J Merril's 5th Best S-F: C D Simak, F Leiber, J G Ballard and T Sturgeon

Let's read four more stories that Judith Merril, born Judith Josephine Grossman in 1923, included in her 1960 anthology The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition; we'll be experiencing these tales in a scan of a 1961 paperback edition of the book.  In our last episode we read from the volume a very good Ray Bradbury story, an OK story by Gordon Dickson and a weak Damon Knight story.  Let's see if Clifford Simak, Fritz Leiber, J. G. Ballard and Ted Sturgeon deserve to be relaxing up in first class with Bradbury or should be crammed into steerage down there with Knight.

"A Death in the House" by Clifford D. Simak (1959)

I think Simak is a good writer, but sometimes his anti-human, anti-urban and anti-technology themes get on my nerves.  Let's hope "A Death in the House," which debuted in an issue of H. L. Gold's Galaxy with a hubba hubba Wallace Wood cover, doesn't lean too heavily on those misanthropic and anti-modern tropes.

Mose is a widower living alone on his "runty" farm which has no electricity--Mose hates electricity!  He finds an alien on his property.  Now, the cover illo of the October 1959 Galaxy might give you the idea that if you go out into space you'll find it inhabited by curvaceous babes, but Simak here in "A Death in the House" suggests space is home to hideous smelly monsters that don't even have what we would recognize as a face.  The hideous alien in question is almost motionless, apparently on the brink of death, though the "worms" around its "head" are writhing with life, and it is making some kind of keening noise.

Mose carries the alien into his untidy house and tries to keep it warm and comfortable, even has the local doctor come by to look at it, but neither Mose nor the doc have any idea how to help the creature, so it dies.  Mose wants to give it a decent Christian burial, but the undertaker and the local minister don't want to provide services to a non-human; Mose thinks "what heels some humans are."

Mose buries the dead alien and from its grave, from an egg or seed on its person that shares its memories, sprouts a plant that after some months breaks free and is more or less the same alien.  (Simak has foreshadowed in multiple ways that this alien is essentially a plant, and so its rebirth is not that bug a surprise to us readers.)  The alien lives with Mose, and though they can't talk, Mose is happy to have a companion--the loneliness he has suffered for years is eased.  Mose helps the alien fix its spacecraft; Mose hates paper money and has a stack of silver coins, and the alien uses the silver to repair the vessel.  Then the alien leaves, but first gives to Mose a little translucent sphere with flickering internal lights, a device that projects a field or something that relieves loneliness--Mose will never be alone.  

This is a pretty good story, sort of heartwarming even if Simak indulges in some of the attitudes I just told you annoy me.  While Simak's tale is somewhat similar to Bradbury's "The Shoreline at Sunset," in that story the humans who interact with the alien are reprehensible, while here in the saga of Old Mose, while most humans are callous or exploitative, our protagonist makes an effort to do the right thing and he is rewarded for his good deeds by being made a sort of honorary member of a society superior to our own.  A good choice by Merril, and it serves her theory that the good stories of 1959 were about the question of what it means to be human.  

"A Death in the House" has taken seed within and reemerged from the pages of numerous anthologies and Simak collections; Merril liked it enough to include it in her Best of the Best anthology that re-reprinted her favorite stories from her famous anthology series.

Among the stories appearing in translation in Des souris et des robots is

"The Golden Bugs," which we read in 2018.

"Mariana" by Fritz Leiber (1960)

In her intro to "Mariana," Merril gushes about how awesome Leiber's "The Silver Eggheads" is.  I read the novel version of The Silver Eggheads back in 2022 and took to this here blog to share with the universe my many complaints about the book, which I called "banal," "unfocused" and even "a chore to read."  Merril also mentions that Leiber is currently writing the Buck Rogers comic strip, something I hadn't known, or had forgotten.  According to wikipedia, Fritz had this job for a little over a year in total, split over two periods.  Doesn't seem like the job was really for him.

In preparation for this story, I reread Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Mariana," which is about a woman who lives in a decrepit house and wishes she was dead because her boyfriend is away and perhaps is not coming back.  The lion's share of the poem's text describes the female lead's decaying domicile; we don't learn about her life or her beloved or anything, though maybe we are supposed to come into the poem already knowing that stuff, the poem being inspired by Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, with which I am not familiar.     

"Mariana" starts out seeming like a feminist story and turns into one of those holo helmet virtual reality programmable dream therapy stories.  Mariana is stuck at home while her husband, a callous--even cruel--man who is her intellectual inferior, commutes to work every day.  She hangs out alone, with the robot servants.  One day she stumbles upon a secret control panel.  It turns out the house is on some barren moon, and the trees outside are not real, but an artificial matter projection.  The top switch on the hidden panel shuts the trees off.  Despite warnings, Mariana, over the course of a few days, throws the succeeding switches, one by one.  It turns out the house and even her angry husband are just matter projections.  When she hits the penultimate switch the moon disappears and Mariana is in a hospital, being treated for depression.  The moon house and unpleasant husband were "wish-fulfillment therapy."  Is Mariana ready for actual treatment from a doctor?  Or will she throw the final switch, which, it is implied, will kill Mariana--could she herself be no more than an artificial construct?

This story is OK, though I question the logic of much of it.  Why would wish-fulfillment therapy offer the simulation of a boring life with an unpleasant husband instead of a comfortable or exciting life with a loving or thrilling husband?  And what is the point of expending resources to provide therapy to an artificial construct, and why would an artificial construct have a psychological illness?  I guess one could come up with reasons for all these things (the unfulfilling virtual reality life is meant to shock her into desiring real therapy, her mental illness--if she is artificial--is like a computer virus or bug in her programming, etc.)  And I guess the point of the story is to blow your mind, not to make sense, and that Fritz's priority was to explore and emulate the elements and themes of Tennyson's poem about a suicidally depressed woman in a dilapidated house, not for the thing to an airtight plot.  But it just doesn't sit right with me, feels gimmicky.     

I'm tolerating rather than loving "Mariana," but it has been reprinted in many Leiber collections and anthologies since its debut in Fantastic.

Among the stories in Theodore W. Hipple and Robert G. Wright's The Worlds of Science Fiction
are Stephen Goldin's "Sweet Dreams, Melissa" and Chad Oliver's "Final Exam," both of which
we have blogged about here at MPFL.

"The Sound-Sweep" by J. G. Ballard (1960)

Ballard is beloved by the critics, maybe because of the experimental and abstract nature of much of his work, its focus on decay and degradation, and his penchant for explicit references to real life popular culture, you know, Marilyn Monroe, JFK, Ronald Reagan, that kind of thing.  I'm a Ballard skeptic, but I like to think I am open-minded about this guy, and I did like "Billenium" and "A Host of Furious Fancies."     

Madame Gioconda, presumably named after the famously enigmatic Mona Lisa, is a sort of Norma Desmond figure, a mentally ill former star of the opera who dreams of a comeback.  She lives in an old studio under a "flyover" (those of us who grew up in New Jersey would call this an "overpass") and every night has dreams or hallucinations that she can hear the applause and the jeers of an audience, as in her heyday.  Every day a young man who is a superfan of hers, Mangon, comes by to "sonovac" Gioconda's quarters.  You remember how in Kuttner and Moore's 1949 Astounding cover story, "Private Eye," the cops could glean audio and video of past events from the teeny tiny textures sound waves and photons left on surfaces?  Well, in "The Sound Sweep," Ballard uses a similar gag--people can hear, or at least be affected by the emotional content of, old sounds "embedded" in surfaces, and people like Mangon exorcize these sounds with a device much like a vacuum cleaner, then dump the sounds in a sound garbage dump.  Of course, Gioconda, old (48 or 49!) and fat, her teeth ruined by tobacco and cocaine, her mug covered in cosmetics, is insane and the sounds of the audience she "hears" are not real, but a delusion, but slavish fan Mangon still runs the sonovac all over the studio to placate her.

Mangon himself is a remarkable character, a man rendered mute by his mother, who punched him in the throat when he was three, and was raised in institutions, and is now a member of the untouchable class of sound-sweeps.  He is perhaps the world's finest sound-sweep, better able to distinguish and understand sounds embedded in walls than anybody; he even dumps in his own little hovel the sounds he collects from the sites of dinner parties so he can hear them and enjoy the conversations as much as if he attended the shindigs.

Having introduced his two characters, Ballard then gives us insight into the alternate reality world in which they live.  Gioconda's stellar career, and that of all singers, went into severe decline about ten years ago because of the development of ultrasonic music.  Such music makes no audible sound, but works directly on the brain, producing the emotional effect of music on the listener without causing sounds to be embedded in your walls and furniture.  The sounds of musical instruments can be turned into ultrasonic recordings and broadcasts, but human vocals cannot, and when ultrasonic music was embraced by the public, work for singers became very hard to find.  Another innovation: long pieces of music like symphonies can be compressed into a shorter form, just a few minutes, so you can get the good out of them in a fraction of the time.  (I guess all this is Balllard's allegorical commentary on the degradation of culture in the postwar period, what with the rise of rock music and TV at the expense of operatic and orchestral music and stage drama and serious cinema.  I thought Ballard's "The Garden of Time" took a similar tack.) 

The plot.  Madame Gioconda wants to blackmail a big exec in this world's analog of Hollywood ("Video City") so he will allow her to broadcast her singing over the airwaves--this would be the first public performance of a singer in ten years.  Mangon helps her collect blackmail material--he can learn things about this corrupt big wig by listening to old sounds of big wig's private conversation at the sound dump.  The blackmail plot succeeds, and Gioconda is grateful to Mangon, and the man expects his relationship with his beloved idol Gioconda is going to flower into something intimate.  Mangon is so happy, he gets his voice back--his condition was only psychosomatic!

Of course, Gioconda is a drug addict and has not practiced her craft for a decade--there is no way she can sing competently, much less put on the kind of world-class performance she put on regularly fifteen or twenty years ago.  With the help of Mangon, some broadcast producer and musician guys figure out a way to put on a performance that will not get out to the public but which Gioconda will be deceived into believing is reaching the public, using various technical means including the sonic sweepers with which Mangon is an expert.  Shortly before the big broadcast, Gioconda, confident that she is about to be rich and famous again, gives Mangon the cold shoulder--in fact, she insults him in a very demeaning and dismissive way, even though he loves her and was key to her expected comeback.  Mangon loses his voice again but gets his revenge, allowing Gioconda's atrocious performance to reach the public and causing a show biz disaster of epic proportions.

"The Sound-Sweep" is like 40 pages long but it only feels long here and there, when you hit one of Ballard's long descriptions.  Both the exposition about this alternate universe and the narrative about talented people who foolishly set themselves unattainable goals and suffer from turns of fate and from their own delusions are pretty compelling and entertaining, plus there are some clever little bits, like how Gioconda uses lots of cocaine and Mangon drinks lots of Coca-Cola.  (I've been trying to consume less sugar and so being reminded of my suspended relationship with my favorite beverage was a little saddening--I know there are plenty of people love Diet Coke and Coke Zero, but those just don't do it for me.)  So, thumbs up for "The Sound-Sweep."  The melodrama of Mangon debuted in Science Fantasy and has been reprinted many times in Ballard collections, as well as a Damon Knight anthology, Tomorrow and Tomorrow: Ten Tales of the Future.                

"The Man Who Lost the Sea" by Theodore Sturgeon (1959)

The title of this story feels familiar, so much so that I thought I'd read it until I double checked and found no record of a blog post about it.  In 1999, Arthur C. Clarke in an intro to the story in the anthology My Favorite Science Fiction Story announced that "The Man Who Lost the Sea" inspired his own "Transit of Earth," which we read in 2016.  Here in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Merril suggests that it no longer makes sense for SF to be about "rocketry" and "astrogation" and "planet-hopping," as the hard sciences have "caught up with us" and offer little room for speculation, and so SF writers are turning to what she calls, in quotes, "'humanic studies.'"  Then she wonders whether Sturgeon, whom she calls "Solo Sturgeon," with "The Man Who Lost the Sea" is doing old-style SF, exploring the "humanic studies," or even pioneering beyond them.

"The Man Who Lost the Sea" is a very literary story in that for much of its length it is confusing and surreal and has what amounts to an unreliable narrator, and offers tons of metaphors and similes and descriptions of images that are close to abstract.  At the same time, Sturgeon's story is a very traditional science fiction story that tells you science and technology are awesome and conquering outer space is going to be extremely dangerous and people are going to be killed but it will all be absolutely worth it.  A key to making this story a successful hybrid is that, rather than leaving everything ambiguous as modern literary stories so often do, in the end all the confusing things we put up with in the beginning of the story resolve themselves and are explained and the last line is a totally unambiguous normative statement.  Sturgeon here quite cleverly instigates an itch and then scratches it in a very satisfying way, so thumbs up for "The Man Who Lost the Sea," a big success for Sturgeon and a good selection by Merril.  

The narrative.  There is a guy half buried in the sand in a space suit, and a kid with a model aircraft and then a model space ship, and we get scenes of a kid who suffers a head injury in gym and loses some memories, but regains them, and a scene of a swimmer near a coral reef who gets into trouble and nearly drowns.  Sturgeon confuses us because he doesn't make it immediately clear if it is the spacesuit guy or the kid who is "real" and just imagining the other, and calls something "the sea" that we later learn is not the sea but a flat plain, and calls something a "monster" or "ameba," but that is just a metaphor for a painful and dangerous condition.  Anyway, the space suit guy is real and the kids and the swimmer are also him, at pivotal moments of his life that he is remembering as he lies on Mars, the first human to land on the red planet, dying because his ship crashed.  The spaceman in his youth loved science and was also athletic and took risks and suffered injuries that foreshadowed his death today on Mars--in the same way his injuries in gym class and while snorkeling temporarily disordered his mind, the crash on Mars messed up his mind so, for example, he thinks he sees the ocean when in fact he is looking at a plain.  When he came to his senses in school and on the beach he felt like he had triumphed over injury and over death, and when he comes to his senses on Mars, even though he is seconds away from dying, he also feels triumphant, because the human race has reached another planet.

I'll admit I found this one annoying for a few pages, but then came the snorkeling scene, which was quite good with its description of ocean creatures, and then when Ted resolved all the mysteries in the end he had fully won me over and then when he gave us a very pro-space exploration finale I was enthusiastically on his side.  Ted played me like a fiddle but I can only admire him for it.

Deservedly, "The Man Who Lost the Sea" has appeared in many anthologies as well as a bunch of Sturgeon collections since its first appearance in F&SF.

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These are pretty good picks by Merril; the Leiber doesn't really hold together, but it succeeds as literature and as entertainment, and the Simak, Ballard and Sturgeon hold together nicely and make their points quite ably.  The Ballard is a real downer, with people misbehaving and getting defeated and with culture becoming degraded by technology and democracy, but Simak and Sturgeon take a more balanced approach, showing triumph as well as tragedy, human decency and human achievement as well as (in Simak's case) human greed and callousness and (in Sturgeon's) human loss.  The Simak, Ballard and Sturgeon are worthy companions to the Bradbury story I praised in my last post.

More anthologized short stories next time, kids, but from over ten years later than today's.  See you then!