Merril-approved 1958 stories by Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin

Reading 1956 stories recommended by Judith Merril in the second edition of her famous anthology series was a good experience, so let's keep that ball rolling but shift to 1958 by using as our menu the three-page list of honorable mentions at the back of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  I'll pick out stories of interest from the list, three or four at a time, and we'll read and assess them, perhaps with an eye as to why Merril might have liked them. 

The first name on the alphabetical list is Poul Anderson's, three of whose stories Merril recommends.    I've already read one of them, "Last of the Deliverers," so to round out this blog post we'll read the included story by the second name on the list, famous actor Alan Arkin.

Before we begin our journey, I will note that, besides that list, two science articles, and a poem by Isaac Asimov, the fourth volume of Merril's much-heralded anthology includes 15 stories, of which I believe I have read nine; in one 2021 blogpost I talked about the included stories by Richard Gehman, Rog Phillips, Gerald Kersh and John Steinbeck, and in another the stories by Fritz Leiber, Brian Aldiss, E. C. Tubb, and Theodore Sturgeon, while back in 2019 I read the Avram Davidson story to which Merril gave the nod.

"Backwardness" by Poul Anderson  

This story seems well-liked.  Anthony Boucher, after publishing it in F&SF, included it in the eighth F&SF "Best of" volume, Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander and Patricia Warrick selected it for their textbook School and Society Through Science Fiction, and Hank Davis included it in Worst Contact; the story has also been translated into French, Russian, Croatian and Japanese.  Another place in which "Backwardness" appears is 1991's Kinship with the Stars, an Anderson collection I own, and I am reading it in there.  

Rats, here we have something of a joke story that tries to "subvert conventions," as the cool kids say.  "Backwardness" is a first- contact-with-the-Galactic-Federation story.  Anderson's tale is a series of vignettes, in which various Earthmen of the nearish future interact with the representatives of the GF, who have arrived because they detected the first use of an Earth star-drive.  The GF, which has been around forever and includes thousands of planets, investigates all civilizations that are on the brink of exploring the stars; violent civilizations are exterminated forthwith, but luckily Earth passed the test.

I suppose it is common for SF stories about aliens who arrive on a pre-FTL drive Earth to portray the visitors as wise or cultured or super-intelligent or something.  Anderson's joke is to suggest that the people of the Galactic Federation--or at least these representatives--are unsophisticated rubes of average or even below average intelligence, by Earth standards; the Galactics have outstripped the people of Earth technologically simply because they have had so much longer to develop.

Anderson explicitly lays out his premise on the last page of the 12-page story; the preceding pages illustrate it.  A party of the GF spacemen paints the town red in Manhattan, getting drunk, banging sluts and buying and adorning themselves with cheap garish jewelry.  (All the aliens in the story look like Earth humans--the galaxy is full of human civilizations.)  The head of the UN meets the captain of the GF ship and finds the alien can't explain anything at all about science or technology and that the GF has a quite laissez faire government--the alien captain, who has been to many planets, remarks that New York City is the biggest city he has ever seen and marvels at the ability of Earthers to govern such a huge conglomeration of people.  A Catholic bishop meets the alien vessel's chaplain, expecting to be enlightened by a sophisticated thinker, a theologian, only to learn this guy is addicted to TV ("You got some real good TV on this planet") and that the religion of the ship's crew consists of sacrificing cows (rabbits on a ship, to save space) to appease the gods and bring good luck.  (Alien planets don't just give rise to intelligent beings genetically similar to Earth people--the plants and animals there are also the same as Earth's.)  Anderson's big concluding joke is that a New York con man with a bachelor's degree in psychology quickly susses out the aliens and sells one of them the Brooklyn Bridge.

As joke stories that try to subvert conventions go, this one isn't bad.  The jokes are not annoyingly lame, and the idea that an intelligent species with an average IQ of 75 instead of 100 would eventually build nuclear reactors and space craft, it would just take longer than it has take us, is sort of interesting,  So I'll call "Backwardness" acceptable.

"The Apprentice Wobbler" by Poul Anderson

Here we have a story that was, it seems, never reprinted after its initial appearance in Fred Pohl's short-lived Star, a magazine that had one issue!  Star is kind of cool because Richard Powers was its art director.  (I wrote a little about Star in 2021 when I read Brian Aldiss' "Judas Dancing"; just last year I read another story from Star, Robert Bloch's "Daybroke," which I denounced on several counts.)  

The stagnant and conformist near-future is entering a period of radical change!  After a military coup in Moscow ended the Cold War, there followed a period of little economic or technological progress as people's desire for security and the extensive encroachment on business of the suffocating tendrils of government and labor unions inhibited the taking of risk by individuals and firms.  But just two years ago Steve Wojcek burst onto the scene with his amazing machine!  The Wojcek device is the size of a suitcase, covered in dials and gauges, and in the hands of a skilled operator it can manipulate energies at the atomic level, generating power with amazing efficiency; its most spectacular use is in levitating people and things and moving them through the air without consuming fuel or producing pollution.  It takes a long time to train a Wojcek operator, and the Wojcek school in Iowa has limited capacity, so the number of Wojcek devices in use is still small, but it looks like eventually the entire world economy is going to be revolutionized as the atomic power and petroleum industries, the automotive and aviation industries, and much else, are all put out of business.

Daniel Holloway is our hero, an engineer at one of the corporations that is trying to figure out how the Wojcek machine works, and failing--only people who take the year-long course given by Wojcek and co can make it perform its wonders.  His superiors send Holloway on a mission he is to enroll at the Wojcek school outside Des Moines and learn all he can about the inexplicable machine that is changing the world, and perhaps figure out a way to sabotage Wojcek's project and preserve the economic and social status quo.

Over in the Hawkeye state, Holloway learns to operate the device (colloquially called a "wobbly") quicker than do most, but it appears that nobody, not even Wojcek, really understands how it generates almost unlimited energy without producing waste or dangerous radiation, and without incurring any risk--no one has ever been injured or killed in a wobbly failure or accident.  Study in Iowa not only gives Wojeck the opportunity to fly like a bird and manipulate objects from a distance, but shows him a new way of relating to other people--back in the rat race in New York, Holloway had to suck up, had to try to keep up with the Jonses, had to wear suits and ties and worry if his wife, a native of Oregon, would impress his colleagues and clients, but the Wojcek people don't take hierarchy seriously, they dress casually, and they aren't obsessed with chasing money and chasing status!     

The big revelation comes after Christmas vacation, when the Wojcek crew realizes Holloway is a spy.  The wobblies are fake--they don't do anything concrete.  What Wojcek discovered was psionics!  Psychic powers only operate if you have faith in them, and if the people around you do as well, and since every educated person thinks psychic powers are fiction, it is almost impossible to get them to work.  The wobbly tricks people into thinking telekinesis and ESP and all the rest are technological and physical, eliminating the inhibitions of the wobbly "operator" and the skepticism of onlookers.  Holloway, it turns out, is a psyker of great potential, and after learning the truth proves himself able to fly and perform other psychic feats without the crutch that is the wobbly.  He abandons his job at the New York corporation despite their promises of promotion and raises and joins the egalitarian Wojcek project of changing the world. 

This story is OK.  The human drama is a kind of weak, so "The Apprentice Wobbler"'s oomph has to come from the science lectures and its ideas about economy and society.  Anderson dramatizes some interesting tensions inherent in a market economy, and so it is easy to see why leftists Pohl and Merril liked it.  For one thing, innovations and progress that are self-evidently good for society as a whole often cause disruption to the lives of individuals and pose new challenges--everybody benefits when a new more efficient product or process comes on the market, but the people who are producing and selling the current product or service that has been rendered obsolete suffer, at least in the short term, and their suffering can have social and political ramifications.  A related tension is how individuals and firms that grow big by innovating, who have benefitted from the dynamism of the market economy, once they are big often use their influence to clamp down on innovation and tamp down dynamism in order to stifle competition and protect their own position.  These are uncomfortable truths which supporters of the market economy may be loathe to admit, and which serve as a chink in the armor of a market orientation which enemies of the free market are always trying to exploit.

Acceptable, but I see why "The Apprentice Wobbler" hasn't been reprinted; Anderson has produced plenty of stories full of adventure, human feeling and jokes that are more entertaining and have a broader appeal.

"People Soup" by Alan Arkin

Alan Arkin is a beloved actor with a stack of awards but I have to admit that I find his face and his voice annoying and so as an adult I have not sat through any of his films or TV shows.  (As a kid I saw on TV The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming and The In-Laws because my mother liked them, and it is possible my distaste for Arkin is a subconscious act of rebellion.)  But maybe I'll like this story, one of three short stories with which Arkin is credited on isfdb.

"People Soup" is a trifle about precocious kids; it is five pages of obvious but inoffensive jokes. 

Bob slopped a cupful of ketchup into the juicer, added a can of powdered mustard, a drop of milk, six aspirin, and a piece of chewing gum, being careful to spill a part of each package used.

(I realize that I type the phrase "obvious jokes" often, and begin to fear that at age 52 I have heard all the jokes I am going to hear and so now all jokes are obvious to me.)

Mom is out shopping, so little Bob mixes ingredients apparently at random, puts the concoction in a pot and cooks it; he lets his sister Connie help after she pays him ten cents.  They taste the finished product and pretend to have turned into animals.  Then they pretend to have turned back and go out for ice cream.

To me, it feels like an acceptable filler story, but Merril isn't the only person to take "People Soup" seriously.  Groff Conklin included it in the anthology Science Fiction Oddities, and another pair of anthologists whose names I am always typing out, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander (with the participation of Fred Pohl) included it in the 1980 anthology celebrating Galaxy.  Arkin's name doesn't appear on the cover of any of these publications, so I can't say these editors and publishers are using Arkin's famous name in an effort to win attention from beyond the ranks of SF fans.  Perhaps we are supposed to think this cutesy story has an edge.  The way the text reads, the reader is permitted to believe the kids actually do change into a chicken (Connie) and then a St. Bernard (Bob) and then back.  Connie doesn't like being a chicken, but Bob urges her to remain one as long as possible in order to collect information about chicken life.  In the last lines of the story, Bob declares his intention to build an atomic bomb tomorrow.  Maybe Arkin is suggesting that the search for knowledge in the late 1950s is being conducted by reckless men who blithely take terrible risks with the lives of others.  The title of the story, after all, sounds a little grisly.     

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None of these stories is bad, so we can say without reservation that the first step on our journey through 1958 with Judith Merril has been an easy one.

Keep an eye out for future installments of this series on 1958 SF stories; next time, however, we'll be looking at stories from earlier decades.