MPorcius Fiction Log: Abernathy

Showing posts with label Abernathy. Show all posts

Monday, March 13, 2023

Merril-approved 1956 stories: Robert Abernathy and Brian W. Aldiss

At the end of her 1957 anthology of 1956 stories, SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume, Judith Merril offers a three-page list headed "Honorable Mention" and explains it thusly:

Inevitably, in compiling a book of this sort, one is left with a stack of stories that would have made it if--if they were shorter, if they were less like something already included, if rights had been available, etc.....A listing of these is included in the pages following....

Merril's Honorable Mention list is in alphabetical order by author, and here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are going to go through it, picking out stories by authors who interest us and reading them three or four at a time. Today we'll read stories by Robert Abernathy and Brian W. Aldiss.

(We've already read a bunch of stories that Merril actually printed in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume--check out the discussions and links at these three blog posts: ONE TWO THREE.)

"Hour Without Glory" by Robert Abernathy

Among other things, the July 1956 issue of F&SF features Anthony Boucher's gushing review of The Return of the King and his prediction that The Lord of the Rings will never appear on any bestseller lists, Mack Reynolds' deal-with-the-devil story "Martinis 12 to 1" (we read it back in 2018), a short story by R. V. Cassill, whose mainstream sex novel Pretty Leslie we read in 2016, and Robert Abernathy's "Hour Without Glory."

"Hour Without Glory" is a mediocre anti-war/anti-nuclear weapons story. As it begins a column in retreat has been hit hard by enemy aircraft, and the only apparent survivor is the General in command of the whole army, who is pinned under his jeep overturned jeep. We learn the war underway is a Second American Civil War. The General is desperate to get back to the rest of the army and his command, because he fears his direct subordinate, who must currently be in command, will use tactical nuclear weapons in an effort to save the army, an escalation the General does not want to commit to. He can hear and see friendly helicopters searching for the him, but can't reach his radio or flare gun to direct them to his location. Luckily some civilians come by and help him get to the flare gun, so he gets back in command and makes sure nuclear weapons are not used.

Abernathy doesn't get into what started the civil war or what the ideological or geographical dividing lines between the two sides are; the whole point of the story, it seems, is that under no circumstances should you use nuclear weapons. To this end, Abernathy employs a little literary device, suggesting that "holding the line" against nuclear weapon use is a higher duty than "holding the line" on the battlefield against the enemy. I thought the fact that the story is about an American civil war in which we don't know about the aims or ideology of the combatants muddied the issue: would Abernathy think it was acceptable to use nuclear weapons against foreign invaders or on foreign soil or against certain ideological opponents, people who were against democracy or were racists or sexists or whatever your particular bugaboo is? (It is easy to imagine refraining from escalation if you are in a conflict with people who share some of your heritage and values so you have reason to expect you can come to terms with them, but being willing to escalate if you are fighting Nazis or Communists or cannibal Martians who are going to wipe out your whole culture or commit genocide against your people.)

The story is well-written and constructed, but no big deal--merely acceptable. It looks like "Hour Without Glory" has only ever been reprinted in the French version of F&SF.

"The Year 2000" by Robert Abernathy

Like "Hour Without Glory," "The Year 2000" has not been reprinted much; besides in a Mexican anthology of stories from F&SF, it appeared in the French edition of F&SF, in an issue with a collage cover--I think Joachim Boaz is into this kind of illustration.

"The Year 2000" is a lame joke story of like two and a half pages with a grim resolution that I guess is in sync with "Hour Without Glory." The first part of the story depicts a guy waking up on January 1, 2000, and lists off all the awesome technological and political developments his world enjoys. These are mostly broad and obvious jokes, like cars that have "thermonuclear tail-lights guaranteed to work underwater," the US government announcement that all taxes have been abolished and news from Moscow that the Soviet government has "withered away" as per Marxist theory; the climax of this part of the story is the simultaneous Second Coming of Christ and the acceptance by aliens of Earth into the Galactic Empire. Also noted is that the guy has a "svelte, curvesome" wife.

The second part of the story indicates that the first part was just the dream of a guy waking up in the real Year 2000, in the aftermath of an atomic war; the guy's wife is "sagging, slattern," his kids are mutants, they live in a cave, and their diet consists of rabbits he traps.

I am giving this waste of time a thumbs down--this is banal filler.

"Psyclops" by Brian W. Aldiss

Unlike the Abernathy stories, of which Judith Merril may be the sole superfan, "Psyclops" has been reprinted innumerable times across the decades in Edmund Crispin and Robert Silverberg anthologies, Aldiss collections and continental European books and magazines. The story first appeared in an issue of New Worlds which includes an editorial by editor John Carnell in which Carnell talks about how awesome Judith Merril is. Small world! Carnell quotes Merril's assessment that British SF magazines are better than American ones, no doubt music to his London-born ears.

"Psyclops" is pretty good. The text of Aldiss's tale consists of dialogue between two telepaths, one a stranded space traveler, the other his unborn son, a six-month-old fetus in his mother's womb! You see, Dad and Mum landed their space ship on a planet, only to be attacked by the natives. The pregnant wife escaped, while the injured husband was captured. As the ship bearing his family gets further and further away from him, the doomed father instructs his unborn son in how to telepathically communicate to Earth and request help, which is required because his mother lacks the ability to steer the ship into radio range of Earth and she isn't a telepath herself.

"Psyclops" feels fresh; I like it.

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The Aldiss is worthy of attention, but I have my doubts about the Abernathy stories; I suppose they appealed to Merril because of their subject matter--depictions of America laid low, dire admonitions about atomic weapons, and dumb jokes.

More 1956 SF stories by people with last initials that come early in the alphabet in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Tuesday, March 7, 2023

Merril-approved 1956 stories by R Nathan, R Thorne, and R Abernathy

At our last meeting, we talked about three stories from the second entry in Judith Merril's series of Best Of anthologies, stories by people who were not terribly famous or prolific, at least in the English-language SF field. And today we have three more such stories, SF tales first published in 1956 that Judith Merril saw fit to reprint whether or not they debuted in SF magazines.

"Digging the Weans" by Robert Nathan

In the words of a Barry N. Malzberg essay in Galaxy's Edge, Merril was on a mission "to take down all of the barriers between what she called the science fiction 'ghetto' and the 'mainstream.' She was going to prove that the barriers were artificially constructed and made no sense." And so her famous anthology series includes many stories from mainstream magazines and stories by mainstream writers. Here is an example, a story from Harper's Magazine by the guy who wrote the novel which was the basis for one of those movies beloved by women I know, The Bishop's Wife.

"Digging the eans" is one of those stories set in the far far future, when all that is left of our own civilization is a pile of ruins which the societies that have succeeded us study in search of clues to how you and I lived, giving the author the opportunity to make jokes and present riddles based on corruptions of the English language. Remember Nelson S. Bond's 1941 "Magic City," which we read in 2015? Bond's tale was an adventure story that addressed the issue of gender roles, so had multiple levels of interest beyond jokes based on signs with missing letters, but Nathan's story here has no plot to speak of; it consists of a scholarly paper with footnotes and references to academic disputes, its topic excavations in the long lost civilization of what we readers recognize is the United States, the citizens of which the writer calls "Weans" because they seem to have called their nation "Us," a synonym for "we." Similar jokes include how the author calls the capital of "Us" "Pound-Laundry," because "wash" is a synonym for "laundry" and "ton," like "pound," is a unit of measure. Did Nathan hire an eight-year-old to help him compose this story?

These jokes are total garbage and there are like seven damn pages of them. It seems that the point of Nathan's agonizingly bad story is to attack 1950s culture--but not the female domesticity, bourgeois conformism and casual homophobia your college professor denounces when she attacks the culture of the 1950s--no, the elements of mid-century American culture which have aroused Nathan's ire are modern art and rock and roll. I actually enjoy or at least find thought-provoking conservative attacks on contemporary art and pop music if they are passionate or funny or based on some kind of considered philosophy of art and life, but all Nathan gives us are more clunky and mind-bogglingly unfunny puns.

"Digging the Weans" may have won Merril's approval because among the seven pages of embarrassingly bad jokes there are seven or eight lines to tickle the fancy of liberals and leftists--it is indicated that the advanced future civilization of the writer and his academic colleagues is based in Africa, and the writer denounces the United States, the British and the Romans as violent imperialists who despoiled native populations before vanishing into oblivion. Sympathetic readers may consider "Digging the Weans" to be the Wakanda Forever and 1619 Project of its day!

Terrible--worst story I have read in a long time.

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log hate "Digging the Weans" with a rage that is volcanic, but it still managed to get included in Robert A. Baker's A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown, a "collection of scientific humor" (so says the introduction of the copy that somebody scanned into the internet archive) and was even ***expanded***--more garbage jokes???--into a longer version that appeared as a 56-page chapbook and was reprinted in Gregory Fitz Gerald's Neutron Stars.

"Take a Deep Breath" by Roger Thorne

Thorne has only one credit at isfdb, this story, which appeared in the men's magazine Tiger and, after Merril elevated it, never again (at least as far as isfdb knows.)

(UPDATE, March 8, 2023: Check out the comments for a revelation of the true identity of the writer here credited as "Roger Thorne" and the true publication history of "Take a Deep Breath.")!

It is conventional for educated people to say they hate advertising, and it used to be conventional for educated people to say they hate TV. So old books and magazines are full of stories attacking advertising and attacking TV. And here's another one, six pages long.

Our narrator, a magazine writer, gets hired by an ad agency and realizes they use hypnotic techniques to sell shoddy products via TV ads. As the story ends, the narrator warns us the president of the ad agency is going to use TV ads to hypnotize the public into voting said president into the White House.

Banal and lame, a weak example of the sort of elitism we see in SF so often, the argument that ordinary people are dopes who can easily be manipulated by the cognitive elite who wield the tools of science. It is easy to see why this story's subject matter would appeal to leftist Merril, but couldn't she have found a better story that says the common man is a fool who can be led by the nose by advertising?

"Grandma's Lie Soap" by Robert Abernathy

Back in 2017 I read Abernathy's story "Deep Space" and liked it, so maybe he can get us out of the rut that Nathan and Thorne have put us in.

"Grandma's Lie Soap" is OK; it has an idea and speculates about that idea in a satisfactory way, but it isn't surprising or suspenseful or thrilling, it doesn't inspire emotion or offer memorable images or anything like that.

The narrator grew up in farm country (I feel like I'm reading a lot of stories about rural people lately--the contrast of country life and city life is one of those ancient tropes that all readers can be expected to intuitively grasp, I guess) and had a grandmother who was reputed to be a witch. This old woman makes a soap with various herbs and with it washes out the mouths of kids who lie, and for the rest of their lives these kids must be absolutely honest; they can't even engage in hyperbolic verbal horseplay or tell white lies--they can't even lie to themselves!

The narrator moves away and becomes a chemist and gets a job at a multinational company that produces and sells such goods as soap and toothpaste. Appalled by city life, how advertisers deceive and politicians cheat and on and on, he convinces his grandmother to share her recipe for the soap that turns people honest, and he has it integrated into his firm's products. Pretty soon almost nobody in the world can lie, and everybody's life improves radically--beyond enjoying the benefits of a new high level of honesty in business, politics, and sexual relations, people are all mentally stable and happy, as Abernathy optimistically suggests that psychological problems stem from people lying to themselves.

(Remember Edmond Hamilton's story about turning everybody honest? In that story mass honesty leads to widespread misery!)

The world is a far better place, but the ending of the story has a little sting. As the years go by, people get so used to everybody being honest that they lose their skepticism and much of their caution. UFOs continue to be sighted, so must be real because nobody can knowingly make false reports, and the narrator wonders if a world of people who can't lie or deceive or trick others, and who themselves are very easy to deceive, will be able to survive contact with aliens who very likely have the ability to deceive.

"Grandma's Lie Soap" first saw print in Fantastic Universe. Besides Merril, no editors thought it worthy of reprinting until Gregory Luce included it in 2014's Science Fiction Gems: Volume Seven.

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Three stories about how the American people are a bunch of jerks, only one of which is at all original and competently written. We expect writers to be bitter and angry snobs who think they are qualified to run other people's lives, but we also hope that they have the ability to write and the inclination to put a little effort into their writing, and I am afraid this time such hopes were not realized. Well, in our next episode we'll read stories from Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy Second Annual Volume by big (or at least bigger) names in the SF world, and maybe they'll be better.

Monday, July 17, 2017

Stories by A. C. Friborg, E. B. Cole & R. Abernathy from 1954

It was in South Carolina, where I chased skinks and toured 19th-century mansions with my wife, that I purchased this time-ravaged copy of 1957's 5 Tales From Tomorrow, a Crest Reprint of selected stories from T. E. Dikty's The Best Science-Fiction Stories and Novels: 1955. I like the hulking asymmetrical suit of space armor depicted on the cover by Richard Powers, but I am puzzled by the fact that the contents page lacks the authors' names. If this book had been printed in 2017 I'd suspect this was some stratagem to overcome sexism and racism, but here I guess it is just a bizarre editorial decision or an unforgivable oversight.

This recent weekend, I read three stories from 5 Tales From Tomorrow, all by authors (billed as "top writers of science fiction") with whom I was quite unfamiliar, Albert Compton Friborg, Everett B. Cole, and Robert Abernathy.

"Push-Button Passion" by Albert Compton Friborg (1954)

The intro to the story here in 5 Tales from Tomorrow tells us that Friborg attended Princeton, Yale, and is pursuing a Master's in English while teaching freshman comp. Also, that "Push-Button Passion," which first appeared (in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) under the title "Careless Love," was his first fiction sale. isfdb suggests that it was his only fiction sale, though he did produce a scholarly book on SF, 1990's The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction, as well as papers and articles on Jules Verne, Clifford Simak, Stephen King, and other SF writers--the article on Robert Heinlein at encyclopedia.com quotes his article about Heinlein from the Detroit News. Also, that his real name was Irving Flint Foote and he was generally known as "Bud Foote." Foote's obituary at a website for Princetonians describes his academic and literary pursuits, including penning book reviews at "The National Review" (I assume the famous William F. Buckley National Review, though those guys eschew the "The" as vigorously as they oppose the immanetization of the eschaton), developing classes in speed-reading, African-American literature and science fiction, and composing songs protesting highways. (Friday, on Route 71, a hefty fragment from a burst tire flew through the air and struck the windshield of my poor Toyota Corolla, right in front of my face--surely an affront worthy denunciation in song!)

So, a life well-lived. But is Bud Foote's single published SF story any good? That is the kind of thing you tune into MPorcius Fiction Log to find out!

"Push-Button Passion" (too spoily a name, "Careless Love" is probably better) is a decent satire of the field of psychology and of the government and military, mixed with a traditional SF "engineer-type resolves crisis through trickery" story. Our tale is set in a future of perpetual atomic/bacteriological war, when all of American society lives underground and the ruined surface of the Earth is a battle zone pummeled by Western and Eastern ICBMs and ground by the treads of tanks. The US war effort is directed by a huge supercomputer called Dinah, and our hero is Dinah's head programmer, Enoch Odell.

The war is causing psychological stress on a mass scale--all the characters have neuroses, including Odell, who is obese because he drinks five or ten milkshakes a day--and morale among American civilians is dangerously low, threatening production quotas and even civil order. When the President goes totally insane, the rest of the government, lead by the Pentagon chief, enlists a bunch of shrinks to study the problem of morale with the help of some of Dinah's processing power. To figure out a solution to the American population's psychological problems, Dinah needs a better understanding of human emotion, so Odell has her watch Hollywood movies and read love stories, which gives him cover to put into operation his secret plan. Odell psychologically manipulates Dinah into embracing a teenage girl's attitude towards love so that she falls in love with the supercomputer running the Eastern military apparatus. Dinah seduces the Communists' computer and they conspire to render harmless both military establishments and thus end the war; they then install their central processors in space ships and fly off together to Saturn, leaving a devastated Earth at peace.

Competently written and structured, and enlivened with references to both learned and popular culture (oblique references to A. E. Houseman's A Shropshire Lad and to Greta Garbo, for example), "Push-Button Love" is entertaining. Maybe today the story, or at least its hero, would be considered sexist, but I didn't let that bother me. Like Anthony Boucher (who included it in 1955's The Best of Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fourth Series) and T. E. Dikty, I can give Bud Foote's sole short story a thumbs up.

This Christmas cover illo has nothing to do
with Cole's story

"Exile" by Everett B. Cole (1954)

"Exile" was an Astounding cover story. Cole has two novels and eight stories listed at isfdb, and I think they all first appeared in Astounding--John W. Campbell, Jr. really seems to have liked his work. The intro here in 5 Tales From Tomorrow informs us that Cole was a career military man with technical expertise; Wikipedia relates that he went on to became a math and science high school teacher and a historian of Texas. (I'll never forget that time the wife and I drove through the Texas panhandle on a trip from the Des Moines area to Albuquerque. The highway went right through a vast cattle ranch, and it was like we were cruising on a black sea of beef that stretched to both horizons. Also, two times big heavy birds I have never been able to identify flew right into the Toyota Corolla with a heavy thump. In Iowa it was the deer that pulled those shenanigans, not the birds!)

Another productive and worthwhile life. But was seminal SF editor Campbell justified in putting Cole on the cover of his famous magazine multiple times? Let's find out!

"Exile" takes place on a human-inhabited planet with a sort of 20th-century technology level; this planet is isolated from, and its people ignorant of, the Galactic Federation, a vast space-faring human civilization whose people have force fields and psionic powers and levitation belts all those sorts of doodads. Our hero is one of the Galactics and he is visiting the planet incognito; we aren't sure why he is there exactly and we aren't even told his name. He gets mugged in a narrow city street, and the muggers take off with all his high tech stuff. Back at their hideout the muggers monkey with the futuristic gear, causing an explosion that kills them and destroys any evidence that the protagonist is a visitor from beyond.

Meanwhile, the hero awakens with amnesia and no knowledge of this planet or his own alien origin. He recuperates in the hospital, and then becomes an indentured worker to the aristocratic clan (the House of Dornath) who pays his hospital bill. For weeks he works in the Dornath automobile factory, lives in the factory's dorm, shops at the company store and eats in the factory cafeteria. He spends his free time reading in the public library, where the girls behind the circulation desk look down on him for being a mere worker (they are in the clerical class) and where he is denied certain books because of his inferior social position.

While reading a book speculating on the possibility of life on other planets (meta!), our hero's memories of his earlier life come flooding back, and we get some flashbacks of him talking to his dissertation adviser, who encouraged him to do some primary research for his thesis on how societies evolve instead of just using secondary sources. So our hero (real name: Klion Meinora) flew around in his private one-man space ship, took a wrong turn in hyperspace, and found a planet not yet in contact with the Federation. Ignoring all the Federation rules on first contacts, he levitated himself down to the surface to conduct his research on this rich virgin source of data.

With his memory back, Meinora becomes wealthy writing stories based on his research and Galactic life, and buys his way out of his indenture and joins high society. He lives on the planet for decades (Galactics have long lives), and with his Galactic knowledge (he's a humanities student, but he somehow knows a lot of engineering stuff--many of these old SF stories are all about romanticizing the scientist or the engineer) is able to improve the Dornath autos and enjoy a second career as the driver and owner of the winningest race cars. He misses home, but building a space ship (I think his orbiting ship crashed while he had amnesia) would likely introduce more scientific and technological concepts to the natives than would be ethical or safe. Eventually, he figures out a way to safely transmit a message to the stars, and is rescued. The twist ending is that his unconventional transmission jammed Galactic communications and to pay the Federation back he must work as an indentured servant for them for decades.

I liked the start of "Exile," all the jazz in the hospital and the factory and the dorm and the library, but when Meinora gets his memory and psionic powers back the story loses narrative drive and any kind of tension. I believe Cole intends Meinora's moral dilemmas--how much should he use his psionic powers to take advantage of the natives? How much technological and social change can he introduce ethically and safely to this planet with its stratified aristocratic society and industrial-age technological level?--to generate tension, but I didn't care, and the second half of the story contains too much fluff and padding, forgettable conversations and descriptions of auto races and such. The second half of the story could really be tightened up. ("Exile" is like 55 pages, and that second part drags.)

Marginally good.

"Deep Space" by Robert Abernathy (1954)

For some reason, 5 Tales from Tomorrow doesn't include a little intro describing Abernathy in front of "Deep Space." (This thing is full of weird editorial decisions or mistakes.) Abernathy has dozens of stories listed at isfdb, and according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction he was a professor at the University of Colorado specializing in Slavic languages. (When the wife and I left Albuquerque we drove up to Denver. I think it was on this leg of our trip that I first saw tumbleweeds. I had thought tumbleweeds were just some Hollywood BS, and was amazed to see them crossing the highway in large numbers and getting stuck in the grills of other vehicles. Somehow the Toyota Corolla was spared the indignity of collision with a tumbleweed.)

"Deep Space" is short and economical, has both human and science components, and feels fresh--it is definitely the best of the three stories we're talking about today.

Linden is a man obsessed with experiencing free fall--his happiest childhood memory is jumping out of a barn's hay loft, even though he broke his ankle! During the Second World War he became a paratrooper, and now that the first space rocket able to take human passengers has been built, he pulls every string and calls in every favor making sure he will be Earth's first astronaut!

Marty is another World War II vet, an expert engineer crippled when his bomber was ventilated by the Krauts. He designed and built the rocket and envies Linden's being tapped as the first human in space. And then there is Linden's significant other Ruth; she doesn't want Linden to go into space because she thinks the cosmic rays up there will make it impossible for him to have healthy children. She forces him to choose between her and space, and he chooses space!

When "Deep Space" first appeared in F&SF it was titled "Axolotl." An axolotl, as an epigraph tells us, is a sort of salamander that generally lives out its life in the water and does not fully metamorphose out of the larval stage like most amphibians do. But, if for some reason it does leave the water, it will metamorphose into an adult form. (Abernathy's description is somewhat different from Wikipedia's, so don't you be citing 5 Tales from Tomorrow in your biology term papers!) This amphibian's unusual life cycle foreshadows Linden's experience in outer space. When he leaves the atmosphere and is bathed in those cosmic rays, Linden's body transforms and he gets all kinds of powers. He no longer needs oxygen or food--he can subsist on the rays--and he develops powerful telepathy. Earthbound mankind is merely the larval stage of a higher form of creature! The void between the stars is no void at all, but an ocean of pulsating electronic vitality, and the planets and stars are like barren islands! Linden, now an expert physicist because of his intuitive familiarity with all the atomic particles and waves and rays, sends a telepathic message to Marty, instructing him how to build a super nuclear rocket, and then a message to Ruth, inviting her to ride the rocket and live with him in outer space and make space babies with him! She eagerly accepts and we readers know that the human race has taken the first step into a new age of unparalleled freedom and adventure!

A well-written story with a crazy idea that Abernathy manages to make convincing, "Deep Space" has the human feeling we hope to find in legitimate literature and the "sense of wonder" and speculative science that SF is famous for--I like it!

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It is nice to read stories by guys you never read before and find them good; 5 Tales from Tomorrow was a worthwhile purchase, and I have added Cole and Abernathy to my list of writers worth reading.

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