Spectrum 5: 1950s stories by Wallace, Thomas, Ashwell, and Ashby

1969 and 1972 paperback editions of Spectrum 5; I probably should have used the '69 image
on my last blog post because the cover looks like it may have been inspired by
James H. Schmitz's "Grandpa."

In our last episode we read half the stories in Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest's 1966 anthology of 1950s SF stories Spectrum 5, the half by authors I felt were more or less famous.  Today we experience the other half of the book's content, four stories by authors whom I, at least, am less familiar with.  Let's check out these "guys"--maybe we'll meet a new favorite!

"Student Body" by F. L. Wallace (1953)

Wallace has a single novel and like two dozen stories listed at isfdb. Barry Malzberg, whom we at MPorcius Fiction Log both take very seriously and consider a figure of fun, asserts that Wallace is a writer who deserves a higher reputation than that which he enjoys.  A story by Wallace is included in the 1979 anthology Neglected Visions, a book edited by Malzberg, Martin H. Greenberg, and John D. Olander dedicated to reprinting work by nine such SF writers who, according to Malzberg, have been unfairly neglected.

Marin is the biology officer with the first wave of colonists on a virgin planet.  Before the colonists got there the planet was surveyed by a whole team of biologists, but Marin finds that their survey is not accurate, that there are troublesome creatures on the planet they weren't warned about, namely voracious rodents that start taking a chunk out of the colony's limited food supplies.  Marin deals with this problem by designing a robot cat, and when even bigger rodents show up that the steel feline can't handle, by manipulating his supply of frozen animal material and breeding a pack of terriers the size of great danes.  The huge terriers soon have to contend with heretofore undetected native predators who are bigger still, beasts much like tigers.

By observing a captive native creature, and by using a sonar device to study in situ fossils without digging up the terrain, Marin figures out what is going on.  All these vermin and carnivores are the same species--when environmental conditions change, as with the introduction of the Earth dogs, the current generation of native fauna gives birth to a generation fully equipped to deal with the new conditions--for example, to deal with the dogs the rat-like natives gave birth to a generation of tiger-like offspring.  The sense of wonder ending is that when the human colonists kill the tigers with rifles, the next generation of natives looks quite like human beings--maybe the Earth-derived humans can negotiate with these creatures?  They had better learn to, because mouse-sized natives have stowed aboard the star ships which brought the colonists and have since headed home, and soon every planet in mankind's space empire will be infested with these quick-growing and quick-adapting alien creatures.  

This story is about average, not bad, but no big deal.  A little better than acceptable, I guess.  

"Student Body" is the only story in Spectrum 5 that is not from Astounding; its first appearance was in Galaxy.  It has been included in numerous anthologies, including ones edited by Groff Conklin and by Galaxy editor H. L. Gold.

"The Far Look" by Theodore L. Thomas (1956)

Uh oh, I read Thomas's 1970 story "The Weather on the Sun" in May and denounced it as a piece of garbage that romanticized politicians and bored me to death.  I implied that this irritating misfire was included in Orbit 8 because Thomas was friends with editor Damon Knight's wife Kate Wilhelm, but I am not aware that any such excuse is available for Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. or British men of letters Amis and Conquest.  Well, let's do the right thing (for once) and try to look at "The Far Look" with an open mind.

"The Far Look" starts out long-winded and annoying.  As a scientist provides the background exposition to a subordinate egghead (and to us readers) Thomas buries us under a blizzard of mind-numbing minutia about Dr. Scott's pipe--how he fills the pipe,  the size of the match he uses to light the pipe, the gurgling noises the pipe makes, the size of the flame that comes out of the bowl of the pipe, how Scott waves the pipe around for emphasis and how he prods the junior scientist with the end of the pipe to put him in his place (that's right, Scott takes his disgusting cancer promotion device out of his mouth and touches one of his colleagues with the saliva-covered end of it as a means of enforcing dominance--sickening!) and blah blah blah.  Oh wait, I said I was keeping an open mind.  Well, let's take a look through all the tobacco smoke at the actual text of the exposition Scott delivers.

The United States has a base on the moon, staffed by two men.  Every month the two astronauts are relieved by a different pair sent up from Earth.  Many of the astronauts who return have become geniuses, the world's best in some field of art or science or business.  Earthlings can immediately tell which astronauts have become geniuses by looking at their eyes--those who have become geniuses have a "far look" and crinkles around their eyes.  Pipe enthusiast Dr. Scott is tasked with figuring out how spending a month on the moon has turned above-average men into supermen.

Once the seven Earthbound pages with the scientists are past and we are up on the moon with two of the astronauts, "The Far Look" is actually pretty good.  I like stories in which people in space suits go about the business of surviving in low-gravity, zero-atmosphere, environments, where death awaits only a few centimeters and a few seconds away, and Thomas actually does a good job of describing all the technical technological aspects and even the psychological aspects of two men's stay on the moon.  (And by "a good job" I mean the story is entertaining and builds an anxious, claustrophobic atmosphere--I am not competent to assess how realistic any of the science is.)

Over 27 pages we follow the astronauts' compelling adventures on Luna, their fears and their near death experiences, and then they are replaced and return to Earth with "the far look."  It's a little vague, but apparently the experience of being so horribly alone, and then returning back to the bosom of Earth and its teeming millions, is what turns the astronauts into geniuses.

I'm skeptical of the story's central gimmick (it's not clear what causes the astronauts to become superhuman and there is very little about how these newly superior persons behave on Earth) and the first part with the scientists, who we don't see again at the end of the story is poor and practically superfluous, but all the stuff on the moon is good and won me over despite my bitterness about Dr. Scott and his filthy habits and "The Weather on the Sun."  I am happily surprised to be able to give "The Far Look" a solid thumbs up.

"The Far Look," after its debut in Astounding, was chosen by Judith Merril for her second Year's Best volume, which means I own two printings of the story, I having purchased that Merril anthology in December of 2015 in New Jersey, and by Harry Harrison and Willis E. McNeilly for a 1975 anthology of Science Fiction Novellas.

"Big Sword" by Pauline Ashwell (as by "Paul Ash") (1958)

Here's another story I own multiple printings of.  After its debut in Astounding, Pauline Ashwell's "Big Sword" was included by Groff Conklin in his 1966 anthology Another Part of the Galaxy, a copy of which I acquired in Kentucky in 2016, as well as by Amis and Conquest in Spectrum 5.  In all three places the story appears under the masculine pseudonym "Paul Ash."  Ashwell has two novels and a score of stories listed at isfdb but I don't think I have ever read her work before.

Jordan is a spaceman and a scientist, currently the leader of a scientific expedition to planet Lambda.  At the start of his career he foolishly married a social climber who was only interested in his notoriety, Cora.  Cora divorced him while he was away on one of his expeditions, after she had given birth to his son, Ricky.  While back home on Earth, Jordan learns that Cora and Ricky, now fourteen, don't get along, and she is trying to send Ricky to some school for troublemakers so she won't have to deal with him, or even see him, for some years.  Instead of authorizing the shipping off of Ricky to this school, Jordan brings Ricky, who is interested in science, to Lambda.  He thinks that this trip will be a chance for him to get to know his son, whom he has hardly ever seen, but as leader of the expedition Jordan has almost no time to spare for Ricky.

Meanwhile, the 6-inch tall Lambda natives, of whom the human explorers are not even aware, are trying to open negotiations with the Earthers, who have unwittingly damaged their home.  Ashwell's aliens have an interesting biology and society, one so different from that of the humans that it makes any cross-species communication difficult--in fact their first efforts to communicate are perceived by the humans as an attack by invisible enemies or even an irresponsible practical joke played by Ricky.  (Some of the scientists are suspicious of Ricky.)

Luckily, Ricky turns out to be a rare human telepath--in fact the poor relationship he has with his mother and some of the expedition team members is largely a side effect of his psychic powers; Ricky, by picking up stray brain waves, innocently acquires knowledge that has lead Cora and others to think he has been snooping in their private papers.  Using his telepathy, Ricky, unbeknownst to all the adults, who have yet to even see a Lambdan, develops a friendship with the leader of the natives.  Ricky goes off with the alien leader to help him resolve an existential threat to his tribe, and Jordan, thinking his son has run away or is perhaps lost, organizes search parties and flies an aircraft in search of his son.  Ricky solves the Lambdans' dire problem and makes peace between human and native.  Tying up our other plot thread, Jordan even finds a wife among the other scientists.

Ashwell's aliens are very good, but the story feels too long and the whole deal with the precocious kid who is believed to have run away from home and who makes peace between the races feels tired and a little childish, like something from a sappy live action Disney movie from my youth.  I guess it all averages out to marginally good.  Suggesting that I am not necessarily an outlier in my assessment of where "Big Sword"'s strength lies, it was reprinted in 1983 in an anthology titled Aliens from Analog.

"Commencement Night" by Richard Ashby (1953)

In the 1960s the UN sponsored an elaborate experiment, Project Peace, that sought to find out how to prevent all the strife attendant with human life by studying human beings who were unaffected by history and culture.  A bunch of scientists took an island and exterminated all the rats and germs on it, then left a multicultural cohort of forty-five babies on the island.  It is now the early 21st century, and for decades a fifty-strong company of researchers has been observing the island through a multitude of hidden cameras and microphones as the children invented a super efficient language and multiplied to today's population of over 300 individuals.

One of the technicians on the research team is a former Olympic swimmer, and one New Year's Eve he was drunk and decided to leave the secret subterranean facility from which the researchers watch every move the experimental subjects make and take a swim around the island.  This lapse of judgement sets in motion a series of events which lead to the scientists learning that the island's inhabitants have developed psychic powers and been visited by space aliens.  (This is news because the islanders and E.T.s have been exploiting blind spots not covered by the boffins' cameras and mikes.)

The swimmer talks to an alien.  The alien explains that there is a Galactic Confederation with many member species, and they would like humanity to join, because humanity has some very useful skills, but we can't be accepted yet because our system of communication is too primitive--it is our inadequate ability to communicate that has lead to the wars and crime and greed, etc., that have plagued humanity throughout history.  When the aliens learned about Project Peace they secretly came down to teach the islanders their space language, in hopes of jump starting Earth's development of better means of communication.  Sure enough, because the islanders only know the alien language and not any Earth language or culture, they are all peaceful and honest hippies overflowing with love for everything.  As part of his work under the island observing the islanders, the swimmer has learned to speak the space language, and so the islanders are able, with their psychic powers, to change the swimmer's brain, erasing the negative effects of Earth culture so he, too, is full of love.  As the story ends we are led to expect that all the researchers will soon have their brains fixed and that humanity is on its way to joining the Galactic Confederation.

This is the worst story in Spectrum 5.  It is silly, it is sappy, and it is boring.  Ashby takes a bunch of SF elements (scientists who experiment on people, a Galactic Confederation, psychic powers) and instead of exploring them in any depth or using them as the building blocks for an entertaining story he just piles them up like a bunch of discarded bricks.  Gotta give this one a negative vote.

"Commencement Night" has been anthologized in only one place besides Spectrum 5, by Groff Conklin in Giants Unleashed, which was republished with the title Minds Unleashed.  Ashby has a single novel and like a dozen short stories listed at isfdb.

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It ends on a sour note, but Spectrum 5 is a good anthology of more or less optimistic tales that celebrate science and the ingenuity and drive of the human race.   A worthwhile purchase.