Today I’ve reviewed the 28th story in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future. In Henry Kuttner’s masterpiece “Year Day” (1953), a couple attempts to rekindle their relationship in the midst of a sonic deluge of advertising that threatens to blot out their thoughts.
Previously: Kate Wilhelm’s “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis” (1976) and Langdon Jones’ “The Empathy Machine” (1965)
Up Next: Sydney J. Van Scyoc’s “Shatter the Wall” (1962)
Richard Powers’ cover for the 1st paperback edition
5/5 (Masterpiece)
Henry Kuttner’s “Year Day” first appeared in his collection Ahead of Time (1953). Some of the other stories in the collection were co-written with his wife C. L. Moore. You can read the story online here.
The Air, Throbbing with Electronic Breath
Set against geopolitical chaos and endless urban sprawl (98), “Year Day” imagines an America beset by the desperate and sinister machinations of capitalism unbound. The air pulsates with “beamed commercials” (91) and technology that “can pierce walls and whisper hypnotism in your ear while you sleep” (95). The air coalesces into “shouting signals in nucolor” — “BE HEALTHY! BE ADMIRED BE TOPDOG BE RICH–ADMIRED–FAMOUS / JOY SMOKE! CREAMIES! MARSFOOD!” (96). The pockets of artificial silence along the roadways–achieved via “special mikes and amplifiers [that] pick up sound and send out reactions enough of phase”–serve as a further advertisement, “this silence is coming to you courtesy of Paradise Homes” (92). And everyone wants happiness and peace, a way to escape the harrowing sonic deluge.
“Year Day” follows Bill, who receives a call after six years from his ex-wife Irene. They meet at his apartment, tentative, fragments of their old love seems to ring true. They project change to each other: “I supposed I’ve matured a little,” Bill says (94). Irene confesses her secret, she’s been living the last five years at Paradise Homes, a mysterious underground complex that promises peace and quiet. But she wants to return to Bill.
Both claim they’ve moved on from the petty jealousies created by the omnipresent advertising avatars–Niobi Gai, Jerome Foret, and Freddi Lester. Their faces are projected on buildings. Their voices intone “buy into Paradise Homes” (92). They represent beauty and class: Freddi, “he’s too perfect to be real” (92). In their “film-strip composite” perfection, they set the societal trends and shape desires. Irene still wears her Niobi Gai hair job (93). Bill used to have the “Foret double part[ed]” hair (93).”Even their names are horrible, aren’t they?” Irene asks (93).
Irene and Bill talk of new beginnings. Maybe they’ll buy a hydroponics farm away from the city: a manifestation of that nagging desire to escape it all, the urge to return to some primeval ancestral existence. They impulsively remarry. But is it possible to escape the electronic breath that caresses and berates its will into your very being?
Final Thoughts
Traversing a similar advertising landscape as Ann Warren Griffith’s “Captive Audience” (1953), both Kuttner and Griffith evoke a dystopic future in which the American mind is turned into malleable putty by an entropic (and sonic) inundation of advertisements. As discussed in my Griffith review, in the 1950s, Americans depicted Communism as denying inherent human freedoms of choice and enslaving the mind. Over the decade, the terror of Communist brainwashing collided with fears of the detrimental effects of consumer culture and advertising. Perhaps Americans were also susceptible to commercial brainwashing deployed to convince the American family to conform and buy the latest products and models. For this fascinating collision of external Cold War terror and internal fear of American weakness, check out Matthew W. Dunne’s A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society (2013) and Charles R. Acland’s Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence (2012).
Within this larger context, Kuttner elevates the premise by making his characters fully aware of the nature of their world. Bill frequently acknowledges that conditioning is “drummed into your head as soon as you’re old enough to know what words mean. Movies, TV, magazines, book reels, every medium of communication there is.” (97). He wonders how those who grow up in a commercial world can even trust their own logic and identify what’s real and what’s fantasy (96). Bill knows the tricks psychologists use to create commercials work on emotion and identify your weak spots (96). For example, he remembers how after his divorce from Irene a TV call had come from a woman, attempting to sell him insurance, made up to look exactly like his ex-wife (93). With this awareness, there’s a powerful inevitability and sadness to what transpires: the desperate migration underground, the need for peace, the need for Freddi and Niobi.
This is a brilliant short story. Kuttner’s imagery and prose create a sonic advertising deluge nightmarish in its physicality and deep resonances. There’s a sense of America’s retreat from the external world and a new battle on the Homefront, a battle to maintain sanity in the face of forces that seek to dictate all desire. Kuttner’s most disturbing implication is that we will more and more mediate our existence through the artificially created avatars that will “think” for us.
One of the best stories I’ve read for this series, I highly recommend “Year Day” for all fans of 50s science fiction.
While I have read substantial scholarship that touches on Henry Kuttner and his co-written works with C. L. Moore, I have not read too many of their stories. I plan on reading the rest of the short stories in Ahead of Time (1953) soon. If I adored this one, what are some other Kuttner (or Kuttner/Moore) stories you think I might enjoy?
Josh Kirby’s cover for the 1970 edition of The Best of Kuttner 1 (1965)
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Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations 
Now, granted, I am neurodivergent, but the advertising saturation thing relates. TV is too hyper for me so I don’t even have one. Without certain browser addons the web would be unusable to me.
I think it safe to say that social media and AI are headed right where Kuttner suspected, “Kuttner’s most disturbing implication is that we will more and more mediate our existence through the artificially created avatars that will think for us.”
Hello Scott,
The story is possessed by an overbearing almost hyper sense of deluge and information overload. Social media — twitter in particular — is the only place where I sense myself giving into the scroll, and hating every second of it. Hah.
For a bit of clarity, Kuttner isn’t talking explicitly about AI or social media. The avatars I mention are “perfect” people who live perfect lives and are designed by ad men to sell products. They are “artificial” in that they are not real people but rather created from bits of film that are omnipresent in the advertising landscape. I seem to remember a few years shock that a popular instagram account wasn’t a real person but rather a photoshopped avatar that sold handbags and other products.
But yes, both Bill and Irene find themselves conditioned to compare themselves to the avatars and aspire to what they have — even when they know they are fake.
I re-read it this morning in that Best of Kuttner vol 1 you picture above.
Answering his doorbell remotely jumped out at me as something he casually dropped in which would have seemed very sf for his time, but easily available now…
Haha, yeah. It took me a second to realize that he was receiving the doorbell ring in his car!
What did you think of the story? Was my analysis on point?
Yeah, I think you got it about right.
I enjoyed the story – I know I’ve read it at least a couple of time before, but ages ago. It seems to me that the hyper-vivid and intrusive adverts was a bit of a thing back then, but don’t ask me for examples! PKD started being published just a year before this was and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had influenced him at least a bit.
The Ann Warren Griffith’s “Captive Audience” (1953) I linked and mentioned in the Final Thoughts is another story with hyper-vivid and intrusive adverts — the grocery store shelves inundate the consumer with vocalized slogans.
A few Kuttner stories (including this one) read to me as PKD-esque, although given when Dick got started it’s more like certain Dick stories are Kuttner-esque. Indeed you can find Kuttner’s DNA in other SF writers of the period, especially Kornbluth. Ray Bradbury of all people thought him an inspiration, which is funny to me because honestly Kuttner and Bradbury have little to do with each other. Kuttner was chronically pessimistic, and “Year Day” might be the most despondent story of his I’ve read. At the same time it reads like a distant precursor to cyberpunk, and even to Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Some of the imagery Kuttner conjures would not be out of place in Blade Runner, never mind the noir-style narration.
I, too, had the sense that the story was redolent with elements that would become popular during the cyperpunk movement: (SPOILER) sex with an “perfect” avatar projection, huge advertising faces projected on the urban landscape, the physical sense of the swirling (NUCOLOR = neon!) advertising that infiltrates ones consciousness, and the despondent moody broody nature of it all. Loved it.
I’m currently reading David Seed’s monograph on Ray Bradbury and he mentions that Kuttner was one of Bradbury’s mentors. I’d suggest that both are interested in a “literary” touch to their prose (I have a limited sample size of course). This story is also quite well written — as are all of Bradbury’s.
I would say “Year Day” is unusually refined and serious for Kuttner. It’s not sentimental, because Kuttner is NOT the sentimental type, but it is genuinely heartbreaking, that climax and ending are brutal. For more typical Kuttner that I think are still memorable and entertaining I would recommend “The Proud Robot,” “The Misguided Halo,” and “Exit the Professor” (the last of these I’ve reviewed and which I thought was pretty funny).
The story also effectively avoids portraying Irene as NOT entirely at fault. Bill, too, falls victim to the same subliminal compulsions. There’s a reason she wore a Niobi Gai hair-do. The hooks are still there despite the talk of change. And the talk of change is what makes that climax and ending so brutal.
I have “The Proud Robot” on my media list — the Seed book, in passing, mentions that it “describes a near-future America where television totally changed national viewing habits.”
I will probably read the rest of the stories in the Ahead of Time (1953) collection as well.
Here’s a minimal Kuttner/Moore suggested reading list, reflecting the maximum restraint I can muster:
Mimsy Were the Borogoves (as by Lewis Padgett) (probably the most famous)
The Twonky (Padgett)
Open Secret (Padgett) (seemingly little known, reminiscent of John Collier)
Private Eye (Padgett)
Call Him Demon (sometimes attributed to Kuttner, reads like Moore)
Vintage Season (Moore) (her most famous)
The Children’s Hour (Moore) (every bit as good to my taste)
Paradise Street (Moore) (an unabashed Bat Durston, and a splendid one)
Two-Handed Engine
Home There’s No Returning
Rite of Passage
Stories from the mid-‘50s when K & M were writing little SF; strange, dark stories that are powerful even if they don’t add up perfectly
De Profundis (in Ahead of Time) (very powerful, maybe heavy-handed, but it’s in Ahead of Time)
Thank you John!
What were your thoughts on Year Day?
Brilliant, made more so by its compactness. (I flagged it for you some time ago.) Your discussion of it is spot-on.
Ah, it must have been a while ago. Thank you for the recommendation then. I read the story a year ago but never managed to put together my thoughts. Decided impulsively to reread it a few days ago — and it helped get through a bit of writer’s block that I was experiencing.
Speaking of Henry Kuttner stories (or it may be under Padgett, I forget) which remind one of PKD, my recommendation for him would be “Jesting Pilot” (1947). It was a bit hard to believe this story was from that long ago as it seemed ahead of its time. It also reads almost as “weird fiction”.
Ah yes, I came across this one when I was looking through his bibliography last year when I first read “Year Day.”
Love the tagline in Astounding: “Under normal circumstances, a man must face reality to be a sane, well-balanced citizen. But not in that city! Any man who faced and understood the reality of the place was insane!” https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v39n03_1947-05_AK/page/n77/mode/2up?view=theater
JB: ‘Henry Kuttner, and his co-written works with C. L. Moore, remains a massive hole in my SF knowledge.’
They shouldn’t be. Much of what we think of as good in 1950s American SF begins with the Kuttners in the 1940s, after John W. Campbell pulls them in to fill ASF when he loses Heinlein and others of his stable of writers to the war effort. To keep the plaudits short, ‘Vintage Season’ is the first truly adult story produced by American magazine SF (and predominantly or entirely from Moore’s hand); and then, too, as Brian Collins alludes to above, you don’t get PKD in the 1950s without the example of the Kuttners in the 1940s.
Your best overall bet is to find a copy of TWO-HANDED ENGINE. This was originally published in 2004-5 and is advertised as the largest collection of Kuttner-Moore fiction available (though, alas, it lacks ‘The Children’s Hour,’ which, while almost unknown these days, is one of the finest and strangest of the Moore-dominated novellas; I strongly echo John Boston here) and comes with a fine Richard Powers wraparound cover.
https://www.centipedepress.com/sf/twohanded.html
Don’t be put off by the sticker price. You can probably get a used copy for $35 if you look around. If I were you, I’d buy a copy because I don’t see them getting cheaper.
Also worth a look is JUDGMENT NIGHT, solely by C. L. Moore, an anthology of five stories, first published by Gnome Press in 1952 —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_Night_(collection)
— but available more cheaply as a Dell 1979 paperback —
It’s just been republished in the UK by Gollancz/Orion. The last two stories in this volume are interesting. ‘The Code’ (1945) is another unknown Moore novella, which I maintain is close to the level of ‘The Children’s Hour’ if just for its unique premise, but which, IIRC, John B. thinks is too wacky and ramshackle. Meanwhile, ‘Heir Apparent’ is, arguably, a cyberpunk-themed story from 1950 (!).
Of the worthwhile Kuttner-Moore novels, you’ve reviewed DOOMSDAY MORNING (entirely Moore) already. Also worth a look are: –
FURY (1950) —
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1892
–which in its original 1947 magazine publication in ASF had the classic Golden Age SF cover
— https://www.mediastorehouse.co.uk/p/497/science-fiction-magazine-cover-hubert-rogers-may-6258373.jpg.webp
–and CHESSBOARD PLANET (1956, originally in ASF in 1946 as THE FAIRY CHESSMEN).
CHESSBOARD PLANET strikes me as Kuttner-Moore doing their more coherent, lucid, inventive version of an A.E. Van Vogt novel i.e. retrocausality is a theme the Kuttners play with in this one, and they do a lot more with it than Van Vogt ever could have by logically taking it to the limit and having a whole civilization evolving backwards in time.
Returning the Kuttners’ influence on Philip K. Dick, PKD was on record as liking the ‘Cosmic Jerrybuilder’ aspect of Van Vogt’s recomplicated fictions, precisely because the universes in them didn’t make sense. But early PKD novels like SOLAR LOTTERY and THE WORLD JONES MADE strike me as deriving more from the Kuttners’ CHESSBOARD PLANET than Van Vogt.
Finally (!!!), be warned: the Kuttners were professional writers. The pulps were very much an extant market for them and they — Kuttner especially — wrote a lot of pure pulp, with no redeeming qualities except that it paid their rent and put food on their table. Kuttner’s novels like TIME’S LAST CITADEL fall in this category.
“They shouldn’t be.” I mean, yeah, that’s partly why I read Kuttner’s “Year Day.” What are your thoughts on the story?
I realize now that how I phrased it in the review doesn’t really convey the fact that I religiously read about SF that I might not have read yet (Kuttner and Moore included), haha. Yup, I am aware of the general nature of their fiction and that they were professional writers who also wrote pulp and responded to the markets of the day. This is probably I reason I hadn’t read a lot of Moore’s earlier work. I have read about them in the Mike Ashley volumes and countless other monographs on SF I’ve consumed (Martha Bartter for example who analyses their various nuclear war tales).
I’ve gone ahead and purchased Fury. I can’t promise I’ll get to it anytime soon though.
I’ll get to Fury eventually, but I know there’s a prequel novella, “Clash by Night,” that I’ll get to sooner. Much sooner. It’s supposed to be proto-military SF, which is impressive for 1943. And speaking of proto-cyberpunk there’s the solo Moore novella “No Woman Born,” which I’ll at some point reread for the sake of writing about it.
I enjoyed Fury a long time ago when I was teenager and tried to re-read it more recently. I finished it, but I’m not sure it was worth the effort!
All I can say is, we shall see! 🙂
I’ve read Clash by Night but not Fury. I vaguely recall liking the former and need to read the latter. I couldn’t finish Time’s Last Citadel when I tried it, though I loved the set up.
Year Day is very “modern” in the sense that it reads more like a New Wave story. It’s vision of a spectacular hyperreal before anyone spoke of such is to me simply perfect. A great piece.
Most of what I have read of Moore and Kutner has been good, sometimes great. I’m keen to Check out Chessboard Planet. Those stories in Judgement Night sound great. I need to track it down.
I was inspired by “Year Day” to track down a copy of their collection Return to Otherness (1962). It has a lovely Powers cover.
I think “Year Day” fits neatly with a handful of 50s stories that attempt to tackle the concept of information overload. The Sturgeon that shall remain nameless as I am still (wink) mystified why you don’t link it joins its ranks…
The cover is great. I hope you find some gems in there.
I sure was harsh on that nameless Sturgeon story. It could have been so good…
Sturgeon is an odd one. Some great stories, some so so. I stand by my assessment that a Heinlein version of this story would have been better and way cooler.