Four more tales from Budrys' Inferno

I wasn't crazy about Algis Budrys's famous novel Rogue Moon when I read it in 2007, so I have been a Budrys skeptic for years, but I have to say that I have liked or at least found acceptable the first five stories in Budrys' Inferno, which we read over the last three blog posts.  Maybe I am becoming a softie, or maybe the high emotional pitch of Budrys's fiction works better in the short form than in a full-length novel, where it might get exhausting or silly.

Well, let's read the last four of the nine pieces in the 1963 collection, hoping as we do that I like them as much or more than the first five.

"Lower Than Angels" (1956)

This is one of those SF stories that feels like it is inspired by the voyages of Captain Cook.  (My wife and I recently ate at a restaurant called "Walrus," which gave me a chance to tell her the story of how Cook tried to get his men to eat walrus meat.)  Earth's empire spans much of the galaxy, and continues to expand!  The men who explore the edges of known space, identifying star systems with life and valuable resources and making first contact with those aliens and staking claims to those resources, are the heroes of their generation!  When twenty-six-year-old Fred Imbry gets out of the Terran Space Navy he immediately joins up with one of the most successful of the explorer teams, the crew of the Sainte Marie.  And he is immediately disillusioned!  These "heroes" are just in it for the money, and one is a drunk, another a coward, a third a serial fabulist, etc. 

A month after Fred signs on, the Sainte Marie enters a frontier system and our disillusioned and bitter buddy is on his first mission as the ship's explorers, alone or in teams of two, set out from the Sainte Marie in their space boats to check out the system's individual planets.  Imbry, alone, has two weeks to make friends with the natives on a hospitable planet covered in rain forests and act as a good influence on them.  If Fred can spur the natives, who currently have a stone age technology, to develop technologically and economically, they will eventually make good trading partners for the rest of Earth's space empire.  (Isn't this what the anthropologist in Chad Oliver's 1958 story "The Marginal Man" is supposed to do with the primitive aliens he meets?) 

This is a good set up for a story, but the aliens and Imbry's interactions with them are kind of boring, and take up what feels like a lot of pages.  ("Lower Than Angels" in this book publication is 30 pages long.)  The natives, fishermen who live in a small island village, think Imbry is a god, and he tries to disabuse them of this notion, as he fears it will open the natives to exploitation by Earthmen.  Imbry uses modern medicine to save a child who has an infected injury, which of course makes the villagers even more confident he is not a man, as he insists, but a god.  Then a hurricane strikes and the village is destroyed and many villagers killed; Imbray, in his space armor which has an integrated force field, is not harmed by the storm.  The surviving villagers now think Imbray must be some kind of devil who caused the storm or at least refused to stop it, as they assume he must have been able to.

"Lower Than Angels" consists of a prologue and six chapters.  The brief sixth chapter is set "three seasons" later.  It is a little opaque, but I think what this two page chapter tells us is that Imbray has made his peace with the men of the Sainte Marie and is working hard from orbit to nudge the planet's natives into building a modern society with a modern technology and economy.  Imbray's particular contribution is to put robots on the planet that look like short people; when the natives meet these dwarves, the dwarves act like they think the natives are gods because they are physically stronger and have have boats (which the fake dwarves ostensibly lack); in this way the natives will have the same experience that Imbray had, and realize that Earth people are just people, only with a more advanced society.

"Lower Than Angels" has some elements in common with stories in the long tradition of anti-imperialist SF in which Earthers exploit or enslave primitive aliens (Edmond Hamilton's 1932 "Conquest of Two Worlds," is one example that sticks in my mind) but in the end of the story Budrys seems to be suggesting that the Earth explorers are not so bad, that modernization and trade between alien races can be mutually beneficial.  The means by which the natives in this story are modernized (by tricking them with robots) reminds us of another long SF tradition, stories in which elites deceive their inferiors for their own good (Asimov's Foundation books are perhaps the most famous example, though Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Clarke's Childhood's End and Sturgeon's "Slow Sculpture" are similarly elitist award winners) as well as all the bizarre and complicated schemes these Budrys stories seem to feature.

I'm calling this one "barely acceptable" because it is too long and tedious, though I suppose it is not actually bad.  "Lower Than Angels" was the cover story of an issue of Infinity Science Fiction with a striking and sexalicious Emsh cover painting (which has nothing to do with Budrys's story) and was included by Robert Silverberg in the 1966 anthology Earthmen and Strangers (I own the 1968 paperback edition) and by Sylvia Engdhal and Rick Roberson in the 1975 anthology Universe Ahead.  I guess a lot of people found it more compelling than I did.

"Contact Between Equals" (1958)

William Schaeffer is a genius businessman, a millionaire five or six times over.  He was also born blind.  But today he lies in a secluded house with bandages covering his face--today is the day he will see, thanks to an operation by top surgeon Louis Champley.  His wife Alicia is standing right there as Champley removes the bandages and Schaeffer, our narrator, sees his wife and the world for the first time!  But neither his first view of beauty-contest winner Alicia nor his first sight of the beautiful wooded mountains of North America is the most mind-blowing revelation our hero has to confront!

Like several of the stories in Budrys' Inferno, "Contact Between Equals" has at its center an elaborate and complicated crime.  Schaeffer is a genius, and even when blind he realized that Alicia and Champley were having an affair, and that this summer cottage on the side of a hill had some rooms wifey and Doc had scrupulously kept him away from.  But marital infidelity is just the tip of the iceberg in this wild story which reminded me a little of A. E. van Vogt's work, in which so often shocking plot twists and exposed secrets follow each other in rapid succession.  Brainiac Scaheffer not only looks in a mirror and realizes that Champley has switched bodies with him(!), but, putting his top-of-the-line grey matter to good use, over the course of this short fast-paced tale, Scaheffer susses out that Champley isn't just trying to steal Scaheffer's benjamins but to throw off his trail a vengeful space alien who is imprisoned in a secret room behind the kitchen!

Thus speaketh Schaeffer:

"I never wonder about anything, Alicia.  I find out."

Our hero does find everything out, foiling the evil sawbones and his own evil wife (if this guy is so smart why did he marry an avaricious bimbo instead of an honest businesswoman or college professor?--I guess we all make mistakes!) and making friends with the alien and hooking the Earth up with a diplomatic and commercial relationship with the E.T.s that will make life better for every (decent) human being.

This is a fun example of the classic-style SF story in which a smart guy uses logic and knowledge to figure something out at breakneck speed and thus save his own life.  Budrys stuffs "Contact Between Equals" with iconic SF elements like a dangerous alien and high technology that lead to a sense-of-wonder paradigm shift, plus such hard-boiled detective elements as a first-person narrator who totes up the clues before our very eyes and a faithless back-stabbing dame.  I like this one quite a bit.

"Contact Between Equals" was first published in Venture under the pseudonym Albert Stroud.  It was also included in Harry Harrison's  SF: Author's Choice 2 ("A DOZEN SF GREATS PRESENT THEIR FAVORITE STORIES"), suggesting that, like me, Budrys thought it one of his better productions.  I appears in that 1970 anthology with an essay by Budrys about the story that I would like to read.  (On Wednesday I dug through the boxes of SF paperbacks at Second Story Books' Rockville location looking for SF: Author's Choice 2,  but had no luck.)

"Dream of Victory" (1953)

In his introduction to Budrys' Inferno, Budrys tells us that "Dream of Victory" was the first novelette that he wrote, and he thanks Amazing's editor Howard Browne for making it more "comprehensible," Budrys having initially drafted it as a "free-wheeling" exercise in "technical bedazzlement."

It is the high tech 21st century, a time of world government, peace and prosperity, of video phones, self-driving cars and "chutes" instead of elevators.  As we learn from a chunk of exposition in the middle of the story, there was a devastating war in the late 20th century which reduced the population of advanced countries to like a quarter of what it had been.  To rebuild civilization, multitudes of androids--artificial, organic men, almost exactly like real men but with no ability to reproduce--were created.  Now that the natural human population has bounced back, the androids are being phased out; no more are being produced and those still extant are gradually losing their jobs and being replaced with woman-born people.

The actual plot concerns an android who is going through a crisis, Stac Fuoss.  Fuoss is cheating on his android wife Lisa with a natural woman, Carol, and being pushed out of his job at an insurance agency.  He is also having terrible nightmares; these nightmares evince some of that "technical bedazzlement" Budrys warned us about:

She came from blackness, and it was into blackness that he went for her.

He rolled and jerked on the bed.  Time whinnied by like a silver beast.

The woman was gone, hidden in blackness.  His feet moved spasmodically against the sheets.

The blackness parted and the woman returned.  There was with her--

While the dream scenes are sort of annoying, there are good things in the story, mostly concerning what life is like as an android, the neuroses that spring up from being an artificial person who can't have kids.  The android men are all chain smokers, for example, android women were only created to provide companionship to the male androids, and Fuoss spent all his money paying the android-making company to destroy the template used to make his wife so she will be a unique being and not just one of many clones.  The recurring nightmare is meant to convey to us readers the obsessive nature of Fuoss's hopeless hope of having a child, but I think Budrys could have done the dreams better or come up with some other technique to get this across.  (Full disclosure: Dream sequences are one of my pet peeves.)

In the final pages of the story the celebrated android lawyer who is having an affair with Lisa comes up with a scheme that provides some measure of hope for the androids.  Androids will crew the first space ship to leave the atmosphere, and come up with bogus evidence that indicates that natural-born humans can't go into space but androids can.  This will create a reason to manufacture more androids and put in the hands of the androids the power to control Earth.  But, driven over the edge by his obsession with fathering a child and human prejudice (when he asks Carol to marry him she scoffs, "Me, marry an android?"), Fuoss assaults Carol, perhaps killing her.  News reports of his crime inflame the natural-born population against androids, ruining the lawyer's plan and dooming the androids to extinction.

While it is perhaps too long, I like the plot of this one, and judge "Dream of Victory" moderately good.  Like so many of these Budrys stories, it is about somebody who is out of place, alienated, but instead of being about a diplomat or an exile or a spy, it is about someone who is a second-class citizen; I assume the story is at least in part an allegory of the experience of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States.

"Dream of Victory" has not been widely anthologized; after its debut in the same issue of Amazing as one of my least favorite Henry Kuttner stories, "Or Else," it reappeared in Amazing in 1969, while that venerable magazine was being edited by none other than one of this blog's particular heroes,  Barry N. Malzberg!   

"The Peasant Girl" (1956)

Like those Gus stories, this is a story of homo superior and the difficult relationship they have with us mundanes.  But in this tale it is the supermen who have the whip hand!

It is the future, and the superhumans are our more or less benevolent rulers, using their astonishing psychic powers to make our lives more comfortable, convenient, and efficient.  For example, as the story begins, our homo sapien protagonist, Henry Spar the cabinetmaker, finds that his younger sister, whom he has raised, has vanished.  Because now there is only one person living in their rural small town domicile, the powers that be shrink the house to a more compact, more manageable size!  Similarly, when Spar decides to ride the bus to nearby NYC to confront the rarely seen supermen and find out where they have teleported Dorothy, the bus that comes by is just the right size for the number of waiting passengers--Earth’s psychic rulers can read all our minds and know at any moment how many of us need a bus and where we want to go!  Mundanes don’t even have to light their own cigarettes, because some guy somewhere is always reading your mind and will use his long-distance pyrotechnic powers to safely light it for you the moment you want it lit!  And, of course, when you are done with it, somebody somewhere teleports away the unsightly butt.

The supermen are always reading everybody’s minds, so they have no trouble finding their perfect mates; for this reason, mundane women regularly just vanish from their homes, teleported into the arms of their new superhusbands. Spar suspects that Dorothy has been taken against her will, but when he meets her and her superbeau she tells him she truly loves the mental giant who has whisked her away from the Spar household without warning and taken her to Paris for a new dress, to Rome to have her hair done, and to a seaside kirk in Scotland to be married.  As Dorothy's superspouse explains, because they are all constantly reading each other’s minds, the supermen can’t really commit any crimes.

Mundane men are understandably bitter about living in a surveillance state where the women in their lives can just be teleported away any minute, but the supermen aren’t happy either. They are socially and genetically distinct from us normies, but have no culture of their own (in part because they have no need to work with their hands or even walk); everything they do is a reflection of or derivative of us mundanes, who hate them. But Budrys ends his story on an upbeat, hopeful, note.  After she gives birth to superhubby’s son, Dorothy begins spending time with her brother again, and Spar develops a relationship with his nephew.  Said nephew begins to learn how to work with wood from his uncle, and we are given reason to believe that Dorothy's son will be one of the first of the supermen to show some kind of creativity, that he is a pioneer in the development of a native homo superior culture, and that his relationship with his uncle is a harbinger of a future in which superman and mundane will be better able to get along.

"The Peasant Girl" is a good story and a good way to end the collection.  It first appeared in Astounding under that Paul Janvier pen name and would later see print in Joan Kahn's 1969 anthology of suspense stories, Hanging By a Thread.

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I'm quite happy with Budrys' Inferno, and even purchased another book of 1950s Budrys short stories, 1960's The Unexpected Dimension, just this week.  I guess we have to say that Budrys' Inferno has converted me from a Budrys skeptic to a Budrys fan.

Back in 2017 Joachim Boaz reviewed Budrys' Inferno at his blog Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.  He also liked the book as a whole, but, a testimony to our divergent tastes, I think the story he may have liked most, "Lower Than Angels," which he awards 4.25 stars out of five, was the one I liked least!  (Joachim also gave "The Peasant Girl" a 4.25; there we are much closer to agreement.)  Joachim was also very harsh in his dismissal of "The Man Who Tasted Ashes," which I enjoyed.  So, to get a different perspective on Budrys' Inferno, definitely check out Joachim's take and the discussion there at his exciting blog.  (And remember that you can read these vintage science fiction tales, and thousands of others, for free at the internet archive!)

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More 1950s SF in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!