The Shores of Another Sea

Book 499: Gateway Essentials

by Chad Oliver

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

Synopsis

On the dusty, remote plains of Kenya, Royce Crawford runs a baboonery. One day there is a strange light in the East African sky, and the baboons start disappearing from their cages. he finds that the animals have changed. The strange look of cold intelligence. reveals to Crawford that he is no longer the hunter, but the hunted.

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

Kingsley Amis, in his review of this novel, wrote that a six-foot, two hundred pound American anthropologist from Texas, dressed in a wide-brimmed hat, khaki shift and trousers, Ph.D. well hidden, was an unlikely hero for a science-fiction story; yet this was nothing more than a fair description of Chad Oliver himself. In his photos, Chad Oliver could easily have passed for John D. MacDonald’s popular sleuth, the thoughtful yet adventurous Travis McGee. Amis’s lapse into parochialism was odd in a critic who was a reader of science fiction, especially when he was discussing a novel about a first encounter with an alien civilization.

The first book I read by Chad Oliver was Mists of Dawn, a young-adult novel published in 1952 as part of a distinguished science-fiction program presented by Winston. These books set a standard for unpatronizing young-adult science fiction which, together with the books published by Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton, has rarely been bettered. Mists of Dawn, which I came upon in 1958, was also one of the first science-fiction novels I read. I remember being struck by the sympathetic account of the early humans depicted in the story; and the time-travel adventure enthralled me so completely that I read the book at one sitting. Chad Oliver became one of my favorite writers. And, I learned one of the joys of early readership--that there were other books by the same author!

Chad Oliver belonged to that distinguished group of science-fiction writers who are also scientists. The list includes Isaac Asimov, Gregory Benford, and Sir Arthur C. Clarke, among others; but Oliver was the only anthropologist in this group, and as such he brought a deeper sense of humanity into his writing. It was the qualities of compassion, attention to mood and thoughtfulness and character, together with a constant awareness of a larger horizon to human history looking back in time as well as forward into futures—that kept me reading Oliver’s work.

When his first story collection, Another Kind (1955) appeared, Damon Knight noted that Oliver was “building up our field’s most fascinating and comprehensive collection of anthropological science fiction.” Anthony Boucher praised Another Kind as the “outstanding science-fiction book of the year.” And this was only the author’s third book. A comparable traversal of anthropological themes was not to be seen until the publication of Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Bishop in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Shores of Another Sea, Oliver’s sixth novel, was published as a Signet New American Library paperback original in 1971 and as a British hardcover in the same year; it received excellent notices in England. It followed The Wolf Is My Brother (1967), which won the Spur Award as best western historical novel of the year, given by the Western Writers of America. Oliver had every reason to feel encouraged, but the American paperback of Shores was not reviewed in any of the science-fiction magazines, not even in Analog, where Oliver was well known. One suspects that the printing was small and that few review copies were sent out.

The novel is set in Kenya, where Oliver spent some time doing anthropological research It’s a novel in which personal experience is perfectly blended with the theme of first contact. Dean McLaughlin, a writer also noted for his anthropological themes, has called it “the most marvelously understated first contact story I have ever found. So quietly real you know it could have happened. Maybe it did.”

As the novel unfolds, an unnerving analogy begins to emerge: we are to the baboons of the story as the alien visitors are to us. A subtle guilt begins to operate in the reader, recalling not only the horrors of the colonial white man’s treatment of Africa but also our treatment of the planet’s animal life. Only Arthur C. Clarke, in The Deep Range (1957), has given our treatment of Earth’s animals the pointed consideration given the problem in Oliver’s novel. It is a work rich in resonances and ironies, and Kenya’s colonial past makes the reader tremble as the characters are overtaken by the full development of the central situation. The stresses and strains of the story, together with its deeply felt emotional core, involves the reader completely. Hemingway could not have written a better book with this theme.

The best and brightest of science fiction’s critics and reviewers responded well to Oliver’s two decades of science fiction. Anthony Boucher placed him in the front rank with Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov. Gary K. Wolfe, writing in St James Guide To Science Fiction Writers (St. James, 1996), notes that Oliver’s “real strengths lie in the construction of hypothetical anthropological problems and his graceful, understated style. Unearthly Neighbors (1960) may be the most carefully reasoned account of the problems of making contact with an alien culture in all science fiction.” Wolfe credits Oliver as being solely responsible for introducing well-thought-out anthropological themes into science fiction. His work is “valuable both for the specific insights it offers and for the importance it holds in the developing sophistication of the genre.” Damon Knight summed up Oliver’s talent best: “Oliver has the kind of gift this field sorely lacks—the ability to touch the heart of the human problem.”

One error about Oliver’s writing career deserves to be cleared up: he never stopped writing fiction. Although his last science fiction novel was published in 1976, short fiction continued to appear in such anthologies as Again, Dangerous Visions, in the Continuum series, in Future Quest and Future Kin. In 1981, new stories were published in Analog and in Fred Saberhagen’s A Spadeful of Spacetime. Another story, “Ghost Town,” appeared in “Analog” in 1983. A work of nonfiction, The Discovery of Humanity: An Introduction to Anthropology, was published in 1981. He continued to write until his death in August of 1993, and published two award-winning historical novels in 1989, Broken Eagle and The Cannibal Owl, which received poor support from their publisher and should have new editions; both should be of interest to SF readers who know his work.

Chad and I became friends in the last decade of his life, when I edited the Crown Classics and included these three alien novels. We had a mutual friend, the writer Howard Waldrop, whom I had anthologized, and with whom Chad went fishing. Howard and I occasionally bring Chad back to life between us. When I told Howard of this NESFA omnibus of these novel about contact with alien humanities, he said: “Chad lost a year of life and school when he had rheumatic fever and spent nearly a year in bed reading air-war pulps and SF magazines and missing out on other kinds of stuff.

“Then he was taken—kablooie—from an upper-middle class white neighborhood in Cincinnati; and plopped down in the outskirts of Crystal City, Texas with blacks, native americans and latinos. If that wasn’t disjunction enough, he lived in the Japanese-American internment camp during WWII, where his father was the doctor, next to the German and Italian POW camp. He had what we call a well-rounded introduction to other cultures, in a big hurry. And at the time he was a 78 pound weakling.

“‘Football saved my scrawny ass,’ is the way he used to phrase it. I don’t know what this has to do with anything about Chad’s career as a writer and anthropologist …”

“Everything, Howard,” I said. “Read books while he was sick and later met a lot of different people. There are saints who started that way.”

“Yeah—I knew that,” Howard said, “but no one brought it up about Chad before.”

We were silent for a few moments, holding Chad between us.

—George ZebrowskiDelmar, NY 2007   

And if by chance you make a landfall on the shores of another sea in a far country inhabited by savages and barbarians, remember you this: the greatest danger and the surest hope lies not with fires and arrows but in the quicksilver hearts of men.

—ADVICE TO NAVIGATORS (1744)

It began as a perfectly ordinary day—ordinary, that is, for the Baboonery.

Royce Crawford frowned at his crippled typewriter. He filled his pipe with tobacco from a yellow Sweet Nut tin, and lit it. It wasn’t the best tobacco in the world, but it had one decisive advantage over all other brands: it was the only kind he could get. He could buy Sweet Nut for a few bob anywhere in Kenya, even at the duka in Mitaboni, and that made it extra special. He puffed on the pipe and stared at the bare plank walls of the little room he used as an office. The door was open and he could see into the main operating room across the hall. The clean white table was empty. The clamps were relaxed and waiting. They had been waiting for a long time now.

He had to finish his monthly report to Wallace, which was a chore he detested at the best of times. And this, emphatically, was not the best of times. Royce knew that something was wrong, but he had no solid facts at his disposal. He had an impression, a crawling sensation on his back, a feeling of unease. For three days he had felt that he was being … watched.

Royce was not an unduly fanciful man. He was singularly unworried by dreams. He wouldn’t have known an omen if he tripped over one. In his scheme of things, premonitions were in a class with astrology and female vapors. At the same time, he was not a clod with a muscle for a brain. Royce had led an unusual life and he was no stranger to trouble. He had learned to trust himself when he could not rely on others. When he had a hunch it generally meant something. As far as he was concerned, if he felt that he was being watched it meant just that.

Something had him under observation.

A man cannot be a hunter without knowing what it is to be hunted. He couldn’t tell that to Wallace, of course. Wallace was a long way from the Baboonery. He was in another world.

Royce shifted in his chair and looked out the window. The window was open, as always, for the excellent reason that it could not be shut. It had a screen in it, but no glass. This alone marked the Baboonery as an American enterprise: most of the British-built structures in Kenya had glass windows and no screens. On the whole, he supposed, the system worked pretty well. The majority of the British houses—some still British, some not—were in the highlands where the weather was often chilly. It never got cold at the Baboonery.

Maybe that was part of the trouble, he thought without conviction. The weather was getting on his nerves. It was dry, bone dry, and it was hot. There was nothing green as far as the eye could see. The red dust was everywhere, like a crust of rusted iron. Even the elephants were a light reddish color, pink elephants for real; they would not be gray again until the short rains came. The baboons sat in their rows of cages and peered out along their snouts at a world that seemed too barren to support life. The parched dry banana leaves rustled in the steady arid wind like a mockery of rain. From somewhere around the main building, out of his line of vision, he could hear the tuneless song of Mbali, the shamba boy. It was a curious song: haunting but formless, it faded on the wind and could never be quite recalled when the singer stopped.

Royce’s pipe went out and he lit it again. He pulled up the typewriter. Ben Wallace knew what the Baboonery was like. He had spent a lot of time there. He knew all about the heat and the politics and the men who could suddenly turn alien just when you thought you had them figured out. Royce thought of Wallace on the other end of the report he had to write, Wallace sitting there at his compulsively neat desk at the Foundation office in Houston. It was late September. The air conditioning would still be going full blast in Houston. There would be mobs at the Astrodome, watching the Astros limp valiantly through another season. Ben Wallace would be dressed in one of his sincere dark suits—wrinkle-free, lint-free, bulge-free. Wallace would want some facts, not impressions.

Okay. Royce typed the familiar heading: Kikumbuliu Primate Research Station, P. O. Mitaboni, Kenya, East Africa. He supplied the date and proceeded to confine himself to essentials. He had forty baboons on hand, fifteen of them female. He would ship twenty animals to Houston within three weeks, sending them by train to Nairobi and then putting them on the plane himself at Embakasi. The other twenty baboons were still undergoing tests of various sorts; he included information on the condition of each animal. The only unusual expenses—and they were becoming something less than unusual—involved repairs to the starter on the Land Rover and to the generator for the Baboonery electrical system. He added that he, his wife, and the two kids were all well, signed the report, and that was that.

Royce Crawford stood up, stretched, and glanced at his watch. It was after two. He would have to shake a leg. The men needed meat and he might have to go all the way to the Tsavo to get it. It had to be today; Donaldson would be coming in within the next day or two, and Donaldson did not take kindly to hunting when he was wet-nursing a safari.

Royce grabbed an envelope—already stamped and addressed to the Foundation—and walked out into the African sunlight.

It took Royce a good hour to do what he had to do. He sent the battered lorry into Mitaboni twenty-five miles away to air-mail the report and pick up some supplies. He checked the baboon cages to make certain they were clean and secure. He took his .375 out of the gun safe in the breezeway between the kitchen and his bedroom. He helped Kathy get the children down for their afternoon nap. He drank a cup of ferocious coffee.

Then he was as free as a man can be, and despite his nagging worry he was content. It was good to have a task ahead of him that was pure pleasure. There weren’t many jobs like that left in the world.

The Land Rover, miraculously, started on the first try. It was a wide-wheel-base model with a tarp that stretched over a frame in back of the cab. In the dry seasons, the tarp wasn’t used; the Land Rover, in effect, became a pick-up truck not unlike the ones Royce had used back in Texas. When he hunted, Royce rode in back with Mutisya. Kilatya, God help him, did the driving.

There were three dirt roads, little more than trails, that led away from the cluster of buildings that was the Baboonery. One, straight as a drunken snake, went ten miles through the bush to join the main road that connected Mombasa on the Indian Ocean with Nairobi in the heart of Ke. . .