Merril-approved 1956-7 stories by L Shaw, R Silverberg, H Still and T Sturgeon

Let's read some stories printed in 1956 (give or take a few months) by authors whose names begin with the letter S and which famous anthologist and mover and shaker in the SF community Judith Merril saw fit to recommend.  There are many such stories, and we've already read a few of them, like Clifford Simak's "Honorable Opponent" and Theodore Sturgeon's "And Now the News," and today four more of them will be thrust under the hot lights and face the third degree here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"Syllabus" by Len Shaw (1956)

Shaw has eight short story credits at isfdb.  "Syllabus" appeared in the same issue of Science Fantasy as the debut of Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop, a book version of which we read way back in 2014 (when we were young and the world was free), and while Non-Stop has been reprinted a billion times and even won some kind of retro award in 2007, it looks like "Syllabus" has languished in obscurity ("success walks hand in hand with failure....")

Well, its obscurity is easily explicable, as is Merril's quixotic decision to champion it.  "Syllabus" has a simple plot: in the future of air cars, a husband and wife have a teen daughter who has been having trouble settling on a college major and career path.  After a few false starts she finally chooses marine zoology.  Her father's sleep is wracked by nightmares in which his daughter is eaten by a whale, so he takes the family flying machine to the women's college to talk to the imposing woman who is the headmistress, where he learns he is mixed up in the headmistress's scheme to manipulate his strong-willed daughter into revealing her budding psychic powers and signing up for study not in Zoology Dept but the school's Psionics Institute. 

The remarkable thing about "Syllabus" is its style.  Shaw renders the story in the vernacular of the future, and reading "Syllabus" is like reading a long difficult poem.  The text often ignores standard grammatical conventions--most of the sentences are technically fragments, and the reader has to supply a subject or a verb that is merely implied by context clues.  Almost every line includes some unusual word and some tweaked version of a stock phrase or cliched allusion--"Cardiac-Queen" for "queen of my heart" is one example.  Shaw's project in writing this story is not to narrate an obvious plot, but to illustrate the fact (explicitly mentioned in the editor's intro to the story) that English has evolved greatly over the last four or five centuries and will continue to evolve.

What is going on in "Syllabus" is comprehensible, but it is no smooth and easy ride, and it is not fun.  It is easy to admire the ambition, creativity and labor that went into "Syllabus," but it is hard to actually enjoy the product into which all those laudable resource has been put.  (Shaw's story is rather more challenging, and much less rewarding, that Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange; the experience of reading "Syllabus" reminded me much more of that time I reading Aldiss' Report on Probability A.)  

Got to give "Syllabus" a thumbs down.  Looking for silver linings here, I will suggest that reading it may offer some educative value--I for one learned a Biblical allusion new to me, "the law of the Medes and Persians," which is presented in this story as if it is a commonplace (maybe it was in 1950s England?) and perhaps other readers will encounter words or references new to them.

Finally, a shout out to luminist.org, where I read a scan of Science Fantasy Volume 6, Number 17, having been unable to find a scan at the internet archive.

"The Guest Rites" by Robert Silverberg (1957)

Here we bear witness to Merril making a little mistake or maybe bending the rules a bit.  The list from which we are drawing her recommendations appears at the end of her 1957 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, and it indicates that "The Guest Rites" appeared in Infinity Science Fiction in February 1956, when in fact it appeared in the February 1957 issue, an issue with a great cover by Emsh that brings to beautiful life such beloved SF elements as zero gravity, sexy spacesuits and their sexy inhabitants, colorful nebulae, and high tech equipment.  We'll read "The Guest Rites" anyway, of course.

Silverberg's is one of those stories that contrasts the wise aliens who are in touch with nature with us humans who are greedy and racist jerk offs.  The story starts at a Venusian temple in the desert; an exhausted Earthman stumbles by, saying he has been lost in the starless desert as he has lost his compass.  The Venusian main character, a monk or priest of the religion that worships the planet itself, offers him endless hospitality, as his religion obliges him to.  But then a cleric from another temple nearby comes by and explains that the human enjoying shelter here is a thief--he stole the eye of the statue of the cyclops god Venus at that temple and ran off, accidentally leaving his compass behind.

On the one hand, such sacrilege is punishable by death, but on the other hand, the thief has been offered the hospitality required by the god that is Venus--how to reconcile this legalistic theological dilemma?  The Venusian clergymen trust that Venus will show the way.  Sure enough, without his compass, the human cannot find his way out of the desert to a Terran settlement; try as he might, he always ends up back at the temple.  The felonious Earthman is doomed to live out the rest of his life in this temple.  When he dies in a few decades, which will seem short to the long-lived Venerians, the priests will retrieve the lost eye.  The human of course tries to bribe a kitchen boy to guide him out of the desert, but unlike us lucre-loving Earth jerks, Venusians don't care about money!  (Don't ask me how the Venusian economy works--these jokers all live in a desert in a temple and spend all day praying and profess to care not a whit about money, so how did they get all these temples built and how do they acquire the food they generously offer any strangers who come by?)

Acceptable filler.  Presumably Merril liked its anti-colonial, anti-Western attitude.  "Guest Rites" would have to wait until the 21st century to be reprinted by Armchair Fiction in their 2011 Science Fiction Gems: Volume Two.  

"Sales Resistance" by Henry Still (1956)

Still has ten credits at isfb.  "Sales Resistance" appeared in If alongside Frank Riley's "Project Hi-Psi," another Merril recommendation which we recently read, one which I liked.  

Here we have another anti-capitalism story.  And unlike Silverberg's story, which is sort of structured as an adventure or horror tale, this is an absurdist satire in which salesmen are the priests of the late 21st century, Pulitzer prizes are awarded to ad campaigns and the hit songs are all sales jingles.  Good grief.  

Perry Mansfield is an oddball non-conformist in the consumerist future.  When a salesman named Marlboro (oy, the joke names) comes to his house to sell him a machine that can use invisible rays of force to cook his food, clean and decorate his house, and even shave and dress him, he refuses to buy one.  This is sacrilege, so later that day Perry is in court, where the lawyers and jury are all computers.  The punch card spat out by the jury declares him guilty and the human judge sentences him to buying the machine.  Back home he goes into a rage and destroys the machine (a scene illustrated with vim and vigor by Emsh, who is shaping up to be the star performer of today's blog post) and so he is carted off to the loony bin.

Banal and lame, maybe lefties who enjoy looking down their noses at our market society would find "Sales Resistance" to be acceptable filler, but I am giving it a thumbs down.   

"Sales Resistance" itself seems to have been unable to penetrate the sales resistance of the world's SF editors after its initial sale to If; apparently it has never been reprinted. 

"Fear is a Business" by Theodore Sturgeon (1956)

Here's the second Sturgeon story Merril recommended in her "Honorable Mention" list in the back of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume.  (Merril also printed a Sturgeon story in her 1957 anthology, "The Other Man," which we read last year.)  Since debuting in F&SF, "Fear is a Business" has been widely anthologized, including in Robert P. Mills' A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction and  Flying Saucers, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh.

"Fear is a Business" is another absurd satire, another attack on our capitalist way of life, and another story featuring goodie goodie aliens who serve as a foil that points out how bad are us humans.  Gadzooks!  Ted includes some of his favorite themes, like collective consciousness and how it is awesome, and even shoehorns in some pretty out-there sex.  There are also lots of jokes, and plenty of references to recent and current events (e.g., Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, the 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and the Air Force's report on UFOs) that are sometimes serious and other times fuel for topical jokes.  We might also see "Fear is a Business" as a satire of L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics, and even a sort of prefiguring of the response to Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

Phillipso is a successful writer of advertising copy.  One day, because he needs an excuse for skipping work, he claims he met aliens and fought them off, even faking a saucer landing site by marking the ground with a blowtorch he happens to have in his car.  By coincidence, the first person to see the marks and hear his story is a journalist, and soon Philsy boy is famous and rich, a publisher having asked him to write a book about his experience and legions of fans wanting to hear him speak.  He becomes essentially the leader of a cult known as the Temple of Space.

On page four of the 14-page story a real space alien contacts Phillipso, appearing as an image of an ordinary human projected from his hovering spacecraft into Phillipso's office because what the aliens really look like would be more shocking than Phillipso could take.  This alien wants to end war and crime and disease and poverty on Earth, but he can't because Phil's book has made everybody assume aliens are hostile--the alien seeks to persuade Phil to publicly retract all the stuff he has said about aliens.  When Phil expresses doubts that the alien has the wherewithal to solve all of Earth's problems, the alien proves his power by using hypnotism or something to make Phil fuck himself.  (Sturgeon doesn't type "fuck himself," but instead "something proverbial, unprintable, but not quite impossible.  He didn't want to do it--with all his mind and soul he did not want to, but he did it nonetheless.")  The alien then talks a little about his means of radically improving life on Earth.  He proposes that in his next book, Phillipso include plans the alien can provide for constructing a simple device that will facilitate the rise of a collective consciousness among all mankind; the text will claim the device is a weapon that will protect the builder from the aliens.  Collective consciousness would make language obsolete and lying impossible, which the alien says is awesome but which Phil says will overturn our entire culture and economy, which he admits are built on language and deception.

Three pages form the end, the alien leaves Phillipso and our guy ponders helping the E.T. bring peace and prosperity and collective consciousness to Earth.  But then he gets calls from that journalist and then his publisher which spur him to forget all about helping bring about paradise on Earth and instead continue his grift.         

This story is not very good.  Its jokes are not funny, its themes and ideas are tired, the plot is shaky (though I guess in a satire that doesn't mater) and as for the structure of the thing, most of it is a tendentious conversation, like an annoying Socratic dialogue or something.  The twisted horror scene in which the alien makes Phil (apparently) have anal sex with himself makes the personality of the alien and the whole tone of the story jarringly inconsistent.  The alien is all about peace and love and empathy, but he inflicts this horrendous trauma on Phillipso:

He fell back into his chair, sobbing with rage, fear and humiliation.  When he could find a word at all, it came out between the fingers laced over his scarlet face and was "Inhuman...."

Why didn't Sturgeon have the alien demonstrate his power by fixing some minor medical issue Philsy boy had, like near-sightedness or a heart murmur or a hangnail or something?  Sturgeon seems aware of how ill-fitting this episode is, having Phillipso point out what the alien just did to him when the alien says he won't just conquer the Earth and make us behave because "We couldn't force even one human to do what we want done," but the alien just dismisses Phil's objection with the suggestion that it hurt him more than it hurt Phillipso, a sort of stock joke.

I'm giving "Fear is a Business" a thumbs down, but I can see how lefties who like joke stories might enjoy it; most importantly, Sturgeon is a good writer and I can't deny that all the individual sentences and paragraphs of the story are each a smooth and easy read, even if what they add up to is weak.

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More than anything, these four stories demonstrate the gulf between what I look for in a story and what Merril, it seems, looks for.  I don't want lame jokes, I don't want absurdist satires, and I don't want recitations of the same tired criticisms of our individualistic market society I've already heard a million times.  Of these four stories, Silverberg comes closest to delivering what I seek from fiction, as he at least tries to portray real human feeling and drama.  I am sympathetic to what Shaw tried to do in his story, but it just was not enjoyable or enlightening.        

Well, maybe Merril and I will be on the same page more often once we leave the "S"s behind and start exploring the "T"s, "U"s and "W"s in the next episode of this long series on the SF of 1956.

Speaking of which, use the links below to check out any earlier stages on this journey you may have missed.

Abernathy and Aldiss
Anderson, Allen and Banks

Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler  
Carter, Clarke and Clifton 
Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen
de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle 

Barrow, Beaumont and Blish

Ellison and Fontenay

Galouye, Garrett, Grimm & Gunn

Hart, Herbert and Jones 

Kuttner & Moore, Lang, Leinster, L'Engle and McClintic

McConnell, McIntosh and Melchior

Moore, Norse and Oliver

Porges and Presslie   

Riley and Ritchie

Roberts, Russell and St. Clair