After putting up a blog post that discusses three of a Nobel-prize-winning American writer's short stories (and engages in some drive-by art criticism), let's return to one of our more conventional operations, reading selected short stories from a list of honorable mentions that Judith Merril, a woman adored by aficionados of the New Wave, put at the end of her 1957 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume. This will be the fourth installment of this project, finishing up the "B"s of Merril's alphabetical list. One "B" who interests us is Robert Bloch, and Merril included among the ranks of her honorable mentions the Chicago-born Psycho scribe's "I Like Blondes," a Playboy story we've already read and which I called "barely acceptable" when I wrote about it last year. Today we'll be reading four entries on Merril's list by "B"s who interest us which we haven't read yet, stories penned by Ray Bradbury, Reginald Bretnor, Algis Budrys and Frank Butler.
"Next Stop: The Stars" AKA "The End of the Beginning" by Ray Bradbury
This is a brief romantic and sentimental story that repeatedly references the African-American religious song "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel," likening the wheel seen by Ezekiel to the first space station. A man and his wife watch the sky to see the rocket manned by their son, Earth's first astronaut, take off to build that station. Before and after watching this historic and very personal (to him) event, the father mows the lawn--the lawnmower is another example of a wheel.
In addition to all the emotional stuff about the couple worrying and holding hands and jumping out of their seats when they see the rocket blast off, and the references to the "Negro spiritual" and the Bible, the story is characterized by Bradbury's idea that if Man can colonize other planets he will achieve a sort of immortality (after all, if all of us are stuck here on Earth we are only one gain-of-function mishap away from total extinction.)
This story is fine, but obviously lacks today the power it must have had before actual space stations had been built.
"The Past and Its Dead People" turns out to be a pretty conventional story on a pretty conventional subject--small town women who are nosy, small-minded and judgmental gossips! At 20 pages it feels sort of long and tedious--the metaphors and other literary flourishes add more to the length than to the atmosphere--as well as bland and cold--I feel like the main character could have been engaging, she being a woman driven by a passion and full of strong emotions, but Bretnor describes her as if from a distance, so we don't feel her excitement and aren't infected with her drive, don't hope or fear she will succeed.
The setting of Bretnor's story is one of those boarding houses we see so often in older fiction where a bunch of strangers live under one roof and eat together and watch TV together. One tenant is the widow Emily Molbert, who apparently has limited psychic powers that don't allow her to read minds or see through walls or anything really impressive like that, but do help her figure out things. Molbert likes to manipulate other people and demonstrate superiority over them, enjoys their envy of her, their fear of her, and their efforts to get her on their side.
A new guy, an older man named Dr. Flitter, comes to live in the boarding house and hang out with the crew, eating in the dining room with them and watching TV in the parlor with them every evening. Quiet and reserved, retired from medical practice and returned to America after a period of residence in Australia, everybody is curious about this guy, and Molbert senses he has some kind of dark past. Efforts to learn more about him achieve little until one day the landlady connives to give Molbert a chance to search his room. Molbert learns (I think) that Flitter euthanized a child, a relative of his, and is broken hearted over it. Backstabbing the landlady, Molbert doesn't share this blockbuster piece of gossip with the landlady, instead keeping it to herself and relishing the fact that she has a secret everybody else in the house is either trying to keep (the Doc) or is in agony to know (everybody else.) Molbert shows off her knowledge in clever, subtle, plausibly deniable ways, and, eventually, uses her knowledge to manipulate Flitter into dramatically commiting suicide.
"The Past and Its Dead People" is competent, so I'll grade it "acceptable," but I am curious why Merril thought it was so awesome--the best of the hundreds that appeared in 1956 SF magazines! Maybe the way it portrayed Americans as a bunch of small-minded hypocritically-moralistic status-seeking jerks appealed to her leftist sensibilities? Personally, I suspect the story could more easily be interpreted as a piece of misogyny, a portrayal of women as cruel, even sadistic, liars who employ guile to manipulate men and each other, and not necessarily out of concrete rational interest (for money, say) or for feminist reasons (like to get "Burning Bed" revenge on wife beaters or to undermine the patriarchy) but just for their own sick twisted pleasure.
Maybe it was Bretnor's treatment of euthanasia that appealed to Merril--the story implicitly or obliquely argues that euthanasia can be commendable, and skepticism of it is misguided, perhaps even bigoted. SF writers often question social taboos, like the taboos on incest and public nudity, and many argue that scientific experts should have a larger role in running society, so it wouldn't be that surprising to learn Merrril, a leftist SF writer, thought there should be more leeway for doctors--members of the cognitive elite--to kill people for their own good.
Finally, it is of course significant that the piece Merril thought the top story of 1956 is only barely describable as SF, its plot relying not at all on psychic powers (Bretnor could have just had Molbert figure out what Flitter did by discovering a diary or a letter or something mundane like that without changing the story's plot and themes a whit)--Merril famously thought the boundaries between SF and mainstream literature were bogus and sought to include in her famous anthologies stories by mainstream writers and from mainstream publications. But I can't endorse her assessment--this story is pretty average, not much more than filler.
"With a Dime on Top of It" is a psychological study of a man on a suicide mission! How does he handle the stress of knowing he is about to die?
The United States and the Soviet Union are at war, an air war in which bombers escorted by fighters try to make their way past interceptors and through anti-aircraft fire to deliver nuclear strikes on enemy cities. The US military has been caught with its pants down because it didn't train enough men in how to arm a nuclear bomb, so civilian technicians have been called for to accompany the bombers on their missions to Russia! Norman is just such a man, and we follow as he arrives at the air base, meets the bomber crew, boards and flies in the ship, arms the bomb and drops it on the Kremlin, where it explodes, destroying (I hope) the leadership of the USSR and also Norman's own bomber, which he expected all along. Budrys's focus is on Norman's mind, how he copes with the stress of knowing he has no hope of surviving the mission. Norman compartmentalizes his mind, focusing on the task at hand and forgetting he is about to die. He makes snide remarks and speaks in movie quotes. He follows his training like a robot. He flips a dime in his pocket and then indulges in the self-consciously dramatic gesture of putting the dime on the bomb so the coin will fall with the bomb.
The theme of much of Budrys's work is the question of "what is a man?" and here he explores the psychology of the kind of person who can successfully go through with a complex operation while burdened with the knowledge that he and all his fellows will not survive that operation.
"With a Dime on Top of It" is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis, but it doesn't build to a climax or spring a surprise ending on readers or anything like that, because we know from the start that Norman and his fellows are doomed to die. Maybe we are supposed to be surprised that Norman actually goes through with it, that he doesn't turn out to be a communist spy or suddenly become a peacenik and betray the mission or at the last minute figure out a way to save the bomber or something--maybe the twist ending is that there is no twist ending!
It looks like "With a Dime on Top of It" was never reprinted after its debut in Science Fiction Stories, which is not surprising seeing as it is not conventionally satisfying.
"To the Wilderness I Wander" by Frank Butler
Marianne, an attractive young married woman and a grad student who teaches English literature, reads detective and science fiction stories, and has crushed her husband's spirit with her sarcasm, is riding the New York City subway one day when the train drives right into another dimension with different subway stations. She gets out at a cavernous station devoid of life and walks around.
Butler's text largely concerns itself with the woman's ambiguous and equivocal feelings. Is she scared or is she not scared? Does she want to be scared or is she scared of being scared? A theme of the story seems to be how we can never pin anything down or be certain of anything, that authenticity is a myth--our sense impressions of the outside world and our memories are totally unreliable and our own thoughts and feelings are artificial constructs.
Again she wondered whether she were mad. This time it was an idle thought, but still not without appeal. It would explain a good many things about her and about what seemed to be going on, but now she doubted whether she could ever convince herself of it.
After ten pages on the subway and in the alien subway station Marianne finds a stairway and climbs to the surface to find an empty room, and then steps out into an empty city of crooked streets and buildings reminiscent of 17th-century Europe. Finally she meets another person, Benjamin, an ugly man who, in keeping with the story's themes, speaks cryptically, often ignores questions, and whenhe does answer professes ignorance. Marianne's interactions with Benjamin reveal more of her character, and we see that, as with Bretnor's psyker, Butler's student has the sort of character flaws we associate with women:
...being sophisticated...[Marianne] abhorred plainness, abhorred any simplicity of dress or manner that was not calculated to attract covetous men or impress envious women.Women are shallow, they are fake, and they live emotional lives entirely based on what others think of them--at least according to male authors Bretnor and Butler.
Page after page of boring description and tedious inconclusive dialogue ensues ("To the Wilderness I Wander" is over 25 pages long.) Benjamin eventually explains that this world is a world of futures, histories, which never occurred, "a place of things that did not quite happen," inhabited by people who, like Marianne and himself, blundered into this world that is "time's refuse heap." Perhaps Merril liked this boring thing because it serves as a debunking or subversion of traditional SF stories in which characters are transported to Barsoom or Narnia or wherever and get mixed up in wars and with princesses and become heroes--Benjamin tells Marianne that he doesn't really understand this place and has no map to it and sums up "This is not Africa, Marianne, and I have found no romance to tell you and no weapons for us to use." When Marianne realizes she is stuck here in this empty world forever because she was a selfish fool on Earth she thinks she can change and become a good person as well as Benjamin's lover, but Benjamin assures her that there is no hope, love or sex here in this netherworld:
"There is no love and little emotion here. There are no men and no women. There are only lost people."
"To the Wilderness I Wander" debuted in The Hudson Review alongside an example of serious literature that is seriously hard to understand, Ezra Pound's 96th Canto, a long poem full of Greek, Chinese, Latin, and references to history only very few people are going to get--in one stanza of the poem Pound actually flaunts this, writing "If we never write anything save what is already understood, the field of understanding will never be extended. One demands the right, now and again, to write for a few people with special interests and whose curiosity reaches into greater detail." I read "To the Wilderness I Wander" in the scan at the internet archive of Martha Foley's Fifty Best American Short Stories.
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I think it is fair to say that I didn't like any of these stories as much as Merril did, though I only thought one of them was actually bad.
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