In response to a blog post in which I mildly praised
"The Faithful Friend," a story by Evelyn E. Smith, a woman who has over fifty short story credits at isfdb, one of my knowledgeable readers recommended Smith's "Tea Tray in the Sky." "Tea Tray in the Sky" debuted in the September 1952 issue of H. L. Gold's
Galaxy, an issue which also includes a discourse on heroism in fiction and in real life from Gold, reviews by Groff Conklin of collections of old stories by David H. Keller, A. E. van Vogt and John W. Campbell, Jr, and brandy new stories by Katherine MacLean, Gordon R. Dickson and James H. Schmitz. Let's get a peek at what kind of product Gold was selling back in the fall of 1952, nineteen years before I was born, by reading MacLean's, Dickson's and Schmitz's stories as well as Smith's.
"The Snowball Effect" by Katherine MacLean
Looks like I've read three stories by MacLean over the years. We've got
"The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl" published in Ben Bova's
Analog, and
"Unhuman Sacrifice" and
"Feedback," both from Campbell's
Astounding. I liked two of those three stories; let's hope "The Snowball Effect" makes that score 3 to 1.
The narrator of "The Snowball Effect" has recently been made dean and president of a university and charged with making the university profitable. He goes to the head of the Sociology Department and asks this joker to explain how the Sociology Department can bring in money. The professor claims he has come up with mathematical formulas that can describe and predict how organizations grow or shrink in size and power. He tells the narrator that, if given six months, he can prove the value of sociology, and the prof and the prez develop a plan to experiment on some local people, try to make their little organization grow.
Using math equations, the sociology prof develops a scientifically designed constitution and organization chart for a local women's sewing club and gives it to the most ambitious and competent member of the club. The twist of the story is that, four months later, when the prez checks in on the sewing club, he finds the competent woman has revolutionized the sewing club, turning it into a sort of social welfare NGO and using the super-scientific constitution and organization chart to grow the club into an entity of thousands. The objective of this organization is to revolutionize the town, fashion it into "the jewel of the United States" with "a bright and glorious future—potentially without poor and without uncared-for ill—potentially with no ugliness, no vistas which are not beautiful—the best people in the best planned town in the country...." By the sixth month mark the organization is huge, and has incorporated into itself businesses and politicians. The protagonists predict in a decade or so the organization will take over America and then the world. They expect that the organization will then, as all big institutions do, collapse, perhaps throwing the entire world into chaos, as when the Roman Empire collapsed.
This is an idea story that maybe is supposed to be funny, rather than a human story with suspense or human relationships, and everything about the idea is questionable, but "The Snowball Effect" isn't too long and it isn't poorly written or constructed, and I guess the idea is sort of interesting, so we're giving it a rating of acceptable.
I may think the story is just OK, but lots of editors are into it, maybe because it is very much about science, like a traditional science fiction story should be, but instead of romanticizing a hard science or engineering, disciplines anybody can see are awesome without having to be told they are awesome, in "The Snowball Effect" MacLean ups the level of difficulty she faces by tackling the task of trying to portray as effective one of those soft sciences we all instinctively know is a scam. You can find "The Snowball Effect" in H. L. Gold's Second Galaxy Reader, Brian Aldiss' Penguin Science Fiction, Damon Knight's Science Fiction Inventions, multiple anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name printed on their covers, Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell's Ascent of Wonder, the Vandermeers' Big Book of Science Fiction, and still other publications. I daresay "The Snowball Effect" is a wish fulfillment fantasy for leftists, who dream of technocratic elites using mathematical formulas to control the masses and reshape society to their own specifications, but, to her credit, MacLean in her story leaves room for the reader to believe she is suggesting that giving an organization the key to easily conquering the world might be a mistake, that "The Snowball Effect" is a horror story rather than a utopian story.
"Tea Tray in the Sky" by Evelyn E. Smith
This story, the story that brought us to this issue of
Galaxy, is a long plot-light satire of television, advertising, the metastasizing of the Christmas season far beyond December 24th and 25th, and, most importantly, the cult of tolerance and perhaps mass immigration. We might say the story is about the internal contradictions of Western liberalism, or democratic capitalism, or whatever we want to call the ideology, mores and norms of the mid-20th-century United States.
It is the future of intergalactic civilization. The human race is in intimate daily contact with dozens of other intelligent species. In the interest of tolerance, the taboos (spelled here "tabus") of all races are enforced by law almost everywhere in the populated universe. For example, in New York City on Earth, if you want to eat you have to do so very discretely, alone and out of sight, because one race of aliens finds eating as gauche to talk about and as private a matter as you or I might consider defecating. Everyone in the inhabited universe must wear gloves and a hat because there are races of aliens who never show their fingers or the tops of their heads. And so on--Smith gives many examples. Perhaps most alarming is the outlawing of monogamy--marriage is forbidden, free love is mandatory. There are, apparently, government spies and informers everywhere who will make sure you are thrown in prison for uttering any one of the verboten expressions or or performing any of the forbidden behaviors inscribed on the ever-expanding list of taboos imported from every cover of the known universe.
The plot, such as it is, concerns a young man who has spent his entire life in a sort of monastery or retreat in California, having been brought there as a young child. Before advancing to the next level of membership in "the Brotherhood," he has decided to see what life is like in the mainstream world. He takes an airplane ride to New York, and "Tea Tray in the Sky" story describes his experience of culture shock, offering us one farcical joke after another. Besides all the wacky taboos, there is the fact that it is July, and New York is covered in red and green decorations because Christmas is approaching, and, more importantly, the ubiquity of television; TVs are everywhere, pumping out hard-sell advertising, and it is illegal to turn them off, as that would be an infringement of free enterprise. This society is strongly committed to free trade and the market economy--the word "tariff" is a dirty one and price controls are not exercised.
"Tea Tray in the Sky" seems to dramatize how some liberal values, like market economics, tolerance, freedom of movement, if pursued and defended to the nth degree, can infringe on other liberal values, like free speech and freedom of association. Smith's story may also express the annoyance of publishers and broadcasters at having to craft their content with an eye to not offending religious people and anti-communists, and maybe even frustration at the way average white Americans may have been expected to alter their behavior to accommodate blacks and immigrants.
Anyway, the protagonist, after experiencing a New York full of aliens of all types where you can't get married or eat in public and where you have to scrupulously watch what you say and you can't even walk more than two hundred yards because the sight of you strolling around may trigger depression in aliens who have no feet, decides to return to the Brotherhood, where, and I guess this is sort of a twist ending, there are human female residents as well as human male, so he can cultivate the sort of sexual relationship and family life considered normal in the 1950s USA.
"Tea Tray in the Sky" is sort of interesting as an historical document, in particular because issues like mass immigration and tariffs and infringements on free speech in the interest of tolerance are so central to the politics of Western nations today in the Trump Era. But as a piece of fiction it is not terribly compelling, it being variations on the same few jokes--bizarre taboos and annoying TV commercials--repeated again and again.
Another acceptable story.
H. L. Gold included "Tea Tray in the Sky" in the Second Galaxy Reader along with MacLean's "Snowball Effect." The story would reappear in the 21st century in Smith collections and in an anthology of stories from Galaxy penned by women.
"The Mousetrap" by Gordon R. Dickson
Here we have one of those stories which opens with the protagonist not knowing who he is or where he is. Dickson describes our protagonist exploring a brightly lit landscape with a house on it in some detail, the flowers and grass and paths and rooms blah blah blah. Though the area is lit there is no sun in the sky, and the main character, when he walks away from the house but then comes upon it again, realizes he is on some kind of sphere, like a tiny planet or something.
Gradually our guy begins to regain his memory, and we get a picture of a crazy future interstellar civilization centered on Earth. Our hero was born on Earth, which faces spectacular overpopulation, which causes an unemployment problem. The shortage of work is exacerbated by the fact that people who get rich on one of Earth's many colonies return to Earth to take the plum jobs. So, like so many others, when our protagonist came of working age he was exiled to the colonies.
Our guy loved Earth; in particular, he loved moonlit nights. He worked hard, for years and years, to get back to Earth. The economy of the colonies is fast growing, and trade amongst the various colonies and Terra is brisk, and there is a lot of government corruption and onerous red tape and, as a result, lots of black market and smuggling activity. By necessity, anybody who engages in interstellar commerce on any scale has to engage in all sorts of bribery and special favors done and that sort of thing. Our hero became an expert at knowing who to bribe, how to bribe them, and whatever else it takes to get shipments hither and thither efficiently through the maze of unjust laws and sketchy lawbreakers. Eventually somebody hired him for a big job and he took the huge amount of cash they gave him to use for bribes stole it for use in getting back to Earth. He was eventually arrested and imprisoned for the theft, but at least he was on Earth and having bought citizenship with the stolen money he looked forward to living the rest of his life on Terra after getting out of prison in ten years or so. His memory goes dark after his conviction--he doesn't know how he ended up on this lonely little brightly lit world.
Some nonhuman aliens land their spacecraft on the little world and they seem friendly enough but post hypnotic suggestion (that he has been hypnotized has been foreshadowed) leads to our hero throwing a switch which traps the aliens in a forcefield. The aliens are stuck in the trap so long they die. Then a government ship arrives and an official explains to our protagonist what is up. The hero was "volunteered" for duty manning a trap satellite planted beyond the current reaches of the human space empire. Such satellite traps provide the Terran government specimens for study; this gives Terra a leg up on aliens we haven't formally met yet, facilitating the incorporation of them into our empire.
The tragic ending is that our guy is not only now complicit in murder that facilitates imperialism, but can't go back to Earth because, having been in close contact with mysterious aliens, he must be quarantined for the rest of his life on a planet on the edge of human space. To add insult to injury, this planet doesn't have a moon! Our moonlight-loving guy will never see moonlight again!
This story is OK. A lot of the exposition about the Earth economy and description of the trap satellite and even the protagonist's career seems superfluous--it isn't bad but it isn't very entertaining intrinsically and it doesn't really add to the plot. The plot gimmick, of a criminal manning a trap for aliens he doesn't even realize is a trap, is similar to the gimmick of Eric Frank Russell's
"Panic Button," which appeared in
Astounding in 1959. One has to wonder if Dickson's story here inspired or influenced Russell and/or
Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in the creation of that later (and I have to admit, more entertaining) story.
"The Mousetrap" would be included in the oft-reprinted Dickson collection The Star Road and a German anthology which repurposed as its cover the cover of Richard Lupoff's Space War Blues, which is odd, as it is a pretty specific image, what with its Confederate States of America imagery; there is no Lupoff fiction is included in the book--could one of the included stories also be about some kind of Confederacy in space?
"The Altruist" by James H. Schmitz
This is probably the best story we're reading today, or at least the most ambitious, as it integrates philosophical ideas and SF speculations (and presents them seriously, not as some kind of joke or satire) and a human story with suspense and human relationships. Schmitz's ideas revolve around the mysterious workings of the human mind; Schmitz proposes the theory that people are essentially altruistic and, often subconsciously, always trying to help society and others, and he takes as a main theme of the story knowledge and ignorance of quotidian things, the way we notice and fail to notice things, consciously, subconsciously, and due to the manipulations of others.
Our protagonist is a colonel with a desk job, head of an important department in a regimented, authoritarian future state, the product of a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions following a period of hardship known as the Hunger Years. One day the colonel can't find his scissors. Then they mysteriously turn up just where they should be, but weren't a few minutes before. The same day, a person from the statistics department brings up the subject of "Normal Loss;" inexplicably, for many years, two percent of supplies of many types have been vanishing without a trace.
The colonel is an intelligent and thorough man, as he has needed to be to rise in the current efficiency-obsessed, rigidly organized society in which the job performance of individuals blessed with professional government positions is carefully tracked and those who fail to measure up are are coldly, even callously, demoted and sent to toil among the undifferentiated masses of common people. The colonel methodically uses logic, research in books, and experiments to uncover a mind-blowing reality about his world--a whole tribe of people has opted out of society and live like mice in the recesses of the world via the use of psychic powers. These people can influence a normie's brain so adeptly that the normie can't see things right in front of him, or hear sounds, or remember this or that, etc. The invisible people live by stealing food and other necessities, using their psychic abilities to conceal any evidence of the theft. Can the colonel, who isn't exactly happy in this authoritarian society, join this secret parasitic society of drop outs? After all, if he was able to detect them, he must have something in common with them; perhaps they are recruiting him, allowing him to see them?
There are some twists and turns in the plot, with the colonel falling in love with one of the invisible people and deciding to commit suicide when it looks like the invisible people have rejected him because he demoted an incompetent and incompatible subordinate, but in the end it is clear that the invisible woman who has caught his fancy is also in love with him and he joins this invisible tribe, and we readers are given the hint that the colonel will lead the invisible people in a successful effort to make society less oppressive. "The Altruist" in basic outlines follows the old SF template of a guy in a less than ideal society getting into contact with the secret underground and having to choose whether or not to join them in reforming or overthrowing the current order.
I think this is probably the most admirable of today's four stories, but I am not in love with it. I'm not sure Schmitz really gets the story's two themes--the theme of noticing and not noticing and avoiding notice and the theme of how we are all acting altruistically even if we don't know it--to mesh all that well; they seem to be parallel and distinct rather than complementary. Does the altruism angle even contribute to the plot? Does it even make sense? Aren't the invisible people acting selfishly rather than altruistically? Is the colonel's desire to abandon his job and leave society because he's in love with some woman he just met altruistic?
A number of events and characters in the story left me feeling similarly uneasy, at least at first, wondering what they signified, what they had to do with the story's plot or themes; I'm not sure if this reflects unclear writing on Schmitz's part or the fact that I am too dim to easily grasp Schmitz's subtlety. Specific examples (I include these for people who have read the story--feel free to enlighten me in the comments) are the question of the relationship between the statistician and the invisible people, the feelings of the secretary for the colonel, and why the colonel thinks, erroneously, that the invisible people will no longer contact him after he demotes the troublemaker. There's also the matter of whether the colonel really was going to commit suicide, or if it was some kind of ploy to get the attention of the invisible woman.
Again we're calling a story from Galaxy's September 1952 issue acceptable, though recognizing that this story is on the higher end of the acceptable spectrum. "The Altruist" was reprinted in English in the 2002 collection Eternal Frontier, but if you can read the language of Moliere, Voltaire and Proust, you can enjoy "The Altruist" in a 1976 French anthology of stories about telepaths.
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I guess I'm feeling wishy washy today, unable to make decisive judgments of these stories. Or maybe all four of them really are middling or competent but flawed. Or maybe I am the flawed one, maybe I am smart enough to recognize the value of stories that lack sex and violence, but not smart enough to enjoy them.
It has been like half a dozen posts about 1950s short stories, so we'll be shifting gears for the next post; stay tuned, we may find the sex and violence our animalistic subconsciouses crave!