Our curated tour of 1956 SF stories continues. Who is doing the curating? Judith Merril, who included in her 1957 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume a long alphabetical list of "honorable mention" stories printed in 1956, and your humble blogger, who has been selecting stories from this list. I have been skipping many authors I already know I don't like, but giving some new to me a shot, a strategy which paid off in our last episode, when I enjoyed two stories by Frank Riley. Today we've got two stories by people--women, in fact!--I don't think I've read before, and two by a guy we have read a lot, Eric Frank Russell.
(See the bottom of this post for a list of links to previous posts on Merril-approved 1956 stories that sparked my interest.)
"When Jack Smith Fought Old Satan" by Mary-Carter Roberts
Mary-Carter Roberts has four credits art isfdb. "When Jack Smith Fought Old Satan" first appeared in
Collier's, but I am reading the version that appeared in
F&SF in 1957, as it is easier to find. I generally find tiresome stories in which some mortal cuts a deal with the devil, so I am sort of inclined to skip this one (especially since it is like 22 pages long), but let's give it a try anyway.
"When Jack Smith Fought Old Satan" isn't really one of those deal-with-the-devil stories, but a sort of tall tale that incidentally or obliquely dramatizes a sort of generalized left-wing anti-establishment/anti-rich/anti-law-and-order attitude.
Her story is set in Delaware in 1769, and as Roberts starts it she hints that she should be considered an unreliable narrator and foreshadows that her tale will be essentially incredible by telling us the story has been passed down by word of mouth generation after generation, and by asserting in what feels like a sarcastic way that it must be true because all who have told it before her were "godly folk." Roberts also introduces the theme that people from Delaware are "exclusive," though I'm not 100% sure what that means or what it really has to do with the story and to what extent she is being ironic. (Frank Riley in
"Project Hi-Psi" suggests some of the behavior of that story's main character reflects his New England heritage and upbringing, and maybe what Jack Smith does in this story is supposed to reflect the characteristic personality of people from Delaware in a way that I am not getting because Delaware is one of those states I don't know much of anything about, like Maryland--oh, wait, having lived in Maryland I now know they put that stupid seasoning on everything.)
Jack Smith is a big strong farmer, a twenty-year-old orphan who has served in the wars against the Indians and is a free thinker, an atheist who refuses to show respect to his social superiors or acknowledge the truth of the Christian religion. As a result he is ridiculed by the community when he comes into the village to drink at the tavern. Unnoticed by Smith, the "bound girl" Oma, a fellow orphan who works at the tavern, has fallen in love with him.
The villagers have just finished building the area's first church, but are dismayed to find someone they can never catch has been vandalizing the church physically and supernaturally--not only do the parishioners often find the furniture in disorder, but the bell refuses to ring.
The people figure Satan himself must be to blame--the Devil must be hiding out in the nearby dark woods. This accords with the old story that the "baronet" who owned the woods in the 17th century refused to donate some portions of the woods upon which to build a school for the poor, saying that he'd rather the Devil had the land than the poor--Satan must have finally taken that mean old rich guy up on his offer a hundred years later. One guy suggests that Satan's strength comes from the evil of the people of the community, and to drive Satan off they have to punish malefactors more severely--he brings up the case of a bound girl (a different one than Oma) who was caught stealing sugar and who received only a mere six lashes.
Jack Smith the atheist scoffs at the idea that the Devil exists at all, much less is terrorizing the community--he suspects the culprit it is some bound man (lots of bound people in Delaware, apparently) venting his rage against the hypocritical religious person to whom he is bound. Jack Smith the champion of the poor, after considering catching this hypothetical vengeful bound man in order to disprove the Devil theory, decides against doing so because if caught the bound man will suffer some harsh punishment for his crimes. Smith also criticizes the idea of punishing criminals more severely.
One thing leads to another and Smith ends up vowing to walk through the woods that very night and fight the Devil if he should encounter him. Sure enough, on the dark lonely trail, Smith meets Satan and Roberts provides a long and tedious and quite gory description of their fight. (This story is full of graphic violence.) In the end, of course, the Devil proves to be essentially unkillable--he only allowed the fight to go on so long because he was testing how tough a guy Smith was. Impressed by Smith's strength and determination, he tries to recruit Smith to his diabolical cause. Smith realizes that if Satan is real, so must God be, begs God for aid, acquires the strength to pull the biggest tree in the woods, a 500-year-old oak, out of the earth, and uses it to strike Satan and drive him back to Hell, liberating the community. Smith marries Oma and when a grateful populace gives them some money they use it to free from bondage that sugar thief.
(I wonder if we are supposed to think that Smith found the vandal and convinced him or her to knock it off and then made up the devil story to tell the gullible Christians when he got back to the tavern.)
This story isn't bad, and Roberts' writing style is pretty good, but "When Jack Smith Fought Old Satan" is kind of long and it doesn't present any interesting ideas (we've all heard a million times that religion is a scam and that you shouldn't punish criminals) and because it is so unbelievable what happens to the characters doesn't have any effect on the reader's emotions. I'll call it acceptable.
isfdb doesn't list any appearances for this story besides Collier's and F&SF.
"Legwork" by Eric Frank Russell
Merril includes two stories by Russell on her honorable mention list, both of them printed in
Astounding. (
Alan Dean Foster told us that Russell was
Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s favorite author, you'll remember.) "Legwork" was a publishing success, getting reprinted in multiple Russell collections, a 1965 anthology by Groff Conklin which
I actually own,
5 Unearthly Visions, a recent British anthology about crime in the future, and two different Italian publications with Karel Thole covers. (NB: I am reading "Legwork" in a scan of the April 1956
Astounding, not my copy of
5 Unearthly Visions.)
We encounter quite a few SF stories that use aliens as foils for humans in an effort to point out how humans suck--peaceful aliens who are a contrast to violent Earthers, communistic aliens with a collective consciousness that highlight the selfish individualism of humans, aliens who are at one with nature in contrast to us humans who bend the natural world to our will. You'll be glad to hear that here in "Legwork" Russell uses an alien foil to say something nice about human beings.
Russell's big theme is that the galaxy is full of intelligent races, and most advance through what he calls "flashes of inspiration" or "touches of genius." But Earth and the human race are outliers--sure, humans have had those unpredictable "flashes," but our civilizations also advance by simple determined hard work, what we today might call "grinding" and what Russell calls "slogging along," and "plain, lousy legwork."
The Andromedans have conquered many planets, defeated and enslaved scores of intelligent species. The first step in taking over some new planet is recon, and Andromedan Harasha Vanash is a scout who has investigated fifty planets which the Andromedans have subsequently taken over. Vanash has tremendous hypnotic powers, and with these powers he can almost perfectly camouflage himself, by projecting into your mind what he wants you to see and remember. This way he can walk among the natives of a planet, appearing to be one of them, interacting with them and collecting all the info about their culture and capacities required to make conquering them a snap.
The first part of "Legwork" follows Vanash as he lands in the USA and begins his reconnaissance. Russell makes of Vanash a compelling character and it is entertaining to watch him go about his business. The next part of the story has as its focus a big fat GF-man, a detective from the Treasury Department, sent to a small town to investigate a bank robbery we readers know Vanash pulled using his hypnotic powers. This part of the story is very much like a police procedural, with the obese fed Eddie Rider and local police captain Harrison talking about clues and hashing out theories and directing underlings and so forth--dozens of men around the country talk to people and follow possible leads and hunt through files, doing the exhaustive and exhausting legwork of the story's title. Russell actually makes all this detective stuff sort of interesting, and his style is smooth enough that it goes down easy; even though this story is 40 pages, it never feels long.
When it becomes apparent that an alien being with the ability to masquerade as any man is the culprit, the entire apparatus of the Federal government, including the armed forces, gets involved. In the end mankind triumphs, and not only is Vanash vanquished, but we get a sense of wonder ending that promises that the human race has taken its first step to seizing the stars and laying low those Andromedans!
Solid classic SF--thumbs up!
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| The Urania cover illustrates "Legwork" |
"Top Secret" by Eric Frank Russell
After enjoying "Legwork" so much, "Top Secret" is a real letdown, a gimmicky joke story based on puns that tries to get on your good side by appealing to your perfectly natural distaste for government bureaucrats. (
Russell often lampoons government and bureaucrats so maybe "Legwork," in which government people at all levels work hard and do a good job and receive eager support from the populace, is an outlier in his body of work.)
The Terran space empire and the Zeng space empire are on good terms and have been for ages, but the Terran officer in charge of defending the sector where they are adjacent still worries about how he and his men must act should there be a Zeng sneak attack. So he sends a message to the commander of forces at planet Motan offering direction on priorities should war break out. The way interstellar communications technology works in this story, people have to read messages aloud into machines, and because the message has to pass through many stations, eighteen different guys from all different cultures with all different accents have to listen to it and repeat it to pass it on, so that, like in the game of telephone,* the message received by Motan is nonsense. This gag isn't the springboard for the story's plot--the entire story is just a succession of such jokes as Terran HQ and the Motan base transmit messages back and forth multiple times seeking clarity, only to receive nonsensical messages that only add to the confusion.
Waste of time, thumbs down.
My denunciation comes too late to prevent Ace and The Dial Press from reprinting "Top Secret" in a 1958 Russell collection (Six Worlds Yonder) and a 1984 anthology (From Mind to Mind.)
*Today I learned that British people call this "Chinese whispers," which is funnier than this story.
"Horrer Howce" by Margaret St. Clair
St. Clair produced a lot of stories under her real name and under the pen name Idris Seabright, but I have avoided her work because I had the impression she wrote joke stories. The title of this story leads me to suspect it is a joke story, but I'm giving it a shot anyway in a duplicitous effort to make people think I am open-minded.
"Horrer Howce" made its debut in the same issue of
Galaxy as Theodore Sturgeon's
"Skills of Xanadu," which I penned a negative review of back in 2014 ("like a three page essay on what Ted thinks the perfect society would be stretched out to 26 pages....") People love "Horrer Howce;" it was included in multiple anthologies of stories from
Galaxy as well as books edited by Peter Haining and Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. Could I be one of those people? Could I love "Horrer Howce?"
My heart sank when I turned away from the Virgil Finlay illustrations to "Skills of Xanadu" (I'd never seen them before, having read Ted's utopian tedium in the paperback anthology 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction) and saw the editor's intro to "Horrer Howce" on the first page of St. Clair's story:
Oh no, was this another pun story?
Luckily, St. Clair's story has more to it than bad spelling. We have two characters, a guy who builds equipment for amusement park haunted houses--mechanical monsters and the like--and a guy who buys such equipment for a national chain of amusement facilities. After some foreshadowing that suggests artist guy is some kind of intellectual and maybe a political radical, he shows the buyer guy a conventional horror room, one that offers the illusion you are outside by a well--inside the well is an elaborate clockwork monster.
The meat of the story comes in a second room. Various clues suggest this is not so much a room as a portal to another world inhabited by dangerous alien entities, and St. Clair offers a quite good action/horror scene in which artist guy drives a car on a congested highway--buyer guy comes as passenger--seeking to escape a black car driven by a monster with three arms; the pair witness a similar car catch up to another vehicle and tear apart a (simulated?) human driver. The pair make it off the highway and back to the office alive, but then the monster busts into the office and kills the buyer.
It is strongly implied that the man just killed was the third such buyer to be shown the horror highway, and the other two were driven insane by the experience and are no longer in the horror house business. So the artist guy comes up with a new scheme--he will open portals to worlds where live even more horrible alien entities and use them to build horror houses for the three-armed monsters.
This is an acceptable horror story, and I guess it is also a sort of joke story about how scary was driving on the new highway system? (I suppose the highways were in the news when the story was written and published, as in 1954 Ike appointed a committee to propose a plan for an interstate highway system, in 1955 Congress received a proposal from the administration, and by June 1956 the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 had been passed and signed.) Bad spelling and puns don't actually seem to play that big a role in the story--"Horrer Howce" is some graffiti the monsters have left outside the highway room, foreshadowing that they are able to leave the room. The name applied to the monsters, "Voom," is I guess just a reference to the onomatopoeia "vroom" commonly used to describe or imitate the sound of an automobile; maybe that counts as a pun?
I guess I can mildly recommend this one.
One of Russell's stories was lame (presumably Merril admired it for its attack on the minds of military men), but one was good and the Roberts and St. Clair stories had their moments and were thought-provoking. So, a decent batch of '56 stories.
If you want to check out other stories in this series of Merril-inspired blog posts, the links below will facilitate your journey.
Russell can be very good or very awful. I have a collection of Margaret St. Clair's and find most of her stories very good. Not familiar with this one. He stuff is not normally of the jokey side.
ReplyDeleteI may have gotten my idea that St. Clair wrote joke stories from the letters columns of Startling and Thrilling Wonder (I read a lot from those magazines in 2022.) According to wikipedia, St. Clair's early work included the eight Oona and Jick stories, which were published in Startling and Thrilling Wonder in the late '40s and were "satirical," "light" and "comic," and which in a 1981 interview St. Clair said "were not especially popular with fans," whom she complains are humorless. Probably in the letters columns lots of people were complaining about these stories and this fixed in my mind the image of St. Clair as somebody who was trying to be funny by doing just the "let's laugh at these uncultured suburbanites trying to keep up with the Jones" humor I find so annoying.
Delete"Horrer Howce" was successful, so maybe I'll read more of St. Clair's 1950s work.