De Camp in his intro to "Proposal," which made its debut in Startling, talks about the theory of humor (a joke must contain surprise and incongruity or irrationality, but will not be funny to those who hold dear something the joke exposes to scorn or ridicule) and says that this story was inspired by the experience of sitting through his nine-year-old son's school play, a performance of Engelbert Humperdink's Hansel and Gretel.
"Proposal" is like a sitcom episode. Alice Wernecke is a twenty-something school teacher in suburban Pennsylvania, a virgin who is looking for Mr. Right. Men--including a jerk who tries to use his superior position in the public school hierarchy to get her to succumb to his desires--pursue her, but she fends them off, preserving herself for a man she really wants to marry. Alice diets so she too won't get fat like her roommate, fellow schoolteacher Inez Rogell, a woman no man wants to date, and Alice also has an immigrant mother with an accent who gives advice on how to get a man.
Friendly space aliens land in Africa and seek to learn all about the human race. Individual aliens go to different parts of the world to live among us natives and learn our ways. One alien, Kstaho (Alice pronounces it "Stanko") is chaperoned by a young State Department employee, Byron Matthews, around the Philadelphia area. Matthews is friends with the family of one of Alice's students, and Alice thus meets the diplomat and the alien. Alice and the attractive Byron hit it off and want to start dating, but Stanko, as an anthropologist, wants not only to sit in on Alice's classes and Inez's Rogell's students' performance of Hansel and Gretel, but to accompany Alice and Byron on their dates! This guy is in the way of their budding love connection, but Alice and Byron can't give this creature from the stars the brush off because his race is very sensitive and likely to commit suicide if insulted. Stanko even starts dating Alice himself, and then, not realizing the realities of human sex and reproduction, offers Alice a proposal of marriage!
When sexual reproduction among humans is explained to him, Stanko is embarrassed and begins the process of committing suicide. Inez Rogell, who has given up all hope of a sex life, and, like Alice, does not actually enjoy being a teacher, saves the day when she offers to marry Stanko. A sexless life seeing new things in outer space is preferable to her than a sexless life as a school teacher in PA. Byron proposes to Alice, she accepts, and then he tells her he is getting a promotion and they will soon be moving to Stanko's planet!
"Proposal" is merely acceptable in my opinion, though I expect today's woke audiences may be offended by it, as much of its humor (which doesn't actually make you laugh, but maybe smile a little) relies on stereotypes about women and African-Americans (there is a "colored" kid in Inez Rogell's class who is so scared of Stanko he can't sing his part of Hansel and Gretel) and a blasé attitude about what today we would consider career-as-governor-and-senior-citizen-exterminator-ending sexual harassment.
It is interesting that de Camp took the opportunity of SF: Author's Choice to highlight a story full of sitcom jokes instead of one that taught science or offered adventure thrills or had something to say about the human condition, but maybe "Proposal" does have something to say about the human condition--that no matter the circumstances, people will pursue love and sex. People in Europe in the early 1940s, living under the threat of having the Luftwaffe or RAF drop a bomb on their heads or being drafted into a rifle squad or thrown into a death camp, people surrounded by death and destruction and conscious that their whole way of life was threatened, fell in love and pursued their sexual desires, so why wouldn't suburban Pennsylvanians do the same in the presence of a friendly alien? Life goes on!
"Judgment Day" is barely a science fiction story; mostly it is a mainstream literary story, the autobiography of an alienated misanthrope, an intelligent man who has no social skills and is a failure with women (a significant proportion of SF fans have viewed themselves this way, and wikipedia is telling me this story is semi-autobiographical.)
Wade Ormont describes in some detail how, as a child, he was very smart but lacking in tact, and also thin, weak and clumsy. We get page after page relating how the other boys bullied him; because he was too feeble to fight them, and because reporting them to the adults or crying only invited more torment, he learned to just endure the abuse heaped upon him, resisting in no way and showing no emotion. Years of this lead to an inability to express any feelings, to "put himself out there," and so he didn't date any women until his thirties, after he had become a respected physicist and had even worked on the Manhattan Project. His incapacity to display any human warmth lead to the collapse of his brief marriage.
What makes this a science fiction story is the fact that, at age 53, Dr. Ormont has discovered a relatively simple way to cause a chain reaction that can blow up the Earth; any nation with access to nuclear material can accomplish it. Ormont assumes that if he writes up this discovery it will eventually leak to communist and third world dictatorships and within a few years some psycho will, perhaps after trying to blackmail the world and setting off a cataclysmic war, trigger the chain reaction and exterminate the human race. Ormont has spent some days considering whether to write up a report or to destroy his findings and keep his discovery a secret, but last night was Mischief Night (like Bon Jovi, a lamentable New Jersey phenomena some of my readers may not be familiar with) and the neighborhood boys vandalized his home and automobile, so he decides to write the report.
A competent story, maybe marginally good?
Alfred Ten Eyck is a loser. He had to leave Princeton and return home to the Adirondacks of upstate New York when his father died. His father left him some land, including an island with a sort of resort camp for summer visitors, but he can't seem to make it profitable. When America entered WW2 he volunteered but caught TB in training camp. He married a woman who quickly left him when it became apparent he couldn't satisfy her sexually. The people in the village consider him a wealthy outsider and dislike him, and his money is running out as all his business ventures, a bowling alley among them, fail.
Alfred's friend and our narrator, W. Wilson Newbury, was in Europe during and just after the war, and Alfred contacted him, asking him to bring across the Atlantic to him an ancient oil lamp he had bought via wire in Paris. The seller claims it is from fabled Atlantis. While bringing it over from the Old World, Newbury had crazy dreams, and after he is in possession of it Alfred has the same dreams, of a tentacled monster on a throne. The monster, a sort of monster-god, requests a sacrifice, and tells Alfred it will turn him from a loser into a winner in return for the sacrifice. Alfred is willing to make a sacrifice, but bad weather keeps him from leaving the island to buy a pig or something else suitable, and his efforts to capture a snapping turtle comically fail. Then the island sinks (just like Atlantis, right?) and Alfred is drowned. Newbury escapes, however.
I guess this is supposed to be funny, but it is only faintly amusing, and the jocular tone short circuits any thrills or chills we might get from the weird elements. Merely acceptable.
(The more I think about this story the worse it seems. Why does Alfred, who is low on funds, invest in an ancient lamp? Does he know it will put him in touch with a monster god who can change his luck? And why is it a lamp? Why isn't it a dagger or an incense burner or a cup that catches blood or something, something that is linked to a sacrifice? A lamp is something you use to light your way--shouldn't a Lovecraftian story about an ancient lamp be about using the lamp to help you see into other dimensions or see the future or something like that? Also, Alfred never puts oil in the lamp or uses it as a light source--any Atlantean object would have served the purpose the lamp serves in this story. Lazy!)
"The Lamp" was the first published of a series of stories about W. Wilson Newbury which would be collected in 1980 in The Purple Pterodactyls. I wonder if all these stories involve Newbury's friends getting killed--sounds like a laugh riot!
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Looking back I see a theme running through all these stories: life is a nightmare because it is so hard to engineer a fulfilling career and a fulfilling sex life. I did not expect reading these stories to be so depressing!
"Lament by a Maker" is written in the voice of a hack SF author whose published stories are denounced by letter writers. The poem is in three stanzas, and each is a parody of a type of SF story; the narrator has tried his hand successively at each as it came into vogue, but never achieved popularity. The first stanza is about planetary romance like the Mars stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Leigh Brackett, the second gadget-heavy space operas like those of Edmond Hamilton or E. E. Smith, the third SF stories about psychology and mental powers, like those of A. E. van Vogt and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. I guess this verse is a fun in-joke for people knowledgeable about the history of SF before the end of the Second World War, but it is not a particularly good poem. For one thing there is no climax or resolution; through all three stanzas the writer says he doesn't know why readers claim his tales are boring, and the poem would be improved if in a fourth stanza he seized on an answer (perhaps a comically wrong one) of why his work was frowned upon or came up with a new tack to try, like switching to westerns or confession-type stories or something.
These four items are all OK, but no big deal. De Camp seems like a capable professional writer, but nothing here is inspired or excellent. Maybe these pieces are useful as reflections of the SF community, and the wider world, of their day, with the World War II and Cold War references and the depictions of (what a man supposes about) women's yearnings and so on.
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More short stories by a Golden Age SF writer pulled from my anthology shelves in our next episode!
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| MPoricus Library: Paperback SF anthologies |
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| MPorcius Library: Hardcover SF anthologies |
Very nice Library! I see plenty of wonderful books in that photo!
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