Merril-approved 1956 stories: Frank Riley and Jack Ritchie

Like Johnny Thunder, we are stuck in the 1950s.  Let's read some more 1956 stories recommended by Judith Merril, this time by authors whose names start with the letter "R."  Last time we did this we had to slog through some overly long stories deploring human greed written by people whose names begin with the letter "P," but maybe today will be our day.

"The Executioner" by Frank Riley 

Riley has eight short fiction credits at isfdb, and was co-author with Mark Clifton of the Hugo-winning novel They'd Rather Be Right, which I haven't read but which I hear the conventional wisdom has decreed is not very good.  Riley's main work seems to have been as an L.A.-based journalist; he also wrote detective stories.  It looks like nobody saw fit to reprint "The Executioner" after its debut in If, so maybe Judith Merril is this story's biggest fan.  

(Though the story is not named on the cover, the Kelly Freas painting on the cover of this issue of If illustrates "The Executioner," the jewelry, lace, fingernail paint and absurdly elaborate hairstyle of the main character bringing to life the story's theme that a utopian life is going to feminize men. 

It is the 22nd century, the future of air cars and pushbutton jobs, a neofeudal future complete with lords and ladies and public executions in the form of gladiatorial pistol duels in the arena.  Life is so easy and boring in this high-tech low-work world that the execution duels are essential to maintaining public order by providing a safety valve for the masses' natural desires for excitement and cathartic violence.

The Lord High Executioner, Sir Jacques de Carougne, has twenty years of gunning down convicted felons in the arena behind him, but it hasn't always been smooth sailing--for one thing, he has an inhibition about shooting women and will often get an understudy to fight malefactors who lack a Y chromosome.  Today he gets some bad news--the convicted felon he is supposed to duel is a woman, and not just any woman--it's Lady Ann of Coberly, the woman he was in love with before he started his execution career, the sole woman he has ever loved over the course of a life of having sex with dozens of executioner groupies!  And Jacques isn't given enough time to get somebody to fill in for him!  

Before the actual execution, the high court, installed on a moving dais in the center of the arena in full view of the crowd, has to vote on whether to veto the convicted's sentence.  Ann takes this opportunity to give a speech saying that the men of her day are not men at all!  (The text implies that 22nd century men have lost the ability to sexually satisfy women.)   

Ann having been denied a stay of execution, Ann and Jacques face each other in the arena.  Ann is smart, brave, and a good shot, and proves to Jacques that she could kill him and save her own life, but instead she misses on purpose, giving Jacques a chance to prove that he is the only true man left in the world--will he gun her down or spare her?  What would a real man do?

This is a pretty good story; the writing is good, and it forces the reader to try to figure out what Ann considers a true man to be, and consider whether or not he agrees with her.  We see the utopia-will-suck theme a lot, but I actually like that theme so I don't mind it the way I mind the tired themes that got on my nerves in our last episode.  When it comes to "The Executioner" I'm right there with Merril--thumbs up!

"Project Hi-Psi" by Frank Riley

That's right, Merril chose two stories by Riley for her list of honorable mentions, and this one also appeared in If.  Like "The Executioner," it looks like "Project Hi-Psi" was forgotten by everybody with clout who wasn't born Judith Josephine Grossman after its publication in 1956, but if it is as good as "The Executioner" I will join Merril in championing it!

The early sections of "Project Hi-Psi" have a jocular tone, and our main character, Dr. Lucifer Brill, professor of Parapsychology at a university in California, son of a New England minister and descendant of Puritans, is an eccentric character.  He has eccentric clothes, eccentric facial hair, eccentric pets, etc.  This stuff isn't exactly funny, but fortunately for us readers it isn't annoying, either.  (And it is interesting to see an author leveraging what he perceives to be readers' expectations and opinions of New Englanders--we saw Robert E. Howard do this recently in his famous horror story "Pigeons from Hell.")

With the help of his fellow researchers into ESP and PK around the country, Brill has been compiling a comprehensive list of peeps in the USA who took Zener card (Riley calls them "Rhine card") tests and following up on them.  He stumbled upon an astonishing fact--over the last eight years over 3000 people who did well on the tests (suggesting they had psychic powers) have disappeared!  We learn all this in expository dialogue as Brill meets with the head of the FBI office in L.A.

The federal government does some investigating, but it is Brill who puts his own life on the line to find out the truth.  He spreads the rumor that he himself has taken a Zener card test and got a great score, and gets himself kidnapped like those 3000+ missing psykers.

Brill wakes up to find himself on an alien planet, an outpost of the space empire of the Capellans, where he and the 3000+ are subjected to long term experiments, including selective breeding experiments, by the aliens.  The set up is a little like that TV show The Prisoner, where everybody has nice little quarters in a pleasant environment but you can't escape and you have to attend classes and you get manipulated and so forth.  Brill does what investigating he can, and the fact that Brill actually doesn't have any psychic powers adds additional tension to the story--what will the aliens do when they realize he is a dud?  

Brill is paired with a woman with psychic powers, and he is manipulated into impregnating her.  (As with Ann in "The Executioner," this woman, Nina, offers her theory on what constitutes a real man and judgment of whether our main character is one.)  Brill, as a scientist, has convos with the aliens about scientific methods, which are an opportunity for Riley to discuss some criticisms of the scientific establishment.  One of Riley's themes is the way specialization retards progress, the way researchers in individual disciplines and fields will ensconce themselves in "cubicles" and fail to accept insights from other fields (when I knew scientists, well, "scientists," seeing as they were profs and students in the political science department, they would sometimes talk about getting out of their "silos" and going "interdisciplinary," and we also have the example of the guy in the novel version of A. E. van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle, who synthesizes knowledge drawn from all fields of science.)  Another of Riley's themes is how the followers of innovators like Freud and Einstein, instead of innovating themselves, will stifle innovation by defending an orthodoxy based on a rigid version of their heroes' ideas.   

The aliens explain that psi powers were relatively common in Earth's medieval period, but the ideology of the industrial era stifled their development--those with psychic abilities hid them and refused to develop them, and the human race's psychic potential atrophied.  The aliens' society followed a similar path, and the small cadre of Capellans at this outpost are trying to jump start a revival of psychic powers, which they feel will open up new vistas of learning and experience.  They want Brill, whose career proves he is as passionate about psychic powers as are they, to work with them, and offer him facilities with a thousand times more potential than those Brill had back in Cali.  And there are no restrictions on what methods they can employ--as Brill sees when he learns that one of the aliens' lines of research is to subject people to radical gene editing and extreme radiation experiments that produce mutants, many with psychic powers, but almost all of whom are wretched and pathetic monsters, hideous misshapen freaks (Virgil Finlay illustrates some of these sad beings on the title page of the story.)

Will Brill work with the ruthless and amoral aliens who can give him a chance to make strides in knowledge about which he could only dream back on Earth?  His decision is complicated by the fact that among the 3000+ is a secret underground of Earthers, many of them war veterans who know how to lead, fight and sneak around, who have figured out how to disable the aliens' surveillance and security apparatus and aim to try to take over the facility--they certainly don't want to continue to be the guinea pigs of the aliens, and would perhaps prefer to die fighting.  Which side will Brill, who has skills and knowledge that would be of great value to both the alien scientists and to the human freedom fighters, join?

After some plot twists, character developments and action scenes we get our sense of wonder ending-- the course of galactic history is changed and the human race stands on the precipice of a future of infinite challenge and opportunity.

"Project Hi-Psi" is a good story with many elements familiar to van Vogt fans--the expanding mental powers that lead to a radical paradigm shift, the competing secret groups, the sense of wonder ending--but Riley's writing is more clear than Van's and he is better at depicting personalities and relationships.  I also like that Riley addresses the tension between the goals of progress and freedom.  Thumbs up for "Project Hi-Psi;" in introducing us to Riley, Merril has steered us on a profitable course. 

"Sim" by Jack Ritchie

Ritchie seems to be known not as a SF writer but a mystery writer, and while he has a decent-sized list of credits at isfdb, most of them seem to be stories that appeared in those anthologies with Alfred Hitchcock's name on them.  "Sim" is not listed at isfdb, and first appeared in Sir!, which bears the subtitle "A Magazine for Males."  At the internet archive there is a collection of what purports to be Ritchie's entire body of work, and it is there that I am reading a photocopy of the pages of Sir! that contain "Sim" as well as ads for pornographic cartoons, photos of women wrestling, a guide to how to win over women, and aphrodisiac perfume.  

"Sim" is a competent filler story that is sort of like an episode of The Twilight Zone, the obvious foreshadowing and the obvious twist ending.  The narrator visits his sister and brother-in-law after a long period of separation and meets their sons for the first time, a ten-year-old and an eight-month old.  The ten-year-old talks about flying saucers and the narrator assures him no aliens will ever invade the Earth.  The eight-month-old is some kind of super-strong genius, already able to walk with ease.  They call him "Sim," short for "Simon."  Sim loves to eat meat.        

Two years later the narrator visits again.  Sim is now like a teenager, brooding and sinister, and has weird yellow hair and yellow eyes.  The narrator takes Sim to the zoo and realizes he has some mannerisms and physical attributes much like the lions!  Sim even hints that "Sim" is in fact short for "Simba!"  Then he notices some other weird-looking leonine kids hanging around.  The narrator, now knowing too much, meets a grisly fate.

This story is merely acceptable.  Presumably Merril recommended it as part of her project of rubbing out the already blurry boundaries between genres.  

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I really enjoyed the Riley stories, and the Ritchie was not painful.  So, a good start to the "R" leg of this journey through 1956.  More 1956 "R"s next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.