Mitch's Blog

“The Push of a Finger (free Gutenberg download) by Alfred Bester, was my second go at reading a story that I loved when I was 12 years old. I re-read it this past weekend, and very much enjoyed it. (Previously: Revisiting a childhood favorite story: ‘Dreams are Sacred’ still delights.)

As with “Dreams Are Sacred,” the Bester story is still entertaining. Like “Dreams Are Sacred,” the hero is a street-smart, wisecracking New York newspaperman with a brain in his head and abundant common sense. Published in 1942 in Astounding Science Fiction, “The Push of a Finger” is set a thousand years in the future, but the situations and language are straight out of a screwball comedy or noir movie from the 40s.

The hero is Carmichael, one of a dozen reporters for as many different newspapers assigned to the mysterious Prog Building in New York, where the technocrats who run the world issue pronouncements to preserve the Stability that has been the rule of civilization for centuries. The reporters are a brawling, fast-talking bunch, but they keep to their roles. By the rule of the Stability, every newspaper must have a balancing newspaper on the other side, and every decision by the ruling technocrats must be met by full-throated agreement by one newspaper and equal denunciation by its opposite number.

Carmichael finds a way to sneak into the mysterious Prog Building and discovers an event that will destroy the universe in a thousand years. “The Push of a Finger” has a similar gimmick to the far more famous “The Sound of Thunder," by Ray Bradbury, which ran in the far more upscale Collier’s magazine in 1952: The cataclysmic change in the future can be prevented by a trivial change in the present. Carmichael leads a team of technocrats in finding out what that minor, precipitating event is and stopping it.

I’m making the story sound more bombastic than it is. Bester was always a playful writer, fond of wordplay, absurdism and doggerel. In “The Push of a Finger,” a crowd of students at a demonstration chants

Neon
Krypton
Ammoniated
FitzJohn

and that bit of verse has been stuck in my head for days. (And now it’s stuck in yours. Um sorry I guess.)

Later, one of the characters exclaims, “I’ll be a pie-eyed emu!” which proves to be important.

Bester seemed to be drinking from the same creative well as the Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc.), but a decade or two earlier, and pinning his writing to a scaffolding of pulp science fiction.

Bester’s best-known novels were “The Demolished Man” (1953), a murder mystery in a society of telepaths, and “The Stars My Destination” (1956), a retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo in a society where people have the power to teleport from one location to another by sheer force of mind.

The politics of “The Push of a Finger” are typical of science fiction of the day and maybe of the U.S. at that time. The world of the future was going to be highly organized, centrally planned, and run by technocrats, just as the real world was at that time. It was 1942 – World War II was raging, the Depression was just a few years earlier, and the great nations of the world were highly centralized machines governed by technocrats. Surely that would continue forever. That’s the way Isaac Asimov wrote, and even Robert A. Heinlein, later an icon of libertarianism, featured centrally planned societies in his early stories, published at about this time.

I didn’t talk abut racism and sexism in “Dreams are Sacred” and I don’t have much to say about it here. Both stories are typical in that regard for pulp science fiction written and published in the 1940s. Race isn’t mentioned, women are nearly in the background, LGBTQ and disabled people don’t exist.

Something odd along those lines that I did notice: In the American pulps of the 40s and earlier, characters almost always had Anglo or European names: Carmichael, Pete Parnell, Steve Blakiston, etc. This was the norm back then, and I grew up in the 70s immersed in stories from that period and didn’t think twice about it. But re-reading those stories today, the high percentage of Anglo names (and the missing women and nonwhite people and disabled and LGBTQ people) stands out to me as weird. I’m not saying this to condemn the writers of that era; they were living in their world just as I live in ours. But it’s odd and unrealistic.

Bester was a giant of science fiction when I was a young fan in the 70s, and all science fiction fans then would have heard of him and most would have read him. Now I suspect he’s nearly forgotten by anybody under 50. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Fresh Air:

25 years ago, the TV series The West Wing premiered. It was a behind-the-scenes look at a fictional White House. We revisit our interviews with show creator/writer Aaron Sorkin, and actors Allison Janney, who played C.J., and John Spencer, who played Leo McGarry. They talk about the show’s signature walk-and-talk and the quippy, rapid-fire style of dialogue.

Allison Janney describes herself as “five feet 12 inches” tall and said she had difficulty landing roles until her late 30s. Now, she said, “I get cast as either the smartest person in the room or the drunkest person in the room.”

We’ve re-watched the first and second episodes recently, and I think we’ll stick with it.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber in conversation with The Verge’s Nilay Patel about the iPhone, camera photography and more. It’s a wide-ranging interview – more than two and a half hours – but listening flew by, because Gruber and Patel are outstanding speakers.

One particular point jumped out at me: The camera has become a primary input device for iPhones. Cameraphones are now multipurpose machines used to record a wide range of video and photos: Hollywood movies, fine art photography and videos, family milestones such as a child’s first steps and weddings, casual photos (“Hey, look at this!"), and serial numbers on consumer purchases. And the phone is expected to excel at all those things.

“It’s not Jersey Boys!” A conversation on the Take Me To Your Reader podcast with Matthew Zrebski, director and adapter of a contemporary English-language update to the 1920 science fiction play “R.U.R.,” by Karel Čapek. The play was where the word “robot” was coined.

So many people I know hate retirement until they get a hobby that requires them to work. They join a board and do tons of work, or they start crafting and making tables. They do that work and then they relax and have their glass of wine and they have a really nice day because they actually were productive. I think we, as humans, are designed to be productive.

Make Identity Central Again, with Bluesky’s Jay Graber. Bluesky’s vision is that your identity is the same across social media services, and you would be able to move your following and follower list from one service to another, like phone number portability but for social media.

“Social is really starting to stagnate because we’re in this trap where users are locked in and developers are locked out. And we need to open that up again,” says the Bluesky CEO in an interview with Mike McCue on the Dot Social podcast.

Whatever happened to Kate Middleton? Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick talks with British royals journalist Ellie Hall about the rumors that swirled earlier this year about Kate Middleton. “A lot of very, very unhinged people kind of got this right.”

Conspiracy theories aren’t just for lunatics like the Qanon Shaman and people who obsess about the royals — we all get our news from conspiracies nowadays.

I had a blast Sunday re-reading one of my favorite stories from when I was 12 years old: “Dreams are Sacred,” by a writer named Peter Phillips. It was easy to track down — a quick Google search on the title (which fortunately I remembered) led me to the Internet Archive and a complete scan of the magazine where it was first published: Astounding Science Fiction, September, 1948

The story holds up — it’s exciting, fast-paced and funny.

The hero is Pete Parnell, a fast-talking wisecracking New York sportswriter who is recruited by his friend Steve Blakiston, a psychiatrist, to help with an experimental technique that could cure the madness of a science fiction and fantasy writer named Marsham Craswell. The writer has fallen into an unconscious fugue state and is trapped in an endless dream scenario from his own stories, which resemble Conan the Barbarian or Barsoom.

Fortunately, Blakiston has invented a machine which allows one person to enter another’s dream. Parnell is tapped for the job of curing Blakiston because Parnell is the fastest-thinking and hardest-headed person Blakiston knows.

Supporting characters include a friendly cop with an Irish accent straight out of cartoons, a surly cab driver and a sexy lounge singer.

I found the story every bit as enjoyable as I did when I was 12 years old. Old-fashioned? Sure! That’s part of the fun.

Phillips, the author, was no New Yorker — he was English. He was a newspaperman who wrote about two dozen science fiction stories. He died in 2012, age 92. In addition to “Dreams are Sacred,” he also wrote another story I loved when I was a boy, “Manna,” about a stack of canned super-food that gets transported accidentally back in time to a medieval monastery. Hilarity ensues.

More on Phillips here, including some wonderful old magazine and book covers.

Astounding Science Fiction, the magazine “Dreams are Sacred” appeared in, was founded in 1930, with the delicious title, “Astounding Stories of Super-Science.” Beginning in 1939, under editor John Campbell, Astounding published groundbreaking writers including Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. The magazine changed its name to Analog Science Fact & Fiction in 1960 and still publishes today, under the name Analog Science Fiction & Fact.

Also last weekend, I re-read another favorite from the same period, “The Push of a Finger," by Alfred Bester. And I downloaded one more, “Farewell to the Master,” by Harry Bates, which was the basis for the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

I read all three stories when I was a boy, in the fat, two-volume anthology, “The Astounding-Analog Reader," which I checked out of the East Northport Public Library about a dozen times, every time I was in the mood to re-read it.

All three stories have newspapermen as heroes. I guess those stories made an impression — I have made my career in journalism of one form or another for my entire life. (In addition to those stories, I also devoured Superman, Spider-Man, and especially the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Lou Grant. I wanted to be Lou Grant when I grew up. I still do.)