Raymond E. Banks: "This Side Up," "The Littlest People," and "Double Dome"

Looking through the archives, it appears that over the last seven years or so I have read four stories by Raymond E. Banks, joke stories which bear marks of Banks putting a lot of effort into not just the jokes but also scientific and social speculation.  Most recently I read "Rabbits to the Moon" and liked it; the three stories I read earlier, "Walter Perkins is Here!," "The Instigators," and "Never Trust an Intellectual," I couldn't recommend, though their ambition was at times admirable.  One hit to three misses is a pretty bad record, but today Raymond E. Banks has a chance to even things up, even come out ahead, as I am going to read three more 1950s stories by the man who (I hear) was a manager at an electronics company and who would go on to write in the 1960s Meet Me in Darkness and The Computer Kill and in the 1970s Lust in Space and Lust of the Swampman.

In the interest of giving Banks every chance to succeed, I deliberately chose three stories published in Galaxy, a magazine with a reputation for trying to publish "literary" and "pertinent" work about social issues (in contrast to magazines like Astounding or Planet Stories that emphasize the hard sciences or action-adventure thrills) during the editorship of H. L. Gold, a famously hands-on editor, stories that were later anthologized--these three Banks stories have the imprimatur of the snobbier end of the SF establishment, and cannot be dismissed as hack work tossed off for some fast money, but must be seen as works that have gone through multiple layers of editing and gatekeeping.

I'm going to read all of these stories in scans of the appropriate issues of Galaxy.   

"This Side Up" (1954) 

This is a long absurdist story full of internal contradictions as well as lame jokes founded on the story's foundational gimmick, itself a stupid joke.  The alien Thurkians, who look exactly like humans, land on an Earth they find totally devastated.  The Thurkians may look just like Earth people, but their biology is radically different.  Thurkians pop into existence all wrinkled and bent over, and then straighten out and become vigorous, then begin shrinking until they vanish--their life cycle is the exact opposite of that of human beings.  So, when the Thurkians find a baby--apparently the last living human!--they figure this infant is an old man about to die.  The aliens figure a cemetery is a place from which new humans are dug up, and when they find the maternity ward of a hospital they come to believe women would have dying old people implanted into their bodies to achieve immortality.

This childish "opposite day" joke continues through the entire story.  Among Thurkians, a kiss isn't a sign of affection but an expression of hate.  Among Thurkians, high firm breasts and smooth clear skin are not attractive--sagging breasts and wrinkly splotched skin are attractive.  Thurkians hear with their mouths and eat with their ears.  And on and on, one groaner after another for like 16 pages.

As for the plot, one Thurkian scientist has figured out the reality of the life cycle of humans and voices his dissent against the famous scientist in charge of the expedition.  The rest of the expedition dismisses the dissenter's theories, but then a high level politician, a woman with whom the dissenting scientist went to school, arrives.  She comes to agree with the dissenter.  In a bizarre scene that may be some kind of lie told by the dissenter, or some kind of misunderstanding or hallucination he has suffered, the human infant kills the top scientist via trickery and the head scientist kills the baby with a knife before he expires.  Again and again in "This Side Up" the reader is confronted with behavior that is unconvincing and events that don't logically follow from preceding events.

Anyway, with the top scientist out of the way we get our happy ending as the the dissenter marries the politician.

This nonsensical story may be a clumsy satire of Christianity and conservatism and/or skepticism of technology and science.  Among the Thurkians, when a person overturns a scientific paradigm, the authorities execute him by carving a cross into his chest.  Thurkian history begins with world government and high technology, and then political authority fragments into increasingly smaller and more numerous states and societies become increasingly primitive technologically.  The top scientist argues this course of development is for the best.  Maybe this is meant to be a parody of luddites who fear technology and conservatives who oppose world government, but this element of the story renders "This Side Up" nonsensical--if the Thurkians have gone from a high-tech industrial society to a current low-tech agrarian society, how did they build a space ship to get to Earth, and what do scientists actually do?  

I don't get "This Side Up," and as a work of entertainment and speculation it stinks--thumbs down.  H. L. Gold was proud of it, however, and included it in a Galaxy best-of anthology.    

"The Littlest People" (1954)

This story's central gimmick has some similarities to elements of the Genesis song "Get 'Em Out By Friday," and its plot to the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who, unsatisfied by real women, falls in love with a statue of a woman he himself carved.  

It is the future of interplanetary human civilization.  Many planets and asteroids have been colonized.  There is an unemployment problem on Earth, so people unable to find work are sent to the colonies.  Of course, shipping people through space is expensive, so, to save on fuel, food and O₂, these job seekers are shrunk to like 6 or 7 inches tall and put into suspended animation.  At the colony these inert little doll-sized people are inspected by employers (and lonely men looking for wives!) and if selected get returned to normal size.

Banks uses this conceit to address issues like class relations, sexual relationships, and the nature of economic life.  Most of the people who get hired and returned to full size do not succeed in the colonies.  Is this because they have no reason to integrate into a society which saw fit to ship them hither and thither like cargo, and because their lack of connections and social capital means they are unlikely to build fulfilling lives in the colonies?  Or because they are just intellectually or morally inferior--after all, isn't the reason they couldn't get work on Earth the fact that they were below-average workers?  Banks depicts the guilt felt by middle-class people about the plight of the losers among the working class, and the insincerity of relationships between employers and the barely-employable, how the low-skilled workers suck up to the new boss early on but are soon proving themselves lazy troublemakers.  At the same time, we hear a man who has made a success of himself, more or less, after being shrunk and resized, comment that nobody cares what happens to the shrunken people. 

The plot.  Our narrator, a kid, accompanies his father, a Personnel Director, when Dad does business with the regular rocket that brings new shrunken people to the barren asteroid colony where they live.  The guy who pilots the one-man rocket is getting old and disorganized and one of the shrunken people, an attractive young woman, through an unfortunate series of mishaps, ends up in the narrator's pocket and the rocket leaves without her.  The kid knows there are all kinds of laws and rules governing treatment of these shrunken people, and for fear of punishment doesn't just tell his parents about the pretty frozen shrunken woman--instead he hides her among his sister's dolls! 

In "This Side Up," Banks forced us to endure scenes of one alien scientist conducting abusive experiments on a human baby, and then another alien actually killing the baby.  In "The Littlest People" we have to countenance a woman in suspended animation getting her leg broken by a careless child.  The accident awakens the woman, and the narrator, still too scared to tell any adult what he has done, tries to patch up the woman himself.  The leg heals, but the little woman has a limp, and so despairs of ever getting a job or getting married and bitterly accuses the narrator of ruining her life and vows to kill him.  Sure enough, she tries to assassinate him while he sleeps, but she is too small to succeed; she does manage to kill the cat, though.

Our narrator expects to be employed in his father's office when he grows up, so tells the tiny woman, whom he dubs "Gleam" after her blonde hair, that he will give her a job as a school teacher in a few years.  Gleam is uneducated and has no interest in book-learning, so the narrator has to chain her up and torture her to get her to agree to become a dutiful student, with he as her teacher.  For years, the narrator is the only person this woman has to talk to, and it is he who gives her all the formal education she has ever received and he teaches who her everything she knows about middle-class life--in a sense he is creating her.   

The narrator brings the tiny woman with him when he goes to college on another asteroid.  On this world, full-sized people keep little people who are mentally ill or alcoholics or otherwise unemployable as pets, so he need not hide his little captive.  Gleam seems to lose interest in getting resized and finding a job, and starts to flirt with the narrator.  Has she become dependent on the narrator, has she accepted the role of pet and lost any desire to live as a full adult, a working member of society?

Or could it be she has fallen in love with the narrator?  Has the narrator fallen in love with her?  Has their unusual relationship made them unfit to spend their lives with anybody except each other?  What is going to happen to these two people who have transgressed so many of society's most basic rules?

This is a good story, well-written and full of suspense and ambiguity.  Thumbs up!

"Double Dome" (1957)

In 1963, "Double Dome" was reprinted in Human and Other Beings, an anthology whose cover blurb suggests that every story it contains is a condemnation of the human race as a bunch of meanies.  Good grief!  I know there are a lot of misanthropic SF stories out there in which we are told human beings are too violent or too focused on material gain or whatever, but often such stories will camouflage their preachiness or spring the lecture on you near the end--this book tells you right out on its cover that you are in for a dressing down for the stories within.  Who would buy such a thing?  A masochist?

The narrator of "Double Dome" is a personnel manager, like the narrator of "The Littlest People."  He works at a factory in a small town in the spacefaring future; the factory has fewer than 100 employees, and produces parts for spacecraft.  One day an office worker quits, and his replacement arrives the next day.  The replacement is an "adaptoman," a man with four arms, an additional sub-brain, and a third eye.  Such genetically modified men were first developed to operate space ships--they can do more work than the average man, saving costs on space travel by reducing crew sizes.  The working-class employees of the factory are unhappy to see him--is he the first of an army of adaptomen who are going to do the jobs of two men and slash the number of union jobs at the factory?  The engineers and the company doctor aren't too crazy about having this freak around, either.

The narrator is sympathetic to the adaptoman; others accuse him of having the values of a big-city inhabitant, not those of a small town guy.  The narrator in his youth wanted to be a spaceman, and sometimes wishes he was an adaptoman himself, and he and his wife have been considering signing up to have their own children, when they are ready to have kids, turned into adaptopeople.  (Adaptos are created by bathing the fetus in the womb with radiation soon after conception.)  

The plot of "Double Dome" is sort of episodic and mechanistic.  The adaptoman gains acceptance among the citizens of the small town through a series of psychological stratagems, each of them targeting some demographic among the factory employees and then the town as a whole.  This four-armed operator even manages to get engaged to the prettiest girl in town, daughter of the vice-president of the town's bank.  There is a conversation between the adaptoman and the narrator about how adaptomen are the future, suggesting that one day everybody will be genetically engineered, and in different ways for different tasks.  In a paragraph that today would be considered sexist and racist, the adaptoman says that Arab men like fat women and African men like women with "plate-sized lips" and hints that in the near future female fetuses could be engineered to have these characteristics. 

Everything is coming up roses for this adaptoman but at the last moment the town balks--the idea of a man with two extra arms and an extra eye and an oversized noggin marrying a normie woman is too much for the people of the small town to handle.  At the wedding ceremony the prettiest girl in town sees something that triggers her to run out of the church, leaving the adaptoman at the altar, and the adaptoman slowly walks out, four hands over his face, weeping, never to be seen again.

The sight of the adaptoman weeping pulls the heartstrings of all the women in town and they decide they want their sons and daughters to be adaptos.  I guess that counts as the first twist ending.  The second twist ending is the narrator's discovery of a clue that indicates that the adaptoman engineered the disaster at the church in order to get all the women in town to embrace the adapto future.  The adaptoman didn't really come to town to take an office job at a factory, and he didn't really fall in love with the prettiest girl in town--he is an agent of an activist organization that trained him in how to convince people in small towns to accept adaptopeople.  He travels from town to town, pulling the same tricks in every town in the interest of building the new adapto society.   

"Double Dome" fits squarely in the tradition of science fiction stories in which--boo hoo!--we see how hard a time superior people have in a world of mundanes; I always assume there are so many SF stories like this because so many SF fans think of themselves as better than everybody else even though they were bullied in school by other boys and ignored by the girls.  "Double Dome" is also one of those science fiction stories in which the cognitive elite are shown to be fully justified in using their superior intelligence to manipulate the masses.  I guess it is also a kind of allegory about the plight of minorities, like Jews and African-Americans.

"Double Dome" isn't great, but it isn't bad.  The style and pacing and all that are fine; the problem is that the plot and the individual plot beats all seem either tired (the adaptoman is beaten up by the working-class factory employees but they respect him afterwards because he put up a good fight) or unbelievable (women see a freak get his heart broken by another woman and this inspires in them a desire to give birth to their own little freaks.)  It is just too easy for the adaptoman to manipulate everybody.  Can you believe this guy, even with his second brain, can seduce the hottest richest chick in town after town?  And, after getting her to the altar, manipulate her into dumping him right there in church in front of all her friends and relatives?  (I have this same criticism of all those "gaslighting" horror and crime movies in which a cabal tries to drive somebody crazy to get her inheritance, and of Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories--people are just not that predictable.)  

Finally, I want to point out a choice Banks makes I found noteworthy.  Even though this story is set in the future (we are told adaptomen have been around for over 50 years, so this story must be in the 21st century), Banks includes dialogue that puts you in mind of the 1940s, having one character crack "Something new has been added" and another invoke "the four freedoms."  Maybe these early 1940s coinages were still in such wide use in 1957 that Banks assumed they would continue to be so for many decades?

 We'll call "Double Dome" acceptable. 

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So, these tales run the gamut.  We've got an abysmal piece of junk.  And a competent, if preachy and less than believable, traditional SF story.  And a fine story that offers interesting speculations and social commentary as well as an unreliable narrator and characters with complex and ambiguous, but still creditable, psychologies.  One has to wonder if Gold had a hand in ruining the bad story and/or elevating the good story, how responsible he was for my reaction to them.  A mystery that will probably never be solved.

More 1950s magazine SF in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.

R P Mills' Decade of F&SF: M W Wellman, R E Banks and A Davidson

Robert P. Mills edited Venture and F&SF in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and also edited a bunch of F&SF-related anthologies.  Let's check out some stories from his 1960 book A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which has a sort of abstract cover by Mel Hunter, a realistic work of whose I recently saw during one of my regular explorations of magazines at antique stores.

Of A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction's contents, we've already read John Ciardi's "The Hypnoglyph," Theodore Sturgeon's "Fear is a Business," and Mildred Clingerman's "First Lesson."  Today we'll attack stories from this anthology, all of which debuted in F&SF, by Manly Wade Wellman, Raymond E.  Banks, and Avram Davidson.  We'll probably investigate three more tales from the book in a future blog post.

Nota bene: I am reading all these stories in a scan of A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but if something looks fishy I will consult scans of the original magazines.

"Walk Like a Mountain" by Manly Wade Wellman (1955)

This John the Balladeer story first saw print in an issue of F&SF that also included Damon Knight's "You're Another," a story I took to task at great length in a blog post which also serves as one component of my defense of A. E. van Vogt against the Knight groupies.  This ish also offers stories by Chad Oliver, Evelyn E. Smith and Charles Beaumont I haven't read yet but may read in the near future.  Who knows what paths I will tread?

It is pretty common for SF stories to find inspiration in, and to directly invoke as a means of creating a mood or painting an image for the reader, elements of Greek and Roman or Norse mythology, or 19th-century British novels like Frankenstein or Dracula.  Here in "Walk Like a Mountain," Wellman changes things up a little, piling on references to the Bible and to American tall tales like those of Paul Bunyan and John Henry.  This not only feels like a refreshing change of pace, but makes sense for the milieu Wellman always sets his Silver John stories in--the rural South--and the characters who inhabit them--hillbillies, not the scientists, college professors, urban nerds and aristocrats who populate so many of the SF stories we read.

John has taken up the task of bringing to an old friend some money due to him from an inheritance.  This old friend now lives near the top of a mountain, in a little village of like five houses.  Above the little village, atop the mountain, is a sixth house, home of a man eight feet tall who is said to have the power to summon rainstorms and control lightning.  Up on the plateau where sits this giant's shack is the stream and pond that feed the waterfall that rushes past the village.

When John arrives at the village, he finds the place in turmoil.  The giant has kidnapped John's pal's beautiful daughter, a woman over six feet tall.  The villagers are of course scared to confront the giant, who, besides being hugely muscled sorcerer, can only be reached via a treacherous climb, during which the climber will be very vulnerable.

John volunteers to try to talk sense into the giant.  The silver-tongued bard uses his ability to sing and play his silver-stringed guitar, his knowledge of the Bible and folklore, and his natural cleverness and neighborliness to get in good with the giant.  After climbing up the cliff, John learns from the giant that the village is doomed--a big rainstorm is coming and it will swell the waterfall to the point it will wash away the village and its inhabitants--the giant carried off the beautiful girl to save her from this disaster.  The giant is in love with this tall woman, who besides being beautiful is brave and resourceful, but he couldn't care less about the other villagers, whom he suspects think him a freak.  With the woman's help, John uses psychology to persuade the giant to put his super strength and magical powers to the job of altering the shape of the pond so that water from the terrific storm will drain on another side of the mountain and not destroy the village.  This act of redemption wins the giant the hand of the beauty in marriage.

An entertaining story, Wellman rendering the images and ideas skillfully and making all the characters sympathetic--thumbs up!  "Walk Like a Mountain" has been reprinted in numerous Wellman collections and several anthologies.

"Rabbits to the Moon" by Raymond E. Banks (1959)

Here we have a dead pan, straight-faced, humor story.  While it isn't actually funny, the story is clever, even sophisticated at times, and the humor doesn't get in the way of the more serious character and speculative elements of Banks' story.  For example, I found Banks' depiction of a once-vital man going senile, and how those around him react to his decay, very convincing, even sad.  "Rabbits to the Moon"'s plot is also well-constructed; the disparate pieces operate smoothly so the story has plot twists and a compelling complexity but is not hard to follow or to credit, and Banks' wild science fiction speculations are not simply window dressing but are actually fully integrated into the plot.  Thumbs up!

It is the future of air cars and routine travel between Earth and the little colony of domed scientific facilities on the moon.  Reginald Goom is a wealthy businessman, head of Goom Looms, a boutique clothing manufacturer.  For generations, Goom Looms has been a small firm that trades in the finest attire for fashionable men, each article it produces and sells a work of art.  But today the company has an opportunity to get a huge contract, for space suit components, and expand its operations and profits radically.  Reginald Goom doesn't want his company to get into mass production, to abandon its essential nature; of course, most everybody else who has shares in the company wants to seize this opportunity to make stacks of money.  These people who care more about profits than tradition and quality can outvote Reginald Goom because, at the moment, they have more voting shares than he does; you see, Reginald's cousin Dick Mullen usually sends a proxy to Reginald so Reginald can vote his shares, but cuz is currently on the moon and the proxy won't arrive in time for the vote.

Reginald is one of the two surviving Gooms; the other is his niece, who is married to a scientist who is secretly working on a teleporter.  This scientist has been teleporting rabbits to the moon, but hasn't got all the kinks out of the process yet, so is scared to send a human being.  When Reginald Goon finds out about the teleporter he jumps into it when the inventor isn't looking, thinking this way he can get to Luna ad get his hands on the proxy in time to save his company from expansion.  When Reginald arrives on the moon he is like a blob--the teleporter transmits soft tissues and bones at different speeds, and his bones haven't arrived yet, and won't for a week or so.  Amazingly, life as a blob ain't so bad!  As a blob, your cells become pretty plastic, and you can devote additional cells to the brain to increase your intelligence (a cure for senility!) or to your muscles to increase strength, maybe even form wings and glide around.       

With the help of his clever, manipulative niece, Reginald Goom triumphs.  With the proxy from cousin Dick Mullen, he can vote down acceptance of the space suit contract, a contract no longer valuable anyway, because the success of the teleporter renders space suits obsolete.  Increased profits that can satisfy the shareholders are still available, however--separating yourself from your bones is going to become very popular among the fashionable set, and Goom Looms can get into the business of making the most stylish of exoskeletons for those who prefer to walk around instead of slither and ooze from place to place.  

I find this story unusual and entertaining, but it hasn't been reprinted much beyond the various editions of A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Here in "Rabbits to the Moon" Banks demonstrates the ability to construct a satisfying plot, develop science fiction speculations, and write likable and interesting characters, but it seems he never wrote a respectable science fiction novel, just goofy porn novels and hard-boiled detective novels which wikipedia says did not sell.  Sad!    

"The Certificate" by Avram Davidson (1959)

Here we have a brief and pungent horror story about life on Earth fifty years after the conquest of humanity by inexplicable and invincible space aliens.  These alien bastards destroyed most of what was on the Earth's surface in their irresistible attack, including most of the people, and the human survivors are maintained as slaves, put to work at jobs they don't even understand, pulling levers twelve hours a day that do they know not what, sleeping the rest of the day in poorly heated dormitories.

The aliens spare little for the humans, so that people's clothes wear out, for example.  Once a year you can petition the aliens for some boon by forgoing sleep and waiting in line on your off hours; if you make it to the head of the line before it is time to report for work you then fill out the request forms; lots of people ask for new clothes or for permission to visit relatives or friends they knew fifty years ago, before the invasion.

People like our protagonist are still able to work twelve hours a day fifty years after the conquest because the aliens have instituted a comprehensive system of socialized medicine.  All humans have had something implanted in them that immediately cures them of any disease they might contract or heals any possible injury in a matter of moments.  This system also serves as law enforcement--anybody who is late for work or otherwise misbehaves suffers horrendous physical and psychological torture which leaves no permanent damage.

This implant makes people almost immortal, and also makes suicide almost impossible.  And on the fifth and final page of "The Certificate" we learn what the main character has been waiting in line, scurrying from one office to another, and filling out forms to request--permission to die.

Thumbs up.  

After its debut in an "All Star" issue of F&SF, "The Certificate" was reprinted in several Davidson collections and various anthologies.

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Robert P. Mills did us a solid recommending to us these three stories, all of which are somewhat unusual and all of which hold the attention and generate real human feeling in the reader by depicting characters who face challenges and pursue goals that resonate with the reader and who evolve in response to changing circumstances.  Let's hope that the next time we open up A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction that the stories will be equally satisfying.

F&SF July '53: A Derleth & M Reynolds, L Sprague de Camp & F Pratt, J Ciardi, and M St. Clair

In our last episode, we read a stack of stories from an issue of F&SF because the ish included a work of fiction by John Ciardi, famous American man of letters, and today we are doing the same thing.  The Ciardi story we read last time was about a robot who was tired of "living" and so committed suicide, but today's Ciardi story, if the cover illustration for it by Emsh is anything to go by, is going to be life affirming, or at least low key sexalicious!  Let's check out Ciardi's pseudonymous "The Hypnoglyph" along with three other stories from this issue of F&SF edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, one penned by Margaret St. Clair, whose "Change the Sky" we trashed in that last blog post, and two collabs, one by the team of August Derleth and Mack Reynolds and one the team of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt.

"The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" by August Derleth and Mack Reynolds

This is a Solar Pons story.  Solar Pons is a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes concocted by that one-man mass production fiction machine August Derleth, the subject of a vast catalog of stories produced not only by Derleth but an array of other Holmes-loving scribblers.  Personally, I don't really like Sherlock Holmes, but I find Derleth a likable individual and his career curious, and I find even more bewildering the career of the coauthor of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time," Mack Reynolds, so decided to read this story even if I don't expect to enjoy it.

isfdb lists Lovecraft-correspondent Derleth as first author of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" while F&SF lists former teenaged-Socialist-Labor-Party demagogue and expert on beer-drinking Reynolds as first author.  The intro to the story in the Derleth collection A Praed Street Dossier indicates that Reynolds came up with the plot and submitted to F&SF a story based on his idea, but Boucher and McComas felt Reynolds' manuscript didn't feel very Holmesian, so Derleth was enlisted to punch the thing up.  The thing was a big enough success that Reynolds and Derleth collaborated on further Solar Pons stories with a science fiction angle.

I find "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" to be a silly joke story full shopworn SF concepts and meta-jokes about genre literature.  Reynolds is renowned as one of the few SF writers to take as one of his main topics political economy, and this is reflected in the fact that the plot of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" is resolved by tariff legislation.  

A guy in wacky clothes from the 26th century comes to visit Solar Pons and our narrator, Doctor Parker.  He turns out to be a cop from another dimension, and a lot of the story's limp wit relies on the contrast between Pons' acceptance of the man's increasingly incredible assertions and the doctor's bullheaded incredulity.

Future Cop explains that there are an infinite number of universes so everything that could happen has or will happen.  The Moriarty of his dimension has taken to travelling between universes and stealing art treasures, among them Pogo strips.  (Pogo, like Sherlock Holmes, is one of those cultural artifacts that is widely beloved but which leaves me cold.)  So, this cop has come to this dimension to consult with Solar Pons, who in the cop's dimension is merely a fictional character, in hopes that Pons can produce a solution to the problem of inter-dimensional theft.  Pons asks the traveller if there are taxes in his universe, and is told that yes, there are, and the tax laws are punctiliously followed by everybody, even criminals like Moriarty.  So Solar Pons suggests that prohibitive tariffs be levied that will discourage all inter-dimensional commerce.

Additional jokes involve Moriarty and this cop enlisting fictional attorneys like Perry Mason to champion their causes in court and references to whether Solar Pons knows Parker is writing up Pons' adventures or whether Parker has actually begun doing so yet.

To me, this story is a waste of time, but it wasn't painful and I can see that, for what it is, it is competently produced, so that people who love Sherlock Holmes and want to see him and Dr. Watson in outré situations like fighting Count Dracula or Jack the Ripper will enjoy "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time;" the dialogue and atmosphere and all that feels like the Sherlock Holmes stories I read so long ago, and those seeking such an experience will find it here, and I guess in all the Solar Pons stories.

This story that to me seems tolerable and forgettable has been quite successful, appearing in at least three anthologies as well as Derleth and Reynolds collections. 

"The Hypnoglyph" by John Ciardi (as by John Anthony)

Anthologists like August Derleth, Robert P. Mills and Tom Boardman have seen fit to reprint "The Hypnoglyph," and, having read it myself, I agree with their decisions to do so; "The Hypnoglyph" is full of cool SF and horror ideas and I strongly recommend it.

A veteran spaceman invites a younger man to see his collection of valuables brought back from his adventures in deep space.  The most fascinating specimen in the collection is a little item wrought from a wood-like substance; the item features a depression into which fits comfortably the younger man's thumb.  He finds stroking the little item with his thumb pleasurable, even addictive, and the adventurer talks to him about "tropism" and theories about how certain parts of the body enjoy certain types of stimuli and can, in effect, be hypnotized into behaving in certain ways by such stimulation.

The spaceman describes one of his greatest adventures, in which he discovered a quite human-like race, a matriarchy in which women use hypnotic powers, including the "tropism" techniques the spaceman has just hinted at, to dominate their men folk.  Ciardi does a good job of titillating the (male) reader's desire for and fear of women by suggesting these alien women have extreme control over their bodies that makes them capable of providing men with terrific sexual pleasure and our eager to have sex with human men but at the same time indicating that these women are obese, hairless, lazy, callous and cruel manipulators who treat the native men like disposable slaves--in fact, these alien women are champing at the bit to breed with human males because their ill treatment of the men of their own race has sapped those men's will to live and resulted in a radical numerical imbalance between the sexes.

The veteran space man and the younger man engage in a sort of psychological duel; will the younger man be able to blackmail the wealthy older man because the adventurer has broken laws that require the discovery of alien civilizations be reported to the authorities?, or will the older man, who it turns out has gone native, trick the young man into becoming a sexual slave of the obese and hairless alien matriarchs?

A great story that, with its mix of sexual fascination with the exotic and fear of the special powers and monstrous practices attributed to natives sort of reminds you of stories of European sailors interacting with tribes of primitive islanders who may be beautiful and sexually open but also might be engaged in voodoo, human sacrifice, head hunting, cannibalism, and God knows what.  "The Hypnoglyph" is a success that makes you wish Ciardi had written more SF and horror stories.

"The Untimely Toper" by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

Way back in 2014 we read a Gavagan's Bar story, of which there are like 29 or 30, and today we read a second Gavagan's Bar story.  At this rate we'll finish up with the Gavagan's Bar series during our rice break in the Chinese Communist Party labor camp orbiting Ganymede.

"The Untimely Toper" is a tedious and silly joke story that is a little confusing.  It seems an obnoxious guy, Pearce, comes to Gavagan's but rarely, when he has pissed off the people at his regular hang out.  Pearce is at Gavagan's one night when a bat appears inside the establishment; Pearce kills the bat.  Another habitue of the bar, maybe a vampire or a wizard or something, is offended by the killing of the bat, perhaps his pet or friend or something, and afflicts Pearce with a ridiculous curse the workings of which I didn't quite understand.  When Pearce goes into the men's room, he goes to another dimension or is trapped in time or something; other people go in and out of the men's room and do not see Pearce in there, but hours or days later Pearce emerges from the rest room thinking only a few minutes have passed.  The bartender figures out that the duration of Pearce's disappearances is correlated with his level of intoxication, and so tricks the man into drinking a hangover cure, which sobers him and, I guess, keeps him from returning to Gavagan's from wherever it is he goes after he goes to the bathroom to vomit.

I don't get it, and I don't want it; the jokes are not funny, the characters' motivations are mysterious, and the mechanics of the magic don't make sense to me.  Thumbs down!

As with the Derleth Solar Pons stories, I suspect the appeal of the Gavagan's Bar stories for their fans is the style and atmosphere.  Such fans are numerous enough that Gavagan's Bar collections have been published in multiple editions, and "The Untimely Toper" is a good enough example of the species that Boucher and McComas included it in a Best from F&SF volume.

"Judgment Planet" by Margaret St. Clair (as by Idris Seabright)

This is a far better story than the last St. Clair thing we read, the annoying and pointless "Change the Sky."  The images to be found in "Judgment Planet" constitute a contribution to the story rather than a distraction, the pace is quick, the psychology is believable and the travails of the character have some emotional effect on the reader.  As for the plot, it is just OK--"Judgment Planet" is one of those stories like Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" or William Golding's Pincher Martin in which a dying man hallucinates salvation as well as yet another story in which goody goody aliens make us humans look bad by contrast.

You know those guys who fall in love with some foreign culture or society, Japan or Ancient Rome or the Soviet Union or whatever, and don't want to hear criticism of or think about apparent misdeeds of their beloved, like the Rape of Nanking or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or whatever?  (I knew a multitude of these guys in grad school--hell, I maybe was one of these guys.)  The protagonist of "Judgment Planet" is one of those guys.  He is a scholar of the future of interstellar human civilization, and St. Clair hints that this civilization punishes dissent.  Before the rise of Earth's space empire, another race colonized multiple planets, the Elea; Elean civilization collapsed long ago, but left behind artifacts of great beauty that suggest the Elea were a people who loved freedom.

As the story begins, our hero is all alone on a pretty desolate planet far from his ship and has just been injured and dropped his food supplies down an unscalable cliff.  Oops.  Why is he in this sticky situation?  Some other scholar has claimed that this here planet was the planet where the Elea exiled their dissenters, suggesting the Elea are not the goody goodies our guy thinks they were, so he came to explode this theory.  Unfortunately, it kind of looks like that theory was accurate.

Our guy suddenly finds a door into an underground complex where he discovers preserved food and evidence that this planet was not a place of exile for dissenters but actually a comfortable quarantine for individuals afflicted with a plague.  The Elea were as good as he had hoped!  He spends weeks exploring the place, but then comes our twist ending.  The complex is just a dream, but the Elea really were goody goodies--this planet has a powerful hypno apparatus that detects when you are going to die and fills your brain with dreams that ease the pain of your last moments, dreams that validate your life and beliefs.  The scholar can die knowing that the people he worships are beyond reproach and worthy of that worship--only the best sort of people would ease the pain of the dying in this way.

The plot sounds a little lame, like childish wish fulfillment goop (is this story supposed to hearten F&SF's leftist readership by implying that all the crummy things people say about the USSR aren't true?) when you just describe it baldly as I have, but the style and pacing and all that are good, with real suspense and a believable psychology at the center of the story, so I enjoyed it.        
 

Seeing as "Judgment Planet" is legitimately effective, it is odd to learn it has never appeared in an actual book, just been reprinted in various foreign editions of F&SF, especially when you know an aggravating bore like "Change the Sky" was the title story of a St. Clair collection.  Again we see I'm not on the same wavelength as the people who edit SF books.    

Left: UK     Right: Australia

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The Derleth and Reynolds collaboration, and the de Camp and Pratt as well, don't scratch any itch I happen to have, but their authors have probably succeeded in their goals and pleased their fans.  I was much more impressed with the Ciardi and the St. Clair, which, instead of showcasing lame jokes, use interesting science fiction concepts, generate suspense, and portray real human emotions.

More 1950s magazine stories when next we meet!

F&SF March '55: M St. Clair, J Blish, F Brown & J Ciardi

On December 22nd, one of my clever and helpful commentors reminded us that John Ciardi, likely best known for translating Dante, published some science fiction stories.  One of these appeared in the March 1955 issue of F&SF, edited by Anthony Boucher.  We are already familiar with some of the contents of this ish, including Robert Bloch's "I Do Not Love Thee, Dr. Fell" and Avram Davidson's "The Golem,"  but there is a ton of stuff in the issue new to us worth looking at besides Ciardi's contribution, so today we'll also be checking out stories by Margaret St. Clair, James Blish, and Fredric Brown as well as the Ciardi.  I'm reading all these stories in a scan of the original magazine. 

"Change the Sky" by Margaret St. Clair

Much of St. Clair's work appeared under the pen name Idris Seabright, and "Change the Sky" does so here.  Boucher's intro to "Change the Sky" quotes Judith Merril, who praises "Seabright" for "undercutting the pretensions of her fellow humans, and for silhouetting against an alien background the most human of our weaknesses."  Is this story going to be some kind misanthropic indulgence in rank snobbery?  Well, let's not reject this story before we have even read it--maybe Boucher and Merril are mischaracterizing or exaggerating.  (I keep telling myself to not read an intro until after I have read the story, the way I don't read the tendentious label next to a painting at the art museum until I have looked at the picture and formed my own opinion of it, but I keep reading these damned intros anyway.)

"Change the Sky" is a long tedious story of 12 or 13 pages, but at least it doesn't actually strike me as a hammer blow against the human race and people's pretensions or weaknesses.  I would describe "Chaneg the Sky" as the record of a course of the psychotherapy of the interstellar future, neither particularly snobby nor misanthropic, but a total bore.

Much of St. Clair's text is given over to pointless surreal or psychedelic images, descriptions of things the protagonist sees but doesn't really interact with.  One reason this story is a drag is that the main character doesn't perform many actions or make many decisions; he just kind of witnesses natural phenomena and elaborate but sterile artifacts, and has emotional reactions to them that are quite subdued. 

That bland and flat main character is Pendleton, the son of a rich family of loners.  Our guy was born on a space ship and has never had a real home, spent his life as a traveler crisscrossing the galaxy, seeking something, he is not quite sure what, his entire life.  His father before him was on a similar quixotic quest, and boy and teen Pendleton accompanied Dad on his useless explorations, learning all the ins and ourts of being a space man along the way.  As the story begins, Pendleton, now I guess middle-aged, knows his health is such that he won't be able to participate in space travel any more, so he has come seeking the services of an artist, a man who makes artificial worlds which his clients can visit or even, perhaps, inhabit.  These artificial worlds are kind of like hypnosis, I guess--St. Clair doesn't bother to make them logically comprehensible to the reader, so they function in the story like magic or hallucinations or drug dreams.

Pendleton wants the artist to make him an artificial world that will satisfy him, the kind of world he has been seeking, even though he isn't really sure what he wants the world to be like.

"What I’m hunting is a place that’s so beautiful, or so winning, or so right, that I’ll feel, ‘This is the place in the whole universe that I love best. This is home.’ ”

The artist asks Pendleton to describe the most beautiful and most interesting and most etc. planets he has seen, and Pendleton complies; one planet had lots of lightning, another had lots of aromatic flowers, and so forth.  The descriptions of these planets are mind-numbingly boring, a list of vapid and vague attributes, an absolute snoozefest.

"Genlis is the most beautiful, by far,” Pendleton answered. “It’s a water world, with deep green, swelling, foam-laden seas, and a sky so intensely blue that it’s almost purple. On the islands — there are a few islands — tall graceful trees like palms lean into the wind, and the perfume of the flowers is so sweet it makes you dizzy. There are flowers everywhere. They say that no matter how far you get from land on Genlis, you can always smell the flowers. The air is soft and yet fresh, and when the wind blows against your face or body, you feel your skin tingle with delight....Nothing could be more beautiful than Genlis."      

Most of the story is like this, sterile descriptions of places where nobody does anything or experiences or expresses any deep emotions.

The artist makes the artificial world, and Pendleton enters it, and it is just a series of boring bubbles in which, his brain addled, Pendleton moves from bubble to bubble to bubble until he turns around and travels back through all the bubbles to real life.  He complains to the artist, who sends him to a different artist.  This second artist creates an artificial world in which Pendleton is a child again, flying around the galaxy with his father, who is teaching his son how to be a space man while searching for evidence to substantiate his absurd theory about a probably fictional alien race.  Pendleton seems to forget he is an adult whose parents have died, so it looks like he is going to disappear into this fantasy world for the rest of his life.

I guess the twist ending or point of the story is that the most beautiful things in life are the processes of education and exploration and the place you feel most at home is wherever your attentive family is.  Or that the artificial worlds are a trap?  Is Pendleton going to survive in this artificial world--can he eat and drink there?    

Slow and boring, an aimless narrative punctuated by long lifeless scenes that add nothing to the plot and nothing valuable to the atmosphere, a story with no emotion for a dozen pages and then sappiness on the final page--thumbs down for "Change the Sky."  Maybe this story is supposed to be boring, maybe it really is an attack on the human race's pretensions and weaknesses, depicting how bogus psychoanalysis is, how the people who seek psychoanalysis are empty souls who want other people to fill them and how these other people are in fact not real healers but just exploiters.

"Change the Sky" is actually the title story of a 1974 St. Clair collection, so I guess there are those who find it to be an above average story of St. Clair's, or at least one that is representative of her virtues as a writer.  A 1968 French anthology included the story, as does a 2022 US anthology of mid-1950s SF by women.

"The Book of Your Life" by James Blish

Here we have a horror story about two of our favorite things--books and creepy sex!  

Petrie Mapes is a publisher who lives with his attractive wife on Long Island.  He is obsessed with sex, but has a sad perversion or dysfunction or maybe just a kink, whatever you want to call it: he finds real sex disappointing, and much of his sexual life revolves around pornography and erotica.  "The Book of Your Life" is full of literary references, and Blish mentions Henry Miller, Frank Harris, Ben Hecht and Jack Woodford and talks about how Mapes hires writers and artists to craft him unique one-of-a-kind fiction and drawings of an erotic nature.*  (Blish also engages in some literary criticism of Ellery Queen, which some may find interesting.)

*This whole story may be inspired by Henry Miller.  Miller and his circle, Anais Nin among them, wrote little one-of-a-kind porno stories for money for a perverted guy in the book biz--see the preface to Nin's Delta of Venus--and the theme of "The Book of Your Life," that reading and writing are not life but an escape from life or an obstacle to living life, is a theme of Miller's work--see Sexus, Chapter 1: "No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in."

Mapes comes into Manhattan on business with some frequency and has an odd, tense, relationship with a bookseller there, who may perhaps be the Devil.  The plot of "The Book of Your Life" revolves around how this bookseller has a huge book, something the size of an unabridged dictionary, that has magical powers.  Over a thousand pages of tiny type, the book is comprehensive, including, for every possible reader, a scene that perfectly manifests the deepest desire or foremost obsessions of that reader, and when you open the book at random for the very first time, the scene tailored to your peculiar overriding interest will be what you find and it will shake you to your core!  You can read the entire rest of the book, but never will you be so stirred.  The bookseller rents out this colossal sui generis tome to people, and Mapes has possession of it over the course of Blish's story, and we observe as the book has a malign effect on Mapes and those in Mapes' orbit.  

A good story that addresses the theme that life is a journey about pursuing goals and if you achieve your goals, if your desires are fulfilled, you life will lose its savor.  The idea that pornography is more exciting than actual sex, and consumption of pornography can damage your real-life relationships, feels topical in 2025, when I am writing this, and maybe will continue to feel topical in 2026, when you are reading it.  But perhaps the most striking thing about "The Book of Your Life" is its suggestion that reading books (or watching TV or otherwise consuming media) is not really living, but just a substitute for living, and people who devote their time to books are throwing their lives away, that media is consuming them rather than vice versa.  Ouch! 

It looks like "The Book of Your Life" has not been reprinted beyond a translation in the French edition of F&SF, which is strange, as the story is compelling and very meta, being about genre literature and the people who produce and consume it.  An overlooked gem!

"Millennium" by Fredric Brown

This is one of Brown's one page stories, what fans of the genre, of which many consider Brown the master, call "short shorts" or "vignettes" or "vinnies."  I have read a bunch of these Brown vinnies (among them, "Too Far," "Expedition," "Abominable," "Blood" "Sentence," "Daisies" and "Politeness") and in general I find them a waste of time.

In this one, Satan is sitting in his office, one by one interviewing people who want to sell their souls for a wish, as he does every day.  As Satan has feared for so long, one of the soul sellers makes a wish that puts Satan out of business, the wish that ends, or reduces substantially, the amount of evil and unhappiness on Earth.  The way the wish is worded is a little oblique and I had to ponder it before I really understood it; maybe this suggests this vinny is more sophisticated than are many others of its ilk?  (Or just reminds us how dim I am?)  I'll call this vignette "acceptable."

"Millennium" has appeared in several Brown collections in four or five different languages, as well as one of those anthologies that has Isaac Asimov's name on it above those of hard-working anthologists, in this case Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh.

"The Bone that Seeks" by John Ciardi 

Here's the thing that brought us to the March 1955 F&SF, a story attributed to "John Anthony," though Boucher in his intro tells you it is a pen name and offers clues as to the real name of the author.  As with Blish's "The Book of Your Life," isfdb suggests that the only place "The Bone that Seeks" was ever reprinted was in the French edition of F&SF.  When they aren't suppressing the free speech of their hottest actresses or sautéing slugs and toads, maybe the Frenchies know what they are about?

Maybe, maybe not.  "The Bone that Seeks" is an OK story, sentimental and histrionic, that relies for much of its oomph on a poem by Archibald MacLeish (the title is a line from the poem.)  

It is over a million years in the future.  The human race has endured, and many of the features of life we are familiar with, desks, government, reports, etc., are still important components of Earth society.  The current form of government approaches its one millionth anniversary, and as part of the celebration the government wants the oldest robot, a robot that was built and operational before the current government was founded, to play a major role in the festivities.  But looking through its old memory banks has inspired the million-year-old robot to feel tired and desire death.  A government bureaucrat tries to badger the robot into following orders, but it has developed an independent intelligence over the millennia and it plays sad music, recites the MacLeish poem "What Riddle Asked the Sphinx?", looks at the sunset, and turns itself off. 

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Brown's story is about a guy who risks his soul to make the universe a better place, but all the other stories we read from this magazine today are absolute downers.  A robot who wants to commit suicide?  A pervert who risks his soul using a magic book to destroy other people?  A guy who feels like he has no home and, in his search for the place where he belongs, loses himself in an artificial world?  Happy New Year, everybody!

Manly Wade Wellman: "Outlaws on Callisto," "Space Station No.1" and "The Theater Upstairs"

We just read four stories from the December 1936 issue of Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales, stories about a werewolf, a guy who achieves vengeance from the afterlife, and Americans who make friends with foreigners and then get embroiled in deadly fights and encounters with monsters.  But we still haven't read the story in that issue by that African-born historian of America's Old South, Manly Wade Wellman.  Let's tackle that story today, plus two other Wellman tales published in 1936, one from F. Orlin Tremaine's Astounding and one from Argosy, a magazine founded in 1882 and which, according to wikipedia at least, became the first pulp magazine in 1896 when its publishers switched to cheap paper and devoted its entire contents to fiction targeting a male audience.

"Outlaws on Callisto"  

We'll start with a story which has, apparently, never been reprinted, "Outlaws on Callisto," which debuted in Astounding alongside tales by Raymond Z. Gallun and P. Schuyler Miller and letters from space opera icon E. E. Smith and future editor of Amazing and Fantastic (and author of "Doorway to Hell") Ray Palmer.

"Outlaws on Callisto" is a traditional pirate story with science fiction trappings.  It is the 28th century, and having colonized the inner planets, the human race is starting to colonize the moons of Jupiter.  Wellman suggests that, in the same way the discovery and colonization of the New World led to piracy and revolutionary wars, the development of settlements on Ganymede has led to space piracy and political unrest.  

Our hero is Captain Tarrant.  The freighter he is commanding is boarded by the ruthless crew of a pirate ship; in the fight all members of the freighter's crew are killed save Tarrant, who is knocked out in the fight; the freighter's sole passenger, a woman in a concealing cloak, is spared so the pirates can gang rape her.  When Tarrant comes to, the pirates ask him to join their crew, and he agrees, demanding that the woman be his sole property.  The pirate captain thinks the pirates should share the woman, and he and Tarrant fight a duel with their "ray sabers" to decide the issue.  After Tarrant, an expert fencer, kills the pirate captain, the woman throws off her cloak and reveals herself to be the leader of the entire pirate fleet, daughter of the man who founded the pirate community and set up the secret pirate base on Callisto.  Her name is Jahree but the pirates all call her "Herself" as a sign of respect.  She is happy to have a skilled fighter, pilot, and good-looking gentleman like Tarrant as part of her pirate empire, and Tarrant goes along with the gag.

The sciency stuff in "Outlaws on Callisto" involves how a tiny bit of atmosphere is to be found on barren Callisto, deep underground in a cavern accessible through a narrow gorge; Jahree's Dad found this unexpected supply of breathable air and the failure of government scientists to theorize its existence has meant the authorities have never looked for the pirate base on Callisto, nor discovered that Callisto has a native population of seven-foot-tall shaggy people.  At the base, Tarrant meets the various pirate captains, most of them human, save a Martian scientist, a skinny guy with toad-like features who has hypnotic powers, synthesizes all the supplies the pirates need from raw materials mined from the moon, conducts experiments on the native Callistans to increase their intelligence, and has developed an invisibility device.

All this stuff is sort of interesting, and the story has tension (at least for me) because I wondered if Tarrant was going to figure out a way to alert the authorities of the location of the buccaneers' base and end the pirate menace or if he would refrain from doing so because he has the hots for Jahree or for some other reason.  But then the narrative hits a boring spot as Wellman spends multiple pages explaining and depicting card playing, including not only poker but a game of the future presumably of Wellman's own devise.  Tarrant beats the Martian in a hand of poker and wins a slave from the scientist, a native Callistan who can read, write and understand the spoken word but not speak.  Tarrant frees the giant hairy alien, who stays on as a sort of servant.

(I probably don't have to say it, but in the same way the ray sabers reminded me of the traditional weapon of the Jedi, this shaggy guy reminded me of Chewbacca.)

The Martian scientist is tired of living on the barren moon, and tries to make friends with Tarrant in hopes they can team up to rebel against Jahree and the pirates.  At the same time, Jahree is sick of being leader of a murderous criminal operation and wants Tarrant, the closest thing to a decent man she has met in ages, to take over the pirate fleet and be her boyfriend.

“I’m sick of being chieftainess. I’ve held the job because it was the only way to keep louts like Fetcho and Sam and the others at their distance. Now you’re here. You can stand up for me — I can be just a woman.”

There follows a series of tricks and double crosses as Tarrant, with the indispensable help of his huge hairy servant, outwits and outfights the Martian scientist and the human pirate officers and takes control of the pirate fleet, which he then hands over to the government.  As for Jahree, she is in love with Tarrant, and he is in love with her, but circumstances are such that a relationship is impossible--Tarrant pulls the trigger on the missile launcher that shoots down her ship over Ganymede and after Tarrant digs her out of the wreckage she dies in his arms.

Though it has never been reprinted, "Outlaws on Callisto" is actually a good adventure story with interesting fights, somewhat edgy sexual content, characters that are memorably distinct from each other in personality and background and who each pursue their goals in a rational fashion, and various entertaining scientific elements.  The story also has an ideology we might call conservative--Tarrant's priority is to fulfill his duty to others, to society, whatever the cost, while Jahree demonstrates the belief  that what women really want is a relationship with a take-charge kind of guy who has just the kind of code of honor that Tarrant has.  I like that Wellman doesn't romanticize the pirates as rebels against an unjust society or whatever, and that Tarrant and Jahree don't get a cheap happy ending together--Tarrant has to pay a price for doing the right thing and Jahree is punished for her horrible crimes.

"Space Station No. 1" 

           

After its appearance in mainstream adventure magazine Argosy in 1936, "Space Station No. 1" was reprinted in the SF magazines Famous Fantastic Mysteries in 1939 and Super Science and Fantastic Stories in 1945.  It appeared in book form in 1949 in the American anthology My Best Science Fiction Story, and in 1954 in a French anthology.  In 1984 a Croatian translation of "Space Station No. 1" saw print in the magazine Sirius alongside Barry Malzberg's "The Wonderful All-Purpose Transmogrifier," one of Malzberg's many hypno-helmet stories.  Curiously, it looks like "Space Station No. 1" has never been included in a Wellman collection; I guess Wellman's weird horror/fantasy work gets more notoriety than does his science fiction.

I'm reading "Space Station No. 1" in a scan of a paperback edition of My Best Science Fiction Story, where it appears with a foreword by Wellman.

"Space Station No. 1" has a lot in common thematically with "Outlaws on Callisto."  We've got space pirates with a secret weapon, a woman who wants the love of a man above all, and a guy who is dedicated to his duty above all and who succeeds in his time of desperate need because of the actions of a dependable and courageous non-human who has been augmented by high technology.   

The scene of the action is a space station in the same orbital path as Mars, but on the exact opposite point of that orbit from the red planet, with the sun lying between them.  As this story tells it, the distance between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter is so great that space ships can only travel between the red planet and the colonies on the Jovian moons when the two planets are at their closest proximity ("conjunction") which only happens every two Earth years.  The space station permits such trips to occur twice as often. 

Service on this space station is considered so onerous (by humans, at least) that the two men there now are a Martian who likes being there and our protagonist Everitt, an ordinary schlub who has been exiled to the station because he had the temerity to date the daughter of the "director-general" of the corporation that owns the space station and manages the space merchant marine, a young woman named Fortuna.

The station is approaching conjunction with Jupiter when a space ship arrives from the direction of Earth earlier than expected.  It is not one of the expected freighters, but a new fangled vessel, a warship faster and with better ray weapons than any ship Everitt has ever seen.  In command of the ship, to Ev's amazement, is his hot girlfriend Fortuna!  Fortuna has sprung some patients from an insane asylum who had space experience and stole this prototype super-ship so she could liberate Everitt from exile; her plan is that she and Ev hide in Brazil or Africa and live out their lives together in anonymity and peace in the Third World where her rich powerful father can never find them.

Forunta has some bad news coming--Ev is a gentleman, and refuses to abandon his post and put the colonies orbiting Jupiter at risk and the entire economy of the solar system in disarray.  Even worse, the men Fortuna released from the loony bin and armed with all different kinds of slug-throwing and ray-projecting small arms--as well as the solar system's top warship--don't want to go to Africa or Brazil (and who can blame them?) but instead plan to rape Fortuna and then make themselves dictators of the Jovian colonies.

Ev's Martian buddy joins up with the mental cases but it is a sham--the Martian neutralizes the rank-and-file space pirates and saves Fortuna from becoming a sex toy for mental patients and sets things up so Ev can have a final conclusive fight with the pirates' leader.  The Martian even tells the government that Fortuna didn't lead the space pirates' effort to hijack the prototype warship but was rather kidnapped by them, and he gives Everitt all the credit for slaying the pirates and recovering the lost ship so that the director-general gives his blessing to the marriage of Everitt and Fortuna.  What a guy that Martian is!

This is a fun space adventure.  The science stuff is interesting, including the Martian, who is a kind of genetically engineered cyborg, a Martian uplifted so he can live among humans and is in fact deracinated, alienated from his own people--if you are in grad school you could compare him to a "house n*****" or to an Uncle Tom or a "Magic Negro" or something like that, in an American context, or, in a broader imperial context, to an Indian or African serving the British or French colonizers, a man who embraces the materially superior culture of the outsiders and abandons his own native culture and people.  The action scenes--the various ways Ev and the Martians kill the pirates--are exciting; for example, Everitt and the pirate leader fight in zero gee in the vacuum of space, struggling not only to kill each other but to avoid drifting so far from the station that they are doomed.  Feminists might not like that Fortuna's actions are all driven by her desire to be with a man, and that her scheme is mind bogglingly stupid (giving the space navy's most advanced weapons to inmates from a madhouse?) but at least she is brave and resourceful.

Thumbs up for "Space Station No. 1."

"The Theater Upstairs" 

OK, here is the story that spawned this blog post, Wellman's contribution to the December 1936 issue of Weird Tales.  I'm reading it in a scan of that issue of Farnsworth Wright's magazine, but you can find it in Peter Haining's anthology Dr. Caligari's Black Book, one of those Barnes and Noble anthologies--100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories--and the Wellman collection The Devil Is Not Mocked and Other Warnings.

Jan Luther is a good-looking guy, a Hollywood actor.  Years ago, he abandoned his girlfriend, successful actress Georgia Wattell, and she killed herself.  Today Luther and our narrator are wandering around Lower Manhattan, and in a district full of shops run by immigrants, they find a tiny cinema showing one of Wattell's films.  They go into the theater and watch the film, one neither of them recognizes.  We readers quickly realize that this is no ordinary film--the actors on the screen are ghosts, and they conspire to wreak a deadly vengeance on Luther, the man who broke Wattell's heart.

Short and to the point, well-written and effective.  Thumbs up!

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Three good stories--my respect for Wellman is really growing.  It is also interesting that all three of today's stories have plots largely set into motion by women's extravagant behavior in search of love, and all feature men animated by animalistic lust.  Wasn't one of the complaints of the New Wavers that "old" science fiction didn't include sex?  (See Harlan Ellison's review of Barry Malzberg's Herovit's World in a 1974 issue of F&SF.)  Like the Pre-Raphaelites, who produced great work but whose criticisms of the Renaissance painters and the 18th-century painters against whom they performatively rebelled could be pretty dumb, I suspect the New Wavers, much of whose work is good, have presented people with a caricatured view of the SF writers who preceded them.  Secondary sources are not to be trusted, even those produced by intelligent and well-read people like Ellison and Malzberg--to learn about SF before the New Wave or before the atomic bomb or whatever dividing line you choose, you have to actually read those old magazines and anthologies, and thanks to the internet archive, luminist.org and annas-archive.org, today you can easily do so, something many people in 1974 could not easily do.  And if your taste is at all like mine, you will find many of those old stories are very fun, like today's three tales by Manly Wade Wellman.