Atavism — Key Ideas to Explore

War as a Stage for Alien Intervention

The Pacific theater is rendered in concrete detail: LCI's and LCT's, flame throwers, combat-hardened men. Yet the human conflict is almost immediately upstaged. The nurse and radioman, Gunnar and Martha, are not typical soldiers; they are survivors of a plane crash, already detached from the military machine. Their indifference to battle is the first clue that their story diverges from the war plot.

Fennel uses the invasion as a backdrop for a different kind of encounter. The Japanese garrison, left behind, becomes the target of invisible saboteurs. The narrative treats the war as a given, not a problem to solve, freeing the reader to focus on the strange events that unfold within it.

Invisibility and the Limits of the Body

When Gunnar and Martha become invisible, the story shifts from external action to bodily sensation. Gunnar wishes for feet like snowshoes, and immediately feels a tug, a spreading that lets him walk lightly on drifts. The transformation is not just visual but tactile, a change in how they interact with the world.

Their invisibility is imperfect: they flicker, appearing dimly before vanishing again. This instability suggests the alien life form is not fully under control. The physical comedy of a floating pistol and a disembodied laugh underscores the absurdity of the situation, but the story never lets the reader forget the cost—the loss of solidity, of being seen.

Martian Politics and the Atavism of Speech

The Martian scenes are a counterpoint to the human ones. Yark, a Great Brain, addresses his peers orally, a choice he calls an atavistic trait. This detail is the story's thematic core: the Martians value pure mind-to-mind communication, but Yark indulges in the little frills of speech-making. The title Atavism thus refers not to humans but to the Martians themselves, who harbor a vestige of primitive behavior.

The council's reaction to Yark's failure—calling for the destruction of his creation, Erg—reveals a ruthless logic. The Martians are not benevolent; they are a collective that punishes error. This political layer adds depth to what might otherwise be a simple invasion story.

The Unreliable Boundary Between Self and Other

Gunnar and Martha's invisibility is not a superpower but a symptom of possession. They are submerged beneath false personalities, as Yark puts it. The story blurs the line between human and alien: the nurse and radioman become tools of a Martian experiment, their identities overwritten.

When they regain visibility, the transformation is sudden and unexplained. Martha sees Gunnar solid and in the flesh, and they are left speechless. The ending, as excerpted, offers no resolution—only a return to the ordinary that feels provisional. The reader is left to wonder whether the atavism has been purged or merely suppressed.

Fennel's story rewards attention to its structural shifts: the jump from war zone to Martian council, the slide from visible to invisible, the oscillation between human and alien perspectives. The excerpts do not reveal the full arc, but they suggest a tale that uses the trappings of pulp science fiction to explore identity, control, and the persistence of the irrational. Readers may find that the most interesting questions are not about the plot but about the gaps between scenes.

That rainy afternoon, Fennel’s stranded nurse kept whispering to me long after I closed the book—how invisibility didn’t erase her, just made her choices louder. I found myself reaching for another story about people shaped by islands and silence, Action on Azura — Themes and Context, almost as if the first book had left a door ajar.