Bowling for Real Estate

They Walked Like Men

by Clifford Simak
p. 1962

In small town America, a series of strange occurrences pointing towards a sinister invasion begin to present themselves to intrepid reporter, Parker Graves. As the truth unfolds, Parker must fight to make their plan known to the world before the situation becomes untenable. Clifford Simak’s pulp sci-fi novel, They Walked Like Men, is precisely what I look for when I read novels from this era and genre: bizarrely unique—almost laughable—situations unapologetically masking deeper motives. It’s kind of like getting the Best Gift Ever, only packaged in that loud, ugly wrapping paper your grandmother uses on everything. After you tear away the nonsense, you can get at the heart of things.

Describing the specifics of They Walked Like Men could only net some incredulous or disparaging glares. This is a short novel where the alien plan involves unstoppable sentient ‘bowling balls,’ real estate, and tiny, lifelike dolls used as vehicles for possession, and is at various points foiled by a talking dog and an army of skunks wrangled by a hillbilly. Like I said: incredulous. Despite all this indulgent window treatment, the plan is relatively straightforward: the aliens come in quietly, plant themselves in human form, and slowly but legally displace all of humanity by buying up their real estate through legal channels and giving them the boot. Mankind, burdened by our pesky inclinations towards law-abiding, would soon have nowhere to go (and presumably the aliens would eventually possess or murder whatever remains of humanity? I’m not sure and the story is unclear on this point). Simak seems to believe this anyway; I’m not so sure it would take too long for lawlessness to prevail, but for the purposes of the story, this is never relevant. The plan works, so long as people remain unaware of it. Parker, ever the loyal reporter, sets out to make people believe him, pursued by the aliens and their feeble murder attempts.

The invaders insist they are in the right, because they are acting within humanity’s legal boundaries. The hypothetical argument posed is whether it is better to behave legally or morally and Simak’s position is clear that it certainly isn’t moral behavior. I liked the parallel it posed with big business or government versus the individual, and the startling relevancy to issues that still plague us today. With an economy in shambles and so many forced out of their homes or into bankruptcy, it’s important to ask ourselves if behaving morally trumps legality. We’re all in this together, after all. Here is an excerpt from the alien race’s spokesperson:

“Money here on Earth is more than the paper or the metal that you use for money, more than the rows of figures that account for money. Here on Earth you have given money a symbolism such as no medium of exchange has anywhere else that I have ever known or heard of. You have made it a power and a virtue and you have made the lack of it despicable and somehow even criminal. You measure men by money and you calibrate success with money and you almost worship money.”

Even Parker’s obligations are the same as our own—the only way to solve a problem of this caliber is by first drawing attention to it. We are so easily lulled into complacency if someone pats us on the back and tells us to look the other way, something which the banks and various politicians have been accused of doing. Parker Graves draws attention to his dilemma with a physical demonstration, perhaps one a little too easy; in reality, it’s much harder to bring about permanent change, as Occupy Wall Street has, perhaps, proven to us. In any case, I certainly appreciate a villain whose stance makes you question your own values.

One thing that stood out to me in this book was the numerous references to Parker’s preoccupation with needing a drink. Every couple of pages he’d lament that he could use a drink—the novel even starts with him stumbling home after driving himself there intoxicated (ah, the sixties). It got to a point where I wondered if the book would go in another direction—that it would be revealed that our narrator really was insane, and the invasion plan was all in his alcohol-fueled brain—but it didn’t turn out that way. I guess we were meant to take Parker’s rampant alcoholism as an affectation of his character or simply a product of the times, because—though distracting—it never amounted to much.

The plot is ludicrous and nonsensical, and it provides nothing in the order of gender equality (though Simak would probably like to think his passive misogyny is a complement to my sex) but They Walked Like Men still proves why I love these romps in science fiction’s halcyon days. It is the third alien invasion tale of Simak’s I’ve read and I look forward to seeing how the fourth plays out.