1955 stories by Damon Knight, Avram Davidson and Fredric Brown

Today we do a biopsy on a sample from Anthony Boucher's The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series, first published in hardcover in 1956.  I own a copy of the 1968 paperback, Ace G-714; looking at the contents list of the first edition on isfdb, it looks like this paperback of mine is a slightly shortened version; a poem by Boucher is missing, and Boucher's intro was shortened.  (It looks like there is a scan of Ace F-105, the 1961 edition of this anthology, at the internet archive, in case any of you Silas Stingies out there want to read these stories.)

My copy of The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series was owned by Private Charles E. Harris, who inscribed his name, rank, serial number and Social Security number on its title page.  Included in the start of this volume is a one-page "Proem" by Fredric Brown entitled "Imagine," a poetical exhortation to us readers to imagine not just easy things like witches and spacecraft, but difficult things like the fact that there are billions of stars in the universe and the true nature of the relationship between our consciousness and our bodies.

Based on Boucher's spoily intros to the stories, I'm expecting the three pieces we'll talk about today to be joke stories.  (A review from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of this very anthology, quoted on the first page of the book, accuses Boucher of having "a love of the droll.")  In our next episode we'll look at stories from The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series that, I hope, are a little more serious.  All of these stories, and Brown's "Imagine," originally appeared in issues of F&SF in 1955.

Fellow SF fans Private Charles G. Harris and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, we salute you!

"You're Another" by Damon Knight

In the last installment of MPorcius Fiction Log we found that Knight had chosen some pretty good stories about robots and computers threatening our position at the top of the food chain for inclusion in The Metal Smile.  But throughout our career reading old SF stories we have also found that Knight can produce some pretty lame joke stories.  "You're Another" is a long story, over 30 pages here, so reading it is feeling like a risky investment.  So why am I doing it?  Well, once I walked through Central Park alone in the dark of night to prove to myself I wasn't as big of a p--I mean weenie--as I suspected I was.  Maybe this is a little like that.

"You're Another" actually starts in Central Park--our hero Johnny Bornish is there to do some sketching (in the 1940s Knight himself actually sold quite a few illustrations to magazines like Planet Stories and Weird Tales.)  Johnny is not only an artist, but a klutz who has bad luck--somebody's dog knocks him into the famous sailboat pond and when he goes to the Automat he drops his change and there is a major malfunction with the coffee machine.  (I don't know if Knight himself was a klutz.)  But Johnny has a good attitude.  You probably remember that when one of Don Quixote's acts of chivalry went awry the Knight of the Doleful Countenance would say "this adventure must be reserved for another knight!"  Well, when Johnny goes into an art supply store to purchase a new sketchbook and then forgets all about the sketchbook because he has spilled a can of red paint and made a mess of the store he thinks that "God did not care for him to do any sketching today."

On the day of these pond water, coffee and paint episodes Johnny has a revelation--whenever he suffers one of these catastrophes two people are nearby, a "tweedy woman" and an "old man."  Are they causing his bad luck?  And what about that Japanese coin he has been carrying around for ten years as a lucky charm...it is the only thing he hasn't lost in ten years.  Could it be an unlucky charm, or some kind of homing device used by the tweedy woman and old man?

One of the famous things about Knight is that he wrote a scathing and influential review of my favorite Canadian, A. E. van Vogt.  Here in "You're Another" we see a rather van Vogt-style plot, in which some guy learns about the secret weirdos who manipulate the universe behind the scenes, gains super powers and becomes one of those weirdos, but Knight, more or less, plays it for laughs.  I guess you could say this is, or very nearly is, a parody of van Vogt.

Johnny tries to get rid of the Japanese coin, but the thing always finds its way back to him, even flying through the air and adhering to his skin.  The coin gets damaged in the struggle, and then the old man shows up*, disguised as a "dark man," and there is some kind of malfunction and, by waving around the arm to which the coin is attached, Johnny can teleport through different dimensions or timelines or something.  Mostly he teleports to different Manhattan locations; eateries, the subway, a bus, the top of the Empire State Building.  This power gives him the upper hand over the old/dark man, and Johnny forces his former tormentor to tell him what is going on--it turns out that our world is just a movie set constructed by people of the future.  You and I, dear reader, are mere extras, while Johnny is the comic relief--the old/dark man and the tweedy woman are second unit directors or something like that, manipulating the unwitting "actors" like Johnny into following the script.  Johnny makes his way to the director and gets the script changed in his favor.

I'm giving "You're Another" a thumbs down; it isn't abysmal, but it is a marginal failure, a waste of time.  I don't care for parodies and spoofy imitations--I think Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and Goldfinger and On Her Majesty's Secret Service are legitimately good movies, and things like Spaceballs and Austin Powers are a childish waste of time, the capering of buffoons; it is hard to create something sincere that is good, and easy to throw together a mocking imitation.  So, to the extent that "You're Another" is a goof on my man Van, I'm against it.

You can sort of look at this story as a straight SF story with a straight plot with lots of jokes appended to it; so maybe I should think more about why, if Knight is semi-seriously using a van Vogt-like form here, I enjoy this story far less than I have so many van Vogt stories?  I think that van Vogt's stories generally include one or more unusual theories about psychology or politics or sociology that can be thought-provoking (remember, SF is a literature of ideas, or so we like to tell ourselves) and help to generate an atmosphere of alienness and novelty; "You're Another" doesn't do much in this line.  Knight does refer to artists like Benvenuto Cellini and to New York mayor William O'Dwyer, which is kind of interesting, but those references don't add much to the feel of the story.  Also, in a van Vogt story, there is some usually some kind of war or revolution or killing spree going on, there is lots of danger and the stakes are high, which transmits to the reader tension and uneasiness.  Knight's story here has lots of little jokes that create a tone of light fantasy, make it a "romp" about which there is no reason to care, a limp contrast to van Vogt, who gives us a nightmare struggle for life or death and/or a mystery to be solved.

No ideas and no feeling means no good.

"You're Another" is included in the Special Wonder anthology published as a memorial to Anthony Boucher; I actually own the second volume of the paperback version of that anthology (I read a William F. Nolan story in it in 2015) and so I own two printings of "You're Another."  The story also appears in multiple Knight collections, including ones published in Europe.
 
*I had been hoping the tweedy woman was going to show up; more photogenic.  Sadly, Knight drops her from the narrative altogether--she has no dialogue.  Why even include her?  These kinds of extraneous elements help to make a story like this way longer than it needs to be.

"The Golem" by Avram Davidson

In his little intro Anthony Boucher tells us that the story of the golem is so famous that "it is familiar even to gentiles," so I need not rehash it here.  Davidson is a vast storehouse of knowledge, and often bases his SF stories on history and literature (he has a whole series of books I have not read that take medieval conceptions of Virgil as their jumping off point); the recent Davidson story we read included all sorts of references to figures of the period of the American revolution.  "The Golem's" characters live in sunny California, and Davidson alludes to a long list of old Hollywood notables, like my beloved Laurel and Hardy and a bunch of people I know little or nothing about, like Leatrice Joy and Harold Lloyd.

The Gumbeiners are a retired Jewish couple whose dialogue is full of words like "nebbich" and complaints about the Czar.  They sit on the porch, bickering back and forth ("When are you going to cut the lawn?," "Of course, of course...I am always wrong, you are always right") and are so busy with their squabbles that they don't pay much heed to the grey-faced man who sits down on the porch next to them and explains that he is a robot and, by reading Mary Shelly and Isaac Asimov, has come to realize war between robot and man is inevitable.

"Foolish old woman," the stranger said; "why do you laugh?  Do you not know I come to destroy you?"  

When the robot insults his wife Mr. Gumbeiner strikes it and cracks its skull so gears and wires are exposed.  Intimately familiar with the story of the golem, which he is certain is true (he even speculates that the "Communisten" may have sent the golem to Moscow), Gumbeiner contrives to get this new golem to mow his lawn the way the original golem in Prague carried the rabbi's water and cut his wood. 

I admire Davidson for having a huge brain full of cultural information and for being able to turn it all into genre stories (he apparently also wrote lots of detective stories set in various historical periods), but these stories rarely make me laugh or excite me.  Easier for me to respect than to love, this story is just OK, a sort of cute trifle.

The big wigs of the SF community seem to legitimately adore "The Golem" and it shows up in many anthologies with gush like "All-Time-Great," "Classic" and "Best of the Best" in their titles, as well as in anthologies of robot stories and of Jewish SF.

Click for a closer look at these quite good covers

"Too Far" by Fredric Brown

"Too Far" was first published in an issue of F&SF that, for whatever logistical or financial or artistic reasons, is led by a story by J. T. McIntosh, one of my betes noir, and includes many reprints, including of pieces decades old.  Brown's piece is new, however, another one of these one-page jobs.  If you have a minute you can read the magazine version yourself at the link above to the internet archive, that fabulous resource for all of us interested in the popular fiction of the 20th century.

Editor Boucher calls these short-shorts "vignettes," and tells us that Brown calls them "vinnies."  Brown, we are informed, is a master of the form, a pioneer in the production of vinnies who has inspired others to take up the challenge of the vinnie.  "Too Far" is about a womanizer who lives in New York City.  He is also a lycanthrope who can change at will into a deer.  One day he decides to experience sex as a buck, and so sneaks into the Central Park Zoo to mate with a doe.  The doe turns out to also be a lycanthrope, a human woman who can also change at will into a deer.  (Who would have thought this was a common malady?)  She is also a witch (this I can believe) and casts a spell on our hero that makes him unable to change back into human form, trapping him in the zoo where he will be hers, all hers.

This story includes lots of puns, many around the fact that "buck" and "doe" are homophones for slang terms for money.

This story is linguistically clever and titillatingly hovers around the edges of good taste, what with its hints of bestiality and misogyny, and so I cannot deny that it has won me over.  This is a joke story that works--1) it is short, not 30-plus damned pages long; 2) it has some originality, and isn't just a "I'm too cool for school" half-assed mockery of what some other guy did sincerely; and 3) it actually generates in the reader some kind of feeling, because a) even though were-deer is an absurd idea, the characters are recognizable realistic types, the man who wants to sleep around and the woman who wants a steady relationship; and b) the bestiality and misogyny elements can disgust you or make you uneasy--the kind of "shock" humor I used to hear on the Howard Stern show in the late '80s and '90s, with Gilbert Gottfried and Andrew Dice Clay and other such characters may be low and vulgar and offensively sexist and racist and homophobic, but it gets a rise out of an audience in a way a guy spilling a can of paint does not.

"Too Far" appears in Brown collections, as well as in some anthologies about witches and scary sexual relationships.

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Knight's and Davidson's stories are "meta," reflecting self-consciously on other fantastic literature and referring to other art forms and to history, but Brown, who wrote one of the most "meta" of all classic SF novels in What Mad Universe, beats Knight and Davidson decisively in the comedy game and he does it in a fraction of the time. We admire such efficiency here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

More 1955 stories from F&SF in our next episode.