James H. Schmitz (1911–1981) was a German-born US writer of science fiction whose short stories sometimes included ecological or sociological themes that have only become more resonant and relevant in the modern era. Schmitz’s first published story was “Greenface” for Unknown (1943), but his most successful stories with readers were four tales featuring sentient robot spaceships and troubleshooters with psi powers, later assembled as Agent of Vega (1960). A more recent collection from 2001 with the same title includes a more diverse selection of stories. Although he published a few novels, he was primarily known for his short fiction.
Schmitz’s most popular space-opera adventures, published prior to 1970, featured women who perform an active role and save the universe when necessary, in a manner almost completely free of gender clichés—equal to men in intelligence and strength, which was virtually unheard of in the pulp magazines of the time. Several of his stories share a more or less common backdrop of a galaxy inhabited by humans and aliens with room for all and numerous opportunities for discoveries and reversals that carefully fall short of threatening the stability of that background. Many of his stories, as a result, focus less on moments of conceptual breakthrough than on the pragmatic operations of teams and bureaus involved in maintaining the state of things against unfriendly species; in this they rather resemble the tales of the pulpier Murray Leinster, though they are more vigorous and less inclined to punish the adventurous.
“Grandpa,” included here, was first published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1955. In this story, as in others he’s written, Schmitz seems to have sympathy for his alien creatures rather than seeing them as monsters, in contrast to the horror-SF written by many of his contemporaries. As a result, “Grandpa” has aged better than much other fiction from the era. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of his stories is how he wrote about ecology as a major theme, not only on this story but others as well (see also “Balanced Ecology” from 1965, in Analog). The alien ecosystem described in this story is very intricate and ingenious and points out that human explorers shouldn’t base their reactions and reasoning on the world they think they know. Schmitz is one of the earliest writers to use the word ecology in his fiction.