What, Again Dangerous Visions: In The Barn, Piers Anthony
Joseph Nebus
Piers Anthony
This is a hard story to read. It's a hard story to evaluate.
It might be the most dangerous, in the sense of giving me the feeling of
imminent peril, in the book so far. Part of this is the subject matter.
Part of this is the author.
To the extent Piers Anthony is thought of now it's usually as a
punch line, the author who's at most admitted to have been someone we
read when we were younger and before we saw through his Xanth gimmick
and the heavy doses of AAAAAUGH MY EYES THEY BURN which his more, ah,
adventurous explorations into such matters as sexuality inspire. At
best he's acknowledged as someone who had some talents which were buried
under a gimmick so extremely popular that it's hard to blame him for
writing what look to the non-fan like extremely disposable,
interchangeable books that sustain his whole ``eating'' habit. Whatever
his reputation is, he's not regarded these days as one of the founts of
good or challenging science fiction.
So this modern reader already feels pulled into a weird
alternate universe by Ellison's fawning introduction, featuring praises
including:
Only rarely in our field does a writer emerge quickly
and totally, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, whole and
complete, writing the way he or she wants to write, and giving
very little damn for the opinions of the fans with their
frequently already-formed conceptions of what is acceptable in
their genre.
It happened with Sheckley, and it happened with Ursula
Le Guin, and it happened with Lafferty, and it happened with
Norman Spinrad, and it happened with Tom Disch ...
And it happened with Piers Anthony.
It goes in this vein for *seven* *pages*, and it inspires a
retrospective clucking at what those silly people thought before they
knew how it all turned out not as grand as Ellison's comments about
James Tiptree Jr very late in the book, but much more sustained. Piers
Anthony praised like *that*? The Piers Anthony who's somehow
satire-idempotent, like local TV news, the Texas State Legislature, or
the Silver Age-era Legion Of Superheroes, impossible to parody in a way
distinguishable from impersonation? It's hard to read the story without
being regularly interrupted with thoughts of, ``What *happened*,
Anthony?'' and reminders of ``oh, yeah, that `eating' habit''.
That feeling of slipping into an alternate world is a benefit
the modern reader has which couldn't have been experienced on original
publication, since the *story* is set after Earth Prime has figured out
the trick of opening portals to other dimensions and is casting about
for alternate histories with stuff worth trading for. Protagonist Hitch
is exploring Counter-Earth #772, evaluating not just its value to Earth
Prime but also its moral fibre: Earth Prime would really quite prefer
not to deal with hideously immoral planets.
And there's a mystery: On Counter-Earth #772, some sort of
backstory catastrophe has wiped out nearly all mammals other than
humans. There are some rodents, sure, but no cows, no goats, no pigs,
no horses, no dogs, no cats ... so why do they have barns? How do they
have milk? He sets off for some work as an itinerant farmhand to try to
crack the mystery.
If you didn't figure it out by now, don't worry; the
illustration heading the story while non-representational gives the key
point away. Think ``Soylent Cheese.'' Still, Hitch finds fair reason
to go through a day handling the ... livestock ... and getting up close
and quite personal with all the major phases of their lifestyle.
Anthony points out in his afterward that while this is science
fiction all he's *really* done is make a substitution of one species for
another relative to how cattle are kept. I admit I'm much more a city
boy than a farm boy, gaining most of my knowledge from informational
short films produced by the National Dairy Council and mocked by Crow
and Tom Servo, but I am willing to believe this claim. Nothing shown
seems outrageously unlikely or contrived if I make the mental switch
back to cows and bulls.
And, good grief, but this *is* science fiction, of the
respectable ``quo warranto'' strain, demanding the reader think about
how it is we consider this to be normal. I did not know until the
supplementary material that Anthony was a vegetarian, even in the 1950s
and even serving in the Army, circumstances which I'd have thought would
make it impossible to even keep kosher, never mind have any more
elaborate dietary habits. It's easy to suppose that perspective formed
the basis of this story; it gives the feeling of something he cared
passionately about.
Anthony puts his finger heavily on the scales here of the moral
questions he's hoping we ask --- Counter-Earth #772 is alleged to be
generally better-behaved than Earth Prime is, and the narrator even
admits that he doesn't understand how that can be --- but then the ways
humans use animals has had a lot of supportive press since the
domestication of whatever was domesticated first. A ``quo warranto''
story can get away with thumbs on the scales given what it's attempting
to ask. I'm not quite sure if Anthony's over the line with his efforts
to assert Counter-Earth #772's virtues, perhaps because most of the
virtues it supposedly has are informed attributes rather than ones shown
(or showable) in the story.
For that matter the world-building falls apart under serious
scrutiny; I'd think a generation removed from the elimination of mammals
there would be much more ecological havoc wrought by insects and birds
and reptiles discovering new niches, and I don't see how the breeding of
humans to be farm animals would be as advanced and developed as shown in
so little time, which is after all *barely* long enough for
grandchildren of the original stock to exist. But this may be written
off as unavoidable for the story background: if the removal of mammals
were so far back that the ecology and sociology could really be balanced
then the human culture would probably have diverged so badly that the
society could not be recognized as ours-with-one-little-change. The
``quo warranto'' story may only work with an improbable change like
that.
The story by itself is not quite as dangerous as it would have
been in 1971, primarily because society's changed. Vegetarianism is no
longer an oddball, far-out habit --- you can eat vegetarian at Burger
King or McDonald's without straining the menu boards --- and even
Veganism is getting relatively easy to accommodate; and people are
rather more willing to think about the suffering humans inflict on
animals and demand stronger reasons for the infliction and less
suffering in the doing. For that matter when the story was written it
wasn't far removed from the days that it was acceptable to taunt the
animals in zoos --- weren't they prisoners, brought forth for shaming,
losers of the war against Savage Nature? (an attitude more common to the
19th Century, but not fully eliminated yet) --- and when Rachel Carson
controversially suggested that maybe we didn't need to soak *every*
square inch of the planet four feet deep in neurotoxins just to be sure
traffic signs weren't obstructed by tall bushes.
And yet the context of the story has changed. Besides a growing
acceptance that animals should be treated as humanely as possible, and
that level should be growing in time, there's the source issue. What is
Piers Anthony, one of the least challenging writers you can buy by the
cubic yard at the bookstore, doing with a story that Peter Singer might
have written to make some of his arguments about animal ethics? And why
isn't he writing stuff like that now? (Oh, yeah, ``eating''.)
There are many creepy things in here, including touches of ... I
suppose it is bestiality despite the literal meaning of the term, and
I'd have to stare at the story and think about it a while to say where
the . But it's unmistakably a deliberate, conscious choice done to make
the story demand more thinking. And that leaves me distracted by
Anthony-the-punching-bag now.
There's bits of the lesser Xanth novels which get into
bestiality and other stuff which it's easy to try to just not think
about. Remember that amusing ``true book covers'' thing that went
around maybe two years ago, with the faux Piers Anthony title _Child
Porn Is Perfectly Acceptable In Some Cultures_. And I'm left wondering:
is creepy weird stuff slipped into his books because Anthony sells well
enough that his editors are satisfied his name is spelled correctly on
the book jacket, or is he trying to see if he can outrage readers who'd
otherwise written him off? Is he pushing envelopes of comfort the way
he did here? Is he challenging readers to answer for themselves why a
proposition is controversial even if he's not being noticed for that?
The story's left me thinking about a lot, only some of which is
what the original story meant to ask. But as a thing I go back to and
try to re-evaluate and reconsider this story is probably on top of the
_Again, Dangerous Visions_ set so far.
DANGER LEVEL: Remarkably high.
VISION LEVEL: Yes, there's a lot to see here, too.
NEXT: ``Soundless Evening'', Lee Hoffman.
NEAR: [ Blotch ], Gahan Wilson.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Goss
> And yet the context of the story has changed. Besides a growing
>acceptance that animals should be treated as humanely as possible, and
>that level should be growing in time ...
Yet, the story was written before the domination of the factory farm.
Chicken "batteries" for egg layers existed, but not the hog crates or
some of the other feed lot innovations. There may be a belief in the
public that animals should be treated as humanely as possible, but not
if that adds a dime a pound to the price of the meat.
--
Tomorrow is today already.
Greg Goss, 1989-01-27
David Cowie
> ``In The Barn''
> Piers Anthony
I read A, DV in the mid 1980s, and so far the only stories that I
remember reading from your reviews are this one and "When It Changed" by
Joanna Russ.
--
David Cowie http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidcowie/
Containment Failure + 58635:53
Robert Carnegie
> There are many creepy things in here, including touches of ... I
> suppose it is bestiality despite the literal meaning of the term, and
> I'd have to stare at the story and think about it a while to say where
> the . But it's unmistakably a deliberate, conscious choice done to make
> the story demand more thinking.
There seems to be a text glitch but I'm not sure I want to stay around
to find what you were going to say...
I'm also reminded, firstly by the question of the creepy end of
exploitation, of one or more exploitative texts with slavery in the
United States as the setting (is "In the Barn" a race story, or is the
story society, like ancient Rome, enlightened enough to make slaves
of anyone regardless of physical appearance?), and also of incomplete
acquaintance with _Monkey Planet_ / _Planet of the Apes_, in which it
wasn't clear to me even whether the native "humans" were sophonts,
unless it was considered inconceivable by the story creators and
intended audience that they weren't. (Clothed by Franciscan apes or
by a prudish film studio.) Of course 21st century Earth has debates
about "human rights" for primates other than homo sapiens, too.
And to several other stories where one species looks like another from
a different world and really isn't - sapient or not.
David DeLaney
>Joseph Nebus wrote:
>> There are many creepy things in here, including touches of ... I
>> suppose it is bestiality despite the literal meaning of the term, and
>> I'd have to stare at the story and think about it a while to say where
>> the . But it's unmistakably a deliberate, conscious choice done to make
>> the story demand more thinking.
>
>There seems to be a text glitch but I'm not sure I want to stay around
>to find what you were going to say...
Almost certainly on the order of "to say where the line could be drawn",
given the subject.
Dave
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