Robert Bloch, 1958: "Block that Metaphor," "Egghead," and "The Deadliest Art"

In our last episode we read a story by Frederik Pohl (the less said about it, the better) in an issue of Galaxy.  That issue of Galaxy also includes stories by Avram Davidson and Robert Bloch that piqued my interest, so today let's read that Bloch story, "Block that Metaphor," and two other stories by the man who brought you Norman Bates that appeared in 1958 magazines.  Next time we'll read three 1958 stories by Davidson.

"Block that Metaphor"

This story has two foundational ideas, one solid science fiction idea, and one childish joke idea.  It is the space faring future and the human race has recently made contact with another of many intelligent alien races.  These aliens have abandoned their physical forms and installed their brains in robotic bodies, so they don't have to eat or rest or take a dump and they have super 360-degree vision and super hearing and super memory, etc.--that's the solid SF idea.  The childish joke idea is that these aliens (whom humans call "Mechs") are extremely "literal"--they have no concept of metaphor, simile, or hyperbole.  There is a lot of tension between humans and the Mechs because, when humans first met them, the Mechs heard a guy say offhandedly that "I ought to have my head examined" and the literal-minded Mechs took the man's head apart, accidentally killing him.  Other similar mistakes have occurred, inspiring the animosity of ordinary Earth people towards the Mechs, whom the Earth government and big business want to be friends with.

The plot of "Block that Metaphor" concerns diplomat Lane Borden, who is hosting the first Mech to arrive on Earth at the Embassy while outside an angry anti-Mech mob demonstrates.  Around the Mech, Borden, and all the other staff at the Embassy, wear a device to "scramble" their "subvocalizations" because if the alien's super duper electronic hearing picks up any figurative or metaphorical comments the Mech may act upon them and cause trouble.  There is a ball at which Borden's fiancé plays the piano.  The mob gets past the gates and throws a rock through the window of the ball room.  Borden goes outside and pacifies the crowd.  The alien is grateful--it believes the human mob might have killed it if Borden hadn't worked his diplomatic magic on the crowd.  The Mech wants to give Borden a gift to show its gratitude.  Borden's scrambler has been malfunctioning, and our gruesome twist ending is the result of the Mech picking up one of frustrated musician Borden's subvocalizations while watching his fiancé tickle the ivories--"I wish I had those fingers...."     

"Block that Metaphor" is well paced and smoothly written and all that, so I want to like it, but the fact is that the story's entire raison d'etre is to provide the opportunity to deliver a dumb joke, the kind of joke a little kid might compose, and that makes it impossible to give it a passing grade--thumbs down for "Block that Metaphor."

"Block that Metaphor" can be found in the oft-reprinted Bloch collection Atoms and Evil, as well as a Dutch collection which takes as its title story Bloch's "Comfort Me, My Robot."  What is the Dutch equivalent of "ooh la la"?

"Egghead"

Here's another story that shows up in Atoms and Evil.  "Egghead" debuted in Fantastic Universe, alongside stories by Grand Master Robert Silverberg; Evelyn E. Smith, whose "Softly While You're Sleeping" we liked; and Michael Shaara, who is probably more famous for his American Civil War and baseball fiction than his SF--we read his sentimental robot story "Orphans of the Void" a while ago and I gave it a thumbs down.  Enough with the sentimental robots already.

"Egghead" is about conformity, one of the big topics when people talk about the 1950s.  The story is set in the near future of the 1970s, when everybody wears the same clothes and has the same hair cut and eats the same thing for breakfast (cruller and coffee.)  Bloch also manages to fit in other de rigueur 1950s topics--how there is too much TV, too much advertising, too much consumerism, and too much automobile, I mean, too many automobiles.

Our protagonist and narrator, a college student, lets his hair grow long, wears a suit that is some years out of date, and orders eggs and cocoa for breakfast.  He even is willing to sit in the booth at the drug store (remember kids, in the 1950s many a drug store was like a diner or coffee shop) which doesn't have a TV, and to sell his car.  His girlfriend dumps him, not wanting to be seen with such a nonconformist guy.

News that our narrator is a nonconformist gets around fast and it looks like our guy will get thrown out of college--in this world college exists to enforce conformity among the middle class and train the professional elite to enforce conformity on and inspire consumerism among the proletariat through advertising and other psychological techniques.  Our guy is contacted by the local underground of individualists, college students led by a disgraced professor who seek to hide their nonconformity and work their way into the highest ranks of society to later lead a nonviolent individualist revolution.  The professor gives a long history lesson about how America went from being an individualistic country to a conformist one and points out that while the establishment calls the nonconformists "commies" and "pinkos" those words are now just terms of abuse, divorced from their literal meanings, and the nonconformists aren't really communists at all.   

The twist ending is that the narrator is a double agent, working for the elite.  He collects info on the individualists and turns them in to the authorities.

A pedestrian twist ending story that airs the complaints about mid-century America we have heard a million times already.  Barely acceptable.

"The Deadliest Art" 

Here's a story that first saw print in Bestseller Mystery Magazine.  It would reappear in several Bloch collections, among them the second volume of The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch (whch is where I'm reading it) and the German collection Horror Cocktail.

"The Deadliest Art" is a little trio of short-shorts.  The first is about how a British guy in India discovers his wife is cheating on him and tosses a snake at the man who cuckolded him--when the second guy survives the bite he convinces the wronged man that the Indian who sold him the serpent cheated him, selling him a harmless snake, and that the guy's wife is a liar.  The twist ending is that the guy who got bit has an artificial leg--the snake really is deadly and the wife's lover proceeds to trick the cuckold into getting killed by his own snake.

The second is about a Chicago musician, a drummer, who is a heroin addict.  Bloch writes this with a lot of musician slang.  The drummer's drug dealer owns a pawn shop, which is convenient because the drummer can pawn stuff and get his drugs all in the same place--one-stop shopping.  The time comes when the junkie drummer has pawned his drums and can't work to get the money to buy them back.  He tries to steal the drums back, and in the struggle with the pawn broker the drums get busted up.  The druggie drummer then murders the pawn broker and uses medical instruments in the shop to skin the pawn shop owner and use the skin to fix his drums.

The third and final story involves two guys who own a barbecue joint.  They annually hold a cook out in honor of the local police.  When one of the men kills the other he cooks the corpse up and feeds it to the cops; the story ends with one of Bloch's lame puns.

Barely acceptable.

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Not Bloch's best work--forgettable, disposable little trifles.  Hopefully the Avram Davidson 1958 stories we will be reading next time will be a little more ambitious and successful.