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Dorothy Louise Les Tina and “When You Think That… Smile!”



Warning: This story seethes with racism! It’s frankly fairly weird racism by modern standards, a burst of minstrel pseudo-dialect from a person described as “Sam, the milk-chocolate elevator boy” apropos of nothing, plus a heavy dose of orientalism at the end, but damn is it hot garbage.


The first story in this series, for all I made fun of it a lot, I fundamentally did enjoy. (That story, as with this one, is from Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp’s Sisters of Tomorrow.)Its science was nonsense, but it was nonsense with context. Its dreadful upper crust college boy characters were probably dreadful on purpose, for all everyone who was not a dreadful college boy was a vapid puff of nothingness with a vaguely feminine shape. They were definitely supposed to be horrible. And I felt a sort of… accord with Clare Winger Harris, she who shared my alma mater and base of operations and weird parental expectations to live up to.


I do not like this story. For purposes of this series, I don’t suppose this fact matters, but it’s an observation I feel compelled to share. And I definitely would not like Dorothy Louise Les Tina. I might develop an ill-advised crush as I often do on girls who feel too cool for me, but that’s my own problem. She seems an adventuress in the classical sense, somewhere in the vastness between slightly non-conformist and absolutely bonkers. Married many times, including to Frederik Pohl for what seems to have been a brief period, part of the Women’s Army Corps, and a world traveler listed by her biographers as a fan of Armenia, amateur astronomy (whatever that is) and gardening, she seems to have been busy, exciting, and a bit exhausting. She also only wrote a few SF stories, and the vibe of someone who generally writes lit/mainstreamish fiction and just assumed they can do spec fic without any great effort is strong here. I am not condemning her by any means. Sounds like she had a great time. I just find the prospect a tad staggering.


“When You Think That… Smile!” makes me think, in its very few pages, of the regular dust-ups that ripple over social media whenever someone ostensibly well-meaning writes something that falls into shitty nonsense under a moment’s speculation. (Yes, I mean The Men, but I mean everything else like it, too.) There’s an attempt in this story to have an unsympathetic, unreliable narrator be torn to shreds. But the limits of the author’s own worldview obscure the places where our nameless main character’s failings vanish into the narrator’s. This is the story of an upper class white lady who could not imagine others might also struggle.


The story opens when Nameless Geoffry discovers he is telepathic. It’s a very short story, a few fleeting pages just over what would be considered flash length now, and not much actually happens. Finding yourself telepathic was a pretty regular danger in this period of SF, so while I don’t find it terribly interesting, I can let it slide. It’s like a heroine in the nineties who wore sensible boots and owned lots of weapons and heaped disdain on ladies who embroidered things. There are elements of time and place that don’t say much from sheer ubiquity.


Nameless Geoff’s first impulse on discovering his new talent is to tell off his wife for all her infractions (not liking his mother, losing money on petty gambling, a minor fender-bender). He is loathesome and clearly intended to be, a man who suddenly finds himself a god and who uses that power to whine at the one person who’ll put up with him. And the story has an almost modern flash-feel at this point. A weird thing happens. People react. The themes of what we owe each other and see in each other are clear. There are some good turns of phrase. I enjoy, “I’m not a student of the occult. Or any other cult.” It has a breezy effectiveness, like, yes, telepathy is dumb, but it’s our starting point, and let’s examine that.


Then the story spoils itself with scope.


Nameless Geoff immediately strikes out into the world to be racist and dismissive at people. A very generous reading fumbles when he describes a man as milk-chocolate (fuck I wish I was making this up) and a boy (uggggghhhhh) and scolds him like a child. Any hope that the author intends you to hold him in contempt dies the moment this poor man opens his mouth and dialogue from a banned Fleischer cartoon spills from his mouth. I can’t express how obvious it is that Les Tina does not seem to be writing this as anything other than a faithful description of the people she imagines working-class nonwhite people to be. He then encounters a homeless person begging and triumphantly declares they have lots of money in the bank and a sex worker of some kind he showers with disinterest. None of these scenes is presented as demonstrating anything other than what a person with telepathy would naturally come upon.


Anyway, most of the rest is about his marriage and how he fucks it up (and another racist caricature he meets). This guy sucks, don’t get me wrong, but analysis of this story points very strongly to the deep roots of the I’m progressive look at me no don’t look at anything I’ve said or done moments that dog us all. There’s no clever observation for me about the science or the time because neither matter. In such a short story, dedicating half your words to a man wandering around having all his dweeby prejudices confirmed is quite a choice. All this happens in between and unrelated to proving he is bad because he’s shitty to his wife. Long before the word intersectionality was coined, it was failing.

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