Another day, another docket of stories from 1950s science fiction magazines to be judged! Today's victims are three stories from the June 1955 issue of Anthony Boucher's
. Way back in 2018, shortly after the discovery of fire, I read the Damon Knight story in this ish,
and explained at length why I didn't like it, though I was happy for the excuse it provided to search the interwebs for 1950s photos of women clad in tweed. Just a few days ago we read the issue's contribution from Manly Wade Wellman,
and I gave it a vigorous thumbs up. Today a woman and two men stand before us, soon to be subjected to similarly subjective and mercurial judgement--Evelyn E. Smith, Charles Beaumont, and Chad Oliver. None can predict who will be vaunted and who will be condemned.
I'll be reading these stories in a scan of the original magazine. And, yes, I know there is a Derleth/Reynolds Solar Pons story in here, but I'm in no mood for that sort of gaff today.
"The Faithful Friend" by Evelyn E. Smith
From the title alone we know to expect that Evelyn E. Smith's contribution to this issue of F&SF will test to the utmost our ability to suspend disbelief (ha ha, he laughed mirthlessly.) I think I've read three stories by Smith. In 2015, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, I read "Softly While You're Sleeping" and liked it. In 2020 I read Smith's gimmicky story about crossword puzzles, "DAXBR/BAXBR" and didn't care for it. I didn't like her locked-room mystery "Really It Was Quite Simple" when I read that in 2021, either. One score and two misses. Well, if I like "The Faithful Friend," today Smith can achieve equilibrium here in the merciless and dyspeptic court of MPFL.
Earth has been conquered by insectoid telepathic space aliens who spend a lot of time indulging in recreational drug use via an "inhaler." Generations ago the aliens destroyed most of humanity, they considering humans little better than animals who were marring the beautiful Terran landscape with their industry and wars. Some humans were retained to be bred on farms as pets and slaves, and some escaped destruction and their descendants today live a parlous existence in the wilderness, occasionally raiding the alien compounds and killing alien guards, and sometimes in turn subjected to hunts by the aliens; the aliens find life on Earth, a planet far from the main space lanes, boring and hunting the natives relieves the monotony.
The plot of "The Faithful Friend" concerns the current alien governor of Earth, an old bug, and a young diplomat who comes to our poor colonized planet. This young bug thinks Earth a drag, but it looks like the inevitable next step of his career is to become governor of Terra after the current holder of the office dies. This young careerist thinks maybe he can make Earth more prestigious and make himself rich by breeding a large quantity of humans and offering them for sale across the space empire as pets and servants. The current governor hasn't done this because he likes the natives and doesn't want to see them exploited; this sentimentalist has a human servant/pet of whom he is particularly fond, one who is particularly skilled at mixing the drugs for the inhalers.
A lot of this material feels like an allegory of British imperialism, that Smith has taken inspiration from stories of how the English admired the Irish landscape and lamented that the Irish people were cluttering it up, allegations that British people hunted Australian aborigines for sport, that sort of thing. When Smith turns our attention to scenes of wild humans who creep up on the Governor's complex with the plan of assassinating the Governor, she seems to be lampooning Americans and their conceptions of freedom and independence. The wild humans talk about liberty, using the phrase "give me liberty or give me death" but can't articulate what freedom is or how their lives will be improved by slaying the alien governor. The raiders manage to surprise and kill the sentries and get to the house unawares (the insectoidal aliens have poor hearing and detest the sensation of hearing sounds, and so their sleeping quarters are sound-proofed.) The Governor's human servant, however, cannot be persuaded to join the human raiders, and he warns the Governor of the danger he is in. The aliens' high tech weapons make short work of the wild humans, but not before the servant, the faithful friend of the title, is killed by the raiders, who of course feel betrayed by this well-fed collaborator.
The final scenes of the story are about how much the Governor misses his faithful friend (his replacement can't mix the drugs right!) and how the young diplomat schemes to, once he becomes governor himself--perhaps by murdering the current governor--annihilate the free-range humans and use the story of the faithful friend to market farm-bred humans all across the galaxy.
Sometimes these stories about how foul are English-speaking people or white people in general or just all humans offer the left-wing reader the wish fulfillment fantasy of an alien civilization of communists or hippies or tribal people to whom good lefties like the reader can flee, or who can destroy or seize control of or serve as a model for our deplorable human civilization. But "The Faithful Friend" is 100% dark, offering no such comfort! The aliens are bad, and so are the humans, and by fighting for theor freedom the aliens only make things worse for themselves! Smith has crafted a sad cynical story here.
I'm biased against these anti-human, anti-Western type stories, but "The Faithful Friend" is well-written, and everything that happens is believable, so I can mildly recommend it. It doesn't seem to have been a hit though, only ever being reprinted in the French edition of F&SF (the readers of which no doubt enjoyed the people who liberated them from Germany in their own lifetimes taken down a peg.)
"The New Sound" by Charles Beaumont
I think this will be the seventeenth (17th!) story by Charles Beaumont I have blogged about. Oh no, it's time for links!
"The Crooked Man"
Charles Beaumont has a high reputation, but we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are inveterate contrarians and I have slagged many of the above-linked stories based on a diverse host of criteria. But some I have enjoyed, so maybe we'll like "The New Sound," eh?
Message from the other side: this story is OK. A rich guy who started collecting records and then narrowed his focus down to just collecting nature sounds makes the bizarre decision to narrow his interest further and exclusively collect the sounds of animals dying. He hires some unscrupulous characters who bring him recordings of all different kinds of animals being killed. He moves out of the city to the country, to a house that has a view of the city, so he has more room to store his records and so people will stop calling the cops when they hear cries of pain coming from his apartment.
Eventually, he has a sound recording of the death of every kind of animal. So he moves on to people! Eventually he has a huge library of the last utterances of all different kinds of men and women as they are being murdered in all different ways.
In the story's final scene a nuclear weapon is detonated at the city, and the protagonist rushes to his window with a tape recorder and tries to record the sound of the city's destruction.
This story's basic idea isn't bad and the style is good, but the ending is kind of a let down. Maybe this ending is inevitable, though, if we see the story as social commentary or satire--the collector of death represents humanity, he is the avatar of humanity's cruelty, callousness, and addiction to violence, and to drive this metaphor home the story has to culminate in worldwide destruction. If the collector killed himself or was captured by the police or suffered the vengeance of his victim's relatives or something then he would just be one bad apple at odds with society, and the story wouldn't work so well as a condemnation of humanity (but would work better as a human drama.)
We'll judge "The New Sound" acceptable.
"The New Sound" can be found in Beaumont collections that promote his work as "sinister"--the US
Yonder and the British
The Edge--and in an anthology, I guess a college text book that presents "Social Science Fiction" entitled
Above the Human Landscape.
"Artifact" by Chad Oliver
In the summer of 1971 the US government launches a secret operation, the first manned flight to Mars and back. The astronauts bring back to this big blue marble an astonishing find--a primitive tool, a scraper made from chipped flint or something like flint, evidence that there are, or have been, intelligent beings on Mars. The government recruits an archaeologist to join the second mission to Mars. On Mars, he uses various archaeological techniques which Oliver, an anthropologist himself, describes in some detail, to uncover more tools of the same technological level as the scraper, things like arrow- or spear heads. There is no evidence of houses or pottery or agriculture, and it is theorized that the native Martians never developed such things because Mars lacks natural resources.
Mars is pretty desolate, most of it an arid desert with itty bitty plants and a small population of little gopher-like mammals and an even smaller population of reptilian predators. But there is some water near the poles. So the expedition heads to one pole and there they meet some of the intelligent natives. We've read many
stories in which Oliver
romanticizes stone-age
people and their
life style, and he does the same thing here. They may not have much of anything by way of technology, but the Martians are much smarter and much nicer than Earth people, and after this has been demonstrated the story has a sense of wonder ending as the archaeologist thinks--in the vaguest possible terms--of how the Martian culture is going to have a beneficial influence on Earth and our violent civilization.
Oliver's story is pretty well-written, and the archaeological dig he depicts is pretty interesting, but the story lacks plot and character; there is very little suspense or conflict or grappling with obstacles. The Earthers meet the Martians, the Martians are perfect, the end. You might even call "Artifact" utopian, though Oliver doesn't offer any recipe for creating a utopia other than "if everybody is a genius and a saint, the result will be a utopia!" Boucher, in his intro to the story here in the magazine, launches a preemptive strike on the obvious criticism of the story--that it has no real plot--by saying that "Artifact" depicts the thrill and suspense of the practice of science, of the pursuit and discovery of truth, which he claims is more exciting than a detective's pursuit of a dangerous criminal across the galaxy. Well, if you say so.
I'm wrestling with the decision of whether to judge "Artifact" merely acceptable or conclude that it sneaks just across the line into marginally good territory, and I don't feel like I am going to resolve this dilemma. We'll just have to be content to call it "borderline" and accept the criticism that we are wishy washy. If you want to judge for yourself, "Artifact" can be dug up from many locations, such as the 1955 Oliver collection Another Kind, later Oliver collections, and various European magazines and anthologies.
I'm not in love with any of these stories, but we've all heard that if you can't be with those you love, you should love those you are with, and none of today's stories is actually bad, so maybe we can take that advice? All three are well written, so we have to distinguish among them based on stuff like plot and character and subject matter. Smith's is the best story, as it has a conventional plot with characters who exhibit human emotion and because imperialism and the need for society and individuals to balance liberty and security are inherently interesting, universal topics. Oliver's is second best, as the archaeological stuff is fun, but there is no real conflict or climax, and the characters are flat. Beaumont is the worst, though still OK, because it is just an idea and the ending, which I guess is supposed to be shocking or say something disparaging about humanity, is weak as drama.
Still more Fifties SF when next this court is in session.
My favorite Evelyn E. Smith story is her 1952 yarn "Tea Tray in the Sky" about multiculturalism and political correctness.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I'll keep it in mind!
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