*In a 2016 essay that appeared in Galaxy's Edge.
The last leg of our journey through 1956 with Merril as our pathfinder saw us reading stories by authors whose names begin with a "G," so today we reach the "H"s. This batch is fertile ground for exploring Merril's propensity to look beyond the category SF magazines like Astounding and Galaxy for "great" SF, seeing as two of the stories, those by Richard Harper and Robert A. Hart, appeared in men's magazines. Alas, I can't find the text of Harper's "The Pugilist," which debuted in Nugget, anywhere online. The issue of Dude that first brought Hart's "The Automatic Gentleman" before the eyes of the world is thankfully available at the internet archive. Rounding out Merril's three "H"s is Frank Herbert's "The Nothing" which we will also tackle.
Two stories is a little slim for a blog post (not that I haven't done that), so let's also take a look at the two "J"s (there are no "I"s.) One of these is "A Little Magic" by one of those authors people are always telling you you have to like, Shirley Jackson, but I can't seem to find a text of this story, which first appeared in Woman's Home Companion, online. (Maybe I just don't know how to use the internet properly.) We'll just assume "A Little Magic" is a work of genius that heartbreakingly illuminates the manifold contradictions of the life of women under the patriarchy and move on with our lives. The other "J" who won Merril's approval is Raymond F. Jones, whose story "The Non-Statistical Man" appears on the Honorable Mentions list and is easily available even to us internet neophytes.
"The Automatic Gentleman" by Robert A. Hart
The robot doesn't just look like an educated person--it has educated tastes! It hates game shows and Ed Sullivan and likes modern drama! It beats the narrator at Scrabble, quadrupling his score! Soon his wife is more attracted to the robot than to her husband, and both husband and wife begin to wonder if there is another "job" around the house it can perform flawlessly, if you know what I mean! But their marriage is saved when the high class robot rejects the vulgar wife's advances.
This feels like a filler story, and, seeing as in Dude it is nestled among fiction by big name writers like Michael Shaara, Erskine Caldwell and Tennessee Williams and photos of topless ladies, I guess it sort of is filler. Merril's choice of it is thus a little odd; maybe the sex joke element of the story lent "The Automatic Gentleman" value in Merril's eyes (one of the standard complaints of New Wave boosters--and Merril is perhaps New Wave Booster Numero Uno--is that SF didn't deal enough with sex.) And maybe she liked the story's suggestion, however jocular, that technology might pose problems to human relationships.
"The Nothing" by Frank Herbert
Due to the effects of radiation almost everybody in Herbert's future world has some kind of psychic power. Some people can teleport, some can read minds, others can see the future, etc. Our narrator is an attractive young woman who can start fires with her mind. She meets a man in a bar and is led to believe that they are destined to marry--it turns out that she has been selected by a sort of political activist (the man's father) to produce children with his son as part of his effort to preserve society. You see, the human race is reverting to the mean (as people who know about math say), and fewer and fewer people are being born who have psychic powers--in fact, the man our narrator is to marry is one of the "nothings" who lacks a psychic ability. Society is under threat of collapse because the ubiquity of psykers has lead to civilization abandoning technology, and now the entire societal infrastructure is reliant on mental powers--for example, almost nobody knows how to maintain automobiles or aircraft because there are so many people who can teleport you. The narrator's soon-to-be-father-in-law is a leader in the secret movement to revive technological facility and--to buy time for sufficient technological education--prolong the prevalence of psykers through eugenic breeding; this guy has studied the narrator's genetic code and determined she is the perfect match for her son.
Perhaps too light-hearted at times, this story feels a little slight, almost like a joke story, but it is not bad; I suppose I can mildly recommend it. I haven't actually read Dune, but it is my understanding that the milieu of the famous novel is one in which computers are outlawed, so maybe we should see "The Nothing" as addressing a theme that would later appear in Herbert's blockbuster, that of people getting by without technology.
"The Nothing" would be reprinted in a few anthologies and Herbert collections following its debut in Fantastic Universe.
"The Non-Statistical Man" by Raymond F. Jones
Jones' "The Non-Statistical Man" is promoted in the pages of Science Fiction Stories as a novel, and isfdb categorizes it as a novella; either way, that means it is long, around 80 pages in its magazine appearance. And it feels long, as the pace is sort of slow, sex and violence are largely absent, and much of the text consists of dialogue and lectures on speculative history and science.
Like Herbert's "The Nothing," Jones' story is about paradigm shifts and the way different attitudes towards science and technology can radically change society, and about a small cadre of superior people who are trying to guide society to a better place. These are common fixtures of classic SF we have seen many times.
The main character of "The Non-Statistical Man" is the head statistician at an insurance company on the East coast, Charles Bascomb. Bascomb loves numbers and math (one of Jones' little jokes is to say Bascomb is fascinated by figures--in particular the Arabic kind, not just the kind most men find fascinating) and believes that it is through statistics that we can understand the universe and improve our position within it. His wife Sarah kind of gets on his nerves with her reliance on hunches and "feelings" that reflect intuition.
One day some unusual anomalies in the records come to his attention--in a few towns, many people who just recently took out insurance have made totally legitimate claims and received the payments to which they are entitled; the volume of these short term payouts far exceeds that of other towns and of these towns in the past. Bascomb investigates, and makes little progress until he takes advantage of one of his wife's hunches. And then what he finds astonishes him and shakes his view of mankind and the universe!
All the people who bought insurance and then profited from that decision almost immediately made their purchasing decision based on a hunch, on intuition! And one other thing connects these insurance customers--they all attended public New Age self-help lectures by a retired college professor, Magruder. Bascomb meets Magruder, who explains to our hero his wild and crazy theory. Human beings have innate powers of intuition that could potentially make our lives far more safe and comfortable if we unleashed them--currently these powers are suppressed by fears of being ridiculed by conventional logical men like Bascomb.
Magruder makes a complex argument that perhaps is meant to appeal to the libertarians who are disproportionately represented among the ranks of SF fans. All the apparatus of modern civilization, like government and the insurance industry and theories of logic, are meant to collectivize risk, to even out risk among the population and over time; this obviously limits our individual freedom, but at the same time provides a measure of safety, at least in the aggregate. (Limiting everybody to a slow speed on the highway costs all drivers some liberty and some time, but in return a small number of people who would otherwise suffer in accidents benefit greatly.) Magruder claims that if we unleash our intuition we can all look after ourselves and throw off all this stifling collectivism. (We could all drive at whatever speed we felt like most of the time, only slowing down when our intuition warned us an accident was likely.) And Magruder knows how to unleash everybodies' intuition--by easing their fears of ridicule from society through the administration of drugs! Engaging in a practice that probably wouldn't have passed muster with the people who monitor the ethics of research on human subjects at his university, Magruder has been prescribing these anti-anxiety drugs to people who attend his lectures, saying they are merely vitamins; it is those who have taken these drugs who have been purchasing insurance from Bascomb's firm based on hunches, hunches that have proven to be quite prescient.
To me, Magruder's revelation felt like a climax, but unfortunately this lecture comes only half way through the story and Jones has like forty more pages of less interesting stuff for us to wade through, the saga of Chuck Bascomb's evolution from intuition skeptic to leader in the intuition movement. First, Bascomb refuses to accept Magruder's ideas and with the help of a newspaper man works to undermine the professor's campaign, Bascomb seeing Magruder as a threat to our very civilization. Then we witness Chuck's own experience of gaining super intuition himself--after taking Magruder's pills (his wife plays a role in getting him to take them) he can tell just by looking at strangers on the street the risks they are facing (a woman with a small as-yet-undiagnosed tumor; a man considering a risky business deal) and how to mitigate them (go to the doctor right away; don't sign that contract.)
Bascomb now knows Magruder's ideas are true, but thinks that Magruder is spreading the gospel in the wrong way, in a way that is underhanded and threatens society, and decides to explain to people the good news in an honest way that won't put our civilization at risk. This is a disaster--here at this blog I have regularly pointed out how elitist so many SF stories are, how they portray the common people as a mob of dolts whom the cognitive elite are perfectly justified in manipulating for their own good, and Jones takes that tack here in "The Non-Statistical Man." When Bascomb tries to explain intuition logically to people (instead of wrapping the idea up in a lot of goofy pseudo-Oriental mysticism as Magruder has been) and demonstrate its use, he is branded a commie and a child molester and he and his family are run out of town by a violent mob. Using intuition to guide them, the Bascombs escape to a town where Magruder and his earliest disciples are in charge, a town of people wholly committed to intuition whose citizens have destroyed all their TV sets, intuitively understanding how bad TV is for you. After another lecture from the professor, Bascomb becomes Magruder's right hand man in the long term campaign to rework our society so we have more safety and more liberty, and are less beholden to technology, logic, one-size-fits-all rules, and hierarchy.
"The Non-Statistical Man" is certainly noteworthy as a 1956 science fiction story which is essentially attacking science, math, logic and technology that at the same time appeals to the various demographics of the SF community (above, I highlighted the story's appeal to libertarians, but Jones also tries to push the buttons of left-liberals by having Bascomb use his intuition to figure out that some immigrant convicted of a heinous crime is in fact innocent and by having Bascomb's enemies be over-the-top McCarthyite Red-baiters and sex-hating prudes.) Besides all this stuff, Merril may also have liked how a woman is proven right in the end and is instrumental to the salutary resolution of the plot. Jones' style is OK--not great, but not bad; my main criticism is that the story is too long and nothing is surprising or strange after the middle section.
We'll call this one acceptable.
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| The collection The Non-Statistical Man has been published in various forms in multiple languages; it looks like the Romanian edition has a cover by H. R. Giger. |
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None of these stories is bad, so I guess we can't fault Merril for promoting them, even though I am not in love with them. By coincidence, they seem to share a theme, a theme embraced by one of the few people willing to express skepticism about the universally-praised Judith Merril, Barry N. Malzberg himself--the human race's uneasy relationship with technology.
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Stay tuned for more SF from 1956--but first, more weird stories from the 1930s here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
Abernathy and AldissAnderson, Allen and Banks
Barrow, Beaumont and Blish
Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler
Carter, Clarke and Clifton
Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen
de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle
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