Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

Columns

Overtaken

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

Here was Plan The First for this installment. I would undertake a synopsis of James Tiptree's 1978 novelette, "Slow Music," a fully achieved and heartbreaking work (John Clute called it "The last great Tiptree story") which would, after a brisk and celebratory two hundred words or so, lead into a mournful elegy for the author (Alice B. Sheldon, of course) whose brightness fell so shockingly from the air almost exactly twenty years ago. That elegy would proceed then to muse on the abandoned and ruined Earth depicted in the story and the way in which all human aspiration and possibility of love is subsumed and destroyed by the Great Other. Away go the protagonist and the woman he loves, the last people on the planet, the last holdouts against the aliens who came in their great ships to escort them to the River of All Passage. In thrall, they join already departed humanity in the incumbent and overreaching darkness. So much for hope.

And so much for humanity. We have been utterly overtaken. Step by grim step, that quick march into the tumbling, grey, barren rush of the river. Their hands are parted, they are alone, descending alone into the illimitable sea of loss. Of wandering and the Earth again. Embraced by the river, under the cold stars, forever.

So much for ad astra per aspera. The story leaves us with nothing. "When I finished this I was completely empty," Alice Sheldon is reported to have said. "I had nothing more inside." "Slow Music" is possibly the best story of this matchless writer and—one way of looking at a blackbird—may be the best story to come out of science fiction in the century's last quarter. It is a savage put-on of the post-apocalyptic genre in general and of Alfred Bester's 1961 story, "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To" in particular.

The Bester is another last man/last woman scenario which depicts human love and sexual passion manifest even as the aliens occupy. A man and woman seemingly stripped of all desire fall passionately into one another against the sounds of the ordnance of the aliens' approach. This Bester story, of course, is itself a put-on of the old Adam-and-Eve ploy. It took no small talent to put on a put-on and Tiptree, savage in her own loss, spares no one in "Slow Music." Not even herself. (She makes a cameo appearance in drag, a magnificently mustached fellow whose genitals are not exactly as expected.)

So my column—an unwritten, unmailed letter from this particular Zemblan House of Detention—would have celebrated Tiptree's savage envoi even as it mourned the fifty years of science fiction from which it was a true departure . . . the aliens and their mighty River trivializing all technology, hope, device. A narrative of the utterly overtaken.

That seemed good enough in the abstract. Then it occurred to me that with all of its excellence, "Slow Music" is not, after all, thematically unusual. The story is simply (as was the