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An antisocial Saturnian professor sent to Earth for a prestigious exchange program finds himself tormented by overwhelming popularity and forced into a year of constant pampering.
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Evelyn E. Smith was one of the sharper comic voices publishing in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s, and she’s been somewhat underremembered since — which is a shame, because stories like “The Vilbar Party” demonstrate a gift for a very specific kind of social observation that the genre didn’t always make room for. This is not a story about rockets or robots or the fate of civilization. It’s a story about a grumpy academic who just wanted to be left alone, and what happens when the entire population of a planet refuses to cooperate.
The Joke That Runs on Inversion
Most first-contact stories of the era were anxious about the same thing: that alien beings would be hostile, that humanity would be judged and found wanting, that contact would be dangerous. The genre was haunted by its own worst-case scenarios — tentacles, aggression, the inevitable misunderstanding that ends in war.
“The Vilbar Party” takes the opposite premise and wrings it completely dry. Narli Gzann doesn’t encounter hostility. He encounters something far worse for a man of his temperament: total, unrelenting, embarrassingly enthusiastic affection. He looks like a teddy bear, which it turns out is an extraordinarily good thing to look like if you want to be showered with cocktail parties and frismil nuts and kisses on your fuzzy forehead, and a catastrophically bad thing to look like if what you actually wanted was to be left alone to work on your definitive history of the Solar System.
The story runs on the gap between what Narli feared — the hostility of an alien species, the loneliness of being the only Saturnian on Earth — and what he gets, which is the exact same social overwhelm he was hoping to escape by leaving Saturn in the first place. The alien exchange professorship was supposed to be a retreat from people. It turns out to be the most aggressively sociable year of his life.
Narli as the Protagonist You Root For Against Your Better Judgment
Smith does something tricky with Narli: she makes him genuinely unpleasant in a way that’s somehow completely sympathetic.
He eats compulsively when anxious. He’s snippy with Slood, who is his only friend and who, for genuinely inexplicable reasons, seems to be fond of him anyway. He accepted the exchange professorship partly because he thought being on an alien planet would mean fewer social obligations — which is perhaps the most Narli-brained possible reason to relocate 750 million miles. He planned to get a lot of meditation done on the spaceship journey and was annoyed when the hostess kept interrupting.
And yet. When she describes him as looking like a teddy bear to the co-pilot, and he eavesdrops because “it’s so seldom you get the chance to learn what others are saying about you behind your back,” the story finds its rhythm. Narli is self-aware in exactly the proportion necessary to be funny without being pitiable — he knows he’s not charming, knows he’s not going to win anyone over through personality, and has arranged his entire professional strategy around avoiding situations where this would matter. The universe refuses to cooperate.
By the end, when he calls Slood an introvert and starts dialing the Perzils, the reversal is earned. Narli has been forced, against his will, by an entire planet of people who thought he was adorable, into discovering that he actually likes being liked. This is not presented as a triumph. It’s presented as an irritating surprise that he’s choosing to lean into, mostly because the alternative is admitting that Slood was right about parties.
The Saturnian’s Burden
The story’s best joke is structural: Narli’s year on Earth is, by every objective measure, a roaring success, and he is absolutely miserable about it.
His students were engaged and courteous. His lectures were well-attended. The cafeteria problem was solved by a chef from Washington. He was given a new air-conditioning unit by students who wore coats to class so he’d be comfortable. Mrs. Purrington sobbed when he left. He came home with matched luggage, six cases of champagne, a diamond and curium bauble, argyles knitted by a devoted student, and four wristwatches — one for each wrist — plus a bank account significantly depleted by all the hostess gifts and clothes he had to buy for himself.
He sent Slood a postcard that said “Having miserable time; be glad you’re not here.”
When he gets home and tells Slood the truth — that no, he wasn’t discriminated against, he was in fact constantly kissed and mobbed by admirers — Slood doesn’t believe him. Slood has already constructed a narrative about the brave Saturnian ambassador who suffered in dignified silence through a year of alien hostility, and he cannot reconcile this with the reality of a tenured professor who ate too much champagne and pâté de foie gras and got kisses on his fuzzy forehead from the First Lady of North America.
The story ends on this miscommunication hanging in the air — Narli unwilling to explain further, Slood murmuring consolingly about suffering, and Narli already dialing the Perzils. The joke about travel being “broadening in more than one way” is the one he’s willing to share. Everything else, apparently, would take too long.
Smith’s Comic Timing and the 1955 Galaxy Tradition
Galaxy Science Fiction, where this story appeared, was edited by Horace Gold, who had a particular taste for science fiction that used genre conventions to make observations about social behavior — what would later be called “soft” science fiction, more interested in psychology and sociology than in engineering. Gold published Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants in Galaxy. He published Sheckley. He had a gift for finding writers who could make the genre funny in ways that also meant something.
Smith fits squarely in this tradition. “The Vilbar Party” is, underneath its comic surface, a story about the gap between how we imagine being different will go and how it actually goes — and specifically about the particular hell of being an introvert who gets exactly as much attention as an extrovert might want. Narli’s suffering is real. It’s also entirely his own fault for assuming that alien beings would be any less interested in a novelty than his own species, and for not accounting for the Saturnian tendency to look, apparently, exactly like the most beloved children’s toy in human history.
He should have done more research before accepting the position. He would probably agree with this assessment and find it annoying.
