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.