From Great Science Fiction of the 20th Century: Davidson, Budrys & Knight

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are flipping through Great Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century, a glamorous 1987 reskin of 1980's The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction.  In our last episode we looked at the stories penned by Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury that editors Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg selected for the volume; today let's read their picks from the bodies of work of Avram Davidson, Algis Budrys, and Damon Knight, three writers about whom I've scribbled a bit in the last few months.

"Or All the Seas With Oysters" by Avram Davidson (1958)

This story won a Hugo after first appearing in Galaxy and has been anthologized many times, including by Neil Gaiman.  (I hear Neil Gaiman is one of the favorites of the kids these days.)

I guess "Or All the Seas With Oysters" might qualify as a joke story, but it is more sophisticated, at least in style, than the broad and absurdist joke stories I am always complaining about here at the blog.  Two men run a bike shop.  One, Oscar, is a hearty chap who seduces a lot of women and whose attitude is to take life as it comes, to make the best of the situations you find.  His partner is Ferd, a shy nervous type who reads books and worries over the things he reads about in the newspaper.

To make a long story short, over the course of Davidson's tale, clever and sensitive Ferd realizes that some sort of weird creature, one that looks like a safety pin in its larval form, a clothes hanger in an intermediate form, and a bicycle in its mature form, has infiltrated human society--Davidson's gimmick here is based on commonplace observations that you can never find a safety pin when you need one and that one's closet is always filled with superfluous coat hangers.  The story's punchline is the contrast between how Ferd and Oscar respond to this astonishing discovery and what fates their reactions lead them to.

One of the sophisticated aspects of the story is how Davidson doesn't make it too obvious which of the two men we should identify with, and whether we should view the story as a terrible tragedy or something of a goof.  Similarly, there is a vague reference to Ferd suffering anxiety over reading about communists in the newspaper, and Davidson doesn't let on whether Ferd is worried about the threat posed by the communists who are murdering and enslaving millions of people in Eastern Europe and China, or sympathizing with leftist Hollywood screenwriters whose careers are suffering some obstacles due to their beliefs.  This sort of ambiguity allows the reader to comfortably assume Davidson sees the world as he sees it, or forces the more thoughtful reader to think twice, which adds value to the story. 

Despite my aversion to absurd joke stories, I enjoyed and am recommending this one.  Over time Davidson is growing on me.

"Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night" by Algis Budrys (1961)

As has Davdison, Budrys, about whom I was skeptical when this blog first lurched on to the interwebs from the recesses of my fevered brain, has been growing on me.  Like "Or All the Seas With Oysters," "Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night" first appeared in Galaxy.  It would go on to be included in a number of anthologies, including Isaac Asimov and Greenberg's The Great SF Stories #23, which also includes a story we at MPorcius Fiction Log liked, R. A. Lafferty's "Rainbird," and two stories we loved, Jack Vance's "Moon Moth" and Cordwainer Smith's "A Planet Named Shayol."

It is the future--the 21st century!  Rufus Sollenar is an optical engineer and a successful businessman, who surveys beautiful Manhattan from his office atop a skyscraper--he can even see spaceships taking off and landing out at the Long Island spaceport.  He is on top of the world, his firm having just started manufacturing a new kind of TV, EmpaVid, that interacts directly with the viewer's emotions via subliminal messages and a biofeedback mechanism.  But word comes of trouble--a rival firm, that of Cortwright Burr, has been working with Martian engineers--the native Martians are a dying race, but they have all kinds of mysterious technology.  Presumably Burr has returned to Earth with an entertainment system superior to EmpaVid, putting Sollenar's firm, and all those who have invested in it, in terrible financial risk.

Utilizing some of the many gadgets and devices featured in this story, Sollenar launches a one-man commando raid on Burr's office and tries to assassinate him and steal his Martian technology.  But it seems that Burr has been given Martian immortality treatments and is almost indestructible!  A shattered, scarred and half-disguised Burr begins to haunt Sollenar at his office, at a big party, on the commercial space ship Sollenar takes to Mars to meet the Martian engineers himself.  On Mars, Sollenar and we readers realize that there are no Martian immortality treatments, that Sollenar is not being pursued by an immortal Burr revenant, but is hallucinating such persecution because Burr, using the hypnotic entertainment device he acquired from the Martian engineers, laid a trap for Sollenar, whom he expected to kill him.

Sollenar is, however, in fact being pursued by somebody, an agent representing an association of all the companies of the broadcast industry--this association enforces agreements and looks out for the broadcast industry's collective interests, and has decided that Sollenar, who is acting like a nut and thus putting all their investments in EmpaVid at risk, should be killed.  As the story ends Sollenar lays a trap for his killer similar to that which Burr laid for him.     

This is a solid SF story full of futuristic devices and processes and mysterious aliens; there is also, implicitly, the criticism of TV and big business we see in so much SF.  Budrys is a good writer and the images in New York and on Mars and the pacing throughout are quite satisfactory.  I have to admit that I was a little disappointed when I realized that Burr was not really a living-dead avenger chasing his assassin all over Manhattan's towers and the red planet's wastes, that it was all an illusion--I guess I have a childish fascination with immortality, revenge narratives and chases, as well as limited patience with "it was all a dream" stories.  But Budrys makes it work, and I can recommend "Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night."

(I'm glad I can give the thumbs up to two stories from Galaxy in this blog post, because I don't want people to think my lukewarm reaction to a bunch of Galaxy stories a few blog posts ago means I am some kind of irrational Galaxy-hater.)

"Stranger Station" by Damon Knight (1956)

"Stranger Station" got top billing on the cover of the issue of F&SF with the third installment of the serialized version of Robert Heinlein's Door Into Summer and a striking cover by Kelly Freas.  Like the other stories we have been talking about, it has been widely anthologized, and was selected for republication by, among others, respected anthologist Judith Merril and British men of letters Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest.

This is a traditional sort of SF story about space stations, a talking computer that may very well have developed a personality, psychic interaction between human and alien, and trying to figure out alien motives.

A century ago Earth astronauts encountered on Titan extrasolar aliens, colossal arthropod-like creatures with many limbs whose proximity caused an intense psychological pressure to the humans.  The aliens apparently also suffer from psychic contact with humans, and their suffering causes them to exude a fluid; this fluid, when taken by humans, greatly extends the human lifespan.

By the time of our story the process of trading with these aliens has been regularized, and human civilization is reliant on the alien longevity goop.  A space station orbits the Earth, and every twenty years a human spends a few months in one living compartment of the station, while an alien does the same in a huge adjacent compartment.  The mental stress on the human of being so close to the alien for such a long time is tremendous and tends to drive the human volunteer insane, though the details of that insanity, and what the aliens actually look like, is kept a secret from the common people.  The plot of "Stranger Station" covers one such period of interment at the station with the alien, that of Paul Wesson--we follow Wesson's wavering mental health, his relationship with the computer that runs the station and is meant to keep him company, and his efforts to figure out the aliens' motives for giving us this invaluable secretion for free.

There are many SF stories that contrast belligerent humanity with pacific aliens, and "Stranger Station" is one of them.  Wesson comes to believe that the elephantine bug-like aliens are not violent, and would thus be at the mercy of the aggressive human race when, in one hundred years or whatever, we invent an interstellar drive.  Contact with an alien mind alters a human's mind, making it more like that of the alien--for example, Wesson loses the ability to read and speak English during his exposure to the alien brainwaves--and Wesson theorizes that he is being manipulated into becoming a member of "the vanguard--the conquered men, the ones who would get along with their strange brothers, out among the alien stars."  The E.T.s are preemptively colonizing our psyches before we can colonize their planets!

This alien plan of altering our brains so we will be like them is characterized (as you might guess from the use of the word "brother" in the quote above) as "conquering by love," but in this case love is no match for good old hate!  Wesson's will, his ability to hate the hideous alien whose body "reminded him of all the loathsome, crawling, creeping things the Earth was full of" overcomes the alien efforts to adapt his brain and make it accept brotherhood with those freaks.  The alien dies, and in its death throes wrecks the space station, which Wesson presumes will mean an end to the goop handout, triggering human resentment and, when the human race does achieve interstellar travel, a campaign of revenge on the peaceful aliens.

A concurrent and interconnected subplot is how the computer may have developed free will and if so may be falling in love with Wesson.  The computer seems to break the rules a bit at Wesson's request, letting Wesson see a forbidden video feed of the repulsive oozing space monster that wants to be his brother, and it seems possible that it is this rule breaking that gives Wesson the ability to resist alien influence and set off the chain of events that will end the goop giveaway and set us on the road to interstellar war with these peaceful aliens.  Has love of computer for human tragically ruined any hope of love between alien and human...or rescued us from unnatural bondage to disgusting alien weirdos, from a betrayal of our essential nature?

(While I am holding on to the possibility that Wesson and his computer girlfriend should be seen as heroes for preserving human independence and free will from the machinations of giant alien hypno-bugs, Silverberg and Greenberg here in their intro to "Stranger Station" suggest Wesson's resistance is irrational racism.)

A good story.  I have been down on many of Knight's stories over the years, but I enjoyed "Stranger Station" and definitely recommend it.

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Three good stories.  Maybe we'll read more from Great Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century in the future.

"Why Should I Stop?," "The Strength of Ten" and "The Mechanical Man" by Algis Budrys

If you have been following the exploits of the crew of MPorcius Fiction Log you know in the last few months we read two collections of 1950s Algis Budrys stories, Budrys' Inferno and The Unexpected Dimension.  Today let's read three Budrys stories which, after appearing in science fiction magazines in the year 1956, were never reprinted.  As I often do, I turned to that indispensable resource for those who would explore the pop culture of the mid-20th century on a budget, the internet archive, to read these tales which, it appears, the critics and editors weren't so crazy about.

"Why Should I Stop?"

This is a lame gimmicky story with superfluous recursive "meta" elements; it is no surprise that the people at Ballantine didn't include "Why Should I Stop?" in Budrys' Inferno or The Unexpected Dimension and that editors like Judith Merrill and T. E. Dikty, who included other Budrys stories in their "Best of" anthologies covering 1956, didn't leap at the chance to reprint this one.

(Also, this magazine has annoying printer's errors, with several lines repeated in inappropriate spots.)

"Why Should I Stop?" appeared in Science Fiction Quarterly and is actually the cover story.  (Somebody should be fired for allowing those printing errors on the damned cover story!)  It is an epistolary story, a record of correspondence between Budrys and the editor of Science Fiction Quarterly, Robert A. W. Lowndes.  Budrys sends Lowndes two stories on the same theme and asks what Lowndes thinks of them--these stories are included in the text we readers are presented.

The first story within a story, "Thus, Conscience," is an episodic biography of a scientist who feels that people should moderate their vices, like smoking and drinking--drinking a little or smoking a little is fine, but many people overindulge, which causes social problems and health problems.  As an adult this joker makes a device which will project a wave across the world that will reduce people's inhibitions so they even further overindulge; the boffin's theory is that he will have people the world over overindulge for two days, and then turn off his machine, so that they see the potential damage of their addictions and then reform.  The twist ending to this story is that the waves from the machine lead to the strengthening of the scientist's own predilection to make and operate such machines so that he does not turn off the first machine and instead constructs more.

The second story within a story is "Moderator."  A bunch of scientists and military officers are on a space station while war rages on Earth below.  The peeps on the station have low morale--some are close to panic--because the station weapons are out of ammo and if the station's camouflage measures are not up to preventing detection they will be easy prey for the enemy.  One of the scientists devises a machine that transmits radiation that, he tells the station commander, will calm everybody down.  But the egghead is lying: in fact, the radiation is going to make everybody even more scared!  The scientist's plan is to turn the transmitter on for an hour and then off; when everybody sees how dangerous their panic has been, he reasons, they will calm down.  As with the other story, the scientist, when affected by the radiation himself, decides to not turn the machine off but instead to build duplicate machines.

The topic of the two stories is obsession and addiction and the joke pressed home in the epistolary segments at the end of "Why Should I Stop?" is that the Budrys character keeps sending the Lowndes character very similar stories and gets more angry and more paranoid as they get rejected.       

This story has philosophical and science content (there is lots of talk about people's reluctance to believe in their own mortality, and talk about the readings of "Chi curves" on people's EEGs) but it is boring besides being gimmicky and the joke is not funny and way too long to tell.  Thumbs down.

"The Strength of Ten"

No doubt you remember Tennyson's "Sir Galahad":

My strength is as the strength of ten,

Because my heart is pure.

(If memory serves, Bertie Wooster was apt to quote this couplet, or fragments thereof.)

"The Strength of Ten" stars a self-important scientist, Langley.  Langley is a real jerk.  He busts into the corporate offices of the firm for which he is working, shouldering past secretaries and jumping in line ahead of people with appointments so he can talk to a big wig, Conway.  Langley unleashes a big chunk of exposition to Conway for the benefit of us readers--this is stuff Conway should already know.  Their company copies onto tape the brains of human beings with special skills--say, jet pilots--and then puts the tape into a robot so it can pilot a jet as well as a human but has the advantage of lacking human physical needs and frailties.  Langley then tells Conway he wants to carefully edit tapes to remove hatred and greed and such negative human traits and thus create the first truly good man!  Such a noble man would be perfect for the first manned mission to Mars!  When Conway suggests some other scientist lead the project because Langley is busy, or that Langley be part of a team, Langley arrogantly insists only he is qualified to head the project, and refuses to countenance such interference.

Conway refuses to authorize the project.  Budrys presents us with a sort of ironical philosophical twist ending here, the wording of which I have to admit I found a little confusing.  Langley's arrogant behavior has somehow convinced Conway that the project of creating an artificial man without greed, jealousy etc., would be pointless and even dangerous, because such a man would lack ambition and thus not be interested in leading important projects and going on dangerous missions.

Barely acceptable.  "The Strength of Ten" was printed in Fantastic Universe.

"The Mechanical Man"

We just recently read Harlan Ellison's story "Blind Lightning" about a guy sacrificing himself to help primitive aliens.  "Blind Lightning" first was printed in Fantastic Universe, and in the same issue SF fans of 1956 would have found Algis Budrys's "The Mechanical Man," which on the cover is vaunted as "an exciting novelet."  Exciting or otherwise, it was never reprinted.  Let's see "The Mechanical Man" is a forgotten gem unfairly looked over by anthologists over the decades!

Presumably I am the millionth person to notice that
this Emsh robot from 1956 looks a lot like the
Hoth probe droid designed by Ralph McQuarrie for
1980's The Empire Strikes Back

It is the future!  North America is the least respected component of the world government (it looks like the world government was set up after communists took over of the world--shit!), and the space navy is the least senior of the Earth's military services, the branch least likely to get what it wants out of appropriations bills.  Marshal Yancey is a North American and the head of the space navy, so he has a lot to prove!  He's on the moon for the test of the space navy's armored suit--if the suit is a success it will make his career and assure his branch's position.

Yancey is at a ball where all the high-ranking officers and their wives are subtly probing each other psychologically and trying to undermine each other socially when there is news from the armored suit test site--a nuclear weapon has gone off and the site is wiped out!  But wait, the armored suit is OK!  In a bit of symbolism, the guy in the suit, Major Pollack, is a North American and, in order to show the resilience of the suit and of North Americans, he is told to walk alone cross the lunar surface for hours and hours instead of using the suit's rockets--his literal lonely walk to the main base is like Yancey's metaphorical lonely walk of a career.  But Pollack, exhausted, disobeys orders and uses the suit's rockets to get back to HQ.  Then, understanding that he will suffer some kind of terrible punishment for his insubordination, he refuses to get out of the impregnable suit!

(Barry Malzberg is a big booster of Budrys, as I noted a few blog posts ago, and Pollack's plight feels like the sort of thing that would happen to a Malzberg character.) 

Yancey holds an official inquiry at which he gives his most dangerous rival, Colonel-General Malke, the death penalty for negligence in handling the nuclear weapon that blew up the research station.  Then he convinces Malke's wife to help him get Pollack out of the impenetrable armored suit--her feminine wiles and cold heart, so recently used (without success) against Yancey, are now turned to exploiting Pollack's neuroses about women in an effort to get him to relinquish the womb-like interior of the battle armor.  If Yancey can't deliver the suit to Earth in eighteen hours he will be in trouble with the President!

Yancey apparently succeeds in his career objectives but the twist ending shows up his personal weaknesses and the failures of personal life.  Pollack is not a North American after all but a South African, and the thing Yancey and Pollack have in common is that they are "immature neurotics" who are seeking a "mother substitute" and both have fallen in love with Madame Malke and neither will ever have a chance of winning her.

A recurring theme in Budrys's work is the question of "what is a man?"  In "The Mechanical Man" we are asked if a real man is the man who follows orders and procedure under any circumstance, no matter how dangerous, no matter what the pressure, or the man who bucks the system when he thinks it wrong.  Does a real man prioritize his own honor, abstract justice, or the well-being of the collective when they appear to be in conflict?  Does a real man side with his proximate comrades (his family or ethnic group or cultural group) or with the greater whole (the empire or the revolution or the entire world) when they are in conflict?

This is interesting enough material, but the story itself is all dialogue and descriptions of guys wiping their faces and gritting their teeth and plucking at the piping on their sleeves and that sort of thing, tense conversations in which everybody is about to explode but strives to keep a stiff upper lip as they use complicated social customs and legalistic chicanery to outdo each other.  "The Mechanical Man" is one of those stories in which different elites all ostensibly in the same organization are all trying to sink each other's careers and give their own departments the upper hand over other departments, and these sorts of stories leave me cold.

We're calling this one acceptable.   

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These stories reflect the fact that Budrys is a smart guy who is interested in philosophical issues and psychology as well as hard science, and writes literary stories about human beings instead of just adventure capers full of monsters, sword fights and gun fights.  But these three stories are not particularly fun or entertaining, and they didn't inspire much emotion in this reader.  I'm going to have to agree with all those editors who passed on them when choosing what Budrys material to reprint.

Three more stories by Algis Budrys from The Unexpected Dimension

The 1960 collection The Unexpected Dimension contains seven stories by Algis Budrys.  We read three in our last installment of MPorcius Fiction Log, and a fourth, "First to Serve," last year when we read a bunch of robot stories by important SF writers.  So today let's finish up the collection by reading the three remaining tales.

"The Burning World" (1957)

This one has a title that sounds like it belongs on a J. G. Ballard novel, but it feels like it's aimed at the kind of techno-optimist libertarian who listens to Kmele Foster and Katherine Mangu-Ward podcasts while he's folding the laundry and washing the dishes (I know a guy like that!) because it depicts a post-scarcity anarchist society!

Some decades ago the merciless totalitarian regime headed by a cult-of-personality dictator named Bausch that ruled an unspecified mountainous region of Europe was overthrown when a rebel scientist discovered a simple means of tapping energy from some other dimension.  This new source of energy not only armed revolutionaries with powerful ray guns but made armies and taxmen and police obsolete by enabling everyone to easily provide food and electricity for himself and his family.

Josef Kimmensen was a leader of the movement that overthrew the old regime.  After winning the succession war that followed the revolution, he became president of the new small-government polity, known as the League.  Now he is an old sick man, practically at death's door.  Who will take his position as head of the last lingering vestiges of government and defend this free society based on individual responsibility and voluntary exchange?  And what will happen to his irresponsible twenty-something daughter, Susanne?  Kimmensen sees the solution to both problems in Jem Bendix, his young protege.  Kimmensen can die in peace if he knows Bendix is married to his daughter and firmly ensconced as head of the bare bones League administration.  But poor Kimmensen, in his rapidly fading twilight years, has to face some bad news: not only is some young jackass named Anse Messerschmidt talking up the need for a stronger government with a military force that can confront some alleged threat from the northwest, but said jackass is dating Susanne!

Budrys melds here the sort of ideas about individualism and freedom you see in some of the work of A. E. van Vogt (I'm thinking of "The Weapon Shop") and Robert Heinlein (I'm thinking of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Rolling Stones and Beyond This Horizon) with a human story about a guy who is disappointed in his child specifically and the younger generation in general.  We get a brief history of Kimmensen's libertarian League and description of how it operates, interspersed with the plot, which follows the dying Kimmensen's plan to defuse pro-government activist Messerschmidt's plays for Susanne and for power--Kimmensen calls an election and Jem Bendix runs for president against Messerschmidt.  But Messerschmidt turns out to be a talented orator and a smooth political operator who has the ear of the young people who were born too late to remember the horrors of big government.  How far will Kimmensen and Bendix go, what kind of moral compromises will they make, to preserve the League?  When push comes to shove, how different really are Bausch, Kimmensen and Messerschmidt, all of them men with a vision for society and the determination and intelligence to pursue it?  To what extent do such men drive history and society, and to what extent are they the product of historical and social forces?

A somewhat sad and cynical piece, not bad.  "The Burning World" first appeared in Infinity Science Fiction, marketed as an "Exciting Long Novelet."  It was translated into French and appeared along with a 1957 story by Walter M. Miller Jr. in the 1984 volume Etoile Double #10.

"Go and Behold Them" (1958)

This story first appeared with the title "The End of Winter" in Venture Science Fiction under a pseudonym, maybe because Budrys's The Falling Torch was appearing as the serial in that same issue.  It would reappear in the 1990s periodical Pirate Writings, what isfdb calls a "quarterly semi-prozine."

It is a future of FTL drives and deep space exploration.  Our narrator, Harry Becker, works for "the Institute," a body that sends out two person-teams of scientists in small space ships to collect data on sectors of space measured in the hundreds of cubic light years.  Most of these two-member teams consist of married couples, and the narrator describes one such couple, a particularly skilled and likable pair, Lew and Norah Harvey.  The Harveys' ship crashed and our narrator is a member of the team that finds the wreck on an odd alien artifact, a metal sphere a thousand miles in diameter that is hurtling through space and is covered in sinister, disturbing rust-colored shapes.

This is an emotional story.  Becker is one of the members of the Institute who is not in a couple; he was in love with Norah, and finding her dead is a painful blow.  Norah's last recordings indicate more clearly what was only dimly hinted at before, that she loved Lew, but that there was some kind of trouble between them.  Apparently their marriage was sexless; I guess Norah was sterile and/or frigid (are we supposed to say "frigid" anymore?) or something like that.

"I loved you Lew," she said, quietly and serenely.  "Even though you never believed me.  Even though sometimes you hated me.  I loved you.  If I could never prove it to you in that one narrow way, still I loved you."

Lew died before Norah, and she buried her husband under a cairn of metal pieces.  Harvey buries Norah in turn, and the hideous, threatening metal forms on the surface of the artificial planet change, become less unsettling, even beautiful.  The narrator surmises that the alien sphere was a machine built to generate and support life, a machine that had failed aeons in the past, but which reactivated itself after receiving new insights about life from Lew's dead body.  As Lew was bitter, the shapes of the mechanism's attempts at creating life were ugly and scary, but the subsequent burial of the kind and generous Norah has given the machine the knowledge it needed to create forms of beauty.  The narrator surmises that if humans ever encounter the artifact again they will meet creatures who are, essentially, Norah and Lew's children, I suppose the children they couldn't have while alive because of Norah's unfortunate condition.

Good; the descriptions of the strange alien machine are vivid and evocative, and all the human stuff about frustrating sexual relationships and other emotionally charged experiences (for example, the narrator believes the beings who created the sphere, and perhaps those beings the sphere will finally engender, will be so advanced as to present an existential threat to the human race) is also effective.   

"The Executioner" (1956)

"The Executioner" first appeared in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding, and would be selected by famous British men-of-letters Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest for their 1961 SF anthology Spectrum and by Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini for their anthology of SF crime stories, Dark Sins, Dark Dreams.  With all these important editors behind it, it must be good!

The place: New York State, now an independent country!  The time: A bizarre aristocratic future in which powerful families, their superior genetic material protected by eugenics laws that control who can produce children with whom, dominate society and politics.  This rigid control of the gene pool and the direction of society was deemed necessary centuries ago in order to prevent another cataclysm like that one back in the 21st century!

Some human beings were better equipped than others to judge what was best for the human race as a whole, but, with unrestricted marriage, these superior qualities were in grave danger of dilution.

This utilitarian reason for this polity's illiberal and inegalitarian structure is cloaked in the fiction that it was set up by a messiah/god figure, the Messire, who continues to watch over and direct every human action. 

Justice in this classbound society is meted out by men in tights, wigs, and lace, men who act as judge, jury and executioner!  Executions have an element of trial by combat to them, though the odds are strongly stacked in the judge's favor.  We observe as Chief Justice Samson Ezra Joyce presides over the trial of Clarissa Jones (are these names references to modernists Ezra Pound and James Joyce and 18th-century novelists Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding?), a plebeian who is accused of addressing a member of a family (her lover!) by first name in public.  Joyce appears to be one of the few aristocrats to actually believe in all this Messire business; everything that happens, he feels, is a reflection of the Messire's will--Joyce thinks he is just doing the Messire's work and that his decisions in court, and the outcomes of his executions, are an expression of the judgement of the Messire, not a product of his own will and ability.

When something goes wrong at the trial of Jones, a stricken Joyce interprets it is a message from the Messire indicating that he, Joyce, should resign his post.  As a rebellion against the New York social order erupts and Joyce's less pious colleagues abandon all pretense in their scramble to quell the uprising, we readers see beyond the veil and recognize the cynical scam that is New York government and religion, but Joyce is driven to a final desperate act of faith in the Messire, an act that threatens the status quo and public order.

"The Executioner" isn't bad, but, to me, feels a little melodramatic and overwrought, too long and too extravagant; Budrys is still talking our ears off long after we have gotten the point.  I think the intellectual issues addressed here are less interesting than those discussed in "The Burning World;" nobody today believes in trial by ordeal or trial by combat and very few would advocate a rigidly stratified society or strict eugenics laws, but debates over how much power the government should have and the extent of individuals' right to self defense are alive and well.  The human relationships and emotional crises described here in "The Executioner" are less compelling and affecting than those Budrys wrote about in "Go and Behold Them."  Despite its popularity with editors, this is not Budrys's best work in this collection.

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The Unexpected Dimension is a quite good collection, definitely worth the classic SF fan's time.

Three 1950s stories by Algis Budrys from The Unexpected Dimension

In 1979 Ace Books published The End of Summer: Science Fiction of the Fifties, an anthology edited by MPorcius fave Barry N. Malzberg and his frequent collaborator Bill Pronzini.  In his long (thirteen pages!) introduction to the volume, Malzberg picks out Algis Budrys for special praise, saying Budrys "might have been the best of them; he certainly had the most profound, subtle mind, the best insight, the deepest perspective."  Wow!

That 1979 anthology takes its title from the Budrys story it reprints, 1954's "The End of Summer."  I recently purchased the 1960 Ballantine collection The Unexpected Dimension, which also includes "The End of Summer;" let's check out that story and two others from The Unexpected Dimension and get a deeper acquaintance with the writer Malzberg saw fit to laud with such vigor.

"The End of Summer" (1954)

In a "Prefatory Note" at the start of The End of Summer: Science Fiction of the Fifties, Malzberg and Pronzini argue that the merit of Astounding in the 1950s is underrated; the critics, they say, feel John W. Campbell's magazine peaked in the 1940s, but Malzberg and Pronzini feel this was "not quite so," and present the stories in their anthology as evidence of Astounding's quality enduring into the Fifties.  "The End of Summer" was an Astounding cover story, and would go on to be selected for 1961's Penguin Science Fiction by Brian Aldiss, by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg for the Great Science Fiction Stories volume dedicated to 1954, and by Budrys himself for 1984's Writer's Choice II ("More Top Writers' Own Favorites.") 

It is the year 11958!  Mankind has achieved immortality, and all the people walking around in the 120th century were alive in 1973--in fact, they look about the same as they did back in 1973, with the five-year-olds of 1973 still physically and mentally five years old!  Women who were pregnant in 1973 are still pregnant 10,000 years later!  Nobody ever grows or gets older, and, if they are careful not to fall off a cliff or drink anti-freeze or something, they never die!

Budrys gives us a sort of tour of this strange future world, exposing us to its various weird cliques and classes of people, each of which responds to immortality and its side effects in different ways, and in the end of the story explains the genesis of this bizarre milieu.  In 1973 a guy set up a generator that promulgated a radiation across the entire Earth; this radiation gives everybody a sort of super healing ability; under the influence of the radiation, cells quickly reverse any changes they experience, so people don't get sick or get old.  But one troublesome side effect of this absolute resistance to alteration is that the changes in your brain that are the physical basis of memory are "healed," so everybody loses every new memory after eight hours or so--when people wake up in the morning, they think it is still 1973!  The solution to this problem is that every evening people have their brains scanned and a record of their memories recorded into a computer, and then this record is rewritten on to their brains in the morning.  A side "benefit" of this system is that if something crappy happens to you, like say your dog gets run over by a car, you can edit the record of your memory to remove any reference to the dog and thus the heartache its absence may cause you--you won't even remember ever having had a dog!  Many people's memories are a carefully crafted fiction that bears little resemblance to what other people remember about them!

The plot of the story follows one Kester Fay, a man whom we eventually learn is the guy who invented that generator. Fay runs over a kid's dog and this traumatic event triggers a thought process that culminates in his decision to turn off the generator and put an end to this stagnant, sterile, artificial society of immortals who can customize their memories and never grow or have children.

In "The End of Summer" Budrys addresses his typical themes of the lonely man somehow alienated from his surroundings and the question of what constitutes a real man--is a real man somebody who refuses to just take it easy but instead embraces risk, makes decisions, and then lives with the consequences of those decisions?  As the story begins, Kester Fay is returning to America from Europe, and it is made clear to the reader that he doesn't really belong in either place.  For example, he finds that his old American friends have forgotten him, for example.  Fay is also a member of one of the minority social groups, the Dillies (short for "dilettantes"), who use their long lives to travel and experiment, who drive cars and fly aircraft manually, when most people prefer to use much safer automatic guidance systems or to just stay home (there is a whole demographic of people called "Homebodies.")  Fay is also one of the few people who refuses to edit his memories. 

I like immortality stories, and I usually like these sorts of stories in which utopian conditions turn out to be more of a curse than a blessing because to be at his best man must face challenges and for societies to be worthwhile they must evolve, and this is a solid example of those SF subgenres.

"The Distant Sound of Engines" (1959)

"The Distant Sound of Engines" first saw print in an "All Star/Every Story New" issue of F&SF.  The very next year it was reprinted in a magazine I have to admit I had never heard of before, Harvey Kurtzman's Help!, in the same issue in which was also reprinted Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 "The Yellow Wallpaper," which I read in 2015.

This is a brief, clever little story.  Our narrator is in the hospital because his legs were severed in a highway accident.  Damn!  In the bed next to him is a guy covered in bandages who apparently fell from a burning plane, though they never found the plane.  This guy will not live much longer, and is kept under sedation most of the time, but when he is lucid he tells our narrator all kinds of important formulas for stuff like superalloys and how to overcome the speed of light.  Presumably he is an alien or time traveler come to give us this valuable information, but our narrator, of course, can't understand or remember all the formulae so the outsider dies thinking, erroneously, that he has succeeded in giving 20th century Earthman a boost when, in fact, all his efforts have been in vain.

"The Distant Sound of Engines" is well-written, with lots of ancillary stuff, like the narrator's descriptions of his careers as a truck driver and as a waiter at a diner, that holds the reader's interest the way such stuff would in a good mainstream story.

"Never Meet Again" (1958)

"Never Meet Again" was first printed in Infinity, and would later appear in an anthology of stories that speculate about what would happen if the Axis powers had won WWII.  The title is presumably a reference to the famous 1939 song, "We'll Meet Again."

It is 1958 in a Europe ruled by Germany, and old Professor Jochim Kempfer eats his lunch on a park bench in Berlin as he does almost every day, watching the happy young people and thinking.  He thinks about the war--the Germans conquered Britain in 1940 and ended the war by conquering the USSR in 1942; Canada and Australia are hopelessly blockaded by the Kreigsmarine and the current Chancellor seems able to maintain peace with the USA (Hitler died in a car wreck shortly after victory in Europe.)  He thinks about his scientific work on radar for the Hitler government, a major contribution to German victory in the war.  He thinks about his wife, who died of tuberculosis in a concentration camp.  And he thinks about the machine he has been secretly building in his basement for fifteen years!

Later that day Kempfer activates his secret machine and is transported to an alternate time line, one where the Allies won the war.  Kempfer emerges from his basement to find to his dismay that he is in the drab and depressing, ugly and oppressive, Soviet-occupied zone of Berlin!  (It sounds like this universe is the one you and I live in, dear reader.)  Kempfer by chance meets his wife on the street--in this universe she survived the war and he was killed in a U.S.A.A.F. bombing raid.  The lovers are reunited!  But Kempfer's sense of relief doesn't last--his wife runs to the communist authorities to tell them about his machine, and the Bolshies immediately place an order for another such machine,  which they feel will be useful in their project of achieving worldwide revolution.  Whatever universe Kempfer finds himself in, tyrants use his genius to enlarge the scope of their evil!

This story is alright, no big deal; its ideas feel less fresh than those in "The End of Summer" and it isn't as engagingly written as "The Distant Sound of Engines."

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Three decent stories.  "The End of Summer" is a story in the classic SF mold, all about paradigm shifts and how technology changes society and people's lives.  It is also fundamentally optimistic--mankind may have got off on the wrong course, but a single intelligent and moral man has the ability to set things to rights.  "The Distant Sound of Engines" and "Never Meet Again," on the other hand, are a little more literary (especially by John W. Campbell, Jr.'s definition of "mainstream literature," which he called "a literature of defeat"); they are smaller in scope, and fundamentally pessimistic, their protagonists unable to figure out a way to escape or overcome the terrible fates that confront them, their efforts to improve their own lives or the lives of others coming to nothing.

We'll read more from The Unexpected Dimension next time.

Four more tales from Budrys' Inferno

I wasn't crazy about Algis Budrys's famous novel Rogue Moon when I read it in 2007, so I have been a Budrys skeptic for years, but I have to say that I have liked or at least found acceptable the first five stories in Budrys' Inferno, which we read over the last three blog posts.  Maybe I am becoming a softie, or maybe the high emotional pitch of Budrys's fiction works better in the short form than in a full-length novel, where it might get exhausting or silly.

Well, let's read the last four of the nine pieces in the 1963 collection, hoping as we do that I like them as much or more than the first five.

"Lower Than Angels" (1956)

This is one of those SF stories that feels like it is inspired by the voyages of Captain Cook.  (My wife and I recently ate at a restaurant called "Walrus," which gave me a chance to tell her the story of how Cook tried to get his men to eat walrus meat.)  Earth's empire spans much of the galaxy, and continues to expand!  The men who explore the edges of known space, identifying star systems with life and valuable resources and making first contact with those aliens and staking claims to those resources, are the heroes of their generation!  When twenty-six-year-old Fred Imbry gets out of the Terran Space Navy he immediately joins up with one of the most successful of the explorer teams, the crew of the Sainte Marie.  And he is immediately disillusioned!  These "heroes" are just in it for the money, and one is a drunk, another a coward, a third a serial fabulist, etc. 

A month after Fred signs on, the Sainte Marie enters a frontier system and our disillusioned and bitter buddy is on his first mission as the ship's explorers, alone or in teams of two, set out from the Sainte Marie in their space boats to check out the system's individual planets.  Imbry, alone, has two weeks to make friends with the natives on a hospitable planet covered in rain forests and act as a good influence on them.  If Fred can spur the natives, who currently have a stone age technology, to develop technologically and economically, they will eventually make good trading partners for the rest of Earth's space empire.  (Isn't this what the anthropologist in Chad Oliver's 1958 story "The Marginal Man" is supposed to do with the primitive aliens he meets?) 

This is a good set up for a story, but the aliens and Imbry's interactions with them are kind of boring, and take up what feels like a lot of pages.  ("Lower Than Angels" in this book publication is 30 pages long.)  The natives, fishermen who live in a small island village, think Imbry is a god, and he tries to disabuse them of this notion, as he fears it will open the natives to exploitation by Earthmen.  Imbry uses modern medicine to save a child who has an infected injury, which of course makes the villagers even more confident he is not a man, as he insists, but a god.  Then a hurricane strikes and the village is destroyed and many villagers killed; Imbray, in his space armor which has an integrated force field, is not harmed by the storm.  The surviving villagers now think Imbray must be some kind of devil who caused the storm or at least refused to stop it, as they assume he must have been able to.

"Lower Than Angels" consists of a prologue and six chapters.  The brief sixth chapter is set "three seasons" later.  It is a little opaque, but I think what this two page chapter tells us is that Imbray has made his peace with the men of the Sainte Marie and is working hard from orbit to nudge the planet's natives into building a modern society with a modern technology and economy.  Imbray's particular contribution is to put robots on the planet that look like short people; when the natives meet these dwarves, the dwarves act like they think the natives are gods because they are physically stronger and have have boats (which the fake dwarves ostensibly lack); in this way the natives will have the same experience that Imbray had, and realize that Earth people are just people, only with a more advanced society.

"Lower Than Angels" has some elements in common with stories in the long tradition of anti-imperialist SF in which Earthers exploit or enslave primitive aliens (Edmond Hamilton's 1932 "Conquest of Two Worlds," is one example that sticks in my mind) but in the end of the story Budrys seems to be suggesting that the Earth explorers are not so bad, that modernization and trade between alien races can be mutually beneficial.  The means by which the natives in this story are modernized (by tricking them with robots) reminds us of another long SF tradition, stories in which elites deceive their inferiors for their own good (Asimov's Foundation books are perhaps the most famous example, though Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Clarke's Childhood's End and Sturgeon's "Slow Sculpture" are similarly elitist award winners) as well as all the bizarre and complicated schemes these Budrys stories seem to feature.

I'm calling this one "barely acceptable" because it is too long and tedious, though I suppose it is not actually bad.  "Lower Than Angels" was the cover story of an issue of Infinity Science Fiction with a striking and sexalicious Emsh cover painting (which has nothing to do with Budrys's story) and was included by Robert Silverberg in the 1966 anthology Earthmen and Strangers (I own the 1968 paperback edition) and by Sylvia Engdhal and Rick Roberson in the 1975 anthology Universe Ahead.  I guess a lot of people found it more compelling than I did.

"Contact Between Equals" (1958)

William Schaeffer is a genius businessman, a millionaire five or six times over.  He was also born blind.  But today he lies in a secluded house with bandages covering his face--today is the day he will see, thanks to an operation by top surgeon Louis Champley.  His wife Alicia is standing right there as Champley removes the bandages and Schaeffer, our narrator, sees his wife and the world for the first time!  But neither his first view of beauty-contest winner Alicia nor his first sight of the beautiful wooded mountains of North America is the most mind-blowing revelation our hero has to confront!

Like several of the stories in Budrys' Inferno, "Contact Between Equals" has at its center an elaborate and complicated crime.  Schaeffer is a genius, and even when blind he realized that Alicia and Champley were having an affair, and that this summer cottage on the side of a hill had some rooms wifey and Doc had scrupulously kept him away from.  But marital infidelity is just the tip of the iceberg in this wild story which reminded me a little of A. E. van Vogt's work, in which so often shocking plot twists and exposed secrets follow each other in rapid succession.  Brainiac Scaheffer not only looks in a mirror and realizes that Champley has switched bodies with him(!), but, putting his top-of-the-line grey matter to good use, over the course of this short fast-paced tale, Scaheffer susses out that Champley isn't just trying to steal Scaheffer's benjamins but to throw off his trail a vengeful space alien who is imprisoned in a secret room behind the kitchen!

Thus speaketh Schaeffer:

"I never wonder about anything, Alicia.  I find out."

Our hero does find everything out, foiling the evil sawbones and his own evil wife (if this guy is so smart why did he marry an avaricious bimbo instead of an honest businesswoman or college professor?--I guess we all make mistakes!) and making friends with the alien and hooking the Earth up with a diplomatic and commercial relationship with the E.T.s that will make life better for every (decent) human being.

This is a fun example of the classic-style SF story in which a smart guy uses logic and knowledge to figure something out at breakneck speed and thus save his own life.  Budrys stuffs "Contact Between Equals" with iconic SF elements like a dangerous alien and high technology that lead to a sense-of-wonder paradigm shift, plus such hard-boiled detective elements as a first-person narrator who totes up the clues before our very eyes and a faithless back-stabbing dame.  I like this one quite a bit.

"Contact Between Equals" was first published in Venture under the pseudonym Albert Stroud.  It was also included in Harry Harrison's  SF: Author's Choice 2 ("A DOZEN SF GREATS PRESENT THEIR FAVORITE STORIES"), suggesting that, like me, Budrys thought it one of his better productions.  I appears in that 1970 anthology with an essay by Budrys about the story that I would like to read.  (On Wednesday I dug through the boxes of SF paperbacks at Second Story Books' Rockville location looking for SF: Author's Choice 2,  but had no luck.)

"Dream of Victory" (1953)

In his introduction to Budrys' Inferno, Budrys tells us that "Dream of Victory" was the first novelette that he wrote, and he thanks Amazing's editor Howard Browne for making it more "comprehensible," Budrys having initially drafted it as a "free-wheeling" exercise in "technical bedazzlement."

It is the high tech 21st century, a time of world government, peace and prosperity, of video phones, self-driving cars and "chutes" instead of elevators.  As we learn from a chunk of exposition in the middle of the story, there was a devastating war in the late 20th century which reduced the population of advanced countries to like a quarter of what it had been.  To rebuild civilization, multitudes of androids--artificial, organic men, almost exactly like real men but with no ability to reproduce--were created.  Now that the natural human population has bounced back, the androids are being phased out; no more are being produced and those still extant are gradually losing their jobs and being replaced with woman-born people.

The actual plot concerns an android who is going through a crisis, Stac Fuoss.  Fuoss is cheating on his android wife Lisa with a natural woman, Carol, and being pushed out of his job at an insurance agency.  He is also having terrible nightmares; these nightmares evince some of that "technical bedazzlement" Budrys warned us about:

She came from blackness, and it was into blackness that he went for her.

He rolled and jerked on the bed.  Time whinnied by like a silver beast.

The woman was gone, hidden in blackness.  His feet moved spasmodically against the sheets.

The blackness parted and the woman returned.  There was with her--

While the dream scenes are sort of annoying, there are good things in the story, mostly concerning what life is like as an android, the neuroses that spring up from being an artificial person who can't have kids.  The android men are all chain smokers, for example, android women were only created to provide companionship to the male androids, and Fuoss spent all his money paying the android-making company to destroy the template used to make his wife so she will be a unique being and not just one of many clones.  The recurring nightmare is meant to convey to us readers the obsessive nature of Fuoss's hopeless hope of having a child, but I think Budrys could have done the dreams better or come up with some other technique to get this across.  (Full disclosure: Dream sequences are one of my pet peeves.)

In the final pages of the story the celebrated android lawyer who is having an affair with Lisa comes up with a scheme that provides some measure of hope for the androids.  Androids will crew the first space ship to leave the atmosphere, and come up with bogus evidence that indicates that natural-born humans can't go into space but androids can.  This will create a reason to manufacture more androids and put in the hands of the androids the power to control Earth.  But, driven over the edge by his obsession with fathering a child and human prejudice (when he asks Carol to marry him she scoffs, "Me, marry an android?"), Fuoss assaults Carol, perhaps killing her.  News reports of his crime inflame the natural-born population against androids, ruining the lawyer's plan and dooming the androids to extinction.

While it is perhaps too long, I like the plot of this one, and judge "Dream of Victory" moderately good.  Like so many of these Budrys stories, it is about somebody who is out of place, alienated, but instead of being about a diplomat or an exile or a spy, it is about someone who is a second-class citizen; I assume the story is at least in part an allegory of the experience of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States.

"Dream of Victory" has not been widely anthologized; after its debut in the same issue of Amazing as one of my least favorite Henry Kuttner stories, "Or Else," it reappeared in Amazing in 1969, while that venerable magazine was being edited by none other than one of this blog's particular heroes,  Barry N. Malzberg!   

"The Peasant Girl" (1956)

Like those Gus stories, this is a story of homo superior and the difficult relationship they have with us mundanes.  But in this tale it is the supermen who have the whip hand!

It is the future, and the superhumans are our more or less benevolent rulers, using their astonishing psychic powers to make our lives more comfortable, convenient, and efficient.  For example, as the story begins, our homo sapien protagonist, Henry Spar the cabinetmaker, finds that his younger sister, whom he has raised, has vanished.  Because now there is only one person living in their rural small town domicile, the powers that be shrink the house to a more compact, more manageable size!  Similarly, when Spar decides to ride the bus to nearby NYC to confront the rarely seen supermen and find out where they have teleported Dorothy, the bus that comes by is just the right size for the number of waiting passengers--Earth’s psychic rulers can read all our minds and know at any moment how many of us need a bus and where we want to go!  Mundanes don’t even have to light their own cigarettes, because some guy somewhere is always reading your mind and will use his long-distance pyrotechnic powers to safely light it for you the moment you want it lit!  And, of course, when you are done with it, somebody somewhere teleports away the unsightly butt.

The supermen are always reading everybody’s minds, so they have no trouble finding their perfect mates; for this reason, mundane women regularly just vanish from their homes, teleported into the arms of their new superhusbands. Spar suspects that Dorothy has been taken against her will, but when he meets her and her superbeau she tells him she truly loves the mental giant who has whisked her away from the Spar household without warning and taken her to Paris for a new dress, to Rome to have her hair done, and to a seaside kirk in Scotland to be married.  As Dorothy's superspouse explains, because they are all constantly reading each other’s minds, the supermen can’t really commit any crimes.

Mundane men are understandably bitter about living in a surveillance state where the women in their lives can just be teleported away any minute, but the supermen aren’t happy either. They are socially and genetically distinct from us normies, but have no culture of their own (in part because they have no need to work with their hands or even walk); everything they do is a reflection of or derivative of us mundanes, who hate them. But Budrys ends his story on an upbeat, hopeful, note.  After she gives birth to superhubby’s son, Dorothy begins spending time with her brother again, and Spar develops a relationship with his nephew.  Said nephew begins to learn how to work with wood from his uncle, and we are given reason to believe that Dorothy's son will be one of the first of the supermen to show some kind of creativity, that he is a pioneer in the development of a native homo superior culture, and that his relationship with his uncle is a harbinger of a future in which superman and mundane will be better able to get along.

"The Peasant Girl" is a good story and a good way to end the collection.  It first appeared in Astounding under that Paul Janvier pen name and would later see print in Joan Kahn's 1969 anthology of suspense stories, Hanging By a Thread.

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I'm quite happy with Budrys' Inferno, and even purchased another book of 1950s Budrys short stories, 1960's The Unexpected Dimension, just this week.  I guess we have to say that Budrys' Inferno has converted me from a Budrys skeptic to a Budrys fan.

Back in 2017 Joachim Boaz reviewed Budrys' Inferno at his blog Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.  He also liked the book as a whole, but, a testimony to our divergent tastes, I think the story he may have liked most, "Lower Than Angels," which he awards 4.25 stars out of five, was the one I liked least!  (Joachim also gave "The Peasant Girl" a 4.25; there we are much closer to agreement.)  Joachim was also very harsh in his dismissal of "The Man Who Tasted Ashes," which I enjoyed.  So, to get a different perspective on Budrys' Inferno, definitely check out Joachim's take and the discussion there at his exciting blog.  (And remember that you can read these vintage science fiction tales, and thousands of others, for free at the internet archive!)

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More 1950s SF in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!     

Algis Budrys's "Gus" stories

The third story in Budrys' Inferno is "And Then She Found Him," which isfdb is telling me is the second of the three "Gus" stories written by Algis Budrys and published between 1955 and 1957 under the Paul Janvier nom de plume.  I decided to look up the other two Gus tales at the internet archive and read the three of them in chronological order.

"Nobody Bothers Gus" (1955)

Augustin Kusevic is one of the early specimens of homo superior.  He has tremendous intellectual and psychic abilities--he can use math to foretell future social and economic developments; he need only read the first three pages of a novel to predict its course and conclusion; he can manipulate matter, say, turn a pen into a bouncing ball and back again or melt a twelve-lane highway, with ease.  But all these powers have come with a terrible price.  Gus autonomically generates a "field that damps curiosity," with the effect that people pay no attention to him, dismissing as magic tricks the psychic miracles he performs and forgetting that he was once heavyweight boxing champion of the world.  Superior to everyone, and  unable to form any emotional connection to an individual or to the larger culture, Gus is a lonely man without a country, without friends, without love.

"Nobody Bothers Gus" is a mood and character piece whose main plot (middle-aged Gus, having abandoned his too-easy boxing career, buys and fixes up a remote house only to lose it to eminent domain when the Feds decided to build Earth's first spaceport nearby) feels secondary.  The tantalizing component of the plot is the revelation that there are other people like Gus out there, presenting the possibility that maybe Gus need not be alone forever.

Not bad.  "Nobody Bothers Gus" first appeared in Astounding and was well received, chosen by Judith Merril for her first Year's Greatest SF anthologies and included since then in a multitude of anthologies edited by everybody ranging from Damon Knight and James Gunn to Barry Malzberg and Martin H. Greenberg.

"And Then She Found Him" (1957)

Gus Kusevic doesn't actually appear in "And Then She Found Him," making me doubt the utility of calling these three stories "The Gus stories," but the tale does take place in the same universe and address similar themes.  It appeared in Venture and later in the anthology No Limits, as well as the various printings of Budrys' Inferno (AKA The Furious Future) and some European publications.

"And Then She Found Him" is quite plot-driven, and even has a shock ending.  In Chicago a community of fifty of the superhumans with the curiosity-damping field has assembled.  Following various clues, one of the supermen, Deerbush, travels the country finding these mutants and bringing them back to Chi-town to be welcomed to the super-community.  Deerbush is sort of like a matchmaker; when he finds a mutant he usually senses that there is a person back in the Windy City who would make a perfect spouse for this new member of the homo superior colony.

In a town he finds Viola, a mutant who has been using her superpowers to steal expensive consumer goods.  Viola has a power Deerbush has encountered in no other mutant--she can hypnotize people into obeying her; nobody can resist her commands, even commands to steal or to assault others. So rapacious is Viola that her thefts are wrecking the local economy and making the local retailers and law enforcement personnel paranoid.  If the Viola crime wave is not ended soon many people may lose their jobs and innocent people may be imprisoned or suffer mob justice!

Almost as mindblowing as Viola's powers is that Deerbush the matchmaker realizes Viola is his soulmate and he falls in love!

Tragedy strikes when the extent of Viola's mental illness becomes fully apparent.  She refuses to go to Chicago and leave behind all the luxury items she has stolen, and she has no interest in marrying Deerbush.  Unreformable, her powers of hypnosis a threat to all of civilization, Deerbush has no choice but to kill her!

This story is acceptable, less moving and more sensationalistic than "Nobody Bothers Gus."  I suppose feminists might object to it as a story in which a woman is so selfish, materialistic, and manipulative that she has to be put down for the good of the universe, or just on the basis that it is a story written by a man which attempts to psychoanalyze a woman. 

"Lost Love" (1957)

Old Doc Bennett is riding a bus across the great state of New Jersey.  Doc is dozing on mass transit among the plebs instead of caressing the wheel of a Mercedes because he is the kind of doctor who ministers to the poor instead of providing face lifts to the haute bourgeoisie!  Doc notices a teen-aged boy across the aisle, a pathetic wretch clad in rags!  He wants to help this emaciated scarecrow of a human being, and engages him in conversation, even offering to let him stay in his household a while until he gets on his feet.  But the boy refuses Doc's help, saying it would be no use; he describes his life and we readers of "Nobody Bothers Gus" recognize that this kid is one of those supermen with a curiosity-damping field, that he can't make friends with us normies because we forget him as soon as we look away from him.  Case in point: every time Doc Bennett wakes up from a snooze the kid has to introduce himself again!  The kid has been travelling the nation, refusing to use his superpowers to steal and thus living on the edge of starvation, hoping he will somehow meet somebody who will remember him, somebody of his own superhuman species.

The tragic twist ending comes when Doc gets home.  He greets his wife but is surprised to find that a teenage girl who actually looks a little like his wife is also living in his house--this girl moans that Mom forgot to set the table for her yet again.  Dun dun dun!  Doc Bennett's own daughter is one of the superpeople, and if the boy had accepted Doc's hospitality he would have met his soulmate and his (and her!) abject loneliness would have been relieved for good!

Acceptable, but inferior to "Nobody Bothers Gus" because it is too sappy and too melodramatic.  "Lost Love" first jerked the tears of SF readers in a magazine called Science Fiction Stories edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes that endured for seven years (1953-1960, 38 issues total.)  Martin H. Greenberg would later include it in 101 Science Fiction Stories, which was published in the United Kingdom as The Giant Book of Science Fiction Stories.

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"Nobody Bothers Gus" stands above the crowd, but I think "And Then She Found Him" and "Lost Love" are just average, though I guess "And Then She Found Him" is remarkable for being one of those stories (like Tom Godwin's famous 1954 "The Cold Equations") that contrives a situation in which it makes sense to slay a woman who isn't perhaps really morally responsible for all the trouble she has caused.

We'll finish up Budrys' Inferno in our next blog post.

Three 1950s stores from Budrys' Inferno

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Budrys' Inferno, a 1960s paperback collection of nine stories by Algis Budrys first published in science fiction magazines in the 1950s.  The collection is dedicated to Damon Knight, and in the introduction Budrys tells us the stories were selected by Thomas A. Dardis.

In our last blog post we read the second story in the collection, 1958's "Between the Dark and the Daylight."  Today let's read the first, fourth and fifth pieces.

"Silent Brother"  (1956)

This one appears to have been a hit.  After it first appeared in John W. Campbell's Astounding it was chosen by Judith Merril for the 1957 edition of her famous Year's Greatest SF anthology series, and would go on to be translated into French, German and Japanese.  I actually own that edition of Year's Greatest SF, and see that, in her intro to "Silent Brother," Merril praises Budrys fulsomely, jokes about his profusion of pennames ("Silent Brother" appeared under the pseudonym "Paul Janvier") and says he is "from Jersey;" Budrys was born in Konigsberg in 1931 but, his Lithuanian family in exile after the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe, Budrys spent his youth in the greatest state of the union.

Harvey Cable is an astronaut and engineer whose work was essential to making Earth' first interstellar voyage successful, but he wasn't able to fly to Alpha Centauri himself with his comrades because he had been severely injured in a test flight accident.  When his friends return from their unprecedented adventure, the invalided Cable envies the public acclaim they receive.  But soon he has other things on his mind--mysterious changes around his lonely house which suggest there is either an intruder in his home, or that in his sleep he is able to move freely, as if he had never been injured.  Whoever it is, a stranger or his own sleep-walking self, is constructing in the basement an electronic device that the waking Cable can make neither head nor tail of!

This is a good story, a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy about becoming a superman who will never be lonely again in a world of plenty and peace.  Cable's friends, out on some alien planet, were united with benevolent immaterial aliens, and have come to share these beneficent beings with the rest of humanity.  An Earthling living in symbiosis with such an alien is super healthy (in mere days Cable's ruined eye, useless legs, and lost teeth are regenerated) and can walk through walls and perform feats of technical wizardry.  Soon every person on Earth will have such a little friend and all our problems will be solved and we will be able to explore the universe.

I thought Budrys's handling of the scenes in which Cable tried to figure out the mystery of what was going on in his house clever and entertaining, and Budrys also provides us a sort of life-affirming story arc in which Cable misses and envies his friends but then learns that they have been thinking and caring about him all along.  This is a story about people getting along which isn't mawkish or saccharine and doesn't show its hand until the end--thumbs up!

Budrys' Inferno was printed several times in Great Britain under the title The Furious Future

"The Skirmisher" (1957)

This is a brief noirish detective story about a time traveler from the future who comes back to 1957 to set elaborate traps that kill people before they can produce the offspring whom, for unspecified reasons, somebody in the future doesn't want to have to deal with.  Maybe the most noteworthy element of the story is that the reader is expected to figure out that the assassin is a time traveler.  The meticulous planning of the deadly Rube Goldberg "accidents" in this story reminded me of Budrys's intricate descriptions of Harvey Cable's methods of investigating what is going on in his house in "Silent Brother," but while that story had an emotional arc and was optimistic, "The Skirmisher" is cynical and a little gimmicky, and too short to really develop characters or a world.   Acceptable.

"The Skirmisher" was first published in Infinity Science Fiction and has only ever resurfaced in Budrys collections.

"The Man Who Tasted Ashes" (1959)

Like "The Skirmisher," "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" concerns an outsider who puts into motion an elaborate scheme to murder somebody.  A space alien living in disguise on the Earth wants to start World War III and hires Redfern, an English adventurer who now lives in America and does things like gunrunning for a living, to murder a communist diplomat who is visiting Washington.  "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" is composed of scenes that feel like they were lifted out of espionage fiction: Redfern in a hotel room, trying to remain cool as a cucumber as he negotiates with the alien and receives high tech gadgets, Redfern's anxiety boiling over as he talks to a British diplomat in the shadowy corner of a restaurant, Redfern obsessively checking his watch as he drives down the highway in a stolen car, trying to reach the aliens' spaceship before blast off.  Will the diplomat from the Warsaw Pact be killed?  Will war erupt between East and West?  Will Redfern get to the alien ship on time?

I liked the car driving scenes, and Budrys starts the story in the car, in medias res (all those negotiations are related in flashbacks), and thus gets the reader's attention in a way that telling the story in strict chronological order might not.  And while the complicated crime stuff in "The Skirmisher" is the meat of that story, all the lurid spy and space alien skulduggery in "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" is used to construct a psychological portrait of a warped personality; I can recommend this one.

"The Man Who Tasted Ashes" first saw print in Damon Knight's If, and would go on to appear in an anthology of If stories and a 1966 book of SF stories designed for use in schools.

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More 1950s stories by Algis Budrys in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!