Reviewing A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn, Part II

Last week: the plot of A Mirror for Observers.

This week: the point of A Mirror for Observers.

Every week: some weird thing you've never heard of.

Relevance?

How do the musings of a 1950s-produced alien bear upon the world of 2026? AMfO has its highs and lows in this regard. There is some dated racial language and a shortage of female characters (those who do appear are slightly angelic in their caring, nurturing natures) but as far as 1950s science fiction books go, that’s a very small amount of cringe. Greater than the cringe are the compelling eccentricities of Pangborn and his protagonists.

Pangborn raises surprisingly sharp ecological themes by not only including his trademark pastoralism, but also contrasting Elmis’ twinned loves of nature and humanity with Namir’s explicitly ecofascist genocidal plague. The inclusion of this particular conversation surprised me. Many people in real life today still accept very troubling, eugenics-derived ideas about overpopulation and resource exhaustion. I watch climate change intensify while human selfishness terrifyingly fails to abate. Seventy-some years ago, though, Pangborn chose to have his POV character directly reject the doomerist musings of a population-reductionist. When Elmis promised that the Earth will heal in concert with a slowly bettering humanity…well…I am manifesting, but at the time of reading I was crying…

Though Elmis has clear principles he tries to inculcate into Angelo throughout the book, there is a certain fluidity and looseness to the selves of AMfO’s main characters outside of ethics. Elmis, Namir, and Angelo all change names and identities during the book. As the viewpoint character, Elmis gives us particular insight into the way he leverages these identities, how he chooses to occupy whatever self feels most appropriate or useful or comfortable at a given moment. He calibrates himself to those around him as befits someone who lives at a slight and self-aware remove from others. This is the sensibility which lends credence to Gay Pangborn Trutherism, and it also makes the book feel more contemporary than other ‘50s SF, which can imagine a man in space but not a man who isn’t an aggressively prime slab of white American manhood.

(Gay Pangborn Truthers would probably find more direct evidence in the fact that the first half of the book concerns an older man cultivating a friendship with a sensitive young man, but that is a much-out-of-date gay relational norm which doesn’t feel comfortable in our time. Nothing in this book crossed the line for me in terms of weirdness, but there are a few moments which get rather Phaedrus-coded.)

Then we come to Pangborn’s pandemic, the most vital and distressing sequences in the book. These scenes are painfully familiar, as are the emotions Pangborn ascribes to his characters: exhaustion, paranoia, constant anxiety. In poignantly-observed vignette, the city falls into lonely chaos. Elmis and Angelo volunteer in the overflowing hospital, helping to care for the sick in crowded wards. I found myself wondering how much childhood recollection of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic guided Pangborn here. The horror is particularly vivid.

The conclusion Pangborn reaches about the pandemic does feel naive in that special ‘50s way. As many internet-leftist Substackers lament, our world was not reborn after lockdown. We all got back on board this Hell-bound train, most eagerly. I wish I could join him in his sincere vision for a human race which, shocked by its own mortality, more sufficiently loves itself and the Earth.

But here in real life some days I am unable to look in the mirror, for my anger and sadness at my fellow human beings.

A Mirror?

The book is called A Mirror for Observers. What does that mean?

It refers to a mirror which Elmis carries with him throughout the story. He receives the mirror from his mentor Drozma, who safeguarded it for centuries. It was forged in the ancient Mediterranean and is among the first mirrors ever made by humans. It has magic powers, kind of, in that when people look into it they see themselves as they truly are. They tend to find this unflattering. When Elmis leaves his Martian enclave at the beginning of the book, Drozma informs him that Angelo is one of the rare people who might be taught to look in a mirror, which is to say, he might learn to see himself honestly and be comfortable with that.

So much bad human behavior is driven by discomfort with the offset between the actual self and the desired self. Fear and resentment: these boil up when we can’t reconcile our lived experiences with our self-perception. We see this so easily among all the worst people we know. The comical propensity of the American right for bad plastic surgery is an obvious one: unable to reconcile “being a prominent public figure” with “getting older and less attractive”, our idiot leaders shellack themselves into divinely poreless fuckpuppets, ‘lest they have to acknowledge imperfection and mortality.

This is only one of the ways in which the miserable and repellant core of America’s modern-day fascist movement is unable to look in the mirror. Much of what they espouse is in some way driven by their inability to look honestly at the causes of their own pain, fear, or discomfort. Whether they are incels or Quiverfulls, they cannot integrate their own failings into the story of themselves and so have to shift their dissatisfaction off onto anyone else in range.

This is how Elmis helps Angelo back away from Namir’s far-right party: he teaches Angelo to look in the mirror and accept himself. He listens to Angelo’s troubles and concerns. He shores up their relationship with kindness and attention. Reviews give Elmis a certain amount of flack for passivity, which it’s true is not exactly what the average reader seeks in a science fiction novel. But being a mentor is not an action-packed role, especially not when done right. You can only offer tools and advice. You can’t act for your charge. 

When Angelo at last matures into the person he’s meant to be and lets go of the striving and bitter parts of himself, he proves to be a caregiver, a person of exceptional kindness and attention. This is not common among science fiction protagonists, or so I have noticed.

Canonization?

Online I saw someone compare AMfO to Stranger in a Strange Land. This is a great comparison because they are both 1950s books about near-future fellas being mentored into world-saving by Martians. Also, I like AMfO, whereas Stranger in a Strange Land sucks butt. I tried to read it a few months ago, literally on an airplane with no other options for entertainment, and I quit. It’s baloney. Robert Heinlein frames his protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, as the hottest, coolest, most magical guy who gets a billion dollars and teaches everyone on Earth how to tele-fuck and be libertarian. 

Or something: I didn’t finish it.

At the end of AMfO, Angelo comes into his own by learning to take care of the truly abject during the pandemic, and uses those skills to strengthen his community and support his newly-disabled life partner. That’s the end of the story. After all the talk among Elmis and Namir about Angelo’s world-historical import, you might reasonably call this a huge anticlimax. The decision to which Elmis needed to guide Angelo, the decision which will govern the fate of the human race, was basically “be a good guy”.

Well. 

Yes. 

Unlike people who post habitually on Bluesky, I am past the point of believing I am to be a hero of world-historical import. I am not past the point of believing my actions have consequences, though. If I can do nothing good on any scale that matters, let me do something good at the scale I’ve got. Angelo’s right about this. You should in fact be a good guy.

What Pangborn captures with his framing of Angelo as an unusual human subject, and which Heinlein and many other SF writers of the time fail to catch with their own supermen, is that some people are outside the rest of humanity for reasons beside so-called “superiority”. Some of us are marginalized. Some of us just didn’t turn out right. Elmis and the other Martians recognize value in Angelo because of this, but I’d argue it’s a different recognition than what, say, Heinlein demands for his omnipotent, telepathic, billionaire hero. There’s plenty of Great Man Theory in science fiction. I don’t think that’s what A Mirror for Observers endorses.

Imperfect though Pangborn’s book is, marginal though his modern influence may be, I’m ready to put him in the hall of fame. Real life has exhausted my patience with a canon of conquerors and messiahs. Sometimes being just a guy is alienation enough.