"There is a world of experience and culture that is exclusively Amerindian that has never been told. That I have set out to try to relate what I can of this world is audacious, perhaps. But there was simply no way I could have done otherwise, even if I had consciously tried" -- Russell Bates' intro to "Rite of Encounter" (May 1973)

With this post I complete my micro-series covering the short fiction of Kiowa author Russell Bates (1941-2018), one of a handful of Native American science fiction authors active in the 1970s. In Part I, I provided a short biography and what I could find about his writing career including contributing to Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974), and reviewed his first three short stories.

In this post, I’ll cover his three remaining published non-franchise science fiction stories. He also wrote “The Patient Parasites” anthologized in Star Trek: The New Voyages 2, ed. Myrna Culbreath and Sondra Marshak (1978) that I won’t feature. Unfortunately, his submission–“Search Cycle: Beginning and Ending 1. The Last Quest; 2. Fifth and Last Horseman”–to Harlan Ellison’s infamous Last Dangerous Visions, slated for 1973, still has not seen the light of day.

“Hello, Walls and Fences” (1973) and “Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined…:” (1977) also serve as the 32nd and 33rd story in my media landscapes of the future series.

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

Up Next: TBD

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3.75/5 (Good)

“Hello, Walls and Fences” first appeared in Infinity Five, ed. Robert Hoskins (1973). You can read it online here.

A bleak allegory of the societal forces that compel the creative to sell their souls, “Hello, Walls and Fences” follows a nameless narrator attempting to find work from a mysterious tycoon named Thornton, who spends his days on a technologically advanced estate playing wickets and eating cheese. The work itself isn’t entirely clear: it might concern computer programing for massive one-time military “hologrammers” that Thornton places across his oasis (70).

Initially the programmer resists Thorton’s cajoling, “I wouldn’t understand it my own self. I’d have no freedom. I’d lose other people like I’d lose myself” (69). Thorton counters: “Commercial work is easy to get. But you don’t be respected. Part of pay, you know, is the salary for the soul” (69). Again, it’s not entirely clear what Thorton has in mind. Although, when the narrator leaves Thorton’s house and treks out across what might be the empty wilderness in which he resides, he’s beset with projected images from the hologrammers of warfare and violence: “Villagers ran, leading their children and animals in panic. The soldiers fired into them. Women, children, old people tumbled away, fell” (70). He might be programming similar machines. Eventually the narrator must make a final decision. Others rely on him.

Despite its short length, I found “Hello, Walls and Fences” effective and surprisingly deep–in part due to its oblique way of telling that invites analysis. Bates indirectly suggests Thorton is white and the narrator a native American. The psychological warfare described above represents the white extermination of the native peoples of America. In another instance, the mogul’s hologrammers project “shattered bottles” and “crumpled insecticide cans” in the narrator’s fleeing path that represent the devastation wrought by alcohol and the exploitation of the environment (70). The nature of the future media technology remains mysterious. The human impact fills out the tableau.

A more overt commentary on the effects of colonization on Native Americans would appear the same year with “Rites of Encounter.”

Recommended.

4/5 (Good)

“Rite of Encounter” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Edward L. Ferman (May 1973). You can read it online here.

Of the six published Russell Bates short stories, “Rite of Encounter” is the most overt commentary on the Native American encounter with the white man. It’s also an effective work of body horror. More a fantasy than science fiction, Bates renders the intrusion of an anthropomorphic manifestation of smallpox brought by white colonists into the life of a young Kiowa named Singing-owl.

Singing-owl engages in a solitary fast out in the wilderness in order to bring about a vision that will impart wisdom that “would be his power as a warrior and as a man” (121). Growing weaker day after day, tempted by his food, he waits for the medicine man’s promise. But none comes. Only “dreams of deer and clouds and fishes and snow” (120)…. until…

Weak, he stumbles across a starving barking dog and an encampment of dead white men. Suspicious, he feeds the dog their food. He notices the symptoms of disease: “He looked at the face. The sores there had ragged white strings that waved in the flowing water” (123). Horrified he leaves the camp and throws out the expensive pistol he had pilfered from the first corpse. And that night in front of his fire, a thing appears a short distance away: “It was shaped like a man. But it wasn’t a man. It was a mass of raw flesh. With a body, and arms and legs, and a head” (123). Its voice fills the dark night: “I am Black Smallpox. And I wish to walk with you” (123).

An effectively harrowing commentary on the devastating effects of contact between colonizers and native populations and the rivalries between native tribes. It’s stark and powerful. I am surprised that none of Bates’ stories (or Craig Strete‘s for that matter) were collected in Grace L. Dillon’s Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012). The anthology ignored the trailblazing 70s genre publications by indigenous authors.

Recommended.

3.5/5 (Good)

“Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined…:” first appeared in Fantastic, ed. Ted White (1977). You can read it online here. Ted White notes that Bates wrote the story at the 1973 Clarion Workshop.

Bates imagines a media dystopia in which the downtrodden and depressed submit their own nightmares to a technician who records and illegally sells them to “ordinary folks who hunger for a taste of vicarious violence once in a while” (72). The payment depends on level of vivid pain and terror present the nightmares. The fragments of background world sprinkled throughout the story suggest a Hays-like code dictates “Simon-pure” media–“teevee and books and movies” (72)–with draconian federal laws deployed against the code-breakers (69).

The story follows Harriman Walters as he submits his nightmare–extracted via a “wraparound sensor fabric” and “eye clips” (69)–to Kirkland, a slimy dealer of dreams who can’t help but jest about what he sees. Walters dreams of a sinister medical procedure tied to a “table in a chill green room” (69). A woman approaches him with ragged teeth and sinister intent. She holds a syringe with murky liquid. He breaks free and exerts his revenge. “Was she your mother?” Kirkland asks. He hands over the cash. And Walters promises to return another nightmare. Kirkland will buy anything.

As with Robert Silverberg’s hellish “The Pain Peddlers” (1963), “Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined…:” speculates on the commodification of pain. I found Silverberg’s even more sinister as he imagines technology that records the pain experienced by patients desperate for life-saving medical procedures. Of course, they receive a discount if they consent to the recording and receive as little sedative as possible. Both imagine a media landscape where the experiences of the downtrodden, depressed, and desperate are consumed by others: private agonies become public spectacles.

Somewhat recommended.

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