You probably remember that the MPorcius Fiction Log staff is picking stories to read from the list headed HONORABLE MENTION at the back of Judith Merril's 1957 anthology
SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume. These are stories printed in 1956 that Merril liked but which for whatever reason didn't end up among the 18 pieces actually reprinted in the book. The list is alphabetical by author, and we today look at the two P entries, "Masterpiece" by Arthur Porges and "The Creep" by Robert Presslie. If you wonder what A through O stories we've selected from Merril's list, click click click to your heart's content on the links below.
"Masterpiece" by Arthur Porges
"Masterpiece" debuted in the hubba hubba men's magazine
Escapade alongside pictures of topless ladies and full-page cartoons that slyly hint at bestiality, pedophilia, incest and white slavery. (There is also a sort of Easter Egg, a little photo of Bettie Page's face.) One of Merril's projects is to question the boundaries between genre and mainstream fiction and the distinctions between genres, and "Masterpiece" is not listed at isfdb, suggesting that few people recognized "Masterpiece" as SF, or at least SF notable enough to reprint in some anthology or collection. Well, let's surf on over to the scan of the September 1956 issue of
Escapade at the internet archive, world's greatest website, flip past the report on fall fashion, the wine quiz, the profile of a pre-Ginger Tina Louise, and the "blow-by-blow account of what goes on" at a progressive jazz recording session, and read "Masterpiece" and then take a guess as to why Merril recommended it.
"Masterpiece" is mediocre filler, but I guess, as a satire of advertising and people's greed and acquisitiveness, it appealed to Merril's leftist sensibilities.
One of America's top ad men (he makes $80,000 a year) comes to a dive bar and talks to the the bar tender and the overweight blonde hanging around at the bar, telling them about some of his most successful publicity stunts, like painting a slogan promoting cigarettes in colossal print on the White Cliffs of Dover. The climax of the story is that he has arranged to have an advertising slogan written on the moon, the same gag we see in Robert Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and in Arthur C. Clarke's
"Watch This Space."
The text of the story is overly long, adding in multiple little sub plots in which people reveal their avarice. And then there is the fact that the ad text is so long the letters of which it would be composed would be impossible to read with the naked eye (Clarke had just eight characters reproduced on the moon in his story, and one of Heinlein's ideas was that the commies might reproduce the hammer and sickle log up there.)
Barely acceptable.
"The Creep" by Robert Presslie
It looks like "The Creep" was serialized over two issues of
Authentic Science Fiction Monthly and then never reprinted. It is pretty long--over 60 pages--so let's hope it is good.
"The Creep" is about how the capitalists have been lying to the public in order to manipulate the stock market but a lone hero, a journalist, was willing to tell the people the truth, only to find that the common people preferred to be lied to! These same capitalists are going to kill us all with their silly competition with the Reds, but luckily some space aliens come along to save us with the help of the journalist and a woman. Obviously this goop is right up the alley of a pinko like Judith Merril.
Like some kind of crappy stage play, the first half of "The Creep" takes place in a single location, a bar, and has a small cast, each member of which represents a class of people.
World famous journalist Sam Garnet is drowning his sorrows. Garnet was working for the TV news program owned by Grossen Electronics Industries but got fired today because he told the apocalyptic truth on his broadcast. For one thing, he predicted a nuclear war in the next few days. (The story never uses specific place names or political identifiers like "USSR" or "the West" or "communist," just allusions, like "our side" and "the other side.") For another, he revealed that one of Grossen's consumer products, the Creepmeter that measures radiation, is calibrated to underreport how much the radiation of Western and Soviet weapons testing (people call this radiation "the Creep") is poisoning the environment, hiding from the people the fact that even if the impending nuclear war is averted then most people are going to die in a few days anyway from radiation sickness. And finally, Sam exposed on air the fact that the spheres that recently appeared in Earth orbit are not new Western defense satellites, as the Grossen suits want him to say, but vessels of totally unknown, presumably extraterrestrial, origin! A woman in the bar in fancy clothes some man bought her, Lena, expresses her anger at Sam for disabusing everybody of their illusions, of puncturing their blissful ignorance.
Presslie pads the length of his childishly tendentious story with lots of filler text about people drinking booze and smoking cigarettes and so on; I don't know, maybe he thinks that builds tension. When the bar's roof caves in, presumably from a bomb blast as the nuclear war starts, we get detailed descriptions of everybody's physical injuries and psychological symptoms, and then we get Presslie's idea of a suspense scene, a blow-by-blow account of the lifting of a beam off the body of a fallen man that lasts an entire page; sample text below:
With the shifting of the beam his grip was now all wrong. One arm was bent more than the other. Max slid his left knee further forward until it pressed beneath his lowermost hand. He sucked in an enormous gulp of air....
Sam is the truth telling member of the cognitive elite, I guess a stand in for SF readers who, of course, think they are smarter and better educated and more rational than everybody else. The man who gets killed by the beam represents the good members of the populace, the victim of the capitalist establishment's pursuit of profit. Lena represents the less savory aspects of the common masses (but don't worry, feminists, she'll redeem herself!) The owner of the bar turns out to be a communist spy, and represents the USSR and the revolutionary left, and to represent the capitalist bourgeoisie we have Max, a senior financier from Grossen Electronics, come to the bar try to get Sam to go on TV again to take back his predictions that everybody who isn't already in a deep bunker has like 48 hours to live. The pressure of being trapped in the ruined bar, which everybody is too scared to leave because its lead-lined walls are believed to be providing some protection against the Creep and the radiation from the bomb that (apparently) hit the town, leads to the bourgeois and the commie being exposed as just two sides of the same coin of selfishness and exploitative elitism (as opposed to Sam's and the space aliens' paternalistic elitism.) Both Max and the Red barkeep want to have sex with Lena in their last hours, and fight over her, and it is we readers who suffer through Presslie's tedious description of the hand-to-hand fight that ensues. The capitalist is the first to die, and then Sam helps Lena fight the commie, who is also killed.
The first episode of the serial thus ends with only two characters in the lead-shielded bar, Sam the journalist man and Lena, who under the influence of Sam instead of the capitalist or the Bolshevik starts to wisen up.
The 31 pages of the second and final installment of this dreadful borefest starts with the observation that humans are like cats in that both species have a tenacious will to live. (SF people love cats.) Sam and Lena wake up when a space suited figure busts through the rubble blocking the entrance to the ruined bar. The figure collapses, and behind it Sam can see that one of the alien spheres has crashed across the street, flattening those buildings--it was this alien crash, not a Soviet bomb, that hit the neighborhood, and the man in the space suit is the only alien survivor of the crash.
It turns out that Sam and Lena are still alive because the crashed sphere is projecting a radiation-damping field that has neutralized the Creep within a radius of like 40 yards. We get a meticulous description of how Sam figures out how to get into the alien sphere; inside he finds the rest of the crew has died. Then he and Lena split up to search the radiation-free 80-yard diameter section of city for a medical professional who can keep the alien alive so he can explain how to extend that 80-yards to all of Earth and save the world from the pollution caused by the Cold War arms race. I could barely believe how much detail Presslie offered us readers in his description of the brass sign in front of the doctor's office, but I wasn't surprised by the play by play account of the surgery the doctor performed on the alien, a scene of five pages. (The doctor is a drunk who hasn't operated in years, but his contact with Sam and the alien revives him and redeems him, just like they are going to revive the entire human race!)
The alien recovers from open heart surgery in a few hours and then teaches Sam and Lena his language in thirty minutes--this is how efficient the alien language is! Even though Sam played the role of truth-loving bleeding-heart liberal earlier and Lena was a selfish deluded dope, for a few pages in the closing pages of the story they switch roles; Sam is skeptical, even hostile, to the alien, but Lena, who reveals she was a school teacher before she decided to live off rich men by exploiting her sex appeal, insists that to earn the alien's aid they must bare their souls to E.T. Explicitly comparing the alien to a parent and implicitly to a priest or god, she confesses the sins of the Earthman (sample sins: "greed for profit, greed for property, greed for territory, and the foulest greed of all--the desire to possess the very souls of other human beings...") to the alien, who agrees to clean the Earth of the radiation. It is implied that Sam and the alien will teach the human race how to behave in the future.
Bad! I am against these stories that offer goody goody aliens as foils for evil humanity, and I am against these stories that suggest the liberal West is no better than the Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union. Even worse, this story is very slow and very boring, and is structured poorly, with the sudden switch from "we got bombed" to "it was really an alien crash landing" and the unbelievable evolutions of Sam's and Leda's characters being pretty annoying. Merril set a trap for us this time, and I fell right into it.
(I probably wouldn't have fallen into this spiked pit if I had remembered that I read a story by Presslie in 2018 and said it was tedious despite being full of weird sex, violence against women and body horror. Having a bad memory sometimes leads to suffering!)
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Not a good batch of Merril-approved stories this time around, but no knowledge is wasted, and maybe by lifting up a rock and discovering these obscurities I have done a favor to all of you out there who are maintaining a list of anti-capitalist satires.
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