1955 stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Charles Beaumont, and Richard Matheson

1955 was a big year for culture!  Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was first published in 1955, the first McDonald's opened in 1955, and Elvis Presley made his (local) television debut in 1955.  Was 1955 as big a year for SF as for literary fiction, gastronomy, and music?  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have been looking at SF which Anthony Boucher considered among the best of 1955 and included in 1956's The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series.  (I own a 1968 printing of the paperback edition.)  In our last episode we looked at three joke stories; today we look at three stories that Boucher, in his spoily intros, tells us he finds "moving" or "pointed."

"This Earth of Majesty" by Arthur C. Clarke

The story printed in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series under the title "This Earth of Majesty" appeared in F&SF under a big question mark!  You see, the magazine was running a $200 contest to see which reader could come up with the best title!  (See the contest rules and MPorcius Fiction Log's 63-year-late entry below!)  According to isfdb, "This Earth of Majesty" was the name Clarke used, while the winner of the contest came up with "Refugee."  When the story was printed in the British magazine New Worlds in 1957 it was titled "Royal Prerogative."

It is the nearish future, when mankind has colonized Mars and Venus and ships carry cargoes between Earth and those worlds.  Rockets have just recently been replaced with ships propelled by "Field Compensation Drive generators" and a space port has been set up in England, not far from Stonehenge.  (England had no suitable sites from which rockets could take off, being too densely populated.)

Captain Saunders is a Texan in command of a space ship about to carry cargo from England to Mars; both members of his two-man crew are British.  The Prince of Wales comes to visit the ship after it lands; Prince Henry is a space buff and knows all about space ships and the history of space travel but has never been on a real space voyage because the government thinks it too risky.  Clarke here takes the line that being a member of the royal family is more a burdensome responsibility than a privilege, that the position is constricting and going to all those openings of schools and lame parties is soul-drainingly boring.  "This Earth of Majesty" is a sort of patriotic pro-Albion story; when Saunders visits London we are told that the Underground is "still the best transport system in the world," for example, and the story has the famous "this sceptred isle" quote from Shakespeare as its epigraph ("this Earth of majesty" is a phrase from this quote.)

The plot of this story is sort of obvious--American Saunders tosses aside his republican sentiments and quickly develops a soft spot for the prince, so when his crew finagle things behind his back so that the prince can stow away on the trip to Mars, he doesn't mind.  People who have it in for the English and fierce adherents to democratic ideals will groan!

Acceptable sappy filler.  Maybe an interesting historical document as a presentation of an Englishman's view of what Britain and the US are all about, or maybe the image of Britain a particular Englishman wanted to project to Americans.

My idea for the title is a nod to William IV.  Cross your fingers because I could use those 200 bucks.

"The Vanishing American" by Charles Beaumont

This story is about a 47-year-old who failed in his ambitions to become a college professor.  Wait, I’m 47 years old!  And...well, at least this guy still lives in the big city!  Count your blessings, bro!

Mr. Minchell works in an office at an adding machine.  His colleagues hardly ever talk to him--they hardly even look at him!  At home are his wife who never stops complaining and his kid who watches TV and never reads books—Minchell can’t identify with that little brat!  When he was a kid he read Edgar Rice Burroughs and L. Frank Baum!

On his 47th birthday Minchell looks in the mirror and realizes that the metaphorical process of vanishing has culminated in the literal condition of becoming invisible--nobody can see him! Shocking, a fate not unlike death...but perhaps also liberating?  When he wasn’t following the adventures of Tarzan or Dorothy and the Scarecrow, as a kid Minchell fantasized that the huge lion statue in front of the library was a mighty beast lying in wait, a creature that only he, young Minchell, could ride.  Now that nobody can see him Minchell decides to fulfill his childhood dream and climb up on the lion.  The act of living one of his dreams cures his invisibility—children and an adult man who himself was a dreamer in his youth see Minchell up there and cheer him.

Acceptable sappy filler. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, you'll recall, accused Boucher of having a “love of the precious;” maybe this is the kind of thing that august publication was warning us about?

“The Vanishing American” has been reprinted many times. To me it felt like the story of an individual guy’s problems, but I’m an individualistic sort; in fact the story’s title suggests Beaumont meant Minchell to represent “Everyman” and the city in the story, though at times it feels like the greatest city in the world and the tomb of my hopes and dreams, is a sort of "Everytown, USA,"* and so I guess Beaumont is casting Minchell's unsatisfying job and unsatisfying family life as a universal problem, perhaps the result of something wrong with the larger culture of the United States.  Serious anthologists putting together serious tomes (for sale in bulk to government schools, one presumes) took that ball and ran with it, including “The Vanishing American” in such books as 1975's Social Problems through Science Fiction and 1976's The City 2000 A.D.: Urban Life Through Science Fiction. (What are the chances that today’s college professors would assign their victims--I mean students--a book that suggests a nagging wife is a social problem?  And are the editors of The City 2000 A.D. using “urban life” as a synonym for “modern life?”  I’m sure there are plenty of people in farm country and suburbia who failed to achieve their dreams and are alienated from their irritating spouses and dimwitted offspring.)

If crummy wives and TV-obsessed brats are your cup of tea, check out Robert F. Young's 1957 story "Thirty Days Had September," discussed just days ago here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

*The subway Minchell rides and the huge lion before the library are of course reminiscent of New York City, but Beaumont never names the town and while there are two white lions before the NYPL at Fifth and 42nd, where in a different phase of my life I spent many hours, the lion in this tale is black and solitary.  I personally think Beaumont made an artistic mistake in leaving his story bereft of a sense of place by setting it in some vague neverland.  The best thing about Damon Knight's "You're Another," which also appears in this anthology and which I was slagging in our last episode, is the real New York locations.      

"Pattern for Survival" by Richard Matheson

I'm wishing I could tell you that the author of "Duel" and "Prey" was going to break this streak of sappiness we're going through, but I cannot; this brief tale, while not bad, is pretty sappy.

The story begins with a fragment in italics, the end of a SF love story in which the happy lovers look across their beautiful glittering city of mirrored towers.  Then we follow the love story's writer as he seals up this manuscript and takes it to the mail box, then the mail man (I know, "mail carrier") as he takes the manuscript from the mail box, then the editor at the magazine as he reads the manuscript, etc.  There are hints that something weird is going on, for example, the fact that the story is written in the morning and the magazine featuring it is published that very afternoon, and there there are all the references to the decrepitude of the magazine's offices and damage to the streets.  By the end of the story we realize that there has been a nuclear war and the writer is the last man on Earth and, in his despair, he is playacting all the roles of writer, postal worker, editor, newsagent, et al.

This story is not bad, and it is less than four pages long so it doesn't waste you time, but I'm kind of sick of these sentimental stories.  "Pattern for Survival" has not been anthologized much in English, but has appeared in many Matheson collections, including Collected Stories: Volume Two, a withdrawn library copy of which I own.  Collected Stories: Volume Two includes comments by Matheson himself after each story, and, contra Boucher and me, who took "Pattern for Survival" seriously as a portrait of a man whose mind has been destroyed by a cataclysm, Matheson says it is a "humor story" and a gentle satire of Robert Sheckley whom, Matheson suggests, would get his stories published under even the worst possible conditions!  "Pattern for Survival" has also been included in several European publications.

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These stories are all fine; I guess I am just too cynical and jaded or simply not in the mood for this kind of sentimentality.  I wish I would come across more stories like Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "I Made You," to be honest.

More SF stories from the MPorcius Library's anthology shelf in our next installment!