Three stories by Mack Reynolds

Happy May Day, comrade!  As the bourgeois intellectuals at Wikipedia tell it, "The 1904 Sixth Conference of the Second International called on 'all Social Democratic Party organisations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the First of May for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace.'"  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log on the First of May we talk about California-born Mack Reynolds, who was a star member of the Socialist Labor Party in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, until in 1958 he was excommunicated when the SLP's Executive Committee discovered that Reynolds had authored the book How to Retire Without Money.  (Check out last year's May Day commemoration of Reynolds, which includes a reproduction of the amusing cover of How to Retire Without Money.)

Reynolds didn't just write retirement guides and sex novels--he also wrote tons of SF.  Today we'll be looking at three Reynolds stories that appear in the 1976 volume The Best of Mack Reynolds, a copy of which I own.  These tales were first published in Fantastic, Playboy, and Analog, magazines close to this blog's heart.  I chose these individual stories because I thought the titles interesting, and it is very possible that some or all of them have nothing to do with socialism or politics or economics.

"No Return From Elba" (1953)

I probably don't have to tell my erudite readership that Elba was the island to which the merciful forces of justice exiled the Corsican Ogre back in 1814.  But, as they say, mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, and it was from Elba that the little corporal escaped to once again terrorize mankind.

Each story in The Best of Mack Reynolds is accompanied by an introduction from the author, and, in the intro to "No Return From Elba," Reynolds brags that Fantastic editor Howard Browne paid "the unheard of, in those days, rate of four cents a word" for the tale.

This is a very brief, and rather lame, doublecross tale with a feeble twist ending.  A warmongering dictator (I guess from Venus) has been defeated by a coalition of other planets and his three closest lieutenants fly him to an asteroid to hide.  The plan is that after a few years the coalition will fall apart and the Venusian public will welcome the tyrant's return.  The three lieutenants leave, and a bomb they planted on the asteroid explodes, killing the dictator--these jokers plan to seize power for themselves and didn't want the dictator to interfere.  But what they don't know is that the dictator, to help keep his hiding place a secret, planted a bomb of his own on the ship and the would-be triumvirs will soon join the dictator in death.

A forgettable filler story.  There is no reason for this story to even be a SF story--it would make just as much sense if it was about a mob boss or a Third World caudillo or something.  Sirius, the Croatian SF magazine, included a translation of "No Return From Elba" in a 1978 issue whose theme was SF crime stories.

"Burnt Toast" (1955)

Originally appearing in Playboy, a year later "Burnt Toast," under the title "Martinis: 12 to 1," reappeared in F&SF, and in 1988 it was translated for inclusion in an Italian horror anthology that endeavoured to capitalize on the enduring fascination of readers with H. P. Lovecraft and girls' boobs.

"Burnt Toast" is one of those stories in which a guy has a wager with the Devil.  Mephistopheles presents the protagonist 13 cocktails--one is poison.  If the main character, a drunk found in the gutter, drinks the poison cocktail his soul as well as his life are forfeit.  But if he drinks one of the twelve safe cocktails he gets one hundred dollars.  The wagering need not end there--if the man takes a second drink and survives he gets $200, a third $400, and so on.  We follow the protagonist's progress as he wins money, leaves, then days or months or years later returns because he needs or wants more money and is willing to take the ultimate risk to get it.  Of course, the Devil has not necessarily been playing fairly....

This one is actually mildly entertaining and moves at a brisk pace, so I feel free to give it a passing grade.

"Survivor" (1966)

This one is more what I expect from Reynolds, a pacifistic utopian thing.  Here is another Reynolds story that after its first appearance ("Survivor" was first published in Analog) was picked up by the people at Sirius for translation.

When negotiations break down between the West and the commies, atomic war is expected any minute.  People flee New York City, on the way out fighting each other for vehicles, food, and weapons.  A small number of Manhattanites, thinking there is no hope or unwilling to do violence to their fellow citizens, remain in the Big Apple awaiting their destruction.

To the surprise of those who chose to stay, New York is spared.  While millions of people in the countryside are killing each other in competition for scarce resources, those in the city, the meek, inherit all the canned food and other goods the city has to offer.  Via ham radio they learn that neither side in the Cold War conflict launched any missiles--apparently, when it looked like war was inevitable, all the politicians and military men in Washington and Moscow fled instead of doing their duty and pushing the button.  All over the world the ruthless fled the cities to engage in a fruitless and ultimately suicidal red-in-tooth-and-claw struggle while the resigned stayed home and, paradoxically, survived.  Soon all the aggressive people will have starved or murdered each other, and the pacific softies in the cities can begin building a new and peaceful society.

This story is silly and gimmicky, but the gimmick is original and the story is competently written, so "Survivor" gets a pass.

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Nothing really good, but nothing really dismal, either.  If this blog is yet afloat in one year's time, we'll check in again with Comrade Reynolds.

Four stories by Mack Reynolds

May Day is a big holiday for the commies, commemorated with red banners, parading military hardware and menacing marches the world over. Because every time I read his work, it seems to be about socialist utopias or the Soviet Union (and because I don't have access to any military hardware of my own), here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are commemorating May 1st by reading some stories by Mack Reynolds, who once won the title of "World's Most Popular SF Author" in an election as fishy as any in Castro's Cuba.  I selected the following four stories to mark the day because I thought their titles indicated they might be attacks on our bourgeois society and its market economy.

All four of these stories I found in my copy of 1976's The Best of Mack Reynolds; I read them in the order they appear in the volume, Pocket Books 80403.

"Compounded Interest" (1956)

Barry Malzberg, in his introduction (quoted on the back cover of the collection with an embarrassing typo), tells us "Compounded Interest" is very "important" and very "terrible," but in a good way!  Let's see.

"Compounded Interest" is a story about how a tiny cabal of businessmen secretly owns the lion's share of the world's wealth and callously manipulates all of our lives! Yes, this is just the kind of Bolshie bollocks we are looking for on May Day!

A mid-20th century guy goes back in time to 1300 to make an investment with Italian merchants.  He gives them advice about upcoming historical events and trends that assure his investment (and the Italian firm) will grow.  He returns to give the firm's managers advice about the coming century every one hundred years, stuff like "invest in Cortez and Pizarro" and "drop Bonaparte in 1812."  Reynolds probably should have kept his Encyclopedia Britannica closer while writing this thing because he suggests that Robert Clive's adventures in India took place in the 19th century, when in fact Clive died in 1774. Oops.

After a few centuries the cabal includes eminence grise types from all over the West and is basically running the world in secret, starting wars and so forth to protect the interests of a guy most of them never see who has no ability whatsoever to enforce his wishes.  In 1960, breaking the one-hundred-year schedule, comes the final meeting, when we learn why the mysterious time traveler is accumulating all this money and power--so he can finance the construction and power the operation of the time machine which will allow him to start this whole time loop!  I guess the "point" of the story, reinforced in the last few lines, is that the people in charge of the world are callous and selfish.

This "story" is basically an idea, which the uncharitable might call a "gimmick," unaccompanied by any style or human feeling or even plot to make it an actually enjoyable story.  I'm grading this one "barely acceptable."  In 1946 C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner produced a story about callous time travelers, "Vintage Season," which is much more worth your time as it includes all the suspense, characterization and human drama that "Compounded Interest" lacks.

"Compounded Interest" first appeared in F&SF, and important people like Malzberg, Judith Merrill and the people at NESFA have been championing it for decades, so that it appears in numerous "Best" and "Greatest" anthologies and is the title story of a 1983 collection of Reynolds stories.

"The Business, As Usual" (1952)

This is another time travel story which has been reprinted a billion times, a four-page joke story.  A 20th-century guy travels to the 30th century where he is taken advantage of by one of the natives.  The story is totally contrived, with the time travel "rules" set up so the joke will work (you can travel to the future, but items and even memories you acquire in the future won't go back with you to your time of origin) but it is sort of amusing, and fits into the "SF stories about Jews" and "SF stories about language" categories, so has some sociological interest. So I can give this one a (marginal to moderate) thumbs up.

"The Business, As Usual," which nicely fits our May Day theme (exploitative business deal!), first appeared in F&SF.

"Your Soul Comes C.O.D." (1952)

This one has a title which sounds like it belongs on a teenage Marxist punk rocker's torn black T-shirt.  Let's see if it delivers the May Day goodness we crave!

A guy, driven by envy, collects the esoteric materials necessary to summon a demon--he wants to sell his soul so he can have "a few years of the good things of life that others enjoy."  Even before he has finished the ritual, a "spirit" appears and tells him he will "support" him for forty years in exchange for his soul.  The guy agrees, and, immediately upon the spirit's disappearance, the guy's estranged girlfriend is at the door saying she will marry him after all and, oh yeah, she just inherited an oil well.

So our hero has forty years of happiness, and then the spirit returns.  Our protagonist thinks he is bound for hell, but it turns out the spirit was not a demon after all but an angel, and the protagonist is going to heaven!  What?

Yes!  The perfect May Day cover!  

This is one of those surprise twist ending stories that I call "Twilight Zone stories."  I have to admit that I was surprised by the ending; surprised because it makes no sense! Does it make any sense that an angel would manipulate your ex-girlfriend and subterranean petroleum deposits because you were willing to sell your soul to the devil? Does it makes sense that an angel would schedule your death?  Or am I supposed to think the marriage and the oil and the date of death were all coming anyway, and the angel was just saving the guy from the sin of contacting the devil? To me, this story feels contrived and ridiculous, so gotta give it a thumbs down.  It's like those mystery stories where all the clues point to Mr. Green but then, at the very end, we are supposed to be amazed that it's Mr. Brown who is the killer.  Of course we're amazed, amazed that the writer would think we would enjoy such a lame trick.

"Your Soul Comes C.O.D.," which first bewildered the SF community from its perch in Fantastic, barely qualifies for our May Day theme because our hero expresses disgust at the stock market (commies hate the stock market), as if investing in a publicly-traded business is more questionable behavior than summoning a demon.

"Fad" (1965)

The pet rock!  Rubik's Cube!  Bell bottoms!  Wacky Wall Walkers!  So many crazy fads!  There was a brief moment there when some of us (the naive ones) thought that the planned economy and big government were fads whose days were over, but now it looks like it may be free trade and free speech that were mere passing fads!  Well, let's see what Reynolds has to say about fads.

"Fad" fits comfortably into our May Day theme because it is about two old con men with goofy nicknames ("The Funked Out Kid" and "Professor Doolittle") who, after parting ways fifteen years ago, went straight, each becoming head of a major concern, one a PR firm, the other a marketing research firm.  Commies hate advertising and all the related fields, thinking that the bourgeoisie trick the people into having unnatural desires so they can sell them stuff they don't need or which actually harm them.  At Rutgers I took a class on 19th-century Europe, and one of the things the prof told us that I still remember is that in the 19th century the capitalists convinced people that they smelled so that they could sell them soap--before then nobody noticed that dirty people (even Frenchmen!) smelled bad!  "Fad" also airs the leftist argument we sometimes hear that our society is wasting resources on consumer goods that should be spent on something more "important."  This story is full of pinko red meat!

"Well, that's what Irene [Frankle, a psychologist] says, sir.  Such organizations as Doolittle Research, the other MR outfits and the ad agencies manipulate human motivations and desires and develop a need for products with which the public has previously been unfamiliar, perhaps even undesirous of purchasing.  She thinks that's ultimately turning the country into a nation of idiots, besides wasting natural resources."

The Kid and the Professor reunite to manufacture a fad in order to make a lot of money.  The consumer fads I mentioned above were big in the '70s and '80s; Reynolds in this 1965 story mentions the Davy Crockett fad, the hula hoop, and "the Space Man fad."  The con men decide to inspire a Joan of Arc fad which will get women to spend money on trips to France, reproduction swords, Joan of Arc movies and books, fashions based on clothes of the Fifteenth Century, etc.  The women of America unite in their love of the Maid of Orleans, but Irene Frankle, a "do-gooder" headshrinker, hijacks the movement for her own purposes (a rebellion against advertising and the fashion industry) and women, armed with swords, take over the country by force.

This story of 28 pages consists almost entirely of conversations among the staff of Doolittle Research (Irene Frankle never appears "on screen"--we only learn about her second-hand) and has no human drama or feeling.  It rehashes criticisms of advertising you've already heard before, tosses in some facts about Joan of Arc and 20th-century fads, then gives you the twist ending that makes sense only as a joke. Gotta give this one a (marginal) thumbs down.  It appeared in the same issue of Analog as James Schmitz's "Goblin Night," which I praised back in 2013.    

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When the SF community was first exposed to these four cold and bloodless thought experiments and jokes masquerading as stories they probably seemed better than they did to me over 50 years later.  The SF fans of the '50s and '60s found each in a magazine, sandwiched between stories by other writers, so they could read the Reynolds piece, think "well, that is an interesting idea I guess," and then move on to a story with some emotional content or literary value, some sex or violence or stylish prose or deft characterization. They wouldn't encounter another Reynolds story for some weeks, during which time they could forget how lackluster in execution that last Reynolds piece was, leaving in their minds only the germ of the story, its somewhat interesting idea.  Reading these four gimmicky and sterile stories in one burst in one day, as I did, was rougher going, and it may be a few years before I embark on any further exploration of Reynolds' output.

(An indication of Reynolds' mediocrity is found at the start of The Best of Mack Reynolds--Malzberg's introduction to the volume, which is one of the least interesting things I have ever read by New Jersey's own winner of the John W. Campbell Award and author of the hilarious Underlay.  Instead of telling us anything specific about Reynold's work and why it is so great, Malzberg just inflicts upon us an extended and embarrassingly vague metaphor about how Reynolds' oeuvre is like a well-crafted house and each story is like a strong wall or a charming decoration or something.  A sad performance.  Why would Malzberg write such an intro?  As a favor to a nice guy with whose politics Malzberg sympathized?  Or because Malzberg saw in Reynolds, like himself a professional writer who had to resort again and again to writing sex novels and stories based around other people's plots and characters to make ends meet, a kindred spirit?)        

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There are three pages of ads in the back of Pocket Books' The Best of Mack Reynolds, none of them for SF books.  Perhaps appropriately, perhaps ironically, they purport to reveal the secrets of the stock market and bankruptcy.

Click to get the inside scoop on these Simon and Schuster bestsellers

Maybe this is where I should tell you that Mack Reynolds was thrown out of the Socialist Labor Party in 1958 (after a lifetime of service to the People's Cause!) for working on How to Retire Without Money!--the book was published under a pseudonym, but if there is anything those commies are good at, it is ferreting out dissidents. (They are also good at denouncing as traitors people who are in fact perfectly loyal, which may well have been the case for hapless Comrade Mack in this instance.)

I include a picture here of the 1960 second edition of How to Retire Without Money!, complete with resource-wasting superfluous exclamation point and a cover which is adorned with bourgeois retirees enjoying the good life fishing, golfing, and just laying back, absolutely oblivious to the suffering of the proletariat masses!  

Three 1959 stories by Howard Fast

Internet SF maven Joachim Boaz recently reminded us of communist Howard Fast's birthday.  Besides winning the Stalin Peace Prize and authoring a huge pile of novels about American history, Fast contributed many stories to science fiction magazines. On the same fruitful expedition which yielded Theodore Sturgeon's Godbody, I purchased Bantam F3309, a "Bantam Fifty," entitled The Edge of Tomorrow, containing eight stories by Fast.  The book is copywritten 1961; my copy was apparently printed in 1966.

There is an unusual stamp on the first page of my copy of The Edge of Tomorrow, offering Christmas Greetings from Elisha Penniman of the Precision Tools company of Elmwood, CT.  Was this a gift to one of firm's customers?  Or was Penniman just using the Christmas stamp as a bookplate, perhaps accidentally?

Let's check out three stories by Fast which first appeared in The Magazine of  Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1959, by which time, wikipedia suggests, Fast had become disillusioned with the Communist Party and communist rule of the long-suffering people of Eastern Europe.

"Of Time and Cats"

This is one of those stories which is more or less straightforward but which the author tries to make more interesting by telling it somewhat out of chronological order, through dialogue and flashbacks.  Fast tells it in a matter-of-fact, deadpan style which, to me, came off as cold and flat.

At least these three F&SF covers
are awesome!

Two physicists in beautiful Manhattan build a machine ("a field deviator or something of that sort" says the wife of one of the boffins) that "ties a knot in time."  When one of the physicists (our narrator) "steps between the electrodes" he starts a process which repeatedly duplicates him; soon there are dozens of identical reproductions of him walking the New York streets.  He stops the process, and the duplicates disappear, causing a public sensation and a police investigation.  A similar accident has caused the second physicist's cat to be duplicated, and for some reason the cat duplicates cannot be made to disappear or even to cease appearing, raising the possibility that the world will be engulfed by an infinite number of cats.

I didn't quite get the science behind this one, nor understand why the reproduction cats couldn't be dealt with the same way as the reproduction college professors, and the story wasn't engaging enough for me to the sit down and furrow my brow and make a serious effort to figure it all out.  "Of Time and Cats" feels like filler; not particularly bad, but not special either, just acceptable.

"The Cold, Cold Box"

This is the story of Steve Kovac, bazillionaire!  Like "Of Time and Cats" it is told somewhat obliquely and out of order, I guess in an effort to add tension and surprise. The story reaches us in the form of a presentation to a Board of Directors (thrilling, right?) and portions of a doctor's diary.

Kovac was born into poverty, which turned him ruthless.  A genius, he became the richest man in America through building various businesses by any means necessary, and through his control of newspapers he was able to keep his wealth and power a secret from the general public.  At age 46 he was stricken by cancer, and hired the world's best doctor to treat him.  Doc froze him cryogenically, with the idea that he would be thawed when a cure for cancer was developed.  Kovac left his business concerns in the hands of a Board of Directors of 300 members; at the time of the story, this Board's members drawn from among all the people of the world, and half are men, half women.  The Board takes over the world peacefully through propaganda and bribery: "And above all, we bought control--control of every manufacturing, farming or mining unit of any consequence upon the face of the Earth."  Under the dictatorship of the Board the world finds unprecedented peace and prosperity, "deserts turned into gardens...poverty and crime a thing of the past."  Of course, when the cure for cancer arrives they don't thaw Kovac.

This is just the kind of fantasy you would expect a pinko to have.  A rich guy (who of course got rich by being an asshole, and was only an asshole because of the cruelties of capitalism) falls under the power of an elite multicultural cabal, and the cabal uses his wealth and cunning propaganda to seize the means of production and run the world as a beneficent dictatorship.  The story takes for granted that the common people are dolts easily manipulated by the lies of their betters and would be be better off if all their property was controlled by an unelected government of 300 people. This is like a version of 1984 in which Big Brother is the good guy!

Looking past the story's childish politics and economics, it is totally devoid of feeling or character, of tension or drama.  We are just told Kovac is a genius and a paranoid, none of this is demonstrated, there are no clues as to how he got rich and what crimes he committed or anything like that.  When Fast goes to the trouble of trying to manipulate the reader his efforts are risible: besides the Vietnamese Chairman, only one member of the Board is ever described, and in the three lines she is afforded we learn "She was a beautiful, sensitive woman in her middle thirties, a physicist of note and talent, and also an accomplished musician."  Wait, there's a hot chick on the Board?  Here, take all my stuff!

Lots of SF stories have unconvincing or objectionable political or economic ideas, but bring something else to the table that makes them fun or interesting.  But not "The Cold, Cold Box."

Lame.

"The Martian Shop"

Both "Of Time and Cats" and "The Cold, Cold Box" are about a dozen pages long. Those two stories were so unappetizing that when I saw that "The Martian Shop" was twice as long I almost bailed on reading it.  But I had already downloaded from isfdb the cover image of the issue of F&SF in which it appeared (alongside the short version of Robert Heinlein's famous Starship Troopers) so I soldiered on.  Sunk costs, you know.

"The Martian Shop" is practically the same damned story as "The Cold, Cold Box!"  Good grief!  Well, it is actually a little better than "The Cold, Cold Box," but it has the same themes and ideas.

New stores open up in Manhattan, Tokyo's Ginza district, and Paris; these stores purport to sell high tech devices imported from Mars! These devices are so incredibly advanced that the world economy is shaken.  The governments of the world investigate the "Martians," and in response the Martians flee with all their wares.  A police detective discovers a tiny scrap of film left behind by the aliens, and top scientists decode its text--the Martians are going to attack the Earth! Led by the French ambassador to the US, the world unites under a single government to fight off the expected Martian invasion force!

In the last three or four pages we learn the truth about the "Martians."  A businessman who rose up from poverty to become a major tycoon who controls the newspapers assembled a secret multicultural Board of Directors and hired the world's best craftsmen and bribed the police detective and the French ambassador and the top scientists to perpetrate a hoax on the public.  This hoax, making everybody, including the governments of all the major powers, think a Martian invasion was imminent, has not only increased demand for the tycoon's spacecraft and other high tech equipment (everybody loves those government contracts!) but lead to world peace!

"The Martian Shop" is better than "The Cold, Cold Box" because the detailed descriptions of the shops and their merchandise are fun.  I would really like to see these shops and these devices!  So this one gets a grade of "acceptable," but the ideological basis of the thing is the same, as is the absolute lack of character or emotion.

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1961 printing

The advertising blurbs on this collection call Fast "author of some of the most popular books of our time" and "one of the foremost literary figures of our century" but the style and plotting of these stories is pedestrian, and they lack compelling characters and human feeling.  What these stories have are ideas that will seem unusual to people unfamiliar with SF, but these ideas are little more than gimmicks, and don't serve as a background to an entertaining story or the springboard for exciting speculations, they just sit there, like a dead rodent brought to you by your cat.  Pussy doesn't try to sell you on the inert carcass, he just lays it there, sure you're gonna like it, like it's the kind of product that sells itself.  Fast's ideas do not sell themselves, but he doesn't bother to put any lipstick on these pigs.    

(These stories reminded me of the work of Chad Oliver and Mack Reynolds: repetitive polemics pushing tired and discredited ideas that lack literary or entertainment value.)

We'll see if I read any more stories by Howard Fast, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you!

Four stories by Mack Reynolds from the early 1960s

When I read Mack Reynolds' Commune: 2000 A.D. in 2011 I thought it was kind of lame.  In the same year Joachim Boaz reviewed Reynolds' Rolltown and thought it deserved 2 of 5 stars and "isn't worth the effort of procuring" due to an "average plot," a "silly final twist" and "endless info-dump lectures...."  But you hear good things about Reynolds now and again (famous SF historian and critic Barry Malzberg praises him, and Reynolds at one point won a readers' poll and was thus proclaimed SF's most popular writer), so when I saw the thick (370 pages!) 1976 collection The Best of Mack Reynolds for sale for one dollar at Half Price Books, I bought it.  Maybe, I reasoned, Reynolds shines in the short form. Besides, Reynolds's own introduction to the book, about his life as a professional writer and his travels around the world, was charming.

What kind of exotic system of voting did they use that allowed Reynolds to beat Asimov and Heinlein?
  Ranked Choice?  Instant Runoff?  Range Voting?  Limiting the franchise to the Reynolds family?    

Last week I read four stories from the collection, which I chose based on their provocative one-word titles.  By chance, all turned out to have been published first in the early 1960s.

"Revolution" (1960)

A lot of SF stories ask you to accept things which don't make much logical sense and for which there really isn't much evidence, like hyperspace, psychic powers, and time travel.  Mack Reynolds' "Revolution" asks you to accept that the central planning and dictatorial rule of the kind of psychos who ran the Soviet Union could produce an economy that by 1985 was surpassing the economy of the United States.  Our hero in this story is Russian-born American agent Paul Koslov, who is sneaked into Communist Russia in hopes he will be able to spark a revolution, in the same way Lenin was sent to Czarist Russia back in 1917.

In the introduction to the volume (remember a minute ago when I told you it was charming?) Reynolds compares himself to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, major science fiction writers whose work focuses on the hard sciences.  Reynolds tells us he knows little of "the physical sciences," but has a background in "the social sciences...especially socioeconomics...." The impression I get from "Revolution" is that, in the same way Asimov or Clarke might use a SF story to talk about robotics or astronomy or oceanography (remember Imperial Earth?), Reynolds uses SF to talk about forms of government and different models of society, based on his readings in theory and history and his own travels around the world (in the intro he says he spent ten years travelling among over 75 countries.)    

So, "Revolution" starts out with discussions of MPorcius fave Somerset Maugham and anti-Soviet leftist intellectual Milovan Djilas, author of The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System with Koslov's boss in Washington.  Later, in Russia, we get a lecture from one anti-Soviet activist on the "three bases of government evolved by man": the family (example: Native Americans); property (example, European slave, feudal, and capitalist societies); and "your method of making your livelihood," (the activist hopes to replace Communist Party rule with just such a system, one in which each sector of the economy would elect representatives.)  Another Russian rebel gives Koslov (and us readers) a lecture on revolutions--we are told revolutions come from the people when they need them, not from leaders--great leaders are created by the desperate times they live in, and often struggle to stay ahead of the popular tide.
    
The story ends with the anti-communist revolutionaries, thanks to Western aid, in position to overthrow the Soviet Union.  But since these revolutionaries have chosen to maintain the USSR's nuclear arsenal and have not embraced British- or American-style democracy and capitalism, Koslov wonders if the new Russia he is playing midwife to might be an even greater threat to the West than the Soviet Union--maybe he should report his friends to the KGB and put the kibosh on the whole thing!

Reynolds tries to create an interesting character in Koslov, who, over the course of the story, realizes, despite his Russian blood and 15 years of single-minded dedication to liberating Russia from communism, that his upbringing in the USA has made a true American out of him.  Reynolds also tries to create an interesting relationship--Koslov and one of the Russian anti-communist rebels fall in love, but their love founders on their different loyalties (hers to Russia, his to the West) and political attitudes.  But these facets of the story are not very effective; most of the story is all those lectures and historical references.

Acceptable, but I wouldn't urge anybody to rush out and find it.  "Revolution" first appeared in Astounding-- the Galactic Journey blog earlier this year analyzed that entire issue.  Worth checking out.

"Freedom" (1961)

Each of the 22 tales in The Best of Mack Reynolds has a little introduction by the author himself.  In the intro to "Freedom," which was first published in Analog, Reynolds tells us that he has spent considerable time in Moscow and Prague, and that he has not heard from Czech friends since the 1968 invasion by a Soviet army which crushed Czech efforts to secure liberal reforms.

"Freedom," like "Revolution," is set in a hypothetical future in which socialist economics has worked and the Soviet Union and its satellites have achieved the world's highest GDP and standard of living.  Our main character, Ilya Simonov, is a security officer whose job is to kill and imprison Soviet citizens (without a trial, of course!) who oppose the rule of the Communist Party.  His superiors want to know why there are so many such people--aren't they grateful for the economic health created by the Communist Party and its policies?  The Kremlin assumes malign Western influence is the cause of their problems, and sends Simonov to Czechoslovakia to ferret out any possible Western sources of this inexplicable hostility to the Soviet regime.

In Prague, Simonov finds that government controls over speech and the press have loosened--people openly criticize the Communist Party, read Western books, even meet American journalists.  At first he is outraged, but over a period of months he not only realizes that the people he is investigating are not dupes of the West, but spontaneous seekers of personal liberty--he even comes to share their dreams of a free Eastern Europe.  Simonov returns to Moscow and shoots his boss and burns the official records of his mission (in order to protect his new friends back in Prague) but is then killed himself while trying to escape.

Obviously, I'm behind this story's ideological content--even if, in some fanciful way, the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and the countries it had conquered had produced economic plenty, their murderous, arbitrary and unaccountable rule could in no way be morally justified.  But does this make "Freedom" a good story?  No.  The story is full of political lectures, even a page-long extract from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited, and the plot and characters fail to generate any real feeling.

Reynolds addresses interesting and important ideas here, which is presumably why John Campbell published it in his famous and important magazine Analog and Judith Merril included it in one of her famous and important The Year's Best S-F anthologies, but as a story I'll have to judge it as merely acceptable; it does the job you'd expect of an article in an opinion magazine, not what you hope a piece of fiction does.  

"Subversive" (1962)

This one, which also first saw light of day in Analog, is even more lecture-heavy than "Revolution" and "Freedom."  The foundation of those stories was the dubious assertion that the command economy of the Soviet Union could outproduce the market economy of the United States.  In "Subversive" Reynolds presents what he perhaps considers one of the advantages of the command economy over the free economy--the money and manpower devoted to such things as advertising and TV shows in a market economy.  We get long lectures on how one bar (or "cake," as I guess people said in 1962) of soap is much like another, and is manufactured very cheaply.  Likewise for electric razors and loaves of bread (!).  These products sell dearly to the consumer because of all the advertising costs and middlemen.  (This reminds me of Bernie Sanders' apparent belief that it is immoral for there to be several brands and types of deodorant on the market.)

A company is formed that can sell soap and razors and bread cheaper than the other middlemen because it eschews advertising.  Such competition will make the American economy more efficient, so Soviet agents attack the new company, killing everybody involved.

This story is like 19 pages of lectures with 2 pages of plot.  There is no effort at presenting a human story, and Reynolds even dispenses with the historical anecdotes and quotes from intellectuals with which he peppered "Revolution" and "Freedom." I'm going to have to give this one a thumbs down.

"Pacifist" (1964)

"Pacifist" was a cover story for The Magazine of Fantasy of Science Fiction, even though the cover illustration apparently depicts a scene from the magazine version of Damon Knight's Beyond the Barrier, the paperback edition of which I read, more or less on a dare from Joachim Boaz, back in the summer of 2014.  "Pacifist" takes place in an alternate universe much like our own but in which the Cold War is between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.  The brainiacs of this world have determined, Hari Seldon-style, that, unless government policies change, nuclear war will break out in three years.  Instead of working through the media and the democratic process, presenting their ideas and hoping the voters and their representatives are swayed by them, these elitists form a secret society called The Pacifists and engage in terrorism designed to change government policies.  They eschew no tactic in their quest for peace, no matter how outrageous: they kidnap a Senator's son and threaten to murder his friends and family if he refuses to resign, they strafe a military academy graduation ceremony with a hijacked jet fighter, and more.

The point of the story, I guess, is to examine this paradoxical strategy for achieving peace; does the noble end justify the murderous means?  Would such a campaign hope to succeed?  Reynolds may also have hoped to shock the reader with characters who suggest that strategic bombing (like the British and Americans inflicted on the Axis countries less than 20 years before the story was published) is no different than the cold-blooded murder of children and that in modern war conscientious objectors are more brave than volunteer soldiers.

The plot follows the lead "hatchetman" of the Pacifists, Warren Casey, the guy who actually gets his hands dirty threatening, beating, kidnapping, and killing people whom I (and who could be more reasonable than me?) would consider innocent.  Casey joined the Pacifists after his experience as a bomber pilot in this universe's equivalent of World War II, which led him to the conviction that war should be outlawed at any cost.  Over the course of the story he becomes skeptical of the Pacifists' strategy of using violence to end violence.  Casey is killed while trying to escape from police officers because he didn't take an opportunity to shoot the police in the back, an ambiguous ending.

The audacity of this story, and the effort put into the psychology of its main character, makes it probably the best Reynolds story I am discussing today.  Mild recommendation.

***********

These stories are not appallingly bad, but they lack literary value; their value is in the ideas they present.  (I'll leave aside the fact that the more you think about their ideas, the goofier the ideas appear.)  Reading four of them over the space of three days in the 21st century probably doesn't present them in the best light; for one thing, you easily notice a sameness about them (e.g., all four stories are about agents and include meetings between the agent and his boss; Koslov and Simonov are almost the same character: both had little time for women before the story begins because they were busy fighting for or against communism, and during the story they fall in love with a woman with a different political point of view; Simonov and Casey have almost the same fates and their stories the same ending: both are shot dead while trying to escape government forces and then subjected to musings on their psychologies by their killers.)  SF fans who read only one of them a month or so, during the height of the Cold War, decades before we knew how the Soviet empire would collapse, perhaps found them very thought-provoking.

In our next episode more science fiction short stories, but I hope and expect these stories will have (what I consider) literary value: a distinctive style, human feeling, vivid images.  I highly doubt they will have much to say about the Soviet Union or economics, but you never know!

Commune 2000 A.D. by Mack Reynolds

SF blogger extraordinaire Joachim Boaz tweets that today is Mack Reynolds' birthday.  In late 2011 I read Reynolds' novel Commune 2000 A.D., a Frederick Pohl selection with a very cool red cover.  My copy also has an eight page ad for the novel All Creatures Great and Small bound inside, which is much more fun than the cigarette ads you sometimes find in these old SF paperbacks.

I didn't recall very much about the book, but fortunately I had my Amazon review of December 27, 2011, pasted below, to refresh my memory:

Published in 1974, Mack Reynolds' novel, Commune 2000 A.D. depicts a North America in which 90 percent of the population is unemployed and on government assistance, and yet everyone leads a comfortable lifestyle, with plenty of food, beautiful spacious housing, efficient public transportation, and an array of electronic devices (including what we would now call cell phones and internet access.) Crime and envy are almost entirely eliminated, and there is no paper money or coins, all transactions being done through what we would call debit cards. There is no pollution and the landscape has been restored, with factories and highways underground. Computers and automation make this utopia possible. In fact, every year people take an intelligence/aptitude test, and the government computers select the best individuals for the tiny number of jobs available.

The fact that everyone has a middle class income and lifestyle without working allows them to leave the cities and band together into communes of the like-minded (for example, a commune of homosexuals, a commune of artists, a commune of people who like to get high on drugs every day, etc.) The main character, a graduate student in the social sciences, is tasked by his graduate adviser to write his thesis on the communes, and he travels from commune to commune, interviewing communards and taking notes.

There is not much plot to the book. The main character travels from commune to commune, and, because he is very skilled in bed and this is a very promiscuous society, he has sex with a beautiful woman in every commune. In the last 20 pages or so we suddenly get some plot momentum, with the conspiracy behind the communes, and the conspiracy in the government, both revealed, and the main character having to choose which one to ally with. What are the chances that he will join up with the conspiracy that has been throwing beautiful women at him?

This is a talky book, with lots of dialogue about life in the various communes and lots of anthropological and historical trivia - early in the book we read about the sexual positions favored by different civilizations, and get a lecture on the history of the mobile home in 20th century America. Later we get a recipe for cannabis brownies and a boring description of an LSD trip.

The book is also devoid of passion; most books about a socialistic future will be bashing your head in trying to convince you that our current market economy is horrible, or bashing your head in trying to convince you that the socialist economy we are headed for is horrible. In Commune 2000 A.D. there are some mild criticisms of a society in which 90% of people are on the dole, and some mild criticisms of 20th century exploitation of the environment, but neither the book's characters nor Mack Reynolds seem very exercised over anything (with the possible exception of homosexuals, both gay men and lesbians, who are portrayed in a rather unsympathetic light.)

Lacking in the plot department and the point department, Commune 2000 A.D. is a limp, tepid read. It is not offensively bad, but when you are done you wonder why the hell it was written or published.

Oh yeah, now I remember why I haven't read the other Reynolds book I own.