Merril-approved 1956 stories: Carter, Clarke and Clifton

Here at MPoricus Fiction Log we are picking out stories to read from the list of Honorable Mentions at the end of Judith Merril's 1957 anthology of 1956 SF stories, the second of her famous anthology series.  (Get your copy at Wonder Book!)  Our enterprise is full of surprises, in part because Merril, always trying to expand the definition of what SF is and always concerned about the public perception of SF, doesn't just do the obvious thing and pluck good science fiction and fantasy stories from genre magazines like F&SF and Astounding and Galaxy--she also mixes things up by recommending bad stories from literary journals like The Hudson Review, as we saw last time.  I'm not (exactly) complaining--in the same way Telengard wouldn't be the same if there wasn't a chance of getting burnt to a crisp by a level 17 dragon before you can even touch a key, and spending the day going to Washington, D.C. museums and bookstores wouldn't be the same if you weren't likely to be harassed by an army of insane beggars while you were trying to savor your braised lamb at Cava, part of the excitement of reading a batch of these Merril-approved stories is the chance of having to endure some inexplicable piece of junk.  There is no adventure without risk!

This will be the fifth installment of this endeavor; today we start reading stories by "C" authors--four stories which all appeared in reputable SF magazines.  Below find links to the "A"s and the "B"s.

            Abernathy and Aldiss
            Anderson, Allen and Banks 

            Barrow, Beaumont and Blish

            Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler

"Unbalanced Equation" by Paul A. Carter

Let's start with a story from an issue of F&SF we've already looked at recently, when we read Robert Abernathy's "The Year 2000" (link above.)  Paul A. Carter has like a dozen fiction credits at isfdb, and also wrote a history of SF magazines.  I don't believe I have read anything by him before, so today MPorcius Fiction Log blazes new territory.

Paul A. Carter was a college professor, one of the cognitive elite, and "Unbalanced Equation" is about how in their role as the maintainers of order the cognitive elite sometimes have to trick, manipulate and lie to the common people.  

Nuclear war wipes out the human race on Earth and the communist moon base--but the American moon base survives!  Finally some good news!  The entire human species now consists of like 2,500 people--and only 130 of them are women!  About 110 of them quickly get married, but that leaves 2,400 young men with nobody to marry, nobody to have sex with!  Carter's story is mostly about how the General commanding these 2,500 people tries to maintain order so the human race can endure.

The US moon base was home to a Mars colonization project that was almost ready to go when the war broke out, so the 2,500 blast off for Mars, where, in this story, people can breathe the air (with the help of compressors) and eat the native flora and fauna.  The survivors of the war quickly start building a colony, but it is obvious that the imbalance between men and women is going to cause chaos, with men fighting over the tiny number of women and women betraying their husbands when they get sick of them and so forth.  The number of married couples is so small, every single couple must be protected, must be given every chance to produce as many children as possible!  So, the General comes up with the idea of leaving the married couples at the landing site and splitting the unmarried men and women into four exploratory expeditions.  Some scouts from one of these columns have the delusion they have seen a beautiful woman in the distance; the general encourages the men to believe the sighting legit, and has them search for native women with the idea that if the men have hope they won't devolve into a crazy mass of suicidal or murderous maniacs and spoil any hope for humankind's enduring survival.  There is also the, somewhat obliquely presented, idea that the handful of unmarried women will be promiscuous and sexually satisfy the men of the four exploratory columns. 

(I think maybe the illustration on the cover of the magazine depicts the sighting of the hallucination.)

Even though "Unbalanced Equation" takes for granted the value of the traditional heterosexual family and seems to celebrate women acting as prostitutes to save humanity, it has feminist elements--the Earth women are not foolish enough to believe there are native women on Mars and a woman saves the General from death during a monster attack.

This story is OK.  It looks like other editors didn't like it as much as Merril did--after appearing in the French version of F&SF, it has never been reprinted (according to isfdb.)    

"The Starting Line" by Arthur C. Clarke

Alright, something by one of the "Big Three" classic SF writers.  On Merril's list under Clarke's name appears "'Venture to the Moon,' F&SF 12/56."  A look at isfdb and wikipedia indicate that "Venture to the Moon" is actually a series of six stories that first saw print in The London Evening Standard.  F&SF in 1956 published two of them, "The Starting Line," the first, and "Robin Hood, F. R. S.," the second.  We'll read those two today; if they are good maybe someday I'll track down and read the rest.  But be forewarned: while F&SF editor Anthony Boucher and Judith Merril seem to have liked them, Damon Knight, the hard ass who lost a job because he insisted on telling the truth about how much Merril's novel The Tomorrow People sucked, thought the "Venture to the Moon" stories (reports wikipedia) "remarkably trivial."     

      

I think of Clarke as a pretty optimistic guy, and "The Starting Line" is a cheery optimistic little story.  Not only are the United States and the Soviet Union working together on the project of travelling to the moon, but they have included the United Kingdom as an equal partner in the endeavor!  Each nation has a spaceship orbiting Earth; our narrator is the commander of the British ship, and he tells us he is bosom chums with both the other captains.  When he gets the word from the British government that on D-Day he should jump the gun so that Great Britain will have the immortal honor of putting the first man on the moon, he is appalled, but goes through with it anyway.  The very predictable twist ending is that the god-damned commies and the irrepressible Yanks have gotten the same orders from the Kremlin and Washington, so all three captains fire their rockets early and the three ships land on Luna within a second of each other.  (You see kids, we in the West are just like the Soviet Union!)       

Slight, even silly, but well-written and pleasant if you can look past the way the USSR is regarded as morally equivalent to the US and UK (something Merril presumably had no trouble doing.)  Boucher included the "Venture to the Moon" stories in the seventh "Best of" anthology of F&SF stories, and they would also be reprinted in numerous Clarke collections.  There's a market for these light feel-good stories.

"Robin Hood, F. R. S." by Arthur C. Clarke

The second of the "Venture to the Moon" stories is a traditional hard SF story about astronauts facing a problem and solving it through application of reason and science knowledge.  A load of supplies from an unmanned supply rocket ends up atop a difficult to scale cliff, and the boffins figure out how to get the supplies down by shooting arrows, taking advantage of the low lunar gravity.  The story's main joke is that after this caper that locale on Luna is named "Sherwood Forest."  Another of the story's benign little jokes is a reflection of how Americans are rich and have the most elaborate equipment--a common observation of British people exposed to Americans during WW2.  

A pleasant little thing.

"Clerical Error" by Mark Clifton

The final Merril Honorable Mention we'll be reading today is Mark Clifton's "Clerical Error."  In Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, "Clerical Error" is listed as debuting in T. E. Dikty's The Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels: 1956, but when you look at that anthology (a scan of which is available at the internet archive) you see it says the story originally appeared in Astounding.  Odd.  In case the story was revised for inclusion in Dikty's book, I will note that I am reading the story in a scan of the February 1956 Astounding.  (I don't know if I have read any Clifton before--more virgin territory falls within the experience of MPorcius Fiction Log!)

"Clerical Error" is a story about the value of skepticism, freedom of speech, open-mindedness, thinking outside the box, and not being a yes-man.  

America is deep in a dangerous cold war, and scientists are needed to develop the latest technologies so we can prevail in the twilight struggle!  But many of our young scientists are suffering nervous breakdowns!  Dr. K. Heidrich Kingston is a Division Administrator at a government psychiatric hospital, and one such case, that of David Storm, comes to his attention when Dr. Ernest Moss requests permission to lobotomize Storm.  Kingston is skeptical of lobotomy, and doesn't just let the headshrinkers under his authority lobotomize people with reckless abandon as they would like to--our hero insists on specifically reviewing all such procedures before authorizing them.  Moss is one of these jokers who loves lobotomizing peeps, and has set Kingston a trap.  Storm knows all kinds of classified information, so only people with a top security clearance can talk to him; Moss, as a yes-man, has such a clearance--he is in fact head of the wing that treats men who are working on top secret projects and have gone off their rockers--but Kingston, a free thinker who gives off strong Thomas Szasz vibes*, isn't considered reliable enough by the establishment to receive a top security clearance, so he can't talk to Storm, and so can't really examine him to determine if a lobotomy is warranted or not.

Kingston is a true man of science--he loves learning!  He was content to be a small-time psychiatrist, but his nurse/secretary, Miss Verity (always with the evocative names!), whom he hired twenty-five years ago, is an ambitious and detail-minded woman, and has guided Kingston's career to its current pinnacle.  Kingston thinks too many of America's scientists don't have the skepticism that is the true essence of science; many of them went into science only because it is a cushy job with decent pay and some prestige, not because of a passion to increase the human store of knowledge, and these careerists are yes-men more interested in not rocking the boat and winning promotions than in pursuing the truth.  The government encourages the prominence of this personality type among the scientists working on our defense by only giving security clearances to the most loyal and predictable men--nobody with new ideas who questions dogma and resists authority can get a security clearance.  As a result, American scientific development is stagnating, producing no new ideas. 

Kingston figures out that Storm lost his mind ("withdrew from reality") because he began to suspect some truth that went against the settled science and his rigid mind--trained to obey superiors and utter no dissent lest he jeopardize his career--couldn't handle it.  Through clever manipulation of paperwork and personnel assignment, Kingston gets himself labelled insane and put in the same cell with Storm!  By talking to Storm he discovers what cognitive dissonance it was that drove Storm insane--the awareness that the scientific method and the regime of rigid obedience to rules were in conflict--and Kingston cures him.  Maybe this success presages a successful effort to loosen the rules and change the culture of the American science establishment in such a way that the free world's scientists will enjoy greater dynamism and productivity and give us an edge over the Reds!  

This is a good science fiction story in the classic mold that romanticizes science as a crusading, pioneering enterprise and the scientist as the heroic individual and denounces sclerotic bureaucracy and collectivist groupthink.  I liked that it suggested that most scientists are just ordinary people subject to ordinary selfish go-along-to-get-along biases and pressures and that it subtly warned us that we should take care that the pressures of the struggle against tyrannical collectivists not lead us to emulate those collectivist tyrannies.  While I am primarily seeing it as an attack on government, bureaucracy and the psychological establishment, lefties can embrace the story as an attack on McCarthyism and 1950s conformity.  (But, look out, feminists--Kingston--and I guess Clifton!--has some theories about women's attitudes about men and society that you are not going to like!) 

Thumbs up!  T. E. Dikty, Judith Merril and I all like "Clerical Error," but perhaps its biggest booster is our hero Barry Malzberg, who says in the intro to the story in Neglected Visions that "Clerical Error" is a masterpiece, Mark Clifton is "the most unjustly forgotten of all science fiction writers" and that he (Malzberg) had the idea to put out Neglected Visions primarily to serve as a way to get Clifton back on SF readers' radar.  Malzberg also suggests that "Clerical Error"'s attack on yes-men and leaders who demand obedience and rigid conformity is also a subtle dig at Clifton's editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., who famously guided his writers' output and put the stamp of his own personality on Astounding.     

*Speaking of her difficulty in getting Kingston a top security clearance, Miss Verity says "you've made public statements questioning the basic foundations upon which modern psychology is built.  You've questioned the value of considering everyone who doesn't blend in with the average norm as being aberrated."      

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log have blogged about several stories that appear in Dikty's
volume: Young's "Jungle Doctor," de Camp's "Judgment Day," Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon,"
Robinson's "Dream Street," Bloch's "I Do Not Love Thee, Dr. Fell," Scortia's "Shores of Night," and
Godwin's "You Created Us."

**********

I can't fault Merril on any of these choices.  The Clarke stories and the Clifton piece achieve their goals and are quite entertaining, and the Carter story, while not brilliant, addresses a provocative topic more or less successfully.  Lots of science in these stories, lots of Cold War material, and two of them have lots of gender stuff--definitely worth checking out if those are your interests.

More 1950s excitement awaits in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!