JOURNEYS TO THE FUTURE: STORIES (p. 1172)
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
The Nine Billion Names of God (p. 1173)
The short story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” written by famed science-fiction
writer Arthur C. Clarke, chronicles the attempts of a Tibetan lamasery to identify all
the possible names of God. Using a Mark V Computer to speed up the process, the
monks believe that once all the names have been listed, life as we know it will end.
Dr. Wagner, the scientist who rents out the computer, finds the monks’ initial request
bizarre. In setting up the project, he asks the High Lama the same kinds of questions
that would likely occur to readers, including what the purpose of the name list might
be and how the monks will get enough electricity in the Himalayas to run the com-
puter. From his Manhattan office, Dr. Wagner muses portentously on “the follies of
mankind” and ultimately reminds himself that “the customer is always right.”
The rest of the story is from the perspectives of Chuck and George, technicians
who have spent months in the isolated monastery making sure the Mark V is doing its
job. Dubbed “Project Shangri-La,” which invokes author James Hilton’s mystical
Tibetan paradise, the enterprise is a subject of some derision and skepticism from the
Westerners. Chuck and George, for example, nickname the High Lama “Sam Jaffe,”
KURT VONNEGUT
Harrison Bergeron (p. 1178)
Once upon a time, many years ago, at one of our universities, a math professor lost
his job after only one semester for giving all of the students in his class A’s. Although
this (true story or campus folklore) is an extreme case, providing a cautionary tale to us
all as we are tempted to cut corners, grade inflation is an ever-present problem at the
university level. Few students see a C as a passing grade, and most of us cave in and
give an undeservedly high grade to a student who has put a lot of sweat into revision or
has written an adequate argument with few errors, even if the paper lacks the bril-
liance that should reflect a superior grade. It is difficult to explain to a weeping student
why his or her paper is mediocre. But in the world of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison
Bergeron,” that math professor not only would have a job but probably would be
chancellor by now. No one in the world of this story is allowed to suffer from low self-
esteem or to feel himself or herself in any way inferior to any other person. Vonnegut’s
story is a parable of egalitarianism carried to its ridiculously logical conclusion.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the early nineteenth century, in the opening years
of the American Republic, that “Americans are so enamored of equality that they
would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.” He worried that
opportunities the help they need to achieve equality without pushing out qualified
applicants? Our culture seems to have trouble with difference of any kind, whether
low IQ or eccentric genius.
The first line of Vonnegut’s narrative implies a utopia of equality, but we soon
discover that the society described in “Harrison Bergeron” stands in for a subject of
satire. Satire usually makes a strong point, targeting with humor and irony groups and
individuals who deserve to be criticized. It has been suggested that Vonnegut’s story
satirizes practices like affirmative action. One might make a good case that the story
satirizes quota systems that unfairly place people in positions based solely on ethnic
Although readers readily identify with the title character of the story, Vonnegut
(perhaps teasingly) said in an interview that he identified with Diana Moon Glampers.
It’s unclear what he meant. Does he see himself as firing shotguns and killing those
who step out of line to act as individuals? Perhaps he speaks as a writer, the godlike
personage who must make characters behave. It may be that the story aims its shotgun
of satire at those who think they are superior to others and arrogantly show off. Maybe
Vonnegut aims at totalitarian governments, or any totalizing systems, that demand
conformity. We might find further evidence for Vonnegut’s intertextual relationship to
Tocqueville, who wrote, “Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one
word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty,
socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.” At the time Tocqueville wrote the
preceding quotation, the sentence in the Declaration of Independence that states “all
men are created equal” was implicitly thought to include only men in the sense of
gender as well as humanity. Women were not allowed to vote until the twentieth
century. Nor were African slaves or Native Americans to be included in the category of
men who were created equal. This meaning has changed over time, at least as an
ideal. Harrison cannot help but value joy, grace, and independence of spirit.
JOANNA RUSS
When It Changed (p. 1184)
Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” reimagines gender roles beyond the traditional
Western expectations of what women and men think, do, even what they wear. Read-
ers shortly learn that all humans on the Earth colony “Whileaway” are women—men
died out thirty generations ago—and human females have learned to reproduce by
combining ova. Interestingly, they still marry one another and have traditionally fe-
male names (like Katy and Janet), indicating that the story might be a bit dated in its
reliance on stereotypically feminine features, behaviors, or rituals. Its continued rele-
vance is unquestionable, however, in that it asks readers to consider our contemporary
social constructs for gendered behavior.
Given that the society on Whileaway has evolved beyond needing males for re-
production, and Russ’s descriptions suggest that all community tasks (from technolog-
ical innovations to hunting to resolving conflicts) are carried out by the solely female
population, the story’s central figures are nonplussed and ultimately discouraged by
the return of “Earth men.” Katy and Janet find the visitors disconcertingly large and
are rightfully suspicious of the men’s repeated insistence that Earth now has equality
OCTAVIA BUTLER
Human Evolution (p. 1190)
Octavia Butler’s “Human Evolution” thrusts readers into a futuristic Mars colony in
which some humans have reproduced with a complex and highly intelligent alien
race, the Oankali. Earth, while not completely destroyed by its war and turmoil, is no
longer a desirable place to live. This new world is rich with “otherness,” from the
main character’s process of metamorphosis and mysterious sensorial abilities to its five
parental figures. However, the notion of “coming of age,” as well as the nuances of
interpersonal relationships between parents and offspring, might seem quite familiar
to readers. We learn that this family and others like it live as part of the Lo entity—a
living substance that houses and nourishes them in their Mars colony. The main
character, Jodahs, is a 29-year-old “construct” of some of the Lo’s founding members.
In Butler’s story, Jodahs is introduced to a human couple interested in joining the
colony, and Jodahs shows this couple the area on the edge of the Lo where humans
FAIRY-TALE JOURNEYS:
RE-VISIONS OF A STORY (p. 1198)
CHARLES PERRAULT
Little Red Riding Hood (p. 1198)
Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” begins with a close extended family of
women taking care of each other and showering affection on the little girl of the
youngest generation. But hints of problems are present in the second sentence: the
mother is “excessively fond” of the child, and the grandmother is said to have “doted”
on her. The implication for readers in the 1600s, long before the Romantic period’s
idealization of childhood in the early 1800s, would have been negative. This child is
spoiled and perhaps vain and therefore is likely to come to a bad end.
Coming from the country puts Little Red Riding Hood at a further disadvantage.
She is sent into the world to do good works but is little prepared for the dangers along
The connotations of rape in the grandmother’s house are clear. The wolf intrudes
into the innocent family love among the three generations of women, first devouring
the grandmother out of hunger and teasing and consuming Little Red Riding Hood
seemingly for dessert. Both women die because they are too trusting, and some readers
might question whether they are truly as innocent as they appear to be. It is rather
shocking when the wolf’s invitation for the girl to get into bed—presumably with her
grandmother—elicits the response of disrobing. We can imagine adults enjoying the
naughty connotations of the scene whereas children giggle at the series of questions as
they eagerly await the “All the better to eat you up with” of the well-told tale. The
ignorance of the females in the story provides a satisfying irony, because we know what
will happen and pick up on the sexual nuances but the characters do not.
In fairy tales, young women are both innocent and pretty, a stereotype of women
Although the story has much comic potential, the issue is serious: Our definitions
of men and women are shaped by subliminal messages, and our ability to interact with
each other without playing fairy-tale games is hampered by them. We might as easily
critique the images of men in the tale: One male is a predatory wolf who feeds his
hunger through deceit; other males are protectors who are supposed to defend the
public against the wolf but because they are busy working do not save the women from
death (or a fate worse than death) in this particular narrative. (And though it may take
us a bit off track, environmentally minded students may question the images of wolves
as villains and woodcutters as heroes!)
Perhaps the mother could have given the naive Little Red Riding Hood and her
sickly grandmother some concrete help, had she been on the scene. But like the dead
mothers in the tales of Snow White and Cinderella, this potentially strong character is
removed from the scene. In fact, she is responsible for throwing the more vulnerable
females into danger, and we may question why she chooses not to accompany her
daughter on the walk through the woods and not to serve as a caregiver to her own
mother. In Perrault’s world, perhaps she has been removed by her position as a
(presumably) married woman or by her need to provide for the family. More telling is
the disappearance or nonexistence of the father. In most traditional fairy tales, the
father’s absence or complicity leaves the child open to danger, often from a
stepmother or witch.
We may want to return to the issue of education and raise the question of Little
Red Riding Hood’s age and her preparation for the world outside her home. On the
one hand, if she is a thirteen-year-old surfing the Internet or hanging out at the mall,
her parents have some culpability, but the story also becomes a parent’s nightmare.
On the other hand, if she is a college student, the story might be more relevant to our
violent tales of Perrault and the Grimm brothers were so long told to children, but we
might recall that children love scary stories and often understand the moral, especially
when it is given so explicitly. Perhaps children need to know that unthinking decisions
can lead to death: we don’t want them to run into the street or to help the “nice man”
find his puppy, setting themselves up for harm. The deaths of Perrault’s narrative seem
appropriate because they emphasize the danger.
JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM
Little Red Cap (p. 1201)
The Charles Perrault version of “Little Red Riding Hood” seems to be aimed mostly at
“well bred young ladies” susceptible to seduction by male predators at the French
court in the late 1600s. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s tale, adapted from stories told by
German peasant women, imagines a less sophisticated audience. Modern parents
might be reluctant to tell their children stories with this degree of violence, but the
Grimms’ “Little Red Cap” is more childlike than Perrault’s in terms of sexual innuen-
do. In both tales, the wolf devours the grandmother and the female child, and this
gobbling up of women by a fearsome but clever predator can be equated with rape.
Perrault clearly gives his audience a cautionary tale, laced with a certain amount of
adult humor: His characters are gullible, and their fate comes as a direct result of their
trusting natures. Wolves exist, the narrative implies, and if you are not prepared to deal
with them, you die and the wolves win.
At the beginning of their tale, the Grimms emphasize how sweet and likable Little
Red Cap is. She is the good little girl that female children are expected to emulate.
Unlike the child of Perrault’s version, who is depicted as spoiled and overly “doted” on,
Little Red Cap is loved by everyone and has been given training and discipline. We
hear her mother instructing her on how she should mind her manners. But like
Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, this girl also lacks knowledge about how to deal with
deception in the world away from home. This omission in her education makes her
vulnerable to the wolf, who—with veiled sexual connotations—is attracted to her being
a “sweet young thing” and imagines that she “will taste even better than the old
woman.” Even when Little Red Cap goes astray, she thinks about gathering flowers for
Ironically for modern readers, Little Red Cap is drawn from the path of
righteousness because her eyes are opened to the beauty of nature. For audiences in
around 1800—as the Romantic period in art, music, and literature was beginning to
flower in Germany and other European countries—the conflict between traditional
moral virtues and the sublime awe of untamed nature would have been more
problematic than it may be for twenty-first-century readers. For the Grimms’ readers,
the idea that the beauties of nature should be sought out and enjoyed was
revolutionary, and for earlier tellers of the folktales such a thought would have
bordered on sin. Wilderness was something to be tamed and brought under God’s
control: Woodcutters cleared the tangled growth of sinful nature to create the parks
and gardens of Christian civility and order. Being swept up in the beauties of nature
would have been judged by some listeners to the tale to be as dangerous spiritually as
discovery, we need to imagine audiences who would and examine both their warrants
and our own.
We also need to problematize the views of women revealed in the story. The
society that we meet at the beginning of both the Perrault and the Grimm versions of
“Little Red Riding Hood” seems to be centered on the female members of a family;
fathers, brothers, and grandfathers are nowhere to be seen. When the first male figure
enters the picture, he takes the dangerous form of a ravenous wolf. In Perrault’s
The message may be that women need men to save them, encouraging passivity
in women and the desire to be a rescuer in men. Certainly, many other Grimm tales
carry this message: in “Cinderella” and “Snow White,” for example, handsome
princes come to the rescue of persecuted women, and marriage is seen as a happy
ending that solves all problems. Perhaps, however, rather than assuming that the
message is one we would now see as negative—that women are too weak or foolish to
save themselves without the help of a man—we could see “Little Red Cap” as
demonstrating the reality that women usually cannot enclose themselves in a society
that ignores the presence of men. Indeed, ignoring their existence may lead to danger
when women instead trust those who would do them harm. The women of the
Grimms’ story actually learn to fend for themselves by the story’s end: The heroine
does not marry the woodcutter, and the women carry on as an autonomous group,
benefiting from the knowledge acquired by their experiences.
As we have noted already, although the Perrault and the Grimm versions of
“Little Red Riding Hood” share the same plot, subtle differences exist between the two
tales. Perrault’s female characters are more gullible, weaker, and less likable than the
Grimm brothers’ women. The Perrault characters are quickly killed by the wolf and
do not return to life to exact revenge or to learn from their mistakes. The women in
of an outright attack. But death, like sex, is similarly skirted in the Grimm story. The
power of good is foregrounded, and the power of evil is somewhat denied, making the
cautionary effect of the Grimm tale perhaps less dramatic than that of the Perrault
version.
The device of having the women return to life in the Grimm version may deliver
an unrealistically optimistic view of life. If the hunger of the wolf stands for the
compulsion to rape, then the easy recovery of the women may imply that one can
ANGELA CARTER
The Company of Wolves (p. 1205)
Traditional folktales about Little Red Riding Hood warn young women not to stray
from the path of conventional morality and obedience. The feminist retelling by An-
gela Carter, “The Company of Wolves,” first published in 1977, complicates the sto-
ry’s message by turning it upside down. Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood embraces the
wolf and the wolf nature within herself as she seizes her own sexuality.
In the movie version of Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” the story begins with
Rosaleen, the Little Red Riding Hood character, dreaming of the death of her
conventional, judgmental sister, Alice, who is attacked by wolves as she runs in fear
through the forest. Should some people stay on the path, because not everyone
possesses a moral compass or the ability to deal with ambiguity? Is it okay to become a
predator oneself and to devour others? Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood attacks the
wolf and tames him, and the argument can be made that she thus falls into a
dangerous fantasy that kills many marriages. She seems unconcerned about her
dangerous as the “bad neighborhood” represented by the forest. In both the world of
the folktale and the world of today, however, young people reach a point when they
must strike out on their own and enter into adult relationships. Perrault’s “Little Red
Riding Hood” warns girls about the dangers of seduction, and the Grimm version ends
with women banding together to protect themselves against predators; neither one,
however, seems to admit that girls grow up and enter into sexual relationships,
whether through their own desires or through society’s overt or subtle admonitions to
marry and produce children. The stories may mean to discourage the former and
pot.”
Carter’s narrative gives us several episodes about wolves before bringing us to the
story that most closely resembles the Little Red Riding Hood of the folktales. In her
screenplay, Carter has these stories told in the girl’s dream by her grandmother. These,
therefore, are the cautionary tales meant to teach the budding young woman to stay on
the path of morality and to be on guard against predators. But from the beginning,
although the narrator tells us that the wolf is “carnivore incarnate” and beyond reason
and redemption, she also hints that the wolf simply follows his nature and responds to
his hunger. When hunters cut off the paws of the trapped animal, the reader is more
likely to feel empathy for the creature than to side with the brutal humans of the story.
When we think of paws, we think of our pets, and the connotations of the word raise
issues about distinctions between wild animals and the ones we feel at home with.
When the wolf turns into a human being, the narrator drives home her point that
predators are not always easy to recognize and that wolves are not always what they
seem to be. When the voice of the storyteller tells us that we “could count the
starveling ribs through their pelts,” the reader’s compassion is further aroused.
have followed the voice of her mate into the forest rather than simply waiting under
the covers, even if this meant death. Her first husband seems to think so. The matter-
of-fact narration continues as we are told that both men abuse the woman for what
they see as unfaithfulness. Readers may find irony in this episode or may be angry that
the writer does not condemn it. This is how things usually are between men and
women, the story seems to say in its medieval voice. But the anecdote about the
woman with two husbands prepares the audience to accept the different woman who
later takes the far-from-sensible action of embracing her wolf lover, contrasting the
passive victim with the eager participant who demands equality.
The narrative is composed of several episodes, tied together by observations about
wolves that are told in the present tense and evoke a sense of timelessness. This
technique does not explain all of the tense shifts in the narrative, however; in fact,
Carter changes tenses at least eighteen times in the course of the story, sometimes for
These anecdotes, along with the more complex story of the missing bridegroom,
seem to be offered as evidence. Their past-tense delivery implies that these events
indeed happened and are facts that could be verified. The bridegroom story is
interrupted, however, by a beautifully evocative paragraph in the present tense that
expresses the inherent despair of wolves. The missing bridegroom anecdote is followed
by the storyteller’s voice giving information in the present tense again, starting in
paragraph 20 with the suspiciously unreliable “They say.” Instructors might want to
take the opportunity here to discuss the credibility (and the lack of attribution) of
experience the violence through the old woman’s eyes. The sexual connotations are
made explicit here, and after we see the wolf’s huge genitals, the story shifts suddenly
to past, then present, and then past tense again as the wolf attacks the grandmother.
After the young woman seizes her own wild nature, refusing to listen to “the old
bones under the bed”—the old wives’ tales that urge women to stay on the path far
away from their own sexual pleasures—the narrative moves from past tense to present
tense for one line and then for the first time to future tense. This sentence implies that
the girl and the transformed wolf indeed have a future and that her overturning of the
story’s expectations will lead to a mutual taming mixed with a mutual wildness. The
result is peaceful as we are told in the past tense that the blizzard did die down as
predicted. The story ends with an image in the present tense and a happy ending as
the girl “sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.”
This Little Red Riding Hood differs in many ways from the naive girls of the
earlier tales, and we are told explicitly that she deliberately delays her arrival at her
grandmother’s house so that she will lose the bet and be forced to kiss the wolf.
Although she may not know exactly what will happen, she knows by instinct that to
become a woman she must step past the grandmother’s admonitions against female
sexuality. There is a fine line in Carter’s story that students should discuss. Does
Carter mean for us to believe that young girls wish to be seduced and that the rapist
can be tamed by turning his seduction around on him? Or does she mean that women
are capable of making their own decisions about sex? Where does the line exist
between actions that are bold and powerful and actions that are dangerous or
exploitative? Where is the line between rape and the sort of sexual fantasy that women
enjoy reading about in romance novels?