Seven Come Infinity: R F Jones, M Leinster & E F Russell

Over the years I have acquired a tall stack of paperback anthologies, so let's take off the pile a book I've owned for over a decade and read some of the stories printed therein by people with whose work we already have some familiarity.  Today's subject: Seven Come Infinity, edited by Groff Conklin and published here in the republic in 1966 by Fawcett Gold Medal and reprinted in the United Kingdom a year later by Coronet.  I've already digested two stories that appear in this volume, Chad Oliver's "Rite of Passage" (I read it in 2014 and gave it a thumbs down) and Clifford Simak's "The Golden Bugs" (I read that one in 2018 and concluded it was "acceptable.")  Today we'll read the stories Conklin included in the book by Raymond F. Jones, Murray Leinster, and Eric Frank Russell.  Take note that I am reading these stories in this here paperback, and not in their original magazine appearances or in later books, though if I find a puzzling typo or something like that I may consult other such sources.

"Discontinuity" by Raymond F. Jones (1950)

I think I've covered nine Jones productions here at MPFL, the novels The Cybernetic Brains, Syn and The Alien, and the stories "Noise Level," "Fifty Million Monkeys," "Rat Race," "The Non-Statistical Man," "Starting Point," and "The Gardener."  Today we make it a round ten with "Discontinuity," which debuted in Astounding and has not been reprinted in English other than here in Seven Come Infinity.  German readers can find it in Deutsch in Die neuen Gehirne und andere Stories; "Discontinuity" is actually the title story of that 1971 collection.

In the future of force fields and interstellar travel, David Martell was a scientist and medical man of rare genius!  He figured out how the brain stored information, and even began development of techniques to restore memories and other brain functions to people who had suffered brain damage.  But Dr. Martell's life was not exactly one triumph after another.  For one thing, he married a woman, Alice, whom he loved but who didn't understand him and had no interest in science; Alice came to loathe the Doc and started cheating on him.  Ouch!  Then, his experiments with brain-damaged patients produced results that the general public and the establishment didn't consider to be successes--sure, the head injury patients were still alive, but they lost almost all of their intelligence--the Martell Synthesis was tried on 100 people, and all 100 are now "idiots!"  ("Idiot" is the word Jones uses consistently.)  The Martell Synthesis was outlawed!  Ouch again!  Then there was the car crash that left Martell himself brain damaged and almost dead--a crash that many suspect was no accident, but engineered by Alice and one of her boyfriends!  Ouch to the second power!

Such is the background.  The plot of "Discontinuity" kicks off as Martell's team tries to--illegally--use the process Martell developed to revive Martell's own smashed brain.  Part of the Martell Synthesis is to hook wires into the heads of people the patient knew and shift info from their healthy brains to the patient's damaged brain, to fill in gaps.  Alice has to be convinced to submit to this procedure--she would see greater financial benefits from having a husband who is a dead duck than a husband who is a live idiot--so the boffins threaten to reveal evidence she tried to murder her hubby, blackmailing her into cooperating.

(We later learn that the Synthesis process also writes info from many books into your brain.)

In Chapter II (this is a longish story, over 40 pages) Martell wakes up after the Synthesis process is over--he is OK!  Or so he thinks at first!  After he gets out of bed he finds he can't read English, and when he tries to talk, people don't understand him, and when they speak, it sounds like gibberish to him!  His colleagues think he is an idiot, like all the other brain-damaged peeps who were subjected to the Martell Synthesis, but now Martell knows they are not idiots, they just have aphasia!  Martell escapes the lab and in Chapter III hooks up with other subjects of the Martell Synthesis and finds they can speak to each other.  Among them is Marianne, a woman as pretty as Alice but smarter and more intellectually healthy.  (In this future, people who lie, cheat and commit murder aren't considered bad or evil, just ill or ignorant.)  Marianne was one of Martell's top assistants before her brain was wrecked by an electric shock and Martell used his process to bring her back to (it appeared at the time idiotic) life.  

Chapters III and IV are largely given over to speculative lectures on how the brain works and how the Martell Synthesis works--as we expect from these old time science fiction authors, Jones weaves science lectures in with his adventure plot and power fantasy themes.  It turns out that the Martell Synthesis turns you into a superior being, organizing the data in your brain (the data is compared to the punch cards of early computers) more rationally than mere natural processes can and somehow distinguishing irrational beliefs based on emotion from cold hard facts and prioritizing the latter.  

"The semantic selector, in arranging the pre-punched molecules in precise order with semantically correct cross-indexing, has swept clean the crazy, nonsensical filing system accumulated over the years."         

"We have within our hands the means to make a new kind of man, one which can displace the old and bring reason into the world....I am very certain we are the most completely sane people the world has ever known!"

Communication between people with synthesized brains and the old mundane kinds is impossible because synthesized brains are super-efficient and have naturally developed super-efficient means of communicating to each other.  English is too irrational for the efficient brain to comprehend!  Martell also finds that the synthesized no longer need sleep and have acquired superagility.

Chapter V sees the plot resolved.  Martell and Marianne use the Synthesis equipment to reduce their superiority enough that they can again communicate with us normies saddled with all-natural no-artificial-additives brains via the inefficient and irrational tongue of William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and Pete Townshend.  They try to convince people of the benefits of the Martell Synthesis but everybody is too scared of change, so our superman and superwoman start synthesizing people by force.  Among the first beneficiaries of nonconsensual synthetization is Alice; synthesis cures her of her deceitful and murderous ways as well as giving her super smarts and all those other abilities; the Martell marriage, we can be sure, is going to be a super-happy one from now on, and eventually all humanity will be equally super!  (Marianne is a little jealous, having fallen in love with Dr. Martell, but her rational brain will keep her from getting truly heartbroken.)

I love stories about disastrous sexual relationships and I love stories in which people mess with brains, so Jones has me on his side from the start.  "The Discontinuity" is also a decent homo superior story with sense-of-wonder elements as well as the elitism we see in so much SF that suggests their betters are fully justified in using guile and force to drag the ignorant masses into the glorious future.  This elitist attitude is disgusting, but I can't deny that it is exciting in fiction, and I didn't let the disgusting incest in Elleston Trevor's The Sibling stop me from enjoying and praising that novel and I'm not letting the elitism of Jones' "The Discontinuity" stop me from enjoying this story and giving it a thumbs up.

"The Corianis Disaster" by Murray Leinster (1960) 

"The Corianis Disaster" first saw print in what I believe to be the final issue of The Original Science Fiction Stories, a magazine Robert Lowndes had kept afloat since 1953.  I think I've read like 24 pieces of Leinster's fiction during the period of this blog's life, but my link finger is tired, so click the "Leinster" tag if you want to see what I've had to say about the man.  I will say here that, as with Jones, I've liked most of Leinster's work with which I am familiar.  Hopefully this is another likable one, as it is over 40 pages.

The Corianis is one of the largest and safest starships in the interstellar civilization depicted in Leinster's story, and it is carrying important officials between two planets who are in the midst of major trader negotiations.  By chance, also aboard is a scientist, a physicist, who is very shy.  A one in a million bit of bad luck causes the Corianis to come out of hyperspace abruptly because a huge amount of debris, the remains of a planet destroyed by a nova a million or so years ago, was in its path.  The hyperdrive is wrecked, but ships the size of the Corianis carry two hyperdrives, just in case.  So the ship gets to its destination, just a little late.  Where they find that an exact duplicate of the Corianis has preceded them!  

The Corianis that is already there is populated by a trade delegation identical to that on the second-arriving ship, but several people aboard the second vessel, including our main character, the physicist, are not duplicated on the first ship.  The physicist quickly learns to overcome his shyness and asserts himself to solve the problem posed by the duplicate people, something only he is able to achieve, as everybody else aboard the two vessels, as well as everybody among the populace among whom they have landed, becomes violently irrational in the face of this unprecedented and apparently supernatural phenomena.  The physicist saves the day and even meets a girl and gets married.

The first part of "The Corianis Disaster," all the stuff about space flight and hyperspace and all that, is good.  But the second part, the puzzle of the duplicates, its effect on people, and the scientist's solution to it, is boring, even annoying.  There's the elitism of the story--everybody but the scientist acts like a violent irrational monster--which is bad enough, but worse, Leinster plays a lot of the confusion among the duplicates and the local populace for laughs.  Worst of all, Leinster makes this part of the story way way too long, hitting the same points again and again in the same way.  To show how irrational non-scientific people are, he has angry mobs form, not just once, but again and again.  He describes people's fears and diagnoses them again and again, uses the same metaphors and analogies again and again.  What Leinster is saying is kind of obvious, so he needn't tell us repeatedly, but he does, and it is no fun.  Maybe Lowndes requested a story of a certain length and Leinster stretched this one out by repeating himself?  A mistake!

As we readers figure out pretty quickly, but Leinster really takes his time to come out and say, during its hyperspace jump, the Corianis with the shy scientist aboard accidentally jumped into a different time line, one in which the bashful physicist didn't make the flight and the ship's flight was uneventful.  Our hero figures out how to return his Corianis to its native universe.  As I guess science fiction readers want to hear, our problems are solved when a scientist is given command over the government and the ship.  The the story ends with a limp joke about marriage--a man may make himself an alpha and save the lives of a ship and all its occupants, but his wife will still tell nag him into doing what she wants. 

Far from Leinster's best work.  I'm calling it barely acceptable.

In 2006 "The Corianis Disaster" was presented in a Russian Leinster collection, and in 2015 Armchair Fiction included it in a double novel along with Harry Harrison's famous Deathworld.

"Panic Button" by Eric Frank Russell (1959)

Another Astounding story, this one by the Englishman who is reportedly (see Alan Dean Foster's intro to The Best of Eric Frank Russell) Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s favorite writer, a man much of whose work we have read.  "Panic Button" would go on to be reprinted in a 1974 Dutch collection and in NEFSA's 2000 Major Ingredients: The Selected Short Stories of Eric Frank Russell.

Two intelligent races are exploring the galaxy, the humans of our beloved Terra and some alien race from the Antares system.  Each species has quite limited knowledge of the other, and neither wants to risk a war with an enemy of unknown capabilities, so both civilizations have been following a first-come-first-served or finders-keepers rule--any planet belongs to the race that first lands upon it.  This story chronicles what happens when an Antarean star ship with a crew of 600 and a complement of ten boats discovers a valuable planet with only one single Terran on it, a man unaccompanied by any space craft or heavy equipment--should the Antareans honor the tacit finders-keepers rule or kill this guy and disintegrate his hut and claim the planet?

The plot and gimmicks of this story, which is sort of a series of logic puzzles and suggests people act rationally and predictably, are good, and additionally Russell offers readers characters with fun personalities who deliver cleaver jocular dialogue.  I am constantly bitching about joke stores, as you know, but in "Panic Button," in a way that reminds me of Jack Vance, Russell employs subtle and sophisticated humor based not on absurd situations or broad satire but personality and human reaction to stressful situations, humor which complements Russell's plot and themes instead of burying or undermining them.  The story is also no longer than it need be.  Thumbs up for "Panic Button!"

**********

Two good stories and one story that crawls feebly just barely across the border into "acceptable" territory (but could have been good if a ruthless editor had hacked it down to 60 or 70% of its current size.)  Conklin in Seven Come Infinity seems to have put together a commendable anthology.

Three more short stories penned before I was born in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  We can only hope they will go down as easily as today's selection.