Of Men and Monsters

I'm sitting here feeling I've almost (not quite, but very nearly) failed some sort of intelligence test with this book. Having completely missed the huge clue in its title, some distance in I was still thinking, 'Well, I like the oddness of this, but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere much' and it looked to be heading for a disappointing two stars.
   The set-up is this: after an invasion from space by gigantic aliens (called 'Monsters' throughout) what's left of humanity has been reduced to living in a maze of burrows and tunnels - scuttling to and fro behind the wainscotting so to speak - and risking their lives on expeditions out into Monster territory to steal food from the invaders' gigantic larders. The story itself follows show more raw initiate Eric the Only as he's transformed by his experiences into a resourceful leader; and, although actually published in 1968, it had a pleasantly nostalgic 1950s-or-so feel to it.
   It's a satire of course (the quote from Gulliver's Travels at the start was another Monster-sized clue I nearly missed). For 'men' read 'mice' and for 'monsters' read 'men' - the Monsters are us in disguise, while we are now the mice, annoying 'vermin' to be exterminated. 'See how you like it' is the theme, see how it feels to be a couple of inches tall and at the mercy of something a hundred times your size. And an alien invasion is a good metaphor for that: appearing as if out of nowhere (which, in evolutionary terms at least, H. sapiens certainly has), armed with incomprehensible weapons, suddenly here and taking over the whole world. The book does satirise other things too (religion for instance) but in essence it's about us humans seen from the terrifying perspective of a house mouse.
   So, in the end, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel as it climbed steadily all the way up to a solid four-star rating. I'm giving myself only one star though; I did get the point of Men and Monsters, did solve the maze and reach the cheese, but only (eek, eek!) by a whisker. show less

My reactions to reading this novel in 1968. Spoilers follow.

I enjoyed this famous Tenn novel about men living in the walls of the “Monster” alien race that conquered Earth.

This is Tenn so the story is humorous and almost savage in parts. The title comes from Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, but the inspiration and structure of the novel seems to come from the Brobdingnab section of Gulliver’s Travels. The plot starts as a variation on that favored by many stories and films featuring primitive (or post-holocaust primitives): a young man finds himself on the wrong side of tribal politics and questioning a religious taboo. Here that's that Ancestor-Science is not as efficacious in battling the Monsters as advertised. After all, show more as the uncle who initiates hero Eric the Only into the heresy points out, it didn’t do humanity much good in resisting the Monsters. But Alien-Science turns out to be, in part, a scheme by Eric’s uncle to become Chief, a scheme that leads to a brutally suppressed uprising. Eric takes up with the more advanced “back burrowers” only to find their technology and knowledge of Monsters impressive but their military skills lacking. Eventually, he meets, marries, and mates with a woman of the Aaron People (after a funny scene where he tries to act dignified while assessing his mate’s physical wiles).

In a way, this is one of those conceptual breakthrough stories. Eric learns that the tribal society he was born in was based partly on fraud - rigged visions used in naming initiate warriors and “enemy” chiefs who will band together to quell heretic Alien Sciencers. He also learns that not front or back burrower, Ancestor Science or Alien Science is a total solution, that other points of view have merit, that man lives in the walls of Monster houses (the whole novel is set in one Monster house before man leaves for the stars), and that a whole universe exists outside the Monster house, a universe which renders Monsters as inconsequential as man.

My favorite moments are when Tenn defies the clichés of this sort of plot. There is no claim that lost human science can ever defeat the monsters or bring humanity lordship of the Earth. In a discussion about why some ancients saw the Monsters as divine judgment, Rachel, Eric’s mate, remarks man was always guilty about how he treated other animals. How, she asks, can we judge the Monsters brutal (some of the book depicts experiments on humans in an alien Pest Control Lab) for their actions when man historically (and even in the course of this book) does just as brutal things to each other? Another of my favorite scenes is when Eric, told of the Aaron People’s plan to hope on a Monster starship and infest Monster dwellings throughout the universe, bitterly retorts they can’t expect man to become vermin. The Aaron replies that he already is a vermin of a most superior (like the rat and cockroach) kind. This is a condition Eric and everybody else cheerfully accepts at story’s end. show less

Almost put it down several times, but blurb and reviews promised a nifty ending. Well, Tenn sure did take his time getting there. I guess a reader who likes quest stories, stories with a series of actions and dramas, would like it more. The world-building is terrific, but, again, could have been just as effective with a lot fewer words.

The copyright page of my edition says 1977, a portion published as "The Men in the Walls" in *Galaxy* in 1963. I wish I'd read the short story and stopped there, I think.

At least there was some humor:

"He placed the palms of his hands together and bowed his head over them. "Oh, well,... back to the drawing boards."... "That's one of the oldest invocations known to my people.""

But the sexism, well, hmm. Not show more too bad at the beginning, where we learn that women are treasured, especially if they bear children well, but also because of their traditions of what passes for science and medicine. And then, too, we learn that, though warrior-hunters are also valuable, they are considered more expendable. But when Eric becomes mate of the captive woman, she seems delighted to serve him, and her eyes "seemed to express a hope that he would treat her well, along with a calm acceptance of the fact that it was entirely his decision... and that whatever his decision, she would cheerfully abide by it. show less

Science fiction satire in which the monsters regard humans not as a threat, but as pests. The storytelling is first rate and the ending, though it comes out of nowhere, is pretty nearly perfect. I met the author when I was in college and interviewed him, and he was a hoot. Just bought a book containing most of his short stories and am very much looking forward to it.

After reading past what is probably one of the best opening paragraphs in science fiction, the novel settles down to an amusing, well-written, often clever but ultimately straightforward adventure story set in a future where humans live in tribes, burrowed like vermin into the walls of the homes of giant aliens. The writing flows nicely and as mentioned before, the tongue-in-cheekness of it all is amusing. The final scene manages to cap it all with the old science-fiction trope of conquering the stars given a new twist. Fun but not exceptional.

Where it's good, it's really good. Where it's corny, it's...well, embarrassingly corny. Where it's strange, it's intriguingly strange. And where it's profound, it is...I swear it...profound. Tenn's work may be uneven, but he is swiftly moving toward the top of my list of the heroes of golden age science fiction. My top Tenn list, perhaps.

William Tenn was a prolific writer of science fiction short stories from 1953-1968. His only novel, Of Men and Monsters (1968), is an expansion of “The Men in the Walls,” a 1963 story published in Galaxy. It can be read as a straightforward, adventurous coming-of-age story in which a young man learns how to fight monstrous aliens. [BEWARE: SPOILERS AHEAD!] But Tenn’s point is slyly satirical. Human beings, he suggests, are ideally suited to fill the ecological niche we usually associate with rats and other urban pests. The story was published about the time we were beginning to wonder whether cockroaches would hitchhike on our early lunar missions.
James S. A. Corey's The Mercy of the Gods (2024) brought it to mind.