Merril-approved 1958 stories by M St Clair, T N Scortia and J Shepley

For a while now we've been on a slow-paced tour of the speculative fiction of 1958.  Pointing out the highlights for us is Judith Merril, herald of the New Wave and recipient of a blizzard of critical accolades.  In the 1959 edition of her Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy series of anthologies she included at the very end a list of honorable mentions three pages long in quite small type, and we have been going through it alphabetically, picking out authors who interest us and stories that are easy to access and then judging to what extent we agree with Merril that these are among the best SF stories of 1958.  Today we reach the letter S, and investigate one story each by Margaret St. Clair, Thomas N. Scortia and John Shepley which received Merril's blessing.  There are lots of people whose names start with "S" and so we've got a bunch more "S" stories ahead of us.  Behind us we have 1958 stories by all these worthies:

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
Avis Pabel, Frederik Pohl, and Robert Presslie
John T.Phillifent, Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, and Charles W. Runyon

"Squee" by Margaret St. Clair

I have avoided St. Clair's work as I acquired the idea she wrote joke stories while perusing the letters columns of Startling (or maybe it was Thrilling Wonder.)  But when on Merril's recommendation I read "Horror Howce" a year ago I liked it, so maybe I am treating her unfairly.  Well, let's see what we think of "Squee," which debuted in Future Science Fiction and was reprinted in 2020 in a St. Clair collection which I believe was published by the Canadian government.

"Squee" is one of those misanthropic stories about how the human race is violent and irrational and will destroy itself, though perhaps it distinguishes itself with its misandry, or, if you prefer, its biting feminist satire.  "Squee" is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis, the pacing and all that are good, and St. Clair produces real characters with legible personalities and relationships, and doesn't go too far into rank absurdity and farce, so "Squee" is better than the general run of these things.  We'll call it mildly good.

St. Clair's story takes place entirely upon a space ship on a desperate mission.  The stress of the years-long trip, in which the crew live packed closely together like men on a submarine, fosters all manner of conflict among the spacemen; luckily among them is a genius mechanic who is also a talented musician and performer who is able to make jokes and sing songs that soothe the spacers' nerves and defuse arguments and fights...so far at least.

Through expository dialogue we learn the horrible predicament the human race finds itself in.  A few years ago ago, a scientist named Neil developed a bacteriological weapon that targeted women; it was hoped the threat of the weapon, or its use, would end an ongoing war, and that the vaccine against the weapon--issued to the enemy immediately upon their surrender--would keep too many women from dying.  But the bioengineered disease mutated and the vaccine lost its effectiveness and soon all the women in the world were pushing up daisies.  Neil was murdered by an angry mob, but his son, also a scientist, survived, and is a prominent figure in the effort to solve the no-female problem by figuring out how to create more people by somehow altering sperm cells.

Neil the Younger is aboard the ship, the mission of which is to collect samples of insects on Ganymede--substances from the alien bugs may be an aid in the process of altering sperm and continuing the human race.  As the story begins, the ship is on it way back to Earth, and Neil the Younger spends all his time in the lab, alone, working on sperms cells with the alien bug goop.  The men of the crew hate Neil for the deeds of his father and because Neil is aloof and even arrogant.

Morale gets worse after Neil reports that he may be able to create new people, but only men, no women.  (St. Clair actually devotes quite a few column inches to describing the science of reproduction and why this is so.)  The genius mechanic invents a robot squirrel to entertain the crew.  St. Clair in this story depicts men not only as violent and irrationally competitive, not only callous and dismissive of women, but also as fool at the mercy of their sex drive, as irrationally attached to the female and driven to act irrationally by their desire to appeal to women.  That genius mechanic puts a skirt on the robot squirrel and gives it a feminine voice, so the men basically fall in love with it.  (One of St. Clair's little jokes is that the robot squirrel keeps saying "I love nuts"; I'm assuming here that "nuts" was already slang for testicles in 1958.  Another is that the mechanic, a talented ventriloquist, not only composes but actually voices the squirrel's lines, so all the flirting between the robot and the crew is homoerotic.)

Neil the Younger feels contempt for the men's simple-minded response to the robot squirrel, and apparently jealousy over how the men hang on every word of the mechanic and his creation, Squee.  So Neil has the robot deactivated, claiming he needs one of its components in his work on saving the human race.  One of the men, I guess the robot squirrel's most dedicated fan, goes to the lab to murder Neil and in the fight both men die and much of the lab is destroyed, setting back the essential work of preserving humanity.

In case we missed the point, St. Clair has some characters explicitly discuss how man's aggression and his rabid competitiveness is putting the survival of the human race in jeopardy, both in the middle and at the end of the story.

These kinds of stories rub me the wrong way because I think the sub rosa purpose of them is to divert responsibility for the Cold War away from the Soviet Union and/or to make the related point that everybody is somehow to blame for crimes and atrocities and not just the individuals who committed those misdeeds.  But "Squee" is not bad, and I suppose Merril is justified in recommending it on its merits, even if she really chose it because it portrayed a guy with a British name and not a Russian name threatening humanity and because of its feminist politics.  The way the story depicts an intersection between international politics and gender politics perhaps makes "Squee" a valuable text for feminist academics in the humanities writing about the Cold War.

"The Avengers" by Thomas N. Scortia

I have used my "Scortia" tag seven times, and I think I have read a dozen Scortia short stories and one novel by the man.  Merril liked "The Avengers," but if isfdb is to be believed, "The Avengers" was never printed outside of the US and UK editions of Science Fiction Stories.  Let's see if Merril was right and the world is all wrong and my thirteenth Thomas N. Scortia short story is a good one.

Scortia's novels, most of them written in collaboration with Frank M. Robinson, seem to be in the disaster genre, and "The Avengers" starts out with a description of a pretty monumental disaster--Earth's cities are "in flames" and the sun has been "murdered"!  A space ship, crewed by aliens who look just like Earth people, lands on the ruined Earth to look for survivors.  These aliens are on a quest for revenge on whoever just destroyed our civilization and set our sun on the path to going nova in a few hours because thousands of years ago this same fiend did the same thing to their home world and has been destroying star systems inhabited by intelligent life on the regular ever since!

(We can't help but be reminded of the Glis, who travelled the galaxy messing with one star system after another in A. E. van Vogt's 1960s Silkie stories.)

The aliens find only one survivor, a man named Joseph.  Joseph doesn't want to leave the Earth, even though the sun is going to explode and destroy the entire solar system in a few short hours.  He escapes protective custody on the alien ship and when the woman sent after him catches up to him, he convinces her to stay on the doomed Earth and share his fate.  The ship leaves, on the trail of the sun destroyer.  

Joseph equates the ship with the Wandering Jew of legend, and himself with Joseph of Arimathea from the Bible.  I guess the monster destroying star systems is God or His representative, and those killed on the planets are not truly annihilated, but transported to Heaven--the destruction of each sun is the local manifestation of The Second Coming.

"The Avengers" reads like a weak Twilight Zone story, one whose hopes to move or entertain an audience rest solely on the effectiveness of its wacky twist-ending gimmick--Scortia's characters are uninteresting while his plot feels contrived and lacks tension and doesn't build to a satisfying climax.  But the gimmick fails to deliver--Scortia does not explore the Christian ideas he mentions nor convincingly connect them to the destruction of the solar system by a nonhuman intelligence.  It is not even clear if Scortia is endorsing Christian ideas or goofing on them, it is like he doesn't take the ideas he is trying to exploit for effect, or his audience, seriously enough to think about them.  Lacking any other qualities, the story lives or dies on its gimmick, and since its gimmick is poorly realized, gotta give "The Avengers" a thumbs down.           

Why did Merril endorse this half-baked clunker?  Maybe as an anti-American leftist she experienced "The Avengers"' lazy and superficial treatment of Christianity as thrilling blasphemy, or liked the way the story portrayed a mission of revenge as sheer folly--if the Soviet Union conquers some place, America should turn the other cheek!       

"Gorilla Suit" by John Shepley 

Shepley has only four credits at isfdb.  A Jewish-American who lived in Rome and New York City, he published literary stories in places like Paris Review and Quixote and translated Italian books like Ferdinando Camon's Conversations with Primo Levi and Roberto Calasso's The Forty-Nine Steps.  As I have told you a hundred times, one of Merril's objectives in her career was to point out how bogus were, or to break down to the extent they were real, the distinctions and barriers between genre literature and mainstream literature, so she loved to reprint and promote what she took be to SF that was written by mainstream writers or appeared in mainstream venues, making Shepley and his work is right up her alley.

"Gorilla Suit" first appeared in F&SF, but for some reason Merril's cite points readers to The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Eighth Series, so I am dutifully reading it there. 

"Gorilla Suit" is a professionally written but bland joke story, "witty" and understated rather than funny or exciting.  The main jokes (I guess) are that people in New York see so much crazy stuff they have become blasé, even immune, to bizarre events, and that Hollywood people, probably people in general, prefer the artificial to the real.

Toto is a gorilla who has human intelligence--he reads the paper and does the crossword puzzle--but cannot speak.  He lives in the zoo; I guess the Central Park Zoo.  When he sees an ad for a one-day job for a man with a gorilla suit or a gorilla promoting the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope film Road to Bali featuring Dorothy Lamour, Toto decides to escape the zoo to apply for the job in hopes of meeting Lamour, of whom he is a fan.  People don't bat an eye as a gorilla walks around Manhattan and rides the elevator to the office where the job interview will take place.  None of the many other applicants for the job notices Toto is a real gorilla.  The job goes to another real gorilla--this ape is canny enough to don a fake gorilla costume in front of the interviewers, who marvel over the high quality of the fake suit's "nylon-acetate." 

We'll call it acceptable.

**********

This batch of "S"s is a little underwhelming, though I suppose these stories, each being satirical on some level, are particularly ill-suited to me--I'm sick of satire.  Still, if my mind and body hold out long enough I will probably be reading St. Clair, Scortia and even Shepley again--in Merril's eighth volume of Year's Best S-F she recommends a 1962 Shepley story.