Third Galaxy Reader: T R Cogswell, F L Wallace, A Davidson, and L del Rey

There are people who will tell you that conquering outer space is a waste of time.  We at MPorcius Fiction Log beg to differ!  And today we are gambling that 1950s stories from H. L. Gold's Galaxy will agree with us and not the naysayers who want to tie us all down permanently to this big ol' rock that--admit it!--you are kind of getting sick of.

Years ago I purchased a bedraggled copy of Permabook M-4172, The Third Galaxy Reader, for 50 cents at the Second Story Books location in Washington D.C., the belly of the beast.  This book has crossed this great country of ours at least once, as a stamp indicating it was at one time on the shelves of Rodden's Bookshop in Long Beach, CA, indicates.  First printed in 1960, this paperback edition of the 1958 hardcover promises, right there in all-caps on its cover, stories about "the world of outer space" that are "soaring" and "exciting," not depressing or discouraging.  Let's investigate the contents of this book which is falling apart in my hands as I speak.

But first, I'll point out that I have already read many of the tales here in Third Galaxy Reader.  Who could forget Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon," which I read ten years ago?  Less memorable was "Volpla" by Wyman Guin which I also read in 2014.  Oh yeah, and then there's Evelyn E. Smith's "The Vilbar Party," "Time in the Round" by Fritz Leiber, "The Haunted Corpse" by Frederik Pohl, "Man in the Jar" by Damon Knight and "Honorable Opponent" by Clifford D. Simak, all of which I read in one fell swoop in 2019.  That's a lot of stories, but there are still some left for us to try on for size today: Theodore R. Cogswell's "Limiting Factor," F. L. Wallace's "End as a World," Avram Davidson's "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper" and Lester del Rey's "Dead Ringer."  These titles don't exactly sound optimistic, but let's not give up before we've even started.  

"Limiting Factor" by Theodore R. Cogswell (1954) 

Here we have a story lacking in plot and character that relies for what little energy it has on weak jokes and a counterintuitive idea about a SF commonplace, homo superior.  Barely acceptable filler.

Jan and Ferdie (these feel like very Fifties names to me, but I guess that is because I think of Jan and Dean as a 1950s act, even though wikipedia is telling me their big hits were in the '60s) live in the near future.  They are among the secret minority that has psychic powers--they can communicate telepathically, fly, etc.  We see the theme of the story immediately when they talk about how taking an elevator or an air taxi is faster than using their mental powers to fly and using telepathy causes a head ache so calling somebody up on the phone is preferable.  The secret supermen and superwomen decide to leave the Earth to avoid the inevitable conflict between them and the mundanes, so Ferdie and Jan abandon their jobs and friends and families and are aboard the psychic-powered hyperspace ship when it takes off from its secret location on a mission to find a world for the super people to settle.  They discover a world inhabited by human beings who developed independently of Earth; these people are decadent and bored, their civilization is going nowhere.  At first the Terran superpeople think that these losers are mundanes abandoned by their own homo superior minority, and figure that homo superior members buoy and protect society; the belief that progress and prosperity on Earth is dependent on them, they decide to return home out of a feeling of responsibility to their fellow (if inferior) Earthers.  But then it comes to their attention that these do-nothing bores are the local homo superior, people who left their home world just like they just did!  There is a limit to human psychic powers, just like there is a limit to human muscle power--even the strongest man can't lift as much as a steam shovel, and similarly machines will soon be developed on Earth that can perform any feat a psychic superman can but far better.  The psykers of this dead-end civilization the Earthers have discovered thought, wrongly, their psychic powers would expand without limit, and brought with them no people able to build machines, and so they have stagnated.  The homo superiors of Earth return home and take their old jobs and reunite with family and friends, confident that their powers don't make them all that special and so there will be no race war.

Cogswell's basic idea is not bad, but the actual story lacks entertainment value--the story is mostly light-hearted dialogue and the characters are not there to inspire feeling in the audience, but just to air the idea.  "Limiting Factor" has resurfaced in mutant-oriented anthologies and Cogswell collections.

"End as a World" by F. L. Wallace (1955)

Here we have a gimmicky story the twist ending of which is based on what amounts to a pun.  "End as a World" has an optimistic hopeful message, which in theory might be uplifting or give you the warm fuzzies, but the lion's share of the story deceitfully tries to inspire in the reader the opposite emotions.  Thumbs down! 

Our narrator is a teenaged boy.  We see him interact with his mother and with various friends, including a black kid (a "Negro") whom we are told is better at sports than all the white kids.  Everybody in town is sort of anxious--everybody in the world is sort of anxious!  In front of the churches are signs saying "THIS IS THE DAY THE WORLD ENDS!"  At the predicted hour the townspeople gather to watch the sky--people all over the world are watching the sky!  The twist ending is that the human race is not going extinct, as the text has sort of duplicitously implied--the first ship that went to Mars is returning today and before landing the vessel will circumnavigate the globe and leave a condensation trail that everybody in the world can see.  If people are worried it is because something might go wrong with the ship.  The phrase "This is the day the world ends" is an oblique poetic way of saying "this is the day the human race takes its first steps out into the universe" or something.  The ship arrives safely on time and everybody rejoices and strangers kiss each other and so forth.

I hate this kind of trickery.

Martin H. Greenberg seems to have liked "End as a World"--he put it in at least two anthologies.

"Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper!" by Avram Davidson (1957)

Here we find a joke story about illegal immigration and welfare fraud.  Is Galaxy a humor magazine?

The setting of the story is a secret meeting of the leadership of the American Dental Association.  The assembled dentists have received a message from the most innovative dentist in the United States, inventor of superior dental prosthetics, Morris Goldpepper, who has been missing for some weeks.  Goldpepper, we learn, was a SF fan who made no secret of his ambition to be the dentist on the first space ship.  The message was found in a faulty dental plate by a dentist who worked on the mouth of an old--and odd--man, and is read to the assembled ADA big wigs and reproduced in the text of the story.

The message describes how Goldpepper was approached by an old man whose mouth and inner eyelids were blue.  This guy turned out to be an alien and invited Goldpepper to accompany him back to his homeworld via teleporter to help the aliens improve the state of their dental science, apparently lacking.  But it was all a trick!  These aliens naturally shed all their teeth as they reach adulthood and eat goops and slimes, and always look old to human eyes, even when in the prime of life.  They can more or less pass as (aged) Earthers if they put cosmetics on their blue skin and if they are provided false teeth.  Their scheme is to move to Earth, to California, the state which has the most generous welfare provisions, and live on the dole.  Goldpepper is enslaved, forced to make false teeth for these interstellar parasites!

As the story ends, the assembled ADA leadership discusses steps to deal with the aliens and rescue Goldpepper.

This story is competently executed, with Davidson giving Goldpepper a personality and writing style, and it is interesting to see a satire about illegal immigration and abuse of the welfare system, though I don't know enough about Davidson to know if he thinks generous social spending and unregulated immigration are a real problem or if he is just poking fun at people who consider them a problem.  Part of the satire of course is of SF itself, this story serving as a comic contrast to the huge number of SF stories in which aliens want to conquer the Earth; these aliens are merely small scale deadbeats.

We'll call it acceptable.  "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper!" would be reprinted in Davidson collections and by Robert Silverberg in his anthology Infinite Jests: The Lighter Side of Science Fiction.

"Dead Ringer" by Lester del Rey (1956)

Here we have a decent horror story with a twist ending you can kind of see coming. 

Dane Phillips is a reporter and a veteran of the Pacific War who moves from newspaper to newspaper, repeatedly getting sacked.  During the war he saw a comrade get killed, only to meet him later and find him hale and hearty!  Since then, Dane has done some investigating and come to believe there live among us humans, undetected, space aliens who look human but are almost unkillable, capable of healing up after almost any injury.  When mangled in an explosion or a car wreck or something, some of these E.T.s have had to fake their own funerals--others have even had to escape from their coffins after being buried by ignorant native Terrans.  Dane keeps getting fired from newspapers because he keeps trying to get them to print the stories he writes with the aim of blowing the lid off this alien conspiracy and editors won't have it.  Dane has even been committed to a mental institution and escaped.

We observe some of Dane's sleuthing--digging up a grave!--during which he is captured by the men from the funny farm; he is dragged back to the loony bin where he overhears the shrinks' plans for him--since he has refused to abandon his beliefs in alien infiltration they are going to give him shock treatment in an effort to erase these obsessive thoughts!  This sounds like a fate worse than death, so Dane tries to commit suicide!  But when he slashes his throat the wound heals up lickety-split!  Dane himself is one of the aliens!

A fun little story.  Besides del Rey collections, "Dead Ringer" has been reprinted in some anthologies, including a 1966 German "Best of" Galaxy volume. 

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Obviously, these were not the "soaring" stories about "the world of outer space" we were promised.  We'll put aside whether they are set in space or actually about life outside the Earth's atmosphere and consider if they are "soaring," which I am taking to mean uplifting, optimistic, hopeful, a vindication of life and humanity, etc.; I'm not going to allow any lawyerly bunkum about how these stories "soar the heights of terror and anxiety."

Wallace's "End as a World" comes the closest to soaring because at its climax we realize the people of Earth are united across national and ethnic boundaries in their hopes of conquering space and their joy at the first step of that heroic destiny being concluded successfully, but the story consists of a cheap trick and through most of it Wallace tries to make you sad.  Cogswell's "Limiting Factor" is optimistic about the future of the human race, suggesting high technology will open up wide vistas of freedom and damp down class and racial conflict, but it is too silly and jokey to be soaring.  Davidson's "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper!" is not soaring but base and belittling, being full of jokes and having as its characters self-important goofballs who resent the relatively low esteem in which their profession is held and parasitic deadbeats who take advantage of others' credulity and generosity.  Del Rey's "Dead Ringer," while probably the most entertaining story, is not soaring but sordid--it is a blood-soaked horror story about infiltration, suicide, and a horrible revelation about one's own identity.

It seems Galaxy is not the place to look for validation of our belief that the human race should bend the universe to its will and colonize the galaxy.  Again we learn not to trust the text on the covers or jackets of SF books.

Look out for more stories from anthologies in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Merril-approved stories from 1956 by E C Tubb, F L Wallace and J Williams

In 1957, Judith Merril published, as the last section of her anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, a long alphabetical list of 1956 stories which hadn't quite made the cut for inclusion in the anthology but which she thought worthy of recommendation.  In 2023 and 2024 we have been reading selected stories from that list, starting with the A authors and working our way through the list until today we hit T and proceed beyond.  We've got three stories today, and I will also note that we've already read the story by a U author that Merril recommends for 1956, Helen Urban's "The Finer Breed."  

"Into the Empty Dark" by E. C. Tubb

First up, E. C. Tubb, creator of Dumarest of Earth.  "Into the Empty Dark" debuted in Nebula Science Fiction ("Voted Britain's Top Science Fiction Magazine") and has never been reprinted.

"Into the Empty Dark" is serious old-fashioned science fiction, an attempt to realistically portray space flight in the near future.  In the universe the story describes, mankind has only been travelling between the planets for twenty years, and journeys between the inner planets are slow, dull, and strain everybody's mental heath.  The ships must strictly follow predetermined courses to get to their destinations, as they lack the fuel, sensors and communications equipment to safely or profitably make course corrections on the fly.  So when Captain Strackland's ship gets an SOS from another vessel, one which has been hit by a meteor and thrown off course, there is not a hell of a lot Strackland and the two men who make up his crew can do to help them.  

Tubb does a good job describing the way space flight work in this story, and a decent job describing the psychological effects on the spacemen as they face crisis and tragedy in the void between the Earth and Mars.  The story's tone and atmosphere, and all the little details, bring home the idea that space travel is unglamourous and tedious, but still dangerous, and Tubb doesn't talk much about how mankind has benefitted from exploring and colonizing the solar system.  The people on the other ship die, there being nothing Strackland and company can do to help them, and Tubb suggests Strackland and his crew will suffer lifelong psychological scars from the incident.  

I like it. 

"A Little Thing for the House" by F. L. Wallace

Over the years we have read two stories by Wallace, "Student Body," and "Big Ancestor," and thought them relatively good.  This story isn't bad, either, though it seems it has never been reprinted.

"A Little Thing for the House" is another of those stories that warns you utopia is going to suck and that to flourish people need some kind of challenge, need some kind of productive work to do.  It depicts a future in which computers and robots do everything, and people are actually forbidden from performing any sort of real work, even such things as cooking their own food, much less building or operating or repairing machines.  The computers allow people to be poets, artists, athletes and scientists, but the story suggests that since most people lack the talent to be truly successful at such work, many are unfulfilled. 

Our hero Holloway is an aspiring mechanic; as a child his great grandfather told him stories about the old days when people had to make their own way in the world instead of having everything handed to them, and how he (greatgrandpa) had been a fixer or tinker, a guy who repaired tools and machines and did odd jobs.  All his life that sort of work has appealed to Holloway, who has a mechanical mind but doesn't want to be a scientist--he likes to work with his hands.  As the story begins, Holloway has managed to find a person, the married woman Madge, who has somewhat similar aspirations--Madge wants to bake and cook like people did in centuries past, not just tell the kitchen machines what to make and have it spat out of a little door at her.  Holloway knows how to alter the kitchen machines to allow her to turn them off and on at will, so she can bake her own cookies (interestingly, in this 1956 story Wallace spells the singular "cooky") or whatever she wants.  Accomplishing this task will take a while, so Holloway moves in for a few days--Madge tells hubby (who goes to an office to play a stock market simulation set up by the computers to fill up his time) and daughter Alicia that Holloway is an old friend just visiting.

Alicia is an exhibitionist who chases men and wishes she lived in the days when she could be a courtesan and bang a succession of guys.  She flaunts her "hard young" body at Holloway and flirts with him briefly, but when she realizes how unlikely he is to become famous she turns her attention to another guy who starts showing up, the new local counsellor, a young guy taking the place of the old geezer who just retired.  These counsellors are sort of like commissars who help people figure out what to do with their leisure-filled lives and also keep an eye out for people who might illegally be doing real work.  This new guy is pursuing rumors of a "maladjusted" citizen, and Holloway is his prime suspect, but he gets a little distracted by Alicia's attentions.

When Holloway has reason to believe the counsellor has his number and is about to arrest him, the would-be tinker sneaks into the central computer for his city and puts to use all his mechanical skills to threaten the computer and compel it to loosen the regulations and allow people more leeway in which they can do productive work.  After his success, Alicia throws herself at Holloway (he is kinda famous now) but he rejects her--he has another woman in mind.  I figured this would be Madge, with whom he has something in common, but instead it is some woman whom Wallace hasn't mentioned before, Anne, I guess Holloway's wife or fiancé or something.  We are told Anne has patiently waited for Holloway while he pursued his risky campaign to become a working mechanic in a world in which that is a crime.  Is this Wallace telling us that the ideal woman is one who stays in the background and silently supports her man?  Was Anne, who is only mentioned in one paragraph, a late addition to the story? 

This story is OK, maybe marginally good.  Feminists won't like that the active women in the story aspire to either bake and cook or become promiscuous groupies and that the woman the hero chooses as a romantic partner is neither of those risk-taking outgoing women but instead a woman who passively waits for him.  Personally, I have to question the wisdom of introducing a new character on the penultimate page of a 29-page story--seeing Holloway take up with either horny little Alicia or accomplice-in-rule-breaking Madge, or just passing on women altogether to focus on his libertarian activist work, would have been more satisfying.  But in general the themes, pacing, and structure of the story work; "A Little Thing for the House" is never boring or annoying, and I found it entertaining enough--in particular, it is interesting to see a depiction, over 60 years ago, of a world in which it is not necessary to work and so men become immersed in computer games and women devote themselves to using their sex appeal to win fame.

"The Asa Rule" by Jay Williams 

"The Asa Rule" debuted in the same issue of F&SF that included Robert Bloch's "All on a Golden Afternoon," which I declared "the Platonic ideal" of a Bloch story when I read it way back when.  For some reason, on Merril's honorable mentions list in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, the source for the story is listed as The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series, so we'll read it there to ensure we are experiencing the text Merril is recommending.   

(The boys down in Marketing want me to post a link to my blogpost about the Poul Anderson, Ted Sturgeon and Avram Davidson stories in The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series, so here it is.)  

Lucy Ironsmith is an equatorial Martian with pale green skin, silver hair, crimson eyes, and a slender body, and is so striking that when Terran Leonard Jackson first sees her he spills his drink and the service robot has to roll in to clean him up.  Leonard has come to Mars to study the ecosystem of the Martian tundra, and Lucy is going to be his assistant, teach him Martian culture and help him avoid offending the locals out of ignorance of their customs.

The Martians, we readers of stories recommended by Judith Merril are not surprised to learn, are better than humans--closer to nature, more peaceful, less aggressive.  Lucy says that to Martians, Earth's history seems "bloody, senseless, and disagreeable."  Leonard suggests that some humans are like Martians, naming "the Hopi, the Navaho, some Polynesian people, some of the Africans...," you know, peaceful and friendly, and that the rest of the human race is slowly catching up to those admirable demographics, learning to be peaceful.  Lucy admits that Martians used to fight, but that was long ago; for two thousand years Mars has had its own United Nations, something which Earth has only had for less than 100 years.    

Leonard wasn't sent to Mars to flirt with a green girl and explain to her that not all Earthers are as bad as white people, however; his job is to figure out a way to deal with the deadly swarms of insects that make the Martian tundra hard to cultivate.  The clouds of bugs leave the villages of the local primitives, the grey-skinned, flat-nosed, semi-nomadic Asa, alone, but, when in the tundra, Martians of Lucy's green ethnic group, the Hvor, have to carry with them special protective suits to don should a swarm appear.  The Asa are even more in touch with nature than Lucy's people, and "live by a rigid rule in which they must love and assist each other and even their worst enemies."  The Asa hold the bugs to be sacred, and refuse to explain to others their method of keeping them from attacking.  (You'd think that "assisting others" would include telling the Hvor, if not us deplorable Caucasians, how to avoid getting killed by the bugs, but I guess not.)

Monthly, the women of the Asa hold a secret ritual honoring the insects, a ritual no man must witness.  Leonard sneaks off and spies on the ritual without informing Lucy or his Terran superiors, who specifically told him not to do this.  He is caught, and, I guess having forgotten to identify as transgendered, is taken by the Asa to a special boulder out in the tundra, "given to" the bugs to suffer their judgement.  When Lucy finds out she is pretty upset, being in love with Leonard, and even whips out a gun and threatens the Asa tribal leaders, to the amazement of the human accompanying her--he has never seen a Martian acting so aggressively before.  Luckily, before anybody gets blasted, Leonard appears.  He explains that after the Asa left him, the insect swarm arrived and started biting him, but Leonard, gosh darn it, is such an inquisitive scientist and such a nice guy that, even while they were biting him, he found the bugs fascinating and even "cute."  As soon as he realized how adorable the venomous insects were they stopped biting him.  You see, the bugs can sense hate and love, and they only bite haters; people full of love they leave alone.  

The story ends as Leonard and Lucy are on the brink of sharing their first kiss.

"The Asa Rule" is written in a simple and childish style that matches its one-note characters, sappy message and all the little lectures on the UN and diversity and the environment--the story reads like a kid's book meant to mold your little tyke's personality and opinions.  Thumbs down!  I guess I should have expected this, as when I looked at the page on Williams at isfdb it appeared that most of his SF output consisted of juveniles about kids learning to cooperate or marveling at the fascinating culture of the Native Americans, but I did not (in fact, when I realized this was the story with the sexy green girl on the cover of both the magazine and the hardcover edition of The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Sixth Series, I got hopeful.)

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It is easy to see why Merril included these stories on her list; the Tubb and Wallace express skepticism of technological progress in the context of stories that also say something about human psychology, and while the Williams is like a propaganda piece directed at nine-year-olds, it promotes aspects of what I take to be Merril's own ideology.     

We've been plugging away at this 1956 SF a la Merril project since March of last year, and the final stage of the journey approaches!  Stay tuned for the final episode of this caper, and cross your fingers in hopes the last stories we read from Merril's list are more like today's contribution from Tubb than that from Williams!   

Odd stories selected by G Conklin: K Amis, J H Schmitz & F L Wallace

We just read the Pyramid paperback printing of Philip José Farmer's novel about a war among the inner planets in which the Pope is one of the heroes, Tongues of the Moon.  The back cover of that volume features an ad for another Pyramid paperback, Five-Odd, a 1964 anthology of SF stories that appeared in SF magazines in the period 1954-1961.  I actually own that edition of Five-Odd; I think I got it at one of those antique malls on Route 40 in Hagerstown--those places are full of bargains for the fan of 20th-century SF and comics.  

Above the ad for Tongues of the Moon on the back cover of Five-Odd is the come-on text that tells you that its editor, Groff Conklin, is a "master anthologist" and the five stories he has selected are "top notch SF from leading American and British writers."  Under the roll call of these six savants on the front cover is an illustration of five spacers: a fat dude, a fit dude, and three trim dudettes.  (The fat guy must have aced his SATs or something.)  This painting is by John Schoenherr, whom I usually think is good, but this one looks kind of amateurish--what is up with everybody's arms?  

Let's check out three of these "top notch" stories, those by British novelist Kingsley Amis, chronicler of female space cops James H. Schmitz, and F. L. Wallace, with whom I am not very familiar.

"Something Strange" by Kingsley Amis (1960)

Kingsley Amis is no stranger to MPorcius Fiction Log.  We've read his novels Lucky Jim and Jake's Thing.  Back in 2018 I had a chance to buy an edition of his novel The Anti-Death League with a very stylish sex and violence cover, and today regret not having done so.  The Green Man and Russian Hide-and-Seek look like they might be worth reading.  In his intro to Five-Odd, Conklin suggests that "Something Strange" is Amis's first published SF story.  isfdb alerts us that it appeared in the famous weekly The Spectator (oldest surviving weekly in the world, first published during the reign of King George IV and the premiership of the Duke of Wellington) before being picked up by Robert P. Mills for an "all star" issue of F&SF where it was presented alongside stories by Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson and Kris Neville.  Another magazine I should check out someday.

Four people are in a small space station at the edge of the galaxy.  Every day they take readings of the stars in view and transmit the data they collect back to Earth.  There are two men, a fat one who is smarter than the rest and a fit one, and two attractive women; the women are paired off with the men, but the men are not quite satisfied--the fit man would like to have sex every day but the woman he is sleeping with doesn't want it that often, while the heavy man and his partner have sex quite often, but he still would rather be with the less sexually active woman. 

The most noteworthy thing about their service in the station is that every day the sensors detect, and they see and sometimes hear, some inexplicable thing going on outside the space station.  These phenomena must be illusions, as they are plainly impossible.  As the story progresses the fat guy is uneasy or disordered--he is on the cusp of figuring out something important.  As we observe these four people, we are given clues as to what is actually going on.  Of course, Groff Conklin, master anthologist, told us what is going on in his intro to the story, which I now know I should not have read before actually reading the story.

In the final scenes some people with rifles open up the space station and enter.  They are soldiers of a revolutionary army that has just defeated the local forces of the government--our four main characters have been on Earth the whole time, in a sealed tank, hypnotized into thinking they are a space crew as part of government experiments.  A further twist is the revelation of what the government was trying to accomplish in this experiment--it seems the government was trying to make them immune to fear by erasing from their brains all conception of death and love.

This story is well-written and all that, and the theory that we would be fearless if we didn't know about death and couldn't fall in love is thought-provoking, but I am never that keen on these Matrix/Truman Show type stories--I find their revelations deflating.  Four spacers on a remote station, having to contend with interpersonal crises and alien mysteries is, to me, more interesting material for a story than "the authoritarian government is making people see illusions, and after you read fifteen pages of illusions we tell you they are illusions--gotcha!"  Amis plays fair, giving you enough clues so that you don't feel tricked at the end, but this story is not for me; "Something Strange" is one of those stories which a cold and objective MPorcius knows is good, but which the experiences and prejudices and inclinations of flesh and blood MPorcius keep him from enjoying more than a merely acceptable story. 

Students of SF history should compare "Something Strange" to Christopher Priest's 1971 story "Real-Time World." 

"Something Strange" can be found in the Amis collection My Enemy's Enemy and numerous anthologies.

"Gone Fishing" by James H. Schmitz (1961)

I've read some good science fiction adventure fiction by Schmitz, like the novel The Demon Breed, the collection Agent of Vega, and the short story "Grandpa," these stories generally include interesting aliens and the strong female protagonist we are expected to crave nowadays--Schmitz was on the strong female protagonist beat over two decades before I was born (the title story of Agent of Vega was first published in 1949.)

("Gone Fishing" includes no aliens or women, but you don't expect me to rewrite that first paragraph, do you?)

Barny Chard is a crooked financier and a suave con man.  Over the course of scenes reminiscent of detective fiction, he discovers that septuagenarian retired physicist Oliver McAllen has invented a teleporter.  The teleporter is very inexpensive to construct and operate, and so McAllen has decided to keep it a secret--nobody will be safe if the secret gets out, as every criminal, terrorist and government will have the ability to go anywhere at anytime.  

Chard introduces himself to McAllen and plots to get himself in a position to possess the secret of the device and to murder McAllen and his assistant, an African-American engineer who turns McAllen's theories into practical devices and who poses as McAllen's valet.  But McAllen and the engineer--and the secret association of geniuses of which they are members--are more cautious and clever than Chard realized; Chard is taken prisoner and finds his prison is an extrasolar planet!  A pleasant enough place, populated with transplanted Earth trees and birds and squirrels and supplied with all the food and water Chard will need to survive for years, but very very lonely!

For five years the alien planet will be out of reach of the teleporter system based on Earth, its orbit putting its sun between itself and Earth.  McAllen planned it this way--reminding us of the Amis story we just read, McAllen has used the opportune appearance of Chard in his life to conduct an experiment in altering the psychology of a human being by subjecting it to a punishingly limited menu of stimuli; such an experiment might be considered cruel by other members of the association, who ight want to rescue Chard, and so McAllen has put Chard out of their reach.  We observe how Chard responds to being all alone on this safe alien planet for half a decade.  

"Gone Fishing" is smoothly written, though perhaps a little long and slow, and the characters are all sort of interesting.  The ending is a little underwhelming, however.  Moderately good, I think.

"Gone Fishing" debuted in an issue of Analog with a Schoenherr cover that shows the kind of solid work the man is capable of.  It would be included in a 2001 Baen Schmitz collection that is an expansion of the 1960s Agent of Vega I read.  

"Big Ancestor" by F. L. Wallace (1954)

Wallace doesn't seem to have devoted his life to SF but to have had a real job as an engineer; still, he got like two dozen stories printed in SF magazines in the decade between 1951 and '61, most in the more "respectable" SF magazines like Galaxy and Astounding.  I read his story "Student Body" when I read Spectrum 5, and thought it not bad.

It is the future of interstellar commerce on a vast scale!  Earth people have encountered many intelligent alien species, and perhaps more amazingly, have encountered many varieties of the human race, some of whom can interbreed with Earth humans, and some of whom cannot.  It is theorized that the first starfaring human species, 200,000 years ago, flew around this part of the Milky Way, colonizing many different planets, Earth among them, and these colonists have forgotten their origin and evolved since.  The limited archaeological evidence that remains of these progenitors of ours suggests they grew to forty feet tall.   

An expedition is underway to search for the planet from which our economy-sized ancestors hailed.  The pilot of the expedition's star ship has fallen ill, so a non-human alien who looks like a big ribbon or tapeworm has been hired to fly the vessel.  Most of the text of the story consists of conversations, much of them the humans explaining to the worm pilot the theory I summarized in the last para.  There is also considerable discussion of some vermin who have got aboard the ship and mutated into even more troublesome pests, and human efforts to deal with the little invaders.

Other conversations demonstrate the tension that exists between the different species and sub-species of humans who crew the ship.  There is a hierarchy of human species; some are considered "early" and "primitive," others "late" and "advanced."  (Lots of old SF stories address the related topics of evolution and mutation, and it is very common for them to present evolution in a Whiggish way, suggesting evolution is a ladder that a species or race climbs, each step an advance or improvement on earlier forms.)  A woman aboard the ship from an advanced demographic of humanity that can consciously control such bodily functions as healing and thus heal very quickly, is sexually attracted and engaged in a physical affair with a more primitive man, but is reluctant to marry him or have children with him because of his inferiority, leading to much resentment and jealousy on his part.  Wallace offers us a scene of cruelty and fetishistic eroticism in which the advanced woman humiliates her less advanced lover, egging him on to hit her, and apparently enjoys the blow when he does.  (This tragic and perverse scene in which lovers deliberately hurt each other and struggle to comprehend their own apparently inexplicable lusts is much more arousing than the lame and idiotic depictions of sex in those two Charles Beaumont stories we read in the last episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, and it feels totally believable, being as sad and disappointing as real life, unlike the childish wish fulfillment fantasy sex Beaumont tried to lay on us.)  

The expedition finds the planet, thanks to the abilities of the worm, and learns the origins of the human race.  Those forty-foot tall people were not our ancestors; they were giant intelligent slug people.  Our ancestors were vermin who throve in the slugs' sewers and sneaked aboard their ships and thusly infested the Milky Way.  (Our ancestors apparently behaved much like the vermin aboard the expedition's ship.)  The slug people fled the Milky Way to get away from us.

As demonstrated by the relationships among the crew of the expedition, galactic civilization is very hierarchical, and the fact that the human race is descended from vermin is going to mean all the other intelligent races will look down on us.  Learning our origin has been a terrible mistake. 

This is a hardcore misanthropic story--the human race is vermin or children and the other spacefaring aliens react to us with disgust and terror (as demonstrated by the slugs) or treat us with contempt and condescension (as demonstrated by the worm.)  And human beings treat each other shabbily, different strata of the pecking order using each other sexually but withholding love.

Students of SF history should compare "Big Ancestor" with Edmond Hamilton's 1930s misanthropic evolution/radiation/origin of mankind stories like "Accursed Galaxy" and "Devolution."  

Provocative and crazy, depressing and fresh, thumbs up for "Big Ancestor," which really engages the reader's emotions, is the best story we've read today.

"Big Ancestor" was selected by Brian Aldiss for his anthology Galactic Empires: Volume 2. 

**********

Five-Odd was a successful anthology, reprinted in other languages and in Great Britain under the less gimmicky title Possible Tomorrows.  The Amis and Schmitz are good, but I found their twist endings a little disappointing.  The Wallace, on the other hand, gains strength as it proceeds.  

More post-war stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.                 

Deathstar Voyage by Ian Wallace

"You are confident of your allure."

"Should I be?"

"In most situations, yes.  In this one, I am afraid you will lose.  My queen is the Eiland of Ligeria, and these are holy hours, and I do not intend to go a-wooing elsewhere.  My eiland is about to die in a famous bradzh...." 

Driven thither by family obligations, I recently found myself in Beaumont, Texas, a conglomeration of highways and strip malls 90 minutes east of Houston; I never actually saw Houston, as our inbound flight landed around midnight and two days later we boarded our outbound flight before sunrise.  The wife and I spent almost all of our brief visit embroiled in wedding-related operations and looking after my mother-in-law, but I managed to steal away for an hour to go to Red B4 books, a small used bookstore in an ugly strip mall.  Putting aside my sighting of an anole lizard climbing a tree, this was the highlight of my trip, as I purchased four old and battered SF paperbacks for a low low price.

Among these four finds was a 1970 printing of Ian Wallace's 1969 Deathstar Voyage.  You will recall we read Wallace's Croyd back in early 2016.  That novel had some elements of espionage fiction, and a subtitle on Deathstar Voyage's title page, "a downtime mystery cruise," suggests it is a detective or suspense story in SF guise.  Also noteworthy: isfdb suggests Deathstar Voyage takes place in the same universe as Croyd and its sequels.  Well, let's check it out.

The Eiland of Ligeria is a starliner, over a kilometer long and full of shops and restaurants and theatres that cater to its two thousand passengers.  The Eiland is currently on its final voyage, a trip of six days from Earth to planet Ligeria in the Altair system, where it will be scrapped.  Among the passengers is Zhavar, the King of Ligeria and the owner of the ship.  Zhavar is a white man--white people have ruled Ligeria for generations, but the majority of Ligeria's population is made up of golden people; the golden people have a matriarchal culture ("eiland" is the Ligerian word for "queen" or "empress") that practices a version of suttee (called "bradzh") in which a queen's husbands and lovers jump into a fire upon her death.  (Wallace admits in a "Forenote" to Deathstar Voyage that he got some ideas for the novel from the history of British India.)

Acting as the King's bodyguard is our lead character, Lieutenant Claudine St. Cyr of the Galactic Police, an artificial woman who has great reflexes and is a perfect shot with her energy pistol and has some psychic powers that warn her of danger.  "I am told that five continents on three planets collaborated in my design."  Based on Earth, she has just been assigned to protect Zhavar, and they spend a lot of time telling each other their biographies and flirting, producing much of the "clever" dialogue between characters and dialogue with sexual overtones that fills this book, none of which is amusing or arousing.

Deathstar Voyage is a mystery story (one of the characters even compares their situation to that depicted in Agatha Christie's novel Ten Little Indians*), and the crimes and suspects pile up at a rapid pace.  Someone is trying to assassinate the King, and somebody has sabotaged the ship's power source, a big glowing sphere of energy called the Differential Mass Component.  Maybe a religious fanatic called Old Fire-Eyes Greco who thinks the ship is "the ultimate symbol of human corruption" is involved?  What about The Great Dore, a golden Ligerian magician who can use his telekinesis to turn items inside out?  And then there is the ship's Captain, Schwarz, who dislikes the king and thinks it a crime to scrap the Eiland of Ligeria and replace it with more efficient and less luxurious ships.  Oh, wait, Captain Schwarz just dropped dead at the dinner table a few seconds after flirting with Claudine.  He is replaced by Swainson, the first officer, who drops dead the next day during a competition at the ship's elaborate shooting gallery.

*Look up the original title of this best-selling detective novel, but don't say it aloud.

We get a science lecture on atoms, the point of which is to explain that the sabotage to the Differential Mass Component is going to turn the ship, and the two thousand souls aboard, into a star in less than 24 hours.  We get scenes in which people look for clues in the personnel files of the suspects and of the victims, scenes of people interrogating suspects, and scenes of people sitting around talking blah blah blah about clues.  This is all quite boring and also confusing; here is a paragraph I puzzled over for a while:

These images are from the scan of the hardcover edition at the internet archive

Somehow, the biography contains no hints of enemies and also suggests many enemies, and somehow Claudine admits it is full of "exploits" but denies that anything is "out of line" or "flashy."  Did anybody at Berkeley edit this?
     
Deathstar Voyage is not well-written; many of the individual sentences are ugly or clumsy or both.  Here's another frustrating extract, the first two paragraphs from Chapter 9:

What does "going away" mean in this context?  I guess "strip and unstrip" is Wallace's idea of clever wordplay, with "unstrip" meaning "dress."  This passage also includes another of Wallace's anemic jokes, the fact that the second officer, at this point in the story acting captain, has a lisp.  Wallace doesn't give Mashti a lisp to indicate he is a homosexual, a traditional sort of joke; rather, Mashti is from a planet where people have their teeth removed because they only eat liquid food.  Even Wallace realizes that this lisping is a drag, and after a few pages of it just stops typing the phonetic representations of Mashti's lisp and instructs the reader to remember that the officer is lisping.

A "cutichron" is a tiny watch or clock on your fingernail.  Wallace talks a lot about time pieces in this novel, and, in fact, the book is dedicated to his (and his wife's) wristwatches.  Which brings up another of Wallace's lame conceits: gratuitous references to the 20th century.  Early in the novel Zhavar buys Claudine a 20th-century wrist watch.  At the fancy dinner at which Captain Schwarz suddenly dies, the men all wear 20th-century evening dress.  The rifles used at the shooting gallery at which Swainson dies are 20th-century rifles.  I've already mentioned the reference to Agatha Christie. 

Wallace piles on mountains of boring details that I guess we are supposed to think are clever or amusing, but which are simply a waste of time.  There are many passages about people's clothes and people's food and people's tobacco that seem totally pointless, unless the point was to bulk up the page count, which, in my paperback, is a criminally excessive 191 pages.  Here's an exchange that comes after the episode at the shooting gallery, when the king asks Claudine to have lunch with him and she asks what she should wear:

Autopsies reveal that Captain Schwarz and First Officer Swainson were murdered by a psychic who turned their hearts inside out--the same sort of psychic powers were also probably used to sabotage the Differential Mass Component.  Investigation also reveals that Dore, the psychic who can turn stuff inside out, is the bastard son of Greco the religious fanatic and that Greco can hypnotize people, and that Dore is particularly susceptible to Greco's hypnosis.  There is a long scene of multiple chapters in which Claudine has a date with Dore (yes, they are on a date even though the star ship is due to explode in like 10 hours) and they flirt and Dore gives a science lecture on how to use psychic powers to turn stuff inside out.  During the course of this date the two fall deeply in love and decide to marry.  But when they go to the shooting range to have their first kiss on the grass, Dore is shot in the head by a sniper!  Wallace tries to pull our heartstrings by assuring us that Dore is dead ("Claudine was a cop, and almost instantly she knew he was dead....she lay down in the grass beside him, her face by his ruined head....") but after a few pages of grief Claudine realizes the bullet just creased the magician's head, not actually penetrating the skull.

Karel Thole makes this tedious dud
look fascinating and sexy--
DON"T YOU BELIEVE IT!

Claudine believes Greco hypnotized Dore into wrecking the Differential Mass Component and murdering Schwarz and Swainson.  When Dore is shot she changes her theory--she now figures Zhavar the King of Ligeria is the culprit, that he has psychic powers he has kept a secret and has been driven by knowledge that the gold people are about to overthrow his government and execute him to spectacularly commit suicide by blowing up the ship.  Zhavar convinces her he is innocent and has no psychic powers, and also reveals that Captain Schwarz was his nephew, whom he raised as a foster father.  Schwarz turned against him and embraced the gold cause and was a master hypnotist and psyker, better than Greco and Dore--Claudine realizes it was Schwarz is the villain.  After he sabotaged the Eiland of Ligeria's Differential Mass Component he faked his own death, and then Swainson's (working in concert with the ship's doctor, who committed suicide out of guilt), and then shot Dore.  Claudine confronts Schwarz, who is disguised as a watch-salesman, and tries to convince him to fix the Differential Mass Component, employing her sexual wiles ("Before you condemn me, I suggest that you taste me") and promising to get the king to change his mind about scrapping the Eiland of Ligeria.  She fails--Schwarz refuses to repair the ship.  Luckily, King Zhavar was lying--he really does have psychic powers, and he fixes the Differential Mass Component, saving the ship and all the passengers.
     
This book is terrible. I don't like mysteries generally, and I certainly don't like mystery stories that feel like a scam, that tell you on page 40 that a guy has died and then on page 166 reveal, ha ha, that the guy actually faked his death, or tell you early on that there is only one person on the ship who can keep it from exploding and then reveal in the last ten pages that there was another guy aboard who could fix it all along so there was really nothing to worry about.  So, the mystery elements of Deathstar Voyage stink.  I like stories about difficult sexual relationships and I like science fiction stories, but the love elements and SF elements of this book also stink, being silly, tedious, unconvincing, and sterile, totally unable to inspire excitement or reflection in the reader.  I can be won over by any type of story, including a mystery story, if it is well-written, but Wallace's style is quite bad, as I think I have chronicled, and the characters and images and events and jokes are all boring or offensively poor.  (There are also annoying plot holes that I won't waste your time by going into...OK, look at the footnotes if your time is not important to you.*)

Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal,
your sources for fake news

Sometimes it is with regret that I feel the duty to give a piece of fiction which had some good elements a thumbs down because the bad outweighed the good.  But Deathstar Voyage has nothing at all to recommend it, and gets an embittered and definitive negative vote.  Zero out of ten 20th-century wrist watches.

*1) The ship's engineer admits that there is a way to fix the Differential Mass Component but he didn't pay attention to that lecture in engineering school and so has forgotten it.  Why doesn't he just look in the manual?--there must be a manual!  Even if there isn't a manual on board, why don't they just radio for instructions?  Multiple times over the course of the novel they radio Ligeria or Earth and receive responses!  2)  One of the clues that reveals that Schwarz is the saboteur and that he is the watch salesman is that when the king bought Claudine a watch it was inverted or flipped or whatever--the second hand runs backwards.  We are led to believe that Schwarz flipped the watch by accident--but when we learn all about the psychic powers Dore, Zhavar and Schwarz have, it is made clear that quite a bit of concentration is involved.    

Spectrum 5: 1950s stories by Wallace, Thomas, Ashwell, and Ashby

1969 and 1972 paperback editions of Spectrum 5; I probably should have used the '69 image
on my last blog post because the cover looks like it may have been inspired by
James H. Schmitz's "Grandpa."

In our last episode we read half the stories in Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest's 1966 anthology of 1950s SF stories Spectrum 5, the half by authors I felt were more or less famous.  Today we experience the other half of the book's content, four stories by authors whom I, at least, am less familiar with.  Let's check out these "guys"--maybe we'll meet a new favorite!

"Student Body" by F. L. Wallace (1953)

Wallace has a single novel and like two dozen stories listed at isfdb. Barry Malzberg, whom we at MPorcius Fiction Log both take very seriously and consider a figure of fun, asserts that Wallace is a writer who deserves a higher reputation than that which he enjoys.  A story by Wallace is included in the 1979 anthology Neglected Visions, a book edited by Malzberg, Martin H. Greenberg, and John D. Olander dedicated to reprinting work by nine such SF writers who, according to Malzberg, have been unfairly neglected.

Marin is the biology officer with the first wave of colonists on a virgin planet.  Before the colonists got there the planet was surveyed by a whole team of biologists, but Marin finds that their survey is not accurate, that there are troublesome creatures on the planet they weren't warned about, namely voracious rodents that start taking a chunk out of the colony's limited food supplies.  Marin deals with this problem by designing a robot cat, and when even bigger rodents show up that the steel feline can't handle, by manipulating his supply of frozen animal material and breeding a pack of terriers the size of great danes.  The huge terriers soon have to contend with heretofore undetected native predators who are bigger still, beasts much like tigers.

By observing a captive native creature, and by using a sonar device to study in situ fossils without digging up the terrain, Marin figures out what is going on.  All these vermin and carnivores are the same species--when environmental conditions change, as with the introduction of the Earth dogs, the current generation of native fauna gives birth to a generation fully equipped to deal with the new conditions--for example, to deal with the dogs the rat-like natives gave birth to a generation of tiger-like offspring.  The sense of wonder ending is that when the human colonists kill the tigers with rifles, the next generation of natives looks quite like human beings--maybe the Earth-derived humans can negotiate with these creatures?  They had better learn to, because mouse-sized natives have stowed aboard the star ships which brought the colonists and have since headed home, and soon every planet in mankind's space empire will be infested with these quick-growing and quick-adapting alien creatures.  

This story is about average, not bad, but no big deal.  A little better than acceptable, I guess.  

"Student Body" is the only story in Spectrum 5 that is not from Astounding; its first appearance was in Galaxy.  It has been included in numerous anthologies, including ones edited by Groff Conklin and by Galaxy editor H. L. Gold.

"The Far Look" by Theodore L. Thomas (1956)

Uh oh, I read Thomas's 1970 story "The Weather on the Sun" in May and denounced it as a piece of garbage that romanticized politicians and bored me to death.  I implied that this irritating misfire was included in Orbit 8 because Thomas was friends with editor Damon Knight's wife Kate Wilhelm, but I am not aware that any such excuse is available for Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. or British men of letters Amis and Conquest.  Well, let's do the right thing (for once) and try to look at "The Far Look" with an open mind.

"The Far Look" starts out long-winded and annoying.  As a scientist provides the background exposition to a subordinate egghead (and to us readers) Thomas buries us under a blizzard of mind-numbing minutia about Dr. Scott's pipe--how he fills the pipe,  the size of the match he uses to light the pipe, the gurgling noises the pipe makes, the size of the flame that comes out of the bowl of the pipe, how Scott waves the pipe around for emphasis and how he prods the junior scientist with the end of the pipe to put him in his place (that's right, Scott takes his disgusting cancer promotion device out of his mouth and touches one of his colleagues with the saliva-covered end of it as a means of enforcing dominance--sickening!) and blah blah blah.  Oh wait, I said I was keeping an open mind.  Well, let's take a look through all the tobacco smoke at the actual text of the exposition Scott delivers.

The United States has a base on the moon, staffed by two men.  Every month the two astronauts are relieved by a different pair sent up from Earth.  Many of the astronauts who return have become geniuses, the world's best in some field of art or science or business.  Earthlings can immediately tell which astronauts have become geniuses by looking at their eyes--those who have become geniuses have a "far look" and crinkles around their eyes.  Pipe enthusiast Dr. Scott is tasked with figuring out how spending a month on the moon has turned above-average men into supermen.

Once the seven Earthbound pages with the scientists are past and we are up on the moon with two of the astronauts, "The Far Look" is actually pretty good.  I like stories in which people in space suits go about the business of surviving in low-gravity, zero-atmosphere, environments, where death awaits only a few centimeters and a few seconds away, and Thomas actually does a good job of describing all the technical technological aspects and even the psychological aspects of two men's stay on the moon.  (And by "a good job" I mean the story is entertaining and builds an anxious, claustrophobic atmosphere--I am not competent to assess how realistic any of the science is.)

Over 27 pages we follow the astronauts' compelling adventures on Luna, their fears and their near death experiences, and then they are replaced and return to Earth with "the far look."  It's a little vague, but apparently the experience of being so horribly alone, and then returning back to the bosom of Earth and its teeming millions, is what turns the astronauts into geniuses.

I'm skeptical of the story's central gimmick (it's not clear what causes the astronauts to become superhuman and there is very little about how these newly superior persons behave on Earth) and the first part with the scientists, who we don't see again at the end of the story is poor and practically superfluous, but all the stuff on the moon is good and won me over despite my bitterness about Dr. Scott and his filthy habits and "The Weather on the Sun."  I am happily surprised to be able to give "The Far Look" a solid thumbs up.

"The Far Look," after its debut in Astounding, was chosen by Judith Merril for her second Year's Best volume, which means I own two printings of the story, I having purchased that Merril anthology in December of 2015 in New Jersey, and by Harry Harrison and Willis E. McNeilly for a 1975 anthology of Science Fiction Novellas.

"Big Sword" by Pauline Ashwell (as by "Paul Ash") (1958)

Here's another story I own multiple printings of.  After its debut in Astounding, Pauline Ashwell's "Big Sword" was included by Groff Conklin in his 1966 anthology Another Part of the Galaxy, a copy of which I acquired in Kentucky in 2016, as well as by Amis and Conquest in Spectrum 5.  In all three places the story appears under the masculine pseudonym "Paul Ash."  Ashwell has two novels and a score of stories listed at isfdb but I don't think I have ever read her work before.

Jordan is a spaceman and a scientist, currently the leader of a scientific expedition to planet Lambda.  At the start of his career he foolishly married a social climber who was only interested in his notoriety, Cora.  Cora divorced him while he was away on one of his expeditions, after she had given birth to his son, Ricky.  While back home on Earth, Jordan learns that Cora and Ricky, now fourteen, don't get along, and she is trying to send Ricky to some school for troublemakers so she won't have to deal with him, or even see him, for some years.  Instead of authorizing the shipping off of Ricky to this school, Jordan brings Ricky, who is interested in science, to Lambda.  He thinks that this trip will be a chance for him to get to know his son, whom he has hardly ever seen, but as leader of the expedition Jordan has almost no time to spare for Ricky.

Meanwhile, the 6-inch tall Lambda natives, of whom the human explorers are not even aware, are trying to open negotiations with the Earthers, who have unwittingly damaged their home.  Ashwell's aliens have an interesting biology and society, one so different from that of the humans that it makes any cross-species communication difficult--in fact their first efforts to communicate are perceived by the humans as an attack by invisible enemies or even an irresponsible practical joke played by Ricky.  (Some of the scientists are suspicious of Ricky.)

Luckily, Ricky turns out to be a rare human telepath--in fact the poor relationship he has with his mother and some of the expedition team members is largely a side effect of his psychic powers; Ricky, by picking up stray brain waves, innocently acquires knowledge that has lead Cora and others to think he has been snooping in their private papers.  Using his telepathy, Ricky, unbeknownst to all the adults, who have yet to even see a Lambdan, develops a friendship with the leader of the natives.  Ricky goes off with the alien leader to help him resolve an existential threat to his tribe, and Jordan, thinking his son has run away or is perhaps lost, organizes search parties and flies an aircraft in search of his son.  Ricky solves the Lambdans' dire problem and makes peace between human and native.  Tying up our other plot thread, Jordan even finds a wife among the other scientists.

Ashwell's aliens are very good, but the story feels too long and the whole deal with the precocious kid who is believed to have run away from home and who makes peace between the races feels tired and a little childish, like something from a sappy live action Disney movie from my youth.  I guess it all averages out to marginally good.  Suggesting that I am not necessarily an outlier in my assessment of where "Big Sword"'s strength lies, it was reprinted in 1983 in an anthology titled Aliens from Analog.

"Commencement Night" by Richard Ashby (1953)

In the 1960s the UN sponsored an elaborate experiment, Project Peace, that sought to find out how to prevent all the strife attendant with human life by studying human beings who were unaffected by history and culture.  A bunch of scientists took an island and exterminated all the rats and germs on it, then left a multicultural cohort of forty-five babies on the island.  It is now the early 21st century, and for decades a fifty-strong company of researchers has been observing the island through a multitude of hidden cameras and microphones as the children invented a super efficient language and multiplied to today's population of over 300 individuals.

One of the technicians on the research team is a former Olympic swimmer, and one New Year's Eve he was drunk and decided to leave the secret subterranean facility from which the researchers watch every move the experimental subjects make and take a swim around the island.  This lapse of judgement sets in motion a series of events which lead to the scientists learning that the island's inhabitants have developed psychic powers and been visited by space aliens.  (This is news because the islanders and E.T.s have been exploiting blind spots not covered by the boffins' cameras and mikes.)

The swimmer talks to an alien.  The alien explains that there is a Galactic Confederation with many member species, and they would like humanity to join, because humanity has some very useful skills, but we can't be accepted yet because our system of communication is too primitive--it is our inadequate ability to communicate that has lead to the wars and crime and greed, etc., that have plagued humanity throughout history.  When the aliens learned about Project Peace they secretly came down to teach the islanders their space language, in hopes of jump starting Earth's development of better means of communication.  Sure enough, because the islanders only know the alien language and not any Earth language or culture, they are all peaceful and honest hippies overflowing with love for everything.  As part of his work under the island observing the islanders, the swimmer has learned to speak the space language, and so the islanders are able, with their psychic powers, to change the swimmer's brain, erasing the negative effects of Earth culture so he, too, is full of love.  As the story ends we are led to expect that all the researchers will soon have their brains fixed and that humanity is on its way to joining the Galactic Confederation.

This is the worst story in Spectrum 5.  It is silly, it is sappy, and it is boring.  Ashby takes a bunch of SF elements (scientists who experiment on people, a Galactic Confederation, psychic powers) and instead of exploring them in any depth or using them as the building blocks for an entertaining story he just piles them up like a bunch of discarded bricks.  Gotta give this one a negative vote.

"Commencement Night" has been anthologized in only one place besides Spectrum 5, by Groff Conklin in Giants Unleashed, which was republished with the title Minds Unleashed.  Ashby has a single novel and like a dozen short stories listed at isfdb.

**********

It ends on a sour note, but Spectrum 5 is a good anthology of more or less optimistic tales that celebrate science and the ingenuity and drive of the human race.   A worthwhile purchase.