F&SF Feb 1958: C Oliver, R Phillips, & C Emshwiller

We've already read four stories from the February 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher, who in the book review column of this issue tells you he disagrees with Ayn Rand's philosophy and denounces Frank Belknap Long's Space Station 1, Kenneth Bulmer's City Under the Sea, David Duncan's Occam's Razor, Henry Gayle's Spawn of the Vortex, and Mach 1: A Story of Planet Ionus by Allen A. Adler as "worthless."  (Back in 2017 I read Mach 1 under its title Terror on Planet Ionus and I didn't care for it either.  The day may come when I read Long's Space Station 1, but I think I own other Long novels that I will tackle before that one.)

Anyway, the stories from this issue we've already passed judgement on are Poul Anderson's "The Last of the Deliverers," Robert Silverberg's "The Man Who Never Forgot," Avram Davidson's "I Do Not Hear You, Sir," and Charles Fontenay's "A Summer Afternoon."  Let's today drag before the merciless tribunal that is the MPorcius Fiction Log staff Chad Oliver's "Pilgrimage," Rog Phillips' "Love me, Love My -," and Carol Emshwiller's "Baby."  Order in the court!

"Pilgrimage" by Chad Oliver

This story immediately reminded me of the Clifford Simak stories we read in our last episode, as it concerns a small town and has as its hero an older man, an irascible character, who serves as a liaison between humanity and space aliens.  But it lacks any interesting SF content, the human feeling we saw in those Simak stories, and any sense of hope or wonder, instead indulging in cheap contempt for people.

Grandpa Erskine lives in a dry Southern county, in the town of Pryorville, and enjoys annoying people by walking clumsily, as if drunk, and showily carrying around books like Lady Chatterly's Lover and General Sherman: American Hero while singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  It is not that he particularly likes booze or the North--what he likes is pissing people off.

This week is the Pryorville Pilgrimage, when the citizens dress up like Confederate soldiers or cowboys or pioneers or Native Americans, when there is a vintage automobile show and a Conestoga wagon shows up.  Pryorville, Oliver tells us, is stuck in the past, a bogus romanticized view of the past--I guess Oliver is giving us permission to have contempt for these people and cheer on Grandpa Erskine's efforts to hurt people's feelings as well as the aliens' somewhat non sequiter punishment of them.

Alien anthropologists, hovering in a starship high above (Oliver was an anthropologist and his profession informs much of his SF) are looking forward to observing the strange native festival that is the Pryorville Pilgrimage.  But they are here to do more than observe.  As the parade begins, they use a time machine (the aliens call it an STD or Selective Temporal Dislocator, one of Oliver's little jokes) to bring figures from Pryorville's past to the present day, and to send some 20th-century Pryorville inhabitants back into the past.  The Indians and cowboys and whores from the 19th century shoot up the town, rape the women and seduce the men, eat a dog, etc.  Grandpa Erskine gets along with these jokers just fine; he has been in league with the aliens, stealing artifacts (like his cousin's TV) and delivering them to the aliens, and I guess the aliens' payment to Grandpa for his aid is this humbling and enlivening of the town.  Are these aliens anthropologists, practical jokers or terrorists?  As for the 20th-century people unexpectedly sent back to the past for which they had such misguided nostalgia, they find that they are stuck in lives of poverty, violence and gender inequality.

I guess we can give this trivial and gimmicky joke story a grade of barely acceptable.  I suppose it is true that romanticizing the past is silly, but is pointing this out the basis for an entertaining or enlightening story?  Not really.  And it is odd to get this message from Chad Oliver, who, unless my memory fails me, has used multiple SF stories to argue that pre-industrial life was better than post-industrial life.  Maybe readers who like seeing Southerners humiliated will enjoy this story more than I did, though the way Oliver goofs on those who romanticize Native Americans may bother such people.

"Pilgrimage" was reprinted in various foreign editions of F&SF and chosen for inclusion in the volume produced as a memorial to celebrate Boucher.  In our own 21st century it appeared in the NESFA collection of Oliver's short stories.  

I own the red Volume 2 of the paperback edition of Special Wonder
and from it have read Kris Neville's "Old Man Henderson" and
William F. Nolan's "He Kilt it With a Stick."  It also reprints
Damon Knight's "You're Another," which I read in another publication.

"Love Me, Love My -" by Rog Phillips

When I started this blog post the plan was to read the Oliver, Davidson and Emshwiller stories from this issue of F&SF, but then I realized I'd already read Davidson's "I Can't Hear You, Sir" so I subbed in this story by Phillips.  I've only read one story by Phillips before, "The Yellow Pill," which I thought "OK."  This story, "Love Me, Love My -," only ever saw print again in foreign versions of F&SF.           

This is a banal story full of traditional jokes about how middle-class men in the corporate world are pushed around by women and by their bosses.  Barely acceptable.

Lin is a young executive.  Having finished up training and his first assignment on Venus, the company is sending him to Tau Ceti III.  He doesn't want to go because he has a girl on Venus, but if he doesn't go he will be fired and have to take a working-class job.  The company will pay to transport a wife along with him to Tau Ceti III, so he is told that if he marries the girl all will be well.  But the girl, Leah, refuses to leave her "vegy," and the company won't pay to transport a vegy as well as a wife.

It is the 25th century, and humans have had a relationship with vegies for almost a century.  The vegies are alien plant people who thrive on soil and sunlight and emit oxygen; one vegy produces enough oxygen to keep three humans alive.  Vegies have replaced mechanical means of producing oxygen on space ships and in the sort of dome cities humans have to live in on planets like Venus.  As smart and as strong as humans, vegies are often treated more like a member of the family than an employee and people tend to become attached to them, and Leah has had the same vegy all her young life and won't leave Venus without it.  She tells Lin that if he really loved her he would figure out a way to get her vegy passage on the star ship to Tau Ceti III, even though the passage costs twice Lin's yearly salary.  (To add insult to injury, the vegy isn't crazy about Lin and is always hanging around, keeping Lin from having sexual contact with Leah.)

Lin works with smugglers to smuggle Leah's vegy aboard, but the smugglers try to kidnap the vegy so they have oxygen on the space boat they are going to steal after seizing the diamonds the space liner is transporting to Tau Ceti III.  The vegy outfights the smugglers and in return for foiling their schemes Lin, Lea and the vegy get a big reward that is spent on transporting stuff the vegy wants transported to Tau Ceti III.  The upshot of the story is that Lin is at the mercy of his boss, his wife and his wife's alien friend, living the tragedy of middle-class life--responsibility for the survival and comfort of others who show him no respect.

"Baby" by Carol Emshwiller 

I've sort of avoided Emshwiller's work because the wikipedia article on her suggests the selling point of her fiction is that it is feminist, and, as someone who has spent decades of his life in and around academia and bookstores and art museums, I doubt there is any story written in the 1950s that is going to expose me to a feminist idea that I will find new and exciting.  But "Baby" is the cover story of a major magazine edited by a major writer and thus important to the history of SF, and when I read Emswiller's 1959 story "Day at the Beach" in 2018 I found it thought-provoking, so let's give "Baby" a spin.  It is only 13 pages and was reprinted by famous horror and crime anthologist Peter Haining in a book on the Frankenstein theme, so how bad can it be?

"Baby" is a pretty well-done last-man-on-Earth, postapocalyptic story with robots, which touches on themes like man's desire to grow up, the stifling of an overbearing mother, and how, left outside civilization, a man will act like a beast.  It has real human feeling and no dopey jokes.  Moderately good.

Baby is a 38-year-old man, naked, living among malfunctioning robots in a half-operational automatic house with machines that cook food and doors that open automatically and so forth, in the midst of an automatic city where some things still work but others do not.  Baby is getting thin as much of the equipment that cultivates and cooks food is failing.  Unfortunately, the robots that still treat him like a child, admonishing him to be polite and so on, are still fast enough and strong enough to catch him and force him into the bed that is far too small for him when he escapes.

We learn over the course of the story that the United States got involved in a cataclysmic biological war just as Baby was being born--his parents instructed the robot with the artificial womb to keep Baby in the womb an extra year--when he finally got out all the germs were gone, but so were (apparently) all the people.  So Baby has been treated like a kid by caretaker robots for 38 years and never seen another human.  He instinctively wants to grow up and become responsible for himself and to share love with another human, but is so ignorant that for a while he thinks he will grow into a robot, his two eyes merging into the single red electronic eye like those he sees on the robots who look after him, his arms becoming like tentacles and so forth.

The plot of this story, once all the background is out of the way, concerns Baby's most successful yet escape attempt.  He rides the underground slidewalks the furthest he has ever taken them, essentially at random, and stumbles upon a house similar to his own in which lives a woman in a situation almost identical to his, though her imprisoning house's cooking machinery is working better.  These two more or less fall in love, but, having had zero socialization, have little idea how to deal with each other, and of course the robots who are taking care of her (they call her "Honey") are in the way.  But over a period of time Baby and Honey are making progress, and it looks like we readers may get a happy ending.  But then Baby's caretaker robots finally catch up to him and drag him back home.  As the story ends, we know Baby is going to escape again and again, searching the vast city for Honey, striving to avoid recapture by robots and attack from packs of wild dogs, but we don't know if he will succeed.  

This is the best story we are reading today, the most serious and the best-written; maybe I should stop avoiding Emswhiller's work.

**********

A profitable excursion into the oeuvres of writers of whom I have been skeptical.  The Oliver and Phillips are tolerable, though the former leaves a bad taste in the mouth because it feels vindicative and arrogant and the latter, though it reflects real life relationships, is mediocre.  Emshwiller's story uses standard SF devices in a more mature way and exhibits real sympathy for the human condition and has the best images and finest style as well and serves as an argument to suspend my skepticism of her.

Stay tuned for more SF short stories in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, in which we will be guided by the aforementioned Mr. Haining.