A Pail of Air by Fritz Leiber uses a child narrator. I am reminded instantly of two other stories which use a child narrator brilliantly: The Fifth Head of Cerberus, by Gene Wolfe, and The Comet, by Bruno Schulz. The former is a tale of slow reveal: the things the child sees in a colony world and comments upon casually enough opening up the world for the reader too. The Comet, by Schulz, while more surrealist fiction than SF, does the same but in a lush, heightened, exaggerated way. Much like a child sees the world, one could argue.
A Pail of Air feels remarkably fresh for a story written so long ago. And this freshness can be largely attributed to the child narrator. Earth has been captured by a dead star which has ensnared it in its orbit. Now the atmosphere is almost non-existent and the air has condensed into ice. The apparently sole surviving members of the human race, composed of the narrator and his family, make do by scooping up air by the bucketful and heating it to generate oxygen. They don't live in an air tight compartment, but somehow make do.
The science, I'm sure, is very patchy. But who reads Fritz Leiber for the science? One of Leiber's pet themes had been the dichotomy of magic and science, and when he isn't writing about such a dichotomy explicitly, you can still see it coloring his view of science fiction 'proper'. The key to understanding the genius behind A Pail of Air is by allowing yourself to visualize the 'science' in it as a (dare I say it) mood.
How could it be interpreted as a mood? Well, this is a story that very conveniently sidesteps all the social and moral ambiguities that SF of the New Wave would churn up by the truckload. The calamity is a non-human one, and the human race is not to blame. This opens up a mental space that needs to be interpreted as a kind of conceptual playground for the working out of certain human impulses, all seen through the eyes of a chid.
This is difficult, for to take this story seriously is to ask the reader to inhabit the head of a child, fresh and equipped to be gosh-wowed at the mysteries of Nature. That is the first hurdle. The next is to channelize that enthusiasm to make sense of the strong sense of loneliness that Leiber invokes, when the family turns down the offer by the other survivors to come join them. They're very much human, but somewhat typically, they have grown used to a life they are proud of, because they have survived. Leiber calls for a definition of life free from distraction: in survival, in the most basic necessities lie a joy that just might be enough. Or so he suggests.
A Pail of Air feels remarkably fresh for a story written so long ago. And this freshness can be largely attributed to the child narrator. Earth has been captured by a dead star which has ensnared it in its orbit. Now the atmosphere is almost non-existent and the air has condensed into ice. The apparently sole surviving members of the human race, composed of the narrator and his family, make do by scooping up air by the bucketful and heating it to generate oxygen. They don't live in an air tight compartment, but somehow make do.
The science, I'm sure, is very patchy. But who reads Fritz Leiber for the science? One of Leiber's pet themes had been the dichotomy of magic and science, and when he isn't writing about such a dichotomy explicitly, you can still see it coloring his view of science fiction 'proper'. The key to understanding the genius behind A Pail of Air is by allowing yourself to visualize the 'science' in it as a (dare I say it) mood.
How could it be interpreted as a mood? Well, this is a story that very conveniently sidesteps all the social and moral ambiguities that SF of the New Wave would churn up by the truckload. The calamity is a non-human one, and the human race is not to blame. This opens up a mental space that needs to be interpreted as a kind of conceptual playground for the working out of certain human impulses, all seen through the eyes of a chid.
This is difficult, for to take this story seriously is to ask the reader to inhabit the head of a child, fresh and equipped to be gosh-wowed at the mysteries of Nature. That is the first hurdle. The next is to channelize that enthusiasm to make sense of the strong sense of loneliness that Leiber invokes, when the family turns down the offer by the other survivors to come join them. They're very much human, but somewhat typically, they have grown used to a life they are proud of, because they have survived. Leiber calls for a definition of life free from distraction: in survival, in the most basic necessities lie a joy that just might be enough. Or so he suggests.
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