I’ve been trying to lay off science fiction for a while, but I haven’t gone completely cold turkey. Every once in a while I’ll open an anthology and try reading a story to see if any are worth returning to my addiction. Time after time I’ve only found watery beer and went back to literary fiction and nonfiction. Today I read “The Alley Man” by Philip José Farmer. That story is pure SF heroin, you can shoot it up here.
“The Alley Man” is a masterpiece. What’s ironic is it may not even be science fiction or fantasy. Like most great fiction, it’s ambiguous. Old Man Paley may or may not be a Neanderthal. He may or may not be immortal. He is one ugly dude who lives in a shanty at a dump with two old women way past their prime. The June 1959 cover illustration of the story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is misleading. Paley only has one arm, having lost the other arm in an epic battle with Cro Magnon men, or a railroad accident.
“The Alley Man” is lovely character development and storytelling. The story has a prose density that most science fiction stories lack. There is great complexity in Old Man Paley. I remember reading this story decades ago, when I was a science fiction true believer, so I assumed Old Man Paley was immortal. But with this reading I realized that Farmer had something far more multiplex in mind. I consider “The Alley Man” on par with “Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester, “Coming Attraction” by Fritz Leiber, and “The Moon Moth” by Jack Vance.
Why did I like this story so much, when so many other science fiction stories have been a disappointment to me? I really enjoyed the characterization and prose. But I also liked the fact it was set on Earth and in the present. Even though it was published in 1959, it still felt like it could have happened in 2024. It wasn’t about the future, space travel, aliens, or robots, which I feel are themes that have been over-explored in SF.
“The Alley Man” makes me want to read more short fiction by Philip José Farmer.
But for now, I’m going back to the short novel I was reading, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, a 1925 comic novel. I’m not ready to go back to a steady diet of science fiction just yet, but I will sample it from time to time.
I got the idea to read Gentlemen Prefer Blondes from this YouTuber.
James Wallace Harris, 7/3/24
