We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are exploring 1959 speculative fiction, and we've got a map to guide us, a map drawn by that Trotskyist cheerleader of the New Wave, Judith Merril. The map comes from the back of Merril's fifth
Year's Best anthology, where lies a long list, alphabetically organized, of Honorable Mentions. Of course, I am not making every stop on the map; today, as we travel through the "F" district, I'm skipping the story by Howard Fast,
"Cold, Cold Box," because I read it ten years ago (and pronounced it "lame.") But we'll check out
Philip Jose Farmer's "Alley Man," Charles G. Finney's "The Gilashrikes," and
Charles L. Fontenay's "Wind." To read along, click the links in the previous sentence to be whisked away to scans of the famous science fiction magazines in which these stories first came under the gaze of SF fans back in the twilight of the 1950s.
"The Alley Man" by Philip Jose Farmer
I recently purchased a copy of the 1962 Farmer collection
The Alley God because I liked the Richard Powers cover. I could read this story from there, I suppose, but I'll stick with the
F&SF version, as that is what our guide, Ms. Merril, is recommending.
Farmer begins his story by introducing us to two impoverished white women who live near the garbage dump, and unleashes a load of metaphors on us bringing to stark life how ugly they are. It isn't nice, but it is strong evocative writing, and you can't help but admire it. The man they live with arrives with a pretty young middle-class woman. Old Man Paley, a ragpicker who makes his living collecting and selling discarded wood, metal, cardboard and paper, looks like a cave man and has a powerful smell, but he has the gift of gab and, it turns out, women of all classes find his smell irresistible. "The Alley Man" is a story--in part--about how women are naturally attracted to big strong violent men who dominate them! Zowie! We actually see a physical altercation between Paley and one of his women, right there while the new girl lies nearby, sleeping off a drunk.
The middle-class woman is Dorothy Singer, a grad student in sociology. She is going to pay Paley fifty bucks she got from a foundation to follow him around as he works and to live in his home--a shanty with no running water--for a few days. She has essentially fallen for him already, on the first day, and has been out drinking with him.
Singer and Paley travel into town the next day to scavenge in alleys. Paley believes he is a Neanderthal, and has stories about life in the old world, before the arrival of homo sapiens and of the wars between his people and the physically weaker but more technologically and culturally advanced (they had archery and a relationship with dogs, which hate Neanderthals) homo saps. Paley believes in, or affects a belief in, magic, and says the homo saps defeated the Neanderthals because they stole a magic item of great power, a hat, from his people and that the tiny number of survivors of his race, of which he may be the last, have been searching for it for millennia, and he has not given up the search.
Farmer succeeds in making being a ragpicker sound like a pretty cool job, and in making Paley a very fun guy, but also a sad figure--does this incredibly strong but ugly brute believe all the guff he says, or did he just get it from old comic books and issues of Weird Tales he found in the trash, use his self-image of the last of a lost race of heroes as a shield from social opprobrium, as a distraction from the marginalization he suffers? Farmer doesn't beat you over the head with the marginalization stuff, he shows it rather than tells you about it, and the story is entertaining whether you notice it or not.
In the interests of science, Singer has a fake magic hat made and contrives a way for Paley to discover it. And because she can't resist Paley's clever wooing and the smell of his monstrous body, she has sex with him. This sets into motion a series of events which climax in a dramatic and tragic catastrophe.
"The Alley Man" is an edgy story, what with what it says about women and the fact that it depicts sympathetically a man who abuses women psychologically, physically and sexually, but it is also well-written, with believable and compelling characters with complex but very comprehensible relationships, and it is quite fun--Paley's monologues and manipulations are clever and amusing, and Farmer's description of a ragpicker's life makes it sound like its a blast. Thumbs up for "The Alley Man."
Besides in The Alley God, "The Alley Man" has been reprinted in many anthologies and Farmer collections; people are crazy about this story, and I don't blame them.
"The Gilashrikes" by Charles G. Finney
Two years ago we read Finney's
"The Iowan's Curse" and I said it was acceptable. That story was a part of the "Manacle, Arizona" series, and so is today's story, "The Gilashrikes," which debuted in
F&SF and reappeared in the Finney collection
The Ghosts of Manacle, as well as foreign editions of
F&SF.
This is a merely acceptable trifle. An herbalist in Arizona has a pet gila monster, female, and a pet shrike, male. He puts an aphrodisiac in their food and they mate and produce three intelligent winged lizards. The three hybrids, in order to redeem their kind from the bad reps suffered by the venomous gila monster and the notorious butcher bird, take on the task of maintaining law and order in the community. They drive off cats who terrorize little birds and big dogs who bully little dogs. They punish peeping toms and necking teens and even encourage layabouts who would sleep in to get out of bed and attend church Sunday mornings. But when they try to get the herbalist to become a teetotaler, the herbalist kills them.
Competent filler. Maybe edgy because of all the sex; a gripe of the New Wavers was that there was not enough sex in Golden Age and early Cold War SF, so maybe that is what attracted Merril to this tale.
"Wind" by Charles L. Fontenay
There are a lot of racial and ethnic stereotypes out there. I'm not going to list them, tell you who runs Hollywood and who steals your bike, who drinks tea all day and who drinks booze all day, who covers women head to toe and then rapes little boys, or who buys used panties from a vending machine, because I'm a uniter, not a divider. But you can probably think of a few of them. One that maybe isn't coming to mind, one I don't know I ever heard of before, is that Dutchmen are stubborn. This stereotype is one of the motifs of Fontenay's story "Wind," which all you 12-year-olds out there will be disappointed to learn is not about farting.
There is a Dutch colony on Venus, and a Dutchman is enlisted to make an emergency drive from the Dutch colony to the remnants of a failed colony to pick up an individual who has a terrible disease and requires return to Earth. The space boat to the orbiting Earth-bound spaceship is leaving the Dutch colony soon, and this patient has to be on that boat or he will die here on the second planet, but getting him to the boat is going to be a hassle because there is a terrific wind storm brewing. The wind is so strong it can overturn a ground car if not driven just right--our hero is the best driver in the colony.
His pipe clenched between his teeth (Fontenay includes references to everything you know about Dutch people, like wooden shoes and tulips, with windmills particularly prominent), our guy makes the dangerous drive to the wretched little settlement where the patient awaits. Reminding us of
Hal Clement's 1999 "Exchange Rate," which we just read, Venus is constantly being shaken by earthquakes, and new fissures are always opening and new cliffs rising up to make the drive hazardous.
Our guy is disappointed to find that the people in the pathetic settlement the Dutch call "Rathole"--it doesn't even have a nuclear reactor, but powers its air conditioning with wind mills!--are Spaniards or Mexicans (they are all the same to him) because he still nurses a grudge from when the Spanish oppressed the Netherlands like 500 years ago! He gets over his prejudice pretty quick when he meets the patient, a bright eight-year-old boy, and his mother, a gorgeous blonde widow. The Dutchman immediately starts plotting future visits to this sad little settlement to date up this delectable senora.
A new fissure blocks the way back to the Dutch colony and the space port. Is the boy doomed? Well, Rathole used to be the site of a U. S. military base, and there is an old hover craft hanging around. But it has gasoline engines and there is no gas here in Rathole (the Dutch ground car runs on diesel.) The Dutch guy has a brainwave--he attaches a windmill to the hover craft and uses it to turn the fans that provide the vehicle's lift and thrust. He and the sick boy take off and get to the Dutch colony and the space boat just in time!
This is an OK classic-style SF story in which the author comes up with meteorological and geological reasons for plot obstacles and then has the protagonist use his ingenuity and science knowledge to jury rig a technological means of overcoming the obstacles. We also have an antiracist theme and a little "we are all human--even the Russians!" lecture. I'm torn between judging "Wind" to be on the high end of acceptable or the low end of good.
"Wind" debuted in Amazing, in an issue that includes an installment of the serialized version of E. E. Smith's The Galaxy Primes; Smith's novel is illustrated by the great Virgil Finlay, who takes the opportunity to celebrate the female form and explore human anguish. A 1969 reprint magazine included "Wind" among its offerings, and you can also find Fontenay's tale of a flying Dutchman in some 21st-century collections.
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Merril didn't steer us wrong today. Farmer's "The Alley Man" is a sophisticated and fun story that talks about racial and class prejudice without being preachy and annoying and without romanticizing minorities and the lower classes. Finney's "The Gilashrikes" is a silly joke story, but not bad, and maybe it says something about the costs and benefits of living in an orderly society--the same forces that protect you from bullies might be deployed to keep you from feeling up your girlfriend and taking the edge off with a little of the old firewater! Fontenay's story is a traditional science fiction piece competently performed that reminds us not to judge people by what their co-ethnics did centuries ago, but judge them as individuals, based on their own particular attributes, like whether they are good-looking or not.
Next up in our tour of 1959 will be the "G"s--let's hope they treat us as well as the "F"s have. But first, a novel of terror! Have your vocal cords ready for some screaming next time we meet!
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