J Merril's 5th Best S-F: C D Simak, F Leiber, J G Ballard and T Sturgeon

Let's read four more stories that Judith Merril, born Judith Josephine Grossman in 1923, included in her 1960 anthology The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition; we'll be experiencing these tales in a scan of a 1961 paperback edition of the book.  In our last episode we read from the volume a very good Ray Bradbury story, an OK story by Gordon Dickson and a weak Damon Knight story.  Let's see if Clifford Simak, Fritz Leiber, J. G. Ballard and Ted Sturgeon deserve to be relaxing up in first class with Bradbury or should be crammed into steerage down there with Knight.

"A Death in the House" by Clifford D. Simak (1959)

I think Simak is a good writer, but sometimes his anti-human, anti-urban and anti-technology themes get on my nerves.  Let's hope "A Death in the House," which debuted in an issue of H. L. Gold's Galaxy with a hubba hubba Wallace Wood cover, doesn't lean too heavily on those misanthropic and anti-modern tropes.

Mose is a widower living alone on his "runty" farm which has no electricity--Mose hates electricity!  He finds an alien on his property.  Now, the cover illo of the October 1959 Galaxy might give you the idea that if you go out into space you'll find it inhabited by curvaceous babes, but Simak here in "A Death in the House" suggests space is home to hideous smelly monsters that don't even have what we would recognize as a face.  The hideous alien in question is almost motionless, apparently on the brink of death, though the "worms" around its "head" are writhing with life, and it is making some kind of keening noise.

Mose carries the alien into his untidy house and tries to keep it warm and comfortable, even has the local doctor come by to look at it, but neither Mose nor the doc have any idea how to help the creature, so it dies.  Mose wants to give it a decent Christian burial, but the undertaker and the local minister don't want to provide services to a non-human; Mose thinks "what heels some humans are."

Mose buries the dead alien and from its grave, from an egg or seed on its person that shares its memories, sprouts a plant that after some months breaks free and is more or less the same alien.  (Simak has foreshadowed in multiple ways that this alien is essentially a plant, and so its rebirth is not that bug a surprise to us readers.)  The alien lives with Mose, and though they can't talk, Mose is happy to have a companion--the loneliness he has suffered for years is eased.  Mose helps the alien fix its spacecraft; Mose hates paper money and has a stack of silver coins, and the alien uses the silver to repair the vessel.  Then the alien leaves, but first gives to Mose a little translucent sphere with flickering internal lights, a device that projects a field or something that relieves loneliness--Mose will never be alone.  

This is a pretty good story, sort of heartwarming even if Simak indulges in some of the attitudes I just told you annoy me.  While Simak's tale is somewhat similar to Bradbury's "The Shoreline at Sunset," in that story the humans who interact with the alien are reprehensible, while here in the saga of Old Mose, while most humans are callous or exploitative, our protagonist makes an effort to do the right thing and he is rewarded for his good deeds by being made a sort of honorary member of a society superior to our own.  A good choice by Merril, and it serves her theory that the good stories of 1959 were about the question of what it means to be human.  

"A Death in the House" has taken seed within and reemerged from the pages of numerous anthologies and Simak collections; Merril liked it enough to include it in her Best of the Best anthology that re-reprinted her favorite stories from her famous anthology series.

Among the stories appearing in translation in Des souris et des robots is

"The Golden Bugs," which we read in 2018.

"Mariana" by Fritz Leiber (1960)

In her intro to "Mariana," Merril gushes about how awesome Leiber's "The Silver Eggheads" is.  I read the novel version of The Silver Eggheads back in 2022 and took to this here blog to share with the universe my many complaints about the book, which I called "banal," "unfocused" and even "a chore to read."  Merril also mentions that Leiber is currently writing the Buck Rogers comic strip, something I hadn't known, or had forgotten.  According to wikipedia, Fritz had this job for a little over a year in total, split over two periods.  Doesn't seem like the job was really for him.

In preparation for this story, I reread Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Mariana," which is about a woman who lives in a decrepit house and wishes she was dead because her boyfriend is away and perhaps is not coming back.  The lion's share of the poem's text describes the female lead's decaying domicile; we don't learn about her life or her beloved or anything, though maybe we are supposed to come into the poem already knowing that stuff, the poem being inspired by Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, with which I am not familiar.     

"Mariana" starts out seeming like a feminist story and turns into one of those holo helmet virtual reality programmable dream therapy stories.  Mariana is stuck at home while her husband, a callous--even cruel--man who is her intellectual inferior, commutes to work every day.  She hangs out alone, with the robot servants.  One day she stumbles upon a secret control panel.  It turns out the house is on some barren moon, and the trees outside are not real, but an artificial matter projection.  The top switch on the hidden panel shuts the trees off.  Despite warnings, Mariana, over the course of a few days, throws the succeeding switches, one by one.  It turns out the house and even her angry husband are just matter projections.  When she hits the penultimate switch the moon disappears and Mariana is in a hospital, being treated for depression.  The moon house and unpleasant husband were "wish-fulfillment therapy."  Is Mariana ready for actual treatment from a doctor?  Or will she throw the final switch, which, it is implied, will kill Mariana--could she herself be no more than an artificial construct?

This story is OK, though I question the logic of much of it.  Why would wish-fulfillment therapy offer the simulation of a boring life with an unpleasant husband instead of a comfortable or exciting life with a loving or thrilling husband?  And what is the point of expending resources to provide therapy to an artificial construct, and why would an artificial construct have a psychological illness?  I guess one could come up with reasons for all these things (the unfulfilling virtual reality life is meant to shock her into desiring real therapy, her mental illness--if she is artificial--is like a computer virus or bug in her programming, etc.)  And I guess the point of the story is to blow your mind, not to make sense, and that Fritz's priority was to explore and emulate the elements and themes of Tennyson's poem about a suicidally depressed woman in a dilapidated house, not for the thing to an airtight plot.  But it just doesn't sit right with me, feels gimmicky.     

I'm tolerating rather than loving "Mariana," but it has been reprinted in many Leiber collections and anthologies since its debut in Fantastic.

Among the stories in Theodore W. Hipple and Robert G. Wright's The Worlds of Science Fiction
are Stephen Goldin's "Sweet Dreams, Melissa" and Chad Oliver's "Final Exam," both of which
we have blogged about here at MPFL.

"The Sound-Sweep" by J. G. Ballard (1960)

Ballard is beloved by the critics, maybe because of the experimental and abstract nature of much of his work, its focus on decay and degradation, and his penchant for explicit references to real life popular culture, you know, Marilyn Monroe, JFK, Ronald Reagan, that kind of thing.  I'm a Ballard skeptic, but I like to think I am open-minded about this guy, and I did like "Billenium" and "A Host of Furious Fancies."     

Madame Gioconda, presumably named after the famously enigmatic Mona Lisa, is a sort of Norma Desmond figure, a mentally ill former star of the opera who dreams of a comeback.  She lives in an old studio under a "flyover" (those of us who grew up in New Jersey would call this an "overpass") and every night has dreams or hallucinations that she can hear the applause and the jeers of an audience, as in her heyday.  Every day a young man who is a superfan of hers, Mangon, comes by to "sonovac" Gioconda's quarters.  You remember how in Kuttner and Moore's 1949 Astounding cover story, "Private Eye," the cops could glean audio and video of past events from the teeny tiny textures sound waves and photons left on surfaces?  Well, in "The Sound Sweep," Ballard uses a similar gag--people can hear, or at least be affected by the emotional content of, old sounds "embedded" in surfaces, and people like Mangon exorcize these sounds with a device much like a vacuum cleaner, then dump the sounds in a sound garbage dump.  Of course, Gioconda, old (48 or 49!) and fat, her teeth ruined by tobacco and cocaine, her mug covered in cosmetics, is insane and the sounds of the audience she "hears" are not real, but a delusion, but slavish fan Mangon still runs the sonovac all over the studio to placate her.

Mangon himself is a remarkable character, a man rendered mute by his mother, who punched him in the throat when he was three, and was raised in institutions, and is now a member of the untouchable class of sound-sweeps.  He is perhaps the world's finest sound-sweep, better able to distinguish and understand sounds embedded in walls than anybody; he even dumps in his own little hovel the sounds he collects from the sites of dinner parties so he can hear them and enjoy the conversations as much as if he attended the shindigs.

Having introduced his two characters, Ballard then gives us insight into the alternate reality world in which they live.  Gioconda's stellar career, and that of all singers, went into severe decline about ten years ago because of the development of ultrasonic music.  Such music makes no audible sound, but works directly on the brain, producing the emotional effect of music on the listener without causing sounds to be embedded in your walls and furniture.  The sounds of musical instruments can be turned into ultrasonic recordings and broadcasts, but human vocals cannot, and when ultrasonic music was embraced by the public, work for singers became very hard to find.  Another innovation: long pieces of music like symphonies can be compressed into a shorter form, just a few minutes, so you can get the good out of them in a fraction of the time.  (I guess all this is Balllard's allegorical commentary on the degradation of culture in the postwar period, what with the rise of rock music and TV at the expense of operatic and orchestral music and stage drama and serious cinema.  I thought Ballard's "The Garden of Time" took a similar tack.) 

The plot.  Madame Gioconda wants to blackmail a big exec in this world's analog of Hollywood ("Video City") so he will allow her to broadcast her singing over the airwaves--this would be the first public performance of a singer in ten years.  Mangon helps her collect blackmail material--he can learn things about this corrupt big wig by listening to old sounds of big wig's private conversation at the sound dump.  The blackmail plot succeeds, and Gioconda is grateful to Mangon, and the man expects his relationship with his beloved idol Gioconda is going to flower into something intimate.  Mangon is so happy, he gets his voice back--his condition was only psychosomatic!

Of course, Gioconda is a drug addict and has not practiced her craft for a decade--there is no way she can sing competently, much less put on the kind of world-class performance she put on regularly fifteen or twenty years ago.  With the help of Mangon, some broadcast producer and musician guys figure out a way to put on a performance that will not get out to the public but which Gioconda will be deceived into believing is reaching the public, using various technical means including the sonic sweepers with which Mangon is an expert.  Shortly before the big broadcast, Gioconda, confident that she is about to be rich and famous again, gives Mangon the cold shoulder--in fact, she insults him in a very demeaning and dismissive way, even though he loves her and was key to her expected comeback.  Mangon loses his voice again but gets his revenge, allowing Gioconda's atrocious performance to reach the public and causing a show biz disaster of epic proportions.

"The Sound-Sweep" is like 40 pages long but it only feels long here and there, when you hit one of Ballard's long descriptions.  Both the exposition about this alternate universe and the narrative about talented people who foolishly set themselves unattainable goals and suffer from turns of fate and from their own delusions are pretty compelling and entertaining, plus there are some clever little bits, like how Gioconda uses lots of cocaine and Mangon drinks lots of Coca-Cola.  (I've been trying to consume less sugar and so being reminded of my suspended relationship with my favorite beverage was a little saddening--I know there are plenty of people love Diet Coke and Coke Zero, but those just don't do it for me.)  So, thumbs up for "The Sound-Sweep."  The melodrama of Mangon debuted in Science Fantasy and has been reprinted many times in Ballard collections, as well as a Damon Knight anthology, Tomorrow and Tomorrow: Ten Tales of the Future.                

"The Man Who Lost the Sea" by Theodore Sturgeon (1959)

The title of this story feels familiar, so much so that I thought I'd read it until I double checked and found no record of a blog post about it.  In 1999, Arthur C. Clarke in an intro to the story in the anthology My Favorite Science Fiction Story announced that "The Man Who Lost the Sea" inspired his own "Transit of Earth," which we read in 2016.  Here in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Merril suggests that it no longer makes sense for SF to be about "rocketry" and "astrogation" and "planet-hopping," as the hard sciences have "caught up with us" and offer little room for speculation, and so SF writers are turning to what she calls, in quotes, "'humanic studies.'"  Then she wonders whether Sturgeon, whom she calls "Solo Sturgeon," with "The Man Who Lost the Sea" is doing old-style SF, exploring the "humanic studies," or even pioneering beyond them.

"The Man Who Lost the Sea" is a very literary story in that for much of its length it is confusing and surreal and has what amounts to an unreliable narrator, and offers tons of metaphors and similes and descriptions of images that are close to abstract.  At the same time, Sturgeon's story is a very traditional science fiction story that tells you science and technology are awesome and conquering outer space is going to be extremely dangerous and people are going to be killed but it will all be absolutely worth it.  A key to making this story a successful hybrid is that, rather than leaving everything ambiguous as modern literary stories so often do, in the end all the confusing things we put up with in the beginning of the story resolve themselves and are explained and the last line is a totally unambiguous normative statement.  Sturgeon here quite cleverly instigates an itch and then scratches it in a very satisfying way, so thumbs up for "The Man Who Lost the Sea," a big success for Sturgeon and a good selection by Merril.  

The narrative.  There is a guy half buried in the sand in a space suit, and a kid with a model aircraft and then a model space ship, and we get scenes of a kid who suffers a head injury in gym and loses some memories, but regains them, and a scene of a swimmer near a coral reef who gets into trouble and nearly drowns.  Sturgeon confuses us because he doesn't make it immediately clear if it is the spacesuit guy or the kid who is "real" and just imagining the other, and calls something "the sea" that we later learn is not the sea but a flat plain, and calls something a "monster" or "ameba," but that is just a metaphor for a painful and dangerous condition.  Anyway, the space suit guy is real and the kids and the swimmer are also him, at pivotal moments of his life that he is remembering as he lies on Mars, the first human to land on the red planet, dying because his ship crashed.  The spaceman in his youth loved science and was also athletic and took risks and suffered injuries that foreshadowed his death today on Mars--in the same way his injuries in gym class and while snorkeling temporarily disordered his mind, the crash on Mars messed up his mind so, for example, he thinks he sees the ocean when in fact he is looking at a plain.  When he came to his senses in school and on the beach he felt like he had triumphed over injury and over death, and when he comes to his senses on Mars, even though he is seconds away from dying, he also feels triumphant, because the human race has reached another planet.

I'll admit I found this one annoying for a few pages, but then came the snorkeling scene, which was quite good with its description of ocean creatures, and then when Ted resolved all the mysteries in the end he had fully won me over and then when he gave us a very pro-space exploration finale I was enthusiastically on his side.  Ted played me like a fiddle but I can only admire him for it.

Deservedly, "The Man Who Lost the Sea" has appeared in many anthologies as well as a bunch of Sturgeon collections since its first appearance in F&SF.

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These are pretty good picks by Merril; the Leiber doesn't really hold together, but it succeeds as literature and as entertainment, and the Simak, Ballard and Sturgeon hold together nicely and make their points quite ably.  The Ballard is a real downer, with people misbehaving and getting defeated and with culture becoming degraded by technology and democracy, but Simak and Sturgeon take a more balanced approach, showing triumph as well as tragedy, human decency and human achievement as well as (in Simak's case) human greed and callousness and (in Sturgeon's) human loss.  The Simak, Ballard and Sturgeon are worthy companions to the Bradbury story I praised in my last post.

More anthologized short stories next time, kids, but from over ten years later than today's.  See you then!

Dangerous Visions from F Leiber, J G Ballard and S R Delany

Let's get dangerous!  Today we read three more stories from my First Edition of Harlan Ellison's famous 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions.  We have various reasons to believe these are among the best or most important stories in DV, so maybe this will be an exciting adventure for us.

"Gonna Roll the Bones" by Fritz Leiber

Here's a story that won a Hugo and a Nebula--kaboom!  "Gonna Roll the Bones," which has been reprinted a million times, is also the inspiration of the cover illustration of the edition of The Best of Fritz Leiber that I own, and, to my surprise, of a 2004 children's book.  

From line one, "Gonna Roll the Bones" certainly feels like a story that would win awards.  It is stuffed full of long sentences filled to the brim with metaphors and similes that paint vivid pictures not of charm and beauty but of squalor and decadence. Immediately we are presented intimations of catastrophe to come, predictions of mass death.

In his intro to "Gonna Roll the Bones," Ellison tells us SF writers tend to be specialists--Edmond Hamilton and A. E. van Vogt specializing in world destruction, Ray Bradbury in poetic imagery, etc.  But Leiber, your old pal Harlan opines, is a master of all forms, from fantasy to science-oriented "hard" science fiction.  "Gonna Roll the Bones" demonstrates this.  The story has a sort of Olde World fairy land setting, but is full of references to space ships and alien life forms and astronomical phenomena and is set in the spacefaring future--many of the metaphors and similes are references to space craft:

While among the trees the red-green vampire lights pulsed faintly and irregularly, like sick fireflies or a plague-stricken space fleet.

These metaphors and similes don't necessarily make a lot of literal sense, but strike a mood or fashion an image. 

Joe Slattermill works in a mine and lives with his mother and wife and cat (SF people love cats and we hear plenty about the cat.)  Mom and wifey make additional money as bakers and the house has a huge fireplace and series of ovens and Joe expects someday the place will burn down, killing all inside.

Stir crazy, Joe, known to gamble and get drunk and beat his wife, heads out to raise hell.  There is a new gambling hall on the dark side of town full of sexy girls and craps tables--presiding over the "Number One Crap Table" are the fattest man Joe has ever seen and a pale woman who is alarmingly tall and skinny whose role is to collect the dice once they are thrown.  But even more prominent, and obviously in charge de facto if not de jure, is a mysterious figure in black, his face partially obscured, a perfectly poised gentleman gambler.  Leiber describes all these people, and the dice and the table, in great detail.  As I read of topless girls, the excitement in Joe's crotch, the man in black groping a girl's ass and then killing a guy with a karate chop to the throat, and Joe's and the gentleman in black's use of derogatory terms for people of African descent, I kept wondering what the hell was in that 2004 kid's book.  (It turns out the text in that book has been abridged down almost to nothing by Sarah L. Thomson--the main point of the volume is the pictures by three-time Caldecott winner David Wiesner, which are very bland and unfinished and do absolutely nothing to convey the apocalyptic tone, dark power and rococo intricacy of Leiber's baroque images--Joe the wife-beating drunk has a face with zero personality!  Thumbs down for that colorless and lifeless thing!)  

Joe is kind of a superhero, or a tall-tale figure like Paul Bunyon, when it comes to throwing things, and he can roll dice and make them come up on the sides he wishes.  He makes a stack of dough and then passes the dice on after deliberately rolling boxcars, as he wants to see the man in black, who is psychologically dominating all the assembled gamblers and hangers on, throw.  The sinister gentleman  can also roll whatever he wants, but while Joe makes his throws look natural, making the dice bounce around and going through the rigamarole of rolling the dice and getting a point and then rolling several times before hitting his point, the gambler in black just arrogantly rolls seven after seven after seven, flaunting his power.

The gambler in black, as Ellison hinted in his intro, is of course the devil.  He wants to gamble with Joe--the stakes Joe's life and soul!  Joe can back out, but he doesn't want to seem a coward.  In the end, Joe wins, thanks to his own courage and his wife's love for him and faith in Jesus Christ--at least that is what I think happened; it is a little confusing.  As the story ends, Joe is about to enjoy his winnings--when he put up his life and soul, the devil put up "the world," and Joe, a working-class schlub stuck in a mining town up to now, is going to see the world.

A good story that is written elaborately and can be examined from various angles--religion-based, class-based, sex- and race-based.  In his afterword, Leiber explains some of what he is doing, suggesting, for example, that the story is in part about how men resent the control over them wielded by women but should recognize that mothers and wives are in fact often a critical support for men.  Manifesting the spirit of old time science fiction, even here in this monument to the New Wave, Leiber urges readers to understand that the limits we see in our lives and the universe are in fact bogeymen we can brush aside if we arm ourselves with knowledge--mankind really can cure cancer and conquer the stars the way mankind has already achieved flight and embraced sexual freedom, and science and technology are the key to these overcoming these obstacles and building better lives and a better society.  As Ellison suggested it would, "Gonna Roll the Bones," with its poetic style, hope for the future, sympathy for the working class, Christian themes, horror tone and embrace both of psychic powers and space-age tech, cunningly appeals to many factions of the SF community.

Both Leiber's "Gonna Roll the Bones" and Delany's "Aye, and Gomorah" appear in 
both Zelazny's Nebula Award Stories: Number Three and Bova's The Best of the Nebulas

"The Recognition" by J. G. Ballard

Our friend tarbandu of The PorPor Books Blog, in a December post titled "The Most Overrated Science Fiction Writers of the Postwar Era," in the section of the blogpost devoted to slagging Theodore Sturgeon, praises "The Recognition," so let's check it out.

This here is an enigmatic weird story which I guess dramatizes sad facts and ambiguities about human life, that we are all truly alone and require psychological and sometimes physical protection from each other and that society and its rules are like both a cage that restrains us and a fence which protects us.

The narrator witnesses a small circus--a mysterious and oddly compelling woman and a dwarf are the only staff and six wagons drawn by exhausted horses the extent of the entertainment offered--roll into a small English town.  On the wagons are cages, but in the same way the narrator can't discern the age of the woman, who at times seems young ("her robe revealed a small childlike breast") and other times middle-aged, he can't tell what sort of animals are in the cages--he just has glimpses of pale figures and detects a familiar scent from the cages.  Some boisterous sailors come along and terrorize the dwarf, shake up the wagons, and excite the horses--in the excitement our narrator is accidentally knocked out.  When he wakes up he realizes there are people in the cages--I guess the sailors.

In his intro Ellison talks about how this story is perhaps a fantasy or an allegory and how Ballard's work is often surreal, and in his afterword Ballard says the story "expresses a cordial distaste for the human race" and complains that people nowadays are narcissistic ("the temper of the times seems to be one of self-love") but a few lines later assures us that "The Recognition" is not "a piece of hard won misanthropy."  In fact the story, he tells us, is a comment on "unusual perspectives that separate us."  Also, he suggests that the key to the story is figuring out the motivations of the woman and dwarf.

Personally, I'm finding "The Recognition" a little too opaque and obscure--it feels like a put-on, a story that could mean nothing or anything, depending on what the reader decides.  We'll call it merely acceptable...maybe barely acceptable.  Ballard ably describes the setting and characters and the story isn't boring, but the sum total of it is underwhelming because it is too coy about what the point is.

"The Recognition" has not been anthologized much since its debut in Dangerous Visions, but of course it has been reprinted in Ballard collections.

"Aye, and Gomorrah" by Samuel R. Delany

Ellison starts his intro to "Aye, and Gomorrah" with talk of how meeting writers whose work you like is often a disappointment ("The writer of swashbuckling adventures is a pathetic little homosexual who still lives with his invalid mother"--is this supposed to refer to a real person?  Robert E. Howard lived with his unhealthy mother most of his life, didn't he?)  But this doesn't apply to Delany, one of the most impressive people Ellison has ever met, a man with a talent like that of Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut or Theodore Sturgeon who is similarly bound to become prominent in the mainstream.  (Did Sturgeon really achieve mainstream prominence?)  Ellison also makes much of the fact that while Delany has sold a stack of SF novels already, this is the guy's first short story.

"Aye, and Gomorrah" is like Ballard's "The Recognition" in that it is kind of opaque and mysterious but while Ballard writes in long detailed paragraphs and his narrator is almost as deep in the dark as us readers, Delany's story is written in fragments and jump cuts and snatches of dialogue and the narrator knows exactly what is going but we readers are kept in the dark for a while.  Perhaps ironically, while Ballard's text paints detailed images of locations and characters but renders the thematic substance or point of the story quite vaguely, Delany provides very little by way of physical descriptions, but eventually makes the bizarre speculative content of the story quite clear.  

It is the spacefaring future.  The only people who can safely leave Earth's atmosphere for any amount of time are people whose gonads have been removed.  Among the populace there develops a sizable population of people who fetishize astronauts, who are fascinated by and sexually attracted to the sexless neutered people who have the exciting job of exploring and exploiting other planets.  Many of these fetishists, known as frelks (short for "free-fall-sexual-displacement complex") are willing, even eager, to pay astronauts good money to have some kind of sexual encounter with them.  

I guess the "real" dramatic arc of the story is us readers discovering the facts about this future world.  The plot of "Aye, and Gomorrah" concerns an astronaut, a neutered man, and his time on leave in various places on Earth and his encounters (and the encounters of his fellow spacers) with civilians; the astronauts always wear their uniforms so they are easily identifiable by the public.  Some astronauts are happy to get paid for whatever limited forms of sex they can provide frelks, others are not so sanguine.  Our narrator seems to be looking for something more, a human connection, but such connections are hard to come by, maybe because frelks see him as primarily or only a sex object (even though he no longer has any sex organs) while ordinary people see him as sexless--to nobody is he a whole human being.

This story is alright; by the end, it is more clear and compelling that Ballard's, and certainly more economical.  Maybe these two stories share a theme, the idea that human beings are hopelessly separated from each other.

In his Afterword, Delany lists the source material of the story--he has been to the locations that are the settings of the scenes in the story, and he once overheard two women talking about an astronaut in the news, one of them finding the astronaut asexual, the other finding him very attractive.  Of course, we readers wonder if the fact that Delany is a black man and a gay man has also informed the story.

"Aye, and Gomorrah" won a Nebula and has been included in many anthologies, including those that appear to be efforts to document a history of SF or to create a SF canon that is "diverse"--the SF cognoscenti are unanimous in their belief that this story is important, and it is not bad, so I can't really take them to task for this belief.     

    

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Of the three stories, the Ballard is the least satisfying and the least "dangerous," though it is not bad by any means.  Delany's is the most "dangerous," seeing as it is about creepy sex fetishes and seems to be a rumination on how minorities of different kinds are viewed by majorities and also suggests that the government and society are willing to mutilate young people in order to achieve their goals.  But the most entertaining and satisfying of the stories in Leiber's--it is full of evocative images and phrases and handles effectively a host of themes.

An enlightening expedition into the anthology we are always hearing about.  Next time a SF novel from the early Sixties!

Amazing Stories, July 1968: Edmond Hamilton, Milton Lesser and Paul Fairman

In our last episode we read a 1926 Weird Tales serial by Edmond Hamilton, "Across Space," and it came to our attention that in 2015 "Across Space" was reprinted in an Italian paperback omnibus along with another Hamilton tale, 1929's "Locked Worlds."  "Locked Worlds" debuted in Amazing Stories Quarterly and was reprinted in Amazing Stories almost forty years later.  Let's take a look at that 1968 issue of Amazing, an issue produced in the brief period when that magazine was edited by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld fame.

Despite Harrison's protests, publisher Sol Cohen's policy during this difficult time in Amazing's long life was to devote most of Amazing's page count to reprints of stories that had appeared earlier in the magazine (or its sister publication Fantastic) and it looks like this attitude extended even to the covers--the cover illo of this July 1968 issue is a mediocrity that had appeared first on the cover of a German magazine four years earlier!  Is this the behavior of the "World's Leading Science-Fiction Magazine"?  Sad!

Harrison starts the issue off with an editorial about developments in the SF field that I confess I found to be a little vague and all over the place; he tackles many ideas and provides a minimum of supporting evidence (but throws in various personal notes) when I would have preferred he address a small number of ideas directly and clearly.  Harrison suggests the avant garde of SF (he offers his drinking buddy J. G. Ballard as its exemplar) can be described as "subjective," in contrast to old-fashioned SF which is "objective."  A subjective "new wave" story emphasizes not what the story is "objectively" about--what physically happens in the story--but rather what is going on in the "inner space" that is the minds of the story's characters, or the mind of the author writing the story.  He argues that what such Ballard stories as "Terminal Beach" and "End-Game" are truly about is guilt.

Harrison's editorial is not only descriptive, but proscriptive, and he warns against two trends in SF that he does not like: 1) the "vacuous" and "cliched" adventure story full of "standard props" like "blasters" and "starships" that has no plot other than violence and no meaning or wit; and 2) the overly complex or opaque story that uses experimental methods that inhibit rather than facilitate communication and whose writers import from literary fiction a snobbish "ivory tower" attitude.

Look at the frightening example of James Ballard and see what can happen.  His latest works are almost unreadable and incomprehensible, the direct opposite of his earlier magnificent efforts.

I find these kind of controversial statements provocative and exciting, but their value--especially to those of us reading them 55 years later--is severely diminished by the fact that Harrison didn't offer examples of vacuous adventure stories full of violence and didn't specify which Ballard stories are allegedly "unreadable."

More controversy is to be found in the book review column, in which Leroy Tanner attacks Algis Budrys, and in the letters column, in which Ted White attacks Tanner in response to Tanner's earlier attack on Roger Zelazny.  (If you are looking in the pages of Amazing for some brotherly love, Poul Anderson gushes about an Isaac Asimov collection, Asimov's Mysteries.  If you are looking for boredom, there is Brian Aldiss' two pages about a trip to Oslo--Aldiss met a bunch of fun and interesting guys in Norway, but doesn't tell us anything fun or interesting about them.)

Alright, let's look at some of the fiction in this issue of Amazing.  There is actually a new story, one by by "Samuel R. Delaney," a man better known as "Samuel R. Delany," but I think it is a portion of the novel Nova, a novel I read in the period before the birth of this blog and so I am passing it by.  We'll turn our eye to three of the reprints: Hamilton's 1929 "Locked Worlds" and one story each by Milton Lesser and Paul Fairman first published in the 1950s.  (Note that I am reading all three in their 1968 printings--this may have been a mistake, as I ran into quite a lot of typos.)

"Locked Worlds" by Edmond Hamilton (1929)

"Locked Worlds" is the account of Harker, an English professor employed by Northeastern University.  As the story begins, the most famous academic at NEU is the 30-something physicist Adams, a man universally recognized by those in his field as a top innovator, an actual revolutionary, but unpopular for his bitter sarcastic tongue and arrogant nature.  After explaining to us what atoms and electrons are, Harker describes the controversial theory put forward by Adams that sets the story's plot in motion in more ways than one.  These long repetitive science lectures may have some readers longing for the "standard props" and violence that Harrison was complaining about in his editorial (such readers' patience will be rewarded.)

In brief, Adams has discovered that the atoms in our universe all have two sets of electrons that move in opposite directions around the same nucleus and are dissimilar in number.  This means (he says) that all the matter in our universe exists simultaneously in two different worlds that occupy the same space but are invisible to each other, and that atoms of one element in one world are a different element in the other world.  If we can manipulate these electrons and reverse their courses we can travel between these two parallel worlds--the matter that is a person in this world can be sent to the other world, and in its place will appear in this world an equal number of atoms that are rocks or trees or whatever from the other world.

The matter that is the scientists of this world find Adam's theory, known colloquially as the "interlocking atoms" theory, so ludicrous that Adams' formerly high reputation is dashed and he becomes the target of ridicule, so much so that his position as head of the NEU physics dept is threatened.  Adams then disappears, leaving behind a cryptic note.  Weeks later, Adams' assistant Rawlins, the narrator's friend, reveals that he has been examining the apparatus found in Adams' lab and believes Adams transposed himself into the parallel world described in his theory...and probably is planning to inflict a monstrous vengeance on this world whose inhabitants ridiculed him!  Newspaper stories about people in remote areas like Iowa and Suriname reporting the disappearance of geographical features and the appearance in their place of some never-before-seen soil add meat to Rawlins' suspicions.  Rawlins and Harker decide they must follow Adams into that parallel world in order to stop him from launching some kind of attack on our own.

"Locked Worlds" is like 48 pages long, and after a dozen pages of all that sciency background stuff we get to the adventure portion as R & H find themselves in a world of mobile vegetation grazing low-nutrient blue soil under a blinding blue white sun, a world of spider people armed with disintegrator ray guns and anti-grav sleds that fly by managing the sleds' repulsion from and attraction to the planet's magnetic poles.  The college professors don't get to explore on their own much, but are rather provided a tightly controlled guided tour by the spider men who immediately capture them and take them to a city of thousand-foot high conical buildings connected by a highway of cables so the city resembles a huge spider web.  Adams the vengeful scientist has allied himself to the spider people, promised to transport them to Earth--a more fertile world than this infertile blue world--where they can conquer us.  Adams has Rawlins imprisoned in the city's central building, intent on forcing him to act as his here as on Earth, assistant, and leaves Harker to the tender mercies of the spider people, who imprison him in a nearby tower, in the same cell as a bird man.

This bird man, Nor-Kan, teaches Harker his speech, and schools him in the history of this world.  The bird people built a high-tech civilization, but generations ago became lazy and so bred from mindless natural spiders a servant race of giant intelligent spider people to do all their work for them.  In due course, the spider people overthrew their masters and took over most of the world--a small remnant of the bird people still holds out in a fortress on the south pole.  (As did the slave race in that last Hamilton story we read, "Across Space," the spider people in "Locked Worlds" remind us of the shoggoths of Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness and are perhaps a warning against becoming reliant on machines and/or the labor of other ethnic groups that might have reason to resent you or ovet your position.)

Nor-Kan and Harker escape their cell and climb up the side of the conical skyscraper in which is located the prison and then go hand over hand to the HQ building where are to be found Adams and Rawlins.  While Harker frees Rawlins and makes an abortive effort to capture Adams, Nor-Kan retrieves the flying machine he was piloting when he got captured.  The three barely escape after a bloody fight and fly south to the bird city at the pole, narrowly evading pursuit by spider-creature aircraft.

The bird-people are easily convinced to launch an attack on the spider-city where Adams is almost finished creating the machines to transport spider cities and spider armies to our Earth, because if the eight-legged fiends conquer Earth, they can just go to Earth's South Pole and Adams can transport them behind the impregnable walls of the bird-city.  The last ten pages or so of "Locked Worlds" concern the bird attack on the spider capital, a long naval battle in the air between two air fleets of over a thousand vessels each that climaxes with a hand to hand struggle between Adams and Rawlins on the apex of a conical tower over the controls of a machine that will either transport the spider horde to our Earth or exterminate the entire spider race.  After the two-legs-good, eight-legs-bad ending, Harker and Rawlins return to an Earth that has no idea how close it came to being conquered by ray gun wielding arachnids.

Though it gets off to a slow start with its repetitive lectures about electrons, I'm giving "Locked Worlds" a grade of moderately good.  It has many similarities to "Across Space," which I judged as simply acceptable, but has many advantages over that 1926 story.  It has an interesting villain, for one thing, and he spider city is also better than the subterranean city of "Across Space"'s Martian colonists.  I enjoyed the long sequence covering the escape from the prison and then the aerial chase to the polar city, as well as all the different fun types of high-tech artillery and defense measures with which Hamilton armed the two alien war fleets.  

Like "Across Space," "Locked Worlds" would be reprinted by Haffner Press and by the Italian publisher Edizioni Della Vigna in our own 21st century.

"The Impossible Weapon" by Milton Lesser (1952)

It looks like we've covered four short stories by Lesser on ye olde blogge, "'A' as in Android," "The Graveyard of Space," "Ennui," and "It's Raining Frogs!"; I read his fix-up novel Secret of the Black Planet before I started this blog. According to my notes I thought Secret of the Black Planet "bland and forgettable" and the links above attest to the fact that I was not terribly enthusiastic about those four stories, but maybe this one, "The Impossible Weapon" will be more exciting.  Hope springs eternal, people.

The writing style Lesser employs for "The Impossible Weapon" reminded me of that we find in hard-boiled or noirish detective fiction, bitterly, cynically jokey in a way that exposes human frailty.  You science nerds don't have to worry, though--Lesser manages to integrate some science lectures about atoms and the behavior of light into his text. 

Earth is at war with the Venus-Mars-Ganymede League, a war which started with a nuclear sneak attack on this big blue marble of ours.  Earth's fleet was defeating the enemy fleet when the Leaguers whipped out a new weapon, one that could penetrate any Earth forcefield.  Now that Earth's ships and surface are defenseless, it looks like we may have to sue for peace with the villains of the League.

Stanley Stokes is a "quantum technician," and he thinks he knows how to nullify the League's new weapon.  His fiancé is the daughter of the United Nations' Assistant Secretary of Defense Weapons, Spatial Division, and he gets an interview with this bureaucrat, but the paper pusher considers Stokes' idea to be crazy.  When Stokes gets drunk and complains about her father to his fiancé, she calls off their engagement. 

Stokes goes to a bar frequented by spacemen, meets a big hulking brute of a spacer, a guy who fights in bar brawls on the regular and even rumbles with the cops.  This veteran sailor of the void between the planets, O'Hanrohan (of course this dude is Irish), wants to take the fight to the League, and so is willing to join forces with Stokes in a desperate effort to illegally acquire a space ship and the necessary supplies to test Stokes' theory out beyond Earth orbit, in the teeth of the enemy.  Our heroes hold off the police, get their stolen ship into orbit, and prove that Stokes has developed a way to counteract the League ray weapon, making them heroes and getting Stokes' girl to agree to marry him after all.

A little slight, but a fun story; Lesser's jokes actually work, and the humor and the science lectures don't overwhelm or distract from the plot but actually support it.  Thumbs up for "The Impossible Weapon."  Besides in its two appearances in Amazing, you can find "The Impossible Weapon" in the 2013 collection 'A' as in Android.

"This is My Son" by Paul W. Fairman (1955)

I have little familiarity with Fairman's work; looking at the regular sources on line (isfdb, wikipedia, the internet archive) it seems Fairman was a prolific writer who had his hand in many genres, including science fiction, westerns, detective stories, novelizations of TV sitcoms I have never seen like Bridget Loves Bernie and That Girl and even soft core porn spoofs--isfdb credits Fairman with five titles in the series The Man from S.T.U.D.; two sample titles: The Orgy at Madam Dracula's and Rape is a No-No.  Much of Fairman's work appeared under pen names, including the only thing I think I have read by him, the novel Whom the Gods Would Slay which debuted in Amazing and would be published as a paperback with a Jeff Jones cover.  I liked Whom the Gods Would Slay so maybe I'll like "This is My Son," which debuted in Fantastic, as well. 

It is the 2030s.  John Temple is a young American physicist working on a major contract down in Latin America--this super duper important job requires that he spend six continuous years on the job site and not return home to the USA even once.  He can talk to his wife and kid on the video phone, but that doesn't seem like enough, and again and again his colleagues have to talk him out of breaking the contract and rushing back to his family and thus ruining his career.

Temple, as a college student and early post-grad, wanted more than anything to have a son.  After marrying an attractive woman, Jill, he was very disappointed to find the two of them couldn't seem to have a child, even after two years of trying.  When the Latin American opportunity came up--a six-year job which would yield enough money on completion of the contract to set them up for life--he only took it because he had no child--if he'd had a child he would have been unable to part from it.  Poor Jill realized this and was broken-hearted because she loved her husband for himself, and it was now clear  he primarily saw her as a potential mother.

Amazingly, only a few months after he has arrived in South America, Jill tells Temple she is pregnant.  It is a hard six years, but eventually Temple gets back home to live with his family.  Everybody is happy until by chance Temple learns the truth--John, Jr. is not his biological son!  Wanting Temple to love her, Jill purchased a bespoke artificial baby--an android--designed and conceived in a lab and has been passing it off as their natural son!  Temple calls the kid a monster to his innocent little face and John and Jill immediately separate.  For years Temple lives a life of gambling and womanizing, all the while sending to his estranged family all the money they might need.  Then one day he sees in the paper that his son at private school has been severely injured while rescuing his classmates during a fire.  John, Jr. is a hero, hovering on the brink of death!  Temple rushes to the hospital and gives his son a blood transfusion, so that, in a way, he becomes his true flesh and blood, and we are led to believe that John, Jill, and John, Jr. will live together happily ever after.

A pleasant little human interest story that explores how new technology might affect family life; we might even call this a pro-diversity story that argues that there are all different kinds of families and the traditional way of creating a family is no better than other less typical ways.  Naysayers might argue this is not really a SF story, but a redecorated mainstream story about adoption, the way those same naysayers will tell you space operas and planetary romances and Jack Vance's revenge drama The Demon Princes are just redecorated westerns or detective stories or adventure tales about Western adventurers in the mysterious East.  These analyses are appropriate, but do nothing to detract from a story's literary or entertainment value, and do not stop me from giving "This is My Son" a thumbs up.

I like it, but it seems that after its second appearance here in Amazing that "This is My Son" has never been reprinted.

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It is understandable that members of the SF community in 1968, especially professionals like Harry Harrison, would want to read or work for a magazine that printed brand new stories and not a bunch of reprints.  But the three reprints we read today are pretty good!  The Hamilton and Lesser stories are solid classic SF about scientists who invent paradigm-shifting devices and get mixed up in wars in which people discharge a dizzying array of energy weapons at each other.  And the Fairman actually has mainstream literary elements like those we expect a New Wave "inner space" story to have--it is about the psychology and relationships of three people, and about how new technology shifts paradigms not in the realms of war or transportation, but the world of the family.  To me, this seems like a pretty rewarding issue of Amazing.

More 1950s SF in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

  

Merril-approved 1956 stories by R Russell, J G Ballard and T Sturgeon

Let's embark on a third foray in our campaign to explore the SF of 1956 using SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume by Judith Merril as our Baedeker.  I feel like Merril lead us into some pitfalls last time around, but we forgive and forget here at MPorcius Fiction Log and forge on.

"Put Them All Together, They Spell Monster" by Ray Russell 

I'm not the kind of guy who deliberately watches bad movies with the intention of laughing at them or making fun of them; for example, I actually sincerely love the monster designs and art direction and music in Gamera and Godzilla films, not "ironically."  Over the course of this blog's life, it has been my general practice to cherry pick stories out of anthologies in an effort to avoid those I am likely to find boring or irritating; my sample is far from random and would not be useful for any kind of statistical analysis.

When I started this current series of blog posts based on Merril's second Best Of volume I expected to skip Ray Russell's story because I didn't like his "Ghost of a Chance" (I called it "a total waste of time"), gave "I Am Returning" a "grudging acceptable rating" and called his "The Darwin Sampler" an "inoffensive gimmick story" and his "The Long Night" a "gimmicky joke story."  But when the staff was plotting out this phase of the operation it was decided that we couldn't really do an entire blog post on just the two stories I really wanted to read, the Ballard and the Sturgeon, and that the Russell was the one that made sense to add to the mix, in part because I recently did a series of blog posts on SF stories that, like "Put Them All Together, They Spell Monster," can be found in the pages of 1950s issues of Playboy.  So here we go, a story over eight pages long which Merril in her intro warns us is a spoof of monster movies, the kind of movies like The Thing From Another World that Merril doesn't think deserve to be called "science-fiction."  (Judith Merril, gatekeeper.)  

(Merril also says "the article" is "somewhat foreshortened," for which I guess we should thank her.)

Russell's story, labeled "satire" in the pages of Hugh Hefner's skin rag, is narrated by a horror movie fan who describes his dream of sitting in a theatre with Marilyn Monroe and watching a monster movie about a giant blob of Vaseline that comes to Earth and is misunderstood by us natives.  Russell uses lots of obvious jokes and tried and true comedic techniques, and he doesn't use them badly, so, while "Put Them All Together, They Spell Monster" is not good, it isn't terrible.  (It is far far better than that trainwreck of a humor story by Robert Nathan we read for our last blog post.)  We'll call this one barely acceptable.

"Put Them All Together, They Spell Monster," after its debut in Playboy and apotheosis in Merril's pages, would return in 1971, the year of my birth, in The Fully Automated Love Life of Henry Keanridge, an anthology of humorous SF stories.  In the introduction to The Fully Automated Love Life of Henry Keanridge, the editors of Playboy claim that "there have been all too few examples of wit, humor and the light touch in science fiction."  I had to roll my eyes at this one, as I feel like I am constantly stumbling over joke stories and absurdist satires as I look through old SF magazines and anthologies.  Perhaps more interestingly, the editors of Playboy in this intro seem to be taking a swipe at the New Wave: 

...when it's bad ["it" being science fiction], the style matches the subject matter in pomposity and pretentiousness.  This is particularly true of a certain fringe element in contemporary science fiction, which concentrates exclusively on cosmic nastiness expressed with "experimental" eccentricity in lieu of talent.

I find these kind of vague attacks both fascinating and irritating--irritating not because I agree or disagree with them, but because they don't offer any specific examples of what they are talking about.  Who exactly are these talentless writers who write about cosmic nastiness?  What eccentric and experimental story would the editors of Playboy offer as a representative sample of the work of the fringe element they are demeaning?  I know why writers attack each other in this cloak and dagger fashion--the great Thomas M. Disch apparently hurt his career by attacking the universally beloved Ray Bradbury in broad daylight and it seems the great Barry N. Malzberg got in trouble for his passionate attack on the sainted Judith Merril in Galaxy's Edge--but it is frustrating because these kinds of attacks can be very illuminating (more illuminating than slavish praise) if we know exactly what writer and what work are being criticized.  (And when I say "illuminating" I refer not only to the target of the attack but its perpetrator--what Disch and Malzberg have to say about Bradbury and Merril is quite likely to tell us more about TMD and BNM than about RB and JM.)

Anyway, The Fully Automated Love Life of Henry Keanridge is easily accessible at the internet archive and the intro may be of value to all of you who are interested in the history of SF-- particularly humorous SF, the New Wave, and the intersection of SF and men's magazines. 

"Prima Belladonna" by J. G. Ballard 

Alright, now on to the main event, stories I legit wanted to read.  First, J. G. Ballard's "Prima Belladonna."  "Prima Belladonna" is apparently sometimes considered Ballard's first published story; at least it is included in the 1981 anthology First Voyages.  In any case the public first encountered it in Science Fantasy and it has been reprinted many many times since; it can be found in at least two books I own.

"Prima Belladonna" is the first of Ballard's Vermillion Sands stories.  Vermillion Sands is an apartment complex on the shore in a future or alternate world that is home to various pervasive phenomena that seem strange to us readers but which the characters seem to take in stride; one such phenomenon is the presence of many types of mutants, and this story is about the narrator's relationships with multiple types of mutants.  The narrator is a shop owner, and he raises, trains, and sells plants which, in response to stimuli, move and produce sounds--with careful training and precise control of their environments these plants can be induced to produce music.  (Ballard is one of those SF authors who knows all about classical music and in this story he refers to various composers and uses musical terminology.)

Another prominent mutant in "Prima Belladonna" is a gorgeous woman who has recently arrived in the community; she is a professional singer and is performing at the casino.  She has beautiful breasts and hips and golden skin and so on, but most remarkably her eyes look like insects and one can judge how agitated she is by how vigorously the legs of the insects in her eyes wriggle.  These eyes sound absolutely horrifying, but the narrator and his pals find the woman irresistibly attractive regardless, and ogle her as she settles into to her new apartment, which is across the way from the narrator's.

The narrator and the singer have a brief erotic relationship, but perhaps more intense and definitely more strange is the woman's relationship with the senior of the narrator's flowers, the flower that keeps the others in tune.  

Pretty good.

"The Other Man" by Theodore Sturgeon

Merril in her intro to "The Other Man" says she had trouble choosing between this story and Sturgeon's "And Now the News..." when determining the line up for this anthology.  A year ago we read "And Now the News..." and I thought it was good.  Hopefully I'll think the same of this caper, which is over 50 pages in length.

Fred is the world's greatest therapist!  Using hypnosis and technology, he can take you into his custody and, over six or eight weeks, examine and then improve your personality, accentuating positive traits and suppressing troublesome aspects, and fix in place this upgraded and refined version of you.  

Fred has got a new patient!  Richard!  Fred is already pretty familiar with Richie-boy's personality, because five years ago this very Dick stole Fred's wife Osa!  Rich is a kind of gigolo deadbeat character who doesn't like to work and is always looking for kicks and because of his tremendous charisma has no trouble seducing women and getting them to pay his way to kicksville!

There is a lot of verbal sparring between the ethical Dr. Fred and the selfish jerkwad Richard, and we also hear all about the therapeutic techniques employed by Fred--under hypnosis, particular frequencies of sound are used to induce specific states in the patient or activate facets of his personality; e. g., when subjected to sounds of a frequency of 700 cycles, Richard will think he is eleven years old again, while exposure to 800 cycles will trigger rage.  When they set the apparatus to 200 cycles, Fred's pretty female assistants (you didn't think Fred was spending all day twiddling those knobs himself, did you?) discover a whole additional personality or "ego," an adorable innocent free of knowledge and thus free of all sin and evil!  Rich has multiple personality disorder--one dominant evil personality and one suppressed goody good personality!  

The theme of Sturgeon's story is that people can't go it alone, and Fred figures out how to solve Richard's problem only by working in concert with Osa and with the women on his staff.  The solution Fred's team comes up with is to use the technology at their disposal to join up what appear to be Richard's two personalities, which team Fred realizes are not in fact "multiple egos" but actually "multiple siblings sharing the same body, the same brain," much like what Sturgeon calls "Siamese twins" and you had better call "conjoined twins."  Our happy ending sees Richard living as a decent, productive and giving man with a happy marriage to Osa, while Fred's realization that he has to work together with his staff has paved the way for him and the senior woman at the office to fall in love.

This story is not bad, but there are problems.  Richard's motivation in coming to see Fred seems a little iffy.  The story feels long, consisting of lots of conversations as well as technical descriptions.  One issue that bloats the word count and, worse, makes the story feel longer is that Sturgeon doesn't want to use the old fashioned idea that a man is a dichotomy composed of a good half and a bad half that are in tension--Fred spends a whole paragraph disparaging such simple black and white thinking and saying that morals are no more than arbitrary opinions.  But the theory with which Sturgeon replaces the traditional dual nature of man theory--his idea that some tiny fraction of people are born twins who share the same body and same brain, and Richard is the victim of a "cantilever" effect as the dominant twin, perceiving the sweet and innocent buried twin as an invader, acts cruelly and selfishly in an effort to distinguish itself from the invader and so Richard attacked all the things that he actually loved--is complicated and takes a long time to explain and isn't really any more satisfying for the reader than the moralistic theory Sturgeon is trying to discard.  This reminded me a little of how Edmond Hamilton in The Vampire Master wanted his heroes to wield crosses in battle against the undead but didn't want to endorse Christianity so he came up with a theory of how the cross is a time-old universal symbol of goodness and light.

I can give "The Other Man" a mild recommendation, and tell you it is in line with what we expect from Sturgeon, a story about how togetherness of as intimate a nature as possible is what we should aim for to improve our individual lives and our society (see The Cosmic Rape), plus a story about how we should be willing to put our fates in the hands of geniuses (see "Slow Sculpture.")  

"The Other Man" would reappear in several Sturgeon collections, including The Stars Are the Styx, which features on its cover a Rowena Morrill portrait of Sturgeon as a superbly muscled Charon, and The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon, which our confreres in Gaul may know as Les talents des Xanadu.  

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The Ballard and the Sturgeon both have strange and memorable new ideas, and the Ballard has some wild images and the Sturgeon some energetic science speculations, so they both seem like perfectly understandable selections for a "Best of" anthology covering 1956.  The Russell is harder to justify, as it is nothing but an extended joke about pop culture ephemera.  I suppose Merril included it because she had an axe to grind against monster movies (I guess she was bitter that these films were the basis for many normies' views of what science fiction was all about) and maybe because she was friendly with Russell and/or wanted to associate SF with a successful mainstream publication like Playboy.

We aren't finished with 1956 and Judith Merril's take on that year's SF, but we'll be taking a little break from '56 and Ms. Grossman to read something somewhat more recent and much less respectable for the next episode of MPorcius Fictoin Log.

More Merril-approved 1960 stories: Anderson, Ballard, Blish and Budrys

In the last thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log we read seven stories from Judith Merril's 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F, a 384-page anthology of 1960-related stories, cartoons, essays and commentary (and only really liked two of them, selections by tragically-short-lived American Rosel George Brown and major British literary figure Kingsley Amis.)  The last three pages of 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F are a list of stories published in 1960 under the heading "Honorable Mentions," presumably stories Merril admired but didn't think quite reached the level of excellence of the forty items printed in the book, or could not be included for practical reasons.  Let's read five of these Honorable Mentions by people we care about, Poul Anderson, J. G. Ballard, James Blish and Algis Budrys.  (The HM list is in alphabetical order by author and I'm starting at the top.)  Maybe we'll like these stories more than those from last time which Merril actually printed.

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But first, let's take note of the 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F Honorable Mentions we've already read and offer links to my blog posts that discuss them.

Poul Anderson's "The Burning Bridge": I didn't actually read this, but it is one of the stories upon which Anderson based his novel Orbit Unlimited, which I blogged about in 2018.

Robert Bloch's "The Funnel of God": This epic (or tedious, you know, opinions will differ) attack on our society was subjected to an MPorcius analysis in 2019. 

Algis Budrys's "Rogue Moon": I haven't actually read this short version, but I read the famous novel that goes by this name and delivered a skeptical take on it in 2007 which I reprinted on this blog some years later.

Keith Laumer's "Combat Unit": I read this good story (also known as "Dinochrome") about a robot tank in 2019.

Fritz Leiber's "Night of the Long Knives": Back in 2022, after reading the version that appears in the collection The Night of the Wolf under the title "The Wolf Pair," I offered a moderate recommendation for this at times silly post-apocalyptic story about how we are all addicted to murder and should join Murderers Anonymous.  Like Leiber's very good "The Button Molder," "Night of the Long Knives" feels like a story that  offers insight into Leiber's life and thought and techniques; even though I have a lot of reservations about "Night of the Long Knives" as a work of art/entertainment, it has value for understanding who Leiber was and what he was all about and I strongly recommend it to those curious about Leiber the man and his career.    

Mack Reynolds's "Revolution": This one I read in 2015 in my copy of The Best of Mack Reynolds. 

Cordwainer Smith's "The Lady Who Sailed the Soul":  Back in 2019 I read this very good piece, which I considered a moving love story and an exemplar of the SF that tells you conquering space will be a bitch but it will be worth it, in the Smith collection You Will Never Be the Same.

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"The Martyr" by Poul Anderson 

It is the spacefaring future!  Mankind (currently operating under some kind of authoritarian imperial government with a monarch at its head) has colonized multiple planets, and met multiple intelligent alien species.  Fifty years ago the human race first encountered the Cibarrans, a race of beings with terrific psychic powers.  These jokers can communicate across intergalactic distances via telepathy, travel across similarly vast distances via teleportation, and employ telekinesis.  They have knowledge and power we poor humans can only dream of!  The Cibarrans are very friendly and helpful to other, less psychically adept, races, but they refuse to aid other civilizations in the development of their own psychic powers.  The human race begins to feel confined--one human character thinks "Isn't the Cibarran silence keeping our whole race trapped in our own skulls?"--and to suffer an inferiority complex, seeing the Cibarrans as gods that are keeping from us the key to godhood.  So the authorities take desperate, morally suspect, measures to squeeze the info out of the unwilling Cibarrans!

This story, like 16 pages in F&SF where it first appeared, describes how an arm of the human government seizes some Cibarrans and holds them prisoner (no easy task considering the Cibarrans' ability to teleport and call for aid telepathically) and experiments on them.  "Martyr" is a science-heavy story, Anderson coming up with a whole theory of how psychic powers operate.  (You know what people mean when they say "standing wave," "phase velocity," and "constants of propagation," right?)  The story is also about ethics--what acts are justified, and what acts are wise, in the pursuit of knowledge and power, and what sorts of responsibilities do those with knowledge and power have to those who are lacking?    

The shock ending is that the Cibarrans have endeavored to keep the truth about psychic powers from us and other intelligent beings to spare us a heartbreak that could wreck our societies--the Cibarrans have immortal souls but other races, including us humans, do not!

All the science and philosophy stuff is interesting, and the surprise ending is pretty good.  Thumbs up for "The Martyr."

Numerous editors, including Edmund Crispin, Robert P. Mills, and Anthony Boucher, have included "The Martyr" in anthologies, and, to commemorate Anderson's award of the title of Grand Master by the SFWA in 1998, Connie Willis included "Martyr" in the 1999 Nebula Awards anthology.  

"The Last World of Mr Goddard" by J. G. Ballard

I'm reading this in a scan of the 2009 edition of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard as I can't find a scan of the issue of Science Fantasy in which it first appeared.  

Old man Mr Goddard is a department manager at a big department store.  We learn that he has at home an elaborate scale model of the town in which he lives--this model is a sort of exact analog of the town, and is in fact inhabited by hundreds of tiny people who go about their business every day.  The people in the model are analogs of the real people Goddard works with, and by studying the model every evening he gleans information he can use to his advantage during the workday, though mostly he uses this info to help people.

One day some people seem to realize they are living in a circumscribed world and try to escape, but die accidentally in the attempt.  It also turns out that Goddard had made an assumption about somebody based on his observation of the model that has turned out to be wrong, severely damaging his relationship with the people of the town.  These dismaying events, and others, foreshadow a cataclysm--in the evening Goddard accidentally knocks over the model during a moment of physical weakness and, before he can recover, his pet cat devours all the townspeople, leaving himself the only survivor in an empty town.

"The Last World of Mr Goddard" is well-written and engaging; Ballard's descriptions of Goddard's daily routines are particularly sharp and vivid.  One might complain that the story is gimmicky, that upon reflection it makes no sense and is merely a well-turned out façade with little substance, but it is enjoyable nonetheless.  So, thumbs up.

"The Last World of Mr Goddard" can be found in many Ballard collections.

"The Voices of Time" by J. G. Ballard

I read "The Voices of Time" in that 2009 US edition of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard mentioned above, where it is 26 pages long, and I read it twice in an effort to really figure it out.  This is a dense story in which a lot of stuff going on, a story that is a little oblique and opaque, Ballard waiting until the middle of the story to present us with critical information about the characters that the characters themselves have been aware of the entire time, for example.  All the individual components of "The Voices of Tuime," the images and ideas, and all the individual sentences and paragraphs, are good, but as a while the story is sort of challenging.

I'm saying that the main theme of "The Voices of Time" is that everything comes with an expiration date--from individual creatures to entire species and ecosystems, to civilizations and the universe as a whole. 

Our main character is Powers, a scientist and neurosurgeon who is haphazardly continuing the work of a colleague who committed suicide, a biologist who irradiated animals and plants in order to change their DNA and induce changes in their forms.  Radiation from nuclear weapons tests and/or an atomic war similarly seem to have caused mutations among wild animals and vegetation; the mutations seem largely to be adaptations to a more radioactive environment, animals growing lead carapaces, for example, or developing the ability to "see" via detecting gamma radiation.  I got the impression that, in the milieu of the story, evolution and mutation are not random, but preprogrammed into the DNA of living things; each living thing carries within it a racial memory clock that measures time by absorbing radiation, and when a certain amount of solar radiation has been absorbed by a species, it changes its form according to schedule.  (Clocks and watches and countdowns, measurements of time, are a recurring theme of the story.)  The use of nuclear weapons has increased the amount of radiation in the environment, and advanced the clocks of Earth's species so they are changing prematurely, going disastrously haywire.  The human race is not immune to this effect, and more and more people are developing a disease called narcoma--they sleep more and more hours a day until finally sleeping all day, never waking.  (Those who cease waking up are called "terminals.")  It is suggested that the entire human race might succumb to this malady.  Powers himself suffers this disease, and as the story progresses he sleeps longer and longer each day--it is predicted that in three months he will go totally comatose.  

Powers is also responsible for a radical medical experiment; he performed brain surgery on a mathematician, Kaldren, that rendered him unable to sleep.  Sleepless Kaldren follows the main character around, and, when he isn't haunting Powers, he resides in a bizarre labyrinthine seven-story tall modern architecture building that is a 3D representation of the square root of negative one which houses his collection of artifacts related to the end of the human race and of the universe ("terminal documents," he calls them.)  Among the collection are some chattering ticker tape machines that with a regular periodicity print out numbers with 14 or more digits; each printed number is lower than its predecessor.  Kaldren writes one, 96,668,365,498,721, in the dust on Powers's unwashed car at the start of the story, and a week or so later Powers finds K has scrawled "96,668,365,498,702" on his garden gate.  These numbers are, apparently, transmissions from outer space, a clock broadcast by an alien civilization, a countdown to the end of the universe.

Kaldren is in a relationship with a pretty and slim young woman, I guess a psychology student, whom he calls "Coma" and whom other people call "the girl from Mars."  Her role in the story is to offer Powers someone to explain his research to, facilitating the story's exposition and description of its speculative science.

There is a lot of other stuff in the story I haven't mentioned, most importantly the possibility that Powers, like his suicidal colleague before him, is triggered by instructions written into his DNA into semi-consciously constructing a large mathematical diagram or mandala, a circular ideogram representing a giant clock that can't help but remind readers of the pentagrams common in stories of black magic and sorcery, and transmitting his soul out of his body and into space by committing suicide at the mandala's center.

A story that is a little difficult, but worth the effort of puzzling out.  I wasn't crazy about Ballard's nocvel The Drowned World when I read it long ago, and I have not particularly enjoyed Ballard's experimental items like "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" and "You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe", but I quite enjoy Ballard stories like "Billenium" and today's two stories that have something like a traditional plot and skillfully employ more conventional techniques.  

"The Voices of Time" debuted in New Worlds and would be widely reprinted in Ballard collections and in anthologies.

"The Oath" by James Blish

Here's another tale that debuted in F&SF.  "The Oath" would go on to be included in several Blish collections and in the anthology Beyond Tomorrow.  

It is the post-apocalyptic future!  Dr. Tucci is a member of the largest and most organized group trying to rebuild civilization, a bunch of people who live in a big storage vault with filtered air and a nuclear reactor, and they are recruiting other survivors, in particular skilled people like doctors and technicians, from miles around.  Tucci, an experienced medical man, rides up to the house of a guy, Gottlieb, rumored to be a doctor, but who before the atomic war was a published poet.  The story mostly follows their conversation as Tucci tries to convince this versifier turned amateur sawbones to join the vaulties 200 miles away.  "The Oath"'s content is mostly psychological and philosophical--what might attract Gottlieb to vault life, why might he want to remain in his current community, and what techniques and arguments can Tucci employ to convince the former poet to sign up?

This story is a little boring, and I found I didn't care whether Gottlieb joined the organization or not.  Rather than trying to entertain you, Blish seems to be using the story to raise questions about the relationship of the individual to the collective, and about sacrifice and responsibility.  What responsibility does the individual have to the collective?  How far should a man sacrifice his own ambitions in furtherance of the good of the community?  What rights does the collective have to use trickery or force against individuals who are deemed a drag on the collective?  How far can those in power go in sacrificing individuals for the benefit of the community?

Tucci, it seems, routinely uses trickery to recruit specialists to the vault's civilization restoration project.  For his part, Gottlieb acts like a god over his little community, running roughshod over people's privacy and facilitating the death of people who have genetic disorders (like diabetes) so their inferior genes won't be passed down to future generations and thus weaken the human race in its hour of crisis.  (A lot of classic SF is quite elitist, what with Asimov's Foundation and Heinlein's lunar rebels manipulating people, and tons of other examples, and "The Oath" is another slice of this elitism, putting forward the idea that doctors--members of the cognitive elite--should not be bound by such conventions as the Hippocratic Oath.)  Gottlieb seems to enjoy being a big fish in a small pond, and is reluctant to move to the vault, where he will be subordinate toothers and, as an amateur, in the shadow and under the direction of the trained medical personnel there; on the other hand, in the vault he will also be in a position to do more good for more people.

Acceptable.

"The Price" by Algis Budrys

This is a brief (two and a half pages) self-consciously literary allegorical story about how to survive an ordeal you may have to become a monster, or how war turns you ugly, or war is the devil's work, or evil never dies, or something; I have to admit I'm not sure I'm getting it.

Three men sit at a table, interviewing a hideous hunchback who initially refuses to give a name but then offers "Rumpelstiltskin."  We learn that Hunch has lived over a hundred years, been a prisoner and the subject of study in Czarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and East Germany, but never given up any information.  Hunch made it to Switzerland in the late Sixties and then spent some decades sheltered by monks during a seventy-year-long war, presumably between the West and the Warsaw Pact.

Dramatically the curtains are opened and it is revealed that the world outside has been transformed by war into a sea of fire!  Somehow, Hunch has made it here (presumably the United States) from Europe.  The three men want to know how he survived the fiery holocaust, and express a reluctant willingness to become like him if that is necessary to survive.  Hunch then ecstatically celebrates, dancing around.

"The Price" is a pretentious waste of time, an arty exercise or experiment.  Budrys uses up a lot of ink describing in detail the idiosyncratic way the hunchback, who I guess is the devil, smokes cigarettes, for example.  Long passages describing people manipulating matches and cigarette cases and cigarettes is one of my pet peeves, and another is stories in which the devil tries to trick somebody into making a deal, so Budrys is doing everything to get on my bad side here.  Of course, those are just my prejudices.  Another of my opinions: maybe a story about how you think war is bad is supposed to be provocative or groundbreaking or whatever, but in fact it is banal--everybody says war is bad--and often hypocritical--many people who loudly remonstrate against a war today will in a few years be just as loudly urging support for some other war.  Blish's story, "The Oath," is a useful contrast to Budrys's "The Price."  While I essentially agree with Budrys that war is terrible, his broad and over-the-top denunciation of war is boring and unproductive, while Blish's argument, which appears to be that the cognitive educated elite should be able to run our lives for us, is far more interesting and useful, even though I disagree with it, because Blish's case is based on specific examples and evidence and is in fact truly rebellious in its thinking, not a mere rebellious pose.   

Thumbs down!           

"The Price" first saw print in the same issue of F&SF that included Ward Moore's "The Fellow Who Married the Maxill Girl," one of the stories Merril reprinted in 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F which we read in our last episode.  "The Price" would reappear in the Budrys collection Blood and Burning and a number of American and European anthologies, including James Sallis's The War Book and a German anthology of stories from F&SF.

**********

Of today's batch of stories, the Ballard pieces are the most accomplished when it comes to traditional literary values, offering striking images and good writing and a compelling narrative.  Anderson's story is solid traditional SF with aliens and science, plus a moral dilemma and a somewhat surprising cosmic horror ending instead of (or in addition to) a sense of wonder ending--the universe is full of endless possibilities, but not for us humans!  (The ultimate in social inequality!)  Blish's story is talky and a little boring, but at least it competently makes a rational argument worth engaging with.  The Budrys is just bogus self-indulgent pseudo-arty goop, like a dreadful off-off-Broadway play.

Today's stories are perhaps united by a bleakness and even misanthropy; our next blog post will cover more 1960 stories recommended by Trotskyist Judith Merril and it will be interesting to see if they are a little cheerier.