Today I’m joined again by Rachel S. Cordasco, the creator of the indispensable website and resource Speculative Fiction in Translation, for the fourth installment of our series exploring non-English language SF worlds. Last time we covered Hugo Correa’s intense parables of alienation and exploitation: “Alter Ego” (1967) and “Meccano” (1968). This time we’re tackling Kathinka Lannoy’s strange Dutch language story “Drugs’ll Do You” (1978, trans. 1981).
Please note that Rachel and I are interested in learning about a large range of authors and works vs. only tracking down the best. That means we’ll encounter some stinkers!
According to the sources I’ve been able to find, Kathinka Lannoy (1917-1996) grew up in Amsterdam and, due to childhood sicknesses, started writing from a young age.1 Lannoy studied music and elocution and worked as a piano teacher in addition to her writing. Her first published work appeared after 1940 in various newspapers and modelled on Norwegian regional novels that were popular at the time. In the late 1950s, Lannoy started writing horror and science fiction stories and joined the Dutch SF association SF Terra. After the King Kong Award for original Dutch SF stories under 10k words started in 1976, her stories often placed in the top ten.2 In addition to writing SF, she also translated SF — including a work by Damon Knight. From the possibly incomplete Internet Speculative Fiction Database listing, it appears that only two of her genre short stories appeared in an English translation.
“Drugs’ll Do You” appeared in Terra SF: The Year’s Best European SF, ed. Richard D. Nolane (1981). The story was translated by Joe F. Randolph. I cannot find an online copy. Please reach out if you want to read it and don’t want to track down the anthology.
Enjoy!
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Vicente Segrelles’ cover for Terra SF: The Year’s Best European SF, ed. Richard D. Nolane (1981)
Rachel S. Cordasco’s Review
You’ll find very little about Dutch author Kathinka Lannoy on the internet (believe me, I tried). That said, I did find on isfdb that she has two stories in English—the one under review here, and one called “S.O.S.” (1987) (also likely a translation).
“Drugs’ll Do You” is a pretty disappointing story that wanted to be like Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” but just couldn’t quite do it. Centered around a husband and wife living in a house filled with conveniences (dusting machine, rocking chair that rocks itself, etc.), the story opens with the unnamed wife asking her husband if he’s read anything about some new drugs. They apparently don’t have any side effects but help you make sure “you don’t get confused and you have no urge to jump out of the window or off the roof.” Seemingly out of nowhere, the story veers off into a consideration of who is actually in charge in the world and who is calling the shots about such things as how many children people can have and where they can go on vacation. The husband and wife somewhat dreamily discuss exactly what the meaning of life is, but then drop it because it’s either a) too boring, or b) too tiring.
The husband thinks the drugs sound good, because then his wife won’t care about getting a new, expensive garden room. Another sudden switch takes the reader into a lab, where a bunch of slavish scientists are all hanging on the words of one professor. Noting that war is no longer a viable option for subduing the common people, he argues that the new drug created in the lab will make everyone so docile that they’ll be just fine with him becoming the ruler of the world—of a “Fourth Reich,” as he says.
Back at the house, the husband and wife try to talk about how they’re feeling on this new drug, with the wife wondering if it’s “altogether satisfying to be happy.” Then she starts dissolving. Cut back to the lab, where the professor’s admirers have also taken the drug. It’s at this point that the professor drops his disguise, shows himself as a Devil figure (hooves and tail) and calls his alien(?) friends to come and land on Earth.
Even if this is supposed to be a spoof/smash-up of stories about evil cabals taking over the Earth and alien invasions, I’m still not a fan (and I don’t think this was supposed to be a spoof). The multiple jump cuts leave the reader disoriented (like the husband and wife), but the story is too short for it to seem purposeful. So many different and interesting issues are raised—drugs developed to subdue the populace, totalitarianism, convenience, boredom—but they’re all swept aside with the coming of the Devil-like aliens. One bright note is that the idea of scientists trying to take over the world put me in mind of a much better (and much longer) text by Pierre Boule, author of Planet of the Apes: the novel Desperate Games, one of my favorite shark-jumping, absolutely bonkers books of all time. I encourage you to read it. (I reviewed it here).
Sorry, this is supposed to be a review of the Lannoy story. To recap: strange, disappointing, seemingly slapdash.
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Eddie Jones’ cover art for Dutch SF magazine Orbit, ed. Kees van Toorn (1978)
Joachim Boaz’s Review
2/5 (Bad)
In a late 70s interview, Lannoy stated “that realism permeated by sex and ego trips doesn’t suit me.”3 “Drugs’ll Do” (1978) embodies that reactionary and blunt quote. The short story, a mere seven pages, contains a wide-ranging and utterly muddled conservative critique of late 70s western culture.
A couple ensconced in a large apartment complex replete with VR “Garden room” (46), discuss new drugs that allow someone “to be happy, contented” (47). Discussion might be the wrong word. It’s more a passive aggressive verbal interaction between two people manifesting all the pathologies of the modern age. The wife doesn’t want to read about the drugs herself as she’s tired after only an hour awake (46). Rather than respond to her request to explain the new drugs, the husband gives voice to the existential dread that fills his existence: “we’re all like pieces of plastic” (45). The wife gets distracted via lengthy almost diuretic streams of jumbled interior monologue about the nature of ideas and where they come from and where they go and who forms them and who relays them and what happens when they are relayed. There’s an obvious reference to Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).4 As a fan of science fiction about the decayed relationships and ruminations of media, I initially thought the story might have some redeeming value. But…
Lannoy, in seven pages, makes fun of everything in a surface and dull way. It’s the science fictional equivalent of buckshot, fired from the hip in no particular direction. She jabs at the ubiquity of media in our daily lives and our inability to understand what is force-fed to us. She ridiculous technology of ease: disposable dishes and silverware placed in a garbage chute next to the dinner table, plastic newspapers that double as shopping bags, automated dusting machines, mechanical rocking chairs, and scenic wall screens. She huffs at the morality of women: naked sunbathing, long legs, sex for the sake of sex, etc. I imagine what she thought late 60s radicalism was the working of some secret devilish entity. I mean, in this story, it sort of is…
And I’m not even talking about the idiotic ending. It’s the worst version of Ray Nelson’s “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” (1963) that you could imagine–the source material for John Carpenter’s They Live (1988).
The story as a story is poorly told, haphazard and confused, and contains no real narrative core to hold together the disparate parts jostling for attention. That said, this isn’t intriguing New Wave-esque experimentation. It isn’t an expose of the the interior self or an attempt to create generic invention or a metacommentary on genre. Instead, the story reads as a list of unfocused tangential grumbles.
Avoid unless you’re a scholar interested in late 70s conservative backlash in European science fiction. I imagine everyone else will be unsatisfied or even angry after reading this one.
Notes
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