Merril-approved 1958 stories: K MacLean, L Cole, and D McLaughlin

This blog post is brought to you by the letter "M," which stands for MPorcius and Merril.  As you know, we've been cherry-picking stories from the honorable mentions list at the back of 1959's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  We've reached the "M" authors on the list, of whom there are five.  One is Richard Matheson, whose story "The Edge" Merril gave the nod; I read "The Edge" back in early May.  Another is Sam Merwin, Jr., whose novel The House of Many Worlds I read back in 2017 and said failed as a humor piece, as an adventure tale, and as a SF story.  Merwin's Merril-approved story, "Lady in the Lab," appeared in the men's magazine Adam, in an issue I cannot find a free scan of; seeing as I am too cheap to buy this magazine on ebay (looks like it goes for $13.00 or more) we won't be discussing "Lady in the Lab" today.  That leaves us with stories by three authors, Katherine Maclean, "T. H. Mathieu," and Dean McLaughlin, to read and dissect today.

"Unhuman Sacrifice" by Katherine MacLean 

After debuting in John W. Campbell's Astounding, "Unhuman Sacrifice" would be reprinted by British geniuses Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest in their oft-reprinted anthology Spectrum and by that American icon of high brow SF Damon Knight in his own oft-reprinted anthology A Century of Science Fiction.  So here we have a science fiction story that is endorsed by all the smarty smarts of the SF community regardless of their political commitments or geographic locations!  I read MacLean's "The Gambling Hells and The Sinful Girl" recently and enjoyed it so I have every reason to expect that I too can join the lovefest!

It is the future of common interstellar travel, and the human race has explored many systems and discovered many planets.  Our story begins on a planet inhabited by natives with stone-age technology, a planet on which three humans have landed.  We've got two engineers, who manage the vessel, and the man whom they were hired to ferry around the galaxy: a young missionary determined to convert the natives to his religion, which I guess is Christianity, though this is never explicitly declared.  The engineers find the missionary's constant talk about his religion annoying, and fear he is going to cause trouble with the natives with his efforts to convert them.

MacLean's style is good and all the science--the planet's ecosystem, the culture of the natives, and all the futuristic human technology--is well-thought out and interesting and she does a good job describing it.  The plot is replete with ironies and surprises--things are not quite what they seem to any of the human and native characters, nor do things don't turn out the way readers might expect, either.

To put things briefly and in broad terms, the engineers and the missionary initially disagree about everything, but come to agree that the natives perform cruel and unnecessary rituals of torture on a regular basis, at set times of the year, and the humans decide to try to stop these rituals, though they disagree on how to do so.  MacLean also gives us scenes from the point of view of one of the natives, one who is about to be forced to undergo this apparently horrifying ritual, and this guy has wildly inaccurate ideas about the humans and is also largely ignorant of his own people's customs and biology, which is trouble because the three humans learn most of what they know about the natives from this one naive guy.

In their efforts to succor the hapless native, the humans put their lives and their sanity at desperate risk, and, one might argue, make things worse for the native.  Or, perhaps, they actually do help this guy, but in an unintentional and ironic way.  You see, the creatures of this planet, the lower animals as well as the intelligent bipeds, have a remarkable natural life cycle.  Early in life they are animals that move around and eat other animals--the intelligent villagers hunt and fish and build huts and conduct trade and go to war with other tribes and so forth.  But then the rainy season comes, flooding the plains and forests where the animals and villagers live, these creatures, once submerged, metamorphosize into plants, taking root in the soil and losing their intelligence.  The "torture" ritual is the hanging up of young natives in tall trees by the elder natives right before the floods--this keeps the natives from fully metamorphosizing; they become skinny and weak, but don't lose their ability to walk and think.  The humans, cutting down their native friend and trying to get him into their ship, accidentally allow him to be submerged and become a bush--they have, unintentionally, facilitated the completion of the native's natural life cycle, something his culture's traditions for centuries have prevented.  (Seeing his friend become a plant turns one of the engineers into a neurotic obsessive.)

One of several good things about "Unhuman Sacrifice" is that there are no real villains or heroes in the text--all the characters do what they think is best and try to help other people, but their ignorance and prejudices render everything they do of questionable value.  The preacher, the engineers, and the native elders all act with good intentions in trying to master and alter conditions as they find them, but we readers don't necessarily have to agree that the changes they work are for the better.  MacLean's isn't one of those stories in which the religious guy is shown to be a total jackass and the science guys humiliate him with their superiority or one of those anti-imperialist stories with goody goody aliens and evil humans, which is nice, and MacLean cleverly sets the stage for just such a story but delivers something more nuanced and surprising, which adds excitement to the piece, and reinforces its theme of the need for epistemic humility--the characters don't know what is going on with the planet's ecosystem and culture and can't predict what is going to happen, and we readers equally can't predict how the story will turn out.

Pretty good.

"Cargo: Death!" by Les Cole (as by T. H. Mathieu) 

Cole is new to us here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  He has like 18 fiction credits at isfdb, and Merril seems to have recommended three of them.  This one debuted in Future Science Fiction, one of Robert A. W. Lowndes' magazines (Lowndes edited like a dozen magazines) and is like 40 pages long and feels like it is 140 pages long.    

It is the future of interstellar settler-colonialism!  The year 2106! Mankind has discovered and colonized many planets, and our tale begins upon on one such world 683 light years from Earth, a planet upon which humans arrived 20 years ago and which today is home to five human cities with a total of population of 50,000 human inhabitants; there are also 75,000 natives.  The planet is so newly colonized it doesn't even have an official name yet!    

A problem has arisen!  A diminutive creature like a mouse but with a bite that causes instant death to humans!  Our hero Art Hamilton, member of the civil service (this story forces us to endure the whining we are always hearing from government employees that the taxpayers are overworking and underpaying them--boo hoo!) is charged with the mission of returning to Earth to hand over a specimen of the killer mouse to the motherworld's scientists so they can figure out how to exterminate the little monster.  Art embraces this chance to see Earth again and to hit on the beautiful stewardess whom he knows works the ship that will take him back home.

Science fiction stories often base their space ship scenes on the Earth experience of sailing the high seas on a warship or ocean liner, but Cole chooses to base the space ship scenes in "Cargo: Death!" on 20th-century commercial air travel--hence the stewardess.  Art straps in across the aisle from a child and its mother and like a hack comedian groans in fear the kid will cry for the entire two-hour flight.

A lot of this story just feels wrong.  If the frontier planet is only two hours away from the center of human civilization, it doesn't really feel like its on the frontier.  And then there is the relationship between Art and the stewardess.  Sometimes they act as if they are going steady and considering marriage, but other times we get the idea that Art hasn't seen her in months and that she dates lots of other guys--it is all very unclear.  And then there is the fact that the mouse that can kill you with one bite is not kept in some kind of locked metal crate that you need a key or combination to open but instead in a flimsy mesh cage through which the monster may be able to bite people.  Cole indulges in jokes in which people think the monster is adorable and rush to the cage to get a close look and other characters slapstick-fashion physically interpose themselves between vapid human and kawaii beast.    

Anyway, Art is friends with the crew of the star ship that is supposed to take them to Earth in two hours, and they all find time to hang around together and shoot the breeze.  But then a disaster occurs, the atomic power plant failing and the ship coming out of hyperspace in some random spot between Terra and the mouse monster planet.  The sudden return to normal space causes the luggage to shift and the cage holding the instant-death venom rodent cracks open and the mouse escapes, compounding the problems of the captain, who is considering euthanizing everyone on the ship before they starve to death--it looks like the ship doesn't have the small tools ("microtools") aboard that are needed to fix the reactor.  The captain gives Art a hat to wear because this will inspire obedience from the other passengers and Art looks for the mouse with the help of the stewardess.  There's conversation about what to do and a subplot about a passenger with a burst appendix.  In the end, Art catches the mouse and a guy fixes the ship even without microtools and everybody gets to Earth safely.    

There's a lot going on in this story, but none of the individual components is really developed to the point that it is entertaining or interesting--in fact, many end up going unresolved--and all the different elements proceed in parallel rather than synergistically working in tandem to create a compelling story.  It's all just a bunch of barely acceptable stuff--much of it hanging fire or misfiring--cobbled together.  

There's the monster on the loose plot.  It is hinted the mouse is intelligent and has tiny little hands, and I thought this was foreshadowing that the mouse was going to become Art's friend and fix the reactor, but this doesn't actually happen.  Also, after all the talk at the start of the story of the need for a solution to the mouse problem, the story ends on Earth before any Terran scientist has even looked at the mouse.  

There's the love plot between Art and the stewardess; I expected the crisis on the ship to bring these two close together so they can get married, but when the story ends the future of their relationship still seems ambiguous.  As with the mouse, we readers are not granted the catharsis of a conclusion--we have no idea if Art has achieved either of his two goals.  Maybe those issues are resolved in the sequel to "Cargo: Death!", printed later in the year in Future Science Fiction; if so, "Cargo: Death!" should have been advertised as a serial.

There are long passages about the nature of colonization, about the layout of the ship, and about the nature of hyperspace--the strange alien colors and shapes passengers see out the window when the vessel is in hyperspace--that fill up column inches but contribute little to the plot and are not so well-written or so intrinsically fascinating that they make the story more entertaining.  Similarly, there are psychological themes and the author and the characters throw around various psychology terms and claims--e.g., "he suffered from the human failing of deriving more ego gratification from delivering bad news than good" and "the schizophrenic, split-personalitied scene played to its conclusion..." and "Humans grow used to certain sights and continue to see them, even if they no longer exist or are altered" that just waste your time.

There are a bunch of women characters who, I guess, each represent a different aspect of womanhood or course of life women can undertake--one female passenger is brave settler stock and a mother, while another is a self-important upper-middle-class nag, and then of course there is the competent stewardess, a good-looking career gal who could settle down with any of dozens of men who find her gorgeous.  It may also be significant that the mouse is also female and is pregnant.

There are lame jokes, like when in zero-gee, in the dark, Art's hat floats up against the stewardess and at first she thinks he is groping her and then fears it is the venomous mouse crawling on her.  (Does a hat really feel like fingers or a rodent?)  One of the characters is named John Paul Jones and he says "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead," which I guess is a joke about how people in the future will confuse 18th-century American naval officer Jones with 19th-century American naval officer David Farragut.  This kind of junk undermines any tension the escape of the poison mouse or the possibility of being lost in space may have generated.

Why did Merril like this story?  Because some of the female characters are brave and competent?  Or do we have to consider the possibility that Merril was friendly with Cole, who was very active in SF fandom, and this colored her judgment of the "Cargo: Death!"?  Maybe Cole was a great guy, but his story here is long and tedious because it works like half a dozen angles and not one of them goes anywhere and the story lacks any compensatory virtues.  Thumbs down!

"Cargo: Death!" was never reprinted in English, but in 1971 was reprinted in West Germany, the same place where multiple David Hasselhoff records have been certified platinum or gold.

"The Man on the Bottom" by Dean McLaughlin

Some time ago I purchased a 1971 paperback copy of McLaughlin's Dome World and since then it has collected dust on my shelf among a legion of similarly neglected books.  Well, today we read "The Man on the Bottom," which, it appears, was expanded and revised to form the first part of Dome World.  Maybe we'll love "The Man on the Bottom" despite its homosexual porn title and graduate to reading Dome World?  

It is the future of undersea dome cities!  Danial Mason, veteran of service on the Moon (we often hear how weary Earth gravity makes him), is in charge of Wilmington Dome in the South Atlantic, an American dome that mines iron and produces steel and manufactures the hulls of ships and additional domes.  Today he's got trouble!  All the domes have got trouble!  South Africa and the United Americas (capital: Panama) both claim some newly discovered mineral deposits that lay exactly fifty miles from both an American and an African dome and it looks like war is inevitable!  The politicians in Panama order the American domes evacuated and send Navy personnel to take command of each dome, but Mason is confident he should maintain authority over Wilmington and stays, as does his spunky red-headed assistant Jenny, who knows as much about the operation of the dome as Mason does.  Mason is a sort of informal charismatic leader among the dome commanders, and all the other dome commanders follow suit.  You see, Mason has a plan--he knows the domes are vulnerable and will all be destroyed in a war, so a war must be prevented.  As we see in a holographic conversation with the wise black chief who is in charge of one of the South African domes, Mason is buddies with all dome executives, not just the American ones, and the dome leaders no longer see themselves as Americans or Africans but as a new nation.  (I guess we are expected to see this as being like how the thirteen British colonies by the 1770s had come to see themselves as a culture distinct from Great Britain.)  When the war breaks out the domes all declare independence--Mason's security personnel seize the handful of naval personnel in the dome with a minimum of violence.  This ends the war between Panama and Johannesburg, who of course would rather trade with independent dome cities than have ownership of domes that are radioactive ruins.  Text from a history book of the future ends the story, telling us that the domes united in a confederation that becomes a major world power.

This is a pedestrian story.  It is better than Cole's "Cargo: Death!" because, instead of piling on extraneous information and laying the groundwork for payoffs that never come and presenting conflicts that are never resolved, McLaughlin only includes pertinent info and wraps up everything by the end, but "The Man on the Bottom" is still dry and obvious.  So, acceptable, but not exciting.  Presumably Merril liked it because it offered a relatively peaceful solution to great power conflict and presented sympathetic and competent women and black people who work in concert with white men and maybe because of the way military men are humiliated and the heroes eschew violence as much as possible.  She couldn't have chosen it for brilliant writing or memorable images or deep characters or touching human relationships because those things are absent.

"The Man on the Bottom" in its themes reminds me of Robert Heinlein's work.  Heinlein repeatedly depicted wars of independence in the style of the American Revolution, as McLaughlin does here, and Mason in "The Man on the Bottom" stresses that his security personnel shouldn't use "burp guns" in taking over the dome from the Navy, reminding me of how in Tunnel in the Sky the mentor figure tells the kids not to bring firearms to the dangerous alien world.  

Merely acceptable.    

Nobody saw fit to reprint this bland piece of work (unless you count the British edition of Astounding, which included it in a different month's issue), and I have to say the chances of me reading my paperback expansion of it are just about nil.  Nice Paul Lehr cover, though.

**********

MacLean's is obviously the best of today's three stories, seeing as McLaughlin's is mere filler and Cole's has so many problems I am a little surprised it was published in this form--Lowndes should have demanded a rewrite or rewritten it himself.  I may never read any stories by Cole or McLaughlin again, but I'll keep MacLean in mind.