“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester is story #15 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 Men Who Murdered Mohammed” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (October 1958).

Alfred Bester is a weird writer. He doesn’t like to just tell a plain story but works out various weird ways to tell stories cleverly. Bester is best known for writing The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, but when the name Alfred Bester comes up, I think of his short story “Fondly Fahrenheit.” That’s Bester’s most famous science fiction short story according to our data. “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” comes in second with the same data. I wish Hartwell had used “Fondly Fahrenheit” instead of “The Man Who Murdered Mohammed” because Bester gave us a real story with “Fondly Fahrenheit,” even though it’s very weird and tricky to read too.

For me, “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” comes across like “5,271,009,” my second favorite Bester short story, in that he’s making fun of science fiction. This might be heretical to the science fiction faithful, but I feel Bester looked down on us science fiction readers. “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” is making fun of time travel stories, while poking the writing of science fiction in the ribs, and giving us a wink-wink. I thought that was also true with “5,271,009” – see my review of that story.

Now, I don’t mind Bester looking down on us. He’s obviously far smarter than me, and our genre does shovel out a lot of silly crap worthy of satire. I’ve taken a graduate course on humor in literature and humor often bites the hand that feeds it.

“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” is an obvious farce. It’s about a wildly brilliant mad scientist, Henry Hassel, professor of Applied Compulsion at Unknown University. Hassel comes home one day and discovers his red-headed wife in the arms of another man. Instead of yelling, “What the fuck is going on here,” Henry dashes to his lab, invents a time machine, and goes back in time to kill one of his wife’s grandfathers. But upon returning to the scene of the tryst, his red-headed spouse is still smooching another. So Henry goes back and kills one of his wife’s grandmothers. That doesn’t work either. Henry decides he must wipe out a significant event in time to affect the present and goes on a killing spree blasting more and more famous people with his .45 — but with no success. Eventually, Henry meets another time traveler who also claims to have murdered Mohammed. Upon reflection, this leads to new theories about the nature of time and travel within.

It’s a rather stupid theory about time travel that Bester assumes will amuse science fiction readers because it’s clever — and unique. “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” and “5,271,000” are outright farces. They are fun enough, but they aren’t engaging stories like “Fondly Fahrenheit.” Now, don’t get me wrong, “Fondly Fahrenheit” is batshit crazy — but it has a compelling plot and characters with decent fictional conflicts to solve. Now, that I think about it, I’m sure Bester wrote “Fondly Fahrenheit” at our expense too – thinking science fiction readers will believe anything. And I did with “Fondly Fahrenheit.”

That’s the difference between “Fondly Fahrenheit” and “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” — while reading “Fondly Fahrenheit” I forget I’m being told a story, I suspended my disbelief, and just get into the story. With “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” I just read along admiring Bester’s cleverness, never forgetting I’m reading a story, especially a story by a man trying to wow us with his ability to be witty.

A lot of humor fiction is absurd. A lot of literary science fiction is intentionally absurd to be clever. I don’t like that. If I’m reading a story and all I notice is cleverness then I never forget myself and drop into the story. Novels like The Confederacy of Dunces, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or Mindswap are over-the-top absurd. But I stop looking for how the magician did their tricks and just let myself be fooled. That’s fun.

I never stopped watching Bester do his tricks in “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed.” Oh, it’s still a good story, but its main virtue is cleverness. Unfortunately, cleverness alone is never enough for me, no matter how clever the story gets.

To make my point, here are the first two pages of the story:

Writing the above about “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” clarifies to myself, the kind of story I want to read. I’ve been starting a lot of novels lately that I give up on quickly. Lately, I’ve been hungry to get into a good novel, but I keep being frustrated by not finding one. Maybe I know a little more about how to spot one I will like.

I’m not saying the tried and true methods of fiction are the only way to tell a story, but for me, I need them. I guess I shouldn’t say Hartwell shouldn’t have included “The Man Who Murdered Mohammed” in The World Treasury of Science Fiction — it’s his anthology, but it does disappoint me. “Fondly Fahrenheit” is Bester’s story to remember. It’s his masterpiece.

James Wallace Harris, 6/7/23