Walter Tevis is a very interesting writer to me for many reasons. When I started to enjoy the new take on The Man Who Fell to Earth from creators Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet I decided I was going to finish reading all of the Tevis books. I mean sadly there are so few of them. I knew I wanted to cover him on the show I figured why not know it all. Covering his short stories seemed like the easiest and smartest thing to do and I was glad I did.
Tevis is an interesting case because his first published stories were science fiction, and while many writers in the genre wanted to break out of the genre ghetto they never did. Philip K. Dick tried and failed so many times to break into the mainstream that he had a pile of manuscripts left behind when he died. Only Confessions of a Crap Artist survived. John Brunner wrote a novel about the anti-nuke movement that has been lost to time. One of the reasons I think Tevis was different is because of how purely good his prose was.
His skill at world-building honed in many science fiction stories is clear when you read the Hustler it is one of the things that makes the thing work. The subtle ease with which he builds the world of the 50s poolhall is done with a world-builders eye in the way most mainstream authors don’t think about. They assume you know enough about the world. The stories in this collection are divided into two sections, close to home, and far from home. The first half is from short stories mostly from 1980, and the second half is classic stories from the pulp magazines like Horace Gold's Galaxy in the late 50s early 60s, including the first published Tevis story.
The stories in the first half are interesting in many ways because they were the first Tevis wrote after close to two decades of not writing. Teaching and drinking his nights away it took the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, A second marriage, and moving to New York to re-ignite his passions. While it might not have been cool for his family the output gave us lots more work. Two SF novels, Two mainstream novels, and these short stories. The stories of this era have a Charles Beaumont feel to them. It is interesting to compare the two authors. Both left far too few stories, ones that were light on fantastical elements, lean tight prose, and powerful meaning that are sometimes super dark. The stories in the second have are far stranger and embrace the pulpy tradition of SF.
The topics in the first half range from Twilight Zoney tales of phones that call the past to super gross stories about incest. These stories feel like Beaumont in all the ways that made his short stories amazing. Tevis has a hybrid reputation thanks to Queen’s Gambit and The Hustler and I get the feeling he was prouder of these. Two or three of the stories seem to be inspired by the very challenging relationship Tevis had with his parents, one of which is DISTURBING.
Me? I liked the second half stories a lot more. They are a cool capsule of the writer learning his craft and in a sense, they showed me exactly what I wanted to see. The seeds of the writer who he would become. Stories like the Big Bounce, The Goldbrick, and his first published story the Ifth of Oofth.
The Big Bounce is probably his most famous short story, it has been collected and reprinted several dozen times. Like many of these stories, they feature out-of-date ideas for technology. You see bits and pieces of the writer who as a 12-year boy wrote a letter to Fantastic Adventures to rate the stories. Tevis did love Science fiction since before WW2, and snooty literary readers should just enjoy it when he is totally science fictioning it up.
The Big Bounce is a classic for a reason. The story of an inventor who creates a limitless power source, well he has to figure out one tiny detail. He can’t control it. Simak had written a novel in 1952 called Ring Around the Sun that explored the idea of a limitless power source, but the big bounce is the story of an inventor that doesn’t get there…
“I was so excited by the thing that I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept dreaming of power stations, ocean liners, even automobiles, being operated by balls bouncing back and forth in cylinders.
I even worked out a spaceship in my mind, a bullet-shaped affair with a huge rubber ball on its end, gyroscopes to keep it oriented properly, the ball serving as a solution to that biggest of missile-engineering problems, excess heat. You’d build a huge concrete launching field, supported all the way down to bedrock, hop in the ship and start bouncing. Of course, it would be kind of a rough ride…
In the morning, I called my superintendent and told him to get a substitute for the rest of the week; I was going to be busy.”
It is foundational to his classic novel to come. Farnsworth the inventor is an early version of Thomas Netwon in The Man Who Fell to Earth. That said it is a bit of a satire of Science fiction. Not in laugh out loud funny way, but in witty, I see what you did there way.
One of my favorite aspects of the Goldbrick was the world-building and I think I want to comment on something said in this fantastically weird tale about an indestructible Goldbrick. In the story, the army destroys an entire mountain and still can’t destroy this brick. The reason why presents a great ending I don’t want to spoil. Again this is a funny weird concept that might not hold up to scientific eyes, but it is a just surreal SF story.
That said let's talk about this bit of world-building. Published in 1957…
“U-10 had been before the 1980s Decade of Enlightenment, the University of Tennessee – the 1980s had held no illusions what was important to the American way of life- and they landed their little olive drab plastic craft in front of the library.”
The library is everything in the 1980s because it is a time of enlightenment. Who knows if Tevis really thought in the 1980s that humanity would have it all figured out or if it was part of the satire of the story. I think it is the second option. As Tevis was at the time using his science fiction to comment on the world where he always felt out of place.
That 12-year-old who wrote to Fantastic adventures was just two years from the culture shock of moving from San Francisco to Lexington Kentucky. Science fiction was an escape. If you look at these stories as much more than that you may be missing the point.
This collection is a must-read for two groups. Those who love SF short stories and Walter Tevis completionists. It is not SF canon by any stretch but a few of the stories come close. I loved it but I love Tevis.
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