Early '70s stories by R. A. Lafferty, Alan Dean Foster, & Leonard Tushnet

We're still reading The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald Wollheim.  Today we have a story from 1970 by R. A. Lafferty and 1971 stories by Alan Dean Foster and Leonard Tushnet.

"All Pieces of a River Shore" by R. A. Lafferty (1970)

This is a fun, surprisingly light-hearted and straightforward (Lafferty's work can be grisly and a little opaque, but not here) story with a good central idea and sprinkled with interesting little factoids. And of course Lafferty's charming and amusing style.  I enjoyed it a lot.

We learn that carnivals that travelled the American countryside in the 19th century offered, as one of their amusements, long paintings depicting the shore of the Mississippi.  Like a giant scroll, these paintings, several feet tall and up to or even more than a hundred yards long, would be unrolled by mule power so that viewers were given the illusion that they were travelling along the river bank.

The main character of "All Pieces of a River Shore" is a 20th century collector, an American Indian of some means by the name of Leo Nation.  He collects a multitude of things, from books and posters to wagons and locomotives, mostly related to Native America and the Old West.  Nation has decided to start collecting the aforementioned river shore paintings, heralded in their day as "The Longest Pictures in the World."  Over the course of the story, as he crosses North America hunting up and buying up these artifacts, he learns that the more common crude examples, made in the last few centuries by the white man, are merely imitations of startlingly clear panoramic pictures of mysterious origin known to Indians long before the arrival of Europeans.  When Nation and his friends closely examine these "originals" they find they depict flora and fauna long extinct (giant sloths, for example) and in such detail that even under a microscope no brushstrokes are visible--in fact, one can see the individual cells in a leaf!  In the last part of the story we learn the startling origin of these weird artifacts.

Here is a story I can recommend without reservation.  First appearing in Damon Knight's Orbit 8 (reviewed by Joachim Boaz here), you can also find "All Pieces of a River Shore" in the Lafferty collection Lafferty in Orbit and the anthology Alpha 4.

"With Friends Like These..." by Alan Dean Foster (1971)

Foster wrote the novelization of the first Star Wars movie, as well as Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the first independent Star Wars novel.  Reading "With Friends Like These..." makes the choice of Foster for these tasks feel very appropriate, because the story is a space opera with many elements in common with the Star Wars films.

The galaxy is riven by a tremendous war!  Standing against the powerful Yop empire is a Federation of over 200 dazzlingly-different alien races.  (Some have feathers, some are hairy, some have tentacles, etc.)  This war of space battleships has been going on for centuries, and the multicultural alliance is losing.  A desperate ploy is conceived!  450,000 years ago another war shook the universe, the war between Earth and the Venn!  The people of Earth were found to be the galaxy's greatest warriors, and the Venn were exterminated, but the predecessor of the Federation was able to drive humanity back to Earth and surround the planet with a powerful force field, trapping our doughty descendents there.  That forcefield is still in operation today, and "With Friends Like These..." tells the story of a Federation expedition to lower the forcefield and enlist the aid of the human race against the Yop.

At first it looks like the human race has been reduced to a small population of farmers who resort to using draft animals to plow their fields.  But in reality mankind has evolved tremendous psychic powers!  In one scene a young man uses his mind to disintegrate an entire Yop battleship!  Earth's domestic animals also have high intelligence and telepathy!  And the Earth has been hollowed out and is full of machinery--in the story's final scene the planet sets off under its own power to join the Federation fleet, a colossal dreadnought that will no doubt vanquish the Yop and, one of the Federation's wise men fears, make humanity master of the galaxy!

The tone of this story is light-hearted, with lots of little jokes and no real tension or thrills.  Endearingly, Foster refers directly to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, and King Kong (one of my very favorite films), suggesting that the fame of these icons of pop culture will endure half a million years.

"With Friends Like These..." first appeared in Analog, and in his intro Wollheim suggests the story exemplifies the spirit of editor John W. Campbell and his prominent magazines, the idea that humanity will triumph over every obstacle.  (Foster, it seems to me, is also undercutting, or showing the dark side, of that idea, portraying the human race as uniquely belligerent.  In his 1978 intro to The Best of Eric Frank Russell, Foster, apparently a conventional lefty who bites his nails with worry over the environment and sympathizes with the Viet Cong and all that, tells us he disagreed with Campbell about just about everything.)

Inoffensively, adequately, pleasant, but I'm skeptical it is one of the "best" stories of its year.

"Aunt Jennie's Tonic" by Leonard Tushnet (1971)

If Wollheim hints that he chose Foster's "With Friends Like These" for this anthology because it is a good example of an Astounding/Analog Terra uber alles space opera, he comes right out and tells us that he chose "Aunt Jennie's Tonic" because it has an "ethnic background" and is about "the origins of modern medicine from primitive folk remedy."  I'm going to be honest--"the origins of modern medicine from primitive folk remedy" doesn't sound like a recipe for a thrill ride to your humble blogger.

Our narrator is a Jewish-American chemist.  When he realizes that the home remedies concocted by the aged immigrant woman who ministers to his relatives from her cluttered apartment in what is now a bad neighborhood, actually work, he analyzes them at the lab.  Most simply duplicate the formulas of commercially available drugs, but one preparation appears to be a unique elixir of youth that revives his dying dog and, when he takes it himself, enhances his job performance.  The chemist, envisioning riches and a Nobel prize, becomes obsessed with duplicating the potion, no mean feat after his "aunt" is murdered by thugs.  His pursuit of the miracle drug imperils his sanity, family life, and career.

I liked the "East Coast Jewish life" parts of the story, the young American atheist scientist's relationship with the elderly representative of his superstitious Yiddish-jabbering Old World ancestors.  But I think the chemistry parts were too long; Tushnet provides an overabundance of examples of Aunt Jennie's productions and describes their creation in superfluous detail.  (I think "Aunt Jennie's Tonic" qualifies as a hard SF story, albeit one married to a mainstream narrative about the culture of immigrants and their descendents.)  The dramatic part of the story, our narrator's collapse, is rushed, almost perfunctory.  There's really no build up or climax--Tushnet's premise and background take up most of the page count and are carefully constructed, but the main plot is poorly paced and structured, almost like it is an afterthought.

Still, a marginal recommendation.

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The Lafferty feels like a "Best of the Year" story, but the Foster and Tushnet, while good, seem to have been included for their interesting attributes.

In our next episode we'll finish up with The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, reading contributions by Eddy Bertin, who is new to me, member of the "Big Three" Arthur C. Clarke, and enfant terrible Harlan Ellison.

Nota bene: The 1972 Annual World's Best SF also includes short-tempered chess player Barry Malzberg's "Gehenna" and Ted "Killdozer" Sturgeon's "Occam's Scalpel," which I won't talk about this week because I read them and wrote about them on this blog in the past.

Three early '50s stories by Eric Frank Russell

Here's the third installment of our exhaustive look at the 1978 collection The Best of Eric Frank Russell, part of Del Rey's "Critically Acclaimed Series of Classic Science Fiction."  Today's three tales all appeared in Astounding (remember when Alan Dean Foster told us Russell was Astounding editor John W. Campbell's favorite SF writer?)

Del Rey's Critically Acclaimed Series of Classic Science Fiction,
available at a second-hand store near you!

"Fast Falls the Eventide" (1952)

All you Christians already know that "fast falls the eventide" is a phrase from the famous hymn "Abide with Me," written in 1847 by a Scotsman dying of TB.  Russell is going for a sort of sad but hopeful mood here, the mood a religious person, confident of God's love and a just afterlife, might have while facing his own or a friend's death.

Everybody loves A. E. Housman 

The setting of "Fast Falls the Eventide" is reminiscent of Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.  A million or more years in the future Sol is growing dim (Earthlings can see the stars during the day) and the human population on Earth is down to a paltry one million.  Soon Earth will be uninhabitable. As the plot, which follows a young woman, Melisande, to a sort of job placement interview at her college and then to a planet inhabited by crocodilian aliens where she takes a position as a teacher, unfolds, we gradually learn the truth of humanity's subtle strategy to achieve racial immortality!

Mankind has evolved to the point that people live thousands of years and many have telepathic powers.  Many Earthlings, like Melisande, go to college for centuries (!) to absorb the tremendous store of knowledge which the human race has compiled over its own long history and through interaction with innumerable alien species. These students are then hired by aliens to act as educators; so knowledgeable are Earth's academics that human tutors are the most sought after in the galaxy, and every alien civilization demands far more than can be supplied.  Retaining a human tutor is a major status symbol!  Spread far and wide throughout the galaxy, and coveted and admired by all intelligent species, humanity faces no risk of extermination from local catastrophes or alien hostility.  And, in a touch all you teachers out there will love, Russell suggests that students leave school fundamentally changed by their teachers: "Each arrived as an utter stranger, departed like a child of his very own [Melisande's professor muses] taking some of his essential essence with them."

(If you are keeping score at home, this story also features aliens who do not vocalize, like the Martians in "Homo Saps" and the very different Martians in "Dear Devil," and an explicit don't- judge-people-by-their-looks / embrace-diversity message.  The crocodile aliens smell bad, but Melisande is sophisticated enough to ignore it, and Russell reflects, "How boring the universe would be if all creatures were identically the same!")

"Fast Falls the Eventide" is more about a mood and an idea than about plot or character.  The beginning feels a little too precious, the effort to be poetical a little too labored.  But once we get past the scene setting and to our heroine, Russell does a good job of holding the reader's interest by revealing the truth of what is going on slowly, and keeps us from getting bored by employing various SF images and props.  I liked it, even if at times it smells a little like teachers' union propaganda.

"I Am Nothing" (1952)

In "Late Night Final," you may recall, we had a ruthless imperialist commander who was reformed (in part) by exposure to an innocent young female member of the society he was trying to forcibly incorporate into his empire.  Well, here in "I Am Nothing" we have a similar plot.  Luckily, this story is a little more sophisticated and interesting.

David Korman is the autocratic ruler of planet Morcine.  (Are we supposed to think "corpsman" and "porcine?")  As the story begins he launches an invasion of peaceful planet Lani; for PR purposes, his own son is serving aboard the first ship that lands on Lani.

While "Late Night Final" was full of repetitive satire and included a vaguely realized and unconvincing utopia, in "I Am Nothing" Russell tries to produce a psychological portrait of a man who is obsessed with strength and who, because his parents were jerks, is unable to develop healthy human relationships, and instead tries to win respect by inspiring fear in all with whom he deals.  We witness Korman's cold and unsatisfying relationships with his wife, his son and his subordinates.  The crisis of the story comes when the tyrant's son sends back to Morcine a refugee from Lani, the only survivor of a village razed in the fighting, an eight-year-old girl mentally scarred by her ordeal.

The little girl, Tatiana, a psychologist discovers, feels she is nothing because she has no one, even her cat having been killed (the internet weeps!) during the fighting. Korman identifies with the child--he also has no one.  An opportunity to open peace negotiations fortuitously comes out of the blue, and Korman, transformed by his budding relationship with Tatiana, seizes it.  We are led to believe that the war will end and that Korman will become a foster father to Tatiana and each will make whole the other's broken psyche.

This story is sentimental and sappy, but I think it works.  It is also psychological and philosophical, delving into why oppressive individuals commit their crimes against others, and arguing that the greatest victory a man can win is not over outside enemies, but is the victory over one's own base nature.      

"Weak Spot" (1954)

This is one of those stories that is just an idea, with zero plot, character or feeling.  "Fast Falls the Eventide" was also a story constructed around an idea, but that tale had an interesting, even surprising, idea, and Russell kept his idea in the shadows until the end and enlivened that story with a mood and with arresting images.  "Weak Spot" story lacks any feeling, and its idea is pretty obvious and pretty boring.

A vast and powerful human space Empire (6000+ planets) has, on one of its borders, a tiny empire (8 planets) of belligerent reptilian aliens.  Periodically the warlike reptilians raid or conquer a human planet, and there follows a limited punitive expedition and a prisoner exchange.  The point of the story is that the Empire's rulers don't wipe out the much weaker civilization of alien troublemakers because this external threat stabilizes the Empire.  Raids by the lizard men keep the Imperial populace distracted from other problems and united, preventing civil war and independence movements.  The reptilian menace also gives hotheaded and adventurous Imperial citizens something heroic to do beyond the Empire's borders so they aren't within the Empire, destabilizing human civilization with their atavistic antics.

I don't appreciate it when a guy spins his paragraph-sized idea into a limp ten-page story.  Life is too short!  Thumbs down!

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You can see Russell working hard to achieve literary value and engage the reader's emotions with "Fast Falls the Eventide" and "I Am Nothing;" in those essentially sad but also hopeful stories civilizations and peoples interact with each other and change.  "Weak Spot," on the other hand, is cold and gimmicky, a sort of filler story.

Just three more stories from The Best of Eric Frank Russell to go.  Catch them in our next episode!

Three stories from Astounding by Eric Frank Russell: "Mana," "Jay Score," & "Homo Saps"

I haven't exactly been champing at the bit to read Eric Frank Russell stories because when I read his famous and widely anthologized "...And Then There Were None" I thought it was a long and tedious exercise in smart alecky utopianism.  But when I saw the 1978 collection The Best of Eric Frank Russell I decided to give Russell another shot.

Alan Dean Foster (of movie tie-in fame), in his introduction to this volume, tells us that Russell is his favorite SF author, and, more surprisingly, that Russell was John W. Campbell's favorite SF author!  Campbell, the editor of Astounding who worked closely with those titans Heinlein and Asimov, said Russell was his favorite SF writer? I suppose that is reason enough for someone interested in classic SF to read Russell. Let's start with the first three tales in the book, all of which appeared in Campbell's Astounding.

"Mana" (1937)

Omega is the last man on Earth.  It is the far future, when men have evolved into immortal beings who can use their mental powers to effortlessly fly.  People only die when they have achieved all their goals, achieved satiety, and Omega, six thousand years old, is the only man who has not yet achieved satisfaction.

Omega's quest is to inspire intelligence ("mana") in ants!  He finally accomplishes this by shooting a ray through his own brain at a terrarium full of ants.  When he has done this enough, the ants figure out how to start fires and shoot a bow and arrow!  No doubt, Omega reasons, a million or whatever years ago space aliens gave the human race intelligence in a similar way (isn't this the premise behind 2001: A Space Odyssey?) His work done, Omega releases the ants and then flies up into space, to commit suicide.  The ant civilization that is to come (barring some kind of catastrophic anteater attack, I suppose) will be Omega's monument, and the monument to the achievements of the human race.

A tight five pages, with an interesting idea, numerous memorable images, and a good writing style; this one gets the MPorcius Seal of Approval.

"Jay Score" (1941)

In the 23rd century a space ship gets hit by a small asteroid, and the multiracial crew finds they are hurtling towards the sun!  While the rest of the crew takes cover in the most heavily shielded part of the vessel, expert pilot Jay Score stays in the searing hot cockpit, steering the ship on a one in ten thousand chance course past old Sol.  The ship makes it, but poor Jay is burnt within an inch of his life!  Thankfully, back on Earth he becomes the first ever man to have his brain put in a robot body!

The thing about this competent but basically routine story that will stick out to 21st-century readers is how it addresses the issue of race. Russell uses the story to promote racial harmony and the idea that different people's different abilities can complement each other (he is "celebrating diversity" in today's argot) but the way he does it, focusing on fanciful biological differences between ethnic groups instead of on human equality, would at best be considered "problematic" by today's cultural arbiters, and at worst it would be career suicide.

On the first page of the story we are told that, since white people invented space drives, only white people are ever hired as engineers on space ships--whites "know most about them [rockets] and can nurse them like nobody else."  This doesn't really make much sense; maybe it is an appeal to the idea of "racial memory?"  The special ability Russell assigns to black people is approximately as silly: "All ship's surgeons are black Terrestrials because for some reason none can explain no Negro gets gravity-bends or space nausea."

Anyway, the white engineers, the black doctor, and the crew's tentacled Martians (who need less oxygen than humans and can better stand extremes of heat) all contribute to the ship's and the crew's survival.  Presumably it is significant that hero Jay is "neither black nor white;" whether this means he is biracial or an Asian or Native American is unclear.

Russell's pacing and style are good, and he makes the Martians interesting (they love chess, for one thing--the cover of this collection illustrates "Jay Score") and I have a weakness for stories about space travel, so I'm giving this one a thumbs up.

"Homo Saps" (1941)

This is a nonsensical joke story whose payoff doesn't justify the long set-up.

Fifteen or more years ago a cure for cancer was discovered on Mars!  So human businesspeople flock to native Martian settlements to buy it.  Instead of using spacecraft or aircraft to go to the Martian towns, Earth merchants ride Earth camels across the spider-infested deserts between the spaceport and the native settlements. (Russell repeatedly tells us that this is because there is no gasoline on Mars.)  Our story follows one such camelback journey.

The native Martians can't talk, so trade is conducted via hand signals and pictures (the natives build up credit and point to what they want in illustrated Earth catalogs.)  One of the Martians invites one of the human merchants to his home--the human is amazed to find that the Martian has used Earth parts to build a device which allows him to talk!  It has taken over fifteen years of contact for the first Earthling-Martian conversation to take place, and we are there to witness it!

The native Marsplains that his race lost the ability to talk because they developed telepathy.  He opines that only primitive types speak; advanced species like Martians and camels communicate via telepathy.  When the human scoffs at the idea that camels are superior to humans, the Martian tells him that camels don't wear clothes or pay taxes--obviously their lives are better than those of a human.  The denouement of the story involves the human experimenting and confirming that the camels can indeed read his mind.

Thumbs down!

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These stories, taken as a group, are good enough that we'll be seeing three or four more selections from 1978's The Best of Eric Frank Russell in our next episode.