Small-Town Magic - Familiar Community Life in Science Fiction

In Clifford Simak's All Flesh is Grass (1965), the narrator, Brad Carter, describes his love-hate relationship with his home town of Millville:

I stood there on the sidewalk, looking down the street, and I felt hatred for the town - not for the people in it, but for the town itself, for the impersonal geographic concept of one particular place.

The town lay dusty and arrogant and smug beyond all telling and it sneered at me and I knew that I had been mistaken in not leaving it when I'd had the chance. I had tried to live with it for very love of it, but I'd been blind to try. I had known what all my friends had known, the ones who'd gone away, but I had closed my mind to that sure and certain knowledge: there was nothing left in Millville to make one stay around. It was an old town and it was dying, as old things always die. It was being strangled by the swift and easy roads that took clients to better shopping areas; it was dying with the decline of marginal agriculture, dying along with the little vacant hillside farms that no longer would support a family. It was a place of genteel poverty and it had its share of musty quaintness, but it was dying just the same, albeit in the polite scent of lavender and impeccable good manners.

Yet, as we gradually discover through Simak's electrifying tale, Milville has been targeted for a cosmic experiment by an alien intelligence - a plant intelligence that made first contact with the narrator's green-fingered father. An invisible, elastic force-barrier has gone up around Millville, isolating those within it and, overnight, making it into the centre of a Elvis crisis. Like someone stirring an ant-heap with a stick, the author stirs the sleepy population of this insignificant town with the apparatus of his stunning plot. When the mayor orders the siren to summon the people:

There was old Pappy Andrews, hobbling along, cracking his cane on the surface of the street with unaccustomed vigour and the wind blowing his long http://www.viaggra.org/levitra.php whiskers up into his face. There was Grandma Jones, who had her sunbonnet socked upon her head, but had forgotten to tie the strings, which floated and bobbed across her shoulders as she stumped along with grim determination. She was the only woman in all of Millville (perhaps in all the world) who still owned a sunbonnet and she took a malicious pride in wearing it, as if the very fact of appearing with it upon her head was a somehow commendable flaunting of her fuddy-duddyness. And after her came Pastor Silas Middleton, with a prissy look of distaste fastened on his face, but going just the same. An old jalopy clattered past with that crazy Johnson kid crouched behind the wheel and a bunch of his hoodlum pals yelling and catcalling, Tales from the Crypt of any kind of excitement and willing to contribute to it. And a lot of others, including a slew of kids and dogs.

You certainly get the impression that Brad Carter isn't completely enchanted by his fellow townsfolk, and yet by the end of the book you feel that Millville has in a sense been saved from itself, saved by the crisis that hit it. And maybe all small towns can be saved - in a wider, diffuse sense - by association with the immensity that always lies just round the I Love Lucy of every human thought, every touch of imagination.

The cataclysm that occurs to Middletown (note that "Mid-" theme) in Edmond Hamilton's City At World's End (1951), is the work of human error rather than alien invasion, but the results are even more staggering. A super-bomb has the unforeseen effect of rupturing Time and hurtling the town millions of years into the future, to a time when the Sun is growing cold and Earth has been abandoned. Hamilton, like Simak, is a master at the depiction of ordinary folk's reactions; at all the transitions from shock to incredulity to an amazed acceptance of what has happened. The narrator, Kenniston, is slightly more in the know than Brad Carter in All Flesh is Grass, insofar as Kenniston is at least a scientist, but he and his boss, Hubble, still shrink with human dismay from the appalling truth as they climb Middletown's water tower to try to see what has happened:

They came out at last on the railed platform around the big, high tank. Kenniston looked down on the town. He saw knots of people gathered on the corners, and the tops of cars, a few of them moving slowly but most of them stopped and jamming the streets. There was a curious sort of silence.

Hubble did not bother to look at the town, except for a first brief glance that took it all in, the circumference of Middletown with all its buildings standing just as they always had, with the iron Civil War soldier still stiffly mounting guard on the Square, and the smoke still rising steadily from the stacks of the mills. Then he looked outward. He did not speak...

The countryside around Middletown is gone, replaced by the arid, alien landscape of the dying far-future Earth.

As the story unfolds, we see follow the fortunes of several characters, those who adapt and those who do not. The natural environment has become threatening to them, the greatest threat being the cold. And of course there is the psychological wrench as it becomes more and more evident that they are the last people left on the planet - though they eventually learn that humans still live elsewhere.... Hamilton does a perfect job of putting us in the place of these people and living their experience, their wonder and terror, their courage and cowardice, their pettiness and their resolve.

My third example is another story which achieves perfection of its kind. It is not, unfortunately, a novel but a novella, 55 pages, entitled "Legwork" (1955-6), by Eric Frank Russell.

The hypnotic Andromedan spy, Vanash, who is on Earth to investigate the planet as a target for invasion, does not suspect that humanity has

...a tedious, conventional and most times unappreciated substitute for touches of genius. It was slow, grim, determined and unspectacular, but it was usable as and when required and it got results.

Variously it was called making the grade, slogging along, doing it the hard way, or just plain lousy legwork. Whoever heard of such a thing?

But it is patient legwork that leads to the identification and defeat of the invader, and Russell entertains us by giving us all the stages and deductions by which it was done. In so doing he gives us a picture of life in Northwood, the small town of this tale, and in particular of banks and police chiefs and detectives racking their brains to figure out how someone has managed to commit the apparently perfect crime. The Andromedan can make you think whatever he wants you to think, so one would suppose that the very existence of such a creature would remain unsuspected - yet they do catch him in the end, and you will want to read how they do it again and again. (The story is to be found in the Russell collection called Far Stars.)

All these great stories help us to feel that we are richer than we knew. If our little ambience were threatened for real, it would of course suddenly seem more precious in our eyes and we'd take it less for granted - all this is understandable. But the threat would do something else for us as well. It would enhance the size of the setting, like a good mounting enhances the beauty of a jewel. Our villages and towns are enlarged by cosmic vistas, the little places themselves becoming forces to be reckoned with.

Robert Gibson is caretaker of the Ooranye Project, creating a fictional giant planet which can be explored on TARGET="_new" www.ooranye.com">www.ooranye.com .

The project's aim is to meld the subgenres of Future History and Planetary Romance, resulting in over a million years of civilization with its own societies, customs, conflicts, triumphs and disasters, politics, philosophies, flora and fauna, empires both human and non-human, and adventures that Abba lyrics over an area ten times that of the surface of the Earth. Lovers of planetary adventure are invited to view the history, comment on the progress of the project, access the tales and keep in touch with the developing destiny of Ooranye.