Merril-approved 1958 stories by P Ashwell, D Berry and R Bloch

In alphabetical order by author, we are reading stories published in 1958 that Judith Merril recommended in the back of her 1959 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  We started this journey with Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin, and today finish up the "A"s with Pauline Ashwell and advance into the "B"s with Don Berry and Robert Bloch.

"Unwillingly to School" by Pauline Ashwell

Merril actually has two stories by Ashwell on her list; I read the other, "Big Sword," back in 2019 when we were reading Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest's Spectrum V.  Like "Big Sword," "Unwillingly to School" debuted in Astounding; wikipedia credits Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. with discovering Ashwell.

"Unwillingly to School" is a lot like those Heinlein stories in which a young person, often the first-person narrator, enters the wider world and receives life lessons, a story that both is focused on likable characters in human relationships that have some emotional effect on the reader and affords the author opportunities to speculate on what life might be like in the future as well as unleash some philosophy on you.  

"Unwillingly to School" is 38 pages long and the first in a series of four stories about Lysistrata "Liz" Lee; the four stories appeared together in the 1992 collection Unwillingly to Earth.  "Unwillingly to School" also reappeared in a 1986 anthology of stories considered by such people as Piers Anthony and Barry N. Malzberg to have been "neglected masterpieces" entitled Uncollected Stars, as well as in the 2019 anthology Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963).      

Liz is our narrator, an attractive teenager with blue eyes and blonde hair.  Liz is a tomboy, raised on a frontier world by men (her mother having abandoned the family when little Lizzie was three) and accustomed to working with farm machinery and domestic animals.  Dad is uneducated, and has a sort of minor learning disability that means he can't take advantage of modern high-tech learning machines and instead reads actual physical books, which takes like eight times as long.  Dad, however, has an iron will, a drive to succeed, and an allergy to being pushed around, and these characteristics propelled him to success against all odds on the frontier planet, first as a miner and then as a farmer.  Liz has inherited both her father's learning disability and his independent streak.

The plot of "Unwillingly to School" is set in motion when Dad is injured in an accident on the farm and has to be taken to the hospital in town.  This town is a famously rough place, full of miners who spend weekdays working hard and every night and all weekend getting drunk and letting off steam by fighting each other.  Despite everybody telling her the town is no place for a girl, Liz insists on staying in town to be close to Dad, who is in a coma for some days and then stuck in his hospital bed for weeks.  Like something out of a Shirley Temple movie, Liz gets a job in the toughest dive bar in the town and her charm pacifies all the roughnecks there, bringing out their natural decency.

In the course of all this, Liz meets a college professor from Earth who recruits students from all over the Terran space empire of over a hundred planets.  He is a professor of Cultural Engineering, and Liz's ability to pacify miners who are regulars at the bar suggests she is a natural Cultural Engineer.  This professor, her father, and other characters who care about her, join forces to manipulate Liz into attending college on Earth, even though she has no desire to go to Terra or attend college.  (Like in much of Heinlein's work, there is a tension in this story in regards to authority--rebellion and independence are celebrated, but at the same time wise authority is venerated.)

On Earth, Liz gets some philosophy from her room mate, a woman who thinks rules and regulations are there to be broken and that it is essential to take risks, and a black African (another similarity to Heinlein--the admirable nonwhite character), and of course the college professor.  She also discovers a solution to her learning disability, so she can now "read" as fast as anybody.  As the story ends we have every reason to believe Liz is going to have a successful college career while at the same time maintaining her intellectual independence and not just blindly accepting whatever the profs say. 

"Unwilling to School" is a fun story that is a pleasure to read.  The structure is a little questionable; the story feels like a series of episodes instead of a cohesive whole, and there isn't really a big climax.  One could also argue that Liz isn't driving the narrative, but is at the mercy of others and of circumstance.  These issues make "Unwilling to School" feel sort of like the first two or three chapters of a novel that show the character growing so she will be able to act like a self-directed hero who resolves the conflict that is at the center of in the later sections of the book.

Another issue I have with the story is that Ashwell employs unconventional grammar, capitalization and punctuation, I guess an effort to mimic speech (as opposed to composed and copyedited text) or Liz's disability or just the way language has evolved since the 20th century.  This is a little annoying, but not too bad; I got used to it, and of course it is the kind of ambitious stylistic technique that lots of critics might praise. 

So, thumbs up for "Unwillingly to School."  I'll also note that the Frank Kelly Freas illustrations for the story's appearance here in Astounding are quite fun.

"Man Alone" by Don Berry

Wikipedia tells us that Berry published nine SF stories and then abandoned the form to write fiction and histories set in the Pacific Northwest and the Rocky Mountains.  "Man Alone" seems to be Berry's last published SF story--well, Berry went out with a bang, his last SF work being a cover story for Damon Knight's If that occupies 27 pages of the magazine and was illustrated by Emsh.  (This issue of If is noteworthy as "a special issue" with a silly gimmick--each of the issue's eight short stories is assigned a date and readers are enjoined to read them in order and experience them as a future history of space flight.  "Man Alone" takes place in 2110.)  

I guess Merril liked "Man Alone" because it is about psychology, glamorizes and perhaps emulates mainstream literature, and expresses skepticism of the space program.  I'm calling it merely acceptable, or maybe just barely acceptable, as it is kind of long and slow, and at times feels repetitive.

"Man Alone" is made up of five chapters.  Most of Chapter 1 takes place in a spaceship operated by a single astronaut, and we observe various strange aspects of his psychology.  For one thing, his memory and knowledge are severely lacking--he doesn't seem to understand simple English words and social concepts, "wife" among them.  He seems to operate the spaceship robotically, or automatically, like a man who has been hypnotized--he pushes buttons and dictates messages to home base in response to stimuli, but doesn't consciously will or understand what he is doing, thinks of the stuff he says into the microphone as "nonsense."  As we readers watch, he steers the ship back to Earth, lands at the space program's base in the desert and steps out of the ship, to then encounter invisible aliens--he recognizes their presence only because they touch him--and flee back to the ship.  

The remaining chapters focus on the efforts of a general of the space program and a civilian psychologist who smokes a pipe (Berry commits one of my little pet peeves in this story, writing at length about a person's smoking as a way of giving him a personality and conveying his feelings) to figure out what is going on with the astronaut.  It turns out this guy was given the job of test flying the first ship ever built that can go into hyperspace, and was indeed hypnotically conditioned to operate the vessel.  When he jumped into hyperspace he was so horrified by something that as a defense mechanism his mind made him forget anything and everything about his life and the fact that the human race even exists.  He doesn't know what the word "wife" means, and couldn't see or hear the space program personnel who greeted him upon landing because his brain was trying to hide from him the very fact that the human race exists.

The pipe-smoking shrink figures out how to get the astronaut out of the ship--he has the spaceman's wife call the ship on the radio and ask her husband again and again to disembark, and her familiar voice eventually worms its way into his subconscious and prompts him to leave the ship.  Outside, he is shot with a tranquilizer dart and put into a padded cell.  In the cell the pipe-smoker hypnotizes him, and gets some insight into what is going on in his head.  Then the shrink rereads Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Nature," which contains the line "...if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars."  While the shrink is away the astronaut escapes his padded room and somehow gets back into the ship.  He tries to take off, but because the ship has not been properly prepared, instead of taking off it explodes, killing the astronaut who is the "the loneliest human being who ever lived."  The general says that they will launch another mission just like this one and the shrink is certain the next astronaut to go to hyperspace will be driven just as crazy as the tragic man who was the first.

I guess people like Merril, champion of the New Wave and somebody who was always looking to dissolve the boundaries between mainstream literature and genre literature, had read so many science fiction stories in which science and technological progress were glorified, and/or in which a hero overcame some obstacle and achieved some goal, that they got sick of that stuff and became excited about science fiction stories that suggested science and technology weren't so great after all and which depicted not success but failure, like so much of mainstream literature.*  Berry's "Man Alone" is just such a story.  "Man Alone" also brings to mind the way Harry Harrison characterized the New Wave in that 1968 issue of Amazing we recently looked at, as fiction more concerned with the "inner space" of the mind than traditional SF.

Powerhouse editors Damon Knight and Judith Merril were into this story, which we might see as a precursor of the New Wave (or an indication that the New Wave wasn't all that revolutionary after all), but it seems the rest of the SF community resisted the suasion of those two cultural arbiters--"Man Alone," if we are to believe isfdb, has never been reprinted. 

*Here I remind you of Barry Malzberg's 1982 account of his 1969 meeting with John W. Campbell, Jr., printed in Engines of the Night, in which Campbell insisted mainstream literature was a literature of defeat and science fiction was about discovery and problem solving.   

"That Hell-Bound Train" by Robert Bloch

This is one of Bloch's most famous and respected stories; it won a Hugo, is illustrated on the cover of 1977's The Best of Robert Bloch, and has been reprinted in many anthologies, including Martin H. Greenberg's My Favorite Fantasy Story ("That Hell-Bound Train" is apparently Rick Hautala's favorite fantasy story) and John Pelan's The Century's Best Horror Fiction 1951-2000.  

"That Hell-Bound Train" is one of those stories in which a guy makes a deal with the Devil; the twist is that in this story the mortal outsmarts Ol' Scratch.  I generally find deal-with-the-devil stories lame, but this one is OK. 

Martin ran away from the orphanage four or five years ago to live the life of a hobo and petty thief; his father, who died when Martin was a little kid, worked for the railroad, and Martin has kept close to the rails.  He's about had enough of this difficult and lonely life, and is thinking about going straight when a strange black passenger train pulls up and Martin is accosted by a creepy conductor whom he knows must be the Devil!  Satan has been counting on Martin's soul, and doesn't like the idea of Martin getting in tune with the straight and narrow.  So Mephistopheles has come by hoping to cut a deal with Martin that will allow him to retain that valuable commodity that is Martin's eternal soul.  Martin makes a clever trade--in return for his soul, payable upon death, Martin receives a watch that when activated will stop his passage through time; he plans to arrest his journey through time at just the point that he has achieved happiness and thus make his happiness eternal.

Martin considers stopping time after eating a satisfying meal and reclining in a comfy bed, but decides to push himself a little harder, to achieve even greater happiness.  Years go by as he actually gets a job and makes some money, dates women and earns a series of raises and promotions so he can get better lodgings and even get married and father a son.  Again and again he has achieved some measure of happiness and considers stopping time so he can enjoy this moment forever, but he always opts to pursue an even greater measure of happiness.  Eventually Martin screws up, cheating on his wife, and he loses his family, ushering in a period of loneliness and poor health.  Finally, Martin has a stroke by the train tracks and Satan's train rolls up to carry him to hell.

Martin enters a passenger car full of partying sinners, and it is here that Martin activates his Time Stopper--he will spend eternity at this loud raucous drunken party and never actually be delivered to Hell.

This story is well-put together, and I can't say it has any glaring faults or is annoying, but I can't help but feel it is just a sort of filler gimmick story--it doesn't have any kind of emotional impact or philosophical core, unless we are supposed to take seriously the idea that endless drunken partying will make you happier than holding down a steady job and maintaining a family.  "That Hell-Bound Train" is fine, but no big deal; maybe I should read the Fritz Leiber and Manly Wade Wellman stories it beat for the Hugo and see how they stack up.  (I read the Algis Budrys story beaten by "That Hell-Bound Train," "The Edge of the Sea," back in 2022, and, if memory serves, it is more mature and serious than Bloch's winning story, but not written quite as smoothly.)  

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The 1958 Merril train keeps a rollin'.  Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log to ride along with us.

Spectrum 5: 1950s stories by Wallace, Thomas, Ashwell, and Ashby

1969 and 1972 paperback editions of Spectrum 5; I probably should have used the '69 image
on my last blog post because the cover looks like it may have been inspired by
James H. Schmitz's "Grandpa."

In our last episode we read half the stories in Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest's 1966 anthology of 1950s SF stories Spectrum 5, the half by authors I felt were more or less famous.  Today we experience the other half of the book's content, four stories by authors whom I, at least, am less familiar with.  Let's check out these "guys"--maybe we'll meet a new favorite!

"Student Body" by F. L. Wallace (1953)

Wallace has a single novel and like two dozen stories listed at isfdb. Barry Malzberg, whom we at MPorcius Fiction Log both take very seriously and consider a figure of fun, asserts that Wallace is a writer who deserves a higher reputation than that which he enjoys.  A story by Wallace is included in the 1979 anthology Neglected Visions, a book edited by Malzberg, Martin H. Greenberg, and John D. Olander dedicated to reprinting work by nine such SF writers who, according to Malzberg, have been unfairly neglected.

Marin is the biology officer with the first wave of colonists on a virgin planet.  Before the colonists got there the planet was surveyed by a whole team of biologists, but Marin finds that their survey is not accurate, that there are troublesome creatures on the planet they weren't warned about, namely voracious rodents that start taking a chunk out of the colony's limited food supplies.  Marin deals with this problem by designing a robot cat, and when even bigger rodents show up that the steel feline can't handle, by manipulating his supply of frozen animal material and breeding a pack of terriers the size of great danes.  The huge terriers soon have to contend with heretofore undetected native predators who are bigger still, beasts much like tigers.

By observing a captive native creature, and by using a sonar device to study in situ fossils without digging up the terrain, Marin figures out what is going on.  All these vermin and carnivores are the same species--when environmental conditions change, as with the introduction of the Earth dogs, the current generation of native fauna gives birth to a generation fully equipped to deal with the new conditions--for example, to deal with the dogs the rat-like natives gave birth to a generation of tiger-like offspring.  The sense of wonder ending is that when the human colonists kill the tigers with rifles, the next generation of natives looks quite like human beings--maybe the Earth-derived humans can negotiate with these creatures?  They had better learn to, because mouse-sized natives have stowed aboard the star ships which brought the colonists and have since headed home, and soon every planet in mankind's space empire will be infested with these quick-growing and quick-adapting alien creatures.  

This story is about average, not bad, but no big deal.  A little better than acceptable, I guess.  

"Student Body" is the only story in Spectrum 5 that is not from Astounding; its first appearance was in Galaxy.  It has been included in numerous anthologies, including ones edited by Groff Conklin and by Galaxy editor H. L. Gold.

"The Far Look" by Theodore L. Thomas (1956)

Uh oh, I read Thomas's 1970 story "The Weather on the Sun" in May and denounced it as a piece of garbage that romanticized politicians and bored me to death.  I implied that this irritating misfire was included in Orbit 8 because Thomas was friends with editor Damon Knight's wife Kate Wilhelm, but I am not aware that any such excuse is available for Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. or British men of letters Amis and Conquest.  Well, let's do the right thing (for once) and try to look at "The Far Look" with an open mind.

"The Far Look" starts out long-winded and annoying.  As a scientist provides the background exposition to a subordinate egghead (and to us readers) Thomas buries us under a blizzard of mind-numbing minutia about Dr. Scott's pipe--how he fills the pipe,  the size of the match he uses to light the pipe, the gurgling noises the pipe makes, the size of the flame that comes out of the bowl of the pipe, how Scott waves the pipe around for emphasis and how he prods the junior scientist with the end of the pipe to put him in his place (that's right, Scott takes his disgusting cancer promotion device out of his mouth and touches one of his colleagues with the saliva-covered end of it as a means of enforcing dominance--sickening!) and blah blah blah.  Oh wait, I said I was keeping an open mind.  Well, let's take a look through all the tobacco smoke at the actual text of the exposition Scott delivers.

The United States has a base on the moon, staffed by two men.  Every month the two astronauts are relieved by a different pair sent up from Earth.  Many of the astronauts who return have become geniuses, the world's best in some field of art or science or business.  Earthlings can immediately tell which astronauts have become geniuses by looking at their eyes--those who have become geniuses have a "far look" and crinkles around their eyes.  Pipe enthusiast Dr. Scott is tasked with figuring out how spending a month on the moon has turned above-average men into supermen.

Once the seven Earthbound pages with the scientists are past and we are up on the moon with two of the astronauts, "The Far Look" is actually pretty good.  I like stories in which people in space suits go about the business of surviving in low-gravity, zero-atmosphere, environments, where death awaits only a few centimeters and a few seconds away, and Thomas actually does a good job of describing all the technical technological aspects and even the psychological aspects of two men's stay on the moon.  (And by "a good job" I mean the story is entertaining and builds an anxious, claustrophobic atmosphere--I am not competent to assess how realistic any of the science is.)

Over 27 pages we follow the astronauts' compelling adventures on Luna, their fears and their near death experiences, and then they are replaced and return to Earth with "the far look."  It's a little vague, but apparently the experience of being so horribly alone, and then returning back to the bosom of Earth and its teeming millions, is what turns the astronauts into geniuses.

I'm skeptical of the story's central gimmick (it's not clear what causes the astronauts to become superhuman and there is very little about how these newly superior persons behave on Earth) and the first part with the scientists, who we don't see again at the end of the story is poor and practically superfluous, but all the stuff on the moon is good and won me over despite my bitterness about Dr. Scott and his filthy habits and "The Weather on the Sun."  I am happily surprised to be able to give "The Far Look" a solid thumbs up.

"The Far Look," after its debut in Astounding, was chosen by Judith Merril for her second Year's Best volume, which means I own two printings of the story, I having purchased that Merril anthology in December of 2015 in New Jersey, and by Harry Harrison and Willis E. McNeilly for a 1975 anthology of Science Fiction Novellas.

"Big Sword" by Pauline Ashwell (as by "Paul Ash") (1958)

Here's another story I own multiple printings of.  After its debut in Astounding, Pauline Ashwell's "Big Sword" was included by Groff Conklin in his 1966 anthology Another Part of the Galaxy, a copy of which I acquired in Kentucky in 2016, as well as by Amis and Conquest in Spectrum 5.  In all three places the story appears under the masculine pseudonym "Paul Ash."  Ashwell has two novels and a score of stories listed at isfdb but I don't think I have ever read her work before.

Jordan is a spaceman and a scientist, currently the leader of a scientific expedition to planet Lambda.  At the start of his career he foolishly married a social climber who was only interested in his notoriety, Cora.  Cora divorced him while he was away on one of his expeditions, after she had given birth to his son, Ricky.  While back home on Earth, Jordan learns that Cora and Ricky, now fourteen, don't get along, and she is trying to send Ricky to some school for troublemakers so she won't have to deal with him, or even see him, for some years.  Instead of authorizing the shipping off of Ricky to this school, Jordan brings Ricky, who is interested in science, to Lambda.  He thinks that this trip will be a chance for him to get to know his son, whom he has hardly ever seen, but as leader of the expedition Jordan has almost no time to spare for Ricky.

Meanwhile, the 6-inch tall Lambda natives, of whom the human explorers are not even aware, are trying to open negotiations with the Earthers, who have unwittingly damaged their home.  Ashwell's aliens have an interesting biology and society, one so different from that of the humans that it makes any cross-species communication difficult--in fact their first efforts to communicate are perceived by the humans as an attack by invisible enemies or even an irresponsible practical joke played by Ricky.  (Some of the scientists are suspicious of Ricky.)

Luckily, Ricky turns out to be a rare human telepath--in fact the poor relationship he has with his mother and some of the expedition team members is largely a side effect of his psychic powers; Ricky, by picking up stray brain waves, innocently acquires knowledge that has lead Cora and others to think he has been snooping in their private papers.  Using his telepathy, Ricky, unbeknownst to all the adults, who have yet to even see a Lambdan, develops a friendship with the leader of the natives.  Ricky goes off with the alien leader to help him resolve an existential threat to his tribe, and Jordan, thinking his son has run away or is perhaps lost, organizes search parties and flies an aircraft in search of his son.  Ricky solves the Lambdans' dire problem and makes peace between human and native.  Tying up our other plot thread, Jordan even finds a wife among the other scientists.

Ashwell's aliens are very good, but the story feels too long and the whole deal with the precocious kid who is believed to have run away from home and who makes peace between the races feels tired and a little childish, like something from a sappy live action Disney movie from my youth.  I guess it all averages out to marginally good.  Suggesting that I am not necessarily an outlier in my assessment of where "Big Sword"'s strength lies, it was reprinted in 1983 in an anthology titled Aliens from Analog.

"Commencement Night" by Richard Ashby (1953)

In the 1960s the UN sponsored an elaborate experiment, Project Peace, that sought to find out how to prevent all the strife attendant with human life by studying human beings who were unaffected by history and culture.  A bunch of scientists took an island and exterminated all the rats and germs on it, then left a multicultural cohort of forty-five babies on the island.  It is now the early 21st century, and for decades a fifty-strong company of researchers has been observing the island through a multitude of hidden cameras and microphones as the children invented a super efficient language and multiplied to today's population of over 300 individuals.

One of the technicians on the research team is a former Olympic swimmer, and one New Year's Eve he was drunk and decided to leave the secret subterranean facility from which the researchers watch every move the experimental subjects make and take a swim around the island.  This lapse of judgement sets in motion a series of events which lead to the scientists learning that the island's inhabitants have developed psychic powers and been visited by space aliens.  (This is news because the islanders and E.T.s have been exploiting blind spots not covered by the boffins' cameras and mikes.)

The swimmer talks to an alien.  The alien explains that there is a Galactic Confederation with many member species, and they would like humanity to join, because humanity has some very useful skills, but we can't be accepted yet because our system of communication is too primitive--it is our inadequate ability to communicate that has lead to the wars and crime and greed, etc., that have plagued humanity throughout history.  When the aliens learned about Project Peace they secretly came down to teach the islanders their space language, in hopes of jump starting Earth's development of better means of communication.  Sure enough, because the islanders only know the alien language and not any Earth language or culture, they are all peaceful and honest hippies overflowing with love for everything.  As part of his work under the island observing the islanders, the swimmer has learned to speak the space language, and so the islanders are able, with their psychic powers, to change the swimmer's brain, erasing the negative effects of Earth culture so he, too, is full of love.  As the story ends we are led to expect that all the researchers will soon have their brains fixed and that humanity is on its way to joining the Galactic Confederation.

This is the worst story in Spectrum 5.  It is silly, it is sappy, and it is boring.  Ashby takes a bunch of SF elements (scientists who experiment on people, a Galactic Confederation, psychic powers) and instead of exploring them in any depth or using them as the building blocks for an entertaining story he just piles them up like a bunch of discarded bricks.  Gotta give this one a negative vote.

"Commencement Night" has been anthologized in only one place besides Spectrum 5, by Groff Conklin in Giants Unleashed, which was republished with the title Minds Unleashed.  Ashby has a single novel and like a dozen short stories listed at isfdb.

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It ends on a sour note, but Spectrum 5 is a good anthology of more or less optimistic tales that celebrate science and the ingenuity and drive of the human race.   A worthwhile purchase.