1956 F&SF tales by A Davidson, T Sturgeon & P Anderson

For some time now I have owned a copy of the 1962 paperback printing of The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series, an anthology edited by F&SF editor Anthony Boucher first published in 1957.  This copy was once owned by a Fred Thivener, who also owned the copy of Alternities on my shelf, a 1970s anthology edited by David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin about which I wrote at some length back in 2016.  By owning and reading these used anthologies, I am sort of in touch with the SF fans of the past!  Let's sample the contents of this little piece of SF history, shall we?

In his introduction to the volume, Boucher takes issue with John W. Campbell, Jr.'s article in the May 12, 1956 issue of The Saturday Review (easily accessible at the world's greatest website, the internet archive), in which Campbell argues that science fiction has different goals than conventional literature and should be judged on a different basis.  Boucher quotes Campbell's assertion that "Science fiction is written by technically-minded people, about technically-minded people, for the satisfaction of technically-minded people," and then assures readers that this is an "overstatement" that only applies to a small sub-genre of SF stories, and that the stories in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series "are intended simply for the reader who wants entertainment" and can be understood even by those who are not "technically-minded."

Relieved that a dunderhead like me, who first heard of Lenz's Law two days ago and has already forgotten what jurisdictions it covers, will be able to comprehend these stories, I'm ready to grapple with one tale each from The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series by Talmudic scholar Avram Davidson, Ted Sturgeon, whose sexual advances Thomas M. Disch claimed to have rejected, and Poul Anderson, who, with his bachelor's in physics, might actually qualify as a technically-minded person.

"King's Evil" by Avram Davidson 

Like all of today's stories, "King's Evil" debuted in a 1956 issue of F&SF.  Among the places it would reappear are the 1979 collection The Best of Avram Davidson, and some European magazines.

"King's Evil" feels long for what it accomplishes, but I guess you are supposed to enjoy the style.  There is a frame story: a contemporary guy has acquired an old book, the memoirs of a mesmerist active in England in the late 18th century.  Then comes the story proper, taken from this memoir.  The mesmerist meets a physician in London to discuss a business proposition.  Another guy, a guy who acts a little silly, like he is drunk or dazed or whatever, insinuates himself into their meeting.  Davidson offers many clues as to who this amiable interloper is, and then, after the main story, in the ending frame, tells you who it was in case you missed the clues.

I suppose "King's Evil" is meant to appeal to people who read Boswell and Casanova and that sort of thing, and in fact I am one of those people, but I'm finding the story merely acceptable, the game only just barely worth the candle; the story is a trifle regardless of the fact that quite a lot of work was put into crafting it.  Maybe its form and character, and its presence in F&SF and here in a collection of the "best" stories from F&SF, is a reflection of Davidson and Boucher's commitment to the mystery genre, and it is mystery readers who are "King's Evil"'s true audience. 

"And Now the News..." by Theodore Sturgeon 

"And Now the News..." has been reprinted many times in many languages, including in anthologies inflicted upon that captive audience known as schoolkids, and was the title story of the ninth volume of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.  After it appeared in a Japanese magazine in 2004, it received the 2005 Seiun award for Best Translated Short Story.  I think we can safely presume that this story is considered a better-than-average and/or particularly representative Sturgeon work.

As you probably know if you've made your way to this website and are actually reading the text instead of just looking at the pictures, good ol' Ted is a utopian.  A lot of SF stories warn us that utopia is impossible or a trap or a scam, but Sturgeon is always eager to tell us that utopia is within reach, and he has come up with a myriad of possible paths for us to get there, and we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have read and expounded on some of these recipes for paradise.  There's "If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?", in which we get to utopia if we abandon the incest taboo.  (Our man tarbandu of the great PorPor Books Blog read this story recently and liked it less than I did.)  There's "The Skills of Xanadu," in which individualism and privacy seem to be the obstacles to utopia, and in which technological augmentation is used to achieve radical egalitarianism.  There's "Slow Sculpture," in which we learn genius scientists could give us utopia if it wasn't for the conspiracies of the establishment and the stupidity of the masses.  (Joachim Boaz at the influential Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations blog read this one in 2014 and liked it much more than I did.)  And then there is what might be considered the capstone of Sturgeon's career, Godbody, in which we are told that the key to a happy life and a happy world is sex.

Also prominent in my mind, though I read them before I started this blog, are The Cosmic Rape AKA To Marry Medusa, in which utopia is achieved when an alien invasion integrates us into a collective mind whether we like it or not, and Venus Plus X, in which the thing keeping us from utopia is sexual dimorphism.  (Joachim has also blogged about these, here and here, and again thought them better than did I.  I'm a hardcore anti-utopian individualist, and I am prejudiced against stories in which we are expected to welcome alien conquest, scientists ordering us around, or collective consciousness.  I also recall The Cosmic Rape and Venus Plus X being long and repetitive and tedious.  Godbody may have been sort of repetitive and tedious, but at least I can get behind advocacy of having sex.)                      

If you are still awake after that link-happy preamble, it is time to amaze you by telling you that the path to utopia prescribed in "And Now the News..." is becoming a hermit!  After reading all those stories pushing collective consciousness and free love, all those optimistic stories about the possibilities of reforming society and improving people, today I find a Sturgeon story that is a pessimistic horror tale about how happiness comes from limiting your contact and communication with others!

Mr. MacLyle was a decent friendly middle-class family man who commuted to the city from the suburbs every day.  But then he became a news junkie!  He would read three papers over the course of a day, listen to multiple radio news broadcasts and watch multiple TV news shows every damn day.  He paid less and less attention to his family, and so Mom committed a little sabotage to Dad's TVs and radios and canceled his subscriptions.  Forced to go cold turkey, MacLyle experiences a radical psychological change.  He abandons his family (leaving them enough money to maintain them) and his job and moves to a cabin in the woods!  More mysteriously, he loses his ability to read, and then even his ability to speak and even understand spoken English!

In the second part of the story a psychiatrist hired by Mrs. MacLyle does the detective work necessary to track MacLyle down and then pays the hermit a visit.  He finds that the mute and illiterate MacLyle is happy!  The man makes his own food, fashions his own art, blows out his own music on a wind instrument I've never heard of, etc.  Abandoning society--to the point of divorcing himself from human culture altogether and resorting to creating his own culture--has made him happier than he ever was.

The head shrinker believes every man's role is to contribute to society, that becoming a hermit is a form of suicide.  So he drugs and hypnotizes MacLyle and revives the runaway's ability to read and speak English.  In the shocking ending, MacLyle suggests that following of the news, which of course is mostly a catalog of human misdeeds and other disasters, is like compulsively picking at a grievous wound, a practice that only makes things worse; then he gives the psychiatrist the slip and becomes a serial killer!  The news had driven MacLyle insane, and divorcing himself from humanity was the only thing keeping him from going on a bloody rampage, and then the psychiatrist, driven by selfish greed and ostensibly community-minded blind adherence to the dogma of his school of thought, loosed him upon the world to wreak havoc!        

I like surprises in a story, at least if they make sense, and I had no idea where the hell Sturgeon was going with this story from one page to the next, and even if you don't buy his extravagant premises, it all more or less adds up on its own terms.  The story is full of interesting little details, like references to John Donne and a description of the ophicleide, that musical instrument I can't recall being aware of before.  It is perhaps a little long-minded and repetitious, but not terribly so, and the style is good.  So, thumbs up for "And Now the News...".  It really is a better-than-average Sturgeon, and I like that, while it is still banging the usual Sturgeon drum of crapping on our society, it has a tone and attitude different from much of his other work.

"The Man Who Came Early" by Poul Anderson 

Compare Dick Shelton's cover here to his cover
 for the hardcover of The Best from Fantasy
 and Science Fiction: Sixth Series

Avram Davidson in "King's Evil" endeavoured to depict the Europe of the late 18th century, and here in "The Man Who Came Early" Poul Anderson takes a stab at the Europe of the early Middle Ages.  The text of Anderson's tale consists of one side of a conversation between a Viking chief who has retired to his farm and a Christian missionary; apparently the Christian tells the Icelander that the End Times are nigh, because the Viking assures the priest that this ol' world will be spinning for centuries to come.  How does he know?  Well, the meat of "The Man Who Came Early" consists of the Viking retailing the story of how a few years ago he met a time traveller from the 20th century!

And a tragic story it is!  Sometimes in time travel stories the man from the future uses his superior knowledge to outwit the natives and dominate them (Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is I guess the archetype of such a story), and sometimes in SF stories about castaways the man of science uses his engineering skill to build a means of escape (we saw this in E. E. Smith's Spacehounds of IPC.)  But Anderson tells a more realistic story here; the 20th-century Yankee visitor to medieval Iceland may be an engineer and a professional fighting man, but his unfamiliarity with the milieu he finds himself in causes one humiliation or grievous injury after another until it finally leads him, and others, to ruin.  

This is an entertaining story; when I started it I expected it to be fun, but it is too sad for me to say that; Anderson really exhibits a tragic sense of life here.  Anderson also fills the story with references to medieval history and dramatizations of Viking life and the Viking way of thinking, which is interesting.  Thumbs up!

"The Man Who Came Early" has been very successful, appearing in a multitude of anthologies in many languages.  Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg, Martin H. Greenberg, and Barry N. Malzberg are only some of the editors who saw fit to reprint it.       

Hardcover edition

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The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series actually includes two stories by Poul Anderson, but Anthony Boucher's pun-infested intro to "The Barbarian" indicates that it is a spoof of Robert E. Howard's Conan, and so I am skipping it.  I have very limited tolerance for parodies, spoofs, and puns, and don't want to dampen the warm feelings I am experiencing about The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series after reading one respectable and two impressive stories.

In our next episode, more short stories from a major figure in the SF community mentioned in this blog post.  Stay tuned!