Though James de Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) is a powerful precursor, and works as a corrosive dismantling of Imperialism’s exploitative gaze upon worlds that comment upon its pretences, the great period for the club story, for the club story that threatens rather than consoles, comes rather later: during the 1890s, exactly when reactive club story writers (see above) were beginning to construct Polders against a sense that the Western imperium had become fragile. The four greatest novellas of that decade are probably Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1894), H G Wells’s The Time Machine: An Invention (1895), The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James (1843–1916) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (in Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories, 1902). Each of them is a club story. Each of them constitutes a witness against any stable understanding of a darkening world. The case of The Time Machine is central to the history of sf: the Time Traveller recounts his Scientific Romance–inflected epic of long inevitable decline to a group of auditors who are forced to recognize his tale by virtue of the fact that he returns like some inverted Hero of the Thousand Faces to irrefutably tell it. In Heart of Darkness—whose setting and tone reflect the contemplative witnessing of the Gustave Doré New Zealander, who gazes upon the same darkening Thames that Marlow and his auditors have sailed into—a tale almost totally resistant to paraphrastic analysis is recounted, at times somewhat bewilderedly, by Marlow, whose pilgrimage into the heart of darkness at the head of the Congo leaves him whited like a sepulchre: Kurtz’s cry of “The horror! The horror!” is in fact—after decades of critical analysis—beyond all understanding: though we suspect he sees what the future will hold. In conveying his witness to this overwhelming cry, and by enforcing his auditors’ witness to that prophetic experience, Heart of Darkness perfectly exemplifies the deep power available within the club story format. A club story that has been told cannot be untold.
WHAT WE FOUND
Geoff Ryman
Can’t sleep. Still dark. Waiting for light in the East.
My rooster crows. Knows it’s my wedding day. I hear the pig rooting around outside. Pig, the traditional gift for the family of my new wife. I can’t sleep because alone in the darkness there is nothing between me and the realization that I do not want to get married. Well, Patrick, you don’t have long to decide.
The night bakes black around me. Three-thirty a.m. In three hours, the church at the top of the road will start with the singing. Two hours after that, everyone in both families will come crowding into my yard.
My rooster crows again, all his wives in the small space behind the house. It is still piled with broken bottles from when my father lined the top of that wall with glass shards.
That was one of his good times, when he wore trousers and a hat and gave orders. I mixed the concrete, and passed it up in buckets to my eldest brother, Matthew. He sat on the wall like riding a horse, slopping on concrete and pushing in the glass. Raphael was reading in the shade of the porch. “I’m not wasting my time doing all that,” he said. “How is broken glass going to stop a criminal who wants to get in?” He always made me laugh, I don’t know why. Nobody else was smiling.
When we were young my father would keep us sitting on the hot, hairy sofa in the dark, no lights, no TV because he was driven mad by the sound of the generator. Eyes wide, he would quiver like a wire, listening for it to start up again. My mother tried to speak and he said, “Sssh. Sssh! There it goes again.”
“Jacob, the machine cannot turn itself on.”
“Sssh! Sssh!” He would not let us move. I was about seven, and terrified. If the generator was wicked enough to scare my big strong father, what would it do to little me? I keep asking my mother what does the generator do?
“Nothing, your father is just being very careful.”
“Terhemba is a coward,” my brother Matthew said, using my Tiv name. My mother shushed him, but Matthew’s merry eyes glimmered at me: I will make you miserable later. Raphael prized himself loose from my mother’s grip and stomped across the sitting room floor.
People think Makurdi is a backwater, but now we have all you need for a civilized life. Beautiful banks with security doors, retina ID, and air conditioning; new roads, solar panels on all the streetlights, and our phones are stuffed full of e-books. On one of the river islands they built the new hospital; and my university has a medical school, all pink and state-funded with laboratories that are as good as most. Good enough for controlled experiments with mice.
My research assistant Jide is Yoruba and his people believe that the grandson first born after his grandfather’s death will continue that man’s life. Jide says that we have found how that is true. This is a problem for Christian Nigerians, for it means that evil continues.
What we found in mice is this. If you deprive a mouse of a mother’s love, if you make him stressed through infancy, his brain becomes methylated. The high levels of methyl deactivate a gene that produces a neurotropin important for memory and emotional balance in both mice and humans. Schizophrenics have abnormally low levels of it.
It is a miracle of God that with new generation, our genes are knocked clean. There is a new beginning. Science thought this meant that the effects of one life could not be inherited by another.
What we found is that high levels of methyl affect the sperm cells. Methylation is passed on with them, and thus the deactivation. A grandfather’s stress is passed on through the male line, yea unto the third generation.
Jide says that what we have found is how the life of the father is continued by his sons. And that is why I don’t want to wed.