I've been looking back at some old science fiction stories by
Jack Vance and
Isaac Asimov. Here in this blog post, I'll discuss Vance's 1949 story called "
The Sub-Standard Sardines", which is a
Magnus Ridolph story.
Write What You Know
Parts of "The Sub-Standard Sardines" remind me of Vance's novel
Marune. I suppose Vance had once visited a cannery and seen fairly appalling conditions for the workers. In
Marune, a man who lost his memories is sent to a work camp where he must collect the raw material for a red dye. In "The Sub-Standard Sardines", Ridolph goes to work in a sardine packing plant on a distant planet in order to investigate strange goings on. Someone is adulterating the sardines!
Message in a Bottle
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Ridolph communicating with intelligent fish.
Interior art by Virgil Finlay |
In Vance's novel
Araminta Station, a murderer seals up poor
Sessily Veder in a wine cask, perhaps the most disturbing example of product adulteration that Vance ever wrote into a story.
In
Marune, the human settlers of the planet Marune must deal with intelligent natives, the
Fwai-chi. The Fwai-chi have interesting abilities, possibly including telepathic powers.
On Chandaria
Sadly, the intelligent sardines of "The Sub-Standard Sardines" are not alien creatures, they have been imported from Earth to the planet Chandaria where they feast upon the native algae.
Rather than have to send out fishing boats to net the sardines, a few of the sardines have been mutated and transformed into intelligent fish who lead the other sardines by the million into the canning factory. These intelligent sardines have had a dispute with the canning factory manager, so they sent a message to Earth in the form of several batches of sub-standard sardines which attracted the attention of Magnus Ridolph.
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| 1983 |
The story has a happy ending. Magnus Ridolph arranges a new labor agreement with the intelligent sardines, and once again little packages of wholesome Chandaria sardines reach far worlds such as Earth.
Uplift
In the early 80s I tried to read
Sundiver by David Brin. The idea of human scientists working side-by-side with genetically-engineered chimps was highly influential on me; genetic engineering plays a major role in the
Exode Saga. However, I was horrified by the way Brin developed his story and depicted the intelligent chimp in the story; that talking chimp reminded my of some sort of emotionally erratic and annoying "man
Friday". Also, I was not able to buy into the whole "creatures living in the sun" plot. I never finished reading that 340 page book. 👎
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The end of a series of novels, by
which point the size of the author's name
has grown to galactic proportions. |
Later, I could never bring myself to read
Star Tide Rising. Norman Spinrad reviewed
Star Tide Rising for
Asimov's Science fiction Magazine and complained that after 500 pages, nothing was resolved. In Brin's imagined galaxy of his "
uplift universe", every intelligent species has been crafted and "uplifted" by an older intelligent species, except for we humans. Also, all of galactic history is carefully recorded by intergalactic historians and librarians. Still, nobody knows how humans managed to evolve without help from another, older species. Brin was trained as a physical scientist, I was trained as a biological scientist. I spent several visits to book stores skimming through the pages of
Star Tide Rising but I did not find Brin's depictions of uplifted and alien species believable. No Sale. I could not avoid the feeling that the entire uplift saga was Brin's reaction to
Star Wars. I hate mindless space wars, and that's what I saw in
Star Tide Rising.
Brin went on to write at least six novels in the uplift universe, including Brin's version of "The Planet of the Apes" in his
The Uplift War novel. In a sense, Brin's uplift fictional universe is the opposite of Asimov's
humans-only fictional universe. Because Brin must deal with alien species that are a billion or more years old, he needed to imagine fantastic technological abilities, such as being able to alter the physical properties of the universe, an idea that I liked when I first saw it in Carl Sagan's novel
Contact. Strangely, although Asimov (see his "
Mother Earth") and Brin started from diametrically opposed premises (no aliens vs. many aliens), they both end up in a future, about 1,000 years from now, in which Earth is penned in by a surrounding fleet of hostile spaceships.
One of the refreshing things about Vance's imagined future era of interstellar adventure is that he managed to avoid getting bogged down in ponderous fictional politics (an exception might be
Emphyrio which seems to have intentionally been made darker than the average Vance novel) that seem to recapitulate dreary elements of human history on Earth while inflating them to galactic proportions. Vance wrote dozens of fun adventure stories set on distant exoplanets, and most of the time nothing got in the way of the fundamental goal of fun and entertainment.
"The Sub-Standard Sardines" is short and amusing, veering into the silly. Still, that is better than bloated and tedious, with
readers wishing for less, not more. "The Sub-Standard Sardines" is an early Vance story that contains seeds he would later plant and grow in his novels, many of which are relatively brief and leave readers wishing for more.
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One of Vance's alien creatures:
a merling from Trullion
(see) |
I'm glad I read "The Sub-Standard Sardines", but my advice to readers is that they go right to Vance's more mature works such as
Marune and
Trullion. (Jack Vance
ebook website)
Vance never tried very hard to conform to genre expectations. "The Sub-Standard Sardines" is at the boundary between science fiction and fantasy. Vance packed most of his stories with wit and amusing surprises; he never let
hard-science fiction restrictions derail a fun story. Sure, I wish he had either 1) put more effort into explaining how to make an intelligent sardine or 2) used an alien fish with special cognitive abilities, but that's just my personal biases speaking.
Magnus Ridolph. The December 1984 issue of
Asimov's Science Fiction that contains Spinrad's review of
Star Tide Rising, also includes an amusing editorial by Asimov about how to provide names for fictional characters. I'd read that editorial previously (in
Gold), but it had new meaning for me today because just yesterday I had created
the names of six characters for the Exode Saga.
I'd like to know how Vance came up with the name "Magnus Ridolph". If anyone has seen an account by Vance of why he selected that name, please drop me a line. Later, Vance used a string of fictional characters with names that started with the letter "G" as his protagonists (
Ghyl,
Gersen, Glinnes, Glawen).
In the case of my six "new characters", they are all new-born babies, so it was natural for me to think about the process by which their mothers would have selected their names. Somehow, I never realized that this is how I should usually select the names of fictional characters.
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New cover in 2023.
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Update 2023: can an AI-generated magazine cover image be as good as an
Earle Bergey painting? The image that is shown to the right was generated by
WOMBO Dream.using the image at the top of this blog post as a reference and this text prompt: "
high resolution full color magazine cover of Zosia Mamet under water, Zosia Mamet is twenty years old, Zosia Mamet has long blond hair, Zosia Mamet has big eyes, Zosia Mamet is surrounded by fish".
Warp to 2023: AI-generated fish.
Related Reading: "The Girl and the Dolphin"
from 1947: Jerry Was A Man
and from 1949: "The Time Axis"
in 2020: more Magnus Ridolph stories
Next: Computer hacking in 1959
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