Social Science Fiction by Harry Harrison, R. A. Lafferty and Raymond F. Jones

One reason I have been reading all those stories from Weird Tales instead of purportedly more "serious" science fiction is that I sort of feel that I have nothing to learn anymore from stories that try to tell you how society functions or should function.  I'm 49 years old and I've read quite a few SF books and I have a long (at least it feels long!) career on the periphery of academia behind me, so I've read my fair share about whether or not religion is a dangerous scam and whether or not the government should have more power over your life and whether or not we have free will and whether history is driven by the actions of impressive individuals or by vast collective forces, and all that stuff, and I've made up my mind about those topics and no short story is going to alter my thinking about these things, things which I am in fact a little sick of hearing about.  I am not sick of sex and violence, though, and thus Weird Tales is still right there at the center of my interest.

That said, let's take a break from the living dead and black magic to read science fiction short stories that are specifically promoted as "casting new light on social problems."  If you type "science fiction anthology" into the internet archive's search field, one of the things that comes up is Above the Human Landscape: An Anthology of Social Science Fiction, published in 1971, edited by college professors Willis E. McNelly and Leon Stover.  According to wikipedia, McNelly was "close friends" with Frank Herbert, and Stover wrote an unpublished biography of Robert A. Heinlein, so these individuals were intimately connected to the SF community.  

Let's take a look at stories from within the pages of McNelly and Stover's book by authors with whom I already have some familiarity: Harry Harrison, R. A. Lafferty, and Raymond F. Jones.   

(But first, I'll provide links to blog posts in which I unburdened myself of my opinions about three stories in Above the Human Landscape: An Anthology of Social Science Fiction which I have already read: "They" by Robert Heinlein (1941), "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" by Harlan Ellison (1968), and "Who Can Replace a Man?" by Brian Aldiss (1958).

"Rescue Operation" by Harry Harrison (1964)

As a youth I really enjoyed Harrison's Bill the Galactic Hero, the Stainless Steel Rat books, and the Deathworld books; nowadays that sort of broad satire and sarcastic smartassery appeals to me much less, but when I recently (within the last ten years is recent, right?) read the first two of Harrison's books about an alternate Earth full of dinosaurs in which humans have to fight a race of matriarchal reptile people, West of Eden and Winter in Eden, I quite liked them.  Above the Human Landscape: An Anthology of Social Science Fiction includes two stories by Harrison--let's see how I feel about them. 

"Rescue Operation" is about how rural people are closed-minded religious dopes who should listen to their superiors--the scientists! 

Joze Kukjovic is a nuclear physicist in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; currently he is hanging around in a little seaside town full of superstitious peasants because he loves to dive and explore sunken Roman ships.  Two fishermen come to him one morning when he's drinking his Turkish coffee and tell him that they saw a spaceship crash in the Adriatic and spotted the ejected astronaut in the relatively shallow water!  Kukjovic hurries to the site of the crash and rescues the astronaut--but it's not one of our boys who has the right stuff, and it's not some vodka-swilling Russki--it's a bona fide space alien!

"Rescue Operation" is a sort of traditional SF story in which our hero, a man of science, uses the scientific method and trickery to try to overcome his inferiors--the uneducated Christian villagers--and solve a problem--the problem of keeping the alien alive.  Because of the bungling of the locals, Kukjovic fails, and the alien dies in agony.  Even worse, as the alien is dying it whips a book out of its suit to give to Kujovic, but a local priest, who thinks the alien is a demon, snatches the book and throws it in a fire, destroying this potentially world-shaking source of new knowledge!

The story's themes may be tired, but "Rescue Operation" is well-written and paced and Harrison handles all the hard science stuff in a fun way, so I can recommend it--moderately good standard issue anti-religion pro-science SF.

"Rescue Operation" debuted in Analog and has been reprinted many times in anthologies and Harrison collections.  It appears that Harrison considered it one of his best stories.

"Roommates" by Harry Harrison (1971)

"Roommates" first appeared in Thomas Disch's anthology The Ruins of Earth.  (R. A. Lafferty's "Groaning Hinges of the World," which I read back in 2013, also made its debut there.)  Wikipedia tells me that "Roommates" is a reworking of snippets from Harrison's 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!, a book I have not read and the source material of the famous film Soylent Green.  This is like the opposite of one of SF's standard operating procedures, employed by our heroes A. E. van Vogt and Barry N. Malzberg, in which you take a bunch of short stories and stitch them together to make an episodic novel--here Harrison hacks bits out of a novel to make an episodic short story.

Like "Rescue Operation," "Roommates" has been reprinted in numerous anthologies and Harrison collections.

I lived in beautiful New York City, the unrivaled center of the universe and pinnacle of human achievement, in 1999, and I am here to tell you it was a paradise!  But in this story, printed in the year of my birth, life in the future Big Apple of summer 1999 is a living hell!  There is a heat wave but no air conditioning!  Water isn't pumped into everybody's apartment--instead you have to carry a jerry can outside to get your water ration from the heavily guarded government spigot!  Everybody is gaunt from the food shortage and our main character can only afford to buy two or three razor blades a year!  Oh yeah, and the whales are all dead!  Why is all this happening?  Because of overpopulation!  Families get government handouts proportionate to the number of kids they have and social pressures limit access to birth control (as in "Rescue Operation," Christians are the villain here) and so Mother Earth is collapsing under the weight of a surfeit of homo sapiens.

"Roommates" is split into four little chapters.  The first is "Summer," then comes "Fall," then "Winter," and then (you guessed it) "Spring."  In "Summer" we meet Andy the cop and his septuagenarian roommate Sol, who is a sort of Jewish wiseman character who is smarter than everybody else and voices Harrison's arguments (e.g., he has hooked up a bicycle to four car batteries to power a fridge; he grows his own herbs and distills his own booze; when the U. S. Congress is set to pass legislation that will encourage birth control he says "the Pope will really plotz!")  In "Fall" we meet Shirl, Andy's girlfriend, who has moved in with Andy and Sol, and go with her on her trip to the government spigot; she witnesses a fight between a mother and water thieves.  In "Winter" the city is wracked by riots in which Andy must fight the mobs.  In "Spring" Sol has died and the government moves a welfare queen, her wretched husband and her army of disgusting brats into Andy and Shirl's place, and we have reason to suspect that Shirl is going to leave Andy--she can use her attractive body to earn a more comfortable lifestyle.

The episodic nature of "Roommates," and its focus on its dystopian setting instead of the relationships among the characters (there are long expository passages in "Winter" describing stuff none of the characters witness that feel tedious) mean the story is not very satisfying.  I'll call it acceptable.  

"Slow Tuesday Night" by R. A. Lafferty (1965)

"Slow Tuesday Night" first appeared in Galaxy and has been anthologized many many times, by editors ranging from Judith Merrill and James Gunn to Terry Carr and Robert Silverberg.  It appears in at least one book I own, but said book is interred in one of many cardboard boxes piled up here in the new MPorcius HQ, 100 miles west of my previous domicile, so I'm reading it in the internet archive's scan of Above the Human Landscape: An Anthology of Social Science Fiction, as I am all the stories I am babbling about today.

"Slow Tuesday Night" is a sort of satire of the fast pace of modern life and the perhaps regrettable prominence of ephemeral fads and short-lived, shallow trends in modern cultural life.  The universal application of a simple surgical procedure in everyone's childhood has radically increased average intelligence--everybody thinks much faster and somewhat better than they do in our day, dear reader.  Whereas in the past an entrepreneur might spend years developing an idea, securing funding, then marketing a new product, nowadays this process takes minutes!  Skyscrapers are erected, occupied, abandoned and demolished over the course of hours.  Social interactions have similarly sped up--the main character, a businessman who builds multiple industrial and financial empires in the course of a night, only to see each fall to competition or changing market conditions within hours, marries a woman and she tires of him and divorces him before sunrise--she has married and divorced him in the past in the same way, and will probably do so again in the future.  

An acceptable story.  Interestingly, it doesn't seem to have much of an edge--Lafferty portrays this silly world in which professional careers, love affairs and cultural evolutions that would span a decade or more in the 20th century sprout, blossom and wither in a single day, but he doesn't seem to suggest explicitly that this makes the people of this sped-up future unhappy--many of the people in the story are vapid, but they seem blissfully unaware that their lives are shallow, their accomplishments sterile.    Lafferty isn't judgmental; he observes human foibles with a smile and expects us to make our own conclusions.  (Compare this to the in-your-face tendentiousness and dire warnings of the other three stories we are reading today.)     

"Rat Race" by Raymond F. Jones (1966)

"Rat Race" first appeared in Analog, but hasn't been the hit the other three pieces we read today are.  It has only ever been reprinted here in Above the Human Landscape: An Anthology of Social Science Fiction and in a school textbook edited by Bernard Hollister, You and Science Fiction, which has gone through several editions and which includes J. G. Ballard's famous "Billenium," a story Joachim Boaz, tarbandu and I all blogged about in 2014.  

"Rat Race" is set in one of those utopian futures in which robots and computers do all the work so people have nothing to do and find that a life without goals or obstacles is unfulfilling.  George Sims-Howton is one such unfulfilled man, the kind of guy who could just look data up on the computer network but prefers to wander the physical archives of a library, looking at old books and magazines.  He stumbles upon references to model trains, how popular they were among men and boys like 150 years ago, and conceives a desire to have his own elaborate model railroad, a contagious fascination that has soon spread to his friends.  By feeding old plans they find into the computer that efficiently runs the world economy, they are soon provided with an abundance of engines, cars, track, scale buildings, etc., and enjoying this creative hobby, planning out track layouts and train schedules, much to the consternation of their wives, who think their obsession a sign of insanity.  (Women in this story are presented as so many albatrosses around their husband's necks, each a burden and a drag that inhibits her husband's pursuit of his goals.)

While engrossed in their new hobby these citizens of a world without work or money are happier than they have ever been, but then they go too far.  With the idea that it would be even more fulfilling to build their own trains and accessories than it is to have them delivered readymade from the computer, George orders from the computer stuff like raw metal, a screwdriver, and a lathe.  Then the cold-eyed government men arrive to explain that the means of production must be in the hands of the computer, that private production would result in trade between people and then economic chaos.  George is warned that if he messes up again he will be sent to a "subsistence reservation."   

After the government men leave George reflects:

A man's supreme joy was the joy of building, molding, changing, assembling--creating--with his own two hands and his mind.  And this was the single thing the Abundant Society could not tolerate for fear of coming apart at the seams.  Only a narrow elite, isolated from all other citizens, could be permitted the luxury of creation--of work. 

The story's resolution sees George trying to figure out a way to satisfy men's needs for creative work that won't end up sending him or anybody else to the subsistence reservation and optimistically offers us readers the possibility that George's efforts will lead to a social revolution and a return to a world in which people run their own lives.

My father is a railfan with a pile of dusty old model trains and model train magazines whose wife discouraged him from joining model train clubs, and I am always ready to cheer on attacks on the planned economy, so "Rat Race" easily won my sympathies.  I also think it is pretty well-structured and written.  I'd judge this one moderately good.  The problem with the story, for me, is that the theme is tired--I totally agree with what Jones is trying to say, but I've heard it so many times that it is part of my flesh and blood and so "Rat Race" doesn't offer, to me, any challenge or surprise.  (No doubt commies and feminists will have other gripes with the story.)    

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These are decent stories, and reasonable choices by McNelly and Stover for their anthology of social science fiction, but the Harrison and Jones stories only serve to reinforce my complaint from the start of this blog post--I've already read many SF stories that argue that religion is a dangerous scam, that overpopulation is a problem, and that socialism would crush the human spirit even if it didn't lead to poverty and mass murder, and I have already embraced or rejected these claims, so why do I need to read any more?