Vintage Season

As a kid I had access to many treasuries of science fiction short stories that were around the house. I enjoyed them on a sort of surface level, enough to revisit some of the stories certainly. It's been interesting to go through them again and apply the sophistication that comes with my fancy-shmancy college learnin'.

"Vintage Season," by Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore, is about a group of time travelers taking a tour of seasons: the most perfect fall, winter, spring, and summer known to history, which leads them to take lodgings at a house belonging to the unsuspecting protagonist. But as it turns out, the people from the future are connoisseurs, who delight in both the beautiful and the grotesque. There's a pretty strong parallel, I think, between the way the future folk enjoy the tragedies of the past without feeling anything for plight of the people in the past and refuse to change it as doing so might jeopardize their own lifestyle and the way we in the first world often turn a blind eye and even profit off of the suffering of the less fortunate.

What's really always stuck with me are the descriptions. Sometimes I find myself remembering the way the folds of their clothes and the strands of their hair are always immaculate, like "an actress on the screen, who can stop time and the film to adjust every disarrayed fold so that she looks perpetually perfect," or Kleph's set of rosy covered cups. Also worth pointing out is the sort of stare-down between Kleph and the protagonist's wife, where the wife is dressed more fashionably with big padded shoulders and Kleph just kind of overpowers her with her unfashionable but feminine silhouette. I think it's interesting to note that we're not talking about some kind of atrocious '80s pantsuit here, but rather the fact that this story was written in the mid-40s. In the Depression and the war years there wasn't a lot of excess in fashion, and this sort of mannish, broad-shouldered look was in, so we haven't really seen women shaped like women for ten or fifteen years and Dior's New Look is still a few years off. I really like the statement that a strong showing of femininity will win out over how we try to contort or conceal it.