Super-Science Fiction, Dec '58: R Silverberg & H Ellison

In our last episode we read a story by Charles Runyon from the December 1958 issue of Super-Science Fiction.  This issue, edited by W. W. Scott and with an Ed Emshwiller woman-in-bondage cover, includes three stories by Robert Silverberg (two printed under pen names) and an apparently rare story by Harlan Ellison.  Let's supplement our reading of 1958 stories recommended by anthologist Judith Merril, the critics' favorite, with these four less acclaimed science fiction tales, though the Silverbergs can't be all that terrible, as Silverberg himself was happy to include them in 21st-century anthologies.  I'll note here that I am reading all of today's stories in a scan of an original copy of Super-Science Fiction I found at luminist.org, not in any book.

"The Aliens Were Haters" by Robert Silverberg 

The year is 2190.  Mankind has discovered and explored dozens of extrasolar planets, but never yet met intelligent aliens.  Our protagonist is a spaceman on foot, crossing the killer jungle of Kothgir II, carrying back to the US base a bag full of valuable plants that back on Earth will be processed into pain-killing drugs, when he makes first contact!

Spaceman Massi, of St. Louis, Missouri, comes upon a wrecked spacecraft in the jungle, and moments later four people from the Brazilian base on Kothgir II arrive.  The American and the Brazilians each claim the invaluable alien artifact for their nations.  The leader of the Brazilians is a mannish six-foot-tall woman; she and Massi enter the alien ship and discover two injured beings, people three feet tall, green and scaly.  Silverberg talks about women in this story in a way that perhaps wouldn't fly today among the enlightened; Massi reflects on how, while she has an ugly face, the Brazilian captain looks pretty good from behind in those tight shorts of hers, and while she is a real hard ass while bossing around her subordinates, her maternal instinct kicks in when she sees the injured diminutive aliens.  

That maternal instinct vanishes without a trace when the aliens wake up and gun down the three male Brazilians--she guns down the aliens and makes Massi her captive.  She forces him to accompany her in the march to the distant Brazilian base.  Before they get there, Massi employs a ruse to distract his captor and pounces on her, and we get some sexualized violence as he overpowers her.  They split up, she vowing revenge.  But before either of them can reach his or her nation's base, a second alien ship arrives and bombs both bases into oblivion, slaying thousands of Earthers.  As the story ends, Massi decides he has to hook up with that ruthless Brazilian woman--they are the only two humans left on the planet, and it will be a year before a ship arrives from Earth!  We readers are left to speculate whether she and Massi will fight to the death or become lovers.

This is an acceptable entertainment.  "The Aliens Were Haters" would be reprinted in the 2016 Silverberg collection Early Days: More Tales from the Pulp Era. 

"The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" by Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin W. Knox) 

It is the early 25th century.  The human race has trade relations with hundreds of other civilizations all over the galaxy, and in fact has a monopoly on the carrying trade, as, of all the intelligent races in the galaxy, only the human has developed a FTL drive.  Our protagonist, Garth, is a young employee of the Interstellar Merchant Service, a private company, and as the story begins he goes to the home office in Buenos Aries (today's Silverberg stories suggest Silverberg expected Latin America to come into its own as a rival of Northern Hemisphere countries in the future) to receive an important assignment.  Another of the IMS's employees, a Lidman, runs the one-man trading post on Murchison IV, planet Danneroi, a source of thorium, and he is suspected of selling drugs to the stone age natives!  Allowing aliens access to alien booze or drugs is strictly forbidden!  Garth is given the job of investigating--he will go to Murchison IV on the pretext of acting as Lidman's assistant, but his real job will be to investigate the allegations, and take the guy's job if he has to be sacked.   

On the planet we learn about how the trading post operates, and Garth sees that Lidman is doing a superior job and has great relations with the natives--this dude teaches English classes and has even learned how to perform surgeries so he can save the lives of natives who fall ill!  The allegations that he is supplying the aliens narcotics turn out to be accurate--at some point a native got sick and Lidman administered some medicine to the guy and it gave him "good dreams."  That alien was the first of many of the natives of Danneroi to became addicted to the medicine, and instead of trying to cure them of addiction, Lidman is handing the drugs out to them regularly.  

Garth confronts Lidman, who dramatically declares he had no choice but to provide the natives the drugs, and then kills himself.  Soon Garth, now in charge of the station, learns how the natives forced Lidman into supplying the narcotics they craved--these alien addicts threaten to commit suicide if Garth won't fork over the "dream-stuff," and Garth does their bidding after two of them disembowel themselves right in front of him!  Garth begins to lose his sanity and transmits a message to Earth, begging to be relieved of his duty.

I guess I say this a lot, but this story about two humans from a galaxy-spanning culture who occupy a position of authority among large populations of primitive aliens and suffer psychological and moral crises as a result reminded me of Somerset Maugham's stories of white men in a similar positions in 19th and 20th-century colonies.  Garth even expresses a sentiment apparently common among Western colonizers when he says to himself that the natives are like children.      

Silverberg in this story also addresses numerous aspects of economic theory--monopoly, the subjective theory of value, the role of honesty in a market society, the idea of a just price, etc.  Silverberg does a decent job of speculating on what interstellar trade might be like, and I thought this stuff was all pretty interesting. 

Silverberg's style here in "The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" is kind of pedestrian, flat and simple, but not bad.  The problem with the story is that the natives' means of compelling Lidman and then Garth to supply narcotics is not foreshadowed--the aliens' culture and society are not described in any detail at all, so when we learn they are willing to casually destroy themselves if denied a high, it comes out of nowhere.  In this story Silverberg does an entertaining job of speculating about interstellar trade, but the plot of his story isn't really about that, but about addiction and suicide, and what his plot calls for is speculations on the kind of society that would produce people who are quite pacific but nonetheless have little compunction about killing themselves in order to secure for their surviving fellows the hallucinogenics to which they are addicted.

I can mildly recommend this one.  If you are interested in SF depictions of imperialism/colonialism, interstellar trade and drug addiction, I would more strongly commend it to you.  "The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" appears in Early Days under the title "The Traders."

"Exiled from Earth" by Robert Silverberg (as by Richard F. Watson)

If "The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" suggests Silverberg had been reading some economics book, "Exiled from Earth" seems drawn from Silverberg's delving into English history and classic English literature--the thing is full of direct references to Shakespeare, at least one veiled reference to Coleridge, and its whole scenario is based on the period of the English republic under Cromwell.

Our narrator is a director in the legitimate theatre, the human head of a human troupe of actors on an alien planet who put on performances of highlights from Shakespeare and Euripides for the natives.  You see, a few decades ago, the Earth electorate voted in a Neopuritan administration that outlawed dancing, stripping, and acting.  Those in the performing arts who didn't want to change their professions were given a free space flight into exile.  

The plot concerns a septuagenarian actor who has gone insane.  He thinks the drama is again permissible on Earth, and that he has a shot at portraying Hamlet in New York.  He askes the narrator to help him get to Earth, and our hero tries to bribe Neopuritan officials into letting the guy return to Earth--even if there is no chance he'll be able to perform, the director figures his colleague would at least be pleased to die on Earth.  The Neopuritans, however, are true to their strict code, and no offer of bribe is going to get them to allow an exiled sinner to get to Earth.  So, the narrator hires some alien hypnotists to make the aged actor believe he has travelled back to Earth--this enables him to die happy.

Acceptable.  "Exiled from Earth" can be found in the 2006 collection In the Beginning: Tales from the Pulp Era.

"Creature from Space" by Harlan Ellison 

If isfdb is to be believed, "Creature from Space" has never been reprinted, and I can't even find a reference to the story at the Harlan Ellison website.  Ellison completists take note!

The star freighter Ionian Trollop is manned by the most hell-raising, womanizing, trouble-making crew in the galaxies, but they run a profitable enterprise because when it comes to getting a cargo from Point A to Point B they are the most reliable in all the known universe.  The story opens with joke descriptions of each of these hellions, and humor scenes in which the bald and overweight super-cargo's six-legged pet bird who recites Dante defecates on the star charts, to the frustration of the captain, who throws his cap on the deck in rage.  There are also multiple scenes in which the men physically fight each other.

(Like the Shakespeare and Coleridge references in Silverberg's "Exiled from Earth," the quotes from Dante here in "Creature from Space" strike me as the writers trying to convince readers or maybe just themselves that SF isn't just drivel written for childish dolts by hacks but something worthwhile, produced by thoughtful educated people for thoughtful educated people.)

The plot of the story concerns the last voyage of Ionian Trollop.  We watch as a meteor busts into the ship and turns out to be a shape-shifting alien who can imitate robots, people, writing implements, etc.  It starts killing the crew one by one.  It is apparently immune to ray pistol fire, or at least able to dodge the rays, and by taking the form of tools, men, or the pet six-legged bird, it is able to hide from the humans it hasn't yet murdered.  In the end it triumphs over the crew and it is hinted the monster will soon arrive on a human-inhabited planet and reproduce and conquer that world and maybe all of human civilization.

A merely acceptable entertainment.  All the comedy stuff about the crew is more or less competent, and the monster-on-the-loose material is OK--the robot scenes are actually quite good, the most entertaining and most productively speculative passages in the story--but these two aspects of "Creature from Space" don't jell or jive; the comic spacemen's idiosyncrasies don't help them overcome adversity nor do they prove to be their downfall, and the men don't grow or change as people over the course of the story, becoming more responsible due to their ordeal or whatever.  The men's personalities and back stories have zero effect on the plot, and thus feel superfluous once you have finished the story. 

**********

Silverberg and Ellison are skilled professionals and these stories maintain your interest and have fun parts, but they are sort of forgettable and at least two of them have some real structural flaws.  Not award winners, but worth your time if you are curious about 1950s SF or the careers of Silverberg and/or Ellison.

More late 1950s science fiction from a big name writer in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!