you’ll dream of microwaves tonight

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself contemplating the parallels between Bridezillas and the “two minutes hate” of Orwell’s 1984, when I happened to jog loose a random memory about a story I read in grade school. It was about a future society where the populace was kept in line though a ubiquitous food additive that made those who ingested it susceptible to subliminals embedded in the (government-controlled) television broadcasts. A teenage chemistry whiz manages to unravel the secrets of the totalitarian state’s social control program, but like Winston Smith, ends up learning the hard way that you can’t fight city hall Big Brother.

The story disturbed me immensely when I first read it a sci-fi anthology that had been collecting dust in the back of my fifth grade classroom, and even over the space of twenty-plus years, I felt a small chill when I recalled it. The titles of the story and the anthology eluded me, and the book itself was most certainly consumed in the fire that destroyed that wing of my elementary school in the mid-eighties. (Along with the school library’s copy of an absolutely stunning retelling of the Iliad and Odyssey illustrated with Greek urn-inspired watercolor paintings that now goes for a small fortune online. If only I had been bold enough to commit petty larceny in my formative years…)

I did, however, remember the name of the breakfast cereal in the story that piques the doomed student’s curiosity: “Biskies.” Armed with that small lead, I popped onto the internet to see what Google could uncover for me. Based on the results returned, it seemed that I was not the only child traumatized by the story, which turned out to be “A Bowl of Biskies Makes a Growing Boy” by Raymond F. Jones. It appeared in The Other Side of Tomorrow: Original Science Fiction Stories About Young People in the Future published by Random House in 1973. A quick check of half.com, my usual go-to site for cheap out-of-print books, turned up a reasonable-priced copy which was promptly ordered by yours truly and delivered a week or so later by the USPS.

The style of the book mirrors that of those Alfred Hitchcock horror and suspense anthologies (Monster Museum, Haunted Houseful, et cetera) that used to scare the bejeezus out of me when I was a wee lad, and the book itself seems like an attempt to spin off the format into the science fiction realm. (Plugs for several of the Hitchcock anthologies appear on the inside of the dustjacket’s back endleaf, which supports my theory.) I managed to finish the entire book in a single evening’s reading, and it was fascinating to discover how much of the material I remembered, misremembered, or just plum forgot over time.

Many of the online commentaries about The Other Side of Tomorrow make note of the generally bleak tenor of the stories considering the target audience, but I’d have to respond by saying it was published at a time when bleakness in was in vogue. For all its prognosticative window-dressing, science fiction is most usually rooted in the issues and concerns of the “now,” which is why the art-deco alien cities of 1930’s sci-fi and the chrome and neon Nippon-ocentric worlds of 1980’s cyberpunk novels appear kitschy and quaint these days.

1973, the year The Other Side of Tomorrow was published, was smack dab in the middle of a period I’ve informally dubbed The Great Disillusionment, a mass crisis of faith in the wake of the failures of both the Establishment and the counterculture to effectively respond to changing times. The war in Vietnam, race riots, Kent State, the growing concern over the state of the environment, the end of cheap fossil fuels, the stagnation of real wages, the assertion of and resistance to the demands by historically marginalized groups for equal rights, the violent implosion of the counterculture movement – these events formed the tapestry that serves as the contextual background for The Other Side of Tomorrow, and in light of that fact, I’m surprised it wasn’t an even bleaker read.

Not all of the stories are grim in tone. Thomas N. Scortia’s “Final Exam” is a straightforward adventure story with overtones similar to E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series or even the 60’s Green Lantern comic book tales. “Night of the Millennium” by Edward D. Hoch is an adventure-mystery yarn set in the last few hours of the year 1999, where the writer envisions a future where fifteen year olds are considered independent adults (as opposed to a world where twenty- and thirty-somethings attempt to prolong their adolescence indefinitely).

Arthur Tofte’s “The Speeders” is a reiteration of Lord of the Flies by way of Harlan Ellison’s “Along the Scenic Route,” as teenage repeat offender speed freaks (of the vehicular, not the meth-head, sort) are shuttled off to a prison camp where they can fatally indulge their lead feet. It’s not a happy story, by any stretch, but the main characters don’t really elicit the reader’s sympathy, leaving one to feel that they’re just paddling toward a foregone conclusion.

Both Joseph Green’s “Let My People Go!” and J. Hunter Holly’s “The Others” deal with the plight of throwbacks and mutations in worlds where genetic enhancement is the norm. Holly’s story is the better of the two, and features real moments of pathos (whereas the first person narrator in Green’s story is too clinically detached to be taken seriously as a believable character), but both tales end with a sense of hope for the outcasts’ future.

I found Leigh Brackett’s “Come Sing the Moons of Moraven” and Gail Kimberly’s “Peace, Love, and Food for the Hungry” of particular interest because they both address the issues of the sixties’ youth movement in a direct and unromantic manner through the premise of young folks attempting, and failing, to create off-world utopias. The young colonists in Brackett’s story are highly-educated, highly-motivated pioneers whose earnest dreams come up against and immutable force of nature. The communal society of Kimberly’s story finds itself being crushed alive by their own demons, embodied by a rapidly multiplying mass of alien lifeforms that feed on the colonists’ negative emotions, which are in ample supply despite their frequently-mouthed “love the brother” homilies. The vectors of delivery may be science-fiction tales, but the echoes of Great Disillusionment loom large over both stories, specifically the death of the dream via unyielding external pressures (Chicago 1968) or the internal seeds of self-destruction (the Manson Family murders and the rise of militant factions, plus the seamy side of the free love and drug cultures). It’s depressing stuff, but absolutely of its time.

The two dystopian future tales, the previously mentioned “A Box of Biskies Makes a Growing Boy” and Gordon Eklund’s “Examination Day” are both unremittingly bleak, but that’s par for the course in dystopian fiction, whose appeal lies in painting a really grim (and ostensibly cautionary) picture of the possible shapes of things to come, especially when it extrapolates based on present trends, hothousing problematic acorns into terrifyingly twisted giant oak trees. “Biskies” is by far the better story in terms of premise and execution, but the core concept of “Examination Day” – in a society where careers are determined by the state, how does one deal with being selected to oversee a concentration camp? – is strong enough to carry the tale despite several awkward missteps by the author. I once read an essay (and I wish I could remember where) that the overarching theme in fiction about adolescence is that of acknowledging limits, bartering the dreams of youth for the realities of adulthood at a really lopsided rate of exchange – and nowhere has the rate of exchange been as lopsided as in “Examination Day.”

If there’s a current of grimness in there stories, it’s one in sync with the tone of that era of young adult fiction from Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War to Robert C. O’Brien’s Z for Zachariah to Paul Zindel’s The Pigman to the works of S.E. Hinton and even M.E. Kerr (Not to mention Jack Thomas’s teen trash classic Heavy Number, which is as close an American equivalent to Richard Allen’s Skinhead novels as one can find.) Given the reactionary trends of the past three decades, it may seem harsh stuff to market to kids, but, speaking from personal experience, the kids are a lot tougher than the grown-ups give them credit for being, and there are worse things than being given an opportunity to think about big issues, rather than spoon feeding them aseptic escapist fare in hopes of delaying the inevitable.

The Epoxies – No Interest (from Stop the Future, 2005) – Maura brought home the new Epoxies EP the other day. I’m not sure what I think about it, yet. There’s a decent enough Wipers’ cover, a formerly iTunes-exclusive bonus track from Stop The Future, and two new songs that are slower and more experimental than anything previously released by the band.

Max Frost and The Troopers – Shape of Things to Come (from Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968, 1998) – A repost from last year’s cult movie-themed post, but too perfect a fit to pass on.

The B-52’s – Song for a Future Generation (from Whammy! 1983) – Hello, I’m Andrew, I’m a Pisces! I like nectarines and writing long, self-conscious blog posts!