After typing all that stuff about Merril promoting stories from mainstream outlets, I was hoping to read the Calvin Kentfield story she included on her Honorable Mention list, "The Angel and the Sailor," but I couldn't easily find any copies of the issue of Harper's Bazaar (September 1956--an issue with a cover for all you foot fetishists!) or the collection (The Angel and the Sailor: A Novella and Nine Stories) in which it appears. Rats. I was however relieved to find a PDF of Winona McClintic's story from the November 1956 issue of The Atlantic, "A Heart of Furious Fancy." McClintic's will be the final story we deal with today; before we get to it, we'll read "Rite of Passage" by two of our favorite people, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore; a story by a person new to our notice, Varley Lang, "Thereby Hangs;" "Exploration Team" by another person we read all the time, Murray Leinster; and famous author Madeleine L'Engle's "Poor Little Saturday."
(I will also note that Merril's Honorable Mention list includes a story from Playboy by Richard Matheson that we read in a different context, "A Flourish of Strumpets;" follow the link to the blog post in which I opine about it.)
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
"Rite of Passage" made its debut in an issue of F&SF with one of Emsh's charming pretty girl covers, an issue full of stories by people we care about here at MPorcius Fiction Log: not only are Kuttner and Moore represented in its pages, but also Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson and Poul Anderson. The Matheson story, "Steel," is very famous, having been made into an episode of The Twilight Zone as well as a 21st-century film, and is the sort of thing I would pass on because I already know the plot, similarly the Anderson looks like a pun-filled broad satire of Robert E. Howard and his Conan character, the sort of thing I am likely to give a wide berth because I find puns and broad satires irritating. Well, let's hope we can embrace "Rite of Passage" as well as Emsh's cover.
"Thereby Hangs..." by Varley Lang
Varley Lang has only two entries at isfdb, a 1955 story in If and this 1956 Astounding story. "Thereby Hangs" is one of those classic-style SF stories in which a smart guy uses high technology and trickery to outwit his adversaries. Unfortunately, it is pretty bland and boring, with no character, feeling or excitement.
It is the spacefaring future! Human civilization has spread to many star systems. A single company, C & S, has a monopoly on space travel, having recently forced their only rival, the people of planet Glencoe, out of the starship business, apparently by inflicting a plague on Glencoe. The people of Glencoe fled their home planet, and were placed under quarantine, prevented from landing on any human inhabited planet. So they had to search for a new planet, but the scouts of C & S tried to keep ahead of them, landing on and claiming any suitable planets before the Glencoeans could get to them--currently the Glecoeans are stuck on a barren rock with few natural resources.
After the author lays out this background, we get the main plot, which follows the two-man crew of one of the C & S scout ships as they investigate a world with lots of valuable natural resources. On the planet they meet what is apparently a native, a man with a tail who says that he is the ambassador of the planet’s people. The scouts never meet any other people on the planet, but off in the distance see evidence of the presence of other people. The man with the tail succeeds in convincing them that his people have very advanced technology. Eventually the scouts sign a treaty with the native, a treaty with terms pretty favorable to the natives, because it has been impressed upon the scouts how powerful the natives are. Then comes the twist ending. The man with a tail is a human, a Glencoean--the tail was just a high tech gadget, and the evidence in the distance of intelligent activity was in fact natural phenomena. Thanks to the treaty the Glencoeans now have a resource rich planet and the right to trade with other planets, despite the efforts of C & S.
Besides being boring, most of the Glencoean tricks are hard to take seriously. I have to give this story a thumbs down. We must ask why Merril chose to recommend "Thereby Hangs...." Maybe because of its anti-business vibe? (After all, if we are to believe the article at wikipedia on the Futurians, Merril was a Trotskyist.)
"Exploration Team" by Murray Leinster
Here’s another story from John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Astounding, a cover story, in fact. Isfdb tells us it is a component of the series “Colonial Survey,” and it was a big hit, winning the Hugo for novelette and getting reprinted time and time again.
"Exploration Team" is vulnerable to the charge that it is too verbose, with long detailed descriptions of, for example, what the landing of a rocket ship looks like, alien flora, fauna, and scenery, and the marching formations of a para-military unit as it crosses hostile territory. But rocket ships, alien monsters and Earthers traversing dangerous locales are classic SF elements, and I found Leinster’s treatment of them entertaining. The story also has philosophical themes: the bonds that can grow between men and beasts, the superiority of living things to machines and how reliance on machines can make people weak, and the need to stay true to your own nature.
The plot. Huyghens is the sole human on an illegal colony on planet Loren Two; his subordinates are genetically modified Kodak bears and a similarly enhanced bald eagle. Loren Two is quarantined because of its dangerous animal life, and Huyghens lives in what amounts to a fortress with his bears and eagle.
To Huyghens’ surprise, a rocket boat lands on the planet, drops off a single man, and blasts off. This man is Roane, an officer of the Colonial Survey, come to assess a legitimate colony consisting of a small number of men and a large force of robots that landed on Loren Two some time ago. Presumably this colony was wiped out by the ferocious native wildlife; the ship that brough Roane couldn’t detect any sign of it, and Huyghens has never heard of it.
Huyghens jerry-rigs something out of his radio equipment and detects where the lost colony must be, and discovers evidence that some of its human members may still be alive. So the two men, the four bears, and the eagle march two hundred miles over mountainous monster-infested terrain to effect a rescue. Along the way we learn why Huyghens got involved in an illegal colonizing effort and how his relationship with the bears and eagle began, and we get a triumphant happy ending that sees the monsters wiped out, our heroes lauded, and their values vindicated.
A solid adventure story--thumbs up! As noted, you can find it in a multitude of anthologies and Leinster collections.
Here, from an issue of Fantastic Universe with a cover by Hannes Bok, we have a story from the author of A Wrinkle in Time, a book I recall people talking about a lot when I was a kid in the Seventies and Eighties.
This here is one of those stories in which the narrator has the paranoid delusion that the entire world is an elaborate fake put up to trick him or her; The Matrix and Truman Show films leverage this idea, and years ago we read a Heinlein story on this theme. In "A Heart of Furious Fancy" the narrator is a woman grad student studying languages and literature; she thinks all the people she meets are actors reciting lines, all the rooms she enters hastily assembled sets full of props. There is sort of a feminist angle to the story, which perhaps attracted Merril's approbation.
Before we hump this episode's lengthy segment of our journey through 1956, here are links to my blog posts on those thirty 1956 Merril-approved stories we've already grappled with:
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
"Rite of Passage" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore
It is the future! Government is weak and corrupt, and real power is held by the monopolistic corporashuns! Each of the competing corps, also known as "clans," has two chief executives, a White President and a Black President. In this future, most people believe in magic, and the Presidents are essentially witch doctors, White Presidents masters of healing and protective sorcery, and Black Presidents workers in black magic which inflicts illness on people, triggers accidents, even inflicts death by theft of the soul! Our narrator is the Black President of the Communications Corporation, and he has a beef with one Jake Haliaia, a big Polynesian, a key member of the Food Corporation. Black Presidents are forbidden to use their fell wizardry to pursue personal grudges, so our narrator has been waiting for somebody to come to him who has also been wronged by Haliaia with a request for a magical attack on Haliaia. As the story begins, that day has finally come!
The course of the story follows the Black President as he bends the rules to kill Haliaia (who stole the narrator's wife) even though BP's client (whose inheritance was stolen by Haliaia) can't afford to pay for a murder, only an illness. Kuttner and Moore bring to life this whole screwy world as well as the mind of the narrator as he performs and resists the magic he doesn't really believe in; one of the wrinkles of the story is that magic is not "real"--it leverages a sort of placebo effect that relies on the belief of those subjected to it, supplemented by dirty tricks and the witch doctors' training in psychological manipulation--and the narrator is one of the very few in this superstitious world who knows the truth. Does the narrator's skepticism mean he will be immune from attack by other witch doctors who discover any of his various blasphemies or rule breaking? What if Haliaia or the narrator's ex-wife is also a skeptic? We also learn how society became so superstitious, how the narrator came to doubt the reality of magic, and why BP's wife left him for Haliaia.
A solid story about psychology and human relationships; K & M weave together all the different elements with skill. In her intro to the edition of Fury I own, Moore tells us that the basic theme of her writing has been "The most treacherous thing in life is love" while that of her husband's work was "Authority is dangerous and I will never submit to it" and she and Kuttner handle these powerful themes ably in "Rite of Passage." An interesting component of the story is how education and social mores shape your mind--can you really believe 2+2=4, and can you actually act upon that belief, if everybody you know, and all the newspapers and TV shows, have been telling you all your life that 2+2=5?
Thumbs up!
"Rite of Passage" reappeared in the 1988 Asimov/Greenberg anthology printed by DAW, The Great SF Stories #18 (1956), and in a 21st-century collection put out by the good people at Haffner Press which has an intro by Robert Silverberg and an afterword by Frederik Pohl.
"Thereby Hangs..." by Varley Lang
It is the spacefaring future! Human civilization has spread to many star systems. A single company, C & S, has a monopoly on space travel, having recently forced their only rival, the people of planet Glencoe, out of the starship business, apparently by inflicting a plague on Glencoe. The people of Glencoe fled their home planet, and were placed under quarantine, prevented from landing on any human inhabited planet. So they had to search for a new planet, but the scouts of C & S tried to keep ahead of them, landing on and claiming any suitable planets before the Glencoeans could get to them--currently the Glecoeans are stuck on a barren rock with few natural resources.
After the author lays out this background, we get the main plot, which follows the two-man crew of one of the C & S scout ships as they investigate a world with lots of valuable natural resources. On the planet they meet what is apparently a native, a man with a tail who says that he is the ambassador of the planet’s people. The scouts never meet any other people on the planet, but off in the distance see evidence of the presence of other people. The man with the tail succeeds in convincing them that his people have very advanced technology. Eventually the scouts sign a treaty with the native, a treaty with terms pretty favorable to the natives, because it has been impressed upon the scouts how powerful the natives are. Then comes the twist ending. The man with a tail is a human, a Glencoean--the tail was just a high tech gadget, and the evidence in the distance of intelligent activity was in fact natural phenomena. Thanks to the treaty the Glencoeans now have a resource rich planet and the right to trade with other planets, despite the efforts of C & S.
Besides being boring, most of the Glencoean tricks are hard to take seriously. I have to give this story a thumbs down. We must ask why Merril chose to recommend "Thereby Hangs...." Maybe because of its anti-business vibe? (After all, if we are to believe the article at wikipedia on the Futurians, Merril was a Trotskyist.)
"Exploration Team" by Murray Leinster
"Exploration Team" is vulnerable to the charge that it is too verbose, with long detailed descriptions of, for example, what the landing of a rocket ship looks like, alien flora, fauna, and scenery, and the marching formations of a para-military unit as it crosses hostile territory. But rocket ships, alien monsters and Earthers traversing dangerous locales are classic SF elements, and I found Leinster’s treatment of them entertaining. The story also has philosophical themes: the bonds that can grow between men and beasts, the superiority of living things to machines and how reliance on machines can make people weak, and the need to stay true to your own nature.
The plot. Huyghens is the sole human on an illegal colony on planet Loren Two; his subordinates are genetically modified Kodak bears and a similarly enhanced bald eagle. Loren Two is quarantined because of its dangerous animal life, and Huyghens lives in what amounts to a fortress with his bears and eagle.
To Huyghens’ surprise, a rocket boat lands on the planet, drops off a single man, and blasts off. This man is Roane, an officer of the Colonial Survey, come to assess a legitimate colony consisting of a small number of men and a large force of robots that landed on Loren Two some time ago. Presumably this colony was wiped out by the ferocious native wildlife; the ship that brough Roane couldn’t detect any sign of it, and Huyghens has never heard of it.
Huyghens jerry-rigs something out of his radio equipment and detects where the lost colony must be, and discovers evidence that some of its human members may still be alive. So the two men, the four bears, and the eagle march two hundred miles over mountainous monster-infested terrain to effect a rescue. Along the way we learn why Huyghens got involved in an illegal colonizing effort and how his relationship with the bears and eagle began, and we get a triumphant happy ending that sees the monsters wiped out, our heroes lauded, and their values vindicated.
A solid adventure story--thumbs up! As noted, you can find it in a multitude of anthologies and Leinster collections.
"Poor Little Saturday" by Madeline L'Engle
The text of "Poor Little Saturday" is the memoir of the strange relationship a man enjoyed with two female figures when he was a teenager growing up in the American South. Stricken with malaria, the young narrator was often tormented by fevers, wracked by fits of shivering, and even subject to delusions. On the outskirts of town sat an abandoned planation house, said to be haunted, with a grove of trees on its grounds, and the narrator would often lay in the ferns in the shade of this grove to get some relief from the ferocious Southern heat. One day while lying thus he is approached by a pretty teenaged girl, who takes him into the house to meet a witch. The witch cures the boy’s malaria, and befriends him, and for some months he visits the witch and the girl daily. L’Engle offers various weird and supernatural scenes (the witch dances with a skeleton, mixes potions in test tubes and retorts, introduces the kid to the camel she summoned from the Middle East to act as her steed and to offer her advice in Arabic and Hindustani, etc.) and insight into the character and identities of the girl (apparently the spirit of a 19th-century still-born baby, an evocation summoned by the witch of the young woman that baby might have grown to become) and the witch (who it seems has lived for many centuries and all over the world.) These women are mercurial, selfish and amoral. The girl in particular is prone to attacking the narrator with her teeth and nails should he anger or disobey her, so when she offers him a ring as a symbol of their love he has no choice but to accept it. Eventually the townspeople learn he has this ring, which is famous in local legend and worth a fortune, leading to a violent confrontation between the townsfolk and the witch that culminates in the departure of the witch from the plantation house and the dissolution of the ghost girl.
L’Engle has a smooth and comfortable style and her images are strong and clear, which makes this story a pleasant read, but I didn't find it quite satisfying. The tone is perhaps a little uneven, the sinister parts and silly parts sitting uncomfortably next to each other, and I felt like the plot had loose ends. My gripes here could be dismissed as a failure to appreciate the story's oh-so-literary ambiguity, but while I commend L'Engle's wise decision to leave ambiguous how we should feel about the witch and the girl, who on the one hand help the kid and suffer grievously in the climax, but on the other are callous and sometimes cruel and it seems in league with the devil, I argue that ambiguity in the plot and tone weaken the impact of the story, leaving frustrating doubts in the mind of the reader instead of the sort of sharp and deep impressions L'Engle succeeds in creating with her images.
Despite my stated reservations, a good story worth reading. "Poor Little Saturday" has reappeared in many anthologies of ghost and witch stories.
"A Heart of Furious Fancy" by Winona McClintic
McClintic was a U. S. Navy veteran of World War II and the Korean War who published a bunch of stories and poems in The Atlantic and in SF magazines, mostly F&SF, between 1945 and 1960.
The narrator's insanity leads her to murder a man, and then, in the final paragraphs, commit suicide (or so I suspect.)
A boring gimmick story--thumbs down.
**********
Another leg of our long journey through 1956 is now behind us. Our friends Kuttner and Moore and Leinster didn't let us down, and the famous L'Engle offered something worthwhile, but I can't get on board with Merril's decision to honor Lang and McClintic with spots on her list. Three out of five is not so bad, though.
I remember reading this anthology when it was first published long, long ago. Judith Merril was a super star editor back then!
ReplyDelete