"The Timeless Man" by Frank Belknap Long
It looks like this story by one of H. P. Lovecraft's closest associates has never been reprinted. "The Timeless Man" is a paean to the power of art and a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for creative people; the science fiction gimmick at its center bears some similarity to that in A. E. van Vogt's "The Monster" (AKA "Resurrection,") which appeared in Astounding in August of 1948.
Holden is a painter who loves life, loves doing his work, loves seeing the beauty of the world around him. A nuclear was has broken out, and even as the deadly radiation is penetrating his flesh, killing him, he is painting his final canvas.
When aliens arrive on Earth, Holden's dedication to his art receives extreme vindication--he put so much of himself into his last painting that the aliens are able to deduce his entire psyche and physical form from the canvas and construct a duplicate of him. I guess because it is necessary for the plot, the aliens don't stick around until Holden II wakes up, ostensibly because the radiation still enshrouding the Earth is unhealthy for them, which is ridiculous, because if they have a starship they must have some kind of radiation shield technology. Anyway, the duplicate Holden wakes up and sees their ship receding into the sky, and then his own skeleton, identifiable by the ring on its finger.
Holden II manages to survive in post-atomic war America, finding that breeding populations of fruits and birds and small animals have endured. The story's climax is when he meets a small tribe of humans--savages, cave people. The tribe accepts him, and he resumes his career as an artist, using paints he makes from berries and dirt.
I like this one--Long's argument that art is essential, eternal, and can be a source of joy in any circumstance is a little naïve, self-serving, and saccharine, but I appreciate the sincerity he brings to the story and I can sympathize with, even identify with, his vision.
"This Star Shall Be Free" by Murray Leinster
Tork is a subordinate male in a small tribe of people who have fire and pointed sticks, but no stone or flint blades yet. One day aquatic aliens--their reflective silver starship and their spacesuits are filled with water--arrive. These Antareans are telepathic and also have a machine, a box, that sends out hypnotic waves--those close to the box focus their thoughts on a certain type of creature, and that creature is irresistibly attracted to the machine. With this attractor box they draw Tork to their ship. As an experiment in ecology, they give Tork stone knives, spears with stone points, a bow, and arrows with flint heads; they also give him the attractor box and explain how to use it. They even supply him with pictures of local animals to help him use the device to attract animals--it is easier to concentrate your thoughts on an animal if you have a picture of it to look at. The aliens, who are callous jerks who have overpopulated their own world and are looking for other watery planets to colonize, think that with the weapons and the attractor box the Earthers will exterminate the local wildlife and then starve themselves.
Tork, using these tools, makes himself chief of the tribe, and earns the envy of many other tribes; people start stealing the weapons. So Tork figures out how to use the attractor box to attract the Antareans, in hopes the aliens will replenish his weapon supply. To concentrate strongly enough about the aliens to compel them to come, the cave people draw images of the Antareans--the aliens have not only inspired man to begin using complex tools, but to begin making representational art. The humans are such a nuisance with their use of the attractor box that the Antareans abandon Earth before seeing how their experiment in ecology works out. In their absence, the people of Earth learn how to make their own weapons and create increasingly more sophisticated art.
When the Antareans return 30,000 or so years later to colonize Earth they find the humans have a heavily armed interplanetary space fleet. The Antareans are outfought and the Terran space navy captures a specimen of their interstellar drive--foolishly, the Antareans have twice spurred technological and cultural growth among humans, enabling them to conquer the galaxy.
An acceptable entertainment. isfdb lists three anthologies in which "This Star Shall Be Free" has been reprinted: Groff Conklin's Invaders of Earth, which saw quite a few editions, Michael Sissons' Asleep in Armageddon, and Thomas E. Sanders' Speculations, which looks like a 600-page textbook that mixes people like James Dickey, W. H. Auden and Graham Greene in among SF Grand Masters like Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt and Fritz Leiber.
"Impossible" by Ray Bradbury
Two older people have retired to Mars, to a homestead near a canal; they lack indoor plumbing and bring water in buckets from the canal. Their son died as a teenager on Earth long ago, but, amazingly, he suddenly shows up, still fourteen years old. The husband realizes this must be a Martian shape shifter who has read in their minds their memories of their son, but the wife is more susceptible to the weird native's hypnotism. The Martian seems friendly, to want to be loved as much as the settlers want to love, so maybe it will be OK.
Tragedy strikes! The wife recalls how much their son enjoyed going into town back on Earth, so she insists they take their boat down the canal to the nearby town. The "son" is very reluctant to go, but she overcomes his resistance. In the town, other humans see the shape shifter as some dead person from their own past, and everybody fights over the alien, who can't take the pressure on his not-exactly-voluntary shape-shifting ability and expires. Sad!
Quite good.
"Appointment for Tomorrow" by John D. MacDonald
Here we have a story by famous detective novelist MacDonald. We here at MPorcius Fiction Log (feel free to call it "The MFL" for short) have read MacDonald's SF novel Wine of the Dreamers and six of his SF short stories: "Ring Around the Redhead," "A Child is Crying," "Flaw," "Spectator Sport," and "A Condition of Beauty." Here comes lucky seven, which, if isfdb is to be believed, was never reprinted.
You can see why this one wasn't included in anthologies and collections like some other of MacDonald SF stories we have read: the main gimmick is kind of weak and the human story simple and sappy. Reminding us of Robert Heinlein's "Lifeline" (Astounding, 1939) and Isaac Asimov's sprawling Foundation series (the first of which appeared in Astounding in 1942), in the future the government can use statistics to figure out what day you will (probably) die. Six months ago, 40-something widower and big business president Samuel Larkin got a notice from the "Future Bureau" that his day was approaching if he didn't make radical changes in his life. Larkin felt he couldn't leave his job, there being thousands of people relying on him, and so today the feds have come to his office to warn him that tomorrow is the day he will die! This doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense to the reader, seeing as Larkin is perfectly healthy, but all the characters have trust in the science and believe the Future Bureau's calculations implicitly.
Larkin says farewell to everybody and writes memos to his successor on how to handle all the current projects and otherwise straightens up his affairs. His gorgeous secretary, 20-something Martha Hood, admits she has been in love with him for seven years. Then Larkin takes a long walk through the night city (we are to believe he is going to buy the farm tomorrow but he is hale and hearty enough to walk from dusk till dawn), drinking in the atmosphere of the city for the last time.
The text has been hinting at some "alternative," and the twist ending that greets readers is that the government offers a way to radically change your life so you can beat the statistics and survive. The most radical change you can make to your life is flying to another planet, right? So, people who are predicted to die can "volunteer" to join the space colonization effort, a very unpleasant and dangerous enterprise, but better than death while you are still healthy, right? After his long walk, Larkin boards the star ship and is strapped in. At the last moment Martha Hood hurries on to the ship, one of the vanishingly small number of people who sign up for these horrifying space missions even though the government stats suggest they have many years to live. Her love overcame her fear of space, and Larkin can now look forward to the future with hope.
The idea that statisticians can predict a healthy person will die of an accident on a specific day is very hard to take, at least for me. I am seriously considering that the Future Bureau is a government scam to trick capable people into colonizing space, but MacDonald doesn't seem to leave much room for this interpretation, which would make more sense in a totalitarian society in which the government keeps a tight rein on information and punishes dissent, not the liberal market society he depicts here.
Weak filler.
"The Sleepers" by John D. MacDonald
MacDonald gets a second bite at the apple today because he has two stories in this issue of "The Big Book of Science Fiction," this one appearing under the pen name John Wade Farrell. Maybe "8" is the lucky number today.
In fact, "The Sleepers" is another filler story, but it is more internally consistent and believable than "Appointment for Tomorrow," and its themes, you might say its ethos, are more amenable to my own sensibilities, so I'm judging it as solidly acceptable.
It is the future. For like 1,300 years the vast majority of the human race, generation after generation, has lived in a sort of induced coma, stacked up in niches in a uniform city of hundreds of identical buildings, fed intravenously, their waste products sucked away by tubes. People are conceived in a machine, moved to a cold niche where their hearts beat just ten times an hour, then, after a century or so of life, they die and are put in the furnace.
The population of over a billion sleepers are tended to by 8,000 workers. Workers are men (and only men) who are woken from sleep, indoctrinated hypnotically by machines, and then serve a twenty-year tour of duty at such tasks as handling the conception and birth of new people, maintaining the machines that keep the sleepers alive, and trundling them off to the furnace when they expire. The indoctrination not only teaches them to speak and read and to fulfill their duties, but stifles all desire for sex or freedom or friendship, deadens all curiosity about the past and about the world beyond the monotonous city of the sleepers. The workers also can't remember the dreams they had while sleeping, but are told their dreams are wonderful, are of a life in paradise, and so are generally eager to return to sleep after twenty years of service.
Due to various factors, indoctrination is not perfectly reliable in all cases, and sometimes workers in their second decades of service begin to become curious or horny or even to remember the dreams they had while sleeping. The plot of "The Sleepers" concerns two such men. One of these men, by chance, is the head of the whole city! The other is a rank and file worker who found some old books about life before the era of the sleepers, and who has fallen in love with a sleeping woman of great beauty. This guy remembers the dreams he had before he was awakened to work. Maybe the first generation of sleepers had wonderful dreams of a paradise, because they went to sleep with brains full of memories of a life of sex and family and food and work and hobbies, but later generations, because they have never had lives, have dreams of absolute sterile blackness!
These two guys, because one of them can order the workers around and manipulate work schedules and so forth, are able to thaw and wake some people, teach them how to talk and so forth in the old fashioned way, and then lead this small band in a break out from the city of sleep and into the wilderness.
The setting is interesting and I like the theme of people fighting tyranny in pursuit of love and freedom, so "The Sleepers" is an acceptable if not remarkable entertainment.
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A tolerable crop of stories. The best of them, the Bradbury has real human feeling, and the Long and the "Farrell" express sentiments about life I can get behind, while Leinster's story is an interesting bit of "what if" speculation that ends on a sense-of-wonder note. Only the story that appears under MacDonald's real name has so many problems that it is rendered annoying instead of entertaining.
More short stories from magazines published before you were born in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.
It took me a while to recall what story "Appointment in Tomorrow" vaguely reminded me of. It was Eric Frank Russell's "U-turn". In EFR's yarn, citizens volunteering to be euthanized are surprised to find themselves beamed to a secret space colony.
ReplyDeleteInteresting! Maybe I will check that story out; looks like it debuted in Astounding in 1950.
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