Merril-approved 1959 stories: Davidson, Davis, De Vet & Dickson

The last time we mined stories from the Honorable Mentions list at the back end of Judith Merril's Year's Best SF: Fifth Annual Edition, we read stories by four people whose names began with "C" and with whose work I was not very familiar.  Today we've got some Merril-approved "D"s and two of them are pretty famous writers whose work I have read, Avram Davidson and Gordon Dickson, while two of them, Chan Davis and Charles V. De Vet, are not very famous and I don't think I've ever read anything by them.

To give these tales a shot yourself, use the handy links in the above paragraph to be carried magic-carpet-like to the scans of the stories I am reading.

"The Woman Who Thought She Could Read" by Avram Davidson 

This story debuted in F&SF alongside the short version of Fritz Leiber's "The Silver Eggheads;" I read the book version of The Silver Eggheads back in 2022 and thought it pretty bad.  "The Woman Who Thought She Could Read" would be reprinted in Davidson collections and in anthologies edited by David G. Hartwell and Isaac Asimov (the former assisted by Kathryn Cramer, the latter by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles H. Waugh--in my academic career I learned that "assisted by" can mean "did all the real work," so keep that in mind.)

"The Woman Who Thought She Could Read" is a competent but essentially conventional twist-ending, you- shouldn't-trust-in-supernatural-advantages story, not bad at all but sort of ordinary.  Maybe it is special in its themes of people from different cultures being unable to communicate with each other, and its suggestion that more information often won't actually help you make better decisions.  We might also consider Davidson's story as a reflection of a Jewish-American perspective, or an allegory of the life of Jews in America.  Of all gentile nations, the United States has probably been the most welcoming to Jews, and Jews have achieved success here and contributed admirably to American life  in a myriad of ways.  At the same time, Jews might worry that, in the event of a catastrophe, they might be scapegoated by the very neighbors who so recently tolerated or embraced them, and it is just this sort of thing that happens in "The Woman Who Thought She Could Read."  A tragic, depressing story, in any case.

Our narrator is telling us a story of his youth.  He begins by retailing to us the history of the house he grew up in, which maybe Davidson does to bring to mind the way history is characterized by change, with families and businesses rising and falling over time, often due to unforeseeable developments beyond their control.

Living next door to the narrator's family was an Eastern European woman.  This woman spoke English with a heavy accent, and she had never been taught to read, not even her native language--where she grew up, only boys, not girls, were taught to read.  A witch, however, taught her to divine the future with beans.

Davidson lays some family relationship stuff on us; the bean reader's son is a muscleman who travels the country as a professional wrestler ("The Masked Marvel," "The Slav Slayer," etc.), and the narrator's older sister marries a guy the narrator gets along with very well.

One day, the narrator's sister and her husband are going to take some kind of holiday boat excursion.  The bean counter cautions them--the beans warn that water is dangerous to them and they should avoid the water.  So they don't go on the boat, but instead take a drive.  Due to the behavior of another driver, the car ends up in a canal where the narrator's sister and brother-in-law drown.  The boat does get into trouble, but not as severe as this--if the narrator's sister and brother-in-law had been on the boat, they would have lived.  The narrator and his parents, somewhat irrationally, blame the bean counter for this disaster, and the bean counter declares she will never read the beans again and soon leaves town.

Davidson writes his story well--the characters all convincingly to life, for example, and as I suggested earlier, the story is ripe for all kinds of analysis, so I can recommend "The Woman Who Thought She Could Read" even though the plot is just sort of typical. 

"Adrift on the Policy Level" by Chan Davis

Mathematician Chandler Davis' "Adrift on the Policy Level" debuted in Fred Pohl's fifth Star anthology, which I am having trouble finding a scan of.  Luckily, Pohl also included the story in his 1962 anthology, The Expert Dreamers (reprint, reuse, recycle), and I have been able to find a scan of that volume.  

"Adrift on the Policy Level" is a story that dramatizes with exaggeration and efforts at humor the supposed contrast between academic life and life in the private sector.  You'd think academics would be grateful to the taxpayers for financing (albeit at the point of the gun wielded by academia's brutish crony, the government) their cushy jobs, but no, academics have contempt (at best!) for business and are always seeking to demean or actually destroy the private sector.  You'll even find academics who feel that the public sector is Lucy to the private sector's Dracula instead of the other way around.  Anyway, "Adrift on the Policy Level" is a satire of the free enterprise system, with a focus on the power of salesmanship, just the kind of thing commies like Judith Merril and Frederik Pohl eat right up and are eager to serve to the rest of us.   

Our protagonist is a scientist who has discovered a natural chemical in plants that could be used to preserve wheat crops from disease and this 22-page story is all about his efforts to get a big business called "The Corporation" that owns big wheat-growing "colonies" in Antarctica with names like "Churchill" and "Great Slave" to take on the new chemical.  The scientist has to navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Corporation, but luckily he has a professional salesman to guide him.  Part of the humor of the story is the scientist's naivete--he is flabbergasted at the sight of a pretty girl, for example.  The salesman provides Davis a chance to satirize Social Darwinism; the salesman uses the phrase "survival of the fittest" approvingly, for example.  He also uses "altruism" slightingly, which may be an attack on Ayn Rand; I am not familiar enough with Rand's work to know if she talked with specificity about altruism before 1959.     

One of Davis' main themes is that in business success is achieved by charisma and trickery, while in academia success is based on results.   Now, I wasn't in academia in the 1950s, but in the 1990s and 2000s, so maybe my experience is different than Davis', but in my experience the opposite is the case.  In business you succeed when people are willing to buy your product or service--the product or service, and the money you earn by selling them, are the result.  In academia there are all too often no tangible results, just unreplicable and unfalsifiable assertions entombed in documents nobody reads, so success comes from sucking up and through corruption.  Allow us to consider a wholly hypothetical example.  (Any similarity in this example to real people or events is wholly coincidental.)  You have a friend at the, er, Fnord Foundation.  Friend gives your research center half a million bucks.  You use the half million bucks to buy your grandkids Hannukah and Christmas gifts and to furnish your Manhattan apartment and your beach house in the Hamptons and to take your friend at Fnord Foundation to the most expensive restaurants in Manhattan and to hire a bunch of ass-kissing ESL grad students to write a bunch of nonsense that looks sort of like a research report after you hire a young M, er, Pontus to copy edit it.  If a young MPontus goes to the government agency that ostensibly oversees the half million dollars to tell them about the Hannukah gifts and the Christmas gifts and the furniture and the lunches, young MPontus is reminded that this government agency gets 20% of the half million and so if anybody were to jeopardize the research center's future acquisition of additional funds from people's friends at the Fnord Foundation it would be the copy editing guy whose job would be threatened, not yours as head of the research center.  

Anyway, in the end the scientist, like Winston Smith in 1984, falls prey to the persuasive methods of his oppressors and joins their ranks, becoming an enthusiastic collaborator in his own oppression.

Obviously this story's style, themes and attitude rubbed me the wrong way, and it feels repetitive and banal besides.  I am giving "Adrift on the Policy Lebel" a thumbs down, but commies might like it.  As you might expect, a story about how poor innocent academics are the victims of big business has been reprinted in textbooks for use in the classroom like Above the Human Landscape: A Social Science Fiction Anthology and Political Science Fiction: An Introductory Reader.

"Seedling" by Charles V. de Vet

Here we have an acceptable science fiction twist ending story that addresses interesting topics we see addressed pretty regularly in SF.  Short and to the point.

De Vet sets the stage with a brief description of the reptilian animals in a jungle on an alien planet.  Then we meet our three characters, two human astronauts and their buddy.  They tell their buddy, whose memory is all messed up and has the body of a big ape-man kind of thing, that they have done biological modifications to him so he can blend in with the natives.  That way he can gather anthropological data from the inside.  Buddy hates his own smell in this native body, but as he goes off to join a tribe of natives, he gets used to it.

Among the natives the native stuff in his brain allows him to mingle with ease.  The human components of his brain make him disgusted by the smell of his fellows, keep him from accepting the sexual advances of a female native, and drive him to build a hut when it rains.  The other natives are impressed by the hut, and build their own.  

The twist ending is that this guy is not a human who has been modified to mix with the natives, as he has been led to believe, but a native who has been modified to have higher intelligence so he will do stuff like build a hut and introduce fire and the wheel among the natives with the aim of getting the primitive natives to advance to civilization more quickly than they naturally would.  The two astronauts discuss a little the moral propriety of interfering with a people's natural development and putting an innocent alien through the disturbing experience that has made his own people and lifestyle repugnant, but decide it is all for the good in the end, as a superior level of culture and technology will make life safer and healthier and more comfortable for the natives.

We might consider this story in comparison to stories like Lee Corey's "Letter from Tomorrow" in which aliens jumpstart humanity's technological and cultural development.  And to Chad Oliver's "The Marginal Man," which, like de Vet's "Seedling," has Earthmen giving technology to primitive aliens to jumpstart their development.

Acceptable.  This minor story was reprinted in the British edition of Astounding, if that counts, and no where else.  I think this is the first thing by de Vet I have read, and I wouldn't be averse to reading other work by him, though  his novels look a little gimmicky (a guy has to play life or death chess like on Barsoom; aliens drop a monster on to Earth and film its attacks for entertainment for the masses back home.)

"The Amulet" by Gordon Dickson 

I'm a Dickson skeptic, having found some of his novels and short stories weak, but "The Amulet" is a very good witch story.  The magic in the story is quite good, and the images, and Dickson makes use of animal metaphors in an effective way.  In the same way I hypocritically decry the decadence of our culture and the corruption of our government at the same time I exemplify that decadence and benefit from that corruption, I, like everybody else, like cats even though I recognize the cruelty and the selfishness that characterize the feline, and Dickson's chief metaphor in "The Amulet" is just this, comparing a sadistic criminal, a man with a young, strong, healthy body and a cunning mind, to a cat again and again.

Said criminal beats up a teenaged boy for fun and then flees town hobo-style, hopping on and then off a freight train.  In the back woods he encounters first one, and then another, witch, first an old crone and then a young beauty.  Dickson's descriptions of the woods, the women, and their eerie domiciles are evocative and vivid.  The charming criminal matches wits with these evil women--will he side with one against the other as one tempts him with money and the other sex?  Or try to outwit them both?  Can a normal man, no matter how evil and clever, really go toe to toe with women who are servants of the Devil and have an array of supernatural powers at their disposal?

I really like it.  Thumbs up for "The Amulet."  

"The Amulet" debuted in an important issue of F&SF, the one with Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon," which was in one of my school text books back in the day and was adapted into an award-winning film.  This ish also prints Fred Pohl's "To See Another Mountain," which we read some years ago.  Rod "The Bod" Serling (as my wife the comedienne calls him) and a German named Gunther included "The Amulet" in anthologies, and you can also find it in the Dickson collection The Last Dream.

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Davidson and Dickson's weird stories, which use the supernatural to talk about real huma psychology and relationships with which we can all identify, are better written and more entertaining than Davis and de Vet's legitimate science fiction stories, the one an irritating and tendentious satire and the other bland speculation on the methods and ethics of human interaction with aliens.  My brain thinks that science fiction is better than fantasy because the author is trying to say something about technology and society but my heart resonates to fantasy stories in which people are driven by their anxieties and desires.  On a certain level, stories about witches, which are not real, are more "realistic," better reflect our actual daily lives, than stories about rockets, which are so very very real.  So don't be surprised when you find MPorcius Fiction Log is back on the Weird Tales track when next we meet.