Men, Martians and Machines by Eric Frank Russell

Let's grapple with another of my South Carolina purchases, the 1965 Berkley Medallion paperback edition of Eric Frank Russell's 1955 collection Men, Martians and Machines, loot from my visit to The Book Dispensary in Columbia.  Men, Martians and Machines has been reprinted many times, and is apparently widely considered a classic.  (A 1985 British edition that you can read at the internet archive includes an introduction by George Zebrowski that catalogs the praise Men, Martians and Machines has received.)  So let's check out these stories from the 1940s and 1950s, which, the cover blurbs announce, follow the adventures of the crew of the space ship Marathon in "the outer galaxies."  

"Jay Score" (1941)

I read this tale, which debuted in Astounding along with Robert Heinlein's famed "Universe," in 2016 when I read The Best of Eric Frank Russell.  You can check out the first of my blog posts about The Best of Eric Frank Russell, which includes discussion of "Jay Score," by clicking this link.  Or, for maximum convenience, just read the pasting of the "Jay Score" passages below:

In the 23rd century a space ship gets hit by a small asteroid, and the multiracial crew finds they are hurtling towards the sun!  While the rest of the crew takes cover in the most heavily shielded part of the vessel, expert pilot Jay Score stays in the searing hot cockpit, steering the ship on a one in ten thousand chance course past old Sol.  The ship makes it, but poor Jay is burnt within an inch of his life!  Thankfully, back on Earth he becomes the first ever man to have his brain put in a robot body!

The thing about this competent but basically routine story that will stick out to 21st-century readers is how it addresses the issue of race. Russell uses the story to promote racial harmony and the idea that different people's different abilities can complement each other (he is "celebrating diversity" in today's argot) but the way he does it, focusing on fanciful biological differences between ethnic groups instead of on human equality, would at best be considered "problematic" by today's cultural arbiters, and at worst it would be career suicide.

On the first page of the story we are told that, since white people invented space drives, only white people are ever hired as engineers on space ships--whites "know most about them [rockets] and can nurse them like nobody else."  This doesn't really make much sense; maybe it is an appeal to the idea of "racial memory?"  The special ability Russell assigns to black people is approximately as silly: "All ship's surgeons are black Terrestrials because for some reason none can explain no Negro gets gravity-bends or space nausea."

Anyway, the white engineers, the black doctor, and the crew's tentacled Martians (who need less oxygen than humans and can better stand extremes of heat) all contribute to the ship's and the crew's survival.  Presumably it is significant that hero Jay is "neither black nor white;" whether this means he is biracial or an Asian or Native American is unclear.

Russell's pacing and style are good, and he makes the Martians interesting (they love chess, for one thing--the cover of this collection illustrates "Jay Score") and I have a weakness for stories about space travel, so I'm giving this one a thumbs up.

On rereading "Jay Score" four years later I find it seems I misunderstood the story's twist ending.  I thought Jay Score was a heroic man of indeterminate ethnicity who sacrificed his body to save the ship and his comrades, and that at the end of the story his brain was installed in a robot body.  In fact, for the bulk of the story Russell is just tricking you into thinking Jay Score is a man of superior physical and mental fortitude--the twist ending of "Jay Score" is that the title character was a robot all along, the twentieth of the J-series of robots.  Well, isn't my face red! 

(Am I crazy, or is making the reader think he is reading a tale of great personal sacrifice and of cutting edge medicine and then pulling the rug out from under him kind of lame?)

"Mechanistria" (1942)

"Jay Score" was set on the interplanetary freighter Upskadaska City, but at the start of "Mechanistria" the entire crew--the narrator (the ship's sergeant-as-arms), the black doctor, the comic relief Martians, Jay Score the robot whom everybody treats like a person, and all the rest--are transferred to the Marathon, a revolution in ship design capable of interstellar travel.  On the Marathon they join a bunch of scientists and government employees and before you know it they are approaching an extrasolar planet.

Not long after landing, the ship is attacked by an army of machines that range from the size of dogs to the size of railway cars, all of them bristling with pincer arms and tentacles.  The narrator and company put up a spirited resistance with energy pistols ("needle-ray guns"), grenades ("one of those eggs known as a pocket A-bomb") and an automatic cannon (an eight-barreled "pom-pom") but all the Terrans are seized and carried off; the Martians manage to escape.

In captivity, the humans and Jay Score meet some lobster-people who can communicate telepathically.  The lobsetermen are natives of this star system, and explain that their water-covered planet is at war with this machine-dominated planet, because the machines, who share a communal intelligence, are mystified by the individualism of flesh-and-blood creatures, and dissect all they can get their hands on in hopes of learning the secret of individuality.  

The Martians rescue their Terran shipmates, an operation facilitated by the fact that one of the rules of the war between the machines and the lobstermen is a prohibition on escape attempts--both lobstermen and machines are taken aback at the Solarian determination to break out of the clink.  The lobstermen don't just refuse to accompany our heroes to freedom, they even upbraid them for their disgraceful behavior!  The Marathon returns to our solar system laden with samples from the world of machines.

I like violent adventure stories and I like the individualism vs collectivism theme, but "Mechanistria" didn't do much for me.  Russell fails to imbue any of the fight scenes or horror scenes with any human feeling, there is no thrill during the fights, no dismay when the narrator comes upon evidence that one of his comrades has been cut to pieces without benefit of anesthesia, no relief when the survivors make their getaway.  One problem is that these Jay Score stories are all written in a jocular, smart-alecky style that keeps you from taking anything seriously.  Another problem is the characters--they are all flat and uninteresting, each equipped with a single wacky personality trait that does nothing to drive the plot but just serves to present opportunities for (weak) comedy--one human who goes unnamed in "Mechanistria" always has his beloved wrench (or, as Russell calls it, "spanner,") with him; one Martian loves to take naps.  Successful stories are often built around the personality and decisions of a compelling character--things happen in The Iliad, Moby Dick and Watamote because of the remarkable psychologies of Achilles, Ahab, and Tomoko Kuroki, psychologies which drive them to make decisions that have tragic consequences.  But in "Mechanistria" the characters' personalities and decisions don't drive the plot, the people are just along for the ride and do not elicit the sympathy or interest of the reader.

The optimistic theme I detected in "Jay Score" of diverse crewmembers' different skills complementing each other seems too have degenerated in "Mechanistria" into a lame depiction of humans as goofballs who need superior beings--the Martians and a robot--to pull their bacon out of the fire.

Barely acceptable.   

"Mechanistra" first appeared in Astounding, where it was adorned with illustrations by William Augstin Kolliker; Kolliker's depiction of the pom-pom appears to be directly based on photos of the 2-pounder anti-aircraft guns mounted on British warships during World War II.  The story has been widely reprinted, including in several German magazines and books.

"Symbiotica" (1943)

"Symbiotica" made its debut in an issue of Astounding full of stories by people we care about (sometimes against our better judgement!) here at MPorcius Fiction Log, like A. E. van Vogt, Raymond F. Jones, Fredric Brown, Henry Kuttner and Frank Belknap Long.  Of the stories by this gallery of fascinating figures in the issue I have only written about Kuttner's "The Proud Robot," so maybe I should make time to give the October 1943 Astounding a thorough going over.  Well, today we can make a start to such a project with our examination of "Symbiotica."  "Symbiotica" has appeared in such important anthologies as Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas's Adventures in Time and Space and Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg's The Great SF Stories: Volume 5, and I certainly hope I like it as much as did those four editors.  

Ah, as so often happens in life, hopes are dashed.  "Symbiotica" is long (50 pages, over twice as long as "Jay Score") and tedious, with a routine and repetitive plot.  All my criticisms of "Mechanistria" hold for "Symbiotica:" the total lack of interesting characters means the story has no hold on the reader, and Russell's jocular tone and incessant supply of low key jokes undermines the effect of the many scenes of violence and gore.       

The plot:  The Marathon lands on a planet inhabited by primitive green-hued people who have a symbiotic relationship with plants, most prominently huge trees of various sorts.  Irresponsible humans, despite the best efforts of Jay Score the robot, piss off the natives and a fight breaks out.  Ray guns and grenades only barely prove a match for the various plants, who can fling volleys of poison darts at you or knock you out with gas or dissolve you with acid, and we readers are treated to many pages during which the narrator and other boring people are held captive by the aliens.  The narrator does almost nothing besides getting knocked out and getting captured.  The robot and the Martians rescue most of the humans and the ship returns to Earth.

"Symbiotica" feels like a shaggy dog story, a story with no climax in which the characters accomplish nothing.  Barely acceptable.  Maybe Healy and McComas in the 1940s and Asimov and Greenberg over thirty years later chose it for anthologies because it has a little speculative biology in it and they hoped to present SF as a literature that was about science and considered entertainment value of secondary importance in their selections?  

"Mesmerica" (1955)

"Mesmerica" made its debut in this book, Men, Martians and Machines, and has only appeared in one anthology, a German one that reuses Richard Powers' cover of the edition of Edmond Hamilton's The Star of Life that I own.  (I blogged about The Star of Life back in 2018, and if you want to read me gush about how much I love Hamilton and Powers just click the link.  TLDR: Hamilton does all the things in The Star of Life that I have been bitching Russell fails to do in these Marathon stories: produce an adventure story that has human drama and features characters who have compelling personalities and whose decisions drive the plot.) 

"Mesmerica" follows the same template as "Mechanistria" and "Symbiotica."  The Marathon lands on a planet, and a fight with the natives erupts, and some Terrans get captured, and Jay Score the robot and the Martians use their special powers to resolve the whole issue and then the Marathon leaves the planet with a sample of the native life.  (Lots of SF is about paradigm shifts or revolutions--The Star of Life by Edmond Hamilton depicts such a radical change--but in Russell's Marathon stories contact with Solarians does not wreak any change on the various natives.)  In this case the natives have mental abilities that allow them to make humans see things that are not there, and to even affect human thinking, making humans squabble among themselves, for example.  "Mesmerica" is probably a little better than the two proceeding stories, as it feels a little shorter and the narrator is more active, but it only rises above them to the level of "acceptable."

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"Barely acceptable" has to be my verdict for this collection as a whole; I don't think I can recommend Men, Martians and Machines to anyone beyond those with some sort of deep interest in Russell's career or World War II-era Astounding.  I certainly can't recommend it to casual readers looking for an entertaining or emotionally moving or intellectually stimulating read.  

If there are people who come to MPorcius Fiction Log looking to be directed to reads that are entertaining and emotionally affecting I can, however, recommend highly another NSFW manga about the difficult emotional lives of Japanese high school girls, the aforementioned saga of anti-hero loner Tomoko Kuroki, WataMote by Nico Tanigawa, the proper title of which is Watashi ga Motenai no wa Dou Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui!  (Equally commendable is the spinoff Tomomote, which relates some of our heroine's adventures during her middle school years, and also worth checking out is the anthology of stories about Tomoko by other authors--several of them are very funny.)  WataMote is engrossing because it is not only amusing, but because of the tension and ambiguity in the portrait the author crafts of Tomoko and in the emotional responses he elicits from the reader--Tomoko is both victim and villain, and readers, drawn to sympathize with her plight and identify with her unhappiness are also forced to recognize the extent to which her own misbehavior has led her to one humiliating predicament after another; at the same time I felt compelled to deplore her selfishness, her callousness, the way she abuses and exploits others, I could not help but admire Tomoko's insistence on maintaining her independence and individuality, whatever pitfalls such determination lead her to walk right into.