Venture, March 1958: R Silverberg, A Budrys, & D Berry

Recently we read a 1958 story by Don Berry, "Man Alone," about the first man to travel in a FTL vessel, and how seeing hyperspace drove him insane.  A reader commented that another 1958 Berry story, "The Intruder" had a similar premise, which piqued my interest.  When I saw that "The Intruder" appeared in an issue of Venture featuring stories by Robert Silverberg and Algis Budrys which I haven't read yet, I decided to fire up the internet archive, world's greatest website, and crack open that issue of Venture.  This is an issue that includes two stories we have already looked at, Poul Anderson's Flandry adventure "The Game of Glory" and Budrys' "The Edge of the Sea" (Budrys has two stories in the issue; the one we will read today appears under a pseudonym.)

This issue of Venture also offers readers an essay by Theodore Sturgeon in which he takes to task Time magazine--and mainstream publications in general--for their hostility to SF and in particular for subjecting to criticism Judith Merril.  (Merril has many vociferous supporters, and I guess Ted is one of them.)  Ol' Ted is also a pioneer recycler; he fills up half a page quoting from Bob Leman's fanzine, and another quarter page restating and discussing his famous "Revelation" that "Ninety percent of everything is crud."  Gotta meet those word counts, gotta fill those column inches.

"Eve and the Twenty-Three Adams" by Robert Silverberg

This is a story about sex that goes against everything current elite culture tells us to think about sex roles and sex differences.  The first person narrator says stuff like "They talk about the soothing touch of the female, and it's all true" to us readers and, to a woman, "'you're the only member of the crew whose job can't be done by someone else.'"  Wow!  Well, I guess in science fiction we can imagine any kind of  world, even one in which men can't get pregnant and women don't have penises!

It is the year 2240, and the space destroyer of which our narrator, 40-something Lieutenant Harper, is Psych Officer is about to ship out to the new war between the Terran and Sirian space empires.  Harper tells us the war is the result of the inability of the two empires to agree on "who was to sell what to which planets of the galaxy" and, further, that "A trade collision is a common cause of wars.  It probably destroyed ancient Troy."  Is this really true?  

Anyway, getting to Sirius system will take the Donnybrook many months and require over a hundred carefully calibrated jumps into and out of hyperspace.  A ship on such a stressful voyage, which even the slightest error caused by fatigue or anxiety can bring to total disaster, is required by law to include a "Crew Girl" to serve as "mother, wife and mistress" to the men, to relieve their stress and allow them to focus.  It is generally the job of the Psych Officer to hire the Crew Girl, so Harper interviews a few dozen women and selects Eve Tyler, who is bright and pretty and has never served as a Crew Girl before.

A few days into the eight-month trip it is clear that Tyler is a absolutely unsuitable as a Crew Girl.  She refuses to have sex with the men, and is so sweet and cute that they are all falling in love with her.  Instead of relieving tension she is causing it, and the astrogators are starting to make mistakes, putting the ship's mission and its very survival at grave risk.  When the officers confront Tyler she admits she is a virgin who never intended to have sex with the men and hired a forger to prepare her papers--her fiancé is in the Sirius system and she got herself mustered into the crew fraudulently in order to join him and marry him out in the battle zone, and she is determined that he will be her first lover.

The solution to the problem faced by Harper and the Donnybrook is pretty monstrous, turning Silverberg's story into a sort of horror tale or fetishistic soft core porn.  Tyler is drugged so that she has the mentality of a baby or imbecile.  She can't feed herself or dress herself, much less read a book or talk.  The point of this is that she can't refuse sexual advances.  On the long voyage to Sirius, every single one of the twenty-three crewmembers of the Donnybrook uses her sexually multiple times, and this keeps their morale on an even keel.  To think that twenty-three educated men could all enjoy sex with a woman who can't consent or offer any kind of emotional or intellectual response is pretty disturbing--is Silverberg offering a brutal critique of men's attitude towards women here or depicting a dystopian future?  

(We might also consider the similarity of Silverberg's story to Tom Godwin's famous "Cold Equations," a 1954 story the plot of which is largely the product of Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.; "Cold Equations" is another story in which a woman puts many lives at risk by stowing away on a ship and who thereby renders null her basic rights.)    

When the destroyer arrives in the war zone, Harper hypnotizes Tyler so she will think the trip was uneventful and nobody had sex with her.  She is left at a base to get some kind of desk job or something.  The twist ending of the story is that Tyler's fiancé turns out to be Harper's son from a long dissolved marriage--as the story ends Harper is about to attend his son's wedding to a woman who thinks she is a virgin but whom Harper knows has been sexually violated by himself and twenty-two of his colleagues.

"Eve and the Twenty-Three Adams" is a pretty wild story, and even if you think it is full of bogus psychology, physics, and history and find the behavior it depicts appalling it is compelling and thought-provoking.  Silverberg creates an alien world and we see it through the eyes of an insider, and his writing style is smooth, ensuring the story is an easy read and rendering the wild stuff that takes place all the more jarring.  (And perhaps reminding us of H. P. Lovecraft's suggestion in a letter printed in the March 1924 issue of Weird Tales that horror stories should be written from the point of view of the villain.)

Quite effective--thumbs up!  "Eve and the Twenty-Three Adams" would see print again in a number of European publications, and the 1969 Silverberg collection Dimension Thirteen.    

"There Ain't No Other Roads" by Algis Budrys (as by Robert Marner)

This is something of a rare Budrys, only reappearing (as far as isfdb knows) in the British edition of Venture and the French version of F&SF (Venture, which produced only 16 issues, was put out by the same people who produced the more successful F&SF.) 

Latin American migrant Ernesto Garcia, our narrator, got off a ship in Florida and is hitchhiking up Route 1 to meet his folks in New York.  In some Southern state, three country boys, one with greenish teeth and the other two with rat-faces, beat him up, but before they can inflict permanent damage they are driven off by another drifter.  This guy was waylaid by miscreants himself a few days ago, and has a head wound; apparently he was saved from death by a metal plate installed in his skull, presumably after a war injury.  This Good Samaritan suffers amnesia and doesn't even recall his own name.  

These two hitchhikers become companions, and continue the march north.  They have a strange series of interactions with people that I won't try to describe here and which Budrys keeps pretty mysterious, expecting the reader to figure them out based on clues or to just accept them as bewildering.  (In several ways, "There Ain't No Other Roads" reminds me of the work of Gene Wolfe.)  To put it briefly, it seems that the Good Samaritan is a robot from a Galactic Federation and has as its duty to wander the Earth, chasing down aliens who come down here to exploit or just toy with us humans; these aliens disguise themselves as humans or take over human bodies or something like that.  A bunch of these alien criminals are trying to destroy the robot, whom they call "a cop;" it was they who inflicted that head wound, and our narrator witnesses the robot's outwitting of their efforts to spring a complicated trap on him.

Budrys aims to imbue his story with pathos.  The robot has a consciousness, though either through design or because of battle damage it sometimes forgets it is a robot.  Even when forgetful, automatic systems set it on the right path to continue its mission.  When it remembers its true nature it is sad, because it has no real family, history or people.  It seems to feel some sort of kinship with one of the criminals, the ringleader, because they are both from beyond Earth and because this ringleader, in his efforts to figure out how to destroy the almost invincible robot, is the only person to really try to understand the robot, how it thinks and feels.

The theme of much of Budrys' work is the question of "what makes a man?", and we see it here in "There Ain't No Other Roads."  The robot is alien to Earth, and at least in part inorganic, but he has the attributes we associate with a good man--he is strong and a good fighter, but respectful of others, using his strength to help others rather than to abuse them.  Part of the trap laid by the villains is to leave an inoperative ray pistol in a second hand shop with a sign on it reading "THIS BELONGS TO THE MAN WHO CAN USE IT," an allusion to the Arthurian story of the sword in the stone.

Garcia is portrayed as intelligent and educated, and Budrys uses the narrator's references to history and high culture to foreshadow events later in the story and give us clues as to what is going on.  Garcia comments that the people of this Southern state are obsessed with their ancestry, and derisively suggests they can trace their ancestors back to Newgate and Tyburn, foreshadowing the importance of family and history to the robot and that the story will be about law enforcement.

Budrys gives us reason to think of the robot as an angel come to Earth to guard people and mete out justice.  When Garcia looks in a record shop window his eyes linger on "the Angel L. P. of Verdi's Requiem Mass."  At the end of the story the alien cop tells Garcia that "There is justice in this world, and everywhere else."  (These Christian overtones are of course another thing that reminds me of Gene Wolfe.)

"There Ain't No Other Roads" is a somewhat tricky and challenging story full of allusions and mysteries; we are giving it a thumbs up here at MPorcius Fiction Log, but it is easy to see why it hasn't been reprinted much--it isn't a smooth read and its rewards are perhaps elusive.  Budrys' style, narrative techniques and themes make his story something of an interesting contrast with Silverberg's easy-to-read, in-your-face-shocking, modern-in-style and modern-in-theme (sex and clinical psychology) contribution to this issue of Venture.

"Intruder" by Don Berry

Alright kids, it is time to make the jump to hyperspace and read the story that brought us here!  "Intruder" was only ever reprinted in the British edition of Venture, but let's not count it out until we have read it ourselves.

Oy, "Intruder," 18 pages, starts with a dream sequence more than a page long that is conveyed via a multitude of poetic devices: one-word paragraphs ("Fury."), run-on sentences, repetition ("Red, red, red."), ellipses, neologisms ("talldom.")  A boy is faced by his naked father, who wears an opera hat and questions and scolds sonny, and the boy has trouble speaking because his throat is filled with fire.  

The dreamer is David Saar, the lone astronaut on what he has been told is the first ever FTL flight.  Saar's ship is equipped with the new hyperdrive, and takes millisecond long trips through hyperspace, each jump hurling the ship hundreds of light years through real space.  It is apparently during these split-second jumps that he has his dreams of being berated and interrogated by his naked father.  Via hyperspace radio Saar can communicate with Earth as easily as you talk to your Mom on the phone.  The radio operator back on Earth receives all of the various data Saar collects, and keeps asking questions about how Saar feels, and if Saar has any dreams.  Saar denies he has any dreams.

The truth kept from Saar is that the radio operator is a shrink, and Saar is the third man to travel through hyperspace; the astronauts on the first two missions went insane--apparently they ceased to believe in their own existence!--and later died.   

The PsychOfficer, some military men, and the team of Chinese mathematicians who came up with the theory that made the hyperdrive possible spend the story carefully observing Saar and trying to figure out what hyperspace is all about.  Saar appears to be gradually losing touch with reality, in unguarded moments talking as if his father is out there in space with him, I guess subconsciously, but not consciously, remembering those dreams,

The plot of "Intruder" is not bad, but there are way too many long and tedious and repetitive dream sequences in which Saar is on fire and his father asks him official-sounding questions like "Name and occupation?" and "Place of residence?"  Are there people who enjoy this sort of text?  These sequences could have been severely shortened and still served their narrative purpose.  

Anyway, the shrink and the Chinese math guys theorize that hyperspace is home to or actually consists of an alien intelligence that is trying to communicate with the humans who pop into its realm, and Saar's psyche is responding to these communications by anthropomorphizing the alien entity, an effort of the subconscious to maintain Saar's sanity by translating inexplicable sense impressions into something familiar; because the alien is so superior it is only natural that Saar's subconscious represents it as his father, and Saar himself as a child.  We who are privy to the dreams realize the alien considers human appearances in its realm an intrusion and is demanding the use of the hyperdrive be suspended permanently.  The cosmic horror ending of Berry's story is the suggestion that the alien entity is going to colonize Saar and, when Saar gets back to Earth, kill us all.

I want to like "Intruder," and I think I would if the dream sequences were each a paragraph long instead of a page long--I'll call it acceptable.

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Three serious and ambitious stories which pursue a variety of goals and employ diverse strategies in pursuit of those goals.  This is a good issue of Venture!  Kudos to editor Robert P. Mills and everybody else involved.

Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more explorations of SF of days gone by.

    

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.