Merril-approved 1956 stories: de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle

I love the spires (or whatever they are) that appear in Richard Powers' illustrations
for the front and back covers of 
SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume

As you know, Bob, here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are exploring 1956 speculative fiction by going through the list headed "Honorable Mention" at the back of famed anthologist Judith Merril's 1957 volume SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume and reading in scans of old magazines stories recommended by Merril whose authors or titles strike our fancy.  Today we'll read stories by "D" authors Merril anointed with her approval to the number of four.  But first I will point out that I read and wrote about the Avram Davidson story Merril included on her '56 Honorable Mention list, "King's Evil," about a year ago, and present a list of links to the A, B and C stories on Merril's list which we've already discussed.

            Abernathy and Aldiss
            Anderson, Allen and Banks 

            Barrow, Beaumont and Blish

            Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler    

            Carter, Clarke and Clifton

            Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen

"Internal Combustion" by L. Sprague de Camp 

I read quite a few de Camp things before starting this blog and my reaction to them was lukewarm, so I haven't read a lot of his work since MPorcius Fiction Log slouched onto the scene.  But let's give "Internal Combustion," which debuted in the same issue of Infinity Science Fiction that included Charles Beaumont's "Traumerai," which we read just a month ago, a shot.

"Internal Combustion" is a sort of misanthropic black humor story that portrays (middle-class) people as violent racists who oppress the less fortunate, so we can guess why leftist Merril liked it.  It is actually pretty well-written; some of the jokes, based on character and personality and not puns (thank heavens), are good and the plot is alright, so I can give it a moderate recommendation.

The main cast of the story consists of a bunch of robots who are wearing out and have been abandoned by their owners, the MacDonalds.  Old MacDonald got rich publishing a xenophobic newspaper, but his offspring had no interest in living in his mansion so they abandoned it and its staff of robots.  Over the years these robots, receiving no maintenance, have fallen into disrepair; one symptom of this neglect is the fact that they have lost many of their inhibitions against harming human beings.  In fact, their leader, nuclear-powered Napoleon, after poring over the "N" volume of the encyclopedia, has decided to emulate his namesake and launch a merciless scheme to make himself ruler of the world.  Napoleon can't leave the mansion because of a malfunctioning leg and so has come up with the idea of kidnapping a human and grooming him to become the figurehead of his robot dictatorship.  The opening scene of the story clues us in to how dark "Internal Combustion" is--one of Napoleon's subordinate robots, Hercules, has kidnapped a homeless person to serve as this figurehead, but accidentally slain him, so Napoleon instructs his mechanical minions to hide the body.  He then directs them to try to kidnap a child whom Napoleon can raise into a world conqueror.

There is a lot of comedy around how the subordinate robots are powered by liquid fuel and prefer gasoline because it makes them drunk, and a lot of business with the child the robots kidnap, a kid who loves violence and acts like a terrible brat, and that kid's father, who is a portrait of middle-class angst, a guy who feels unfulfilled because he inherited wealth and doesn't have to work and his nagging wife won't let him pursue his hobbies or take the kind of working-class job he might enjoy because it is low status; this guy is an irresponsible father, lazy, and has a therapist.  There is also quite a bit of talk (from the robots, which we perhaps are not meant to take seriously) about how the robots are just as deserving of love and civil rights as the humans, but are treated shabbily by their creators.  (The misbehavior of the robots is clearly shown to be the fault of humans--when they are drunk or violent the robots are emulating their neglectful creators and sinful masters.)    

The story's hero is the one robot among the decaying MacDonald crew whose "serve humans" programming is still largely intact.  Named Homer, this robot has also been programmed to recite poetry, and in his voice de Camp unleashes plenty of popular verses from such poets as Dorothy Parker ("Resume"), Omar Khayyam ("The Rubaiyat") and Oliver Wendell Holmes ("One-Hoss Shay.")  Homer works odd jobs to get money to buy fuel--the other robots steal--and when a disaster occurs Homer sacrifices his own mechanical life to save the child kidnapped by Napoleon.

"Internal Combustion" is like 16 pages of text that move at a brisk pace and are always engaging--a respectable choice by Merril, and a better story than I had expected it to be.  Among other places, "Internal Combustion" can be found in the oft-reprinted de Camp collection A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales and Mike Ashley's robot-themed anthology Souls in Metal.   

"The Margenes" by Miriam Allen deFord 

I don't think I've ever read anything by deFord, whose name sometimes appears as "de Ford," as it does in connection to this story, which first saw print in If and was included in an If anthology published a year later, as well as the 1971 deFord collection Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow and the 1978 Helen Hoke anthology Demons Within and Other Disturbing Tales.

"The Margenes" is a twist-ending idea story with no real characters and precious little plot, one of those stories that is presented as a popular history written in the far future.  DeFord's tale is almost 100% speculation, and its field is political economy; it reminds me a little of Edmond Hamilton's early work depicting scientific disasters that befall the Earth (see "The Truth Gas," "The Life-Masters" and "The Death Lord") and Mack Reynolds' 1960s stories that speculate on economics and Cold War "what ifs" (like "Freedom," "Revolution" and "Subversive,") but those guys generally include in those stories horror and adventure elements (in Hamilton's case) or detective or spy shenanigans (Reynolds) in an effort to pad the page count and/or up the entertainment value; deFord's story is brief and its human element is a sort of cursory portrait of a couple that dramatizes the vacuity of relationships under industrial capitalism. 

All of a sudden strange little creatures, in the millions, start washing up on the beaches of California.  Neither animal nor plant, but packed with healthy proteins and every nutrient imaginable, these things are the perfect food, and they are breathtakingly abundant!  These creatures are named "margenes" because the first people to see them bore the first names Marge and Gene.  

The human race is suffering widespread hunger due to overpopulation, so the government moves quickly to subsidize the exploitation of this new resource and distribute the superfood around the world.  Beautiful California beaches and forests quickly become industrial eyesores, but the world economy is buoyed and relations between the liberal West and the communist East improve markedly.  But nine years later the supply of margenes suddenly runs out and the economy tanks and world war erupts and the human race is almost wiped out.

(Marge and Gene serve as archetypes of the futility of middle-class life--they abandon their dreams of fulfilling intellectual careers and take soulless office jobs pushing margene, get married, get divorced, then separately get killed in the wars that erupt after the supply of margenes runs out.)

The twist ending is that the margenes were members of a race of extraterrestrials who have overpopulated their own planet and have been spreading throughout the galaxy, planet to planet, seeking living space.  After expending all her imagination on describing the economic and political effects of a cheap and abundant food source, deFord does not bother to explain how there aliens got into the Pacific Ocean without being seen falling from the sky or something and why they have no visible culture or technology and didn't resist being eaten, just handwaving away all details of margene life as incomprehensible to the human mind.  Coming out of nowhere and making little sense, the twist ending of "The Margenes" sort of undermines the plausibility of the story as a whole.

Merely acceptable.  Presumably Merril appreciated the story's focus on overpopulation, criticisms of industrialism, economic explanations for social phenomena like war, and the "meta" gag at the end in which the future author says science fiction writers wrote many stories speculating about what first contact with aliens might be like but never guessed that it would consist of us eating the delicious aliens.

"Flat Tiger" by Gordon R. Dickson

Here's another famous guy whose work I have only found OK upon my early introduction to it and so have not really sought out since.  But I liked the de Camp from '56 that Merril chose, so maybe I'll like Gordon Dickson's "Flat Tiger," which first came under the eyes of SF fans in an issue of Galaxy that also features de Camp's famous "A Gun for Dinosaur" and the first episode of Frederik Pohl's "Slave Ship."

Ugh, this is a joke story based on puns and childish fantasies that tried my patience.  The Galactic civilization of thousands of distinct intelligent species is holding a race and the speed star ship of one of the contestants breaks down because one of the tigers that manages one of its four warp engines runs out of the essential gas it has to inhale to perform its function.  (This is the kind of wordplay that Dickson founds his story on, the fact that "gas" is short for "gasoline" and "tiger" sounds like "tire."  Oy.)  This fanged and tentacled contestant, named Captain Bligh, lands on the lawn of the White House in mid-century America to ask the President for help getting more of the gas required to fill his flat tiger.  We learn that, secretly, within the White House, lives a guy who is the president's special adviser--this is an hereditary position occupied by thr same family since the days of George Washington, and it has analogs in the offices of other great powers, among them the Soviet Union.  These secret eminence grises are the real masters of the world.  A conference is held in the White House that gathers Captain Bligh and the chief executives of the top four nations of the world--the US, USSR, Great Britain and France (those were the days!) and the Earthers open negotiations with Captain Blight on a deal to allow Earth membership in the Galactic Federation.  Should we join, the aliens will cure all our diseases, set up a teleporter so we can explore the universe, install clean energy sources, etc.  In return, we need only offer the aliens our love--in the post-scarcity society of the Galactic civilization, the only thing of real value is love. 

The twist ending is that members of the Galactic Federation must be physically reengineered to live directly off energy--humans won't be permitted to eat animals or plants or even drink water, as the Federation members love all living things, even the microorganisms we humans kill by the billions in the process of preparing drinking water.  So the representatives of the four leading nations agree to forgo membership in the Galactic Federation, and the Earth becomes united in peace behind a shared love of food and drink and opposition to the aliens who would take our food and drink from us.

Thumbs down for this dopey waste of time.  Maybe Merril liked its irreverent attitude towards the Cold War and American pretensions to being a democracy, and the idea it floats that people so covet the sensual pleasure of eating and drinking that they would pass up a chance to end all illness and poverty and lift all limits to human knowledge in order to keep on chowing down. 

"Flat Tiger" would be reprinted in the Dickson collection Danger--Human, the paperback edition of which bears the title The Book of Gordon R. Dickson. 

"The Lover of the Coral Glades" by Adrian Conan Doyle

As you have probably guessed if you didn't already know, Adrian Conan Doyle is one of the sons of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame.  "The Lover of the Coral Glades" appeared in the same issue of Playboy as Richard Matheson's "A Flourish of Strumpets," which we read pretty recently.  

"The Lover of the Coral Glades" is the story of the tragic love affair of a 200-year old sperm whale.  Never has this bull whale met a cow whale he could truly love, though he has of course impregnated some and then abandoned them.  (This is Playboy you are reading, remember.)  But finally he meets her, his dream cow!  They fall deeply in love, and spend months together, swimming all over the world eating squid.  One day when the she-whale is pregnant and they are in a part of the ocean with few squid near the surface the male whale ventures alone to the darkest deep to kill a giant squid and bring back a chunk of it to feed his bride.  But, alas, his wife has been mortally wounded by thresher sharks working in concert with a swordfish--there is also a whaling ship stalking her!  (I read this section multiple times, the idea of thresher sharks and a swordfish teaming up to murder a whale with their tails and bill being so outlandish that I thought maybe I was misunderstanding what was going on.)  The pregnant whale expires and sinks, and then the crew of the whaling ship kills the grieving male whale with one shot from their harpoon gun; the beast immediately sinks so they can't harvest its sperm and blubber.  The whalers figure a merciful God made sure the whale would sink so it need not suffer further indignities in its time of sorrow and can lie forever on the bottom of the ocean besides its wife and the mass of cells it thinks of as its unborn child.

This story is histrionic and boring when it isn't being eye-poppingly ridiculous; it begs to be taken super seriously, but everything that happens in it is absurd.  Thumbs down.  I think here Merril fell victim to her desire to expand the definition of SF to include mainstream fiction that appeared in mainstream outlets but engaged in what we might in a generous mood call "speculation."

"The Lover of the Coral Glades" would be reprinted in the Doyle collection Tales of Love and Hate.

**********

There is a tradition in SF of stories that glorify and romanticize science and technology and their ability to make human life better as well as the scientist and the man of intelligence who solves problems by quick thinking and knowledge of logic and scietific laws.  Today's four stories are not in that tradition.  Today's stories are examples of the tradition of misanthropic elitism in SF and stories that employ non-human characters to illustrate human pettiness, callousness, short-sightedness and propensity for violence.  The de Camp is a good example, as it offers characters with personality and an entertaining narrative.  The deFord is not terrible, but it lacks human feeling and the gimmicky ending is a little hard to take.  Dickson's story is based on irritatingly childish jokes, and the Doyle story is embarrassingly melodramatic slosh that is also full of elements that beggar belief.  

So, today Merril served up to us a heaping plate of downer stories.  Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log to see how many more of Merril's favorite 1956 stories are designed to make you hate the human race.