Girl, 20 by Kingsley Amis

'I'm appealing to you.'  Kitty had got into her stride by now.  'It's all I can do.  I've nothing to fight with, no bribe to offer.  I can only ask you to realize the unhappiness you'll be bringing four people who've never hurt you.'

'Which are they?'

'Roy's two children, our own child, and myself.'

'You aren't including him, then.'

'That's not for me to say.'

'No, that's right.  Well, from the way he talks about his life at home, I can't see he gives a sod for any of you, so I don't see why I should.'

Let's check out another novel by Kingsley Amis, this one Girl, 20, first published in 1971, the year of my birth.  I have a 1973 Bantam paperback which a previous owner contrived to keep in one piece with packing tape; a good job, too, as the book is still intact even after a week of bouncing around in my shoulder bag as I walked hither and yon in our nation's capital and in the back seat of the Toyota Corolla as I drove up and down the East Coast.

Smart people love classical music and know all about it, and lament its decline (we just read a story by Barry N. Malzberg that is like a sad love letter to classical music.)  So I guess we shouldn't be surprised that the narrator of Girl, 20 is a newspaper critic who writes about classical music and expresses contempt for pop music and jazz.  This guy, Douglas Yandell, 33, for some time in the past served as secretary to prominent conductor and composer Sir Roy Vandervane, a man in his fifties, and they are still pals.  Both unmarried Douglas, and Roy, who is on his second wife, Kitty, and is father to a twenty-something son, Christopher, a daughter of 20, Penny, and a son of six, Ashley, are womanizers.  Roy regularly cheats on his wife, going from one young woman to the next, and he does a quite poor job of concealing these affairs.

Girl, 20 is full of politics, starting from page 1.  Douglas tells people he has no interest in politics, but the people around him are obsessed with the topic.  The editor of his newspaper, Harold Meers, is a hardcore anti-communist who doesn't want Douglas to write an article about a talented East German pianist because he fears it will serve as propaganda for the tyrannical GDR.  Among those living at the Vandervane estate is a West Indian, Gilbert Alexander, a writer who is, somewhat informally, a kind of tutor for Ashley, chauffer for Roy and Kitty, and boyfriend (or maybe just sex partner) to Penny.  Gilbert calls every white person he meets a racist fascist imperialist and complains about white supremacy.  Wealthy Roy (Kitty says to the narrator, "'You know, Douglas, it's quite frightening how much Roy earns now,'") is a socialist who has adorned his rooms with pictures of Che Guevara and a bust of Mao Zedong.  Amis suggests that both Gilbert and Roy's politics are merely performative, what we today might call "virtue signaling." In one scene Roy jumps to help a blind man cross the street, only to be disappointed, even angered, upon learning the man is not blind at all, but simply wearing dark glasses.  Signaling his separation from true working-class people, we get a scene in which a bus driver who recognizes the famous Roy tells the composer to move to Russia if he thinks England is so bad. 

Squint or click to read enthusiastic blurbs from my copy

The plot.  Roy is having an affair with 17-year-old Sylvia, a girl whom, when Douglas meets her, is stoned and acts in an outrageously cruel and callous manner.  Roy is attracted to Sylvia for her youth; as a leftist he is simpatico with the rebellious youth culture of drugs and rock music (he tells pop-music hater Douglas not to judge rock music on the basis of acts like Herman's Hermits, but rather good bands like Led Zeppelin) and the thing that sexually arouses him nowadays is the breaking of laws and the defying of social mores--he's been with many women over the years and he is no longer aroused by prosaic sex, but needs a little depravity to get turned on.  Amis/Douglas gives us multiple clues that suggest that Roy is attracted to Sylvia because she looks like his daughter Penny.  (Gross!)

Sylvia is no longer content with getting banged in private--she wants to go out in public with her famous lover.  Roy has the idea that he and Sylvia can go out on the town if they bring Penny with them, camouflaging their affair behind the story that Sylvia is Penny's friend and just tagging along.  (In fact, Penny has never met Sylvia.)  Roy figures that this cover story will be buttressed if Douglas accompanies them in the role of Penny's boyfriend.  Douglas resists, but Penny, whom he finds attractive (she has very high and firm breasts) implores him and he agrees, setting the stage for the uncomfortable evening out during which Sylvia, who acts like an absolute jerk, and Penny meet.

Roy isn't the only member of the Vandervane household to ask Douglas for a favor.  When it looks like Roy is actually going to leave Kitty for Sylvia, Kitty and Penny each independently beg Douglas to try to convince Roy to break things off with the teenaged girl and save the Vandervane family from total destruction.  When this doesn't work, Douglas accompanies Kitty when she goes to Sylvia's flat to beg the girl to show mercy on Roy's family, a confrontation that goes disastrously.  

In the Sylvia-Kitty confrontation scene, and a scene in which Roy explains his behavior to Douglas, Amis illustrates in broad strokes his theory that socialists and other rebels against society are not principled ideologues who are fighting for a better world but selfish libertines who have absolutely no concern for others.  Roy admits that everything he is doing--like cheating on his wife and championing the fashionable causes of the young--is in the shallow pursuit of pleasure.  He composes music for rock musicians and goes on TV to argue in favor of left-wing causes because it makes teenaged and 20-something girls want to have sex with him and boys of that age admire him, and he enjoys being the object of attention he compares to "hero-worship."  Seeing that Roy doesn't care about his family, Douglas takes a different tack, arguing that by immersing himself in pop music, leftist politics and sexual license--mere ephemera!--Roy is failing to live up to his potential as a musician, is sacrificing his opportunity to truly make the world a better place by contributing to the eternal project that is high culture.  Roy is not convinced, and Douglas turns to more desperate measures still, measures quite underhanded! 

Gilbert also has a favor to ask Douglas; Gilbert is fond of Penny and sees how living in her collapsing home is hurting her, and asks Douglas to help him convince Penny to move out of the Vandervane estate and and run away with him (Gilbert.)  We readers have to wonder about Gilbert's feelings about Penny, however, when Gilbert offers to Douglas as an inducement the opportunity to have sex with Penny!

In the final quarter of the novel Roy and Sylvia's relationship comes under assault from another direction.  Sylvia, in one of those it's-a-small-world coincidences fiction is replete with, turns out to be the daughter of the editor of Douglas' paper, right-winger Harold Meers!  Meers has been doing research on Roy, and has interviewed Roy's son Christopher, and threatens to publish the interview, in which Christopher brutally attacks his father, if Roy doesn't leave Sylvia.  

In the final fifth or so of the 245-page novel, we get various climactic scenes.  Douglas meets the father of a woman he sleeps with on the regular, Vivienne Copes--Mr. Copes is a religious man who reads science fiction and suspects the moral character of the British people is in such dire straits that the United Kingdom would benefit from dictatorial rule.  Also, the best thing that could happen to the people of Africa is if the British conquered and administered the dark continent again.  This character is, on the one hand, a goofball, but on the other, his commitment to the world around him, and the world that Christians and SF fans feel must be beyond this one, casts into relief how shallow is Douglas, how our narrator is a man who only cares about music and sex, a man who is not interested in building a family or preparing for the future.

Roy, on violin, accompanies a rock band on stage in their performance of a pop song of his own composition; the crowd does not appreciate the performance and on their way out of the venue Roy and Douglas are assaulted by thugs and Roy's Stradivarius is destroyed.  But Roy remains committed to pop music and youth rebellion, and to marrying Sylvia, outwitting Sylvia's father and rebuffing Douglas' efforts.

At the end of the story we find that all of Douglas's efforts to accomplish anything have been met with failure.  He couldn't stop Roy from leaving his family.  He couldn't stop Roy from wrecking his career in serious music.  Douglas gets fired from his job at the newspaper, and Vivienne ends their casual sex relationship.  But Amis makes clear that Douglas' sin is not that he gets defeated every time he launches an enterprise--his sin is not launching enough enterprises, not engaging enough in life.  Vivienne is cutting Douglas off because she is getting engaged to Gilbert Alexander--where the cool Douglas was content with a mere physical relationship, because he didn't care deeply about Vivienne and had imbibed the current feminist thinking about how men and women are equals, Gilbert has fallen in love with Vivienne the person, and, as a West Indian, has older ideas about sexual relations, and has been acting like a "masterful man" with Vivienne.  Gilbert's telling her what clothes and jewelry to wear (when Douglas didn't care that she had bad taste and looked sloppy), for example, Vivienne interprets as evidence Gilbert truly cares about her--Douglas' open-minded, laissez-faire attitude she sees as proof he doesn't really care about her.

The final scene leaves things up in the air for Douglas and Penny.  Penny, shattered by the collapse of her family, has, it appears, turned to heroin!  Douglas is attracted to her, and in theory he could follow Gilbert's example and take up the role of the masterful man and take Penny in hand, save her from the doom that is addiction to H and with her build a worthwhile life based on traditional gender roles, but does he care enough about her to do so?  The ironic final words of the novel are "We're all free now," Amis suggesting that the freedom brought by the sexual revolution and society's embrace of drugs is a trap, that this kind of freedom leads to destruction and a kind of slavery, that true freedom can only thrive within the guard rails of traditional rules and hierarchies.   

Girl, 20 is a competent mainstream novel.  Many of its ideas--e.g., that socialists are generally selfish hypocritical jerks and people who have lots of sex get jaded and lose the ability to get aroused by conventional sex and so pursue increasingly bizarre fetishistic sex--are ideas I basically agree with, and the others--e.g., that the liberations associated with the 1960s have made life worse rather than better--I find intriguing if not wholly convincing.  However, these are all ideas I have been exposed to many many times; from my perspective these ideas are conventional wisdom rather than new and exciting revelations.  The novel's jokes--for example, Douglas is tall and hits his head on things--are not bad, but only once did I literally laugh.  Amis' characters are believable, but I didn't find them terribly sympathetic or engaging, while Amis' tone is sort of understated, putting emotional distance between the reader and what is going on.    

One of the appealing things about the novel--and other of Amis' novels I have read--is that he is obviously interested in things I am interested in, like science fiction (and genre fiction in general) and military history--Douglas refers to Dracula and Frankenstein and many of the book's little jokes involve martial metaphors and references.  Hinting at how Roy and Kitty's lackadaisical parenting style has turned little Ashley into a hellion, we get this exchange between Kitty and our hero:

'We've got a new system [of persuading Ashley to attend school.]  Every day he goes, he gets a surprise when he comes home.'

'What sort of surprise?'

'Something nice, of course.  Something it's fun for him to play with.'

'You mean like a trench mortar or a flame-thrower or a--'

'There are no militaristic toys in this house, Douglas.'

This dialogue also makes one of Amis' points, that left-wingers misdiagnose the world's problems and make them worse with their misguided prescriptions--Roy and Kitty simplemindedly think that it is playing with toy soldiers that makes people violent, while actually doing the very thing that is in fact turning their kid into a troublemaker--depriving him of discipline.

(One of the minor themes of Girl, 20 is how children and parents disappoint each other--in the novel the conservative or right-wing parents have kids who are sluts while the offspring of left-wing parents turn on their progenitors, denouncing their indulgent and self-indulgent ways or actually engaging in physical violence.  At the end of the book, however, it does look like Mr. Copes, the most right-wing of the parents, may live to see his daughter in a stable healthy marriage.)

Girl, 20 is a success--the book is well-paced and well-structured and all that, and Amis appears to accomplish his goals--so I guess on a technical level it is good, but its ordinary plot and ordinary point of view did not thrill me or challenge me.  Like a guy who has banged so many chicks he has to break the law to get aroused, it seems like I have read so much fiction I can only get really excited by a story if there are monsters or aliens or space ships or sorceries in it.  I guess I can give a mild recommendation to Girl, 20, and a stronger rec to feminists and BLM activists who are looking to fuel their rage. 

Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis

"She's a decent wee girl, Standish, and that's her attraction for me.  She's the steady kind, not flighty or featherbrained like so many of them today."

It feels like it's been a while since I've issued one of these dispatches; besides additional remunerative work and family goings-on, my free time has been taken up by the ramifications of my purchase at an antique mall of a forty-dollar box of dusty old HO railroad models and rusty brass track, including the fact that, when my father learned that I was trying to get fifty-year old trains running, he sent me multiple boxes of his own model railroad equipment and supplies from the 1970s and I have been striving to get that stuff in working order.  But another reason I haven't blogged in a while is that the book I have been reading, Kinglsey Amis's 1960 novel Take a Girl Like You, a Signet paperback printing of which I picked up at Wonder Book last year, has taken me a bit of time to get through.  But I have finally finished what Saturday Review proclaimed to be Amis's "biggest, most ambitious (and best) novel," a work which the susceptible people at the London Observer found "awe-inspiring," and can write this blog post and move on with my fiction reading life.

Take a Girl Like You is a well-written realistic novel about real life, its theme being, as the excitable crew at the London Observer tells us in the back cover text, sex.  The characters in the book all have believable personalities and behave in easily understandable ways--all the actions and relationships ring true, and little if any suspension of disbelief is required of the reader.  Amis's novel is full of understated, even subtle, humor that is based on people's thoughts and feelings, not wacky coincidences or hyperbolic parody.  Amis explores what life is like for a beautiful naïve young woman from the "industrial north of England" who moves to the south, a manipulative and lecherous young man who pursues sex with gusto and has deflowered many a virgin, and his friend and roommate, an unattractive man whose pursuit of women has been a history of frustration and failure.  Amis compares old-fashioned mores, typified by the working class of the north, with the modern licentiousness practiced by the educated middle-class professionals and aristocracy in London and its environs, suggesting that the new sexual freedoms are bound to conquer traditional restraint, though without suggesting this will make people any happier.  And he provides amusing anecdotes about academic life, all three of the principal characters being educators--the young lady from the north a teacher of primary school age children, the young men "school masters" who apparently instruct the equivalent of American high school students (one of the cohorts in receipt of instruction is described as "the Junior Sixth.") 

The plot follows northerner Jennifer Bunn as she takes up a job at a school an hour or so from London and moves in to one of those private houses whose owners take in multiple boarders which old fiction is full of and meets a bunch of people from different parts of Britain and even a woman who claims to be from France but (as we learn at the very end of the novel) is an Englishwoman putting on an act because "Playing a part's the only thing left these days, it shows you won't deal with society in the way it wants you to."  Jenny is a dark exotic-looking beauty, often mistaken for a Frenchwoman, and every man she meets--plus the faux-Frenchwoman--endeavours to get into her knickers, but Jenny has old-fashioned values and wants to retain her virginity, and resists all their advances.  Chief among the men pursuing Jenny is Patrick Standish, a good-looking half-Irish teacher of Latin who embraces all things modern, music and culture and ways of thinking--"I haven't got my ideas from anyone else, I've thought them out for myself."  One of Patrick's ideas is that marriage is a lot of bunk, and his primary interest in life is having sex with lots of different women, a field in which he has achieved considerable success.  In contrast we have Patrick's virginal comrade, Scotsman Graham McClintoch, a fellow Labour Party activist and schoolmaster.  Graham is himself consumed with sexual desire, but has old-fashioned values and looks down on Patrick's seductions; perhaps this is one reason he has never had any success with the ladies.

Patrick is not only a charming, smart, handsome and outgoing man, but a selfish and callous deceiver and manipulator, and throughout the book's course he manages the other characters like some kind of puppet master.  One of the elements of the novel that makes it feel so much like real life is its pervasive moral ambiguity; I was not at all clear how much we were expected to admire Patrick for his successful pursuit of all those women and achievement of vengeance on minor characters or to share his contempt for traditional morals, how much we were supposed to sympathize with Jenny in her defense of her virginity and Graham in his apparently doomed efforts to divest himself of his own virginity, and to pity or commend both Jenny and Graham as they try to do the right thing, only to find their generosity and efforts to help people fall flat and go unrewarded.  

Anyway, Jenny is the most beautiful woman Patrick has ever seen and by the novel's halfway point he has gotten her to fall deeply in love with him.  The two seriously date for months; Jenny is deeply happy and Jenny's working class parents are charmed when they meet Patrick; Jenny's mother expects them to soon be married and Jenny hopes this will be the case.  However, Patrick is accustomed to regularly enjoying sexual intercourse, and finds Jenny's limiting him to "heavy necking" to be very frustrating, and in any case marriage does not interest him.  

In a long sequence, Patrick and one of the novel's many secondary characters go to London where, among other capers, Patrick is introduced to a beautiful, self-absorbed and air-headed young actress whom he seduces by telling her he is some kind of businessman.  Soon after bedding this woman, Patrick issues Jenny an ultimatum--she must have sex with him or they will be through.  Jenny initially agrees, but when the day upon which she is to surrender her virginity to Patrick comes, she stands him up.  By a coincidence, that very day the headmaster's 17-year-old daughter, who has been pursuing Patrick for ages, comes to his place, where he is alone awaiting Jenny (he has tricked Graham into being out all day) and throws herself at him.  After they have sex, the 17-year-old admits the real reason she has just given herself to Patrick--she is pregnant by some other guy and needs help getting an abortion, and of course womanizer Patrick can introduce her to a discrete and reliable abortionist.      

Amis does a good job in the last third or quarter or so of the novel keeping readers in suspense as to what is going to happen.  Many eventualities seem possible, and at various times I expected Patrick to dump Jenny and break her heart, Jenny to dump Patrick and thus force him to see the error of his ways, Patrick to reform and propose to Jenny, and/or for Jenny to suddenly realize she should build a relationship with good-guy loser Graham.  None of that stuff happens, at least not in a way that sticks.  

At a wild party at a Lord's house, Patrick tells Jenny they are through, Jenny gets drunk and Graham saves her from being raped by some minor character, and then Patrick takes Jenny's virginity while she is so inebriated that she can't even remember it happening.  Jenny tells Patrick they are through, but a few days later is back in his arms, and we are lead to believe they are going to spend the rest of their lives together, more on Patrick's terms than Jenny's.  The novel's ending leaves an impression that the world and life are chaos, with little justice and no peace of mind--cunning and amoral Patrick has triumphed over decent Jenny and Graham, practically coercing Jenny into becoming a person she didn't want to be, and at the same time a sort of shadow lies over Patrick, Amis suggesting in a number of ways that a number of ways Patrick has wasted his potential (to be some kind of literary scholar, it seems) and may even soon be coming to a bad end (indications of advancing age and intimations of an impending medical crisis.)  Wikipedia may describe this book as a "comic novel," but it is kind of a downer.

Take a Girl Like You is a book that is easy to admire, but it is not exactly thrilling.  Maybe I have grown too accustomed to reading short stories and short novels that speculate on the future or the supernatural and involve people fighting in wars or getting involved in horrible crimes; this 270-page book (the print of which is pretty small) about young smart people's love lives and teaching careers wasn't quite up to the task of drawing me away from the task of cleaning and lubricating my trains while I watched giallo movies on YouTube.  

Still, we'll probably be hearing from Kingsley Amis again; looking back on Take a Girl Like You, I like it more than I did when I was actually reading it, and of course I already own other books by Amis.  It even appears that there is a sequel to Take a Girl Like You that continues the story of Patrick and Jenny's relationship.  But expect to see some posts about horror fiction and 1950s SF here at MPorcius Fiction Log before we make our next foray into 20th-century British literary fiction.

Merril-approved 1960 stories by W Moore, J Brunner, H Fast, F Brown, R Bretnor, R G Brown & K Amis

I love the cover of my copy of Dell's 1962 paperback edition of Judith Merril's 1961 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F, which features a yellow sphere created by John Van Zwienen.  Often in life we will find it easy to love exteriors, only to be disappointed with what lies beyond them.  But let's crack open this baby with hope in our hearts and read seven (lucky!) stories by people with whom we already have some familiarity--though not necessarily a fond familiarity!

(First, we'll note that we have already blogged about two stories that appear in 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F.  I liked Arthur C. Clarke's "I Remember Babylon" and I didn't like "Old Hundredth" by Brian Aldiss.  Also, I'll point out that the Lester Del Rey contribution is a half-page poem, a parody of the 23rd Psalm that takes as its topic the dangers of nuclear weapons; that the Ray Bradbury contribution is an essay I haven't read; and that the Walt Kelly contribution is a lame two-page comic strip while the Shel Silverstein contribution is a four-page comic strip depicting a TV that eats people.  Part of Merril's editorial project is expanding the definition of what constitutes SF as well as expanding recognition of SF in media other than traditional prose.)

"The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl" by Ward Moore (1960)   

Years ago I read Ward Moore's "It Becomes Necessary" AKA "The Cold Peace," which Merril included in her seventh Best S-F volume.  I liked that story, so I have some hopes for "The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl," which is the longest story we are reading today, taking up 28 pages of 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F.

This is a sappy story about how a poor rural family during the Depression takes in an alien and their lives are enriched by this E.T.'s miraculous powers to heal people's skin disorders, double or triple the hens' production of eggs and the cows' production of milk, and on and on; this guy has lots and lots of powers.  The alien can't speak English upon arrival, but his alien speech sounds like music that makes everybody "stronger, kinder, more loving."  "The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl" is also one of those misanthropic SF stories that offer us a goody goody alien as a means of throwing human evil into stark relief.  The alien doesn't eat meat or other animal products, and he hates machinery.  He doesn't feel anger or hate, and doesn't even understand those concepts.  He has no interest in possessions--he refuses to sully himself by touching money--or power--he never tries to sway anybody or assert his independence from the patriarch of the family, Malcolm Maxill, an incompetent moonshiner and bootlegger, who exploits his abilities to get rich.  

Maxill's daughter, Nan, who falls in love with the extraterrestrial, endeavors to hide his powers from the outside world, as she knows they will excite the greed and envy of our horrible human race.  Nan marries the alien and they have a child, and she knows she will have to conceal E. T. Jr.'s superpowers as well.  Luckily, Dad then dies in a car wreck so Nan and her husband are free of him.  

After married life of some twenty years, during which Nan's husband does not age, hubby has to return to his people to help them through a crisis.  I guess we are expected to believe he never returns but he has made Nan a better person so it was all worthwhile.    

I generally don't like sappy stories, and I generally don't like stories in which the author creates a super being or super society to dramatize his banal and boring criticisms of America or the white man or capitalism or humanity or whatever.  And I don't like "The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl."       

"The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl" made its debut as the cover story of F&SF, and, after Merril reprinted it in book form, Robert P. Mills, editor of F&SF, and Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg followed suit.  People apparently like this kind of thing.  

"Report on the Nature of the Lunar Surface" by John Brunner (1960)

I've actually never blogged about anything by the famous and prolific John Brunner.  The things I hear about his famous works make me suspect they would irritate me, and when, in my pre-blog days, I read two of his minor works, Maze of Stars and one of the Traveller in Black books, they were not entertaining enough to inspire in me a desire to read anything else by Brunner.  Regardless, I decided to read "Report on the Nature of the Lunar Surface" because it is only two pages long and it made its debut in John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding and Astounding and Campbell's career interest me.

This is a joke story, a report from the first men to land on the moon that informs the authorities that the moon is made of green cheese; you see, some time ago a careless person dropped a sandwich into an unmanned reconnaissance rocket, which subsequently crashed on the moon--the lunar surface has proven to be an ideal medium for the propagation of the sandwich's cheese.  (Is that how cheese works?)  

Waste...of...time.

I have to admit that I am taken aback that serious people like Campbell and Merril would print such a thing, and it is not just them: "Report on the Nature of the Lunar Surface" would be reprinted in at least four later books, including one edited by Robert Hoskins and another by Hal Clement. smh

"The Large Ant" by Howard Fast (1960)

Back in 2016, when we were young, I read three stories by Stalin Peace Prize recipient Howard Fast and said they were "repetitive polemics pushing tired and discredited ideas that lack literary or entertainment value."  (Hmm, nowadays I would say they were "repetitive polemics that push tired and discredited ideas and lack literary or entertainment value."  Oh, well.)  Despite that denunciation, here I am reading another Fast production.

I must report that this is another lame lump of junk.  In "The Large Ant," Fast, whom Merril presents as some kind of mastermind in her little intro, just rehashes in a limp way SF concepts we've already read many times.  There is the noble alien who knows nothing of murder and is used to show, by contrast, how monstrous are human beings.  Fast also throws in the ideas of collective consciousness and  of aliens sitting in judgment of the human race.  Three SF cliches with which "America's foremost chronicler of historical rebellion," as Merril calls him, does absolutely nothing new or fresh.  And it is not like Fast unleashes some brilliant literary style on us in this story--the style is totally ordinary. 

A New York writer is taking a little vacation in the country, fishing and practicing his putting.  While reclining he suddenly sees an ant over a foot long right by him--reflexively he smashes it with a putting iron.  When he takes the dead specimen to a scientist he learns that these oversized ants are popping up all over, and whenever a man sees one he responds by instantly destroying it.  But these aren't ants--they are intelligent aliens, as evidenced by the little tools they carry in camouflaged pouches.  The fact that every single encounter with these aliens results in an immediate instinctive act of murder proves how evil we humans are.  It is assumed by the scientist and his colleagues that these aliens enjoy a collective consciousness, are peace lovers who can't conceive of murder, and may destroy the human race after judging our behavior.

After first appearing in Fantastic Universe, "The Large Ant" would reappear in a host of anthologies, including ones edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison and Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest.  Did editors reprint this dross because they hoped that some of the prestige of Fast would rub off on the SF ghetto?  Or did they love its message, that we are all a bunch of irredeemable jerks and deserve to be killed and wouldn't it be better if we enjoyed collective consciousness instead of individual autonomy.  (Stalin Peace Prize, indeed.)

Sheesh.

"Abominable" by Fredric Brown (1960)

    

Remember back in 2018 when we read Anthony Boucher's praise of Fredric Brown's short-short stories, a form which Brown calls "the vinny?"  "Abominable" is one of three Brown "vinnies" that appeared together in The Dude.  The "magazine devoted to pleasure" misspelled Brown's name on its cover, a goof also committed by the people at Dell on the contents page of 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F.  Sad.

 

A famous film star, an Italian sex symbol, has been captured by the yeti.  The world has given her up for lost.  But a British adventurer who is the sex symbol's biggest fan has not abandoned hope.  He ascends the Himalayan mountain where she disappeared.  When he sees a yeti he shoots it down.  But a second yeti captures him and explains the secret of the yeti.  These beings are humans transformed into monsters by drinking a chemical.  The tribe of yeti periodically captures people to turn into yetis to help maintain the yeti population, and the yeti the Englishman just killed was the Italian actress!  And now he too will be forced to become a yeti--the yeti who captured him is a female and she already has the hots for him.

Barely acceptable filler.  "Abominable" has been included in many Brown collections.

"The Man on Top" by Reginald Bretnor (1951)

Merril wanted to include multiple stories about the Himalayas in her anthology because the abominable snowman had been in the news a lot in 1960, and she came up with three; this is the third.  "The Man on Top" was actually first published in 1951, in Esquire, but Merril considered it eligible for publication in 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F because it was reprinted in F&SF in 1960.  I think it is fair to wonder if, in an effort to be cute or funny, Merril wasn't drifting away from her book's stated purpose of showcasing the best fantasy and science fiction published in 1960.

"The Man on Top" is a story that contrasts the terrible arrogance and inhuman technology of the white man with the serene wisdom of the East, and has a twist ending that is cheap and lame.  Instead of demonstrating the alleged superiority of the East, it just asserts it in an unconvincing manner.  Maybe I am exaggerating the ambition of the story, though--maybe "The Man on Top" is just supposed to be a light joke story. 

Barbank is a rich jerk who wants to be the first man to reach the summit of the world's highest mountain.  He has contempt for the Sherpas, thinking he doesn't need their aid, that he can use superior equipment and techniques that he himself has designed to get to the top of the mountain.  He launches the expedition with ten other white men, including the narrator.  You might call the narrator a nice liberal; he always has nice things to say about the Sherpas and he is so turned off by Barbank's arrogance that he decides to sabotage Barbank's ambitions, to make sure Barbank does not succeed in becoming the first man to reach the peak of the world's tallest mountain.

Before the expedition departs, they go visit a local Holy Man, a guy in a loin cloth who has a beautiful face and serene affect and imparts words of wisdom, etc.  The Holy Man tells Barbank that Barbank cannot achieve his heart's desire without the Holy Man's help; Barbank scoffs.

The march up the freezing cold mountain is challenging, but Barbank's plans work and he and the narrator approach the summit.  The narrator proves that he is the stronger, and could race ahead and become himself the first man to get to the top of the world, but decides to let Barbank pass him, to humiliate the arrogant jerk by patronizing him.  On the peak the climbers find the Holy Man, naked and serene as ever, sitting in a little circle of warmth apparently created by his magic powers.  It is not made clear how he got there, flew or teleported, I guess.  Anyway, the joke ending of the story is that the Holy Man asks Barbank how he got up the mountain and acts surprised to hear a man would walk all this way. 

Bretnor's story is up to the standard of acceptable filler until the end, but the climax/punchline is lame and annoying.  Maybe "The Man on Top" is meant to be a shaggy dog story, but the emphasis on the contrast between the West and the East and the contrast between the jerk Barbank and the sensitive goody goody narrator suggests the story has some kind of tendentious social message to convey and is not merely meant as a joke.    

"The Man on Top" would be reprinted again in an anthology of ESP stories, and by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander in their collection of short shorts, which I read from way back in the infancy of this blog in 2014.

"David's Daddy" by Rosel George Brown (1960)

We just recently read two novels by Rosel George Brown, Sibyl Sue Blue, the tale of a cigar-smoking sexually promiscuous lady cop of the future, and its sequel, The Waters of Centaurus.  Here's our chance to sample another of Brown's productions, a story that first appeared in Fantastic and in 2003 was revived by Ellen Datlow for her internet magazine.

Like the Sibyl Sue Blue novels, "David's Daddy" is about a heroic female public employee.  It is also a grim sad story about how horrible life is!

Our narrator is a young school teacher.  Amid all the stuff in the first part of the story about how hard it is to be a teacher and how awesome teachers are there is a clue that one of the kids in the school is telepathic, can read minds and transmit his thoughts to other minds.  The second part of the story is about how a creepy guy comes to the school to ask to bring his son home.  The son is embarrassed by his father, a disgusting drunk and a loser who has been pushed around by others all his life.  Our narrator employs the psychological tricks she uses to keep the students under control to manipulate the scary father, whom she fears has planted a bomb in the school.  Then she recruits the telepath kid to read the bomber's mind and help her find and deactivate the bomb.  (They put the bomb in a tub of water.  Does that really work?)

The end of the story highlights how the bomber's son is ashamed ("So many things were worse than death") and how the telepathic kid must know how horrible and unreliable are people and the world because he can read minds.

This is the best story we have read yet today because it has real human feeling and on a mechanical level the plot and pacing work well--it is not a lame joke like several of the stories described above and it is not too long like Moore's story and it feels sort of fresh, not tired, like Fast's story.  And yet all those stories have been reprinted more often than Brown's--the world and people really are unreliable!   

"Hemingway in Space" by Kingsley Amis (1960)

Amis was seen as a major mainstream literary figure and when his New Maps of Hell, described in cover blurbs as "A Survey of Science Fiction" and "The Book That Made Science Fiction Grow Up," was published it received a lot of attention from the SF community.  Anthony Boucher contributes a three-page essay to 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F entitled "S-F Books: 1960" and devotes a paragraph to New Maps of Hell, which he calls "the most controversial book of the year," and notes that Merril was in violent disagreement with it.  In a 1970s interview* he conducted via mail with Paul Walker, Frederik Pohl notes that in New Maps of Hell Amis praised Pohl to the skies.  But...

A few years later, Kingsley changed his wife and his politics and came to the conclusion I was no damn good at all.

"Hemingway in Space" is a five-page parody; I'm probably not familiar enough with Hemingway to really get the nuances of this thing.  I am actually more familiar with Amis's work than Hemingway's; I read Lucky Jim and Jake's Thing in 2019 and plan to read another Amis mainstream novel soon.

A big game hunter and his native guide, a two-headed Martian, are taking a couple out hunting a powerful and dangerous whale-sized beast that lives in the vacuum of space.  The husband is a college professor or something, and his wife is a loud, annoying, petulant, self-important nag.  The hunter thinks the prof should get rid of the "bitch" but isn't brave enough to do so.

The party comes upon their quarry, and something goes wrong and the Martian dies, sacrificing himself to save the humans.  The wife is more or less to blame for the catastrophe, and the prof grows the stones to put her in her place (he sends her to the galley to cook) and divorce her.  

This is a pretty gentle satire--it almost reads like a sincere SF adventure story with blasters and space suits and air locks and like a straight masculine tale of how women are obstacles to an authentic life and freedom is the most important value and indigenous people are noble and the natural world is beautiful and all that.  Where the parody becomes obvious is when Amis uses repetition to make those themes seem ridiculous; the hunter doesn't just call the woman a bitch once but again and again, the contrast of the blackness of the void and the brightness of the stars isn't just mentioned once but restated again and again in a single paragraph, and so forth.  But "Hemingway in Space" doesn't feel like an effort to dismiss the commonplaces of science fiction or undermine those masculine values, but rather a mock-up of a mediocre effort to employ those tropes and promote those values--Amis doesn't so much ridicule the conquest of space and the pursuit of the authentic life in the wilderness as he does writers who incompetently work with these ideas.

I found this an engaging, even provocative story, as I wondered to what extent Amis was goofing on adventure SF and Hemingway, and to what extent he was emulating or celebrating them, perhaps esoterically.  Amis's "Hemingway in Space" is the only competition faced by Rosel George Brown's "David's Daddy" for the title of best story we've read today.

"Hemingway in Space" debuted in Punch, has appeared in Russian and Italian anthologies (the Italian volume is adorned with a terrific repurposed Karel Thole illo) and was chosen by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison for their anthology of representative 1960s SF stories.  

*You can read it in Walker's Speaking of Science Fiction.       

**********

So we read seven stories from 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F today, and only two of them were good (luckily they were the last two, so I can walk away from this blog post with a smile on my face instead of a scowl.)  It seems I am not on the same wavelength as Judith Merril and the legions of people who are always extravagantly singing her praises (see contemporary extravagant praise below.)

The first two quotes are from the back cover of 
6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F;
the four quotes that follow are from the first page of 
the anthology

More science fiction short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

Odd stories selected by G Conklin: K Amis, J H Schmitz & F L Wallace

We just read the Pyramid paperback printing of Philip José Farmer's novel about a war among the inner planets in which the Pope is one of the heroes, Tongues of the Moon.  The back cover of that volume features an ad for another Pyramid paperback, Five-Odd, a 1964 anthology of SF stories that appeared in SF magazines in the period 1954-1961.  I actually own that edition of Five-Odd; I think I got it at one of those antique malls on Route 40 in Hagerstown--those places are full of bargains for the fan of 20th-century SF and comics.  

Above the ad for Tongues of the Moon on the back cover of Five-Odd is the come-on text that tells you that its editor, Groff Conklin, is a "master anthologist" and the five stories he has selected are "top notch SF from leading American and British writers."  Under the roll call of these six savants on the front cover is an illustration of five spacers: a fat dude, a fit dude, and three trim dudettes.  (The fat guy must have aced his SATs or something.)  This painting is by John Schoenherr, whom I usually think is good, but this one looks kind of amateurish--what is up with everybody's arms?  

Let's check out three of these "top notch" stories, those by British novelist Kingsley Amis, chronicler of female space cops James H. Schmitz, and F. L. Wallace, with whom I am not very familiar.

"Something Strange" by Kingsley Amis (1960)

Kingsley Amis is no stranger to MPorcius Fiction Log.  We've read his novels Lucky Jim and Jake's Thing.  Back in 2018 I had a chance to buy an edition of his novel The Anti-Death League with a very stylish sex and violence cover, and today regret not having done so.  The Green Man and Russian Hide-and-Seek look like they might be worth reading.  In his intro to Five-Odd, Conklin suggests that "Something Strange" is Amis's first published SF story.  isfdb alerts us that it appeared in the famous weekly The Spectator (oldest surviving weekly in the world, first published during the reign of King George IV and the premiership of the Duke of Wellington) before being picked up by Robert P. Mills for an "all star" issue of F&SF where it was presented alongside stories by Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson and Kris Neville.  Another magazine I should check out someday.

Four people are in a small space station at the edge of the galaxy.  Every day they take readings of the stars in view and transmit the data they collect back to Earth.  There are two men, a fat one who is smarter than the rest and a fit one, and two attractive women; the women are paired off with the men, but the men are not quite satisfied--the fit man would like to have sex every day but the woman he is sleeping with doesn't want it that often, while the heavy man and his partner have sex quite often, but he still would rather be with the less sexually active woman. 

The most noteworthy thing about their service in the station is that every day the sensors detect, and they see and sometimes hear, some inexplicable thing going on outside the space station.  These phenomena must be illusions, as they are plainly impossible.  As the story progresses the fat guy is uneasy or disordered--he is on the cusp of figuring out something important.  As we observe these four people, we are given clues as to what is actually going on.  Of course, Groff Conklin, master anthologist, told us what is going on in his intro to the story, which I now know I should not have read before actually reading the story.

In the final scenes some people with rifles open up the space station and enter.  They are soldiers of a revolutionary army that has just defeated the local forces of the government--our four main characters have been on Earth the whole time, in a sealed tank, hypnotized into thinking they are a space crew as part of government experiments.  A further twist is the revelation of what the government was trying to accomplish in this experiment--it seems the government was trying to make them immune to fear by erasing from their brains all conception of death and love.

This story is well-written and all that, and the theory that we would be fearless if we didn't know about death and couldn't fall in love is thought-provoking, but I am never that keen on these Matrix/Truman Show type stories--I find their revelations deflating.  Four spacers on a remote station, having to contend with interpersonal crises and alien mysteries is, to me, more interesting material for a story than "the authoritarian government is making people see illusions, and after you read fifteen pages of illusions we tell you they are illusions--gotcha!"  Amis plays fair, giving you enough clues so that you don't feel tricked at the end, but this story is not for me; "Something Strange" is one of those stories which a cold and objective MPorcius knows is good, but which the experiences and prejudices and inclinations of flesh and blood MPorcius keep him from enjoying more than a merely acceptable story. 

Students of SF history should compare "Something Strange" to Christopher Priest's 1971 story "Real-Time World." 

"Something Strange" can be found in the Amis collection My Enemy's Enemy and numerous anthologies.

"Gone Fishing" by James H. Schmitz (1961)

I've read some good science fiction adventure fiction by Schmitz, like the novel The Demon Breed, the collection Agent of Vega, and the short story "Grandpa," these stories generally include interesting aliens and the strong female protagonist we are expected to crave nowadays--Schmitz was on the strong female protagonist beat over two decades before I was born (the title story of Agent of Vega was first published in 1949.)

("Gone Fishing" includes no aliens or women, but you don't expect me to rewrite that first paragraph, do you?)

Barny Chard is a crooked financier and a suave con man.  Over the course of scenes reminiscent of detective fiction, he discovers that septuagenarian retired physicist Oliver McAllen has invented a teleporter.  The teleporter is very inexpensive to construct and operate, and so McAllen has decided to keep it a secret--nobody will be safe if the secret gets out, as every criminal, terrorist and government will have the ability to go anywhere at anytime.  

Chard introduces himself to McAllen and plots to get himself in a position to possess the secret of the device and to murder McAllen and his assistant, an African-American engineer who turns McAllen's theories into practical devices and who poses as McAllen's valet.  But McAllen and the engineer--and the secret association of geniuses of which they are members--are more cautious and clever than Chard realized; Chard is taken prisoner and finds his prison is an extrasolar planet!  A pleasant enough place, populated with transplanted Earth trees and birds and squirrels and supplied with all the food and water Chard will need to survive for years, but very very lonely!

For five years the alien planet will be out of reach of the teleporter system based on Earth, its orbit putting its sun between itself and Earth.  McAllen planned it this way--reminding us of the Amis story we just read, McAllen has used the opportune appearance of Chard in his life to conduct an experiment in altering the psychology of a human being by subjecting it to a punishingly limited menu of stimuli; such an experiment might be considered cruel by other members of the association, who ight want to rescue Chard, and so McAllen has put Chard out of their reach.  We observe how Chard responds to being all alone on this safe alien planet for half a decade.  

"Gone Fishing" is smoothly written, though perhaps a little long and slow, and the characters are all sort of interesting.  The ending is a little underwhelming, however.  Moderately good, I think.

"Gone Fishing" debuted in an issue of Analog with a Schoenherr cover that shows the kind of solid work the man is capable of.  It would be included in a 2001 Baen Schmitz collection that is an expansion of the 1960s Agent of Vega I read.  

"Big Ancestor" by F. L. Wallace (1954)

Wallace doesn't seem to have devoted his life to SF but to have had a real job as an engineer; still, he got like two dozen stories printed in SF magazines in the decade between 1951 and '61, most in the more "respectable" SF magazines like Galaxy and Astounding.  I read his story "Student Body" when I read Spectrum 5, and thought it not bad.

It is the future of interstellar commerce on a vast scale!  Earth people have encountered many intelligent alien species, and perhaps more amazingly, have encountered many varieties of the human race, some of whom can interbreed with Earth humans, and some of whom cannot.  It is theorized that the first starfaring human species, 200,000 years ago, flew around this part of the Milky Way, colonizing many different planets, Earth among them, and these colonists have forgotten their origin and evolved since.  The limited archaeological evidence that remains of these progenitors of ours suggests they grew to forty feet tall.   

An expedition is underway to search for the planet from which our economy-sized ancestors hailed.  The pilot of the expedition's star ship has fallen ill, so a non-human alien who looks like a big ribbon or tapeworm has been hired to fly the vessel.  Most of the text of the story consists of conversations, much of them the humans explaining to the worm pilot the theory I summarized in the last para.  There is also considerable discussion of some vermin who have got aboard the ship and mutated into even more troublesome pests, and human efforts to deal with the little invaders.

Other conversations demonstrate the tension that exists between the different species and sub-species of humans who crew the ship.  There is a hierarchy of human species; some are considered "early" and "primitive," others "late" and "advanced."  (Lots of old SF stories address the related topics of evolution and mutation, and it is very common for them to present evolution in a Whiggish way, suggesting evolution is a ladder that a species or race climbs, each step an advance or improvement on earlier forms.)  A woman aboard the ship from an advanced demographic of humanity that can consciously control such bodily functions as healing and thus heal very quickly, is sexually attracted and engaged in a physical affair with a more primitive man, but is reluctant to marry him or have children with him because of his inferiority, leading to much resentment and jealousy on his part.  Wallace offers us a scene of cruelty and fetishistic eroticism in which the advanced woman humiliates her less advanced lover, egging him on to hit her, and apparently enjoys the blow when he does.  (This tragic and perverse scene in which lovers deliberately hurt each other and struggle to comprehend their own apparently inexplicable lusts is much more arousing than the lame and idiotic depictions of sex in those two Charles Beaumont stories we read in the last episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, and it feels totally believable, being as sad and disappointing as real life, unlike the childish wish fulfillment fantasy sex Beaumont tried to lay on us.)  

The expedition finds the planet, thanks to the abilities of the worm, and learns the origins of the human race.  Those forty-foot tall people were not our ancestors; they were giant intelligent slug people.  Our ancestors were vermin who throve in the slugs' sewers and sneaked aboard their ships and thusly infested the Milky Way.  (Our ancestors apparently behaved much like the vermin aboard the expedition's ship.)  The slug people fled the Milky Way to get away from us.

As demonstrated by the relationships among the crew of the expedition, galactic civilization is very hierarchical, and the fact that the human race is descended from vermin is going to mean all the other intelligent races will look down on us.  Learning our origin has been a terrible mistake. 

This is a hardcore misanthropic story--the human race is vermin or children and the other spacefaring aliens react to us with disgust and terror (as demonstrated by the slugs) or treat us with contempt and condescension (as demonstrated by the worm.)  And human beings treat each other shabbily, different strata of the pecking order using each other sexually but withholding love.

Students of SF history should compare "Big Ancestor" with Edmond Hamilton's 1930s misanthropic evolution/radiation/origin of mankind stories like "Accursed Galaxy" and "Devolution."  

Provocative and crazy, depressing and fresh, thumbs up for "Big Ancestor," which really engages the reader's emotions, is the best story we've read today.

"Big Ancestor" was selected by Brian Aldiss for his anthology Galactic Empires: Volume 2. 

**********

Five-Odd was a successful anthology, reprinted in other languages and in Great Britain under the less gimmicky title Possible Tomorrows.  The Amis and Schmitz are good, but I found their twist endings a little disappointing.  The Wallace, on the other hand, gains strength as it proceeds.  

More post-war stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.                 

Stories by Miller, Jones, Schmitz and Godwin from Spectrum 5

Back in the middle of July I purchased a copy of Kinglsey Amis and Robert Conquest's Spectrum 5, a 1966 anthology of 1950s SF stories; my copy of a 1968 edition has an irresistibly beautiful cover painting by Paul Lehr.

In their introduction, Amis and Conquest defend science fiction from the haters.  After making an appeal to authority (reminding us that C. S. Lewis, Angus Wilson, and William Golding are all SF fans) they get to some more serious literary analysis.  Novelist and James Bond fanatic Amis and poet and Sovietologist Conquest argue that while a good writing style would be nice (they suggest J. G. Ballard and Algis Budrys as examples of SF writers with a good style) it is not essential in SF, as what makes SF what it is is mythic themes (they present Jules Verne as an example here) or ideas (for this they offer the example of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s "Who Goes There," an SF story with "a brilliantly engineered main problem" resolved by an "unexpected but logical solution.")  As for the development of character, another virtue supposedly absent in SF, Amis and Conquest follow the line of Edmund Crispin, who noted that science fiction is about the relationship of humanity to some novel "thing," an invention or alien or cataclysm or whatever.  The character in such a story need not, maybe even should not, be too unusual or complex, because he represents all of mankind, acts as a sort of everyman.  Amis and Conquest's examples here include, again, Verne, as well as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, the narrator of which represents an ordinary Englishman.

I don't know to what extent I agree with everything Amis and Conquest have to say, but it is a thought-provoking little essay that makes me want to see the essays at the start of the other Spectrum volumes.

Let's read four stories from Spectrum 5 by writers we have already discussed at least a little here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Raymond F. Jones, James H. Schmitz, and Tom Godwin.  All four of these stories appeared in Astounding, which was sort of the flagship for SF that was about science and ideas and didn't necessarily focus on heroic or horrific adventures or prioritize literary style.

"Crucifixius Etiam" by Walter M. Miller, Jr.  (1953)

I loved Miller's 1954 story "I Made You," and liked his 1955 "The Triflin' Man" so I have high hopes for this one!

It is the year 2134, and Peruvian Manue Nanti wants to travel the world and see the sights: Notre Dame, New York skyscrapers, the pyramids of Egypt, the radioactive craters of Russia.  But he needs money to do so.  Solution: signing a five-year contract for a lucrative job on Mars!

On Mars Nanti works as a laborer, swinging a pick!  To breathe the thin air of Mars, laborers like Nanti have artificial lung machines implanted into their bodies.  The risk of using such a machine is that your body will likely forget how to breathe naturally, and your natural lungs will atrophy, and you won't be able to live without the uncomfortable machine, even back on oxygen-rich Earth.  (The engineers have better machines and better working and living conditions and don't run this risk as severely.)

Life for Nanti on Mars is a nightmare--no women, no friends (everybody on Mars is a jerk), the work is exhausting (there is a vague and not really convincing explanation for why they use picks and shovels instead of bulldozers and backhoes on Mars) and the lung machine is like a torture device, the valves pulling painfully at the skin in which they are embedded every time you move or try to breathe naturally.

For most of its 21 pages "Crucifixius Etiam" reads like one of those stories in which the space program is a foolish waste of time and humans aren't fit to live off of Earth--beyond Earth, Earthmen lose their culture, religion, morality, etc.  This is Barry Malzberg territory, and demonstrates that 1) Malzberg is not quite as innovative as he is sometimes considered, 2) pre-New Wave SF and Astounding in particular are not quite so technophilic and optimistic as sometimes considered!  It is also one of those stories in which the government and bourgeoisie abuse the working classes (represented by non-whites like Nanti) and major government and industrial projects, like terraforming Mars, don't have a legitimate goal, but are a scam that serve, as one character in "Crucifixius Etiam" puts it, as "an outlet for surplus energies, manpower, money....if the Project folded, surplus would pile up--[causing a] big depression on Earth."

The ending of Miller's story could be considered a twist--a hopeful and life-affirming twist!  When it is explained to Nanti that he and the other people stuck on the Hell that is Mars are building the first of 300 derricks and associated processing machines that will draw up subterranean frozen "tritium" and convert it to helium and oxygen so that in 800 years Mars will have an Earth-like atmosphere, he accepts his fate and believes his sacrifice is worthwhile.  Nanti suffers now so that people in eight centuries can live on a beautiful healthy world!  Miller doesn't come right out and say it, but I believe we are meant to see Nanti and his comrades as like Christ, sacrificing themselves for others, and like Moses, unable to enter the promised land to which they are leading humanity; Miller includes priests and rabbis as minor characters, nudging you, I believe, to make this interpretation.

Not bad--Miller's style is good and all the economic, religious, and technological stuff, whether or not any of it is really believable, is interesting and serves a human story.  Anthologists Judith Merrill and Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty would see merit in "Crucifixius Etiam" and reprint the story (in Human? and their The Best Science Fiction Stories series, respectively) in 1954, over a decade before Amis and Conquest did.

"Noise Level" by Raymond F. Jones (1952)

I really enjoyed Jones's novel about disembodied brains, artificial life, and the perils of socialism, 1962's The Cybernetic Brains, so I am also looking forward to this one!

It is the Cold War.  A bunch of physicists are gathered together by the U.S. government under conditions of strict security to watch a film.  The film depicts a twenty-something demonstrating to government officials his anti-gravity device, a thing like a backpack that lets you levitate and fly around!  But during the demonstration the device explodes, killing the young inventor!  The assembled eggheads are told the young inventor was a paranoid with no friends who left no notes or blueprints describing his amazing invention, and they have been summoned to work on the top secret project of studying the wreckage and this genius misfit's library and lab with the goal of rediscovering the secret of anti-grav!

"Noise Level" is a smooth and pleasant read, though some may say it is too long (like 45 pages in my copy of Spectrum 5) and doesn't amount to much: it consists mostly of conversations and throws around concepts like Einstein's postulate of equivalence and metaphors involving whirlpools and signal to noise ratios.  The point of the story is that people get too set in their ways to be able to think outside the box and that being more open-minded is the path to making major breakthroughs.

All the physicists, before seeing that film, thought that anti-grav was impossible.  Some of them maintain that anti-grav is impossible and that the film is a hoax.  But seeing the film convinces some of them that anti-grav is possible--they get to work on the problem and in a few weeks have a working prototype of an anti-grav vehicle that weighs one hundred tons.  The twist of the story is that the film and wreckage and lab are all a government trick, just special effects and props designed to get the country's best physicists to abandon their preconceptions and free their minds so they can develop a technology that will allow us to explore the universe and give us a leg up on the commies.  The sense of wonder ending is the revelation that all the things we think are impossible are in fact possible if we can first convince ourselves that they are possible, which will free our minds and give us a chance, through hard work of course, to make them a reality.

This story is alright, and it has many of the hallmarks of classic golden age SF: a bunch of scientists, a paradigm shift and a sensawunda ending, and the use of trickery and manipulation by an elite group on an inferior group for their own good.  I can't help but find the lionization of elite trickery of the masses, which we see so often in classic SF (Asimov's Foundation stories and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress are my go-to examples) kind of sick and twisted, but at least this time the victims are themselves a bunch of geniuses.

"Noise Level" was included in two anthologies published before Spectrum 5, one by William Sloane and one by Edmund Crispin, and was also selected by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss for a 1973 anthology of Astounding material.

"Grandpa" by James H. Schmitz (1955)

I enjoyed Schmitz's 1943 horror tale "Greenface" and his collection of stories about female psychic space cops who manipulate people (or just shoot them, you know, whatever works), Agent of Vega, so I've got no qualms about reading this one.

Cord is a fifteen-year-old boy, a member of the two-thousand strong team preparing planet Sutang for colonization.  Schmitz stories usually portray women in positions of authority, and as the story begins a seventeen-year-old girl is warning Cord that he had better start behaving or the Regent, the head woman in charge of the colony, will have him sent back to his home planet in disgrace.  Don't think that Cord has been smoking crack and playing dice while neglecting his duties, dear reader--Cord is a junior biologist and when he is supposed to be following orders he has been capturing native fauna and studying them in his unauthorized private zoo.  Cord is from planet Vanadia, a world settled relatively recently by humans, and he isn't as enamored of rules and regulations as the Terrans who make up the vast majority of the team's members.  (I thought maybe Schmitz here was trying to remind us of how British people sometimes see Americans and Australians as unruly uncouth cowboys.) 

One of Cord's jobs, apparently, is as a driver, so when the Regent comes by to make an inspection of the Colonial Team's work, Cord drives the vehicles she rides around the colony.  One of these "vehicles" is a native animal, a thing like a giant lily pad, 25 to 50 feet across, with all kinds of tendrils and paddles underwater; people can climb aboard this creature, which the humans call "a raft," and direct its movement.  (All you animal rights activists will be booking flights to Sutang when I tell you that the way one directs a raft is by shooting it with a heat ray pistol--don't get your granola in a bunch, treehuggers, the heat ray is--well, usually--set on low power!)

A dangerous situation arises related to the larger than average raft Cord and the Regent's party are riding (this raft has been christened "Grandpa") and it is Cord who saves the day using his knowledge of biology and his powers of observation and quick-thinking and quick-stabbing.

The real star of this story is the ecology of Sutang--Schmitz does a great job of coming up with and describing interesting alien life forms.  The character of Cord, the slightly subversive teen-aged boy, is fun (he hopes that a disaster will occur so he can be a hero and save his position on Sutang.)  A good story.

"Grandpa" has been anthologized many times, in books edited by Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Martin. H. Greenberg, Gardner Dozois, and still more. A well-regarded classic with something for everybody--alien monsters, the glorification of science and the colonization of the galaxy, people shooting off guns and stabbing enemies with knives, and women who tell you what to do for your own good whom the author doesn't portray as nags but as people we are supposed to admire.

"Mother of Invention" by Tom Godwin (1953)

So far, the stories I have read from Spectrum 5 have been stories that have been widely anthologized, stories that editors and/or readers have been crazy about.  But "Mother of Invention" has only been anthologized by Amis and Conquest, though it has also appeared in the Croat magazine Sirius in 1976 and a Baen collection of Godwin's work with a preface and an afterword by our hero Barry Malzberg.  Maybe this one is weak, or maybe Amis and Conquest have found an overlooked gem?  (It is also possible that this story's length, like 60 pages in my copy of Spectrum 5, has discouraged reprinting.)  Well, let's find out what is up with this one.

"Mother of Invention" starts with a sort of comedy scene, in which a concatenation of factors--including a nagging wife!--leads to a mistake by a technician engaged in inspecting a space ship's "nuclear converter."  This mistake, compounded with additional bad luck, leads to the five men who own the ship being marooned on a virgin planet they discover 30,000 light years away from civilization.

Aurora, the name they give this new world, has a very high percentage of carbon in its make up, and there are diamonds as big as your fist all over the ground and diamond dust in the air which plays havoc with the men's equipment as they search for the uranium and cadmium they need to repair their wrecked space ship. They are under a lot of time pressure, because in seven or eight months a star passing through this system (they erroneously thought this was a binary system--doh!) is going to annihilate Aurora.

Unable to find any uranium, and with their mining equipment ruined by the diamond dust anyway, the five adventurers decide to invent an anti-grav device.  Through dogged persistence, and by keeping their minds open, they accomplish in the wilderness what people in well-appointed labs back on Earth were never able to.  Then, like in an Edmond Hamilton story, they move Aurora itself away from the impending stellar collision and ride the planet back home.

Back in 2014 I read Godwin's novel The Survivors, AKA Space Prison.  As here in "Mother of Invention," in The Survivors a bunch of people find themselves on a barren planet but through hard work not only escape but trigger a paradigm shift and usher in a new period of human history.  "The Mother of Invention" is also like The Survivors in that it is quite bland.  The five explorers in "The Mother of Invention" lack personality, motivation and relationships--there is more human drama and characterization in the jocular little prologue than the main story.  (Maybe Amis and Conquest chose it specifically to prove their point about SF not needing characterization?)  After Schmitz's vivid and fascinating Sutang, Godwin's Aurora is woefully dull.  I gave The Survivors a marginal negative vote, but I'll say "Mother of Invention" is barely acceptable.  Like Jones's anti-grav story, it is very much a classic SF tale about male scientists who, in response to an external impetus, invent a technology that will revolutionize human life, but Jones injects more surprise, fun, and human feeling into his story.

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The first US edition of Spectrum 5 has a
wacky collage cover--I think Joachim Boaz
loves this kind of thing!

Godwin's piece is pretty marginal, but these four stories are all worthwhile reads, good examples of SF that glorifies science and technology and tells you that it totally makes sense to take terrible risks and make huge sacrifices to expand the power and reach of the human race.

Spectrum 5 includes eight stories; in our next episode I'll read the four stories in it by SF writers I don't think are quite as famous as Walter A Canticle for Liebowitz Miller, Raymond This Island Earth Jones, James Witches of Karres Schmitz and Tom "The Cold Equations" Godwin.