F&SF March '55: M St. Clair, J Blish, F Brown & J Ciardi

On December 22nd, one of my clever and helpful commentors reminded us that John Ciardi, likely best known for translating Dante, published some science fiction stories.  One of these appeared in the March 1955 issue of F&SF, edited by Anthony Boucher.  We are already familiar with some of the contents of this ish, including Robert Bloch's "I Do Not Love Thee, Dr. Fell" and Avram Davidson's "The Golem,"  but there is a ton of stuff in the issue new to us worth looking at besides Ciardi's contribution, so today we'll also be checking out stories by Margaret St. Clair, James Blish, and Fredric Brown as well as the Ciardi.  I'm reading all these stories in a scan of the original magazine. 

"Change the Sky" by Margaret St. Clair

Much of St. Clair's work appeared under the pen name Idris Seabright, and "Change the Sky" does so here.  Boucher's intro to "Change the Sky" quotes Judith Merril, who praises "Seabright" for "undercutting the pretensions of her fellow humans, and for silhouetting against an alien background the most human of our weaknesses."  Is this story going to be some kind misanthropic indulgence in rank snobbery?  Well, let's not reject this story before we have even read it--maybe Boucher and Merril are mischaracterizing or exaggerating.  (I keep telling myself to not read an intro until after I have read the story, the way I don't read the tendentious label next to a painting at the art museum until I have looked at the picture and formed my own opinion of it, but I keep reading these damned intros anyway.)

"Change the Sky" is a long tedious story of 12 or 13 pages, but at least it doesn't actually strike me as a hammer blow against the human race and people's pretensions or weaknesses.  I would describe "Chaneg the Sky" as the record of a course of the psychotherapy of the interstellar future, neither particularly snobby nor misanthropic, but a total bore.

Much of St. Clair's text is given over to pointless surreal or psychedelic images, descriptions of things the protagonist sees but doesn't really interact with.  One reason this story is a drag is that the main character doesn't perform many actions or make many decisions; he just kind of witnesses natural phenomena and elaborate but sterile artifacts, and has emotional reactions to them that are quite subdued. 

That bland and flat main character is Pendleton, the son of a rich family of loners.  Our guy was born on a space ship and has never had a real home, spent his life as a traveler crisscrossing the galaxy, seeking something, he is not quite sure what, his entire life.  His father before him was on a similar quixotic quest, and boy and teen Pendleton accompanied Dad on his useless explorations, learning all the ins and ourts of being a space man along the way.  As the story begins, Pendleton, now I guess middle-aged, knows his health is such that he won't be able to participate in space travel any more, so he has come seeking the services of an artist, a man who makes artificial worlds which his clients can visit or even, perhaps, inhabit.  These artificial worlds are kind of like hypnosis, I guess--St. Clair doesn't bother to make them logically comprehensible to the reader, so they function in the story like magic or hallucinations or drug dreams.

Pendleton wants the artist to make him an artificial world that will satisfy him, the kind of world he has been seeking, even though he isn't really sure what he wants the world to be like.

"What I’m hunting is a place that’s so beautiful, or so winning, or so right, that I’ll feel, ‘This is the place in the whole universe that I love best. This is home.’ ”

The artist asks Pendleton to describe the most beautiful and most interesting and most etc. planets he has seen, and Pendleton complies; one planet had lots of lightning, another had lots of aromatic flowers, and so forth.  The descriptions of these planets are mind-numbingly boring, a list of vapid and vague attributes, an absolute snoozefest.

"Genlis is the most beautiful, by far,” Pendleton answered. “It’s a water world, with deep green, swelling, foam-laden seas, and a sky so intensely blue that it’s almost purple. On the islands — there are a few islands — tall graceful trees like palms lean into the wind, and the perfume of the flowers is so sweet it makes you dizzy. There are flowers everywhere. They say that no matter how far you get from land on Genlis, you can always smell the flowers. The air is soft and yet fresh, and when the wind blows against your face or body, you feel your skin tingle with delight....Nothing could be more beautiful than Genlis."      

Most of the story is like this, sterile descriptions of places where nobody does anything or experiences or expresses any deep emotions.

The artist makes the artificial world, and Pendleton enters it, and it is just a series of boring bubbles in which, his brain addled, Pendleton moves from bubble to bubble to bubble until he turns around and travels back through all the bubbles to real life.  He complains to the artist, who sends him to a different artist.  This second artist creates an artificial world in which Pendleton is a child again, flying around the galaxy with his father, who is teaching his son how to be a space man while searching for evidence to substantiate his absurd theory about a probably fictional alien race.  Pendleton seems to forget he is an adult whose parents have died, so it looks like he is going to disappear into this fantasy world for the rest of his life.

I guess the twist ending or point of the story is that the most beautiful things in life are the processes of education and exploration and the place you feel most at home is wherever your attentive family is.  Or that the artificial worlds are a trap?  Is Pendleton going to survive in this artificial world--can he eat and drink there?    

Slow and boring, an aimless narrative punctuated by long lifeless scenes that add nothing to the plot and nothing valuable to the atmosphere, a story with no emotion for a dozen pages and then sappiness on the final page--thumbs down for "Change the Sky."  Maybe this story is supposed to be boring, maybe it really is an attack on the human race's pretensions and weaknesses, depicting how bogus psychoanalysis is, how the people who seek psychoanalysis are empty souls who want other people to fill them and how these other people are in fact not real healers but just exploiters.

"Change the Sky" is actually the title story of a 1974 St. Clair collection, so I guess there are those who find it to be an above average story of St. Clair's, or at least one that is representative of her virtues as a writer.  A 1968 French anthology included the story, as does a 2022 US anthology of mid-1950s SF by women.

"The Book of Your Life" by James Blish

Here we have a horror story about two of our favorite things--books and creepy sex!  

Petrie Mapes is a publisher who lives with his attractive wife on Long Island.  He is obsessed with sex, but has a sad perversion or dysfunction or maybe just a kink, whatever you want to call it: he finds real sex disappointing, and much of his sexual life revolves around pornography and erotica.  "The Book of Your Life" is full of literary references, and Blish mentions Henry Miller, Frank Harris, Ben Hecht and Jack Woodford and talks about how Mapes hires writers and artists to craft him unique one-of-a-kind fiction and drawings of an erotic nature.*  (Blish also engages in some literary criticism of Ellery Queen, which some may find interesting.)

*This whole story may be inspired by Henry Miller.  Miller and his circle, Anais Nin among them, wrote little one-of-a-kind porno stories for money for a perverted guy in the book biz--see the preface to Nin's Delta of Venus--and the theme of "The Book of Your Life," that reading and writing are not life but an escape from life or an obstacle to living life, is a theme of Miller's work--see Sexus, Chapter 1: "No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in."

Mapes comes into Manhattan on business with some frequency and has an odd, tense, relationship with a bookseller there, who may perhaps be the Devil.  The plot of "The Book of Your Life" revolves around how this bookseller has a huge book, something the size of an unabridged dictionary, that has magical powers.  Over a thousand pages of tiny type, the book is comprehensive, including, for every possible reader, a scene that perfectly manifests the deepest desire or foremost obsessions of that reader, and when you open the book at random for the very first time, the scene tailored to your peculiar overriding interest will be what you find and it will shake you to your core!  You can read the entire rest of the book, but never will you be so stirred.  The bookseller rents out this colossal sui generis tome to people, and Mapes has possession of it over the course of Blish's story, and we observe as the book has a malign effect on Mapes and those in Mapes' orbit.  

A good story that addresses the theme that life is a journey about pursuing goals and if you achieve your goals, if your desires are fulfilled, you life will lose its savor.  The idea that pornography is more exciting than actual sex, and consumption of pornography can damage your real-life relationships, feels topical in 2025, when I am writing this, and maybe will continue to feel topical in 2026, when you are reading it.  But perhaps the most striking thing about "The Book of Your Life" is its suggestion that reading books (or watching TV or otherwise consuming media) is not really living, but just a substitute for living, and people who devote their time to books are throwing their lives away, that media is consuming them rather than vice versa.  Ouch! 

It looks like "The Book of Your Life" has not been reprinted beyond a translation in the French edition of F&SF, which is strange, as the story is compelling and very meta, being about genre literature and the people who produce and consume it.  An overlooked gem!

"Millennium" by Fredric Brown

This is one of Brown's one page stories, what fans of the genre, of which many consider Brown the master, call "short shorts" or "vignettes" or "vinnies."  I have read a bunch of these Brown vinnies (among them, "Too Far," "Expedition," "Abominable," "Blood" "Sentence," "Daisies" and "Politeness") and in general I find them a waste of time.

In this one, Satan is sitting in his office, one by one interviewing people who want to sell their souls for a wish, as he does every day.  As Satan has feared for so long, one of the soul sellers makes a wish that puts Satan out of business, the wish that ends, or reduces substantially, the amount of evil and unhappiness on Earth.  The way the wish is worded is a little oblique and I had to ponder it before I really understood it; maybe this suggests this vinny is more sophisticated than are many others of its ilk?  (Or just reminds us how dim I am?)  I'll call this vignette "acceptable."

"Millennium" has appeared in several Brown collections in four or five different languages, as well as one of those anthologies that has Isaac Asimov's name on it above those of hard-working anthologists, in this case Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh.

"The Bone that Seeks" by John Ciardi 

Here's the thing that brought us to the March 1955 F&SF, a story attributed to "John Anthony," though Boucher in his intro tells you it is a pen name and offers clues as to the real name of the author.  As with Blish's "The Book of Your Life," isfdb suggests that the only place "The Bone that Seeks" was ever reprinted was in the French edition of F&SF.  When they aren't suppressing the free speech of their hottest actresses or sautéing slugs and toads, maybe the Frenchies know what they are about?

Maybe, maybe not.  "The Bone that Seeks" is an OK story, sentimental and histrionic, that relies for much of its oomph on a poem by Archibald MacLeish (the title is a line from the poem.)  

It is over a million years in the future.  The human race has endured, and many of the features of life we are familiar with, desks, government, reports, etc., are still important components of Earth society.  The current form of government approaches its one millionth anniversary, and as part of the celebration the government wants the oldest robot, a robot that was built and operational before the current government was founded, to play a major role in the festivities.  But looking through its old memory banks has inspired the million-year-old robot to feel tired and desire death.  A government bureaucrat tries to badger the robot into following orders, but it has developed an independent intelligence over the millennia and it plays sad music, recites the MacLeish poem "What Riddle Asked the Sphinx?", looks at the sunset, and turns itself off. 

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Brown's story is about a guy who risks his soul to make the universe a better place, but all the other stories we read from this magazine today are absolute downers.  A robot who wants to commit suicide?  A pervert who risks his soul using a magic book to destroy other people?  A guy who feels like he has no home and, in his search for the place where he belongs, loses himself in an artificial world?  Happy New Year, everybody!