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| There's Myra and her creepy kid! |
In the introduction to An ABC of Science Fiction, editor Boardman apologizes because there are only two women represented in the anthology. Here's the first of the two, Carol Emshwiller. Emshwiller's wikipedia article is pretty short, reminding us that her husband was important SF illustrator Ed Emshwiller (AKA "Emsh") and quoting Ursula K. LeGuin who heralds Emshwiller as a "consistent feminist voice." Hopefully "Day at the Beach" isn't going to be a lecture on how I sit incorrectly on the subway and don't do my fair share of the dusting.
Four years ago there was a nuclear war (I guess) and Myra and Ben, a married couple, were among the survivors. Neither of them has any hair, not even an eye lash! What they do have is a three-year old son, the only child in the vicinity, apparently; it is hinted that the kid is a mutant, maybe a cannibal!
Emshwiller gives us vague clues as to the state of the world. Ben "commutes" on a train during the week, and there is sometimes electricity, so I guess there is some kind of heavy industry and maybe government agencies still in operation, but there are very few cars and it seems like Ben doesn't bring money home after commuting but preserved food, and it sounds like it is common for fights over the food to erupt on the train.
It is the weekend, and Myra talks about how before the cataclysm they used to go to the beach on the weekend, and now they just hide at home. So they drive to the beach for the first time since the war. At the beach they are menaced by bandits, but Ben, who was fat before the war but is now a lean hard fighter, beats the bandits' leader to death with a hammer, which scares off the rest. Then the family goes home, Myra asserting, repeatedly, that it has been a good day.
This story is a sort of "slice of life" thing, with no flashy twist ending or shocking revelation that I could detect (I was hoping the three-year-old would try to eat the dead bandit, but he just sort of investigates it before Ben swats him away from it--Emshwiller was teasing me!) Maybe "Day at the Beach" is meant to be a satire of bourgeois people, people who would continue their middle-class routine of commuting and going for weekend drives even after an apocalypse? Maybe it is supposed to induce a mood, maybe horrify us by showing that a life of fighting for food and confronting child-molesting thugs and raising a monster can come to seem routine, that for Myra to retain any sanity she has to act like it is routine? (It is perhaps significant that "It was no day at the beach," like "it was no picnic"--and Myra does actually pack a picnic basket--is a cliched euphemism for a dangerous challenge or arduous task.)
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| Both Judith Merril and Isaac Asimov (or likely Martin H. Greenberg) consider "Day at the Beach" to be one of the best SF stories of 1959 |
Oy, this is one of those allegedly clever one-page stories that people seem to love but which I consider a gimmicky waste of time. Two people are in a zoo where extinct species are recreated. We get a list of resurrected beasts--passenger pigeon, dodo, quagga, etc. Then comes an animal so diabolical, so monstrous, so sinister, that the scientists needed special permission to resurrect one. Of course, it's a human man, so we now know that the people talking are aliens who came to Earth after we also went extinct, no doubt because we threw candy wrappers in a creek or something of that nature.
Lame filler. The most interesting thing about the story is that Farmer has one of the aliens (before we know they are aliens) say "You might say that man struck God in the face every time he wiped out a branch of the animal kingdom." Is this just a trick to make us think the speakers are human, or, is this Farmer expressing his own religious belief, pushing back against the atheism typical of SF writers? (Remember that article Farmer wrote for Brian Ash's Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction?)
"The King of the Beasts" was mentioned on the cover of the issue of Galaxy in which it originally appeared, and despite my distaste for it, has been reprinted many times.
Here's another one from Galaxy. I don't think I have ever read anything by Galouye, who, wikipedia is telling me, is one of Richard Dawkins's favorite writers. Hopefully "Homey Atmosphere" isn't going to be a lecture on how religious people are all insane and taking your kid to church is child abuse.
"Homey Atmosphere" is a traditional SF story about space travel and robots, people's reaction to machines which mimic life and whether there is any difference between "true" consciousness like you and I have and very sophisticated artificial simulations of consciousness.
Lorry is a young astronaut, and Burton an older one, on a months-long voyage exploring the galaxy, leaving a string of navigation beacons in their wake. Their hyperdrive ship is managed by three computers which respond to voice commands; to keep the two spacemen from suffering psychological problems, the three computers have been given personalities, one that of a grumpy and forgetful old man, one an enthusiastic kid, one an attractive young woman. When the ship starts to malfunction (perhaps because the forgetful computer has forgotten to lay in spare parts!) Burton wants to jump in the lifeboat and get back home, but Lorry is too fond of the "crew" to abandon them! The astronauts argue over to what extent the personalities of the ship are "real" as the ship's problems increase in severity. When the apparent risk reaches catastrophic levels Lorry and Burton finally abandon ship with the encouragement of their artificial shipmates.
I say "apparent risk" because on the last page we learn that the three artificial personalities have developed independent desires and curiosity, and their ambition is to explore the galaxy unsupervised! All the problems with the ship were a sham designed to (humanely) get rid of the human astronauts.
An ordinary but acceptable entertainment. Over twenty years after its original publication "Homey Atmosphere" would be the cover story of an issue of the Croatian magazine Sirius.
Harrison has a very smooth and readable style and in my youth I read a ton of his books, and as an adult was impressed by the first two Eden books (the third, which I have been more or less planning to read for years now, awaits.) So I have been looking forward to this one.
Harrison's work is often tendentious, attacking religion or the military or pollution or whatever, and "Mute Milton" is a heavy-handed anti-racism story. An African-American college student from New York City, down in Mississippi, by chance meets a local college professor, another black man. The college prof has invented a means of converting gravity into electricity--he can generate power practically for free. The New Yorker is studying economics, and immediately recognizes that such a device could radically improve human life, but seconds later an overweight cop who is in the Ku Klux Klan murders the college professor and destroys the only working model of the device.
This is the kind of story whose point you can't argue against, but which is too over the top, too obvious and manipulative, to be effective as literature or entertainment. There is no tension or ambiguity, the characters don't evolve, the villain is a flat caricature, etc. It is like a homily for a child. Thumbs down. "Mute Milton" has been reprinted numerous times in Harrison collections, as well as in an anthology almost as gimmicky as An ABC of Science Fiction, A Treasury of American Horror Stories: 51 Spine-Chilling Tales from Every State in the Union plus Washington, D. C.--I guess there is a shortage of horror stories set in Mississippi?
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It looks like today the Grandmasters gave us limp polemics bitterly denouncing humanity's failings while the people I never read before made an effort to give us stories imbued with human feeling that press us to speculate on life in strange future circumstances. Today our Grandmasters let us down! Well, maybe a Grandmaster will live up to his title in our next episode, when we read another batch of stories from An ABC of Science Fiction? Until then, Brian Aldiss, himself a Grandmaster, still has the best contribution to this anthology.
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