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megapolisomancy's review
2.0
YEAR THREE
Started off as bad and uninspired as the last volume, but picked up some steam somewhere along the way. I don’t know that I’d say any of these were truly great, but they at least had a bit of a spark from time to time, even if they were almost all played in a totally straight and unsubtle manner (it occurs to me that perhaps a large part of this problem is that so many of them just consist of expository dialogue wherein two characters explain things to one another). Thematically, there was an upsurge in time travel, psychology, and biology this year, and the Cold War is weighing noticeably heavier on the authors (the influence of the Korean War, perhaps?). Capitalism also figures (oddly) in two of the stories, but more on that below.
Only three of the nineteen authors are repeats this time, and C. L. Moore’s absence means we have only a single woman author (Katherine MacLean, whose story also features the one woman protagonist this year and also the closest example of passing the Bechdel test so far).
Four take place entirely in a different star system.
One starts on Earth and features space travel and another star system.
Thirteen take place on Earth.
The abundance of time traveling makes organizing these stories chronologically more difficult, but we have one story that takes place primarily in the past, one in an unclear era, seven contemporary, three near future settings, and six in a more distant future.
"The Santa Claus Planet", by Frank M. Robinson
A story commissioned specifically for this book, which kind of distorts the meaning of a “year’s best” anthology if you ask me. I’m becoming more and more convinced that my problem with these volumes lies less with the general state of the field mid-century and more with Bleiler and Dikty’s specific tastes and goals (1956 and Judith Merril can’t get here fast enough).
Supported by extensive anthropological research, we’re told, this story is about a space ship that, following the time-honored tradition of the space navy, finds some hospitable planet on which to land and celebrate Christmas (Christmas not being Christmas without solid ground and the smell of pine, which appears to be abundant throughout the universe). Having landed on the titular planet, two suckers from the crew are sent out into the cold to invite any local “Terran speaking community” to join their “synthetic roast goose” feast. The natives (“probably the degenerate remnants of those who had colonized the planet hundreds of years ago”) turn out to be playing second fiddle to a marooned Terran trader, and the rest of the story is given over to his narration.
The natives on this planet, it seems, enjoy a habitat so lush and resource-intensive that they have evolved some sort of super-capitalism that involves dueling “challenge gifts” whereby participants exchange gifts and then “destroyed them to show how worthless the items were in comparison with their own wealth.” This “conspicuous waste” made them the “original capitalists;” partisans of “a fanatical, perverted capitalism run wild;” and something about them making great stock brokers. Being natives, though, they also get called out for their derogatory attitude towards women (is there a name for this trope?), lack industrial technology, and love shiny things.
Now, I would love to read this as a commentary creative destruction, but aside from the idea of annihilating existing wealth, that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny at all. If anyone can tell me what this is supposed to revealing about capitalism, I’d love to hear it - it’s kind of a Benjamin Barber-ish attack on unbridled consumer capitalism, I guess.
"The Gnurrs Come from the Voodvork Out", by Reginald Bretnor
If the title wasn’t enough to clue you in, the first paragraph’s mention of war with “Bobovia” really hammers home the fact that this is a goofy, goofy piece. It starts at the “Secret Weapons Bureau,” which just so happens to be under the command of a Colonel who “did not believe in secret weapons. He didn’t even believe in atomic bombs and tanks, recoilless rifles and attack aviation. He believed in horses.” In walks one Papa Schimmelhorn, a “moron” who had worked in Einstein’s lab as a janitor, and has invented a sort of bassoon thing that calls “gnurrs,” well, “from the voodvork out” - a weapon he insists will end the war. Gnurrs are sort of mice-pig things that eat everything but living flesh. This mostly amounts to them eating the pants off of people, by the by. A plan is developed to win the war, interspersed with scenes of Schimmelhorn “charmingly” sexually harassing a secretary and the Colonel complaining about modern warfare, the plan works (“ATOMIC MICE DEVOUR ENEMY”), and then it turns out something with the plan went wrong and the gnurrs are invading L.A. and devouring pants left and right.
It comes to light the gnurrs are easily defeated by (what else?) cavalry, horse smell being terrifying to them, so the Colonel gathers the men and horses of the nation and drives the gnurrs back into the fourth dimension before declaring that “Never again must we let politicians and long-haired theorists persuade us to abandon the time-tried principles of war, and trust our national destiny to - to gadgets!” Schimmelhorn’s wife appears to drag him away from sexually harassing the secretary.
This is the first in a series of Schimmelhorn stories, but how you milk any more pages out of this “joke” is beyond me.
So, another anti-modern story about the lunacy of the Cold War, although the fact that the Colonel is a character mostly played for laughs seems at odds with his triumph at the end. Asimov’s “No Connection” (1949) was much better.
"The Mindworm", by Cyril Kornbluth
Bleiler and Diky introduce this one as “biological speculation upon post-atomic life,” and sure enough, it starts with a couple having sex near a test site while “unfelt radiation sleeted through their loins.” The child, put up for adoption, “grew up stupid, puny, and stubborn, greedy and miserable,” but comes to realize that he has STRANGE MENTAL POWERS. This setup makes this kind of a dark reflection of the Wilmar Shiras stories, but Kornbluth actually manages to make it pay off. The Mindworm (never given a proper name in the narrative) runs off and begins rampaging around provoking people into extreme emotional states (destroying an artist’s magnum opus, dating and then proposing to a woman, so on), off of which he feeds (with fatal results).
He eventually ends up in an Appalachian mining town, which Kornbluth describes as being two towns at once: that of the native-born capitalists, and that of the Eastern European immigrant laborers. The Mindworm, attuned only to the former, begins his reign of terror again, only to quickly be beset, decapitated, and staked in the heart by a horde of men yelling “WAMPYR!” Not only had he been unable to read their non-English minds and dismissive of their culture, he had taken for granted the fact that “he had not been the first of his kind, and that what clever people have not yet learned, some quite ordinary people have not yet entirely forgotten.” As condescending as that is, it’s one of the more socially conscious messages in these volumes so far. It’s tough to admit that I’m speaking highly of a story featuring a death-by-marriage-proposal scene, but given the company it’s keeping here...
"The Star Ducks", by Bill Brown
A reporter is called from the city to the country to investigate a mysterious plane crash, and he quickly turns into the straight man in an Abbott and Costello routine. The crash was, of course, an alien landing, but the country folk (the Alsops) are such stupid rubes that they don’t even know how amazing this is. The aliens, despite being telepathic beings who are “part bug,” know to keep “their antennae neatly curled to show they weren’t eavesdropping on other people’s minds,” and “their name is something about bending iron with a hammer.” The reporter eventually puzzles out that this is “Smith.” Get it? The aliens are Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
The Smiths had visited 3 years prior and traded the Alsops some space eggs for some chicken eggs... only the eggs had rotted before they reached their home planet, so now they’re back for a breeding pair. After they blast off, the reporter, desperate for proof of this momentous occasion, asks the Alsops where the space eggs are, and is told that they hatched into star ducks - something like a hippo combined with a swallow, with 6 legs each.
The Alsops ate them for Thanksgiving.
Maybe Bleiler and Dikty felt this bit of anti-common-folk tomfoolery was necessary to balance out the message of the Mindworm?
"Not to Be Opened—", by Roger Flint Young
Jim Tredel, wealthy industrialist and man-about-town, returns from World War II and realizes his company has somehow been tricked into manufacturing parts that appear to be for toy rayguns but are actually being used for some other nefarious purpose. He knows this because his machinist father taught him to intuitively understand machinery not as parts, or pieces, but as wholes. After much corporate espionage, he realizes his parts are being combined with parts from many other hoodwinked corporations in order to make a blaster thing that disintegrates living matter in a path 30 feet wide and 2 miles long. No one ever appears to notice that he blew up a park in the process of this discovery. Eventually, he tracks his quarry to a series of warehouses and caves equipped with floating conveyor belts and matter-transmitters, only to be trapped and brought before a man named Del (you, like me, might be assuming this name is linked to “Jim Tredel” in some way, but apparently you’d be wrong). Del is an ego from a thousand years in the future, sent back to build up and store weapons caches for the freedom fighters of his time, when there are no longer any nations or governments, just one dictator controlling all 10 billion humans on the planet. Del’s group, seeking to restore the “glories of the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth centuries,” chose the mid-twentieth century to begin their stockpiling because “a few years from now will be too late for our purposes. The world is drawing together, even now, becoming organized. Governments will become more centralized, and it will be harder to do things without their knowledge... These years now are the last offering permanent secrecy.”
Tredel, in one of those incredible leaps of logic endemic to these stories, tells Del that his 100,000 revolutionaries would have more widespread support if their cause was just, and that if the people were on their side they would have just sent his ego into the body of the dictator to get rid of him, and promptly springs out of his bonds and knocks Del out cold.
Only this time the leap of logic is WRONG! because it has been superseded by another mid-century trope: the inability of the human mind to comprehend a more advanced mind. Tredel’s knockout blow was accidentally a (slowly) fatal one, and as Del fades he points out that Tredel is unable to comprehend the specificities of the future, just as Plato or Caesar would be mystified by Tredel’s time.
This story is largely given over to conversations between Tredel and other mystified businessmen, and then between Tredel and Del, which were mostly uninteresting, but it is noteworthy for its narrative leap (it opens with Tredel’s entrapment, then backtracks to the beginning), and those early musings on globalization and the military-industrial complex: in tracing the manufacture of these mystery weapons, Tredel realizes he is up against “biggest thing in the country, outside of the government itself.”
"Process", by A. E. van Vogt
A vignette attempting, for once, to have some actually alien aliens, a forest possessing some sort of slow-moving, aggregate, hivemind intelligence. That’s pretty much all there is to it, though: a space ship lands, the forest leeches Uranium 235 out of the soil to use atomic explosions to drive away the ship, then realizes it can use this against the other continent-spanning forest on the planet (hint, hint). It’s implied at the end that maybe this was all a trick by the space ship to be able to get easy access to uranium?
"Forget-Me-Not", by William F. Temple
A slowly-unfolding example of science fictional gnosticism, a genre unto itself that I imagine will pop up more and more as the New Wave begins to unfold. Temple drops the reader into something Not Quite Right beautifully: the story opens with Direk, the young protagonist, telling his mentor Lock that he’s off to walk around the world; Lock says “Again? Well, I shall still be here when you come back.” This world is not only small enough to be quickly walkable, but walled in, illuminated by “stars” spaced regularly in the sky, from which, at random intervals, food plummets. Meanwhile, at night when the lights are off, corpses vanish, and “sinners” are sometimes found to have been mauled in their sleep, with no memory of their assault. The life of most of the population is given over to sitting around sullenly and then fighting over the food, but Lock is a bit of a philosopher, and his wards Direk and Sondra have taken on some of his free-thinking attitude (the male Direk more than the female Sonda, of course).
Direk, it probably goes without saying, eventually breaks into the real world, experiences the majesty of nature for the first time (complete with a revelatory apple-falling-from-a-tree), and realizes that what “the others thought was the whole world was but a small cavern beneath the great cylindrical tower,” but then decides he has to go back for Sondra and Lock. Dree, the Demiurge of the tale (who appears to be some sort of mad scientist? His actual identity is never really made clear), welcomes Direk back with open arms, revealing that this was all a test and that he was sure that Direk rushed back to his comfortably-familiar imprisonment after being overwhelmed by the outside world. It’s here that the story takes an uninspired turn: Direk defies Dree, is punished savagely for his heresy and tossed back into the cavern, then finds that the rest of the cave-dwellers are too close-minded to believe his story of an idyllic outside world. His fiery individual spirit awakened to the rational truth, though, he vows to fight on against their false religious view of the world, etc etc.
"Contagion", by Katherine MacLean
Opens on an alien world (Minos) with a hunting party consisting of four doctors - one of whom is a woman (the protagonist). This is a novel enough point in 1952 that MacLean proudly emphasizes it a couple of times in the first couple of pages. This is the only time a woman is the main character this year, and MacLean is the only woman author in this volume. Said hunting party is looking for native creatures because “if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases.” Disease, we quickly learn, is a matter of utmost importance in the universe of the story: “plague planets” had been responsible for the extinction of a number of colonies before stricter measures had been implemented. At this point, “[a]ll legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection onboard with him.” This sort of thing pops up throughout the story, and offers some of the most considerate and in-depth reflection on future societal changes in all of these stories thus far.
The hunting party, though, stumbles upon a surprising example of local fauna: a human named Patrick Mead, who is friendly enough even while expressing his surprise at the four of them being “so varied.” Mead’s people are the descendents of a lost colony wiped out by a “melting plague,” which is exactly what it sounds like, and which the patriarch of the Mead family, a geneticist, survived by engineering his DNA to be more like the surrounding wildlife, which also gave his family the ability to eat food produced on the planet.
Like “Forget-Me-Not,” the resolution of this story pales next to the setup: Mead is screened and then permitted onboard the ship, where his “pioneer” physique attracts the attention of the women among the crew, and the jealousy of the men. June, the protagonist, realizes that this is because the men are wasting away, and assumes the melting plague has somehow made it on board. She - what else? - hits the “Medical Emergency” button, which seals off rooms and establishes quarantines, and sprays “Nucleocat Cureall” everywhere to kill off the nonhuman cells. When that doesn’t work, she realizes that the men are being remade into Mead clones by his leucocytes (or something? there was a lot of biology technobabble here). Mead quips that he has a “contagious personality,” and June realizes this is what he meant by remarking on their variation at the beginning of the story: all the men of the colony are clones of the first male Mead. The story closes with the arrival of the rest of the Mead clan, including the women clones, sparking the realization among the women of the ship that if they want to survive on Minos, they’ll also have to accept the loss of their individuality. Many of them are displeased.
"Trespass!", by Poul Anderson & Gordon Dickson
More time travel, and more courtroom hijinks. The CEOs of two corporations, Pan-American Securities, Inc. and Timeproofing, Inc., are meeting to celebrate their work on “the finest vaults in the world, proof now against time itself,” when they are called to the largest vault because turning on the time-travel-proof field had trapped a time traveller who happened to have brought an Aztec temple along with him - despite Timeproofing, Inc.’s insistence that such a thing is no longer possible. Oops.
This pretty much sums up the rest:
The intruder (Pedro O’Brian Rubinsky, 783-A-42973): “Oh - Anglic. You have not the Semantikon - in’national auxispeech yet, no? Then what barbaric year it be now?”
Assembled gawkers: “2012.”
Rubinsky: “Oh, no! Not the Dark Ages!”
Rubinsky, a historian or anthropologist of sorts from 2974, is repulsed by “these dreary centuries,” with their practices of “flesh touching” (after a proffered handshake), revolting smells, sub-Aztec manners, and lack of psychoconditioning to repress criminality (the field being an invention to ward off time-traveling vault robbers). The problem is that the field must be turned off permanently to allow Rubinsky to reach 2974 again, and we are treated to another farcical courtroom scene (strongly echoing “Ex Machina” from the 1949 collection), which Rubinsky loses due to his insubordinate attitude - particularly his revulsion at the idea of using a human, rather than a robot, as an impartial judge. It’s worth noting here that this story takes place in a post-nationalist “Pan-American Federation,” specifically in Mexico City, and the local authorities are presented as being competent and fair-minded (for humans, at any rate). Denied legal recourse, Rubinsky and the closest thing to a friend that he has (an engineer involved in the implementation of the field, and the narrator of the story) take matters into their own hands and simply use Rubinsky’s apparatus to move the whole building (field generators and all) into the future and then back to 2012, sans Rubinsky and the Aztec temple. The story closes with the CEO of Pan-American Securities, Inc., who owns the building in question, being beset by employees who realize they can claim 900 years worth of salary, investors who demand 900 years worth of interest, etc.
If only time-traveling capitalism had been the starting point for the story instead of a rather throw-away joke at the end.
And into the comments once again.
Started off as bad and uninspired as the last volume, but picked up some steam somewhere along the way. I don’t know that I’d say any of these were truly great, but they at least had a bit of a spark from time to time, even if they were almost all played in a totally straight and unsubtle manner (it occurs to me that perhaps a large part of this problem is that so many of them just consist of expository dialogue wherein two characters explain things to one another). Thematically, there was an upsurge in time travel, psychology, and biology this year, and the Cold War is weighing noticeably heavier on the authors (the influence of the Korean War, perhaps?). Capitalism also figures (oddly) in two of the stories, but more on that below.
Only three of the nineteen authors are repeats this time, and C. L. Moore’s absence means we have only a single woman author (Katherine MacLean, whose story also features the one woman protagonist this year and also the closest example of passing the Bechdel test so far).
Four take place entirely in a different star system.
One starts on Earth and features space travel and another star system.
Thirteen take place on Earth.
The abundance of time traveling makes organizing these stories chronologically more difficult, but we have one story that takes place primarily in the past, one in an unclear era, seven contemporary, three near future settings, and six in a more distant future.
"The Santa Claus Planet", by Frank M. Robinson
A story commissioned specifically for this book, which kind of distorts the meaning of a “year’s best” anthology if you ask me. I’m becoming more and more convinced that my problem with these volumes lies less with the general state of the field mid-century and more with Bleiler and Dikty’s specific tastes and goals (1956 and Judith Merril can’t get here fast enough).
Supported by extensive anthropological research, we’re told, this story is about a space ship that, following the time-honored tradition of the space navy, finds some hospitable planet on which to land and celebrate Christmas (Christmas not being Christmas without solid ground and the smell of pine, which appears to be abundant throughout the universe). Having landed on the titular planet, two suckers from the crew are sent out into the cold to invite any local “Terran speaking community” to join their “synthetic roast goose” feast. The natives (“probably the degenerate remnants of those who had colonized the planet hundreds of years ago”) turn out to be playing second fiddle to a marooned Terran trader, and the rest of the story is given over to his narration.
The natives on this planet, it seems, enjoy a habitat so lush and resource-intensive that they have evolved some sort of super-capitalism that involves dueling “challenge gifts” whereby participants exchange gifts and then “destroyed them to show how worthless the items were in comparison with their own wealth.” This “conspicuous waste” made them the “original capitalists;” partisans of “a fanatical, perverted capitalism run wild;” and something about them making great stock brokers. Being natives, though, they also get called out for their derogatory attitude towards women (is there a name for this trope?), lack industrial technology, and love shiny things.
Now, I would love to read this as a commentary creative destruction, but aside from the idea of annihilating existing wealth, that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny at all. If anyone can tell me what this is supposed to revealing about capitalism, I’d love to hear it - it’s kind of a Benjamin Barber-ish attack on unbridled consumer capitalism, I guess.
"The Gnurrs Come from the Voodvork Out", by Reginald Bretnor
If the title wasn’t enough to clue you in, the first paragraph’s mention of war with “Bobovia” really hammers home the fact that this is a goofy, goofy piece. It starts at the “Secret Weapons Bureau,” which just so happens to be under the command of a Colonel who “did not believe in secret weapons. He didn’t even believe in atomic bombs and tanks, recoilless rifles and attack aviation. He believed in horses.” In walks one Papa Schimmelhorn, a “moron” who had worked in Einstein’s lab as a janitor, and has invented a sort of bassoon thing that calls “gnurrs,” well, “from the voodvork out” - a weapon he insists will end the war. Gnurrs are sort of mice-pig things that eat everything but living flesh. This mostly amounts to them eating the pants off of people, by the by. A plan is developed to win the war, interspersed with scenes of Schimmelhorn “charmingly” sexually harassing a secretary and the Colonel complaining about modern warfare, the plan works (“ATOMIC MICE DEVOUR ENEMY”), and then it turns out something with the plan went wrong and the gnurrs are invading L.A. and devouring pants left and right.
It comes to light the gnurrs are easily defeated by (what else?) cavalry, horse smell being terrifying to them, so the Colonel gathers the men and horses of the nation and drives the gnurrs back into the fourth dimension before declaring that “Never again must we let politicians and long-haired theorists persuade us to abandon the time-tried principles of war, and trust our national destiny to - to gadgets!” Schimmelhorn’s wife appears to drag him away from sexually harassing the secretary.
This is the first in a series of Schimmelhorn stories, but how you milk any more pages out of this “joke” is beyond me.
So, another anti-modern story about the lunacy of the Cold War, although the fact that the Colonel is a character mostly played for laughs seems at odds with his triumph at the end. Asimov’s “No Connection” (1949) was much better.
"The Mindworm", by Cyril Kornbluth
Bleiler and Diky introduce this one as “biological speculation upon post-atomic life,” and sure enough, it starts with a couple having sex near a test site while “unfelt radiation sleeted through their loins.” The child, put up for adoption, “grew up stupid, puny, and stubborn, greedy and miserable,” but comes to realize that he has STRANGE MENTAL POWERS. This setup makes this kind of a dark reflection of the Wilmar Shiras stories, but Kornbluth actually manages to make it pay off. The Mindworm (never given a proper name in the narrative) runs off and begins rampaging around provoking people into extreme emotional states (destroying an artist’s magnum opus, dating and then proposing to a woman, so on), off of which he feeds (with fatal results).
He eventually ends up in an Appalachian mining town, which Kornbluth describes as being two towns at once: that of the native-born capitalists, and that of the Eastern European immigrant laborers. The Mindworm, attuned only to the former, begins his reign of terror again, only to quickly be beset, decapitated, and staked in the heart by a horde of men yelling “WAMPYR!” Not only had he been unable to read their non-English minds and dismissive of their culture, he had taken for granted the fact that “he had not been the first of his kind, and that what clever people have not yet learned, some quite ordinary people have not yet entirely forgotten.” As condescending as that is, it’s one of the more socially conscious messages in these volumes so far. It’s tough to admit that I’m speaking highly of a story featuring a death-by-marriage-proposal scene, but given the company it’s keeping here...
"The Star Ducks", by Bill Brown
A reporter is called from the city to the country to investigate a mysterious plane crash, and he quickly turns into the straight man in an Abbott and Costello routine. The crash was, of course, an alien landing, but the country folk (the Alsops) are such stupid rubes that they don’t even know how amazing this is. The aliens, despite being telepathic beings who are “part bug,” know to keep “their antennae neatly curled to show they weren’t eavesdropping on other people’s minds,” and “their name is something about bending iron with a hammer.” The reporter eventually puzzles out that this is “Smith.” Get it? The aliens are Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
The Smiths had visited 3 years prior and traded the Alsops some space eggs for some chicken eggs... only the eggs had rotted before they reached their home planet, so now they’re back for a breeding pair. After they blast off, the reporter, desperate for proof of this momentous occasion, asks the Alsops where the space eggs are, and is told that they hatched into star ducks - something like a hippo combined with a swallow, with 6 legs each.
The Alsops ate them for Thanksgiving.
Maybe Bleiler and Dikty felt this bit of anti-common-folk tomfoolery was necessary to balance out the message of the Mindworm?
"Not to Be Opened—", by Roger Flint Young
Jim Tredel, wealthy industrialist and man-about-town, returns from World War II and realizes his company has somehow been tricked into manufacturing parts that appear to be for toy rayguns but are actually being used for some other nefarious purpose. He knows this because his machinist father taught him to intuitively understand machinery not as parts, or pieces, but as wholes. After much corporate espionage, he realizes his parts are being combined with parts from many other hoodwinked corporations in order to make a blaster thing that disintegrates living matter in a path 30 feet wide and 2 miles long. No one ever appears to notice that he blew up a park in the process of this discovery. Eventually, he tracks his quarry to a series of warehouses and caves equipped with floating conveyor belts and matter-transmitters, only to be trapped and brought before a man named Del (you, like me, might be assuming this name is linked to “Jim Tredel” in some way, but apparently you’d be wrong). Del is an ego from a thousand years in the future, sent back to build up and store weapons caches for the freedom fighters of his time, when there are no longer any nations or governments, just one dictator controlling all 10 billion humans on the planet. Del’s group, seeking to restore the “glories of the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth centuries,” chose the mid-twentieth century to begin their stockpiling because “a few years from now will be too late for our purposes. The world is drawing together, even now, becoming organized. Governments will become more centralized, and it will be harder to do things without their knowledge... These years now are the last offering permanent secrecy.”
Tredel, in one of those incredible leaps of logic endemic to these stories, tells Del that his 100,000 revolutionaries would have more widespread support if their cause was just, and that if the people were on their side they would have just sent his ego into the body of the dictator to get rid of him, and promptly springs out of his bonds and knocks Del out cold.
Only this time the leap of logic is WRONG! because it has been superseded by another mid-century trope: the inability of the human mind to comprehend a more advanced mind. Tredel’s knockout blow was accidentally a (slowly) fatal one, and as Del fades he points out that Tredel is unable to comprehend the specificities of the future, just as Plato or Caesar would be mystified by Tredel’s time.
This story is largely given over to conversations between Tredel and other mystified businessmen, and then between Tredel and Del, which were mostly uninteresting, but it is noteworthy for its narrative leap (it opens with Tredel’s entrapment, then backtracks to the beginning), and those early musings on globalization and the military-industrial complex: in tracing the manufacture of these mystery weapons, Tredel realizes he is up against “biggest thing in the country, outside of the government itself.”
"Process", by A. E. van Vogt
A vignette attempting, for once, to have some actually alien aliens, a forest possessing some sort of slow-moving, aggregate, hivemind intelligence. That’s pretty much all there is to it, though: a space ship lands, the forest leeches Uranium 235 out of the soil to use atomic explosions to drive away the ship, then realizes it can use this against the other continent-spanning forest on the planet (hint, hint). It’s implied at the end that maybe this was all a trick by the space ship to be able to get easy access to uranium?
"Forget-Me-Not", by William F. Temple
A slowly-unfolding example of science fictional gnosticism, a genre unto itself that I imagine will pop up more and more as the New Wave begins to unfold. Temple drops the reader into something Not Quite Right beautifully: the story opens with Direk, the young protagonist, telling his mentor Lock that he’s off to walk around the world; Lock says “Again? Well, I shall still be here when you come back.” This world is not only small enough to be quickly walkable, but walled in, illuminated by “stars” spaced regularly in the sky, from which, at random intervals, food plummets. Meanwhile, at night when the lights are off, corpses vanish, and “sinners” are sometimes found to have been mauled in their sleep, with no memory of their assault. The life of most of the population is given over to sitting around sullenly and then fighting over the food, but Lock is a bit of a philosopher, and his wards Direk and Sondra have taken on some of his free-thinking attitude (the male Direk more than the female Sonda, of course).
Direk, it probably goes without saying, eventually breaks into the real world, experiences the majesty of nature for the first time (complete with a revelatory apple-falling-from-a-tree), and realizes that what “the others thought was the whole world was but a small cavern beneath the great cylindrical tower,” but then decides he has to go back for Sondra and Lock. Dree, the Demiurge of the tale (who appears to be some sort of mad scientist? His actual identity is never really made clear), welcomes Direk back with open arms, revealing that this was all a test and that he was sure that Direk rushed back to his comfortably-familiar imprisonment after being overwhelmed by the outside world. It’s here that the story takes an uninspired turn: Direk defies Dree, is punished savagely for his heresy and tossed back into the cavern, then finds that the rest of the cave-dwellers are too close-minded to believe his story of an idyllic outside world. His fiery individual spirit awakened to the rational truth, though, he vows to fight on against their false religious view of the world, etc etc.
"Contagion", by Katherine MacLean
Opens on an alien world (Minos) with a hunting party consisting of four doctors - one of whom is a woman (the protagonist). This is a novel enough point in 1952 that MacLean proudly emphasizes it a couple of times in the first couple of pages. This is the only time a woman is the main character this year, and MacLean is the only woman author in this volume. Said hunting party is looking for native creatures because “if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases.” Disease, we quickly learn, is a matter of utmost importance in the universe of the story: “plague planets” had been responsible for the extinction of a number of colonies before stricter measures had been implemented. At this point, “[a]ll legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection onboard with him.” This sort of thing pops up throughout the story, and offers some of the most considerate and in-depth reflection on future societal changes in all of these stories thus far.
The hunting party, though, stumbles upon a surprising example of local fauna: a human named Patrick Mead, who is friendly enough even while expressing his surprise at the four of them being “so varied.” Mead’s people are the descendents of a lost colony wiped out by a “melting plague,” which is exactly what it sounds like, and which the patriarch of the Mead family, a geneticist, survived by engineering his DNA to be more like the surrounding wildlife, which also gave his family the ability to eat food produced on the planet.
Like “Forget-Me-Not,” the resolution of this story pales next to the setup: Mead is screened and then permitted onboard the ship, where his “pioneer” physique attracts the attention of the women among the crew, and the jealousy of the men. June, the protagonist, realizes that this is because the men are wasting away, and assumes the melting plague has somehow made it on board. She - what else? - hits the “Medical Emergency” button, which seals off rooms and establishes quarantines, and sprays “Nucleocat Cureall” everywhere to kill off the nonhuman cells. When that doesn’t work, she realizes that the men are being remade into Mead clones by his leucocytes (or something? there was a lot of biology technobabble here). Mead quips that he has a “contagious personality,” and June realizes this is what he meant by remarking on their variation at the beginning of the story: all the men of the colony are clones of the first male Mead. The story closes with the arrival of the rest of the Mead clan, including the women clones, sparking the realization among the women of the ship that if they want to survive on Minos, they’ll also have to accept the loss of their individuality. Many of them are displeased.
"Trespass!", by Poul Anderson & Gordon Dickson
More time travel, and more courtroom hijinks. The CEOs of two corporations, Pan-American Securities, Inc. and Timeproofing, Inc., are meeting to celebrate their work on “the finest vaults in the world, proof now against time itself,” when they are called to the largest vault because turning on the time-travel-proof field had trapped a time traveller who happened to have brought an Aztec temple along with him - despite Timeproofing, Inc.’s insistence that such a thing is no longer possible. Oops.
This pretty much sums up the rest:
The intruder (Pedro O’Brian Rubinsky, 783-A-42973): “Oh - Anglic. You have not the Semantikon - in’national auxispeech yet, no? Then what barbaric year it be now?”
Assembled gawkers: “2012.”
Rubinsky: “Oh, no! Not the Dark Ages!”
Rubinsky, a historian or anthropologist of sorts from 2974, is repulsed by “these dreary centuries,” with their practices of “flesh touching” (after a proffered handshake), revolting smells, sub-Aztec manners, and lack of psychoconditioning to repress criminality (the field being an invention to ward off time-traveling vault robbers). The problem is that the field must be turned off permanently to allow Rubinsky to reach 2974 again, and we are treated to another farcical courtroom scene (strongly echoing “Ex Machina” from the 1949 collection), which Rubinsky loses due to his insubordinate attitude - particularly his revulsion at the idea of using a human, rather than a robot, as an impartial judge. It’s worth noting here that this story takes place in a post-nationalist “Pan-American Federation,” specifically in Mexico City, and the local authorities are presented as being competent and fair-minded (for humans, at any rate). Denied legal recourse, Rubinsky and the closest thing to a friend that he has (an engineer involved in the implementation of the field, and the narrator of the story) take matters into their own hands and simply use Rubinsky’s apparatus to move the whole building (field generators and all) into the future and then back to 2012, sans Rubinsky and the Aztec temple. The story closes with the CEO of Pan-American Securities, Inc., who owns the building in question, being beset by employees who realize they can claim 900 years worth of salary, investors who demand 900 years worth of interest, etc.
If only time-traveling capitalism had been the starting point for the story instead of a rather throw-away joke at the end.
And into the comments once again.
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