TWO COLD-WAR SF STORIES, "The Last Crusade" and "Baby"

THE LAST CRUSADE
GEORGE H. SMITH
IF: WORLDS OF SCIENCE FICTION
February 1955 edition, pages 74-85, free Project Gutenberg download at link above

Rating: 4* of five

My friend Joachim Boaz has a review of this title on his site as part of a Terry Carr collection. It's a Cold War dystopian tale of the futile and self-perpetuating nature of that conflict. Clearly George H. Smith, largely forgotten today, was a clear-eyed observer of the idiocies of the 1950s. As the world was moving faster and faster, and the role of technology in it was increasing, Smith's was a reasonable near-future projection of soldiers contained in full-service "mecho-suits." The battleships on legs that they're isolated from the world they're destroying within...our narrator even touches briefly on the fact that he has no idea what any of his fellow soldiers look like, sealed inside their battle- and life-support pods, and has stopped caring...seemed practical, desirable. And true to Smith's sexual fixation, he even tosses (!) in the speculation that "Realie TV" will supply the men (of course) sealed up with, um, services like there were "girls" right there in the pods with them. Southern-born Smith wrote more extensive sexual SF, as well as a reverse-PoV version of Doctor Strangelove about a rogue Russian general who launches an atomic attack on the US.

The military, as personified by our ignorant grunt narrator and a pointed parody General called "Fightin' Joe Mac Williams" (who is clearly the performative battle-boy Douglas MacArthur, he of the famous "I shall return" speech and the chestful of medals) does not get the standard Cold-War adulation. Here that stupidity is beautifully lampooned by the narrator listening to a speech that he knows will cause a lot of death in this Paris, barely even sketched in, that we're told is the scene of the action: "A voice that used to sell us bath soap is selling us war."

The story appeared in 1955, shortly after the Korean War that MacArthur famously wanted to run very differently from then-President Truman, and got himself fired for insubordination as he went public with their differences. It was a case of being kicked upstairs, though, as MacArthur landed a role as leader of defense contractor and computer innovator Remington Rand, whose main business was in typewriter sales at that time. MacArthur, the War Hero as he would never, ever hesitate to remind you, taking such a deeply civilian job as selling typewriters and electric razors, was the source of the dig I quoted above. The dénouement takes place in the Louvre...and it's really nothing less than heart-breaking, if heavy-handed, in delivering its (more suited to the Sixties) message: What are we fighting for, again?

In all, I was very pleased to follow Dr. B down this weird little side-path of SF history, learn more about a writer I feel sure I'd never read a single word by before now, and renew my Cold War memories of people and events now dusty with the uninterest of the modern audience.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

BABY
CAROL EMSHWILLER
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
February 1958 edition, free to read on pages 114 to 128 linked above

Rating: 5* of five

My friend Joachim Boaz is reading through the short fiction of Carol Emshwiller...his review of this story is here.

Possibly the bleakest story I've ever read. This is the end of days, the end of Humanity...and it's all our fault. Our creations, those meant to care for us, have long outlived their responsibilities and, while executing irrelevant or now-harmful duties, are making the world impossible for us to live in.

Emshwiller and her compatriots warned us. And, while it doesn't look precisely like she predicted, the events of the present year are seriously in line with the predictions she made sixty-three years ago. I'm never quite sure the world's failing is real; then I read this, the systems slowly collapsing, the zombies of Reassurance and Normality trying to wish away the plague and the increasingly obvious shortages. I'm not crazy after all. (Well, yes I am, but not in the "lost-to-reality" way...more's the pity.)

Baby's young-adult body, not equipped with an education or a language to handle the new world he lives in, is naked and vulnerable to the world, acted on without his consent and/or despite his resistance as the zombie systems try the same solutions for the new problems. They fail utterly to help. The man is starving. The man is going to die.

It's 1958, so he Finds a Woman (called Honey) and Has a Purpose. Let's just put that down to the poison of the era, nothing can exist outside the Binary Amen World Without End, and draw a line under it.

The larger story of Baby is the resources of the planet will only last so long. When we run out of what we think we need, what will we be able to do about it when we have no knowledge to create anything new? And from what resources we have, are we going to allocate them and use them equitably? After all, Baby set out on his voyage of discovery because he was starving and Honey still has food. The Central that Baby invokes (I'd say "prays to" if he'd ever had a concept of Divinity) doesn't run properly anymore or he'd have supplies. The chocolate pie he eats in House 76 at the beginning of the story stands in for Emshwiller's ever-so-American suspicion of a central planner with the authority to do things for you. "And when it fails?" she asks without subtlety.

It's not at all a bad question to ask...Baby and Honey are as infantilized as I fear most people are becoming as the educational fads of today fail to prepare them even to read fluidly. (Read my review of this book.) Of course the automated Library has failed Baby and his Guardians, too...as I'm hugely dependent on my ereader, I recognize with no small trepidation how vulnerable that leaves me to technological disruptions that are, quite frankly, inevitable. I hope to be dead before they bite too hard....

But Emshwiller's main achievement in these dozen pages is really more impressive than simply Cassandra-ing up a future we should all dread. What she did was, as a woman, tell a story in a misogynistic field to readers not predisposed to like the way she presents it...Cold War SF fans...and without making it Sentimental. (Still ignoring Honey.) She did, ironically, marry and have kids shortly after this piece appeared and was silenced for almost an entire decade by the life of a Wife and Mother. She also came back from that silence, see her bibliography. This voice spoke wisdom, and did not stop speaking it. Seek her work out.

THE WORLD WELL LOST, Theodore Sturgeon's genuinely surprising story of the fate of The Loverbirds

THE WORLD WELL LOST
THEODORE STURGEON
Universe Science Fiction, June 1953
Free to read a PDF at the link above

Rating: 5* of five

The Book Report: from Wikipedia: "In the future, two members of an alien race called the Dirbanu come to Earth. They win humanity's heart by their grace and love for each other. Earth's media has dubbed them the "Loverbirds," and almost everyone on Earth is touched by the Loverbirds' tender displays of wonder and affection.

Dirbanu heretofore had almost no contact with Earth, except for one short investigative trip in which the ambassador of Dirbanu made clear that he found Earth disgusting. However, the Dirbanu government breaks the silence with Earth in order to demand the return of the Loverbirds. Allegedly, the Loverbirds are fugitive criminals and must be extradited. Earth's government, hoping to profit by cooperation with this powerful planet, dispatches spacers Rootes and Grunty to return the Loverbirds."

But Love, as we know, must never be allowed to flourish. Read it to see what happens next.

My Review: The nine-days' idyll of the Loverbirds arriving on space-faring Terra, with their mysterious origin among people who rejected all contact with Terra long, long ago, is lyrically described by Author Sturgeon. An example:

But watch loverbirds, just for a moment, and see what happens. It's the feeling you had when you were twelve, and summer-drenched, and you kissed a girl for the very first time and knew a breathlessness that you were sure could never happen again. And indeed it never could—unless you watched loverbirds. Then you are spellbound for four quiet seconds, and suddenly your very heart twists, and incredulous tears sting and stay; and the very first move you make afterward, you make on tiptoe, and your first word is a whisper.

That's pretty much a paean to the palpable aura of Love that these two beings emit? outgas? glow with? anyway, exude somehow. Terra is enraptured! There are trideo stories made, you can order a solidograph of the Loverbirds, the usual commercialization of the ineffable takes place in this way, far distant time when Terra is among the crowded, spacefaring galaxy.

Which is one way you know this is an old, old story. The Fermi Paradox, stated in 1950 at Los Alamos National Lab by Enrico Fermi as "Where is everybody?", wasn't yet scientific let alone secular orthodoxy in thinking about alien life Out There. (And yes, pedants, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said a similar thing in 1933, so don't bother to remind me.) But the exuberance of that universe-view is so appealing to me that I am always willing to grandfather it in.

So the Loverbirds, having created this rapturous current in Terran civilization, have to come to a bad end or there's no story, right? The Dirbanu catch wind of the Loverbirds' existence. And recognize them. With absolutely no pleasure at all. These two are wanted criminals! And since the Dirbanu are thought to be a powerful, if aloof, race and thus a people that Terrans would very much like to cozy up to, they agree to send the criminals back to face whatever. The crew selected for the trip are one of the most well-established crews in Terra's service. No problems being together in a small ship, no bad trips or unsuccessful missions; of course Rootes and Grunty will get the job done and return the Loverbirds to Dirbanu for punishment. (The issue of guilt is unimportant, apparently, as is the nature of the punishment; Terra needs new tech!) They're a finely tuned machine, these two, trustworthy in the extreme. Grunty's huge, Rootes is small; Grunty's quiet, Rootes is voluble. Perfect!

Rootes had filled the small cabin with earthy chatter about his conquests in port, detail by hairy detail, for two solid hours preceding their departure. ... Grunty had long ago noted that these recitations, for all their detail, carried the tones of thirst rather than of satiety.

I believe we have a source for the modern use of "thirst" in this sixty-seven-year-old story written by a man born 102 years ago! And it's not the only example in this story of Sturgeon's seemingly prescient use of "thirst" in its modern sense. Makes reading this story such a bemusing, beguiling experience.

Possibly the most poignant line in the whole story, but only after one has finished it, is Grunty's thought, "And what you could buy with a shekel's worth of tenderness, my prince!" which, despite its pithy, proverb-ly ring, appears to be used for the first (and so far only) time by Sturgeon. More quotations from Grunty's extensive reading float into his mind...and are understood by the hitherto-uncommunicative loverbirds. A telepathic race? Not unknown, but uncommon, and the Dirbanu having sent one Ambassador in all of Terran history (and he was simply appallingly bad-mannered to his hosts), a factor entirely to be chalked up to Chance. No one would know from the outside looking at them, after all, that their brains operate in this way....

Maleficent chance, to Grunty. He has A Secret, and he does not want his secret revealed.

Apparently Author Sturgeon had a low opinion of Terrans, and based on the attitudes of 1953, I can't blame him. Apparently he believed there would not be any improvement in Terran society's attitude of intolerance and loathing towards gay men. Apparently even going to the stars doesn't teach men that whoever and whatever a man may be, you're both still Human in a Universe so vast that your existence is insignificant, so lighten up on the petty details. And Rootes is exactly NOT the man to get that lesson, spending a considerable time expounding to Grunty how much he agrees with the Dirbanu's calling the Loverbirds criminals, and making sure his loathing for them is clear. Because they share Grunty's Big Secret:

They're gay.

Grunty, poor lad, is left with what I think is a super-pithy aperçu: "Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose?"

Any answers to that question would be gratefully welcomed all over this planet.

BEYOND BEDLAM, a condensed sprawling novel of a novella that needs rediscovery

BEYOND BEDLAM
WYMAN GUIN
Project Gutenberg
Free; reprint of original Galaxy Magazine publication, August 1951

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Book Report: (adapted from The Science Fiction Encyclopedia)
A brilliant novelette describing an Earth about a thousand years hence where Drugs enforce a strictly regulated schizophrenia in every human being in a five-days-on, five-days-off routine, each body inhabited alternately by two personalities. The balance created between the two personalities' divergent aspects ends up serving to nullify Humanity's subconscious aggressions, thus eliminating the "paranoid wars" of the "ancient Moderns" aka "us." But passion and art likewise disappear. The good and evil of this system are explored with a literacy and verisimilitude that make it a startling, propulsively readable and interesting variation on Aldous Huxley's vision of drug-enforced stability in Brave New World.

My Review: This antique survivor of the post-war optimism about advances in medicine and psychology takes a radical turn on the medicate-me-well paradigm. Very unusual to read a story that celebrates schizophrenia as the savior of humanity, as the road out of the Mutually Assured Destruction deterrent days. I learned of this story's existence via James W. Harris's blog, Classics of Science Fiction, and I seem to have liked it just a bit more than he did.

Author Wyman Guin was certainly a man you'd trust to tell this story of a future, beautifully functional schizophrenic society balanced into cultural stasis by lifelong usage of psychoactive drugs. He was a Big Pharma man as his career, and so uniquely well placed to create a story of hyperalters and hypoalters (dominant and recessive personality traits) cohabiting in the same brain.

Of course there is no story in a happy, smoothly functioning world. Something must go pear-shaped, and in this instance it's the emergence of a man's love for a completely, utterly forbidden-to-him woman. The wife of the one person he absolutely can not get away with cuckolding.

His hypoalter.

Bill Walden, bookish and genius-level smart, has a wife (there clearly is no room for queer folk in Guin's future) and a child. All three of them are hyperalters, the different bodies' dominant personalities. He isn't getting much deeply drug-addled emotional juice from the wife, and simply cares nothing for the child. He somehow decides his hypoalter's wife (who is his own wife's hypoalter) is The One. She agrees, naturally, and they embark on the Grand Passion journey that absolutely never ends in sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows.

They needed each other as each had been, before fear had bleached their feeling to white bones of desperation.

(This is why affairs always end badly, or turn into replacement primary relationships, or not infrequently both.) This outcome being their world's major promise to its schizophrenic folk, there is a power structure...the Medicorps...with dictatorial powers and uberinvasive surveillance monitoring the individuals in each body, assuring that they are all in medical compliance or else. The Medicops (don't you just love this idea? The Medicops! What a donnybrook that concept would start in 2020 Merica!) are arbiters of the thousand-year peace that "Better Living Through Chemistry" as a social system has enabled (enforced) at very, very significant cost. That cost being in the rather distant past, the ancient "Moderns" of the 20th and 21st centuries, Bill and his fellows are truly well-established in a working, stable, functionally fulfilling society.

But here's Bill Walden, in love with Forbidden Fruit. Human beings will not just stop being the chaos vectors we started out to be. So Bill, as a tragic hero must, sows the seeds of his downfall...not the wife-shagging part that unglues the armature, but the neglected and unloved child. Out of the mouths of babes comes truth, and that is almost never a good thing for adults. In this case it's a gigantic chaotic reckoning of the transgressors, the victims, and the entire model of the society that has held sway on Earth for most of a thousand peaceful, unwartorn years.

All it took to create it was the suppression (however partially successful, however massively destructive) of human nature by drugs.

Listen, I'm not ever going to complain about psych drugs. Anti-depressants literally saved my life after a suicidal break six years ago; months and months in a locked hospital ward being treated with psych meds enabled me to put myself back together, and here I am. I will say that, as this story came out in 1951, the drugs I took were but fantasies to the doctors of the day. So the idea central to the story, that pharmacology could fix psychological problems, is even more believable now than it was then. Yes, there are many who rail against medicalizing psychological issues. I won't get into that debate; but I'll point out that dead people don't use many psychological services and there would be more dead people (me, for one) without the help the drugs can be.

Another strand of this story that resonates strongly today is the Medicorps. We're in a pandemic where people are refusing to follow the informed and reasonable plans made by educated subject-matter experts. In the story, this issue was explicitly dealt with in a kind of flashback sequence. I approved. Since the ebook is free and short enough to read in an afternoon, maybe you'll take a look and see if you do as well. Like all Utopias, especially medicalized ones like this and Brave New World, there is a repressive government in charge of everything. Unlike Brave New World, there is no pocket of defiantly Other people. The simple truth is that no human being believes we can be trusted to run our own lives in such a way as to minimize conflict with other human beings. I know I don't.

But the yearning for freedom, for unfettered experiences, is powerful and motivates many of our species' most enduring creations. For good and ill, of course. Like the drugs that accidentally harmonize the formerly disabling condition of schizophrenia into the basis of a stable society. The drugs that were invented led to a centuries-long breeding program resulting in humans with two and only two personalities. The social structure, rigid of course, built on this discovered binary has a lot of tech backing it up, like the drugs designed to enhance, enforce even, the bifurcation of the hyperalters and hypoalters into separate and un-overlapping lives. In a 21st century where we have fMRI and CAT and PET scanning technologies, the dénouement of this piece is a lot more believable than it was in 1951.

Like all humans, Bill wants to be his unmediated self. But in a society where everyone is a binary, sharing bodies and faces, what keeps confusion from reigning supreme? Of course there is a shift-based apartheid system to ensure minimal social overlap of hypers and hypos; as the hypers are the dominant personalities, the hypos are waging a cultural battle to retire those denigratory terminologies:

Those idealists—they were almost all hypoalters, of course—who wanted the old terminology changed didn't take {the stability of society} into account. Next thing they'd want children to live with their actual parents!

But the system has more elaborate ploys! Makeup, for one: Everyone wears it; everyone is ashamed to be seen without it; and in cases like Bill's, where he has anti-socially "forced a shift" on his hypoalter to spend time with the man's wife, wearing the alter's makeup and clothing is repugnant to the other, socially conditioned to see that other as unreachable.

She pulled the sheet tighter about her and said icily, "I will not wear that woman's clothes." ... {Bill} shifted! He left me with...Oh, I'm so ashamed!"
There was no way to escape the conditioning of childhood—sex relations between hyperalter and hypoalter were more than outlawed, they were in themselves disgusting.

There is a lot more depth to this world than can possibly be contained in the under-100 pages of the written tale. No sequel or other work was ever written in the man's lifetime, nor was this story ever filmed (as best I can tell).

And that, my friends, is a damned shame. This would be a *superb* movie, with big names and lush effects and a biting wit to the screenplay. It could even be a terrific little morality tale for the present climate of fear and distrust of Experts. Does anyone here know how to reach Ryan Reynolds? He'd be *awesome* as Bill!

WINE OF THE DREAMERS, 1950s Science Fiction by...JOHN D. MacDONALD!

WINE OF THE DREAMERS
JOHN D. MacDONALD
Random House
$13.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3 and a half surprised stars of five

The Publisher Says: Wine of the Dreamers, a classic science fiction novel from John D. MacDonald, the beloved author of Cape Fear and the Travis McGee series, is now available as an eBook.

They are the Watchers: pale laboratory creatures living in a remote, sealed-off world. Their game, their religion, their release is to dream, and their dreams carry across the galaxy to lodge in the minds of the inhabitants of another world: the planet Earth. But as the human race approaches a dream of their own—traveling beyond their own planet to other worlds—the Watchers step in. For escape from Earth is an impossible dream, one that the Watchers will go to any length to destroy.

My Review: JOHN D. MACDONALD WROTE SCI FI?!?

*splutter*

Well blow me down and call me Shorty! I would never, ever in a month of Sundays have guessed that Travis McGee's daddy ventured into outer space! But he did, and I have now passed its odd and lumpy lineaments before my eyes.

I poke around the Internet when I'm at a loose end. I found a Wikipedia article on Startling Stories, a pulp rag from the Golden Age of SF. Oooh, lookee here, what innocent things the ancestors were, I thought, and oooh how scrummy there's a link to an internet archive of the magazines!

Babes in brass bras...ads for defunct brands of whisky using Mexican artists...Vaseline Hair Tonic...JOHN D. MACDONALD?!?

Downloaded and read. And what a ride it was: Square-jawed hetero male has non-rapey friendship with bodacious curvy babe. Not at all like the MacDonald we know and love. (Or don't love, as the case may be.) This is an aberration, explained by a plot twist in the story of the Dreamers. Now this is an old chestnut, the mental passengers who suddenly take over innocent earthlings for malign purposes. It wasn't the latest thing in 1950 (!!) when the story appeared in Startling Stories. But it's an evergreen for a reason, it explains the strange turns and periodic about-faces that humans actually do have. There was a moment when I thought, "aha this explains Parseltongue!" before I realized JK Rowling's younger than I am and not known to be related to MacDonald...the only means I can imagine whereby the Scottish lassie would've heard of this obscure gem. But at an even greater remove in time (I found this story in 2014), the metaphor for the evil Dreamers being or neoliberal overlords leapt forcefully to my mind.

In more or less 50,000 words, MacDonald hit all the buttons of an action adventure on multiple planets, America's inevitable domination of the Space Race, and that eternal favorite of male readers, Man's Unique Destiny to Rule and Dominate! It was 1950, go fight the odds. It rings more hollow seventy years on than ever, given the state of climate change and the unending wretchedness of the pandemic.

As I scrolled through the accursèd PDF file, I was increasingly amazed at the un-MacDonald-ness of the story. His touch with a wisecrack was entirely absent, his trademark pessimism was not yet at full cry as the ending was hopeful (!), and while I would not put MacDonald up there with Henry James in the ability to convey character in a few well-chosen words, these folks were Central Casting call sheets.

So it was that, despite the siren call of sleep, I scrolled and scrolled through the scanned pages of this deeply forgotten footnote to the popular career of MacDonald. It was certainly MacDonaldy in the sense that, despite the humorously outdated science, and despite the hoary familiar tropes being unspooled before me, I couldn't think of a good reason not to keep right on reading until the inevitable ending. And by inevitable, I mean so clearly telegraphed in the set-up that Helen Keller running out of a burning building wouldn't have any trouble supplying it for you.

Sophisticates are therewith warned.

In fact, would I recommend starting this little marvy to most people? No, not really, it's not earth-shatteringly good at anything. It's a curiosity, and a charmingly old-fashioned stroll down memory lane for those of us on the downhill slide to death. You can always download it free with a modest amount of effort if Halloween seems like the right time to think about the dear, dead past's quiet little corners.

MORE FREE SF! Two stories from 1957 to read in line, while waiting for the gift wrap or at the P.O.

Shopping and wrapping and waiting, oh my! Shopping and wrapping and waiting, oh my! Fire up the browser on your phone, let's get some free reads for the line.

SF blogger Joachim Boaz decided to do a project where he will review a sampling of the Golden-into-Silver Age short fictions about generation ships. The first review, and story, I read was Spacebred Generations by Clifford D. Simak. Then I read his Judith Merril review; he was pretty stoked while I, welllll, maybe not quote so much. But the reads as a whole I'd call a success, so why not follow along?

I went back to the first one, then got ahead again...comme d'habitude.

THE WIND BLOWS FREE
CHAD OLIVER
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
July 1957 issue, free

Rating: 3.5* of five

What better time is there to give yourself a booster shot of resistance to Faux Smarmy Cheer? Here it is, readers, a tale of how irredeemable Humanity is! A good part of my mingy rating, and for an author whose work I have always liked before!, comes down to this:

As a matter of fact, Bob was the closest thing to a friend he had ever had. There had been a few girls, but that was different.

It's hard for me to choose which thing to object to the most here: Bob's relegation to not-friendship despite clearly behaving as a friend, or the appalling-to-me notion that "girls" can't be a male's friends. The assumption that men are either studs or cucks (though I don't think Professor Oliver, deceased 1993, would've used those terms, I know he'd "get" them right away), and that studs are always tall and strong and a little bit ugly, is reductive and objectionable in today's landscape. It's also wrong, both factually and conceptually.

From there, the logical lapses just built and built...why would the designers of a closed system allow books that contained Earthly images like ships, seas, clouds in reach of people for whom those words mean nothing? if the movie the people saw on Founding Day has images of Earth, how would the first-time viewers know what they were looking at? Sam comes across space suits, things he's never seen before, and just knows what they are HOW?!...but all that pales into insignificance held against The Big Reveal.

Omigawd.

I assume you're curious enough to read the darn thing yourself but I'll say this much: Oliver's low opinion of Humanity didn't start late in life. He was only thirty-ish when this tale, and the more famous Transfusion of 1959, appeared. Even famously cynical SF writer and fellow Austinite Howard Waldrop got nothin' on the bitterness of this tale, or the cynical outrage at the pusillanimity of our species. I might not be thrilled by the read, but I am in sympathy with it, being as bleakly unimpressed by the inner workings of Humankind as Oliver was before me.

LUNGFISH
JOHN BRUNNER
Science Fantasy
December 1957 issue, PDF read-only link above

Rating: 4.5* of five UPDATE 11 DECEMBER 2019 Distinguished SF blogger James W. Harris reviews this generation-ship tale.

This is a Brunner story I haven't read before! He's an old favorite of mine (see my review of Times Without Number, others came before I was reviewing). So when Joachim Boaz posted the link to this story, well, I don't have much impulse control when it comes to reading....

Like Judith Merril's story reviewed below, this one takes place as things are reaching a crisis or inflection point; in Brunner's case, opposite to Merril's, the point-of-view was adult...well, aged Earthborn people, the ones who started the trip to a new world that was planned by a visionary called Yoseida, so obviously a Japanese person. This sort of surprised me. Japan was on the come-up in 1957, but it wasn't the economic and technological powerhouse it would become. But Yoseida was the money-man as well as the macher behind this effort to colonize a new world. Prescient, or very lucky? I suspect Brunner himself wouldn't know now.

Franz Yerring is the head of the ecological section of the generation ship. He's Earth-born, aging out of his position, hoping that he won't have to deliver bad news to Captain Magda Gomez about their steep decline in food and air availability looming within a month. Wish granted, Franz, the ship will now be in orbit over Trip's End around Tau Ceti in about two weeks!

Then the fecal matter impacts the rotary ventilation enhancement device in quantities previously undreamed of.

The shipborn aren't much interested in getting off the ship.

You see, this development would (in less devious hands) set the rest of the story onto the rails of conflict and strife...like Clifford D. Simak's Spaceborn Generations, reviewed in November...but no, our lad John takes that expectation and shakes it hard, until its wallet falls out and disgorges the serious gelt. There is no conflict between the spaceborn and their elders. They aren't interested enough in the Earthborns's issue, planting a colony, for it to matter enough to cause a fight.

Read the story, the real conflict is much, much higher stakes than passive resistance to The Plan. A lot scarier, too. But the problem is that the ending relies on science that seemed more plausible in 1957 than it's proven to be in modern times. The issue it raises is bleeding-edge current, and the problem it posits is also bleeding-edge current. It's a wonderful way to bring up a painful discussion in sociopolitcally polarized families. But the central premise is debatable in its form presented.

I'm getting dangerously close to irretrievable spoilers here. Let me say this to you, dear readers: The story is free at the link provided and it will richly reward the 30min you spend reading it with hours of rumination.

FREE SF short story from 1958! Only it's GOOD!

WISH UPON A STAR
JUDITH MERRIL
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Free on the Internet Archive

Rating: 3.5* of five

SF blogger Joachim Boaz (link is to his review) decided to do a project where he will review a sampling of the Golden-into-Silver Age short fictions about generation ships. The first review, and story, I read was Spacebred Generations by Clifford D. Simak. That read was a success, so why not follow along?

I got ahead instead.

In this December 1958 tale of a generation ship much more under its crew's control that Simak's, and on a much shorter voyage as well...there are people on Merril's ship who were born on Earth!...we're re-introduced to the hell that is adolescence and the agonies of first love.

We're also seeing the ship's life much more intimately than we did in Simak's story. For one thing, Sheik (Toshiko, our PoV character) is a boy in a world run by women. All the officers are women. The men, like Sheik's maybe-dad Bob, are laborers and technologists. Sheik's mentor as well as other maybe-dad is a plant specialist, Abdur or Ab, the one responsible for maintaining the biodiversity of the ship's air supply. Eventually, of course, when the ship lands Ab will be the one who teaches the whole community to grow plants for their food. And Sheik is his shadow, his willing and joyful amanuensis, already teaching the next generation about the miracle of plant life.

So we join the fun when Sheik's wretched over Naomi's mean and cutting comments to him, ruminating over how unfair it is that she'll always be in charge over him and she's just mean! Also why won't Sarah, like him the oldest in her generation, Notice Him? So far, so standard...but times are a-changin' and Sheik isn't about to let a little thing like being forbidden to listen in on adult stuff stop him.

Kids are kids. Don't care who's in charge, daddy or mama, a kid's gonna rebel. This time, what he hears is something so HUGE he almost can't believe it! And add to that Sarah's sudden, um, Noticing Him, and you have Sheik's birthday and Christmas come at once. (Heh.) Add on top of all that the men's secret council regarding the Big News, a discovery about what men and women really do together, and a sleepless night will pass for Sheik. Probably Sarah, too.

I gave this story three and a half stars because it's not the revelation that it would've been sixty-one years ago to have women in charge. There's a decent chance that'll happen in the USA in 2020, or so I hope. It's also a very small story, a slice of adolescent life; that's not all that interesting to me personally. It's fine as a story, it has good things to say about equality and the arbitrary nature of society and the fairness doctrine is far fleshier for its 1958 readers than it would've begun by being.

Just...slight. Homey. Not meant to be more, and published in December so it was probably meant as a holiday tale, one of the lighter fare that most entertainment venues specialize in presenting as North Americans head into the Winter Holidays with their feasts and decorations and gift-wrapping-fests. It's not badly written. It's just not my personal taste. Heck, the read is free, try it out.

TWO free-to-read online short stories for US folks' trip home from overeating & fighting with relatives!

Author Joshua Ferris reading; from his Facebook page

Good Legs by Joshua Ferris (visit his website!)

Rating: 3.5* of five

Read it here free. You get four free reads a month from The New Yorker; this one is worth burning one of them.

See this? The Old Flame isn't worth the stress:

Then my old flame graduated early and was gone. There were rumors of a new boyfriend and a life in Ireland. I didn’t miss her. By then, I was in this terrible on-off thing with Sisyphus, who kept dragging me up a pretty blond hill and hurtling me down.

Because there's always another Old Flame. Author Ferris, winner of the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award for Then We Came to the End, clearly has thought the modern condition through; he writes the voice of the Millennials faultlessly, musically, and honestly. The obsession of a young man is not (solely) sex, it's the being-ness of his sex partners, the odd and quirky and endlessly shifting kaleidoscope of characteristics and qualities that occur and recur in his solipsism's background. He maintains through it all a sense that The Other is just ever so slightly unreal, is reducible to A Title. Like most all the young men I've ever known, from every generation I've ever met.

It's wonderful to read the thoughts I've had all my life, the wonder and the bewilderment and the anxious unreality of existence, come from another brain. It's incredible to me that anyone can read a short story of this economy and precision and not instantly fall in love with the form.

Beautiful.

from the August 1953 edition of Science Fiction-Plus magazine

Spaceborn Generations by Clifford D. Simak

Rating: 3.5* of five

Not for nothing was Simak a journalist/popularizer of science. This generation-ship tale is short, so doesn't go into a lot of details about *how* a thousand-year voyage through space would be accomplished without human maintenance of its workings, and how it came to be that twentieth-century English was the lingua franca of the Ship, and whether the Ship's breeding program took account of skin color variations, and why The Little Woman was still in her place...the list goes on.

But what I see in Simak's story is the basic story I read SF for. It is about the tiny little prisons Humankind builds and calls Paradise. It is about the unquestioning and overly trusting way we accept what is given and hunger only for more, not radically and materially different. Novelty is more important than innovation...gossip more important than erudition. Wake up, Author Simak shouted at the Folk of 1953 who read this story, Life is short so wake up!

His fix-up novel, City, was in much the same vein. The Earth is subject to disasters and cataclysms, but savvy Humankind was somehow or other ready for that and hijinks ensued. As I think we can imagine, since Simak lived through the Cold War (died only three years before it ended, if we take 1991's collapse of the Soviet Union as The End), that was more a triumph of hope over experience. But his fiction, never precisely deft in execution, was always aimed at making a point about doing your own best, convincing others to do theirs, making the best of the stuff you had to hand. Teddy Roosevelt's formulation would've appealed to Simak, I think: "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."

And that's all the Folk on the Ship in this story have done. It isn't a perfect world, at least not to us looking in at it, but they're still alive, and Humanity can always chug along somehow. But Mr. Simak, what I wouldn't give to ramp your ideas about women above the helpmeet/homemaker/uterus bearer. Mary Hoff, who is Mrs. Hero and no more than that, sees a whole new world spread before her barely comprehending eyes and her first thought is, "can we have a baby now?" She's *asking*permission*from*her*husband* to have a baby on a wide-open new planet. That's just...ICK is nowhere near strong enough a response.

Feminists are duly warned: Probably not enough substance here, in storytelling terms, to outweigh the deep, dark, dank cave of regression Simak lived in. I'm not resentful that I read the piece. I won't go out of my way to urge you to. But Simak's view of Humanity seems to accord with mine: Pretty damned lazy, really happy to remain stupid, and full of hate and spite, but love 'em or leave 'em.

Does the Shipping News cover off-planet departures?

THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, apocalypse now all over again?

THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS
JOHN WYNDHAM
Modern Library
$11.99 Kindle editior, available 22 April 2022

Rating: 4 worried, sky-searching stars of five, with a pair of dark goggles at the ready

Don't forget there is a 3.5* film adaptation as well...free to view here...and cheap at twice the price.

The Publisher Says: In 1951 John Wyndham published his novel The Day of the Triffids to moderate acclaim. Fifty-two years later, this horrifying story is a science fiction classic, touted by The Times (London) as having “all the reality of a vividly realized nightmare.”

Bill Masen, bandages over his wounded eyes, misses the most spectacular meteorite shower England has ever seen. Removing his bandages the next morning, he finds masses of sightless people wandering the city. He soon meets Josella, another lucky person who has retained her sight, and together they leave the city, aware that the safe, familiar world they knew a mere twenty-four hours before is gone forever.

But to survive in this post-apocalyptic world, one must survive the Triffids, strange plants that years before began appearing all over the world. The Triffids can grow to over seven feet tall, pull their roots from the ground to walk, and kill a man with one quick lash of their poisonous stingers. With society in shambles, they are now poised to prey on humankind. Wyndham chillingly anticipates bio-warfare and mass destruction, fifty years before their realization, in this prescient account of Cold War paranoia.

My Review:

It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" — that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.

In this time of fearful concern over genetically manipulated Frankenfoods, the triffids should give this book a fresh and timely aura, IMHO. For Soviet manipulation of plants, read Monsanto, and, well....

One of the big issues with the book is the Dreaded Infodump, pretty much all of chapter two. I know why folks don't like long expository passages, but there is always a certain amount of world-building to do in any novel, especially so in SF. So, in the end, I come down on the side of the flow NOT being interrupted by the backstory. I think it was well handled, well as well-handled as such a thing can be; Wyndham starts the chapter with "This is a personal record." That's the jumping-off place for the character's memories. That was, for me, an adequate narrative frame for the purpose of keeping the important sense of forward momentum present in the 18pp (in my Modern Library reprint) it takes to put readers in the picture.

I think I was lulled into acquiescence by Wyndham's style, as well: "Such a swerve of interest from swords to plowshares was undoubtedly a social improvement, but, at the same time, it was a mistake for the optimistic to claim it as showing a change in the human spirit." (p21, Mod. Lib. reprint) Understatedly gives the reader a sense of the narrator's already extant character and informs the retentive reader that later dark musings the narrator indulges in are not due to a freshly developed case of the post-apocalyptic blahs.

Then this chilling bit:

But there were a number of not unobvious characteristics which escaped comment for some little time. It was, for instance, quite a while before anyone drew attention to the uncanny accuracy with which {the triffids} aimed their stings, and that they almost invariably struck for the head. Nor did anyone at first take notice of their habit of lurking near their fallen victims. The reason for that became clear only when it was shown that they fed upon flesh as well as insects. The stinging tendril did not have the muscular power to tear firm flesh, but it had strength enough to pull shreds from a decomposing body and lift them to the cup on its stem.

(p31, Mod. Lib. reprint)
EEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWW

But how much more effective and chilling and revolting and scary when delivered in the even, measured voice of a scientist-cum-post-traumatic-stress-survivor instead of screeched at us. The narrator's reliability is well established with the reader at this point, and later horrors are subtly magnified by the unconscious impression of trustworthiness this kind of technique provides.

REAL horror, not gore: that sense of unspeakable and terrifying things happening on a Wednesday afternoon at four pm, not in some horrible abbatoir at midnight where I the reader/moviegoer know for sure and certain there are not enough wild horses to drag me.

Uh oh. I'm hearing crickets chirping. Better clam up. (But not before mentioning the 1962 Howard Keel-starring film...a twelve-years-after more horror-focused adaptation conceived and filmed during the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It has a charm all its own but it sure ain't up there with the 21st Century's adaptations!)

THE MADONNA AND THE STARSHIP, laugh-it-up lark

THE MADONNA AND THE STARSHIP
JAMES MORROW
Tachyon Publications
$3.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the golden era of sci-fi TV, why were alien crustaceans so darned literal? Beloved 1950's star Uncle Wonder must create the ultimately irreverent television show — or crayfish from outer space will inflict their death-ray on an unsuspecting viewership.

It is New York City, 1953. The new medium of live television has been kind to young pulp-fiction writer Kurt Jastrow. Not only does he enjoy scripting a popular children’s space opera, Brock Barton and His Rocket Rangers, he also plays an eccentric tinkerer on Uncle Wonder’s Attic.

But Kurt’s world is thrown into disarray when two extraterrestrial crayfish-like creatures arrive at the studio. Certain that the audience for a religious program program represents "a hive of irrationalist vermin,” the crustaceans scheme to vaporize its two million viewers. Kurt and his co-writer have a mere forty hours to write and produce an explicitly rational and utterly absurd script that will somehow deter the aliens from their diabolical scheme.

My Review: What a lark! (And I don't mean either the cigarette or the Studebaker

). If you're old enough to have watched Lost in Space or Star Trek at night, you'll resonate with this tale's daffy Firesign-Theater-esque Smothers-Brothers-y energy; if Captain Video crossed your eyestalks as a sprog, a sharp pang of nostalgia will pierce your vitals to add tears to the grins.

Anyone born in, say, 1965 or later, well now...come try the waters of your elders' Glorious Pools. It is a shocking amount of fun to see every shibboleth twisted in the mouths of desperate, deranged people attempting to avert catastrophe...to no avail, and yet no catastrophe ensues. And the reason it doesn't will, if you have an irony bone at all, leave you wryly pursing your mouthparts. Religion takes its licks...there is nothing on this Earth so satisfying as the mental picture of Jesus arguing that playing god is a bad idea on a show called Not By Bread Alone...but so does rationalism by way of a surrealist romp of acid-trip proportions. Eight-foot-tall blue lobster-women wearing the statue of Prometheus from Rockefeller Center as a necklace tend to fall on the surreal end of my personal story-telling spectrum, don't know about you.

What prevents this from achieving full five-star glory for me is the frenetic pace and unwieldy cast. Too many faces, too little screen time. There was a lot to do, and I enjoyed seeing it done; but a bit more book or a few fewer folks would've served the tale being told better. The Qualimosans were so incredible that they would simply lose yet more credibility with more face-time; it's the secondary characters, Saul Silver the editor of Andromeda magazine, Walter Spalding the producer, a few others...who needed a bit more room to make their deeply funny and still very believable quirks more than Thespian masks.

This is a minor grumble, however, hidden in a major guffaw. The fun that I had reading this delectable morsel of mash-up gumbo made this trim volume a sterling value.

THE MIDAS PLAGUE, Frederik Pohl's 60-year-old novelette of consumerism

THE MIDAS PLAGUE
FREDERIK POHL
Out of print
Various prices and sellers, starting at about $6

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Although the three part serial beginning in the June 1952 issue in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth had established Frederik Pohl as a formidable contributor, this novelette in the April 1954 issue was his first solo contribution and marked him as an important addition to the growing roster of social satirists enlisted by Horace Gold, the editor of GALAXY magazine.

The audacious and patchwork concept underlying this story (the richer you are the less you are forced to consume; the greatest poverty is involved with the aggregation of goods) was Horace Gold’s and according to Pohl he had offered it to almost all of his regular contributors, asking for a story centered on the idea. The idea lacks all credibility, everyone (including Pohl) told him and everyone refused to write something so patently unbelievable until, according to Pohl, Horace browbeat him into an attempt and Pohl decided that it was less trouble to deliver something than continue to resist.

To his utter shock, the story was received by Gold and his readership with great glee, was among the most popular GALAXY ever published (or Pohl) and one of the most anthologized. Whether this demonstrated the audacity and scope of Gold’s unreason or whether it confirmed Gold’s genius (or both) Pohl was utterly unable to decide. The sculpted consumer-obsessed society was used again by Pohl a few years later in the novelette THE MAN WHO ATE THE WORLD which was far more credible (consumption-obsession as a kind of personal tyranny) and, perhaps for that very reason, much less successful, barely remembered.

My Review: Rather entertaining, in a simple way. But as I read on, I had this chill of terror...after all, in a world where there are "old" Kindles and iPhones and Galaxy tablets made in 2012, how far are we from the dystopia of this tale?

Thanks to LibraryThing Fred, I read this antique, sixty-year-old tale of consumerism's most appalling subtext writ large. It's hard not to see how this 12,000 or so word novelette would benefit from either more or less space. It would, in hands more skilled, have been side-splittingly funny. Pohl wasn't really up to it in 1954. But honestly, it was an hour spent smiling and frowning at the same time, as I processed the implications of the fact that people saw what was happening in the wake of consumerism in 1954...and did nothing.

That chilled me.

At $6-ish and an hour or so of time, this felt like a break-even investment. I was hoping for a positive return of laughs, and got the smiles instead. But overall I'd say it's a good way to spend an afternoon. Very worthwhile for the Unlimited folks, less so for the money-spenders.