Published in 1955 in F&SF, Two Handed Engine uses a familiar 50s era dystopian backdrop–one Kuttner and others come back to again and again, in stories like The Midas Plague, and the Marching Morons (which would become the movie Idiocracy decades later… without any credit given) and Jack Williamsons The Humanoids. The same dystopia also forms the backstory for Cordwainer Smith’s Instrumentality future history.
What is this fifties era dystopia? Abundance and broadly shared prosperity.
Post War American experienced a boom, a boost in living standards that drove a lucky generation (those that survived WW2 and Korea) virtually insane. It was a perfect storm, of pro-labor decisions and government policies after WW2, combined with the being only industrial power undamaged by the war, retooling to dominate world markets for decades to come; the sole nuclear superpower for many years. With an internal market for goods and services exploding as the gains in productivity were shared with most workers.
That hasn’t happened since Ronald Reagan. It’s hard for millennials, or even Generation Jones or Gen X to even imagine.
The US experienced the greatest, fastest rise in economic growth—coupled with broadly shared prosperity—any people have ever enjoyed, again, in the history of forever.
That post WW2 generation didn’t want to hop out of their tanks and planes into shitty jobs, into near poverty. They refused to. There were strikes. Things were going to get ugly.
So the National labor Relations Board acted as a good faith arbiter between workers and management, deals were cut, even as management schools filled with middle class and working class men riding the GI bill. These executives shared the wealth with the middle class–because they were middle class. Or they’d sprung from it.
This would end in a few decades, again, by the Reagan era.
These optimistic, supremely secure creatures built the suburbs and bought super fast cars without seatbelts and smoked like chimneys and drank like fish and bought houses with big yards and snapped up generation after generation of labor saving appliances… and when they wrote science fiction?
They saw this pattern repeating itself endlessly into the future. RAH (Robert Heinlein and yes I know you hate him) called this type of story ‘If This Goes On.’ It’s fun and pretty easy to write. It speaks to the time, to the zeitgeist, but then, William Gibson told us that that’s all that SF ever does, is talk about the present. Put it under a weird kind of microscope, inflating our fears, or concerns, our misgivings.
Kuttner’s story, which re-imagines the mythical furies as robot law enforcement, is one of a genre that picks something cool, visual, mythic, or something counter-intuitive, and then struggles to construct the world where that thing makes sense. You back into the premise.
Kuttner’s world in The Two Handed Engine passes through a period of great abundance and dissipation, (free stuff for everybody coupled with the Escape Machines, some kind of VR fantasy world fulfillment that beats real life hands down) into what Cordwainer Smith would call The Rediscovering of Man in his universe–a former utopia gone wrong where work and crime is re-introduced into society.
Because it turns out humanity can’t have nice (unearned) things.
My labor theory teacher, who taught me about the boom described in the paragraphs above, had a word for this, too.
The Dignity of Labor. He did not believe in base income.
But the premise, that too much shared prosperity is the inevitable result of ever escalating productivity gains turns out not to be a problem under capitalism! That doesn’t happen. Heinlein feared it too, Bread and Circuses, the unwashed and undeserving voting themselves a too easy life, and again, doesn’t happen. Not in America at any rate. (see infant mortality, hunger, lack of access to health care, disparities in life expectancy, incarceration, etc etc etc, and if you can’t see these things don’t bother commenting, just GTFO.)
The post war boom was an aberration, a perfect storm. Fearing that entire cultures can be transformed into sociopaths because of abundance (Happens in this one) is at odds with what we now know about the hard-wired nature of this kind of mental illness, and our better natures.
Kuttner’s era, Golden Age SF, very much believed humanity to be a tabla rasa. This of course, was a step forward, from seeing us as programmed by God or the Devil or our racial ethnic background, but taken to extremes, you ended up with lots of stories like this one.
Improbably sick cultures.
Of course, we can do this story now with genetic engineering or tailored viruses or whatever. We can still do these stories. But basic income won’t turn us all into murderous sociopaths. That’s not a viable story anymore.
Some notes about the story to myself. Having not read a ton of shorts for some time I find certain narrative styles jarring, but fun and workable, and I have to remember that these kinds of stories are possible.
Spoiler alert:
In this story, third person omniscient, with a lot of internal monolog, the viewpoint character shifts, from one character to his murderer. It works perfectly.
The story starts with a giant hunk of world building exposition intoned by an omniscient narrator. Not sure we could get away with it now. But maybe, if you’re as good as Kuttner. Kuttner didn’t have to fuck around with Bruce Sterlings “The edges of ideas.” He could just tell you what the fuck happened to make the world he set his story in.
that’s it for now.
