We're reading 1959 stories which Judith Merril included on her Honorable Mentions list in the back of her fifth critically lauded "Year's Best" anthology. This is the second post in this series;
in the inaugural post we handled three stories by authors whose names begin with "A," Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson and Christopher Anvil. Today we'll read stories by "B" authors. There are actually a lot of authors whose names start with "B" whom Merril thought published stories in 1959 worthy of note, so I think we'll be doing more "B"s next time; today we've got a pretty famous guy associated with
The Twilight Zone, Charles Beaumont, and two people I don't think I have read before--I don't even know if I have
heard of them before--Alan Barclay and Merle Benedict.
"Nearly Extinct" by Alan Barclay
World War II RAF veteran Barclay has over two dozen short fiction credits at isfdb and five listed novels. "Nearly Extinct" debuted in John Carnell's
New Worlds, but it seems has never been reprinted. Let's see if we can figure out what Merril saw in this story that other editors, apparently, did not see.
"Nearly Extinct" is an acceptable story, reasonably well-written and somewhat entertaining and interesting, but it doesn't have a real plot. In structure and setting it somewhat resembles Brian Aldiss' "The Lieutenant," but Aldiss' story had a plot--the lieutenant's personality evolved, the story chronicled a change, there was a climax. "Nearly Extinct" does not really have that sort of narrative.
Some years ago, space aliens conquered the Earth and almost exterminated humanity. Nowadays, the few surviving humans live as savages, almost animals, in the wild spaces. Sometimes the aliens, black hairless people whom the humans call "Frogs," come out to the wilderness to hunt the humans on foot or in low-flying aircraft.
As the story begins, a woman whose family has just been killed is fleeing the Frog hunters. She is saved by a young man, a stranger to her, who is skilled with knife and bow. She escapes and he stays behind to fight--he gets surrounded by the Frogs, who have firearms. In the next scene we find he has survived and is guiding the woman to his family's camp. How did he get away from the aliens who had surrounded him? We soon learn that his father, he, and his children can teleport to any spot they can see--his wives cannot.
Barclay provides scenes in which the Frogs attack and the humans deal with them. Many Frogs are slain, but so is the male lead's father. Then comes the final scene, in which it is implied that one day, the male leads descendants, humans who can teleport, will retake the Earth and maybe conquer the Frogs' home planet.
Lacking character development or a climax, this story feels like a fragment or an anecdote. Maybe it is a character study of the kind of people who will survive an apocalyptic event like conquest of the Earth from space--the male lead is cold, emotionless, he doesn't seem excited to have sex with the members of his harem, much less to love any of them, and he is not moved by the death of his father in the fight with the Frogs. He just seems coldly committed to keeping the human race alive.
"Nearly Extinct" is OK. I'm not sure why Merril liked it enough to include it in her list--maybe its fragmentary nature made her think it "literary," a sort of subversion of pulp expectations that we would see the human race get finished off (if this were a horror story) or see it achieve its liberation (in a conventional human vs alien invasion science fiction scenario)?
"Sorcerer's Moon" by Charles Beaumont
This story by the famous Beaumont debuted in your favorite jazz magazine,
Playboy. (Merril strives in her anthologies to find SF that debuted outside the SF mags.) Besides coverage of the upcoming Playboy Jazz Festival, an article on yachting, and quite a bit of material about the Beats (even the centerfold is promoted as a Beat who loves Dylan Thomas, Prokofiev and organic food), this issue of Hugh Hefner's upscale skin rag has a story by Avram Davidson we read last month,
"No Fire Burns." "Sorcerer's Moon" is a weak joke story, and very short. There are only two wizards left alive in the world, two men several centuries old who are masters of black magic and in touch with hellish powers. Instead of forming a little wizard club and spending their time goofing on the normies, or mundanes, or "muggles" as I guess the kids are calling them nowadays, these two wizards are feuding, each seeking to destroy the other to become the sole wizard in the world. Won't the survivor be lonely?
Anyway, one sorcerer manages to trick the other into taking a sheet of paper with a rune on it. When a particular midnight rolls around, the last wizard to have had possession of the rune will be destroyed. So, each wizard tries to trick the other into taking possession of the rune, disguising it as a piece of mail or something. One hires a private detective who is an expert process server to deliver the rune to the other, but can this private dick be trusted?
Lame filler. I read it in the magazine, where it shares a page with a cartoon about incest, pedophilia, and the dirty minds of hicks that references Lolita, but you can also catch "Sorcerer's Moon" in The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural and multiple Beaumont collections.
"The Dancing that We Did" by Myrle Benedict
"Myrle Benedict" is one of the pen names used by Sasha Miller, who went on to do historical novels (I guess about ancient Greece) and then fantasy novels, some in collaboration with Andre Norton. She also worked on a GURPS supplement! (I never had any GURPS stuff, though I had a lot of
James Bond roleplaying material,
Toon,
Star Frontiers,
Marvel Super Heroes RPG, and borrowed some
Gamma World stuff from another kid.) Merril included two Benedict stories in her honorable mentions list for '59; neither has, as far as isfdb knows, ever been reprinted.
As you might expect of a story written by a woman (if you were some kind of neanderthal misogynist!), Sasha Miller's "The Dancing that We Did" begins at a dance. A country dance in hillbilly country; maybe it qualifies as a square dance ("...swing her where, I don’t keer, take that purty gal out fer air!”) Our narrator Alan Wiley left this rural town to go to the big city to get an education, and today he is back and attending the dance. He flirts with a 16-year-old girl, Letty Sue; these two seem to have crushes on each other from way back. Adam likes Letty Sue because she is sleek and slim, almost childishly so--she has feet that are more slender and breasts that are smaller than those of the other pretty girls at the dance. We hear all about her clothes and hair and all about the clothes and hair of Letty Sue's competition, big-breasted Jodene Bailey.
As if this material already wasn't boring enough, Miller does that thing that so many authors do that I find so tiresome, renders people's speech phonetically.
"Ain’t even been here but a couple days, an’ every time I try t’ get near you, some over-grown lunk jest shoves me out o’ the way!”
Anyway, by page two I was checking to see how long this story was--OK, only ten pages, I can do it.
Alan and Letty go to their favorite spot by the river and have their first kiss. Alan banged a lot of chicks back in the city, but this kiss is the most wonderful experience he has ever had! Then they go back to the dance and dance together and all the other people there marvel at how great they are at dancing.
We learn that Alan is the smartest guy in town and will be the best farmer if he takes up farming but he would rather do something else with his life--he doesn't fit in here in hillbilly country. Then comes our SF content--Alan is some kind of alien or merman or something! He wears contact lenses to conceal his cat-like pupils and has only four toes on each foot. Then comes our happy ending--Letty Sue reveals she is of the same race--they will marry and then search the world for their people.
"The Dancing that We Did" is like a mix of a women's romance story and the standard SF reader's wish-fulfillment goop in which the main character doesn't fit in because he is better than everybody else. The plot is almost nonexistent--there is no conflict (Jodene with the big boobs is introduced and then vanishes from the narrative), and the characters don't achieve happiness by doing anything, by overcoming some kind of obstacle or making some decision, rather, they are successful because of their genetic heritage. Check your four-toed privilege, you freaks!
Maybe "The Dancing that We Did" was meant to be a chapter of a novel, to set the scene for the conflict to come in the later chapters? The intro to "The Dancing that We Did" in the magazine that is the only place it has ever been published, Fantastic Universe, tells us that Sasha Miller owns a cat with a precious pun name and that "The Dancing that We Did" is a sequel to an earlier story about people with cat pupils, "Sit By the Fire," so maybe an entire series was envisioned, and this installment is just to help introduce the characters and concepts of the series.
Not for me, thumbs down. A weak choice by Merril--did she chose it to support a fellow woman writer? Because it demonstrates how SF elements can be integrated with traditional mainstream story content?
"The Comanleigh" by Myrle Benedict
Here's another story by Sasha Miller published in
Fantastic Universe and set in a rural location, a fishing village where people say stuff like "“Sure, there’s na comanleigh,...na more thin Bess here has na Ma or Pa. What say you, Bess? A foundling you are, sure you’re na skeert o’ na comanleigh?” Hmmm, let me check...ten and a half pages...well, we can do it.
Bess, a foundling, is a serving girl at the tavern. Rad, the best sailor in the village, is a fisherman. These two are in love but keep it a secret from everyone else. Rad is saving up so they can get married. Rad's mother does not approve of Bess, as nobody knows who Bess's real parents are.
The comanleigh of the title is a monster many villagers believe becomes active when there is a storm and kills men foolish enough to be abroad during the storm. On the way home from the tavern one night, a storm suddenly whips up and Rad sees a mysterious shape fly by and he, who always scoffed at the comanleigh before, comes to believe in it. Some weeks later Rad has made enough money, and he and Bess marry and move into a cottage Rad built. Soon Bess is pregnant, and goes on to give birth to a little girl.
Shortly after becoming a father, Rad is out in his boat and gets caught in a storm. The comanleigh, a ghost woman of great beauty, appears and tries to seduce him--she looks much like Bess. The monster explains that it lives in the body of Bess, and has lived in the body of Bess's mother, grandmother, etc. She will live on in the body of Bess's daughter when Bess dies. Bess's love gives Rad the strength to resist the ghost's charms. He fights the monster, which grows a wolf's snout brisling with cat teeth with which to rend Rad and a serpent's body with which to crush Rad. When Rad strikes the comanleigh with a steel hook, Bess, back ashore, also suffers a penetrating wound. Rad expires, but the comanleigh is dying, and sends its soul to Rad's cottage to take up residence in the baby's body. The dying Bess, realizing the monster will live on in her daughter, breaks her baby's neck before she herself expires from her many gory injuries. Rad and Bess's family has been annihilated, and they have liberated their village from the commanleigh.
The plot of this story is not bad, but the long passages of phonetic dialogue are kind of annoying and the domestic scenes feel too long. We'll call "The Comanleigh" acceptable. I guess Merril liked the centrality of women to the story--with the exception of Rad, the hero, the villain, and the victims are all women, and Bess and the monster are very proactive women who engage in activity that goes against conventional morality, like engaging in premarital sex and killing people.
**********
A weak batch from Merril's list. Maybe the next bunch of "B"s will be better? Let's hope so!
No comments:
Post a Comment