Frank M. Robinson: "The Reluctant Heroes," "Two Weeks in August," and "The Fire and the Sword"

I liked the three 1950-51 stories from Astounding by Frank M. Robinson that we read in our last blog post enough that today we are reading three stories Robinson got published in Galaxy in 1951.  

"The Reluctant Heroes" 

The issue of Galaxy in which "The Reluctant Heroes" made its debut includes reviews by Groff Conklin of three books, Stanton Coblentz's After 12,000 Years, A. E. van Vogt's The House that Stood Still, and Robert E. Howard's Conan the Conqueror (AKA The Hour of the Dragon), and to the amazement of this reader he argues that Coblentz's book is the best of the three!  Conklin himself seems to be a little surprised by this turn of events, and his dismissive descriptions of the van Vogt detective caper and the Conan novel make them sound like fun reads, while he fails to make the Coblentz satire sound like anything other than a tedious slog.  I haven't read After 12,000 Years myself, so I can't really judge, but reading Conklin's reviews makes me want to read The House that Stood Still and The Hour of the Dragon again, and has not inspired any urge to hunt up After 12,000 Years.   

"The Reluctant Heroes" (the real reason we directed our browser to the internet archive scan of the January '51 issue of Galaxy) was a hit with editors, being reprinted in anthologies by Galaxy editor H. L. Gold, Donald A. Wollheim, and T. E. Dikty (two different ones!)  Let's check it out!

Chapman has been on the moon for three years and is dying to get back to Earth.  He arrived with the first expedition, as pilot and mechanic; the other members of that first expedition were all scientists.  A practical man, Chapman has been the informal leader, keeping the eggheads alive by constantly reminding them to check their space suits for leaks and making sure their air tanks are full and that sort of thing--these absent minded nerds are likely to kill themselves without his nagging!  

The first expedition was relieved after eighteen months, but Chapman was persuaded to stay to manage the second squad of boffins.  Today the third crew is coming to relieve the second, and Chapman is determined to go back to Earth this time, to marry his girlfriend.  Everybody, however, is trying to convince him to stay for a third tour of duty!  The guy from the second expedition chosen to stay on is having cold feet, and people are very skeptical he can do as a good a job as Chapman has.  They offer Chapman money, a fancy title, etc., but he turns them down repeatedly.  

When the third ship arrives they bring the mail along with them.  Among the other letters are a Dear John letter from Chapman's sweetheart!  The wedding is off!  He decides to stay on the Moon after all, having no reason to go back to Earth if his girl isn't waiting for him!

The first twist ending is that the letter is a lie!  Chapman's girl was persuaded by the government to say she didn't want to get married; they convinced her of the vital importance of the moon base and that there was only one guy--her guy!--who could be trusted up there to keep it going!  

"The Reluctant Heroes" is about the terrible costs paid, the heavy sacrifices individuals make, when society embarks on some tremendous endeavor.  Robinson depicts the dangers of being on the moon and just getting to and from the moon, the psychological stresses of being up there and the way people have to compromise their values (like by lying) to make the project a success.  But Robinson's point in this story isn't that exploring space or conquering the moon is a load of crap, a delusional crusade or an elite conspiracy, like a Barry Malzberg story might suggest.  Instead, "The Reluctant Heroes" is like Walter M. Miller Jr.'s 1953 "Crucifixus Etiam"--conquering space is tough, but it's all worth it!  Robinson points out the short term and the long term benefits of the base on the moon, and in the italicized frame story we learn that Chapman and his girlfriend eventually got married and lived the rest of their lives in the moon city that grew out of the little research base Chapman helped to found and expand!  The Chapmans have a son, and he is chosen to go on the first expedition to Venus!

Pretty good!  All the human stuff and all SF stuff works, and the philosophical content is compelling, so thumbs up.                

"Two Weeks in August"

This issue of Galaxy starts off with an ad bragging that Galaxy has covers that won't embarrass you in public* and has added Ray Bradbury to its stable of writers ("The Fireman" debuted in this issue.)  In his book review column, Groff Conklin praises Henry Kuttner, in particular Fury and "This is the House" (I liked Fury quite a lot but haven't read "This is the House" yet.)  Conklin expresses reservations about the Hogpen stories, which had me nodding in agreement, as I am also skeptical of them.  A theme of his column in this ish of Galaxy is that SF has improved and SF writers matured since the dawn of modern SF; in talking about Robert Heinlein's juvenile Farmer in the Sky, Conklin stresses that it is better and more mature than the books aimed at an adolescent audience in the past, like Tom Swift, and in talking about Clifford Simak's Cosmic Engineers he says Simak's writing has improved since he first penned the serial version of the tale in 1939.  (Farmer in the Sky, which I read before the launch of this blog, is good, and I agree with Conklin's analysis of what is good about it; I read The Cosmic Engineers back in 2018 and while I fully endorsed its ideology and attitude I thought it bland and flat because of poor construction and writing style.)  Conklin finishes up with a discussion of the memorial edition of A. Merritt's The Ship of Ishtar and its Virgil Finlay illos, which he calls "superb."  Conklin likes the novel, but admits it is "corny" and wonders if perhaps he just likes it out of nostalgia, Merritt having been a big deal in Conklin's youth.  (You can take a gander at this book at the internet archive, and you definitely should if you are a fan of Finlay's.)

Now back to Frank M. Robinson.  "Two Weeks in August" would be reprinted in the French edition of Galaxy in 1958 and in the 1960s in Isaac Asimov and Groff Conklin's Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales, a book which has gone through many printings; did contributors like Robinson get another check every time the anthology was reprinted?  I hope so!

The narrator of "Two Weeks in August" works in an office with an irritating guy.  I've worked in an office myself, and it's no fucking picnic!  But I've also worked in a machine shop, a book store, a warehouse, a department store, and as a delivery driver, and working in an office was better than those jobs, all of which entailed actual labor.

The irritating guy always one-ups everybody else; his kids are smarter, his car gets better gas mileage, his vacation was more luxurious, etc.  The narrator, one day, as a joke, puts on an act, claiming his coming vacation this year will be a trip to Mars, and his other colleagues play along.  I guess everybody in this office takes vacation at the same time, and on the day they all return to the office they discuss their vacations.  The punchline of the joke is that while the narrator, for reasons of economy, had a staycation, the irritating guy says he went to Mars--and he has the photos and souvenirs to prove it!

Lame filler.         

"The Fire and the Sword"

"The Fire and the Sword" was reprinted several times; Robinson himself took sufficient pride in it that it was printed in Harry Harrison's SF: Author's Choice 4, which you can read at the internet archive.  In his intro to the story there, Robinson tells us it is about alienation, how "we" discriminate against blacks, women, Communists (Robinson capitalizes "Communists") and homosexuals, keeping them out of our society, refusing to open our hearts to them, refusing to accept them as human beings.  But Robinson seems to hedge a little, giving us reason to suspect that maybe he didn't really write this story in the early Fifties to protest the fact that some people are reluctant to open their hearts to poor ol' Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin, but is sort of projecting his 1974 feelings onto his 1951 self.  "Some of this I was conscious of when I wrote the story, though not all of it," he writes, and goes on to explain how he originally thought one faction in the story was the bad guys, and later realized it was the other faction who were the villains; if he wrote the story today (1974), he tells us, it would be quite different.  As we read "The Fire and the Sword" today in its original appearance in the pages of Galaxy, form, let's try to put ourselves in the shoes of the SF fans of 1951 by pretending we haven't read Robinson's 1974 assessment of the tale and see how the text on its own, without ancillary elaboration or interpretation, strikes us.

It is the space faring future!  Tunpesh is a minor planet with natives much like Terrans, but they have no space ships of their own and few Terran ships ever visit them.  Three years ago, the first Earth diplomat ever stationed on Tunpesh, a Pendleton, took up his post there.  Recently the Earth authorities learned he had committed suicide.  Oddly, the Terran anthropologist who had been on Tunpesh also killed himself.  Terra sends two men to Tunpesh for a six-month stay, to figure out why the only two Earthers to ever spend any time on Tunpesh did away with themselves.  Eckert is an old space hand, seasoned, tough, mature, steady.  Templin is young, in fact, Pendleton's age; Templin and Pendelton were friends, and Templin is confident Pendleton was not the type to commit suicide, that the Tunpeshans murdered Pendleton!  Something that Eckert knows but Templin does not is that Templin was chosen for the mission because his psychological profile is very similar to Pendleton--Eckert is to observe how Templin reacts to life on Tunpesh to gain insight into how Pendleton likely reacted.

Tunpesh, Eckert and Templin find, is a utopia like something out of a Theodore Sturgeon story.  Everybody is good-looking, nobody ever gets sick, people never fight or lie, nobody is greedy or lonely or bitter, there is no heavy machinery but there is plenty of food and housing and they have medical equipment as good as that of Terra.  The tension of the first part of the story lies in the fact that Templin is very suspicious and trigger happy, and Eckert fears he is going to overreact and start a fight they can't escape from (no Terran ship will be able to collect them until the appointed date) or commit some atrocity.

Both conventional and unconventional (lie detector machine) means of investigation uncover no evidence that Pendleton was murdered, nor any reason why he committed suicide, even though the natives are fully cooperative.  The crucial clue we readers get that is that while all the Tunpeshans say Pendleton was a good guy, they also say it would have been impossible for them to be Pendleton's friend or for a native woman to fall in love with him.

Finally convinced that the natives didn't kill his friend, Templin starts to like living in paradise, and when the ship comes to collect them he announces his decision to stay.  But Eckert uses a sleep gas gun on him and drags him aboard the ship.  Shipboard, as Tunpesh recedes, Eckert explains that Pendleton (and the anthropologist) killed themselves because they fell in love with the paradise that is Tunpesh, but the Tunpeshans were unable to accept them--lying, violent, ambitious, individualistic, forever unsatisfied Terrans are just too repulsive for the honest, pacific, community-minded and perennially satisfied Tunpesh to ever like.  Eckert and Templin agree to falsify their report so Earth won't try to strike up a trading relationship with Tunpesh--contact with human evil would no doubt corrupt the Tunpeshans' paradise!  "The Fire and the Sword," here in Galaxy, appears to be an example of the common SF strategy of presenting an alien utopia as a means of attacking our own civilization.  In his 1974 intro to the story in SF: Author's Choice 4, Robinson says if he had written the story today the Tunpeshans would be severely punished for their crime of killing Terrans with their refusal to embrace them.  (No tolerance for intolerance!) 

Presumably Robinson in 1974 thought of this story as one of his favorites because he saw it as dramatizing his own feeling that, as a gay man, American society was rejecting him (or would have rejected him if his sexual orientation was known--seeing as the top SF magazines and top men's magazines were eager to publish his stories and columns, and Hollywood turned his first novel into a film, it is hard to see Robinson's career as a story of rejection.)  The text as it appears in Galaxy doesn't make this interpretation of the story very obvious to the reader, and, in any event, I'm finding "The Fire and the Sword" to be just OK.  The writing style is fine, but neither the obvious interpretation (humans are too jerky to get into paradise) nor the esoteric interpretation (people who have it good are jerks if they don't open their hearts to every single other person) is terribly original or compelling, and neither are the supposed sources of suspense (will Templin's suspicions cause trouble? will Templin go native?)

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"The Reluctant Heroes" is good, but "Two Weeks in August" is a lame joke story and "The Fire and the Sword" is just tepid.  Of course, I always cotton to stories about climbing into a vacuum suit and getting out there and conquering the cosmos and am allergic to joke stories and utopia stories, so, your mileage may vary.

I've got a big stack of books and magazines I want to read, but maybe we'll find time to read more 1950s  Frank M. Robinson stories in the future.  Time will tell.

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*Intrigued by the idea offered in this 1951 ad that a hackie, housewife or haberdasher might be ashamed to be seen with a SF magazine, I looked at all the 1950 covers of seven of Galaxy's most prominent competitors, looking for the most potentially embarrassing covers borne that year by Amazing, Astounding, Fantastic Adventures, F&SF, Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Weird Tales with the idea of getting a gander at what the writer of the ad was thinking of.  For each of those magazines, I chose the 1950 cover I felt most likely to embarrass you should you be seen carrying it around town as you pursued your regular duties driving a cab or selling ties.  Goggle at these allegedly shameful covers below.

Some of the 1950 issues of Amazing have emblazoned on their covers such a legend as "Today's Fiction Can Be Tomorrow's Fact!" or, more succinctly, "Today's Fiction--Tomorrow's Fact!", the earnestness of which might be considered juvenile and thus embarrassing.  Many of Amazing's covers for the year under review feature attractive young ladies showing off their chests as they fly through space, dance before a giant face, lead an army of robots into battle, or just appear out of nowhere to the amazement of present-day construction workers, all of which have the potential to embarrass.  However, I am choosing as the most embarrassing cover of a 1950 Amazing that of the March issue, which shows what I assume is a metaphorical image of a man made of fire who has the hindquarters of a rocket ship. The text "Earth Lay Helpless Before This Cosmic Killer" adds to the level of potential shame.

Compared to Amazing's sex-oriented covers, Astounding's 1950s covers are pretty sedate and serious.  As most embarrassing I'm selecting the humor cover of the June issue, which depicts a young man in a wacky getup suffering the frustrations we have all felt while dealing with computers.  We just read the Robinson story from that issue.

With Fantastic Adventures we return to the world of sexy babes--I think every one of the magazine's twelve 1950 covers features a fetching lass, and more power to them, I say!  Of course, I'm sitting in my secret lair admiring these things, not carrying them on the subway or down the boulevard.  Our three candidates for most embarrassing are the comedy cover featuring a bum and a rube along with the sexy girl (who is holding a fizzing bomb), the cover in which the sexy girl is in the jaws of a drooling King Kong-sized canine, and our winner, in which the sexy girl looks naked at first glance and is apparently in communication with the disembodied head of a leering devil.

F&SF's covers for 1950 are pretty bad, one below-average Chesley Bonestell rocket ship cover and three faux-sophisticated covers featuring muted colors and distorted figures that I guess are supposed to be whimsical.  All four of these are so nondescript and boring they wouldn't embarrass you because nobody would even notice them--they are like white noise, your gaze just slides right off them.  I'm going with the cover presenting headless figures dancing as the most embarrassing--I say, one of these cavorting tumblers sports four feet, and his compatriot has four hands!  My word, how droll!   

There were four issues of Planet Stories printed in 1950.  The November issue's cover is too cluttered and hard to read at a glance to be embarrassing.  The Fall cover is a legitimate thing of beauty (we read four stories from it a year ago), and the Summer cover is solid, if routine.  I guess the Spring cover, while not particularly embarrassing, is the most embarrassing, its subject a couple inexplicably flying through space, the woman almost expressionless and carrying a glowing sphere.

We read "The Voice of the Lobster" and Leigh Brackett's "The Dancing Girl of Ganymede"
in 2020 and enjoyed them.

Thrilling Wonder put out six issues in 1950. All six covers seek to woo customers with bare female flesh, but the most embarrassing of them is the bondage-themed February image; the attire of the villains is silly, and the facial expression of every individual depicted is sort of disturbing. The name of the Henry Kuttner story on the cover, "The Voice of the Lobster" is also kind of ridiculous.  I wouldn't want to be seen with this one.

Of Weird Tales' six 1950 issues the most potentially embarrassing has to be the March issue, which shows a big bold unmissable portrait of a bloody maniac with oversized hands, a pin head, and lots and lots of hair. Adding to the insanity are the phrase "When the Rats Take over!" and the story title "Home to Mother."  I think this cover may not only be the most embarrassing from 1950 WT, but the most embarrassing SF cover of any magazine from that year!  Anybody seeing you carrying this around while you are schlepping groceries, or reading it while slouching in your cab between fares, is going to wonder if maybe you aren't a little off!