The Growing World

The fourth novel in the Library of America’s American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956 is Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man.  All in all, the LOA volume was quite good—three of the four novels were fun to read; not all Great Books to be sure, but nonetheless, a good selection.

The Shrinking Man is, as the title might suggest to the perceptive reader, about a man who shrinks.  Being written in the 1950’s, the cause of the shrinking was obviously going to be radiation.  So, at one level the book is just another warning about the horrors of the modern world.  Matheson is a good, solid writer—the tale never loses its forward momentum.  It does this through a nice switching back and forth between our protagonist when he is less than an inch tall and the stops along the way to his (literal) descent into the microscopic.  The story when he is small is a constant struggle to find food and ward off the seemingly mammoth Black Widow which hunts him.  The story when shrinking is a series of set pieces about the problems of the world as one gets smaller and smaller.

There is a real terror at the heart of this book.  It’s not the Black Widow.  It’s this:  every day, Scott (the protagonist) gets smaller (one-seventh an inch a day).  From the outside, we think of Scott as getting smaller.  But, flip the viewpoint—from the viewpoint of Scott, every day the world gets a little bit bigger.  As the world grows, the problems of the world grow.  His wife thinks he is a freak.  A child molester picks him up. His daughter loses respect for a father shorter than she is.  Some local teenage hoodlums threaten him.  The cat terrorizes him.  The spider chases him down.  His financial struggles grow day by day; he loses the ability to work; he dreads the attention of becoming a media sensation.  And he is getting smaller.  And smaller.  He can count down the days until he reaches a height of zero.  And as these problems grow, Scott can do nothing about them.  The book could easily have been entitled, with an Einsteinian relativistic twist: The Growing World.

So, imagine that life. You have problems.  You know that not only will the problems not go away the next day, but that the problems will be bigger the next day.  And the day after that they will be bigger still.  And bigger the day after that.  Eventually, what you see as problems now will be so large, you lose sight of them because you are focused on a whole new set of problems which have arisen.  And they too will inexorably grow every day.  Day after day after day.  There is nothing you can do to stop your problems from getting larger and larger and larger.  There is no way to halt the process, nothing at all that you can do.  How many days could you endure that life?  How many days could you endure knowing, with utter mathematical certainty, that your problems will be larger tomorrow than they are today, and that will be true every day for the rest of your life, which isn’t long anyway because you already know the date at which you reduce to nothing.

What do you do?  Curiously, the novel is not one of despair.  Even though there is no end to the spiral downwards, Scott still struggles day after day to survive.  He makes it through another day.  Why?  Is the survival instinct that strong?  If you knew you were going to reduce to a height of zero in less than a week, would you too bother to wage war against a spider which is larger than you are?  Would you endure a day of struggle and toil to gather up a few more cracker crumbs in order to feed yourself for another day?

Oddly, this book is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit.  Yes, the world is a big, very big, nasty place, but Scott endures.  Despite having no reason to endure, despite having no prospects for improvement, Scott endures.

Curiously, and I have no idea if this is by design or not, that is the same lesson as the other three books in this Library of America volume. Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow and this book: the theme in all four is survival against all odds, survival in the face of despair.  That certainly was a theme in the air in the 1950s, but this volume has me wondering—is the consistency of that theme in the four books selected by LOA for this volume a curious accident or would it have been the same if they had picked any four of the best of SF from 1953 to 1956?  I have no idea.  Perhaps the answer lies in the companion volume covering 1956 to 1958.

There is a danger in this sort of speculation, though.  Once looking for a theme, it is far too easy to find it in everything.  That after all is exactly what modern literary critics do all the time—have theme, find it in book, move to next book and find it there.  And, it’s not just books.  How hard would it be to find this same theme in the four books in this LOA volume if you looked in this song from 1956?  (Finding it is left as an exercise for the Reader.)