F&SF Feb. '57: Clarke, Brown, Anderson, Derleth and Wellman

Let's crack open the February 1957 issue of F&SF to finish up Arthur C. Clarke's 1956 collection of anecdotes about the human race's first trip to the Moon, as related by the captain of the British component of the joint US-UK-USSR expedition, "Venture to the Moon."  (We wrote about the first two anecdotes here, the second two here.)  While we have the issue in hand, might as well look at editor Anthony Boucher's book column (high praise for Charles Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao and Robert Heinlein's Time for the Stars, commendations of Jack Vance's To Live Forever, Donald Wollheim's One Against the Moon, John W. Campbell Jr.'s "The Moon is Hell!" and Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr and The Big Sun of Mercury, a middling review for Raymond F. Jones' The Secret People, and denunciations of Felix Morley's Gumption Island, Guy Richards' Two Rubles to Times Square and Martin Caidan's The Long Night) and read the issue's stories by Fredric Brown, August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman and Poul Anderson. 

"Watch this Space" by Arthur C. Clarke (1956)

Alongside the hip of the woman in distress on the cover of this issue of F&SF, we see the legend "EVERY STORY in this issue NEW," but "Watch this Space," like all six of the "Venture to the Moon" stories, first appeared in The London Evening Standard.  Tricky, tricky....  

The lunar explorers conduct an experiment, projecting sodium into the thin atmosphere of the Moon during the night to see exactly how sunlight affects it as it rises out of the lunar shadow--it is expected to glow and from this glow various measurements can be made that will tell the eggheads things about the Moon and its atmosphere.  This is a highly-anticipated event because the glow should be visible from Earth.

The sodium (a few hundred kilograms) arrives from Earth in a device they call a "bomb" that volatilizes the sodium and then propels it skywards through a nozzle.  When the sodium rises into the sunlight the words "COCA COLA" appear--somebody on Earth clandestinely fashioned and installed into the nozzle a stencil and the windless thin atmosphere of the Moon did not disrupt the pattern as the gas rose.

(Isn't this reminiscent of a plot element of Robert Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon?")   

The final joke of the story is that the head of the American team is so embarrassed by this incident that he has to give up drinking delicious Coca-Cola and end his lifelong career as a teetotaler and start drinking beer, which he does not enjoy.

The Other Side of the Sky is one of multiple Clarke collection which reprinted 
"Venture to the Moon"

"A Question of Residence" by Arthur C. Clarke (1956)

The Soviet ship has failed, so the Soviet astronauts will have to return to Earth split up between the American and British ships.  Many of the explorers are eager to get home, and it has been decided that one ship can return a little earlier than the other, as a full complement of men is not needed to tidy things up now that all the experiments have been concluded.  But which will return to Earth first, the US or UK vessel?  All the astronauts have publishing contracts or deals with periodicals to produce accounts of their discoveries and adventures, and the British captain convinces the American captain to let the British crew stay on Luna longer; his persuasive argument is that they are only a few weeks away from living on the moon for a full six months, and if Britons are away from Blighty for over half a year they will face less income tax liability on what they make on their books and articles, seeing as they worked on them beyond the boundary of the United Kingdom.

Another pleasant if not laugh-out-loud funny joke based on human nature.

These "Venture to the Moon" stories have been light-hearted (but still science-filled) fun--thumbs up for all six!

"Expedition" by Fredric Brown (1957)

Back in 2018, when we were young, we learned that editor of F&SF Anthony Boucher considers Fredric Brown a master of the short-short, which they call the vignette or "the vinnie."  "Expedition" is just such a vinnie, less than two pages.

This is a lame joke story, as so many vinnies are.  Earth is starting a colony on Mars.  The first ship will carry thirty people, to be chosen by lot from among the graduates of the space academies--by a bizarre twist of luck, 29 women and only one man end up on the first ship.  When the second ship arrives on Mars, all 29 women have given birth--the sole male colonist impregnated all of them.  The joke is that the second ship arrived only nine months and two days after the first, so that guy must have had sex with all the women in a very short time span very soon after first meeting them (there being two space academies, one for men, the other for women.)

Thumbs down!

"Expedition" has been a big hit and has been reprinted many times in many languages, in various Brown collections as well as theme anthologies on math, sex and space pioneers.  

"The Dark Boy" by August Derleth (1957)

This is a decent story about people who are lonely, a story that has a hopeful sort of ending.

A young widow who is sad because she has no children comes to a small rural town to teach in the one room school house; the previous teacher left under somewhat strange circumstances, and by mysterious means has urged the widow to not take the job.  It turns out that a boy was killed in an accident on the school grounds a few years ago, and the previous teacher claimed to have seen the kid's ghost and was thus deemed crazy by the townspeople.  Our heroine also sees the ghost boy, and learns that the boy's father, a widower, regularly sees the ghost as well, which scares him--after all, if anybody finds out he is seeing a ghost they may say he is insane as well.  The new teacher reaches out to comfort the ghost and his father, and as the story ends I believe we are expected to understand that the new teacher and the widower (who has a living son as well as a ghost one) are going to build a happy family and relieve each other's loneliness as well as the loneliness of the ghost child.

Derleth has laid some clunkers on us, but this one is pretty well put together.  It appears a TV show was actually made out of "The Dark Boy," an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery that aired in 1971, the year of my birth.  It looks like Derleth died earlier in that year--it is too bad he didn't get to see this work of his broadcast on the small screen.  "The Dark Boy" has reappeared in several Derleth collections and two different anthologies helmed by Martin H. Greenberg.       

"Old Devlins Was A-Waiting" by Manly Wade Wellman (1957)

Alright, another story from a man associated with Weird Tales (as most of my readers will know, Derleth was a big supporter of Weird Tales whose work often appeared in its pages--one reason Derleth penned so many clunkers was that he hurriedly produced things to fill up space when Weird Tales was short and to sell to finance Arkham House, the famous but not really profitable publisher that was founded to keep the work of H. P. Lovecraft in print.)  "Old Devlins Was A-Waiting" is one of Wellman's numerous tales of John the Balladeer, a guy who travels around the South, his guitar always at his side, and would go on to be included in Wellman collections.

John comes to a small college and meets a female professor, Dr. Anda Lee McCoy, who is conducting research on ESP and the occult.  Dr. McCoy is a blue-eyed blonde beauty, and two men on campus are chasing her.  One is a Rixon Pengraft, a fat guy with expensive clothes who smokes a cigar; the other is Anderson Newlands, a veteran of the Korean war who has eye trouble because of a war injury.  Newlands has more ESP ability than any person Dr. McCoy has ever met.

McCoy has a theory that people with ESP can see into the past or future if the mood is right, and there is a lot of business with drawing a SATOR square on the floor, interpreting what the words in the square mean, and then having John play the music to a song that apparently refers to an ancestor of Newlands', Captain Anderson Hatfield, a soldier in the American Civil War and a leader of the famously feuding Hatfield clan.   John doesn't know many of the words to the song, but then Pengraft appears--it turns out this guy knows the words, and sings them with gusto because they slight Captain Hatfield--Newlands interrupts the singing because he fears that if the song is completed it will summon his dangerous ancestor!  But then Pengraft pisses Newlands off, putting him in a situation which he can't resolve himself (Pengraft has a gun and Newlands does not), so Newlands completes the spell and Captain Hatfield is summoned from the other side.  Hatfield humiliates Pengraft and makes sure Newlands can hook up with Dr. McCoy.  Wellman suggests that the cause of the famous Hatfield and McCoy feud was a Romeo and Juliet-style love match that Captain Hatfield himself obstructed, and that by assisting his descendent to marry a McCoy, Captain Hatfield is somehow redeeming himself.  

This story is well-written enough, the style and the pacing and all that, but I feel like the construction of the plot has some problems.  Are we supposed to admire a guy who summons a man of violence from the dead to solve his love triangle problem, and accept that a woman would find that sort of thing attractive?  I feel like summoning one of your dangerous undead relatives to defeat your enemies is something an evil wizard or devil-worshipping priest or a desperate naïf would do, and the story would sit better with me if Anda Lee McCoy and Anderson Newlands were morally ambiguous characters, but Wellman obviously wants us to see them as mature upstanding citizens and feel all warm inside because they are going to get married.  Rixon Pengraft is also a problem.  One might feel Wellman stacks the deck too much against this guy--I mean, he is fat, short, smokes a cigar, has expensive shoes, has a wacky snob last name and a first name that reminds you of Richard Nixon, and is portrayed as an over-the-top sneaky boastful coward.  And how does Pengraft know so much about that song, more than almost anybody else?  It is certainly a strange coincidence that he has rare knowledge that provides him a way to make fun of the very guy he is competing with for the hand of a woman.

Presumably Wellman wanted this to be a feel-good story about good people succeeding and evil people being punished, but the goody goods are too good and the baddie is too bad, while the plot device used by the heroes to defeat the villain is the sort of cheap and underhanded device a villain or an anti-hero would use, so the whole thing is not only too manipulative but also emotionally confused.  Merely acceptable.    

"Journeys End" by Poul Anderson (1957)

This is a well-regarded story that has been reprinted in anthologies many times by people like Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg (two different anthologies!), Robert Hoskins, J. Francis McComas and Marvin Kaye, as well as by Boucher for a "Best of" F&SF volume.  In his intro here in the magazine, Boucher complains that there have been too many telepathy stories in SF lately, but assures us this telepathy story by Anderson is fresh and "tender and tough-minded." 

The main character of "Journey's End" is a telepath, and Anderson's story is a pretty good "realistic" exploration of what life as a telepath in our society might be like, and also evidences what we might call Anderson's "right libertarianism"--a skepticism of governmental and religious authority, a belief that the United States is basically a good place, and a tolerance for pluralism and human foibles--as well as Anderson's sense that life and history are tragic.*  The telepath's powers manifested themselves during puberty, and he had to leave his father's house because Dad was a Christian fanatic and thought his son engaged in witchcraft.  The telepath is stressed out when too many people are nearby and their thoughts overwhelm him, so he lives in the country.  He is an adult now, a successful writer.  A few years ago while on a moving train he sensed there was a telepathic woman on a train travelling the other way; this has been his only encounter with a fellow telepath, and he feels this is the only woman he could ever love, and has been seeking her ever since.  The telepath figures if they become parents their kids will also be telepaths, and their grandchildren as well, and that they can found a race of telepaths that, because of their empathy, will be able to steer society into a utopia of peace.

At the end of this story, which is mostly devoted to the telepath's biography and describing the experience of being a telepath, he finally finds the woman, and we get our sad twist--after looking into each other's minds each is repelled by the other, not perhaps by knowledge of the other's faults and sins, but rather because he/she can't bear the knowledge that the other is fully apprised of his/her own shortcomings, this consciousness making it impossible for them to forget or ignore their own regrettable thoughts and actions.  Ironically, the main character, whom Anderson has depicted as able to forgive and tolerate other people's faults, is crippled by his inability to forgive his own.

Pretty good.  I feel like I've seen this plot before, and a look around the blog reveals that Ed Bryant's 1970 story "In the Silent World," which I read back in 2018, has a quite similar plot. 

*I will note here that, in his intro to "Journey's End" in his 1971 anthology Mind to Mind, Robert Silverberg characterizes Anderson's work as essentially optimistic and believes this story is an exception, so my "take" on Anderson, that he has a tragic sense of life and history, is apparently not unanimous.   

**********

On the whole, not a bad batch of stories, only the very short Brown piece being truly reprehensible. 

More 1950s short SF stories in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.