Shadows in the Sun

by Chad Oliver

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Anthropologist Paul Ellery discovers that the small Texas town of Jefferson Springs is actually an imitation of small-town America created by the aliens who now offer him a chance to explore the universe

Release date: September 11, 1985

Publisher: Crown Publishing

Print pages: 192

Sample

Shadows in the Sun (1954) was Chad Oliver’s second published novel, and his confessed favorite throughout his life. The Ballantine Books edition appeared in simultaneous hardcover and paperback, and was followed by British, French, German, and Italian editions published between 1955 and 1967. The second American edition came out in 1968, in the Ballantine Bal-Hi books paperback series for students, featuring a special two-page introduction to parents and teachers about the novel’s theme and a reading level indicator at the back of the book. Crown’s edition of 1985, in my ten volume set of rediscovered books, with a general foreword by Isaac Asimov, was the novel’s first American edition in nearly two decades.

“The theme is an alien masquerade on Earth,” wrote Damon Knight in the May 1955 Science Fiction Quarterly; “the treatment is original and compelling.” J. Francis McComas, the great co-founding editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction wrote in The New York Times Book Review for December 5, 1954: “With this, his first adult book, Chad Oliver, author of a number of excellent short stories and a first-rate juvenile, has written what is very likely the best science fiction novel of the year. In a quiet, realistic, entertaining story, he has brought one of the great science fictional themes down to earth. For, in this book, the almost insoluble problem of the Terran man versus the superman from outer space is worked out…within the confines of one small American town. To the men of other star systems, Terran man may be nothing more or less than a savage. And what happens to the savage when he meets civilization head-on? What happened to the savages of our own world when their lands were colonized by the culturally superior white man? In essence, then, the problem posed by this novel is the salvation of the savage. And while the whole equation is not worked out-—no earthly anthropologist is yet wise enough to do that-—enough of the solution is intimated to make this one of the most thought-provoking pieces of fiction, scientific or otherwise, this reviewer has read in years.”

One of Oliver’s wry solutions to the problem of the earthborn savage is to let us live in “reservations” known as cities, where we can be contained and managed by the aliens, who will control the liberated countryside. Another solution is to let us destroy ourselves. Alien control will simply follow our natures, since we exhibit both the tendency to crowd into cities and to threaten our survival through warfare. The aliens would go unnoticed.

Writing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for April 1955, Anthony Boucher, the other great editor and cofounder of that publication, announced that Shadows in the Sun “…clearly establishes Chad Oliver as one of the leading young talents in the field…Oliver is a trained professional anthropologist as well as a skilled writer; and he uses his knowledge of anthropological field techniques to revitalize completely the familiar theme of “There-Are-Alien-Observers-Among-Us.” I can’t think of anyone who has more sensibly and convincingly portrayed members of a highly advanced civilization who are not supermen, or who has treated more logically and humanly the problems of one of us in adjusting to such a culture.”

P. Schuyler Miller, writing in Astounding Science Fiction (May 1955), stated that the novel showed “Chad Oliver’s study of anthropology sinking into his thinking and writing, and I’m inclined to say that it’s the best science fiction with an anthropological theme that I have seen.” He also underscored one of the book’s key ideas: that humanoid intelligence may be common in the galaxy, and that the greatest differences between its civilizations may be cultural, not physical. Oliver at one point in the novel does permit the existence of wholly alien Others, “…intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,” in H. G. Wells’ famous phrase, with which Oliver will deal in The Shores of Another Sea, the third novel in his Aliens Trilogy of escalating otherness. But in this opener the problem for Paul Ellery, anthropologist, is to decide whether he wants to be educated to take his place in the alien society. This opportunity holds a great attraction for a scientist; so much will be revealed to him. His other choice is to remain with his own kind and help its development as best he can.

Kingsley Amis’s disappointing view of Shadows in the Sun (in New Maps of Hell, a study of science fiction published in 1960), shows him blind to the novel’s anthropological materials. Paul Ellery is, for Amis, an unlikely anthropologist: six feet tall, two hundred pounds, and an American from Texas, of all places, but in fact a fair physical description of Chad Oliver himself. Certain features of genre fiction are, of course, completely overcome by the novel’s scientific authenticity revealing the impotence of purely literary or formal critiques of genuinely scientific science fiction. The similarities in Oliver’s novel to conventional genre narrative strategies are superficial, the differences profound.

Amis’s lapses into literary and cultural parochialisms seemed strange in a critic who professed to understand science fiction, especially when discussing a novel of first contact with an alien civilization. But his confused reaction may also explain why too few readers appreciated Oliver’s work in the 1950s; they failed to notice the subtle use of anthropological dilemmas in his stories and novels. This was not the case, happily, among the better critics and reviewers; Amis seemed to have been the most noteworthy exception.

An interesting professional notice for Shadows in the Sun appeared in a 1955 issue of the American Anthropologist. Evon Z. Vogt of Harvard University wrote: “…this delightful book calls the attention of social scientists to Chad Oliver (a graduate student of anthropology at UCLA) as a first-rate science fiction writer. The plot is similar to Huxley’s Brave New World but with an interesting extension in scope. Instead of dealing merely with Earth, Oliver brings ‘civilized’ man in from other Earth-type planets. The ‘savages’ are not American Indians but ourselves. This startling discovery is made by Paul Ellery, Ph.D. in Anthropology, who is making an anthropological study of Jefferson Springs, Texas. Throughout the book, effective use is made of the concepts and data of contemporary anthropological writers. Anthropology definitely comes of age in science fiction in this unusual book…”

This description of Oliver’s novel shows how far removed it is from routine commercial genre efforts involving aliens and flying saucers.

Today, Shadows in the Sun has lost nothing of its reputation. Readers who take anthropology for granted in the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Bishop, and others, responded with interest to the 1980s Crown editions of Chad Oliver’s three alien novels. A major article on Chad Oliver by L. David Allen appeared in Everett F. Bleiler’s Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day (Scribner, 1982), in which only seventy-five authors are covered. Oliver was ranked in the top ten percent of science fiction writers. Oliver’s books are listed in Neil Barron’s influential Anatomy of Wonder (1976, and in continuing editions). Harlan Ellison wrote: “I have been an enthusiastic admirer of Shadows in the Sun since it was originally published. Among other virtues, it was one of the first genuine New Wave novels, and that long before there was a New Wave. Chad Oliver was among the most underrated writers in science fiction.”

The New Wave description called attention to Oliver’s focus on character and place, its here-and-now reality and to the emotional undercurrents that show up in all of Oliver’s fiction. The science is real, however, and so the novel might also be claimed for the “hard science fiction school” as well, except that this description is still incorrectly applied to science fiction based on physics, astronomy, chemistry, and even biology, often lacking in writerly virtues. But Oliver, the scientist, did bring his professional sensibility into his fiction and was compared to scientist-authors Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and others; and it was this combination of science and human character, expressed in a graceful, literate style, one of the professed ideals of the science fiction’s New Wave of the 1960s, however often that movement rode off in other directions, that won Oliver that comparison. The challenge of combining the writerly virtues with those of genuine science fiction is still with us.

One example of how Oliver met this challenge, as both a writer and anthropologist, and as a science fiction writer, is made clear when Paul Ellery decides to stay on Earth rather than be educated by the aliens. He stays because it would be bad anthropology for him to go; he would be exchanging one set of cultural problems for another, for ones that he would have to learn from scratch. Character, plot, science all move dramatically forward at the same time, subtly, with feeling and poetry, streaming implications in all directions from the main action. Compare this with Richard Dreyfuss donning a red suit and rushing to board a flying saucer in Close Encounters, a movie with more than a few echoes of Oliver’s work in it, but less of his sophistication.

The final, moving moments of Paul Ellery’s decision to stay on Earth in order to delve more deeply into himself and his kind, reveals a profound anthropological commitment, one that I suspect is much like Oliver’s dedication to his own work as a scientist and teacher.

Suddenly we see that cultures are angular views of the universe, and that their unique physical and cultural perspectives are to be treasured and defended; each is a response to the mystery of existence, but Oliver raises the problem beyond the level of nation-state, to a planetary awareness. Here is mine, hard won, with its own integrity, such as it is—a statement of natural identity, and a source of irrationally prideful conflict when attacked militarily.

Paul Ellery chooses his humanity, knowing that progress cannot be imported without a price and free of all harm; to be real, it must be won from within, in endless ways, just as understanding must be built up afresh in each individual.

—George ZebrowskiDelmar, NY 2007

At first it had had been plain stubbornness, disguised as scientific curiosity, that had kept Paul Ellery going. It was different now.

He had to know.

He sat at the corner table of the Jefferson Springs Cafe, alone as he had always been alone in Jefferson Springs. There wasn’t much to look at in the small dining room—a grimy electric clock that had been exactly six minutes slow for the past two months; a somewhat battered jukebox, with tired technicolored bubbles, dying on its feet; the inevitable painting of Judge Roy Bean’s Law West of the Pecos; a greenish-glass case filled with warm candy bars. Paul Ellery looked anyway, with restrained desperation. Then he pushed back his plate with its remnants of chicken-fried steak and French fries, and began to draw wet circles on the varnished table with the bottom of his beer bottle.

There was a boxlike air-conditioner stuck in one window, consisting of a fan that blew wet air into the room. Ellery could hear the water from the fan hose dripping down to the ground on the other side of the wall; and inside the cafe it was so humid that even the wood was sweating.

Except for the hum and drip of the air-conditioner, there wasn’t a sound. It was like sitting in a cave, miles beneath the earth.

Waiting for an earthquake.

Ellery tried to ignore the unwanted little animal that kept shivering up and down his spine on multiple ice-sheathed feet. He tried to remind himself that the animal was imaginary. He tried to tell himself that he had nothing to fear. He tried to look calmer than he felt.

It was incredible.

The month was August, the day was Thursday. He was in Jefferson Springs, a town of six thousand inhabitants, in the state of Texas; a part, usually, of the United States of America. It was eight o’clock in the evening and it was hot. Some one hundred and twenty miles to the north was the city of San Antonio, where the Alamo had given way to the Air Force. Sixty miles to the south was Eagle Pass, and on across the river was Piedras Negras, in Mexico. Everything seemed perfectly ordinary. Indeed, Jefferson Springs could hardly have been a more average town if it had tried.

On the surface, there was no cause for alarm.

He finished his beer, and it was as hot and sticky as the rest of the cafe. He briefly considered ordering another one, but abandoned the idea. Instead, with great deliberation, he dug his pipe out of his back pocket, where he carried it like a .45, and filled it with tobacco from a cloudy plastic pouch. He lit it with a wood stick match, broke the match, and dropped it artistically into the beer bottle. Then he aimed a wobbly smoke ring in the general direction of Judge Roy Bean and watched it battle the current from the air-conditioner.

“The hell with all of you,” he said, silently but inclusively.

He was the only customer in the Jefferson Springs Cafe. He had been the only customer, so far as he could tell, for the past sixty-one days. Cozy.

The first week he had been in Jefferson Springs he had played the jukebox religiously. It had seemed like sound field technique, and it had helped to fill up the emptiness with a semblance of life. As he was somewhat selective in his choice of popular music, however, this hadn’t proved precisely a sedative to his nerves. The jukebox in the cafe was typical of those in small Texas towns. There were a number of nasal cowboy standards, including When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again and San Antonio Rose. There were several old Bing Crosby records: White Christmas and Don’t Fence Me In. There were a number of year-old blues sides, featuring honking one-note saxes and leering pseudo-sexual lyrics leading up to inevitable anticlimaxes. There was a haphazard collection of middle-aged hit-parade agonies, notably Doggie in the Window and Till I Waltz Again with You. And finally, slipped in by mistake, there was an old Benny Goodman Sextet number, Rose Room. He played that ten times during the first week, and then gave up.

In a way he could not quite understand, the record had violated an unseen pattern. It was not a simple and obvious case of the records being out of place in Jefferson Springs; rather, it was the fact that music was being played at all, any music. The pattern was a subtle one, but he had been trained to be sensitive to just such cultural harmonies and configurations.

Paul Ellery had often remarked elsewhere that he would just as soon eat his food without the collective sobbings of the music industry in the background, to say nothing of an endless babble of human voices earnestly reciting the current cliches. Now that he found himself faced with total silence, however, he found the experience unexpectedly unpleasant. The silence cut him off, isolated him. It put him in the middle of a bright stage, without a script or an orchestra, alone, with the curtain going up.

He sat for what seemed to him to be a long time, smoking his pipe. Somehow, only fifteen slow minutes crawled by on the greasy electric clock above the doorway. The doorway led to a small alcove, which faced both the kitchen and the dar. . .