Fifties SF stories by A Budrys, R Bradbury, & R Matheson

Years ago, in a thrift store in the Middle West if memory serves, I bought hardcover copies of those volumes of Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison's Decade series of anthologies that cover the 1940s and 1950s.  A stamp on the first pages of both books certifies that they were once in the library of one Gary E. Colburn.  Today I'm cracking open the volume covering the Fifties.  Mr. Colburn's copy is an American edition printed in 1978; the original edition of Decade: The 1950s was issued in Britain in 1976.  I guess the same plates were used to print both editions--the text of this copy uses British punctuation, with no period after "Mr" and single instead of double quote marks.  

Harry Harrison writes the introduction, presenting a sort of standard history of SF and offering conventional opinions, with some personal notes: the '30s pulps were crude and garish but Harrison and Aldiss and a legion of other SF fans and future pros devoured them; the '40s were dominated by John W. Campbell, Jr. and Astounding; in the '50s arose new editors and new magazines like Horace L. Gold with Galaxy and Anthony Boucher with F&SF, SF writers gave more attention to the soft sciences like sociology and psychology, and the focus of SF publishing began to shift from magazines to books.  The most remarkable thing about Harrison's intro is his praise for Robert Crane's Hero's Walk, a book which I found exasperating.

Now let's read a few of the stories which Aldiss and Harrison selected to represent the decade of the Korean War, the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising, and "We will bury you."  (Feel free to think of the 1950s as the decade of the plastic hula hoop, the rock 'n' roll sock hop, and I Love Lucy if you are trying to cultivate a good attitude about life or something.) 

"The Edge of the Sea" by Algis Budrys (1958) 

"The Edge of the Sea" first was published in Venture, where it was the cover story.  In his intro, Harrison tells us that Venture "was the first SF magazine consistently to use adult themes."  Alright, let's try some "adult themes" on for size.  

The recurring theme of Algis Budrys's work, and I guess it is an "adult" one, is the question of what it means to be a man.  (We've solved this issue nowadays by asserting that a man and manliness is whatever you say it is, but life wasn't so easy in the past as it is in the 21st century.)  The protagonist of "The Edge of the Sea" is a self-sufficient and independent man of great physical strength and indomitable will.  Budrys lets us know just what a hard ass this dude is with a line that may shock all you foodies out there who have considered opinions about when to harvest avocados or what single source dark chocolate is the best: "Dan Henry had never cared how his food tasted."

(I think Budrys chose his protagonist's name with the intention of reminding readers of John Henry and Paul Bunyan, the muscular heroes of American tall tales of feats of strength.)

This rugged individualist is driving down Route 1 down in Florida, the Atlantic on either side of him as he heads for Key West, when he spots a metal thing the size of a car covered in barnacles at the base of the road; we SF fans assume this must be an alien space ship that has been beached by the rough seas after being underwater for years.  Dan Henry is sure he can get rights to this piece of salvage and make a stack of cash.  So he climbs down to the water's edge, even though a hurricane is coming, to secure the thing to the shore by tying it up with a make shift rope and moving big rocks around it.  He pushes his muscles to the limit and risks his life battling the elements to make sure his treasure isn't carried away by tide or gale.

In his quest to secure his rights to this UFO, Dan Henry doesn't just challenge the power of nature--he resists the authority of government!  A cop comes by and, suspicious about what Dan Henry is up to in the middle of a god-damned hurricane, tries to arrest him, but Dan Henry outfights this agent of the state, fearing arrest will somehow jeopardize his salvage rights to the metal artifact.  

The UFO begins showing signs of life, shooting a ray up into the sky, and the cop drives off to get help.  He brings back a professor, another representative of authority for Dan Henry to triumph over--Dan Henry is sure the thing he found is an alien craft, and the academic is skeptical.  But not for long!  A larger space craft arrives to retrieve Dan Henry's discovery with tractor beams.  Rather than let his treasure slip through his grasp, Dan Henry jumps on the thing, which must be a robot probe or scout or something, and rides it up to the big space ship!  Nothing on Earth or in Heaven is going to keep Dan Henry from achieving his goals!  As the story ends we can't be sure if Dan Henry is about to enjoy the greatest adventure of all time--First Contact with space aliens!--or just get killed.

(Dan Henry's ride is reminiscent of the famous scene in Dr. Strangelove, released some seven years after this story was published.)

While we might interpret Budrys's story as romanticizing the manly man who sets himself goals and overcomes all efforts of nature, government and the intellectual elite to discourage him, the author doesn't sugarcoat the costs of living such a life--the crazy lengths Dan Henry goes to to assert his independence and triumph over the natural and the artificial environment put his health, liberty and very life at risk, and make of him something of an outcast from society.  And Dan Henry, like an addict or a man driven by irrational passions, is conflicted about his own risky decisions, not really knowing why he does the things he does. 

Not bad.  The themes and ideas are fine, but Budrys's descriptions of Dan Henry's struggles trying to move rocks and survive gale force winds are a little too long; his description of the ray that shoots out of the alien artifact is also too long.  While trying to craft powerful images and set a mood Budrys has a tendency to go a little overboard, to overexplain and overdescribe; I find myself getting bogged down in Budrys's paragraphs.  

"The Edge of the Sea" not only impressed Aldiss and Harrison, but other editors as well, including Judith Merrill, who included it in her third Year's Greatest SF anthology and Damon Knight who put it in his oft-reprinted Worlds To Come.  The story also was translated into French and Italian--you can see Dan Henry tied to a guard rail, his car precariously balanced over the Atlantic, and the alien probe transmitting its message to the mother ship in Karel Thole's cover for 1966's Urania #444. 

Karel Thole ignored all of Budrys's talk about barnacles

"The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury (1951)

If Budrys goes overboard and overwrites, Bradbury in this brief story is starkly succinct.  Addressing some of the same themes as Fahrenheit 451, "The Pedestrian" is a lament about the corrosive effect of television on our culture and our communities.  It is well done, but slight, more of an idea and a setting than a full story with plot and character.

Leonard Mead is a writer who hasn't written in years because books and magazines are no longer produced--everybody watches TV all the time.  Mead loves to take long walks at night.  For ten years he has taken these walks on the overgrown sidewalks, and he has never once encountered another walker, and he almost never sees an automobile--everybody spends the evening at home watching TV.  There is almost no crime, so the city has only one robot police car left.  When it by chance comes upon Mead, he is arrested and taken to the loony bin because it is assumed anybody who takes walks instead of staying home watching TV must be insane.

        

"The Pedestrian," isfdb is telling me, first appeared in The Reporter.  The Decade: The 1950s lists a copyright of 1952 held by the publishers of F&SF, where it appeared in '52.  Bradbury edited a SF anthology himself in 1952, Timeless Stories of Today and Tomorrow, and "The Pedestrian" was the story of his own he included in it.  Since then the tale has been reprinted many times, including in the Bradbury collections Golden Apples of the Sun and S is for Space.

"The Last Day" by Richard Matheson (1953)

"The Last Day" is an affirmation of the value of religious faith and the family and a demonstration of the vacuity of hedonism and sensuality.  Like Bradbury's "The Pedestrian" it is an idea story in which the dystopian setting is sort of the point, but unlike Bradbury's tale it has a sort of inner core of hope and an actual plot in which a character makes decisions and grows.

The world is doomed as the sun expands!  The end is mere days away!  Society collapses, with people committing crimes of even the worst sort just for kicks, killing themselves or indulging in sexual license and inebriation.

On the Earth's last day the main character wakes up and looks back with some regret on a night of drunken debauchery and "animalistic" sex with women and friends.  He also regrets not having gotten married when he had the chance.  A skeptic, he doesn't get along with his religious mother, but decides to make the dangerous trip out of Manhattan to the suburbs to spend his final day--everybody's final day--with his mother, his sister, and his sister's husband and child.  He sees how his mother's faith in God comforts her and gives her the strength to act decently and face doom with equanimity, and they spend their last moments sitting on the porch together.

"The Last Day" succeeds in its goals, and I can't say there is anything wrong with it, but it is leaving me kind of cold.  I guess I have to admit that I am allergic to schmaltz about motherhood.   

After debuting in Amazing, "The Last Day" would be included in several Matheson collections, including The Shores of Space, and a few anthologies, Michael Ashley's The History of the Science Fiction Magazine: Part 3 among them.

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Three stories about the individual and his relationship to the community, about people who go their own way, diverging from the herd or bucking the establishment, and the costs such individualism may incur as well as the possible benefits of going maverick.  Bradbury and Matheson in their pieces also seem to be expressing fears about social changes they are witnessing in the 1950s, the influence of mass media in the form of television for Bradbury and a loosening of traditional morals and a weakening of religious belief on the part of Matheson.  

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Over the years, as this blog has skulked about the series of tubes we call the interweb, I have read four additional stories that Aldiss and Harrison included in Decade: The 1950s, some of them in other venues.  There's James H. Schmitz's "Grandpa," which Harrison here suggests is a work about ecology published years before the word was in common currency.  (One of the weird things about Decade: The 1950s is that, in his Introduction, Harrison says that the diminishing importance of Astounding in the Fifties is reflected in the fact that none of the stories in the volume was first printed in Astounding, but in reality "Grandpa" actually did first appear in Astounding.)  Also Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain," Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "Two-Handed Engine" (credited here solely to Kuttner) and Jerome Bixby's "The Holes Around Mars."