Merrill-approved '58 stories by T Sturgeon, W Tenn & W Tevis

Was it really early July when we last read stories included on Judith Merrill's Honorable Mentions list in 1959's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume?  Merrill's list is alphabetical by author, and in the previous installment of this tour of 1958 SF stories we started the "S"s; today let's forge ahead, finishing the "S"s and taking on the "T"s.

"The Graveyard Reader" by Theodore Sturgeon

Merrill includes two stories by Sturgeon on her Honorable Mentions list for 1958, "A Touch of Strange," which we read back in January, and "The Graveyard Reader," the title story of the Groff Conklin anthology in which it debuted.  I'm reading "The Graveyard Reader" in a scan of that anthology, which has a creepy, even disturbing, Richard Powers cover. 

There are several Peter Hammill lyrics in which Hammill presents the idea of inanimate objects or natural processes like the ocean tide striking the sand on a beach somehow "writing" messages which human beings might be able to read (see "The Emperor in His War Room," "Darkness (11,11)" and "The Wave").  The central gimmick in "The Graveyard Reader" reminded me of this recurring theme in the Van Der Graaf Generator discography.

Our narrator stands before the fresh grave of his wife.  His wife and he had trouble communicating; she refused to vocalize her complaints and desires, I guess expecting her husband to know what to do and say without being told.  It also seems she was unfaithful to him.  She left him one day and three days later turned up dead in a wrecked car with a strange man at the wheel.  The narrator decides it is appropriate to refrain from having anything inscribed on his wife's headstone.

Another man appears.  Our narrator learns that this guy can look at a grave and from various apparently random signs, like the color and shape of vegetation on the grave and the path over the grave traced by insects, learn everything that happened during the deceased's life, even his or her thoughts.  The narrator asks this joker to teach him to read graves, and over the course of a year our narrator becomes a grave reader himself.  Sturgeon's theme is "to know all is to forgive all," and our narrator's ability to learn all about people by reading their graves gives him the life changing fortitude to forgive his wife her trespasses, and forgive himself, and move on to a happier life.  Sturgeon emphasizes that we can all take the healthy course taken by the narrator--gaining peace of mind by forgiving others and ourselves--without engaging in a year-long study of an esoteric pseudo-science by having his main character embrace forgiveness without taking the step of reading his wife's grave, and having a quotidian but sincere inscription engraved on her tombstone.

Thumbs up for "The Graveyard Reader," a well-written piece of work with an interesting argument to make, an argument that has appeal for traditional Christian types as well as progressives who wonder why we even have police and prisons.  Even if you think Sturgeon's attitude is naive and unworkable, he puts it across in a compelling and affecting way in this enjoyable story.

"The Graveyard Reader" has been reprinted many times in Sturgeon collections as well as fantasy and horror anthologies, even though the story is life-affirming rather than horrifying.  The many editions of The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology, I find, have particularly memorable covers.

"Eastward Ho!" by William Tenn 

I avoid the work college professor Philip Klass' published under the name William Tenn because my impression is that he writes satires and my interest in satire has reached a pretty low ebb.  (I elaborate on my attitude towards humor in fiction at the two links that follow.)  Now, it is true that in 2018 I read Tenn's "Project Hush" and had to admit it was pretty good.  However, in 2024 I read Tenn's "Null-P" and it confirmed all my fears about the man's fiction.  That means that today's Tenn story, the third I will have ever read, is a kind of tie-breaker and will likely determine whether or not you ever see Tenn's name here at MPorcius Fictin Log in the future.

"Eastward Ho!" debuted in an anniversary issue of F&SF and has since been reprinted a billion times, in multiple "The Best from F&SF" volumes, in several Tenn collections, and in a stack of anthologies that includes volumes edited by Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg, Martin H. Greenberg (one printing of which reuses a Games Workshop image of Mad-Max/Car Wars-style automobiles) among others.  In "Eastward Ho!" we have a story welcomed and monumentalized by the professional SF community.  I am going to read "Eastward Ho!" in my copy of the Silverberg anthology, Alpha 4, which served up the story to SF readers yet again in 1973 after they had already have a chance to experience it in one of the F&SF "Best Froms," three editions of the Aldiss, and one of the Tenn collections.        

You know those switcheroo stories in which a German U-boat captain finds himself in hell aboard a merchant vessel as it gets torpedoed, or a guy who kills a spider finds himself in a giant spider web, or Wilma goes down to the quarry to operate a dinosaur while Fred dons an apron and does the housework?  Well, here we go again.  In "Eastward Ho!" it is the post-nuclear war future, and Native Americans have better technology than white people (oil lamps and firearms!) and push white people around.

Our protagonist is an ambassador from the impoverished United States of America, which has been reduced in scope by Indian expansion to New England, New York and New Jersey; he is on a mission to the Garden State to negotiate with the Seminole, but upon arrival finds that the Sioux have taken over the area.  The various Indian tribes are seizing land inhabited by the technologically inferior white people at the same time they are aggressively competing with each other, you know, just like the Spanish and British and French fought each other while conquering the New World.  As the story ends it becomes clear that the United States is going to be entirely extinguished very soon by one or multiple Native American empires--our protagonist is probably the highest-ranking official of the US government still alive and not in captivity.  So he takes command of the last vestiges of the US defense apparatus--three ships--and the last free white people in America sail off to colonize Europe; it is funny because in real life white people left Europe to colonize America, and, in the story, white people leave America to colonize Europe!  Get it?  It is the opposite!  Hilarious!

"Eastward Ho!" is a total waste of time.  There is no real plot and very little by way of character, and we can't accept this story as a serious speculation about the future, like we might a story about communists or China conquering the United States.  The backbone and the meat of the story consists entirely in the  switcheroo jokes.  (By the way, if you think the switcheroo technique is a brilliant one, as Robert Silverberg apparently does, you call it "an inversion," as SilverBob does in his intro to "Eastward Ho!" here in Alpha 4.)  Additional switcheroo, er, inverted, elements I haven't already covered include how, while in real life Native Americans are vulnerable to alcoholism, in this story it is white people who can't handle booze--our protagonist's deputy is humiliated by Sioux who give him a bottle of tequila.  The Sioux leaders also say stereotypical stuff that white people in authority might say at the time the story was written, variations on "you are a credit to your race" and "he is a hotheaded young man" and "I judge people as individuals" and so forth.

As for the purpose of the story, I guess it offers self-hating whites an opportunity to do penance in an effort to assuage their liberal guilt, and perhaps enjoyment to lefties of whatever ethnic or racial background who love to see white people humiliated.  Besides the humiliations I have already mentioned, there's a black person in the story who is smarter and more decent than the white characters and condescends to help them, and a white woman who prefers sex with Indians over white men but is kicked to the curb by the Sioux after enjoying her body and consigned to a dreadful life among palefaces.

(If memory serves, Clifford Simak wrote stories in which nuclear war or some other Caucasian misbehavior left Indians (and robots and animals) in charge of the world, but Simak's stories were heartfelt and sincere, not absurdist jokes, so had more value than this junk.  There's also Michael Moorcock's Oswald Bastable novels in which Chinese people or Africans defeat Europeans and Americans, Warlord of the Air and The Land Leviathan, which similarly serve as leftist revenge fantasies but are also serviceable adventure stories.)

"Far From Home" by Walter Tevis

Not long ago we read three disappointing stories from the December 1958 issue of F&SF.  Well, Walter Tevis had a story in that issue that caught Judith Merrill's eye, so let's take a stab at it.  I don't think I have read anything before by Tevis, a successful author several of whose works, both mainstream and SF, were adapted for the silver screen and the idiot box.

"Far From Home" is a well-written trifle, just three pages.  I guess we can recommend it.  Maybe it is meant to illustrate the contrast between youth and old age, and perhaps we should see it as an expression of distaste for life in the American interior away from the coasts.

An old guy who works as a janitor at a public pool in some Arizona town comes to work in the morning to discover a huge blue whale in the pool.  There's a lot about how this guy acts the way he does because he is old, and also some stuff about how he is reminded of the excitement he enjoyed as a child when he saw the ocean while on a trip to San Francisco.  

Hanging around the pool is a little boy with a paper bag.  After being humiliated by the whale, which splashes water on him, the janitor runs for help from the town government, and then it is revealed that the boy has a wee little leprechaun in his bag--the appearance of the whale must be one of his three wishes.  When the janitor returns the whale and the boy are gone and I guess we are expected to believe the boy has left the desert for some more salubrious locale, it having been implied that life in Arizona is not good.

I have to admit the revelation that a leprechaun and magical wishes explained the surreal circumstances encountered by the janitor was a little disappointing--I expected there to be no explanation, or for the explanation to be less prosaic.  Still, Tevis succeeds in producing a sort of sense of wonder as well as recognizable portraits of people stuck in a boring place who have either memories or hopes of life in a more interesting, more vibrant, place.

"Far From Home" has been reprinted many times in anthologies and Tevis collections, and is even the title story of one such collection.

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Sometimes Merrill on her Honorable Mentions list recommends stories that received little notice and have been all but forgotten, or stories that lie on the periphery of the porous SF envelope.  But today's three stories not only represent Merrill's own taste but a consensus among the professional SF class.  And we don't have to wonder why Merrill and her fellow anthologists liked them; the Sturgeon and Tevis stories are skillfully written and full of real human psychology and real human feeling, while the Tenn is outlandish fan service for pinkos, an influential demographic among SF professionals as they are seemingly everywhere.

Next time, science fiction from 1980, the year your humble blogger turned 11 years of age.