This blog already has the weekly feature of Friday's quote of the week. To this I am adding another, for Wednesdays: reviews of short stories that made an impact on me. For much of my life I was primarily a short story reader, generally eschewing the longer format of novels (and series of novels) until the last fifteen years or so. I built up a substantial collection of short stories, primarily in the science fiction genre, and still haven't read most of them. Well, it's time to "hit the books" and explore this treasure of good fiction! Today's story is from a popular (back then) mid-twentieth century science fiction writer named Cyril Kornbluth. Kornbluth sadly lived a short life, plagued and eventually ended at the age of 34 by a heart condition and his refusal to abide by prescribed treatments...he suffered his fatal heart attack on a winter morning in 1958 after rigorously shoveling snow from his walkway and then running fast to the railway station. He was a collaborator with other sci-fi writers on novels and wrote many short stories that were published in the pulp science fiction magazines of his day. In 1950 one such tale, The Little Black Bag, came out in Astounding magazine and would make it to that year's list of top short stories...
The Little Black Bag paints the picture of a future society in which humanity is blessed with great advances in technology and still keeps the structures of democracy and economic freedom. Sounds too good to be true, right? And of course the answer is a resounding YES! For the overwhelming majority of people in "this" distant future have regressed in their intellectual capacities and are unknowingly completely dependent on a very small subclass of people with advanced abilities who provide all the needed supertechnology, maintain the structure of society, monitor the mentally-challenged majority...and stay discretely hidden and disguised as menial workers. A "physician" in this world one day carelessly loses his "little black bag" in a time machine and it makes its way back to "our" time...and into the hands of a much smarter, but ruined and alcoholic doctor. When he begins to use the instruments contained within the bag on patients, he discovers that they work autonomously and to a precision that he could never possess...in other probably politically incorrect words, they are idiot-proof. I'll let you, the potential reader of this truly "short" story, read what happens for yourself. Instead I'd like to further examine its premise and what the author was trying to say about our present world...
I'm living in 2017 and I see it all around me, but for Cyril Kornbluth to notice and report in 1950 on the general decline in standards and levels of education and knowledge among the population as the seeming magic of technological development made communications, transportation, and "creature comforts" much more readily available demonstrated to me this author's ability to forecast the future...albeit in a pretty sarcastic fashion. The consumer would make use of all the new "stuff" coming out, "stuff" that a smaller group of other folks who had much more extensive and specialized training had developed. Nowadays what do most people know about how smartphones function other than the settings they can select on them? I look around me in public and almost always note a substantial portion of the people are dumbly staring at their little gadgets. I've even been watching sporting events where the camera pans the spectators after an exciting play...only to find many of them also preoccupied with their little miracles of technology instead of what just happened on the field or court. And what about social media and the Internet...are they making people smarter and more discerning...or the opposite? I imagine that if my pal Cyril were here today, he'd have a few choice comments to say about that. Have you ever watched Jesse Watters on Fox walk around out in public and randomly ask people very simple questions about history and general knowledge? The level of ignorance and apathy among the general population is incredible, regardless whether or not you happen to agree with Watters' conservative politics. But we also have a smaller number of very engaged, knowledgeable people in our present world who...surprise, surprise...seem to operate "behind the scenes". Which makes me wonder what our society is going to look like in about a hundred years...or even further down the line. Will it resemble Cyril Kornbluth's cynical prediction? I sure hope he's dead wrong (no pun intended)...
The Little Black Bag is just one story of many from the book His Share of Glory: the Complete Short Story Science Fiction of Cyril Kornbluth. The publishers are NESFA (New England Science Fiction Association) and it came out in 1997. I found that some of Kornbluth's stories in this book were "hits", but a few were "misses"...and with others, to this day, I still don't know what he was talking about...
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