Edmund Cooper: "The Menhir," "M 81: Ursa Major," and "The Enlightened Ones"

Let's read the first three stories in my 1969 American edition of Edmund Cooper's News from Elsewhere, Berkeley Medallion X1696, which has a pleasant Kelly Freas cover.  The first edition of News from Elsewhere came out in the U.K. in 1968 with a modified version of a Paul Lehr cover which first appeared on an anthology ostensibly edited by Arthur C. Clarke but perhaps ghost-edited by Robert Silverberg.  (So here is something Robert Silverberg and I may have in common--I once edited an anthology of academic papers which my boss took credit for editing; of course the book I edited was full of execrable drivel penned by my boss's hack friends that no other person would ever read after I had suffered through them, while the Clarke anthology is full of stories by giants in their field like Robert Heinlein, Jack Vance and Isaac Asimov.)

"The Menhir" (1968)

It looks like "The Menhir," which is just seven pages long, made its debut in News from Elsewhere and would go on to be reprinted in two more Cooper anthologies, Unborn Tomorrow (1971) and Jupiter Laughs (1979)--I bought a copy of Jupiter Laughs in South Carolina back in 2015.    

"The Menhir" is one of those post-apocalyptic stories in which Stone Age tribes eke out a parlous existence and are in a constant war with mutants and always on the lookout for signs of mutation among their young.  Every year Runa's tribe travels into the radioactive desert, where everything glows, to present all their children, naked, to the priests who await them under the monument known as the Sightless One.  Any child deemed to be a mutant is slain and its body added to the giant pile of bones that looms next to the Sightless One.  Runa, earlier this year, was captured by mutant raiders; she escaped, but not before being raped and impregnated.  So as her tribe marches to the Sightless One this year she carries with her a little baby with weird growths on his back--she has hidden these growths, a sure sign her son is a mutant, from tribe,  but she won't be able to conceal them from the priests.  So, on the night before they are going to reach the Sightless One, Runa sneaks away with her baby, even though these is no hope of surviving alone in the glowing desert.

Runa falls into a crevice and fears her baby has been crushed.  When she manages to get out of the crevice Runa finds that, in the dark, she somehow wandered right up to the Sightless One.  Another surprise--her baby survived the fall, and being pressed hard against the rock wall scraped off those queer growths of hair and horn and revealed healthy skin.  The baby is saved!  There are even vague hints that maybe the baby will become a leader who will make peace or something.  (In all three of today's stories Cooper tries to generate a sense of wonder in the last few pages by vaguely hinting at some amazing, world-shattering, events in the future.)  

More clear is the story's closing zinger--the radioactive desert is a London that was leveled by nuclear attack and the Sightless One is the statue atop Nelson's column, which has somehow survived, even though the lions around it have been buried.

Acceptable. 

My copies of News from Elsewhere and Jupiter Laughs

"M 81: Ursa Major" (1956)

This one first appeared under the title "M 81: Ursa Major" in the paperback collection Tomorrow's Gift, which has a good Richard Powers cover, but it originally was printed in Fantastic Universe under the title "The End of the Journey."  Like "The Menhir," it would reappear in Unborn Tomorrow and Jupiter Laughs.

Captain Mauris commanded the first space vessel to use the interstellar drive.  That was years ago--today he is commanding the first ship to use the intergalactic drive.  But he is not really in charge--running this mission is the squad of physicists who designed the new propulsion system and will be at its controls on this first history-making first voyage.  Mauris has contempt for the scientists, comparing them to robots, suggesting they have no souls.

One of Cooper's vague and hard-to-pin-down themes in this story is the idea that motion is not harmful but stillness can be.  When the intergalactic drive is activated, the scientists tell Mauris, the ship and its passengers will be perfectly still and almost cease to exist.  (There's a lot of thermodynamics talk about how matter and space are just energy in a different form and so forth.)  Ruminating on this, in a way i was too dim to follow Mauris comes to the conclusion that the jump is going to be dangerously cold--maybe not physically cold, but rather spiritually cold; right before the new drive is to be activated he fortifies himself by donning extra clothing and drinking booze and taking glucose pills.

During the jump all is black and Mauris hears a woman's voice that says cryptic things about him being unborn and needing to learn to wait and how he is everyman, including Adam.  When he wakes up he finds everybody else on the ship has died, and everything is in reverse--the apparatus on the port side of the bridge is now on the starboard side, the legends on meters and gauges are now printed backwards, etc.  He tosses his former comrades out of the airlock and waits for death.  But death does not come; before the ship's food or air runs out it approaches a beautiful green and blue planet and Mauris activates the auto landing system.  The planet has an atmosphere Mauris can breathe, and he takes his clothes off and bathes in a stream.  When he looks back from the stream the space ship is gone.  I guess we are supposed to think the drive sent him back in time to prehistoric Earth and he is Adam and eventually the woman of the voice will appear and be his Eve.

This is a barely acceptable filler story.  Many of Cooper's various themes and ideas in "M 81: Ursa Major"--stillness is more dangerous than motion, you lose your humanity if you overcommit to science and technology, the galactic drive reverses everything, a guy from the future goes back in time to become father of the human race--don't seem to go together particularly well and aren't explained in a way that makes sense or moves the reader.  Did Mauris really survive the jump because he put on an extra sweater and drank whiskey, or are those actions just symbols that demonstrate the fact that he has maintained his humanity when everybody else has lost his soul to science and technology?  Does the way the use of the galactic drive reverses everything signify anything, or is it just there because it is a cool visual?  The voice during the jump and the disappearance of the ship we can only ascribe to divine intervention, or insanity.  Instead of a smoothly operating whole, Cooper's story is a bunch of ideas that might be interesting individually but which are not quite compatible and have been jammed together regardless.        

It is possible I am missing something; in "The Menhir" Cooper doesn't actually say that Runa is in the middle of London at Nelson's column, he just gives lots of clues, and I can imagine somebody who has never been to London or heard of Horatio Nelson missing it.  So maybe I am missing something here in "M 81: Ursa Major."  

"The Enlightened Ones" (1958)

It looks like "The Enlightened Ones" was published first in the collection Tomorrow's Gift and then shortly after in the January 1959 issue of Fantastic Universe.  

"The Enlightened Ones" is like 29 pages long, and it feels long, as it lacks any emotional punch or intellectual stimulation and just drags on to a conclusion you more or less expect.

A spaceship with four human crewmembers lands on a planet; the crew works for a mining firm, Trans-Solar Chemicals, and is searching for valuable minerals.  On the planet they make a discovery that no other human expedition has yet made--they encounter intelligent alien life!  The natives are ape-like primitives with a smelly ugly village of huts.  These primitives are friendly, and over a period of days the explorers achieve some progress in their efforts to learn how to communicate with them.  Gifts are exchanged--to the amazement of the Terrans the locals present them crude bowls made of platinum.  Further exploration proves that there are major deposits of platinum and other valuable minerals on the planet.  The Earthmen figure the natives can be hired as labor to mine all this valuable ore and in the process can be civilized, taught sanitation and hygiene and so forth.  Some members of the crew wonder if perhaps it would be immoral and exploitative to change the natives' society in such a radical way; others think that their first duty is to the human race, and that almost any act that benefits terra, no matter how ruthless, is justified. 

As the story progresses, the humans discover clues that suggest that the natives are not as unsophisticated as they seem.  Finally, the truth is revealed--the natives are superbeings who are at one with the universe, members of the holistic interstellar community or creatures who have put aside all individual ambition and transcended all material needs and acquired the ability to alter matter with their minds.  They have been testing the Earthmen by creating all that platinum; now they know humans are still like children, still slaves to their physical bodies and still driven by dreams of wealth and conquest.  The superbeings erase all accurate memories of their time on the planet from the minds of the four explorers, implant in them false memories of a barren useless world, and hypnotize them into returning to Earth.  Someday the human race may abandon its youth and join the interstellar community of psykers with no material needs or desires, but not today.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down; I generally dislike these stories about wise aliens showing how lame we humans are, and "The Enlightened Ones" is a particularly boring example.  

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All three of these stories do things that other SF stories do, and Cooper doesn't bring anything special to these traditional themes and ideas--he doesn't tell funny jokes, he doesn't write beautiful sentences, he doesn't teach you anything interesting, he doesn't generate any emotion.  Cooper also has a tendency to include in his stories metaphors or philosophical ideas that are not very easy to figure out, and which don't necessarily make common cause with the story's surface themes.  Bland and disappointing, even frustrating.

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You can hang up your vacuum suits and energy pistols because it looks like next time we'll be looking at some mainstream literary fiction.