Best SF Seven: Fred Pohl, Eric Frank Russell, Brian Aldiss & Tom Disch

I'm not a guy who makes plans--I follow whims!  I don't know what I am going to do next week, and what happened last week I can barely remember--I let the winds of fate propel me hither and thither.  In my last blog post we read a story by Keith Laumer that appeared in the August 1966 issue of Galaxy, and while flipping through the issue I noticed a story by Brian W. Aldiss I couldn't recall ever encountering before.  Looking up other places it had appeared, I came upon the contents list for the 1970 Faber and Faber anthology edited by Edmund Crispin, Best SF Seven.  Besides the Aldiss, I noticed among the contents stories by Frederik Pohl, Eric Frank Russell and Thomas M. Disch that I hadn't read, and took this as a signal from the universe to read all four of these tales to which Crispin had given the nod of approval.

I don't have access to a copy of Best SF Seven, so I'll be reading versions of the stories from other venues.  Also note, I've actually already read three stories that appear in Best SF Seven: "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" by Roger Zelazny, "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, and "Snuffles" by R. A. Lafferty.  Click the links to marvel at MPorcius opinions and MPorcius typos from ages gone by.  (I reread "Snuffles" today, and wow, it is really good, so many little fun turns of phrase and nuggets of wisdom packed into a surreal but also viscerally convincing suspense and horror story.)  

"The Children of Night" by Frederik Pohl (1964)

I'm a Fred Pohl skeptic, but he's done things I have enjoyed, like Gateway, of course, and his memoir The Way the Future Was, and the short story "The Fiend," so let's give this one a try.  "The Children of Night" made its debut in Galaxy, edited at the time by Pohl himself, where it was illustrated by the renowned Virgil Finlay.  The story has been reprinted widely, including in several Pohl collections and in The Ninth Galaxy Reader, which Pohl himself edited, but I am reading the original magazine version in a scan at the internet archive.

"The Children of Night" is about how dirty politics and the PR business are, and how ordinary people are at the mercy of the cognitive elite and the science and technology they wield.  I feel like a large proportion of Pohl's career consists of picking out some industry or institution and writing an over-the-top story on how diabolical that industry is, and this story here is firmly in that genre.

Over a decade ago, the Terran colony on Mars was the target of an alien sneak attack.  The attackers, natives of Arcturas, massacred the adults and then carried the children of the colony back to their homeworld to experiment upon.  Earth's space force attacked the Arcturan homeworld, defeated the aliens and liberated the physically and mentally scarred children.

Today there is a truce between Earth and the Arcturan Confederacy.  The Arcturans want to set up a scientific base in the American town of Bridport; the town is holding a referendum on zoning that will determine whether the Arcturans will be permitted to set up their base.  The idea of letting the aliens who tortured Earth children set up a base in their town is not too popular with the townspeople, and the Arcturans have hired a PR firm to try to sway public opinion and make it possible for the referendum to go their way--our narrator is the PR firm's top man.

The PR firm has many tools at its disposal: polling, focus groups, advertising, stunts like giving away Arcturan felines to foster positive associations with the Arcturans, digging up dirt on local politicians with which to blackmail them, and the ability to use editing technology to fabricate video evidence of people misbehaving for use in poisoning their reputations.  Pohl really pours on the examples of unscrupulous things the narrator is willing to do and also piles up a list of the tortures and lingering injuries suffered by the children held in Arcturan captivity; he also keeps reminding you that smart people like the narrator can easily make the common people act the way they want them to.  Fred just hammers away at this stuff, ignoring the drawers in his toolkit labeled "SUBTLETY" and "ECONOMY."  There is also a subplot about how the narrator is in love with one of the women working for the PR firm on this Bridport job, and they used to date but she broke up with him and is marrying some other guy on Christmas Day.  The story feels long and just drags on with all this redundant stuff, the plot sort of stagnating as Pohl tries to manipulate your feelings as he both demonstrates and just tells you how crummy people are.

Finally, at the end we get some plot movement.  It looks like relations between Earth and Arcturus are souring again, that another war might break out.  The narrator uses all the tools at his disposal to get the Arcturans and humans to join forces in hatred of himself, the vile PR man.  War is averted as human and smelly space bug learn to get along thanks to the narrator's redeeming self sacrifice.

I found the plot twist pretty unconvincing intellectually and pretty unsatisfying emotionally, and I've already suggested the pacing is bad and that the story as a whole is repetitive as well as over-the-top in its efforts to bang home its banal arguments and emotionally manipulate you with its cast of overly goody good characters and overly foully foul characters.  Thumbs down!

We don't have to ask why Pohl would make sure to include this story in books and magazines he himself was editing--hey, we all need money.  But why would Crispin select it?  Maybe he shared Pohl's attitude about PR and his belief that the common people are easily gulled?  Maybe he thought the relationship of the Earth and Arcturus a clever parallel to how the United States and Great Britain had quickly made friends with Germany and Japan after the Second World War despite the multitudinous and unforgivable atrocities the Axis nations had committed because we needed to make common cause with them in the face of the threat posed by the Soviet Union?  Or maybe he just liked Pohl.  Whatever the reason, it was a mistake to include "The Children of Night" in Best SF Seven--this story is lame.

"Ultima Thule" by Eric Frank Russell (1951)

"Ultima Thule" debuted in Astounding (I'm reading it in a scan of the issue, and would later appear in Milton Lesser's anthology Looking Forward and several other places, including a Hungarian anthology.  I'm reading a scan of its first appearance in that issue of Astounding.

I was pretty lukewarm over Russell's novel which we read recently, With a Strange Device AKA The Mindwarpers, but this story here I can heartily endorse--it is SF in the classic mold, about three guys in a space ship and their reactions to the tremendous stress of interstellar travel, a story that speculates about the nature of time and space and offers us both a sense-of-wonder ending and a life lesson--that one should always do his duty!

The three spacemen come out of hyperspace in a black void, with no stars or anything at all visible in any direction.  In the three thousand years mankind has employed the hyperdrive, a few dozen ships have vanished without a trace, and they are the latest!  With no external stimuli, it is impossible to tell if the ship is moving or still; firing the rockets has no apparent effect on their position and when they try the hyperdrive nothing seems to happen.  They are doomed to die when the oxygen or water runs out.  The two subordinate crewmen can't take the pressure and Russell describes ably how they crack.  The captain keeps a steady nerve, writing everything in the log as per regulations, thinking that maybe if his ship is ever found the record of what has happened to it and its crew will prevent future such disasters. When the O2 runs out, he dies.

And is reborn 17,000 years later!  The people who revive him explain to the captain the salient features of the universe that made his revival possible, and thank him for his careful maintenance of the log, which, as hoped, contains clues that will help other spacemen.  

"Ultima Thule" is a real success; the sciency stuff, the human drama, and the sensawunda ending all work.  Thumbs up!  A good choice by Crispin.                     

"Heresies of the Huge God" by Brian W. Aldiss (1966)

As a little joke, on the Table of Contents page of the issue of Galaxy in which it made its maiden appearance "Heresies of the Huge God" appears under the heading  "Non-Fact Article," and Aldiss's story is in fact a joke story in the form of a secret history penned in the theocratic future approximately 1000 years from today.  The work of a cleric, "Heresies of the Huge God" describes how in the 20th century a metallic reptile with eight legs and over four thousand miles long landed on the Earth and this arrival's aftermath.  The creature's landing and occasional movements cause a series of catastrophes, changing the orbit and rotation of the Earth, throwing up new mountain ranges, digging new seas, etc.  Aldiss's story is an attack on religion, and the cataclysm triggers a radical religious reformation on the Earth that features human sacrifice (mostly of women) on a mass scale and a series of world wars in the form of Crusades fought to resolve theological disputes (like over whether people should dress in metallic attire in honor of the alien god) that serve for many as an excuse to pursue the satisfaction of their greed and lust for vengeance.

The story is clever and fun, an entertaining example of the SF tradition of misanthropy and anti-clericalism as well as another successful example of Aldiss using a nonfiction primary source document from a fantastical milieu to obliquely describe that fictional world--his 1967 "Confluence." is an example we read not too long ago.  Thumbs up for "Heresies of the Huge God"!

A critical and commercial success, "Heresies of the Huge God" has been reprinted many times in many languages in anthologies and Aldiss collections.

"Come to Venus Melancholy" by Thomas M. Disch (1965)

"Come to Venus Melancholy" is a great little story addressing some of my favorite topics.  Disembodied brains!  Unrequited love!  Suicide!  Our narrator is a female English professor who contracted leukemia in her thirties.  The medicos were able to remove her brain and put it into a computer, and she was given the job of managing a one-man/one-cyborg outpost on Venus.  She falls in love with the fully human half of their team, and they have some sort of sexual relationship (it seems that she makes up pornographic stories while he jerks off, though Disch doesn't make this crystal clear) but the two are incompatible--she's a sensitive intellectual who adores the poetry of Milton, and he's a sort of working-class brute, or so it is implied--and their relationship is rocky.  It doesn't help that being essentially alone on Venus, capturing native slugs with hallucinogenic properties for mysterious purposes (biological warfare? psychiatric therapeutics?) can cause neuroses, as can life as a disembodied brain, using the same nerve endings that once controlled your fingers and toes to now control doors and kitchen appliances.  Tragedy is the predictable outcome for this relationship.  

Disch is a very skilled writer, and with admirable economy he offers cool SF speculations, a Barry Malzberg-friendly "machines are taking away our humanity and exploring space drives you batty!" theme, and a sad story that tugs at your heartstrings.  Very good!  There's even a ton of references to the poetry of John Milton for all you people out there who went to a good school to enjoy!       

SF fans first lay eyes on this one in F&SF, and it has since appeared in a number of anthologies, including one put out by the British Psychological Society, PsiFi: Psychological Theories and Science Fictions, and Disch collections; I read it in my paperback copy of Fun With Your New Head, which has a good Gene Szafran cover.

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With the exception of Fred Pohl's weak contribution, Edmund Crispin seems to have put together a quite good anthology here.  Following this whim has paid off!

More 1960s SF short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.