In
our last episode we read a story by Richard Matheson from the July 1957 issue of
F&SF, and I noticed some other stories in the issue that interested me, so let's check them out.
"Your Ghost Will Walk..." by Robert F. Young
This is a satire of suburban Americans who like TV and automobiles, as if we needed another of these. We often see SF in which space aliens serve as a foil for us humans, the aliens being more peaceful than humans or more in tune with nature or whatever; this story is about how humans (at least middle-class suburbanites) are crass and don't understand love and don't understand poetry, and these deficiencies are thrown into high relief by the presence of robots who love poetry and each other!
It is the early 21st century. This guy Wade writes advertising jingles for cigarette and automobile manufacturers. With the money his jingles have earned him he has acquired for himself and his family a big suburban home, lots of TVs and two 2025 Cadillacs. His domestic staff consists of two robots who have fallen in love with each other; these robots are well-versed in poetry, and recite poems to each other while they do their jobs, like cooking, and get so distracted that they screw up their work, burning the food, for example. Wade also has a robot to maintain his and the wife's cars. Whereas the maid and butler robots are converted poetry bots bought on the cheap, the mechanic bot is custom built to love cars.
The maid and butler run away and Wade jumps in one of the Caddies to find them, bringing the mechanic robot with him. In the course of the search, Wade's cigarette case scratches the paint on the car, and so the mechanic robot murders him with a wrench. (This is a pretty mean-spirited satire.) Meanwhile the two poetry robots, it is implied, walk onto a highway and get destroyed by the traffic.
I hate these satires that are just an exercise in venting rage and expressing contempt. The point of "Your Ghost Will Walk..." isn't to convince the reader that watching TV and driving a car is bad, the author just assumes the reader already thinks that and expects him to enjoy seeing a TV watcher and car driver get murdered. "Your Ghost Will Walk..." is a wish fulfillment fantasy that caters to the bloodlust of urban sophisticates who despise (or is it envy?) suburban families.
Stinks.
According to isfdb, "Your Ghost Will Walk..." is the second of two stories about poetic robots. Maybe the earlier one is also about this same maid and butler. "Your Ghost Will Walk..." would be reprinted in The Worlds of Robert F. Young.
For more MPorcius assessments of Robert F. Young stories, check out these links:
"Life Cycle" by Poul Anderson
Here we have a relatively rare Anderson story--if isfdb is to be believed, "Life Cycle" has never been reprinted in an Anderson collection. Robert Silverberg did include "Life Cycle" in his 1968 anthology
Earthmen and Strangers, and within that volume both Silverberg and Anderson provide half-page long intros to the story. Silverberg in his intro stresses Anderson's science credentials and tells us this story is going to be about reproduction. Anderson's intro, which is headed "AUTHOR'S NOTE," is a sort of apology for and explanation of the inaccurate picture of Mercury painted in "Life Cycle"--in 1957 astronomers thought Mercury had a permanently hot day side and a permanently cold dark side, but by 1968 this had been disproven. Anderson is one of those guys who really thinks science fiction should be teaching people science.
Like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson fights racism and celebrates diversity by populating his stories with sympathetic and admirable characters who are non-Anglo, non-white and non-human. The crew of space ship Explorer, currently stuck on the surface in Mercury's twilight zone, consists of a Basque biologist, a Mohawk engineer and a Martian bird-man mineralogist who came here to trade with the natives. Why are they stuck? The local Mercurians, silicon-based life forms that look like insects and share a hive-mind, have deployed armed guards to keep the outworlders from accessing their supply shed a short walk away for Explorer; in the shed is their food and the fuel for their ship. The three men will starve if they can't lift the embargo, which the previously friendly natives have instituted at the behest of their gods, who have decreed that all aliens die. The three spacemen only have one pistol between them, so they can't fight the entire Mercurian community of thousands, even though these characters are armed with nothing more advanced than a spear.
The gods of these nightsider Mercurians are the inhabitants of Mercury's dayside, whom the explorers have not yet met or even seen. The explorers seek to learn more about these gods in hopes they can persuade them to rescind the death order. The space men acquire the exoskeletons of dead nightsiders--they find them in a big pile of empty exoskeletons just beyond the twilight zone, a short distance into the hellishly hot dayside region. The nightsiders explain that when they get old, nightsiders walk to the dayside and are killed by the sun's rays.
While the Martian keeps an eye on the ship, the humans don the exoskeletons as a disguise and attend a religious service at which the daysiders appear. It turns out that the nightsiders are female and the daysiders, who look like lizards, are the males, and this ceremony is a mating ritual/one-night stand where the males impregnate the females. Even more amazing, the human scientists figure out that the males are former females, those who went to the dayside expecting death--the Mercurians are like oysters, changing sex in mid life! The females are an egg-laying larval form who, under the influence of the fierce sunlight of dayside, shed their exoskeletons and emerge as males who can fertilize females through sexual intercourse. The males (who lose their memories in the metamorphosis and thus have no fellow feeling for the females they once were) have set themselves up as gods and conduct an unfair trading partnership with the females, and they want the explorers dead because the offworlders might act as trade competition or even expose the truth to the females. The males' fears come true when the spacemen explain what is going on to the females--the civilization of Mercury, like so many civilizations in SF stories, is about to undergo a paradigm shift.
The last paragraph of the story is a sort of social commentary sting or maybe just a sexist joke--the Mohawk feels a little guilty that he and his comrades may have triggered the rise of a matriarchy here on Mercury like that which reigns in the United States.
"Life Cycle" is pretty good example of the traditional libertarian science fiction story that promotes science and trade, romanticizes the scientist, the engineer and the merchant, tells you religion is an obstacle and a scam, and tries to teach you biology and astronomy via little lectures. I like it.
"Summerland" by Avram Davidson
I don't always like Davidson's work, but this one is well-written so I'm giving "Summerland" a thumbs up.
Davidson's plot is quite simple. The narrator's elderly mother becomes friends with a middle-aged couple who are into new age occult fads, like seances. The husband of the couple, who owns lots of rental properties, falls and dies, and the wife, accompanied by the narrator's mother and sometimes the narrator, goes to many mediums in hopes of contacting her husband via a seance. Finally, one of the seances gets in touch with the dead husband, and everyone gets evidence that the man is burning in Hell because he gave all his tenants a raw deal, neglecting his properties to the point they were unsafe.
Among the virtues of "Summerland" is its length--a mere four pages, so there is no fat, nothing that will bore the reader or try his patience. Most importantly, Davidson succeeds in painting believable characters and relationships, and he also structures the story in such a way that it achieves some clever and entertaining effects, like foreshadowing as well as some little surprises. This is a well-crafted thing.
Quite good. "Summerland" was reprinted in the Davidson collection Or All the Seas with Oysters and multiple anthologies for which Martin H. Greenberg is partly credited. One of those is Hollywood Ghosts, but "Summerland" isn't really about ghosts and has nothing to do with show biz--the California angle is the West Coast culture of vegetarianism, hypochondria, beatniks and proto-hippies, of interest in Eastern philosophy and the occult and the way these counter-culture values seep into the precincts of bourgeois business people and their wives.
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The Anderson is solid traditional science fiction, and while the Young story is annoying, it, like the admirable Davidson story, offers some insight into the intellectual and cultural currents of the late 1950s in America. This is a good issue of F&SF, well worth investigating.
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