If you were going to some place where they eat snails to throw soup on the
Giaconda, or some place where they eat sheep's organs cooked in a sheep's stomach to hunt for Nessie, or some place where they eat raw fish in order to buy used panties, you might bring a Fodor's or Frommer's guide with you. Well, we're going to 1956 and we're bringing with us Judith Merril's
SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume as our guide. This installment of Merril's famous anthology series includes a long list of 1956 speculative fiction stories which Merril thought worth recommending but which she didn't include in the book. We've been doing this for a while, working our way through Merril's alphabetical list, reading selected stories, and today we will tackle an "M," an "N" and an "O." If you are curious about earlier stops on this tour, check out the links at the bottom of this post,
mon cheri.
(Nota bene: Merril recommends Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "And the Light is Risen," but I am skipping it because it would later be incorporated into A Canticle For Leibowitz, which I read ages ago, as a recent Rutgers grad working for minimum wage in a New Jersey bookstore, and may reread one of these days.)
"No Man Pursueth" by Ward Moore (1956)
I almost bought a
1972 Avon edition of Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee because I liked the Jeff Jones cover, but alternate history isn't my thing, and even the endorsement of Ray Bradbury was not enough to entice me into committing to reading it. Last year I read Moore's 1960 story
"The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl" and I didn't like it; I called it "sappy" and judged the points it was trying to make "banal." However, I did like the 1961 Moore story I read in 2015,
"It Becomes Necessary." Maybe today's Moore story, "No Man Pursueth," will be a tiebreaker.
Things got off on the wrong foot when, on page 3 of this 30 page story, Moore indulged in unfunny self-referential "meta" humor aimed at the SF community, with thinly veiled references to Sam Moskowitz and Forrest J. Ackerman and direct references to Galaxy editor H. L. Gold and F&SF editor Anthony Boucher. I find this kind of thing tiresome.
Our lead is a famous stage actress, age 41, and she is having breakfast in a New York diner, reading the paper, when a balding guy introduces himself to her as the number three science-fiction fan in America, even slinging some SF lingo at her ("egoboo," for example.) After Moore is done with his in-jokes, the SF fan shares with the actress his theory about the recent spate of disturbing and inexplicable events that are dominating news coverage. All over the world, airplanes are disappearing and large numbers of ordinary people are reporting incredible experiences, the sensation of having been transported to, and then returned from, alternate worlds where people where unusual clothes. Number Three claims holes in the time-space continuum are responsible. Later, the actress finds herself in a church and hears another explanation for the phenomena, that they are the result of the accumulated weight of human evil.
Bad news comes from La La Land via the telephone--the actress's second husband reports that her daughter, age 20, from her first marriage, tried to commit suicide (sleeping pills) and is in the hospital. Scared to fly, the actress and her black maid (whom Moore gives bad grammar and an accent) hop in the car and strike out west from New York City for the left coast. In Zanesville, Ohio (the maid says "Uhia") they stop to get out to eat and the actress is transported to the past or an alternate universe or something, to find herself an actress performing at a Nazi extermination camp!
After hearing a black-clad soldier's racist monologue (he talks up the scientific methods employed by the Nazis, perhaps a dig from Moore at the sort of SF fans who are science-obsessed and read Astounding, in contrast to the more literary-minded readers of F&SF) she is transported back to our world, to backwoods Kentucky, where she gets some help from some poor Christians who don't have electricity and don't read the papers ("Sin enough in the world, without reading about it.") The maid catches up to her and they are continuing their journey west when they and their car are transported to a city with cobblestoned streets (apparently Vienna, centuries ago) where they witness some guys shoot a cat with an arrow.
In some ways "No Man Pursueth" is like a mainstream story about the guilt of parents who focus on their careers instead of spending time with their kids, thus damaging the kids' psychology. There's even a "
magical Negro" who dispenses wisdom about parenting in "blaccent." In Vienna, the maid cannot understand the speech of the cat killers, but the actress can comprehend both the Viennese and the Nazi; the actress figures this is because the black maid is good and the actress is herself evil, somehow on the same wavelength as the Jew-killers and feline-killers. It is also the maid who figures out how to get out of the cat-killing world and back to modern America (not by using logic or science, however, but just by following a hunch, as if Moore is following the tradition that while white men try to master the world through data collection and rational calculation, women and blacks just follow intuition or benefit from being close to nature.)
As these adventures proceed we are privy to the actress's thoughts. For one thing, she seems to identify with the fictional characters she has played more than with real people. More importantly, we learn that her first husband cheated on her with her sister, and that hubby #1 urged her to abort their daughter because being pregnant might ruin her figure; the actress carried the pregnancy to term because the risks of the abortion procedure (septicemia) scared her, not because she loved her unborn child.
The two women have almost reached California when the actress is again transported to another world, this a surreal one, a sort of abstract representation of a court of law and/or a theatre stage where she hears voices reciting, among other things, quotes from and about Sacco and Vanzetti. (When I was a kid in the '70s and '80s people talked about Sacco and Vanzetti all the time, but I feel like I don't hear so much about them any more.) The actress suddenly realizes that she has been a bad person because she has withheld love from others:
And what was evil? Cruelty, self-righteousness, stupidity, insensitivity, yes--but in the end it was essentially lack of love.
Her sins include withholding sex from her first husband--she is not only to blame for her daughter's suicide attempt because she was a distant and cold mother focused on her own career, but is also to blame for her husband's infidelity because of her stinginess in sharing her body. Significantly, we learn that the maid, the person in the story who represents or exemplifies goodness and wisdom, is very sexually active. (As so often in white-penned fiction, black people in Moore's story are characterized as overflowing with sexuality.)
The phenomena of people travelling to other times and/or worlds, the actress now realizes, were the universe educating people in how to be good, and she somehow senses that these trips would soon end--enough people who were evil, like her, have now been educated, and the balance between good and evil has been restored.
(I think Moore leaves a huge loose end hanging regarding the disappearing airplanes--the actress feels the planes will stop disappearing, but I don't think Moore addresses whether the lost people and machines will ever come back. Why did he even include the whole concept of vanishing airplanes? I guess as a way to force the actress and the maid to drive cross country, but he could have just said the actress was afraid of flying, you know, like Isaac Asimov.)
As an historical document, "No Man Pursueth" is sort of interesting, it being a specimen of the pro-sex SF we generally associate with Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein, and of anti-racism SF that, even though it is all about how awesome black people are, itself feels sort of racist. The story's apparent low opinion of abortion, nowadays a centerpiece of elite morality, also marks it as being from another era, and we also have the matter of a male writer depicting a female character and passing judgement on her sex life--perhaps a no-no in 2024.
As a work of entertainment or literature, however, "No Man Pursueth" is lame. In his intro to the story in F&SF, Anthony Boucher says "No Man Pursueth" is "one of the stories I have been most proud to publish." I guess Boucher was excited to print a SF story that, instead of trying to teach you science or entertain you with an adventure, tried to treat philosophically real-life relationship issues like marriage, parenting, and race relations. Unfortunately for all of us, Moore doesn't deal with these issues in a compelling way, and so he's getting a thumbs down from me. The universe giving people lessons by sending them into the past to witness atrocities is just lazy and childish deus ex machina goop, and Moore isn't even content to let the visions or whatever speak for themselves--after presenting his symbolism and offering his clues, he just tells you exactly what they mean, so his story has no subtlety or nuance or ambiguity, and demands no thought from the reader. Besides lacking intellectual challenge, "No Man Pursueth" also lacks any real fun or excitement, feels long because of all the extraneous material (like the SF in-jokes in the opening scene) and features a writing style that is merely adequate. Anthony Boucher, you sold us a lemon.
"Second Sight" by Alan E. Nourse (1956)
I've read two stories by Nourse so far, a lame cat story called
"Nize Kitty" and
"Family Resemblance," which I condemned as "a ten-page fat joke." It's been over five years since I read those stories and tempers have cooled, so let's give Nourse a third look, why don't we? (And let's hope he fares better than Ward Moore has today, and that I can deal with this story in less that 1,500 words. MPorcius Fiction Log is at risk of blog bloat!)
"Second Sight" is pretty well-written and makes an effort to develop real characters and inspire emotion in the reader, but the actual plot and twist ending are sort of slight.
The story comes to us in the form of an excerpt from a journal that we are told has only recently been written down but which the journal writer has kept in her mind for years. The diarist is a young woman who can read minds, and through dialogue and exposition and so forth we learn that she is the world's only psyker, that as a little girl she so scared her parents they willingly surrendered her to government scientists. At the time covered by the journal excerpt she is in her early twenties and the text largely focuses on how one researcher may be in love with her and is sheltering her from experiments other researchers may want to inflict upon her. In the end she agrees to do work that consists of using her mind-invading powers to trigger the growth of psychic powers in others ("latents") who have psychic potential but can't seem to blossom on their own. The surprise reveal at the end is that the psyker is blind and deaf, that her entire relationship with the world is through the medium of her psychic senses.
Acceptable filler. "Second Sight" would be reprinted in the Nourse collection The Counterfeit Man and in one of those themed anthologies credited to pteromerhanophobic Isaac Asimov and two other guys, in this case Martin Greenberg and Charles Waugh, this one on the theme of mutants. (I don't know that the woman in the story is really a mutant, though, as her genes, we are told, are normal and if she has kids they are no more likely to have psychic powers than any other person's offspring. Of course, biochemist Asimov probably knows more about who is and who isn't a mutant than I do.)
 |
The cover of Asimov's Mutants illustrates one of Edmond Hamilton's
more "serious" and critically acclaimed stories, "He That Hath Wings,"
which we read back in 2017 |
"Let Me Live in a House" by Chad Oliver (1954)
Merril recommends two Oliver stories in the back of
SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume; we read 1956's
"North Wind" ten years ago, back in my Iowa days, and I said it was "acceptable." But "Let Me Live in a House" is new to us. According to isfdb this story debuted in 1954 in
Universe Science Fiction, and then in 1955 appeared in a Groff Conklin anthology,
Science Fiction Terror Tales. I guess Merril treated it as a '56 story because it was reprinted in a 1956 issue of the British magazine (then edited by E. C. Tubb!)
Authentic Science Fiction. Despite this bending of the parameters, we're going to roll with it, and read "Let Me Live in a House" in
Authentic, to make sure we read the precise version Merril was recommending. (The illustration in
Universe--by the great Virgil Finlay--is better, though.)
I will always think of Oliver as the guy who tells us modern life sucks and we should live like stone-age Plains Indians, and "Let Me Live in a House" does not alter my attitude.
"Let Me Live in a House" starts with a sort of sarcastic description of two houses ("cottages,") a sort of caricature of stereotypical suburban homes, each with a white picket fence and a refrigerator ("frigidaire") and a knick-knack-laden mantel and all that, reminding us of all those pop songs that goof on suburbanites, like "Little Boxes" and "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and "Shangri-La."* Again things were off on the wrong foot--I don't read SF to endure the sort of banal and snobbish criticism I can find (and have) in a multitude of other venues. Of course, part of Judith Merril's project was to emphasize commonalities between SF and the mainstream, so what I see as a bug she very likely saw as a feature.
*I'll note here that the great Dave Davies has asserted that "Shangri-La" is not in fact "a go at the little, common man."
Anyway, I learned on page two that Oliver's title from the story is from a poem I'd never heard of by Sam Walter Foss, apparently a poem about how you should live among humanity instead of living apart or above the community, even if you are some kind of brainiac; Foss describes the geniuses who live like hermits as "souls like stars" and "pioneer souls who blaze a path," and asserts that he is not one of them, but wants to live in communion with other men. One of the main themes of Oliver's "Let Me Live in a House" is that (most if not all) human beings are not suited to life in space away from the rest of humanity, and that those who go into space will suffer horribly, probably to no profit or purpose other than to appease their lust for glory--glory they will not receive! (Like Kris Neville, Chad Oliver prefigures the themes we see in the work of Barry Malzberg.)
Four people, three of them boring stereotypes--the dutiful housewife, the woman who is addicted to watching TV, and the middle-aged man still obsessed with his youthful football career--live in a tiny colony or outpost under a dome on barren Ganymede; the colony is built to simulate suburban life, complete with artificial sounds of wind and neighborhood children. The four people are there to keep an eye on the outpost for a year-long tour of duty; the two fake suburban houses are meant to keep them from being driven insane by the pressures of living in space, and the three I have described have been programmed to be drones, conditioned to act more or less robotically at the outpost--they almost believe they really are in a suburban American neighborhood. Our main character, Gordon, is the man whose mind is not as blinkered and hindered, the man charged with dealing with unexpected problems.
The plot of "Let Me Live in a House" is about Gordon's reaction to just such an unexpected problem--the arrival of an alien! After some scenes meant to build tension that presage the arrival of the alien, we get many pages of conversation between Gordon and the extrasolar being, who as aliens so often are in stories, is disguised as a human and has telepathy. Oliver uses these conversations to give us the backstory of the colony I have already summarized above, and to describe the aliens, who are a contrast to modern European humanity, and illustrate the idea that going into space is a waste of resources, as humans are not psychologically prepared for the challenges presented by space and conquering space will not solve human problems like war, only expand their scope, and the common people of democratic polities will realize this and turn against the space program.
The alien explains that his people are nomads, like "the ancient Plains Indians in the area you think of as North America;" they don't produce anything the way settled people do, so to live they prey upon "sedentary" civilizations, their mental powers giving them the power to trick and overwhelm natives whenever necessary. The human race is next on the menu. The first time Gordon tries to attack the alien, Oliver spends half a page describing the pain the alien inflicts on the guy via his telepathy. But in the end Gordon succeeds in defeating the alien. But his victory is a tragic one. For one thing, he is permanently mentally scarred. For another, none will know of his heroism: Gordon covets the dream that man will conquer space, and he knows that if the common people learn that space is inhabited by hostile aliens that the space program will be shut down. So he keeps the alien attack a secret.
I'm giving "Let Me Live in a House" a thumbs down. Obviously I find its satire of the suburbs annoying, I disagree that the Plains Indians are somehow better than civilized cultures, and I think the human race should conquer the stars and is capable of doing so. But I have reasons to condemn the story beyond my ideological differences with Oliver. Most importantly, "Let Me Live in a House" is weighed down with too many long and tedious expository passages. I also found that Gordon's triumph isn't particularly well explained, isn't all that convincing--he can't resist the psychic attack, and then he can? Maybe I am just prejudiced because I think Gordon's success works at cross purposes with what I think are Oliver's sincere ideological commitments.
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Not a stellar batch of stories this time; Merril presumably liked the Moore and the Oliver because they were consonant with her own leftist beliefs.
Thanks for reading this long blog post consisting of my dumb jokes and semi-coherent musings on 1956 SF stories. For more of the same, check out the links below to previous posts in our Merril-approved-1956-stories series:
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