"Chillbinding" 1950s Science Fiction from J. Blish, P. Anderson and T. N. Scortia

An unexpected road trip to Lincoln, Nebraska earlier this month put me within striking range of A Novel Idea Bookstore, where they were, fortuitously, having a sale in which individual customers were randomly assigned different discounts.  Yours truly hit the jackpot, winning a 50% discount, so the wife and I stocked up.  Among my purchases was Crest Book L728, the 1964 edition of a 1960 anthology of stories selected by Leo Margolies entitled Get Out of My Sky.  At $1.50, how could I resist that Powers cover and the promise of "chillbinding" novellas by three authors I am interested in, James Blish, Poul Anderson and Thomas N. Scortia?  Let's take a trip back in time to the late 1950s, and to a terrifying future with "three master craftsmen of the science-fiction suspense story."  We'll ask if each story is good, like we always do, but also assess if these stories are truly chillbinding, as advertised!

"Get Out of My Sky" by James Blish (1957)

The title story of this anthology is almost 80 pages long and appeared first across two early 1957 issues of Astounding.  Besides here in this anthology, it would later appear in a few Blish collections and an Italian magazine.  Mama mia!

Numerous times on this blog I have complained about elitist classic SF stories which seem to advocate the manipulation, by any means necessary, of the masses by the cognitive elite and even politicians(!)  And here we have another one!

Ocean-covered planet Home and desert planet Rathe are twins that revolve around a common point, each perpetually showing its sister the same hemisphere.  Along with a small star, the two planets form a Trojan system that orbits a large star.  Both planets are home to intelligent species of humanoids who have achieved what I guess we can call a 20th-century level of technology (nuclear bombs, rocket and jet engines, TV) and in just the last few years they have opened up communications via radio and television.  "Get Out of My Sky" is the story of this new interplanetary relationship, with the leading politician from Home, First Minister Aidregh, as our protagonist.

The main theme of the story is that the ordinary people of Home and Rathe are gullible, irrational, superstitious and religious fools, and their foolishness is driving the two planets towards a push button war that will likely lead to the extermination of one or both civilizations.  In fact, the first scene of the story, an italicized prologue, depicts what appears to be a tent revival, where a nameless demagogue drives the common people into a frenzy of hostility towards their sister planet.  Aidregh and the rulers of Rathe have to work together to prevent this cataclysm.

After the prologue, the novella is broken into nine chapters.  The early chapters largely concern the gathering of intelligence about Rathe.  Chapter I features observations of the desert planet from shipboard during an eclipse--did stories of Captain Cook's observations of an eclipse in 1766 and the transit of Venus in 1769 and inspire this scene?  There is also a secret space mission (Home's first manned space flight) to photograph Rathe's "dark" side.  The first five chapters also describe a lot of political jazz concerning different polities on Home (Aidregh is First Minister of the most powerful state on Home, Thrennen, but there are a few other countries on the islands of the watery planet with whom Thrennen has sometimes contentious relationships) and different political parties in Thrennen.  Blish portrays Aidregh's dealings with the voters and with the opposition party not as the inevitable features of a free society, but as a hassle, an obstacle to Aidregh's solving everybody's problems.  Aidregh seems to like the ruler of Rathe with whom he talks via TV, Margent, more than he likes the bulk of his own countrymen! 

In Chapter VI, Aidregh and the rest of our cast of characters fly to Rathe (this is Home's second manned space flight) to negotiate with the Rathemen.  In a secluded cave Margent explains to Aidregh that the Rathemen are mystics who for centuries focused not on developing material wealth and technology, but on developing telepathy and precognition; as a result, Rathe everybody loved everybody and there was no crime or politics or war.  Yes, "Get Out of My Sky" isn't just an elitist story, but a mystical utopian one!  Gadzooks!

But fifty years ago the Rathemen utopia was shaken by the invention of the radio!  The people started listening in on Home transmissions, and when the Rathemen learned about all the politics and crime and war on Home, it shook the common people to the core; in fear that the Home people would attack Rathe as soon as they learned of the Rathemen, the Rathe hoi polloi demanded the construction of a Rathe war apparatus.  Such technological and martial production began stunting Rathe psychic abilities, and even souring their lovey dovey attitude.  As things stand now, with the populations of both planets scared and suspicious of each other, nuclear war is only days away!

Luckily lead mystic Margent has a plan to make peace.  The Rathemen spend three days and three chapters teaching Aidregh a psychic trick--the power to sway audiences emotionally.  Then Aidregh uses this trick to get the people of both planets to step back from the brink.  An italicized epilogue exposes the fact that the italicized prologue was a trick played on us readers by Blish; the scene was really depicting Aidregh, resigned from the First Ministership (naturally, his son now holds the position), not preaching hatred of Rathe after all but spreading peace and love!

"Get Out of My Sky" is not very well written.  There is no human feeling, even though Blish wastes many words on the boring relationships between Aidregh and his son, his best friend, his dead wife, and his son's fiance (his best friend's daughter.)  Efforts to create drama can be silly--the astronaut who leads the months-long expedition to photograph the far side of Rathe dies of exhaustion immediately after giving his report (you know, like Pheidippides.)  The people in the story are aliens from a fictional star system, and Blish describes their appearance in some detail (the people of Home have six fingers and two thumbs and flat noses and a ridge above the eye sockets while the Rathemen have long noses and no ridge above the eyes, etc.), but Blish clumsily calls them "human" and has them use Earth metaphors (e. g., a determined woman is described as being like "a female tiger defending her cub.")  I also thought it was sloppy that Blish didn't come up with an actual name for Aidregh's planet, just referring to it as "this planet" or "Aidregh's world" in the first half of the story and then hitting upon "Home" in the second half.  Worst of all, the story is way too long, moving at a slow pace and burdened with extraneous detail and narrative dead ends.  Is this text a draft rather than a final version of the story?   

Neither am I impressed by the story's ideology or its SF ideas; the psychic powers of the Rathemen come across as infallible and unbelievable magic, which is boring and silly--contrast "Get Out of My Sky" with Algis Budrys's "The Peasant Girl," in which equally puissant psychic powers make compelling reading because Budrys shows the moral and psychological and sociological drawbacks and shortcomings of such powers.

"Get Out of My Sky" is getting a thumbs down from me.  Too bad.

Is it good?  No.                                               Is it chillbinding?  More like sleep-inducing!   

"Sister Planet" by Poul Anderson (1959)

Let’s see if Poul Anderson can deliver us a chillbinding story…or at least a good one.

Earth grows increasingly overcrowded, and at the same time that governments are becoming ever more intrusive and oppressive they are proving less and less able to handle the exploding crime problem. Some fear the building pressure will result in nuclear war that could wipe out humanity!

Our story is set on Venus, a world covered in a single vast ocean that teems with diverse and spectacular life.  A multicultural team of fifty Earth scientists and technicians work there on a floating research station; their work is financed by sending back to Earth “firegems” which the playful twenty-foot long Venusian whales bring the boffins in exchange for objets d'a and snacks from Earth.  These cetoids are eager to play and trade, and even help Earthmen in trouble, but they don't seem to use tools and efforts to communicate with them have been unproductive, so there is debate among the scientists over how intelligent they really are—do these creatures have a real civilization down at the bottom of the sea or are they just over-sized oceanic pack rats little smarter than a chimp?

Nat Hawthrone from New England, an ecologist, believes the cetoids are as intellectually advanced as humans, and halfway through the 40-page story one of the whales takes Nat down deep to show him something that proves he is right.

The same day Nat has proof that the whales are an intelligent civilized species, a geologist unveils his calculations that prove Venus can be affordably terraformed to create a second Earth; such a  colonizable frontier could relieve sociological and psychological pressure on the Earth and assure survival of the human race!  But the terraforming (which involves detonating nuclear bombs near the planet core to raise continents and release buried elements that will give Venus an Earth-like atmosphere) will kill all native life, including the whales.  When the assembled research team hears from Nat that the whales are an intelligent race, they all agree that the terraforming research will be suppressed, but that is not good enough for Nat “Dances with Whales” Hawthorne.  He knows that another scientist with access to the same data might make the same calculations, so, to save the whales, whom Nat prefers to humankind, he goes rogue, like the guy in Edmond Hamilton’s 1932 "Conquest of Two Worlds" or in James Cameron’s 2009 Avatar, which I have not exactly seen but have heard people talk about.

Nat knows that nobody will finance trips to Venus if there is no prospect of trade between the whales and humans, so he sparks a war between the cetoids and the scientists, blowing up the research station and killing his 49 human friends and then massacring the local tribe of his aquatic buddies. When Nat gets back to Earth he commits suicide; we are presented a clue that suggests his participation in the two-planet tragedy may have led the atheist Nat to embrace Christianity before jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Sister Planet” is a brisk and entertaining read.  For thirty pages Anderson pushes his customary themes--promoting science, trade, the fine arts and the study of history and deploring the government--and introduces us to a bunch of nice people, and then in the last ten pages he hits us with an apocalyptic melodrama in which one of the characters we like murders all the other characters we like and likely consigns the human race to extinction, all in order to protect some aliens. I think Anderson may have actually produced something “chillbinding” here!  The story is talky, with all the exposition about how the men cope with conditions on Venus and conduct their research, the science lectures, the debates about how intelligent the cetoids might be, and the historical analogies Anderson likes to present to his readers (some of the characters in "Sister Planet" suppose that the Earth is reenacting the fall of the Roman Empire and the start of the Middle Ages, with the scientists on Venus--none of whom are women--playing the role of monks.)  But all that stuff is pretty interesting.

After it initially appeared in Satellite Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison included "Sister Planet" in their late 1960s anthology All About Venus, published in Britain as Farewell, Fantastic Venus!  Kinglsey Amis in 1981 put it in his anthology The Golden Age of Science Fiction.  It looks like this one is endorsed by the SF cognoscenti, and I am happy to agree with them.

Is it good?  Sure.                                               Is it chillbinding?  I think so!

"Alien Night" by Thomas N. Scortia (1957)

So far we've got one dud and one score.  Will Thomas N. Scortia's "Alien Night," around 46 pages here in Get Out of My Sky, a story which first appeared in Science Fiction Adventures and hasn't seen print since Margolies's volume, make it two hits out of three?

It is the future!  The Universal Insurance Company, based in the Universal Building in Universal City on the banks of the mighty Mississip, is in the process of conquering death!  For centuries they have been administering a longevity serum that you need only take every 25 years to indefinitely postpone senescence.  All over America their medical robots stand ready to rush to the aid of anybody who gets in an accident.  Skyscrapers are equipped with automatic nets which will snap into position if any clumsy person should fall out a window.  And if your girlfriend dumps you, don't bother considering anything rash--the Company has blanketed the country in a "hetrerodyne field" that will knock you unconscious if a brain scanning computer detects serious thoughts of suicide.

While "Get Out of My Sky" is one of those pro-utopia stories, "Alien Night" is one of those stories about how utopias are unhappy and unsatisfying places.  In response to a life without excitement, risk or even work (androids do almost all the work), around the country have arisen "hunt clubs" whose members pursue what we might call the most dangerous game.  So, the next step in the Company's quest to eliminate death is to try to put these clubs out of business.  Kenneth Huber has been spying upon the clubs for the Company, but when he learns he has a rare disease that the Company can't cure and has only five years to live, Huber decides to commit suicide in the indirect fashion of joining a hunt club as the quarry!

Thus begins Huber's 24-hour odyssey through three dozen pages of plot twists.  Huber tries to rescue a woman he thinks is also being pursued by a hunt club, then suspects that she is hunting him and so fights with her, only later to be told she was rescuing him from hunters.  Out of nowhere an alien spacecraft crashes nearby and Huber (an unemployed thermonuclear engineer) gets shanghaied into helping investigate it.  Huber survives a helicopter crash, participates in a fire fight, discovers that many androids in sensitive positions are in fact humans in disguise--no, wait, they are actually aliens disguised as humans disguised as androids.  These aliens have infiltrated the top ranks of the Company in order to prevent any possible reforms--human society is sliding into decadence and sterility thanks to the Company's elimination of risk and challenge, and an impotent human race is just what the aliens want so that they can easily take over our beautiful planet.  (They have targeted the hunt clubs because hunt club members are the only humans left with any bravery.)  The woman rescues Huber, again, and reveals herself to be the leader of the anti-alien resistance, an agent from the future of a timeline in which the aliens succeed in taking over Earth.  Together they neutralize the alien menace, making sure her timeline never occurs and that humanity will shake off its decadence by pursuing the exploration of outer space.  Huber (don't worry, a cure for his disease will be found), having gotten a good look at the alien space engine, will be a leader in the new space program.

"Alien Night" feels like a pastiche of an A.E. van Vogt story, what with all the jarring plot twists and the inclusion of every possible SF trope--immortality, decadence, time travel, time lines, space craft, aliens, androids, the sense of wonder ending--but it lacks something it is hard to define, a tone or style or something to match the material, maybe, and comes off as a little rushed and kind of silly.  It certainly fails to excite any emotion in the reader.  Barely acceptable filler, I guess.

Is it good?  Not really.                                               Is it chillbinding?  No.

********** 

The Anderson is the winner, obviously; I am totally on board with his libertarian sensibilities and view of life as a tragedy, but looking beyond my biases I think he has the story here which is best constructed and which actually succeeds in inspiring some emotion in the audience; he takes a little time to develop characters and their relationships so when somebody takes a radical step and everybody gets killed we readers actually care.  Blish's and Scortia's efforts to depict people and relationships in their stories in Get Out of My Sky feel cheap or just lame (in general, Anderson's story feels finished, polished, while Blish's feels like it could use a revision and Scortia's feels like a rush job.)

I don't know what Margolies saw in the Scortia's "Alien Night," but in defense of the Blish, it was voted second best story by readers in both issues of Astounding in which its component parts appeared, so its selection makes sense from a marketing point of view--I guess "Get Out of My Sky" reflects the preferences of those SF fans sufficiently committed to the genre to write to Astounding and make their voices heard.