Tag: judith merril

Novella Review: “Project Nursemaid” by Judith Merril

January 11th, 2024

(Cover by Mel Hunter. F&SF, October 1955.)

Who Goes There?

Judith Merril was one of the few female members of the Futurians, that New York-based fan group that would have way too many big names among its ranks. She wrote a couple novels in collaboration with fellow Futurian C. M. Kornbluth, but she’s much more known for her short fiction and work as an editor. Her debut story “That Only a Mother” is one of the most reprinted so-called Golden Age SF stories—really too often reprinted at this point. She was never that prolific a writer, and after 1970 she basically took no part in the field; because she quit SF relatively young her work gives the impression of someone who was restless and, by the end of it, more than a little jaded. Her criticism is well worth reading. I’d been meaning to get more into Merril’s fiction (which is not hard, as there’s not a lot of it), but something would always sidetrack me. But no more!

“Project Nursemaid” might be the most Judith Merril story ever, in both its length and how it encapsulates Merril’s mission statement; it shows off what made her unique at the time as well as her weaknesses. When Algis Budrys called Merril the founder of “the steaming-wet-diaper school of SF,” he was probably thinking of this story specifically. For my money, “Project Nursemaid” is a good story that tragically has been stretched too thin, like a delicious gob of peanut butter over too much bread. It took me several days to get through it, partly because I’ve been sick for the past few days (my tonsils rebelling against me) but partly because you start to feel that length. Also sorry this is a day late; these things happen.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1955 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It has only been reprinted a few times. It was anthologized once, in Six Great Short Science Fiction Novels (ed. Groff Conklin). For Merril collections we have Daughters of Earth: Three Novels and Homecalling and Other Stories: The Complete Solo Short SF of Judith Merril. That last one rolls right off the tongue.

Enhancing Image

The plot is simple. In a distant (although not too distant) future, the “world government” wants to colonize the moon. One problem: you can’t take pregnant women to the moon. You can take a fetus in an incubator, but not a pregnant woman. Thus for Project Nursemaid there are two objectives: to gather enough “Pre Natals” (fetuses) and Foster Parents—those who will raise the young on the moon. ~~Major~~ Colonel Tom Edgerly thus has to find enough would-be mothers who are willing to give up their babies, and even more importantly enough women who are willing to spend a whole year on the moon. The deadlines are strict and the criteria for the women are no less strict. Conveniently Tom is also a trained psychologist, which makes him fit to interview quite a few women in search of those with the right stuff. But, unfortunately, the saying that doctors are bad at taking care of themselves (dentists having bad teeth, for example) holds true here, as Tom will have to answer to some hard truths about himself, and unlike the women who have a psychologist to talk to, Tom’s superiors want results first and foremost. This almost sounds like a recipe for disaster.

And that’s basically it!

Looking at the Mel Hunter cover for this issue of F&SF, I assumed the cover illustrated Merril’s story and thus had to do with robots colonizing the moon; we don’t get robots nor do we ever get to see the moon colonization first-hand. If you’re curious to read an SF story about a robot raising human children on another world then I would recommend Vernor Vinge’s “Long Shot.” Overlooked short story, that one. Anyway, technology doessn’t really play a part in “Project Nursemaid” other than as a point of logistics; the tech is feasible, and arguably not even science-fictional from today’s viewpoint, but Merril discusses (at exhausting length) who might be the right people to get involved with such tech. One could make the argument that “Project Nursemaid” is not even really a science fiction story, but pure speculative fiction. What’s the difference? For my money, it has to do with the role technology plays in the character drama and how essoteric said tech is. Maybe in 1955 using incubators to create moon babies was far-out, but not so much in 2024. More importantly, you could replace the colonization project with some other thing—some totally real-life project, like the space race that was just getting started in 1955—and I’m pretty sure the ensuing character drama would be mostly unchanged.

Let me put it another way: Gravity is certainly speculative fiction, in that it speculatives on a what-if scenario of some freak accident marooning some astronaut on the cusp of Earth’s outer atmosphere, but it’s not really science fiction because the technology is basically arbitrary. Of course the other, equally valid, argument is that something can be SF even if it does not involve the hard sciences—for example if it’s about the soft sciences. I forget who said this (might’ve been P. Schuyler Miller), who argued Theodore Sturgeon’s novel Some of Your Blood still counts as SF, depite scoring zero in the area of technology, because it’s still a novel about a soft science—namely psychology. “Project Nursemaid” is certainly more about psychology, a soft science, than it is about the hard-nosed business of raising a group of people on the moon. What type of woman would willingly give up her baby, and what type of person would be looking for such a woman in the first place? This novella brings up some topics which would’ve been rarely discussed, if not taboo outright, in genre SF at the time, such as abortion and women having sex out of wedlock, and we even get a reference to masturbation, if only in the metaphorical sense.

(Little side note, but I found it amusing that Merril set her story in some alternate timeline where the UN was actually useful, but did not predict Alaska soon becoming a US state. It had been a territory for decades but would not join the Union until 1959.)

Speaking of stuff that would’ve been unusual for ’50s genre SF, we have Tom, who in the hands of a Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov would’ve been a cold, chauvinistic, reason-oriented man who would only do “what needs to be done.” This story would’ve been fundamentally different had it been written by someone preoccupied with the logistics of the project itself, but to its advantage Merril was not. Tom gets to know some of the women he interview, and even has romantic tension with one (Ceil, a tough-minded unmarried woman barely out of high school), though the latter comes about not because there’s some romantic tension quota to meet but because it’s implied Tom is a deeply lonely person. Much is made about how women in genre SF have historically drawn the short stick, being often written without interiority or much of a sense of agency; but just as important is that the men in genre SF, especially in the early decades, often lacked interiority as well. Tom, unlike most of the male leads in other stories of the time, has a rich inner life, with palpable internal conflict. This richness of Tom’s character remains something to admire, even when “Project Nursemaid” (as it does sometimes) becomes nothing but people talking.

There Be Spoilers Here

(This is the part where I would be discussing late-game plot developments, but for one, I feel like roadkill and can barely bring myself to type these words; and another is that this novella has a rather amorphous plot structure. I’m afraid you’ll just have to use your imagination for this part and come up with my possible response, assuming you’ve already read this story. I actually considered skipping this review altogether but I figure I at least owe you an impression of what I took away from this story.)

A Step Farther Out

I was surprised by how little I had to say about this one. You can blame it on the illness, but also it did take me four days to get through “Project Nursemaid,” by the end of which I was… tired. There’s some fun with realistic speculation on moon colonization, plus Tom being kind of a unique male protagonist in genre SF at the time, but this is still seventy pages of mostly people talking in rooms. I can get invested in people talking in rooms under the right circumstances, and with enough zeal on the writer’s part, but there are chunks where “Project Nursemaid” spins its wheels more than anything. No doubt I’ll look back on this review and feel bad about it, and give Merril a more fair shot, but be aware this was about the best I could do whilst sick for the better part of a week now. Apologies.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: January 2024

January 1st, 2024
(Cover by Ron Walotsky. F&SF, February 1976.)

Happy New Year, ya screwheads. I said last month I would be taking a year off from covering serials, which means the field has very much opened up for tackling short fiction. The schedule I keep has changed in a sense, except not really; the only difference is that the spots that would normally be held for serial installments are now for short stories. So we’re looking at six or seven short stories a month, which if you ask me is for the best. There are so many short stories across the long history of the biz that I couldn’t stay content with only three or four a month. Think about how much ground there is to cover. Thus we have two novellas and seven short stories for this month, with as many authors being pulled.

There is one other thing I wanna mention, since it will be affecting what I cover for this year. As you know, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is celebrating its 75th anniversary; it had premiered way back in 1949, and was initially called The Magazine of Fantasy. F&SF is such a prestigious outlet, with such a long history and with so much good material gathered in its pages over the decades, that a year-long tribute is in order. The question I then had tumbling around in my head was: How do I go about this? The solution I came to was twofold: first, as with last year, I’ll be covering all short stories in March, July, and October, only this time it will be all fiction from F&SF‘s pages; and the second is that outside of those months I’ll be covering two pieces (a short story and novella, or two of either) from F&SF each month. For example, you may notice we have two novellas from F&SF for January, which I think is a fine idea.

How March, July, and October will work is that I’ll be covering the first thirty years of F&SF across these months, so one decade for each. I’ll be grabbing stories from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s respectively, with the ’70s—falling on October—leaning more towards spooky stuff. F&SF‘s history is so rich that I won’t be able to give an adequate impression of its contents across 75 years, even with the methods I’ve created.

Lastly, in more solemn news, I’ll be reviewing works this month by some notable authors who sadly passed away recently. Michael F. Flynn died in September last year; Michael Bishop died in November; and David Drake died only last month. I’ve tackled Drake before, but while I wasn’t exactly a fan of “Time Safari” I did say I was curious to read more of his work. These are writers who are well-respected in the community and whom sadly I had read very little of when they were alive. If we’re to do right by the dead then we can’t afford to forget them.

For the novellas:
1. “Project Nursemaid” by Judith Merril. From the October 1955 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She became known as an important critic and editor, but she started out as a member of the Futurians. Her story “That Only a Mother” is probably one of the most frequently reprinted classic SF stories, to the point that it’s now a little overexposed. I have to admit that aside from being force-fed “That Only a Mother” across multiple anthologies I’ve not read any of Merril’s other fiction, but I’m about to correct that!
2. “The Samurai and the Willows” by Michael Bishop. From the February 1976 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Placed first in that year’s Locus poll for Best Novella. Speaking of writers I’ve been meaning to read more of, Bishop’s been on my radar for a minute now, but prior to his death I had only read a couple of his short stories. As with some other works of his, Bishop would revise “The Samurai and the Willows” extensively many years after the fact, but we’re reading it as it had originally appeared in F&SF.
For the short stories:
1. “Inertia” by Nancy Kress. From the January 1990 issue of Analog Science Fiction. I’ve covered Kress before, and while it’s always tempting to go for one of her novellas (given her fondness for that mode), I opted for something different—both in length and where the story was published. Kress has been a regular at Asimov’s for years, but “Inertia” is a rare appearance from her in Analog.
2. “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” by Algis Budrys. From the December 1961 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. In some ways diametrically opposed to Judith Merril as a critic, and with as vicious an intellect, Budrys started as one of ’50s SF’s most promising writers. After a decade of heated activity he would turn away from fiction for the most part to focus on criticism and editing.
3. “Apartness” by Vernor Vinge. From the June 1965 issue of New Worlds. Vinge is one of the most important living SF writers, although sadly he retired from writing fiction about a decade ago. Despite being in some ways a prototypical Analog-type writer, Vinge made his debut in the Moorcock-run New Worlds with this story here. He would’ve been all of 19 years old when he wrote “Apartness.”
4. “House of Dreams” by Michael F. Flynn. From the October-November 1997 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner. I actually live one town over from Flynn, but sadly we never got to meet. “House of Dreams” is a rare case of Flynn appearing outside of Analog, and despite the Sturgeon win it has apparently never been reprinted in English, which is weird.
5. “The Valley Was Still” by Manly Wade Wellman. From the August 1939 issue of Weird Tales. Wellman started out during the Gernsback years, and was one of the few SFF authors of that era to maintain his street cred after Campbell took over Astounding—if only because he was more of a fantasy writer. I picked this one for the nerdy reason that it became the basis for a Twilight Zone episode.
6. “The Automatic Rifleman” by David Drake. From the Fall 1980 issue of Destinies. (Yes I’m still counting Destinies and its ilk as magazines.) David Drake was one of the codifying writers of military SF, but his range was a lot wider than that, having also written sword-and-sorcery fantasy and horror, on top of work that’s not so easy to classify. The following story seems to be an exercise in terror.
7. “The Agony of the Leaves” by Evelyn E. Smith. From the July 1954 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction. I only discovered this one as part of a very recent SF anthology edited by a certain colleague, and I’m pretty sure it’s not SF. As with too many female SFF writers in the ’50s, Smith moved away from the short fiction market once new avenues opened up; after 1960 she mostly stuck to novels.
And that’s it.

Won’t you read with me?
The Observatory: Anthology Limited

November 15th, 2022

(Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. First edition cover by George Salter. Published 1946.)

The mission statement of my blog is to explore SFF in the magazines, of which there are many. Ideally original publications, but at some point I’ll cover stories that were first published elsewhere and then reprinted in the magazines. This is not to say I dislike the other major avenue for finding short fiction, the anthology; after all, I would not have discovered so much short fiction in the first place if not for anthologies, and I have to admit I have a lot of those on my shelves. For every unnecessary reprint of Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” there are over a dozen short stories and novellas I now love that I probably would not have found otherwise. The thing, though, is that by focusing on magazines I feel I’ve created both a filter and unlocked a door to a unfathomably huge world of mostly uncovered fiction, non-fiction, letter columns…

There’s only so much you can do with anthologies.

Not a criticism of anthology editors! Some of the best editors in the field have mostly or solely devoted their time to book publishing; when the Hugo for Best Professional Magazine was replaced by the Hugo for Best Professional Editor, it was to accommodate what was then an uptick in original anthologies, as well as to credit specific people whose achievements were not restricted to magazines. People like Damon Knight, Judy-Lynn del Rey, and Terry Carr would have been shut out from Hugo recognition with the previous category, but now they had a chance; that it took more than a decade for someone in book publishing to win Best Professional Editor is beside the point. My point is that this is not a problem of talent, but simply of the nature of anthologies, of their physical limitations and especially of the grim realities of the publishing world.

Let’s retrace our steps a bit. What is the purpose of an anthology? Obviously the answer will be different depending on whether it’s a reprint or original anthology, and even reprint anthologies (which are so often grouped together as fodder, unjustifiably) have different goals in mind. A reprint anthology might seek to cover a certain span of time or a certain demographic of authors; there are several reprints dedicated to female SFF authors at this point and we still have much work to do. The problem is that it’s never enough. I read a short story recently, “The Piece Thing” by Carol Emshwiller; it’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a fine read, and it strikes me as being worthy of being reprinted in at least a couple SF-horror anthologies. Not so. Despite being first published in 1956, it has since been anthologized a grand total of once, in Rediscovery 2: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957), which came out… this year. How many more are like it?

Editors of reprint anthologies are allowed to be much pickier than magazine editors while also having a bigger pool to work with (keep in mind that magazines have to deal with a lot already), and as such their standards are inherently different. If a story which originally appeared in some obscure magazine in the ’50s was anthologized even once then presumably the editor of said anthology thought it worthy enough to not be stranded in a volume quite literally made of pulp paper which was not built to last and which has been out of circulation for many years. Sure, the issue that “The Piece Thing” first appeared in (the May 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly, for those wondering) can now be read online, but prior to digital archiving there was literally only one way to find this story for decades. Again, how many stories are in this situation? How many “worthy” stories have been trapped in purgatory because anthology editors have overlooked them or simply not been able to know about them in the first place?

(Cover by Ed Emshwiller. Science Fiction Quarterly, May 1956.)

Again, this is not really the fault of editors. Well, maybe some of it is. There were quite a few female authors active in the ’40s and especially the ’50s, but you wouldn’t know that from contemporary reprint anthologies; even Judith Merril’s annual best-of anthologies tended to only have one or two stories by women per volume. Maybe that’s unfair, though. Maybe it really has to do more with the editor’s tastes than with their prejudices, not that the two don’t overlap at all. You can’t make an editor include a more diverse set of authors, and anyway I don’t think setting quotas is very healthy. Still, it’s telling that there have been several anthologies over the decades which have sought to “rediscover” magazine SFF by women, as if to compensate for the failings of earlier anthologies. It’s as if editors are only human and that they’re liable to overlook fiction which is very much deversing of preservation.

Because that’s what reprints are always ultimately about: preservation. Why anthologize in the first place? Why were fancy hardcover anthologies like Adventures in Time and Space and Groff Conklin’s A Treasury of Science Fiction big deals when they surfaced in the ’40s? Because for basically all of the stories included in those anthologies, it would’ve been the first time they met a reader’s eyes outside of the flimsy and brittle pages of a magazine; with book reprints there was hope that these stories could be discovered by future generations. Consider that Lovecraft’s legacy has been allowed to not only persist but thrive for two reasons: he was a compulsive letter writer who formed connections with a lot of people, a few of whom went on to form publishing houses (namely August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, who founded Arhham House), and also because said publishers made his work available in book form.

Lovecraft died poor and in obscurity, but if his work stayed in the magazines like virtually all of it was at the time of his death, he might now be yet another shrouded figure waiting to be rediscovered.

(Beyond the Wall of Sleep, editor uncredited. Cover by Clark Ashton Smith and E. Burt Trimpey. Published 1943.)

Obviously there’s a lot of crap in the magazines that’s not worth actively preserving; Sturgeon’s Law will not be defied. But I feel like even with the good stuff, there’s so much of it that anthologies are simply unable to cover everything. Take one of the greatest SFF anthologies of all time for instance, Adventures in Time and Space: this is a thick fucking book (about a thousand pages), and it has an extra advantage by covering only a relatively narrow range of material, with pieces published between 1932 and 1945. It also does something unusual for a fiction anthology, in that on top of the fiction it also reprints two speculative articles, which other reprint anthologies simply don’t do for some reason. Even with all these parameters, the 33 stories collected only emcompass a tiny fraction of the good stuff from that period, and it doesn’t help that editors Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas give some authors multiple entries, which dilutes the diversity of voices. If you’re looking for a survey of where SFF was at in the ’30s and first half of the ’40s then a volume like Adventures in Time and Space will be a good starting point, but then you must dig deeper after that.

Keep in mind that most anthologies aren’t as long as Adventures in Time and Space; most are half that length, or even shorter. How many times have you started a anthology and the editor’s introduction goes something like this: “If I could edit a hypothetical hyper-dimensional book that never ran of space so that I could fit all the stories I wanted, I would, but unfortunately we don’t live in that reality so I can’t.” The horrors of picking favorites indeed. Imagine being a Gardner Dozois or a Terry Carr where you’re such a voracious reader, and you have hundreds of magazine issues and hundreds upon hundreds (vast oceans!) of stories at your disposal, and you can only pick so many. Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction series was huge, both in its number of installments and the thickness of each book, and yet he still felt it necessary to list stories that he would recommend that unfortunately he could not include properly. These recommendation lists were always quite long, and while these stories weren’t always taken from magazines, that tended to br the case more often than not.

Best-of anthologies try valiantly to sum up “the good stuff” from a given year, and we seem to be living in a golden age of best-of anthologies as we have several of them, all by capable editors. However, even if you were to combine the annual best-ofs by Neil Clarke, Jonathan Strahan, and Rich Horton (we’re looking at a good 1,500 pages or more, by the way) for a given year, you still could not even hope to cover everything. SFF is vast and it’s only gotten vaster as we’ve entered a new golden age for magazine SFF, what with magazines like Lightspeed and Uncanny Magazine voyaging beyond mere page count and entering that fourth dimension: digitalization. I can’t even say for sure how many pages it would take to print all the good SFF in 2022 because most of the magazines currently running publish exclusively online and in ebooks. The sheer amount can drive one mad; it feels like a variation on Borges’s library of Babel.

(The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2020, edited by Rich Horton. Cover by Argus.)

What I’m trying to say is that I find magazines ultimately more liberating. Sure, an issue of a magazine will be smaller and contain fewer stories than the average anthology, but there’s that flavor unique to magazines, and there’s always that feeling of digging for buried treasure. If a story shows up in a reprint anthology then it’s not up to you to rediscover it, as someone already did that job for you. Ah, but if you were to find some obscure story from six decades ago that has maybe been reprinted once in all that time while in the middle of digging through an equally obscure magazine issue, then it really feels like discovery! And the best part is that it doesn’t stop there. You’re not just leafing through an anthology—a selection of stories hand-picked by someone who had narrowed a pile down to what they feel are the best of the best—you’re a voyager, on a five-mission mission to explore strange new worlds. With the magazines you’re bound to hear voices you’ve never heard before and see places you’ve never seen before.

When I started this blog I wasn’t sure if I was ready to plumb the depths of magazine SFF, and ironically, as I’ve since only come to find just how deep those depths are, I’ve only become more excited about reaching for those depths. I turn over a rock and I find gold in the mud. Anthologies are a great supplement to magazines, but they’re not a substitute, for there’s always more to be uncovered, and the magazine, when taken collectively, is named Möbius.

Tag: judith merril

Novella Review: “Project Nursemaid” by Judith Merril

Things Beyond: January 2024

The Observatory: Anthology Limited