Tag: 1960

Old Hundredth by Brian W. Aldiss

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Old Hundredth by Brian W. Aldiss (New Worlds #100, November 1960) is set on a far future Earth where humanity has departed and only animals are left; it opens with Dandi Lashadusa (who we later discover is an uplifted sloth-like creature) passing a musicolumn:

When old Dandi Lashadusa came riding down that dusty road on her megatherium, the column began to intone. It was just an indigo stain in the air, hardly visible, for it represented only a bonded pattern of music locked into the fabric of that particular area of space. It was also a transubstantio-spatial shrine, the eternal part of a being that had dematerialised itself into music.  p. 63

Dandi dismounts near the column to listen to its music, and telepathically communes with her tetchy mentor half a world away in Beterbroe. He ignores Dandi’s suggestion to look at the view through her eyes, and he instead provides a trenchant critique of an unnamed piece of music that is of significance to Dandi. The conversation then briefly touches on to her tentative plans to die, before she gets back on the megatherium and continues on.
As Dandi travels towards her next stop, the Involute (“it seemed to hang irridial above the ground a few leagues on”), we learn that, in this far future, the Moon has left Earth to orbit the Sun, and that Earth and Venus now orbit each other. We also learn about humanity’s expansion throughout the solar system, and their development of the Laws of Intergration, which ultimately led to the construction of the transubstantio-spatialisers used to project them onto the pattern of reality. They never came back.
When Dandi arrives at the Involute her mentor senses her dark thoughts. He tells her that moping does not become her, and that she should return home, and adds that he does not want to hear any more about the music she has chosen for her swan song. She replies that she is lonely:

He shot her a picture from another of his wards before leaving her. Dandi had seen this ward before in similar dream-like glimpses. It was a huge mole creature, still boring underground as it had been for the last twenty years. Occasionally it crawled through vast caves; once it swam in a subterranean lake; most of the while it just bored through rock. Its motivations were obscure to Dandi, although her mentor referred to it as ‘a geologer.’ Doubtless if the mole was vouchsafed occasional glimpses of Dandi and her musicolumnology, it would find her as baffling. At least the mentor’s point was made; loneliness was psychological, not statistical.
Why, a million personalities glittered almost before her eyes!  p. 68

The last part of the story (spoiler) sees Dandi arrive at her old home in Crotheria. When she goes to look at her old house she is confronted by an uplifted bear—transgressive creatures that are the only ones who wish to emulate “man’s old aggressiveness”. Dandi panics and summons her mentor (now revealed as an uplifted dolphin). He takes control of her body and moves to kill the bear, but Dandi fights her mentor and tells the creature to flee. The enraged mentor throws Dandi’s elephant-sized body against the wall and the house begins to collapse. She jumps to safety.
Dandi later realises, when she hears nothing further from her mentor, that she has been excommunicated. She continues her journey until she comes to a suitable spot, frees her mount, and proceeds with her plan:

Locking herself into thought disciplines, Dandi began to dissolve. Man had needed machines to help him do it, to fit into the Involutes. She was a lesser animal: she could unbutton herself into the humbler shape of a musicolumn. It was just a matter of rearranging—and without pain she formed into a pattern that was not a shaggy megatherim body . . . but an indigo column, hardly visible . . .
Lass for a long while cropped thistle and cacti. Then she ambled forward to seek the hairy creature she fondly—and a little condescendingly—regarded as her equal. But of the sloth there was no sign.
Almost the only landmark was a faint violet-blue dye in the air. As the baluchitherium mare approached, a sweet old music grew in volume from the dye. It was a music almost as old as the landscape itself and certainly as much travelled, a tune once known to men as The Old Hundredth. And there were voices singing: “All creatures that on Earth do dwell . . .”  p. 73

There isn’t much of a story here, and the pleasure that this piece provides comes from (a) its exotic and elegiac descriptions of a pastoral far-future Earth, and (b) its transcendent, sense-of-wonder ending. I thought this was an excellent story the first time I read it but, this time around, it was apparent that part of its charm is the novelty of its touching last line.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,300 words. Story link.

The Voices of Time by J. G. Ballard

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Voices of Time by J. G. Ballard (New Worlds #99, October 1960) opens with Powers reflecting on the suicide of his colleague Whitby, and the strange grooves the dead man cut on the floor of an empty swimming pool:

An inch deep and twenty feet long, interlocking to form an elaborate ideogram like a Chinese character, they had taken him all summer to complete, and he had obviously thought about little else, working away tirelessly through the long desert afternoons. Powers had watched him from his office window at the far end of the Neurology wing, carefully marking out his pegs and string, carrying away the cement chips in a small canvas bucket. After Whitby’s suicide no one had bothered about the grooves, but Powers often borrowed the supervisor’s key and let himself into the disused pool, and would look down at the labyrinth of mouldering gulleys, half-filled with water leaking in from the chlorinator, an enigma now past any solution.  p. 91

This is just the first piece of strangeness that we are introduced to in this story, and we soon learn that Powers is one of a number of people who are beginning to sleep for increasing periods of time (a number of “terminals” are already in permanent comas). We also are introduced to an ex-patient of Powers’ called Kaldren who, after a recent operation, never sleeps at all, and who intermittently stalks Powers to pass on a series of decreasing numbers (the first one we see is 96,688,365,498,721, scribbled in the dust on the windscreen of his car). Kaldren also has a girlfriend called Coma (quite apt given the situation with Powers and the other narcoma sufferers).
There is more of this kind of thing when Powers spots a creature trapped at the bottom of the empty swimming pool, a frog that has grown a lead carapace, one of a number of organisms that have started growing shells for radiological protection. Later on, when Powers shows Coma round Whitby’s laboratory, we see even odder creatures (an intelligent chimp, a mutated anemone, etc.), specimens that have been irradiated to switch on their “silent pair” genes, in the belief that that this will trigger a massive move up the evolutionary slope.
This is all intriguing stuff, but many of these ideas are never fully realised, and the remainder of the story focuses on Powers’ decreasing periods of wakefulness, as well as his creation of a mandala (presumably similar to Whitby’s design) on a target at an Air Force weapons range. During this period Powers also visits Kaldren’s house, and we learn about the latter’s bizarre preoccupations which, among other things, include the series of decreasing numbers mentioned previously. We discover that they are being received from deep space, and may be a countdown to the end of the Universe.
The final section (spoiler) sees Powers irradiate the laboratory specimens and himself with the X-ray machine. When he goes outside afterwards he can sense the age of the landscape and then, when he reaches the mandala, he tunes into the “time-song” of the stars above him:

Like an endless river, so broad that its banks were below the horizons, it flowed steadily towards him, a vast course of time that spread outwards to fill the sky and the universe, enveloping everything within them. Moving slowly, the forward direction of its majestic current almost imperceptible, Powers knew that its source was the source of the cosmos itself. As it passed him, he felt its massive magnetic pull, let himself be drawn into it, borne gently on its powerful back. Quietly it carried him away, and he rotated slowly, facing the direction of the tide. Around him the outlines of the hills and the lake had faded, but the image of the mandala, like a cosmic clock, remained fixed before his eyes, illuminating the broad surface of the stream. Watching it constantly, he felt his body gradually dissolving, its physical dimensions melting into the vast continuum of the current, which bore him out into the centre of the great channel sweeping him onward, beyond hope now but at rest, down the broadening reaches of the river of eternity.  p. 121

This is a story that has some striking ideas and impressive passages, but they never really click into place—other than in Ballard’s head,1 I guess, or perhaps as some sort of entropic tone-poem. So an ambitious piece then, but not an entirely satisfying one.
I’d also add in passing that I think this work presages the likes of The Terminal Beach and his other “concentrated” stories, in that it presents a number of core images or obsessions unconnected (or largely unconnected) by conventional narrative links.
*** (Good). 12,700 words. Story link.

1. Although I generally admire Ballard’s writing (and would put The Kindness of Women on my top five novels list), I occasionally get the feeling I’m reading about the obsessions of a psychiatric patient.

What the Left Hand Was Doing by Randall Garrett

Posted on by Paul Fraser

What the Left Hand Was Doing by Randall Garrett (Astounding, February 1960) begins with the protagonist, Spencer Candron, arriving at The Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research, Inc., a front for a group of psi (mind-power) capable individuals. Once we eventually get beyond the over-padded beginning (which includes a description of the building, of Candron, and of the secretary and her role in keeping away the crazies) he finally receives a leisurely briefing about the Red Chinese abduction of a famous US physicist called Ch’ien at an international conference in their country (his abductors have attempted to cover this up by murdering a double). Candron is told to rescue Ch’ien before the Chinese uncover his interstellar drive secrets.
The story picks up pace when Candron flies over Chinese territory and arranges to have an aircraft door to fall off during the flight. He then jumps out:

Without a parachute, he had flung himself from the plane toward the earth below, and his only thought was his loathing, his repugnance, for that too, too solid ground beneath.
He didn’t hate it. That would be deadly, for hate implies as much attraction as love—the attraction of destruction. Fear, too, was out of the question; there must be no such relationship as that between the threatened and the threatener. Only loathing could save him. The earth beneath was utterly repulsive to him.
And he slowed.
His mind would not accept contact with the ground, and his body was forced to follow suit. He slowed.
Minutes later, he was drifting fifty feet above the surface, his altitude held steady by the emotional force of his mind. Not until then did he release the big suitcase he had been holding. He heard it thump as it hit, breaking open and scattering clothing around it.
In the distance, he could hear the faint moan of a siren. The Chinese radar had picked up two falling objects. And they would find two: one door and one suitcase, both of which could be accounted for by the “accident.” They would know that no parachute had opened; hence, if they found no body, they would be certain that no human being could have dropped from the plane.  p. 183 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

Not bad, and the next part of the story—where he establishes himself in a hotel room in the city—is interesting too. However, the piece falters when Candron later goes to the Security HQ in the middle of the city and makes full use of his psi powers: he holds onto the underside of a car with his fingertips as it goes through the checkpoint; levitates up an elevator shaft; impersonates a Chinese general in a phone call to the cell guards to organise his visit; and then goes down to see Ch’ien. This is all too easily done, as is his rescue of the physicist, which (spoiler) sees him knock the scientist unconscious with an uppercut, set off a smoke bomb, and then teleport them both back to his room in the city. There, he carries Ch’ien to the roof of the hotel, and levitates himself and the physicist out to sea where they eventually meet a submarine (this latter event happens when he’s getting a bit tired, something we find out after a two page lecture about the limits of the human mind and psionic abilities).
The last couple of pages of the story have a Senator and a couple of other men debrief Candron at the institute, and one of the questions they ask him is why he kept knocking the physicist unconscious throughout the flight to the sub. Candron replies with some typical Campbellian blather about psionics:

“It would ruin him,” Candron broke in, before the senator could speak. “If he saw, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that levitation and teleportation were possible, he would have accepted his own senses as usable data on definite phenomena. But, limited as he is by his scientific outlook, he would have tried to evolve a scientific theory to explain what he saw. What else could a scientist do?”
Senator Kerotski nodded, and his nod said, “I see. He would have diverted his attention from the field of the interstellar drive to the field of psionics. And he would have wasted years trying to explain an inherently nonlogical area of knowledge by logical means.”
“That’s right,” Candron said. “We would have set him off on a wild goose chase, trying to solve the problems of psionics by the scientific, the logical method. We would have presented him with an unsolvable problem.”
Taggert patted his knees. “We would have given him a problem that he could not solve with the methodology at hand. It would be as though we had proved to an ancient Greek philosopher that the cube could be doubled, and then allowed him to waste his life trying to do it with a straightedge and compass.”
“We know Ch’ien’s psychological pattern,” Candron continued. “He’s not capable of admitting that there is any other thought pattern than the logical. He would try to solve the problems of psionics by logical methods, and would waste the rest of his life trying to do the impossible.”  pp. 202-203 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

I think this sort of thing is what was meant by “pushing Campbell’s buttons” (i.e. pandering to the editor of Astounding magazine, John W. Campbell, and his sometimes whacky ideas).
I eventually lost patience with this story as I’m not a fan of work that (a) uses lazy SF ideas and terminology (“psi”) or (b) is obviously padded with word-rate generating material (e.g. endless description and lectures). But most of all I don’t like (c) stories (and movies—I’m looking at you Wonder Woman) where the superhero protagonists can seemingly do anything they want and are never in any sort of jeopardy.
If none of this applies to you, this may be an entertaining enough piece as it’s readable enough.
* (Mediocre). 10,900 words. Story link.

The Sound Sweep by J. G. Ballard

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Sound Sweep by J. G. Ballard (Science Fantasy #39, February 1960) opens with Madame Gioconda, an ageing and out of work opera diva, suffering a headache which is worsened by the sounds of flyover traffic and then, later, by the phantom applause that comes from the auditorium around her apartment on the sound stage of a disused radio station—applause that later turns into boos and catcalls. At midnight a man called Magnon, a mute who can “hear” sound residues, arrives with his “sonovac”:

Understanding her, he first concentrated on sweeping the walls and ceiling clean, draining away the heavy depressing underlayer of traffic noises. Carefully he ran the long snout of the sonovac over the ancient scenic flats (relics of her previous roles at the Metropolitan Opera House) which screened-in Madame Gioconda’s makeshift home—the great collapsing Byzantine bed (Othello) mounted against the microphone turret; the huge framed mirrors with their peeling silverscreen (Orpheus) stacked in one corner by the bandstand; the stove (Trovatore) set up on the program director’s podium; the gilt-trimmed dressing table and wardrobe (Figaro) stuffed with newspaper and magazine cuttings. He swept them methodically, moving the sonovac’s nozzle in long strokes, drawing out the dead residues of sound that had accumulated during the day.
By the time he finished the air was clear again, the atmosphere lightened, its overtones of fatigue and irritation dissipated. Gradually Madame Gioconda recovered. Sitting up weakly, she smiled wanly at Mangon. Mangon grinned back encouragingly, slipped the kettle onto the stove for Russian tea, sweetened by the usual phenobarbitone chaser, switched off the sonovac and indicated to her that he was going outside to empty it.  p. 205 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

When Magnon empties the sonovac there is only the usual sound detritus, and it becomes obvious that the audience that Madame Gioconda claims to hear is only imaginary. But Magnon is an admirer of the singer and hopes to win her favour—he visits every day to clean the apartment of sound residues, serve her tea, and listen to her tales of a comeback and revenge—so he keeps this information to himself.
In the next part of the story we learn more about her obsolescence (normal music was replaced by ultrasonic music which can’t be heard by humans but has an emotional effect) and her plans to stage a comeback by blackmailing a wealthy producer called LeGrande who is going into politics (she drunkenly relates she has intimate photographs of them together as well as a “no holes barred” memoir).
The rest of the story follows quite an involved plot, which adds another character, Ray Alto, a client and friend of Magnon’s who is an ultrasonic composer, and Madame Gioconda’s discovery of the fact that Magnon can not only hear sound residue but can distinguish snatches of conversation. This latter ability eventually sees Magnon and Madame Gioconda go the “sound stockades”—a dumping ground for all the city’s sonic waste—and sieve through the detritus for fragments of conversation which will let them blackmail Le Grande. During this search Magnon recovers his powers of speech.
All of this eventually rolls towards a climax where (spoiler) Madame LeGrande is scheduled—after her blackmail attempt is successful—to sing alongside a debut performance of Alto’s ultrasonic Opus Zero, much to the composer’s fury. Alto then plots with Magnon (who has subsequently been brutally snubbed by Gioconda after she got what she wanted) to hide a sonovac at the performance to hoover up her voice before it gets to the mike (a voice which sounds like, according to Alto, a “cat being strangled” because “what time alone hasn’t done to her, cocaine and self-pity have.”) But, of course, during the performance Magnon (who has by now lost his voice again) decides to revenge himself by letting the world hear her:

Mangon listened to her numbly, hands gripping the barrell of the sonovac. The voice exploded in his brain, flooding every nexus of cells with its violence. It was grotesque, an insane parody of a classical soprano. Harmony, purity, cadence had gone. Rough and cracked, it jerked sharply from one high note to a lower, its breath intervals uncontrolled, sudden precipices of gasping silence which plunged through the volcanic torrent, dividing it into a loosely connected sequence of bravura passages.
He barely recognized what she was singing: the Toreador song from Carmen. Why she had picked this he could not imagine. Unable to reach its higher notes she fell back on the swinging rhythm of the refrain, hammering out the rolling phrases with tosses of her head. After a dozen bars her pace slackened, she slipped into an extempore humming, then broke out of this into a final climactic assault. Appalled, Mangon watched as two or three members of the orchestra stood up and disappeared into the wings. The others had stopped playing, were switching off their instruments and conferring with each other. The audience was obviously restive; Mangon could hear individual voices in the intervals when Madame Gioconda refilled her lungs.
[. . .]
Satisfied, he dropped the sonovac to the floor, listened for a moment to the caterwauling above, which was now being drowned by the mounting vocal opposition of the audience, then unlatched the door.  pp. 242-243 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

This is an original piece and a pretty good one too. I note, however, that it feels like early Ballard: not only does the sonovac and ultrasonic music subject matter feel more like something you would find in Barrington Bayley’s later work, but the story also has a conventional plot. That said, it does have Ballard’s distinctive style.
If the final scene had been clearer, and the miraculous speech recovery in the middle of the story less awkwardly placed, I would have probably rated this higher. That said, these are minor criticisms, and it is well worth a read.
I note in passing that there are a significant number of drug references for the time.
***+ (Good to very good). 14,500 words. Story link.

Mariana by Fritz Leiber

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Mariana by Fritz Leiber (Fantastic, February 1960) opens with Mariana discovering a secret panel of switches in her house, one of which has a lit sign labelled “Trees” underneath. When her husband Jonathan comes home from work she asks him about the switches:

“Didn’t you know they were radio trees? I didn’t want to wait twenty-five years for them and they couldn’t grow in this rock anyway. A station in the city broadcasts a master pine tree and sets like ours pick it up and project it around homes. It’s vulgar but convenient.”
After a bit she asked timidly, “Jonathan, are the radio pine trees ghostly as you drive through them?”
“Of course not! They’re solid as this house and the rock under it—to the eye and to the touch too. A person could even climb them. If you ever stirred outside you’d know these things. The city station transmits pulses of alternating matter at sixty cycles a second. The science of it is over your head.”  p. 156 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

While Jonathan is away at work the next day (spoiler) she switches off the trees, much to his annoyance when he comes home—and then exacerbates matters the next day when she switches off the “House”. Next to go is “Jonathan” when he angrily confronts her; then she switches off the “Stars” in the sky above.
After sitting in the dark for several hours (no sun rises as there are no stars) she notices the fifth switch is off and labelled “Doctor”. She switches this one on and shortly finds herself in a hospital room. A mechanical voice asks her whether she wants to accept treatment for her depression or continue with the wish-fulfilment therapy. Mariana responds by turning off the “Doctor” switch on a pedestal beside her and, when she is back in her virtual reality, she turns off the switch labelled “Mariana”.
This last action doesn’t really make any sense—why would therapy program let her suicide?—but the surreal, dream-like logic of the story may work for some readers.
** (Average). 1,900 words.

The Other Wife by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Other Wife by Jack Finney (Saturday Evening Post, January 30th, 1960) starts with a fairly stereotypical husband-wife encounter—she’s prattling on about her knitting and he’s day-dreaming about a sports car—which eventually devolves into a mild spat. During the early stages of this encounter the husband discovers a 1958 Woodrow Wilson coin in his change: this becomes significant later.
The next part of the story sees the husband transported to an alternate world where, after seeing a “Coco-Coola” sign, he notices other changes (the cars are all black, and they are of different makes) before discovering the most significant difference on his arrival back at his apartment—which is that he is married to another woman.
He later realises that she is an ex-girlfriend of his, although this takes some time, and after some slight hesitation he picks up where he left off. He subsequently enjoys a honeymoon period with his other wife and during this also has the pleasure of finding new books that exist in this world but not in his own:

There on the revolving metal racks were the familiar rows of glossy little books, every one of which, judging from the covers, seemed to be about an abnormally well-developed girl. Turning the rack slowly I saw books by William Faulkner, Bernard Glemser, Agatha Christie, and Charles Einstein, which I’d read and liked. Then, down near the bottom of the rack my eye was caught by the words, “By Mark Twain.” The cover showed an old side-wheeler steamboat, and the title was South From Cairo. A reprint fitted out with a new title, I thought, feeling annoyed; and I picked up the book to see just which of Mark Twain’s it really was. I’ve read every book he wrote—Huckleberry Finn at least a dozen times since I discovered it when I was eleven years old.
But the text of this book was new to me. It seemed to be an account, told in the first person by a young man of twenty, of his application for a job on a Mississippi steamboat. And then, from the bottom of a page, a name leaped out at me. “‘Finn, sir,’ I answered the captain,” the text read, “‘but mostly they call me Huckleberry.’”
For a moment I just stood there in the drugstore with my mouth hanging open; then I turned the little book in my hands. On the back cover was a photograph of Mark Twain; the familiar shock of white hair, the mustache, that wise old face. But underneath this the brief familiar account of his life ended with saying that he had died in 1918 in Mill Valley, California. Mark Twain had lived eight years longer in this alternate world, and had written—well, I didn’t yet know how many more books he had written in this wonderful world, but I knew I was going to find out. And my hand was trembling as I walked up to the cashier and gave her two bits for my priceless copy of South From Cairo.  pp. 25-26 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

This part of the story, and his realisation about what the odd coins in his change do—see below—is probably the best of it.
In a few months, of course, the shine eventually comes off his new relationship and, while checking his change one night, he finds a Roosevelt coin. He realises that it was the Woodrow Wilson one which transported him to this world—and that the Roosevelt will let him return.
The story ends with him back in his own world where no time has passed. He has a second honeymoon period with his first wife and then, later, finds another Woodrow Wilson coin in his change . . . .
I guess, overall, this story is okay, but it’s essentially shallow New Yorker froth where a bigamous husband has his cake and eats it. A pity, because there is a better story here about how the shine comes off of new relationships and marriages, and of the possibilities of the road not taken. (And hopefully a story which explains the reason there isn’t already a husband in the alternate world.)
** (Average). 5,850 words.

The Handler by Damon Knight

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Handler by Damon Knight (Rogue, August 1960) sees a TV actor called Pete go into a bar and glad-hand all the people who have just finished work on a successful TV show, ending with these individuals:

“Sol and Ernie and Mack, my writers, Shakespeare should have been so lucky—” One by one, they came up to shake the big man’s hand as he called their names; the women kissed him and cried. “My stand-in,” the big man was calling out, and “my caddy,” and “now,” he said, as the room quieted a little, people flushed and sore-throated with enthusiasm, “I want you to meet my handler.”  p. 11 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

At this point Pete becomes motionless, and a dwarf—his “handler”—climbs out of Pete’s body. The party cools, and everyone drifts away. The dwarf is called Fred and he tries to chat to people but is either ignored or rebuffed (as well as his physical appearance he is nowhere as extrovert a personality as Pete). Then, while Fred is having a beer and trying to be friendly, one of the writers bluntly suggests that he gets back inside Pete. When Fred does this Pete comes to life, and the party restarts.
After his initial appearance Fred is variously described as “little man”; “was a very small man, almost a dwarf, stoop-shouldered and roundbacked in a sweaty brown singlet and shorts”; “had a perspiring brown face under a shock of black hair”; “was about forty, with a big nose and big soft brown eyes”; “his voice was cracked and uncertain”. Fred also has “knobby hands”; “sad hound-dog eyes”, etc. If Knight was trying to make the wider point that people react to our outer selves rather than our inner ones, he rather buries this idea under a mass of description that appears to make the piece about little more than people’s reaction to other’s physical attractiveness (and possibly manner).
The whole idea struck me a bit silly.
* (Mediocre). 1,600 words.