The story vacillates between over-explanation and leaving a lot left unsaid, alternately sounding preachy or half-baked.
The Plot: Five men from Eros (the planet of love?) visit Earth and impregnate five women, leaving once they're sure the women will have sons. One Erosian returns after twenty-something years to harvest their crop of boys/young men, all physically and mentally superior to pure-breed humans. NASA becomes interested because four of the boys, all born in Spider County within a month of each other (and all two months premature), were geniuses in their varied field and suddenly disappeared without a trace on the same day. The fifth boy, Ethan, hadn't disappeared. His mother died young, leaving the boy orphaned and taken in by a farmer who had no sons to do farm chores. All five boys were considered strange and grew up as targets of jealousy by the locals. Four moved away, but Ethan was stuck, his "strange" status leading to his current arrest, basically for being a "witch-boy." As a NASA agent arrives to talk to Ethan, Aabel (Ethan's father) arrives to take him home.
Nothing at all is said about the mothers. How did they handle being mere incubation chambers for aliens, fertilized then abandoned. Were they even conscious when they became unwed mothers? Were the relationships anything other than rape? Did the boys' developing superiority spook their mothers unintentionally (as it apparently did the townies)? Did Ethan's "difference" drive his mother to suicide? The lack of information on the mothers in this Man's Universe is painful.
It's genetically unclear what the sons inherited from their fathers and what from their mothers. Whereas Aabel has ant-like features such as mandibles and huge eyes, the sons are entirely human in appearance, suggesting that human appearance traits are genetically dominant features, both inside and out. What about psychological differences, or that of special powers? Aabel considers "killing" and "destroying" to be quite distinctly different things. He does NOT kill people. That would be slow and painful and immoral. He DESTROYS them, which is quick and merciful and, goes without saying, pretty much all right. By Earthly thinking, these are not distinct, but Ethan may be playing this semantics game, too. He's arrested on a murder charge for the disappearance of Jonathan Stimson. Johnathan entered his barn, where Ethan waited within wanting Johnathan's apology for indecent thoughts he had ("remarks he made" insists Ethan) at a dance. Johnathan never came out again. (Ethan insists he's not a mind-reader, but he shares this trait with his father; the two at least share an empathic kind of communication.) Aabel can disintegrate people at a thought. It would seem Ethan has this ability too, though it's not said or shown. Ethan's insistence that he didn't kill Johnathan may be a semantic splitting of hairs against, what Twilight Zone had called, "wishing him into the cornfield." (See "Twilight Zone: It's a Good Life" for reference.)
Aabel is also very manipulative, and seems to always want things his way. Warmly it seems, he offers Ethan the apparent choice of going back to Eros or not, but then, when Ethan decides to stay with his Earth girlfriend Anna, Aabel manipulates circumstances so that it becomes a choice between living on Eros or dying on Earth. (If these are psychological predispositions that Ethan could inherit, it could be in Anna's best interest to lose this boyfriend.)
The moral of the tale is that dreams are desirable, but there are two dream definitions floating about here. In the first, dreams are visions that come in an unconscious state when one is asleep. It is through dreams that Aabel first communicates with Ethan, which for Ethan amounted to nightmares. The second means "aspirations" along with the ability to visualize goals. Aabel says Eros is dying because his race has pretty much lost the "art" of dreaming. Because of this, boy births have dropped critically - but are they talking about mind pictures while sleeping or about aspirations and creativity? It remains unclear which of these is dying out on Eros (and why either should affect the birth of males).
Going back to the "It's a Man's World" idea for a moment, Eros needs boys like Mars needs woman. In both stories, it's the men who are proactive, not the woman. Both The Children of Spider County (1964) and the film Mars Needs Women (1968) feature proactive men. Mars is running out of birth mothers, so the men head to Earth to fetch women for impregnation; Eros is running out of boys, so the men head to Earth to find women for impregnation - and among this information is a comment that the men of Eros didn't return home until they were sure the women they impregnated were carrying sons. One can only speculate in what possibly horrible, immoral or inhumane way this was guaranteed.
The only slight, positive nod this tale gives to women is that the four boys who were raised by single moms were nurtured to the point of reaching their full potential, where they set out into the world as brilliant men in their various fields. Without a mom to raise him, Ethan - with the same genius capabilities as his other mixed-race brethren - rose no higher in society's standing than that of (with no disrespect intended) a farm hand.
In the end, Aabel would seem to let Ethan win the argument; but, with Eros still at risk of dying out, that's no reason to assume he won't return with others to win the war.
With these ideas lurking just beneath the surface, The Children of Spider County can leave a viewer cold, but on the positive side, performances by Lee Kinsolving as Ethan and Kent Smith as Aabel, with a special chemistry they establish through their odd, semi-empathic verbal communication, keeps the show afloat. Boo on the hidden messages, yay on the performances.
The Plot: Five men from Eros (the planet of love?) visit Earth and impregnate five women, leaving once they're sure the women will have sons. One Erosian returns after twenty-something years to harvest their crop of boys/young men, all physically and mentally superior to pure-breed humans. NASA becomes interested because four of the boys, all born in Spider County within a month of each other (and all two months premature), were geniuses in their varied field and suddenly disappeared without a trace on the same day. The fifth boy, Ethan, hadn't disappeared. His mother died young, leaving the boy orphaned and taken in by a farmer who had no sons to do farm chores. All five boys were considered strange and grew up as targets of jealousy by the locals. Four moved away, but Ethan was stuck, his "strange" status leading to his current arrest, basically for being a "witch-boy." As a NASA agent arrives to talk to Ethan, Aabel (Ethan's father) arrives to take him home.
Nothing at all is said about the mothers. How did they handle being mere incubation chambers for aliens, fertilized then abandoned. Were they even conscious when they became unwed mothers? Were the relationships anything other than rape? Did the boys' developing superiority spook their mothers unintentionally (as it apparently did the townies)? Did Ethan's "difference" drive his mother to suicide? The lack of information on the mothers in this Man's Universe is painful.
It's genetically unclear what the sons inherited from their fathers and what from their mothers. Whereas Aabel has ant-like features such as mandibles and huge eyes, the sons are entirely human in appearance, suggesting that human appearance traits are genetically dominant features, both inside and out. What about psychological differences, or that of special powers? Aabel considers "killing" and "destroying" to be quite distinctly different things. He does NOT kill people. That would be slow and painful and immoral. He DESTROYS them, which is quick and merciful and, goes without saying, pretty much all right. By Earthly thinking, these are not distinct, but Ethan may be playing this semantics game, too. He's arrested on a murder charge for the disappearance of Jonathan Stimson. Johnathan entered his barn, where Ethan waited within wanting Johnathan's apology for indecent thoughts he had ("remarks he made" insists Ethan) at a dance. Johnathan never came out again. (Ethan insists he's not a mind-reader, but he shares this trait with his father; the two at least share an empathic kind of communication.) Aabel can disintegrate people at a thought. It would seem Ethan has this ability too, though it's not said or shown. Ethan's insistence that he didn't kill Johnathan may be a semantic splitting of hairs against, what Twilight Zone had called, "wishing him into the cornfield." (See "Twilight Zone: It's a Good Life" for reference.)
Aabel is also very manipulative, and seems to always want things his way. Warmly it seems, he offers Ethan the apparent choice of going back to Eros or not, but then, when Ethan decides to stay with his Earth girlfriend Anna, Aabel manipulates circumstances so that it becomes a choice between living on Eros or dying on Earth. (If these are psychological predispositions that Ethan could inherit, it could be in Anna's best interest to lose this boyfriend.)
The moral of the tale is that dreams are desirable, but there are two dream definitions floating about here. In the first, dreams are visions that come in an unconscious state when one is asleep. It is through dreams that Aabel first communicates with Ethan, which for Ethan amounted to nightmares. The second means "aspirations" along with the ability to visualize goals. Aabel says Eros is dying because his race has pretty much lost the "art" of dreaming. Because of this, boy births have dropped critically - but are they talking about mind pictures while sleeping or about aspirations and creativity? It remains unclear which of these is dying out on Eros (and why either should affect the birth of males).
Going back to the "It's a Man's World" idea for a moment, Eros needs boys like Mars needs woman. In both stories, it's the men who are proactive, not the woman. Both The Children of Spider County (1964) and the film Mars Needs Women (1968) feature proactive men. Mars is running out of birth mothers, so the men head to Earth to fetch women for impregnation; Eros is running out of boys, so the men head to Earth to find women for impregnation - and among this information is a comment that the men of Eros didn't return home until they were sure the women they impregnated were carrying sons. One can only speculate in what possibly horrible, immoral or inhumane way this was guaranteed.
The only slight, positive nod this tale gives to women is that the four boys who were raised by single moms were nurtured to the point of reaching their full potential, where they set out into the world as brilliant men in their various fields. Without a mom to raise him, Ethan - with the same genius capabilities as his other mixed-race brethren - rose no higher in society's standing than that of (with no disrespect intended) a farm hand.
In the end, Aabel would seem to let Ethan win the argument; but, with Eros still at risk of dying out, that's no reason to assume he won't return with others to win the war.
With these ideas lurking just beneath the surface, The Children of Spider County can leave a viewer cold, but on the positive side, performances by Lee Kinsolving as Ethan and Kent Smith as Aabel, with a special chemistry they establish through their odd, semi-empathic verbal communication, keeps the show afloat. Boo on the hidden messages, yay on the performances.