Merril-approved 1956 stories by R Nathan, R Thorne, and R Abernathy

At our last meeting, we talked about three stories from the second entry in Judith Merril's series of Best Of anthologies, stories by people who were not terribly famous or prolific, at least in the English-language SF field.  And today we have three more such stories, SF tales first published in 1956 that Judith Merril saw fit to reprint whether or not they debuted in SF magazines.

"Digging the Weans" by Robert Nathan

In the words of a Barry N. Malzberg essay in Galaxy's Edge, Merril was on a mission "to take down all of the barriers between what she called the science fiction 'ghetto' and the 'mainstream.'  She was going to prove that the barriers were artificially constructed and made no sense."  And so her famous anthology series includes many stories from mainstream magazines and stories by mainstream writers.  Here is an example, a story from Harper's Magazine by the guy who wrote the novel which was the basis for one of those movies beloved by women I know, The Bishop's Wife.

"Digging the eans" is one of those stories set in the far far future, when all that is left of our own civilization is a pile of ruins which the societies that have succeeded us study in search of clues to how you and I lived, giving the author the opportunity to make jokes and present riddles based on corruptions of the English language.  Remember Nelson S. Bond's 1941 "Magic City," which we read in 2015?  Bond's tale was an adventure story that addressed the issue of gender roles, so had multiple levels of interest beyond jokes based on signs with missing letters, but Nathan's story here has no plot to speak of; it consists of a scholarly paper with footnotes and references to academic disputes, its topic excavations in the long lost civilization of what we readers recognize is the United States, the citizens of which the writer calls "Weans" because they seem to have called their nation "Us," a synonym for "we."  Similar jokes include how the author calls the capital of "Us" "Pound-Laundry," because "wash" is a synonym for "laundry" and "ton," like "pound," is a unit of measure.  Did Nathan hire an eight-year-old to help him compose this story?

These jokes are total garbage and there are like seven damn pages of them.  It seems that the point of Nathan's agonizingly bad story is to attack 1950s culture--but not the female domesticity, bourgeois conformism and casual homophobia your college professor denounces when she attacks the culture of the 1950s--no, the elements of mid-century American culture which have aroused Nathan's ire are modern art and rock and roll.  I actually enjoy or at least find thought-provoking conservative attacks on contemporary art and pop music if they are passionate or funny or based on some kind of considered philosophy of art and life, but all Nathan gives us are more clunky and mind-bogglingly unfunny puns.

"Digging the Weans" may have won Merril's approval because among the seven pages of embarrassingly bad jokes there are seven or eight lines to tickle the fancy of liberals and leftists--it is indicated that the advanced future civilization of the writer and his academic colleagues is based in Africa, and the writer denounces the United States, the British and the Romans as violent imperialists who despoiled native populations before vanishing into oblivion.  Sympathetic readers may consider "Digging the Weans" to be the Wakanda Forever and 1619 Project of its day!

Terrible--worst story I have read in a long time. 

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log hate "Digging the Weans" with a rage that is volcanic, but it still managed to get included in Robert A. Baker's A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown, a "collection of scientific humor" (so says the introduction of the copy that somebody scanned into the internet archive) and was even ***expanded***--more garbage jokes???--into a longer version that appeared as a 56-page chapbook and was reprinted in Gregory Fitz Gerald's Neutron Stars.       

"Take a Deep Breath" by Roger Thorne

Thorne has only one credit at isfdb, this story, which appeared in the men's magazine Tiger and, after Merril elevated it, never again (at least as far as isfdb knows.)  

(UPDATE, March 8, 2023: Check out the comments for a revelation of the true identity of the writer here credited as "Roger Thorne" and the true publication history of "Take a Deep Breath.")!

It is conventional for educated people to say they hate advertising, and it used to be conventional for educated people to say they hate TV.  So old books and magazines are full of stories attacking advertising and attacking TV.  And here's another one, six pages long.

Our narrator, a magazine writer, gets hired by an ad agency and realizes they use hypnotic techniques to sell shoddy products via TV ads.  As the story ends, the narrator warns us the president of the ad agency is going to use TV ads to hypnotize the public into voting said president into the White House.

Banal and lame, a weak example of the sort of elitism we see in SF so often, the argument that ordinary people are dopes who can easily be manipulated by the cognitive elite who wield the tools of science.  It is easy to see why this story's subject matter would appeal to leftist Merril, but couldn't she have found a better story that says the common man is a fool who can be led by the nose by advertising?

"Grandma's Lie Soap" by Robert Abernathy

Back in 2017 I read Abernathy's story "Deep Space" and liked it, so maybe he can get us out of the rut that Nathan and Thorne have put us in.

"Grandma's Lie Soap" is OK; it has an idea and speculates about that idea in a satisfactory way, but it isn't surprising or suspenseful or thrilling, it doesn't inspire emotion or offer memorable images or anything like that.

The narrator grew up in farm country (I feel like I'm reading a lot of stories about rural people lately--the contrast of country life and city life is one of those ancient tropes that all readers can be expected to intuitively grasp, I guess) and had a grandmother who was reputed to be a witch.  This old woman makes a soap with various herbs and with it washes out the mouths of kids who lie, and for the rest of their lives these kids must be absolutely honest; they can't even engage in hyperbolic verbal horseplay or tell white lies--they can't even lie to themselves!

The narrator moves away and becomes a chemist and gets a job at a multinational company that produces and sells such goods as soap and toothpaste.  Appalled by city life, how advertisers deceive and politicians cheat and on and on, he convinces his grandmother to share her recipe for the soap that turns people honest, and he has it integrated into his firm's products.  Pretty soon almost nobody in the world can lie, and everybody's life improves radically--beyond enjoying the benefits of a new high level of honesty in business, politics, and sexual relations, people are all mentally stable and happy, as Abernathy optimistically suggests that psychological problems stem from people lying to themselves.

(Remember Edmond Hamilton's story about turning everybody honest?  In that story mass honesty leads to widespread misery!)  

The world is a far better place, but the ending of the story has a little sting.  As the years go by, people get so used to everybody being honest that they lose their skepticism and much of their caution.  UFOs continue to be sighted, so must be real because nobody can knowingly make false reports, and the narrator wonders if a world of people who can't lie or deceive or trick others, and who themselves are very easy to deceive, will be able to survive contact with aliens who very likely have the ability to deceive.

"Grandma's Lie Soap" first saw print in Fantastic Universe.  Besides Merril, no editors thought it worthy of reprinting until Gregory Luce included it in 2014's Science Fiction Gems: Volume Seven.

 

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Three stories about how the American people are a bunch of jerks, only one of which is at all original and competently written.  We expect writers to be bitter and angry snobs who think they are qualified to run other people's lives, but we also hope that they have the ability to write and the inclination to put a little effort into their writing, and I am afraid this time such hopes were not realized.  Well, in our next episode we'll read stories from Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume by big (or at least bigger) names in the SF world, and maybe they'll be better.