Today’s warnings: Weird old timey racism (no slurs, just stupidity), wild classism, transphobia weirdly enough. I’ve decided to just tag all these at the beginning because, as I’ll touch on a bit more later, yeah, none of these so far have been without some shitty elements. The thirties: Tada!
Sometimes I’m reading spec-fic of the right age for the pulps and stumble across some absolute ass-pull of a science. A comic panel from what I think was Strange Tales from Marvel but could really have been anything of the right age has a man in a jail cell announcing he knows the formula for interdimensional travel, reciting a nonsensical string of symbols, and walking through the suddenly appearing portal. I laugh, and then I remember the last time I read a headline about physics or astronomy, and having been humbled, move on. Research is hard. Research was harder in 1937. But you still have to wonder why a straightforward fantasy element like summoning a portal to your jail cell or the absolute nonsense that happens in “Strange Orchids” was labeled science. I mean, there were reasons. Early SF trended toward telepathy and teleportation and all sorts of straightforwardly magical elements. The idea that SF educated you about science was powerful and also rewarded if you could work in an infodump. But. Still funny.
Science as a name for a specific form of narrative magic has a distinct ring to it. And today’s bellringer is Dorothy Gertrude Quick, a friend of Mark Twain’s, somewhat noteworthy society lady, and prolific wordsmith who went about unhindered by genre. Writing under her maiden name, she seems to have done things like donating to museums as John Adams Meyer while maintaining her wordsmithing life under a slightly sideways persona. And she was really into the Mark Twain thing. Wrote multiple books about it. She’s remembered as much for mystery and romance as science fiction, but her first novel, Strange Awakenings, sounds like straight up sword and planet stuff. Her first genre sale was to… Oriental Stories. Christ on a bike. The entire first half of the century, really.
“Strange Orchids” (she knew her strengths, I guess) is absolutely a gothic horror story. For reasons known only to Quick and her editors, it is sporadically asserted that the things that happen are because of science. Even the characters seem to understand this is absurd. One suggests at one point that they’re up against magic and, well, no reply ensues, because it is very clearly magic. The viewpoint character compares their straits to a movie (an actual movie, The Devil Doll from 1936, so, topical!) and then both characters continue to reference that movie as if it’s a reasonable starting point for their predicament. Maybe if you’re in a gruesome gothic horror and the bad guy goes around with a nametag that says SCIENTIST you just learn to roll with the punches.
Maybe I’ve harped on it too much, but the point of this series (is there a point to this series?) is to examine old strains in the spec-fic world and see what’s up with those. I can giggle now, but how many standards of the genre are just as goofy? Most space opera would cease to function without totally nonsensical FTL, and we all just accept that without demanding it be relabeled magic. What will we do for story’s sake, for genre’s sake, for the market’s sake? How long can you believe something really silly in the hands of a good tale-spinner?
All that said, to compare “Strange Orchids” to my first story in the series, “The Evolutionary Monstrosity,” you could absolutely see the fingerprints of science, however wrong the conclusions were in a modern context. Both are gothic sci-fi, and hell, that’s where sci-fi started. Mary Shelley is eating bonbons in the afterlife (I don’t generally believe in any afterlife, but Shelley would make one) and laughing at us all. Different branches on this oddly grafted tree we call Science Fiction.
Well, that was seven hundred words. What the fuck is “Strange Orchids” about? The highly relatable experience of meeting a really shitty, intense guy at a party and having him get way too into you, really. Our heroine, a real drip named Louise Howard, is standing around at her much cooler friend’s house when the creepy dude sweeps down on her. His name is O’Malley, which is, unfortunately, the least sinister name you could give a human being. He is described in weirdly lurid, anthropological terms that I think are meant to communicate his handsomeness? I don’t know if this is a dated prose thing or just Dorothy Gertrude Quick being a little bit of a weirdo who’s really into foreheads. What kind of forehead is handsome?
Anyway. O’Malley wants her to come see his beautiful orchids. She is rescued from this ploy by Rex Stanton. No, that is not the dumb name I made up for him. Quick did this to us. Take it up with her.
Rex Stanton is so uninteresting I can only bring myself to say he is investigating useful parts of the plot and wants to marry Louise as soon as he meets her. Beautiful girls have been disappearing. Beautiful, educated girls from rich families. Girls who matter, not like the usual type of disappearing girl. This is a long conversation, during which the phrase “white slavery” is used many times. There is absolutely no self-awareness here. Any time you’re too tempted to call the shitstains of SFF an aberration and believe that an intrinsically forward-thinking genre must naturally force its authors to examine anything about their own thinking, read a story from 1937.
Once you understand that nobody matters beyond the upper echelons of society, the story also goes out of its way to explain how Louise isn’t beautiful at all, but dudes keep throwing themselves at her anyway. It’s not a staggering failure of compassion and empathy on the same scale, but interesting to note how far that one goes back, too. Among Louise’s ancestors sits Jane Eyre, languishing in all the ways she is unjustly denied beauty and wealth, seething with contempt for anyone who actually is ugly and poor, rewarded for the value everyone insists she has because she’s just so great.
This bit is depressing, but it does move the plot along. Girls disappearing. Creepy orchid man. The mystery unfolds from there. It’s effectively creepy, even if you’ll figure everything out a hundred years before Louise and Rex do.
There are questions here, if not about any actual science, but about the nature of science and society. I could excoriate (I can never spell that word) Quick for another page, but when she did know what she was doing, she did it well. Louise is perhaps less than sympathetic to a modern reader, or, indeed, any reader in 1937 who was already over the character type. O’Malley’s power over her, supernaturally enhanced as it is, captures a familiar feeling of claustrophobia and terror. O’Malley’s depredations in quest of satisfying his pointless aesthetic whims and turning all the power of human achievement toward that end is terribly familiar. SpaceX having a secret orchid laboratory would surprise me not a bit. Irritatingly, if you compare “Strange Orchids” and its close cousin on the SF tree, “The Evolutionary Monstrosity,” the former probably does a better job capturing its particular horrors, even if Harris’s story was more thoughtful and less infuriating.
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