James Nicoll Reviews

Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore’s 1953 Mutant is a collection of near-future evolutionary science fiction stories, unconvincingly transformed into a novel by a loose framing sequence.

Trapped in the wilderness by a plane-crash, a desperate survivor does what any person would do in their position. They relive the tumultuous events of the last two centuries.

Two hundred years ago the Blowup brought peace. The cost was humanity’s doom. At least, from a certain point of view.

Big cities and grand nation states are a thing of the past. Instead, there is a patchwork of small towns, each with their specialty. Any community that gets above itself is rewarded for its ambition with a cheap atomic bomb, courtesy of its jealous neighbors.

Lingering radiation has led to an increase in mutations. Most of the mutant fetuses are not viable. However, one strain, the telepathic Baldies, has proven to be viable. While their telepathic gifts are limited to passive mind-reading, the advantages this confers make it clear that the Baldies are the next step in human evolution… or could be if humans do not wipe them out first.

The Baldies are greatly outnumbered by regular humans. Too dispersed to be targetable by atomic weapons, Baldies do have to worry about lynch mobs. Prudent Baldies do their best to fit in, wearing wigs to conceal their baldness and limiting themselves to roles that will not inflame the jealousy and fear of their human neighbors.

The Piper’s Son • (1945) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

Baldies like Ed Burkhalter carefully avoid inflaming jealousy and fear, choosing always the path of humble utility.

To Ed’s alarm, he discovers that someone is corrupting his son Al with dreams of racial superiority and conquest not seen since the days of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. The culprit? A strain of paranoid but sane Baldies bent on global conquest.

Three Blind Mice • (1945) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore 

Game hunter Dave Barton is recruited by fellow Baldy Sue Connaught for a very special hunt. The paranoid Baldies have somehow developed a telepathic channel that sane Baldies cannot tap. Can Barton’s skills allow him to track and eliminate telepaths whose minds he cannot read?

The Lion and the Unicorn • (1945) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore 

The hedgehound nomads reject town life, preferring to roam free in the wilderness. As far as Linc knows, he is just another hedgehound, unusual only in that he is utterly hairless. In fact, Linc is a foundling Baldy, raised by an old-model human. Fated to be drawn into the conflict between sane and paranoid Baldies, Linc is more concerned about the repercussions on his romance with the old-model human woman he loves.

Beggars in Velvet • (1945) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore 

The Baldies have kept the existence of the paranoid Baldies and the silent war between the two strains of telepath secret from the humans. If the humans ever suspected there was a strain of Baldy intent on ruling Earth, the humans would certainly turn their genocidal fury on all Baldies. As paranoids deliberately turn events in the town of Sequoia into a flashpoint, regular Baldies like Burkhalter will discover just how far they will go to keep the peace.

Humpty Dumpty • (1953) • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore 

Secretly imprisoning the entire population of Sequoia only bought time. The paranoids are looking for the means to wipe out humanity. The sane Baldies already possess such a weapon, but they’d prefer to provide every human with telepathic powers. It’s a lofty goal but what if it is impossible? Is race war the only answer?

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For some reason I got Kuttner and Moore’s Baldy stories mixed up with their comedic Hogben stories, so I went into this with entirely the wrong mind-set. I don’t recommend doing that. That should be easier for all of you who have no idea what a Hogben story is.

This collection has the earmarks of something consciously designed to sell to John W. Campbell, Jr. There’s the psionics stuff, the conviction that dissimilar races cannot live in peace¹, references to what seems to be General Semantics, the replacement of big cities and nation states with libertarian² towns, where interpersonal differences are settled man-to-man, rather than with those pesky courts.

At the same time, Kuttner and Moore don’t seem to have been entirely on board with Campbell. While the sane Baldies do think time and the fact that the Baldy mutation is dominant mean that old-style humans will be assimilated, they don’t particularly want to kill old-style humans if they can live in peace³. The genocidal Baldies are consistently presented as being in the wrong. As well, the small-town balance of terror society is belatedly presented as a social misstep, rather than a sensible way of doing things.

One odd detail: guns are only mentioned in passing. Personal disputes are settled with knives. If the dispute justifies a larger response, people (or at least the townies) resort to cheap nukes. I feel like this ladder of escalation could use a few more rungs.

The dynamic between regular Baldies and the paranoid Baldies is very reminiscent of the dynamic between (bald and telepathic) Charles Xavier’s X‑Men and Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Did Mutant influence Marvel Comics’ X‑Men?

This isn’t really a novel and it’s not all that good, either. There are some interesting details, such as the lengths to which the Baldies go to pass as human through the use of wigs and such, but there is not a lot of range in the Baldy stories. Alone, each one might be tolerable but all together in a set, they’re repetitive. At least the book was short.

Mutant is available (as part of an omnibus) here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), and here (Glassboxx).

I did not find Mutant in any edition at Barnes & Noble, Chapters-Indigo, Kobo (the SF Gateway Kobo link is dead), or at Words Worth Books.

1: There are passages that suggest that Baldy-human tensions have eliminated the old-fashioned racial tensions.

2: Not, I think, that the term libertarian would have been used.

3: The sane Baldies don’t seek coexistence because they are selflessly altruistic. Open war with the humans risks total extermination of the Baldies, whereas if the Baldies are patient, they might gradually replace the humans.