User:JerryFriedman/Vintage Season


 * For the term in wine-making, see Vintage.

"Vintage Season" is a science-fiction novelette by Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore (under the joint pseudonym "Lawrence O'Donnell"). It has been anthologized many times and was selected for The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 2A.

Authorship
Kuttner and Moore usually used the O'Donnell pseudonym for stories that were mostly or entirely by Moore. This story is often said to be hers ) or "almost entirely" hers, but scholars are not certain of how much Kuttner was involved and at least one gives him some credit.

Plot introduction
The story is set in an unnamed American city, in May at about the time of publication. There are several mentions of how beautiful the weather is.

Synopsis
Oliver Wilson has rented an old mansion to three vacationers for the month of May. He wants to chase them out so he can sell the house to someone who has offered him three times its value, provided the buyer can move in during May.

The tenants are a man, Omerie Sancisco, and two women, Klia and Kleph Sancisco. They fascinate Oliver with the perfection of their appearance and manners, their strange connoisseur's attitude to everything, and their secretiveness about their origin and their reasons for insisting on that particular house at that time. Oliver lives in the house too so he can push them out. Instead, he becomes attracted to Kleph (though he is engaged), and the mystery deepens with remarks she lets slip, with the unspectacular but advanced technology of things she has in her room—including a recorded "symphonia" that engages all the senses with imagery of historical disasters—and with the appearance of the other buyers, a couple from the same country who plant a "subsonic" in the house intended to drive the residents out.

Hearing Kleph sing "Come hider, love, to me" from the Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Oliver realizes that she and her friends are time travelers from the future. He traps Kleph into admitting that they are visiting the most perfect seasons in history, such as the fall of 1347 in Canterbury.

At the end of May, more time travelers visit the house. A meteorite lands nearby, destroying buildings (but Oliver's house survives) and starting fires. Oliver understands that all the "vintage seasons" the time travelers visit gain part of their artistic interest because they are followed by disasters, such as the Black Death in Europe (1348–1350).

The time travelers leave for Rome in 800, except for Cenbe, the genius who composed the symphonia Oliver had experienced. In conversation with Oliver, Cenbe admits the time travelers could prevent the disasters they savor but do not do so because changing history would keep their culture from coming to be. Oliver goes to his room, feeling ill.

In a short scene set in the future, the final version of Cenbe's symphonia is performed, including a powerful image of what is apparently Oliver's face in the "emotional crisis" induced by his conversation with Cenbe.

Oliver writes down a message warning about the time travelers, which he hopes will change history. He dies of a new plague, and the house including the unread message is destroyed in the futile attempt at quarantine.

Reception
Readers immediately acclaimed the story. it has been called "great", "perhaps the ultimate expression of Catherine L. Moore's art", "her masterpiece", "hauntingly memorable", "classic" and "one of the most brilliant stories in modern science fiction." One reviewer praised its "carefully controlled suspense".

Derivative works
Robert Silverberg wrote a story about the aftermath, "In Another Country", which was published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1979 and reprinted with "Vintage Season" as a Tor Double in 1980.

The 1992 film Timescape was loosely based on "Vintage Season".