Strange Compulsion

Reading Diary of The Captain's Daughter by Philip José Farmer

Greetings and Salutations! This issue of the Official William Emmons Books Newsletter takes the form of a review of a 1953 novella by my favorite science fiction author Philip José Farmer alternatively titled Strange Compulsion or The Captain’s Daughter. This one first appeared in the October 1953 issue of Science-Fiction Plus. It was reprinted as part of the 1959 collection The Alley God which is where I read it. It has been out of print since 1962. In the twenty-first century, with one major exception, the fan press and other publishers have been more focused on Farmer’s novels than his shorter works. This is kind of shame given the extent to which Farmer’s short fiction really has the juice. As an armchair quarterback with no publishing experience, it seems to me that someone ought to produce ebooks and audiobooks of The Alley God, Strange Relations and Father to the Stars. But I digress.

One thing that interests me about Strange Compulsion is how you see many of Farmer’s big preoccupations already fully formed in the early 1950s. This novella is part of a sequence of fiction dealing with themes of sex, aliens and religion that began with Farmer’s 1952 novella The Lovers (expanded into a novel in 1961; I recommend the original novella version which is in Startling Stories here and in this collection from my friends Meteor House). The Lovers is oft given credit for paving the way in terms of sex and science fiction but the sound byte usually fails to emphasize that the sex is between man and alien in the context of intense religious repression. Since Octavia E. Butler has become kind of a household name in certain quarters, it’s worth pointing out that “Bloodchild” and the Lilith’s Brood/Xenogenesis trilogy are thematically aligned with much of Farmer’s early work. If you dig Butler, you might dig Farmer.

The protagonist of Strange Compulsion is a doctor with no sense of smell named Gaulers who is an indentured worker for Saxwell, a space company that paid for his education. The story opens on the moon when a spaceship called the Erlking has landed. Two big things are going on the Erlking: the disappearance of the second mate Claxton and a medical emergency involving the Captain’s daughter Debby Everlake. Gaulers is called aboard to deal with the medical emergency.

Debby has had a seizure of unknown causes. In the past, I’ve reviewed the science fiction medical thriller “Contagion” by Katherine MacLean and expressed my affection for Lester del Rey’s novella Nerves. Those works are more about the tension of responding quickly to novel medical problems using speculative science. Figuring out the cause of Debby’s seizure and everything that is going on with and around her is more of a protracted mystery that involves not just her medical condition but also the disappearance of Claxton and the hushed up secrets of the puritanical Remoh religious sect to which Debby and her father belong.

In order to resolve the mystery and because he has fallen in love with Debby, Gaulers joins the crew of the Erlking. Some of the clues that come out are that both Debby and her father Captain Asaph Everlake have an intense fishy odor, that Captain Everlake almost never interacts with his daughter in person, that Debby and Claxton became lovers soon after Claxton joined the Remoh sect and participated in a group baptism ceremony with Debby on the Remoh home colony of Melville, and that the Erlking’s previous physician Doctor Ginas drowned trying to take samples from the lake in which the group baptism took place. The Saxwell company investigation ruled this last event a suicide but Gaulers is unconvinced.

When the Erlking returns to Melville, Gaulers is himself almost drowned by a person wearing a spacesuit in the same lake. In the exposition near the story’s end Gaulers discerns that a small minority of Remoh, including the Everlakes and the late Claxton, are infested by a parasite called an oners that takes the form of a filament invisible to x-rays that stretches all around the body and forms its sex organs inside the human gametes. Gaulers compares the oners to an Earth genus of parasitic barnacle called Sacculina.

The oners creates an extreme fishy odor that repels most humans but which causes intense sexual attraction among those who are hosts to the oners. Captain Everlake admits these individuals are isolated as serial adulterers in prison camps on Melville and that knowledge of the parasite is hidden from the Remoh public. The narrative implies very strongly that the strange compulsion caused by the oners is so strong that the infested Captain Everlake can’t go near his infested daughter without falling on her sexually unless he masturbates beforehand. In the end, Captain Everlake confesses to killing Ginas and Claxton in order to protect the Remoh community’s parasitical secret and Gaulers modernizes a surgical technique cribbed from Melville’s Dark Age indigenous humanoids to remove the oners from Debby.

I have two criticisms of Strange Compulsion. One is that it spends time on unnecessary world building and a throwaway relationship between Gaulers and his female assistant Rhoda in the first half of the novella. We learn that in the future on Earth women out number men two-to-one. Women seem to do some of the pursuing as a result and the government issues bigamy licenses. Rhoda is very forthcoming with her desire to court and marry Gaulers and he rejects her. As a result, Rhoda chooses to take an assignment on a frontier planet where men outnumber women five-to-one. At the last mintue, she tells him off and he realizes that maybe he was into her the whole time. These are dangling threads that don’t do much to inform Gaulers’ attempt to solve the mystery at the heart of the story. The novella probably could have been parred down into a novelette and the interesting idea of an Earth where women outnumber men could have been saved for another story.

My second criticism is I that thought the doctor-seeking-patient romance was, as they say, cringe. The love story between Gaulers and Debby is central to everything going on with the story and cutting it out would render a wholly different narrative. I’m not suggesting Farmer should’ve rewritten this story to suit what my tastes and sensibilities would be some 71 years later but I’m weirded out nonetheless. Farmer’s sex-and-alien stories are known evoke a feeling of revulsion in some readers but I have a sense that wasn’t the intention with this particular love story. I suppose I’ll just have to chalk it up to an empathy exercise and remember this sensation next time I tell someone that “Mother” (also available in this collection) is my favorite story by Farmer.

I always like to situate a story in space and time to understand it a little better. My read on this story is that it represents part of the trend of science fiction becoming a genre for grown ups in the 1950s. The work is adult literature because Farmer was writing about how a religious community’s attitudes toward sex created a minor public health crisis. This sociological theme blends well with the speculative xenobiology to deliver an intellectual treat for the reader.

My friend Jesse Willis recently tweeted out a scan of a 1955 editorial on The Limitations of Science Fiction by Robert A. W. Lowndes. In the editorial, Lowndes argues that the field is limited in terms of its ability to produce great literature—defined dubiously as fiction that adds to our “knowledge or understanding of human nature”—because your average science fiction writer at the time was a 20-something with little life experience who had only read science fiction. I’m willing to accept this may have been true at some point in Lowndes’ youth. But at the time of Lowndes’ editorial, the field was full of professionals who, like Lowndes himself, had lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War. Farmer’s own career gives the lie to Lowndes’ assertion. He entered the field in his thirties having read broadly in the fields of literature, history and social science. The man had something substantial to say, and at the time he wasn’t alone.

The place of original publication for a story like this always fascinates me. Strange Compulsion first ran in Science-Fiction Plus which was my irksome and exasperating science fiction publishing hero Hugo Gernsback’s short-lived final attempt to re-enter the then-booming magazine field, with Sam Moskowitz doing most of the heavy-lifting. I wish I knew more about this magazine. If the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is to be believed, the publication was an unhappy marriage between Gernsback and Moskowitz and ran both traditional stuff we might associate with Gernsback’s 1930s pulp Wonder Stories as well as modern stuff like the story under review that Moskowitz thought ought to constitute science fiction. Apparently, the final editorial involved Gernsback decrying a genre that had moved on from the kind of stories he wanted to publish. These are the kinds of factoids that drive my magazine-collecting habit.

The last thing that I want to do to situate Strange Compulsion is note the use of psychology in the story. Following Debby’s seizure and her being gruffly informed by her father that her beau Claxton had died, Gaulers administers a form machine-and-drug-driven psychotherapy that causes her to work through the trauma very quickly so that she won’t have psychically painful aberrations later. This is in line with society-at-large and the science fiction community in particular’s interest experimental psychology at the time. In 1953, the world was only three years out from L. Ron Hubbard introducing his theory of Dianetics in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction. Like many in the science fiction community, Farmer was interested in Dianetics until it became obvious Hubbard’s acolytes were making cultish demands. It’d be interesting to know how Farmer’s involvement with Dianetics lined up with the writing of this story. In any event, the encounter with Dianetics had a big enough impact on Farmer that he later anonymously denounced Astounding editor John W. Campbell in the pages of the zine Who Killed Science Fiction? (see Anonymous #2) for his role in popularizing Hubbard’s ideas before they could be scientifically tested.

Overall, Strange Compulsion is a rich text that still deserves to be read in 2024. It not only provides a window into what was going on in the maturing field of science fiction in the 1950s, it also has something to say about the risks associated with taboos and hushing up secrets that are evergreen in a country founded in part by Puritans and which keeps producing different strains of puritanical thinking to this very day. More than that, it’s an interesting story by the “most underrated SF writer of all time.” Seek this one out.

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