It is time to break out into some new territory here at MPorcius Fiction Log and read four stories by people I have never blogged about before. Our guide on this expedition will be Judith Merril, a woman whose fan base may not be all that big (Barry Malzberg in a 2016 column for Galaxy's Edge reports that Donald Wollheim told him that Merril's famous anthology, England Swings! SF, "was the worst-selling Ace paperback in history") but its members are dedicated and powerful. Merril, by including them in the fourth installment of "The Most Acclaimed S-F Anthology," is telling us that these four stories are among 1958's "greatest," so let's give them a shot.
"Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" by Richard Gehman
Richard Gehman appears to be a guy who wrote some novels and did lots of Hollywood and Broadway journalism, writing articles about celebrities for
TV Guide and penning biographies of
Bogie, Jerry Lewis, Gary Cooper, and the restaurant Sardi's. He apparently also hung around with the "Rat Pack." Gehman only has two fiction entries at isfdb. Merril's little intro to the two-page "Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" here in
SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Fourth Annual Volume tells us it is a satire and points out that
Playboy editor Ray Russell warned her he didn't think it fit into her SF anthology.
I'm a little reluctant to say this story is a total waste of time because I haven't read any Kerouac so maybe nuances are going over my head, and maybe people familiar with Kerouac love "Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" when first they encounter it. But to me it is just a bunch of puns and goofs on hipster slang. For example, the protagonist, a mouse, tries pot, but it doesn't give him any kicks, so he tries pan. Later, still in pursuit of a transcendent experience, the mouse runs up and down a clock like in the nursery rhyme. Then he gives up on trying to get high from external sources ("in the final analysis, he had to look inward") and writes a novel and gets rich.
I guess Merril considers this SF because animals talk, but there is no speculation in it, no escapist adventure, no science--it's a gentle parody of a cultural phenomenon. I have to suspect she included it in her book of 1958's "greatest science-fiction and fantasy" stories in an effort to make it look like SF readers are sophisticates conversant with important literary movements and not just pimple-faced freaks who know how to use a slide rule.
"Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" appeared first in Playboy under the pen name Martin Scott, alongside photos by Shel Silverstein of his trip to Moscow and a story by Richard Matheson. Merril loved it so much she included it in 1967's SF: The Best of the Best; Gehman didn't get his name on the cover among those of Brian Aldiss, Clifford Simak and Damon Knight (who famously panned Merril's novel The Tomorrow People at some risk to his career), but is instead lumped in with Steve Allen under the description "eleven other contemporary masters." "Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" would be reprinted again in 1974 in a McGraw-Hill textbook, Fantasy: The Literature of the Marvelous. I guess if he is in a text book he really is a master!
"The Yellow Pill" by Rog Phillips
The pill in "Mother's Little Helper" is yellow, isn't it?
Now there's a great song. And it's about a contemporary social issue--I wonder if Merril considered it one of the greatest SF songs of 1966.
"The Yellow Pill" first appeared in John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding, so I think we can expect it to be a better fit for conventional notions of what constitutes SF than is Gehman's piece. Rog Phillips actually has many stories listed at isfdb and a pretty long Wikipedia entry but somehow I have never read anything by him before.
Cedric Elton is the world's most famous psychiatrist. The cops bring to him Gerald Bocek, a man who murdered five people in a supermarket. Bocek claims those he shot down were in fact a boarding party of reptilian space pirates who had attacked the space ship upon which both he and Elton are serving as professional spacemen. Bocek insists that if Elton really thinks himself a head shrinker on Earth it is because he is suffering from space madness, an occupational hazard of space travel, and should take one of the yellow pills carried aboard to dispel such madness.
Over the course of several days, each man tries to convince the other that he is delusional and each employs strategies to cure the other. The twist ending of the story is that both succeed in changing the other's mind--as the story ends Elton has come to believe they really are spacemen whose vessel is full of charred lizardman corpses while Bocek has come to think himself a murderer (not guilty by reason of insanity) who has just been cured of his delusions by Elton the brilliant psychiatrist. After expressing his gratitude, Bocek walks out of the doctor's office...or did he just step into the airlock where he will die of asphyxiation?
This story is OK; competent, but no big deal. Editors have been keen on "The Yellow Pill" and it has appeared in numerous anthologies and reprint magazines.
"River of Riches" by Gerald Kersh
In her intro to "River of Riches," Merril says that "s-f has enjoyed a rather more reputable name in Great Britain than it has here--or at least a good many more 'literary' British authors have written it" and goes on to name Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, and others. Kersh himself is British, though he moved to New York and in 1958 became a U.S. citizen. Kersh's novels, wikipedia is telling me, were about London low-life, but his post-war short stories were largely of the detective or speculative type. Wikipedia also informs us Harlan Ellison told people that Kersh was his favorite author. So maybe this story is going to be good.
The narrator, an Englishman in New York, meets an impecunious countryman in a bar. This guy, Jack Pilgrim, tells the story of how he comes from a wealthy family but doesn't stand to currently inherit much and was sent to Canada to work and has since worked many jobs and gained and lost multiple fortunes.
The central episode of this account is how Pilgrim found himself alone among cannibal Indians in a Latin American jungle and there made and quickly lost a fortune. In brief, these primitives played a game like marbles using a certain species of nut. As explained in their mythology, one in ten-million of these nuts is intelligent! A tribal chief traded Pilgrim one of the rare intelligent nuts for the Englishman's rifle. With the thinking nut Pilgrim won the game again and again, amassing a vast fortune in gold and jewels, which the natives do not consider valuable. But, ignoring the advice of both natives and a European trader, Pilgrim went up against the chief of a tribe of Indians famed for their trickery, and those guys stripped Pilgrim of his wealth, including the super nut!
This is a well-put-together and entertaining story, so thumbs up. "River of Riches" first appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post and would be included in a British collection of Kersh's and in one of those anthologies with Alfred Hitchcock's name and handsome mug on them.
"The Short-Short Story of Mankind" by John Steinbeck
Richard Gehman and Gerald Kersh may be forgotten, but I think people still read John Steinbeck--I feel like it was just a few years ago that there was a whole controversy over how much of
Travels with Charley was just made up. Whether they make kids in school read
Of Mice and Men nowadays I don't know, but they made me read it back in the 1980s.
In her intro Merril admits "The Short-Short Story of Mankind" is not really SF, but as it is a "delightful" satire, and her famous anthology has begun including a non-fiction section, she included it.
This five-page joke story is about a bunch of cavemen who engage in incestuous sex and cannibalism. The joke is that they say the same sorts of things and hold the same sorts of attitudes as 20th-century people whom people like Steinbeck and Merril look down upon. They complain about the younger generation. They are suspicious of foreigners and people of a different religion. They fear new technology. Besides the repetitive jokes, Steinbeck offers fable-like stories of how agriculture, trade and government arose, and finally suggests that people today are no different than the cave people he has depicted. He ends on the positive note that in the past people chose to abandon their prejudices rather than go extinct, and so it is likely we 20th-century people will do the same, getting over our differences rather than nuking the world into oblivion.
Tedious self-satisfied conventional wisdom packaged with lame jokes. Thumbs down!
"The Short-Short Story of Mankind" first appeared in Playboy and would be included by Brian Aldiss in the oft-reprinted Penguin Science Fiction.
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I might read something by Rog Phillips or Gerald Kersh in the future, but don't bet on seeing blog posts about Richard Gehman or John Steinbeck ever again here at MPorcius Fiction Log, oh my brothers.
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