Let's read three more stories from the late 1950s that were reprinted in the 1960s Robert Silverberg collection Dimension Thirteen. Amusingly, in 1972, our German friends printed a translation of Dimensions 13, but because they left out one story, "Prime Commandment," they retitled the collection Dimension 12.
"Solitary" (1957)
"Solitary" is a detective story set in the future of galactic-scale civilizations and one-man warp ships, the theme of which is that sometimes a human being's ability to think illogically (or, as Silverberg puts it, "alogically") gives man an advantage over computers.
The main character of the story is an employee of the police apparatus whose passion is criminology and crime-solving. Unfortunately, from his point of view, on a practical level he is just a computer programmer, sitting in an office, entering evidence into a computer and then receiving its assessments. He wants to use his own brain to solve a crime! So he gets the computer to print him out a list of unsolved crimes, and learns that a heinous kidnapper, some thirty years ago, escaped from a high security prison, stole a warp ship, and has never been found.
Silverberg takes us through the detective's entire decision-making process and describes every step of his campaign to track and bring down this escaped crook. He studies the records; he requisitions a government one-man warp ship; he searches a likely star system for the fugitive, taking care to investigate places the computers of thirty years ago deemed too unlikely to be worth looking into. And sure enough he finds the criminal, now the old man depicted on the cover of the magazine.
The twist ending of "Solitary" is that the fugitive has endured such hardship all on his lonesome on this barren rock of a planet that 1) he dies from the shock of seeing another life form for the first time after three decades and 2) according to the detective, at least, he has suffered a worse punishment than he would have suffered in prison--the kidnapper used all his intelligence and ingenuity to win a freedom that was in fact merely illusory.
This is a diverting filler story; Silverberg's smooth, faintly jocular style is engaging enough to carry you along pleasantly from beginning to end; nothing thrilling or moving happens, but you are never bored or annoyed. We might venture to give props to the story for being a meditation on freedom, as it depicts both the benefits and the costs of shaking off the pervasive and paternalistic apparatus of modern society.
Besides various Silverberg collections, "Solitary" has appeared in European magazines, and is even the inspiration for the cover illo of a German one.
"Journey's End" (1958)
(Is it just me, or did Emsh make the face of the woman on the cover a little too...or maybe a lot too...masculine?)
"The Seed of Earth" is one of those SF stories that doesn't contain much speculation, and could more or less work as a Western if set in 19th-century America instead of on some alien world in the future, and, while I haven't read much Western fiction, the plot elements, tone and themes certainly put me in the mind of a Western.
Twenty-three years ago, several thousand Terrans founded a colony on planet Lorverad; among them was our protagonist, Barchay, then in his early thirties. Like the short muscular natives, these humans have been living a pretty primitive existence, at least by space faring civilization standards; for example, they ride beasts instead of driving cars, and get much of their food by hunting instead of going down to the supermarket. Three months ago a party of the natives raided outlying Terran farms, killing hundreds of humans. Instead of launching a retaliatory military campaign, the humans have since made an uneasy peace with the natives. Today, Barchay is riding his beast to a native village.
Over the course of the story we learn about Barchay's life and why he is going to visit the natives. It seems that twenty years ago he left his wife and son on some mission or other and found himself at this village. He was welcomed--relations between the Terrans and Lorveradians were better then--and ended up having sex with a teenage native girl. Today he has come to the village to discover if he impregnated that girl, and we eventually learn the reason why--Barchay's wife died of plague soon after they landed on Lorverad, and Barchay's son was killed in the recent native raid. Reminded of how he seduced a native girl, the villagers attack and kill Barchay, but he can die content with the knowledge that he actually has a half-human son, that his line is not extinguished, that his Terran genes will endure on this alien planet.
This story is entertaining enough. Feminist readers will probably groan at the depiction of the female natives; the native women are dimwitted, and while in their teens they might be slender and have "high and firm" breasts, in their twenties they lose their looks and become totally repulsive, with "pendulous breasts more like udders than breasts" and bodies "thickened and stooped by toil"; it is implied that the men among the natives just hang idly around or hunt while the women work the fields.
It is a little hard to believe that the humans, who may lack automobiles or aircraft but have "blasters," didn't launch a punitive expedition against the natives after the massacre, but it is implied that the native raid was a response to human's cruelty to the Lorverdaians, so maybe there was a faction of Terrans felt guilty or something?
Another problem I have with the story its attitude towards biology. If you are going to read SF you just have to wave away the objection that humans and aliens probably couldn't breed, sexual relationships between humans and aliens being ubiquitous in the field, but I am talking about how Barchay identifies his half-native son. I had expected Barchay to recognize his offspring by hair color or eye color or skin color, something like that, but instead his son has a blue birthmark on his hip, just like a blue birthmark Barchay has on his own hip! Are such birthmarks really heritable? [UPDATE 4/12/2024: Anton i.o., down in the comments below, offers useful perspective on this issue and on my idea that "Seed of Earth" is a "Western."]
"The Seed of Earth" is open to many criticisms, but as I said, it is pretty entertaining. Under the title "Journey's End" it has been reprinted in American and German Silverberg collections.
"Prime Commandment" (1958)
"Prime Commandment" appears under the Knox pseudonym, and in his introduction to the issue editor Robert A, Lowndes jokes in a manner that suggests many SF readers knew Calvin W. Knox was Robert Silverberg, and that Lowndes and Silverberg didn't care that they did. The story merits a full-page interior illustration by Frank Kelly Freas, and I have to admit it is pretty mesmerizing--like Emsh's cover, it features a scantily-clad woman performing some kind of obeisance to a space ship, but Freas' composition is more balanced and the pose of his female figure is far more dynamic and striking.
Unfortunately, "Prime Commandment" is a lame and obvious anti-religion story. I'm an atheist myself, but I am tired of the simple attacks on religion I have been hearing all 53 years of my life, and the religious people I have met over the course of my life have been pretty nice, so I don't get any kind of frisson out of reading denunciations of religious people.
Three hundred years ago a Terran spaceship crashed on an uninhabited planet. Today the descendants of the survivors of the shipwreck, numbering several hundred, live a primitive lifestyle and pursue a religion that is a mixture of fragments of Christianity and worship of their ancestors and of the rusty old wrecked ship. Five times a year these people have a ceremony before the ancient ship, their young priestess doing a sexy dance and then the rest of the population engaging in a sex orgy.
During one of these orgies another space ship from Earth, a colony ship with hundreds aboard, lands on the planet. The authorities on Terra awarded this planet, still thought to be uninhabited, to these people, adherents to a radical new Christian sect that objects to recreational sex and any exposure of the human body.
The newcomers tell the veteran colonists (who speak English and know they came to this world on the ship they worship but have no cultural memory of Earth, not even its name) that they will have to start wearing clothes and join the religion of the newcomers. The ship worshippers object. The newcomers, seeing that the "natives" will not be reformed, decide that they will have to exterminate them--these sex positive nudists must have been placed here by the Devil to tempt them, and if they aren't eliminated their toned bare bodies will lead the newcomers to sin.
The natives are having their own meetings and coming to their own radical conclusions. Well aware that the First Commandment is "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," and, seeing that the newcomers refuse to worship the rusty old ship, the priestess and her cronies judge that the new arrivals must be destroyed to a man. The priestess strips naked, smears upon her irresistible body the red paint of death, and leads an assault on the newcomers' camp. The two groups are working on different calendars, and the sword-wielding nudists have a stroke of good fortune--by the Terran calendar today is the Sabbath, and they are forbidden to employ their modern weapons to defend themselves. The newcomers are wiped out and their bodies thrown into the ocean; considering the shiny new space ship a rival god to their own patinaed vessel, the primitives figure out a way to push it into the briny deep as well.
Another filler story, this one pretty banal plot wise and thematically, but Silverberg's smooth engaging style makes it digestible. We'll call this one barely acceptable.
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Reading these three stories was like watching old TV shows or reading fluffy manga; the stories are not difficult, not challenging, not surprising, and full of questionable components, but because they are competently put together and gesture in a safe way towards melodrama, towards sex and violence, their deficiencies are forgivable and they provide the consumer a light and pleasurable, if perhaps forgettable, experience.
More 1950s SF magazine stories coming up here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
I assume "The Seed of Earth" should be classified as Eastern, not Western:
ReplyDelete1. Blue birthmark on a hip could be a Mongolian spot, which is heritable and very common between Asians.
2. "Barchay" sounds like a mongolian last name Бархаа (transliterated to English as Barkhai).
3. Beast-riding and hunting can be compared to the real-life nomadic lifestyle.
Wow, very interesting! Thanks for the insightful comment!
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