Merril-approved 1959 stories: Davidson, Davis, De Vet & Dickson

The last time we mined stories from the Honorable Mentions list at the back end of Judith Merril's Year's Best SF: Fifth Annual Edition, we read stories by four people whose names began with "C" and with whose work I was not very familiar.  Today we've got some Merril-approved "D"s and two of them are pretty famous writers whose work I have read, Avram Davidson and Gordon Dickson, while two of them, Chan Davis and Charles V. De Vet, are not very famous and I don't think I've ever read anything by them.

To give these tales a shot yourself, use the handy links in the above paragraph to be carried magic-carpet-like to the scans of the stories I am reading.

"The Woman Who Thought She Could Read" by Avram Davidson 

This story debuted in F&SF alongside the short version of Fritz Leiber's "The Silver Eggheads;" I read the book version of The Silver Eggheads back in 2022 and thought it pretty bad.  "The Woman Who Thought She Could Read" would be reprinted in Davidson collections and in anthologies edited by David G. Hartwell and Isaac Asimov (the former assisted by Kathryn Cramer, the latter by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles H. Waugh--in my academic career I learned that "assisted by" can mean "did all the real work," so keep that in mind.)

"The Woman Who Thought She Could Read" is a competent but essentially conventional twist-ending, you- shouldn't-trust-in-supernatural-advantages story, not bad at all but sort of ordinary.  Maybe it is special in its themes of people from different cultures being unable to communicate with each other, and its suggestion that more information often won't actually help you make better decisions.  We might also consider Davidson's story as a reflection of a Jewish-American perspective, or an allegory of the life of Jews in America.  Of all gentile nations, the United States has probably been the most welcoming to Jews, and Jews have achieved success here and contributed admirably to American life  in a myriad of ways.  At the same time, Jews might worry that, in the event of a catastrophe, they might be scapegoated by the very neighbors who so recently tolerated or embraced them, and it is just this sort of thing that happens in "The Woman Who Thought She Could Read."  A tragic, depressing story, in any case.

Our narrator is telling us a story of his youth.  He begins by retailing to us the history of the house he grew up in, which maybe Davidson does to bring to mind the way history is characterized by change, with families and businesses rising and falling over time, often due to unforeseeable developments beyond their control.

Living next door to the narrator's family was an Eastern European woman.  This woman spoke English with a heavy accent, and she had never been taught to read, not even her native language--where she grew up, only boys, not girls, were taught to read.  A witch, however, taught her to divine the future with beans.

Davidson lays some family relationship stuff on us; the bean reader's son is a muscleman who travels the country as a professional wrestler ("The Masked Marvel," "The Slav Slayer," etc.), and the narrator's older sister marries a guy the narrator gets along with very well.

One day, the narrator's sister and her husband are going to take some kind of holiday boat excursion.  The bean counter cautions them--the beans warn that water is dangerous to them and they should avoid the water.  So they don't go on the boat, but instead take a drive.  Due to the behavior of another driver, the car ends up in a canal where the narrator's sister and brother-in-law drown.  The boat does get into trouble, but not as severe as this--if the narrator's sister and brother-in-law had been on the boat, they would have lived.  The narrator and his parents, somewhat irrationally, blame the bean counter for this disaster, and the bean counter declares she will never read the beans again and soon leaves town.

Davidson writes his story well--the characters all convincingly to life, for example, and as I suggested earlier, the story is ripe for all kinds of analysis, so I can recommend "The Woman Who Thought She Could Read" even though the plot is just sort of typical. 

"Adrift on the Policy Level" by Chan Davis

Mathematician Chandler Davis' "Adrift on the Policy Level" debuted in Fred Pohl's fifth Star anthology, which I am having trouble finding a scan of.  Luckily, Pohl also included the story in his 1962 anthology, The Expert Dreamers (reprint, reuse, recycle), and I have been able to find a scan of that volume.  

"Adrift on the Policy Level" is a story that dramatizes with exaggeration and efforts at humor the supposed contrast between academic life and life in the private sector.  You'd think academics would be grateful to the taxpayers for financing (albeit at the point of the gun wielded by academia's brutish crony, the government) their cushy jobs, but no, academics have contempt (at best!) for business and are always seeking to demean or actually destroy the private sector.  You'll even find academics who feel that the public sector is Lucy to the private sector's Dracula instead of the other way around.  Anyway, "Adrift on the Policy Level" is a satire of the free enterprise system, with a focus on the power of salesmanship, just the kind of thing commies like Judith Merril and Frederik Pohl eat right up and are eager to serve to the rest of us.   

Our protagonist is a scientist who has discovered a natural chemical in plants that could be used to preserve wheat crops from disease and this 22-page story is all about his efforts to get a big business called "The Corporation" that owns big wheat-growing "colonies" in Antarctica with names like "Churchill" and "Great Slave" to take on the new chemical.  The scientist has to navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Corporation, but luckily he has a professional salesman to guide him.  Part of the humor of the story is the scientist's naivete--he is flabbergasted at the sight of a pretty girl, for example.  The salesman provides Davis a chance to satirize Social Darwinism; the salesman uses the phrase "survival of the fittest" approvingly, for example.  He also uses "altruism" slightingly, which may be an attack on Ayn Rand; I am not familiar enough with Rand's work to know if she talked with specificity about altruism before 1959.     

One of Davis' main themes is that in business success is achieved by charisma and trickery, while in academia success is based on results.   Now, I wasn't in academia in the 1950s, but in the 1990s and 2000s, so maybe my experience is different than Davis', but in my experience the opposite is the case.  In business you succeed when people are willing to buy your product or service--the product or service, and the money you earn by selling them, are the result.  In academia there are all too often no tangible results, just unreplicable and unfalsifiable assertions entombed in documents nobody reads, so success comes from sucking up and through corruption.  Allow us to consider a wholly hypothetical example.  (Any similarity in this example to real people or events is wholly coincidental.)  You have a friend at the, er, Fnord Foundation.  Friend gives your research center half a million bucks.  You use the half million bucks to buy your grandkids Hannukah and Christmas gifts and to furnish your Manhattan apartment and your beach house in the Hamptons and to take your friend at Fnord Foundation to the most expensive restaurants in Manhattan and to hire a bunch of ass-kissing ESL grad students to write a bunch of nonsense that looks sort of like a research report after you hire a young M, er, Pontus to copy edit it.  If a young MPontus goes to the government agency that ostensibly oversees the half million dollars to tell them about the Hannukah gifts and the Christmas gifts and the furniture and the lunches, young MPontus is reminded that this government agency gets 20% of the half million and so if anybody were to jeopardize the research center's future acquisition of additional funds from people's friends at the Fnord Foundation it would be the copy editing guy whose job would be threatened, not yours as head of the research center.  

Anyway, in the end the scientist, like Winston Smith in 1984, falls prey to the persuasive methods of his oppressors and joins their ranks, becoming an enthusiastic collaborator in his own oppression.

Obviously this story's style, themes and attitude rubbed me the wrong way, and it feels repetitive and banal besides.  I am giving "Adrift on the Policy Lebel" a thumbs down, but commies might like it.  As you might expect, a story about how poor innocent academics are the victims of big business has been reprinted in textbooks for use in the classroom like Above the Human Landscape: A Social Science Fiction Anthology and Political Science Fiction: An Introductory Reader.

"Seedling" by Charles V. de Vet

Here we have an acceptable science fiction twist ending story that addresses interesting topics we see addressed pretty regularly in SF.  Short and to the point.

De Vet sets the stage with a brief description of the reptilian animals in a jungle on an alien planet.  Then we meet our three characters, two human astronauts and their buddy.  They tell their buddy, whose memory is all messed up and has the body of a big ape-man kind of thing, that they have done biological modifications to him so he can blend in with the natives.  That way he can gather anthropological data from the inside.  Buddy hates his own smell in this native body, but as he goes off to join a tribe of natives, he gets used to it.

Among the natives the native stuff in his brain allows him to mingle with ease.  The human components of his brain make him disgusted by the smell of his fellows, keep him from accepting the sexual advances of a female native, and drive him to build a hut when it rains.  The other natives are impressed by the hut, and build their own.  

The twist ending is that this guy is not a human who has been modified to mix with the natives, as he has been led to believe, but a native who has been modified to have higher intelligence so he will do stuff like build a hut and introduce fire and the wheel among the natives with the aim of getting the primitive natives to advance to civilization more quickly than they naturally would.  The two astronauts discuss a little the moral propriety of interfering with a people's natural development and putting an innocent alien through the disturbing experience that has made his own people and lifestyle repugnant, but decide it is all for the good in the end, as a superior level of culture and technology will make life safer and healthier and more comfortable for the natives.

We might consider this story in comparison to stories like Lee Corey's "Letter from Tomorrow" in which aliens jumpstart humanity's technological and cultural development.  And to Chad Oliver's "The Marginal Man," which, like de Vet's "Seedling," has Earthmen giving technology to primitive aliens to jumpstart their development.

Acceptable.  This minor story was reprinted in the British edition of Astounding, if that counts, and no where else.  I think this is the first thing by de Vet I have read, and I wouldn't be averse to reading other work by him, though  his novels look a little gimmicky (a guy has to play life or death chess like on Barsoom; aliens drop a monster on to Earth and film its attacks for entertainment for the masses back home.)

"The Amulet" by Gordon Dickson 

I'm a Dickson skeptic, having found some of his novels and short stories weak, but "The Amulet" is a very good witch story.  The magic in the story is quite good, and the images, and Dickson makes use of animal metaphors in an effective way.  In the same way I hypocritically decry the decadence of our culture and the corruption of our government at the same time I exemplify that decadence and benefit from that corruption, I, like everybody else, like cats even though I recognize the cruelty and the selfishness that characterize the feline, and Dickson's chief metaphor in "The Amulet" is just this, comparing a sadistic criminal, a man with a young, strong, healthy body and a cunning mind, to a cat again and again.

Said criminal beats up a teenaged boy for fun and then flees town hobo-style, hopping on and then off a freight train.  In the back woods he encounters first one, and then another, witch, first an old crone and then a young beauty.  Dickson's descriptions of the woods, the women, and their eerie domiciles are evocative and vivid.  The charming criminal matches wits with these evil women--will he side with one against the other as one tempts him with money and the other sex?  Or try to outwit them both?  Can a normal man, no matter how evil and clever, really go toe to toe with women who are servants of the Devil and have an array of supernatural powers at their disposal?

I really like it.  Thumbs up for "The Amulet."  

"The Amulet" debuted in an important issue of F&SF, the one with Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon," which was in one of my school text books back in the day and was adapted into an award-winning film.  This ish also prints Fred Pohl's "To See Another Mountain," which we read some years ago.  Rod "The Bod" Serling (as my wife the comedienne calls him) and a German named Gunther included "The Amulet" in anthologies, and you can also find it in the Dickson collection The Last Dream.

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Davidson and Dickson's weird stories, which use the supernatural to talk about real huma psychology and relationships with which we can all identify, are better written and more entertaining than Davis and de Vet's legitimate science fiction stories, the one an irritating and tendentious satire and the other bland speculation on the methods and ethics of human interaction with aliens.  My brain thinks that science fiction is better than fantasy because the author is trying to say something about technology and society but my heart resonates to fantasy stories in which people are driven by their anxieties and desires.  On a certain level, stories about witches, which are not real, are more "realistic," better reflect our actual daily lives, than stories about rockets, which are so very very real.  So don't be surprised when you find MPorcius Fiction Log is back on the Weird Tales track when next we meet.

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.