There are people who will tell you that conquering outer space is a waste of time. We at MPorcius Fiction Log beg to differ! And today we are gambling that 1950s stories from H. L. Gold's
Galaxy will agree with us and not the naysayers who want to tie us all down permanently to this big ol' rock that--admit it!--you are kind of getting sick of.
Years ago I purchased a bedraggled copy of Permabook M-4172, The Third Galaxy Reader, for 50 cents at the Second Story Books location in Washington D.C., the belly of the beast. This book has crossed this great country of ours at least once, as a stamp indicating it was at one time on the shelves of Rodden's Bookshop in Long Beach, CA, indicates. First printed in 1960, this paperback edition of the 1958 hardcover promises, right there in all-caps on its cover, stories about "the world of outer space" that are "soaring" and "exciting," not depressing or discouraging. Let's investigate the contents of this book which is falling apart in my hands as I speak.
But first, I'll point out that I have already read many of the tales here in Third Galaxy Reader. Who could forget Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon," which I read ten years ago? Less memorable was "Volpla" by Wyman Guin which I also read in 2014. Oh yeah, and then there's Evelyn E. Smith's "The Vilbar Party," "Time in the Round" by Fritz Leiber, "The Haunted Corpse" by Frederik Pohl, "Man in the Jar" by Damon Knight and "Honorable Opponent" by Clifford D. Simak, all of which I read in one fell swoop in 2019. That's a lot of stories, but there are still some left for us to try on for size today: Theodore R. Cogswell's "Limiting Factor," F. L. Wallace's "End as a World," Avram Davidson's "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper" and Lester del Rey's "Dead Ringer." These titles don't exactly sound optimistic, but let's not give up before we've even started.
"Limiting Factor" by Theodore R. Cogswell (1954)
Here we have a story lacking in plot and character that relies for what little energy it has on weak jokes and a counterintuitive idea about a SF commonplace, homo superior. Barely acceptable filler.
Jan and Ferdie (these feel like very Fifties names to me, but I guess that is because I think of Jan and Dean as a 1950s act, even though wikipedia is telling me their big hits were in the '60s) live in the near future. They are among the secret minority that has psychic powers--they can communicate telepathically, fly, etc. We see the theme of the story immediately when they talk about how taking an elevator or an air taxi is faster than using their mental powers to fly and using telepathy causes a head ache so calling somebody up on the phone is preferable. The secret supermen and superwomen decide to leave the Earth to avoid the inevitable conflict between them and the mundanes, so Ferdie and Jan abandon their jobs and friends and families and are aboard the psychic-powered hyperspace ship when it takes off from its secret location on a mission to find a world for the super people to settle. They discover a world inhabited by human beings who developed independently of Earth; these people are decadent and bored, their civilization is going nowhere. At first the Terran superpeople think that these losers are mundanes abandoned by their own homo superior minority, and figure that homo superior members buoy and protect society; the belief that progress and prosperity on Earth is dependent on them, they decide to return home out of a feeling of responsibility to their fellow (if inferior) Earthers. But then it comes to their attention that these do-nothing bores are the local homo superior, people who left their home world just like they just did! There is a limit to human psychic powers, just like there is a limit to human muscle power--even the strongest man can't lift as much as a steam shovel, and similarly machines will soon be developed on Earth that can perform any feat a psychic superman can but far better. The psykers of this dead-end civilization the Earthers have discovered thought, wrongly, their psychic powers would expand without limit, and brought with them no people able to build machines, and so they have stagnated. The homo superiors of Earth return home and take their old jobs and reunite with family and friends, confident that their powers don't make them all that special and so there will be no race war.
Cogswell's basic idea is not bad, but the actual story lacks entertainment value--the story is mostly light-hearted dialogue and the characters are not there to inspire feeling in the audience, but just to air the idea. "Limiting Factor" has resurfaced in mutant-oriented anthologies and Cogswell collections.
"End as a World" by F. L. Wallace (1955)
Here we have a gimmicky story the twist ending of which is based on what amounts to a pun. "End as a World" has an optimistic hopeful message, which in theory might be uplifting or give you the warm fuzzies, but the lion's share of the story deceitfully tries to inspire in the reader the opposite emotions. Thumbs down!
Our narrator is a teenaged boy. We see him interact with his mother and with various friends, including a black kid (a "Negro") whom we are told is better at sports than all the white kids. Everybody in town is sort of anxious--everybody in the world is sort of anxious! In front of the churches are signs saying "THIS IS THE DAY THE WORLD ENDS!" At the predicted hour the townspeople gather to watch the sky--people all over the world are watching the sky! The twist ending is that the human race is not going extinct, as the text has sort of duplicitously implied--the first ship that went to Mars is returning today and before landing the vessel will circumnavigate the globe and leave a condensation trail that everybody in the world can see. If people are worried it is because something might go wrong with the ship. The phrase "This is the day the world ends" is an oblique poetic way of saying "this is the day the human race takes its first steps out into the universe" or something. The ship arrives safely on time and everybody rejoices and strangers kiss each other and so forth.
I hate this kind of trickery.
Martin H. Greenberg seems to have liked "End as a World"--he put it in at least two anthologies.
"Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper!" by Avram Davidson (1957)
Here we find a joke story about illegal immigration and welfare fraud. Is
Galaxy a humor magazine?
The setting of the story is a secret meeting of the leadership of the American Dental Association. The assembled dentists have received a message from the most innovative dentist in the United States, inventor of superior dental prosthetics, Morris Goldpepper, who has been missing for some weeks. Goldpepper, we learn, was a SF fan who made no secret of his ambition to be the dentist on the first space ship. The message was found in a faulty dental plate by a dentist who worked on the mouth of an old--and odd--man, and is read to the assembled ADA big wigs and reproduced in the text of the story.
The message describes how Goldpepper was approached by an old man whose mouth and inner eyelids were blue. This guy turned out to be an alien and invited Goldpepper to accompany him back to his homeworld via teleporter to help the aliens improve the state of their dental science, apparently lacking. But it was all a trick! These aliens naturally shed all their teeth as they reach adulthood and eat goops and slimes, and always look old to human eyes, even when in the prime of life. They can more or less pass as (aged) Earthers if they put cosmetics on their blue skin and if they are provided false teeth. Their scheme is to move to Earth, to California, the state which has the most generous welfare provisions, and live on the dole. Goldpepper is enslaved, forced to make false teeth for these interstellar parasites!
As the story ends, the assembled ADA leadership discusses steps to deal with the aliens and rescue Goldpepper.
This story is competently executed, with Davidson giving Goldpepper a personality and writing style, and it is interesting to see a satire about illegal immigration and abuse of the welfare system, though I don't know enough about Davidson to know if he thinks generous social spending and unregulated immigration are a real problem or if he is just poking fun at people who consider them a problem. Part of the satire of course is of SF itself, this story serving as a comic contrast to the huge number of SF stories in which aliens want to conquer the Earth; these aliens are merely small scale deadbeats.
We'll call it acceptable. "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper!" would be reprinted in Davidson collections and by Robert Silverberg in his anthology Infinite Jests: The Lighter Side of Science Fiction.
"Dead Ringer" by Lester del Rey (1956)
Here we have a decent horror story with a twist ending you can kind of see coming.
Dane Phillips is a reporter and a veteran of the Pacific War who moves from newspaper to newspaper, repeatedly getting sacked. During the war he saw a comrade get killed, only to meet him later and find him hale and hearty! Since then, Dane has done some investigating and come to believe there live among us humans, undetected, space aliens who look human but are almost unkillable, capable of healing up after almost any injury. When mangled in an explosion or a car wreck or something, some of these E.T.s have had to fake their own funerals--others have even had to escape from their coffins after being buried by ignorant native Terrans. Dane keeps getting fired from newspapers because he keeps trying to get them to print the stories he writes with the aim of blowing the lid off this alien conspiracy and editors won't have it. Dane has even been committed to a mental institution and escaped.
We observe some of Dane's sleuthing--digging up a grave!--during which he is captured by the men from the funny farm; he is dragged back to the loony bin where he overhears the shrinks' plans for him--since he has refused to abandon his beliefs in alien infiltration they are going to give him shock treatment in an effort to erase these obsessive thoughts! This sounds like a fate worse than death, so Dane tries to commit suicide! But when he slashes his throat the wound heals up lickety-split! Dane himself is one of the aliens!
A fun little story. Besides del Rey collections, "Dead Ringer" has been reprinted in some anthologies, including a 1966 German "Best of" Galaxy volume.
Obviously, these were not the "soaring" stories about "the world of outer space" we were promised. We'll put aside whether they are set in space or actually about life outside the Earth's atmosphere and consider if they are "soaring," which I am taking to mean uplifting, optimistic, hopeful, a vindication of life and humanity, etc.; I'm not going to allow any lawyerly bunkum about how these stories "soar the heights of terror and anxiety."
Wallace's "End as a World" comes the closest to soaring because at its climax we realize the people of Earth are united across national and ethnic boundaries in their hopes of conquering space and their joy at the first step of that heroic destiny being concluded successfully, but the story consists of a cheap trick and through most of it Wallace tries to make you sad. Cogswell's "Limiting Factor" is optimistic about the future of the human race, suggesting high technology will open up wide vistas of freedom and damp down class and racial conflict, but it is too silly and jokey to be soaring. Davidson's "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper!" is not soaring but base and belittling, being full of jokes and having as its characters self-important goofballs who resent the relatively low esteem in which their profession is held and parasitic deadbeats who take advantage of others' credulity and generosity. Del Rey's "Dead Ringer," while probably the most entertaining story, is not soaring but sordid--it is a blood-soaked horror story about infiltration, suicide, and a horrible revelation about one's own identity.
It seems Galaxy is not the place to look for validation of our belief that the human race should bend the universe to its will and colonize the galaxy. Again we learn not to trust the text on the covers or jackets of SF books.
Look out for more stories from anthologies in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.
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