“The Public Hating” by Steve Allen is story #33 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Public Hating” was first published in Bluebook (January 1955). It was reprinted in Judith Merril’s first annual anthology, S-F: The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy.

Again, we have a non-SF writer writing an excellent work of science fiction. I was also surprised that “The Public Hating” was so well-written and succinct. I never thought of Steve Allen as a writer. I know he was the creator and first host of The Tonight Show back in 1953. I’ve seen film clips of Steve Allen for years but never really knew who he was. I read his Wikipedia entry and was amazed. Besides all the television shows he created, he composed more than 8,500 songs and published more than 50 books. The guy was a whirlwind of productivity. The Wikipedia piece makes me want to watch his old TV shows. Steve Allen’s shows from the 1950s set up much of what we came to watch later.

The Bluebook intro says “The Public Hating” is Steve Allen’s first short story. Fiction Mag Index lists only a handful of short stories by Allen but does list “The Public Hating” first. Wikipedia shows that most of his books were nonfiction, and fiction writing wasn’t common with Allen.

My guess is because Steve Allen was such a great comedian and a great writer of comic material that he was also a great mimic. “The Public Hating” reads very much like something Ray Bradbury would have written. Allen was well-known for his political views, a famous liberal, and a skeptic, so writing a short story about public hating just after many of the famous HUAC hearings is obvious.

“The Public Hating” is typical science fiction for the 1950s, something that could have been published in Galaxy or F&SF. The structure of the story is dramatic but with a certain amount of infodumping. Like much science fiction of that time, it depends on explaining a made-up scientific concept — that groups of people can project an extrasensory force. People are executed in stadiums by having large crowds think about the exact punishment. Allen imagines in 1955 that in a future set in 1978 that large crowds can focus their hate.

I read “The Public Hating” thinking it was still a story of our times. It strangely resonates with a Carl Sagan quote I read today, from The Demon-Haunted World.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

I believe “The Public Hating” is more than satire. I believe it was a warning. That Allen like Sagan feared the world was reverting backward into the superstitious times of the Inquisition. I believe what the Trump years have taught us is that we’re always been there.

James Wallace Harris, 7/20/23