The Ugly Little Boy

Plot summary

A Neanderthal child is brought to the present day as a result of time travel experiments by a research organization, Stasis Inc. He cannot be removed from his immediate area because of the vast energy loss and time paradoxes that would result. To take care of him, Edith Fellowes, a children's nurse, is engaged.

She is initially repelled by his appearance, but soon begins to regard him as her own child, learns to love him and realizes that he is far more intelligent than she at first imagined. She names him 'Timmie' and attempts to ensure that he has the best possible childhood despite his circumstance. She is enraged when the newspapers refer to him as an "ape-boy". Edith's love for Timmie brings her into conflict with her employer, for whom he is more of an experimental animal than a human being.

Eventually, her employer comes to the conclusion that his organization has exacted all the knowledge and publicity which could be gotten from Timmie, and that the time has come to move on to the next project. This involves bringing a Medieval peasant into the present, which necessitates the return of Timmie to his own time. Miss Fellowes fights the decision, knowing that he could not survive if he went back to his own time because he has acquired modern dependencies and speech. She decides to smuggle the boy out of the facilities, but when that plan fails, she causes the integrity of the Stasis module to fail and returns to the ancient past with Timmie.

Television adaptation

In 1977, "The Ugly Little Boy" was made into a 26-minute telefilm in Canada, directed by and starring Barry Morse. London-born actress Kate Reid played the role of Nurse Fellowes. The film is noteworthy for its fidelity to the short story, as well as the pathos between Timmy and Nurse Fellowes which has gained the film praise from both fans and reviewers.

Novelization

The 1991 novel, Child of Time, expands on the short story by introducing a subplot detailing Timmie's original Neanderthal tribe, and introduces another subplot dealing with a children's advocacy group that seeks to liberate Timmie. The Neanderthals are shown sympathetically as a highly articulate people whose tribal society and culture is complex and sophisticated, a far cry from the "primitive brutes" which the future scientists consider them to have been—having only the fragmentary information derived from a little Neanderthal child. The Neanderthal society - shown mainly from the point of view of an assertive tribal woman determined to prove herself the equal of the male hunters/warriors—is faced with the existential crisis of the appearance of a completely different, competing kind of human beings the Cro-Magnons. While the Cro-Magnons try to negotiate with the Neanderthals, they cannot communicate and understand each other due to the fact that the languages are not mutually intelligible. The reader knows that this would end with the extinction of the Neanderthals, which the Neanderthal characters do not know, though they are full of foreboding.

The two story lines merge with Edith Fellowes taking the irrevocable decision to go back to the past with Timmie, care for him and share his fate. Her appearance coincides with the crisis point in the confrontation between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon; both groups regard her as goddess to be worshiped. As she is clearly akin to the Cro-Magnon but has adopted a Neanderthal child, her appearance deflects the two groups from what seemed an inevitable conflict.

The ending suggests that in the modified past Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon would cooperate and come closer to each other in the common worship of the "Goddess" - with Timmie growing up to be her acolyte and a "demigod" himself; that the Neanderthals would not become extinct but coexist with the Cro-Magnon and possibly eventually interbreed with them; and that thus, the whole of subsequent human history would be completely changed, producing an utterly different and unrecognizable future. (Or, according to a different view of time travel and its implications, possibly human history would not change at all, due to the "convergent series"...)

Critical View

Margaret Woods wrote on the novel: "Well, 'Ugly Little Boy' draws you right in and does not let go. An enthralling plot, credible characters which make you feel great empathy - all of which serves to hide a very fundamental flaw: the basic premise of the plot just does not make any sense. What the hell is the use of spending a lot of money and effort in order to bring a Neanderthal child into the here-and-now - and then proceeding to give him an English name, teach him English, and place him in a modern environment with modern toys to play with? How is that supposed to help you learn about the Neanderthals? (...) Not only is it cruel to the child - because he will never get out of his cage, never see America, and will eventually have to go back to his own time and survive there. It also makes no scientific sense. The obvious course would be to send in a team of the world's most skilled linguists, charged with learning the child's language and absolutely forbidden to utter a singe word of English in his presence. To place him in the closest approximation which could be made to a Neanderthal dwelling and fill it with Neanderthal artifacts, so that the child could teach researchers their names in his language. There is no reason whatsoever to teach the child anything at all about the world of the 21st Century, and several good reasons not to. It is the child who should teach the researchers all that a child could teach of Neanderthal life and society - and when they learned all they could, they should send him back. (...) It is not implausible, also in that scenario, for a lonely woman researcher to start feeling strongly maternal - even to the point of deciding to follow the child back to Prehistoric times. And if she goes there after having learned to speak at least the rudiments of the Neanderthal language, she would be a bit better equipped to survive...".