Frederik Pohl: "Let the Ants Try," "The Schematic Man," and "The Day After the Day the Martians Came"

The Frederik Pohl collection In the Problem Pit, published in 1976 by Bantam, includes nine pieces of fiction and so far we've blogged about seven of them: "In the Problem Pit," "I Remember a Winter," "Some Joys under the Star," "Rafferty's Reasons," "What To Do Until the Analyst Comes," "The Man Who Ate the World" and "To See Another Mountain."  Today we'll read the remaining two, "Let the Ants Try" and "The Schematic Man."  And since two stories doesn't feel like a whole blog post, we'll finish up today by reading Pohl's contribution to the world famous anthology that we have so often heard shook the foundations of the universe, Dangerous Visions, "The Day After the Day the Martians Came," even though I just told tarbandu and anybody who reads the comments to my blog posts that the next time I read from Harlan Ellison's tome that I would read the stories by J. G. Ballard, Fritz Leiber and Samuel R. Delany.  I'm fickle!

"Let the Ants Try" (1949)

"Let the Ants Try" debuted in an issue of Planet Stories with a cover showing colorfully-dressed good-looking people beating the hell out of ugly people people in bland monochrome attire--an allegory of life, perhaps.  In his intro to the tale in In the Problem Pit, Pohl tells us that the story is based on ideas presented to him verbally by a colleague at the Popular Science Publishing Company, where Pohl did advertising work.  In Planet Stories, "Let the Ants Try" appeared under the pseudonym "James MacCreigh," a pen name Pohl seems to have used dozens of times.  "Let the Ants Try" was a success, being reprinted in multiple European magazines as well as Robert Silverberg's Mutants, and Pohl must have been proud of it, seeing as he included it in multiple anthologies he edited himself, and it shows up in three Pohl collections, including the 21st-century "Best of" collection, Platinum Pohl.

In "Let the Ants Try" we have an acceptable twist-ending story, as well as one of those misanthropic stories about how terrible the human race is.  The main character is a scientist based in Detroit who has invented a time machine.  A war breaks out and Detroit and Washington D.C. get nuked.  Who nuked these towns and how the war started is not mentioned--we wouldn't want people to think the government of the Soviet Union is any worse than any other government, would we?  The point of these sorts of stories is that all people everywhere are equally bad.  

Anyway, the scientist's family has been wiped out, but his invention has survived.  He makes sure the time machine doesn't fall into the hands of the US government for use in fighting America's enemies.  The inventor decides to live among the mutant mice and insects on the edge of practically deserted Motor City and try to grow his own food in the irradiated soil.  (This guy's decisions are a little hard to understand.)  Another intellectual happens along, a biologist.  This guy was associated with the same institution as our hero, and he decides he'd like to live with the inventor.  

These two brainiacs come up with the idea of taking mutant super-ants and transporting them via the time machine to prehistoric times, long before the dinosaurs, and leaving them there with the idea that they will evolve into an intelligent race--these new-fangled ants, unlike the real life ants I am always trying to kill before they can get into the house to steal my Ovaltine, have lungs, and the scientists think this will give them a chance to evolve into human-sized creatures.  Maybe a civilization of ant-people will be a nicer than the human civilization which invented nuclear weapons and is going to blow up the world any minute now?  Or maybe the ant-people will be friends with humanity?  Or maybe--and this seems to be the theory the inventor has the most hope for--human beings, who are full of hate for those who are different, will focus their hate on the ant-people instead of each other, leading to intra-human unity and peace.

This wild scheme doesn't work out--the rise of the intelligent ants prevents the rise of humanity.  When our pair of academics returns to the 20th century there are no humans and the biologist gets killed by the ant-people and the inventor gets imprisoned and forced to help the ants study the time machine.  The inventor manages to escape and take the time machine back to prehistoric times--he has the idea of stopping himself from leaving behind the ants in the first place.  The twist is that, as has been foreshadowed, the ant people have built their own time machine and ambush him before he can undo his history-changing deed.

The more I think about this story the more silly it seems, but I'll still classify it as acceptable; the foreshadowing element is good.

The 1956 Ballantine collection Alternating Currents includes three stories that
also appear in In the Problem Pit, "Let the Ants Try," "Rafferty's Reasons" and
"What To Do Until the Analyst Comes"

"The Schematic Man" (1969)

"The Schematic Man" first appeared in a special 15th-anniversary issue of our most honored girlie magazine, Playboy, alongside articles by funnyman P. G. Wodehouse, purported funnyman Art Buchwald, wild and crazy guy Henry Miller, and resident sycophant at the court of America's royal family, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.  SF fans' interest may be piqued by an article in which predictions about the coming year are solicited from a tarot card reader, an astrologer, a gypsy fortuneteller, and other shysters, or an article offering advice on what clothes to wear, food to serve and music to play when you host a futuristic costume party, but I warn I tried to read these articles and they seemed mind-numbingly boring.  Gene Szafran aficionados should take note that "The Schematic Man" is accompanied by an illustration by Szafran.

"The Schematic Man" is a first-person narrative.  A couple of pages are devoted primarily to a description of what a mathematical model is; this being Playboy, some of the examples of models are of a (by the standards of our porn-suffused 2025 culture, very mildly) risqué nature.  Then comes the plot and the character elements, which Pohl fashions with some skill and power.  Our narrator is a computer scientist, and a man who has led what we have to consider a sad life.  He marshals all the grad students and computing power at his command to create within a computer a mathematical model of his own mind and personality!  As the story ends, our narrator finds memory is a little faulty, and he is not sure if he is the flesh and blood academic, gone insane and suffering some level of physical incapacity in a medical institution, or if he is not in fact the "real" scientist at all but merely the second-rate computer copy of his brain.

I like it--Pohl handles the science and technology lectures well enough, and the plot and character elements with subtlety and economy.  Quite a bit better than average for Pohl; I have to wonder if something about writing for Playboy pushed Pohl to do his best work, maybe the higher level of pay, maybe some kind of restrictions (say on how much space he had to work with) or freedoms (liberty to write more about sex, perhaps) peculiar to Playboy, because some of my favorite Pohl stories, like "The Punch" and "The Fiend," also appeared in Playboy.       

In the intro to "The Schematic Man" in In the Problem Pit, Pohl tells a curious story about the story's publication history.  As Pohl tells it, Hugh Hefner's flunkies had an illustration they liked, and commissioned Pohl to write a story based upon it.  Pohl wrote them two stories--the Playboy staff bought one, and rejected the other.  "The Schematic Man" was the reject.  A "couple of years later," Pohl revised "The Schematic Man" a little and sent it to Playboy a second time and this time they bought it.

What was the story that was accepted immediately?  Where can you see the illustration that prompted not one but two stories from Pohl?  Pohl does not say.  So, I put on my deerstalker cap and launched an investigation.  Real life investigations do not involve fist fights, foot chases, and femme fatales, but looking through documents.  First, I consulted isfdb and found it listed four Pohl stories that appeared in Playboy in the 1960s before "The Schematic Man": "Punch," "The Fiend," "Making Love" and "Speed Trap."  Then I looked through each of the indicated issues of Playboy, scrutinizing the illustrations accompanying each of the four Pohl stories in an effort to judge which seemed most applicable to "The Schematic Man."  Discovering the answer did not require the intellect of a Holmes; the editorial intro to the story in the December 1966 issue of the magazine, where it is styled "Lovemaking," comes right out and explains that Playboy showed the illo (a photo of a modernistic abstracted bust of a man with the parts labelled) to three SF authors--Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas Disch and Pohl--and printed a story submitted by each inspired by the image.

(I'll have to read "Lovemaking" AKA "Making Love" soon.)

Anyway, "The Schematic Man" has reappeared numerous times, including in anthologies edited by Thomas F. Monteleone and Rudy Rucker on themes of computers and math.

"The Day After the Day the Martians Came" (1967)

This story, in at least some of its appearances since its debut in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, has borne the shorter title "The Day the Martians Came."  The story has had many sequels and these were all compiled in a 1988 collection titled The Day the Martians Came that some sources consider a fix-up novel.

"The Day After the Day the Martians Came" is a story about how racist people are.  Pohl also suggests that racist beliefs are totally irrational, totally unrelated to reality--people of one race just make up stuff about other races.  The story is set in a Florida hotel stuffed full of reporters who are here to cover the big story--a NASA space ship has returned from Mars with some natives of the red planet, weak and sad individuals who have only a primitive technology.  The journalists watch news items about the Martians on TV, and make jokes about how the Martians are ugly or stupid or smell bad, even though they have yet to personally meet a Martian.  These are old jokes, the same jokes Christians have long made about Jews or Englishmen about Irishmen or whites about blacks, with the word "Martian" plugged into the "noun" spot like in a Mad Libs.  Pohl makes sure you, the reader, get this by having the main character, the hotel manager, actually spell it out for you.  The manager also tells one of his African-American bellmen that the arrival of the Martians isn't going to change anything on Earth, but but his black employee begs to differ, saying the presence of Martians will make a big difference to some people, including him.  I presume the idea Pohl is indirectly getting at here is that if every Earther has the Martians to make fun of, to be suspicious of and to discriminate against, white people may stop heaping abuse upon and discriminating against black people.  This echoes the idea we have already encountered today in Pohl's oeuvre, in "Let the Ants Try," when the inventor thought the presence of alien ant-people might unite humanity.  In the Afterword, Pohl reiterates this theme when he speaks approvingly of a minister in Alabama who is encouraging his white parishioners to read science fiction in hopes suspicions that aliens exist will foster a belief in the brotherhood of humankind.  Pohl sees human beings as simple-minded and easily manipulated, a fact he laments but also hopes society's elite will be able to take advantage of.  

For a tendentious satire that is not very believable, "The Day After the Day the Martians Came" isn't bad, as it is quick and to the point, the style is alright, and I like how Pohl ascribes racism to people like himself--professional knowledge-workers--instead of caricaturing some inferior "other," like rural hicks or working-class brutes or even the hotel manager, who comes off as less racist than the journalos.  I guess we'll call the story acceptable, even though Pohl's vision of how people would respond to meeting aliens and his description of racism are not very convincing, do not ring true, fail to reflect real life interactions between different cultures and real people's thought processes.  "The Day After the Day the Martians Came" tells us something about Fred Pohl and his beliefs, but doesn't tell us much of anything about race relations or the ways different cultures influence and affect each other in the real world.

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So, we've got two stories that sort of sneak in under the wire and one legitimately successful story.  I will suggest that I liked "The Schematic Man" much more than "Let the Ants Try" and "The Day After the Day the Martians Came" because "The Schematic Man" is about the hard sciences and about the psychology of one man, and the other two stories are about Pohl's less-than-convincing soft science theories and about group psychology or sociology instead of the personality of a single individual.  A look at the life and mind of a specific individual is always going to be more compelling (to me) than blanket statements about people as an undifferentiated mass, especially when those statements don't accord with my own life or reading experiences.   

Another Pohl collection sits on the shelves of the MPorcius Library and maybe we'll read from it soon.