"Best" stories by James White, Bob Shaw and Brian Aldiss

Let's pull a volume off the paperback anthology shelf of the MPorcius Library and read three SF stories by British authors that appear in editor Mike Ashley's 1977 book The Best of British SF 2.  The Best of British SF 2 contains 14 stories over its 378 pages, and I have already read and blogged about two of them, Arthur C. Clarke's 1971 "Transit of Earth," and John Wyndham's "The Emptiness of Space," AKA "The Asteroids, 2194."  That leaves a dozen tales new to me; let's start with three authors of whom I already have a good opinion: James White, Bob Shaw, and Brian Aldiss.  The stories in The Best of British SF 2 by White, Shaw, and Aldiss were selected by the authors themselves and represent personal favorites, and each is preceded by an intro by Ashley that includes a long quote from the author himself which discusses such topics as narrative strategies and recurring themes in his work--these intros, along with Ashley's intro to the volume which discusses the work of British SF writers who do not have stories in the anthology, make The Best of British SF 2 particularly valuable to the student of SF from the UK.

"Tableau" by James White (1958)

I don't think I've read anything by White since I started this blog, but, in that prehistoric era when I read SF and kept my opinions about it to myself, I enjoyed White's novel All Judgement Fled (check out Joachim Boaz's review of it) and his stories "Grapeliner" and "The Lights Outside the Windows;"
those two stories, I felt, had interesting and unusual takes on space travel.

isfdb lists "Tableau" as one of the earliest-written stories in White's famous and long-running Sector General stories, which, I think, are about doctors in space dealing with alien patients, or something like that.  I generally find medical stuff boring, so I have sort of avoided these stories, but today I dip my toe in the Sector General water and read this piece, which was a cover story at New Worlds during the period that periodical was edited by John Carnell and was later selected by Michael Moorcock for 1965's The Best of New Worlds.

"Tableau" starts with an italicized prologue describing an anti-war war memorial on planet Orligia, what appears to be a sculpture of the meeting of an Orligian and a human on the deck of a wrecked spacecraft; the human's guts are falling out of a wound he has suffered during a space naval battle against the alien's ship.  Then we get a narrative of the dogfight which led to the scene depicted by the memorial, and the meeting itself.  Integrated into the description of the battle and the meeting of the two pilots after their crippled ships crash land on a planet is the revelation of how the war began years ago.  The Orligians look like teddy bears, inspiring the first human to meet to be overly friendly to them, because they were so damn adorable!  This premature familiarity backfired, because we humans look like a species of carnivore that haunts Orligia and uses guile to prey on immature teddy-bear people!  In reflexive, almost involuntary,  response to the human's invading the aliens' personal space, the teddy bears killed him and his crew thus starting the war.  (This is a little like Poul Anderson's 1954 "Butch," which we just read in January, in which an alien's instincts led it to kill humans who were actually no threat to it.  "Butch" appeared in New Worlds three years before "Tableau."  Hmmm...come to think of it, Anderson, in collaboration with Gordon R. Dickson, wrote some stories of his own in the early '50s about aliens who look like teddy bears....)

"Tableau" is an anti-war story with a happy ending.  Since the start of the war, the Orligians have developed a telepathy device, and the two crash-landed pilots use one to communicate--they overcome their prejudices, and start the peace process.  "Tableau" also has a twist ending.  That memorial in the prologue is not a work of art, but the two pilots and part of a ship frozen in time by a special device; when medical science has advanced enough the pilots will be unfrozen and the human's mortal wound healed.  White explicitly stresses that these two pilots are true heroes who deserve to be celebrated because they ended the war, and the last line of the story is a reminder that "there was nothing great or noble or beautiful about war."

This story is cleverly constructed, has interesting elements (the weapons and tactics used in the space battle are quite good) and is competently written, but somehow it didn't really excite me.  The teddy-bear business is a little silly, the "this-war-has-no-villains-it-is-all-just-a-misunderstanding" business felt a little contrived, and I thought that the scenes of the telepathic discussions at the end dragged a little.  White tries to inspire in the reader a revulsion at war with his descriptions of the physical and psychological wounds suffered by the servicemen of both Earth and Orligia, but this stuff failed to move me.  I'm judging "Tableau" marginally good, though maybe my own coldness and cynicism are leading me to rate it lower than other people might.

"A Full Member of the Club" by Bob Shaw (1974)

In 2018 I read an entire book of Bob Shaw short stories, and one of them was an affectionate homage to A. E. van Vogt.  (Wikipedia suggests that Shaw's first exposure to SF was reading a story by van Vogt he found in Astounding.)  Well, here in "A Full Member of the Club" we have another story that is reminiscent of a van Vogt tale and is perhaps itself an homage to the Canadian Grandmaster.  In van Vogt's 1943 story "The Search" (later integrated in a somewhat different form into the 1970 fix-up novel Quest for the Future) a guy meets a woman who has some very high tech consumer products, including a super pen, and his investigation into these items gets him mixed up with competing factions of people from the future.*  Well, in "A Full Member of the Club" a guy notices that his girlfriend has a super efficient cigarette lighter on the same day she dumps him, and his investigation of this lighter (and other supergadgets to which she has access, including a super pen) leads him to get mixed up with space aliens!

Basically, the story is about how a bold and persistent businessman who is willing to bend or flout the rules to achieve his goals (he breaks into a mansion in one scene, for example), after discovering the existence of the super consumer goods (better tasting tobacco and coffee and more sharp TVs, as well as the super efficient lighter and other devices) obsessively leaves no stone unturned until he has figured out where the items have come from.  He finds out that aliens are teleporting the items to Earth and renting them to the very rich in exchange for Earth paintings and sculptures.  The aliens consider seizing him and sending him to outer space, but our hero is such a smooth talker and such a talented man of business that he convinces them to let him join their firm, and his contributions make their operations much more efficient and profitable. 

Shaw adds a layer of interest, and I guess what you could call satire, to the story by having the two main human characters expose themselves as shallow nouveau riche types--they care more about accessing the consumer goods and the status they represent than about love and human companionship or high culture.

For some reason (perhaps because the characters in the story are materialistic status-seekers and that is how Shaw--and maybe British people in general--see us Americans) Shaw, born in Northern Ireland and resident in England when The Best of British SF 2 was published (as noted by editor Mike Ashley in the intro to the story) set "A Full Member of the Club" in the northeast United States--Trenton, New Jersey and Philadelphia, PA and their environs--and the story includes what appear to be little mistakes, like having an American say "differently to" instead of "differently from."  Curious, I looked at the version of the story that appeared in Galaxy (you can read it at the link earlier in this blog post) and found in that version the proper Yankee lingo, "differently from."  Did Ashley or somebody else at Orbit simply fail to notice the error fixed by somebody more familiar with US English at Galaxy, or make a conscious decision to retain British usage because an accurate portrayal of US speech (which of course would be appropriate given Shaw's chosen setting and characters) might throw UK readers?   

A good story; the pacing is good, the gadgets are fun, the style engaging.  I prefer the more subtle commentary on materialism and bourgeois striving Shaw employs here to White's in-your-face "war is terrible--look, this guy's guts are falling out!" approach in "Tableau."  Similarly, in Shaw's story here, the rational way the human and alien characters go about their business feels more like how things work in real life than White's wacky "they look like teddy bears to us but we look like ghouls to them so we all act irrationally" premise.

"A Full Member of the Club" has been well received not only by me, but the wider professional SF community, Donald Wollheim including it in the 1975 edition of World's Best SF and Ellen Datlow in 2003 in her 2000-2005 webzine Sci Fiction.

*I read the magazine version of "The Search" at the internet archive today after reading "A Full Member of the Club," and found a reference to Nazis that dated the story had been altered to something more vague in the version of "The Search" that appears in my 1964 copy of Destination: Universe!  

"Manuscript Found in a Police State" by Brian Aldiss (1972)

Aldiss has a large and diverse body of work, including nonfiction and mainstream fiction as well as SF that ranges from the pretty traditional to the very experimental and New Wavey.  I have been unimpressed by some of his more pretentious or boring "literary" SF, but "Manuscript Found in a Police State," first published in the eighteenth volume of Winter's Tales, a yearly anthology of short stories edited by A. D. Maclean and published from the '50s to the early '80s, is a success.

Despite the title, this is not a first person narrative, though it does focus on one character and his thoughts and psychological state.  Axel Mathers is one among a group of people being imprisoned in Khrenabhar Mountain, in one of several thousand cells embedded in the perimeter of a colossal wheel buried deep inside the mountain.  This miles-wide wheel rotates on a huge axle when the prisoners during the daily three-hour work period all pull on chains.  It takes ten years for the wheel to make one revolution, and thus each prisoner's sentence is ten years.  Presumably this is all an allegory for life and for society, the environment in which we are all trapped, truly alone, forced to work for individual survival and destined to work together, either voluntarily or at the behest of oft inscrutable and arbitrary authorities, if any progress is to be achieved, though said progress may very well be illusory.

Aldiss describes the various ways the people about to be imprisoned respond to the prospect of their ten-year sentence, their delusions and coping mechanisms, and the impact upon their minds of solitary confinement.  We follow Mathers as he explores his cell and learns the ways of Khrenabhar Mountain and faces unforeseen circumstances, like faults in the tremendous and ancient mechanism that provide access to dangerous creatures and hold out the slim possibility of escape or at least some kind of psychological relief.  We also gradually learn about the origin of the centuries-old prison and the myth-shrouded history of Mathers's world, apparently a planet colonized by humans many generations ago who displaced a native race of primitives and set up the tyrannical state of the title, which is in a perpetual state of civil war.

As I have said on this blog before, I always enjoy the portions of adventure stories in which some guy is confined in a cell and studies the graffiti on the walls and tries to contact the other prisoners and undergoes all kinds of psychological trauma and all that, and I certainly enjoyed "Manuscript Found in a Police State."  This is no adventure story--one of the "literary" aspects of the tale is that there is no plot resolution, Mather's ultimate fate and even the true nature of the planet he lives on being quite ambiguous--but while things like self-delusion and the questions of free will are the meat of the story's themes, Aldiss includes plenty of the horror and violence and strange technology we expect in our genre fiction.  I can heartily recommend this one.

Besides here in The Best of British SF 2, "Manuscript Found in a Police State" has been reprinted in Betty Owen's 1974 Nine Strange Stories.

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Three stories worth reading, each supported by insightful ancillary matter--I'm glad I picked up The Best of British SF 2 and hopefully I'll have time to return to it in the future.