"The Fiction of Ideas," or How Changing One Part of the Human Race Changes The World

“The Fiction of Ideas” is an interesting topic; change one thing about the human race, and an entirely new world is created. Such a wide variety of stories can come from this subgenre, each taking wildly different paths. Two short stories I read that fall under this broad category are “The Drowned Giant” by J. G. Ballard and “Come To Venus Melancholy” by Thomas M. Disch (I read a third story, “And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill,” that falls under this genre which is discussed in the previous blog post).

“The Drowned Giant” is quite short, but in its few pages it tells a unique story. In this tale, we see what happens when a group of miniature humans find a drowned man washed upon the shore. The townspeople proceed to not only examine the giant body but crawl over it, kids using the nose as a rock to climb and the arms as stairs. The casualness with which the people treat the body is almost disconcerting, as if it’s just a large collection of rocks. Then, the scientists take the body apart for examination and supplies. It makes sense, as if the body were that of a beached whale, but hearing about the main character coming back and seeing the body disassembled is such an odd, unsettling visual. It’s a cavalier attitude never usually associated with a corpse, and it really just makes you stop and think. The body loses its humanity as its taken apart and decomposes, and soon it no longer is a spectacle.

On the other end of the spectrum, Come To Venus Melancholy is a short story by Thomas M. Disch about transferring one’s consciousness to a machine. It involves a machine-transferred woman talking to the reader, never really sure of the reader’s presence but too desperate for company to doubt it. We go from a large, beached body to no body at all. This short story was written like a one-sided conversation, which made it very interesting to read. I wanted to reply, to give the poor machine woman confirmation that she was indeed talking to someone. Her husband smashed her “eyes,” and now she exists blind and immortal. It’s a sad life, living in never-ending uncertainty. If humans ever obtain the ability to transfer a human conscious to a machine, how would we adapt to that? How long would a human live as a machine? Would it be like immortality?

Both of these short stories were well-written and interesting to read, enjoyable and thought-provoking. They were the perfect length, too. The reader is given a clear understanding of the world it takes place in, and nothing is left to be desired by these “Fiction of Ideas” short stories.