Merril-approved '59 stories: R G Brown, A Budrys and A B Chandler

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading selected stories printed in 1959 (more or less) that critically-lauded anthologist Judith Merril saw fit to include in the list of honorable mentions in the back of the 1960 edition of her annual Year's Best S-F series.  Today we'll finish up the "B"s and start the "C"s.  One of Merril's missions in life was to dissolve or at least point out the fatuity of distinctions between genre and mainstream fiction, and so she liked to include in her anthologies and honorable mentions lists stories that appeared in mainstream outlets that shared aspects with the material appearing in category SF magazines, and among her 1960 honorables we find a story by a William Chamberlain entitled "The Flying Jeep" that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post.  Chamberlain, a distinguished U. S. Army officer, was apparently also a prolific writer of fiction.  (It is amazing to the lazy among us how productive some people are.)  I can't find the text of "The Flying Jeep" anywhere online, so we'll have to skip Chamberlain and go right to A. Bertram Chandler after digesting Rosel George Brown and Algis Budrys.

"Lost in Translation" by Rosel George Brown

Editor of F&SF, where we are reading Brown's "Lost in Translation," Robert P. Mills, tells us that Brown is good-looking and that she majored in Ancient Greek.  Sounds awesome.  Then he hints that "Lost in Translation" is a joke story.  Not awesome.  Well, the story takes up only nine pages, so we can probably hack it.  

Brown immediately clues us in to the fact that her main character, Mercedes, is a contemptible poseur.  She is a virgin of the sex-positive future who reads ancient Greek texts in translation but doesn't understand them as well as a devotee of the current neo-Victorian fad.  Why does Brown think we will want to spend nine pages with someone whom she keeps telling us is contemptible?  So we can enjoy looking down on her?  As I keep telling you, SF is full of elitism.

Mercedes, who keeps affecting Victorian mannerisms, is visited by a man she has never met before.  Mercedes' father is a college professor and this is one of Dad's grad students.  Dad and this joker have invented a time machine and they want to test it out on Mercedes.

You may remember that Brown's novels Sibyl Sue Blue and The Waters of Centaurus were about a hip happening chick who was sexually promiscuous--how could you forget Sibyl Sue Blue having casual sex with lizard people from another planet?  Well, Mercedes here in "Lost in Translation" is the opposite of Sibyl Sue Blue, a square and a prude.  Our gal gets sent back to ancient Greece equipped with a translation device and finds the Greek literature and lifestyle she has been pretending to understand and revere is, in fact, to her neo-Victorian mind, vulgar and offensive, full of talk about sex, populated by  women who wear revealing attire and extravagant make up.  Mercedes falls in with some prostitutes who teach her how to apply cosmetics; now all dolled up, men are attracted to her.  (Brown here in this story illustrates the fact that women are positive that men prefer women with lots of cosmetics slathered on, no matter how often men tell them different.)  Never before have men desired her, and Mercedes finds she likes the feeling.  At a party she gets drunk and loses her virginity to a rich guy, though she barely remembers the actual intercourse.  Transported back to her time of origin, it is clear Mercedes has become a normal woman who will abandon prudery and start troweling her visage with artificial goop and have lots of sex.

A weak filler story that goofs on prudery and advocates sexual promiscuity and cosmetics.  Maybe "Lost in Translation," while failing to entertain us, serves to enlighten us denizens of the 21st century, is valuable as a primary document of 1959 feminism and progressive thought, offering insight into how the feminist line on stuff like sexual activity and the use of cosmetics has evolved over time.  I am going to judge "Lost in Translation" barely acceptable--it is not fun or funny and its attitude is banal and off-putting, but it isn't terrible.

Our mates over on Airstrip One reprinted "Lost in Translation" in a 1965 issue of Venture, and the story also reappeared in the 1963 Brown collection A Handful of Time.  

"The Stoker and the Stars" by Algis Budrys

Merril uses her honorable mentions list to promote two stories by Algis Budrys, but we've already read "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" so we're just addressing "The Stoker and the Stars" today, a tale that debuted in Astounding under a penname and would not be reprinted until 2011 in Leigh Ronald Grossman's Sense of Wonder. 

The cliched analysis of Budrys' work is that it is about what it means to be a man, and in "The Stoker and the Stars" Budrys almost comes right out and says this, in a passage that reminded me of Seneca's 86th letter to Lucilius (like Mercedes I read the classics in translation, and the trans. of Seneca's letters I read is Robin Campbell's.)

I couldn’t really describe him to you. He had a duffelbag in his hand and a packed airsuit on his back. The skin of his face had been dried out by ship’s air, burned by ultraviolet and broiled by infra red. The pupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmic rays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body was hard. What did he look like? He looked like a man.

"The Stoker and the Stars" suggests that being a man means taking risks to help others, and being a leader who supports his society.  The story comes to us as the memoir of a space man, a crew member on a Terran space ship who rose in rank to become captain of such a ship.  His career began in a difficult, humiliating time for the human race.  You see, after developing an interstellar drive, the human race tried to conquer other planets and races, and the alien races defeated us, chasing us back to Terra and then sort of quarantining our solar system, allowing only a small number of trading vessels to leave our system every year.  Our narrator is on the crew of one of those few trading ships.

A guy joins the crew to be a "stoker"--this man is the actual protagonist of the story, not our narrator.  The interstellar drives on ships during and just after the wars are temperamental and dangerous; a person--the stoker--has to stay in the engine room and constantly tend to the drive, clad in uncomfortable armor because the drive can arc and kill unprotected individuals.  The new stoker is obviously a veteran of the wars, but doesn't talk about his service.  By chance, the narrator learns that he was a Marine, one of that hardy crew of men who fought the most heroically during the wars, took the most risks, participated in the most savage fighting, etc.  Our narrator and others fear that, when the ship arrives at the trading post, that this Marine will launch some kind of kamikaze revenge terrorist attack on the aliens and ruin Earth's trade relations with the aliens, maybe even lead the aliens to wipe out humanity once and for all.

On the trip to the trading post, the stoker becomes a hero, suffering injury while saving the ship when the drive goes haywire.  Even though he is an enlisted man, his behavior while aboard, singing songs and so forth, raises morale and makes the ship operate more efficiently--he is obviously a talented leader of men.  This makes it hard for the narrator and his fellows to do anything about the man whom they fear is going to cause a diplomatic disaster once they arrive at the trading post; they just leave him be and hope for the best. 

When the day comes, the former Marine puts on his wartime uniform and walks right over to the aliens he fought with earlier in his career.  Instead of a disaster erupting, the Marine signs on to be a stoker on the aliens' ship.  In the denouement, we learn that this Marine, no mere grunt but a ship commander during the war, becomes a good will ambassador to multiple alien races, working as stoker on one ship after another, and is so charismatic and makes Earth look so good that the aliens allow more and more trade ships to leave our system and Earth eventually becomes integrated peacefully into the multi-racial galactic civilization.

A smoothly written and entertaining story with suspense, characters you can identify with who act in a believable manner, and a nuanced view of humanity and of what it means to be a man and a leader.  Thumbs up for "The Stoker and the Stars"!             

 

"The Man Who Could Not Stop" by A. Bertram Chandler 

Merril included two stories by Australian sailor A. Bertram Chandler on her list.  "The Man Who Could Not Stop" is classified at isfdb as a component of Chandler's famous series of stories and novels about space navy officer John Grimes, and it is set in the same universe as the Grimes stories, but Grimes himself does not appear.  Which is perhaps for the best as the Grimes stories I read in the dark age before I started the blog were kind of underwhelming. 

"The Man Who Could Not Stop" is an entertaining sort of slice-of-life story, set in the furthest reaches of the Milky Way, among the Rim Worlds.  Chandler sketches out effectively what life is like on these unattractive worlds, so far from Earth and the well-populated planets, and then introduces us to a pretty despicable fellow, a highly intelligent master thief who has pulled some major heists and killed at least one person in a fight.  He has fled from planet to planet through the galaxy, and ended up at one of the Rim Worlds because they are under a different jurisdiction and will not punish immigrants for crimes committed back among the Inner Worlds.  Chandler then chronicles this master criminal's life on the Rim in sort of jocular style, but the jokes are not absurd or based on puns or otherwise annoying or offensive.

In brief, Chandler depicts how the protagonist is an inveterate breaker of rules and exploiter of others--he is unreformable and essentially addicted to stealing from others.  Chandler also contrasts the law enforcement systems of the Inner Worlds, where criminals are coddled and prisons are comfortable places it is hoped will reform malefactors, and the law enforcement systems on the Rim, where criminals are punished with hard labor and poor food.  At times "The Man Who Could Not Stop" feels like a law and order conservative's satire of liberal "soft on crime" policies.

Again and again the protagonist robs somebody and is then thrown in prison for some months, only to get out and steal again and be captured and imprisoned again.  Chandler's descriptions of the man's crimes and his time in stir are entertaining.  Then comes the twist ending.  You see, while in prison the protagonist gets training as a mechanic.  After his third infraction he, along with many other irredeemable crooks, are impressed onto the crew of a starship about to embark on a dangerous mission--to leave the galaxy and attempt to reach an alien galaxy.  Few people would volunteer for such an arduous journey, so men who have been given a chance to straighten out and fly right but have proven unable to respect the law and the rights of others will crew the ship and in that way, finally, contribute to society.

Thumbs up for "The Man Who Could Not Stop," which I certainly enjoyed more than the John Grimes stories I read in the period before this blog came into operation.

"The Man Who Could Not Stop" debuted in the same issue of F&SF as Brown's "Lost in Translation" and would go on to be included in the collection Beyond the Galactic Rim.

"Familiar Pattern" by A. Bertram Chandler

"Familiar Pattern" was printed in Astounding under a pen name--Chandler had another story under his own name in this issue of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s magazine.

Chandler makes extensive use of his experience as a seaman here in "Familiar Pattern."  Our protagonist is the Australian captain of a merchant ship.  By chance--or so it seems!--an alien craft lands in the ocean near his ship, and he meets the aliens, who are more or less human-like.  They are pretty friendly, say they came to our planet because they were low on water and Earth, which they had no idea was inhabited, was the closest source of that oh-so-essential H2O.  The aliens and the humans trade small items, mostly booze and cigarettes (the aliens love to smoke, and Earth tobacco is more powerful than theirs, apparently) and then leave.

The aliens return and request to deal again with the protagonist.  Soon Earth is receiving regular trading delegations from alien space ships.  Interstellar trade remains based in Australia, and Chandler spends a lot of time detailing the logistics of moving stuff from the starships to the surface and the Earth goods to the starships and so forth.  Among the aliens who spend a lot of time on Earth are not only a trade commissioner and merchants but also alien missionaries.  Their religion, which preaches frequent use of alcohol and sexual indulgence, starts getting popular.

Throughout the story Chandler and his human characters point out parallels between European contact with Pacific natives and these aliens' new relationship with Earth humans.  In particular, there is a "pure-blooded Polynesian" bosun among the protagonist's crew who plays a sort of Magic negro role in the story, he being a better sailor and more phlegmatic and more wise than all the white people in the story.  This guy predicts, though in vague terms, what happens by the end of the story.

The provision of alcohol by the alien church serves as competition to local breweries.  And the sexual license promoted by the alien church offends the local prudes.  These conservative forces conspire to generate a mob that destroys the alien church.  This gives the aliens a pretext to bomb Earth ("gunboat diplomacy") and eventually take over our planet.  Has their entire series of visits, even the first, been a scam to provide the aliens a chance to conquer our world?

This story is OK.  The satire is a little too obvious and the description of trade negotiations and logistics a little too lengthy.  We're calling this one solidly acceptable, an uninspired but professional piece of work.  It doesn't seem to have been reprinted if you don't count British editions of Astounding or an appearance in Ellen Datlow's internet magazine in 2005. 

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In these Merril-approved posts I often try to figure out why Merril chose to include these specific stories on her list.  It is easy to see what Merril liked about today's stories by Rosel George Brown and Algis Budrys--they can readily be seen as attacks on the civilizations of Great Britain and the United States that lefties like Merril thought so reprehensible.  Brown's joke story is an attack on the bourgeois attitudes about sex of the English-speaking world, an attitude that liberals and leftists throughout the 20th century labeled "Puritanism" and blamed for a host of psychological and social problems.  As for Budrys, he may not himself be a liberal or leftist, but his story can be seen as, in part, a condemnation of the violence and imperialism of the British Empire and the Cold War USA (the Earth playing the allegorical role of the English-speaking world in the story) as well as a dramatization of the left-wing aspirational dream of seeing the First World humiliated by the socialistic Second World and/or the non-white Third World.  Of course, Budrys' story (unlike Brown's silly piece) also has literary merit--its characters have personality and behave realistically and face moral dilemmas--as well as entertainment value, and can be seen by us free-market types as arguing that trade is the key to productive international relations, making it a choice by Merril that is easy for me to endorse.

The second of Chandler's stories is even more of an anti-Western text than Brown's or Budrys', so we can see how it must have warmed Merril's heart.  Chandler's first story, however, with what it seems to say about recidivism and the foolishness of leniency towards criminals, would seem to go against what I would have expected Merril to believe, but it is a pretty fun and well put together light-hearted crime story, so maybe Merril promoted it purely based on her recognition of its merit as a piece of entertainment.  Or maybe she thought it a very subtle dig at punitive crime policies because the criminal was portrayed with sympathy and society eventually found a use for him instead of executing him or condemning him to a lifetime of incarceration?

These stories, whether I loved them or merely tolerated them, all provide food for thought.  So, a good batch.  More "C" stories next time we hop on the Merril tour bus and further explore exotic 1959.