Astounding Stories #4: Sinister Barrier

Note: As I dive into the research process for my upcoming book Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, I’ll be taking the opportunity to highlight works within the genre that deserve to be rediscovered, reappraised, or simply enjoyed by a wider audience. You can read the earlier installments here. 

At the beginning of the only episode worth watching of the tenth season of The X-Files, a dejected Mulder says wearily to Scully: “Charles Fort spent his entire life researching natural and scientific anomalies, which he published in four books, all of which I know by heart. And at the end of his life, Fort himself wondered if it hadn’t all been a waste…Is this really how I want to spend the rest of my days? Chasing after monsters?” To which Scully gently replies: “We’ve been given another case, Mulder. It has a monster in it.” And while Mulder’s air of despondency can be attributed in large part to the sensibilities of writer Darin Morgan—who once had a character divided over whether to commit suicide or become a television weatherman—the reference to Fort is revealing. Charles Fort, who died in 1932, was a tireless cataloger of anomalous events from newspapers and scientific journals, mostly gathered in the reading room of the New York Public Library, and he’s something of a secular saint to those of us who try to take an agnostic approach to the unexplained. During his life, he was the object of a small but devoted following that included the authors Theodore Dreiser and Ben Hecht, and in the years that followed, he became the hidden thread that ran through an entire subgenre of science fiction. The X-Files, as Morgan implies, falls directly in his line of descent, and if I’m honest with myself, when I look at the science fiction I’ve published, it’s obvious that I do, too.

And I’m not the only one. Take Sinister Barrier by Eric Frank Russell, which I think is one of the four or five best science fiction novels ever written. It was originally published in 1939 in the inaugural issue of Unknown, and there’s a persistent rumor that John W. Campbell founded the entire magazine solely to find a place for this sensational story, which wasn’t quite right for Astounding. The truth is a little more complicated than that, but there’s no question that the novel made a huge impression on Campbell, as it still does on receptive readers today. After a quick nod to Charles Fort on the very first page, it opens with one of the great narrative hooks of all time: scientists across the world are committing suicide in exceptionally gruesome ways, and the only factor connecting the deaths, at least at first, is the fact that each man had painted his upper arm with iodine and dosed himself with mescal and methylene blue. Bill Graham, a kind of proto-Mulder working for military intelligence, is assigned to the investigation, and as he digs even deeper into the case, the anomalies continue to multiply. He discovers that one of the dead scientists had been looking into the low rate of goiter among the institutionally insane, and in a page of discarded notes, he reads the words: Sailors are notoriously susceptible. And he ultimately realizes that an excess of iodine—common in a seafaring diet, and inversely correlated with goiter—leads to changes in the eye and nervous system that allowed the scientists to stumble across a terrible truth.

By this point in the novel, I was sitting up in my chair, because what Russell is doing here is so close to what I’ve spent so many stories trying to achieve. And the big revelation more than lives up to our expectations. It turns out that humanity isn’t the highest form of life on this planet: instead, we’re little more than cattle being raised and devoured by aliens called Vitons that live in the upper atmosphere. Normally, they exist in the infrared range, so they’re invisible, but after being dosed with iodine, mescal, and methylene blue, we can see them for what they really are: balls of glowing plasma that descend on their unwilling victims and suck out their emotional energy. The Vitons can also read minds, which means that they can target and destroy anyone who glimpses the truth, and once Graham realizes what is going on, he finds that his own thoughts—and even his dreams—can betray him to the enemy. Other human beings can also be controlled by the Vitons, turning them into murderous automatons, which means that he can trust no one. This only complicates his efforts to fight the menace, which he soon identifies as the secret cause behind countless seemingly unrelated events. The Vitons deliberately inflame religious hatred and incite wars, in order to feed off the violent emotions that ensue, and they’re the explanation for such disparate mysteries as the disappearance of the Mary Celeste, the enigma of Kaspar Hauser, ball lightning, and, of course, alien abductions and unidentified flying objects. And as a global cataclysm ensues, Graham finds himself at the center of the resistance movement aimed at freeing mankind from its unseen oppressors.

In all honesty, the third act of Sinister Barrier doesn’t quite live up to that amazing opening, and it all comes down to the development of a superweapon that can destroy the alien menace, a plot device that was already a cliché by the late thirties. And it suffers, like much of the science fiction of its era, from a poorly developed love interest, when Russell’s heart is so clearly elsewhere. But it’s still an amazing read. It takes the novel less than eighty pages to accelerate from that initial string of unconnected deaths to action on a planetary scale, and it’s crammed throughout with action. At its best, it’s unbelievably fun and ingenious, and at times, it eerily anticipates developments to come. (For instance, it speculates that the Vitons were behind the actual unexplained suicide of the astronomer William Wallace Campbell, who, decades later, would lend his name to the Campbell Crater on Mars—which also honors a certain science fiction editor.) It’s so good, in fact, that it makes later efforts in the same line seem almost superfluous. To modern eyes, it reads like an entire season’s worth of The X-Files compressed into a single breathless narrative, and it even anticipates The Matrix in its vision of the entire human race enslaved and fed upon without its knowledge. If Fort was the godfather of the paranormal, Russell was the first author to fully realize its possibilities in fiction, and anyone who explores the same ground is in his debt, knowingly or otherwise. And I’m strangely glad that I didn’t discover this novel until I’d already made a few similar efforts of my own. If I’d known about it, I might have been too daunted to go any further. Because a little knowledge, as Russell warns us, can be a dangerous thing.

Looper and the secret of good science fiction

There are a lot of things to recommend about Looper, the excellent new science-fiction thriller from writer and director Rian Johnson, but one of my favorite elements is the movie’s time machine. It looks something like an industrial washer-dryer, and we only see it for a few seconds, housed in a dingy warehouse somewhere in China. To use it, you just shove someone inside, and he comes out the other end at a specific location thirty years in the past. None of the characters seem especially interested in knowing how it works, any more than we’d be curious about, say, the mechanics of our local subway—and this is exactly how it should be. Like Inception, which never really explains its dream invasion technology, Looper takes its biggest imaginative leap for granted, which accounts for a lot of its brainy but grounded appeal. (Actually, to be perfectly accurate, time travel is only the second-biggest imaginative leap in the movie…but I can’t say anything more without giving the plot away.)

This is how science fiction ought to be: less science, more fiction. I don’t know what the writing process behind Looper was like, but I imagine that Johnson received a fair amount of pressure from outside readers to spell out this information in greater detail—studio executives love exposition—and managed to resist it. (Evidently, Johnson shot, or at least conceived, a special-effects sequence depicting the process of time travel, with the help of Primer director Shane Carruth, but none of this seems to have survived in the final cut.) Instead, he takes time travel as a given and uses it to tell a complicated but always lucid story that cleverly teases out the potential of its premise. I’m a sucker for time travel movies with even a modicum of ambition—I even liked Déjà Vu—and Looper deserves a lot of credit for presenting its paradoxes without holding the audience’s hand. It’s hard to overstate how difficult this is, and one of the movie’s great virtues is that it makes it look so easy.

This is, in short, a very smart screenplay, and it’s one that I expect to cite approvingly at various points on this blog. Among other things, it provides one of the best recent examples of the anthropic principle of fiction, by casually introducing telekinesis as a minor plot point—certain characters can move small objects with their minds, but only at the level of a parlor trick—in order for it to pay off down the line in a major way. It doesn’t indulge in stylistic flourishes for their own sake, but it’s more than capable of big formal conceptions when necessary, as in one dazzling montage that follows one possible timeline over the course of three decades. It quietly develops two persuasive futures without making a point of it, and gives us an unusually interesting supporting cast. (I especially liked Jeff Daniels in the role of a man from the future, whose knowledge of coming events is rivaled only by that of Will McAvoy.) And it’s also ready to make its leads unsympathetic, as when the character played by Bruce Willis makes an agonizing choice that few other movies would be willing to follow to its logical conclusion.

If there’s one small disappointment that prevents Looper from becoming a stone classic out of the gate, it’s that its action isn’t quite as inventive as the story surrounding it. There’s nothing that says an innovative science-fiction thriller is required to deliver sensational action, but when you look at the short list of recent movies that have pushed the envelope in the genre—The Matrix, Minority Report, Children of Men, and Inception—you often find writers and directors who are just as eager to show us something new on a visceral level as to tell us a mind-bending story. Looper doesn’t seem as committed to redefining its boundaries in all directions, and its chases and gunfights are all fairly routine. (Its most memorable action beat is a direct lift from The Fury, but not remotely as effective.) Still, that shouldn’t minimize what Johnson has accomplished: he’s set a lot of challenges for himself, met nearly all of them, and come up with one of the two or three best movies I’ve seen all year.