"Why Should I Stop?"
This is a lame gimmicky story with superfluous recursive "meta" elements; it is no surprise that the people at Ballantine didn't include "Why Should I Stop?" in Budrys' Inferno or The Unexpected Dimension and that editors like Judith Merrill and T. E. Dikty, who included other Budrys stories in their "Best of" anthologies covering 1956, didn't leap at the chance to reprint this one.
(Also, this magazine has annoying printer's errors, with several lines repeated in inappropriate spots.)
"Why Should I Stop?" appeared in Science Fiction Quarterly and is actually the cover story. (Somebody should be fired for allowing those printing errors on the damned cover story!) It is an epistolary story, a record of correspondence between Budrys and the editor of Science Fiction Quarterly, Robert A. W. Lowndes. Budrys sends Lowndes two stories on the same theme and asks what Lowndes thinks of them--these stories are included in the text we readers are presented.The first story within a story, "Thus, Conscience," is an episodic biography of a scientist who feels that people should moderate their vices, like smoking and drinking--drinking a little or smoking a little is fine, but many people overindulge, which causes social problems and health problems. As an adult this joker makes a device which will project a wave across the world that will reduce people's inhibitions so they even further overindulge; the boffin's theory is that he will have people the world over overindulge for two days, and then turn off his machine, so that they see the potential damage of their addictions and then reform. The twist ending to this story is that the waves from the machine lead to the strengthening of the scientist's own predilection to make and operate such machines so that he does not turn off the first machine and instead constructs more.
The second story within a story is "Moderator." A bunch of scientists and military officers are on a space station while war rages on Earth below. The peeps on the station have low morale--some are close to panic--because the station weapons are out of ammo and if the station's camouflage measures are not up to preventing detection they will be easy prey for the enemy. One of the scientists devises a machine that transmits radiation that, he tells the station commander, will calm everybody down. But the egghead is lying: in fact, the radiation is going to make everybody even more scared! The scientist's plan is to turn the transmitter on for an hour and then off; when everybody sees how dangerous their panic has been, he reasons, they will calm down. As with the other story, the scientist, when affected by the radiation himself, decides to not turn the machine off but instead to build duplicate machines.
The topic of the two stories is obsession and addiction and the joke pressed home in the epistolary segments at the end of "Why Should I Stop?" is that the Budrys character keeps sending the Lowndes character very similar stories and gets more angry and more paranoid as they get rejected.
This story has philosophical and science content (there is lots of talk about people's reluctance to believe in their own mortality, and talk about the readings of "Chi curves" on people's EEGs) but it is boring besides being gimmicky and the joke is not funny and way too long to tell. Thumbs down.
"The Strength of Ten"
No doubt you remember Tennyson's "Sir Galahad":
My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.
(If memory serves, Bertie Wooster was apt to quote this couplet, or fragments thereof.)
"The Strength of Ten" stars a self-important scientist, Langley. Langley is a real jerk. He busts into the corporate offices of the firm for which he is working, shouldering past secretaries and jumping in line ahead of people with appointments so he can talk to a big wig, Conway. Langley unleashes a big chunk of exposition to Conway for the benefit of us readers--this is stuff Conway should already know. Their company copies onto tape the brains of human beings with special skills--say, jet pilots--and then puts the tape into a robot so it can pilot a jet as well as a human but has the advantage of lacking human physical needs and frailties. Langley then tells Conway he wants to carefully edit tapes to remove hatred and greed and such negative human traits and thus create the first truly good man! Such a noble man would be perfect for the first manned mission to Mars! When Conway suggests some other scientist lead the project because Langley is busy, or that Langley be part of a team, Langley arrogantly insists only he is qualified to head the project, and refuses to countenance such interference.
Conway refuses to authorize the project. Budrys presents us with a sort of ironical philosophical twist ending here, the wording of which I have to admit I found a little confusing. Langley's arrogant behavior has somehow convinced Conway that the project of creating an artificial man without greed, jealousy etc., would be pointless and even dangerous, because such a man would lack ambition and thus not be interested in leading important projects and going on dangerous missions.
Barely acceptable. "The Strength of Ten" was printed in Fantastic Universe.
"The Mechanical Man"
We just recently read Harlan Ellison's story "Blind Lightning" about a guy sacrificing himself to help primitive aliens. "Blind Lightning" first was printed in Fantastic Universe, and in the same issue SF fans of 1956 would have found Algis Budrys's "The Mechanical Man," which on the cover is vaunted as "an exciting novelet." Exciting or otherwise, it was never reprinted. Let's see "The Mechanical Man" is a forgotten gem unfairly looked over by anthologists over the decades!
It is the future! North America is the least respected component of the world government (it looks like the world government was set up after communists took over of the world--shit!), and the space navy is the least senior of the Earth's military services, the branch least likely to get what it wants out of appropriations bills. Marshal Yancey is a North American and the head of the space navy, so he has a lot to prove! He's on the moon for the test of the space navy's armored suit--if the suit is a success it will make his career and assure his branch's position.
Yancey is at a ball where all the high-ranking officers and their wives are subtly probing each other psychologically and trying to undermine each other socially when there is news from the armored suit test site--a nuclear weapon has gone off and the site is wiped out! But wait, the armored suit is OK! In a bit of symbolism, the guy in the suit, Major Pollack, is a North American and, in order to show the resilience of the suit and of North Americans, he is told to walk alone cross the lunar surface for hours and hours instead of using the suit's rockets--his literal lonely walk to the main base is like Yancey's metaphorical lonely walk of a career. But Pollack, exhausted, disobeys orders and uses the suit's rockets to get back to HQ. Then, understanding that he will suffer some kind of terrible punishment for his insubordination, he refuses to get out of the impregnable suit!
(Barry Malzberg is a big booster of Budrys, as I noted a few blog posts ago, and Pollack's plight feels like the sort of thing that would happen to a Malzberg character.)
Yancey holds an official inquiry at which he gives his most dangerous rival, Colonel-General Malke, the death penalty for negligence in handling the nuclear weapon that blew up the research station. Then he convinces Malke's wife to help him get Pollack out of the impenetrable armored suit--her feminine wiles and cold heart, so recently used (without success) against Yancey, are now turned to exploiting Pollack's neuroses about women in an effort to get him to relinquish the womb-like interior of the battle armor. If Yancey can't deliver the suit to Earth in eighteen hours he will be in trouble with the President!
Yancey apparently succeeds in his career objectives but the twist ending shows up his personal weaknesses and the failures of personal life. Pollack is not a North American after all but a South African, and the thing Yancey and Pollack have in common is that they are "immature neurotics" who are seeking a "mother substitute" and both have fallen in love with Madame Malke and neither will ever have a chance of winning her.
A recurring theme in Budrys's work is the question of "what is a man?" In "The Mechanical Man" we are asked if a real man is the man who follows orders and procedure under any circumstance, no matter how dangerous, no matter what the pressure, or the man who bucks the system when he thinks it wrong. Does a real man prioritize his own honor, abstract justice, or the well-being of the collective when they appear to be in conflict? Does a real man side with his proximate comrades (his family or ethnic group or cultural group) or with the greater whole (the empire or the revolution or the entire world) when they are in conflict?
This is interesting enough material, but the story itself is all dialogue and descriptions of guys wiping their faces and gritting their teeth and plucking at the piping on their sleeves and that sort of thing, tense conversations in which everybody is about to explode but strives to keep a stiff upper lip as they use complicated social customs and legalistic chicanery to outdo each other. "The Mechanical Man" is one of those stories in which different elites all ostensibly in the same organization are all trying to sink each other's careers and give their own departments the upper hand over other departments, and these sorts of stories leave me cold.
We're calling this one acceptable.
**********
These stories reflect the fact that Budrys is a smart guy who is interested in philosophical issues and psychology as well as hard science, and writes literary stories about human beings instead of just adventure capers full of monsters, sword fights and gun fights. But these three stories are not particularly fun or entertaining, and they didn't inspire much emotion in this reader. I'm going to have to agree with all those editors who passed on them when choosing what Budrys material to reprint.
Conway refuses to authorize the project. Budrys presents us with a sort of ironical philosophical twist ending here, the wording of which I have to admit I found a little confusing. Langley's arrogant behavior has somehow convinced Conway that the project of creating an artificial man without greed, jealousy etc., would be pointless and even dangerous, because such a man would lack ambition and thus not be interested in leading important projects and going on dangerous missions.
Barely acceptable. "The Strength of Ten" was printed in Fantastic Universe.
"The Mechanical Man"
We just recently read Harlan Ellison's story "Blind Lightning" about a guy sacrificing himself to help primitive aliens. "Blind Lightning" first was printed in Fantastic Universe, and in the same issue SF fans of 1956 would have found Algis Budrys's "The Mechanical Man," which on the cover is vaunted as "an exciting novelet." Exciting or otherwise, it was never reprinted. Let's see "The Mechanical Man" is a forgotten gem unfairly looked over by anthologists over the decades!
 |
| Presumably I am the millionth person to notice that this Emsh robot from 1956 looks a lot like the Hoth probe droid designed by Ralph McQuarrie for 1980's The Empire Strikes Back |
Yancey is at a ball where all the high-ranking officers and their wives are subtly probing each other psychologically and trying to undermine each other socially when there is news from the armored suit test site--a nuclear weapon has gone off and the site is wiped out! But wait, the armored suit is OK! In a bit of symbolism, the guy in the suit, Major Pollack, is a North American and, in order to show the resilience of the suit and of North Americans, he is told to walk alone cross the lunar surface for hours and hours instead of using the suit's rockets--his literal lonely walk to the main base is like Yancey's metaphorical lonely walk of a career. But Pollack, exhausted, disobeys orders and uses the suit's rockets to get back to HQ. Then, understanding that he will suffer some kind of terrible punishment for his insubordination, he refuses to get out of the impregnable suit!
(Barry Malzberg is a big booster of Budrys, as I noted a few blog posts ago, and Pollack's plight feels like the sort of thing that would happen to a Malzberg character.)
Yancey holds an official inquiry at which he gives his most dangerous rival, Colonel-General Malke, the death penalty for negligence in handling the nuclear weapon that blew up the research station. Then he convinces Malke's wife to help him get Pollack out of the impenetrable armored suit--her feminine wiles and cold heart, so recently used (without success) against Yancey, are now turned to exploiting Pollack's neuroses about women in an effort to get him to relinquish the womb-like interior of the battle armor. If Yancey can't deliver the suit to Earth in eighteen hours he will be in trouble with the President!
Yancey apparently succeeds in his career objectives but the twist ending shows up his personal weaknesses and the failures of personal life. Pollack is not a North American after all but a South African, and the thing Yancey and Pollack have in common is that they are "immature neurotics" who are seeking a "mother substitute" and both have fallen in love with Madame Malke and neither will ever have a chance of winning her.
A recurring theme in Budrys's work is the question of "what is a man?" In "The Mechanical Man" we are asked if a real man is the man who follows orders and procedure under any circumstance, no matter how dangerous, no matter what the pressure, or the man who bucks the system when he thinks it wrong. Does a real man prioritize his own honor, abstract justice, or the well-being of the collective when they appear to be in conflict? Does a real man side with his proximate comrades (his family or ethnic group or cultural group) or with the greater whole (the empire or the revolution or the entire world) when they are in conflict?
This is interesting enough material, but the story itself is all dialogue and descriptions of guys wiping their faces and gritting their teeth and plucking at the piping on their sleeves and that sort of thing, tense conversations in which everybody is about to explode but strives to keep a stiff upper lip as they use complicated social customs and legalistic chicanery to outdo each other. "The Mechanical Man" is one of those stories in which different elites all ostensibly in the same organization are all trying to sink each other's careers and give their own departments the upper hand over other departments, and these sorts of stories leave me cold.
We're calling this one acceptable.
**********
These stories reflect the fact that Budrys is a smart guy who is interested in philosophical issues and psychology as well as hard science, and writes literary stories about human beings instead of just adventure capers full of monsters, sword fights and gun fights. But these three stories are not particularly fun or entertaining, and they didn't inspire much emotion in this reader. I'm going to have to agree with all those editors who passed on them when choosing what Budrys material to reprint.
Stop! Before it's too late! Or at least, before you waste a lot more time.
ReplyDeleteI have been down this rabbit hole before you, and can attest that rummaging through Budrys's uncollected and unanthologized stories is a mug's game. Budrys had a shrewd estimation of the worth of his own work. (See his remarks about his "lard dumplings that sank through the top of the market" to come to rest in unauspicious surroundings, or something like that, in the Pohl et al. anthology GALAXY: THIRTY YEARS OF INNOVATIVE SF, if I recall correctly.) If it didn't turn up in one of his collections, and no anthologist picked it up, there's probably a good reason.
That said, some of his spurned works are at least interesting. You might want to look up "The Sound of Breaking Glass" in the September 1959 ASTOUNDING, one of the most thoroughly unpleasant SF stories I have ever read--a performance that must be respected, if nothing else, though preferably at arm's length. Not unrelated is "The Eye and the Lightning" in the December 1958 F&SF, which definitely earns the classification "lard dumpling," but at least has an interesting idea behind it, and an effort to develop it. Both of these stories reflect Budrys's consistent preoccupation with the nastier traits of the human species, which seemed to reach a fever pitch in the late '50s, not long before he mostly gave up SF writing for a day job.
Oops, wasn't seeking anonymity.
ReplyDeleteDamn it, how does this work?
ReplyDeletejohn.boston@verizon.net