F&SF Feb 1958: C Oliver, R Phillips, & C Emshwiller

We've already read four stories from the February 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher, who in the book review column of this issue tells you he disagrees with Ayn Rand's philosophy and denounces Frank Belknap Long's Space Station 1, Kenneth Bulmer's City Under the Sea, David Duncan's Occam's Razor, Henry Gayle's Spawn of the Vortex, and Mach 1: A Story of Planet Ionus by Allen A. Adler as "worthless."  (Back in 2017 I read Mach 1 under its title Terror on Planet Ionus and I didn't care for it either.  The day may come when I read Long's Space Station 1, but I think I own other Long novels that I will tackle before that one.)

Anyway, the stories from this issue we've already passed judgement on are Poul Anderson's "The Last of the Deliverers," Robert Silverberg's "The Man Who Never Forgot," Avram Davidson's "I Do Not Hear You, Sir," and Charles Fontenay's "A Summer Afternoon."  Let's today drag before the merciless tribunal that is the MPorcius Fiction Log staff Chad Oliver's "Pilgrimage," Rog Phillips' "Love me, Love My -," and Carol Emshwiller's "Baby."  Order in the court!

"Pilgrimage" by Chad Oliver

This story immediately reminded me of the Clifford Simak stories we read in our last episode, as it concerns a small town and has as its hero an older man, an irascible character, who serves as a liaison between humanity and space aliens.  But it lacks any interesting SF content, the human feeling we saw in those Simak stories, and any sense of hope or wonder, instead indulging in cheap contempt for people.

Grandpa Erskine lives in a dry Southern county, in the town of Pryorville, and enjoys annoying people by walking clumsily, as if drunk, and showily carrying around books like Lady Chatterly's Lover and General Sherman: American Hero while singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  It is not that he particularly likes booze or the North--what he likes is pissing people off.

This week is the Pryorville Pilgrimage, when the citizens dress up like Confederate soldiers or cowboys or pioneers or Native Americans, when there is a vintage automobile show and a Conestoga wagon shows up.  Pryorville, Oliver tells us, is stuck in the past, a bogus romanticized view of the past--I guess Oliver is giving us permission to have contempt for these people and cheer on Grandpa Erskine's efforts to hurt people's feelings as well as the aliens' somewhat non sequiter punishment of them.

Alien anthropologists, hovering in a starship high above (Oliver was an anthropologist and his profession informs much of his SF) are looking forward to observing the strange native festival that is the Pryorville Pilgrimage.  But they are here to do more than observe.  As the parade begins, they use a time machine (the aliens call it an STD or Selective Temporal Dislocator, one of Oliver's little jokes) to bring figures from Pryorville's past to the present day, and to send some 20th-century Pryorville inhabitants back into the past.  The Indians and cowboys and whores from the 19th century shoot up the town, rape the women and seduce the men, eat a dog, etc.  Grandpa Erskine gets along with these jokers just fine; he has been in league with the aliens, stealing artifacts (like his cousin's TV) and delivering them to the aliens, and I guess the aliens' payment to Grandpa for his aid is this humbling and enlivening of the town.  Are these aliens anthropologists, practical jokers or terrorists?  As for the 20th-century people unexpectedly sent back to the past for which they had such misguided nostalgia, they find that they are stuck in lives of poverty, violence and gender inequality.

I guess we can give this trivial and gimmicky joke story a grade of barely acceptable.  I suppose it is true that romanticizing the past is silly, but is pointing this out the basis for an entertaining or enlightening story?  Not really.  And it is odd to get this message from Chad Oliver, who, unless my memory fails me, has used multiple SF stories to argue that pre-industrial life was better than post-industrial life.  Maybe readers who like seeing Southerners humiliated will enjoy this story more than I did, though the way Oliver goofs on those who romanticize Native Americans may bother such people.

"Pilgrimage" was reprinted in various foreign editions of F&SF and chosen for inclusion in the volume produced as a memorial to celebrate Boucher.  In our own 21st century it appeared in the NESFA collection of Oliver's short stories.  

I own the red Volume 2 of the paperback edition of Special Wonder
and from it have read Kris Neville's "Old Man Henderson" and
William F. Nolan's "He Kilt it With a Stick."  It also reprints
Damon Knight's "You're Another," which I read in another publication.

"Love Me, Love My -" by Rog Phillips

When I started this blog post the plan was to read the Oliver, Davidson and Emshwiller stories from this issue of F&SF, but then I realized I'd already read Davidson's "I Can't Hear You, Sir" so I subbed in this story by Phillips.  I've only read one story by Phillips before, "The Yellow Pill," which I thought "OK."  This story, "Love Me, Love My -," only ever saw print again in foreign versions of F&SF.           

This is a banal story full of traditional jokes about how middle-class men in the corporate world are pushed around by women and by their bosses.  Barely acceptable.

Lin is a young executive.  Having finished up training and his first assignment on Venus, the company is sending him to Tau Ceti III.  He doesn't want to go because he has a girl on Venus, but if he doesn't go he will be fired and have to take a working-class job.  The company will pay to transport a wife along with him to Tau Ceti III, so he is told that if he marries the girl all will be well.  But the girl, Leah, refuses to leave her "vegy," and the company won't pay to transport a vegy as well as a wife.

It is the 25th century, and humans have had a relationship with vegies for almost a century.  The vegies are alien plant people who thrive on soil and sunlight and emit oxygen; one vegy produces enough oxygen to keep three humans alive.  Vegies have replaced mechanical means of producing oxygen on space ships and in the sort of dome cities humans have to live in on planets like Venus.  As smart and as strong as humans, vegies are often treated more like a member of the family than an employee and people tend to become attached to them, and Leah has had the same vegy all her young life and won't leave Venus without it.  She tells Lin that if he really loved her he would figure out a way to get her vegy passage on the star ship to Tau Ceti III, even though the passage costs twice Lin's yearly salary.  (To add insult to injury, the vegy isn't crazy about Lin and is always hanging around, keeping Lin from having sexual contact with Leah.)

Lin works with smugglers to smuggle Leah's vegy aboard, but the smugglers try to kidnap the vegy so they have oxygen on the space boat they are going to steal after seizing the diamonds the space liner is transporting to Tau Ceti III.  The vegy outfights the smugglers and in return for foiling their schemes Lin, Lea and the vegy get a big reward that is spent on transporting stuff the vegy wants transported to Tau Ceti III.  The upshot of the story is that Lin is at the mercy of his boss, his wife and his wife's alien friend, living the tragedy of middle-class life--responsibility for the survival and comfort of others who show him no respect.

"Baby" by Carol Emshwiller 

I've sort of avoided Emshwiller's work because the wikipedia article on her suggests the selling point of her fiction is that it is feminist, and, as someone who has spent decades of his life in and around academia and bookstores and art museums, I doubt there is any story written in the 1950s that is going to expose me to a feminist idea that I will find new and exciting.  But "Baby" is the cover story of a major magazine edited by a major writer and thus important to the history of SF, and when I read Emswiller's 1959 story "Day at the Beach" in 2018 I found it thought-provoking, so let's give "Baby" a spin.  It is only 13 pages and was reprinted by famous horror and crime anthologist Peter Haining in a book on the Frankenstein theme, so how bad can it be?

"Baby" is a pretty well-done last-man-on-Earth, postapocalyptic story with robots, which touches on themes like man's desire to grow up, the stifling of an overbearing mother, and how, left outside civilization, a man will act like a beast.  It has real human feeling and no dopey jokes.  Moderately good.

Baby is a 38-year-old man, naked, living among malfunctioning robots in a half-operational automatic house with machines that cook food and doors that open automatically and so forth, in the midst of an automatic city where some things still work but others do not.  Baby is getting thin as much of the equipment that cultivates and cooks food is failing.  Unfortunately, the robots that still treat him like a child, admonishing him to be polite and so on, are still fast enough and strong enough to catch him and force him into the bed that is far too small for him when he escapes.

We learn over the course of the story that the United States got involved in a cataclysmic biological war just as Baby was being born--his parents instructed the robot with the artificial womb to keep Baby in the womb an extra year--when he finally got out all the germs were gone, but so were (apparently) all the people.  So Baby has been treated like a kid by caretaker robots for 38 years and never seen another human.  He instinctively wants to grow up and become responsible for himself and to share love with another human, but is so ignorant that for a while he thinks he will grow into a robot, his two eyes merging into the single red electronic eye like those he sees on the robots who look after him, his arms becoming like tentacles and so forth.

The plot of this story, once all the background is out of the way, concerns Baby's most successful yet escape attempt.  He rides the underground slidewalks the furthest he has ever taken them, essentially at random, and stumbles upon a house similar to his own in which lives a woman in a situation almost identical to his, though her imprisoning house's cooking machinery is working better.  These two more or less fall in love, but, having had zero socialization, have little idea how to deal with each other, and of course the robots who are taking care of her (they call her "Honey") are in the way.  But over a period of time Baby and Honey are making progress, and it looks like we readers may get a happy ending.  But then Baby's caretaker robots finally catch up to him and drag him back home.  As the story ends, we know Baby is going to escape again and again, searching the vast city for Honey, striving to avoid recapture by robots and attack from packs of wild dogs, but we don't know if he will succeed.  

This is the best story we are reading today, the most serious and the best-written; maybe I should stop avoiding Emswhiller's work.

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A profitable excursion into the oeuvres of writers of whom I have been skeptical.  The Oliver and Phillips are tolerable, though the former leaves a bad taste in the mouth because it feels vindicative and arrogant and the latter, though it reflects real life relationships, is mediocre.  Emshwiller's story uses standard SF devices in a more mature way and exhibits real sympathy for the human condition and has the best images and finest style as well and serves as an argument to suspend my skepticism of her.

Stay tuned for more SF short stories in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, in which we will be guided by the aforementioned Mr. Haining.

Astounding Sept '40: L R Hubbard, R Rocklynne and V Phillips

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories from the issues of Astounding in which L. Ron Hubbard's Kilkenny Cats stories debuted.  Today we've got the September 1940 issue, from the pages of which we will read not only Hubbard's contribution but a piece by Ross Rocklynne, even though the last time we read a Rocklynne story I denounced it as a "repetitive" and "tedious" "waste of time" consisting of "anemic jokes" (ouch) and a story by Vic Phillips, about whom I know nothing. 

(This important issue of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s magazine also features the first installment of the serialized version of A. E. van Vogt's famous Slan, and a story from Robert A. Heinlein's Future History, "Blowups Happen."  I read a book version of Slan many years ago, and may read this magazine version someday.  "Blowups Happen" I blogged about way back in 2014.  I reread "Blowups Happen" yesterday, and can't think of anything additional to say that is any more interesting than what I said back then.)

"The Kilkenny Cats" by L. Ron Hubbard

Like the first Kilkenny Cats story, "The Idealist," "The Kilkenny Cats" appears under the pseudonym Kurt von Rachen.  According to isfdb, this story has never been reprinted on its own, just in the 1980 Italian Kilkenny Cats collection I ribelli dell'universo and the 1992 small press hardcover Kilkenny Cats collection.  

At the end of "The Idealist," the leaders of the Anarchist party were captive on a starship headed for planet Sereon, having been sentenced by the newly installed communist government of Earth to exile on that mysterious planet.  (The naive anarchists had been the commies' allies in the revolution against Earth's aristocratic rulers, only to find the Reds turning on them as soon as the aristos were out of the way.)  Hubbard spends the first few pages of "The Kilkenny Cats" demonstrating somewhat comically how the starship, run efficiently when manned by the men of the old Royal Space Navy, is now being run haphazardly and lackadasically by the uneducated communist dopes who have succeeded the deposed aristocrats.  We also learn that the dictator of Earth, Fagar, has given the commander of the starship, Lars Tavish, instructions to set up the penal colony on Sereon in such a way that will foster a self-destructive fight between the disparate groups of anarchist exiles.  The two main factions are the seventeen middle-class scientists led by Jean Maucahrd and the longshoremen (375 in number) led by Dave Blacker; also in the mix are our two main characters, Colonel Stephen Gailbraith, a space navy veteran and hero of the revolution who now heartily regrets his support of the revolution and Fredericka Stalton, master propagandist and former poster child for the communist party who has been exiled along with the anarchists because Fagar worried her popularity threatened his rule, especially after she expressed misgivings about communist policy.

Lars Tavish sets up the scientists in one camp and the laborers in another, the former with all the food and high tech equipment, except for the rifles, which go to the longshoremen.  Almost immediately following the departure of the ship, the two groups are at each other's throats.  Meanwhile, Gailbraith, accompanied by Stalton, who don't get along with either Mauchard or Blacker, march off into the wilderness.  Demonstrating an iron will, a talent for command and endless resourcefulness, Gailbraith succeeds in getting Mauchard's boffins and Blacker's laborers to stop fighting each other and work together by introducing an external threat--packs of native carnivores.  Stalton, a tough and cynical girl whose ability to manipulate others carried her out of the tenements and into the top ranks of the revolution, constantly bickers with Galbraith, but as he proves his abilities and saves her life she begins to respect him.

An acceptably entertaining SF story in the classic mold, showing one clever man overcoming obstacles using logic and trickery and demonstrating how diverse social demographics need to work together to make a thriving society, though it will probably take elite manipulation to get them to do so.  Again Gailbraith's future--as the man who will overthrown the communist government--is foreshadowed.  Presumably we will see this feat in a future installment of Hubbard's Kilkenny Cats series.

"Quietus" by Ross Rocklynne

Two bird-like aliens arrive on Earth in their spherical spaceship to discover that your home planet and mine is a total wreck, having been hit by an asteroid 15 or so years ago.  Except for a few thousand square miles in North America, the Earth's surface is a barren waste punctuated by ferociously active volcanoes; but in that green strip in the Western Hemisphere lives 21-year-old Tommy and his pet crow Blacky.  Blacky can talk, and parrots things Tommy says and occasionally repeats things people said when Tommy was just a little kid, before the cataclysm that killed everyone Tommy knew, phrases Tommy can't quite understand.  (Impulsive Tommy survived the asteroid strike because he had run away from home and was hiding in a cave the night of the disaster.)

Tommy is crying because of a hunger he cannot define--we readers of course instantly recognize that Tommy's hunger is for a woman.  Tommy stumbles upon evidence that he is not the only human left on Earth, and that the other survivor is a girl!  He starts tracking her, and she, shy and skittish, evades him, but as time goes by she becomes more and more curious about him.

All the worlds love a lover, and I'd like to tell you that Tommy and whatshername live happily ever after, but, as the title of his story suggests, "Quietus" is a tragedy and Rocklynne lays a depressing twist ending on us.  The two avian aliens watch Tommy, and one of them assumes that Blacky, who rides on Tommy's shoulder and is always jabbering, is the intelligent being and Tommy a beast of burden.  Again and again, Blacky's cries and chatter startle and scare off the young woman, and eventually the emotional Tommy vents his frustration with his black-feathered friend by throwing pebbles at him.  Thinking she is saving a fellow bird-person from a mere animal, one of the aliens shoots Tommy down; the last Earthwoman emerges from cover to stand sobbing over the corpse of the last Earthman.

Not bad.

Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas saw fit to reprint "Quietus" in Adventures in Time and Space (one of the most famous s-f collections of all time!) and Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg included it in the volume of their series The Great Science Fiction Stories covering 1940, which was later reprinted under the moniker Isaac Asimov Presents the Golden Years of Science Fiction.  (Don't let me hear you say life's taking you nowhere, angel.)

"Emergency" by Vic Phillips

It is the future!  Mankind has colonized the solar system, and operates under a single central government on Earth.  Human civilization relies on powerplants that can transmit energy safely and efficiently through air or vacuum to where ever it may be required.

"Emergency" begins in the chamber where the Earth's ruling council of seven men are confronting an unprecedented and bewildering crisis.  Over the last few hours, all contact with the other planets and moons of the solar system has been lost, one after the other, suggesting some alien force is travelling through the system, deactivating the power transmission infrastructure in each colony as it proceeds.  Earth's rulers have no idea what to do as whatever it was that has just silenced Mars approaches our home planet!

All machinery on Earth ceases functioning, and the capitol city goes dark.  But wait, out the window, is that a single light?  Yes, the centuries' old electric bulb on display at the museum!  The eighth man in the council chamber, the "chief liaison officer," who seems like a sort of secretary and office manager, leads the councilmembers to the museum, where he has a brain wave:

Whimhurst, Farraday, Franklin, Hertz, the ghosts of these and a dozen others of the ancient pioneers seemed to be with him at that moment....

Gathering together tools and materials from the museum, and recruiting hobbyists who have obsolete skills that have not been remunerative for hundreds of years, they labor to build a last ditch defense against the invader.

We learn what this defense is in the climax.  At the direction of the secretary, amateur technicians have generated a powerful static electricity charge using hand-cranked generators ("Taupler Haltz machines"), and stored the charge in a human "condenser," a line of thousands of hand-holding volunteers.  When the alien, a six-foot wide sphere that is absorbing all of the power generated by human civilization's powerplants and transmitting it back home, hovers close enough, the head of the line of volunteers touches it, discharging the static charge.  Fifty of the Earth's heroes are killed in the explosive discharge, but it interrupts the alien's energy piracy long enough to bring Earth's defense weapons back online so they can blast the alien.

A decent enough science gimmick story.  "Emergency" has, it seems, never been reprinted.  Sometimes we dig up the deep cuts here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

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Readers, I presume, were happy with this issue of Astounding; not only does it include the major van Vogt and Heinlein stories, but even these three lesser pieces are pretty entertaining and full of daring deeds, tragedy, life advice (don't get mixed up with commies!) and science.

More Kilkenny Cats, and more Astounding, in our next episode.

1958 SF (?) stories by Richard Gehman, Rog Phillips, Gerald Kersh & John Steinbeck

It is time to break out into some new territory here at MPorcius Fiction Log and read four stories by people I have never blogged about before.  Our guide on this expedition will be Judith Merril, a woman whose fan base may not be all that big (Barry Malzberg in a 2016 column for Galaxy's Edge reports that Donald Wollheim told him that Merril's famous anthology, England Swings! SF, "was the worst-selling Ace paperback in history") but its members are dedicated and powerful.  Merril, by including them in the fourth installment of "The Most Acclaimed S-F Anthology," is telling us that these four stories are among 1958's "greatest," so let's give them a shot.

"Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" by Richard Gehman 

Richard Gehman appears to be a guy who wrote some novels and did lots of Hollywood and Broadway journalism, writing articles about celebrities for TV Guide and penning biographies of Bogie, Jerry Lewis, Gary Cooper, and the restaurant Sardi's.  He apparently also hung around with the "Rat Pack."  Gehman only has two fiction entries at isfdb.  Merril's little intro to the two-page "Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" here in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Fourth Annual Volume tells us it is a satire and points out that Playboy editor Ray Russell warned her he didn't think it fit into her SF anthology. 

I'm a little reluctant to say this story is a total waste of time because I haven't read any Kerouac so maybe nuances are going over my head, and maybe people familiar with Kerouac love "Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" when first they encounter it.  But to me it is just a bunch of puns and goofs on hipster slang.  For example, the protagonist, a mouse, tries pot, but it doesn't give him any kicks, so he tries pan.  Later, still in pursuit of a transcendent experience, the mouse runs up and down a clock like in the nursery rhyme.  Then he gives up on trying to get high from external sources ("in the final analysis, he had to look inward") and writes a novel and gets rich.

I guess Merril considers this SF because animals talk, but there is no speculation in it, no escapist adventure, no science--it's a gentle parody of a cultural phenomenon.  I have to suspect she included it in her book of 1958's "greatest science-fiction and fantasy" stories in an effort to make it look like SF readers are sophisticates conversant with important literary movements and not just pimple-faced freaks who know how to use a slide rule. 

"Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" appeared first in Playboy under the pen name Martin Scott, alongside photos by Shel Silverstein of his trip to Moscow and a story by Richard Matheson.  Merril loved it so much she included it in 1967's SF: The Best of the Best; Gehman didn't get his name on the cover among those of Brian Aldiss, Clifford Simak and Damon Knight (who famously panned Merril's novel The Tomorrow People at some risk to his career), but is instead lumped in with Steve Allen under the description "eleven other contemporary masters."  "Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac" would be reprinted again in 1974 in a McGraw-Hill textbook, Fantasy: The Literature of the Marvelous.  I guess if he is in a text book he really is a master!

"The Yellow Pill" by Rog Phillips

The pill in "Mother's Little Helper" is yellow, isn't it?  Now there's a great song.  And it's about a contemporary social issue--I wonder if Merril considered it one of the greatest SF songs of 1966.     

"The Yellow Pill" first appeared in John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding, so I think we can expect it to be a better fit for conventional notions of what constitutes SF than is Gehman's piece.  Rog Phillips actually has many stories listed at isfdb and a pretty long Wikipedia entry but somehow I have never read anything by him before.

Cedric Elton is the world's most famous psychiatrist.  The cops bring to him Gerald Bocek, a man who murdered five people in a supermarket.  Bocek claims those he shot down were in fact a boarding party of reptilian space pirates who had attacked the space ship upon which both he and Elton are serving as professional spacemen.  Bocek insists that if Elton really thinks himself a head shrinker on Earth it is because he is suffering from space madness, an occupational hazard of space travel, and should take one of the yellow pills carried aboard to dispel such madness.

Over the course of several days, each man tries to convince the other that he is delusional and each employs strategies to cure the other.  The twist ending of the story is that both succeed in changing the other's mind--as the story ends Elton has come to believe they really are spacemen whose vessel is full of charred lizardman corpses while Bocek has come to think himself a murderer (not guilty by reason of insanity) who has just been cured of his delusions by Elton the brilliant psychiatrist.  After expressing his gratitude, Bocek walks out of the doctor's office...or did he just step into the airlock where he will die of asphyxiation?           

This story is OK; competent, but no big deal.  Editors have been keen on "The Yellow Pill" and it has appeared in numerous anthologies and reprint magazines.  

"River of Riches" by Gerald Kersh

In her intro to "River of Riches," Merril says that "s-f has enjoyed a rather more reputable name in Great Britain than it has here--or at least a good many more 'literary' British authors have written it" and goes on to name Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, and others.  Kersh himself is British, though he moved to New York and in 1958 became a U.S. citizen.  Kersh's novels, wikipedia is telling me, were about London low-life, but his post-war short stories were largely of the detective or speculative type.  Wikipedia also informs us Harlan Ellison told people that Kersh was his favorite author.  So maybe this story is going to be good.

The narrator, an Englishman in New York, meets an impecunious countryman in a bar.  This guy, Jack Pilgrim, tells the story of how he comes from a wealthy family but doesn't stand to currently inherit much and was sent to Canada to work and has since worked many jobs and gained and lost multiple fortunes.  

The central episode of this account is how Pilgrim found himself alone among cannibal Indians in a Latin American jungle and there made and quickly lost a fortune.  In brief, these primitives played a game like marbles using a certain species of nut.  As explained in their mythology, one in ten-million of these nuts is intelligent!  A tribal chief traded Pilgrim one of the rare intelligent nuts for the Englishman's rifle.  With the thinking nut Pilgrim won the game again and again, amassing a vast fortune in gold and jewels, which the natives do not consider valuable.  But, ignoring the advice of both natives and a European trader, Pilgrim went up against the chief of a tribe of Indians famed for their trickery, and those guys stripped Pilgrim of his wealth, including the super nut!

This is a well-put-together and entertaining story, so thumbs up.  "River of Riches" first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and would be included in a British collection of Kersh's and in one of those anthologies with Alfred Hitchcock's name and handsome mug on them.           

"The Short-Short Story of Mankind" by John Steinbeck

Richard Gehman and Gerald Kersh may be forgotten, but I think people still read John Steinbeck--I feel like it was just a few years ago that there was a whole controversy over how much of Travels with Charley was just made up.  Whether they make kids in school read Of Mice and Men nowadays I don't know, but they made me read it back in the 1980s.

In her intro Merril admits "The Short-Short Story of Mankind" is not really SF, but as it is a "delightful" satire, and her famous anthology has begun including a non-fiction section, she included it.

This five-page joke story is about a bunch of cavemen who engage in incestuous sex and cannibalism.  The joke is that they say the same sorts of things and hold the same sorts of attitudes as 20th-century people whom people like Steinbeck and Merril look down upon.  They complain about the younger generation.  They are suspicious of foreigners and people of a different religion.  They fear new technology.  Besides the repetitive jokes, Steinbeck offers fable-like stories of how agriculture, trade and government arose, and finally suggests that people today are no different than the cave people he has depicted.  He ends on the positive note that in the past people chose to abandon their prejudices rather than go extinct, and so it is likely we 20th-century people will do the same, getting over our differences rather than nuking the world into oblivion.

Tedious self-satisfied conventional wisdom packaged with lame jokes.  Thumbs down!

"The Short-Short Story of Mankind" first appeared in Playboy and would be included by Brian Aldiss in the oft-reprinted Penguin Science Fiction.

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I might read something by Rog Phillips or Gerald Kersh in the future, but don't bet on seeing blog posts about Richard Gehman or John Steinbeck ever again here at MPorcius Fiction Log, oh my brothers.

Stories of Contact with aliens by Walton, Leiber, Brown and Phillips

As you can see from this receipt (the true historian knows that truth lies in the documentary evidence!) I purchased Contact, a 1963 anthology edited by Noel Keyes, on June 7 of 2016 at A-1 Bookstore for $1.50.  This book was 50% more expensive than Planet of Peril by John Christopher, which I read in August of 2017.  The vagaries of the market!  Contact is Noel Keyes's only credit at isfdb, and the know-it-alls there pour salt in Mr. Keyes's wounds by claiming that famous SF historian Sam Moskowitz actually did much of the work putting Contact together.  Keyes (real name: David Keightley) was probably too busy studying Chinese history and literature to devote his full attention to Contact.  Priorities, man!

Let's check out four stories from Contact, two from people we are familiar with, Fritz Leiber and Frederic Brown, and two from guys I know little or nothing of, Harry Walton and Peter Phillips.

"Intelligence Test" by Harry Walton (1953)

This is a sort of Twilight Zone-ish story in which, shortly after a UFO is spotted over Everytown, USA, a handful of people find themselves trapped by a forcefield in a roadside diner, the subjects of an alien test of human intelligence!  A journalist among those trapped figures out how to escape, despite the obstructions presented by the presence of two members of the decadent and corrupt bourgeoisie!

This is a good story of its type and I enjoyed it.  "Intelligence Test" originally appeared in Science Fiction Plus, and forty years later was translated into Russian and included in an anthology alongside Clifford Simak's Goblin Reservation and Horacio Quiroga's "Anaconda."

 

"What's He Doing in There?" by Fritz Leiber (1957)

Fritz, the man behind the much-beloved Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, has been showing up on the blog a lot lately, which is good, because he had an interesting career and I like much of his work.  Of course, he doesn't hit it out of the park every at-bat (as you sports fans might say.)  "What's He Doing in There?" is a tepid joke story.  I can't really object to Leiber writing joke stories, because he wrote one of the very best comedy SF/F stories, "Lean Times in Lankhmar," published in 1959, but this one feels like no more than competent filler.

The first Martian to come to Earth makes a beeline to an anthropologist who has a wife, a "coltish" teenage daughter and a "little son."  After a nice chat the alien utters a vague phrase that the humies interpret as a request to use the bathroom.  They direct him, and he locks himself in...for hour after hour.  What could the Martian be doing in there?  In the morning he finally emerges and it becomes apparent that Martians sleep underwater, and the alien took the tub for a comfortable bed.

An acceptable trifle.

First appearing in Galaxy, in 1982 "What's He Doing in There?" was translated into (I think) Croatian and appeared in the Yugoslavian SF magazine Sirius.

"Knock" by Fredric Brown (1949)

Hubba hubba!

Remember when we read a Fredric Brown novel about a homophobic boozer and a god-like rock?  Good times!  Let's hope this short story is equally fun and crazy.

Aliens hose down the Earth with rays that kill all animal (but not plant) life, saving only a few score specimens for their zoo, among them one man and one woman.  These aliens don't die of old age, though they can die by violence, and are dumbfounded and disappointed when their brand new Earth specimens start dying of natural causes.  These E.T.s are also cold-hearted, with no conception of love or affection, and the last man on earth tricks them; he tells them Earth creatures live longer if petted and caressed, and suggests they show such affection to their rattlesnake specimen.  The aliens start keeling over, and somehow don't realize they are dying from snakebites--they think that Earth is the planet of death and they have started dying of old age like Earth creatures do.  So, they leave.

There is also a sort of subplot about whether or not the last man and last woman on Earth will ever have sex; she does not find him attractive.

I can't tell you that this story is bad, but it is leaving me cold.  More filler.

After first appearing in an issue of Thrilling Wonder with a cover that is making my eyes dilate, "Knock" has been reprinted many times; according to isfdb, Sirius presented it twice, the second time as the cover story!  Weird!

"Lost Memory" by Peter Phillips (1952)

Phillips's career seems to have caused some confusion among SF scholars--not only are there multiple SF writers with this name, but it was also used as a pseudonym by Howard Browne.  The Phillips we are acquainting ourselves with today is mentioned by Barry Malzberg in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, Malzberg telling us that Phillips was the first person to write about a machine that facilitates and manipulates dreams.

"Lost Memory" is yet another story about emotional robots who have lost knowledge of who first constructed them, like "Robots Return" and "Orphans of the Void," both of which we read earlier this week.  These here robots reside on a lifeless rock of a planet and have a complex society complete with a division of labor--there are politician robots, for example, and our narrator is a journalist robot.  These individualistic robots feel pride and fear and have differences of opinion, and some make a practice of customizing themselves--one has replaced his legs with wheels, for example.  Another converted himself into an aircraft and tried to escape the planet's gravity, without success.

When what we readers realize is a rocket ship crash lands on the planet, the robots think it is a robot from another world who has successfully converted itself into a space ship.  The injured Earth astronaut in the ship, via radio, tries to explain to the assembled robot politicians and journalists that he needs medical attention, but these robots have no experience with living things and continue thinking it is the rocket itself talking.  (The rocket's airlock was jammed in the crash and there are no windows or anything like that.)  A robot technician cuts open the rocket to conduct repairs, and the heat caused by the friction burns the human to a crisp.  Phillips really pours on the horror elements, with the astronaut repeatedly screaming things like "Dear Jesus!" and "You're burning me alive!" and then with the description of the corpse, which the robots think some sort of insulation.  This is like proto-splatterpunk!

Not only is the astronaut killed by his would-be rescuers, but the robots lose an opportunity to learn from him the secret of their origins.  I'll give this hardcore tragedy a moderately positive vote.   

"Lost Memory" has been reprinted numerous times in anthologies of robot stories and horror stories and translated into several foreign languages, including Japanese.

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I don't feel like any of these was a waste of my time, so a successful mission.  More fifty-plus-year-old SF stories in our next episode when I explore another of my paperback SF anthologies.

Six more from The Best of Barry N. Malzberg

Back cover of my copy

After a short break it is back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, published in 1976 and containing 38 stories, all published in the 1970s, as well as lots of fascinating discussion of SF and the (genre) literary life.

Intro to "Revolution"

Back in 2011 Joachim Boaz and I both read "Revolution" in Future City so I am skipping it today.  You can read our efforts to figure it out at the link; much of the discussion is in the comments.

In the intro to "Revolution" in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg the author talks about and engages in SF criticism.  He praises Damon Knight, James Blish and Algis Budrys for their criticism, and laments that most SF readers don't take the genre seriously and don't care about criticism.  (It is not just SF readers who think criticism is a load of crap; flipping through T. S. Eliot's letters recently I found a 1922 quote from George Santayana in the footnotes to a letter from Eliot to Norbert Wiener dated 6 January 1915: "Criticism is something purely incidental--talk about talk--and to my mind has no serious value, except perhaps as an expression of the philosophy of the critic.")  Contra Santayana, Malzberg thinks that SF will stagnate without serious criticism.

Malzberg then lists whom he thinks are the best "modern" SF writers, splitting them into two categories.  Category 1 is "modern SF," and he crowns Robert Silverberg as the absolute best "modern writer of modern S-F."  "Running close behind" Silverberg are Thomas Disch, Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Fred Pohl.  Category 2 is "non-modern" SF, which he assures us is "not necessarily an inferior form."  The best "modern writer of non-modern S-F" is James H. Schmitz, with Poul Anderson a "close second."  What Malzberg means by "modern" in the two contexts in which he uses the word is not exactly clear.

I, and most readers of this blog, could probably spend hours disputing or defending these lists and puzzling over how Malzberg arrived at these rankings; readers should feel free to voice their opinions in the comments, but I don't have the energy to attack this thorny issue in this blog post today.

"Ups and Downs" (1973)

"Ups and Downs" was first published in Eros in Orbit, an anthology of SF stories about sex.  Malzberg jocularly mentions that there were two anthologies of science fiction stories about sex published in 1973; maybe he means Strange Bedfellows, which was published in late 1972?  (There is an ad for Strange Bedfellows in my copy of the April 1973 issue of F&SF.)

The year is 1996 and Jules Fishman is the sole astronaut on the first manned (or, as the feminists say, staffed) flight to Mars!  (Always down on the space program, Malzberg hints that the trip is an election year stunt meant to protect the incumbent.  Maybe in 2020 we'll be seeing a rocket of deplorables lifting off for the red planet.)  Jules unexpectedly finds a beautiful young woman is also aboard the rocket; this chick is incredibly horny and they have sex several times a day.  Jules begins neglecting his important duties, he is so busy engaging in what we like to call "horizontal refreshment."

Jules figures some kindly bureaucrat secretly requisitioned a woman for inclusion on the flight, to make the month-long (and that's just one way!) journey to Mars more comfortable.  Of course, we readers just assume Jules is going bonkers and hallucinating this woman.  Jules is sex-obsessed; in a funny flashback when he learns the trip will last two-and-a-half months total he worries that he won't be able to handle such a long period of abstinence--he is accustomed to having sex four or five times a week!

"What about masturbation?" I wanted to ask.  "Is this a plausible activity, or will the sensors pick up the notations of energy, the raised heartbeat, the flutterings of eyelids, the sudden congestion of my organ and beam all of it back to Earth to be decoded to a stain of guilt." 

I was a little disappointed that this one petered out at the end; Jules doesn't crash the rocket into Mars or Chicago or even Deimos or Phobos, which he thinks are artificial satellites built by a lost high-tech Martian civilization.  The real climax of the story is when he tries to develop a real human relationship with the woman on the ship, asking her her name, what her childhood was like and about her dreams and so forth, and she refuses to tell him anything.  Is Malzberg doing that Proust thing (you can never really know another person) or that feminist thing (men only care about women as sex objects and treat them as mere commodities)?  Maybe both?  Either way, "Ups and Downs" is pretty good.

"Bearing Witness" (1973)

In his intro Malzberg compares "Bearing Witness," first published in Flame Tree Planet and Other Stories, to "Track Two," which appears later in this volume and which I read and blogged about in February of 2015.

A man, not a Catholic himself, thinks he has detected signs that Judgment Day and the Second Coming are imminent, so he tries to get an audience with Catholic authorities, hoping for advice.  The priesthood and Catholic administrative apparatus, whom Malzberg depicts as more interested in bread and butter politics than the spiritual world, try to ignore and avoid the narrator.  On the last page of this three-page story the narrator climbs atop an automobile and addresses a crowd of people in the street, believing himself to be the risen Christ.

I'm bored with stories that offer shallow criticisms of Christianity, and this story felt like a trifle to me.  (I am an atheist, and as a youth I took the line that religion was a menace because it filled people's minds with a lot of nonsense.  Then I went to college and realized that people eagerly fill their minds with any kind of nonsense that comes to hand, and of all the nonsense available in the 20th and 21st centuries, Christianity and Judaism are among the most benign.  As I get older and older I find myself more and more in the position of what you might call a Christian sympathizer.)  Acceptable, but perhaps the weakest yet story in this collection.

Intro to "At the Institute"

I'm skipping "At the Institute" because I read it in 2015 (the same day I read "Track Two," it appears.  Reading that old blog post is fun because in it I express my fervent hope of owning a copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, and now, over a year later, I do.  Dreams can come true, kids!) 

In his intro to "At the Institute" Malzberg talks a little about these stories of his in which people get therapy by having a machine facilitate the experience of vivid and crazy dreams, and how such devices are very plausible, considering recent scientific developments.  He cites SF writer Peter Phillips as being one of the first people (in the 1948 Astounding story "Dreams are Sacred") to use this literary conceit.

"Making it Through" (1972)

In the intro to this one Malzberg commends his friend, editor Roger Elwood, and his uncle, Dr. Benjamin Malzberg, author of such works as Mental Disease among Jews in Canada and The Mental Health of the Negro.  For decades Dr. Malzberg was Director of Research and Statistics at the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene.

In case you were wondering, I have an uncle who worked in a machine shop.  I worked in a machine shop myself for a little while; I didn't find all that noise and all those dangerous blades and drills very congenial.

"Making it Through" appeared in Elwood's And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire and Other Science Fiction Stories and brought to mind Malzberg's "Out of Ganymede," which I should probably reread.  Our narrator is the second-in-command of the crew of a two-man mission to Jupiter.  Jupiter is inhabited by arthropods who emit a ray which drives humans insane; they have already driven batty the crews of three ships.  The Earth wants to take over Jupiter, and so the narrator and his Captain are flying a specially shielded ship loaded with atomic bombs--their mission is to exterminate the arthropods.  The Captain goes insane and wants to turn back and use the nuclear weapons on his fellow humans; when the narrator ties him up, the Captain claims they are on a mission to merely study the arthropods, that the weapons are just a last ditch self-defense measure; the Captain insists it is not he but our narrator who is insane!

The narrator nukes Jupiter, and then wonders if perhaps the entire human race might be insane, and the ray of the Jovian arthropods their charitable effort to cure us!  

I like it.
    
"Tapping Out" (1973)

"Tapping Out" first appeared in Future Quest, an anthology aimed at kids.  In his intro to the story Barry muses that "juvenile" SF may actually have a bigger audience and influence than "adult" SF, and, citing "the phenomenal works by Robert A. Heinlein in the 1950s," considers the possibility that the best SF has been written in the juvenile category.

This story has almost the same plot as "On Ice," but with less rape and incest.  (Nota bene: "Less" does not mean "zero.")  A 17-year old boy has a mental problem, so his parents pay a packet of money to get their kid hypnodream therapy.  In the therapy sessions he murders his father and his therapist and "has his way" with a girl.  The therapist says that, since he is using the sessions as recreation rather than therapy, that hypnotherapy treatment will be ceased and the narrator sent to a conventional hospital.

This story is alright, but lacks the layers of meaning and the extreme sex and violence that make "On Ice" so remarkable.  It's like "On Ice" with training wheels!

"Closed Sicilian" (1973)

Whoa, Barry got the cover illo!

In his intro to this story, which first appeared in F&SF, Malzberg talks about fiction about chess.  He praises Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense (the edition I read was just called The Defense) as a "great work of literature."  He also admits that he'd rather be a professional chess player or symphony violinist than a writer, reminding me of the section on Malzberg in Charles Platt's Dream Makers, in which Platt experiences Malzberg's poor chess playing and painful violin scraping.

(Jokes about violins always make me think of Jack Benny, of course, and the portion of Casanova's memoirs in which Casanova is a violinist--Volume 2, Chapters VI and VII, in the Trask translation covers this period, I think late 1745.  This is also the period of Casanova's life in which he suffers and perpetrates many outrageous practical jokes; in Chapter X, in 1747, Casanova even digs up a corpse as part of a joke.)

I read "Closed Sicilian" in my copy of The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg back in 2011 and wrote two lines about it in my Amazon review of that collection.  I thought it was one of the better pieces in that collection, and in his intro Barry suggests it is one of his most successful stories, so I decided to reread it today.  

It really is one of Malzberg's better stories, tight and with real human feeling. Professional chess players, former childhood friends, are engaged in an important match before a large audience.  Through flashbacks we learn of the narrator's life, his relationship with his opponent and how, over the years, his obsession with chess lost him his humanity and apparently his sanity--he believes that this big match will determine the outcome of a war between the human race and evil aliens, and that his friend is a traitor to Earth, playing for the aliens.

"Closed Sicilian" would be expanded into the novel Tactics of Conquest.

"Linkage" (1973)

In his intro to "Linkage" Malzberg discusses the fact that (he says) literary critics dismiss science fiction as merely the "grandiose versions of the fantasies of disturbed juveniles;" while SF claims to be investigating possible human futures it is in fact childish "power fantasies."  Barry offers a very tepid defense of SF, admitting that (in his opinion) most SF is severely lacking in "literacy and technique," even if much SF does present valid ideas.

"Linkage," first presented to the public in the anthology Demonkind, is four pages long and feels like a response to such stories as Jerome Bixby's famous "It's a Good Life" and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore stories like "Absalom" and "When the Bough Breaks," stories about children with super powers who represent the next stage of human development and may very well be a menace to us poor homo sapiens.  The narrator of "Linkage" is an 8-year-old kid who has been put into an insane asylum because he claims to have psychic abilities that allow him to do anything (like the kid in "It's a Good Life") and to have been visited by people from the future who tell him he is the first of a new human species, homo superior, (like in "When the Bough Breaks.")  Of course, this being a Malzberg story, the narrator is obviously insane and obviously has no superpowers.

"Linkage" has what I am considering a shock twist ending--I think it is one of the very few Malzberg stories which may actually have a happy ending!  In the last paragraph we receive hints that the narrator is going to start cooperating with his therapist and abandon his delusions about future aliens and mental powers!  Of course, the waters are a little muddy, with Malzberg leaving open the possibility that the kid is going to pretend he is cured simply to escape the asylum and have sex and start propagating the superior race of whom he is the first, but I think I am going with the happy ending interpretation, because it is such a surprising departure for Malzberg.

Not bad, but not as fun and exciting as the apparent source material, the three stories I cited by Bixby and Kuttner and Moore.  So much of the culture of my lifetime is mockingly or dismissively derivative--South Park and The Simpsons lift memorable elements or entire plots from other works in order to goof on them, classic legends and iconic pop culture stories are retold with a diversity reshuffling of the main characters--but the new work rarely matches the power of the original, and often feels petulant or lazy.

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I respect Malzberg and enjoy his work, but there is a limit to how many stories narrated by insane people I can take in a short period of time, especially since Malzberg isn't the kind of writer who writes in different voices or tones; there is a sameness to his work that can become monotonous.  So, time for an extended break. The next few episodes of MPorcius Fiction Log will cover adventure capers which (I hope) feature dinosaurs and people fighting with swords.  But don't worry, Malzberg fans, barring sudden death on the road we'll get back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.