Five 1950s stories by Thomas N. Scortia

Via his twitter feed, Joachim Boaz of the Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations blog will often remind us of the birthdays of authors and artists of SF.  (Joachim's twitter account is seriously worth following if you are interested in classic or retro or vintage or whatever you want to call it SF.)  A recent birthday boy was Thomas N. Scortia; Joachim's tweet lead me to look at my blog posts about Scortia's Earthwreck!, a novel I liked, and "Alien Night," a novella I thought was "barely acceptable filler" and perhaps "a rush job."  I remembered that I own the 1976 paperback edition of Scortia's 1975 collection Caution! Inflammable!, and decided to check out some of its stories.  Instead of reading Caution! Inflammable! from cover to cover, let's today read the five stories therein first published in the 1950s.

"Caution!  Inflammable!" (1955)

When this story first appeared before the SF-reading public in Fantastic it was called "End of the Line."  (Remember what a big deal everybody made over The Traveling Wilburys?  These were musicians my mother liked, and I resented having to hear about them every time I turned on the radio or the idiot box.)  After appearing under its new edgier title as the title story of Caution! Inflammable!, this two-page joke story would later (in 1986, like two years before I had to endure the indignity of hearing the local TV news ratify my mother's taste in music) be included in one of those books with Isaac Asimov's name on the cover, Isaac Asimov's Magical Worlds of Fantasy #6: Mythical Beasties ("with headnotes by Isaac Asimov.")

A phoenix is building its nest on the roof of the city hall of some Midwestern burg.  A journalist interviews the bird, and learns that it can predict the future.  The concluding joke of the story is that the phoenix tells the reporter that it actually doesn't set itself on fire when it dies, but is ignited by some outside force--then we readers are given an obvious clue that the government is going to test an experimental nuclear weapon today and much of the USA will be incinerated.

A waste of time, just like my irrational pop music criticism.

"Sea Change" (1956)

After first appearing in Astounding, "Sea Change" has resurfaced in many anthologies--Scortia even included it in the anthology he edited with George Zebrowski titled Human-Machines: An Anthology of Stories About Cyborgs.  Interestingly (or maybe not, judge for yourself), in Astounding and Caution! Inflammable! the story is preceded by a six-line epigraph drawn from "Ariel's Song" in The Tempest, but in Human-Machines this is dispensed with.  (The extract in question includes the line included multiple times by T. S. Eliot in The Wasteland: "Those are pearls that were his eyes.")

Piloting spaceships around the solar system was too difficult a challenge for human beings, their reflexes were just not fast enough, and a computer powerful enough to independently run a space ship was just too heavy to be cost effective.  So travel between the Earth and the colonies that have been established on the other planets of our solar system is accomplished by ships conned by disembodied human brains!  When their tours of duty are over, these brains are put into robot bodies that almost perfectly mimic human bodies, but somehow it is not the same--Bart, the best of these pilots, has recently retired and been put into a robotic body, but he is not happy; he loiters around a Martian colony, feeling increasingly alienated from his humanity, losing what he calls the "basic human emotions" and "the basic ways of thinking that make you human" and fearing he is becoming no more than a machine.

Over the course of this 14-page story, Bart, through face-to-face conversations with flesh and blood humans and radio conversations with his comrades, disembodied brains who are installed in space ships and space stations around the solar system, realizes that the human brains integrated into space craft are a new form of human life equal or superior to the old kind, a form of human life that is at the forefront of "the biggest dream man ever dared dream"--the conquest of the stars!  The disembodied brain of a woman Bart loves is going to pilot the first space craft to travel to a different star system, and Bart decides to accept an offer to have his brain installed in the second such ship, and accompany his girlfriend on humankind's first interstellar adventure.

This is a good story, told in a literary style that is lyrical and emotional and full of images and sciency stuff, but also economical and to the point--a good example of a classic SF tale about the effect of future technology on the psychology and relationships of individual people, one that doesn't casually dismiss the challenges presented by high technology but concludes with the famous sense of wonder at the awesome possibilities of high technology to enable us to explore the universe.

Thumbs up!

"The Bomb in the Bathtub" (1957)

"The Bomb in the Bathtub" was first printed in Galaxy.  You can believe that I groaned when I saw that it was included in an anthology called Cosmic Laughter and was thus presumably a joke story.  (Galaxy editor H. L. Gold also included it in The Fourth Galaxy Reader, which I just recently saw in a Pennsylvania antique mall.)

This 15-page story is a spoof of detective fiction, a goof on psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and a series of absurd gags.  An alien from another dimension appears in Sidney Coleman's bathroom and leaves in his bathtub a large device which Coleman assumes is an H-bomb.  The alien apparently has deployed the explosive in order to destroy our universe--we learn that this act of what to us Earthers appears to be vandalism of the highest order is a component of the alien's psychotherapy.  Coleman goes to private eye Caedmon Wickes for help.  Wickes goes to see the bomb, which can talk and which sings "Frankie and Johnny."   The reader endures many more absurdities before the story ends.

As a child I liked parodies and spoofs (like Saturday the 14th) and absurdist humor (like Monty Python), but as an adult I consider such work to be a sterile waste of time.  "The Bomb in the Bathtub" I found to be almost unreadable, my eyes glazing over as I waded laboriously through each sentence.   

(I still laugh at humor based on human shortcomings and a recognition that life is a tragedy, like Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, the Tony Randall and Jack Klugman Odd Couple, Charles Schulz's Peanuts, the comic scenes in my new favorite movie The Driller Killer, and Peter Hammill's "The Polaroid." ) 

A dud.

"John Robert and the Dragon's Egg" (1957)

This story was printed first in Fantastic Universe under the title "John Robert and the Egg."  It was included in The Best of Thomas N. Scortia and in one of those anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name on the cover, Dragon Tales.

I don't know if I can take another joke story, so I am hoping this is a sincere straight piece.

John Robert is a farm boy, living with his aunt, uncle, and grandfather because his parents are dead.  One day he finds a weird egg in a swamp, and, over his aunt's objections, contrives to keep it.  (Grandpa is his accomplice.  Us men have to stick together!)  John Robert and Grandpa hatch the egg in an unused hen house and nurture the fire-breathing dragon that emerges.  When John Robert's aunt and uncle see the creature, grown larger than a horse in just a few month's time, they decide to sell it to a circus--these people are poor, after all (John Robert sleeps on a mattress on the kitchen floor and Grandpa sleeps on a couch.)  But before this transaction can take place John Robert and Grandpa climb on the dragon's back and fly off to explore this world and maybe others!

This is like a pleasant children's story--people say "tarnation" and "varmint;" the dragon eats cardboard and wooden planks and coffee grounds and just about anything else that doesn't move, like it's a cartoon goat; there is little tension and no sex or violence and there is no effort to explain anything logically--it is a celebration of imagination and childish joy.  There is a faint adult edge--Aunt Bess is said to have been a fun kid like John Robert as a child, but to have been hardened by a tough life.  I suppose it is filler, but it is charming, and Scortia's descriptions of the dragon are vivid, so I'll give "John Robert and the Dragon's Egg" a moderate recommendation.

"The Icebox Blonde" (1959)

This one first appeared in the men's magazine Rogue alongside stories by Harlan Ellison and Robert Bloch.  As the wikipedia article on the magazine indicates, Rogue had a close relationship with the SF community--Frank R. Robinson and Harlan Ellison edited the magazine, Bloch, Fredric Brown  and Alfred Bester wrote regular columns for it, Ted White wrote about jazz for the magazine, etc.  (Unfortunately, the internet archive does not seem to have any scans of Robinson- or Ellison-era issues.)  Scortia would later include "The Icebox Blonde" in Strange Bedfellows, an anthology he edited of SF stories about sex, and it would also show up in a sort of textbook, Marriage and the Family Through Science Fiction.

"The Icebox Blonde" is a feeble lampoon of wealthy British people and their attitude towards sex and towards American people.  There is no escaping these blasted joke stories!

Foringham is a middle-aged London business executive on an extended stay for his firm in New York.  His wife, the 42-year old daughter of a viscount (the owner of the firm) is with him.  One of Foringham's American colleagues is apparently trying to seduce Mrs. Foringham.  Meanwhile, a new product has come on the market, super sexy female androids that you can buy in the freezer section of the supermarket.  Mrs. Foringham decides to run away with the American, but she is a considerate wife, so she buys one of the sex androids--when Foringham comes back home one night to find his wife gone, one of the androids is in the bathtub, defrosting.  Their marriage was an arranged one, based on financial considerations rather than passion or attachment, so Foringham is not very put out, and looks forward to having sex with the android when she defrosts.

A waste of time.

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Scortia is obviously an able writer; "Sea Change" is quite good and "John Robert and the Dragon's Egg" goes down easy, but among these gems are plenty of pitfalls and booby traps in the form of frustratingly lame joke stories.  Hopefully the 1960s and 1970s stories in Caution! Inflammable! will have a higher ratio of worthwhile stories to useless joke stories.