Challenge 217

Nikto barata Klaatu, Gort

San Ivey’s Gilboy’s Quest: Bill Bowler points out that Bernard Gilboy sets out alone for Australia without so much as a by your leave to his wife and, presumably, family. In fact, Gilboy’s wife doesn’t even come to the wharf to wave goodbye. Is this an unintentionally humorous case of an unhappy husband running away from home? Does chapter 1 send a warning signal about Gilboy’s character? Or is Gilboy afflicted with insatiable wanderlust and the reader is supposed to assume that he has bid farewell to his wife before undertaking a voyage from which, the odds are, he will never return?
Bill Bowler’s “Birds of a Feather”:
1. What does the title mean in terms of the story? Can you suggest other possible titles?
2. Why might Bill Bowler have chosen for an epigraph the famous robot-quashing line — Gort, Klaatu barata nikto — from the film The Day the Earth Stood Still? How might it fit “Birds of a Feather”?
3. Compare the ending of “Birds of a Feather” with the role of androids in Isaac Asimov’s later Foundation novels and with the ironic view of human nature in Joe Haldeman’s space novels.
4. “Birds of a Feather” is less a short story than a basis for a novella. What further chapters or scenes would you recommend for the middle of the story?
Neil Burlington’s “The Far Moai” is a historical narrative in diary form.
1. How could the story be retold as a drama?
2. What theme does “The Far Moai” have in common with Gilboy’s Quest and “You Are Alien”?
Luke Jackson’s “You Are Alien”:
1. Gary Inbinder points out that this is a rare example of a story told in the second person. What would happen to it if “you” were changed to “he”?
2. What does “proglottidean” mean? Can you pronounce it? What other name might the “aliens” have?
3. Comparing the roles of the humans and the “worms,” of space and the underground, of the zoo and the Empire, of stability and conformity — and more besides — yields crushing ironies. What are they?
4. “You Are Alien” resembles Barry Longyear’s “Enemy Mine” in its theme of a human living among aliens. However, Luke Jackson turns the theme upside down: the human child is not an accidental ambassador, he is an “alien.” In what other ways does “You Are Alien” contrast with “Enemy Mine”?
5. What ironies can be found in the descriptions of humans and “worms,” especially in terms of sound and touch?
Arnold H. Hollander’s “Pluto” and Mary B. McArdle’s “The Planets of Sol’s Realm” are two rare examples of poems devoted to planets as planets rather than as surrogates of Earth. How do they differ essentially from “Mars Draws Near,” in issue 57 ?

Responses welcome!