Frederik Pohl, '74: "We Purchased People" and, w/ C M Kornbluth, "The Gift of Garigolli," and "Mute Inglorious Tam"

I recently unleashed upon the interwebs a blog post casting aspersions on some stories from the 1970s by Grand Master Frederik Pohl.  Today we'll address the same topic, Pohl's 1970s work, but with a little guidance from SF readers who suggested in the comments to that post that Pohl's better work includes the particular story "We Purchased People" and as well as collaborations with fellow Futurian C. M. Kornbluth.  "We Purchased People" was first published in 1974, and in that exciting year, the year of the resignations of Richard Nixon, Golda Meir, and Willy Brandt, the year your humble blogger turned three years old, Pohl also published two collabs with Kornbluth, who died in 1958.  Let's check these 1974 stories out!

(There's some juicy gossip out there about the relationship between Pohl and Kornbluth, and Pohl and Mrs. Kornbluth after her husband's early death, that I won't go into here, but I mention it briefly in a blog post from earlier this year in which a book edited by Mary Kornbluth figures; at that post are links to material written by Pohl about the Kornbluths and some evidence that Mrs. Kornbluth resented Pohl.)

"We Purchased People" by Frederik Pohl

People really like this story; after its debut in Final Stage, an anthology of "ultimate" SF stories edited by Edward Ferman and our hero Barry N. Malzberg but famously mangled in its first edition by a woman at the publisher, "We Purchased People" has been reprinted numerous times, including in Terry Carr's Best Science Fiction of the Year #4, Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann's Aliens!, David Hartwell's Foundations of Fear, and a bunch of foreign anthologies.  Having read it now, in my copy of the restored paperback edition of Final Stage, I have to report that the  hype is fully justified--"We Purchased People" is a great science fiction story that speculates about Earth's possible relationship with space aliens, a great human story about abnormal psychology and people's psychological responses to an abnormal situation, and a great horror story full of gruesome and evil deeds with a cunningly developed plot; with perfect pacing, Pohl skillfully builds a foundation of mountingly disturbing revelations that leads very convincingly to the final nightmare twist.  Thumbs up!

The Earth some years ago was contacted by aliens from a distant star system.  The aliens have a sort of radio that can send messages, much faster than the speed of light, straight into people's brains.  In fact, if a person has the right equipment connected to his noggin, the aliens can control him like a puppet!  (Cf. Robert Silverberg's 1968 "Passengers.")  The governments of Earth were quite willing to sell to the aliens heinous criminals for use as puppets, and through the puppets the aliens can learn all about Earth and make business deals with Earth people.  The aliens sell to the Earth technology of tremendous value to us--such technology has prevented war, for example.  From us the aliens buy art treasures and specimens of plants and uniquely Earthly stuff like that, even though the rockets that carry these items will take many centuries to reach their new owners.  Numerous alien races contact the Earth, and they each have their peculiar idiosyncrasies; this being a horror story, these idiosyncrasies are designed to make the reader uneasy.

Like half or so of the text of "We Purchased People" is a first-person narrative in the voice of a white American criminal who has been purchased by some particularly disgusting aliens.  Pohl does a good job of describing what day-to-day life is like for this guy as a slave of the aliens, and of building up sympathy for this guy in the reader while at the same time stoking our suspicions of him.  We start out feeling pity for this joker and hostility to the aliens and the human authorities for the way they treat him, but then we realize how monstrously this guy behaves if left to his own devices we have a moral dilemma on our hands.  The narrator is so dangerous, his crimes so shocking and outrageous, that we are left little reason to feel bad for him, especially since trade with the aliens has done so much to enhance human peace and prosperity.  Maybe the crime against his liberty, maybe the existence of slavery in 20th or 21st century America, is justified by all the benefits of interstellar trade?  And then at the end of the story Pohl has the aliens do something so horrible to him that maybe we feel bad for him again--or maybe not, as it is his own foul nature that, in only a slightly oblique way, leads to the mind-shattering horror to which he is subjected.

You'll remember that the mainstream-like story by Pohl we read recently, "I Remember the Winter," seemed to deny that human beings had agency and could be blamed for any regrettable results of their behavior.  "We Purchased People" has a much more interesting and challenging take on human agency and responsibility.  On the one hand, one might argue that the main character is not really morally responsible for murdering little girls because he is mentally ill, and, of course, the whole story depicts people under the ruthless control of more powerful people--a leftist can read "We Purchased People" as an allegory of how under the market economy we are all slaves whipped or robots programmed by "capital" or merchants or the decadent rich or bourgeois liberal governments rabidly pursuing GDP.  Even for non-leftists, the story raises the question of how much infringement on individual freedom we are willing to accept in exchange for safety, order and wealth.  (We might also point out that Pohl hints that the communist rulers in Moscow and Peking, and Third World dictators, are even more eager to sell undesirables to the aliens than is the US government.)

But, at the same time it depicts people who are under the control of mental illness and the rich and powerful, Pohl's story also portrays a main character who does seem responsible for his black fate, who does exercise free will.  For one thing, we see him carefully calculate all his moves during periods when the aliens temporarily relinquish their control over him--he clearly demonstrates agency, the ability of the individual to assess risk and allocate resources in pursuit of the personal goals he has selected.  And the mind-blowing horror the protagonist suffers in the end of the story is an outgrowth of his own murderous fetish--is Pohl arguing that people really are the authors of their own fates, even in a largely or apparently deterministic world?  

"We Purchased People" works as emotion-triggering entertainment as it generates suspense and horror with all that creepy sex and horrendous violence, and works as thought-provoking science fiction with its depictions of both free will-oriented and deterministic views of human life, and the possible character of interstellar trade.  Very good--highly recommended to horror fans and to fans of SF that makes you think about the realities of human-alien interactions and the nature of human agency.

"The Gift of Garigolli" by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Oy, here we have a long and tedious domestic comedy with a little SF content and bland satire of the business world tacked on to it.  The structure and some of the themes of the story reminded me of those old black and white comedies like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse, what with the hapless middle-class husband, his troublemaking wife, and the deus ex machina resolution of the plot.  In the Pohl/Kornbluth collection Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Pohl seems to hint he knows "The Gift of Garigolli" is bad (and seems to be trying to blame Kornbluth for the story's inadequacy), and compares the story to I Love Lucy.  Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse is tolerable because Cary Grant and Myrna Loy are quite likable, and I Love Lucy is lovable because Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, and William Frawley ably portray characters easy to identify with, and "The Gift of Garigolli" utterly lacks any corresponding virtues.  The story's characters are ciphers whose motivations are difficult to discern and it drags aimlessly along at a snail's pace for like 20 pages, alternately lulling the reader to sleep and irritating him.  Bad.

Dupoir (a joke name for DuPont?) is a suburbanite commuter who works in PR for the plastics industry, trying to inspire in the populace good feelings about plastic.  He writes scripts for radio spots and works with a guy in his office with what I assume is a joke name, Jack Denny, who draws sexy girls for the weekly plastics newsletter.  Environmental activists are one of his headaches.  But he's got a bigger headache.  When his brother-law-law, an addict, checked himself into a rehab center, Dupoir's wife co-signed the papers.  Brother-in-law bugged out to the coast to try to get into movies without settling his bill, and now Dupoir is on the hook for the rehab center's fee--over 14,000 simoleons!  Dupoir can't afford it and he is being sued by the rehab center and fears he will lose his house.

Much of the story is a first-person narrative in the voice of Dupoir, and much of the story's comedy and SF content consists of Dupoir doing a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as if he is Tarzan; for example, he describes his competing for a seat on public transit the way ERB might describe Lord Greystoke struggling against some African beast.  Dupoir's Tarzan fixation, the stuff about plastic, and the space aliens, are like elements from three different stories just jammed together--each has no connection to the other.

Yes, space aliens.  The rest of the humor and SF content consists of the fact that Dupoir is under surveillance by teeny tiny airborne E.T.s.  These aliens are follow Dupoir around--he thinks they are fruit flies that are inexplicably attracted to him.  Sections of the text of "The Gift of Garigolli" are communiques from the leader of these alien observers back to HQ, discussing the various directives that serve as the guiderails for how the aliens are to interact with natives.  The aliens are supposed to help the natives, and when they perceive that Dupoir is in need of cash they try to create some gold for him through manipulation of molecules.  This does not work.   

Dupoir goes to a bar to drown his troubles, and meets another man trying to drown his troubles.  It turns out this guy is owner of the rehab center, depressed because he is owed 14,000 bucks.  The two get drunk and end up in the man's office at the rehab center, but nothing happens there and we readers wonder why the authors saw fit for them to go there.  In the morning these guys are both at Dupoir's house, where the tiny flying aliens have devised a process that turns plastic into alcohol.  This self-sustaining process enables Dupoir to pay his debts and also solves the problem of plastic litter, getting the environmental activists off the back of the plastics industry.

This story is horrible.  The plot is a total mess, the jokes are lame, and as I have suggested, I don't even feel as if the characters' motivations make sense, though maybe I missed the explanations of why they were doing what they were doing because the story was so boring my eyes were glazing over during the explanations.   

Thumbs down!

I may have hated "The Gift of Garigolli," but the world welcomed it with open arms!  Inexplicable!  You can find this half-baked dish of garbage in Donald Wollheim's The 1975 Annual World's Best SF and multiple Galaxy retrospectives.  Were editors buying this story in an effort to help Kornbluth's widow?  I don't get it.              

"Mute Inglorious Tam" by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Here we have another posthumous collaboration between Pohl and his toothpaste averse friend that won accolades.  "Mute Inglorious Tam" debuted in a special anniversary issue of F&SF and Lester del Rey included it in his annual "Best of" anthology.  In 1977 Edward Ferman put it in the twenty-second of the Best of F&SF volumes.  In 1992 Mike Resnick included it in an anthology of recursive or meta SF stories.  Well, let's try to read "Mute Inglorious Tam" with an open mind, leaving behind any resentment resulting from our reading of "The Gift of Garigolli" and refusing to be swayed by the spirit of contrariness that whispers "just because del Rey and Ferman and Resnick like it doesn't mean you have to like it," true though that may be.

Sometimes you'll encounter people who think life in medieval Europe had a lot going for it, that peasants didn't work as many hours as do today's suburbanite commuters, that religion and the clearly defined social order gave life meaning and structure, that the food wasn't giving people diabetes and the air wasn't giving people cancer, etc.  And of course you'll encounter people who will suggest life in medieval Europe was a nightmarish hell where everybody was impoverished and the man who lived to see his 30th birthday was a true rara avis.  "Mute Inglorious Tam" takes the latter tack, depicting medieval Sussex as a sort of racist police state, the Normans lording it over the Saxons, everyone living in poverty and discomfort, people getting the death penalty for thought crimes against the lord or the priests.  

"Mute Inglorious Tam" is more like a tendentious history lesson full of questionable recreations (like the recreations on true crime and history TV shows, where instead of just interviewing a cop about the bank robber he nabbed or a historian about the president whose biography he penned, the TV producers hire some clown to slap on a balaclava or a tricorn and prance around, pretending to be a bandit or the father of our country for the supposed benefit of viewers) than an actual story with a plot and everything.  Lots of time is spent on the geography and economics of the Sussex village at the center of the story.  As for the recreations, our protagonist, Tam, gets himself mixed up in plenty of domestic violence.

Tam isn't just a peasant who knocks down and then kicks his wife when she neglects to brew his beer.  Tam is a dreamer!  Working the fields, he dreams of corn that is more fecund.  Guiding a wagon, he dreams of a self-propelled cart.  Looking at his dirty village, he dreams of a village that is clean.  As Pohl tells us explicitly in the intros to "Mute Inglorious Tam" in F&SF and in Our Best, Tam, in a future milieu, would be a science fiction writer.

This story is competently written on a sentence by sentence basis--the descriptions of the setting and of the domestic violence are engaging--and I find the debate over how bad life really was in the Middle Ages interesting, so we can call "Mute Inglorious Tam" an acceptable sort of gimmick piece aimed directly at the niche market of SF readers committed to the idea of progress.

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It's been a day of extremes here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  In "We Purchased People" we have something of a classic, a top notch piece of work.  And in "The Gift of Garigolli" we have something I am a little surprised was even published in this state, it is so poor.  That's the power of a bankable name, I guess.  

Thanks to my commenters for guiding me to these stories, all of which are challenging in their own ways.  In  our next episode we'll read a novel by an even more bankable name than Fred Pohl's.