F&SF May '59: J T McIntosh, C Oliver, M A deFord & A Davidson

In our last exciting excursion into the world of mid-century speculative fiction, we read two stories that appeared in the May 1959 issue of Robert P. Mills' F&SF (as we people who hate to type call it), A. Bertram Chandler's quite good "The Man Who Could Not Stop" and Rosel George Brown's pretty lame "Lost in Translation."  Let's read four more stories from this publication, a long story by J. T. McIntosh and short stories by Chad Oliver, Miriam Allen deFord, and Avram Davidson.  That is the order in which they are printed in the magazine, and by coincidence (?) this correlates with how much I am expecting to like each story.

"Tenth Time Round" by J. T. McIntosh

Many have been the times I have told you that J. T. McIntosh sucks.  But last year I found McIntosh's novel The Rule of the Pagbeasts AKA The Fittest an involving and enjoyable read.  So there is a chance that I will find worthwhile "Tenth Time Round," a story that takes up 19 pages of this ish of F&SF and was reprinted in Japan's premier SF magazine in 1960 and, in 2019, in the British Library's Beyond Time: Classic Tales of Time Unwound.

"Tenth Time Round" is one of those stories about timelines and branching points in history that create new universes and all that.  You see, in 1986 an amazing new service opens for business.  For over $100,000, this firm can send your consciousness back to an earlier iteration of yourself, though no further back than 1975.  You will take over your old body, but retain your current memories, all the knowledge you have accumulated.  Your greater experience and maturity, and your knowledge of the future, will offer you a lot of advantages, so maybe you can succeed in this new universe where you failed in your original universe.  There are limits, though.  For one thing, if you behave differently than you did the first time around, which is inevitable, you will cause changes in this timeline, and so your memories of the first 1978 you went through won't match one-for-one this new 1978.  Second, some historical events, labelled "immutables," cannot be changed, no matter what you do.

The protagonist of "Tenth Time Round" is Gene Player, a writer.  He is in love with a woman, Belinda, and keeps going back in time to restart his life in 1975, a few weeks before he meets Belinda, in hopes of getting her to fall for him.  As our story begins, he is going back in time from 1986 for the tenth time--he has failed to win Belinda nine times, spent 99 years trying to win her, and each time losing to a guy named Henry.  Player is beginning to wonder if Belinda's love for Henry isn't one of those "immutables."

Most of the text of "Tenth Time Round" is romance movie stuff.  There's the "meet cute" that Player experiences for the tenth time.  There's Player plotting to win Belinda over Henry.  There's the surprise appearance of a fourth character, Doreen, who falls in love with Player.  This universe is far different than the last nine--this is the first time Doreen has entered the equation, and it looks like Henry's position with Belinda is not as secure as it has been in the earlier versions of 1978.  Will Player end up with Belinda or with Doreen?

This story is OK.  It is pretty well written, though maybe a lot of it is not very substantive.  The various elements of the story--Belinda, Doreen, the legal and the cosmic rules of time travel, the effect of this story's version of time travel on stuff like Gene Player's literary career (Player writes the same novel in every universe, but having written it nine times already, this tenth version is the most streamlined)--are each handled competently, but do they really all mesh together well, buttress and complement each other to further a single theme?  Maybe not.

A little better than acceptable, maybe a mild recommendation for "Tenth Time Round."    

"The One That Got Away" by Chad Oliver

Anthropologist Oliver often tells us that life as a stone age barbarian is better than life among skyscrapers and books and factories and motor cars*; let's see if he's banging the same drum this time or has something else going on. 

*(See "Let Me Live in a House," "Rite of Passage," and "The Marginal Man.")

"The One That Got Away" is set out in the great outdoors, a valley where there are lots of ranches for "dudes" and cabins for tourists to rent so they can go fishing and engage in other rural-type activities.  The last two years there have been many fires in the valley; multiple people have perished in the conflagrations, and everybody suspects an arsonist is at work.

[C]ome to think of it, just about every modem building in the town had burned down.

The protagonist, who rents "rustic cabins," is glad he didn't build any such "modern buildings" on his own property, but our hero is not immune to the other problem plaguing the valley--the fishing is getting worse for some unknown reason.

The protagonist takes a nap behind a rock at a river, and when he wakes up observes a space alien (E.T. doesn't notice our protagonist).  We realize this is a joke story, even though we've been hearing about innocent people getting killed.  The alien stuns the human anglers by the river side and uses advanced technology to catch a huge haul of fish with ease.  Our protagonist approaches the visitor from the stars and fast talks his way onto the alien's space boat and up into the orbiting star ship.  Our hero knows how to deal with tourists from the city who want to enjoy nature for a few days, which is just what the aliens on the star ship are--they have been burning down the "modern buildings" in the valley so as to preserve its rustic charm, the charm they travel light years to experience, their own worlds being totally urbanized.

"We come a long way every year to find what we want, and we simply cannot permit this commercialization. That’s what we’re trying to get away from, don’t you see?”

“So if we build something you don’t like you bum it down?”

“Naturally." 

I guess the point of this joke story is that businessmen are evil.  The alien businessmen casually slay native Earthers, and threaten to kill our hero.  But our guy figures out how to persuade them to stop monopolizing the fishing in his neck of the woods and move to a different valley, where, he convinces them, there are even better fishing spots.  The fishing in his valley recovers and local buildings stop burning down, though now other Earthpeople are getting mysteriously burned up--not that our protagonist cares.

"I don't care a used salmon egg about men from another world, and I never worried any about Earth either. I care about my business...."

"The One That Got Away" is a sort of traditional light science fiction story in which an intelligent human outsmarts aliens, resolving the plot conflict with quick thinking, but it has the anti-modern bias we see in so much of Oliver's work as well as the hatred of businesspeople we expect to see from college professor types.  Oliver's reprehensible politics and his many references to fishing (Oliver himself was an avid angler) give "The One That Got Away" more character and substance than a filler story, so I can't dismiss it as such, but I still don't care for it.  It doesn't commit any literary blunders, so we'll call it merely acceptable--pinkos and fly fishermen will likely enjoy it more than I did.

"The One That Got Away" was reprinted in the Japanese magazine I mentioned earlier, the British Venture, and right here in the USA, where the businessman has achieved his ultimate expression, in the  2003 Oliver collection A Star Above It.

"First Dig" by Miriam Allen deFord

This will be the second deFord story we have addressed here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Two years ago we read "The Margenes," which I deemed, as I do so many stories, "merely acceptable."  Hopefully "First Dig" will be more entertaining or enlightening.  The editor's intro to the story makes us expect it is some kind of ironic gag story, but we're going to "keep hope alive!" and read this thing (five pages) anyway.

One of my pet peeves about fiction is the shortcuts writers take in their task of manipulating the reader's emotions.  For example, writers know that putting a child in danger will get a rise out of readers because people have a natural sympathy for defenseless children.  The writer doesn't have to convince the reader about anything, the reader will naturally worry about the child.  Similarly, if a writer wants to serve the bloodlust of readers with depictions of a sympathetic protagonist who kills lots of people, he can make the people getting killed Nazis--all our lives we've been told killing Nazis is good, so the writer doesn't have to put any time or effort into explaining why the hero is justified in killing all these people.  The use of these kinds of shortcuts can diminish the tension of the story by absolving the reader of any responsibility, freeing him from doing any kind of intellectual work--nobody sympathizes with or identifies with somebody who harms a child or a Nazi, so the reader doesn't have to figure out if the violence in the story is justified and doesn't have to work through his emotional response to the violence.  Much more challenging, for reader and writer, would be to put not children or Nazis in danger, but government bureaucrats, wealthy businessmen, nagging spouses, African-American burglars, communist spies, or Christian clergy.  Such types of characters inspire a range of attitudes in readers; plenty of readers will sympathize or identify with such characters while at the same time plenty of other readers will hope to see such figures punished; this generates tension because readers won't know where the story is going and are forced to think through intellectually what the story is trying to say and whether they agree with it.  And to achieve the desired result from a maximum number of readers, the writer will have to make a convincing case, and he or she can play games with us readers, getting us to change our minds about the characters over the course of the story.

(A story can use these shortcuts and still be a good story, of course, if other elements of the story generate tension or if the story has other virtues--the most cliched and obvious plot and characters can be the foundation of a great story if it is well-written by some savant like Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, or Tanith Lee, with sentences that are beautiful and/or paragraphs that are economical.)

Anyway, in "First Dig" I think deFord is taking a shortcut by appealing to people's admiration for William Shakespeare.  In the same way we all are disturbed when we hear a child is in danger or feel justice has been served when we see a Bf-109 go down in flames or a U-boat sink with all hands, we all know Shakespeare is awesome, so by putting the Swan of Avon at the center of her tale, deFord has liberated herself from the need to convince us to go along with one of her main themes.

"First Dig" has a science fiction setting but is actually a weird or fantasy/horror story.  The intellectual and emotional tension of the story is generated by raising the question of whether our lives have any meaning, whether human excellence matters.

DeFord's story begins with a little prologue in which we observe the attendees of a funeral; the event is described in a vague way, no really famous names of people or places, though deFord offers clues that will indicate to those familiar with the Bard's biography what is going on.  Then the main text, set 50,000 years in the future.  Earth has long been nothing more than a barren waste, and the billions and billions of humans who live all across the galaxy know almost nothing about the history of the planet upon which their ancestors evolved.  They don't even know if Earth humans had a religion, they can't read a single word of any language written before mankind conquered the stars.  All they know about the "Old Planet" is its location.

A college professor brings some archaeology students to Earth for a dig; this is a training exercise, and the students are not expected to find anything of value, and the prof, who comes across as cynical, cold, arrogant and dismissive, pooh-poohs the bones and things the students find.  The most energetic and romantic student, a kid emotionally committed to the past and the profession of archaeology, finds a gravestone.  He senses, without any rational reason, that this headstone is a big big deal, even when the prof dismisses the stone as valueless.  Driven by some compulsion, the student laboriously copies by hand the inscription on the headstone, even though he can't read a word of it, the letters mere squiggles to him.  Then he drops dead.

The story ends with the revelation that this kid found the gravestone of Shakespeare, upon which was engraved a curse on any who would disturb the Bard's bones.  While the realistic portions of the story suggest our lives are meaningless, that even the greatest of the world's artists and their cultures will be forgotten by those who follow them, the fantasy portion of the story suggests that great artists are like wizards, their art--in Shakespeare's case, the written word--like magic, able to shake and shatter human hearts and minds.

Competently written, and thought-provoking (nowadays you could use this story in a college class to interrogate "whiteness"--the elevation of the white male, white worship of the written word, white obsession with time, you know what I'm talking about), I can mildly recommend this one.  

"First Dig" was included in the 1971 deFord collection Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow and Helen Hoke dug it up and exposed it to the world in her 1977 anthology Eerie, Weird and Wicked.

Hey, comics fans!  Two points:
1) The cover of Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow is by Richard Corben
2) Hoke also included in Eerie, Weird and Wicked Robert Bloch's joke story about
comic books "The Strange Island of Dr. Nork," which last year I told you was terrible

"The Montavarde Camera" by Avram Davidson

Here comes the story I had the highest hopes for.  I gave Oliver a low "C," and McIntosh and deFord low "B"s, so it shouldn't be hard for Davidson to go to the head of the class!  Let's hope he's on his game today!

Davidson's style here in "The Montavarde Camera"--the vivid, emotionally evocative, images of people and places, the little subtle jokes--is quite good, so right away the story gets a thumbs up.  As for the plot, we are in weird territory again.  (I take a break from reading Weird Tales, but they keep pulling me back in!)  A guy in turn of the century England is mysteriously drawn to a shop owned by a remarkable figure who is probably the Devil or one of Satan's servants.  The protagonist is interested in photography, and the smooth and charismatic shopkeeper sells him a very special camera, one constructed by a pioneer of photography, a somewhat mysterious individual with a chequered history, a man rumored to have produced pornography and to have links to satanic cults.

Clues mount that the camera has a diabolical influence, that it drains the strength, the life force, from objects and people whose image it captures.  Will the protagonist do the right thing and try to destroy the infernal device?  Or will he be corrupted by it, seek to use it to liberate himself from his nagging penny-pinching wife?  

An entertaining weird tale.  "The Montavarde Camera" has been a hit with editors and reappeared in multiple anthologies and Davidson collections.

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The Davidson piece is the best of today's stories, the most fun to read, but also the hardest to write about, because it seems to be designed solely to be an entertainment that transports you to an earlier age with its references to the technology, events and aspects of daily life of a past era; in contrast, the Oliver story seems to be trying to make a banal argument about our market society while deFord's story seems to be trying to make profound points about the meaning of life and the roles of the artist and of the scientist, favoring the former over the later in a provocative way.  McIntosh's contribution is mostly trying to entertain you with a story about human relationships, but has the speculative element we expect to find in "real" science fiction, asking the question, if you could travel back in time under certain parameters, how might it affect your relationship life and career life?

A diverse bunch of stories, none of which is actually bad.  So, a good issue of F&SF.  Kudos to Mr. Mills and all concerned.

Merril-approved 1956 stories: de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle

I love the spires (or whatever they are) that appear in Richard Powers' illustrations
for the front and back covers of 
SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume

As you know, Bob, here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are exploring 1956 speculative fiction by going through the list headed "Honorable Mention" at the back of famed anthologist Judith Merril's 1957 volume SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume and reading in scans of old magazines stories recommended by Merril whose authors or titles strike our fancy.  Today we'll read stories by "D" authors Merril anointed with her approval to the number of four.  But first I will point out that I read and wrote about the Avram Davidson story Merril included on her '56 Honorable Mention list, "King's Evil," about a year ago, and present a list of links to the A, B and C stories on Merril's list which we've already discussed.

            Abernathy and Aldiss
            Anderson, Allen and Banks 

            Barrow, Beaumont and Blish

            Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler    

            Carter, Clarke and Clifton

            Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen

"Internal Combustion" by L. Sprague de Camp 

I read quite a few de Camp things before starting this blog and my reaction to them was lukewarm, so I haven't read a lot of his work since MPorcius Fiction Log slouched onto the scene.  But let's give "Internal Combustion," which debuted in the same issue of Infinity Science Fiction that included Charles Beaumont's "Traumerai," which we read just a month ago, a shot.

"Internal Combustion" is a sort of misanthropic black humor story that portrays (middle-class) people as violent racists who oppress the less fortunate, so we can guess why leftist Merril liked it.  It is actually pretty well-written; some of the jokes, based on character and personality and not puns (thank heavens), are good and the plot is alright, so I can give it a moderate recommendation.

The main cast of the story consists of a bunch of robots who are wearing out and have been abandoned by their owners, the MacDonalds.  Old MacDonald got rich publishing a xenophobic newspaper, but his offspring had no interest in living in his mansion so they abandoned it and its staff of robots.  Over the years these robots, receiving no maintenance, have fallen into disrepair; one symptom of this neglect is the fact that they have lost many of their inhibitions against harming human beings.  In fact, their leader, nuclear-powered Napoleon, after poring over the "N" volume of the encyclopedia, has decided to emulate his namesake and launch a merciless scheme to make himself ruler of the world.  Napoleon can't leave the mansion because of a malfunctioning leg and so has come up with the idea of kidnapping a human and grooming him to become the figurehead of his robot dictatorship.  The opening scene of the story clues us in to how dark "Internal Combustion" is--one of Napoleon's subordinate robots, Hercules, has kidnapped a homeless person to serve as this figurehead, but accidentally slain him, so Napoleon instructs his mechanical minions to hide the body.  He then directs them to try to kidnap a child whom Napoleon can raise into a world conqueror.

There is a lot of comedy around how the subordinate robots are powered by liquid fuel and prefer gasoline because it makes them drunk, and a lot of business with the child the robots kidnap, a kid who loves violence and acts like a terrible brat, and that kid's father, who is a portrait of middle-class angst, a guy who feels unfulfilled because he inherited wealth and doesn't have to work and his nagging wife won't let him pursue his hobbies or take the kind of working-class job he might enjoy because it is low status; this guy is an irresponsible father, lazy, and has a therapist.  There is also quite a bit of talk (from the robots, which we perhaps are not meant to take seriously) about how the robots are just as deserving of love and civil rights as the humans, but are treated shabbily by their creators.  (The misbehavior of the robots is clearly shown to be the fault of humans--when they are drunk or violent the robots are emulating their neglectful creators and sinful masters.)    

The story's hero is the one robot among the decaying MacDonald crew whose "serve humans" programming is still largely intact.  Named Homer, this robot has also been programmed to recite poetry, and in his voice de Camp unleashes plenty of popular verses from such poets as Dorothy Parker ("Resume"), Omar Khayyam ("The Rubaiyat") and Oliver Wendell Holmes ("One-Hoss Shay.")  Homer works odd jobs to get money to buy fuel--the other robots steal--and when a disaster occurs Homer sacrifices his own mechanical life to save the child kidnapped by Napoleon.

"Internal Combustion" is like 16 pages of text that move at a brisk pace and are always engaging--a respectable choice by Merril, and a better story than I had expected it to be.  Among other places, "Internal Combustion" can be found in the oft-reprinted de Camp collection A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales and Mike Ashley's robot-themed anthology Souls in Metal.   

"The Margenes" by Miriam Allen deFord 

I don't think I've ever read anything by deFord, whose name sometimes appears as "de Ford," as it does in connection to this story, which first saw print in If and was included in an If anthology published a year later, as well as the 1971 deFord collection Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow and the 1978 Helen Hoke anthology Demons Within and Other Disturbing Tales.

"The Margenes" is a twist-ending idea story with no real characters and precious little plot, one of those stories that is presented as a popular history written in the far future.  DeFord's tale is almost 100% speculation, and its field is political economy; it reminds me a little of Edmond Hamilton's early work depicting scientific disasters that befall the Earth (see "The Truth Gas," "The Life-Masters" and "The Death Lord") and Mack Reynolds' 1960s stories that speculate on economics and Cold War "what ifs" (like "Freedom," "Revolution" and "Subversive,") but those guys generally include in those stories horror and adventure elements (in Hamilton's case) or detective or spy shenanigans (Reynolds) in an effort to pad the page count and/or up the entertainment value; deFord's story is brief and its human element is a sort of cursory portrait of a couple that dramatizes the vacuity of relationships under industrial capitalism. 

All of a sudden strange little creatures, in the millions, start washing up on the beaches of California.  Neither animal nor plant, but packed with healthy proteins and every nutrient imaginable, these things are the perfect food, and they are breathtakingly abundant!  These creatures are named "margenes" because the first people to see them bore the first names Marge and Gene.  

The human race is suffering widespread hunger due to overpopulation, so the government moves quickly to subsidize the exploitation of this new resource and distribute the superfood around the world.  Beautiful California beaches and forests quickly become industrial eyesores, but the world economy is buoyed and relations between the liberal West and the communist East improve markedly.  But nine years later the supply of margenes suddenly runs out and the economy tanks and world war erupts and the human race is almost wiped out.

(Marge and Gene serve as archetypes of the futility of middle-class life--they abandon their dreams of fulfilling intellectual careers and take soulless office jobs pushing margene, get married, get divorced, then separately get killed in the wars that erupt after the supply of margenes runs out.)

The twist ending is that the margenes were members of a race of extraterrestrials who have overpopulated their own planet and have been spreading throughout the galaxy, planet to planet, seeking living space.  After expending all her imagination on describing the economic and political effects of a cheap and abundant food source, deFord does not bother to explain how there aliens got into the Pacific Ocean without being seen falling from the sky or something and why they have no visible culture or technology and didn't resist being eaten, just handwaving away all details of margene life as incomprehensible to the human mind.  Coming out of nowhere and making little sense, the twist ending of "The Margenes" sort of undermines the plausibility of the story as a whole.

Merely acceptable.  Presumably Merril appreciated the story's focus on overpopulation, criticisms of industrialism, economic explanations for social phenomena like war, and the "meta" gag at the end in which the future author says science fiction writers wrote many stories speculating about what first contact with aliens might be like but never guessed that it would consist of us eating the delicious aliens.

"Flat Tiger" by Gordon R. Dickson

Here's another famous guy whose work I have only found OK upon my early introduction to it and so have not really sought out since.  But I liked the de Camp from '56 that Merril chose, so maybe I'll like Gordon Dickson's "Flat Tiger," which first came under the eyes of SF fans in an issue of Galaxy that also features de Camp's famous "A Gun for Dinosaur" and the first episode of Frederik Pohl's "Slave Ship."

Ugh, this is a joke story based on puns and childish fantasies that tried my patience.  The Galactic civilization of thousands of distinct intelligent species is holding a race and the speed star ship of one of the contestants breaks down because one of the tigers that manages one of its four warp engines runs out of the essential gas it has to inhale to perform its function.  (This is the kind of wordplay that Dickson founds his story on, the fact that "gas" is short for "gasoline" and "tiger" sounds like "tire."  Oy.)  This fanged and tentacled contestant, named Captain Bligh, lands on the lawn of the White House in mid-century America to ask the President for help getting more of the gas required to fill his flat tiger.  We learn that, secretly, within the White House, lives a guy who is the president's special adviser--this is an hereditary position occupied by thr same family since the days of George Washington, and it has analogs in the offices of other great powers, among them the Soviet Union.  These secret eminence grises are the real masters of the world.  A conference is held in the White House that gathers Captain Bligh and the chief executives of the top four nations of the world--the US, USSR, Great Britain and France (those were the days!) and the Earthers open negotiations with Captain Blight on a deal to allow Earth membership in the Galactic Federation.  Should we join, the aliens will cure all our diseases, set up a teleporter so we can explore the universe, install clean energy sources, etc.  In return, we need only offer the aliens our love--in the post-scarcity society of the Galactic civilization, the only thing of real value is love. 

The twist ending is that members of the Galactic Federation must be physically reengineered to live directly off energy--humans won't be permitted to eat animals or plants or even drink water, as the Federation members love all living things, even the microorganisms we humans kill by the billions in the process of preparing drinking water.  So the representatives of the four leading nations agree to forgo membership in the Galactic Federation, and the Earth becomes united in peace behind a shared love of food and drink and opposition to the aliens who would take our food and drink from us.

Thumbs down for this dopey waste of time.  Maybe Merril liked its irreverent attitude towards the Cold War and American pretensions to being a democracy, and the idea it floats that people so covet the sensual pleasure of eating and drinking that they would pass up a chance to end all illness and poverty and lift all limits to human knowledge in order to keep on chowing down. 

"Flat Tiger" would be reprinted in the Dickson collection Danger--Human, the paperback edition of which bears the title The Book of Gordon R. Dickson. 

"The Lover of the Coral Glades" by Adrian Conan Doyle

As you have probably guessed if you didn't already know, Adrian Conan Doyle is one of the sons of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame.  "The Lover of the Coral Glades" appeared in the same issue of Playboy as Richard Matheson's "A Flourish of Strumpets," which we read pretty recently.  

"The Lover of the Coral Glades" is the story of the tragic love affair of a 200-year old sperm whale.  Never has this bull whale met a cow whale he could truly love, though he has of course impregnated some and then abandoned them.  (This is Playboy you are reading, remember.)  But finally he meets her, his dream cow!  They fall deeply in love, and spend months together, swimming all over the world eating squid.  One day when the she-whale is pregnant and they are in a part of the ocean with few squid near the surface the male whale ventures alone to the darkest deep to kill a giant squid and bring back a chunk of it to feed his bride.  But, alas, his wife has been mortally wounded by thresher sharks working in concert with a swordfish--there is also a whaling ship stalking her!  (I read this section multiple times, the idea of thresher sharks and a swordfish teaming up to murder a whale with their tails and bill being so outlandish that I thought maybe I was misunderstanding what was going on.)  The pregnant whale expires and sinks, and then the crew of the whaling ship kills the grieving male whale with one shot from their harpoon gun; the beast immediately sinks so they can't harvest its sperm and blubber.  The whalers figure a merciful God made sure the whale would sink so it need not suffer further indignities in its time of sorrow and can lie forever on the bottom of the ocean besides its wife and the mass of cells it thinks of as its unborn child.

This story is histrionic and boring when it isn't being eye-poppingly ridiculous; it begs to be taken super seriously, but everything that happens in it is absurd.  Thumbs down.  I think here Merril fell victim to her desire to expand the definition of SF to include mainstream fiction that appeared in mainstream outlets but engaged in what we might in a generous mood call "speculation."

"The Lover of the Coral Glades" would be reprinted in the Doyle collection Tales of Love and Hate.

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There is a tradition in SF of stories that glorify and romanticize science and technology and their ability to make human life better as well as the scientist and the man of intelligence who solves problems by quick thinking and knowledge of logic and scietific laws.  Today's four stories are not in that tradition.  Today's stories are examples of the tradition of misanthropic elitism in SF and stories that employ non-human characters to illustrate human pettiness, callousness, short-sightedness and propensity for violence.  The de Camp is a good example, as it offers characters with personality and an entertaining narrative.  The deFord is not terrible, but it lacks human feeling and the gimmicky ending is a little hard to take.  Dickson's story is based on irritatingly childish jokes, and the Doyle story is embarrassingly melodramatic slosh that is also full of elements that beggar belief.  

So, today Merril served up to us a heaping plate of downer stories.  Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log to see how many more of Merril's favorite 1956 stories are designed to make you hate the human race.