Merril-approved 1959 stories by T Godwin, "D Gordon," & W L Gresham

After "F" comes "G."  Back on July 9, we read three stories published in 1959 by authors whose names begin with "F," stories that Judith Merril, renowned anthologist, had recommended.  On the same list of Honorable Mentions in the back of Merril's critically acclaimed The Year's Best S-F: Fifth Annual Edition we find six stories by author's whose names begin with "G."  We're reading four of these, skipping Daniel F. Galouye's "The City of Force" because I read it in Bodyguard and Four Other Short Novels from Galaxy back in my New York days and Ron Goulart's "Parlor Game" because I avoid joke stories and always assume that is what Goulart is selling, and I am not in the market for joke stories.  But we've still got four capers torn from the science fiction magazines of the second Eisenhower term to explore.

"Empathy" by Tom Godwin 

Let's see what kind of story Merril thought worth promoting that was penned by Tom Godwin, author of the controversial "Cold Equations," a story heavily influenced by John W. Campbell, Jr.  "Empathy" debuted in Fantastic and would not be reprinted until our own wild 21st century in a Baen collection; I'm reading the Fantastic printing.

"Empathy" is one of those stories about how some white people who represent a Western power are nice to nonwhite natives and some other white people are mean to nonwhites and you should be one of the nice ones.  Also, a story about intragovernmental rivalries and the limitations of computers and the danger of doing everything by the book instead of thinking on your feet.

Captain Rider of the Frontier Corps used to be in charge of the Terran outpost on Deneb Five, a planet whose location makes it strategically essential to further Earth exploration, and he had a decent relationship with the natives, a bunch of black-skinned dragon-riding cavalrymen armed with slug rifles.  But just recently Deneb Five has fallen under the jurisdiction of the Extraterrestrial Relations Board (ERB--maybe a joke reference to the creator of John Carter?), a new agency that has been hoovering up all the funds once issued to the Frontier Corps.  Now Deneb Five's human outpost is under the control of a General Beeling, whom we know is no good because he is fat.  While Rider of Frontier Corps had a tiny staff of dog-people from the Altair system, people renowned for their powers of empathy, Beeling of ERB has a vast human staff, many of them young men tricked into joining ERB with promises of adventure.  Beeling has contempt for non-Terrans like the canine Altairian empaths and the black Denebian riders.  As the story begins, hundreds of native mounted troops are surrounding the Terran outpost, annoyed and scared by the arrival of Beeling's large force, and a final negotiation is about to begin--Rider fears that if Beeling botches the negotiation the far more numerous Denebians will kill all the Terrans (and the dog-people.)  When it rains it pours, and Rider has another problem on his mind-- one of the dog-people is off on a mission on the coast forty miles away and is about to be drowned by the very high tide caused by this planet's many moons, and Beeling won't authorize use of the helicopter to rescue her while there is a chance of native attack on the base--Beeling and ERB think of the Altairians as mere animals, as Rider's pets or mascots.  

Beeling has a computer analysis of the natives and it guides his negotiations into disaster--as Rider knows, computer analysis doesn't work in negotiations with people; sensitive people like Rider who have respect for others and can understand their emotions have to negotiate with people, not some haughty computer-user like Beeling, who sees people as soulless profit maximizers.  Rider is aware that ERB computer analysis has failed on almost every alien race, a fact the ERB has kept a secret from the chief executives of the Earth government.  So, it looks like tomorrow the Denebian riflemen will kill all the humans and dog people, even though the computer told Beeling the black natives would never actually attack the Terran base.     

Beeling, via helicopter, abandons his men at the base after sending a report to Earth blaming the Frontier Corps for the impending massacre; this report that will likely lead to the total defunding and disbanding of the Frontier Corps.  Rider marches forty miles to rescue the female dog-person.  When the natives see that Rider, unlike the absent Beeling, isn't a racist and a coward, they decide to resume negotiations; Rider not only secures the use of the planet as a refueling station for Earth, but the Denebian chief sends a message to Earth explaining how great Rider and the Frontier Corps are and how terrible are Beeling and the ERB.

This story's message and drama are both pretty banal and pretty over-the-top; for example, the dog people don't just look kind of like dogs, but act like dogs, wagging tails when happy and carrying stuff in their mouths and all that, so we readers get the hint that they are loyal and devoted, like dogs are, and should like them, while the General is a moron and a coward and a fatso and every other bad thing Godwin can think of.  We call this stacking the deck.  I wouldn't call "Empathy" bad, just weak filler, so we'll grade it "barely acceptable."  Presumably Merril liked "Empathy"'s anti-racist message.

"Despoilers of the Golden Empire" by Randall Garrett (as by David Gordon)

I tend to avoid Randall Garrett as I expect his stories to be joke stories, and the two stories by "David Gordon" recommended by Merril on her 1959 Honorable Mentions list certainly have joke titles.  I was, however, initially fooled by the pseudonym and didn't realize who the real author of these stories was until after I had psychologically committed myself to reading them, and a blog post with only two stories feels kind of light, besides, I am interested in John W. Campbell,  Jr. and Astounding, so it sort of makes sense for me to read these Garrett pieces if I am going to read any.

"Despoilers of the Golden Empire" is written in a chatty casual style, like the narrator is hanging out with you, and is one of those stories that has the feel of a popular history written in the far future, discussing events from the not quite so far future with a level of detached irony.  The narrator, for example, says stuff about how this or that question you might have about elements of the story aren't addressed by extant sources, and stuff like "Before you can get a picture of the commander—that is, as far as his personality goes—you have to get a picture of the man physically."

The commander in question is one of the most famous of the many adventurers of the Second Empire.  You see, long long the human race conquered the universe, then its empire collapsed into squalling factions, but then came the Second Empire, which tries to maintain control while allowing individual regions some autonomy.  The odd thing to the reader about this Second Empire is that gold, in some unexplained fashion, is key to the universe's economic and political systems, not uranium or petroleum or something that seems more intuitive, and so starships full of adventurers travel the galaxies looking for gold while scientists and businessmen struggle to figure out a way to artificially create gold.  Kelly Freas' opening illustration to the story makes crystal clear the connection of these Second Empire adventurers to the conquistadors and pirates of the days of Cortes and Drake.

After this background, Garrett offers his physical and psychological description of the tough 60-year-old soldier Commander Frank, and then it is on to his grand adventure.  Frank is confident he has found a planet loaded with gold, but investors are very cautious, so his expedition is undermanned and underequipped.  On the planet he and his men acts exactly like conquistadors, not scientists or astronauts or whatever.  Frank gives stirring speeches to his men, everybody is clad in steel armor and armed with swords and pikes because the charges for their energy weapons are expensive.  They march around the planet on foot, though they do have motorized "carriers," which are used like pack animals most of the time but in battle ridden cavalry charge style.

If Frank and his men are like conquistadors, the natives of the planet are almost exactly like Pre-Columbian Mesoamericans, red-skinned humans who don't have the wheel or riding animals and whose civilization consists of a ruling demographic that lords it over the lesser tribes of its vast empire. 

What follows the landing on the planet is a standard adventure story with very few science fiction elements.  The Terrans, though outnumbered, can outfight the natives with their superior equipment and they take over one village after another; other obstacles include disease and the fatigue of the march and snake attack and occasional dissension in the ranks.  Frank is shown to be a great fighting man able to take on multiple opponents at once and best them, as well as a cunning and charismatic leader.  Garrett throws in an analog of Christianity and a missionary priest who wants to convert the natives--this element suddenly appears in the middle of the story and feels tacked on.  When Frank's little army arrives at the capital city of the native empire, Frank captures the native emperor via trickery and takes over the planet.

Garrett then quickly sketches out the succeeding decade, in which Frank has to crush rebellions by both natives and Terrans.  Then comes the twist ending, in which Frank is murdered by traitors, and the big reveal, when Garrett explicitly admits that this story is a retelling of Pizarro's conquest of Peru.

As I was reading "Despoilers of the Golden Empire," I was expecting to give it an "acceptable" rating as an unoriginal, plodding, mediocre, but not actually bad, adventure story, but the final self-satisfied revelation of the story's lazy and cheap gimmick was so annoying that it sank the story down into bad territory.  Thumbs down!  Why would prestigious editors Campbell and Merril countenance such a thing? "Despoilers of the Golden Empire" has nothing interesting or new to say, no real point of view--it doesn't even have the "imperialism is bad" or "white people are greedy" theme you might expect--and no particular artistic merit--it isn't well-written or funny or make you feel sympathy for Frank or the natives or anything like that.  And why would anthologists like Stanley Schmidt and Robert Adams reprint it?  Schmidts anthology has a humor theme, but "D of the G E" is not funny.  Adams' anthology is about soldiers, and Frank/Pizarro is a soldier, but "D of the G E" is not particularly exciting or entertaining and doesn't say anything interesting or special about the life or profession or character of soldiers.  What were Campbell, Merril, Schmidt and Adams (or co-editors Greenberg and P. C. Adams) thinking?

When I worked in public academia I pretty regularly had to copyedit, and sometimes even compose, propaganda that was a bunch of lies, eh, I mean, qualitative research the conclusions of which I found unconvincing.  To do so, I would, like an actor, "get into the head" of some other person and make the kinds of arguments such a person would make.  Let's pretend I am being paid to come up with arguments that Campbell, Merril, Schmidt and Adams might make if you asked them what is good  about "Despoilers of the Golden Empire."  As for "D of the G E" as joke story, perhaps it is a satire of those science fiction writers who lazily rehash episodes from history as adventure stories, or maybe a puzzle pointed at science fiction readers, a test to see if they are familiar with history.  A brief mention of psychic powers which has no bearing on the plot may be a friendly little dig at Astounding editor Campbell, well-known to be fascinated by psychic powers and eager to print stories on that theme.  More philosophically, perhaps "D of G E" is a meta/recursive criticism of escapist literature that sets adventures in fantasy lands when real life includes locales and civilizations, journeys and battles, and characters and ideologies every bit as strange and amazing as anything a genre writer could dream up. 

I don't know if I am earning my pay today speaking for SF editors any better than I earned my pay speaking for academic pinkos back in my Manhattan days; these arguments of mine are not too hot.  The success of this story will remain inexplicable to me.    

"...or Your Money Back" by Randall Garrett (as by David Gordon)

This will probably be the last Randall Garrett story I ever read, so pay attention!

Like "Despoilers of the Golden Empire," "...or Your Money Back" chugs along competently though unimaginatively through a bunch of formulaic and mediocre scenes until we get a sort of twist ending that we sort of saw coming.  We'll call this one barely acceptable as it is shorter than the very long "D of the G E" and at least has some traditional science fiction elements like speculations about the future, you know, what you read an actual science fiction magazine looking for.

Our narrator is a Las Vegas attorney and Garrett runs up the word count with cliches about the law, you know, a lawyer is an officer of the court and has a duty to give his client the best possible defense even if he knows he is guilty and that sort of stuff.  You've already heard this stuff a hundred times, hearing it the 101st time won't hurt you.  A guy from New York hires the narrator to defend him--NY guy expects to get in trouble at the casino.  

Big Apple guy has a pocket-sized device with a dial on it and when he goes to the top casino in town he turns the dial to the number of the roulette wheel on which he has placed his bets and wins all his bets.  Garrett gives us a long scene in which Gotham guy does this stuff again and again and the people at the casino--casino staff, customers, police--react to the guy's amazing run of luck.  He and his device end up in the hands of the police, and he is indicted for cheating at gambling.  

Next up, a long trial scene in which our narrator and the district attorney question witnesses and the NYer and the judge says this and the jury does that blah blah blah.  The casino scene and the court scene feel like the thousand casino scenes and the million court scenes you have already endured on TV, in the movie theatre, and in books before.  

Anyway, the twist is that the device does nothing whatsoever, it is just a decorated box (it actually sounds like one of those fidget boxes that first became available a few years ago.)  The NYer has had success at the roulette wheel because he has psychic powers.  He wanted to bring this case to court to publicize the existence of psychic powers, which many people have but which generally lie dormant.  Three years later, human life has been revolutionized by the unleashing of humankind's psychic powers--for example, a space ship powered by psychics has just landed eighty astronauts on Mars and chemical and mechanical machines are becoming obsolete.

Astounding editor Campbell was fascinated by psychic powers so we can see why this optimistic story about such abilities might tickle his fancy.  I don't know why Merril liked this one.  I may think "...or Your Money Back" is better than "Despoilers of the Golden Empire," but SF editors don't seen to have thought so--this tale of cheating at the casino for the good of humanity has only ever been reprinted in the 1987 Garret collection Takeoff, Too!, sequel to 1980's Takeoff, which includes "D of the G E." 

"The Forsaken Earthman" by William Lindsay Gresham

Gresham of Baltimore has only five fiction credits at isfdb; he seems to have been more successful as a detective writer and a nonfiction writer specializing in spiritualism and the milieu of the carnival sideshow.  His life sounds more interesting than his work, to be honest; it seems Gresham's catastrophic mishandling of the family finances, his alcoholism and his infidelity drove his wife, poet and novelist Joy Davidman, to flee to England and marry C. S. Lewis, whose master wordsmithery had played a role in her conversion from atheistic communism to Christianity.  Anyway, "The Forsaken Earthman" debuted in Satellite* and does not appear to have been reprinted; did Merril, always trying to build bridges between and dissolve barriers between the genres and between the genres and the mainstream, promote "The Forsaken Earthman" because Gresham's 1946 novel Nightmare Alley was a hit and the basis for a film?  With its emphasis on human relationships--sexual relationships between men and women, the relationship between a man under stress and a man of the cloth, and the relationship between a man and his children--and because it is a sort of riff on Matthew Arnold's "The Forsaken Merman." "The Forsaken Earthman" often feels like a mainstream story. 

*Here in this bitchy footnote I will complain that "The Forsaken Earthman" here in Satellite ("THE BEST IN SCIENCE FICTION") is full of typos and the illustration that accompanies the story is crude and without style or charm. 

And maybe Merril liked "The Forsaken Earthman" because it is an anti-racist story and one of those stories that concocts a utopian society of aliens who are better than humans as a way of criticizing the human race.  The protagonist of "The Forsaken Earthman" is a crew member of the first serious expedition to Mars; he goes native, abandoning the mission to marry a Martian girl.  Part of the story is a first person account from the chaplain and morale officer on the mission, part of it letters written by the deserter to the chaplain from his new Martian home.  Early letters describes his happy life among the amphibious Martians, who have gills and spend most of their time underwater in their canals, which they long ago covered over with airtight buildings and rooves, to keep in the oxygen they need, which is scarce on the Martian surface--Mars is dead on the surface, but alive below the surface, in what the chaplain likens to an aquarium.  The Martians have a technology based on bioengineering--the airtight suits of armor they wear while on the surface are a bunch of living molluscs stuck together, for example, and they work steel by applying to it colonies of acidic germs or single-celled creatures or something.    Reading about how happy and smart and good-looking the Martians are and how beautiful their civilization, where everybody runs around naked and plays music all day is, paragraph after paragraph, kinda boring.

The deserter lacks gills, of course, and has to live in the buildings and on the ledges just under the roof of the canal, and in his letters keeps asking the chaplain to provide him diving equipment so he can spend more time with his family and explore the dark depths of the canals.  The chaplain eventually brings it, so we get more long descriptions of how beautiful everything is under the canals and how superior the Martians are.  The deserter writes a book about the stuff he discovers.

"The Forsaken Earthman" is a tragedy of sorts.  The deserter's Martian wife abandons him, leaving the part of the canal to which he is confined by his lack of gills, and she takes the kids with her--he never sees any of them again.  In his letters he goes on and on about missing the kids and eventually even missing Earth.  He becomes a drunk and dies of an infection the Martians don't know how to deal with.  But posthumously, he is a hero and statues are built of him.  His half-Terran, half-Martian kids are leaders in the development of a peaceful interplanetary civilization that consists of Venus (the people there are aquatic, too), Earth and Mars, and his book on submarine Mars is a classic pioneering work.  Most importantly, by defying the racism of his fellow Terrans and by disobeying orders and abandoning his post, he demonstrated the importance of being a rebel and the tremendous value of interracial marriage.  Yes, this story doesn't just say interracial marriage should be legally and socially equal to intraracial marriage, but is actually better because it advances the human species.

His tragedy was an illustration of a fact now accepted everywhere throughout die solar system—that when two species capable and desirous of mating are thrown together by circumstance, it is criminal to keep them apart by law, by force, by censure or by ridicule. Through the mating of similar species new species are developed which have their contribution to make in the ever upward spiral of life in the galaxy and eventually beyond.

"The Forsaken Earthman" feels like a filler piece as it covers well-trod themes without generating any excitement or surprise, married to an OK mainstream story about a guy who screws up his relationships but turns out to be a hero in the end because he's a rebel.  Is this a pathetic wish-fulfillment fantasy of Gresham's, a drunk whose wife and children left him for a more successful scribbler from a related but distinct culture?

Reading "The Forsaken Earthman" felt like a chore while I was doing it, but looking back on it, the basic plot and themes are more or less sound, it is just that Gresham lays it all on way too thick.  Barely acceptable is our verdict.

**********

Oy, another rough day here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Four stories that feel long and rehash shopworn themes without adding to them any novel twist or adorning them with some kind of unique style.  I guess we have to hope Merril will be serving up a better plate of "H"s than she has "G"s.  Stay tuned to find out if she does so.