"Warm Man" (1957)
This story, which premiered in an issue of F&SF that has what I think may be a caricature of Lucille Ball on its cover, might qualify as a weird or horror story, and has the kind of structure that an episode of The Twilight Zone would have."Warm Man" is set in an upper-middle class suburb of New York full of gossips, bored housewives who sleep around, college profs and stock brokers. A new guy, a bachelor by the name of Hallinan, moves in, and the woman who is sort of the neighborhood busybody and who is always hosting parties invites him to a shindig where he meets everyone. The locals find themselves unburdening themselves of all their woes to the kind and understanding Hallinan, and afterwards feeling relieved, even though Hallinan himself had but little to say. For some weeks this goes on, with everybody feeling better from the opportunity to talk to Hallinan and divulge to him their secret sorrows.
The revelatory ending of the story indicates that Hallinan is a "receiver empath" who absorbs people's emotions and derives some kind of satisfaction or sustenance from them. He meets an untimely end when he speaks to a young child, a shy kid who is the perennial victim of bullies--the boy is a bashful introverted outcast because he is a telepath who can read minds and project his thoughts into the minds of others; using his powers disturbs people, so he rarely uses them. When he realizes Hallinan is receptive to his emotions, the boy transmits his sorrow to the man, but because the pent up feelings of years constitute a more powerful volume of emotion that Hallinan can handle, the man dies of an overdose.
A satisfactory piece of entertainment. "Warm Man" has been included in multiple Silverberg collections, including The Best of Robert Silverberg, and Ellen Datlow reprinted it in her vampire anthology A Whisper of Blood.
"World of a Thousand Colors" (1957)
"World of A Thousand Colors" first saw print in Super-Science Fiction; Silverberg's contribution is trumpeted on the cover but that blonde being disrobed by a murderous alien is not in the story. "World of a Thousand Colors" has been reprinted in Silverberg collections--in fact is the title story of one--and in anthologies like Asimov and Greenberg's The Great SF Stories #19 and one called A Century of Science Fiction: 1950-1959: The Greatest Stories of the Decade, a volume edited by none other than the humble Robert Silverberg himself."En Route to Earth" (1957)
"En Route to Earth" appeared under the pen name Calvin M. Knox in Science Fiction Quarterly. The cover illo, by Emsh, featuring a three-headed white man and a red-headed blue flight attendant, illustrates Silverberg's story, even though neither it nor its author are named.
The stewardess on the cover is Milissa, a Vegan, and after a year of serving on ships that only travelled locally, today for the first time she is working on a vessel that will travel via warpspace, taking her, the Vegan crewmen and the fifty passengers on a three-and-a-half day trip from her native Vega II to Earth.
"En Route to Earth" is a joke story. There is no plot, really, just a series of gags. I expected there to be a pro-diversity message, Milissa learning that people of all types are worthy of respect or all the different races on the flight working together to save the ship or something, but we don't even get that--Milissa doesn't make any decisions, overcome any obstacles, or change in any way.
I'll list half or so of the gags. The three-headed Terran on the cover is a product of genetic engineering, and the three heads have conflicting personalities and fight each other--one flirts with Milissa. The pink alien in the lower right corner of the cover has bought a 300-year old Terran SF magazine and is enraged that the heavies in the violent space opera in it look just like his people--he sells the magazine to a collector who happens to also be a passenger on the ship. A pair of siblings from the Deneb system suddenly go into heat, one shifting from neuter to male and the other from neuter to female, and have to be rushed to the restroom so they can mate in private--they promise to name their offspring after Milissa. A member of a worm-like species that reproduces by ejecting a cloud of spores suddenly can't stop herself from doing so. (Many of the story's jokes have to do with sex, which I guess we sort of expect from Silverberg.)
Silverberg keeps this one short, and the jokes aren't bad, just bland, so we won't condemn this one--we'll call "En Route to Earth" barely acceptable.
"En Route to Earth" would be reprinted in a Dutch collection of Silverberg stories named for the story we read a few blog post ago, "Eve and Twenty-Three Adams," as well as the World of a Thousand Colors collection.
In the early1960s, I read a lot of SF magazines (they were cheap and available) and our local used bookstore often offered a "Buy One, Get One Free" promotion. Robert Silverberg seemed to be in almost every issue!
ReplyDeleteBack in those days Agberg filled whole issues of some magazines under various pen names.
ReplyDelete"A pair of siblings from the Deneb system suddenly go into heat, one shifting from neuter to male and the other from neuter to female . . ." So that's where Ursula stole the idea for The Left Hand of Darkness!
ReplyDeleteI'm a big Silverberg fan but his best work comes in the 60's and 70's.
ReplyDeleteIn his Collected Stories from Subterranean Press, Silverberg says "Warm Man" was inspired by C. M. Kornbluth cryptically saying "Cold" at the Milford Writer's Conference.
ReplyDeleteMarzAat (because Google doesn't think my blog URL is valid)