Frank M. Robinson: "The Maze," "Situation Thirty," and "Untitled Story"

Frank M. Robinson's name came before my eyes recently when I read Harlan Ellison's collection Gentleman Junkie and when I spotted at Wonder Book in Frederick, MD one of the thrillers he co-wrote with Thomas N. Scortia.  Robinson had a wide-ranging career, inside and outside SF, including authoring in 1999 one of those glossy pictorial histories of SF that in 1977 Christopher Priest told us he detests.  (You can read Robinson's Science Fiction of the 20th Century at the internet archive, and Priest's attack on the genre of "slickly printed, glossily jacketed, mass-produced book[s]" that cater to "codswallop-chic: the trendy middle-class taste for nostalgic ephemera" in general and David Kyle's contribution, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction, in particular in Maya 12 & 13 at the link to fanac.org.)  I don't think I have ever read any fiction by Robinson, so let's sample some of his earliest published SF work, three stories that appeared in 1950 and 1951 in Astounding, the magazine to which Robinson's history devotes an entire chapter titled "Astounding: The Class Act."

"The Maze" (1950)

This is one of those switcheroo stories, and also one of those stories about a guy with false memories, the twist ending of which undoes much of what went before.

Our narrator lives on the Terran colony on Venus, where it is so hot everybody wears shorts all the time and sweats constantly.  (Air conditioning was well known by 1950, so its absence is an odd oversight or a deliberate choice of Robinson's, a sign the story may be a farcical satire.)  He works as a PR guy for the colony, coming up with ways to convince Terrans to come to this planet of bad weather and constant danger.  One source of danger is the colonists' crazy laws and customs; for example, you are allowed to murder a guy if you declare your intention to do so--you have 30 days to kill him before it will again be illegal to do so, and, of course, he is allowed to kill you first, if he can.

After a mysterious frame section in italics, the plot proper begins as a long flashback.  The narrator has a girlfriend, and a rich guy named Kennedy wants her, so the big K announces his intention to terminate our hero.  With his money, Kennedy can afford all manner of weapons and surveillance and can hire innumerable assassins and spies, so PR boy has no chance of outfighting him.  He decides to go hide with a friend who is doing research in the remote swamps; on the way out of the city and into the country our dude survives a number of attacks from Kennedy's hirelings.

The narrator's friend is doing research on the intelligence of some bipedal natives.  It is unclear how intelligent these Venusians are, and he has gotten grants to figure out if they should be legally considered animals or people.  As part of his testing, the scientist has been putting captive Venusians in a maze like you would rats, using their favorite food as an incentive (after starving them for a few days, naturally.)  But the results of the tests are inconclusive; instead of getting better and better at navigating the maze, the natives seem to get bored with the maze after solving it once, regardless of how hungry they are.

The big surprise ending is that the Venusians are much smarter than humans and have pulled a switcheroo on the narrator and the scientist--in the period covered by the italicized frame portions fo the story, the PR guy and the scientist are captives of the natives, who are now giving them intelligence tests.  The narrator is not really being pursued by the agents of Kennedy--the narrator is in a cage much like the cage the scientist put the Venusians in, and the scenario of being marked for murder by Kennedy, and the series of attacks on him, are being fed into his mind as a sort of illusion or dream, knitted almost seamlessly with his memories of his mundane real life visit to his friend out in the swamps.  Every time one of these false memory dreams ends the scientist has to explain to him again that the Kennedy murder caper is not real, but being imprisoned by the natives is all too real.  So far the PR guy has passed all the tests by figuring out how to survive the illusory attacks.  But will he continue to pass the tests?  And if he should fail a test and get killed in his mind, will that drive him insane?   

An acceptable story that moves briskly and is entertaining enough as it proceeds.  It seems to pursue several themes we have seen in SF stories we have read in the past, stories we might classify as left-wing or anti-Western or misanthropic; I refer to Robinson's portrayals of advertisers as a bunch of liars, the common people as a bunch of dopes, colonization of other planets as a folly committed by a bunch of merciless imperialist exploiters who abuse both human dupes and noble natives who live in harmony with nature and are in fact our betters, even though they don't seem to have any property or technology.

"The Maze" would be included in the 1981 Robinson collection A Life in the Day of... and before that appeared in French and Italian anthologies.  Mamma mia!

"Situation Thirty" (1951)

This is a classic style SF story with space navies, space empires, mass death, and a hero who solves the problem presented by the plot with intelligence, knowledge of science, and trickery.  It is pretty good.

A Terran Space Navy fleet enters a new system and is ambushed, with the result that the entire fleet except a destroyer is wiped out, and that small ship is crippled, its weapons and engines and most of its electronics out of commission.  The alien fleet departs, leaving behind a single battleship, a warship far larger than the surviving Terran ship.  The battleship tries to communicate with the Terrans, and finally hits upon a signaling system based on the language of a civilization both species have encountered in the past, a signaling system based on flashing lights in various color patterns.  They demand the Terrans' surrender.

Terran naval officers are conditioned to be incapable of surrender, or even considering defeat.  Terrans must fight to the death!  So the top surviving officer on the little vessel is psychologically compelled to fight on, whatever way he can.  This guy is a psychologist, and is able to figure out a bunch of stuff about the aliens based on their behavior.  He deduces that the aliens who ambushed the Terran fleet are biologically and culturally very similar to us humans, and we readers know he is right because like half the story is set on the alien ship.  The officer devises a scheme that takes advantage of his knowledge of human psychology.  He has a hand-sized cube of metal, perfectly harmless, sent over to the aliens.  He is confident that the aliens will be flummoxed by this cube, fearing it is a trap and so worried by it that they will let the Terrans go, or even surrender to them.

The plan more or less succeeds, but Robinson still gives us a twist ending that sees the psychologist hoist by his own petard; luckily, an old-fashioned spaceman who is skeptical of all this psychology stuff and who has not been conditioned steps in and picks up where the psychologist left off, ensuring the Earthers survive this adventure.  I guess Robinson wants us to know that, however awesome science may be, it has its limits. 

I like it.  "Situation Thirty" would be reprinted in Gordon R. Dickson's Combat SF.  

"Untitled Story" (1951)    

"Untitled Story" is pretty long story (isfdb calls it a novella) that has a lot in common with hard boiled detective stories and with van Vogt tales of a guy becoming aware that the universe is secretly under the control of warring elites with super technology, and it has a sense of wonder ending.  It seems like this is a rare Robinson story, never reprinted after being published in Astounding.  It was, however, adapted for use on the radio program Dimension X, which fact is advertised in the issue of Astounding in which it appeared.

Our hero is a private detective in the 20th century, and he is hired by the corrupt mayor of Chicago to investigate an oddball who sold the mayor a potion that the weirdo promised would cure the politician's  inoperative cancer and even offer him tremendous longevity.  The mayor hasn't drunk the elixir because he received a mysterious phone call that warned him it was a deadly poison; he gives the PI the vial of fluid to aid him in his investigation.

The private dick realizes that the mayor's sexalicious blonde secretary was listening in on his convo with His Honor, so when bizarre futuristic death traps almost kill him--and succeed in killing his dog!--he figures blondie tipped off somebody, probably somebody connected to the elixir salesman!  There follow many plot twists, additional minor characters, and many scenes of chases and of violence--people get captured, people get killed.  The detective gets drugged and hypnotized and works for one side at one point and the other side at another point, and is fed all kinds of lies by all kinds of people.  The detective actually gets killed at one point, and, like his dog, comes back to life (sort of.)  Robinson does a good job with the strange technology and the action scenes--this story is pretty entertaining.

Eventually the amazing truth is revealed.  It turns out the 20th century is often visited by time travelers from the distant future, when people have lifespans of 1,000 years or more.  These chrononauts are like students who disguise themselves as natives to learn about ancient life by living among us doing mundane jobs for a few years at a time.  The blonde secretary is one such time traveler; on other trips to the past she has been an Egyptian priestess in the time of the pharaohs, for example.  These students are severely enjoined to not let natives learn about the reality of time travel--natives who do so are to be killed to hide the secret!

The elixir salesman is another time traveler, the leader of a proscribed political party.  He came back to 1950s Chi-town to save the corrupt Chicago mayor from cancer so the mayor would continue in office and affect politics in such a way that it would pave the way for elixir guy's party to come out on top many centuries from now.  The secretary and her fellow time travelers are trying to stop this guy (they made that mysterious  phone call to the mayor, for example), and the detective has become mixed up in their struggle, each side at one point or another manipulating him to aid them or just trying to kill him.  As I mentioned, he is actually killed, but a time traveler just goes back in time to make sure he escapes the event that slew him; a similar stratagem also brings the dog back to life.  Of course, pulling such shenanigans creates new branches in the time stream or whatever they call it in this story, and risks throwing history out of whack in unexpected ways. 

To make a long story short, the detective and the blonde fall in love, they defeat the elixir salesman by chasing him back in time to the age before the rise of life on Earth, where the detective and he wrestle to the death beside a pool of lava, and then our heroes are hauled before the court of the time police of the future because they have changed history with their reckless adventures.  The blonde is forbidden from ever travelling through time again, and she elects to stay with the detective in the 20th century.  But wait, isn't she going to live another 975 or so years while he only has another 50 or 60 years to go, maybe 70 if he is really conscientious about eating his vegetables?  Oh, don't you worry about these love birds!  Before anybody can stop him, the PI drinks from that vial, which he has kept with him intact through all kinds of fights and accidents.  Now he and the blonde can live together from 195X to 295X, observing all the exciting political and technological and social changes that will take place!  The dream of every Astounding reader!

This is a good story; Robinson handles all that stuff I sometimes talk about, like style and pacing, quite well, and the detective jazz and the SF gadgets are all fun.  I'm a little surprised this story hasn't been reprinted; maybe its length makes it hard to fit in anthologies, or maybe my taste doesn't match that of most editors and/or most readers?  Well, "Untitled Story" gets a thumbs up from me.

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I liked these stories more than I thought I might; they are just the sort of stories you expect to read in Astounding, "The Maze" done to an acceptable standard and "Situation Thirty" and "Untitled Story" done quite well.  I think I'll dig up some more Robinson stories from 1950s magazines available at the internet archive for the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!