1955

Novella

The Darftsteller

Walter M. Miller Jr

Fog Index 9.5

Walter M. Miller Jr (1923-1996) studied at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville from 1940-1942. He served in the Army Air Corps during World War II as a radioman and tail gunner. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1947, but eventually found himself drifting away from the Church. His novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, won the Hugo in 1961, and was the only novel published during his lifetime. A second novel, St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, was completed by Terry Bisson and published in 1997.

In The Darfsteller, stage actors have been replaced by autodrama--mannequins controlled by the Maestro, a machine. The Maestro (using tapes, of course) directs the dummies, using recordings of human actors to simulate those actors’ abilities. This type of theater has, according to our story, pretty much replaced plays with human actors, which are too expensive and unpopular to stage very frequently. Our protagonist, Ryan Thornier, used to be an actor of great ability, but can’t get acting work anymore. Instead he works as a janitor in an autodrama theater. Most of the actors he worked with in the past have made their fortunes recording their acting styles for the company that makes the Maestro, or have moved on to other kinds of jobs, but he refuses to do so, believing that it would compromise his integrity. He hates his job. He hates his boss, who, among other things, is threatening to replace him with a cleaning robot. Old theater friends tell him to give up and move on in his life, but he’s determined to be true to his ideals, to be a great actor or nothing. He is, in short, self-destructing.

This story is, of course, one of the many SF tales that questions the effect technology has on human creativity (or if you want to sound lofty, "the human spirit"). Many stories of this type come off as preachy—the author has a Point to make, and no mistake about it, you’ll know what that Point is if it’s the last thing the author does. And the Point is usually that technology will ruin the human spirit, destroy human creativity, and enslave people. Humankind is, after all, special and better than other creatures and will perish in captivity, etc., insert Star Trek homily here. Well, duh. And knives kill people, too, but they’re devilishly useful if you want to chop onions. A more thoughtful look at the question should produce something more nuanced, intelligent enough to recognize that a good answer (if there is one) won’t be black and white. The Darfsteller is a thoughtful look at this question--or at any rate, Walter Miller never thought any important questions in life had easy answers.

 

Short Story

Allamagoosa

Fog Index 10.7

Eric Frank Russell (1905-1976) Born Sandhurst, Surrey. His father was in the military and his family moved a number of times. He spent part of his youth in Egypt and Sudan. At college, he studied a variety of subjects including chemistry, physics and metallurgy. During WWII, he took radio courses in London and at the Marconi College in Chelmsford, eventually leading a small RAF mobile radio unit attached to General Patton's army. He worked for a time in an engineering firm, published his first novel in 1939, and later became a full-time writer. In his later years, he gave up writing.

Allamagoosa is, well, clever. It’s fun to read, and amusing, and it’s one of those short stories with a punchline. The crew of a ship, knowing that they’re about to be audited, want to be sure there are no discrepancies between the actual contents of their ship and the inventory thereof. Except there *is* a discrepancy, and…..I won’t spoil it for you. The Hugo winners are anthologized and pretty widely available, and it’s only a few pages long. Go ahead and read it, it’ll give you a chuckle.

Eric Frank Russell never became as famous as many of the other Hugo Winners, but some of his novels have recently been re-issued and are available at Amazon.    Shadow Man: The life and works of Eric Frank Russell is a good fansite .   For some reviews of some of Russell’s other works, visit this site.

 

Novel

They’d Rather Be Right (aka The Forever Machine)

Mark Clifton and Frank Riley

Fog Index 13.4

Mark Clifton (1906-1963) worked as an industrial psychologist. After retiring early (due to illness) he began writing sf. He died of lung cancer.

Frank Riley 1915-1996

Brian Aldiss said it best: "Indeed, the controversial nature of science fictional themes is such that only careful control…deflects the fantasy from the sermon." Read The Forever Machine and say to yourself, "Ain’t it the truth."

The main character (and I use the word advisedly) of this novel is Joe Carter, a telepath. He’s involved in the design and building of a machine that is supposed to be able to predict the future. It turns out to have other uses, the ignorant populace fear it, the government wants to use it to control the world, etc.

Joe is, of course, better, smarter, and more insightful than anyone else in the world. In fact, the world is peopled by petty, self-serving idiots with hardly a redeeming virtue that Joe hasn’t beamed into their little minds. Of course, if society (through their mothers and then through school) hadn’t warped their minds and beaten them down, maybe they’d be like Joe.

This book is full of the most jaw-dropping leaps of logic. I found the central one the most astonishing—the awesome machine that is the center of the story, basically an AI, is able to take objective facts and reason from them to an infallible conclusion (infallible because it only accepts facts which are really, objectively verifiable, and somehow its reasoning process is faultless). No, that’s not the jaw-dropper. The scientists attempt to give this machine all the psychological learning of the day, and the machine rejects it as subjective and unsubstantiated. No, we still haven’t reached the stunner. Just wait, here it comes. The machine, after examining every objective fact its designers can cram into it, comes to the infallible conclusion that psychological problems cause all disease and aging. Oh, and gravity helps the process along. A good session on the couch and you’re cured—young, beautiful, and disease-free. Even the deleterious effect of gravity on one’s cellular health (honestly! It’s a proven fact!) can be reversed by a psychoanalysis from the machine. Objective, observable, soundly grounded in fact! Uh-huh.

There are smaller ones, like the reasoning that children’s upbringing causes them to equate knowledge with punishment (and somehow the child is always a boy, and the reprimanding parent always a mother…perhaps it’s best not to delve too deeply into that). Because, of course, when parents say "you should know better than that, young man!" the child reaches the only possible conclusion—that if he hadn’t known better than that, he wouldn’t have been punished. Any parent can see the pit gaping between premise and conclusion here.

Did I mention that it’s miserably written? "He tried to trace the designs on the wallpaper, but they, too, became twisting worms of despair." Oh, and here’s another good one. "He kept his voice normal, not revealing the dark loneliness of life-long solitary confinement, such as might be known by a human who was never once permitted to communicate with one of his own kind."

Then, of course, this book has the failings of even the greatest SF novels of its time. The one sympathetic, reasonably intelligent female character seems to exist only to provide a suitable helpmeet for our hero. Women are, otherwise, characterized in condescending, even insulting terms. This won’t come as a surprise to readers familiar with the SF of the period, but may be hard to take if you’re venturing into this area for the first time.

If you’ve previously read favorable reviews of this book, you may be surprised by what you’ve read here. Some readers seem to have been tremendously taken with the "revolutionary" idea this book puts forward. And after all, science fiction is the literature of ideas, right? Well, there are ideas and ideas, and if this one strikes you as life-changingly original, you really need to get out more.

Most Hugo winning novels are, if not in continuous print, in and out of print. You can find them in the library, or the used book store, or ebay, or somewhere. To the best of my knowledge, The Forever Machine has been out of print (and difficult to find used) from shortly after it won the Hugo until 1992. I find this entirely understandable. What is mysterious is how it won the Hugo to begin with. Was there a dearth of great SF that year? Were readers so taken with its anti-McCarthyite stance that they ignored the novel’s shortcomings? Were voters actually pod people? We may never know.

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