published in the year 1958 because Trotskyist and cheerleader of the New Wave Judith Merril, whom
of waging a campaign to destroy science fiction, recommended them in tiny print in the back of one of her influential anthologies. Well, we're going back Jack and doing it again! Pages 318, 319 and 320 of Merril's
are taken up by a list of stories published in 1959, in alphabetical order by author, that Merril deemed worthy of honorable mention. Over the coming months, maybe years, who knows?, I will be cherry picking stories from this list to read. Today we read three "A" stories, tales by Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson, and Christopher Anvil, that debuted in science fiction magazines and I will take up your valuable time by expressing to you at length my opinions of the stories and maybe my guesses as to why Merril saw fit to promote them. If your time really is as valuable as I suspect it is, remember there is no shame in just looking at the pictures.
"The Lieutenant" by Brian Aldiss
Here we have a story by major SF figure Aldiss that appeared in the magazine
Nebula and would not see reprint until 2013 in
The Complete Short Stories. (I read it in a scan of the magazine.)
In "The Lieutenant," World War II veteran Aldiss describes the contradictory and evolving, or perhaps degenerating, psychology of an inexperienced Army officer in a tough spot. The world is being conquered by aliens, whom we eventually learn are not people but animals much like giant spiders, and our main character has to take command of an ad hoc unit of soldiers drawn from shattered formations as they travel across the devastated countryside, dealing with civilians as well as aliens. Aldiss very convincingly displays the young officer making mistakes, putting on an act to convince others and himself of his fitness to command, and, after a shocking event, radically shifting from pursuing a course that is calm and cool and cautious to one that is risky and based entirely on unbridled emotion.
Well done, though its fragmentary and inconclusive nature and focus on psychology (demonstrated through behavior and not sterile talk about theories) is perhaps more literary than what we expect in genre literature; it is easy to see why "The Lieutenant" appealed to Merril, who was always looking for stories that defied the boundaries between the literary mainstream and SF. The tone and setting might appeal to fans of post-apocalyptic fiction, and there are pretty effective shock scenes involving a dead body for all you horror fans.
Thumbs up for "The Lieutenant."
"Brave to Be a King" by Poul Anderson
This is a long one; our friends in Italy serialized it over three issues of
Urania. I don't think "Brave to Be a King" has been anthologized in a book, but it has appeared in a million Anderson collections. In general I am not crazy about time travel stories, so the fact that isfdb is telling me this is the second installment in the Time Patrol series is giving me pause, but I like Anderson so let's give "Brave to Be a King" a chance. I'm reading the novelette in a scan of the issue of
F&SF in which it debuted, the issue that includes Carol Emshwiller's
"Day at the Beach," which we read back in 2018; "Day at the Beach" is one of the stories Merril reprinted in
The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition.
The first two of "Brave to Be a King"'s ten chapters introduce us to our characters and the whole idea of the Time Patrol. Manse Everard is one of the top Time Patrol agents, and he was going to relax for a few days in an apartment in 20th-century Manhattan reading Sherlock Holmes stories but his break period is interrupted by a knock at the door--it's the love of his life, blonde, blue-eyed, short Cynthia Denison nee Cunningham. He hasn't seen Cynthia in three years, since she married his best friend, Keith Denison. Cynthia has bad news and makes a desperate request for help--Keith has disappeared in ancient Persia, and the Time Patrol's efforts to find him have come to nothing. Can agent extraordinaire Manse go looking for Keith? Anderson pulls out all the stops describing the distress of Cynthia and Manse, how they are shaking and chain smoking and on the verge of screaming and all that. He maybe pours it on a little too thick.
In Chapter III, Manse is in the Iran of the sixth century B.C. (that's BCE to you kids) and Anderson gives us a lecture on the reign of Cyrus and then a long description of a Persian town. Anderson has quite complimentary things to say about Cyrus and 6th-century Persia. Disguised as a Greek traveler, Manse in Chapter IV is at the mansion of a wealthy courtier, looking for clues as to Denis's fate and hearing from the courtier a biography of Cyrus that feels a little sketchy. Manse has aroused the suspicion of this noble, and in Chapter V is interrogated by the head of Cyrus' security; things are looking hairy but then the King himself arrives and Manse finds that his old friend Keith, the man who stole his girl, is impersonating King Cyrus!
Chapter VI is Keith's story of how he became Cyrus the Great and his accomplishments as king. Chapter VII is about how Cyrus and Persia are so important to creating the future, to saving the Jews and laying the groundwork for the spread of Greek civilization and Christianity, that Manse thinks he can't extract Keith from the role of Cyrus and bring him back to Cynthia--Cyrus's deeds are so critical to history they can't risk any of them not happening. Anderson has the men yelling and knocking cups over and so forth, so we know how emotional they are. The subtext, of course, is that if Keith stays in ancient Iran then Manse can probably get his hands back on Cynthia's perfect, if short, body.
Chapter VIII has a decent action scene as Manse is intercepted on his way back to his time machine by that security chief, who has an inkling that Cyrus and Manse are wizards from another universe; this guy is a patriot and wants to make sure Cyrus, who has been such a good leader, does not leave Persia, and maybe to force Manse to use his wizardry to help the kingdom. There are some histrionics in this chapter, from the courtier as he dies, but I found them affecting rather than over the top.
In Chapter IX, Manse figures out how to get Keith back to the modern world while making sure somebody else is in the role of Cyrus and does all the history-making things Keith as Cyrus has done. In Chapter X, Keith comes home to 20th-century NYC and Cynthia. Cynthia seems thrilled, but Keith has some qualms--he was Cyrus the Great for 14 years, living in a palace and having sex with dozens of submissive women, being treated as a hero and obeyed unquestioningly; does he really want to live in a tiny apartment with a single short woman who is going to be telling him what to do?
A pretty good adventure story. Some of the the historical lectures may seem a little much, and some of the human drama in the first two thirds may feel overdone, but everything in the last third or so is actually good. I sometimes read stories that start well and then fall apart or simply fail to live up to their potential, and I sometimes read good stories that have weak endings, and a story like "Brave to Be a King" that goes from OK to good has its advantages. I am guessing Merril appreciated the effort Anderson put into the interpersonal drama stuff, as well as his laudatory description of a non-Western culture and all the nice things Anderson has to say about Cyrus' senior wife, who at one point saved the kingdom.
"The Law Breakers" by Christopher Anvil
I don't think I've read anything by Anvil before, so this is a real exercise in exploration for the MPorcius Fiction Log staff. "The Law Breakers" was an
Astounding cover story, so I feel like both the leftist herald of the New Wave and the right-wing architect of the Golden Age are telling me this is a good place to start with Anvil, but the fact that, like Aldiss' "The Lieutenant," Anvil's "The Law Breakers" had to wait until the 21st century to be reprinted is making me wonder if the market is telling me that, no, this is not the place to start.
Well, "The Law Breakers" is an OK adventure story told in a sort of jocular manner that tries to get across some historical and sociological theories. I guess the big one is about the effect of diversity and competition on technological development, and another is the drawbacks as well as the obvious benefits of the fact that the human race is ambitious and always striving, always trying to improve. We might consider "The Law breakers" an example of the kind of stories Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. wanted to publish, an optimistic story that celebrates human achievement and teaches the reader something about science and technology.
Our main characters are two space aliens whose civilization has achieved interstellar travel but has yet to develop an FTL drive. These aliens look almost like humans and share humans' preferences for air and food and so forth, with the exception that their arms have more joints and these joints are extra flexible. Our protagonists are on a commando mission to Earth. Four hundred years ago, like 1600 or 1700, I guess, scouts came to Earth and saw that the human race was split up into many discrete and often hostile ethnic, cultural and political groups, and that there was no central authority controlling population growth or use of natural resources. The aliens' scientists figured the human race was going to exterminate itself through war or overuse of resources or something in a few centuries, so the aliens would be able to colonize the Earth without having to kill us themselves.
Recently, scouts returned to the vicinity of Terra and were astounded to find that the human race was not extinct--in fact, they had developed an FTL drive and were colonizing the galaxy! The aliens fretted that if they didn't deal with the humans soon, they (the aliens) would be subordinated to the Earthers! The alien space navy is far away, so to buy time and slow down Earth's expansion, successive small squads of commandos were sent to Earth to blow up the HQ of the human colonization effort. None of these squads has returned; our protagonists are the latest pair sent on this dangerous mission, armed with invisibility devices and high explosives and hand guns and charged with the task of blowing up the skyscraper in the middle of a rural district that is Earth colonization HQ.
Most of the text of "The Law Breakers" is moderately entertaining adventure stuff, the commandos crash landing, hiking to a road, stealing a car and driving to the skyscraper, sneaking around, setting the explosive charges. They are invisible, but dogs smell them and humans get suspicious and so the aliens try to hide in the building. The building includes, for training purposes, simulations of alien planets so the commandos, who can't read or speak English, blunder into a very cold room, a high gravity room, etc. Finally they fall into a trap and are captured.
The aliens find that their predecessors were also captured, and are now fully integrated into Earth society. We get lectures on the value of having multiple cultures and polities--the human race as a whole never became satisfied with any one method or piece of technology, because Earth had many competing cultures and polities. The aliens never got a FTL drive because they were satisfied with the drive they have, and those that invented it and produce it, in a civilization with only one society, were able to discourage competition.
The aliens are offered jobs as car mechanics. While the aliens' civilization has settled on a single, uniform, simple and reliable automobile, Earth automobiles are very complicated and very diverse and always being improved upon, so they require a lot of maintenance, and the aliens, with their super-flexible arms, can reach more easily into the recesses of an engine than can a human. But our joke ending, in which the aliens have to serve jail time for stealing a car and speeding, will keep them from their new jobs for a while. (The story title has two meanings--the alien protagonists broke Earthly laws relating to property and speed limits, while the human race has been breaking what the aliens considered laws of nature, like that you can't go faster than light.)
An acceptable story. I'm not quite sure why Merril considered it a stand out...Anvil does depict international conflicts being resolved peacefully and the diversity angle extends to race--there are people of all races at the colonization center--so maybe that has something to do with it. In 2007 the people at Baen included "The Law Breakers" in the Anvil collection The Trouble with Humans.
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Not a bad start to our alphabetical journey through the SF of 1959. Aldiss' story--oppressive, pessimistic, claustrophobically stuck in one guy's head--is probably the most literary of the stories. Anderson's is tragic when it comes to the lives of individuals but optimistic when it comes to the sweep of human history, and depicts people doing the right thing and behaving with competence and confidence. Anvil's story is the most gee whiz and optimistic of the tales, but like Anderson's it tries to teach you something as well as offer adventure thrills and human drama.
Keep your eyes open for our excursion into 1959 SF "B"s under the direction of one Judith Merril.
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