"The Beach Where Time Began" by Damon Knight
Mediocre young man Albert Eustace Rossi moved from Seattle to New York City, hoping something good might happen to him. (Oy, this sounds painfully familiar.) He found himself unable to make friends and unable to hold down a decent job. (Ouch.) He became obsessed with the idea of travelling through time to a more salubrious epoch, and read various books and encyclopedia articles on the science and philosophy of time, and Knight fills the story with direct references to Einstein, Milne, Dunne, Minkowski and others, and with indirect references to Descartes and Heisenberg. The upshot of all Rossi's reading and thinking is that he becomes able to travel through time simply by willing himself to do so, after following some ritualistic procedures similar to the stereotypical behavior of a wizard in a fantasy story like chanting, drawing a circle and formulae on the floor and burning a piece of paper with formulae written upon it; "The Beach Where Time Began" has "meta" elements, another example being that Rossi is an avid reader of SF magazines.
Rossi's method of time travel isn't easily controlled or calibrated; he pops into one period after another, moving forward in time, spending only a few seconds in each period. When he reaches the end of time he then pops back to the beginning. People are able to see him, and address him, and, realizing he is a time traveller, they ask him questions, and the answers he gives alter the course of history in unpredictable ways. Rossi eventually figures out how to stop himself on a beautiful beach among the peaceful primitive people he has been longing to live among, but this kills him, turning him into a statue hard as stone whom the peaceful primitive people worship as a god.
An acceptable pessimistic joke story that has as its central figure a loser for whom the author has not sympathy but contempt and which leaves the reader (this one, at least) uneasy, even sad. "The Beach Where Time Began" was reprinted in a French Knight collection and a German anthology, but apparently not in English--maybe Knight's portrait of a SF-reading loser who had intelligence but no real talent or ability and so no friends and no success hit a little too close to home.
"The Fool" by David Mason
Years ago I read David Mason's sword and sorcery novel Kavin's World and a commenter complained I hadn't understood it. Well, let's see if I understand this work of Mason's. Speak up if I flub it, Mason cognoscenti!"The Fool" is a competent twist-ending story with an unreliable narrator, a sort of pastiche and/or allegory of European experiences with primitive native tribes and of the Gospels. The text of the story consists of one side of a conversation between the retiring representative ("Agent") of a Terran business concern (or maybe government agency?) on a planet of Stone Age barbarians and his replacement. The retiring Agent is our narrator, and he spends almost the entire story describing his own predecessor, Duncan, to whom he was assistant.
Duncan was educated and earnest, but according to the narrator totally incompetent, so much so that the narrator had to more or less do the Agent's job for him. The Agent's job is to trade with the natives, not to interfere with their wacky culture. The natives of this planet are a warlike race separated into hostile tribes who regularly conduct raids on each other, taking trophies much like headhunters on Earth (though, I guess as a joke, Mason has these people cut off each other's tails rather than heads) and seizing women, whom these people treat as chattel before they become mothers, but kowtow to after they have achieved motherhood. (The narrator says the natives have some kind of matrilineal inheritance customs, and because the story paints Duncan as a Christ figure I have to think Mason included this matrilineal jazz as a signal we are to think of these natives as somehow analogous to Jews, who famously have a tradition of matrilinearity.)
Instead of cutting business deals and keeping the account books up to date, Duncan spent his time trying to educate the natives, giving them speeches advising them not to treat women so harshly and to knock it off with all the warring and raiding; essentially, he is preaching that they love one another. According to the narrator, the natives treated these speeches as a joke. Duncan also set up a school and tried to teach math and other things to the native children, which the narrator dismisses as a stupid waste of time. The Agent is also supposed to maintain order, punish lawbreakers and so forth, and Duncan displayed a reluctance to do so.
The religion of the natives centered around a monstrous idol to whom they sacrificed women and children. Duncan blew up the idol, and in response the native high priest speared him, nailing him to a tree. As he died, Duncan forgave his murderer, and the natives were so impressed that they rebuilt the idol in the likeness of Duncan and ceased sacrificing people. The ending of the story hints that the followers of the teachings of Duncan may become the dominant power in the universe the way Christian Europeans came to dominate Earth (and in this story, at least, the galaxy.)
"The Fool" is an acceptable filler story. It appears that it has never been reprinted.
"Trojan Hearse" by Harlan Ellison
The belligerent Kyba, who produce nothing of value on their own planet but instead live by plundering other races, want to conquer Earth but Terra is too far away. So they have built a huge teleporter that can instantly transport an army of AFVs to Earth. But an Earth spy has gotten back to Earth with all the Kyban plans, so, when the Kyban war machines roll into their teleporter they roll out onto Earth and right into an Earth teleporter set up a foot in front of the Kyban destination point; the Earth teleporter has been set to teleport them to the vacuum of space where they will die at once.
This forgettable four-page gimmick story feels like a rush job. Ellison refers to the Kyban force of tanks and trucks as an "armada" or "fleet" instead of an "army" or "legion" or something more appropriate for a ground force. He says the Kyban dictator and his right hand man have fought together in many campaigns, and that the people of Kyba "were geared to a life of constant preparation for battle," but he also says Kyba hasn't fought a war for three hundred years. He says Kyba has conquered "this end of the galaxy" but he also has a Kyben character say that before the teleporter was invented a few years ago that "Interstellar war has never been feasible. Distances were too great." If the distances are so great, how do the Kybens know all about Earth, enough to pinpoint where their teleporter will land their army, and how did the human spy get to Kyba?
Barely acceptable filler.
"The Final Challenge" by Robert Silverberg
Delaunay the musician and composer is a self-hating Earthman! "Earth was a planet of hate full of haters" that had fallen into decadence and decline after carving an empire out of the galaxy, a place that no longer produced noteworthy art, music or literature, no longer engaged in grand projects. So he left Earth to live on the planet of the Sallat, a race of goodie goodies with six fingers on each hand, a people whose music fascinated Delaunay. Delaunay doesn't want to be reminded of Earth--he even pushes his Sallat girlfriend away when she tries to kiss him because kissing is an Earth practice his girlfriend was aping; the Sallat have more "pure" and "beautiful" "ways of love."
One of the Sallat whom Delaunay knows is an influential politician, Demet. Some years ago it came to everybody's attention that the neighboring planet of the Krozni was going to be destroyed in some "freak cosmic accident." Instead of letting the Krozni be wiped out, Demet authorized their mass immigration to the planet of the Sallat. These ungrateful bastards are now raiding Sallat communities, and as the story begins, news has arrived that Demet's own son was killed in such a raid. The Sallat respond to these crimes not with a spirited resistance but a sad resignation--they don't have the capacity to hate like an Earthman does, like Delaunay does! Sure, the young Sallat join the army and march to the front, but they insist on observing all their daily and weekly religious rituals, and playing their beautiful music whenever they feel like it, which is often, and the Krozni attack during their prayers and concerts, massacring the unprepared Sallat forces.
Delaunay joins the Sallat defense forces and tries to persuade them to suspend the prayers and concerts for a while, so they can get down to the serious business of preserving the Sallat civilization, but to no avail. Delaunay, behind enemy lines, meets an Earthman--this guy is the general of the Krozni army! The Earth is behind the Krozni attack on the people of Sallat!
This Earthman explains that the Earth is decadent for lack of challenge. So he and his coterie of conspirators are grooming the war-like but primitive Krozni into a disciplined modern fighting force that will be able to build its own space empire and threaten Earth. Faced with the threat, Earth will, it is hoped, be shaken out of its torpor and rise to the occasion and once again be vital civilization. This general says it is sad that the Sallat are going to be wiped out, but the Sallat are even more decadent than Earthers, as their refusal to take seriously the war for their survival proves; if a dead end society has to be destroyed in order to rejuvenate a once great society that is at a low point but is salvageable and may be great again, well, that is a fair bargain.
"The Final Challenge" is more intriguing than Mason and Ellison's stories and not quite as big a downer as Knight's. One of the themes it addresses is that of responsibility, in particular responsibility to one's people and culture. Delaunay felt no responsibility to help fix an Earth that was in trouble--instead he selfishly abandoned Earth. Is it possible that the Earth general who is getting all kinds of Sallats killed is a better person than Delaunay, because he is doing something to help his people? Demet felt a responsibility to do the right thing by the Krozni, a responsibility to uphold an abstract principle of justice, but doing so doomed his own people to destruction. The soldiers feel a responsibility to their religion and traditions, and so keep at their rituals, even though it puts the very existence of their civilization at risk.
The actual things that happen in the story are kind of silly, but Silverberg's tale here is thought-provoking. I can mildly recommend this one.
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None of these stories is actually bad, though Ellison's is pretty close to the edge. Mason's is an interesting example of SF that comments on Christianity and Judaism in a way that is not entirely dismissive of religion, while Knight's and Silverberg's perhaps have something to say about the themes and attitudes of those two major figures in the SF community. (Knight sometimes comes off as an arrogant jerk, and he does so here.) So a worthwhile expedition into the pages of a 1950s magazine not as famous as, say Astounding, F&SF or Galaxy, to read some stories we'd have to say are on the rare side.
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