In alphabetical order by author, we are reading stories published in 1958 that Judith Merril recommended in the back of her 1959 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume. We started this journey with Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin, and today finish up the "A"s with Pauline Ashwell and advance into the "B"s with Don Berry and Robert Bloch.
"Unwillingly to School" by Pauline Ashwell
"Unwillingly to School" is a lot like those Heinlein stories in which a young person, often the first-person narrator, enters the wider world and receives life lessons, a story that both is focused on likable characters in human relationships that have some emotional effect on the reader and affords the author opportunities to speculate on what life might be like in the future as well as unleash some philosophy on you.
"Unwillingly to School" is 38 pages long and the first in a series of four stories about Lysistrata "Liz" Lee; the four stories appeared together in the 1992 collection Unwillingly to Earth. "Unwillingly to School" also reappeared in a 1986 anthology of stories considered by such people as Piers Anthony and Barry N. Malzberg to have been "neglected masterpieces" entitled Uncollected Stars, as well as in the 2019 anthology Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963).
Liz is our narrator, an attractive teenager with blue eyes and blonde hair. Liz is a tomboy, raised on a frontier world by men (her mother having abandoned the family when little Lizzie was three) and accustomed to working with farm machinery and domestic animals. Dad is uneducated, and has a sort of minor learning disability that means he can't take advantage of modern high-tech learning machines and instead reads actual physical books, which takes like eight times as long. Dad, however, has an iron will, a drive to succeed, and an allergy to being pushed around, and these characteristics propelled him to success against all odds on the frontier planet, first as a miner and then as a farmer. Liz has inherited both her father's learning disability and his independent streak.
The plot of "Unwillingly to School" is set in motion when Dad is injured in an accident on the farm and has to be taken to the hospital in town. This town is a famously rough place, full of miners who spend weekdays working hard and every night and all weekend getting drunk and letting off steam by fighting each other. Despite everybody telling her the town is no place for a girl, Liz insists on staying in town to be close to Dad, who is in a coma for some days and then stuck in his hospital bed for weeks. Like something out of a Shirley Temple movie, Liz gets a job in the toughest dive bar in the town and her charm pacifies all the roughnecks there, bringing out their natural decency.
In the course of all this, Liz meets a college professor from Earth who recruits students from all over the Terran space empire of over a hundred planets. He is a professor of Cultural Engineering, and Liz's ability to pacify miners who are regulars at the bar suggests she is a natural Cultural Engineer. This professor, her father, and other characters who care about her, join forces to manipulate Liz into attending college on Earth, even though she has no desire to go to Terra or attend college. (Like in much of Heinlein's work, there is a tension in this story in regards to authority--rebellion and independence are celebrated, but at the same time wise authority is venerated.)
On Earth, Liz gets some philosophy from her room mate, a woman who thinks rules and regulations are there to be broken and that it is essential to take risks, and a black African (another similarity to Heinlein--the admirable nonwhite character), and of course the college professor. She also discovers a solution to her learning disability, so she can now "read" as fast as anybody. As the story ends we have every reason to believe Liz is going to have a successful college career while at the same time maintaining her intellectual independence and not just blindly accepting whatever the profs say.
"Unwilling to School" is a fun story that is a pleasure to read. The structure is a little questionable; the story feels like a series of episodes instead of a cohesive whole, and there isn't really a big climax. One could also argue that Liz isn't driving the narrative, but is at the mercy of others and of circumstance. These issues make "Unwilling to School" feel sort of like the first two or three chapters of a novel that show the character growing so she will be able to act like a self-directed hero who resolves the conflict that is at the center of in the later sections of the book.
Another issue I have with the story is that Ashwell employs unconventional grammar, capitalization and punctuation, I guess an effort to mimic speech (as opposed to composed and copyedited text) or Liz's disability or just the way language has evolved since the 20th century. This is a little annoying, but not too bad; I got used to it, and of course it is the kind of ambitious stylistic technique that lots of critics might praise.
So, thumbs up for "Unwillingly to School." I'll also note that the Frank Kelly Freas illustrations for the story's appearance here in Astounding are quite fun.
"Man Alone" by Don Berry
I guess Merril liked "Man Alone" because it is about psychology, glamorizes and perhaps emulates mainstream literature, and expresses skepticism of the space program. I'm calling it merely acceptable, or maybe just barely acceptable, as it is kind of long and slow, and at times feels repetitive.
"Man Alone" is made up of five chapters. Most of Chapter 1 takes place in a spaceship operated by a single astronaut, and we observe various strange aspects of his psychology. For one thing, his memory and knowledge are severely lacking--he doesn't seem to understand simple English words and social concepts, "wife" among them. He seems to operate the spaceship robotically, or automatically, like a man who has been hypnotized--he pushes buttons and dictates messages to home base in response to stimuli, but doesn't consciously will or understand what he is doing, thinks of the stuff he says into the microphone as "nonsense." As we readers watch, he steers the ship back to Earth, lands at the space program's base in the desert and steps out of the ship, to then encounter invisible aliens--he recognizes their presence only because they touch him--and flee back to the ship.
The remaining chapters focus on the efforts of a general of the space program and a civilian psychologist who smokes a pipe (Berry commits one of my little pet peeves in this story, writing at length about a person's smoking as a way of giving him a personality and conveying his feelings) to figure out what is going on with the astronaut. It turns out this guy was given the job of test flying the first ship ever built that can go into hyperspace, and was indeed hypnotically conditioned to operate the vessel. When he jumped into hyperspace he was so horrified by something that as a defense mechanism his mind made him forget anything and everything about his life and the fact that the human race even exists. He doesn't know what the word "wife" means, and couldn't see or hear the space program personnel who greeted him upon landing because his brain was trying to hide from him the very fact that the human race exists.
The pipe-smoking shrink figures out how to get the astronaut out of the ship--he has the spaceman's wife call the ship on the radio and ask her husband again and again to disembark, and her familiar voice eventually worms its way into his subconscious and prompts him to leave the ship. Outside, he is shot with a tranquilizer dart and put into a padded cell. In the cell the pipe-smoker hypnotizes him, and gets some insight into what is going on in his head. Then the shrink rereads Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Nature," which contains the line "...if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars." While the shrink is away the astronaut escapes his padded room and somehow gets back into the ship. He tries to take off, but because the ship has not been properly prepared, instead of taking off it explodes, killing the astronaut who is the "the loneliest human being who ever lived." The general says that they will launch another mission just like this one and the shrink is certain the next astronaut to go to hyperspace will be driven just as crazy as the tragic man who was the first.
I guess people like Merril, champion of the New Wave and somebody who was always looking to dissolve the boundaries between mainstream literature and genre literature, had read so many science fiction stories in which science and technological progress were glorified, and/or in which a hero overcame some obstacle and achieved some goal, that they got sick of that stuff and became excited about science fiction stories that suggested science and technology weren't so great after all and which depicted not success but failure, like so much of mainstream literature.* Berry's "Man Alone" is just such a story. "Man Alone" also brings to mind the way Harry Harrison characterized the New Wave in that 1968 issue of Amazing we recently looked at, as fiction more concerned with the "inner space" of the mind than traditional SF.
Powerhouse editors Damon Knight and Judith Merril were into this story, which we might see as a precursor of the New Wave (or an indication that the New Wave wasn't all that revolutionary after all), but it seems the rest of the SF community resisted the suasion of those two cultural arbiters--"Man Alone," if we are to believe isfdb, has never been reprinted.
*Here I remind you of Barry Malzberg's 1982 account of his 1969 meeting with John W. Campbell, Jr., printed in Engines of the Night, in which Campbell insisted mainstream literature was a literature of defeat and science fiction was about discovery and problem solving.
"That Hell-Bound Train" by Robert Bloch
"That Hell-Bound Train" is one of those stories in which a guy makes a deal with the Devil; the twist is that in this story the mortal outsmarts Ol' Scratch. I generally find deal-with-the-devil stories lame, but this one is OK.
Martin ran away from the orphanage four or five years ago to live the life of a hobo and petty thief; his father, who died when Martin was a little kid, worked for the railroad, and Martin has kept close to the rails. He's about had enough of this difficult and lonely life, and is thinking about going straight when a strange black passenger train pulls up and Martin is accosted by a creepy conductor whom he knows must be the Devil! Satan has been counting on Martin's soul, and doesn't like the idea of Martin getting in tune with the straight and narrow. So Mephistopheles has come by hoping to cut a deal with Martin that will allow him to retain that valuable commodity that is Martin's eternal soul. Martin makes a clever trade--in return for his soul, payable upon death, Martin receives a watch that when activated will stop his passage through time; he plans to arrest his journey through time at just the point that he has achieved happiness and thus make his happiness eternal.
Martin considers stopping time after eating a satisfying meal and reclining in a comfy bed, but decides to push himself a little harder, to achieve even greater happiness. Years go by as he actually gets a job and makes some money, dates women and earns a series of raises and promotions so he can get better lodgings and even get married and father a son. Again and again he has achieved some measure of happiness and considers stopping time so he can enjoy this moment forever, but he always opts to pursue an even greater measure of happiness. Eventually Martin screws up, cheating on his wife, and he loses his family, ushering in a period of loneliness and poor health. Finally, Martin has a stroke by the train tracks and Satan's train rolls up to carry him to hell.
Martin enters a passenger car full of partying sinners, and it is here that Martin activates his Time Stopper--he will spend eternity at this loud raucous drunken party and never actually be delivered to Hell.
This story is well-put together, and I can't say it has any glaring faults or is annoying, but I can't help but feel it is just a sort of filler gimmick story--it doesn't have any kind of emotional impact or philosophical core, unless we are supposed to take seriously the idea that endless drunken partying will make you happier than holding down a steady job and maintaining a family. "That Hell-Bound Train" is fine, but no big deal; maybe I should read the Fritz Leiber and Manly Wade Wellman stories it beat for the Hugo and see how they stack up. (I read the Algis Budrys story beaten by "That Hell-Bound Train," "The Edge of the Sea," back in 2022, and, if memory serves, it is more mature and serious than Bloch's winning story, but not written quite as smoothly.)
The 1958 Merril train keeps a rollin'. Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log to ride along with us.
I've only read one other story by Don Berry, and that one, "Intruder" in the March 1958 Venture, was also about the terrors of hyperspace.
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