A week or so ago I wrote about some stories in the February, 1956 issue of Manhunt and I had some unkind things to say about Sam Merwin, Jr.'s "Block Party." Way back in 2017 I wrote about Merwin's novel The House of Many Worlds and was even less generous. In the comments to that recent Manhunt blog post, a well-read SF fan with a good memory listed four stories by Merwin that he or she felt were "pretty good." Lett us today scour the internet archive, the world's finest website, and read those four stories in hopes we can agree that they are good and that they will provide us an opportunity to say some nice things about Merwin.
"The Carriers" (1949)
"The Carriers" appeared in a magazine Merwin himself edited,
Thrilling Wonder Stories,
in an issue that we've already blogged about. That issue features a component of
A. E. van Vogt's Isher saga, the story by James Blish and Damon Knight that would be expanded into the novel
VOR, and short stories by Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon--click the links for the MPorcius take on these works, and read on for the MPorcius take on "The Carriers," which Merwin must have been proud of, because it is included in the 1949 hardcover anthology
My Best Science Fiction Story. (It didn't make the cut when an abridged paperback edition of
My Best Science Fiction Story came out five years later--ouch!)
(Note that I am reading "The Carriers" in its original magazine version, and I am doing the same for all four of today's stories.)
The thing you note almost immediately when reading "The Carriers," and the most or second most memorable thing about it, is that it is a feminist story. Our protagonist is a spacefaring woman physicist who conducts experiments, designs a new hyperdrive, orders subordinates around, and takes the lead in forming a sexual relationship (albeit with a man--this story doesn't quite achieve feminist escape velocity and make it all the way to Planet Lesbos.) On the first full page of the story the names of "Susan Anthony" and "Carrie Nation" are invoked heroically, and we are told that women make better spacers than men!
...women adjusted better and more rapidly than men to the varied conditions of interplanetary exploration. Men—more limited in physical and biological function—were for the most part more brittle. Those who survived were not rugged Vikings of the Nansen-Amundsen type but, for the most part, smaller, softer, more feminine types....
The man our lead character pursues a relationship with is specifically described as one of those soft feminine type men--is this story a wish fulfillment fantasy for feminist women or for short unassertive men?
I'll also note that our heroine is constantly smoking cigarettes--maybe this represents her liberation and/or her tough can-do attitude, or maybe Merwin, like T. S. Eliot*, finds women smoking to be sexually exciting?
*See Eliot's April 24, 1915 letter to Eleanor Hinkley.
The problem with this feminist theme of "The Carriers" is that it is wholly unconnected to the plot--all the characters could be straight men and the plot would work exactly the same (the sexual relationship I mentioned doesn't get very far and is also wholly independent of the plot, though at the end of this blog post I will suggest it serves a narrative function.) In fact, I think that the plot might even be said to undermine the feminist theme, as the plot doesn't present the characters or the gynocentric space program depicted as achieving any kind of triumph.
OK, let's describe the plot. Earth has developed a hyperspace drive and our multi-ethnic cast, most prominent of whom is our protagonist Dr. Lydia Gray, is the crew of Earth's first star ship, a huge sphere that Merwin describes in some detail. The planets of the Solar System all proved to lack living animal life, though some had plant life and upon some were found the dead remains of animate life forms now extinct. The crew of the ship finds the same sad reality on all the extrasolar planets they explore. Among several of these dead planets are high tech cities, now in ruins--these cities bear evidence that they fell only recently, that their people were exterminated by a disease and then their nuclear power plants, unattended, caused all-engulfing fires.
Gray's study of some alien artifacts offers her the insights she needs to improve the ship's hyperdrive so they can get to the next planet more quickly. When she and her comrades land on the next planet they find the intelligent population dead, but only just--much of their infrastructure hasn't burned down yet, and what amounts to a TV set or automatic film projector is still operating! Watching TV provides the info Gray needs to come to a horrible conclusion--the disease killing all these alien species is coming from the Earth space ship! (Something we readers may have guessed from the title of the story, unless we somehow thought it was a reference to aircraft carriers.) How does a disease precede a star ship through the vacuum of space? Merwin and Gray can only lamely theorize that "beams" are involved. The story ends on this down note, though Gray does express confidence the human race will figure out and solve the issue.
"The Carriers" is acceptable. It is probably longer than it needs to be, Merwin offering copious details and multiple scenes which do nothing to set up the twist ending, and I am finding the idea that your germs or autonomic disease beams or whatever can precede you and kill everybody in front of you before you get to them--even though you are in a ship going faster than the speed of light--hard to credit. But the story is not actually bad. I wonder if Merwin's "the human race is the disease!" gimmick was at all inspired or influenced by
Edmond Hamilton's 1930s stories "The Accursed Galaxy" and "Devolution."
"The Carriers" was reprinted in some magazines in the 1950s, including the first issue of Australian magazine Future Science Fiction.
"Exit Line" (1950)
Here's another story from a magazine Merwin himself edited,
Startling Stories. (One reason I am reading these four Merwin stories even though I was lukewarm at best about stuff I read by him in the past is that I like
Thrilling Wonder and
Startling, so am kindly disposed to the guy.) This issue of
Startling features the magazine version of
Raymond F. Jones' The Cybernetic Brains, the book version of which we read in 2017, as well as a version of Jack Vance's "To B or Not to C or to D" entitled "Cosmic Hotfoot," a story by Mack Reynolds, a Captain Future caper by Edmond Hamilton, and a reprinted collab between Arthur K. Barnes and Henry Kuttner. This looks like a good issue of the magazine! Probably I should reread the Vance and blog about it someday, and cover as well the Reynolds and the Barnes/Kuttner pieces, which I have yet to read. Well, who knows, maybe soon. (I like Hamilton, of course, but here we have the 23rd Captain Future adventure and I'll want to read more of the earlier ones first*.)
Today we are focusing on Merwin's story in the mag, which appears under a pen name. "Exit Line" was reprinted in 1951 in Groff Conklin's Possible Worlds of Science Fiction, where Conklin in his little four-line intro tells us that the alien in the story, which he categorizes as a "BEM," is one of the rare likable BEMs in science fiction. I shouldn't read these little intros, as they are often spoily and/or guide the reader's interpretation of the story in a way that diminishes or perverts its impact, but I am weak-willed, and my relationship with these intros is like my relationship with all the chocolate ice cream I shouldn't eat--I see them, I devour them, and regret follows.
"Exit Line" is a trifling twist ending story that is an homage to fairy tales; the characters not only mention "The Emperor's New Clothes," The Hunting of the Snark, and Davy and the Goblin but these fables actually play a role in the structure and plot of the story.
A dozen or so humans have landed on a planet and have been trying to set up a viable colony there. They are friends with a sort of blob creature with many eyes and pseudopods that can read their minds and communicate telepathically. The blob is not native to the world, but also an alien colonist. The humans and the blob work together to stave off attacks from giant hostile natives as well as invisible monsters--humans can't see these beasts but the blob can detect them with his telepathy right before they attack; when an attack is imminent the blob warns the humies and they shelter behind a forcefield the blob generates. The blob also directs the Terrans in how to erect fortifications against the attackers--the humans spend so much time constructing these defenses to the blob's exacting specifications that they have to neglect their crops and as the story begins the humans have decided to abandon the colony after six years of effort. They invite the blob to come with them off the planet (its vaguely described means of arriving on the planet was strictly single use) but it declines to accompany them. After the humans have left they realize the blob was tricking them into building it a dwelling--there are no invisible monsters, the blob was just lying and play acting their attacks.
This story seems needlessly complicated, what with the two types of monsters, one of which is not real, and with two explanations for why the blob wanted the Earthers to build it a large series of walls, neither of which is very convincing. As for Conklin, why does he assume I am going to like the blob? this duplicitous and manipulative monster wasted six years of my fellow humans' lives and a significant volume of other resources by sabotaging their colonization effort, and it's not like the blob is a native I might be expected to feel bad for like I am supposed to feel bad for native Americans confronted by European settlers--the blob is a rival colonial power. I guess I am supposed to see the blob as a puckish trickster, but I am not buying it.
Barely acceptable.
"Judas Ram" (1950)
Here we have a story that appeared in H. L. Gold's Galaxy. Gold also included it in 1952's
Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction."Judas Ram" is, in part, one of those switcheroo stories, like the EC comic in which a guy who kills spiders by an astonishing coincidence finds himself the prey of an elephant-sized spider or the Twilight Zone episodes in which German WWII service men find themselves the victims of submarine warfare or genocide instead of the perpetrators. You know how humans kill animals and mount them as trophies, capture animals and run experiments on them and train them to do tricks and breed them--well, in this story, aliens do that stuff to humans! "Judas Ram" also has strong fetishistic sex undertones, and lots of descriptions of women's bodies and clothing. Most importantly for our purposes, "Judas Ram" is better written than "The Carriers" and "Exit Line," with a good action scene as well as smoother and more compelling sentences and a better overall structure--there's less extraneous detail, less fluff, and a stronger sense of rising tensions and climax.
OK, the plot. Extradimensional aliens have opened up an invisible doorway in a particular spot on Earth and seized three young women and one man. The aliens have also brought back to their universe the heads of some men--we later learn that it is easier, for unexplained reasons, for the aliens to capture women alive than men; our hero, Rog, was only captured because he had wrecked his car and was unconscious when the aliens came upon him. In the alien universe, Rog has to impregnate the three women--like most aliens in the stories we read, these jokers have telepathy and they can manipulate the minds of Rog and the ladies so they get sexually aroused, even against their will. After 18 months or so in captivity, Rog has several kids; the aliens make giving birth a snap and the kids grow at an artificially rapid rate. Rog and the women live in a house and wear clothes and eat food the aliens conjure up based on their captive's thoughts, so the humans have some ability to determine their own living conditions, but everything is subtly wrong and unsatisfying--food, booze and cigarettes don't have a smell, for example, the aliens apparently not having a sense of smell, and/or smell not working in this universe, where the laws of physics are different than in our own universe and Rog experiences what we might call non-Euclidian geometric effects.
One wall looked normal for perhaps a third of its length, then it simply wasn't for a bit. It came back farther on at an impossible angle. Yet, walking along it, touching it, it felt perfectly smooth and continuously straight.
The aliens have been training Rog to teleport, and once he has learned this new skill they take him back to Earth with the idea that he will help them trick other men into walking through the dimensional portal and into their clutches--Rog is the Judas ram of the title, a play on "
Judas goat." (We've seen SF writers use this Judas goat idea before--Jack Vance in 1949's "The Sub-Standard Sardines" and Thomas N. Scortia in 1980's
"Judas Fish.") Can Rog outwit the aliens and reunite with his wife? Can he shut down the portal and maybe save the Earth from further kidnappings and murders? What if it turns out his wife is already banging some other guy who has more money than Rog ever had and this love triangle quickly becomes murderous like in some hard-boiled detective story? Could it be that Rog is better off as a guinea pig with a harem in another universe than on an Earth where all the people who know him want to get rid of him?
I like this one. Frederik Pohl has suggested that Gold's role as editor was often to essentially rewrite people's stories* so maybe we have Gold to credit for the fact that "Judas Ram" seems better than Merwin's average. Pohl certainly credits Gold with the ability to improve people's stories.
*See Pohl's The Way the Future Was, page 213 of the 1979 paperback.
"Star Tracks" (1952)
It is the dawn of the space age! Mankind has put a big space station in orbit around the Earth, and the rockets that will take men to Mars have been built and tested, and soon will land on the red planet. One of the men who will con those rockets is our hero Bob Marny, hot shot pilot! Bob loves speed and excitement, but today he is bored. His current mission has him stuck on that space station--he ferried three astronomers here over a week ago, so they could study Mars through a telescope unhindered by Earth's atmosphere. They were only supposed to be on the station three days, but it seems like they found something interesting on Mars and they, and thus Bob, have been sticking around so they could take a better look at it. What they found is top secret, but Bob is curious, and decides to see what he can learn from one of the three astronomers--the female one! Carol Lee may be old--35!--but she looks like a teenager! Hubba hubba!
These two fall in love over cigarettes and fruit juice, alcohol being forbidden on the station, but more important to us readers than Dr. Lee's revelation that she left an acting career to become a scientist is her revelation of the discovery the astronomers have made that has kept them tied up on the space station. Outer space is some kind of scam! Mars is a prop! Not far beyond it is some kind of black barrier--the stars are also artificial props, machines moving slowly along barely visible tracks! The Earth and the human race, as Charles Fort* suggested, are somebody's property! Bob's dreams of landing on alien planets, the dreams of the human race of expanding out into space and relieving population pressure, are shattered!
*Carol Lee mentions Fort by name; Fort was very familiar to long time readers of Astounding, his book Lo! having been serialized in Astounding in 1931, during the editorship of F. Orlin Tremaine. Another indication of how important Fort was to SF readers in the 20th century is that Damon Knight published a biography of Fort in 1970.
Like "The Carriers," "Star Tracks" ends on a down note; in both stories our hopes of exploring the galaxy are dashed by a twist ending revelation that is difficult to take seriously, though in both cases Merwin softens the blow by having the cigarette-smoking lady scientist express confidence that the human race will get around this obstacle somehow. And I guess we are supposed to be soothed by knowledge that the tobacco-loving female genius is about to embark on a happy marriage.
Acceptable. "Star Tracks" debuted in John W. Campbell's Astounding, and no editor seems to have been jazzed enough by "Star Tracks" to want to publish it a second time.
**********
These four stories are noteworthy for several reasons. First of all, their pessimism: at the end of each the main characters have been foiled, are stuck in some kind of trap and/or have seen their dreams melt away almost to nothing--the experience of encountering alien intelligences has been disappointing at best, a horror at worst. These stories remind one of horror tales which climax with a terrible revelation and in tone are quite unlike the standard science fiction story which celebrates the man of knowledge who triumphs over adversity via quick thinking. Secondly, the prominence of women in the stories, and the role played by sexual relationships in three of them in softening the blow of realizing your adventure beyond has been a bust; we might argue that this reflects an ancient wisdom the slide rule boys are liable to forget about, that love is more essential to happiness than achieving your ambitions for knowledge and power.
These stories are not bad, and perhaps provide insight into the SF of the immediate post war period, so reading them was worthwhile. But I didn't love them and it might be a while before we read anything by Sam Merwin, Jr. again.
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