Katherine MacLean
"Katherine MacLean was born January 22, 1925 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.
She
received her BA at Barnard College in 1950. She has been a nurse's
aide,store
detective, pollster, econ graphi-analyst, antibiotic lab researcher,EKG
and
laboratory quality control technician, food analyst, and currentlyis
alternating
labwork with writing and lecturing, while pursuing her Master'sdegree
and
traveling extensively both within and without the United States.She is
a
member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the Science
FictionResearch
Assocation, the Teilhard de Chardin Center, Canada, the Societyfor
Research
in General Systems, the World Future Society, MENSA, the
AudubonSociety,and
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, amongothers.
She
gives her interests as 'science, history, ESP, carpentry,
medicine,health,
encounter groups, the real future, ecology, psychotherapy,
dianetics,'and
attempts to 'figure out a way for the earth to survive.' In 1971 she
received
the Nebula Award for best novella of the year from the Science Fiction
Writers
of America."-- from The Trouble With You Earth People story collection
Copyright
© 1997 by Katherine MacLean, first appeared in Analog,
February
1997 issue.
"Night Rise"
Cosmic Checkmate
With Charles DeVet, 1962
The Diploids
Short story collection
April 1981, Gregg Press
Dark Wing
1979, with Carl West
The Missing Man
April 1975, Putnam, Nebula nominee
The Man in the Bird Cage
1971
Trouble With Treaties
Short story collection, 1970
The Trouble With You Earth
People
Short story collection, 1980
"Pictures Don't Lie"
Galaxy, 1950's
"Contagion"
Women
of Wonder: The Classic Years
Michael Koelsch
|
"The Missing Man"
novella, 1971, Nebula
"The Snowball Effect"
1952, Galaxy
REVIEWS
Missing Man
New York in the near future: Everyone lives in the
commune
of his or her choice, ranging from the Society of Creative Anachronism
to Arab
enclaves and city neighborhoods in underwater domes. Everyone, that
is,unless you
are a high school dropout with no prospects but to join a gang,
getbusted,
then "brain wiped" and sent to the country by the condescending,
semi-autistic
computer scientists who rule the city's giant central
administrativecomputer.
George is that kind of drop out, but is saved from
deportation
by a rare skill: the ability to "tune in" to raw human emotion, a sort
of ESP.
His former childhood gang leader, Ahmed, now in the police force,
persuades
George to put his talent to work for the city's Rescue Squad, picking
up distress
vibes from victims and anger vibes from criminals.
In the inside cover of the tattered paperback
[published
in 1968] I am holding while writing, Lester del Rey praises this first
novel
by Katherine MacLean, a Nebula Award Winner. Do any of you SF experts
out there
know if MacLean ever wrote another novel since? Despite the
sixties-bias in
her view of the"future", MacLean does a good job painting a world where
only
a handful of people have original personalities; everyone else
merely"catches" the
pervasive mood and echoes it. A few gifted individuals like George can
tune
in to (and thankfully tune out) the variations in the background mood.I
hear
that there is a current TV show called Millennium on the Fox net work
in which
Lance Hendrickson uses similar abilities to solve crimes, but as far as
we
know, MacLean may have thought of the idea first... thirty years ago!
Too
bad she doesn't explore the implications for advertising.
George falls under the spell of one of the original
personalities
among the many shadows, a brilliant teen runaway and gang leader,Larry,
who
attempts to subvert George's abilities to his own antisocial
agenda,while
persuading him that the computer scientists are trying to reengineer
society
in their own image.
--Halliday Piel
The Snowball Effect
A quite different story.
A senior university sociologist is challenged to
prove
the worth of his department- is it all theory, with no practical
application.
He proposes a test of the 'snowball effect'. Can
that
theory be used on the Watashaw Sewing Circle to increase its membership.
The experiment proves to be a success. Beyond
theirwildest
dreams (and nightmares) as the Sewing Circle grows exponentially.
Denny's
new
girlfriend, Laury, was not interested in science; she was busy studying
computer
applications to business, but she was pretty and she hung around his
laboratory
most of her free time and happily listened to him explain what he was
doing.
This time his laboratory
was
full of frogs.
"This bunch is from South
Africa,
and this bunch in the plastic crate," he pointed, "they're from
Kenya." He moved his
skinny
self over to a big damp glass box. "These are from a lake in
Georgia,
where they fell into a fishing boat. Usually people only send in
frog
falls when they come down in dry territory or on city sidewalks, come
down
like rain. Maybe they come down over lakes too, but on a lake,
they
could have jumped into the boat from the water. So I don't trust
this
batch."
Laury stared solemnly at
each
one, trying to see some exciting difference. All the frogs were
dark
brown, or green with spots, or a pinkish tan, and they all had big
yellow-gold
eyes. "Beebeeb," said the big one.
"But they all look
normal!"
she was disappointed. "They don't look strange at all." She
picked up the biggest tan one from his glass
box
and kissed it, but nothing about it changed. It stared at her and
puffed
its throat in and out, "Reebeeb."
She put it back.
"Reebeeb," she
said back.
Denny was eager to
explain. "That's
what's strange about them, there aren't any tree frogs or desert toads
or
poison frogs or any of the interesting ones, the frogs people send in
from
frog falls are always the same three kinds, no matter where they are
from."
"Where did you get all
these
frogs?" She tapped on the side of the glass box. Morst of
them
jumped away from her finger into the water, and some jumped toward her
finger
and bumped their noses on the glass.
"Ouch," she said
sympathetically
to the ones who had bumped their noses. "That must have hurt."
Denny was pleased by her
interest.
"The whole collection --" he waved at the room full of glass-faced
boxesfull
of frogs, "was turned over to me by the Charles Fort Foundation.
People
are always sending them frogs from sidewalks and city roofs. They
are
funding me for a research project on the frogs that come down in frog
falls."
"Funding you?" She
looked
at him with admiration. Scientists seemed to have a talent for
generating
money for their most kooky projects. "What do they want you to
do?"
"Just study their genes.
I put
it to the university gene finger printer machine. So far just
normal
Rana pippens and such. No lead there." He leaned warmly
against her
shoulder to point. "That bunch is from a desert in Arizona.
Look
at the date on the label. They were just sent in this week."
Laury was baffled.
"Arizona? Frogs
don't grow in deserts, do they? They grow in water."
Denny was excited.
"They
didn't grow in the desert. They rained out of the sky. A
rain
of frogs. The bible had something about rains of frogs in
Egypt.
But when it happens in a desert, ten or twenty miles from the nearest
puddle,
people really notice it and save some frogs to look at. Then I
have
a chance to get samples."
She was indignant.
"You
think I'll believe frogs fall out of the sky? You're putting me
on.
How did they get into the sky?"
"Here, read this,"
He shoved
a big book into her hands. "It's a collection of reports
about frogs
raining from the sky." Dennis pointed at a photograph of a
wrinkled-looking
toad. "Ask me where that toad came from."
Obediently she asked,
"Where
did it come from?" She calculated the chances of making a tourist
business
about frog falls. Could Denny predict them?
"It was found inside a
lump of
coal. That means it's a billion years old or so. Maybe
all frogs
and toads came from rains of frogs. Maybe rains of frogs
started life
on land, instead of lungfish. Frogs are a billion years old."
She looked at the big one
she
had kissed. "They don't look that old." She thought of
putting
a million-year-old frog on display. Would anyone pay admission?
He took a deep breath to
control
his temper and looked at her figure for consolation. "I don't
mean these
frogs. I mean the ancestors of all frogs. And maybe weare
descended
from them too. My theory is that some alien space satellite was
set
in orbit to seed Earth with life, and it has been cloning frogs eggs
and
raising
pollywogs, and launching frogs down on us ever since Earth cooled and
the
oceans condensed. I'm sure that when I map all the frog falls and
their
dates they're going to show an orbit line around the Earth. With
that
for a clue I can get an observatory to locate the alien satellite in
orbit
around Earth and get it on camera launching frogs." He spun
around
in
glee. "Ha! On CNN and the cover of Science!"
"Why would aliens launch
frogs
at us?" Laury asked. "Is it an invasion?"
"Calm down, Laury.
Frogs
aren't going to hurt us. They never have. They're too
small.
All they do is hop around, swim, lay eggs and eat bugs. They
don't live
long enough to become civilized and start wars." Denny started a
round
of throwing little white worms into the glass boxes. The
frogs' tongues
shot out and yanked the worms into their mouths so suddenly the
insects
seemed to vanish.
"Some of these are adult
males.
The green ones say Peeep and the big ones say Reebeeb and Beebeeb are
singing
to attract females. They mature to be adults in one year."
Laury nodded, "That's
their real
problem, too much sex at an early age, retards growth, distracts
from learning."
The big tan one in the
glass
case said, "Reebeeb reebeeb," in a deep musical voice, still staring at
her.
"You shouldn't have kissed
him," Denny
said, "Kiss me instead."
"You never know about
superstitions
until you try them. He didn't turn into a prince," said
Laury.
"But if he's only a year old he'd make a pretty small prince anyhow,
still
in diapers, so it's a good thing it didn't work."
"But he's an adult."
Denny
moved closer. "I'm an adult too. I'm a consenting
adult.
Kiss me. Maybe I'll turn into a prince."
"Maybe you'll turn into a
frog."
She kissed him but his green baseball cap got in the way. He spun
the
visor to the back, crossed his legs, and tried again.
The big frog sang
"Reebeeb,reebeeb!" and hopped at them, butting his nose against the
glass.
"He's not very
smart," said
Laury. "No kind of invader from a spaceship can conquer anything
being
so small and dumb. Maybe they were sent down to be invaders from
outer
space, but Earth is too sexy for them and they become adults instead of
growing
up."
"If you put thyroid into
the
water of the pollywogs they turn to their adult shape when they are
really
tiny. The tiny females can even lay eggs." Denny said
absently,
watching Laury.
"That's not the kind of
growing
up I meant. That's the opposite. I mean -- what can you give them
to
keep them from getting sexy so they can keep on growing and get bigger?"
"Oh." Denny looked
at the
big pink one. He went to medical reference on his computer and
let
it
search Retarded Growth, Premature Maturity, and Dwarfism, and sat down
to
read it on the screen. "It says it's pituitary hormone,
low pituitary
hormone," he said. "I can expose some of them to pituitary
hormone to
increase growth and retard maturity. I'll write it up as another
project
and they'll grant me more money. Grantsmanship. Do you know
that
frogs have more DNA than humans? I could claim it means that they
have
more shapes available, not just tadpole and frog."
He stayed up reading and
typing
and did not take Laury on a date that night, nor the next night, or any
time
the next two weeks. She grew angry and when she graduated with
her MBA
she volunteered for the Peace Corps and went off to balance books fora
community
improvement incorporation in Mexico. It was easy. She had
free
time to find a beach and let the students try to teach her windsurfing.
In a hotel bar on a
beautiful
beach she met a handsome man who owned the hotel. She moved into
the
hotel for a few years, remaining after the Peace Corps job was over,
balancing
his books and enjoying water sports in the day, and dancing and
lovemaking
with the handsome man at night. Her hair sunbleached a brighter
blonde
and her tan grew darker.
When the handsome man
married
a girl who had been chosed by his mother, Laury accepted his apology
withan
inscrutable smile, packed, wiped out all the hotel's financial
records from
the computer and shredded all the paper records, and caught a plane
back
to
California.
She found out that Denny
had
been given another doctorate on his frog research and now had a bigger
laboratory
and some employees, and best of all he was still unmarred. She
arrived
at Denny's laboratory sure she looked more beautiful than ever.
"Honey, I'm back from
Mexico," she
called out to the back of a man in a green cap wearing Denny's favorite
T-shirt.
The man turned and stood
up tall. His
face was shiny tan and very wide, his eyes were bright gold and very
big,
and his mouth stretched almost from ear to ear.
He was surprisingly
attractive.
"I've never forgotten
you," he
said in a deep musical voice. "Kiss me again."
