Library of America: The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett / The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson

American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth / More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon / The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett / The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
edited by Gary K. Wolfe

The last two novels in this Library of America edition are The Long Tomorrow (1955) by Leigh Brackett and The Shrinking Man (1956) by Richard Matheson. The former was, as far as I know, my first experience of the work of Leigh Brackett, a pioneering author of her era; The Long Tomorrow was a finalist for the 1965 Hugo Award for Best Novel, but lost out to Heinlein's Double Star (1956). I've read a few pieces by Matheson, including his 1975 novel Somewhere in Time.

Collection published: 2012
Novels originally published: 1955-56
Acquired: July 2023
Read: March 2024

What strikes me reading and writing them up together is that they are both concerned with what it means to be a man. The Long Tomorrow is a bildungsroman set in a postapocalyptic United States. It's not a novel of nuclear fallout or anything; what the novel focuses on is the fact that the U.S. government banned the establishment of communities of a certain size. No more cities, no more large buildings. This slows down technological redevelopment and prevents the creation of large targets for enemy nations. The main character is a boy, later young man, from an Amish-adjacent community in rural Ohio, who struggles as he runs up against the stipulations of his family and his village. Eventually, he goes on the run, traveling to a city on the Ohio River and then further west, in search of a mythical place where people can build cities and develop advanced technology once more.

The big conflict of the novel, though, is internal. How do you decide what values to adhere to, and what ones to ignore? Especially when these values seem to boil down to a form of fanaticism? But... what is there to replace them with other than a different form of fanaticism? I am a sucker for a good bildungsroman, and this is an excellent one, my favorite of the four novels collected in this volume. Lots of acutely observed, painful human psychology wedded to strong worldbuilding and atmospheric prose. I do really like Double Star, but if this had won the Hugo, I would have been quite pleased too.

But if The Long Tomorrow is a bildungsroman, the novel of the making of a man, then The Shrinking Man is the opposite—the novel of the unmaking of a man. I had thought going in from the cheesy title of the film based on the book (The Incredible Shrinking Man, which admittedly I have not seen) that this would be a cheesy story... but actually the title is very clever. Yes, the novel is about a shrinking man, but more specifically, it is about a shrinking man. As the protagonist shrinks, he loses his sense of masculinity and thus his sense of self, he diminishes in terms of being able to think of himself as a person who can do the kind of things men are supposed to be able to do: to provide for women and to desire and be desired by women, to exert physical authority over others. I can't say I loved this novel—Matheson takes you through his diminishment in a very methodical way that sometimes becomes plodding—but it was considerably more interesting than I expected it to be, and it paired nicely with The Long Tomorrow.

As a man can be built up by figuring out what he values, so too can he be torn down by having what he values taken away. Both of these novels showcase the ability of science fiction to defamiliarize the familiar, to get the reader to reconsider how their world operates by presenting a different one.