Harry Harrison: "The Ghoul Squad," "Toy Shop" and "You Men of Violence"

German editions of Prime Number

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading a British paperback edition of Prime Number, a collection of stories by Harry Harrison first printed in the period 1962-70.  Sometimes I like Harrison's stories, but ofttimes I don't, so this is like gambling.  Gambling is fun, right?

"The Ghoul Squad" (1969)

It looks like this story first appeared in print in Four for the Future, an anthology edited by Harrison himself that has a cover that reminds me of what I heard about that movie I never saw called The Human Centipede.  Four for the Future is a theme anthology that presents stories by four authors, Harrison, Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson and James Blish, on two themes, "sacrifice" and "redemption."  (Maybe I'll read this anthology in the future; it seems kind of interesting.)  Later that same year "The Ghoul Squad" appeared in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s  Analog, and a note in Four for the Future recognizing that Conde Nast owned the copyright to "The Ghoul Squad" suggests the story was sold to Analog back in '68.

The first part of "The Ghoul Squad" takes place in the late 1970s.  A police patrolman is at the scene of an automobile accident.  We learn that the federal government has passed a law and created an agency so that trained medical professionals arrive quickly at every accident to seize dead bodies so their still usable parts can be collected and put in storage for use in transplants.  Some people object to this practice; they call the new federal agency "The Ghoul Squad" and wear medallions that indicate they do not want their bodies turned into spare parts, and the federal agents are bound by law to not harvest from these people.  The patrolman is one of those objectors.

The second part of the story takes place in 1999; that patrolman is now sheriff of his county, and he is locally famous for how much he hates the feds who harvest human parts from accidents.  A huge cruise liner hovercraft that regularly carries tourists over the land of the American South and the sea in the Caribbean suffers a catastrophic malfunction while crossing the main character's county; there are many casualties and some fatalities.  The sheriff rushes out to help organize the emergency response effort.  He tries to obstruct the Ghoul Squad detachment sent to the site of the disaster, and gets into an argument with some state troopers--the law, after all, is on the side of the Ghouls.  The sheriff has a heart attack, because he has refused to get a replacement for the weak heart he was born with.  As he dies, we learn why he is so averse to transplants, and then we get the twist--the sheriff, in his hurry to get to the site of the hover liner disaster, forgot to put on his medallion, so his organs will be harvested by the feds.

This story is merely competent, lacking in drama and human feeling.  Harrison tries to be fair to everybody, not going out of his way to paint the sheriff as a ridiculous religious fanatic nor the Feds as cold-hearted and heavy-handed utilitarians, but perhaps this evenhandedness is one reason the story feels a little flat.

"Toy Shop" (1962)

Here we have another Analog story, one that was selected by Judith Merril for inclusion in her famous Year's Best anthology series.  

This is one of those SF stories that justifies and even glamorizes a small minority of brainiacs tricking and manipulating the populace; there are a lot of SF stories like this, the Foundation stories and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress being among them, and they always rub me the wrong way--I don't doubt that Harry Harrison, John W. Campbell, Jr., Judith Merril, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein are smarter than the average person, but seeing them indulge their fantasies of humiliating ordinary people and/or leading them by the nose for their own good I find embarrassing and even repellant.  A little humility and generosity on the part of those with special skills or resources is to be preferred to showboating, arrogance, and a flaunting of superiority, especially when that arrogance is expressed in self-serving wish-fulfillment fantasies.

"Toy Shop" is particularly irritating as it is a waste of time with its convoluted and totally unconvincing plot.

Most of Harrison's story consists of a long and detailed description of guys demonstrating the use of a toy rocket ship.  This is a fraud, presented as a magic trick--during his act the salesperson says the toy is able to fly due to the exploitation of magnetic waves, but he later reveals that the ship is suspended from a string attached to the ceiling and moves because he holds the other end of the string.  

The twist is that while it is a string that lifts the toy rocket, the toy actually does contain a device that has anti-grav properties and reduces the weight of the toy rocket.  If the battery-operated anti-grav device is not switched on the rocket is too heavy for the string to lift and the string will break.  The makers of the toy rocket, the inventors of the anti-grav device, were unable to get people interested in their invention because everybody is so close-minded and rigid in their thinking; their current plan is to sell the toys to adult hobbyists in hopes one of these nerds will stumble on the anti-grav properties of the toy and then improve the device and eventually mass-produce anti-grav equipment; the inventors will reap a financial benefit because they have patents on the device.

The plot is not credible, and I don't enjoy the elitist theme of how the masses and the establishment are dopes so the true cognitive elite have to trick them if society is to progress, so thumbs down to "Toy Shop."   

"You Men of Violence" (1967)

This is a decent adventure story that is also a pacifist/vegetarian wish fulfillment story in which violence doesn't accomplish goals but instead backfires on the violent so that some day the meek will inherit the galaxy.  

A huge powerful man, Raver, is an expert in electronics.  He has been arrested for his activism on the part of the Pacifist Party on his planet and has been sent to work in the slave mines on a wilderness planet where many different entities have mines; one of the mines is the property of people from a planet where the Pacifist Party is in power.  Raver tricks the captain of the slave ship into beating him up, creating a distraction so he can steal the electronic components he needs to escape his cell and make his way across the barren airless landscape to the Pacifist Party mine--he'll be safe if he can get there because the Pacifists' planet is a more powerful planet than the slave planet and the slavers can't risk attacking them.  In the course of his escape the Pacifist hulk/genius repeatedly outwits and outfights his pursuers while being careful to never actually physically harm them--he's a pacifist, after all.  In a final showdown with the smartest and most resourceful of his pursuers, Raver tries to convince his pursuer to join the Pacifist Party; multiple times he warns this officer that "he who lives by the sword dies by it," that the killer kills himself.  The officer remains loyal to the slave power and by pulling the trigger of his rifle manifests the pacifist's metaphor--the pacifist has sabotaged the rifle and it kills the officer, not Raver.

"You Men of Violence" is vulnerable to many criticisms.  The plot elements are pretty contrived, with every little factor set up by the author so things will work out in a way that supports the pacifist line he is selling; but of course adventure stories are often contrived and unbelievable, with everything falling the hero's way in a way that challenges the reader's ability to suspend disbelief.  I often complain about stories that denounce human violence and I often complain about utopian stories (Theodore Sturgeon comes to mind here with stories like "The Skills of Xandadu.")  But Harrison's attack on humanity in "You Men of Violence" is more convincing and more palatable than most; he doesn't come up with an unbelievable race of alien goody-two-shoes or robots to serve as a foil for humanity and suggest that we'd be better off if we were conquered or replaced by these flawless cardboard characters--Harrison here is more hopeful and less misanthropic, suggesting that humanity can evolve genetically or culturally to overcome its addiction to violence.  And Harrison's utopia is more believable and less simple-minded than most and seems to be produced via hard work and not something cheap like the magic belt Sturgeon introduces in "The Skills of Xanadu."

Most importantly, "You Men of Violence" is actually a good adventure story, well-written and well-paced, a story that doesn't just propagandize or hector you, but entertains with suspense and excitement.  So I can give a moderate recommendation to "You Men of Violence."       

"You Men of Violence" debuted in the same issue of Galaxy as Kris Neville's "Ballenger's People," which we read back in 2015.  The story would be reprinted in 50 in 50.

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As with our last look at Prime Number, we've got one good story out of three, though "The Ghoul Squad" isn't exactly bad.  We'll be reading more 1960s stories by Harrison as we continue our exploration of this collection in the near future, but first a foray into the 1950s.