Week Nine: Four Short Stories by C.L Moore (4 pts)

  C.L Moore’s “Song in a Minor Key,” “No Woman Born,” “Vintage Season,” and “Yvala” all analyze human nature through the lenses of space travel and technology. By examining how each main character encounters the fictive novum- or new thing- of their world, C.L Moore isolates specific human emotion leaving her readers with something both fascinating and utterly haunting.

“Song in a Minor Key,” is a short vignette starring Northwest Smith. In it, he’s managed to return to Earth despite his exile to rest and reflect before invariably starting another adventure. This story, compared to the others, is short and doesn’t rely on a series of plot points to explore the subject matter. Here, Moore is asking how predetermined is one’s fate, especially in a world like Northwest where you can be exiled from Earth and forced to survive on the barren landscape of Mars? Smith, as he muses in the grass, recalls just how much he had going for him before that one moment in time changed everything. He could’ve had the dream house and the dream girl, but nothing can change the fact that he killed a person and was forced into this life of interstellar travel. This short story isn’t as flashy as the others, but it still is very human. Everyone has something in their life that changed them forever. This was Northwest’s.

“Yvala,” is another Northwest Smith adventure. In this, Smith and Yarol travel to one of Jupiter’s moons to hunt sirens they intend to sell as sex slaves. Instead of finding their prey, they encounter Yvala, an alien being that takes on the shape of whatever they desire. Already, Moore is laying on some heavy topics. Yvala’s beauty has the side effect of making men go crazy in her presence. Yvala is a being of abstraction and extremes given a form that she has no control over but must put up with. Transcendence, here, is ill-advised, dangerous, and absolute which is why Northwest and Yarol flee. 

“No Woman Born,” tells the story of Diedre- an entertainer who died tragically in a theatre fire but has been given new life in a metal asexual body. While she has grown accustomed to her new form and even revels in it, her creator, Maltzer, fears that he has damned her to ruin. Moore takes the story of Pygmalion and Galatea but allows the creation to encompass its own being wholly rather than be subject to the desires of the two male characters in this story. Maltzer warns that subjecting Diedre to an audience will only greater aggravate her feeling of being ‘subhuman.’ Diedre claims herself as Diedre and still portrays herself as human, but grows into something that she calls “superhuman.” Meanwhile, John is a bystander and proxy for the audience to witness this argument occur. Here, Moore is asking how performative is feminity and how does that carry over into daily life? Diedre’s new body houses and answers these questions. 

“Vintage Season,” uses time travelers from the future to explore the depth of human privilege. Oliver Wilson rents out a house to a man and two women who he eventually figures out are time travelers who revisit certain seasons to observe tragedy for entertainment. Moore slowly eases Oliver into the truth via his relationship with Kleph. Despite the sick wonder of the symphonia and the tapestries within her room, the reality that Kleph is here to witness the beginnings of the blue plague cement this story into a place of horror. It is shocking that this is a method of entertainment for powerful people from the future, but it’s nearly the same as us turning on the news to witness something terrible or doomscrolling through Twitter. It is violently human to seek out pleasure in others’ pain, and Moore puts that on full display here with the time traveler’s technology. 

Each of these stories, despite their vast differences, are all deeply human stories that provoke haunting emotion long after reading. Moore’s precise planting of new worlds within familiar feelings of nostalgia, melancholy, despair, and triumph allows readers to fully immerse themselves into these new worlds without feeling left out. It was a joy to read these pieces and reflect on the ideas that Moore plants in them.