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megapolisomancy's review
2.0
YEAR FOUR
I’m writing this months after I read the book, so you should probably take everything I say with a grain of salt.
The scope tends to shrink down a bit this year - 16 of the 18 stories here take place on Earth (leaving one on Mars and one out in the galaxy somewhere), and half of them fall into one of two categories: post-apocalyptic or time travel. Two stories by women this year, and none with a female protagonist. Still no authors of color, although one story this year (“Dark Interlude”) actually engages with race in a critical manner.
Bleiler and Dikty note that this year continues the “progress of story themes from one side of the equation, science-fantasy, to the other,” begun in “The Mindworm” last year, with “Tourist Trade” rationalizing ghost stories, and “At No Extra Cost” scientifically updating... stories about souls, I guess. This idea of the saturation of rationalism is a compelling one, I have to admit, and throughout this volume there is the sense that technology/science/scientists are no longer the cure-all hope for humanity they once were, just a fact of life now. As the editors also point out, two of the other stories (“Balance” and “The Marching Morons”) feature “a mature note that might not have appeared in the science-fiction of a few years ago: the concept that even a superman has an environment.” I would argue that it’s the environment itself that has changed, though.
The Other Side - Walter Kubilius
Jim is a young boy in a rural town surrounded by a glass wall erected after the “Inter-continental Atomic War” of 1970, outside of which “poisoned fumes and deadly gases scorched the ground and made one breath of air a sentence of death.” He notices, though, that the water coming in under the wall is “clear and good.” Other things start to seem amiss - he wishes a bully was dead and the boy turns up dead the next day, in the library he can’t find any books that reference the wall or the war, and even though he knows it’s 1993, he finds a book published in 2039, in which he finds the passage “The gradual elimination of farming communities, begun during Robinson’s term as president, continued under the new administration. The artificial manufacture of food by reprocessing industrial waste had revolutionized social customs, particularly in the frequent distressing economic dislocations-” - which doesn’t quite line up with Jim’s experience living in an idyllic farming community, although it does place this story kind of tangentially in the mid-century school of post-scarcity thought (which seems rather odd for a post-apocalyptic story).
The town doctor, fulfilling the role of primary antagonist, sedates Jim and tries to convince him that he has been hallucinating or dreaming these inconsistencies, and tells him that he’s wasting his time: “History has no meaning,” Doc Barnes said, “and you’ll never find truth there. Study the sciences where all evidence can be weighed and measured. It’s the only road to truth.” This is a sentiment which would have been delivered by the hero of the story just a few years ago.
Determined to escape and find the truth (this objective remains even with the caveat that modern science isn’t the only way to find it, of course), Jim swims under the wall of the dome and finds that “Hillsboro, from the height where he stood, did not look like New York or Moscow, or any of the other really big cities of the Earth which he seen pictured in some of the older history books. Rather it had a bit of all of them, and he now understood who he was and why he was so important.” A series of levers telepathically inform him that humanity was wiped out 200 years ago, not by war but by alien colonizers, and he is the only surviving human, surrounded by “Robot-Duplicate Models of all known types of Man Specimens.” The story closes with the Keeper of the Natural Habitat Zoo slithering up to deliver him to the dissection chamber. Where this teenager came from 200 years after the end of humanity isn’t addressed, nor is the justification for dissecting him immediately.
Compare with the earlier humans-in-an-alien-zoo story, Fredric Brown’s “Knock” (1949).
Of Time and Third Avenue - Alfred Bester
Where “The Other Side” introduced this volume’s near-constant themes of the end of humanity, “Of Time and Third Avenue” introduces the diametrically-opposed optimistic idea that the future is something to look forward to - a message often delivered by means of a time traveller. Young couple Oliver and Jane head into a bar after stopping by a book store, where a strange man informs Oliver that while he thought he had just purchased the 1950 Almanac, it was actually the 1990 edition. Oliver is momentarily tempted by greed (the almanac offering him “Money in my pocket. The world in my pocket.”), but the man makes a persuasive offer: “We are forbidden to transfer anything that might divert existing phenomena streams, but at least I can give you one token of the future.” This token is a $100 bill from 1980, signed by Oliver Wilson Knight, Secretary of the Treasury. As an incredible reveal about your future career, this seems slightly... underwhelming?
The Marching Morons - C. M. Kornbluth
A sleeper-awakes time travel story where a modern man awakes in the future into a sort of proto-Atlas Shrugged dystopia: “The actual truth is that the millions of workers live in luxury on the sweat of the handful of aristocrats.” Why? Because “while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and short-sightedly having children--breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!... Your intelligence was bred out. It is gone. Children that should have been born never were. The just-average, they’ll-get-along majority took over the population. The average IQ now is 45.” The “aristocrats,” powerless to stop the exploding overpopulation, look to our sleeper, Barlow, as a savior (even as they are appalled by his boorishness and racism). Barlow, who was a real estate salesman in his day, concocts an ad campaign selling the “morons” on the idea of emigrating to Venus, only to pull the old switcheroo on them and have the ships explode somewhere off in the distance of space instead. The geniuses, of course, boot Barlow into one of the ships so they don’t have to deal with him anymore.
This sort of technocratic/eugenic elitist theme is one of the worst currents that runs throughout the history of science fiction, and this is a particularly reprehensible example of it.
Notably, though, Barlowe is aware of the science-fictional aspect of his story. He’s surprised by the currency of the future (“...and it’s dollars, too! I thought it’d be credits or whatever they call them.”) and thinks in his moments of panic soon after he awakes:
“They’ll track me down… It’s a secret police thing. They’ll get you--mind-reading machines, television eyes everywhere, afraid you’ll tell their slaves about freedom and stuff. They don’t let anybody cross them, like that story I once read.”
A Peculiar People - Betsy Curtis
A robot attache from Mars finds love on Earth, while keeping his robo-identity a secret. As the human ambassador reminds him: “Check appearance carefully with a mirror. Martian security demands Terran ignorance of your mechanical nature!” This demand is because “It’s only human nature, you know, to be afraid of machines, and what men fear they fight.”
The recipient of his affections turns out to have a secret of her own. You’ll never guess what it is.
A rather blatant example of the normalization of science-fictionalisms so prevalent this year - robots are just well-engineered people.
Extending the Holdings - Donald A. Wollheim [as by David Grinnell]
John Clute coined the term ”Edisonade” in 1993 to refer to stories prevalent around the turn of the 20th Century about do-it-yourself inventors who save the day and make it big by means of their bootstrapping ingenuity. In this wonderful satire, a boorish, self-involved man takes advantage of the help offered by his long-suffering wife, brother, and sister-in-law, builds himself a spaceship in his barn in order to “astound the world and confound the papers by personally presenting a bit of genuine moon lava to President Cleveland.” Shaking his brother’s hand and “forgetting to bid good-bye to the two women,” he blasts off. The brother, however, has followed the advance of science a bit more closely, and is aware that the erstwhile astronaut will not long survive the cold void of space in his unheated ship. The three look forward to a happier life without him.
The Tourist Trade - Wilson Tucker
A less successful attempt at humor, essentially a ghost story with time-traveling tourists from the future responsible for the haunting. And what do we get when we have a story about people from the future? Hilarious misunderstandings of our own time, of course:
“This race were called Indians, or Americans, the two terms being interchangeable. Sections, or tribes, existed among them and each tribe adopted the name of some patron saint, protective god or robber baron to whom they paid monetary and honorary tribute. Their tribes sometimes bore colorful names like Ohio, Dogpatch, Jones, Republican, and so forth.”
This is not the most effective way of historicizing the action here, but the homeowner’s response is about as perfectly mid-century American as you can get: “You’re a radical,” Donald exclaimed. “Now get out of here or I’ll put the dog on you!”
After a number of run-ins with these tours invading his home, Donald capitalizes on his problem the good old-fashioned American way and starts charging the public to come into his home to observe the “ghosts.” Of course he also tosses in some insults for the tour guide while he’s at it:
“He’s a legend connected with the house,” Donald exclaimed glibly. “According to the story, this fellow in the uniform was an eccentric inventor who used to live here but he finally killed himself. They story says he was a 4-F but he wore that uniform to ease his conscience; he always claimed to be inventing war machines for the government.”
The Two Shadows - William F. Temple
Not time travel or robots, so it must be about the end of the world (in 2003), rather clumsily described as:
“A divided Earth, struggling with a divided mind to preserve itself, had fallen into the desperate error of preventive war. The disease germs, as thick as clouds in the atmosphere, were proving to be the conquerors of both sides. Earth, quivering under the impacts of countless atomic missiles, many darted into its side by its own satellite and human colony, flung out a seed.”
Said seed, though, crash-lands on Mars, leaving only two survivors: the cultured and urbane (and whiny) Johns and the brutish, self-centered industrialist Malatesta. Mars is livable but drab, covered with sickly grass and populated by hairless rabbit-mouse things (with a Schiaparelli reference dropped into the discussion of the lack of artificial structures), so the stage is set for endless arguments between Ayn-Randisms (“You only believe in a system of equal shares for all because you’re weak--too weak to fight for your share. So you invent this thing you call social justice to get your share for you, so that you don’t starve.”) and Johns’s Frasier-esque whining about culture and history (He felt a certain sense of loss but it was for the Acropolis, for the Uffizi Galleries, the Louvre, the Sistine Chapel, the Taj Mahal--not for the lately living people of Earth. The hills that Shakespeare had walked on around Stratford-on-Avon, the City of London, redolent with history...).
This goes on until they fortuitously find an amnesiac nurse from the ship who had been comatose up until this point. As she functions as nothing more than a tiebreaker to be swayed to one side or the other, they name her Madge... for “majority.” Malatesta wins her affections handily, and Johns is banished to live on his own... until he finds what appears to be a carved head. Returning to camp, he finds Malatesta burning books (In Earth’s dark history there had been many a “burning of the books.” This, the last, could never be surpassed. It was a funeral pyre and no Phoenix would arise from the ashes.), each man accuses the other of being the snake in the garden of Eden, and Johns hits Malatesta in the head with the carving, killing him. Madge, about to shoot Johns down in retaliation, decides that her desire to have children outweighs her desire for revenge, and spares him. Johns thus learns the value of selfishness. They continue burning some books for fuel (like Income Tax Accountancy, because bureaucracy always gleefully dies with the old order in these stories), while saving others – specifically, Obstetrics. Oh and the head carving turns out to have circuits in it or something.
Balance - John Christopher
In a near-future proto-dystopia run by corporations, Max Hewison is a retired espionage agent who served his company for 18 years on Venus until swamp-fever forced him into a life of ease back on Earth (“Director Hewison couldn’t get you on vidiphone.” Max said: “No. That’s not surprising. I had it disconnected. The only business I have to conduct now is collecting my pension and I can see to that by the old-fashioned method of writing letters.” This sense of nostalgia surfaces again in Hewison’s insistence on never leaving the ground – he travels by railways that have survived in Southern Europe as a tourist trade). This story finds him pressed back into service, over a meal of Venusian swamp-pig, to help find and turn a genetically-engineered super-genius created in the service of a rival company.
What makes a super-genius, you ask? Well, think of regular geniuses, and “consider how one-sided his gift has invariably been. Newton the mathematician--and Newton the theologian, strenuously working out the size of the seventh horn of the Beast of Revelations. Einstein the mathematician--and Einstein the well-meaning but completely naive social scientist. Outside his own narrow field the genius is on level or even inferior terms to the rest of humanity.” The super-genius does not share this limitation, and threatens therefore to upset the balance of power between the companies that run the world (the rather oddly-specialized “United Chemicals, Genetics Division, Transport and Communications, Atomics, Hydroponics... and the rest.”).
Hewison does his spy thing and tracks the super-genius down, and both he and the reader are shocked to learn that she is a woman. It bears mentioning that she writes and publishes under pseudonyms, just like the genius children in Wilmar H. Shiras’s stories from 1949 and 1950, and further that her keepers allow her to do this because to them books were “toys” read by fewer and fewer people. There follows much discussion about how hard it is to be surrounded by “apes” when you are a remote, unknowable super-genius, and how it was the otherwise-simple nature of the regular geniuses that allowed them to maintain points of contact with their fellows. Hewison, recognizing her plight and also the threat that she poses to “liberty,” shoots her. Ugh.
Brightness Falls from the Air - Margaret St. Clair [as by Idris Seabright ]
In which Kerr, a human, is a sort of undertaker at the “tepidarium of the identification bureau,” where the bodies of dead bird aliens are placed to float about until their families come to claim them, a slow process since their extraterrestrial origin made them second-class citizens forbidden from using “ordinary means of transportation.”
Kerr strikes up a friendship with Rhysha, one of the bird people, and this melancholy, dystopic story explores his growing understanding of the unequal relationship between the races, which not only holds the “Exteys” down as subordinate citizens, but also forces them into showy gladiatorial battles (hence the dead bodies):
“After the Earthmen took our planet,” she said, “we had nothing left they wanted. But we had to have food. Then we discovered that they liked to watch us fight.”
“You fought before the Earthmen came?” Kerr asked.
“Yes. But not as we fight now. It was a ritual then, very formal, with much politeness and courtesy... The Earth people were impatient with our ritual--they wanted to see us hurting and being hurt. So we learned to fight as we fight now, hoping to be killed.”
Kerr, like any good exceptional individual at the heart of an old science fiction story, takes it upon himself to fix this problem, trying to increase public awareness and going to the governing council to enact some sort of reform – only he fails at both counts, and after he is sidelined by illness for a while, Rhysha has to return to battling in order to support herself, and is killed in the process. So much for the heroic hyper-individual.
Outside, one of the vast voices that boomed portentously down from the sky half the night long began to speak: “Don’t miss the newest, fastest battle sport. View the Durga battles, the bloodiest combats ever televised. Funnier than the bird people’s battles, more thrilling than an Anda war, you’ll...
Kerr gave a cry. He ran to the window and closed it. He could still hear the voice. But it was all that he could do.
Witch War - Richard Matheson
A short piece about a coterie of teenage girls, in the service of the government, who take a break from chewing gum and gossiping in order to wipe out an approaching army with a series of macabre spells. Matheson is a much better writer than most of the other authors in this era, and the flashes back and forth between the two poles of calm /youth and disastrous war are definitely interesting structurally (even if the girls=innocence theme is not one I find appealing), but I’m not sure that this story belongs in an anthology of science fiction. Recall that this was pretty much my reaction to his “Born of Man and Woman” (1950) also.
Into the comments.
I’m writing this months after I read the book, so you should probably take everything I say with a grain of salt.
The scope tends to shrink down a bit this year - 16 of the 18 stories here take place on Earth (leaving one on Mars and one out in the galaxy somewhere), and half of them fall into one of two categories: post-apocalyptic or time travel. Two stories by women this year, and none with a female protagonist. Still no authors of color, although one story this year (“Dark Interlude”) actually engages with race in a critical manner.
Bleiler and Dikty note that this year continues the “progress of story themes from one side of the equation, science-fantasy, to the other,” begun in “The Mindworm” last year, with “Tourist Trade” rationalizing ghost stories, and “At No Extra Cost” scientifically updating... stories about souls, I guess. This idea of the saturation of rationalism is a compelling one, I have to admit, and throughout this volume there is the sense that technology/science/scientists are no longer the cure-all hope for humanity they once were, just a fact of life now. As the editors also point out, two of the other stories (“Balance” and “The Marching Morons”) feature “a mature note that might not have appeared in the science-fiction of a few years ago: the concept that even a superman has an environment.” I would argue that it’s the environment itself that has changed, though.
The Other Side - Walter Kubilius
Jim is a young boy in a rural town surrounded by a glass wall erected after the “Inter-continental Atomic War” of 1970, outside of which “poisoned fumes and deadly gases scorched the ground and made one breath of air a sentence of death.” He notices, though, that the water coming in under the wall is “clear and good.” Other things start to seem amiss - he wishes a bully was dead and the boy turns up dead the next day, in the library he can’t find any books that reference the wall or the war, and even though he knows it’s 1993, he finds a book published in 2039, in which he finds the passage “The gradual elimination of farming communities, begun during Robinson’s term as president, continued under the new administration. The artificial manufacture of food by reprocessing industrial waste had revolutionized social customs, particularly in the frequent distressing economic dislocations-” - which doesn’t quite line up with Jim’s experience living in an idyllic farming community, although it does place this story kind of tangentially in the mid-century school of post-scarcity thought (which seems rather odd for a post-apocalyptic story).
The town doctor, fulfilling the role of primary antagonist, sedates Jim and tries to convince him that he has been hallucinating or dreaming these inconsistencies, and tells him that he’s wasting his time: “History has no meaning,” Doc Barnes said, “and you’ll never find truth there. Study the sciences where all evidence can be weighed and measured. It’s the only road to truth.” This is a sentiment which would have been delivered by the hero of the story just a few years ago.
Determined to escape and find the truth (this objective remains even with the caveat that modern science isn’t the only way to find it, of course), Jim swims under the wall of the dome and finds that “Hillsboro, from the height where he stood, did not look like New York or Moscow, or any of the other really big cities of the Earth which he seen pictured in some of the older history books. Rather it had a bit of all of them, and he now understood who he was and why he was so important.” A series of levers telepathically inform him that humanity was wiped out 200 years ago, not by war but by alien colonizers, and he is the only surviving human, surrounded by “Robot-Duplicate Models of all known types of Man Specimens.” The story closes with the Keeper of the Natural Habitat Zoo slithering up to deliver him to the dissection chamber. Where this teenager came from 200 years after the end of humanity isn’t addressed, nor is the justification for dissecting him immediately.
Compare with the earlier humans-in-an-alien-zoo story, Fredric Brown’s “Knock” (1949).
Of Time and Third Avenue - Alfred Bester
Where “The Other Side” introduced this volume’s near-constant themes of the end of humanity, “Of Time and Third Avenue” introduces the diametrically-opposed optimistic idea that the future is something to look forward to - a message often delivered by means of a time traveller. Young couple Oliver and Jane head into a bar after stopping by a book store, where a strange man informs Oliver that while he thought he had just purchased the 1950 Almanac, it was actually the 1990 edition. Oliver is momentarily tempted by greed (the almanac offering him “Money in my pocket. The world in my pocket.”), but the man makes a persuasive offer: “We are forbidden to transfer anything that might divert existing phenomena streams, but at least I can give you one token of the future.” This token is a $100 bill from 1980, signed by Oliver Wilson Knight, Secretary of the Treasury. As an incredible reveal about your future career, this seems slightly... underwhelming?
The Marching Morons - C. M. Kornbluth
A sleeper-awakes time travel story where a modern man awakes in the future into a sort of proto-Atlas Shrugged dystopia: “The actual truth is that the millions of workers live in luxury on the sweat of the handful of aristocrats.” Why? Because “while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and short-sightedly having children--breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!... Your intelligence was bred out. It is gone. Children that should have been born never were. The just-average, they’ll-get-along majority took over the population. The average IQ now is 45.” The “aristocrats,” powerless to stop the exploding overpopulation, look to our sleeper, Barlow, as a savior (even as they are appalled by his boorishness and racism). Barlow, who was a real estate salesman in his day, concocts an ad campaign selling the “morons” on the idea of emigrating to Venus, only to pull the old switcheroo on them and have the ships explode somewhere off in the distance of space instead. The geniuses, of course, boot Barlow into one of the ships so they don’t have to deal with him anymore.
This sort of technocratic/eugenic elitist theme is one of the worst currents that runs throughout the history of science fiction, and this is a particularly reprehensible example of it.
Notably, though, Barlowe is aware of the science-fictional aspect of his story. He’s surprised by the currency of the future (“...and it’s dollars, too! I thought it’d be credits or whatever they call them.”) and thinks in his moments of panic soon after he awakes:
“They’ll track me down… It’s a secret police thing. They’ll get you--mind-reading machines, television eyes everywhere, afraid you’ll tell their slaves about freedom and stuff. They don’t let anybody cross them, like that story I once read.”
A Peculiar People - Betsy Curtis
A robot attache from Mars finds love on Earth, while keeping his robo-identity a secret. As the human ambassador reminds him: “Check appearance carefully with a mirror. Martian security demands Terran ignorance of your mechanical nature!” This demand is because “It’s only human nature, you know, to be afraid of machines, and what men fear they fight.”
The recipient of his affections turns out to have a secret of her own. You’ll never guess what it is.
A rather blatant example of the normalization of science-fictionalisms so prevalent this year - robots are just well-engineered people.
Extending the Holdings - Donald A. Wollheim [as by David Grinnell]
John Clute coined the term ”Edisonade” in 1993 to refer to stories prevalent around the turn of the 20th Century about do-it-yourself inventors who save the day and make it big by means of their bootstrapping ingenuity. In this wonderful satire, a boorish, self-involved man takes advantage of the help offered by his long-suffering wife, brother, and sister-in-law, builds himself a spaceship in his barn in order to “astound the world and confound the papers by personally presenting a bit of genuine moon lava to President Cleveland.” Shaking his brother’s hand and “forgetting to bid good-bye to the two women,” he blasts off. The brother, however, has followed the advance of science a bit more closely, and is aware that the erstwhile astronaut will not long survive the cold void of space in his unheated ship. The three look forward to a happier life without him.
The Tourist Trade - Wilson Tucker
A less successful attempt at humor, essentially a ghost story with time-traveling tourists from the future responsible for the haunting. And what do we get when we have a story about people from the future? Hilarious misunderstandings of our own time, of course:
“This race were called Indians, or Americans, the two terms being interchangeable. Sections, or tribes, existed among them and each tribe adopted the name of some patron saint, protective god or robber baron to whom they paid monetary and honorary tribute. Their tribes sometimes bore colorful names like Ohio, Dogpatch, Jones, Republican, and so forth.”
This is not the most effective way of historicizing the action here, but the homeowner’s response is about as perfectly mid-century American as you can get: “You’re a radical,” Donald exclaimed. “Now get out of here or I’ll put the dog on you!”
After a number of run-ins with these tours invading his home, Donald capitalizes on his problem the good old-fashioned American way and starts charging the public to come into his home to observe the “ghosts.” Of course he also tosses in some insults for the tour guide while he’s at it:
“He’s a legend connected with the house,” Donald exclaimed glibly. “According to the story, this fellow in the uniform was an eccentric inventor who used to live here but he finally killed himself. They story says he was a 4-F but he wore that uniform to ease his conscience; he always claimed to be inventing war machines for the government.”
The Two Shadows - William F. Temple
Not time travel or robots, so it must be about the end of the world (in 2003), rather clumsily described as:
“A divided Earth, struggling with a divided mind to preserve itself, had fallen into the desperate error of preventive war. The disease germs, as thick as clouds in the atmosphere, were proving to be the conquerors of both sides. Earth, quivering under the impacts of countless atomic missiles, many darted into its side by its own satellite and human colony, flung out a seed.”
Said seed, though, crash-lands on Mars, leaving only two survivors: the cultured and urbane (and whiny) Johns and the brutish, self-centered industrialist Malatesta. Mars is livable but drab, covered with sickly grass and populated by hairless rabbit-mouse things (with a Schiaparelli reference dropped into the discussion of the lack of artificial structures), so the stage is set for endless arguments between Ayn-Randisms (“You only believe in a system of equal shares for all because you’re weak--too weak to fight for your share. So you invent this thing you call social justice to get your share for you, so that you don’t starve.”) and Johns’s Frasier-esque whining about culture and history (He felt a certain sense of loss but it was for the Acropolis, for the Uffizi Galleries, the Louvre, the Sistine Chapel, the Taj Mahal--not for the lately living people of Earth. The hills that Shakespeare had walked on around Stratford-on-Avon, the City of London, redolent with history...).
This goes on until they fortuitously find an amnesiac nurse from the ship who had been comatose up until this point. As she functions as nothing more than a tiebreaker to be swayed to one side or the other, they name her Madge... for “majority.” Malatesta wins her affections handily, and Johns is banished to live on his own... until he finds what appears to be a carved head. Returning to camp, he finds Malatesta burning books (In Earth’s dark history there had been many a “burning of the books.” This, the last, could never be surpassed. It was a funeral pyre and no Phoenix would arise from the ashes.), each man accuses the other of being the snake in the garden of Eden, and Johns hits Malatesta in the head with the carving, killing him. Madge, about to shoot Johns down in retaliation, decides that her desire to have children outweighs her desire for revenge, and spares him. Johns thus learns the value of selfishness. They continue burning some books for fuel (like Income Tax Accountancy, because bureaucracy always gleefully dies with the old order in these stories), while saving others – specifically, Obstetrics. Oh and the head carving turns out to have circuits in it or something.
Balance - John Christopher
In a near-future proto-dystopia run by corporations, Max Hewison is a retired espionage agent who served his company for 18 years on Venus until swamp-fever forced him into a life of ease back on Earth (“Director Hewison couldn’t get you on vidiphone.” Max said: “No. That’s not surprising. I had it disconnected. The only business I have to conduct now is collecting my pension and I can see to that by the old-fashioned method of writing letters.” This sense of nostalgia surfaces again in Hewison’s insistence on never leaving the ground – he travels by railways that have survived in Southern Europe as a tourist trade). This story finds him pressed back into service, over a meal of Venusian swamp-pig, to help find and turn a genetically-engineered super-genius created in the service of a rival company.
What makes a super-genius, you ask? Well, think of regular geniuses, and “consider how one-sided his gift has invariably been. Newton the mathematician--and Newton the theologian, strenuously working out the size of the seventh horn of the Beast of Revelations. Einstein the mathematician--and Einstein the well-meaning but completely naive social scientist. Outside his own narrow field the genius is on level or even inferior terms to the rest of humanity.” The super-genius does not share this limitation, and threatens therefore to upset the balance of power between the companies that run the world (the rather oddly-specialized “United Chemicals, Genetics Division, Transport and Communications, Atomics, Hydroponics... and the rest.”).
Hewison does his spy thing and tracks the super-genius down, and both he and the reader are shocked to learn that she is a woman. It bears mentioning that she writes and publishes under pseudonyms, just like the genius children in Wilmar H. Shiras’s stories from 1949 and 1950, and further that her keepers allow her to do this because to them books were “toys” read by fewer and fewer people. There follows much discussion about how hard it is to be surrounded by “apes” when you are a remote, unknowable super-genius, and how it was the otherwise-simple nature of the regular geniuses that allowed them to maintain points of contact with their fellows. Hewison, recognizing her plight and also the threat that she poses to “liberty,” shoots her. Ugh.
Brightness Falls from the Air - Margaret St. Clair [as by Idris Seabright ]
In which Kerr, a human, is a sort of undertaker at the “tepidarium of the identification bureau,” where the bodies of dead bird aliens are placed to float about until their families come to claim them, a slow process since their extraterrestrial origin made them second-class citizens forbidden from using “ordinary means of transportation.”
Kerr strikes up a friendship with Rhysha, one of the bird people, and this melancholy, dystopic story explores his growing understanding of the unequal relationship between the races, which not only holds the “Exteys” down as subordinate citizens, but also forces them into showy gladiatorial battles (hence the dead bodies):
“After the Earthmen took our planet,” she said, “we had nothing left they wanted. But we had to have food. Then we discovered that they liked to watch us fight.”
“You fought before the Earthmen came?” Kerr asked.
“Yes. But not as we fight now. It was a ritual then, very formal, with much politeness and courtesy... The Earth people were impatient with our ritual--they wanted to see us hurting and being hurt. So we learned to fight as we fight now, hoping to be killed.”
Kerr, like any good exceptional individual at the heart of an old science fiction story, takes it upon himself to fix this problem, trying to increase public awareness and going to the governing council to enact some sort of reform – only he fails at both counts, and after he is sidelined by illness for a while, Rhysha has to return to battling in order to support herself, and is killed in the process. So much for the heroic hyper-individual.
Outside, one of the vast voices that boomed portentously down from the sky half the night long began to speak: “Don’t miss the newest, fastest battle sport. View the Durga battles, the bloodiest combats ever televised. Funnier than the bird people’s battles, more thrilling than an Anda war, you’ll...
Kerr gave a cry. He ran to the window and closed it. He could still hear the voice. But it was all that he could do.
Witch War - Richard Matheson
A short piece about a coterie of teenage girls, in the service of the government, who take a break from chewing gum and gossiping in order to wipe out an approaching army with a series of macabre spells. Matheson is a much better writer than most of the other authors in this era, and the flashes back and forth between the two poles of calm /youth and disastrous war are definitely interesting structurally (even if the girls=innocence theme is not one I find appealing), but I’m not sure that this story belongs in an anthology of science fiction. Recall that this was pretty much my reaction to his “Born of Man and Woman” (1950) also.
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