Herein we will discuss/comment on:
The Red One by Jack London.
Prompts for discussion:
This time around I'm a bit challenged to come up with interesting prompts. The Wikipedia page mentions a possible influence by Carl Jung on the story. Anyone more familiar with Jung want to shed some light on that?
This story is also pretty notable for the time it was written; it's a fair bit older than probably every other piece of material we've encountered in the club and predates a lot of sci-fi tropes. We have a hint of an alien encounter which seems a good deal ahead of its time.
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Bassett never got to report his discovery back to "civilization" so we don't know what London thought about what people in his day might actually do about such a discovery. But what might our reaction be today? What kind of response might we have? Especially since no one saw the thing crash and we don't know how long it has been here, would we have any chance of determining where it came from if it doesn't have a note pinned to it's shirt?
Well I would try my utmost to go there because now I'm desperate to know what that sound was. I wonder what the sound designers of modern entertainment would do with it? It is a strange first contact story, (before they were named), in how limited the impact of it is, the first act is basically just discovering the village, but I suppose humanity in the wilderness is what we know him for. The other thing that struck me about this story is our hero's "relationships" with Ngurn, who is eager for him to die to shrink his head, and Balatta, who he unwillingly sleeps with and then actively avoids in order to survive. Since zebra2 already mentioned the possible Jung connection, how do we unpack why the author chose those as the only 2 relationships he elaborates on? Also Vngngn? What kind of response might we have?
So the thing that always struck me about The Red One is how raw it is. It's pretty much what you'd expect science fiction from the guy who wrote To Build A Fire. What it indicated to me was that London pretty much had that "raw" inside him and all the Call of the Wild/White Fang stuff was purely situational. Reading up it's a little chilling that if I were Jack London I would be three years dead.