And we are back for the Thousand Worlds Book Club
and we're talking about
Nobody Leaves New Pittsburg.
Oh my god, Nobody Leaves New Pittsburg.
It's my favorite story. What, really, Brandon?
You like it?
No. Dumbass. Well,
our guest this week is Dolorous Edd.
Oh, you brought me in for the greatest of George R. R. Martin tales.
I don't see why these stories need to be reviewed.
I'm not sure they needed to be viewed.
I think people should keep their wondering eyes to themselves.
That's how fights break out.
Well, yes. Nobody Leaves New Pittsburg is not exactly
a favorite of many people, including our author.
The story was published in 1976
in a magazine called
Amazing Science Fiction,
formerly know as Amazing Stories;
but the magazine had fallen in popularity in the 70s
and only had a circulation of about 25,000.
After this, the story never appears again.
George doesn't include it in any of his collections.
This video may introduce it to more people than its actual publication.
If it weren't for crazy fans
tracking down this old story
it would have died a nice quiet death.
Yeah, I would like a nice quiet death
but, in my experience,
death is pretty noisy and doesn't have very much good to say.
Well, I guess it's more interesting than
most people at the end of the day.
So Nobody Leaves New Pittsburg does have the honor
of being the first story in the Corpse Handler Trilogy,
of which the third story, Meathouse Man,
is pretty darn stellar, in my opinion.
There is some debate about whether the Corpse Handler Trilogy is even part of the
Thousand Worlds. In Dreamsongs, George says
it's not part of the continuity
but, at the same time, the story references Old Earth, Newholme,
Silversky and other
first generation human worlds that are the base
of the Thousand Worlds universe.
Granted we have no references to Hrangans, Fyndii,
the Double War or the Interregnum
but there is no reason why the story couldn't be set
in the Thousand Worlds universe prior to the expansion
of the Federal Empire and the Double War.
So Nobody Leaves New Pittsburg is a fairly simple tale
and very similar to the theme of The Stone City.
Our protagonist deals with bureaucracy,
a rigged system
and visits loser friends.
It's about the need to escape shit places and, once again,
it's a story about George R. R. Martin's life growing up in
Bayonne, New Jersey. Our protagonist beat the odds
and escaped his shit planet,
just like our author beat the odds and escaped his shit town.
So our story follows Sykes,
who has returned home to his home world
of New Pittsburg for a mystery reason.
Sykes is a corpse handler and,
aided by technology, he can telepathically
control human corpses
and provide cheap human labor. His home planet of
New Pittsburg is run
by a fairly sinister company called
the New Pittsburg Company,
which keeps nearly all living people
in effective slavery. The workers are paid little,
work in dangerous environments and have
hidden fees all over the place. If you screw up
and commit a crime, you are transformed into
a working corpse.
So Sykes begins the story by dropping off
his three corpses at a corpse depot.
And we are introduced to the many ways
that the company nickels and dimes people.
Bad exchange rates, late fees,
poor services; Sykes is required to pay
to house his corpses for the night, but
the service is nothing more than an empty room
and the company bears no responsibility
for damage.
Sykes remembers his childhood a bit and a man named
Banner, who taught him how to be a corpse handler
and allowed him once to watch a conversion of a man from being alive
to becoming a controlled corpse.
That man had killed someone but Sykes sees
that now people are being
converted to becoming corpses for simple assault.
Sykes then heads to the bar
and runs into some old acquaintances.
He finds out that half of his old friends are dead,
some from health reasons and others from accidents.
The company itself
is not doing well financially,
which is why things have gotten worse on New Pittsburg.
Sykes listens to some hard-luck tales from the locals:
the company doesn't give work to people
unless they are desperate and willing to work in dangerous places,
rent, depot fees, imported food -
these all cause the workers to lose more money than they earn
and they all end up trapped.
Sykes oddly has little sympathy for them.
He tells them that they've acted stupidly;
they had opportunities to get out and they didn't take them.
The locals complain and say they never really had a chance
but Sykes is the exception and proof
that escape is possible.
He got off the planet as a corpse handler despite the fact
that his father never really taught him any useful skills.
Sykes's closer friends then arrive at the bar
and they drink and they have a good time.
In the morning, Sykes gets ready to leave and we discover
why he came to New Pittsburg in the first place.
He wanted to visit his father's grave.
He notes that his father's grave is no different
from a typical corpse grave. And then Sykes leaves.
Wow, it's a happy ending. We don't have many
of those with our author. Or in life.
Well, I suppose there's happy endings in Moles Town.
Yeah, I suppose it's a happy ending for our protagonist.
The rest of the story is so depressing that George R. R. Martin
had to give us something, I suppose.
As with The Stone City, the story establishes
a pretty brutal metaphor for anyone in a dead-end job
or a poor financial situation. They are
nothing more than walking corpses
being controlled and used by the system.
Profit is taken by the company while
loss is taken by the individual. And as the economy goes down,
it only gets worse and worse for the common man.
They are just mindless bodies to be exploited by the system
and then they die.
Man, life must have really sucked in Bayonne, New Jersey.
Oh, I would have loved to live in a place like Bayonne.
At least they had clean water.
Nothing beats a good cup of clean water.
It helps wash down the taste of unclean water.
Well, we talked a bit about our author's feelings
about our economic system in The Stone City.
And here again George definitely feels that
poor working conditions and a rigged system
are akin to slavery.
That said, he once again shows his frustration at people
for not using their brains
and escaping the system.
So I guess the message is, yes, the system is horribly rigged
but it's your fault as well.
Yeah, I can understand that.
It's like that time I was hungry and I ate that rotten meat.
The meat had done its best to make me lose my appetite,
smelling bad and such,
so, really, I'm the one to blame.
Hmm, I'm not sure if that analogy works at all.
Anyway, like The Stone City, there is a bit of melancholy about
fathers in Nobody Leaves New Pittsburg.
Sykes has done better than his father
but, in some ways, blames his father for not doing more
but also seems saddened that his father
never broke the cycle and escaped himself.
I suppose all the anger
and frustration at the locals
was just veiled disappointment with his father or something.
If there is one thing that sets this story apart from others,
it's the angry perspective of the protagonist.
Most of our protagonists so far have been fairly sad,
introspective and self-loathing.
But Sykes is more jaded, bitter and uncompromising.
More so than any protagonist we've seen
in any of his other work. And that is probably the point.
It takes a hard personality to actually rise out
of a rigged system.
But it is striking as this story is so auto-biographical.
Our author was clearly very passionate
and angry about our economic system and
what it put him, his family and his community through.
Anyway, what's more interesting than the actual story
is the science behind the corpse handling itself.
Now we've seen the telepathic
control of other beings in Men of Greywater Station
and in The Plague Star. And we've seen
the either telepathic or telekinetic
animation of dead beings in Nightflyers.
I suppose this is more like Rica Dawnstar controlling
the Tyrannosaurus Rex as the bodies
in this story are still alive but just
have computer brains.
Still, the imagery of controlling a group of corpses
reminds us very much of the Others.
The Others, of course, seem to have the ability to
telepathically control masses of dead.
The zombies at the Fist of the First Men, for example,
seemed co-ordinated.
I'm not sure if this is because the wights have a hive-mind
or because the many zombies
have another master. Perhaps it's a bit of both;
Varamyr Sixskins could also control
many bodies at once.
He was the prime controller though his consciousness was still
blended with his animals.
And I can't really say too much else about this story.
We covered much of this theme with The Stone City
and we'll be talking more about corpse handling with
its sequel, Override. The link for Override is below;
and it's worth noting that two more Thousand World
stories have been found. One is called
Warship and the other is The Runners.
You can find them below as well. I'd like to thank Dolorous Edd.
Oh, I don't like to be thanked.
Thanking is for good deeds and no good deed goes unpunished.
And we will see you next time.