It’s vaguely ominous, is open to several meanings, and while the alternate title “A Friend to Man” is perfectly fine (the irony is what sells it), this is much better.įirst published in the March 1954 issue of Universe Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. In the case of his SF we’re talking alien cultures, and with today’s story, “Let Me Live in a House,” we’re given quite the taste of what Oliver’s game is. Given his background, it should be less surprising that Oliver’s fiction is less concerned with individuals and more so with cultures. Le Guin became SF’s leading anthropologist (among other things), there was Chad Oliver. He was also, a little unusually (and admirably) for the time, vocal about his sympathies for indigenous peoples, with his westerns and some of his SF apparently depicting Native Americans as flesh-and-blood people.īefore Ursula K. His 1952 thesis “They Builded a Tower” had to be one of the first academic papers about “modern” SF, and his preoccupation with wedding academia with SF in the ’50s coincided with the likes of Jack Williamson and others bringing the genre to the world of higher education. Despite being a mainstay of the ’50s, there were certain oddities about Oliver’s background and character that separated him from his fellows, namely that he was an academic-more specifically he was an anthropologist, first as a student and later as a staff member at the University of Texas. Universe, March 1954.)Ĭhad Oliver was one of many authors who came about just in time for the bubbling of the SFF magazine market in the first half of the ’50s he debuted in 1950, and more than half his short fiction was published by 1960.

Another Kind by Chad Oliver