Frederik Pohl: "The Middle of Nowhere," "The Gentle Venusian" and "The Day of the Boomer Dukes"

We recently finished up reading all the stories in Frederik Pohl's In the Problem Pit, a 1976 collection.  Let's turn our attention to a Pohl collection first published in 1959, reprinted in 1969, and then reprinted in Germany four times in the 1970s and 1980s, Tomorrow Times Seven.  My copy of Tomorrow Times Seven is a 1959 one, with a Richard Powers cover.  The 1969 edition also has a pretty good cover, one by Robert Foster.

As the title suggests, Tomorrow Times Seven presents SF fans with seven stories.  We've already read and blogged about a pair of them, "The Haunted Corpse" and "To See Another Mountain," leaving us with five to go.  Today we'll read three of them, those appearing second, third and fourth in the volume.  (I'll note here that I am reading the stories in my decaying paperback, printed 12 years before I was born and leaving little yellow fragments all over the house; there may be differences between these book versions and the original magazine versions.)   

"The Middle of Nowhere" (1955)

Here we have a story about the colonization of Mars by greedy private sector Earthmen--Pohl explicitly likens the humans on Mars to the Hudson Bay Company and the East India Company and calls their enterprise a "monopoly"--and the resistance to this colonization by the native Martians.  Maybe we should see "The Middle of Nowhere" as a left-wing fantasy of Native Americans or South Asians triumphing over British imperialism, of killing white people en masse, and compare it to Edmond Hamilton's "Conquest of Two Worlds" and especially Chad Oliver's "Final Exam."

"The Middle of Nowhere" is a first-person narrative in the voice of a guard or soldier of the Company that is colonizing Mars.  Pohl does a decent job with the adventure setting stuff--Mars is a dangerous place where humans have to wear respirators and insulated capes because the air doesn't have much oxygen and both the fierce noonday sun and the bitterly cold nights are a threat to human health and life.  The native Martians appear to be primitives who live in huts, though humans have never seen a Martian up close--the natives sneak off whenever an Earther approaches.  The Martians do, however, have access to some high-tech weapons, weapons as good as some of those produced on Earth--no rifles and aircraft with which to fight Earthers toe to toe, but indirect fire-and-forget weapons, including self-guided missiles that home in unerringly on Earth vehicles, knocking them out and killing all occupants.  As a result, humans on Mars have to travel on foot, exposing themselves to the aforementioned solar radiation and frigid temperatures as well as the deadly sandstorms which strike with regularity.  Where do these stone age people get these missiles?

The plot of "The Middle of Nowhere" follows an expedition of which the narrator is a member, a relief force that travels from one human settlement to another--the latter has been devastated by a native attack.  The expedition is almost wiped out by the Martian indirect fire weapons and the terrible weather that is common to Mars.  The relief force does discover that the natives the humans have been encountering are, apparently, the fallen descendants of a lost Martian high-tech civilization--the primitives have just been finding the self-guided missiles and are able to launch them, but not maintain or construct them.  The concluding lines of the story suggest that the high-tech Martians are not extinct, but merely hiding, and will emerge in a few years and give the Terran invaders a run for their money.

An acceptable adventure story that is an ominous downer and has an anti-Western/anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist bent, a competent filler piece that will appeal to fans of Yahya Sinwar and Ho Chi Minh.  "The Middle of Nowhere" debuted in the issue of Galaxy in which Groff Conklin calls J. R. R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring and Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword "excellent" but admits he didn't finish either of them because he doesn't like fantasy.  "The Middle of Nowhere" would go on to be reprinted in various Pohl collections, and in a 1979 Soviet anthology of English and American SF.

The Frederik Pohl Omnibus also includes "The Day of the Boomer Dukes."
Science Fiction: English and American Short Stories apparently prints the stories
in English but has notes and an introduction in Russian.  The cover seems to show
a church, a curious choice for a book of science fiction stories printed in the USSR.

"The Gentle Venusian" (1958)

Another story from Galaxy, where it appeared as "The Gentlest Unpeople."  Is this going to be one of those stories that dramatizes how terrible humans (or just white humans) are by presenting a goody goody nonhuman as a foil to the rapacious and racist Earthman?  Galaxy editor H. L. Gold liked this one enough to include it in The Fourth Galaxy Reader alongside Avram Davidson's "Or All The Seas With Oysters," Margaret St. Clair's "Horrer Howce," and Robert Sheckley's "The Gun Without a Bang," all of which are the subjects of positive reviews here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  (You'll also find in The Fourth Galaxy Reader Fritz Leiber's "What's He Doing in There?," which I called "an acceptable trifle.")  "The Gentle Venusian" also shows up is the pages of a 1965 Hungarian anthology.  

"The Gentle Venusian" is a long tedious misanthropic joke story.  Thumbs down!

The insect people of Venus are smarter and nicer and blah blah blah than humans.  The first scenes of the story follow two Venerians as they play a complex version of golf in which you throw a bejeweled boomerang.  These boomerangs are passed down from generation to generation--boomerang golf is at the very center of Venerian culture and society.  The two insect men find that a fellow boomeranger has been murdered, his boomerang stolen.  The culprit--a low-IQ middle-aged Earthman, David T. Jiminez!  Dirty Dave, as he is called, was a horse jockey thrown out of the biz because he was found to have drugged a horse.  So he became a spaceman at the age of 49.  You see, few men can go to space--the cosmic rays slay them--and Jiminez is one of the handful of winners of the genetic lottery who has immunity to the rays.  The government sent Dirty Dave to Venus on a one-man autopiloted rocket to babysit research apparatus, but DD has been throwing out all the automatic survey equipment and filling the rocket with stuff he has stolen from the submissive and comically polite natives.  You see, thousands of years ago the Venerians were ambitious and aggressive and came to the brink of wiping themselves out in a war--after that close call they developed a culture of extreme politeness and deference.  DD plans to somehow alter the course of the rocket when it automatically blasts off for Earth and land it in some remote area like the Congo and there live off the gems and platinum he has seized from the Venerian natives--these commodities, rare on Earth, are common on Venus.

The Venerian bug men currently live in a utopia; while they play games all day, robots do all the work.  Robots also handle law enforcement and a huge robot arrests Dirty Dave for interfering with the boomerang gold game and drags him to the slammer.  Convicted by the robot cop, DD is sentenced to death.  The Venerians feel bad for him and tell him they are helping him escape, but actually they are only sparing him the anxiety of waiting to be executed--they lead him right into the arms of the robot executioner who tears him limb from limb.  I guess that is the punchline joke.  There is an additional final joke--a few bug men decide to climb into the automatic rocket and return with it to Earth.

Waste of time, a series of jokes about how Jiminez is stupid and arrogant and loves to drink and the natives are overly polite and obsessed with playing their boomerang golf game.  It is curious that Dirty Dave has a Spanish name--maybe in the 1950s there were a lot of famous Spanish or Latin American jockeys?  Or is there a chance his name is a reference to conquistador treatment of Native Americans?  (Not that the Aztecs and Incas were all that gentle or polite.)

"The Day of the Boomer Dukes" (1956)

This one debuted in Robert Lowdnes' Future Science Fiction, in an issue with plenty of fun illustrations by Emsh, Freas and Orban.  It would be reprinted in an anthology with a great cover by Ralph Brillhart, Masters of Science Fiction, and several Pohl collections, including the British volume Survival Kit. 

"The Day of the Boomer Dukes" is an ambitious piece of work, a jocular time travel and hidden-elites-are-ruling-the-universe story, split into four chapters, each with its own first person narrator, each of whom has a wacky name and a dialect with its own slang and colloquialisms, which can make reading it a little challenging; for example, our first narrator's memoir is sprinkled with French words that are spelled phonetically.  "The Day of the Boomer Dukes" is not a straightforward story; you sort of have to figure some of it out, some plot components being presented to you obliquely rather than spelled out simply.  I'm judging "The Day of the Boomer Dukes" to be almost good, or maybe borderline good, certainly better than the first two stories we looked at today.

In the far future a guy (or maybe a robot?) is bored and wants to live a life of adventure.  He studies old texts and a book called U.S.A. Confidential gets him excited about 1950s America--he collects a bunch of energy weapons and gets himself transported to New York City in the Fifties in hopes of joining the Mafia and waging war on society.  U.S.A. Confidential is a real book, published in 1952 by two journalists that, apparently, described the "dark underbelly" of American life in a way that offended lefties; Pohl here suggests that among the book's sins was its exaggeration of the size and power of the Mafia.

The time traveler runs afoul of teenaged street gangs.  The leader of a gang called The Boomer Dukes, our second narrator, acquires the time traveler's ray pistols and forcefield generator and, high on heroine, decides to go to war against the police--the cops' revolvers cannot penetrate the forcefield, rendering this thug almost invincible.  Our third narrator is a cowardly and incompetent journalist who is sent to investigate the fighting in Manhattan.  Our fourth is a woman secret agent from the future.  It seems there is a vast organization of time police or history police who are working undercover in every period of human history; they impersonate natives and employ an array of high tech devices as they strive to prevent time travelers from changing history.  She and her comrades neutralize the leader of The Boomer Dukes, and then she leads the effort to clean up the mess; many people have been killed and much property destroyed in the fighting, and this whole episode has to be kept from humanity, so the dead, and even witnesses to the fracas, are replaced with android simulacra who look like the deceased and will take on their appointed roles in history.  

Survival Kit includes all three of today's stories
The master recyclers at Belmont would reuse the gorge Brillhart cover on
Masters of Science Fiction four years later on the Theodore Cogswell collection The Third Eye 

********** 

All three of these stories are about selfish individuals who threaten the status quo and are dealt with by their betters; SF often celebrates change agents and paradigm shifts, but these stories are all about distant, even secret, authorities maintaining the status quo.  "The Middle of Nowhere" is a serious-minded adventure story in which everything goes wrong for the protagonist, who doesn't realize he is the villain; in some ways it is more like a horror story than an adventure tale as he and his fellows suffer one disaster after another and a final cataclysm is foreshadowed on the last page.  "The Gentle Venusian" has the same anti-imperial/anti-Western/anti-capitalist politics as "The Middle of Nowhere" but is a broad humor story with silly caricatured characters and tired banal jokes (this guy is a dummy and a drunk!  Ha ha!)  "The Day of the Boomer Dukes" is also a joke story, but the humor is based on the personalities of far more believable and fleshed-out characters, it uses more challenging narrative techniques and deals with more complex science fiction themes, and the political themes are more subtle.

I don't share Pohl's political convictions, and I am allergic to joke stories, but there is inherently interesting material in two of today's stories, and Pohl is such an important figure in SF history even the story I thought was bad was worth reading in order to gain further familiarity with his body of work.  We'll probably finish up Tomorrow Times Seven soon, so stay tuned, pinkos!