MPorcius Fiction Log: Merril-approved 1958 stories by J Williams, R Wilson, J Wyndham and R F Young

Thursday, February 19, 2026

Merril-approved 1958 stories by J Williams, R Wilson, J Wyndham and R F Young

The day we all doubted would come has finally arrived. The day we finish our tour of 1958's speculative fiction and bid farewell to our guide, critical darling (though one of our favorite critics, Barry Malzberg, has had some choice things to say about her) Judith Merril. For what seems like forever, I have been reading and blogging about selected stories from the alphabetical honorable mentions list in the back of Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy, 4th Annual Volume. And today the light at the end of the tunnel is visible up ahead as we arrive at the last letters of the alphabet, "W" and "Y" (Merril didn't encounter any stories by "X" or "Z" authors she felt worth recommending.) Today's blog post will be the final of this long term project.

(Find at the bottom of this post a long list of links to the previous posts in this series.)

Merril includes on her list five "W" stories and one "Y" story, and five of these pieces of fiction are easily accessible to us cheapos. Sadly, Merril's first "W" story, "Piggy" by Paul Wallach, appeared in an issue of Swank that I can't find any scans of. As for her second "W," that is James White's "Tableau," which we read in 2020. it is the remaining three "W" tales and the "Y" piece we'll be reading today in scans of the publications in which they debuted. Let's hope this project will be ending on a high note with four great stories!

"The Hunter and the Cross" by Jeanne Williams

Jeanne Williams seems to have penned many historical novels about the American West, as well as a few fantastical sex or romance novels. There are four short fiction credits at Williams' page on isfdb; this one is the third. "The Hunter and the Cross" debuted in Fantastic, in an issue with some weaker than usual Virgil Finlay illustrations and an ad on the back cover for the Science-Fiction Book Club that highlights John Christopher's No Blade of Grass ("The book that SHOCKED the editors of The Saturday Evening Post"), which I read back in 2015.

"The Hunter and the Cross" is a story about Catholic mysticism, with lots of blood and some fetishistic sex undertones, set in a village in New Mexico. The first paragraph sets the scene and offers some foreshadowing thusly:

It was the trail of the Penitentes, where they marched in the night wind, leaving a track of blood in the snow. There on the mountain at Easter they crucified one of their number, enacting the passion of Christ.

Soledad is a gorgeous girl who got married to some old geezer who can't get it up. One day she is out in the woods getting water, and Gil, from the village on the other side of the mountain, comes by. A great hunter, he is carrying the corpse of a mountain lion, his kill dripping blood on him. Gil has banged the hot wives of many of the men back in his village, including those of "the jefe" and "the colonel," but when he sees Soledad he thinks this is the hottest chick he has ever seen! He aches to possess her, but something keeps him from taking her by force and then carrying her off to his village. Is it the cross that hangs between her breasts? Is his love for her turning him into a believing Christian?

Gil takes lodgings in Soledad's village, gives the mountain lion's pelt to Soledad as a gift, starts attending church, even joins the Penitentes, who slash and flagellate his back, drawing blood, a process that deepens Gil's understanding of the sacrifices endured by Christ, a process Williams describes with gusto.

His back was a raw mass. In his belly was acrid sickness. But now he was one of the Brothers of Blood.

When Gil, feverish, makes a lonely pilgrimage up the mountain, a peon, I guess the Devil in disguise, tempts him with peyote, an episode I expect is to remind us how Satan tempted Jesus during those 40 days in the wilderness. Gil resists, but only for so long--after he succumbs, he, apparently, transforms into a monstrous mountain lion that terrorizes Soledad's village, devastating the crops and slaying multiple farmers. The jealous women of the village blame beautiful Soledad for the murderous attacks, accusing her of being a who transforms into the lion. It doesn't help that they catch her caressing the lion's pelt Gil gave her. Gil realizes Soledad loves him as much as he loves her!

In an effort to save Soledad, Gil promises the villagers he will kill the monster cat after he's finished participating in the current ecstatic Penitente ritual, in which his fellow Penitentes have assigned him the role of Christ. When they tie him up to the cross, Gil feels himself transforming into the monster lion again! In front of everybody! Soledad comes to him, her love redeeming him and turning him into a human again before he dies--this miraculous event proves to those watching that Soledad is not a witch.

A wild and crazy story that treats Christianity with deadly seriousness, condemns drug use, and also has the elements you expect to see in women's erotica/romance ("the hunkiest of hunks who has cuckolded all the elite men of his town comes to my town and can't resist my looks and I convince him to go monogamous for me.") The style is a little weak and the plot construction is a little clunky, but not terrible. We'll call it acceptable.

I can't find any evidence that "The Hunter and the Cross" was ever reprinted, and it is a little curious that Judith Merril, whom I think of as a Jewish Marxist, would recommend this ecstatic Christian story, but maybe she liked that it was written by a woman and included a woman falsely accused of witchcraft who, in the end, resolves the plot with her bravery? And maybe Merril, who was always trying to convince people that genre boundaries were a scam, thought the story a prime example of how broadly SF could be defined, how science fiction/fantasy devices like a guy transforming into a monster could be used for almost any purpose, to push almost any agenda.

"Man Working" by Richard Wilson

It seems this story, which debuted not in a magazine but in the fourth of Fred Pohl's Star anthologies, has never been reprinted in English, though it would show up in a 1970s German version of the Star series entitled Titan and in a 1984 French anthology. I believe this will be the fifth story by Wilson I have read. Back in 2016 I denounced his apparently well-regarded tale "The Story Writer." I liked "The Big Fix" and "Lonely Road" much better when I read them in 2024. But in January I read Wilson's "Course of Empire" and thought it terrible. So I guess anything can happen today with "Man Working."

As it turns out, "Man Working" is a trifling joke story, though it has some good SF concepts. You might argue that it is an anti-racist or pro-diversity story, and/or that it pokes fun at the banal stock phrases used by liberals who preach tolerance. The jokes and plot are not bad, they just don't amount to much. We're calling it acceptable.

It is the near future. A skyscraper 528 stories high has been built in Chicago. Unfortunately, a global depression hit soon after the mile-high tower was completed, so today only the lowest ten stories are occupied--floors 11 through to the observation deck are abandoned...or so they want us to believe!

In fact, the top-most stories are occupied by extraterrestrials of various species resident here on Earth in secret. These long-term visitors are not alien government spies or the recon squad of an invasion force or anything like that--most of them are somehow involved in show biz. There's an alien who can pass for human who uses his psychic powers to perform magic on Earth stages--it is rumored he has kidnapped a human woman, an Earth magician's assistant whom he made disappear but has not reappeared, for sexual purposes. There is a blob alien who, a handsome leading man on his planet, takes monster parts here in Earth films. Another alien is doing research on Earth for a book he is writing. One alien is trying to sell an English translation of an alien novel. And so on.

Almost no humans know about these aliens; our narrator, a down on his luck show biz guy with experience as a publicity man, is himself in the dark. If he doesn't make some money soon he'll be thrown out of his residence hotel--he is so low on funds he hasn't had his shoes shined in two days. (Some of the details in the story remind you it was penned in the 1950s.) He can make a few bucks if he can find a mind-reading act for a TV show airing tonight. He spots an old friend, an old crony from happier days, and asks for help. This second guy knows all about the secret a mile above Chicago's mean streets. He takes our narrator up to the top of the 528-story building via its ultra hi-tech secret entrance to try to find a mind-reading act. Some of the humor of the story lies in the amazement of the narrator that these aliens are on Earth, some in how his friend impresses upon him that the aliens are just folks with souls like you and me, so don't call them "aliens" because that is "Earth-supremacy talk," and besides they are better than humans.

There are lots of mind-reading ETs in the building, but none are really suitable for the TV spot, but our narrator makes the money he needs by taking a role as a monster in an alien movie--the aliens think us humans are as hideous and scary as we humans think blob people are.

Acceptable filler. Maybe the "immigrants are just as good or better than we are and none of them are going to try to change our culture, abolish dog-owning or pork-eating or anything like that" angle attracted Merril's admiration.

"Idiot's Delight" by John Wyndham

This is one of Wyndham's Troon stories. We read another, 1960's "The Emptiness of Space" AKA "The Asteroids: 2194" way back in 2015. Damn, I've been running this blog a long time. "Idiot's Delight" has been reprinted many times since its debut in New Worlds, often under the title "The Moon A.D. 2044" or just "The Moon," including in Fantastic, a Troon collection titled The Outward Urge, and several anthologies. I'm reading the New Worlds version, which is like 35 pages long.

John Carnell, editor of New Worlds, spoils the theme of the story in his little intro, which alerts you to the fact that "Idiot's Delight" is a sad British wish fulfillment fantasy--the British become the leaders of the post-World War II effort to colonize space--and a lame bit of bolshie apologia that suggests doing anything to deter or defeat a Soviet attack is a waste of resources. Ugh.

The first part of Wyndham's story establishes that fifty-year-old Michael Troon, commander of the British moon base, is a giant among men, that Britain's moon base would never have been established if not for his heroic efforts. But, boo hoo, today his subordinates don't appreciate him! They may even mutiny! Well, at least one of his crew is still on his side--a beautiful thirty-year-old woman doctor. They have a philosophical discussion on how good things can cause or be the result of bad things (the Roman Empire was brutal but laid the foundation for European civilization, cars and airplanes kill people but are extremely useful, etc.) and then we get the expository dialogue that sets the scene.

Ten days ago, war between the Soviet Union and the West erupted. As is usual in SF stories, nobody knows if it was the liberal capitalists or the totalitarian communists who started the war--many members of the SF community sympathize with the USSR and its goals, so SF stories are very reluctant to say anything critical of the USSR, at least not without also saying something bad about the United States. The American and Soviet moon bases launched many missiles, fully participating in the war, and, apparently, have been destroyed, but Troon (apparently) has held back, launching only a small notional number of medium-sized missiles, presumably to preserve the British moon base because he doesn't care about anything more than he cares about the quest for the stars. His men are unhappy because they came to the moon to deter the Soviet Union and, if necessary, to defend Great Britain with the many heavy atomic warheads they think the base is equipped with, and under Troon's leadership the base has failed to fulfill its raison d'etre, not done all it could to protect their homes and families. Troon's defense is that he hasn't received orders from Earth to launch the full complement of missiles, but his gung ho subordinates don't believe him or think he should launch them anyway on his own initiative. (The example of Nelson as Copenhagen is invoked.)

Troon takes a walk in his space suit on the lunar surface and reminisces, and Wyndham provides us a flashback to Troon's life and career. As a nepo-baby, son of a hero, Troon had the public prestige to convince the British government and public that a British moon base was a good idea, and Wyndham describes the various PR and psychological strategies Troon employed to get the British moon base constructed and some of the technical aspects of the base.

Halfway through the story Troon returns to the base interior and we get more conversation with that female doctor that reveals how Troon has temporarily defused the tension between him and his subordinates. We also get a brief feminist sideline, exposition on why women are on the base--to raise morale--which includes the assertion that women are more adaptable than men.

In the second half of the story a handful of Soviet troops, including the Soviet moon base commander, come to the British base claiming to be the only Soviet survivors on Luna. The Soviet officer describes in detail how his base destroyed the American base but then American robots destroyed his base--Wyndham goes to great lengths in this quite long section of the story to make the communists sympathetic and the Americans appear alien and sinister, to make you hope the Soviet soldiers, who have killed all the Americans on the moon, survive the US retaliatory strike. Wyndham goes even further--the wily Reds are smarter than the Americans and Troon's British subordinates--the commies are fully aware that the British moon base never had a full arsenal of heavy missiles, just that notional number of medium missiles that have already been expended! That is our twist ending--the British moon base was toothless all the time, a sham!

We readers are then encouraged to look forward to a future in which British tricksters and communist murderers join forces to explore the stars.

Obviously I think a story which paints the monstrous gangsters who ran the Soviet Union and their thugs as more sympathetic than the elected leadership of the United States and members of America's armed services is disgusting. But let's try to put that aside and judge whether this is a good or bad story based on whether it achieves the author's goals and whether it is entertaining or interesting to the reader.

All the technical stuff about building a moon base and the operation of war robots and so on is good. The action scenes in which the heroic Soviets face the evil American robots are good on a literary and entertainment level even though their purpose is morally reprehensible, and Troon's walk on the surface of the moon is not bad.

So much for the good parts. Now the problems. Most of the story is a series of conversations, which is kind of boring. Then there is the attractive doctor. We hear all about how elegant she is and her nice hair and pretty eyes blah blah blah but then she vanishes from the narrative half way through, playing little role in the plot. She was just there so Troon would have somebody to talk to, and when the Soviet commander appears she offers no more use to the author so he discards her. Another problem: we are kept in suspense by the question of the unfired missiles, the mystery as to why Troon hasn't launched the missiles and why HQ back on Earth hasn't ordered the launch of the missiles, only to find that there are no missiles, that Troon isn't making an heroic or foolish decision--he isn't making a decision at all because there is no decision to make. This is deflating. Finally, it is a little depressing and annoying that the whole story is an endorsement of elites deceiving the public and those who look to them for leadership. This is typical SF stuff, but it never sits well with me, as people who have followed my blog are well aware.

I am giving "Idiot's Delight" a thumbs down, but I can see why, with its celebration of elite manipulation, pro-Soviet and anti-American content, and two lines of tacked-on feminism, that leftists like Merril would like it.

(If you want to hear me attack more of Wyndham's work check out my blog post about Re-Birth AKA The Chrysalids.)

"Lucas Parkes" is a pseudonym of Wyndham's

"Magic Window" by Robert F. Young

There is a typo in the vary last line of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy, 4th Annual Volume--"Magic Window" is cited as having appeared in Fantastic Universe when it in fact debuted in the same issue of Fantastic as Williams' "The Hunter and the Cross," which we read earlier today. "Magic Window" reappeared in a 1968 reprint magazine, in a 1977 Japanese Young collection, and in a 2011 American Young collection.

This story is pretty lame, like a saccharine thing from a mainstream magazine or a particularly sappy episode of The Twilight Zone. I guess Merril liked it for its valorizing of the creative artist and its contempt for the boring ordinary people who actually do the real work that keeps society functioning. This is today's reminder that if you work an ordinary job in an office or factory or something like that, the people who write the books you read and perform the music you listen to and make the shows you watch think you are a little Eichmann.

A salesman living in a big city one day stumbles upon a sidewalk sale of art--a pretty girl has only one painting for sale but nobody stops to consider buying it. The painting catches the salesman's eye, and he talks to the girl briefly. All day he thinks about the painting, which sounds (to me) like a totally boring piece of junk a kid would produce, but which I guess Young wants us to think is magical--a landscape with sparkling lakes and a night sky full of stars of many colors. Good grief. Our guy can't stop thinking about this painting and it distracts him while he's trying to make sales and when he has lunch with his fiancé. Young makes clear that the fiancé is a square and that ahead of the salesman lies a square life in the suburbs with a house and kids.

Instead of keeping his dinner date with his fiancé, the salesman returns to the side walk sale to find only one artist remains, you know who, and she has not sold her painting. He buys it and takes the artist to dinner and they talk about Keats and Wordsworth blah blah blah. He takes her home and she shows him the window--she calls it her "Magic Casement"--through which she looks to see the visions she paints; he just sees the bricks of the building across the alley. She pleads with him, saying she can help him see the magic in the world, begs him to not become just another cog in the machine, another person who watches TV, but he leaves.

Some weeks later the salesman sees the girl on the street, looking unhealthy. Later he goes to her apartment but the landlord tells him the girl has left. It is May 1st, which I guess is significant; maybe another reference to Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," maybe a reference to the start of summer or International Workers' Day or something. Back home the salesman unrolls the painting and finds it is now a painting of bricks, not of a fairy tale landscape. The salesman is a sensitive person who had the opportunity to become a beatnik or hippy or whatever, but he has thrown that chance away to join the masses, working a 9 to 5 and watching TV with a suburban wife and suburban kids in a suburban house.

In general I have sympathy for the theme of middle-class men who regret settling down to a boring wife and a boring job instead of leading a life of risk or creativity or adventure or something. I love The Kinks' Soap Opera, for example. But Young's story here is sterile and lifeless, like something anodyne for a kid with no edge, no challenge, no excitement or personality, obvious banal filler. Thumbs down!

**********

I feel like our journey through 1958's SF is ending with a bang. I didn't think any of today's stories was actually good, much less great, but they run the gamut of topics that might appeal to the woman who became the cheerleader of the New Wave and they are provocative and are certainly inspiring a big reaction in me. Jeanne Williams' story is odd, a combination of ecstatic Catholicism and a womens' romance novel, something that is surprising to see in a SF magazine and on Merril's honorable mentions list. Richard Wilson's entry on Merril's list is a mere joke story but it has some interesting SF elements and is pretty economical. Today's John Wyndham story has politics that I find quite aggravating, but the story is ambitious and covers a traditional SF theme in a traditional SF format (a future history of the quest to conquer the stars) and its big action scene and the technical scientific stuff is well-handled. Robert F. Young's story is the blandest bit of filler, but certainly representative of the outlook of many people in the SF community.

Well, this has been an interesting project, and I will probably embark on a similar expedition in the near future. For now, find below a link to each of the previous entries in our exploration of Judith Merril's honorable mentions of 1958 SF stories.