Today I’ve reviewed the 29th story in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future. In Sydney J. Van Scyoc’s debut “Shatter the Wall” (1962), a bedraggled wife attempts to prevent her daughter and husband from taking on the personas of a television family.

Previously: Henry Kuttner’s “Year Day” (1953)

Up Next: Edmond Hamilton’s “Requiem” (1962) and John Anthony West’s “George” (1961)

As I’d only previously read one of Van Scyoc’s novels more than a decade ago, I added her next two published short fictions to fit the parameters of my series on the first three published short fictions by female authors who are new(ish) to me. So far I’ve featured Phyllis Gotlieb (1926-2009), Josephine Saxton (1935-), Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019), Wilmar H. Shiras (1908-1990), Nancy Kress (1948-), Melisa Michaels (1946-2019), Lee Killough (1942-), Betsy Curtis (1917-2002), and Eleanor Arnason (1942-).

Sydney J. Van Scyoc (1939-2023) published eleven novels and around thirty short stories across her writing career (primarily 1962-1991). Her visions were rarely republished or anthologized. “A Visit to Cleveland General” (1968) might be her best-known short story as it appeared in Carr and Wollheim’s best of 1969 anthology. I have a positive impression of her work so far.

Have you read any of her work? If so, what were your thoughts?

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3/5 (Average)

“Shatter the Wall” first appeared in Galaxy, ed. Frederik Pohl (February 1962). You can read it online here.

According to Gary R. Edgerton in The Columbia History of American Television (2007), a debate emerged in the late 1950s about American materialism and its glorification on television. John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958) suggested that advertising created synthetic needs and damaging desires in American citizens. “Shatter the Wall” is all about synthetic needs and damaging desires.

Kathryn wants to be Kippie, the “wall idol” on the family screen (42). She wishes her family would become the family she watches. Kathryn has the “dark Kippie-cap” hair, obsessively jabs her cheek where Kippie has a dimple (42), and begs her mother, Amanda, to replace her name with Kippie’s. Her mother refuses to indulge her daughter’s disturbing whims. She dreams of Kathyrn meeting a boy, having children, making her own path. Kathyrn is the youngest person in the city, “the week after you were born, the city hospital’s obstetrical ward closed permanently” (43). But Kathryn only wants to meet Bass, the object of Kippie’s love in the shows. And her dad seems too willing to indulge her whims. He has the hots for Alice in the wall drama. Amanda must take action. Violent action.

While traversing similar territory as Henry Kuttner’s advertising avatars in “Year Day” (1953), “Shatter the Wall” effectively charts the disintegrating individuality of a family subsumed by the constructed media personas who sell both products and experiences. Amanda’s family yearns to become, in the malaise of this post-scarcity world, someone else. They are consumed by imaginary perfection, the absence of conflict, and the possibility another life would have more meaning. It’s a deeply sad story. Amanda, driven to extremes, will eventually conform.

A solid first story!

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3/5 (Average)

“Bimmie Says” first appeared in Galaxy, ed. Frederik Pohl (October 1962). You can read it online here.

Bimmie, 18, marries Listie, 16. He, possessed with the delusion of being a scientific genius, forces her to keep a diary “for when he’s famous” and “we can have it published anytime we need money” (167). Listie’s curt diary entries create a window into a troubled teenage relationship. Bimmie’s prone to dismissive verbal abuse: “Don’t waste my money, woman” (167). He spends his days in their basement laboratory. Listie, restless and frustrated, remarks, “he just married me to cook!” (167). Soon she is pregnant and starts to take shortcuts with his instructions for their animals (part of his experiment). He ignores her needs and her protestations devolve into arguments. At first, it appears his experiment with the household pets failed. But something starts to happen with the contents of her daily reflections.

This is a deceptively disturbing story that charts the societal forces that forced women to conform and place their needs as secondary to their husband’s. It’s rare for SF to tackle teenage marriage and pregnancy. I’m not convinced that the two threads–a mad scientist’s first experiments–combine effectively with the domestic drama. The experiment itself is so incredibly hokey that it diminishes the societal commentary that Van Scyoc crafts. I found her suggestion that a pharmaceutical might be needed to break through the socially constructed gender roles sinister.

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4/5 (Good)

“Pollony Undiverted” first appeared in Galaxy, ed. Frederik Pohl (October 1963). You can read it online here.

Sydney J. Van Scyoc takes a substantial step forward in craft and vision with her third story. Like the previous two, “Pollony Undiverted” centers on a frustrated female narrator desperate to escape from the confines of her horizons. In a world made immediate by household teleportation devices, the labyrinthine expanse of street-less suburbia walls in abandoned city centers. The denizens of the “suburban maze” spend their days collecting artifacts—from hats to people and old-time cereals boxes–and constantly popping in on their relatives with trite conversation before jumping away.

Pollony lives with a physically abusive husband, Brendel, who spends his days consuming copious amounts of food that he forces his wife to dial-up and listening to opera tapes. She remembers how she fell in with Brendel, desperate to find a man with the home she could escape from her family. Her mother collected men: “She gave them her grid card and took theirs […] If a man came, she tacked his card on her bulletin board. If he came twice or three times, she marked his card with colored pencil.” Pollony wanted the perfect man. And Brendel and his fist wasn’t it. She reflects that his aggression “masked fear; his quarrelsomeness masked insecurity.”

Brendel, like everyone else desperate to experience something new, takes Pollony to visit Latsker Smith. He’s an oddity in this world. He lives off his rich industrialist father in the city center rather than the suburbs with a pre-grid automobile and airplane. As he can’t drive between city centers, he saves up the allowance so he can use the commercial teleport system to teleport his car. Brendel tires of him immediately. But Pollony is intrigued.

Van Scyoc deftly interweaves popular notions of the freedom of the road in a world transformed almost beyond recognition. Latsker and his car exude the possibility of escape. Pollony, just as aimless as the rest, finds herself anchored to grand narratives of the past. I found the most compelling and unusual element of the story Van Scyoc’s extrapolation that the obsessive drive to collect would become part of the daily routine if teleportation collapsed distance.

Recommended.

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