Worlds of Tomorrow: P W Fairman, T Sturgeon and W Tenn

As I draft this blog post, the internet archive, world's greatest website, is still down, so my reading plans have been temporarily suspended and I am resorting to reading books the way our ancestors read them.  From the anthology shelf of the MPorcius Library, located in a dusty attic full of Frazetta posters, Burne-Jones prints, Rookwood vases, Glinsky sculptures and my father's HO-scale electric trains, we take down my paperback edition of Worlds of Tomorrow, Berkley G-163, which sports a Richard Powers cover featuring Jupiter, a naked man, a rocket ship a futuristic city in the desert, and starring an indescribable hovering object.  This 1958 paperback reprints 10 of the 19 stories in the original hardcover edition of Worlds of Tomorrow, edited by August Derleth and published in 1953 with the phrase "science fiction 'with a difference'" emblazoned on its cover.  We've already read seven of these ten tales--yes, it's links time!

Edmond Hamilton       "The Dead Planet"
August Derleth            "McIlvaine's Star"
Frank Belknap Long    "The Great Cold"
Arthur C. Clarke          "The Fires Within"
Carl Jacobi                   "The Gentleman is an Epwa"
Fritz Leiber                  "The Enchanted Forest"
Mack Reynolds            "The Business as Usual"

That leaves three stories unread, those by Paul W. Fairman, Theodore Sturgeon, and William Tenn--let's tackle them today and then bask in the pride of having read an entire paperback anthology's contents.

"Brothers Beyond the Void" by Paul W. Fairman (1952)

"Brothers Beyond the Void" debuted in an issue of Fantastic Adventures with Josef Stalin on the cover.  We've already read a story from this ish of FA, Mack Reynolds' "Your Soul Comes C.O.D.," a story I denounced as contrived and ridiculous as it relied for its punch on a surprise twist ending that made no sense.  Hopefully I'll find Fairman's Derleth-approved story from the issue more palatable--it seems Rod Serling also approved of "Brothers Beyond the Void," basing a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone on the story.  (My wife, an admirer and perpetrator of absurdist jokes, says "Rod 'the Bod' Serling" every time Serling or his work comes up, and I have to admit I laugh every time.)

"Brothers Beyond the Void" is a misanthropic twist ending story; the thing feels cliched, though maybe its central gimmick wasn't cliched when the story first appeared in 1952?  Our hero is an astronaut--he is going to be the first man to land on Mars!  The night before blast off, he talks to a philosophical friend--friend assumes there will be people on Mars and assures the astronaut that people are the same everywhere.  When the astronaut gets to the red planet, sure enough, there are people there.  The astronaut has been comforted by his friend's assurances that people are the same everywhere, thinking his friend meant to suggest that the Martians would be nice to him.  And the Martians don't immediately gun him down--in fact, they seem to cater to him, provide shelter and food and so on.  But then on the last page of the story it becomes clear that the Earthman is not an honored guest but on exhibit in a zoo!  People are the same everywhere--jerks!

We'll grade this story barely acceptable.  "Brothers Beyond the Void" would be reprinted in anthologies of stories which became Twilight Zone episodes, as well as in a 1970 reprint magazine.

Back in 2018 we read Fairman's pseudonymous novel Whom the Gods Would Slay and earlier this year we read his "This is My Son."  I think I liked them better than I like this.

"The Martian and the Moron" by Theodore Sturgeon (1949)

I think Sturgeon is a good writer, but find his scolding elitism, his suggestion that the cognitive elite should collar and corral the common masses, and his affection for the idea of collective consciousness to be tiresome.  Probably I haven't read this story yet because the title made me think it would be an exercise in dismissively attacking the human race by contrasting us with good goody Martians.  But today we'll overcome our inhibitions and see what's up with this thing, a Weird Tales cover story that would go on to appear in Leo Margulies' The Ghoul Keepers and various Sturgeon collections.

Woah, I'm glad I read this one.  The style is charming and witty and smooth, and the content integrates characters with real personality and human feeling, rumination on how life should be lived, and a plot that is elaborate but fun and easy to read and full of legitimate surprise--surprises that are actually surprising and not cheap trickery, surprises that follow logically from what has come before.  Thumbs up!

In brief, our narrator is a child of middle-class parents in (I guess) New York City in the first half of the story and we observe his father's obsessive behavior as he pursues a secretive hobby, chases a mysterious goal.  Dad does not fulfill his quest.  In the second half of the story our narrator is a young adult, a veteran of the Second World War, his mother is dead, and he lives with his father.  He finds himself on an obsessive quest of his own--he falls in love with a beautiful, fascinating, frustratingly elusive woman!  Dad offers sage advice, and our narrator is shattered to find Dad's suspicions that this goddess was a phony, an empty suit whose air of mystery is mere pretense masking a vacant mind and stunted personality, were fully justified.  But a bizarre event occurs that unexpectedly links son and father's unconnected obsessions!  Dad's secretive labors in the basement back before the war were an effort to pick up radio signals from Mars!  And son's beloved vapid beauty turns out to be an unwitting receiver of psychic signals from the red planet!  Will father and son work together to make history and get in touch with the civilization on Mars?  No!  Some of Dad's wisdom backfires and the opportunity to make humanity's greatest discovery and revolutionize life in our solar system slips through their fingers!

If you look hard at the plot you will see it relies on an extremely unlikely coincidence, but otherwise this is a great story.  I can recommend "The Martian and the Moron" wholeheartedly.

"Null-P" by William Tenn (1951)

I've sort of avoided English professor Philip Klass's work because I have a sense he writes satires attacking capitalism or Western imperialism and that sort of thing, and I have limited patience for satire--you aren't going to convince me of the value of your theory of the ideal relationship between the state and the economy with your bitter caricature of people who disagree with you.  But back in 2018 I liked his "Project Hush" so maybe I am being unfair to the guy.  Maybe August Derleth today is going to midwife a new relationship between Tenn and me.

Ugh, "Null-P" is just what I feared, a 15-page joke story, a monument to the sort of hatred and fear of religious people and contempt for ordinary people--conformists who watch TV and at every moment are about engage in a riot--that you'd expect from a college professor in the 1950s.  (College professors now love TV and they seem to like riots as well.)  There is no character or drama on offer here, just a goofy joke history lesson that I guess at times is supposed to remind you of Swift, what with the talking dogs who build a superior civilization and enslave and selectively breed mankind on the last page.

After a nuclear-biological war wipes out the east and west coasts of the United States and much of the rest of the world, the American cult of the common man (Klass in this story argues that American culture lionizes mediocrity and suppresses excellence and idiosyncrasy) achieves its apotheosis when a man who is the statistical average in height, weight, age he got married, and everything else, is elected president.  American culture becomes pacific and stagnant as nobody strives to stand out or compete, and everybody pursues the statistical mean in all facets of life.  There are no new technological developments, there is no economic growth, and the human race goes into decline as fossil fuels run out.  Dogs isolated on some island develop intelligence and civilization and take over the world and treat humans the way humans have treated dogs, breeding them for particular tasks and attributes.  When the dogs lose interest in humans with the invention of robots the human race goes extinct. 

Thumbs down!

There are lots of people who love satire and so the flat and boring sneerfest that is "Null-P" has been reprinted in many anthologies since it first appeared in Damon Knight's short-lived magazine Worlds Beyond.   

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These three stories illustrate the potential of SF as well as some of its regrettable tendencies.  The Sturgeon is fresh and exciting, full of human feeling, a good example of compelling SF with real literary value.  The Fairman is run-of-the-mill twist-ending slosh, mere filler that flatters the elitism and cynicism of so many SF readers, while the Tenn represents maximum elitism, an expression of the disgust and bitterness of the smarty smarts over having to share the world with ordinary schlubs and dismay that in a market society said schlubs actually have influence over the culture and the government.

More SF short stories from a paperback anthology in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!