We just read the Pyramid paperback printing of Philip José Farmer's novel about a war among the inner planets in which the Pope is one of the heroes, Tongues of the Moon. The back cover of that volume features an ad for another Pyramid paperback, Five-Odd, a 1964 anthology of SF stories that appeared in SF magazines in the period 1954-1961. I actually own that edition of Five-Odd; I think I got it at one of those antique malls on Route 40 in Hagerstown--those places are full of bargains for the fan of 20th-century SF and comics.
Above the ad for Tongues of the Moon on the back cover of Five-Odd is the come-on text that tells you that its editor, Groff Conklin, is a "master anthologist" and the five stories he has selected are "top notch SF from leading American and British writers." Under the roll call of these six savants on the front cover is an illustration of five spacers: a fat dude, a fit dude, and three trim dudettes. (The fat guy must have aced his SATs or something.) This painting is by John Schoenherr, whom I usually think is good, but this one looks kind of amateurish--what is up with everybody's arms?
Let's check out three of these "top notch" stories, those by British novelist Kingsley Amis, chronicler of female space cops James H. Schmitz, and F. L. Wallace, with whom I am not very familiar.
"Something Strange" by Kingsley Amis (1960)
Kingsley Amis is no stranger to MPorcius Fiction Log. We've read his novels
Lucky Jim and
Jake's Thing. Back in 2018 I had a chance to buy an edition of his novel
The Anti-Death League with a very stylish sex and violence cover, and today regret not having done so.
The Green Man and
Russian Hide-and-Seek look like they might be worth reading. In his intro to
Five-Odd, Conklin suggests that "Something Strange" is Amis's first published SF story. isfdb alerts us that it appeared in the famous weekly
The Spectator (oldest surviving weekly in the world, first published during the reign of King George IV and the premiership of the Duke of Wellington) before being picked up by Robert P. Mills for an "all star" issue of
F&SF where it was presented alongside stories by Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson and Kris Neville. Another magazine I should check out someday.
Four people are in a small space station at the edge of the galaxy. Every day they take readings of the stars in view and transmit the data they collect back to Earth. There are two men, a fat one who is smarter than the rest and a fit one, and two attractive women; the women are paired off with the men, but the men are not quite satisfied--the fit man would like to have sex every day but the woman he is sleeping with doesn't want it that often, while the heavy man and his partner have sex quite often, but he still would rather be with the less sexually active woman.
The most noteworthy thing about their service in the station is that every day the sensors detect, and they see and sometimes hear, some inexplicable thing going on outside the space station. These phenomena must be illusions, as they are plainly impossible. As the story progresses the fat guy is uneasy or disordered--he is on the cusp of figuring out something important. As we observe these four people, we are given clues as to what is actually going on. Of course, Groff Conklin, master anthologist, told us what is going on in his intro to the story, which I now know I should not have read before actually reading the story.
In the final scenes some people with rifles open up the space station and enter. They are soldiers of a revolutionary army that has just defeated the local forces of the government--our four main characters have been on Earth the whole time, in a sealed tank, hypnotized into thinking they are a space crew as part of government experiments. A further twist is the revelation of what the government was trying to accomplish in this experiment--it seems the government was trying to make them immune to fear by erasing from their brains all conception of death and love.
This story is well-written and all that, and the theory that we would be fearless if we didn't know about death and couldn't fall in love is thought-provoking, but I am never that keen on these Matrix/Truman Show type stories--I find their revelations deflating. Four spacers on a remote station, having to contend with interpersonal crises and alien mysteries is, to me, more interesting material for a story than "the authoritarian government is making people see illusions, and after you read fifteen pages of illusions we tell you they are illusions--gotcha!" Amis plays fair, giving you enough clues so that you don't feel tricked at the end, but this story is not for me; "Something Strange" is one of those stories which a cold and objective MPorcius knows is good, but which the experiences and prejudices and inclinations of flesh and blood MPorcius keep him from enjoying more than a merely acceptable story.
Students of SF history should compare "Something Strange" to Christopher Priest's 1971 story "Real-Time World."
"Something Strange" can be found in the Amis collection My Enemy's Enemy and numerous anthologies.
"Gone Fishing" by James H. Schmitz (1961)
I've read some good science fiction adventure fiction by Schmitz, like the novel
The Demon Breed, the collection
Agent of Vega, and the short story
"Grandpa," these stories generally include interesting aliens and the strong female protagonist we are expected to crave nowadays--Schmitz was on the strong female protagonist beat over two decades before I was born (the title story of
Agent of Vega was first published in 1949.)
("Gone Fishing" includes no aliens or women, but you don't expect me to rewrite that first paragraph, do you?)
Barny Chard is a crooked financier and a suave con man. Over the course of scenes reminiscent of detective fiction, he discovers that septuagenarian retired physicist Oliver McAllen has invented a teleporter. The teleporter is very inexpensive to construct and operate, and so McAllen has decided to keep it a secret--nobody will be safe if the secret gets out, as every criminal, terrorist and government will have the ability to go anywhere at anytime.
Chard introduces himself to McAllen and plots to get himself in a position to possess the secret of the device and to murder McAllen and his assistant, an African-American engineer who turns McAllen's theories into practical devices and who poses as McAllen's valet. But McAllen and the engineer--and the secret association of geniuses of which they are members--are more cautious and clever than Chard realized; Chard is taken prisoner and finds his prison is an extrasolar planet! A pleasant enough place, populated with transplanted Earth trees and birds and squirrels and supplied with all the food and water Chard will need to survive for years, but very very lonely!
For five years the alien planet will be out of reach of the teleporter system based on Earth, its orbit putting its sun between itself and Earth. McAllen planned it this way--reminding us of the Amis story we just read, McAllen has used the opportune appearance of Chard in his life to conduct an experiment in altering the psychology of a human being by subjecting it to a punishingly limited menu of stimuli; such an experiment might be considered cruel by other members of the association, who ight want to rescue Chard, and so McAllen has put Chard out of their reach. We observe how Chard responds to being all alone on this safe alien planet for half a decade.
"Gone Fishing" is smoothly written, though perhaps a little long and slow, and the characters are all sort of interesting. The ending is a little underwhelming, however. Moderately good, I think.
"Gone Fishing" debuted in an issue of Analog with a Schoenherr cover that shows the kind of solid work the man is capable of. It would be included in a 2001 Baen Schmitz collection that is an expansion of the 1960s Agent of Vega I read.
"Big Ancestor" by F. L. Wallace (1954)
Wallace doesn't seem to have devoted his life to SF but to have had a real job as an engineer; still, he got like two dozen stories printed in SF magazines in the decade between 1951 and '61, most in the more "respectable" SF magazines like
Galaxy and
Astounding. I read his story "Student Body" when I read
Spectrum 5, and thought it not bad.
It is the future of interstellar commerce on a vast scale! Earth people have encountered many intelligent alien species, and perhaps more amazingly, have encountered many varieties of the human race, some of whom can interbreed with Earth humans, and some of whom cannot. It is theorized that the first starfaring human species, 200,000 years ago, flew around this part of the Milky Way, colonizing many different planets, Earth among them, and these colonists have forgotten their origin and evolved since. The limited archaeological evidence that remains of these progenitors of ours suggests they grew to forty feet tall.
An expedition is underway to search for the planet from which our economy-sized ancestors hailed. The pilot of the expedition's star ship has fallen ill, so a non-human alien who looks like a big ribbon or tapeworm has been hired to fly the vessel. Most of the text of the story consists of conversations, much of them the humans explaining to the worm pilot the theory I summarized in the last para. There is also considerable discussion of some vermin who have got aboard the ship and mutated into even more troublesome pests, and human efforts to deal with the little invaders.
Other conversations demonstrate the tension that exists between the different species and sub-species of humans who crew the ship. There is a hierarchy of human species; some are considered "early" and "primitive," others "late" and "advanced." (Lots of old SF stories address the related topics of evolution and mutation, and it is very common for them to present evolution in a
Whiggish way, suggesting evolution is a ladder that a species or race climbs, each step an advance or improvement on earlier forms.) A woman aboard the ship from an advanced demographic of humanity that can consciously control such bodily functions as healing and thus heal very quickly, is sexually attracted and engaged in a physical affair with a more primitive man, but is reluctant to marry him or have children with him because of his inferiority, leading to much resentment and jealousy on his part. Wallace offers us a scene of cruelty and fetishistic eroticism in which the advanced woman humiliates her less advanced lover, egging him on to hit her, and apparently enjoys the blow when he does. (This tragic and perverse scene in which lovers deliberately hurt each other and struggle to comprehend their own apparently inexplicable lusts is much more arousing than the lame and idiotic depictions of sex in
those two Charles Beaumont stories we read in the last episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, and it feels totally believable, being as sad and disappointing as real life, unlike the childish wish fulfillment fantasy sex Beaumont tried to lay on us.)
The expedition finds the planet, thanks to the abilities of the worm, and learns the origins of the human race. Those forty-foot tall people were not our ancestors; they were giant intelligent slug people. Our ancestors were vermin who throve in the slugs' sewers and sneaked aboard their ships and thusly infested the Milky Way. (Our ancestors apparently behaved much like the vermin aboard the expedition's ship.) The slug people fled the Milky Way to get away from us.
As demonstrated by the relationships among the crew of the expedition, galactic civilization is very hierarchical, and the fact that the human race is descended from vermin is going to mean all the other intelligent races will look down on us. Learning our origin has been a terrible mistake.
This is a hardcore misanthropic story--the human race is vermin or children and the other spacefaring aliens react to us with disgust and terror (as demonstrated by the slugs) or treat us with contempt and condescension (as demonstrated by the worm.) And human beings treat each other shabbily, different strata of the pecking order using each other sexually but withholding love.
Provocative and crazy, depressing and fresh, thumbs up for "Big Ancestor," which really engages the reader's emotions, is the best story we've read today.
"Big Ancestor" was selected by Brian Aldiss for his anthology Galactic Empires: Volume 2.
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Five-Odd was a successful anthology, reprinted in other languages and in Great Britain under the less gimmicky title Possible Tomorrows. The Amis and Schmitz are good, but I found their twist endings a little disappointing. The Wallace, on the other hand, gains strength as it proceeds.
More post-war stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.
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