Showing posts with label Presslie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Presslie. Show all posts

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Merril-approved 1958 stories: Pabel, Pohl, and Presslie

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are taking a tour of the speculative fiction of 1958 with herald of the New Wave Judith Merril acting as our guide.  This tour has been on hiatus for a few months, but today we are back aboard the Judith Justine Grossman bus and through the windshield we can see some "P" stories up ahead.

As you probably know if you regularly read my scribblings here, Judith Merril in her SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume reprinted a bunch of 1958 stories and in the back of the book provided an alphabetical "Honorable Mentions" list of stories that for whatever reason didn't quite make the cut, but which she thought good, and we have been selecting stories from this list to read.  We've already dealt with a stack of Merril-approved 1958 stories from authors whose names start with the letters "A" through "O"--see the links below:


Whew, gotta whole lotta links.

Today we've got a story by woman of mystery Avis Pabel, one by Grand Master Frederik Pohl, and two by Londoner Robert Presslie.

"Basic Agreement" by Avis Pabel

Avis Pabel only has one credit at isfdb, and a quick look around the interwebs suggests she led an exciting life.  She married an escaped German POW living incognito as a Chicago bookseller, got involved in Objectivism and published articles in an Objectivist magazine under the name Avis Brick, and eventually vanished from sight altogether.  Wild.  Let's try to figure out what John W. Campbell, Jr. and Merril saw in Pabel/Brick's sole SF story, "Basic Agreement," which appeared in Campbell's Astounding and, it seems, never again.

This is a brief trifling story but well-told, a story about family life that rings true.  A little girl keeps seeing a monster in the corner of her bedroom--when she screams, her stressed-out parents get angry at her, insisting she is just having a nightmare.  We learn that the little girl had an older sister, Jill, who died protecting her, and to whom the parents keep comparing her, unfavorably--Jill never had nightmares, Jill was good at math, Jill was popular, etc.  So she has to get used to the creepy sight of the monster just standing in the corner of her room every night.  Then one night, after our little heroine has had a particularly bad day, the monster speaks, and we realize it is a sad little alien girl, a little dolly in one of its tentacles, and it wants to make friends with the protagonist, and maybe it can help her with her math!

Thumbs up!    

"The Wizards of Pung's Corners" by Frederik Pohl

All three of the illustrations to "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" in Galaxy, where it debuted, include a TV set, and I groaned thinking this story of 25 pages by Fred Pohl, alumnus of the Young Communist League, was going to be an attack on television, advertising, and, by extension, our entire market-oriented society.  Twenty-five pages?  Suddenly, firing up my C-64 emulator and playing some more Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (which I hear is in the news again, like 40 years after I first played it) was looking pretty attractive.  When I had satisfied my need to scribble--and ruefully erase--notes on graph paper, I felt a little better about seeing what Fred had to say about the boob tube.

These good feelings didn't survive the first page of the story.  "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" is written in the annoying colloquial style of a tall tale told by some rural yarn spinner around the fire...
You never saw a bag like that! It looked like a kind of electronic tool kit, I swear.
...and takes the form of a popular history written in the far future which describes events in the near future, full of references to memoirs and history books.  The content of "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" constitutes an even more absurd and broad satire than I had feared, with Pohl focusing on telling tired jokes and detailing his social and economic theories and putting no effort into plot or character.

Bad!

Alright, here's the plot summary for all you gluttons for punishment.

Pung's Corners is a New England town in the middle of a desert--it had the good fortune to survive the atomic war that wiped out most of America's northeast.  Pung's Corners has a history of sitting out America's wars, its inhabitants having avoided service in the War of Independence and in the Civil War, and the current inhabitants are not unhappy about being cut off from the rest of the United States by the radioactive wastes--in fact, there is a local law prohibiting TV antennas so they won't get info from the outside world and their anti-aircraft missiles have shot down multiple approaching aircraft.  As the story begins, an old man we are told is wicked on the first page of the story, Coglan, drives into town in a car sheathed in lead.  He takes a room in the hotel; the bellboy watches Coglan through the keyhole as the old man communicates with his colleagues via his two-way TV phone (that is what is in the bag referenced in the quote above.)  

The United States government is under the control of an advertising agency and Coglan is their agent, come to Pung's Corners to reintroduce the isolated town to advertising.  The automated underground factories that survived the atomic war need more markets for their products and Pung's Corners is to be one of those markets.  The people of Pung's Corners have hard wired TV service which runs the same old movies again and again.  Coglan somehow patches into this signal, adding subliminal advertising for mass-produced consumer goods.  He has drugs put in the local water supply to make the townspeople more suggestible.  He uses a subsonic hypnotic device to trick the local banker into giving him money.  He hires the town slut to be his assistant.  These characters disappear from the narrative in the middle of the story to be replaced by other, perhaps even more ridiculous, caricatures.

Living in Pung's Corners is a retired advertising man who can tell what Coglan is up to.  He rallies the people of the town to physically overpower feeble old Coglan and thus foil his scheme.  So the federal government sends the United States Army to attack Pung's Corners.  Pohl gives us a long and tedious  absurdist military campaign in which the war correspondents that accompany the expeditionary force outnumber the riflemen, who don't know how to use their rifles because of planned obsolesce--the subterranean factories put out a new rifle every season and so the privates never have time to adequately train on each new model.  The people of Pung's Corners accept the surrender of the attack force, and then advance on the capital and take over the United States and put an end to advertising.

This story is just a vehicle for Pohl to inflict his lame leftist economic and social theories on readers.  Ordinary people, in Pohl's view, are easy prey for the manipulations of business people, who are all monopolists who overproduce products no sane person would want and use advertising, which is irresistible, to trick people into buying those useless items.  Government is needed to step in to protect the ignorant masses from advertising.  Pohl goes to the trouble of giving "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" a style--the hokey tall tale style I mentioned before--but plot and character have no place.  The plot offers no suspense, as it is made clear in the beginning that the people of Pung's Corners are going to take over the world and we are expected to cheer them on in doing so, and much of the text is unconnected to the plot, taken up by exposition as Pohl lays out his various theories in the form of historical digressions.  The characters are all broad stereotypes or archetypes--the evil old man, the vapid slut, the blundering, glory-seeking, military man, and these characters don't do much of anything--they get introduced, they are the butt of feeble jokes, then the plot resolves itself without them making any decisions.

I repeat: bad.  Merril may have been doing her fellow bolshie a favor by recommending it, but she was doing us readers a disservice!  "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" has reappeared in several Pohl collections, as well as a 1964 Penguin paperback marketed as being for "connoisseurs" and a 1974 Prentice-Hall textbook designed for use in the government schools.  Good grief.


"Another Word for Man" by Robert Presslie

A year ago I read a story by Presslie on Merril's recommendation, "The Creep," and I hated it.  In 2018 I read his story "The Day Before Never" and found it boring.  Yet, somehow, today I have committed to reading two more stories by Presslie.  Now who's the glutton for punishment?

The first blow in this Presslie one-two punch is "Another Word for Man," which debuted in John Carnell's New Worlds and would go on to be included in the second anthology in the Out of this World series edited by Amabel Williams-Ellis and Mably Owen as well as Michael Moorcock's Best of New Worlds.  It seems the SF community, at least over in the green and pleasant land, embraced this story.  Well, let's hope it provides me an opportunity to revise my opinion of Presslie.   

"Another Word for Man" is, thankfully, a competent if pedestrian story in which an alien performs a Christ-like act of sacrifice for a human who doubted it, leading that human to rethink his religious dogmatism.  Presslie, according to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, worked as a "pharmacy manager" and this story's science speculation centers on medicine and biology.

A lobster fisherman from a remote Canadian village pulls up an alien in one of his pots.  This thing, looking like a slug the size of a basketball, has telepathy, as so many aliens in these old stories do.  Its body is flexible and changeable--it can grow gills with which to breathe underwater, if need be, extend tubes with which to breathe air and make sounds, etc.  The lobsterman brings the alien to the little community's de facto leader, the priest.  This man of god decides to keep the alien a secret from the outside world.  Because the alien professes to be a doctor, the priest remands it to the custody of the two physicians at the local doctor's office.  We later learn that the priest and the alien had an argument over religion and the priest holds a grudge.

The alien is an eager beaver and learns all about human physiology from the doctors--soon it is better at diagnosing patients than they are!  The alien laments that human surgery involves cutting people open--among his people, who can change shape with ease, no such cutting is necessary.  When the priest is found to have a massive cancerous growth in his chest that has extended tendrils all through his body (he has been ignoring his chest pain for three years), the alien projects hundreds of cilia into the cleric's body and withdraws all the cancer cells into itself, killing itself but curing the priest, who realizes the alien is one of God's children and the phrase typically translated as "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" should be rendered "Greater love hath no creature of Mine...."

There is a mountain of SF stories out there that show up how crummy humans are by contrasting us with goody goody space aliens, and we can add "Another Word for Man" to the pile, but while there is a passage in which one of the doctors groans that governments spend more on weapons research than cancer research, Presslie in his story here does more showing than telling--he doesn't indulge in tendentious speeches or anything--and the writing is reasonably good.  Acceptable.


"Dial 'O' for Operator" by Robert Presslie

Here we have a good horror story; the horror elements work, and so do the human elements, as the two main characters act in a way that is believable and compelling, and at least one of them actually grows as a person as a result of his ordeal.

A telephone operator answers a call--a prostitute is at the docks, in a phone booth, and claims she is pursued by a blob monster!  All we know of her plight we learn from her dialogue--we are in the same boat as the operator.  Presslie does a good job conveying the tension and fear of both the woman and the operator as he and the police try to help her.  The telephone company employee is initially presented to us as a dull man, but he comes to life as he strives to save this woman.  The police go to the phone booth, but there is no woman, no monster.  A clue convinces the operator that the woman must be calling from the future!  He comes up with a plan to save her, but whether it succeeds or not, whether she escapes or is devoured by the blob, he will never know.

Thumbs up for "Dial 'O' for Operator"--Merril steered us right this time!  The story debuted in John Carnell's Science Fantasy; Carnell reprinted it in an anthology of horror stories by science fiction writers, and it has also reappeared in anthologies on the theme of time.

**********

So we've got three misanthropic stories today in which human beings are shown to be either evil or powerless victims who can only get out of jams through deus ex machina interventions, not their own  initiative.  Pohl's treatment of this theme is tendentious and tedious, lacking an engaging plot or compelling characters and instead filling up two dozen pages with absurd jokes and lame theories.  Presslie's story about a self-sacrificing alien is OK, as, unlike Pohl, his speculative science is somewhat interesting and he makes an effort to construct multiple engaging characters with believable personalities.  Pabel's story might not have the science or can-do hero we expect to see in Astounding, but it nails the human emotion components and is an effective little weird tale I can recommend.  But today's top story is the fourth, Presslie's horror piece about a blob monster and inadvertent communication across time.  This story has a more hopeful theme, depicting ordinary--even fallen--human beings who have a fighting chance when faced with novel and deadly challenges and who grow in response to their terrible adventure; most importantly, it delivers horror thrills and isn't preachy.

We hit a jarring pothole with the Pohl, but otherwise this hasn't been a bad leg in our guided tour through 1958, and I am especially pleased to see a better side of Presslie's work.  Stay tuned for more 1958 SF here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  
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Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Merril-approved 1956 SF stories: Arthur Porges and Robert Presslie

You probably remember that the MPorcius Fiction Log staff is picking stories to read from the list headed HONORABLE MENTION at the back of Judith Merril's 1957 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume.  These are stories printed in 1956 that Merril liked but which for whatever reason didn't end up among the 18 pieces actually reprinted in the book.  The list is alphabetical by author, and we today look at the two P entries, "Masterpiece" by Arthur Porges and "The Creep" by Robert Presslie.  If you wonder what A through O stories we've selected from Merril's list, click click click to your heart's content on the links below.


"Masterpiece" by Arthur Porges 

"Masterpiece" debuted in the hubba hubba men's magazine Escapade alongside pictures of topless ladies and full-page cartoons that slyly hint at bestiality, pedophilia, incest and white slavery.  (There is also a sort of Easter Egg, a little photo of Bettie Page's face.)  One of Merril's projects is to question the boundaries between genre and mainstream fiction and the distinctions between genres, and "Masterpiece" is not listed at isfdb, suggesting that few people recognized "Masterpiece" as SF, or at least SF notable enough to reprint in some anthology or collection.  Well, let's surf on over to the scan of the September 1956 issue of Escapade at the internet archive, world's greatest website, flip past the report on fall fashion, the wine quiz, the profile of a pre-Ginger Tina Louise, and the "blow-by-blow account of what goes on" at a progressive jazz recording session, and read "Masterpiece" and then take a guess as to why Merril recommended it.

"Masterpiece" is mediocre filler, but I guess, as a satire of advertising and people's greed and acquisitiveness, it appealed to Merril's leftist sensibilities.  

One of America's top ad men (he makes $80,000 a year) comes to a dive bar and talks to the the bar tender and the overweight blonde hanging around at the bar, telling them about some of his most successful publicity stunts, like painting a slogan promoting cigarettes in colossal print on the White Cliffs of Dover.  The climax of the story is that he has arranged to have an advertising slogan written on the moon, the same gag we see in Robert Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and in Arthur C. Clarke's "Watch This Space."  

The text of the story is overly long, adding in multiple little sub plots in which people reveal their avarice.  And then there is the fact that the ad text is so long the letters of which it would be composed would be impossible to read with the naked eye (Clarke had just eight characters reproduced on the moon in his story, and one of Heinlein's ideas was that the commies might reproduce the hammer and sickle log up there.)

Barely acceptable.

"The Creep" by Robert Presslie 

It looks like "The Creep" was serialized over two issues of Authentic Science Fiction Monthly and then never reprinted.  It is pretty long--over 60 pages--so let's hope it is good.

"The Creep" is about how the capitalists have been lying to the public in order to manipulate the stock market but a lone hero, a journalist, was willing to tell the people the truth, only to find that the common people preferred to be lied to!  These same capitalists are going to kill us all with their silly competition with the Reds, but luckily some space aliens come along to save us with the help of the journalist and a woman.  Obviously this goop is right up the alley of a pinko like Judith Merril.  

Like some kind of crappy stage play, the first half of "The Creep" takes place in a single location, a bar, and has a small cast, each member of which represents a class of people. 

World famous journalist Sam Garnet is drowning his sorrows.  Garnet was working for the TV news program owned by Grossen Electronics Industries but got fired today because he told the apocalyptic truth on his broadcast.  For one thing, he predicted a nuclear war in the next few days.  (The story never uses specific place names or political identifiers like "USSR" or "the West" or "communist," just allusions, like "our side" and "the other side.")  For another, he revealed that one of Grossen's consumer products, the Creepmeter that measures radiation, is calibrated to underreport how much the radiation of Western and Soviet weapons testing (people call this radiation "the Creep") is poisoning the environment, hiding from the people the fact that even if the impending nuclear war is averted then most people are going to die in a few days anyway from radiation sickness.  And finally, Sam exposed on air the fact that the spheres that recently appeared in Earth orbit are not new Western defense satellites, as the Grossen suits want him to say, but vessels of totally unknown, presumably extraterrestrial, origin!  A woman in the bar in fancy clothes some man bought her, Lena, expresses her anger at Sam for disabusing everybody of their illusions, of puncturing their blissful ignorance.

Presslie pads the length of his childishly tendentious story with lots of filler text about people drinking booze and smoking cigarettes and so on; I don't know, maybe he thinks that builds tension.  When the bar's roof caves in, presumably from a bomb blast as the nuclear war starts, we get detailed descriptions of everybody's physical injuries and psychological symptoms, and then we get Presslie's idea of a suspense scene, a blow-by-blow account of the lifting of a beam off the body of a fallen man that lasts an entire page; sample text below:
With the shifting of the beam his grip was now all wrong.  One arm was bent more than the other.  Max slid his left knee further forward until it pressed beneath his lowermost hand.  He sucked in an enormous gulp of air....

Sam is the truth telling member of the cognitive elite, I guess a stand in for SF readers who, of course, think they are smarter and better educated and more rational than everybody else.  The man who gets killed by the beam represents the good members of the populace, the victim of the capitalist establishment's pursuit of profit.  Lena represents the less savory aspects of the common masses (but don't worry, feminists, she'll redeem herself!)  The owner of the bar turns out to be a communist spy, and represents the USSR and the revolutionary left, and to represent the capitalist bourgeoisie we have Max, a senior financier from Grossen Electronics, come to the bar try to get Sam to go on TV again to take back his predictions that everybody who isn't already in a deep bunker has like 48 hours to live.  The pressure of being trapped in the ruined bar, which everybody is too scared to leave because its lead-lined walls are believed to be providing some protection against the Creep and the radiation from the bomb that (apparently) hit the town, leads to the bourgeois and the commie being exposed as just two sides of the same coin of selfishness and exploitative elitism (as opposed to Sam's and the space aliens' paternalistic elitism.)  Both Max and the Red barkeep want to have sex with Lena in their last hours, and fight over her, and it is we readers who suffer through Presslie's tedious description of the hand-to-hand fight that ensues.  The capitalist is the first to die, and then Sam helps Lena fight the commie, who is also killed.

The first episode of the serial thus ends with only two characters in the lead-shielded bar, Sam the journalist man and Lena, who under the influence of Sam instead of the capitalist or the Bolshevik starts to wisen up. 

The 31 pages of the second and final installment of this dreadful borefest starts with the observation that humans are like cats in that both species have a tenacious will to live.  (SF people love cats.)  Sam and Lena wake up when a space suited figure busts through the rubble blocking the entrance to the ruined bar.  The figure collapses, and behind it Sam can see that one of the alien spheres has crashed across the street, flattening those buildings--it was this alien crash, not a Soviet bomb, that hit the neighborhood, and the man in the space suit is the only alien survivor of the crash. 

It turns out that Sam and Lena are still alive because the crashed sphere is projecting a radiation-damping field that has neutralized the Creep within a radius of like 40 yards.  We get a meticulous description of how Sam figures out how to get into the alien sphere; inside he finds the rest of the crew has died.  Then he and Lena split up to search the radiation-free 80-yard diameter section of city for a medical professional who can keep the alien alive so he can explain how to extend that 80-yards to all of Earth and save the world from the pollution caused by the Cold War arms race.  I could barely believe how much detail Presslie offered us readers in his description of the brass sign in front of the doctor's office, but I wasn't surprised by the play by play account of the surgery the doctor performed on the alien, a scene of five pages.  (The doctor is a drunk who hasn't operated in years, but his contact with Sam and the alien revives him and redeems him, just like they are going to revive the entire human race!)

The alien recovers from open heart surgery in a few hours and then teaches Sam and Lena his language in thirty minutes--this is how efficient the alien language is!  Even though Sam played the role of truth-loving bleeding-heart liberal earlier and Lena was a selfish deluded dope, for a few pages in the closing pages of the story they switch roles; Sam is skeptical, even hostile, to the alien, but Lena, who reveals she was a school teacher before she decided to live off rich men by exploiting her sex appeal, insists that to earn the alien's aid they must bare their souls to E.T.  Explicitly comparing the alien to a parent and implicitly to a priest or god, she confesses the sins of the Earthman (sample sins: "greed for profit, greed for property, greed for territory, and the foulest greed of all--the desire to possess the very souls of other human beings...") to the alien, who agrees to clean the Earth of the radiation.  It is implied that Sam and the alien will teach the human race how to behave in the future.

Bad!  I am against these stories that offer goody goody aliens as foils for evil humanity, and I am against these stories that suggest the liberal West is no better than Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union.  Even worse, this story is very slow and very boring, and is structured poorly, with the sudden switch from "we got bombed" to "it was really an alien crash landing" and the unbelievable evolutions of Sam's and Leda's characters being pretty annoying.  Merril set a trap for us this time, and I fell right into it. 

(I probably wouldn't have fallen into this spiked pit if I had remembered that I read a story by Presslie in 2018 and said it was tedious despite being full of weird sex, violence against women and body horror.  Having a bad memory sometimes leads to suffering!)

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Not a good batch of Merril-approved stories this time around, but no knowledge is wasted, and maybe by lifting up a rock and discovering these obscurities I have done a favor to all of you out there who are maintaining a list of anti-capitalist satires.

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Saturday, August 18, 2018

1965 stories by Keith Roberts, William Spencer and Robert Presslie

My copy 
Here's the fourth book from the new Joachim Boaz wing of the MPorcius library that I'll be reading, New Writings in SF 6, edited by John Carnell.  This is a copy of the American 1971 Bantam printing; this anthology of all new stories first appeared in Britain in 1965 as a hardcover from Denis Dobson and was presented in paperback by Corgi in 1966 and again in 1971.

Today we'll talk about the first three stories in the book, and then tackle the remaining four in our next blog post.  If you want to read what Joachim had to say about New Writings in SF 6 before or after (or instead of 😢) reading my comments, check out his November 2017 post on the book.  If you are desperate to read the stories before getting spoiled by Joachim or me, or after hearing what we have to say, you need not wait--the 1966 Corgi edition of New Writings in SF 6 is actually available at the internet archive.

"The Inner Wheel" by Keith Roberts

I've never read any fiction by Roberts, though I read his article in Brian Ash's Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction four years ago and poked (gentle?) fun at it on this blog.  "The Inner Wheel" is by far the longest story in this anthology, and Carnell uses up the lion's share of his Foreword to this volume discussing it.  I guess this is an important and widely admired story--it has been published numerous times as the title story of a Roberts collection (sometimes advertised as a novel) which has appeared with various interesting covers.  [UPDATE 8/19/18: isfdb labels The Inner Wheel a collection, but in the comments below Paul Fraser agrees with the people at Playboy Press that the designation of "novel" is appropriate.]

"The Inner Wheel" comes across as a self-consciously literary work, with passages full of italics meant to represent a collective consciousness (or "gestalt mind," as Roberts puts it), lots of poetical repetition, a surreal dream sequence in which rust spreads from a decaying train to the surrounding town and people, and plenty of Dickensian names.  Jimmy Strong, an artist, is our main character.  His father James Strong was a scrap dealer who struck it rich by purchasing old World War II vehicles like Bren carriers and half-tracks and then renting them out to film productions.  After his father's funeral, flush with his inheritance, Jimmy goes to the town of Warwell-on-Starr, which people tell him again and again is "nice."

In the town odd things occur that suggest Jimmy's mind is being read and his unspoken desires responded to; when he feels in need of company some World War II vets appear who tell him stories about their service in the Eighth Army, or a dog, or a sexually available woman.  He also has strange dreams, some of which vaguely hint that a  "Wheel" is "driving this town."  Jimmy is determined to figure out the town's strange secret; in some ways "The Inner Wheel" is structured like a detective story or a Western in which the hero arrives at a corrupt small town and confronts its evil establishment, and Roberts includes what I take to be clues that we should think of the story in this way.

Jimmy meets another attractive woman, Anne Nielson, and he engages in a psychological and psionic struggle over her mind and allegiance with the mysterious psykers who rule Warwell and used their powers to attract Jimmy and Anne to the place in hopes of integrating them into their gestalt.  Jimmy (whom late in the story the omniscient narrator sometimes identifies as "Strong" instead of "Jimmy," reflecting one of "The Inner Wheel"'s themes, that of the maturation process, the growing into adulthood of Jimmy the individual and of the entire human race) discovers the weakness of the gestalt mind, that pain felt by one of the psykers is felt by all, and this discovery facilitates his and Anne's escape.  This escape is likely to only be temporary, but we can hope that, just as Jimmy has grown to be a more responsible, less selfish person, so will the psykers of the gestalt, in course of time, grow into their powers and use them more benignly. 

This story isn't bad, but I felt it too long and in spots tedious with too much description, while the characters of Jimmy and Anne are sort of flat and boring.  The story is vague and dreamlike, and I would have preferred something sharp and bold.  "The Inner Wheel" certainly didn't hold my attention like the two Second Story Books Clearance Cart finds I was reading at the time, James Taylor and Martin Davidson's Bomber Crew and Lyndall Gordon's T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, so I perhaps didn't give "The Inner Wheel" the attention it deserves as I was reading it 5 or 10 pages at a time over a series of days.

"Horizontal Man" by William Spencer

Am I crazy, or does this look like
Darth Vader's helmet?
Spencer, who worked in advertising and as a college lecturer in English, has like 16 short stories on isfdb; most appeared in New Worlds during the period John Carnell was editing the magazine (before the editorship was taken up by Michael Moorcock and the magazine became the flagship of the New Wave.)

"Horizontal Man" is one of those stories about how in the future everybody will be immersed in virtual reality games and abandon the real world (remember Kuttner and Moore's 1955 story "Two-Handed Engine"?)  Timon (named perhaps for the skeptical philosopher and/or the Athenian misanthrope and hermit?), an artificial umbilical cord providing all the sustenance he needs, sits in a room before a control panel; he has apparently spent hundreds or thousands of years in that couch!  Via the control panel he can call up any of thousands of fantasies to be pumped into his brain via a cable, including affairs with over 900 different women, but he has experienced every fantasy hundreds and hundreds of times and is bored of them all.  Spencer describes a few of the fantasies--surfing, playing four-dimensional chess, and a date at a night club with a sexy chick.  The author compares the fantasies to recorded music--after a few hundred listens a recording of a song is too predictable and becomes tedious, likewise grow boring the 900 women and the multitudinous variations of a game of chess, once Timon is intimately familiar with their every idiosyncrasy.

This is one of those stories that is more of an idea than a plot-driven narrative.  I thought maybe Timon was going to launch a rebellion or commit suicide, but when Timon is on the brink of boredom-induced insanity a robot just comes along and replaces the memory bank so Timon will have new fantasies to occupy him.  Merely acceptable, on the very brink of too boring (ironic, eh?)

It looks like "Horizontal Man" only ever appeared here in New Writings in SF 6.

"The Day Before Never" by Robert Presslie

Am I crazy, or does this look like
a woman's crotch?
Here's another story which never appeared beyond the various printings of New Writings in SF 6.  Robert Presslie has 40 stories listed at isfdb, and most seem to have seen print in British SF magazines like Carnell's New Worlds and Authentic Science Fiction, which was edited in its last two years by our pal E. C. Tubb.  Blogger Andrew Darlington has an extensive blog post about Presslie if you are curious about this guy and his career.

"The Day Before Never" is set in a sort of post-apocalyptic future Earth which has suffered abominably at the hands of hostile space aliens known as "the Barbarians."  These malefactors bombarded the planet with their "glazer" weapon, which "melts" things, but also preserves them, so that people and buildings struck by this ray become an ooze and actually run together, I guess like if you heated two different crayons that were next to each other and then cooled them when they were half melted, creating a blob one third blue, one third yellow, and one third green.

Our narrator is driving across Eastern Europe in a Ferrari (these post-apocalyptic stories generally include an element of wish fulfillment, providing the characters a chance to create a new and better society or, as with this Ferrari, just the opportunity to enjoy luxuries that were out of their price range before the catastrophe) past all the spectacular and grotesque half-melted people and buildings that are littering the landscape.  In a passage made to order for feminist analysis he looks at the bared breasts of the headless corpse of a teenage girl which is half absorbed into a wall.

Our hero isn't just some car thief--he's a secret agent on a mission for the anti-Barbarian resistance!  After thousands of miles of driving, he meets his contact in Riga, a woman.  The alien Barbarians are able to mimic human beings, so to prove his humanity our hero has to have sex with this woman--the aliens cannot convincingly ape human sexual passion.  (Oh, brother.)  Our narrator and this woman are key participants in a complicated resistance operation which seeks to kill all the aliens by simultaneously detonating a number of explosives set in precisely determined locations all over the world.  This scheme is unconvincing and so is the twist ending to Presslie's story.

Presslie tries to use his tedious and crazy tale as a means of talking about human nature (to what extent will people submit to tyranny to survive and to what extent will they risk their lives to oppose tyranny, and to what extent do both the collaborator and the resister compromise their values in their response to tyranny) and attempts to put across a metaphor in which a society's resistance to invasion is like the human body's resistance to infection, but the plot and style of "The Day Before Never" are not good and render any such ambitions a failure.  I have to give the story a thumbs down.  The noteworthy thing about "The Day Before Never" is the sensational/exploitative elements: the weird sex, the violence against women, and the body horror stuff; unfortunately, none of those components of the tale are entertaining or disgusting enough for me to call this a successful horror or shock story.

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 The back cover of my copy of New Writings in SF 6 has the incongruous heading "SERIOUS BUSINESS" and claims that the stories in the volume represent "fresh new thinking."  The ideas in these three pieces (homo superior in conflict with homo sapiens, hi-tech entertainment leading to decadence, alien invasion, and journeys across a post-apocalyptic landscape) do not feel fresh or new, though I guess they are "serious."  Maybe in our next episode, when we read the rest of the stories in New Writings in SF 6, we really will find some "fresh" ideas?

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Bound within this copy of New Writings in SF 6 is the exact same ad for the Science Fiction Book Club we saw in my 1971 copy of The Yngling, the one which includes a "special coin carrier" in which you send the club a dime to pay for a copy of Anthony Boucher's A Treasury of Great Science Fiction.  I own that two-volume anthology, something which I have bragged about on twitter more than once!



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