Thrilling Wonder Stories, Aug '39: S A Coblentz, R M Williams & F B Long

I love old-fashioned blood and guts depictions of dinosaurs and have even been collecting old luridly illustrated books about dinosaurs.  So, flipping through old covers of Thrilling Wonder Stories, I was taken by the cover of the August 1939 issue, which seems to depict soldiers from ancient Rome, medieval Northern Europe and Renaissance Western Europe in a time machine witnessing a fight to the death between Mesozoic Era titans.  This wild cover image does not illustrate any of the stories within the ish, but is in fact the subject of a contest which invites readers to describe the story behind the picture.

The letters column of this issue of Thrilling Wonder features some pretty big names.  Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint, writes in to talk about how much he loves Thrilling Wonder and joke about the magazine's science quizzes.  Manly Wade Wellman, Stanton A. Coblentz and Ray Bradbury have letters in the column praising the magazine's recent tenth anniversary issue.  All three of these guys express excitement over the personal, social, aspect of the magazine, the biographies and photographs of the authors--they really want to get to know other members of the SF community.

This issue includes a photo and bio of Otis Adelbert Kline.  Kline's story, "Race Around the Moon," billed as a complete novel, is illustrated by the great Virgil Finlay, who contributes a full-page illustration of space ships and the Moon, three portraits (an attractive woman and two somewhat goofy looking men) and a half-page illo depicting the men interacting with spider-people.  

We're skipping that Kline story, a story by Ray Cummings, and the joke story by Arthur K. Barnes and Henry Kuttner, as well as various stories by people we don't know.  Instead, we will be grappling with one story each ("novelets" is what the table of contents calls them) by the aforementioned Coblentz, Robert Moore Williams and Frank Belknap Long.  It is true that in the past I have ofttimes found the work of these gentlemen to be sub par, and that, as far as isfdb is aware, not one of these three stories has ever been reprinted, which might give us pause, but in honor and emulation of the wrestling saurians on that blood-drenched cover, let's give these three rare stories a tumble.

"The Man from Xenern" by Stanton A. Coblentz 

If memory serves, Coblentz's 1935 In Caverns Below AKA The Hidden World was an anti-war satire that included reference to people so habitually lazy their limbs atrophied.  "The Man from Xenern" strikes some of these same notes.  Our narrator is a bipedal alien with a tail, and he describes how his race long ago developed a technological civilization but then became warlike and decadent, so that another intelligent race of his planet, bird-men three or four times as tall as the tailed men, took over, enslaving the majority of tailed men, though a small number of bands lived on in the wilderness, eluding capture by the bird-men.  Our narrator was born a member of one of these nomadic tribes of free men, but as a child was captured by the bird-men and enslaved.  He describes at some length his adventures in captivity, giving us a view of bird-man society, which maybe is in part a satire of 1930s Earth society.  Our narrator moves from episode to episode, enslaved in some fashion in one strata of bird-man society for a period, then escaping and finding himself enslaved in some other capacity in a different segment of bird-man society.  Eventually he is shanghaied into serving as crew aboard the bird-people's first star ship.  The ship eventually leaves out narrator on Earth, on a remote island.  This story is his memoir, penned in the last days of his life; he fears he will die soon as Earth's atmosphere is not rich enough in oxygen for his blood.

Lacking a conventional climax and other features of a traditional plot, I can't really call "The Man from Xenern" good.  But individual scenes are competent, and the humor is not so over the top as to overwhelm the story or irritate the reader.  We'll call it acceptable.

"The Warning from the Past" by Robert Moore Williams

Here we have a piece advertised on the cover, a science-fiction story that romanticizes science and the scientist pretty extravagantly, and slathers on a pretty thick helping of the contempt for ordinary people we see in so much science fiction, contempt for simple country folk, contempt for the idle rich, contempt for grasping business people and contempt for dim-witted military men.  The proles and the peasants, the merchants and the aristocrats, in this story they all suck--only the scientist is admirable, and the scientist in "The Warning from the Past" gets to play both the ubermensch and the Christ role, being both a man who is permitted absolute latitude to achieve his world-saving goals and a man who sacrifices himself for humanity!   

In the first scene of "The Warning from the Past," we meet a booze-loving farmer and his nagging wife.  They are astonished when some hulk, belching smoke and emitting brilliant beams of light, explodes out of their corn field.  The farmer thinks it must be the devil!  Next we meet an ignorant rural cop quixotically studying to be a G-man--he hurries out to the farm when the farmwife telephones.  This guy doesn't reappear that I recall and I don't know why Williams introduced us to him.

We then meet a rich inventor who hates his wife's friends, idle society people who play bridge.  The inventor sneaks away to the attic and his ham radio sets, and we get a sentimental description of how this guy, as a kid, built his own crude ham radio and this set him on the path to becoming the world's greatest inventor.  The farm where all the excitement is taking place lies 100 miles south of Chicago, and the beams of light the mystery artifact flashes up into the sky can be seen from the inventor's suburban Chi-town window.  The newspapers and the government call the inventor up on the phone looking for help investigating this novel phenomena, and he hurries down there. 

Our cast is rounded out by a buffonish businessman who plays no role in the plot but is just there for Williams to humiliate, and a general with a lame joke name (General Warsin) who at least talks to the scientist.   

The disturbance in the corn field is a time capsule left by a forgotten advanced race that preceded our own human race as rulers of the Earth.  These ancients were attacked by hostile aliens from Sirius over ten thousand years ago; they defeated the Sirians, but biological warfare agents the Sirians employed went on to slowly kill the victors.  Before they expired, however, this prehistoric race set up time capsules that would emerge when their detectors sensed another Sirian invasion fleet, in hopes that a successor intelligent race could benefit from their wisdom and experience.

Sure enough, Sirian ships are approaching!  Info in the time capsule enables 20th-century man to build the ray cannons and nuclear missiles the ancients used to shoot down the Sirian ships in the forgotten past.  But when the Sirians arrive today their vessels are equipped with a forcefield that frustrates the ray projectors and atomic warheads directed against them--the Sirian bastards have upgraded their defenses, rendering the weapons that foiled them last time obsolete!  Many cities and millions of people are killed by the Sirian bombing campaign, the foolish tycoon and the inventor's social-climbing wife among them.

The inventor returns home to dig his wife's body out of the rubble.  He also finds his childhood ham radio.  He realizes that, using info he read in some documents in the time capsule from thousands of years ago, he can make minor adjustments to this artifact of his adolescence that will enable it to neutralize the Sirian invasion fleet's forcefield!  General Warsin thinks the inventor is insane when the scientist shows up with his crude scratch built children's toy and sends the inventor away.  

Having laid waste to Europe, the Sirian space craft approach General Warsin's position on the New Jersey coast.  His ray cannon and atomic missiles have no effect on the alien ships.  The inventor snatches up a pistol, murders the crew of a ray cannon, and hooks his modified ham radio to the ray projector's power source.  Then he uses the ham radio to deactivate the forcefields of the alien ships.  US Army and Navy units shoot down the now vulnerable alien fleet, delivering the human race from extinction, though the explosions of the space craft wipe out much of the surrounding area and General Warsin and the inventor are among the dead.  Luckily the word gets out somehow that it was the inventor who saved the world, and it is suggested he will be immortalized in the history books and honored by statues that will no doubt be toppled in a future period of Sirian Lives Matter hysteria.  

"The Warning from the Past" is like a parody of a snobby science fiction wish-fulfillment story aimed at science nerds who are alienated from the rest of society, but it is not terrible; I like the plot outline and Williams propels his story forward at a rapid pace.  We'll grade it barely acceptable.

"The Dweller in Outer Darkness" by Frank Belknap Long

Of the three writers we are reading today Long, a close associate of H. P. Lovecraft, is by far closest to my heart, I having read so many of his bizarre productions.  Long justifies my interest immediately today as "The Dweller in Outer Darkness" begins in medias res in a Terran space craft landed on Pluto and reveals Long's theme to be that of the love triangle!  Among biologists, no less!  Slim, dark-eyed and black-haired Helen Torrey uses her Cupid's bow mouth to snarl that our cautious narrator Mark Banner is a coward for staying in the ship while handsome Peter Miles ventures out onto the surface into a scary tunnel to bring back a magnificent sample of native life.  For his part, our narrator considers Peter a "foolhardy showoff" and Helen a "romantic nitwit" with no appreciation for the "stern discipline" required of space farers.

We learn how Helen got on this expedition (she is taking the place of her father, who organized the mission but then broke his leg) and hear all about how dedicated Mark is to planning and safety, unlike Peter, who has been acting recklessly in order to impress Helen.  Then Peter brings in his specimen, a hideous little freak, apparently dead.  Helen's response to Peter's success fills poor Mark with jealousy. 

Soon after blasting off from Pluto the three scientists are confronted by the ship of Delcha, the famous space pirate!  Delcha boards the expedition's vessel, and we find him to be a small effeminate man with some Chinese ancestry, accompanied by a huge "Negro" with the "evilest smile" the narrator has ever seen. 

As we might have predicted, in the crisis Mark proves a better man than Peter and Helen realizes she really loves Mark, not Peter, and the Plutonian specimen comes to life and plays a pivotal role in the fracas in which the giant "Negro" dies a horrible death of one kind and Delcha dies an equally horrible death of a different kind.  

Long's story is written extravagantly and sort of childishly.  There's the behavior of the three elements of the love triangle, which is like that of teenagers in a TV show.  There's Long's repeated reminders that Miles' body is like that of a Greek god.  There's the sex angle (Helen has to take off her space suit to put on some other high-tech equipment and Mark stares at her bare limbs) and the Yellow-Peril, homophobic and racist angles in the descriptions of Delcha and his black subordinate.  Long also includes all kinds of wacky speculative science about radiation and atomic particles far smaller than the electron and how these phenomena might kill you or be used as a weapon with which to kill your enemies.  The sex and race stuff is unsophisticated and the science stuff is faux-sophisticated, but in a life-and-death who-will-get-the-girl adventure context I found it all fun.  The gore is also off the charts.  

So, I can mildly recommend "The Dweller in Outer Darkness" as a fun, fast-paced, vigorous sex-and-violence space opera that is never boring.

**********

Having never been reprinted since their publication in 1939, I am probably one of the few living people who has read any of these stories, and you are probably one of the few people to have even heard of them.  Should more people read them?  Well, these stories are not terribly impressive, all of them suffering from severe weaknesses, but they are also full of action, wild images, and strongly held points of view which many may find offensive.  I guess they all qualify as filler, but it is not lazy boring filler; Coblentz, Williams and Long blunder and demonstrate strange, even repulsive, attitudes, but they are committed to producing entertainment and to arguing their points and they write with brio.  Energy and commitment can go some distance in making up for a lack of skill and for disreputable content and so I enjoyed reading these three stories, and maybe other people will as well, or, at least, find their attitudes about science, women and non-whites illustrative of a past era.

More SF stories from an earlier age in our next episode, but from a writer who has earned more awards and accolades than Messrs. Coblentz, Williams and Long.

Seven Come Infinity: R F Jones, M Leinster & E F Russell

Over the years I have acquired a tall stack of paperback anthologies, so let's take off the pile a book I've owned for over a decade and read some of the stories printed therein by people with whose work we already have some familiarity.  Today's subject: Seven Come Infinity, edited by Groff Conklin and published here in the republic in 1966 by Fawcett Gold Medal and reprinted in the United Kingdom a year later by Coronet.  I've already digested two stories that appear in this volume, Chad Oliver's "Rite of Passage" (I read it in 2014 and gave it a thumbs down) and Clifford Simak's "The Golden Bugs" (I read that one in 2018 and concluded it was "acceptable.")  Today we'll read the stories Conklin included in the book by Raymond F. Jones, Murray Leinster, and Eric Frank Russell.  Take note that I am reading these stories in this here paperback, and not in their original magazine appearances or in later books, though if I find a puzzling typo or something like that I may consult other such sources.

"Discontinuity" by Raymond F. Jones (1950)

I think I've covered nine Jones productions here at MPFL, the novels The Cybernetic Brains, Syn and The Alien, and the stories "Noise Level," "Fifty Million Monkeys," "Rat Race," "The Non-Statistical Man," "Starting Point," and "The Gardener."  Today we make it a round ten with "Discontinuity," which debuted in Astounding and has not been reprinted in English other than here in Seven Come Infinity.  German readers can find it in Deutsch in Die neuen Gehirne und andere Stories; "Discontinuity" is actually the title story of that 1971 collection.

In the future of force fields and interstellar travel, David Martell was a scientist and medical man of rare genius!  He figured out how the brain stored information, and even began development of techniques to restore memories and other brain functions to people who had suffered brain damage.  But Dr. Martell's life was not exactly one triumph after another.  For one thing, he married a woman, Alice, whom he loved but who didn't understand him and had no interest in science; Alice came to loathe the Doc and started cheating on him.  Ouch!  Then, his experiments with brain-damaged patients produced results that the general public and the establishment didn't consider to be successes--sure, the head injury patients were still alive, but they lost almost all of their intelligence--the Martell Synthesis was tried on 100 people, and all 100 are now "idiots!"  ("Idiot" is the word Jones uses consistently.)  The Martell Synthesis was outlawed!  Ouch again!  Then there was the car crash that left Martell himself brain damaged and almost dead--a crash that many suspect was no accident, but engineered by Alice and one of her boyfriends!  Ouch to the second power!

Such is the background.  The plot of "Discontinuity" kicks off as Martell's team tries to--illegally--use the process Martell developed to revive Martell's own smashed brain.  Part of the Martell Synthesis is to hook wires into the heads of people the patient knew and shift info from their healthy brains to the patient's damaged brain, to fill in gaps.  Alice has to be convinced to submit to this procedure--she would see greater financial benefits from having a husband who is a dead duck than a husband who is a live idiot--so the boffins threaten to reveal evidence she tried to murder her hubby, blackmailing her into cooperating.

(We later learn that the Synthesis process also writes info from many books into your brain.)

In Chapter II (this is a longish story, over 40 pages) Martell wakes up after the Synthesis process is over--he is OK!  Or so he thinks at first!  After he gets out of bed he finds he can't read English, and when he tries to talk, people don't understand him, and when they speak, it sounds like gibberish to him!  His colleagues think he is an idiot, like all the other brain-damaged peeps who were subjected to the Martell Synthesis, but now Martell knows they are not idiots, they just have aphasia!  Martell escapes the lab and in Chapter III hooks up with other subjects of the Martell Synthesis and finds they can speak to each other.  Among them is Marianne, a woman as pretty as Alice but smarter and more intellectually healthy.  (In this future, people who lie, cheat and commit murder aren't considered bad or evil, just ill or ignorant.)  Marianne was one of Martell's top assistants before her brain was wrecked by an electric shock and Martell used his process to bring her back to (it appeared at the time idiotic) life.  

Chapters III and IV are largely given over to speculative lectures on how the brain works and how the Martell Synthesis works--as we expect from these old time science fiction authors, Jones weaves science lectures in with his adventure plot and power fantasy themes.  It turns out that the Martell Synthesis turns you into a superior being, organizing the data in your brain (the data is compared to the punch cards of early computers) more rationally than mere natural processes can and somehow distinguishing irrational beliefs based on emotion from cold hard facts and prioritizing the latter.  

"The semantic selector, in arranging the pre-punched molecules in precise order with semantically correct cross-indexing, has swept clean the crazy, nonsensical filing system accumulated over the years."         

"We have within our hands the means to make a new kind of man, one which can displace the old and bring reason into the world....I am very certain we are the most completely sane people the world has ever known!"

Communication between people with synthesized brains and the old mundane kinds is impossible because synthesized brains are super-efficient and have naturally developed super-efficient means of communicating to each other.  English is too irrational for the efficient brain to comprehend!  Martell also finds that the synthesized no longer need sleep and have acquired superagility.

Chapter V sees the plot resolved.  Martell and Marianne use the Synthesis equipment to reduce their superiority enough that they can again communicate with us normies saddled with all-natural no-artificial-additives brains via the inefficient and irrational tongue of William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and Pete Townshend.  They try to convince people of the benefits of the Martell Synthesis but everybody is too scared of change, so our superman and superwoman start synthesizing people by force.  Among the first beneficiaries of nonconsensual synthetization is Alice; synthesis cures her of her deceitful and murderous ways as well as giving her super smarts and all those other abilities; the Martell marriage, we can be sure, is going to be a super-happy one from now on, and eventually all humanity will be equally super!  (Marianne is a little jealous, having fallen in love with Dr. Martell, but her rational brain will keep her from getting truly heartbroken.)

I love stories about disastrous sexual relationships and I love stories in which people mess with brains, so Jones has me on his side from the start.  "The Discontinuity" is also a decent homo superior story with sense-of-wonder elements as well as the elitism we see in so much SF that suggests their betters are fully justified in using guile and force to drag the ignorant masses into the glorious future.  This elitist attitude is disgusting, but I can't deny that it is exciting in fiction, and I didn't let the disgusting incest in Elleston Trevor's The Sibling stop me from enjoying and praising that novel and I'm not letting the elitism of Jones' "The Discontinuity" stop me from enjoying this story and giving it a thumbs up.

"The Corianis Disaster" by Murray Leinster (1960) 

"The Corianis Disaster" first saw print in what I believe to be the final issue of The Original Science Fiction Stories, a magazine Robert Lowndes had kept afloat since 1953.  I think I've read like 24 pieces of Leinster's fiction during the period of this blog's life, but my link finger is tired, so click the "Leinster" tag if you want to see what I've had to say about the man.  I will say here that, as with Jones, I've liked most of Leinster's work with which I am familiar.  Hopefully this is another likable one, as it is over 40 pages.

The Corianis is one of the largest and safest starships in the interstellar civilization depicted in Leinster's story, and it is carrying important officials between two planets who are in the midst of major trader negotiations.  By chance, also aboard is a scientist, a physicist, who is very shy.  A one in a million bit of bad luck causes the Corianis to come out of hyperspace abruptly because a huge amount of debris, the remains of a planet destroyed by a nova a million or so years ago, was in its path.  The hyperdrive is wrecked, but ships the size of the Corianis carry two hyperdrives, just in case.  So the ship gets to its destination, just a little late.  Where they find that an exact duplicate of the Corianis has preceded them!  

The Corianis that is already there is populated by a trade delegation identical to that on the second-arriving ship, but several people aboard the second vessel, including our main character, the physicist, are not duplicated on the first ship.  The physicist quickly learns to overcome his shyness and asserts himself to solve the problem posed by the duplicate people, something only he is able to achieve, as everybody else aboard the two vessels, as well as everybody among the populace among whom they have landed, becomes violently irrational in the face of this unprecedented and apparently supernatural phenomena.  The physicist saves the day and even meets a girl and gets married.

The first part of "The Corianis Disaster," all the stuff about space flight and hyperspace and all that, is good.  But the second part, the puzzle of the duplicates, its effect on people, and the scientist's solution to it, is boring, even annoying.  There's the elitism of the story--everybody but the scientist acts like a violent irrational monster--which is bad enough, but worse, Leinster plays a lot of the confusion among the duplicates and the local populace for laughs.  Worst of all, Leinster makes this part of the story way way too long, hitting the same points again and again in the same way.  To show how irrational non-scientific people are, he has angry mobs form, not just once, but again and again.  He describes people's fears and diagnoses them again and again, uses the same metaphors and analogies again and again.  What Leinster is saying is kind of obvious, so he needn't tell us repeatedly, but he does, and it is no fun.  Maybe Lowndes requested a story of a certain length and Leinster stretched this one out by repeating himself?  A mistake!

As we readers figure out pretty quickly, but Leinster really takes his time to come out and say, during its hyperspace jump, the Corianis with the shy scientist aboard accidentally jumped into a different time line, one in which the bashful physicist didn't make the flight and the ship's flight was uneventful.  Our hero figures out how to return his Corianis to its native universe.  As I guess science fiction readers want to hear, our problems are solved when a scientist is given command over the government and the ship.  The the story ends with a limp joke about marriage--a man may make himself an alpha and save the lives of a ship and all its occupants, but his wife will still tell nag him into doing what she wants. 

Far from Leinster's best work.  I'm calling it barely acceptable.

In 2006 "The Corianis Disaster" was presented in a Russian Leinster collection, and in 2015 Armchair Fiction included it in a double novel along with Harry Harrison's famous Deathworld.

"Panic Button" by Eric Frank Russell (1959)

Another Astounding story, this one by the Englishman who is reportedly (see Alan Dean Foster's intro to The Best of Eric Frank Russell) Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s favorite writer, a man much of whose work we have read.  "Panic Button" would go on to be reprinted in a 1974 Dutch collection and in NEFSA's 2000 Major Ingredients: The Selected Short Stories of Eric Frank Russell.

Two intelligent races are exploring the galaxy, the humans of our beloved Terra and some alien race from the Antares system.  Each species has quite limited knowledge of the other, and neither wants to risk a war with an enemy of unknown capabilities, so both civilizations have been following a first-come-first-served or finders-keepers rule--any planet belongs to the race that first lands upon it.  This story chronicles what happens when an Antarean star ship with a crew of 600 and a complement of ten boats discovers a valuable planet with only one single Terran on it, a man unaccompanied by any space craft or heavy equipment--should the Antareans honor the tacit finders-keepers rule or kill this guy and disintegrate his hut and claim the planet?

The plot and gimmicks of this story, which is sort of a series of logic puzzles and suggests people act rationally and predictably, are good, and additionally Russell offers readers characters with fun personalities who deliver cleaver jocular dialogue.  I am constantly bitching about joke stores, as you know, but in "Panic Button," in a way that reminds me of Jack Vance, Russell employs subtle and sophisticated humor based not on absurd situations or broad satire but personality and human reaction to stressful situations, humor which complements Russell's plot and themes instead of burying or undermining them.  The story is also no longer than it need be.  Thumbs up for "Panic Button!"

**********

Two good stories and one story that crawls feebly just barely across the border into "acceptable" territory (but could have been good if a ruthless editor had hacked it down to 60 or 70% of its current size.)  Conklin in Seven Come Infinity seems to have put together a commendable anthology.

Three more short stories penned before I was born in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  We can only hope they will go down as easily as today's selection.

The Sibling by Elleston Trevor

The 1979 USA Playboy Press printing of The Siblings has one of those
fold out covers so you can admire the beauty of both Debby and Raff;
do they look like a 15- and a 16-year-old to you?

All she knew now was that everyone had been wrong; it wasn't going to be a white Christmas after all.  It was going to be another pitched battle, withering and unceasing and with no mercy shown on either side; and this time she didn't believe there would be any survivors.

Not long ago I read British author Elleston Trevor's 1956 novel about tank crewmen fighting the Normandy campaign, The Killing Ground, and thought it worthwhile.  And you know I am curious about Robert Bloch.  So why not read a "novel of terror and desire" published by Trevor and praised by our guy Bob?  The Sibling, which I am guessing is going to be exploitation trash about incest and murder, first appeared in 1979 in England under the Elleston Trevor pen name and here in the land of the free and the home of the brave as by Adam Hall one of the other pseudonyms used by the man born Trevor Dudley-Smith; ten years later the novel was reprinted here in America under the Trevor name.  I'm reading a scan of a 1981 paperback British edition, which has a silhouette of a bird on the cover--booooring.  I guess the theory was that Bloch's name, or Trevor's own, would sell the book.  The American Adam Hall edition has a properly provocative cover, one worthy of a book mentioned in Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson's Paperbacks from Hell that features an attractive young woman whose eyes are bugging out as she looks at a gift box which we have to assume contains some person's dismembered digit or ear or something.  This is what we are looking for--sex and violence!  The cluttered cover of the 1989 American edition is the most disturbing of the three, with its superfluity of hard-to-make-out text and its twin images of a pretty boy (recycled from the fold out section of the 1979 cover) that make you wonder if this is a novel about gay incest.  Maybe this edition was supposed to appeal to women?

Trevor spent his early life in Europe but eventually moved to Arizona and sets The Sibling in New England.  Obviously I wish he had set his tale in Britain or France or Spain or even Arizona, so I could feel I was getting legit local color and not just a foreigner's view of the Northeastern US learned from TV, but there it is.  I liked his book about armored warfare even though it seems he served in the RAF and not the British Army, so maybe everything will be OK.

The first scene of The Sibling takes place at the funeral of an eccentric old woman who has an Egyptian prayer (in English translation) read over her dead body and who is buried in her Rolls Royce.  (Nothing about this woman figures in the plot and she is not mentioned after the funeral so I guess Trevor started his novel with this funeral just to foreshadow The Sibling's occult and eternal life themes and make it clear the main characters are rich.)  We meet Lorraine Stuyvesant, 41, and her English friend, Alison Scarborough, 37, a jokey horny widow.  It is the holiday season, and Lorraine's 15-year-old daughter Deborah ("Debby") is coming home from her fancy school in Switzerland soon.  The birthday of Lorraine's 16-year-old son Raphael ("Raff") is just six days before Christmas, and after flirting with his own mother (gross!) Raff dances at his birthday party with Alison, who is sexually attracted to Raff and doesn't keep it a secret.  Debby was supposed to make it to the party, but she is delayed in Paris by snow, and we get the idea that Debby doesn't want to come home and that her relationship with Raff has long been terrible, the subject of much expensive psychiatric attention.  Lorraine inwardly fears this Christmas season is going to be a total disaster, Trevor foreshadowing that the large cast of characters (among them a genius pianist who defected from the Soviet Union, a teen-aged girl--Kim--who has a crush on Raff, and a teen-aged boy--Jerome--who has a crush on Debby) is going to be subjected to a massacre!  (See epigraph above.)  Spoiler alert, Trevor doesn't follow through on this foreshadowing, and Kim and Jerome quickly disappear from the narrative.  I feel like Trevor wrote the first two chapters or so of The Sibling with the idea the novel was going to go places it didn't end up going.

Debby finally arrives and Mom compliments how good her legs look and that sort of thing--Debby in turn wishes she was as sexy as her mother.  This novel has considerable appeal to incest fetishists.  Through flashbacks (for example, Raff tormenting Debby with a snake, and little boy Raff threatened by a berserk horse after Debby locks him in the stables--there are a lot of animals in this novel for some reason) and interior monologues we learn how much Raff and Debby hate each other.  Poor Debby is so scared of Raff that she vomits on the plane and pees her pants when she arrives at the family mansion.  But after three years apart, each of these two mental cases is shocked to see how the other has grown into a sexy teen and Raff and Debby instantly become enamored of each other, embracing so each can  feel the other's heart beating through their chests.

The siblings spend the next few days thick as thieves, playing games, including increasingly extreme versions of hide and seek and tag until they jump into separate cars and chase each other on a curvy road, leading to a crash that injures Debby.  She's OK by the time the Christmas Eve party rolls around, at which Alison comes on to Raff as they dance and then Raff comes on to Debby as he dances with her.  Then there is the bizarre incident at the party when Debby sips her drink and finds somehow she has been given a glass full of human blood!

At first, when Debby realizes her brother is getting erections while they are hugging or dancing, she tries to put an end to their physical intimacy, but is her heart in it?  After all, when she masturbates at night, it is Raff's face that comes unbidden into her mind!  Zoinks!  

Alison seduces Raff, and she expects to be in charge of his sexual awakening, but the boy goes berserk and knocks her out and rapes her, apparently possessed by some other being--even Alison realizes when she looks at him after she has regained consciousness and he has regained his composure that "...he looked like Raff....But he wasn't.  He was somebody else."

The story proceeds (The Sibling is like 290 pages, the rape of Alison occurring around a third of the way through) and while Raff and Debby's sexual desire for each other mounts, voices in Raff's head, apparently those of people from ancient times, like we are reading something out of Weird Tales, keep urging him to kill Debby.  Trevor is a good writer and everyone's dialogue and behavior rings true, and his descriptions of the moonlight and the temperature and the stars and the snowfall don't burden or slow down the narrative, but add to the atmosphere and the vividness of the images as Raff does risky things like walking on thin ice or climbing the mansion's mansard roof and then convinces Debby, who is falling madly in love with her brother, to join him in these life-threatening behaviors.

In the middle third of the novel what is going on with Raff becomes more clear as he has visions of life in a murky past of castles and chariots, seeing through the eyes of a young man who spends a lot of time witnessing a priest perform human sacrifices.  In a somewhat silly scene, the family psychiatrist hypnotizes Raff (without Raff's consent or even knowledge) and works some past life regression therapy on the kid.  The shrink finds that Raff is a reincarnation of Tarkon, some kind of prince (who I guess raped a woman--Raff was animated by the memory of that crime when he raped Alison.)  Tarkon had a sister, Iadris, of whom he was very fond and whom he rescued from an attack by a rabid canine.

While the shrink and Lorraine brainstorm ways to cure Raff, Raff uses adventure fiction tricks (like wearing a white lab coat as a disguise) to infiltrate a local hospital and steal small parts of cadavers.  You see, the priests of Tarkon's people would cut little parts off of their sacrificial victims and toss them to ravens (which is why the cover of the copy of The Sibling I am reading has a picture of a bird on it instead of one of a pretty girl and/or her pretty brother.)  Raff puts the parts in little gift boxes and leaves them in Debby's room.  Debby, though disgusted to the point of vomiting by these offerings, is so in love with her brother that she pretends to like these monstrous gifts and resolves to hide her brother's crimes from the world.  She tosses each gift out the window and a raven snatches them. 

Additional sneak-attack hypnosis sheds light on why Raff, who on the one hand loves his sister, is always putting her in danger.  When a plague started ravaging Tarkon and Iadris's country, the priests told their father that only the sacrifice of Tarkon or Iadris could end the plague.  (I guess these primitive people didn't think of shuttering the schools and restaurants and making everybody wear masks.  Civilization has come a long way!)  The weakest parts of The Sibling are Raff's repetitive and tedious visions/memories of Tarkon being told by his advisors that he had to make sure the priests killed Iadris instead of him.  Tarkon is shown to be a guy with a ferocious temper, always flying off the handle and having to be restrained from physically attacking some advisor.  These cardboard medieval or ancient or fantasy world or whatever figures are pretty boring compared to Trevor's 20th-century cast of people--the sad mother in the distant marriage, her perverted brats, their dutiful servants, the talented defector, the English immigrant who is horny for teenagers, and the shrink who thinks he is on the verge of making a groundbreaking discovery.  I wanted to see what happened to the Connecticut people, but these ancients and their nondescript setting left me cold.  

The final third of the novel begins with Raff killing a friendly dog owned by Kim's family--its appearance triggered Raff into reliving Tarkon's fight with the vicious dog that threatened his sister Iadris so long ago.  Raff's macabre thievery from the hospital escalates (he wants some fresher body parts to offer Debby.)  Lorraine and the shrink, fearing Raff might harm Debby, decide to separate her son and daughter, to send the boy to a madhouse and the girl to her European school.  Debby learns of this plan and in one of the novel's best scenes Debby gives an impassioned speech about how middle-class parents screw up their kids by working too hard and thus neglecting their offspring and then offloading them to shrinks who are all charlatans and instead of curing the kids just make them crazier.  This speech of course totally rings true to me (go Debby!) but at the same time we readers know that the real reason the kids are dangerous bloodthirsty incest-monsters is the reincarnation jazz.  

(I wonder if I might like this novel better if Trevor had concentrated on the bourgeois-parenting-turns-kids-into-killer-perverts angle and jettisoned all the supernatural reincarnation business.)

Raff gives Debby another gift--some poor bastard's penis!  Then he murders a guy, thinking to offer her an entire person, though events prevent Raff from lugging a corpse into the mansion and up the stairs into Debby's room.  (The scene of the murder is good horror stuff, written from the point of view of the victim but focusing on his fear before the attack, not the actual physical fight and the gore.)  The penis is almost a bridge too far for Debby, and she comes close to agreeing with her mom and the shrink that maybe Raff really should be sent to the funny farm, but her faith and love for Raff is strong enough to overcome her temporary flirtation with collaboration with the adult world.  Debby warns Raff about the plan to involuntarily commit him and the incestuous lovers run away from home in the Jaguar that Raff received for Christmas, driving into a ferocious blizzard.  (Wind is a theme of the novel, Tarkon and Iadris's unspecified homeland being very windy.)  

After a pretty well-written car chase (Trevor put out a ton of espionage novels and I'm guessing he wrote lots of car chases) the kids reach a mountain lodge their family owns, where we get the story's somewhat disappointing climax or climaxes.  Raff takes Debby's virginity, what we might call the climax of their relationship.  Obviously this is gross, but it is what we signed up for when we started this book, and the scene is solid.  That is not the disappointing part.

Debby is ready to fight the entire world at the side of her lover and brother, but then she finds out about the murder, that the victim was somebody she knew.  The fact suddenly comes home to her that Raff, all her life, has been putting her in life-threatening situations, as if he has been trying to kill her but just falling short of success.  Now that they are truly alone, separated from the rest of the world by snow covered roads, Debby is scared Raff is finally going to succeed in destroying her, and she takes steps to protect herself.  I expected some kind of showdown, a fight and/or a verbal exchange in which Debby tries to convince her brother to reject the counsels of his advisors, but what we get is one of the siblings getting killed by what amounts to an accident; the circumstances of the accident parallels the methods and practices of human sacrifice among Tarkon and Iadris's people.  As I have told my long-suffering readers many times, I hate deus ex machina endings--one of these horny creeps should have outfought or outwitted the other, surviving thanks to his or her abilities and willpower, and then had to suffer the moral and psychological consequences of killing or imprisoning the sibling they just had mind-blowing sex with.  Trevor's ending robs the survivor of agency and shields him or her from responsibility, which I don't like, even if the whole reincarnation angle implies that people lack agency and responsibility.

I guess I've now read four books mentioned in Hendrix and Errickson's Paperbacks from Hell, and The Sibling is perhaps the best of them.  I say "perhaps" because while I thought Garrett Boatman's Stage Fright and William Schoell's Late at Night were garbage and Trevor here with The Sibling outclasses them by miles, I also enjoyed Peter Tonkin's Killer nine years ago and my memory of that book, about people fighting an orca, is too hazy for me to choose between them.  Still, a definite thumbs up for The Sibling.

As I have suggested, Trevor's style is good, and the sex scenes and action scenes and horror scenes are quite effective.  My fears that Englishman Trevor wouldn't be able to convincingly write about Connecticut proved unfounded--I didn't encounter any major boners.  Not that there weren't a few odd notes.  We get "knickers" once, instead of "underpants," and once "cunny" instead of "pussy."  Four or five times Trevor gives us "bubbies" instead of "boobs" or "tits."  Well, let's say that Raff and Debby were under the linguistic influence of family friend Alison.  Trevor spells Halloween with an apostrophe ("Hallowe'en") which I don't think Americans did in the 1970s, but I can shrug that off.  One jarring moment was when, in referring to the Jaguar, Trevor used "squab" for "seat cushion," which I had never encountered in my entire life.  Maybe we can excuse that because it is a British car?  Another noteworthy oddity is how Deborah thinks "track-suits" are very sexy--track-suits figure in the most memorable sex scene of the book, as well as other scenes.  I was born in 1971, so didn't reach puberty until after the '70s were over, so am unaware if plenty of people in the Me Decade actually did find track-suits sexy, or if this just says something about Debby. 

I've already complained that the scenes set in unspecified ye olde antient tymes are vague and boring, and that the ending is kind of a let down.  I also think there are too many characters, or that too many of the characters don't receive the attention they deserve; in my view, each character should do something that is exciting or materially affects the plot and each should get some kind of resolution at the end, and many of the people in The Sibling do not.  For one thing, I expected more of the cast to be murdered, and was a little disappointed that anybody who actually was murdered was some minor character who was less developed than Alison the slut, the defector pianist (Raff's real father, Lorraine and Charles having a marriage marked by infidelity), and the shrink who believes in reincarnation.  Trevor concocted interesting back stories and motivations for Alison, the pianist, and the shrink, but he doesn't come up with enough stuff for them to do and story arcs for them that are as compelling as those backstories and are satisfying--shouldn't each of these people get killed or perform an heroic deed and/or suffer some permanent psychological scar?  The novel would be more satisfying if the pianist had killed his bastard son Raff or saved somebody from Raff, and if the shrink's career was ruined by his wacky (but accurate!) theories or he had gotten killed because he pursued his theories too boldly.  As for Alison, she should have gotten killed as metaphorical punishment for her depraved pursuit of teen-aged boys or used her body to liberate Raff from his ancient self's baleful influence so that she represented the healing power of the act of physical love--what stand a novel takes, whether it vindicates prudery or celebrates license, is less important than that it demonstrate its stand with power or eloquence.

So, I've got gripes and suggestions.  But The Sibling delivers the icky sex and grue that we look for in this kind of book, and it is actually well written because Trevor is a seasoned professional writer, leading me to strongly suspect The Sibling is one of the best of the Paperbacks from Hell.

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The printing of The Sibling I read, the British 1981 paperback, has some ads in the back all you historians of mass market genre literature might find interesting.  Are "Book Tokens" still a thing?  If not, when did they go out of circulation?  Did any of my readers from the UK or Ireland ever use a Book Token?  And what about this ad for New English Library bestsellers?  Which is the bestselling?  Which have you read?  I've read the Heinleins and started Dune, but that's it, though I've heard of many of those which became films.  Will Errickson has written about The Rats and The Fog, which I am guessing are the closest of the listed books in tone and content to The Sibling.

F&SF, March 1953: A Boucher, W Tucker, and M St Clair

When last we met, we read a story by Manly Wade Wellman we quite liked, "Vandy, Vandy," that debuted in an issue of F&SF. Let's further explore that issue, the March 1953 number.  Now, many years ago, we read Richard Matheson's contribution, "Disappearing Act" (another story I liked) but this issue with the Chesley Bonestell Mars cover also includes new tales for us to investigate by editor Anthony Boucher, Wilson Tucker (who apparently coined the term "space opera") and Margaret St. Clair, critic of Edmond Hamilton and Seabury Quinn and fan of Clark Ashton Smith and C. L. Moore.  Their three stories have all reappeared in collections and anthologies, but keep in mind I am reading them in a scan of the original 1953 ish of F&SF in which they first saw print.

"The Other Inauguration" by Anthony Boucher 

In our last episode I quite harshly criticized Boucher's 1941 story "Snulbug" but it is unto the breach once more my friends as we tackle another Boucher piece which I fear is a joke story occasioned by the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower.  "The Other Inauguration" would be included in the 1955 Boucher collection Far and Away (I love the stark white spire on Richard Powers' cover) and Groff Conklin's Science Fiction Terror Tales reprinted it in that same year.

The year: 1984.  Our protagonist: a college professor at a government university in the poli sci dept.  His obsession: politics.  This guy even broke up with a girlfriend over the '72 election and so never got married.  And he thinks the '84 election is an even bigger deal--when a senator whom he considers a combination of Huey Long and Joe McCarthy wins the presidential race, beating our hero's candidate, a judge, in a landslide, our bachelor considers suicide!  This would save us readers having to read the remaining nine pages of the story, but instead poli sci boy goes to visit a fellow professor saddened by the prospect of a future in which the senator will curtail their latitude to indoctrinate their students.  This second egghead is in the Psi Dept and has the idea of using time travel to change the election results.  (Or shifting to another time stream. to a universe in which the judge won the election--the story seems to conflate the two concepts in a way I found sloppy, or maybe just so boring I lost track of the distinction.)  Yes, just like in "Snulbug," the Boucher story I condemned mere hours ago, we have in "The Other Inauguration" a scientist who wants to use time travel to "make a better world"...and fails!  

The two profs train their psi technique and develop equipment to the point that they can move in time and/or shift to alternate time streams.  (Why Boucher includes mechanical as well as psychic means of manipulating time in his story I don't know, it just makes the story longer.)  The pro-judge activists shift to a time stream where the judge won the election.  But, as in "Snulbug," you can't really change history.  The judge and his party quickly becomes as totalitarian as our protagonists feared the senator and his faction would have.  When our guys are suspected of being subversives, a mob destroys their psi equipment and hits each of them in the head, destroying their psi ability and preventing them from further meddling with history.  I guess the lesson of the story is not only that you can't change history, but that it is counterproductive for elites to try to meddle with the popular will by breaking the rules, that you just have ride the wave of public opinion, which, in the long run, is more to be trusted than that of elites.

More streamlined and with fewer jokes, this is a better story than "Snulbug," but still banal and kind of boring.  We'll judge it acceptable. 

"Able to Zebra" by Wilson Tucker

Way back in 2016 we read Wilson Tucker's 1981 Resurrection Days and I found it disappointing and so have avoided the man ever since.  But today the Tucker-drought ends.

One of the things I noted about Resurrection Days was its jocular tone; another was the meta elements, like its protagonist's fondness for SF and his references to Robert Heinlein. Well, "Able to Zebra" shares these characteristics. (Also, the ability to induce disappointment in yours truly.)

Our hero is an alien secret agent here on Earth in the 1950s.  The galactic federation or whatever it is that he represents has deployed such agents to each of the 26 inhabited planets of the galaxy to keep an eye out for, and remedy, anachronisms introduced by irresponsible time-travelling tricksters.  So when our hero, one of the most junior agents in the service, hears tell that a 400-year old Indian burial mound has been excavated and within it has been discovered 20th-century coins, he contacts HQ and they send a sexy blonde agent, an individual quite senior to him, to take charge of Earth operations.

The junior agent has an idea--he is an avid reader of Earth SF magazines, and thinks he and blondie can somehow make people ignore the anachronistic coins by planting stories about time machines in the magazines.  (The universe Tucker depicts is an alternate to our own, in which, among other things, the idea of time machines has not been broached in fiction yet.)  Tucker puts in the junior agent's mouth a long speech about the history of science fiction and the field's ability to predict widespread use of atomic power and geostationary satellites.  Tucker also includes as a minor character in his story real-life SF editor Beatrice Mahaffey, a woman apparently popular in SF circles because she was pretty.  

The hot blonde agrees to a scheme in which they travel back in time to convince H. G. Wells to write Time Machine and thus alter the history of SF and make it easier to explain away the coins to 1950s people.  The plan works and as the story ends it looks like the blonde is going to reward the junior agent by having sex with him.  (In a jokey wink-and-nod fashion, sex is a pervasive theme of the story.)

Lame filler--thumbs down.  The plot is convoluted and unconvincing, and the self-indulgent in-jokes about Mahaffey and other SF figures are silly.  Probably Mahaffey and Heinlein and all the rest liked Tucker and thought his references to them fun but that fun does not translate to this reader.  

I don't think this limp production has been anthologized in English, though our paisans over in Italia reprinted it in Urania.  It does show up in Tucker collections.

(The Tucker-drought resumes.)

"Thirsty God" by Margaret St. Clair 

"Thirsty God," like much of St. Clair's work, appeared under the Idris Seabright pen name.  I guess I've read three stories by St. Clair so far, "Horror Howce," "Squee," and "Mrs. Hawk."  The fact that "Thirsty God" was reprinted in Groff Conklin's Crossroads in Time (our amigos in Spain perhaps know the anthology as Encrucijadas del tiempo) is making me think this story will be our third today about travelling through time to change the future.  Enough already, guys.

"Thirsty God" reminds us immediately of the work of C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett.  A roguish Terran adventurer is on Venus, riding a beast, pursued by the primitive natives because of his sexual dalliance with one of their females.  He takes refuge in what he takes to be some kind of sacred shrine--the natives do not follow him within.  In fact, this is an ancient facility, left over from when Martians colonized Venus; the building's role was to radically alter the body chemistry and structure of the natives of dry Mars to facilitate survival on humid Venus.  Robotic apparatus transform the Terran adventurer and he is forced against his will to become a vital part of the current Venusian ecosystem.  St. Clair suggests this is poetic justice, his punishment for raping the Venusian girl is to have his body used by alien beings in a way he finds both disgusting and irresistible.

This is a good science fiction horror story--it's central gimmick is clever and St. Clair describes the human's physical transformation and psychological response to it in a way that is convincing and entertaining.  And there is nothing to do with time travel in "Thirsty God," thank heavens.  Thumbs up! 

  

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So Margaret St. Clair, operating undercover as Idris Seabright, is our big winner today with a story that has a good science fiction concept attached to a traditional adventure setting and is well-written and unencumbered by jokes or other superfluities.  I'm glad I read her story last and can thus bid this blogpost on its way with a light heart.

Next time, something I expect will be evil and disgusting, so stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log if that is your bag, you sicko.

Best from F&SF 3: P J Farmer, M W Wellman and A Boucher

I've owned my copy of Ace G-712, The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Third Series, for some years, and the day on which we read from it has finally arrived.  My copy of the 1968 paperback, a reprint of a hardcover published in 1954 and then in paperback first in 1960, was originally owned by a Private Charles E. Harris; you may recall that back in 2018 we read stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, Damon Knight, Avram Davidson and Fredric Brown from Private Harris's copy of The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifth Series.   

Today, from this third of the Best From F&SF anthologies, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, we'll read tales by Philip José Farmer, Manly Wade Wellman, and Boucher himself.  I'll note here that I am reading the versions in my crumbling 1968 paperback, which may or may not be different from their original versions or versions appearing in later collections or anthologies.  Also, that my paperback has quite a volume of annoying typos.  Sad! 

"Attitudes" by Philip José Farmer (1953)

In my youth I read multiple Riverworld and Dayworld books, in my early adulthood one World of Tiers book and Dare, and since the apocalyptic life of this blog began I've read Farmer's novels The Green Odyssey, The Stone God Awakes, and Tongues of the Moon as well as the stories "Down in the Black Gang," "The Shadow of Space," "A Bowl Bigger than Earth," "J. C. on the Dude Ranch," "The Henry Miller Dawn Patrol," "The Leaser of Two Evils," and "The King of the Beasts."  So says the video tape.  Now I will try to stop singing the first track from the Kinks' eighteenth studio album ("doo, doo, doo") and read this 1953 piece by Farmer, which debuted in F&SF alongside a reprint of a 1939 story by Raymond Chandler that debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown.  According to isfdb, "Attitudes" is the first of five stories about a Father Carmody.

The protagonist of "Attitudes" is a professional gambler of the star-hopping future, currently travelling on a star liner.  This guy has telekinetic and ESP powers, and uses his powers to cheat at cards and other games.  He's also an atheist and early in this story, which occupies about 22 pages of The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Third Series, he sneeringly criticizes the five men with whom he is playing a friendly game of pinochle, among them Father Carmody and the ship's captain, because they are believers.  The gambler says the other men are all afraid to take the chance that there is no God, and that really enjoying life requires taking chances.  (Farmer doesn't use the phrase "Pascal's wager," but that seems to be what he is riffing on here.)

The ship lands on a planet of barbarians to take on water.  The captain forbids any passenger from contacting the natives during the four-hour watering process, but the gambler's favorite thing in life is to defy authority, so he leaves the valley in which the liner landed to spy on the locals.  He finds they are playing a game much like a combo of craps and roulette; the human gambler joins the game and uses his psychic powers to start winning most of the natives' money.  Or so he thinks!  Father Carmody appears on the scene to save the day, he having read a scholarly article on these natives.  Reminding us of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and perhaps the Aztecs, this native game is to determine who is to be sacrificed to the natives' god--if the human gambler had been crowned "winner," as his psy powers made almost inevitable, he would have been crucified.  The Father convinces the natives to let the psyker leave the game and so one of the natives is sacrificed instead.  The final scenes of the story explore whether Carmody was right to rescue one man and consign another to death, and suggest God had a hand in this adventure.

This is a competent but mundane sort of story--we judge it acceptable.  Perhaps it is significant in that it doesn't remind you, as so many science fiction stories do, that religion is a scam and that instead of expressing and encouraging admiration of the rebel, as is the norm in science fiction, which so often depicts welcome paradigm shifts, Farmer portrays a man who has contempt for tradition and defies authority as a knave and a fool.  Some readers might find Farmer's treatment of psychic powers innovative and interesting.

"Attitudes" has been reprinted in many languages and was the final story in the 1982 Father Carmody collection Father to the Stars.

Always with the cat people....

"Vandy, Vandy" by Manly Wade Wellman (1953)

Here we have one of Wellman's John the Balladeer stories.  "Vandy, Vandy" has been a big success, with David G. Hartwell including it in his huge 1987 anthology Dark Descent (our British friends split that 1000-page monster into three volumes and "Vandy, Vandy" appears in Volume 1, The Colour of Evil) and Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh reprinting it in their 1996 Supernatural Sleuths.  And of course you can find it in multiple Wellman collections.  "Vandy, Vandy" debuted in an issue of F&SF with a story by Richard Matheson I really liked when I read it ten years ago, "Disappearing Act," and stories by Anthony Boucher and Margaret St. Clair that I will probably read some day.

"Vandy, Vandy" is a very good black magic story into which Wellman smoothly integrates his interests in American history and in folk music.  John and his silver-stringed guitar come to a remote valley, drawn by clues in folk songs he has heard.  Talking to a family of hillbillies, he unravels a crazy story about a devil-worshipping sorcerer centuries old who tried to subvert the American Revolution, to seduce George Washington himself and make the new republic of The United States of America a kingdom devoted to Satanism!  (Wellman's 1939 story "For Love of a Witch" treated similar themes in a far less impressive fashion.)  This witch man desired a blonde violet-eyed girl named Vandy, but was foiled, and over the centuries has been pursuing her even more beautiful descendants.  The evil wizard appears--can John rescue the current Vandy from this devil-worshipper and preserve his own life by exploiting his own knowledge of the occult and summoning the spirit of the Father of Our Country?

The magic scenes in "Vandy, Vandy" are very good, and Wellman handles all the themes--folk beliefs about George Washington, the question at its founding of what would be the nature of the culture and government of the United States, devil worship, and sex--economically but powerfully.  Wellman's style suits his material, and he quickly and clearly paints images and draws characters for the reader that we can see and feel.  Thumbs up for "Vandy, Vandy." 

"Snulbug" by Anthony Boucher (1941)

Here we have a mundane and boring joke story about time paradoxes that tells you that knowing the future is pointless because you can't change the future, a story that goes on way too long and is full of repetition and bargain basement jokes.  Thumbs down!

The most interesting thing about "Snulbug" is that it takes as one of its themes a sort of cynical skepticism of Man's ability to understand and master the universe, making the story a counterpoint to the general attitude of old timey science fiction stories that suggest that man is a problem-solving animal who can master his environment.  Perhaps ironically, one of the leading exponents of the "man is a problem-solving animal" theory, John W. Campbell, Jr., was the first, but far from the last, man to publish "Snulbug," printing it in 1941 in his magazine Unknown.  Boucher himself reprinted "Snulbug" in F&SF in 1953 and then here in The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Third Series.  I'm always a little uncomfortable with editors who buy stories from themselves--it feels like self-dealing--but they all seem to do it so I guess it is like part of your compensation as editor?  And of course it is worse when, as here, the story feels like filler, though I will note that other people don't appear to see "Snulbug" as mere filler but as some kind of classic--Martin H. Greenberg and D. R. Benson included it in anthologies that purport to print "the best" or "hall of fame" stories.  Maybe my opinion is the minority one--it wouldn't be the first time.

A scientist thinks he has figured out a way to detect embolisms early and thus save thousands of lives a year.  But he needs a lab to develop his idea, and nobody wants to finance him.  So he summons a demon to help him get the money.  One of Boucher's little jokes is that the scientist is not a very good wizard and so he can only summon a demon one-inch tall who has a bad attitude.  The demon is actually ancillary to the story, just a sort of comic relief figure and Greek chorus, as the actual plot of "Snulbug" concerns using time travel to get a newspaper from the future; Boucher could have had the scientist use a time travel device or a future viewing device or something of that nature.

The scientist hopes to exploit the info in tomorrow's newspaper to collect the money he needs to develop his life-saving embolism detection technique.  He is foiled again and again because you can't change the future--if you read about a crime in tomorrow's paper and rush to the scene of the crime before it happens with the laudable aim of preventing the atrocity, time will snap back like if you lifted the needle off a record and put the needle back down again a few seconds earlier.  As he tries to change the future, our protagonist repeatedly relives the same moments right before an event he is trying to alter, and Boucher inflicts upon us many repetitive scenes (I find this repetition in stories very annoying.)  Eventually the scientist just tricks some rich fat guy (in fiction if a guy is rich it is a signal to the reader that it is OK to steal from him and if a guy is fat he is fair game for any kind of abuse) into giving him the money.  Boucher seems to leave it ambiguous whether the scientist is going to succeed in starting his own lab and bringing his embolism-detection technique into general use or not.

Not for me.

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Wellman's story is by far the best of these three, and let's talk about why.  I like sincerity and economy in stories, and Wellman's story exhibits these traits in every paragraph.  Wellman's endorsement of Christianity and hero-worship of George Washington may seen corny to our 2025 ears, when smart people all know religion is a scam (though those who want to get ahead pay lip service to socialism and Islam as the religions of the future) and that George Washington's statues should be torn down because he owned slaves, but Wellman's straightforward faith and conviction bowls over any objection that might come to the reader's mind and serves as a strong backbone for his story.  Every other element of "Vandy, Vandy" serves as the muscle and sinew that flesh out that backbone and propel the story in such a way that it vigorously achieves its goals--every one of Wellman's lines furthers the story's plot or adds to the atmosphere that serves that plot.  There are no extraneous elements that get in the way of the plot or muddle the atmosphere, and there is no fat--Wellman doesn't needlessly and counterproductively hammer away at his points again and again.  This is in strong contrast to Boucher's story, which is a jumble of lame jokes slathered on mind-numbingly repetitive scenes that promote his cynical and banal themes.  Farmer's story is not actually bad, but compared to Wellman's strong piece it meanders and it feels pretty routine beyond its sympathy for religion.

More short stories in today's vein in the next exciting (we hope!) episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.