Unearthly Neighbors (21 page)

Perhaps the Moon Shadows spoke to him as he slept; who can say?

For the dreams came to him again as they had come before into this tent in this clearing. The dreams came to him again, but this time they were different dreams: the dreams that come best when a man’s work is done and he is alone.

Monte Stewart smiled in his sleep.

He was dreaming the best dream of all, the dream of the magic promise, the dream of going home.

FIN

Symmes Chadwick Oliver (1928-1993) was born in Ohio but spent most of his life in Texas, where he took his MA at the University of Texas (his 1952 thesis, “They Builded a Tower”, being an early academic study of sf); he then took a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and became professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. His sf work consistently reflected both his professional training and his place of residence: much of it is set in the outdoors of the US Southwest, and most of his characters are deeply involved in outdoor activities. Oliver was always concerned with the depiction of Native American life and concerns:
The Wolf is My Brother
(1967), which is not sf, features a sympathetically characterized Native American protagonist. Most of Oliver’s sf, too, could be thought of as Westerns of the sort that eulogize the land and the people who survive in it. The sf plots that drive his stories – like, in
The Winds of Time
(1957), the awakening of Aliens held in Suspended Animation for hundreds of centuries – tend to be resolved in terms that reward a deeply felt longing for a non-urban life closely involved with Nature, whether on Earth – or on some other planet, where exercises in Uplift tend to be moderately successful. It may be suggested that when the marriage of folk and land had been dissolved as far as Texas was concerned, and when the cultural implications of uplift could not be conceived of without irony, he returned deliberately to the past, before the destruction had properly begun: his last novels,
Broken Eagle
(1989) and
The Cannibal Owl
(1994), are traditional Westerns. His last sf stories, like “Old Four-Eyes” (in
Synergy 4
, anth 1989, ed George Zebrowski), are tragedies of Ecology.

Oliver’s first published story, “The Land of Lost Content”, appeared in Super Science Stories in November 1950; his short work was initially collected in
Another Kind
(coll 1955) and
The Edge of Forever
(coll 1971), the latter containing biographical material and a checklist compiled by William F Nolan; the later Selected Stories sequence – comprising
A Star Above It: Volume 1 of Selected Stories
(coll 2003) and
Far From This Earth: Volume 2 of Selected Stories
(coll 2003) – assembled most of his best work, most of which appeared before 1960. He collaborated with Charles Beaumont on the two-story Claude Adams series (April 1955 and February 1956 F&SF). Oliver’s first novel, a juvenile, was
Mists of Dawn
(1952), a time travel story whose young protagonist is cast back 50,000 years into a prehistoric SF conflict between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.
Shadows in the Sun (
1954), set in Texas, describes with some vividness its protagonist’s discovery that all the inhabitants of a small town are aliens, but that it may be possible for Earth to gain galactic citizenship, and that he can work for that goal by living an exemplary life on his home planet.
Unearthly Neighbors
(1960; rev 1984) depicts human attempts at Communication with alien visitors.
The Shores of Another Sea
(1971), set in Africa where a Western scientist is operating an experimental Baboon refuge, modestly exploits the irony explicit in his discovery that he is being subject to First Contact experiments by a group of visiting aliens. Again articulating Oliver’s growing concern with the natural world,
Giants in the Dust (
1976) argues the thesis that mankind’s fundamental nature is that of a hunting animal, and that our progress from that condition has fundamentally deracinated us.

Oliver was a pioneer in the application of competent anthropological thought to sf themes, and, though awkward construction and occasional padding sometimes stifled the warmth of his earlier stories, he was a careful author whose speculative thought deserves to be more widely known and appreciated. Beyond that, he was a writer who for some years thought it possible to honor the world he loved within the frame of 1950s sf.

Novels

• Mists of Dawn
  (1952)
  
• Shadows in the Sun
  (1954)
  
• The Winds of Time
  (1956)
  
• Unearthly Neighbors
  (1960, revised in 1984)
  
• The Wolf is My Brother
  (1967)
  
• The Shores of Another Sea
  (1971)
  
• Giants in the Dust
  (1976)
  
• Broken Eagle
  (1989)
  
• The Cannibal Owl
  (1994)
  

Collections

• Another Kind
  (1955)
  
• The Edge of Forever
  (1971)
  
• A Star Above and Other Stories
  (2003)
  
• Far from This Earth and Other Stories
  (2003)