And it’s often hard to decide whether to class a given Aiken story as a kids’ story or a grown-ups’ story, which is all to the good. Almost all of the best children’s books—from Alice onward—can be enjoyed by adults as well, and it’s always nice to see books for kids that don’t talk down to them.
The first Aiken story that I ever encountered, probably in Children’s Digest or Child Life sometime in the late ‘70s, was a case in point: a lovely fairy tale titled “The Third Wish.” It appears in Not What You Expected; it wasn’t until I saw it in this book a few years ago that I realized that the story (which had stuck in my memory all those years) was by Aiken. It’s still one of my favorite stories of any kind, by anyone. It’s about a modern man who rescues the King of the Forest and is given three wishes in compensation; his first wish is for “a wife as beautiful as the forest.” To find out how he uses his other wishes, you’ll have to find a copy of the story; it certainly wasn’t what I expected from a three-wishes story. Unfortunately, the story does not appear (as far as I know) in any Aiken collection currently in print; fortunately, it’s been widely reprinted elsewhere, including in American elementary-school textbooks, so chances are good that if you haven’t read it already, you’ll be able to find it somewhere.
And if you haunt used bookstores assiduously, and search the Internet book-search services, and are very very good, you just might find a copy of Not What You Expected.
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Armitage, Armitage, Fly Away Home is a different sort of collection, aimed more clearly at kids (though still an enjoyable read for adults who like kids’ books). Aiken’s stories about Harriet and Mark Armitage, siblings to whom interesting things are always happening, have appeared scattered about in various of her collections; this volume gathers ten of those stories, and adds a charming “Prelude” that explains why interesting things happen to the Armitages. The jacket flap on the book summarizes the Prelude: “When Mr. and Mrs. Armitage were honeymooning at the beach, Mrs. Armitage found a wishing stone. She wished for two children who would never be bored, but who would have lots of ‘interesting and unusual’ experiences.” Mr. Armitage objects, so Mrs. Armitage qualifies her wish: “[W]e could have a special day for interesting and unusual things to happen—say, Mondays. But not always Mondays and not only Mondays, or that would get a bit dull too.”
There are Armitage stories that don’t appear in this collection (such as the two in Not What You Expected), but this collection is the only place I know of where you can find this many of them together. (A Small Pinch of Weather includes five of the stories in Armitage, as well as another Armitage story that doesn’t appear in this volume; if you can’t find Armitage, then Weather is the next-best compendium of Armitage stories.)
In the stories in Armitage, a variety of interesting and unusual things happen to Harriet and Mark. In “Yes, But Today is Tuesday,” for example, they find a unicorn in their garden and decide to keep him as a pet. In “The Frozen Cuckoo,” their practical-joker cousin Sarah comes to visit, and the Armitages are evicted from their house by the Board of Incantation, which wants to create a seminary for young magicians. In “Sweet Singeing [sic] in the Choir,” Harriet and Mark get their fairy godmother to give them nice singing voices, but only temporarily. And in other stories they encounter a loom for weaving hair, a telephone built into a tree, a ghostly governess, a stolen quince tree, and the Furies. Also, they rescue their parents from being turned into ladybirds by angry fairy ladies.
The Armitage stories are, once again, charming and quirky. Some of them veer into slightly serious territory, but mostly they’re Aiken having fun. Harriet and Mark also have fun in these stories, and readers will too.
Near the end of the Postscript to Weather, Aiken writes: “Favourite stories, like unexpected presents, are things that you can keep and cherish all your life, carry with you, in memory, in your mind’s ear, and bring out, at any time, when you are feeling lonely, or need cheering up, or, like friends, just because you are fond of them. That is the way I feel about some of the stories in this collection.” And that’s the way I feel about some of her stories, too.
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Jed Hartman is the Senior Fiction Editor for Strange Horizons.
Choice and Consequences
By Chip Sudderth
10/1/01
Popular science fiction and fantasy are no more immune to clichés than any other genre. In particular, although there has lately been a refreshing trend of anti-heroes and moral ambiguity, morality plays of good versus evil are still quite common. Shades of gray are becoming more evident in speculative fiction, but dark monarchs and evil empires have never gone away. Some fans of “literary” or “artsy” SF have bemoaned this lack of moral complexity, which surely speaks less to our understanding of a complex, sophisticated, morally relativistic world.
Our world shifted dramatically on September 11th. Say what you may about the motivations and frustrations that drove the 19 men who hijacked four airliners that day, but the act of killing thousands in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania was unquestionably, brutally evil. As a world community we saw, and wept, and raged, and feared—feared for the safety of loved ones, for continued security in the face of an invisible enemy, and for the human cost of actions that might be taken in retaliation.
There were stories of heroism as well. Firefighters and police officers gave their lives trying to evacuate the World Trade Center towers before they fell. And we may never know what target the hijackers of United Flight 93 sought, because passengers and flight attendants, warned of the plane’s likely fate by families and friends over cell phones, apparently vowed that no innocent bystander would share in their fate. They, as writer Andrew Sullivan put it, wrestled the plane to the ground instead. (In the wake of two prominent televangelists’ assertions—since somewhat retracted—that the attacks were God’s judgment against America’s tolerance of non-Christian values, I took grim satisfaction in the news that one of the heroes of Flight 93, Mark Bingham, was gay.) There were acts of self-sacrifice on an epic scale, heroism displayed in real life as vividly as it has ever been in fiction.
If only September 11th itself had been fiction.
Now I find myself looking to speculative fiction in a new light. It has always been an escape for me, and now I need such escapes more than ever. But science fiction and fantasy, through extrapolation and allegory, are also valuable tools that we can use to explore actions and reactions, conflicts and resolutions. Speculative fiction can delve into the potential consequences of decisions made and deferred, and some of them are momentous indeed:
Babylon 5’s Londo Mollari, trying to bring glory to himself and his Centauri people, makes an alliance with an ancient race that leads to galactic war. His world is reduced to rubble, and he is forced to sacrifice his very freedom of thought. As the war builds, other races refuse to support each other militarily until, for some, it is too late.
The Council of Elrond, in Tolkien’s masterpiece The Lord of the Rings, are faced with a choice—a small fellowship undertaking a suicide mission to destroy the Enemy’s greatest weapon, or attempt to use the One Ring’s diabolic power against him. They choose the former, causing tremendous suffering for Frodo Baggins. They end Sauron’s evil, but also end the Third Age of Middle-Earth as the elves abandon it for all time.
The Jesuit space explorers of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow inspire the nomadic Runa people to garden and defend themselves against the more advanced Jana’ata, upsetting the tightly controlled and delicate ecological and social balance of the planet. Here the consequences are as unforeseen as they are tragic.
L. E. Modesitt, Jr.’s Nathaniel Whaler, in The Ecolitan Enigma, is a member of a territory-less institution dedicated to interstellar peace and civilization at any cost. He faces a moral dilemma that now uncomfortably reflects the post-September 11th world—is it right to cause the death of innocents in service to a greater peace? The reader may well wonder about the kind of peace bought by such a price.
The common thread in these stories is choice—sometimes difficult, sometimes unthinking, always with consequences foreseen and unforeseen. In The World of Star Trek, David Gerrold lamented the unrealized potential of the ‘60s series. He said that its plots tended to revolve around “Kirk in danger,” when far better stories could have been told about “Kirk has a decision to make.” Fortunately there is no shortage of speculative fiction that stems from inner conflict and the wrestling of one’s desires with one’s conscience. Characters live and breathe when they must face difficult decisions—and readers learn from their successes and failures.