J Merril's 5th Best S-F: D Knight, R Bradbury, & G Dickson

Let's read some stories reprinted in Judith Merril's 1960 anthology The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition.  I've already read and blogged about three stories from this book: Avram Davidson's "No Fire Burns," Cordwainer Smith's "No, No Not Rogov!", and Carol Emshwiller's "Day at the Beach,"  I read a version of Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon" in school back in the Eighties.  But that still leaves a lot of material in the anthology which I have not yet read.  Today let's read three stories from The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, those by editor and critic Damon Knight, Ray Bradbury--in some ways perhaps the most successful of all American SF writers-- and the Dorsai guy, Gordon R. Dickson.  We'll probably devote our next blog post to three or four more stories from this book.

Keep in mind that while these stories debuted elsewhere, and have been reprinted in later books, I am reading them today in a scan of a 1961 paperback edition of Merril's anthology.

"The Handler" by Damon Knight (1960)

"The Handler" debuted in an issue of Rogue which is chock full of content from SF authors, including Harlan Ellison's "Final Shtick," which we read a few years ago.  This issue seems to have as its theme alcohol--I guess they figured it was pointless to compete with Playboy in the jazz department.  I have seen the Table of Contents of this issue on ebay, and Robert Bloch, Robert Silverberg, and Mack Reynolds all contribute articles about booze (William F. Nolan's article is about Dean Martin, which perhaps also qualifies.)  Is "The Handler" also about the sauce?  Well, in her intro to the story here in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Merril, after telling us how great a guy Knight is, hints that "The Handler" is a caustic attack on the entertainment industry.  SF doesn't have to be adventures in strange worlds and speculations on what life might be like in a future of different technologies, customs, and political and economic systems--it can also be a guy making fun of TV!

"The Handler," like 4 pages here in TYBSF5, is a boring joke story about how showbiz people are shallow phonies who are fooling themselves while they fool the public (who are also probably fooling themselves.)  A big party is underway!  Everybody is drinking!  A big handsome guys comes in--he is the hero of the hour!  Everybody loves him!  Big guy is, apparently, the host or emcee or whatever of a TV show, I guess like a Jack Benny or Steve Allen or Jack Paar sort of figure.  The just completed show was a huge success, and will get renewed, and everybody involved is ecstatic!  Then comes our twist!  The big handsome man is a machine, and the short ugly guy who sits in the machine and operates it climbs out of it to take a break from his hot sweaty work.  And all the many people who owe their livelihoods to him are cold to him, find him disgusting, even though they were falling all themselves expressing adoration of the machine, every move of which he controlled.  His colleagues urge him to climb back aboard the machine and when he does the love fest for the big handsome guy continues.

Knight provides us yet another reminder that we are all putting on an act at all times to maintain our careers and relationships, and that smart unattractive people envy and resent good-looking people and behind-the-scenes people envy and resent the figureheads who get the glory.  "The Handler" isn't bogus, and it has the virtue of being short, but it is banal.  So, just a marginal thumbs down rather than a vicious condemnation.  Her intro suggests Merril and Knight were friends, and that, and the fact that Merril loves including in her anthologies stories that debuted outside the category SF mags, perhaps suggests why she thought "The Handler" worthy of reprint here, and even in the anthology that collected her favorites from all her annual Best ofs.  "The Handler" has also reappeared in Knight collections and many more anthologies, including those that endeavor to define the parameters of the SF canon, prescribe what are the greatest SF stories, like Ursula LeGuin's The Norton Book of Science Fiction and Frederik Pohl's The SFWA Grand Masters: Volume 3.   

"The Shoreline at Sunset" by Ray Bradbury (1959)      

In the intro to Bradbury's piece in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Merril puts forward a sort of zeitgeist theory that all the good stories of a given year have the same topic or theme:

Against a background of the inevitable ninety per cent of inept or hackster trash, the better stories, as they emerge each year, always show some very definite--and different from the year before--emphasis on one area of speculation or another.

While unfalsifiable nonsense, this theory is sort of a fun way of looking at the world.  Anyway, Merril suggests that "The Shoreline at Sunset," like all the best SF of 1959, is about how we define what it means to be human.

Two guys, Tom and Chico, are beachcombers.  It seems they have wasted their lives hanging out on the beach, eking out a parlous existence by collecting junk that has washed up on the shore and coins tourists have dropped in the sand, and I guess seducing women, women they sometimes hope will find them marriageable, but which never do.  Tom and Chico are no longer young--they are getting grey hair.  Tom is talking about leaving the beach and Chico.

As the sun is about to set, an excited young boy approaches Tom and Chico--he and a friend have found a strange woman, washed up on the beach!  When the men see her, they find she is a mermaid!  Is she dead or alive?  They can't be sure--she is pretty inert, but upon touching her the men feel what may be a pulse.  Chico thinks they have finally struck it rich, and runs off to get ice to preserve this physical specimen of a heretofore merely mythical species so they can profit from it.  He instructs Tom and the kids to make sure the creature doesn't wash away in the rising tide while he is gone.

Chico and Tom are losers with questionable morals.  Obviously they should try to help the alien woman, who is probably alive and likely dying.  Chico just wants to profit from the woman's tragic situation.  Tom, on the other hand, is static, the kind of guy who does nothing, never makes a decision, just stands there and lets the world pass him by.  Instead of actively trying to help the woman or actively exploiting her, he just stands there while the waves carry her back to the ocean, we readers hoping she will wake up and go back to whatever life she was leading before misfortune struck her.

Chico returns and it is clear neither of these losers will ever leave the beach or get decent jobs or build a healthy relationship with a woman, and that this fate is meet and just because Tom and Chico are each immoral and/or lack drive.

Merril is of course correct that the story is in part about what it means to be human.  The mermaid has a human woman's upper half and a fish's lower half--is she human?  Chico treats her like a fish, not a woman, but Tom is not so sure.  As for Tom and Chico, their behavior suggests they are less than human, because they either act in a manner that is evil or fail to act at all, behaving like a passive vegetable instead of the erect and intelligent member of a complex society that he has the potential to be.  A "real" man supports and contributes to and defends society, these goofs are scavengers divorced from society at best, and are probably better described as parasites or even predators.

The themes and plot of "The Shoreline at Sunset" are good, and it is quite well-written--Bradbury slings the metaphors and descriptions like a master.  And there is a lot for the reader to consider, to analyze.  For example, why did Bradbury include the two little boys?  To remind us that Tom and Chico act like kids, living off society instead of contributing to it and failing to consider the future?  Are we readers to hope that the adventure of the mermaid will somehow affect these boys in such a way to ensure they grow up to be decent people and not losers like Tom and Chico?  

Thumbs up for "The Shoreline at Sunset!"  A solid selection by Merril.  The story, perhaps known to our British friends as "The Sunset Harp," first appeared in F&SF and, in the same year, A Medicine for Melancholy, the slightly different British version of which is known as The Day It Rained Forever.

"The Dreamsman" by Gordon R. Dickson (1959)

Here we have an acceptable trifle written by a man Merril, in her introduction, indicates is a singer and guitar player who performs SF songs he composes in cooperation with Poul Anderson and Theodore Cogswell.  "The Dreamsman" is something of a joke story that sort of mildly spoofs SF commonplaces, but it isn't that absurdist or bitter and doesn't feel like a subversive satire, just a bit of fun.  For some reason it is written in the present tense.  

"The Dreamsman" is one of those stories about how psykers feel alone and then meet fellow psykers, and is also about people who learn about the secret cabals at war in the shadows who are determining the course of history totally unbeknownst to us normies, as well as one of those stories in which aliens who are better than humans are judging whether we can join the galactic federation.

An old guy--some 184 years old!--is a psyker.  One morning while shaving he detects two other psykers, a married couple.  He goes to them.  They are all hopped up to join other psykers and form a group to contribute to society, to use their superpowers to help people in trouble, you know, like a kid who fell down a well, and promote unspecified progress.  The old geezer says that this idealism will not work, that the thing for them to do is to join the colony of psykers on Venus.  He takes them to a military base to a rocket--the old geez clouds the minds of the military personnel on the scene or even go to sleep.

Then comes the twist ending.  From out of the sky, another psyker, one much more powerful than the old guy, appears.  This psyker, an alien, says that the old geezer is a conservative who is killing the psykers he finds because he doesn't want the world to change--the rocket is a death trap!  There is no Venus colony!  The old geez isn't even as powerful as he seems--half the psychic stuff he does, like telekinesis, is just him using hypnosis to trick people.  The alien laments that this old guy has been retarding human progress for many decades, that if not for him, the Earth could have joined the galactic federation ages ago.  But the aliens can't kill or even imprison this troublemaker, violence and force being forbidden them.  The alien saves the couple, taking them to some real colony far away.

Not bad, but no big deal; competent filler that gets away with using old (but beloved!) ideas by using them a little knowingly, with an ironic wink.  Why Merril thinks it is so good, I don't know, maybe she thinks it is more subversive than I do, that its message is that cautious and careful people who follow the rules to preserve what they have--like the old geez, who has a strict dietary regimen and scrupulously follows the traffic laws--or maintain a strict moral code--like the aliens who refuse to use violence to help Earth and humanity advance--are holding us back.  Maybe as a socialist, Merril saw laws and traditions that, for example, respect private property, and those who uphold them, as ridiculous obstacles keeping us from building a workers' utopia right here in America.

"The Dreamsman" debuted in Fred Pohl's paperback anthology series Star, and would reappear in 1985 and in 2017 in Dickson collections.

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Obviously the Bradbury story is far and away superior to Knight's and Dickson's contributions.  But maybe when next we meet we'll read a story hand picked by Merril for The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition that can give the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles a little competition.