The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons

Eleanor Arnason (b. 1942)
From The Future Is Female! More Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women

Interesting Links

“Me and Science Fiction” (Eleanor Aronson, Strange Horizons)

“The Idea House Project of the Walker Art Center, 1941–47” (Jill Vuchetich, Walker Art Center)

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Idea House II, 1947: kitchen, breakfast bar, and dining area. (Hennepin County Library via Docomomo US/MN)

Located in Minneapolis on the grounds of the Walker Art Center and designed by William Friedman and Hilde Reiss, Idea House II was a more ambitious undertaking than its predecessor, also built by the Walker Center and completed in 1941. The original home combined modernistic design with maximum affordability, while the second home focused on family living and technical innovation—although (as one recent article put it) “privacy was an ongoing issue in the free-flowing design, particularly as the children aged out of the child-sized alcoves.” Eleanor Arnason lived here with her parents and brother for over a decade; she later said it was “easier to talk about what was wrong with the house than what was right with the house.” Both structures were demolished in the 1960s to make way for a sculpture garden expansion.

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“I was raised by time travelers in a house of the future,” Eleanor Arnason told fellow author Terry Bisson during an interview in 2010.

Arnason’s father, the art historian H. Harvard Arnason, grew up in a community of poor Icelandic immigrants in Manitoba; her mother, Elizabeth (Yard) Arnason, was raised among American Methodist missionaries in a poverty-stricken area of western China. (“I think you could say they were travelers in time as well as space.”) In 1949, when Eleanor’s father accepted a position at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the family moved into Idea House II, where they remained until 1960. The home was “built in 1947 to be a house of the future—the utopia that was going to happen, now that the Depression and the War were over,” Arnason explained to Bisson. “We had a garbage disposal, electric heat and central air, when these were futuristic. . . . So I grew up in a design project house next to a contemporary art museum; and I grew up around artists.”

When she was in her teens, the Walker Center constructed a geodesic dome, and its architect, the philosopher Buckminster Fuller at the height of his fame, was staying in town. “I came home from school one day and found Fuller holding court in the living room, surrounded by young college students,” Arnason recalled. “Kids always figure their life is the way life is. It never occurred to me that there was anything unusual or wonderful about finding Bucky Fuller in the living room. So I grew up around people who were avant-gardists, which means—I guess—they lived at the edge of the future. That was one reason I became an SF writer. Another was my mother, who was a feminist and a socialist.”

When she was in high school, Arnason teamed up with two other teenagers and coedited several issues of a fanzine, All Mimsy. “I liked popular fiction that was set outside the ordinary world,” she wrote in an autobiographical essay that appeared in 1988. “Maybe I was escaping, though I don't remember the science fiction that I read in the 1950s as being particularly comforting. I remember lots of stories set in police states and in radioactive wastelands. Maybe I turned to science fiction not to escape the world I found myself in, but to understand it.”

After graduating for Swarthmore and pursuing graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, Arnason first moved to Brooklyn and then, from 1968 to 1974, lived in Detroit.

I moved—at least in part—in order to get away from the middle-class white society that had surrounded me all my life. What better place than Motown, which was half black and overwhelmingly blue collar? In this same period, I discovered the women's movement. It was a rough time. I couldn't even talk to the people I met at work. I was too white, too middle class, too intellectual. I had to learn a new way of talking and thinking. Outside work, I spent hours in rap groups and with my friends, discussing what it meant to be a woman. I remember being continually angry for months.

“I loved that city,” Arnason recalled three years ago on her blog. “It was full of energy, but not all the energy was positive.” She lived in a house with three other women and, one night, a prowler broke in and tried to enter the room of her housemate, whose screaming apparently scared off the culprit. The police arrived but “decided that Kathe had dreamed the intrusion.” Both women were stunned by the dismissive reactions from not only the police but also their other two roommates and Arnason’s male coworkers. “All I could think to do was write, and for the first time in my life I began to write fiction that was good enough to sell.”

From this experience came her first two published stories: “A Clear Day in the Motor City” (1973) and “The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons” (1974), each of which appeared in subsequent issues of New Worlds, a short-lived yet influential paperback series established by best-selling British author Michael Moorcock. “Warlord” may well be the best known of Arnason’s short stories, judging from its subsequent appearances in several landmark anthologies.

Set in a near-future dystopian Detroit, Arnason’s story imagines a writer working at home on a novel about a space-age heroine battling a “warlord’s minions” and trying to rescue her would-be lover. Meanwhile, through the newspaper, the radio, and the window the terrible reality of life keeps intruding on the writer’s thoughts. “The space-opera adventure being written by her narrator is science fiction at its most escapist,” writes SF editor Veronica Hollinger in her analysis of the story. “‘There’s hope and so forth’ only in the narrator’s fiction, not in her life. On the other hand, that life is also Arnason’s fiction, which suggests that the story’s conclusion is more complicated than it might at first appear to be.”

Most of the quotes by Arnason in the above introduction are from her interview with Terry Bisson, “At the Edge of Future,” included in the e-book publication of her 2010 novella, Mammoths of the Great Plains, or from her essay “On Writing Science Fiction,” published in Women of Vision (edited by Denise Du Pont, 1988).

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