Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Masterpieces of Horror by D H Keller, H Kuttner and R Bradbury

Bouncing around isfdb, I came upon evidence of the existence of an anthology ostensibly edited by Alden H. Norton but (we are told) in fact edited by SF historian Sam Moskowitz: Masters of Horror, published in 1968.  It seems that Moskowitz and Norton had a sort of regular working relationship, collaborating on a number of anthologies, with Moskowitz sometimes getting credit, sometimes remaining incognito.  We've already read some stories that have appeared in these volumes, like Henry Kuttner's "Time to Kill," which was reprinted in Horrors in Hiding, and Robert Bloch's "Head Man," which was included in Hauntings and Horrors: Ten Grisly Tales.

Today let's read three stories out of Masters of Horror, stories by peeps we are somewhat familiar with from Weird Tales and other fine publications: David H. Keller, the aforementioned Kuttner, and Ray Bradbury.  I can't find a scan of the actual anthology, but will read printings of these stories from other publications in which they appear, scans of which are readily available at the internet archive, world's finest website.

"A Piece of Linoleum" by David H. Keller (1933)

"A Piece of Linoleum" first appeared under a pen name in 10 Story Book, a magazine full of photos of scantily-clad women as well as fiction.  I'm reading the story from a 1974 printing of the 1947 Keller collection Life Everlasting and Other Tales of Science, Fantasy and Horror

As you might expect of a story printed in such a periodical as 10 Story Book, "A Piece of Linoleum" expresses a male viewpoint about women and sex.  A guy, Harker, has just killed himself, and his wife has no idea why.  Most of the text of the story consists of her describing her married life to friends, which she considers to have been very happy.  Of course, her description makes clear to the reader that she was a tyrant who controlled every aspect of her husband's life while refusing to have sex with him or give him children, allegedly on account of her frail health.  Obsessed with keeping the house clean, she lay pieces of linoleum by the sink so her husband wouldn't get water on the floor when he washed the dishes every night as well as wherever his visiting friends might sit, in case they smoked, to protect the carpet from ashes.  The story's final sting is the widow's complains that when her husband slit his wrist he didn't have the courtesy to do it over a piece of linoleum and instead let blood get on the carpet.

Not bad.  August Derleth included "A Piece of Linoleum" in his 1963 anthology When Evil Wakes, which reprints a number of stories we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have already experienced, like Clark Ashton Smith's "The Seed from the Sepulcher," Frank Belknap Long's "Death Waters" and Derleth's collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft, "The Shuttered Room."


"Before I Wake..." by Henry Kuttner (1945)

Pedro is a teenager living in a Brazilian fishing village who spends long hours looking at the collection of books of a friendly doctor who lives nearby.  The illustrations of Arthur Rackham, Sidney Syme and John R. Neill fill his young mind with visions of a brighter and better world, a world that does not really exist, and he day dreams about becoming a sailor and visiting that world.  One day he saves a toad from being tread upon by his drunken father, and Kuttner gives us the idea that this little beast is the familiar of a dead witch.  That night Pedro has vivid dreams of swimming underwater among colorful coral reefs.  He sleeps so deeply his parents can't wake him up in the morning, and they call for the local gypsy woman, who manages to rouse him.  Pedro's sleep is even deeper the next night, and the doctor resorts to a hypodermic injection to wake the kid up.  Doc suggests that Pedro be permitted to enlist on a ship as a cabin boy, and Pedro's dad secures his son a berth on a ship setting sail tomorrow.  The third night after the appearance of the toad, Pedro again has vivid dreams of a brilliant world of wonder like that he has seen in books; will Pedro die in his sleep and remain in that fairy tale world, or wake up to sail forth and experience the grimy and disappointing reality of the actual world that lies beyond his village?

"Before I Wake..." feels long and slow.  Individual characters are indecisive and passive--they don't make decisions and they don't accomplish much--and individual scenes consist of dreamy descriptions and little by way of events.  As a result, the story does not engage the reader's emotions or provoke much thought, and so reading it is boring.  The story would have been greatly improved if Kuttner had more vigorously and more transparently constructed it as a struggle over Pedro's soul between the doctor--man of science--and the gypsy woman--agent of the irrational--or maybe between a tag team of doctor and gypsy against the ghost of the witch, modern medicine and traditional medicine joining forces in a battle of good against evil, something like that.  Stories in which people are just pushed around by fate or circumstances are not compelling.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down. 

"Before I Wake..." was included in the Canadian magazine Super Science and Fantastic Stories, of which Norton was editor, later the same year it debuted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries.  Frank McSherry, Jr., Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg included it in their 1988 anthology Pirate Ghosts of the American Coast.


"The Candy Skull" by Ray Bradbury (1948)

"The Candy Skull" first appeared in Dime Mystery Magazine and in 1960 was reprinted in Britain in Detective Tales.  I am reading it in a scan of the 1984 collection of Bradbury's 1940s crime stories entitled A Memory of Murder.  The wikipedia page on A Memory of Murder describes the strange circumstances under which the collection was published and suggests that Bradbury was neither thrilled about some of the included stories nor about seeing them reappear before the public eye.  

The first scene of "The Candy Skull" sees Old Tomas, the retired bullfighter, sitting around the plaza, showing the little kids the scar on his hip where he was gored, then licking his lips as a "young Spanish woman" with "black and shining" hair and clad in a "gray gabardine suit" walks by, then finally spitting on the plaza tiles after seeing a "clean, loud, tourist American," a "young pink, blond man," up on a hotel balcony. Maybe this scene isn't politically correct, but, with its intimations of danger, lust and filth, it sets a tone and seizes the reader's interest.

The blond American is writer Roby Cibber, the beauty with the black hair is Celia Diaz, and the plaza and hotel are in the center of Guanajuato, Mexico.  Bradbury doesn't paint Mexico as some kind of charming vacation spot.  "There was a smell of death through Mexico you never got away from," we are told, "no matter how far you went," and that is just a small sample of barrage of negative characterizations of the land south of the border.

The story starts on the morning on the Day of the Dead, and Roby begins the day by finding that somebody left him a little gift while he was sleeping--sugar skull with his name written on it!  

Roby is in Guanajuato because it is the last place from which Roby received a letter from his friend, Douglas McClure; Celia knew Doug when he was here.  One day Doug and his luggage just vanished.  A lot of people suggested Doug had gone to Acapulco, and Roby looked there before coming to Guanajuato.  Roby has more luck at the next place he looks for Doug--the catacombs under the local cemetery on the hill above Guanajuato!  Poor Doug's body is right there among the mummies!  (Didn't something like this happen to somebody in the 1955 story we read by Bradbury when we were reading stories by SF figures that appeared in Playboy?)  Now Roby is scared somebody is going to try to murder him

There is a loud street party that night, with people shooting off fireworks and Old Tomas dancing around with a papier-mâché bull that is full of exploding firecrackers.  Amid the noise and raucous confusion Roby is hit by a Roman candle--no, wait, that was a gunshot!  Roby is bandaged up, and when he gets back to his room at the hotel he has another shock--somebody has left him another gift, a little miniature funeral, complete with miniature priest and miniature altar boys...and on the altar a little photo of Roby himself!  Old Thomas comes by to hint that Celia is the one who left the funeral and the sugar skull before it!  Was it beautiful Celia, a modern woman living in an ancient land, who killed Doug and is now gunning for Roby?  Or Old Tomas, the only other character in the story?

Bradbury does a good job of making of Mexico a scary place full of death and full of hatred for us gringos, a place where no one is to be trusted, not the police, not the doctors, not the retired bullfighters and not even the hot chicks!  The gruesome ending, in which Old Tomas, who is jealous over beautiful tradition-busting Celia, who ignores the retired bullfighter and chases after americanos, forces Roby to play the role of bull in a reenactment of his glorious career as a toreador, is pretty good.  So thumbs up for "The Candy Skull," a fun bit of pulp fear and violence that isn't afraid to exploit white uneasiness about non-white cultures.


**********

The Keller and Bradbury stories from Masters of Horror are tight and economical, affecting your emotions and leveraging your suspicions as a white man of women and foreigners and the ridiculous beliefs women and foreigners all seem to have and in explicable behavior they are always engaging in.  Kuttner tries to do something perhaps a little more sophisticated and perhaps more acceptable to the 21st-century palate, evoke the feeling of fairy tales and of a child's wonder at the world--at least the fantasy worlds created by imaginative writers and artists.  But because his story is slow and because it lacks clear human conflict, Kuttner's story ends up being boring.  The Bradbury and the Kuttner are an interesting contrast, because both men try to build an atmosphere with descriptions of strange places, but Bradbury's Mexico succeeds in instilling anxiety and fear in the reader and encouraging him to keep reading to find out what is going to happen, while Kuttner's descriptions of coral reefs and islands and clipper ships just made my eyes glaze over and hope the story would end soon.  

It is sad to see a guy we like, Henry Kuttner, misfire, but the reading life is full of ups and downs--for another example, we liked today's Keller piece, but railed against the last thing we read by Keller.  Well, stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more ups and downs, genre fiction fans.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Merril-approved 1958 stories by Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin

Reading 1956 stories recommended by Judith Merril in the second edition of her famous anthology series was a good experience, so let's keep that ball rolling but shift to 1958 by using as our menu the three-page list of honorable mentions at the back of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  I'll pick out stories of interest from the list, three or four at a time, and we'll read and assess them, perhaps with an eye as to why Merril might have liked them. 

The first name on the alphabetical list is Poul Anderson's, three of whose stories Merril recommends.    I've already read one of them, "Last of the Deliverers," so to round out this blog post we'll read the included story by the second name on the list, famous actor Alan Arkin.

Before we begin our journey, I will note that, besides that list, two science articles, and a poem by Isaac Asimov, the fourth volume of Merril's much-heralded anthology includes 15 stories, of which I believe I have read nine; in one 2021 blogpost I talked about the included stories by Richard Gehman, Rog Phillips, Gerald Kersh and John Steinbeck, and in another the stories by Fritz Leiber, Brian Aldiss, E. C. Tubb, and Theodore Sturgeon, while back in 2019 I read the Avram Davidson story to which Merril gave the nod.

"Backwardness" by Poul Anderson  

This story seems well-liked.  Anthony Boucher, after publishing it in F&SF, included it in the eighth F&SF "Best of" volume, Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander and Patricia Warrick selected it for their textbook School and Society Through Science Fiction, and Hank Davis included it in Worst Contact; the story has also been translated into French, Russian, Croatian and Japanese.  Another place in which "Backwardness" appears is 1991's Kinship with the Stars, an Anderson collection I own, and I am reading it in there.  

Rats, here we have something of a joke story that tries to "subvert conventions," as the cool kids say.  "Backwardness" is a first- contact-with-the-Galactic-Federation story.  Anderson's tale is a series of vignettes, in which various Earthmen of the nearish future interact with the representatives of the GF, who have arrived because they detected the first use of an Earth star-drive.  The GF, which has been around forever and includes thousands of planets, investigates all civilizations that are on the brink of exploring the stars; violent civilizations are exterminated forthwith, but luckily Earth passed the test.

I suppose it is common for SF stories about aliens who arrive on a pre-FTL drive Earth to portray the visitors as wise or cultured or super-intelligent or something.  Anderson's joke is to suggest that the people of the Galactic Federation--or at least these representatives--are unsophisticated rubes of average or even below average intelligence, by Earth standards; the Galactics have outstripped the people of Earth technologically simply because they have had so much longer to develop.

Anderson explicitly lays out his premise on the last page of the 12-page story; the preceding pages illustrate it.  A party of the GF spacemen paints the town red in Manhattan, getting drunk, banging sluts and buying and adorning themselves with cheap garish jewelry.  (All the aliens in the story look like Earth humans--the galaxy is full of human civilizations.)  The head of the UN meets the captain of the GF ship and finds the alien can't explain anything at all about science or technology and that the GF has a quite laissez faire government--the alien captain, who has been to many planets, remarks that New York City is the biggest city he has ever seen and marvels at the ability of Earthers to govern such a huge conglomeration of people.  A Catholic bishop meets the alien vessel's chaplain, expecting to be enlightened by a sophisticated thinker, a theologian, only to learn this guy is addicted to TV ("You got some real good TV on this planet") and that the religion of the ship's crew consists of sacrificing cows (rabbits on a ship, to save space) to appease the gods and bring good luck.  (Alien planets don't just give rise to intelligent beings genetically similar to Earth people--the plants and animals there are also the same as Earth's.)  Anderson's big concluding joke is that a New York con man with a bachelor's degree in psychology quickly susses out the aliens and sells one of them the Brooklyn Bridge.

As joke stories that try to subvert conventions go, this one isn't bad.  The jokes are not annoyingly lame, and the idea that an intelligent species with an average IQ of 75 instead of 100 would eventually build nuclear reactors and space craft, it would just take longer than it has take us, is sort of interesting,  So I'll call "Backwardness" acceptable.


"The Apprentice Wobbler" by Poul Anderson

Here we have a story that was, it seems, never reprinted after its initial appearance in Fred Pohl's short-lived Star, a magazine that had one issue!  Star is kind of cool because Richard Powers was its art director.  (I wrote a little about Star in 2021 when I read Brian Aldiss' "Judas Dancing"; just last year I read another story from Star, Robert Bloch's "Daybroke," which I denounced on several counts.)  

The stagnant and conformist near-future is entering a period of radical change!  After a military coup in Moscow ended the Cold War, there followed a period of little economic or technological progress as people's desire for security and the extensive encroachment on business of the suffocating tendrils of government and labor unions inhibited the taking of risk by individuals and firms.  But just two years ago Steve Wojcek burst onto the scene with his amazing machine!  The Wojcek device is the size of a suitcase, covered in dials and gauges, and in the hands of a skilled operator it can manipulate energies at the atomic level, generating power with amazing efficiency; its most spectacular use is in levitating people and things and moving them through the air without consuming fuel or producing pollution.  It takes a long time to train a Wojcek operator, and the Wojcek school in Iowa has limited capacity, so the number of Wojcek devices in use is still small, but it looks like eventually the entire world economy is going to be revolutionized as the atomic power and petroleum industries, the automotive and aviation industries, and much else, are all put out of business.

Daniel Holloway is our hero, an engineer at one of the corporations that is trying to figure out how the Wojcek machine works, and failing--only people who take the year-long course given by Wojcek and co can make it perform its wonders.  His superiors send Holloway on a mission he is to enroll at the Wojcek school outside Des Moines and learn all he can about the inexplicable machine that is changing the world, and perhaps figure out a way to sabotage Wojcek's project and preserve the economic and social status quo.

Over in the Hawkeye state, Holloway learns to operate the device (colloquially called a "wobbly") quicker than do most, but it appears that nobody, not even Wojcek, really understands how it generates almost unlimited energy without producing waste or dangerous radiation, and without incurring any risk--no one has ever been injured or killed in a wobbly failure or accident.  Study in Iowa not only gives Wojeck the opportunity to fly like a bird and manipulate objects from a distance, but shows him a new way of relating to other people--back in the rat race in New York, Holloway had to suck up, had to try to keep up with the Jonses, had to wear suits and ties and worry if his wife, a native of Oregon, would impress his colleagues and clients, but the Wojcek people don't take hierarchy seriously, they dress casually, and they aren't obsessed with chasing money and chasing status!     

The big revelation comes after Christmas vacation, when the Wojcek crew realizes Holloway is a spy.  The wobblies are fake--they don't do anything concrete.  What Wojcek discovered was psionics!  Psychic powers only operate if you have faith in them, and if the people around you do as well, and since every educated person thinks psychic powers are fiction, it is almost impossible to get them to work.  The wobbly tricks people into thinking telekinesis and ESP and all the rest are technological and physical, eliminating the inhibitions of the wobbly "operator" and the skepticism of onlookers.  Holloway, it turns out, is a psyker of great potential, and after learning the truth proves himself able to fly and perform other psychic feats without the crutch that is the wobbly.  He abandons his job at the New York corporation despite their promises of promotion and raises and joins the egalitarian Wojcek project of changing the world. 

This story is OK.  The human drama is a kind of weak, so "The Apprentice Wobbler"'s oomph has to come from the science lectures and its ideas about economy and society.  Anderson dramatizes some interesting tensions inherent in a market economy, and so it is easy to see why leftists Pohl and Merril liked it.  For one thing, innovations and progress that are self-evidently good for society as a whole often cause disruption to the lives of individuals and pose new challenges--everybody benefits when a new more efficient product or process comes on the market, but the people who are producing and selling the current product or service that has been rendered obsolete suffer, at least in the short term, and their suffering can have social and political ramifications.  A related tension is how individuals and firms that grow big by innovating, who have benefitted from the dynamism of the market economy, once they are big often use their influence to clamp down on innovation and tamp down dynamism in order to stifle competition and protect their own position.  These are uncomfortable truths which supporters of the market economy may be loathe to admit, and which serve as a chink in the armor of a market orientation which enemies of the free market are always trying to exploit.

Acceptable, but I see why "The Apprentice Wobbler" hasn't been reprinted; Anderson has produced plenty of stories full of adventure, human feeling and jokes that are more entertaining and have a broader appeal.

"People Soup" by Alan Arkin

Alan Arkin is a beloved actor with a stack of awards but I have to admit that I find his face and his voice annoying and so as an adult I have not sat through any of his films or TV shows.  (As a kid I saw on TV The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming and The In-Laws because my mother liked them, and it is possible my distaste for Arkin is a subconscious act of rebellion.)  But maybe I'll like this story, one of three short stories with which Arkin is credited on isfdb.

"People Soup" is a trifle about precocious kids; it is five pages of obvious but inoffensive jokes. 

Bob slopped a cupful of ketchup into the juicer, added a can of powdered mustard, a drop of milk, six aspirin, and a piece of chewing gum, being careful to spill a part of each package used.

(I realize that I type the phrase "obvious jokes" often, and begin to fear that at age 52 I have heard all the jokes I am going to hear and so now all jokes are obvious to me.)

Mom is out shopping, so little Bob mixes ingredients apparently at random, puts the concoction in a pot and cooks it; he lets his sister Connie help after she pays him ten cents.  They taste the finished product and pretend to have turned into animals.  Then they pretend to have turned back and go out for ice cream.

To me, it feels like an acceptable filler story, but Merril isn't the only person to take "People Soup" seriously.  Groff Conklin included it in the anthology Science Fiction Oddities, and another pair of anthologists whose names I am always typing out, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander (with the participation of Fred Pohl) included it in the 1980 anthology celebrating Galaxy.  Arkin's name doesn't appear on the cover of any of these publications, so I can't say these editors and publishers are using Arkin's famous name in an effort to win attention from beyond the ranks of SF fans.  Perhaps we are supposed to think this cutesy story has an edge.  The way the text reads, the reader is permitted to believe the kids actually do change into a chicken (Connie) and then a St. Bernard (Bob) and then back.  Connie doesn't like being a chicken, but Bob urges her to remain one as long as possible in order to collect information about chicken life.  In the last lines of the story, Bob declares his intention to build an atomic bomb tomorrow.  Maybe Arkin is suggesting that the search for knowledge in the late 1950s is being conducted by reckless men who blithely take terrible risks with the lives of others.  The title of the story, after all, sounds a little grisly.     

**********

None of these stories is bad, so we can say without reservation that the first step on our journey through 1958 with Judith Merril has been an easy one.

Keep an eye out for future installments of this series on 1958 SF stories; next time, however, we'll be looking at stories from earlier decades.  

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Infinity, August 1956: D Knight, D Mason, H Ellison and R Silverberg

In our last episode we read Richard Wilson's "The Big Fix" from the August 1956 issue of Infinity, and back in June of 2023 we read Randall Garrett's "Stroke of Genius" from the same issue.  That issue of Infinity includes fiction by four other authors whose names we recognize, and today we check them out.

"The Beach Where Time Began" by Damon Knight

Mediocre young man Albert Eustace Rossi moved from Seattle to New York City, hoping something good might happen to him.  (Oy, this sounds painfully familiar.)  He found himself unable to make friends and unable to hold down a decent job.  (Ouch.)  He became obsessed with the idea of travelling through time to a more salubrious epoch, and read various books and encyclopedia articles on the science and philosophy of time, and Knight fills the story with direct references to Einstein, Milne, Dunne, Minkowski and others, and with indirect references to Descartes and Heisenberg.  The upshot of all Rossi's reading and thinking is that he becomes able to travel through time simply by willing himself to do so, after following some ritualistic procedures similar to the stereotypical behavior of a wizard in a fantasy story like chanting, drawing a circle and formulae on the floor and burning a piece of paper with formulae written upon it; "The Beach Where Time Began" has "meta" elements, another example being that Rossi is an avid reader of SF magazines.

Rossi's method of time travel isn't easily controlled or calibrated; he pops into one period after another, moving forward in time, spending only a few seconds in each period.  When he reaches the end of time he then pops back to the beginning.  People are able to see him, and address him, and, realizing he is a time traveller, they ask him questions, and the answers he gives alter the course of history in unpredictable ways.  Rossi eventually figures out how to stop himself on a beautiful beach among the peaceful primitive people he has been longing to live among, but this kills him, turning him into a statue hard as stone whom the peaceful primitive people worship as a god.

An acceptable pessimistic joke story that has as its central figure a loser for whom the author has not sympathy but contempt and which leaves the reader (this one, at least) uneasy, even sad.  "The Beach Where Time Began" was reprinted in a French Knight collection and a German anthology, but apparently not in English--maybe Knight's portrait of a SF-reading loser who had intelligence but no real talent or ability and so no friends and no success hit a little too close to home.

"The Fool" by David Mason

Years ago I read David Mason's sword and sorcery novel Kavin's World and a commenter complained I hadn't understood it.  Well, let's see if I understand this work of Mason's.  Speak up if I flub it, Mason cognoscenti!  

"The Fool" is a competent twist-ending story with an unreliable narrator, a sort of pastiche and/or allegory of European experiences with primitive native tribes and of the Gospels.  The text of the story consists of one side of a conversation between the retiring representative ("Agent") of a Terran business concern (or maybe government agency?) on a planet of Stone Age barbarians and his replacement.  The retiring Agent is our narrator, and he spends almost the entire story describing his own predecessor, Duncan, to whom he was assistant.

Duncan was educated and earnest, but according to the narrator totally incompetent, so much so that the narrator had to more or less do the Agent's job for him.  The Agent's job is to trade with the natives, not to interfere with their wacky culture.  The natives of this planet are a warlike race separated into hostile tribes who regularly conduct raids on each other, taking trophies much like headhunters on Earth (though, I guess as a joke, Mason has these people cut off each other's tails rather than heads) and seizing women, whom these people treat as chattel before they become mothers, but kowtow to after they have achieved motherhood.  (The narrator says the natives have some kind of matrilineal inheritance customs, and because the story paints Duncan as a Christ figure I have to think Mason included this matrilineal jazz as a signal we are to think of these natives as somehow analogous to Jews, who famously have a tradition of matrilinearity.)

Instead of cutting business deals and keeping the account books up to date, Duncan spent his time trying to educate the natives, giving them speeches advising them not to treat women so harshly and to knock it off with all the warring and raiding; essentially, he is preaching that they love one another.  According to the narrator, the natives treated these speeches as a joke.  Duncan also set up a school and tried to teach math and other things to the native children, which the narrator dismisses as a stupid waste of time.  The Agent is also supposed to maintain order, punish lawbreakers and so forth, and Duncan displayed a reluctance to do so.

The religion of the natives centered around a monstrous idol to whom they sacrificed women and children.  Duncan blew up the idol, and in response the native high priest speared him, nailing him to a tree.  As he died, Duncan forgave his murderer, and the natives were so impressed that they rebuilt the idol in the likeness of Duncan and ceased sacrificing people.  The ending of the story hints that the followers of the teachings of Duncan may become the dominant power in the universe the way Christian Europeans came to dominate Earth (and in this story, at least, the galaxy.) 

"The Fool" is an acceptable filler story.  It appears that it has never been reprinted.    

"Trojan Hearse" by Harlan Ellison

"Trojan Hearse" is a component of Ellison's Earth-Kyba war series.  Last year we read another Kyba story, "The Crackpots," and I gave it a thumbs down, but it is possible this one will be to my taste.  isfdb suggests "Trojan Hearse" has not been reprinted in a conventional collection or anthology, but informs us that there was an adaptation of it (or maybe just a printing of the text?) in the 1987 graphic novel upon which Ellison collaborated with Ken Steacy called Night and the Enemy--check out tarbandu's recent post on Night and the Enemy at the PorPor Books Blog at the link! 

The belligerent Kyba, who produce nothing of value on their own planet but instead live by plundering other races, want to conquer Earth but Terra is too far away.  So they have built a huge teleporter that can instantly transport an army of AFVs to Earth.  But an Earth spy has gotten back to Earth with all the Kyban plans, so, when the Kyban war machines roll into their teleporter they roll out onto Earth and right into an Earth teleporter set up a foot in front of the Kyban destination point; the Earth teleporter has been set to teleport them to the vacuum of space where they will die at once.  

This forgettable four-page gimmick story feels like a rush job.  Ellison refers to the Kyban force of tanks and trucks as an "armada" or "fleet" instead of an "army" or "legion" or something more appropriate for a ground force.  He says the Kyban dictator and his right hand man have fought together in many campaigns, and that the people of Kyba "were geared to a life of constant preparation for battle," but he also says Kyba hasn't fought a war for three hundred years.  He says Kyba has conquered "this end of the galaxy" but he also has a Kyben character say that before the teleporter was invented a few years ago that "Interstellar war has never been feasible.  Distances were too great."  If the distances are so great, how do the Kybens know all about Earth, enough to pinpoint where their teleporter will land their army, and how did the human spy get to Kyba?    

Barely acceptable filler. 

"The Final Challenge" by Robert Silverberg

"The Final Challenge" has been reprinted in the 1976 Silverberg collection The Shores of Tomorrow, which was translated into German in 1979.

Delaunay the musician and composer is a self-hating Earthman!  "Earth was a planet of hate full of haters" that had fallen into decadence and decline after carving an empire out of the galaxy, a place that no longer produced noteworthy art, music or literature, no longer engaged in grand projects.  So he left Earth to live on the planet of the Sallat, a race of goodie goodies with six fingers on each hand, a people whose music fascinated Delaunay.  Delaunay doesn't want to be reminded of Earth--he even pushes his Sallat girlfriend away when she tries to kiss him because kissing is an Earth practice his girlfriend was aping; the Sallat have more "pure" and "beautiful" "ways of love."  

One of the Sallat whom Delaunay knows is an influential politician, Demet.  Some years ago it came to everybody's attention that the neighboring planet of the Krozni was going to be destroyed in some "freak cosmic accident."  Instead of letting the Krozni be wiped out, Demet authorized their mass immigration to the planet of the Sallat.  These ungrateful bastards are now raiding Sallat communities, and as the story begins, news has arrived that Demet's own son was killed in such a raid.  The Sallat respond to these crimes not with a spirited resistance but a sad resignation--they don't have the capacity to hate like an Earthman does, like Delaunay does!  Sure, the young Sallat join the army and march to the front, but they insist on observing all their daily and weekly religious rituals, and playing their beautiful music whenever they feel like it, which is often, and the Krozni attack during their prayers and concerts, massacring the unprepared Sallat forces.

Delaunay joins the Sallat defense forces and tries to persuade them to suspend the prayers and concerts for a while, so they can get down to the serious business of preserving the Sallat civilization, but to no avail.  Delaunay, behind enemy lines, meets an Earthman--this guy is the general of the Krozni army!  The Earth is behind the Krozni attack on the people of Sallat!  

This Earthman explains that the Earth is decadent for lack of challenge.  So he and his coterie of conspirators are grooming the war-like but primitive Krozni into a disciplined modern fighting force that will be able to build its own space empire and threaten Earth.  Faced with the threat, Earth will, it is hoped, be shaken out of its torpor and rise to the occasion and once again be vital civilization.  This general says it is sad that the Sallat are going to be wiped out, but the Sallat are even more decadent than Earthers, as their refusal to take seriously the war for their survival proves; if a dead end society has to be destroyed in order to rejuvenate a once great society that is at a low point but is salvageable and may be great again, well, that is a fair bargain.  

Delaunay protests at first, but then comes to agree that the Sallats are doomed and perhaps not worth saving.  He does send a chill up the general's spine before leaving by suggesting that the Krozni may get out of hand and prove too tough for the human race to conquer.

"The Final Challenge" is more intriguing than Mason and Ellison's stories and not quite as big a downer as Knight's.  One of the themes it addresses is that of responsibility, in particular responsibility to one's people and culture.  Delaunay felt no responsibility to help fix an Earth that was in trouble--instead he selfishly abandoned Earth.  Is it possible that the Earth general who is getting all kinds of Sallats killed is a better person than Delaunay, because he is doing something to help his people?  Demet felt a responsibility to do the right thing by the Krozni, a responsibility to uphold an abstract principle of justice, but doing so doomed his own people to destruction.  The soldiers feel a responsibility to their religion and traditions, and so keep at their rituals, even though it puts the very existence of their civilization at risk.  

The actual things that happen in the story are kind of silly, but Silverberg's tale here is thought-provoking.  I can mildly recommend this one.

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None of these stories is actually bad, though Ellison's is pretty close to the edge.  Mason's is an interesting example of SF that comments on Christianity and Judaism in a way that is not entirely dismissive of religion, while Knight's and Silverberg's perhaps have something to say about the themes and attitudes of those two major figures in the SF community.  (Knight sometimes comes off as an arrogant jerk, and he does so here.)  So a worthwhile expedition into the pages of a 1950s magazine not as famous as, say Astounding, F&SF or Galaxy, to read some stories we'd have to say are on the rare side.

Friday, March 8, 2024

Merril-approved 1956 stories by R M Williams and R Wilson

We are witnessing the end of an era!  For a year we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have been reading stories published in 1956 that appear on the Honorable Mention list at the end of Judith Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume.  This list is alphabetical, and we started with A, and through 18 blog posts we have read something like 60 stories and made our way all the way to W, the final letter on the list (I guess Merril didn't like any of Robert F. Young's 1956 stories, and it doesn't look like Roger Zelazny published any stories in 1956.)  And today we have post number 19 and a final three stories, one by Robert Moore Williams and two by Richard Wilson.  (I wanted to read Anthony G. Williamson's "To Reach the Stars," but I can't find a scan of Authentic Science Fiction's May 1956 issue.)     

"Sudden Lake" by Robert Moore Williams 

This blog doesn't have a particularly good relationship with Robert Moore Williams.  While it is true that in 2018 I liked his 1938 tale "Robot's Return" and that in 2020 I enjoyed his 1946 story "The Counterfeiter," in 2022 I read two of Williams' Jongor novels, finding the first "an acceptable Tarzan pastiche with some half-baked science fiction ideas thrown in" and the second "bad," and his fourth Zanthar novel, which I declared "bad in almost every way."  But seeing as Merril liked it, maybe I can hope "Sudden Lake" will at least be competent.

"Sudden Lake" is set in a military installation the  purpose of which is to store uranium.  The uranium has been formed into little cubes, each little cube in a separate locked receptacle.  One day, the alarms go off and it is discovered that one of the cubes is missing; it is soon discovered in the wrong receptacle, sitting atop the cube that belongs there.  This is horrifying, because if a certain amount ("the critical mass") of uranium gets together, an amount which can't be precisely known because it is affected by various exogenous factors, it will explode, obliterating the facility and leaving a huge crater that the men jocularly call "Sudden Lake."

The general who commands the base, Dawson, his long-time assistant, Major Lang, and the facility's head scientist, civilian Dr. Ferguson, try to figure out how this event occurred, and their investigation soon centers on a Private Yakey, a hulking superstitious brute from the South who was on guard the night of the incident, a man who fears nothing natural but is scared of ghosts.  Under a truth serum he reveals what he refused to admit voluntarily, that he saw the errant cube of uranium floating through the air.  It is assumed Yakey was drunk on guard duty, but despite this, Yakey ends up on guard duty again, and the same bizarre and mortifying incident again occurs.

Lang takes charge of the investigation, using unorthodox methods to solve the mystery, and the solution triggers a paradigm shift, a radical change in our knowledge of mankind and the universe that sets the human race on a better path!  It turns out that Ferguson hated nuclear weapons so much that his subconscious sought to destroy the uranium at the base--the egghead's hate was so titanic that it overrode his fear of death (or just exploited the death wish lurking within us all, I guess.)  This hate also served to activate his latent psychic powers so that Ferguson could (without his conscious mind being aware of it) move the uranium through space-time!  Lang, by threatening Ferguson with a pointless death, forces the scientist's subconscious knowledge and abilities to the surface--Ferguson can now consciously control his amazing powers!  And presumably teach other people how to access these powers!

It seems to me that these new powers would be like any new intellectual or technological development--decent people could use them to improve the lives of individuals and of the community, but evil people could use them to rob, oppress and murder others.  But Williams and his characters are more optimistic than I am: they are confident that knowledge of other dimensions and the ability to travel instantaneously with only the power of the mind is going to end the arms race and make nuclear war impossible.  Well, I hope so.
       
This story isn't bad.  Williams works diligently to bring his characters to life, giving them all personalities and constructing relationships among them and flinging various metaphors at you, and it essentially works.  Like most genre fiction, "Sudden Lake" is of course a wish-fulfillment fantasy, catering to our wish for a deus ex machina resolution to the problem posed by the existence of nuclear weapons.  Fortunately, Williams, by constructing his story as a sort of locked-room mystery that is solved by a detective willing to take risks, diminishes the problem I have with typical deus ex machina solutions--the victory Lang wins for the human race is earned, not just handed to him, and it comes at some cost.  

"Sudden Lake" was printed in Ray Palmer's Other Worlds, an issue with a Virgil Finlay cover that celebrates the beauty that is the female form.  (This time out Virgil conceals the beauty that is the male form in a clunky space suit.)  Judith Merril and I think the story worth your time, but it doesn't look like "Sudden Lake" has ever been reprinted.

"The Big Fix!" by Richard Wilson 

Back in 2016, I read Wilson's Nebula-nominated 42-page story "The Story Writer" and condemned it as "sappy, sentimental, self-indulgent and pandering," called the plot "absurd, banal and tired" and denounced the style as "long-winded and boring."  And yet today I choose to grapple with Wilson's prose not once, but twice!

Round One!  "The Big Fix!" 

Our narrator is a man who "has been mainlining it for a decade" but has been "off the junk for three months," having had enough of the life of poverty and violence that is the lot of the junkie; to satisfy his needs he has been relying on mass quantities of alcohol.  As the story begins, he is pursuing rumors of a new drug that isn't habit-forming and which can induce what I'd call collective consciousness ("open up the world for you so you'd be close, really close, to others like you....your mind would be their mind....union more terrific than any other kind....")  His quest leads him to a Manhattan apartment where a mysterious dealer has him lay down and smoke a weird cigarette in a weird holder. 

The narrator is transported to an extragalactic planet where there is no pollution or machinery and people share their thoughts telepathically and relax and eat delicious food in cities of short quaint buildings, not impersonal oppressive skyscrapers.  (Come on, Wilson, I love skyscrapers!)  But our narrator's visit is a brief one--if he wants to return to utopian Uru, he will have to sign up permanently, abandoning Earth forever.  And he does!

Flash forward to the narrator's life on Uru--like so many people in SF, he has been thrown into the gladiatorial arena!  The former junkie participates in battles between teams of fifteen men, all wearing gloves and boots studded with steel claws and even mouthpieces with fangs!  The drug dealer who recruited the narrator, a native of Uru, is commander of the team, directing his fifteen men via telepathy from outside the arena.  These annual games resolve disputes between cities, and serve as a cathartic "letting-off of steam" for the natives of Uru, who through their telepathy can experience the emotions of the 30 gladiators shanghaied from all over the universe without themselves risking life and limb.  This is his third and final fight; if the narrator, who has already lost a leg and an eye in his first two engagements, can live through this one he will be awarded a place in the aristocracy.  

The fights are not free-for-alls, but a series of one-on-one duels.  By coincidence, today the narrator is faced with a fellow Earthman.  When the combatants realize they are both human (people from all over the universe look the same, it turns out) they refuse to fight, and so are sent back to Earth.  On Earth these two wangle positions on teams conducting research on peyote--our happy ending is that the narrator has figured out a way to get paid to use drugs.  

"The Big Fix!" is well-written, especially the first two-thirds on Earth, but I'm not sure the whole thing holds together well.  Are we supposed to see some parallel between recreational drug use and vicarious enjoyment of violence?  If we are, Wilson doesn't sell the parallel very well.  If we aren't, "The Big Fix!" feels like Wilson just jamming together three different SF themes (mind-expanding drug use, the dark underside of utopia, and being forced into the arena) that don't really sync up well.

After the narrator abandons Earth the whole story feels discordant and disconnected, even if we ignore the nuttiness of the idea that smoking a cigarette can transport your physical body to another galaxy in the blink of an eye.  How are we supposed to think about the people of Uru?  Is Uru really a paradise if they trick foreigners into losing their lives in the arena?  And if they are ruthless enough to fool people into becoming gladiators who are likely to die, does it make sense they are generous enough to send recalcitrant gladiators back home?  The ending, in which the druggies find an ostensibly healthy way to devote their lives to recreational drug use, is not very satisfying--a more satisfying ending would be punishment for throwing your life away on drugs, or some kind of redemptive ending in which the druggies go straight.  The ending we get, in which the druggies keep using drugs and are even paid to do so, feels like a cop out.  Is this story just a roundabout endorsement of peyote?         

I'm going to call this story acceptable; before the gladiator stuff started I was expecting to give it a thumbs up.  "The Big Fix!" will be of value to those interested in depictions of the drug culture, and might also be seen an example of the romanticization of Native Americans, as the narrator closely associates peyote with Indians.  Also of note are references to Aldous Huxley, whose book on his use of mescaline (the active agent of peyote), The Doors of Perception, came out in 1954.  

"The Big Fix" first appeared in Infinity, in an issue we looked into in June of last year when we read another story promoted by Merril, Randall Garrett's "Stroke of Genius."  "The Big Fix" would be reprinted in an anthology of stories about drug use edited by Michel Parry called Strange Ecstasies and in the Wilson collection Time Out for Tomorrow, which in both its American and German printings has enjoyed some pretty awesome covers.


"Lonely Road" by Richard Wilson

Round Two!  "Lonely Road."

This is a sort of Twilight Zone-style story.  Our main character is on a long drive homewards.  He realizes that he has seen no other cars on the road for some time; he goes into restaurants and gas stations and finds no people around.  We get several pages of him trying to find evidence of people, leaving money in empty businesses so he can feel comfortable about taking the food and fuel he requires.  We also learn in passing that his young son died recently.

He's almost home when he starts seeing people again.  Everybody is acting a little strangely, and when he asks about the last two days, the days when he seemed alone in the world, they don't have much to say, sort of avoid the topic.  Back home with his wife we get some clues as to what happened.  For one thing, at the approximate times her husband stopped seeing people, and started seeing them again, his wife noticed some pretty odd phenomena.  More significantly, we hear about one of their son's last activities.

You see, their boy, when his illness got too severe for him to get up and around much, seriously took up tropical fish as a hobby.  He even had his parents buy a second tank and, as an experiment, transferred the fish from their original tank to the second tank, which was arranged a little differently.  Eventually he realized that one of the tank's denizens, a snail, had accidentally been left behind in the first tank.  Then he put all the fish back into the first tank.  Wilson gives us reason to believe that God or Fate or whoever or whatever moved the human race to a quite similar Earth--leaving the protagonist behind by mistake--and then after two days moved all the people back again.

This story is reasonably well-written, and all the stuff about grieving parents makes you a little verklempt, but what is the point of the weird SF element?  The boy died soon after his abortive experiment, and the fish all died soon after that--are we to believe that God or the Universe and/or the Earth and its inhabitants are on the brink of death?

Wilson's depiction of a man left totally alone and of parents' heartbreak are pretty effective, so I'm willing to call "Lonely Road" good.  "Lonely Road" made its debut in F&SF, in an issue which features Reginald Bretnor's "The Past and its Dead People," a particular fave of Merril's, and a reprint of Evelyn E. Smith's joke story about people who design crossword puzzles, "BAXBR/DAXBR."  "Lonely Road" was a success, being reprinted in the Wilson collection Those Idiots from Earth and numerous anthologies, including John Pelan's The Century's Best Horror Fiction 1951-2000.   

The Wilson story I hated appeared quite late in Wilson's career, and maybe represents a decadent phase of his writing; perhaps I should try to find these paperback collections with the terrific Richard Powers covers and sample more of Wilson's 1950s work. 


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Well, there we have it folks, our final post on 1956 stories recommended by Judith Merril.  This has been a rewarding adventure; many of the stories have been entertaining--including some by authors I have been avoiding and some I would not have encountered in the normal course of business--and even the weak stories offer us insight into the history of SF and present a puzzle--if I think a story is bad, why did Merril profess to like it?

Finally, links to the entire run of blog posts based on Merril's list of honorable mentions from SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume. 

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Merril-approved stories from 1956 by E C Tubb, F L Wallace and J Williams

In 1957, Judith Merril published, as the last section of her anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, a long alphabetical list of 1956 stories which hadn't quite made the cut for inclusion in the anthology but which she thought worthy of recommendation.  In 2023 and 2024 we have been reading selected stories from that list, starting with the A authors and working our way through the list until today we hit T and proceed beyond.  We've got three stories today, and I will also note that we've already read the story by a U author that Merril recommends for 1956, Helen Urban's "The Finer Breed."  

"Into the Empty Dark" by E. C. Tubb

First up, E. C. Tubb, creator of Dumarest of Earth.  "Into the Empty Dark" debuted in Nebula Science Fiction ("Voted Britain's Top Science Fiction Magazine") and has never been reprinted.

"Into the Empty Dark" is serious old-fashioned science fiction, an attempt to realistically portray space flight in the near future.  In the universe the story describes, mankind has only been travelling between the planets for twenty years, and journeys between the inner planets are slow, dull, and strain everybody's mental heath.  The ships must strictly follow predetermined courses to get to their destinations, as they lack the fuel, sensors and communications equipment to safely or profitably make course corrections on the fly.  So when Captain Strackland's ship gets an SOS from another vessel, one which has been hit by a meteor and thrown off course, there is not a hell of a lot Strackland and the two men who make up his crew can do to help them.  

Tubb does a good job describing the way space flight work in this story, and a decent job describing the psychological effects on the spacemen as they face crisis and tragedy in the void between the Earth and Mars.  The story's tone and atmosphere, and all the little details, bring home the idea that space travel is unglamourous and tedious, but still dangerous, and Tubb doesn't talk much about how mankind has benefitted from exploring and colonizing the solar system.  The people on the other ship die, there being nothing Strackland and company can do to help them, and Tubb suggests Strackland and his crew will suffer lifelong psychological scars from the incident.  

I like it. 

"A Little Thing for the House" by F. L. Wallace

Over the years we have read two stories by Wallace, "Student Body," and "Big Ancestor," and thought them relatively good.  This story isn't bad, either, though it seems it has never been reprinted.

"A Little Thing for the House" is another of those stories that warns you utopia is going to suck and that to flourish people need some kind of challenge, need some kind of productive work to do.  It depicts a future in which computers and robots do everything, and people are actually forbidden from performing any sort of real work, even such things as cooking their own food, much less building or operating or repairing machines.  The computers allow people to be poets, artists, athletes and scientists, but the story suggests that since most people lack the talent to be truly successful at such work, many are unfulfilled. 

Our hero Holloway is an aspiring mechanic; as a child his great grandfather told him stories about the old days when people had to make their own way in the world instead of having everything handed to them, and how he (greatgrandpa) had been a fixer or tinker, a guy who repaired tools and machines and did odd jobs.  All his life that sort of work has appealed to Holloway, who has a mechanical mind but doesn't want to be a scientist--he likes to work with his hands.  As the story begins, Holloway has managed to find a person, the married woman Madge, who has somewhat similar aspirations--Madge wants to bake and cook like people did in centuries past, not just tell the kitchen machines what to make and have it spat out of a little door at her.  Holloway knows how to alter the kitchen machines to allow her to turn them off and on at will, so she can bake her own cookies (interestingly, in this 1956 story Wallace spells the singular "cooky") or whatever she wants.  Accomplishing this task will take a while, so Holloway moves in for a few days--Madge tells hubby (who goes to an office to play a stock market simulation set up by the computers to fill up his time) and daughter Alicia that Holloway is an old friend just visiting.

Alicia is an exhibitionist who chases men and wishes she lived in the days when she could be a courtesan and bang a succession of guys.  She flaunts her "hard young" body at Holloway and flirts with him briefly, but when she realizes how unlikely he is to become famous she turns her attention to another guy who starts showing up, the new local counsellor, a young guy taking the place of the old geezer who just retired.  These counsellors are sort of like commissars who help people figure out what to do with their leisure-filled lives and also keep an eye out for people who might illegally be doing real work.  This new guy is pursuing rumors of a "maladjusted" citizen, and Holloway is his prime suspect, but he gets a little distracted by Alicia's attentions.

When Holloway has reason to believe the counsellor has his number and is about to arrest him, the would-be tinker sneaks into the central computer for his city and puts to use all his mechanical skills to threaten the computer and compel it to loosen the regulations and allow people more leeway in which they can do productive work.  After his success, Alicia throws herself at Holloway (he is kinda famous now) but he rejects her--he has another woman in mind.  I figured this would be Madge, with whom he has something in common, but instead it is some woman whom Wallace hasn't mentioned before, Anne, I guess Holloway's wife or fiancé or something.  We are told Anne has patiently waited for Holloway while he pursued his risky campaign to become a working mechanic in a world in which that is a crime.  Is this Wallace telling us that the ideal woman is one who stays in the background and silently supports her man?  Was Anne, who is only mentioned in one paragraph, a late addition to the story? 

This story is OK, maybe marginally good.  Feminists won't like that the active women in the story aspire to either bake and cook or become promiscuous groupies and that the woman the hero chooses as a romantic partner is neither of those risk-taking outgoing women but instead a woman who passively waits for him.  Personally, I have to question the wisdom of introducing a new character on the penultimate page of a 29-page story--seeing Holloway take up with either horny little Alicia or accomplice-in-rule-breaking Madge, or just passing on women altogether to focus on his libertarian activist work, would have been more satisfying.  But in general the themes, pacing, and structure of the story work; "A Little Thing for the House" is never boring or annoying, and I found it entertaining enough--in particular, it is interesting to see a depiction, over 60 years ago, of a world in which it is not necessary to work and so men become immersed in computer games and women devote themselves to using their sex appeal to win fame.

"The Asa Rule" by Jay Williams 

"The Asa Rule" debuted in the same issue of F&SF that included Robert Bloch's "All on a Golden Afternoon," which I declared "the Platonic ideal" of a Bloch story when I read it way back when.  For some reason, on Merril's honorable mentions list in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, the source for the story is listed as The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series, so we'll read it there to ensure we are experiencing the text Merril is recommending.   

(The boys down in Marketing want me to post a link to my blogpost about the Poul Anderson, Ted Sturgeon and Avram Davidson stories in The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series, so here it is.)  

Lucy Ironsmith is an equatorial Martian with pale green skin, silver hair, crimson eyes, and a slender body, and is so striking that when Terran Leonard Jackson first sees her he spills his drink and the service robot has to roll in to clean him up.  Leonard has come to Mars to study the ecosystem of the Martian tundra, and Lucy is going to be his assistant, teach him Martian culture and help him avoid offending the locals out of ignorance of their customs.

The Martians, we readers of stories recommended by Judith Merril are not surprised to learn, are better than humans--closer to nature, more peaceful, less aggressive.  Lucy says that to Martians, Earth's history seems "bloody, senseless, and disagreeable."  Leonard suggests that some humans are like Martians, naming "the Hopi, the Navaho, some Polynesian people, some of the Africans...," you know, peaceful and friendly, and that the rest of the human race is slowly catching up to those admirable demographics, learning to be peaceful.  Lucy admits that Martians used to fight, but that was long ago; for two thousand years Mars has had its own United Nations, something which Earth has only had for less than 100 years.    

Leonard wasn't sent to Mars to flirt with a green girl and explain to her that not all Earthers are as bad as white people, however; his job is to figure out a way to deal with the deadly swarms of insects that make the Martian tundra hard to cultivate.  The clouds of bugs leave the villages of the local primitives, the grey-skinned, flat-nosed, semi-nomadic Asa, alone, but, when in the tundra, Martians of Lucy's green ethnic group, the Hvor, have to carry with them special protective suits to don should a swarm appear.  The Asa are even more in touch with nature than Lucy's people, and "live by a rigid rule in which they must love and assist each other and even their worst enemies."  The Asa hold the bugs to be sacred, and refuse to explain to others their method of keeping them from attacking.  (You'd think that "assisting others" would include telling the Hvor, if not us deplorable Caucasians, how to avoid getting killed by the bugs, but I guess not.)

Monthly, the women of the Asa hold a secret ritual honoring the insects, a ritual no man must witness.  Leonard sneaks off and spies on the ritual without informing Lucy or his Terran superiors, who specifically told him not to do this.  He is caught, and, I guess having forgotten to identify as transgendered, is taken by the Asa to a special boulder out in the tundra, "given to" the bugs to suffer their judgement.  When Lucy finds out she is pretty upset, being in love with Leonard, and even whips out a gun and threatens the Asa tribal leaders, to the amazement of the human accompanying her--he has never seen a Martian acting so aggressively before.  Luckily, before anybody gets blasted, Leonard appears.  He explains that after the Asa left him, the insect swarm arrived and started biting him, but Leonard, gosh darn it, is such an inquisitive scientist and such a nice guy that, even while they were biting him, he found the bugs fascinating and even "cute."  As soon as he realized how adorable the venomous insects were they stopped biting him.  You see, the bugs can sense hate and love, and they only bite haters; people full of love they leave alone.  

The story ends as Leonard and Lucy are on the brink of sharing their first kiss.

"The Asa Rule" is written in a simple and childish style that matches its one-note characters, sappy message and all the little lectures on the UN and diversity and the environment--the story reads like a kid's book meant to mold your little tyke's personality and opinions.  Thumbs down!  I guess I should have expected this, as when I looked at the page on Williams at isfdb it appeared that most of his SF output consisted of juveniles about kids learning to cooperate or marveling at the fascinating culture of the Native Americans, but I did not (in fact, when I realized this was the story with the sexy green girl on the cover of both the magazine and the hardcover edition of The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series, I got hopeful.)

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It is easy to see why Merril included these stories on her list; the Tubb and Wallace express skepticism of technological progress in the context of stories that also say something about human psychology, and while the Williams is like a propaganda piece directed at nine-year-olds, it promotes aspects of what I take to be Merril's own ideology.     

We've been plugging away at this 1956 SF a la Merril project since March of last year, and the final stage of the journey approaches!  Stay tuned for the final episode of this caper, and cross your fingers in hopes the last stories we read from Merril's list are more like today's contribution from Tubb than that from Williams!   

Sunday, March 3, 2024

Merril-approved 1956-7 stories by L Shaw, R Silverberg, H Still and T Sturgeon

Let's read some stories printed in 1956 (give or take a few months) by authors whose names begin with the letter S and which famous anthologist and mover and shaker in the SF community Judith Merril saw fit to recommend.  There are many such stories, and we've already read a few of them, like Clifford Simak's "Honorable Opponent" and Theodore Sturgeon's "And Now the News," and today four more of them will be thrust under the hot lights and face the third degree here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"Syllabus" by Len Shaw (1956)

Shaw has eight short story credits at isfdb.  "Syllabus" appeared in the same issue of Science Fantasy as the debut of Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop, a book version of which we read way back in 2014 (when we were young and the world was free), and while Non-Stop has been reprinted a billion times and even won some kind of retro award in 2007, it looks like "Syllabus" has languished in obscurity ("success walks hand in hand with failure....")

Well, its obscurity is easily explicable, as is Merril's quixotic decision to champion it.  "Syllabus" has a simple plot: in the future of air cars, a husband and wife have a teen daughter who has been having trouble settling on a college major and career path.  After a few false starts she finally chooses marine zoology.  Her father's sleep is wracked by nightmares in which his daughter is eaten by a whale, so he takes the family flying machine to the women's college to talk to the imposing woman who is the headmistress, where he learns he is mixed up in the headmistress's scheme to manipulate his strong-willed daughter into revealing her budding psychic powers and signing up for study not in Zoology Dept but the school's Psionics Institute. 

The remarkable thing about "Syllabus" is its style.  Shaw renders the story in the vernacular of the future, and reading "Syllabus" is like reading a long difficult poem.  The text often ignores standard grammatical conventions--most of the sentences are technically fragments, and the reader has to supply a subject or a verb that is merely implied by context clues.  Almost every line includes some unusual word and some tweaked version of a stock phrase or cliched allusion--"Cardiac-Queen" for "queen of my heart" is one example.  Shaw's project in writing this story is not to narrate an obvious plot, but to illustrate the fact (explicitly mentioned in the editor's intro to the story) that English has evolved greatly over the last four or five centuries and will continue to evolve.

What is going on in "Syllabus" is comprehensible, but it is no smooth and easy ride, and it is not fun.  It is easy to admire the ambition, creativity and labor that went into "Syllabus," but it is hard to actually enjoy the product into which all those laudable resource has been put.  (Shaw's story is rather more challenging, and much less rewarding, that Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange; the experience of reading "Syllabus" reminded me much more of that time I reading Aldiss' Report on Probability A.)  

Got to give "Syllabus" a thumbs down.  Looking for silver linings here, I will suggest that reading it may offer some educative value--I for one learned a Biblical allusion new to me, "the law of the Medes and Persians," which is presented in this story as if it is a commonplace (maybe it was in 1950s England?) and perhaps other readers will encounter words or references new to them.

Finally, a shout out to luminist.org, where I read a scan of Science Fantasy Volume 6, Number 17, having been unable to find a scan at the internet archive.

"The Guest Rites" by Robert Silverberg (1957)

Here we bear witness to Merril making a little mistake or maybe bending the rules a bit.  The list from which we are drawing her recommendations appears at the end of her 1957 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, and it indicates that "The Guest Rites" appeared in Infinity Science Fiction in February 1956, when in fact it appeared in the February 1957 issue, an issue with a great cover by Emsh that brings to beautiful life such beloved SF elements as zero gravity, sexy spacesuits and their sexy inhabitants, colorful nebulae, and high tech equipment.  We'll read "The Guest Rites" anyway, of course.

Silverberg's is one of those stories that contrasts the wise aliens who are in touch with nature with us humans who are greedy and racist jerk offs.  The story starts at a Venusian temple in the desert; an exhausted Earthman stumbles by, saying he has been lost in the starless desert as he has lost his compass.  The Venusian main character, a monk or priest of the religion that worships the planet itself, offers him endless hospitality, as his religion obliges him to.  But then a cleric from another temple nearby comes by and explains that the human enjoying shelter here is a thief--he stole the eye of the statue of the cyclops god Venus at that temple and ran off, accidentally leaving his compass behind.

On the one hand, such sacrilege is punishable by death, but on the other hand, the thief has been offered the hospitality required by the god that is Venus--how to reconcile this legalistic theological dilemma?  The Venusian clergymen trust that Venus will show the way.  Sure enough, without his compass, the human cannot find his way out of the desert to a Terran settlement; try as he might, he always ends up back at the temple.  The felonious Earthman is doomed to live out the rest of his life in this temple.  When he dies in a few decades, which will seem short to the long-lived Venerians, the priests will retrieve the lost eye.  The human of course tries to bribe a kitchen boy to guide him out of the desert, but unlike us lucre-loving Earth jerks, Venusians don't care about money!  (Don't ask me how the Venusian economy works--these jokers all live in a desert in a temple and spend all day praying and profess to care not a whit about money, so how did they get all these temples built and how do they acquire the food they generously offer any strangers who come by?)

Acceptable filler.  Presumably Merril liked its anti-colonial, anti-Western attitude.  "Guest Rites" would have to wait until the 21st century to be reprinted by Armchair Fiction in their 2011 Science Fiction Gems: Volume Two.  

"Sales Resistance" by Henry Still (1956)

Still has ten credits at isfb.  "Sales Resistance" appeared in If alongside Frank Riley's "Project Hi-Psi," another Merril recommendation which we recently read, one which I liked.  

Here we have another anti-capitalism story.  And unlike Silverberg's story, which is sort of structured as an adventure or horror tale, this is an absurdist satire in which salesmen are the priests of the late 21st century, Pulitzer prizes are awarded to ad campaigns and the hit songs are all sales jingles.  Good grief.  

Perry Mansfield is an oddball non-conformist in the consumerist future.  When a salesman named Marlboro (oy, the joke names) comes to his house to sell him a machine that can use invisible rays of force to cook his food, clean and decorate his house, and even shave and dress him, he refuses to buy one.  This is sacrilege, so later that day Perry is in court, where the lawyers and jury are all computers.  The punch card spat out by the jury declares him guilty and the human judge sentences him to buying the machine.  Back home he goes into a rage and destroys the machine (a scene illustrated with vim and vigor by Emsh, who is shaping up to be the star performer of today's blog post) and so he is carted off to the loony bin.

Banal and lame, maybe lefties who enjoy looking down their noses at our market society would find "Sales Resistance" to be acceptable filler, but I am giving it a thumbs down.   

"Sales Resistance" itself seems to have been unable to penetrate the sales resistance of the world's SF editors after its initial sale to If; apparently it has never been reprinted. 

"Fear is a Business" by Theodore Sturgeon (1956)

Here's the second Sturgeon story Merril recommended in her "Honorable Mention" list in the back of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume.  (Merril also printed a Sturgeon story in her 1957 anthology, "The Other Man," which we read last year.)  Since debuting in F&SF, "Fear is a Business" has been widely anthologized, including in Robert P. Mills' A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction and  Flying Saucers, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh.

"Fear is a Business" is another absurd satire, another attack on our capitalist way of life, and another story featuring goodie goodie aliens who serve as a foil that points out how bad are us humans.  Gadzooks!  Ted includes some of his favorite themes, like collective consciousness and how it is awesome, and even shoehorns in some pretty out-there sex.  There are also lots of jokes, and plenty of references to recent and current events (e.g., Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, the 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and the Air Force's report on UFOs) that are sometimes serious and other times fuel for topical jokes.  We might also see "Fear is a Business" as a satire of L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics, and even a sort of prefiguring of the response to Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

Phillipso is a successful writer of advertising copy.  One day, because he needs an excuse for skipping work, he claims he met aliens and fought them off, even faking a saucer landing site by marking the ground with a blowtorch he happens to have in his car.  By coincidence, the first person to see the marks and hear his story is a journalist, and soon Philsy boy is famous and rich, a publisher having asked him to write a book about his experience and legions of fans wanting to hear him speak.  He becomes essentially the leader of a cult known as the Temple of Space.

On page four of the 14-page story a real space alien contacts Phillipso, appearing as an image of an ordinary human projected from his hovering spacecraft into Phillipso's office because what the aliens really look like would be more shocking than Phillipso could take.  This alien wants to end war and crime and disease and poverty on Earth, but he can't because Phil's book has made everybody assume aliens are hostile--the alien seeks to persuade Phil to publicly retract all the stuff he has said about aliens.  When Phil expresses doubts that the alien has the wherewithal to solve all of Earth's problems, the alien proves his power by using hypnotism or something to make Phil fuck himself.  (Sturgeon doesn't type "fuck himself," but instead "something proverbial, unprintable, but not quite impossible.  He didn't want to do it--with all his mind and soul he did not want to, but he did it nonetheless.")  The alien then talks a little about his means of radically improving life on Earth.  He proposes that in his next book, Phillipso include plans the alien can provide for constructing a simple device that will facilitate the rise of a collective consciousness among all mankind; the text will claim the device is a weapon that will protect the builder from the aliens.  Collective consciousness would make language obsolete and lying impossible, which the alien says is awesome but which Phil says will overturn our entire culture and economy, which he admits are built on language and deception.

Three pages form the end, the alien leaves Phillipso and our guy ponders helping the E.T. bring peace and prosperity and collective consciousness to Earth.  But then he gets calls from that journalist and then his publisher which spur him to forget all about helping bring about paradise on Earth and instead continue his grift.         

This story is not very good.  Its jokes are not funny, its themes and ideas are tired, the plot is shaky (though I guess in a satire that doesn't mater) and as for the structure of the thing, most of it is a tendentious conversation, like an annoying Socratic dialogue or something.  The twisted horror scene in which the alien makes Phil (apparently) have anal sex with himself makes the personality of the alien and the whole tone of the story jarringly inconsistent.  The alien is all about peace and love and empathy, but he inflicts this horrendous trauma on Phillipso:

He fell back into his chair, sobbing with rage, fear and humiliation.  When he could find a word at all, it came out between the fingers laced over his scarlet face and was "Inhuman...."

Why didn't Sturgeon have the alien demonstrate his power by fixing some minor medical issue Philsy boy had, like near-sightedness or a heart murmur or a hangnail or something?  Sturgeon seems aware of how ill-fitting this episode is, having Phillipso point out what the alien just did to him when the alien says he won't just conquer the Earth and make us behave because "We couldn't force even one human to do what we want done," but the alien just dismisses Phil's objection with the suggestion that it hurt him more than it hurt Phillipso, a sort of stock joke.

I'm giving "Fear is a Business" a thumbs down, but I can see how lefties who like joke stories might enjoy it; most importantly, Sturgeon is a good writer and I can't deny that all the individual sentences and paragraphs of the story are each a smooth and easy read, even if what they add up to is weak.


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More than anything, these four stories demonstrate the gulf between what I look for in a story and what Merril, it seems, looks for.  I don't want lame jokes, I don't want absurdist satires, and I don't want recitations of the same tired criticisms of our individualistic market society I've already heard a million times.  Of these four stories, Silverberg comes closest to delivering what I seek from fiction, as he at least tries to portray real human feeling and drama.  I am sympathetic to what Shaw tried to do in his story, but it just was not enjoyable or enlightening.        

Well, maybe Merril and I will be on the same page more often once we leave the "S"s behind and start exploring the "T"s, "U"s and "W"s in the next episode of this long series on the SF of 1956.

Speaking of which, use the links below to check out any earlier stages on this journey you may have missed.