Merril-approved 1958 stories: Pabel, Pohl, and Presslie

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are taking a tour of the speculative fiction of 1958 with herald of the New Wave Judith Merril acting as our guide.  This tour has been on hiatus for a few months, but today we are back aboard the Judith Justine Grossman bus and through the windshield we can see some "P" stories up ahead.

As you probably know if you regularly read my scribblings here, Judith Merril in her SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume reprinted a bunch of 1958 stories and in the back of the book provided an alphabetical "Honorable Mentions" list of stories that for whatever reason didn't quite make the cut, but which she thought good, and we have been selecting stories from this list to read.  We've already dealt with a stack of Merril-approved 1958 stories from authors whose names start with the letters "A" through "O"--see the links below:

Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin
Pauline Ashwell, Don Berry and Robert Bloch
John Brunner, Algis Budrys and Arthur C. Clarke
"Helen Clarkson" (Helen McCoy), Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell
John Bernard Daley, Avram Davidson and Chan Davis
Gordon R. Dickson 
Charles Einstein, George P. Elliot, and Harlan Ellison
Charles G. Finney, Charles L. Fontenay, Donald Franson, and Charles E Fritch
Randall Garret and James E. Gunn 
Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert and Philip High
Shirley Jackson, Daniel Keyes and John Kippax
Damon Knight and C. M. Kornbluth
Fritz Leiber, Jack Lewis and Victoria Lincoln
Katherine MacLean, "T. H. Mathieu" (Les Cole) and Dean MacLaughlin 
A. E. Nourse
"Finn O'Donnevan" (Robert Sheckley) and Chad Oliver

Whew, gotta whole lotta links.

Today we've got a story by woman of mystery Avis Pabel, one by Grand Master Frederik Pohl, and two by Londoner Robert Presslie.

"Basic Agreement" by Avis Pabel

Avis Pabel only has one credit at isfdb, and a quick look around the interwebs suggests she led an exciting life.  She married an escaped German POW living incognito as a Chicago bookseller, got involved in Objectivism and published articles in an Objectivist magazine under the name Avis Brick, and eventually vanished from sight altogether.  Wild.  Let's try to figure out what John W. Campbell, Jr. and Merril saw in Pabel/Brick's sole SF story, "Basic Agreement," which appeared in Campbell's Astounding and, it seems, never again.

This is a brief trifling story but well-told, a story about family life that rings true.  A little girl keeps seeing a monster in the corner of her bedroom--when she screams, her stressed-out parents get angry at her, insisting she is just having a nightmare.  We learn that the little girl had an older sister, Jill, who died protecting her, and to whom the parents keep comparing her, unfavorably--Jill never had nightmares, Jill was good at math, Jill was popular, etc.  So she has to get used to the creepy sight of the monster just standing in the corner of her room every night.  Then one night, after our little heroine has had a particularly bad day, the monster speaks, and we realize it is a sad little alien girl, a little dolly in one of its tentacles, and it wants to make friends with the protagonist, and maybe it can help her with her math!

Thumbs up!    

"The Wizards of Pung's Corners" by Frederik Pohl

All three of the illustrations to "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" in Galaxy, where it debuted, include a TV set, and I groaned thinking this story of 25 pages by Fred Pohl, alumnus of the Young Communist League, was going to be an attack on television, advertising, and, by extension, our entire market-oriented society.  Twenty-five pages?  Suddenly, firing up my C-64 emulator and playing some more Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (which I hear is in the news again, like 40 years after I first played it) was looking pretty attractive.  When I had satisfied my need to scribble--and ruefully erase--notes on graph paper, I felt a little better about seeing what Fred had to say about the boob tube.

These good feelings didn't survive the first page of the story.  "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" is written in the annoying colloquial style of a tall tale told by some rural yarn spinner around the fire...

You never saw a bag like that! It looked like a kind of electronic tool kit, I swear.

...and takes the form of a popular history written in the far future which describes events in the near future, full of references to memoirs and history books.  The content of "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" constitutes an even more absurd and broad satire than I had feared, with Pohl focusing on telling tired jokes and detailing his social and economic theories and putting no effort into plot or character.

Bad!

Alright, here's the plot summary for all you gluttons for punishment.

Pung's Corners is a New England town in the middle of a desert--it had the good fortune to survive the atomic war that wiped out most of America's northeast.  Pung's Corners has a history of sitting out America's wars, its inhabitants having avoided service in the War of Independence and in the Civil War, and the current inhabitants are not unhappy about being cut off from the rest of the United States by the radioactive wastes--in fact, there is a local law prohibiting TV antennas so they won't get info from the outside world and their anti-aircraft missiles have shot down multiple approaching aircraft.  As the story begins, an old man we are told is wicked on the first page of the story, Coglan, drives into town in a car sheathed in lead.  He takes a room in the hotel; the bellboy watches Coglan through the keyhole as the old man communicates with his colleagues via his two-way TV phone (that is what is in the bag referenced in the quote above.)  

The United States government is under the control of an advertising agency and Coglan is their agent, come to Pung's Corners to reintroduce the isolated town to advertising.  The automated underground factories that survived the atomic war need more markets for their products and Pung's Corners is to be one of those markets.  The people of Pung's Corners have hard wired TV service which runs the same old movies again and again.  Coglan somehow patches into this signal, adding subliminal advertising for mass-produced consumer goods.  He has drugs put in the local water supply to make the townspeople more suggestible.  He uses a subsonic hypnotic device to trick the local banker into giving him money.  He hires the town slut to be his assistant.  These characters disappear from the narrative in the middle of the story to be replaced by other, perhaps even more ridiculous, caricatures.

Living in Pung's Corners is a retired advertising man who can tell what Coglan is up to.  He rallies the people of the town to physically overpower feeble old Coglan and thus foil his scheme.  So the federal government sends the United States Army to attack Pung's Corners.  Pohl gives us a long and tedious  absurdist military campaign in which the war correspondents that accompany the expeditionary force outnumber the riflemen, who don't know how to use their rifles because of planned obsolesce--the subterranean factories put out a new rifle every season and so the privates never have time to adequately train on each new model.  The people of Pung's Corners accept the surrender of the attack force, and then advance on the capital and take over the United States and put an end to advertising.

This story is just a vehicle for Pohl to inflict his lame leftist economic and social theories on readers.  Ordinary people, in Pohl's view, are easy prey for the manipulations of business people, who are all monopolists who overproduce products no sane person would want and use advertising, which is irresistible, to trick people into buying those useless items.  Government is needed to step in to protect the ignorant masses from advertising.  Pohl goes to the trouble of giving "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" a style--the hokey tall tale style I mentioned before--but plot and character have no place.  The plot offers no suspense, as it is made clear in the beginning that the people of Pung's Corners are going to take over the world and we are expected to cheer them on in doing so, and much of the text is unconnected to the plot, taken up by exposition as Pohl lays out his various theories in the form of historical digressions.  The characters are all broad stereotypes or archetypes--the evil old man, the vapid slut, the blundering, glory-seeking, military man, and these characters don't do much of anything--they get introduced, they are the butt of feeble jokes, then the plot resolves itself without them making any decisions.

I repeat: bad.  Merril may have been doing her fellow bolshie a favor by recommending it, but she was doing us readers a disservice!  "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" has reappeared in several Pohl collections, as well as a 1964 Penguin paperback marketed as being for "connoisseurs" and a 1974 Prentice-Hall textbook designed for use in the government schools.  Good grief.

"Another Word for Man" by Robert Presslie

A year ago I read a story by Presslie on Merril's recommendation, "The Creep," and I hated it.  In 2018 I read his story "The Day Before Never" and found it boring.  Yet, somehow, today I have committed to reading two more stories by Presslie.  Now who's the glutton for punishment?

The first blow in this Presslie one-two punch is "Another Word for Man," which debuted in John Carnell's New Worlds and would go on to be included in the second anthology in the Out of this World series edited by Amabel Williams-Ellis and Mably Owen as well as Michael Moorcock's Best of New Worlds.  It seems the SF community, at least over in the green and pleasant land, embraced this story.  Well, let's hope it provides me an opportunity to revise my opinion of Presslie.   

"Another Word for Man" is, thankfully, a competent if pedestrian story in which an alien performs a Christ-like act of sacrifice for a human who doubted it, leading that human to rethink his religious dogmatism.  Presslie, according to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, worked as a "pharmacy manager" and this story's science speculation centers on medicine and biology.

A lobster fisherman from a remote Canadian village pulls up an alien in one of his pots.  This thing, looking like a slug the size of a basketball, has telepathy, as so many aliens in these old stories do.  Its body is flexible and changeable--it can grow gills with which to breathe underwater, if need be, extend tubes with which to breathe air and make sounds, etc.  The lobsterman brings the alien to the little community's de facto leader, the priest.  This man of god decides to keep the alien a secret from the outside world.  Because the alien professes to be a doctor, the priest remands it to the custody of the two physicians at the local doctor's office.  We later learn that the priest and the alien had an argument over religion and the priest holds a grudge.

The alien is an eager beaver and learns all about human physiology from the doctors--soon it is better at diagnosing patients than they are!  The alien laments that human surgery involves cutting people open--among his people, who can change shape with ease, no such cutting is necessary.  When the priest is found to have a massive cancerous growth in his chest that has extended tendrils all through his body (he has been ignoring his chest pain for three years), the alien projects hundreds of cilia into the cleric's body and withdraws all the cancer cells into itself, killing itself but curing the priest, who realizes the alien is one of God's children and the phrase typically translated as "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" should be rendered "Greater love hath no creature of Mine...."

There is a mountain of SF stories out there that show up how crummy humans are by contrasting us with goody goody space aliens, and we can add "Another Word for Man" to the pile, but while there is a passage in which one of the doctors groans that governments spend more on weapons research than cancer research, Presslie in his story here does more showing than telling--he doesn't indulge in tendentious speeches or anything--and the writing is reasonably good.  Acceptable.

"Dial 'O' for Operator" by Robert Presslie

Here we have a good horror story; the horror elements work, and so do the human elements, as the two main characters act in a way that is believable and compelling, and at least one of them actually grows as a person as a result of his ordeal.

A telephone operator answers a call--a prostitute is at the docks, in a phone booth, and claims she is pursued by a blob monster!  All we know of her plight we learn from her dialogue--we are in the same boat as the operator.  Presslie does a good job conveying the tension and fear of both the woman and the operator as he and the police try to help her.  The telephone company employee is initially presented to us as a dull man, but he comes to life as he strives to save this woman.  The police go to the phone booth, but there is no woman, no monster.  A clue convinces the operator that the woman must be calling from the future!  He comes up with a plan to save her, but whether it succeeds or not, whether she escapes or is devoured by the blob, he will never know.

Thumbs up for "Dial 'O' for Operator"--Merril steered us right this time!  The story debuted in John Carnell's Science Fantasy; Carnell reprinted it in an anthology of horror stories by science fiction writers, and it has also reappeared in anthologies on the theme of time.

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So we've got three misanthropic stories today in which human beings are shown to be either evil or powerless victims who can only get out of jams through deus ex machina interventions, not their own  initiative.  Pohl's treatment of this theme is tendentious and tedious, lacking an engaging plot or compelling characters and instead filling up two dozen pages with absurd jokes and lame theories.  Presslie's story about a self-sacrificing alien is OK, as, unlike Pohl, his speculative science is somewhat interesting and he makes an effort to construct multiple engaging characters with believable personalities.  Pabel's story might not have the science or can-do hero we expect to see in Astounding, but it nails the human emotion components and is an effective little weird tale I can recommend.  But today's top story is the fourth, Presslie's horror piece about a blob monster and inadvertent communication across time.  This story has a more hopeful theme, depicting ordinary--even fallen--human beings who have a fighting chance when faced with novel and deadly challenges and who grow in response to their terrible adventure; most importantly, it delivers horror thrills and isn't preachy.

We hit a jarring pothole with the Pohl, but otherwise this hasn't been a bad leg in our guided tour through 1958, and I am especially pleased to see a better side of Presslie's work.  Stay tuned for more 1958 SF here at MPorcius Fiction Log.