F&SF, Dec 58: A Budrys, A Boucher, & F Leiber

Mel Hunter

Let's read three stories from the December 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, an issue edited by Robert P. Mills.  This ish has a fun damsel-in-distress cover by Emsh, Anthony Boucher's mixed review of Theodore Sturgeon's novel The Cosmic Rape and his enthusiastic praise for both Sturgeon's collection A Touch of Strange and for a publication edited by Karen Anderson that celebrates the recently dead Henry Kuttner, Henry Kuttner: A Memorial Symposium.  (In January of this year I wrote about A Touch of Strange myself across three blog posts, one, two, three.)  On the back cover is an ad for a print of a painting by Mel Hunter three feet wide depicting a lunar crater--just send 75 cents to Geek Systems, Inc. in New York City.

Lots of valuable material, but our main interest is the fiction, so on to stories by Algis Budrys, Boucher, and Fritz Leiber.  I almost read the Cornell Woolrich contribution, but then realized it is not a story but a play, and bailed.  

"The Eye and the Lightning" by Algis Budrys (1958)

It kind of looks like "The Eye and the Lightning" was a flash in the pan, promoted on the cover of this issue of F&SF but never reprinted in a book, just in a French magazine and a British magazine.

"The Eye and the Lightning" is a pretty confusing and somewhat convoluted story, all the basic elements of which strain the reader's credulity, and perhaps must be interpreted as merely metaphorical or allegorical; it is easy to see why it was not popular.

It is the bizarre super-individualistic, super-suspicious future!  Everybody lives alone in an underground bunker he builds for himself, the location of which he keeps hidden.  Everybody has a homemade high tech "rig" that consists of a scanner, a teleporter, and a burner.  The rig can home in on and provide a televised view of places and people it is keyed to--you key your scanner to a location by taking a bit of the soil of the place and putting it in the scanner, or key it to a person by securing a lock of his hair or a fragment of his clothes or whatever.  I guess this is like the way you get a bloodhound on the trail by letting it sniff a guy's clothes or how you make a voodoo doll using a lock of your enemy's hair or his fingernail paring.  Once the scanner is keyed to a location you can teleport to that place as well as observe it, and teleport back home from that spot.  And once your rig is keyed to a person you can watch that person and kill him with the burner.  

People need to go out and buy stuff, like replacement parts for their scanner rigs, so they regularly teleport to towns to buy and sell.  In town, everybody wears elaborate disguises--concealing masks, padded suits meant to obscure your body weight and shape, and so forth, and people even put on fake voices--I guess it is implied that the scanners can home in on the timbre of a voice and even your personality.

Such is the background.  As for the main character, we meet a guy who, in this paranoid world in which most people spend every waking moment working on their rigs and disguises to ensure their security, is remarkably chill, spending his time making castles out of playing cards and carving elaborate marionettes and stage sets for them.  Again and again Budrys tells us this guy doesn't understand why all other people are so scared and suspicious and waste their time spying on others and building defenses against others.  We are also privy to his metaphorical dreams.

As for the plot, our protagonist teleports out to buy more parts for his rig, even though he has the bare minimum of a rig.  He is confronted by angry mobs and suspicious individuals--the already crazy world is getting crazier because of rumors that somebody has developed an even more advanced rig, one that can detect when another rig is watching you.  Our guy manages to escape various episodes of danger by using different types of grenades and teleporting.  In the course of the day's adventures he develops relationships with a young male electronics expert and an attractive young woman and the three end up in the protagonist's bunker.  The three are very suspicious of each other, and the woman tries to use her sexual attractiveness to get in good with one and then the other of the men, as she thinks one of them has one of the new advanced rigs and is thus able to protect her.  At least I think that is what is going on.

In the end it turns out that both of the male characters have innovative rigs, but the protagonist's is by far the better.  Our twist ending is that the chill protagonist has a split personality--he can be chill because his other personality is the world's top electronics expert and has devised the best rig in the world, even though his chill personality thinks it is the lamest rig in the world.  The story ends on a happy note--our hero is going to spread the innovations of his advanced rig around the world, with the result that everybody will meet on a plane of equality and people will be less suspicious and build friendships and communities again.  Again, that is what I think is what is going on, though I am not quite sure.  As the world gets safer, our hero can spend less time as his defensive personality and more time as his chill personality until his defensive personality eventually expires.

I had trouble wrapping my head around how the rigs work and why people were acting the way they were and how such a society could develop and maintain itself; the hard science, sociology and psychology of "The Eye and the Lightning" seem to have been arbitrarily and unconvincingly thrown  together by Budrys merely to allow him to make some kind of metaphorical point.  What might that point be?  That we all desire friends and love and recognize that a community can accomplish things that isolated individuals cannot, but at the same time we all fear others because other people can break our hearts if we open them and physically kill us if we let our guard down in proximity to them?  I also am considering if this story is influenced by sad realities made obvious by World War and Cold War conditions--liberal polities like the United States that value freedom and the rule of law may have to develop split personalities to survive in the same world as such monstrous polities as those that made up the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis and the Warsaw Pact, may need a second personality devoted to defense and able to engage in ruthless behavior, a second personality that the primary, liberal, personality barely even knows about.  If we extend that metaphor, is Budrys suggesting that if the United States develops a super defense we should share it with our rivals?  Are the conventional rigs like nuclear missiles and the new rigs like an anti-missile system?  Or maybe the rigs are like a conventional army and the advanced rigs are like nuclear weapons, which put competitors on an equal footing?

This story is not entertaining enough, and its philosophy not lucid enough, for me to endorse, but it isn't terrible, so maybe people who like a puzzle will enjoy it?  I'll call it acceptable.

Oh la la!

"The Pink Caterpillar" by Anthony Boucher (1945)

This story first appeared in an issue of the magazine Adventure and was reprinted by Donald Wollheim in the seventeenth issue of Avon Fantasy Reader in 1951.  It would go on to be included in Boucher collections and the David Alexander anthology Tales for the Rainy Night.

Like Budrys' story, Boucher's "The Pink Caterpillar" is sort of convoluted and has a central gimmick that doesn't make sense, or at least one which I can't understand.  The tale takes the form of a detective story, and is apparently one of a series of novels and stories starring a red-headed Irish-American gumshoe who here in "The Pink Caterpillar" is called Fergus O'Brien but who in other tales apparently bears the name "Fergus O'Breen."

Note that I am reading this 1958 version of the story, which is different in at least one way from the 1945 version--in the '45 version, on the first page, Hitler is mentioned in passing, and, in the '58 version, Khrushchev's name has been substituted for Der Fuhrer's.

O'Brien is hanging around with his fellow servicemen.  Our narrator is some other Navy man, but O'Brien's dialogue takes up most of the text of the story.  The topic of native witch doctors comes up, in particular their power to snatch one item from 100 years in the future and bring it to the present.  O'Brien contributes a story that illustrates the use of this power, a case he dealt with in Mexico before he joined the Navy when he was a detective working for an insurance company.

O'Brien was sent to Mexico by the insurance company to investigate the death of a gringo whose sister sought the insurance money; the company was suspicious because some evidence had arisen that the deceased was referred to by Mexicans with the title of "Dr." even though he was not in fact a doctor.  O'Brien describes all kinds of clues and interviews with people he conducted, giving his comrades (and I guess readers) a chance to solve the case themselves.  In the end the story's outlandish and macabre gimmick is revealed to us.  

The gringo had an enemy.  Gringo got a witch doctor to summon from 100 years in the future the skeleton of the enemy.  Somehow, this meant that the enemy no longer existed in this time, I guess because two of any one item cannot exist in the same time.  Should the skeleton be destroyed, the enemy would reappear.  So, the gringo took care to preserve the skeleton.  (He convinced the Mexicans he lived among that he was a doctor to explain why he had a skeleton mounted in his house.)  This guy was not as careful about his skeleton as I would have been, for example, letting the cleaning woman near enough to the skeleton that she knocked one of its fingers off.  (My wife would like to hire some stranger to come into our house to clean, but I flatly refuse, positive such a person would break one of the Rookwood vases or knock over one of the Art Deco statues.)  The enemy's finger, fully fleshed, thus appeared and crawled around, menacing the gringo.  (This is the pink caterpillar of the title.)  You'd think after this mishap that the gringo would really take care of this skeleton, but somehow he permitted some high-spirited young American engineers working for the local mining company to steal the skeleton on Halloween and throw the skeleton on a bonfire.  As a result, the enemy reappeared in toto  and came after the gringo, who died of a heart attack upon seeing his foe.

"The Pink Caterpillar" moves along at a decent clip and the various horror images in the story are good, but Boucher has to come up with so many absurd and contrived situations to provide a basis for those images that the story's plot is a ridiculous mess.  And I'm not a fan of stories that consist of "Here's a bunch of clues, reader, try to figure this out--ha ha, the answer is something totally impossible that doesn't make sense, you lose."  I guess I'm issuing another rueful "acceptable " grade. 

"Little Old Miss Macbeth" by Fritz Leiber (1958)

Mills, in his introduction to "Little Old Miss Macbeth," which he calls "a nocturne," promotes Leiber's earlier F&SF contributions "The Big Trek" (which I feel like I've read, but I guess that was before I started this blog) and "A Deskful of Girls" (which I read in 2024), and suggests Leiber is a "vividly visual" writer and all three of these stories have "distinctively evoked" and unforgettable images.  Well, let's see.

Actually, images are all that "Little Old Miss Macbeth" has going for it--besides verbose descriptions of surreal images, all we get are a lame joke and a lame surprise ending.  An old woman gets out of bed, sleep walks through a dark deserted city full of strange (but harmless) mutants and broken windows, to some other building where she silences a leaky faucet, then walks back home.  The surprise ending is the revelation that, after some kind of apocalyptic war, there are so few people alive that each person can have an entire ruined city to him- or herself.  

Gotta give this waste of time a thumbs down.  SF pros seem to love this sterile literary exercise, however.  (At MPorcius Fiction Log, we go against the grain!)  Rod Serling chose it for Rod Serling's Other Worlds, which bears the tag line "Fourteen amazing tales of galactic terror and suspense," even though "Little Old Miss Macbeth" features no terror or suspense.  It also appears in Marvin Kaye's Witches and Warlocks: Tales of Black Magic Old and New even though it is not about black magic and Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg's 100 Twisted Little Tales of Torment even though it is not about torment.  You can perhaps find "Little Old Miss Macbeth" most readily in the oft-reprinted The Best of Fritz Leiber, even though...well, you get the picture.

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Ouch, three stories I cannot recommend.  Leiber's is probably the most successful in terms of the author achieving his goals--it has no blunders, and I am rejecting it because I am not an admirer of the goals Leiber set himself with the story.  I can get on board with what Budrys and Boucher are trying to do with their stories, but I think they pursue their goals in an unsatisfactory fashion, their plots convoluted and their science-fictional and supernatural devices contrived and unconvincing.  

Too bad!

Robert Bloch: "The Chaney Legacy," "The Yougoslaves," and "Pranks"

In the last thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, we read a story by Avram Davidson that appeared in a 1986 issue of Night Cry, the horror magazine full of J. K. Potter illustrations put out by the people who produced the Twilight Zone magazine.  That same issue printed a story by Robert Bloch, so let's read it, and two other stories published by the creator of Norman Bates in that year.

"The Chaney Legacy"

Bloch's career is all wrapped up in Hollywood, even if he often portrays Hollywood as a den of iniquity and American popular culture in general as deplorable.  "The Chaney Legacy" is set in Tinseltown, and in the story Bloch unleashes a barrage of silent era movie biz trivia at us, as well as demonstrating his familiarity with Los Angeles geography.  Some of this material is kind of interesting, and the rest is not annoying, so it doesn't hamper the plot and atmosphere and I can moderately recommend "The Chaney Legacy" as a conventional and perhaps obvious but competently put together horror story.

Dale is fascinated by cinema, obsessed, even.  He teaches a film history course at a college and aspires to write books on the movies of early Hollywood.  And when he has the opportunity to rent an ugly little house purportedly once occupied by silent film legend Lon Chaney (father of the today more famous Lon Chaney, Jr.) he jumps at the chance, even though his girlfriend, Debbie the radio newscaster, dumps him rather than move into the remote and uncomfortable "dump."

The Latina Dale hires to clean the Chaney house discovers an old box and Dale's mind is blown when he realizes it is Lon Chaney's make up kit!  Dale sees strange faces looking back at him from the mirror on the inside lid of the kit, and, to make a long story short, Dale runs a terrible risk and learns the secret of how Chaney and other horror greats were able to so effectively portray characters physically and psychologically deformed.  You see, guys like Chaney, Peter Lorre and Bela Lugosi would conceive the monstrous personas upon which they built their careers and then project those psychic constructions into a magical mirror.  Then, when it can time to perform on stage or screen, they could download the required persona from the mirror back into their own brains.  Dale has made an amazing discovery, but is also in horrible danger--the monsters Chaney created (and Bloch offers a long list of them, from the one-eyed whoremaster of The Road to Mandalay to the armless knife thrower of The Unknown) are still alive in the mirror and they seek another chance to inhabit a human body and the world beyond the make up kit and try to take over Dale.

I enjoyed it.  After its debut in Night Cry, "The Chaney Legacy" was included in the 1989 Bloch collection Fear and Trembling (along with our next story, "The Yougoslaves,") and a bunch of anthologies, among them and Marvin Kaye's Witches and Warlocks and John Betancourt's New Masterpieces of Horror, on the cover of which Bloch gets top billing, above even Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and Joyce Carol Oates.  

(I'll note here that I am reading both "The Chaney Legacy" and "The Yougoslaves" in scans of the issues of Night Cry in which they debuted.)

"The Yougoslaves"

Another story that first saw print in Night Cry and is boldly trumpeted on the cover.  "The Yougoslaves," "a novelette" that you should feel free to call "The Yougo-Enslaved Persons" if you must, seems to have been a hit; Stephen Jones, Martin H. Greenberg and Karl Edward Wagner all included it in anthologies over the next ten years. 

Remember in 2015 when we read Bloch's 1989 novel Lori and I told you one of its themes was of an America in decline?  Well, it's not only the U S of A that is in decline in Bloch's eyes--France is also going down the tubes!  At least that is what our narrator thinks, based on his current visit to Paris.  Things get still worse when a pack of swarthy kids younger than ten years old swarm him and pick his pocket.  The gendarmes tell our narrator that his assailants were "gypsies" (whom you should feel free to call "the Roma" if you must) and our hero learns from the clerk at his hotel that in recent years these little Eastern-European scamps have, apparently trained and directed by organized crime, become a real scourge on the streets of the City of Light, one which the police are unable--or is it unwilling?--to mitigate.  

Our guy doesn't care about money, but there is something in his wallet he desperately needs back.  So he undertakes a solo mission to secure this unspecified bit of property, capturing one of the little gypsies and using violence to get the address of yougoslave HQ out of him.  The thief offers our narrator drugs, little girls, even his own nine-year-old body (gross!) in an effort to dissuade his captor from contacting "Le Boss" and revealing his own failure, to no avail--our guy is determined to get the contents of his wallet back.

Le Boss's lair is a disused sewer lit by candles; Le Boss is a huge fatso with "fingers thick as sausages."  Le Boss summons his pack of kids away from their playtime raping a five-year-old girl (yikes!) to kill the narrator, but then comes our twist--the narrator is a vampire and summons his own pack--of voracious rats!--to dispose of the kids.  Le Boss's revolver has little effect on the narrator, and soon our protagonist is feasting on the obese criminal mastermind.  Oh yeah, the thing the vampire sought from his wallet was the key to his tomb.  

A pretty good adventure/horror story; for a long time I figured Le Boss and/or the kids were vampires--after all, Bloch tells us one of the kids has old eyes and that Le Boss is pale--not the narrator.  The theme of disgusting sex involving children and the horrible deaths suffered by all the children in the story gives "The Yougoslaves" an exploitative edge.

"Pranks" 

"Pranks" debuted in Alan Ryan's anthology Halloween Horrors.  "Pranks" seems to have had a fraught publication history; according to isfdb, at least one edition of Halloween Horrors was heavily edited by some freelancer without authorization from the publisher and then destroyed, and when "Pranks" appeared in Chills and Thrills: The Ultimate Anthology of the Mystical, Magical, Eerie and Uncanny some kind of error left the last two lines of the story missing.  Well, don't worry kids, I am reading "Pranks" in a recent electronic edition of the 1987 Bloch collection Midnight Pleasures.

Instead of introducing us to a character and then relating to us his or her adventure or series of challenges or whatever, "Pranks" is one of those stories which consists of a series of scenes or vignettes each starring a different group of characters.  I find this kind of thing irritating.

The little vignettes that make up "Pranks" take place on the evening of Halloween and Bloch makes sure to tell us what time it is in each scene.  First we've got a couple with no children who make a big deal of the holiday, putting on elaborate costumes and relishing a chance to offer candy to the kids who come to the door.  Then we have a married couple with two kids; Dad is cranky and hates Halloween and complains that Mom spent too much on the kids' outfits.  Then a married couple with twins--they send the little girls off to trick or treat and then jump into bed to have sex, which they rarely do because the twins are always around.  Then we've got a priest who is visiting a couple whose kids are out trick-or-treating--the priest implies that Halloween is serious business, that it is a day on which Satan's power waxes and maybe his parishioners shouldn't have sent their kids out alone.  Then a couple who return home from a party to find their lax babysitter let their little boy leave the house like an hour ago and the boy has not yet returned.  

The finale is a one-two punch.  All the kids in the story, and others besides to a total of thirteen, have vanished, and we readers learn they were seized and killed by the couple in the first vignette when they came to collect their candy; the Halloween-loving couple are apparently cannibals and are going to eat the kids.  (Trick-or-treaters whose parents accompanied them were allowed to leave the house of death unmolested.)  The second punch is that, after midnight, the spot where the cannibals' house was standing has reverted to a vacant lot--I guess the killers are ghosts or demons or whatever whose house appears only on Halloween, in a different town each year.

"Pranks" is more of an idea than an actual story, and I'm not crazy about its apparent message--that you should be a helicopter parent.  It is short, so doesn't have enough time to really get on your nerves, but I was certainly glad when I got to the end of it.  We'll be nice and call it barely acceptable.

1987 and 1991 editions of Midnight Pleasures

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"Pranks" is bordering on being a waste of time, but "The Chaney Legacy" and "The Yougoslaves" are entertaining horror stories, the Hollywood story a pretty traditional one buoyed by references to largely forgotten movies and the Paris one energized by graphic violence, twisted sexual elements and a pretty good twist ending.  (Are the sex elements and the killing of children in "The Yougoslaves" and "Pranks" Bloch's response to the splatterpunk movement?)  Bloch also keeps the social commentary and the jokes to a manageable level in the two Night Cry stories, which is welcome.

We'll probably get around to reading all the stories in Fear and Trembling and Midnight Pleasures some day, but it will be stories by other authors culled from old magazines when next we convene here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Avram Davidson: "The Patient Cup," "Body Man" and "The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon"

At a West Virginia antique mall I recently picked up for one dollar an issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, purportedly "The World's Leading Mystery Magazine."  Apparently this thing is still a going concern!  The issue I purchased is the July 1986 number, and I bought it because it contains "The Patient Cup," a story by Avram Davidson that, according to the Avram Davidson Website, has never been published elsewhere!  Let's check out this story and two other stories Davidson published in magazines in 1986, "Body Man" and "The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon."

"The Patient Cup"

Back in March we read a story by Davidson that suggested that the government and other establishment institutions of Mexico are less than exemplary.  "The Patient Cup" similarly takes a swipe at our neighbors to the south.  You see, a gringo gigolo living down there during the postwar era has found that relieving American and European women he has seduced of their moolah sometimes necessitates his sending them to an early grave, and his customary method of disposing of these wealthy ladies has been to poison them with arsenic.  Conveniently for our lethal Lothario, the Mexican police don't bother to test ex-pats who keel over for arsenic poisoning, instead just marking the cause of death down as "dysentery" or "heart failure" or some such thing for which nobody can be blamed.

"The Patient Cup" is written in a humorous style, with the murderous gigolo as the protagonist, and the reader has to wonder if we are perhaps meant to like the killer.  The plot revolves around the seduction and murder of a poor confused woman and the complication that arises after her burial under the cellar of a house--the killer can't find the money that recently fell into his victim's hands!  Oops!  Later it comes to his attention that the woman's wealth, converted into jewels, must be on her body.  Luckily, the house is owned by a single woman and the gigolo figures he need only seduce her to get to the corpse and the treasure.  He manages to insinuate himself into her household but he can't find the time alone to dig up that body--this chick won't leave him alone!  So he starts poisoning her, but things don't work out for him and he ends up doing hard labor in the hot sun at a prison camp--Davidson has stressed throughout the story that the gigolo hates the sun and hates manual labor.  The story's second punchline is that the second woman wasn't felled by the arsenic because her Mexican doctor has been giving her arsenic as a medicine for years and she has built up a tolerance for it.

A slight but entertaining story that I can mildly recommend, the style being smooth and pleasant and the plot and characters sort of fun and Davidson getting a lot of mileage out of the period and setting.

"Body Man"

This story debuted in Asimov's and was reprinted in the 1993 anthology of humor stories Isaac Asimov's SF-Lite, so I guess we have another meant-to-be-funny story on our hands.     

"Body Man" is very short, a joke story about Jewish small businessmen and craftsmen and their relationships with customers and with women.  The manner of speech of all the characters certainly reminds you of Jewish-American comedians and actors you've seen on TV or heard on the radio.  The story works, but it is slight.

It is the future, and, it seems, people of means can put on new bodies; these bodies are made by salt-of-the-earth men who own small shops--I guess we are supposed to be reminded of tailors.  A customer complains to the shop owner who is our protagonist that his new body has warts when he specifically requested no warts.  The shop owner upbraids the "dumb kid assistant" who made up that body, and this kid insists he is an artist and he puts the warts on where they belong artistically.  The kid also complains about his girlfriend, who, apparently, thinks the kid only likes her for her body.  The punchline of the story comes when the girlfriend appears at the shop boiling mad--it is implied that the young "artist" put unwanted warts (in some out of view place) on the (outwardly flawless) body she is currently inhabiting.

Acceptable.

"Body Man" also appeared in 1987 in the Croat magazine Sirius.  I wonder how they translated the characteristically Jewish-American flavor of the dialogue; maybe Yugoslavian Jews had distinctive mannerisms and turns of phrase?

"The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon"

All three of today's stories have a strong foundation in geography and/or ethnicity.  We've had Mexicans dealing with Anglos who live in Mexico.  We just did the Jewish tailor bit.  And now we've got a 19th-century Chinese laundry guy living far from his hometown, where he was some kind of fighting man, in a European quarter among white people, whom he considers savages with ugly blue eyes who fail to bind women's feet like civilized people do.  This story doesn't exactly portray Chinese people in the best possible light.

The laundry guy had a daughter, called by the whites Lily, who helped him in the shop by folding the shirts.  Lily weekly attended Sunday school at a Christian church, and when she got sick one of the white teachers started coming over to the shop to minister to Lily and get her a white doctor and so forth.  This generosity is to no avail; Lily died.

The story ends with the laundry man, driven insane by grief and the heat or maybe having died of fever himself and become some kind of avenging ghost, creeping into the house where the white teacher lives--his mission, to assassinate the teacher's evil stepmother who is trying to manipulate the teacher's aged father into disinheriting the teacher and leaving her in penury in a foreign land.  [UPDATE October 21, 2025: The teacher is not in fact the one in a foreign land; a commentor below explains where the story takes place--hey, I was only 8,000 miles off--and who the white people in the story are.]

(Didn't we just have an evil stepmother only yesterday?)

Like the other two stories we are talking about today, "The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon" feels minor but it is well put together.  I guess marginally good.

"The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon" has been reprinted in Davidson collections.

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These three stories are entertaining, more for their milieus and characters than their plots; Davidson seems to expend more energy on setting and personality than what the characters actually do.  "Body Man" is the least impressive, its setting being sort of familiar and its plot the slightest, and "The Patient Cup" probably my favorite, it having the most fully realized plot in which the fates of the characters are most closely aligned with their actions and personalities.  I have a simple and conventional mind that likes to see all the puzzle pieces smoothly and securely fit into place and finds untidy loose ends and red herrings irritating.

Next time, more stories from the year I had my fifteenth birthday--1986!

Theodore Sturgeon: "Bright Segment," "Shadow, Shadow on the Wall," and "Twink"

Let's read three more stories from my now worn copy of 1955's Caviar, a collection of stories by Theodore Sturgeon with an abstract Richard Powers on the front cover and an ad for Sturgeon's More than Human on its back cover; the 1970s American paperback has a pretty literal Darrel K. Sweet cover, and the numerous foreign editions run the gamut. Today's stories all first saw print in the 1950s.

"Bright Segment" (1955)

This one made its debut right here in Caviar, and went on to be reprinted many times beyond this collection, including in the horror magazine Shock in 1960 and the horror magazine Night Cry in 1985, where Sturgeon is promoted as one of the "high priests of horror."  "Bright Segment" was even chosen to be the title story of Volume VIII of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.  It appears we have every reason to expect that "Bright Segment" represents ol' Ted at the top of his game, and I hope it lives up to the hype, because I feel like I've been pretty nitpicky lately, and it would be nice to praise a story without reservation.

We are in luck!  This is a strange story, but the strangeness is one reason "Bright Segment" is so memorable and engaging.  Sturgeon also runs the risk of being monotonous or repetitive as he provides long detailed descriptions of a man's handiwork (remember when I noted how detailed were Sturgeon's descriptions of the operation of a bulldozer in "Killdozer!"?), but the work Sturgeon is describing here in "Bright Segment" is emotionally affecting, somewhat disturbing as well as heartwarming, if you can believe it, generating tension which keeps the reader from getting bored.  Sturgeon is an able writer and keeps a grip on the reader not only with his vivid and at times squirm-inducing descriptions but also with his smooth and moving style, little mysteries, and a compelling psychological portrait of a man in some ways pathetic and other ways admirable.  The story is also well-structured and has a twist ending that works.  Thumbs up for "Bright Segment," a disturbing and memorable examination of Sturgeon's characteristic topic--different forms of human love and their irresistible power.

The plot.  A janitor, a huge ugly man who has never had a woman or a friend, carries a young woman into his apartment--she is severely wounded in the chest, groin and head, and is bleeding all over the place.  For a while we readers may wonder if she is dead and the janitor murdered her, but then Sturgeon spends page after page describing how the janitor deftly treats her wounds and then her fever.  Through flashbacks we learn that this unattractive guy, rejected again and again throughout his life, has always had a desire to be needed and this helpless woman is his chance to achieve his lifelong dream.  We learn he is very strong and has very dexterous hands--he makes jewelry and makes his own pasta and so forth.  The woman begins to recover, and we eventually find out how she was so badly injured and what sort of person she is.  What kind of relationship can these two people have?  We get a twist ending of the best kind, surprising but also in keeping with all that has gone before.

A good start to today's blog post!      

"Shadow, Shadow on the Wall" (1951)

"Shadow, Shadow on the Wall," after its debut in Imagination, would go on to be reprinted many times, including in one of those Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthologies for juveniles.  And sure enough, the protagonist of the story is a kid who must contend with that staple villain of the fairy-tale, the evil stepmother!

Bobby's father remarried a woman with what sounds like a good body but a bad attitude, Gwen.  Dad sounds awesome, making Bobby toys out of pipe cleaners and forgiving Bobby when the kid accidentally breaks a window and that sort of thing, but Gwen is resentful of Bobby and treats him cruelly.  As the story begins, Dad is away and Gwen, ostensibly as punishment for that whole window caper, confines Bobby to his room and takes away his toys.  Bobby has a vivid imagination and loves to do that shadow puppet thing where you make a bird or whatever appear in the light on the wall from the sun or a lamp.  Bobby, in fact, has concocted in his mind a whole dream world behind the wall upon which the sunbeams lands, and sometimes wishes he could go there to escape Gwen.  Most of the creatures that appear on the wall are the product of Bobby's nimble fingers, but there is one vague and dim shadow that seems to have a life of its own.

Gwen keeps abusing Bobby psychologically, and she gets her comeuppance when Bobby innocently energizes that mysterious shadow and it pulls Gwen into the shadow world behind the wall forever.

I can moderately recommend "Shadow, Shadow on the Wall."  It is well-written, even if the plot is kind of obvious, and there is some uncomfortable sexual tension with all the talk of Gwen's narrow waist and broad shoulders and wide hips and how she searches Bobby's body for concealed toys that adds a layer of emotion and interest.

"Twink" (1955)

It looks like "Twink," which debuted in Galaxy, has only ever been reprinted in Sturgeon collections.  Still, I have hopes it will provide us the opportunity to put up a 100% "good" blog post!

We have here a dense story with quite a lot going on, much of it unsubtle and sort of over the top, with people yelling and weeping and gesticulating wildly, some of it allusive and a little mysterious, Sturgeon hinting at things and expecting us to get the hints, leading us to believe things and then making us question those beliefs.  The main theme of "Twink" is human isolation, alienation, which is cast into relief by the depiction of a uniquely close human connection.

Our narrator works in an office building for a charitable guy who goes out of his way to hire misfits who have trouble fitting in and finding work, like a guy crippled in some war in Asia (the story takes place in the high tech future of 1973 and presumably this is a war defending Taiwan against the Chines Communist Party), an ex-con, and a black person.  Our narrator, we eventually learn, is a misfit because he is (moderately) famous for having psychic powers, and before he got this position he had trouble keeping a job because his colleagues felt uncomfortable around him, fearing he could read their minds.  As well as startling revelations, "Twink" is a story that is full of paradoxes and ironies.  For example, the narrator resents his boss for his charity, I guess because by hiring people because they are disabled or otherwise different, he is reducing their identities to their disabilities or distinctiveness, making it impossible for them to overcome or put aside their differences from others and build an identity independent of those differences.  Or something like that.  Another irony is that the narrator can't really read minds, he is just uniquely good at those Rhine card tests, scoring the best on the tests of anyone in history, and so people's fears he can read their minds, the fears that made our hero unemployable, are spurious.

The narrator has a little girl, Twink, with his wife, Doris.  Twink is in terrible shape because the narrator is a reckless driver and got in a crash while Doris and Twink were with him in the car; Twink is in a coma and has suffered all manner of injury so that it seems likely she will remain a "basket-case" who can't see or hear or walk.  Much of the story's word count is devoted to examining the narrator's psychology, how he feels all alone because he has this problem that almost no other person can identify with, how he isn't sure if he wants Twink to live as a "basket-case" or to die, whether his desire that Twink die is based on sympathy for Twink or guilt and selfishness.  There's a sidelight that offers an illuminating contrast to the narrator's feelings about Twink--while Twink's case is not very famous, another sick little kid's case is front page news; that boy has cancer and is doomed, and the narrator envies the certainty of that kid's fate, but is glad Twink hasn't received the publicity the little boy has.

We were told that the narrator can't read minds, but it turns out that since the car wreck the narrator can communicate telepathically with the stricken Twink.  One of the confusing mysteries of the story is how Sturgeon indicates that this telepathic link began as a result of the car wreck, but then offers reasons for us to believe this link has existed longer, even since she was still in the womb.    

The first half or so of the story follows the narrator as he leaves work early to go attend the surgery that may or may not fix all of Twink's innumerable problems.  The second half of the story is about how the world expert on psychic powers is on hand and insists in no uncertain terms that the narrator support the delicate surgery on his daughter by communicating with Twink during the risky procedures--I guess the idea is that for the surgery to succeed, little Twink must maintain her will to live, and the narrator can make sure that will endures despite the pain of the operation by continually telling his daughter telepathically that he loves her and that even if what the doctors are doing is painful it is to help her.  The operation is a success and Twink will live a normal life, though doubt is cast upon whether the narrator's telepathic link was essential to that success or not--was the parapsychologist just running an experiment on Twink and her father?

Then comes the big bombshell.  At first I thought the last page or so of the story included flashback scenes to the day Twink was born, but then I realized that Sturgeon had tricked me--Twink was born today during the same procedure that repaired her injuries!  I thought Twink was a little child during the car wreck that triggered the psychic connection between father and daughter, but she was in fact still in her pregnant mother's belly.     

As the story ends it is brought home to us that, ironically, the man who felt like an isolated and alienated misfit at the start of the story will enjoy a less isolated life than any man in history, as he will be in constant telepathic communication with his daughter, sharing all her emotions and experiences.  His wife Doris cries from jealousy, as she won't be able to share this intimacy with her husband and daughter.     

I am willing to say "Twink" is good even though it feels a little confusing and tricky.  The story is ambitious, for one thing, and Ted, an emotional guy who always speaks his mind, writes with  conviction.  The style is good, and all the characters behave in believable ways, if loudly and extravagantly.  The trick ending took me by surprise, but when I reread the story it seemed that Sturgeon was playing fair, so I only have myself to blame for falling into the trap.  For today's readers, what with the politics around abortion and euthanasia throughout my own 54-year lifetime, it is also interesting how Sturgeon presents Twink, who is in the womb and in a coma throughout almost the entire story, as a full human being and a locus of life-changing love and not some clump of cells that should be treated by the able-bodied as nothing more than an obstacle to be casually brushed aside.  There is also the implicit criticism of what after 1961 we would call affirmative action programs.  And women may find it annoying that a story about a powerful connection between a parent and child chooses to depict a daughter who is closer to her father than to her mother and even show Mom envying that connection.  "Twink" is a challenging story on multiple levels.  

**********

Alright, three good stories, happy day.  "Shadow, Shadow on the Wall" is a well-done conventional horror story/wish fulfillment fantasy that is easy to understand and the least of today's stories, though certainly better than hundreds of stories we have read over the long busy years of this blog's life.  "Twink" is challenging and ambitious, a little harder to digest and full of surprise and big emotions and big statements.  The best of the three, in my opinion at least, is "Bright Segment," as unusual as "Twink" but easier to grasp, a smoothly functioning and compelling piece of work.

Next time we meet, three stories from the recent past--the 1980s!  Cross your fingers in hopes we get another blog post about three genuinely good stories!

Best SF: 1968: B Shaw, D I Masson, & J D MacDonald

I guess I've had my copy of Best SF:1968, edited by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat fame with some help from Brian Aldiss, for years now; today I finally get around to reading some of it.  Mine is the US paperback edition of an anthology first printed over on the sceptered isle as The Year's Best Science Fiction, No. 2 and reprinted several times over the years under various titles and with slightly differing contents--my edition includes a story by Aldiss but in some other editions a story by Theodore Sturgeon takes its place.  

Obviously I love the Paul Lehr cover on the American editions-- the color, the little human figures, the crags, the domed ship or building sheltering structures that echo the crags, the little dart-like craft, the mist obscured planet, and the monstrous eyes.  Awesome.  Then we have Harry Harrison's intro, in which he trumpets the success of SF in getting mainstream and academic attention and minimizes the drama surrounding the New Wave, arguing that there "there is no new wave, save in the eye of the beholder"; after all, there have always been experimental SF authors and there have always been writers whose prose is "dense, impressionistic, and bad."  Frustratingly, Harrison doesn't back up his assertions with a lists of SF writers active before and after the heralding of the New Wave who meet the criteria of "experimental," "dense," "impressionistic" and "bad," and goes on to say stuff like "One of the foremost writers in the 'new wave' admitted that my own writing fits into both [new wave and old wave] camps" without telling us who this "foremost" writer is.  I find these kinds of blind items annoying.      

Then come the stories.  Today we'll deal with the contributions by Bob Shaw, whom we have read several things by and whom I like, David I. Masson, with whom I am not at all familiar, and detective writer John D. MacDonald, whose work I think we have encountered five or six times.

 "Appointment on Prila" by Bob Shaw (1968)

When we read Shaw's "A Full Member of the Club" in 2020 and his "The Weapons of Isher II" in 2018, I compared them to the work of beloved Canadian madman A. E. van Vogt, and in his intro to it here in Best SF: 1958, Harrison compares "Appointment on Prila" to the output of good ol' Van.  The comparison is appropriate--as in many of the stories that ended up serving as raw material for Voyage of the Space Beagle and The War Against the Rull, in "Appointment on Prila" humans are confronted by an alien monster with special powers and have to figure out how to survive the encounter.

First we meet the alien monster, witnessing its tremendous abilities and getting a sense it is a callous exploiter of our kind.  Then we meet the humans, who are exploring the inhospitable world on which the monster has been marooned by a third group of enigmatic aliens who sought to exile the dangerous creature.  The human ship has a complement of six ground vehicles; these have sallied forth to map the planet.  But when the mapping is done, it is seven vehicles that approach the mother ship--one is the shape-shifting monster!  Can the Terrans puzzle out which machine is an enemy in disguise before it devours them?

A fun classic-style science fiction tale full of astronomy, high technology and cool aliens that is all about how awesome science, logic and explorers are, has a twist ending, and is well-written and well-structured.  Thumbs up for "Appointment on Prila."   

Having debuted in Analog, "Appointment on Prila" reappeared in two 1969 anthologies by Harrison, this Best of book and Worlds of Wonder.  When our friends in the Netherlands got around to translating Best SF:1968 in 1979 they titled the anthology after this Shaw story.  "Appointment on Prila" seems to be the first in a series of stories about the starship crew it depicts; maybe I should check them all out.  On the other hand, it kind of looks like the stories all served as the source material for a 1979 fix-up novel, Ship of Strangers, so maybe I should read that.

"Lost Ground" by David I. Masson 

In his intro to "Lost Ground," Harrison really talks up Masson, saying, among other things, that "overenthusiasm in the past has discovered too many bright lights of authors--who become darkened cinders after emitting only a handful of protons.  This will not be true of Masson."  isfdb lists ten short stories by Masson, only four of them appearing after "Lost Ground," so maybe Harrison got over his skis a little here.    

It is the surreal future.  The air is full of particles that manipulate human emotion; these particles are pushed around by natural weather patterns, to the point that the feelings and behavior of people can be predicted like the weather, with radio newscasters saying stuff like 

"A system of depressions and associated troughs will follow one another in quick succession over Scotland and the north....Insecure, rather sad feeling today and tomorrow, followed by short-lived griefs, some heavy, some stormy, with cheerful intervals.  By midweek griefs will be dying out...."

"Lost Ground" is full of sentences like "...a squall of rage and grief burst upon him" and "The chilliness was becoming palpable hostility...."  Somewhat muddying the picture of emotion-determining particles behaving like the weather, later in the story we learn that certain areas generate certain emotions in people and that each time of year also has a characteristic effect on people's psychological state.  Maybe this is a satire of how little the "experts" really know about both the weather and human psychology?

People in the third world are at the mercy of this "mood-weather," and it retards their development, while in the developed world (this story is set in England, which when the story was written was still considered developed, ha ha ha please don't take offense at my little joke) people mitigate the effects of the mood-weather by using air purifiers and air conditioners inside and by taking drugs--everybody keeps close at hand a battery of pills and aerosol sprays to stabilize and improve their moods and employ them at the drop of a hat.  Try wrapping your head around a society in which everybody is constantly on drugs, dear reader! 

This crazy world is dramatized for us through the experiences of a middle-class family whose head of household is a TV journalist.  An "unexpected pocket of terror in a dip in the road" causes a driver to crash, killing the journalist's son, and his wife loses her will to live and stops taking all the drugs everybody is on.  The journalist and his wife move to a rural area to get away from it all, leaving their surviving child, a little girl, with relatives.  There is a weird phenomena taking place near the little village where they are staying--the fields of an abandoned farm inexplicably seem to change, with hedges and walls and rocks appearing one day and disappearing the next; animals that venture onto the farm sometimes vanish.  The bereaved mother walks into the fields and disappears, and her husband becomes a member of the team investigating the phenomenon.  It turns out that, with bewildering inconsistency, some sections of the fields are moving forward in time and others backward, and people and animals that move from one section to another can cross the barrier of time and find themselves unable to return.

The journalist searches through time for his wife.  He winds up sixty years in the future, and is collected by scientists who are studying this region of time-chaos, which has been growing over the decades to encompass more and more of England, necessitating migrations of people out of its path.  The journalist is interrogated by future journalists.  He has a conversation with his daughter, who has grown up and become old without her parents.  Then he joins a team trying to map the region of time-distortion; the plot is resolved when the journalist finds himself in some Early Modern era in which the men wear lace and breeches and are religious, and learns that his wife got stuck in that period, became a respected and even beloved member of the community, and died of old age--this was foreshadowed earlier in the story, back in the 20th century, when he saw her old weathered headstone but didn't know it was hers because the inscription was partly worn away.    

"Lost Ground" feels long and slow.  Masson spends a lot of time explaining the story's two uncanny phenomena and providing examples of them in operation, so that the story feels repetitive and the phenomena become boring.  The characters are not compelling and you don't care what happens to them.  The two gimmicks and the plot are not bad in and of themselves, but the delivery is kind of flat and uninspiring.  Also, I'm not sure why the story has two gimmicks--the mood-weather gag doesn't affect the plot, which revolves around the time-travel gag, and both gimmicks make the same point, that the universe is inexplicable and we are at the mercy of outside forces and all that.  

We'll call it acceptable.

"Lost Ground" debuted in 1966 in an issue of New Worlds with a cover like something out of the credits sequence of a James Bond movie.  It was included in Masson's 1968 collection Caltrops of Time, which I guess is how Harrison justifies including it in a best of '68 book.  "Lost Ground" would go on to appear in European anthologies with some pretty cool spacey covers.

"The Annex" by John D. MacDonald (1968)

"The Annex" debuted in an issue of Playboy alongside stories by J. G. Ballard and Isaac Bashevis Singer, a bunch of film stills of a nude Julie Newmar, and an elaborate chart constructed by Len Deighton that tells you what to do, eat and buy in 21 European cities.  In his intro to the story, Harrison talks about how MacDonald is one of the best living American authors but the critics don't recognize it.  It kind of reads like Harrison being some sort of suck up, hoping the famous crime writer will rejoin the ranks of the SF community after a long absence or just say something nice about SF.  Sad.

"The Annex," like Masson's "Lost Ground," has surreal elements, and Harrison in his intro tells you the story is "Kafkaesque."  For example, a guy walks through a labyrinthine building, following a red pipe that vibrates in time with a big thumping machine somewhere in the building--I guess the machine is like a heart and the pipes are like veins or arteries, so that the building is like a body.   The protagonist has to navigate his way through the building to some upper floor room, I guess representing the brain, at the behest of inexplicable authorities. 

The guy meets a woman who acts in an inexplicable manner and complains about arbitrary authorities.  Then she guides him through the maze-like building.  MacDonald wastes our time describing the corridors and stairways, and reminds us this story was first printed in Playboy by describing the woman's ass and the guy's fantasies of feeling her up.  MacDonald fails to imbue these scenes with any kind of emotion or excitement--in real life being guided though a baffling series of corridors and stairways might be scary and studying the movements of a woman's ass might be sexually arousing, but MacDonald, I guess intentionally, to keep the story dreamlike and surreal, makes sure to not ascribe such emotions to his protagonist or to inspire such emotions in the reader.  I find this kind of surrealism that doesn't generate any emotion beyond "wow, this is surreal" to be a waste of time.

The pair gets to the door of the room the guy was assigned to perform some task within, but when the door is opened the room is not there, just a sheer drop, 40 or whatever floors down to the street.  The body the building represents is dying, even actually brain dead, we readers must assume.  The pair then retires to another room, still intact, and undress but do not, I guess, actually have sex.  

Finally comes the scene in which it is made clear this mission in a maze-like skyscraper was all the dream of a dying man and/or a metaphor for a doctor's failed attempt to heal a dying patient or something like that.  The doctor tells the loved one of the dying man that she can hold his hand as he dies and he will know she is there, even though the doctor knows the patient is already technically dead or dead by any practical measure.

A laborious and pretentious waste of time.  Maybe MacDonald really is a once-in-a-generation genius at writing about a guy in a boat unravelling a pyramid scheme or whatever the hell he usually writes about, but this pseudo-literary goop is not providing any evidence of that fact.  Thumbs down!

In 1976, "Annex" reared its ugly head in another anthology, The Late Great Future, and in 1978 appeared in the MacDonald SF collection Other Times, Other Worlds.

Nobody, no way, no how, is ever going to convince me that Beat or
Three of a Perfect Pair is half as good as Islands 

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The Masson and MacDonald stories are ambitious and you might call them "New Wave" what with their surrealism and pessimism but they are long and belabor their points and lack human feeling even though they are both about people's loved ones dying.  Shaw's story is a conventional old-fashioned science fiction story that is actually entertaining and easily the best of today's crop.  Score one for the old wave.

We'll probably read more stories from Best SF: 1968 in the near future.  Feel free to tune in for more of my bitter musings about the state of the world.

Theodore Sturgeon: "Ghost of a Chance," "Prodigy" & "Blabbermouth"

Back in August I purchased a 1955 copy of Caviar, Ballantine #119, because I admired the Richard Powers cover.  I actually like much of Sturgeon's work, and Caviar, a collection of stories first published in the period 1941-1955, includes a bunch of things I haven't read yet, so let's have at it!  Today we'll investigate three of the eight tales in the collection, "Ghost of a Chance," "Prodigy" and "Blabbermouth."  Of the other stories in Caviar, I have of course read the classic "Microcosmic God," ages ago, and, during the period of this blog, "Medusa." 

Nota bene: Today's stories debuted in 1940s science fiction magazines, but I am reading them in my 1955 paperback--let's hope it survives the adventure.  

"Ghost of a Chance" (1943) 

This story debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown under the title "The Green-Eyed Monster."  When it reappeared in 1951 in the short-lived magazine Suspense behind a cover featuring a murdered nude blonde it bore its new title, "Ghost of a Chance," under which it has reappeared ever since.

I'll note first that, while I made a big production out of telling you I am reading this in my flesh and blood paperback and not in a PDF scan of a magazine, "Ghost of a Chance" here in Ballantine #119 suffers from numerous printing errors, including lines printed out of order, rendering a conversation hard to comprehend, so I did end up looking at a scan of Unknown online.

"Ghost of a Chance" is sort of a slight joke story, but the main gag is OK and the minor jokes sprinkled throughout are tolerable and Sturgeon's writing style is quite good and carries you pleasantly from start to finish.  The characters, though they act extravagantly, are likable and you can identify with their all-too-human desires and emotions.  Sturgeon's big theme throughout his body of work is the power of love, and this story demonstrates various species of love, including the brotherly love of men who are friends and try to help each other, in a way that I found affecting.  So, "Ghost of a Chance" adds up to an entertaining piece I can comfortably recommend.

The plot.  A working-class guy, Gus, encounters a pale girl with white hair who behaves strangely.  He falls for her, but she avoids him because she is haunted by a jealous ghost who ruins the lives of every man who gets close to her.  Sturgeon describes many different ways a ghost can torment a living man, some of them slapstick humor, others closer to real horror stuff.  Things get pretty over the top, with the girl threatening to kill herself if Gus won't leave her alone and Gus becoming a homeless drunk in response.  Throughout the story, Gus seeks aid from various sources, including an advice columnist and a friend of his, a head shrinker.  Eventually Gus adds up the various pieces of advice he accumulates and solves the problem--the girl, pale and with white hair, looks like a ghost and so a ghost has a crush on her; the solution is to get the girl a dye job so she is a brunette.

"Prodigy" (1949)

This one first saw print in a pseudonym-heavy issue of Campbell's Astounding alongside stories by L. Ron Hubbard (as by Rene Lafayette) and by John Christopher (as by Christopher Youd) and a portion of a serial by Jack Williamson (as by Will Stewart.) Besides the many printings of Caviar, "Prodigy" has been reprinted in several foreign language Sturgeon collections and volume V of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.

It is the post-apocalyptic eugenic future.  Centuries ago an atomic war damaged the human gene pool, and the government took up the job of sorting and educating all the newly born children.  Every child is interned in the government creche and carefully examined over a series of years, the mutants and other irregulars identified and euthanized.  The normal kids are subjected to government propaganda that justifies the destruction of the freaks; Sturgeon comes up with nursery rhymes to demonstrate this.  

So it went for like 200 years.  Recently there have been reforms.  Now, mutants and other irregulars are separated and carefully studied with the idea that maybe some of them have useful traits that will breed true and improve the genetic stock of the human race--the government is trying to breed homo superior!  It also seems that parents now have to give permission for their kids to be euthanized.

Our characters are one of the women who work in the creche, Mayb, and an irregular child, Andi, who is currently under observation as a possible superior specimen.  Four-year-old Andi is a real pain in the neck, aware of his specialness and always making demands, demands he can back up with his psychic powers.  He escapes and returns to his mother.  Mom initially protects Andi, but soon brings him back to the creche to be destroyed because his demands and his use of his powers is intolerable.  

The twist ending is that the real special thing about Andi is that he is a one-way telepath in a world where almost everybody is a two-way telepath; Andi can transmit psychic messages but not receive them, and I guess because he can't "hear" his own telepathic projections or those of others he doesn't know how to modulate his transmissions, to make them safe and comfortable for others, and so is always doing the telepathic equivalent of screaming or shouting, constantly disturbing everybody around him.

I can moderately recommend this one, as the story is well-written and well-structured.  The twist ending, that Andi is the only person who can't receive psychic messages, is a little questionable, however, as Sturgeon tricks you into thinking Mayb and others are not telepaths.  For example, Mayb's boss calls her on the "annunciator," which I guess is like an intercom, and Mayb calls up Andi's mother on the videophone--if all these jokers can communicate telepathically, why do they need telephones and intercoms?  Maybe because telepathy has limited range?  But the boss, Mayb and Andi are all in the same building, and the boss and Mayb can both sense Andi's psychic screams, but these two adults still use the intercom to talk to each other.  Personally, the fact that mom is eager to kill Andi after spending time with him is enough of a twist for me; the one-way telepath thing feels a little clunky and superfluous.           

"Blabbermouth" (1947)  

"Blabbermouth" is listed as a 1945 story at isfdb but I think they are just reproducing a typo that appears on the publication page of the 1977 printing of Caviar, as my 1955 book has a copyright date of 1946 for "Blabbermouth" and the story debuted in Amazing in 1947.  Amazing printed "Blabbermouth" a second time in 1967 alongside Jack Vance's "The Man from Zodiac,"  and like "Ghost of a Chance," you can find "Blabbermouth" in the third volume of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.

This one feels slow and long, the central gimmick is kind of goofy and the plot does not operate smoothly.  The jocular style, though (like the plot) similar to that in "Ghost of a Chance," doesn't land as well, at least not to me, partly because there is a lot of talk about living in poverty, suicide, and murder that I think we are supposed to take seriously.  "Blabbermouth" is the weakest story of the day, which I guess tracks with the fact that Amazing has a lower reputation than Unknown and Astounding.

Our narrator is a real Mr. Charisma, Eddie the radio DJ (though they call them M. C.s back then, for "master of ceremonies") who gets lots of chicks and has tons of friends.  As part of publicity for his show, he participates energetically in the city's nightlife, yakking it up with fun fashionable people who become his regular correspondents; they call in (or telegram in, in this time period) with song requests and little comments, bringing material, a sense of community, and interactivity to Eddie's show.

As "Blabbermouth" begins our narrator bumps into a beautiful woman as he tries to grab a cab.  She is the best-looking girl he has ever seen!  She looks a little familiar...it is a woman he had one date with back in college, Maria, and she looks better now than she did then.  Eddie pursues her; she is cold at first, thinking they wouldn't be good for each other, but eventually Maria succumbs--after Eddie threatens to jump out a skyscraper window--and they get married.

As the story proceeds, various events occur that provide clues as to why Maria was reluctant to marry Eddie even though our narrator is a charming hunk.  Early in the story we learned that, after college, she made a serious study of the occult, including spending an extended period alone on a mountain top mediating and experimenting, and it seems to us readers that now she can read minds.  Also, it appears that Maria is a compulsive gossip, and when Eddie's back is turned she can't help but, for example, tell women what their husbands are up to when it comes to their extramarital affairs and business deals and all that kind of stuff they are keeping from the little woman.  Soon Maria is ruining all of our narrator's many friendships by spreading everybody's secrets around, jeopardizing his popularity and thus his ratings and thus his career!

Confronted by our narrator, Maria explains to him exactly what is going on, and it is even more contrived and silly than we readers have suspected.  You see, your guilt and suspicion and other negative emotions, kept bottled up inside, create a poltergeist.  Maria is susceptible to being possessed by such poltergeists.  These poltergeists yearn to be free, or something, and so when they take over Maria they compel her to voice--to their objects--the secret hatreds and misdeeds of those around her.  This is not very interesting or very convincing (and it gets worse.)

Maria stops leaving the apartment, so she never is taken over by poltergeists, and things regarding Eddie's friendships and career settle down.  But then, months into their marriage, Eddie's radio station is up for sale to a national network--if the network takes over the station it will mean a 20% raise for Eddie!  But to cement the deal, Eddie has to bring Maria to an important dinner party with the network execs!  At the party, Maria can't help but tell people secret and unwelcome facts about the network's business plans and who is sleeping with who's wife, and a fight breaks out and somebody gets killed.  

Eddie's career in radio is over, and our couple falls into poverty.  Maria tries to commit suicide by turning on the gas but is revived in a nick of time.  Then Eddie has a brain wave and the story becomes even more contrived and even harder to credit.  Eddie theorizes that if Maria doesn't actually tell people the secrets she learns about them, but just writes the secrets down on a piece of paper and then hides the piece of paper so nobody mentioned on it can see it, this will free the poltergeists without breaking up people's relationships.  It works!  Eddie becomes a gossip columnist--he and Maria go out to dinner at night clubs and so forth, hobnobbing with important people, Maria learns all kinds of secrets and writes them down while sitting at the table, and then Eddie works them into a regular newspaper column; Eddie and Maria get rich.

Barely tolerable--the poltergeist "rules" make no sense, and people's relationships make no sense--Eddie has all these friends, then they drop him, then they pick him up again, then they drop him again, then they pick him up again, and nobody puts two and two together when their secrets are revealed in the media after they had dinner with Eddie's wife who the entire dinner is scribbling stuff down in a notebook?    

***********

It is always sad when the final story covered in a blog post is the worst and the first is the best.  Also sad is the fact that the act of reading this seventy-year-old book has led to its spine breaking and half the pages falling out.  Oh, well.

There are three more stories in Caviar I haven't read yet, and maybe we'll tackle them soon.  But first, three stories published about 20 years after today's subjects.

In the 1970s Ballantine sought to sell Caviar with sex appeal,
while our British friends sold it as a horror collection