Birthday Reviews: Barrett, Dickson, Ewers, Haldane

This week’s birthday gang brings us a bittersweet comedy, a bitterersweet drama, a Halloween horror, and a mob-ridden monetary melodrama.

Neal Barrett, Jr. (1929-11-03/2014-01-12)

“Perpetuity Blues” (IAsfm, May 1987)

This is the tale of “Maggie McKenna from Marble Creek” and a hilarious tale it is, but also an affecting one that can be read as very sad and, yet, ultimately perhaps upbeat even so. Maggie’s a small-town Texas girl whose father has disappeared and whose mother has died when she ends up with her lecherous uncle and an aunt who’s primary advice is to for God’s sake never sit on anyone’s lap. Maggie deals with many people, some good and some bad, both early in her life and on her big move to New York to become a playwright. The most important early encounter is with Oral Blue, a albino-looking man who claims to be an alien and who dresses and lives in blue. How he and her stories entangle is profound and also very funny, as he talks about being attacked by “Mormon terrorists” on one occasion and then by Vikings on another, whom he describes as “worse than Mormons.” Later, her most important influences are the truckers who get her to New York (one of whom has a library where all the books are written by various people named “John”) and, when she arrives, she declares, “Lordy, it looks near as real as a movie.”

This sort of makes me think of Tom Robbins turned up to 11. One of the most effective elements is how it takes a narrative tone that has room for ironic/comic distance on the one hand and for Maggie’s subjectivity at the same time, as when we get a flash as through a microscope when we learn that Maggie “liked to wander over limestone hills where every rock you picked up was the shell of something tiny that had lived.” It’s a very engaging, funny, and layered story with a superb “voice.”

Gordon R. Dickson (1923-11-01/2001-01-31)

“Dolphin’s Way” (Analog, June 1964)

A scientist is trying to communicate with dolphins while fearing the budgetary ax will fall when a strangely attractive reporter arrives and begins asking him questions. Over the course of the story, we get his theories about tests aliens might have for humanity and how we might communicate with dolphins and then witness his pyrhhic victory. This is an excellent tale about linguistics, the Fermi Question, the nature of “humanity” and the cosmos. There is a problem with some gaps in the reporter’s knowledge, it seems to me, but this is about the only blemish on a story that does a great job of packing a lot of ideas into a very short and intelligent space and is also strangely vivid and concrete, perhaps due to its focus on clarity and essentials, allowing the details of place and sensation to achieve more than those in most stories do. This is also a good story to enrich the perspectives of those who see Campbell and/or Dickson stories in simple, monolithic terms.

Hanns Heinz Ewers (1871-11-03/1943-06-12)

“The Spider” (Die Besessenen, 1908)

Happy Halloween! (And with minutes to spare.) This tale of a medical student renting a room in which three people have hanged themselves on consecutive Fridays is steeped in sex and death (or eros and thanatos, if you want to get fancy and Freudian) and combines a third-person omniscient presentation of the student’s diary, giving the best of both narrative worlds while the student suffers the worst of both psychosexual worlds. While I question its “psychological” underpinnings, it’s a creative and skilled dramatization of them and, while I can’t get into it without spoilers, it makes an odd antithesis to the preceding story. (Also, the little dash of number-play that I think I see is a twistedly amusing element.)

J. B. S. Haldane (1892-11-05/1964-12-01)

“The Gold-Makers” (The Inequality of Man, 1932)

The following is adapted from my review of Great Science Fiction by Scientists.

Several scientists have written SF stories. Many are surprisingly melodramatic and, in some cases, even more surprisingly effective. J.B.S. Haldane’s “The Gold-Makers” is a strong example, dealing with a complicated noir mob-like plot turning on the financial implications of being able to create gold, with some parties trying to achieve this and others trying to suppress it. This is wrapped in an “I’m publishing this true story as fiction” wrapper, which is entertaining.

Birthday Reviews: Brown, McConnell

Late yet again, but still right on the day (in some time zones) for McConnell and in time in all time zones for Brown.

Fredric Brown (1906-10-29/1972-03-11)

• “Imagine” (F&SF, May 1955)
• “Recessional” (Dude, March 1960)
• “Nightmare in Yellow” (Dude, May 1961)
• “Earthmen Bearing Gifts” (Galaxy, June 1960)
• “Jaycee” (Nightmares and Geezenstacks, 1961)
• “Answer” (Angels and Spaceships, 1954)
• “Rebound” (Nightmares and Geezenstacks, 1961)
• “Abominable” (Dude, March 1960)
• “Not Yet the End” (Captain Future, Winter 1941)
• “Experiment” (Galaxy, February 1954)
• “The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver (I, II, and III)” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1961)
• “Reconciliation” (Angels and Spaceships, 1954)
• “Pattern” (Angels and Spaceships, 1954)
• “The End” (Nightmares and Geezenstacks, 1961)

Fredric Brown has written excellent long stories, on up to novel length, but there are probably few people who have written more, better, shorter stories. That is to say, he wrote a lot of excellent short-shorts. Even when they’re not perfect, there’s usually something either interesting, funny, or thought-provoking to them that makes them worthwhile and, it seems, the darker they get, the better.

“Imagine” is an unusually sunny piece which argues that reality, looked at properly, is at least as amazing as fantasy or science fiction. “Not Yet the End” shows the perils of sampling errors when aliens come to Earth looking for slaves, while “Earthmen Bearing Gifts” shows how Martians overestimating humanity (or underestimating our capacity for erroneous estimations) can lead to disastrous consequences. Some tackle theological issues: “Answer” turns Asimov’s “The Last Question” on its head with a bitter twist while “Jaycee” shows, with blasphemous verve, an unforeseen side-effect of compensating for a deficiency of males in the population. Conversely, “Abominable” adjusts a legend’s implicit sexism in a comical mode that might offend chauvinists and feminists alike. To borrow from the great Murray Leinster’s title Twists in Time, several of Brown’s short-shorts involve time travel with twists, especially when the travelers push things too far. “Experiment” is perhaps the most audacious of these but, at the same time, not entirely satisfying, and “The End” is clever and comical piece but sort of a one-shot. “The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver” (originally published as “Of Time and Eustace Weaver”) is a more detailed and character-based tale of a ne’er-do-well trying to get something for nothing which is quite ingenious until the traditional ending.

Above all those, four stick out (and one goes with a couple of them in varying ways).

“Pattern” may be one of the more perfect twist short-shorts with its two calm protagonists contemplating the imaginatively conceived aliens who seem to go about their business on the earth while the majority of humans panic. The quiet economy of the set-up and twist is superb. And “Recessional” may be the most striking in this batch of stories as the subjective view of a chess game takes on cosmic proportions in a few words on a universe beyond good and evil.

“Nightmare in Yellow” has no speculative element but to omit such a masterpiece of a dark and twisted twist because of that would be a… crime. The only flaw, as in some of the best puns, is a slightly manufactured premise but this tale of an embezzler’s plan to take the money, run, and knock off his wife as a bonus, is brilliant. “Reconciliation,” a lesser (but still rewarding) tale, relates to this in showing a reverse relationship in which the hate is open and the ending is changed as more pressing matters intervene. And it makes me think of how trapped people can become in seeing relatively small things as greater than they are and missing the bigger picture. Which brings in “Rebound,” the tale of a petty and ridiculous man who happens to figure out how to wield inordinate power and plans to become a huge dictator until (as I fervently hope really happens) his solipsistic viciousness “rebounds.”

James McConnell (1925-10-26/1990-04-09)

“Learning Theory” (If, December 1957)

The following is adapted from my review of Great Science Fiction by Scientists.

Some stories involve entities coming to wrong conclusions based on insufficient evidence. One of the best of these is the excellent “Learning Theory” by James (V.) McConnell. It focuses on confirmation bias and turns the table on a psychologist by having him get abducted by aliens and put through his paces in accordance with their pet theories, so to speak. Very clever and with a sound critique of a scientific problem.

Birthday Reviews: Hamilton, Le Guin

Late again, but still in time to wish our birthday twins a happy birthday in the beyond. (They were both born on the same day, have feathers on their covers, and bring us idealistic tales in which one divinely-tinged creature’s suffering makes pleasure possible for others.) Plus, there’s a special birthday demento–er, memento at the end of this post.

Edmond Hamilton (1904-10-21/1977-02-01)

“Exile” (Super Science Stories, May 1943)

This brief tale is almost impossible to review because of its twist ending and its structure, which is simply the after-dinner conversation of four science fiction writers turning immediately to the fantastic tale of one of them, after another mentions the notion of being glad he never ended up in any of the worlds of his imagination. The details in this, such as the comment on knowledge versus belief or how the discussion of the two worlds is simultaneously simple, yet remarkably detailed and coherent, are effective and the tension between idealism and realism, the nature of fiction and reality, is actually quite powerful. Reading this story is akin to taking a step in a puddle and suddenly finding yourself fully underwater.

(For a Halloween bonus, I’ve also previously mentioned another piece by Edmond Hamilton in an old review of Weird Tales.)

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-10-21/2018-01-22)

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (New Dimensions 3, 1973)

Every time I read this story, I’m surprised at how it initially seems annoying as the narrator intrusively hypothesizes what the nature of the utopia in the story might be and then I’m surprised again at how powerful it becomes as the price for this utopia and the conflict within each person who does or does not accept the bargain is shown. If one person’s torment could produce utopia for all others, what then? In a way, the tale is a reductio ad absurdum in that a more realistic scenario might be “If we were Utilitarians who sought to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number, this implies that some number will not receive the greatest good. And what then?” But, by concentrating it to its utmost, perhaps it is a reduction to a core reality? And either way, what would you do? (And the cynic or masochist or Christian (a motley crew?) could note one of the options the story doesn’t address, which brings up the Dostoevsky Le Guin says she’s forgotten: If one had the opportunity to endure misery for the sake of providing a utopia for the human race, shouldn’t they do it? And if it could be voluntary, shouldn’t the human race honor that choice?)

Either way, this concretized thought experiment is obviously deficient in many of the usual storytelling virtues (which is not unusual in SF but for which SF is usually condemned while this story is praised) but it is a powerful and thought-provoking piece.

(Incidentally, I’d recommend reading this in its original collection, as the author’s note before the story is also excellent. I’ve never forgotten “‘Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?’ From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?”)

Bela Lugosi (1882-10-20/1956-08-16)

“Bela Lugosi’s Dead” (Bauhaus, 1979)

Birthday Reviews: Morrison, Schmitz, Wilde, Wodehouse

Picking up where I left off a couple of years ago, here are reviews of stories selected from people born in the coming week of October 10-16 (or what would have been the coming week if I weren’t a few days late). The stories include a cake baking contest, a bank robbery aftermath, and a contrasting pair of fractured fairy tales.

(There is one birthday that falls in the missed days that I feel like mentioning even if no short fiction goes with it: Happy Birthday and Halloween to Mr. Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1924-10-10/1978-12-10)!)

William Morrison (1906-10-13/1980-06-02)

“The Model of a Judge” (Galaxy, October 1953)

There aren’t many SF stories about judging a cake-baking contest but this is one, involving as it does a wolf-like native inhabitant of a moon which humans have colonized who has been conditioned away from his carnivorous ways and modified into a semblance of humanity, but who still retains his amazingly discriminating taste and more. As the judge overhears seemingly scattered conversation amongst the bakers and then tastes their wares, he reflects on his past, his present, the people who have made him what he is, and then comes to his interesting decision. This is an unusual, well-constructed, efficient, thought-provoking tale.

James H. Schmitz (1911-10-15/1981-04-18)

“An Incident on Route 12” (If, January 1962)

James H. Schmitz is best known for his strong female characters, ranging from mature scienstists to cute little witches who exist in far-flung times and spaces but this little gem features a tough bank robber on the way to make his escape when he encounters car trouble. The horror he inflicts on a good Samaritan is nothing to the horror to come. A really short, hardboiled, powerful masterpiece.

Oscar Wilde (1854-10-16/1900-11-30)

“The Nightingale and the Rose” (The Happy Prince and Other Tales, 1888)

Best known for his witty plays and powerful novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde also wrote poetry and short fiction. In this, a Student of the philosophy that he’s read in books wants to dance with a girl who has said she would if he gave her a red rose, but he has no rose. A nightingale hears his lament, decides he’s a true lover, and undergoes an astonishing ordeal to help him. This tale makes me think of things like “philosophy will clip an angel’s wings” and “love is blind” and so on, but the point is that it’s quite a striking and cynical “fairy tale.”

P. G. Wodehouse (1881-10-15/1975-02-14)

“Sir Agravaine” (Collier’s, June 29, 1912)

Perhaps it’s best to let Wodehouse sum up his own story:

Some time ago, when spending a delightful week-end at the ancestral castle of my dear old friend, the Duke of Weatherstonhope (pronounced Wop), I came across an old black letter MS. It is on this that the story which follows is based.

I have found it necessary to touch the thing up a little here and there, for writers in those days were weak in construction. Their idea of telling a story was to take a long breath and start droning away without any stops or dialogue till the thing was over.

I have also condensed the title. In the original it ran, “‘How it came about that ye good Knight Sir Agravaine ye Dolorous of ye Table Round did fare forth to succor a damsel in distress and after divers journeyings and perils by flood and by field did win her for his bride and right happily did they twain live ever afterwards,’ by Ambrose ye monk.”

It was a pretty snappy title for those times, but we have such a high standard in titles nowadays that I have felt compelled to omit a few yards of it. We may now proceed to the story.

And so it goes that the weak and homely knight and the plain maiden find out what is above strength and beauty and all else. I don’t know that this is his best and, despite threats of dragons and other fanciful things, really only the theme makes this a speculative story but, still, it’s entertaining and amusing, especially (for some reason) regarding the sort of indigestion someone like Agravaine could cause a dragon.