had Oliver was a large man who loved largely, as his friends attested after he died of cancer; he was a smoker, his stories are full of smoke. He loved his family, his companions, his students, his readers; he loved his pipes; he loved the trout streams he fished (some of them still exist) and the mountains they decanted; he loved the SF of the 1930s and 1940s, which he grew up reading, and whose narrative values he carried on into his own work; he loved his profession, which was anthropology; he loved the country, which he understood, more than the city, which he clearly did not; he loved the sand and soil and water of the world itself.
This was perhaps an odd passion for a writer who began to publish SF in 1950, back in the glory days, the Outward Bound days, when the only other significant writers in the field with anything like a similar focus on the texture of things were probably Clifford D. Simak and Ray Bradbury. But Bradbury really kind of hated SF, and the hothouse desiderium of his take on the world was precisely not Oliver's; and Simak's lovers of the earth were more likely to be farmers than professionals trained to understand cognitively what they cherished. Oliver was actually comfortable as an SF writer (his few attempts at fantasy are slick and hammy); and for the short decade of his creative prime, before he began to possum-trot between teaching and writing because his career at the University of Texas had taken off, he wrote as though he believed that simultaneously to love the earth and to love the future was to utter two sentences with but a single heart. For a while, he acted as though his job, his art, his planet and his species shared the same address.
It is perhaps for this reason that Chad Oliver, who would have been only 75 years old in 2003, seems to come from a world which—as I said in an obituary appreciation for Locus in 1993—"now seems impossibly distant ... [that he] was a figure of the past not only because he made sense of the paranoia of a decade [the 1950s] now distant, but also because he felt at home, without terrors, in the soil of America."
A king of the pastoral hill
A Star Above It and Far From This Earth—the two volumes of selected stories now handily assembled for The NESFA Press by Priscilla Olson—do nothing to dispel this vertigo, this sense of time abyss between now and then (17 of the 40 stories collected here were first published between 1950 and 1955). Nor do the few later stories included—anything from after 1970 or so—dispel the eeriness. Oliver's latter-day discomfort with the SF modes of explanation of his younger years, and his general cultural despair, are embarrassingly evident in "King of the Hill," which he wrote for Harlan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions (anth 1972), a tale which sounds as though he were trying to stick out his tongue like Ellison. The plot—the world's richest man, disgusted by Homo sapiens's destruction of the world and all its sibling species, uplifts a family of mutant raccoons to a habitat on Titan, where they may learn to treasure life—is desperate.
The very last stories collected here—each volume moves crabwise from early to late—are even more despairing, but do work powerfully as fiction. "A Lake of Summer," which may be his last story, homages Ray Bradbury (it was written for a 1991 anthology called The Bradbury Chronicles), but without a touch of consolation. There is some consolation in "Old Four-Eyes" (first published in Synergy 4, an 1989 anthology edited by George Zebrowski, whom Olsen thanks in her acknowledgements for persuading her to put these collections together), but the despair is deep: One of the last survivors of a raccoon-like wainscot species on Earth reveals herself to a compassionate human at the end of his own tether as developers rape the Earth around him. The two find an enclave, and hide in it, for a while.
But these stories are not the heart of these two books; for they are tragedies of a world that could no longer, in 1990, be addressed by sane arguments articulated through plots that generated single outcomes from single premises, after the fashion of the Thought Experiments that engined the SF Oliver grew up loving. To reach the heart of A Star Above It and Far From This Earth, we need to go back a long ways. We need to remember ourselves as we once were: reading a tale like "Blood's A Rover" (1952 Astounding) as though it imparted a lesson in how the world actually might work. In this story, a human anthropologist leaves his wife and family—as always in Oliver, the primacy of the nuclear family is never challenged, here or on other planets; men think and work and return to their women, who raise kids and cook and gossip (which is nothing like doing network)—to go on missions to other planets, where it is his job to "uplift" "primitive" cultures, all of them humanoid, along the high-technology road to true "civilization." In the end, he discovers that humans from other planets are doing the same to the humans of Earth. In this case, uplift works; in other stories, as for instance in the quite remarkably moving "Guardian Spirit" (1958 Fantasy and Science Fiction), there is a sting in the tail of uplift. But always in these tales it is, as it were, one thing or another. Something works, or it doesn't. Something is good, or it is bad. Love works, love is good.
Remembering the way it used to be
It makes one long to be there again, to be able to learn again like that. There may be no series in Oliver's work, no Our Town-like Stage Manager linking what we're told into a meta-tale; but there is certainly a sense of narratage, a sense that Oliver is telling us stories within the frame of some forum: that we are all sharing love and lessons together, in a world simple and stable enough to permit their transmissal.
Readers half a century on, after absorbing a couple dozen of the tales assembled in these two volumes, may well guess in advance what is going to happen—that an Oliver story will demonstrate the value and integrity of different ways of life; that it will demonstrate the high cost of attempting to "guide" more "primitive" societies in the "right" direction, though will be able to measure that cost—but we do not guess because Oliver has slipped us the wink. We do not guess because we are superior (the way readers in tales employing dramatic irony are superior; Oliver never published in Galaxy); we guess because we remember.
We remember (or, if we are too young to remember, we reimagine) what it felt like when the world, the tale and the devil occupied a level playing field in the pages of SF, long ago, when right questions obtained right answers, when the sweet-smelling world unpacked like spring in these stories of love at work, long before the trout began to steam.
