Here find cryptic links to the scans of the stories I will be reading today so you can read them yourself with a minimum of fuss and see how I have totally misunderstood them and/or distorted their clear meanings to further my own selfish and perverse agendas, horrible truths of which the world at large will remain in blissful ignorance.
"Lex" by W. T. Haggert
"Lex" is a "real" science fiction story, one that has engineers as characters and is all about science and technology and how they can affect the economy and human life, a story that glorifies the self-made man, the radical individualist who looks at the world, sees people aren't doing things the best possible way, and, all on his lonesome, carves a path towards doing things the best possible way. There is also a wise mentor-smart student relationship, like in so many Heinlein stories. Haggert describes, in some detail, both good and bad business practices as well as the mechanical operations of a fully automated factory, and he does it in a way that is not boring, and he doesn't just talk about engineering and economics, but biology, as well, as the operation of the factory is largely designed to mimic the workings of an animal's nervous system.
The more surprising twist is that when the owner of the automated factory dies, the night after the interview, the factory commits suicide. Luckily the owner has prepared a will that gives all his wealth to the young engineer.
Thumbs up, even if the ending is maybe a little over the top. It is too bad this guy Haggert didn't write more stories.
"Measure for a Loner" by Jim Harmon
"Measure for a Loner" is a sort of joke story full of weak little jokes. It is the future, though it can't be too far in the future, as the narrator as a kid saw Charles Lindbergh when Lucky Lindy was an old man. It does seem to be some generations in the future, though. Anyway, our narrator is a head shrinker of the future. His job is not treating living people, because nowadays everybody as a child is conditioned to be psychologically healthy, so there aren't many patients out there. Instead, his job is psychoanalyzing the dead for historians or curious descendants. But he puts that work aside when he is recruited by the government to find the loneliest man on Earth, no easy task when there are no more lonely people in evidence. Why does the government need a lonely man? To crew the first interstellar spacecraft, that's why!
The text of the story, multiple times, says the government is looking for a "lonely" man, but it seems what they really want is a man who likes to be alone. In conventional English, isn't a man who feels "lonely" a man who doesn't want to be alone? The title gets it right, using the word "loner," but the actual story insists on "lonely" and "loneliest." Why didn't Amazing editor Cele Goldsmith clear this up? This pissed me off so much it soured me on the whole story and I had a hard time judging the rest of the story with the usual fair and open mind for which I am renowned.
The text of "Measure for a Loner" is the psychologist's oral report to the General in charge of the project, and it reads like this shrink is addressing the reader, like the reader is the General. We hear about the disputes the narrator has with his liaison with the government, a man who knows much more about psychoanalyzing and treating live patients than does the narrator. And we hear about the narrator's interviews with two men who are prime candidates to be loneliest man in the world, and the tests they are put through. When it becomes evident that deception as to the nature of a test flight is a major component of these tests, Jim Harmon and his characters directly refer to Robert Bloch's "The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton," about which I posted a negative review back in 2013, as if that story by our pal Bob is a classic everybody in the future will know, like Romeo and Juliet or Dracula. I have to say I found the whole government program from the first page nonsensical --maybe this could be justified by the claim that the story is an absurdist joke--and confusing--this I am asserting is an unjustifiable consequence of the story being poorly written. "Measure for a Loner" ends as I expected it would on its twelfth page, with the narrator admitting he is the loneliest man on Earth and volunteering for the first interstellar flight. He feels lonely because of guilt--the two candidates, each in a one-man interplanetary ship as part of the tests, have refused to return to Earth because they are enjoying being alone out in space, and the narrator feels like he has murdered them, and as a murderer feels ostracized by society.
Bad, thumbs down. The plot twist is predictable and the story's construction and execution are shoddy. Why does Merril like this mess? Because of its skepticism about the space program and government in general? Because of its skepticism of psychology? Because she thought it was funny? An inexplicable choice by Merril.
"Hex" by Laurence M. Janifer (as by Larry M. Harris)
Marie Wladek is a widow who grew up in the USSR and now lives in America and she isn't crazy about life in these United States. She strongly resents the fact that, to get her welfare money, she has to allow the New York City welfare office to invade her privacy. When people suggest she or her son get a job, she admits that the freedom and ease of living on the dole are worth surrendering a little privacy, but she still bitterly resents the imposition. Wladek thinks of the government and the taxpayers who are feeding her not as her benefactors, but as "Cossacks," as "monsters." If only the case workers could understand that she needed enough money to hire a maid! Her apartment is full of dust--do the case workers expect her or her son to dust their apartment?
Wladek has a new welfare case worker, a 21-year-old blonde, Gloria. Gloria is a psyker! She can read minds! She doesn't tell anybody about her powers, but Wladek's nose was trained in the old country to sniff out people with supernatural abilities and she senses that Gloria is "a witch." Even though she can read minds, Gloria is an innocent young liberal, eager and enthusiastic, always looking on the bright side, happy to be working at the welfare office where she and her colleagues are helping people. As Janifer's story proceeds, we learn that Gloria has a whole array of powers. She can tinker with people's minds, for example. When Wladek comes in for her regular appointment and lies about being unable to work and lies about her son assiduously seeking a job and failing to find one, Gloria reaches into the immigrant's mind and alters it to give her a sort of compulsive desire to get a job. The she reaches across town to where the Wladek son is plotting a crime with his cronies and does the same to him!
The old woman recognizes that this sudden urge to go to the employment agency and get a job must be the work of the witch! She resists the sorcery of the slim and pretty blonde, sorcery to which her son has no defense--he gets a job in a matter of hours! The widow Wladek visits a gypsy woman, another psyker, and pays her handsomely--two bucks!--for her help. When the gypsy finds that Gloria is a mightier witch than she, Wladek goes to the church for help in her struggle to avoid employment, but, as you can imagine, she doesn't get too far with her complaints that her son has been ensorcelled into getting a job and that she is at risk of suffering the same grim fate. "Well I...," says the priest, nonplussed, "we all have to work."
Meanwhile, Gloria is using her powers with some assiduity to put other young ne'er-do-wells back on the straight and narrow, turning their minds away from idleness and criminality and towards a desire to work and help their relatives and contribute to society. We eventually learn that Gloria has the best record in the city for getting people off the dole and helping them become productive citizens, that the Wladek woman is the only person on Gloria's caseload who hasn't gotten off relief. Gloria's bosses at first were suspicious of the young woman's record of success, but investigations indicate her clients really are getting out of trouble and into jobs, that she is not running some kind of scam. Of course, a somewhat higher than usual number of her clients have died, but, hey, people die all the time--only Gloria knows that she telepathically compels the real troublemakers, like a violent drunk, to commit suicide or get into "accidents."
In the end, Mrs. Wladek demands to see Gloria's supervisor, and when she accuses Gloria of being a witch, Gloria's boss has the immigrant widow sent to Bellevue. According to Gloria, everything has turned out for the best--Wladek's son will no longer be under Mom's malign influence and will become a productive member of the workforce, while the widow Wladek is actually getting what she really wants, to be taken care of by others.
As with those provocative novels of Janifer's, "Hex" is a thoughtful story that gets your attention by saying or implying things that might be offensive, like that many people on the dole are frauds, layabouts, or dangerous criminals and that many people, and in turn all of society, might benefit from having a woman with psychic powers force them to go to work or, if they are really dangerous, commit suicide. "Hex" explores the justness of the welfare state and the tension between the social welfare state liberalism of the New Deal and after and the values of traditional 18th-century liberalism upon which the United States was founded. To what extent should we allow the state to interfere with your life to make sure you are not a parasite or a thief or a killer? Gloria destroys that drunk before he has actually killed anyone, because she is pretty confident he will kill somebody, eventually, and this obviously goes against our Anglo-American tradition of jury trials where you can face your accuser and the idea that every man is innocent until proven guilty. And, Clockwork Orange style, is taking away people's free will and ability to make moral choices really making them better people, or just turning them into slaves or robots? Could turning the worst people in society into slaves or robots actually be justified by the fact that by doing so we relieve a burden on and end a menace to the majority of the population, which consists of people who aren't on the dole and who aren't committing crime?
Quote good. I should look for more of Janifer's short stories. This is a good pick by Merril--it works as an entertaining and dramatic black magic story (Gloria actually makes clay dolls of those she "helps" to aid in focusing her mind on them) with believable characters, and it works as a thought-provoking rumination on the social and political stuff I have been blabbing on about--"Hex" is a model of what a good author working in the speculative fiction form can achieve.
"Hex" has reappeared in Peter Haining's Black Magic Omnibus and in a book of stories from the 1950s edited by Barry Malzberg, who himself has written multiple works of fiction set within New York City's welfare apparatus, and Barry's pal Bill Pronzini.
Like Harmon's piece, this is "true" science fiction, a story that speculates about how technology will change society that features a central figure who is a smart engineering type with an independent streak; it likewise has a human drama narrative with a twist ending. Harrison is a good writer, and "I See You" moves briskly but still conjures up vivid images of the scary future it depicts. In common with some of Harrison's famous work, the story's protagonist is a criminal-slash-rebel.
Carl Tritt lives in a high tech city in which computers and robots do most of the work and the government apparently has control of all aspects of property and the economy Tritt is a telephone technician, installs lines and that sort of thing. Like most of us, he'd like to have more money, and unlike most of us (I hope) when he sees a chance to steal from lockers that have cash in them, he jumps at it. Harrison does a good job describing Tritt's effort to pull off the heist, which is just complicated enough to be technically interesting but is at the same time easy to comprehend and carries some emotional weight, some tension--the whole story is like this, well-balanced and engaging.
Tritt lives in a surveillance state and his crime is detected and he is captured and sentenced to twenty years of punishment. In this future world they don't put you in a prison, really, they just keep you separated from all amenities as you go about a life in the city that is totally planned for you--the doors to bars and restaurants won't open to you--you can only eat at a kind of public cafeteria with bland food; you can't ride the subway or a taxi but have to walk everywhere; you are given a boring job; you live in a part of town that the sanitation robots don't clean as often; you can't get mainstream books at the library, only morally instructive books, etc.
Tritt is both resourceful and impulsive, and we observe his life as a convict, how he tries to improve his situation whenever an opportunity to do so appears but also, through his temper and lack of self-control, commits more infractions and earns further punishment. Harrison gives the reader the opportunity to shake his head at Tritt's foolishness and selfishness as he assaults people and damages property, or, to sympathize with Tritt and cheer on his cathartic violence as he rebels against the mechanical authoritarian state that seems to generally keep the city clean and safe and to keep most people content. Are the docile and obedient people wiser or better than Tritt, or are they inhuman cogs whereas he is a real man? Harrison doesn't tell you outright how to feel about Tritt and the society he weas born into. In the ending, which is the least credible part of the story, Tritt escapes into a section of the city where there is no surveillance and where, perhaps, he can live a life of ease, even power, manipulating the system instead of being manipulated it. But another rebel has preceded him into this position, and Harrison ends the story without telling us if Tritt's risk-taking will pay off in a better (if morally suspect) life or leave him dead after a brief fight with a foe who has a superior weapon.
Thumbs up--a good action and adventure story with good science fiction elements that offers moral dilemmas and doesn't just come out and tell the reader how to feel about those moral issues. "I See You" was the cover story of John Carnell's New Worlds and was included by Michael Moorcock in The Best of New Worlds. When it was reprinted in Fantastic Universe it bore the alternate title "Robot Justice." You can also find it in Harrison collections.
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| On Merril's recommendation, we read "Mr. Merman" by Raymond Brossard from this ish of FU |
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Wow, three "thumbs up!" stories in one blog post--Merril did us a favor today. As for that exasperating fourth story, we'll just sweep that garbage under the rug! Kudos to Messrs. Haggert, Janifer and Harrison for writing such exemplary work, and let's not forget editors and anthologists like H. L. Gold (and/or Fred Pohl if he was actually in charge of any decisions related to the August '59 ish of Galaxy), John W. Campbell, Jr., John Carnell, Peter Haining, Malzberg, Pronzini and Moorcock for making these good stories widely available.
Keep your socks ready for hoppin', because we've got more 1950s material scheduled for next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
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