Merril-approved 1958 stories by "F O'Donnevan" and C Oliver

We continue looking at 1958 SF by reading selected stories included by Judith Merril in her list of Honorable Mentions in the 1959 edition of her critically lauded anthology series.  Today the "O" authors from the list.  

"The Gun Without a Bang" by Robert Sheckley (as by Finn O'Donnevan)

I read this one without first looking it up at isfdb and so got tricked.  I usually avoid Sheckley because I associate him with joke stories and satires, and would have skipped this if I had known the true identity of its author.  Luckily "The Gun Without a Bang" is not a humor piece, but a well-written adventure story that reminds us of the limitations of technology as well as the adaptability of mankind.

It is the spacefaring future!  All over the galaxy brave men are having adventures, discovering lost civilizations, fighting monsters, building a space empire.  Some of these men get lucky and get rich.  Dixon is one of these adventurers, but so far he hasn't been one of those to get rich.  He is content with his fate, however.

Today he is alone on a wild planet checking on an automatic radio relay station.  He has with him a prototype disintegrator pistol--he is testing it in the field for its inventors.  When he is attacked by a pack of things like wolves or hyenas and a pack of things like killer monkeys he uses the disintegrator to fight them off.  The weapon is very good at disintegrating Dixon's assailants, but it has its drawbacks.  For one thing, the disintegrator doesn't make a loud noise and disintegrated animals don't cry out in pain or fear, nor leave dead bodies, so the other animals of the pack are not scared by the weapon even as it reduces their numbers.  For another, the disintegrator beam has a wide area of effect and is liable to cause collateral damage and friendly fire incidents; a branch falls from a tree that is partly disintegrated and hits Dixon, putting him in peril, and during a wild close range struggle Dixon disables his own spaceship with stray fire, marooning him on this planet of voracious monsters.

A year later the inventors of the disintegrator pistol come looking for Dixon and their prototype and find Dixon has survived using the most basic and primitive methods, like building a stockade and fighting with handmade bow and arrows.  The pistol he uses as a hammer.

The action scene is very good and the plot twists make sense, so thumbs up for Robert Sheckley, not a thing I expected to type and not a thing you can expect to read from me again.

"The Gun Without a Bang" has been reprinted in several Sheckley collections and multiple anthologies.  I read it in the issue of Galaxy in which it first appeared.  

"The Space Horde" by Chad Oliver

Merril might have liked it, but "The Space Horde" didn't set the world on fire when it debuted--it was not printed in book form in English until 2016, though our Italian friends included it in an anthology in 1972.  It first saw print in an issue of Amazing alongside a story by Harlan Ellison with an equally corny title, "The Vengeance of Galaxy 5," that looks like it might be fun.  

"The Space Horde" is structured like a stereotypical SF thriller, like a B-movie about some disaster, that tries to horrify you, teach you some science, and trigger in you that good old sense of wonder at the vastness and mysteriousness of the universe.  First we get an intro about the vastness of space, how space is like the sea and the stars and planets like islands, etc.  Then the plot starts--three spacecraft have landed on Earth and from each emerges a blob monster that can dissolve anything and is immune to conventional weaponry; the unstoppable jelly creatures expand as they feed, laying waste to ever more acreage.  Then we get talky scenes of American scientists discussing what to do, interspersed with horror scenes in italics depicting children and women being dissolved by the ever-growing blob monsters.  The Rand Corporation computer calculates that the goop will cover all of the world in two years.  One team of scientists comes up with a wild theory of how to save the world from the invincible alien slime, and this is what makes the poorly titled "The Space Horde" unusual and worthy of Merril's recommendation. 

Maybe, posit the scientists, somewhere on Earth there lives the next step in evolution, a creature more advanced than the human race.  (We get some pretty suspect lectures about evolution at this point.)  If such a superior species exists, maybe it can defeat the aliens!  The scientists brainstorm what this next stage of evolution would look like, figure it must have telepathy, and that if it hasn't already fought the space jelly then it must not be aware of it yet, must live in some remote area, like Madagascar!  So the scientists go to Madagascar and wander around, thinking about the threat posed by the blobs from beyond the stars and broadcasting a mental cry for help to creatures they don't even know exist.  There is a flash and the slime retreats and returns to space.  The scientists can't be sure, but we readers are made aware, that they were right, that there lives in Madagascar an inconspicuous community of little psychic people who look like rodents and have no need for technology; when they learned of the space ooze they acted to save the world and the human beings they see as cute and clownish children.  The crisis over, the scientists speculate about whether the human race will colonize other planets and what will happen if we ever meet the secret superior species they theorize saved us.

"The Space Horde" isn't too long, and while the alien menace is sort of tired Oliver's resolution of the crisis is crazy and feels fresh, so I can moderately recommend it.

**********

Well, there are the "O"s, or, I guess, the "O" and a ringer, two respectable science fiction stories with science and horror/adventure elements.  Merril has guided us aright today.  

More 1950s SF featuring adventure and violence (I hope!) in our next episode!