MPorcius Fiction Log: Dickson

Showing posts with label Dickson. Show all posts

Thursday, March 19, 2026

J Merril's 5th Best S-F: D Knight, R Bradbury, & G Dickson

Let's read some stories reprinted in Judith Merril's 1960 anthology The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition. I've already read and blogged about three stories from this book: Avram Davidson's "No Fire Burns," Cordwainer Smith's "No, No Not Rogov!", and Carol Emshwiller's "Day at the Beach," I read a version of Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon" in school back in the Eighties. But that still leaves a lot of material in the anthology which I have not yet read. Today let's read three stories from The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, those by editor and critic Damon Knight, Ray Bradbury--in some ways perhaps the most successful of all American SF writers-- and the Dorsai guy, Gordon R. Dickson. We'll probably devote our next blog post to three or four more stories from this book.

Keep in mind that while these stories debuted elsewhere, and have been reprinted in later books, I am reading them today in a scan of a 1961 paperback edition of Merril's anthology.

"The Handler" by Damon Knight (1960)

"The Handler" debuted in an issue of Rogue which is chock full of content from SF authors, including Harlan Ellison's "Final Shtick," which we read a few years ago. This issue seems to have as its theme alcohol--I guess they figured it was pointless to compete with Playboy in the jazz department. I have seen the Table of Contents of this issue on ebay, and Robert Bloch, Robert Silverberg, and Mack Reynolds all contribute articles about booze (William F. Nolan's article is about Dean Martin, which perhaps also qualifies.) Is "The Handler" also about the sauce? Well, in her intro to the story here in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Merril, after telling us how great a guy Knight is, hints that "The Handler" is a caustic attack on the entertainment industry. SF doesn't have to be adventures in strange worlds and speculations on what life might be like in a future of different technologies, customs, and political and economic systems--it can also be a guy making fun of TV!

"The Handler," like 4 pages here in TYBSF5, is a boring joke story about how showbiz people are shallow phonies who are fooling themselves while they fool the public (who are also probably fooling themselves.) A big party is underway! Everybody is drinking! A big handsome guys comes in--he is the hero of the hour! Everybody loves him! Big guy is, apparently, the host or emcee or whatever of a TV show, I guess like a Jack Benny or Steve Allen or Jack Paar sort of figure. The just completed show was a huge success, and will get renewed, and everybody involved is ecstatic! Then comes our twist! The big handsome man is a machine, and the short ugly guy who sits in the machine and operates it climbs out of it to take a break from his hot sweaty work. And all the many people who owe their livelihoods to him are cold to him, find him disgusting, even though they were falling all themselves expressing adoration of the machine, every move of which he controlled. His colleagues urge him to climb back aboard the machine and when he does the love fest for the big handsome guy continues.

Knight provides us yet another reminder that we are all putting on an act at all times to maintain our careers and relationships, and that smart unattractive people envy and resent good-looking people and behind-the-scenes people envy and resent the figureheads who get the glory. "The Handler" isn't bogus, and it has the virtue of being short, but it is banal. So, just a marginal thumbs down rather than a vicious condemnation. Her intro suggests Merril and Knight were friends, and that, and the fact that Merril loves including in her anthologies stories that debuted outside the category SF mags, perhaps suggests why she thought "The Handler" worthy of reprint here, and even in the anthology that collected her favorites from all her annual Best ofs. "The Handler" has also reappeared in Knight collections and many more anthologies, including those that endeavor to define the parameters of the SF canon, prescribe what are the greatest SF stories, like Ursula LeGuin's The Norton Book of Science Fiction and Frederik Pohl's The SFWA Grand Masters: Volume 3.

"The Shoreline at Sunset" by Ray Bradbury (1959)

In the intro to Bradbury's piece in The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition, Merril puts forward a sort of zeitgeist theory that all the good stories of a given year have the same topic or theme:

Against a background of the inevitable ninety per cent of inept or hackster trash, the better stories, as they emerge each year, always show some very definite--and different from the year before--emphasis on one area of speculation or another.

While unfalsifiable nonsense, this theory is sort of a fun way of looking at the world. Anyway, Merril suggests that "The Shoreline at Sunset," like all the best SF of 1959, is about how we define what it means to be human.

Two guys, Tom and Chico, are beachcombers. It seems they have wasted their lives hanging out on the beach, eking out a parlous existence by collecting junk that has washed up on the shore and coins tourists have dropped in the sand, and I guess seducing women, women they sometimes hope will find them marriageable, but which never do. Tom and Chico are no longer young--they are getting grey hair. Tom is talking about leaving the beach and Chico.

As the sun is about to set, an excited young boy approaches Tom and Chico--he and a friend have found a strange woman, washed up on the beach! When the men see her, they find she is a mermaid! Is she dead or alive? They can't be sure--she is pretty inert, but upon touching her the men feel what may be a pulse. Chico thinks they have finally struck it rich, and runs off to get ice to preserve this physical specimen of a heretofore merely mythical species so they can profit from it. He instructs Tom and the kids to make sure the creature doesn't wash away in the rising tide while he is gone.

Chico and Tom are losers with questionable morals. Obviously they should try to help the alien woman, who is probably alive and likely dying. Chico just wants to profit from the woman's tragic situation. Tom, on the other hand, is static, the kind of guy who does nothing, never makes a decision, just stands there and lets the world pass him by. Instead of actively trying to help the woman or actively exploiting her, he just stands there while the waves carry her back to the ocean, we readers hoping she will wake up and go back to whatever life she was leading before misfortune struck her.

Chico returns and it is clear neither of these losers will ever leave the beach or get decent jobs or build a healthy relationship with a woman, and that this fate is meet and just because Tom and Chico are each immoral and/or lack drive.

Merril is of course correct that the story is in part about what it means to be human. The mermaid has a human woman's upper half and a fish's lower half--is she human? Chico treats her like a fish, not a woman, but Tom is not so sure. As for Tom and Chico, their behavior suggests they are less than human, because they either act in a manner that is evil or fail to act at all, behaving like a passive vegetable instead of the erect and intelligent member of a complex society that he has the potential to be. A "real" man supports and contributes to and defends society, these goofs are scavengers divorced from society at best, and are probably better described as parasites or even predators.

The themes and plot of "The Shoreline at Sunset" are good, and it is quite well-written--Bradbury slings the metaphors and descriptions like a master. And there is a lot for the reader to consider, to analyze. For example, why did Bradbury include the two little boys? To remind us that Tom and Chico act like kids, living off society instead of contributing to it and failing to consider the future? Are we readers to hope that the adventure of the mermaid will somehow affect these boys in such a way to ensure they grow up to be decent people and not losers like Tom and Chico?

Thumbs up for "The Shoreline at Sunset!" A solid selection by Merril. The story, perhaps known to our British friends as "The Sunset Harp," first appeared in F&SF and, in the same year, A Medicine for Melancholy, the slightly different British version of which is known as The Day It Rained Forever.

"The Dreamsman" by Gordon R. Dickson (1959)

Here we have an acceptable trifle written by a man Merril, in her introduction, indicates is a singer and guitar player who performs SF songs he composes in cooperation with Poul Anderson and Theodore Cogswell. "The Dreamsman" is something of a joke story that sort of mildly spoofs SF commonplaces, but it isn't that absurdist or bitter and doesn't feel like a subversive satire, just a bit of fun. For some reason it is written in the present tense.

"The Dreamsman" is one of those stories about how psykers feel alone and then meet fellow psykers, and is also about people who learn about the secret cabals at war in the shadows who are determining the course of history totally unbeknownst to us normies, as well as one of those stories in which aliens who are better than humans are judging whether we can join the galactic federation.

An old guy--some 184 years old!--is a psyker. One morning while shaving he detects two other psykers, a married couple. He goes to them. They are all hopped up to join other psykers and form a group to contribute to society, to use their superpowers to help people in trouble, you know, like a kid who fell down a well, and promote unspecified progress. The old geezer says that this idealism will not work, that the thing for them to do is to join the colony of psykers on Venus. He takes them to a military base to a rocket--the old geez clouds the minds of the military personnel on the scene or even go to sleep.

Then comes the twist ending. From out of the sky, another psyker, one much more powerful than the old guy, appears. This psyker, an alien, says that the old geezer is a conservative who is killing the psykers he finds because he doesn't want the world to change--the rocket is a death trap! There is no Venus colony! The old geez isn't even as powerful as he seems--half the psychic stuff he does, like telekinesis, is just him using hypnosis to trick people. The alien laments that this old guy has been retarding human progress for many decades, that if not for him, the Earth could have joined the galactic federation ages ago. But the aliens can't kill or even imprison this troublemaker, violence and force being forbidden them. The alien saves the couple, taking them to some real colony far away.

Not bad, but no big deal; competent filler that gets away with using old (but beloved!) ideas by using them a little knowingly, with an ironic wink. Why Merril thinks it is so good, I don't know, maybe she thinks it is more subversive than I do, that its message is that cautious and careful people who follow the rules to preserve what they have--like the old geez, who has a strict dietary regimen and scrupulously follows the traffic laws--or maintain a strict moral code--like the aliens who refuse to use violence to help Earth and humanity advance--are holding us back. Maybe as a socialist, Merril saw laws and traditions that, for example, respect private property, and those who uphold them, as ridiculous obstacles keeping us from building a workers' utopia right here in America.

"The Dreamsman" debuted in Fred Pohl's paperback anthology series Star, and would reappear in 1985 and in 2017 in Dickson collections.

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Obviously the Bradbury story is far and away superior to Knight's and Dickson's contributions. But maybe when next we meet we'll read a story hand picked by Merril for The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition that can give the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles a little competition.

Friday, January 16, 2026

Galaxy, Sept '52: K MacLean, E E Smith, G R Dickson, and J H Schmitz

In response to a blog post in which I mildly praised "The Faithful Friend," a story by Evelyn E. Smith, a woman who has over fifty short story credits at isfdb, one of my knowledgeable readers recommended Smith's "Tea Tray in the Sky." "Tea Tray in the Sky" debuted in the September 1952 issue of H. L. Gold's Galaxy, an issue which also includes a discourse on heroism in fiction and in real life from Gold, reviews by Groff Conklin of collections of old stories by David H. Keller, A. E. van Vogt and John W. Campbell, Jr, and brandy new stories by Katherine MacLean, Gordon R. Dickson and James H. Schmitz. Let's get a peek at what kind of product Gold was selling back in the fall of 1952, nineteen years before I was born, by reading MacLean's, Dickson's and Schmitz's stories as well as Smith's.

"The Snowball Effect" by Katherine MacLean

Looks like I've read three stories by MacLean over the years. We've got "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" published in Ben Bova's Analog, and "Unhuman Sacrifice" and "Feedback," both from Campbell's Astounding. I liked two of those three stories; let's hope "The Snowball Effect" makes that score 3 to 1.

The narrator of "The Snowball Effect" has recently been made dean and president of a university and charged with making the university profitable. He goes to the head of the Sociology Department and asks this joker to explain how the Sociology Department can bring in money. The professor claims he has come up with mathematical formulas that can describe and predict how organizations grow or shrink in size and power. He tells the narrator that, if given six months, he can prove the value of sociology, and the prof and the prez develop a plan to experiment on some local people, try to make their little organization grow.

Using math equations, the sociology prof develops a scientifically designed constitution and organization chart for a local women's sewing club and gives it to the most ambitious and competent member of the club. The twist of the story is that, four months later, when the prez checks in on the sewing club, he finds the competent woman has revolutionized the sewing club, turning it into a sort of social welfare NGO and using the super-scientific constitution and organization chart to grow the club into an entity of thousands. The objective of this organization is to revolutionize the town, fashion it into "the jewel of the United States" with "a bright and glorious future—potentially without poor and without uncared-for ill—potentially with no ugliness, no vistas which are not beautiful—the best people in the best planned town in the country...." By the sixth month mark the organization is huge, and has incorporated into itself businesses and politicians. The protagonists predict in a decade or so the organization will take over America and then the world. They expect that the organization will then, as all big institutions do, collapse, perhaps throwing the entire world into chaos, as when the Roman Empire collapsed.

This is an idea story that maybe is supposed to be funny, rather than a human story with suspense or human relationships, and everything about the idea is questionable, but "The Snowball Effect" isn't too long and it isn't poorly written or constructed, and I guess the idea is sort of interesting, so we're giving it a rating of acceptable.

I may think the story is just OK, but lots of editors are into it, maybe because it is very much about science, like a traditional science fiction story should be, but instead of romanticizing a hard science or engineering, disciplines anybody can see are awesome without having to be told they are awesome, in "The Snowball Effect" MacLean ups the level of difficulty she faces by tackling the task of trying to portray as effective one of those soft sciences we all instinctively know is a scam. You can find "The Snowball Effect" in H. L. Gold's Second Galaxy Reader, Brian Aldiss' Penguin Science Fiction, Damon Knight's Science Fiction Inventions, multiple anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name printed on their covers, Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell's Ascent of Wonder, the Vandermeers' Big Book of Science Fiction, and still other publications. I daresay "The Snowball Effect" is a wish fulfillment fantasy for leftists, who dream of technocratic elites using mathematical formulas to control the masses and reshape society to their own specifications, but, to her credit, MacLean in her story leaves room for the reader to believe she is suggesting that giving an organization the key to easily conquering the world might be a mistake, that "The Snowball Effect" is a horror story rather than a utopian story.

"Tea Tray in the Sky" by Evelyn E. Smith

This story, the story that brought us to this issue of Galaxy, is a long plot-light satire of television, advertising, the metastasizing of the Christmas season far beyond December 24th and 25th, and, most importantly, the cult of tolerance and perhaps mass immigration. We might say the story is about the internal contradictions of Western liberalism, or democratic capitalism, or whatever we want to call the ideology, mores and norms of the mid-20th-century United States.

It is the future of intergalactic civilization. The human race is in intimate daily contact with dozens of other intelligent species. In the interest of tolerance, the taboos (spelled here "tabus") of all races are enforced by law almost everywhere in the populated universe. For example, in New York City on Earth, if you want to eat you have to do so very discretely, alone and out of sight, because one race of aliens finds eating as gauche to talk about and as private a matter as you or I might consider defecating. Everyone in the inhabited universe must wear gloves and a hat because there are races of aliens who never show their fingers or the tops of their heads. And so on--Smith gives many examples. Perhaps most alarming is the outlawing of monogamy--marriage is forbidden, free love is mandatory. There are, apparently, government spies and informers everywhere who will make sure you are thrown in prison for uttering any one of the verboten expressions or or performing any of the forbidden behaviors inscribed on the ever-expanding list of taboos imported from every cover of the known universe.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a young man who has spent his entire life in a sort of monastery or retreat in California, having been brought there as a young child. Before advancing to the next level of membership in "the Brotherhood," he has decided to see what life is like in the mainstream world. He takes an airplane ride to New York, and "Tea Tray in the Sky" story describes his experience of culture shock, offering us one farcical joke after another. Besides all the wacky taboos, there is the fact that it is July, and New York is covered in red and green decorations because Christmas is approaching, and, more importantly, the ubiquity of television; TVs are everywhere, pumping out hard-sell advertising, and it is illegal to turn them off, as that would be an infringement of free enterprise. This society is strongly committed to free trade and the market economy--the word "tariff" is a dirty one and price controls are not exercised.

"Tea Tray in the Sky" seems to dramatize how some liberal values, like market economics, tolerance, freedom of movement, if pursued and defended to the nth degree, can infringe on other liberal values, like free speech and freedom of association. Smith's story may also express the annoyance of publishers and broadcasters at having to craft their content with an eye to not offending religious people and anti-communists, and maybe even frustration at the way average white Americans may have been expected to alter their behavior to accommodate blacks and immigrants.

Anyway, the protagonist, after experiencing a New York full of aliens of all types where you can't get married or eat in public and where you have to scrupulously watch what you say and you can't even walk more than two hundred yards because the sight of you strolling around may trigger depression in aliens who have no feet, decides to return to the Brotherhood, where, and I guess this is sort of a twist ending, there are human female residents as well as human male, so he can cultivate the sort of sexual relationship and family life considered normal in the 1950s USA.

"Tea Tray in the Sky" is sort of interesting as an historical document, in particular because issues like mass immigration and tariffs and infringements on free speech in the interest of tolerance are so central to the politics of Western nations today in the Trump Era. But as a piece of fiction it is not terribly compelling, it being variations on the same few jokes--bizarre taboos and annoying TV commercials--repeated again and again.

Another acceptable story.

H. L. Gold included "Tea Tray in the Sky" in the Second Galaxy Reader along with MacLean's "Snowball Effect." The story would reappear in the 21st century in Smith collections and in an anthology of stories from Galaxy penned by women.

"The Mousetrap" by Gordon R. Dickson

Here we have one of those stories which opens with the protagonist not knowing who he is or where he is. Dickson describes our protagonist exploring a brightly lit landscape with a house on it in some detail, the flowers and grass and paths and rooms blah blah blah. Though the area is lit there is no sun in the sky, and the main character, when he walks away from the house but then comes upon it again, realizes he is on some kind of sphere, like a tiny planet or something.

Gradually our guy begins to regain his memory, and we get a picture of a crazy future interstellar civilization centered on Earth. Our hero was born on Earth, which faces spectacular overpopulation, which causes an unemployment problem. The shortage of work is exacerbated by the fact that people who get rich on one of Earth's many colonies return to Earth to take the plum jobs. So, like so many others, when our protagonist came of working age he was exiled to the colonies.

Our guy loved Earth; in particular, he loved moonlit nights. He worked hard, for years and years, to get back to Earth. The economy of the colonies is fast growing, and trade amongst the various colonies and Terra is brisk, and there is a lot of government corruption and onerous red tape and, as a result, lots of black market and smuggling activity. By necessity, anybody who engages in interstellar commerce on any scale has to engage in all sorts of bribery and special favors done and that sort of thing. Our hero became an expert at knowing who to bribe, how to bribe them, and whatever else it takes to get shipments hither and thither efficiently through the maze of unjust laws and sketchy lawbreakers. Eventually somebody hired him for a big job and he took the huge amount of cash they gave him to use for bribes stole it for use in getting back to Earth. He was eventually arrested and imprisoned for the theft, but at least he was on Earth and having bought citizenship with the stolen money he looked forward to living the rest of his life on Terra after getting out of prison in ten years or so. His memory goes dark after his conviction--he doesn't know how he ended up on this lonely little brightly lit world.

Some nonhuman aliens land their spacecraft on the little world and they seem friendly enough but post hypnotic suggestion (that he has been hypnotized has been foreshadowed) leads to our hero throwing a switch which traps the aliens in a forcefield. The aliens are stuck in the trap so long they die. Then a government ship arrives and an official explains to our protagonist what is up. The hero was "volunteered" for duty manning a trap satellite planted beyond the current reaches of the human space empire. Such satellite traps provide the Terran government specimens for study; this gives Terra a leg up on aliens we haven't formally met yet, facilitating the incorporation of them into our empire.

The tragic ending is that our guy is not only now complicit in murder that facilitates imperialism, but can't go back to Earth because, having been in close contact with mysterious aliens, he must be quarantined for the rest of his life on a planet on the edge of human space. To add insult to injury, this planet doesn't have a moon! Our moonlight-loving guy will never see moonlight again!

This story is OK. A lot of the exposition about the Earth economy and description of the trap satellite and even the protagonist's career seems superfluous--it isn't bad but it isn't very entertaining intrinsically and it doesn't really add to the plot. The plot gimmick, of a criminal manning a trap for aliens he doesn't even realize is a trap, is similar to the gimmick of Eric Frank Russell's "Panic Button," which appeared in Astounding in 1959. One has to wonder if Dickson's story here inspired or influenced Russell and/or Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in the creation of that later (and I have to admit, more entertaining) story.

"The Mousetrap" would be included in the oft-reprinted Dickson collection The Star Road and a German anthology which repurposed as its cover the cover of Richard Lupoff's Space War Blues, which is odd, as it is a pretty specific image, what with its Confederate States of America imagery; there is no Lupoff fiction included in the book--could one of the included stories also be about some kind of Confederacy in space?

"The Altruist" by James H. Schmitz

This is probably the best story we're reading today, or at least the most ambitious, as it integrates philosophical ideas and SF speculations (and presents them seriously, not as some kind of joke or satire) and a human story with suspense and human relationships. Schmitz's ideas revolve around the mysterious workings of the human mind; Schmitz proposes the theory that people are essentially altruistic and, often subconsciously, always trying to help society and others, and he takes as a main theme of the story knowledge and ignorance of quotidian things, the way we notice and fail to notice things, consciously, subconsciously, and due to the manipulations of others.

Our protagonist is a colonel with a desk job, head of an important department in a regimented, authoritarian future state, the product of a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions following a period of hardship known as the Hunger Years. One day the colonel can't find his scissors. Then they mysteriously turn up just where they should be, but weren't a few minutes before. The same day, a person from the statistics department brings up the subject of "Normal Loss;" inexplicably, for many years, two percent of supplies of many types have been vanishing without a trace.

The colonel is an intelligent and thorough man, as he has needed to be to rise in the current efficiency-obsessed, rigidly organized society in which the job performance of individuals blessed with professional government positions is carefully tracked and those who fail to measure up are are coldly, even callously, demoted and sent to toil among the undifferentiated masses of common people. The colonel methodically uses logic, research in books, and experiments to uncover a mind-blowing reality about his world--a whole tribe of people has opted out of society and live like mice in the recesses of the world via the use of psychic powers. These people can influence a normie's brain so adeptly that the normie can't see things right in front of him, or hear sounds, or remember this or that, etc. The invisible people live by stealing food and other necessities, using their psychic abilities to conceal any evidence of the theft. Can the colonel, who isn't exactly happy in this authoritarian society, join this secret parasitic society of drop outs? After all, if he was able to detect them, he must have something in common with them; perhaps they are recruiting him, allowing him to see them?

There are some twists and turns in the plot, with the colonel falling in love with one of the invisible people and deciding to commit suicide when it looks like the invisible people have rejected him because he demoted an incompetent and incompatible subordinate, but in the end it is clear that the invisible woman who has caught his fancy is also in love with him and he joins this invisible tribe, and we readers are given the hint that the colonel will lead the invisible people in a successful effort to make society less oppressive. "The Altruist" in basic outlines follows the old SF template of a guy in a less than ideal society getting into contact with the secret underground and having to choose whether or not to join them in reforming or overthrowing the current order.

I think this is probably the most admirable of today's four stories, but I am not in love with it. I'm not sure Schmitz really gets the story's two themes--the theme of noticing and not noticing and avoiding notice and the theme of how we are all acting altruistically even if we don't know it--to mesh all that well; they seem to be parallel and distinct rather than complementary. Does the altruism angle even contribute to the plot? Does it even make sense? Aren't the invisible people acting selfishly rather than altruistically? Is the colonel's desire to abandon his job and leave society because he's in love with some woman he just met altruistic?

A number of events and characters in the story left me feeling similarly uneasy, at least at first, wondering what they signified, what they had to do with the story's plot or themes; I'm not sure if this reflects unclear writing on Schmitz's part or the fact that I am too dim to easily grasp Schmitz's subtlety. Specific examples (I include these for people who have read the story--feel free to enlighten me in the comments) are the question of the relationship between the statistician and the invisible people, the feelings of the secretary for the colonel, and why the colonel thinks, erroneously, that the invisible people will no longer contact him after he demotes the troublemaker. There's also the matter of whether the colonel really was going to commit suicide, or if it was some kind of ploy to get the attention of the invisible woman.

Again we're calling a story from Galaxy's September 1952 issue acceptable, though recognizing that this story is on the higher end of the acceptable spectrum. "The Altruist" was reprinted in English in the 2002 collection Eternal Frontier, but if you can read the language of Moliere, Voltaire and Proust, you can enjoy "The Altruist" in a 1976 French anthology of stories about telepaths.

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I guess I'm feeling wishy washy today, unable to make decisive judgments of these stories. Or maybe all four of them really are middling or competent but flawed. Or maybe I am the flawed one, maybe I am smart enough to recognize the value of stories that lack sex and violence, but not smart enough to enjoy them.

It has been like half a dozen posts about 1950s short stories, so we'll be shifting gears for the next post; stay tuned, we may find the sex and violence our animalistic subconsciouses crave!

Thursday, May 30, 2024

Analog, Jan 1975: Larry Niven, Gordon R Dickson & Katherine MacLean

We just read four of Larry Niven's 1960s Known Space stories, two of them starring Beowulf Shaeffer. Let's today read a 1975 Beowulf Shaeffer story, "The Borderland of Sol," which debuted in an issue of Ben Bova's Analog that has a great cover by John Schoenherr. We'll read "The Borderland of Sol" in a scan of the magazine, which also includes stories by Barry Malzberg, Gordon R. Dickson, and Katherine MacLean. Malzberg's "January 1975," an epistolary alternate universe thing that is apparently an attack on Analog's fanbase, I read in 2021 and declared weak. The Dickson story looks like a bizarre experiment but we'll try it anyway. Katherine MacLean I have never read before, but wikipedia has quotes from Damon Knight, Brian Aldiss and Theodore Sturgeon asserting "she has few peers," can "do the hard stuff magnificently," and employs "beautifully finished logic," so I guess I'll give her a try.

Before attacking the fiction I'll point out that I found P. Schuyler Miller's book column interesting. He gushes about Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, which I have not read, and also reviews Christopher Priest's The Inverted World, reacting to it much like I did, and E.C. Tubb's Zenya, which he seems to have liked more than did I.

"The Borderland of Sol" by Larry Niven

"The Borderland of Sol" starts with lots of references to the adventures of narrator Beowulf Shaeffer that we read about in Neutron Star. Two years have passed since he rescued and avenged that ten-foot-tall sculptor, and Beowulf feels like returning to Earth--the woman he is in love with, the woman who can't leave Earth for psychological reasons, is now the mother of two children by a friend of Beowulf's, genius scientist Charles Wu (Wu is so smart and healthy that the Earth eugenics bureaucrats who forbid albino Beowulf to breed on Terra have given Wu permission to have as many children as he can produce) and Beowulf wants to return to Earth to be a father to them. It's a small galaxy, and Beowulf runs into Wu on a high gravity planet and the two of them decide to journey to Earth together on the heavily armed government ship that is disguised as a mundane cargo vessel; in charge of this interstellar Q-ship is a minor character from one of the earlier Beowulf Shaeffer stories, law enforcement official Ausfaller.

Ships have been disappearing in the further reaches of the Solar System, and theories as to why range from space pirates to space monsters; Ausfaller hopes to catch the mysterious menace with his camouflaged war machine. Our three heroes get to the Solar System and are soon subjected to a mysterious force that makes their hyperdrive disappear. Wu collects background data and reads theory as he puzzles over the question of what happened to their hyperdrive and all the lost ships (it is all linked to the question of whether we live in an expanding or a steady state universe, black holes, and the mystery of the Tunguska meteorite) while Ausfaller and Beowulf do the detective work of figuring out who is responsible for the disappearances. Out here in the cometary region of the Solar System lives another genius scientist at his fully staffed research station. Can this guy be the inventor or discoverer of a superweapon that is being used to destroy all those ships? Even if he isn't responsible, it makes sense for Wu to pick his brain--maybe his fellow genius can provide clues as to what is going on and who really is to blame.

So, Beowulf and Wu pay this boffin a visit, bringing, hidden on their persons, advanced weapons and defensive equipment provided them by Ausfaller, who, for his part, stays behind, hidden aboard his warship. The ending of "The Borderland of Sol is a little like a James Bond story, when Bond goes to visit the villain and we readers don't know if the villain recognizes 007 as a danger to him or not. And like in a Bond story, Wu and Beowulf get captured. Ausfaller's weapons and Beowulf's dexterity save our heroes, after the villain has fully explained his criminal enterprise as well as why he went rogue (women wouldn't have sex with him.) The villain and his lead henchman are dramatically hoist by their own petard.

I don't understand the science in "The Borderland of Sol"--the villain has control over a teeny tiny black hole and has been using it to cripple and rob ships and then dispose of the evidence, but the effects the black hole has on various objects seems pretty inconsistent--sometimes it makes entire ships and asteroids vanish in a flash, other times it makes a man disappear but another man in the same room is not affected. Maybe it makes sense, and maybe I would understand it if I really put my mind to it, but life is short. And "The Borderland of Sol" is still a decent adventure story.

Decent enough to win the Hugo for Best Novelette! "The Borderland of Sol" was later included in Niven collections like Tales of Known Space and a few anthologies like Jerry Pournelle's Black Holes.

"The Present State of Igneos Research" and "Ye Prentice and Ye Dragon" by Gordon R. Dickson

This is an elaborate and silly joke. "The Present State of Igneos Research" is a discussion of the poem that follows it, "Ye Prentice and Ye Dragon" ("igneos" is the scientific word for "dragon.") The recently discovered manuscript of the poem, we are told, is written on medieval paper with medieval ink, but various clues indicate it was written by a modern person, and thus poem constitutes proof that dragons are real and can travel through time; the text of the poem is evidence that dragons are not the enemies of mankind but in fact have a symbiotic relationship with human beings.

This parody of an academic paper is five pages long, and the poem (of 34 quatrains) is seven pages long, though much of those seven pages is taken up by illustrative cartoons by Jack Gaughan. The poem is kind of annoying to read, the words being spelled in what I guess is Middle English fashion, or a joke version thereof. The poem tells the story of a dragon who has grown obese, and can no longer fly. A brave young man harasses the dragon, so that it runs and loses weight and can then fly; these two become friends and send each other a letter every Christmas thereafter.

A waste of time that nowadays is vulnerable to charges it platforms fatphobia and human savior narratives. Dickson here also triggers one of my pet peeves, the story in which the traditional symbol of evil--the ogre, the vampire, or as here the dragon--is really the good guy. MPorcius Fiction Log is anathematizing "The Present State of Igneos Research" and "Ye Prentice and Ye Dragon" but Dickson's capriccio has big league supporters; Ben Bova included this exercise in a "best of" Analog anthology and Stanley Schmidt included it in an anthology of joke stories from Analog.

"The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" by Katherine MacLean

The pleasant Kelly Freas illustration for this story is making me fear it is another joke story.

Like Freas' illustration, "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" is pleasant but nonsensical. In the way Ray Bradbury sometimes does, MacLean here transports into the future and into space stereotypical American people of the 19th or 20th centuries. Our narrator is eleven and he lives a life much like that of poor rural folk in the period before space travel, but he's living it in the asteroid belt. His family--a single mother, a bunch of kids, and a bunch of farm animals--lives in a small space station shaped like a barrel that I guess is the size of a suburban house, growing food inside the structure and trading with other such settlers of the belt as well as with a general store in a similar orbit. As we'd expect of a single mother living in the rural South or Middle West, Mom is a dedicated Christian and she warns her kids not to get involved with gambling and with loose women.

The plot concerns how the narrator's older brother leaves to get a job in a foundry and on a visit home two weeks later brings with him a sexy dancing girl he met at a casino and whom he plans to marry. Mom is not crazy about her son getting mixed up with a stripper, but she is quickly pacified when her son makes clear how serious he is about making his fiancé an honest woman.

Besides, the dancing girl was tricked into being what we might now call a sex worker. She has an indentured servitude contract with the men who financed her trip to the casino from Earth and, having skipped out on them, they are after her. Thinking the house is an abandoned ruin, the stripper's employers shoot at it in order to scare the stripper. The narrator's family uses their ingenuity to neutralize these thugs and call for help. In the end, the narrator's older brother buys out the dancer's contract, she gets a job in an office at the foundry and they live happily ever after; our narrator resolves to get a job at the foundry himself when he is older so he can snag a sexy girl of his own.

This is a trifling story, but entertaining enough. I find the way MacLean has lifted her characters and plot from traditional mainstream fiction a little annoying--such people and problems are a product of their time and place, and the future in the asteroid belt would produce different personalities and challenges than rural America before the space race--but MacLean's style and pacing and descriptions are good, and she does come up with some interesting technical speculations, like how people patch their orbiting homes when hit by a meteor or gunfire.

MacLean uses a strategy here in "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" that we see Heinlein use--keeping secret until the end of the story some fact that, when we learn it, might change the way we view the story we have just read. We don't learn the age or sex of "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" until the very end of the tale. Themes of self sufficiency and the character of people on the frontier also remind me of Heinlein.

I can mildly recommend "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl." It would be reprinted in the MacLean collection The Trouble with You Earth People, the cover of which has the same Freas image as is found on the title page of "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" here in Analog, and in anthologies about the frontier beyond Earth: a 1979 one by Jerry Pournelle and a 1986 one by the team of Asimov, Greenberg and Waugh, this one directed at kids; in the intro to Young Star Travelers, Asimov tries to convince young people that their parents are overcrowding and polluting the Earth to the point that it will soon be unlivable and so "We simply need to get off Earth." A downer, but more hopeful than the sorts of messages kids are getting today, I reckon.

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I have problems with both the Niven and MacLean stories, but they still work as adventure stories that offer speculations about what life will be like in the spacefaring future, including fun ideas about what sort of equipment and supplies people will need to survive the inevitable mishaps that will occur out there in the vacuum. While Niven and MacLean serve up traditional meat and potatoes SF fare, Dickson's contribution is on its surface subversive and experimental but in fact fundamentally hollow and frivolous and is being categorically rejected by this finicky eater.

I'll probably read more of Niven's Known Space stories in the future, and look into more stories by MacLean, but Dickson, I don't know.

Friday, May 10, 2024

Merril-approved 1958 stories by Gordon R. Dickson

In our last episode I condemned a story Judith Merril claimed was one of the greatest of 1962. Today we shift back in time four years to look at three stories from 1958 which Merril thought worthy of her recommendation, all three of them by Gordon R. Dickson, a writer to whom I have paid limited attention. In 2014, I read Dickson's contribution to Five Fates and said I liked his themes of individualism and exploration but found his story ruinously slow and poorly written. Last year I read "Flat Tiger" and called it a "dopey waste of time." In those long past days before R.M.S. MPorcius Fiction Log set sail for its inevitable rendezvous with an iceberg, I read a few things by Dickson and I recall finding them mediocre. Dickson and I haven't clicked, but maybe my distaste for his work is an artifact of small sample size, maybe among today's three stories there will be one or more pieces that will show Dickson at his best or see him doing things which coincide with my own tastes. Cross your fingers!

"The Christmas Present"

I hate Christmas. I hate all the holidays! Wracking my brain trying to find the right present, then the agony upon giving somebody the wrong present ("Why would you think I wanted this? It's like you don't even know me!") Pretending to like the presents I receive that will just take up room and collect dust. Taking down the pictures and vases I actually like to replace them with geegaws in the shape of pumpkins, turkeys, Santa Claus, pine trees, snowmen, hearts--whatever the calendar decrees--and then spending hours lugging all that stuff up and down the treacherous basement stairs (after the hours spent trying to find the stuff packed away down there 10 months ago.)

Well, that's neither here nor there; we are not here to listen to me vent, but to talk about Gordon R. Dickson's "The Christmas Present," a story that debuted in the same issue of F&SF as Brian Aldiss' "The New Father Christmas" (we read it in 2018), Richard Matheson's "Lemmings" (we read it last month) and Theodore Sturgeon's "A Touch of Strange," which we will read when we get to Merril's 1958 "S"s. People seem to like "The Christmas Present;" it has been reprinted in at least four different anthologies and two different Dickson collections.

This is a very sappy sentimental story, like a children's Christmas TV special. A small boy and his parents have emigrated to a new planet and live on their farm by a swampy river. The boy has made friends with a native, a sort of intelligent jellyfish the size of a housecat that lives in the water near the farmhouse. This is the colonists' first Christmas on the new planet, and the little boy is sad when he sees that their Christmas tree is decorated with odds and ends and not with nice ornaments like the tree he saw last year on the colony ship. But Mom explains that Christmas is about love and so the tree is beautiful anyway because it represents their love.

The little boy and his mother explain Christmas to the jellyfish, and the little boy gives the jellyfish a gift, one of the toy spacemen his parents made him from clay and paint, the astrogator. The jellyfish wants to give a gift in return. The father of the little human family is away, travelling via boat, and due to return tomorrow. Mom is worried that a river monster will attack her husband. The jellyfish swims away to kill the river monster it knows is lurking along Dad's route--this is his gift. The jellyfish can generate electricity and so is able to kill the monster, which is like the size of a hippo or elephant or something, but is himself killed in the fight. Dickson doesn't come out and say it, but the jellyfish has sacrificed himself for others, like Jesus Christ did. The final paragraph of the story seems to be describing the jellyfish ascending into heaven, guided by the toy astrogator it clutches in its dead tentacles--the human colonists have saved the jellyfish's soul by bringing to him the good news about Jesus.

It is remarkable to see such an audaciously Christian story in a science fiction magazine--while it is true that some of the most innovative, talented and critically acclaimed SF writers, like Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty, are committed Christians, most SF writers (and editors!) are either commies or libertarians who think religion is a scam that shackles people and think that missionaries are not saving the natives by teaching them about Christianity but corrupting them. "The Christmas Present" is too sappy for me, but it is well-structured and well-paced and all that, it achieves its goals, and I can't help but admire its commitment, so we'll call it acceptable.

"The Question"

This story is reasonably well-written and entertaining, and I guess it has some point to make about individualism, diversity and human resiliency, but the point is a little opaque, perhaps intentionally so.

Humans and humanoid aliens are engaged in a ground war over some planet, a war in which infantry men fire rifles and machine guns and throw grenades at each other perhaps reminiscent of the war underway during Dickson's own US Army service in the 1940s. It looks like the humans are doomed to be defeated and lose the planet.

As "The Question" begins, we are in an office with some high ranking aliens. The subordinate alien plays a film for his superior--the film was taken by secret cameras in a bunker or pillbox in which four human soldiers, retreating from a larger enemy force, took shelter. Most of Dickson's story describes the last stand of these humans in the redoubt, shooting out the loopholes at the attacking aliens, husbanding their resources, arguing amongst themselves, treating wounds, and their final defeat and deaths. In the end of the story it is explicitly stated that the aliens lack individuality ("Each, unlike our own race" says one of the aliens, "has his own personal philosophy") and Dickson, in the dialogue of the four humans, highlights how each man has his own personality, opinions and ways of looking at the world that are radically different from those of his fellows. One guy is a Christian and prays, while another, an atheist, curses him out for praying. One guy has a racist hatred of the aliens, calling them "animals" and objecting when another soldier offhandedly refers to them as "men," while a more open-minded soldier feels guilty over shooting down aliens and wishes he could learn more about them and their culture. At the end of the story we learn that the aliens took the film to try to figure out why humans fight so hard, despite the overwhelming odds facing them, as the aliens are contemplating trying to take over other parts of the galaxy under human control, but that the film has not given them a clear answer.

The account of the fighting is pretty entertaining, and Dickson's dialogue here is fine, so the story is a smooth read. But what is the point of "The Question"'--does Dickson suggest an answer to the aliens' questions of why humans fight so hard even when there is little hope? Maybe the point of the story is that human behavior is inexplicable, but maybe Dickson is suggesting that human beings are both individualistic and communal, that men will risk their lives and make sacrifices for other men despite religious or political differences. We might also see a Christian bias to the story, and perhaps some jibes at conventional liberal sensibilities--the Christian soldier is self-sacrificing, while the atheist soldier is the racist one and is the least effective as a fighting man and the least psychologically stable.

I can give "The Question" a mild recommendation. It hasn't been anthologized, but is included in two Dickson collections.

"Gifts"

This is a philosophical story about the justness of charity that you could extrapolate to related topics like the welfare state and socialism. When you give handouts to people, are you really helping them, or are you robbing them of the experience of achievement, perhaps robbing their lives of meaning? "Gifts" comes down on the side of those skeptical of or hostile to handouts.

A suburban father in mid-century America works at a pharmacy; he has a pretty wife as well as a son and a pet cocker spaniel. He hopes to one day buy the pharmacy from the boss. Aliens that more or less look like humans pay him a visit. These aliens say their civilization is much like ours, but further along in its development. They have solved many of the problems to be found on 20th-century Earth, disease and famine and so on, and they can solve ours for us if we ask them to. The junior pharmacist has been chosen at random from among the responsible people of Earth to choose whether Earth will accept or reject this alien charity. The aliens perform astonishing feats to prove they can do what they say--these feats take the form of making wishes of the pharmacist and his wife come true.

The pharmacist is given time to decide whether or not to accept the charity. He talks to his wife. He sits in his home office and thinks about the changes that will occur if the Earth suddenly receives all kinds of super technology. He takes a walk and looks at the sky and at flowers. He has dreams and nightmares. Finally he decides to reject the alien gift and tells the aliens that he feels that "we ought to get it for ourselves."

"Gifts" is competent, but not thrilling or moving or anything, partly because you assume all along that the protagonist is going to reject the charity; it feels like a filler story. We'll call it acceptable.

"Gifts" would go on to be reprinted in the Dickson collection In Iron Years and the volume of Isaac Asimov's Magical Worlds of Fantasy on wishes.

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These stories aren't bad--they are better than the Dickson stuff I've read in the past--but I'm not in love with them, either. I won't avoid Dickson in the future, but I don't think I'll be seeking him out particularly, either.

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We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are reading selected stories from the list headed "Honorable Mentions" at the back of Judith Merril's 1959 SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume. The list is organized alphabetically by author name and, having today finished up the "D"s, next time we do this we'll look at some "E"s.

Monday, April 24, 2023

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

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

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

Abernathy and Aldiss
Anderson, Allen and Banks

Barrow, Beaumont and Blish

Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler

Carter, Clarke and Clifton

Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen

"Internal Combustion" by L. Sprague de Camp

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Margenes" by Miriam Allen deFord

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Flat Tiger" by Gordon R. Dickson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pages

Thursday, March 19, 2026

J Merril's 5th Best S-F: D Knight, R Bradbury, & G Dickson

Friday, January 16, 2026

Galaxy, Sept '52: K MacLean, E E Smith, G R Dickson, and J H Schmitz

Thursday, May 30, 2024

Analog, Jan 1975: Larry Niven, Gordon R Dickson & Katherine MacLean

Friday, May 10, 2024

Merril-approved 1958 stories by Gordon R. Dickson

Monday, April 24, 2023

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