Merril-approved 1956 stories: Harlan Ellison and Charles L. Fontenay

It is normal to hear people praise Judith Merril as a great anthologist.  For example, I was leafing through a scan of the July 1955 Astounding while reading Eric Frank Russell stories recently and came upon P. Schuyler Miller's review of Merril's Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time, in which Miller praises Merril's "diligence" and declares her compilation of 19 stories about psychic powers "the best anthology of 1954."  So if one was going to choose a guide through the jungles of 1956's SF, Merril would be a logical choice, and this is a choice we at MPorcius Fiction Log made back in March.  Since then we have been picking stories out of the list of honorable mentions, organized alphabetically by author's last name, at the end of Merril's 1957 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, and have already read many selections by writers whose names start with letters A through D.  Today we read the E and F stories, of which there is only one each.

"The Crackpots" by Harlan Ellison 

"Crackpots" is one of those stories that doesn't waste your time with nuance, subtlety, ambiguity, or believable characters and situations.  "The Crackpots," instead, is a fairy tale farce/satire that depicts over-the-top events and is populated by carboard characters, all the easier to hit you mercilessly over the head with its banal, self-aggrandizing fan-service ideology.  I am reading "The Crackpots" in the scan of the 1979 omnibus anthology The Fantasies of Harlan Ellison that is available at the internet archive because the scan of the 1956 issue of If in which it first appeared lacks the pages containing "The Crackpots," which I am assuming is testimony to the fear instilled in the masses of mankind by Harlan Ellison's crack legal team.  This 38-page 1979 printing of the "The Crackpots" is preceded by an introduction over two pages in length in which Ellison name drops Nancy Weber, reminds us he doesn't like Richard Nixon, brags about his idiosyncratic furniture, and tells us that "The Crackpots" is about the fact that "Madness is in the eye of the beholder."  Thanks for the Cliff's Notes, Harlan--nothing makes hacking through 38 pages of anemic jokes more enjoyable than being told the point of it all ahead of time.

The Kyben are the dominant power in the galaxy, a hierarchical civilization of obedient and disciplined rules-followers.  Kyben who are not disciplined conformists are confined to planet Kyba, the planet of eccentric and insane Kyben.  All that occurs in the Kyben space empire is recorded by the men of the vast and ubiquitous surveillance apparatus known as The Watcher Corps; Watchers carry around with them "dicto-boxes," watch everything and make a record of everything by speaking into the dicto-boxes.  Our protagonist is Themus, a recent graduate of the Watcher Academy; great things are expected of him, as he graduated second in his class of 1200.  Themus has been assigned to Kyba, and we are there as he records the behavior of the local maniacs.  Ellison provides many descriptions of the crazy costumes people wear and the wacky things they do, including things that are unusual but certainly possible, like having sex with strangers, and things that go beyond unusual and seem essentially impossible, like surviving falls from high buildings and using psychic powers to divine the contents of another's pockets.  I guess these images and episodes are supposed to be funny, but instead they feel like a waste of time; even worse are the repetitive speech patterns and nonsense phrases that characterize the dialogue of some of the madmen and madwomen, which are are annoying to read.

As we sort of expect in SF stories about authoritarian societies, Themus gets mixed up with the secret underground when a pretty girl introduces herself to him.  She uses her feminine wiles to get him to surrender his dicto-box, which she wrecks, apparently dooming him to a court martial and consignment to the capital-M Mines--with such a black fate looming over him otherwise, he has little choice but to join up with these mad people.  The mad crew won't admit him into their mad ranks until he has done five mad acts, right now and right here in their HQ, and we have to endure Harlan's descriptions of all five; Harlan tries to make one interesting by having it involve disrobing the attractive woman who got him into this mess, which would certainly have made a cinematic adaptation of "The Crackpots" more interesting, but does but little for us readers.  

having succeeded in performing five mad acts, to Themus is reveled the amazing truth of Kyben civilization.  The madmen of Kyba are not really mad--they are in fact secretly in control of the entire Kyben space empire!  From Kyba they manipulate the ordinary conformist masses of Kyben; their apparent madness is merely creativity and innovation that appears mad to the dull close-minded conformists.  The stuff they do that seems impossible is a reflection of the superpowers they have developed because they are free thinkers who do not permit society's rules to stifle them.  Themus was assigned to Kyba because he seemed smart, and is inducted into the ranks of the madmen and, presumably, lives happily ever after with the hot girl.

"The Crackpots" is an expression of Ellison's contempt for ordinary people with ordinary jobs who follow conventional norms, a wish fulfillment fantasy in which the superiority of people like Ellison, the creative people who break all the rules of the squares, cannot be questioned, a world in which people like Ellison are in charge.  (The way the hot girl just comes out of nowhere and declares her desire for Themus without him having to do anything to attract her is another aspect of wish fulfillment that scratches an itch that nags many of the young men who read SF magazines.)  "The Crackpots" is also a story that celebrates the manipulation of the masses by the cognitive elite.  Science fiction is full of this sort of elitist fantasy and pandering to alienated nerds--the Slan, the X-men, the Dragonriders, the Jedi, the Foundation, on and on--but when we are fortunate it is a little more subtle and is embedded in an entertaining adventure narrative instead of a series of lame jokes and farcical anecdotes.  Today we have not been fortunate.

Thumbs down!  Presumably Merril liked this one because she sees herself as a creative person oh-so-superior to the ordinary American with his stuffy bourgeois morality.  "The Crackpots" hasn't been anthologized as far as I can tell, but was reprinted in the various editions of Paingod and Other Delusions.  

On the left above we see Jack Gaughan's cover to the first edition of Paingod and Other Delusions.
Below we see the covers of European publications which include translations of Ellison stories
and bear covers shamelessly ripping off Gaughan's work for Pyramid.

"The Silk and the Song" by Charles L. Fontenay

I don't think I've ever read anything by Fontenay before.  "The Silk and the Song" first appeared in F&SF, and editor Anthony Boucher selected it for a F&SF "Best of" anthology; it has also seen print in multiple anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name on them, a text book, and Fontenay collections.  People seem to like it, so maybe it is good--I hope so, because the last story has me feeling a little down about the whole SF community.  

Faith restored!  "The Silk and the Song," unlike Ellison's clunker, presents a believable alien world, inspires real human feeling, and has a competently executed adventure plot--and no dumb jokes!  Plus, lefties can easily read it as advocacy of diversity and tolerance and maybe even an animal rights piece.  Thumbs up!

The Hussirs are a short people with tails and only four fingers on a hand who have a sort of medieval civilization--there are lords in the countryside who have a tense relationship with the merchants in the towns, and everybody fights with spears and archery.  These lords and merchants own slaves of another race like twice as tall as they, using them as we would use horses, as steeds and to pull plows and so forth.  This slave race is homo sapiens, the descendants of a Terran space crew who landed on the planet like a thousand years ago and were captured after a futile fight against overwhelming numbers.

Our protagonist is a young slave who, through a concatenation of events, finds himself free, a member of a community of escaped humans and their descendants who live in the hills.  Following clues left by their ancient ancestors, our hero and an attractive girl figure out how to escape the planet on the towering  thousand-year-old space ship that sits at the center of a Hussir town.

A well-written classic-style SF story with paradigm-shift and sense-of-wonder elements in which all the little details and character relationships ring true.  A relief!    

**********

Well, that was a roller coaster ride.  Two stories about superior young men who discover the truth about their authoritarian societies and fight their way to freedom, one an irritating farce full of non-sequitur comedy scenes and oozing with self-important elitism and the other an entertaining adventure story with convincing characters and images.  

This has been the eighth post in our Merril-approved 1956 stories series.  Below find links to the first seven installments, and stay tuned to see how many additional 1956 SF stories will inspire agonized groans or sighs of relief here in the headquarters of MPorcius Fiction Log. 

Abernathy and Aldiss
Anderson, Allen and Banks
Barrow, Beaumont and Blish
Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler  

Carter, Clarke and Clifton 
Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen
de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle