More stories from The Year's Best S-F: 7th Annual Edition: Rome, Bone, Feiffer, Glaser, & Russell

The seventh edition of Judith Merril's The Year's Best S-F, printed in 1963 by Dell, includes lots of quite short pieces by people whose writing I'm not very familiar with. This week I read five such stories; all of which first appeared in 1961.

"Parky" by David Rome

This one first appeared in the British magazine Science Fantasy.  British-born Australian Rome has over 20 short story credits at isfdb, but only one listed novel, a 1970 release called Squat (other sources suggest Squat first appeared in 1964.)  Squat is billed as a novel about "sexual adventure on other planets," and the cover art is pretty striking.

"Parky"'s plot is a little slight, but Rome has a good style and includes charming little details that really elevate the material, so that I rather enjoyed the story.

Our first person narrator for this seven-page story is the owner of a traveling circus. One of his employees is a mind reader, Ephraim Parkinson, AKA "Parky." Parky isn't much of a showman, and his performances are unprofitable. So, the narrator is not exactly put out when an odd character appears and wants to hire Parky away. Once the deal is done it is revealed that Parky's new employer is from another world, one ravaged by war. Parky is the only true mind reader in the universe, and his abilities are needed to facilitate critical peace talks on this other planet or galaxy or whatever it is.

An example of one of the little touches that I liked: the alien is disguised as a human, and his umbrella is merely a prop-- when it rains he doesn't think to open it.

Good! I will have to figure out if I have easy access to any more stories by Rome online or at local libraries.

"A Prize for Edie" by J. F. Bone

Jesse Franklin Bone has quite a few credits at isfdb, and nine stories (including this one) available for free at gutenberg.org.  I believe this story, which appeared in Analog, is the first Bone story I have ever read.

"A Prize for Edie" is more of an idea than a story; there isn't much character or plot. As such, at four and a half pages it is too long.

The year: 2001.  A mysterious American researcher has discovered a cure for cancer! The Nobel Committee wants to award its prize to this benefactor of mankind, but C. Edie turns out to be not a man, not a woman, but a computer!  The entire story is a conversation among the Committee members in which they express embarrassment over having to invite a machine to a banquet and hang a medal on a machine and eat dinner with a machine, etc.

A weak joke.

"Looking Backward" by Jules Feiffer

Have you seen that 1980 Popeye movie?  I saw it this weekend....well blow me down, is it terrible!*   And yet half the people who worked on the movie (e. g., Robert Altman, Robin Williams, Henry Nilsson) are people we are supposed to revere as geniuses.  Well, I guess genius takes a day off sometimes.

One of the geniuses of whom I speak is Jules Feiffer, who wrote the screenplay for Popeye.  Feiffer has a comic strip in The Year's Best S-F 7 in which he expresses his belief that "urban renewal" and post-war architecture suck.  His gimmick: when alien archaeologists dig up the ruins of New York they will suspect that the older, more ornate, buildings, like brownstones, were built by a later more sophisticated culture than the in fact newer, sterile, glass box skyscrapers.  I sympathize with his point of view, but this joke is just OK, and I don't really like Feiffer's drawing style; it feels weak, wispy, vague, though this strip is more solid and weighty than most of Feiffer's characteristically attenuated work.  I guess I'm giving a narrowly passing grade to the genius for this production.

(I actually quite like Carnal Knowledge, so don't think I'm some kind of Feiffer-hater.)

I'm going to pull a tarbandu here and reproduce the comic strip below.  If you are Jules Feiffer's lawyer, please take into account my effort to promote Carnal Knowledge to my vast readership before filing that lawsuit.

"The Tunnel Ahead" by Alice Glaser

This is Alice Glaser's sole credit at isfdb.  "The Tunnel Ahead" appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

This is an overpopulation story, set in the 22nd century.  Tom and his family are riding their tiny self-driving car home to Manhattan after spending time at the beach.  Glaser fills the story's nine pages to the brim with details of life in the overcrowded world; Tom looks out the window and Glaser describes the landscape of Manhattan, New Jersey and Long Island, the buildings and elevated highways and so on, and Tom reflects on his life and she tells of how people have reacted to slow, overcrowded lives without privacy and without productive work.  The story's punchline is that to get back to Manhattan you have to drive through a tunnel, and at random times the tunnel seals up, capturing the hundreds of cars within and exterminating their occupants.  This is a population-control policy that has been put to a vote repeatedly and endorsed by the electorate.  Presumably Glaser is attacking the American people, whom she believes to be more willing to murder people at random than to voluntarily or by legislation limit births.  (Tom has four kids and a fifth on the way.)  Perhaps most interesting about the story is the fact that Tom enjoys the life and death gambling aspect of driving through the tunnel; in a world in which computers and machines do all the work, it is the only excitement available to people.

This is a better than average overpopulation story, and a good science fiction story, combining as it does technological, social and psychological speculations with interesting images and even interesting characters.  It is too bad Glaser does not seem to have done any more work in the field.

"The Long Night" by Ray Russell

This story appeared in Russell's collection Sardonicus and Other Stories.  Russell had a career working in men's magazines, and this story also appeared in Rogue that year.

This is a gimmicky joke story, just two pages.  Due to a series of unlikely coincidences involving sorcery, astronomy and vampirism, a deposed dictator suffers an eternal torment in a desolate place of exile; he cannot eat, cannot sleep, and cannot die.

I'm finding it hard to believe this is one of the best SF stories of 1961.

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It's a nice reminder of the cruel world we live in that the stories I liked out of this batch of five, the David Rome story and the Alice Glaser story, are by people who did no more work in the SF field or whose work is not easy to get a hold of.

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*1) Boring.
  2) Long.   Every scene is very long and very slow, including action scenes, which need some velocity to be effective, and slapstick joke scenes, which require surprise to be effective.  Each joke takes too long to tell, and is repeated again and again--how many times do I have to see an anemic gag like a guy failing to pick up his hat, or demanding some weird tax?     
  3) Confusing. I could barely understand half the dialogue, and the highly choreographed scenes, like the meal at the Oyls' place early in the picture, are very busy and cluttered, and have no weight, no meaning or feeling, so there is no payoff for bothering to figure them out.  Character motivations are also a little confusing; why does Olive Oil change her opinions about Popeye and Bluto/Brutus? Similarly, I lost track of how we and the characters were supposed to feel about Pappy/The Commodore.  Did I doze through the explanations for these things?  
  4) Bad songs.  Too many of the songs are just a word or phrase repeated again and again.  Ugh.  
  5) Photography.  I'll grant that the water and sky are beautiful, but often the camera work puts the viewer far away from what was going on, putting distance between the viewer and the story and characters, making things more confusing and less emotionally resonant.

1961 stories by Fritz Leiber, Cordwainer Smith, & John Wyndham

Traversing this great land of ours, mountains, forests, railroads, skyscrapers, art museums, birds, amphibians, and my wife's relatives are not the only natural and man made wonders I discover.  I also discover classic science fiction bargains!  One such bargain was a paperback edition of Judith Merril's The Year's Best S-F: 7th Annual Edition, printed in 1963 by Dell and covering science fiction and fantasy published in 1961.

In our last episode we looked at stories from Merril's anthology written by two writers on the periphery of the SF community, as well as one by a SF writer whose work has, perhaps, largely been forgotten.  In this installment we'll read stories by relatively well-known SF writers: Fritz Leiber, perhaps most famous for his contributions to the sword & sorcery genre; Cordwainer Smith, celebrated for his Instrumentality of Mankind stories, and John Wydham, author of Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids.

"The Beat Cluster" by Fritz Leiber

"The Beat Cluster" first appeared in the October issue of Galaxy, where it was the cover story.  I've enjoyed quite a bit of Leiber's work, but I cannot deny that Galaxy's cover illustration had me fearing  "The Beat Cluster" was going to be a story about popular music.  I try to avoid stories that tediously romanticize the author's favorite rock band or celebrate his favorite style of jazz or blues musician or whatever.

Merril, in her intro, responds to early '60s claims that science fiction (exemplified by the "space story") was about to be superseded by events, that once "science catches up with science fiction," it will be "dead."  She suggests that "space stories" that are more about people than "rockets and orbits," will have an enduring value and appeal, and that "The Beat Cluster" is an example of just such a story.

I was pleased to find that this was a story about people, as Merril had proposed, and that Leiber didn't overdo the music angle.  The Beat Cluster is a sort of beatnik colony or commune, informally overseen by Fat Jordan, an overweight black man who, following a career as a welder, is now an amateur guitarist and singer/songwriter.  (I agree, he doesn't really look black on the cover of the magazine.  Here's a data point for your master's thesis on the depiction of blacks in science fiction, grad students!) The commune consists of giant bubbles of self-sealing plastic, connected by tunnels to each other and to a proper space station devoted to research.  Large blankets with one reflective side hover around to provide cover from the sun, and the inhabitants spend their time making music and art, gardening, and just hanging around.  Lieber talks a lot about how the lack of gravity fosters lifestyles different from those on Earth, and how people grow food and generate oxygen and so forth in space.

The plot of the story serves to provide opportunities to compare Earthbound life with zero gee life.  The Station has a new Administrator, and he wants to send the beatniks back down to Earth--they are essentially squatters who have no legal right to be attached to the station, and they are dirty, their bubbles smelling horribly.  The beatniks list all the things they won't be able to do on Earth, all the discomforts gravity will inflict on them.  Luckily, the President of the United States and public opinion, on Earth and among the scientists and technicians on the main Station, intervene.  The beatnik colony, in fact, serves a useful purpose, as a pool of surplus labor, a place for the Station's staff to relax, and as the subject of a study of anarchic zero-gee life, and Fat Jordan and his fellow musicians have achieved a level of popularity on Earth via jazz broadcasts.  The deportation order is cancelled and everybody lives happily ever after.

I liked it.    

"A Planet Named Shayol" by Cordwainer Smith  

This is one of the critically acclaimed Instrumentality of Mankind stories; over the course of this blog's life I have enjoyed several stories in this series, so I was looking forward to this one.  Like "The Beat Cluster" it appeared in the October issue of Galaxy, and was promoted on the cover.  A little googling provides a look at the truly disturbing two page illustration by Virgil Finlay that adorned "A Planet Named Shayol;" is this what the kids are talking about when they use the term "body horror?" Yikes!

Merril in her introduction doesn't talk about the story, but rather about Smith's unique and exciting life and career inside and outside science fiction.  (I'm not being sarcastic here, check out Smith's Wikipedia page, he really is a unique figure.)  And there is no need for Merril to tell you anything about the story--it really speaks for itself.  "A Planet Named Shayol" is a terrific piece of work, full of emotion and psychological insight, as well as bizarre and memorable images.  It is also a truly disturbing horror story.  This is the kind of story which really gives you an idea of what science fiction can achieve, how it can be something truly vital, more than an entertaining adventure story set in outer space or a thrilling detective yarn set in a ray gun- and robot-infested future.

Mercer has been convicted of a terrible crime against the famously cruel Emperor, and so he is shipped to Shayol for what is rumored to be "eternal punishment."  After harrowing preparations on an orbiting satellite, where medical specialists alter Mercer's body so it is fit to survive on the surface, Mercer is shipped "downstairs." Native to Shayol is a sort of microorganism knows as the "dromozoa."  A person infected by the dromozoa is kept alive indefinitely by the organism; it provides rapid healing and sustenance for hundreds or thousands of years.  The dromozoa also causes its hosts to grow additional body parts--arms, legs, heads, fingers, whatever. There are hundreds of convicts on the planet, and the population's caretaker, an "homunculus" who was created with the mixed genetic material of a human and a bull, periodically prunes the convicts of their extra body parts for freezing and subsequent use in hospitals around the galaxy.

This whole process is horribly painful, and so the cattle-man keeps the convicts high on a super-powerful drug most of the time.

After Mercer has lived on the planet for over a century there is a change in galactic government, and the new government, once alerted to Shayol's true nature, has to figure out a way to continue the salutary production of body parts for use in rehabilitating accident victims, while ending the use of Shayol as a place of outrageous punishment.  They also have to do something with all these drug addicts.

"A Planet Named Shayol" is full of compelling ideas, touching characters, moving scenes and vivid images; much of this I have not even hinted at here.  (The story is substantial, about 40 pages long.)  Smith's style is unobtrusive but brilliantly conveys all the story's dramatic, intellectual and emotional elements.  I expected it to be good, but the story surprised me by how much if affected me.

Highly recommended!

"The Asteroids, 2194" by John Wyndham (1960)

Alright, so I was a bit disappointed with Re-Birth AKA The Chrysalids.  Let's see if I like this better.

"The Asteroids, 2194" actually first appeared in New Worlds (with the much more euphonious title "The Emptiness of Space") in 1960, throwing off my whole theme for this blog post: "Stories From 1961."  I guess Merril thought it kosher to include it in the anthology because it first appeared in the US in 1961 in Amazing, as the cover story.

As she did in the intro to the Leiber story, Merril says this tale is a "space story," but focuses not so much on "hardware" as on the effect of life in space on human beings and their culture.

"The Asteroids, 2194" is a first person narrative about a space flight, led by a Captain Gerald Troon,  to the asteroid belt, during which a derelict ship, lost for over four decades, is discovered.  In the derelict is a man in a special space suit which has kept him alive via some sort of deep freeze or suspended animation system.  This man turns out to be Captain George Montgomery Troon, the grandfather of Gerald Troon. George Montgomery Troon is religious, and when he is revived he fears he has lost his soul.

This asteroid belt story (eight pages) is alright, but it is embedded in another seven-page long first person narrative set on Earth that gives a lot of background about a future world in which, after a devastating war in the Northern Hemisphere, Brazil and Australia are the competing great powers and various islands constitute a "third world" over which they compete for hearts and minds.  As a result this story feels too long. Isfdb is telling me this story is part of a series about the Troon family, so maybe all that (here, superfluous) background detail serves a purpose if you read the entire series.

This story isn't bad, but I am skeptical it was one of the best of 1961 or 1960.  Maybe Merril thought its use of religious themes made it stand out from the crowd.

*********

It's the Cordwainer Smith story, "A Planet Named Shayol," that made me sit up and take notice, but Leiber's "The Beat Cluster" is good and Wyndham's "The Asteroids, 2194" is OK.  The Year's Best S-F: 7th Annual Edition continues to prove itself a worthwhile purchase.  I'll sample more of its contents in the future.

1961 SF stories by Kaatje Hurlbut, Robert Beverly Hale, & Ward Moore

Another of my Davenport, Iowa finds was The Year's Best S-F: 7th Annual Edition, Dell 9773, printed in 1963.  I love the look of the thing--being shorter than most paperbacks, and utilizing bold wide fonts for much of the text on the cover, it has a sort of solidity and strength that is appealing.  This impression of power and seriousness is reinforced by the black background and the fact that the book is 400 pages!  The cover illustration is also fun, as is the echoing swirl on the title page.

Edited by Judith Merril of Tomorrow People fame, The Year's Best S-F is the science fiction anthology series which the critics go gaga for, and which always has listed on its cover writers I don't think of as science fiction authors.  (Lawrence Durrell?  Muriel Spark?) One of Merril's favorite topics appears to be the relationship between SF and the mainstream.  In an essay at the end of the book she talks about how, in the early '60s, "s-f" as she calls it, is being (re)absorbed into the mainstream, but without receiving the respect it deserves; The Saturday Evening Post prints a fantasy or science fiction story in just about every issue without labelling it as such, the tv show The Twilight Zone is not recognized as "s-f," and "much of the best science fiction published today is under wrappers and headings that either angrily disclaim the 'science-fiction' label, or ignore it completely."

I decided to pursue this idea, and so today after mowing the lawn (ah, the country life) I read three stories from The Year's Best S-F: 7th Annual Edition that originally appeared in magazines which did not specialize in science fiction, by writers I've never read before.

"A Passage from the Stars" by Kaatje Hurlbut

In her intro to this story Merril tells us this is Hurlbut's first SF story.  It is also the only title listed for Hurlbut at isfdb.  She seems to have had some well-received short stories published in the '50s and '60s, but then to have faded into obscurity.

"A Passage from the Stars" first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post.

Mr. Paradee has lived his life in the canyons between the skyscrapers of a big city, working as a bookkeeper at a button factory.  He has no family, and in retirement has moved to a tiny Atlantic coastal town where, with its big sky and ocean, and the friendly townspeople, he finally feels at home.  Another old single person lives in the town, Miss Pomeroy.  Pomeroy's ancestors settled the area, and their 17th century house still stands.  The Historical Society wants to turn this old cottage into a museum, but Pomeroy wishes it could become a home, a place of shelter and comfort for a living breathing family.

One of Paradee's hobbies is tinkering with a ham radio set, and one day he makes contact with space aliens, a family of refugees in a small ship that is about to run out of supplies.  The aliens are looking for a home, just like he was!  He overcomes fears that this alien family will use its technological superiority to conquer the Earth the way the British used their technological superiority to conquer North America and New Zealand (Cook is obliquely mentioned) and he and Pomeroy invite them to land in the tiny town and take up residence in the 1600s cottage.  The aliens, we learn, in the course of achieving the kind of civilization that can cross the interstellar void, have grown out of any desire to conquer people.  Humans haven't grown out of that yet, but maybe Paradee and Pomeroy are a sign that we are moving in that direction.

This story is alright, maybe a little sappy.
       

"Immediately Yours" by Robert Beverly Hale

Merril has her own definitions of words like "science fiction" and "s-f" which I am not sure I am grokking yet. The first lines of her intro to this story are "Now this one is not science fiction.   It is, very much, 'S-F.'  Mr. Hale was not concerned with how or why his strange events occurred, or with the logic of the situation--and neither am I."  I guess Merril thinks "science fiction" applies to fiction that includes some science or logic, while "s-f" includes fantasy and stories with strange new ideas that have no basis in reason or reality.

I was kind of excited to read "Immediately Yours," as Merril informs us that Hale is not only an accomplished poet and artist, but the curator of the American Painting and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in my old stomping grounds of New York City.  Followers of my twitter feed will know I am a big fan of the American sculpture there.  (I love St. Gaudens, French, MacMonnies, McCartan, Bitter, etc.)

This story appeared in Mademoiselle.  Hale has only this one credit for fiction at isfdb; he has another for a poem that appeared in F&SF after first appearing in The New Yorker.  Apparently he is most famous as a draughtsman and as a drawing instructor.

This is a somewhat surreal story about an artist (our narrator) who is hanging out in a barn on Long Island--the area is a sort of informal artists' colony--and he is out there trying to get some painting done.  The bulk of the story may well be the painter's dream.  When a poet steals his girlfriend the painter takes some peyote and comes into possession of a meteorite.  The meteorite comes to life as a shape shifting alien.  The alien takes on the appearance of the girl of our hero's dreams and is eager to have sex with him, but instead of enjoying this situation he has the girl transform herself into a Jackson Pollock painting which he sells to an art dealer.  The art dealer, however, realizes the Pollock is an alien being, and before paying our narrator takes advantage of the E.T.'s  shape changing powers himself, both to make money via forgery and to create his perfect woman.  The alien girl is quite fickle, and at a party drifts off to spend time with a Coast Guard officer.  

There's also a lobster who likes to play marbles.

This story is a trifle; it doesn't even have a banal message, like the Kaatje Hurlbut story does.  However, it is fun and interesting.  Little details here and there made it feel like an authentic depiction of the life and milieu of a 1950s-60s fine artist.  There are also a few successful jokes; for example, when the girl first transforms into a Pollock our hero finds that the canvas is too large to fit out the doorway of the room in which he is claiming to have stored the piece.

"It Becomes Necessary" by Ward Moore

Unlike the last two writers, Moore seems to have made a go at a career in science fiction.  (Admiral.Ironbombs talked about one of Moore's big novels back in 2013.) "It Becomes Necessary" did not first appear in a SF magazine, however, but in Gent, which I am told is a Playboy imitator with a focus on women with larger than average breasts.  The story was entitled "The Cold Peace" (or maybe "A Cold Peace"?) at that venue.

Merril, in her intro, waxes nostalgic about her high school years during the New Deal, when the intellectual class supported communism and lamented the lack of sex education in the public schools and the impossibility of world government.  She also argues that the political and social changes that took place between 1936 and 1961 were as momentous as the technological changes, but were not recognized quite so readily.

This story is chockablock with learned references, like it is overcompensating for being in a magazine dedicated to girls' boobs.  On the very first page we get Brancusi, Queen Nefertiti, Louis Napoleon, and "Paris is worth a Mass."  This is not just Moore showing off, though; these references make sense in the context of the story.

The world has split into three blocs: the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Third Force, which apparently includes every other country in the world, lead by the British and the French.  There has been a war between the US and USSR, and there has been a revolution in the United States that has put a racist and anti-Semitic regime in power; the revolutionaries maintain old forms, like voting and the Congress, but the President rules dictatorially via Executive Orders.  I'm not clear about cause and effect, if the creation of Third Force and the racist revolution in the US came before or after the war.

The entire story takes place at a Parisian sidewalk cafe.  Mrs. Fieldman is an American expatriate who fled to Europe after the revolutionaries in the US killed her husband. She is meeting a U.S. agent, who wants to purchase some information from her; in return for the addresses of other American expats, he offers her a pile of money and the right to return to America.  The agent says the other American expatriates won't be kidnapped or killed, that the current U.S. government wants to use them as intelligence assets inside the Third Force, which seeks to "police" the United States.

A French mob realizes the two are Americans, and, under a UN flag, menaces them. The American agent slips away, but Fieldman is forced to deal with them.  They demand she spit on a US flag in order to prove she is not a supporter of the current fascist regime in Washington, but she can't bring herself to do it, so they knock her down and kick the hell out of her.

The theme of the story seems to be that, while Fieldman deplores the current dictatorial U.S. government, she still has strong attachments to American culture and traditions.  Several times in the story she reflects that American food, booze, furniture and hygiene are so much more to her liking than that in Europe.  This brought to mind emigres from the French and Russian Revolutions, Vietnamese boatpeople and similar refugees from revolutions, who must miss the food and culture of their homelands, however much they hate and fear those of their countrymen who have put them to flight.

This story is pretty good; in fact, the more I think about it, the more I like it.

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Swirl!

These three stories are unobjectionable if not spectacular; they all get a thumbs up.  "A Passage from the Stars" is a little precious, and the most conventional of the stories, with its innocuous characters and uncontroversial message.  "Immediately Yours," is a bit of whimsy, and while fun and full of interesting art history tidbits, like "A Passage from the Stars" it does not engage the emotions. "It Becomes Necessary" is probably the best story; it inspires real thought and feeling ("What would I do, how would I feel, if my home country was taken over by violent radicals?  Could I be happy in some hostile, foreign, land?") and has a portion of the melodrama, violence and sex that are among the raisons d'etre of genre fiction.

I paid 35 cents for my copy of The Year's Best S-F: 7th Annual Edition; I feel like it has been a good investment.*

*Zut alors!  People at Amazon and abebooks are asking over 20 bucks for this paperback!  I'll try not to spill Coke on it!

West of the Sun by Edgar Pangborn

"You're proposing," Dorothy said, "to take a chance on love?"

Wright was tranquil, watching the meadow.  "Whenever men put their chips on the other thing they always lost, didn't they?"

One of the few of my 386 SF paperbacks that is not currently packed up in a cardboard box is my Dell edition (#9442) of Edgar Pangborn's West of the Sun, a novel that first appeared in 1953.  My copy was printed in 1966; I purchased it at Second Story Books in Washington D.C., a cool place to buy old prints (I got a Kenyon Cox print) and tribal masks (these are outside the MPorcius budget) as well as 50 cent paperbacks of obscure SF novels.

I was afraid to guess what the blue thing was... could it be a plesiosaur fin?  Is that you, Nessie?

The collage on the cover by Hoot von Zitzewitz is pretty insane; from left to right we've got an orangutan with a (I guess) spear that our man Hoot helpfully drew in, some kind of sea anemone, young lovers running on the beach (we all remember that scene with Elke Sommer in 1962's Douce Violence don't we?) a tree (on fire?) and a hand drawing a bow.  Are these images emblematic of what takes place in West of the Sun?  Sounds like readers can look forward to the sex and violence we all crave in our genre literature.  Looking through Hoot's body of work via google, I was a little surprised to see that Dell used the same cover on its British edition of critical darling Judith Merril's ninth Annual of the Year's Best S-F anthology.  Maybe there was hope that the orangutan would join the rocket and the robot as iconic SF images suitable for any SF paperback's cover.

Internet SF gadfly Joachim Boaz told me (via twitter and in a comment on my post about Pangborn's Davy) that West of the Sun was so weak that he couldn't finish it, but I had just read Nicholas Thomas's book on James Cook's voyages so I was all revved up to explore new territory, no matter how forbidding!

Our cast of characters, and
Second Story's 50 cent stamp

The year is 2056.  The Earth is divided into two unhappy camps, a technocratic and technophilic socialist West ("the Federation") and a despotic East ("Jenga's empire.")  Human freedom has taken a hit, but the Federation has made major technological advances, and as the novel opens the multi-ethnic crew of the Federation's first star ship is about to land on Lucifer, a "red-green" planet named for the "son of the morning."  We get a serving of one of the novel's themes (the potential for all people, and all things, to do both good and evil) right there on the third page of text, when the mission's intellectual leader, Doc Wright, tells his comrades, "Lucifer was an angel....Devils and angels have a way of turning out to be the same organism."

Due to a fault in the construction of the star ship (perhaps an indication that the technology-obsessed Federation isn't even good at what it professes to be its primary focus) the six astronauts who lived to see Lucifer are shipwrecked on the red-green planet.  They quickly meet and befriend a member of an over-sized hairy race of territorial individualists; this character is depicted in all his glory, battling a serpentine reptile, on the Italian edition of the novel, and, I suppose, is represented by our man Hoot with that stock image of an orangutan.  Soon after, contact is made with a society of war-like Stone Age (Pangborn uses the word "Neolithic") pygmy villagers. As Harry Harrison would do with the reptile people in his Eden series in the 1980s, Pangborn flips gender roles with these belligerent shorties; among them the females are big and strong and form the ruling and military class, while the small and weak males are sensitive and raise the kids and form a parasitic priestly class.

The second of the book's three sections takes place a year after the arrival of the humans.  Doc Wright and his crew have tried to convince the queen of the pygmies to stop enslaving people and breeding them for the dinner table, but the pygmies are reluctant to change their ways, and, besides, are busy with a war against another, much larger, empire of pygmies.  Much of this second part of the book is taken up with a blow by blow account of the climactic battle of this war between pygmy empires; the humans with their firearms and a cadre of the hairy giants lead the smaller group of pygmies in battle.  The tone of the war chapters is tragic--the human led side is defeated, and we get lots of scenes of minor characters dying, Iliad-style.

The novel's final section takes place ten years after the Earthlings' landing. The handful of humans, giants and pygmies who survived the war have founded a peaceful city on an island. The pygmies have given up cannibalism, slavery, religion, and their antipathy to the giants.  While Doc Wright was building a libertarian utopia, Ed Spearman, the human most closely associated with the socialists back on Earth, struck out on his own to make himself ruler of yet another empire of pygmy villagers.  (One of Doc Wright's catchphrases is "No one is expendable," which reminded me of Ayn Rand's exhortations that every man "is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others"--Spearman's oft-repeated catchphrase is "you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs," a cliche associated with Stalinism and warfare.)  When Doc Wright and friends meet Spearman for the first time in years he is a paranoid dictator of a crumbling city.

Minutes after the meeting with Spearman, in one of those coincidences books are filled with, Earth's second star ship lands nearby.  The four members of this ship's crew are individualist small-government types, like Doc, so when everybody is sitting around drinking wine and talking about how Marx and Lenin suck, Spearman steals the new ship and flies off.  The last dozen pages of the novel are a transcription of a conversation in which Doc and his buddies describe the philosophy and practice of the utopia they have built on Lucifer.
     
When I talked about Davy, Pangborn's celebrated 1964 novel, I suggested it had a lot in common with the works of big name SF writers Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, and the same can be said for West of the Sun.  Like in so many Heinlein stories we get a strong dose of individualism (the likable Earth characters are dismissive of socialism, democracy, collectivism, and the state in general) as well as a discussions of the nature of freedom.  As in both Heinlein's and Sturgeon's work there is a hostility to religion, conspicuous anti-racism, and a stress on the importance of love (e. g., Doc Wright preaches to the natives that "we are all one flesh").

We even get scenes of nudism, another Heinlein/Sturgeon interest, one of those relationships in which an adult man marries a woman he knew as a prepubescent girl (like in Heinlein's Time for the Stars and Door into Summer), and group marriages.  The character of Dorothy, a young black woman, embodies much of the novel's ideology.  She was assigned to the mission as a little girl, straight from the government orphanage (it took eleven years to get to Lucifer.)  (I don't know why the government would use up any of the seven crew slots on its first interstellar mission on somebody with no college degree and no work experience, but there it is.)  Once on Lucifer she takes the lead in diplomatic relations with the pygmies, stripping off her top to demonstrate she has no weapons, and so the leaders of the matriarchal natives (who have four boobs) will be able to tell she is a fellow woman (though two boobs short.)  Dorothy married Paul Mason during the space trip, but when Wright looks to him to see if he approves of sending his wife on this perilous diplomatic mission, Dorothy strikes a blow for individualism and feminism, insisting that whether she will take this risk is her decision to make.  Later in the novel Dorothy bears not only Paul's children but another man's.

I mentioned above that I just read 400 pages about Captain Cook's three voyages to the Pacific in the 1760s and 1770s, and things in West of the Sun kept reminding me of stuff that happened to Cook and his compatriots.  The pygmies, for example, share attributes with some of the various Pacific and South American people Cook encountered: they practice cannibalism, wear tattoos and a smelly oil, worship giant idols, and their culture is characterized by tension between a priestly class and a warrior class.  Maybe Pangborn was influenced by accounts of Cook's explorations?

Click and squint to read Kim Stanley
Robinson's fulsome praise of Pangborn

West of the Sun also brought to mind Virgil and Horace.  Like those Latin poets and their readers, the human characters in the novel are preoccupied with memories of a recent civil war back on Earth.  Like the Trojans in the Aeneid, the humans and the pygmies in the novel flee trouble at home to found a new and better civilization.

I found West of the Sun interesting because of all these connections I was able to detect (or concoct) to other books I've read, and I am sympathetic to its ideology, but is it entertaining?  When it comes to style and pacing, it is just pedestrian, and the characters are not particularly well drawn or memorable. One of my issues with the novel is that there are very many characters, too many to really keep track of: eleven humans, ten or so pygmies, a bunch of giants, and a bunch of riding animals that are given precious names like "Miss Ponsonby" and "Susie."  (My apologies to all the Ponsonbies and Susies in the audience--your name is just too adorable!)  Another of my gripes is how the most interesting human characters, Dorothy and Spearman, disappear from the narrative for long stretches.  Paul is the main character for long periods, and he is just not compelling.

In the end, I have to give West of the Sun my overused "acceptable" rating.  Not bad, but not thrilling or special.  I can't decide whether I like it more or less than Davy... Davy has a better style and is more ambitious, but I think West of the Sun is better structured and more even.

**********

My copy of West of the Sun has five pages of ads in the back.  None are for SF books, though some are for books that would perhaps be of interest to the SF community, like Arthur C. Clarke's novel about World War II flight technology, a pile of anthologies with Alfred Hitchcock's name on them, and the source material for one of the iconic manly man's films.

"The Big Night" and "Don't Look Now": The Finale of Best of Kuttner Volume 1

It is time to finish off my bedraggled copy of The Best of Kuttner 1, published by Mayflower in Great Britain in 1965.  Perhaps appropriately, isfdb credits these last two stories solely to Henry Kuttner, unlike many of the tales in the book, which Kuttner wrote in collaboration with C. L. Moore.

"The Big Night" (1947)

This one appeared under the Hudson Hastings pseudonym in Thrilling Wonder Stories.  "The Big Night" is an entertaining space opera, complete with a risky mission in a decrepit space ship, alien civilizations, an unscrupulous space captain who exploits impressed crewmen and contemplates running drugs and participating in the slave trade, and a second in command who considers mutiny.

The "Big Night" of the title is a euphemism for interstellar space, but also for Fate or entropy, the fact that everything eventually decays and is forgotten. One of the alien characters is among the last of his race, a race which once ruled a hundred systems.  The aforementioned space captain is taking desperate measures because he is one of the last hyper ship captains and his rusty old ship, the unfortunately named La Cucaracha, is one of the last of the hyper ships--the new teleportation network has rendered interstellar space ships obsolete and it is almost impossible for him to find jobs carrying legal cargo.

The end of the story, while admitting that we and all our works will be forgotten, affirms the value of endeavor and of friendship.

A fun piece of work.

"Don't Look Now" (1948)

I wish "The Big Night" had been the last story in this book, because then I could have put it back on the shelf after hitting a high note.  "Don't Look Now," which was first published in Startling Stories, is one of those joke stories I find so dreadful.

Two men, one called Lyman and one who is not named but whom we learn works at a newspaper, are sitting in a bar.  Lyman, who seems like a drunk paranoid, explains to the journalist at great length that Martians have "owned the world" for centuries, that they walk among us in disguise, that they hate cats (cats ruled the world before them), that our lives are so difficult--plagued with wars, uncomfortable bathtubs and irritating radio shows--because this serves the Martians' inscrutable purposes.      

For a while the reporter resists, but eventually admits he has had his own suspicions about aliens, and shows Lyman two infra red photographs he has taken which hint at an alien presence.  Lyman takes one of the photos, and, after the journalist departs, comes the punchline twist--Lyman is an alien!

The jokes didn't make me laugh, and the twist made me groan.  Despite my reservations abut the story, "Don't Look Now" has been widely anthologized in books with titles like The 18 Greatest Science Fiction Stories and even My Best Science Fiction Story--Kuttner himself thought "Don't Look Now" was his best work!  I guess this makes me some kind of science fiction dissident!

Maybe people like this story because they see it as a satire of the kind of people who think that Jewish bankers (or The Bilderberg Group or The Trilateral Commission, though they were founded long after this story was published) are running the world, or of fears of communist infiltration.  But I think since, in the story, aliens really have infiltrated and really are manipulating humanity (and since Kuttner and Moore use a similar theme in "Juke-Box") it is either not meant that way, or is a weak example of such a satire.

Too bad to end the volume on a boring trifle like this.

***********

To sum up. let's rank the fifteen stories in Best of Kuttner 1 from best to worst, and split them into three categories, good, passable, and a waste of time.

-----Good-----

Piper's Son

Housing Problem

The Big Night

Shock 

Absalom 

-----Passable-----

Juke-Box

Year Day

Proud Robot

A Gnome There Was

-----Bad-----

Call Him Demon

Ego Machine
Don't Look Now

Or Else

Cold War

See You Later

Not a stellar collection, but a worthwhile one.

************

The last two pages of The Best of Kuttner 1 consist of advertising for other Mayflower titles.  It is an odd selection.  Only one of the eleven books is a science fiction book, Judith Merril's Best of Sci-Fi No. 2.  According to isfdb this is properly known as The Best of Sci-Fi—Two and is a British edition of the American title The 7th Annual of the Year's Best S-F.  It has a disturbing cover and includes several writers I've never heard of, and a few whom I don't think of as SF writers, like Lawrence Durrell, Muriel Spark, and John Dos Passos.  The cover is so riveting I would be sorely tempted to purchase it if I ran into it in a store, but a quick survey of Abebooks, Amazon and ebay suggests this book is not easily found here in the good ol' USA.

The rest of the list consists of two important books about the First World War, a book of literary short stories, and seven titles which, we are led to believe, will appeal to the prurient.  These include "the story of a man beyond innocence [and] of a woman aching for experience," one about "a reckless love affair between a beautiful worldly woman and a sixteen year old boy" that has been reprinted fourteen times, and a novel about young lovers that "may astound some readers."  I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most of these books would seem astoundingly tame to us jaded 21st century readers. 

Damon Knight and The Tomorrow People by Judith Merril

Yesterday I did a little research on famous SF writer and editor Damon Knight, after reading his feeble story, "World Without Children."  I learned at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction that Knight wrote many reviews of SF work, but ceased doing so after "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction declined to print a negative response to Judith Merril – the review of The Tomorrow People (1960)."   This rang a bell with me, because I read The Tomorrow People in 2007 and thought it was terrible.  I tracked down the review at the Drake University Library (it appears in the 1967 edition of In Search of Wonder, pages 104-105) and sure enough, Knight shows no mercy.

It is nice to see that Damon and I are seeing eye to eye on something.
    
Below I have pasted my February 21, 2007 Amazon review of Judith Merril's The Tomorrow People.  While Knight comes right out and says the science in the book is "a shambles" and that it is too feminine, comparing it to a saccharine woman's magazine, I ignore any science mistakes (I don't know much science myself, and I'm sure the science in the books I love is horrible) and only hint that The Tomorrow People reads like a book written by a female for females. 

Don't be fooled by the positive blurb from Fred Pohl (Merril's husband) on the cover of the 1968 paperback edition of The Tomorrow People; this book is incredibly slow and painfully dull.

Written in 1960, it depicts 1977, a year after the Soviet Union and the United States have each sent a rocket to Mars. Only the American rocket came back and only one of its two crew members came back with it. What happened to the rest of the astronauts is a mystery, and truth drugs, hypnosis, and psychotherapy are unable to get the answer out of the one surviving astronaut, Johnny Wendt.

This is a good foundation for a story, but after setting the above scene in a few pages the reader wades through 150 pages of poorly-written soap opera stuff; can Wendt beat his alcoholism? Is his girlfriend cheating on him? Why does Wendt's girlfriend refuse to marry him? Can Wendt be convinced by the space agency to go on another space mission? Will that up and coming politician hurt the space agency's budget? Lots and lots of long boring conversations in which people look for subtle clues about each other's psychological states and try to manipulate each other; about as thrilling as a staff meeting at your office or Thanksgiving with your extended family.

In the last 40 pages or so of this 192 page novel the story slowly comes back to life, and evolves into a forgettable utopian tale about how the Martians can teach Earthmen to love each other, how to use telepathy, and how to access a non-polluting, infinitely renewable, energy source.

The 42 page hippy story was worth two stars, just barely, but the 150 pages of mind-numbing conversations make this one of the biggest duds of all time.