A year ago I read Nourse's pessimistic humor story "Nize Kitty," an experience which leads me to expect we've got another jocular downer on our hands here.
This story starts with a practical joke. Three young doctors, stressed out by the long hours in the hospital where they are interning, get a little recreation by putting a piglet in among the newborn brats in the maternity ward, thereby intending to scare the unintelligent but pretty nurse on duty. The nurse faints--mission accomplished!
By chance an anthropologist, Dr. Tally, is on the scene. This college prof is suffering under the tyranny of the head of his department, a Dr. Hogan, who Nourse again and again reminds us is fat and looks like a pig. Hogan is writing a book that seeks to prove that human beings are primates related to the apes, and makes his subordinates like Tally do all the real work on the book. (In my experience this is actually how academic work is conducted, so Nourse gets realism points here.) The unfolding of the joke gives Tally an idea that will destroy Hogan and further his own career.
Basically, Tally argues that perhaps man is descended not from apes but from swine. He gets together the Board of Trustees (five skinny old men) and Hogan and takes all six men to the maternity ward. What they see makes Hogan faint and convinces the trustees that Hogan is unreliable and that Tally's prima facie absurd theory deserves to be investigated.
I'm giving this story, a ten-page fat joke, a thumbs down, but I note that it follows the forms of a traditional SF story. It is about science, and is one of the few stories in An ABC of Science Fiction that actually has some real science in it, as Nourse devotes over a page to the similarities between pigs and humans. Like so many old-fashioned SF tales, the plot is resolved via intelligence and trickery. Following this traditional SF template as it does, it makes sense that "Family Resemblance" appeared first in Astounding, the old SF magazine we most associate with hard core science and engineering. "Family Resemblance" would reappear in Nourse collections and anthologies of SF about doctors and mutations edited by famous anthologist Groff Conklin.
 |
| Click to read the fine print--whoever composed the cover text of Adventures in Mutation loved to write "etc." and you don't want to miss that. |
 |
| Whoa, we're almost back in 1940 Horror Stories territory |
From a story about anthropologists to a story by an anthropologist, Chad Oliver. We can usually count on Oliver to decry our modern industrial society and advocate living like a primitive in harmony with nature; let's see if old Chad is running true to form in this story selected by Boardman.
In "Final Exam" we have a sort of anti-imperialist wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the colonized primitives turn the tables on the colonizers. Decades ago Earthmen colonized Mars. The native Martians have almost disappeared; it is theorized that they died from Earth diseases. (The Earthling characters explicitly liken the taciturn and stoic Martians to Native American Indians, while also saying, again and again, in an echo of Rudyard Kipling, that the natives are like children.) The plot consists of vapid tourists and academics on a field trip on Mars, visiting a sort of ranch where some of the few remaining Martians work. After eight pages of the humans acting dumb and callously we get our climax when these doomed Earthers are witness to the old switcheroo!
(The old switcheroo, as I call it, when a German U-boat captain is punished in Hell by having to sail on an Allied merchant vessel as it gets torpedoed or when a guy who torments spiders gets caught in the web of a kaiju-sized spider, is one of my least favorite literary devices.)
You see, most of the Martians, millions of them, have been hiding in caves--the small number of visible Martians who work at unskilled jobs for humies are spies. The Martians may have been technologically backward when the Earthman first arrived, but by employing their mind-reading powers and their superior intelligence, the natives of the red planet have become experts on Earth technology, and the hidden Martians have been able to build a fleet of rocket ships and an arsenal of ray guns that are better than their Earth models! As the story ends we can be confident that the Martians are going to exterminate most of the human race and keep a small number of us alive for their amusement!
Oliver makes his use of the switcheroo obvious by having the Martians, formerly silent but verbose now that they have the whip hand, repeat mockingly to the doomed humans all the bigoted things the Earthers said about them earlier in the story. Oliver also makes it clear that we are not supposed to think poorly of the Martians or sympathize with our fellow homo sapiens—all the references to children, students and (despicable) teachers tell us that if the Martians do anything bad it is because we have taught them by example to be bad, and whatever they may do to us, we deserve it.
I was surprised by the cataclysmic ending to "Final Exam;" I was expecting it to just be one of those Ray Bradbury things in which it was sad that the Martians were going extinct but it was inevitable; maybe the Martians would kill a few explorers or colonists, the way in real life Indians massacred a few frontier settlements and defeated Custer, but they were doomed in the long run. Instead, we get a thing like Michael Moorcock’s Land Leviathan in which black Africans build a land battleship and conquer Europe and America.
"Final Exam" is heavy-handed and over the top, and I can’t cheer on Martians as they destroy Earth civilization (I wouldn’t cheer on Indians who destroy the United States or Africans who destroy Western Europe, either) so this one gets a thumbs down.
 |
| This is the best scan I can find of the front cover of the British edition of The Best from Fantastic, but I didn't want you to miss out on another "etc." |
Frederik Pohl, important SF editor, writer and memoirist, got "The Bitterest Pill" in Galaxy during a period in which he was more or less editing the magazine himself ("ghosting" is the word Pohl uses in The Way the Future Was) because the official editor, H. L. Gold, was suffering psychological problems. (Gold sounds like a real neurotic Jewish New York character--scared to leave his apartment, going through a divorce, yelling at his writers, fraudulently awarding victory in a writing contest to his cronies, etc. Malzberg should write a roman a clef about this dude's inner life and his difficult relationships with women and writers.)
The plot of "The Bitterest Pill" is as follows: a baby boy takes pills that “weaken” the “blocks between cell and cell in your brain;” this renders him a super genius and in short order he makes himself emperor of the USA. This plot takes up like two pages, and Pohl tacks on like nine pages of sitcom/soap opera stuff that at times feels gratuitous.
The story starts with a complaint about what we would now call "income inequality"—what kind of world are we living in when our narrator, who spends his time in an air conditioned building, has more money than the cop who protects him, a man who spends his days out in the heat sweating? (Wikipedia quotes Pohl as saying Gold wanted SF to be "relevant.") Our narrator is Harlan Binn. A few years ago Binn’s fiance Margery left him at the altar and ran away with scruffy and erratic scientist Winston McGhee. After six months she returned, and Binn forgave her and married her. (This is what I am calling "soap opera stuff.") The couple live in Levittown, the prototypical suburb and the kind of place city boy pinko Pohl can be expected to detest. The importance of this detail is reflected in the fact that when "The Bitterest Pill" was reprinted in the 1961 Pohl collection Turn Left at Thursday and the 1975 collection The Best of Frederik Pohl it appeared under the title "The Richest Man in Levittown." How did Binn become the richest man, you ask? After his marriage to untrustworthy Margery, Binn's uncle, some kind of big wheel in the petroleum industry in the Middle East, died and left Binn a fortune.
As our story begins Harlan and Margery are having a hell of a time handling their little kids and all the letters and telephone calls from people wanting to borrow money or sell them junk. Their baby boy eats dog food and puts a graham cracker in his ear and so forth. (This is what I am calling "sitcom stuff.") Then McGhee reenters their lives, asking them to finance his new invention, those intelligence pills. (Margery obviously is still attracted to McGhee, fixing her hair and changing into sexy clothes and so on--a fusion of soap opera and sitcom stuff?) The baby, who, as we have seen, puts everything in his mouth, gets a hold of the pills and then becomes a genius and takes over America. The body of the text is mostly the contentious meeting with McGhee and the juggling of the brats--we are just told about the baby's conquest of America in a tiny bit at the end.
I guess the point of this story is that the world is unfair and people are all selfish jerks, and that nobody earns big money--the rich got rich via swindles or dumb luck. (Smart people are not to be trusted because their smarts just give them the power to swindle others.) I suppose this is what we should expect from Young Communist League alumnus Pohl and from editor Boardman, who is filling this anthology with pessimistic stories and joke stories. This particular work of pessimism full of weak jokes is getting a thumbs down.
"The Bitterest Pill" was actually made into an episode of Tales from the Darkside in 1986. If the viewer reviews at IMDb are any guide, the episode is not a fan favorite.
 |
| In May I spotted a foreign language version of F&SF with a version of this image on its cover, but quite different contents |
I feel like I'm being a real hard ass today--three negative reviews in a row! Maybe I'll like this story by Quattrocchi, who has eight short fiction credits at isfdb ("He Had a Big Heart" is the last one) and it will provide an opportunity for me to display the true core of my personality, the real me as it were, which of course is all sweetness and light.
In keeping with the tone of this anthology as a whole, "He Had a Big Heart" is a story about petty criminals and is full of jokes. Our narrator is Bailey, a guy who hangs around with a bunch of other lowlifes at a bowling alley. One of these lowlifes is Bailey's brother Dave--Dave makes a habit of stealing the narrator's unemployment checks and skipping out when it is time to pay the rent on the apartment they share, so when the narrator learns his brother has been shot through the heart by a jealous boyfriend while in bed with a young woman, it doesn't faze him.
Dave's heart was destroyed by the bullet, but Dave is still alive, having been hooked up to an experimental artificial heart, a machine I guess the size of a desk. (The story takes place about the time it was written--news about Dave's remarkable survival vies for space in newspapers with news about Marilyn Monroe's nude calendar photos--these photos were one of the big stories of early 1952.) The plot of the story is a mishmosh of the consequences of Dave being the first person to benefit from the experimental device: there is the question of whether the guy who shot Dave can be tried for murder when Dave is still alive; the artificial heart's inventor suggests he wants to unplug poor Dave so he can use the machine on the philanthropist who financed its development, who has heart trouble himself; Dave becomes a cause celebre and considers running for president, and is in some vague way involved with organized crime. Quattrochi doesn't explore these plot threads in a way that I found very satisfying, they just fizzle out indecisively.
The ideas behind this story, and the deadpan humor of a callous narrator who doesn't care if his ne'er-do-well brother lives or dies*, show potential, and maybe this could have been a good story if it had gone through some revisions. (Genre fiction pros would perhaps have advised Quattrocchi to "run it through the typewriter one more time.") "He Had a Big Heart" is a disappointment, but I am going to have a heart myself and judge it barely acceptable.
After its first appearance in F&SF, "He Had a Big Heart" only ever appeared in one other venue, here in An ABC of Science Fiction.
*Bailey is like the opposite of Rael, the protagonist of Peter Gabriel's masterpiece The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
**********
 |
| Don't you believe it! |
Well, I'm committed to this mission to the bitter end! Four more stories handpicked by Tom Boardman, Jr. in our next episode!
*If I had known that the anthology Boardman edited before this one was called The Unfriendly Future maybe I would have stepped back from the brink.
No comments:
Post a Comment