"The Splendid Source" by Richard Matheson (1956)
This is a joke story, a spoof (I guess) of detective fiction and those SF stories in which a conspiracy of supermen who run the world behind the scenes is uncovered. A somewhat silly rich guy becomes obsessed with finding out who writes all the dirty jokes men tell each other, and he travels all over the country, talking to bartenders and bellboys and salesmen, listening to dirty jokes and trying to figure out where they came from. He eventually is ushered in to the secret headquarters of the centuries-old secret society of men who write the dirty jokes that are circulated by word of mouth around the world.
This story is a waste of time; it is like 20 damn pages long and my eyes were glazing over as I tried to read it. Maybe I should note that, like an orange soda that contains no juice, this story about dirty jokes contains no dirty jokes, but just reminds you of them. There are jokes, but they are tame. For example, we get a list of the protagonist's earlier quixotic cultural ventures, like his unfinished contrarian books The Slums: A Positive View and Horatio Alger: Misunderstood Satirist. Those two titles are the best jokes in the entire story, and appear on its fourth and fifth pages.
"The Splendid Source" was reprinted in F&SF in 1957 and has since appeared in anthologies of humorous stories and in Matheson collections. It is included in my copy of Collected Stories: Volume Two, and in the little commentary there after the story Matheson tells us that he wrote a sequel in which the hero gets into the adult film business but, for some reason, Playboy didn't buy it.
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| Whoa, looks familiar |
"The Monster Show" appeared in the same issue of Playboy as Matheson's "The Splendid Source," and was also reprinted in F&SF.
This is another joke story and another attack on television and consumerism. I'm tripping over a lot of these lately. Do I read SF to hear bad jokes and endless moaning from snobby smarty-pantses about how the average person is a TV-worshiping knuckledragger? I'm suffering an acute shortage of tense stories in which a guy in a space suit uses his engineering knowledge to fight a robot!
In "The Monster Show," Beaumont takes us behind the scenes of the TV business in the consumerist future of 1976 where the TV execs use wacky slang and take drugs to endure the pressure of trying to get high ratings. After two pages I was turning back to the table of contents to see how long this thing was--sweet relief, only eight pages. Anyway, the bulk of this story consists of a conversation between TV execs in which one guy describes an evening's programming to another, the biggest evening of programming of all time! The jokes Beaumont serves up consist of the kinds of exaggeration gags a dim 3rd-grader could compose--"We begin with a two-hour commercial roundup, advertising the products of our fifty-seven sponsors," and funny name jokes--one of the fifty-seven sponsors is "Chewey-Flakes." The twist ending is that this special evening of programming is an alien plot--one of the execs is an alien spy and the night's TV shows will be putting everyone on Earth asleep so we won't be able to resist the alien invasion. Did a child write this?
"The Monster Show" has been reprinted in Beaumont collections, and not many other places.
"The Food of the Gods" by Arthur C. Clarke (1964)This story comes to us as an historical document, the six-page transcript of a speech given to Congress several hundred years in the future! From this document we learn that, in the 21st century, scientists figured out how to synthesize food of all sorts from rocks and water! Any food, from broccoli to hamburger, can be identically duplicated in a lab and mass-produced in a factory, which ends hunger and puts farms and ranches out of business. Most people in the future depicted in this story don't even know their ancestors ate dead animals, and being appraised of this fact makes some of the Congressmen at the hearing physically ill!
The shock ending of the story comes when the person giving the speech, a spokesman for a food manufacturer, reveals that he is before Congress to complain that one of his firm's competitors is playing dirty pool. The new food they have introduced, which is universally popular and is putting all the other food manufacturers out of business, is a duplicate of human flesh!
I'm going to call this one acceptable--it is sort of interesting and not boring or irritating, and the jokes are inoffensive. It has been reprinted many times in Clarke collections, not much elsewhere.
According to isfdb "Leviathan!" is the second in a series of six or seven stories about a character named Svetz. On the cover of a Niven collection that includes many of the Svetz stories we are told Svetz is a "Time Retrieval Expert." The Dean Ellis cover of this collection has a pretty sincere and "sensawunda" vibe, so maybe Niven is going to break us out of our humor story rut.
In the Clarke story it is so far in the future that even the educated have forgotten that people used to eat meat from dead animals, which is hard to believe, because classic literature that the college professors of the future will read, like Virgil's Aeneid and Proust's In Search of Lost Time, include references to people slaughtering beasts and cooking them up and eating them up. (Who could forget that scene of Francoise and the killing of the chicken?) Well, in "Leviathan!" the people of 1,000 years in the future, when the world is ruled from the UN palace, don't have any records or knowledge of what a gila monster or a sperm whale look like. So when the ruler of the world, the UN secretary general, wants a gila monster and a sperm whale for his zoo, and Svetz goes back in time to find them, he has no idea what precisely he is looking for!
This story focuses on the sperm whale; at the start of the story the UN apparatus already has a forty-foot fire-breathing dragon in custody which everybody calls a gila monster. Svetz takes a sort of aircraft back in time to the mid-nineteenth century and flies over the Atlantic, hunting for a whale. His equipment first detects a sea serpent, and Svetz, at the controls of the anti-grave devices and stun rays at his disposal, struggles with the tremendous monster, which we are told is four times the size of a sperm whale. In the end of the story we get a literary joke (after vanquishing the serpent Svetz captures Moby Dick and brings the albino cetacean back to the future) and a hint that the reason Svetz keeps finding dragons and sea serpents and other fantastical beasts when he goes back in time is that the time machine itself is fucking up the universe.
Another joke story, but not bad.
"Leviathan!" has reappeared in Niven collections and in anthologies of time travel stories and sea serpent stories. (Some of these anthologies get pretty specific.)
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Four joke stories, though the ones that integrated a little science into the drollery were not repellent. I am going to be stacking the deck in an effort of avoid joke stories in our next episode, however!
PLAYBOY used to be a reliable market for Science Fiction stories for years. And, like you, I try to pick up these PLAYBOY PRESS paperbacks whenever I find them. I've read a few of these anthologies. As you point out, the joke ending seems to have been popular back then.
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