Groff Conklin's 1953 paperback anthology Crossroads in Time recently came to my attention when we read from it Hal Clement's story "Assumption Unjustified." This volume of 312 pages is full of stories by writers we are interested in that, for one reason or another, we haven't read yet. (I will here note that we have, in fact, already read the included story by Margaret St. Clair, "Thirsty God" as well as Clement's story.) Today let's read from this book five stories that debuted in Astounding. I will be reading them in a scan of this 1953 paperback with the awesome Richard Powers cover, though I may consult other versions if I suspect a typo or printing error.
"Courtesy" by Clifford D. Simak (1951)
This is one of those SF stories that condemns the human race and presents goody goody aliens who are better than us to serve as a contrast to our vileness. I'm going to call it acceptable because it is well-written and suspenseful, but the ending is a groaner. Simak has produced a lot of fiction like this, with ants, dogs, robots all proving better than humans, and Native Americans proving better than white people, and I don't find the theme persuasive or entertaining.
"Courtesy" tells the tale of an expedition to a barren alien planet. The expedition has twenty-five members, and we meet a few of them and Simak does a good job sketching out their personalities and relationships--like I said, this story, the theme of which and the plot resolution of which I think are crummy, is pretty well-written. We learn that humans have explored many habitable alien planets, but everywhere they go, the natives hate the humans. Most of the text of the story involves a guy who stupidly leaves the camp and gets lost, and then how everybody in the expedition, which won't be able to contact any other humans for two years, catches the lethal local plague because the medical officer stupidly didn't check the expedition's drugs before or soon after landing and it turns out the drugs are expired, useless.
Only one man of the 25 survives the plague, and the reason he survives reveals why all aliens hate us humies. We humies are all arrogant and think we are better than aliens! The aliens on this planet, naked savages with no technology or literature, have the power to cure people, and they cured the one guy who will survive the plague because he was the only human to show any common courtesy to any of the natives.
The idea that all humans would be arrogant all over the galaxy and all natives resent the humans is silly, because, as Simak seemed to know when he wrote "Ogre" in 1944, interactions between advanced colonial and imperial societies and less advanced indigenes are complex and diverse--sure, plenty of ancient Romans and early modern Europeans who went out to the provinces and colonies looked down on the natives and plenty of natives hated them in return, but significant numbers of the colonizers liked and admired the natives and even "went native" and significant numbers of natives were eager to collaborate or emulate or imitate the colonizers.
You can find this professionally produced but ultimately frustrating and sterile exercise in several anthologies as well as multiple Simak collections.
"The Mutant's Brother" is a quite good hard-boiled crime story about psychic powers. Leiber handles quite well the psychological aspects, the action scenes, and the speculative elements about how guys with psychic powers might use them, and there are horror elements as well, and the pacing and the style are just right. Thumbs up for "The Mutant's Brother!"
It is the high tech future of the early 1970s! Our protagonist is a mutant, a man who can work other people like puppets via hypnotic telepathy. Or maybe it is telepathic hypnotism. Either way, if you are within a hundred or so feet he can make you do anything, and when he stops doing it you have no memory of what happened while you were under his control.
The hero grew up an orphan, raised by good foster parents. He has been contacted by a twin brother he has never met. He goes to meet his twin but soon learns his twin has been using his ability to control others to commit heinous crimes. Overconfident, evil twin has been identified and the entire police force of his city is after him. Evil twin has lured the protagonist into the town in hopes the cops will mistake our hero for the villain and gun him down and then relax their search for the real malefactor. Much of the length of the story consists of the hero using his power to survive in a city in which every hand is turned against him and then in a head-to-head battle of hypnotic puppet master vs hypnotic puppet master.
The tone of the story is sad, depressing, oppressive, and nerve-wracking, with many people, including innocents and people trying to do the right thing, suffering indignities, torture, and horrible deaths. Conklin here in Crossroads in Time spoils the ending in his intro, which is too bad because "The Mutant's Brother" is the kind of story in which you don't know who will win in the end until you actually get to the end.
A real success. Sometimes Leiber goes on too long, or introduces some of his boring or annoying or creepy hobbyhorses and thus weakens his stories*, but "The Mutant's Brother" is perfectly proportioned and every component is appropriate and contributes to the literary and entertainment value of the piece.
*(If you want to hear me attack Leiber stories on these grounds, check out my blog posts on "Nice Girl with Five Husbands," "A Deskful of Girls," The Night of the Wolf, and "Black Glass." Of course, you might prefer to hear me unreservedly praise Leiber stories like "The Button Molder," "The Dreams of Albert Moreland," "Stardock," and "Ship of Shadows." If you click the link to the blog post on "Ship of Shadows" you will also have a chance to witness me sarcastically mocking SF royalty Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon.)
To my mind it is odd that "The Mutant's Brother" has been reprinted less often than Leiber stories that are less exciting and less well-put together; in the 20th century "The Mutant's Brother" reappeared only in Crossroads in Time (and the Spanish translation of Conklin's anthology.), You can find it in two 21st-century Leiber collections, Day Dark, Night Bright and Masters of Science Fiction: Fritz Leiber, fortunately.
"Feedback" by Katherine MacLean (1951)
Argh, this is a long tedious didactic story about how the common people are conformists who will join a witch-hunting mob on the slightest pretext, set in the America of 1991 in which democracy means conformity and posses of vigilantes regularly set upon free thinkers and lynch them. "Feedback" features a school teacher who suffers just such a fate after encouraging his students to not conform. MacLean describes the mob's torture of the teacher in considerable detail, and we get lots of oratory from the heroic school teacher. There is a sort of twist ending which involves the teacher and his comrades in the secret resistance of middle-class professionals faking his death with their high technology, and a sort of joke reference to Nathan Hale's quote "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country;" I guess the joke being that the school teacher in the story has multiple "lives" to lose for anti-conformism, he being able to survive multiple lynchings by faking his death.
Seventeen pages of hectoring self-righteousness, an exercise in over-the-top manipulation and extravagant flattery of the audience, Astounding readers of course thinking themselves smarter than everybody else and dreaming of outwitting their inferiors with superior technology. Thumbs down!
"Feedback" was reprinted in the MacLean collection The Diploids and it has also reappeared in Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander's Science Fiction of the Fifties and the German anthology Der metallene Traum.
After hearing how awesome this Martian is, even though his people don't have a written language any more, their high civilization having fallen thousands of years ago, we meet a human colonist, a working-class moron who is greedy, loves alcohol, and is racist towards the noble native Martians. This guy, a miner, uses his free time to explore the deserts of Mars in hopes of finding some kind of treasure, even though the managers of the mining company, you know, middle-class people with book-larning, are sure the valuable minerals of Mars were all used up by the high-tech ancestors of the currently barbaric native Martians. The storm drives him into the cave (he finds it by sheer luck) and he encounters the Martian and all the monsters in the cave. Of course the man acts like a selfish jerk, unlike the Martian and the monsters with whom the hunter shares a code of honor, and gets killed by the noble Martian.
This story is well-written; the plot is suspenseful and all the stuff about the cave and the native Martian ecosystem is believable and engaging, so I enjoyed this story even though it is yet another allegory about the evil white man abusing the noble indigenes who live in concert with the natural world. (In 200 years, when the Chinese communists have conquered the Earth, will their creative class be writing stories that romanticize the English-speaking people they have crushed under their heels, the Anglo's bizarre individualism and incomprehensible notions of free speech and private property?) So, thumbs up, even though I wish the human had come out of the cave alive, maybe gripping a fistful of jewels.
"The Cave" debuted in an issue of Astounding which also prints one of Jack Williamson's Seetee stories--one of my widely-read commentors recently recommended the Seetee stories to us. Also in this issue, A. E. van Vogt's "The Search," which was integrated into the novel Quest for the Future and which I read in 2016, one of Anthony Boucher's Fergus O'Breen stories (we just read one of those), one of Henry Kuttner's Gallegher stories (we read one of those in 2014) and a Kuttner/Moore collaboration. Probably we'll be coming back to this issue of Astounding.
"The Cave" was reprinted in anthologies by Brian Aldiss, Martin H. Greenberg, and Jane Hipolito and Willis E. McNelly.
No, we are not. "Vocation" is merely acceptable.
"Vocation" is full of science, but science I am having trouble taking too seriously. The whole story is based around the idea that humans use only 10% of their brains, which I think is a myth. Also, there is a lot of talk about evolution that anthropomorphizes nature, suggesting that nature is designing and improving the design of the human race over time, aiming to achieve some final perfect form, the way engineers design equipment and steadily improve succeeding models of the equipment.
"Nature causes many sports to be sterile because they interfere with her proper plan."
"Nature expects the brain to be called on, one hundred percent, and she intends to keep increasing that ability as it is needed."This kind of stuff would be fine in a fantasy story or horror story, where we accept gods and the supernatural and so on, but this story feels like it is supposed to be hard SF, and this undermines that feel, and these brain and evolution issues are not a casual aside, but the entire foundation of the story.
Another issue with "Vocation" is that it consists almost entirely of conversations, which is not that exciting.
It is the future of aircars and other such high technology. Humans have yet to reach the stars. The starfaring galactic civilization has made itself known to Terra, and there are two alien ambassadors on Earth, a really charming good-looking guy and his very charming and good-looking wife. They are here to offer advice to humans, but they refuse to give away the technological secrets that will enable travel between the stars.
The plot of "Vocation" follows a few smart humans--a scientist and a journalist--who are a little skeptical of the aliens. Why won't they give us the star drive? Are they afraid of us because we are so aggressive and ambitious? These guys come up with the theory that we humies only use 10% of our brains because the aliens are emitting a field upon Earth that limits our brain usage. They start working on a device to cancel out that field, or increase the amount we can use our brains so we get closer to 100%. The device works. The scientist has the machine hooked up to his skull, and after a few minutes of writing supergenius-level equations on paper, he dies. The brain is like a motor, if you run it at 100% too long it burns out. Oops. The journalist is just standing near the machine, and the fraction of the field that leaks out of the connections is enough to make him the smartest human on Earth, as smart as the alien ambassadors. The best part of Smith's story is the description of the powers having a 260 IQ gives the journalist.
The journalist goes to meet the ambassador. The journalist is smart enough now to realize the aliens are the goody goodies they present themselves as--they aren't scared of us, they aren't retarding our development, and they really are refusing to offer us the technology needed to travel between the stars on a silver platter for our own good--we haven't developed the ability to use the technology responsibly yet. The human race will have to achieve a star drive on its own; by the time we are smart enough to invent it we'll also have naturally grown to a level of responsibility to enable us to use the tech without blowing up the sun or something. The journalist resolves to destroy the brain-improving machine.
Smith includes a twist and sense-of-wonder ending that I think is unnecessary. In one of those coincidences we so often find in fiction, one of the ambassadors' direct superiors happens to be visiting on the very day the journalist increases his intelligence. The ambassador introduces the journalist to this alien if the next level up, and this guy is so intelligent it blows the journalist's mind--among their own people, the ambassadors, at 260 IQ, are morons, and are sent on this kind of mission because it is impossible for humans of a mere 100 or so IQ to communicate with an alien of average IQ.
"Vocation" is like a filler piece, not bad, but no big deal.
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We think of old science fiction, in particular science fiction associated with Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr., as optimistic about science and technology and as being a celebration of the ability of man to master the environment and solve problems. But today's five stories are all about human limitations and human evil. I guess Astounding was serving up a pretty varied diet to readers.
More samples from that diet next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
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