Looking through the archives, it appears that over the last seven years or so I have read four stories by Raymond E. Banks, joke stories which bear marks of Banks putting a lot of effort into not just the jokes but also scientific and social speculation. Most recently I read "Rabbits to the Moon" and liked it; the three stories I read earlier, "Walter Perkins is Here!," "The Instigators," and "Never Trust an Intellectual," I couldn't recommend, though their ambition was at times admirable. One hit to three misses is a pretty bad record, but today Raymond E. Banks has a chance to even things up, even come out ahead, as I am going to read three more 1950s stories by the man who (I hear) was a manager at an electronics company and who would go on to write in the 1960s Meet Me in Darkness and The Computer Kill and in the 1970s Lust in Space and Lust of the Swampman.
In the interest of giving Banks every chance to succeed, I deliberately chose three stories published in Galaxy, a magazine with a reputation for trying to publish "literary" and "pertinent" work about social issues (in contrast to magazines like Astounding or Planet Stories that emphasize the hard sciences or action-adventure thrills) during the editorship of H. L. Gold, a famously hands-on editor, stories that were later anthologized--these three Banks stories have the imprimatur of the snobbier end of the SF establishment, and cannot be dismissed as hack work tossed off for some fast money, but must be seen as works that have gone through multiple layers of editing and gatekeeping.
I'm going to read all of these stories in scans of the appropriate issues of Galaxy.
"This Side Up" (1954)
This is a long absurdist story full of internal contradictions as well as lame jokes founded on the story's foundational gimmick, itself a stupid joke. The alien Thurkians, who look exactly like humans, land on an Earth they find totally devastated. The Thurkians may look just like Earth people, but their biology is radically different. Thurkians pop into existence all wrinkled and bent over, and then straighten out and become vigorous, then begin shrinking until they vanish--their life cycle is the exact opposite of that of human beings. So, when the Thurkians find a baby--apparently the last living human!--they figure this infant is an old man about to die. The aliens figure a cemetery is a place from which new humans are dug up, and when they find the maternity ward of a hospital they come to believe women would have dying old people implanted into their bodies to achieve immortality.
This childish "opposite day" joke continues through the entire story. Among Thurkians, a kiss isn't a sign of affection but an expression of hate. Among Thurkians, high firm breasts and smooth clear skin are not attractive--sagging breasts and wrinkly splotched skin are attractive. Thurkians hear with their mouths and eat with their ears. And on and on, one groaner after another for like 16 pages.
As for the plot, one Thurkian scientist has figured out the reality of the life cycle of humans and voices his dissent against the famous scientist in charge of the expedition. The rest of the expedition dismisses the dissenter's theories, but then a high level politician, a woman with whom the dissenting scientist went to school, arrives. She comes to agree with the dissenter. In a bizarre scene that may be some kind of lie told by the dissenter, or some kind of misunderstanding or hallucination he has suffered, the human infant kills the top scientist via trickery and the head scientist kills the baby with a knife before he expires. Again and again in "This Side Up" the reader is confronted with behavior that is unconvincing and events that don't logically follow from preceding events.
Anyway, with the top scientist out of the way we get our happy ending as the the dissenter marries the politician.
This nonsensical story may be a clumsy satire of Christianity and conservatism and/or skepticism of technology and science. Among the Thurkians, when a person overturns a scientific paradigm, the authorities execute him by carving a cross into his chest. Thurkian history begins with world government and high technology, and then political authority fragments into increasingly smaller and more numerous states and societies become increasingly primitive technologically. The top scientist argues this course of development is for the best. Maybe this is meant to be a parody of luddites who fear technology and conservatives who oppose world government, but this element of the story renders "This Side Up" nonsensical--if the Thurkians have gone from a high-tech industrial society to a current low-tech agrarian society, how did they build a space ship to get to Earth, and what do scientists actually do?
I don't get "This Side Up," and as a work of entertainment and speculation it stinks--thumbs down. H. L. Gold was proud of it, however, and included it in a Galaxy best-of anthology.
"The Littlest People" (1954)
This story's central gimmick has some similarities to elements of the Genesis song "Get 'Em Out By Friday," and its plot to the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who, unsatisfied by real women, falls in love with a statue of a woman he himself carved.
It is the future of interplanetary human civilization. Many planets and asteroids have been colonized. There is an unemployment problem on Earth, so people unable to find work are sent to the colonies. Of course, shipping people through space is expensive, so, to save on fuel, food and O₂, these job seekers are shrunk to like 6 or 7 inches tall and put into suspended animation. At the colony these inert little doll-sized people are inspected by employers (and lonely men looking for wives!) and if selected get returned to normal size.
Banks uses this conceit to address issues like class relations, sexual relationships, and the nature of economic life. Most of the people who get hired and returned to full size do not succeed in the colonies. Is this because they have no reason to integrate into a society which saw fit to ship them hither and thither like cargo, and because their lack of connections and social capital means they are unlikely to build fulfilling lives in the colonies? Or because they are just intellectually or morally inferior--after all, isn't the reason they couldn't get work on Earth the fact that they were below-average workers? Banks depicts the guilt felt by middle-class people about the plight of the losers among the working class, and the insincerity of relationships between employers and the barely-employable, how the low-skilled workers suck up to the new boss early on but are soon proving themselves lazy troublemakers. At the same time, we hear a man who has made a success of himself, more or less, after being shrunk and resized, comment that nobody cares what happens to the shrunken people.
The plot. Our narrator, a kid, accompanies his father, a Personnel Director, when Dad does business with the regular rocket that brings new shrunken people to the barren asteroid colony where they live. The guy who pilots the one-man rocket is getting old and disorganized and one of the shrunken people, an attractive young woman, through an unfortunate series of mishaps, ends up in the narrator's pocket and the rocket leaves without her. The kid knows there are all kinds of laws and rules governing treatment of these shrunken people, and for fear of punishment doesn't just tell his parents about the pretty frozen shrunken woman--instead he hides her among his sister's dolls!
In "This Side Up," Banks forced us to endure scenes of one alien scientist conducting abusive experiments on a human baby, and then another alien actually killing the baby. In "The Littlest People" we have to countenance a woman in suspended animation getting her leg broken by a careless child. The accident awakens the woman, and the narrator, still too scared to tell any adult what he has done, tries to patch up the woman himself. The leg heals, but the little woman has a limp, and so despairs of ever getting a job or getting married and bitterly accuses the narrator of ruining her life and vows to kill him. Sure enough, she tries to assassinate him while he sleeps, but she is too small to succeed; she does manage to kill the cat, though.
Our narrator expects to be employed in his father's office when he grows up, so tells the tiny woman, whom he dubs "Gleam" after her blonde hair, that he will give her a job as a school teacher in a few years. Gleam is uneducated and has no interest in book-learning, so the narrator has to chain her up and torture her to get her to agree to become a dutiful student, with he as her teacher. For years, the narrator is the only person this woman has to talk to, and it is he who gives her all the formal education she has ever received and he teaches who her everything she knows about middle-class life--in a sense he is creating her.
The narrator brings the tiny woman with him when he goes to college on another asteroid. On this world, full-sized people keep little people who are mentally ill or alcoholics or otherwise unemployable as pets, so he need not hide his little captive. Gleam seems to lose interest in getting resized and finding a job, and starts to flirt with the narrator. Has she become dependent on the narrator, has she accepted the role of pet and lost any desire to live as a full adult, a working member of society?
Or could it be she has fallen in love with the narrator? Has the narrator fallen in love with her? Has their unusual relationship made them unfit to spend their lives with anybody except each other? What is going to happen to these two people who have transgressed so many of society's most basic rules?
This is a good story, well-written and full of suspense and ambiguity. Thumbs up!
"Double Dome" (1957)
In 1963, "Double Dome" was reprinted in
Human and Other Beings, an anthology whose cover blurb suggests that every story it contains is a condemnation of the human race as a bunch of meanies. Good grief! I know there are a lot of misanthropic SF stories out there in which we are told human beings are too violent or too focused on material gain or whatever, but often such stories will camouflage their preachiness or spring the lecture on you near the end--this book tells you right out on its cover that you are in for a dressing down for the stories within. Who would buy such a thing? A masochist?
The narrator of "Double Dome" is a personnel manager, like the narrator of "The Littlest People." He works at a factory in a small town in the spacefaring future; the factory has fewer than 100 employees, and produces parts for spacecraft. One day an office worker quits, and his replacement arrives the next day. The replacement is an "adaptoman," a man with four arms, an additional sub-brain, and a third eye. Such genetically modified men were first developed to operate space ships--they can do more work than the average man, saving costs on space travel by reducing crew sizes. The working-class employees of the factory are unhappy to see him--is he the first of an army of adaptomen who are going to do the jobs of two men and slash the number of union jobs at the factory? The engineers and the company doctor aren't too crazy about having this freak around, either.
The narrator is sympathetic to the adaptoman; others accuse him of having the values of a big-city inhabitant, not those of a small town guy. The narrator in his youth wanted to be a spaceman, and sometimes wishes he was an adaptoman himself, and he and his wife have been considering signing up to have their own children, when they are ready to have kids, turned into adaptopeople. (Adaptos are created by bathing the fetus in the womb with radiation soon after conception.)
The plot of "Double Dome" is sort of episodic and mechanistic. The adaptoman gains acceptance among the citizens of the small town through a series of psychological stratagems, each of them targeting some demographic among the factory employees and then the town as a whole. This four-armed operator even manages to get engaged to the prettiest girl in town, daughter of the vice-president of the town's bank. There is a conversation between the adaptoman and the narrator about how adaptomen are the future, suggesting that one day everybody will be genetically engineered, and in different ways for different tasks. In a paragraph that today would be considered sexist and racist, the adaptoman says that Arab men like fat women and African men like women with "plate-sized lips" and hints that in the near future female fetuses could be engineered to have these characteristics.
Everything is coming up roses for this adaptoman but at the last moment the town balks--the idea of a man with two extra arms and an extra eye and an oversized noggin marrying a normie woman is too much for the people of the small town to handle. At the wedding ceremony the prettiest girl in town sees something that triggers her to run out of the church, leaving the adaptoman at the altar, and the adaptoman slowly walks out, four hands over his face, weeping, never to be seen again.
The sight of the adaptoman weeping pulls the heartstrings of all the women in town and they decide they want their sons and daughters to be adaptos. I guess that counts as the first twist ending. The second twist ending is the narrator's discovery of a clue that indicates that the adaptoman engineered the disaster at the church in order to get all the women in town to embrace the adapto future. The adaptoman didn't really come to town to take an office job at a factory, and he didn't really fall in love with the prettiest girl in town--he is an agent of an activist organization that trained him in how to convince people in small towns to accept adaptopeople. He travels from town to town, pulling the same tricks in every town in the interest of building the new adapto society.
"Double Dome" fits squarely in the tradition of science fiction stories in which--boo hoo!--we see how hard a time superior people have in a world of mundanes; I always assume there are so many SF stories like this because so many SF fans think of themselves as better than everybody else even though they were bullied in school by other boys and ignored by the girls. "Double Dome" is also one of those science fiction stories in which the cognitive elite are shown to be fully justified in using their superior intelligence to manipulate the masses. I guess it is also a kind of allegory about the plight of minorities, like Jews and African-Americans.
"Double Dome" isn't great, but it isn't bad. The style and pacing and all that are fine; the problem is that the plot and the individual plot beats all seem either tired (the adaptoman is beaten up by the working-class factory employees but they respect him afterwards because he put up a good fight) or unbelievable (women see a freak get his heart broken by another woman and this inspires in them a desire to give birth to their own little freaks.) It is just too easy for the adaptoman to manipulate everybody. Can you believe this guy, even with his second brain, can seduce the hottest richest chick in town after town? And, after getting her to the altar, manipulate her into dumping him right there in church in front of all her friends and relatives? (I have this same criticism of all those "gaslighting" horror and crime movies in which a cabal tries to drive somebody crazy to get her inheritance, and of Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories--people are just not that predictable.)
Finally, I want to point out a choice Banks makes I found noteworthy. Even though this story is set in the future (we are told adaptomen have been around for over 50 years, so this story must be in the 21st century), Banks includes dialogue that puts you in mind of the 1940s, having one character crack "Something new has been added" and another invoke "the four freedoms." Maybe these early 1940s coinages were still in such wide use in 1957 that Banks assumed they would continue to be so for many decades?
We'll call "Double Dome" acceptable.
**********
So, these tales run the gamut. We've got an abysmal piece of junk. And a competent, if preachy and less than believable, traditional SF story. And a fine story that offers interesting speculations and social commentary as well as an unreliable narrator and characters with complex and ambiguous, but still creditable, psychologies. One has to wonder if Gold had a hand in ruining the bad story and/or elevating the good story, how responsible he was for my reaction to them. A mystery that will probably never be solved.
More 1950s magazine SF in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.
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