More Merril-approved 1960 stories: Anderson, Ballard, Blish and Budrys

In the last thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log we read seven stories from Judith Merril's 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F, a 384-page anthology of 1960-related stories, cartoons, essays and commentary (and only really liked two of them, selections by tragically-short-lived American Rosel George Brown and major British literary figure Kingsley Amis.)  The last three pages of 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F are a list of stories published in 1960 under the heading "Honorable Mentions," presumably stories Merril admired but didn't think quite reached the level of excellence of the forty items printed in the book, or could not be included for practical reasons.  Let's read five of these Honorable Mentions by people we care about, Poul Anderson, J. G. Ballard, James Blish and Algis Budrys.  (The HM list is in alphabetical order by author and I'm starting at the top.)  Maybe we'll like these stories more than those from last time which Merril actually printed.

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But first, let's take note of the 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F Honorable Mentions we've already read and offer links to my blog posts that discuss them.

Poul Anderson's "The Burning Bridge": I didn't actually read this, but it is one of the stories upon which Anderson based his novel Orbit Unlimited, which I blogged about in 2018.

Robert Bloch's "The Funnel of God": This epic (or tedious, you know, opinions will differ) attack on our society was subjected to an MPorcius analysis in 2019. 

Algis Budrys's "Rogue Moon": I haven't actually read this short version, but I read the famous novel that goes by this name and delivered a skeptical take on it in 2007 which I reprinted on this blog some years later.

Keith Laumer's "Combat Unit": I read this good story (also known as "Dinochrome") about a robot tank in 2019.

Fritz Leiber's "Night of the Long Knives": Back in 2022, after reading the version that appears in the collection The Night of the Wolf under the title "The Wolf Pair," I offered a moderate recommendation for this at times silly post-apocalyptic story about how we are all addicted to murder and should join Murderers Anonymous.  Like Leiber's very good "The Button Molder," "Night of the Long Knives" feels like a story that  offers insight into Leiber's life and thought and techniques; even though I have a lot of reservations about "Night of the Long Knives" as a work of art/entertainment, it has value for understanding who Leiber was and what he was all about and I strongly recommend it to those curious about Leiber the man and his career.    

Mack Reynolds's "Revolution": This one I read in 2015 in my copy of The Best of Mack Reynolds. 

Cordwainer Smith's "The Lady Who Sailed the Soul":  Back in 2019 I read this very good piece, which I considered a moving love story and an exemplar of the SF that tells you conquering space will be a bitch but it will be worth it, in the Smith collection You Will Never Be the Same.

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"The Martyr" by Poul Anderson 

It is the spacefaring future!  Mankind (currently operating under some kind of authoritarian imperial government with a monarch at its head) has colonized multiple planets, and met multiple intelligent alien species.  Fifty years ago the human race first encountered the Cibarrans, a race of beings with terrific psychic powers.  These jokers can communicate across intergalactic distances via telepathy, travel across similarly vast distances via teleportation, and employ telekinesis.  They have knowledge and power we poor humans can only dream of!  The Cibarrans are very friendly and helpful to other, less psychically adept, races, but they refuse to aid other civilizations in the development of their own psychic powers.  The human race begins to feel confined--one human character thinks "Isn't the Cibarran silence keeping our whole race trapped in our own skulls?"--and to suffer an inferiority complex, seeing the Cibarrans as gods that are keeping from us the key to godhood.  So the authorities take desperate, morally suspect, measures to squeeze the info out of the unwilling Cibarrans!

This story, like 16 pages in F&SF where it first appeared, describes how an arm of the human government seizes some Cibarrans and holds them prisoner (no easy task considering the Cibarrans' ability to teleport and call for aid telepathically) and experiments on them.  "Martyr" is a science-heavy story, Anderson coming up with a whole theory of how psychic powers operate.  (You know what people mean when they say "standing wave," "phase velocity," and "constants of propagation," right?)  The story is also about ethics--what acts are justified, and what acts are wise, in the pursuit of knowledge and power, and what sorts of responsibilities do those with knowledge and power have to those who are lacking?    

The shock ending is that the Cibarrans have endeavored to keep the truth about psychic powers from us and other intelligent beings to spare us a heartbreak that could wreck our societies--the Cibarrans have immortal souls but other races, including us humans, do not!

All the science and philosophy stuff is interesting, and the surprise ending is pretty good.  Thumbs up for "The Martyr."

Numerous editors, including Edmund Crispin, Robert P. Mills, and Anthony Boucher, have included "The Martyr" in anthologies, and, to commemorate Anderson's award of the title of Grand Master by the SFWA in 1998, Connie Willis included "Martyr" in the 1999 Nebula Awards anthology.  

"The Last World of Mr Goddard" by J. G. Ballard

I'm reading this in a scan of the 2009 edition of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard as I can't find a scan of the issue of Science Fantasy in which it first appeared.  

Old man Mr Goddard is a department manager at a big department store.  We learn that he has at home an elaborate scale model of the town in which he lives--this model is a sort of exact analog of the town, and is in fact inhabited by hundreds of tiny people who go about their business every day.  The people in the model are analogs of the real people Goddard works with, and by studying the model every evening he gleans information he can use to his advantage during the workday, though mostly he uses this info to help people.

One day some people seem to realize they are living in a circumscribed world and try to escape, but die accidentally in the attempt.  It also turns out that Goddard had made an assumption about somebody based on his observation of the model that has turned out to be wrong, severely damaging his relationship with the people of the town.  These dismaying events, and others, foreshadow a cataclysm--in the evening Goddard accidentally knocks over the model during a moment of physical weakness and, before he can recover, his pet cat devours all the townspeople, leaving himself the only survivor in an empty town.

"The Last World of Mr Goddard" is well-written and engaging; Ballard's descriptions of Goddard's daily routines are particularly sharp and vivid.  One might complain that the story is gimmicky, that upon reflection it makes no sense and is merely a well-turned out façade with little substance, but it is enjoyable nonetheless.  So, thumbs up.

"The Last World of Mr Goddard" can be found in many Ballard collections.

"The Voices of Time" by J. G. Ballard

I read "The Voices of Time" in that 2009 US edition of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard mentioned above, where it is 26 pages long, and I read it twice in an effort to really figure it out.  This is a dense story in which a lot of stuff going on, a story that is a little oblique and opaque, Ballard waiting until the middle of the story to present us with critical information about the characters that the characters themselves have been aware of the entire time, for example.  All the individual components of "The Voices of Tuime," the images and ideas, and all the individual sentences and paragraphs, are good, but as a while the story is sort of challenging.

I'm saying that the main theme of "The Voices of Time" is that everything comes with an expiration date--from individual creatures to entire species and ecosystems, to civilizations and the universe as a whole. 

Our main character is Powers, a scientist and neurosurgeon who is haphazardly continuing the work of a colleague who committed suicide, a biologist who irradiated animals and plants in order to change their DNA and induce changes in their forms.  Radiation from nuclear weapons tests and/or an atomic war similarly seem to have caused mutations among wild animals and vegetation; the mutations seem largely to be adaptations to a more radioactive environment, animals growing lead carapaces, for example, or developing the ability to "see" via detecting gamma radiation.  I got the impression that, in the milieu of the story, evolution and mutation are not random, but preprogrammed into the DNA of living things; each living thing carries within it a racial memory clock that measures time by absorbing radiation, and when a certain amount of solar radiation has been absorbed by a species, it changes its form according to schedule.  (Clocks and watches and countdowns, measurements of time, are a recurring theme of the story.)  The use of nuclear weapons has increased the amount of radiation in the environment, and advanced the clocks of Earth's species so they are changing prematurely, going disastrously haywire.  The human race is not immune to this effect, and more and more people are developing a disease called narcoma--they sleep more and more hours a day until finally sleeping all day, never waking.  (Those who cease waking up are called "terminals.")  It is suggested that the entire human race might succumb to this malady.  Powers himself suffers this disease, and as the story progresses he sleeps longer and longer each day--it is predicted that in three months he will go totally comatose.  

Powers is also responsible for a radical medical experiment; he performed brain surgery on a mathematician, Kaldren, that rendered him unable to sleep.  Sleepless Kaldren follows the main character around, and, when he isn't haunting Powers, he resides in a bizarre labyrinthine seven-story tall modern architecture building that is a 3D representation of the square root of negative one which houses his collection of artifacts related to the end of the human race and of the universe ("terminal documents," he calls them.)  Among the collection are some chattering ticker tape machines that with a regular periodicity print out numbers with 14 or more digits; each printed number is lower than its predecessor.  Kaldren writes one, 96,668,365,498,721, in the dust on Powers's unwashed car at the start of the story, and a week or so later Powers finds K has scrawled "96,668,365,498,702" on his garden gate.  These numbers are, apparently, transmissions from outer space, a clock broadcast by an alien civilization, a countdown to the end of the universe.

Kaldren is in a relationship with a pretty and slim young woman, I guess a psychology student, whom he calls "Coma" and whom other people call "the girl from Mars."  Her role in the story is to offer Powers someone to explain his research to, facilitating the story's exposition and description of its speculative science.

There is a lot of other stuff in the story I haven't mentioned, most importantly the possibility that Powers, like his suicidal colleague before him, is triggered by instructions written into his DNA into semi-consciously constructing a large mathematical diagram or mandala, a circular ideogram representing a giant clock that can't help but remind readers of the pentagrams common in stories of black magic and sorcery, and transmitting his soul out of his body and into space by committing suicide at the mandala's center.

A story that is a little difficult, but worth the effort of puzzling out.  I wasn't crazy about Ballard's nocvel The Drowned World when I read it long ago, and I have not particularly enjoyed Ballard's experimental items like "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" and "You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe", but I quite enjoy Ballard stories like "Billenium" and today's two stories that have something like a traditional plot and skillfully employ more conventional techniques.  

"The Voices of Time" debuted in New Worlds and would be widely reprinted in Ballard collections and in anthologies.

"The Oath" by James Blish

Here's another tale that debuted in F&SF.  "The Oath" would go on to be included in several Blish collections and in the anthology Beyond Tomorrow.  

It is the post-apocalyptic future!  Dr. Tucci is a member of the largest and most organized group trying to rebuild civilization, a bunch of people who live in a big storage vault with filtered air and a nuclear reactor, and they are recruiting other survivors, in particular skilled people like doctors and technicians, from miles around.  Tucci, an experienced medical man, rides up to the house of a guy, Gottlieb, rumored to be a doctor, but who before the atomic war was a published poet.  The story mostly follows their conversation as Tucci tries to convince this versifier turned amateur sawbones to join the vaulties 200 miles away.  "The Oath"'s content is mostly psychological and philosophical--what might attract Gottlieb to vault life, why might he want to remain in his current community, and what techniques and arguments can Tucci employ to convince the former poet to sign up?

This story is a little boring, and I found I didn't care whether Gottlieb joined the organization or not.  Rather than trying to entertain you, Blish seems to be using the story to raise questions about the relationship of the individual to the collective, and about sacrifice and responsibility.  What responsibility does the individual have to the collective?  How far should a man sacrifice his own ambitions in furtherance of the good of the community?  What rights does the collective have to use trickery or force against individuals who are deemed a drag on the collective?  How far can those in power go in sacrificing individuals for the benefit of the community?

Tucci, it seems, routinely uses trickery to recruit specialists to the vault's civilization restoration project.  For his part, Gottlieb acts like a god over his little community, running roughshod over people's privacy and facilitating the death of people who have genetic disorders (like diabetes) so their inferior genes won't be passed down to future generations and thus weaken the human race in its hour of crisis.  (A lot of classic SF is quite elitist, what with Asimov's Foundation and Heinlein's lunar rebels manipulating people, and tons of other examples, and "The Oath" is another slice of this elitism, putting forward the idea that doctors--members of the cognitive elite--should not be bound by such conventions as the Hippocratic Oath.)  Gottlieb seems to enjoy being a big fish in a small pond, and is reluctant to move to the vault, where he will be subordinate toothers and, as an amateur, in the shadow and under the direction of the trained medical personnel there; on the other hand, in the vault he will also be in a position to do more good for more people.

Acceptable.

"The Price" by Algis Budrys

This is a brief (two and a half pages) self-consciously literary allegorical story about how to survive an ordeal you may have to become a monster, or how war turns you ugly, or war is the devil's work, or evil never dies, or something; I have to admit I'm not sure I'm getting it.

Three men sit at a table, interviewing a hideous hunchback who initially refuses to give a name but then offers "Rumpelstiltskin."  We learn that Hunch has lived over a hundred years, been a prisoner and the subject of study in Czarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and East Germany, but never given up any information.  Hunch made it to Switzerland in the late Sixties and then spent some decades sheltered by monks during a seventy-year-long war, presumably between the West and the Warsaw Pact.

Dramatically the curtains are opened and it is revealed that the world outside has been transformed by war into a sea of fire!  Somehow, Hunch has made it here (presumably the United States) from Europe.  The three men want to know how he survived the fiery holocaust, and express a reluctant willingness to become like him if that is necessary to survive.  Hunch then ecstatically celebrates, dancing around.

"The Price" is a pretentious waste of time, an arty exercise or experiment.  Budrys uses up a lot of ink describing in detail the idiosyncratic way the hunchback, who I guess is the devil, smokes cigarettes, for example.  Long passages describing people manipulating matches and cigarette cases and cigarettes is one of my pet peeves, and another is stories in which the devil tries to trick somebody into making a deal, so Budrys is doing everything to get on my bad side here.  Of course, those are just my prejudices.  Another of my opinions: maybe a story about how you think war is bad is supposed to be provocative or groundbreaking or whatever, but in fact it is banal--everybody says war is bad--and often hypocritical--many people who loudly remonstrate against a war today will in a few years be just as loudly urging support for some other war.  Blish's story, "The Oath," is a useful contrast to Budrys's "The Price."  While I essentially agree with Budrys that war is terrible, his broad and over-the-top denunciation of war is boring and unproductive, while Blish's argument, which appears to be that the cognitive educated elite should be able to run our lives for us, is far more interesting and useful, even though I disagree with it, because Blish's case is based on specific examples and evidence and is in fact truly rebellious in its thinking, not a mere rebellious pose.   

Thumbs down!           

"The Price" first saw print in the same issue of F&SF that included Ward Moore's "The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl," one of the stories Merril reprinted in 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F which we read in our last episode.  "The Price" would reappear in the Budrys collection Blood and Burning and a number of American and European anthologies, including James Sallis's The War Book and a German anthology of stories from F&SF.

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Of today's batch of stories, the Ballard pieces are the most accomplished when it comes to traditional literary values, offering striking images and good writing and a compelling narrative.  Anderson's story is solid traditional SF with aliens and science, plus a moral dilemma and a somewhat surprising cosmic horror ending instead of (or in addition to) a sense of wonder ending--the universe is full of endless possibilities, but not for us humans!  (The ultimate in social inequality!)  Blish's story is talky and a little boring, but at least it competently makes a rational argument worth engaging with.  The Budrys is just bogus self-indulgent pseudo-arty goop, like a dreadful off-off-Broadway play.

Today's stories are perhaps united by a bleakness and even misanthropy; our next blog post will cover more 1960 stories recommended by Trotskyist Judith Merril and it will be interesting to see if they are a little cheerier.