Fairy Tale Spotlight: Backlash [Short Story Review]

[I completely spoil this story.]

"Backlash" is a short science fiction story written by Winston K. Marks. It was published in 1954. I was originally not going to spoil this story, but I eventually made the tough decision to do so because I wanted to rant a little about the weird ending.

The story goes that an alien race called the Ollies crash-land on Earth, and the humans save and help the survivors. The Ollies seem to be an extremely friendly and even subservient race. They offer to pay back the humans by providing them with servant robots called Soths.

The Soths are big, hulking creatures who seem to be extremely good at doing the tasks given to them. The Ollies agree to manufacture them while the main character is basically in charge of selling them. As might be expected, the Soths are are hit and soon most of the humans around the world are not doing there own chores anymore, although I should mention that the wealthy people ended up getting to the front of the line. So everything sort of works out at first.

I had a similar opening to my book "The Fascinating Life of Animal Robots." Everything goes really good... until it doesn't. And in "Backlash," things go down hill in the worst way. For one, the cruelty of humanity comes out. Some of them begin just treating the Soths badly, even to the point of the robots having to protect themselves.

There was also a really creepy scene where the main character asks his wife to take off her clothing in front of the Soth to see how he will react. He makes her do this in front of a friend of theirs. Of course, the Soth leaves the room because he is being placed in a situation that is inappropriate, but I was more annoyed with the husband in this case. It reminded me a little of the husband from "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" to some extent. It was not a very nice thing to do, but it was also one of the things that made humanity not look so good in the story.

So after a bunch of controversial incidents with the Soth, the world goes into full riot about them. Many of them think they are defective or just plane evil. One woman even claims a Soth raped her, but that was unfounded. She was just trying to get attention. Basically, this whole thing turns into chaos really quickly, and soon the Soths turn on the humans.

The Soth owned by the main character explains that this happens all the time. They are given to the people of different planets as slaves, but soon the people turn on them or treat them badly. This then leads the Soths to flip the rolls on them, making the people the slaves with the Soths as the masters. Basically they invade planets and take control as a matter of righteous retaliation. The Ollies were already the slaves, but they were playing the roll of the masters because they had been ordered to.

So the ending is the whole reason why I wanted to spoil the story. This sort of came out of nowhere. The Soth that was owned by the main character announces that he requires a Sith (a female Soth) to breed with, but that it will take time for the Siths to arrive at Earth. Until then he is fine with using the husband's wife for his own pleasure. He calls for her, and she shows up looking like she is ready to go through with it.

Shockingly, the wife had secreted a hunting knife in her robes and kills the Soth dead. She basically gutted him right there in front of her stunned husband. Up until this point, she did not seem to be pitched as the type of woman to act like this. She even shoots another Soth in the head right before the book ends.

Now, the author wraps all this up in the concept that humans have simply risen above slavery, and his wife's actions are the fruits of this, but to me... it just seemed kind of forced. Maybe, he just liked the idea of a strong woman killing aliens or something. I'm okay with that, but there was no clue that she would act like that up until that point.

So this is a mixed bag. It's really a cool story! I even recommend it. But the business with the wife is a bit of a stretch. What do you think? Did he drop the ball at the end?

This blog was written on May 1, 2024.

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