Comments | jordan179: Retro Review of "The Valley" (1954) by Richard Stockham

jordan179

Retro Review of "The Valley" (1954) by Richard Stockham

Jul 15, 2012 17:29

Publication

This story was originally published in If - Worlds of Science Fiction (June 1954) and can be read online in its entirety at

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32744/32744-h/32744-h.htm

It was anthologized in Brian Aldiss' Evil Earths (1976), so I do ( Read more... )

retro review, 1950's science fiction, meta, fantastic worlds

Comments 9

polaris93 July 16 2012, 01:56:23 UTC

The faillure of this novel is ironic, considering that there are many excellent novels, e.g., Trevor Hoyle's The Last Gasp, that are built on the assumption that we can ultimately find or make another home away from Earth.Those novels are not, however, founded on quasireligious assumptions, and maybe that's the reason that novels like The Valley ultimately fail.

jordan179 July 16 2012, 05:29:46 UTC

Short story, actually, and it works as a story. The problem with it is a logical one: specifically that it is difficult to imagine all planets having environments so hostile that life-support techniques improved over five thousand years of Earth history would be incapable of overcoming them. Yes, it would be a bummer if, off Earth, everyone had to live in fully-artificial environments, forever, but then, everyone on Earth had been living that way anyway for the last two to three millennia (until Michael and Mary found The Valley), so I don't see what precisely would have been the obstacle to human expansions.

polaris93 July 16 2012, 16:30:43 UTC

It was the logical fail I was referring to. You're right: there is no good reason for people not to use the technology they already had to live on other worlds. Mars and the Moon, in particular, would have been good places to start, And surely there would be other worlds somewhere at least that habitable by aid of artificial environments and, eventually, terraforming. Sounds as if the author had a conceptual block against such scenarios.

polaris93 July 16 2012, 16:32:57 UTC

Also: sorry about the misfire as to "novel" rather than "short story," which it is.

banner July 16 2012, 04:25:05 UTC

It is sad that so many people wrote so many negative doom and gloom stories (to push their political agenda) back in the 50's and the 60's. Many of them were praised for their 'vision' though the mainstream authors pretty much made fun of them (people like RAH for example).

These people believed that the earth would succumb to either a nuclear war, over population, famine, depletion of resources, pollution, etc, and all BEFORE 1970!

50 years later and those people are still peddling the same sort of crap.

jordan179 July 16 2012, 05:24:36 UTC

Well -- to be precise, the Earth hadn't succumbed in "The Valley." It had recovered -- and twice.

One thing that occurred to me just now is that the immortal Earthlings of that tale were remarkably passive. It took Michael and Mary, who were accustomed to risking their lives, to actually explore and discover that the environment outside the domed cities wasn't completely lifeless.

wombat_socho July 16 2012, 16:36:21 UTC

There is an echo of this in Traveller. When Terrans first encounter the Ziru Sirka (=Galactic Empire) they encounter a lot of "frontier" Vilani who would have liked to continue exploring rimward but who have been forcibly stopped by the Imperial government, which sees their urges as a threat to the stability of the Empire.

jordan179 July 16 2012, 16:54:20 UTC

This has happened more than once in actual history, the ur-example being the deliberate Chinese turn away from oceanic operations in the 15th century, which extended not only to cutting off funding for oceanic expeditions, but to burning the plans for the treasure junks and forbidding under law merchant voyages or even in some cases living too near the coastlines. Other good examples of this are post 16th century Japan and Korea -- which makes one suspect that they must have caught a really virulent and destructive meme from the Chinese.

Given the immortality of the human population in "The Valley," and the obvious advantage to the authorities in keeping them confined in the domed cities, one suspects that it was a combination of extreme fear of risk-taking coupled with governmental censhorship of the actual conditions outside. Note that the World President in fact does censor Michael and Mary's report, and apparently feels that he will do so with complete success. (Whether his effort really succeeds is debatable, but he's leading ( ... )

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