This week’s short story club entry is Carol Emshwiller’s “No Time Like the Present,” a sort of timeless time-travel story. It’s narrated by a teenage girl in an unnamed town somewhere in the US whose town sees a sudden influx of tall blond people who behave very oddly. While it’s pretty obvious to the reader that something science-fictional is going on, the narrator takes a while to get to that realization, and even when she does, it’s mostly buried in typical teen concerns– friends, parents, potential romantic relationships.
This story has a sort of timeless quality, partly because it’s a sort of old-school SF topic– the characters are too human for Asimov and too passive for Heinlein, but you could imagine this being written in their era by Sturgeon or Simak or somebody like that. It’s got a kind of Bradbury-esque small-town America feel, but the basic set-up and ambiguous ending could easily fit as a “Twilight Zone” story. The idea that humans from the future would be tall and Nordic looking also seems more like a Golden Age trope than anything connected to modern SF.
More importantly, though, the story is lacking in much of anything that would allow you to date it precisely. While that’s kind of charming, it ends up being a bit of a problem.
The narrator largely remains a blank, and the teenage voice rings a little false as a result. Teenagers are very in-the-moment by their nature, and a lack of any references to pop culture or technology just sounds wrong. The story is set sometime after Tazers became known, which puts it in the 90’s at least, but the only reference to anything cultural is that the narrator reads Edgar Rice Burroughs, which seems more plausible for somebody in the 1950’s than anything closer to the present day.
Aside from that, there’s really not much to say about this one. It’s a very nice story, with all the connotations that come with that term, both good and bad: it’s well written, well paced, and has an engaging if weirdly atemporal narrative voice; it’s also very polite and inoffensive, with no real attempt to push the boundaries of, well, much of anything, or do anything novel with the well-worn subject matter. This would fit well into basically any general-interest SF anthology written in the last, say, fifty years. That’s both good and bad, which is probably appropriate given the ambiguity of the ending.
I really got the sense that it took place in the 60s or so, maybe even earlier, given the Burroughs books. The ‘tazer’ conversation, I assumed that the narrator was imitating without actual understanding, in order not to seem dumb, as teens will. But on re-reading, perhaps not.
Anyway, I’m interested in your comment about the characters being “too human for Asimov”. Some of Asimov’s characters are fairly cardboard, but surely not all of them?
“Some of Asimov’s characters are fairly cardboard, but surely not all of them?”
No, only the good ones were cardboard. Most of them were even thinner than that.