Let's read some 1958 stories by Avram Davidson, starting with "Paramount Ulj," which debuted in the same issue of Galaxy as a Fred Pohl story and a Robert Bloch story we read recently, and then checking out two other stories that debuted in SF magazines.
"Paramount Ulj"
The Pohl was largely a joke story, with weak obvious jokes littered throughout it and a central theme that was broad satire of the modern market economy and modern warfare. The Bloch was a longish story that served as the set up for a gruesome and childish bit of wordplay. "Paramount Ulj," like the Bloch, ends on a tired little macabre pun, but the story as a whole is a little more subtle and sophisticated, but not much. We'll call this merely acceptable.
(Is Galaxy a humor magazine? I asked this question when reading a Davidson story in Galaxy in the autumn, and today I ask it again.)
Alien diplomats arrive in current day (1950s) New York. Much of their speech is intelligible by the natives, but they throw around a few terms that are untranslatable, and unfortunately these words are the important ones. It seems the aliens have amazing, inscrutable and insuperable powers--they can communicate and even teleport across the galaxy, and wipe out the life of an entire planet with ease. They are travelling around the galaxy, looking for societies that exhibit "ovlirb-tav"--those who fall short are annihilated. If Earth's people do not demonstrate this mysterious characteristic, we will be exterminated. Earth's diplomats are desperate to show we have this quality, and sort of assume it means peace or justice or something like that, and squirm when the aliens look at newspapers and see stories about murder in America, riots in India, civil war in Thailand. The aliens are suddenly called back home--their father, leader of their space empire, has died. Our twist ending comes back on these aliens' home world. These star-hopping beings represent a civilization whose culture revolves around assassination and cannibalism, and they will probably wipe us out because we don't eat dead humans but instead make it our general practice to bury or cremate them. The pun in the last line, as the diplomats eat their father's corpse, is that the old man had excellent taste.
One of the interesting things about "Paramount Ulj" is that, of the three Earth diplomats, one is Thai and one is Indian, and Davidson offers little jokes about and caricatures of those cultures which are not exactly flattering. Thus, the story perhaps illustrates the liberties which American writers dealt with non-Western cultures in their work, and provides insight into what an intelligent well-read American thought the noteworthy aspects of India and Thailand in the 1950s. Along with Davidson's references in the story to the Soviet Union and its satellites sort of provide a view of what was going on in the world and in the minds of Americans in the middle 1950s.
Much better than Pohl's revolting pile of junk, and somewhat better than Bloch's overly long gag story, but no better than passable. This is not a good issue of Galaxy, folks.
"Paramount Ulj" would be reprinted in the collection Strange Seas and Shores.
"Great is Diana"
Davidson starts the story with a bunch of wealthy guys talking over after-dinner drinks about how women nowadays don't breastfeed and maybe this is why kids act crazy in the 1950s--they were weaned on dextrose, maltose and corn syrup! (Woah, these guys can maybe get jobs at HHS!) This is the frame; the core story is told by one of these jokers.
The main narrative is about an 18th(or early 19th?)-century Englishman who travels across Europe to Turkey, sampling all the food and drink available and banging lots of women. In his letters he describes all his adventures. In a wild part of Turkey, near Ephesus, he meets an attractive woman who was, apparently, once rich but has now fallen on hard times. He tries to have sex with her but when he reaches into her clothes he feels not two breasts but many. This is of course a reference to the famous Diana of Ephesus, a sculpture which depicts Diana as a fertility goddess who has a multitude of mammaries (though some think they look like eggs or even testicles.) Thinking this a test from God or a temptation from the Devil, the Englishman runs from the woman, and becomes a committed Christian and a devoted husband and father. Having touched a fertility goddess, he and his wife have many children.
I'll note that evolution, heredity and selective breeding are also pervasive themes of this story.
"Great is Diana" is well-written, Davidson ably employing multiple styles and throwing around many cultural, historical, and literary references. I can mildly recommend it.
"Great is Diana" was collected in Or All the Seas with Oysters and The Other Nineteenth Century and also selected by David G. Hartwell for Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment.
"The Bounty Hunter"
"The Bounty Hunter" is also probably the most entertaining story we are reading today; less erudite than "Great is Diana," it is a pretty smooth read, a decent twist ending story that is well-written and economically draws portraits of characters and of a society--the twist is important, but there is quite a bit more to it than that.
A legislator and his son, a college student, come to visit a remote cabin in the woods inhabited by a trapper. These three people are the descendants of space colonists--their ancestors took over this planet generations ago after travelling across the galaxy. Those hardy ancestors tamed this wild world, fought for independence, then fought civil wars amongst themselves; their descendants today live in an orderly society in which everything is carefully planned and structured. Is the current regime of strict disciple and conformity a sign this society is exhausted, has lost the drive and spirit of their brave, war-like, industrious forebearers?
Some small percentage of people resist this discipline, and the trapper is one of them. He lives out in the wilderness, trapping native wildlife--"big varmints"--and sometimes hunting them with some kind of firearm. He eats real meat instead of synthetics. He even drinks booze, which everybody knows is unhealthy! The government pays him a bounty for each big varmint he catches--the varmints are dangerous, and their population needs to be kept down. With modern techniques the native creatures could easily be exterminated, but the government doesn't pursue such a policy, perhaps because these trappers, who are often featured in fictional 3D TV shows, are people's last connection to their adventurous past.
The twist ending of "The Bounty Hunter" is that this planet is Earth, and the big varmints are the last human beings--the legislator, college student and trapper are inhuman, but quite humanoid, aliens. We readers have, of course, been assuming they were the descendants of Earthborn people on some alien world.
I like it.
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