But the adventure is not over! We may still find 1960 stories recommended by Merril that are better than the fun tale she chose by R. A. Lafferty (mankind loses the ability to reproduce and looks to a worm for salvation!) and worse than the dreadful piece of self-indulgent junk by Algis Budrys (the Devil smokes cigarettes and dances in the wake of a war that depopulates the Earth and leaves the survivors in a poor position to bargain with him) that garnered her recommendation. Because today we are reading four stories from the tail end of Merril's alphabetical list of Honorable Mentions, two by Clifford "it would be awesome if all the people died and dogs, robots and bugs took over the world" D. Simak, one by Ted "it would be awesome if aliens forced collective consciousness on us, or, failing that, abolished all sex taboos" Sturgeon, and tireless chronicler of a space gladiator's quest to find his home, E. C. Tubb.
"Final Gentleman" by Clifford D. Simak
"Final Generation" is pretty long, like 33 pages in an issue of F&SF with a cover I am too cowardly to make off color jokes about. Simak's tale is a sort of convoluted conspiracy thing that has some elements of a van Vogt story. I guess you might say it asks the question of whether it is better to face reality or believe comforting falsehoods, and the question of to what degree ordinary people should run their own lives and to what degree superior people should guide them. "Final Generation" also glamorizes and/or aggrandizes the role of the novelist, and the writer in general, in history.
Harrington is one of America's most successful novelists, a man whose note-perfect writing style, measured calm and well-ordered genteel life have earned him the nickname "The Final Gentleman." In thirty years he has produced thirteen novels which have, apparently, had a big effect on people; most significantly, a presidential advisor was going to retire and then he came upon a line in one of Harrington's books about destiny and how one man can change the course of history and decided to tear up his resignation letter and continue serving his country.
As the story opens, Harrington is kind of old and suddenly realizes he has no more to write, he has said all he need say. Things get even more disturbing when a journalist from one of the most influential magazines--Situation--comes by interview Harrington. Situation prints a regular column by a "Harvey" that is one of the most widely read in the nation; we eventually learn that "Harvey" is a computer that is fed tons of data and that column is a series of predictions based on its calculations.
The journalist from Situation rocks Harrington's world when he tells the novelist that the research he has been doing on Harrington suggests that his well-known biography is totally counterfeit--there is no record of his attendance at the university he has always said he attended, no evidence he was born in the town he has always said he was born in, and more. (Simak offers a bunch of examples.) Harrington can actually remember his college years and all these other events he has now been told are fallacious--how could they not be true memories?
As the story proceeds Harrington comes to realize he has been living a lie, somebody has hypnotized him! While it seems he did really write and publish all those books, a multitude of aspects of his life have been illusions, and now that the hypnosis has for some reason flagged, his beautiful house and beautiful lawn and beautiful car now just look totally ordinary, to give just some of Simak's examples.
Recollections begin to creep into Harrington's mind of a mysterious episode in his youth, when he was just a failing writer, depressed and frustrated--a shadowy figure whose face he could not clearly see offered to make a deal with him! And young H agreed to the deal! For a while I thought "The Final Gentleman" was going to turn out to be a "deal with the Devil" story, but it isn't, at least not quite. Rather, Harrington figures out that space aliens, for thousands of years, have been manipulating the human race's development--for our own good, of course, we Earthers having great potential but being like unruly children who need to be coddled and challenged in just the right measure to grow in a healthy fashion. Among the alien methods of shepherding us homo sapiens is to pick a person and through him influence the species' cultural and political development; in Harrington's case, the aliens wrote influential novels through him. An earlier example is the Delphic oracle. As part of their manipulation of Harrington, the aliens hypnotized him not only into unwittingly doing their bidding on the literary stage, but also made him think his life was a lot more comfortable than it really was, I guess in part because that fostered in Harrington a temperament and personality that enhanced his reputation and influence.
The alien conducting this operation is undercover at Situation; it has two bodies or is a symbiotic pair or something, and consists both of the computer Harvey (not really a computer, it turns out, but a living thing) and a reclusive editor who is rarely seen by the public. Will Harrington kill this alien and liberate himself and the human race? Or will he decide that maybe we actually do need this alien to keep us on the right path (things are going swimmingly, aren't they?) and living a beautiful illusion isn't so bad after all.
This story is competent; I guess we can say it is OK.
"The Final Gentleman" has been well received, reappearing several times, including in a Groff Conklin anthology and the 1975 British collection The Best of Clifford D. Simak.
"Gleaners" by Clifford D. Simak
"Gleaners" is an entertaining story that engages in speculation about time travel: how it might work, the possible benefits and risks, the reaction of the public and of society. For example, would religious people be eager to investigate the truth behind their faiths, or worried their faith would be exploded? This is not an action adventure story, as so many time travel stories are--our hero doesn't even actually travel in time himself! He wanted to, but was rejected for the job of traveler, and instead worked his way up through the ranks to become a manager at the time travel company.
Time, Inc. operates time machines and sends back in time its own highly trained, meticulously prepared and equipped employees--the travelers--on missions which the firm has been hired to accomplish by wealthy individuals and institutions, as well as for-profit missions of their design; Time Inc. is also obligated by its charter to dedicate a certain percentage of its operations to the pursuit of missions in "the public interest." (Simak stresses that Time Inc., like all real life businesses, has to follow all kinds of rules and regulations, keep an eye on public opinion and stay in the good graces of the government.) Representative for-profit missions include research into the family tree of a rich woman whose hobby is tracing her lineage, eyewitness reporting on the Battle of Gettysburg, and the retrieval for sale to a university some documents from the Library of Alexandria, seconds before they are destroyed by fire. These missions have to be conducted very carefully, as it is forbidden to change history or alert the denizens of the past to the reality of time travel. Travelers are a lonely, hardy lot, unable to maintain healthy relationships in their home century, because they age very quickly in comparison to their contemporaries--while the time machine operators see a man go in to the machine and step out of it a minute later, the traveler himself has lived weeks or months in ancient Rome or Victorian England or wherever and aged accordingly.
Most of the text of "Gleaners" is about the mechanics and controversies and business side of time travel, though there is a twist ending plot that involves time travelers from the future coming back in time in disguise to manipulate history; this is a light-hearted story, so the manipulation is to our hero's benefit and the story has a happy ending.
I enjoyed this one, a pleasant diversion that is a better than average take on time travel.
"Like Young" by Theodore Sturgeon
"Like Young" is a silly twist-ending joke story, I guess taking aim at anthropocentric arrogance. It starts off pretty seriously, even tragically, but winds up a wacky joke, even concluding with a crack about murder.
Our narrator is a poet, given the job of writing one of the human race's last poems. You see, a disease has swept the world, killing all but a few hundred people, leaving the survivors sterile. The human race is doomed! It is the future, and the small number of survivors have access to technology that can accomplish all manner of mind-blowing engineering feats. So that mankind's knowledge will endure, the survivors set about printing the most valuable scientific information and the greatest creative works on indestructible metal plates and burying them all over the Earth for the next intelligent species to evolve--which they surmise will be descendants of the otter--to find. The plates with the most basic data are buried in the most accessible places, and the most advanced plates in locations more challenging to find, so our successors will learn our wisdom at an appropriate pace keyed to their level of technological sophistication.
Before the last metal plate is to be buried there is to be a dedicatory ceremony, and for the occasion the narrator is to write an ode. He sits on the shore next to the last plate, upon which are inscribed Einstein's Theory of Relativity as well as theories and formulae even more advanced. An otter comes up from the sea, reads the plate, inscribes corrections and a critique in English on the supposedly indestructible metal with its claw, then rips off a chunk of the metal to use as a shellfish cracking tool, and leaves. The species we thought we were condescending to do a favor is far far more advanced than we, and the narrator even suspects the otters have somehow authored our demise. He resolves to go out and kill as many otters as he can.
Barely acceptable.
"Like Young" appeared in book form in the collection Beyond the same year it debuted in F&SF. The story also appears in some editions of Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison's 1969 The Year's Best Science Fiction No, 2, even though "Like Young" was like nine years old at that point.
"Too Bad!" by E. C. Tubb
After we learn all about how this works and what a jerk the narrator is, there comes the twist ending, and perhaps something like redemption. The British government has learned about the narrator's operations, and drafts him into Her Majesty's Armed Forces, where he will be expected to use his psyker-spotting ability to make sure unlucky people and similar threats are kept away from military bases.
Mildly good. Not a hit with editors, though--it was not reprinted until well into our own 21st century.
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So we bid farewell to the sixth volume of Judith Merril's famous anthology series. Stay tuned for more explorations of the literature of the fantastic here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
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