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megapolisomancy's review
2.0
No time travel stories this year - which is odd, but fine. No stories by women authors, which is neither odd nor fine.
“Jungle Doctor,” by Robert F. Young
Opens promisingly - Sarith has mistakenly teleported not to Chalce, but to some mysterious other planet currently experiencing a snowstorm. Knowing from the climate that it must support intelligent life (habitable planets always do, apparently), she sets out in search of civilization, before being overcome by the snow. A native approaches… it’s Graham Lindsey, of Anytown, USA. Yes, the alien planet is Earth, and yes, just to twist the knife, Sarith is also a human alien, only apparently space humans look like children. A blonde-haired, blue-eyed child, at that, which reminds me that all of the space humans encountered so far (and there have been so, so many of them) have presumably been white. Lindsey is a drunk who spends his days washing cars, which he hallucinates as being covered in blood. Sarith, as fate would have it, was on her way to Chalce to be a psi-therapist, and she uses her telepathic powers to figure out that Lindsey accidentally ran over and killed his wife some years ago, hence the hallucinations and drunkenness. Inspired by a book she reads about Albert Schweitzer (and the fact that her transporter belt is rapidly running out of juice), she decides to stay on this primitive planet helping to psychically heal Earthlings. Half-heartedly gestures toward a critique of Western medical practices abound (Sarith is aghast that patients have to come to doctors rather than the other way), and she is explicitly compared to Christ.
"Judgment Day", by L. Sprague de Camp
Dr. Wade Ormont, an angry, aging nerd, decides to let the world burn because he was picked on as a child. A nuclear physicist, he’s discovered a way to blow up all the iron in the Earth’s crust, and the story takes the form of his inner monologue as he decides whether or not to report his findings to his superiors in the nuclear weapons program. Having reflected on all the times he was mistreated by others for being too bookish and smart, the story ends with his house vandalized by the local teenagers, and his declaration that “I hate them. I hate them. I hate everybody. I want to kill mankind. I’d kill them by slow torture if I could. If I can’t, blowing up the earth will do. I shall write my report.”
"The Game of Rat and Dragon", by Cordwainer Smith
In the distant future, Earth has been destroyed by internecine warfare, and interstellar travel can only be kept safe by pinlighters, humans who communicate telepathically with “the Partners” who help them spot and destroy the monstrous creatures that live in the vacuum. The identity of the partners is kind of kept secret through the beginning of the story, but it’s clear that it’s cats. The monsters appear as dragons to the humans, but as rats to the partners. It sounds kind of goofy, and there isn’t much of a plot here (it’s mostly an idea/future history piece), but it’s written competently and is one of the most imaginative and enjoyable stories in the bunch. I need to read more Smith.
"The Man Who Always Knew", by Algis Budrys
A very short one about a wealthy, world-famous “inventor” who, it turns out,actually produces nothing of his own - just knows how to buy low and sell high. Capitalism! The science-fictional aspect is his ability to know when and where someone is going to invent something - as in the bar where the scene takes place, as the bartender accidentally invents a new drink that Mr. McMahon buys from him.
"Dream Street", by Frank M. Robinson
A narcissistic, sociopathic orphan runs away (from “The Home for the Children of Space”), kills a mugger, lies to and manipulates everyone he meets, all to achieve his dream of leaving Earth behind and going into space. Ideologically, of course, the ends justify the means, and this is presented as a quintessentially American success story of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. Weird narrative tick of jumping forward in time with no indication that we’re doing so.
"You Created Us", by Tom Godwin
A man encounters telepathic mini-godzillas in the Nevada desert. A by-product of nuclear testing, they plan on taking over the world, and are using their psychic abilities to ramp up the “hate and fear and suspicion” of the Cold War so that humanity will destroy itself, leaving them in charge as the next evolutionary masters of the world. The story closes with the protagonist, his memory wiped, driving out of the desert, musing “for some strange reason, of the mighty tyrannosaurus rex dying out because some little animals he did not notice were eating his eggs.” This is an odd non-sequitur that does not at all apply to the story.
"Swenson, Dispatcher", by R. DeWitt Miller
Once again, drunken irrationality (this time in the form of a spaceship dispatcher), turns out to be the only way to deal with modern life. Swenson (, dispatcher) is hired on at the ragtag Acme Interplanetary Express in a pan-American solar system, and while at first he seems to be a drunken buffoon, it turns out that he’s a drunken miracle-worker, guiding Acme’s ships through a series of hijinks involving blustering Senators on the Moon and shipments of snuff and a rival mega-corporation. Like the Robinson, the narrative stumbles forward in oddly and ineffectually.
"Thing", by Ivan Janvier
Opens with a man watching workers cut apart the radioactive remains of the Statue of Liberty in order to dispose of them at sea (“In the city of New York, even liberty was radioactive”). This man, and his subordinate, are government agents, and they soon meet with a journalist, who knows that they’re after one “Eugene Outlaw,” a survivor of the Providence nuke who is now some sort of superhuman. All three meet up with Outlaw independently (and unbeknowst to the others), who passes on to each of them in turn the alien symbiote that has been giving him his powers - “it likes to be comfortable. When the bomb fell, it was unhappy.” Each, pitying the other two for coming so close only to fail, plans on using their new powers to ensure world peace prevails.
"I Do Not Love Thee, Doctor Fell", by Robert Bloch
Our protagonist, Bromely, finds himself at Dr. Fell’s office without quite remembering how he came to have an appointment there. Bromely also can’t recall having met Fell or told him his story before, but Fell knows it anyway - that Bromely is a failing public relations agent and never-was songwriter whose work never had any individuality. “I’m at the end of my rope. When you come to the end of your rope, you swing. I’m swinging, now. I’m swinging down the lane. Down Memory Lane. I wanted to be a songwriter, once. But my lyrics sounded as if they were stolen. That’s my problem. Association. I’ve got too much association. Everything I do or say sounds like it’s stolen from somebody else. Imitation. Mimicry. Until there’s nothing original, nothing basic beneath to which I can cling. I’m losing myself. There’s no real me left.” The fakery of modern life has left Bromely rudderless and unhinged, and Dr. Fell, a figment of his imagination, ends up as the dominant personality. This is a critique of mechanistic modernity, sure, and not a subtle one at that, but I’m not sure that it could be considered science fiction. Bloch was more of a weird/horror writer anyway, which shines through in the tone of this piece and, dare I say it, its quality, which outshines most others here by a wide margin - and Bloch isn’t even one of my favorite weird writers.
"Clerical Error", by Mark Clifton
Another story about modernity’s fracturing of young white men, although this time the target is mostly inhumane bureaucracy. The protagonist, K. Heidrich Kingston, is the psychiatrist in charge of “the government workers’ mental hospital” seeking to prevent the lobotomy of David Storm, a patient. Because of the patient’s higher Security (proper noun “Security” is an odd commonplace in these stories; “you can’t ignore the Security program, because that’s a sacred cow which no one dares question”) clearance, though, Kingston can’t be allowed near him. To start things off, without ever having met the patient, Kingston uses his “true empathy” ability to figure out the man’s life history - he became a scientist only because it was expected of him, exemplifying the societal problem with “science allied to big government, and controlled by individuals who have neither the instincts nor the knowledge of what science really is. This has given birth to a Security program which places more value upon a stainless past and an innocuous mind than upon real talent and ability.” The ideological divide between Cold War paranoia over the free market of ideas is, it turns out, responsible for the “sharply rising incident of disturbance among these young scientists in government work.” Kingston, not as rigid in his thinking as these young men, thinks outside the bureaucracy and fills out the necessary paperwork to have himself committed as Storm’s roommate and talks him back to sanity. Not science fiction to speak of.
"A Canticle for Leibowitz", by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
When I read the novel a few years ago I thought it was really poorly written, but in context I can say that it is, in fact, a masterpiece. 600 years after the Deluge of Flame destroyed the world as we know it, Brother Francis Girard of Utah, Catholic monk, meets a stranger in the desert who steers him toward a rusted iron box. Said box turns out to contain tools and documents owned by Isaac Leibowitz, founder of his order - a Jewish engineer at the time of the fall, who converted to Catholicism and started the order to try to preserve the knowledge of the past. He was eventually martyred during the Age of Simplification, when angry mobs had destroyed both scientists and books whenever they were found. Brother Francis, assumed to have lied about the stranger, spends seven years in the novitiate for refusing to denounce his own story, before the blueprints he found are verified and he is sent to the New Vatican to witness the canonization of Leibowitz. Kind of the ur-example of post-apocalyptic mythologizing of modernity, while the connection with actual Catholicism anchors the cyclical history a bit more firmly than usual.
"The Cyber and Justice Holmes", by Frank Riley
Not only another courtroom story, but another story about the robots in the court of law. Who knew? The District Attorney has promised, if re-elected, to “do all in my power to help replace human inefficiency with Cyber justice in the courts of this County!” Our point of view character, Judge Wahlfred Anderson, is displeased with this aspersion, but that is to be expected - he is 86 years old, and is so enamored with tradition that he keeps a portrait of Oliver Wendell Holmes in his courtroom. The case du jour is People vs. Professor Neustadt, prosecuted by none other than the District Attorney, and Anderson quickly realizes this is a shame meant to bolster the campaign when we find out that Neustadt is charged with fraud for giving performances at which he claimed to “take over Cyber functions and perform them more efficiently.” Neustadt, acting as his own counsel, tells the DA to bring a Cyber of his choice into the courtroom, which the defendant will outperform. Anderson tries to quash this idea, both men object, and the three find themselves in front of the Cyber Appellate Division (CAD!), which takes only 8 minutes to cite three cases to establish precedent. Back in the courtroom, the showdown between man and machine is neck-and-neck with questions about mathematics and science, but Neustadt of course triumphs when he is allowed to present his own question: “What are the magnitudes of a dream?” (“Problem unsolved.”) Neustadt launches into a monologue about humanity benefiting from technology without being suborned by it, and has the judge dismiss the case.
"The Shores of Night", by Thomas N. Scortia
An odd one - a not-entirely-successful move away from the uninspired, straightahead narrative/formal qualities of the others (I’m not convinced that Robinson or Miller were consciously trying to play around with narrative), but at least Scortia is trying. This is the one novel(ette) included this year, although if I am reading the bibliographies right a portion was published as a short story in 1956 and this was the first appearance of the full piece. Opens with a vaguely stream-of-consciousness-ish prologue with a telepathic conversation between “two great spheres of blazing metal” orbiting Centaurus. Then cuts back to the bulk of the story, some time before, when the team on Pluto building the first interstellar ship receives a message from Earth saying that their funding has been cut - the people of Earth are sick of subsidizing the few colonies and scientific teams scattered throughout the solar system.
Our principles here are General Freck, driven leader and deadbeat dad, physicist Beth Bechtoldt, inventor of the Bechtoldt drive that would propel the ship (but also possessor of “a woman’s weakness”), and Art Sommers, idealistic young pilot. The ending of their program rapidly approaching, Freck blackmails Sommers into trying the ship before it’s ready - the drive malfunctions and the younger man is blinded (this section titled “Bellerophon” after the Greek myth). This is just one more collateral casualty in Freck’s relentless drive for the stars (beginning with the schism with his wife and son), but this is presented as being at least mostly problematic, unlike the protagonist in “Dream Street.” When the ship from Earth comes to take them home, they’re surprised to find out it’s almost entirely automated - progress has marched on without them. Freck forces the base’s doctor to transplant his eyes to Sommers, hijacks the new ship, retrofits the drive to it, and sens Sommers out of the solar system. Then we get an “Interlude” with disjointed telepathy. Back to the main narrative, Freck appears to be back on Earth, in some sort of robot body, and then remembers that he, Sommers, and Bechtoldt, left behind on Pluto, froze themselves to wait for the next ship to arrive. Something went wrong in the interval, and Freck is now a cybernetic brain - his ability to transfer his mind from machine to machine propels the narrative fractures. Also it turns out that “Sung of the Asian Combine” is out to be the next World Executor and is pulling strings, along with some crooked Earth-land-owning industrialists, to kill the space program. Long story short - Freck uses a robot body to try and find his wife and son (both are already dead, although he gets to meet his granddaughter, a child whom the narrative describes in some creepy/unsettling ways), forestalls the coup, and becomes one of the first “haunted spaceships” to explore the further reaches of the galaxy. Art and Beth do the same, and there’s some confusion as to who is thinking what, and humanity seems to be headed toward some sort of telepathic gestalt.
“Jungle Doctor,” by Robert F. Young
Opens promisingly - Sarith has mistakenly teleported not to Chalce, but to some mysterious other planet currently experiencing a snowstorm. Knowing from the climate that it must support intelligent life (habitable planets always do, apparently), she sets out in search of civilization, before being overcome by the snow. A native approaches… it’s Graham Lindsey, of Anytown, USA. Yes, the alien planet is Earth, and yes, just to twist the knife, Sarith is also a human alien, only apparently space humans look like children. A blonde-haired, blue-eyed child, at that, which reminds me that all of the space humans encountered so far (and there have been so, so many of them) have presumably been white. Lindsey is a drunk who spends his days washing cars, which he hallucinates as being covered in blood. Sarith, as fate would have it, was on her way to Chalce to be a psi-therapist, and she uses her telepathic powers to figure out that Lindsey accidentally ran over and killed his wife some years ago, hence the hallucinations and drunkenness. Inspired by a book she reads about Albert Schweitzer (and the fact that her transporter belt is rapidly running out of juice), she decides to stay on this primitive planet helping to psychically heal Earthlings. Half-heartedly gestures toward a critique of Western medical practices abound (Sarith is aghast that patients have to come to doctors rather than the other way), and she is explicitly compared to Christ.
"Judgment Day", by L. Sprague de Camp
Dr. Wade Ormont, an angry, aging nerd, decides to let the world burn because he was picked on as a child. A nuclear physicist, he’s discovered a way to blow up all the iron in the Earth’s crust, and the story takes the form of his inner monologue as he decides whether or not to report his findings to his superiors in the nuclear weapons program. Having reflected on all the times he was mistreated by others for being too bookish and smart, the story ends with his house vandalized by the local teenagers, and his declaration that “I hate them. I hate them. I hate everybody. I want to kill mankind. I’d kill them by slow torture if I could. If I can’t, blowing up the earth will do. I shall write my report.”
"The Game of Rat and Dragon", by Cordwainer Smith
In the distant future, Earth has been destroyed by internecine warfare, and interstellar travel can only be kept safe by pinlighters, humans who communicate telepathically with “the Partners” who help them spot and destroy the monstrous creatures that live in the vacuum. The identity of the partners is kind of kept secret through the beginning of the story, but it’s clear that it’s cats. The monsters appear as dragons to the humans, but as rats to the partners. It sounds kind of goofy, and there isn’t much of a plot here (it’s mostly an idea/future history piece), but it’s written competently and is one of the most imaginative and enjoyable stories in the bunch. I need to read more Smith.
"The Man Who Always Knew", by Algis Budrys
A very short one about a wealthy, world-famous “inventor” who, it turns out,actually produces nothing of his own - just knows how to buy low and sell high. Capitalism! The science-fictional aspect is his ability to know when and where someone is going to invent something - as in the bar where the scene takes place, as the bartender accidentally invents a new drink that Mr. McMahon buys from him.
"Dream Street", by Frank M. Robinson
A narcissistic, sociopathic orphan runs away (from “The Home for the Children of Space”), kills a mugger, lies to and manipulates everyone he meets, all to achieve his dream of leaving Earth behind and going into space. Ideologically, of course, the ends justify the means, and this is presented as a quintessentially American success story of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. Weird narrative tick of jumping forward in time with no indication that we’re doing so.
"You Created Us", by Tom Godwin
A man encounters telepathic mini-godzillas in the Nevada desert. A by-product of nuclear testing, they plan on taking over the world, and are using their psychic abilities to ramp up the “hate and fear and suspicion” of the Cold War so that humanity will destroy itself, leaving them in charge as the next evolutionary masters of the world. The story closes with the protagonist, his memory wiped, driving out of the desert, musing “for some strange reason, of the mighty tyrannosaurus rex dying out because some little animals he did not notice were eating his eggs.” This is an odd non-sequitur that does not at all apply to the story.
"Swenson, Dispatcher", by R. DeWitt Miller
Once again, drunken irrationality (this time in the form of a spaceship dispatcher), turns out to be the only way to deal with modern life. Swenson (, dispatcher) is hired on at the ragtag Acme Interplanetary Express in a pan-American solar system, and while at first he seems to be a drunken buffoon, it turns out that he’s a drunken miracle-worker, guiding Acme’s ships through a series of hijinks involving blustering Senators on the Moon and shipments of snuff and a rival mega-corporation. Like the Robinson, the narrative stumbles forward in oddly and ineffectually.
"Thing", by Ivan Janvier
Opens with a man watching workers cut apart the radioactive remains of the Statue of Liberty in order to dispose of them at sea (“In the city of New York, even liberty was radioactive”). This man, and his subordinate, are government agents, and they soon meet with a journalist, who knows that they’re after one “Eugene Outlaw,” a survivor of the Providence nuke who is now some sort of superhuman. All three meet up with Outlaw independently (and unbeknowst to the others), who passes on to each of them in turn the alien symbiote that has been giving him his powers - “it likes to be comfortable. When the bomb fell, it was unhappy.” Each, pitying the other two for coming so close only to fail, plans on using their new powers to ensure world peace prevails.
"I Do Not Love Thee, Doctor Fell", by Robert Bloch
Our protagonist, Bromely, finds himself at Dr. Fell’s office without quite remembering how he came to have an appointment there. Bromely also can’t recall having met Fell or told him his story before, but Fell knows it anyway - that Bromely is a failing public relations agent and never-was songwriter whose work never had any individuality. “I’m at the end of my rope. When you come to the end of your rope, you swing. I’m swinging, now. I’m swinging down the lane. Down Memory Lane. I wanted to be a songwriter, once. But my lyrics sounded as if they were stolen. That’s my problem. Association. I’ve got too much association. Everything I do or say sounds like it’s stolen from somebody else. Imitation. Mimicry. Until there’s nothing original, nothing basic beneath to which I can cling. I’m losing myself. There’s no real me left.” The fakery of modern life has left Bromely rudderless and unhinged, and Dr. Fell, a figment of his imagination, ends up as the dominant personality. This is a critique of mechanistic modernity, sure, and not a subtle one at that, but I’m not sure that it could be considered science fiction. Bloch was more of a weird/horror writer anyway, which shines through in the tone of this piece and, dare I say it, its quality, which outshines most others here by a wide margin - and Bloch isn’t even one of my favorite weird writers.
"Clerical Error", by Mark Clifton
Another story about modernity’s fracturing of young white men, although this time the target is mostly inhumane bureaucracy. The protagonist, K. Heidrich Kingston, is the psychiatrist in charge of “the government workers’ mental hospital” seeking to prevent the lobotomy of David Storm, a patient. Because of the patient’s higher Security (proper noun “Security” is an odd commonplace in these stories; “you can’t ignore the Security program, because that’s a sacred cow which no one dares question”) clearance, though, Kingston can’t be allowed near him. To start things off, without ever having met the patient, Kingston uses his “true empathy” ability to figure out the man’s life history - he became a scientist only because it was expected of him, exemplifying the societal problem with “science allied to big government, and controlled by individuals who have neither the instincts nor the knowledge of what science really is. This has given birth to a Security program which places more value upon a stainless past and an innocuous mind than upon real talent and ability.” The ideological divide between Cold War paranoia over the free market of ideas is, it turns out, responsible for the “sharply rising incident of disturbance among these young scientists in government work.” Kingston, not as rigid in his thinking as these young men, thinks outside the bureaucracy and fills out the necessary paperwork to have himself committed as Storm’s roommate and talks him back to sanity. Not science fiction to speak of.
"A Canticle for Leibowitz", by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
When I read the novel a few years ago I thought it was really poorly written, but in context I can say that it is, in fact, a masterpiece. 600 years after the Deluge of Flame destroyed the world as we know it, Brother Francis Girard of Utah, Catholic monk, meets a stranger in the desert who steers him toward a rusted iron box. Said box turns out to contain tools and documents owned by Isaac Leibowitz, founder of his order - a Jewish engineer at the time of the fall, who converted to Catholicism and started the order to try to preserve the knowledge of the past. He was eventually martyred during the Age of Simplification, when angry mobs had destroyed both scientists and books whenever they were found. Brother Francis, assumed to have lied about the stranger, spends seven years in the novitiate for refusing to denounce his own story, before the blueprints he found are verified and he is sent to the New Vatican to witness the canonization of Leibowitz. Kind of the ur-example of post-apocalyptic mythologizing of modernity, while the connection with actual Catholicism anchors the cyclical history a bit more firmly than usual.
"The Cyber and Justice Holmes", by Frank Riley
Not only another courtroom story, but another story about the robots in the court of law. Who knew? The District Attorney has promised, if re-elected, to “do all in my power to help replace human inefficiency with Cyber justice in the courts of this County!” Our point of view character, Judge Wahlfred Anderson, is displeased with this aspersion, but that is to be expected - he is 86 years old, and is so enamored with tradition that he keeps a portrait of Oliver Wendell Holmes in his courtroom. The case du jour is People vs. Professor Neustadt, prosecuted by none other than the District Attorney, and Anderson quickly realizes this is a shame meant to bolster the campaign when we find out that Neustadt is charged with fraud for giving performances at which he claimed to “take over Cyber functions and perform them more efficiently.” Neustadt, acting as his own counsel, tells the DA to bring a Cyber of his choice into the courtroom, which the defendant will outperform. Anderson tries to quash this idea, both men object, and the three find themselves in front of the Cyber Appellate Division (CAD!), which takes only 8 minutes to cite three cases to establish precedent. Back in the courtroom, the showdown between man and machine is neck-and-neck with questions about mathematics and science, but Neustadt of course triumphs when he is allowed to present his own question: “What are the magnitudes of a dream?” (“Problem unsolved.”) Neustadt launches into a monologue about humanity benefiting from technology without being suborned by it, and has the judge dismiss the case.
"The Shores of Night", by Thomas N. Scortia
An odd one - a not-entirely-successful move away from the uninspired, straightahead narrative/formal qualities of the others (I’m not convinced that Robinson or Miller were consciously trying to play around with narrative), but at least Scortia is trying. This is the one novel(ette) included this year, although if I am reading the bibliographies right a portion was published as a short story in 1956 and this was the first appearance of the full piece. Opens with a vaguely stream-of-consciousness-ish prologue with a telepathic conversation between “two great spheres of blazing metal” orbiting Centaurus. Then cuts back to the bulk of the story, some time before, when the team on Pluto building the first interstellar ship receives a message from Earth saying that their funding has been cut - the people of Earth are sick of subsidizing the few colonies and scientific teams scattered throughout the solar system.
Our principles here are General Freck, driven leader and deadbeat dad, physicist Beth Bechtoldt, inventor of the Bechtoldt drive that would propel the ship (but also possessor of “a woman’s weakness”), and Art Sommers, idealistic young pilot. The ending of their program rapidly approaching, Freck blackmails Sommers into trying the ship before it’s ready - the drive malfunctions and the younger man is blinded (this section titled “Bellerophon” after the Greek myth). This is just one more collateral casualty in Freck’s relentless drive for the stars (beginning with the schism with his wife and son), but this is presented as being at least mostly problematic, unlike the protagonist in “Dream Street.” When the ship from Earth comes to take them home, they’re surprised to find out it’s almost entirely automated - progress has marched on without them. Freck forces the base’s doctor to transplant his eyes to Sommers, hijacks the new ship, retrofits the drive to it, and sens Sommers out of the solar system. Then we get an “Interlude” with disjointed telepathy. Back to the main narrative, Freck appears to be back on Earth, in some sort of robot body, and then remembers that he, Sommers, and Bechtoldt, left behind on Pluto, froze themselves to wait for the next ship to arrive. Something went wrong in the interval, and Freck is now a cybernetic brain - his ability to transfer his mind from machine to machine propels the narrative fractures. Also it turns out that “Sung of the Asian Combine” is out to be the next World Executor and is pulling strings, along with some crooked Earth-land-owning industrialists, to kill the space program. Long story short - Freck uses a robot body to try and find his wife and son (both are already dead, although he gets to meet his granddaughter, a child whom the narrative describes in some creepy/unsettling ways), forestalls the coup, and becomes one of the first “haunted spaceships” to explore the further reaches of the galaxy. Art and Beth do the same, and there’s some confusion as to who is thinking what, and humanity seems to be headed toward some sort of telepathic gestalt.
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