Yet more Merril-approved 1960 stories: Matheson, Pohl, Reynolds

At the back of the sixth volume of Judith Merril's famous series of Year's Best S-F anthologies you will find a long list of "Honorable Mentions," stories published in 1960 that did not get reprinted in Merril's book but I guess whose merit she wanted to recognize.  We here at MPorcius Fiction Log (M.F.L. if you are in a rush) are going through this list alphabetical list, cherry-picking stories by figures who interest us.  We've already looked at 10 such stories over two blog posts (one, two) and we've got three more stories today, a tale from the guy who wrote Vincent Price's best movie and Steven Spielberg's best movie, and entries from two men who were hardcore left-wing activists in their youth and never quite got over it.

"First Anniversary" by Richard Matheson

This is a bland filler story, a single idea drawn out to several pages.  Our dude suddenly notices his wife tastes bad when he kisses her.  Soon he can't taste her at all.  Over a period of days he notices she smells like garbage, then that he can't smell her at all, then she feels strange ("pulpy") and then her footsteps sound odd.  Visits to doctors offer no succor.  In the end his wife has to admit that she has been using her psychic or magical or whatever powers to hide her true nature from him, but he has begun, after a year of marriage, to penetrate her supernatural disguise.  She then reveals her true form--she is an animated corpse.

Merely acceptable.

"First Anniversary" first appeared in Playboy, and would be reprinted in Matheson collections, The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, and Peter Haining's The Vampire Omnibus. 

"The Day the Icicle Works Closed Down" by Frederik Pohl

Oy, this is a 28-page story from Galaxy about how if people commit crimes, it is only their legitimate response to the machinations of the capitalists.  You know from the first paragraph the thing is a satire, because the main character is named after Clodius, one of Julius Caesar's thugs, and Milo, Clodius's nemesis.

(I'm reading this in the 2005 collection Platinum Pohl because the scans of the appropriate issue of Galaxy I could find online are all missing pages.)

The human race has colonized the galaxy, but starships are slow--it takes decades to travel between human-inhabited planets.  Altair 9 had a thriving export business selling native antibiotics (colloquially called "Icicles") to every other planet in human civilization, but then word came a year ago that a process had been developed to synthetically create functionally identical antibiotics, destroying Altair 9's economy and throwing most of the population out of work.  Our hero, Milo Pulcher, formerly a staff lawyer at the Icicle Works, became a public defender, and as the story begins he is assigned to defend some other former Icicle Works employees and some unemployed teens from a charge of kidnapping the son of the mayor for ransom.  The accused are all guilty, but Pohl wants you to think the kidnapping was justified because the mayor is rich and the kidnappers treated the boy real nice and, oh yeah, the kidnappers like really really needed the money.

Now that they aren't shipping the medicine, the capitalists of Altair 9 have resorted to a new scheme to exploit the bodies of the workers--body renting tourism!  A ship may take a century to get to Altair 9 from Earth, but rich people can afford to have their consciousnesses transmitted instantaneously from their home planets into the bodies of a person on another planet.  There is good hunting on Altair 9, so wealthy people on other planets (Pohl implies they are all fatsos!) have their minds installed into the bodies of healthy young Altairians so they can blast the local wildlife.  Of course, there are rumors that thrill seekers and decadents and perverts use the rented bodies to have weird sex--sometimes men illegally inhabit women's bodies, or vice versa!--experiment with dangerous drugs or perform risky stunts.

One of the defendants is Milo Pulcher's former girlfriend, Madeline.  Maddy was married to a painter, but this dauber didn't think his career could take off on Altair 9 so he got Maddy to sign a contract providing her comely young body to the tourism agency and then he used the money to buy a ticket to another planet.  Maddy got involved in the kidnapping scheme in order to make enough money to buy herself out of the contract.  Milo decides he can maybe win her case by discovering some illegality about the operations of the body rental agency, so he himself signs a 24-hour contract, renting out his own body.  While some stranger is using his body, Milo's consciousness is beamed to another planet to operate a mining robot.  Operating a mining robot is physically painful and psychologically debilitating.  (Pohl also did this thing where the establishment forces your mind to run a machine in his 1964 story "The Fiend.") 

The diabolical exploiters of the working man keep Milo's consciousness in that mining robot for six days instead of one, and Milo's clients have to face a legal hearing without him.  The kidnappers are sentenced to ten years in prison, which Pohl suggests is a very harsh sentence for committing the minor infraction of kidnapping a child for the purposes of extracting money from his or her parents.

Milo figures out that a small cabal of powerful people (which does not include the mayor) has been lying to everybody.  1) there is no synthetic antibiotic, there is still the same demand out in the galaxy for the icicles as ever.  2) there are no tourists beaming their consciousnesses to Altair 9 to hunt; it is the members of the cabal who are occupying those young sexy bodies and using them to participate in immoral indulgences (the lead villain likes TV wrestling and it is implied he occupied Milo's body to engage in that sort of violence).  The cabal has cut Altair 9 off from the rest of the galaxy (though the ship that took the painter still came and left, I guess) because by temporarily making the Icicle Works unprofitable they were able to buy up more shares of on the cheap.  They will make a killing when they reveal there is still demand for the drugs and start shipping it out again.

At a political dinner Milo, working with another lawyer, the only honest member of the Altair 9 establishment, exposes this scam to the assembled people and saves the day.

This is a satire, so I guess we can't expect it to make any sense, just to push an agenda and make emotional appeals to the supposed resentments of readers, but I feel like this story doesn't really add up.  For one thing, we are given the impression that many people are renting out their bodies for long periods, so there has to be an equivalent number of cabal members occupying the bodies, and we are given the idea that there are quite few cabal members.  Also, while using the young bodies, the old cabal members must be out of the public eye, and wouldn't people notice if a bunch of top politicians were repeatedly missing for five or six days at a stretch?  And then there is the fact that if the rest of the galaxy wants that medicine, aren't they going to investigate why Altair 9 was out of communication for a year or two and then back in communication, which will expose the lies of the cabal?  

The idea of transmitting your consciousness or implanting your brain into other bodies or into machines is one of my favorite themes, as regular readers of MPorcius Fiction Log know, and the mining scenes aren't bad, and I'm trying to keep my lack of sympathy with Pohl's socialist ideology from biasing my judgement here as I strive to determine if this story is merely mediocre or actually bad.  So I am coming down on the side of "barely acceptable."  Guiding my ruling is the fact that in our last episode I graded Murray Leinster's joke story about crime "The Ambulance Made Two Trips" just marginally bad, and "The Day the Icicle Works Closed Down" is a tick less irritating than that one (on a literary level, not an ideological level, where Leinster's tale of vigilante justice in the face of government corruption is more palatable.)     

It may not be winning any awards from the M.F.L. staff, but the editor of Platinum Pohl suggests that "The Day the Icicle Works Closed Down" is evidence that Pohl was an expert on politics, economics and the criminal justice system and this story, which I guess is a good representation of what Young Communist League alum Fred Pohl's body of work is all about, has been reprinted in many Pohl collections. 

In an interview you can read in 1978's Speaking of Science Fiction,
Pohl reports that Amis changed his mind

"Combat" by Mack Reynolds

Another long story from a pinko--"Combat" take up over 30 pages of Analog!  Ay caramba!  And unlike Pohl's story, which has been reprinted a million times because people love it, it looks like "Combat" was a dud that would not be reprinted until 2013 when it appeared in a collection of Reynolds' work put out by Spastic Cat Press.  Sacre bleu.  Well, here we go....

Mack Reynolds' defining characteristic, his competitive advantage (at least according to his supporters) is that he is one of the few SF writers to speculate about political economy.  And sure enough, the first full page of "Combat" is all about prices and the allocation of resources.  The West is losing the Cold War to the Soviet Union and Maoist China because the commies are able to sell the world affordable automobiles, petroleum products, and consumer goods.  We are told this is because in the communist nations everybody fucking loves science and kids aspire to be top scientists and inventors, while over here in the decadent West the kids all want to be singers or movie stars!    

Our protagonist is Hank Kuran, an American whose father was a Russian and who speaks the language fluently.  Kuran is a US government employee working in Latin America, trying to sell Made in America equipment, without success because of the superiority of Eastern Bloc products.  Suddenly, Uncle Sam summons him to Washington where an advisor to the president himself drops a bombshell on Hank--aliens have landed in Moscow and seem to think the commies are the dominant polity on Earth!  It looks like the visitors will share their technology with Ivan and then the free world will be doomed!

Kuran is sent to Europe to try to convince E.T. to give the West a look see before handing the Bolshies control of this big blue marble.  He goes in disguise as a tourist--in this future world of Reynolds', Moscow is a top tourist destination!  

I had initial expectations that this story would be better than Pohl's, as it 1) was about ideas and not just a bunch of emotionally manipulative BS that sought to appeal to readers' envy and class resentment, all that goop about like how little Johnny has to become a kidnapper because the capitalists closed the factory and poor Milo Pulcher has holes in his shoes and 2) I had no idea where it was going, unlike Pohl's story which follows tried and true detective/conspiracy story templates--what would the aliens be like?     

But my hopes were dashed when it turned out the story was literally going nowhere, that the plot was just a vehicle for Reynolds, a travel writer as well as a left-wing activist, to type up a lame travelogue and some boring superficial denunciations of the United States and get paid for this typing by John W. Campbell, Jr.  While Pohl tries to emotionally manipulate you to put across his ideological agenda, Reynolds just has his characters say straight out without any persuasive evidence or theoretical explanation that Soviet products are better than American products and Russian cities are more beautiful than Western cities and Russian kids aren't delinquents like American kids and the Soviet Union isn't an aggressive military power like the United States is. 

In London Kuran joins a Soviet tour group that rides a high tech ship to Leningrad and then a high tech train to Moscow.  Reynolds stresses how clean and efficient and advanced and comfortable everything is in the USSR--the food is tasty, everybody seems in good spirits, people all love to read, industry has more automation and thus can manufacture goods at prices lower than can American firms.  On the tour Kuran spends time with a beautiful American woman--the most beautiful woman he has ever seen!--and an Argentine womanizer and an African prince.  They have banal arguments, Kuran standing up for the US and the market economy and the others saying what about the Indians and what about Harlem and what about how Americans watch all that TV and never go to the legitimate theatre and so on.  

In Moscow Hank hooks up with the the anti-Soviet underground, who stress to him they want to overthrow the Communist Party but don't want to be like the United States.  One visit on the tour is the museum in the Kremlin, not far from where the aliens have their quarters.  The African prince turns out to be a British spy and he and Hank both make their way to the aliens.  The aliens explain that they landed in Moscow because the Soviet Union is the most advanced nation in the world, but they are not going to restrict their dealings to them.  In a few weeks they'll visit the number 2 power, Red China, and then they'll come over to talk to power number 3, the USA, and finally power number 4, Great Britain.  Hank's mission has been a total waste of time, just like our reading of this story!

The aliens also offer some advice.  You see, the USSR and Communist China surpassed the West because they focused not on trying to diminish or conquer others, but on improving themselves.  The Western nations on the other hand were aggressive, expending energy on combatting the socialist states that they should have devoted to emulating them and trying to excel them--by opposing Stalin and Mao and slowing down communist technological advances, the United States and its allies were only retarding the advance of Earth civilization.  Tsk, tsk.

After this speech Hank realizes the future is bright, that with the aliens around the US will be friends with the Soviet Union, that beacon of progress, and life will be awesome!  

The idea that the USSR was more peaceful and more technologically advanced and more economically productive that the United States is outlandish, and what is worse, Reynolds doesn't even use this fantastical conceit as a springboard for thought-provoking "what-if" speculations or a thrilling adventure plot--the story has no speculations and no plot!  The main character doesn't make any decisions or overcome any obstacles, he just learns to love Big Brother.  

"Combat" is truly pointless and totally lame.  Thumbs down! 

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This has been a rough patch.  But we still have one more batch of Merril-approved stories to look at.  Stay tuned if you dare, comrade!