We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are running down an alphabetical list titled "Honorable Mentions" compiled by Judith Merril and printed in the back of her 1959 book SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume. We select specimens from this list of 1958 stories, read them, and then transmit our opinions about them to the world at large. Today we address the stories on the list by people whose names begin with the ever-popular letter "F."
"The Iowan's Curse" by Charles G. Finney
Finney is the author of
The Circus of Dr. Lao, a sort of famous novel. As a kid I saw the movie based on this novel, but found it to be a total bore, though that is far from dispositive--as a kid I thought any movie that wasn't monsters and/or violence from start to finish was a bore.
"The Iowan's Curse" debuted in Harper's, and a year later made its way into F&SF. In 1964 it reappeared in the Finney collection The Ghosts of Manacle; isfdb informs us that "The Iowan's Curse" is the first of three Manacle stories.
Manacle is the name of a town in southern Arizona to which people from other states retire because the climate is said to be healthy. (Fiction written before I was born is full of people who move some place because the doctor tells them to.) Our narrator and his wife have so retired, to a house with ten acres of desert property a few miles outside of town. They meet a man who retired to the area from Iowa years ago. The Iowan says there is something wrong with Manacle, that the local populace, indeed the whole place, is ungrateful and even spiteful, that when his wife and he moved in they were neighborly and did people favors, but only suffered thereby. So, says the Iowan, he put a curse on Manacle. And sure enough, the town soon received a devastating blow when its largest employer, a defense plant, closed and much of the population left so the roads and housing stock began to decay.
Finney then relates a series of incidents in which the narrator and his wife do favors and bad things happen to them in consequence. Two examples: 1) they stop to pick up what appear to be distressed motorists, but it is a trap--the people pantomiming a need for help are in fact violent criminals who tie our retirees up and steal their Cadillac; 2) the narrator accidentally shifts a rock and finds a scorpion under it--he spares the little creature, but later in the day it stings him and he requires medical attention. The couple even suffers when they do favors for people while visiting Mexico, which I am considering a plot hole, or maybe an indication that the whole thing is just a coincidence. There is also a sort of accessory phenomena in which people who do bad things to the protagonists end up getting their comeuppance via circumstances having nothing to do with our retirees (e.g., the car thieves are tried and convicted of other crimes in California) but this doesn't extend to some people who rob them in Mexico, presenting another inconsistency that suggests the whole story is a strong of coincidences. Finally I will note that many of the bad things that happen to people in the story seem to happen because they are drinking--maybe the point of the story is that people get what they deserve, are the authors of their own fates, but tend to blame inexplicable forces.
Eventually there is a catastrophic flood and the retirees' house and their new Cadillac (bought with the insurance money received after the thieves burned the first Caddy) are destroyed and the couple moves away.
I'm not a fan of these stories in which the same thing happens again and again for comedic effect, but I guess this story isn't offensively bad. Acceptable.
"A Summer Afternoon" by Charles L. Fontenay
A year ago I read Charles L. Fontenay's
"The Silk and the Song" and liked it a lot, so let's hope we can repeat that positive experience. "A Summer Afternoon" first saw print in
F&SF alongside the well-received Poul Anderson story
"Last of the Deliverers," which we read in 2021. It looks like "A Summer Afternoon" has not been anthologized, nor even reprinted in America, but it was included in the French version of
F&SF in 1959 and a French Fontenay collection in 1999, part of what isfdb calls a series "devoted to macabre fiction," "Le Cabinet Noir."
This is a well-written horror story that ably and economically integrates very realistic family dynamics into a weird supernatural tale with strong eerie images. It is also one of those stories which doesn't really explain what is going on; Fontenay may be drawing on standard fantastical tropes like the vampire, the werewolf, and the wizard, but not in a slavish or comprehensive way.
Peter is ten years old and lives on a farm with Mom and Dad. Uncle Theo, Dad's brother, a huge powerful man whom Peter admires greatly, has come to stay; Theo acts in a strange fashion, going away for days at a time and then returning with little gifts for Peter, and Dad obviously wishes Theo wasn't there but doesn't really know how to get rid of him. One day Theo returns gravely wounded, shot in the stomach, carrying a revolver which has been fired. Dad wants to get a doctor, but Theo resists this course. Peter is alone in the room with Theo when his uncle dies, after touching Peter, and Peter has some bizarre experiences immediately after Theo's death which had me wondering if Theo had passed some kind of esoteric power or curse onto his nephew. Mom and Dad are temporarily frozen or paralyzed, and the usual animal cries and insect sounds of the farm are silenced. Peter, himself still able to walk around, goes outside and spots four little beings, like withered goblins or mummified gremlins, enter the house; when they come out they are carrying what looks like a struggling white moth of unusual size--we have to assume this is Theo's soul.
The weird creatures leave, the farm returns to normal, Mom and Dad not even having noticed the queer episode of their paralysis. Peter is cured of his wish to emulate Theo, but we readers have to wonder if this choice has already been taken from him.
Good! You won't catch me eating snails or frogs any time soon, but I have to admit that sometimes the French know what they are talking about. Maybe I should hunt down the English originals of the stories in La soie et la chanson, I already having enjoyed the title story and this one today.
"The New Science of Astronomy" by Donald Franson
This is a clever story, a popular scientific paper published on Venus and written by a native. The people of Venus just recently developed rockets that provide them a view of the universe beyond the clouds that shroud their world, and this document summarizes their many discoveries and speculations about the planets and stars which they never knew were out there as well as their old traditional ways of thinking that have been exploded by a glimpse of space. Eventually the reader realizes that the people of Venus are plant people, and look upon animals with contempt and fear.
I can moderately recommend this story; there is little by way of plot and character, but Franson makes fun use of his gimmick. "The New Science of Astronomy" appeared in
Future Science Fiction, edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes, who also provides a lengthy analysis of science fiction stories and magazines from 1928 in his "Yesterday's World of Tomorrow" column. Merril and I like it, but it seems that "The New Science of Astronomy" has not been reprinted in English; our friends in France included it in a 1961 issue of the magazine
Satellite, however.
Franson has over a dozen fiction credits at isfdb and five non-fiction credits for things with titles like A Key to the Terminology of Science-Fiction Fandom and A History of the Huge, Nebula and International Fantasy Awards, Listing Nominees and Winners, 1951-1970 and was apparently very active in SF fan circles. Maybe we'll read some more fiction by him in the future.
"Big, Wide, Wonderful World" by Charles E. Fritch
This three-page story has been more successful than most of the other pieces we are reading today, seeing reprint in three or four anthologies as well as the Fritch collection
Crazy Mixed-Up Planet. "Big, Wide, Wonderful World" debuted in
F&SF alongside another Merril fave we read recently, Poul Anderson's
"Backwardness," and a Robert Bloch story which I will probably read someday even though it has a joke title.
"Big, Wide, Wonderful World" is kind of like Fontenay's "A Summer Afternoon," a story that doesn't give you a lot of answers, just describes a weird event and leaves you to contemplate what is going on. I like it.
In the future or an alternate universe or whatever, people have to regularly take a drug or they will have nightmares that will drive them insane, even kill them. Four friends, to prove their bravery to each other, decide to hold off taking their injections, and they experience terrible pain and visions of the world around them that are horrifying--the buildings are ruins, the trees are mere blackened stumps, they see each other as disfigured and scarred.
I am toying with the idea that the nightmare visions are reality and the government makes people use the drug to hide the terrible truth from the citizens, but that doesn't really make sense.
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Merril has proven a wise guide through the "F"s of 1958, directing us to entertaining and thought-provoking stories and introducing us to new authors. Stay tuned to see if Merril's 1958 "G"s are as enjoyable.
You can't judge a book by its movie. I highly recommend that you read "The Circus of Dr. Lao" by Charles G. Finney (I never saw the movie) as well as his much less famous "The Unholy City". (Caveat: I would also have recommended some stories that got your thumbs down.)
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