The first mimsy
I first read Lewis Padgett’s “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” when I was about 12. At the time, scifi—preferably from the “golden age” period of the 40s and 50s—was about all I read, an obsession fed by my father, who had worked for Galaxy in the 50s, and kept a stash of old anthologies around the house. “Mimsy” fit squarely into that universe, as did its companions in the “Science Fiction Hall Of Fame Volume 1” anthology, which included Arthur C. Clarke’s “The 9 Billion Names of God” (still one of my favorites) and Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” (ditto).
With all of the hype over the movie adaptation of “Mimsy” (which I don’t have much interest in seeing), I recently decided to revisit the tale. Unable to find my old Science Fiction Book Club edition of SFHFV1, I picked up a copy from my local library, and reread the story. As with many other scifi stories from that period, it’s charmingly dated, with adult characters swilling martinis and exchanging Nick and Nora-style banter, and seven-year-old children wandering off alone with no adult supervision. Reading the story again, I could see why it appealed to me as a 12-year-old. The tale of two children who discover artifacts from the future that allow them to skip about a million years of evolution and enter another dimension sans parents is a perfect childhood fantasy. Not only do the kids get to vanish through the looking glass, but they do so by learning things that are incomprehensible to their dullard parents. Reading it as an adult, however, it’s a chilling story, with deep elements of loss—not just the parents’ loss of their children, though that’s the story’s climax. It’s also a meditation on what adults lose when they leave behind the openness of childhood and enter a world defined not by a boundless horizon, but by its limitations. It’s no accident that the magical toys arrive in a Box (yes, with a capital B). The adults in the tale—even the futuristic father who creates the time machine and sends it on its journey—live in boxes of their own creation, and can never escape. The children can, and do so, never looking back.
