Saving the World Through Science Fiction by Michael R. Page

Author:Michael R. Page
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2017-02-23T05:00:00+00:00

Despite the hardships in building a new world, the Venus colony is thriving, with three million inhabitants. On Venus the colonists have used hedonics in its proper, balanced way. Morgan was their prophet and left them with an excellent creed: “What hedonics gives us is the techniques with which to make necessity a virtue, with which to make the unavoidable a pleasure. What cannot be cured must be endured, and what must be endured should be enjoyed.”25 He also bequeathed them a history of what had befallen Earth: The Rise and Fall of Applied Hedonics.

The story opens as D’glas M’Gregor encounters a “duplicate in the corridor connecting the motor pool to the elevator bank.”26 The Duplicates are robotic reproductions of actual colonists whose origins are unknown, that like Campbell’s Thing in “Who Goes There?” have some form of telepathy that enhances the deception of their mimicry. This idea also calls to mind two Philip K. Dick stories from the period, now considered classics, where similar robotic infiltrators threaten to decenter human adversaries, “Second Variety” and “Imposter,” raising the question what is real? D’glas meets with three hedonists, Perry, Brian, and Floyd; together they make up the leadership of the Venus colony. Ideas are thrown out: is this the precursor to alien contact or invasion? Is it somehow connected with the dreamers on Earth with whom Venus has lost contact? No matter, D’glas and his colleagues know they have to act with some urgency. As Perry somberly remarks, “‘At this moment we are under observation. What the next stage will be is impossible to guess, but it will not be favorable to a continuation of our society and of our way of life.’”27 They have lost 1,000 people over the last two days, so a resolution is imperative. The task of D’glas is to discover the source of this threat to the colony and he’s sent to Earth to make contact and find out what is going on.

When D’glas disembarks on Earth, Gunn creates a terrific counterpoint image to the “plastic clouds” of Venus. The change of perspective for D’glas causes disorientation and anxiety: “He was trapped between the concrete-covered soil and the naked sky, blue-clear and blazing…. He was exposed pitilessly upon a great plain; a giant eye stared down at him accusingly, watching, condemning. If he moved incautiously he might fall into the transparent blueness above, fall off the surface of the world into the terrible sky.”28 On the field are seven rusting ships, three unidentifiable, one each from Callisto and Ganymede, and two from Mars. Others preceded him. The field is on the edge of the city, adjacent, incidentally, to the Funhouse, now abandoned, where Morgan escaped the Council police.

D’glas wonders at the sparkling cleanliness of the abandoned Funhouse. Not only is it clean, but all the dispensers are full and well-maintained, as if vigilantly waiting for a lost clientele. The perceptive reader will assume some sort of robot intelligence behind this pristine maintenance. Finding no entrance to

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