Third Galaxy Reader: T R Cogswell, F L Wallace, A Davidson, and L del Rey

There are people who will tell you that conquering outer space is a waste of time.  We at MPorcius Fiction Log beg to differ!  And today we are gambling that 1950s stories from H. L. Gold's Galaxy will agree with us and not the naysayers who want to tie us all down permanently to this big ol' rock that--admit it!--you are kind of getting sick of.

Years ago I purchased a bedraggled copy of Permabook M-4172, The Third Galaxy Reader, for 50 cents at the Second Story Books location in Washington D.C., the belly of the beast.  This book has crossed this great country of ours at least once, as a stamp indicating it was at one time on the shelves of Rodden's Bookshop in Long Beach, CA, indicates.  First printed in 1960, this paperback edition of the 1958 hardcover promises, right there in all-caps on its cover, stories about "the world of outer space" that are "soaring" and "exciting," not depressing or discouraging.  Let's investigate the contents of this book which is falling apart in my hands as I speak.

But first, I'll point out that I have already read many of the tales here in Third Galaxy Reader.  Who could forget Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon," which I read ten years ago?  Less memorable was "Volpla" by Wyman Guin which I also read in 2014.  Oh yeah, and then there's Evelyn E. Smith's "The Vilbar Party," "Time in the Round" by Fritz Leiber, "The Haunted Corpse" by Frederik Pohl, "Man in the Jar" by Damon Knight and "Honorable Opponent" by Clifford D. Simak, all of which I read in one fell swoop in 2019.  That's a lot of stories, but there are still some left for us to try on for size today: Theodore R. Cogswell's "Limiting Factor," F. L. Wallace's "End as a World," Avram Davidson's "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper" and Lester del Rey's "Dead Ringer."  These titles don't exactly sound optimistic, but let's not give up before we've even started.  

"Limiting Factor" by Theodore R. Cogswell (1954) 

Here we have a story lacking in plot and character that relies for what little energy it has on weak jokes and a counterintuitive idea about a SF commonplace, homo superior.  Barely acceptable filler.

Jan and Ferdie (these feel like very Fifties names to me, but I guess that is because I think of Jan and Dean as a 1950s act, even though wikipedia is telling me their big hits were in the '60s) live in the near future.  They are among the secret minority that has psychic powers--they can communicate telepathically, fly, etc.  We see the theme of the story immediately when they talk about how taking an elevator or an air taxi is faster than using their mental powers to fly and using telepathy causes a head ache so calling somebody up on the phone is preferable.  The secret supermen and superwomen decide to leave the Earth to avoid the inevitable conflict between them and the mundanes, so Ferdie and Jan abandon their jobs and friends and families and are aboard the psychic-powered hyperspace ship when it takes off from its secret location on a mission to find a world for the super people to settle.  They discover a world inhabited by human beings who developed independently of Earth; these people are decadent and bored, their civilization is going nowhere.  At first the Terran superpeople think that these losers are mundanes abandoned by their own homo superior minority, and figure that homo superior members buoy and protect society; the belief that progress and prosperity on Earth is dependent on them, they decide to return home out of a feeling of responsibility to their fellow (if inferior) Earthers.  But then it comes to their attention that these do-nothing bores are the local homo superior, people who left their home world just like they just did!  There is a limit to human psychic powers, just like there is a limit to human muscle power--even the strongest man can't lift as much as a steam shovel, and similarly machines will soon be developed on Earth that can perform any feat a psychic superman can but far better.  The psykers of this dead-end civilization the Earthers have discovered thought, wrongly, their psychic powers would expand without limit, and brought with them no people able to build machines, and so they have stagnated.  The homo superiors of Earth return home and take their old jobs and reunite with family and friends, confident that their powers don't make them all that special and so there will be no race war.

Cogswell's basic idea is not bad, but the actual story lacks entertainment value--the story is mostly light-hearted dialogue and the characters are not there to inspire feeling in the audience, but just to air the idea.  "Limiting Factor" has resurfaced in mutant-oriented anthologies and Cogswell collections.

"End as a World" by F. L. Wallace (1955)

Here we have a gimmicky story the twist ending of which is based on what amounts to a pun.  "End as a World" has an optimistic hopeful message, which in theory might be uplifting or give you the warm fuzzies, but the lion's share of the story deceitfully tries to inspire in the reader the opposite emotions.  Thumbs down! 

Our narrator is a teenaged boy.  We see him interact with his mother and with various friends, including a black kid (a "Negro") whom we are told is better at sports than all the white kids.  Everybody in town is sort of anxious--everybody in the world is sort of anxious!  In front of the churches are signs saying "THIS IS THE DAY THE WORLD ENDS!"  At the predicted hour the townspeople gather to watch the sky--people all over the world are watching the sky!  The twist ending is that the human race is not going extinct, as the text has sort of duplicitously implied--the first ship that went to Mars is returning today and before landing the vessel will circumnavigate the globe and leave a condensation trail that everybody in the world can see.  If people are worried it is because something might go wrong with the ship.  The phrase "This is the day the world ends" is an oblique poetic way of saying "this is the day the human race takes its first steps out into the universe" or something.  The ship arrives safely on time and everybody rejoices and strangers kiss each other and so forth.

I hate this kind of trickery.

Martin H. Greenberg seems to have liked "End as a World"--he put it in at least two anthologies.

"Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper!" by Avram Davidson (1957)

Here we find a joke story about illegal immigration and welfare fraud.  Is Galaxy a humor magazine?

The setting of the story is a secret meeting of the leadership of the American Dental Association.  The assembled dentists have received a message from the most innovative dentist in the United States, inventor of superior dental prosthetics, Morris Goldpepper, who has been missing for some weeks.  Goldpepper, we learn, was a SF fan who made no secret of his ambition to be the dentist on the first space ship.  The message was found in a faulty dental plate by a dentist who worked on the mouth of an old--and odd--man, and is read to the assembled ADA big wigs and reproduced in the text of the story.

The message describes how Goldpepper was approached by an old man whose mouth and inner eyelids were blue.  This guy turned out to be an alien and invited Goldpepper to accompany him back to his homeworld via teleporter to help the aliens improve the state of their dental science, apparently lacking.  But it was all a trick!  These aliens naturally shed all their teeth as they reach adulthood and eat goops and slimes, and always look old to human eyes, even when in the prime of life.  They can more or less pass as (aged) Earthers if they put cosmetics on their blue skin and if they are provided false teeth.  Their scheme is to move to Earth, to California, the state which has the most generous welfare provisions, and live on the dole.  Goldpepper is enslaved, forced to make false teeth for these interstellar parasites!

As the story ends, the assembled ADA leadership discusses steps to deal with the aliens and rescue Goldpepper.

This story is competently executed, with Davidson giving Goldpepper a personality and writing style, and it is interesting to see a satire about illegal immigration and abuse of the welfare system, though I don't know enough about Davidson to know if he thinks generous social spending and unregulated immigration are a real problem or if he is just poking fun at people who consider them a problem.  Part of the satire of course is of SF itself, this story serving as a comic contrast to the huge number of SF stories in which aliens want to conquer the Earth; these aliens are merely small scale deadbeats.

We'll call it acceptable.  "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper!" would be reprinted in Davidson collections and by Robert Silverberg in his anthology Infinite Jests: The Lighter Side of Science Fiction.

"Dead Ringer" by Lester del Rey (1956)

Here we have a decent horror story with a twist ending you can kind of see coming. 

Dane Phillips is a reporter and a veteran of the Pacific War who moves from newspaper to newspaper, repeatedly getting sacked.  During the war he saw a comrade get killed, only to meet him later and find him hale and hearty!  Since then, Dane has done some investigating and come to believe there live among us humans, undetected, space aliens who look human but are almost unkillable, capable of healing up after almost any injury.  When mangled in an explosion or a car wreck or something, some of these E.T.s have had to fake their own funerals--others have even had to escape from their coffins after being buried by ignorant native Terrans.  Dane keeps getting fired from newspapers because he keeps trying to get them to print the stories he writes with the aim of blowing the lid off this alien conspiracy and editors won't have it.  Dane has even been committed to a mental institution and escaped.

We observe some of Dane's sleuthing--digging up a grave!--during which he is captured by the men from the funny farm; he is dragged back to the loony bin where he overhears the shrinks' plans for him--since he has refused to abandon his beliefs in alien infiltration they are going to give him shock treatment in an effort to erase these obsessive thoughts!  This sounds like a fate worse than death, so Dane tries to commit suicide!  But when he slashes his throat the wound heals up lickety-split!  Dane himself is one of the aliens!

A fun little story.  Besides del Rey collections, "Dead Ringer" has been reprinted in some anthologies, including a 1966 German "Best of" Galaxy volume. 

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Obviously, these were not the "soaring" stories about "the world of outer space" we were promised.  We'll put aside whether they are set in space or actually about life outside the Earth's atmosphere and consider if they are "soaring," which I am taking to mean uplifting, optimistic, hopeful, a vindication of life and humanity, etc.; I'm not going to allow any lawyerly bunkum about how these stories "soar the heights of terror and anxiety."

Wallace's "End as a World" comes the closest to soaring because at its climax we realize the people of Earth are united across national and ethnic boundaries in their hopes of conquering space and their joy at the first step of that heroic destiny being concluded successfully, but the story consists of a cheap trick and through most of it Wallace tries to make you sad.  Cogswell's "Limiting Factor" is optimistic about the future of the human race, suggesting high technology will open up wide vistas of freedom and damp down class and racial conflict, but it is too silly and jokey to be soaring.  Davidson's "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper!" is not soaring but base and belittling, being full of jokes and having as its characters self-important goofballs who resent the relatively low esteem in which their profession is held and parasitic deadbeats who take advantage of others' credulity and generosity.  Del Rey's "Dead Ringer," while probably the most entertaining story, is not soaring but sordid--it is a blood-soaked horror story about infiltration, suicide, and a horrible revelation about one's own identity.

It seems Galaxy is not the place to look for validation of our belief that the human race should bend the universe to its will and colonize the galaxy.  Again we learn not to trust the text on the covers or jackets of SF books.

Look out for more stories from anthologies in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Merril-approved 1958 stories by "Helen Clarkson," Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell

As you know, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are reading stories that Judith Merril included on a list at the end of 1959's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction And Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume headed "Honorable Mentions."  These stories, which were published in 1958, are listed alphabetically by author, and today we are finishing up the "C"s, though one of those "C"s turns out out be an "M" travelling incognito.

"The Last Day" by Helen McCoy (as by "Helen Clarkson")

Helen McCoy was a successful mystery writer who published this SF story under a pen name in the same issue of Satellite that hosted the original version of Murray Leinster's War with the Gizmos, which itself appeared under a different name, "The Strange Invasion."  "The Last Day" would be reprinted in 1994 in New Eves: Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow; when that anthology was republished in a shortened version in 2010, "The Last Day" was one of the survivors.  (There must be some kind of story behind this shortened edition, as the first edition has three credited editors but only one of those people is listed on the short edition.)  It looks like "The Last Day" was expanded into a novel of the same name printed in 1959; a lot of expansion must have been required, as this thing is only five pages here in Satellite, and those five pages are more than sufficient.

"The Last Day" is like a mainstream story, with lots of descriptions of the wind and the clouds and birds and flowers, as well as several Biblical references.  (Merril is always working to blur the distinctions between mainstream and genre literature, and/or point out how arbitrary those boundaries are.)  The narrator is a woman in some coastal New England fishing town.  Near the town is a hollow which, by some freak of geography, is never windy.  A nuclear war breaks out, apparently destroying civilization, but this somewhat secluded town survives the initial cataclysm.  Of course the story doesn't blame the war on the Soviet Union, but on all of mankind, the way sophisticated people don't condemn burglars and muggers for their trespasses, but blame "society."  The people of the little town gradually die of radiation poisoning; the local animals precede them.  The narrator is the last to die, and before she expires she visits the windless hollow, where a bird has survived because the windborne radiation has not reached it yet.

This feels like the kind of story you are supposed to take seriously because of the subject matter, but the thing is bland and unremarkable.  The characters don't do anything, nobody has any personality, and the author doesn't say anything new or interesting--she knows you know you are expected to like birds and flowers and dislike atomic bombs, and expects you to feel the appropriate sadness when she tells you the atomic bombs have killed all the birds and the flowers.  "The Last Day" comes off as pretentious, lazy and obvious.   

Thumbs down.

"Remembrance and Reflection" by Mark Clifton  

Last year, based on Merril's recommendation, I read Clifton's "Clerical Error" and liked it, and of course Barry Malzberg, our hero, is always telling people that Clifton is awesome, so we have reason to hope we'll like "Remembrance and Reflection."

isfdb tells us that "Remembrance and Reflection" is the fourth in a series, and this story is indeed full of references to and summaries of the earlier three stories; probably I should have skipped this one with the idea of perhaps reading all these stories in order some day, as my ignorance of the earlier installments almost certainly diminishes my appreciation of this one; e. g., in this piece, two characters from the earlier stories declare their intention to wed, and I had little idea if I should be happy for them or surprised or  take their relationship as a joke or predict it would fail or whatever.

Ralph Kennedy is the personnel director at some manufacturing company that sells electronic to the government.  The first few pages of the story are a jocular dialogue between Ralphie boy and his secretary that set the story's tone and expose us to its pro-risk, anti-overregulation ethos.  Government and big business are too bureaucratic and, by over-emphasizing safety and discipline, stifle the creativity of employees and the development of new ideas.  Ralph is the kind of guy who likes to bend the rules, to think outside the box.  It seems that his adventurous and skillful management of employees who have psychic powers has, in those three previous stories, led to the development of an anti-grav device as well as joining the minds of five different guys into a collective consciousness; this collective has proven be be a singularly efficient manager of production, empowering the firm to increase output without lowering quality or harming worker morale.

The plot of this story involves a Colonel Logart of the Pentagon.  He swings by the factory and tries to hire the psykers essential to Ralph's successes at the company away from the firm and into direct government employment on a big new project.  There is a lot of verbal sparring between Logart and Ralph, who is our narrator, that features Ralph's analysis of the colonel's psychology and of the colonel's strategies in trying to manipulate Ralph and Ralph's colleagues.  When Logart has no luck stealing the psykers away, the Pentagon decides that instead of the government directly running the project, the taxpayers will hire Ralph's company to take on the critical operation.  This major public work is the design, construction and launch of Earth's first manned spacecraft, a feat the Pentagon feels can only succeed if the ship is propelled by those anti-grav devices only Ralph's psykers can build and crewed by those five guys who share a collective consciousness.  To keep the project on track, Logart resigns his commission and becomes a project manager at Ralph's firm.

The third part of the story covers the space ship project, how Logart and Ralph get the whole thing up and running.  The twist ending, of which Clifton provides plenty of foreshadowing throughout the story, is that Logart himself is a psyker whose mental powers make it easy for him to manipulate people--that is how he got the Pentagon, Congress, Ralph and Ralph's colleagues to sign on to the costly spaceship scheme--and that Logart never had any intention of leaving the space ship under the control of the United States government.  Logart and the various psychics steal the ship and, bringing their wives along with them, escape off into space to start a new society somewhere out there.

While "Remembrance and Reflection" is heavy on exposition and philosophical discussion, I still kind of like it.  The philosophical stuff is interesting and I am more or less in sympathy with Clifton's apparent ideology--besides the skepticism of government and the stuff about too much regulation and an obsession with safety stifling innovation, there is also talk of how liberal societies like the United States, under the pressure of conflict with tyrannical societies like the Soviet Union, run the risk of coming to resemble those societies, plus a pervasive theme of how the thinking of individuals is severely circumscribed by their education, by the milieu in which they were brought up (their "framework") and it is difficult for a person to understand people whose minds inhabit a different "framework."  The parts of the story actually dealing with the things Logart and Ralph have to do to get the space ship built are entertaining and illustrate this "framework" theme.  I also like that Ralph, whom we readers expect to be the hero, and is an outside the box thinker who is supposedly an expert in understanding and managing people, is outwitted by Logart, who is even an even more independent, framework-busting thinker and even better at figuring people out and controlling them.

Not bad.  "Remembrance and Reflection," along with the earlier Ralph Kennedy short stories, would be reprinted in a 1980 Clifton collection edited by our beloved Barry Malzberg and workaholic anthologist Martin H. Greenberg as well as a Clifton collection printed forty years later in 2020.     

"The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak" by Mildred Clingerman

We often say that SF stories are wish fulfillment fantasies--we just said it about Raymond F. Jones' "The Gardener," in which a shy nerd not only makes friends with a big-man-on-campus jock but then learns he is a member of a superior race and his fellow supermen are always there watching over him.  Today we are saying that "The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak" is a wish fulfillment fantasy not for friendless nerds, but for women--in Mildred Clingerman's story a woman succeeds in love and in life because she smokes cigarettes and spent her savings on fancy clothes.

Mavis O'Hanlon has been engaged to bank owner Hubert Lotzenheiser for six years.  Mavis isn't crazy about Hubert, who is always trying to get her to stop smoking and to teach her self-discipline--Mavis is "chicken-hearted" and Hubert thinks she needs "fibering up."  Ironically, the reason Mavis is still engaged to Hubert is because she is timid--if she was brave she would call off the engagement.

A week before the wedding Mavis blows most of her savings on the purchase of an expensive green cloak of Victorian style that she admits to herself she is too shy to wear in public.  Then she looks for her favorite used bookstore.  Mavis loves late nineteenth-century travelogues and journals written by women--she thinks the late Victorian period was a happier time than today, when everybody is in a hurry and expected to work hard; Mavis thinks that she would fit in better in the 1860s or 1870s, that back then "there was room enough in the world for all kinds of people--the inefficient, the chicken-hearted...."  (I'm not sure if Clingerman believes this herself, or is just providing further evidence that Mavis is a person who has some faults.)  Mavis' favorite bookstore is a little place that she sometimes can't find, and, when she does find it, seems to have a different clerk behind the counter every time she visits.

Today she finds the store, and on the shelves the journal of an American woman describing her travels with friends in Germany in 1877.  When the clerk sees the book he has an amazing story to tell--he was travelling with the journal writer on the very trip described in the book when he looked into a German bookstore and was transported to this 20th-century American bookstore while reading a book of fiction about the future!  He has been stuck here in this little store for three days, and is getting cold and hungry, as he has no money and finds the city beyond the bookstore's front door terrifying.  He thinks that maybe he can return to his own time by reading this journal Mavis has found, in which he himself is mentioned.

The 19th-century man is grateful when Mavis gives him her new green cloak to wear in hopes it will warm him up.  Furthermore, when he sees Mavis whip out her cigs and start puffing away, he is astounded by her bravery.  She must be one of the bold "New Women" he reads about in those stories of the future of which he is so fond!  Her even suggests Mavis come back to the 19th century with him and marry him.  Mavis refuses, and runs off to get some food for the time traveler, but when she returns he, and her green cloak, are gone.

This adventure has fibered her up, and she plans to dump Hubert.  But before she can do so, a man who looks like the time traveller shows up at her place.  He says he is that Victorian guy's great-grandson, and in his great-grandfather's will were instructions to find Mavis and meet her on this date and give her back the green cloak.  Mavis and this guy run off to get married without even telling Hubert.  (I think the kids would call this "ghosting.")

Now, maybe you aren't so sure the late Victorian era was a paradise for women compared to the middle of the 20th century, and perhaps you even doubt that smoking cigarettes and throwing your money around recklessly is a capital idea.  Still, "The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak" is a pretty well-constructed and well-written filler story.  Maybe 2024 SF readers will love it for having a female protagonist, or maybe they will condemn it because it portrays a woman whose primary goals in life are bagging a husband and spending money.  Either way, this story is a bazillion times better than McCoy's "The Last Day," because the characters have personalities and the protagonist makes decisions and overcomes obstacles and changes as a person.       

In the 1950s and '60s, "The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak" would be reprinted in European editions of F&SF and Venture, F&SF's sister publication, as well as in the Clingerman collection A Cupful of Space, which has a sort of scary Powers cover.  (This story is a sort of light entertainment, but maybe other stories in the book are disturbing?)  In the 21st century "The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak" would reappear in the Hank Davis anthology As Time Goes By and a big (and apparently comprehensive) Clingerman collection, The Clingerman Files.  

"Thimgs" by Theodore R. Cogswell

Uh oh.  As I've told you many times, I generally avoid absurdist and satirical stories, and it looks like the only time "Thimgs" has been anthologized in English is in the Alan Dean Foster and Martin H. Greenberg volume Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves, which is promoted as "A Very Silly Collection of Funny Fantasies."  Well, we're trying this one on for size anyway...after all, it is only like ten pages.

The story stars a fat jerk, Blotz, who runs a fraudulent mail-order private eye business.  People hire him to help them find lost family members or whatever, and he takes their money and claims to be doing the investigating for which he has been paid, when really he is just sitting around his office listening to horror stories on the radio and drinking heavily.  To handle the correspondence he has as a secretary a woman who is crippled by numerous birth defects.

In a sort of meta SF joke about the often-seen trope in fiction of an odd little shop that disappears (like the book shops in the Clingerman story we just read), a radio program about just such a shop inspires Blotz to send his hunchbacked near-sighted secretary out on her crutches to buy something at a curio shop to send to one of his clients.  She comes back with an odd little doodad with a knob.  When the secretary twists the knob she vanishes but soon returns, transformed into a beautiful, healthy woman!

Blotz starts groping the secretary and she pushes him away.  He starts to have a heart attack and grabs the thingmajig and turns the knob, and is transported to a room full of computers and recording devices manned (or staffed, you know, in feminist) by a mad scientist type guy.  This guy implies that his facility is one component of the secret control apparatus of the universe that does what, in conventional conceptions of religion, God does, judge people upon death and reward the good and punish the wicked, for example.  This guy's name is "Guardian" and his specific job is to record people's lives on tapes, or I guess to run the tapes, since it seems like people's lives are predetermined and already on the tapes--whatever; Cogswell's story doesn't make a lot of internal sense.  The gizmo the secretary found is a key that allows a mortal to request edits to the rest of his or her tape.  The secretary had hers edited to make her body healthy.  

Blotz wants his tape edited so he is rich and healthy and good looking.  The Guardian says that doing so would be pointless as only the future can be edited, not the past, and Blotz's fatal heart attack has already begun and he only has like 90 seconds of future ahead of him.  Blotz somehow convinces the Guardian to start splicing the Blotz tape onto other tapes, so he can continue living indefinitely, and to make sure all of the tapes spliced onto his life be those of rich men.  But the joke is on Blotz, because the Guardian keeps splicing onto Botz's tape brief lengths of tape from the final terrifying and/or painful moments of men of wealth who got killed in fights, accidents, etc.

"Thimgs" is contrived and nonsensical, and is neither funny nor interesting.  Thumbs down!

If you want to read this clunker yourself (it seems that Anthony Boucher, Judith Merril, and Fred Pohl like it, and I can't think of any reason why you should listen to me instead of them) you can find it in the 1962 Cogswell collection The Wall Around the World, which has a "double introduction" from Messrs. Boucher and Pohl.  I suggest getting the 1974 edition, which has an awesome cover painting by John Schoenherr that was also used for multiple editions of Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night.

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It is easy to find fault with the Clifton and Clingerman stories, but they more or less succeed in what they are trying to accomplish and I don't feel like I wasted my time reading them.  I certainly feel I wasted my time with McCloy's lame effort at a tearjerker and Cogswell's wacky fat-fraud-goes-to-hell joke story, but I have to acknowledge that my main objection to them is to their authors' chosen goals--maybe people who crack open SF magazines looking for maudlin misanthropic stories about how humanity has doomed the flowers and birdies and madcap absurdist parodies of genre literature will think that McCloy and Cogswell have hit the nail on the head.

When next we meet, more 1950s SF.

Merril-approved 1956 stories: Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading 1956 stories recommended by Judith Merril in the back of her 1957 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, where you will find a long alphabetical list of "honorable mentions" that didn't quite make the cut for inclusion in Merril's book.  Today we finish up the "C"s with stories by three authors with whom I have very little familiarity: Mildred Clingerman, Theodore R. Cogswell, and Chester Cohen.  

This will be leg six on our Merril-guided journey through 1956.  Below find links to the earlier installments.   

            Abernathy and Aldiss
            Anderson, Allen and Banks 

            Barrow, Beaumont and Blish

            Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler    

            Carter, Clarke and Clifton

"First Lesson" by Mildred Clingerman 

I regularly see Clingerman's name on issues of F&SF (I don't know if she was ever published in any other SF magazine, though her work did appear in mainstream periodicals like Good Housekeeping) but, when I read her joke story "Letters From Laura" in F&SF editor Anthony Boucher's A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, I wasn't impressed enough to seek out other work by her.  (I also had a vague intuition that Boucher was publishing her because he had a crush on her.)  But today, based on Merril's recommendation, let's today give Clingerman another chance.  

"First Lesson" is full of regional stuff and identity politics stuff: a hostile description of the American South presented in the voice of a woman who misses the deserts and the mountains of her native Arizona (Clingerman herself seems to have spent most of her life in Arizona;) a bitter description of relations between the wives of enlisted men and the wives of officers; sketched portraits of the volatile friendships that women have with each other; and a plot that relies on the idea we see in fiction all the time, that black people have special occult or spiritual knowledge that can be used to help or harm white people.  Various Southern accents are represented, but the "crisp consonants" of the residents of New Jersey--the land of my birth--also get a shout out.  (I guess I can provide 21st-century readers trigger warnings that the story features a "magic Negro" and represents African-American speech phonetically in a way that is maybe not flattering and African-American writing as being rife spelling errors.)  

America is at war.  Our narrator is the wife of an enlisted man in the paratroopers and they have moved into the tower room of a Queen Anne house in the Southern town near the base where he is being trained.  (In keeping with the story's horror plot and general tone of unease, the narrator considers the house very ugly, but I have to register my dissent here and say that I find Queen Anne houses delightful; I am quite satisfied with the current HQ of MPorcius Fiction Log, but for years and years I had little daydreams about setting  up my HQ in one of those Victorian towers.)  Every day hubby goes to the base to train, and every night the narrator has horribly vivid dreams of him dying in an accident.  She unburdens herself to the black maid, who offers to employ black magic to protect her husband for a fee of twenty bucks.  Sure enough, after the money is handed over an odd little rituals are performed, husband narrowly escapes death in an accident exactly like the one in the dream.  Clingerman's ending introduces a lot of ambiguity--she gives us multiple clues that the supernatural is real and supernatural phenomena are what saved the narrator's husband, but also has the black maid admit the rituals were all a goof.  I believe that the way Clingerman squares this circle is by rendering her story not a weird tale about how the universe is horrible and inexplicable, but a tale of Christian awakening: the narrator's husband was saved because the black maid prayed to God to spare him, and the narrator is telling us this story because it represents the first step of her journey from young cynical unbeliever to one who today embraces the Christian religion, thanks to the intercession of that African-American servant, a woman who, like all of us, may be a sinner but can do God's work.

This story is well-written and all the characters' behaviors and personalities ring true, and all the social class and regional stuff, though perhaps superfluous, is interesting and feels authentic.  A decent mainstream story with SF elements; probably a good story to read if you are studying the portrayal of black people, Christianity, and (nonsexual) relationships between women in SF.          

Merril loves to reprint and promote stories as SF that first appeared in mainstream venues, and before Anthony Boucher reprinted "First Lesson" in F&SF it made its debut in Collier's.  In 1960, Robert P. Mills included "First Lesson" in A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and you can also find it in the Clingerman collections A Cupful of Space (1961) and The Clingerman Files (2017.)   

"Impact With the Devil" by Theodore R. Cogswell

Here's another name I see when I'm looking at old magazines but haven't gone out of my way to read; this will be the first Cogswell story I have ever read.  Its title is making my spider-sense tingle like crazy--it seems likely it is one of those allegedly humorous deal-with-the-devil stories, but in pursuit of this Merril 1956 project I am reading it anyway.

"Impact with the Devil" debuted in F&SF, where, as a note from editor Anthony Boucher explains, it is one of three stories presented in this issue that each integrate three genre fiction cliches--the deal-with-the-devil story, the locked room mystery, and the time paradox story.  Isaac Asimov and Miriam Allen deFord also contribute stories to this quixotic project, which is the brainchild of Cogswell.

"Impact with the Devil" is a complicated sort of Rube Goldberg thing with various twists and surprises that are neither fun nor interesting.  In the future, a criminal whose henchman is in trouble tries to enlist the help of a scientist who has a time travel machine in getting his underling out of a jam.  We are lead to believe that the scientist is the Devil, but then the truth is revealed--the scientist is not the Devil, but the criminal and his offscreen henchman are rank and file devils.  The onscreen devil travels back in time but his scheme to help his subordinate is foiled by the laws governing time travel.  (You can't change history in a way another person might notice.)  When the devil tries to kill the scientist in a locked room and thus present the police with an insoluble locked room mystery, the scientist turns the tables on the devil--the scientist knows how to bend the rules governing time travel (you can change history if nobody notices) and uses this against the devil; besides, the scientist is an angel in disguise who is on Earth hunting down devils.  

A waste of time with no human feeling or intellectual interest, just a cold and complicated mechanism full of trickery, like a non-heliocentric orrery full of epicycles.  I guess Merril admired the way Cogswell conceived of and tackled the (to my mind profitless and academic) challenge of working three tired and boring cliches into one whopper of a gimmick story.  

"Impact with the Devil" would be reprinted in the Basil Davenport anthology Deals with the Devil and the Theodore Cogswell collection The Third Eye. 

"Round-Up Time" by Chester Cohen

Here we have a name I don't know if I ever saw before it came under my steely gaze in Merril's "Honorable Mention" list.  Cohen only has five fiction entries at isfdb, and this story has never been reprinted.

"Round-Up Time" is a lame filler story and I have no idea why Merril recommended it.  Like the Eric Frank Russell story we read recently, "Rhythm of the Rats," it is based on the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.  

Our narrator is a beggar who goes to Central Park in Manhattan to beg people for money.  He encounters a colorfully dressed guy, watches him attract a crowd of people by, apparently magically, summoning irresistible music.  The music sounds different to each person, but each listener finds it to be his favorite type of music, flawlessly performed.  The gaily attired music-maker hurries off and his rabid fans follow him into a space ship that hovers over the river; the ship leaves, carrying these New Yorkers to an unknowable fate.  The somewhat predictable surprise ending of the story is that the narrator is deaf--this is how he escaped capture.

Cohen includes in his story an analog of the lame child who appears in many of the Pied Piper stories and is not able to follow the Piper with the others.  An element of "Round-Up Time" that maybe is derived from some component of the tale of the Pied Piper that I don't remember, is that people who hear the Piper's music are eager to give money to the beggar.

I have to give this story a mild negative vote.  

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Clingerman's is obviously the best of this scurvy crew of "C"s, her story being the best written and the only one that has any real human feeling or hint of a point or an ideology; the Cogswell is a self-conscious stunt, the Cohen gimmicky derivative filler.  I am interested in authentic feeling and speculation, which Clingerman delivers (a woman worried about her husband, trapped away from home in a place she doesn't like, encountering other demographics and dealing with the supernatural) while the Cogswell and Cohen are just recursive or meta in-jokes--Clingerman's story is in dialogue with and a reflection of real life, while Cogswell's and Cohen's are just commentary on the practice of writing and other earlier writings (if I was being mean-spirited, I would call Cogswell's and Cohen's stories masturbatory and incestuous.)  

Stay tuned for more not-at-all mean-spirited commentary on fiction here at MPorcius Fiction Log.