in piling exposition on the reader. Not enough and we run back to the problem mentioned earlier. Stories set in the so-called
"real world" (i.e. the world that all of us presumably live in, unless one wants to get into a Philip K Dick questioning of reality, but I for one have no desire to go there) come with certain sets of assumptions, especially if it takes place in a society that is not unlike our own. We live here, we know how things work (or how they're supposed to work) and it doesn't need to be explained to us. One can't make that assumption in a SF story, because you're talking about future societies and alien worlds and a whole new game. The worst case scenario you can rely on genre conventions and figure that a lifetime of being exposed to this stuff means that the reader will eventually come in with a set of preconceptions already formed.
That's a good fallback option when you're pressed for time, but it's also kind of taking the easy way out. Nor does it offer much to non-genre readers who may not be as well versed in the trappings of the setting. It's not a bad thing to pitch to a specific audience, heck, I doubt the people who write the Star Wars novelisations are really hoping to capture the Danielle Steel market, or perhaps get your grandmother to take it off the rack at the bookstore. It's probably more prevalent in fantasy, because the clichés are more engrained, elves are like this, dwarfs are like that, magic goes this way, and so on. But that may be my fantasy bias showing. SF has its own quirks, of course, you are expected to know how a spaceship might work, for instance, or that dystopias have to end in everyone dying (that's kind of a joke).
That's not exactly the problem here, if there even is a problem. It's a SF story, what we have here, unabashedly so, although it doesn't start out that way. The opening conversation is blissfully normal, a husband and wife (if that's what they are) having a discussion about his crappy job, the same way that people the world over have discussions over how much they hate what they do. He could be any security force, working at a bank, the local mall, the giant evil company that exists right at the backdoor to your town, because that's where all evil companies are.
But as we go along there are glitches in the conversations, phrases dropped in that don't make any sense from what we first assume. A council, a reference to a place without crime, reflections in front of an armored door, it's off just ever so slightly, like staring at your reflection and realizing that it's left handed just like you are and it shouldn't be that way. Terms like "born in the womb" and "launch" just don't seem to belong here, adding to a disquieting sense of unease. We're being dropped into an ongoing story and are forced to pick it up as we go along. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Nevertheless the author doesn't give himself an easy task here. Because with short stories you are forced to sort of hit the ground running, but he also has to introduce the situation so that it makes sense to the rest of us. You're trying to do two totally different things at the same time and have them be coherent. Fishing and cutting bait, as the old "Far Side" cartoon goes. It appears he decides to go the exposition route instead, and while he does it as organically as possible (as organic as someone conveniently remembering history lessons at the point where the rest of us would need them can be), what happens is that the plot sort of stops for a page or two before kicking back in with Rob facing the sealed door. It's not a huge section and certainly for what amounts to an info-dump, it's well done but you have to wonder if it could have been more interlaced into the plot itself, messing with the reader's expectations more.
Imagine it like a movie camera, I guess. You open up the story with a tight close up on Rob and Eileen talking to each other, having a normal conversation, so you can't see any of their surroundings. And as Rob leaves his room to go find the rebels in the sealed room, the camera pulls back and pans out, so that the scene around him becomes revealed, the inside of a gigantic spaceship, the ambient sounds falling into place, the constant humming, the closeness of everything mixed with the contradictory expansiveness of it all, tight corridors clashing with great arched bays of open space. As security chief Rob needs to know everything about everyone in a place where privacy is in rare supply.
To his credit, the author is making an attempt to clue in the people who don't come into this from a history of reading SF. The concept of the generational spaceship has been around for some time, ever since people realized that we'll never be able to achieve anything greater than light speed and that in the universe, things are very, very far apart. One of the more famous examples was probably Brian Aldiss' Non-Stop, which posed the scenario of a generational ship in flight for so long that everyone aboard had basically forgotten that they were in a gigantic ship and assumed it was the world, with civilization adapting to the new surroundings. It's a good example of the twist story because we aren't given the facts right off the bat, we start in the same place as the characters where it seems like they all just live on this weird jungle planet, and as we go along it's clear that things are not what they seem.
Another good example, for those who want further recommended reading, is James Blish's Cities in Flight sequence of stories, although those are more straightforward.
Getting back, then, the question with a lot of this type of story is how much to give to the reader and how many blanks do you let them fill in? Do we need a detailed history of humanity up to this point, right in the beginning, or is there a way we can infer from the later debate between Rob and the kids the underlying discontent that sent people out to the stars? History helps us put things into context but it tells us nothing about the rules of this society, it tells us where they came from but not where they are now. And the important part is the now of things, where they are and what place they maintain. We need to know how this all works so we can see where it has all gone horribly wrong. Because if the light on the console at the nuclear power plant is blinking, but you don't know what it does, how can you know you're in terrible danger?
Yet we are sketched out the boundaries of this society, and in doing so he's touching on a primal question that underlies maybe all societies. A lot of human history has been caused by a guy looking over at the guy next to him and wanting what he has, whether he needs it or not. But here we are given a situation where everyone can literally have anything they want, where the words "want" and "need" don't really have any meaning because you have is what you need and you don't want what you don't have, because you have everything. But the question is, can that be enough? If everyone becomes equal (which is not the case, otherwise we wouldn't have a council) will there not be people who desire to be more than equal? Can equality be learned, or is it something that has to be forced upon humanity? Can you ever stop really wanting more than what you have?
This does not seem to be a problem for the older generations, who gave and sacrificed and have that sort of driven destiny. But raised away from the problems that drove them away and with the destination barely in sight, those that came after have no such ideals. We've got a generation gap here, with the new younger generation spoiled ever so slightly, feeling they are entitled to things they don't have, purely by the fact that they feel they deserve them. It can be an interesting comment on society today, the gap between rich and poor, those that struggled and those that merely fed on the fruits of that struggle. Is this us, trapped aboard this rocky ship hurtling through the universe to a destination they can't properly conceive? When this is all you know, can you never learn?
It's a good dilemma, and one certainly always welcome to new interpretations, because it's hard to settle the question of who is right. Do you go with the ample present experience of those who have gone before, or assume that their judgments have calcified and that the new hope lies with the fresher thoughts of the untried and untested generation? The steel door is a barrier and you can't bridge it, because you have nothing in common. You're talking but nobody cares what anybody is saying. The kids aren't listening to Rob and he's not sure if he can really understand what they want. He thinks he can but his wants are not their wants, his are shaped by his life and his generation. Having everything to do versus having nothing to do. You're speaking in two different languages now, talking past each other and at each other, words like bullets and you're immune to each other's ammunition. And that's the problem, that's why they lash out in their way, because you'll never get anyone's attention if you can't wound them. Nobody listens to the soothing words, it's the lacerations that count, verbs as contusions, ideas as blunt objects. You only become bruised when you understand.
What it comes down to are the rules. The kids don't know them, Rob thinks that he knows them and ultimately, we don't. You can't succeed if you don't know what you are breaking. It hurts to see so little of the rest of the ship, because that means the heavy lifting of the philosophical argument rests on a bunch of punk kids and Rob. And that could be interesting but what we get is an exchange that amounts to "Let me in" "We're not going to let you in" "You should let me in" "You're not coming in" until we get to a point where they do let Rob in. This is where the story should start, literally or metaphorically. Something is wrong in the perfect society and Rob is about to get to the heart of it. We're about to find out the exact pattern of the cracks and whether they can be repaired. Going into the center of the ship to find out how to regain control.
We don't get that, however. The story blinks at the last second, closes its eyes and looks away right at the moment when we need it to stare without horror. We need utter sobriety and instead it staggers and sways away, so that we only get the hung-over aftermath. The story sets itself up for either a meaty debate or a tense chess game, as Rob and the kids attempt to outmaneuver each other, with the stakes being the lives of everyone on the ship. We're taken right to the brink of the door, we're toured through a new society and shown what could come crashing down (or emerge, reformed) if Rob does not succeed . . . but then the story ducks back, as if unsure how to resolve its own painted corner.
That's sort of a problem, because it's not the resolution we're interested in here, it's the intersections that into forcing that resolution. The conflict between where they are and what they will eventually. The young take over, it's the way of the world, they are going to win in the end. But they want to win right now and the issue is can Rob stop them, or does he even want to? And we need to see how he arrives at that point, because before he goes into the door he's just a guy doing his job and keeping the ship safe. What happens between him entering that room and then later exiting the door is where the story says what it has to say, where you realize that everything has changed, or that it's never going to change. The difference between evolution and capitulation. Do we grow, or do we collapse? The story needs to present us with the arguments. It doesn't, all we get is a door, and the gap that means everything. We're taken from where we are to where we end up without seeing the space in between, and that space is the crucial part, because of what it represents, because of what has to go down.
Isaac Asimov, wonderful man that he was, seemed to really hate writing action sequences. Very often a chapter would end on the cusp of a pitched space battle or some other potentially exciting conflict, and then you'd open the next chapter with a few of the characters standing around mopping their foreheads, saying, "Phew, I didn't think we'd get out of that one." The Foundation series is pretty notorious for this, but the thing is Asimov would surround it with characters talking about things, debating and arguing because while he was a SF writer, his stories were often about ideas. Here we have the setup for an argument and the resolution to an argument without ever seeing the gyrations involved to get it resolved.
Simply put, it's like watching a movie where you have a couple on the verge of divorce throughout the entire picture. Like, okay, War of the Roses where they are fighting throughout the entire film, just at each other's throats, right up to the next to last scene. Then you have the movie close with a scene where they are professing their love for each other and reaffirming their commitments to love. There would be, suffice to say, a bit of a disconnect.
Which in itself would not be a bad thing if we were told everything up front. Readers are intelligent people and don't need to be told every little detail, we can easily infer stuff if needs be. But it comes down to knowing the rules about this society, about how life might conceivably work on a giant hollowed out asteroid that everyone aboard is going to die upon. If we cut to the denouement but are given enough info to see how Rob cleverly inverted the rules of this static society and was able to use it against the people who crafted them, that would be something. Revitalizing the staid atmosphere of the ship by using the bylaws in a way that nobody really expects. That would excuse the gap.
Instead we cut to the revelation that Rob elected all the whiny children as the new council, which was a "Wait, what?" moment. I'd say that the resolution comes out of left field but I'm not even sure what field its hailing from. The actual council is as surprised by this as the reader is, and there's no real explanation for it other than "Because Rob said so." Does he have the authority to scrap the old council, making him potentially the most powerful man on the ship? Is there a loophole in the bylaws that allows him to assign an emergency council in times of crisis, and then have that new council elect themselves permanently (or at least enact a permanent state of crisis, which would have nice parallels to today's environment, if one wished to go there)? Did he broadcast the conversation he had with the kids to the rest of the ship and let them make their own decision, so that the ship decided to give them a chance to be the new council?
Any of those explanations would have worked, as well as a million others that more imaginative people than me could have come up with. What we get instead is just "we're the council now" or, more specifically, Rob stating that the kids are the council now while the actual council is just forced to sit there and take it. On some level you can call it a bloodless coup, except they really have no leverage for their demands. What does the rest of the ship think about all this? What's the ratio of young to old, where maybe you have the old-timers not realizing that they've been outnumbered and never saw it coming. I can't say, the story doesn't say and the ending lacks a bit of impact because of it. Rob does something clever and unexpected. Or maybe he doesn't and he's just insane, thinking that one man can elect the entire council.
For the twist ending to work, to get that "aha!" moment, we need to be able to draw a line between what happened and the consequences were of that. Here, there's a broken dash in the middle and none of the evidence suggests what we see. You've got a beginning and you've got an ending but there needs to be a middle for it to mean anything. The rules have to be clear, or at least implied, for this society to have any kind of weight. Where does the council come from? Who elects them? What do they do? What exactly are Rob's powers as security chief? The story never asks how any of this happens, it just accepts it and expects us to as well. But first, you have to earn it.
What we get instead is a long speech via Rob about how things have to change, none of which I disagree with actually. In a age of stagnation we are all too willing to accept the things we have without question, not bothering to wonder if they could be better, or at least different. We don't want to lose any of our comfortable existences, even if it means that we become locked in amber. I get what Rob is saying, that the guard needs to change if the ship can ever hope to sustain itself, and that things aren't about to change unless someone forces it.
But if I'm convinced it's because I feel the same way about situations like this, not because the story itself has convinced me. He doesn't make a case for why this has to be done now, there's no compelling case that things are stagnating except that's what we're told, he even delivers his explanation for everything that has happened matter-of-factly and walks off, like that's all there is to it. And is it? We need to see more in order to make up our own minds, more of these people, more of what the young folks want, more of what the story is asking us to choose between. We're told when we need to be shown. The rules it has to obey, for the story to have any meaning.
I don't mean to suggest that this story needs to turn into some kind of generation-spanning epic, there are writers who could make these points in half the space. Things don't need to that dense and sharp, nor do they need to be spread out like a quilt. It can work in the room allotted, but we need to know more. The council mentions "values and traditions" being taken down if the kids are put in charge . . . which ones? They have a tradition of living on a giant ship that is moving toward a distant star . . . do the kids want to change that, because even Rob points out that's impossible. Are we to assume that the elders have similar traditions and values to those of us in the present day but even then . . . the same values as Americans? Asians? Those of the Middle-East? It would help if the new generation was portrayed as humans shaped by the new ideals forged in the womb of the ship, if the distinction between what they wanted and what the elders wanted was clearer. The friction that occurs when people don't think the same way you do, but are forced to live your way. But they're just portrayed as teenagers who don't really know what they want, except they want to be in charge. So Rob puts them in charge, seemingly because he's bored of the way things are. In the end he seems to think this is all very funny anyway, even though he's put people in charge of the ship who admittedly have no idea what the heck they're doing.
The only demand they even have is to go running back to Earth, crawling back to the proverbial womb, like trying to unbirth yourself. Going back to Mommy because you don't like the way things are. This is progress, this is the sign of the future? Rob and his generation are pointed toward something, while the kids just want to go in the other direction. Why do they even want to go to a place they've never been to anyway? Just to be difficult? Which isn't out of the question, given how teenagers can be, although the story never really states if any of the adults bothered to tell the kids that if they didn't keep doing things the way they always had, everyone on the ship would die.
The more I read it, the more the ending rationalization seems to be "Good? Bad? I'm the one with the gun." Rob isn't swayed by their arguments at all, he just gives them what they want because they have control of the ship and he's tired of listening to them. Which proves what? If you pout enough you'll get your way? Unless he's trying to show them that it's not all fun and games, but that's not clear either.
All the elements are here but the pieces aren't fitting properly. The society needs to be brought more into focus, the arguments from the young need to be sharper and more incisive, the elders need to be more of an ingrained presence, a wall that no one can move or avoid. The idea of change is excellent and the concept of humanity evolving over the course of an epic voyage is a great one . . . but that's not what we have. Instead of alternatives we have spoiled children, instead of bold decisions we have Rob giving the keys of the car to a toddler while the car is in motion. Sure, you can feel proud of yourself that you've been the cool parent and given the tykes independence, but they're going to just drive right into a house. We need something here, and "we want to be in charge, wah!" isn't enough. Rob is smug in his rightness at the end for no reason, because for all we know he's doomed the entire ship. All because he unilaterally decided that "Hey, why not?"
I don't want to run this topic into the ground. Again, I can buy all of this in the right context but with the gap between when Rob goes in and what happens next, there is no context. There are just two things that happen and when you try to sew them together separately you get an unwieldy beast that may not be able to properly exist. Maybe I'm just reading too much into things (which I'll allow, as I have a tendency to do that) but this story needs more of a frame to hang itself on. Because right now what everyone is lacking are reasonable motivations, and it's rules that often drive those motivations, to either break them or enforce them, and to make others do the same. Without a foundation, the rest of it has nothing to cling to and the "aha!" ending becomes a "eh?" conclusion.
We need a solid world and what we have are words on paper, and paper is only so thick. I did like this, I want to be clear about that, but on some level it lacks the underpinnings that would make it have more of an impact than it should. Right now any impact it does have is more due to us and our assumptions than the story itself and it shouldn't be that way. But it's a story that needs to be told and an argument that can never be really exhausted, no matter what the scenario is. What we've built up can't stand forever, because people change and time changes and nothing lasts as it started. The story is saying that and I can see it. But without knowing what we've constructed you won't know what was broken down or how, or what the pieces might finally resurrect themselves as, what the configurations are and will be some time in the future, long after history is over and everything else is gone.
• MB
2.9.2008
"Never let your conscience be harmful to your health, let no neurotic impulse turn inward on itself, just say that you were happy, as happy would allow and tell yourself that will have to do for now . . ." – Prefab Sprout, "A Life Full of Surprises"
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