Merril-approved 1958 stories: J B Daley, A Davidson and C Davis

Judith Merril read hundreds of stories published in 1958, reprinted like 15 of them in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume and in the back of that book included a list of like a hundred more she thought worthy of note.  After she performed all that labor, the least we can do is read a few of the stories.  Back in September of 2021 we read eight of the 1958 stories Merril reprinted, among them a Fritz Leiber story about a cat who performs miracles in the psychiatric field and an E. C. Tubb joke story about vampires; oh yeah, and then there was the John Steinbeck story that Merril thought a "delightful" "satire" and I thought "tedious" and "lame."  Well, let's put that put behind us and focus on what we are doing today in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Four: cherry picking stories from that alphabetical three-page list in the back of the anthology to read.  We've already conquered the first three letters of the alphabet, so today we start the "D"s.

"Wings of the Phoenix" by John Bernard Daley 

This guy Daley has three short fiction credits at isfdb and we've already read one of them, "The Man Who Liked Lions," an adventure story about warring Atlanteans that also serves as a denunciation of obese Americans.  I don't actually seek out jeremiads against those of my countrymen who share my love of carbohydrates--I read "The Man Who Liked Lions" for the same reason I am reading "Wings of the Phoenix": because Merril recommended it.  "Wings of the Phoenix" was only ever printed once, in Infinity, and even though Daley's story isn't mentioned on the cover, the cover illustration unmistakably depicts characters from "Wings of the Phoenix" and spoils a component of the ending.  

"Wings of the Phoenix" is a postapocalyptic story that (I guess) is supposed to be funny.  These are two more kinds of stories that I don't actually seek out but which I somehow end up reading pretty regularly.

C. Herbert Markel, III, is one of the very few survivors of the atomic war and the plague that followed it.  Markel is a little mad, and has a messianic image of himself as the man who can sire and educate a new human race, one that won't start cataclysmic wars.  To achieve his lofty goal, he first needs a woman to give birth to the first generation of the new race, and early in the story he finds a fat blonde woman (Daley reminds us again and again that this woman is fat) whom Markel dubs "Earth Mother," even though she informs him she already has a name--Darlene.  Besides being fat, Earth Mother is ignorant, vapid and stupid, and her dialogue features grammatical errors, slang, and mispronunciations, and in large part consists of lamentations that the postapocalyptic landscape suffers an absence of popular music, movies, or fun of any sort.  At times she herself drifts into hallucinatory madness.  

A third person rounds out our cast of characters.  This is Rocky, a motorcycle enthusiast who was Darlene's boyfriend before she fled him and by chance blundered into Markel.  When Rocky catches up to Markel and EM, he demands the woman formerly known as Darlene back, threatening to pursue Markel and kill him.  Markel shoots Rocky down, but a few days later, as Markel and Earth Mother are driving to California, the black clad motorcycle rider shows up again, and Markel shoots him down a second time.  But soon Rocky is pursuing them anew.  Markel and EM march up a mountain on foot, where Markel lays traps for Rocky and succeeds in capturing the preternaturally persistent biker.

Markel experiments on the captive Rocky, killing him in various ways and observing as his body heals and he revives; Rocky, it seems, is an unkillable mutant.  Markel tries to come up with a way of neutralizing Rocky, but success eludes him and the ending of "Wings of the Phoenix" is an ironic downer.  Just as Markel is finally becoming attracted to the dim-witted Earth Mother (she having lost weight on their adventures), Darlene decides that, after all, it is Rocky who is the more suitable boyfriend and she kills Markel, dooming the Earth to repopulation by stupid unkillable mutants.

"Wings of the Phoenix" has too many jokes, which sort of undermine its bleak noirish plot, the themes of which are madness and futility, but I like the basic plot outline and the story is not badly written, and the characters' behavior, mental deficiencies and physical and psychological peculiarities are certainly strange and memorable.  We'll give this one a passing grade.

Emsh illustrates six ways Markey tries to kill Rocky; here are two

"The Grantha Sighting" by Avram Davidson

Merril recommended two stories by Davidson, one of which, "Present for Lona," we read back in 2019.  "The Grantha Sighting" is a joke story and a waste of time.

Basically, a childless couple lives on a farm in rural upstate New York and the wife at least finds it sort of lonely and boring.  Luckily, a UFO lands nearby and the alien occupants, a married couple with a baby, require their help--the human husband helps the alien husband repair the flying saucer, while the human wife helps the alien wife change the alien baby's diaper and warm a bottle of alien milk for it.  Then the saucer leaves.  UFO enthusiasts have seen the saucer landing and/or taking off, and come visit the remote farm to investigate.  The mundane quotidian nature of the aliens' visit, as accurately described by the husband, seems to displease the UFOlogists, to raise their doubts as to the veracity of the account, so the wife claims hubby was joking and offers a more dramatic but quite fictional version of their meeting with aliens; this ensures she will have plenty of company in the coming months.

The story of the sighting is actually embedded in a frame story in which a radio talk show host comes to the farm house to record an interview of the couple.  Davidson takes pains to reproduce the cadence and manner of speaking of the radio host and his interviewees with strategically placed italics and additional punctuation.  The closing joke of the story is that scientists are studying a piece of cloth left by the aliens, not realizing what the farm couple knows, that this artifact of a civilization from another world is a diaper.

Joke stories like this are not for me, but they have many fans.  After its debut in F&SF, "The Grantha Sighting" would be reprinted in the applicable F&SF Best of anthology, multiple Davidson collections, and anthologies edited by George W. Early and by Messrs. Asimov, Greenberg and Waugh.

"It Walks in Beauty" by Chan Davis

Chan (AKA Chandler) Davis was a mathematician active in SF fan circles and in the Communist Party USA and related organizations.  He has thirteen short fiction credits at isfdb.

"It Walks in Beauty" is about sex roles and sexual relationships in a socialistic future in which most people live in dormitories and marriage and children are permissible but considered declasse and ridiculous.  Our main character Max works in a plastics or silicone factory, the not-quite comprehensible operations of which Davis describes in some detail.  (It is possible the operations of the factory are a metaphor for the sex act and childbirth and it sort of went over my head.)  Some of Max's colleagues in the factory are female, but because they are "career girls" they aren't referred to with the pronoun "she," but instead "it," and are not considered women, not considered sexually attractive.  Only a small number of females in this society are considered women and desirable and referred to as "she;" these women live in houses and nightly perform erotic dances before audiences of men, sometimes choosing individuals among the crowd with whom to have casual sex or even short term marriages of a few weeks.  (These brief marriages are called "jaypees" which I guess is derived from the abbreviation for "Justice of the Peace.")  These dancers thus do get pregnant and have children.  It is normal for men to fall in love with particular dancers and become their followers, sitting in their audiences nightly for weeks in hopes of being picked out of the crowd for a brief sexual encounter or even a "jaypee."

The plot of "It Walks in Beauty" concerns Max's relationship with a career girl with whom he is friends, Paula.  Besides being a "nice guy," Paula impresses Max because it has a higher position than he at the factory and is good at its job.  Max is in love with dancer Luana, and when he talks about Luana to Paula, it drops a bombshell--Paula and Luana were classmates in their youth, and both had the opportunity to be dancers.  Luana chose the dancer route and has already been pregnant three times with three different guys, while Paula, after dancing just a few times, found itself sickened by the lustful gaze of all those men and chose to be a career girl.  Paula today perhaps has some regret about her choice, or at least the fact that she had to make such a choice, and suspects that Luana may have similar regrets.

This conversation brings home to Max, a more sensitive man than most in this future world and more attuned to pre-revolutionary values (for example, he prefers old-fashioned music to contemporary music, and, unlike most men, he reads books), that current society's rules are maybe not fair to females like Paula, and decides to start using "she" and "her" instead of "it" to refer to Paula.  Paula is even further along in her willingness to challenge this world's mores, and makes a bold move that ends in heartbreak.  Paula contrives to get Max alone in an office in the factory, and puts on sexy clothes and a wig--just like a dancer's--and dances for Max; Paula is in love with Max and hopes he will break the rules with her and have a sexual relationship with her.  But Max isn't prepared to go that far--even though he can see that Paula has a female genitalia just like Luana's, he is conditioned to see Paula as a sort of sexless semi-man, and cannot be aroused by her.  He rushes off to hang around Luana's house in hopes of getting a glimpse of the dancer he loves through her window, leaving Paula to weep.   

I was fully prepared to hate Davis and all his works because he is a god-damned communist but this is a good story.  This is a "real" "science fiction" story in that it is full of talk about technology and science  and engages in radical speculation about alternate future social conditions; Davis considers such psychological and sociological issues as to what extent our sexual desires and relationships are the natural product of our biology and to what extent they are the result of social conditioning.  We might also see the story as a feminist satire of men's obsession with women's looks and of 20th-century society, a dramatizations of the pressure women feel to chose between family life and career life, between a life that revolves around love and sex and a life focused on doing productive work and achieving respect from the wider society.  More importantly for those of us who look for literature or entertainment in our reading, "It Walks in Beauty" isn't a bunch of lectures or caricatures, but an affecting human drama with believable characters and real human feeling.  Thumbs up for "It Walks in Beauty."  

"It Walks in Beauty" debuted in Fred Pohl's magazine Star, which endured only one issue, and that is where I read it.  It seems that fellow commie Pohl made revisions to Davis' story; according to Josh Lukin, editor of the 2010 Davis collection It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, Pohl changed the "humane tone of the story to one of misanthropic irony."

In the past I have read different versions of stories by Thomas Disch (1967's "Problems of Creativeness" and its 1972 version "Death of Socrates") and Barry Malzberg (the original versions of the stories in the fix-up novel in Universe Day as well as in that book itself) and compared them.  I decided to conduct a similar investigation of "It Walks in Beauty" and read the original version of the story from the aforementioned 2010 collection edited by Lukin.

(The original version of "It Walks in Beauty" was first presented to the public in September of 2003 in Ellen Datlow's webmagazine Sci Fiction.) 

The version in Star includes some additional material at the start of the story, introducing earlier the fact that the pronoun "it" is applied to career girls and giving some additional screen time to a minor character.  Pohl's big changes are to the ending.  In Davis's original version, Max's love for Luana is extinguished, partly by Paula's dance, partly because Luana has started a new jaypee, and while things are ambiguous, Davis leaves open the possibility that Max will realize Paula is his real love.  

While Davis's original ending is more hopeful, and perhaps makes more sense, in light of all the indications that Max is different from most men of his time and is evolving in his attitude towards career girls, Pohl's tragic ending has more impact and is more satisfying and easy to understand because it is so definitive. 

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One of the virtues of this Merril-centric project is that I am nudged to read stories I might otherwise not consider because their authors have only three stories listed at isfdb or are hard core socialists, and sometimes, as today, those stories are good. 

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

Merril-approved 1956 stories by J B Daley, E L Malpass, and R Bretnor

We had a good experience employing Judith Merril as a guide to the SF short stories of 1960, as chronicled in those late February and early March blog posts* about stories she reprinted or recommended in the sixth volume of her famous anthology series.  Even when I disagreed with Merril's judgement that this or that story was a slice of awesomeness that should be on every gourmand's menu, it was at least fun to ponder why she picked it out of the crowd of magazines and books printed in 1960.  So let's run a similar caper with one of Merril's earlier anthologies.  A copy of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume in its paperback Dell incarnation, which is ennobled by beautiful and evocative Richard Powers paintings on both back and front covers, resides on the shelves of the MPorcius Library; let it serve as a guide book for a little trip through the SF of 1956.  Today we'll read stories by John Bernard Daley, E. L. Malpass, and Reginald Bretnor.  After some consideration, I have decided to forgo looking up scans of these stories  online and actually read them from my copy of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume, even though its pages are falling out all over MPorcius Headquarters; we here at MPorcius Fiction Log honor this book's sacrifice in service of our genre fiction research.  

(Before we get to today's three stories, let me note that I have already blogged about four stories that Merril chose to reprint in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume: Theodore L. Thomas's "The Far Look," Damon Knight's "Stranger Station," Algis Budrys's "Silent Brother," and Mack Reynolds's "Compounded Interest.")

*Links: W Moore, J Brunner, H Fast, F Brown, R Bretnor, R G Brown & K Amis; Anderson, Ballard, Blish and Budrys; Clarke, Kapp, Knight, Lafferty, Leinster; Matheson, Pohl, Reynolds; Simak, Sturgeon, Tubb

"The Man Who Liked Lions" by John Bernard Daley (1956)

This is a pretty good adventure story about psychic time travelers from Atlantis chasing each other in 20th-century America.  It is also one of those misanthropic SF stories about how people (or at least 20th-century Americans) are fat violent dopes.  (If Daley thought Americans were fat in 1956, I can only imagine what he would think today!)

The story takes place in a zoo, and we get lots of little examples of humans mispronouncing words, saying stupid things, trying to get the caged animals to fight and just trying to kill the caged animals, as well as descriptions of women's fat asses and even fat toes(!) and men's bald heads and sagging stomachs.  The main character reminisces about how he used to hunt humans back in ancient times, and compares the zoo animals of the 1900s to their much larger ancestors back in the age of Atlantis.  This renegade time traveler (and Daley) compare modern humans to chimps.  This story is a feast for you haters out there!  (Maybe this is what Futurian Merril liked about it.)

In the climactic fight the opposing groups of Atlanteans use their mental powers to enlist the aid of the various zoo animals; the main character takes time to make sure the lions kill some humans--slowly to make sure they suffer!    

A solid piece of work I can especially recommend to all my readers who are animal rights activists: you get to build up your anger by witnessing people abuse and exploit animals, and then savor the catharsis of seeing the animals massacre both Atlantean psykers and American deplorables!   

This is a professional performance, but Daley only has three story credits at isfdb.  "The Man Who Liked Lions" debuted in an issue of Infinity Science Fiction with a hubba hubba cover by Emsh which is reminding me of the bookends I just bought at the big antique show.  (We read the Algis Budrys cover story from this issue in 2019.)  In the 1970s Daley's story of mistreated beasts would be included in a Dutch anthology which went through two different editions.    

"When Grandfather Flew to the Moon" by E. L. Malpass (1955?)

You'll perhaps remember that Merril was eager to have stories about the Himalayas in the sixth of these anthologies, and so included a 1951 story by Reginald Bretnor about an arrogant white mountain climber and a wise native psyker in 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F along with all the stories first printed in 1960.  Well, SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume provides evidence she had a history of bending her own rules--it turns out that while Merril first saw "When Grandfather Flew to the Moon" in the Canadian magazine MacLean's, it had already been printed multiple times in England in 1955 under the title "Return of the Moon Man" after winning a story contest put on by the London Observer. 

This is an absurdist joke story which may be an extended riff on the supposed backwardness and stupidity of Welsh people.  It is the future, the year 2500, but somehow a Welsh farm family has just gotten electric lights installed and the British people are just sending up their first rocket to the moon.  Despite this, in the neighborhood lives a man who is an expert at repairing spaceships, so when the sceptered isle's first rocket, en route to Luna from London on its maiden voyage, crashes on the farm, it is quickly put to rights.  One of the astronauts has repented of his commitment to exploring space, so Grandfather is aboard in his place when the ship blasts off from the farm.  Grandmother is astonished by this behavior and every night goes out to look at the Moon in hopes of seeing her husband.  When the new moon comes she figures her husband has died, she thinking the moon is gone because it is invisible.  Making lemonade from lemons, she declares she never liked Grandfather and marries a guy with a time machine.  When Grandfather gets back he acquires his own time machine and chases his bigamist wife and her new husband back in time, eventually catching them and stranding Grandma in the past by wrecking her second husband's machine.

In the same way I suspect, but am too ignorant to know for sure, that Malpass's story is exploiting stereotypes about Welshmen, there is also a sort of recurring joke that people are named after their professions (Grandma's second husband is named "Llewelyn Time Machine" and the guy who fixes the moon rocket is referred to as "Uncle Spaceship-Repairs Jones") that may have resonance with a person more educated than myself.

The tone and style of "When Grandfather Flew to the Moon" reminds me a bit of R. A. Lafferty's work, but somehow it is not fun or interesting.  I'm calling this one a waste of time.

We learn on wikipedia that Eric Malpass was a banker who became a novelist; his historical novels were more successful in Germany than in the Anglophonic world.  (Insert David Hasselhoff joke here, Michael.)  He only has two stories listed at isfb.  "When Grandfather Flew to the Moon," under that title and its original title, would continue to be printed in anthologies in the 1960s.

"The Doorstop" by Reginald Bretnor (1956)

Merril is a big fan of Bretnor, and in her intro to "The Doorstop" tells us that his story "The Past and Its Dead People," which was printed in F&SF in 1956, "was to my mind the finest single story to appear in any science-fantasy magazine during the year."  But she couldn't include "The Past and Its Dead People" here in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume because "it is neither fantasy nor science fiction."  I thought the whole rap on Merril was that she was against genre boundaries and was devoted to trying to bust them down, but I guess she is also the kind of woman who zigs when you expect her to zag.  (Anyway, we'll read the alleged top story of 1956 in the near future.)

Country physician Dr. Cavaness is sitting in on a government meeting among military men and scientists.  On the table under a bell jar is a strange complicated mechanism, a device which, when he looks at it, strikes the doc as queer, as if it doesn't fit in to our world.  We get flashbacks to the doctor's youth in farm country and pivotal events in his more or less mundane life, and then flashbacks to how he discovered this outré device--his wife was using it to hold a door open--and decided to show it to a friend who is an electronics engineer.  The authorities have figured out that it is a sort of detection or tracking device, made of materials that have never been encountered in our solar system and powered by some undetectable source of energy, and must have arrived on Earth less than a month ago.  Dr. Cavaness is severely disoriented by the realization that super advanced aliens from a distant star must be nearby and that how he looks at the universe, and how the human race lives, must radically change.

While a hard science-fiction story, "The Doorstop" has elements we recognize from Lovecraftian tales--the place or thing that feels disturbingly alien, and the sanity-shaking realization that our place in the universe is not what we thought it was.  The spirit of Bretnor's story is not a hopeful one; the scientists suspect the alien device is used to direct weapons fire, which hints that the aliens are not necessarily a bunch of do-gooders who will solve all our problems for us, and Cavaness feels his world "dissolving" around him and scrambles for a psychological defense mechanism that will allow him to doubt the disturbing reality that the universe is full of "unthinkable" alien life and we humans are about to meet some of it.

Pretty good.    

    

"The Doorstop" debuted in John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding and lay dormant for like thirty years after its appearance in Merril's anthology, until 1988 when Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg revived it for inclusion in the 18th volume of The Great SF Stories.

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Two hits, one miss.  We'll see how fares the next batch of three stories reprinted by Judith Merril in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.