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"Or All the Seas with Oysters" is a science fiction short story by American writer Avram Davidson. It first appeared in the May issue of Galaxy Science Fiction.
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One passage above all seized his attention. Hemingway had written, "As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans. At that moment, Mr. Rowley experienced a kind of epiphany that shaped not only his life but, eventually, the oyster culture of the Pacific Northwest.

He resolved, he told me not long ago, "to eat lots of oysters, as many as I could afford, and to make it my quest to learn all about oysters and how they are cultivated, distributed and consumed. Silver-haired, round-faced and sturdy, soft-spoken but fiercely focused, he is still at it at Rowley waxes poetic about the armored carapace that protects the oyster, much as chain mail protected the medieval warrior, and about the lovely nacreous lining of the shell, and about the glycogens, or stored carbohydrates, that make the oyster so fat and meaty.

You might call him the Johnny Appleseed of ostreiculture. He can be a bit of a oyster zealot. He hates undersize oysters, for example, condemning them as "a few tablespoons of membranous seawater" that have not been allowed to reach full sweetness and complexity. They belong in the same gastronomic league, he insists, with baby carrots.

He is a chewer, not a swallower, who asks with an air of bewilderment, "What's the point of eating an oyster if you don't release its flavors by chewing and chewing well? By now it will come as no surprise that Mr. Rowley is in Barnum's class as a promoter. He it was who noted the special virtues of salmon from the Copper River in Alaska and first brought it fresh to the Lower 48 in ; before that it had all been either canned or frozen. Now, of course, its annual arrival is awaited breathlessly by flavor-crazed people all across the nation.

His passion of the moment is Totten Inlet Virginicas — oysters native to the East Coast Crassostrea virginica, to the Latin-spouting crowd , whose ancestors were brought west from the Chesapeake Bay a century ago. Rowley, who helps to market them, gives them his nomination for "the best oyster on the planet.


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It would be easy to dismiss that comment as vulgar hucksterism, but it would be wrong. Not many oysters deliver such a clean, mellow overall impression — perhaps the fabled Belons from Brittany, which have graced the finest Parisian tables for centuries, and the magnificent big Colchesters from the east coast of England, renowned since Roman times, but precious few others.

The Oyster Is His World

The magic, Mr. Rowley says, lies in the particular mixture of algaes and micro-algaes in Totten Inlet. Like wines, oysters are children of their environment. Rowley reported, "but they don't have half the flavor of the Totten Inlet Virginicas. Time was, you found only one oyster name on almost all menus in the big cities of the East and Midwest — Blue Points which come mostly from Great South Bay, Long Island.

Sacnoth's Scriptorium: And All the Seas with Oysters

Now you find oysters from all parts of the country all across the country, and the Pacific Northwest plays a big role in the shellfish game. Shelton, Wash. Most are Pacifics Crassostrea gigas , first imported from Japan in the early 's and farmed here ever since.

Their shells — ranging from whitish to dark brown — are nicely cupped, with pronounced flutes. They are sweet if mature, briny if they are younger. The Northwest also produces the following types, all "imports":. European flats Ostrea edulis , akin to Belons, with crunchy texture and plate-like shells. Westcott Bay flats, which come from the San Juan Islands north of here, fall into this category.

They are salty and buttery, with a sharp coppery aftertaste. Kumamotos Crassostrea sikamea , originally cultivated on the island of Kyushu in Japan, and now all but extinct there. Bite-size, fresh-smelling and crunchy, they have lovely, frilly, deeply cupped shells and a fresh, slightly nutty flavor. Eastern Crassostrea virginica , such as the Totten Inlet Virginicas. And Olympias Ostrea conchaphila, or Ostrea lurida , the only Northwest native, of which more anon. Rowley offered examples of each at a full-throated bash in Seattle in March during the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, complete with blues band, plenty of dry white wine, champion shuckers and pretty girls dressed up as oysters.

No fewer than dozen well-iced oysters were consumed in a couple of hours, raw on the half shell for this oyster purist, of course, sans sauce, of course, slurped Seattle-style from the shell, maybe with a squirt of lemon, and not impaled on a dinky oyster fork. There were dozen perky, first-of-the-season daffodils from the Skagit Valley. They lasted longer than the mollusks.

When the music wasn't too loud, you could almost hear the northwester blowing, the boats slapping the sides of the piers and the gulls squawking — oysters are like that, with an infinite capacity to summon up maritime dreams and memories. View all New York Times newsletters. During the first Golden Age, a century ago, Seattle restaurants offered a broad selection of locally produced oysters. But today's abundance was unimaginable in the Northwest only a quarter-century ago, Mr.

Rowley said. As recently as the late 's, almost no oysters were served on their own half shells in Seattle except at Canlis, then as now one of the city's premier restaurants. Instead, oysters were eaten in "cocktails," shucked and swathed in red sauce laced with so much horseradish that any tang of the sea was largely conjectural, or taken from a jar, plopped on washable shells and served. Jon Rowley, who began his seafood odyssey in Alaska after dropping out of Reed College in Portland, isn't the only colorful character produced by the West Coast oyster business.

The remaining image was chosen because much like the editors of the science fiction magazines of the 's I know that to get some readers you have to use some cheesecake. This is the first fiction that is not science fiction to win. It's possible that there is a science fiction explanation for the events in the story but I'd categorize the work as one of fantasy.

Along with the next year's "The Hell-Bound Train" this story made it clear that the Hugo would not be limited to the strict form of science fiction. While some people looking at the recent Hugo winners may not be happy with that I think it was a good decision on the part of that year's voters. This story is also a good decision on the part of that year's voters. It isn't a very deep story and its big idea has been done quite a few times since it was written but this version is in turns charming and sinister and I enjoyed it. There isn't a lot of narrative to "Or All the Seas with Oysters".

Two bicycle repairmen notice that safety pins always vanish and reappear while you end up with a closet full of unused clothes hangers. One of them begins to ascribe a possible life cycle to these bits of found metal and sees something sinister behind it. The story is very light-hearted but given the direction things take I could have easily seen this tale being done by H.


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  • Lovecraft it's just a matter of time until there are enough clothes hangers to supplant humanity; they are smaller but they breed faster and how many times do you let one of them get close to you without thinking about it. It has that same kind of creeping dread as it shifts tone.

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    It elevates what could have been a simple comedic piece to something more and I have to recommend it. It's a common trope for writers who don't typically do any kind of fantasy to fall back to.


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    Bloch in "The Hell-Bound Train" was not acting as one of those people. In he was a science fiction and fantasy writer with a taste for horror. He was co-presenter at Worldcon that year. And then he must have made his own deal with the devil because less than one year later came the film Psycho and he was noticed by the mainstream public. I'd like to say that "The Hell-Bound Train" is not a typical deal with the devil story.

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    The devil in it is wittier and more clever than most. He isn't relying on trickery or clever wording to bring him the soul, just human nature.

    He makes references to other stories that feature this same plot and lets the reader know that the methods of cheating him used then wouldn't work this time.