This is one of a series of posts I am doing as I read the short stories that have won the Hugo award since it was started in 1955.

I have never heard of Avram Davidson before reading this story, but as I learn more about him I can see why. Davidson was an associate of HP Lovecraft and they maintained a correspondence. Like Lovecraft, Davidson is a self-taught intellectual who joined the branch of paranoid American intellectualism that substitutes feeling and conspiracy for rational and scientific investigation. Science fiction has always provided cover for this brand of paranoia intellectualism since the genre gives this tradition’s lack of intellectual rigor the socially acceptable label of fiction. Yet these individuals’ work tends to flounder, or only find a niche audience, since its intellectual underpinnings are quite dubious and disconnected from the real.

Reading this story, I got the sense that the character Ferd was a stand-in for Davidson. His nose buried in a book on biology, Ferd concludes that if something did not eat the oyster larvae in the sea the entire ocean would fill up with oysters (queue our title). He then extends this to conclude that the everyday objects that you always seem to have too many or not enough of must be living creatures. This is obviously a generalization fallacy where biological principles are applied in a context they are not meant for. This is a story of conspiracy though, so while the story is presented logically the reason driving its plot is inherently emotional and the logic does not hold up to scrutiny.

At the end, when it is revealed that Ferb was found strangled with a clothes hanger in his closet, my first thought was that he had committed suicide. I then realized the implication is that the living clothes hangers had killed Ferd. Considering Ferb as a stand in for Davidson, this would seem to reflect Davidson’s own paranoia about science rather than a shocking twist ending though.

This story reflects the conspiracy loving side of the United States and its opposition to anything the America psyche experiences as other. While not outright racists like Lovecraft, this story exudes a similar fear of the unknown (in this case science) and a sense that the other is the death of the American individual. All of which leads me to wonder why the science fiction society would award the Hugo to a work that seems to find science horrifying. Yet science fiction has always provided refuge for paranoid intellectuals who do not fit into the mainstream since their work in the field is given the socially acceptable label of fiction.

Source: The Hugo Winners Edited by Isaac Asimov