James Nicoll Reviews

Pauline Ashwell’s 1992 fix-up¹ Unwillingly to Earth is a science fiction coming-of-age work.

Lizzie Lee’s first name may be a closely-held secret. Her talent for manipulating people isn’t. Once noticed, this will change her life.

Born and raised on backwater Excenus 23, Lizzie might have spent her life there were it not for an accident that nearly killed her father. While staying in town to be near him, Lizzie takes it upon herself to orchestrate the lives of the rough-edged miners whose company she keeps. Lizzie proves adept at this.

Visitor D. J. M’Clare of the Department of Cultural Engineering at Russett Interplanetary College of Humanities notes Lizzie’s knack for persuasion. He believes that her talents would be wasted on a minor mining world like Excenus and arranges a college education for Lizzie.

Lizzie faces significant impediments. The homeschooled rustic has vast gaps in her education, gaps her professors will not let the teen bluff her way past. Furthermore, Lizzie has a serious, undiagnosed reading disability. Nevertheless, she prevails.

Graduation brings further challenges. Now Lizzie is responsible for more than a few college courses. The fate of worlds may depend on her ingenuity.

~oOo~

Ashwell is yet another example of an SF author who published a flurry of SF stories, which was followed by decades of silence, then followed by another flurry of SF stories. Pauline Ashwell may not be widely remembered today, but readers (and her colleagues) liked her work enough that they nominated her for several awards. In fact, thanks to the fact that she published both as Pauline Ashwell and as Paul Ash, she managed the unique feat of landing two spots on the 1959 Best New Author Hugo ballot.

Ashwell’s body of work isn’t huge², which is to say it’s perfectly suited to some obsessive reviewer who decides to track down the novel-length works. Or, speaking purely hypothetically, stumbling across her only two published books (Unwillingly, and Project Farcry) and realizing that all one needs to do to win a trifecta is find a copy of the Analog issue containing The Man Who Stayed Behind (which seems to be both labelled as a novel and contained within a single issue).

To 1992 readers, this fix-up would have seemed quaint, as though some forgotten work from the 1950s — roughly around the time that Pangea was breaking up — had inexplicably been reprinted without any indication that it was an older work. This is because that is exactly what happened… sort of.

The copyright says ​“First edition: August 1992”. That applies to the fix-up as a whole, but not the contents. Unwillingly to Earth contains four novellas. In publication order³, they were Unwillingly to School (1958), The Lost Kafoozalum (1960), Rats in the Moon (1982), and Fatal Statistics (1988). Or to put it another way, the first two appeared in Campbell’s Astounding, while the last two appeared in Stanley Schmidt’s Analog (Analog being, as you know, a renamed Astounding). Cambell’s tastes had ossified by 1958, whereas Schmidt was never daring.

The work is a curious mix of some very traditional elements (the notion that it would be good for society if some secretive cabal manipulated planets to steer them down productive paths) and less traditional elements (is doing that at all ethical?). Less traditional: plucky, wise-cracking, manipulative girls with colorful vernacular, not often found⁴ in Campbell’s Astounding. More traditional: in the final story by internal chronology, Lizzie marries her much older mentor.

On a similar note, Ashwell is aware that Africans exist, not always a given for Americans of her vintage⁵, and the plot featuring an African character is mostly harmless⁶, also not a given in works of this vintage. However, it does not appear that Ashwell’s sources extended to actual African names. At least her character was not named Ifnoka⁷.

The bit that most surprised me was Lizzie’s reading disability. Her natural reading pace is so slow that conventional measurements don’t register it. The discussion of intelligence and reading speed in Lizzie’s text is as follows:

It has sometimes been suggested that the reading rate should be used as a measure of general intelligence. This is fallacious. The rate at which information can be absorbed, and therefore the rate at which words move across the viewer, is broadly correlated with some aspects of intelligence, but not with all. Mathematicians of genius tend to read slower than average, and so do some creative artists. 

There’s a specific neurological issue that prevents Lizzie (and her father) from reading quickly using the means available. Rather than horsewhipping Lizzie until she reads faster or cramming Lizzie into the nearest eugenic disintegration chamber, the school finds a work around… as soon as they discover the nature of her problem. This takes a while because being embarrassed over disabilities is still a thing in the future.

So, this book is a curate’s egg. Unwillingly probably reads better if you approach it as a relic of the 1950s rather than the bright and shiny 1990s. Not that you will likely to read it, as Unwillingly to Earth is very much out of print.

1: ISFDB calls Unwillingly a collection. So did Locus. I can see why, but I think the structure is closer to a fix-up.

2: In SF, anyway. Ashwell had a romance career about which I only know that she had it.

3: The internal chronology, which is also the order in which the novellas appear in the fix-up, is Unwillingly to School (1958), Rats in the Moon (1982), Fatal Statistics (1988), and The Lost Kafoozalum (1960).

4: Yes, I flashed back to True Grit​’s horse-trading scene.

5: USA delenda est.

6: Africans of this era prefer pure to applied, but this particular student was strongarmed by his father to study Cultural Engineering because Dad is a hidebound conservative who hopes to use Cultural Engineering to Resnick-ify Africa. Consequently, the kid isn’t super-keen on his academic path.

7: Don’t look this up. You’re happier not knowing.