Merril-approved 1956 stories: P Anderson, S Allen & R E Banks

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are taking an alphabetical trip through the SF world of 1956, cherry-picking stories from the list of honorable mentions at the back of the 1957 volume of Judith Merril's famous Best of series of anthologies. Our journey began in our last blog post with Robert Abernathy and Brian W. Aldiss, and today we break out of the "A"s and get started on the "B"s, reading one story each by science fiction Grand Master Poul Anderson, comedian, songwriter and anti-obscenity crusader Steve Allen, and the guy who wrote 1978's Lust in Space, reprinted in 1980 by Hustler Paperbacks as The Moon Rapers, Raymond E. Banks.  

(I know I just read an exploitation novel and was taken aback by how bad it was, but I have to admit I am pretty curious about what a book with a title like The Moon Rapers is all about.)

"The Live Coward" by Poul Anderson

Merril included two stories by Anderson on her Honorable Mention list, "The Man Who Came Early," which we read a year ago, and this one, which appeared in Astounding alongside Thomas N. Scortia's "Sea Change," which we read in 2019.  I actually own two books which reprint "The Live Coward," Groff Conklin's 1966 anthology Another Part of the Galaxy which has a lazy photo cover (sad!) and the 1991 Anderson collection Kinship with the Stars which has an OK cover that is a little busy and hard to read (why is the vehicle the same color as the snow?)  Despite having those two printings in my custody, I'm still reading "The Live Coward" on my computer screen in a scan at the internet archive of the June 1956 issue of John W. Campbell's magazine, where it is illustrated in light-hearted vein by Frank Kelly Freas.

The gimmick of "The Live Coward" is that the human race is the dominant member of a Galactic Empire and maintains order by threatening troublemakers with its space navy but the human government has a secret Prime Directive forbidding the killing of any person, even in self defense.  Varris, a war mongering dictator, has fled the Galactic Patrol and is in hiding on a world with a medieval technology and society--kings, knights, priests whose symbol is an "X," and so forth.  When Patrol operative Wing Alek and his assistant, a sort of caterpillar man (he smokes from a water pipe, I guess a Lewis Carroll reference), finally arrive on this planet to arrest him, Varris has forged a close relationship with one of the native monarchs and is under that king's steadfast protection.  Wing Alek can't seize Varris with modern weapons because to do so would risk getting into a life-threatening fight with the king's many professional fighting men, so how to arrest the fugitive?

Wing Alak uses his knowledge of every aspect of the planet's culture (hypnoed into his brain by a machine) to figure out how build an alliance with the church and manipulate Varris out from under the protection of the monarchy and into the clutches of the church, leaving the fugitive war monger no choice but to return to Galactic civilization, where he will have his brain rewired to obey Galactic law.

Competent filler, acceptable but no big deal.

"The Secret" by Steve Allen

You've heard a million times that Merril thought genre boundaries were bogus and tried to break them down or reach across them, and here is another instance of her practices in this regard, her promotion of a story written by TV personality Steve Allen which appeared in the mainstream magazine Collier's.  I tried to find a scan online of the specific issue of Collier's in which "The Secret" appears, but without luck.  Fortunately the story was reprinted in J. N. Williamson's 1991 anthology Masques IV (as well as the Masques omnibus from 2002, Darker Masques) which is easily available at the internet archive.

"The Secret" is a story about the afterlife, and, I guess, angels.  The narrator describes how he had an out of body experience after falling asleep following a day of exercise his doctors had advised against.  As a ghost, he looks at his inert body and realizes he has died!  His wife finds his body, calls the doctor, and the narrator watches as medical professionals struggle to revive him.  None of these living people can see or hear the narrator, but two men appear who can talk with the narrator.  They ask if he really wants to once again be counted among the living, and the narrator tells them he wants to spend more time with his family.  Apparently because his desire to live (for others!) is deemed worthy, the doctors succeed in reviving the narrator.  The story ends with the narrator telling us he no longer fears death.

This is competent filler; maybe "The Secret" offers additional interest because Allen was an atheist?

"The Instigators" by Raymond E. Banks

We read a story back in 2018 by Banks, a story I called a waste of time, but let's give the author of 1978's Lust of the Swampman (reprinted in 1980 as a Hustler Double Novel with Merlin Kaye's Penetrators of Time under the title The Savage Princess) a second chance.

The "Instigators" of the title are what today we might call programmers.  It is the future in which many people own household robots, and for each task you want your robot to perform, you know, mow the lawn or whatever, you have to buy a unique hand cut punchcard made to suit the exact specifications of the job, like the size and shape of your lawn.  The setting of Banks's story is the neighborhood where are clustered the stores that sell robots and where live the working-class men who fashion the custom punchcards by hand.  

The hero of the piece is a 20-something kid, a college graduate  who is good at making the punchcards but envisions modernizing the instigation process.  College boy has developed a camera that films a human performing the desired action and records the vital statistics on tape--this  tape can then be installed in the robots in place of the punchcards.  This tape system is also able to program robots to perform fluid and complex activities, like dancing, that the punchcard system is too clunky to handle.

This camera system will put the Instigators out of business, as robot owners would just buy one of these cameras and make their own tapes.  The Instigators Guild obviously doesn't like this idea, and in the past they have gotten away with murdering people who stand in their way by programming their robots for violence--there are robots everywhere, a ready made guerilla army that can blackmail the government into not looking into Instigator Guild crimes.  And the head of the Instigators Guild has an additional, personal, reason to want to get rid of the kid--not only is the kid threatening the entire Instigating profession, but the 40-something Guild leader's 30-something girlfriend has a crush on the kid!  

While it may sound like "The Instigators" might be a serious comment on the pros and cons of technological and economic change and organized labor, or a thrilling adventure story or a tense love triangle story, rest assured that this is in fact a joke story in which every male character has a goofy nickname and which features slapstick scenes like when an Instigator programs robots to put misbehaving adults over their knees and spank them.  The ending is tragic rather than comic, however.  The Guild programs a robot to murder the kid, and the Guild leader's girlfriend sacrifices her own life to save him; as the story ends it is clear that the Instigators are doomed to be thrown out of work by the kid's new programming system.  

I think I'm issuing a borderline negative judgement on this one; Banks seems to have put some real work into coming up with a whole culture for the world of robots and Instigators, with novel lingo and rituals and traditions, and I admire this ambition, but I don't feel he quite makes it over the line into "acceptable" territory.   

    

"The Instigators" debuted in Science Fiction Stories in an issue in which Damon Knight complains that there is too much action and adventure in science fiction, offering as one example John Wyndham's Re-Birth, which he says is one of the best postapocalyptic stories of all time until the chase scene at the end ruins it, and, as another, Isaac Asimov's "The Martian Way," which he praises for depicting a space voyage that suffers no mutinies or malfunctions, focusing instead on the beauty of space and Saturn.  Knight also writes about books by  J. T. McIntosh and Jerry Sohl and puts so much energy into making fun of them--or just flat out insulting them!--that I kind of felt bad for McIntosh and Sohl, even though I have not liked their work either.  I guess this is what the lefties call "punching down."

"The Instigators" would be translated into French for a 1959 magazine.

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I didn't love these stories, but I think Merril's promotion of them is justified by the fact that they are all legitimately speculative and put meat on the bones of the claim that SF is the literature of ideas--Anderson speculates on a government which maintains order while scrupulously avoiding killing people, Allen wonders what death might be like, and Banks considers the ways robots might operate and might change our society.  

We have many 1956-centric blog posts ahead of us, but first, we read a relatively recent novel--well, recent by the standards of MPorcius Fiction Log, anyway.