Merril-approved 1956 stories by R Russell, J G Ballard and T Sturgeon

Let's embark on a third foray in our campaign to explore the SF of 1956 using SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume by Judith Merril as our Baedeker.  I feel like Merril lead us into some pitfalls last time around, but we forgive and forget here at MPorcius Fiction Log and forge on.

"Put Them All Together, They Spell Monster" by Ray Russell 

I'm not the kind of guy who deliberately watches bad movies with the intention of laughing at them or making fun of them; for example, I actually sincerely love the monster designs and art direction and music in Gamera and Godzilla films, not "ironically."  Over the course of this blog's life, it has been my general practice to cherry pick stories out of anthologies in an effort to avoid those I am likely to find boring or irritating; my sample is far from random and would not be useful for any kind of statistical analysis.

When I started this current series of blog posts based on Merril's second Best Of volume I expected to skip Ray Russell's story because I didn't like his "Ghost of a Chance" (I called it "a total waste of time"), gave "I Am Returning" a "grudging acceptable rating" and called his "The Darwin Sampler" an "inoffensive gimmick story" and his "The Long Night" a "gimmicky joke story."  But when the staff was plotting out this phase of the operation it was decided that we couldn't really do an entire blog post on just the two stories I really wanted to read, the Ballard and the Sturgeon, and that the Russell was the one that made sense to add to the mix, in part because I recently did a series of blog posts on SF stories that, like "Put Them All Together, They Spell Monster," can be found in the pages of 1950s issues of Playboy.  So here we go, a story over eight pages long which Merril in her intro warns us is a spoof of monster movies, the kind of movies like The Thing From Another World that Merril doesn't think deserve to be called "science-fiction."  (Judith Merril, gatekeeper.)  

(Merril also says "the article" is "somewhat foreshortened," for which I guess we should thank her.)

Russell's story, labeled "satire" in the pages of Hugh Hefner's skin rag, is narrated by a horror movie fan who describes his dream of sitting in a theatre with Marilyn Monroe and watching a monster movie about a giant blob of Vaseline that comes to Earth and is misunderstood by us natives.  Russell uses lots of obvious jokes and tried and true comedic techniques, and he doesn't use them badly, so, while "Put Them All Together, They Spell Monster" is not good, it isn't terrible.  (It is far far better than that trainwreck of a humor story by Robert Nathan we read for our last blog post.)  We'll call this one barely acceptable.

"Put Them All Together, They Spell Monster," after its debut in Playboy and apotheosis in Merril's pages, would return in 1971, the year of my birth, in The Fully Automated Love Life of Henry Keanridge, an anthology of humorous SF stories.  In the introduction to The Fully Automated Love Life of Henry Keanridge, the editors of Playboy claim that "there have been all too few examples of wit, humor and the light touch in science fiction."  I had to roll my eyes at this one, as I feel like I am constantly stumbling over joke stories and absurdist satires as I look through old SF magazines and anthologies.  Perhaps more interestingly, the editors of Playboy in this intro seem to be taking a swipe at the New Wave: 

...when it's bad ["it" being science fiction], the style matches the subject matter in pomposity and pretentiousness.  This is particularly true of a certain fringe element in contemporary science fiction, which concentrates exclusively on cosmic nastiness expressed with "experimental" eccentricity in lieu of talent.

I find these kind of vague attacks both fascinating and irritating--irritating not because I agree or disagree with them, but because they don't offer any specific examples of what they are talking about.  Who exactly are these talentless writers who write about cosmic nastiness?  What eccentric and experimental story would the editors of Playboy offer as a representative sample of the work of the fringe element they are demeaning?  I know why writers attack each other in this cloak and dagger fashion--the great Thomas M. Disch apparently hurt his career by attacking the universally beloved Ray Bradbury in broad daylight and it seems the great Barry N. Malzberg got in trouble for his passionate attack on the sainted Judith Merril in Galaxy's Edge--but it is frustrating because these kinds of attacks can be very illuminating (more illuminating than slavish praise) if we know exactly what writer and what work are being criticized.  (And when I say "illuminating" I refer not only to the target of the attack but its perpetrator--what Disch and Malzberg have to say about Bradbury and Merril is quite likely to tell us more about TMD and BNM than about RB and JM.)

Anyway, The Fully Automated Love Life of Henry Keanridge is easily accessible at the internet archive and the intro may be of value to all of you who are interested in the history of SF-- particularly humorous SF, the New Wave, and the intersection of SF and men's magazines. 

"Prima Belladonna" by J. G. Ballard 

Alright, now on to the main event, stories I legit wanted to read.  First, J. G. Ballard's "Prima Belladonna."  "Prima Belladonna" is apparently sometimes considered Ballard's first published story; at least it is included in the 1981 anthology First Voyages.  In any case the public first encountered it in Science Fantasy and it has been reprinted many many times since; it can be found in at least two books I own.

"Prima Belladonna" is the first of Ballard's Vermillion Sands stories.  Vermillion Sands is an apartment complex on the shore in a future or alternate world that is home to various pervasive phenomena that seem strange to us readers but which the characters seem to take in stride; one such phenomenon is the presence of many types of mutants, and this story is about the narrator's relationships with multiple types of mutants.  The narrator is a shop owner, and he raises, trains, and sells plants which, in response to stimuli, move and produce sounds--with careful training and precise control of their environments these plants can be induced to produce music.  (Ballard is one of those SF authors who knows all about classical music and in this story he refers to various composers and uses musical terminology.)

Another prominent mutant in "Prima Belladonna" is a gorgeous woman who has recently arrived in the community; she is a professional singer and is performing at the casino.  She has beautiful breasts and hips and golden skin and so on, but most remarkably her eyes look like insects and one can judge how agitated she is by how vigorously the legs of the insects in her eyes wriggle.  These eyes sound absolutely horrifying, but the narrator and his pals find the woman irresistibly attractive regardless, and ogle her as she settles into to her new apartment, which is across the way from the narrator's.

The narrator and the singer have a brief erotic relationship, but perhaps more intense and definitely more strange is the woman's relationship with the senior of the narrator's flowers, the flower that keeps the others in tune.  

Pretty good.

"The Other Man" by Theodore Sturgeon

Merril in her intro to "The Other Man" says she had trouble choosing between this story and Sturgeon's "And Now the News..." when determining the line up for this anthology.  A year ago we read "And Now the News..." and I thought it was good.  Hopefully I'll think the same of this caper, which is over 50 pages in length.

Fred is the world's greatest therapist!  Using hypnosis and technology, he can take you into his custody and, over six or eight weeks, examine and then improve your personality, accentuating positive traits and suppressing troublesome aspects, and fix in place this upgraded and refined version of you.  

Fred has got a new patient!  Richard!  Fred is already pretty familiar with Richie-boy's personality, because five years ago this very Dick stole Fred's wife Osa!  Rich is a kind of gigolo deadbeat character who doesn't like to work and is always looking for kicks and because of his tremendous charisma has no trouble seducing women and getting them to pay his way to kicksville!

There is a lot of verbal sparring between the ethical Dr. Fred and the selfish jerkwad Richard, and we also hear all about the therapeutic techniques employed by Fred--under hypnosis, particular frequencies of sound are used to induce specific states in the patient or activate facets of his personality; e. g., when subjected to sounds of a frequency of 700 cycles, Richard will think he is eleven years old again, while exposure to 800 cycles will trigger rage.  When they set the apparatus to 200 cycles, Fred's pretty female assistants (you didn't think Fred was spending all day twiddling those knobs himself, did you?) discover a whole additional personality or "ego," an adorable innocent free of knowledge and thus free of all sin and evil!  Rich has multiple personality disorder--one dominant evil personality and one suppressed goody good personality!  

The theme of Sturgeon's story is that people can't go it alone, and Fred figures out how to solve Richard's problem only by working in concert with Osa and with the women on his staff.  The solution Fred's team comes up with is to use the technology at their disposal to join up what appear to be Richard's two personalities, which team Fred realizes are not in fact "multiple egos" but actually "multiple siblings sharing the same body, the same brain," much like what Sturgeon calls "Siamese twins" and you had better call "conjoined twins."  Our happy ending sees Richard living as a decent, productive and giving man with a happy marriage to Osa, while Fred's realization that he has to work together with his staff has paved the way for him and the senior woman at the office to fall in love.

This story is not bad, but there are problems.  Richard's motivation in coming to see Fred seems a little iffy.  The story feels long, consisting of lots of conversations as well as technical descriptions.  One issue that bloats the word count and, worse, makes the story feel longer is that Sturgeon doesn't want to use the old fashioned idea that a man is a dichotomy composed of a good half and a bad half that are in tension--Fred spends a whole paragraph disparaging such simple black and white thinking and saying that morals are no more than arbitrary opinions.  But the theory with which Sturgeon replaces the traditional dual nature of man theory--his idea that some tiny fraction of people are born twins who share the same body and same brain, and Richard is the victim of a "cantilever" effect as the dominant twin, perceiving the sweet and innocent buried twin as an invader, acts cruelly and selfishly in an effort to distinguish itself from the invader and so Richard attacked all the things that he actually loved--is complicated and takes a long time to explain and isn't really any more satisfying for the reader than the moralistic theory Sturgeon is trying to discard.  This reminded me a little of how Edmond Hamilton in The Vampire Master wanted his heroes to wield crosses in battle against the undead but didn't want to endorse Christianity so he came up with a theory of how the cross is a time-old universal symbol of goodness and light.

I can give "The Other Man" a mild recommendation, and tell you it is in line with what we expect from Sturgeon, a story about how togetherness of as intimate a nature as possible is what we should aim for to improve our individual lives and our society (see The Cosmic Rape), plus a story about how we should be willing to put our fates in the hands of geniuses (see "Slow Sculpture.")  

"The Other Man" would reappear in several Sturgeon collections, including The Stars Are the Styx, which features on its cover a Rowena Morrill portrait of Sturgeon as a superbly muscled Charon, and The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon, which our confreres in Gaul may know as Les talents des Xanadu.  

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The Ballard and the Sturgeon both have strange and memorable new ideas, and the Ballard has some wild images and the Sturgeon some energetic science speculations, so they both seem like perfectly understandable selections for a "Best of" anthology covering 1956.  The Russell is harder to justify, as it is nothing but an extended joke about pop culture ephemera.  I suppose Merril included it because she had an axe to grind against monster movies (I guess she was bitter that these films were the basis for many normies' views of what science fiction was all about) and maybe because she was friendly with Russell and/or wanted to associate SF with a successful mainstream publication like Playboy.

We aren't finished with 1956 and Judith Merril's take on that year's SF, but we'll be taking a little break from '56 and Ms. Grossman to read something somewhat more recent and much less respectable for the next episode of MPorcius Fictoin Log.