Interesting takes on Peter — The arrogance of knowledge seems to be as unpopular as the arrogance of ignorance (that’s how I describe the Dunning-Kruger effect). I found his arrogance refreshing. He takes things at face value and never questions himself, which I also like. Of course, we mere mortals must question everything, but Peter is beyond that. That, in itself, is frightening, wouldn’t you say? He even intimidated Guru with his insistence on knowing the word ”that will explode this planet like a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple.” Idk why that sentence doesn’t creep y’all out like it does me. He’s someone — Some
Thing? — to be feared. His motivations are not apparent to we mere mortals.
What he does to Mary is not to be known to us. As so very much in this little story, it is merely
suggested. It is for Peter to know and we readers to guess. He takes it for granted that we cannot guess because he lives in a different reality than ours. Peter doesn’t think we could handle it, like Mary couldn’t. I
got that. I’m content with not knowing or even being able to imagine.
That’s where the horror lies, for me.
IMO that final word doesn’t have anything to do with nuclear weaponry. The Manhattan Project (named for the borough of Manhattan in New York City where it was initially based) didn’t really start untill 1942, and this story was conceived and written
c. 1939-40. (
Manhattan Project) He was a very bright kid and could have had inklings just from the work being done on enriching uranium, I grant you that; he was such a brilliant anachronism that it’s possible he had ”the bomb” in mind, but I doubt it. Again IMO it was a metaphoric reference to the absolute power of destruction that he literally held over an unsuspecting human race … in the palm of his hand: an apple,
rotten, of course.
Y’all have helped so much in clarifying my heretofore unrefined thoughts about this story. As an Aspie, I didn’t
get the lack of emotional connection between the narrator and the reader. I had an entirely different, perhaps even opposite, reaction. I love the spareness, the absence of excessive description. It’s a mind game that Kornbluth has written, the bare bones of a modern video game with its layers upon layers of embellishment. Maybe that’s why I like this story so much but am entirely indifferent to video games. IMO
less is definitely
more.
So I see the reactions of y’all v. my own take on
The Words of Guru as a succinct example of the difference between NT and Aspie thinking. As such, it is enlightening and exciting. I’ve been trying to understand and delineate the differences my whole life, and Cyril Kornbluth was able to devise this mind game of a story that does the job
while in his teens!
His most famous stories,
The Little Black Bag and its sort-of sequel
The Marching Morons, will be in SF anthologies until the end of time. I have all his short stories in a collection available at Audible.com:
His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth. His story
Two Dooms is one of the earliest
What If The Axis Powers Had Won? WWII stories. Not as slick as Dick’s
The Man in the High Castle, perhaps, and possibly it’d be considered racist in our
times with its broad characterizations bordering on caricature, but I love the way he explores the moral anguish of a Manhattan Project scientist.